Tiso is a tosser and TERF is a slur

From this thread.
























Fanny:

Men know what a woman is in Holbeck

From Mumsnet:

Full speech from today’s Declaration of a Sex Based Rights at Leeds Civic Hall, by Cllr Sarah Field:

Good afternoon everyone and welcome.

Firstly I’d like to thank everyone here for coming today, our panel and the Leeds Spinners for inviting me to Chair.

Our brilliant panel of academics will be speaking today about the Declaration of Sex Based Rights. But by way of introduction I am going to talk a little bit about Leeds and why I’m here.

So, I just want to start off by thanking the many women on the Mumsnet Feminism boards. You are a constant strength and inspiration. 

About three years ago, not long after I was first elected, I was contacted by a woman in Leeds, for advice. Her six year old daughter had been verbally attacked and then subjected to a violent outburst by a 17 year old male who had been allowed to join a local girls group as a helper. This was because he said he identified as a female. What had this child done? She had asked him if he was a boy. And then this six year old girl had been made to stand alone in front of the entire group and apologise to him.

And I couldn’t get my head around this. So I began to do some research. And this was how I found my way to gender critical thinking and radical feminism.

And these are the following statements I’d like to make:

Every single person on the planet is unique. And I don’t care what they wear. And I don’t care who they love or have sex with, as long as they are consenting adults.

There is no such thing as living as a woman. We are women. And it is our female biology which makes us women. It is our sex. And biological sex is observable in every single cell in our bodies: it is a physical, material and biological fact. And our sex is what makes us a class. Our sex which makes us uniquely vulnerable to male violence. Our sex which means we bear the entire burden of reproductive labour. The structural oppression which women face as a class is because of their sex. And that is why all women need legal recourse to separate and sex segregated spaces.

It is simply not ethical to categorise males as females based on their subjective feelings. To do so means the female sex no longer has legal protections or legal meaning and is instead reduced to destructive, regressive gender stereotyping.

If you cannot define women, then you cannot defend them.

Which brings me to Leeds City Council, which famously prevented a meeting here last year to discuss changes to the Gender Recognition Act. When the WPUK meeting was cancelled I read the email from a Labour Councillor and then I read the flurry of replies and actions that not once asked for clarification or any other viewpoints - just this blind acceptance of a hateful narrative – and it became clear to me that it’s become a virtue to dismiss, intimidate and silence women.

That meeting was to discuss proposed changes to legislation and the government’s consultation. Its purpose was not to tell Trans people what is best for them, but to tell politicians and law makers what is best for women.The vast majority of those who ask questions about Self-ID are lifelong left leaning, are lesbians, trade unionists, LGB allies and of all faiths and none. These accusations we face - transphobes, bigots, TERFs, religious fundamentalists, hate preachers - are utter nonsense. And I’ve had enough.And I must say I absolutely refute in the strongest terms any accusations of homophobia against gender critical women. A huge number of them are lesbians. And I stand with my lesbian sisters. Just as I’ve always done for years of solidarity with the LGB community. And since the woke brigade of word salad identity politics seems to love a good cliché, I’ll throw in a mention of my magnificent gay best friend and godfather to both my children.

Leeds City Council has brought in Self-Identification. Anyone can change their sex, or “gender marker” as they call it, across all council services and departments by completing a short online form.

When I asked, under FOI, for the Equality Impact Assessments I was told they didn’t do any. When I asked, under FOI, how this might impact sex segregated services and spaces I was told Leeds City Council does not have any such spaces or services. When I asked, under FOI, for a comprehensive list of women’s and men’s clothes, as cross dressing is specifically defined in council policy as a protected characteristic, I was told no such list exists. When asked to define a woman, they said no such definition exists.

So to be clear: men in this city can access a woman’s changing facility, toilet, leisure facility or support group or service – anywhere they are vulnerable, traumatised, undressed or asleep - because men might at some point feel like they are something which the council says is indefinable, but might mean he once wore something which may or may not be something a woman might also wear.

Well, women fought for those spaces and they are not this council’s to give away.

It is absurd, it is dangerous and millions of women across the country are saying we have had enough. You cannot identify into an oppressed class because you cannot identify out of an oppressed class. And women are uniquely oppressed across the planet: reproductive health and autonomy, Female Genital Mutilation, violence, rape, child marriage, no right to vote, death in childbirth, post-natal illness, denied access to education, lower wages, chemical contraception, sex trafficking, surrogacy, pornography, prostitution and objectification.

I’ve had women in prisons and post-prison services in Leeds who have contacted me in fear and despair because they are confined with men who threaten them with rape, assault them, repeatedly expose their so called female penises and taunt them about playing the system and flushing their hormones down the toilet.

Our statistics will be skewed and we will lose a tool of analysis that provides us with the ability to challenge the very inequalities for which sex based provisions and quotas were created.

And of course there is a wider underbelly of misogyny in Leeds. The so called managed zone of prostituted, emaciated and addicted women is our flagship. In the last few months I’ve visited Holbeck twice, once at night where I observed several men out on the street openly watching pornography in their cars as women stumbled to them to be used and discarded for a fiver. During the day I was approached by punters three times in 10 minutes while simply standing by a car for some fresh air at 2pm. We are spending hundreds of thousands of pounds so men can buy the addicted bodies of the most vulnerable women in the city. Men know what a woman is in Holbeck.

I’m often asked how I would feel if I was born in the wrong body. And I say, I’ve been feeling like that every single day for as long as I can remember. You only have to go into a shop, turn on the TV, open a magazine, click on the internet and women are assaulted with GET A BIKINI BODY, 12 WEEKS UNTIL YOUR CHRISTMAS PARTY BODY, GET THE BODY YOU DREAM OF, THE BODY OF SOMEONE 20 YEARS YOUNGER, THE BODY YOU DESERVE. Botox, surgery, hair removal, Photoshop, permanent makeup, designer vagina. We get it.

I don’t think all men are rapists. I don’t think all men are intrinsically violent, creepy or degenerate. God knows I love my dad and my brother and my dear nine year old son. But 98% of sexual violence is committed by men. And there is no way to tell the good ones from the bad ones. There never will be. That’s why we need our spaces and services and boundaries, for our privacy, our dignity and our safety. It’s why we need to preserve the social norms which generally prevent men from entering our spaces and preserve our confidence to challenge men who do so. Bad men will do anything to gain access to women and girls. That’s why every institution in the world attracts those who will use power and access to abuse us. If they do it in schools, the care system, churches and families then they will sure as hell do it in prisons, toilets, refuges and changing rooms. They already are. 

In terms of protecting females from a significant minority of dangerous males, these reasons don’t cease to operate when males self-identify as women. And self-identification removes any gatekeeping, safeguarding or requirement for any man to do anything other than complete a cursory administrative process via an online form. 

I’m truly sorry for any man who feels imprisoned and tortured by masculinity. But that is something for men to deconstruct, to dismantle and to overthrow. And there are men doing it. There are transsexuals and cross dressers and allies against the male stereotypes which damage everyone. But it is not the moral duty of women to facilitate that. If your feminism prioritises the internal identifications of men over the material conditions of women then you are not a feminist. In a world of structural and systematic oppression, and an epidemic of male violence, we owe it to women and to the legacy of every feminist who has fought before us, to stand for ourselves. 

Thank you.

Lindsay Cooper:

Okies

Barney, a constant poll winner, was gracious enough to answer our questions, frankly, and at great length. An interview by mail is hardly the best kind of interview, but, when an interviewee takes the trouble Barney obviously has, it makes such  an interview extremely provocative and revealing. We think you'll find Barney's comments highly candid and interesting. 

Q: We've often heard of the importance Charlie Christian has played in the evolution of modern jazz guitar playing. What, specifically, has he done"! 

A:Many people believe that Charlie Christian was the first man to play an amplified guitar; others, that he was the first to play horn-like jazz. (Jazz which was styled close to patterns being played by such musicians as Eldridge, Hawkins, Goodman, Chu Berry,  Berrigan etc., rather than following along in the more guitaristic approach such as demonstrated by Carl Kress, Dick McDonough, George Van Eps, Allen Reuss, and Eddie Lang).Actually, both beliefs are incorrect; however, Christian was the first guitarist to  play horn-like jazz not only well enough to play in the company of first-rate horn players, but was inventive to such a degree as to be a model for many horn players  as well as guitarists.

Up until Christian's time, the guitarists who played jazz lines like a horn rather than guitaristically, were still not up to playing as soloists with the horn players. Charlie Christian combined his natural creative talent with influences of horn players of his day (of which, Lester Young was the dominant one), and blazed a trail for every guitarist in jazz, who has followed after him.

Metronome, Volume 75, 1958 p95

Barney Kessel many years later, at the BBC, playing a  Gibson ES-350 with a Charlie Christian pickup:

Security means this

NSA security posters

The sensible party

 Another old piece:

Perhaps it is in the same spirit of liberal constipation that, with the exception of Charlie Brooker, we have been too polite to mention the Canadian study published last month in the journal Psychological Science, which revealed that people with conservative beliefs are likely to be of low intelligence. Paradoxically it was the Daily Mail that brought it to the attention of British readers last week. It feels crude, illiberal to point out that the other side is, on average, more stupid than our own. But this, the study suggests, is not unfounded generalisation but empirical fact.

Oh no it's Monbiot, as they chant on the terraces. And he is doing it again: being smug in public; smug and wrong. Read the abstract, George, the one to which you linked:

We proposed and tested mediation models in which lower cognitive ability predicts greater prejudice, an effect mediated through the endorsement of right-wing ideologies (social conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism) and low levels of contact with out-groups.

See what they are saying there? They are saying that stupid people tend to be prejudiced and support right-wing views. They are not saying that right-wing people are stupid. There is an important difference between those two claims. For there may be many others, intelligent people who are right-wing, who were not part of this study: this was a study of stupid people, not of right-wing people. Is this difficult to understand? I only ask because it seems to have escaped Monbiot's attention, which is rather funny, considering. As A. J. P. Taylor observed in his essay on Lord Salisbury:

The Tory party has been called the stupid party (and not unfairly, to be stupid and to be sensible are not far apart. The Progressive party, Radical and Socialist, is clever, but silly).

Brian Auger and the Trinity with Julie Driscoll:

Professor Dickinson is dead

David's supervisor, Professor Dickinson, was one of the leading academics in Britain in her field. She died tragically when David was at the end of his second year. His supervision was taken over by an experienced researcher whose range of concerns was different and who had only a general interest in David's topic. 

David did not think it necessary to tell his new supervisor in any detail what he was doing, having it clear in his mind that Professor Dickinson would have given her approval. He thus worked without supervision for a further 18 months. When he came to submit his thesis the examiners felt that he had suffered from lack of supervision, which in the circumstances should be taken into account, but that they could award him only an MPhil, not a PhD. He appealed, but in due course the university confirmed the decision.

From How not to get a PhD. Notice, if you will, that it is David's fault his new supervisor failed to provide adequate supervision, that his university failed to provide an adequate supervisor, that the university failed to supervise that supervision; it is almost as if it were David's fault that Professor Dickinson died. In this story are contained the two most important lessons that any PhD candidate can learn: whatever goes wrong, it will be your fault; whatever goes wrong, you will suffer the consequences. 

Every new candidate should be told the tale of Professor Dickinson's tragic death and David's tragic MPhil. To avoid future disappointment, the candidate should learn - as soon as possible after paying the first year's fees - that that he or she has reached the bottom of the heap. Everybody in the university, academics and  administrators alike, is of greater importance and has higher priorities than the PhD candidate.

The university's employees also are blissfully free of any responsibility for their actions. They can forget to do what they are paid to do, they can take holidays without ensuring that their work will be done by someone else, they can act with gross incompetence or gross moral turpitude; they can do all of the above in a single day, yet still they will not be held accountable.


Boy With Cat (Jean Bourgoint), by Christopher Wood, 1926; Kettle's Yard, Cambridge.



Haunted Luau, by Lyon.

Late Capitalism

Another old piece, from July 2018, previously unpublished. 

Drink coffee. Shop High Street. Die happy.  Just imagine being dead. You spent your last day on High Street, shopping. You are a shade now; you were thrown off your feet and on to your head, on High Street. You died happily, because you got that thing you really wanted. You were run down by an oaf in an Audi; but you were happy, because bargains like that don't happen often. You were dying to get home and try it on; but now you are dead. Never mind. The coffee was good.

This advertisement probably cost the citizens of Auckland thousands. It is the work of Heart of the City, the organisation that takes substantial amounts of money from Auckland City Council and uses it to tell us to go shopping in our own city. Not long ago it started a campaign on the  Link buses, which showed  a film to captive passengers about a city which could have been Auckland, were Auckland a city where everybody and everything is colourful, vibrant and diverse. It went on for what seemed like hours, and then started again. A passenger who looked out of a window of the bus might see that Auckland is not like the film at all, were it not for the advertisements on the windows of the bus which make seeing out so difficult.



Nick Low with Rockpile

Stuff Mac Operators like

This is something I wrote on 18th April 2012, but did not publish for reasons which have escaped my memory. It is about the New Aesthetic, which in  April 2012 was predicted by futurologists to be the next big thing. It lasted about a month. The Tumblr page to which I linked and which was the centre of the thing quickly became wordy and nerdy, congested with texts and pictures of robots. It still exists and is occasionally updated, but the aesthetic seems to have been forgotten. In the years that have passed since 2012, talking about the future has become a thing of the past, probably because the future now seems to be catastrophic.

The true problem with the New Aesthetic is that it truly is a new aesthetic. It has to become one, even if it doesn’t much want to be one. “Aesthetics” are more that whatever gets splashed onto Cafe Press T-shirts this season. Aesthetics are by their nature metaphysical. Aesthetics are, by definition, how beauty is perceived and valued in a human sensorium. Aesthetics is therefore an issue of metaphysics. Perception, beauty, judgment and value are all metaphysical issues.

Bruce Sterling is an interesting man who once asked me a question, to which the answer was "Tibor Donner." Bruce Sterling is a futurologist. He predicts the future. His predictions may turn out be wrong but, by the time the future happens, it won't really matter. On the other hand, they may turn out to be right, in which case he will be upgraded to visionary class.

Bruce Sterling is unlikely to be described as an art critic. However, he has taken it upon himself to describe The New Aesthetic, an art movement that was discovered at a music festival. Bruce Sterling is not an aesthetician. However, he has taken it upon himself to describe aesthetics. Bruce Sterling talks of aesthetics as - by definition - being about beauty in something called a human sensorium and - by definition - an issue of metaphysics. Bruce Sterling thinks  perception, beauty, judgment and value are all metaphysical issues. Bruce Sterling thinks aesthetics is simply the plural of aesthetic.

Bruce Sterling should not give up his day job. His writing suggests his philosophical investigations stopped short of Kant and everyone after. Aesthetics is not a metaphysical issue because there are no metaphysical issues. Metaphysics is a parlour game played by a dwindling number of analytic philosophers. Things are so bad for metaphysics that when epistemologists are backed up against the wall (as they should be) their only defence for their gross mental turpitude is "at least we are not metaphysicians." And that is no defence at all.

Metaphysics is about nothing at all that matters. Aesthetics matters and has nothing to do with metaphysics (except for readers in Heidegger, who deserve our pity if nothing else). Aesthetics is about art, about taste; it moved on from discussion of The Beautiful a while back, about two hundred years back.

Bruce Sterling needs to stop trying to imitate Reyner Banham writing about the Independent Group in the early 50s.

By now, you are probably dying to meet this New Aesthetic. Well, here it is. Welcome my friends to the show that never ends: The New Aesthetic.

Yes, that's all there is.

You see, it's not that easy. Or, to put it another way, it's too easy. Internet gives a lot of people the opportunity to talk a lot about things of which they know little. Bruce Sterling knows a lot about some things but these things are not among them. He does not know what is going on in art or in aesthetics.


But then, at least he has that in common with the makers of the New Aesthetic. This is not art and it is not being done by artists. Bruce Sterling is on to the case, unwittingly, when he writes:

The New Aesthetic is image-processing for British media designers.

Yes, that's it. Had he stopped right there, he would have made an amusing footnote to what is no more than an amusing footnote. Instead, he yearns to write what he describes as "5,000-word critical exegeses about contemporary aesthetics." Instead, he gives this thing some credibility, at least among the geeks, and those who believe that creatives are equivalent to artists. He goes so far as to claim that we have to take this thing and its prospects seriously.

We do not. Art has this thing already covered. Art covered this thing a while back, when Turner painted Rain, Steam and Speed or when Monet was hanging around at train stations.  Art keeps covering this thing.The modern world produces extraordinary images. Artists make them into art.

The making is the important thing about this art thing.







Jessica Pavone and Mary Halvorson:

Huntly and the north

The Scholarship is tenable by students who are New Zealand citizens or permanent residents of New Zealand, who meet the requirements for entry into Doctoral programmes and who are graduates of a professional qualification in architecture from a New Zealand institution situated north of Huntly

So, you are a promising architecture graduate who wants to study for a doctorate at Auckland. You think you might apply for the William Chick Doctoral Scholarship In Architecture. Before you go any further, ask yourself this: "Is my current architecture school situated south of Huntley?"

To put it another way, three tertiary institutions in New Zealand offer a professional qualification in architecture; one of them is situated south of Huntly. Can you spot which one?

Still not getting it? Time for bluntness: if you are a student of Victoria University of Wellington, don't bother applying. If another architecture school were to be founded in, say, Whanganui, its students would never benefit from this scholarship; nor would students of hypothetical South Island architecture schools in Geraldine or Pelorus Bridge. On the other hand, graduates of a  Kerikeri School of Architecture and Urban Design would find themselves among the select.








If you want to be an architect, it helps to come from a privileged background, as this advertisement from Unitec's 2011 campaign subtly indicated. Alex Riley, student of St Mary's College, held ambitions to design 'the next Donald Trump Tower'; obviously she was not concerned about being paid.

The making of history

Another casualty of the fast-track process is history. Not only is it recast and manipulated to suit an outcome, history can also be hidden by our Official Information Act.

In 2003, Majurey, battling for Marutuahu recognition in Auckland, asked for access to the reports by historian Bruce Stirling, who Ngati Whatua had commissioned to support its Auckland claims. Ludicrously, the Office of the Ombudsman turned down the request, saying its release would "have adversely affected the relationship of trust" in the negotiations. History is commercially sensitive.

Later the Crown was shown to have concealed documents critical of Ngati Whatua's Auckland claim, including an assessment by Crown Law historian Donald Loveridge showing it did not uncritically accept the research put forward by the iwi. At the same tribunal inquiry, other historians put forward histories of Auckland that painted different pictures of what happened in the region pre- and post-1840.

.....

What is worrying about some of the history emerging from Crown settlements is that it's not historical fact, but secret negotiation and tacit agreement. A more disturbing conclusion is the history that eventually surfaces may not be just biased, but patently wrong.

Wut?