Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • This isn’t a dog whistle. It’s a fog horn

    Channel 4 has been uncovering some truly despicable behaviour by the Leave.EU campaign. First, there were the videos:

    The pro-Brexit campaign group, Leave.EU, faked a viral video and appear to have staged photos of “migrants”, shortly before the EU referendum.

    An investigation by Channel 4 News found that images purporting to show “migrants” attacking young women in London seem to have been staged.

    Then, advertising specifically targeted at racists.

    Leave.EU paid for Facebook adverts targeted at supporters of the National Front, the BNP, Britain First and the EDL.

    The number of recorded hate crimes in England and Wales spiked after the Brexit referendum. The Home Office specifically mentions the increase in xenophobic hate crimes.

    We already know that Leave.EU was involved in illegal election activity, but this is a whole new level of wickedness. In any sane country this would be a national scandal and we’d be putting heads on spikes.

  • “Stop Pretending the Murdochs Are in the News Business”

    Writing in The Nation, Eric Alterman isn’t pulling any punches.

    one family has been able to use the power of the press to subvert democratic norms, misinform citizens, undermine governments, and fill our national debates with lies, misogyny, racism, and ethnocentrism while calling it news.

    Nothing in the article is particularly new: Murdoch’s power over politicians in his native Australia and in the UK is well-known and well documented. But in the age of Brexit and Trump that power is becoming even more malign – and it is power aided by the actions of a group of people who rarely get named in articles about Murdoch’s malevolence.

    …the greatest shame of this story goes to people who receive no mention at all. It belongs to the journalists who, against all evidence and to the detriment of their profession and their nations’ democracies, continue to participate in the charade that what the Murdochs do is journalism and that, therefore, their dishonesty, provocation, and propaganda deserve to be taken seriously as news.

  • If it walks like a fascist and talks like a fascist…

    MP David Lammy is being lambasted by the right-wing press for comparing the Brexit-pushing European Research Group to Nazis and suggesting that the Brexit debate has helped spread far-right hatred. You can probably write the articles yourself: leftie commie, traitor to Britain, etc.

    Except he’s right. And he’s not the only politician saying so. Here’s that infamous commie, former Tory PM Michael Heseltine:

    But you can’t escape this chilling thought: the extremes of the ’30s were born of economic stress, and the thing that is driving the extremism today is the fact that since 2008 we have had frozen living standards and people are looking for alibis.

    And if you put together the bureaucrats of Brussels, the immigrants and the foreigners and the elite … all that sort of stuff … it has a sort of basic, chilling appeal for people who are desperately looking for an alternative.

    Here’s FT commentator David Allen Green on Twitter.

    Those who do not think the rising threats of political violence, strident nationalism, attempts to bypass parliamentary institutions and increasing nastiness towards minorities do *not* indicate the beginning of a turn towards fascism must ask themselves…

    …what would?

    He continues:

    The way fascism manifested itself in the 1920s and 1930s was not the only way it can manifest itself.

    Fascism does not only exist in black and white photos and Pathe news reels.

    The nastiness adapts to new promising environments.

    Think, for example, of the independent institutions which extreme “will of the people” Brexiters have sought to trash:

    – parliamentary “saboteurs”
    – judicial “enemies of the people”
    – civil service “traitors”

    Even demanding letters to universities.

    This cannot be healthy.

    …And look at the routine casual insults and nastiness regarding Jewish people, Muslims, trans people.

    Attacks on LGBT education.

    And recall the first books to be burned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissenschaft#Nazi_era

    Lots of “others” to be de-humanised, despised, mocked.

    We all know where 1930s fascism ended, but it seems that many of us have forgotten or choose to forget how it began.

  • Playing with fire

    This is from BBC Question Time this week: the question was pre-vetted, selected for broadcast and posted on social media to get publicity for the show.

    Is it morally right for the nation’s broadcaster to imply that “LGBT issues” may be immoral?

    If you don’t have your thesaurus handy, here are some synonyms for immoral: Wicked. Evil. Depraved. Vile. Villainous. Degenerate. Perverted.

    Whether by accident or design, this is letting a handful of religious extremists set the terms of discussion (and it really is a handful: while this is being reported in the papers as muslims being intolerant, over in Germany every single muslim MP voted for equal marriage this week; in the UK in the same week, a whole bunch of Christian MPs voted against teaching inclusive sex and relationship education).

    It’s suggesting that there’s something inherently shameful about discussion of LGBT people, that children have to be protected from the very notion. The use of the word “exposed” in much of the so-called debate is telling, because there’s no positive connotation to the word. You’re exposed to unpleasantness, to sickness, to perversion. Nobody talks about people being exposed to family values.

    A reminder: you can’t catch being gay, or trans. If social attitudes could influence sexuality or gender identity there would be no gay or trans people. The only difference social attitudes make is to whether people feel it’s safe to be themselves.

    Another reminder: every school will have LGBT pupils and parents, and probably teachers too.

    This isn’t about an informed debate. It’s about a small bunch of intolerant yahoos trying to drag other people’s children back to the Stone Age. Some people out there think the world is flat, but we don’t have debates on whether we should stop exposing children to the fact that the Earth is a sphere.

    To adopt the position of bigots once would seem careless. To do it again and again… here’s Woman’s Hour.

    This tweet demonstrates another too-common occurrence: the so-called debate is about LGBT people and without LGBT people. That’s like running a piece on racism and only featuring the voices of white people (which happens a lot too). Woman’s Hour has been doing this for a couple of years now with trans people.

    Here’s the Today programme, also on Radio 4.

    We put the hateful Section 28 legislation to bed just under two decades ago, but thanks to right-wing fundamentalists and social media rabble-rousers there’s a concerted attempt to re-open a “debate” that was settled a long time ago: LGBT rights are human rights.

    I’m not the only person who thinks this. The BBC’s own journalists are appalled.

    BBC Breakfast presenter Ben Thompson said he had concerns with the phrasing of the question: “LGBT ‘issues’? Like what? That we exist? One of them, RIGHT HERE, is on your TV every morning … Would you ask if it’s ‘morally right’ to learn about gender/race/religion/disability ‘issues’?”

    BBC News senior foreign producer Tony Brown added: “Replace LGBT with black or Jewish and this question would never have been asked on national TV.”

    One on-screen BBC journalist said there was growing concern among the corporation’s LGBT employees about how the BBC debates such issues: “We are supposed to set things in context – but that doesn’t mean accepting a position that is wrong, or failing to call it out as offensive. We wouldn’t ask ‘Is terrorism morally justified?’

    “I look at the care we take over our other reporting and this leaves me totally confused. We are meant to educate as well as inform.”

    There is something deeply wrong in that part of the BBC: it’s the same thinking that invites neo-Nazi group Generation Identity on to discuss the Christchurch massacre, the same thinking that enables former EDL leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, to portray himself as a free speech martyr instead of a vicious, hateful racist. Not all views are equal. We don’t invite the KKK on to talk about racism. Or at least, we don’t just yet.

    It strikes me that a big part of the problem is that the people making the decisions don’t have to live with the consequences. If, say, Jenni Murray pontificates on whether trans people are human, she isn’t going to suffer from the increase in hate crime that we’ve seen since mainstream media started echoing anti-trans bigots’ talking points. If Newsnight features former EDL people fanning hatred, their producers don’t need to worry about getting their heads kicked in on the way home. This applies to other media, of course, but the BBC is the organisation that sets much of the news agenda and frames much of mainstream political debate.

    Writing in The Guardian today, Owen Jones puts it very well:

    too many of those working in the British press act as hatemongers who play with matches then express horror as the flames reach ever higher

  • God’s money moves in mysterious ways

    OpenDemocracy previously reported the dark money being used by US evangelists to finance “grassroots” pressure groups. But the story is much, much bigger.

    US Christian right ‘fundamentalists’ linked to the Trump administration and Steve Bannon are among a dozen American groups that have poured at least $50 million of ‘dark money’ into Europe over the last decade, openDemocracy can reveal today.

    Between them, these groups have backed ‘armies’ of ultra-conservative lawyers and political activists, as well as ‘family values’ campaigns against LGBT rights, sex education and abortion – and a number appear to have increasing links with Europe’s far right.

    We’re talking in some cases about bona fide hate groups using money to push their agenda globally.

    The SPLC explains that “viewing homosexuality as unbiblical or simply opposing same-sex marriage” is not enough to be categorised as a “hate group”. Groups on this list go further – claiming that homosexuality is dangerous, linked to paedophilia and should be criminalised, disseminating “disparaging ‘facts’ about LGBT people that are simply untrue”

    This is, says SPLC, “no different to how white supremacists and nativist extremists propagate lies about black people and immigrants to make these communities seem like a danger to society”

    OpenDemocracy hasn’t traced the dark money to UK anti-LGBT groups yet, but it’s there: it’s a key reason we’re suddenly debating LGBT rights again.

    Joss Prior connects the dots between US fundamentalists’ dark money and UK anti-trans groups.

    All the anti-trans groups and agitators in the uk, have at some time or another set-up crowdfunders and raised thousands overnight. Quite often filled with significant anonymous donations of 100s or 1000’s.

    Ever wonder why there is a moral panic about trans people using toilets and sex-segregated spaces, even though trans people have had these freedoms since 2010?
    Its because the argument is lifted from a different legal landscape, and people are earning by sharing regardless.

    Back to the OpenDemocracy piece:

    “This is dark money coming into Europe to threaten human rights, and we’re not doing anything about it”, warned Neil Datta, secretary of the European Parliamentary Forum on Population and Development, describing the amounts of money involved as “staggering”.

    “It took the Christian right 30 years to get to where they are now in the White House,” he said. “We knew a similar effort was happening in Europe, but this should be a wake-up call that this is happening even faster and on a grander scale than many experts could have ever imagined.”

  • A new axis of evil

    The Christchurch killer wrote about “the great replacement”, a racist conspiracy theory that effectively says the other – in this case, Muslims – intend to take over the world by having so many children they outnumber the white Christians.

    According to this theory, feminists are part of the problem: they aren’t doing their duty to the white race by submitting to their men and popping out babies to counter the brown ones.

    Nellie Bowles, writing in the NYT:

    As far-right groups have grown across the world, many of their members have insisted that the most pressing concern is falling birthrates. That concern, which they see as an existential threat, has led to arguments about how women are working instead of raising families. The groups blame feminism, giving rise to questions that were unheard-of a decade ago — like, whether women should have the right to work and vote at all.

    …The birthrate conversation — and the question that goes with it, of women’s continued freedom — has become a key recruitment tool for white supremacists. It is often the first political point of agreement a white supremacist recruiter online will find with a target, especially with young people.

    …Once a group of people in an online forum agree that declining white birthrates are an existential threat, then the conversation turns to policies. In some cases the response is that nonwhites should be killed. Often the response is white women need to be re-educated.

    Re-education means the removal of women’s rights, of their reproductive choices, and of their right to vote.

    As if that wasn’t terrifying enough, here’s Rewire News on US politicians’ and hate groups’ support for that ideology in Hungary.

    Trump administration officials and prominent anti-choice activists appeared at a conference hosted by the Hungarian Embassy earlier this month designed to promote government policies to encourage women to have more babies.

    …Tony Perkins, president of the anti-choice and anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council, also spoke at the event, as did representatives from the Heritage Foundation and Concerned Women for America. Perkins praised Hungary’s commitment to what he called “pro-family” policies in a blog post the day after the event, though he noted that the United States isn’t likely to support direct subsidies to increase the birth rate.

    …According to a Christian Post report, Orbán’s plan is designed to boost the country’s birth rate to “replacement level,” the fertility rate at which a population sustains itself, without taking a more open approach to immigration policy.

    This is the true face of supposed family values organisations: racism, xenophobia and a plan to take women’s rights back to the Stone Age. And yet rather than fight against this pernicious, hateful, lethal ideology, some supposed feminists ally with these groups because they hate trans people. That makes them useful idiots at best, collaborators at worst. The women they harm may not care about the difference.

  • When human lives are an optional extra

    Boeing’s 737 Max: is safety an optional extra?

    Two very different but equally shocking stories in the papers today: The New York Times reports on the safety features missing from two Boeing 737 Max plans that crashed, killing dozens, while The Guardian publishes an extract from Beth Gardiner’s book about “dieselgate”, the car emissions scandal. 

    The stories do have a common thread: corporations putting profits above human lives. In dieselgate, car firms deliberately cheated on their vehicles’ emissions tests, putting God knows how many lives at risk from very damaging air pollution (the emissions from diesels, if not dealt with properly, are particularly dangerous).

    With the 737 Max, Boeing withheld crucial safety features, making them an optional extra. The planes that crashed didn’t have them.

    The NYT:

    For Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers, the practice of charging to upgrade a standard plane can be lucrative. Top airlines around the world must pay handsomely to have the jets they order fitted with customized add-ons.

    Sometimes these optional features involve aesthetics or comfort, like premium seating, fancy lighting or extra bathrooms. But other features involve communication, navigation or safety systems, and are more fundamental to the plane’s operations.

    Many airlines, especially low-cost carriers like Indonesia’s Lion Air, have opted not to buy them — and regulators don’t require them.

    There appears to be a significant problem with sensors on the 737 Max, and those problems can make the planes crash. Boeing has a fix for that problem, but it’s not included as standard when an airline buys a 737 Max.

    Multiple informed sources claim that the problem is structural: the way the 737 Max has been designed makes it much more prone to stalling. Its software makes corrections to try and stop that from happening, but it’s dependent on a single sensor. According to AviationCV.com, if that sensor fails “you’re essentially doomed”: the software doesn’t get data from other sensors and there’s no backup.

    Back to the NYT, describing the safety measures that would prevent these planes from crashing:

    “They’re critical, and cost almost nothing for the airlines to install,” said Bjorn Fehrm, an analyst at the aviation consultancy Leeham. “Boeing charges for them because it can. But they’re vital for safety.”

    Horrific, isn’t it? And yet these examples of corporate wickedness pale into insignificance against the firms spending huge sums battling climate change regulation. Plane crashes kill a few hundred people a year; diesel emissions are believed to kill around 5,000 people a year in Europe. Climate change has the potential to kill millions.

    That isn’t stopping fossil fuel firms from trying to stop regulation as they expand their operations. Such firms are spending millions on advertising and social media campaigns designed to undermine, delay and block attempts to clean up our energy sources.

    The largest five stock market listed oil and gas companies spend nearly $200m (£153m) a year lobbying to delay, control or block policies to tackle climate change, according to a new report.

    Chevron, BP and ExxonMobil were the main companies leading the field in direct lobbying to push against a climate policy to tackle global warming, the report said.

    One of the firms, ExxonMobil, faces a ban from the EU parliament over allegations that it is funding and spreading climate change denial.

    This is not new – think of cigarette companies selling proven carcinogens, suppressing the evidence of their ill-effects and battling regulation for decades – but the danger is on an even greater scale. The one cost the world’s biggest companies don’t want to consider is the human cost of what they do.

  • Follow the money

    OpenDemocracy reports that the US anti-LGBT hate group Alliance Defending Freedom has been funding supposed “grassroots” organisations in the UK. In this particular case it has been funding groups that campaign against euthanasia; it also funds anti-abortion campaigners and other lovely people.

    Here are some interesting coincidences.

    The ADF works closely with another anti-LGBT hate group, the Family Research Council. In late 2017 the FRC outlined its “divide and conquer” strategy to roll back LGBT equality by attacking trans people.

    “Trans and gender identity are a tough sell, so focus on gender identity to divide and conquer… if we separate the T from the alphabet soup we’ll have more success.” The strategy would specifically seek out allies such as separatist feminists, “ethnic minorities who culturally value modesty” and “female athletes forced to compete against men and boys”. It would wrap its intolerance in feminist rhetoric to try and recast rolling back LGBT rights as protecting women. Its key talking points would focus on the supposed dangers of trans people in toilets, in shelters and in prisons, of the supposed unfairness of trans people in competitive sport and of the “erasure of women” by trans people.

    Since late 2017, a number of suspiciously well-funded “grassroots” organisations have put anti-trans scaremongering at the top of the UK news agenda. They have attempted to split the T from LGBT, and have been joined in their efforts by ethnic minorities “who culturally value modesty” – the ones currently shouting through megaphones outside primary schools – and female athletes. They campaign to roll back LGBT rights in order to “protect women”. Their key talking points have been the supposed dangers of trans people in toilets, in shelters and in prisons, the supposed unfairness of trans people in competitive sport and of the “erasure of women” by trans people.

    Some of the most high-profile anti-trans activists were listed as members of the Hands Across The Aisle coalition (a list now conveniently deleted from its website), which brings US evangelicals together with anti-trans activists. Hands Across The Aisle is one of the coalitions the FRC praised in 2017 in its description of how to use grassroots organisations to help it roll back LGBT rights.

    As I said. Interesting coincidences.

  • Ban this sick filth

    There’s something missing from the ongoing coverage of homophobic, transphobic parents demanding schools cancel their inclusive education classes: any detail about what’s actually being taught. So hurrah for Luke Tryl, formerly of education watchdog Ofsted and director of the New Schools Network, who’s shared an example of the kind of thing these parents want to protect their children from.

    Imagine letting your children see this.

    The whole thing’s thoroughly depressing, of course, but at least there’s some gallows humour on Twitter. This, by the writer Paul Coleman, made me laugh.

    Homophobic parents are right to be worried about their children turning gay after lessons about LGBT awareness. I lived as a Tudor wench for 2 years following a history class.

  • Just an ordinary day

    How’s your day going?

    Just after midnight, I saw The Economist tweet this.

    It turns out that the article was about Japan, and it has since been corrected with a less inflammatory headline. But as the writer Diana Tourjeé pointed out, “should trans people be sterilised?” is part of the regular media discourse on trans people alongside whether we should be banned from public toilets, whether we should be allowed to participate in sports, whether we should be acknowledged in the history books and in education, whether we should be allowed in homeless shelters, whether we should be given life-saving healthcare, whether we should be allowed correct identity documents, whether we should be allowed to serve in the military, whether we should be given normal health screening, whether killing us should be a hate crime, whether we should be allowed to adopt or raise children, whether we should be protected from discrimination. After all, “they chose this. They are sick. They are perverts. They are not normal.”

    Responding to the thread another journalist, Katelyn Burns, noted that “Every single one of these questions in this thread has been the subject of major media coverage, op eds in large publications, or proposed in legislation over the last 6 months.”

    On my way back from the school run, I listened to Radio Scotland where the discussion was about gender neutral toilets, a largely cost-based decision by local councils building new schools. Much of the discussion was about trans people; online, some listeners condemned the PC agenda, trans people etc. One approvingly shared links to news articles about parents getting “LGBT rights classes” dropped: “We desperately need a revolution” against LGBT people, he said.

    Back home, on Twitter I saw Andrea Leadsom apparently supporting parental “choice” about whether or not children get to know that LGBT people exist, and I saw footage of Donald Trump nodding approvingly while Brazil’s bigoted president said he and Trump stand “side by side” in the war on “gender ideology”. Gender ideology is a meaningless phrase beloved by the hard right to describe all kinds of things they disapprove of: trans people, mainly, but also equal marriage, immigrants and women’s reproductive rights.

    Also on Twitter, I saw that one Scottish school has canned its inclusive education because of it featured this poem:

    Despite my best efforts my news app continues to show me right-wing newspapers, one of which is defending a woman who accused the CEO of trans charity Mermaids of “mutilating” her child and promoting “child abuse”. Almost all of the press and TV coverage has portrayed this not as vicious libel, but as a nice Catholic lady being victimised for using the wrong pronouns.

    This is exceptionally common online: anti-trans activists will conduct a prolonged campaign of bullying against trans people or allies, and when it gets bad enough for the police to get involved they run to the papers claiming they’re being picked on for using the wrong pronouns. The police don’t give a shit what pronouns you use, but they do investigate harassment and malicious communications. The misreporting simply fuels anti-trans hatred.

    My news app also gives me the terrible news that not only is Ricky Gervais still alive, but that his latest material includes more stuff punching down on trans people.

    All of this before 11am on an entirely typical day.  I am so, so tired of this.