Category Archives: Culture & Society

Lez have a fight

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Remember my post about the two lesbians being attacked on the upper deck of a London bus?

So here’s what I think happened. These two women are political activists, steeped in third-wave feminism and high on the fumes of the extremely dangerous narrative that women can go head-to-head with men and come out on top. They were on this bus when they encountered a bunch of feral thugs of the sort who plague British cities but remain untouchable thanks to the efforts of the same lefty do-gooders who encourage open displays of homosexual affection.

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I expect these women, being foreign, didn’t sense the danger. Maybe they believed Sadiq Khan’s tweets about London being a welcoming utopia where diversity is celebrated by all? So when these thugs first noticed them instead of getting up and leaving or moving closer to other passengers, they engaged, perhaps with some sassy feminist boilerplate while thinking feral British youths have some sort of code about smacking women around. Big mistake.

Via Julia, here’s a video of the incident:

Which pretty much confirms my original suspicions. Note that it appears it was one of the women who started the physical altercation, something the report is careful to conceal but it explains why they’ve been charged with public order offences and not assault:

At approximately 0230hrs on Thursday, 30 May, two women, both aged in their 20s, boarded the bus in West Hampstead.

As they sat on the top deck, they were approached by a group of males who began to make lewd and homophobic comments and gestures to them.

A fight ensued which left both victims with wounds to their faces after being punched several times by the suspects and a phone and bag were stolen.

If you or I were to punch a feral scumbag on a bus for making lewd gestures, we’d either be nicked for assault or beaten up in return with the police showing no interest whatsoever. But as I’m fond of saying, the term protected classes means just that:

The investigating officer, Detective Constable Darren Barlow, from the Met’s Roads and Transport Command (RTPC), said: “No one should ever be victimised because of their sexuality and I hope that this result brings some form of closure to both victims and they can put this ordeal behind them.

Detective Superintendent Andy Cox, from the Met’s Roads and Transport Command, said: “Any Hate Crime on London’s transport network, or anywhere else in London, will absolutely not be tolerated. The Met’s RTPC officers will always fully investigate crimes that are committed on the bus network and we would urge anyone who has been a victim of crime to contact us.

“The transport network in London is, and remains, extremely safe and occurrences of this nature are few-and-far between.”

Mandy McGregor, Head of Transport Policing and Community Safety at TfL, said: “This sickening incident was utterly unacceptable. Homophobic abuse is a hate crime and won’t be tolerated on our network. All of our customers have the right to travel without fear of verbal or physical abuse.

The police have wheeled out three people in succession to remind us they will not tolerate protected classes being assaulted by violent, teenage thugs as if they were just ordinary members of the public. Nor will the protected classes be punished for throwing the first punch. I wouldn’t mind them protecting only their preferred demographics if they’d let the rest of us drown feral scumbags in the Thames, but if we tried to do that we’d find Plod suddenly on their side. I’ll say this for our ruling classes, they let us ordinary plebs know where we stand.

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The girl with the cad on spat two

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Via reader Robert Harries comes this article:

A woman has revealed how a ‘predator’ ex-boyfriend groomed her into a ‘fake relationship’ while living a double life with another girlfriend.

We live in an era in which women’s accounts of being with douchebags are deemed newsworthy.

Catherine Garrod, 38, said she was ‘trapped’ for three and a half years by her ex who started out ‘charming and attentive’. She said they met on Plenty of Fish and he was ‘very keen to progress the relationship’ and settle down ‘like his mum and dad’. He wanted to look at houses and they did within six months, but none of them ‘were ever quite right’ for him. As soon as she ‘committed’, she said he ‘pulled back’. She said the relationship followed this manipulative pattern for months on end where ‘he’d promise the world but deliver nothing’.

A man failing to meet the material expectations of a woman is classed as manipulation now, is it?

Catherine repeatedly tried to end the relationship but he would suddenly become ‘loving and attentive’ again, saying he ‘couldn’t imagine a life without her’.

So she could have left him at any point by walking out the door and not listening to his whining. I was at expecting at least a cellar and a set of manacles.

It wasn’t until she got a phone call from an unknown woman in October last year that she realised it was all a cover for a dark secret. For more than two years he had been living a double life with a secret girlfriend a short drive away.

This would be of marginal interest if you or he were 1) married and 2) famous. You fail on both counts.

The other woman had discovered a WhatsApp message from Catherine on his phone and found her the next day on Facebook.

Teenagers on a wet caravaning holiday would find this story boring.

She told Metro.co.uk: ‘When she found me she assumed I was the affair. But when she went through my Facebook profile she realised we had been together for a long time. ‘She then sent me photos of cards he had written telling her how much he loved her, almost to try and justify that she didn’t know about me. ‘I think she thought I was the primary girlfriend and she was the affair, but I said “I don’t see it like that, I think we’ve both been completely f**ked over.” ‘He was great at writing cards. He was very heartfelt on anniversaries, on birthdays and at Christmas.’ When Catherine saw one of the heartfelt cards, she discovered it was a ‘word for word’ copy to one she received when he was on a ‘work trip’. She added: ‘I discovered when he was holiday with me he would tell her he was away for work.’

The central plot of this story is that a man managed to string along a couple of dunderheads for a while.

Within an hour of talking on the phone they both got in their cars and drove to his parent’s house. That’s when they discovered his family and friends had known about his double life all along.

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‘I just don’t understand where their morals were,’ she added. ‘These are the people I thought were nice.’

Well, were they nice to you?

She said: ‘We discovered every move was calculated, every emotion was mimicked, and what we thought was love was an obsession with controlling our lives.

Sorry, what?

‘We both went through a period of being absolutely terrified. We’d come home to our empty homes and check our rooms to see if something had been moved. ‘I was convinced that he’d been here.

How did he get in? Were there signs of forced entry? Or are you insane?

I was having horrendous nightmares. ‘I suffered quite bad anxiety. My whole reality had gone. ‘He had violated my mind and my body. Not only had he controlled my life, but sleeping with somebody who is pretending to be somebody they aren’t, that to me, is physical abuse. ‘I didn’t know who he was. He was pretending to be somebody else and that’s just horrible. ‘You question everything because your whole reality wasn’t real.’

It seems to me as though this period of her life became retrospectively terrifying after she discovered there was another woman in the picture.

Catherine, who lives in Staines, reported him to Surrey Police but said she was told living a double life ‘would not meet the threshold for coercive control’.

And I suspect that was the polite version.

She said: ‘The officer said the CPS just won’t take it on. I said that’s ridiculous and they basically said we don’t necessarily disagree with you but we can only operate within the confines of the law.’ Catherine also accused her boyfriend of threatening to kill her, which Surrey Police did take action on, charging him with domestic assault. But he was later cleared of the charge at Staines Magistrates’ Court in February.

There’s manipulation here all right, but it isn’t coming from the person she says it is.

Catherine has been inspired to share her story after watching Labour MP Rosie Duffield’s account of her own experience of domestic abuse in the House of Commons.

Which I covered here. So an MP uses parliament instead of the changing room at her yoga class to complain about her ex-boyfriend’s non-criminal behaviour, encouraging unhinged women to file complaints with the police over trivial domestic matters brought about largely by their own naivety. And this is progress?

She believes there are more victims like her out there and has set up a website called ‘He Controlled Both of Us’, where victims can come forward, and stay anonymous if they wish to. She has also launched a petition to urge the government to define ‘leading a double life’ as a form of domestic abuse.

Like the upskirting law passed last year, this is another example of women rushing to a policeman every time a man is beastly to her. Modern feminism seems to stunt the development of certain women, leaving them stuck in a teenager’s mentality and unable to cope with the world as they find it.

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Cotton Dud

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I’ve written before about Dany Cotton, the commissioner of the London Fire Brigade:

Her professional biography seems to be a lot more about being a woman than a firefighter.

So how’s she getting on?

Relatives of Grenfell Tower victims today called for the embattled London Fire Brigade chief and other senior officers to be prosecuted over the inferno.

Nazanin Aghlani, who lost two family members in the blaze in West London in June 2017, said the LFB was ‘the hands of people that are incapable of their jobs’.

But the embattled London Fire Commissioner Dany Cotton refused to quit as she apologised for causing ‘additional hurt’ to families of Grenfell Tower victims.

Miss Cotton, who had defended the fatal advice for residents to ‘stay put’, plans to retire next April aged 50 on a pension worth up to £2million.

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She admitted the LFB would ‘do different things’ after learning lessons following the inferno, but refused to quit, saying she wanted to ‘continue to protect the people of London’ and insisted she was ‘standing here and taking responsibility’.

It comes after the report concluded that the LFB breached national guidelines over its ‘gravely inadequate’ preparations and did not have a plan to evacuate the tower.

I don’t know how much the LFB really are to blame for the deaths in the Grenfell Tower fire, but it looks as though this Cotton woman was completely out of her depth. And I can’t but help notice that her “taking responsibility” by staying in her post until she collects her hefty pension looks a lot like that of her Metropolitan Police counterpart Cressida Dick’s “taking responsibility” for the umpteen failures on her watch. These people haven’t a shred of personal integrity, nor an ounce of shame.

Not that I don’t think the whole Grenfell Tower incident hasn’t been a wall-to-wall demonstration of the failings of the modern British state and wider society, from the number of people who were in the tower to the dodgy “green” cladding, from the blatant fraud which followed to the sight of foreign activists demanding the national government resign, from the lack of curiosity over how the fire started to the prosecution of people who didn’t get the memo that the charred remains have been consecrated.

Home appliance firm Whirlpool faces a potential multi-million pound lawsuit after the Grenfell report found a faulty fridge freezer sparked the inferno after Sir Martin dismissed their ‘fanciful’ claim fire was caused by a cigarette;

Just that one fridge freezer, eh? Would have thought a fault like that would have occurred in a number of them. How handy that a major corporation with deep pockets is in the firing line for a hefty compensation claim.

The Grenfell Grift will go on for years, but if it claims the scalp of a useless diversity hire at the head of the LFB, I’ll not shed too many tears. I suspect those who actually turned out to tackle the blaze did brilliantly though, insofar as they were permitted to.

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Unprotected Sex

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I’ve long thought that the numerous articles appearing in fringe media about polyamory are part of a campaign to give legal recognition to such relationships. Now CBS, a mainstream channel, are putting out a documentary on how wonderful it is:

“One big orgy.” That’s the stereotype about the lifestyle of consensual non-monogamy — an arrangement where committed partners openly agree to have sexual relationships with other people.

But people who have practiced non-monogamy for years say it’s not all wild sex — or even all that wild. It takes a lot of work, and it carries a lot of stigma. There can be serious consequences for the family life and even careers of those involved.

The consequences for family life aren’t so serious they consider quitting the practice, though. Apparently the right to have multiple sex partners trumps all other considerations.

“Many people are trying to create families in different kinds of ways. And a lot of people see that as dangerous,” Diana Adams, a Brooklyn-based lawyer who represents polyamorous families, says in the CBSN Originals documentary, “Non-monogamy.”

Brooklyn, eh? There’s a surprise. And yes, a lot of people do have the welfare of children and wider society in mind when looking at deviant behaviour. We’d not be much of a society if we didn’t, would we?

She advises clients in non-monogamous relationships to be careful about telling their employers. She’s seen some lose their jobs over it.

“There are places where it’s not safe to tell people that you’re polyamorous, and many people are not out,” Adams said. “I think employers are aware that they don’t have to allow employees to express themselves, in terms of their relationship status. Because that isn’t a protected class.”

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what it’s all about. Polyamorists want their sexual preferences – which are less lifestyle choices than coping mechanisms – accorded special protections from the government.

There is no legal framework for polyamorous families to share finances, custody of children or the rights and responsibilities that come with marriage.

That’s because they’re not married. Similarly, I rarely get tax relief on pension contributions I don’t make.

Likewise, there are no legal protections against people facing discrimination for being in a non-monogamous relationship.

Nor for people holding conservative views.

Mahdy, a man who lives in Brooklyn, New York, had to end his marriage to keep his relationship together. He is part of what’s called a triad or thruple — a polyamorous relationship between three people who are all actively involved with each other. But because it’s illegal to be married to more than one person, only two people in his triad can be married.

Imagine the oppression!

Mahdy, who did not want his last name to be used, met his first partner about 14 years ago and married her in 2011. One year later, the couple met another woman, and the three formed a triad. But it could have fallen apart after the second woman ran into problems with her immigration status, he says.

For her to remain in America, Mahdy and his wife divorced, and the wife married the second partner. It kept them all together — but he is still reeling from the ordeal.

This is about par for the course for Brooklyn polyamorists: mentally ill foreign woman arrives in the US, gets into polyamory, someone agrees to marry her when her visa expires to keep her in the circle. It’s hard to see how this obvious gaming of the system benefits American society.

“Dissolving the marriage … that was really, really difficult for me,” he says. “I don’t have the legal protections I had when me and my first partner were married. In fact, I don’t think I’ve had health insurance since.”

I’m of the opinion that polyamorists are generally f*ck-ups. That this chap has two “wives” and doesn’t know if he has health insurance doesn’t do much to persuade me otherwise.

For many people in non-monogamous relationships, there’s nothing strange about their arrangement. It’s just romance — plus one or two other people, or more.

There’s nothing strange about Siamese twins. It’s just a person, plus another head.

“People think that there’s this magical thing happening all the time,” says Brooke Houston of Kansas City, Kansas, who has been in a triad for more than a year.

More than a year. I guess they couldn’t find anyone who’d managed to keep it up longer than that.

“And half the time we’re just chilling. … Whoever has the energy for a big orgy 24/7, let me know. Tell me your secret,” she joked.

In 2018, Houston formed a triad with CJ and Brandi George, a couple who have been in an open marriage for four years. She has a sexual relationship with both CJ and Brandi — sometimes individually, and sometimes all together.

LOL, we don’t have orgies! Just threesomes. We’re normal.

It’s not all about sex, though. The three of them live as one unit — sharing a bed, but also sharing dinners.

It’s not all about sex: sometimes they eat food.

Brandi said that years ago, someone wrote an anonymous letter to the school district where she works as a teacher, outing her for being in an open relationship. The district called her in to discuss it. She didn’t end up losing her job — but she feared that she would.

In other words they couldn’t find anyone who’d actually lost their job for being polyamorous. This hardly sounds like an oppressed group desperate for special protections.

“I was terrified that I would be let go from my job or that I would have people that wouldn’t accept me,” she said. “My students, like, they give me oxygen, they give me life. And so to have that taken from me would have just like devastated me. So I was just very aware that that could happen and that I would have nothing. And how could I provide for my kids if I don’t have a job?”

None of which actually happened.

CBSN Originals spoke with two women in Durham, North Carolina, who have been in what they call a polyfidelitous closed quad for more than seven years. That means the two married couples are romantically involved with each other — each woman has sex with the other’s husband — but outside of that the couples don’t see anyone else. The women asked to remain anonymous to protect their families, and for fear of consequences in their jobs.

Which is pretty much where Trump supporters stand in many professions.

“It’s not just about sleeping with each other’s husbands. Our lives are meshed together,” one of the women said. “Mondays, Thursdays, Saturdays are the nights we spend with our extramarital partners. And Sundays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays we spend with our marital partners.”

I don’t want to ask how often they change the bedsheets. My guess is the sheets wait for a window of opportunity before walking themselves to the washing machine.

One of the hardest parts of the arrangement is the children. One couple does not have kids; the other does. The couples care for and parent them together, though there is no question about who their biological parents are. And those children had to have all of this explained to them.

Because God forbid the parents and their sex partners adjust their lives so children don’t have to get their heads around the intricacies of sexual degeneracy.

“It involves a lot of trust,” the woman with children said. “I, as a mother, have to think, ‘Do I trust these people?’ This could really, really impact my children’s life for the worse.”

But I’ll take the risk anyway because, frankly, it’s all about me.

“What we were hoping for was that giving the children more adults in their lives that love them would counterbalance giving them a strange life, and would outweigh it,” her partner added.

And thus began a whole new parenting philosophy which went some way to explain the rash of suicides and instances of clinical depression 15 years later.

Last year, the American Psychological Association created a task force on consensual non-monogamy to promote awareness and understanding of non-traditional relationship structures.

“Finding love and/or sexual intimacy is a central part of most people’s life experience,” the APA website says. “However, the ability to engage in desired intimacy without social and medical stigmatization is not a liberty for all.”

I suppose the APA is wholly uninterested in 1) the effect on any children caught up in this and 2) the psychological state of polyamorists to begin with.

People who engage in or support non-monogamous relationships argue that it’s simply an option that should be available for those who choose — just as monogamy should be an option. And for now, they’re just asking for acceptance.

For now. Then as soon as you’ve got that, compulsory celebration and outlawing criticism will follow.

“It’s never gonna be equal for us,” Mahdy said. “I only ask that people don’t interfere with what we have.”

Erm, they’re not. But you want the law changed so you can marry some disturbed foreigner without having to divorce your current wife, all so she can be permitted to live in the USA.

This whole campaign is just the latest battle in the war on traditional marriage which, once won, will usher in a Utopian society in which anyone can sleep with everyone willy-nilly, and the children all take part and are happy. What could go wrong?

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LGB v T

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This is an interesting Twitter thread from a lesbian on the sinister direction the trans rights movement is taking us in. But I fear she might be reaping what her own movement has sown. Take this for example:

The idea that you can go about modern life in the west without voicing moral agreement with gays is laughable. Every single major corporation has subscribed to the Pride political doctrine to the point all employees are expected to embrace and celebrate the sexual preferences of their homosexual and bisexual colleagues. “Demanding you live as though you share their beliefs” is precisely what gay rights activists do, and they now have the force of law behind them.

Unless you’re a baker who objects to making a cake for a gay wedding, of course.

Which sounds exactly like the gay rights movement.

But if anyone opposes gay marriage or expresses their religious views on homosexuality they’re declared bigots and hounded from their jobs. This hasn’t been about equality and tolerance for a very long time.

In the US they couldn’t get a gay marriage vote passed so they rammed it through the Supreme Court and now use “brute social and political force” to maintain it. What’s the difference?

Well, yes. This is pretty much how it’s been for a while, but the trans lot didn’t start it.

Now it may be that the author is a liberal sort who genuinely wanted only to be left alone, but she must realise the gay rights movement switched from demanding equality to wielding power some time ago. She must also realise that all this was done under the LGBT umbrella, joining homosexuals and trans people together in a way I always thought was stupid. Everything she describes is simply a case of trans activists getting hold of the political power their gay allies have been wielding for years, only with mental illness thrown in.

I’ve said before that gays are going to end up chucked under the bus when progressives move onto other victim groups, and I also said this:

By moving away from the principle that consenting adults ought to do as they please towards one of forcing moral acceptance of their choices onto a reluctant public via the legal system, the gays have lost a lot of natural allies in the process, those people who may or may not have approved of what they do but on the principles of freedom and liberty believed they should have been allowed to get on with it. The question they ought to now be asking is who will they turn to when they are stripped of their victim status and chucked under the bus. They’re not going to find a lot of sympathy among those who didn’t care who shagged who but cared very much that the proprietors of pizza restaurants in Indiana were being crucified by the media, politicians, and gay lobby after being goaded into uttering the wrong opinions. The mainstream, in other words.

And when the gay marriage decision was handed down by the US Supreme Court I said this:

The gay lobby has got what it wanted, but I fear the means in which it has achieved it may come back to haunt them.  A large part of the gay rights campaign was not about gay rights at all, but this was simply an issue on which juvenile, middle-class social justice warriors hooked their bandwagon in order to bash what they perceive to be the Establishment (but more often than not, turned out to be ordinary people trying to get on quietly with their lives).  With this new ruling by the Supreme Court, homosexuals have taken a giant stride towards being part of the establishment and an equally large stride away from being a persecuted minority worthy of the backing of a baying mob of self-appointed professional outrage-mongers.  As the last hold-outs against gay marriage recognition slowly die or get legislated away, new battlefronts will be drawn and the mob will move onto something else: in fact we’re already seeing that transsexuals have become the homosexuals de nos jours, and it remains to be seen whether gay men living otherwise normal, professional lives will enjoy immunity from the increasingly hate-driven and vitriolic modern feminist movement.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying I’m not picking up the cudgels on behalf of the author of that Twitter thread. The LGB lot can deal with the T-monsters they helped create on their own.

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Tyranny of Losers

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As you know, I’m living in the UK with a French car, a BMW. My plan was to go back to Annecy at some point in the autumn and sell it quickly on one of the auction sites. The trouble is, the service light came on. Apparently it needed an oil change and nobody is going to buy a car with a service light on, or at least they’re not going to pay full market value for it. So I called the BMW dealership closest to me and asked if I could book it in (yes, I know the main dealers are expensive and honest Hank down the road can turn the service light off, etc.) They took down the VIN number and told me there was a safety recall on an engine component, and they might need the vehicle for a few days. I said I’d had the car in the main dealer in France a few months back and they’d not said anything, even though this recall is a couple of years old. So I said skip the faulty component, just change the oil. Ah, but this is Britain:

“We can’t do that, we are not allowed to release the car with a safety malfunction”. 

Not allowed by whom? Is there a law saying a garage cannot change the oil in a car with some alleged problem in part of the engine? No, it’s probably some policy imposed by BMW, or even the dealership, being presented as if they are words handed down by God himself. You see a lot of this in Britain, appeals to mysterious higher powers who have delegated their formidable authority to the person you’re dealing with. There’s nothing a British jobsworth likes more than pompously telling you something mundane is illegal, truth be damned.

I decided to take the car in anyway. I asked at the counter why the French BMW concession hadn’t told me about this recall. “Well, it was just a UK-wide recall,” I was told. “Then why does it affect my French car?” I asked. She had no answer for that. When the work was done I asked the same question to another clerk. He replied that “There were a lot of recalls, maybe they were too busy and so decided not to mention it?” Which seems odd for a problem which, according to these jobsworths, was so severe they simply couldn’t just change the oil and let me be on my merry way.

For some reason, I don’t think my experience with BMW was too far removed from this video, which shows a couple of thugs employed by the local government in Grimsby fining a pensioner for having a dog in a graveyard:

British people, in the main, like to follow the rules and cooperate with authority. The downside of this is that certain people, when given a smidgen of temporary authority, gleefully wield it against ordinary folk, and especially those who have little choice but to cooperate. You can be damned sure the fat fool in the video would stay well clear of a couple of chavs with a pitbull; they’d have slapped him silly and posted the video on Snapchat. You see this authoritarian, bullying attitude everywhere in Britain, especially at airports and anywhere else where jumped-up little wannabe Hitlers can cite a Blair-era law to justify their actions. I remember years ago being on a rubbish dump outside Worcester with the bloke who ran the place lecturing us on how interfering with a washing machine we found lying there was “breaking the law”. You can only imagine what these people would be like if given real power.

None of this happens in France. For a start, the local government wouldn’t hire thugs to harass pensioners for walking their dogs. Secondly, no Frenchman would take the job because they’d find the local bar wouldn’t serve them any more. Thirdly, the public wouldn’t cooperate. There’s no way you’d get a hundred euros out of Frenchwoman the way these two shook down the old lady in Grimsby for £100. They’d risk arrest and imprisonment before they’d cough up on the spot like that. One of the things I like about the French is their disdain for authority, particularly that wielded by the government. I’ve written before about the very different relationship the French police take towards the citizenry in comparison to their British counterparts (the gilets jaunes in big cities notwithstanding).

That’s not to say the French fonctionnaires aren’t the most frustrating people on the planet; a trip to the local prefecture would disabuse you of that notion within minutes. But their contempt for you is one of utter indifference: they don’t hate you, they simply don’t care. But in the UK the bureaucrats and petty officials take delight in lording it over people, as if they’re trying to make up for a lifetime of being a complete loser in every field.

There’s also no room for nuance. I expect the reason the recall never happened in France is because the Frenchmen who owned the dealerships realised they were going to have a load of irate BMW owners on their hands, demanding compensation and free courtesy cars. So they probably negotiated and persuaded BMW that maybe the issue wasn’t that bad after all. Whereas in Britain BMW would have called the UK dealerships who immediately accepted whatever they were told and decided they’d refuse to perform routine services on customers’ vehicles unless they agreed to surrender them for several days during which they’d have to hire a car at their own expense (as I did).

The French approach to things can drive you insane at times, but there are times when I grudgingly admire their intransigence. And few things make me feel more ashamed of my country than the combination of authoritarian bullying by British jobsworths and its craven acceptance by ordinary people.

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Workin’ on a building

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This is a good article on the real world consequences of the ludicrous 2015 Modern Slavery Act which requires British companies to ensure there is no “exploitation” in its supply chains.

I’ve witnessed how British companies outsource this responsibility to local factory managers in Sri Lanka.

These local managers feel tremendous pressure to monitor their workforce, even beyond the shop floor, for fear of losing their contracts. And this leads to an excessive amount of surveillance, with devastating consequences for factory workers, most of whom are female.

…

[B]y recommending universal policies, the Modern Slavery Act fails to take into account how local suppliers around the world respond to it, even though the law effectively transfers to them the responsibility to keep the workforce free from modern slavery. It has led to a climate of suspicion and fear that exacerbates the already difficult lives of their workforce.

Like so much contemporary legislation, the Modern Slavery Act mainly exists to signal the virtues of the western professional middle-classes. 

I spent two summers speaking about the Modern Slavery Act to female factory workers in Sri Lanka’s free trade zones, which are industrial areas with a number of garment factories that supply many foreign companies. I found there is intense pressure on local managers to clean up their assembly lines in such a way that the western companies which hire them could not be accused of modern slavery. The pressure to appear “clean” results in an unhealthy working environment.

It also limits women’s freedom in a number of ways. For instance, a number of women I spoke to engaged in part-time sex work to make extra money outside of their factory jobs. This work was of their own choosing – and very different to the sexual trafficking or exploitation that the Modern Slavery Act is also designed to stop. But local managers feared it would be seen by Western auditors as exploitation and threaten their contracts. As one factory manager told me: “If we do not fire part-time sex workers, our factories can get blacklisted, and our orders will be cancelled.”

This was never about the victims. As this paragraph makes clear:

More disturbingly, intentionally or not, Article 54 makes global factory managers responsible for the leisure activities of their workers and, by extension, their moral conduct.

Which is a feature, not a bug. Be it environmental legislation or the Modern Slavery Act, the goal is to force ordinary people to behave in ways which meet the approval of city-dwelling noodle-armed men and women who buy wine by the box. As I’m fond of saying, these people would be better off going to church.

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Meet Markets

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A reader sends me this interesting essay about dating apps and the modern sexual market place:

Dovetailing these concerns is an academic cottage industry on the “increased female unhappiness” of Western women. The theory here is that modern women are less satisfied than their grandmothers because they now delay childbearing to an advanced age while simultaneously holding down demanding jobs in the competitive globalized workplace. Arguably, however, the amount of “happiness” for women has not decreased, but merely been frontloaded to their early 20s when they are having copious sex before settling down for marriage with lesser men. The actual “redistribution of happiness” has been to the alpha males who secure more sexual pleasure in their 20s at the expense of betas who remain lonely until they later make terms with leftover women.

Go read the whole thing.

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Reaming, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic

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Via a reader, this article:

The headteacher of Heavers Farm Primary School in South London suspended two 10-year-old Christian students after one of them asked for permission not to participate in an LGBT lesson during “Gay Pride Month.”

In the Middle East “respecting” Islam means participating fully in Ramadan or risking punishment. In British schools, “tolerance” for homosexuality means actively celebrating it.

The headteacher, Susan Papas, who obliged schoolchildren to participate in a “Gay Pride” parade last year, told the two children, who are both of African descent, they are “a disappointment to the school,” Christian Concern reported Monday.

Oh, they’re black. I’ve suddenly detected racism in Ms. Papa’s remarks.

On June 20, pupil Farrell Spence asked his teacher Alex Smith for permission not to take part in a lesson when Mr. Smith handed out LGBT material for coloring. The teacher denied the permission, insisting that the LGBT lesson was part of the curriculum.

This has nothing to do with tolerance and everything to do with indoctrination of the sort Section 28 was designed to prevent.

After class, Mr. Smith allegedly accused Farrell of using “homophobic language” and saying, “LGBT sucks and LGBT’s dumb,” which the child categorically denies.

Which is what children say about anything they don’t like.

The teacher asked Farrell where he was from and the boy responded that he was of “African Jamaican” heritage, and there “everybody is Christian and Catholic, so they don’t accept LGBT.”

If he’s capable of expressing himself like that perhaps he’s a little past colouring exercises? It would equally explain the reluctance of a 10-year old to take part as any in-built homophobia.

Later, head teacher Papas reportedly called in the two children and shouted at them: “How dare you? You are a disappointment to the school.”

Ms. Papas, whose daughter Attie is a lesbian and the School Manager, next put the children in separate rooms and scolded Kaysey: “How dare you say that you want to kill LGBT people?”

In other words, you have an LGBT political activist masquerading as a teacher and abusing their position to indoctrinate children.

Heavers Farmer Primary School educates 750 pupils in a multicultural and multi-religious borough of South London. Along with the School Manager, the Assistant Headteacher Robert Askey is also openly gay.

Uh-huh.

The mothers of the two children complained to the Principal Officer, citing school regulations that state it is unlawful to suspend a student for “a non-disciplinary reason.”

The parents insist their children did not make homophobic comments and have accused the headteacher of failing “to eliminate discrimination based on religion or belief.” They also cited the European Convention of Human Rights, saying it requires that schools respect the manner in which parents seek to raise their children in accordance with their Christian faith.

And we’re back to where we were with the Muslim parents in Birmingham a couple of months back. Now normally it would be easy to dismiss these Christian parents as bigots, but with they’re being African it’s not so easy. Who wins this hand of victimhood poker?.

This is not the first run-in the school and its headteacher has faced over LGBT activism.

In June 2018, the school organized a “Gay Pride” parade in its playground, posting rainbow flags around the school, and telling students to wear bright colors for the event.

Ms. Papas also invited parents to watch the “Proud to be Me!” parade and join in celebrating “the rainbow of things that make them and their family special.”

At that time, 14 Christian parents complained that Papas was “forcing a very aggressive LGBT agenda on to young children in a manner which abuses parental rights and victimises parents.”

Well yes, it’s run by political activists. Welcome to compulsory state education.

In response, Papas declared she was standing against homophobia: “We stand by our decision to celebrate national Pride Month by teaching British values.”

The subject matter may be different, but these values sound more Soviet than British.

Izoduwa Montague, the mother of one of the students and a Christian, refused to allow her four-year-old son to take part in the parade and complained to the Education Secretary that the school had embarked on “systematic proselytism of its young and vulnerable pupils.”

Which is exactly what opponents of teaching children this stuff in schools predicted would happen.

Montague says she felt “bullied” after she complained that her child was “forced to take part in an event that goes against our Christian beliefs,” and later transferred her child to a Catholic school.

Where I expect they received a better education.

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Epilogue

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Remember this story?

This is the international lawyer filmed ranting at Air India staff on a Mumbai to London flight after she was refused alcohol – leaving other business class passengers holding hands in terror.

Simone O’Broin, 50, was arrested after she was caught on camera shouting abuse at male and female cabin crew and demanding another glass of wine.

Sadly, there’s a follow-up:

A human rights lawyer jailed for abusing Air India cabin crew after being refused alcohol on a business class flight is thought to have killed herself at Beachy Head days after being released from prison.

Simone Burns, 50, was sentenced to six months in April after racially abusing and spitting at stewards during a flight from Mumbai to London last year.

She was released from Bronzefield women’s prison on licence on May 20 and was found dead at the foot of cliffs in East Sussex 13 days later.

This is desperately sad, and no doubt the media will focus on this bit:

A friend, who did not want to be named, said her “world fell apart” after her conviction and she became a target for internet trolls after the four-minute clip of her inebriated rant went viral on social media.

Burns was diagnosed with skin cancer 18 years ago, a condition that required multiple biopsies and surgeries. At the time of her court appearance she was waiting to get a prosthetic nose.

She seems to have been a troubled woman for quite some time, with her illness leading to mental problems. I like to make fun of women who go off to “find themselves” in Zen retreats, dye their hair turquoise, hang around Burning Man, and take up polyamory but the serious point is that many of them are suffering from serious mental issues which have gone untreated. As we have discovered, these are not lifestyle choices but coping mechanisms. So whereas it might have been the jail sentence and media attention which pushed Burns over the edge, what she needed was intervention and professional help a lot earlier. Unfortunately, modern society – particularly third wave feminism – tends to dissuade women from admitting they have problems, and instead encourages them to engage in degenerate behaviour which only makes things worse.

Burns was 50 when she died. Most of the women I’ve written about are between 30 and 40. We really don’t know what anguish they’re storing up for themselves, but we’re going to find out one way or another.

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