Mailwatch(ed) Forum

A place to share the wokerati's latest incursions on common sense and fweedumb.


I'll kick off with (A bit old).

Elf and safety gorn mad bans top hats fomr equesrian sport.

https://www.horseandhound.co.uk/news/fe ... ons-756440

The decision divided opinions, with some welcoming the move while others were in favour of riders having freedom to choose. A 150-strong petition asking FEI for riders (over-25s) to have the option of wearing top hats in international competition was dismissed in November 2020.

The topic has now arisen again, with several national federations and other corners of the sport calling for riders to have the choice of top hat or protective helmet ahead of the first draft of 2022 rule proposals. This garnered mixed reactions from the FEI dressage committee, ultimately receiving a hard no from the medical committee and the FEI board.

I'm personally in favour of the free choice position simply as means towards species improvement.

MisterMuncher wrote: ↑Sat Jun 15, 2024 5:42 pm I'm personally in favour of the free choice position simply as means towards species improvement.

I'm from the radical "Bren guns for foxes" fringe of the argument.

Claire’s to keep on battling against National Trust vegan scones and woke Dr Whos

And Claire 'fucking' Fox has?

Three weeks ago we were in the West End watching a musical about a Greek myth retold as a depression-era jazz and blues fest with colourblind, non-gender specific casting, and with a prominent role played by a woman born with much of one of her arms missing.

Last night we finished watching a TV series re-imagining a fairly well-trodden bit of English history, adding race and sexuality themes to those of religion and gender. With a guy who turns into a horse. Another show we're watching is a very blatant attack on Trump, populism, the American right and everything fucked up in the world.

The only culture Fox is familiar with is the stuff growing between her toes.

Andy McDandy wrote: ↑Wed Jul 10, 2024 12:00 pm
The only culture Fox is familiar with is the stuff growing between her toes.

I larfed.

There has to be some kind of department responsible for making this stuff up.

Some utter cobblers from Quentin Letts.

QUENTIN LETTS: We always called it the Good Old Red Cross after my mother filled parcels for British PoWs. How dispiriting that it's now joined the woke tyranny

Quentin gets all hot under the bonnet because an extremely large charity which operates all over the world has issued guidance on how staff should communicate with the public.

Yesterday's Mail reported that the British Red Cross had issued a 12-page guide telling staff what to say and think. They should no longer address a gathering with the term 'ladies and gentlemen', because that would be insufficiently inclusive and might omit those who are neither male nor female.

Likewise, they should not say someone was 'born as a woman' or 'born as a man', because that could distress a trans person.

Terms such as 'pensioner', 'youngster' and 'elderly' are also out of bounds – hors de combat, as might once have been said about poor Peter –because they could perpetuate negative stereotypes.

Red Cross employees should instead use terms such as 'everyone', 'all' or 'folk'. Oh, and one should never refer to a woman's 'maiden name'. Sexist, you see.

Letts makes a living as a journalist so he knows very well that words matter and terminology matters. I can remember when his chum Boris Johnson wrongly suggested that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was teaching journalism in Iran. His poor choice of words probably resulted in Nazanin getting a much longer stay in prison.

A friend of mine recently came the leader of the district council, he had been a councillor and trade union official for years and he was quite used to making speeches off of the cuff but after becoming council leader he soon realised that every statement he made would be scrutinized by opposition councillors and the media so he sensibly started to write speeches and get them checked over. Making off the cuff remarks when talking to government officials or in pay disputes or planning disputes can easily end up costing the council money.

Using the right terminology and appropriate greetings is not about being woke it is about being professional and being respectful.

Maybe Cuntin should research how many Red Cross workers have been killed, working in dangerous parts of the world

I'd bet a fiver against a florin the red cross policy has rsther more to do with urgent, clear and unambiguous communication in situations of extreme danger and colossal horror. They don't have the luxury of a thousand words a week to explain why everything is terrible these days, whilst holding the notion that not ordering coffee from a girl with tattoos and a lip ring is an act of physical and moral courage

You can't call her a 'girl' these days, by the way. These days.

Working with words as I do, I can wholeheartedly tell you the only people who *ever* get annoyed or even huff about it being “a bit of a bother” about inclusivity in language are ones who have never had to give it a second thought in their own lives.

Philip Marlow wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 11:31 am There has to be some kind of department responsible for making this stuff up.

The day the right fucking grow up about post-modernism is the day we'll all... watch hell freeze over.

This absolute intellectual abjection should be utterly embarassing for them...

While it’s clearly bollocks, the right wing taking issue with people “having their own version of facts” after over a decade of Tories “not recognising those figures” is a bold take.

Crabcakes wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 3:29 pm While it’s clearly bollocks, the right wing taking issue with people “having their own version of facts” after over a decade of Tories “not recognising those figures” is a bold take.

Quite.

This is relevant at two levels:

1) The right are eminently capable of lying, dissembling, selecting alternative truths etc at will. Indeed, they have a track record a thousand yards long in size 3 font.

2) A point (as I understand it) of much post-modern philosophy (Foucault and Derrida are those I know 'best', though my understanding is wooly, to say the least...) is that it's about living in the world as it actually is: that is, a fucking mental place, which our instruments of understanding struggle to gauge and assess (no full clarity can ever be achieved, by definition - but does this demand a nihilistic throwing up of the hands? Discuss..), and within which so much contingency, relationality and instability - even in ostensibly calm, peacful, clear moments - and this has a political implication (discuss): to deny this is to deny truth in favour of privileging an understanding of truth that is actually far more arbirtrary, selective, jaundiced and limited than what the 'right' (and anyone else) seeks to critique. It explodes grand stories, just as modernism sought to do, and in so doing leaves behind shards and fragments of far more complexity and beauty. Grand stories can be amazing and compelling and tellingly powerful, but they are not ways to live (that's my take, anyway).

Foucault, in the Archaeology of Knowledge:

[T]he diagnosis of our archive [i.e. the discourse/s in which we live] does not establish the fact of our identity by the play of distinctions. It establishes that we are difference, that our reason is the difference of discourses, our history the difference of times, our selves the difference of masks. That difference, far from being the forgotten and recovered origin, is this dispersion that we are and make [...] [the] temporal identity in which we are pleased to look at ourselves’ [is dissipated, and so too are] ‘transcendental teleologies.’

Take the two together, and the vocal right do not practice what they preach, and worse, they set up sham intellectual justifications for why they do so, and pretend to be defending intellectual structures in so doing.

There are undoubtedly proper philosophical critiques of this stuff, and undoubtedly positions defensible that are not in agreement with the Frogs, and Foucault, Derrida and the rest could have done with being a bit less impossible to read, etc, but they represent an inflection of philosophy that's no more or less 'legitimate' (discuss) than any other in terms of humans exploring what it means to actually live in the actual world in an actual way that actually tries to actually comprehend the ACTUAL human condition.

It's not like post-modernists invented doubt, for fuck's sake.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk. I know this isn't really the point but this particular thing drives me NUTS.

P.S. I'll stop, but I picked up Simon Glendinning's Very Short... on Derrida, and he has this great summary of (part) of the (political) philosophy:

'In our time, we need to shift decisively from thinking in (classical messianic) terms of an end of Man in which we finally learn how to live to [...] learning to endure interminably learning how to live.'

Hah. Sounds pretty conservative, to me.

I think Sartre and Gramsci put it more succinctly:

"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."

I tend to summarise that as "You can't debate in good faith with a fascist, because they're just humouring you until they get bored and leave, or hit you."

Gramsci of course just said smash their heads open on the pavement; saves time all round.

I believe Professor Henry Jones Jr put it even more succinctly:

You can't reason with someone who doesn't believe in reason (conservatives, basically) and you shouldn't even try with someone who actively celebrates irrationalism (fascists).

Andy McDandy wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 5:06 pm I think Sartre and Gramsci put it more succinctly:

Trust me, anyone put it more succinctly than me!

Barely a day since the banning of Remembrance day.

Now the woke schoolteachers have erased every mention of Christmas from Jack and the Beanstalk.