Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Bullshit

Pernicious nonsense and other irritants

  • Faking the news

    Writing in The Guardian, august journalism commentator Roy Greenslade writes about a crisis that never existed: the supposed immigration crisis facing the UK.

    “It never was news. It was a wholly media-manufactured ‘crisis’,” he writes. Editors “readily published evidence of individual misbehaviour as if it was a universal problem”, published “dodgy figures, as if plucked from mid-air” and ignored facts “in favour of appealing to public prejudice.” They published endless streams of thinly-veiled bigotry from their columnists. They were guilty of “ignoring rational arguments that exposed their distorted agenda” to inflame their readers against a group that in reality is a persecuted minority.

    And it worked, because these papers also drive the wider news agenda: what they print is then picked up by the likes of the Today Programme and discussed on Question Time. It gets circulated on social media and regurgitated on talk radio.

    At the peak of the anti-immigrant newspaper scare, 60% of people thought immigration was the most important issue affecting the country. Now the papers have largely stopped their scaremongering, that figure has dropped to 20%.

    As Greenslade put it, the newspapers manufactured the so-called crisis “through repetition, disinformation, misinformation… and the omission of any positive material.”

    The papers stopped demonising immigrants because it no longer sold copies. That has created a vacuum – when your newspaper’s editorial policy is to scare your readers every day, you still need an enemy.

    The papers haven’t stopped trying to scare their readers or abandoned their dirty tricks. They’ve just chosen a different minority to demonise.

  • The tedious mediocrity of the “anti-woke”

    Novelist and journalist Huw Lemmey asks why the UK media is so obsessed with demonising the “woke”.

    The English media is in the middle of a full-throated culture war, from bendy bananas to woke snowflakes, Stormzy to burqas, trans rights to free speech on campus. It seems like over the past decade the intensification of that journalism, combined with the exaggerating effect of social media on editorial choice, has created a print and TV comment culture dedicated to creating a popular spook or ogre, then to ripping it apart. The English press has developed into a unique combination of bullying and blackmail, where a relentlessly vicious tone of mockery and enforced conformity is policed with the justification that either the enemy is at the school gates, or that their furious mockery is “only banter”. In the process, from sheer incuriosity, a whole generation of journalists have confused disagreement with taking offence, criticism with trolling.

    …if you want to know what “woke” means, and why a “woke elite” are trying to shut down all criticism, why not read Andrew Doyle’s new book, ‘Woke’, in character as Titania McGrath, with glowing reviews from Rod Liddle, Sarah Vine and Ricky Gervais? Why not read Brendan O’Neill’s spiked editorial on Markle, “A woke Wallis Simpson”? Why not read Rod Liddle’s latest on the “wokeplace romance”? Why not check out Toby Young on how the Labour Party got woke and broke? Why not see what Sarah Vine likes so much about Ricky Gervais, “the Wokefinder General”? Why not read Helen Lewis on the superwoke elite, or listen to Helen Lewis on the News Quiz, supposedly the country’s leading news satire radio programme, where the assassination of Soleimani revolved around a joke that the Left wouldn’t have criticised the attack if the Iranian general had misgendered someone.

    As Lemmey points out, the attack lines and tropes are so lazy that last week, Rod Liddle and Giles Coren wrote almost identical articles with almost identically unfunny jokes. I guess it makes a change from using pseudonymous social media accounts to post racist or antisemitic messages.

    I thought this bit was interesting.

    We are reaching the culture war singularity. To all intents and purposes, in terms of England, the right have won the culture war on most fronts. But now they’re left with a problem — they need an enemy. After we leave, and Francois has had his bongs, what replaces the narrative of EU tyranny that has driven English Euroscepticism?

    We’re starting to see the answer to that. It’s the blacks, and the gays, and the trans, and the young, and the feminists, and anyone else who can be dismissed as “woke”. It’s no coincidence that the people spearheading this backlash are white, straight, cisgender, middle-aged and largely male; the people who applaud them on social media are from the same demographic.

    The thing about being “woke” is that being woke is a good thing. It means being aware of injustice in society, particularly racism.

    The Guardian:

    Criticising “woke culture” has become a way of claiming victim status for yourself rather than acknowledging that more deserving others hold that status. It has gone from a virtue signal to a dog whistle.

    What we’re seeing here is exactly what happened with political correctness: the perversion of a term by right-wingers in an attempt to claim that the real victims are the people who have all the power.

    Comedian Stewart Lee skewered that one a decade ago.

    The only time you ever see PC mentioned is when people are complaining about PC. For money. And usually on the very publicly funded radio stations that these dicks believe are involved in a politically correct conspiracy to silence them.

  • At home with the Hitlers

    This week, the BBC introduced people to the “tradwife” movement – “a growing movement of women who promote ultra-traditional gender roles”. The tone of the piece is warm and fluffy, and says that people who claim “tradwives” are connected with the far right are mistaken.

    The BBC is very wrong on this. “Tradwife” is yet another example of neo-Nazi signifiers moving into the mainstream because organisations such as the BBC don’t do sufficient research.

    This information is hardly difficult to find; for example, the New York Times covered the phenomenon in 2018.

    Enter the tradwives.

    Over the past few years, dozens of YouTube and social media accounts have sprung up showcasing soft-spoken young white women who extol the virtues of staying at home, submitting to male leadership and bearing lots of children — being “traditional wives.” These accounts pepper their messages with scrapbook-style collections of 1950s advertising images showing glamorous mothers in lipstick and heels with happy families and beautiful, opulent homes. They give their videos titles like “Female Nature and Advice for Young Ladies,” “How I Homeschool” and “You Might be a Millennial Housewife If….”

    But running alongside what could be mistaken for a peculiar style of mommy-vlogging is a virulent strain of white nationalism.

    Nicolette Michelle, writing on Medium:

    By mobilizing sites like Twitter, the #tradwife, as they label themselves, are utilizing their social platforms to spread white nationalist ideologies, all under the domestic guise of be a perfect wife, and you’ll live a perfect life, but as long as it’s also a white life… their way of life and thinking is almost eerily cult-like, especially with their emphasis on preserving the European race and disdain towards anyone that is non-white.

    TradwivesSeyward Darby, writing on Topic.com about the women activists in the far-right movement:

    On her website, [Ayla] Stewart promotes #tradlife—traditionalist homemaking and white culture—and the “white baby challenge,” in which she encourages “white people to have children to combat demographic decline.”

    …Once in the fold, women are potent disseminators of racist ideology, palatable voices who provide the Far Right with a thin, dangerous veneer of feminine domesticity and normalcy.

    As the NYT writer Annie Kelly noted two years ago:

    Tradwives may seem like a lunatic fringe at present, but they may not stay one for long.

    Especially not if organisations such as the BBC whitewash – pun fully intended – where the movement comes from.

  • A tale of two princesses

    Buzzfeed UK has compared various newspapers’ stories about Meghan Markle with the same papers’ stories about Kate Middleton. The differences are striking.

  • Satan

    The New York Times has published a detailed investigation into Rupert Murdoch’s empire, arguing that “Murdoch and his children have topped governments on two continents and destabilised the most important democracy on Earth.”

    It’s a long read but here are some key claims:

    Fox News has long exerted a gravitational pull on the Republican Party in the United States, where it most recently amplified the nativist revolt that has fueled the rise of the far right and the election of President Trump.

    Mr. Murdoch’s newspaper The Sun spent years demonizing the European Union to its readers in Britain, where it helped lead the Brexit campaign that persuaded a slim majority of voters in a 2016 referendum to endorse pulling out of the bloc. Political havoc has reigned in Britain ever since.

    And in Australia, where his hold over the media is most extensive, Mr. Murdoch’s outlets pushed for the repeal of the country’s carbon tax and helped topple a series of prime ministers whose agenda he disliked, including Malcolm Turnbull last year.

    While Australia burns, Murdoch’s media outlets continue to spread climate denial; across the world his columnists and talking heads have fuelled far-right, anti-islamic, anti-semitic and anti-LGBT+ hatred; and his networks have enthusiastically spread white nationalism.

    Murdoch isn’t in the news business. He’s in the propaganda business.

    NYT:

    A March study by Navigation Research, a Democratic firm, found that 12 percent of Fox News viewers believe that climate change is mostly caused by humans, compared with 62 percent of all other Americans. At the same time, 78 percent of Fox viewers believe that Trump has accomplished more than any president in American history, compared with 17 percent of other Americans.

  • This is the future liberals want

    What’s in this picture? Is it (a) a tasty-looking meal? Or is it (b), an Orwellian nightmare pushed by sinister “vegan extremists”?

    Let’s ask Sun columnist Dan Wooton, who tweeted the picture and wrote:

    This is the plant based meal being given to all guests at the Golden Globe Awards this year. No option with meat at all. No choice. Welcome to Hollywood in 2020 where vegan extremists rule. 🤮🤮🤮

    It’s worth pointing out that Wooton wasn’t even at the Golden Globes, so what we’re seeing here is a grown man getting upset about somebody else eating vegetables on the other side of the planet.

    There’s a lot of it about: last week we had various middle-aged men whingeing about Greggs introducing a vegan version of its steak bake (a version which, I’m told, tastes like a bridie; if it does then it may well be the best snack-related news I’ve heard this year so far).

    This outrage is entirely predictable, so much so that it’s become a PR strategy: as PR Week reported this time last year, upsetting florid-faced middle aged media figures is a key part of many food firms’ PR strategies. But it’s still pathetic that in 2020, “real men don’t eat vegetables” is still seen by some as being edgy and sticking it to the libs – particularly when the people so outraged about vegetables are so quick to damn people who care about considerably more serious things.

    As comedy writer James Felton put it:

    Hi I’m a boomer. You may remember me from such hits as “aww does the widdle millennial snowflake need a safe space because he’s so offended”. Today I’ll be losing my shit because a shop I don’t visit is selling a vegan steak bake I am under no obligation to buy.

  • Boobs from a burger? Now that’s a whopper

    The picture above is of the Impossible Whopper, a meat-free burger from Burger King. Like many vegetable, seed and nut-based products, it contains phytoestrogens – structures that are similar, but different to, the estrogen in people.

    Here comes the internet.

    The above claims, and many like them, are currently circulating on social media. Let’s not get pedantic about the ignorant phrase “a standard hormone replacement therapy shot to become transgender” and focus on the big claim here: this burger will make you female!

    Spoiler: no, it won’t.

    The article that kicked off this particular panic is from a site called National File, which claims:

    the Impossible Burger is a genetically modified organism filled with calorie-dense oils that can make a man grow breasts if eaten in sufficient quantity.

    Man boobs aren’t caused by plants, nuts, seeds or soy. The main cause of gynecomastia is obesity, particularly in older men. If you have a largely burger-based diet of any kind, meaty or meat-free, it’s very easy to pack on the pounds: a Whopper is around 660 calories (630 if meat-free). Add large fries (430 calories) and a large Coke (310 calories) and that’s more than half the daily recommended calorie intake for an averagely active and healthy man.

    National File:

    eating four of the vegetable burgers daily would result in a human male growing breasts

    Even if the claim was true, which it isn’t, if you’re eating four fast food burgers a day it’s not cleavage you need to worry about. It’s a coronary.

    National File’s article is based on a piece by a doctor, but the doctor isn’t a doctor of humans and his article isn’t in a medical or scientific publication. He’s a South Dakota vet, writing for a trade publication (Tri-State Livestock News) written for and funded by the meat industry – an industry that isn’t too happy about Impossible Burgers and other meat-free products.

    You can see why a meat industry magazine might want to try and discredit meat-free food. But why would a political site be so keen to run with the story too? The answer, inevitably, is that the site is connected to the lunatic fringe of the US far right, which is why this story is all across US right-wing media (and why it’s been republished here on the likes of the Daily Mail, which spent over 300 words repeating the claims before quietly admitting that there’s no evidence for any of them).

    The story’s author has previously written for the far-right fantasy factory Breitbart and is a regular guest on the Alex Jones show. Yes, the same Alex Jones who famously claimed that the US government is using a magical, Pentagon-funded “gay bomb” to turn people gay:

    “The reason there’s so many gay people now is because it’s a chemical warfare operation, and I have the government documents where they said they’re going to encourage homosexuality with chemicals so that people don’t have children”

    That was in 2010. A few years later Jones claimed that the government was “putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin’ frogs gay… the majority of frogs in most areas of the United States are now gay.”

    It’s easy to laugh at this, but gay frogs are part of a wider far-right theory called The Great Replacement: brown people and feminists and gay people and trans people are a conspiracy against Honest God-Fearing Straight White Folks to feminise the men (via the aforementioned chemicals in the water supply that turn the friggin’ frogs gay, plus soy milk and meat-free burgers and “gender ideology” and the “gay agenda”) and outbreed the women. The theory’s supporters include senior members of the Trump administration.

    When you read it in that context, the Whopper Gives You Tits story isn’t so funny.

  • Harry Potter and the Chamber of Bigots

    Today’s story of JK Rowling and an anti-trans tweet is a good example of how lazy reporting reinforces bullshit.

    If you missed it (and you probably didn’t; it’s been all over the media today): last night, the author tweeted in support of the anti-trans activist Maya Forstater, claiming that her defeat in a tribunal was an attempt to “force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real”. #IStandWithMaya, she wrote.

    That’s been reported as Rowling supporting free speech, but it isn’t.

    It’s Rowling telling her 14 million followers to support a bully.

    Forstater wasn’t forced out of her job; her employer chose not to renew her fixed term contract. She wasn’t told she couldn’t state that “sex is real”; she was told that she didn’t have the legal right to create a hostile and humiliating environment for her co-workers.

    Forstater has said publicly that her case was intended to establish a legal precedent: the precedent she wanted would give anti-trans activists the legal right to be as abusive as they liked towards trans colleagues without consequences.

    That isn’t how this is being reported. It’s being reported as “cancel culture”, the sinister “woke mafia” picking on a national treasure.

    But Rowling has form for this. She was an unapologetic follower of anti-trans activist Magdalen Berns, who claimed that there was a Jewish-funded conspiracy to turn the world trans and that trans women are “fucking blackface actors” who “aren’t women” but “get sexual kicks from being treated like women. Fuck you and your dirty fucking perversions… you pathetic, sick fuck”. She’s publicly liked anti-trans tweets claiming trans people are “men in dresses” and when called out on it, she had her PR team claim that it was a “clumsy and middle-aged moment” because she doesn’t want to upset her significant LGBT+ fanbase.

    By misrepresenting what the Forstater case was actually about, Rowling is fuelling anti-trans sentiment. The reporting over this is perpetuating the myth that women are being silenced by the sinister trans lobby while giving those women global press coverage for their supposedly silenced views.

    Here’s journalist Laurie Penny.

    Trans people, and trans women in particular, have for years been under attack by dedicated cohort of the British press, egged on by a small group of transphobic extremists. Transphobic views have been normalised in Britain. That’s the context for JK’s comments today.

  • It’s not what you believe. It’s how you behave

    One of the many similarities between anti-trans activists and anti-LGBT evangelicals is their belief that they have an absolute right to be nasty to anybody they disapprove of.

    Inevitably, that means some of them lose their jobs for breaking the terms of employment or find their employers unwilling to renew their contracts when those contracts expire. Those people then go running to the papers and to lawyers. The right-wing press here and in the US hails them as free speech martyrs who will be vindicated in court, and when they lose – and they always lose – the same papers are spookily silent or claim conspiracy.

    Yesterday, Maya Forstater’s case for unfair dismissal was rejected by a tribunal. Forstater worked for an organisation that campaigns against inequality, and her contract was not renewed when it emerged that she’d been using offensive language about trans people and advocating against their rights.

    It’s important to understand what this judgement is about. The full document is here. It is not about freedom of belief.

    You can believe anything you like. It’s how you act on those beliefs that matters. So for example you might personally think Dave from accounts is going to hell because of his sexuality, and that’s perfectly legal. Standing up on your desk shouting “FUCK YOU DAVE YOU’RE GOING TO HELL”, not so much.

    The claimant alleged that the decision not to renew her contract – a contract, remember, with an organisation that promotes equality – was discriminatory because behaviour her co-workers found offensive was driven by anti-trans beliefs that were “philosophical beliefs” and therefore protected under the Equality Act.

    The tribunal found that they were not, and in particular they failed item (v) of the”Grainger criteria”, which define what counts in law as a philosophical belief:

    it must be worthy of respect in a democratic society, not be incompatible with human dignity and not conflict with the fundamental rights of others.

    It’s a long and considered judgement but here are some key takeaways:

    It is important to note that if a person is guilty unlawful harassment of others that conduct is likely to be the reason for any action taken against them, rather than the holding of a philosophical belief.

    Under the Equality Act, it is harassment to engage in “unwanted conduct related to a relevant protected characteristic” when that conduct violates the other person’s dignity or creates an “intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment” for them. Deliberately and aggressively misgendering a trans person or banging on all day about how you hate trans women would meet that definition.

    It would also fall foul of Article 17 of the EHCR, which says that your rights do not allow you to “engage in any activity or perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms” of others. So for example if you refuse to accept the correct gender of someone with a gender recognition certificate, which gives the holder the right to be recognised as their correct gender, you are breaching Article 17.

    In this case, the tribunal noted that when the claimant was told her behaviour was offensive to her co-workers and asked to stop, she said “since these statements are true I will continue to say them.”

    Behaviour, not beliefs.

    …the Claimant’s view, in its absolutist nature, is incompatible with human dignity and fundamental rights of others.

    …if a person has transitioned from male to female and has a Gender Recognition Certificate that person is legally a woman. That is not something that the Claimant is entitled to ignore.

    …The Claimant’s position is that even if a trans woman has a Gender Recognition Certificate, she cannot honestly describe herself as a woman. That belief is not worthy of respect in a democratic society. It is incompatible with the human rights of others.

    The case is significant because anti-trans activists expected it to set a legal precedent that would allow bigots to bully trans people in their place of work. That’s backfired.

    It’s also significant because it was a waste of an estimated £80,000 in crowdfunded donations – donations that would have made a huge difference to charities that work to help vulnerable women and girls.

  • Behold the awesome power of the sinister trans lobby!

    Despite the valiant efforts of many trans candidates in the General Election, the number of transgender and non-binary UK politicians remains zero. As PinkNews notes, there are now more UK MPs who believe that there is a Muslim conspiracy to make people transgender than there actually are transgender MPs.

    The zero MPs elected by the much-publicised transgender lobby amounts to – you guessed it – zero percent of the 650 MPs who sit in the chamber.

    The result means that there are now more MPs who believe that transgender people are part of an extremist Muslim conspiracy to destroy the West than MPs who are transgender.

    It marks the 57th consecutive general election with no openly transgender people elected.

    Being viciously anti-trans and in some cases anti-LGBT and anti-feminist didn’t stop a number of other clowns from being elected either.

    So much for an all-powerful, well funded sinister trans lobby. Yet again we have zero trans or non-binary MPs, zero trans or non-binary judges, zero trans or non-binary newspaper editors, and zero trans or non-binary political columnists. Despite our awesome power we haven’t even been able to secure reliable supplies of HRT.

    It’s been interesting to see the mental gymnastics the anti-trans crowd have been putting themselves through over the election results. They claim that Jo Swinson lost her Scottish seat because she was in favour of gender recognition reform. They don’t seem so keen to point out that the candidate who beat her was from the SNP – a party whose manifesto was explicitly in favour of, er, gender recognition reform.