Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence - the most idiotic thing you can say in an educated crowd

There are several arguments to justify not taking part in a debate or trying to censor other viewpoints, which I will address in another post, but this post is only about this one particular "thought".

You hear this often from people who claim that there is no such thing as "cancel culture", and justify people losing their jobs, their positions, getting in trouble with the police and having a social backlash for saying that does not agree with their "progressive" views with saying "well, freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences". But. This statement is incredibly stupid if you spend just one minute thinking about it. And highlight what the issue is, here's a similar quote.  

"There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech"

Idi Amin

And just who is this Idi Amin? A prominent anti-racist, perhaps? A progressive icon of identity politics? An esteemed gender studies author?

Well... Not exactly. He is your stereotypical African dictator from the '60s-'70s with coups, murder, torture, child soldiers and fancy uniforms. (With a possible death toll of 300 000 if you ignore all the civil wars he was responsible for.)

I used to make the point that if the sentence in the title was true, in that case even Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany and East Germany had freedom of speech. After all, you could shout that "comrade Stalin can suck my dick" -you were absolutely free to do so. This is the logic of these people. The consequences would be there, obviously, but the speech itself was free. In the case of telling Stalin to perform autofellatio, it would be a bullet in the back of your head, but you can die in the safe knowledge that the speech was free. The consequence was there, though. This, as the real world example of Idi Amin shows just, an empty play with words. We all understand what freedom of speech means. Obviously there are limits -and it is always a matter of debate where those limits exactly are- but the whole idea is that you can only take part in the "marketplace of ideas" if you do not have to be afraid.

And "consequences" do make one to be afraid. Having to think of consequences when you try to say that trans women are not women does stifle speech. (I got banned from reddit for saying this. In Scotland you can get the police coming to your house if you post this. You can lose your job for this.) Having to worry about your family when you decide whether to say your opinion about something in your workplace, at your university, in social media is exactly the opposite of what the marketplace of ideas should be. It is self-imposed censorship due to the fear of consequences. In other words: the exact opposite of "freedom of speech".

The UK's non-crime hate database... freedom of speech indeed

What an Orwellian idea - have a database for "non-crime hate incidents" that do not meet any of the standards that would constitute them as crimes. This is for speech perceived as ‘motivated by a hostility’ to race, gender, or other protected categories. 

Anything and everything can fall under this category. The sarcastic question of "Are you deaf?", stating ideas about gender and trans ideologies which do not fall within the "accepted" dogma (like "trans women are not women"), any criticism of feminist ideas... you get the gist. Anything and everything someone perceives as hateful can be logged - and the police has no obligation to inform the person in question that he or she is in some sort of database. No mechanism of appeal, no way of getting removed from this database. After all, it is not a criminal database, right, so we do not have to abide those pesky rule of law stuff. Due process? Getoutta here! It is not a crime procedure so why bother?

So while technically there is free speech -good luck daring to voice any of your opinions. If you end up in a database, who is to say what the consequences would be? You need a background check for your job? Well... good luck. Your employer finds your name in a database? Well... good luck. Want to appeal or challenge the process? Well... good luck.

Not to mention the main issue here: this goes against anything and everything liberal democracies should stand for. This is literally thought policing. In the United Kingdom. Not in Soviet Russia, not in East Germany, not in North Korea. In the middle of the "Free World".

It was surprisingly easy to attack the core values of liberal democracy. All the dystopian books and movies got it wrong. You do not even need a crisis for this. You can just do it. Wannabe autocrats, take note... 

Bradley Cooper and his nose

 Every single time there is a gender or race swap of a white male character (fictional or not), there are several responses.

1. It is just a fictional character, race/sex should not matter, shut up racist. (I am not sure they would like a white Spawn or Blade but that is a different matter.)

2. OK, it is a historical character but back then they had no concept of race as we do, so shut up racist. (I guess Egyptians, Romans, Europeans in the Middle Ages, etc. did not recognize people from Sub-Saharan Africa or from South East Asia as somehow different. Maybe their eyesight was impacted somehow. I wonder what the first person who recognized African features thought. He must have believed he was going insane.)

3. We picked the best person for the role, regardless of gender or race. (Which is in itself interesting -I would like to ask how they think a black woman is the best person to play a white man's role -I am looking at you, Lucien- , but whatever.), so shut up racist.

4. We need to have more representation of historically oppressed minorities, so shut up racist.

And then, we have The opposing idiocy -coming from the same people- who suddenly find it problematic when a non-Jewish person plays a Jewish person on screen, a somewhat overweight person playing a morbidly obese person, or when a straight person plays a gay person on screen. The latest example: Bradley Cooper's fake nose. Maybe he was the best person for the role, who knows? And are we seriously going to argue that Jews are underrepresented in Hollywood? I mean if you take this line of thought to the logical conclusion, only the given person could play the given person on screen, and we do not possess enough knowledge in necromancy to do something about it when it comes to dead people. Plus the whole thing goes directly against the above detailed arguments for race and gender swaps.

This post has one purpose: to highlight the contradiction, and ask for a line of reasoning from anyone and everyone that can explain it away. I am very open to a logical argument.

Now we know what the T stands for in LGBTQ+...

 Oh boy, he didn't... Taliban leader in a homosexual relationship? Say it ain't so.

Why is identity politics (woke) will eat itself

 

As Lizzo's case shows, it is usually true that the "higher they are the longer they fall".  It does seem like that people who are so keen on the victim Olympics, and claim the status of the poor and downtrodden aggressively, also not very nice people when they are in the position of power. Who knew. It is also quite chilling that people can now be arrested for Tweets in certain parts of the world. There are also fundamental problems with the woke as the ideology seeped into institutions, politics, and culture.

But there is a core issue with the progressive mindset, and the progressive ideology that is going to bring it down for sure.

 

 

Just look at feminists. (Currently at the fourth wave as they are.) They played the identity politics card as hard as they could, and they succeeded. (Anyone seriously arguing that women are oppressed in Western countries is a deluded moron.)

However, this does not stop. First, they need to keep the ball rolling, because many people built their careers on this -so new groups are needed to fight for. And suddenly the "old school", hard-core feminists found themselves in the place of the evil white men they fought- the reactionary TERF, who is oppressing poor trans people. The tactics, the language is the same, but the sides have changed. Heck, their efforts to have the "women are identical to men in every way" idea entrenched only helped trans activists who took this concept and made it their own. (Weirdly now feminists, like Kathleen Stock, are demanding that men to raise their voices, even though they were quite insistent that they shut the f... heck up and stand in line, until now... but that is a different matter.)

All of which is ironic. And this will keep going on and on as the groups to be fought for are getting more and more fractured. But this also means that the "mainstream" will have to accept weirder and weirder things, and at some point the dichotomy between reality and ideology will break the system. People could accept "gender pay gap" as a fact even though the way it was calculated is completely bonkers, and even a first grader should see the problem with it. They can ignore domestic violence statistics, etc., etc... Then came the whole issue of who we support -Islam or women- in Europe during 2015 (Islam won - apparently the issues with women's rights in Islamic -and to be fair, other non-European- cultures are non-issues, and mentioning them is Islamphobic). But now the whole "what is a woman" thing is breaking things apart. This is something you average person will not ignore, even though you are trying to muddy the waters with the differences between sex and gender. And this process will continue since the woke have only one way to go -forward. They need to double down or else. Which, eventually, will mean that the whole ideology will crash and burn. You can kinda see signs of it with the whole MAP thing... You can't possibly normalize that with most of humanity as most people have children. It is an interesting topic to explore, but somehow the lines are much, much more blurred than activists declare them to be.

This is not a bad thing -the only problem is that they can do enormous damage until then. For one, enactment of misplaced, sexist and racist policies, destroyed individuals and the rest - but the strengthening of the far Right is also a big issue they carry the responsibility for.

 

So the Witcher showrunner is doing some damage control.

Two things:

1. there is nothing debunked -only some generic phrases that corporate usually uses whenever the shit hit the fan and they wish to deny it. OK, I guess, you are free to claim you respect the source material, when you clearly not (seriously? Yen trying to murder Ciri?), and you essentially chase away your nerd star (and then try to smear him anonymously).

 

This is all well and good - nothing else is expected from the likes of these people.

However, note the last lines...

Several parts of the text in this article, including the title, were generated with the help of an AI tool.

 

Well.  The article actually reads better, it is more coherent than most of similar "articles" published by actual humans. You know the ones I am talking about: that look like as if they were cut and pasted from several other articles, senselessly repeating things, not really having a focus. Apparently AI does write better articles (and looking at TV shows and movies, those, too) than most of these online "journalists". Which ties neatly into my previous post's point: apparently our "betters" are not only not better than us, but actually complete morons. God save us.

The p-hacking of female hunters -the curious case of selective generalization

 This has been one of the issues that bugged me to the max.

Lord of the Rings, Witcher, Kingdom Come Deliverance - stories based on Northern and Central European folklore, history, are obviously racist because they are white. And we all know that Europe was soooo multicultural; heck even the Vikings were not blonde, Nordic warriors. 

And the proof of this very multicultural Medieval Europe, which somehow disappeared, and replaced by an all-white one?

Well, the Vikings travelled a lot, and had some black slaves, apparently. There were a couple of black people visiting Europe even before the Industrial Age. So this absolutely means that your average European village looked like a Starbucks in Beverly Hills when it comes to ethnic composition. (And you are absolutely justified to race-swap not even fictional characters but real ones as well. Obviously.) The arguments for a very multicultural Middle Ages rests on a very strange straw man: namely, there were NO black people in Europe AT ALL. (Also, back then people did not see race. Sure, buddy, nobody noticed the obvious differences.) If you can find just one, well, that means it must have been a very common occurrence. So enter the black Viking Jarls, the racially diverse villages in Central Europe and so on and so forth. By this token, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy also had a very multi-racial army during WWI, since they had him... 

Well, guess what -nobody actually argues for absolute "racial purity". But having a few odd outliers does not mean you are free to claim that black people were just everywhere in Europe during the Middle Ages, and you can't cry racism if they are not present in the media representing this period. Might as well demand that the Franz Joseph to be played by a black man in a movie adaptation now.

Same with women hunters. Never mind that women and men are different. Just look at how the great US women's soccer team fared against boys. Yes, it was funny. No, you can't explain it away. This is a trend that is unbroken -just look at "trans" women competing against actual women.

So they find one female skeleton with a pointy stick, and suddenly - WOMEN HUNTED, TOO. (Weirdly enough this does not work the other way: regardless of having women rulers and whatnot do not mean that DA PATRIARCHY does not exist. After all, the couple of female rules - Cleopatra, Nefertiti, Hatshepsut, Sammuramat, Victoria, Elizabeth, Amina, Tzu-hsi, Maria-Theresa, etc., etc., must mean "Men, move over, women had power, too"... And jokes aside it kinda does.)

Because the conclusion of the original "peer reviewed" article fits with their ideology, the reality behind it -and the flawed methodology- does not matter. Whenever leftist people mock conservatives about their anti-intellectualism, their anti-science stances, when it comes to masks, vaccines and whatnot, this comes to mind. This is straight-out flat-Earth belief, and it is propagated to the highest levels in our culture. Just as the above case, this is a straw man. Nobody claims that gender roles were ever as insanely strict as if we were ants. Well only those people do, who try to argue for teams of women hunting mammoth. 

If this is not dangerous, I am not sure what is. They are corrupting science, and this corrupted, baseless "scientific" literature, which is based on self-selected peer-review is used to influence the "real world".   

On a side-note: I increasingly have the feeling that our institutions were hijacked by well-meaning, intellectually challenged activists who have absolutely no schooling, no concepts of basics of history, biology, no critical thinking skills, just a burning desire to change the world for the better. And it is not just a community college paper in backwater North Dakota we are talking about. It is the NYT, Guardian, politicians, and so on -people who are now steering the boat. And this thought makes me really desperate. I can handle the thought of our intellectual elite to be superior but dishonest. I cannot handle the fact that they are, in fact, stupid as fuck.