Don't give the Woolwich attacks a meaning they don't deserve

Despite a few isolated incidents of thuggishness and much hot air from the online fraternity of the far-right, the aftermath of yesterday’s gruesome events in Woolwich passed off relatively peacefully.

On the whole as events unfolded most people simply looked at their television sets in shock and revulsion.

The media’s attention will now likely turn to what might have been done to prevent the atrocities. A number of questions will immediately be asked. Had the suspects already been picked up by the security services? Do they have links with foreign Jihadists? Has the UK government taken its eye off the ball when it comes to Islamic extremism?

It is important, however, to be clear on two points: the men who carried out the attacks do not represent Islam and they do not represent Muslims. Nor do the attackers have ‘legitimate grievances’ about British foreign policy.

Outside of the UK, the vast majority of those who die at the hands of terrorists are themselves Muslims. Those who see fit to carry out such brutal attacks on British service personnel are about as representative of Muslim opinion as Anders Breivik was of ‘white’ Western Europeans. Muslims should not feel pressured into collectively apologising for the horrendous acts committed by one deranged ideologue, just as the ‘white’ community isn’t obliged to grovel every time a far-right thug attacks a Mosque.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise to see Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson), the English Defence League (EDL) leader with a chequered history of violence and run-ins with the law, encouraging a show of aggression on the streets of Woolwich last night. It is often said that the far-right are guilty of discrimination. The truth, however, is that they are guilty of the opposite. They are cognitively incapable of discriminating between the isolated acts of an individual and the entirely separate lives of millions who simply share a religion or are part of the same ethnic group. One also suspects that in their hearts the EDL secretly long for an incident of this kind so as to puff themselves up and appear relevant to a fraternity wider than a few overweight drunks sporting football shirts.

Very little is known at this point about those who carried out the attacks. One of the suspects was caught on camera blaming British soldiers for killing Muslims, which would indicate Jihadi inspiration. The shouts of Allahu Akbar (God is Great) as the assailants carried out their crimes would appear to support this conclusion. 

However blaming yesterday’s atrocities on UK foreign policy makes no more sense than does blaming them on Islam.

One of the attackers apparently called on the UK government to “bring our troops back so you can all live in peace”. Ignoring for a second the fact that bringing British troops home would contribute very little to the cause of peace in a place like Afghanistan (in fact quite the opposite for Afghani women), those words sound almost pacifistic. Delve a little deeper into Jihadist ideology, however, and historically one finds that it isn’t only troops stationed in “Muslim lands” that they have a problem with, but almost all the tenets of a modern liberal society, be that unveiled women, openly gay men and women as well as those who choose to believe in a different god or none. Like the extremists who sought to blow up the Tiger Tiger nightclub in London’s Haymarket in 2007 with the aim of slaughtering “those slags dancing around”, the grievances of yesterday’s attackers probably aren’t reserved strictly for British troops stationed overseas, but for all the freedoms that make Britain a country worth living in.

Eight years ago another group of deranged fanatics tried to declare war on London. Despite his (to me anyway) disagreeable political views, the great English writer Samuel Johnson was right to say that “by seeing London, [he had] seen as much of life as the world can show”. It was this that so disgusted the murderers of 7/7 – the sheer diversity of life in the capital, represented by everyone from the young people partying in the Haymarket to the insufficiently pious Muslims who practiced in the capital’s Mosques. It is also this same diversity that so disgusts those who will use the attacks as an excuse for opportunistically inciting bigotry and racism. Much like the terrorists they claim to despise, it is modernity in all its variety and colour that they really have a problem with.

No doubt we will soon get a more thorough idea of the process of indoctrination the killers underwent prior to them carrying out their pointless acts. Until then, don’t give the attacks a meaning they don’t deserve, and view those who wish to use the attacks to push their own abhorrent ideology with the purest contempt.

Moving on

If you are reading this you may have noticed that the blog hasn't been updated a great deal of late.

Since taking over at Left Foot Forward I no longer have the time to republish everything I write here, and as a consequence it has become a chore to republish anything I write here.
 
I may still publish pieces at Obliged to Offend from time to time - the blog isn't closing as such - but for the time being my writing will be found at:

http://www.leftfootforward.org/author/jamesbloodworth/

http://www.independent.co.uk/biography/james-bloodworth

https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/Author/James.Bloodworth

I have thoroughly enjoyed blogging here during the past three-odd years - if it wasn't for starting to write regularly here I very much doubt that I would have gotten the opportunities that I have, nor met some of the great people that I have.

Thanks for reading. It's been blast.

As Jay Z once said: You could've been anywhere in the world, but you're here with me. I appreciate that.

Is the seduction community promoting date rape?

Why is it that cults so regularly collapse into scandals involving sex?

There is always the suspicion that it’s because they are invariably run by gruesome and sexless old men. The fanatical devotion they usually demand, combined with the vulnerability of those almost magnetically drawn to charismatic “gurus” who claim to be in sole possession of “the truth”, offers perhaps another explanation.

For the uninitiated, pick-up artists, as they call themselves, dedicate their lives to bedding beautiful women. They exchange ideas in online forums, arrange meet-ups, visit bars and nightclubs to hone their “skillset”, and post about their exploits online. As with most cults, there are rival ideological approaches and theoretical schools. The best known figureheads in the business – for like most other branches of the self-help industry this is first and foremost about commerce – bring in millions of pounds a year selling books, instructing students, and organising conventions resembling World of Warcraft gatherings on steroids.

I actually took a brief interest in the seduction community during my first year at university. For a young man in his late teenage years and early twenties, much excruciating time is spent trying to figure out how to make oneself attractive to the opposite sex during a period when females seemingly hold all the cards - not to mention have the ability to destroy a young man’s self-esteem with a flick of the hair or a turn of the head. The feminist canon about patriarchy holds true for the most part of course, but rarely acknowledged is the fact that women have a greater degree of sexual choice. At no time is this more apparent than during the pangs of adolescence when one’s thoughts turn incessantly to intimacy.

Like most men my age, I didn’t feel in the slightest bit privileged let alone empowered because of what was hanging between my legs.

There was always a dark side to the community, however, and this was what kept my interest in it brief. I managed to get a girlfriend too – and without any of the various wheezes recommended by the pick-up artists. This proved to me at least that I was perhaps not as repulsive as I had feared. I also noticed among friends who took an interest in “the game” that, as with most cults, once they started to feel good about themselves they rarely stuck around.

Together with the casual misogyny of the seduction community – women are regularly referred to as “targets”, “HBs” (hot babes), and “warpigs” (physically unattractive women) - the most disturbing thing I encountered was the idea that when a woman says no it doesn’t really mean “no” at all, but rather “not yet”. Assuming one has executed a successful “seduction” and persuaded a woman that your lodgings are the best place to carry on getting to know each another, the next step according to “the game” is to outflank a woman’s “anti-slut defence” – a socially conditioned response to the fact that society holds promiscuous women in low esteem – and take her to bed.

The “techniques” deployed to overcome a woman’s disinclination to have sex, arguably in some respects, have elements indistinguishable from date rape. One famous PUA known online as “Roosh V” was even placed on the Quarterly Intelligence Report of the Southern Poverty Law Centre, a long-established civil rights organization which monitors and litigates against hate groups in the United States, after promoting in books and articles the notion that what no really means is, well, yes. According to Roosh Vörek (his real name) who says that the SPLA had to “partially retract their list by stating those on it are not members of a “hate group.”, “women need to understand that men aren’t robots who can suddenly stop at the drop of a dime with all that testosterone pumping through their system”.

“Therefore”, he asserts, “it would be prudent for them not to enter situations where the average man can’t stop due to his innate weaknesses as an animal whose entire existence depends on him successfully mating”.

Bastardised evolutionary biology crops up repeatedly in this strange world. Men and woman do not apparently make decisions influenced by their surroundings as well as by their biological drives. No, the way they behave in the sex game is entirely “hard-wired” – a belief which conveniently absolves men of all responsibility when they “can’t stop” due to their “innate weaknesses as an animal”.

And there was I naively thinking self-help was about personal responsibility.

Ok, so there are weirdos out there. Internet weirdos at that, which is probably even less of a revelation. Don’t be fooled by the goofball amateurishness of it all, however. Nor by the nerdy jargon which treats mating as if it were a level in a particularly enthralling computer game, with women as “targets”, friends as “obstacles” and other men as “AFCs (average frustrated chumps)”. Every weekend in London alone, Real Social Dynamics - probably the largest company teaching pick-up in the world, and which holds bootcamps in all major Western cities - will take around half a dozen men out to the capital’s bars and nightclubs (for the eye-watering price of £1,259) and will try to instil in them the core principles of pick-up as they interact with women.

It might not be harmless chivalry that students are imbibing, however.

One delightful thread on the Real Social Dynamics forum from 2011, entitled “Lie your way inside a woman’s vagina”, advises readers that, once they have a woman back at their house, they should not be “afraid to physically force her to do anything or to tell her no or shut up”. The poster goes on to counsel readers to “ignore what she says and physically force her. You must be able to verbally and physically dominate a drunken 18 years old girl”.

Another user chimes in: “yeah, and then when you're done with her, you just like grab all her clothes and then throw ‘em at her, then shout get out you f***ing whore. Women deserve this because ofwhat they've done to us.”

Rather than banning the above posters, or even deleting their posts, which are still there for all to see, Real Social Dynamics dating coach Jeff Allen, aka “jlaix” – a published author who teaches students every week in San Francisco and London - is “Loving the responses”.

Be careful out there, won’t you.

With rates of social mobility stagnant, it’s time to admit we got it wrong on grammar schools

One of the first political epiphanies I had occurred when I was ten years old. I was sat on the carpet in my Grandmother’s house as a speech by Mother Teresa was broadcast on the evening news. “Let us promise”, the saintly patron of Calcutta’s Convents told Ireland, “that we will never allow in this country a single abortion. And no contraceptives.”

It would be a bit much to say I had it all figured out right there and then - I had to ask my embarrassed grandmother what con-tra-sep-tives were for a start - but I do remember a flicker of recognition flashing through my brain as the meaning behind the words became clearer: many of the bad things that are done in the world – many of the very worst things – are done by people who are convinced they are doing good.

When it comes to schools, almost everyone in the political mainstream has accepted the wholesome idea that educational selection is bad. Equality is good but “elitism” is something approaching an abomination. If you understand that the debate over schools has been won by those with the best of intentions but not necessarily the best ideas, you are some way to comprehending the British school system.

Labour has been solidly against grammar schools since Harold Wilson’s government began phasing them out in 1964, but the Conservatives too have been content with the current system of comprehensives, with neither John Major nor Margaret Thatcher building more grammar schools while in office. In 2007 David Cameron reiterated his refusal to bow to calls to “bring back grammars”, and instead defined them as the “key test” of whether the Conservative Party was fit for office. He added that advocates of grammar school education were guilty of “clinging on to outdated mantras that bear no relation to the reality of life”.

Anti-grammar schools campaigner Fiona Millar (herself a former grammar school girl) summed up the attitude of those in favour of the current system when she wrote last year that “Selective education was largely abolished because middle-class parents were incensed at their children being labelled failures at 11 and forced into secondary moderns starved of the balanced intakes all schools need.”

There are two important assumptions in this sentence. The first is that school selection has been “largely abolished”. It has not. In fact the opposite holds true. The abolition of grammar schools has seen the despised “elitism” – or in other words, the recognition that some children are brighter than others – replaced with selection via the most ruthless commodity of all: cold hard cash. Access to most comprehensives today is “largely” decided by the ability of a child’s parents to pay the price of a house in a desirable catchment area. That is why premiums on houses in areas with good schools command an average price of £309,732 - 42 per cent higher than the average price of £218,114.

You do the maths.

Ms Miller is of course correct to say that many middle class parents were “incensed” by the grammar schools system. But then they were usually incensed because their children were losing out to bright working class kids. According to the Campaign for the Advancement of State Education, 66 per cent of parents wanted a grammar school education for their child, meaning many middle class parents were inevitably left disappointed when their child did not make the cut.

Were it the case that grammar schools had irreparably damaged social mobility there would be no point in having this debate. After all, the progressive ideal might just as well be defined as a state of affairs where the life chances of a child are not dictated by the bank balance of that child’s parents. That is, or at least that should be, the baseline for any social democrat or socialist worth their salt. Yet the abolition of grammar schools has had the opposite effect. The Franks Report on Oxford University, published in 1965-6, 21 years after grammar schools were opened to all according to ability, found that 40 per cent of places at Oxford went to pupils from state schools, compared to 19 per cent in 1938-9. Former President of Trinity College Michael Beloff claimed that by the early 1970s state schools supplied 70 per cent of the intake at Oxford.

Today 57 per cent of places on undergraduate courses at Oxford go to applicants from the state sector - including a disproportionately high number from the remaining grammar schools - and 42 per cent of places go to applicants from independent schools. And this is after universities have been told they risk being stripped of the right to charge higher fees if they fail to attract a wide mix of students.

The attempt by Labour education minister Tony Crosland to “destroy every fucking grammar school in England, Wales and Northern Ireland” was wrong not because his intentions were nefarious – the dissolution of grammar schools was supposed to do away with what Crosland called the “extreme social division caused by physical segregation into schools of widely divergent status” – but because the result has been a disaster for bright working class kids, who are crammed into classrooms with the uninterested, the idle and those who will simply always struggle with academic subjects. Rather than ushering in equality, comprehensives have resulted in mediocrity or worse for most children and a bonanza for wealthy families who despised the 11-plus but who can now buy their way into the best schools.

Under the Communist dictatorships of the 20th century, despite official ideology private enterprise flourished to an extent unheard of in the capitalist world. Similarly, under the UK’s comprehensive system selection is ruthlessly enforced in favour of anyone with enough cash and gumption to play the system. And like “actually existing socialism”, for many champions of comprehensives the abstract idea of equality is prized ahead of social justice. Or at least it appears that way. For what socialist would support a system where the children of the poor were condemned to bad schooling while the children of the rich were so privileged?

As benefits dry up, Wonga will prosper: 2013 could be the year of the payday lender

People who endlessly lecture the poor about personal responsibility rarely see the bigger picture. So for instance while commentators and politicians of the Right depict those on benefits as lazy chancers who prefer to stay in bed as their neighbours go off to work, they ignore or forget to mention the fact that 60 per cent of the people hit by the government’s recent benefits squeeze have jobs.

That’s right. Many at the bottom of society who will find the coming year tougher than the last (always the sign of a failing government) are people who leave the house every day to earn their money rather than make it - a distinction most of the millionaire cabinet will probably not appreciate.

No Conservative politician will ever tell you this of course, but as a party it believes with its heart and soul that rich people will not work unless they are given money, whereas poor people will only do so if they are not. Being “tough” on benefits is also more important than being correct about benefits.

As well as being a drain on taxpayers who must subsidise miserly employers, poverty pay has also led to a boom in debt. While the government waxes lyrical about reducing the nation’s credit card bill, the chancellor’s economic policies are resulting in more of us borrowing just to keep our heads above water. Last week the consumer group Which? found that nearly half of people used credit cards, overdrafts, store cards or payday loans to pay for Christmas, with average borrowing just over £300.

And of course, there’s nothing like a good crisis to galvanize a certain type of lustrous “entrepreneur” who is always on hand to interpret the misfortunes of others as an opportunity to make a fast buck.

The payday lending industry has experienced a boom in recent years as incomes have stagnated and speedy, unsecured loans offering cash with no questions asked have replaced banks as the go-to source for credit. Today 1.75 million British adults do not have access to a bank account and a further 9 million are without accounts that grant them credit. Combine this with stagnant pay and the ever-increasing cost of utilities, and many face a brutal choice – go without the basics or take out a payday loan.

Payday lender Wonga was named the fastest growing business in Europe in 2010, and last year it made profits of £62.4m, providing almost 2.5m in unsecured loans. Its headline annual interest rate is more than 4,200 per cent, so borrowing £100 means paying back £137.76p after one month to avoid late charges or, worse still, accrue rollovers and require additional loans to settle existing debts. Of those seeking help with debts from the Citizens Advice service, in the first quarter of 2009/10 only one per cent had at least one payday loan. In the same quarter in 2011 this had risen to four per cent. In 2012, 10 per cent had a payday loan.

A new book on payday lending exposes how the looseness of the regulatory system in the UK has made the British high street a gold mine for the industry, leaving behind a trail of indebtedness as poor families pile debt upon debt to pay off various high interest lenders.

“‘Julieta’ took out a payday loan of £200 on Tuesday, and repaid the loan on Friday, plus £60 interest. Her pay packet was £290 after tax. So of course she didn’t have enough money left to last until next payday so she took another loan from the same payday company a few days later, also repaying it on the Friday with another £60 interest. Her bank statement showed her doing this every week for a month.”

Loan Sharks: The Rise and Rise of Payday Lending (2012) also claims that payday loans are not being used to “top-up an exuberant lifestyle, as some would have you believe”, but are rather being taken out to cover the basics. Just as many previously took out overdrafts and credit cards to stay afloat (or through the bargaining power of trade unions took on employers for better pay), today it is payday lenders – something akin to Robin Hood in reverse – who people increasingly go to as traditional sources of credit dry up.

The payday lending industry has grown out of a failure by government and big banking institutions to accommodate for the rise in the cost of living, declining wages and basic credit facilities for those who need them,” author of Loan Sharks Carl Packman told me.

“These are perfect conditions for an industry that profits from poverty.”

Money lenders have been portrayed in fiction by everyone from Dostoyevsky to Charles Dickens as corrosive parasites who profit from the misfortune of others. Of course, not all money lenders behave like that, and credit would factor in any conceivable economic system – investment, for one thing, relies upon credit; and borrowing is often useful when personal finances take a hit for unexpected reasons.

But the apparently unstoppable growth in payday lending represents something wholly different. As well as being the ugly face of a predatory capitalism which believes profit must always trump ethical considerations, it is the cancer at the heart of Britain’s low pay economy. To justify the inexorable cuts it is making to benefits, the Conservative Party says work must pay. And yet it shows no intention of improving workers’ pay and conditions (quite the opposite), and is instead through a combination of callousness and economic credulity leaving people increasingly in hock to poorly regulated payday lenders.

“The government needs to monitor more closely the activities of payday lending, how responsibly they lend, and evaluate how many loans individuals are taking out to ensure they don't enter a debt cycle,” Packman added.

Those who have nothing to sell but their labour do not have the same interests as the new breed of payday “entrepreneur” just as surely as those who depend on their job for their livelihood do not want the same thing as those who live off dividends and investments. If the government continues on its current path, 2013 might well be the year of the payday lender – or, as they might more accurately be described, the harbingers of debt, debt, and more debt.

Originally published at the Independent.

Three cheers for the UN: female genital mutilation is male insecurity defined

“If an Ohio punk has the right to have her genitalia operated on, why has not the Somali woman the same right?” feminist author Germaine Greer once asked.

Greer is, of course, wrong about almost everything. She once famously refused to sign a petition defending Salmon Rushdie because he was, she said, a “megalomaniac” and “an Englishman with a dark skin” (as if there's any shame in that).

When it comes to FGM, Greer’s mistake is to confuse female genital decoration with mutilation. Surprisingly for a supposedly “feminist” author, she also ignores the blindingly obvious difference between the two “procedures”: the first is a purely aesthetic choice, whereas the second is but one weapon in a much larger and timeless attempt to police women’s chastity.

Fortunately, it’s been reported today that the UN has not listened to the council of cultural relativists like Greer, and has instead called for a ban on what it correctly refers to as the “grotesque practice” of female genital mutilation.

About time I say.

Feminist activist and author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was put through the procedure herself, describes FGM as follows:

“As much of the clitoris as possible is removed along with the inner and outer labia. Then the inner walls of the vagina are scraped until they bleed and are then bound with pins or thorns. The tissue on either side grows together, forming a thick scar. Two small openings roughly equal to the diameter of a matchstick are left for urination and menstruation respectively.”

However in some quarters, almost every measure that’s ever been devised to control female sexuality, be it niqabs, burkas, the cult of virginity, prudishness about promiscuity and, ultimately, a procedure that literally hacks off those parts of the genitalia that respond to sexual stimulation, are viewed as no such thing, but rather as sort of benign forms of cultural expression. The historical context – i.e. male insecurity about women’s sexual choice - is seemingly redefined as an innate feminine inclination towards modesty and wholesomeness; or in Greer’s case, is ignored entirely.

Some western liberals are of course fond of comparing the way in which women are treated in countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia with the apparently “sexualised” portrayal of women in the west. While it would be foolhardy to say that there isn't some way to go in terms of gender equality in the West – there is a significant pay gap and rape is vastly under-reported, to give just two examples – this sort of comparison is curious to say the least, and is especially fatuous when one considers that the “sexualisation” of women in its Page 3-esc form is far preferable to its opposite, of which FGM is just one manifestation.

For until you recognise what’s really going on – what has, in reality, always been going on – you are likely to flounder, and even, like Greer, exonerate the very mindset you ought to be combating. Many men, regardless of their country of origin, are terrified of the degree of sexual choice women have, and Martin Amis was correct to describe Islamism, the ideology of splenetic woman hatred, as male insecurity on steroids.

And that, in the end, is what FGM is: male insecurity defined. Until you recognise that, you will utterly fail to understand one of the major fronts on which the battle for sexual equality is being fought: the equal right to have sex. 

Three cheers for the UN, then.

Originally published @the Independent.

The culture of offence takes aim

This is a guest post by HegemonyOrBust.

Helen Flanagan is an actress who used to appear in Coronation Street and was lately a contestant in ITV’s ever popular “Celebrity Jungle Torture”, or whatever it’s called. She’s one of that new brand of celebrities who tweets herself (rather than having a PR tweet for her, which is often the case), and treats us to the mundane minutiae of her day.

On Monday evening, she ran into a bit of a problem. Being hungover, she posted an image of herself taken in October, showing her in lingerie, pointing what appears to be a very obvious toy gun towards her head, with the caption “headf**k”.

Cue outrage.

As everyone who casts even a vague glance at the news would know by now, there was the small matter of the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre last Friday. Twitter decided, in its hundreds, that Ms Flanagan was “insensitive” and “offensive”. Several newspapers – chief amongst them the Sun and Mail – decided to follow suit (complete, of course, with the offending image, because Ms Flanagan in lingerie is, one assumes, guaranteed to sell newspapers even without the addition of a very obvious toy gun). Ms Flanagan, who states she is diagnosed with bipolar disorder and attention deficit disorder, ends up having to appear on Daybreak, ITV’s bland early morning snoozathon, to apologise profusely for her “crime”.

Each newspaper’s story included within it quotes from parents of children killed in the massacre. These parents were unnamed and unidentified.

Now, there’s only two interpretations one could read of this: the first, is the charitable one, which is the Sun and the Mail made up these quotes. I’ve got no idea whether they did or not, by the way, and am not accusing them of doing so. But, as I say, that’s the charitable interpretation. The uncharitable interpretation is this: a minor British celebrity posts a picture of herself on Twitter that only those stretching, reaching, aching for a connection, could actually connect to Sandy Hook and get “offended”. Ms Flanagan holds no assault rifle. Ms Flanagan is pointing the “gun” at nobody bar herself. Ms Flanagan offers no threat. Ms Flanagan, as the accompanying tweets show, is talking about having a splitting headache. Meanwhile, at the UK Cinemas, hundreds of thousands of people go and watch “Skyfall” and “Seven Psychopaths” and Tom Cruise in “Jack Reacher”, revelling in fictional guns being used violently. On BBC1 on Monday night, the late film was “Matador”, featuring a washed up hitman. On the weekend, hundreds of thousands of people tuned in to watch “The Killing” and “Homeland”, which both feature death, violence and the threat of violence. In this context, Ms Flanagan’s tweet is a mere drop in the ocean, it’s offensiveness diluted to almost homeopathic concentrations, and it takes a reach of almost gargantuan proportions to connect it to Sandy Hook. Convinced they have been “offended” by her “insensitive” behaviour, and determined to share the genuine pain of actual victims through their posturing, hundreds of people take to Twitter to berate a woman with self-confessed mental health issues. The British tabloid press, not to be outdone, decides the best thing to do in this situation is to run with the story and contact the families of victims just days after their children had died, to ask them their opinion about “news” they would never have heard of were it not for the Sun and the Mail contacting them.

Now, putting the story like that, one needs to ask, what’s really insensitive and offensive here? Because for the life of me, I can’t see that it’s Ms Flanagan.