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| Silverfiddle Rant! |
Its a depressing reality: Someone makes a sincere comment regarding race, gender or some controversial subject, and the person is dogpiled and cancelled for her irresponsible outburst of WrongSpeak. Reasonable people who value their jobs and their social standing lapse into repeating approved phrases from the Little Red Book, or more depressingly, self-censor or completely remove themselves from the increasingly unhinged "dialog."
Fortunately, there are good people out there fighting against this neo-Maoist crap, and some of them are winning!
Britian's Royal Academy of Arts featured the works of German-born textile artist Jess de Wahls, until the digital Red Guard dug up an old post of hers...
"in which de Wahls wrote that “a woman is an adult human female (not an identity or feeling),” and that trans women are “biological males [who] choose to live as a woman, or believe they actually are women.”
The Royal Academy removed her items and fired off an Instagram repudiation of the German ogre. Sometime after that, the Royal Academy pulled a 180:
“We have apologised to Jess de Wahls for the way we have treated her and do so again publicly now,” read the RA communiqué. “We had no right to judge her views … This betrayed our most important core value—the protection of free speech.”
You can read the whole story here: Quillette - Standing up to the Gender Ideologues
After reading this, it occurs to me the band Mumford and Sons missed a golden opportunity. If the whole band had stood up for the right of one man to comment on a book, they could have dealt a major blow to the Outrage Tyranny gripping the west.
What say you?
Generally speaking I think there's much less evidence for "cancel culture" than there is for structural racism. The exception to that is with certain enforcers of trans ideology who wield disproportionate power, and use that power to bully and enforce their orthodoxy. The debate is toxic to the point where most people are inhibited from commenting on it, having observed that to oppose the bullies in any way would take over their life, and quite reasonably have better things to do. I don't believe this state of affairs is to anyone's benefit, least of all actual trans or gender dismorphic people, and I don't see anything like that in the other debates where the right wing claim that they are being silenced.
ReplyDeleteWhich is to say, I don't think support for Ngo falls into the same category. It's up to the whole band and Mumford in particular (nobody knows the others' names, but he's stuck with it) to choose which hill to die on; maybe if Ngo's journalism were less shoddy they would have stood by their banjo player.
I think Mumford and Sons would have survived with little damage to the bottom line.
DeleteNot a fan of Andy Ngo? You may call his journalism shoddy, but he is about the only person in the world reporting on the violent street fascists who call themselves Antifa
Andy Ngo is gay. And it isn't the "trans" community that is cancelling him. It's the political "power" community.
DeleteThe political community (DNC) that enjoys having "thugs" and "goons" playing the historical role of klansmen.
DeleteKeeping the "normies" in line.
DeleteI don't have anything beyond the received opinion of Ngo's journalism.
Delete" If the whole band had stood up for the right of one man to comment on a book, they could have dealt a major blow to the Outrage Tyranny gripping the west. "
ReplyDeleteBut they didn't. And that is the micro of the macro.
It's ALL about the Benjamins.
Delete@silverfiddle - Not a fan of Andy Ngo? You may call his journalism shoddy, but he is about the only person in the world reporting on the violent street fascists who call themselves Antifa.
ReplyDelete-----------------------
Still believe there was concrete in the milk shake?
I don't know. I do not follow incidents closely. Anyway, that is irrelevant to the topic at hand.
DeleteAs the AFT has decided to teach CRT nationally regardless of parents and students wishes, one can foresee the coming exodus reminiscent of bussing's "white flight" to the suburbs. The brick and mortar public school, much abandoned during Covid, is dead outside of the minority rich inner city. Private schools will eventually be required to teach CRT as well, leading to the eventual death of the private school. Homeschoolers will be pressured to provide a CRT curriculum. Whether they resist or comply will be interesting to note, as the SAT will likely be replace by the CRT in college admissions. Fortunately, we all recognize the value of a college education today... Autodidacts are back!
ReplyDeleteps- Don't trust any curriculum developed post 1960!
DeleteFJ,
DeleteDon't trust any curriculum developed post 1960!
Not a bad rule of thumb.
Not a bad rule of thumb.
DeleteI would defer to your significantly more expert opinion, were you to offer one. I know only the era in which the more egregious educational practices began to take hold as I witnessed to progressive deterioration of my own children's educations.
We worry and concern ourselves with such things. During my coming of age, the concern was whether I would be "college material." I feel so yesterday. Curriculum? Being "woke"No ACT or SAT... where did it all go.
ReplyDeleteBunkerville,
Deletewhere did it all go
The "children of the 60s" destroyed it.
The neoliberal obsession with reducing everything (in this case higher education) to a market didn't help either.
Delete...nor did the progressive obsession with education subsidies and "universalizing" (w/o credit score/ repayment concerns) education loans removing "natural" educational "price" constraints.
DeleteIs a higher education sector which excludes the poor an improvement over the one we have now?
DeleteIf it were to better match abilities with needs, most definitely!
DeleteThe DNC is a party dedicated to creating occupations for ethnic and feminist studies majors.
DeleteWhile some might find the never ending discussion of race and gender stimulating, I find it both tedious and unproductive.
Deletefrom today's "Quilette":
DeleteBut inexorably, questions of identity inserted themselves into teacher-student relationships. It became increasingly dangerous for me to question, to challenge, to push—let alone to betray frustration or even anger when a student was conning me or not working to capacity. Year by year, as I met each new cohort of students, I had to calculate how much my own disfavored identity (white, male, heterosexual, middle-class) made it risky for me to push—depending on whether or not a student’s identity was (given the political climate of the moment) favored. The job I had been trained to do—help students work with the nuts and bolts of language as writers and readers, as well as help them (in the best of worlds) appreciate the power and beauty of written English—became more and more difficult. Some students considered questioning and criticism racist—and the texts we read and wrote about white. Such thinking expanded, in time, to embrace a variety of identities.
This is the end result of government "market-making". The result is a modern Grand Academy of Lagado.
Delete"... I find it both tedious and unproductive."
Deletestop it, then!
I'd love to, but that's all Lefties do is ignore my actual comments and call me a racist/misogynist.
DeleteMeanwhile back at Lefty Central...
DeleteAndrew Sullivan had a great piece today. But then again, we've alway known what a white supremacist he was, deep down in his heart...
ReplyDelete