UPDATE
Minutes after I posted this article, the ludicrous Jess Phillips published an article in the Guardian which could not have been better designed to prove my thesis. A number of people have posted comments on the Guardian article pointing this out, and they have all been immediately deleted by the Guardian. I just tried it myself and was also deleted. I should be grateful if readers could now also try posting comments there, in order to make a point about censorship on the Guardian.
Catching up on a fortnight’s news, I have spent five hours searching in vain for criticism of Simon Danczuk from prominent or even just declared feminists. The Guardian was the obvious place to start, but while they had two articles by feminist writers condemning Chris Gayle’s clumsy attempt to chat up a presenter, their legion of feminist columnists were entirely silent on Danczuk. The only opinion piece was strongly defending him.
This is very peculiar. The allegation against Danczuk which is under police investigation – of initiating sex with a sleeping woman – is identical to the worst interpretation of the worst accusation against Julian Assange. The Assange allegation brought literally hundreds, probably thousands of condemnatory articles from feminist writers across the entire range of the mainstream media. I have dug up 57 in the Guardian alone with a simple and far from exhaustive search. In the case of Danczuk I can find nothing, zilch, nada. Not a single feminist peep.
The Assange case is not isolated. Tommy Sheridan has been pursuing a lone legal battle against the Murdoch empire for a decade, some of it in prison when the judicial system decided his “perjury” was imprisonable but Andy Coulson’s admitted perjury on the Murdoch side in the same case was not. I personally witnessed in court in Edinburgh last month Tommy Sheridan, with no lawyer (he has no money) arguing against a seven man Murdoch legal team including three QCs, that a letter from the husband of Jackie Bird of BBC Scotland should be admitted in evidence. Bird was working for Murdoch and suggested in his letter that a witness should be “got out of the country” to avoid giving evidence. The bias exhibited by the leading judge I found astonishing beyond belief. I was the only media in the court.
Yet even though the Murdoch allegations against Sheridan were of consensual sexual conduct, Sheridan’s fight against Murdoch has been undermined from the start by the massive and concerted attack he has faced from the forces of feminism. Just as the vital messages WikiLeaks and Assange have put out about war crimes, corruption and the relentless state attack on civil liberties have been undermined by the concerted feminist campaign promoting the self-evidently ludicrous claims of sexual offence against Assange.
As soon as the radical left pose the slightest threat to the neo-con establishment, an army of feminists can be relied upon to run a concerted campaign to undermine any progress the left wing might make. The attack on Jeremy Corbyn over the makeup of his shadow cabinet was a classic example. It is the first ever gender equal shadow cabinet, but the entire media for a 96 hour period last September ran headline news that the lack of women in the “top” posts was anti-feminist. Every feminist commentator in the UK piled in.
Among the obvious dishonesties of this campaign was the fact that Defence, Chancellor, Foreign Affairs and Home Secretary have always been considered the “great offices of State” and the argument only could be made by simply ignoring Defence. The other great irony was the “feminist” attack was led by Blairites like Harman and Cooper, and failed to address the fact that Blair had NO women in any of these posts for a full ten years as Prime Minister.
But facts did not matter in deploying the organised feminist lobby against Corbyn.
Which is why it is an important test to see what the feminists, both inside and outside the Labour Party, would do when the leading anti-Corbyn rent-a-gob, Simon Danczuk, was alleged to have some attitudes to women that seem very dubious indeed, including forcing an ex-wife into non-consensual s&m and that rape allegation.
And the answer is …nothing. Feminists who criticised Assange, Sheridan and Corbyn in droves were utterly silent on the subject of Danczuk. Because the purpose of established and paid feminism is to undermine the left in the service of the neo-cons, not to attack neo-cons like Danczuk.
Identity politics has been used to shatter any attempt to campaign for broader social justice for everybody. Instead it becomes about the rights of particular groups, and that is soon morphed into the neo-con language of opportunity. What is needed, modern feminism argues, is not a reduction of the vast gap between rich and poor, but a chance for some women to become Michelle Mone or Ann Gloag. It is not about good conditions for all, but the removal of glass ceilings for high paid feminist journalists or political hacks.
Feminism has become the main attack tool in the neo-con ideological arsenal. I am sceptical the concept can be redeemed from this.
They came for Muslims I stayed silent!
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There were none left when they came for me, to silence me!
We can always thank our keyboard warriors and their worshipful elders whom sponsor our politicians and select them for us to agree with by ticking a box!
Re the Cologne rape attacks, funny observing on twitter how known xenophobes have suddenly become ardent feminists ! 😀
@Jon I see Mr Shigemitsu has already alerted you to your surprising unawarness re the targetted corruption of the MSM.
Sorry, typo. Udo Ulfkotte, that name is spelled.
However I did not see this until now and think there should have been at least some publicity for multiole women being sexually molested on New Year’s Eve
Yes John, its very strange especially when whats more you hear on the news that the very same thing happened in Munich and Hamburg too. On the very same night one whole week ago and that these incidents have only just reported. Not quite copy cat crime but copy cat reporting perhaps? I would question whether any recent asylum seeker who has still not received asylum and most have not yet having succeeded in getting here, where he is clothed, housed, fed and given an allowance, would risk being deported. Whats going on? I do not have the answer but things do not add up that’s for sure.
I have not noticed any major change since Rusbridger left The Guardian and I do not believe that the editorial policy has changed since Kathy Viner took the helm.
http://www.theguardian.com/profile/katharineviner
The policy according to Alan Rusbridger was to let individual reporters express their views. According to an interview by Peter Oborne when Alan Rusbridger chose to allow reports which were critical of the ‘disproportionate bombing’ by Israel he was pounced on from the board. Even editors have their hands tied. The Guardian is not the worst of our newspapers.
The Guardian does remove comments, as Bob has found out tonight. I’ve had comments removed myself. But then I’ve had comments removed from this blog too. There is a contact on The Guardian website. I suspect the moderators are specially chosen people who have sat a psychometric test and shown themselves not to question policy. This is a big shame because it belies a basic tenet of freedom, the right to free speech. More importantly often the comments are as at least as informed as the articles.
Journalists should be of a different ilk. Unfortunately most of them play the tune the piper calls. Where else would they get that kind of money?
John Goss, my experience of commenting on articles in the Guardian is that if they are written by Blairites and you are critical, the comments get removed. I am always polite, never use offensive language or personal attacks and always comment on content but the comments get removed. I commented on an article by Yvette Cooper the other week, three times, and each time they removed the comment. The paper used to be, IMHO, a bastion of free speech but no longer I fear.
Here in D.C., people in government, often not too bright themselves, consider journalists to be dim bulbs for the most part. I guess they select people who are willing and able to do what journalists are nowadays expected to do.
you bet! The tenets of oligarch owned media are firmly based on keeping their
victimsaudiences in a stupor and belief that they are being told the impartial truth!!!!========
That is the way cookie crumbles, the amounts of money are surprisingly modest and very little buys a huge amount!!!
I trust you have read Gerd-Helmut Komossa’s book The German Card ?
That country is still under occupation as is the case with Japan and Korea, you should know that better, given your background.
John, what do you think of this recent piece published by the Guardian…
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/22/saudi-arabia-isis-us-terrorists-coalition
Or another recent piece published by the Guardian…
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/26/the-truth-is-rushing-out-there-why-conspiracies-spread-faster-than-ever
O/T my apologies, just popping a couple of postings on harassment up on the Coe/Blatter thread. Thanks. John
When you look at the ganging up here in blighty, Fed up, the obsession with the ‘get Corbyn’ campaign by the MSM and from so called colleagues within the Labour Party, then you can be rest assured that the same neocon controllers are at work here.
Ufkotte could only ever have a certain focus , what he saw and heard, by his descriptions there must have been thousands others around the world who process the same tardy messages into gems of wisdom.
One of your best Craig, it peels the chaff from the corn. I do not think that a possible police charge would stop the media, if he was not a neocon MP.
The only feminist comments were really made by his wife, even those were underscored. The press is dying!
Bob, I agree. I confess I used to share a drink with certain journalists from the Birmingham Post. They were committed. One, Chris Upton, died late last year from cancer. A month or two before he had been doing reports for the BBC. He was an historian. He wrote highly amusing asticles on Birmingham history and my friendship with him had lasted since I came to Birmingham in 1980, at which time he was a lecturer at Aston University and I was a toolmaker in a contract toolroom. We used to meet on Fridays in the Gunmakers Arms with John Fletcher, a Reader in the history of universities (hope I got that detail right).
Anyway these journalist friends were, and those that are left are, like all of us, not without faults, but they had kindly and tolerant dispositions, were honest in their views and jolly good company.
Bob: I have had similar experience. I wrote one post comparing Corbyn to Farage and it was thrown out. (Saying they were treated the same way by the media). I wrote another post on the same level as yours. Saying I liked Corbyn for what he wasn’t rather than what he was… Rothschild controlled scum. (Like Brown). (Sacking McFadden further proves this to me. Rothschilds act through the EU. Media reason McFadden fired was very, very silly.)
On the article:
This is very interesting, I have heard before that feminism is a Rockerfeller (Bush-Blair-Nazi) social engineering idea and that Rockerfeller institutes put out a lot of the research into gender differences.
Feminist Gloria Steinem was a spook for the CIA.
Sixer – good thoughts, yes.
Mr Shigemitsu – thanks for the links. I should, genuinely, like to hear your own thoughts about how the media works – is it your view that anyone who works for, say, the Guardian, New Statesman, the Indie etc have direct links to the security services? And ditto any mildly progressive outlets elsewhere in the world?
I’m quite sure the CIA and so forth would like to infiltrate the media, but wouldn’t keeping that secret, involving tens of thousands – hundreds of thousands? – of media professionals – be impossible?
I hadn’t heard of Komossa’s book, but it looks very interesting. I just ordered it.
RobG I did not have time to read the first link to the end before realising that it was totally out of kilter with reality since Saudi Arabia is funding ISIS. The title could be right if they stop funding ISIS. But then a state that publicly executes opposition is a state that only people like David Cameron could have any time with which to conduct friendly relations.
The second, being one often labelled as a conspiracy theorist, is even more ludicrous. It obviously fits the mindset of the real conspirators. Those are the ones who actually do the dirty deeds cosnpiracy theorists are accused of opposing. You know, conspiracy theorist is going to be the hat to wear. I’m proud. You know members of the Society of Friends were ridiculed in the 17th century and first half of the eighteenth century. They were called Quakers because when they were inspired by the Holy Spirit they trembled. Never be ashamed to be in a minority. Sometimes you are in a minority of one like Craig, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. Wear the badge. It is a badge of pride. In vino veritas. Goodnight.
I suppose it’s all part of what GCHQ see as Albannaich expression.
The jolly chaps have to make a bad movie look authentic, don’t they.
My previous comment wasn’t directed at you John, but at other comments that Mods have now deleted.
Would you agree that the owner of and the user of female anatomy might have different concepts of it. This makes my head hurt because we’re not supposed to understand sex.
You want to use my female anatomy and I don’t want you to use it, go and use something else! is nothing to do with feminism, gender rights or even trans-gender rights.
It’s a matter of personal space. Dansuk’s ex might well be tempted to consent, and so might a young potential employee, but that’s different from not being able to give your consent because you’re asleep.
Similarly, in response to RobG’s question about legitimacy to govern Muslims, if anyone of them think that I accept any Muslim power using Western spying technology leased to them by the West for the purpose of controlling me, invading my personal space, which is inviolable in Islam, they can fuck off.
I think there is an assumption on the part of the extreme versions of Islam represented by Saudi royalty and Daesh , that we humans , or we Muslims, will ever consent to invasive voyeuristic spying on our privacy , or get used to it. We will never do either and therefore anyone who thinks we will, forfeits their right to rule us by consent.
@Lysias “Article in Washington Post about how limitations are being put on what Germans can say about the Cologne attacks”
It seems SITE posted this on the 30th December a day before the attacks.
https://ent.siteintelgroup.com/Western-Jihadists/is-fighter-calls-to-rob-easy-targets-during-new-year-celebrations.html
‘I would question whether any recent asylum seeker who has still not received asylum and most have not yet having succeeded in getting here, where he is clothed, housed, fed and given an allowance, would risk being deported. Whats going on?’
Details of the immigration status of the Cologne assailants are not readily available at present- but in a similar grope-fest in Helsinki at New Year (which has received less coverage than the similar incidents in Germany)it is apparent that many of the assailants were recent asylum seekers-
http://www.globalpost.com/article/6716353/2016/01/07/unprecedented-sex-harassment-helsinki-new-year
For the last word on feminism speaking (or not)with forked tongue, and for Macky & Fedup particularly, this graphic says it all-
http://pbs.twimg.com/media/CYHRRuTWYAEiZx0.jpg
I think it’s useful to think of Guardian feminists as high-brow gossip columnists. When I were a lad at Uni’, I read some feminist critical theory, some of it was rather interesting, all of it written to a high academic standard. Churning out a 1000 or so words for The Guardian can’t really be called feminist writing, it’s just an opinion piece, after all. The issues they raise only sometimes get beyond ‘the patriarchy’, social mores, and laughable stuff about glass ceilings.
Jon asks the question of how deliberate this all is. There is a sense that Guardian-style feminism is running interference for the neocon establishment, who continue to fuck things up in their inimitable style. I prefer to think much remains accidental, though could be hugely wrong. I’d guess columnists swiftly discern what gets printed, and what does not. So an article about the rape of female protesters by undercover police might be a good one, but get spiked. Hard to say really. I should add, nothing wrong of course with writing about issues directly related to 50% of the planet, it’s the omissions that are the concern here.
The hatred of Assange is just weird though.
@Old Mark, given some of your previous views, I’m not at all surprised you have now taken up the feminist mantle; here’s a good read by a black berliner, and guess what, he doesn’t care about people like you, and neither do I;
http://www.okwonga.com/how-to-deal-with-the-sexual-assaults-in-cologne/
Your analysis explains the fanatical feminist support for Hilary Clinton who frightens me more than any of the Republican candidates with her rampant very male militarism. If Wasserman Schultz and the DNC enthrone HRC and she wins I am convinced this crazy specimen will initiate WW3 in her first term. The glass ceiling will melt…
This is one of the things wrong with journalism today. Few support those who put their lives at risk getting the truth out.
https://www.facebook.com/181961455147909/photos/a.182111391799582.45846.181961455147909/1126493367361375/?
“Identity politics has been used to shatter any attempt to campaign for broader social justice for everybody.”
A variation of the tragedy of the commons. Everybody pursuing their own self inteerest to the detriment of the best interests of everybody.
I certainly agree with you about the Sheridan case in particular. While there are undoubtedly some great women in Women for Independence who are absolutely sincere in wanting to promote sexual equality, social equality and Scottish Independence, WFI was founded by and is controlled by those who joined forces with the News of the World in bringing down Tommy Sheridan. I get the impression that this feminist organisation’s main purpose is to keep Sheridan down even though he is undoubtedly the most accomplished and effective proponent of independence with a huge, passionate and largely female following. Sadly WFI is hugely influential in the wider Independence movement to the extent that Sheridan’s participation was rejected by Yes Scotland and he is consistently cold shouldered by the SNP to the SNP’s great discredit exposing it as anything but representative of the “grassroots movement” it pretended to be, a disguise which is now wearing pretty thin. Yes, beware the sharp elbows of faux feminists.
Re. Hieroglyph’s point about whether Grauniad (etc) misrepresentation is deliberate or ‘accidental’: I suspect that much of it is better understood as systemic. In other words, rather than being the product of intention, it is ‘ the way the system works’. Like any complex organisation, the political order assimilates human intentions and preferences to build its own dynamic functioning. For example, people like Rusbridger, Viner, et al rise to the top because their views ‘naturally’ echo and reinforce the way the larger organisation functions; and so, in turn, they select those opinions that ‘naturally’ make sense to them. So there is a convergence towards a type of self-reinforcing perspective, and this makes divergence or the expression of any alternative increasingly different.It’s necessary to stand outside this consenus and listen to more distant but more profound drummers in order to maintain one’s contact with any wider reality.
Of course, our human prejudice and arrogance tend to prevent us from recognising that there are intelligences or awarenesses that are beyond our own capacities . . . Which leaves us pretty powerless to challenge systemic functioning.
PS. Isn’t it delightful that the usual trolls are having a lie-in this morning??!