I remember as a young child watching the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was too young to understand that if it was just a wall, why had it been so hard to knock it down?
Complex political structures being beyond my unformed mind, I was a touch too focused on the physics.
But watching Nicola Sturgeon’s sudden fall from grace, and potential collapse, reminds me of how flimsy the wall of woke really is. It is built on ideas that are anything but robust. In fact, it is full of holes. It is also ugly and everyone hates it.
For example, we know from polling data that Sturgeon’s trans policies are unpopular even in Scotland, the one place where presumably some people actually like her.
And so, as with the wokies in general, if their absurd, dangerous, anti-human ideas are supported by so few, why are we letting them stand at all?
The alleged transition of Adam Graham, the face tattooed male rapist, into the convenient female persona ‘Isla Bryson’, thus allowing him to enter a women’s prison, was the obscene flashpoint that pushed the reasonable people of Scotland, Britain, and – in an age of social media – the world over the edge.
Graham was only moved out of a female prison after an explosion of public outrage (for once that word can be used with justification) and the fiasco is said to have left Sturgeon “on the verge of quitting”.
Great news. But even if we do finally see the back of Sturgeon, will the trans madness cease?
Rhona Hotchkiss, former governor of the prison in which Adam Graham was incarcerated, is not confident. She writes in the Spectator:
Will Isla Bryson’s case lead to a shift in thinking? Perhaps for some. Will it lead to a change in attitude from gender ideologists to those who express concern? I doubt it. To those who see no issue with holding trans-identified men in women’s prisons, I am still a ‘transphobe’ and a ‘bigot’ for sharing my fears.
Though she also allows that:
If any good can come from this incident it is surely this: that at least a significant number of those who naively chanted the ‘be kind’ mantra have started to see that this is about much more than kindness to trans-identified people. It’s about reality versus fantasy and, above all, about recognising that sex is immutable.
Perhaps I have been spending too much time with incurable optimist and national security threat Toby Young, but on this issue I am feeling pretty positive.
Yes, we still have disastrous levels of immigration, cripplingly high taxes, virtually everyone is on strike, and economists are saying we’ll be poorer than Poland by 2030.
But when it comes to woke, we are dealing with an entirely pernicious cult that almost everyone hates, which is propped up solely by fear and intimidation.
Once that has been mentally dismantled in the minds of enough people, and once the crowd sees more and more of their number chiselling away at it, we might all realise that the wall of woke can be easily toppled.
All it takes is one big push.
Nick Dixon is Deputy Editor of the Daily Sceptic. You can follow him on Twitter and Substack.
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The wall of covid has been broken. Anecdotally, a mask wearer, when recently told that masks are pointless, supinely accepted it.
Vaccines come next and many more are questioning their judgement, particularly as, tragically, cancer appears to be striking down ever more of the elderly vaccinated.
Woke, net zero, will, eventually, go the same way.
But the damage has been done and must be remedied at law.
Even COVID remains paradoxical. Locally, the general store has finally taken down its perspecy barriers, and the dentist’s waiting room is open again. The church has forgotten to keep all the windows open during services. Yet friends keep cancelling meet-ups because they’ve been “exposed to COVID” and don’t want to spread it.
Same here – plenty of people still doing the 10 day quarantine thing when they get the sniffles. Was at an outdoor event the other day, fresh and gusty wind blowing, everyone in appropriate winter gear, when I heard a voice commenting on how we weren’t being ‘covid compliant’. I thought they were joking but no, it was meant seriously. Gobsmacking.
Was discussing this with my woke sixth form daughter.
She could not grasp the concept that a ‘genuinely’ trans rapist is indistinguishable from a man pretending to be a woman to secure a cushier life in jail.
The youth really have been brainwashed, through fear of social opprobrium, to believe that 2+2=5.
Presumably her teachers do not encourage an enquiring mind and sceptical approach but instead seek to reinforce all the leftist clap trap she picks up on the web?
Perhaps ask your daughter what should be done if the incarcerated (non-surgically altered) trans rapist then goes on to rape an incarcerated biological woman – where should s/he/it be incarcerated then? The technicalities of woman on woman rape are distinctly different to trans on woman rape due to the absence, in the former, of specific biological appendages, no? Wonder if Sturgeon considered this ‘little’ problem. Rona Hotchkiss clearly has – and is thus condemned.
We won’t stamp out the Trans issue until we deal with its root cause – decades of increasingly rabid feminism. The history of feminist agendas/results goes something like this:
Equal rights for women –> equal opportunities for women –> equal outcomes for women —> society is a patriarchy –> men knowingly oppress women –> men have mostly poor traits –> masculinity is evil –> women are superior –> masculinity needs to be eradicated –> women are gods –> men should aspire to be like women –> men want to be women –>…. sh*t, what just happened?
Feminists need to take a long, hard, look in the mirror. Of course, they won’t; even though their achievements are staring angrily back at them and kicking out at anything and everything that moves, the victim card still holds too many privileges. While the snake eats its tail, being able to hear how damn fantastic you are is far more important than having to understand what it is you are being forced to watch.
They’ve never wanted equal outcomes for women where the outcomes are bad!
Workplace injuries and deaths, for example: they’re perfectly happy with men doing the dirty, dangerous work, but not with them getting paid extra for it.
I think this is an overly naive viewpoint. There are certainly traditional stereotypes about men which ought to be overcome, eg, men are emotionless sex robots. Especially as these are really a fairly recent invention. Men weren’t so one-dimensional at the beginning of the last century. The Radau-feminists (German word for making lots of loud noises)
are a minority, just a very vocal one.
Equal rights for men –> equal opportunities for men –> equal outcomes for men —> society is a matriarchy –> women knowingly oppress men –> women have mostly poor traits –> femininity is evil –> men are superior –> femininity needs to be eradicated –> men are gods –> women should aspire to be like men –> women want to be men –>…. sh*t, what just happened? Did that fix it?
I’ve noticed a distinct anti-woman type vibe of late in some of the comments on various threads which makes me rather sad. It’s dressed up as ‘anti-feminist’ but is it feeding from the same trough as the wokerati TERF-labelling anti-feminism in which simply being a biological woman with XX chromosomes these days seems to be a legitimate target for derision and hatred, I wonder?
Back in the day (probably about 40-50 years ago now), ‘feminism’ as I understood it was simply recognition of equal pay for equal work; nothing particularly contentious about that in this day and age, I would have thought. Biological difference, was understood as a given: I don’t remember there ever being a demand for masculinity to be ‘eradicated’ and I’m pretty familiar with some early hard core feminist writing. Patriarchy as a social construct was seen as EQUALLY damaging to both biological sexes when it over-emphasised and weaponised natural divisions of biology, skills and labour. The way biological difference is being manipulated by TPTB is the problem, not that men need to be like women or women like men. While appearing to be the obverse of patriarchy – matriarchy it certainly is not – Woke is yet another way of manipulating difference which is empty of (biological) meaning yet potentially devastating socially. As far as I can tell, the whole ideology of Woke is based on spurious and irrational concepts of sexual preference and identity simply to justify ever more layers of social inequality; I very much doubt that’s what early feminists ever had in mind for society. Woke is being used as a tool of totalitarian divide and control and we – whatever our biology – must resist it with all our might.
Hear hear. You and I clearly subscribe to the same version, the original and fundamental version, of feminism. And that seems to threaten and trigger the resident Misogynist Society very much, so much so that all it comes across as to me is men hating on women. Plain and simple old-fashioned chauvinism is rife and you’re right, it is sad. Sad that men still hold such views about women in this day and age, all the while highlighting their own inferiority complexes.
There’s no denying that the people FreeLemming keeps writing about do exist. An example of that would be the concept of the so-called war on women. This is said to be a global movement which is essentially composed of all men (usually, some bogus qualifiers are added to that to make it less obviously idiotic) who keep perpeprating violent crimes agains all women because they just hate them. I must refuse to belong to this movement.
This also ignores important real-world information about violent crimes: The overwhelming majority of people don’t commit any. Further, they usually obey the law of gravity (so to say). Violent crimes are committed by relatively strong people and the victims are relatively weak people. This means that women are tendencially rather victims than perpetrators but nevertheless, the majority of victims of violent crimes by men are other men. That’s essentially ignored because it doesn’t fit into the narrative.
Apart from your first paragraph, there’s little you say that I disagree with. As I’ve said on countless occasions, the original movement was an honorable one which had every right to exercise change. My point, which my a –> b represents, is the change of that movement over time, and that modern feminism has become something very different to the original cause. Something that has become narcissistic, uncompromising, and incredibly damaging to society. But it is also self-harming. Men don’t want to become women overnight, it’s born from a slow trickle of social propaganda that depicts men as useless, moronic, aggressive, buffoons, and women as deities. Any attempt to raise the alarm about modern feminism is met with insults, which usually revolve around ‘male tears’, ‘male fragility’, ‘male inferiority‘ blah blah blah. It’s an incredibly weak way of trying to shut down a conversation – unfortunately, one that usually works. Anyway, thanks for not treading that tired old path.
I do find it incredible that some can see the cultish propaganda that was Covid, but are blind to it when they are part of a different cult. To pretend there is no problem with societies attitude to men is gaslighting of the highest order. Anti-male rhetoric has been through the roof in the noughties and even the most ardent supporters of feminism must know in their heart of hearts there’s a big problem.
All I want is for men and women to be treated truly equally, and that means addressing men’s issues as well as women’s. What’s wrong with that? I want the war being waged against masculinity to end; not just for the sake of men, but for the sake of women and children too. Society and family has been destroyed by this movement; it’s there in plain sight, but very few women want to look.
As I’ve said before, society needs change, but that will never happen while feminism incites such division. I’m old enough to remember a time when there was balance, when men and women respected each other for their different qualities, and opportunity was on a par – the mid-eighties through to the nineties. What a shame we had such a brief moment in history to enjoy.
I may have missed it in the news, but we don’t see many convicted women claiming to be men so that they can go to men’s prisons.
Sturgeon is a prime example of a postmodernist fantasist politician. She’s possessed by an idée fixe and will destroy everything around her to create her fantasy independent Scotland, even if that makes a country that Scottish people will flee, rather than live in. We see these ‘idées fixes’ throughout the transgender insanity (having extreme plastic surgery allegedly makes you a member of the opposite sex), the COVID-19 imprisonment debacle and obviously the EU’s belief that it’s a viable future state, even as it ruins the great nations of the continent.
Trouble is, all this nonsense stems from postmodernist philosophy. And it infects everything from our politics to our perception of reality (Oprah Winfrey’s ‘Your truth’) to our modern writers and filmmakers who are no longer taught creativity, but rather to take old IPs and ‘deconstruct’ them. Postmodernism is the basis of teaching in schools, it’s the basis of most modern literature and drama and infects how people view everything from a landscape to a painting. It’s destructive. Instead of appreciating a painting for its aesthetic beauty, a postmodernist looks at it from the point of view of what privileges the artist had and what privileges and oppressions its existence represent. I doubt the postmodern viewer even looks at the painting itself.
Trouble is, how does a politician go up on stage and try to explain who Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Andrea Dworkin are/were and why their demented views are controlling our entire intellectual, political and media class? And what philosophers do we look to instead? Aristotle? Plato? Rand? Scruton? Kant?
The general public knows there’s something wrong with our rulers and our academics, but they can’t put their collective finger on the problem, which is bad philosophy. But we aren’t taught philosophy in schools and most teachers have no idea that they’re teaching postmodern philosophy, so the public lacks the one tool it needs to fight back against our deranged rulers.
How I hope this awful woman is driven out of office, along with Jacinda Adhern.
Then it just needs Trudeau … and I’ll be breaking out the English Shampagne.
If Sturgeon falls the Scots will just vote for John Halibut instead. Before that it was Alex Salmond. (Something fishy going on here right?)—– But the trouble is that the Scots would vote for a chair as long as it isn’t Tory or English
As with Covid, we should be asking on whose orders worthless shysters like Sturgeon are acting. I don’t believe the anti-human campaign known as ‘woke’ is an organic phenomenon, I think it’s being pushed by people who would rather see the proletariat arguing about superficial bullshit than asking questions about where their money and political agency has gone.
There was this idea that little men would fight and battle and argue harder than big men. It was called “Little Man Syndrome”. Sturgeon has “Little Politician Syndrome”.