Without conditions

So this happened. The Irish Independent reports:

Maryam Namazie was due to give a talk to the Society for International Affairs on Monday on ‘Apostasy and the rise of Islam’ but decided to withdraw from the event after college security imposed “certain conditions”.

“I’ve just been informed… that college security (why security?) has claimed that the event would show the college is ‘one-sided’ and would be ‘antagonising’ to Muslim students,” she wrote on her blog.

…

“I was told that two conditions were required for the event to go ahead; one, that it only be open to students of the college, and two, that there would be a moderator to chair the talk”. [Read more…]

That’s right, break all the things

Let’s see, where are some places it wouldn’t be a good idea to subject to fracking. The center of Florence, probably. Machu Picchu. The Great Wall. Giza. Stonehenge. Chaco Canyon.

Oh wait – that last one can’t be right.

The renowned Native astronomical and sacred site of Chaco Canyon and its environs may be in danger from encroaching fracking wells, environmental groups fear. [Read more…]

A small, grizzled coven of old-school feminists

Here’s another “lad” for you: Martin Daubney, who was the other “men are oppressed!!” guy on TBQ – the one who said, hilariously, “the great things men do, when do we ever hear about that??” He was the editor of a lads’ mag for years and years and years and now he’s that guy who edited a lads’ mag for years and years and years and thus an expert in the toxicity of feminism. He did some toxicity of feminism explaining in the Telegraph last November.

Twenty years ago, loaded – the magazine I edited for seven and a half years – was debated in Parliament for its corrosive effect on young men – or “lads” as they had been christened after the magazine’s very first cover line.

Today, we’re in exactly the same boat, as the Home Secretarybans toxic pick-up artist Julien Blanc from entering the UK.

What same boat? “Pick-up artist” means “systematic premeditated sexual predator.” Are people supposed to treat that as just another vibrant aspect of human behavior? [Read more…]

Another university rugby club

And then they discovered that it was a pattern. What a surprise.

The men’s rugby club at the London School of Economics, disbanded this week over a homophobic and misogynistic leaflet distributed to prospective members, had previously been involved in actions including “blacking up” and playing Nazi-themed drinking games, according to the university’s students’ union.

The revelations came as it emerged that another university rugby club, at London Business School (LBS), was dissolved for 12 months last year following complaints about racism and lewd sexism in a leaflet produced to mark a tour of France.

[Read more…]

Bigotry masked as banter

The shutting down of the LSE rugger club came swiftly, after no one copped to writing the leaflet.

In a statement on Tuesday evening, Nona Buckley-Irvine, general secretary of LSE students’ union, said the club would be disbanded for the academic year after the flyer handed out at the freshers’ fair on Friday described women as “mingers”, “trollops” and “slags”.

The club apologised for the offending booklet, which said “outright homosexual debauchery” would not be tolerated and that women playing sports were “beast-like”. The leaflets were confiscated after uproar among students. The LSE and the students’ union launched an inquiry on Monday.

[Read more…]

To stare at the crumpet on the treadmills

Ok I’m curious about this “banter” nonsense that I was asking about yesterday, via the BBC Big Questions a week ago that started with a segment on “bloke culture.” I’m repulsed by many aspects of this, and one of the main repulsion-sources is the assumption that the natural state of men is loud emphatic unabashed loathing of women, and that rejecting or avoiding that state is an artificial and harmful kind of repression and discipline.

That relies on what Carol Tavris refers to as the hydraulic theory of psychology, in which people are seen as like boilers that need valves to release the pressure so that they don’t explode. But people aren’t like boilers, and raging at hated others isn’t a release valve at all, it’s a way of stoking even more rage and loathing, and passing it on to others.

Promoting systematic hatred of sets of people is not a healthy thing to do. Human beings don’t have a good history with that kind of hatred. Stoking group-hatreds doesn’t end well.

So. What’s “bloke culture”? The same as “lad culture” I assume, so I started with that, and found an item from last October. The rugger club at LSE passed out a leaflet at the freshers’ fair that was an epic festival of misogyny and other hatreds dressed up as “banter” – a leaflet

in which it described women as “mingers”, “trollops” and “slags”.

[Read more…]

Darling

Hmmmmmmyes. Holding my nose and watching the first twenty minutes of that TBQ, the part devoted to The Tragic Plight of Blokes and Their Excellent Bloke Culture. I’ve paused at 11:45 and may never watch the remaining 8:15 minutes, but I got a look at the dread Milo Yiannopoulos. At 11:10 a woman interrupts him to correct a factual claim, and he blocks her interruption with “Sorry I’m talking about men darling.” Kate Smurthwaite, I’m happy to say, goes ballistic, and the obnoxious presenter makes an obnoxious patronizing quip about oh dear I’m leaving.

Sexism as all a barrel of laughs for the masses, how revolting.

Their honour is more important than loving their children

This is heartbreaking. Nazim Mahmood jumped to his death from a balcony seven months ago after coming out to his parents. His partner of 13 years, Matthew Ogston, talks to Sarfraz Manzoor.

The two were soon inseparable. Matthew was working as a web designer and Nazim was a medical student. Their families did not know they were gay. After a year they bought a house. It had two bedrooms so their families might assume they were just housemates. “We used to have to keep the window blinds in our front room closed so no one would see us,” says Matthew. “When we walked down the street we made sure there was some distance between us just in case a family member of his spotted us together.”

They grew tired of looking over their shoulders and wanted to stop hiding, so when Nazim was offered a job at a London hospital in 2004 they seized the opportunity to move to the capital. They would be far from their families, in a city where they knew no one and could fashion a new life together. “In London we felt free,” Matthew says. “We didn’t have to worry about bumping into our parents.”

They were happy, but Nazim was sad about the distance from his family. [Read more…]

Take thy reward

I see that Twitter-activist for misogyny rights Milo Yiannopoulos was on that BBC The Big Questions last week, which I would have known yesterday if I had watched all of the segment on Whither Blokes? but I didn’t watch all of it so I didn’t know he was on. It’s bizarre that the BBC gives airtime to people like him, since he’s more a bully and harasser than he is an “activist.”

Anyway he was, and Kate Smurthwaite got new consignments of Twitter misogyny afterwards. One sample:

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[Read more…]