And why should the world protect you if you feel “unsafe” because of speech?
Since when did the world exist to guarantee your feeling of safety?
When I was a child – which now begins to seem like it was further in the past than it actually was, so different has the world become in the interim – we used to respond to taunts this way: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.”
It was a chant of some antiquity, and it had a purpose:
The rhyme is used as a defense against name-calling and verbal bullying, intended to increase resiliency, avoid physical retaliation and to remain calm and good-living.
Resiliency seems like a quaint notion as well. The idea was that the world could often be a tough place and that growing up involved a requirement to meet it with inner strength. That involved the ability to shake off relatively minor hurts and offenses, knowing that the world did not exist to meet your emotional needs. A related principle – unstated in the rhyme but nevertheless implied – is that there is a value in allowing people to speak their minds.
Those days are gone. Even in the workplace, which previously was not expected to be the warmest and fuzziest of environments, we often hear of young people (mainly women, but not exclusively women) clamoring for the elimination of any speech that makes them feel “unsafe.” And the definition of what constitutes such speech is left to the offended person, not some objective standard. These days many workplaces seem to have even jettisoned the very concept of an objective standard, in the best postmodern “critical thinking” manner, in which the subjective “narrative” has replaced nearly everything else.
Note the prevalence of scare quotes in the above paragraph. That’s because jargon – and what Theodore Dalrymple has described here as cant – has replaced meaningful speech.
What began in academia and in particular in postmodern philosophy has moved out into the world with a vengeance and a mission: to make the world safe for its young acolytes. Businesses and other entities are eager to fall in line, encouraged by Twitter mobs and Chinese money and fearful of accusations of racism and sexism and homophobia and transphobia and whatever other names that they believe can hurt them.
I have blamed academia, philosophy, and feminism, but in some ways therapy is also to blame, although it’s a misunderstanding and misapplication of the notion that the client’s feelings must always be treated with respect. I don’t know how it goes now with therapists, or what they’re taught these days, but thirty years ago they were still taught that although they needed to show an understanding of and empathy for the client’s feelings, as therapists they also ultimately needed to guide the client according to some reality principle that did not depend on the client’s feelings – that is, to steer clients towards seeing that their perceptions of the world may not be reflective of reality, and that it might be best to find a more productive way of looking at things.
An incident in the early 90s when I was in grad school brought the current trends to my attention – the hegemony of feelings was already in full sway in the university. A professor was relieved of his teaching duties and told to attend sensitivity training classes for saying something utterly innocuous to which a few students had objected because it made them uncomfortable. There was a discussion of this issue in a class of mine, where I was one of just a few grad students in a sea of about a hundred undergrads.
I was also about twice as old as most of the people in the room, although that still made me very young by the standards I hold today. But it did make me a member of a different generation than my fellow students, and what seemed utterly reasonable and right to them seemed horrific to me, so horrific that I stood to speak before the group.
I gave a short but impassioned talk on how the final decision about what is offensive speech should not be the judgment of each listener. That way lay madness and an almost infinite variety of standards that infringed on speech itself. I said that the proper locus of judgment about this was not in the individual’s feelings, but in an objective standard about what constitutes an offensive remark that might justify some sort of official action.
I had expected some response to what I was saying, some discussion of the merits of the points I had raised. Instead, I was ignored. It was as though I hadn’t spoken, as though I was expressing some relic of thinking that was so passé it didn’t require engagement of any kind.
I knew that I had encountered something that was already dangerous. But back then I hadn’t the tools to understand its historical or philosophical or political underpinnings, or that it would in due time take over the outside world.
But that has come to pass. As Dalrymple writes towards the end of his piece (I suggest you read the whole thing):
The judge was enunciating what might be called the eggshell theory of the human psyche. If someone takes offense against something someone says, that is sufficient to be a justiciable harm. Gone is the “reasonable man” of traditional English jurisprudence, in assessing whether behavior is threatening or so insulting as to constitute mitigation for a loss of temper: one is threatened, bullied, insulted, offended if one says that one is, and that is enough to be actionable at law. Feelings become legislators.
That’s exactly what happened in the university I attended thirty years ago. And that’s also what alarmed me in the Larry Summers incident of 2005. In one of the earliest posts I ever wrote on this blog, I described what as happening this way:
Whatever happened to the Enlightenment? If Galileo were to return at this point, he might be in grave danger again–at least, if he were to suggest that the earth didn’t revolve around women.
That post of mine was entitled “Harvard in peril.” Now it’s the entire US that’s in peril, and the hour is late and getting later.
[NOTE: See also this post by David Foster on related trends, plus this Benjamin Boyce video on recent attempts to cancel Jordan Peterson’s newest book.]
Bravo, Neo!!!
We’re of the same generation and not raised to be Wimps. Good Grief. I see the great Einstein’s accurate prediction of the consequences of technology: “We will be witnessing a generation of idiots.” Everywhere. Vanishing basic courtesy. Vapidity on Steroids. Feelings ARE NOW Facts. Entitlement in All Ways.
Maketh me puke.
Theodore Dalrymple (whose real name is Anthony Daniels) is one of the most brilliant living writers, and always worth reading (whether it be travel literature, short stories, essays about psychiatry, his specialty, or social and political commentary). Frank Furedi, by no means a conservative, has also written very well about the therapeutic element in the current obsession, especially on campus, with “safe spaces” and protection from contrarian ideas. The current “woke” insanity can hardly be better demonstrated than by the recent decision at the University of Wisconsin to remove (at great expense to the taxpayer) a large boulder, weighing many tons, from its grassy home because a group of black students claimed to be “offended” and “harmed” by the nickname attached to it a century ago.
Cant is the very backbone of the Chinese Communist Party, where there is NO Freedom of Speech, none whatsoever. It is here, in spades, and it is almost certainly too late to reverse here. Oddly, Dalrymple makes no mention of China in his City Journal piece.
My daughter lives in Durham County, NC, composed of 30% blacks, most of the rest employees of Duke Univ or its medical center. About once a year, in talking to her, I use the N-word, at which she winces and rebukes me. I respond that I was purposefully using my right to free speech to remind her that freedom of speech is the right to say offensive things. She agrees but still wishes me never to use that word again.
Durham County voted 81% for Senile Joe.
I wonder if you guys have it backwards?
I find it hard to believe that the people who complain and try to censor speech are really so imaginative/wimpy/insane that they actually do feel “unsafe” because somebody said something they disagree with.
I find it a lot easier to believe that they don’t believe you should be allowed to say anything they disagree with, and “That makes me feel unsafe” is merely the current stick with which to beat the speaker.
“I find it a lot easier to believe that they don’t believe you should be allowed to say anything they disagree with, and “That makes me feel unsafe” is merely the current stick with which to beat the speaker.” M. Ball
Bingo
The irony here is that Western civilization’s embrace of “conversational safety” is suicidal. At some point, Islam and/or the Chicoms will ‘cure’ Western civilization of that illusion.
And since Islam and Communism are totalitarian competitors, of the two, China’s communists will come out on top, given that it is logistically and technologically superior to Islam.
Along with an equal ruthlessness. If America falls, Mecca will not exist in the 22nd century.
I was also in grad. school 30 years ago, but I would have been part of the then-younger generation to which you refer. I certainly noticed these tendencies among my grad. school classmates (I was working on a doctorate in the humanities). There was a famous professor in my department who was neither a conservative nor a Republican, but his publications espoused enough of a “traditional” view of culture and of interpretation, that I remember other grad. students speaking of him with alarm and derision, as he wasn’t one of the fashionable postmodernists, so it made them very uncomfortable that he continued to be held in esteem.
I also remember how the term “doing violence to” came to be applied with increasing frequency to acts of speech. Such and such a discourse or a line of argument was said to “do violence to” the true experience or the suffering of this or that allegedly marginalized group, and so was not to be tolerated by the educated, according to the thinking of many of my graduate classmates.
Although I didn’t consider myself a conservative in those days, I knew I wasn’t a leftist, and I certainly wasn’t a postmodernist or a poststructuralist. I had chosen to attend the graduate program I did largely because it was on the whole more balanced than many of the other top programs, which were increasingly dominated by the theory crowd, and yet, even there, the loudest and most dominant voices were always from the activist group.
Margaret Ball:
I’m pretty sure there’s a group who fit your description. But I don’t know what percentage of the whole they are. My guess is that it’s a sizeable percentage but not the majority. It seems to me – for example, when I’ve watched videos of people declaring themselves unsafe – that a lot of people are very caught up in their own distress rather than feigning it. That said, sometimes it’s hard to tell, and it can also be a combination of the two.
Hard to believe we are several years past the 50th anniversary of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (1964).
The FSM was a big deal then and for decades after. Today I doubt I could find a college student who was aware of it.
I was curious what those who do remember the FSM think about it today. So I went to the FSM website (hosted by U Berkeley) https://fsm.berkeley.edu.
What jumps out at you is the slogan:
ACTIVISM IS IN OUR DNA.
There was nothing about, you know, free speech. Foolish me. It was always about activism and left-wing activist speech.
Margaret Ball is correct however, in that by casting themselves as victims, such individuals (and groups) are able to behave ruthlessly towards others.
Pretty clever. Pretty devious. The old “I’m a VICTIM! I’m being TORMENTED!! He/she’s making me feel so uncomfortable I can’t stand it. I can’t bear it. They’re attacking my personhood” trick.
Which is precisely the strategy of all these current woke-ists (woke-sheviks?) whether on campus or on the streets.
Or in the Democratic Party. (Steal an election by way of massive fraud, pretend its all legitimate and then cry FASCIST VICTIMIZER!! when Trump tries to demonstrate how it was done.)
And even if it starts out “small”—or perhaps even innocently enough—it must by its very nature metastasize into such perverse obscenities as cancel “culture” and ultimately into such “myths” and “ideas” as antifa/BLM.
IOW they KNOW exactly what they’re doing, viz., using decency (in this case people’s sense of sympathy and fair play, justice and abhorrence of “racism”) to achieve their goal of destruction.
That is, Palestinian Rules. (Hey, it works!!… As long as one is thinking too deeply….)
I loved “The Age of Cant.” I know it just came out but it will probably remain a very influential piece.
Correction: “…As long as one ISN’T thinking too deeply….)”
“Since when did the world exist to guarantee your feeling of safety? “
Since Never. It isn’t that way anywhere, either by culture, custom, law, decree or policy. It’s only that way when obnoxious people insist in ways unpleasant enough for polite people to decide to defer.
Be impolite. Train yourself to choose the moment well for maximum effect. It will stop when it becomes increasingly obvious that the Majority insists and shows willingness to back up words with action.
About the same time you were in grad school, my wife and I had to go to the local elementary school to deal with a problem our youngest son was having. There, on the principle’s wall, was the saying, “ Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will surely hurt me”. I commented to her that it backwards and wrong, but she ignored me.
“Safe space” I believe, though I could be wrong, was a term that started in therapy. Of course, these spaces were for people who had been abused as a child or raped or something generally traumatic. It has become misused to have places where college kids can play with Play-do than have to hear Ben Shapiro. Which is what humanity does takes something meant for something else and warps it in something awful.
Margaret Ball is correct however, in that by casting themselves as victims, such individuals (and groups) are able to behave ruthlessly towards others.
Barry Meislin: NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming, a semi-cultish therapy movement, of which I’ve been a member) teaches a concept called Secondary Gain:
______________________________________________
Secondary Gain is where an apparently negative or problematic behavior actually provides a positive or beneficial end result in some way. For example, smoking may help a person to relax or interact socially with a particular group of people. A Secondary Gain makes the problematic or unwanted behavior more likely to continue, unless specifically addressed.
http://nlpnotes.com/secondary-gain/
______________________________________________
Complaining about feeling unsafe is usually a negative social behavior barring true peril — who wants to be thought of as complaining and fearful? — but here it is locked in by the secondary gains of peer approval and political power. An unbeatable combination, all other things being equal.
I don’t believe most people think that much about what they are doing. They do what works in getting them what they want. Approval and power are big-ticket items.
What society reinforces, it gets more of.
It is not only speech that can be found offensive. Now silence is also offensive, for ‘Silence is Violence.’
So you’re not allowed to say wrong things, nor are you allowed to remain silent. All that remains is to agree publicly with the Left.
“Silence is violence” is probably the most nonsensical slogan to gain popularity in recent years. I just ignore people when they claim to be personally offended by their “friends” not making certain posts on social media (and yes, there are people who actually do say things like “I see you not making posts, and it hurts”). I assume they are not actually going through everyone’s page making sure they made all the right posts, but like Margaret Ball I assume they are just on a power trip.
I also found this kind of amusing and relevant: France makes it illegal to make fun of someone’s regional accent
http://languagehat.com/glottophobie/
I also found this kind of amusing and relevant: France makes it illegal to make fun of someone’s regional accent
shadow: I assume no such protection is available to French Canadians. I’ve heard French people brutal on that score.
So you’re not allowed to say wrong things, nor are you allowed to remain silent. All that remains is to agree publicly with the Left.
Chris: It’s a beautiful thing, n’est-ce pas?
What happened to parents? When i was young i went to my parents for this sort of thing. Today the world is supposed to take the place of parents … BS!
My parents would usually say ignore them and i did!
Huxley…”I also found this kind of amusing and relevant: France makes it illegal to make fun of someone’s regional accent
shadow: I assume no such protection is available to French Canadians. I’ve heard French people brutal on that score.”
Years ago, I gave a presentation in France which was more-or-less simultaneously translated into French by our French country manager. The next speaker was French-Canadian, and he spoke in French. He was also simultaneously translated into ‘real” French.
Neo:
“ It seems to me – for example, when I’ve watched videos of people declaring themselves unsafe – that a lot of people are very caught up in their own distress rather than feigning it. ”
I’ll defer to your judgment, then. I seldom watch videos – too impatient- and it may be that the videos convey more real emotional distress than the transcribed words.
I still wonder, though, how many people have trained themselves to be distressed because it’s rewarded by the silencing of the opposition?
If my toddler granddaughter got a cookie every time she threw herself to the floor in a tantrum, I expect we’d endure a great many more tantrums from her, and I’m sure she would manage to produce affecting tears and sobs…
Victim status is today’s highest denomination of political currency. Moreover, in our time, political currencies out-value all other negotiable forms, including individual rights. Therefore, anyone who can invent a reason to claim victim status will do so. This explains nearly all contemporary Leftist behavior.
“…parents for this sort of thing…”
Something apropos—a review of Jordan Peterson’s “12 Rules” (from a year and a half ago)—which I found supremely intelligent as well as quite entertaining if—because?—a bit heavy on the snark (have to beware of prodigiously clever Aussies, I guess).
The author, who rather enjoys invoking her mother, approached the book with some suspicion before finally appreciating it far more than she ever expected; though she related to it as just another SELF-HELP book whereas I think it belongs more to the “self-salvation” (“self-saving”? “self-salvaging”?) genre…assuming, of course, such a thing exists….
https://standpointmag.co.uk/why-being-normal-is-the-new-normal/
H/T Ron Coleman twitter feed (but this may be misremembered)….
“…trained themselves to be distressed…”
Yes, there is undoubtedly legitimate anti-racist, anti-discrimination, anti-prejudice sentiment.
However, there can be no doubt that such legitimate attempts to weed out—or more realistically, limit or re-train—such anti-social attitudes have been fundamentally transformed (by the usual suspects) into a weaponized kind of “moral imperative” whose goal is no longer to teach tolerance but rather to fundamentally destroy society, recreating it along the lines of all those previously “successful” centralized, utopian (i.e., authoritarian), top-down “collectives” that just happen to end up making freedom of thought (and speech) verboten and enforcing “assent”.
IOW a nightmare dystopia.
The key word would be “STRATEGY”: i.e., the “STRATEGIC” undermining of society using society’s “BOURGEOIS” , though not necessarily, values (i.e., “decency, compassion, justice, etc.”) against it.
“…regional accent…”
There are Quebecois who chafe at this colonialist(?) attitude and claim, with quite a bit of justice on their side, that in fact the Quebec “accent” (though not monolithic) is far closer to the original French as it was spoken before the Revolution forced people, mostly of the nobility, to alter their accent (as well as their last names) so as not to be identified as “enemies of the people”, i.e., as a means of self-preservation.
Remember that Quebec, by then an English colony, “missed” the Revolution: though the battle of the Plains of Abraham took place in 1759 the English conquest of Canada was formally concluded in 1763—at the Treaty of Paris—a generation before the bloody events of 1789.
The Quebec accent, which reflected mostly the French spoken in France’s western regions, didn’t evolve to the extent that French did in the mother country and today is characterized by “wider” vowels (i.e., greater diphthongization) as well as the preservation of a wide variety of nasal vowels, many of which were dropped, over time, in France. In addition, there are words used in Quebec that the French would either find quaint or not understand at all. To be sure, within Quebec there are differences (e.g., Montreal “joual”) and within France there is still a significant, if diminishing, array of regional accents.
And, wouldn’t you know, within French Canada, there are francophones living outside of Quebec (e.g., remnants of the Acadians in New Brunswick and Metis in Manitoba) who very much resent the fact that Quebec, with the greatest number of French speakers in the country, is almost solely identified as “French Canada” and is seen as “lording it” over the others with regards to things French.
(Seems that no matter what, there will always be a pecking order….)
I have come to the impression we live on the crux of a modern-day French Revolution, with young people being the Jacobins.
Mark My Words: We will have a time of sheer, absolute chaos in the near future — within five years, possibly beginning with Biden, but certainly under Harris — and it will rend the remaining fabric of this Republic to tatters.
What will arise out of the aftermath … a resurgent Republic or an American Empire — is the biggest concern of all.
I suppose it may well also see the destruction of this nation as a single entity — we may, indeed, hare off to different destinies. And again, I hope at the center heartland, there is a resurgent Republic.
*sigh*
I don’t think it was because you were speaking of some sort of relic. This is among the common mental defense tactics typically engaged by those on the left. (This tactic is not just of the left, however.) In Star Trek TOS this occurred a few times when all-controlling computer was presented with facts that were inconsistent with the goals apparently inherent in the computer’s programming. The computer would lose its “mind” and lose its ability function. I think what you experienced was very similar. What we would consider a norma reaction from a human being, to communicate with you regarding your point, temporarily became beyond the capability of those hearing your plainly correct ideas. In your case, as opposed to the computers in Star Trek, it was not a bug, but a feature adopted by leftists.
I think OBloodyHell is correct.
Interesting contrast with the preceding one, On Being Told What To Think. There’s a funny conflict going on, on the Left. Here, we have the full perfect and sufficient subjective view on display. And it IS the underlying, dominant view of philosophers on the Left.
But the media types – and I include Twitter, Facebook, et al – take the opposite view. Theirs is as pure an embrace of objective truth as Socrates could want. Their beliefs are not, in their mind, subjective at all. Ours are simply illusions, and superstitions.
And no, I don’t think this is a strategic ploy. The people I am thinking about just don’t pack the equipment for that. Does anyone actually think Stelter could understand Aristotle or Aquinas? To ask is to answer that question, once you stop laughing.
And it’s even worse among the academics. Those who had the ability to see this, have trained themselves not to. Most have been trained to be helpless here.
And note, the idea that objective truth was something “The Enlightenment” came up with is rank BS. I’d argue that it weakened it. That that is where the whole thing starts.
Barry Meislin: I can well imagine the speakers of pure Parisian French looking down on French Canadian speakers from the hinterlands. Quelle horreur!
My question, however, is to what extent are French Candians comprehensible to Parisians? You seem to have some expertise on the subject.
Back in my art house days I’d go to foreign films and got used to subtitles. Then I saw some Ken Loach films who would subtitle English speakers with thick regional accents. At first I thought it was funny. Not long after I would be grateful for those subtitles!
(I was once in London trying to order a fried egg sandwich. The young woman serving me had such a Cockney accent, I kept hearing her say, “Button paper?” After three go-rounds I realized she was asking “Butter and pepper?”)
Well, yes, I’ve had the same problem watching some of the films coming out of the UK (though in my case it was Mike Leigh). The accents can be very thick so that one can totally miss a lot of the jargon, the slang, the realistic talk in quick bursts or in anger. It’s certainly frustrating.
So in films it would make sense to add English/English subtitles.
I would imagine that the same thing is true of French films, depending on the kind of film it is.
Don’t know if it would be relevant for a lecture, but it’s certainly possible. Obviously, no one would want to miss any aspect of the lecture (info or nuance) because of unclear language.
So maybe, as a matter of policy, there should be always be same-language subtitles added to lectures—by default—so that there would be no question of condescension or being patronizing….
Maybe that’s in fact what happened in the case described above.
(On the other hand, there are some people who really go that extra mile in order to feel snubbed, put down, insulted, etc…)
By the way, the reactions are often not so much “How horrible!” as “How quaint!” or “How charming!”—though going that route may, in fact, be merely a more “acceptable” way to express the same sentiment….
(But then one has to understand the relationship that the French have to their own language…and in fact they may be completely justified—though feelings of love and admiration should not necessarily engender or excuse condescension…but all too often c’est la vie….)
As a nerd growing up in the 1950’s and 1960’s, I welcome the new ethos.
Note that I get extra points by starting with “As a {fill in the blank}.”
By comparison to today, I now look absolutely fearsome!
Ha ha ha. Who’s badass now?
Best subtitles ever:
Bon Cop Bad Cop
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0479647/
One cop is French, the other English. Both are bilingual, and keep switching languages. So the French cop switches to English, and gets subtitled back into French and vice versa…
Hilarious cop/buddy flick. The sequel is worth watching as well.
Re: Quelle horreur! …
Barry Meislin: I was exaggerating for the fun of it, while imagining Holly Golightly exclaim, “Quelle rat!”
I’ve lost some hearing and now I watch all English films/shows with the subtitles on. I don’t have to have subtitles, but doing so allows me to relax and not worry I might miss some crucial bit and have to rewind.
I’ve been using closed captions on anything British for years, for exactly the reason you mention, Huxley. It’s not that I have a problem understanding most of it, but it prevents those “what did he say?!?–rewind” moments. And there was always the occasional bit where no amount of re-hearing could make some combination of accent and unfamiliar idiom intelligible.
Anecdote about “feeling unsafe”: I was in a Facebook conversation that included a man who’s a bit of a troll–likes to provoke people–and a fairly stereotypically leftist woman. I want to say “young woman,” but, dang it, she’s almost forty, even though she still comes off like a college student in some ways. The topic was sexual harassment etc. The man mentioned an ancient incident in which he had exuberantly kissed a girl without her permission, expressed or implied. The woman declared that he had made her feel unsafe and demanded that I remove the comment or at least rebuke him.
It was impossible for me to believe that she believed that she was in any real way unsafe. (1) The two people lived thousands of miles away from each other, had never met or even heard of each other before, would almost certainly never meet, and had no connection apart from this discussion. (2) The woman has spent a good deal of her adult life working and traveling, often alone, in places where any middle-class American would feel at least a little bit uneasy, if not unsafe: remote villages in the Peruvian mountains, for instance.
I figured she didn’t feel unsafe, but rather angry, and wanted to shut him up. But since she had no power to do that–it was my Facebook page–her only recourse was to get me to do it, and her way of doing that was to try to make me feel that if I didn’t I would be a party to her victimization. I didn’t, and I suspect she still resents it.
Neo: “I had expected some response to what I was saying, some discussion of the merits of the points I had raised. Instead, I was ignored. It was as though I hadn’t spoken, as though I was expressing some relic of thinking that was so passé it didn’t require engagement of any kind.”
I’ve experienced this many times in academe and in my profession. The Left doesn’t engage. The Left doesn’t discuss. The Left doesn’t debate. The Left ignores, or censors.
Interesting that the poor snowflakes are agnostic at best, and indifferent to religion at the least. The implication is that they all believe in some form of “evolution”, thus they believe in natural selection, or survival of the fittest.
Snowflakes by their own words are unable to go on, survive, maintain sanity without intervention to remove hurtful (to them) speech, attitudes or policies. That implies they are not fit to survive. Just sayin.
Barry, that’s a fun review – I’m reading it now. Some great phrases in there! “My sympathy gland enlarged, […]” (almost a TMI!); “Your body isn’t just ground transportation for your brain.”
“The Left doesn’t engage. The Left doesn’t discuss. The Left doesn’t debate. The Left ignores, or censors.” Hubert
Post modernism posits that citing facts, employing logic and reason are invalid rhetorical tools used to ‘win’ arguments, the goal of which is to maintain white power structures.
So for the “woke” there’s no purpose to discussing issues with us, since the premises, context and foundational ‘ground’ upon which we base discussion ensures that the progressive can’t win regardless of how valid is their POV.
There’s literally no common ground for compromise. Western civilizational precepts literally have to be exterminated for their imagined world to emerge.
OBloodyHell @ 3:38 am,
My impression is that Civil War2 is only avoidable if Trump wins in the courts and takes decisive action; Insurrection Act, Martial Law and military trials for sedition, insurrection and treason. It may presage events to come that the DOJ just reinstituted executions by firing squads…
The rot is far too deep and widespread for half measures.
A resulting American Empire is only then avoidable if… after fully draining the Swamp, Trump prevails upon a majority of the States to agree to attend an Article V Convention where basic reforms are enacted that eviscerate the left’s tactics that enabled its March Through the Institutions.
Nothing less can bring about a resurgent American Republic.
Post modernism posits that citing facts, employing logic and reason are invalid rhetorical tools used to ‘win’ arguments, the goal of which is to maintain white power structures.
So for the “woke” there’s no purpose to discussing issues with us…
Geoffrey Britain: Well-stated and accurate.
However, once upon a time — in Camelot? — leftists loved to debate. They were often well-educated by old-school professors and they had better arguments to make — civil rights and opposing the Vietnam War — than they do now. (Who wants to die on the debate hill of male menstruation possibilities?)
Leftists also had little to lose (they were already considered kooks by the mainstream) and everything to gain in getting a seat at the table with good debates. Thus, the Free Speech Movement.
I imagine postmodernism figures into it, but I’m not sure if it was that crucial. I suspect it was more important that leftists were losing honest debates because they didn’t have strong positions, thus endangering their new mainstream power.
For example, consider the 2007 Intelligence Squared debate on Climate Change in which the climatistas (including Gavin Schmidt) were humiliated by the skeptics. The Schmidt team went into the debate with a 56% to 30% advantage, but the debate turned the audience around so Climate Change lost 42% to 46%.
I believe that was the last major public climate change debate in America.
https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/global-warming-not-crisis
Glad you liked it Philip. It is most unusual, I think. Fun and honest…clever and witty!
Anyway, here’s a sequel (of a sort) about the children of elites (from someone looking in/out from the outside/inside…and with rather fascinating comments):
https://twitter.com/Perez_Writes/status/1332731692105261056
H/T Lee Smith twitter feed.
File under: “looking at crowds (from both sides…)”
Barry Meislin —
I was in Montreal for a weekend convention back in 2001. I was getting ready for an evening event in my hotel room and turned on the TV to find “King of the Hill” dubbed in metropolitian French (not Quebecois). That was surreal enough, but when I mentioned it later to the Montrealers I’d met they said no, it gets better: Hank specifically is dubbed in a Gascon accent, so that even in French he sounds like a hick. 😀
Also: woke-sheviks — I’m stealing that.
Geoffrey Britain —
I suppose if the wokesheviks think discussing issues is useless, then we should cut to the chase and just start punching them, right?
“…like a hick…”
Um, er, careful there, Brian….
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/france-passes-new-law-ban-discrimination-based-regional-accents
(Right on cue, Macron delivers!)
P.S. Sure, tovarich, be my (sincere and honored) guest…
Well, yes, exactly. The French didn’t care 20 years ago, and it was funny.
Offense-warding is the death of comedy.
Fascinating topic. It’s really about our hive brain going nuts.
Of course, for most of our 300,000 years, it was essential that each tribe had an orthodoxy. Every member had to think alike else extinction of the tribe.
So, not to have a hive brain and not to be going through exactly what we are experiencing now, would be unusual. We became modern but our brains didn’t.
The only way I can think of to bring healthy modern thinking back to our hive brain is through education. We were right to dump Critical Racial Theory from federal trainings.
We need to ridicule Critical Theorists by calling them Critical Tribal Theorists.
Dnaxy,
Trump’s decision to issue Executive Order 13950 (banning CRT-based training in federal government agencies and federal contractors–that is, almost every college and university in the country) in September 2020 was one of the most important things he did in his (first?) four years as president. It may have come too late. If Biden is confirmed, the EO will be rescinded on Day 1 or Day 2 of the shadow Obama administration. The Left knows how important this is.
Barry Meislin…”the children of elites”
A friend moved to California (SF area) a few years ago, and very soon posted on FB about how obnoxious the kids of successful Silicon Valley types were. I know quite a few successful entrepreneurs, venture capital people, etc, (though not mostly in SV) and some of their kids, and I challenged her on that assessment, suggesting that maybe she’d just met a few of the wrong people. She held firm on her viewpoint, saying it was a common thing not just obnoxious exceptions.
Now I think maybe she was right as far as SV goes. Geographical concentration surely plays a role…too many like-thinking people clustered together…and certain specific corporations have extremely arrogant cultures.
Hubert:
The left may come afoul of the SCOTUS ruling on EOs when Trump tried to rescind the BHO immigration EO and it would be a just reward for them. Best case however is no President Bidet,
“And the definition of what constitutes such speech is left to the offended person, not some objective standard.” – Neo
All of what Neo said above also applies to the Islamic legal view (in some places) that anyone who hears blasphemy is entitled to punish the offender, even with death, without any sort of adjudication other than the hearer’s interpretation aka feelings.
“If America falls, Mecca will not exist in the 22nd century.” – Geoffrey
I would rather not be around when that hypothesis is tested.
“…“ Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will surely hurt me”.
I commented to her that it (was) backwards and wrong, but she ignored me.” – Paul
Neo and others have covered the theories of why she ignored you.
There is no objective, rational defense for that mutilated maxim.
I don’t claim that words can never hurt us; clearly, many people suffer from genuinely harmful comments (some in my own family hold grudges over even unintentioned woundings, but their pain is real to them).
However, putting that on par with physical violence is a ploy to excuse them beating up or killing someone for saying the wrong things. Note the number of gang-related deaths that are the result of dissing someone.
“What happened to parents? ” – Jack
Your parents, and mine, were practical people.
The snowflakes today were, to a large extent, raised by ur-snowflakes.
See Margaret’s example of how to perpetuate tantrums by toddlers.
I have no idea what started the snowball rolling.
Dr. Spock may bear some of the blame.
The great value of The American Experiment was that of the cultural melting-pot, where the incoming tribes would be assimilated into a single philosophical framework where they no longer had to be tribal to survive — or at least they could move from one tribe to another that was more congenial to their own personal needs. It was not perfect, but it worked enough to make the US the most successful, prosperous, and fundamentally good nation ever to exist (outside of a few scriptural examples).
It was done by imposing Education on Evolution, which works far too slowly to make that kind of change, in the context of Parental guidance and Religious moral values.
The Left has spent 50 years or more subverting and now openly destroying all three pillars of American life.
The Left is now imposing a Balkanization back into Tribes.
The Woke-sheviks are the Mensheviks — the useful idiots.
The Bolsheviks have no need of Snowflakes once the Revolution is complete.