The Observer
Gender
There is so much more for us to worry about than men masquerading as women to access single-sex spaces
Kathryn Bromwich
We are able to worry about this and the cricket at the same time.
The Observer
Gender
There is so much more for us to worry about than men masquerading as women to access single-sex spaces
Kathryn Bromwich
We are able to worry about this and the cricket at the same time.
Shut up and stop complaining about men taking your spaces. I know what’s best for you.
— Kathryn Bromwich
Judging by column inches alone, you might be forgiven for thinking that the thing keeping women awake at night is not femicide, sexual assault, plummeting rape convictions, stalking, unequal pay, the erosion of reproductive rights, workplace discrimination, rampant online misogyny, an institutionally sexist police force, healthcare inequality, insufficient childcare provisions, or never being allowed to age.
My wife doesn’t worry about any of these things, but then I suppose she’s probably too busy being a normal Mum and housewife to believe in conspiracy theories.
To be honest the whole article reads to me as: Gee, it looks like we might even lose this argument, let’s change the subject!
A subject similar to this was discussed with a mate over the weekend. The sort of thing prompted far too many column inches by some obsessed journalist. What we both agreed is that we don’t know anybody who’s exercised about any of it. They’re the concerns of a few art graduate university victims, journalists & politicians on the make. Maybe I should have included the journalists with the politicians. Hardly any of the people who actually produce your goods & services give a toss. They’re restricted to people with too much time on their hands.
BiS – Yarp, but we’re Pauline Kael here.
Our (for want of a better term) ruling class are completely serious about their Cultural Revolution. All those pedo / groomer / you’re a racist flags they put up at public expense are sincere, not merely virtue signaling. They really are out to get you.
It’s amazing & concerning the lack of pushback, Steve. Why aren’t they just told to fuck off? Puts me in mind of the pair of Brit trannies turned up a bar we favour. The one with blue hair in capri pants was particularly vomit inducing. They had the piss taken out them mercilessly. The hissy fit induced, provoked the above FO response. So they skulked off into the night. Complain to the police? Here, I wouldn’t recommend it.
Like I’ve said before, I don’t see tolerance as a virtue. Far too much of it about for my taste.
Steve
Even from Moscow you’re on the money (Missed the ‘Nope, Fuck off’ post where the CIA’s resident ‘morale booster’ in Kyiv was in sterling form)
Judging by column inches alone, you might be forgiven for thinking that the thing keeping women awake at night is not femicide, sexual assault, plummeting rape convictions, stalking, unequal pay, the erosion of reproductive rights, workplace discrimination, rampant online misogyny, an institutionally sexist police force, healthcare inequality, insufficient childcare provisions, or never being allowed to age.
– Femicide – Well, I wonder which group has dedicated itself to undermining the concept of women as biologically distinct? Also, no doubt the author is a fierce proponent of a certain major religion as ‘the RoP’
– plummeting rape convictions – if In spite of rigging the system and removing long standing protections to placate a mindless mob you are still struggling to convict maybe time to consider that a lot of claims are false?
– workplace discrimination – Nice of her to be worried about men (who face rampant discrimination across all economic sectors) for a change
– or never being allowed to age – She’s discovered the key to immortality?
Can’t really add more than that to the other excellent contributors here – the whole piece reads like it came off ChatGPT unedited….
No point worrying about the cricket, Tim. We’re doomed as usual.
“We should concentrate on what unites us, from sexual assault to healthcare inequality”
When it comes to big hairy men being able to follow my 15 year old daughter into the toilet, we can agree on the sexual assault bit.
VP – Thanks. I do wonder about people who unironically use the word “femicide”.
“Help! He’s trying to femicide me!” – I’d strangle anyone who said that.
I see Forever War / Net Zero / Health Authoritarianism / officially approved attacks on whites and their families as being all part and parcel of the same overall agenda.
(Not exactly WhoIsPepeSilvia.jpg, but close enough. Net Zero, Covid and New Cold War are based on the same PR template and tactics used against dissenters is identical in each case.)
The reason I think that is political “elites” and establishment media across the Western world all agree with each other 100% on all the big questions, and anybody who disagrees is run out of politics on a rail and criminalised by the state if they’re unlucky.
Basically, Delingpole is right. But this is bound to infuriate people, because being informed you’re basically that guy in Mad Max with a hacksaw and an ankle chained to a burning car isn’t a popular or hopeful message. We’d prefer to think we’ve got options and time.
Do we?
Maybe this is the solution to Fermi’s Paradox. The reason why there are no alien civilisations out there who have reached a point of technological ability that they can travel through space and visit us (or at least leave enough signs for us to realise they are there) is that civilisations that reach a certain level of technical development then run into the ‘not enough jobs for people to do’ problem, and the devil makes work for idle hands (or tentacles). If you actually add up the number of people in society who are involved in productive work its probably less than half the workforce. The rest are in non-jobs, that only exist as parasites on the productivity of the other half. As covid showed, vast swathes of the country can just stop working and life goes on. And all this frees up too many people to indulge in the nonsense linked to above. Thus our civilisation will collapse well before we ever reach a level of technical ability to travel to the stars. Maybe this is a universal law – advanced societies all collapse once technology makes too many of them redundant, and they have nothing else to do but cause trouble.
If you actually add up the number of people in society who are involved in productive work its probably less than half the workforce. The rest are in non-jobs, that only exist as parasites on the productivity of the other half.
This is where I think tech might actually save us, Jim. So many of those non-jobs are either information dissemination or distributed, rules based, decision making; Ripe to be replaced by AI. We could see whole sectors of employment disappearing. Much as what’s happened to manual labour due to automation.
My list would include most of university faculties, most of the “professions”, virtually all of desk jockey work, a great deal of media. Of course, they’ll be enormous resistance. But you can’t get round, people will be reluctant to pay people’s wages when there’s cheaper alternatives. And if you’re not wanted, you’re sidelined. You lose power to influence.
When it comes to actual “productive” work, there’s no limit to demand. People will find new things to produce to give new things for people to want.
We’ve temporarily gone up a blind alley but there’s a route out of it.
“We’ve temporarily gone up a blind alley but there’s a route out of it.”
And you don’t think the parasite class (who hold all the levers of power don’t forget) will manage to make sure that AI doesn’t get rid of them? Or they’ll just pass laws that say ‘If a job is made redundant by AI, you have to keep the employee on the payroll, doing nothing if necessary’. In effect make AI pay for a UBI. And then the parasites will have even more time and money to cause trouble.
BIS,
“It’s amazing & concerning the lack of pushback, Steve. Why aren’t they just told to fuck off? Puts me in mind of the pair of Brit trannies turned up a bar we favour. The one with blue hair in capri pants was particularly vomit inducing. They had the piss taken out them mercilessly. The hissy fit induced, provoked the above FO response. So they skulked off into the night. Complain to the police? Here, I wouldn’t recommend it.”
Because, in general, people don’t care that much. Not enough to kick up a fuss. And a lot of this is concentrated in the Clownworld Cities (Oxford, Cambridge, London, Bristol) which are the same places where people think it’s OK to block roads, deface statues or fuck around in an art gallery.
I’ve no doubt they’d like to Jim. If we let them. It’s our choice. Most of their power is illusory. The levers aren’t connected to much.
BoM4 – And a lot of this is concentrated in the Clownworld Cities
Not anymore tho.
The Gender War has come home. It’s in your local high school. These girls they send to “gender clinics” come from Middle England. It’s grooming gangs for the children of the middle class.
@BiS,Jim
Unfortunately it’s started already, for instance the GDPR provisions allowing grievance mongers to demand that a person reviews any automated decision. Which process muppet wouldn’t rather tell a bank to change their loan granting process than tell Bloggs Construction to fill in a pointless addendum to a loan application?
“Or they’ll just pass laws that say ‘If a job is made redundant by AI, you have to keep the employee on the payroll, doing nothing if necessary’.”
So that company will go bust and a new company will step into the breach, sans unnecessary ’employees’.
And define AI!
Do you know how many farm labourers were made redundant by the tractor and combine harvester? (etc :)). Or the spinning jenny?
I define anyone to define AI in a testable way that doesn’t include the pocket calculator, an encyclopedia, or a word processor.
And any real AI bright enough to pass the Turing test will be bright enough to ensure it doesn’t.
Well, I don’t know how exactly, but I’m pretty sure the parasites will manage to make it so that there are loads of non jobs for them to ‘do’ in the new AI world, and get well paid for naturally. They aren’t going to just sit there and let the host dispose of them as easily as that.
It probably won’t be one law, just a myriad of little regulations that in effect hamstring AI from doing anyone out of a job. Lawyers will make sure that AI can’t present in court for example, or even have a human read out AI produced legal arguments. Or that anyone given a decision made by AI can request it be checked by a human, that sort of thing. They’ll find plenty of ways to ensure the parasite class don’t go the way of the working classes, where technology was allowed to make people redundant without so much as blink of an eye. Won’t somebody think of the HR consultants!
@TtC
I think Alan Turing saw his Test as more of a thought experiment than reality. It wouldn’t be hard to prompt something like ChatGPT to produce non-human responses. The only way to duplicate human thinking responses would be a self aware device. Currently it’s known where self awareness resides let alone how to duplicate it.
But the majority of human thinking doesn’t require self awareness. It’s simple rules based data processing. We’re not even particularly good at it. Data assimilation’s slow & erratic & processing’s at a crawl. Failure rates high.
Think about GP’s. Who spent Covid proving their virtually superfluous. How much better you could do with a med-tech assisting interfacing the machine examination stage & the machine consulting the entire medical database for the diagnosis & treatment? Quicker, less failures & not paying the arm & leg & pension entitlements GPs think their worth.
I actually think self driving cars are the future. Just not the way it’s being done at the moment. Requires a central traffic management system & cars that can “talk” to it & each other. Most accidents are caused by poor data assimilation & processing. Due to the limitations of the human sensory suite. So why saddle self driving cars with the same limitations?
Me too – I think the self driving car will arrive when they’re a mesh, all talking to each other.
Learning to fly, you get taught about the limitations of the human sensory suite. How tiny the high def field of view is. How you can’t see things that are on a constant bearing until they’re right on you. How poor we are at judging distances.
Steve,
“The Gender War has come home. It’s in your local high school. These girls they send to “gender clinics” come from Middle England. It’s grooming gangs for the children of the middle class.”
School has always been part of Clownworld. It’s Clownworldjugend. Thankfully, most kids know what is nonsense and know better than to argue because it’s just a world of shit for no benefit.
And yeah, the state will take your kids away and sterilise or kill them if you’re not careful. Not that many parents want to demolish the institutions that will do this.
Well BiS. I think the only way to make self driving cars practical is to totally redesign the transport system, removing all the variables. After all it works in the NW of Western Australia, because use of the road is restricted to the trucks.
No doubt then, all the accidents will happen on the footpath, with pedestrians, e-bikes and all the rest of the rabble that’s been pushed off the road clogging it up.
“Me too – I think the self driving car will arrive when they’re a mesh, all talking to each other.”
That’s why we need 5G as a minimum and they’re already working on 6G. A lot of the processing has moved to the edge to allow for faster peer to peer communications in the local area.
Well BiS. I think the only way to make self driving cars practical is to totally redesign the transport system, removing all the variables.
That’s called “a motorway”. Already exists in UK law. Motorways are “special roads”, explicitly not public highways, where everything is banned unless explicitly allowed, to create a highly controlled highly predictable environment. If self-driving vehicles are going to be viable, that is the environment. All predicted in a SciFi short story I read decades ago that I recently managed to track down: Methusalah’s Children. It has the passage (something like) “…she pulled onto the controlled road, put the car into automatic as it picked up the guides buried in the road surface, and slid the seat back to take a nap”
Thanks for the reference jgh. I must try and read it one of these days. It’s one of Heinleins’ if I remember correctly.
Jgh. Towns are supposed to provide predictable environments. That’s why all the limits, signs, road markings, rules, regulations & the rest of it.
@bloke in spain – “Requires a central traffic management system & cars that can “talk” to it & each other.”
We’ve got that. It’s called the railways. But driverless trains are heavily opposed by train drivers’ unions.