Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Britain's Political Police

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Feb. 6, 2019 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

17:03

Britain's Political Police

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	So about a week ago, I made a video called The Progressive Police of Virtue and Vice, which was a kind of joke title to describe Britain's police forces as kind of like the progressive matawa, the the police of vice and virtue from Saudi Arabia and various other Muslim countries that go around actively patrolling the populace for their compliance with Islamic values.
	And this is literally happening in Britain now with intersectionality.
	Today the spectator published an article called Why are the police stopping a 74-year-old tweeting about transgenderism?
	And that is a really, really good question, isn't it?
	If one were feeling charitable, perhaps one would say that the police are aware of the hyper-restrictive and sensitive nature of hate speech laws in this country.
	The fact that thousands of people are getting pulled up each year over the sensitive nature of the things that they've posted on social media to which someone has taken offence.
	Because that's honestly what it's based on now.
	Other people's perception of what you've written.
	Just whether they felt offended.
	Totally subjective.
	No solid line.
	That is the solid line.
	Just did you feel like it?
	Which, in many cases, I think translates to, do you feel the need to be malevolent to this person?
	And I think that you are in fact giving them license to be able to do this.
	Where the police have actively tried to do this, even if they've done it in a polite and well-mannered and perhaps well-intentioned way, they are still trying to suppress other people's liberty to protect intersectionality and the feelings of the people that it deigns to concern itself with.
	Margaret Nelson is a 74-year-old woman who lives in a village in Suffolk.
	On Monday morning, she was woken by a telephone call.
	It was an officer from Suffolk Police.
	The officer wanted to speak to Mrs. Nelson about her Twitter account and her blog.
	On her blog, Margaret describes herself as a humanist celebrant.
	And presumably she's quite a left-leaning individual.
	As after looking at her Twitter account, I've noticed she's been retweeting Graham Lynan.
	And apparently, and I didn't know this before I started recording this, the Norfolk Police once turned up at Graham Lynan's house.
	He is what is known as a TERF, a trans-exclusionary radical feminist.
	And this puts him in a state of open war with the intersectional feminists.
	And apparently, this extends to the Norfolk Police turning up at his house.
	I don't like the fact that I have to defend the TERFs.
	They are usually, as I said in my previous video, people I would enjoy mocking, but the police should have nothing to say to them on the subject of gender.
	And the fact that the police do have something to say to them on the subject of gender, that the police feel that it's their job to go and give their bloody opinions on it because of whatever diversity training they've had, really disturbs me.
	I think this is the police going way beyond the bounds of what is reasonable for a police officer to be concerned about.
	And so I'm afraid that I think that the police are just in the wrong for having done any of this, even if they don't take any action whatsoever.
	Among the statements that she made on Twitter last month, which apparently concerned the police officer according to the spectator, gender is BS, pass it on.
	Another one.
	Gender's fashionable nonsense.
	Sex is real.
	I've no reason to feel ashamed of stating the truth.
	The bloody annoying ones are those who use words like cis or turf, another BS, and relegate biological women to a subset.
	Sorry you believe the mythology.
	This is actually a really fascinating statement and a really great demonstration of the ideological war that's going on within feminism as a movement between the biologically essentialist TERFs and the social constructivist intersectionals.
	And the intersectionals are by far winning, as you can see, because they are the ones who have the police on their side.
	The TERFs are losing this battle so badly, it honestly looks like within the next couple of years, the terms that the TERFs use to describe gender and women and who is and is not a woman may well start to be interpreted as hate crimes or something.
	I think that the intersectionals are so successful in this war that I think they're going to effectively criminalize their opponents and end up sending the TERFs to jail as political prisoners.
	The worst part for the TERFs is that this is not a bad point.
	Gender's fashionable nonsense.
	Sex is real.
	That's true by the social constructivist interpretation.
	They think that gender is socially constructed.
	So to them, saying it's fashionable nonsense is not an objectionable statement.
	Gender roles are different in, or at least express in different ways in different countries, very clearly.
	They know that, and it's one of the core arguments they use to undermine the connection between sex and gender.
	If gender is so changeable and has changed over the centuries in our own countries, then how connected to sex can it really be?
	Therefore, it's just a social construct, therefore, biology is not really a real thing.
	And now when we've got the sort of modern technologies to be able to understand how hormones affect the body and things like this, they can actually make the case for biology being a lot more malleable than it probably was when this woman was growing up.
	But the fact that they want to use hormones to make biology more malleable also demonstrates that sex must be real.
	Otherwise, what are you trying to do when you add hormones to someone's body that weren't there previously?
	There must be some real thing you're trying to change one thing into another for, otherwise you wouldn't be doing it in the first place.
	So this is a totally fair statement from the TERF position and the intersectional position.
	They both have to accept that that is true.
	She then identifies the people that we're talking about.
	The bloody annoying ones are those who use words like cis or turf and other BS and relegate biological women to a subset.
	That is actually a really good observation to make and identifies the crux of the problem.
	The TERFs, the biological essentialists, believe that the biological sex female is where the gender role of woman is derived from.
	And the social constructivists put the social construction of woman first and then find various ways of decoupling this from biological reality to the point where we're just supposed to accept it when someone says it.
	But a lot of them are very fluid on this particular point.
	And honestly, I don't even know how they would describe it themselves.
	I mean, I can think of several potential reasons that they might give, but I think that it might be best just, you know, trying to find these people for yourself and seeing what they tell you.
	Because I think there are going to be many, many long-winded postmodern arguments, and I think they're all going to be as substantial as the breeze.
	Personally, I am of the opinion that the gender role of woman is derived from the biological role of female, which is why there is a 99% male-female even binary split with a very tiny number of people who aren't sure where they fall.
	I just believe that is the correct interpretation of the empirical reality that we see, and I'm afraid that the social constructivists, I believe, are just flat wrong and frankly, in denial.
	Mrs. Nelson also wrote, if a transgender person's body was dissected either for medical education or post-mortem examination, his or her sex would be obvious to a student or pathologist.
	Not the sex that he or she chose to present as, but his or her natal sex.
	The sex that he or she was born with.
	Even when a body has been buried for a very long time, so there is no soft tissue left, any bone, it's still possible to identify the sex.
	DNA and characteristics such as the shape of the pelvis will be clear proof of the sex of the corpse.
	Well, this is true as long as I suppose the person hasn't undergone any sustained process of hormone treatment.
	I imagine that these things do change over time, after a long enough time of being on hormone therapy and stuff, but I'm no such expert.
	But even if it's not true, she's still making an argument.
	She's still trying to back it up with what she believes to be facts, things that she can demonstrate to be true, and it's an argument that people should have with her.
	It's not something that is an attack on someone, and I don't really see how you can consider this offensive, even if this is a sensitive subject to you.
	If you cannot discuss the subject in terms like these, then what you're saying is you cannot discuss the subject.
	This is how Mrs. Nelson described her conversation with the police.
	The officer said she wanted to talk to me about some of the things I'd written on Twitter and my blog.
	She said that some of the things that I'd written could have upset or offended transgender people.
	So could I please stop writing things like that?
	And perhaps I could remove those posts and tweets.
	That's the police going too far.
	People, presumably activists, being upset or offended that this lady is discussing sex and gender in whichever terms that she likes, really.
	That isn't something that the police should be concerning themselves with.
	They're not threatening her with any kind of legal action or anything like this.
	They're just being moral busybodies.
	Mrs. Nelson should be free to be able to upset or offend transgender people by writing something on her blog.
	And because she is at liberty to do it, the police should have no opinion on it.
	Why transgenders over other people?
	It's very obvious what agenda they are serving.
	You shouldn't be telling people what not to write because it might offend or upset someone.
	That's for that person to deal with themselves.
	And surely you have something better to do with your time.
	Giving the police a moral mission beyond enforcing the law, I think, is very concerning.
	Because I really think that that's leading us down a road of for the greater good.
	To the point where the police are actively trying to impose a moral order on the citizenry, not a legal one, a moral one.
	Mrs. Nelson replied to the request to remove the posts and tweets by saying, I asked the officer if she agreed that free speech was important.
	She said it was.
	I said in that case, she'd understand that I wouldn't be removing the posts or stopping saying the things that I think.
	She accepted that, and that was the end of the conversation.
	And she also said that the officer made no suggestion that anything she had done was illegal.
	She says the officer gave no reason for the call.
	The Suffolk Police provided one on Twitter.
	Hi, Margaret.
	We had a number of people contact us on social media about the comments made online.
	A follow-up call was made for no other reason to raise awareness of the complaints.
	Kindergart's web team.
	Well, that's not strictly true, is it?
	I mean, it seems that the reason that the call was made was to prevent her from carrying on putting up tweets and blog posts about this subject in a way that offends a certain subset of activists.
	I mean, that answer does seem like it's not really addressing the core complaint of what is happening and is kind of whitewashing the implications of what you're doing.
	I am sure that the Suffolk Police are operating with the best of intentions, but you have to see that the authority of the police force is being abused to try and enforce a moral agenda in favour of one side of a political argument over another.
	That makes the police partisans for intersectionality.
	That makes the police a moral enforcement agency, because the police have moral authority, because they are meant to act in an ethical way.
	However, I don't believe that this is what I would consider to be an ethical practice for the police, ironically, by adopting an ethical agenda.
	At least an agenda that goes beyond their remit as keepers of the peace and enforcers of the laws.
	And the thing that bothers me the most is because this is violating what I would consider to be the principle of policing by consent that we hold in this country from the very founding of the police force itself.
	The British Police Force was properly founded in 1829, and it was founded on nine particular principles that made up what they defined as policing by consent.
	And these principles have underpinned British policing ever since until this day.
	And in many ways, these are an absolute testament to the British brilliance of prioritising the process above the ideal.
	The method by which one gets to one's destination is more important than what destination you have even chosen.
	Because it doesn't really matter where you go, as long as the method by which you used to get there is fair and just.
	Principle one is to prevent crime and disorder as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.
	Principle two is to recognize that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.
	And principle three is to recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing cooperation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.
	That's why it's wrong for me to fight the police.
	The whole point of this is that I agree that if I am accused of doing something wrong and the police come to arrest me, I'm to go with them peacefully so I can prove my case before a jury of my peers.
	This is what I would consider to be the civilized way of doing things and prevents the police from becoming tyrannical.
	There's a reason that people in Britain aren't fighting the cops.
	We're not like in France right now.
	The yellow vest protests are still taking place in France and they're becoming increasingly more brutal.
	The other day, the leader of the yellow vests had his eye shot out by the police.
	It has been unreal seeing some of the stuff that's been circulating on social media and we are not having that problem in Britain.
	And that is because of principle five.
	To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law in complete independence of policy and without the regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws.
	It is this commitment to the impartiality of the institution that the police are currently breaking.
	It is this principle that the police are violating when they call someone on the grounds of being concerned about their offences towards intersectionality.
	It is not illegal for her to write that blog.
	Therefore the police should have no opinion.
	Because intersectionality is the policy, not the law.
	And that's what the police officer was doing when they've called any of these people about any of this.
	It is a partisan intervention on favour of one side against another.
	And I believe that it is adherence to these principles that makes the British police a model from which the rest of the world should look to with envy.
	So when the police violate these principles, I am very concerned.
	And I really think it bodes poorly for the moral health and the political stability of the country when you start doing these sort of things.
	And I know that sounds terribly drastic, but this is happening very regularly.
	And I really don't like the road that this goes down.
	And we've only just started.
	We're at the very beginning of that road at the moment, but I really don't like where it goes.
	And I think that now is the opportune time for us to say, you know what?
	I don't think this is a road we should go down.
	I don't think we should be having the police as some kind of moral enforcer for a particular kind of partisan policy that the government happen to be in love with right now.
	I think a more fundamentalist approach to the fifth principle of policing by consent is definitely required now.
	And I think that that should be emphasized strongly to police officers by commissioners all across the country.
	This is something that I can't stress enough that I feel is deeply integral to the maintenance of the British state and society in the way that it was handed down to us.
	And I think that if we don't hand that down to our descendants, then we are being irresponsible.

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