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[Nester99]

Interesting article about Cancel Culture.

Murray writes: “The interpretation of the world through the lens of ‘social justice,’ ‘identity group politics’ and ‘intersectionalism’ is probably the most audacious and comprehensive effort since the Cold War at creating a new ideology.” Christianity has been spurned, but the religious impulse is inherent and abhors a vacuum. The “religion” of social justice, Murray observes, poured itself into the handy campus vessel of Marxism with remarkable speed.

One of the hallmarks of Marxism – not a bug, but a feature – is its ruthlessness. I was particularly struck by Murray’s quite poignant chapter, “On Forgiveness.” Normal religions offer redemption to sinners. But there is no forgiveness or statute of limitations for thoughtcrimes in the religion of social justice. A mural of Rudyard Kipling’s “If” – voted Britain’s favourite poem – was painted over at the University of Manchester in retroactive punishment for Kipling’s now politically incorrect views on empire. The past, Murray says, is “hostage — like everything else — to any archeologist with a vendetta.”

This new religion gives permission to those of “oppressed” status — women, people of colour, indigenous peoples, LGBTQ — to hate their oppressors: heterosexual white men, racists, transphobics. (Gay himself, Murray refuses to play the LGBTQ card as the sole, or even most important marker of his humanity.) For many unlucky people, a silly joke tweeted, an incorrect opinion on Facebook or an inadvertently touched knee can be the kiss of death to career and reputation. Murray provides plenty of examples of good people cut down without mercy — indeed with unseemly relish — by relentlessly vigilant activists.

Toby Young, for example, once divided his time between journalism and the New Schools Network, where he worked to help disadvantaged children get a better education. Long story short, a few naughty references to “boobs” on Twitter, excavated by the usual suspects, lost him a government appointment and all his writing gigs in a fusillade of opprobrium. Too good a mind to waste, Young is now the U.K. editor of Quillette magazine, “a platform for heterodox ideas,” ironically one of several excellent magazines that have sprung up in a polemical resistance movement to cancel culture.

Barbara Kay: Douglas Murray is a writer who says what the rest of us would like to


He is right, this is becoming a new relgion and righteousness is dependent on your place in oppression stack.

The Crusades will return, but did you think it be you they are cursading against?

 

[Stilton Disco]

The thing is, it's not a religion, it's a cult, and that's an important difference that will curtail its long term viability and danger.

Like he says, there's no frame work for forgiveness, so as more and more people are branded 'heretics', so too does its reach and power base shrink.

What's more, with no structure, no guiding word to follow, no ultimate goal to achieve beyond the impossible dream of an imagined utopia, it's simply unsustainable in the long term.

Outrage and hatred can only carry a movement for so long, and with it's focus on eradicating traditional values, selfish hedonism, lack of personal responsibility and perceived immorality of children beyond their use for sexual gratification, the simple passage of time will see their numbers dwindle.

The entire ideology has been propped up by big globalist businesses because right now the cult helps their business model. When the current bubble bursts, and it will, the chaos that will ensure will eat these people alive. It just sucks for the majority that don't share their faith in the meantime, because the shrieking wheel gets the grease.

 

[Deleted member 17706]

I've been listening to the audio book version of this (narrated by Murray himself, who is a great orator) and it's very good. I don't agree with everything, but he makes a lot of great points about how we got here and what a lot of the problems are.

Probably going to pick it up as an ebook, too. I like to be able to go back and reference things in books, and that's not really an option with audio books.

 

[Tesseract]

good stuff, will read tonight

 

[VanEs]

I'm interested in reading it ... although i wonder how long i can read a book about wokeness and cancel culture before i get too irritated and do something else.

 

[Birdo]

Modern social justice is more about looking good, than it is actually fighting for justice.

Thanks to social media, we are more narcissistic than ever before.

 

[EviLore]

I read the book when it released. It's a solid read, but doesn't cover much new ground for me, personally, since I've absorbed as much as I can about the issue over the last couple years. The standout moment was when he cited prominent feminist Judith Butler's published incoherent drivel, which actually won a bad writing award:

The Bad Writing Contest

"
“As usual,” commented Denis Dutton, editor of Philosophy and Literature, “this year’s winners were produced by well-known, highly-paid experts who have no doubt labored for years to write like this. That these scholars must know what they are doing is indicated by the fact that the winning entries were all published by distinguished presses and academic journals.”

Professor Butler’s first-prize sentence appears in “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” an article in the scholarly journal Diacritics (1997):

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Dutton remarked that “it’s possibly the anxiety-inducing obscurity of such writing that has led Professor Warren Hedges of Southern Oregon University to praise Judith Butler as ‘probably one of the ten smartest people on the planet’.”
"

 

[Deleted member 17706]

I read the book when it released. It's a solid read, but doesn't cover much new ground for me, personally, since I've absorbed as much as I can about the issue over the last couple years. The standout moment was when he cited prominent feminist Judith Butler's published incoherent drivel, which actually won a bad writing award:

The Bad Writing Contest

"
“As usual,” commented Denis Dutton, editor of Philosophy and Literature, “this year’s winners were produced by well-known, highly-paid experts who have no doubt labored for years to write like this. That these scholars must know what they are doing is indicated by the fact that the winning entries were all published by distinguished presses and academic journals.”

Professor Butler’s first-prize sentence appears in “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” an article in the scholarly journal Diacritics (1997):


Dutton remarked that “it’s possibly the anxiety-inducing obscurity of such writing that has led Professor Warren Hedges of Southern Oregon University to praise Judith Butler as ‘probably one of the ten smartest people on the planet’.”
"

His reciting that section in the audio book version was just hilarious. I went back and listened to it like 5 times in a row and still barely understood the garbage that she wrote.

 

[plushyp]

I read the book when it released. It's a solid read, but doesn't cover much new ground for me, personally, since I've absorbed as much as I can about the issue over the last couple years.

Any books or material you'd recommend regarding this?

 

[EviLore]

Any books or material you'd recommend regarding this?

The whole situation at Evergreen was enlightening:






(continues in parts 2 and 3)

 

[Deleted member 17706]

Also look up the Grievance Studies hoax and the work of Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose.

I would highly recommend this three-video series:







Especially episode 3 if you're curious about "how we got here" in terms of intersectionality and critical race theory. It's an hour long, but it's rather eye opening.

 

[Tesseract]

thanks for those links, zefah

passing them around

 

[highrider]

I’d be more concerned if the majority of this cult could fight its way out of a wet paper bag.

 

[Bigrx1]

I think what's kind of concerning is that this whole outrage cancel culture seems to get stronger and stronger the younger the generation we talk about is. Like it seems fully adopted by the teens of today, kind of adopted by the 20's and less as you get older. Just worrying what happens as we all die off and those who were brought up with it always existing and not knowing any other way get older and raise more kids like that. An entire world walking on egg shells all the time.

 

[BadBurger]

Intersectionality is an interesting topic to me, in that what it proposes is technically correct. However, 90% (I know, just spitballing a figure there) of the "oppressions" and systemic problems in society are really just the result of having less money than someone else, refusing to abide by accepted societal norms (such as speaking like a rational adult in public or in the workplace), and not following basic decorum.

Cancel culture is dangerous to me because we've seen it so often leveled at people with no proof aside from maybe anecdotal or circumstantial evidence (sometimes "evidence" is a strong word, at that), and refusing to ever forgive someone or admit that they're capable of change is frankly unhealthy for society.

 

[Papa]

Intersectionality is an interesting topic to me, in that what it proposes is technically correct. However, 90% (I know, just spitballing a figure there) of the "oppressions" and systemic problems in society are really just the result of having less money than someone else, refusing to abide by accepted societal norms (such as speaking like a rational adult in public or in the workplace), and not following basic decorum.

Cancel culture is dangerous to me because we've seen it so often leveled at people with no proof aside from maybe anecdotal or circumstantial evidence (sometimes "evidence" is a strong word, at that), and refusing to ever forgive someone or admit that they're capable of change is frankly unhealthy for society.

How is intersectionality technically correct?

 

[BadBurger]

How is intersectionality technically correct?

Biases and prejudices exist, clearly, and do overlap in ways that compound. But again, as I mentioned, I think most of it boils down to socioeconomic standing and behavior - not a shadowy cabal of hate from white people.

 

[Papa]

Biases and prejudices exist, clearly, and do overlap in ways that compound. But again, as I mentioned, I think most of it boils down to socioeconomic standing and behavior - not a shadowy cabal of hate from white people.

Uh yeah, of course biases and prejudices exist, but intersectionality asserts that they happen solely along gender (but not male)/race (but not white)/sexual orientation (but not straight)/religion (but not Christianity). It also dogmatically presents them as a modern form of Original Sin, i.e. you inherit varying degrees of them at birth depending on your immutable characteristics. It completely robs people of individual agency and treats them as an indistinguishable member of their group identity. So no, it’s not technically correct at all.

 

[Deleted member 17706]

I think he's talking about the idea that prejudices can overlap and compound to make someone's life more difficult in society. I mean, I don't think anyone is going to argue that, all things being equal, a gay, black, disabled female will probably have a harder time at life than a straight, white, healthy and able-bodied male. That's what makes it so insidious. It's easy to agree at face value, but that's not the extent of what it's actually saying. In reality, it tries to eliminate any form of individual variability from all discussions (in fact, individualism is considered a racist ideology) and hierarchically ranks people in terms of oppression based solely on their various group identities. It affords people authority based on how oppressed their associated groups are and implies that people are prejudiced, racist, sexist, all manners of phobic, etc.--no buts about it--simply because they happen to have a certain combination of immutable characteristics.

 

[Dee Dah Dave]

It will eventually lose to Islam. Which in turn will lose to China.

Fun times ahead for ‘The West’

 

[Papa]

I think he's talking about the idea that prejudices can overlap and compound to make someone's life more difficult in society. I mean, I don't think anyone is going to argue that, all things being equal, a gay, black, disabled female will probably have a harder time at life than a straight, white, healthy and able-bodied male. That's what makes it so insidious. It's easy to agree at face value, but that's not the extent of what it's actually saying. In reality, it tries to eliminate any form of individual variability from all discussions (in fact, individualism is considered a racist ideology) and hierarchically ranks people in terms of oppression based solely on their various group identities. It affords people authority based on how oppressed their associated groups are and implies that people are prejudiced, racist, sexist, all manners of phobic, etc.--no buts about it--simply because they happen to have a certain combination of immutable characteristics.

There are observable group level disparities, but they do not necessarily indicate prejudice or bias. There are a multitude of factors that can affect outcomes, the vast majority of which go unaddressed by intersectionality. Moreover, attempting to attribute them to prejudice and bias requires a mind reading ability that nobody has.

 

[Deleted member 17706]

There are observable group level disparities, but they do not necessarily indicate prejudice or bias. There are a multitude of factors that can affect outcomes, the vast majority of which go unaddressed by intersectionality. Moreover, attempting to attribute them to prejudice and bias requires a mind reading ability that nobody has.

Exactly. In fact, when you dig deeper, you quickly discover that the entire point of the ideology is to avoid addressing any of those multitude of factors. It is indeed an attempt to simplify everything through the lens of group identity.

 

[triplestation]

matt let's go start a protest at mcdonald's

no rest until there are free burger refills

 

[Shrap]

I think he's talking about the idea that prejudices can overlap and compound to make someone's life more difficult in society. I mean, I don't think anyone is going to argue that, all things being equal, a gay, black, disabled female will probably have a harder time at life than a straight, white, healthy and able-bodied male. That's what makes it so insidious. It's easy to agree at face value, but that's not the extent of what it's actually saying. In reality, it tries to eliminate any form of individual variability from all discussions (in fact, individualism is considered a racist ideology) and hierarchically ranks people in terms of oppression based solely on their various group identities. It affords people authority based on how oppressed their associated groups are and implies that people are prejudiced, racist, sexist, all manners of phobic, etc.--no buts about it--simply because they happen to have a certain combination of immutable characteristics.

That's the whole point - all things aren't equal. If the gay, black, disabled female grows up in a wealthy stable family and the straight, white, healthy male grows up in a broken home and is kicked out at 10 then he is more likely to have a harder time at life. Society doesn't exist in a vacuum and there are countless variables that change everything.

Intersectionality is not technically correct in any way at all. It's a gross generalisation that takes broad strokes over incredibly complicated aspects of society. It's what happens when you take a collectivist approach to the world instead of an individualist approach - you cannot see a person for who they uniquely are and instead define them by a few very general categories they fit into.

It's flawed from a surface level and a complete failure from an in depth analysis. People always want to try and simplify things and see the world in black and white as it's easier to comprehend and have a sense of control that way. But we are far too complex to be so grossly oversimplified. Well, except for those that subscribe to intersectionality since they see the world in only two tones.

 

[flibbertyjibbert]

]

I think he's talking about the idea that prejudices can overlap and compound to make someone's life more difficult in society. I mean, I don't think anyone is going to argue that, all things being equal, a gay, black, disabled female will probably have a harder time at life than a straight, white, healthy and able-bodied male.

This is only true in respect of disability. Being black, female and gay are now all significant advantages in the west. Its legal to discriminate to advantage these groups in a way that would be illegal for your straight white man. Scholarships for blacks only. Bias against men in criminal and family courts. Not to mention the cultural acceptance of white-bashing

 

[DunDunDunpachi]

True Believer by Eric Hoffer. Consider it both the field manual that helps you identify the disease and the vaccine to protect you against it.

 

[lil puff]

I think what's kind of concerning is that this whole outrage cancel culture seems to get stronger and stronger the younger the generation we talk about is. Like it seems fully adopted by the teens of today, kind of adopted by the 20's and less as you get older. Just worrying what happens as we all die off and those who were brought up with it always existing and not knowing any other way get older and raise more kids like that. An entire world walking on egg shells all the time.

yeah.

I hate that this is becoming a standard response, but social media allows people to form groups of thought and strongly reinforce each other in that circle.

I'm also observing this more with younger folks more than older folks that once lived without social media, who did not have the 'shields' of today. This isn't to say it's all unavoidable today- but anyone with personal insecurities might be more susceptible to a group think where they will feel more comfortable and supported only by those that agree and that shit becomes cancerous.

I think strong willed people who don't rely on reinforcement of thought end up more confident in themselves, and less likely to be overly concerned about every little issue within their circle, lest they be perceived as 'less cool, less woke' which would once again punch another hole in their fragile sense of security.

It's interesting though, that everyone is trying to be or promote 'open minded(ness)', but in a different sense of the term either way.

 

[jason10mm]

Young people will be fine. This culture cant help but attack itself because it ruthlessly excludes everything else but MUST attack because it cant bear a moment of self reflection. So all those young cishet white folks will abandon it when they get tired of needing 5 paragraphs of disclaimers just to voice their opinion. As "regular" gays or "accepted" ethnic minorities get greater access to the mainstream they will in turn be assaulted by those farther down the social acceptance ladder. Thus the entire movement falls apart under it's own hate.

By creating echo chambers that extinguish external criticism these groups develop internal theories and language that is laughable or outright offensive to the mainstream ("a penis doesnt make you a man" for example, or the term "acephobe") and further isolates them. Instead of hearing the arguments and questions and developing more socially acceptable ideas through rational debate, they install invisible tripwires around themselves that immediately label all outsiders as "racists" and "XXXphobes" simply for questioning the terms or ideas, even if the outsider accepts the person.

Sad really.

 

[Kazza]

Don't listen to what Douglas Murray says, he is a racist, transphobic bigot:




Douglas just takes it in his stride:

 

[ammodotcom]

Interesting article about Cancel Culture.




Barbara Kay: Douglas Murray is a writer who says what the rest of us would like to


He is right, this is becoming a new relgion and righteousness is dependent on your place in oppression stack.

The Crusades will return, but did you think it be you they are cursading against?

Douglas Murray is one of the few people who can make Sam Harris laugh. If that doesn't cement his status as a Wizard, I don't know what does.

 

[Dee Dah Dave]

 

[Red Crayon Aristocrat]

I hate the fact that a Scientology level cult is taking over society.

The one silver lining is if they push things hard enough, there will be a shooting match and they will lose miserably.

 

[Kamina]

No, its a cult which practices intolerance as measure against intolerance by publicly hunting everyone who doesn‘t follow their ignorant agenda.

 

[ROMhack]

I'm still fairly sure this issue would be supplanted if people realised how flawed they are. There's too much insistence on being right when most people only have a certain level of knowledge in a particular area based on their own ontological position. That's what I dislike most about the debate, it often takes the individual away in order to hide behind a system of thought. Then it gets weaponised by other people who want to use it as a trident.

 

[Joyful]

incredibly cringe video

 

[Barnabot]

my thruth
his truth
her truth
our truth
their truth
them truth
not the actual Truth
fuck the actual Truth

 

[Papa]

lol @ Helen Lovejoy on the left there

 

[Dontspeakforme]

Even before cancel culture, intelligent people knew better than to make racist/sexist/political/religious comments in public platforms that expose their identity. That’s just fucking stupid.

If you talk enough shit about any group, someone will eventually come after you. Happened even before the internet era.

 

[Dee Dah Dave]

Another good (and fun) talk

 

[Barnabot]

lol @ Helen Lovejoy on the left there

she's retarded and yet she's "teaching" people. you can clearly see her deviating from the main subject at 1:14 from that video.

 

[JSoup]

she's retarded and yet she's "teaching" people. you can clearly see her deviating from the main subject at 1:14 from that video.

The only thing worse than a fucking idiot is a fucking idiot who's being a fucking idiot "for your own good". That sums up a lot this woke/clown world crap.

 

[Breakage]

Holly Rigby can barely contain herself in that video. Just look at her facial expressions and the way she frequently has to hold her hands together.