DeadJ0ker27
Published on 19 Feb 2010I’m personally offended by people who get offended.
March 1, 2018
Penn & Teller – The Right Not to be Offended
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QotD: In praise of democracy
I have seen many theoretical objections to democracy, and sometimes urge them with such heat that it probably goes beyond the bound of sound taste, but I am thoroughly convinced, nonetheless, that the democratic nations are happier than any other. The United States today, indeed, is probably the happiest the world has ever seen. Taxes are high, but they are still well within the means of the taxpayer: he could pay twice as much and still survive. The laws are innumerable and idiotic, but only prisoners in the penitentiaries and persons under religious vows ever obey them. The country is governed by rogues, but there is no general dislike of rogues: on the contrary, they are esteemed and envied. Best of all, the people have the pleasant feeling that they can make improvements at any time they want to — … in other words, they are happy. Democrats are always happy. Democracy is a sort of laughing gas. It will not cure anything, perhaps, but it unquestionably stops the pain.
H.L. Mencken, “The Master Illusion”, The American Mercury, 1925-03.
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February 28, 2018
QotD: Words as “physical violence”
Berkeley. Evergreen. Middlebury. Missou. Yale. Brown. McMasters. Wilfred Laurier. The list goes on. One must wonder where this trend will ultimately take us. There have been several justifications given for this increasing rash of no-platforming, shaming, and at times, physical violence on North American campuses. In essence, these justifications can be distilled into a triad of well-meaning but ultimately flawed theses, namely, 1.) that all discourse is about power and that any speech that renders a listener physiologically uncomfortable therefore rises to the level of a physical attack upon that individual, thereby justifying actual physical violence in response, 2.) that for the sake of historically marginalized voices, persons who are members of historically privileged groups should forfeit their right to free speech or ought to remain silent, 3.) that certain assertions, even if possibly true, are nonetheless morally impermissible to make since to do so will likely create conditions whereby bad-intentioned persons will inevitably and successfully advance their morally heinous projects.
This first thesis — that all discourse is fundamentally about power — finds its philosophical origins in the likes of post-modernists such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. To quote Foucault, “Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations.” Thus, on Foucalt’s view, if all discourse is, at heart, really just veiled force relations between competing groups; if language isn’t fundamentally capable of being about objective truth or about the world in any meaningful sense, then the ink symbols written on the page and the shaped air admitted from one’s mouth in the forms of ‘rationality’, ‘facts’, ‘knowledge’, and ‘truth’ are just another set of weapons in a person’s overall arsenal to seize and maintain power, no different in kind from weapons of a physical sort. To speak then, on Foucault’s view, is to wield a weapon, albeit a subtler and refined one. The uncomfortable physiological feeling of hearing offensive speech, it would then seem, vindicates this view that one is being attacked. One might thus conclude, “Why not attack back with heavier, more effective, and more expedient weapons?”
Michael Robillard, “In Defense of Offense”, Quillette, 2018-02-05.
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February 27, 2018
Many Americans feel that the elites have “betrayed and abandoned them for a mess of virtue signaling and glib ideologizing”
ESR on the fraught subject of US immigration policy:
Crime is a real issue. Legal immigrants have a slightly higher criminal propensity than the native born (the difference is small enough that its significance is disputed) but illegals’ propensity is much higher, to the point that 22% of all incarcerees are illegals (that’s 92% of all jailed immigrants).
But the elephant in the room is the impact of illegal immigration on social trust.
Diversity erodes social trust, trust being that extremely valuable form of social capital that enables people to make handshake deals, leave their doors unlocked, and trust institutions to treat them fairly. Sociologist Robert Putnam was so shocked to discover this that he sat on his results for seven years before publishing. In diverse communities trust drops not only between ethnolinguistic groups but within them. It’s insidious and very harmful – low-trust societies are bad, bad places to live.
The U.S. has a proud tradition of assimilating legal immigrants into a high-trust society, but it succeeds in this by making them non-diverse – teaching them to assimilate folk values and blend in. Putnam’s work suggests strongly that without the ability to rate-limit immigration to be within some as yet undetermined maximum, the harm from erosion of trust would exceed the benefits of immigration.
We are probably above the optimal legal immigration rate – the highest compatible with avoiding net decrease in social trust over time – already (later in this post it will become obvious why I believe this). There is little doubt that we would greatly exceed it without immigration controls.
Anyway, even if ending border enforcement were a good idea (and I conclude that it is not, despite my libertarian reflexes) it’s a political nonstarter in the U.S. Trump got elected by appealing to sentiment against illegals, and beneath that is a phenomenon one might call Putnam backlash; everywhere outside a few blue-state enclaves, Americans sense the erosion of social trust and have connected it to illegal immigration.
And on the very strong divergence of opinion between the elite (very pro-immigration) and non-elite (becoming much more anti-immigration over time):
One of the major forces currently poisoning our politics is a breakdown in trust between people like you and me – the cognitive elites – and the rest of America. Deplorables. Flyover country. Brexit, and Trump’s election, slapped me upside the head. I’ve been forced to confront some uncomfortable truths.
They think we’ve betrayed and abandoned them for a mess of virtue signaling and glib ideologizing. On the left: identity politics, PC, and open borders justified on multiculturalist grounds. On the right: free trade and open borders justified on laissez-faire principle.
They have a point. I’m seeing that now.
I mean, I might still think free trade is a good idea and have lots of arguments for it. But my arguments don’t mean fuck-all to a Rust-Belt steelworker who’s watched his livelihood get exported and the community around him wither and has nothing left but a cheap high on opioids. Nor to an unskilled black or legal-immigrant urbanite who can’t get a job because the restaurants can hire illegals for cheaper.
We owe these people more than we have given them. What we owe can’t mainly be paid in money. It’s compassion; a fair hearing. Respect. Not dismissing them as trash or troglodytes because they don’t love the brave new globalized world that gives us options but – too often – closes off theirs.
I don’t have easy solutions to these problems. But is it too much to ask that people like you and me should stop being arrogant assholes about them?
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February 26, 2018
Taking Corbyn seriously
In The Spectator, Brendan O’Neill begins considering the threat of a Corbyn premiership:
This week, the Corbynistas bared their teeth. They gave us an insight into the mob-like authoritarianism that lurks behind the facade of their ‘kind’ politics. They insisted Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t a spy for the Stalinists while at the same time exposing their Stalinist tendencies. ‘How dare you lump us in with Stalinists?’, they cried, while in the next breath making manic-eyed videos threatening the press and forming online mobs to punish those who criticise their Dear Leader. The irony has been dark.
For the first time, I feel fearful of Corbynism. Until now, I’ve seen the Corbynistas as a somewhat tragic movement, a kind of cosplay for middle-class millennials who doll up their rather staid politics — their love of the nanny state, their fear of Brexit, their preference for identity politics over class politics — in Marxist memes and Red blather. But this week we have seen another side to them. We have seen their intolerance of rowdy political criticism, their instinct for political interference in the press. This looks increasingly like a movement of petit-bourgeois vengeance.
Exhibit A is Corbyn’s positively Trumpite threat to the press that ‘change is coming’. For all the Corbyn camp’s loathing of Trump, they share his brutish disdain for the trouble-making media. In the video, Corbyn’s contorted face takes to task right-wing newspapers that have indulged the Czech spy story over the past week, and warns that when the Corbynistas come to power there will be a shake-up of press ownership and pressure on press oligarchs to pay more taxes.
His supporters present this an anti-establishment act: a brave Labourite standing up to filthy rich newspaper men. Please. Corbyn’s threatening video was directly inspired by the press’s attacks on him over the past week. He publicly denounced the press in the manner of a tinpot tyrant for one reason only: because the press has been ridiculing his naff, Soviet-tinged shenanigans in the late 1980s. This is political interference: angry at the press attacks on him, he whipped up an online mob to agitate for more press control.
[…]
The Corbynistas’ reactionary clamour for official interference in the press was captured in an article at Novara Media, home to the weird mix of nanny statism, anti-democracy and middle-class pity for the poor that motors the millennial wing of the Corbynista movement. It congratulated Corbyn for ‘send[ing] shivers down the spine of the media establishment’, and promised that under a Labour government Leveson 2 would ‘finish the job and open up this bankrupt industry’. This promise of Leveson 2 is reason enough never to vote for Corbyn’s Labour: it would ride roughshod over the great radical history of this nation, from the Levellers to the Chartists, all of whom were repulsed by the idea of state meddling in the press.
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India’s largest newspaper on Justin Trudeau’s “disaster visit”
Paul Wells linked to this story in the world’s largest circulation English language newspaper, The Times of India:
Justin Trudeau and family during India visit
Image via NDTV, originally tweeted by @vijayrupanibjp
Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s visit was a disaster that has little parallel in India’s recent diplomatic history. But as the Canadian prime minister returned home on Saturday after almost a week of recurrent diplomatic missteps, ironically, it may have provided the opportunity to reset relations between Canada and India.
On Saturday, Indian government officials were angry at suggestions by Canadian officials that India was responsible for Khalistani terrorist Jaspal Atwal getting a visa to India and used his presence to embarrass Trudeau.
Trudeau, in his meeting with prime minister Narendra Modi, also complained that his visit had been shadowed by a single issue. Atwal got a visa because he was taken off the blacklist some years ago. But he was part of a number of Trudeau’s own events that did not involve the Indian government at all.
A prime ministerial visit to a foreign country for a week with a thin official component is always fraught with danger. In addition, moving the official meetings to the very end of the trip indicated that the government meetings were an after-thought. Most foreign leaders who throw in other events almost always front-load the official meetings, and then go on to business or tourism events.
Here, it was clear from the start that Trudeau came to India to score with his Sikh constituency back home — four out of the six cabinet ministers who travelled with him were Sikh, as were an overwhelming number of MPs who also travelled with him. Until the media barrage in India forced the Canadian side to change tack, Trudeau was not even ready to meet Amarinder Singh, chief minister of Punjab. Even the Canadian high commissioner’s official reception was a celebration of Punjab with the prime minister himself waltzing in on bhangra beats.
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February 23, 2018
“…the Trudeaus playing ‘Mr Dressup and Family’ in exotic locations on the taxpayers’ dime isn’t the problem”
The press is having a hard time presenting Justin Trudeau’s India trip in a positive light, which clearly pains the teeny-bopper Trudeau fan club that composes a large part of the Canadian media. Ted Campbell sees the trip as a series of wasted opportunities to begin healing the breach between India and Canada:
I’ve taken my time in commenting on the prime minister’s trip to India. To say that I’m very disappointed is to put it mildly … I’m disappointed and a little embarrassed to be a Canadian. But the Trudeaus playing “Mr Dressup and Family” in exotic locations on the taxpayers’ dime isn’t the problem. We have, in fact, a serious problem as far as India is concerned and we, Canada, one of India’s oldest and firmest friends is in danger of being seen as an adversary. That’s a problem and it is, in my mind, a HUGE problem for Canada.
As Vishnu Prakash, former Indian envoy to Canada, told Indian news site The Print on Monday, ““Over the years, the Canadian political establishment, across the spectrum (whether it is the NDP, Conservatives or Liberals) has been mollycoddling Khalistani elements. Under the Trudeau government, this has increased. He had himself appeared on a Khalistani platform in Toronto in April last year.” It, the “mollycoddling Khalistani elements,” has been going on since at least the 1980s, back when Indira Ghandi’s government cracked down (1984) and nearly provoked a civil war and even in 1985 when Air India flight 182 was bombed, almost certainly an attack organized by Canadians, in Canada, as retaliation. Then the governments of the day spent 20 years and over $100 million on an investigation that retired Supreme Court Justice John Major described as a “cascading series of errors” by the government, writ large, including, especially, the RCMP and CSIS. India was not impressed.
India was less impressed when Canadian political parties began to actively court the Canadian the entire Indo-Canadian community but failed to condemn Sikh separatism. Canadians, including Brian Mulroney, Jean Chrétien, Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau have “explained,” correctly, that people are allowed to support unpopular causes here in Canada, so long as they don’t break our laws, but India, not unreasonably, given Canada’s own history of separatist violence, would like something more. But the Sikh vote is active and “efficient” and all parties want it and that seems, to India, anyway, to mean turning a blind eye to the (disputed)
factassertion that the Khalistan independence movement is centred in and funded from Canada … Prime Minister Trudeau made thing worse, according to The Hindu, when “On April 30, [2017] Mr. Trudeau addressed a parade for ‘Khalsa Day’, which included floats glorifying Sikh militant leaders Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, Amreek Singh and former General Shahbeg Singh who were killed in the siege of the Golden Temple and Operation Bluestar in June 1984.” That act appears to have crossed a line, leading to what the whole world is now interpreting as a major diplomatic snub […]The big issue is not the rather gentlemanly snub of Justin Trudeau by India’s highest officials; our prime minister appears more interested in having an all expenses paid vacation with his family than in doing the nation’s business in any event; the real issue is the Canadian political actions that made it politically necessary for Prime Minister Modi to administer that snub at all.
What Canada needs to do now is repair relations with India, and that may require Prime Minister Trudeau to look very, very closely at any ties any of his ministers may have with the Khalistan independence movement, he says there are none, and either making them sever all ties with separatists or severing them from the Liberal cabinet, caucus and even the Party. Andrew Scheer needs to do the same with the Conservatives and Jagmeet Singh needs to speak out for national unity ~ if it’s good for Canada then it’s good for India, too. On this issue, at least, politics should indeed, stop at the water’s edge.
Of course, when you allow things like this to happen, diplomacy becomes a much trickier profession than normal:
Sweet Mother of God. No family fashion photoshoot in Hello! magazine is going to fix this one. https://t.co/rLvI7ip8Vh
— Terry Glavin (@TerryGlavin) February 21, 2018
In Britain, the Daily Mail published the comments from a lot of Indians who have been offended by Trudeau’s choices of clothing on the visit so far:
Justin Trudeau has been ridiculed on social media by Indians for his ‘tacky’ and over the top outfit choices while on his first visit to their nation as Prime Minister.
While many praised his clothing during the first two days of his trip, patience was wearing thin by the time he attended a Bollywood gala on Tuesday night, before the tide turned against him on Wednesday.
Ministers, authors, journalists and ordinary Indians lined up to mock him on Wednesday, saying his wardrobe was ‘fake and annoying’.
Perhaps taking note of the criticism, the Canadian leader donned a suit on Thursday as he visited Jama Masjid, one of India’s largest mosques.
Leading the criticism was Omar Abdullah, former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, who tweeted on Wednesday saying Trudeau’s preening was ‘all just a bit much.’
‘We Indians do not dress like this every day sir, not even in Bollywood.’
Bhaavna Arora, a bestselling Indian author, also chimed in, accusing Trudeau of wearing ‘fancy dress’ and saying she found it ‘fake and annoying’.
Shekhar Gupta, founder of Indian newspaper The Print also mocked the Canadian Prime Minister, accusing him of ‘running a week-long “election campaign” in India in fancy dress.’
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February 22, 2018
QotD: The importance of defining your terms
If you don’t understand these [gun-related] terms already, why should you care? You should care because when you misuse them, you signal substantially broader gun restrictions than you may actually be advocating. So, for instance, if you have no idea what semi-automatic means, but you’ve heard it and it sounds scary, and you assume that it means some kind of machine gun, so you argue semi-automatics should be restricted, you’ve just conveyed that most modern handguns (save for revolvers) should be restricted, even if that’s not what you meant.
It’s hard to grasp the reaction of someone who understands gun terminology to someone who doesn’t. So imagine we’re going through one of our periodic moral panics over dogs and I’m trying to persuade you that there should be restrictions on, say, Rottweilers.
Me: I don’t want to take away dog owners’ rights. But we need to do something about Rottweilers.
You: So what do you propose?
Me: I just think that there should be some sort of training or restrictions on owning an attack dog.
You: Wait. What’s an “attack dog?”
Me: You know what I mean. Like military dogs.
You: Huh? Rottweilers aren’t military dogs. In fact “military dogs” isn’t a thing. You mean like German Shepherds?
Me: Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody’s trying to take away your German Shepherds. But civilians shouldn’t own fighting dogs.
You: I have no idea what dogs you’re talking about now.
Me: You’re being both picky and obtuse. You know I mean hounds.
You: What the fuck.
Me: OK, maybe not actually ::air quotes:: hounds ::air quotes::. Maybe I have the terminology wrong. I’m not obsessed with vicious dogs like you. But we can identify kinds of dogs that civilians just don’t need to own.
You: Can we?Because I’m just talking out of my ass, the impression I convey is that I want to ban some arbitrary, uninformed category of dogs that I can’t articulate. Are you comfortable that my rule is going to be drawn in a principled, informed, narrow way?
So. If you’d like to persuade people to accept some sort of restrictions on guns, consider educating yourself so you understand the terminology that you’re using. And if you’re reacting to someone suggesting gun restrictions, and they seem to suggest something nonsensical, consider a polite question of clarification about terminology.
Ken White, “Talking Productively About Guns”, Popehat, 2015-12-07.
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February 20, 2018
The EU transition period proposals “are the sort of terms which might be imposed by a victorious power in war on a defeated enemy”
Martin Howe on the way the European Union “negotiators” are treating the transition period for the UK as a re-run of the Versailles Treaty, with the UK substituted for the Kaiser’s Imperial Germany:
The European Union’s proposals for the UK’s transition period make grim reading. They are the sort of terms which might be imposed by a victorious power in war on a defeated enemy. They are not terms which any self-respecting independent and sovereign country could possibly agree to, even for an allegedly limited period.
Apparently, we must agree to implement every new EU law while having no say or vote; and we shall not be allowed to conclude trade agreements, even to roll over existing agreements which the EU has with other countries so that they continue to apply to us, without the EU’s permission. We must abide by the rulings of a foreign court on which there will no longer be any British representation.
Apparently, an outrageous and demeaning proposal by the Commission that the UK should be subject to extra-judicial sanctions under which the EU could suspend market access rights is now to be “re-worded”. But that would still leave the UK extremely vulnerable to damaging new rules being imposed on us during the transition period by processed in which we would have no vote and no voice. As reported in the Telegraph last week, the EU has plans to use these powers in order to launch regulatory “raids” on financial institutions on British territory and to make rules which will damage the competitiveness of the UK’s financial services industry.
But quite apart from the totally unacceptable terms for the transition period itself which are being proposed by the EU, the EU is seeking to use the transition period deal as a lever to secure damaging long term commitments from the UK. The most damaging of these is the EU’s attempt to lever the Irish border issue in order to force the UK to act as a long term captive market for EU goods exports by pressing for legally binding text that would force us into a long term obligation to comply with EU tariffs and regulations on standards of goods, on the specious ground that it is impossible to have an open border without all tariffs and regulations being the same.
There should be no doubt that being required to follow either EU tariffs or EU standards on goods would be a total disaster for the UK. It would make it difficult or impossible to conduct an independent trade policy, and to negotiate trade agreements with non-EU countries. How could we expect any significant trading partner to be willing to enter into an agreement with us, if we tell them that we cannot grant mutual recognition to their own goods standards because our own are permanently regulated by the EU? And how can subordinating the UK to the vassal status of taking rules on which we have no vote possibly be compatible with the British people’s vote to take back control of our laws and our courts?
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February 18, 2018
“The minority of one is the most oppressed minority of all”
Matt Ridley on the rising tide of neo-Victorian prudery in western society:
Is it so different here or are we slipping down the same slope? Pre-Raphaelite paintings that show the top halves of female nudes are temporarily removed from an art gallery’s walls; young girls are forced to wear headscarves in school; darts players and racing drivers may not be accompanied by women in short skirts; women are treated differently from men at universities, as if they were the weaker sex, and saved from seeing upsetting paragraphs in novels; sex is negotiated in advance with the help of chaperones. We have been here before.
In Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s novel of 1928, she portrayed the transition from the 18th century to the Victorian period thus: “Love, birth, and death were all swaddled in a variety of fine phrases. The sexes drew further and further apart. No open conversation was tolerated. Evasions and concealments were sedulously practised on both sides.”
How we laughed at such absurdity in my youth. But even for making the point that some of the new feminism seems “retrograde” in promoting the view that women are fragile, the American academic Katie Roiphe suffered a vicious campaign to have her article in Harper’s magazine banned before publication. “I find the Stalinist tenor of this conversation shocking,” she told The Sunday Times. “The basic assumption of freedom of speech is imperilled in our culture right now.”
The sin of blasphemy is back. There are things you simply cannot say about Islam and increasingly about Christianity, about climate change, about gender, to mention a few from a very long and growing list, without being accused of, and possibly prosecuted for, “hate speech”. Is it hate speech to say that Muhammad “delivers his country to iron and flame; that he cuts the throats of fathers and kidnaps daughters; that he gives to the defeated the choice of his religion or death: this is assuredly nothing any man can excuse”? That was Voltaire, one of my heroes. You may disagree with him but you should, in accordance with his principle, defend his right to say it. In demanding tolerance of minorities, many younger people seem to be remarkably intolerant.
There is an odd contradiction between the declared wish to live and let live — “diversity!”, “don’t judge!” — and the actual behaviour, which is ruthlessly and priggishly judgmental. They never stop drafting acts of uniformity, always in the name of the collective against the individual. The minority of one is the most oppressed minority of all.
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February 17, 2018
Only 3.8% of American adults identify themselves as LGBT
Most people guess a much higher percentage, and if the poll was restricted to the under-30s, the number would likely be at least twice as high. The poll is a few years old now, but it points out that most Americans over-estimate the number of gays and lesbians in the population:
The American public estimates on average that 23% of Americans are gay or lesbian, little changed from Americans’ 25% estimate in 2011, and only slightly higher than separate 2002 estimates of the gay and lesbian population. These estimates are many times higher than the 3.8% of the adult population who identified themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender in Gallup Daily tracking in the first four months of this year.
The stability of these estimates over time contrasts with the major shifts in Americans’ attitudes about the morality and legality of gay and lesbian relations in the past two decades. Whereas 38% of Americans said gay and lesbian relations were morally acceptable in 2002, that number has risen to 63% today. And while 35% of Americans favored legalized same-sex marriage in 1999, 60% favor it today.
The U.S. Census Bureau documents the number of individuals living in same-sex households but has not historically identified individuals as gay or lesbian per se. Several other surveys, governmental and non-governmental, have over the years measured sexual orientation, but the largest such study by far has been the Gallup Daily tracking measure instituted in June 2012. In this ongoing study, respondents are asked “Do you, personally, identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender?” with 3.8% being the most recent result, obtained from more than 58,000 interviews conducted in the first four months of this year.
H/T to Gari Garion for the link.
February 16, 2018
Trump’s Fake News: Deep Breaths and Fact-Checking Might Just Save America
ReasonTV
Published on 15 Feb 2018President Trump labels whatever he dislikes as “fake news,” and makes up his own, but the media is part of the problem. In the latest “Mostly Weekly,” Andrew Heaton provides a solution.
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Donald Trump tends to call whatever he dislikes “fake news,” from inconvenient facts to unfavorable reporting. Even though the President himself is less a font of truth and more a spigot of self-serving exaggeration and insults.
But Trump isn’t all wrong when he labels reporting against him as fictitious or slanted. Reporters have become so enraged with the President that in their hurry to lambast him, they sometimes forget about fact checking and standard quality controls.
The result is that actual “fake news” is slipping into major news outlets. When hit pieces turn out to be false, they bolster Trump’s claims about the media and discredit journalists in the eyes of his supporters.
In the latest “Mostly Weekly” Andrew Heaton explains the relationship between “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” fake news, and a solution for the media.
Mostly Weekly is hosted by Andrew Heaton, with headwriter Sarah Rose Siskind.
Script by Sarah Rose Siskind with writing assistance from Andrew Heaton and Brian Sack.
Special guest appearance by Brian Sack as “TV doctor”
Edited by Austin Bragg and Siskind.
Produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg.
Theme Song: Frozen by Surfer Blood.
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February 11, 2018
February 10, 2018
Protecting (some) women from their own decisions
Kirio Birks on the Formula One “grid girls”:
Objectification, we are told, is degrading. Why? Because any job that requires employees to be sexually attractive and gazed upon for that reason necessarily dehumanises them. It encourages others to treat them as pretty ‘things’ rather than as autonomous people with their own lives, passions, thoughts, and desires. Or so the thinking goes. ‘Grid Girls’ – models employed by Formula One for promotional purposes – have just discovered that their role is to be discontinued. As Formula One’s managing director of commercial operations explained: “While the practice of employing grid girls has been a staple of Formula 1 Grands Prix for decades, we feel this custom does not resonate with our brand values and clearly is at odds with modern day societal norms.”
But in their hurry to spare Grid Girls the indignity of the male gaze, nobody making this argument seems to have stopped to wonder whether Grid Girls might have an interest in defending what they do. Instead, a collective of ostensibly progressive voices leapt to their defence without bothering to ask the girls themselves if they needed defending at all. In response, Formula One abandoned its Grid Girls so that it can be seen to be moving with the times and hip to contemporary mores. In doing so, Formula One’s executives have implicitly conceded that they have spent too long objectifying women instead of empowering them. They would like it to known that they’d rather see women driving the cars, or as members of the engineering teams, or just about anywhere other than track-side holding a driver’s name-board and looking beautiful.
What baffles me is that a move supposed to empower women came at the expense of other women, and only because a minority of outsiders found Grid Girls inappropriate, problematic, and otherwise an offence against good taste. But even if Grid Girls are being objectified, then – contra the explanation offered above – it’s not at all clear that objectification is wrong in and of itself. It is acceptable to use people as a means to an end – that’s called employment. Grid Girls obviously know that they will be objectified and they make an autonomous, informed decision to take the job anyway. They are not harmed, they are paid for their time and their work, and many of them have come forward to say, with understandable indignation, that they enjoy what they do. Needless to say, this has not impressed those feminists who applauded their redundancies. But surely a woman has a right to be the object of somebody else’s desire if she wants and surely it doesn’t matter if she is being paid for it?
Get me on @thismorning so I can defend us #gridgirls
Because of these feminists, they’ve have cost us our jobs! I have been a grid girl for 8 years and I have Never felt uncomfortable! I love my job, if I didn’t I wouldn’t do it! Noone forces us to do this! This is our choice! pic.twitter.com/PUWcyB5BeG— Lauren-Jade (@laurenjadepope) January 31, 2018
Opponents may suggest that Grid Girls have internalised their own oppression in a society shaped by patriarchal values, but not without making two claims: (1) that Grid Girls are unable to adequately think for themselves because of the society they live in and (2) that thinking for yourself is only evidenced by acknowledging the existence of a patriarchal status quo and resisting it.
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QotD: “The masses”
I don’t believe that the ordinary people in fact resemble the normal description of the masses, low and trivial in taste and habit. I put it another way: that there are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses.
Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, 1989.
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