15 Feb 2017
Is The System Still Stacked Against Women? Does Prison Work?
Feminists Are Planning A One-Day Women’s Strike (In 2018) - I Say Bring It On
By Martin Daubney: Just when you thought the Western world couldn’t sustain yet another protest march, the UK’s Women’s Equality Party declares Thursday, March 8th, 2018 a “Women’s Day Off”.
It’s loosely based on a one-day strike in Iceland (the country, not the shop) in 1975 when 90% of women walked out to highlight gender inequality.
Iceland’s female President of the time, Vigdis Finnbogadottir, fondly recalls: “It completely paralysed the country and opened the eyes of many men.”
So would a similar strike work – or is it even needed – in Britain today?
Iceland in 1975 had a population of 100,000 women. In 2016 Britain, there are 14.6m women aged 16+ in employment, 8.4 million full-time and 6.2 million part-timers (men = 14.5m full-time and 2.3m part-time).
The obvious barrier to a mass strike is one of legality. Strikes of any nature have to be legally conducted via union ballots, which is basically impossible across every employment sector.
In vital, female-dominated sectors such as nursing (81% female), for public safety reasons there is very little willingness to strike.
Would the teaching unions use Women’s Day Off for yet another mass walkout (74% teachers are female) when public sympathy is at an all-time low? It seems unlikely.
It’s loosely based on a one-day strike in Iceland (the country, not the shop) in 1975 when 90% of women walked out to highlight gender inequality.So would a similar strike work – or is it even needed – in Britain today?
Iceland in 1975 had a population of 100,000 women. In 2016 Britain, there are 14.6m women aged 16+ in employment, 8.4 million full-time and 6.2 million part-timers (men = 14.5m full-time and 2.3m part-time).
The obvious barrier to a mass strike is one of legality. Strikes of any nature have to be legally conducted via union ballots, which is basically impossible across every employment sector.
In vital, female-dominated sectors such as nursing (81% female), for public safety reasons there is very little willingness to strike.
Would the teaching unions use Women’s Day Off for yet another mass walkout (74% teachers are female) when public sympathy is at an all-time low? It seems unlikely.
Bedfordshire Against Child Sexual Exploitation (Unless It’s Carried Out By Women, Obviously)
By Mike Buchanan: It’s long been known a substantial proportion of sexual abuse of adults and children is carried out by women. In my home town of Bedford there’s currently a poster campaign about child sexual exploitation, featuring pictures of – and statements by – children. Generally, but not always, girls.The ‘umbrella organisation’ behind the posters is Bedfordshire Against Child Sexual Exploitation, the constituent organizations of which include Bedfordshire Police (female Chief Constable, the force pays Women’s Aid to feed feminist lies about domestic violence to police officers), NSPCC (an organization untroubled by MGM, which is clearly cruelty to children), and various public bodies.
While the language used on pages other than the home page of the website is carefully gender-neutral, the ideological bias of the campaign is clear from the images of children on the posters, as displayed on the home page:
- five large images of abused children (three girls, two boys). In every case the abuser is a man.
- six smaller images of abused children (three girls, three boys). One seems to allude to a female abuser, with ‘She told me she loved me on social media then asked for money’, but how is that child sexual exploitation? If anything it’s child financial exploitation, and how much money does the average child have, anyway? Besides, I haven’t seen that particular strange poster in Bedford.
Snowden’s New Job: Protecting Reporters From Spies
By Andy Greenberg: When Edward Snowden leaked the biggest collection of classified National Security Agency documents in history, he wasn’t just revealing the inner workings of a global surveillance machine. He was also scrambling to evade it. To communicate with the journalists who would publish his secrets, he had to route all his messages over the anonymity software Tor, teach reporters to use the encryption tool PGP by creating a YouTube tutorial that disguised his voice, and eventually ditch his comfortable life (and smartphone) in Hawaii to set up a cloak-and-dagger data handoff halfway around the world.
Now, nearly four years later, Snowden has focused the next phase of his career on solving that very specific instance of the panopticon problem: how to protect reporters and the people who feed them information in an era of eroding privacy—without requiring them to have an NSA analyst’s expertise in encryption or to exile themselves to Moscow. “Watch the journalists and you’ll find their sources,” Snowden says. “So how do we preserve that confidentiality in this new world, when it’s more important than ever?”
Since early last year, Snowden has quietly served as president of a small San Francisco–based nonprofit called the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
Now, nearly four years later, Snowden has focused the next phase of his career on solving that very specific instance of the panopticon problem: how to protect reporters and the people who feed them information in an era of eroding privacy—without requiring them to have an NSA analyst’s expertise in encryption or to exile themselves to Moscow. “Watch the journalists and you’ll find their sources,” Snowden says. “So how do we preserve that confidentiality in this new world, when it’s more important than ever?”Since early last year, Snowden has quietly served as president of a small San Francisco–based nonprofit called the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
When I Stood Up For Equality, Parliament Heckled And Jeered
By Philip Davies: The House of Commons was packed for the impending start of the debate on the Brexit Bill – even the Prime Minister had arrived early – when my Conservative colleague Nusrat Ghani introduced her 10 minute rule Bill.These are Bills where, as the name suggests, an MP is given 10 minutes to seek permission to introduce a Bill, and one other MP is given the right to speak for 10 minutes in opposition to it. Often they are unopposed at this very early stage in their life.
Nusrat brought forward a Bill to try to tackle the scourge of so-called honour-based crimes.
She wanted to prohibit the term “honour killing”, to pay for the repatriation of bodies of UK citizens who are the victims of these crimes, and to allow the prosecution of someone in a third country by British courts when the victim is a UK citizen.
You might think all of this is, on the face of it, worthy of support. So did I, until I noticed that these provisions only applied if the victim was a woman. If the victim was a man then, as far as the Bill was concerned, we shouldn’t care.
So I stood up in front of the packed House to say that I opposed the Bill on the grounds that it discriminated against one gender, and that the provisions should apply to all victims of “honour” crimes regardless of their gender.
So what was the reaction of those MPs who are always the most sanctimonious when it comes to promoting gender equality? Did they welcome my stand for gender equality? No, they jeered and shouted me down!
Lone Parents Cause Child Poverty
By Kathy Gyngell: Sir Paul Coleridge’s devastating account of the decline of marriage and the inexorable rise of lone parenthood and cohabitation should give Mrs May’s ‘social reform’ team at Number Ten pause for thought.
What’s crystal clear is that Britain’s rising level of illegitimacy – a word made taboo by the Left – is socially catastrophic. On the scale it is today, it drives ever more children ‘into poverty’. It is the cause of this modern evil – the so-called ‘child poverty’ that the Left have artfully characterised as the sin of income inequality.
The truth is that the sin is that of the parents – of disastrous lifestyle choices that decades of welfarism and a 'thou shalt not stigmatise’ threat has encouraged. What more cunning claim could the Left have made to the moral high ground?
Resistance to such analysis is huge. Political correctness took us into a post-truth world years ago, when the Left first took the Right hostage on the traditional family.
I knew that when I was invited onto The Big Questions last week to counter received poverty wisdom.
“What do you mean women are married to the State?” demanded the oh-so-ingenuous Nicky Campbell, as though lone mothers received their state-provided income by immaculate gift, not from the taxpayer.
He was treating the Child Poverty Action Group’s call for new child poverty targets with huge and virtuous concern. Where the extra money was to come from he did not ask, nor did he challenge the premise of their solution. That was left to me, the token social conservative.
What’s crystal clear is that Britain’s rising level of illegitimacy – a word made taboo by the Left – is socially catastrophic. On the scale it is today, it drives ever more children ‘into poverty’. It is the cause of this modern evil – the so-called ‘child poverty’ that the Left have artfully characterised as the sin of income inequality.
The truth is that the sin is that of the parents – of disastrous lifestyle choices that decades of welfarism and a 'thou shalt not stigmatise’ threat has encouraged. What more cunning claim could the Left have made to the moral high ground?Resistance to such analysis is huge. Political correctness took us into a post-truth world years ago, when the Left first took the Right hostage on the traditional family.
I knew that when I was invited onto The Big Questions last week to counter received poverty wisdom.
“What do you mean women are married to the State?” demanded the oh-so-ingenuous Nicky Campbell, as though lone mothers received their state-provided income by immaculate gift, not from the taxpayer.
He was treating the Child Poverty Action Group’s call for new child poverty targets with huge and virtuous concern. Where the extra money was to come from he did not ask, nor did he challenge the premise of their solution. That was left to me, the token social conservative.
