Margaret Atwood Tries to have a Conversation with Trans Rights Activists
The resulting vomit of coarse and disrespectful language shocks even Buck Angel. Click the images if you are not easily offended by extremely crude language.
The resulting vomit of coarse and disrespectful language shocks even Buck Angel. Click the images if you are not easily offended by extremely crude language.
Amazing. Ridiculous accusation amplified by the media as conflict pornography, morphed into sadly hilarious denouement. Wokeness is universal acid (to borrow Dan Dennett's term). It will permeate everything. Martin Luther King offered a courageous, brilliant and hopeful alternative path.
At this post I will collect passages suggesting the reasons why people, especially young people, are going Woke.
I start with Bari Weiss:
All of this has taken place against the backdrop of major changes in American life—the tearing apart of our social fabric; the loss of religion and the decline of civic organizations; the opioid crisis; the collapse of American industries; the rise of big tech; successive financial crises; a toxic public discourse; crushing student debt. An epidemic of loneliness. A crisis of meaning. A pandemic of distrust. It has taken place against the backdrop of the American dream’s decline into what feels like a punchline, the inequalities of our supposedly fair, liberal meritocracy clearly rigged in favor of some people and against others.
See also,
What has happened is these young people now getting to college have no sense of history – of any kind! No sense of history. No world geography. No sense of the violence and the barbarities of history. So, they think that the whole world has always been like this, a kind of nice, comfortable world where you can go to the store and get orange juice and milk, and you can turn on the water and the hot water comes out. They have no sense whatever of the destruction, of the great civilizations that rose and fell, and so on – and how arrogant people get when they’re in a comfortable civilization. They now have been taught to look around them to see defects in America – which is the freest country in the history of the world – and to feel that somehow America is the source of all evil in the universe, and it’s because they’ve never been exposed to the actual evil of the history of humanity. They know nothing!
I will add other passages below as I encounter them . . .
This article about the dumbing down of American students quotes Camille Paglia:
What has happened is these young people now getting to college have no sense of history – of any kind! No sense of history. No world geography. No sense of the violence and the barbarities of history. So, they think that the whole world has always been like this, a kind of nice, comfortable world where you can go to the store and get orange juice and milk, and you can turn on the water and the hot water comes out. They have no sense whatever of the destruction, of the great civilizations that rose and fell, and so on – and how arrogant people get when they’re in a comfortable civilization. They now have been taught to look around them to see defects in America – which is the freest country in the history of the world – and to feel that somehow America is the source of all evil in the universe, and it’s because they’ve never been exposed to the actual evil of the history of humanity. They know nothing!
There’s one exception to this, however. Even while today’s students have not been taught knowledge, they have also been taught not to bully a person on the basis of their race, class, gender, or any other trait.
We gays emerge from a past in which the freedom to say the unsayable and unpopular — often to great public derision or anger — was almost defining of our kind. We have always been the creators, not the censors; we defend the outrageous, celebrate the subversive, and revel in shock. We have never been the puritans, or the humorless, or among those who want to shut down free expression in order to “prevent harm.”
We defend the eccentric, the unusual, the blasphemous, the offensive. We have never attempted to control anyone else’s speech — until very recently. And this is part of what gays have long brought to the world: the fresh air of freedom and creativity and boundary-pushing against the tut-tutting forces of disapproval and censorship . . .
The capture of the gay rights movement by humor-free, fragile products of the social justice industrial complex is not just terrible PR for all of us. It’s awful politics. They are not even trying to persuade, debate, or make reasoned arguments — as we did relentlessly in the marriage movement. They do not engage and invite critics, as we did. They try to destroy them. Instead of arguments, they tweet out slogans in all caps — TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN — as if they’re citing a Biblical text. And the act of persuasion, the key to any liberal democracy, is, for them, an unjust imposition of “emotional labor.” So much easier to coerce.