Our thanks to Steve for this.
If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.
I’m starting to devote more time to my neglected hobby of photography, with a view to recording events such as Speakers’ Corner, ICMIs, university presentations, and more. I was about to order a 58mm lens hood for my Canon EOS1100D camera, when it occured to me to check out the small number of related customers’ questions and answers. The idea is that potential buyers of items pose questions before buying, and customers provide advice.
If I were not leading J4MB, I’d be tempted to write a book on these questions and answers. They are a comedy well which never runs dry, to my mind. Both men and women appear equally contradictory, and with some of the answers you suspect people have way too much time on their hands. People will pose questions such as, “Is this item available only in black?”, and get a helpful selection of answers such as:
The customer questions and answers on the 58mm lens hood are here. Dear reader, I ordered that lens cap, a bargain for a metal lens hood at £5.99 – here.
If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.
Last night I had to miss Ewan Jones’s talk in Oxford in order to be in London for RTTV (Russia Today television), discussing the Cambridge university story with a feminist. The discussion lasted for eight or nine minutes, but RTTV have posted less than three minutes of video on their website – here – and won’t provide me with the full video file for posting on our YouTube channel. Suffice to say, I thought Paola Diana was by some distance the sillest feminist I’ve debated with in a studio for years, so you’re probably only missing headache-inducing video footage.
If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.
Our thanks to Frank for spotting this job advertisement in a recent Guardian. The same text is on the charity’s website, here. An extract:
WE ARE COMMITTED TO EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES AND WELCOME APPLICATIONS FROM ALL MEMBERS OF THE COMMUNITY.
This organisation is part funded by the BIG LOTTERY.
Post is open to women only, as permitted under Schedule 9, Part 1, of the Equality Act 2010.
If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.
Our thanks to Jean for this. Extracts:
A social worker who accused an innocent father of abusing his daughter has claimed the police put pressure on her to stand by the lie.
Suzi Smith has admitted falsely accusing Jonathan Coupland, 53, of attacking his six-year-old child in an official custody case note – which led to him being handcuffed in front of neighbours and thrown into a cell.
After the Mail revealed the case earlier this year, Mrs Smith was brought before a disciplinary hearing this week over her behaviour.
Mrs Smith, who worked for Cafcass, the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service, which represents children in the family courts, admitted writing the damning note but claimed she later tried to retract the allegation – only to be put under huge strain by the police to stick to her story…
Mr Coupland, a former painter and decorator, raised his daughter, now eight, alone in Spalding, Lincolnshire.
He was granted custody shortly after her birth, but his former partner, a Thai illegal immigrant, has fought him through the courts.
Mrs Smith made a home visit in January 2012 and wrote the case note while she was ‘really, really angry’, claiming she saw Mr Coupland stroking his daughter inappropriately – which he has always denied and she now admits was not true.
Mrs Smith allegedly lied in a fit of pique after the single father criticised her handling of the case…
Mrs Smith told the hearing she did not mean to implicate Mr Coupland but misunderstood what she had seen. She said when she realised her mistake she tried to put the record straight. She added: ‘I sincerely apologise to the father.’
Last night Mr Coupland told the Mail: ‘I was arrested for sexually assaulting the most precious thing in my life … Once you are tarred with that brush, that is it. People where I live think I am a paedophile…
Panel chairman Stephen Fash said Mrs Smith had ‘overstated’ what she thought she had observed.
The panel found she made the false allegation, but did not do so dishonestly. [J4MB emphasis] It will decide whether she is guilty of misconduct at a later hearing.
If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.
I spoke to a feminist journalist two months ago and today the results have been published in the women’s magazine Marie Claire. The article features quotes from myself, Lisa Chamberlain and Rachael Smith – as well as complacent and prejudiced commentary from the journalist.
I would like to take a moment to reflect on the fact that today J4MB has featured in both The Guardian and Marie Claire – and Mike will be on RT TV sometime after 8pm this evening. We’re definitely past the “first they ignore you” stage!
What? I earned it!
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One year after the premier of his outstanding performance, Sex and Circumcision: an American Love Story (video, 2:10:50), Eric Clopper has announced that he is filing a lawsuit against Harvard University (and other entities).
He is seeking financial support. More information can be found and pledges can be made on his website.
If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.
A piece in the latest edition of the Mail on Sunday. We salute the company’s board members.
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A new piece in The Spectator:
It is more than three years since the town of Tisdale, Saskatchewan, decided to ditch its motto ‘Land of Rape and Honey’. That was how the prairie outpost had been known for 60 years, a consequence of the large amounts of canola produced in the region and the fact that they have lots of bees. But the town authorities now thought the slogan had a certain ominous, menacing air to it, so they replaced it with ‘Tisdale — Opportunity Grows Here’, which is entirely lacking in threat, interest and anything else you care to mention.
A year later the supermarket store Aldi was forced to change the name of a paint it was promoting from ‘Rape yellow’ to something else — probably ‘Bright yellow’, I don’t know. Sexual abuse campaigners had been outraged, you see, and apparently unable to accept that a word can have two meanings.
You can tell when an issue has been dangerously politicised by the screeching that arises whenever its name is mentioned, when people think they have ownership of the word and thus the narrative and you are not allowed to mention it any more, not even if you are referring to a noisome brassica related to the turnip, or rapum as it is known in Latin. When that happens, all sorts of derangements occur and the more deranged you are in kowtowing to the new frenzy, the better you’ll be liked by the campaigners.
That has certainly happened to the crime of rape which long ago joined the copious list of stuff you must never, ever make jokes about. The derangement began in the 1990s, predicated on the perhaps correct belief of feminist campaigners that the police were too often dismissive of female claims of rape and that there were both too few prosecutions and too few convictions. So something must be done.
The derangement gathered pace. Now we were quickly enjoined to believe something patently untrue — that all kinds of rape were of equal anguish to the victim, regardless of whether or not additional violence had been employed by the attacker. Following on from this came denunciations of people who said that rape was slightly less likely to occur if women were mindful of what they were wearing, where they were walking (alone) and at what time. These were not, incidentally, people who said that rape was somehow more justified if a woman was wandering alone in a short skirt late at night, which of course it isn’t. Just people who pointed out that this is not a perfect world and that common sense can sometimes be used to obviate danger. That’s deranged, I reckon.
But the derangement was far from finished. Now the police were instructed always to believe a woman when she made an accusation of rape, their discretion and common sense plainly being rooted in sexism. Somehow this transformed itself into an injunction always to prosecute, even when the police were aware that no rape had taken place, even when police had direct evidence that no rape had occurred, evidence which they failed to disclose because the pressure was on to get those convictions. Deranged.
Then came the business with alcohol. Being drunk while committing a crime is never a mitigating factor, the courts are clear about that. But now a woman who had too much to drink and consented to sexual intercourse was to be considered a rape victim — a bizarre case of double standards, of effectively doublethink. And worrying for me, too, because I don’t think I’ve ever had sexual intercourse with a woman who was sober. Oh, maybe once, and it was all a bit grim. But — if the man’s drunk — no mitigation. If the woman’s drunk — rape. Utterly, utterly deranged.
The degree to which we have been captured by this derangement was evident in an ITV drama series I’ve mentioned here before, Liar, where viewers had to choose who was telling the truth in a case of rape, the man or the woman — but they revealed the answer very early on, having accepted that it was quite impossible to portray the woman as being untruthful. To do so would be ‘irresponsible’. The whole point of the series nullified because women are incapable of lying.
When we reach that level of derangement, it’s time to start really worrying. It is quite literally a totalitarian mindset: one is not permitted to see beyond it.
And the latest development? The police have suggested that they might need to sequester the mobile phones of women who make accusations of rape, so they can see what they’ve been saying. This is a grotesque invasion of privacy, according to the campaigners. Another violation, almost as bad as the rape itself! Totally unacceptable! It will stop women coming forward! Well, maybe it will stop women coming forward if they have just texted the alleged perpetrator the day after an alleged rape with the words: ‘OMG top shag Bob! C U tonite by the bins at the back of Tescos LOL xxxx’.
A quick look at that mobile phone might prove the difference between a ten-year prison sentence for an innocent man and a verdict of not guilty. But that is seemingly of no import whatsoever to the campaigners. In effect, they are saying that the woman must always be believed and that there is no real requirement on her behalf to provide evidence to back up her claim. And she can do all this in total anonymity, because uniquely for rape cases, that is what the courts insist on, even when the verdict is not guilty.
I have the horrible feeling that under the welter of complaint the police may well renege on this notion of, you know, gathering evidence. And we will continue to be trapped inside this berserk narrative in which men are always guilty, regardless of whether or not they are guilty. And as a consequence more and more injustices will be done.
You can subscribe to The Spectator here.
If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.
I was on a train to London yesterday when I was called by Sarah Marsh, a “journalist” with The Guardian. She asked me for comments on students’ and academics’ opposition to our forthcoming Cambridge University talks (free tickets still available here.) At the end of the call I told Sarah we’re big fans of her paper. She replied, “Yeah… right!”
We find it significant that no mention is made of Elizabeth Hobson speaking at the event. Mention of a young woman speaking there would counter the narrative of dangerous men being behind the event. But we’re pleased that reference is made to Janet Bloomfield’s excellent article from 2014, “13 reasons women lie about being raped”. No link is provided, it’s here. We will not be deterred from pointing out that feminists have long used rape as a political weapon with which to bludgeon men as a class – and create employment for otherwise unemployable feminists – or that feminists lie relentlessly about the issue, as they lie about domestic violence, and so many other issues.
Mention is made of our manifesto but no link provided, it’s here.
Ms Marsh’s article is here. An extract:
Dr Maha Rafi Atal, one of the letter’s signatories, said: “The university isn’t taking the concerns of female staff, who have been harassed by this group, seriously. We wrote this open letter to give people the chance to voice their concerns, the signatures are mixed but I am getting new names all the time. The staff union separately got concern about this from their members and have written their own separate letter.
“This is a group who are part of anti-feminist websites that spend lots of time harassing and threatening feminist women journalists and academics. [J4MB: Not even one example is provided of us “harassing” or “threatening” anyone, needless to say.] They have publicly, on their website, written a series of posts attacking and almost cyber-stalking various feminist Cambridge scholars … ones who work or teach in [the] building this event is going to be taking place [in]. There are particular posts about specific academics here.”
I think this may be the first time we’ve been accused of “almost cyberstalking” feminists. Exactly which posts are being objected to, I have no idea. All in all, an article with the journalistic integrity for which The Guardian is world-famous.
If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.
Justice for Men & Boys 