Before writing anything about this dreadful case, and before you read my article, it is right to pause to think first about the terrible and entirely undeserved fate of Sarah Everard, and the agony those who loved her must now be suffering.
This tragedy has led me to get into a twitter spat with people who are promoting the line that “all men are potential rapists”. It started when I took issue with a tweet by Stella Duffy (whom I know slightly).
This led to some fierce reactions by feminists, both female and male, then to some more replies by me, and then to quite a few tweets attacking me. As usual when heated debate is precipitated by a single distressing event, passion has been more in evidence than logic.
I think the difficulty lies in an ambiguity of language. The phrase “All men are potential rapists”, or Duffy’s expression “it is what any man might do”, can be taken to mean:
“You cannot tell, by appearance, which man is a rapist” – which is evidently true
or
“Every man is liable to rape” – which I would argue strongly is not true. The large majority of men would never rape, nor commit any other heinous crime.
I suspect that in some of those arguing on twitter, this is not just ambiguity, this is a deliberate conflation of the two concepts. There does seem to be a strain of radical feminist thinking which is anxious to promote the notion that every man is indeed liable to rape. That plainly is misandry – a gross prejudice, in the most literal sense, against people on the basis of their sex.
More interesting have been a number of twitter responses from women stating that they do indeed need to treat every man they might meet as a potential rapist, for their own self-protection, and adopt strategies to avoid dangerous situations. These are interesting because I think the majority of them are genuine iterations of how the writers really feel.
A large proportion of those responses come back to the fact that you cannot tell by appearance who is a rapist. It seems a stock response, judging by my twitter feed, to state that a woman would feel scared of me if she came across me or heard my footsteps while walking alone in a dark place. That is certainly true, and not only women are scared in those circumstances, though I accept they have more cause to fear.
But I am more interested in the sometimes detailed claims it is normal for women to exercise extreme caution in their every day dealings with half of the human race, when not walking in dark streets. One woman on twitter told me, for example, she had long advised her daughters against going out on one on one dates with men.
I have to say, on an every day basis that simply has not been my experience. In 45 years of adulthood, I have genuinely never picked up any sense of a woman being scared of me. In my career in professional situations I frequently had meetings with women, sometimes in my own office or even over lunch, and as a diplomat sometimes over a drink, and I genuinely have almost no recollection of ever being refused or put off, let alone in circumstances where I suspected the person was worried about my intentions. Had I suspected that, it would very definitely have worried me a lot that I gave such an impression. I have always been over-sensitive to what others think of me, to the point of vanity. I have never felt myself suspected of having potential for sexual violence.
I would very frequently offer to escort someone back to their home or hotel if there was any reason to think protection might be helpful, and was seldom if ever refused. On the purely social level, in my younger days I never had the slightest feeling of anyone being scared of me on a date, or to go with me on a date. Every date I ever had was one on one. I just cannot recognise the claims that women routinely in their daily lives treat all mean as a threat, as true in my own experience. Nor does it seem to be true of the women now close to me, in their dealings with other men.
I quite accept that those women on twitter who have told me that they distrust every man, are telling me the truth of their own experience. But I have never found most women, or indeed any women I encountered, to be like that, and I am telling you the truth of my own experience.
It genuinely concerns me that society is now in such a schizophrenic state that it is acceptable to say, in effect, that one half of the human race must never repose trust in a member of the other half of the human race. It ought to be no more acceptable to say that every man must be viewed as a potential rapist, as it thankfully is now unacceptable to label every Roma as a potential thief or black person as potentially violent. People are people.
Of course sexual violence is a terrible problem. Of course conviction rates are worryingly low. That does not mean every man is liable to rape.
That some men are a threat is plainly true. The public shock that it may be the case that a figure of public trust, such as a policeman, would be a danger is entirely understandable. That merely reinforces the truism that you cannot tell who is a potential rapist just by looking at them. But there it ends. The large majority of men are very decent people. To say otherwise is nonsense. It in no way disrespects Sarah Everard to state that she was not negligent, just extremely unlucky. The odds of any woman in the UK being abducted off the street in any given year are one in many millions. Of course women walking alone at night should rightly be cautious; men out at night should be particularly vigilant to avoid situations that may alarm women, more so than ever at present. But there is no rational cause for a general state of fear or a general demonisation of the male sex.
I have never viewed the police as particularly like to be good people in their private lives (I naturally except both my brothers here!)
This may surprise you. When I was about six years old, a fairly senior policeman who was acting as a courier for my father, was caught when a bag of illegal money burst. This had quite profound ramifications for me, not least that my father fled the country and I did not see him again for the rest of my childhood. The Rolls Royce and the Mercedes disappeared (I learnt from an uncle only recently that my father’s share of the black money alone in 1965 had been over £1,500 per day, £25,000 a day in today’s money). After my father left, the rest of my childhood was spent in rural but very real poverty. It also meant I had the great fortune to be largely brought up by my maternal grandfather, a profoundly wise and intellectual old socialist. I often wonder what Craig Murray would have been like if that bag had not burst, and I had instead been brought up as the stinking rich heir to a very dodgy gambling empire. Possibly I would have become not a very nice person.
Anyway, I realised policemen were not all great even before I understood the terrible things they can do in an official capacity. Hearing Cressida Dick’s wavering tones over the alleged policeman’s involvement in the terrible death of Sarah Everard, naturally brought to mind that she was directly in charge of the police operation that murdered Brazilian electrician Jean Charles De Menezes, for the crime of looking a bit like an Arab.
It is also worth stating that everyone, including Cressida Dick, appears to be leaping to conclusions amid a blaze of publicity that is going to make a fair trial very difficult. We don’t know the evidence, or the defence, yet.
I am, I know, out of tune with the times. The politically correct repetition of the mantras of identity politics is the only kind of politics which is mainstream acceptable now. A terrible incident like the dreadful fate of Sarah Everard must be responded to by cries of “all men are potential rapists” and a determined effort to drive deeper the wedges between the two halves of the human race.
Not to quite see it that way may even make me socially unacceptable in some circles. I shall have to be stoical about that.
For me, the great gulf in society remains between rich and poor. In rather different ways, that gap in available resources kills millions across this globe every week. You can find gender components in poverty; much more is race a crucial component; but the prime cause of poverty is inequality.
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A brilliant, eloquent and well-argued piece with which I heartily agree. Everything in life these days seems to be about promoting division and taking sides – no coincidence, I suppose, that this development has taken place during the social media age of simplistic, polarised “for or against” debate.
“Everything in life these days seems to be about promoting division and taking sides…”
Indeed. For the individual it’s a tried and tested way of virtue signalling, which in turn tends to increase your prestige without much risk.
And most governments favour anything that turns people against one another and destroys traditional social units. Thus leaving citizens with no one to turn to but the government.
>>For me, the great gulf in society remains between rich and poor.
I was once receiving an equalities training and at the end, the trainer listed categories under-represented in the professional workplace. “Isn’t there a category missing?” I said. “Low parental income.”
The trainer looked uncomfortable. I looked around the room at the middle-class audience for the training. It’s the inequality that dare not speak its name.
As for men = rapists. There is a responsibility on men to understand women’s justifiable fears, and take steps with our own behaviour to help minimise them.
How do non-abusive non-rapist males ‘take steps with our own behaviour’ to help minimise women’s fears? And how exactly are ‘low parental income’ persons under-represented in the work place?
Seriously. It’s this wokey liberal nonsense that gets us where we are today where someone can genuinely call for a ‘curfew’ on all men after 6pm.
what part of “professional work place” did you miss?
I think another issue is also at large here.
Statistics show that the typical man is almost twice as likely to be murdered as the typical woman. The threat of violence in society as a whole is skewed towards men being the aggressor, but rarely the victim.
In an enlightened age (which unfortunately we aren’t) the threat of something should be correlated to it’s likelihood.
Our media, particularly, portrays too often women as needing to be scared to go out, weak, vulnerable, but men can be in exactly the same position. The ongoing culture of violence in society doesn’t target women, it targets men.
When out late, in the dark, I as a man, would purposefully avoid certain areas, would turn corners to avoid groups and stay in well lit areas. I wouldn’t go out without my phone for this reason.
However, as a counterpoint, what women more generally suffer from that is different is the threat of sexual violence. I believe that part of the reasons for this is the patriarchal society that we should be trying to move away from. Women are structurally and through “tradition” seen as inferior. Why must a father give his daughter away to a man? She is not a possession. Why does a woman change her name in marriage? In my mind this is like a transferrance of ownership.
Society is organised to make women inferior.
For what it’s worth, a Muslim man is allowed a second wife, and he is therefore allowed to look for one as well. But our society for historical reasons is deeply opposed to anything beyond monogamy. There is a massive difference between a man looking for an on going relationship and somebody looking for casual sex.
As far as I can tell our society has been Americanized into thinking that casual sex of any kind LGBT is normal. I have never been to the US but my daughter tells me that Americans there have no concept at all of others being in a relationship and will tout for sex blatantly as if they were talking about the weather. She was appalled and it is indeed appalling to me too.
I have been banned from working in student accommodation because I refuse not to engage in conversation with young people in pc University thinking. I’m not sure how that might come across to a young person if every adult male is abrupt, rude and unfriendly at work, while the same man is free to pick up a student at a club and do whatever he likes consensually.
To me , that message is wrong. That pastoral contact is forbidden, while clubbing with strangers is socially acceptable. I was also deeply honoured yesterday when a close neighbour of 20 years who has six daughters, did me a huge favour of selling me a car at a very good price. There is respect left in the world.
Me and corporate PC were never going to last but my neighbour of 20 years who does know me, knows I am a respectable citizen. Thanks for what’s left of normal life in a crazy corporate world.
Surely this irrational fear of men is much like fear of dogs. Clearly some dogs are dangerous, and since some people can’t tell in advance which ones are, they conclude that it’s best to treat them all the same. I have witnessed a woman becoming hysterical, when she saw that my dog was off a lead in a woodland walk. Dog owners are much less likely to fear other peoples’ dogs, just as women in a satisfactory relationship with a man, are much less likely to fear all men. As a society we seem to be increasingly obsessed by binary classifications – good or bad, right or wrong. Reality is much more complex.
Might be nice not to allow one’s dog to go bounding up to someone who’s minding their own business. Some people don’t like them for good reason, and don’t find it awfully cute when some large dog jumps up at or comes racing towards them. Not saying you do that, but a lot of dog owners do.
Amusing really. Here in Turkey, the small sea side town I am in is home to many dogs that have formed small packs (2-4) in the various parts of the town. The people feed them and put out plastic bowls of water for them. Few people are afraid of them, although some are wary. They are community dogs. Most are spayed or neutered by the baranak (an animal shelter) and returned to their part of town. They are a part of the townscape, hanging out at cafe’s and tea gardens during summer, or playing in some field.
On my kilometer walk through town in the morning to the bakery for bread and simit, I go through various neighborhoods, each with a different pack, and am greeted by the dogs, partly because I give them a treat and a pat, or maybe a tummy rub. Two other dogs, and sometimes a third regularly sleep outside our home, even on our porch in bad weather. During the day they are off somewhere, but usually return for a feed in the evening. They often accompany me on walks by the seaside, and sometimes into town where they might be greeted a friendly pack, or barked at by another, warning they have trespassed on their territory.
Dogs on leads? You see a few attached to human hands, yes. Different attitudes to life, really.
What a lovely story!
Binary classifications are a great help. Don’t knock ’em.
Maybe the experience of women is similar to that of postmen. Most dogs have lovely temperaments and of course if a dog doesn’t then it’s the owner who is to blame, but most postmen who deliver letters by hand have been bitten by dogs, sometimes causing serious injury, and they are right to be very careful when they can hear a dog inside a house that they don’t know, jumping up at the letterbox like crazy.
Also…I’d be careful what you do with the word “hysterical”. It kinda “has a history”…and a history that continues right into the present. I could say a lot about that, but now isn’t the time and place.
It’s not the one inside the house that’s the main concern – if an aggressive guard-type dog comes at a delivery person inside the gates it’s pretty grim.
wonder if bear spray works on them?
Me and my wife love dogs but my son was scared (hysterical) as you say and the owners of a off-lead dog telling us nothing to worry was annoying to be polite. Not to mention dog shit on football pitch. BTW some dogs I do not like and others I don’t trust and would never try to convince my son to get close.
You should not have a dog with this attitude
The word hysteria originates from the Greek word for uterus, hystera, and for four thousand years was applied only to women.
I worked in a conflict country with a female colleague who would regularly break down and be in need of support, which I provided to the best of my personal and professional capacity.
When working with the same colleague back in the organisational headquarters, I once held the door open for her and was then met by a diatribe of feminist outrage. She remained completely oblivious to the hypocrisy of her behaviour.
It’s a funny old world these days where if you behave with the good manners your parents taught you, your seen as a dinosaur and a potential threat.
I’m not sure the canine analogy is quite appropriate for all dog-fearers. Mine comes from being ‘attacked’ by an alsatian (I’m sure he/she was just trying to be friendly, but I didn’t see it that way) while strapped in my pushchair when aged between 2 and 3 years old. The dog was about 4 times my size and I couldn’t move.
My childhood experience may be unique, and 65 years later I still try to be friendly to dogs, but I don’t consider myself to be irrational – just wary.
“Hearing Cressida Dick’s wavering tones over the alleged policeman’s involvement in the terrible death of Sarah Everard, naturally brought to mind that she was directly in charge of the police operation that murdered Brazilian electrician Jean Charles De Menezes, for the crime of looking a bit like an Arab”.
Looking “a bit like an Arab” to her eyes, that is.
Perhaps rather as an inoffensive man might look like a “potential” rapist to a woman.
Of course Mr Murray is quite right that such vague language is bound to lead to cross purposes and misunderstandings – perhaps deliberately.
On the other hand, reasonable caution is… reasonable. If I choose to go for a walk in a forest where a man-eating tiger is known to hunt, I will be wise indeed to keep all my senses strained to the limit (and of course carry a powerful weapon).
The problem of trusting – or not trusting – other people is just one of the many that arise when people live in vast agglomerations of strangers. Most of them may be perfectly safe to trust, but a few aren’t – and which you meet is largely a matter of chance. Just as crossing the street is usually safe, but may be fatal should a reckless or drunken driver come along – or even a police car in “hot pursuit” driving the wrong way down a one-way street (as I once nearly witnessed).
“Of course sexual violence is a terrible problem. Of course conviction rates are worryingly low. That does not mean every man is liable to rape.”
It is a cause for concern, but in precisely the opposite way to that implied by Craig Murray. It is a concern because one on the criteria the Crown Prosecution Service must apply before bringing a prosecution is the likelihood of a conviction. The extremely low conviction rate shows the public prosecutors are either ignoring the criterion or are grossly incompetent. Either way, it shows they are bringing prosecutions wrongly.
“The extremely low conviction rate shows the public prosecutors are either ignoring the criterion or are grossly incompetent”.
That turns out not to be the case.
An alleged crime may have a very low conviction rate because it is intrinsically hard to prove. Any “he said, she said” issue is likely to fall short of the criterion for criminal conviction. There is also huge scope for genuine misunderstanding, and even for the participants to change their minds about what they thought, expected, hoped for or felt.
After all, it is a vital principle that unjust convictions should be avoided, even at the cost of failing to convict some actual offenders.
“it is a vital principle that unjust convictions should be avoided, even at the cost of failing to convict some actual offenders.”
The cops totally screwed up the Rachel Nickell case…. And that’s not “the price of freedom”. That’s a fact that may well mean that further murders have been committed by the guy who killed her, which he wouldn’t have been able to commit if he was in prison.
I suspect that the qualities we admire in Craig Murray, his integrity and his courage. might have a lot to do with the woman who gave birth to and raised him and thus passed on her ethics to him.
I may be wrong but in my experience mother’s ‘make’ sons.
Sons who respect women.
She did a damn fine job!
That’s just right.
Men were boys raised by men and women, and it is sad that charities so desperate for a crumb of funding have to try to exploit others’ suffering and peddle the divisive nonsense that all men are dangerous. I may be mistaken, but I feel this only happens in Britain, where permanent, hostile, flagrant gender war is very good for politicians seeking to distract the public.
Feminism used to have a real and good purpose, but it has been so thoroughly twisted and assimilated, and is now just a bourgeois, corporate, marketeering form of hate crime.
More criminal is that it distracts us from the violence of poverty, international banking, neoliberalism, foreign policy, etc..
So the first point to bear in mind here is that both men and women are responsible for bringing up boys to behave poorly. People are only as good and decent as their role models.
The second point is that we need to get a little smarter about this (something that you can’t do with the screeming nuts on Twitter) and reflect that violence toward men needs to be dealt with too, before you can have any progress on this other front.
Violence toward men exists in the home and workplace, it exists in the expectations placed on men, in expressions like ‘man up’, not just in punches.
My sense of things is that men are much more likely to be victims of abuse and violence. The reason for this is pretty simple. It has to do with the fact that violence against men isn’t really acknowledged anywhere, and therefore doesn’t exist. If it is invisible, and doesn’t exist, then it follows that it is okay for it to go on happening.
Those who try to talk about it get eggs thrown at them by a mob, or yelled out of the auditorium, which is of course more proof that violence toward men does/doesn’t exist.
Human beings are very good at disguising what is in front of them when it is not convenient.
If we acknowledged it, as much as we acknowledge violence toward women, there might be some progress, and more tragedies might be avoided.
But there is a politics and economics to this that prevents us from being truthful and fair.
And so violence continues, and those who have always stood to profit from it continue to profit from it. This seems particularly twisted in Britain.
We should be better than the corporate media and Twitter zombies, and rise above political-economic agendas when talking about such subjects.
Single mothers who are “both mother and father” tend to raise sons very well, and the son will know damned well who put his dinner on the table.
However, there are actually many mothers who encourage their sons to be macho a*seholes.
And that’s a fact that feminists are totally unable to touch. There are others, too – e.g that a pregnant middle class woman is more likely than a pregnant working class woman to want an abortion. Can’t ever recall a feminist coming anywhere near that. They know it, of course. They just think proles don’t have any self-respect.
‘For me, the great gulf in society remains between rich and poor’
That extends even into the realm of rapists. The media that is feeding off this poor girl’s fate have sought to bury the identities of Jeffrey Epstein’s many ‘friends’, as well as the antics of the smiley old man in the White House.
“For me, the great gulf in society remains between rich and poor. “
Precisely. And all the woke attempts to find lesser inequalities to replace the rich / poor divide are deliberate distractions.
I think it only goes to show (yet again) that Twitter is not a good forum for discussion with any form of nuance. Which, as I write, feels like the only form of discussion worth investing significant time in.
I can but agree with your comments and despair at the apparently endless need that people seem to have to find and stoke divisions. It seems to me that most of these divisions are borne of a lack of understanding and lack of willingness to try and understand a different point of view.
One might take a more sinister view and say that as long as people are focused on these superficial divisions they will not address the really important one – financial inequality, be it from country to country or the acceptance of a privileged hereditary elite.
Boycott Twitter!
I have actually – tried it for a bit and could see how it a) sucks time and b) leads to little useful debate.
App deleted and occasionally will end up there when looking for some news but I no longer engage with it.
William Bowles. Rob. Agree your comment. Not enough time in day or life to engage on Twitter and get pulled into a spat with all and sundry agreeing or disagreeing. As to the male female debate….how long have you got ? Going solo.
Rob,
Your comment about Twitter is the first thought that popped into my head.
MS media & tech are the last places I’d imagine finding coherent or constructive discussions.
Saying that, I don’t Twit so maybe I’m missing the good bits – I only hear examples of the ridiculous instances, second hand.
Also, there are lots of solid individuals I read, watch & listen to who do Twit, so I couldn’t say it’s all nonsense.
But for every hundred Twatters spewing sensational, ill thought out, vitriolic twaddle while they’re sat on the sh!tter, it’s worth remembering there are a hundred thousand, a million or three who don’t. They’re either not posting or not on the Twit in the first place.
Not sure what the point of my post is, exactly, perhaps that a Twitter Storm doesn’t strike me as much more than a storm in a teacup.
The fact that the platform has so often been subverted by establishment ‘pushers’ of the official narrative by ghosting, banning, deplatforming, shadowing, labelling or whatever the tool of the day is, of certain discussions, all makes me think it’s not worth the electrons it’s composed of.
But then I’m a bit analogue, like that 🙂
As to the ‘actual’ topic of discussion, I do think it’s as worthy of consideration as it ever was. But that consideration requires more than the few characters allowed when Twitting, and in a more interpersonal & considerate manner such as this format, or talking to friends, family & colleagues…. I wonder if that’s called ‘retro’ now :-)))
Small typo, in the paragraph starting “I would frequently..” :
“…..routinely in their daily lives treat all mean as a threat…
Please feel free to delete this post
I have always understood that rape is an act of violence, an assault that has little if nothing to do with sex. As to the proposition that all men are potential rapists; if this so, then all people are potentially violent. Don’t we ALL have the capacity for love and hate, for violence and non-violence?
True hatred is quite rare – and destructive of the hater.
The word ‘hate’ is very overused in society. When my children used the word I tell them that ‘hate’ was a very strong word and would caution them to look for a more appropriate word, preferably one that comes between ‘love’ and ‘hate’. They have grown up to be strong and kind people.
Misandry is the last acceptable social prejudice – not merely acceptable, but compulsory.
Being an older, white, heterosexual man is rapidly becoming anathema in this mad society – particularly in ‘woke’ Scotland.
I have always held the view that this whole pseudo-left ‘identity’ ‘politics’ thing is a huge, engineered distraction fostered and maintained by those who have most to gain from it: The 0.01% who would be most incommoded by an outbreak of real, class-based politics.
I have the sense that ‘something is happening and you don’t know what it is, do you Mr Jones”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63ucJmVonAc
We have seen, over the last few years, the erosion of tolerance , optimism and a feeling that we live in a benign, progressive political environment, has passed. I am glad Laguerre has defended the EU, as it has been such a large part of my understanding of what it means to be attached to a progressive movement, but that now appears to be in fast retreat, post Brexit. as well as other developments. If one thinks back to the sixties there was even a sense then that there was a benign process of expanding consciousness, awareness of inequalities and oppressions, and which, having become ‘woke’ (original meaning), we would be able to move forward towards something more democratic, more inclusive.
It is strange that that ‘feeling’ has gone and been replaced by the constancy of a fast evolving complexity and ever greater access to self expression. Obviously this all has a lot to do with the development of communications technology and access to frequently conflicting information-as in ‘fake news’ . I saw today a tweet from Yvonne Ridley –
We need to come up with radical thinking to stop male violence. Either a night time curfew or force all men to wear body cams even if it’s just for a month. Women are not being protected and good men are not stepping up to the plate to sort out the rotten apples in their tribe.
While I can sympathise with the outrage at the murder of a young women, it has evoked irrational ( mainly from self appointed feminist spokeswomen) calls for oppressive measure against all men. (collective oppressive punishment is not a road one would want to go down.) how long before some heinous crime by a woman(yes they happen -if less frequently) creates a counter call for collective punishment of women and suspension of rights.
I am not trying to deny the need for reform of human relations – clearly it is unacceptable for women to be in fear of violent men- but the escalation of this panic and catastrophism is not approaching a resolution of the underlying issues-merely amplifying the divisions. I realise this is an ‘apparently’ eternal problem( it isn’t) but it certainly needs to be open to (no doubt uncomfortable) debate. At the moment we are seeing the SNP Government attempting to legislate over ‘hate speech’. Again I think this legislation confronts great complexity and will fail. as it is tested in the real world and will be revealed as a lurch into authoritarianism. I am reminded of the absurdity of the ‘littering’ legislation of the sixties where there were fines for dropping fag ends on the ground. A moment’s reflection reveals the nonsense and I suspect that it will be similarly (mainly) impractical to take action against intemperate speech or temporary emotional outbursts, soon regretted, and partly philosophically a dead end. Free speech is a ‘thing’ – it cannot be suppressed by the confabulations of a distinctly limited unexplained ideology of some Scottish politicians.
There has not been a benign, progressive political environment since before the advent of Thatcherism. Since the 1980s there has been an endless redistribution of wealth from the less well off to the obscenely wealthy.
The nightmare of people like Laguerre and the leading lights of the European Union is the prospect of sovereign social democratic parties in power, returning us to the values and priorities of the post-war era.
When that was attempted in the UK by Jeremy corbyn every liberal institution from the BBC to the Scottish parliament to the European Union did everything it could to undermine him and paint him as an anti-Semite. These people are not benign and progressive.
Of course the thatcher years were a watershed-I agree, and yes that marked the adoption of the model of capitalism that we all now recognise as neoliberalism. of course there was then the ‘great erosion’ of political integrity marked by the Bush/Blair years/Iraq .One had dared to hope that Brown, with his long history (lifetime until then) of left-leaning social democracy would have addressed many of the issues leading up to he 2008 banking crisis, but he either buckled under pressure from US and succumbed to the Greenspan/Randian vision of deregulated American libertarianism and Clinton corruption or he gladly pumped up the bubbles in some genuine state of delusion.
The PFI blunder and relaxation of the basic rules over lending by Brown has done near irreparable harm and amplified the effect of his blunders. Brown really thought he could game the financial system by triggering a huge credit fuelled boom, alongside the American and European credit fuelled bubbles, by taxing the proceeds of the financial explosion. Of course the city financial wizards/ scamsters simply placed their money out of his reach in offshore locations. I think my main point, however, is that ‘something’ is going on that we don’t yet understand. The recent experience of Trumpism was truly a remarkable departure from the cosy accommodation of the political systems with the establishments. If I have to guess I think we are seeing the dying stages of any residual attempt to maintain social democracy. We are lurching into new varieties of Fascism. Partly, there is huge pressure from the environmental limitations and the real fears that the current model of consumerism and fossil fuelled growth is coming to an end for the west, while those huge populations of China and India are to be raised out of their poverty by a continuation of fossil economic development. China and India are in effect rejecting democracy as it is too cumbersome to deliver the kinds of outcome these countries require to maintain control.
There may be some technological miracle but I don’t think it’s going to happen-if anything the negative effects of technology are piling up and setting the scene for explosive unpredictable effects.
So Brian c, “the prospect of sovereign social democratic parties in power,” is what you what you claim you want, but actually you prefer Tory austerity and ideological harshness. Everybody in the EU, very nearly 100%, is quite open to, and quite happy with, this prospect of “sovereign social democratic parties in power”. Somewhere you’ve got stuck in the blind hatred produced by Corbynism.
Being able to see two sides of an argument or question was once regarded as the mark of a civilised human being.
Now it is rapidly becoming a hate crime or at least wrongthink.
ONS data for 2020:
“As in previous years, the majority of homicide victims in the year ending March 2020 were male.
Almost three-quarters of all victims were male (73%) and just over a quarter were female (27%).
In the year ending March 2020, female victims were more commonly killed by a partner or ex-partner or a family member, while for males the suspected killer was more commonly a friend or acquaintance, stranger or other known person.”
It does not seem to be well recognised that the greatest danger to women comes from their own partner, at home. The number of women who seek out a large, aggressive partner because they think they’re going to protect them, but then fall victim to this partner, is deeply depressing. Having said that, violence against women in the UK is extremely small compared with the US. Domestic violence against women was the leading cause of major dental and reconstructive facial surgery, yet when I lived there such cases hardly rated a mention in the news. Of course, rates of violence are vastly higher generally in the US, but there (as in the UK) the fear was all about stranger-rape and murder, probably because that form of violent crime featured so prominently in the news.
My personal view on the ‘all men are rapists’ outburst is that it is spoken in the language of feminine, whereas in the language of masculine, the expression has an entirely different, much more literal meaning.
The term ‘all men are rapists’ is usually an emotional expression of a woman’s temporary desolation, outrage, profound anger and absolute disgust at the actions of one, perhaps a few, man/men.
I would like to ask women how they would feel to all be badged as bullying venal dominatrices, on the basis that I have come across three or four of them in my life whose professional standards would not survive a properly constituted enquiry free of political correctness?
I have also come across plenty of women who enjoy nothing more than to engage in harmless flirting and banter whilst conducting utterly professional negotiations about services to be provided (we are talking about travel arrangements, provision of literature, selling of access to sports stadia etc etc). None of those women took one single piece of nonsense from the male sex (even though many they were negotiating with were considerably richer than they were).
There are millions of women out there who would not be seen dead with servile wimps as sexual partners, and many of them actively seek out men who they expect to be dominant in the bedroom. Not something feminists seem too keen to fixate on, in my experience….
However, there are occasions when we have to make on-the-spot judgements in situations we are ill-prepared for. About a decade ago, I was returning from my regular trip to Emirates Stadium in London on a train back to Leeds (where I was working at the time). I was on the left half of the carriage and on the opposite side were an middle aged couple, a girl aged somewhere between about 18 and 23 and someone who seemed rather obsessed with playing games on their mobile phone.
About 1hr before we got to Leeds, an obviously inebriated young man came wandering down the carriage and his focus suddenly stopped on the 18-23 year old girl. To say that his conversation was inappropriate was putting it mildly, but I was unsure whether this man was just a harmless drunkard or the sort of lout who carried a knife and might use it when challenged. I therefore watched on for about 5 minutes, whilst the poor girl was being emotionally embarrassed in public, before I decided it was safe to intervene. First off, the bloke thought I was the boyfriend (oh really? If I had been, I would have been shutting him up on the spot). My response to that was: ‘She’s young enough to be my daughter, man!’ To which his drunken reply was ‘Age doesn’t matter, mate!’ Oh dear…..it took about 2 minutes to get rid of him, and then I had to apologise to the young woman for having left her to fend for herself whilst I decided that the guy was harmless enough to confront (I have no skills with knives, nor in how to defend myself against them, after all).
My final act in that young woman’s life was to escort her from the train, through the barriers and to the bus stops outside. I politely asked if she would like me to wait until she had boarded a bus, and when she replied in the negative, I bid her farewell and walked home.
I can imagine similar scenarios facing men in more challenging circumstances where a woman’s welfare might potentially be at stake and I am not yet convinced that most of us would sacrifice our lives or our wellbeing for a total stranger with no reward the other end but a heartfelt ‘Thank You!’
I hope women ponder profoundly about whether they would risk their own safety for a child they knew nothing about, when they had their own two children to bring up over the next 15 years……
@Rhys – I’m not sure why you address this to “women” in general. Most women don’t think “all men are rapists” even when very annoyed or upset. “All men are b*stards” is another matter, lol.
Reminds me of a friend who went travelling to the subcontinent post a relationship breakdown with a badge that claimed ‘All women are arseholes’ some decades ago.
He had an interesting time having explained what arsehole meant and the shocked response elicited a mob of men to challenge him about his badge.
It all ended in a happy evening once the gents realised he was just venting and many a stereotype was agreed.
The newest lexicon of Identity Politics to attract or repel the recipients of such propaganda is as clearly identified by CN, is just more bread and circus or let them eat cake fare.
It is an immense tragedy for the individuals and their friends and families (in the perps side too) as it is in any such event, which happens almost daily somewhere in the country.
Why they are being subjected to such publicity is beyond cruel.
The MSM editorial line is now wholesale controlled. All I can see is that the very important and public event of the Royal and Establishment embarrassment suddenly has a handy diversion.
It is the case that men are the victims of a vast majority of violent crimes. It is also the case that female victims are almost always victimised by people known to them. A woman walking down a dark street is as safe as anyone in society.
As for poor old Jean Charles de Menezes, I suppose people who look vaguely Arab must regard all women as potential shooters, and act accordingly.
“A woman walking down a dark street is as safe as anyone in society.“
That is just not true.
It seems everyone is constructing the Sarah Everard they need. Here is Victoria Richards in the Independent. For some reason Ms Richards uses the Twitter handle “nakedvix”. I don’t know why. She writes “Sarah Everard’s disappearance strikes a chord with every woman who’s ever been afraid to walk home alone”. Apparently trying to speak for all women, she write, “We are shaken. And that’s because when we read about a woman going missing at night, we know – with a deeply unsettling and searing sense of dread – that it could be any one of us.”
She’s wrong, because while it is true that many women are indeed afraid to walk home alone in many circumstances, it’s not usually fear of being abducted and murdered that is their main concern.
She continues “Ask any woman and you’ll hear the same stories, over and over: of carrying our keys threaded through our fingers like weapons“… She needs to ask some men too. When I used to live on a council estate in London, for a time I carried a (legal) weapon for self-defence purposes, and yes in particularly dangerous spots I would have it in my hand inside my pocket, ready to use. If for some reason I didn’t have it on me I used to carry my keys in the way she describes.
Yet she has the gall to write “something most men wouldn’t think twice about: walking home, taking a back route, cutting across a park or quiet street”
Whoa!! She is totally wrong there! Speak to some men some time, Victoria! I wonder whether she’s ever been to a run-down area.
Two utterly pragmatic considerations spring to mind here. One is that a position of “all men are potential rapists” means that women who are heterosexual are largely being informed that any sexual relationship (with a man) which they want to have is dangerous and should be avoided. This is not new – it was commonly said in feminist circles in the 80s and was implied, at that time, that only lesbian relationships were valid and safe. Needless to say it was a position held largely or entirely by some students, middle class women, and women prepared to enter communes well away from any form of normal life. Needless to say again: it became unpopular in every sense of the word. Second consideration is that if “all men are potential rapists” and half the population in normal life is composed of men, all women engaged in any form of normal life are in danger and should avoid doing that. This is clearly unworkable again – most women need to go out to work, have to go out for a range of other necessary activities, want to have a social life outside the home. And so on. Again it came up in the 80s – nothing new under the sun – and led to the “safe spaces” idea which certainly helped the move to Refuges, but also partly led to women on the left being discouraged from learning how to cope with public political arguments (and therefore to avoiding public politics), and partly to a desperately diminished social life. Interestingly of course the GRA reforms currently considered for Scotland plays havoc with safe spaces anyway.
What an interesting post about your childhood!
Wow. It’s a novel.
I don’t have any problem with your take on the relationship between men and women, I think it’s rather sweet. However….. as a woman who’s had perfectly ‘nice’ men suddenly turn nasty on me, or sexist, or weird, I’d say every woman you ever took on a date was assessing you for risks. They’d put on a smiling, social face, thinking, yeah, he seems really nice, I like him, but I’m on my guards.
It’s impossible not to be. I’ve never trusted a man 100% based on just a few meetings. You play a careful social game for a while. And almost every time it will turn out all right. But I’d agree with every mother who cautions their daughter. It’s not worth the risk. And even if nothing criminal happens, it can be little things that just break your heart, because you thought he would be nice and respectful but he turned weird and sexist, and your trust is broken.
Thank you for that, Pascale. Relationships are a minefield, and my heart was often broken, but it was I think generally worth the risk – on both sides.
Couldn’t your dad bung you a few hundred thousand to help with the contempt of court case? Even though the money was ill-gotten, it would be going to a very good cause.
My father died twenty years ago. He lost all his money during his many years on the run from the police abroad – it was stashed in trust of his best friend, who stole it all. The total amount I have ever inherited is about £15,000.
Craig – I’m sorry to hear that your father died. It sounds as if he was a good guy in his own way.
There seem to be similarities here with David Cornwell’s (John le Carre’s) father.
Can one say that any person (M or F) is potentially capable of killing another person?
Fortune is a very relative idea, but I would say that – although not intentionally – you were like Michel de Montaigne, fortunate to suffer poverty and connect with the subsistence that most people on this planet face. Lacking this direct experience, likely no erudition would have helped you become such a keen spokesman for justice, imo.
As for you being attacked by the modern feminists, meh – emotion over reason. One can’t argue with a tree, any more than one could with anyone absconding reason for emotional battering points!
I would recommend this channel by a very intelligent woman that I recently found on youtube, and now follow (random video, find a more interesting topic if you see fit!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbiWrOMhMho.. Always pleasant to find sane voices presenting their world views without that brown-beating mentality that is so common in our modern society.
As for poor Sarah – and in no way to belittle her – we live in a society of millions, outliers are now much more common than in the village of old, and sensationalism sells. My question would be what policies could help reduce the risk to women (or men) that end up with her terrible fate.
In my opinion it becomes very stochastic when the odd crazy appears once in a few blue moons to act out their urges. At that point, solutions to minimise that risk by a state regulator begin to sound a bit like the movie Minority Report. Telling women trying to enjoy themselves to be more mindful because they face risk from dangerous outlier men/women is of course, not what we kind people would ever wish, and likely to get you torched in the public square.
My father makes an interesting point – 1000 years ago, some pervert with some predilection would find themselves alone in their social group/village, and likely would work through/suppress that need, so that they could function within the little society they existed in.
Now? We live in amalgamations of millions, and that same pervert can find 1000 others within a 10 mile radius, to call their own society. Perhaps our progress permits extremes to validate themselves, and act out more. Granted crime rates have been falling consistently through the neolithic, so this is just a musing, without support by data.
PS, on a lighter note, my pedantry will speak up: one’s nature is stoic, not stoical, muahahah! 😉
PPS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOKn33-q4Ao
“My father makes an interesting point – 1000 years ago, some pervert with some predilection would find themselves alone in their social group/village, and likely would work through/suppress that need, so that they could function within the little society they existed in.“
That was true even 60 years ago and even in the cities…
Perfect.
The ongoing media-fueled “gender war” is appalling. Being careful when you walk in a deserted street at night is one thing. It is sensible.
Being suspicious of everybody at all times, if they are the opposite sex, is totally another thing. It is paranoia, which is crazy.
And I am a woman.
Craig, of course one doesn’t know how things would have panned out for you had the bag not burst, but I suspect you might not have turned out so different. There are good people in bad contexts and bad people in good contexts. Having said that our character is presumably in part shaped by events and not just by how we respond to the events and iif you don’t mind my tuppence psychology perhaps part of your sense of injustice may somehow stem from what happened to your Dad. if so its a good thing the bag burst.
The bag burst and you went on to burst bigger bags that needed bursting.
Do these women who view all men as “potential rapists” view their fathers/grandfathers the same?
I very much doubt that …
Those of us who have worked in the “they come out at night” sector of the economy, whether as bar/club staff or, especially, taxi drivers, know exactly what proportion of women have been subject to domestic/social/stranger sexual abuse, from incest through aggressive advances to outright rape, because enough conversations are had to make the estimate: 15-20%.
Men who have led ‘sheltered’ lives should probably refrain from lecturing women about how they react to this reality.
Myra Hindley was a woman and she tortured & killed children.
Rose West was a woman and she tortured & killed young women.
Therefore…
My wife has hit me.
I have never hit my wife.
Therefore….