Quotulatiousness

May 15, 2018

Larry Correia gets the instant “unperson” treatment from Origins

Filed under: Books, Gaming, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Science fiction writer Larry Correia was (briefly) the guest of honour at Origins. People threw tantrums and made unfounded accusations and the con chair melted:

So I’m no longer the writer guest of honor at Origins. My invitation has been revoked. It was the usual nonsense. Right after I was announced as a guest some people started throwing a temper tantrum about my alleged racist/sexist/homophobic/whatever (of course, with zero proof or actual examples), and the guy in charge (John Ward) immediately folded. He didn’t even talk to me first. He just accepted the slander and gave me the boot in an email that talked about how “inclusive” they are. I actually heard about it on facebook before I even saw the email.

Oh well.

They did this to John Ringo at ConCarolinas a little while ago, and took a lesson from it. This is just another new way for bullies to target people who disagree with them. Throw a fit, make up some accusations, and cry about how you feel unsafe. Now that they know it works, it is just another tool in their tool box.

For the record, I’m not any of the things they accuse me of. Despite writing a whole bunch of books, and a ton of political articles, and all of my many personal interactions with fans (I’ve done up to 15 cons and events in one year), none of these people can ever find any actual examples of me being sexist, racist, or homophobic (and the Guardian looked hard and still came up with nothing).

That’s because in reality, I’m a libertarian who does not give a shit who you are, or what you do, and it is none of my business, as long as you stay off my lawn. 🙂

This time they kept calling me a “rape apologist”. They dug up that classic that John Scalzi created about me several years ago. It’s total nonsense. I spent many years teaching self defense to women, and I’m all in favor of every rape attempt ending with the rapist receiving a couple hollow points to the chest. But that just goes to show the power of lies, rumor, and narrative.

So years later, complete strangers come out of the woodwork to talk about how evil I am. Yeah… That does get tiresome. It is wearying.

I’m really sorry for any fans who were planning on seeing me at Origins. Hopefully I’ll get to meet you at some other event.

For me personally, meh. I go to enough events. I’ll just do something else fun that weekend.

The saddest person in all of this is my son, who was my plus one. He was looking forward to playing a bunch of games, and then we were going to go to the zoo on Sunday. (They have manatees there!).

May 6, 2018

Now I understand why Google calls it a “campus”

Filed under: Business, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’ve worked in high tech for my entire career, and I’ve never worked at a company that had anything like this kind of non-work-related activity … it sounds much more like a university than a workplace (and I don’t mean that in a positive way):

A recent report in The Wall Street Journal chronicles the drama of a thoroughly politicized and tribal workplace at Google, where activist employee groups stage competing talks on their pet issues, and a growing number of former employees are suing the company for discrimination and bias.

The article opens with an incident that took place in January, when Ingrid Newkirk, the co-founder and president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, was slated to give a presentation at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters as part of the “Talks at Google” series.

The subject of her talk, which was organized by the “Googlers for Animals” employee group, was how animals can be subject to discrimination and bias just like people are. But another employee group, the “Black Googler Network,” understandably found the premise of the talk offensive and protested it. The talk was canceled at the last minute, as Newkirk was waiting in a parking lot outside Google.

“Such is the climate inside the tech giant, where fractious groups of employees have turned the workplace into a virtual war zone of debate over all manner of social and political beliefs,” wrote the Journal. “Google has long promoted a work culture that is more like a college campus—where loud debates and doctrinaire stances are commonplace—and today its parent, Alphabet Inc., is increasingly struggling to keep things under control.”

Welcome to Google, microcosm of America in 2018. Like nearly every facet of American life these days, Google’s workplace has become politicized, which means the company must now constantly adjudicate every offense that arises from an ever-growing roll call of the aggrieved.

Google reportedly has employee groups for every conceivable cause: “Activists at Google,” which is anti-Trump; “Militia at Google,” which is pushing for the ability to carry guns in the office; “Conservatives at Google,” which claims the company discriminates against right-leaning job candidates; and “Sex Positive at Google,” which doesn’t want explicit content removed from Google Drive file-sharing software. Like other tech companies, Google has cultivated a college atmosphere in the workplace. It seems the company has succeeded, but only in the sense that its workplace has fractured into competing identity groups.

How would anyone get any actual work done with all those competing circus acts clamouring for attention throughout the “work”day?

May 3, 2018

“[T]hose who cry ‘cultural appropriation’ are merely whingers with too much time on their hands”

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Naomi Firsht rightly calls cultural appropriation “the ultimate first world problem”:

If ever there was an entirely invented problem, it is ‘cultural appropriation’. No one had even heard of it five years ago. Now it pops up in news stories on an almost weekly basis.

Mansfield College at Oxford University cancelled a cannabis-themed party a few weeks ago because some students feared it could lead to cultural appropriation. It seems some were concerned that the team organising the event drew on the music and culture of the Caribbean in its invitation.

That anyone could care so much as to complain about an event that encouraged students to ‘Get creative with puns’ for fancy-dress ideas – ‘Ganjalf’, ‘The Grim Reefer’ and ‘Ganja Claus’ were among the suggestions – is just sad.

The people most likely to denounce others for their “cultural appropriation” are also the ones most likely to suffer at the sight (or thought) of anyone having fun. They’re modern-day Puritans with tattoos, piercings, and multi-coloured hair.

Let’s be honest, those who cry ‘cultural appropriation’ are merely whingers with too much time on their hands. Not only is this a non-problem, it is also an inherently First World, middle-class problem. Just take a look at Teen Vogue’s article on this year’s Coachella – the annual music and arts festival held in California.

Writer Dillon Johnson complains about ‘appropriative fashion’ at the festival, including bindis, box braids and warbonnets. ‘It’s never okay to wear someone’s culture as a costume, especially not for the sake of getting double taps’, writes Johnson, before generously offering to ‘inform and educate those that are willing to learn’.

Considering a ticket to this year’s Coachella cost a minimum of $429 (and that’s before you’ve paid for accommodation, travel and food), it’s unlikey the festival-goers’ fashion choices will be of much importance to most people.

One of the greatest things about culture is its unifying power. One group borrowing cultural aspects of another is a sign of a diverse society that is proud and admiring of its many influences. As an Ashkenazi (of Eastern Europe descent) Jew, I take immense pleasure in hearing Yiddish words (the language of my grandparents and great-grandparents) being used so liberally in the US. You’d be hard pressed to find a New Yorker who doesn’t know words like schmuck, bubbe and chutzpah. And the liberal littering of Yiddish phrases in Hollywood films always makes me smile. It breathes new life into an old language.

The rage against cultural appropriation sucks the fun out of culture, and, even worse, encourages a new kind of segregation. We should encourage cultural sharing – it enriches our society. Only a schmuck would think otherwise.

April 22, 2018

QotD: Chronic Truth Aversion Disorder

Filed under: Australia, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When little children can’t understand things, they often lash out and throw tantrums.

Workplace and safety considerations prevent adults stamping their feet and hurling themselves onto the playground, so they have to content themselves with spewing invective all over the virtual playground of Twitter.

They take aim at whoever confounded them, claim to be offended and engage in a cathartic process of name-calling and abuse.

This therapeutic process is effect­ive, but flawed.

By enabling tantrum-throwers to re-establish their feelings of moral superiority they can walk away purged, but it doesn’t get to the root of their problem: Chronic Truth Aversion Disorder.

The CTAD epidemic that is raging unchecked through Australia’s social media population is rendering impossible any intellig­ent debate on serious social issues, such as the rampant violence, abuse and neglect of children in remote indigenous communities.

The reactions of people in an advanced stage of the condition to anything that so much as hints at the truth, while utterly irrational, are also so hostile that anyone ­inclined to speak the truth understandably becomes afraid to do so.

Bill Leak, “Bill Leak cartoon: what are you tweeting about?”, The Australian, 2016-08-05.

April 18, 2018

Stossel: Jordan Peterson on Finding Meaning in Responsibility

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published on 17 Apr 2018

Jordan Peterson is an unlikely YouTube celebrity. The Canadian psychologist lectures about things like responsibility. Yet millions of young people watch his videos, line up to hear his speeches, and buy his book 12 Rules for Life. It was number one on the Amazon bestseller list for a month.

———

John Stossel asks: What could make a book about responsibility take off?

“People have been fed this diet of pabulum, rights, and impulsive freedom,” Peterson tells Stossel. “There’s just an absolute starvation for the other side of the story.”

The other side of the story, according to Peterson, is that “it’s in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It’s not in happiness. It’s not in impulsive pleasure.”

Peterson instead advises: “Adopt responsibility for your own well-being, try to put your family together, try to serve your community, try to seek for eternal truth….That’s the sort of thing that can ground you in your life, enough so that you can withstand the difficulty of life.”

Many leftists hate Peterson. They attack him for saying people should be “dangerous.” Peterson explains to Stossel that he means people should have the capacity to be dangerous, but control it.

“People who teach martial arts know this full well,” Peterson says. “If you learn a martial art you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously you learn to control it.”

Advice about that, and responsibility, bring Peterson big audiences.

—–

The views expressed in this video are solely those of John Stossel; his independent production company, Stossel Productions; and the people he interviews. The claims and opinions set forth in the video and accompanying text are not necessarily those of Reason.

April 12, 2018

QotD: “Hate” speech

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The whole idea of ‘hate speech’ needs to be removed from our legal system immediately. Aside from the numerous problems involved with deciding what is and what isn’t ‘hate speech’ (and who gets to define what it is), allowing the most timorous snowflakes to set the boundaries is a surefire recipe for tyranny. And besides all that, the expectation that you somehow have a right not to be offended is ludicrous. Being offended is good. Being offended is healthy. Being offended leads to self-examination. That’s how discourse progresses. Anything new is bound to offend at least one person. If nobody is offended, then nobody is thinking.

“OregonMuse”, “The Morning Rant”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2018-03-21.

March 27, 2018

QotD: Victimology

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One must have a closed heart not to see that some minorities still are mistreated, that some women are still abused, that some of the overweight are still bullied, that some handicapped continue to be neglected, and that some members of the gay community are harassed. But one must have closed eyes not to see how some have used the victim card for personal gain. In our earnest efforts to redress monstrous problems, we consistently create new monsters. Perpetual victimhood is too great a price for temporary protection. Those victim shackles are nearly unbreakable.

We are, I fear, living in a new age of tyranny, and one as sinister as many that have gone before because these modern tyrants are weak and earnest and have had legitimate complaints. The tyranny is a tyranny mostly of the mind. To use another Blakean metaphor — our own “mind-forged manacles” hold us captive and few find escape from a ruthlessly self-imposed victimhood. And the so-called privileged must cultivate a strong streak of masochism in order to cope with this modern liberal view of political reality. And perhaps we are reaching victim overload. No longer just minorities and women and Muslims and gays and the handicapped, but also the overweight and the underfed, and the homeless, the gluten-adverse, the peanut phobic, the emotionally distraught, and so forth ad infinitum. Who will be left to blame? Who will be left to carry the guilt for all these victims of society and nature?

But it is on a still deeper level that victimhood is truly disturbing for a victim is never an equal. A victim is always defined not by who they are, but by what has been done to them. While treating a group as victims is in many ways preferable to denigrating them, it has this same impact: They are not equal. They are like pets, well treated, even pampered, but not their masters equal. Victimhood is little more than a subtler, but equally pernicious, form of enslavement. The liberal enablers of this pretense should be ashamed. They would do well to remember a much less quoted warning my Dr. King: “A shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.” Liberals have made entire segments of society more dependent and eternally adolescent. They are never truly free because they are always defined by their limitations and pain.

Joseph Mussomeli, “Victim Privilege, Cultural Appropriation, & the New Enslavement”, The Imaginative Conservative, 2018-02-09.

March 25, 2018

Policing speech

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

British police forces don’t seem to have enough resources to track down and disrupt organized rape gangs, but they do have a burning desire to clamp down on what you say on social media. Priorities, I guess: it might be dangerous to tackle actual criminals, but it’s as safe as can be to bring the full force of law down on orange-fingered basement-dwelling keyboard warriors, critics of transgender policies, and other clear and present threats to the social order.

Patrick West sums up the situation:

It’s been a strange month for free speech. First comes the news that a stay-at-home mother of four has been contacted by the police for making comments critical of transgender ideology on Twitter.

Then, we read that the Canadian vlogger Lauren Southern was refused entry to the UK because, according to the Home Office, her presence was ‘not conducive to the public good’. Then, most absurdly, we hear that ‘self-confessed shitposter’ Markus Meechan – known on YouTube as Count Dankula – was found guilty in a Scottish court of hate speech for teaching his dog to perform a Nazi salute.

It doesn’t matter if the Count Dankula incident seems innocuous, or that he has many unpleasant supporters online. Nor does it matter that Southern is a leading ‘alt-right’ figurehead. Free speech means standing up for people you don’t care for, because if your enemies aren’t safe from the encroaching powers of the state, then you and you friends won’t be safe, either. You don’t have to be a libertarian fundamentalist to be worried about the state now prosecuting people for jokes.

But these incidents have been thrown into even sharper relief, owing to the fact that this week has also seen supporters of Tommy Robinson – not a particularly endearing character either, but an important one nonetheless – clash with extremist Muslims at Speakers’ Corner in London, of all places.

At a time when there are an estimated 20,000 Islamists at large in the country – 3,000 of whom are deemed particularly dangerous – it is perverse that the police and the courts are instead pursuing such soft targets. Because it’s far better for a police force’s profile to be seen as an ‘anti-Nazi’ rather than ‘Islamophobic’, the scandal of grooming gangs in Telford and elsewhere is ignored or brushed under the carpet. For similar reasons of denial and sheer cowardice, the issue of Sharia Patrols in London, threatening gay people with violence, is met with a proverbial fingers in the ears. If only the police and courts had been so vigilant about those who planned and then executed last year’s atrocities in London and Manchester.

The first duty of a state is to protect its citizens and their safety. The last duty of a state is to tell them what they can and can’t say. Being offensive should never be a crime.

QotD: America’s “read-only” activists

Filed under: Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Outside, unbeknownst to those of us on the panel, the individuals who left said things like, “even the women in there have been brainwashed!” and “Nazis are not welcome in civil society.”

When banal observations like “men and women are different heights” prompts the accusation that I’m both brainwashed and a Nazi, it’s clear that this was not good faith protest.

It is true that the authoritarian-left is denying biology, but the deeper truth of the situation is perhaps even more concerning. The incoherence of the protesters’ responses and the fact that the walkout was scheduled in advance suggests something darker: the protesters are “read-only,” like a computer file that cannot be altered. They will not engage ideas — they will not even hear ideas — because their minds are already made up. They have been led to believe that exposure to information is in and of itself dangerous.

Scientists, philosophers, and scholars of all sorts have effectively been accused of thoughtcrimes before it is even known what we’re going to say. The very concept of thoughtcrime, as Orwell himself well understood, is the death knell to discourse, to discovery, to democracy.

Heather Heying, “On the dangers of read-only activism”, Medium.com, 2018-03-02.

March 17, 2018

“Schedule 7 of [Britain’s] Terrorism Act … effectively treats speech as terror, ideas as violence”

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brendan O’Neill on the British government’s decision to refuse admission to Canadian videographer Lauren Southern:

In Britain in the 21st century you can be punished for mocking gods. You can be expelled from the kingdom, frozen out, if you dare to diss Allah. Perversely adopting medieval Islamic blasphemy laws, modern Britain has made it clear that it will tolerate no individual who says scurrilous or reviling things about the Islamic god or prophet. Witness the authorities’ refusal to grant entrance to the nation to the alt-right Christian YouTuber Lauren Southern. Her crime? She once distributed a leaflet in Luton with the words ‘Allah is gay, Allah is trans, Allah is lesbian
’, and according to the letter she received from the Home Office informing her of her ban from Britain, such behaviour poses a ‘threat to the fundamental interests of [British] society’.

This is a very serious matter and the lack of outrage about it in the mainstream press, not least among those who call themselves liberal, is deeply disturbing. For what we have here is the ringfencing of Britain from anti-Islam blasphemy. The purification of the kingdom against those who would take the mick out of the Muslim faith. In refusing leave to enter to Ms Southern because she handed out those leaflets, the UK authorities are making it clear that this is a nation in which certain things cannot be said about Allah. They are sending a message not only to Ms Southern but to Britons, too: trolling of Islam is a ‘threat’ to society and counter to ‘the public policy of the United Kingdom’. They haven’t only banned one woman; they have sought to chill an entire sphere of ‘blasphemy’.

Ms Southern was stopped at the border in Calais. She was reportedly questioned under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act. This is an extraordinarily broad and illiberal part of the law. It can be used to stop anyone at Britain’s borders, even if there is no suspicion that they are involved in terrorism. The individual can be detained and questioned for up to nine hours. There is no right to silence. There is no right to a publicly funded lawyer if the person is at a border. That such a repressive measure was allegedly deployed in the questioning of someone for distributing leaflets, for speech, should horrify anyone who cares about liberty. This effectively treats speech as terror, ideas as violence, mere words as things to be kept out of the nation, setting a terrible precedent for free speech in this country.

H/T to Perry de Havilland for the link.

March 15, 2018

Tip-toe around topics so as to avoid “triggering” someone

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Matthew Blackwell isn’t alone in finding it necessary to avoid certain topics of conversation when talking with his friends on the left:

Outbursts of emotional hostility from progressive activists – now described as Social Justice Warriors or SJWs – have come to be known as getting ‘triggered.’ This term originally applied to sufferers of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but activists have adopted it to describe the anxiety and discomfort they experience when they are exposed to views with which they disagree. “Fuck free speech!” one group of social justice advocates recently told Vice Media, as if this justified the growing belief among university students that conservatives should be prevented from speaking on college campuses. It’s no secret that, with the rise of the triggered progressive, university professors are increasingly intimidated by their own students. An illustrative example of this alarming trend was provided by the hordes of screaming students who surrounded the distinguished Yale sociologist Nicholas Christakis and demanded his head (which they duly received). Christakis had made the mistake of defending an email his wife had written gently criticizing Yale’s attempts to regulate students’ Halloween costumes. “Who the fuck hired you?!” screamed one irate student in response. “You should step down!”

This sort of my-way-or-the-highway mentality is now spreading well beyond the urban university and into even remote communities. In the small Outback Australian town of Alice Springs where I once lived, agitators have attacked and attempted to silence the local aboriginal town councillor Jacinta Price for her principled efforts to improve the lives of her people. When Price tried to sound the alarm about skyrocketing sexually transmitted diseases, or the adult rape of children in aboriginal communities, she was shouted down as a ‘traitor’ and a ‘coconut’ (a term of disparagement used to describe a person deemed to be black on the outside and white on the inside). These criticisms do not come from the majority of aboriginal people in Alice Springs, but from a minority of furiously offended activists who, in their own little circles, plot to have Price undemocratically removed from the town council. Censorship is now the instrument of choice, and a reactionary authoritarianism increasingly defines what the liberal Muslim activist Maajid Nawaz has termed the ‘Regressive Left.’

So how and why have these activists become so intolerant and horrible to deal with? Part of this hostility can be explained by a wilful ignorance and incuriosity about ideas with which they disagree. Every so often, a progressive friend will peruse my bookshelf in a thought-police sort of fashion. What happens next is fairly predictable. Once they realize that Malinowski’s Melanesian epic The Sexual Life of Savages doesn’t include any erotic pictures, they will turn their attention to the Ayn Rand collection. “Why do you have these?” they ask with an air of indignation, holding up a copy of Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. “Have you ever read her?” I will ask. “No,” they reliably respond.

The liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill once explained that, “The greatest orator, save one, of antiquity, has left it on record that he always studied his adversary’s case with as great, if not with still greater, intensity than even his own.” Mill held that unless we carefully study the views of those with whom we disagree, we will never really know what they’re right or wrong about. “He who knows only his own side of the case,” Mill wrote in his 1859 book On Liberty, “knows little of that.” Our opponents could be right for all we know or care, because they may know a fact or offer an argument we’ve never thought to consider. And even if they aren’t right, Mill points out that specks of truth may exist among their falsehoods which can guide our minds in new directions.

March 1, 2018

Penn & Teller – The Right Not to be Offended

Filed under: Education, Humour, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

DeadJ0ker27
Published on 19 Feb 2010

I’m personally offended by people who get offended.

February 4, 2018

QotD: Modern feminism

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Feminism now regularly calls for women to be treated as eggshells instead of equals. And through this, it does something pernicious to the women it claims to advocate for: Feminism has become a movement for female disempowerment, or what I call “encouraged helplessness” (from psychologist Martin Seligman’s “learned helplessness”—the feeling that there’s nothing you can do to escape your fate).

In fact, feminism, bizarrely, has morphed into paternalism — instructing women that they are fragile, passive, powerless victims who need authority figures to advocate for them.

That’s a movement I want no part of. Or, as I like to put it — because I’m neither a feminist nor much of a lady: Count me the fuck out.

If you’re a woman, I encourage you to join me — count yourself the fuck out of what feminism has become.

This doesn’t require you to be fearless. You just need to shove your fears aside and do what needs to be done — say, getting up on your hind legs and telling some co-worker, “Stop saying that thing to me” or “
treating me this way.”

Now, if they persist after you’ve told them to stop a few times, that’s harassment and you can seek support to get them to stop. But consider that it’s less likely to get to that point if you simply act like men’s equal—act as if you’re powerful — instead of acting like you’re a feminist.

Amy Alkon, “Are Women Really Victims? Four Women Weigh In”, Quillette, 2017-11-22.

January 16, 2018

QotD: Intersectionality

Filed under: Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The term and concept were presented in a 1989 essay by KimberlĂ© Crenshaw, a law professor at UCLA, who made the very reasonable point that a black woman’s experience in America is not captured by the summation of the black experience and the female experience. She analyzed a legal case in which black women were victims of discrimination at General Motors, even when the company could show that it hired plenty of blacks (in factory jobs dominated by men), and it hired plenty of women (in clerical jobs dominated by whites). So even though GM was found not guilty of discriminating against blacks or women, it ended up hiring hardly any black women. This is an excellent argument. What academic could oppose the claim that when analyzing a complex system, we must look at interaction effects, not just main effects?

But what happens when young people study intersectionality? In some majors, it’s woven into many courses. Students memorize diagrams showing matrices of privilege and oppression. It’s not just white privilege causing black oppression, and male privilege causing female oppression; its heterosexual vs. LGBTQ, able-bodied vs. disabled; young vs. old, attractive vs. unattractive, even fertile vs. infertile. Anything that a group has that is good or valued is seen as a kind of privilege, which causes a kind of oppression in those who don’t have it. A funny thing happens when you take young human beings, whose minds evolved for tribal warfare and us/them thinking, and you fill those minds full of binary dimensions. You tell them that one side of each binary is good and the other is bad. You turn on their ancient tribal circuits, preparing them for battle. Many students find it thrilling; it floods them with a sense of meaning and purpose.

And here’s the strategically brilliant move made by intersectionality: all of the binary dimensions of oppression are said to be interlocking and overlapping. America is said to be one giant matrix of oppression, and its victims cannot fight their battles separately. They must all come together to fight their common enemy, the group that sits at the top of the pyramid of oppression: the straight, white, cis-gendered, able-bodied Christian or Jewish or possibly atheist male. This is why a perceived slight against one victim group calls forth protest from all victim groups. This is why so many campus groups now align against Israel. Intersectionality is like NATO for social-justice activists.

This means that on any campus where intersectionality thrives, conflict will be eternal, because no campus can eliminate all offense, all microaggressions, and all misunderstandings. This is why the use of shout-downs, intimidation, and even violence in response to words and ideas is most common at our most progressive universities, in the most progressive regions of the country. It’s schools such as Yale, Brown, and Middlebury in New England, and U.C. Berkeley, Evergreen, and Reed on the West Coast. Are those the places where oppression is worst, or are they the places where this new way of thinking is most widespread?

Jonathan Haidt, “The Age of Outrage: What the current political climate is doing to our country and our universities”, City Journal, 2017-12-17.

January 2, 2018

QotD: Political Correctness

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

What is political correctness? As I see it, it is a predictable feature of the life cycle of modern revolutions, beginning with the French Revolution of 1789, which was inspired by the American Revolution of the prior decade but turned far more violent. A first generation of daring rebels overthrows a fossilized establishment and leaves the landscape littered with ruins. In the post-revolutionary era, the rebels begin to fight among themselves, which may lead to persecutions and assassinations. The victorious survivor then rules like the tyrants who were toppled in the first place. This is the phase of political correctness — when the vitality of the founding revolution is gone and when revolutionary principles have become merely slogans, verbal formulas enforced by apparatchiks, that is, party functionaries or administrators who kill great ideas by institutionalizing them.

Camille Paglia, “The Modern Campus Has Declared War on Free Speech”, Heat Street, 2016-05-09.

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