Falsehoods are running amok

I don’t know how much of a shock this will come to you as — perhaps none, because you are deeply prejudiced people, subconsciously guided by your inner fascist. So, an ‘activist’ called Vicky Osterweil has caused a bit of a stir in the USA with a book advocating the looting of private property as a means of redistributing wealth and dismantling capitalism. Violence and pillaging enables well-informed, politically aware activists like Vicky to acquire worldly possessions without recourse to the reactionary and frankly tiresome notion of working for a living.

No shock or surprise in any of that to me: you can probably do a degree in Radical Looting these days. The revelation instead is that Vicky was writing the same sort of stuff some years ago under the name Willie Osterweil. Since then, Osterweil has dropped the Willie, perhaps both in a titular and very real sense and now lives in a ‘trans-femme lesbian’ relationship with a woman called Sophie Lewis, who refers to Vicky as her ‘wusband’. I only found out about this by digging around after I had seen a photograph of Osterweil which… you know, without being unkind, sort of aroused my suspicions. I was immediately struck by the inverse astonishment to that which once famously possessed Aero-smith: Lady looks like a dude! Does it matter, really? I suppose not.

In my straitened, illiberal and Manichean mind, people who advocate looting and some of those who wish to change their sex are possessed of mental challenges relating to the denial of reality. Much as are white activists who, like Jessica Krug, pretend to the world that they are black and even scream ‘White trash!’ at their white neighbours and ask them not to do white stuff such as jogging. In short, people like that are not quite right in the head.