That the Tories and Unionist establishment would attempt to land a sexist smear on Alex Salmond for calling a woman a, err, woman, is unsurprising. That they are joined by a number of ludicrous feminists is unsurprising too.
It is probably the case that it is a more frequent use in Scotland and Northern England than in Southern England to add “man” or “woman” after an injunction, but anywhere from Grantham northwards “Behave yourself, man!” or “Behave yourself, woman!” is a perfectly unexceptional expression. That the use of “woman” in this sense is sexist is absolute nonsense. “Behave yourself, human” would not be a normal expression. The idea that Salmond calling Soubry “demented” was in some way anti-woman is even more ludicrous. Women have no monopoly on demented behaviour. In fact it is a rather anti-feminist idea that women should be protected from robust verbal exchanges when men should not.
None of which will stop the feminist nutters from having a go at Salmond. Feminism appears unique in breeding acolytes who have no notion whatsoever of wider social questions. They are therefore perfect tools for the establishment to turn against anybody who threatens authority. The feminist stampede to condemn Julian Assange on the basis of quite ludicrous charges orchestrated by CIA asset Anna Ardin is one example where feminists delight the hearts of the powerful. Their turning on Tommy Sheridan was another. Now they fly at Alex Salmond. They are, men or women, stupid, and the most useful of idiots to the forces of wealth, power and privilege.
Breaking…
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/officials-administration-hit-by-massive-data-breach/
The Office of Personnel Management is the human resources department for the federal government, and issues security clearances.
4 million pwned accounts must rate as the security fail of the millenium. No wonder it’s taken them two months to come out with it.
China has been suggested as the culprit….guess who* was in China a couple of days ago.
*T— B—-.
Lysias
04/06/2015 10:17pm
“It’s one thing to allow women to work. It’s quite another to foster a cultural climate which devalues the role of the housewife and mother and thereby pressures women to join the workforce.”
I agree entirely with your thoughts on this, Lysias. I am interested in the language. “Allow” is an interesting word. My father used to “allow” my mother to do things. How appalling is that? Why should one adult human being “allow” another to do anything at all? I think a better way to express it might be “It’s one thing not to interfere with a woman’s right to earn her own living.” The way you use “work” is interesting too. It is as though remunerated work and work are synonymous. Is a woman, or a man, who maintains a home and raises a family not “working”? Finally, “housewife” carries a lot of baggage. Personally I prefer the word “homemaker”.
None of that is intended to criticise you in any way. It’s just really interesting to examine the way we use language and the assumptions that underpin it.
Kind regards,
John
A rather weak, deflective response from Mary. There is no goading, only pure observation. I have no idea how and where you were raised, but have you really never heard of “there’s a time and place for everything”?
You were doing the exact same thing this morning on the rather personal post and thread by Craig on the Scott & Co, ripoff, his financial burdens, even ‘crucially’ his depression; the latter, a particularly brave thing to reveal and share publicly. And what do you do?
While on that subject, let me also observe that tens of comments after Craig’s added post mid-thread, and not one single remark, or did I miss something? Sorry to x-post Craig, but if I may say so the top-most thing I like about you is your humanity. Sensitive people are prone to depression. Coinciding life events can be contributing triggers. Financial vulnerability can certainly exacerbate it. If you’re not taking medication, consider it for a temporary period, so you feel good enough in your skin to move forward in response to your challenges. And get on to regular brisk exercise walks–what was that beautiful picture Nadira took recently in the ‘park’ beside you? It looked like countryside. Beautiful, connect yourself with Nature!
Finally, career-wise, if Galloway can make a career in broadcasting; God, you are ten times smarter than him! Go for it; see what comes up!!
@Jemand: “Look at how Bruce Jenner’s transformation into a (poor) facsimile of an actual woman”
She’s just as much a woman as any other female. Moreover, there is plenty of scientific evidence to demonstrate that there are biological causes to transsexuality: post mortem studies of trans women found that an area of the brain called the hypothalamus is similar in size to that of other non-transsexual women. It’s also useful to note that every foetus starts off as female and is masculinised (or not) to varying degrees by male hormones afterwards. It’s only largely due to the strangle-hold that the three main patriarchal religions held upon much of the world that we’ve lived in a society that saw gender (and even biological sex) as strictly either/or. Now that organised religion is becoming less and less powerful the truths that they’ve tried to hide for centuries is becoming increasingly apparent. Shock, horror: gender is a (literally) man-made, artificial social construct and we are first and foremost individuals!
@Giyane: Big apologies, Giyane – I totally misread your post as Esmerelda Berias.
Maybe a link to the story under discussion would help those of us who haven’t a clue what this is about…?
Media feminism and identity politics more generally, political correctness etc, really gets off the ground in the 1990s.
Around the same time in fact that wages stalled, replaced with credit cards and loans.
And everyone seemed to forget economic and political basics.
We haven’t recovered from that yet, and it seems that recovery involves going to the wall, as in Greece, Spain etc.
@Lysias: “It’s one thing to allow women to work. It’s quite another to foster a cultural climate which devalues the role of the housewife and mother and thereby pressures women to join the workforce.”
I would agree with you that it’s one of society’s biggest mistakes to count housework and bringing up children, caring for family members as a somehow lesser role than spending one’s life working to maximise economic capital for someone else and mostly not even oneself. However, since men can do housework and bring up kids isn’t a cultural climate whereby men are pressurised to join the workforce as opposed to this equally as oppressive?
With regard to Salmond’s rebuke of Soubry, I’d say that use of the term “demented” could potentially be more offensive as the history of this word has prejudiced connotations towards people who suffer mental illness. For some reason, there are still many people who feel that dementia sufferers with a terminal, organic brain disease such as Alzheimer’s are fair game for humour yet would they feel the same way about similarly adding moral judgements upon, ridiculing and generally treating with contempt people who have cancer?
Becky Cohen
04/06/2015 11:12pm
It might be simpler to find another word for neurodegenerative diseases that affect the mind. I have strong objections to the word “dementia” due to its inherited implications of mental illness and its insensitive and misleading connotations.
It wouldn’t be that hard to do, in my opinion. “Senile dementia” is hardly used any more, and “dementia praecox” is gone from the language.
Kind regards,
John
@John Spencer-Davis: Yes John, the persistence of such archaic terms are probably symptomatic of the way in which such neurodegenerative are still widely misunderstood. Even though they are clearly diseases in which large parts of the brain are destroyed I believe they are still classified as “psychiatric” which means that a succession of governments have more of an ‘excuse’ to not automatically provide medical care on the NHS. Unless the sufferer meets the criteria for continuing health care (which is only usually ‘awarded’ a few weeks’ before they’re likely to die) then they basically have to pay for it with whatever financial assets they have. There has been a massive crisis in social and medical care for the elderly (and other vulnerable people) for some time now, but successive governments have chosen to stick their heads in the sand because looking after the sick and the dying wasn’t as much of a ‘boys’ own’ *sexy* issue. They preferred instead to squander billions of taxpayers’ on getting involved in ‘shock and awe’ wars to prove that Britain is still “a major player on the world stage”, thus compensating for certain male politicians’ feelings of inadequacy over their masculinity and insuring their ever-expanding egos’ *places in history*.
“Apart from saying that the trolls come in like performing sea lions clapping their flippers all together”
I think you might be being a little unkind to the SNP MPs at Westminster there.
With regard to the tendency for so many politicians to labour under the misapprehension that they still lead a major imperial power, I always remember that one journalist put it in a nutshell with the wry observation: “There was a time when certain people went around thinking they were Napoleon Bonaparte – now the same sort of people go around convinced they are Winston Churchill.”:)
Becky Cohen
04/06/2015 11:43pm
Dementia is certainly still classified under mental health care by the NHS. It is of course an unfortunate crossover condition which significantly affects both physical and mental health.
Regrettably NHS continuing health care is quite difficult to get and that certainly is not restricted to mental health classifications.
You are absolutely right about the crisis in social and medical care and it is getting worse, not better, due to austerity, as I have personal experience of. There are welcome changes coming in about the use of personal assets to fund care, in the right direction. One thing about the use of assets is that the home is protected under several circumstances, including most notably if a spouse continues to live in the home.
Kind regards,
John
Ten posts on this topic already from our resident expert on Frankfurt School mental masturbation aka ‘gender theory’, Becky Cohen.
Her post at 11.49pm is actually quite good, but some of the others came close to inducing in me a ROFL moment.
Most of what Becky Cohen posts on gender seems eminently sensible to me.
J
Most of what Becky Cohen posts on gender seems eminently sensible to me
John- read this prophetic post (over 20 years old,and thankfully back on the interweb again), and think again-
http://www.namebase.org/news03.html
“Most of what Becky Cohen posts on gender seems eminently sensible to me.”
and to me.
OldMark
05/06/2015 12:20am
I have read it quickly. As I understand it, the article argues that multiculturalism is a distraction from struggle against the deep-rooted power structures of society, that capitalism can perfectly accommodate multiculturalism and even encourages it as in its interests, and that multiculturalism can be used in ways which are inconsistent with its ostensible aims of justice and equality.
I do not see that this demonstrates that multiculturalism and anti-capitalist thinking are mutually exclusive. It is perfectly possible to perceive everything that the article says, take what is meritorious, and still maintain a commitment to gender and race equality, among other things.
Kind regards,
John
MSM making a mountain out of a molehill as usual ….. well depending on who it is of course.
It just came across to me as humorous banter. Much needed in that mausoleum.
Some terms that are used in the North aren’t understood by the Southerners. Sense of humour seems to differ too.
Anyway explanations won’t help because the SNP MPs every move and word spoken will be scrutinised, edited to suit if need be and misrepresented at every turn. They’re probably carrying out their furtive investigations on each and every one of them right now to see what dirt they can dredge up for future reference. Thank goodness there’s 56 of them down there in the hell hole no doubt supporting one another.
At CM:
“An identical labour costs argument is used against immigrants.”
And the argument that immigration lowers wages is undoubtedly correct.
Immigration also lessens the need to train the native population to fill those “skills gaps”, so cheerfully alluded to by advocates of mass immigration when the impact of immigration on wages is annoyingly raised by some racist opponent of the ethnic cleansing of London, Leicester, Luton, Birmingham, etc., etc.
At CM:
““Behave yourself, woman!” is a perfectly unexceptional expression.”
Unexceptional, perhaps, but certainly insulting, or as the Oxford dictionary indicates, “a peremptory form of address.”
The More boorishly the Scotch Nats behave the better, since the sooner the mostly polite people of Scotland will tire of them and their treasonous plan to break the Union and reduce the Scots to a tiny and inconsequential minority among the half billion or so, ex-Commie, or ex-Nazi, or ex-Fascist Euros ready for full integration as a cheap-labor area into the German-dominated Euro economy. A few
@Becky Cohen – “She’s just as much a woman as any other female. .. Shock, horror: gender is a (literally) man-made, artificial social construct and we are first and foremost individuals!”
That is manifestly false. All of what you wrote is normative and prescriptive, not objective and descriptive.
Are XX chromosomes and a uterus “man-made” “social construct[s]”?
No.
They are natural, objective attributes of a human female and, strikingly enough, can be found in most mammals. Some animals can change sex post-natal. Good for them. Some can’t. Too bad for those.
“Gender” might be a man(feminist)-made construct, but sex is not. Humans cannot change sex after a certain pre-natal stage. That is an incontrovertible, objective fact – whatever the emotional impact it seems to have on vocal disbelievers.
The mood amongst Liberal extremists appears to encourage people to change their “gender” if they want to, but any discussion of of transgendering from homosexuality to heterosexuality will incite a hate-filled reaction from those same Liberals. Why is that?
Bullying people into accepting unnatural and politically contrived social paradigms is exactly what Liberal extremists are doing while accusing their targets of the same. This seems to conform to the definition of “bigotry” as an intolerance of different opinions.
So-called “Liberals” are aggressive bigots in my experience and you can witness this phenomenon on this very blog.
This certainly took media attention away from what was really happening in the HoC. eg the announcement by Osborne of even more massive spending cuts. Austerity? What austerity? What do those Tory voters think now? The state is being dismantled on many fronts.
Only the ‘i’ had the cuts on their front page. The others went for Greece’s debts, FIFA’s bung to Ireland, children’s allergies and migrant benefits but there is a horrifying story in the Mail on Shaker Aamer being tortured in US bases in Afghanistan while MI5 operatives watched. Including Bagram I suppose. Did we hear the screams?
MI5 agents watched as I was tortured: British spies implicated as Londoner held for 13 years in Guantanamo speaks out
Shaker Aamer says British officer was in room while he was being tortured
The 48-year-old also claims a young British officer visited him in a ‘cage’
The incidents are alleged to have happened in US bases in Afghanistan
Londoner has been held at Guantanamo Bay for 13 years without charge
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3111632/MI5-agents-watched-tortured-British-spies-implicated-Londoner-held-13-years-Guantanamo-speaks-out.html
~~~
Motormouth Soubry is often seen chuntering away whilst others speak. She has been reprimanded by Bercow for doing this. She has been moved by Cameron from health to defence and now to business. All within 3 years.
The exchange.
Select Committees
Bills Presented – in the House of Commons at 7:18 pm on 3rd June 2015.
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=2015-06-03b.704.0#g710.6
The Press TV report on the French Orange plan to pull out of Israel.
French company boycott infuriates Israel PM
http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2015/06/04/414352/Israel-Orange-Stephane-Richard-France-Netanyahu
Viva Palestina!
Perhaps Becky Cohen forgets that Anna Soubry was the one misbehaving by rudely interrupting Salmond before he made his inappropriate response. Tories and the SNP deserve each other it seems.
Very interesting exchanges yesterday evening on gender, mental health, etc.
Shame about the attempts to divert onto immigration and Israel/Palestine.
John Spencer-Davis’s post on language and gender (at 22h51) merits a re-reading (and response from its addressee).
In the end, what you get away with depends on how you sit with the Establishment. Therefore we have the insanity of a society where a decent person can be attacked for a perfectly non-discriminatory remark, but high ranking politicians can escape persecution for child abuse.
Or a teenager can go to jail for stealing a bottle of vodka while not a single banker goes to jail for stealing billions, laundering drug money and ruining the lives of millions.