Friday, November 19, 2021



Why must every man on TV today be a monster?

Bel Mooney

At my home there’s a shelf of books three metres long (I kid you not) stuffed with books about feminism, women’s history and related subjects.

I even have the first British edition (1971) of Valerie Solanas’s charming little classic: ‘SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto. So, I’ve always counted myself a 1960s feminist — with countless articles and public debates to prove it.

Why, then, do I feel so disturbed about the new wave of man-hating pervading our TV screens that seems to be engulfing my sex?

It seems you can’t turn on the television without encountering women victimised by men, psychologically as well as physically.

Sunday-night viewing, which used to be the home for family friendly favourites, now seems to be dominated by domestic dystopia.

Take the ITV series Angela Black, about a woman who is the victim of domestic abuse.

My husband and I watched one episode then gave up. There was something about actress Joanne Froggatt’s pinched, victimised face, not to mention the close-up of her tooth on the floor, knocked out by her abusive, gas-lighting husband, that turned us both off. ‘Do I need this on a Sunday night?’ my husband asked, and I agreed.

She’s not the only tortured leading lady leading me ever closer to the ‘off’ button.

When we first meet amnesia sufferer Jo in Close To Me (Channel 4), she is lying at the bottom of the stairs in a pool of blood. Was she pushed by her creepy, cheating husband, played by brilliant Christopher Eccleston? What is the truth behind her memory loss?

Watching these shows starts to feel like voyeurism. Which, incidentally, is the central theme to another hit show, You, a Netflix series about a bookshop manager who stalks women and kills them.

However, the most vulnerable young woman grabbing a cult female audience is Alex, the heroine of another Netflix hit, Maid. Based on a bestselling book about a young woman who takes her child away from an abusive partner and is forced to work as a cleaner, the series subjects Alex to every setback you can imagine, with no one to help her.

Critics have accused it of being ‘poverty porn’ — and there’s some truth in that. Every episode I’ve seen has been powerful, compulsive, moving — and deeply depressing. Because every single man Alex encounters is horrible.

Our lovely young heroine is utterly oppressed by the male sex — her father is a wife-beater and there was a string of odious stepdads.

Women watching become judge and jury, condemning all men to eternal perdition.

Of course, there’s a need for good drama depicting tough issues. That said, every modern cop drama seems to star a feisty aggressive female Chief Inspector in charge of a bunch of gormless men. It feels as though programme commissioners relish tapping into a new wave of what can only be called misandry. Meaning hatred of men.

For years, I’ve been ‘calling out’ (as the current phrase has it) misogyny — and quite rightly, since hatred and fear of women goes back centuries. After all, if it wasn’t for vain, stupid, bossy Eve, we’d all still be without sin.

Women have plenty of reasons to be angry — but I am not going to pile on statistics here. Suffice it to say that, as I wrote in a recent Mail article, real advancement remains out of reach for the majority.

The backlash against real freedom for my sex is like waves of scummy filth on a polluted shore. But all that accumulated knowledge and experience convinces me that we do not help women by demonising all men.

The arguments have become dangerously skewed in the direction of prejudice. And prejudice against any person simply on the grounds of what he/she is remains disgusting.

Were all the males, young and old, who took part in last weekend’s moving Remembrance Sunday parade at the Cenotaph all sexist pigs? What about all the decent men who love their families, work hard and do their best?

Are all our lovely partners somehow ‘responsible’ for domestic violence, rape and murder?

According to the prejudice, because they were born male they are de facto guilty. I was told that my blameless husband ‘must have friends who make sexist or racist jokes’ — and therefore be as guilty as they are, by association.

Listen, sisters — he doesn’t and he damn well isn’t!

It shocks me that such women (all educated and articulate) choose to view life through the latest narrow prism of oppression and victimhood. But it’s easy to get why TV show makers seek to capitalise on a fashionable sense of angry vulnerability and outright misandry.

It feeds on itself, so any potential for masculine goodness is denied and prejudice on the grounds of identity is exploited when it comes to men. Why is it wrong for men to state, ‘All women are b******’ — yet acceptable for women to shout, ‘All men are s****’?

Of course, it’s not acceptable at all. But just as casual misogyny used to be the stock-in-trade of comedians (oh, those dreadful mother-in-law jokes), so casual misandry is a phenomenon I’ve been noticing more and more.

I can report one example. The occasion was the 100th anniversary of the excellent charity Gingerbread — once for the ‘Unmarried Mother and Her Child’ but now for single parents in general. As a young journalist, I dealt with the charity, so I went to London to celebrate with them.

The party was held in the fine 18th-century surroundings of London’s Foundling Museum, set up by the great Thomas Coram who was horrified children should be abandoned by mothers too poor or shamed to care for them. The guest speaker was Jane Garvey, then a presenter of Woman’s Hour on Radio 4. She stood on the podium and began with the scornful jibe that there we were, in that room, ‘surrounded by portraits of fat, old, white men in bad wigs’.

Now if Ms Garvey had arrived early enough to explore, she’d have discovered that those mocked men were the brave philanthropists who defied the culture of the time to assist Thomas Coram in 17 hard years of fundraising to help pitiful women and their babies.

Of course, it was just a joke, wasn’t it? Only a bit of banter. Let’s laugh at the old guys in wigs who did good things but obviously ate too many good dinners.

Similarly, we can dismiss and deride television presenters (for example) for being ‘pale, male and stale’ — and that’s perfectly OK. Can you imagine the furore if such prejudiced comments were used about women in this current climate of rapid ‘offence’?

Many women say that sexist comments and man-hating TV storylines are regarded merely as ‘payback’ — another popular term to justify misandry — for all the sexist jokes women have heard over the years. But it doesn’t work that way, does it?

The common-sense idea that ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’ itself dates back to the 18th century, and is a reminder that when two angry people fight a duel they’re both likely to end up wounded or dead.

By all means demand that both men and women ‘call out’ toxic masculinity wherever it occurs, but if you tar all men with that brush it loses any real meaning. How can you muster to defend the rights of abused women and girls across the globe if you foam with rage about some perceived slight overheard in a pub?

The phenomenon we call ‘toxic masculinity’ certainly exists and should always be challenged — but these days I’m sensing ‘toxic femininity’, too, and it’s pretty unpleasant.

What happened to the belief in the moral equality of people based on their actions and not on colour, creed, race or sex? Surely writing ‘All men are s****’ might be considered ‘hate speech’?

In this divided, quarrelsome age, the last thing we need is more division — this rekindling of the old battle of the sexes.

There is plenty in this world for good men and women to be equally angry about, but not if we are encouraged by harridans and opportunistic television bosses to see each other across the lines as hateful enemies.

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The inflation hawks have been right all along

by Jeff Jacoby

FOR THE better part of a year, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has been warning that pumping trillions of dollars into the economy in the name of pandemic relief and economic stimulus was likely to have a dangerous side effect: reawakening the sleeping dragon of inflation.

In a February column for The Washington Post, for example, Summers expressed concern about the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which was then making its way through Congress and would soon be signed into law by President Biden. The measure authorized hundreds of billions of dollars in aid to state and local governments and provided 85 percent of American households with direct payments of $1,400 per person. That much stimulus, wrote Summers, was apt to "set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation."

A month later, Summers warned again that Democrats were "taking substantial risks" by injecting such massive amounts of money into the economy.

"I know the bathtub has been too empty," he said, "but ... think about what the capacity of the bathtub is and how much water we're trying to flow into it."

Summers, a former Harvard president and director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama, is a liberal Democrat, but liberals and Democrats sneered at his forebodings. Biden's top economic adviser, Jared Bernstein, told reporters that Summers's inflation alarms were "flat-out wrong." The New Republic pronounced Summers "finally, belatedly, irrelevant." Paul Krugman, the progressive economist, Nobel laureate, and New York Times columnist, said that to worry about inflation amid the pandemic was to miss the forest for the trees. "Think of it as disaster relief or like fighting a war," Krugman told Summers in a debate. "When Pearl Harbor gets attacked, you don't say, 'How big is the output gap?' "

Krugman has spent the past year downplaying the prospect that Washington's unprecedented spending binge would trigger a surge in inflation. "How Not To Panic About Inflation," he headlined a March column, one of many he has written in 2021 on that theme; among the others were "The Week Inflation Panic Died" in June and "History Says Don't Panic About Inflation" last week.

But while Krugman, President Biden, and others on the left kept insisting there was no reason to be worrying about inflation, inflation grew steadily worse. Last week, the Labor Department confirmed that consumer prices had risen 6.2 percent in October compared with a year ago, the fifth consecutive month in which the increase had been above 5 percent. The United States is experiencing its biggest inflationary spike in 31 years, and it's going to get worse for American households before it gets better: The inflation rate for wholesale goods — a fairly reliable indication of where consumer prices are headed — rose even faster in October than the retail rate.

Everything costs more than it did a year ago. The price of gasoline, motor fuel, eggs, used vehicles, beef, fresh fish, furniture, and televisions are all up by double-digit percentages. New cars and trucks experienced the biggest jump in prices the federal government has ever recorded. With Thanksgiving around the corner, turkeys cost 22 percent more than they did last year.

As prices climb, the purchasing power of salaries falls. After adjusting for inflation, real wages today are 2.2 percent lower than they were in 2020. That's the flip side of inflation: The number on your paycheck may be unchanged, but you can afford less and less. Even if you shop at Dollar Tree.

This is what happens when the government unleashes an avalanche of spending, flooding the economy with trillions of dollars it can't afford, and insisting against all evidence that it won't lead to inflation, or that the higher prices will only be temporary, or — as Biden claimed recently — that more government spending will somehow reduce inflation. Or even, as some in the media are now contending, that rising inflation is something to celebrate. There was a time when you had to tune in to a comedy show to hear something like that.

Millions of Americans still recall the inflation of the 1970s, when the country was whipsawed by double-digit inflation and painfully high interest rates. It was a "terrible period," [No%20one%20wants%20to%20see%20that%20happen%20again.]Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in May. "No one wants to see that happen again."

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Producer Selling Prices Hit Record High in New York as Higher Business Costs Translate Into Inflation

A Fed report on manufacturing in New York state shows that the prices received index—which measures prices manufacturers are paid for the goods they produce—rose to a record high in early November, reflecting how input cost inflation is filtering down through the supply chain and pushing up prices for end consumers.

The New York Fed’s Empire State Manufacturing Survey (pdf), published Nov. 15, showed that the prices received index hit a record high of 50.8, up 7.3 percentage points from October’s reading.

The prices paid index, which reflects input costs for manufacturers, edged up four percentage points to 83.0—just slightly below its record high of 83.5 reached in May, “signaling ongoing substantial increases in both input prices and selling prices,” the report said.

Based on a poll of around 200 manufacturers in New York state, the survey measures price movements from the perspective of industry or producers of products. Economists typically look to manufacturing prices as an early predictor of consumer price inflation, which surged to an annualized 6.2 percent in the 12 months through October, the fastest pace of consumer price growth in nearly 31 years.

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Democrat Hypocrites Censure a Republican

The fight over Paul Gosar posting a cartoon shows that Congress is run by lunatics

On Wednesday, House Democrats censured a member for the first time since 2010, subjecting Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) to official rebuke and stripping him of all his committee assignments for a cartoon tweet.

Granted, that now-removed anime cartoon was in poor taste — it reportedly featured him killing Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and swinging a sword at President Joe Biden. But if there’s anything that truly reveals the utter lack of seriousness among our elected representatives, it’s fighting over a cartoon.

The video “was not meant to depict any harm or violence against anyone portrayed in the anime,” Gosar claimed. “The video is truly a symbolic portrayal of a fight over immigration policy.” Moreover, he insisted that he’s in the same company as Alexander Hamilton, “the first person attempted to be censured by this House.” Make of that what you will.

Gosar behaved foolishly in posting a stupid video, and Republicans should have been quick to rebuke his poor choice. Just because Democrats routinely engage in sophomoric behavior doesn’t mean Republicans should.

That said, it’s hard to tell from Democrats what’s truly outrageous. They are a humorless lot who scream and cry over jokes and memes all the time, so when one actually does cross a line, they’ve been crying “wolf” for so long that no one believes them. This video deserved an eye roll and a rebuke, not censure and lectures about civility from those who don’t know how to practice it themselves.

Speaking of crying “wolf,” Ocasio-Cortez fantastically and falsely claimed to have nearly died during the Capitol riot. (That alone should have made Gosar think twice about making her a martyr again.) She is a charlatan whose primary mission in DC, aside from pushing socialism, is building her own brand as a melodramatic social media diva. Democrats hugging her on the House floor after the vote prove it. Memo to Republicans: Don’t help her.

The bigger point here is that Democrats are a bunch of shameless hypocrites. Ilhan Omar regularly spews hateful and anti-Semitic things. Democrats circled the wagons. Maxine Waters has on multiple occasions incited violence. Democrats ignore it. Eric Swalwell, a member of the Intelligence Committee, slept with a Chinese spy, spilling who knows what secrets. He remains on the Intel Committee. Democrats also shielded Pelosi herself from accountability over her own race-baiting against Donald Trump.

That’s barely scratching the surface of the history of a party that specializes in what the Clintons always called the politics of personal destruction. Democrats say mean and hateful things about Republicans all the time, casting them as the absolute worst of villains.

When it comes to Gosar, there is only one reason Democrats got up off the fainting couch to censure him, and their propagandists in The Washington Post tell us as much in the first sentence of their report: It’s “a move that comes amid growing worries about violent political rhetoric 10 months after a mob of former president Donald Trump’s supporters attacked the Capitol.”

Democrats want to spend the next year telling voters that Republicans are a “threat to democracy.” It might be all they’ve got to stave off or mitigate what most observers expect will be an electoral shellacking akin to 2010. Gosar deserves chastisement for making their narrative easier.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi lectured, “Disguising death threats against a member of Congress and a president of the United States in an animated video does not make those death threats any less real or less serious.”

Do you remember the last time real violence — actual attempted murder — was committed against members of Congress? It was when a Bernie Sanders fan shot at a bunch of Republicans practicing baseball, nearly killing Representative Steve Scalise. That wasn’t a cartoon.

As for where this petty tit-for-tat will lead, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy condemned the Democrats’ “rules for thee, but not for me” approach. “What [Democrats] have started cannot be easily undone. Their actions today and in the past have forever changed the way the House operates,” he warned. He named several Democrats who, if they want to keep committee assignments in a future GOP-controlled House, “will need the approval of a majority.” He concluded: “The House is weaker, more partisan, and more self-focused today than when Speaker Pelosi became speaker less than four years ago. Future Congress will suffer for it.”

Then again, Americans have always been a rowdy lot, and, as the saying goes, perhaps we’re getting the government we deserve. From a higher vantage point, remember this: The real damage being done in Congress isn’t fighting over videos, tweets, and committee assignments. It’s foisting unconstitutional socialist totalitarianism on the nation, a few trillion dollars at a time.

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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