Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • Words have consequences

    The Daily Mail:

     

    Elsewhere in an American high school, members of staff attempt to break into a locked toilet stall because a trans  teenager is in it. In a different school, a lesbian student is beaten up because of her boyish presentation. In October a lesbian woman was kicked out of a bowling alley for looking ‘too masculine’. The same thing happened in North Carolina in June, when a lesbian woman was thrown out of a bathroom by the police: “You got no ID? Get out!” In May, a woman was harassed in a toilet because she was wearing a baseball cap: ‘the woman went up to Aimee and said “you’re disgusting” and “you don’t belong here” before flipping her off.’

    This is what happens when you demonise people, when you tell people that someone’s very presence is a threat to you and to your children. For some people, “looking a bit trans” is sufficient grounds for action against a complete stranger who’s minding their own business.

    It’s not just people like me. It’s particularly horrific for refugees, especially since the whole Brexit mess began. The Overton Window, the range of political discourse that’s considered acceptable in society, has moved so far to the right that supposedly mainstream political parties are echoing the manifestos of the BNP and other far right groups from previous decades. What used to be unacceptable racism is now “asking difficult questions”.

    That demonisation has consequences big and small, and it always, always ends up with people getting attacked. For example, this week we saw horrific footage of a Syrian kid being “waterboarded” by bullies; it’s the latest in a campaign of abuse that’s seen him being doused with water, verbally abused and his hair set on fire, as well as physical violence. His sister has been bullied too.

    The same Daily Mail that’s so concerned about Rain Dove was also concerned about this kid: after years of demonising refugees, the Mail can’t imagine why anybody would pick on a child just because he’s Syrian. The Sun thinks it’s a shocking crime too. That’s the same Sun that paid Katie Hopkins to call immigrants “cockroaches”.

    You’ve got to admire the process here. First of all, newspapers help to create a climate of fear and hatred. Then, they get to run shocked stories when people act on that fear and hatred.

    These publications aren’t just reporting hate crime. They’re fostering it.

  • Oh lord, save me from sniggering bigotry

    Imagine this.

    It’s 2018 and a publicity-seeking entrepreneur embarks on a high-profile court case.

    “If it’s okay for black men to marry white women, then it should be OK for me to marry my pet pig,” he chuckles. Newspapers and radio make it their light-hearted story of the week.

    No? Let’s try this one.

    It’s 2018 and a publicity-seeking entrepreneur embarks on a high-profile court case.

    “If it’s okay for lesbian women to marry, then it should be OK for me to marry my dog,” he sniggers. Newspapers and radio make it their light-hearted story of the week.

    No?

    It’s 2018 and a publicity-seeking entrepreneur embarks on a high-profile court case.

    “If it’s okay for disabled people to get special parking spaces, then it should be OK for me to identify as disabled,” he snorts. Newspapers and radio make it their light-hearted story of the week.

    Still not with me?

    It’s 2018 and a publicity-seeking entrepreneur embarks on a high-profile court case.

    “If it’s okay for trans people to change their legal genders, then it should be OK for me to change my legal date of birth,” he snorts. Newspapers and radio make it their light-hearted story of the week.

    That one happened.

    The guy’s intent doesn’t matter; it’s irrelevant whether he genuinely feels hard done by or if he’s using this to promote something. There is no substantive difference between the coverage of this story and repeating the “I identify as an attack helicopter” abuse trans people get on social media. It reinforces the trope that trans people are tricksters or mentally ill, that legal gender is something people change on a whim.

    Meanwhile in news you probably didn’t see today, Reuters reports that UK doctors push one in five trans people to discredited “pray the gay away” conversion therapy and that LGBT patients experience “shockingly high levels of hostility and unfair treatment” in their dealings with healthcare professionals.

    That’s trans folks’ light-hearted story of the week, and every week.

  • How advertising regulation doesn’t work

    Last month, the extremely dodgy anti-trans group Fair Play For Women dropped a five-figure sum on a full page advert in the Metro claiming that reforms to the Gender Recognition Act would threaten women’s safety. It was cynical. It was designed to whip up hatred. And it was absolute bullshit.

    Some of us complained to the Advertising Standards Agency, which regulates print advertising. They’ve just sent me their verdict.

    With regards to the complaint you made, also along with several other complainants, we understand that you are concerned that the ad misleadingly implied that women will be at risk as a result of the Gender Recognition Act consultation. After assessing the ad in light of this concern, we think it may have broken the Advertising Rules on misleadingness and we have taken steps the address this.

    Unfortunately the verdict is irrelevant and the steps – telling the group not to make such claims again – are pointless. The advertisement ran, the government consultation is now closed. Trans people were silenced; unfortunately the bigots weren’t.

  • Not so hidden agendas

    When is “random person has an opinion” news? When it’s a “concerned parent”. This is from yesterday’s Scottish Daily Mail.

     

    The text describes how a “father-of-two” criticised the First Minister. “Edinburgh parent Richard Lucas…”

    Now, Mr Lucas is indeed a parent. But he also has another role. He’s the head of the ultra-right wing Scottish Family Party. He left UKIP to create the party in order to “fill the void” left by the abandonment of “Judeo-Christian-inspired values of traditional Western civilisation”.

    Their (or more likely, his: we’re not talking a mass movement here. The party has fewer than 2,000 Facebook followers) policies include getting gay people counselling to stop them being gay, to stop golf clubs being forced to admit women and to battle the evils of “feminist orthodoxy” and human rights. The party hates trans people and gay people and feminists and immigrants and women’s reproductive freedom and all the other right wing hate figures and argues that right-wing bigots should be legally allowed to beat their children and discriminate against anyone they disapprove of.

    In other words, he’s a fruitcake who should be fired into the sun, the kind of arsehole who finds a home writing columns for the Glasgow Herald.

    Or if you prefer pictures:

    None of that, as you can see, made it into the Mail article. He’s just a reasonable parent with no particular axe to grind.

    This is despicable journalism, and there’s a lot of it around. All too often people who run pressure groups are allowed to present themselves as ordinary people, and the journalists either don’t bother to find out who they are – which is shoddy journalism – or they know and keep it from their readers, in which case they’re no longer journalists but propagandists.

    It happens on radio too, phone-ins populated by ordinary people who forget to mention that they’re councillors or candidates or head of fundraising for political parties or pressure groups. And you get it on shows such as Question Time, where representatives from “think tanks”, aka pressure groups with shadowy funding, advance the agendas of their paymasters.

    This simply isn’t good enough. It’s poisoning the well of genuine debate and in many cases it’s giving bigots a platform they would be denied if their true affiliations were made clear.

    Time for our next caller. Adolf is a painter from Braunau Am Inn, and he’s got some interesting views on the subject of immigration.

  • The threat of white nationalism, and what law enforcement isn’t doing about it

    We haven’t quite reached this stage, thank God. In the US, Nazis like these yahoos in Georgia are still a fringe group. Neo-Nazis are much more subtle, and much more dangerous.

    The New York Times has brought forward its planned cover story for next week to coincide with the US midterm elections. It’s a horrific story about the rise of neo-fascism and the real threat posed by white nationalism.

    White supremacists and other far-right extremists have killed far more people since Sept. 11, 2001, than any other category of domestic extremist.

    And yet as the NYT details, it’s been almost entirely ignored by law enforcement.

    Data compiled by the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database shows that the number of terror-related incidents has more than tripled in the United States since 2013, and the number of those killed has quadrupled. In 2017, there were 65 incidents totaling 95 deaths. In a recent analysis of the data by the news site Quartz, roughly 60 percent of those incidents were driven by racist, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, antigovernment or other right-wing ideologies. Left-wing ideologies, like radical environmentalism, were responsible for 11 attacks. Muslim extremists committed just seven attacks.

    Meanwhile the US President vilifies muslims and describes white supremacists as “good people”. But this isn’t just a problem with the current administration. As the NYT notes, it goes back decades and its anti-semitism goes back further still. It’s just that a toxic mix of right-wing politics, shockingly negligent journalism and institutional incompetence has created the perfect storm for it to flourish. Some 22 million Americans currently believe that neo-Nazi or white supremacist views are perfectly acceptable. And there are multiple credible reports of white supremacist groups deliberately targeting law enforcement jobs, moving what’s already a largely conservative workforce much further to the right.

    As I’ve written many times before, social media has played a significant role in normalising and spreading neo-Nazi propaganda. The NYT again:

    alt-right memes, while dripping in irony, were also, in essence, hate speech, part of a propaganda war arguably intended to spread terror just as much as any ISIS execution video.

    The so-called debates we see, the platforming of the likes of Steve Bannon or various alt-right “shitlord” trolls, are playing into their hands. They’re amplifiers, enabling extremists to reach enormous audiences. What liberal media types (yes, people like me) seem unable to understand is that they’re being played. The alt-right aren’t interested in debate. For them, there really is no such thing as bad publicity.

    We’re living in very frightening times, I think, and things are going to get worse before they get better.

     

  • Facebook needs a new broom

    Facebook is currently running an ad campaign telling you that it’s against hate speech.

    Facebook was simultaneously enabling advertisers to target people with an interest in “white genocide” just days after the Pittsburgh massacre.

    This is horrific.

    After selecting “white genocide conspiracy theory” as an ad target, Facebook provided “suggestions” of other, similar criteria, including interest in […] far-right-wing news outlets…

    Other suggested ad targets included mentions of South Africa;  a common trope among advocates of the “white genocide” myth is the so-called plight of white South African farmers, who they falsely claim are being systematically murdered and pushed off their land. The South African hoax is often used as a cautionary tale for American racists — like, by all evidence, Robert Bowers, the Pittsburgh shooter — who fear a similar fate is in store for them, whether from an imagined global Jewish conspiracy or a migrant “caravan.”

    You may recall that this time last year Facebook enabled advertisers to target “jew haters”. To enable one group of white supremacists is unfortunate. To do it again suggests incompetence.

    This wasn’t a mistake, or a computer error. Joe Osborne is a spokesperson for Facebook:

    Osborne also confirmed that the ad category had been used by marketers, but cited only “reasonable” ad buys targeting “white genocide” enthusiasts, such as news coverage.

    Facebook is an ongoing example of the law of unintended consequences. It didn’t set out to enable hate groups. But it’s made tools that enable hate groups to flourish.

    I’ve previously linked to articles suggesting Facebook is Dr Frankenstein, deliberately making a monster it (wrongly) thinks it can control. But I think it’s more like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, so impressed by its own cleverness that it doesn’t see the mess it’s making until it’s too late to fix it.

    In Fantasia, a grown-up (Yen Sid, the sorcerer) comes along and fixes everything. Facebook, clearly, needs some grown-ups too.

  • Ignoreland

    Jair Bolsonaro: Image by Wikipedia

    Another day, another horrific right-wing despot is elected to office. Today it’s Brazil.

    Writing for Buzzfeed News, Ryan Broderick retraces a fairly well-worn path about how the internet became such a toxic political force. But the fact that it’s well worn doesn’t mean it isn’t worth repeating.

    [Bolsonaro’s] victory tonight isn’t a surprise. He’s just one more product of the strange new forces that dictate the very fabric of our lives.

    …The way the world is using their phones is almost completely dominated by a few Silicon Valley companies. The abuse that is happening is due to their inability to manage that responsibility. All of this has become so normalized in the three years since it first began to manifest that we just assume now that platforms like Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and Twitter will exacerbate political and social instability. We expect they will be abused by ultranationalist trolls. We know they will be exploited by data firms. We wait for them to help launch the careers of populist leaders.

    We have social networks implicated in lynchings, murders and attempted genocide. And it’s going to get worse before – if – it gets better. Broderick makes an important point:

    In most countries, reliable publications are going behind paywalls. More services like Amazon Prime and Netflix are locking premium entertainment behind subscriptions. Which means all of this — the trolls, the abuse, the fake news, the conspiracy videos, the data leaks, the propaganda — will eventually stop being a problem for people who can afford it.

    Which will most likely leave the poor, the old, and the young to fall into an information divide. This is already happening.

    …There are deserts of information where normal people are algorithmically served memes, poorly aggregated news articles, and YouTube videos without any editorial oversight or regulation. Fact-checkers in Brazil complained this month ahead of the election that most voters trust what their friends and family send them on WhatsApp over what they see on TV or in newspapers.

    This is one of the reasons why voting results – the election of Donald Trump, Brexit in the UK – continue to surprise some of us. It’s because we’re living in a completely different world: a world not just with different voices, but with completely different stories. £350 million a week for the NHS, lurid tales of migrant caravans, the supposed silencing of Tommy Robinson, liberals coming for your guns, feminists wanting to put all men in prison, LGBT people coming for your children.

    All bollocks, of course. But plausible bollocks, convincing-sounding bollocks that isn’t questioned in the world I don’t inhabit, a world of right-wing newspapers and conservative commentators and trashy tabloids and dark money funding shady Facebook advertising.

    Rather than drive the debate, traditional media is merely amplifying sections of it. Where it used to aim to educate and inform its readers, all too often it now chooses to pander to them, reinforcing the beliefs they already have.

    And that brings us to here, where a pathetic caravan of migrants is seen as more dangerous than racist, anti-semitic white men shooting up synagogues, where white men sending pipe bombs is dismissed as “fake news” or a false flag operation.

    As Broderick puts it in his intro:

    The era of being surprised at this kind of politics is over. Now we have to live with what we’ve done.

    Update: More, from Bella Caledonia (warning, some gruesome content in the linked piece):

    The lack of street presence is partly explained by Bolsonaro running an almost exclusively social media campaign. He has come into conflict with election rules after it was found that an elite network of the super-rich were funding a massive fake news campaign on WhatsApp, triggering literally millions of messages to the phones of Brazilians. He has 7.5 million Facebook likes on his page, compared to 1.5 million on Haddad’s.

    …The propaganda is fake. Photoshop images portray the left and progressive artists and other figures as sub-human. As social engineers who want to force all children to be gay, or some other such tropes falling under the rubric of “cultural Marxism.” This plays well with a substantial component of the Bolsonaro coalition – the Christian Right. Pastors urge huge congregations to vote for Bolsonaro to “restore dignity.”

  • We’re not scaremongering, this is really happening

    (The title comes from this Radiohead song)

    I’ve used the phrase “when they’re done with us, they’ll come for you” a few times in this blog: my theory, for which there is tons of evidence, is that trans people are often the canaries in the coal mines. The people that are hateful towards trans people are usually hateful to other groups, such as gay people, women, or ethnic minorities. The organisations that fund or promote anti-trans views are usually against LGBT rights and women’s reproductive freedom.

    The organisation responsible for this week’s Trump anti-trans memo is the office of Health and Human Services, HHS for short. It’s a huge part of the US government: it controls the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institute of Health, Medicare/Medicaid and much more.

    And as Rolling Stone reports, it’s been slowly but surely populated with extremists.

    It was a coup, then, when Trump installed pious orthopedic surgeon Tom Price as secretary, who, with the help of the office of Vice President Mike Pence, began stocking the department with an army of culture-war veterans plucked from the country’s most radical religious organizations — the archconservative Family Research Council, the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List, Americans United for Life, and the National Abstinence Education Association among them. By the time Price was forced to step down over a spending scandal last September, HHS had already been transformed into what the Family Research Council called “a virtual promise-keeping factory” for Christian conservatives.

    Some of these organisations will be familiar to trans people: The FRC in particular is driving the wedge strategy that attempts to build bridges with feminist women against transgender people in order to split the T from LGBT. If you’re in the UK and puzzled by the sheer volume of anti-trans coverage in recent months, follow the money. A lot of it comes from the US.

    These organisations aren’t just anti-trans, or anti-gay. They’re anti-women.

    As Shannon Royce, an alum of the Family Research Council and current head of the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships at HHS, told a gathering of evangelicals in January, Trump’s HHS “is absolutely a pro-life team, across the spectrum, and that is playing out in many ways.” The “team” has found ways to codify its agenda in corners as disparate as the annual budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where the words “fetus” and “transgender” were banned, to the Administration for Community Living, which eliminated questions about sexual orientation from a survey of seniors and people living with disabilities. Royce herself was particularly proud of wedging into HHS’ strategic plan a sentence that redefines life as starting at the moment of conception..

    Evangelicals have essentially bypassed the courts. By taking control of HHS, they can deny abortions to women without having to wait for Roe vs Wade to be taken down.

    Rolling Stone describes the way things are working in ORR, the part of HHS that puts foreigners in camps and splits children from their parents.

    It’s not unusual for girls to arrive at an ORR shelter already pregnant, many as a result of their journey. According to a 2010 Amnesty International estimate, six in 10 female migrants are sexually assaulted at some point during their crossing.

    Scott Lloyd is the director of ORR and compares abortion to the Holocaust.

    During the Obama administration, requests for abortion were only elevated to the director’s office if there was a question of funding. (Under the Hyde Amendment, the federal government can pay for abortions only in cases of rape, incest or if the life of the mother is at risk.)

    …Before Lloyd was even sworn in as the head of the ORR, he ordered an accounting of all pregnant girls in the office’s custody. Internal e-mails show an ORR staffer had to cross-reference reports looking for indications of a possible pregnancy and call each shelter to verify the information before coming up with a tally of 38 girls in 18 shelters. After that, Lloyd began receiving a spreadsheet on a weekly basis listing every pregnant underage girl, her location and number of weeks gestation.

    As this crisis has been unfolding on his watch, Lloyd has been micromanaging pregnant minors — in his own words, a “tiny fraction” of the population ORR serves. But he has not approved a single abortion. Not even for a young rape victim who threatened to kill herself if she was forced to remain pregnant. “It will not undo or erase the memory of the violence that was committed against her, and it may further traumatize her,” Lloyd wrote in his official memo denying her the procedure, annotated with links to pro-life literature he said he found on the Internet.

    If I were a woman in America right now, I’d be terrified.

  • Beware the radicalisation of nice white people

    We’ve heard a lot about radicalisation in recent years. Radicalisation is the process of causing somebody to adopt radical – that is, extremist – positions on political or social issues. As The Guardian reported back in 2014:

    people’s beliefs are rarely determined by good evidence and sound reasoning alone. There are all sorts of psychological biases that make us more ready to believe some things rather than others. [People] who believe they are seen as nobodies in their own country are bound to be attracted by the idea of being heroes elsewhere. And once inside the bubble of an online network dedicated to the same cause, all their pernicious beliefs are reinforced.

    …once persuaded, we seek confirmation, not challenge.

    There’s an element of racism to the term: as the same Guardian article notes, one person’s radicalisation is another’s religious epiphany. But generally speaking, the process goes a bit like this:

    Person feels lost
    Person finds new friends
    New friends persuade them to hate a specified group
    Person becomes immersed in literature and comment demonising that group
    Person starts acting in a hateful way towards that group

    Sometimes it’s triggered by a traumatic event. Some muslim men were radicalised by war. Some anti-muslim people have been radicalised by terrorism. Some people have become radicalised against particular races after being assaulted by members of that race, or have become fearful of the opposite sex because of bad experiences with that sex. And so on.

    But sometimes it’s simply because somebody got caught making a mistake.

    You see it in media. Somebody writes an ill-conceived, poorly researched or just plain piss-poor thing concerning some marginalised group; members of that group respond angrily; the writer feels under attack and doubles down, writing even more inflammatory things; the group responds in even angrier ways; the writer becomes angrier still and starts accumulating supporters who hate the group even more than they do, becoming increasingly convinced that the group is the embodiment of pure evil; and so on.

    Somebody who started off as a perfectly decent human being ends up inhabiting a bubble of bigotry and becomes a frothing, intolerant, abusive arsehole.

    I’m not going to name specific people, because the people I have in mind are notorious for searching their own names on the internet and sending their many thousands of followers after their critics.

    It’s interesting and saddening to see: it’s a journey where mild ignorance becomes outright hatred. People just like you and me, ordinary, reasonably intelligent people, become howling bigots who obsess over the perceived evils of some minority or other. And because they have a powerful platform, whether that’s in traditional media or on social media, they can do a great deal of damage. Their platform becomes a bully pulpit.

    It’s radicalisation, but we don’t call it that when the hate preachers are white and shop in Waitrose.

    The Guardian again:

    The truth is that what we currently call radicalisation is not some sinister manipulation, but a process by which people come to freely choose a dangerously and wickedly misguided path that they nonetheless perceive to be a virtuous calling.

    There is nothing psychologically unique about this. The road to inhuman terror starts with all-too-human error.

  • None so blind

    Image by Prentsa Aldundia, some rights reserved.

    I was in the pub the other night, and two men were talking loudly about feminism. They were early thirties, clearly well educated – one was a teacher – and both parents of young girls. And they felt that feminism in general and the #metoo movement in particular had gone too far.

    People like Harvey Weinstein were abominations, monsters, they said. But they were incredibly rare. And because of their monstrous behaviour, all men were being unfairly accused. Most men are not monsters. Most men are good men. Good boyfriends. Good dads. Good husbands. Good friends.

    They were right, while also being dangerously wrong. People like Weinstein are rare, but it’s not because abusive men are rare. It’s that most abusive men with that kind of power and privilege aren’t usually stopped. One of them, you may have noticed, is in the White House.

    And yes, most men are not monsters. But every day women are harassed, exploited, abused or controlled by people who are not monsters. Good boyfriends, good dads, good husbands, good friends. Every single woman I know has endless tales of abuse: some of it in the street, some of it at work, some of it in their homes. Often by people they thought they could trust.

    The guys at the bar were essentially arguing that now the likes of Weinstein, Bill Cosby and Louis CK have been exposed (although not necessarily punished: CK is making tentative steps to return to his millionaire comedy career; many other people identified in the #metoo campaign don’t seem to have suffered anything beyond bad publicity) it was time for women to stop. The problem has been solved.

    The problem hasn’t been solved.

    In the UK, a nine month inquiry by a government select committee has confirmed what every woman already knows. Sexual harassment of women and girls is “relentless” in bars and clubs, in universities, in parks, on public transport, on the street and on the internet. The stories my girlfriends tell me would break your heart.

    Men don’t see it because they don’t experience it. And because they don’t see it, otherwise intelligent men like our two bar patrons choose to believe what they have, or rather haven’t, experienced. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they’ve never made a girl or woman feel uncomfortable, pressured someone to do something they didn’t want to do, had a sexual encounter where consent was murky. Because they aren’t bad guys, no guys are bad guys.

    For as long as men won’t listen to women, for as long as women’s experiences are dismissed by men who think they know better, women will continue to feel unsafe. Because they are.

    Update: there was a discussion about this very thing on Radio Scotland this morning shortly after I wrote this post. As contributor and retired policeman Graham Goulden put it, “some men are the problem, all men are the solution.”

    This isn’t about demonising men. It’s about recognising that the world is different for men. Men are never told to walk without wearing headphones, as women are currently being told to do in London while a serial attacker remains free. Men are never told to stay home at night when there have been a series of attacks. Men don’t have to worry about people spiking their drinks. Men don’t generally get sexually harassed at work, or fear sexual violence.

    That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t tell our daughters to be careful. But we should also teach our sons not to be, associate with or defend the kind of men our daughters need to be careful of.