“It’s Easy, Common Sense” Means They Obviously Don’t Get It.
According to some, the answer to trans people, queer people, immigrants and crime is just obvious. They only think that because they are cruel.
Important note: I will be using archive.is for my links, so the original I am referencing will be preserved. Online resources are under attack and fact is being rewritten to suit fiction. This way, even if a crank army overwhelm Wikipedia or a news publication is strong-armed into taking an article down, you can still see the knowledge I’m sharing.
To hear some people, you’d think the ills of the world were easy to solve. Like, brainlessly easy. “Gimme five minutes and a biro”-easy. They genuinely think that everyone else — be they in any form of power or arguing that things might be a scootch more complicated than that — are feckless idiots. We just don’t get it, but they do. It’s easy. It’s common sense.
This class of person spans a lot of strata, groups and demographics.
In the UK, take Nigel Farage as an example. To him, the answers are obvious: stop people moving to the UK, tell Europe to get stuffed, brutalise criminals and lower taxes. It’s easy. It’s common sense.
Elon Musk, the International Man With No Brain, is of the same mindset. Smart people should have more kids. Cut government until someone dies then restore it to just before that. Don’t censor anyone or anything.
His master Donald is no different. According to him, the previous administration and all its employees sat around 8 hours a day with pencils up their noses whilst forking over money to scientists to make mice trans. Luckily, it would be easy to fix. Common sense. He was going to bring down prices in the USA on Day One and “make America affordable again”.
The gender-critters who control discourse in the UK are the same again. Everything is easy. You can always tell a trans, they only recently appeared and are a threat. Solving them is easy: it’s common sense, innit? You can’t change gender. Simple.
It’s like a variant on the UK pub staple: the Pub Bore. He holds court at the bar, with his pint and a little circle of cronies, on every topic under the sun. He may not know anything but he reckons a great deal. He’s a bit like an improv artist: all he needs is a “latest fad” topic and a zeitgeist-y issue. He’ll take a preparatory swill from his pint, take a deep breath so he’s puffed up like a pair of bellows and off he’ll go. It’s all easy. It’s all common sense. Use your loaf!
There’s no topic they can’t oversimplify. No issue they can’t muddy. No trite, un-evidenced bon-mot they won’t smugly burble. They’re helping, you see.
Then it falls to the rest of us to try to explain the myriad errors, lies and misunderstandings they’ve just Gish-galloped through. We know it’s hopeless to convince them, but perhaps we might convince someone else watching.
My dad was, and I assume still is, one of these people. His answers to everything were always simple common sense, and usually as brutal as you would expect from an utter psychopath. His assertions would be laughable if he hadn’t used the same mode of thinking to make everyone in his life miserable and traumatised.
Drugs? Simple. Shoot them on site, like what they do in China. That’ll get the message across.
Immigrants? Blow up the boats. Kids and all. Especially the kids. They’re all grown men coming to make little brown babies, anyway.
Gays and whatever? Smack ’em about. That’ll give them something to protest about. Show ’em what discrimination is.
Blacks? They’re just [N-words]. Ship ’em all back to Africa then nuke it. Everyone there is just genetically evil.
Women just aren’t as smart as men. End of. Common sense.
I’m paraphrasing, but some of those are near-enough direct quotes. Yes, that thing about everyone in Africa being ‘genetically evil’ is one of them.
On and on, like a character the British satirical comic Viz would create and then throw out because he wasn’t funny — he was just obnoxious. The political equivalent of scraping nails down a chalkboard. An absolute, unadulterated, unfettered arsehole who nobody should look to for serious comment.
People like this aren’t new. They exist in the same space as Andrew Tate and JK Rowling. Back in the day, the entirety of these people’s public influence would have been a 20-second on-the-street interview for the Six O’Clock News about current affairs. You know, where they ask passing randos what they think about the price of bananas, if they can tell Bisto from the next leading gravy maker or whether-or-not it’s spelt ‘grey’ or ‘gray’.
What unites them all is an almost supernatural unsuitability to the roles they are now playing in our world. Rowling was abused by her ex husband, so now she knows all about trans people? Tate is a role model for some young men? Farage, descended from the Huguenots, a multi-millionaire former commodities trader in the City, is the spokesman for the working class? Donald Trump is going to save America — the same Trump who has mob connections up the wazoo, used a ghostwriter for his “Art of the Deal” bestseller and is such a lousy businessman his casino went bankrupt?
Darling, sweet child, do you know how mindbendingly bad you have to be at business to fail at a casino? It’s a business model wherein customers arrive, give you money for a slim chance to win more money and then leave when they fail. For Trump to bankrupt a casino means he is either an absolute, complete and utter numbskull or it was some sort of mob money-laundering scheme.
What amplified these utter goons to their current roles, with Rowling as Living God-Queen of Feminists and Trump / Farage as Emissaries of the Working Class? Social media. It has monetised the most ugly human emotions for a quick ad buck and, as such, catapulted these dreadful people to popularity and stardom far beyond their natural place or skill.
Remember the smug Pub Bore from earlier? These characters are no different. They don’t want to know better or learn anything — they want the world to change to fit what they reckon and they don’t care about who it will hurt. Their nonsense about the answers being easy are only easy because they have taken intellectual shortcuts — like making people suffer in cruel and unusual ways — because they simply don’t care.
On the day my rights got rolled back so I can no longer legally use the women’s washroom (the washroom I have used for over a decade), Rowling was baking her plastic-surgery on her private mega-yacht in the Bahamas. She isn’t fighting for any physical reality she can experience, she’s fighting because of what she reckons and thinks that more important than any evidence to the contrary.
It’s telling that so many feckless Internet comments run from the same playbook of trying to be The Pub Bore. Maybe they hope to score a juicy dose of attention for their intentionally boneheaded, obtuse, it’s easy, common sense asininery.
The danger with being The Pub Bore is that, sooner or later, you may well say the wrong thing in earshot of the wrong person… and then get a sock-in-the-chops as a convincer. Take these pugilists, all leading with the chin:
Dr. King observed, and I paraphrase, that “until time can change a man’s heart, the law will make him change his behaviour”. Rulings like the UK Supreme Court, on top of a decade of almost 100% negative media coverage of trans issues in the UK, have let people know it’s OK to attack us. They truly can indulge in the hate and ignorance in their hearts. See:
If our law will not serve to deter this now unleashed behaviour, and if the anti-trans crowd want to insist everything we do is a violent assault, then it’s only a matter of time before someone fights back.
You see, best beloved, the Stonewall riot started as a protest. But then the people there got pushed too far. They got insulted and roughed-up once too often. Then someone picked up a brick.
I didn’t see a single gender-critter or TERF countering us in London on Saturday. I did see some pro-trans writing (in chalk) on a statue, and that’s now being investigated as a misogynist hate-crime by the same Metropolitan Police who refuse to investigate the death of drag artist Heklina. That’s why we chant “F*** the Police”. I see plenty of arm-chair heroes in Internet comments saying what they’d like to do to us.
That protest yesterday, of over 20,000 people, was put together at the last minute on a bank holiday weekend. The next time we do it, and do it we shall, there will be more people to organise, disrupt and be very loud. We’ll keep doing it until these nonsense rulings are reversed. These genius Pub Bores, Internet cranks and commenters should come along and tell us again what we are and why we’re sick. Make us pick up 20,000 bricks.
Postscript: Tuesday, 22nd April, Labour MPs are saying the police should also investigate our chants at the rally as ‘utterly unacceptable language’, presumably because one called Starmer a wanker (which he is) and Rowling a c*nt (which she is). The rightwing newspaper frontpages are pearl-clutching over the various architects of this ruling getting ‘vile abuse’, which translates to being told to choke on a c*ck on Twitter. This is not new, they did this during Section 28. They did this to the miners. They do it to BLM and to Muslims. See it for what it is!
Not done reading? Try more of my articles on LGBTQ issues or my definitive resource-pack on transphobia.
