What’s going on? What’s going on?
(As the late, great, Marvin Gaye once warbled …)
On the Rust – given our supposed demographic, thought I might add that according to recent Google Analysis research 27% of our web visitors are aged between 18 and 24 – it may not surprise regular readers to learn that we are used to being pigeon-holed by the right-on PC brigade as out of touch right wing loonies constantly harking back to John Major’s infamous vision of Britain in the 1950s complete with hazy days of summer, warm beer, cricket and cucumber sandwiches.
It may not surprise Rusters that our regular ‘push-back’ to such criticism is that we are simply calling the modern world as we see it.
Arguably, this is a matter of the right to free speech. If we form an opinion on something, are we not as entitled as anyone else to express it in a Western world where every supposedly oppressed minority known to Man can gain access via the internet, social media and innumerable television channels and be granted equal prominence and air-time?
These days it seems few filters of quality, justification, truth remain – hence the ‘fake news’ phenomenon – and those who shout longest and loudest inevitably gain the upper hand.
In these circumstances what price the ‘Silent Majority’?
Does one exist any longer and, if it does, is it simply being trampled underfoot like everything else that does not proclaim its standpoint from the proverbial rooftops as the 21st Century rushes headlong towards … er … wherever it is going?
Let me provide some ‘for instances’ – here are links to some ‘stories’ featuring in the media today:
Jack de Menezes writes on the subject of international rugby players demonstrating their support for LGBT rights in the wake of former Welsh great Gareth Thomas being assaulted in Cardiff on a night out against the context in which Australian wing threequarter Israel Folau was quoted nearly a year ago now as referring to homosexuality as a sin, as appears today upon the website of – THE INDEPENDENT
Gaby Hinsliff comments upon the recent media spat between Piers Morgan and the female pop group Little Mix over the latter posing in the nude to make a feminist point about body-shaming and the right of women to feel comfortable in their own skins and shapes (whatever they are) in a piece available upon the website of – THE GUARDIAN
Sabrina Barr reports upon the outrage caused in Ireland after a female judge pronounces that the victim in an alleged case of rape was ‘asking for it’ by wearing a thong – see here on the website of – THE INDEPENDENT
Now I’m no expert on the complexities of the arguments currently concentrating minds in the world of LGBT rights, but I can see huge and possibly unresolvable complexities ahead.
Israel Folau, a devout Christian, is one of those rare and special rugby players – like the All Black Sonny Bill Williams – who has achieved iconic world status in both rugby union and rugby league.
[Ironically the latter is a Muslim who has gained the right from the Kiwi rugby authorities not to wear sponsors’ branding on his international shirt and who once, straight after receiving his Rugby World Cup-winning medal, famously gave it away to a young boy who had been harshly treated by a steward for running onto the pitch at the end of the Final.]
It is a fact that Folau holds somewhat fundamentalist Christian beliefs and in making them public was only expressing his sincere opinion: he is now being jumped upon because they do not chime with today’s widespread PC climate.
My point is only that if international sportsmen and women are to be ridiculed or even ‘called out’ in public for their opinions, this could end upon a rocky road.
Let’s just see – should the sport of Formula One refuse the prospect of ever mounting a Grand Prix in Saudi Arabia because that kingdom doesn’t give women the same rights of dress and vehicle-driving as our liberated Western world and/or because it is fighting a ugly war in Yemen with weapons we’ve all supplied it with; should all major sports now refuse to go to the United Arab Emirates because it allegedly sees fit to bang a British student up for 25 years on trumped-up charges of spying; and/or should FIFA now strip Qatar of the right to hold the football World Cup in 2022 because it either bribed its way to winning the bid and/or its foreign workers have allegedly been dying in droves as they work on the spanking new stadia being built to house the games?
As the much-esteemed President Trump of the United States has recently proved, when it comes to moral outrage at the medieval attitudes of Middle Eastern countries, Western attitudes can all too often be compromised by self-interested commercial imperatives.
The feminist lobby too can get its metaphorical Marks & Spencer knickers in a twist. Half the time some of its sisters are proclaiming (demanding) the right to dress – or indeed go naked – and behave however they like, by which I mean supposedly sexily, and yet simultaneously they’re also campaigning (or some of them are) against men who then erroneously treat them as being at least, on the face of it, ‘potentially available’ for … er … intimate situations and then make an old-fashioned and possibly inelegant inquiry.
Can they have it both ways? Arguably, it seems, yes they can.
And then there’s issue of transgender rights.
One feminist block is all for them – pardon me for whispering it, but given the preponderance of doctors and pyschologists flooding our airwaves with their views at the moment, it seems practically compulsory for all UK secondary school-age children to at least consider switching gender – whilst another group of the sisterhood is balking at the prospect of any boy who one day wakes up and self-identifies as a girl having an absolute right to share toilets and showers with genuine females (as is being put forward as a perfectly acceptable right by some).
And we’ve recently seen reports of both physical violence and vicious abuse on social media between members of the two distinct factions.
I shall probably receive incoming flak for admitting it, but the current obsession with political correctness in the Western world often plays to me as a typical ‘luxury’ afforded only to those living in relatively well-to-do capitalist societies.
Arguably, if the right-on PC brigade really wished to put the world to right, they ought to get out there in the poorest and most deprived Third World countries where the starving poor’s daily priority is all to do with getting enough fresh water and edible food for they and their families to survive to see another dawn.
Meanwhile I offer our PC brothers and sisters a read that may be of some interest and enlightenment – a report from Oliver Milman of New York on a new US Climate Change Assessment report, as appears today upon the website of – THE GUARDIAN
