I have saved all my contact and their contract and the correspondence we had over the past few weeks. This will not be for publication, saved in drafts.

I have also shown here where I have edited my research to quite a considerable degree

Blog for this session

Since last session
Any thoughts or actions of note since last session?

Yea very difficult to have to cut so much interesting research would really liked to have included more just felt it was getting too wide ranging. It felt like every new topic opened up 5 more topics and i got further and further away from my original point.
Update on tasks
What work did you begin/complete in this session?

Marked out a good amount of my research and refocused my efforts on the specific area I wanted to cover
Did you fulfil tasks as outlined in project management plan?

Yes
Are you on track to meet next deadline?

Yes
Did you have enough time to complete the tasks?

Not really as I was playing catch up on the rest of the class
Risks/issues
Did you identify any risks/issues with lack of skills required to deliver tasks?

yes the risks were spreading my ideas too far and too thinly I was able to over come this by being ruthless with my ideas and killing only those strong enough to help me make my point.
Did you bring these to the tutor’s attention?

Yes however I found it very difficult to broach ideas with the lecturer for fear of being embarrassed in front of the class as my topic was an unpopular one and very easy to shoot down. One particular occasion comes to mind. When the lecturer took issue with some of the Feminist’s that I quoted. It was his assertion that what I was quoting was not true or representative. I have not got an issue with a lecturer disagreeing with me. What I do however take exception to is the lecturer exclaiming out loud for the whole class to hear and pass judgement on. Also the Lecturers assistant was particularly hostile to some or really any and all of my ideas. I had the distinct feeling of being ganged up on. The Lecturer stormed off to his room and brought back a huge big intimidating book that he slammed down on to my table and vitriolically exclaimed “THERE READ THAT” to which a audible gasp and snicker rippled across the computer room. I do not so much have an issue with what he did but the manner in which it was done. I may come across as loud or opinionated but correct me if I am wrong but the teacher does owe me a duty of care not to ridicule and make fun of me, moreover do it in front of an audience backed up by a student teacher that never misses an opportunity assert what little authority she has.

I do realise the apparent stupidity of criticising the very people who will be grading my assignment but although it is counter intuitive I must press on because I do and did feel what I was feeling, it was not just in my imagination. I was embarrassed and deeply let down by the fact that this type and calibre of teaching is permitted to go on. It is foolish to tell the emperor that he is not wearing any clothes but it is the truth and so I must report the facts as I see them no doubt others will have a differing opinion. My only hope is that they can allow there minds to be open enough to see that maybe to some degree I do have a point in some of what I am attempting to say.

 

What was their response?

no response again my emails continue to go unanswered
Problems
What barriers did you encounter in this session?

Being embarrassed and shamed publicly by the lecturer
How did you overcome these barriers?

I tried not to cry in front of the class to be honest I’m quite good at hiding my insecurities I usually just try to brush it off and not give them the satisfaction. But I cannot deny I did go home and was emotional in the privacy of my own home. It was tough coming in the next day though but I got through it.
New ideas and global changes
Were there changes made to the project direction/management plan/deadlines this session?
Personal reflection
How did you feel when you encountered barriers in this session?

Marginalised and ganged up on, like my opinions were unpopular and no amount of evidence i provided was going to change there minds my ideas are not that of the college and so will be ignored marginalised and put down. I though the point was to have better ideas not to quell any voices of decent.
How well have you performed?

As well as can be expected

 

Hell Hath no Fury like a straight white Male Scorned

Young People online 24:7

Bart: It’s just hard not to listen tot TV: it’s spent so much more time raising us than you have.

The transformation of T.V into the internet has had a significant impact on how we consume media and as Bart rightly says it is hard to ignore because it spends so much time raising.

Joanna fortune in the Irish times writes that “The average teenager will check their social media upwards of 60 times a day, and we cannot underestimate the impact on the developing adolescent brain of being switched on 24:7.” Aug, 22nd 2016.

Angela Nagle further elaborates that “social media platforms are where most young people now develop their political ideas for the first time” in her book “kill all Normies”.

Harry Mc Gee back in 2015 commented that “Social media has played a significant role in shaping the debate and mobilising voters in the same-sex marriage referendum, according to preliminary figures compiled by campaigns.”

According to H+A Marketing+PR Snapchat and Instagram are the most popular social channels for Irish teens (96% and 92% respectively). Facebook chases behind at 87%. The top reasons for using social media are for entertainment (57%), to communicate with others (51%) and to keep in touch with family and friends (47%). Interestingly, for 8 – 12-year olds in Ireland, for the 45% that use social media, YouTube accounts for 78% of this usage and Snapchat falls behind at 57% and Instagram at 41%.

Insert info graphic

Identity politics

Tom walker explains identity politics: https://www.instagram.com/p/BiWtgnwF023/?utm_source=ig_share_sheet&igshid=gzolfkaqqe3y 

Identity politics is categorising someone by their gender, sexual orientation or race. Franky Gafney described it in an article titled “Identity politics is utterly ineffective at anything other than dividing people”. In it he outlined why it is unfair by asserting that “Straight white male” is an identity I didn’t choose. I mean it wasn’t a decision I had any say in, what sexuality, race, or gender I am. I was born this way. But also, “straight white male” was never something I chose to “identify” as. At various times if you’d asked me about my identity, I might have said “Irish”, “a Dub”, or “working class”, but never straight, white, or male – let alone the arbitrary combination of all three. But people who talk a lot about “choice” and “freedom” chose for me, and decided that’s what my identity should be reduced to.

Jordan Peterson explains ‘the problem with the fractionation by group identity is that it’s endless, there’s no way of insuring equality across groups because there’s an infinite number of groups’. https://medium.com/@vinewalker/the-blind-spot-in-jordan-petersons-critique-of-identity-politics-5bd10b65e551

John Watters elaborated further on identity politics “Essentially, it elavates certain groups over the remainder of society and by its very existence declares that there is no such thing as justice, since justice can exist only if it is available to everyone. If it is not available on the same basis to everyone, it is not justice”

Even Sinead Redomnd had to conceded that “Working-class ‘straight white men’ in Ireland don’t have it easy these days. They never did. They are ignored by a political class that couldn’t care less about them. They should have a say in the decisions that affect their lives, but they often don’t” in her counter article to Gafneys  titled “cop on comerades”

The Right starts to organise after Gamergate

So the young people today are online all the time and the climate on the net is one of division. Gamer gate The commonly cited start-point is one of classic scandal and rumour. Angry ex-boyfriend of a female game developer writes a long rant about how the game developer had intimate relations with a game journalist and received positive coverage for her game. Although the allegations have been disproven, they were a spark to a smouldering powder keg .https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/games/gamers/opinion-gamergate-in-all-its-glory-30690825.html
Angela Nagle writes in her book “kill all normies”Gemergate brought gamers, rightest chan culture, anti feminism and the online far right closer to mainstreeam discussion and it also politicised a broad group of young people, mostly boys, who organised tactics around the idea of fighting back against the culture war being waged by the cultural far left”.
https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/games/gamers/opinion-gamergate-in-all-its-glory-30690825.html

So because of this perceived unfair division the young rightest chan culture began to organise this was helped along by the death of mainstream media. I myself found it hilarious that college Lecturers were actually arguing the point that it was not dying and so I was and am forced to explain how and why its dead dying or at the very least terminally ill.

Nagle makes this point quite eloquently “it is hard to think of a better term than Gramscian to describe what they (the alt right) have strategically achieved, as a movement almost entirely based on influencing culture and shifting the Overton window through media and culture, not just formal politics they succeeded by bypassing the dying mainstream media and creating an internet culture and alternative media of their own from the ground up”

Kathy Sheridan asks in her Irish times article “Why would a top digital media journalist want to risk his livelihood and drown his talents in the derided old MSM (mainstream media), perceived by many – gloatingly – as a dead man walking?” https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/kathy-sheridan-holding-mainstream-media-to-account-in-era-of-fake-news-1.3399030

Nagel writes “Left cyberutopians claimed that “establishment old media could no longer control politics, that the new public sphere was going to be based on leaderless user generated social media”.

The Left Gets Nutty with INTERSECTIONALITY

This is where it gets silly frankly Nagle explains that “The main preoccupation of this new culture was gender fluidity and providing a safe space to explore other concerns like mental ill-health, physical disability, race cultural identity and intersectionality – the now standard academic term for recognition of multiple varieties of intersecting marginalisation and opperssions”. 

The sociologist, Patricia Hill Collins, describes such people as being subject to “interlocking systems of oppression”, as their lives are marked by “intersectionality”, that is, they are disadvantaged by virtue of their gender, race, and class, for instance. https://www.thejournal.ie/readme/column-irelands-political-system-must-embrace-diversity-to-foster-justice-809240-Feb2013/

Nagle outlines that the left mirrored the right in the opposite way when “Symbolic representatives and diversity and recognition became its goals as it admonished transgressors for erasing my identity and urged white straight men to ‘listen and believe”. 

So never mind due process or innocent until proven guilty  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDBiLT3LASk

Gender and Sex are culturally constructed

“One is not born a woman but rather becomes a woman” wrote french feminist and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir in 1949 by 1990 Judith Butler had taken this several steps further, or perhaps more literally, in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity, in which she argued that the coherence of the categories of sex, gender and sexuality were entirely culturally constructed through repetition of styled and cultivated bodily acts, which created the appearance of an essential ontological ‘core’ gender

In his 1948 work Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Kinsey writes, “Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats … The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects” (Kinsey 1948).

 

Sex and gender are not the same  However, sociologists and most other social scientists view sex and gender as conceptually distinct. Sex refers to physical or physiological differences between males and females, including both primary sex characteristics (the reproductive system) and secondary characteristics such as height and muscularity.

Gender is a term that refers to social or cultural distinctions associated with being male or female. Gender identity is the extent to which one identifies as being either masculine or feminine (Diamond 2002).

The terms “sex” and “gender” refer to two different identifiers. Sex denotes biological characteristics differentiating males and females, while gender denotes social and cultural characteristics of masculine and feminine behavior. Sex and gender are not always synchronous. Individuals who strongly identify with the opposing gender are considered transgender.

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/atd-bmcc-sociology/chapter/sex-and-gender/

 

7c) A person’s sex, as determined by his or her biology, does not always correspond with his or her gender. Therefore, the terms sex and gender are not interchangeable. A baby boy who is born with male genitalia will be identified as male. As he grows, however, he may identify with the feminine aspects of his culture.
8a) one thing that cant be denied is their remarkable success in spreading their ideas through their own alternative and almost exclusively online media content in the absence of traditional media, political establishment bodies or other institutional support. It appear as though in the online culture wars those heeding the ideas of the left most closely, from Chomsky’s idea of manufacturing consent to Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and counter hegemony and applying them most strategically were the right
9a) Most of us have grown up learning to appease men. How to give them our space, how to deal with the fact that they dominate any political discussions, that they are paid more, heard more and believed more. However, most of us expect that the men we work with in all the social justice movements we are part of should have at least considered how they are complicit in this domination when they refuse to recognise that it exists. Patriarchy forces men into roles that damage them as well as us. Most of us have men that we love, admire and respect in our lives and for that reason, not only because it damages and diminishes the life experiences of women, we should all be fighting patriarchy together.
9b) There are women who say it’s been so unfair for so long that if a few innocent men get wrongfully accused, that’s a price they are happy to pay. https://www.bbc.com