Happy…Confederate Memorial Day?

South Carolina state government offices are closed Monday to mark Confederate Memorial Day.

Really. State government is on holiday to commemorate treason in defense of slavery. Cool that it’s the same state that is denying its citizens federal unemployment benefits because the state wants to force them to work in hotels and restaurants for shit pay in shit conditions…which is not as unlike slavery as it might be. It likely affects the same category of people, too.

South Carolina is among a handful of states in the South with such an official holiday. State offices in Alabama and Mississippi closed for their Confederate Memorial Days late last month.

Aka the Deep South aka the cotton belt.

Now let’s talk about girls and shared public spaces.

It’s all the same shit. Those girls jostled and blocked and spat on and kicked and knocked onto the track are the same category of human that was locked up in Magdalen laundries and imprisoned in industrial “schools” that were slave labor camps not schools, and now they’re fodder for adults preening over their infinite supply of solidarity with…boys who say they are girls.

I’ve watched this clip multiple times since yesterday – there’s a lot going on and it’s not possible to take in all of it in one viewing.

One boy kicks a girl as she runs past, one spits on a girl as she runs past, they all spread out over the platform so that they’re in the way of anyone who is trying to get on the train.

Cis female privilege in action yeah?

Catherine Belton, Nick Cohen tells us, has written a book about Russian plutocrats and their ways, and they are flocking to London courts to sue her into oblivion.

The former Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times now faces a pile-on from Russian billionaires on a scale this country has never witnessed. Rosneft, the Kremlin-dominated oil producer (market capitalisation circa $75bn) whose chief executive, president and chairman, Igor Sechin, began his rise to power as Vladimir Putin’s secretary in the 1990s, has lodged an action for libel. No further details were available at the court at the time of going to press.

Roman Abramovich, the Chelsea football boss (estimated net worth $15.3bn) is suing because of what he says are “false and defamatory” statements about his purchase of Chelsea FC. Mikhail Fridman, owner of Russia’s largest non-state bank (net worth about $15.6bn) is suing for libel. Fridman’s business partner, Pyotr Aven, (net worth a paltry $5.3bn) is suing for breach of data protection. Aven and Fridman told the Financial Times they “had no contact with, and did not co-ordinate a legal strategy with, the other plaintiffs or their lawyers’’. Finally, there is a legal action by Shalva Chigirinsky, a former property tycoon (net worth unknown) with no details on record.

That’s a lot of billionaires suing.

Last week, Raab promised to fight “with the staunchest resolve” Russia’s “malign activities aimed at undermining other countries’ democratic systems”. If the foreign secretary is serious, perhaps he should take a look at London’s high-class service sector for the super-rich. He is unlikely to be able to rely on the legal profession to ask the hard moral and political questions for him.

I learned that in 2013 when I sat through a libel case arising from the death of Sergei Magnitsky in a foul Moscow prison. He worked for the Hermitage Capital fund and died suffering from horrible illnesses after he showed how former Russian officials and gangsters (a distinction without a difference if ever there was one) stole about $230m from the Russian taxpayer. His friend and boss at Hermitage, Bill Browder, began a successful global campaign to freeze the western holdings of corrupt Russians.

One official, Pavel Karpov, sued Browder for libel in London. Browder won, but Karpov stayed in Moscow and refused to pay Browder’s costs of £600,000. In other words, Russia, an actively hostile foreign power, appeared able to use the English legal system to impose the punishment of a huge fine on one of its most effective critics.

Slapp suits much?

[T]he EU is under pressure to act against what Americans call strategic lawsuits against public participation. Slapp actions grant access to the courts to powerful individuals or organisations that are less interested in actual verdicts than the prospect of extraordinarily expensive legal costs browbeating critics. My friends at Index on Censorship tell me that Britain has shown no interest in following suit.

Jobs for the barristers is it?

But have we been paying enough attention to the nons? People who aren’t a thing are people too you know! The BBC helps out by paying deep solemn reverent attention to those thrilling misunderstood long-neglected insufficiently advertised people the Aze.

In the UK, our awareness of asexuality – the experience of not feeling sexual attraction towards others – is still low.

Well it would be, wouldn’t it. It’s not generally something we need to know about other people, nor is it generally something other people need to know about us. Not feeling X towards other people is mostly just a personal [whatever] and thus not of general interest.

I really can’t stress enough how important it is to grasp that our personal tastes or habits or quirks or indifferences are not of general interest. They’re not the kind of thing you can build a politics around, even an identity politics, and they’re not the kind of thing you can build a news story around, either. They don’t make a “community.”

A poll of over 1,000 UK adults in 2019 suggests that three-quarters of them were incapable of correctly defining asexuality.

And that doesn’t matter, because there’s not really anything to define. Lack of interest in sex is just that.

So what is asexuality?

It’s a spectrum of experiences and identities. Some asexuals don’t experience romantic feelings, but others do.

What is the BBC doing publishing this teenagery nonsense? Nobody cares.

We get a whole tedious list of definitions, as if we were leaving for Camp Wokamonga tomorrow and needed to know what to pack.

￭ Gray-sexual: Someone who identifies with the area between asexuality and sexuality.

Oh shut up.

For the AVEN [the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network] though, it is clear that the number of people identifying with the term worldwide has been growing. “The most noticeable thing is that new communities are emerging all the time,” says Michael Doré, their spokesperson.

Because people like you babble about this horseshit and because adult institutions like the BBC for some reason publish your babbling. It’s not because there’s anything there.

“Today, the online ace community is represented on social media, Facebook and Discord. There are organisations in many different countries around the world, including outside the Anglosphere. Year on year, we’ve had a steady increase of members joining AVEN.”

Then we get three people’s self-admiring accounts of themselves, which I didn’t read because I want to continue to have the will to live.

A senior Sun reporter has died and tributes are pouring in.

There’s just this one tiny thing they’re forgetting to mention.

He murdered his wife.

Sharron Davies isn’t fooled.

Sharron Davies has hit out at [criticized] the decision to allow transgender weightlifter Laurel Hubbard to compete in the Olympics, describing it as ‘another kick in the teeth for female athletes’.

Parenthetically: I hate that UK metaphor of “hitting out at” for criticizing, and I think journalistic outlets should never use it, seeing as how it thoroughly poisons the well.

‘Sport is for all but it must be fair,’ said Davies, who won a silver medal in the 400 metres medley at the 1980 Moscow Games. ‘I am pro everyone doing sport but I feel sex, not self-identified gender, should be how we compete.’

And that’s not just a feeling, it’s a thought based on facts – obvious facts.

‘I speak out because of personal experience of the East German doping programme when illegally-added male levels of testosterone cheated women out of success for years, unstopped by the International Olympic Committee or any other sporting bodies. It was a shameful period.

‘We were as aware then as we are now that it was not fair, cheating hundreds of people [specifically, women] out of their rightful medals and rewards. It can’t happen again to even one female.

‘Women’s sport has made such strides and we still don’t have equality with airtime, coverage, sponsorship, awareness or prize money. But this is another kick in the teeth for female athletes. Sadly, I think people will only see how unfair this is when it happens in front of their eyes.

‘Some young females will lose medals, places and success before we do something about the obvious, which is males are stronger and faster. It is a biological reality every single Olympic event shows.’

But, who cares, it’s only women. The IOC certainly doesn’t care.

Davies, two-time Olympic champion Dame Kelly Holmes, former marathon world record holder Paula Radcliffe and 60 other top-class athletes wrote to IOC president Thomas Bach expressing concerns in 2019 but did not receive a response.

Yeah, what do they know. Stupid bitches.

The New Zealand Olympic Committee said: ‘The team has a strong culture of inclusion and respect for all. We look forward to supporting all our athletes selected in Tokyo.’

That’s just meaningless pufflegab. They’re not “supporting” their female athletes by doing this.

Several female athletes share the view of Davies but are told to stay silent by sponsors to avoid controversy and a potentially toxic fall-out with the trans community.

Tracey Lambrechs, who competed for New Zealand in weightlifting at Rio 2016, said: ‘I’ve had female weightlifters come up to me and say, “What do we do? This isn’t fair”. Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do because every time we voice it we get told to be quiet. We’re all about equality for women in sport but right now that equality is being taken away from us.’

Oh just shut up about it, you’re only women.

Dr Nicola Williams, director of British campaign group Fair Play For Women, said: ‘Female sports category exists so women have the chance to win. Here’s a person who was never internationally successful as a man, who can come into women’s competition and be an Olympic contender at 43. If you’re wondering if transwomen retain their male advantage, here’s your proof.’

But it’s trans-cheating so it’s virtuous and noble.

The Times reports that employers punish employees who fail to parrot the dogma about trans people, which means that employers are punishing their employees for failing to tell stupid lies. That’s not a fair or reasonable setup.

Dozens of women have faced disciplinary action at work for offences such as saying JK Rowling is not transphobic, asking a question during equality training or requesting female-only lavatories, according to 40 campaigners on free speech.

In a letter to The Sunday Times, the campaigners say that the employers of a quarter of UK workers have signed up to a Diversity Champions scheme run by the LGBT charity Stonewall. It means if people question what the campaigners refer to as “Stonewall law” — that “trans women are women; trans men are men” — they risk punishment.

Has this ever been the case when it’s a matter of hostile or contemptuous remarks to or about women?

The rise and fall (or fall and rise? or rise and fall and rise?) of an “influencer.”

Like cult-leaders, Instagram influencers must navigate a complex symbiosis with their followers to remain popular. Unlike cult-leaders, their lives are often funded by a commercial system of sponsored posts, a practice which Caroline abstains from. Instead, in March, as the world shut down, she started making money from selling topless photos on the platform ‘Only-Fans’.

So, photos with the tops cut off so that you get trees lopped in half or people whose faces stop at their nostrils? Doesn’t sound all that lucrative.

I tell her the way she uses Instagram reminds me of how Sylvia Plath wrote poems: art as an act of confession.

Or attention-seeking, or both.

But Calloway wants to chronicle her life more traditionally too. Her book, called Scammer, will come out next year – if she finishes it. I tell her (she is the kind of person you want to confess everything to) that I want to write about myself, but I feel like a narcissist when I try to. She tuts, “that’s so sad!” Does she ever feel the same? “No, no, no! I think British people see memoir as something so fundamentally guilt inducing, it’s something you should be shamed for, it’s just so fucking English, it’s so fucked up!”

She insists that the English “see a woman who wants to write about herself and the first word that slaps their frontal cortex is narcissism.” I’ve proven her point for her. But the accusation is thrown at Instagram Influencers as much as writers. The act of sharing yourself is easily perceived as obsessing over yourself.

Caroline thinks it’s different in the US. “Something America has that Britain doesn’t is a tradition of white male memoirists. Ernest Hemingway wrote A Moveable Feast, Nabokov…with Speak Memory, George Orwell wrote Down and Out in Paris and London. All these famous American men left this long legacy for American women to pick up and hoist on their backs that I don’t think exists in England. But I think,” she hesitates, deliberating “I always think your own story is worth telling.”

Heeheeheehee.

They’re bound to fix it eventually, so I’d better do a screenshot just for safety.