Leftishist sophistry about bigotry and hate seems to be running out of road
I'm quite optimistic
I'm listening a lot to a Chilean band called Föllakzoid. It's a front for a producer called Domingæ Garcia Huidobro, but the technicalities don't matter. I love Föllakzoid.
Domingæ Garcia Huidobro always looks cool af, typically rocking a strappy, backless dress and a Fender Jazzmaster guitar running into a vintage Fender Twin Reverb. The image is part of the whole Föllakzoid 'experience', which is brooding, dark, slinky and monochrome in every way.
I'd hang out with Domingæ Garcia Huidobro in a heartbeat and next time there's a tour that brings Föllakzoid anywhere near here, I'll lobby friends who organise gigs and parties around the Cotentin to consider booking Föllakzoid for a show.
Why I mention Föllakzoid is because Domingæ Garcia Huidobro is a 'transwoman'.
That's it. There's nothing else to say about it. It just happens to be something about the person behind the cool shoe-gazey groove of Föllakzoid.
Domingæ could move in next door to me and I'd want to jam. I'd use his preferred pronouns in appropriate situations because it doesn't matter enough to me not to.
He's still a guy, though.
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When my generational cohort watched Top of the Pops on Thursday evenings our parents would tut about men wearing makeup and when Mick Ronson put his arm around the strangely beautiful David Bowie for the chorus of Starman we knew this was our world, not theirs, now.
We never thought about what any of this meant. It was just exciting and cool. And it still is, for me.
It all stopped being just exciting and cool when androgyny and gayness gave way to legally mandated identity recognition and policing of speech.
Domingæ Garcia Huidobro might not think so, but he's a guy and his dressing and presenting like a woman diminishes my admiration for him and his music not one jot.
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One of the most notable feats of sophistry in my lifetime was the association of facts with bigotry, by the ascendent academic leftishist class and its mainstream emissaries.
It's the same with hate. Anyone who is unsettled by otherness in appearance or culture (an entirely ordinary human trait) is sneered at, but only if they're lucky. More typically their reaction to more exposure to otherness than they'd like is labelled as hate.
In Britain there are protests at the moment by some obviously ordinary women who are unsettled by the arrival and accommodation of unvetted young men who have been coming ashore unlawfully in record numbers.
The vast majority of sexual crimes are committed by white indigenous people in the UK, say the finger-wagging sensibles of the nu enlightenment who insist that it's all just bigotry and hate. But the women know what the statistics show about the propensity of young men from radically different cultures to commit sexual assault, so they carry on.
But still I'm receiving emails about it being hate, fuelled and funded by the Far Right, from formerly interesting leftishist sources that used to care about the welfare of ordinary people before going all in on theoretical intersectional moralising.
It's often said that the intellectual left is where most of the cleverness lies, but I'm not so sure. To me, this kind of flattening is not only bad faith moral framing. It's abject thickness. Stupidity. Ignorance.
If you can't grasp the difference between baseline human sentiment about certain out-groups and active hostility toward them, that's an intellectual rather than a moral failing.
Another intellectual failing is not recognising that moral flattening doesn't work in the long term. You can only raise the social cost of expressing unease so far before people won't play any more. Every 'movement' ends up like this, when its dogmatic overreach hits the brick wall of reality. That transwomen aren't women and a lot of irregular migration is bad for social cohesion and crime are just facts about the world that have nothing to do with bigotry or hatred.
Just as I have no doubt that I could get along well with Domingæ Garcia I have no doubt that many of those young migrants will be an asset to their host country, given the opportunities and discipline necessary to keep them in line with British cultural norms.
That mix of gnarly working class women and normalton Mumsnet types behind the Women’s Safety Initiative are bound to attract their tiresome share of actual racists. I hope they'll guard against that, because it will doubtless be used in attempts to discredit them. But their existence is necessary. When you drive discomfort underground it ferments the kind of anger that really does turn into bigotry and hate. They're actually doing the leftish a favour by normalising the conversation about the kind of migration that only the self-anointed priest class have any love for.
If they get their way, Britain won't become a white ethnostate. It'll just be more pragmatic and honest about human nature.
You can follow them here.
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