'Relaxed' Hate Speech Rules

There's a bit more to this, I believe, than tech bros realigning out of self-interest with the incoming Orange Blob.

The Wokies themselves have some of the blame to share.

The protections that they offer have been exposed as partisan. They have an in group and an out group for their fact checking and sometimes the facts involved are evidently not even facts.

Significant sections of society have been left high and dry, exposed to constant abuse, most notably a subset of Jews and feminists.

Once it became clear that these checks were as partial and political as they were moral and essential, an outcome like this became that much more likely.

When you become complacent about allowing others to be openly slurred in a supposedly tolerant society, do not be all that surprised when you are suddenly surrounded by trolls yourself.

Coalescing Conversations

In the ‘good old days’, an educated, erudite person could expect to find themselves participating in two rather distinct kinds of ‘loaded’ discussion.

The first, more common — for it tended to occur within the context of one’s peers — was an often thrilling intellectual to and fro, exposing alternative perspectives and variations of informed-ness. They could could also be heated, but almost never to the point of real anger, at least while sobriety persisted, and lasting hatred and vilifications were almost never on the menu. Everyone involved would usually benefit in some way.

The second kind, an exploration of the issues with persons motivated by extremes of prejudice and ignorance, was typically a much less exhilarating experience. One sensed that the interlocutor was inclined to impose themselves and then settle scores even before the first exchange of words, and had usually pre-ordained that one was a devil or a fool.

But as I said, these were rare, and if one stuck to one’s peer group, could practically be avoided entirely, though it tended to be a notoriously inter-generational phenomenon, occurring seasonally or with random strangers on trains.

Unfortunately, today, some of the peer group has gone crossover with the rabid bunch.

Whether the ‘bite’ they received occurred on social media, via populist political discourse, or can be attributed to the fact that perhaps many younger people have just stopped reading texts with a lot of words — or perhaps some combination of all of the above — there sometimes seems to be no issue today with which people of all levels of culture and education are unprepared to align themselves, even define themselves, for or against — regardless of whether they’ve actually done the homework — as fully committed radicals, broadly intolerant of dissent, by which I mean emotionally and intellectually incapable of the first kind of human interaction described above.

In such exchanges, it often seems that the less you actually know, the better.

 

 

Never Mind the Bollards...

Many of the same people who are so offended by the walls and checkpoints that Israel (and Egypt) have erected between themselves and the Islamists living next door are perfectly happy to discuss the recent ‘vehicle attacks’ in Magdeburg and New Orleans almost solely in terms of inadequate barriers — in effect the problem becomes one of policing and planning: stopping those darned vehicles from getting away with murder.

Israelis show little reticence when it comes to talking about the cultural and ideological issues that force them to live like zombie apocalypse survivors within a fortified compound, but many outside observers roll their eyes at this whilst appearing most deeply engaged with the sorrowful condition of the poor zombies. So what if they keep breaking into the compound and munching people? Israelis should just suck it up, for this zombie apocalypse was somehow all their fault.

Meanwhile, back in their own societies, these same armchair Middle Easterners conspicuously fail to apply the very same conclusions — that simply containing the Islamist problem with ever more formidable fortifications might not be the best long term solution (...rather like arming American High School P.E. teachers).

In other words, that they really ought — as they have long lectured Israel — to address the underlying issues a little more resolutely.

These underlying issues are deeply complex and have an air of intractability about them, but refusing to even talk about them for fear of causing a stonking row and setting off the wingnuts is surely the worst of all possible starts.

Whether the problem is mass murder or mass rape, every time we try to apply labels to it, one can almost hear the hiss of an airlock door as it seals. It’s not Islam, because that’s the religion of peace, it’s not Terrorism, because it has elements of noble resistance, it’s not Misogyny, it’s modesty, and so on.

And in as much that it’s Anti-Western it seemingly taps into a low lying squeamishness that has wider prevalence in the culture, specifically within academia.

Right now the US seems willing to simply absorb the Bourbon Street incident as just another mass killing of the ‘running amok’ variety, where the lasting political issue is ultimately the weapon used, in this case a truck rather than an assault rifle, smothering the need to address the mentality itself and both its foundation and likely trajectory. 

In this case, however, it really is people killing people, not pickups. And not because the bollards aren't big enough.