In the news

I thought the culture wars were mostly about racism.

Feminism and gender issues have been a part of the culture wars for a very long time. More so than ever now - misogyny is a core feature of the alt-right.

Cipo's really done it this time. The prosecutor wants him put away for 2.5 years, for hospitalising his ex. “You are nobody and you are worth nothing, while I am Cipollini. If one day at 5am I wake up and I want to make you disappear, no one can find you anymore, I have friends everywhere.” https://road.cc/content/news/prosecutor-calls-25-year-prison-sentence-cipollini-293827

Jon Ronson - things fell apart

Want to know what’s next? IMO: LGBTQI+, starting backwards. Making them taboo in public discourse and education, erasing IQT as concepts, eventually removing equality protections for BGL, potentially even outlawing them.

A bunch of my New York colleagues are protesting at Stonewall on Sunday

There's a really good series on BBC R4 about the origin of various limbs of the culture wars, I'll see if I can find it.

Sounds like Jon Ronson's Things Fell Apart?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/m0011cpr

Either way, particularly recommended for the episode on abortion rights (no spoilers but it's incredibly shocking) and the episode on how the term 'TERF' came about, but I'd recommend the whole thing.

Edit: Oh @t.o. beat me to it but yeah.

IMO: LGBTQI+

This has already been happening for a while I'm afraid. Anti-trans and LGBT activity here in the UK is being funded remotely by the US Christian Right with 'dark money' looking to export their culture war.

Crowdfunders mysteriously reach their targets in hours/overnight with large individual donations and if you're a high profile/totemic anti-trans/TERF/however you want to define them you won't need to worry about legal fees or how to pay the bills.

Look at Kathleen Stock getting rescued by the University of Austin after she quit Sussex.

That's the one. Cheers.

That's the one. Cheers.

Also this Esra Kleine one is good. Albeit on the ethics rather than the policy(ies):
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1v7640V6MDqcj8ByovpU5M?si=1K3kJoP5QO2CbI35WgHR-w&utm_source=copy-link

If people aren't aware of the standard philosophical arguments, etc. It contains a good intro to them and the key academics.

150k For a treehouse, I guess it reinforces how totally out of touch these people are.

http://nitter.net/PippaCrerar/status/1540484388441538562

Ta for this been trying to rember the name of this series to listen too.

TBF have you seen the price of timber these days?

Which episode is about abortion rights?

Seen lots of this on Twitter, how the abortion issue morphs in to a privacy issue
https://twitter.com/kevincollier/status/1540369382274207744

The thing is, it really isn’t. If it were, truly, about religion, then pre and post natal care, universal healthcare and access to education would all be equally prioritised. Not to mention gun control to protect those children later in life.

It is solely about the ability to impose one’s will on others less fortunate or less powerful than you, and maintain power over them. Both individually and en masse over an entire social or ethnic demographic.

None of the people making these laws give a single fuck about the lives of children or the way they grow up.

Map that shows how the decision translates at the state level
https://reproductiverights.org/maps/what-if-roe-fell/

Couple of grand for the actual treehouse then the rest for Carrie to project manage the build?

Geogre Monboit just made a similar argument to @beseku point, that it is all about shifting power by "flooding the zone"

This is the game:
As well as seeking to stamp out the rights of women and minorities, the radical right seeks to bombard us with so many reversals that we have no time or space left for our own agenda, of making the world a fairer, kinder, greener place.
They are occupying our heads, forcing us to respond to their brutal, breathtaking assaults on our common humanity, so that we can no longer develop our own programme. We need to think about how we can both fight these reversals and fight for the better world we want.
Steve Bannon had a term for it: "flooding the zone". When fascists tell us what they're doing, we should pay attention. And rapidly develop a counter-strategy.

https://twitter.com/GeorgeMonbiot/status/1540571294743265282

I was going to write a post on the abortion ethics discussion but to be honest I'm too angry about this. We went through all this in Northern Ireland.
We still don't have proper abortion access btw.

And, lifelog, I rang bupa 10 years ago when I just started dating my now husband as I thought I was pregnant. False alarm (good as abortion isn't exactly fun!) but I could have traveled on savings, nobody would need to know or judge me...many aren't so lucky.

This never is some abstract discussion.

And it affects everyone, a British couple is stuck waiting in Malta for the woman to miscarry as there still is a heartbeat.

So just going to just leave this here, stories of women in Northern Ireland

https://m.facebook.com/279428862699791/

It is often the case that people don't define themselves in the same way as an observer does. Their fundamental 'truths' are going to be different to yours.

I mostly agree with you, but it's religion that let's people convince themselves and others that controlling women's bodies is being "pro life" while also denying gun control. It's religion that people use to say life starts at conception and there are hugely wealthy and powerful religious organisations that have been using that phrase to lobby for controlling women's bodies.

Guns and abortion aren't remotely analogous.

If you want a useful contradiction it is how preventing the "killing" of unborn children is of utmost importance, but prevention of them "just dying" through poverty and lack of access to appropriate treatment is just how it is.

Even then one is active and one is passive, so still not ideal.

This has already been happening for a while I'm afraid. Anti-trans and LGBT activity here in the UK is being funded remotely by the US Christian Right with 'dark money' looking to export their culture war.

Crowdfunders mysteriously reach their targets in hours/overnight with large individual donations and if you're a high profile/totemic anti-trans/TERF/however you want to define them you won't need to worry about legal fees or how to pay the bills.

Look at Kathleen Stock getting rescued by the University of Austin after she quit Sussex.

We have not met but from our exchanges on this I know you are a good and genuine person. I appreciate you, like me, are trying to approach this topic with respect and openness.

This reply is not a challenge to you personally, but a challenge to the assumption by many on the left that any purportedly left wing opposition to losing women's (female) rights and identity must be secretly funded by the US hard right because no true left wing people could possibly support it.

Yes, the Christian alt-right in the US are anti LBGT+ and undoubtably do fund political and legal challenges in the US, just as they have been for funding the anti-abortion movement.

Yes, increasing numbers of left wing women (in the old fashioned, biological meaning of the word), in the UK and elsewhere, while being entirely supportive of gender-nonconformity, do not accept that we can simply hand-wave away the material consequences that being female-bodied has in a culture shaped by patriarchy. That doesn't make them anti-LGB, or even anti TQIA+, it just means they do not believe the only way, or indeed even the most effective way to support TQIA+ people is simply a wholesale replacement of sex with gender identity.

Yes, the public debate about this has so far been predominantly in the centre right and right wing media. That's because the Left media are ignoring our voices and writing us off as simply transphobic, which we know ourselves not to be.

NO, the first group are not funding the second. The hard right don't give a shit about female rights other than as a way to stir the culture wars. The right may be happy to amplify the conflict for their own purposes but the crowd funding you see genuinely does represent a mass of people making individual donations supporting the women who put their head above the parapet to say "this is not ok, we do not consent to this" and in doing so risk or do lose their jobs, suffer dreadful online and real life abuse, and absolutely do worry about legal fees and how to pay the bill.

The people who are supporting crowdfunders are not doing so because they hate or fear TQIA+ people or because they think ones body should define the type life one is allowed to lead, but because, here and now, female people and female reality do exist and the history of female oppression means we are not treated the same as the male-bodied, so until the day our bodies genuinely make no difference to how society treats us, we will continue to need female-only provision and the right to a female political voice to mitigate and fight that.

Or to put it another way - the Right sure as hell know what type of bodies they want barefoot and pregnant. The mass of Pornhub punters sure as hell know what type of bodies they like to see young, naked and used. Employers sure as hell know which type of bodies might land them with the cost of maternity cover. The Left pretending sex is just a meaningless collection of physical attributes that have no social consequence doesn't change that one little iota, all it does is take away our voice and language to fight it.

It should not be perceived as an act of hate to say "trans women should be able to present and live as they wish, but some things will still be reserved for female people because of our bodies directly or the social consequences thereof, and we can work out together what those things need to be, and this is entirely reasonable and ok and does not take anything from trans women".

The tragedy is that the large LGBTQIA+ and Trans orgs actually are well funded - a good thing, in case there is any doubt about what I mean - and those orgs could do so much to support TQIA+ people in practical ways without taking support away from female people, but instead they have focused on inflaming the culture wars by pushing the hard line that acknowledging sex to be a meaningful differentiator in any context is an act of hate and asserting the only way to support TQIA+ people AMAB is to open up all existing provisions for female people to those AMAB who no longer identify as men.

It is this, not some shadowy right wing conspiracy, that has driven a wedge straight between two groups of people who should be natural allies against right wing patriarchy.

This is real, it is important, and the Left needs to face there is a genuine issue here and stop pretending it's all being stoked by nasty boogeymen on the right.

I'd argue both are active - as some of (edited) those in power work very hard to ensure there is no wealth trickle-down and actively engage in stopping social mobility. Therefore poverty, definitely in certain demographics, is a direct and purposeful consequence of policy. Healthcare is also withheld on purpose as a result of policy and business practice.

Tl;dr harm and death by neglect is still a wilful act.

Very true.

It is “religion” but not religion. If it were, as I said, there surely would be more compassion after the baby is born. You can’t have it both ways.

For anyone capable of logical thought being against abortion cannot co-exist with almost every other aspect of US social care and also align with any existing religious belief that I know of.