Tag: Spiked

  • White niggers of the New World Order

    Have a blast from the past.

    Image may contain: 1 person, text

    That’s 1992. In 2007 Claire Fox (one of the Living Marxism set) wrote a touching reminiscence at Comment is Free:

    During the Balkans conflict, the Serbs were routinely demonised en masse. Those of us who argued against casting the former post-cold war Serbia as an international pariah state, instead of a local protagonist in a dirty and bloody civil war, were labeled Serb apologists. In 1992, Living Marxism (the magazine I then wrote for and went on to publish after its re-launch as LM in 1997) noted that the Serbs had been turned into the “white niggers of the New World Order”; they were frequently described as “thugs”, “fascists”, “gangsters” and “rapists” by everyone from Margaret Thatcher to Red Ken Livingstone, from neo-cons to liberal journalists. The anti-Serb consensus was nothing if not broad!

    Now she’s one of the Spiked set, because that’s what the Living Marxism set did – they linked hands and pivoted 180 degrees in unison. Here she is back in December along with Christina Hoff Sommers and Cathy Young and other libertarian rebbuls warning of the dangers of MeToo.

    How ironic that #MeToo is fuelling its own bullying climate: women are told to conform, or else. This climate is a greater threat to real freedom than any pathetic groper.

    Or any terrifying anti-Serb consensus?

  • How about nine? Is that young enough?

    An item from the Onion?

    A prominent barrister specialising in reproductive rights has called for the age of consent to be lowered to 13.

    Barbara Hewson told online magazine Spiked that the move was necessary in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal to end the “persecution of old men”.

    No, the BBC, but the source is Spiked, so it might as well be the Onion (except the Spiked crew think they’re serious).

    Let’s create an age of consent for murder, to end the persecution of murderers.

    She argues for an end to complainant anonymity, a strict statute of limitations to prevent prosecutions after a substantial amount of time has passed and a reduction in the age of consent to 13.

    She said that “touching a 17-year-old’s breast, kissing a 13-year-old, or putting one’s hand up a 16-year-old’s skirt” are not crimes comparable to gang rapes and murders and “anyone suggesting otherwise has lost touch with reality”.

    Good idea! Let’s totally stack the deck against victims of sexual assault so that it’s not just difficult for them to report their assaults, but impossible.

    [opens the Spiked article] Ah yes of course – what is Spiked saying? That it’s a “witch-hunt of ageing celebs.”

    Wednesday 8 May 2013

    Yewtree is destroying the rule of law

    With its emphasis on outcomes over process, the post-Savile witch-hunting of ageing celebs echoes the Soviet Union.

    Barbara Hewson

    I do not support the persecution of old men. The manipulation of the rule of law by the Savile Inquisition – otherwise known as Operation Yewtree – and its attendant zealots poses a far graver threat to society than anything Jimmy Savile ever did.

    Now even a deputy speaker of the House of Commons is accused of male rape. This is an unfortunate consequence of the present mania for policing all aspects of personal life under the mantra of ‘child protection’.

    Witch-hunt and inquisition – that reminds me of something…

    H/t Bernard Hurley

  • New atheists think people are just monkeys so nyah

    Frequent commenter Sigmund alerted me to another entity crying out for scrutiny and derision: the Iona Institute, an Irish “institute” (can any old thing call itself an institute? The Faraday Institute, the Tobacco Institute, the Iona Institute – are there any gates, any gatekeepers? is it just anarchy around here?) dedicated to saying how great the Catholic church is.

    The amusing thing (amusing in a rebarbative kind of way) is that the Iona Institute invited dear auld Brendan O’Neill to give a talk, and he obliged. From Trotskyist splinter group to libertarian “contrarian” faitheist pope-cheering what-the-hell-is-that – that’s Spiked and its editor Brendan O’Neill. So the Trotskyist libertarian pope-fan told the Iona Institute…you’ll never guess what. That’s it’s all the fault of The New Atheism.

    O’Neill, who also writes for The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph among other publications, said [there] was widespread antagonism “towards strong belief or solid faith”.

    He said: “In our relativistic era of ‘anything goes’, when we are expected to respect all cultures as equally valid, a religion that considers itself the ‘one, true faith’ and as ‘universal’, is looked upon as dictatorial if not fascistic.”

    Yes that’s right. A religion that considers itself the ‘one, true faith’ and ‘universal’ is bound to consider itself entitled – indeed mandated – to impose that ‘one, true, universal faith’ on everyone. Since Catholicism is not “true” in any sense that matters, that imposition is as dictatorial as it gets.

    Speaking about the New Atheism, he said: “The New Atheism regards not only religious faith but any view which considers mankind as more than a monkey as suspect, strange, deluded.”

    Well that’s just a stupid falsehood.

    He continued: “New Atheists’ real problem with religion is its treatment of mankind as special and distinctive, as the governor of the Earth, as having ‘dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and every other living thing that moves on the Earth’.

    No it isn’t. That’s one problem, especially when it’s the kind of “dominion” that entails treating all other living things as human property to do with as it likes, but it’s not “the real problem” – there are lots of real problems, many of them worse (at least from the human point of view) than that one.

    “At a time when we are increasingly seen as mere bundles of genes, little more than DNA, sharing 90 per cent of our genes with bananas, religion’s sanctification of man is seen as perverse.”

    Religion’s what?! Religion doesn’t “sanctify” humans – religion scolds atheists and humanists for focusing on human beings instead of imaginary gods; religion tells human beings they can’t understand god’s ways and reasons so they just have to obey; religions tells human beings they are nothing compared to god.

    Concluding, he said: “The end result of the crashing together of these trends is a creeping and sometimes shrieking intolerance of Catholicism in particular, and religion in general. This has led even me – a lapsed Catholic and immoveable atheist – to worry about the illiberal streak to modern-day atheism, and to want to stand up for the absolute freedom of religion.

    Funny that he decides to worry about the putative “illiberal streak to modern-day atheism” and not the well-known and very obvious illiberal streak in Catholicism. Chump.