2020 roundup
Per my usual custom I'll do a roundup of last year and will provide some predictions for the future.
January
On 2nd January last year I wrote, "New Year, New Fear(s)," in which I talked about the increased polarisation of our society. While I saw many people in my usual online haunts decrying this, I saw nothing done to bridge the gaps.
...we've become increasingly isolated from each other, preferring the company of those who agree with us and becoming more hostile to those who do not. I expect this to get worse.
Sadly, I turned out to be more correct than I realised.
I talked about which of my predictions were true and which were not; I still can't get over the fact that jingoism won over common sense and we got stuck with a bare-bones deal with the EU that meets all of Tessa's red lines but leaves food rotting at ports and parcels more expensive to send and receive. But hey, blue passports, innit? Needless to say, it's Merkel's fault, not Rees-Mogg's.
I talked about my great new job that lasted till February when my boss made me structurally redundant by changing my duties to basically sorting out the electronic filing and I ran out of work.
I said "Trump will be cleared and Warren will be the next president since the allegations against Joe Biden's son will cost him any chance he has of winning the election."
Wrong. Biden took office five days ago.
I said "Boris will tie us more closely to the US and to Donald Trump, expect the Russia Report to be redacted and to whitewash the Tories."
Correct. It is now normal for nothing to change when a scandal comes to light. Everyone just goes "Meh!" and goes back to sleep.
I said "Expect a softer Brexit than anticipated... Boris will continue to push a narrative in which the EU is dictating UK policy while they try to maintain order while Scotland screams for independence and Northern Ireland moves closer to reunification with the Republic of Ireland.
Correct. The bare-bones deal we have is softer but still has a lot of issues. Meanwhile calls for Scottish independence are all over my Twitter timeline and the Republic of Ireland is offering Erasmus to Northern Irish citizens. Winning hearts and minds like this makes reunification inevitable.
I said Irish border checks would pose a problem unless an agreement could be reached, and that this would make reunification much more likely.
Correct. The unionists are doing their collective nut and there's a border in the Irish Sea.
I said "The push to expand copyright duration was running out of steam but to expect the EU's Copyright Directive to cause problems for us as people find they can't post as easily as before. As usual, people will find ways around it but they may have to backtrack."
Wrong. Nothing has changed.
I said ".. expect the worldwide right wing coup to claim a few more scalps."
Correct: Jeremy Corbyn resigned his position as party leader and was succeeded by Sir Keir Starmer on 4th April 2020.
Later on that month I asked, "When Can We Discuss Reputation Following A Tragedy?" It's complicated. People grieving family members don't want to think about the Nasty Things He Did, they want to get him in the ground without feeling obliged to spit on his grave. I followed it up with "Rape Culture: When Do We Let Bygones Be Bygones?" because there was still some marrow left in that bone. Whether we're willing to accept this or not there's a burden on women and girls who have been victimised by men, especially when they're powerful men, to shut up and put up with it for the common good. And, apparently, for their own. But how does one go about doing this? I shared my own experiences of getting over painful abuse situations. I'm still getting over them, it never really ends. People need to understand that before they start preaching at people.
February
I just had the one post in February, "Trump Likely To Be Acquitted. Now What?" I predicted that he would be acquitted and that he would get even worse while his base continued to worship him and damn, I was right. He provoked his followers into attempting a coup on 6th January this year by claiming the election was stolen and that Trump had actually won. They actually got into the Capitol and rampaged around until order was restored. While Trump has now lost much of the support he had formerly enjoyed in his party, he still has die-hard fans who will not accept the results of November's election.
March
I had just two posts in March, "Why Can't Right Wing Conservatives Handle The Truth?" and "Coronavirus: Stay At Home V "Herd Immunity." The common thread in both of those is that when the truth is inconvenient some people just ignore it, with horrible consequences. In my utter naivety I had no idea that the exact same thing was also happening on the left, and that it is so common. To be honest I don't want to believe that so many people are so bloody stupid. There, I said it.
April
This month saw me going back to my blogging roots at a time when I was feeling more optimistic. I'd been looking for paid writing gigs and both the search and the experience provided blogging fodder. "Can You Work Remotely Using Your Own PC?" saw my search for paid work online after I was furloughed from my Building Manager job laid bare; if your PC is not pretty new, you're screwed. Also, the companies that offer paid work don't actually pay much. Gig writing jobs require you to be either very niche or very popular. "Copywriters Need Copy" saw me tackle gig writing jobs where I've got sod all information about the product yet I'm still required to wax lyrical about it. I got the job after all but with little in the way of content, I didn't get much for it. As promised, I followed up with a piece about effective link-building, "Link Building - Effective, Authentic SEO." The actual gig was to write a piece for a technical online magazine while including specific links to the client's website. The point of my post is basically how to replicate my success: everything has to be relevant, not an attempt at gaming the system. That might well float your website to the top of the search results but good luck getting engagement from paying customers. Make it relevant to them and their demands and needs.
May
This was my most prolific month with four posts, all of which were political. RE: the TERF wars posts, I always thought a) each one would be my last one on the subject and b) surely to goodness people would start seeing there's a problem with gender identity ideology. None of that was true in the end, nor will it be till people wake up. In "US-UK Trade Agreement: Public Interest Groups Fear Corporate Influence Over Negotiations" I wrote about how corporate influence dominates trade agreement negotiations and that people were pushing back against threats to our NHS as we know it. In "TERF Wars: How The Battle For Validation Threatens Womens' Rights" I wrote about how hard it is for me to accept men who claim to be women as being actual women due to the fact that they are male. I believe that this is the post that turned the tech bros against me because, since then, they've been complaining about my views. They said nothing until it came to a head the following month. What I've learned since then is that there's no middle ground with woke folk, you're either all in or you're out. My most popular post of 2020, "How The Left Lets Us Down: TERF Wars And Class War," saw me recognise how the Left has almost completely abandoned women in favour of a tiny group that doesn't translate into votes. What being all woke and stuff actually does is give them the opportunity to parade their woke credentials without actually doing anything useful. It's all about tokenism, and trans folk are the tokens. As the Covid-19 crisis raged, I was shocked to discover that local authorities were losing confidence in the Government and were now doing their own thing. This is the kind of thing that usually brings down governments but 2020 was gonna 2020. It was the year the world turned upside down. On a personal level, I started working for a call centre company subcontracting to Public Health England as a contact tracer to keep a roof over my head. They didn't want me to talk about it online and I honoured their request. The nay-sayers slagging off the contact tracing were half right: yes there was sod all to do but that was down to PHE not getting the information in to pass on to us. I received training in safeguarding as domestic violence incidents skyrocketed.
June
This was the month when In "TERF Wars: The Quest For Peace" I discussed (with permission from Danielle) the chat I'd had with the mother of a trans teen. It was a most illuminating discussion in which I learned about the struggles she was going through as a GC woman with a son who wants to be her daughter. Set against the usual discussions I have with people on the other side of the trans issue her heartfelt honesty and willing to engage in good faith won me over to her point of view while the others were just too paranoid. Their accounts are now gone. In "TERF Wars: The Balance Of Power" I pointed out that men hold the balance of power in the TERF wars and that little, if any of the money being spent to advance trans issues goes on the services they need, i.e. housing and job provision. It's mostly going on telling women to budge over and if they don't, they're bigots.
July
This was when I realised that the tech bros I had known for years and believed had some respect for me were actually big mad misogynists who think of women as support animals for men they have rejected as male. They've known and followed me for years but even though they're aware that:-
- I don't hate anyone
- I don't believe it's okay to discriminate against anyone
- I am friendly with those transwomen who are willing to be friendly with me
- I've stood up for transwomen against those actual TERFs who hate them on principle
- Most transwomen don't go the whole hog, i.e. they keep their hog
- "Trans" includes cross-dressers
- Dysphoria is not required to claim trans identity
- The modern movement is basically an assault on women's sex-based rights to spaces, designations, honours, and places that don't include men
- The modern movement's adherents harass lesbians to force them to accept male people in their dating pools
- "Genital preferences are transphobic"
- No changes to one's body, appearance, or even dress are required to claim trans identity, i.e. bearded men who present as normal men can claim trans identity and we're obliged to accept this
they all believe I'm utter scum and tell each other that I'm a cruel bigot who picks on a marginalised group (which consists of mostly well-off white men who like messed-up nasty porn). Himself still follows me, as does t'other one, but the woke chaps are having none of it. All the political ones hate me. I just wish they'd told me that they hate women years ago, it would have saved a lot of wasted time in which I thought and believed otherwise. I'm heartbroken, but if they think that this will somehow turn me into a self-negating doormat with pronouns in her bio they can forget it. I've changed my nym on Twitter and have thrown my lot more firmly in with the GC crowd. This did more to convince me than anything else ever did that the modern trans rights movement is a men's rights movement that sees women's spaces as a dumping ground for men who fail at manhood because they don't want "society" to be contaminated by association with such people. I wish I was joking, but I'm not. The tweets I've linked are so utterly, madly homophobic (although he claims he's gay), so cartoonishly horrible, I'll embed the most egregious one so you can see what the problem is because I can't believe that anyone would tweet this in earnest:
Being a girl is not a consolation prize for girls. However, a social fiction in which a boy is designated a "girl" might well be a prize for a boy like Sam, who is persistently & severely effeminate. This social fiction would benefit Sam & shield normal boys from his problem.
— James Crawford (@DrJCrawford) January 22, 2021
It's "bros before hos" to benefit them and shield "normal" boys from their problem (being effeminate). I must thank Dr. Crawford for filling in the missing piece; he has outlined why men I've known for years think I'm scum: because I won't accept effeminate men off them as my own burden to bear. No. Effeminacy in men is not a problem to be fly-tipped onto women. You'd think that people who are all about free speech would have laid down some counter-speech to show me the error of my ways — or at least show our audiences what the problem was, but no, they quietly decided that I am a bigot without giving me any right of reply. I'm supposed to "just know" that my views are problematic. I know why; if they had to defend their own views they wouldn't have a leg to stand on. So much for free speech. I can't take any of them seriously on the subject any more. In "Free Speech: The Discussions We Can Never Have" I expanded on the themes of cancel culture and the denial of the atroturfing driving the current gender identity ideology into every area of public life in "Free Speech: Causes, Consequences, And The Mob." Himself and his cronies are currently denying that cancel culture is a thing; apparently it's the community showing us the door. How the community came to that conclusion is not up for discussion as they don't seem to have the wherewithal to eviscerate my TERF beliefs with facts and logic, which is easy to do when you're actually right. Finally, my logical positivism took over when I started looking for solutions, which to me means finding ways of building bridges to break up the echo chambers. If I could just find people to hold the debates with... not gonna happen. This was also the month I offered my sword emailing and letter writing services to Baroness Nicholson for political campaigning purposes. Oh, and my stepmother died. The funeral was small but dignified with all attendees wearing masks.
August
This month saw three more political posts on cancel culture: 'Cancel Culture: How "Free Speech" Chilled Public Discourse' explained how the people who used to bang on about free speech ended up abandoning their principles in the name of principles. Getting anyone to discuss this who doesn't agree with me is impossible given that wokeness demands complete, unquestioning obedience and Himself has gone all the way down the rabbit hole. When he finds his way out I suppose we'll be able to discuss it then. In "TERF Wars: May The Feelz Be With You" I took a look at the underlying trends in the gender wars and came to the conclusion that it's all based on putting feelz in front of facts, and that pushing for an evidence-based approach to All The Things is the way forward. My last post of the month, "How Politics Affects Your Reputation" warned about the way politics affects the way we see things, people, and events. I hadn't been keeping up with the stories of Glenn Greenwald's fall from grace in woke circles. It seems he's now a mad misogynist who thinks "Boys will be boys" when it comes to revenge porn by Democrat contenders for office. Anyhoo, I accepted his version of the story of a Dem politician running for office who was Very Sorry for cyberbullying his victim and attempting to move on till Himself rebuked me for now knowing the whole story. Like, how could I, having only Greenwald's word for what had happened? After a crusty back-and-forth (and some research since the judgemental prats I was dealing with hadn't bothered to fill me in) I discovered that young Coleman should not be anywhere near power and ended up agreeing with them. Politics had affected Coleman's reputation, but the way I'm perceived by Himself had affected mine, at least in tech circles. Talk about the chilling effect!
September
This is the month I got my activist mojo back, emailing the Powers That Be as part of a group to stem the tide of wokeness taking over public life. I'm delighted to say we were successful in our criticism and pushback, which is apparently not those things when we do them. This month saw my job become more interesting as I switched from initial contact with people diagnosed with Covid-19 to following up with them to finding out how they were getting along. I got a lot of novel-writing done, and moved my characters from what's basically the French Alps down into what's basically northern Italy. They're currently in a ship heading to what's basically Constantinople. The idea is that the fictional countries I've created are authentic and recognizable. The three blog posts I wrote that month were firmly fixed on trans issues: "Why Do Safeguarding And Oversight Fall Apart When The Trans Card Is Played?" challenged the notion that this is a civil rights issue; there is no right to ignore safeguarding. It also took down a scammer riding the TWAW train. In "Shaping The Narrative: How Astroturfing Warps People's Perceptions" I argued that astoturfing is responsible for the sudden shift in social attitudes that now puts trans issues front and centre, to the exclusion of all other considerations. The people you'd expect to be asking why the hell this is happening have bought into it. My guess is that while much of it is cultural the rest is artificially inflated. If you're easily led you'll buy into it. If you're not, you'll ask questions. Finally, I wrote an Open Letter To The Tory Party to ask them not to allow themselves to be swayed by the sophistry of the lobbyists on trans issues. We need a party that stands with women. Much as I loathe to admit it, they're the only one that does.
October
My last post of the year took a humourous look at the victory we won over the trans lobbyists: the GRA expansion was taken to the woodshed and Mermaids et al's teaching materials was banned from schools. Since then Stonewall has tried to sneak the "born in the wrong body" narrative back into schools cunningly disguised as a Champion Awards scheme but we found out and wrote to all of the Education Commissioners, head teachers, councillors — you name it, we hit it — to point out that Stonewall were trying to get their discredited materials back into schools. Results coming in indicate that we've beheaded the hydra again. I also switched jobs again and became an assistant property manager for a student accommodation company.
I didn't really bother blogging after that as I'd been going round in circles as it was, Biden seemed a dead cert to win the election, and Brexit is the slo-mo dumpster fire we Remoaners warned it would be. The good news is the vaccine is being rolled out so hopefully I'll get mine soon.
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