Wis[s]e Words – Page 65 – Ceci N'est pas Un Blog

Ding dong the witch is dead

Published on June 27, 2020Leave a comment

The best thing I saw when I checked Twitter this morning:

Graham -glinner- Linehan suspended from Twitter

We’ve talked about Graham Linehan before. An Irish “comedy” writer who got famous for coasting off the talents of other people on Father Ted, he took criticism to a shitty transphobic joke on The IT Crowd so badly he became a transphobe 24/7. I used to follow him when I first got on Twitter, like I followed a lot of other UK comedy people, but over time his feed became more and more hateful. Just full on hatred for trans people, attempting to sic his followers on anybody who disagreed with him and whinging on how his celebrity friends were deserting him for telling the truth. He lost his friends, his family, his wife and arguably his sanity, but it wasn’t enough to stop his obsession with other people’s genitals. Ultimately he started accusing people of being ‘groomers’ for just talking about trans people. Which was the final straw for Twitter.

A hilarious epilogue followed, as Glinner went crying to Mumsnet, his erstwhile allies in the battle against trans people, only to have the posters there respond like this:

Glinner gets no sympathy on mumsnet

Sorry, who are you and why should I care that you’ve been banned from Twitter? You seem to be a man by the looks of it so why are you posting in the feminism forum? This is a female space.

Never was somebody hoisted on his own petard so beautifully. Thanks, another man. Mumsnet doesn’t need you anymore. On a more serious note, Glinner gone means a huge source of harassment against trans people and their defenders is now gone. There isn’t really anybody with the same sort of reach and audience as him. It once again shows how important no platforming is as a strategy to fight against bigots and nazis.

“Get over it and go pee”

Published on June 20, 2020Leave a comment

Alison Bechdel already knew the score in 1995:

Dykes to Watch Out For comic from 1995 on transphobia

The titular Dykes to Watch Out Fo are walking out of a bad movie, when Jillian has to pee. Mo, who has to do the same, doesn’t want to enter the loo because Jillian, though cool, is a trans woman. Lois tells her off, saying she’s not going to wait around all night just because Mo has a transphobia attack. So Mo enters the toilets, only to be challenged by a woman on whether she is in the right bathroom. (Mo looks rather butch after all.) Jillian defends her, telling the stranger to take a closer look. After this, Mo thanks Jillian and says she would do the same for her. This is however no longer necessary now her “nobody knows I’m a transsexual” t-shirt has worn out.

So there you have it, the absurdity of the bathroom panic laid bare in a twentyfive year old comic. Trans women are no danger, the idea that you can tell who is and is not a woman at a glance is deeply homophobic and barring people from pissing in the toilets they feel most comfortable in is ludicrous.

Remember Ed Milliband?

Published on June 19, 2020Leave a comment

Remember how when he was Labour leader, during the 2015 election, he was treated as basically illegitamite for wanting to take power? How he, a Jewish man, was made endless fun off for eating a bacon sarnie a bit awkwardly? And that his father was accused of being a foreign agitator?

Speaking of Ed Milliband, curiously how antisemitism in the Labour party stopped being an issue the day Starmer was elected as leader, eh?

Daily Telegraph headline: Man who broke the Bank of England backing secret plot to thwart Brexit

That same rightwing press, having had oodles of fun with that picture of Ed eating that sarnie, suddenly found itself Very Concerned about antisemitism in the Labour Party, didn’t they? The Blackshirt supporting Daily Mail, the notoriously antimigrant Sun, the Spectator, praising the Wehrmach one issue and Greek neonazis the next, the Daily Telegraph busy using Soros conspiracy theories straight out of the Protocols of the Elders as headlines, all suddenly Very Concerned about this issue. And all very, very confident that it’s the fault of one lifelong antiracist activist and not something that’s a structural problem in UK society also manifesting itself in Labour. Of course they were the most convinced that this issue was an isolated case and we need not worry about its equivalent in the Tories, or warnings from inside of the party itself that islamophobia is rampant in it.

Antisemitism in the party is of course something Labour, as a leftwing party needs to get its house in order on. Just as it needs to do with the lingering strains of antiblackness, transphobia and islamphobia also present in it..

Labour 2005 election poster showing Oliver Letwin and Michael Howard as flying pigs

But when you have Alistair Campbell, notorious for using antisemitic election posters against Michael Howard as your spokesperson on driving out antisemitism in the party, when you have his mates sabotaging efforts to get Ken Livingstone ejected for his antisemitism, you wonder how much of the anxiety about it last year was genuine. Especially when you have the oldest Jewish newspaper in the world about to to cease publication because of the policies of its hardline rightwing editor, as he used it as a vehicle to slander Labour and other leftwing activists. The Jewish Chronicle, published since 1841, destroyed to get the Tories re-elected.

That whole deluge of mostly false or half true accussations, that unprecedent weaponisation of antisemitism concerns, is perhaps the most cynical part of the whole campaign to keep Corbyn out of number ten. It and everything around is why, suddenly, as Flying Rodent put it:

the public organically decided they wanted a highly exotic and destructive trade/political restructure and they also decided – all by themselves – that the leader of the opposition hated white people and Britain.

You’re hard pressed to find anything about that in Labour Together’s election review. All of that just spontaneously materialised and nobody in the press has to ask themselves any awkward questions.

And yet: remember Ed Milliband?

Steek aan die lont!

Published on June 18, 2020Leave a comment

Een puik stukkie jeugdsentiment, dit:

From January 1987, the very first episode of Vara’s Vuurwerk, a seminal Dutch heavy metal radio show. Hosted by pop icon Henk Westbroek, always a bit tongue in cheek, outraging the real metalheads. Yet this show introduced me to so many metal acts: Metallica, Queensryche, Alice Cooper, Vengeance, Testament, Sodom, Annihilator nevertheless. A rarity in a time when there were only a dozen or so radio channels and metal was never played on them. It was either this, or the slightly elder metal fans at high school to introduce you to new bands. Especially influential were the annual listeners Top Fifty shows, one of which I turned into a Spotify playlist. It really gives an impression of what metal was like back then. Or at least what the listeners thought was great.

Seriously? These losers?

Published on June 17, 2020Leave a comment

The final panel of Nate Powell’s excellent About Face, “death and surrender to power in the clothing of men” has a warning:

These are the future fascist paramilitary participants and their ushers -- take them seriously

But I just cannot take them seriously. Those overgrown man children, with their penis substitutes and nerd sense of what is cool are made to be mocked and bullied. Just look at them. Gargling bleach to own the libs, deliberately running their cars badly to “roll coal” and own the libs, shooting themselves in the cock (literally) because they have the gun discipline of a drunk elephant. Any asshole can look tough in black sunglasses and holding an M-16, but take away these toys and they fold like a cheap suit. Yes, be aware that they’re dangerous, but for heaven’s sake don’t take them seriously. Fascist bully boys always need mocking.