#outrage mob

“Is the accuser always holy now? Were they born this morning as clean as God’s fingers? I’ll tell you what’s walking Salem—vengeance is walking Salem. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law! This warrant’s vengeance! I’ll not give my wife to vengeance!”

-- Arthur Miller, “The Crucible”

--

The Salem Witch Trials came about entirely as a result of crazy, vicious little girls who took on the mantle of victim, claiming to being plagued by dark forces supposedly inflicted upon them by “witches.” These claims pivoted on “spectral evidence” - visions claimed by the girls that nobody but they could see, which could therefore not be refuted by anyone else, since they were inaccessible and unverifiable. What we would know as “lived experience.”

These purported “victims,” these crazy little girls, were the most powerful individuals in Salem, with the entire town terrified of being the next to be accused. To express doubt was to invite suspicion onto yourself. Although that didn’t stop the crazy girls from accusing whomever they wanted for reasons of their own. All the while continuing to play the victim.

The entire saga only came to a halt when people, particularly those in power, stopped collaborating with delusions of “spectral evidence,” and stopped pretending that they believed the claims, simply to keep the spotlight from being pointed in their direction.

By the time the trials came to an end, more than two hundred people had been accused, nineteen had been hanged, five others had perished in jail, and the farmer Giles Corey had been pressed to death with large boulders for refusing to enter a plea. In the throes of victimhood, these children had found the means to become the most powerful members of the community. They could see their fellow citizens executed on the basis of ‘spectral evidence’ alone, what we might today refer to as ‘lived experience’. Those who attempted to apply reason and logic to the events as they unfolded were liable to find themselves accused, and so for the sake of self-preservation most left their doubts unuttered. The fantasies of the few were propagated by the elites: judges and ministers who had lost sight of reality, or had no inclination to see it restored. [..]

The willingness of the villagers to believe the girls’ visions serves as a reminder of the human susceptibility to false narratives, particularly if they are more readily comprehensible than complicated truths. When bad ideas are allowed to spread unchecked they take on an illusion of incontrovertibility, and when figures of authority are captured by dangerous ideologies, resistance becomes a feat of courage that few will dare to attempt. But perhaps the aspect of Salem most redolent to today’s cultural skirmishes is the development of an intense climate of fear and mistrust. This episode in history offers a stark example of the conflicting loyalties and tribal instincts that can manifest in any society if the conditions are right.

-- Andrew Doyle, “The New Puritans”

We’re all Salem now, living under the rule of fantasists.

The Cancel culture and Far Leftist fuckery has reached a new low with how they’ve been treating Gina Carano.

A woman, successful in Hollywood and a “strong, badass woman” something you lunatics have been hollering for ages about needing more representation for in media and the moment she doesn’t fall in line with your totalitarian bullshit, you seek to ruin her life.

Gina Carano does not need to kowtow to your ideology, no one does. She has all the right in the world to write whatever the hell she wants for HER Twitter profile. Because this is what this insanity started over. Someones right to describe their own personal Twitter profile they they want to describe it. It has nothing to do with Trans people or hatred of them. If anything she’s mocking how people on Twitter feel the need to describe everything about themselves in a completely arbitrary way. Absolutely pathetic.

Even worse is they dare go after her when she is out there championing REAL issues and trying to bring awareness to them, like sexual trafficking of women and children, the absolute scum of the Earth, but because she won’t fall in line with your cult-like nonsense you try to deplatform her and lose her job.

And then have the nerve to cry fowl about how she’s so bad and mean when she blocks your harassing asses who keep spamming her with nasty shit for daring to have an opinion. About how she is trying to “oppress” you when you are the ones truly trying to oppress someone. And speaking outright lies by painting her as a “right-winger”, a “Trump supporter”, or “insert ist/phobe” and other dog whistles people like you use whenever someone disagrees with you. 

In what may be the most absurd case of cancel culture yet, a senior curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has resigned after he was accused of white supremacism.

Gary Garrels was the subject of a complaint from museum employees who circulated a petition calling for his removal. The petition accused him of holding ‘toxic white supremacist beliefs’.

The evidence? At a presentation about how to diversify the museum’s collection, he said ‘don’t worry, we will definitely still continue to collect white artists’.

He has previously said that the work of white artists should not be overlooked just because the creators are white, as this would be ‘reverse discrimination’.

By: Richard Dawkins

Published: Aug 20, 2023

I was about to start work on this commission, when in came an email from Twitter. They’d received a complaint that the following tweet violated their standards.

“Sex is not the same as gender.” But it’s not your gender that gives you the physique to tower over woman athletes & break their swimming records. It’s your sex. It’s not your undressed gender that upsets women in changing rooms. It’s your sex. You can’t eat your cake & have it.

Twitter sensibly over-ruled the complaint and cleared me of the proscribed sins that they helpfully listed for me:

Violent speech, violent and hateful entities, child sexual exploitation, abuse/harassment, hateful conduct, perpetrators of violent attacks, suicide, sensitive media, illegal, private information, non-consensual nudity, account compromise, plus various legal technicalities.

I’m sure the complainant was sincere. And that’s my point. A certain type of activist has a level of paranoid hypersensitivity that almost literally warps their hearing. You can say ,“I disagree with you for the following reasons.” But all they actually hear is “Hate hate hate!” So instead of putting a counter-argument (which I would be interested to hear), they resort to censorship. All too often it goes further, and they boil over in virulent abuse: “Transphobe! TERF!”

At least the above tweet was partisan. But so hair-trigger is the hypersensitivity, a mere invitation to discuss something is enough to set it off.

In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.

That 2021 tweet caused the American Humanist Association to withdraw my title as 1996 Humanist of the Year. A 25-year retrospective swipe, which cost them the loss of several major donors. Once again, I have no doubt they were sincere.

On July 26, I interviewed Helen Joyce about her book Trans. The interview is being very well received on YouTube. As it should be, for Joyce is extremely well-informed in her subject and she spoke cogently, soberly, reasonably.

But one of YouTube’s in-house judges heard only hate. And tried to censor the interview.

Short of an outright ban, YouTube has a variety of punishments at its disposal. In this case we got a minor slap on the wrist, a restriction on our video’s licence to advertise. But the real point is, yet again, the ludicrous hypersensitivity of the complainant. Those warped ears heard not reasonable argument deserving a reply, but “hateful and derogatory content”, and “hate or harassment towards individuals or groups”.

Obviously I can’t disprove that here. The interview runs to more than 10,000 words. But judge for yourself, it’s still up on YouTube. I earnestly challenge Evening Standard readers to search diligently for literally anything that a reasonable speaker of the English language could fairly call hateful. Enter it, labelled “Challenge”, in the comments section under the video, and I promise to respond.

I just said “a reasonable speaker of the English language”, and maybe here lies the key: language. If we want a fruitful argument, we’d better speak the same language. In today’s overheated sparring over sex and gender, both sides may appear to be speaking English, but is it the same English? Does “hate” mean to you what “hate” means to everyone else?

Or there’s “violence”. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as “the deliberate exercise of physical force against a person, property, etc”, and that is certainly the meaning I understand. Advocates of free speech often invoke, as a sensible exception, “incitement to violence”, where physical force is normally implied. But that sensible exception would mean something very different if you redefine “violence” to include the non-physical. If someone calls you “she” when you prefer “they”, I might see it as a mild discourtesy. But if you see it as a “violent” threat to your very existence, then our interpretations of “incitement to violence” — and hence of freedom of speech — are going to diverge sharply.

As a textbook example of incitement to real violence, you could hardly do better than “Sarah Jane” Baker’s speech at London Pride this year, where she told the cheering crowd: “If you see a TERF, punch them in the fucking face”. Or Sky News (January 23) has a picture of two SNP politicians grinning in front of a large, colourful sign depicting a guillotine and the slogan “DECAPITATE TERFS”. They claimed they didn’t know the sign was there, and I sympathise. You shouldn’t be blamed for the company you keep. No doubt I shall be labelled “right-wing” for writing this article — and that’s the most unkindest cut of all.

The Guardian (February 14, 2020) reported that police officers turned up at Harry Miller’s workplace to warn him about his allegedly “transphobic” tweets, such as the obviously satirical, “I was assigned Mammal at Birth, but my orientation is Fish. Don’t mis-species me.” One of them told Miller that he had not committed a crime, but his tweeting “was being recorded as a hate incident”.

Well, if Miller’s light-hearted satire is a hate incident, why not go after Monty Python, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Rowan Atkinson, Private Eye’s royal romances of Sylvie Krin, the early novels of Evelyn Waugh, Lady Addle Remembers, Tom Lehrer, even the benign PG Wodehouse? Satire is satire. That’s what satirists do, they get good-natured laughs and perform a valuable service to society.

“Assigned Mammal at Birth” satirises the trans-speak evasion of the biological fact that our sex is determined at conception by an X or a Y sperm. What I didn’t know, and learned from Joyce in our interview, is that small children are being taught, using a series of colourful little books and videos, that their “assigned” sex is just a doctor’s best guess, looking at them when they were born.

A provisional guess, pending the child’s own decision (which is what really counts).

Joyce’s comment is: “And what are you meant to make of this if you’re eight? First off, that you’re very boring if you simply go along with what you were assigned at birth”. Her book quotes the boast of a mother of eight children, “without a single boring cis child in the whole bunch!” I recently received a moving letter from a highly intelligent American 12-year-old, worried that at her school it was not cool to retain your assigned gender. Yesterday I chanced to meet an American teacher whose school rules compel her to go along with a child’s declared gender and not tell the parents.

Miller’s case came up before Mr Justice Knowles, who thankfully didn’t mince words when it came to freedom of speech: “In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society”. 1984’s Appendix lays out the principles of Newspeak, the nascent language of Orwell’s dark dystopia. Newspeak was designed to make unorthodox thoughts impossible. There would be no words to express them.

O’Brien, Big Brother’s enforcer, holds up four fingers, and tortures Winston Smith until he really believes that 2+2= 5 if the Party wills it. Is that realistic? Could political power ever make you really believe a logical contradiction? The Times (January 18) reported that “a transgender woman has denied raping two women with her penis”. If “with her penis” is not quite 2+2= 5, it’s getting close. 2+2= 4.5? Joyce’s book quotes Orwell in an epigraph: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” Are we approaching that point?

But shouldn’t we just indulge the harmless whims of an oppressed minority? Maybe, were it not for a strain of aggressive bossiness which insists, not so very harmlessly and not sounding very oppressed, that the rest of us must humour those whims and join in. This compulsion even has the force of law in some states. And alas, we often zip our lips in abject self-censorship because we aren’t as brave as JK Rowling, and don’t fancy becoming a target of Twittermob vitriol. No, we don’t fear Big Brother or the Stasi. We fear each other.

==

It's a feature, not a bug.

By: James Marriott

Published: Nov 30, 2022

I was perturbed to learn that the Wellcome Collection is “racist, sexist and ableist” (its own words) as I’d been vaguely meaning to go at some point. Evidently, my plans to enliven the melancholy damp of an early December weekend by inspecting such artefacts as Napoleon’s toothbrush and Florence Nightingale’s moccasins concealed more sinister subconscious motives.

Anyway, as we have all now heard, the museum has closed its Medicine Man exhibition so I will not be able to potter around some of the minor curiosities of medical history — sorry, collude in the exclusion, marginalisation and exoticisation of indigenous peoples.

To anyone unfamiliar with the censorious jargon that is threatening to become the lingua franca of modern academia, the grounds on which Medicine Man was shut down must seem either incomprehensible or bleakly hilarious. The public was piously informed that the exhibition was “very much a product of its time”. That time being . . . 2007. Ah, 2007. A cruel and bitter age.

This is strange, isn’t it? A great many people will be prevented from seeing Medicine Man on the basis of views so esoteric and so far outside mainstream discourse that I’m willing to bet that many of the Wellcome Collection’s ordinary visitors have never even heard of them. How many of the families wandering around on the average Saturday afternoon could say what it means to “other” someone or explain what was wrong with prevailing morality in the year 2007

The exhibition has disappeared because, although a very large number of people would have quite liked it to stay, a very small number of people vehemently wanted it to go. We should get used to that equation. The case of the Wellcome is a small but characteristic tragedy of the modern age — the tyranny of the intolerant minority. We are used to the “tyranny of the majority” but in liberal societies a motivated minority with strong opinions can easily override the preferences of the majority of people, especially if those preferences are only mildly held.

Indeed, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out in his book Skin in the Game, there are many situations in which we rightly allow a strong minority preference to shape our behaviour. For instance, on a plane on which three people have nut allergies, a few hundred other passengers will refrain from eating Snickers bars during the flight.

Taleb suggests that some of the prevalence of fast-food chains such as Pizza Hut and McDonald’s may be attributed to the power of minority opinion. In any group deciding where to go for dinner there will be one or two people with strong objections — they won’t eat fish, for instance, or spicy food. The solution is bland compromise. Nobody hates pizza.

This may be merely unfortunate from a culinary perspective but when the same dynamic is at work in intellectual life, catastrophe looms. The academic Jonathan Haidt has described how his fear that one student’s complaint or infuriated tweet might ruin his career led him to the principle of teaching to “the most sensitive person in class”. Difficult, controversial ideas are out. Bland, universally palatable pap is in. Intellectually, everyone goes to McDonald’s. But shouldn’t a university be offering gourmet intellectual fare? The stinkiest cheeses, the weirdest fish?

Tolerant institutions are inherently vulnerable. The philosopher Karl Popper referred to the “paradox of tolerance” — a tolerant society must tolerate even those who wish to destroy tolerance itself. The blogger Scott Alexander describes the way the Quakers of 17th-century Pennsylvania “tolerated themselves out of existence”. By welcoming other sects, they faded into political irrelevance as more activist, intolerant faiths took over. Because humans like to join groups with powerful signifiers of identity (tattoos, flags, unusual beliefs), intolerant institutions are better at attracting followers than woolly, tolerant ones. The fading Anglican church may be another institution tolerating itself out of existence.

The intolerant are motivated and fanatical whereas the tolerant, by their very nature, tend to be uncertain, and cautious about their convictions. The belief that the Wellcome should close an exhibition because it is racist is vastly more potent than the belief that the exhibition should stay open because it would be nice if some people got to see Napoleon’s toothbrush.

Convinced of its moral superiority and certain that the urgent righteousness of the ends justifies the means, an intolerant minority is able to magnify its power with underhand tactics (public denunciation, hyperbolic accusations of racism on social media). The tolerant tend to view such methods as rather extreme.

Tolerance is hard, unrewarding work: repeatedly confronting objectionable views and deciding to put up with them on the grounds of an abstract principle is tedious. Intolerance, meanwhile, rejects thought and replaces it with jargon and slogans which have all the glamorous atmosphere of intellectual distinction while requiring none of the effort. It is an unfortunate truth that in every institution there are a great many people who do not particularly like thinking and who would much rather repeat a slogan than interrogate an idea, particularly if repeating that slogan means nobody will call them names on Twitter.

This is how intolerant minorities exert their power. It is how exhibitions disappear and curriculums narrow. It is how you end up condemned to live for ever in the McDonald’s of the mind. It is a blander, sadder and less nourishing place.

[ Via: https://archive.ph/61DTn ]

--

https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/stories/2019/08/28/jonathan-haidt-doesnt-mind-ruffling-feathers

Most students are great. But when you're lecturing, it doesn't matter the averages, you have to teach to the most sensitive student. Because if you say anything or show a video that has one word that offends any student, you can be reported. So what do you do if you can't trust your class?

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/

In an article published last year by Inside Higher Ed, seven humanities professors wrote that the trigger-warning movement was “already having a chilling effect on [their] teaching and pedagogy.” They reported their colleagues’ receiving “phone calls from deans and other administrators investigating student complaints that they have included ‘triggering’ material in their courses, with or without warnings.” A trigger warning, they wrote, “serves as a guarantee that students will not experience unexpected discomfort and implies that if they do, a contract has been broken.” When students come to expect trigger warnings for any material that makes them uncomfortable, the easiest way for faculty to stay out of trouble is to avoid material that might upset the most sensitive student in the class.

==

The “be kind” people being kind. The “tolerance” crowd being tolerant.

“One of the things that is a classic trope of the religious bigot, is while they’re denying people their rights, they claim that their rights are being denied. While they are persecuting people, they claim to be persecuted. While they are behaving colossally offensively, they claim to be the offended party. It’s upside down world.“