This one had me laughing at the absurdity, from today's Guardian:
"The former prime minister, whose son, Sir Mark, was convicted in a South African court of involvement in the attempted 2004 coup, allegedly told [Simon] Mann at a meeting at her Belgravia home: "I'm sure it's going to work".
It is claimed that Thatcher likened the need for radical change in the oil-rich Equatorial Guinea to the way London's Docklands had been redeveloped during the 1980s.
She is also alleged to have encouraged Mann to talk to a group seeking to overthrow the then president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, with the words: "We must always look after our friends, Simon …"
What was that woman on?
Sunday 14 April 2013
Monday 8 April 2013
Femen - Follow the Money
Amazing how often things are not at all what they appear to be on the surface. Take feminism for example. Most people seem to associate it with left-wing thought, but when you start looking closely, feminism actually seems to link in with deep veins of conservative and authoritarian thought a lot more frequently than you might expect.
For at least a decade some British feminists (see here for the Telegraph's Toby Young and Julie Burchill, a match made in heaven) have been nurturing what appears to be a savage intolerance against transsexual women, who they take it upon themselves to try and define out of existence as not "real women" . This sort of biologically deterministic and reactionary approach to sex and sexuality is of course familiar to us from Roman Catholic doctrine, and has been filtering into feminism via Janice Raymond, a former nun and author of "The Transsexual Empire: the Making of the She-male". Raymond in turn was a pupil of theologian Mary Daly who studied at the College of Saint Rose, Saint Mary's College, and the Catholic University of America, topping it off with teaching at the Jesuit-run Boston College from 1967 - 1999.
So now when you see yet another group of feminists attacking this time both sex workers and Muslim women you start asking what these targets have in common. Little surprise then that they are both hate figures of the religious right. And when you take a look at the group's website it transpires that 'Some of the goals of the organisation are: "To develop leadership, intellectual and moral qualities of the young women in Ukraine" and "To build up the image of Ukraine, the country with great opportunities for women",' bells really start ringing loudly.
For at least a decade some British feminists (see here for the Telegraph's Toby Young and Julie Burchill, a match made in heaven) have been nurturing what appears to be a savage intolerance against transsexual women, who they take it upon themselves to try and define out of existence as not "real women" . This sort of biologically deterministic and reactionary approach to sex and sexuality is of course familiar to us from Roman Catholic doctrine, and has been filtering into feminism via Janice Raymond, a former nun and author of "The Transsexual Empire: the Making of the She-male". Raymond in turn was a pupil of theologian Mary Daly who studied at the College of Saint Rose, Saint Mary's College, and the Catholic University of America, topping it off with teaching at the Jesuit-run Boston College from 1967 - 1999.
So now when you see yet another group of feminists attacking this time both sex workers and Muslim women you start asking what these targets have in common. Little surprise then that they are both hate figures of the religious right. And when you take a look at the group's website it transpires that 'Some of the goals of the organisation are: "To develop leadership, intellectual and moral qualities of the young women in Ukraine" and "To build up the image of Ukraine, the country with great opportunities for women",' bells really start ringing loudly.
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