Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • Block party

    One of the reasons I haven’t binned Twitter is the existence of block lists. These enable you to automate the blocking of various bad people; they can’t see your messages (there’s a way around that, but few bother with it) and more importantly you don’t see theirs.

    The numbers can be quite terrifying. One of the block lists I use, a list of anti-trans trolls, has thousands of people on it. I’m sure a few of them are falsely listed but for me that’s a small price to pay for relative freedom from online abuse.

    One of the most high-profile block lists I’ve seen recently is Repeal Shield, which attempted to filter out the nastiest abuse aimed at Yes supporters in the Irish abortion referendum. Aidan O’Brien discusses the list and the interesting, if unsurprising, patterns that emerged.

    Repeal Shield ended up blocking 16,000 people with very few false positives. Many of the troll accounts had clearly been set up purely to harass pro-repeal women; others had been around longer and also shared far right and/or anti-semitic content.

    You’ll be shocked – shocked! – to discover that nearly three-quarters of the accounts were American. Some of them were quite clear about that; others claimed to be from Ireland but used US time stamps or only posted when everybody in Ireland had gone to bed.

    I’ve written before about the malign influence of US social media users on other countries’ politics; the numbers demonstrate how big a problem it is.

    It also demonstrates how big a problem abuse is on Twitter. Of all the accounts blocked by Repeal Shield, just 2.42% of them have since been suspended by Twitter’s abuse team.

    This is important for various reasons. There’s the fact that Twitter is clearly doing next to nothing to curb the abuse that’s a fact of online life for women, members of minority groups and anybody the far right doesn’t like. And there’s the fact that social media is being used to sway elections.

    Twitter’s response to the growing problem – it’s not just here; right now there are concerns over political bots in Malaysia, where over 17,000 bots tweeted over 44,000 pro-government messages in a single week  – is typically useless. It has just announced new rules on political advertising.

    The company will require advertisers running political campaign ads for federal elections to identify themselves and certify they are located in the U.S… Twitter said it won’t let foreign nationals target political ads to U.S. residents.

    That’s the advertising around tweets, not the tweets themselves. And that means it won’t change a damn thing.

    The problem with Twitter has never been the display ads, the electronic equivalents of billboards. It’s the tweets and retweets, the fake news and the vicious abuse.

    Social media has been weaponised.

  • Not an innocent Spectator

    Another day, another bad article in The Spectator.

    The answer is no. The EDL founder was arrested for deliberately breaking the law on Contempt of Court.

    Whether Liddle or his editor Fraser Nelson actually believes his nonsense or is just trolling for money is irrelevant: by continually trying to paint racist clowns as free speech martyrs The Spectator is becoming the house rag for right-wing bigots of all stripes. It’s become a despicable publication by and for despicable people.

    Update, 28 May

    Liddle also writes a column in The Sunday Times. Axel Antoni takes his latest one apart in a series of 12 tweets.

  • Words as weapons

    The Onion has had to publish its article again:

    This week’s school shooting is in Texas where – surprise! – the shooter is a straight white man who hates women.

    The Texas school shooter killed a girl who turned down his advances and rejected him in front of class before massacring seven more classmates and two teachers, it’s been revealed…

    Shana Fisher, who turned 16 just days before she died in the attack, had been fending off advances from Pagourtzis for months.

    It’s the same old story. Boy meets girl. Boy won’t take no for an answer. Boy murders girl, classmates and teachers with assault weapons.

    We’ll have the usual post-event analysis where various people try to blame everything other than violent men with easy access to military weaponry (although one post on Twitter really nailed it: in response to “What will it take to change the laws to prevent more killings like this?” he replied, “One shooting by a black student”).

    But this is really simple. Some men believe they are entitled to women’s bodies, and they become furious if they don’t get their way. In a culture where easy access to weaponry is seen by many as a basic human right, that results in mass shootings.

    The media is complicit in this. Not just in its gun fetishism, but in supposedly intelligent titles lauding the likes of Jordan Peterson – who this weekend was arguing in favour of “enforced monogamy” as the cure for male violence against women –  and debating whether men have a right to sex.

    Dimitrios Pagourtzis certainly thought he had a right to sex, and when the woman he wanted to have sex with said no – not just once, but repeatedly, over several months – he slaughtered nine people.

    All ideas are not equal. Some are dangerous. And media has a responsibility to consider that. And yet all too often we get pieces that read like “Hooray for the blackshirts”, the Daily Mail’s 1930s ode to the rise of fascism.

    Still, it wouldn’t happen now, would it?

    This is from yesterday’s Sunday Times on Twitter. The print piece was headed “Heil Hipsters”.

    The article itself may have been reasoned and rational, although as it was by noted fantasist Andrew Gilligan I doubt it. But as one Twitter user posted in response:

    What the fuck are you playing at?

    The Times’ original tweet has now been deleted, but it shouldn’t have been posted in the first place. As British Future director Sunder Katwala responded:

    While @thesundaytimes can report on the very fringe middle-class professional banker seeking to relegitimise racism for a better spoken far right, its perhaps best not to tweet it out like its some celebrity fashion shoot.

    As he points out, the “breathless national reporting about [the] rise of hipster racists” lacks context. These are extremists, a tiny minority, but their views are dangerous. And their mission is to normalise racism. Presenting them as normal people is exactly what they want.

  • I ham what I ham

    There’s a completely manufactured controversy brewing over the term “gammon”, which was first used to describe the angry, red-faced, right-wing men in the Question Time audience and has since become a catch-all term for the kind of people who wear MAGA hats, complain about immigrants and rant about Political Correctness Gone Mad in the comments underneath Daily Mail articles.

    According to Brendan O’Neill of The Spectator, who has bad opinions for money, it’s “typical of Corbynista intolerance.”

    That’s hogwash.

    It’s simply a pejorative aimed at the people who call anyone who isn’t an angry, red-faced, right-wing man a snowflake, libtard, cuck, cucktard, remoaner, trot, social justice warrior, traitor… you get the idea. People who revel in how un-PC they are.

    Anyone who tells you gammon is a racist or classist slur is telling you porkies.

    Related: These days, right, if you tell anyone you’re English, you get arrested, and thrown in jail.

  • After the ‘quake

    I wrote about Channel 4’s Genderquake debate a few days ago, and it’s safe to say the programme has caused a lot of controversy.

    The people who refused to take part were proved right: Channel 4 was trying to start a fight.

    Here’s a piece by Pink News on how the audience were told to behave.

    Audience members at a controversial televised debate about gender claim they were “encouraged to heckle” panellists, including transgender activists Caitlyn Jenner and Munroe Bergdorf, by the programme’s producers.

    That’s an interesting contrast to the programme as it was pitched to potential panelists. CN Lester:

    I was one of the dozens approached from March onwards by Channel 4. An email from the production company explained that it would be: ”nuanced intelligent discussion around gender, identity and society. We aim to shed light on such complex issues and ask important questions in a safe environment.”

    Lester declined to take part, guessing – rightly – that the programme wouldn’t be remotely like that.

    This is what the so-called trans “debate” looks like: people shouting “you’re a man!” and “penis! penis! penis!” at people who thought they were there for a “nuanced intelligent discussion around gender.”

    These are the “mums”. The women with “legitimate concerns”. The ordinary people who just want to have a “respectful debate”.

    It’s not just the fact that they heckled. It’s that they were specifically invited so that they would. Channel 4 appears to have deliberately invited bigots – some of whom are currently under investigation for hate speech, some of whom have been suspended from their political parties – and given then prominent positions in the audience. When they did what they were asked to do and heckled the panelists, they were allowed to remain in place for the rest of the programme.

    Imagine for a moment the programme was about the experiences of an ethnic minority and Channel 4 sat members of Britain First and the EDL at the front, letting them shout racial epithets throughout the programme.

    Jenny Boylan, a writer I very much admire, in the New York Times:

    This is what happens when we act as if the humanity of vulnerable, marginalized people is up for debate.

    The people doing the shouting are the same people you read about in the Sunday Times and other papers. They say they aren’t bigots, that they want the chance to have a reasonable debate.

    And when you put them in a studio they shout “Penis! Penis! Penis!”

    Boylan again:

    At the end of the “Genderquake” program, Ms. Jenner said, by way of conclusion: “We have to create a more loving society. We have to celebrate the differences in people. Show love toward one another.”

    The audience booed.

    Not the whole audience. You can guess which section.

    I’ve been asked by a few people why I post about trans things here. That’s why. Every day we are libelled in print, slandered on social media, accused of unspeakable depravity and evil by people who question our right to exist and who repeat long-discredited bullshit.

    Here’s just one example, from the supposedly LGBT-friendly Guardian this week. Gaby Hinsliff linked the issue of trans women being able to change their birth certificates with the vile attacks by Canadian sex offender Christopher Hambrook in 2012.

    It was discrimination law, not the recognition process, that came under scrutiny in Canada after serial sex attacker Christopher Hambrook attacked two women in domestic violence shelters in Toronto, which he’d entered dressed as a woman. (The state of Ontario had previously passed a bill prohibiting discrimination against trans people.)

    The law Hinsliff mentions wasn’t passed until six months after Hambrook committed his crimes. The non-existent link between Hambrook and anti-discrimination legislation was invented by religious conservatives to try and prevent the so-called “Toby’s Law” from being passed. It’s a favourite of the “Penis! Penis! Penis!” shouters too.

    Hambrook wasn’t trans, incidentally. He was a serial sex offender who’d been incarcerated for child abuse and who was freed despite being an obvious danger to women: other inmates complained about the violent fantasies he made them listen to. Yes, he dressed as a woman to access a women’s refuge; had it been a disabled person’s shelter he’d have rolled up in a wheelchair. The judge who finally sentenced him to indefinite imprisonment said that nothing – “no other measure” but permanent incarceration – could protect women from such a dangerous man.

    The number of trans women who’ve sexually assaulted people in toilets or refuges, worldwide, is zero. That’s why people keep bringing Hambrook up: if they had actual examples of trans people being evil you can be sure they’d use them.

    The Hambrook case is about many things: lax sentencing of dangerous men, sexual assault against women not being taken seriously enough by police, and so on. But it had nothing to do with trans people whatsoever.

    But, you know, another day, another insinuation that if you see me in the bathroom I’m there to rape you.

    We are getting tired of this shit.

    Lester:

    The question I’m left with: how much longer can this script play out? Is this still enjoyable for anyone apart from the fanatics who want to spew hate at trans women?

    …I don’t have a choice about living in a culture shaped by such a regressive, dehumanising script.

    Boylan:

    …transgender people don’t need any more think pieces about the legitimacy of our lives. What we need, and what we deserve, is justice, and compassion, and love. What we need is freedom from violence, and protection from homelessness, and the right not to lose our jobs, or our children, or our lives.

    That’s the sinister transgender agenda right there.

  • It’s the f***ing debt

    I’m doing a comedy writing class at the moment, and one of the pieces we’ve studied is this bit of standup about austerity by Frankie Boyle.

    “It was the fucking banks! They showed you them doing it on the fucking news!”

    It’s a great bit, and I’m reminded of it every time there’s an article about a retailer or other household name facing doom. The articles blame falling sales, bad weather, rising rents. But: it’s the fucking debt!

    Did Toys R Us go under because of Amazon?

    It was the fucking debt!

    Is Gibson in trouble because nobody wants to buy guitars any more?

    It’s the fucking debt!

    Is New Look suffering from low-margin competition?

    It’s the fucking debt!

    Debts are usually (but not always) the result of a buyout, which is then used to load massive debts onto the company. For example, Toys R Us went under because it had five billion dollars of debt, most of which was due to its six billion dollar buyout in 2005. As Bloomberg put it:

    It’s been more than 12 years since a group of private equity firms loaded up Toys “R” Us Inc. with debt to take it private. The retailer’s balance sheet would never recover, and while that may not have been obvious then, the writing was always on the wall.

    Gibson’s woes are because it bought other firms. It ran up debts of $560 million trying to become a lifestyle company instead of focusing on making really nice guitars.

    New Look’s in trouble because it’s carrying £1.2 billion in debt.

    The various problems affecting companies are real, but it’s the debt that’s killing them. If they didn’t have to service the massive repayments they would be better placed to deal with the slings and arrows of business.

    This kind of corporate debt is like taking out a massive remortgage: if it’s a stretch in good times and something happens, such as a change in your circumstances or an interest rate rise, you’re fucked. Exactly the same thing is happening to big-name firms.

    It’s not the weather, or Amazon, or the end of guitar music. It’s the fucking debt.

  • Angry young men become terrorists

    A couple of weeks ago I linked to an article by Amia Srinivasan that among other things discussed “incels”, angry young men who believe they’re the victims of evil women.

    Last night, one of them committed mass murder in Toronto. 

    Internet echo chambers are creating terrorists.

    Graeme Wood, writing in The Atlantic:

    The dynamic is a familiar one in the age of digital community building. Once the incels griped to themselves, occasionally victimizing others, and sometimes getting over their pathology or finding a partner. Now they can come together online and find others to validate their grievances and encourage them to action.

    Update, 30/4:

    Writing in The Observer, Catherine Bennett used the Toronto terror atrocity to attack the real enemy here: trans women. Her column compared trans women to incels and Jack The Ripper..

  • Man prosecuted for telling a joke wasn’t prosecuted for telling a joke

    Mark Meechan with EDL leader Tommy Robinson.

    The sentencing verdict has been published in the case of PF vs Meechan. It has wrongly been described as a young man being prosecuted for telling a joke.

    He wasn’t. He was prosecuted for making and publishing a video in which he said “gas the Jews” 23 times, a video that was seen by a very large online audience.

    It was very specifically about one question: whether “using a public communications network on one day to post the video onto your video channel, constituted an offence contrary to section 127(1)(a) of the Communications Act 2003.”

    The sheriff found that it did.

    From the verdict:

    Your video was not just offensive but grossly so, as well as menacing, and that you knew that or at least recognised that risk.

    …The fact that you claim in the video, and elsewhere, that the video was intended only to annoy your girlfriend and as a joke and that you did not intend to be racist is of little assistance to you. A joke can be grossly offensive. A racist joke or a grossly offensive video does not lose its racist or grossly offensive quality merely because the maker asserts he only wanted to get a laugh.

    In any event, that claim lacked credibility. You had no need to make a video if all you wanted to do was to train the dog to react to offensive commands. You had no need to post the video on your unrestricted, publicly accessible, video channel if all you wanted to do was annoy your girlfriend. Your girlfriend was not even a subscriber to your channel. You posted the video, then left the country, the video went viral and thousands viewed it before she had an inkling of what you were up to. You made no effort to restrict public access or take down the video.”

    Meechan is an odious clown who hangs around with neo-Nazis so I certainly don’t have any sympathy.

    Many of his online defenders are clearly anti-semites, among other things, and their analyses of the verdict are based on what appears to be a misunderstanding or deliberate misrepresentation of what the case actually hinged on.

    This is Section 127(1)(a) of the Communications Act 2003:

    (1)A person is guilty of an offence if he—

    (a)sends by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character

    “Grossly offensive” isn’t about matters of taste or people clutching pearls. The relevant judgement about what is and isn’t grossly offensive is simple: “The test is whether a message is couched in terms liable to cause gross offence to those to whom it relates.”

    Here’s an example of how that’s being misunderstood online.

    How many of the reporters who were interviewing and/or reporting on Meechan will be prosecuted on causing gross offense for saying “gas the Jews” in their articles and interviews, @policescotland?

    The answer is none, because none of them are causing gross offence.

    It’s really very simple. If you use the phrase “gas the Jews” in a news report about the Meechan case, you aren’t guilty of gross offence under the Communications Act; if you do it multiple times in a video because you think advocating genocide is funny, there’s a good chance that you are.

    In a week where we saw these frightening photos from Georgia, I’m okay with that.

  • Let boys be happy boys

    I’ve written a few times here about toxic masculinity, the idea that certain beliefs and expectations are bad for men as well as women. This, by Tim Winton, puts it really well.

    Boys and young men are so routinely expected to betray their better natures, to smother their consciences, to renounce the best of themselves and submit to something low and mean. As if there’s only one way of being a bloke, one valid interpretation of the part, the role, if you like. There’s a constant pressure to enlist, to pull on the uniform of misogyny and join the Shithead Army that enforces and polices sexism.

    One of the most worrying things in the world right now is the radicalisation of young men, much of it online. Many young men are lost, and there are plenty of people offering them easy answers. All too often, they’re the wrong answers.

    In the absence of explicit, widely-shared and enriching rites of passage, young men in particular are forced to make themselves up as they go along. Which usually means they put themselves together from spare parts, and the stuff closest to hand tends to be cheap and defective. And that’s dangerous.

    Recruiters for the likes of the far right know this. It’s why you find them in forums where young men talk about depression, and anywhere else there are vulnerable young men looking for answers. It’s why they amplify the voices that tell people liberals, feminists, people of colour and LGBT people are stealing their birthright.

    A man in manacles doesn’t fully understand the threat he poses to others. Even as he’s raging against his bonds. Especially as he’s raging against his bonds. When you’re bred for mastery, when you’re trained to endure and fight and suppress empathy, how do you find your way in a world that cannot be mastered? How do you live a life in which all of us must eventually surrender and come to terms? Too many men are blunt instruments. Otherwise known, I guess, as tools. Because of poor training, they’re simply not fit for purpose. Because life is not a race, it’s not a game, and it’s not a fight.

    Too many people are telling angry young men that it *is* a race, it *is* a game, it *is* a fight. And that’s harming men and women alike. It’s right and proper that we call out toxic behaviour and male entitlement, but men are victims here too.

    …patriarchy is bondage for boys, too. It disfigures them. Even if they’re the last to notice. Even if they profit from it. And their disfigurement diminishes the ultimate prospects of all of us, wherever we are on the gender spectrum. I think we need to admit this.

  • I can’t get no sleep

    The Caledonian Sleeper train is in the news after the latest concerted “pile-on” (their words) by anti-trans activists who organise on Mumsnet: they don’t want trans people on sleeper trains.

    (It’s interesting to see people with hateful views, many of whom advocate violence against minorities, hiding behind the label “mumsnet user” and abusing the stereotype of mums as nice, unthreatening and sensible people who can’t possibly be vicious bigots. The US religious right trades in similar tropes.)

    Later this year, the service is changing so that people won’t be sharing with strangers at all, so the risk of feeling “uncomfortable” will be removed entirely. But even now it’s a non-issue, as Dr Brooke Magnanti explained on Twitter:

    A lot of people piling on @CalSleeper about gender clearly have never used the service; they can if they wish select single occupancy and sleep by themselves; alternatively, there are sleeper seats in an open carriage where anyone can sit next to anyone.

    You can also travel with friends and family and share your cabin with them.

    As someone who has travelled these routes regularly, it is in fact only seldom that you actually end up sharing with a stranger. And most people use the Sleeper for its intended purpose: TO SLEEP.

    If you feel uncomfortable with your assigned berthmate, you can change when you arrive (the old Sleeper system used to designate anyone with ‘Dr’ as male, so I had to do this on the platform a couple of times)

    Every carriage has an attendant, and every berth has an emergency and attendant call button if anything happens. You can change once the journey is underway; I was reassigned an empty cabin due to noisy/drunk person in the top bunk once.

    I fully support trans people.@CalSleeper, the folks piling on you now are doing it for publicity and headlines. They aren’t even your customers.

    This is something I’ve had to think about. I’m going to a concert in That London in the summer and considered the Sleeper, because it’s by far the most convenient and cost-effective option. But I decided against it: on the one hand my fear of sharing with a bloke (the same fear women have, plus the extra risk of abuse that LGBT people face), on the other my concern about making someone uncomfortable by my mere presence.

    So instead, I’m flying and staying in a hotel. It’s going to cost considerably more money and it’s considerably less convenient but I’m fortunate in that I can choose that option.

    Not everybody can. And that’s the problem with the current wave of anti-trans bile coming from Mumsnet and being parroted, unquestioned, in the media and on social media. It’s about policing where we can go, about limiting our ability to live normally. We’ve even got supposedly sensible newspaper columnists advocating segregated bathrooms, an idea that we’ve seen somewhere before:

    Some of the most vicious racists were mums who claimed black women spread disease and must be segregated; in the US, some suffragettes argued for the vote on the grounds that it would help white power defeat black people’s votes. The same kind of nice, unthreatening and totally not bigoted at all people turned their attentions to gay and lesbian people in the 1970s. It’s not that they were racist, or homophobic. They were “uncomfortable”. They had “genuine concerns”. That was more important than the dignity and safety of other people, people who had much more to fear than they did, people who they demonised and vilified.

    What extremists did then, and what their spiritual heirs are doing now, is weaponising people’s fear of the other, of the unknown. Their goal isn’t to protect anybody. It’s to erase a victimised minority, to prevent them from living normally, to exclude them from public spaces and public life.

    Don’t let the labels fool you: what bigots are doing on Mumsnet is the same radicalisation the alt-right racists and anti-semites have been doing on Reddit and other social media.

    They’re not protecting women. They’re grooming them.