Masculinity, toxic and otherwise

This post compares two thinkers on the topic of masculinity and whether it is, to coin a phrase, toxic or not. They are Will Storr and Richard Wrangham.

Celebrating Colchester's City Status

Jumbo on the Hill

The people of Colchester are so proud of their one and only hill that they have named it four times: from the south it is Headgate, from the west, Balkerne Hill and, from the other two compass points, it is North Hill and East Hill.

Cancel culture and gender ideology in the Green Party

This is an extraordinary story of how an ordinary Green Party member was cancelled and suspended over alleged transphobia and anti-semitism in 2021 - for trying to assert women’s and children’s rights in a party that has been captured by gender identity ideologues.

My story is not unprecedented. The trouble has been brewing since at least 2016 (as I outline in Gender identity politics in the Green Party below).

My cancellation started in January 2021 when my 'gender critical' Green Space discussion page was abruptly deleted by the party’s chief exec. This was followed in February by complaints against me that led to a ‘no-fault suspension’ (NFS) for 'transphobia' and 'anti-semitism'.

That, gentle readers, is the short read. Please allow me to introduce myself and recount this sorry tale.

The End of the World is Flat by Simon Edge

The End of the World is Flat by Simon Edge
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A great read. My favourite scene is on p321, where Mel advises Ginny how to write up the story so as to avoid the risk of her wealthy adversaries taking her down with questionable libel claims: "Fictionalise it. Dress it up as something else ... Find some other subject where a bunch of fanatics take incontrovertible truths and rip them up for some crazy ideology." Mel's suggestion is to have the fanatics "argue that biological sex is a false concept imposed on the world by racist imperialists. Or is that too far-fetched?"
I wasn't expecting it to be such a romping adventure with twists and turns of character. I found many characters credible and believable.
(Slight spoiler alert: stop reading here if you haven't read TEOTWIF yet). Shane was an exception, maybe, due to the way he turned into more and more of a callous, unprincipled villain. But still, he was the Love-To-Hate character and deserved what he got!

View all my reviews

The Vaccine Moment by Paul Kingsnorth

The Vaccine Moment by Paul Kingsnorth, published January 2022, is a great essay on the narratives and stories about Covid-19 over the last two years. He expresses concern about the Austrian lockdown of the ‘unvaxxed’ and the Australian quarantine camps. He writes about conspiracy theory and  The Great Reset. Here are two extracts.

All men are rapists

“All men are rapists, and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, their codes.” So says Val, a militant radical feminist character in The Women's Room (1977) by Marilyn French. I had to put up with this discourse in the 1980s while living in the Camdens and Islingtons of right-on johns and trendy wendys. It was, after all, the decade of the so-called New Man: where did he go?

Nathan Robinson on Jordan Peterson

Recommended reading by Chomsky: The Intellectual We Deserve in Current Affairs by Nathan J. Robinson.

universal basic income

Following up on my earlier 2019/03/universal-basic-income blog, I just looked up "universal basic income" on the websites of the three big welfare rights charities I used to work for: CPAG, DRUK and Working Families. Searching for "universal basic income" at cpag.org.uk and workingfamilies.org.uk yields no results, while disabilityrightsuk.org does best with its round-up, 18 March 2019, of two new reports about Universal Basic Income. 

Don't Even Think About It by George Marshall

Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired To Ignore Climate Change by George Marshall, © 2014, Bloomsbury USA. Read the Chapter Summaries by Jock Gilchrist at climateprotection.org...Dont-Even-Think-About-It-Notes.pdf
More about the book at www.climateconviction.org

Colchester local plan and Sajid Javid

Colchester Borough Council (CBC) has an ‘emerging Local Plan’ for 2017-2033. It’s a government requirement to have one. New CBC leader, Mark Cory, is holding a listening event about it at the Town Hall at 3.30pm on Tues 7 August. (Previously there was the Adopted Local Plan 2001-2021, an 80-page document that was largely ignored, as far as I can tell.)

My questions for the listening event would be:

Accidental Anarchist film report

Twenty-seven people attended the screening at Firstsite on Sat 30 June of Accidental Anarchist: Life Without Government. (See previous blogpost for details.)  It was free and there was a collection, which raised £75.

Murray Bookchin

The Murray Bookchin Reader is available as an ebook at libcom.org and a free audio (MP3) download at www.archive.org, which summarizes it thus:

On Anarchism by Noam Chomsky

Latest version of On Anarchism was published 2014 by Penguin, earlier versions available as PDF.

Colin Ward

Colin Ward (1924-2010) wrote Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction in 2004 (one in the Oxford VSI series).

Peter Matthiessen

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse by Peter Matthiessen tells "The story of Leonard Peltier and the FBI's war on the American Indian Movement." Peltier was convicted of murder for the 1975 killing of two FBI agents after a trial which, the author alleges, involved government misconduct. The book portrays the violent turmoil on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation during that time, including the 1973 'Wounded Knee Incident'. 

Matthiessen (1927-2014) was an American novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer, zen teacher and CIA agent. He also wrote The Snow Leopard (1978). 

All above from Wikipedia so check for reliability. 

Stansted deportation protesters charged with terrorism-related offence

Last year in March, 15 people grounded a deportation charter flight for ten hours to prevent it taking off. On 12 March 2018, they are going on trial at Chelmsford Crown Court charged with a terrorism-related offence. If found guilty they could serve many years in prison.

only a woman can be a mother

In 2015 Germaine Greer criticised Elton John and David Furnish for listing David as the mother on the birth certificates of their two sons.

intentional communities - why most fail

Good essay at aeon.co looking at why, like most start-ups, most intentional communities fail. Conclusion is that:

Carmageddon hubcap sculpture

Carmageddon – the hubcap sculpture. Is there anyone with artistic inclination among my friends who would like to collaborate with me on making a sculpture? I call it Carmageddon and it is basically a large sphere covered in hubcaps. Thinks of it as a rollerball coming down the road to crush cyclists, pedestrians and any other kind of non-motorised traffic. The sculpture is a protest against car culture, obviously.

anti-Israel is not anti-Jewish

I'm outraged by Israel's treatment of the people of Gaza and the other Palestinian territories it occupies. I'm almost as vexed by the special status given to Israel by the West, which results from its position as the USA's outpost in western Asia, from which the USA can try to control the region's oil resources for its realpolitik ends.