Needless to say, this is not the story that Western media was telling me about South Africa in the late 90s. Rather they were focused on the dashing and heroic figure of Nelson Mandela. Speaking of which, where exactly was Mandela while all this was going on? Flying around Europe and America getting fêted by celebrities, mostly, and getting sidelined by his much nastier but more effective comrades, including his wife (soon to be ex-wife) Winnie. Mandela may have been president, but he barely had control over his own cabinet, let alone the country. As one of his comrades from the Robben Island prison put it: “there is something very simple and childlike about him. His moral authority, the strength of his principles and his generosity of spirit are all derived from that simplicity. But he will be easily manipulated by those who are quicker, more subtle, and more sophisticated.”
The impression Johnson gives is very much that of a man in way over his head, and when Mandela did try to assert himself, the results were usually buffoonish:
He declared that the solution to continuing violence in KwaZulu-Natal was for everyone to join the ANC … In 1995 he told a May Day rally that if the IFP continued to resist the ANC he would cut off all funding to KwaZulu-Natal, the most populous province. This was a completely unconstitutional threat which had to be quickly retracted. Similarly, when he dismissed Winnie from government he failed to read the constitution and thus had to reappoint her and later dismiss her again. Visiting Tanzania, he announced that: “We are going to sideline and even crush all dissident forces in our country.”
Mandela also made a lot of genuinely very big-hearted speeches pitching a “rainbow nation” vision of South Africa and begging whites not to flee the country, but every time the interests of justice conflicted with those of the ANC, he showed himself to be a party man first and foremost. The most revolting examples of this are two incidents in which independent prosecutors were investigating ANC atrocities (in one case a massacre of dozens of protestors, the other case an incident where some Zulus were kept in a cage inside a local ANC party HQ and tortured for months), and Mandela staked the full power of his moral authority on blocking the inquiries. In the case of the massacre, Mandela went so far as to declare that he had ordered the gunmen to shoot, which everybody knew to be a lie, but which meant that any attempt to pursue the coverup would mean taking down Mandela too. Nobody had the stomach to face that prospect, so the prosecutors dropped the case.
If Mandela was a figurehead, then who was really in charge? The answer is the main character of this book: Thabo Mbeki, the deputy president. Mbeki is a villain of almost Shakespearean proportions — paranoid, controlling, obsessive, bad with crowds yet charming in person. Even before Mandela was out of prison, he was already angling for the number two spot, shaping the narrative, quietly interposing himself between the charismatic Nobel peace prize winner and the true levers of power.
This was bad news for South Africa, because in contrast to Mandela’s “rainbow nation” optimism, Mbeki was a committed black nationalist who immediately set about purging whites from the government and looting white wealth, with little regard for whether this might kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Johnson ascribes a psychological motivation to all this, asserting that Mbeki suffered from a crushing inferiority complex vis-a-vis the white elites, and quoting several truly bizarre and unhinged public speeches in support of his diagnosis. A more prosaic explanation would just be that like many tyrants in the making, Mbeki sought to create and elevate “new men”, men who owed him everything and whose loyalty could thereby be assured.
Whatever the case, Mbeki quickly began to insist that South Africa’s military, corporations, and government agencies bring their racial proportions into exact alignment with the demographic breakdown of the country as a whole. But as Johnson points out, this kind of affirmative action has very different effects in a country like South Africa where 75% of the population is eligible than it does in a country like the United States where only 13% of the population gets a boost. Crudely, an organization can cope with a small percentage of its staff being underqualified, or even dead weight. Sinecures are found for these people, roles where they look important but can’t do too much harm. The overall drag on efficiency is manageable, especially if every other company is working under the same constraints.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: South Africa’s Brave New World, by R.W. Johnson”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-03-20.
June 27, 2023
QotD: Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, and the ANC
June 26, 2023
America can’t build anything these days and “it’s all Ralph Nader’s fault”
One of the readers of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten has contributed a review of Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism by Paul Sabin. This is one of perhaps a dozen or so anonymous reviews that Scott publishes every year with the readers voting for the best review and the names of the contributors withheld until after the voting is finished:
Today, pundits across the political spectrum bemoan America’s inability to build.
Across the country, NIMBYs and status-quo defenders exploit procedural rules to block new development, giving us a world where it takes longer to get approval for a single new building in San Francisco than it did to build the entire Empire State Building, where so-called “environmental review” is weaponized to block even obviously green initiatives like solar panels, and where new public works projects are completed years late and billions over budget — or, like California’s incredible shrinking high-speed rail, may never be completed at all.
Inevitably, such a complex set of dysfunctions must have an equally complex set of causes. It took us decades to get into this mess, and just as there’s no one simple fix, there’s no one simple inflection point in our history on which we can place all the blame.
But what if there was? What if there was, in fact, a single person we could blame for this entire state of affairs, a patsy from the past at whom we could all point our censorious fingers and shout, “It’s that guy’s fault!”
There is such a person, suggests history professor Paul Sabin in his new book Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism. And he isn’t isn’t a mustache-twirling villain — he’s a liberal intellectual. If you know him for anything, it’s probably for being the reason you know what a hanging chad is.
That’s right: it’s all Ralph Nader’s fault.
How’d he do it? By creating what’s now called the public interest movement: a new form of activism through which citizens force change — or, more often, block change — by suing the government. Though it was begun with the best of intentions and achieved some real good along the way, this political innovation led to the constipated governance we all complain about today.
How did a movement launched by an unassuming 30-year-old lawyer become the dominant form of activism in the country, and completely change the way our government operates?
To find out, we have to go back to a time before Ralph Nader had even hit puberty — the era of the New Deal.
[…]
It is the inherent nature of politics that no reform works forever, because the next generation of political entrepreneurs will inevitably discover new ways to bend the process to their will. Eventually, there will always be another Dick Fosbury revealing a way to work the system that no one saw coming.
Still, I do think some of the blame for the way this all panned out can be laid on Nader’s particular personal idiosyncrasies. His ironclad black-and-white view of the world, combined with his near-pathological aversion to dealmaking and compromise, made him uniquely suited to a form of activism that focused on regulatory and legal action rather than coalition-building and electoral politics. Nader was infamously rigid and inflexible, so it’s no surprise that his movement was too. But a less rules-oriented movement might have created fewer of the bureaucratic barriers that have now become a hindrance to progressive action.
Much like the movement whose story it tells, Public Citizens the book is a worthwhile project that nonetheless suffers from significant flaws. The main problem is that it can’t decide if it’s a historical narrative or a work of political theory. As a work of political theory, it doesn’t take nearly a strong enough stand — I’ve made explicit a lot of claims that are only lightly implied in the book. I think we’re making the same argument, but the book makes its argument with such a delicate touch that it’s hard to be 100% sure.
As a historical narrative, Public Citizens has a much simpler problem: it’s boring. The author writes like an academic (which, to be fair, he is), and the book is quite light on colorful details. The uncreative chapter titles (chapter three is called “Creating Public Interest Firms”) give you a taste of what the writing is like. One particularly egregious issue is how little biographical information is provided about Nader, even though the majority of the book is about him. For someone who apparently subscribes to the Great Man theory of history, the author includes surprisingly little information about the Great Men themselves. Any interesting biographical fact you read in this review — even something as basic as the fact that Nader never married—is almost certainly something I found through other sources.
Paradoxically, this book manages to be simultaneously boring and too concise. It’s over in less than 200 generously-spaced pages, and I frequently had to look stuff up on the internet to get a full understanding of what was going on. I get the sense that the author is trying to give this book mass appeal, but come on: anyone who’s willing to read a nerdy book like this is willing to read an additional hundred pages or so. Besides, Robert Caro and Ron Chernow have proven that people will read thousand-page tomes if the story is compelling and the details are juicy.
Basically, my critique of Public Citizens is like that old Catskills joke about the restaurant where the food is terrible — and the portions are too small.
The struggle for equal rights turned into the struggle to oppress others so gradually, most people didn’t notice
From the most recent Weekly Dish by Andrew Sullivan:
Many, many moons ago, when I was a marriage equality pioneer and not a total pariah among the gays, I was asked to speak at the Human Rights Campaign Fund, as it was then called. Determined as ever not to read the room, I said (paraphrasing from memory): “The goal of any civil rights movement should be to shut itself down one day. And once we get marriage equality and military service, those of us in the gay rights movement should throw a party, end the movement, and get on with our lives.”
You can imagine how well that went down. And, sure enough, 30 years later, with marriage, military service and trans equality enshrined in the law, the HRC building now has a massive, six-story high poster hanging on it: “BLACK LIVES MATTER. TRANS BLACK LIVES MATTER.”
That tells us a bit about where we are today, and how we got here.
The point I was making in the early 1990s was that liberalism knows limits. A liberal politics does not seek to impose meaning on everyone; it creates the space for individuals to choose that for themselves. It doesn’t seek to deliver the truth about anything either; it merely provides the mechanisms for the open-ended pursuit of truth. A liberal politics will seek formal equality for members of minorities; but not substantive equality — what is now called “equity”. It would not require us to come to one, single understanding of reality; it would always allow diversity of opinion and encourage free debate. Live and let live. Remember that?
Technically speaking, that makes me a liberal conservative: accepting the reality of liberal modernity (even, in my own case, being happily at home in it), while seeking to limit its illiberal overreach and utopian ambitions. And that was what I tried to sketch out in Virtually Normal. It’s a book less about homosexuality than about politics itself. It’s about a politics of going this far — and no farther. From the NYT review in 1995:
Mr. Sullivan offers his own prescription for a “politics of homosexuality” that reconciles “the best arguments of liberals and conservatives”. It is a liberal stand, Mr. Sullivan argues, in that it puts a premium on individual liberty and equality before the law, but its requirements would apply only to government policies on homosexuality, avoiding “the regulation of people’s minds and actions” in the private sphere.
Homosexual citizens absolutely deserved equal rights, but the question of homosexuality itself would — and should — always be open to dispute and debate. Since a liberal society contains both fundamentalist preachers as well as lesbian atheists, it cannot resolve the core question. So it shouldn’t try. And it should celebrate, not bemoan, this ideological diversity.
I can see why the religious fundamentalists are queasy with the settlement that came from this. They have to live in a society that accepts civil marriages for couples of the same sex. The deal is that in return, they are free to deny the morality of such marriages, to reserve religious marriage to heterosexual couples, and not be forced to participate in any way. I can also see why queer theorists are queasy as well. They don’t like the heteronormativity of civil marriage, or the respectability politics that goes with it. But they in turn are free to live their lives as “queerly” as they want in society, to create culture that seeks to subvert and radicalize.
This, in the end, is my response to all the “slippery slope” arguments about gay marriage now being raised again on the right. There is no slope in the case I made. There is a clear line: formal legal equality alongside cultural and social freedom on all sides. From my liberal conservative perspective, the gay rights movement should have shut down in 2015 after Obergefell; and the trans rights movement should have shut down in 2020 after Bostock. Once gay men and lesbians and trans people achieved legal and constitutional equality, the fight was over.
But in the movement I was once a part of, many, of course, were not liberals, let alone liberal conservatives — but radicals, who reluctantly went along with marriage equality, but itched to transform society far more comprehensively. And these radicals now control everything in the hollowed-out gay rights apparatus. Their main ticket item is a law that would replace biological sex with gender in the law, and remove protections for religious liberty: smashing the liberal settlement. Combine that with acute polarization in the Trump era, and information silos, so that many gays get their sense of reality from MSNBC and Elton John, and you can see how the spiral into illiberal madness began.
June 25, 2023
Workers will be forced to stop working to salve the consciences of university-educated elite wankers
Brendan O’Neill on the Climate Goblin’s latest stunt in Sweden:
Picture the daughter of an opera singer preventing working-class men from doing their jobs. A young woman so well-connected that she probably has presidents on speed-dial physically blocking truck drivers from doing what they do. A child of privilege gathering with her similarly comfortable pals to stop working people from working.
Well, shorn of all the fact-lite bluster about “saving the planet”, that’s exactly what Greta Thunberg’s latest eco-stunt adds up to. The pint-sized prophetess of doom is back in the headlines. This time for getting arrested in Malmo harbour in Sweden, where she and other members of the End is Nigh cult have been holding a sit-down protest to stop oil tankers from leaving and delivering their life-giving cargo to the good people of Sweden and beyond.
The photographs from this temper tantrum disguised as a political protest tell a fascinating tale of the classism and narcissism in green politics. In the middle of the road are the smug-looking youths. One has green hair. Others sport beanie hats. None has ever driven a truck, clearly. Their banners speak of defending Earth from man’s evil burning of the toxic sludge of oil. And in the background are the supposed agents of this evil – the truckers; working men idly standing by their tankers while the world’s media get shots of Greta looking sad for Gaia.
What an apt snapshot of the hierarchy of virtue in what passes for radical politics today. Working-class people reduced to background actors, non-player characters, in a drama feverishly focussed on the jumped-up angst of the privileged. Working men as mere backdrop to the eco-neuroses of the comfortably off. In the moral universe fashioned by eco-influencers and their legion fawners in the political and media elites, the irrational fears of the upper-middle class carry more weight than the living standards of the working class.
It’s a story we see repeated across every act of eco-agitation today. In the UK, the plummy activists of Just Stop Oil, all called Poppy or Edred, block roads and prevent builders, scaffolders, deliverymen, mums and others from carrying out their essential work. The fightback of working men against this imperious imposition on their right to earn a living – witness scaffolders pushing eco-irritants out of the road – has been heartening to see. As a worker at Smithfield meat market in London put it a few years back when Extinction Rebellion types stormed in to speak up for animal rights or something, why should I allow this “happy-clappy mob” to stop me from being “able to pay my bills”?
British schoolchildren mock their oh-so-woke teachers
In Christopher Gage’s weekly round-up, I discovered that I shared a trait with Ted Kaczynski (“austere anarchist scholar” as US mainstream media might have described him). Not just any trait, but the one that ended up putting him in prison after nearly twenty years of sending bombs through the mail:
Elliot Rodger, Ed Kemper and Ted Kaczynski.
Photos from Quillette.
… Ted insisted on the proper use of the idiom, “You can’t eat your cake and have it, too”. Ted rejected the common and logically fraught version: “You can’t have your cake and eat it, too”. Indeed, you can. You must have your cake if you are to eat your cake. You cannot have your cake once you’ve eaten your cake.
That turn of phrase helped F.B.I agents snare Ted. His sister-in-law read his essay, recognised the writing style, and the peculiar diction, and then grassed him up to the rozzers.
For the record, this may be the only point of agreement I have with that noted austere scholar, although I’ve never read any of his writings to find out.
Another amusing incident involved children taking the Mickey out of ultra-progressive teachers in British schools:
Last week, schoolchildren in Sussex dropped themselves into the soup after suggesting that their fellow classmate is not actually a cat.
Two thirteen-year-old girls at Rye College were told they “should go to a different school” if they didn’t believe that a girl could identify as a cat.
During a “life education” class, the pair said there was “no such thing as agender” and: “If you have a vagina, you’re a girl, and if you have a penis, you’re a boy — that’s it.”
When they queried how someone could identify as a cat, the pair were blasted for questioning their classmate’s identity.
An investigation found children at schools across the land now identify as dinosaurs and horses. Another often dons a cape and demands to be acknowledged as a moon. Another identifies as Bambi.
After the hysteria simmered, it became obvious what was going on here. And it too became obvious that this is a good thing.
Reader, these children are taking the Mickey.
When confronted with obvious nonsense held by their preachy, supposedly superior teachers, these kids cannot resist mocking them to a nub.
After all, if one can identify as whatever one wants then that includes anything one wants. For teenagers primed with mischief, this is just too good a brew not to sup on a daily basis.
And it is a promising sign. Ridicule, the sharp-elbowed sister of truth, is essential to all progress. Clearly, these kids are unafraid to think for themselves and are determined to see that which is beyond their own nose.
Perhaps this is the beginning of the end of what almost everybody knows to be patent nonsense. As history assures us, once something becomes a laughingstock it soon dies of ridicule.
As James Thurber put it, that which cannot withstand laughter is not a good thing.
Fifty years after The Princess Bride was published
William Goldman’s novel The Princess Bride was not a blockbuster, nor did the movie adaptation get a huge box office when it released in 1987. Yet despite apparent early mediocrity, it became a cult classic. It’s now fifty years after the book came out, and Kevin Mims has a look back at both the novel and the movie:
Even by the eccentric standards of fantasy literature, William Goldman’s 1973 novel The Princess Bride is extremely odd. The book purports to be an abridged edition of a classic adventure story written by someone named Simon Morgenstern. In a bizarre introduction (more about which in a moment), Goldman claims merely to have acted as editor. Unlike Rob Reiner’s much-loved 1987 film adaptation, the book’s full title is The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, The “Good Parts” Version. Yes, all that text actually appeared on the cover of the book’s first hardcover edition (all but the first three words have been scrubbed from the covers of most subsequent editions).
In the 1990s, I worked at a Tower Books store in Sacramento. Every few months, someone would come into the store and ask if we had an unabridged edition of S. Morgenstern’s The Princess Bride. The first time this happened, a younger colleague who had worked there longer than I had told my customer, “The Princess Bride was written by William Goldman. There is no S. Morgenstern. Goldman made him up.” The customer wasn’t convinced. “It’s metafiction,” my colleague explained. “A novel that comments on its own status as a text.” When the customer had left, my colleague told me that a lot of people still believe there is an original version of the novel available somewhere, written by Morgenstern. Having fallen in love with the story via the Hollywood film, they were now looking for the ur-text.
Although I was a big fan of William Goldman, I had never read The Princess Bride. My wife and I saw the film when it first appeared in American theaters, and we have rewatched it several times since on VHS and DVD. Only about 10 years ago did I actually get around to reading the novel. And when I did, I found myself sympathizing with all those people who still believe that, somewhere in the world, there exists an unedited edition.
In his introduction, Goldman tells us that S. Morgenstern was from the tiny European nation of Florin, located somewhere between Germany and Sweden, which is where the story’s action takes place. Such a place never existed, but it’s not surprising that many 21st-century American readers don’t know the names of every current and former European kingdom. European history is littered with microstates that rose briefly and then vanished without leaving much of a trace. Back in the 1990s, before Internet access became commonplace, confirming the existence of a small defunct European statelet would have involved a trip to the library.
But readers in the 1970s might have been more alive to Goldman’s ruse. Back then, metafiction was all the rage. John Barth became a literary superstar (among the academic set, anyway) with books like The Sot-Weed Factor (which, like The Princess Bride, is a fantastical comic adventure supposedly written by a fictional author) and Giles Goat-Boy (the text of which, Barth writes in the foreword, was said to have been written by a computer). In 1983, Goldman would publish a second novel behind the Morgenstern pseudonym, titled The Silent Gondoliers, but this time he removed all mention of himself, even from the copyright page.
QotD: We won’t be seeing any rebooted TV shows from the 1990s
Thirty years on, we can only dream of a government competent enough to cover up contact with extraterrestrials. As someone remarked at Z Man’s the other day, our government is now so retarded, Eric Swalwell — a high-ranking member of the House intelligence committee and putative presidential candidate — couldn’t successfully bone a hooker. Sorry, gang, the aliens won’t be stopping by; they only want to make contact with intelligent life.
Severian, “Random Thoughts”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-17.
June 24, 2023
Canada’s Online News Act already impacting news delivery for smaller outlets
A local site I use regularly has already begun to feel the negative effects of the federal government’s Online News Act (aka Bill C-18):
Durham Radio News (DRN) doesn’t normally post editorial content, but when local news is being attacked we refuse to stay silent.
Bill C-18 is now law and will have a very negative impact on local independent newsrooms such as DRN.
The bill forces major tech companies such as Google and Meta to pay news outlets for content.
The vast majority of referrals to our DRN site come from Facebook and Google.
Both platforms have been instrumental in growing our audience.
Despite multiple warnings from Meta and Google that they would block news, the Liberal government proceeded with Bill C-18.
It’s now law and in a statement Meta says news will no longer be available on Facebook and Instagram.
Google is expected to follow suit.
Both tech giants have publicly said they don’t make much money off links to news stories so it doesn’t make financial sense for them to pay news providers.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called their threats to remove news a bullying tactic and said it will not work with his government.
It really appears the Liberals thought they were bluffing, we now know they were not.
DRN has been trying to get our voices heard for months on the negative impact this bill would have on our business.
We were drowned out by larger media outlets who would stand to benefit from this bill.
We will not be naming other outlets and we don’t begrudge the financial help they are already receiving.
Meta provides funding through fellowships with some media partners, and it is these outlets that became greedy and were asking for more.
For them it doesn’t matter if they get kicked off social media platforms.
For us it will make a huge impact.
June 23, 2023
From Operation Barbarossa in 1941 to the disinformation and cover-up over the origins of the Wuhan Coronavirus
Chris Bray outlines the utterly amazing situation between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany on the eve of Hitler launching Operation Barbarossa — where Stalin refused to believe that Hitler would attack Russia despite overwhelming evidence from many sources — to the parallel situation over Covid:
Several sources quite specifically reported to the Soviet government that the Germans would invade around dawn on June 22. Their reports can be found in the Soviet archives in a “folder of dubious and misleading reports”. Then, shortly before dawn on June 22, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Military leaders on the border called in reports of the invasion, and the people they talked to in Moscow declined to believe them. Soviet border troops held their fire, seeing Germans while being ordered to understand that no true invasion could possibly be underway. Stalin knew better, and contradicting Josef Stalin was known to be a fatal mistake. Achieving an entirely avoidable surprise, the Germans destroyed much of the Soviet air force on the ground, parked wingtip-to-wingtip for the convenience of the invader’s bombers.
[…]
An invasion that could have been met with brutal severity from the first moment instead achieved considerable initial success against a supine nation because the Soviet leader, and the chain of subordinates beneath him who were forced to adopt his conception of facts and truth, assumed that things they didn’t wish to believe constituted disinformation. Millions of lives were wasted for that illusion. A society that categorizes inconvenient truths in this way is committing a form of suicide, hiding from hard facts that demand acknowledgment.
Now: In 2021, the lab leak theory was a disgusting lie with “racist roots”.
In June of 2023, the, uh, first people who got sick with Covid turn out to have been, uh, scientists at the lab in Wuhan. BUT THEY PROBABLY HAD SOME BAT SOUP AT THE WET MARKET, IS WHY, or something.
Stupid conspiracy theorists, you people are such MORONS, do you actually bel— okay, that one’s true too.
We’ve somehow developed an industry of professional information barriers, dimwitted parasitical human garbage whose sole function in life is to prevent understanding by pasting “disinformation” stickers on things that you’re not supposed to know.
June 22, 2023
Any news about weather or climate is bad news
The transition of weather from merely reporting on weather conditions and relaying (somewhat) authoritative forecasts is pretty much complete, as now every change in the weather pretty much has to be linked to the dreaded anthropogenic climate change. New York City’s recent poor air quality due to Canadian wildfires highlights a change they haven’t been pushing — how much better air quality in major cities has become:
Earlier this month, as wildfires ravaged Canada, the Northeastern United States experienced heavy air pollution problems from the smoke.
The out of control fires and subsequent pollution is a tragedy, certainly. But the fact that a low-visibility New York City was national news highlights how much things have changed.
Pollution has dramatically declined over the past few decades. To get a clear picture of how much, look at this graph.
This shows the number of days air quality is considered to be at “unhealthy levels” by the US government in seven major metros in the U.S.
All seven metros have improved their air quality since 1980. This is good news!
In the NYC metro, nearly 300 days in 1980 had unhealthy air quality. Today it’s less than 50.
So what’s going on here? Well, some might argue regulation is the primary source. It’s certainly possible that environmental regulations in the end of the 20th century resulted in less pollution. As our technology has improved, we’ve gained the ability to police people polluting the air of their neighbors. But this isn’t the full story.
June 18, 2023
Brendan O’Neill’s new book, A Heretic’s Manifesto
This is an extract from A Heretic’s Manifesto thanks to Spiked:
Words hurt, they say. This is the ideological underpinning to so much censorship today – the idea that words wound, as a punch might wound. The imagery of violence is deployed in almost every call for censure in the 21st-century West. Speech has been reimagined as aggression, hence “microaggressions”. People speak of feeling “assaulted” by speech. “Words, like sticks and stones, can assault; they can injure; they can exclude” – that’s the thesis of Words That Wound, an influential tome published in 1993. Activists claim to feel “erased” by controversial or disagreeable utterances. Trans campaigners speak darkly of “trans erasure”, as if words from the other side of the divide, the speech of gender-critical feminists, might contain that most awesome and nullifying power of genocide.
Words make us feel “unsafe”, people say. Witness the rise and rise of Safe Spaces on university campuses, designed to ensure students’ psychic security against the terrible threat of their hearing an idea they disagree with. Safe Spaces recreate the state of childhood, complete with colouring books and ice cream, speaking to how determinedly some long to retreat from the adult world of hurtful chatter and brickbats.
The United Nations wrings its hands over “hate speech and real harm” (my emphasis). The “weaponisation of public discourse for political gain” can lead to “stigmatisation, discrimination and large-scale violence”, it says. Better keep a check on those hurtful words. One US university even maintains a list of “words that hurt“. It includes the phrase “You guys”. That scandalous utterance “erases the identities of people who are in the room” and “generalise[s] a group of people to be masculine”. Shut it down. Silence that act of violence.
Both the formal and informal punishment of words rests on the belief that they can wound. Laws in Europe claim to guard people from speech that is alarming, distressing, hurtful. The overlords of social media censor speech for “the wellbeing of our community“. Everywhere the cry goes up: words injure, they can cut like a knife, they can be used as “weapons to ambush, terrorise, wound, humiliate and degrade“. And just as the law protects us from such dreadful things when they are done to our bodies with fists and kicks, surely it should also protect us from them when they are done to our minds with words and ideas. Surely our psychic wellbeing should be accorded as much respect by the powers-that-be as our physical integrity is.
The temptation of many of us who believe in freedom of speech, in the liberty of all to utter their beliefs and ideas, is to damn this claim that “words hurt” as a libel against public discourse. As a slippery untruth that is cynically designed to depict words as all-powerful, as containing so much energy, so much heat, that they can lay waste to self-esteem and even make us fret over erasure, over being wiped out entirely by that sore comment or that disturbing idea. Actually, we often say, words are just words. They’re not sticks, they’re not stones, they’re words. They won’t kill you, they won’t hurt you, you’ll be fine. They say words are a force of nature like no other, we say: “Relax. It’s just speech.”
We need to stop doing this. We need to stop countering the new censors by accusing them of exaggerating the power and the potency of words. We need to stop responding to their painting of speech as a dangerous, disorientating force by defensively pleading that words don’t wound because they’re just words. We need to stop reacting to their branding of speech as a weapon, as a tool of ambush and degradation, by effectively draining speech of its power and saying: “It’s only speech.” As if speech were a small thing, almost an insignificant thing, more likely to contain calming qualities than upsetting ones, more likely to help us overcome conflict rather than stir it up, more likely to offer a balm to your soul than to stab at it as a knife might stab at your body.
For when we do this, we play down the power of words. And that includes the power of words to wound. Words do wound. It’s true. Words hurt people, they hurt institutions, they hurt belief systems. Words make churches tremble and ideologies quake. Words inflict pain on priests and princes and ideologues. Words upend the social order. Words rip away the comforting ideas people and communities might have wrapped themselves in for decades, centuries perhaps. Words ambush the complacent and degrade the powerful. Words cause discord, angst, even conflict. Isn’t every revolution in history the offspring of words? Of ideas? Words do destabilise, they do disorientate. People are right to sometimes feel afraid of words. Words are dangerous. When they say words wound, we should say: “I agree.”
Today, “‘gender-critical’ is a jargonny way of describing the ordinary views held by the vast majority of the planet’s population”
The Quillette Editorial Board on the startling difference between LGBT activists’s views and the default view of most of humanity:
“What is feminism? Who is it for? Can men be feminists, or only allies? What is intersectionality, and must feminism be intersectional?” These are some of the questions tackled in a University of Melbourne course on the philosophy of feminism, formally designated in the university’s handbook as PHIL20046. Prospective students are informed that course content will include “a range of feminist theories, including both radical feminism and liberal feminism, and from all four ‘waves’ (with an emphasis on second wave feminism). We’ll also consider a range of applied topics like prostitution and pornography, inclusion of transwomen, theories of gender, gendered social norms, and reproductive rights.”
Content that is not included in PHIL20046, on the other hand, includes white supremacist propaganda, neo-Nazi talking points, and an approving literary exegesis of Mein Kampf. This might seem like an odd detail to note. But it is important to state for the record, given the profusion of stickers and posters recently plastered around the University of Melbourne campus, accusing the course instructor, Holly Lawford-Smith, of crafting her syllabus for the exclusive benefit of “fascists”.
Those who are familiar with the mantras of “intersectional feminism” likely won’t require an explanation for the quantum logic leap by which feminist philosophizing might be casually equated with the doctrines of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco. But for those unschooled in such matters, the basis of complaint here is that Lawford-Smith is a “gender-critical feminist” — a term indicating one’s belief that biologically rooted differences between men and women are real; and so must be considered when marking the boundaries of female-protected spaces, such as women’s sports leagues, prisons, and domestic-violence centres.
Which is to say that “gender-critical” is a jargonny way of describing the ordinary views held by the vast majority of the planet’s population. And it speaks to the shocking extent of academia’s radicalization that Lawford-Smith’s belief in biological science would be regarded as the academic equivalent of a Nazi salute.
Gender-critical feminists trace their roots to the radical-feminism movement of the 1960s. They often focus on the pernicious effects of gender stereotypes; and critique the industries that profit from women’s pain, such as pornography. This kind of analysis focuses attention on the hardships that have historically gone along with existing as a woman. It also focuses attention on the real policy solutions required to address such hardships, including, where necessary, the maintenance of safe single-sex spaces. As one might assume, gender-critical feminists typically have little time for men who, having recently announced the discovery of some soul-like spark of womanhood within them, commence hectoring women about the imperfect nature of their intersectional feminism.
Gender crits speak their mind at their professional peril. In 2021, Kathleen Stock, a British analytic philosopher, was forced to abandon her academic position at Sussex University following a prolonged harassment campaign. Like other prominent gender-critical intellectuals, Stock is perfectly forthright about her support for the rights of trans people to live, study, and work as they please, free from discrimination and harassment — while also being equally forthright about the plain fact that transwomen are not literal women. As a consequence of expressing such (again, widely held) views, Stock was advised to install CCTV cameras in her home and to venture onto campus only when accompanied by bodyguards.
June 16, 2023
Blackadder at 40
Ed West remembers his first encounter with the brilliant, devious, and hilarious Edmund Blackadder:
What do these famous figures from British history all have in common? Elizabeth I, George III, George IV, Victoria and Albert, the Duke of Wellington, Dr Samuel Johnson, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Douglas Haig, Richard III, er Richard IV, William Pitt the Younger, William Pitt the Even Younger …
They’re all, of course, characters in the greatest tale of our island story, a giant rollercoaster of a comedy in four sizzling chapters, one that was first shown 40 years ago today.
New British stamps issued on the 40th anniversary of the BBC comedy series Blackadder
I was probably always going to love history — my dad was obsessed with it — but Blackadder helped imprint the idea that the past can be one great black comedy. History is funny because people’s behaviour is often quite irrational, or spiteful, or motivated by petty reasons that contrast with their high-minded principles — and no doubt we will seem the same to future generations, too.
That was the whole idea behind Blackadder because, as creator Richard Curtis points out in a documentary screened tonight on Gold, he’s “a modern person in the stupidity of ancient times”.
Yet when the idea was first proposed by Curtis and Rowan Atkinson, they were advised that there are two sitcom premises that can never work — shows set in heaven and hell, or those in historical settings. And Blackadder was lucky to survive its first season.
Atkinson and Curtis had met at Oxford, going on to work together on Not the Nine O’Clock News, where they’d met producer John Lloyd. The two men were inspired by Fawlty Towers, but were also determined to avoid any comparison with John Cleese and Connie Booth’s great creation, so decided on a setting as far removed from a south coast hotel as possible.
Aired on 15 June, 1983, The Black Adder was quite lavish. There were location shots in places like Alnwick Castle and huge amounts spent on costumes and horses. Curtis says that one of the hats Atkinson wore was worth more than he was paid for writing the episode. It featured such big names as Brian Blessed and Peter Cook, the godfather of alternative comedy whose presence granted the show its place in the apostolic succession. But, while the first series has its moments, it was flawed; the original Blackadder was a weasel-like and pathetic figure, and less clever than his sidekick Baldrick. The comedy didn’t exactly work.
I was fortunate enough to encounter the second series, set in Elizabethan England, before I saw any of the first series. The original has its funny moments, but Ed is quite correct that it’s less than the sum of its parts. Brian Blessed steals every scene he’s in (as always), and Peter Cook’s portrayal of Richard III is great. The rest … is kinda funny if you know a bit of the history. Thankfully, there was more to come.
Blackadder II aired at the start of January 1986, and had a much smaller budget and a simpler set up — and it was far, far funnier, the protagonist no longer a conniving weasel but a court sycophant with Baldrick and Percy as comedy punchbags.
“Well, it is said, Percy, that civilised man seeks out good and intelligent company, so that through learned discourse he may rise above the savage and closer to God. Personally, however, I like to start the day with a total dickhead to remind me I’m best.”
(Fans of comedy shows who quote the lines endlessly can become quite tedious but, well, tough.)
Or: “The eyes are open, the mouth moves, but Mr. Brain has long since departed, hasn’t he, Percy?”
Towards Baldrick he is somewhat more indulgent, telling him that “Thinking is so important“.
“I’ve been in your service since I was two and a half my Lord,” his dogsbody protests upon being thrown out: “Well that is why I am so utterly sick of the sight of you.”
Elton also thought the medieval era to be too squalid and wanted Season 2 set in the “sexier” Elizabethan era (and indeed Edmund’s outfit is rather sexy, as Percy might put it).
June 15, 2023
Sarah Hoyt objects to being an “imaginary creature”
Recent revisions to the quasi-official dictionary of the woke English language seem to have classified individuals like Sarah as “non-men”:
I was born female in a country that was profoundly patriarchal and, back then, patriarchal without guilt. So, it was acceptable to make jokes about women being dumber than men. And it was acceptable for teachers to assume you were dumb because female.
Most of these things amused me. It was always fun in mixed classes after the first test to watch the teacher look at my test and at the boys in the class trying to figure out what parent was so cruel as to name their son a girl’s name.
I enjoyed breaking people’s minds. And once I was known in a group or place, I was not treated as inferior. The only things that truly annoyed me were the ones I thought were arbitrary restrictions, like not going out after 8 pm alone. Took flaunting them a few times to find out they weren’t arbitrary. Or rather, they were arbitrary but since culture-wide flaunting was dangerous, and I was lucky not to pay for the flaunting with life or limb.
Yes, I went through a phase of screaming that I was just as good as any man. Then realized it was true and stopped screaming it.
Then got married and had kids, and realized I was just as good but different. I could do things men couldn’t do. Parenthood is different as a woman. And none of it mattered to my worth, just like being short and having brown hair doesn’t make me inferior to tall blonds. Just different.
And even though I’m a highly atypical woman, at the beginning of my sixth decade, I find myself completely at peace with the fact I am a woman and not apologetic at all for it.
Imagine my surprise when I found out women don’t exist. There’s only man and non-man.
This nonsense, from here, has got to stop. When you get so “inclusive” you’re excluding an entire biological sex (but curiously not the other) you might want to re-evaluate your principles. Also, your sanity.
Yes, I know, saying this makes me a TERF, which is nonsense. Maybe a TERNF, since I’ve not called myself a feminist since I was 18 and realized feminism aimed for making women “win” at men’s expense. It wasn’t aiming for equality but for “equity” and since I never needed a movement to outcompete males, I decided it was spinach and to h*ll with it.
Also I’m not trans-exclusionary. If women don’t exist, what the heck are men who are trans trans TO? Non-man? Uh … what? What are drag queens imitating? Is it just non-man?
QotD: Incels
Freddie deBoer, “Some Reasons Why Smartphones Might Make Adolescents Anxious and Depressed”, Freddie deBoer, 2023-03-07.
