Matt O’Connor, who has tickets for one event, was told police were trying to ban him from entering the Games and going within 100m of any venue or the torch relay.

Mr O’Connor, who lives 15m from the flame’s route in Andover, Hampshire, said: ‘There is absolutely no way on God’s earth I’m going to be restricted from attending.’

The restrictions are expected to be confirmed in Westminster magistrates’ court on Monday.

Fathers4Justice campaigns to ‘ensure fathers play a fundamental role in the parenting of their children after parents separate’ and is known for scaling buildings dressed as superheroes as a means of protest.

It says it ceased its direct action campaign in June 2008 but continued campaigning through direct talks with successive governments up until June 2011.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/moms-chaperoning-prom-sprayed-teens-lysol-dirty-dancing-report-article-1.1078612

Two mothers chaperoning a high school prom in Manitou Springs, Colo., allegedly sprayed Lysol on students for dancing dirty, calling the teen girls “sluts” and “whores.”

About eight students were hit with the disinfectant spray, Manitou Springs police told the Daily News. The spray got in some students’ eyes and mouths, and they had to leave the prom, said police.

A female teen that was at the April 21 dance is pressing charges against the chaperones.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18062485

Rebekah Brooks and her husband, Charlie, have been charged with perverting the course of justice as part of the phone hacking inquiry.

She was arrested on 13 March as part of the Met Police’s Operation Weeting.

In a statement, they accused the CPS of “posturing” and said: “We deplore this weak and unjust decision.”

The couple will become the first suspects to be charged in an inquiry lasting 18 months and involving 185 police officers and staff.

Under her, journalists for the News of the World hacked into the phones of numerous celebrities in order to gain scoops and boost the newspaper’s profits, including a missing 13 year old schoolgirl later found murdered, as well as the parents of a little girl whose murder was the catalyst for the name and shame campaign.

Well I was a little bit imprecise and perhaps unwarranted in describing the girls who handed out feathers to the 16 year old boy as ‘femnists’. Of course, I have no idea if those girls were feminists, and neither I am claiming categorically that their actions implied or entailed that they were feminists.

I should also point out that in the two chapters of ‘The Second Sexism’ that I have so far read, the author David Benatar makes clear that he is not an ‘anti-feminist’, and carefully distinguishes between different types of feminism (and even I, like him, support true ‘egalitarian feminism’, although I clearly have less faith than him that it even barely exists in practice).

However, it is known amongst many online men’s rights activists that the suffragettes played a major part in the shameful white feather campaigns of the First World War. I have read accounts of this online and in books (even feminist books) many times. But it seems that many or most of the subscribers to r/mensrights are not aware of this historical fact.

Just a cursory look online will provide numerous links to information regarding the role that early feminists did play in the scandalous campaigns to shame men into fighting in world war 1 – including disabled men, conscientious objectors, men working in vital industries, and even underage boys.

I haven’t got time to post much material tonight, but I will add to this during the week. Readers are also invited to post any links they find themselves in the comments section.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christabel_Pankhurst

Her supporters handed the white feather to every young man they encountered wearing civilian dress and bobbed up at Hyde Park meetings with placards: “Intern Them All”.

The above quotation is taken from a book written by Sylvia Pankhurst herself (sister of Christabel) : E. Syvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals, Longmans, London, 1931

http://itech.fgcu.edu/&/issues/vol1/issue1/feather.htm

The justification for political involvement and military force was framed in gender specific imagery with sexually violent overtones.  “Playing on the allegorical representation of Liberty as a woman, Allied artists repeatedly depicted a female Belgium stripped to the waist, bound and violated . . .”  (Gullace, Sexual Violence 16).  It was this kind of propagandized imagery that stimulated and popularized the war effort.  Many of the very same negative characterizations (of men) which had been waged in the “sex war” by the suffragists were now employed to depict the “Teuton barbarian” in the fight against German aggression.  The oppressors of both British women (in the fight for equality) and Belgium (in the fight for liberation) were characterized in a sexually aggressive manner.  It was this kind of war propaganda, combined with an already fully mobilized feminine consciousness, that both ignited the imaginations of and guided the actions of  the “White Feather Brigade.”

Shaming men into political or military action is not unique to the tactics used by the women of wartime Britain.  The idea carries all the way back to ancient times and is evidenced by the comical yet poignant depiction put forth by Aristophanes in Lysistrata.  In World War I alone, both a women’s contingent in Russia and in the United States utilized the same tactics to sway men into military service.  It is the timing and momentum of  “The White Feather Brigade” and the anti-masculine sentiment which was attached to the “feathering”  that ties this wartime activity to the feminist movement.  

Articles by Men’s Rights Activists Discussing the White Feather Campaign :

http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/feminist-governance-feminism/this-truth-really-hurts/

In 1914 despite widespread pro war propaganda, male enthusiasm for shipping off to go get slaughtered in foreign battlefields was low. To overcome the reluctance of young men to get themselves killed or maimed for the benefit of a few hereditary elites and royals, Admiral Charles Fitzgerald began organizing a groups of women to help “convince” the men of Britain to enlist.

Using public humiliation, the objective of these groups was to shame civilian men into joining the armed services. “This aim was to be accomplished by public humiliation — the women handing out white feathers to any man who did not wear a uniform.  The feathers were intended as a badge of disgrace, branding the men who received them as cowards, the primary effect of which as to render them as unsuitable in the eyes of women. “The Order of the White Feather” and their recruiting methods quickly spread across Britain. Women of all backgrounds contributed their influence to the war effort.”

“(Gullace, “White Feathers” 178) The zeal and the scope of this gendered phenomenon was paralleled only by the contemporaneous movement for suffrage — a movement which, right before the war, had reached a radical pitch. It is in the radical nature of “The White Feather Brigade” — the confrontational method which was employed by these women toward men — that a tactical tie is evidenced between the pro-suffrage and pro-enlistment movements. It is in the motives and movements of Emmeline Pankhurst that an ideological connection is discovered between the feminine pro-war demonstration of the “White Feather Girls” and the Suffragists.”

Part 3 of ManWomanMyth’s war segment of his excellent series of YouTube videos on the myth of equality :

Not relating to the feminist role, but this clip from a news report brings the white feather campaign to life :

One particularly graphic example of this is the campaign, during the First World War, of British women distributing white feathers – a symbol of cowardice – to young men who were not in uniform.  These were distributed even to adolescent boys who were technically too young to register.  One boy, Frederick Broome, who had succeeded in enlisting at age 15, fought in battle, was returned to England in a febrile state and then discharged at the insistence of his father, who produced his birth certificate to convince the authorities.  Then, while walking over a bridge in town, then age 16, young Frederick was accosted by four girls who gave him three white feathers.  He later recalled as follows :

“I felt very humiliated.  I finished the walk over the bridge and there on the other side was the Thirty-seventh London Territorial Association of the Royal Field Artillery.  I walked straight in and re-joined the army.”

 

Note that I have not sought the author’s permission to quote the above passage – I assume he will have no objections to me highlighting a small sample of his work on a men’s rights advocacy site.

The quoted quote from the boy soldier is taken from (according to the author’s notes) ‘We Will Not Fight‘, by Will Ellsworth-Jones.

In the notes section, David Benatar also reveals that the feminist icon Virginia Wooff dismissed, against all the evidence, the claim that white feathers were handed out during World War I in any great numbers.  She apparently attributed the belief to ‘male hysteria’.

You can read an interview with David Benatar on the subject of his book here in the Pink Paper.

**UPDATE : I have added a follow-up to this article which deals with the historical relationship between feminism and the white feather campaigns, something which redditors seem to be having a hard time believing :

http://theantifeminist.com/feminism-and-the-white-feather-campaign-during-world-war-1/

The storyline is of the journey of a 13 year old girl named Aviva (spell it backwards), a girl who dreams of having children but is forced to have an abortion by her parents which renders her infertile.  After running away from home, she is picked up by a ‘reformed’ sex offender named Earl (portrayed sympathetically), who abandons her after anal sex in a hotel.  She is then found and taken in by an evangelical Christian couple and their family of handicapped foster children.  There she meets Earl again, who is being prepared by the family to assassinate the abortionist who, co-incidentally, had operated on her….

Liberal pro-choicers and Christian pro-lifers alike share the conviction that human individuals have the power to choose who to be and how to act.  For the Christian, individuals have the power to choose between good and evil. God has granted us the power to define our very souls and to be granted everlasting heaven or hell. Homosexuals can be ‘saved’. Even ‘child molesters’, like the character Earl, can be born again.
For the liberal on the other hand, the only thing constraining choice is that of unfavourable power relationships. Society may determine the choices that women want to make i.e. wishing to have children, or deny them the choice at all.

Solondz presents the journey of Aviva as a darkly grim fairytale that reveals a different kind of truth about human nature – people don’t change.  People may have a need to categorise themselves and others differently through the various stages and events of life,  but it is all artificial and illusory.  To illustrate this, Aviva is played by 7 different actresses, including a 30 stone black woman.

The need to believe in free will, the ability to change and to control one’s destiny is fundamental to almost all creeds and dogmas and indeed across the American political spectrum and to the American dream itself.  It is essential to our notions of morality, to praise and blame, reward and punishment, to who we are and to what we may become.

But there is no free will. In the end we finish up the same people we were at the beginning. Despite her many weird experiences, at the end of her journey Aviva is a lot older and wiser, but still the same individual she was at the beginning, still needing love and acceptance, and still needing to fulfil those needs through having children.

In the end we are the same collection of cells, the same genetic blueprint for life and potential that we were as a fetes, a fetes that Avivas mother describes as ‘just a tumour’. The same human fetus that is somehow imagined by Christians to be a unique human soul (even those that ‘lack fingers and toes, brains and hearts’) and yet has its uniqueness defined by a power of choice it does not yet have, if it ever will.

The film ends with Aviva returning to her parents who hold a party to celebrate her homecoming.  Now played by 42 year old actress Jennifer Jason Leigh, the 13 year old Aviva is asked if she wants to invite her cousin Mark Weiner to the party – he has been (falsely) accused of child molestation by his own sister (both characters featured in Solondz’s ‘Welcome to the Dollhouse’).  She is adamant that he be invited.  When she meets him at the party, Mark delivers one of the most depressing speeches in cinematic history :

Here’s an interview Todd Solondz gave for the Guardian during the release of Palindromes.

not the feminist

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-17984725

Josefina Vazquez Mota, who is bidding to become Mexico’s first female president, said the assistant’s dress was “not in keeping with the seriousness of the debate”.

Electoral Commission member Lorenzo Cordova said it was deplorable that a stellar event in the electoral process should have been overshadowed by an “outrageous stereotype”.

It was the first TV debate ahead of July’s poll pitting the four presidential hopefuls against each other.

Meanwhile, for those looking for intelligent articles on male sexuality and the future of the sex war, head off now to AvoiceforMen and read :

http://www.avoiceformen.com/men/male-sexuality-un-demonized/

http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/the-future-of-civilization/

http://www.counselheal.com/articles/1762/20120503/sexual-competition-causes-jealousy-envy-more-women.htm

Sexual competition affects women more than men in raising jealousy and envy in a work environment, according to a recent study.

The study of analyzing the differences between men and women in feeling jealous and envious was published in the journal Revista de Psicología Sociai by a group of researchers from universities in Valencia, Spain, Groningen, Netherlands, and Palermo, Argentina. Women are more likely to feel jealous and envy in a sexual competition than men, while social skills provoked men and women equally.

“Women with a high level of intrasexual competition are more jealous if the rival is more attractive and more envious if the rival is more powerful and dominating. They did not get any results in men, as no rival characteristics that provoke jealousy or envy predicted intrasexual competition,” co-author Rosario Zurriaga at University of Valencia told Servico de Información y Noticias Científicas (SINC).

Intrasexual competition, as the study defined, is a competition between same sex people trying to keep access to the opposite sex. The group of researchers distributed questionnaires to around 200 people and chose 114 as the sample for the exploratory study. The sample was 50 percent men and 50 percent women, and they had an average age of 36 years and spent 11 years in their current employment.

The studied defined jealously as “a threat or loss of success in a relationship due to interference from a rival and implies a loss or threat of loss of what they had” and envy as “a response to another person who has success, skills, or qualities that they desire and involves a lack in comparison to the envied person”.

Sexual competition made women feel jealous and envious more so than men. Rival’s social skills, however, provoked both men and women equally.

“Our research intends to clarify the role of emotions like envy and jealousy at work. These feelings have not been studied in working contexts and can cause stress in workers and negatively affect the quality of working life,” said the researcher.

“This is one of the first studies that examines rivals’ characteristics in this environment and contributes to a better understanding of conflicts and problems that can occur in working relationships,” they said.

The study implied that in order to prevent the negative effects, they should modify aspects such as the perception of threat, loss, or comparison with others at work.

It’s not simply the disturbing fact that a young man has been jailed for FIVE FUCKING YEARS for having sex with a drunken woman, who only an hour earlier was able to consent (according to the court) to sex with the footballer’s black friend that she had basically picked up for a quickie that same night. (incidentally, she claimed that the black footballer had raped her, which means that somewhat bizarrely, according to the court, she is both a rape victim AND a false rape accuser).

It’s the media reaction which really makes me think we are witnessing a watershed moment in the complete corruption of the justice system and of the media by the sexual trade union.  Despite the general misandry long since inculcated into the British population, I’m convinced that millions of men (and women) share the opinion that the five year sentence handed out to a talented young man for having sex with an intoxicated woman is excessive. This is, after all, longer than the average sentence for violent stranger rape in the UK, and on the basis of a law that was only introduced a few  years ago by a government at the beck and call of radical feminists.  At the time of its creation, the law was highly controversial.

Yet the media is constantly pumping out articles with headlines screaming the like of ‘Outrage at Ched Evans Rape Apologists’.  Mysteriously, nearly all of these articles have had their readers comments function disabled.   Virtually all of the national UK newspapers are carrying the same articles sharing the same artificial outrage – from the Sun to the Guardian.  Even given the feminist domination of the mainstream media, this all seems a little too contrived, co-ordinated, and stage managed.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2136435/Ched-Evans-Fans-footballer-jailed-rape-planning-support-match-today.html

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4280804/Lib-Dem-hopeful-says-Ched-Evans-rape-conviction-was-excessive.html

On top of this, perhaps even more disturbingly, the British police have arrested THIRTEEN twitter users, in dawn raids, for tweeting the name of the ‘victim’.  Whilst I strongly disapprove of publishing the name of this woman, and recognise that such acts are illegal, what is disturbing is not only the amount of resources that must have been deployed in order to foil this crime, but the way in which the media coverage of the arrests appear to be consciously giving the message that if you so much as criticise either a rape verdict or a feminist law, you too could face arrest.

It is important to remind oneself that in the UK of 2012, thankfully, it is still not illegal to criticise feminist laws, or to question controversial court verdicts that are the outcome of feminist laws.  How long this will remain the case, however, God only knows.

One of the few articles I’ve read defending Ched Evans online (outside of forum comments – the threads often quickly deleted) has come from a foreign publication – ‘Russia Today’ :

http://rt.com/usa/columns/namenotfound/men-rape-girl-britain/

We live in 2012 when men increasingly have no rights.  All the while small but extremely noisy groups appropriate the rights to speak on behalf of women.

• “Evans Rape Apologists Are A Disgrace To Humanity”
• “Rape culture is alive and kicking”
• “Rape convictions in this country are far too low”

­What is this, a call to arms? No – just headlines in some of Britain’s newspapers. Does it sound vengeful to you as much as it sounds to us?

They don’t have to all be like Valerie Solanas or Eva Lundgren. Some even permit the male species to exist in some defanged form. But too many a woman thinks that somehow men are a source of unfairness and trouble in the world.

The ideas of “Society for Cutting Up Men” are alive and well, kicking. These days primarily in the form of men being guilty as charged.

Asking for equal pay and equal rights is one thing. To hold a grudge against modern men because for generations the male human species was oppressing the female one is another.

When we say “oppressing” we actually mean it – the laws of the land were outright unfair even some hundred years ago, customs were even worse. Should it follow that now it’s somehow a woman’s turn to exact revenge on men as some defective sub-species, “a disgrace to humanity”?

And who stands to win? Surely not the 19-year-old girl in Evans’ story – whose name cannot be named for legal reasons – but whose identity and pictures are freely available on the Internet thanks to social networks.

­

Kill them all, the lord will recognise his own

­Thankfully, nobody slaughters men physically just yet. But when it comes to dealing with gender-related crimes, the radical mentality of Abbot Arnaud might as well be used as a motto.

Alleged rape? Lock him up. Domestic abuse? Lock him up. Alleged sexual harassment at work? Fire him, make him pay damages (and yes,  lock him up if possible).

The police force, prosecutors, judges might have more men than women in their ranks, but it counts for little.

Everyone in the force knows that it could be extremely detrimental to one’s career to ignore any complaint of that type – and neither should a complaint be ignored, we agree.

But in today’s society, law enforcement exists not to establish the truth but to isolate the alleged abuser – guilty or innocent matters not.

It’s not openly spoken about outside the male locker room – again, for the fear of repercussions. But it does exist and it’s getting worse by the year.

Women have nothing to celebrate either. The real rapists and serial wife batterers should be investigated and prosecuted. The problem is, it’s so much easier to catch a “rapist” who never thought he was one, than to stalk, catch and prove the guilt of a real sexual predator, especially with the underfunded law enforcement that – like all of us – lives in the age of austerity.

Meanwhile, lads, take our good advice. In documentary film production, every step you take you cover with signed “release forms” – essentially, a written consent to appear in that documentary.

You might as well have a few pre-written on you before you head out to that local pub of yours on Saturday.

 

The writer above appears to have largely ‘got it’ without having seemingly encountered the men’s rights movement (or else, presumably, he would be able to question the myth of patriarchy and the historical oppression of women).

Needless to say, a feminist at the Guardanista is on hand to express her indignation :

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/02/russia-today-ched-evans-rape

To which Russia Today has responded in turn :

http://rt.com/usa/columns/namenotfound/evans-rape-british-press/

Isn’t it ironic that it is now the British (state controlled) media using creepy terms such as ‘hatespeak’ and castigating Russian writers as ‘(rape) apologists’ and thought criminals for being able to freely question the court verdicts and feminist laws of the United Kingdom?

The very reason – the ‘justification’ for – why Breivik behaved in the appalling way in which he did was because of the completely closed-down debate about PC. That is abundantly clear from his ‘manifesto’. To head off the possibility of more Breiviks, this has to change.
The ‘guilt by association’ usual ruse was in full swing to close down debate yet further.
The standard line on Breivik is that he is ‘beyond the pale’, and therefore any analysis of PC is also ‘beyond the pale’.
It most certainly is not.
That someone who acknowledges the researched historical analysis of the origin of PC is a mass murderer in no way makes the research into the origin of PC a doctrine itself of mass murder. It is never the case that if A is in some way coincidental with B, and B is ‘beyond the pale’; that, therefore, A is likewise ‘beyond the pale’. That would be the most elementary non-logic.
Malicious nonsense of ‘guilt by association’ as it is applied to analysis of PC requires combating. If there is no free speech even on the topic of the most deep-seated, entrenched and widespread fascism ever to afflict societies — which PC indeed is — then there is no free speech at all.
Concerns about ‘sensitivity’ are just smokescreens to cover a PC-fascist stance. Evidently, even the deepest irony is opaque to the PC-fascist.
‘You’re not fit to be a journalist, let alone a political editor’, I admonished the hapless Marsden. “I don’t think you’re fit to be a candidate”, he retorted.
But that is my point! A PC-fascist does not accept that anyone who challenges the PC hegemony can be moral; and that therefore such a challenger is ineligible to stand in any election.
That PC is itself the height of immorality — seeking to label the disadvantaged as ‘oppressors’ and the privileged as the ‘oppressed’ – completely escapes PC-fascists. They feel obliged to stick rigidly to this self-delusion rather than to admit the failure of their whole ideology. But this vehement denial inevitably cannot long survive being comprehensively found out.

http://stevemoxon.blogspot.co.uk/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-17911131