Oh pleeez. I am a feminist of some longevity and I never read Wilde’s essay and thought he wasn’t talking about me.

Really? How nice for you. Have you read it?

It is laughable to lay such an asinine politically correct burden on the wily Wilde and frankly makes me think how anal and rigid are the very people who accuse leftists of being proscriptive, unrealistic and impractical.

I agree. It is asinine. Fine word ‘asinine’.
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I added the qualification principally in furtherance of rounding off this tedious and obligatory anality at the pass. I’m afraid I’ve become accustomed to the standard requirement to add peripheral prologue viz “I am not a [insert appropriate term]” to any political discussion I partake in. With those of the Left and Right might I add. I have been called an anti-Semite, a fascist, a Windschuttlian revisionist, a Communist, a market-fundamentalist, an American style Social-liberal etcetera. None of these labels is remotely true and the use of them was never appropriate coming from anyone with the least capacity for deductive reasoning.
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I don’t know you and hence I default to experience.
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Apologies for any insult to your intelligence. Still Wilde’s essay is written from the perspective of a dead white male. A living white male would tend to be more aware of gender specificity, yes? Evidence of progress?
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I think the adherents of various ideologies classified under the over-simplistic Left/Right schema are each in their own ways blind. They tend to be blind to different things is all. An artifact, possibly, of the circumstance that today’s political thinking has descended from the Religious Warfare of the 16th and 17th centuries.

I’m especially concerned with private firms such as Hakluyt and Co moving into such operations. Like their military counterparts KBR and Blackwater, they are less transparent and even less amenable to regulation than the government ones (who couldn’t organise a pissup in a brewery anyway, according to some of the above comments.) Rodney Eddington is employed as our head of Infrastructure and he used to work for Hakluyt and Co, which infiltrated green groups on behalf of BP and Shell; what kind of commitment to public transport and bicycle infrastructure are we going to get from someone who was attached to the fossil fuel lobby? What other private firms are sniffing around and influencing public policy – apart that is, from the other astroturfing outfits we already know and love?

You’re half right. Wily Wilde is dead, so there’s no point in complaining to him about his English usage. However, using “man/men” to denote the entire human race has been found to help in making half of the human rage the default and the other half, or actually somewhat more than half, the exception. This is by no means the cause of all our problems but it certainly doesn’t help. Therefore, there’s a good reason to ditch the usage.

Sweet, so it’s blokes and chicks open slather from here on in?

Oh pleeez. I am a feminist of some longevity and I never read Wilde’s essay and thought he wasn’t talking about me. It is laughable to lay such an asinine politically correct burden on the wily Wilde and frankly makes me think how anal and rigid are the very people who accuse leftists of being proscriptive, unrealistic and impractical.

I’d put Wilde’s essay into the category of essential children’s literature – along with “The Happy Prince” – and say that his primary interest was aesthetics not political economy or ethics or governance. He was a utopian Adrien, rather than a socialist and as he said no map of the world is useful or worth reading unless it includes a Utopia.

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within

B) If you eavesdrop on or infiltrate enough protest groups you could be turned yourself like the MI5 officer, Cathy Massiter, who spent so much time listening to bugged CND conversations, she ended up joining them. Or on a slightly different scale, you might start feeling your side is so full of crap you’d pull a Powell.

C) Why not join the establishment and fuck ‘em up from from within? After all you’re smarter than those national security thickies aren’t you? What’s stopping you from replacing ‘em?

D) It’s endlessly fucking boring and soul-eroding boring in from within to achieve point C.

E) I still have all my own hair but my boss doesn’t anymore.

F) I’m now listening to ‘Louie, Louie’ by the Kingsmen.

G) There is no point G.

wpd on [8] and epicene [63] might have good points. It’s not just that information – and misinformation and dysinformation – from old Police Special Branch files may still exist …. but, since all the old files are said to have been destroyed, that there is no way at all to correct any lies, exaggerations, misinterpretations, malicious gossip, errors and downright risible mistakes in them. True, the paper documents may no longer exist but the potential for mischief and injustice from them probably continues to exists in another form. And of course, whatever is in an official record must always be absolutely true and beyond question …. never mind what the people targeted actually knew or did or were. What was that about GIGO? [= garbage in, garbage out].

Paulus [50]:

So do you believe, then, that the various Police Special Branches were far too small to keep up with all their official duties let alone to have had the time, the staff or the resources to do any informal jobs or to return unofficial favours? Yeah. Right. Of course. And what else did the Easter Bunny have to say?

Yobbo [68]:

Sadly, you are right about that law having the potential to be misused against people exercising their democratic rights. I’ll bet it is not what the legislators intended at all when they passed that bill.