ajogle

Artist. Maker. Teacher. Woman (Adult human female).

[HYWEL ROBERTS😀🦈 @HYWEL_ROBERTS]

This so sad. What an inspiration. #RIPBenjamin

[Journal of Art in Society @artinsociety]

Sarah Bernhardt, or “The Divine Sarah”, was probably the most famous French actress of the 19th century, and was also a talented sculptor, exhibiting at the Paris Salon and other major exhibitions ~ here, at R, After the Tempest / and Death of Ophelia

[ajogle @ajogle]

@Glinner Thank you for holding steadfast to the truth Graham. You peaked my mother with this article! Yay!

[ajogle @ajogle]

@BBCTheOneShow @Joancollinsdbe I once dreamt that I met Joan Collins at a fancy hotel over cocktails. We hit it off and became great pals, making each other laugh and hanging out with each other.
It was such a vivid dream, that to this day I have to remind myself that I don’t actually know her 🤣🤣

[Journal of Art in Society @artinsociety]

Back in the 12th century, French sculptor Gislebertus carved this angel as (s)he appears to the three Magi as they dream, & wakes one with the delicate touch of a finger (Cathedral of St Lazare at Autun)

[Rowena Dugdale @redrubyrose_]

In progress. Snippets of meadowsweet, indigo, madder, iris root, reed flower and gorse.

[ajogle @ajogle]

One of my favourite quotations ever…

[Wodehouse Tweets @inimitablepgw]

“Very good," I said coldly. "In that case, tinkerty tonk." And I meant it to sting.

[Wodehouse Tweets @inimitablepgw]

“Very good," I said coldly. "In that case, tinkerty tonk." And I meant it to sting.

[Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins]

How can we have a proper debate when we no longer speak the same language?

I was about to start work on this commission, when in came an email from Twitter. They’d received a complaint that the following tweet violated their standards.

“Sex is not the same as gender.” But it’s not your gender that gives you the physique to tower over woman athletes & break their swimming records. It’s your sex. It’s not your undressed gender that upsets women in changing rooms. It’s your sex. You can’t eat your cake & have it.

Twitter sensibly over-ruled the complaint and cleared me of the proscribed sins that they helpfully listed for me:

Violent speech, violent and hateful entities, child sexual exploitation, abuse/harassment, hateful conduct, perpetrators of violent attacks, suicide, sensitive media, illegal, private information, non-consensual nudity, account compromise, plus various legal technicalities.

I’m sure the complainant was sincere. And that’s my point. A certain type of activist has a level of paranoid hypersensitivity that almost literally warps their hearing. You can say ,“I disagree with you for the following reasons.” But all they actually hear is “Hate hate hate!” So instead of putting a counter-argument (which I would be interested to hear), they resort to censorship. All too often it goes further, and they boil over in virulent abuse: “Transphobe! TERF!”

At least the above tweet was partisan. But so hair-trigger is the hypersensitivity, a mere invitation to discuss something is enough to set it off.

In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.

That 2021 tweet caused the American Humanist Association to withdraw my title as 1996 Humanist of the Year. A 25-year retrospective swipe, which cost them the loss of several major donors. Once again, I have no doubt they were sincere.

On July 26, I interviewed Helen Joyce about her book Trans. The interview is being very well received on @YouTube. As it should be, for Joyce is extremely well-informed in her subject and she spoke cogently, soberly, reasonably.

But one of YouTube’s in-house judges heard only hate. And tried to censor the interview.

Short of an outright ban, YouTube has a variety of punishments at its disposal. In this case we got a minor slap on the wrist, a restriction on our video’s licence to advertise. But the real point is, yet again, the ludicrous hypersensitivity of the complainant. Those warped ears heard not reasonable argument deserving a reply, but “hateful and derogatory content”, and “hate or harassment towards individuals or groups”.

Obviously I can’t disprove that here. The interview runs to more than 10,000 words. But judge for yourself, it’s still up on YouTube. I earnestly challenge readers to search diligently for literally anything that a reasonable speaker of the English language could fairly call hateful. Enter it, labelled “Challenge”, in the comments section under the video, and I promise to respond.

I just said “a reasonable speaker of the English language”, and maybe here lies the key: language. If we want a fruitful argument, we’d better speak the same language. In today’s overheated sparring over sex and gender, both sides may appear to be speaking English, but is it the same English? Does “hate” mean to you what “hate” means to everyone else?

Or there’s “violence”. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as “the deliberate exercise of physical force against a person, property, etc”, and that is certainly the meaning I understand. Advocates of free speech often invoke, as a sensible exception, “incitement to violence”, where physical force is normally implied. But that sensible exception would mean something very different if you redefine “violence” to include the non-physical. If someone calls you “she” when you prefer “they”, I might see it as a mild discourtesy. But if you see it as a “violent” threat to your very existence, then our interpretations of “incitement to violence” — and hence of freedom of speech — are going to diverge sharply.

As a textbook example of incitement to real violence, you could hardly do better than “Sarah Jane” Baker’s speech at London Pride this year, where she told the cheering crowd: “If you see a TERF, punch them in the fucking face”. Or Sky News (January 23) has a picture of two SNP politicians grinning in front of a large, colourful sign depicting a guillotine and the slogan “DECAPITATE TERFS”. They claimed they didn’t know the sign was there, and I sympathise. You shouldn’t be blamed for the company you keep. No doubt I shall be labelled “right-wing” for writing this article — and that’s the most unkindest cut of all.

The Guardian (February 14, 2020) reported that police officers turned up at Harry Miller’s workplace to warn him about his allegedly “transphobic” tweets, such as the obviously satirical, “I was assigned Mammal at Birth, but my orientation is Fish. Don’t mis-species me.” One of them told Miller that he had not committed a crime, but his tweeting “was being recorded as a hate incident”.

Well, if Miller’s light-hearted satire is a hate incident, why not go after Monty Python, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Rowan Atkinson, Private Eye’s royal romances of Sylvie Krin, the early novels of Evelyn Waugh, Lady Addle Remembers, Tom Lehrer, even the benign PG Wodehouse? Satire is satire. That’s what satirists do, they get good-natured laughs and perform a valuable service to society.

“Assigned Mammal at Birth” satirises the trans-speak evasion of the biological fact that our sex is determined at conception by an X or a Y sperm. What I didn’t know, and learned from Joyce in our interview, is that small children are being taught, using a series of colourful little books and videos, that their “assigned” sex is just a doctor’s best guess, looking at them when they were born.

A provisional guess, pending the child’s own decision (which is what really counts).

Joyce’s comment is: “And what are you meant to make of this if you’re eight? First off, that you’re very boring if you simply go along with what you were assigned at birth”. Her book quotes the boast of a mother of eight children, “without a single boring cis child in the whole bunch!” I recently received a moving letter from a highly intelligent American 12-year-old, worried that at her school it was not cool to retain your assigned gender. Yesterday I chanced to meet an American teacher whose school rules compel her to go along with a child’s declared gender and not tell the parents.

Miller’s case came up before Mr Justice Knowles, who thankfully didn’t mince words when it came to freedom of speech: “In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society”. 1984’s Appendix lays out the principles of Newspeak, the nascent language of Orwell’s dark dystopia. Newspeak was designed to make unorthodox thoughts impossible. There would be no words to express them.

O’Brien, Big Brother’s enforcer, holds up four fingers, and tortures Winston Smith until he really believes that 2+2= 5 if the Party wills it. Is that realistic? Could political power ever make you really believe a logical contradiction? The Times (January 18) reported that “a transgender woman has denied raping two women with her penis”. If “with her penis” is not quite 2+2= 5, it’s getting close. 2+2= 4.5? Joyce’s book quotes Orwell in an epigraph: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” Are we approaching that point?

But shouldn’t we just indulge the harmless whims of an oppressed minority? Maybe, were it not for a strain of aggressive bossiness which insists, not so very harmlessly and not sounding very oppressed, that the rest of us must humour those whims and join in. This compulsion even has the force of law in some states. And alas, we often zip our lips in abject self-censorship because we aren’t as brave as JK Rowling, and don’t fancy becoming a target of Twittermob vitriol. No, we don’t fear Big Brother or the Stasi. We fear each other.

Originally Posted on Evening Standard

[Journal of Art in Society @artinsociety]

Olga Suvorova takes us back to an earlier time as she creates a fantasy world of colour, flowers, beautiful people, fashion & birdlife, with meticulous attention to detail ~ here, Annunciation
https://t.co/kMKW6JZ0kG

[REDUXX @reduxx]

UK: Reduxx has confirmed that a prominent trans activist known for using the courts to silence critics was previously convicted of sexual assault on a 14-year-old boy.

Stephanie Hayden had a mother arrested in front of her children for "misgendering" him.
https://t.co/DTxN9da43c

[James Hogg @JamesAHogg2]

As we all know, Parky was from Yorkshire, as was David Bowie's dad.

This is a corker 👊

[Frankie Boyle Updates @frankieboyle]

If you didn’t get the A-level results you wanted, remember that we’re only a few years away from the collapse of organised human life

[Helen Day @LBFlyawayhome]

The Little Red Hen, walking back to the farm via Hambledon High Street, Hampshire
😊
Artist: Robert Lumley (1966)

[ajogle @ajogle]

@LBFlyawayhome This was the very first book I read all by myself! I remember being very proud

[Bluebelle @bluebelle993]

@Kt28271548 The legal position is explained here.
https://t.co/AfXJzp4gIT

[GirlScout27 @GirlScout27]

@Kt28271548 Another guide here https://t.co/GZVvQVntSu

[Benny Johnson @bennyjohnson]

WATCH: A “pan-sexual” reporter tries to bait Vivek Ramaswamy at the Iowa State Fair

Instead, he delivers a masterclass on how to instantly turn the tables

Watch his masterful warning against activists grooming children, and their “tyranny of the minority”🔥

[ajogle @ajogle]

@caenhillcc I haven’t seen you on my timeline for ages- happy Sunday and thanks for starting my day off with a a smile!