Month: February 2018

“Some women will shag anything to get anywhere”: Lisa Stansfield on fame, Weinstein and the problem with Jeremy Corbyn

/ Mike Buchanan / 3 Comments

Our thanks to Stu for this piece in the current New Statesman. An extract:

“I’m sorry. But if I was an 18-year-old girl in Hollywood, and nothing was really working out for me, and Mr Harvey Weinstein asked me to come and watch him have a shower, I’d fucking watch him have a shower!” she says. “I’d watch him do anything as long as he didn’t touch me! There’s a lot of women who would do that. When they complain about things like that, they’re trivialising everything that those women who seriously have been abused have been through.”

 

 

Support required to promote the conference – Chelsea FC v Barcelona, Stamford Bridge, tomorrow evening

/ Mike Buchanan / Leave a comment

With only six weeks left before ticket sales for the conference end on 31 March, we want to promote the conference strongly over the period. One way is to promote it outside stadiums on afternoons / evenings when high-attendance Premier League football games are being played, handing out leaflets and displaying our promotional placards. The first match will be Chelsea FC v Barcelona at Stamford Bridge, tomorrow evening. The game starts at 19:45, we’ll aim to meet around 18:00. Please email us ASAP if you can join us (info@j4mb.org.uk), so we can bring along sufficient placards and leaflets, and we’ll agree where to meet. Thanks.

You can book your conference ticket(s) here.

‘Grayfell’, a Wikipedia ‘editor’, removed a link to the ICMI18 website on the Wikipedia page for AVfM just 18 minutes after it was posted

/ Mike Buchanan / 5 Comments

We’ve had very good reasons to expose the hostility of Wikipedia ‘editors’ in relation to men’s issues, men’s rights organisations, and individual MRAs, but this story takes the biscuit. I was pleased to be emailed by a supporter who’d been checking out the Wikipedia page on AVfM, and was pleased to see a line linking to the July conference website, and alerted me to it. I was pleased to hear the news, but here’s the thing. When I checked out the AVfM website, the text was nowhere to be seen. So I checked out the history, and learned the following had been posted at 23:49:

He [Mike Buchanan] announced on his party’s website on 1st December 2017, that a contract had been signed with a new venue in London, for a conference over July 20-22, 2018.

The line was followed by a reference, clicking on which would take readers to the conference website.

At 00:07 – just 18 minutes after the addition had been posted – ‘Grayfell’, a Wikipedia ‘editor’, removed it. His (or her?) justification was as follows:

Find a reliable, independent source, please.

The history of the edit is here. So a website posted by an established political party campaigning on men’s issues, giving details of a forthcoming International Conference on Men’s Issues, is not “reliable”.

Wikipedia’s coverage of gender-related matters is predominantly written, edited, and censored by feminists. 

Craig Richard Coley, 70, wrongly jailed in 1980, gets $2m payout ($140 per day he was in jail)

/ Mike Buchanan / 4 Comments

Our thanks to Martin for this. Extracts (emphases ours):

A man has been awarded almost $2m (£1.4m) after being wrongly imprisoned for murder for almost 40 years.

Craig Richard Coley, 70, was awarded the cash on Thursday (15 February) by the California Victims Compensation Board, which allotted $140 for each of the 13,991 days he spent in prison…

He was jailed for the murders of 24-year-old Rhonda Wicht and her four-year-old son, Donald, who were found dead in her southern Californian apartment on 11 November 1978.

But Coley, who had always maintained his innocence, was pardoned last year, the day before Thanksgiving Day, by Californian Governor Jerry Brown, after advanced DNA evidence cleared his name.

Coley was arrested after Wicht had been found beaten, raped, and strangled. Her son, Donald, had been smothered in his bed. The former military man had recently ended a relationship with Wicht, and detectives made him their prime suspect.

Coley’s first trial in 1979 resulted in a hung jury, but at his second a year later, he was found guilty of the double murder and sentenced to life without parole.

After a series of failed appeals Coley’s supporters turned to a private lab, which used techniques not available at the time of the trial to examine Rhonda’s bed sheet. Tests did not find DNA from Coley, but did find DNA from another unknown man. 

Investigators were also able to disprove testimony from an eyewitness who placed Coley at the scene.

How many innocent men must be languishing in prison – or facing execution, in prisons in the United States and elsewhere – because they don’t have supporters with the money to fund DNA tests, private investigators etc.?

 

 

 

Rod Liddle: Ah, votes! Such a pity to waste them on the idiotic, Labour-loving young.

/ Mike Buchanan / 1 Comment

Three of the five pieces in Rod Liddle’s column in today’s Sunday Times:

Ah, votes! Such a pity to waste them on the idiotic, Labour-loving young.

vaguely remember being 47. A difficult time of life. The hair greys and thins, the gut burgeons, the knees begin to creak and snap and for the first time you can see Death, with his big black wings, hovering in the middle distance. And indeed the hobbled, pain-ridden procession to the place where Death impatiently awaits.

Everything becomes horribly clear at 47. Perhaps that is why it is also the age at which everybody starts voting Conservative. Before the age of 47 you are more likely to vote Labour than Tory; afterwards it’s the other way around. At 47 you at last start to see the world as it really is, rather than as you wish it were.

By the time you’re 70, there’s only a 19% chance you’ll vote Labour. I assume the growing legions of the demented contribute heavily to that total, that minority of the elderly who no longer know their own names, or where they are. Between 18 and 19 there is just a 19% chance you’ll vote Tory. The age of 47 is where the two lines on the graph cross.

The government is edging towards giving votes to 16-year-olds, apparently. The Tory MP Sir Peter Bottomley, who is 168, says it is a case of when, not if. Other Tories who support the proposal include the worst education secretary we have ever had, Justine Greening, and her close runner-up in that prestigious competition, Nicky Morgan. Oh, and former chancellor George Osborne. The defeated remainer legions, then — you are also much more likely to have voted for Brexit if you are over 47. In fact, one columnist suggested we should hold the referendum again because statistically the winning margin will have popped its clogs by now. But the idiot had failed to understand that statistically even more people will now have passed the age of 47 and thus changed their minds.

I can’t see the case for lowering the age of voting. In truth, I’d prefer stricter criteria to be applied. No votes for people working in the public sector, for example — conflict of interest, you see. Especially not teachers. No votes for women called Roz living in Camden, just out of spite. No votes for anyone who has attended a same-sex civil ceremony. No votes for cyclists who wear Lycra.

I have no problem with women voting in general, so long as they are married and abide by their husband’s decision. I suppose some of you might argue that this is just bigotry on my part, and you may have a case. But 16-year-olds? Have Osborne & Co never met any of these idiots? I would rather we repealed the ban on certifiable nutters voting.

If a private member’s bill is introduced to this effect, it might just win. On the upside, it is unlikely that many will actually turn out to vote — the 18 to 19 age range had the lowest attendance figures at the last election. And it would be comparably easy to stop your kids making a stupid decision. Give them the wrong date for the election, set up a false polling booth at the end of the road, leave some high-quality skunk in their bedrooms. That should do it.

I don’t want people voting who are so insulated from the real world, so enveloped in the distorted reality imposed upon them by our education system, too often convinced that what they “feel” is more important than what actually is. People who do not work and do not understand what it is to work.

Very few places allow 16-year-olds to vote, because they know what they’re like. OK, there’s Scotland — but, then, Alex Salmond would have extended the franchise to foetuses if he’d thought that might nudge his now-desolate independence campaign over the line.

And that’s probably the point. Osborne, Bottomley, Greening and Morgan — this is the vestigial tail of remainer bitterness wagging and wagging away. Let’s be truly European about this — 26 of the 27 other EU countries don’t let 16-year-olds vote and in Italy the age of suffrage is 25. Or, better still, let’s raise the age to 47, when one’s perspective is both broader and comprehensively darkened.

Loretta Liddle, tome raider
Exciting times at New Broadcasting House. An email doing the rounds announces: “The new BBC Feminist Network is holding a women’s book swap between 5-7pm today at NBH, 8th Floor Hip Hop room (turn right out of the lifts).”

I wouldn’t have thought anybody needed telling where the BBC’s “Hip Hop room” is — it’s the place David Attenborough and the Dimblebys hang out.

Anyway, I shall be going (I identify as a woman called Loretta) and will be taking my collection of Sven Hassel classics, including Legion of the Damned and Assignment Gestapo — hopefully I can exchange them for some raunchy lesbian stuff.

The tantalising email advertises that cake will be available. Cake which the feminists will hungrily devour and yet, paradoxically, leave intact.

Slugs and snails and the PC mob rails
Asda is in trouble for its T-shirts again. A while back the company was criticised for selling T-shirts that bore the words “Boys Will Be Boys”. A woman complained that this sort of statement could encourage sex attacks. No, not kidding.

The latest T-shirt simply features a mock dictionary definition of the word boy: “Digger of dirt, noise maker, lots of mischief.” Campaigning groups have said this is gender stereotyping, and one mother said the definition could end with boys having mental health problems. Less severe mental health problems as those occasioned by having her as a mother, I suspect, but there we are.

My own T-shirt suggestion is a short slogan: “Boys — we earn more than girls.” That should keep everyone happy.

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