Billy Bragg is unapologetic and determined: he knows which views are unpopular and To Be Avoided. Whether they’re any good or not is entirely beside the point.
Come on, Suzanne. Can he be any clearer??? The views in question are frowned upon. What more is there to say? We all know that no true claim is ever unpopular, right? Well then.
Her views are contentious! And divisive! And therefore obviously wrong. No true or reasonable or useful view is ever contentious or divisive, so why is Hadley even trying?
Nobody must ever say anything contentious!! How is this so contentious? Why is everyone not agreeing with my assertion that contentious views are automatically wrong and forbidden?!!
People can see! They won’t sit next to you in the cafeteria! They won’t ask you to their parties! They’ll point at you and laugh!
Comments
12 responses to “Your first duty is to conform”
I don’t know if Julie Burchill has drifted ever rightward but it’s clear that Billy Bragg has drifted deep into a conspiracy-theory mindset. People “who stand behind” FFS.
Julie Burchill has ALWAYS been like that.
This conversation with Bragg reminds me of the lefties from way back. They were going to save the world from capitalist imperialism… and the women were going to make the coffee and photocopies and keep the mattresses warm. Is there a straight line from taking advantage of women in the name of socialism to supporting fake sex workers unions to trans rights activism?
I guess if a dude wants to make coffee and photocopies for Billy, he’s happy to call that dude a woman.
A comment from another website I look at daily:
This is a beautiful display of the gigantic cudgel the genderists have given the Right. Those of us in that “minority” that this right-wing dipshit mentions will continue to be applied as spikes to that cudgel, and I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do about it.
I just stay home and grow food.
When did Mr. Bragg ever suffer a “cancelling” similar to what Róisín Murphy is enduring?
This truly is a cudgel for the right-wing to beat everyone to their left with. I won’t say “the left” because it encompasses everyone who supports gay marriages and abortion rights. This whole crowd has got it into their heads that “gender” is real. That “gender dysphoria” (unlike anorexia) is based on something valid. That “gender non-conforming” means your brain is in the wrong body. And that the thing to do is to put youngsters on Lupron and label concerns about osteoporosis and impaired cognitive development as “transphobia.” And to label concerns about impaired sexual development as being obsessed with children’s genitals. And from there they happily go on to mastectomies for 14 year old, and cross-hormone treatments with irreversible side-effects.
And they wrap themselves up in a cocoon of deluded self-righteousness. And when the butcher’s bill comes due some of them will continue to live in disgusting denial and the Trump crowd will only have more reasons to think that they’re the sane ones.
… Or the Republican Party or the Christian Right. This I think is not only one of the main reasons people are afraid to speak out against trans ideology and/or pediatric sex trait modification, it’s one of the main reasons people support the two in the first place. When Marjorie Taylor Greene says transwomen are not women, do we really need to think hard about this question? They clearly are. If arguments for a bill restricting experimental, permanent medical procedures on minors include appeals to God’s Will and references to Adam and Eve among the studies and statistics, isn’t it just obvious it’s the wrong side? It’s life-saving. Let’s get all our information from Reliable Sources which don’t share anything with those we’ve dismissed. All issues are partisan, details be damned.
Bragg’s version of the Argument From Shut Up would have shut down pretty much every progressive cause he stands for. You can’t stand on “the Public Has Spoken” and effect any change.
Exactly. And yet he doesn’t notice. It would be laughable if it weren’t so disgusting.
Apparently, people like Bragg don’t understand how insidious guilt by association is… or they simply don’t understand what it is.
FFS, I am so tired of imbeciles and the willfully ignorant trying to make policy and influence social conventions.
Or maybe they don’t care, just as long as they’re the ones determining guilt and making the associations.
No, they really don’t see anything wrong with guilt by association, not because they don’t understand what it is, but because they can’t understand why it’s bad. GBA and the genetic fallacy are two of the most normal modes of inference humans use throughout our lives. Hell, that’s why even people who know better feel compelled to offer their tribal bona fides before saying anything substantive or to apologize for citing sources from “the other side”. And every time they do, that social hedging reinforces the idea that such reasoning is legitimate. Because those fallacies are powered by social pressure, they’re very hard for social animals to resist.
Hmm, guilt by association, eh? I can think of at least one professor of biology who regularly plays that game, accusing the gender critical of getting into bed with one or both of the hated enemies – Conservatives and religion – just because they oppose the same thing, albeit for often completely different reasons. So with that in mind, I offer this recent quote from said professor in his post about far-right religious wackaloons and the devout Christians who oppose them.
Hmm.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/08/28/who-the-heck-is-clay-clark/
Hmmm indeed.