I’ve spent the night perusing various radical feminist websites, ranging from the ulta-misandrist ravings of I Blame The Patriarchy to the friend-of-twisty look-a-like to the aptly named Rage Against the Manchine.

My conclusion runs that radical feminism is actually a far more binary obedient movement and ideology than it likes to imagine. This became clear fairly quickly, indeed grew immediately apparent simply from the wariness shown towards male contributions. This was both upon an structural level (comments policies making men feel clearly unwelcome) and upon an ideological one (the endless reference to “male privilege” make it fairly clear that the accounts of men are going to be treated with a scepticism women will not be subjected to).

To their credit the radfems are at least believers in the binary. Indeed Andrew Dworkin described biological essentialism as “the most pernicious ideology on the face of the earth” and it is pleasing to know that the absolute anti-assimilationist elements she recalls encountering in that accounts have mostly faded into historical characters. This does nothing save reinforce the absurdity of the present approach towards gender reconstruction by Dworkin’s ideological inheritors, who seem to have taken her urging to “Fuck up” the Patriarchy by gathering in small, thoroughly sealed groups of like minded ranters, who remind themselves constantly, incessantly, of the divisions within society that they can outline with immense eloquence but seem to wish to identify and emphasise more than they do to move beyond, transcend or obliterate.

In short, embittered cliques are established, then fiercely sustained.

The radical credentials for this are highly limited: the notion that the best fashion in which to attack the binary is assembling into websites which are written by women and commented upon by women is surely both utterly disingenuous and entirely self-defeating. To attempt to destroy a set of prejudices (indeed, a set of concepts, or even identities) that by their very nature apply to all of humanity using a single half of it is a bizarre approach, doomed to failure.

Perhaps this leads us to my core difficulty with feminism in the contemporary Anglosphere: it has become virtually impossible to further women’s rights, as is the aim of feminism, without attacking the gender binary. But feminists are largely hesitant to do exactly that, distracted by focusing upon what the successes of their movement have left unaltered instead of noting the vast amount that has changed.

This realisation of progress made since death of the 1950s is at the heart of post-feminism, and brings us onto my next point:

C.G. Brown, in his magnum opus ‘The Death of Christian Britain’, posits that the cause of the demise of the titular religion within this nation was the collapse of the concept of “Pious Women” during the 1960s. Prior to then women were seen as the sole source of active religiosity: men could be saved, but only once sufficiently strong-armed by the earnest females filling their lives (be it wives or mothers). Christianity could not recover as there was only a conception of female piety, as “Boys would be boys” and men would inevitably run awry unless carefully instructed and trained. Men were depraved creatures incapable of controlling themselves and it was only through the positive influence of femininity that salvation could be brought to the coarser sex.

Now this concept had a shadow side: men as corruptive, women as pure beings that men could degrade. A large amount of the concepts of seduction, deflowerment and general robbery of innocence seem to be tied tightly to this.

It is here that the rhetoric of radical feminism strikes the most noticable harmony: women are beings which the creation of pornography tears down from some imagined state of purity and defiles, argue the radical feminists. There are deeds that can not be done without besmirching the actor, and pornography insists upon their performance, by women. However, is it possible to miss the assonances with the other side of this ideal? Think of the attitude feminism takes towards the supply side of pornographic matter. Through feminism the otherwise helpless, base men may be rescued from their own masculinity. Rescued, that is, by pious women.

Men alone are incapable of recognising their foulness. They must be shown. Men involved in the production are demonised, in the acting conspicuously disregarded.

The women engaged in pornography are flecks of foam upon the ocean, pure and borne aloft, swept along by grand cultural forces, then thoroughly befouled.

Had they not kept their movement so purged of penises (men are at best “allies” that could well be fradulent and merely adopting the mantle of “feminist” falsely, to gain advantage and unearned trust, to avoid confrontation) or had they not engaged with the women who choose to participate in the sex industry in a fashion so starkly devoid of any acceptable of female autonomy (and I speak here as a determinist) in a way that makes it clear that they simply wish to avoid thinking of women opting to participate in the process at all except as a facet of the Patriarchy’s endlessly insiduous influence, had they not held an equally damaged and lacking view of the men involved that sees them as otherwise helpless masturbators that only feminism can save, or their utter indifference to the implications for the men involved within the process then perhaps the similarity not be so striking.

As it is, one has to wonder whether the fixation radical feminism holds for pornography (note that RATManchine has made no less than nine essays on the matter, each of considerable length, and shows no sign of ceasing to churn) is truly based upon their wrath at women performing sex acts while observed by cameras on an entirely upon their disdain for the Patriarchy or whether it is more closely tied to long standing expectations of appropriate womanly conduct.

Not that this argument is anything new, this one has been raging for a very long time. But, as far as I am concerned, the irony lacing the prospect of women imagining themselves to be the fiercest critics of Patriarchal structures while in fact behaving as inadvertant, unaware throw-backs to the time when the Patriarchy still existed remains quite delightful.

The following proposal is vile:

THE Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain routinely to hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant.

The move, which follows a decision by the European Union’s council of ministers in Brussels, has angered civil liberties groups and opposition MPs. They described it as a sinister extension of the surveillance state which drives “a coach and horses” through privacy laws.

The hacking is known as “remote searching”. It allows police or MI5 officers who may be hundreds of miles away to examine covertly the hard drive of someone’s PC at his home, office or hotel room.

Material gathered in this way includes the content of all e-mails, web-browsing habits and instant messaging.

Under the Brussels edict, police across the EU have been given the green light to expand the implementation of a rarely used power involving warrantless intrusive surveillance of private property. The strategy will allow French, German and other EU forces to ask British officers to hack into someone’s UK computer and pass over any material gleaned.

That’s the equivalent of allowing a policeman into every living room to listen to every conversation, without a warrant. The vagueness of the legislation simply invites abuse. Police may indulge in this espionage if they “believe” it’s “proportionate”; that is, whenever they feel like it. There is no check on this power, and so no check on its abuse.

And the idea comes from the EU Council of Ministers - which means, if previous experience is anything to go by, it’ll be quite hard to shift. Are they really trying to put the entire internet off the entire institution?

Briefly; this won’t work. Deploying a mechanised block designed solely for slaughter in a neighbourhood alienates everyone in the neighbourhood. Even if you have a specific target, it looks as though you threaten everyone, because it’s so loud and intimidating.

Most Gazans will thus perceive themselves as under threat. They will turn to those who offer to protect them; here, Hamas.

Hamas will then have yet more fleshy fodder to throw into a vicious ground war with the IDF. This will be particularly bloody, given the degree to which Gaza resembles a warren designed for guerilla fighting. A long and ugly struggle will follow.

This could end in a very few ways. The ground war could go on and on and on and be reduced to a a stagnant quagmire. The IDF could slaughter so many Gazans that any will to resist is sapped and the strip is annexed; violence inevitably follows from the West Bank. Or the IDF could suffer a setback, withdraw, and the old stand-off could resume.

None of these will help anyone involved.

There’ll always be yet another far-left group to laugh at.

Check out the fraternal criteria for MonkeySmashHeaven, a website pointed my way by a “Libertarian Socialist” yesterday during a Gaza Protest (which I will write up later today). I assure MSH that any snideness in what follows is simply a consequence of embitterment at us clearly not being fit for fraternity.

This bunch seem to be intent upon agitating the international proletariat, by which they mean “Third Worlders”. Their take on the American working class poor can be found here. Their “Gender Line” is here and here. In the last document they do at least admit that “We need to be more skilled at projecting our voice to the international proletariat.”

How exactly they managed to avoid the realisation that projecting to the third world poor via a weblog might not have been the best of ideas, though, is beyond SES.

Why does anyone think that bombing someone will make their neighbours better disposed to them?

Israel ought to understand this. Its civilians in Sderot have their lives made a misery by rocket fire from Hamas. They’re scared and can’t live secure lives - so demand action. Understandably.

And yet the Israeli government doesn’t seem to expect Gazans to behave in the same way. But, of course, they do; they too are scared and threatened by the bombs, and have very likely seen someone killed or injured by them. They see that Israeli planes dropped the bombs, and so blame Israel - in the same way that citizens of Sderot blame Hamas for the rockets. Someone who’s forced to cower from the bomb that fell down the road must find it very hard not to take that as an attack on them, whoever the target was.

These Gazans become understandably angry at Israel. They demand action to stop the bombs, and move towards actively resisting Israel. Some, inevitably, will be drawn to the group whose rhetoric most aggressively assaults Israel; Hamas.

So every bomb that falls acts as a recruiting beacon for Hamas. It doesn’t matter that the Israeli military hopes to decapitate Hamas. For every bomb that kills a member of Hamas, yet more join because of that bomb.

People on both sides of the border suffer the same emotions when an angry man in a uniform hurls several tons of high explosive with the intent to kill them. They don’t like it, and want it to stop. Why does doing the same back seem like a good idea, then? Those caught up in the retaliation will feel exactly the same way - because they don’t want to die, and they don’t want their families and friends to die either.

I genuinely don’t understand how that could be missed. The premise that “I am human, they are human, therefore they’re as unlikely to enjoy watching their aunt bleeding to death by a roadside as I” is simple. Either that those firing the explosives either don’t think of the others as fully human, haven’t thought at all, or actively want the slaughter on both sides to continue.

Unfortunately, I suspect all three are true to varying degrees for various groups…

A key argument of apologists for the slaughter in Gaza is that Hamas are a collection of armed thugs (they are) who force themselves on the Gazan people.

They acknowledge that the Gazans have little or no control over Hamas. How can unarmed civilians and children overthrow men with machine guns and rockets?

They then defend dropping high-explosive on those unarmed civilians on the grounds that Hamas hides itself amongst them. The civilians can’t control Hamas, yet suffer in their hundreds from the retaliation.

Large explosions kill indiscriminately. The Israeli military know this, and so know civilians will be killed. Because the Hamas gunmen live amongst the civilians.

They do not know how many, if any, members of Hamas will be killed by each bomb. They do know civilians will die.

How can that be justified without resort to the denial of an oppressed Palestinian’s basic humanity? They did not choose for a Hamas gunman to live across the gutter from them, yet they die because of it.

How can you justify that?

In a fashion which was probably highly unwise I actually went to the effort of trawling through and critically analyising this comment brawl.

Now to be fair their was intellectual shakiness on each side and neither seemed to display the level of self-awareness I think you need to adopt when approaching this endlessly turned-over and incessantly debate. But the Zionists struck me as especially incapable of rational coherency.

A good deal of this stems from their inability to put all their cards behind utilitarianism. Indeed, any such case is effectively impossible to stage without plunging into the worse of Millian excesses and declaring that the uneducated barbarians of the Gaza Strip are worth less in pleasure than the high minded Levanites who bombard them. Even Zionism hasn’t got anyone mad enough to argue that. It is fairly blatant that it is the IDF which is causing the overwhelming majority of suffering and death (250 to 1 says it all, really) and so they are left with either talking about the relatively uncommon event of a missle caused fatality (which risks emphasising the ease of focus since amount of deaths from this imprecise method of fire as compared to air strikes is so much smaller that the scale is a personal instead of mass one).

That’s fairly clearly never going to work since if it’s an anecdote war the Palestinians are, for once, heavily outgunning their oppressors. So the second approach is perhaps their strongest: that of legitimacy. Endlessly distinctions will be drawn between the stateless terrorists and the state actors of the relative sides. Somehow efforts to “sap” the Palestinian resolve do not constitute “terrorism”. Military efforts to achieve political ends via militant force are distinguishable from those perpetuated by the true terrorists since the organisation of Hamas is one which is anti-semitic and genocidal, while the IDF is merely an army and must be considered a protective tool rather than an aggressive organisation.

Of course this rather makes things problematic for those who advocate Two State Solutions seeing as Hamas would be in power if the Palestinian state was a democracy (indeed, even if it was not they would probably defeat Fatah military, as they have done previously) and therefore the creation of a separate Palestinian state would simply be the creation of a Palestinian Defence Force with equivalant legitimacy to the Israli version. Which is why that is unlikely ever to occur.

But this is made especially awkward given that Israel’s firmest backers are American. The irony here is quite overwhelming. Here poster LFC invites us to:

Imagine a fully armed and organized 100,000 man army under Hamas. Do you think this is “better” than what Israel faces now?

I’m not sure about “better”, LFC, but that sounds like the sort of force that could wage a War of Independence.

However to be fair to the pro-Israelites the second strand of their argument can not be understood fully without their third: that each side has different motivations and therefore we must treat the actual consequences of their actions as substantially distinct bodies. The outcomes of Israeli policy and of Palestinian can not be compared directly and the context of the intent of the actors is of the highest importance.

In other words its a fairly twisted piece of deontology, which suggests that somehow the IDF is free from cause & effect while Hamas is not. Hamas must be held responsible for their (occasional) killing of civilians while the IDF are entirely at liberty to arrange raids where they know civilian death will occur. The amount of agony caused is an irrelevance so long as it is accidental. Inept execution of intent to kill is worth ending unconnected human life over.

How exactly this fails to distort entirely the meaningfulness of death and the value of a sentient being is utterly beyond me.

Furthermore this also often leads to the unfortunate that the Israelis no less than a blog commenteer in favour of their behaviour:

Palestinian suicide bombers directly targeted civilians. The IDF tries to kill military who unfortunately hide within civilians. Hamas tried to goad the IDF into responding in the hopes that civilians would be killed. The IDF responded and were in the propaganda cycle now.

So are we to understand that the IDF and its masters were all somehow unaware that assailing the Palestinians would bolster support for the Palestinians? That this would thus exacerbate the crisis and assure further footsoldiers for the Gaza Strip? Or are they simply unaware of the fact that massive loss of innocent life is occuring?

(That is the only argument I could feasibly accept for this: ignorance. Unfortunately…)

Strand four is the simplest: as we can not tell who has been killed and belongs to Hamas and who has been killed and does not it is assumed that the IDF was successful in its discriminate use of such an indiscriminate weapon as large amounts of high explosive delivered from a great height.

Not, I think we can agree, the safest of assumptions. But it seems that a large amount of weight rests upon it given the quantity of occasions that this action is couched in the terms of smashing Hamas instead of massive scale bombing killing everyone in the area struck, as bombs truly do tend to.

Naturally when this is accepted at all the standard line is to blame Hamas for their “perfidy”. What I am interested in is how a civilian based battle force could do anything but surround themselves with other civilians. They are not a distinguished military force in the official sense and it would be making themselves fairly obvious to present themselves in so blatant a way as purchasing distinct property. Now I am not going to act apologist for this bunch of low-life theocrats but I do wonder if distinguishing themselves physicially from their cover isn’t expecting a little too much of these asymmetric warriors.

And it is hardly as if Israel is unaware of this practice. Nor is it the case that the Palestinian population is filled with members of Hamas. Voters? Unquestionably, due to their hard-line on the people starving and pumping excrement towards the Palestinians, they have massive electoral support. But the Labour Party has far more voters than members, as does any other British Party.

Which leads us, inexorably, back to an earlier point: either it is acceptable to “punish” Palestinians for their views over who should run their country, to cow them into backing someone less hostile to Israel, to back state terrorism which sees these individuals as a collective to be battered and converted via attrition, or else hundreds of innocents are dying in an accident everyone is capable of predicting and continuing to .

And even this is politely disregarding the children of Palestine, as the ardent & partisan Zionists would doubtless have us do, who will remain forever unaffiliated.

For the most part the row triggered by talking about this issue isn’t worth the row, but with over 200 dead I am prepared to make a seasonal exception. This scale of killing is absurdly disproportionate. If Israel imagines that it can kill of the widespread support for Hamas (a democratically elected body) in this fashion they have failed to learn from the distinct absence of success when they adopted much the same strategy over the past decade.

If you want a shot of despair then try reading this.

My choice quotes:

Even if the end figure of deaths has more naughts at the end, I am still in support of Israel’s response.

And:

Hamas had it coming. They are completely to blame.

Well let us hope that only Hamas were killed in these effectively indscriminate killings over 200+…

…please leave the internet alone:

Film-style age ratings could be applied to websites to protect children from harmful and offensive material, Culture Secretary Andy Burnham has said.

They won’t work. Cinema age-ratings work only because cinemas sit employees outside the entrance to check whether those going into a film look old enough. Video age-ratings work sometimes because shop-staff can refuse sale to those who look too young, and sometimes because parents can decide whether or not a child should watch it.

Neither of these can be said of the internet. To enforce website age-ratings, you would either need to sit a particularly patient policeman in front of every computer, ready to pull the plug at first sight of “naughtiness” or simply institute a blanket filter of certain material nation-wide; because, of course, the internet can’t judge the age of those using it.

The former of these options is simply undesirable. Who wants a state-employed busybody sitting in their living room - and who’d be willing to pay for one to sit in every living room? The latter, though, is just as bad. A blanket filter would affect not just children, but adults who have every right to decide what they should read.

So, Mr. Burnham, when you say:

“It’s not about banning or stopping people having that freedom of expression. It’s simply about clearer signposting, more information, so people know where they’re working.”

You are, of course, lying. Any possible attempt to enforce your ratings would require intervention into the lives and choices of every dweller or user of the internet. This is, in itself, an assault on the user’s freedom of expression; control over what you read or watch matters as much as control over what you say. The liberty to do both springs from the same idea that rational individuals have a right to their own minds, and this would clearly impact their ability to use those minds.

Moreover, to set yourself up as the supervisor of the internet further sets you up as moral supervisor to the entire nation. You decide what’s suitable for whom, and at what age individuals are to be judged mature; the clear implication being that they can’t decide this for themselves, and need protection in the meantime. An assault on their independence, at the very least.

Burnham, you’re not my mother. I already have one of those. She’s considerably less controlling than you have apparent aspirations to be, and I love her a great deal more for it. Perhaps you ought to learn from this…

(Hat-tip, as I just hadn’t read the news very well today: Jennie)

Annoyingly his comments on homosexuality have allowed Benedict’s main thrust here to be disregarded. I know that the implications for gays are significant and doubtless some of the thinner skinned might find his words offensive, but it’s hardly the main jist. This follows a long-standing and much noted upon pattern: the Pope says something foolish which has implications for near enough everyone and only the elements related to a minority are picked up upon.

This is why you see gay Catholics as somehow seen as having some additional burden which heterosexuals are free from. In reality the straight Romans are permitted only the outlet of sex within a marriage where they intend to procreate, with everyone who spills a drop of sperm outside of those precise conditions a sinner. This should make it fairly obvious to all but the clinically naive that Catholicism is incompatible with virtually all strains of sexuality. Homosexuals who live other than chaste existences are only as defiant as their legion brethren who have disregarded the absurdly restrictive laws applied to them to.

So now Benedict assails gender theory (next up: mind) and much the same occurs: an edict which applies to the totality of humanity is presented as something which is worth discussing only with regards to humanity. This is clearly a foolish approach. When Benedict speaks of a matter such as this he speaks of everyone, there can be nobody excluded.

What makes it so frustrating that this was that his reason is so shoddy. Indeed he states “The Church speaks of human nature as ‘man’ or ‘woman’ and asks that this order is respected” without so much as a jot of evidence. Apparently the importance of this dichotomy and its inherency can be deduced by “Listening to the language creation”, although Ratzinger fails to elaborate, instead declaring that disregarding this mysterious linguistical muttering would mean “self-destruction”.

But on one thing, at least, we can agree:

The human being wants to make himself on his own and to decide always and exclusively by himself about what concerns him.

Precisely. And so, to content them, we should not assume their nature through minor physiological details.