The cost of luxury beliefs - play stupid games, win stupid prices

 So these luxury beliefs are essentially beliefs that are espoused by the upper middle class because they are -in general- not impacted by the consequences of said beliefs. Most of the woke stuff belongs to this group of beliefs. For example, liberals, by large, are worried more about the future of girls than boys -but only when the boys in question are not theirs. Then suddenly they actually worry as much as conservatives. 

Another case is the de-fund the police. It has been a very popular thing in later years after George Floyd -with foreseeable consequences where it was tried.

And now there is Shivanthi Sathanandan, who actively campaigned against the police.

 

 Until, that is, four armed men beat her up in front of her family and stole her car. And now she is quite pro-policing, proving the old saying that a conservative is a liberal who got mugged. It is quite ironic, I guess. It is not nice to laugh at others' misfortune, but in this case I guess a mild sense of satisfaction of having seen the person facing, what she is advocating for for other people, is somewhat justified. I think she thought police was only important for poor people, and her words would have no effect on her own personal life. Suddenly she feels that it is important to have police presence. Obviously the whole conservative media is having a field day with this, and rightly so-, while the left side of the media keeps quite silent on it.

What I would put large sums on, however, is that her political career will not suffer for this, and she will not be forced to face the apparent hypocrisy in the sudden change of tune. She -and others- can just continue with other idiocy without actually considering what they are advocating for. (Just mentioning that her photo under her statement does not really look real -the blood looks more like red wine, and while the makeup is perfect, no smears, no tear marks, nothing, there is also no swelling. If you want to see how someone who got hit on the head looks like, well, google it - it is quite different. I mean sure, it was a nasty experience, but you do not have to make it look even worse for a little more drama, eh?)

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.