"...And do black lives still matter? Or are we now supposed to dump that and concentrate on the 'Not all men but most men and we don't know which men so we have to fear all men and we'd better not say the actual words but that includes black men' campaign?"
Judging someone's character and motivations is sometimes more a matter of what you don't see than what you do. Ideological influencers claim to stand for the disadvantaged, but I've discovered a quick way to get a sense of whether they're really there to do that, or merely to use the concept of victimhood for personal gain.
The method entails searching for two keywords, relating to groups that have a very high incidence of disadvantage, and so should, theoretically, figure in the campaigning of someone who claims to be fighting disadvantage. The two keywords are:
“Disabled”
“Elderly”
The idea is to look for each keyword, individually, in a search restricted to the ideologue's Tweets. Here's the format for the search, as entered into the Twitter Search box…
from:@username “disabled”
or
from:@username “elderly”
Replace @username with the actual username of the person you're checking out. Don't change anything else, and make sure you don't add or subtract any spaces. You can also try variations on the theme, such as “disability” and “old age”, just to make sure you're not missing anything.
Okay, so why are we doing this, and what might we find in the search results?…
THE DISABLED AND THE ELDERLY
The keywords “disabled” and “elderly” reveal an enormous amount about ideological influencers. It's less about whether or not those influencers are mentioning disabled and/or elderly people, and more about the context in which they're mentioning them. I'll move onto this shortly, but to set the scene…
The context one would expect from a self-styled champion of victims is direct support. That is, a recognition that disabled and elderly people face special disadvantages and fears, and if not a direct effort to reduce those disadvantages and fears, then at least an attempt to raise awareness of them.
At the moment, we're hearing a lot about how unsafe women feel or are on the streets, and it's an important debate. In my opinion a debate that would get a hell of a lot further without a “most men are…” or a “not all men but…” every other sentence, but it's a debate society needs to have.
I understand that many women have urgent concerns about their safety, and that this creates a worry which never really goes away. I honestly do sympathise and try to put myself into that position mentally. I've always been aware of distance, space and body language, and I do everything I can to minimise concern or discomfort. I welcome being told if I, personally, am getting something wrong. So yes, let's continue to talk about how women can feel and be safer.
But what about people who are old and frail, and who need to walk the streets to buy shopping, or to exercise their dog? Do they not have fears? Do they not ever think: “I'm weak, and I have no realistic means to defend myself. I can't run. What if I got attacked? What if I got overpowered on my doorstep? I live alone. I don't use technology. What happens?” Amid all these fears about safety, are lone elderly people (also a prime target for scammers) not worth one or two awareness Tweets from a champion of disadvantage? One would think so.
And what about people with disabilities? People who struggle with mobility. People who struggle with communication. People who may inadvertently upset or anger someone because they don't communicate to expectation, and who know that, and can't do anything to change it. People who can't hear. People who can't speak. Do they not have fears? Are people with disabilities not worth one or two awareness Tweets from a champion of disadvantage? One would think so…
And do black lives still matter? Or are we now supposed to dump that and concentrate on the “not all men but most men and we don't know which men so we have to fear all men and we'd better not say the actual words but that includes black men” campaign?
I know I'm being facetious, but these are serious issues that need nuanced discussion, and I need to use wake-up tactics. And let me be clear. I'm not having a pop at feminists, or diminishing women's need to voice their concerns. I'm having a pop at everyone who uses these issues, and others like them, as a means to gain clout, rather than seeking to help resolve them.
Serious issues like racism and women's safety need sensitive handling to avoid undoing the progress that previous campaigns have made. To be explicit about what I'm saying, how do black men feel, as a group who are way beyond sick and tired of unfounded suspicion, to be reminded every few tweets that all women are frightened of them? I'm not answering that question. I'm asking it.
Remember, the cry of "but men tho" is not one person making one point, once. It's masses of people chanting a meme with no solution gameplan, on an endless loop, like a playground taunt. The common intention is not to solve. It's to win applause.
And how is an actual abuser going to react to that? With contrition? Or with malice? These nuances are not being considered, and they need to be.
We live in an age where, rather than being addressed, deadly serious issues are hijacked and turned into tools of self-service. By commercial enterprise looking for virtue points. By writers looking to sell books. By marketers looking to serve ads. By drones looking for applause. And none of these parties are known for handling sensitive issues with sensitivity.
So with this post, I'm aiming to separate the people who really care about disadvantage, from those who just want to weaponise and exploit disadvantage for their own personal gain. And the way I've chosen to expose that is by throwing the spotlight onto two groups of people with demonstrably high levels of disadvantage, but who have low value to rabble-rousers and virtue-trend-hoppers because, crudely speaking, they don't generate enough clout. Those groups are the disabled and the elderly.
My theory is that when supposed champions of the disadvantaged ignore, or worse, weaponise the disabled and the elderly, they are not really about overturning inequality. They are about clout. Let's see how that panned out in practice…
TWITTER STUDY
I did a study on the use of the words “disabled” and “elderly” within ideological Twitter profiles, and despite starting out with pretty low expectations, I was still shocked. I found that while both disabled and elderly people were commonly recognised as disadvantaged (disability more than old age), they were very rarely supported in any shape or form.
In fact, I found disability and old age, if mentioned at all, were most commonly just weaponised against an opposing ideological group. For example, a men's rights activist repeatedly linking to news stories about women taking advantage of disabled people, but never actually tweeting anything that might help people with disabilities face less fear, prejudice or disadvantage.
These keywords can cut to the core of an ideologue's real motivations and priorities - which are much more often to attack rival groups for rabble-rousing purposes than to actually help people with disadvantages. Remember, if influencers are weaponising disability and old age, they understand the vulnerability of the two groups. But they're choosing to ignore those people's high-priority disadvantages and simply USE them as a weapon. That's the real violation. It's not negligence. It's a wilful preference for USING disabled and elderly people over and above helping to address their issues.
And in my admittedly limited study sample, intersectionals aside, feminist ideologues fared no better than MRAs. The intersectional feminists in my sample did speak up for disabled and elderly people without weaponising. But there were MRAs who did too - more so than two major non-intersectional feminists, one of whom did not mention the elderly at all. In fairness, whilst the two non-intersectionals in question had the word “feminist” in their bio and are widely identified as 'career feminists', they're really marketers using emotive issues as a self-publicising tool. Most people orchestrating the gender war - on both sides - conform to that template.
And this is where nearly all hand-me-down, repetitive memes and slogans come from. Not from welfare orgs tasked with reducing disadvantage. But from digital marketers tasked with attracting disposable income. Think about that next time you wonder why 99% of ideological memes have no solution gameplan whatsoever, and are merely attacks on perceived enemies. As Barack Obama famously said, that's not activism. But most of the pawns in ideological wars still think it is.
The elderly were particularly roundly neglected by our supposed champions of the disadvantaged. Even among the bigger names it can be hard to find any mention of the elderly. And when you do, rarely is it a call for support. In fact, I didn't find a single one supposed champion of victimhood in the MRA or feminist category specifically saying “Let's do better for the lone elderly members of our community”. None.
One can only conclude that this is because the elderly are not well represented on Twitter. Therefore the ideologues, whose goal is typically, let's face it, solely to mobilise victimhood for attention, see no point in mentioning them. Simply, there are not enough eighty-somethings and ninety-somethings on Twitter to hit the engagement buttons, so “bollocks to 'em”.
The keyword “disabled” also unearthed some worrying views. A claim, for example, that disabled people have privilege if they belong to a “privileged sex”. That particular slice of stupid came from a notoriously regurgitant “male feminist” who cites himself as a doctor. He did concede that the privilege is tempered by the disadvantages of disability, but imagine saying out loud that a disabled man has male privilege. It encapsulates the insanity of the gender war, where there are no individuals, only groups, and the theory does not allow for any form of exception. It's striking parallels with religion, in that the beliefs and memes, no matter how stupid, are upheld on pain of blasphemy.
I encountered fully pejorative uses of the word “disabled” from the other side of the political divide. A sore illustration of the fact that these ideological wars are really about pandering to a home audience. Unless they can be used as a weapon to beat the opposition, anyone outside that home audience gets no consideration at all - whatever their plight.
As I say, the study proved pretty shocking given that I was looking at people who are shaping public attitudes. Collectively, we're seeing a catastrophic distortion of entitlement in which strong, young and fully able people have somehow clambered to the top of the victim priority list and genuinely believe they're the most deserving of sympathy, aid and/or political intervention.
Extreme examples of this include the Incels, some of whom believe that their inability to attract women, whom they don't even see as human, makes them such victims that… and brace yourself for this… That they should be sent free prostitutes, by the Government, at the taxpayer's expense. Sex as a welfare service. This is modern victimhood. This is what happens when thought leaders will not stand up and say:
“Seriously! Get a fucking grip!”
And if they're in it for clout and/or money, thought leaders will not stand up and say “Seriously! Get a fucking grip!” to the home crowd. They just won't. It's unheard of. So more and more stupidity runs unchecked, and is reflected back and forth. Meanwhile, less and less priority need is acknowledged. Some of the nation's most disadvantaged people don't even have the Internet. But no one ever mentions them. They don't exist.
When we had the first UK COVID lockdown in spring 2020, I wondered what people who normally used libraries to go online would do, given that all the libraries had closed. I searched Twitter to see what people were saying about it. I found one Tweet.
ONE TWEET.
One person on the whole of Twitter who expressed a concern that this incredibly vulnerable group could not access the Internet. She was not a politician. She was not a welfare group rep. She was just an ordinary person who happened to consider the issue and care about it. But the most sobering blow was the knowledge that all of the library-reliant Web users cared about it. Their voices were only silent because, as I'd feared, their one means of raising the issue on a public discussion platform had been cut off.
Let's be aware of the issues that people face. But let's prioritise them sensibly, and let's remember that it's the quietest voices that tend to need the most help. Not the loudest.
I know this post is controversial. And I know it's a hiding to nothing, because it attacks both sides of the ideological spectrum. But there has to be some content on the Internet that is not driven by personal aspiration and a desperation for applause. If you're not used to seeing such content. This is what it looks like.