Insulting Muhammad is a risky business these days. Not only in Muslim-majority nations with stiff blasphemy laws, but also in supposedly enlightened Europe. Yes, even on a continent that loves to trumpet its commitment to freedom of speech, mocking Muhammad can land you in hot water.
Consider the recent trials of two women who committed the speech crime of insulting the Prophet, one in Pakistan and the other in Austria.
In Pakistan, Asia Bibi, a Christian, has finally had her death sentence for blasphemy overturned.
Bibi was found guilty of blasphemy in 2010 after she got into a row with neighbours during which they insulted her Christian faith and she fired back with a swipe at Muhammad. (She has always denied doing this.)
Under Pakistan's cruel, archaic blasphemy laws—first introduced by the British Raj in 1860 and strengthened under the military rule of General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s—it is a crime to insult religious beliefs, willfully desecrate the Koran, or insult the Prophet.
The price for destroying a Koran? Life in prison. For mocking Muhammad? Death.
Bibi was packed off to death row, where she languished for nine years, awaiting the gallows. "Hang Asia," read the placards of hardline Islamists who agitated many times for Bibi's execution to be hurried along.
But Wednesday, in a decision that rocked and enraged these Islamists, Bibi had her sentence overturned. She has been freed. She will now, of course, be spirited out of Pakistan to somewhere that's safe for those who don't love Muhammad.
Somewhere in Europe, perhaps? Good luck with that. This is also a place where officialdom will punish you if you insult the Prophet.
Bibi was taken to court and convicted merely for saying something about a holy figure to a small group of people. The case of a woman who did the same thing, only in Austria, reached its conclusion just last week.
In 2009, a woman known only as E.S. in the court proceedings, gave two seminars titled "Basic Information on Islam" at the hard-right Freedom Party Education Institute in Vienna. There were about 30 people in attendance.
During the seminars, she brought up the prickly issue of Muhammad's marriage to Aisha. It is widely accepted as historical fact that Muhammad got hitched to Aisha when he was 56 years old and she was 6 years old; and that he consummated the marriage when Aisha was only 9 years old.
This shows, said E.S. in her seminars, that he "liked to do it with children." She continued: "What do we call it, if it is not pedophilia?"
Unfortunately for E.S., there was an undercover journalist among her small audience, and the journalist lodged a complaint with the cops. E.S. was arrested, put on trial, and in early 2011, she was found guilty at the Vienna Regional Criminal Court of threatening the religious peace in Austria.
Her words were a libel against Muhammad, the court said—she had wrongly accused him of having a "primary sexual interest" in children's bodies. And they were also capable of "hurting the feelings" of Muslims. She was fined 480 euros.
Now, a 480 euro fine is nothing compared with what Bibi suffered. But the principle in both cases was the exact same: Those who insult Muhammad must be punished.
The denouement to E.S.'s trial came last week. She appealed to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), perhaps fancying it would defend her rights. Instead, it upheld the ruling of the Viennese court.
The ECHR said on Thursday of last week that E.S., like all Europeans, has the right to freedom of speech. But—and there is always a but—this freedom comes with responsibilities, including the responsibility to avoid, "as far as possible," being "gratuitously offensive" to "objects of veneration."
In short, don't insult gods or prophets. Just as the Raj straitjacketed its subjects on the subcontinent and forbade them from insulting religious beliefs, so Europe's spectacularly misnamed court of human rights instructs Europeans not to "gratuitously" insult religious beliefs.
How is it possible that a court tasked with upholding freedom of speech—under Article 10 of the Human Rights Act—could nod along to the curtailment of someone's freedom of speech?
The problem lies in Article 10 itself. It starts off well enough—"Everyone has the right to freedom of expression"—but it goes swiftly downhill from there.
This right, the Article decrees, can be curtailed by "formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary."
The European Court gives us freedom of speech in one breath and takes it away in the next. This is a good, jolting lesson in what happens when you caveat or hamper or err over freedom of speech—you destroy it.
You can't kind of have freedom of speech. You either have it or you don't. And in Europe, thanks to ECHR's green light to the curtailment of freedom of speech in the name of everything from public safety to the protection of morals (Stalinist, much?), we don't have freedom of speech. We have licensed speech: we are licensed to speak until we say something the state disapproves of, as E.S. discovered.
This isn't only an illiberal ruling; it's a dangerous one, too.
Europe has a radical Islam problem. As we have seen in recent massive terror attacks, and most notably in the massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in 2015, we have fairly significant numbers of people who are violently intolerant of aspects of the Western way of life, and of anyone who takes the piss out of Muhammad.
The European Court of Human Rights has just given its official nod to such intolerance. In agreeing with Austria that it is impermissible to insult Muhammad, the court has taken the side of those who think that Muhammad's insulters deserve punishment. There are significant differences between the ECHR, the Pakistani court that sentenced Asia, and the terrorists who massacred the journalists at Charlie Hebdo. But they are procedural differences, not philosophical ones.
Pluralism cannot survive without free expression, and free expression requires tolerance of criticism. The ECHR has failed not only to defend the liberty of E.S., but of all Europeans—Christian, Muslim, and atheists alike.
The post In Europe and in Pakistan, Two Women Are Condemned for Insulting Muhammad appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Which country's police force just called on its citizens to report offensive speech? Not libelous speech or death-threat speech, just plain old insulting speech. Speech that is merely hurtful or hateful. Which nation's cops instructed the citizenry to snitch on haters?
North Korea? China? Maybe Turkey?
It was Britain. Yes, Britain has become a nation in which offensive speech can become a police matter. Where, in April this year, a 19-year-old woman was convicted of sending a "grossly offensive" message after she posted rap lyrics that included the N-word on her Instagram page. Where, also in April, a Scottish shitposter was found guilty of a hate crime for teaching a pug to do a Nazi salute and posting the footage on YouTube. Where in recent years individuals have been arrested and in some cases imprisoned for making racist comments or just cracking tasteless jokes on Twitter.
This birthplace of John Stuart Mill, this nation that gave the world John Milton and his Areopagitica, still one of the greatest cries for the "liberty to utter," is now at the forefront of shutting speech down.
The latest Orwellian invitation to rat out offensive speakers was issued by the South Yorkshire Police.
These clearly time-rich coppers took to Twitter to remind people that "HateHurts". That was their actual hashtag. I'm sure hate can hurt, but not nearly as much as being burgled or beaten up or whatever other crimes these cops are probably missing as they trawl Twitter for rudeness.
"In addition to reporting hate crime, please report non-crime hate incidents," they pleaded. These non-crimes include "things like offensive or insulting comments, online, in person or in writing."
It is chilling that cops, whose only business should be fighting crime, now want to hear about non-crime. Anyone who has even a sliver of respect for the ideal of liberty, for the right of people to go about their lives without being watched or narked on, should be seriously concerned that cops would want to hear about non-criminal behavior, otherwise known as everyday behavior.
Even more perversely, these non-crimes really just mean "insulting comments." So if you're in Yorkshire and someone on Facebook calls you a fat slob, call the cops. If you wear a niqab and a work colleague tells you—a la Boris Johnson—that you look a little bit like a mailbox, phone the police.
In essence, South Yorkshire Police want people to report on everyday conversations. This is Stasi territory. Coppers asking citizens to file reports on things they have read or overheard really should have disappeared from Europe with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet here it still is, this GDR-style instruction to eavesdrop and squeal, though now it's happening on the other side of the old Iron Curtain.
It is testament to how entrenched censorship has become in 21st-century Britain that a police force can so casually call for reports about speech.
This is a country whose communications laws and public-order legislation can be, and regularly are, used to punish hateful expression. Last year The Times reported that British police are arresting nine people a day for posting "offensive messages online." In 2016, 3,300 people were detained and questioned for things they said online. In some parts of Britain the arrest rate for offensive speech has risen by nearly 900% in recent years. We Brits are sleepwalking into a police state.
Not content with punishing people for the offensive things they say on public online platforms, now there are moves afoot to punish them for what they say privately too. This week the Labour MP Lucy Powell put forward a Bill in parliament that would ban private online discussion forums because, she says, hate speech can fester in these "echo chambers." Why not go the whole hog and mic us all up so that you can hear what we're saying at all times of the day?
The South Yorkshire call for information about "non-crimes" caused a stink in the media here in Britain, which is good. Yet while these cops' declaration of war against offensive speech may have been shocking, it wasn't surprising. It is the logical next step in Britain's ever-expanding empire of hate-policing.
We have laws that criminalize hate. We have laws against being grossly offensive. We have hate-crime laws, which mean that if you commit a crime with hatred in your mind, then you might get a stiffer punishment. Punch a Buddhist because you hate Buddhism, and you could get a longer sentence than if you punch him simply because you dislike that particular Buddhist.
This is the policing of thought. The policing of ideology.
The policing and punishment of hate by officialdom should never be acceptable. Hatred is a feeling, a sensation, a thing of the mind, and that area of life must always be off-limits to the authorities. South Yorkshire Police, here's some offensive speech for you: Fuck you and your Stasi tribute act.
The post Britain Turns Offensive Speech Into a Police Matter appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Everyone loves being part of a pile-on against Lena Dunham, I know. I do too. But the current Twitter-mauling of Dunham after she defended her friend and 'Girls' colleague Murray Miller against sexual-assault allegations is really nothing to celebrate.
If we could all turn down the Schadenfreude for five minutes, we might realize the furious social-media ostracism of Dunham for expressing her inner conscience reveals just how far out-of-control the post-Harvey Weinstein climate has spun.
Dunham is getting it in the neck for tweeting her doubts about the accusations made by actress Aurora Perrineau. Perrineau says she was assaulted by Miller when she was 17. Dunham said that she and her fellow 'Girls' executive producer Jenni Konner believe Miller is innocent. Even that Perrineau is making it up. "While our first instinct is to listen to every woman's story, our insider knowledge of Murray's situation makes us confident that sadly this accusation is one of the 3 % of assault cases that are misreported every year," she tweeted. Cue social-media meltdown.
The response was instant, and intense. Dunham was accused of being a rape apologist. A sell-out. A phony feminist who claims to believe women but swiftly changes her tune when one of her male friends stands accused of sexual wrongdoing. Her feminism is too white, too upper middle-class, too capitalistic, an army of tweeters said.
The right got stuck in, too. Of course it did. Dunham-hunting is its favorite bloodsport. Fox News called out her "shocking hypocrisy."
She's now being accused of "hipster racism' by Lenny Letter contributor—now resigned—Zinzi Clemmons. "It is time for women of color, black women in particular, to divest from Lena Dunham," said Clemmons. Right now it feels like women of all colors — alongside the somewhat tragic male feminists who clog up certain sections of Twitter—are divesting from Dunham. Her moral stock is down, down, down.
So down that she has apologized for defending Miller. "[I]t was absolutely the wrong time to come forward with such a statement and I am so sorry," she says. "We regret this decision with every fiber of our being." Every fiber—ouch. This sounds to me like a woman in turmoil.
I think Dunham's apology is sad, tragic, and unnecessary. The problem here, the niggling difficulty, is that Dunham both deserves and doesn't deserve the onslaughts against her morals and her social (media) standing. She deserves it for the simple reason that she has played a key role in pushing the problematic—to use their language—cult of belief around accusations of sexual assault.
We live in a time when, increasingly, every woman who makes an accusation against a man is instantly believed. No questions. No skepticism. No "Let's test this in court." No presumption of innocence. "Believe the women," the cry goes. This cult of credulity, this discouragement of doubt in favour of instant, tweeted assumptions of guilt, feels dangerous. Or certainly damaging—damaging to reason, public debate, and justice.
Instant belief lay behind the Rolling Stone fiasco, where a journalist fell for a concocted story of gang rape at the University of Virginia. Instant belief fueled the hysteria and injustices of the pedophile panics of the 1980s and 1990s: back then the rallying cry was "Believe the children." If we want to go back further, instant belief was the cause of unspeakable horrors in the Old South, where black men were frequently punished, even destroyed, by accusations of sexual harassment. This is why the great civil-rights warrior Ida B. Wells said we should "appeal to the public for the presumption of innocence"—because she knew the dangers of speedy, uncritical belief in accusations.
Of course, everyone who makes an accusation of sexual assault—whether it's against Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, or some ordinary Joe—should be treated sympathetically. And seriously. They should be listened to. But justice demands we maintain an element of doubt. Otherwise we end up in the kind of situation we have now, where you can topple someone with one social-media post detailing something he allegedly did (that word, "allegedly," is falling out of favor, I know).
The cult of credulity cultivates a finger-pointing climate, in which the difficult, complicated task of searching for the truth is supplanted by the online thrill of shouting "I BELIEVE"—which is only a slightly more PC version of the days when mobs would gather round some hapless citizen and bellow "GUILTY" until he was duly done in. And Dunham, like other modern feminists, has helped to fuel this rush to believe and condemn. Just four months ago she tweeted: "Things women do lie about: what they ate for lunch. Things women don't lie about: rape." This could be the motto of the cult of belief: the idea that no accusation of sexual assault is ever false, or simply mistaken or confused; they are all true, gospel, unquestionable.
In which case, why even bother with courts? Perhaps all men accused of sexual assault should be instantly punished without the benefit of mounting a defense of themselves. That Dunham said all claims of rape are true and now says that the one made against her good friend is false makes her look like a massive hypocrite. On this level, she deserves the opprobrium.
But she also doesn't deserve it because surely no one deserves to be metaphorically strung up like this simply for expressing skepticism about an accusation of criminal activity. This is the problem: in calling out Dunham's double standard on believing accusers, we risk further entrenching the rush to believe accusers, the primacy of accusation over justice. The ritual denunciations of Dunham, and her craven apology in response to them, exacerbates the very notion that any kind of defense of a person accused of sexual assault is a huge no-go zone, something only cretins or rape apologists would do.
In going after Dunham like this, her critics, including many on the right, have worsened the often shrill, unforgiving culture that Dunham and other modern illiberal liberals have helped to bring about. Well done, guys.
That a woman has been put under enormous pressure to retract a statement of conscience, an expression of doubt, a defense of a friend, confirms how terrifying the fallout from the Hollywood sexual-harassment scandal has become. Now, not only are all sorts of sexual behavior, from the fairly innocent to the absolutely terrible, being called out on a daily basis, but so are those who say "Hang on a second…"
Criticizing this campaign and its possible excesses is becoming very difficult indeed. And that's bad. It's bad for Dunham right now, but more importantly, it's bad for free, open, skeptical debate. You're having fun going after Dunham, I know, but know that you are very possibly degrading public life in the bargain.
The post Why You're All Wrong To Be Raging Against Lena Dunham appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Katy Perry has made a public apology. She's been filmed making a mea culpa. She has confessed to having made "several mistakes" in recent years. So what exactly were her moral crimes? Did she get embroiled in a drug scandal? Is she a tax-dodging queen? Did her spat with Taylor Swift cross the line from tweets to violence?
Nope. She once wore her hair in cornrows.
The cultural appropriation hysteria has reached such a fever pitch that celebs are now apologizing for hairstyles. In an interview with DeRay McKesson, Black Lives Matter activist and host of the podcast Pod Save The People, Perry fessed up to her many "mistakes," including sporting cornrows in the video for "This Is How We Do" and rocking the geisha look at the 2013 American Music Awards. In the world of the cultural-appropriation fanatic, who frowns viciously upon any borrowing from a culture other than one's own, such behavior is tantamount to blacking-up and singing "Mammy."
Perry has now learnt the lesson of her crazy foray into cultural imperialism and arrogant white-lady hairstyle theft. "Why can't I wear my hair that way?," she asked herself when "This Is How We Do" caused a Twitter-stink. Luckily for her, "empowered angels"—B.S. spiritual talk for politically correct people—were on hand to give her an answer. It's because there is "power in black women's hair" and white women can't just steal that.
Acknowledging that her whiteness means she will never fully grasp this mystery of black women's hair-related power, Perry says she's nonetheless trying to redeem herself for her crimes against cultural purity. "I will never understand, but I can educate myself, and that's what I'm trying to do," she told McKesson.
This act of moral self-flagellation, this very public confession of wickedness, confirms how widespread the cultural-appropriation panic has become. When even someone as pop as Perry, who has more Twitter followers than most countries have citizens, is playing the awful game of bowing and scraping before cultural dividing lines, you know the P.C. madness has gone mainstream.
Will other celebrities follow suit? Will Beyonce finally apologize for that time she wore a sari, which Teen Vogue, fashion mag turned mouthpiece of P.C. silliness, held up as proof that India is treated as "a shallow vessel that exists for Westerners to find themselves"? Will Zoe Saldana beg forgiveness for using darkening make-up to play Nina Simone, which one mag branded an act of black appropriation whose "degree of wackness… can't be overstated"? And how about Ke$ha, who in the video for "Crazy Kids" wears not only cornrows but also a grill and enough bling to make Mr. T balk?
The clampdown on cultural appropriation has gone crazy. Campuses forbid the wearing of sombreros lest Mexicans feel culturally violated. Britain's Glastonbury music festival has banned the sale of Native American headdress. Authors are warned against writing characters of a different race or culture to them, which I'm pretty sure would make the entire enterprise of literature impossible, or at least pointless.
Anthony Horowitz, British author of the wildly popular Alex Rider teen novels, was advised not to include a black character in his latest story because that is "not [your] experience." Imagine if all authors wrote only from personal experience. All of Shakespeare's plays would be about people who grew up the sons of glove-makers in sleepy Stratford. More importantly, the very humanity of literature, its capacity for finding the universal in the particular, for uncovering some of the truth of human life across the racial, gender, and sexual board, would be destroyed.
The aim of the sanction against cultural appropriation is actually pretty sinister. It is to keep us in our cultural lanes. It is to lock us into our racial boxes. It's a plea for cultural purity, a rehashing in P.C. lingo of that dark, old 20th-century idea that biology or heritage should count for more than our shared humanity, and that blacks and whites will never really understand each other. Don't mix, it says. It rehabilitates segregation, or at least the segregationist imagination. "I will never understand," as Perry said. That is, she'll never understand black people. How depressing is it that this has become an acceptable and even media-praised thing to say in 2017?
"I will never understand" is the cry of the right-on in the 21st century, and it runs directly counter to every properly liberal, enlightened movement of the past hundred years, which encouraged understanding, solidarity in fact, across the racial divide.
This new celebration of cultural purity deadens culture. It drains pop culture in particular of the thing that keeps it alive and urgent and sometimes brilliant: its fusions and rip-offs and derivations. Pretty much every form of popular entertainment we enjoy is a product of cultural mixing, whether it's rock, springing from the interactions of blacks and whites in the South, or hip-hop, which in the early days nodded to 1970s European electro music, or Western blockbuster movies, which have borrowed from the style and feel of East Asian cinema. All culture is "cultural appropriation." Cultural appropriation isn't some terrible evil—it's the stuff of life itself.
How awful that Perry is communicating to her young fan base the idea that it's bad to borrow from other cultures. Why is she doing this? Well, there's the rub. It's because while white self-flagellation might look like self-hatred, it is in fact, darkly ironically, a new shortcut to the moral high ground. It's how you show you're "woke." It's how you prove you're a Good White Person in contrast with white trash who wear chunky jewelry and speak in black twangs or college students who think it's okay to don a sombrero.
Whether it's Perry apologizing for her cultural crimes, Macklemore rapping about his white privilege, or Lena Dunham bemoaning "privileged white womanhood," modern culture is stuffed with white folks beating themselves up. But their self-ridicule is really an advert of their white wokeness. So not only does the cultural-appropriation hysteria racially compartmentalize humanity, it also creates the space for a new, weird, destructive form of political correctness. Everything about it is terrible.
The post Katy Perry Is Very Sorry She Once Wore Her Hair in Cornrows appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>How thin is the line between reason and delirium. Just a few years ago, Democrats and liberals were presenting themselves as paragons of level-headed politics in contrast to those cranky Obama bashers and birthers in the darker crannies of the worldwide web. Now, four weeks into the Trump presidency, they've become the thing they mocked; they're giving febrile Obamaphobes a run for their money in the paranoia game.
It's striking how closely the media and culture sets' meltdown over Trump mirrors the rash reaction to Obama among some on the harder, tetchier right of politics. Just as some of those frazzled comment-section dwellers became convinced Obama was a Muslim Brotherhood mole, bent on laying waste to their way of life, so left-leaning Trump-fearers are buying into ever-crazier notions about Trump being a Putin-puppeteered Manchurian candidate come to destroy American values, and art, and decency: everything they hold dear. The panic and self-pity that once gripped unreasoned right-wingers now has a firm hold of many leftists.
The most striking similarity between the meltdown over Obama and the meltdown over Trump is the belief that the president is a stooge of dark foreign forces.
A favored conspiracy theory of the Obama-fearers was that Obama wasn't born in the United States, and was probably a Muslim to boot. Some went further, insisting he was a smart, smooth-talking front for those dastardly aspiring destroyers of the United States, the Muslim Brotherhood.
"Barack Hussein Obama: Muslim Brotherhood Mole?" headlines asked. (Always with the Hussein.) Some wondered if Obama was an MB "agent." "The Muslim Brotherhood has taken over the White House," bloggers feverishly claimed.
They said there were MB moles "inside the Department of Homeland Security," and the "Commander-in-Chief is one of these individuals." This swirling theory made its way to National Enquirer. "Muslim Obama's White House Infested With Terrorist Spies!" the mag insisted.
The unhinged conviction that the White House has fallen to a wicked foreign power now finds expression in many liberals' belief that Putin, through leaks and fake news, won the election for Trump, and that Trump is doing his bidding.
Of course there's evidence of contact between Trump's people and Putin's people—dinners, phone calls, a shared dislike of Hillary—but nothing to warrant the widespread use of the term "Putin's puppet." That's appeared everywhere from the Washington Post to MSNBC.
Trump is the "Siberian candidate," said a writer for The New York Times, using language right out of the conspiracy-theory thriller The Manchurian Candidate. "Putin has managed a bloodless coup," says a Daily Kos blogger. In short, Russia now runs America.
Saturday Night Live runs skits showing a shirtless Putin bossing about a gurning Trump—a "manipulative dictator and his oblivious puppet," as The Guardian describes it. It's funny (at times) but it's worth remembering that the folks at SNL would have been in the frontline of mocking Obamaphobes who thought Obama was the plaything of Islamists.
The talk of Trump as a Putin plant utterly runs ahead of any facts. Alarmingly, at the end of December YouGov found in a survey of Democratic voters that 50% of them believed "Russia tampered with vote tallies to help Donald Trump." This goes beyond believing that Russian-engineered fake news and leaked Dem emails swung the election for Trump, which is already a bit of a stretch, since I'm petty sure voters can still think for themselves; as YouGov said, it crosses into the territory of "Election Day conspiracy theory."
The post-Obama meltdown led to loads of phony stories—what we now call fake news. Obama was raised by communists; he once refused to say the pledge of allegiance; he won the election through mass hypnosis. (I particularly like the hypnosis story, which is actually now echoed in some liberals' snooty belief that Trump voters were hoodwinked by the Orange One's demagoguery—that they are "compulsive believers," as one columnist puts it.)
Likewise, the post-Trump meltdown is marshalling some very tall tales. It seems the more Trump fearers become convinced he is a proto-fascist or a Putinite puppet the more likely they are to believe all sorts of rubbish about him.
As The Atlantic reports, "shocked, terrified, or incensed," some progressives have taken to sharing claims about Trump that are "full of fables and falsehoods."
Anti-Trump web-users have shared false stories about Melania selling jewellery on the White House website; about a boy being handcuffed at an airport as a direct result of Trump's executive order restricting travel from certain Muslim countries; about Mike Pence saying that if we allow rape victims to have abortions then women will go out and try to get raped—of course he said nothing of the sort.
Even real but entirely innocent things become twisted. So when Obama's political and campaign pages, including information about LGBT rights, were taken down from the White House website and archived, Trump was accused of "erasing" gay people from political life. Nope. Archiving former presidents' web stuff is standard practice.
The Obama fearers and Trump fearers come from very different sections of society. The former were were less likely to be well-educated or well-connected; they indulged their fears on amateurish, weird blogs. The latter are part of the Smart Set and ply their presidential panic in newspaper columns or well-read blogs.
But something important unites them. Both embrace a politics of fear over reason, fuelled by a sense of siege. Both cleave to an unfounded belief that their nation and their lives have been overrun by a destructive, probably foreign force. And both fail to make a good fist of actually challenging the president. Just as paranoia over Obama led to the spreading of wild tales rather than to robust critiques of Obama's illiberalism and war-mongering, so too many in the Trump meltdown lobby are currently in the business of panic rather than clear political criticism of Trump's disregard for liberty and openness. Fear makes for lame opposition.
During the Bush years, Arianna Huffington infamously claimed that where liberals tended to use their "linear, logical left brain," Republican voters were more likely to think with their "lizard, more emotional right brain." Recent events suggest the chattering classes are as susceptible to dread and rumor and crankiness as any of the "low-information" rednecks they love to bash. Hey, clever media sneerers at Obamaphobes—there's a beam in your eye.
The post Outlandish Trump Hysteria Mirrors Obamaphobia appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It's great to see that leftists and millennials and others are snapping up George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four in a bid to make some sense of Trump's presidency. Because when they get deep into this dystopian tale—into the Newspeaking, sex-fearing, history-rewriting meat of it—they might realize that it describes their authoritarianism better than Trump's. I can picture their faces now: "Guys… is this novel about us?"
The book shot to the top of Amazon's bestseller list after Kellyanne Conway used the phrase "alternative facts" to describe the Trump administration's belief that the crowds at his inauguration were larger than the media had let on. People pointed out that "alternative facts" sounds creepily like something the Party in Orwell's story would say. Trump seems to believe he can fashion facts from thin air, to boost his own political standing.
"Alternative facts is a George Orwell phrase," said Washington Post reporter Karen Tumulty. MSNBC correspondent Joy Reid tweeted the following lines from the novel: "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." Within hours Nineteen Eighty-Four was a bestseller again, people buying it as a map to the liberty-challenging Trump era.
But the novel is a better guide to what preceded Trump, to the nannying, nudging, speech-policing, sex-panicking, P.C. culture that Trumpism is in some ways a reaction against.
Consider the Junior Anti-Sex League, the prudish youths in Orwell's story who think the "sex impulse" is dangerous and devote themselves to spying on interactions between the sexes. "Eroticism was the enemy," they believed. "Desire was thoughtcrime." If this prissiness finds its echo in anyone today, it isn't in the creepily oversexed, pussy-grabbing Trump—it's in the stiff buzz-killers of the campus feminist movement.
These radical wallflowers demonize drunk sex, bossily insisting all sexual interactions must be "sober, imaginative, enthusiastic, creative, wanted, informed, mutual and honest." (Even the Junior Anti-Sex League didn't come up with such a thorough list of what counts as acceptable sex.) They drag male students to campus kangaroo courts for allegedly doing sex the wrong way. Student officials in Britain have banned the making of "animal noises" in the student bar lest they arouse sexual bravado in men, and sexual dread in women.
Fortunately, it is curable. Some universities make freshmen undergo diversity training, inculcating them with the correct mindset on all matters racial, religious, and social. The University of Delaware, going full O'Brien, referred to its diversity training as "treatment" for incorrect attitudes. The New York Times reported last year that more and more students think diversity training "smacks of some sort of Communist re-education program." The modern campus, as devoted to treating moral infection as to imparting knowledge, could adopt O'Brien's cry as its slogan: "Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you!"
And of course there's thoughtcrime. The Party punishes anyone who dares to hold a point of view it disagrees with. Not unlike modern P.C. warriors who will brand you a "denier" if you're not fully eco-conformist and a "misogynist" if you criticize feminism.
Witness the doublespeak of today's leftist lovers of censorship. They create Safe Spaces, they speak of "the right to be comfortable". These are darkly Orwellian euphemisms for censorship. The Party would be proud of these people who have successfully repackaged the expulsion of unpopular views as "safety" and "comfort"; who will use actual threats and force—see the Berkeley stink—to secure students' "safety" against unpleasant ideas. War is Peace, Violence is Safety, Censorship is Comfort.
As to "alternative facts" and the invitation to "reject the evidence of your eyes and ears": that Nineteen Eighty-Four theme applies at least as well to the P.C. set as it does to Trump's hissy fits. Their clinging to patently overblown rape-on-campus stats, and their trashing of anyone who dares question them, suggests a deep devotion to alternative realities.
And how about Newspeak, the Party's made-up, minimalist language that it pressures people to adopt? That finds expression today in the Pronoun Police, who demonize the use of "he" and "she" as potentially transphobic and invent Newspeak pronouns in their stead. Some campuses now want everyone to use "ze" as a default pronoun. "Ze" might be the most Newspeak word ever: a strange small word you must use if you want to be considered morally good.
Then there is the war on history, the demolition of ugly or inconvenient historical ideas and symbols. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, old things that have fallen out of favor are plunged down the memory hole. Today, P.C. zealots demand the tearing down of statues of old colonialists or the renaming of university halls that are named after people from the past who—shock, horror—had different values to ours. The Year Zero fervor of Orwell's Party is mirrored now in the behaviour of intolerant culture warriors.
Trump will be authoritarian, that's for sure. But his is likely to be a clumsy authoritarianism, oafish rather than Orwellian. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, leftists and millennials won't find a dystopian, fictionalized version of Trumpism—they'll find themselves. In the Party, in the treatment of ideas as disorders, in the Two Minutes Hate against those who are offensive or different, in the hounding of unpopular opinions, in the memory-holing of difficult things, they will see their own tragic creed reflected back to them. They will find a stinging rebuke from history of their own embrace of the sexless, joyless, ban-happy urge to control almost every area of individual thought and life. I hope they heed to this rebuke, and change.
The post Orwell's <em>Nineteen Eighty-Four</em> Describes the Authoritarian Left Better Than It Does Trump appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This week the leftish Twittersphere and liberal comment sites went wild for two stories. The first, that President Donald Trump doesn't seem to know who Frederick Douglass was. The second, that those Berkeley students and non-Berkeley anarchists who shut down the Milo Yiannaopolous meeting might not have done such a bad thing. Okay, a mob silenced Milo, people tweeted and intoned, but perhaps that's okay in the anti-Trump fightback.
It's almost unbearably ironic. Because if these critics of Trump themselves knew anything about Douglass, they'd know he was implacably opposed to using mob pressure to shut down public meetings. They'd know he valued free speech so highly, above all other values, that he thought no one should ever be "overawed by force" simply for what he thinks and says. Imagine: in one breath mocking Trump for not knowing who Douglass was, and in the next saying things that will have made Douglass spin in his grave.
The mocking of Trump followed his comments marking Black History Month, on Wednesday morning. He praised Dr. Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass, before going on to talk about matters closer to his heart: himself and how much he hates CNN.
But it seems he doesn't know much about Douglass, the slave turned abolitionist and suffrage campaigner who wrote brilliantly in defence of free speech and the right to bear arms. He was fleeting in his praise of Douglass, and his wording seemed to suggest he thinks Douglass is still alive (he died in 1895.)
The headlines and snark came flying. "Trump implied Frederick Douglass was alive," the Washington Post laughed. "Seth Meyers roasts Trump for being too lazy to Google whether Frederick Douglass is still alive," said a headline over a video of Seth Meyers doing exactly that. Cue millions of shares.
All of which is fine, of course, and funny in fact. Trump really ought to know about Douglass. Someone should have briefed him. But then the same political sphere that came over all pro-Douglass as a way of meming against the President—right-on tweeters, the left-leaning web—started to wonder out loud if it's such a bad thing that Milo was silenced at Berkeley. Which is about as anti-Douglass a thing as you could say.
"Milo Yiannopoulos is trying to convince colleges that hate speech is cool," CNN cried. When Trump tweeted that perhaps Berkeley should have its federal funding cut if it won't stand up for free speech, The Advocate accused him of "defending hate speech." The mayor of Berkeley, Jesse Arreguin, implicitly sided with the protesters against freedom of speech when he said: "Hate speech isn't welcome in our community." In short, let's cleanse Berkeley of certain, dangerous ideas; let's make it a Milo- and alt-right-free zone.
The celeb set also welcomed the shutting down of Milo's meet. "RESISTANCE WORKS!", tweeted Debra Messing. As Heat Street said, "vocal members of the progressive left took to social media" to celebrate Milo's silencing, "dubbing it a legitimate resistance movement against the Trump administration."
This cheering, or at least failure to challenge, the heavy-handed prevention of political chatter at Berkeley is a far bigger snub to Douglass and everything he stood for than Trump's Black History comments were. Indeed, anyone who knows anything about Douglass will know that one of the most stirring, moving things he ever wrote was a criticism of the shutting down of public meetings by mobs.
On 2 December 1860, at the Tremont Temple in Boston, anti-slavery activists held a meeting called "How Shall Slavery Be Abolished?". Douglass was there. To his horror, a group of pro-slavery people—Douglass called them "a mob of gentlemen"—disrupted the meeting. They screamed insults at the attendees, took over the room, drowned out anyone who tried to speak. They pushed the attendees about. Douglass was most alarmed by the failure of the mayor of Boston to protect the meeting. The gathering was "broken up and dispersed by the order of the mayor, who refused to protect it, though called upon to do so", he wrote. This brings to mind Mayor Arreguin's craven response to the Berkeley fiasco.
In response to this illiberal violence, Douglass wrote an article titled "A Plea for Free Speech in Boston." It is one of the best things ever written about free speech. He said the intrusion and stopping of the meeting was "a palpable and flagrant outrage on the right of speech." He said it had "trampled under foot" the "law of free speech and the law for the protection of public meetings." And then, in words that echo down the decades, he spelled out why freedom of speech is so important:
"Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power. Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble, if men are allowed to reason of righteousness, temperance, and of a judgment to come in their presence."
This is probably Douglass's most important legacy: his argument that free speech underpins all liberty; that the freedom to think and speak and organise is the precursor to any kind of progress. And it is this legacy that is shot down by those who argue that using pressure or threats or speech codes to shut down controversial speakers is acceptable behaviour.
Sure, the men meeting in Boston 150 years ago were discussing something incredibly important and good—how to abolish slavery—while Milo's meeting would largely have consisted of provocateur ridicule. But so what? As Douglass said in that article, all people, whatever their thoughts or station, should enjoy freedom of speech: "There can be no right of speech where any man, however lifted up, or however humble, however young, or however old, is overawed by force, and compelled to suppress his honest sentiments."
So yes, of course Trump should know who Douglass was—I hope someone has since given him a copy of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass's profound autobiography. But in continually compelling people to suppress their honest sentiments, in "overawing by force" those they disagree with, in thinking it is acceptable to use pressure or law or rules to prevent the holding of public meetings, too much of the modern left does an even greater disservice to Douglass. They forget his plea to humanity to remember that liberty is meaningless where people's right to utter their thoughts has ceased to exist.
The post Frederick Douglass Would Have Ardently Supported Milo Yiannopoulos's Free Speech Rights appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>For proof that the snowflake tendency runs as deeply among Trumpites as it does among campus censors, look no further than the Madonna controversy.
Yes, the dowager duchess of pop, the 58-year-old who sings about being a "girl gone wild," has let her mouth land her in hot water again. Her speechcrime this time? To admit in public that she fantasized about blowing up the White House after Trump won it.
In an otherwise typically Madonna speech at the Women's March in Washington, D.C. — all "fuck you"s and "look-at-me"s — she said she had "thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House." She thought better of it, though, and decided it would be more effective to challenge Trump with a "revolution of love" and through her music. Ick. Maybe the blowing-up wouldn't have been so bad after all.
The outrage was instant and predictable. The right-wing bits of Twitter went into meltdown. This was incitement to violence, they said. Breitbart got stuck in, whipping its readers into a Twitter-frenzy with reports on Madonna's "profanity-laced speech" and claims that her violent remarks are going to be investigated by the Secret Service (it's not clear whether this is true.)
Then came the talking heads. Brit blowhard Piers Morgan charged Madonna with going beyond mere "rudeness" and instead saying something "incredibly offensive"—to which we might wonder what's wrong with being incredibly offensive. He accused her of "fueling an idea" to "assassinate" Trump. "Publicly threatening to blow up the White House is a serious criminal offence", he said, and "Madonna should be arrested."
Newt Gingrich was up next. He told Fox & Friends that Madonna is part of "an emerging left-wing fascism"—get a grip, Newt—and "she ought to be arrested." The inevitable petition wasn't far behind. There's always someone who wants to Change.org out of existence an idea or image they find offensive. So far 6,500 people have signed the petition calling on the Department of Justice to "Arrest Madonna for Making Threats Against the White House."
Here's the thing that these pearl-clutching wailers and tweeters, these right-leaning Safe Spacers don't seem to understand: Madonna made no threat to blow up the White House. Nor did she incite anyone else to. She merely talked about a fantasy she had had.
She "thought an awful lot" about blowing up the White House. She thought it. To arrest her for this would be to arrest her for committing a thoughtcrime, for imagining something. It would be as mad as arresting her for her murder of that bloke in the movie Body of Evidence, which she also didn't really do—that, too, was a fantasy, an image.
What next? Arrest film directors who have used CGI to depict the White House being destroyed? Feel the collar of anyone who's written fiction about the killing of a president? After all, those fantasies might also trigger some hothead to do something he shouldn't. Maybe all stories and dreams and thoughts of doing harm to politicians should be outlawed.
We shouldn't only defend Madonna because she didn't actually "threaten to blow up the White House," as the possibly illiterate Morgan put it. We should also defend her because heated speech, hyperbolic speech, even violence-tinged speech, is a legitimate part of political discourse and should remain absolutely free.
There was a Supreme Court ruling that put this very well. In Watts vs the United States in 1969, the justices said that political talk often includes "vehement" and "unpleasantly sharp" attacks on public officials and even forms of criticism that sound violent but which are really just crude or super angry.
They were ruling on the 1966 case of a young man who was convicted of knowingly threatening an individual's life—the President's—during a rally in D.C. against police violence, when he said: "They always holler at us to get an education. And now I have already received my draft classification… and I have got to report for my physical this Monday coming. I am not going. If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J." The Court threw the conviction out, ruling that it was not a realistic threat to kill President Johnson but was merely a "crude" way of expressing "political opposition to the President."
And so it is with Madonna. She was crudely stating political anger. She was expressing political exasperation in an unfiltered way. We must have space in the political realm for crudeness and nastiness and stupidity and all the rest.
Of course genuine incitement to violence, where you use words knowing that they could imminently and directly contribute to the physical harming of an individual, is not a free-speech issue. But violent fantasies are. Violent thoughts are. Violent-inducing speech is not a free-speech issue, but violent-sounding speech—"I could kill that son of a bitch," "I thought about blowing up the White House"—is. Feminists should bear this in mind. Some of them are defending Madonna today, which is cool, but in the past they've sometimes been too quick to depict porn or misogynistic music as forms of violence.
The Madonna controversy is striking for what it tells us about the Trump era. Which is that its promised war on P.C. might be a bit of a sham, and these right-wing railers against Safe Spaces and triggered youths might not be as big on free speech as they'd like us to believe. Their freakout over some throwaway comments by Madonna is as mad as when campus snowflakes lose the plot over scenes of sexual assault in Shakespeare. All of you, listen: these are fantasies; they won't harm you.
The post Let's Avoid Fake Outrage over Madonna's Violent White House Fantasy appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Chicago Facebook torturers, the four black assailants who filmed themselves abusing a white teenager with special needs, have been charged with committing a hate crime. But they shouldn't have been. Yes, their actions were hateful, and appeared to have been motivated by anti-Trump and even anti-white sentiment, but so what? If we're serious about freedom of thought and belief, then we must insist they be charged only for what they allegedly did to their victim physically, not what they were allegedly thinking while they did it.
There has been a collective sigh of relief that the four face hate-crime charges. It was feared the cops would let them off for the prejudiced aspect of their crime. Chicago Police Commander Kevin Duffin sent much of the media and the entire right-leaning blogosphere into meltdown mode when he initially described the four as "kids" and said "kids make stupid mistakes." We can't be sure this was a hate crime, he said, because we don't know if the attackers' remarks—"Fuck white people," "Fuck Trump"—were "sincere or just stupid ranting and raving." Cue fury, Twitter-rage, and columns on how hate crimes against white people are taken less seriously than hate crimes against black people.
There was palpable agitation for the four to be had up for being hateful as well as violent; for verbally abusing white people as a group as well as physically abusing a white individual. On the alt-right in particular, or whatever we're calling it these days, there was concern that black racism against whites isn't taken seriously. Heat Street called out the "progressive pundits" who were "slow to call [this] torture a hate crime." It listed the Washington Post's Callum Borchers and the New York Daily News' Shaun King as people who are quick as lightning to denounce grim acts against blacks as hate crimes, and evidence of an entrenched racism, but who in this instance were "reluctant to call it a hate crime."
Many fumed over CNN's political commentator Symone Sanders, who said the torture was "sickening" before adding: "We cannot callously go about classifying things as a hate crime." Sanders took issue in particular with the idea that the torturers' cries of "Fuck Trump" were a case of hatefulness officialdom should concern itself with. "In connection with the president-elect Donald Trump, or even President Obama for that matter, because of their political leanings, that's slippery territory—that is not a hate crime." Tweeters and the white right went crazy.
But here's the thing: Sanders has a point. A very important point. If we allow the torturers' cries of "Fuck Trump"—or, more realistically, their cries of "Fuck white people"—to be factored into their charges or trial or punishment, then that is indeed slippery territory. Because we're inviting the state to chastise them for their beliefs. We're making thought crime an actual thing.
It is undoubtedly the case that those who normally see hate crime everywhere—who think misogyny is rampant, that criticising Black Lives Matter is a species of racism, and that inviting controversial speakers to campus is tantamount to violence—were cagey about calling this a hate crime. But our response shouldn't be to demand: "Admit this was a hate crime! Call for anti-white hatred to be punished too!" That plays their game of empowering officialdom to police and punish hatred. No, we should challenge their categorization of anything at all as a hate crime.
The problem with the whole idea of hate crime is captured in its name: what business is it of prosecutors and judges if we hate things? The four have been charged with kidnapping, aggravated unlawful restraint, aggravated batter with a deadly weapon, and hate crime. The first three are absolutely the business of officialdom: society ought to treat seriously any violent or criminal diminution of an individual's autonomy. But the last one, hate crime, takes us from the realm of the four's behaviour into the realm of their minds, their ideas, their convictions. As a BBC report put it, the hate-crime charge is based on the fact that they made "derogatory statements against white people" and their target was a "mentally disabled white man." It should not be a crime to hate white people, though, or even disabled people. Such hatred might be foul, but it's an emotion; an ideology.
In Illinois, where the four will go on trial, a hate crime is one motivated by "reason of the actual or perceived race, color, creed, religion, ancestry, gender, sexual orientation, physical or mental disability, or national origin of another individual or group of individuals." Such hate-crime law is now widespread in the US, and across the West. In some cases it can mean individuals being punished more harshly where hatred of a group was a driving force to their criminal behaviour.
This doesn't work. It is rightly against the law to punch a man in the face, but it should be no concern of the law that you punched that man in the face because you hate his religion, or national origin, or creed. Punching a Muslim is criminal; hating Islam shouldn't be. Stabbing an Italian is criminal; hating Italy shouldn't be. Yes, such hatred should be confronted when it rears its ugly head in the public sphere—but it should not be pathologised by governments or courts.
Thought policing is being reintroduced through the backdoor. When we allow the state to make a spectacle of someone because they dislike certain groups or religious beliefs or ideas, then we throw open the mind, emotion itself, to sanction and correction. Those four people should be tried for what they did to that young man, not for what they thought about him or his race or his ability.
The post Facebook Live Torture Suspects Shouldn't Be Charged With Hate Crime appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>If you want to see politics based on emotionalism over reason and a borderline-religious devotion to an iconic figure, forget the Trump Army; look instead to the Cult of Clinton.
Ever since Donald Trump won the presidential election, all eyes, and wringing hands, have been on the white blob who voted for him. These "loud, illiterate and credulous people," as a sap at Salon brands them, think on an "emotional level." Bill Moyers warned that ours is a "dark age of unreason," in which "low information" folks are lining up behind "The Trump Emotion Machine." Andrew Sullivan said Trump supporters relate to him as a "cult leader fused with the idea of the nation."
What's funny about this is not simply that it's the biggest chattering-class hissy fit of the 21st century so far — and chattering-class hissy fits are always funny. It's that whatever you think of Trump (I'm not a fan) or his supporters (I think they're mostly normal, good people), the fact is they've got nothing on the Clinton cult when it comes to creepy, pious worship of a politician.
By the Cult of Hillary Clinton, I don't mean the nearly 62 million Americans who voted for her. I have not one doubt that they are as mixed and normal a bag of people as the Trumpites are. No, I mean the Hillary machine—the celebs and activists and hacks who were so devoted to getting her elected and who have spent the past week sobbing and moaning over her loss. These people exhibit cult-like behavior far more than any Trump cheerer I've come across.
Trump supporters view their man as a leader "fused with the idea of the nation"? Perhaps some do, but at least they don't see him as "light itself." That's how Clinton was described in the subhead of a piece for Lena Dunham's Lenny Letter. "Maybe [Clinton] is more than a president," gushed writer Virginia Heffernan. "Maybe she is an idea, a world-historical heroine, light itself," Nothing this nutty has been said by any of Trump's media fanboys.
"Hillary is Athena," Heffernan continued, adding that "Hillary did everything right in this campaign… She cannot be faulted, criticized, or analyzed for even one more second."
That's a key cry of the Cult of Hillary (as it is among followers of L. Ron Hubbard or devotees of Christ): our gal is beyond criticism, beyond the sober and technical analysis of mere humans. Michael Moore, in his movie Trumpland, looked out at his audience and, with voice breaking, said: "Maybe Hillary could be our Pope Francis."
Or consider Kate McKinnon's post-election opening bit on SNL, in which she played Clinton as a pantsuited angel at a piano singing Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," her voice almost cracking as she sang: "I told the truth, I didn't come to fool ya." Just imagine if some right-leaning Christian celeb (are there any?) had dolled up as Trump-as-godhead and sang praises to him. It would have been the source of East Coast mirth for years to come. But SNL's Hallelujah for Hillary was seen as perfectly normal.
As with all saints and prophets, all human manifestations of light itself, the problem is never with them, but with us. We mortals are not worthy of Hillary. "Hillary didn't fail us, we failed her," asserted a writer for the Guardian. The press, and by extension the rest of us, "crucified her," claimed someone at Bustle. We always do that to messiahs, assholes that we are.
And of course the light of Hillary had to be guarded against blasphemy. Truly did the Cult of Hillary seek to put her beyond "analysis for even one more second." All that stuff about her emails and Libya was pseudo-scandal, inventions of her aspiring slayers, they told us again and again and again.
As Thomas Frank says, the insistence that Hillary was scandal-free had a blasphemy-deflecting feel to it. The message was that "Hillary was virtually without flaws… a peerless leader clad in saintly white… a caring benefactor of women and children." Mother Teresa in a pantsuit, basically. As a result, wrote Frank, "the act of opening a newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station."
Then there was the reaction to Clinton's loss. It just wasn't normal chattering-class behavior. Of course we expect weeping, wailing videos from the likes of Miley Cyrus and Perez Hilton about how Clinton had been robbed of her moment of glory; that's what celebs do these days. But in the media, too, there was hysteria.
"'I feel hated,' I tell my husband, sobbing in front of the TV in my yoga pants and Hillary sweatshirt, holding my bare neck," said a feminist in the Guardian. Crying was a major theme. A British feminist recalled all the "Clinton-related crying" she had done: "I've cried at the pantsuit flashmob, your Saturday Night Live appearance, and sometimes just while watching the debates." (Wonder if she cried over the women killed as a result of Hillary's machinations in Libya? Probably not. In the mind of the Hillary cultists, that didn't happen—it is utterly spurious, a blasphemy.)
Then there was Lena Dunham, who came out in hives—actual hives—when she heard Clinton had lost. Her party dress "felt tight and itchy." She "ached in the places that make me a woman." I understand being upset and angry at your candidate's loss, but this is something different; this is what happens, not when a politician does badly, but when your savior, your Athena, "light itself," is extinguished. The grief is understandable only in the context of the apocalyptic faith they had put in Hillary. Not since Princess Diana kicked the bucket can I remember such a strange, misplaced belief in one woman, and such a weird, post-modern response to someone's demise (and Clinton isn't even dead! She just lost!).
It's all incredibly revealing. What it points to is a mainstream, Democratic left that is so bereft of ideas and so disconnected from everyday people that it ends up pursuing an utterly substance-free politics of emotion and feeling and doesn't even realize it's doing it. They are good, everyone else is bad; they are light itself, everyone else is darkness; and so no self-awareness can exist and no self-criticism can be entertained. Not for even one second, in Heffernan's words. The Cult of Hillary Clinton is the clearest manifestation yet of the 21st-century problem of life in the political echo chamber.
Mercifully, some mea culpas are now emerging. Some, though not enough, realize that Hillaryites behaved rashly and with unreason. In a brilliant piece titled "The unbearable smugness of the liberal media," Will Rahn recounts how the media allowed itself to become the earthly instrument of Clinton's cause, obsessed with finding out how to make Middle Americans "stop worshiping their false god and accept our gospel."
Indeed. And the failure to make the gospel of Hillary into the actual book of America points to the one good thing about Trump's victory: a willingness among ordinary people to blaspheme against saints, to reject phony saviors, and to sniff at the new secular religion of hollow progressiveness. The liberal political and media establishment offered the little people a supposedly flawless, Francis-like figure of uncommon goodness, and the little people called bullshit on it. That is epic and beautiful, even if nothing else in recent weeks has been.
The post America Called Bullshit on the Cult of Clinton appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Hell hath no fury like an establishment spurned. If you didn't know this already, you certainly know it now, following the British people's vote for a "Brexit." A whopping 17.5 million of us voted last week to cut our nation's ties with the European Union (E.U.), against 16 million who voted to stay. And we did so against the advice of most of the political class, media "experts," the Brussels bureaucracy, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), President Barack Obama, and virtually every other Western leader. Most shockingly of all—against the advice of celebs—not even Benedict Cumberbatch's earnest, crumpled face could make us want to stay. We defied them all. We rejected every E.U.-loving overture from the great and good and well-educated. And boy, are they mad.
In the three days since this modern-day peasants' revolt—the poor and working-class voted for a Brexit in far large numbers than the well-to-do and well-connected—the political and media elites have rained damnation upon the little people. Their language has crossed the line from irritated to full-on misanthropic. They're calling into question the ability of ordinary people to rationally weigh up hefty political matters, and are even suggesting the referendum result be overturned in the name of the "national interest."
David Lammy, a member of Parliament (MP) representing the Labour Party, has been most explicit. He says we must "stop this madness" and "bring this nightmare to an end." The nightmare he's talking about is people voting for things he doesn't agree with. He says the people's will must now be overridden by a "vote in Parliament." It's terrifying that an elected MP doesn't seem to know how democracy works.
Peter Sutherland, a United Nations (U.N.) Special Representative, likewise thinks the Brexit vote "must be overturned," because voters were led astray by a "distortion of facts." U.N. officials normally slam the thwarting of a people's will; now they promote it.
And Tony Blair's former spin-doctor says he has "lawyers on the case" to see if a legal challenge can be mounted against the masses and their dumb decision. Lawyers v. the People: Bring it on.
Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party and First Minister of Scotland, has threatened to veto the Brexit as it works its way through Parliament. This is a woman whose party received 1.5 million votes in the General Election last year, now saying she will usurp the will of 17.5million Brits who said screw-you to the E.U.
Media commentary, meanwhile, has become positively unhinged and Victorian in its attitude to the throng. Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, finding that she didn't like some of the pro-Brexit arguments, said Brexiteers have "lifted several stones" and let out a "rude, crude… extremism." We all know what lives under stones. An Observer columnist, perusing the Brexit chatter, said "it is as if the sewers have burst." Over at the New Statesman—house magazine of the British left—a columnist claims it was "the frightened, parochial lizard-brain of Britain [that] voted out, out, out."
Reptiles, insects, shit flowing from the busted sewer of bad ideas—this is how the media elite views the minds and actions of Brexit people.
A recurring theme in the elitist rage with the pro-Brexit crowd has been the idea that ordinary people aren't sufficiently clued-up to make big political decisions. We have witnessed a "populist paean to ignorance," says one observer. Apparently populist demagogues—like Nigel Farage, leader of the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP), and Boris Johnson, everyone's favorite bumbling, toffish politician—preyed on the anxieties of the little people and made them vote for something bad and stupid. For these little people, "fear counts above reason; anger above evidence," opined a writer for the Financial Times. A writer for The Guardian suggested that for anti-E.U. types, emotions "play a larger part than rationality."
This idea that the less well-educated sections of society are ripe for exploitation by emotion-stoking demagogues is not new. It's the prejudice that has motored most elite campaigns against the expansion of democracy. The Chartists, Britain's brilliant nineteenth-century warriors for universal male suffrage, encountered this nasty prejudice all the time. Their critics insisted that "the lower orders of the people" do not have a "ripened wisdom," and therefore they are "more exposed than any other class in the community to be tainted by corruption, and converted to the vicious ends of faction." Others said that "spouters at the meetings of the working classes" could easily exploit the "astonishing ignorance and credulity on the part of the hearers."
The Chartists raged against such nasty elitism. How horrified they would be to know that, 150 years later, it is back with a vengeance, in the idea that the scared British people are "ripe for canny right-wing operators to manipulate."
Indeed, much of the elitist rage with the masses who voted for Brexit echoes a longstanding suspicion of democracy. Among the upper echelons of society there has never been a willing acceptance of the idea that ordinary people should have an equal say in political life. As John Carey notes in his classic 1992 book The Intellectuals and the Masses, late 19th- and early 20th-century thinkers and writers feared nothing more than mass democracy. Carey describes how numerous European writers and artists warmed to Nietzsche's view of democracy as a "tyranny of the least and the dumbest."
Sure, in these politically correct times, few would use such ugly language to describe ordinary people. But the angry petition calling for a second referendum, the planned middle-class march on Parliament to demand that MPs reject the Brexit, and the suggestion that young people in particular have had their futures destroyed by "some of the oldest and whitest people on Earth [voting] against their monsters in their heads," all speak to an elitist disgust with the "tyranny of the least and the dumbest," and a desire to prevent their democratically stated views from becoming reality.
This is as ugly an anti-masses sentiment as I can remember. And the consequences of it are likely to be dire. Ordinary people are effectively being told they're too dumb for politics. And democracy is being treated as a negotiable commodity that can be cast aside if we the stupid people make the wrong decision. This is a species of tyranny. The mask has slipped. Our normally conscientious elite, feeling bruised and aloof after the referendum, has dispensed with its usual platitudes about "respecting all views," and shown that beneath the polite veneer there lurks an ancient fury with the least and the dumbest; with the masses; with the people.
The post Elitist Rage With the Pro-Brexit Masses Echoes Longstanding British Suspicion of Democracy appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"The mask has slipped." That's what Charlie Hebdo's haters said when the French magazine published a stinging, Islam-slamming editorial in the aftermath of the recent Brussels bombings. We now know, that Charlie Hebdo is not a heroic secularist publication sticking it to Big Religion, chirped the haters— it's just anti-Muslim. American-Nigerian writer Teju Cole accused Charlie Hebdo's editors of viewing Muslims the same way that Hitler viewed Jews.
They're kind of right, these Charliephobes: a mask has slipped. Yet it's not Charlie's mask, but theirs. We now know that when the anti-Charlie Hebdo set feigns concern for ordinary Muslims, what it's really worried about is any criticism of Islam itself. Their mask of concern has slipped to reveal an illiberal hostility to perceived blasphemy against Islam.
The Brussels issue of Charlie Hebdo had barely rolled off the presses before the mag's critics were going for the kill. Cole said Charlie's writers had "finally [stepped] away from the mask of 'it's satire and you don't get it' to state clearly that Muslims, all of them, no matter how integrated, are the enemy." Venturing into hyperbolic overdrive, he said we now know that the forces behind Charlie Hebdo are "frighteningly similar" to the Nazis, and clearly believe "there are no innocent Muslims."
A Guardian writer said the Brussels editorial was "seminal," because it "states that the problem is not with some Muslims, but with all Muslims." According to to Salon, the editorial was "so extreme," blaming "peaceful Muslims" for the Brussels attacks. "This isn't effective satire, debate or dissent," it said.
In short, the editorial was not legitimate commentary. It crossed the line into something else, perhaps something not covered by the ideals of freedom of speech.
So what did this allegedly fascistic editorial actually say? For starters, none of the things its critics claim that it did. Far from blaming all Muslims for terrorist attacks, the editorial explicitly criticizes "xenophobes [who] blame immigration" for terror. On the question of Europe's everyday Muslims, the editorial says the vast majority "do nothing wrong."
The editorial, titled "How Did We End Up Here?", is really about the culture of intellectual caution and suffocating non-judgmentalism sweeping 21st-century Europe (and much of the West.) If the mag blames anything for Brussels, it's this censorious culture. It suggests the most rotten thing in Europe right now is the PC cult of self-censorship, the widespread "aversion to causing controversy" and "fear of contraction or objection," especially around Islam. It says the Brussels attack was "the end of a philosophical line already begun," a line which tells us to "hold your tongues… give up discussing, debating, contradicting or contesting."
This "philosophical line," this culture of frowning upon and sometimes even punishing criticism of Islam, is deeply entrenched in Europe. In France, as Charlie Hebdo discovered in 2007 when it was taken to court under anti-racism laws for the crime of publishing Muhammad-mocking cartoons, you can actually be arrested for ripping the piss out of Islam. More informally, the idea of "Islamophobia"—which treats everything from opposition to the burqa to discomfort with the Koran as evidence of a swirling, hate-fuelled fear of Muslims—keeps criticism of Islam in check.
In Charlie Hebdo's view, this erection of a ridicule-deflecting force-field around Islam has a terrible impact on community life in Europe. It creates an atmosphere of "mute and general apprehension," the editorial says. The editorial describes the taxi-ride taken by the Brussels bombers as a "last step in a journey of rising anxiety." In short, terror springs, not so much from Islam itself as from the restriction of debate about Islam, which fosters communal angst and misunderstanding.
I think Charlie Hebdo is right. The strangling of free, open commentary on Islam—and on various other ideologies—has had an impact that is as predictable as it is dire. First, it has encouraged certain, usually hard-right sections of European society to harbour a deep, necessarily unspoken suspicion of Islam; to wonder why they may not openly mock it; and to develop, in some cases, a conspiracy theory which sees Islam as the single-handed despoiler of European civilization.
Secondly it nurtures a victim culture within some Islamist quarters and among young Muslims in particular, who now grow up in societies in which the law, politicians, and intellectuals all give the impression that criticism of Islam is wicked. The elevation of Islam above the realm of testy, frank discussion has the unwitting effect of making some Europeans feel more antsy about Islam while cultivating a sense of psychic vulnerability among some Muslims, who bristle and balk and sometimes respond violently to ridicule of their religious beliefs.
It is this moral sheepishness, not Muslims, which Charlie Hebdo blames for Brussels. Where its editorial talks about the "veiled woman" in our local town or the baker who refuses to serve ham, it isn't blaming these ordinary Muslims for terror; it's simply asking if we should be allowed to have open, critical debate about their cultural habits, about the veil and other things. Where the editorial says that something like Brussels cannot happen "without everyone's contribution," it is talking about Europe itself, not Muslims. It is talking about "the dread" of open debate, "the dread of being treated as an Islamophobe or being called racist," which, it says, makes public life in Europe less open, less honest, and more prickly. It's right.
And how have Charlie's critics responded to its critique of the culture of "You Can't Say That?" By saying to the mag: "You can't say that." Charlie's editorial is an "anti-religion rant," said Salon. To which the only reasonable response is: So what? Why shouldn't people be anti-religion? The anti-Charlie set isn't about protecting Muslims from harm; it's about protecting Islam from rebuke.
The real problem in Europe today is not so much Islamophobia, though anti-Muslim sentiment certainly exists; it's Charliephobia, if we take this term to mean the fear of letting a magazine, or anyone else for that matter, dissent from PC orthodoxy, reject relativism, and engage in robust discussion about any worldview they choose. It's this culture of worshipping self-censorship over freedom of thought and frankness of debate that is damaging public life and brewing communal tension and in some cases violence. Indeed, I would say that the campaign against Islamophobia has done more to foster awkwardness and bitterness in 21st-century Europe than Islamophobia has.
So yes, a mask has slipped. The Charliephobes' mask. Their claim to be against "punching down," to care about ordinary, vulnerable people, has been exposed as utter bunkum. In truth, they're all about protecting a global religion, an ideology, from ridicule, and in the process they're doing more damage to freedom and social solidarity in Europe than they could ever understand.
The post <em>Charlie Hebdo</em>, Terrorism, and the Culture of 'You Can't Say That' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Who's to blame for the shooting at Planned Parenthood in Colorado? Those of us who believe in individual responsibility, that people have free will and the choice of whether to do good or bad, will say: "Robert L. Dear Jr. is to blame. No one else but Dear." He plotted this vile assault. And he carried it out. No one hypnotised him and planted this plot in his head. He's no Manchurian Candidate. He chose to kill, and he should be punished for it.
But some on the pro-choice side, which is my side, have a different take. They're pointing the finger of blame at those who use fiery pro-life rhetoric, or, as I prefer to call it, anti-choice rhetoric. They claim that a swirling anti-abortion outlook, promoted by Republicans and various religious hotheads, create the conditions under which the likes of Dear become murderous. And now they're demanding that pro-life people tone it down, police their politics, and watch their words.
This is a really bad idea. Even those of us who find pro-life arguments deeply unconvincing, and occasionally offensive, should take a stand against attempts to guilt-trip pro-lifers into timidity or silence in the wake of the Planned Parenthood shooting—something both pro-choice politicians and pundits were quick to do.
Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) called on both pro-life and pro-choice activists to "tone down the rhetoric." Violent crimes like Dear's could be a consequence of such "inflammatory rhetoric," he said. Ben Carson wrung his hands over the "hateful rhetoric" of too many in the abortion fray, arguing that moral heat can be "detrimental to our society."
Writing in The Guardian, feminist Jessica Valenti said Dear's crime was "the predictable result of a culture that demonizes abortion, uses fantastical and false rhetoric about Planned Parenthood, and allows politicians and activists to make false representations about women's reproductive health."
The word "allows" is especially ominous there. What's the suggestion: to disallow heated or plain wrong talk about reproductive health?
Valenti, like others, unwittingly erases Dear's culpability for his crime. Her description of Dear's actions as the "predictable" result of strong rhetoric suggests he lacks agency, that he's nothing more than a vessel through which other people's ideas flow and then explode. Ironically, she's doing Dear a favour, diluting his wickedness through finger-pointing at the "lies, language and culture of misogyny" that apparently facilitate "this kind of violence."
Over at The Washington Post, Ruth Marcus says that those politicians and lawmakers who over the past few months have whipped up myths and moral panic about Planned Parenthood's "sale of fetal parts" must take some blame for the "ensuing violence." She concedes that her argument that anti-Planned Parenthood politicians are partly culpable for Dear's killings could be seen as a "slippery, subjective slope," since "holding advocates responsible for such unintended consequences risks dampening speech." But she forges ahead nonetheless, insisting that "extreme rhetoric combined with falsehoods tips the balance towards greater culpability."
Just as conservatives call for clampdowns on death metal after school shootings, or moral panickers about gangsta rap try to hold edgy hip-hoppers responsible for gang violence, so supposedly liberal pro-choicers want to indict the passionately pro-life politician or priest for the violence of a mercifully small number of individuals. It's a pseudo-liberal version of media-effects theory, deploying the same hackneyed, unproven argument that has been used by censors for decades: that controversial or heated or misleading words and images could propel individuals towards crime.
It's a form of moral blackmail: Shush your passion, dial down your ideals, or people will die.
The post-Colorado instinct to "dampen speech" also points to a larger problem in pro-choice politics today: an inconsistency on freedom and autonomy, and a shift away from emphasizing women's capacity to determine their destinies towards presenting them (and everyone else) as fragile individuals in need of protection from nasty words and wicked trends.
The reason I am pro-choice is pretty simple: like John Stuart Mill, I believe that "over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign"—or, in this case, over her body and mind the individual is sovereign. Individuals must be free to believe and say whatever they like, and to behave and govern themselves and their lives as they see fit, just so long as they do not harm anyone else or anyone else's property.
To my mind, abortion rights are absolutely essential to the ideal of moral autonomy. If women stop being sovereign over themselves the minute they become pregnant, then they aren't free. Their bodies become subject to stringent laws, and their individual sovereignty is usurped by a higher authority tyrannically presuming to speak on behalf of something inside the woman's body.
But too much pro-choice activism is becoming depressingly illiberal. Pro-choice campaigners on American and British campuses have banned pro-life speakers on the basis that their words will harm women's "mental safety." And there are calls to prevent pro-life protesters from gathering outside clinics lest they confuse or upset women who are "in a vulnerable state." The irony is a dark one: many of those who claim to be defending women's moral autonomy simultaneously call into question that autonomy, by presenting women as weak individuals whose "mental safety" can be threatened by mere words or arguments.
Do we trust women or not? Not simply to decide the future of their pregnancies but also to engage in robust public discussion about all manner of issues, including abortion? I do. The ideals of freedom and autonomy must be put back at the heart of the pro-choice agenda. Let's start by defending to the hilt the right of the pro-life side to say whatever it wants, for three reasons: 1) because pro-lifers must enjoy the same freedom of speech as everyone else; 2) because the adult, free-thinking public is more than capable of making up its mind about the virtues or otherwise of pro-life speech and does not need state governors or feminists to think on its behalf; and 3) because it is massively in the interests of pro-choice people to allow pro-lifers to speak freely and angrily. It gives us something to challenge; to take down; to pit our own better, more liberal, more humanist arguments against.
The post Free Speech for Pro-Lifers appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Third-wave feminists are the best friends a rapist could ask for. With their promotion of the idea of "rape culture"—the notion that images and culture propel men to hate and harm women—they have done more than anyone to diminish rapists' responsibility for their foul crimes. And the evidence suggests rapists are really grateful.
A recent horrific murder in Britain confirms that, 30 years on from Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon's scaremongering over porn and its impact on the putty-like male mind, feminists are still depicting porn as the instigator of criminal activity. And in the process they're excuse-making for criminals.
Last week, Nathan Matthews, 28, was found guilty of murdering his 16-year-old stepsister, Becky Watts, during a sexually motivated kidnap plot. Matthews and his girlfriend, Shauna Hoare, had been text-messaging each other about kidnap fantasies. They also watched a lot of teen-themed and violent porn. Matthews later suffocated Becky and then sawed up her body.
It was an unspeakable crime. The court, in Bristol, found Matthews guilty both of having a criminal mind and of carrying out a criminal act: he was punished as a murderer. But in the days after his trial, something perverse happened: feminists, those who should be most keen to see the likes of Matthews held fully responsible for their foul plotting and behaviour, offered up an explanation for his wickedness that will have given him some comfort.
The revelation that Matthews was obsessed with porn became a key part of the media coverage. He was branded a "paranoid pervert." Some reporters gave the impression that the porn he watched drove him to kill. He was a "porn-obsessed recluse" who "let sick fantasies overtake him." Another said Matthews may have suffered the "desensitising effect" that apparently comes from living in a porn-saturated world: porn dulls our feelings, apparently making us cavalier about hurting others.
The hacks who focused on Matthews' obsession with porn no doubt thought they were exposing what a despicable character he is. But their reporting had a different, unwitting impact: it absolved Matthews of full culpability through claiming he had been "taken over" by porn. Some of the coverage verged on presenting Matthews as a victim; a victim of "porn culture."
Feminist commentators got closest to diminishing his responsibility. In the New Statesman, Sarah Ditum argued that Matthews, like other men who watch porn and then kill or rape, will have "learned" from all his porn what "women are supposed to be for": "something to fuck, something to use, something to hurt if you'd like to."
Ditum went so far as to suggest that many men are almost possessed by porn. "This is how porn operates," she said: "first through the eyes, and then in the mind, and then back through the body, against other bodies." So porn takes hold of us, took hold of Matthews, and drives us, automaton-like, to evil. If Matthews has read Ditum's words, he will have found comfort in them: perhaps I'm not evil, he'll have thought; perhaps I am just the slavish enactor of cultural trends. "Humans are creatures of culture," said Ditum. How surreal that it was a feminist who unwittingly absolved Matthews of wickedness through claiming that porn acted through him—through the eyes, the mind, the body—rather than this being a case of him acting upon his own warped volition.
In the Telegraph, Joan Smith argued that the "normalisation" of watching hardcore porn has made murders like Matthews' more likely. It is time, she says, to make the anti-porn message part of every child's schooling, so that they know that watching twisted porn is "not healthy or acceptable behaviour." "However liberal we might want to be," it is time to address how "desensitising" porn culture can be, she said.
Here, again, Matthews is effectively excused. He was desensitised, programmed, and if only educators had protected him from porn, perhaps Becky would still be alive. The porn made him do it.
These feminists' unwittingly friendly overtures to rapists and killers show how dangerous the idea of "rape culture" is. "Rape culture" is the name given to a vast array of mostly harmless cultural practices—from saucy magazines to sexist banter on campus—which feminists claim contribute to a social disregard and even disdain for women's equality and security. On both sides of the Atlantic, the rallying cry of third-wave feminists is that culture makes men wicked and reduces women to victims.
There are two big problems with the idea of "rape culture." The first is that it is built on some very shoddy statistics. As Christina Hoff Sommers, Cathy Young, and others have amply demonstrated, it simply isn't true that one in four women are sexually assaulted or that women in the 21st century live in a "sea of misogyny."
The second problem is that the fetishisation of culture as the cause of violence and shaper of attitudes smashes the idea of free will and moral autonomy. And this is a boon to those who have chosen, freely, to do something awful with their moral autonomy. Like rapists.
The notion that porn directly acts on society, as if it were some sentient force moving "through the eyes" and "against other bodies," is not new. It was promoted by Dworkin and MacKinnon in the 1980s and 1990s, and it was challenged, brilliantly, by feminist libertarians like Nadine Strossen, author of Defending Pornography (1995).
As Strossen argued, "a causal connection between exposure to pornography and the commission of sexual violence has never been established." And it still hasn't been: not one serious study shows any link between the availability of porn and spikes in misogynist violence. Indeed, Strossen pointed out that in countries where possession of porn is severely punished—like Saudi Arabia—women are far more likely to face everyday prejudice and violence. In the West, meanwhile, the explosion in online porn has coincided with a general fall in violence.
But one group of people have fully welcomed censorious feminists' fact-lite association of porn with rape and murder: rapists and murderers.
Strossen pointed out that in the 1980s and 90s, some men who had committed foul deeds fell back on the Dworkinite idea that the culture made them do it in an attempt to shrink their guilt. Marcia Pally, academic and feminist against censorship, wrote about how in the mid-1980s, when the court refused to declare him insane, Ted Bundy started "collecting information attesting to the negative effects of pornography," in order to show that wicked images made him wicked. He started quoting academic research as part of his attempt to "bolster his pornography-made-me-do-it claim."
At the time of Bundy's execution in 1989, Dr Gene Abel, Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University, wrote of Bundy's "false beliefs" that were designed to "explain his behaviour." He summed up Bundy's excuse-making as: "It wasn't my fault, these are pornographic things that I've seen." In the Harvard Civil Rights—Civil Liberties Law Review, Barry Lynn wrote of how in the 80s and 90s, "some defendants [were using] pornography as a convenient excuse for their actions."
How long until Nathan Matthews uses the porn defense, too? The case is already being made for him—by feminists. What a damaging idea "rape culture" is, pushing for censorship, spreading fear about sex, and, worst of all, allowing Bundy, Matthews and other nasty men to present themselves as victims, effectively. Rapists could not ask for a more favourable ideology than rape culture. It's what they've been waiting for. The feminist-rapist alliance—it has come to this.
The post How Feminist Attacks on Porn Enable Rapists appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It hasn't quite reached the boob-baring, free-lovin' level of Woodstock yet, but a sexual revolt of sorts is underway on campus. In Britain, some male students are refusing to attend their university's sexual-consent classes, and I reckon this could be the first salvo in a sexual uprising against the gender-studies prudes now running (and ruining) student life.
George Lawlor, a student at Warwick University, started a firestorm when he wrote a piece for a student newspaper called The Tab, headlined "Why I Don't Need Consent Classes." Not only did he tell the "self-appointed teachers of consent" to "get off your fucking high horse"—even worse, in the eyes of the raunch-allergic feminists who staff Britain's students' unions, he posted a photo of himself holding a sign saying: "This is not what a rapist looks like."
Cue global media outrage. Pretty much every liberal broadsheet in Christendom asked, "Well, what DOES a rapist look like?," hinting that Lawlor, by virtue of the fact that he has XY chromosomes, does look like a rapist. A Guardian writer suggested every man in the world, including the Dalai Lama, should post photos of themselves holding a sign that says "This is what a rapist looks like." Because, yep, any man might be a rapist. Maybe every woman in the world should post a pic of themselves with a sign saying, "This is what someone who commits infanticide looks like"? No, best not — the women who do that are a tiny minority, as are the men who rape.
A few days later, another Warwick student, Jack Hadfield, announced that he, too, would not be attending campus consent classes. We are witnessing "the demonisation of men," he said, the promotion of the idea that "men are dangerous sex pests."
Then came The Tab's poll on consent classes. Sure, readers of The Tab, Britain's spunkiest student newspaper, which often raises a very arched eyebrow at the buzzkilling shenanigans of student unions, might not be completely representative. Yet it's striking that of the 4,440 people who voted in its poll, 2,708 said they were against consent classes, with 1,732 in favour. That's 61 percent who don't think they need to be told how to have sex.
The big question is: Why didn't this happen earlier? Consent classes have been taking place on campuses in Britain for more than a year, and they're deeply patronising. In an irony that would make Orwell proud, or mad, they're compulsory on some campuses, including Cambridge and Oxford. Compulsory consent education—you couldn't make it up.
They treat students like children, telling these men and women, many of whom will have already had sex, how to express and recognise consent. They tell students that consent must be "active," "ongoing," and "sober." So no more drunk sex. Lawlor is right that students don't need worthy lectures about "basic human interaction."
A new sexual revolution is overdue. From Britain's consent classes to California's affirmative-consent laws to the explosion of sexual-assault kangaroo courts on U.S. campuses, the sexual freedom of young people is being subtly but significantly corroded.
Their ability to experiment, to screw around, to negotiate the ups and downs of relationships for themselves—as adults have done for centuries—is being undermined by finger-waggers determined to throw their sexual encounters open to public and even pseudo-legal scrutiny.
Students' sexual appetites are seen as "problematic"—the PC irritant's favourite word. That's why Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" is banned on more than 30 campuses in Britain; why Britain's National Union of Students rails against chat-up culture in student bars (including the making of "sexual noises"); and why American student leaders rage against fraternities and scaremonger about women's safety: because they see sexual relationships as a minefield to be minutely policed.
The end result is a new climate of fear on campus: women encouraged to fear the drunken line; men fearful of being hauled before the legal-ish overlords of campus sex life authorised to rule on regretted sex, drunken sex, bad sex.
Where yesteryear's youth struggled against priests and prudes and blue-haired ladies-who-lunched, today's young people who want to find out for themselves what sex is all about, and to enjoy it guilt-free, will need to rise up against a new breed of bores: not nuns, but Dworkinites; not conservative old women, but pseudo-punkish student leaders who want saucy books trigger-warned and Safe Spaces to protect women from being approached by men who want sex. (Women want sex too, of course, but, as in Victorian times, you're not allowed to say that.)
Today's encroachment into students' sex lives is actually worse than the religious moralism of old. At least those prigs only told us that certain acts were Wrong and we should hold back from doing them; today's prigs think all sex that happens outside of their purview is by definition dangerous and that young men and women are incapable of negotiating even bar life, never mind sex life, by themselves.
Yesterday's moralists warned us against being wicked; today's moralists warn us not to do anything at all without first being advised by self-elected sexperts. The old prudish brigade said "Don't do certain things"; the new prudish brigade calls into question our very ability to act autonomously.
So, yes, revolt. Do all the things you're told not to: drink, fumble, enjoy, regret, cope—all the stuff adults have always done.
But can we please not turn this into a "men's rights" issue? Too many of the revolters are presenting these first shoots of a sexual revolution as a case of brave men standing up to "feminazis" (man, I hate that word). Consent-class rebel Jack Hadfield's talk about the "demonization of men" and some media commentators' handwringing over wicked feminists gives the impression that men alone are damaged by the stifling anti-sex climate on campus. That is wrong. The new campus climate is as damaging to women as it is to men—more so, in fact.
It might hint that men are rough and untrustworthy, but it does something worse to women: reduces them to childlike creatures in need of protection against the whistles and chatter and larks of life. As Nadine Strossen said in the 1990s: Victim feminists don't only resuscitate the Victorian notion of "man as voracious satyr"—they also rehabilitate a view of women as "sexual victim."
Rise up, students. Demand your right to have sex as and when you please, as drunkenly as you please. But don't make this about men vs women, or even men vs feminists. This should be men and women united against the creeping official colonisation of ever-more areas of our private lives.
The post A New Sexual Revolt Is Underway at British Universities appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It's fun and important to mock the jumped-up Joe Stalins who have seized power in student associations across the West and who are banning songs, hats, newspapers, and people that piss them off. But it isn't enough. Too often we treat this scourge of student censorship as a sudden, almost malarial hysteria infecting campuses—the fault of a uniquely intolerant generation corrupting a hitherto healthy academy with their demands to be Safe-Spaced from hairy ideas. But this is wrong. These ban-happy brats are actually the bastard offspring of… well, of some of the people now criticizing them. They are Complacency's Children, the angry logical conclusion to liberals' failure over the past 30 years to kick back against a creeping culture of intolerance.
The good news: Over the past year, everyone from Barack Obama to sensible feminists have taken to calling out the censoriousness of students. And they definitely deserve called out. Consider recent examples of student-union tyranny in Britain:
Other students' unions in Britain have banned the Robin Thicke song "Blurred Lines," men's magazines like Zoo and Nuts (they contain images of scantily-clad women, which is a big no-no for the weirdly prudish radicals of the 21st century), and the making of "sexual noises." Then there are all the countless folks who have been "No Platformed" by Britain's student-union terrors, including members of far-right political parties, Zionists, and alleged "Islamophobes."
Last year I was prevented from speaking about abortion at Oxford (I was due to make the pro-choice case) on the basis that I don't have a uterus. Such is the knee-jerk prejudice of student leaders that they think nothing of banning speakers not only because of what they say, but even because of their biological make-up.
All these cases expose how utterly contemptuous of the student body today's student leaders are. The idea that Muslim students can be easily "intimidated" by words, and that female students must be protected from saucy pop songs, is shot through with a retro neo-colonialism and Victorian-style fear for dainty women's mental safety.
Student leaders commit what Frederick Douglass called censorship's double-wrong: "It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker." They silence those who provoke, and infantilize those whose very purpose in life is to be provoked, to have their minds rattled during their time at university.
Such paternalism can be seen in the U.S. too. From the demand for warnings on classic works of literature that mention rape to the idea that controversial speakers might threaten students' mental safety, policers of student life suck the soul out of the academy when they treat words as violence.
Yet as we criticize the illiberal turn on campus, we must also ask where these banners and buzz-killers came from. To follow the growing media and political backlash against P.C., you'd be forgiven for thinking these students emerged from nowhere, zombie-like, overrunning the academy with their deathly miserabilism. The largely forty- and fifty-something observers wringing their hands over the spread of the P.C. blob present this as a generational conflict, pitching switched-on older people against muddled youth who've lost the love of liberty.
This is too simplistic. It brings to mind the grey-haired guardians of the academy in the 1960s, who wondered how spoiled, long-haired students were managing to overthrow curricula and introduce relativism into university life without ever once stopping to wonder if perhaps their own complacency towards enlightenment values might have acted as a green light to these "pinkos." Now liberals rather than traditionalists are throwing their hands up in horror at a new generation while failing to ask if their own complacency might have midwifed it.
This is clearest in the U.K. Here, the student-union policy of No Platform has existed since 1974. In the 1970s and 80s it was used largely against the far-right. Then it spread to Zionists. In the 1990s it was used against Islamist groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir, on the basis that they were homophobic and menacing. Then in 2001 it spread to Eminem, because… well, he's homophobic too, right?
How did British liberals respond to these bans? Not well. They either turned a blind eye to them, or supported them. Indeed, in a February letter to The Guardian decrying the new No Platforming of radical feminists, various academics said No Platforming was supposed to be "a tactic used against self-proclaimed fascists and Holocaust deniers." So even as they bemoan the No Platforming of radfems, they green-light the No Platforming of right-wingers.
This sums up the problem with the middle-aged backlash against P.C: It's too late, and it still isn't consistently challenging censorship. Its main concern is that "people like us" are now falling victim to P.C. student intolerance.
In the U.S., too, many liberals seem to have become concerned with P.C. only when their friends fell victim to it. When Jonathan Chait, in his New York essay in January, said P.C. "has returned," you had to wonder where he'd been for the past 20 years. From the Brown University students who stormed their newspaper's offices after it published a piece criticizing reparations for slavery, to the Dartmouth students who burnt their newspaper after they thought it had made light of date rape, throughout the 2000s this attitude had been running riot on campus, following on from its explosion in the 80s and 90s. Perhaps liberals didn't notice because its main targets back then were right-wingers, Christian evangelists, and Israel supporters, rather than liberals.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, too many liberals failed to stand up to the censorship of scoundrels. And as H.L. Mencken said: "The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
Liberals' complacency in the face of a 30-year tide of intolerance, fuelled by identity politics, the therapeutic culture, and the politics of victimhood, allowed P.C. to take root among a new generation. I mean, if an Islamist can be banned for being homophobic, why not Eminem? And if a neo-fascist can be banned because his ideas "harm" ethnic minorities, why not a radfem whose ideas "harm" trans people? The students of today aren't super-weird, they're just following the logic of censorship that earlier liberals either helped to set in motion or shrugged their shoulders at.
The post Baby Boomers Share Blame for Today's Censorship-Happy Students appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Charlie Hebdo is under attack again. Mercifully not by gun-toting Islamists this time, but rather by the unarmed but nonetheless nasty professional offence-takers that are legion in modern Europe.
The scurrilous mag's crime? It dared to publish two cartoons about the refugee crisis engulfing Europe. The cartoons aren't remotely anti-refugee. In fact, they're critical of Europe, not the foreigners trying to get here. One is a drawing of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian kid who washed up on a beach in Turkey. The cartoon shows his dead body alongside the caption "So close to his goal…" and a sign on the beach that says: "Promotion! Two children's menus for the price of one." To my eyes, this looks like a (pretty lame) criticism of European consumerism, the kind of lazy lefty platitude that Charlie Hebdo often indulges in. Big deal.
The second cartoon is more provocative, and better. It shows Christ walking on water next to the words: "Proof that Europe is Christian. Christians walk on water—Muslim children sink." Only the most literally-minded could consider this an attack on Muslims. It's quite obviously a stinging criticism of those hard right-wingers who insist Europe must remain a Christian continent and who might just think that drowned Muslim kids around our watery borders are a price worth paying to keep it so.
But none of this matters to the offence-taking set, because their aim is not to understand, far less be tolerant—it is to take offence. Like vampires in desperate need of blood, the offencerati has an insatiable urge to feed its inner outrage machine, to devour some giver of grievance and spit him out the other end as a chastised, apologetic shadow of his former self.
So the British tabloid the Daily Mirror thundered about Charlie Hebdo "mocking dead Aylan Kurdi." The Los Angeles Times wrung its hands over this latest "Charlie Hebdo furor," reporting the always angry Twitterati's decision that no one could possibly still "want to declare 'Je Suis Charlie'" after this. Russia Today asked "Je Suis Charlie now?" In its link to the offending cartoons, Russia Today put a trigger warning that even some campus authoritarians might consider a bit much: "YOU MAY FIND LINKED CONTENT OFFENSIVE, READER DISCRETION ADVISED," in all capital letters.
Tweeters declared Charlie Hebdo racist, disgusting, etc. One, quoted in media reports, said: "There's free speech, hate speech and simply disgusting & distasteful vitriol. These #CharlieHebdo [cartoons] are the latter." Yet to those of us who have a genuine commitment to freedom speech, it isn't only nice stuff that should be publishable—so should the hateful and disgusting.
After the media fury came the threats of legal action. Britain's Society of Black Lawyers described Charlie Hebdo as "racist, xenophobic and ideologically bankrupt." The Society said it was considering reporting the publications to the International Criminal Court on the grounds that its cartoons were an "incitement to hate crime and persecution." It hasn't done that yet, but it might—the Society has censorious form. Earlier this year it reported a columnist for The Sun to the police, claiming an anti-migrant column she wrote was an incitement to racial hatred. The police are investigating. Seriously. A British police force in 2015 is investigating a woman on suspicion of expressing herself.
The fact-lite fury over these latest cartoons tells us two important things about the sorry state of free speech in the West today.
First, it exposes the shallowness of that eruption of "Je Suis Charlie" following the massacre at the mag's offices in January. Back then, politicians, most of the media, and the Twitterati rallied behind the publication, declaring no one should be shot simply for mocking Muhammad. But that edifice of liberal solidarity soon started to corrode, with liberal columnists wondering if maybe Charlie should tone down its "Islamophobia," followed by various novelists having a hissy fit when PEN America gave Charlie a courage award. Now, in the instinctive tut-tutting and threats hurled at Charlie for publishing cartoons of refugees, we can see that "Je Suis Charlie" was most likely an emotional outburst against an act of barbarism rather than a deep defence of the freedom to say and draw anything we want.
The second thing this latest controversy reveals is that, like charity, censorship begins at home. After the massacre, too many commentators internationalized the crisis of free speech, presenting its demise as something brought about by an alien strain, in this case Islamists with guns. But the offence-taking culture is awesomely powerful within Europe itself, in our capitals, our academies, political circles, and everywhere.
Indeed, it's worth remembering that before Charlie Hebdo was shot up, it had already been taken to court by people offended by its rabble-rousing—because France, like every other European country, has actual laws against being overly offensive about religious groups. It had also been upbraided by, among others, President Obama. The Western culture of "You Can't Say That!" had found Charlie Hebdo guilty of crimes against politically correct sensibilities long before those killers summarily executed its staff for speech crimes against Muhammad. Having been brought up on a continent that chastises gratuitous offensiveness against Islam and other ideologies, those killers can be seen as the armed wing of the offence-taking lobby.
Charlie Hebdo, and others, will get flak so long as Western society values individuals' and group self-esteem over freedom of speech. It's this homegrown warped priority that we need to fix. Say it loud, say it clear: Je Suis Charlie, whether it's punching up, punching down, ridiculing Muhammad, upsetting the right-on, or whatever.
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]]>There are many mad and worrying things about the speech codes spreading across campuses like a contagious brain funk. There's their treatment of even everyday words as "problematic" terms of abuse. There's the branding of the most anodyne forms of friendly banter as "aggressive" (apparently it is a microaggression to say to a Latino or Native American, "We want to know what you think"). And there's the idea that even static objects can commit acts of violence against students: one university bemoans "environmental microaggressions," which can include a college in which all the buildings are "named after white heterosexual upper class males." What these codes add up to is a demand that everyone be permanently on edge, constantly reevaluating their every thought before uttering it. It's an invitation to social paralysis.
But perhaps the worst thing about these tongue-clamping rules is how they incite hyper racial-consciousness. Indeed, some college speech codes chastise students who refuse to think racially, who balk at the idea that they should always be actively mindful of their own and everyone else's racial make-up.
The "problematization" of students who refuse to think and behave racially is best captured in a University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) guide to "Recognizing Microaggressions." In keeping with other campus speech codes, the guide treats as dicey everything from simple questions (such as asking someone "Where were you born?") to expressions of faith in meritocracy (like saying "America is the land of opportunity"). But even more perniciously, it warns students and faculty members against being non-racial, telling them they must always "acknowledge" other people's race.
UCLA says "Color Blindness," the idea we shouldn't obsess over people's race, is a microaggression. If you refuse to treat an individual as a "racial/cultural being," then you're being aggressive. This is a profound perversion of what has been considered the reasoned, liberal approach for decades—that treating people as "racial/cultural beings" is wrong and dehumanizing.
UCLA offers the following examples as "color blind" utterances that count as microaggressions:
"When I look at you, I don't see color."
"There is only one race: the human race."
"I don't believe in race."
Apparently such comments deny individuals' "racial and ethnic experience." But on a campus like UCLA a few decades ago, refusing to treat individuals as "cultural beings" would have been the right and good thing. Now, in an eye-swivelling reversal, the polar opposite is the case: to demonstrate your politically correct virtue you must acknowledge the skin color of everyone you meet.
The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point similarly advises that color blindness is a racial microaggression. It lists "America is a melting pot" as an aggressive phrase. It brands as problematic any comment by a white person that suggests he or she "does not want to acknowledge race." Anyone who claims to be "immune to races"—that is, who prefers not to think about people as racial beings—is viewed as aggressive.
At the University of Missouri, the guide to "inclusive terminology" lists color-blindness as a form of prejudice, even as it recognizes that this term "originated from civil-rights legislation." Once, color-blindness was considered cool, but now we know it can be "disempowering for people whose racial identity is an important part of who they are," says the school.
And in the University of New Hampshire's (UNH) barmy guide to "bias-free language"—brilliantly mocked by Reason's Robby Soave at The Daily Beast, and now disowned by UNH's president—students are expected to take account of a person's skin color, age, and heritage before engaging with them. Whether they're being told that using "American" to refer to people born in the U.S. is wrong, that they should call Arabs "Western Asians" (what?), the message to students is clear: judge your acquaintance's skin color, consider his or her cultural origins, and then decide what to say. Think racially, always.
Gwendolyn R.Y. Miller, a diversity consultant who advises educational institutions on how to tackle racial microaggressions, says being color blind is a "microinvalidation," since it serves to "exclude, negate, or nullify the psychological thoughts, feelings, or experiential reality of certain groups." She says the phrase "We all bleed red when we're cut" is a microaggression. (Perhaps Shakespeare was being microaggressive to Jews (and others) when he wrote his great, humanistic line: "If you prick us, do we not bleed?") Miller says the claim that "character, not color, is what counts with me" is a racial microaggression too.
If that line sounds familiar, that's because it is almost exactly what Martin Luther King said in his "I have a dream" speech. But American colleges in the 21st century demonize those who follow the King approach of judging people by "the content of their character" rather than by the color of their skin. Today, MLK would be viewed as naive at best and suspect at worst, conspiring to deny the primacy of our selves as "racial/cultural beings."
But here's the thing: King—like many other postwar radicals, liberals, and progressives—was challenging the idea that people should be engaged with and judged as "racial / cultural beings." He, and others, preferred to treat people as people, not as products or expressions of "culture." Now, 50 years on, the regressive, racial politics of identity has won out over that old humanistic dream of a post-race society, to such an extent that anyone who refuses to think of whites and blacks as different is treated as problematic.
New college speech codes don't only infantilize students and stymie open, frank discussion. They also point to the creeping re-racialisation of society, and to the rebranding of universalism itself as a form of racism. Call me microaggressive all you like but, as a humanist, I will not treat my fellow citizens as "racial/cultural beings."
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]]>If you thought only the whackjobs of ISIS were hellbent on obliterating statues that offend them, think again. Thousands of miles from the Islamic State, in what you would imagine to be the different moral galaxy of the Western academy, there are young hotheads who likewise want to remove from public view the monuments that have the temerity to upset them.
Last week it was revealed that a bunch of students at Oxford want a statue of Cecil Rhodes removed. Rhodes was a British imperialist, founder of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), architect of Apartheid, and all-around unpleasant guy. And according to Oxford students calling themselves the "Rhodes Must Fall" movement, his statue at Oriel College—his alma mater—is not only offensive but an act of violence.
"There's a violence to having to walk past the statue every day," one student told Sky News. The statue is "really problematic."
Problematic is to the intolerant PC brigade what "haram" is to Islamists—it's used to brand things that are wicked, and which should ideally be No Platformed or Safe Spaced out of existence. The activists' casual conflation of speech with violence—or rather, of walking by a statue with feeling assaulted—speaks to the terrifying Orwellianism that has much of the Western student body in its grip.
The notion that expression is a form of violence—whether it's controversial books that are said to assault students' fragile minds or invited speakers whose words allegedly harm students—opens the door to the policing of speech as thoroughly as we police physical force. After all, if walking past a statue is like being punched in the face, or hearing a controversial idea is akin to being stabbed, then that statue must go and that idea must be extinguished, right? Equating thought with violence has been a key tactic of every tyrannical censor in history.
Unlike ISIS, the Oxford students aren't wielding sledgehammers against the stone object of their fury (not yet, anyway). And where ISIS has mainly demolished statues it considers idolatrous, these students are more politically minded demolishers, keen to rid Oxford of the likeness of a racist. And yet, the similarities between these Western statue-fearers and the ISIS statue-destroyers are striking.
The "Rhodes Must Fall" guys talk of Rhodes' problematic "legacy" and how it has no place on a 21st-century campus. One says his statue is "a reminder… of the colonial project." ISIS, too, is also all about erasing legacies. Its English-language magazine Dabiq justified the destruction of artifacts at Mosul Museum in Iraq as a means of "erasing the legacy of a ruined nation." It boasts of having "laid to waste the … legacy of a nation that had long passed from the face of the Earth."
What ISIS and the Oxford lot share in common is a Year Zero attitude, a desire to rewrite history. It's a deeply authoritarian instinct: not merely to discuss the past, and challenge its events and ideas, but to cleanse all remnants of it from the present. It's cultural cleansing, disguised as an Islamic duty by ISIS and as radical anti-racism by Oxford students.
Oxford students aren't the only ones aping the ISIS approach to yesteryear's monuments. They were inspired by students at the University of Cape Town, who protested against and threw shit at a statue of Rhodes until it was taken down last April. In the U.S., students at the University of Texas at Austin (UTA) are agitating for the removal of a statue of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy during the Civil War. A UTA student leader says the statue is "not in line with… the ideals of a diverse and all-inclusive university." Imagine that—a historical monument that fails to conform to the values of today.
Earlier this year, St Louis University took down a statue of the Jesuit Missionary priest Father Pierre-Jean De Smet holding a crucifix over Native Americans. The statue has been there for decades, but it was recently judged "culturally insensitive." Students at the University of Maryland are demanding the renaming of their football stadium, currently named for H.C. Byrd, a segregationist.
In the wake of Charleston church massacre, the Guardian actually set up a page to track all outdated or racist symbols and monuments in the U.S. Seriously. It's like a sex offenders' registery for statues.
If every old thing, whether it's the works of Mark Twain, which are strewn with racial epithets offensive to modern ears, or those libraries named after slave-owner Thomas Jefferson, were to be judged by how well it sits with modern-day mores, we'd have to tear down everything. News Flash: people in the past had different values to ours.
The attempt to airbrush historical stuff from the present is the height of authoritarianism. It's an attempt not merely to control what people can think and say today, but to project contemporary conformism back in time. Yet being surrounded by statues of flawed historical figures and dead eccentric writers is part of living in a complex, colorful society. They're reminders of history's ups and downs, and its changes.
"He who controls the past controls the future," said Orwell. Yes, that's it. The intolerant students and others seeking to smash past images and ideas really have their eye on establishing their future authority to determine what all of us may think and say.
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]]>Rihanna, the best and sexiest thing to happen to popular culture in a decade, has had her fair share of run-ins with the morality cops. She gets the Moral Majority hot under their starched collars with her refusal to wear many clothes. That she has a tattoo of a gun, smokes weed, and relishes having loads of money—she's Instagrammed pics of herself standing on piles of cash in stilettos—doesn't sit well with the anti-fast living crew. And she riles the finger-wagging wing of modern feminism, as well. When she got back with singer Chris Brown in 2012, despite the fact he beat her up in 2009, the sisterhood effectively cast her out as a dumb-as-shit broad who doesn't know her own mind. Now, not content with having caused gnashing of teeth among the religious, the feminists, and the anti-drug crowd, Rihanna has rattled another constituency: what we might call the new policers of culture, the growing army of online warriors who think nothing of judging art and entertainment not by whether it's good, but by whether it says the right thing.
Rihanna's video for her new song, "Bitch Better Have My Money," has caused just about everyone to have a fit of Victorian vapours. Co-directed by Rihanna, it's a Tarantino-esque, blaxpolitation-style mini-movie in which Rihanna plays a woman screwed over by her rich accountant who decides to get revenge by kidnapping his beautiful, blond wife. Said wife is shown hanging upside down from a rope in a warehouse, being hit on the head with a bottle, and suffering other abuses at the hands of Rihanna and her all-female crew, all while Rihanna sings: "Bitch better have my money!" Look, it won't make Werner Herzog feel threatened, but it's a slick, seven-minute slice of all of Rihanna's glorious toxicity. Unless you're one of the new culture-policers, that is, in which case it's an outrageous glorification of misogyny, racism, violence, blah blah blah.
Ours is an era in which no piece of popular culture escapes the Media Studies pontification of those sad people whose favourite word is "problematic." And to them, everything is problematic. As Drew Magary says, "There's a whole black hole of the internet that spends all day up its own ass, endlessly worried about approving of pop culture rather than actually fucking enjoying it."
So it has been with Rihanna's most recent video. Instead of enjoying it—or not, if it ain't their kind of thing—people are think-piecing the video to death.
"It seems traditional to apologise for being too white and past-it to comment on any video by a young black artist," says a white and past-it columnist, before unapologetically branding Rihanna's video "crude" and "pure misogyny." Another writer (whose piece comes with a trigger warning) says Rihanna's video is "not very feminist." To which the only response is: so what? Neither was the work of the Marquis de Sade or J.G. Ballard's Crash or Robert Palmer's video for "Addicted to Love"—still all brilliantly entertaining, though.
Yet others have accused Rihanna of "internalized misogyny." It's one of feminists' favorite tricks: to suggest that any woman who thinks differently than them must have thoughtlessly imbibed male hatred for women and allowed it to frazzle their brain cells. Ironically, this may be the most anti-female idea around today, that women are so easily brain-fried by the culture that (allegedly) surrounds them.
Whatever critics' particular beefs, this branding of Rihanna's video as "problematic" speaks to one of the ugliest strains in the West today: the moral policing of pop culture. Whether it's movies being branded insufficiently feminist (Gone Girl), computer games being called out for featuring sexual violence (Grand Theft Auto), or pop songs being banned by students for being too dirty (Blurred Lines), we seem to have lost the ability simply to enjoy culture—its drama, its thrill, its tunes—and instead now say: "Ah, but does it conform to my political and moral viewpoint?"
As the "problematic" lobby grows, we should heed the words of Ray Bradbury. He once received a letter from an earnest liberal-arts student suggesting he rewrite his Martian Chronicles to include more female characters. Such an attempt to "interfere with aesthetics" was intolerable, Bradbury said.
"There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches," he later wrote. "The real world" is the place where you can make your moral case and try to reshape politics, suggested Bradbury—"but the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where [your] rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run, and rule."
Today's constant branding of certain forms of pop culture as "problematic" is the book-burning of our era. It creates a climate in which artists feel under pressure to make their work more morally palatable and politically acceptable, to water down their "territorial imperatives"— that is, their artistic freedom—at the behest of the new culture-policers.
We once thought pop culture would be slayed by old-style moralists, or that it would eat itself. In fact it's being killed in slow motion by a new generation of observers who seem to think culture should not only entertain them but also embody their moral outlook. What extraordinary arrogance. Rihanna, like Ray Bradbury, should tell them to get fucked.
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]]>Pope Francis's eco-encyclical, issued to great fanfare this week, might be hyperbolic, anti-progress, and seemingly keen to bring the hotness of hell up to Earth. (How else do we explain its mad aside against air-conditioning, which the pontiff brands as one of humanity's "harmful habits"? Clearly he wants to heat us up in preparation for our eternal frying for all the eco-sins we've committed.) But we should nonetheless be grateful that, for all its dottiness, this humanity-lecturing letter has been published. For it shows in black and white—and green—what a colossal amount in common there is between environmentalism and Catholicism.
That Francis can so readily adopt eco-lingo, can read as fluently from the gospel according to Greenpeace as he does from those other gospels, confirms that God-botherers and eco-worriers share a serious agitation with the human urge to explore and develop—what they call our "hubris"—and long to make us live simpler, less stuff-filled lives.
Francis takes to eco-moaning like a duck to water. (Probably polluted water— yes, yes, we know.) He slams humanity's view of itself as "lords and masters" of nature, our belief that we can "plunder her at will." Such arrogance and greed will have "dire consequences," he finger-wags. Mother Nature has been "gravely damaged by our irresponsible behaviour," and all we're leaving to future generations is "debris, desolation and filth."
He warns that our avarice—by which he means our desire to live in big homes and drive nice cars, like he does—is propelling the world to disaster. We have become "self-centred." "The emptier a person's heart is, the more he or she needs things to buy, own and consume," he says, from his vast, palatial home, which has so much art in it that if you spent one minute looking at each piece you'd be there for four years. Seriously, it's like being lectured about paying your taxes by Charles Rangel.
And what will be the end result of our wicked urge to own things? Mayhem, of course. All the pollution produced in the making of our things will increase "the threat of extreme weather events," he says, echoing in green-friendly language the Old Testament God's promise of floods as punishment for mankind's sinful antics. We should also gird ourselves for the "catastrophic consequences of social unrest," since "our obsession with a consumerist lifestyle, above all when few people are capable of maintaining it, can only lead to violence and mutual destruction."
Shorter version: your material aspirations will destabilise the planet and cause people to kill each other. So lower your horizons. The meek shall inherit the Earth.
Francis is especially agitated by what he calls our Promethean delusions, our belief we can tame nature and use her resources to create a world of plenty and opportunity.
Humans are "usurping the place of God," says God's representative on Earth, "even to the point of claiming an unlimited right to trample his creation underfoot." We think we have "dominion over the Earth." We are in thrall to a "Promethean vision of [our] mastery over the world," and it's high time we realised that we should be "responsible stewards" of this fragile planet, not "ruthless exploiters" of it.
He slams our "excessive anthropocentrism." We must "restore men and women to their rightful place"—that is, as humble janitors of the planet, whose only job is to keep Earth nice for future generations, not to dig at it, extract its innards, remake it in our own image.
If all this downbeatness about humanity and scaremongering about the future sounds familiar, that's because it echoes the eco-hysteria that has become so prominent in Western political life.
The Vatican is now a fully-fledged green institution. Which isn't surprising. The demonisation of human hubris and promotion of eco-meekness that is at the heart of the green ideology chimes perfectly with the asceticism of Catholicism.
The similarities between the pieties of environmentalism and the diktats of Catholicism are striking. Environmentalism rehabilitates in secular drag the stinging rebukes of humanity once delivered by pointy-hatted men of God.
Christianity's end-of-worldism is getting a new airing in the apocalypse obsession of greens, who warn of an eco-unfriendly End of Days. Its promise of Godly judgement for our wicked ways has been replaced by greens' promise that we'll one day be judged for our planetary destructiveness. A leading British green has fantasised about "international criminal tribunals" for climate-change deniers, who will be "partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths."
The Word of God has become the authority of The Science (greens always say "The" before "Science," to signal its definitiveness.) "Science has spoken," said Ban Ki-Moon last year, in a speech on why we should all obsess over climate change, just as Catholics insist the "Lord has spoken" so STFU. Greens breathe life back into Catholic guilt, too, urging us to feel bad about everything from flying abroad to eating strawberries out of season. Carbon-calculating, where people measure their every single production of carbon, is like Catholic guilt on steroids.
Of course, you can offset your carbon by planting a tree or something—what Catholics call penance. In the past, rich believers paid priests loads of money for an Indulgence, which absolved them of their non-mortal sins—today the eco-concerned wealthy spend their cash on offsetting their carbon farts, the modern equivalent of an Indulgence.
This is why Francis is so drawn to environmentalism: he sees it as a more acceptable, 21st-century way of pushing the guilt and meekness and anti-Promethean outlook that the Vatican has long been hawking.
Indeed, the most striking passage in his encyclical is when he celebrates environmentalism for potentially bringing to an end the era of progress: "Following a period of irrational confidence in progress and human abilities, some sectors of society are now adopting a more critical approach. We see increasing sensitivity to the environment and the need to protect nature." The honesty here is refreshing: the Pope likes the green stuff because it winds back modernity; it reins in the moment in history when we believed in progress and human power.
He's talking about the Enlightenment, in essence. About that revolution in ideas when philosophers and scientists challenged the mysticism of the Church and said mankind should explore his surroundings, extract nature's secrets, dare to know, dare to discover. That radical moment which led to us unlocking the long-dormant sunlight in coal to power the Industrial Revolution: which allowed us to fly; which helped us discover the fantastic secrets hidden in uranium, which earlier generations only used to dye glass yellow but which we have used to create so much energy that even God was probably bowled over. He's talking about humanity playing God, which, as God's spokesman, he isn't happy about.
How striking that he now dons enviro-garb in order to hector hubristic humans and cheer the coming to an end of the "irrational confidence in progress." He instinctively recognises that environmentalism represents the greatest challenge to what he no doubt views as the error of Enlightenment. And he's right. Those of us who still believe in progress, and in humanity, and who think Prometheus had the right idea, will need to wage war on green thinking as determinedly as those Enlightenment greats stood up to the humanity-binding mysticism of their eras.
The post Pope Francis Embraces Green Theology to Demonize the Modern World appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>If you were in any doubt that a dark cloud of illiberalism has descended over the Western academy, then the case of Tim Hunt should put you straight.
Hunt is a British biochemist. A really good one. In 2001 he won the Nobel Prize for his breakthrough work on cells. He's a fellow of the Royal Society in London, founded in 1660 and thought to be the oldest scientific research institution in the world. And this week he was unceremoniously ditched by University College London for telling a joke.
Hunt's crime was to make a not-very-funny gag during an after-dinner speech at a conference on women in science in South Korea earlier this week.
"Three things happen when [girls] are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry," he said. According to one of the attendees, the joke was greeted by a "deathly, deathly silence."
In a normal world, a world which valued the freedom to make a doofus of oneself, that should have been the end of it. Seventy-two-year-old man of science makes outdated joke, tumbleweed rolls by, The End.
But we don't live in a normal world. Certainly we don't live in a world where people are allowed to make off-color comments. And so with tedious, life-zapping predicability, Hunt fell victim to the offence-policers, to the machine of outrage being constantly cranked up by self-styled guardians of what we may think, say, and even joke about.
Twitter went into meltdown. Journalists kicked up a fuss. His comments were branded "shocking and bewildering." (You find a silly joke bewildering? You really should get out more.) And then came the denouement to this latest outburst of confected fury: Hunt "resigned" from UCL, where he was honorary professor.
"Resign" is in quote marks because it's pretty clear he was elbowed out. Consider UCL's statement about his leaving. "UCL was the first university in England to admit women students on equal terms to men, and the university believes that this outcome [Hunt's resignation] is compatible with our commitment to gender equality."
That's another way of saying that Hunt's penchant for making un-PC jokes was incompatible with life at UCL. So he had to be excommunicated. Professors of Britain, be warned: tell a funny that irritates the right-on, and you shall be cast out.
Even more depressing than the resignation/sacking of Hunt has been the response to it. "This is a moment to savour," said the Guardian. The Twitterati has given birth to the hashtag #distractinglysexy, featuring pics of women in laboratories, all designed to mock Hunt's 1950s worldview. One science journalist thinks Hunt deserves the roasting he's received because it is alarming that "in this day and age… someone would be prepared to be so crass, so rude."
What is truly alarming, what should really send a shiver down every liberal's spine, is not the words that came out of Hunt's mouth but the haranguing of him that followed, the shunning of him by the academy and possibly by the scientific elite itself. (As the Guardian crows, Hunt is a "fellow of the Royal Society… at the time of writing, at least." Yes! Let's cast him out of that institution too! And can we pelt him with rotten eggs as he leaves?)
The response to Hunt is way more archaic than what Hunt said. Sure, his views might be a bit pre-women's lib, pre-1960s. But the tormenting and sacking of people for what they think and say is pre-modern. It's positively Inquisitorial.
The irony is too much to handle: Hunt is railed against for expressing an old-fashioned view, yet the railers against him do something infinitely more old-fashioned: they expel from public life someone they judge to have committed heresy. Kick him out. Strip him of his titles. Mock his misfortune. "Savour the moment." How awfully ironic that the Royal Society, which played a key role in propelling Britain from medievalism to modernity, is now being asked to behave in a medieval fashion and send into the academic wilderness a heretic among its number.
The Hunt incident is quite terrifying. For what we have here is a university, under pressure from an intolerant mob, judging a professor's fitness for office by his personal thoughts, his idea of humour. Profs should be judged by one thing alone: their depth of knowledge. It shouldn't matter one iota if they are sexist, stupid, unfunny, religious, uncouth, ugly, or whatever. All that should matter is whether they have the brainpower to do the job at hand.
UCL and the mob's hounding of Hunt echoes the university of the pre-Enlightenment era, when only those who were 100 percent Good Catholics had a hope in hell of getting a job. Only now, academics must be unflinchingly in accordance with the commandments of PC rather than with Biblical thinking. A Nobel Laureate has been broken on the wheel of PC. This is bad. Really bad. For if even a Nobel winner can be treated like this, what hope is there for lesser professors? The chilling effect of the Hunt debacle on the Western academy is likely to be pretty intense.
The Hunt case confirms something important: that Western universities are complicit in the censoriousness that is consuming them. In fact, they invite it; they invented it.
In effectively dumping Hunt, UCL is sending the message that it will not tolerate deviant thinking. Oxford University did something similar last year when it cancelled a debate on abortion (which I was due to speak at) at the behest of an angry mob of feminists. The management of the London School of Economics gave the nod to the disbanding of its student rugby team for the crime of distributing a rude leaflet. In the U.S., Columbia has indulged the mattress girl, allowing her to defame both a man and campus life more broadly. UVa banned fraternities in response to what turned out to be an utterly made-up rape. Even the notorious Laura Kipnis case is not a simple case of mad, intolerant students trying to shut down an outspoken academic, but rather has been facilitated by educational structures themselves: in this case the federal Title IX rules dealing with gender issues on campus.
Too often today we're told that gangs of crazy students or irate feminists, invading armies of pinkos, are turning otherwise enlightened universities into hotbeds of PC intolerance. That's way too simple. In truth, universities themselves, having embraced relativism, non-judgmentalism, and discomfort with the idea of Truth itself, incite such behaviour. They green-light it. They facilitate it. The Hunt story confirms that the academy isn't being destroyed by morally alien beings, by cushioned, entitled youth—it is destroying itself.
The post The Illiberal Persecution of Tim Hunt appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole in the opposite wall. O'Brien lifted the grating. Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling away on the current of warm air; it was vanishing in a flash of flame. O'Brien turned away from the wall. 'Ashes,' he said. 'Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist. It never existed.'"
This is the moment in Nineteen Eighty-Four when O'Brien, an agent of the Thought Police who tortures Winston Smith in Room 101, dumps into a memory hole an inconvenient news story. It's an 11-year-old newspaper cutting which confirms that three Party members who were executed for treason could not have been guilty. "It does exist!" wails Winston. "It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it." O'Brien, mere seconds after plunging the item into the memory hole, replies: "I do not remember it."
Of all the horrible things in Nineteen Eighty-Four that have come true in recent years—from rampant thought-policing to the spread of CCTV cameras—surely the memory hole, the institutionalisation of forgetting, will never make an appearance in our supposedly open, transparent young century? After all, ours is a "knowledge society," where info is power and Googling is on pretty much every human's list of favourite pastimes.
Think again. The memory hole is already here. In Europe, anyway. We might not have actual holes into which pesky facts are dropped so that they can be burnt in "enormous furnaces." But the EU-enforced "right to be forgotten" does empower individual citizens in Europe, with the connivance of Google, to behave like little O'Briens, wiping from internet search engines any fact they would rather no longer existed.
The right to be forgotten recently celebrated its first birthday. It was introduced last May, when a Spanish man went to the European Court of Justice to complain about the fact that a story about his home once having been repossessed was still showing up when his name was Googled. This was an infringement of his privacy, he claimed.
The ECJ agreed, and instituted what has come to be known as the right to be forgotten. It said citizens have a right to demand the erasure of search-engine links to stories containing "irrelevant" or "outdated" data about them. This means, weirdly, that online news reports about, for example, that Spanish man's financial travails will still exist—Europeans just won't be able to find them, at least not by using Google or any of the other main search engines.
In the year since the ECJ effectively gave us the right to say "It does not exist!" there have been tens of thousands of requests for the rewriting of history.
Google says it has received 253,617 requests, asking for the removal of 920,258 links. And it has approved more than 40 percent of them. That's more than 100,000 news stories or webpages whose links will no longer show up in search-engine results. Which means that, for Joe Average, in this hyper-online age, they effectively no longer exist. Just like the proverbial falling tree that makes no noise because no one's there to hear it, so the old news item that will never show up on your Google page makes no impact on public consciousness. It's un-news, as Orwell might have said. "Ashes. Not even identifiable ashes."
If you're wondering why Google is not only receiving requests for links-burning but is also ruling on them, it's because the ECJ ruling made search engines into the judge and juries of what may be remembered and what must be forgotten.
It's one of the scariest things about the right to be forgotten: it outsources authoritarianism to private companies. Google—which, to its credit, is not exactly over the moon about having been made overlord of memory—says it has had to hire "a number" of paralegals to deal with the tsunami of requests. To begin with, it was getting 10,000 requests a day; now it's more like a thousand. So in Europe in the 21st century we have a situation where a private firm that promised to open up the world of info and ideas to vast swathes of humanity is now in charge of shutting down bits of that world at the behest of disgruntled and embarrassed O'Briens.
Some say that, unlike Orwell's memory holes, the right to be forgotten won't, and in fact can't, be used by powerful political actors to bury awkward facts. Instead it's about helping citizens hide "irrelevant" info. But this overlooks the seriously detrimental impact that the right to be forgotten nonetheless has on people's right to know, and even on our standing as free citizens.
The 100,000 approved requests for links-removal include the following: An individual who was convicted of a serious crime five years ago, and whose conviction was later quashed on appeal, has had all links to an article mentioning his crime erased. A political activist who was stabbed at a demonstration successfully obliterated links to news reports about the stabbing. A woman whose husband was murdered decades ago has had links to news reports about the murder deleted. And on it goes. Many of the removals are of old stories about long-ago court cases or of embarrassing facts that an individual feels have become "irrelevant."
The cases listed above, and many of the 100,000 expunged story-links, share one thing in common: they are matters of historical record. They are part of history. It's a historical fact that a man was found guilty of a crime five years ago, even if his conviction was later quashed. It's a historical fact that an activist was stabbed at a protest. And we citizens must have the right to know, and to access, history—whether it's legal convictions (which are carried out in our name) or violent assaults (which are serious matters).
The right to be forgotten is held up as a citizen-friendly system that protects us from social shame. In truth, it diminishes citizenship, and freedom, through depriving us of the right to know about historical events. In a free, democratic society, the people's right to know about recorded matters should always outweigh an individual's right to be forgotten and to scrub those matters from history like O'Brien forces the forgetting of awkward news.
A private life is a very important thing. But with the right to be forgotten, we aren't talking about private matters, like what porn a person watches or what they get up into their bedroom after midnight. We're talking about public events, court rulings, historical occurrences. The redefinition of matters of public record as issues of privacy is also Orwellian: it's a doublespeak extension of the idea of "private life" to cover public matters, leading to the shrinkage of the people's right to know, to discover, to discuss.
Lucky Americans, with your First Amendment, are unlikely to see the granting of a right to be forgotten anytime soon. But you should nonetheless remain vigilant, and watch for any expansion of privacy protections at the expense of the freedom to discover history and truth.
The post Europe Goes Down the Memory Hole With the 'Right to Be Forgotten' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Are you now or have you ever been a climate contrarian?"
How long before this McCarthyite question is asked of everyone who enters into academia, in order to weed out those who refuse to bow and scrape before green orthodoxy?
If you think this sounds like a far-fetched proposition, consider a recent scandalous act of academic censorship at the University of Western Australia (UWA). And consider, more importantly, the lack of outrage it caused in the West's professorial circles.
It involves Bjorn Lomborg, the blonde-haired, Danish annoyer of environmentalists everywhere.
Famous for his book The Skeptical Environmentalist—in which he argued that, yes, climate change is real, but, no, cutting back on economic growth won't help—Lomborg has been a brilliant piece of grit in one-eyed green thinking for more than a decade.
The Australian government, headed by the semi-skeptical Prime Minister Tony Abbott, decided to offer a base to Lomborg for his greenish but pro-growth analysis and agitation.
It asked him to bring his Copenhagen Consensus Center, the U.S.-based, Danish-funded not-for-profit think-tank he's been running since 2006, Down Under. It would now be based at UWA, would be renamed the Australia Consensus Center, would be funded to the tune of 4 million Australian dollars, and would continue to stoke heated debate about whether mankind really is on the precipice of eco-doom (no) and whether more growth, not less, is the most sensible solution to the problems we face (yes).
Well, that was the plan. But it was scuppered by what can only be described as a ramshackle modern-day Inquisition, which found Lomborg guilty of the crime of denial—not of God, but of climate-change alarmism—and had him cast out of UWA.
As soon as it was revealed, last month, that Lomborg would be coming to UWA, eco-friendly but debate-unfriendly agitators started to bristle and fume.
The Guardian questioned his fitness for academic life. At UWA, there was a rowdy gathering of academics and students, described by one witness as being "like a Rolling Stones concert," at which there was apparently "riotous applause" when a speaker called on UWA to "end [its] deal with the climate change-contrarian." Sounds less Rolling Stones gig, and more controversy-allergic mob.
The UWA Student Guild also insisted Lomborg should be kept out of UWA. The language the Guild used was striking: it accepted that Lomborg "doesn't refute climate change itself," but pointed out that he does have a "controversial track record [as a] climate contrarian." So this was about keeping controversy off campus, protecting UWA, not from scientifically incorrect thinking, but from contrarian thinking. It was a demand for nothing less than political censorship, of a thinker who dares to think differently to the mainstream on the issue of climate change.
And here comes the truly shocking bit: the academic mob was successful. UWA capitulated and called off its deal with Lomborg, citing the "strong and passionate emotional reaction" from academics, students, and sections of the media.
So the emotionalism of people who dislike a certain way of thinking overrides the right of that way of thinking to be expressed, explored, even to exist on campus. What a terrifying precedent UWA has set. Want a thinker out of your college? Then instigate a "passionate emotional reaction" against him. UWA has effectively institutionalised a mob veto over academic freedom.
The silence from western academia has been striking: very few voices have piped up to condemn UWA's reneging on an academic deal after a noisy few had a "passionate emotional reaction" against it.
In fact, some academics have cheered UWA's decision. A lecturer at the Australian National University took doublespeak to dizzy new heights when, in The Guardian, he said UWA's erection of a Lomborg-deflecting forcefield was actually academic freedom in action. Yes, he said, universities partake in the "soft censorship of bad ideas… it's called learning."
This is a highly disingenuous reading of what learning means. Learning is a process of testing, discussion, submitting your ideas to debate and standing by them as the brickbats of disagreement and counter-argument come flying in. This is why academic freedom is so important: the liberty to think and speak and argue is the only real way of getting to the truth of a matter, and in the process boosting our understanding of the world.
In the Lomborg scandal, this process was circumvented. Lomborg's center was pre-emptively denied the right to put its case in Australian academia, by "passionate emotional" protesters who think they already know The Truth on climate change: that it's happening, it's terrible, and we will only alleviate its worst impacts by putting restraints on humanity's material aspirations.
This isn't learning, far less academic freedom in action. Rather, it echoes the old, pre-modern view of a university as, in essence, a bookish guardian of ecclesiastical authority. Only now it's eco-authority that is protected from intellectual poking and awkward analysis, ringfenced from ridicule just as surely as the pointy-hatted overseers of universities in the pre-Enlightenment era also ringfenced ideas that they just knew were true.
UWA's backtracking on its Lomborg deal is the bastard offspring of two of the more censorious strains in the 21st-century West.
First, eco-intolerance, the use of medieval-echoing slurs like "Denier" to demonise those who doubt the gospel of climate-change alarmism, and the elbowing-out of polite society anyone who thinks climate change is not actually the end of the world.
And secondly, creeping campus conformism, a growing problem everywhere from America's Ivy League to Britain's dreaming spires to Australia's colleges. Whether students and academics are "No Platforming" offensive politicians, disinviting un-PC speakers, or giving "riotous applause" to the demand that a climate contrarian be denied university space, the one place you would expect intellectual tolerance to exist—the academy—is becoming more and more intolerant.
Smash together eco-correctness with the West's scarily cavalier attitude to the great modern ideal of academic freedom, and what do you have? A serious, valuable thinker like Lomborg being chased from a university by a passionate emotional mob. We need to make a fuss about this, before more people start getting the idea that they have the right to shout down and silence anyone who dares to be contrary.
The post Academic Mob Chases 'Climate Change Contrarian' Bjorn Lomborg Off Campus appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Imagine if radical left-wing students were only allowed to play for their college football teams if they first agreed to attend a class designed to expunge their edgy thinking. We would consider that outrageous, a return of McCarthyism, an intolerable assault on the right of students to think whatever they want. We'd call it thoughtpolicing.
So why is there so little uproar about Oxford University's decision to make its rugby clubs undergo anti-sexism classes before being allowed to compete in major college tournaments?
Replace radical left-wing students with rugby-playing students, and Red thinking with laddish banter, and the nightmarish scenario described above is actually happening on a British campus: students are being forced into thought-washing before being allowed to represent their colleges in sports.
None of the rugby clubs at Oxford has been implicated in any crimes. But the university administration has nonetheless decided to make all of them sit through one-hour "anti-misogyny classes" in an attempt to "combat sexism on campus." Any rugby-playing student who refuses to be lectured about the rottenness of sexist thinking will be forbidden from playing in this year's Cuppers Final, an annual clash of Oxford's various college rugby teams. That is, they're being strong-armed to submit themselves to a moral clear-out of their minds.
Notably, the classes aren't designed to alter any problematic behaviour—they're explicitly about transforming how these students think and speak. As one news report says, it's about educating these guys about the horribleness of their "jokes and songs," which can be saucy and raucous and apparently make some women feel uncomfortable, and getting them to ditch their "lad banter"—the rude chit-chat rugby guys are famous for indulging in.
There's a word for this kind of thing: re-education. British universities no longer simply educate their students, adding bits of knowledge to their brains; they also re-educate them, removing apparently dodgy stuff from their minds.
Oxford's rugby players aren't the only students being cajoled into moral re-education under the guise of combating misogyny. Indeed, on British campuses lads are the new Reds: across the U.K., laddish students (known in the U.S. as jocks or frat boys) are being subjected to the kind of mind-policing and moral censure that would cause a huge stink if it were applied to any other social group.
Last October at the London School of Economics (L.S.E.), the rugby club was disbanded for a year and its members were pressured by the LSE Students' Union, in cahoots with university management, to sign up for "Good Lad" discussion groups at which they are encouraged to fix their allegedly backward ways of thinking. Only when the Union and the university are satisfied that the rugby lads have been remade as "Good Lads" will the club be allowed to reform.
What was the L.S.E. rugby boys' crime, earning them this year-long bout of repentance and re-education? At the Freshers' Fair last October they distributed a jokey leaflet advertising their upcoming social events which said that "mingers" (English slang for ugly women) and "homosexual debauchery" were not welcome. For making this crass but ultimately harmless joke, they were denied the right to play college sports for a year and were pushed into anti-lad re-education.
As part of their re-education programme, the students gather on public streets near the L.S.E. holding placards saying "A good lad…", and then they fill in the blank. "A good lad frees himself of gender stereotypes"; "A good lad understands that feminism isn't a dirty word"; and so on. To see these students holding up self-critical placards in public is extraordinary, and sad. It's like something out of Mao's China, when disobedient professors and artists were likewise paraded in public with insulting placards, usually hung around their necks, identifying them as intellectual reprobates. Fast forward 50 years, and students at L.S.E. are being publicly identified as moral reprobates, sinners against the new orthodoxy of P.C. speech and feministic censure.
The Oxford and L.S.E. punishment of boorish speech is part of broader culture war against lads on U.K. campuses. And often the war is led by students themselves, or certainly by Students' Unions that claim to represent the student body.
The National Union of Students (N.U.S.), the umbrella body for all Students' Unions, had a Lad Culture Summit in 2014—really—to discuss how to hammer the alleged scourge of laddish banter and behaviour. Out of this summit came a National Strategy on Lad Culture, which involves the N.U.S. putting pressure on Students' Unions to clamp down hard on any displays of laddishness on their campuses.
To that end, Edinburgh University's S.U. introduced a policy to "End Lad Banter on Campus." Imagine the tyrannical arrogance it takes to believe you have the right to end an entire way of speaking. Cardiff University has an "Anti-Lad Culture Policy," which aims to tackle the "pack mentality," fuelled by "heavy alcohol consumption," that can give rise to "banter" and the use of "gender-, sexuality- and rape-based humour." Booze, gangs, taboo-busting jokes—to some people that's a night out, not a moral crime. One person's "evil banter" is another person's perfectly acceptable larks.
Cardiff's Anti-Lad Culture Policy was used to ban Dapper Laughs, a saucy comedian, from performing a gig on campus last year. This stuff has a directly censorious impact.
In the name of clamping down on lad culture, other Students' Unions have banned Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" and even forbidden the making of "sexual noises." Newcastle University's Students' Union warns students against making "unwelcome sexual invitations" (like asking someone to dance?) and (again) "offensive sexual noises," which can include wolf-whistling and cat-calling. If you can't make an offensive sexual noise while you're a student, when can you do it? Under pressure from the N.U.S, more universities are adopting anti-lad policies.
No matter how much P.C. gloss gets slathered on this war on lads, there's no disguising what it really is: intolerance, plain and simple, of a particular way of thinking, speaking, and socialising. And of course it isn't only Britain: following Rolling Stone's fact-free fantasy about a frat rape at the University of Virginia and the expulsion of frats from the University of Oklahoma after they were videoed making a racist chant, it's open season on U.S. frats as much as it is on British lads.
How long before frats in the U.S. are also made to parade in public with placards of self-disgust? This transatlantic war on male students who commit the ultimate crime of failing to be P.C. is the logical conclusion to the culture of campus censorship: not satisfied with controlling what students say, intolerant student reps now want to police their very thoughts, clean out their grey matter, re-educate them. Mix Mao with Andrea Dworkin, and chuck in a bit of Orwell for good measure, and you have a terrifying new intolerance of maleness that is the match of any mind-policing authoritarianism of the past.
The post Campus Nags Want to Change How Male Students Think appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Today, Brits are heading to the ballot box, following the most boring election campaign in history. Even the BBC, whose job is to enthuse the plebs about public life, has described it as "duller than usual."
There's unlikely to be an outright winner. To form a government in Britain, a party needs to win more than half the seats (326) in the House of Commons. And no party is predicted to do that. So we'll probably end up with another coalition, like the one we've been ruled over for the past five years, which comprised David Cameron's Tories (which won 306 seats in 2010) and Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats (which won 57 seats in 2010).
Who will make up the next coalition? There's no telling. Could be Cam and Clegg again. Or maybe Labour and the Scottish National Party (SNP) with some help from the Greens. But even amidst all this uncertainty about the result, and the yawn-inducing dullness of the campaign, there's one thing we can be sure of: whoever wins, freedom loses. None of the main parties takes liberty remotely seriously. Just look at some of the autonomy-strangling stuff they're proposing.
Labour
Labour, led by Ed Miliband, is the most illiberal party. The last time it was in power, from 1997 to 2010, it invented the "politics of behaviour"—its actual words!—openly devoting itself to nannying the fat, feckless populace towards a slimmer, more enlightened existence. It banned stuff left, right and center, including any words that "glorify terrorism" and expressions of hatred for religion. It banned smoking in public, introduced "Drinking Control Zones" in which police can instruct you to dispose of your alcoholic beverage (and arrest you if you refuse), and dreamt up Anti-Social Behaviour Orders: local-council diktats which, without so much as a court case, can forbid individuals from doing certain things. Everything from dressing up as a werewolf and howling in a garden to having sex too loudly was banned by a Labour ASBO.
It completely banned handguns; introduced the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, granting the state the authority to spy on our letters and emails long before America's NSA scandal exploded; and forced the estimated nine million adults who work with children to undergo criminal-records checks, to make sure they aren't evil paedophiles. In the space of 13 years, Labour created an eye-watering 4,300 new criminal offences: nearly one offence for every day it was in power.
Not content with doing more than any other party of the postwar period to turn Britain into a curtain-twitching, behaviour-policing Orwellian entity, now Labour wants to go further. Miliband, if he wins, will ban Islamophobia. Yes, that most amorphous form of behaviour, covering everything from actual harassment of Muslims to legitimate mickey-taking out of Islamist beliefs, would be illegal under Miliband. Charlie Hebdo wouldn't survive a second in his Brave New World of blasphemy-laws-in-all-but-name.
Miliband will also push through Lord Leveson's post-phone hacking proposals for cleaning up the raucous press, which would include having a press regulator underpinned by a Royal Charter: the first time the state will have intervened directly in the press in Britain since 1695. And, bizarrely, but tellingly, he'll force food producers to cut the sugar, salt and fat content of grub marketed to children. So, to add to the vast system of Byzantine bossiness introduced by his party last time it ruled, Miliband will silence the ridicule of religion, police the press, and play in loco parentis to our kids, because of course we can't be trusted to feed or raise them properly.
Tories
Not only did Cameron fail to overturn the nagging state set up by the Labour government that preceded his—he actually brought that state right into Downing Street. One of the first things he did in 2010 was set up a Nudge Unit in Downing Street, the aim of which was, in the terrifying, Orwellian words of a Cabinet Office document, to be the "surrogate willpower" of the populace—seriously—and change Britain's "choice architecture" in order to cajole the public into making the "right decisions" about health, exercise, and so on. Once, governments were meant to reflect what the public thought; in contrast, nudging Cameron was all about, as one news report put it, "changing the way citizens think."
Now, if he gets back in, Cameron has promised to introduce a Communications Data Bill, which will boost the British state's already considerable powers to access "communications data": the citizenry's emailing and phone-calling habits. And he'll bring in Extremism Disruption Orders (EDOs), which will allow the authorities to ban even non-violent extremism—that is, speech—and forbid extremists from using the internet or making public speeches. EDOs will silence those who show a lack of "respect for the rule of law" or "respect for minorities," making them a tyrants' charter, giving a Cameron-led government the power to shut down everyone from hotheaded Islamists to Commie rabble-rousers to stinging critics of marriage equality.
Liberal Democrats
Don't be fooled by the L-word in the Lib Dems, the party that governed alongside Cameron for the past five years—they're anything but liberal. They went wholeheartedly along with Cameron's building of a Nudge Unit and his plans to spy on people's data. And if they creep back into power, they'll give Labour a run for its money in the lifestyle-authoritarianism stakes.
They will ban TV adverts for junk food before 9pm. They will legislate to ensure that all cigarette packets are plain—no flashy colours or logos that might tempt the moronic public to take up the nasty habit. They will clamp down on e-cigarette advertising, which is bizarre: if you're anti-smoking then you should be pro-vaping, a no-brainer. They will set a minimum price on alcohol, instituting what John Stuart Mill called a "sin tax": Prohibition for the poor. And, like Labour, they will institute Leveson, warning the press that if it doesn't clean up its act then "Parliament will need to act" and take "legislative steps" to ensure that newspapers become more ethical. The state openly threatening the press: Britain does the timewarp to the 17th century.
Scottish National Party
It's predicted the SNP will win every seat in Scotland, giving them serious clout in the Westminster Parliament after today. Which would be terrible because the SNP is allergic to liberty. This is a party which, in Scotland, where it's been dominant for a while, has banned offensive singing at football matches, leading to the actual imprisonment of people for songcrimes; worked to make all of Scotland smokefree (that wonderfully Orwellian word that says "free" but means the opposite) by 2034; and introduced a Bill that would attach a state-approved Named Person to every child born north of Hadrian's Wall, to keep an eye out for said child's moral and physical wellbeing. In short, a state spy in every family. Ladies and gents, welcome to Scotland, where free speech no longer exists, and family privacy— springing from that great radical 17th-century rallying cry: "The house of every one is to him as his Castle"—is being thrown on the rubbish dump of history. And after today, this party is likely to have a big say across all the U.K.
UKIP
The UK Independence Party, the quirky anti-EU outfit led by the colourful Nigel Farage, is the wild card of the election. Pollsters can't decide if it will win a handful of seats or none. On paper, UKIP looks good liberty-wise. It promises to unban smoking in public and describes the nanny state as "modern puritanism." Yet it has a puritanical streak of its own. It would ban halal and kosher meat. It has floated the idea of banning climate-change lessons in schools. It promises to expel from Britain radical Islamic clerics who promote extremism (that is, ideas). And it's flat-out opposed to freedom of movement, promising to restrict severely how many Johnny Foreigners can come to live here; it wants to cap immigration at 50,000 folks per year. Currently around 300,000 migrants arrive annually. What a cutback. You can imagine the levels of authoritarianism it would require to set up UKIP's miserabilist migrant-deflecting forcefield.
Greens
Where to start? Mercifully, the Green Party has only one MP, but the closed-doors coalition-building that will take place after today means it could wield influence. And this is a party that wants to ban the sale of "sexist" lads' mags in supermarkets; ban the topless women on Page 3 of the Sun; ban the use of animals in circuses; ban drinking on flights (because of air rage); ban the Grand National, an annual rollicking horse race that Brits love; and abolish zoos. Zoos! And Greens have the gall to bristle if you call them miserabilists.
What all these party promises add up to is not simply an ever-more authoritarian Britain, but a wholesale reworking of the relationship between the state and the individual. Government itself is being redefined, to mean, not the will of the people, but the determination of small elites to use censorship and laws to remake the people, to turn us into better, fitter, less offensive creatures.
This is the great tragedy of today's vote: we aren't really expressing our political will and shaping the destiny of the nation. No, we're choosing between different gangs of authoritarians who want to shape us; who want to change the people's will, not reflect it; who want to act as our "surrogate willpower" and decide how we should live our lives. We're voting for the negation of our own moral autonomy.
The post U.K. Election: Whoever Wins, Freedom Loses appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"I intend to vote with my vagina."
Have you ever read a more squirm-inducing sentence than that? It appeared in a pro-Hillary piece in Dame magazine, written by a person with a vagina who intends to vote for Clinton because she also has a vagina.
Let's leave aside the unfortunate image conjured up by that sentence ("You can hold a pencil with that thing?!") The bigger problem with such unabashed declarations of "vagina voting" is that they confirm the descent of feminism into the cesspool of identity politics, even biologism, and its abandonment of the idea that women should be valued more for their minds than their anatomy.
Kate Harding, the vagina voter in question, isn't only going to vote with her vag—she's also going to tell everyone about it. "I intend to vote with my vagina. Unapologetically. Enthusiastically… And I intend to talk about it," she wrote in Dame.
She thinks Hillary would be a great president because she "knows what it's like to menstruate, be pregnant, [and] give birth."
So you're going to pick your leader on the basis of her biological functions, the fact she's experienced the same bodily stuff as you? Imagine if a man did that. "I'm voting for Ted Cruz because he knows what it's like to spunk off. And he knows the pain of being kicked in the balls." We'd think that was a very sad dude indeed. Why is it any better for a female commentator to wax lyrical about voting on the basis of her biological similarity to a candidate rather than any shared political outlook?
The point of Harding's pussy politics, as I think we should call this biologism among some in the Hillary camp, is to say that it would be a brilliant, symbolic breakthrough if the U.S. were to have its first-ever female president.
It would be "enormously important," she says. "American women have been bleeding for over 200 years"—again with the blood!—"and a lot of us have arrived at the point where we just want someone with a visceral, not abstract, concept of what that means."
There's something profoundly sexist in this. Hillary is valued, not for her ability to think abstractly, which is the very essence of politics, but for what she represents viscerally—the visceral being, in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, the bowels, "the seat of emotion."
A hundred years ago, the precise same view of women as visceral rather than abstract creatures was used as an argument against having them in the political realm.
In 1910, the London-based journal The Anti-Suffrage Review said women have difficulty "forming abstract ideas." "Woman is emotional," it said, "and government by emotion quickly degenerates into injustice." Yet now, a century later, the potential first woman president of the U.S. is hailed by some for her visceral—"not abstract," in Harding's words—understanding of women's lives and everyday issues. To stick with the biological-function theme, modern feminism is pooping all over the suffragettes, who fought tooth-and-nail against the valuation of their viscera over their brains.
Harding's pussy politics is only a more physical, blood-obsessed version of one of the main arguments coming from Hillary's cheerleaders in the media: that she deserves to be elected because she's a woman, because she has a vagina.
In response to the claim that Hillary is "playing the gender card," Jessica Valenti says "good," adding "I hope she plays the gender card so hard…" Valenti writes about "the very important, symbolic and necessary vision of the first woman president," and says "that's a gender card I'd play again and again." In short, she's voting with her vagina.
Chelsea Clinton says her mother's femaleness is "absolutely important for…symbolic reasons." Nancy Pelosi says Hillary's sex should also be a "very major consideration" for voters, because of the brilliant gravity of "what it would mean to elect a woman president of the United States." In short, vote with your vaginas. Or if you're in the unfortunate position of having a dick, then at least give "very major consideration" to the fact that Hillary is a woman and vote for her accordingly. Think about what is in this woman's knickers rather than what is in her mind.
Over at Bustle magazine, Gabrielle Moss continues the suffragette-defaming fashion for elevating women's biology over their brains, admitting she will be "voting with my emotions" and eschewing the "clear-eyed political rationality that so many of the men around me [claim] to possess."
She says her vote for Clinton won't be "based on a clear-eyed, unemotional review of her political track record," nor on a "clear-eyed assessment of all possible Democratic candidates," but rather will be an expression of the "intense personal connection" she feels with Hillary as a woman. They both have vaginas, you see.
Here, again, the very thing the suffragettes street-fought against—the idea that women are too emotional to partake in abstract politics—is bizarrely rehabilitated as a badge of honour. I'm a woman, and therefore I'm visceral, and I will vote for a woman. Vaginas of the World, Unite!
The rise of vagina voting, and the centrality of gender to the whole Hillary shebang, shows how dominant the politics of identity has become in the space of just eight years.
Back in 2007/2008, Hillary bristled at the idea that she should big up her gender and make a major display of her femaleness. "I'm not running as a woman," she told an audience in Iowa. Now, however, she is running as a woman—selling herself as a grandmother, peppering her campaign launch video with women of every age and hue—and she's celebrated for doing so.
In 2008 she "struggled against the idea" that she was representing a particular gender, says the Guardian, among the Clinton family's most fawning fans, but this time she's putting "gender at the forefront of her presidential race," the paper's coverage says, approvingly. Or as one news report put it: "Ms Clinton played down the gender role the first time she ran for the top job. But this time it's expected to be a core plank of her campaign."
This embrace of the gender card by Clinton and her cronies, this move from thinking with their heads to voting with their vaginas, is being celebrated as a great leap forward. It's nothing of the sort. It merely confirms the speedy and terrifying shrinking of the political sphere in recent years, with the abstract being elbowed aside by the emotional, and the old focus on ideas and values now playing a very quiet second fiddle to an obsession with identity.
The celebration of a potential president on the basis of her natural characteristics shows that the growing vacuum where big and serious ideas ought to be is being filled with biologism, with a view of people as little more than bundles of genes, accidents of birth, colors, sexes, genders. The rotten thing that human beings struggled against for generations—the tendency to judge individuals by their biology rather than their talents and beliefs—has made a comeback under the banner of identity politics.
In 2001, The Onion did one of its brilliant "American Voices" polls on the question of Hillary standing for the presidency in 2004. One of the respondents, the white guy in the suit, says: "A woman president? What if she menstruates all over some important legislation?"
So as recently as 2001, talking about Hillary as someone who menstruates was recognised to be a sexist throwback to that old, dark era when women were treated as animalistic, and not as capable of abstract reasoning as men; today, the fact that Hillary "knows what it's like to menstruate" is presented as a serious reason to vote for her. Meet the vagina voters, the new sexists, reducing women to bits of flesh as thoroughly as those hoary old misogynists were doing a hundred years ago.
The post Meet the Vagina Voters appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Freedom of speech no longer exists in Britain. The land that gave the world the Magna Carta, the Levellers, and John Stuart Mill—three of the key foundation stones of the modern conception of liberty—is now arresting and even jailing people simply for speaking their minds.
To see how bad things have got, consider three cases from the past week alone:
Twitter Crime
A man has been investigated by the police for a hashtag he used on Twitter. Seriously. Never mind speechcrime, or even tweetcrime—now we have hashtagcrime, the criminalisation even of those snarky, ironic asides people pepper the internet with. The man in question, Stephen Dodds, committed the sin of taking a photograph of two Muslims praying at Anfield, the home ground of Liverpool Football Club, and posting it on Twitter alongside the tweet: "Muslims praying at half-time at the match yesterday. #DISGRACE." That hashtag saw him become the victim of a furious Twitterstorm, the modern version of a tomato-wielding mob, and he was eventually reported to the cops. They investigated the matter for two weeks—two weeks!—before finally instructing Liverpool FC to take appropriate action against the evil hashtagger. Liverpool this week said it is deciding how to punish this man who dared to type the word "DISGRACE" on the internet.
Aggravated Meanness
2. A journalist, Katie Hopkins, has been reported to the police, and, bizarrely, to the International Criminal Court (ICC), for writing a column for the Sun in which she referred to the African migrants trying to get into Europe as "cockroaches." Hopkins is known for her outré views. She's been reported to the police before, for "hate crimes against fat people"! She said "fat people are just lazy," which is apparently a police matter now. The police didn't charge her over her fat-shaming, but they might well interrogate her over her migrant-bashing. Her cockroaches column caused the Twittersphere to go into meltdown; 285,000 people have signed a petition calling on the Sun to sack her (my preferred solution to Europe's migrant crisis is to swap these 285,000 intolerant Brits who fancy they have the right to shut down writers they don't like for 285,000 Africans who want to live in this country); and now the Society of Black Lawyers has reported Hopkins both to the UK cops and also to the ICC, demanding it investigate her comments "under the provisions of incitement to commit crimes against humanity." Am I allowed to call this a DISGRACE?
Shameful Bodies
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has launched an investigation into the appropriateness of an advert for protein supplements which features a sexy woman in a bikini next to the words: "Are you beach-body ready yet?" The ads, which appear on the London Underground, have been vandalized by SJW feminists who claim they "body shame" the plump. More than 30,000 people have signed an online petition—again with the petitions—demanding the ads be removed because they make women "feel physically inferior to… the bronzed model." And now the ASA, overlord of advertising in Britain, which has the power to expunge from the public sphere any ad it judges to be offensive, is heeding the feminist vandalizers and subjecting the ad to one of its stiff-lipped investigations. We wait with bated breath to see if this unelected institution will graciously allow the rest of us, the 64 million people of Britain, to keep seeing this actually quite pleasant ad.
These three cases of the past week encapsulate the crisis of free-speaking in 21st century Britain. They show that no zone of British life is free from the peering eyes and always primed red pen of the new censorious set that longs to scribble out or shut down anything dodgy, eccentric, hateful, or upsetting (to some.)
The cases confirm that everywhere from the new virtual terrain of the Internet (that hashtag guy), to the old-fashioned printed press (the Katie Hopkins case), to the public square itself (that bikini ad), speech is under threat from an unholy marriage of intolerant virtual mobs, censorious Social Justice Warriors (SJWs), and state institutions keen to censor stuff in order to protect the allegedly fragile public.
And these cases aren't one-offs. In relation to the Internet, numerous people have been arrested for tweetcrimes. In 2010, a man was found guilty of being "grossly offensive" after he joked on Twitter about blowing up an airport in Nottingham that was experiencing severe delays. He was fined £385 and lost his job. His conviction was finally quashed on the third appeal. In 2012, a student was imprisoned for 56 days for making racist comments on Twitter. Also in 2012, a 20-year-old man was sentenced to 240 hours' community service for writing on his Facebook page: "All [British] soldiers should die and go to hell."
Other tweeters have been arrested and interrogated by police for making off-colour comments. In December last year, a 19-year-old man was arrested for making a joke about the truck disaster in Glasgow, when an out-of-control truck hit Christmas shoppers and killed six. The tweeter said: "So a bin lorry has apparently driven into 100 people in Glasgow eh, probably the most trash it's picked up in one day." For that, for doing what people have been doing for generations—making up stinging jokes in the wake of a tragedy—he was arrested. He was let off, but the police sent a chilling warning to us all: anyone who makes horrible jokes on Twitter we will be visited and given "strong words of advice," they said.
Various laws enable this police invasion of the online world: the Public Order Act of 1986, which criminalizes "racially aggravated" speech; the Malicious Communications Act of 2003, which criminalizes "offensive, indecent or menacing" speech in electronic media: these are the statutes the cops have used to colonise the internet.
The war on Katie Hopkins isn't a one-off, either. It follows hot on the heels of the Leveson Inquiry's creation of a chilling, choking climate in relation to the British press.
Launched by David Cameron in 2011 ostensibly to investigate phone-hacking at the News of the World, but actually having the vastly expanded remit of looking into the whole "culture, practice, and ethics of the press," the Leveson Inquiry has created a situation where Britain might soon have a press regulator set up by Royal Charter—which would be the first system of state-backed regulation of the press in Britain since 1695.
Even before that Royal Charter has been signed, Leveson has already, predictably, emboldened the petty censors in our midst who have long desired to silence offensive columnists, especially tabloid ones. As one agitator against Katie Hopkins admitted. "Leveson was a smack in the teeth" of newspapers like the Sun, he said, which should now feel less able to publish Hopkins' and others' "vicious… right-wing opinioneering." In short: A state-decreed, judge-led inquiry is leading to the castration of the press, and we should be happy about that.
As to the ASA's investigation of the bikini ad—such topdown regulation of the words and images of the public sphere has become commonplace in recent years.
The ASA has banned ads for hair products that were offensive to Christians (they featured nuns in suspenders); ads for an airline that had a woman dressed as a schoolgirl, on the basis that they could cause "widespread offence" (in fact, only 13 people complained about them); and even an ad for a supermarket that showed a girl taking the salad out of her hamburger on the grounds that it "condoned poor nutritional habits." Censorship in the UK has become so psycho that even the presentation of hamburgers is now strictly policed.
Over the past decade, our virtual world, our media, and our public spaces have become subject to ever-greater policing by both SJWs demanding bans and officials all too willing to ban. The end result is a nation which poses as liberal and modern yet where everything from pics of a woman in a bikini to naughty jokes can be subjected to official sanction, and where everyone becomes less sure of what they're allowed to say and thus tends to shut themselves up to be on the safe side. Self-censorship: the worst kind.
To this end, we sometimes haven't even needed coppers or campaigners to force the closure of allegedly offensive words or art: institutions and individuals have silenced themselves in the face of hollers of complaint.
Last year, the Barbican Arts Centre closed down a piece of performance art exploring slavery and racism after 250 protesters turned up on the opening night. ITV ditched a TV show featuring sexist comic Dapper Laughs after journalists and SJWs tweeted and petitioned against it. And numerous theatres have pre-emptively cut or changed plays that mention Muslims out of fear that Islamists will kick up a fuss. Free speech in Britain is being killed by police, officials, agitating mobs, and by us—by a culture of fear which encourages people to opt for self-silence over the possibility of causing a stir.
Americans will, I hope, be aghast at all this. The one massive difference between you and us is that you have a constitutional guarantee of free speech that shackles the state, whereas we have a long history of brave battles for press freedom and free speech, yes, but no written-down surety that such liberties will be respected or protected. Which is why they can now be so casually trampled underfoot.
And yet, Britain and America do share something scary in common on the new-censorship front: we both have new armies of the intolerant, growing groups of so-called SJWs and other agitators for the silencing of foul or simply old-fashioned views.
This is especially the case on campus. On both sides of the Atlantic, universities have become hotbeds of the new intolerance. British student leaders have banned the pop song "Blurred Lines," the Sun newspaper, and numerous controversial speakers, while American campus agitators demand trigger warnings on edgy (and not even edgy) literature and the disinvitation of anyone who offends them, and they harry and scream at anyone who holds different views to theirs: most recently the non-victim feminist Christina Hoff Sommers.
America and Britain might be divided by a piece of paper guaranteeing free speech—you have one, we don't—but we're united by a shared new generation of aspiring speech-policers. And in Britain, it has often been the demands of these informal groups of heresy-hunters that have coaxed the state to take action against eccentric or outrageous speech. How long can the First Amendment hold out against America's budding new censors? How long before the U.S. joins the U.K. at the funeral of free speech?
The post The Slow Death of Free Speech in Britain (America, You're Next!) appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In the twilight of his administration, with all that stage-managed hope of 2008 having long turned to dust, Obama needs all the whoops he can get. And he got a fair few with his expression of contempt for conversion therapy—the pseudoscientific, psychobabbling attempt to turn gay kids straight by bombarding them with Biblical scripture.
In response to a WhiteHouse.gov petition calling for conversion therapy to be banned, Obama's people said they shared the petitioners' concerns about the "devastating effects" such therapy can have on "the lives of transgender as well as gay, lesbian, bisexual, and queer youth."
The petitioners want a conversion-outlawing "Leelah's Law"—named after Leelah Alcorn, the 17-year-old trans girl who killed herself in December after her parents sent her for therapy—and Obama is sympathetic to their pleas. As part of "our dedication to protecting America's youth," the Obama team "supports efforts to ban the use of conversion therapy for minors," the statement said.
Protecting American youth, including gay ones—who could be against that? Only the cold-hearted and possibly homophobic, surely?
Actually, it depends on who's doing the protecting, and what they're protecting youth from. And in the case of officialdom's growing agitation with conversion therapy, we have a pretty clear case of the state wanting to protect youth from their own parents' beliefs, from their parents' way of thinking, and from their faith.
The Obama lot can doll this up as a nice, liberal idea as much as they like, but there's no disguising the threat it poses to freedom of religion, freedom of association, and the rights of parents.
All of us—bar perhaps those on the fringes of Christian evangelism—will balk at some of the stuff that happens at conversion-therapy sessions. Based on the mad, outdated idea that homosexuality is a mental disorder, some religio-therapeutic meddling with gay teens involves making them undergo humiliating rituals, like stripping naked in front of others to generate a sense of sexual distance from bodies of the same gender. There are reports of teens being given nausea-inducing drugs to make them think the junk of their own sex is gross rather than attractive.
Listen, if young people are being made to rip their clothes off by so-called experts, or are given dodgy drugs, then there's a case for intervention—perhaps a knock on mom and dad's door to ask them "WTF?".
But the tag "conversion therapy" covers so much more than those clearly perverse antics. As a Guardian piece says, it can sometimes involve intensive praying sessions—an attempt to "pray the gay away"—or "talking with church leaders or visiting religious camps."
Even counselling sessions that involve only speech—no drugs, no nudity—are sometimes dragged under the conversion-therapy heading. So one-on-one sessions between a concerned Catholic priest and a teen giving off gay vibes could be counted as a stab at conversion, if the priest's aim is to turn the teen straight.
A university in Ireland recently banned Catholic counselling for gay students, on the basis that its offer to help those students "move beyond the confines of the homosexual label" counted as homophobic conversion. Might there be similar bans on religious speech in the U.S. if a future administration clamps down on conversion therapy? Will we see the outlawing, not only of the stripping of youngsters, but also of intense Catholic chats, eccentric religious camps, certain forms of proselytization?
If we invite the authorities to police conversion therapy, we throw open the realm of religious liberty itself to their watchful eye. A top-down war on all the stuff that gets collapsed under the title "conversion" would seriously dent the freedom of religion.
Parents must be free to communicate their beliefs to their children. That's a central part of religious liberty: the right to raise one's kids according to one's own moral, spiritual convictions.
Yes, this will often mean parents telling their children stuff that the rest of us—mainstream, largely secular society—would rather they didn't, whether it's that Jews killed Christ, other religions are BS, or that being gay is wicked. But that's life. That's liberty. Giving people the freedom to voice and spread only those ideas that have won mainstream society's approval is not freedom at all—it's state-enforced thought, it's tyranny.
The administration's move against conversion therapy speaks to one of the major threats to liberty today: the utilisation of children by the authorities, or campaigners, as a means of undermining the freedom and autonomy of adults. Ours is becoming an era of in loco parentis, where those with power are increasingly using kids as a moral shied for their intolerant clampdowns on the behaviour or beliefs of adults.
There's United Kingdom Prime Minister David Cameron's desire to turn off the porn on all Britons' home computers in the name of protecting children; the European campaign group Child's Eye Line, which seeks to remove sexual imagery from public life to prevent the pollution of kids' minds; the growing international campaign to have circumcision banned—which would mean an end to Jewish boys, in essence—on the basis that it's "child abuse"; the rising number of police clampdowns, in both Europe and America, on parents who—horror of horrors—allow their kids out alone, and on it goes. "Saving children"—whether from moral pollution or physical threat—has become the top rallying cry of those who really want to interfere in and rearrange the adult worlds of words, images, ideas, morality, parenting, home life, and community life.
This isn't new, of course. As Marjorie Heins showed in her 2008 book Not in Front of the Children: Indecency, Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth, for hundreds of years various officialdoms censored and controlled society under the guise of preventing "harm to minors." But such child-fronting cynicism by aspiring authoritarians appears to have intensified in recent years. The more that the old, traditionalist, moral arguments for controlling what we think and do have fallen into disrepair, the more the illiberal have been forced to shove children to the front of their censorious campaigns and to holler: "Won't somebody please think of the children?" Emotional blackmail as a stand-in for moral authority.
And it's the same with the proposed clampdown on conversion therapy: here, too, officials paint themselves as the decent protectors of youngsters from harm, when in truth their urge is to restrict the expression of certain religious ideas and the rights of association of those parents and adults who, I'm afraid to say, think homosexuality is bad.
It's time liberals called into question the very idea of children's rights. Of course children must have the same legal protection from harm or harassment as adults. But they can't have rights in the same way we do—like the right to serve on a jury, the right to vote, the right to leave home and shack up with hippies—because they lack the moral capacity to exercise those rights and to take responsibility for their behaviour.
Which means that most pursuits of so-called "children's rights" really involve adults, usually quite powerful ones, exercising rights on children's behalf, normally as part of a culture war against raunch, or religion, or parents themselves. It's the exploitation of children to the end of curtailing pesky liberty. It's the undermining of rights—real, adult rights—in the lingua franca of rights. Activism doesn't get much more cynical than this.
The post Conversion Therapy and Other 'For the Children' Measures As Efforts to Curtail Liberty appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It's great that those who value truth and reason finally won out over Rolling Stone, publisher of 2014's most egregious example of dime store fantasy journalism.
Through doing the things Rolling Stone flatly failed to—elevating fact-gathering over moral narratives; hunting down info; asking awkward questions—bloggers, journalists, and, now, the dean of the Columbia School of Journalism successfully exploded the myth of a gang rape at the University of Virginia (UVA) in 2012.
Truth, 1; Agenda-Driven Mythmaking, Nil. A clear win for fact over fallacy, objectivity over journalism more interested in telling a morality tale, however tall, than in communicating clear, proven facts. A victory for veracity. Right?
I'm not so sure. The Rolling Stone story might be dead, slain by an army of genuinely inquisitive observers. But the hysteria that made that fact-lite mess of a feature possible in the first place survives. It staggers on, bloodied but unbowed, Michael Myers-style.
Yes, Rolling Stone is reprimanded, but the unhinged panic about a "rape culture" on campus that made that mag so blind to the hollowness of Jackie's story is still getting away with it. Indeed, Rolling Stone's final withdrawal of its story this week, following Columbia's cool dismantling of it, has, perversely, given rise to a chorus of demands that we now focus on the true problem: the epidemic of rape on campus.
The hysteria is dead, long live the hysteria!
The most common criticism made of Rolling Stone in the past few days is that it has hampered the war against campus sexual assault. In publishing BS about a gang rape at UVA, it created a situation where female students, apparently under threat, might feel reluctant to speak out. In short: the problem with Rolling Stone's rape-culture mythmaking is that it made it harder to grapple with rape culture.
The Columbia report itself contains the seeds of this concern. It criticises Rolling Stone for spreading "the idea that many women invent rape allegations." In the section on "Reporting Rape on Campus," it doesn't address the central problem with such reporting—that it too often buys into totally inflated stats about assault—but instead offers advice on how to sensitively cover rape stories.
In her statement on Columbia's report, the author of Rolling Stone's rape tale, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, apologized to her readers and editors (but not to frats she so scandalously defamed), and she said sorry to the "victims of sexual assault who may feel fearful as a result of my article." Her main concern is ensuring that, even after her disastrous piece, "the voices of the victims" will still be heard.
UVA President Teresa A. Sullivan took a similar line, slamming Rolling Stone for distracting attention from the real problem, the "serious issue": sexual violence on campus.
Even as she rapped Rolling Stone's knuckles for publishing a scare story about rape, Sullivan promised to introduce "substantive reforms" to "improve culture" on her campus as a means of "prevent[ing] violence" and "ensur[ing] the safety of our students so they can learn and achieve their personal potential in an environment of trust and security."
So apparently there is a culture issue at UVA, a violence issue, an attitudinal problem that needs top-down fixing.
What these responses share in common is a desire to draw attention back to the alleged real stuff: female students not being believed; a warped campus culture that needs intervention; the need to turn campuses from alleged sites of violence back into "environments of security."
They're still buying the core misconception of Ederly's article, the really rotten part: the idea of a culture of rape, a culture of evil. According to Columbia's report, Ederly wanted to find a "single, emblematic college rape case" that would show, in Ederly's own words, "what it's like to be on campus now… where not only is rape so prevalent but also that there's this pervasive culture of sexual harassment / rape culture." And much of the response to Columbia's report is basically saying: Her emblematic case was hooey, yes, but she's right about the pervasive-culture thing.
Only she isn't. And if we correct Rolling Stone without challenging the rape-culture myth, then we leave the colossal problems here untouched.
Media feminists have been even more explicit in their demand that we swiftly turn our eyes away from Rolling Stone's failings and back to the alleged tsunami of sexual assault on campus.
Jessica Valenti frets that the Jackie fiasco will damage efforts "to end sexual violence on campus"—campuses where the "scourge of rape" is rife. Over at the radical lesbian magazine, Curve, Victoria A. Brownworth says it's all well and good for Rolling Stone to have retracted its story, but "some things can't be retracted"—like the fact that "Rape culture is real. There's a pandemic of rape on college campuses like UVA."
Feminist Suzannah Weiss says "we shouldn't let Rolling Stone's mistakes stand in the way of taking campus sexual assaults seriously," since "campus rape culture is a very real problem." This only says more openly what Ederly and Sullivan nodded to in their post-Columbia statements: that for all the faults in the Rolling Stone piece, the thing Ederly hoped to illustrate—the existence of a "pervasive culture of sexual harassment"—is still around and requires substantive action.
But this culture doesn't exist. Are women on campus sometimes sexually assaulted? Yes, they are, as are women in all walks of life, tragically. But the idea of a culture of rape on campus is bunkum.
It's been shot down by libertarian and liberal feminists, most notably Emily Yoffe at Slate, who trashed with facts the oft-spouted idea that one-in-five college women are sexually assaulted before they graduate.
According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, between 1995 and 2011 only 0.6 percent of college women had experienced an attempted or actual sexual assault, which is less than the 0.8 percent of non-college women aged 18 to 24 who had the same experience over the same time. So American colleges are not hotbeds of assault and rape, and are actually safer for women than most other zones of life.
Even the treatment of the Rolling Stone drama as just a failure of journalism—Columbia offered an "anatomy of a journalistic failure"—feels insufficient. Yes, its writers and editors messed up royally (and still are, by refusing to make any significant changes to their staff or editorial processes.) But that terrible article arose out of a moral swamp that still festers even following the article's retraction. It spoke to and reflected and sought to capture one of the most hysterical panics of our time: the idea that largely middle-class women at some of the best universities in the United States are stalked by danger, hunted by rapists, threatened by a foul, free-floating culture of violation.
It's this madness that we must now challenge. And it will require more than a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism dean to do that. It will require all of us picking apart victim feminism, advocacy research, the demonization of men (especially of the frat variety), the culture of misanthropy, and the modern urge to trash both due process and civil rights in the name of hunting down a new breed of Emmanuel Goldsteins: jocks, lads, college guys. All of these are the ingredients, not only of Erdely's sorry excuse for reporting, but also of the still extant, still profoundly damaging moral panic about rape.
The post The Real Problem With <em>Rolling Stone</em>'s Campus Rape Fiasco appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Many Americans, when they hear the word Scotland, will think of Mel Gibson in blue facepaint yelling: "FREEDOM!" That's how Scotland is viewed by non-Scots the world over: as a plucky, liberty-loving nation that sits atop snooty England and longs to be free and wild and beer-soaked in a kilt.
Well, if that's how you see Scotland, you urgently need to update your mind's image bank. For far from being a land of freedom-yearning Bravehearts, Scotland in the 21st century is a hotbed of the new authoritarianism. It's the most nannying of Europe's nanny states. It's a country that imprisons people for singing songs, instructs people to stop smoking in their own homes, and which dreams of making salad-eating compulsory. Seriously. Scotland the Brave has become Scotland the Brave New World.
If you had to guess which country in the world recently sent a young man to jail for the crime of singing an offensive song, I'm guessing most of you would plumb for Putin's Russia or maybe Saudi Arabia. Nope, it's Scotland.
Last month, a 24-year-old fan of Rangers, the largely Protestant soccer team, was banged up for four months for singing "The Billy Boys," an old anti-Catholic ditty that Rangers fans have been singing for years, mainly to annoy fans of Celtic, the largely Catholic soccer team. He was belting it out as he walked along a street to a game. He was arrested, found guilty of songcrimes—something even Orwell failed to foresee—and sent down.
It's all thanks to the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act, which, yes, is as scary as it sounds. Introduced in 2012 by the Scottish National Party, the largest party in Scotland the Brave New World and author of most of its new nanny-state laws, the Act sums up everything that is rotten in the head of this sceptred isle. Taking a wild, wide-ranging scattergun approach, it outlaws at soccer matches "behaviour of any kind," including, "in particular, things said or otherwise communicated," that is "motivated (wholly or partly) by hatred" or which is "threatening" or which a "reasonable person would be likely to consider offensive."
Got that? At soccer games in Scotland it is now illegal to do or say anything—and "in particular" to say it—that is hateful or threatening or just offensive. Now, I don't know how many readers have been to a soccer game in Britain, but offensiveness, riling the opposing side, is the gushing lifeblood of the game. Especially in Scotland. Banning at soccer matches hateful or offensive comments, chants, songs, banners, or badges—all are covered by the Offensive Behaviour Act—is like banning cheerleaders from American football. Sure, our cheerleaders are gruffer, drunker, fatter, and more foul-mouthed than yours, but they play a similarly key role in getting the crowds going.
The Offensive Behaviour Act has led to Celtic fans being arrested in dawn raids for the crime of singing pro-I.R.A. songs—which they do to irritate Rangers fans—and Rangers fans being hauled to court for chanting less-than-pleasant things about Catholics.
Even blessing yourself at a soccer game in Scotland could lead to arrest. Catholic fans have been warned that if they "bless themselves aggressively" at games, it could be "construed as something that is offensive," presumably to non-Catholic fans, and the police might pick them up. You don't have to look to some Middle Eastern tinpot tyranny if you want to see the state punishing public expressions of Christian faith—it's happening in Scotland.
It gets worse. SNP officials have said that even singing "God Save The Queen"—the national anthem of the U.K.!—could be a crime at Scottish soccer. If it were to be sung by Rangers fans, say, as a way of winding up Irish-identifying Celtic fans, then that could "become offensive behaviour," an official says. You know a nation has truly lost the plot when it outlaws the singing of the national anthem in certain situations. Imagine if American football fans were told that they sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" at their own peril, because if someone in the stadium finds their patriotic warbling offensive then they could be arrested. Welcome to Scotland.
Not content with policing what soccer fans sing and say, the SNP also polices Scots' smoking, boozing, and eating habits. It was the first country in the U.K. to ban smoking in public. Last month it announced that it will ban smoking in cars with kids. It is currently pushing through a ban on smoking in parks. And it has its eyes on smokers' homes: if a public-sector employee, like a doctor or social worker, visits your home, he or she has the right to say that you should "not smoke when they are providing [their] service." This, of course, is the ultimate goal of the global jihad against nicotine: to move from making bars, cars, and parks smokefree to making our homes smokefree.
Scotland has set itself the Orwellian-sounding goal of making the whole nation, every bit of it, smokefree by 2034. What will happen to any smoker still lurking in Scotland after the glorious dawn of the 2,034th year? It's probably best not to ask.
Scotland is also plotting to put a sin tax on booze. The SNP blubs about the fact that "alcohol is now 60 per cent more affordable in the U.K. than it was in 1980"—that's a bad thing?—and so it is pushing through the Alcohol Minimum Pricing Act, which will impose a state-decreed price on all liquid pleasures. It is trying to push the Act through, I should say: it's being held up by a legal challenge from the Scotch Whisky Association which, understandably, doesn't want the state telling it how much it should sell its wares for. I would say "God bless those whisky makers," but I'm not sure how much you're allowed to say "God" or "bless" in relation to Scotland these days.
The SNP insists minimum pricing is "not a tax." Yes it is; it's a sin tax, the taxing of larks, the imposition of a kind of Prohibition-for-the-poor, where, in the words of John Stuart Mill, "every increase of cost is a prohibition to those whose means do not come up to the augmented price."
Scotland's great and good also watch what the little people eat. Last month, BMA Scotland, an association of doctors, declared war on Scotland's "culture of excess" and said ads for junk food and booze should be banned. The SNP wants to go further: it's agitating for an EU-wide ban on junk-food ads, clearly keen that all the peoples of Europe, and not just poor Scots, feel the stab of its Mary Poppins extremism.
There is even—get this—a discussion in Scotland about making salad bars mandatory at restaurants. Yes, there exist actual officials who would like to force businesses to serve you vegetables, even if they don't want to and you don't want to eat them. Concerned that "Scots are 30 years away from reaching the World Health Organization target of five portions of fruit and vegetables a day"—apparently the average Scot only eats 3.5 portions a day—there is talk of "beefing up [get it??] the number of greens by introducing mandatory salad bars."
And then there's the authoritarian icing on the cake, if Scotland will forgive such an obesity-encouraging metaphor: the SNP's Children and Young People Act. This Act plans to assign a Named Person, a state-decreed guardian, to every baby born in Scotland, in order to watch him or her from birth to the age of 18.
Due to come into force in August 2016, the Named Person initiative is truly dystopian. Once, it was only abandoned or orphaned children who became charges of the state; now, all Scottish children will effectively be wards of the state under a new, vast system of, in essence, shadow parenting. In an expression of alarming distrust in parents, and utter contempt for the idea of familial sovereignty and privacy, the state in Scotland wants to attach an official to every kid and to keep tabs on said kid's physical and moral wellbeing.
There'll be a state spy in every family. In Scotland, Big Brother is not only watching you (it was recently revealed that Scotland has 4,114 public-space CCTV cameras and "camera vans," which drive through towns filming the allegedly suspect populace); he's also watching your kids.
In Scotland, we see in gory Technicolor what happens if the so-called nanny state—such a weak, quaint term for this lifestyle tyranny!—is allowed to run riot. Scotland is creating a truly cradle-to-grave system of state meddling in people's lives, where from birth to adulthood, and everywhere from soccer games to the pub, from the CCTV-saturated streets to your local restaurant, you're being watched, finger-wagged at, told what you can and can't say, what you should and shouldn't eat, where you can smoke, how much you can drink, even how passionately you may bless yourself.
Let Scotland the Brave New World be a salutary lesson. Challenge every act of state authoritarianism you encounter, because they will speedily accrue and you'll end up living in a nation where you can't even freely sing the goddamn national anthem. Adopt a brilliant Scottish turn of phrase and say it with abandon to all those who would interfere in your life: "Get tae fuck."
The post Scotland: The Most Nannying of Europe's Nanny States appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Who are the true warriors for freedom of speech, Dolce & Gabbana (D&G) or Elton John? This puzzle comes out of last week's furious bust-up between the Italian fashion designers and the widely loved piano man. When Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, who are gay, told an Italian magazine that they aren't big fans of in-vitro fertilization treatment or surrogate pregnancies for gay couples, John hit the roof.
Being dad to two surrogate children, John was understandably offended by the designers' dissing of gay families, which they described as made up of "synthetic children" born of "semen chosen from a catalog." So John called for a boycott of D&G, and hordes of celebs and tweeters heeded him. Before long, #boycottD&G was trending on Twitter and an angry crowd had gathered outside D&G's big store in central London to holler "Shame! Shame!" at the staff inside. Commentators insisted that all self-respecting supporters of gay rights should stop buying D&G's stuff, at least until its founders apologize for or, ideally, retract their "vile" comments.
Let's leave aside the question of which camp is correct on the matter of gay families. Instead, let's ask which side is respecting free speech and which side is doing something else.
Both claim to be pro-free speech. In an echo of the post-Charlie Hebdo global cry, D&G's supporters have been tweeting "Je Suis D&G." Stefano Gabbana said that, unlike their stinging critics, he and Dolce "firmly believe in democracy and the fundamental principle of freedom of expression that upholds it." An Italian politician accused John of behaving like the Taliban, describing his crusade against D&G as "shameful and intolerable."
But wait a second, counter the D&G boycotters—aren't we just exercising freedom of speech also, the same as D&G did? A Guardian writer said that just as D&G "used their public platform to make gross generalisations," so John and his backers have "exercised [their] own right to freedom of expression in response." A writer for Pink News said D&G's claim to be suffering some kind of "censorship" is nuts, and it's a "gross mutation of freedom of speech" to suggest that people should be able to "express whatever offensive view [they] like… without being offended in return."
So is this a simple clash between competing views, with both sides exercising free speech in a fair debate over values? I don't think so. The boycotters' claim to be merely "exercising freedom of expression" is spectacularly unconvincing. In truth, they have brought to bear against D&G what John Stuart Mill called the "tyranny of prevailing opinion"—the informal, non-governmental policing of the parameters of acceptable thought, and punishment of anyone who steps outside those parameters. Whatever one thinks about the gay-family stuff, I'm in the "Je Suis D&G" camp: they're the ones whose speech rights have been dented here.
Yes, the anti-D&G side is using words, and could therefore be described as "exercising freedom of speech." But they're doing something else, too: they're using financial pressure to force two individuals to abandon their deeply held moral beliefs (or at least pretend to) and conform to what others consider the correct way of thinking. They aren't simply saying to D&G "You're wrong, and here's why," which is the lifeblood of good, testy debate. They're saying, "Your views are unacceptable—so unacceptable that we will seek to punish you financially until you retract them." This moves beyond speech into action, censorious action.
The anti-D&G brigade have responded to accusations of censoriousness by saying no one has a right to speak his mind without being criticised. They're absolutely right about that. But the campaign to hit D&G where it hurts—in the bank—isn't criticism. In fact, it's the avoidance of criticism; it's the dodging of grown-up, heated debate in favor of simply saying: "You can't say that! What you have said is so vile that we will seek to expel you from polite society and the free market until you have apologized."
There's nothing wrong with boycotts, per se. But traditionally they were aimed at overturning discriminatory behavior—think the bus boycott in the 1950s. Boycotts harnessed "people power" to throttle an actual discriminatory action that heavily impacted people's lives. More recently, however, we've seen the rise of boycotts designed to punish a company for what its bosses think, not what they do.
Philosophers have warned us about this. Consider Baruch Spinoza's essay on freedom of speech, published in the 1660s. Yes, Spinoza tub-thumped beautifully against "government by compulsion." But he also took aim at those who "seditiously stir up the quarrelsome masses," so that even "in a free state, [they] seek to curtail the liberty of judgement which they are unable to tyrannize over." That is, even where speech cannot legally be trounced, it can still be informally assaulted by the "quarrelsome."
The clearest argument against non-state authoritarianism came later, from Mill. His On Liberty (1859), perhaps the greatest of liberal texts, isn't really about the state; it's far more about the "deep slumber of decided opinion" and the informal intolerance of those who snub mainstream thought. Mill couldn't have been clearer about the need to liberate thought and speech, not only from the officialdom's dead grip, but also from the spittle and fury of non-state authoritarians.
"Protection against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough," wrote Mill. "There needs [to be] protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them."
Here, in these 150-year-old words, we have the perfect description of what the financial punishers of D&G are seeking to do, and what is now done by so many Twitter-mobs infuriated by offensive speech: a stab at imposing "by other means than civil penalties" the prevailing opinion on those who have dared to turn their backs on it. From the campus authoritarians who win the disinvitation of controversial speakers by threatening to disrupt their speeches, to the protester-won sacking of Brendan Eich by Mozilla over his views on gay marriage, ours is an era of weaponized majority opinion—the imposition of "right thinking" not only by the church's flames or state coercion, but through informal threats of financial hardship or social ostracism against mis-speakers.
The end result is that the worst kind of censorship—self-censorship—spreads. Who will now dare express religious reservations about gay families following the fury visited on D&G? Every act of non-state authoritarianism is a reminder to all of us to silence our darker or simply non-mainstream beliefs. It's the straitjacketing of public debate, the informal silencing of out-there or eccentric views. And that's a disaster, for as Mill said: "The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time." And of ours, too.
The post Elton John vs. Dolce & Gabbana: Should You Boycott Anti-Gay-Adoption Businesses? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The UK-based Islamic Human Rights Commission has disgusted everyone who owns a moral compass by giving its international "Islamophobe of the Year Award" to Charlie Hebdo.
Yep, that's right—not content that the editors and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo have already been summarily executed for the "crime" of Islamophobia, the IHRC now wants to posthumously insult them, metaphorically branding their corpses with the i-word so that everyone remembers what scumbags they were.
The IHRC, a charity founded in 1997 to research, study, and bleat about anyone who is less than fawning about Islam, initiated the Annual Islamophobia Awards in 2003. The winners are, of course, not actually anti-Muslim bigots, but simply people who have had the temerity to criticize some aspect of Islamic faith or culture.
So Ayaan Hirsi Ali has won one for failing to show sufficient respect to the religion that ruined her childhood. How dare she! Tony Blair was awarded one as well, proving that even painfully PC politicians who go around quoting the Koran and saying what a wonderful religion Islam is can still find themselves labelled haters.
And now, eclipsing even those previous undeserving winners, Charlie Hebdo has been dishonored with an award. On March 7, exactly two months after the massacre—nice—the IHRC christened that mag the worst of the international Islamophobes. No one from the magazine was available to pick up the award, of course, since many of its writers are now dead.
The IHRC's labelling of freshly-killed satirists is like a post-mortem justification for the massacre itself, a reminder of the "crimes" these people committed prior to being shot at their desks. In fact, it's merely a less bloody version of the Islamic State's habit of hanging a placard around the neck of some poor bloke about to be crucified or pushed off a building: a reminder of the wickedness done by these individuals who are being, or have been, executed.
It isn't surprising that the IHRC's giggling at the dead of Charlie Hebdo has been met with outrage. But now we need to go further. We need to reject, not only the grisly handing of an Islamophobia award to dead cartoonists, but also the very idea of Islamophobia—the word itself, the notion that to criticize or mock Islam is to be disordered and therefore in need of reprimanding or a cure.
We live in an era of phobias. They are apparently spreading like a ravenous blob, turning more and more human minds black with prejudice. Today, it isn't only fear of spiders, clowns, or open spaces that is branded a phobia—so are certain ways of thinking, certain beliefs, moral viewpoints that fall outside the mainstream.
Islam is protected from ridicule not only by the slur of Islamophobia, but also through accusations of "hijabphobia" against anyone who criticizes the veil, and "shariaphobia," which is used to brand as sickly those who think Western democratic nations should have one, universal law applicable to everyone rather than different courts for different folks.
One Muslim writer describes hijabphobia as an "irrational fear" that has "crept into the subconscious of the unsuspecting all over the world." So you might think your dislike of the veil is motored by secular, liberal concern for the treatment of women as frail sexual creatures who must always be hidden, but actually you're sick; you've been infected by a fear of the Other.
Shariaphobia is, according to one dictionary, "fear or hatred of sharia law." The heated debate about the introduction of a sharia tribunal in Texas has led to accusations of shariaphobia. A writer for the Texan paper the Star-Telegram said commentators' criticisms of the tribunal show that "shariaphobia is back." So even the suggestion that we should have one law for all—a pretty standard Enlightenment idea—is now rebranded a weird, dark fear.
The purpose of all these utterly invented phobias is to delegitimize moral criticism of Islam by depicting it as irrational, fuelled by fearful thoughts that the mass media probably implanted in your unwitting brain. It's like an informal, non-legal enforcement of strictures against blasphemy. Whereas the Inquisition branded disbelievers as morally disordered "deniers," today's intolerant protectors of Islam brand critics of that religion as morally disordered "phobes." In Europe, a hotbed of phobia-policing, people have actually been arrested, convicted, and fined for the crime of "Islamophobia"—a direct echo of the Inquisition's trial and punishment of those who, in retrospect, we should probably call Bibliophobes.
It isn't only Islam and its sympathizers who use the phobe label to chill legitimate moral debate. Everyone's at it.
Gay-rights activists have become way too fond of using the word "homophobe," not only to attack actual anti-gay bigots but also to slam people who simply oppose gay marriage, for religious reasons, or who aren't in love with every aspect of the gay lifestyle. Here, too, legit moral viewpoints are reimagined as irrational fears and in the process demonized. Homosexuality was once treated as a mental illness; now criticism of homosexuality is described, in the words of psychiatrist and writer Martin Kantor, as an "emotional disorder."
Heaven help anyone who criticizes any aspect of transgender politics. Question the idea that boys who identify as girls should be allowed to use the girls' toilets at school and you're a transphobe. Wonder out loud if gender is at least partly biological and you're a transphobe. Accidentally call Chelsea Manning Bradley Manning and you're the most foul, irrational, phobic creature in Christendom.
There's also biphobia, lesbophobia, whorephobia (used against feminists who, wrongly in my view, want to outlaw prostitution), fatphobia, ecophobia (for people who aren't eco-friendly and, what's more, think green politics is a crock), and on it goes.
What we're witnessing is the pathologizing of dissent, the treatment of edgy or just eccentric ideas as illnesses requiring silencing or even treatment. It's a cynical attempt by certain groups and their media cheerleaders to opt-out of the battle of ideas by branding their opponents as irrational, and therefore not worthy of engagement.
Pathologizing moral thought has long been the favored tactic of the most authoritarian regimes. Think of the Soviet Union dumping dissenters in lunatic asylums. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, O'Brien, the torturer in Room 101, offers to cure Winston Smith of his anti-authority outlook: "You are mentally deranged," he tells him. "Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane!"
The 21st-century West is rife with O'Briens, keen to cure us of our phobias. We should respond by challenging the phobia-accusers to ditch the name-calling and instead take part in real, honest, moral debate.
The post Stop Smearing Critics of Islam as Islamophobes appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Two months after the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, the French state has just taken a massive merde on the graves of those who were killed.
It has decided to honor their memory, or dishonor it, by instituting what promise to be the most stringent anti-hate speech laws in Europe. It has declared an "unmerciful battle"—the Justice Minister's actual words—on anything on the internet that insults religious groups or ethnic minorities.
In other words, its response to those gun-wielding Koran-thumpers who declared an unmerciful war on cartoonists for blaspheming against Muhammad is to extend that unmerciful war to cover other forms of offensive speech, too. "Je Suis Charlie," crowed every French politician eight weeks ago, but now we know the complete opposite is the case—the leaders of France are actually finishing the job started by the Charlie-killers, the job of crushing with force "hateful" speech.
The Justice Minister, Christiane Taubira, has announced that the government is gearing up for "unmerciful battle" against online hate speech, especially racism and anti-Semitism. She wants to ensure that France's severe hate-speech laws are applied as strenuously to online blather as they already are to offline stuff like newspaper commentary or speeches in public squares. "Crimes recognised in public spaces must also be recognised as such on the internet," she says.
Her big idea is to give the state new powers to unilaterally remove dodgy material from the web without even requiring the approval of a judge. As France 24 reports, she wants the authority to "shut down websites hosting content that is deemed illicit, without prior court approval." This is alarming. It would make the state the judge, jury, and executioner of public debate, the sole policeman of the parameters of acceptable thought. It would remove even that thin, unconvincing veneer of democracy that gets attached to hate-speech clampdowns in Europe—the bothersome task of having to go through a court case to prove that certain words were indeed racist or something-phobic and therefore should be punished—and would instead allow officialdom to strike from the public sphere, and shove down the memory hole, anything it "deemed illicit."
This unmerciful dispatching of hate-policers across the internet hasn't come out of the blue. In the two months since the Muhammad-mockers at Charlie Hebdo were gunned down at their desks, the French authorities have arrested loads of people for the crime of saying nasty things—the same "crime" the Charlie Hebdo folk were executed for.
In the seven days following the massacre, 54 people were arrested for hate speech or apologizing for terrorism. One man was arrested for saying to some cops, "There should be more Kouachis [the brothers who carried out the massacre]. I hope you'll be the next ones." The anti-Semitic comedian Dieudonne M'bala M'bala was arrested for a Facebook post in which he said he was less Charlie and more Coulibaly—the name of the guy who carried out the post-Charlie murder of Jews at a kosher deli.
It isn't only apologists for terrorists who have felt the mouth-covering long arm of the law. At the end of January, a French court found three people guilty of anti-gay hate speech after they managed to get the hashtag #gaysmustdiebecause… trending on Twitter. A French gay-rights group, pre-empting Christiane Taubira's declaration of an unmerciful battle against online spite, cheered the conviction of the tweeters, saying it hoped this would "send out the message that the internet is not a place… where you can do whatever you want." Or say whatever you want. Express your feelings on the web in France, and you could be arrested.
This darkly ironic post-Charlie rounding-up of people who simply said wrong or bad things reflects how strictly speech is controlled in the alleged land of liberté, égalité, fraternité. The 1881 Law on the Freedom of the Press (more dark irony) forbids the incitement of discrimination or hatred against any racial, religious, or sexual group. Do that, and you could be locked up for a year or fined 45,000 Euros. The 1990 Gayssot Act makes it a crime to deny the Holocaust. The French penal code outlaws the defamation of any group on the basis of its race, religion, nationality, sex, or sexual orientation.
This vast battery of thought-policing laws doesn't only chastise the sort of stuff we can all agree is repulsive—like using the n-word to describe black people—it also polices and punishes moral convictions: people's deeply held, if not very mainstream, beliefs. So poor Brigitte Bardot has been arrested five times for expressing her serious animal-rights view that the Islamic method of slaughtering meat is "barbaric." The novelist Michel Houellebecq was hauled before the courts for describing Islam as "the most stupid religion," an entirely legitimate viewpoint.
Those cases should remind us that one man's hate speech is another man's profoundly held belief. Some people believe that Islam is barbaric, or that the Holocaust is a hoax, as fervently as you might believe that cannabis should be decriminalized or Hillary Clinton is an asshole. And their punishment for thinking those things, however batty and fact-free they might be, is every bit as outrageous as if the police turned up at your door and dragged you to court for saying "Marijuana should be legal" or "Clinton's a bitch." The punishment of any belief, whether it's a decent liberal belief or a barmy prejudiced one, is equally wicked, equally authoritarian, and equally wrong.
To grant the state the authority to police hatred—which is nothing more than an emotion, words, a feeling—is to open the door to the policing of thought, conscience, and morality. So in France you can be arrested not only for writing about "niggers," but also for saying "Islam is shit." And in order to prevent the latter, the expression of a moral viewpoint, from being a crime, we must also demand that the former, the expression of blind prejudice, should not be a crime either.
And yet now, not content with policing the press and the utterances of novelists and actresses, the French state wants to spread hate-watchers across the web and shut down anything it considers foul and unacceptable. In the process, it isn't only denigrating the memory of those killed at Charlie Hebdo, who were self-consciously foul, and definitely unacceptable; it is also denting the very values upon which the French Republic was built. Terrifyingly, it is also sending to all the citizens of France the very clear message that "hate speech" is wicked and sinful and must be punished. You know who will fervently embrace that message? The kind of people who shot up Charlie Hebdo; super-sensitive and censorious Islamists who think anyone who takes the mick out of Muhammad or riles their religion is a "phobic" who should be reprimanded. Well done, France—you have just inflamed the very offense-killing sentiment that motored the Charlie Hebdo massacre; you have just given the green light to others who also want to launch an "unmerciful battle" against those who defame or diss their beliefs. Only their merciless war might not be as blood-free as yours.
The post France Dishonors Charlie Hebdo By Policing Hate Speech appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Is it acceptable to have drunk sex? Most people who aren't citizens of the Islamic State or followers of some frigid Christian group will answer with an emphatic: "Hell, yeah." Not only is it acceptable, they'll think; it's good, one of life's great pleasures, a rare moment when you can ditch the pesky rational thinking required in everyday life and instead abandon yourself—mind, soul, and genitals—to a moment of dumb, beautiful joy.
Well, enjoy it while you can, folks. Because like everything else pleasurable in the 21st century—smoking in a bar, complimenting a lady on her looks, drinking a bucket-sized Coke—drunk sex is under attack from that new caste of killjoys who wouldn't recognize fun if it offered to buy them a drink ("unwanted sexual advance.") Drunk sex is being demonized, even criminalized: turned from something that can be either wonderful or awkward into, effectively, rape. They warned us for years, "Don't drink and drive." Now it's, "Don't drink and fuck."
Alison Saunders, Britain's Director of Public Prosecutions, the boss lady of all the British state's legal actions against suspected lawbreakers, has issued new advice on rape. Sent to cops around Britain as part of a "toolkit" of tips for dealing with rape cases, it says society must move "beyond the old saying 'no means no'." Because apparently women are sometimes incapable of saying no when they would probably like to. When? When they're shit-faced, as Americans say; or pissed as a fart, as us Brits prefer.
"It is not a crime to drink," said Saunders (she might have added a "yet," because I'm sure some teetotaler in the corridors of British power is working on this), but it is a crime "to target someone who is no longer capable of consenting to sex through drink," she continued. And she wants the law to be better able to deal with what the press has called those "grey areas" (50 Shades of Grey areas?) in which sex happens when someone is "incapacitated through drink or drugs." Her advice to cops and lawyers is that in every case of allegedly dodgy, drunk, disputed sex, they should demand of the suspect: "How did [you] know the complainant was saying yes and doing so freely and knowingly?"
There are many terrifying things about this advice. The first is its subtle shifting of the burden of proof so that it falls to the defendant to prove that the claimant said "yes" rather than to the claimant to prove she said "no" and was ignored. As Sarah Vine of the Daily Mail says, this could lead to a situation where "men in rape cases [will] automatically be presumed guilty until they can prove they obtained consent." In essence, this would mean sex becoming default a crime until you, the drunk dude who slept with the drunk girl, can prove that your sex wasn't malevolent. Imagine raising such an idea in the year in which we celebrate the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, midwife of the presumption of innocence, which for centuries guarded citizens from the whims and prejudices of the mighty state and powerful prosecutors like Ms. Saunders.
But even worse is her thought-free mash-up of drunk sex and rape, as if they're the same. When Saunders talks about sex that happens while one or both parties is hammered, she's sticking her snout—the state's snout—into what for many people is a perfectly normal part of life: college parties, house parties, youthful get-togethers, at which the truly shocking thing would be to see sober people getting it on.
She's following the lead of the campus killjoys: the Orwellian junior sex leagues masquerading as feminists who for a decade have been turning student sex into something foul and potentially criminal.
On both sides of the Atlantic, campuses that were once hotbeds of anti-The Man radicalism have become conveyor belts of conformist policymaking, particularly in relation to anything that has what these prudish heirs to Andrea Dworkin consider to be the rancid whiff of s*x. And what kind of sex do they loathe most? Drunk sex.
Numerous colleges now insist that it isn't possible to consent to sex if you're three sheets to the wind, which means that all sexual acts carried out under the influence are potential crimes. The University of Georgia warns students that sexual consent must be "voluntary, sober, imaginative, enthusiastic, creative, wanted, informed, mutual, honest." There are many problematic words in that—"imaginative"? Can't we consent to sex unimaginatively, maybe by saying "Oh, go on then"?—but the most problematic is "sober." Apparently sex must always be booze-free.
These consent commandments are found on campuses across the West. At Oxford and Cambridge in the U.K., sexual consent classes are now compulsory for all freshmen (Compulsory classes on consent? What delicious, Orwellian irony.) At these classes, students are told they must be of "sound and sober mind" to consent to sex. So, no paralytic, sozzled, WTF sex.
The University of Wyoming takes this authoritarian downer on drunk sex to its logical conclusion by warning students: "Sex that occurs while a partner is intoxicated or high is not consensual… it is sexual assault." If this stipulation were enforced retroactively, pretty much every person I went to university with could be arrested for rape. Everyone had a blind-drunk bang at some point, because it was fun.
Some of the sex-scared authoritarianism on campus merely mirrors shifts in certain states' law, where intoxication is increasingly said to void consent. But elsewhere, the student anti-sex leagues are helping to reshape the law, as can be seen in Saunders' enthusiastic embrace of the idea that drunk sex is A Very Bad Thing.
It's hard to know what is most repulsive about this creeping criminalization of shit-faced sex. Is it the way it infantilizes women with its sexist implication that they are less capable of negotiating sexual encounters while drunk than men, hence the drunk man must shoulder responsibility for these apparently depraved shenanigans? This echoes the temperance movements of the late 19th century, which likewise warned dainty ladies that getting blotto would lead to sexual misadventure and downfall. Or is it the way it demonizes men, turning even the sweet, utterly non-violent young lad who has to have eight vodkas to buck up the courage to sleep with his beau into that most heinous of criminals: a rapist? Or is it the fact that its aim is to deprive us of one of the great hoots of human life: stupid sex, where you don't know or care what is going on, where the condom is, or even if she's on the Pill? That moment of madness, that instant when feeling takes over and your brain has a night off, that time when you can't string a sentence together but somehow you can still have sex… seriously, students, you should try this.
The big problem is the shift in recent years from talking about rape to "sex without consent." Rape is a violent word that describes a conscious act by a wicked man (usually) to defy a woman who says no and to force sex on her. Disgusting. Lock him up. But "sex without consent" is a totally different phrase: it's more passive, signalling an act that doesn't require criminal intent and which can cover everything from rape as it was once understood to drunk sex, drugged-up sex, or regretted sex. We've gone from punishing those who rape to casting a vast blanket of suspicion over anyone who has sex. But the fact is—and please don't hate me—sex isn't always 100 percent consensual. Especially after booze. Sometimes it's instinctual, thoughtless, animalistic. Sometimes it just happens. It's sex without consent—that is, without explicit, clearly stated, sober consent—but it ain't rape. It's sex.
The cultivation of the new crime of "sex without consent" completes the state's intervention into private life. It effectively makes the authorities into the arbiters of sex itself, the judges of when sex is okay and when it isn't, of whether a particular drunken romp is acceptable or rape. Don't drink and fuck, or the state will fuck you—with or without your consent.
The post In Defense of Drunk Sex appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The two recent acts of censorship-by-murder in Europe—first at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, and then at a free-speech debate in Copenhagen—have put the continent's political classes in a pickle.
For as much as European rulers want to, and do, condemn the brutal actions of these Koran-thumping offense-takers, the fact is they also share something in common with them: a devotion to shushing and sometimes punishing those who offend people's sensibilities.
There's only so much distance the elites of Europe can make between themselves and these cartoonist-loathing shooters. For while our elites might not summarily execute people for the crime of being offensive, they do arrest them, and put them on trial, and occasionally jail them. All of which are acts tinged with menace, underpinned by the threat of violence, where it's understood by all that if any of these offense-givers were to dodge arrest or jump jail they could be restrained by force. It isn't only Islamo-censors who use violence to silence—all censorship, by its nature, is violent.
The awkward fact of a shared outlook between the opinion-forming set and the killers of cartoonists surfaced once again following the shoot-up of a debate about Islam and free speech in Copenhagen at the weekend.
The smoke from the gunfire had barely disappeared before cagey columnists were saying that if we don't want to get killed then we should stop offending people. A writer for the Guardian said Copenhagen should remind us of the "obligations…upon those who wish to live in peaceful, reasonably harmonious societies"—primarily the obligation to "guard against the understandable temptation to be provocative," especially by publishing Muhammad-mocking cartoons. Shorter version: to avoid being shot, zip your lip. The Guardian writer is effectively doing the shooter's dirty work for him, spelling out in words what the shooter said with bullets: if you offend, you might die, so don't do it.
Another Guardian columnist said the peoples of Scandinavia should now "step back from their principles"—their "strong belief in the moral imperative of free speech"—and "show more of the pragmatism for which Denmark is also famous." In short, Denmark and its neighbour nations should do what the shooter wanted them to: ditch that pesky principle of free speech, that old right to provoke, and instead erm and ahh before saying or showing anything edgy.
These responses to Copenhagen, this effective aiding and abetting of the shooters' profoundly illiberal message by the supposedly liberal commentariat, echo some of the grislier responses to the Charlie Hebdo massacre. There was the infamous Financial Times column that slammed the "editorial foolishness" of Charlie Hebdo (apparently the cartoonists brought their murders on themselves), and the New Statesman screed against "free-speech fundamentalists" who stupidly say "Je Suis Charlie" when the fact is we all know there are free-speech lines that "cannot be crossed." It sounded almost like a threat, an echo of the sentiments of the Charlie Hebdo killers themselves: "Cross the line and you'll regret it…"
So twice now, the great and the good have condemned the actions of offense-killing gunmen while at the same time embracing and spreading the moral message behind these actions: the idea that there's a line that shouldn't be crossed, things that shouldn't be said, and principles that should now be ditched. In essence, liberal observers have made themselves willing participants in acts of terror, behaving as the propagandistic spokespeople, or at least as media echoers, for the misanthropic, intolerant, censorious killers.
These creepy commonalities between small gangs of killers and whole layers of respectable society reveal that these attacks may not be as alien to our way of life as some would have us believe. In fact, the two shooting sprees can be seen as simply a bloodier expression of something that's now depressingly mainstream in Europe: the idea that it's bad to give offense—so bad that you can be punished for doing it.
The massacre at Charlie Hebdo and the shooting in Denmark didn't happen in a vacuum; they happened at a time and on a continent where offensiveness is an actually punishable offense.
So in France in the six weeks since the Charlie Hebdo massacre, far-right ideologues have been arrested for the crime of anti-Semitic speech, and three people who wrote homophobic tweets have been convicted of committing a hate crime. In Copenhagen just four months ago, an art exhibition was cancelled on the basis that it was racist: the Danish penal code forbids any speech that threatens or simply insults or degrades a group on the basis of its race, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, or faith. Was it the Koran that gave the Copenhagen cafe shooter the idea that any slur against his faith was an intolerable crime, or was it the insult-punishing law of the land in which he was born and brought up? His own nation sent him the message that anyone who degraded his faith deserved to be punished.
Across Europe, a glut of hate-speech laws now control what people can say and write. Over the past 30 years, everywhere from Britain to France to Finland, laws have been passed forbidding the insulting or ridiculing of religious folk, women, ethnic minorities, gays, and others. These laws don't only punish those who shout the word "Nigger!" or "Faggot!", which would be bad enough; they punish people for their actual moral and political convictions.
Like the Swedish pastor given a one-month suspended prison sentence for expressing his belief that homosexuality is a "tumour" on society. Or Brigitte Bardot, arrested and fined five times in France for describing Islam as barbaric. Or the novelist Michel Houellebecq, dragged to court in France for describing Islam as "the stupidest religion." Or the far-right British politician given a suspended eight-month prison sentence for expressing his disdain for Britain's immigration policy and using the word "darkie" to describe foreigners. Or the Swedish artist sent to jail for six months for producing paintings that mocked black people.
It's the return of the mindset of the Inquisition, of the old, rotten idea that those who offend orthodoxies, in this case PC, may be punished, sometimes severely. Maybe the Charlie Hebdo and Copenhagen killers were mind-warped by the online ravings of some extremist finger-wagging imam from the Middle East—or maybe they imbibed the thinking of their own societies, of the laws in France and Denmark, which remove the liberties of those who insult Muslims and other groups, and turns these insulters into criminals, outcasts, moral lepers. These killers can be seen, not so much as an invading foreign strain of intolerant Islamism, but as the militant enforcers of the now mainstream European creed of offense-avoidance and criminalization of hate and ridicule.
Some will say: "But our censorship is more civilized than theirs. We don't kill, we just arrest and fine or imprison those who misspeak or misthink." Please. What underpins the state's ability to criminalize and in some cases incarcerate those who give offence? Force does; violence does; it's the knowledge that anyone who refused to pay his fine or serve his prison sentence for the crime of saying what he thinks would be made to do so by the enforcers of the state's will. Censorship is inherently threatening. It is never civilized. In fact, it's the antithesis of civilization, for it calls into question the ability of the public to judge for itself which ideas are good and which are bad and it elevates, with menace, tiny cliques of people into the arbiters of what may be thought and said.
To rebuild freedom in Europe, it isn't enough condemn the actions of small groups of gunmen. We must also dismantle, piece by piece, the vast legal structures and censorious culture that empower the offense-takers, making them believe they have the right to silence and punish those who criticize them and to live in a safe space, an anti-social bubble, in which a cross word is never uttered. Let's invade their safe space. Let's burst their bubble. Let's challenge the idea that words of any kind—be they gratuitously offensive or just morally dubious—should be the business of either the state or Islamo-murderers.
The post After Copenhagen: The Myth of Civilized Censorship appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>To see the true dread impact of political correctness, look beyond the attitude-policing antics of the pampered imbeciles stinking up America's Ivy League campuses and Britain's top universities. Instead, cast your gaze to a town called Rotherham, in Yorkshire in Northern England.
Working-class, rough, famous for having been one of the beating hearts of the Industrial Revolution, Rotherham is about as far as it's possible to get from the starched lecture halls of Columbia or the dreaming spires of Oxford.
Yet this once thriving and now economically depressed town, home to 250,000 people, stands as an ugly testament to the grave dangers posed by political correctness, or P.C. For here, P.C. has done rather more than cause irritation to libertarians and liberals who don't think novels should come with trigger warnings; here, P.C. has allowed young women to get raped.
In the fortnight since Jonathan Chait broke the internet by doing what many a libertarian has been doing for 30 years—criticising P.C.—most of the Johnny Come Latelys to the anti-P.C. party have aimed their ire at the crazier instances of speech-policing and word-watching.
They've put the boot into students' sociopathic insistence that we use mad words like "cis" or have railed against academics' acquiescence to the transformation of universities into kindergartens for outsized offence-takers.
But beyond all this admittedly scary/hilarious stuff, there's a far larger and harder-to-criticise problem—P.C.'s invasion of everyday life; its movement from colleges into the concrete worlds of politics, society, and community relations. Consider Rotherham.
Major official inquiries, including one published last week, have discovered that in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, around 1,400 young people, mainly white working-class girls, were sexually exploited and abused by gangs of men, most of them of Pakistani Muslim heritage.
The girls, mostly poor, vulnerable, and from broken families, were groomed by the men and passed around as sexual playthings. Some were prostituted; many were plied with drugs and alcohol.
What does this have to do with P.C.? P.C. facilitated these crimes; it aided and abetted them.
The left-leaning Labour-run local council in Rotherham was so hamstrung by P.C., so riven with what the U.K. Home Secretary Theresa May has called "institutionalised political correctness," that it was reluctant to investigate or talk openly about the Pakistani men's sex crimes for fear of appearing racist and demeaning an ethnic minority.
All of the major investigations into this 16-year-long reign of abuse by gangs of Pakistani men have fingered P.C. as one of the key reasons the men's behaviour did not come fully to light earlier.
In last week's report, commissioned by the government and overseen by Louise Casey, an official who specializes in social welfare, Rotherham is described as having had a culture of "political correctness, incompetence and cover-up," which "allowed gangs of Asian men to get away with child abuse for years." Casey found that Rotherham "suppressed" the issue of Asian abuse gangs out of a "fear of being branded racist."
Her findings echo those of Alexis Jay, a professor of public policy, who last year chaired the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham. Jay likewise found among officials in Rotherham a "nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of [the] perpetrators for fear of being thought racist."
Theresa May describes it as "institutionalised political correctness." She says P.C. was so entrenched in Rotherham that some of the victims' "cries for help" were actively ignored by officials who did not want a national spotlight to be shone on the problem of Pakistani abuse of largely white girls. The girls were ushered away, sent back to their abusers, effectively, by officials who did not want to break the first rule of P.C.: Never let any culture or community be subjected to public criticism or ridicule. Well, what's a few rapes compared with maintaining Britain's multicultural mush of respect for all identities?
The P.C.-inspired lethargy of local officialdom in Rotherham meant it fell to the media to uncover the abuse scandal. The Times in particular was dogged in its determination to highlight the scourge of Pakistani gangs grooming young women: its reporting led to the first court case, in 2010, 13 years after the gang's lawlessness first kicked off, in which five Pakistani men were found guilty of grooming three girls, two aged 13 and one 15, and using them for sex. More men have since been arrested. Some of the victims have recently given interviews, describing how they were disbelieved and shushed by officials—officials more concerned with appearing right-on than doing what was right.
The Rotherham debacle captures the most terrifying thing about P.C.—how it discourages, paralyses, in fact, moral judgement; how it strangles critical thinking and common, human decency in favour of turning everyone into obedient nodding robots who promise never to break the First Commandment of P.C.: Thou Shalt Not Offend.
P.C.'s insistence that all cultures are equally valid, and that inciting concern about the behavior of individuals from any particular identity group is a really bad thing to do, led directly to a situation where young people could be raped.
The thing Chait got most wrong in his New York essay was his claim that, after it first burst onto the academic scene in the late 1980s, P.C. "went into a long remission" and is only now returning. Not so. In those 25 years, P.C. silently, and mostly uncontroversially, colonized more and more areas of life across Western Europe and the U.S., including the military, politics, education, and community life and politics.
It moved into the vacuum left by the decline and fall of older Western values, most strikingly the Enlightenment ideals of universalism, tolerance, and freedom. For this, in essence, is what P.C. represents—not simply the harebrained schemes of spoilt students who want to shut down debate, but a new, hastily constructed, and speedily spreading moral system that might replace the morality of old that has withered and lies gasping for breath.
The end result? Rotherham. A town in a modern, democratic nation where elected officials had elevated offence-avoidance and non-judgementalism to such a dizzying height that they could not allow something so seemingly petty as young women's pleas to be protected from rape to derail their P.C. project.
The irony is almost too much to bear. Well-off, middle-class students and academics unleash a new morality which they claim will, among other things, protect women from harmful words and images, yet in Rotherham it helps to subject women to unspeakable forms of abuse. "P.C. is simply about providing vulnerable students with a safe space!" they crow. Not in Rotherham, it isn't—there, P.C., with its pathological allergy to giving offence to any culture, made a whole town into a dangerous space, a violent, rapacious space, for numerous girls and women.
The post How Political Correctness Aided and Abetted Sex Crimes in England appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Sony copped a lot a flak for caving in to the mysterious Guardians of Peace and pulling The Interview from theaters. It may have since rediscovered its spine, allowing the movie to be released in a few theaters on Christmas Day and making it available online too, but the impact of its act of self-censorship continues to reverberate. It has rightly found itself lambasted for initially hiding away a piece of culture at the behest of a yammering mob making threats and wailing about feeling offended.
But we shouldn't single out Sony as the sole jeopardizer of artistic freedom, for it is far from the only institution to cave in to demands for self-censorship this year. 2014 has been the year of the self-gag, the year of institutions silencing themselves in response to shrill hollers of "You can't say that!" Here's a countdown of the Top 10 cavers of 2014, all of whom helped set the stage for Sony's behaviour.
10) ITV2
The British TV channel dumped its sexist comedian Dapper Laughs in response to a virtual uprising of pearl-clutching, prudish souls. Dapper, real name Daniel O'Reilly, is a 25-year-old funnyman who gave advice to twentysomething blokes about how to pull "birds" (women) and get "gash" (pussy). Sensitive commentators churned out op-eds slamming his misogyny. An online petition was launched, calling on ITV2 to "Cancel Dapper Laughs": 62,000 people signed it. Outrageously, 44 comedians wrote an open letter denouncing Dapper, bringing to mind the regime-friendly artists of the GDR who would shop their less right-on arty pals to the Stasi.
The censorious virtual mob got its way: in November, ITV2 pulled Dapper, and O'Reilly himself appeared on a news show to say sorry and confirm that his character Dapper would never again make a public appearance. A mob-extracted, Stalinist-style public apology—truly ugly.
9) The Economist
The bible of the business elite prides itself on having both brains and balls. "In opinion polls, 100% of Economist readers had one," its adverts say. But it seems some opinions are too controversial, even for The Economist. In September, following an outburst of spittle-flecked fury on Twitter and blogs, The Economist took the extraordinary, and Orwellian, decision to "unpublish" an article about slavery. The piece, a review of Edward Baptist's book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of America, expressed a longing for an "objective history of slavery" that doesn't conform to the narrative that "all the blacks… are victims, [and] all the whites villains."
A silly view, we can agree, given that slavery was a pretty clear-cut case of black victimhood and white supremacy. But in abjectly apologizing for the review, and withdrawing it from its official archive, The Economist made itself, and the rest of us, hostage to the offense-takers. The offencerati celebrated The Economist's climbdown as a great victory, with one tweeting: "It took a Twitter riot to get The Economist to withdraw their idiotic review." So next time The Economist publishes an article you don't like, just start a Twitter riot—that should get rid of it.
8) Festival of Dangerous Ideas
In August, the Festival of Dangerous Ideas (FODI), an intellectual staple of the Aussie liberal elite that takes place in Sydney every year, pulled an Islamist speaker in response to media shouts and online cries. The speaker, one Uthman Badar, was due to give a talk called "Honour killings are morally justified"—a rather provocative title for a speech that was actually just going to try to explain why some Islamic communities overseas *think* honour killings are justified. Politicians complained, journalists mass-produced angry columns, Twitter went into meltdown, and eventually the organizers of FODI capitulated, killing the planned speech on the basis that "the level of public outrage" was too much to bear. See? It isn't only Kim Jong-un (or whoever's behind Guardians of Peace) who weaponizes outrage to squash offensive speech. Rumors that the festival will change its name to the Festival of Ideas Deemed Acceptable by Australia's Chattering and Tweeting Classes have yet to be confirmed.
7) The Barbican
What should an art gallery do when a crowd of 200 gather outside and demand an exhibition be shut down? The London arts venue the Barbican gave a depressing answer this year: shut down the exhibition. The Barbican had been due to host a piece of performance art called Exhibit B, featuring, among other things, black actors in cages. It was a study of our attitudes toward race and history. But at the opening night in September, a gathering of self-styled spokespeople for Britain's black community blockaded the entrance, waved placards, and the Barbican executed a stunning cave-in, closing the exhibition. Perhaps Kim Jong-un, or whoever, was inspired to shout The Interview out of existence by this earlier, very British elevation of hecklers' rights over artistic freedom.
6) Time
We're all marvelling at the colossal humourlessness of North Korea and its fanboys on the internet, who can't even take a Seth Rogen-delivered joke about their Glorious Leader. But they're not the only ones who demand the censure of allegedly off-colour humour. In November, Time magazine caved in to po-faced feminist agitators who complained about its inclusion of the f-word—feminism —in its annual light-hearted poll on what words have become so annoying that they should be banned. After some Twitter-fems lost their shit, Time issued a mea culpa and pulled the f-word from the poll. Eleanor Smeal of the Feminist Majority Foundation said she was relieved Time had "come to its senses," because the word feminist "cannot and must not be trivialized." Just as Kim Jong-un cannot and must not be trivialized by Hollywood.
5) Oxford University
If you think it's only big corporations concerned about their reputations who kill content on request, think again. At one of the highest seats of learning on Earth—Christ Church College, Oxford—a debate was pulled in November after a mob of 300 students threatened to turn up with "instruments" and disrupt it. Why? Because it was a debate about abortion at which both of the speakers were men (one of whom was me). College officials caved into the controversy-allergic student agitators and binned the debate on the basis that it might threaten students' "mental safety." (Isn't that what university is meant to do—shake up students' "mental safety?")
One of the debate-squishers later wrote in the Independent that "the idea that in a free society absolutely everything should be open to debate has a detrimental effect on marginalised groups." That isn't a million miles from what the Guardians of Peace say: that The Interview had to be bullied out of theaters because it was a case of Big Bad America using free speech to attack poor, marginalised North Korea.
4) Opera Australia
Back Down Under, where, in June, Opera Australia caved in to the demands of a Twittermob to expel Tamar Iveri, a Georgian opera singer, from its production of Othello. The reason: Ms. Iveri once said something derogatory about homosexuals on her Facebook page. Yes, that's right, the McCarthyite insistence that all artsy people must have the right and same moral views has been given a new lease on life. An online petition calling for Iveri's visa to work in Australia to be revoked "immediately and irrevocably" got 4,698 signatures. The petition page now boasts of its "Confirmed Victory," not dissimilar to what Mashable calls the "horrifying victory" won by the Guardians of Peace.
3) Mozilla
In April, Mozilla bowed to demands to ditch its new CEO, Brendan Eich, after it was revealed that— horror of horrors—he isn't a huge fan of gay marriage. A mob demanded his metaphorical scalp, with OKCupid pleading with its users to boycott Mozilla's Firefox on the basis that "those who seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame, and frustration are our enemies, and we wish them nothing but failure." In short, Eich is an enemy of the people and therefore had to be expelled from public life, propelled into a life of failure for daring to hold and express the Wrong Views. Isn't there a country somewhere that similarly practices such expulsions from public view of the enemies of decency?
2) Edinburgh Fringe
This annual gathering of thespians and comedians for a month of performance and chatter is looked upon as a free-wheeling, open-minded cultural shebang. Not this year, it wasn't. A theatre called the Underbelly caved into protesters and cultural bigwigs who said its hosting of a hip-hop opera by an Israeli theatre company was an outrage. Luvvies hate Israel, you see. The Jerusalem-based company, Incubator, is part-funded by the Israeli government and that was enough to have keffiyeh-wearing liberals gathering outside the Underbelly every day to demand its show be shut down. Of course they didn't protest at any of the many performances part-funded by the UK government's Arts Council, despite the fact that the UK government has been involved in more wars and killed more people than Israel has over the past 10 years. But hey, moral consistency has never been censors' strong point. The Underbelly capitulated and sent the Jews into theatrical exile.
1) American universities
The slamming of Sony for caving in to foreign, terroristic bullyboys gives the impression that mob-like demands for censorship are a totally un-American activity. Yet at the heart of the American academy, a new breed of het-up, intolerant, debate-dodging student is likewise using pressure and cries of "I'm offended!" to have words they don't like extinguished. Controversial speakers are disinvited from campus or shouted down by angry mobs. Most alarmingly, in April Brandeis University cancelled plans to award an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali after a gaggle of bloggers and agitated students branded her "anti-Muslim" and unfit for Brandeis approval. A woman who escaped moral tyranny overseas being subjected to a new form of moral tyranny in her adopted homeland—possibly the most shameful cave of the year.
So all that hating on Sony before it changed its mind was, I'm afraid, too little, too late. Self-censorship has been rampant in 2014. We need a more consistent commitment to standing up to the intolerant, whether they're Western feminists, Scottish luvvies, or North Korean nutters, and to asserting the right of artists and writers to think, say, and depict whatever they like without requiring the approval of moral majorities or angry minorities. In 2015, let's make sure freedom of expression should trump individuals' sensitivities every single time.
The post Beyond <em>The Interview</em>: The Top 10 Cave-In Artists of the Year appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Now that Rolling Stone has retracted its University of Virginia gang-rape story—a piece of penny-dreadful writing dolled up as journalism—the hunt is on for the culprit in this fiasco. Who's to blame for the appearance of what seems to be straight-up fabulism in the pages of a once-respectable magazine?
Some are blaming "Jackie," the pseudonymous woman who claimed to have been gang-raped for hours by drunken frat boys yet who offered not so much as a smidgen of evidence to back up her tale. Others point the finger at Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the author of this piece, who failed to execute the most basic of journalistic tasks, such as finding the alleged rapists and, err, talking to them. Some hold the editors of Rolling Stone responsible, wondering what possessed them to give the green light to such thin-gruel hackery.
There's no doubt that all these people—from the student source to the credulous journalist to the clickbait-beats-factchecking editors—have a lot of questions to answer. But we also need to cast the net wider. We need to think about the broader climate that could allow such a tall tale to appear in an esteemed publication.
We now live in an increasingly Salem-like culture, in which people are called to suspend skepticism in relation to all allegations of rape, to say "I believe" the minute anyone claims to have been raped, and to be openly and proudly credulous in response to reports of rape. This cult of credulity, this constant chanting of "I believe!" has warped the public debate about rape and sexual assault. It has now reached its nadir in the shocking suspension of skepticism at Rolling Stone in response to a fabricated horror story.
If Erdely nodded along to Jackie's story while robotically thinking "I believe," she isn't alone. Automatically and uncritically believing allegations of rape is all the rage today. Where for most of the Age of Enlightenment it was considered civilized to believe that those accused of a crime were innocent until proven guilty, now it appears the way to show that you are a good and caring person is to do pretty much the opposite. You should believe instantly the alleged victim's every word, and by extension to believe instantly that the accused is guilty as hell.
So when Dylan Farrow claimed she was sexually abused as a child by Woody Allen, the meme "I Believe Dylan" spread like a pox across the internet. #IBelieveDylan trended on Twitter. At Indiewire, Melissa Silverstein said "There are a few fundamental beliefs that I hold, and one of them is that I believe women." All women? All the time? Including, say, Condoleezza Rice when she said Saddam had loads of weapons of mass destruction? This is silly. Women are just as capable as men of making stuff up.
The blogger Lindy West recently set up a website called "I Believe You, It's Not Your Fault," where women share their stories of sexual assault and everyone believes them. In the United Kingdom, the website Mumsnet, where Guardian-reading moms discuss the world's problems as a Polish au pair looks after their kids, launched a rape-awareness campaign called "We Believe You."
The allegations against Bill Cosby have likewise led to outbursts of instantaneous belief, with tweeters imploring us to "Believe The Victims" (they mean accusers) and sharing memes declaring that Cosby is a rapist.
The cult of credulity doesn't apply just to women. When Shia LaBeouf rather fantastically claimed to have been raped by a woman in a crowded hipster art gallery, the cult-like chant "I believe Shia" started to spread. A writer for The Guardian, under the headline "I believe Shia LaBeouf," says she was shocked to see "expressions of doubt" on the Internet in relation to LaBeouf's claims. This is the scary situation we now find ourselves in: When it comes to rape, to doubt, to be skeptical, is apparently an act of evil. Even in relation to LaBeouf, whose last extended bit of publicity revolved around his rampant plagiarism as a filmmaker and tweeter.
There's an air of cultish religiosity to the "I believe" movement. Like theism, it is based entirely on faith. It actively discourages and even pathologizes skepticism and is suspicious of calls for evidence. It demands that everyone suspend their skepticism, reject objectivity, and simply utter the mantra: "I believe you." It demonizes objectivity. To say we should be objective about all allegations of crime, including rape, is to run the risk of being branded a "rape apologist"—as I discovered last week when I wrote a piece for USA Today saying we must presume Bill Cosby is innocent because he hasn't been proven guilty, and quickly found myself branded "pro-rape." To be skeptical is to be suspect. To demand objectivity is to be an apologist for evil.
This cult of credulity is the bastard offspring of the "Believe The Children" movement of the 1980s. Back then, in the U.S. and Europe, it was de rigueur to believe every accusation of abuse made by a child, even if a kid claimed, often under the influence of psychologists, to have been ritually abused by Satanists. To express skepticism about any of this was to be branded an enabler of abuse. As the British child-abuse expert Jean La Fontaine argued in her book Speak of the Devil: Tales of Satanic Abuse in Contemporary England (1998), the slogan "we believe the children" pathologized objectivity: "It was emphasized that if adults did not believe children, [then] they were denying help to innocent victims." And so it is today: if you don't believe Dylan Farrow or Shia LaBeouf or "Jackie," then you're heaping further pain on "innocent victims." So instead, you shoul suspend your skepticism and BELIEVE.
This is the climate in which Rolling Stone could see fit to publish an incredible tale of abuse—a climate in which credulity is worn as a badge of pride and objectivity is tantamount to a sin. Now, even as the hollowness of Jackie's claims is exposed, #IStandWithJackie is trending on Twitter and a writer for The Washington Post says we must still believe, "as a matter of default," those who make accusations of rape, because "incredulity hurts victims." It seems as if they still cannot shake their belief in Jackie's story, because theirs is effectively a religious movement, based in blind faith and openly hostile to "expressions of doubt."
The "Believe The Children" movement had a disastrous impact on Western societies. Families were ripped apart on the basis of rumors and people were unjustly jailed. The "Believe The Women" cult is also harming society. It is whipping up a climate hostile to due process and warping one of the central ideals of civilized societies: that individuals are innocent until proven guilty. And it is needlessly spreading panic on college campuses, too. In pushing an expansive new law that will further curtail due process in the name of preventing sexual assault, Sen. Kristen Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) has claimed that "women are at a greater risk of sexual assault as soon as they step onto a college campus." As Slate's Emily Yoffe has documented, this is patently false. Women between the ages of 18 and 24 who are not on college campuses are in fact 1.7 times more likely to be the victim of violent crime, including sexual assault.
When you say "I believe this woman was raped," you are saying something else, too: "I believe the suspect in question is a rapist." This turns every principle of justice on its head. The presumption of innocence has existed in some form or other for centuries, going as far back as the sixth century Byzantine Emperor Justinian the Great, who said: "Proof lies on him who asserts, not on him who denies." In short, it is the accuser we should be skeptical of, and who we should doubt, and not the responsibility of the accused to disprove the claims made against them. The cult of credulity is laying to waste this civilizing ideal, through effectively saying: "She who asserts is telling the truth; he who denies is guilty."
Yes, Jackie and Erdely and Rolling Stone have some soul-searching to do. But let's not ignore the underpinnings to this journalistic debacle—the emergence of an illiberal, intolerant, unjust climate in which all "victims" are instantly believed, even by journalists, and in which, terrifyingly, a suspect can be condemned through accusation alone.
The post Rolling Stone and the Cult of Credulity appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In Britain, if you have extreme views on anything from Western democracy to women's role in public life, you might soon require a licence from the government before you can speak in public. Seriously.
Nearly 350 years after us Brits abolished the licensing of the press, whereby every publisher had to get the blessing of the government before he could press and promote his ideas, a new system of licensing is being proposed. And it's one which, incredibly, is even more tyrannical than yesteryear's press licensing since it would extend to individuals, too, potentially forbidding ordinary citizens from opening their gobs in public without officialdom's say-so.
It's the brainchild of Theresa May, the Home Secretary in David Cameron's government. May wants to introduce "extremism disruption orders", which, yes, are as terrifyingly authoritarian as they sound.
Last month, May unveiled her ambition to "eliminate extremism in all its forms." Whether you're a neo-Nazi or an Islamist, or just someone who says things which betray, in May's words, a lack of "respect for the rule of law" and "respect for minorities", then you could be served with an extremism disruption order (EDO).
Strikingly, EDOs will target even individuals who do not espouse or promote violence, which is already a crime in the U.K. As May says, "The problem that we have had is this distinction of saying we will only go after you if you are an extremist that directly supports violence. [This] has left the field open for extremists who know how not to step over the line." How telling that a leading British politician should be snotty about "this distinction" between speech and violence, between words and actions, which isn't actually some glitch in the legal system, as she seems to think, but rather is the foundation stone on which every free, democratic society ought to be built.
Once served with an EDO, you will be banned from publishing on the Internet, speaking in a public forum, or appearing on TV. To say something online, including just tweeting or posting on Facebook, you will need the permission of the police. There will be a "requirement to submit to the police in advance any proposed publication on the web, social media or print." That is, you will effectively need a licence from the state to speak, to publish, even to tweet, just as writers and poets did in the 1600s before the licensing of the press was swept away and modern, enlightened Britain was born (or so we thought).
What sort of people might find themselves branded "extremists" and thus forbidden from speaking in public? Anyone, really. The definition of extremist being bandied about by May and her colleagues is so sweeping that pretty much all individuals with outré or edgy views could potentially find themselves served with an EDO and no longer allowed to make any public utterance without government approval.
So you won't have to incite violence to be labelled an extremist —in May's words, these extremism-disrupting orders will go "beyond terrorism." May says far-right activists and Islamist hotheads who have not committed any crime or incited violence could be served with an order to shut the hell up. She has also talked about people who think "a woman's intellect [is] deficient," or who have "denounced people on the basis of their religious beliefs," or who have "rejected democracy"—these folk, too, could potentially be branded extremists and silenced. In short, it could become a crime punishable by gagging to be a sexist or a religion-hater or someone who despises democracy.
Never mind violence, you won't even have to incite hatred in order to be judged an extremist. As one newspaper report sums it up, the aim is "to catch not just those who spread or incite hatred," but anyone who indulges in "harmful activities" that could cause "public disorder" or "alarm or distress" or a "threat to the functioning of democracy." (By "harmful activities", the government really means "harmful words"—there's that Orwellian slip again.) This is such a cynically flabby definition of extremism that it could cover any form of impassioned, angry political or moral speech, much of which regularly causes "alarm or distress" to some of the people who hear it.
As some Christian campaigners recently pointed out, they are frequently accused by their opponents of being "extremists" and of "spreading hatred" simply for opposing gay marriage and taking other traditional stances. Will they potentially be silenced for saying extreme things and causing distress? It's not beyond the realms of possibility, given that May has said that anyone who wants to avoid being thought of as an extremist should "respect British values and institutions" and express "respect for minorities." Slamming gay marriage could very well be read as disrespect for a British institution (gay marriage was legalised here this year) and disrespect for a minority.
What the government is proposing is the punishment of thoughtcrimes, plain and simple. Its insistence that officialdom must now move beyond policing violence and incitements to violence and start clamping down on hotheaded, "harmful" speech that simply distresses people is about colonising the world of thought, of speech, of mere intellectual interaction between individuals—spheres officialdom has no business in policing.
But self-styled progressives, members of the left and those who consider themselves liberal, don't have much of a leg to stand on when it comes to challenging May's tyrannical proposals. For it is was their own arguments, their claims over the past decade that "hate speech" is dangerous and must be controlled and curbed, that gave legitimacy to May's vast silencing project, that inflamed the government's belief that it has the right to police heated minds and not just heated behaviour.
For the best part of two decades, so-called progressives have been spreading fear about the impact of dodgy words and dangerous ideas on the fabric of society. On campuses, in academia, in public life, they've continually pushed the notion that words hurt, that they cause terrible psychic damage, especially to vulnerable groups, wrecking people's self-esteem and making individuals feel worthless. From Britain's student-union officials who have banned Robin Thicke's 'Blurred Lines' in the name of protecting "students' wellbeing" to feminists who have demanded (and won) the arrest and imprisonment of misogynistic trolls, a climate of intolerance towards testy and vulgar speech has already been created in Britain, and the government is merely milking it.
May's proposal to set up a system of licensing for speech, essentially to provide a license to those who respect British values and deny it to those who don't, is the ugly, authoritarian endpoint to the mad obsession with hate speech that has enveloped much of the Western world in recent years.
We should defend extremists. Extremism can be good. I'm an extremist, especially on freedom of speech, which I don't think should ever be limited. Extremists enliven public debate; they sex it up, stir it up, forcing us all to rethink our outlooks and attitudes and sometimes to change our minds. A world without extremists would be conformist and dull and spiritually and intellectually dead.
Let's remember the words of the 17th-century poet John Milton in his impassioned argument against those authorities that last tried to license public expression: "Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties." Guess what was said about Milton after he said those words? Yep, he was called an extremist.
The post Britain Poised to Muzzle 'Extremist' Speech appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When the actor and comedian Steve Coogan (pictured) was made a patron of the Index on Censorship earlier this month, the British media's guffawing could be heard round the world. Coogan, you see, is a leading light in Hacked Off, the celeb-packed censorious outfit that has spent the past three years agitating for state-backed regulation of Britain's raucous tabloid press. For a venerable free-speech group like Index on Censorship to make the celebrity censor Coogan a patron is like the British Humanist Association giving a job to the Pope of Rome.
So it's understandable that large sections of the British press went into meltdown over Coogan's appointment. A writer for the Daily Mail said Index's embrace of Coogan was a "shabby betrayal of freedom of expression." Index was founded in 1972 to be a "champion of free expression," the Mail reminded us, yet now it cosies up to a man who has been the most visible, vocal advocate of state-legislated regulation of the press during the Murdochite phone-hacking scandal of the past three years.
This is a celeb who thinks "freedom of expression does not apply to those writing about his own affairs," said the Mail (Coogan was famously made irate by the muckraking tabloids after they exposed some of the shenanigans of his private life), yet he's now been welcomed with open arms by one of the world's best-known free-speech outfits that once "oppos[ed] tyrants in the Soviet Union and the Third World and passionately defend[ed] the freedom of the press."
On another level, though, it is odd that there has been so much shock at the shacking-up between Coogan and Index. Because, believe it or not, there are many incestuous links between those warriors for press censorship at Hacked Off and those one-time battlers for freedom of expression at Index on Censorship.
Indeed, the current campaign to enforce tighter state regulation of the press in Britain is being spearheaded by individuals who are intimately associated with, or who previously worked for, free-speech groups such as Index on Censorship, PEN International, and Liberty. This is the terrible, untold irony of the current war of words against press freedom in Britain: It is being waged by those who, just three or four years ago, were key players in the supposedly anti-censorship sections of Britain's liberal establishment. The eye-swivelling speed and ease with which these one-time complainers about censorship became cheerleaders for state-backed regulation of the press needs some explaining.
Hacked Off was founded in 2011 by the Media Standards Trust, a group devoted to "cleaning up" (some would say taming) British journalism. It was set up in response to the phone-hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch's Sunday tabloid the News of the World (now deceased), where some journos were using less-than-admirable methods for getting stories about celebs, royals, and ordinary members of the public who found themselves caught up in crimes or scandals.
With big-name actors Steve Coogan and Hugh Grant doing much of its bidding, and with effusive support from numerous influential writers, thinkers, and comedians from across the U.K., Hacked Off has been extraordinarily successful. Its demand for firmer state oversight of the naughty press has influenced everyone from Lord Justice Leveson, the judge who oversaw the 2011-2012 Leveson Inquiry into the phone-hacking at the tabloids and into the "culture, practices and ethics of the press," to the various politicians who have spent much of the year-and-a-half since Leveson published his 2,000-page report coming up with new ideas for how the press might be brought to heel.
Thanks in large part to Hacked Off, Britain now faces the very real prospect of the state venturing back into the world of the press and doing something it hasn't done for around 350 years: reprimanding press reporting which in its view is "unethical" and officially distinguishing between the good, ethically correct press (the broadsheets, basically) and the bad, unacceptable press (the tabloids). So the gains made by John Milton and other heroic historical figures who fought tooth-and-catapult against the state licensing of the press ("give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties," cried Milton in 1643) could be reversed by tabloid-haters like Coogan, Grant, and too many Members of Parliament to mention.
And who staffs a censorious outfit like Hacked Off? Who are its leaders? Incredibly, people from Index on Censorship.
It isn't just Coogan. Hacked Off's inaugural executive director and key thinker, the man who wrote its bible, Everybody's Hacked Off, is one Brian Cathcart—a former key writer for Index on Censorship.
Prior to becoming the architect of most of the arguments spouted by Coogan and Grant for state regulation of the press, Cathcart was best known as a contributor to and campaigner for Index on Censorship. Indeed, it was in his Index on Censorship blog that he first announced his decision to set up Hacked Off. On 4 July 2011, he told Index readers that he had got funding and support for a campaign to demand an official inquiry into the antics of the redtops, and Index readers didn't seem to think it was at all weird for a writer for a free-speech campaign group to start agitating for a state-led investigation of the culture and ethics of the press. On the contrary, they cheered him on, with one saying, "All the best in this vital campaign."
The government quickly heeded this cry for a public inquiry into the press—a cry first made on the website of Index on Censorship, let's remember. Ten days later, on July 14, 2011, Prime Minister David Cameron announced the setting-up of the Leveson Inquiry. Many of the censorious proposals later made by Lord Leveson were effectively cribbed from Cathcart's book, Everybody's Hacked Off. So, get this: Hacked Off was set up by a writer for Index on Censorship; its formation was first announced on the website of Index on Censorship; and the key Leveson arguments for tighter control of the press were first formulated by this former contributor to Index on Censorship.
There's more. Another of Hacked Off's most visible spokesmen, the former Member of Parliament Evan Harris, has previously worked with Index on Censorship on its campaigns for reform of the English libel laws. And last year it was revealed that one of the donors to Hacked Off is Simon Singh, the science writer, who has also worked with Index on Censorship on its libel-reform campaign. That so many Hacked Off people come from the Index on Censorship camp is, to say the very least, odd.
Other venerable free-speech outfits have likewise provided Hacked Off with people and arguments in its campaign to muzzle the low-rent press. Hacked Off's current executive director, taking over from Cathcart last month, is Joan Smith, a columnist for the Independent. She really hates the tabloids. When she gave evidence at the Leveson Inquiry, she described journalists like herself, who write for proper newspapers, as a "different breed" to tabloid hacks. Prior to taking the lead in the censorious campaign group Hacked Off, Smith was known for a different kind of campaigning: She was chair of the Writers in Prison Committee of PEN International, the anti-censorship campaign founded in 1921 which agitates for the right of writers to express themselves and publish their thoughts. Unless, one presumes, those writers are of a lower "breed" than the likes of Smith, in which case every effort can then be made to silence, punish, and imprison them—in Britain over the past five years of political hysteria about allegedly demonic tabloid behaviour, 104 newspaper staff have been arrested, questioned, often put on elongated bail, and some have been imprisoned.
How extraordinary that a woman who once campaigned for the rights of imprisoned writers should now steer a campaign group that cheers the imprisonment of tabloid journalists. And how extraordinary that the first two executive directors of Hacked Off should have come from the ranks of Index on Censorship and PEN International.
To see the extent to which Britain's liberal establishment has conspired with the attempted reintroduction of the boot of the state into the world of the press, just look at the list of 200 cultural bigwigs who earlier this year signed Hacked Off's letter demanding that the press sign up to Leveson's proposed state regulation by Royal Charter. Key writers who have for years depicted themselves as devotees of freedom of speech and the right to publish put their names on the dotted line for Hacked Off, including Michael Frayn, A.S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, V.S. Naipul, even Salman Rushdie. Many of these writers, most notably Rushdie, previously stood up for the freedom to speak, to utter, to scribble, to think, and many of them worked with groups like Index or PEN—yet here they now were signing a letter agitating for state policing of the press.
But surely Britain's best-known civil-liberties group, Liberty, has taken a stand against the campaign to demonise and muzzle the tabloid press? Well, not quite. In fact Liberty's director, Shami Chakrabarti, was an actual panel member of the Leveson Inquiry, one of the Great and Good who sat in judgement of the sinning tabloids in this modern-day Star Chamber.
So get your heads around these facts, if you can: The campaign to restrict the historic rights of the press to rabble-rouse and publish and be damned—rights fought for over centuries by some of Britain's greatest liberals—has been led from the very start by people associated with Index on Censorship, PEN International, and Liberty, and cheered on by the liberal establishment. It wasn't a brutal state or truncheon-wielding coppers who effectively brought to an end 350 years of relative press freedom in Britain—it was liberals; it was progressives; it was the cultural elite; it was people who have made a name for themselves over the past 30 or 40 years as supporters of freedom of speech, though we now know what a colossal con that was. Liberty and Index have since made fairly anaemic statements saying the state shouldn't venture too far into the press—but it's too little, too late. Index and Liberty people were central to creating the climate of hysteria that has allowed the British state to loom large over the press for the first time in nearly four centuries.
How can this be? How could yesteryear's agitators for writers' freedom become today's demanders of state regulation of the press? It's because, in truth, such people's commitment to freedom of speech was always pretty partial. It was always fuelled, less by a full-on, balls-out, consistent conviction that everyone, regardless of their "breeding," should have the right to think, say, and write whatever they pleased, than it was by a belief that some writers had very important things to say and that their liberties should be protected. It was a free-speech position always more outraged by the harassment of Nobel Prize-winning authors in places like Eastern Europe than by state intervention into the affairs of the hacks and dimwits here at home. It was driven by a feeling that the purveyors of fine literature and clever ideas deserved freedom of speech, but badly bred, foul-mouthed tabloid hacks? Fuck them. Imprison them.
The phone-hacking scandal in Britain killed off the News of the World, a Sunday paper that had been in existence since 1843. It has also killed off something else, though not many people seem to have noticed: It has laid to waste the claims of Britain's liberal, progressive establishment to be committed to freedom of speech. These individuals, and many of the people in groups like Index and PEN that were their intellectual homes, now stand exposed as censors in disguise, pretty happy to see the state pummel those writers and editors whose publications offend the educated liberal sensibility. The era of these middle-aged, bourgeois, partial pontificators about freedom of speech is now surely over; the remnants of their institutions should finally be swept aside, ideally by a new, younger generation of freedom-of-speech campaigners who actually believe in freedom of speech.
The post How British Liberals Sold Out Free Speech appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The most striking revelation about Elliot Rodger, the alleged Santa Barbara shooter, is that he had been in therapy for most of his life.
A family friend said Rodger had been seeing a therapist since the age of eight. Apparently he had visited a therapist "virtually every day" during his high school years. By the time of the massacre and suicide at the University of Santa Barbara over the weekend, when he was 22, Rodger reportedly had "multiple therapists."
Today it has been revealed that so central were his therapists to his daily existence that he emailed his hateful 141-page manifesto to them (and to his parents) 15 minutes before going on his stabbing and shooting spree.
I think Rodger's reported reliance on therapists from childhood through to adulthood deserves more analysis than it has so far received, because it potentially speaks to a dark side—a very dark side—of the modern therapy culture. There has been a mad dash to blame Rodger's actions on the misogynistic websites that he was known to visit, with some claiming these sites warped his mind and made him murderous. There has been far less focus on the therapy culture which by all accounts, and according to his family and friends, was a far more longstanding part of his life than his Internet habits.
Yes, he might have spent some late nights lurking on "men's rights" websites, but if the reports coming from those who knew him are to be believed, he spent 14 years visiting therapists.
To my mind, if we are going to say that any kind of "culture" was responsible for Rodger's rampage—and that is always a dangerous thing to do, since it lessens Rodger's own moral responsibility for what he did—then we might want to examine the impact of mainstream therapy culture rather than obsessing over the fringe misogyny culture he might have dabbled with.
We know a handful of things about Rodger. One is that he visited therapists. Another is that he was full of self-regard, was incredibly self-obsessed, and was utterly outraged when people, especially women, didn't treat him with the love and respect he felt he deserved.
It is possible that these two things are connected, maybe even intimately connected. For one of the main, and most terrifying, achievements of the modern cult of therapy has been to churn out a generation of people completely focused on the self and in constant need of validation from others; a generation that thinks nothing of spending hours examining and talking about their inner lives and who regard their own self-esteem as sacrosanct, something which it is unacceptable for anyone ever to dent or disrespect.
Could Rodger's fury at the world for failing to flatter his self-image as a good, civilized guy be a product of the therapy industry, of the therapy world's cultivation of a new tyrannical form of narcissism where individuals demand constant genuflection at the altar of their self-esteem?
Many thinkers have attacked the therapy industry's creation of a new and ravenous narcissism which demands constant flatter-feeding. In his classic 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism, the great Christopher Lasch said "the contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious." He said therapy culture, the post-'60s obsession with self-reflection, had created a new "narcissistic personality"; it had given rise to individuals who "depend on others to validate [their] self-esteem" and who "cannot live without an admiring audience." The therapeutic individual views the world as a mirror, constantly expecting to see his own image in it, said Lasch, where the earlier, more robust individual saw the world as an "empty wilderness to be shaped by his own design".
In her powerful essay "The Overpraised American," Christine Rosen said the "overarching goal" of most therapeutic tomes is to teach people "how to love oneself." She quotes one self-help book which advises people to "Have a love affair with yourself!" Rosen writes: "Today's commercialised therapy purveyors all begin with the same premise: Think first of yourself."
The end result is a new generation invited to focus more on their navels, on their apparently fantastically interesting inner selves, rather than on the world around them; a generation encouraged to see any kind of challenge to their self-esteem, whether it's a tough exam, a presumed slight or a difficult, controversial idea, as an intolerable assault on their inner god. As the late American philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain said, the era of therapy has created a "quivering sentimental self that gets uncomfortable very quickly, because this self has to feel good about itself all the time."
We see this everywhere today. We see it in university students who want to ban everything that they think harms their self-esteem, because they've been educated to see any attack on what they think and how they feel as utterly unacceptable. We see it in the growing cult of self-revelation and the search for validation on social networks like Twitter, where individuals' frenetic tweeting and their desperate desire for that all-important retweet speaks to the reorganization of society around the need for recognition, the need for an "admiring audience" to make the self feel puffed up. And we potentially see it, in its most extreme form, in Elliot Rodger, the son of therapy, who appears to be the ultimate "quivering sentimental self" made "uncomfortable very quickly" when he didn't feel good about himself.
It is striking how therapeutic is the language used by Rodger in his videos and his murder manifesto. He talks about how people's attitudes towards him "really decreased my self-esteem." He clearly sees such assaults on his self-esteem as unacceptable, saying "if they won't accept me… then they are my enemies." In short, fail to offer recognition to this damaged creature and you will pay the price. And then he makes the key cry of our therapeutic era: "It's not fair. Life is not fair."
Watch Rodger's video. The most alarming thing is how cool and well-spoken he is. This is a man used to talking about himself, following years of practice in therapy sessions. Clearly having decided to have a love affair with himself, Rodger terrifyingly declares: "I am the closest thing there is to a living god… Magnificent, glorious, supreme, eminent, divine!"
This isn't a religious thing. There's no evidence that Rodger thought he was a messiah, as other nutjobs have. Rather, it's a therapeutic thing. Therapy culture has created a new army of little gods made fearsomely angry by any perceived insult against their self-esteem. It has generated groups of people who, like something out of the Old Testament, think nothing of squishing things that offend them or hurt their sense of self-worth. It has made a whole new anti-social generation whose desire to protect themselves from emotional harm overrides the older human instinct to engage with other people and be tolerant of their differences. When Rodger says "I am a living god," he is speaking, not from any kind of wacky religious script, but from the mainstream bible of therapy. The cult of therapy convinces individuals they are gods and that their self-esteem is a gospel that must not be blasphemed against. As the New York Times columnist David Brooks once said of a therapeutic self-help guide to life, death, and life after death, "In this heaven, God and his glory are not the center of attention. It's all about you." The self has elbowed aside God; the self is God, as Rodger seems to have realised.
Perhaps we should see Rodger as a kind of therapeutic terrorist, using murder to gain recognition; his rampage can be seen as a very violent therapy session, a real primal scream in defense of his sacred self-esteem.
The post Could Therapy Culture Help Explain Elliot Rodger's Rampage? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>If there really were such a thing as a bullshit detector, a machine that bleeped upon encountering nonsense, it would probably go into meltdown whenever someone talked about second-hand smoke.
In the modern public sphere, there are few issues that are as riddled with myth, misinformation, contradictory claims and outright claptrap as the scare about what smokers' foggy puffing is doing to us innocent non-smokers.
In recent years we've been told that second-hand smoke, or passive smoking, as some people call it, is as bad as smoking itself and can give you lung cancer. And apparently if you are surrounded by it in a car that has its windows closed that is like being in the most smoky, nicotine-stained bar you could ever imagine (if such bars still existed, which of course they don't).
Yet it turns out that these claims about the toxicity and cancer-causing powers of other people's smoke are either untrue or unproven. So how do prissy anti-smoking campaigners and health-freaky politicians continue to get away with churning out tall tales about second-hand smoke? Why won't this panic die under the boot of actual facts? What gives it its Michael Myers-like ability to keep coming back, in a crazier form every time, wagging its warning finger at humankind?
The evidence-light nature of the second-hand smoke scare was on full display during British politicians' recent mean-spirited attempt to outlaw smoking in cars in which children are present.
Last week, the House of Lords, our unelected second chamber, gave its nod of approval to a new Bill that would make it an offense to smoke in a car with kids, even if the windows are open. The Bill is now working its way back to the House of Commons, and if a majority of the members there agree that coppers should have the right to stop and threaten with arrest any motorist who has that apparently deadly combination of a lit ciggie and a child in his vehicle, then the Bill will become law and another bit of Brits' everyday freedom will be stubbed out.
Smoking in a car with minors is already banned in Australia, Canada, South Africa and in some American states, including California, Maine and Oregon. These bans capture superbly the zealous miserabilism of the modern-day nannying'n'nudging set. They expose the new authoritarians' casual disregard for the notion of privacy, so that even our privately owned vehicles come to be seen as fair game for petty laws to curb and control what was once perfectly legal behavior; they reveal the nannying lobby's powerful distrust of everyday men and women, who are now viewed as so bone-headed and bereft of decency that new laws are required to prevent them from polluting their own children, both physically and morally; and they show what shockingly low esteem the ideal of autonomy is held in these days, so that anyone who stands up and says "I think adults should be free to choose what vices to indulge in and pleasures to pursue" is either laughed at for being naive or branded a wicked stooge for Big Tobacco.
So what evidence have British politicians cited for their desire to ban smoking in cars? Well, it's not really clear. Peruse British media coverage of the second-hand smoke issue and I guarantee you will end up bamboozled.
One of our public health ministers, Luciana Berger, said last week that the evil of puffing in cars with kids has to be squished because "a single cigarette can create concentrations of tobacco smoke in a car that is 23 times more toxic than a typical house." That "23 times" figure sounded familiar. Where have we heard it before? Ah yes, the prestigious British Medical Association (BMA) once claimed that lighting up in a car with the windows closed creates toxin levels that are "23 times higher than… a smoky bar."
Excuse me? Which is it? Is smoking in a car so nasty that it turns your vehicle into a hurtling smoke machine that is 23 times more toxic than a smoker's house or 23 times more toxic than a smoky bar? It can't be both. You don't have to be a peer-reviewed scientist to know that a smoky bar will be a hell of a lot smokier than a smoker's house, so is smoking in a car 23 times worse than the former or the latter?
It gets worse. The BMA has got into trouble for its version of the "23 times as toxic" claim. In 2011 it was forced to correct a press release that said toxins in a smoky car were "23 times greater than in a smoky bar," changing it to say that the toxins in a smoky car were actually only "11 times greater than in a smoky bar."
It gets even worse. One of the key studies cited by the BMA as evidence for its massively reduced "11 times as toxic as a smoky bar" claim actually says something quite different. Published in the prestigious American Journal for Preventative Medicine, the study found that in a car with closed windows, smoking generated particulate concentrations of 272 micrograms per cubic metre of air. And it found that in bars, the toxins levels were either similar (smoky bars in Massachusetts had 206 micrograms per cubic metre) or were around double that found in a smoky car (smoky bars in New York reached 412 micrograms per cubic metre).
So to summarize—smoking in a car possibly makes that car 23 times as toxic as a smoker's house, 23 times as toxic as a smoky bar, 11 times as toxic as a smoky bar, or less than doubly as toxic as a smoky bar. Got it?
The flimsiness of the evidence offered for a ban on smoking in a car with kids is typical of the promoters of second-hand smoke scare. These folk have also told us that second-hand smoke is an "invisible killer" (in the words of Britain's National Health Service) because it "causes lung cancer in non-smokers." Lots of people believe this claim. But there's no evidence to back it up. At the end of last year, the much respected U.S. Journal of the National Cancer Institute carried out an exhaustive study of the research and found "no clear link between passive smoking and lung cancer."
Unperturbed by that blow to their evidence-low but hyperbole-high claims, the anti-smoking zealots have now started talking about "third-hand smoke." This is the residue from smoking that sticks to walls and other surfaces. This week, a report from the University of California, Riverside claimed to have found that mice exposed to such "smoke" (it's not really smoke, of course) became a bit more hyperactive and developed liver problems. One science website headlined its report on the new study: "Third-hand smoke just as deadly as first-hand smoke." Seriously? Who but the most blinkered loather of the pastime of smoking could claim sans shame that touching a wall in a room where someone once had a cigarette is as bad as dragging nicotine into your lungs from an actual cigarette?
What next—"fourth-hand smoke," to describe coming into contact with someone who was once in a room in which someone once had a cigarette?
Why does this fact-lite fearmongering about second and third-hand smoke trundle on even as the evidence for it either falls apart or is laughed out of existence by serious research? It's because the whole idea of second-hand smoke isn't really a scientific one at all. No, it's more of a metaphor, a metaphor disguised as science. It's a pseudoscientific allegory for our highly suspicious era in which we're all expected, encouraged in fact, to see our fellow citizens, our work colleagues and even our own parents as toxic creatures whose very breath and touch might harm us.
What really underpins the obsession with second-hand smoke is not scientific evidence but today's broader culture of mistrust, our profound sense of alienation from one another. Second-hand smoke is one of the main mechanisms through which we're invited to see the world around us—its workplaces, bars, restaurants—as threatening, and that world's inhabitants—strangers, our colleagues, our own families—as poisonous. It speaks to, and further entrenches, today's fearful and atomised outlook, in which we're more likely to look upon other people as corrupters of our health and minds rather than as potential comrades or friends.
The profoundly anti-social nature of the second-hand smoke nonsense is summed up in advice offered by the U.S. Lung Association. It says you can protect yourself and your kids from second-hand smoke by keeping them away from "places where people usually smoke": "This could include restaurants, relatives' homes, cars, etc. The chemicals in tobacco smoke get into curtains, carpets, toys, furniture, walls, car seats, clothing, skin, and hair…"
In short, everywhere and everyone is dangerous; invisible toxic elements lurk in granny's carpets and restaurant curtains; in your cousin's hair and your kids' playmates' toys; on park swings, on public benches, on buses. Better to stay at home, in a totally smoke-free environment, than venture into the filthy world outside your front door.
What a dispiriting and divisive view of the world. Through the increasingly unhinged crusade against smoking, we have been cajoled with suspect science into viewing all people—even mom and dad—as the potential poisoners of our bodies and souls. The reason dodgy scientific claims about other people's smoke keep emerging is because they are moulding themselves around, and offering justification for, an already existing social malaise—one in which we are invited to fear people, to fear the world, to disavow autonomy, and to trust the state. The specter of the threatening, toxic Other, of he who smokes, is one of the main ways in which the authorities now encroach upon our everyday lives and cynically split man from man.
Enough. I would prefer to run the risk of getting a hacking cough through freely mixing with smokers than to live in a detoxified, disinfected society in which we're expected to judge every person and scenario by how many particulate concentrations they contain.
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]]>On both sides of the Atlantic, football teams with archaic names are under attack by self-styled guardians of proper speech and moral purity.
In Britain, the fans of Tottenham Hotspurs, a London-based soccer club, are being chastised for referring to themselves as "Yids." Yid, of course, is a derogatory term for Jew. Why do Spurs fans call themselves Yids? Is it some kind of weird self-abusive anti-Semitism? No, they use the Y-word in the same way some American blacks use the n-word – in order to defuse what was for many years a slur and transform it instead into a badge of identity pride.
This is something that fans of Spurs, which has historically had many Jewish supporters, have been doing for decades. Spurs fans joyously chant "We are the Yid Army!". The magic of this is that it utterly disarms any opposing fan who might have been planning to hurl some anti-Semitic abuse at Spurs – there's no point calling a Spurs fan a Yid when he's already loudly and proudly bellowing out the Y-word to describe himself.
Yet now the Yid Army is under assault by the PC Army, that gaggle of killjoys who cannot permit the existence of anything it finds unusual or offensive.
A coalition of football officials, anti-racism campaigners and commentators is trying to expunge the Y-word from football stadiums. London's Metropolitan Police have told Spurs fans the Y-word is "unacceptable." A fan was arrested at a Spurs game earlier this month and charged with a public order offense for the "crime" of calling himself a Yid. Imagine the police going around to Jay-Z's house and arresting him for calling himself and his friends niggas – that's how crazy this is.
Some context might be useful here: British football fans have of late been subjected to extraordinary levels of speech-policing.
At some stadiums, stewards wear head cameras to capture offensive chatter among fans. Liverpool football club has drawn up an actual list of words you are not allowed to say in its stadium, including everything from "nigger" and "queer" to everyday phrases like "man up" (sexist, apparently.) In Scotland, a new law—the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act—forbids fans from singing sectarian and political songs. The Yids are only the latest victims of the British authorities' war on football fans' traditions.
The Washington Redskins are also being lambasted for using an outdated word. "Redskins" was once commonly used as a pejorative term to describe Native Americans, so it is totally inappropriate for it to be used in the world of football, say the PC police.
This week, NBC sportscaster Bob Costas said the Redskins' name was a "slur." Even President Obama has got stuck in, saying that if he were in charge of Washington Redskins he would "think about changing" the name. There have been legal challenges to the Redskins' name, launched by Native American community leaders, but they've thus far proven unsuccessful.
The use of the name Redskins is different to the tag "Yid Army" in one way: where Spurs fans use the Y-word to refer to themselves, to their club's historic roots in London's Jewish communities, "redskins" is a term that refers to others, in fact to The Other, as Native Americans were seen for many years, particularly by racists.
Some will argue that it is one thing for an informal community of sports fans to ironically use a pejorative term about themselves, but it's another thing for a team to use a term that has traditionally been a slur against people that fall outside of its support base.
Perhaps. But the sport-based uses of the Y-word and the R-word also share something very important in common, which is that neither team, neither Spurs fans in Britain nor Redskins fans in the U.S., uses these terms abusively. There's absolutely no offensive intent. Indeed, these once-shocking words are denuded of their wickedness, emptied of their historic horribleness, when they're innocently uttered by proud modern-day sports fans either to refer to their cultural roots, in the case of the Yids, or just as a straightforward team name that has been in existence since 1933, as with the Redskins.
The Yid and Redskins controversies tell us a lot about the craziness of PC. Both are underpinned by the central conceit of PC: that the "right" of certain groups or individuals not to be offended trumps the freedom of speech of other communities.
But the right not to be offended is not a serious right. The desire to never feel offence is just sensitivity disguised as a right, emotional weakness dolled up as a "freedom from offence," and it is used as a battering ram against real liberties that actually matter—particularly the liberties of speech and association. The war of words against any team or informal community that speaks in a way decreed "inappropriate" by the self-elected guardians of correctness shows how imperious PC can be.
The simple fact is this—neither the name of the Redskins nor the tag Yid Army has any racial intent. On the contrary, when fans holler "Come on you Redskins!" or "We are the Yids!," they are making completely harmless, even positive statements, about themselves and the team they support. But that doesn't matter to the PC brigade, which is now so cut adrift from the real world inhabited by the rest of us that it cares not one jot for the context in which words are spoken.
PC violently wrenches words from their context and imbues them with an extraordinary power to do harm regardless of the meaning behind them. So even the positive use of the word Yid as a term of Jewish empowerment and the totally innocent, sports-based use of the word "redskin" can be interpreted by the overlords of PC as "racial slurs." This is mad. Surely in order to make a racial slur, you need to be a) racist and b) intending to make a slur? Not in the eyes of PC agitators, it seems, for whom context counts for nil.
Indeed, Britain's Football Association has decreed that dodgy words are unacceptable in football "regardless of their context." It was on this basis that, earlier this year, an FA official called Paul Elliott, who is black, was forced to resign for calling another black man a "nigger" in a cellphone text message.
PC's philistine disregard for the context in which things are said takes us back to a medieval attitude to language. It imbues certain words with an innate power to cause harm simply by being uttered. Like the kids in Harry Potter who never say "Voldemort" for fear that evil will befall then, so PC lobbyists tell us we must never say "redskins," "nigga," or "Yid," in any setting whatsoever, because such utterances might pollute minds, cause distress, damage souls—all modern versions of saying "unleash evil."
Once, censorship was primarily concerned with obliterating certain ideas, be it communism, fascism, or whatever. Now it has bigger ambitions: to blacklist not just certain ways of thinking but also certain forms of chatter and banter between friends and teammates. It wants to colonise not just our ideological universes, but our personal lives and friendships, our informal discussions, our very self-identification.
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]]>Which institutions, I hear you ask? Stuffy churches, perhaps, aghast that a song would promote casual sex? Islamic groups, maybe, believing that lines like "I know you want it" are not suitable for young ears, especially female ones? Or maybe it was killjoy police forces, not exactly renowned for their ability to chill out, which forbade the playing of Thicke's tune?
Nope, it was student unions. Five student representative bodies—at the Universities of Edinburgh, West Scotland, Leeds, Derby and Kingston—have banned Blurred Lines in all the premises in which they have dominion, including student bars and dancehalls, on the basis that it "undermines and degrades women" and "promotes an unhealthy attitude toward sex and consent".
Once upon a time, students' political leaders kicked against authoritarianism; now they enforce it.
In the space of a generation, they've gone from demanding the right of young adults on campus to listen to, dance to, read and watch what they want, to placing a paternalistic hand over students' ears and eyes lest they hear something a bit raunchy.
Blurred Lines, a massive global hit sung by Thicke with Pharrell Williams and the rapper T.I., has been the subject of controversy since it was released in March. The modern breed of sexless, censorious feminist has been particularly vocal in slamming both the song and its accompanying video, which features the three singers, fully clothed, cavorting with some very attractive models wearing only flesh-colored thongs. Blurred Lines is "creepy" and "a bit rapey," says one observer.
Now, British student unions have taken this shrill reaction to what is just a pretty good and perfectly harmless pop song to its logical conclusion. The student union at Edinburgh kicked things off on 12 September by banning Blurred Lines from every student building. It did this as part of its policy to "End Rape Culture and Lad Banter" on campus.
It's hard to work out what is most shocking about the Edinburgh union's ban-happy antics: the fact that it thinks nothing of behaving like a nun at a convent-school disco and switching off any song that mentions the sex act, or the fact that it has an actual policy to "end lad banter"—that is, to prevent young men from speaking in a certain gruff, licentious fashion. Quite when student leaders switched from fighting for students to fighting against them, and against their apparently demonic thought and speech patterns, is a mystery.
The Edinburgh union said Blurred Lines "trivializes rape," and in doing so it contributes to "a culturally permissible attitude to rape." Really? Are the minds of male students so malleable, so putty-like, that a single encounter with lyrics like "You're an animal, baby, it's in your nature" and "Let me liberate you" might be enough to push them towards committing rape?
Behind the Edinburgh union's pseudo-radical, feminism-justified banning of Blurred Lines there lurks the old, highly discredited spectre of media effects theory—the idea that media images and words pollute people's minds and make them behave in all sorts of sordid and even criminal ways. Just as Britain's stuffy old censors of the pre-1960s period refused to let the public read D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover on the basis that it might make them immoral and depraved, so today's youthful, rosy-cheeked student censors refuse to allow their charges to hear Blurred Lines on the basis that it could turn them bestial.
The instinct behind the Edinburgh union's banning of Blurred Lines is the same one that has motored every act of censorship in history: a paternalistic urge to keep the little people's base motives in check by protecting them from sexy, blasphemous, or shocking imagery.
Other student unions have followed Edinburgh's authoritarian lead. The union at Leeds University banned Blurred Lines on the basis that it "degrades women." Kingston University in London has banned it due to "the disrespectful nature of the lyrics." If universities only play songs with respectful lyrics, what will happen to gangsta rap, the Sex Pistols, the Velvet Underground, death metal, or any other musical genre that broaches the old chestnuts of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll?
Student leaders' intolerant war on Blurred Lines fits a depressing pattern in modern British university life. In the UK, as in other parts of the Western world, students have become extraordinarily censorious in recent years, seeking to obliterate from campuses any song, book, newspaper or person that has the temerity to offend their sensibilities.
Various British student unions have banned Eminem's songs (they're homophobic and misogynistic, apparently); the tabloid newspaper, The Sun (because it has a naked woman on Page 3, and men and women over the age of 18 can't possibly be exposed to tits); and right-wing or Zionist speakers—numerous unions have "No Platform" policies, which means they forbid inviting far-right or Zionist spokespeople to take part in debates on campus.
We seem to have nurtured a spectacularly narcissistic generation, many of whom seem truly to believe that it is perfectly natural and reasonable to demand the squishing of anything that offends them. This is the grisly end product of the self-esteem culture: having educated young people to believe that their self-esteem is sacrosanct, and that anything which dents it is evil, we cannot now be surprised that they believe they have the right to erect a moral, censorship-powered forcefield around themselves and their peers in order to ward off any idea or image or song that makes them feel bad.
Universities, or at least some of them, were once hotbeds of radicalism, sites of feverish and excitable political debate in which any idea was permissible, especially if it railed against adult society. Not now. Today, universities in Britain and elsewhere have become breeding grounds for nanny staters and nudgers, training courses for the blue pen-wielding authoritarians of the future. That's the most worrying thing about the student reps currently bashing Blurred Lines—one day, these joyless, casually censorious, fun-allergic misanthropes will be running Britain.
The post British Students Ban "Blurred Lines" From Their Own Universities appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Something has gone horribly wrong in Britain in recent years. The birthplace of John Milton ("Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience"), and John Stuart Mill ("Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service"), has become a cesspit of censoriousness.
The frequency with which the police and legal system now throw into jail anyone judged to have committed a "speech crime" is alarming.
On October 11, Barry Thew, a 39-year-old man from Manchester, was sentenced to eight months in jail—eight months!—for the crime of wearing a t-shirt that said, "One less pig — perfect justice".
He donned the t-shirt just a few hours after two police officers were shot dead in Manchester, on September 18. Some members of the public took offence at his flagrantly police-baiting tee, complained to the cops about him, and before you could say "Fuck da police" Thew was being found guilty of committing a Section 4A offence under England's Public Order laws—that is, he "displayed writing or other visible representation with the intention of causing harassment, alarm or distress."
On October 8, Matthew Woods, a teenager from Lancashire, was jailed for three months for—get this—writing jokes on his Facebook page.
Currently, a five-year-old Welsh girl called April Jones is missing. Woods decided to make some jokes about this, writing on FB stuff like "Who in their right mind would abduct a ginger kid?" and "I woke up this morning in the back of a transit van with [a beautiful girl] — I found April in a hopeless place."
Funny? No. Criminal? Apparently, yes. For telling these tasteless jokes to the infinitesimally small number of people who can see his Facebook page, Woods was found guilty under the Communications Act 2003 of sending "a message or other matter that was grossly offensive."
The judge described Woods' "crimes" as "abhorrent." I find the state's imprisonment of a teenager for telling jokes infinitely more abhorrent than Woods' sad stab at creating lolz.
These are only the most recent incidents of people being banged up for saying "grossly offensive" things. Last month, Michael Coleman, a member of the right-wing British National Party, was given a suspended eight-month prison sentence and 240 hours of community service for using the word "darkies" on his blog.
He blogged about what he stupidly considers to be "the difference in personality, perceptions and values of people of darker races and ourselves" and said Britain's current immigration policy amounts to "darkies in, whites out." For this, for expressing his petty prejudices on a little-read blog, he was found guilty of racially aggravated harassment. The politician who brought the case against him said his crime was to express views that are "not acceptable to the overwhelming majority of local people."
Social-networking sites are being subjected to the most stringent censorship. In July, a 17-year-old boy was arrested and questioned by police after he sent insulting tweets to British Olympic diver Tom Daley. The 17-year-old was spared jail but was issued with a "harassment warning." In March, a 21-year-old student called Liam Stacey was sentenced to 56 days in jail for making crude jokes on Twitter about a then very ill footballer called Fabrice Muamba.
Last year, following the summer riots that rocked many English cities, two young men were jailed for four years for setting up a Facebook page called "Smash Down Northwich Town," a reference to the town in Chester where they lived. The page was all about how cool it would be to have a local riot. No one accepted their invitation to riot, though; there was no "smashing down." Yet still the two men were convicted of a public order offense, criminalized for being fantasists effectively.
I guess we should just be grateful that The Clash were never banged up for likewise giving voice to riot fantasies in their 1977 hit "White Riot": "I wanna riot, a riot of my own."
Now, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), the body responsible for prosecuting crimes in England and Wales, is holding a series of meetings to clarify the law on tweetcrimes and FB misdemeanors, and to decide when it is legit, and when it isn't, to bring criminal charges for trolling or inflammatory speech online.
I can save it a bucketload of time by telling it right now when charges should be brought against web-users for speech-based affrays: Never. Ever.
Speech is either free or it isn't. And if it is, then that means everyone must have it—not just nice people, but also nasty people; not just the right-on, but also the racist; not just well-educated judges who use their free speech to spout BS about how abhorrent certain jokes are, but also immature tweeters, Facebook saddos, and unpopular bloggers who use their free speech to insult minorities or make bad gags about missing girls.
Granting the state the power to determine what is abhorrent and what is acceptable, which thoughts may be expressed publicly and which may not, is a dangerous game. At the moment, the state might "only" be locking up racist joke-tellers or teenage buffoons, but who knows who else might fall foul of today's self-styled shapers of public morality. Blasphemers, perhaps? Queen Elizabeth-bashers? Sexist porno makers?
Allowing the state to determine the rightness and acceptability of words and ideas doesn't only lead to gobsmacking levels of censorious authoritarianism—it also robs us, the public, of our right and our responsibility to work out what is true and to challenge what feels like dross in the arena of public debate. As John Milton put it 350 years ago, "Let Truth and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?"
The most worrying thing in Britain right now is the rise of the idea that individuals may be rightfully harassed and punished by the state if they hold views that are "not acceptable to the overwhelming majority of people," as was said of the racist blogger.
That's the end of eccentricity right there, of any element of danger and daring in public discourse. If being unpopular is seen as a sufficient justification for being arrested and put on trial, then who will ever dare put their neck on the line and say controversial, offensive, properly interesting things? The top-down enforcement of thought-policing doesn't only mean we will see fewer racist ramblings and less teenage stupidity—it also means there'll be less intellectual risk-taking, and a stifling culture of back-watching conformism.
Besides, society has no right to punish people just because the overwhelming majority of people don't like what they say, as John Stuart Mill argued decades ago: "If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind." Absolutely. Free all Britain's tweeters, t-shirt wearers, and bloggers now!
The post Britain's High-Tech Thought Police appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Remember when feminism was about The Sisterhood? About women clubbing together to stick it to The Man, patriarchy or whatever they were calling the system that kept them in a state of social subjugation?
Those days are gone. Today, if Caitlin Moran's wildly successful feminist tract How To Be A Woman is anything to go by, feminism is less a universal club and more a bitchy sorority, made up of well-connected women like Moran who consider themselves better, more spiritual and more "real", than other women, than lesser women, than what the Victorians might have called "fallen women". Feminism is now about asserting the moral superiority of enlightened women over unthinking, uncouth broads.
Moran is a columnist for The Times, Britain's newspaper of record, where she is paid a fortune to titillate that paper's largely Tory readership with tales of her countercultural antics. She reports from Glastonbury (rock festival for fortysomethings), interviews pop stars, and writes about what it is like to be "rock'n'roll" in the "Sea of Bullshit" that is mainstream modern Britain. (Yes, she really uses phrases like that.)
How To Be A Woman, her first book, was published in the UK last year and is now about to hit bookstores across the U.S. Described as "Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch as written from a bar stool", it is part memoir, part commentary on the habits and hopes of 21st-century women. It has been lapped up by British female writers, with Moran hailed as "the new face of feminism." Judging by a fawning piece in Slate, it looks set to win the approval of American feminists too.
What is striking about this treatment of Moran's book as a manifesto for the modern woman is that much of the book is… well, anti-women. It expresses supreme disappointment with the behavior, mores and grooming habits of vast swathes of womankind, especially those of a (whisper it) working-class persuasion.
Moran's book kicks off with a telling anecdote about her childhood in Wolverhampton, England. She recounts being 13 years old and 13 stone and running away from "yobs" (a British word for gruff, uneducated people) who were teasing her.
In the process of legging it from the brutes, it suddenly dawned on Moran that by dint of her youthful flirtation with radical culture she was better than these yobs, who "do not look as if they have dabbled much in either the iconography of the counterculture or the inspirational imagery of radical gender-benders". Moran says she felt like turning to her tormentors and yelling: "I have read The Well of Loneliness by famous trouser-wearing lesbian Radclyffe Hall."
This is a fitting story to start the book with, because, in essence, How To Be A Woman is one long countercultural boast, one big fat advert for the author's superior tuned-in outlook on life and culture in contrast with the outlook of "yobs". So where, for example, most men and women are obsessed with keeping themselves fit, plucked and preened, Moran says she prefers to be chilled out, to live "like it's 1969 all over again and my entire life is made of cheesecloth, sitars and hash". The book is full of such contradictorily ostentatious claims to coolness.
Moran is most keen to distance herself from those women who have, in her view, been brainwashed by mainstream culture, particularly by porno culture, and who therefore don't live "like it's 1969 all over again".
She devotes much of the book to the vagina and the question of why some women — Them — insist on shaving off their pubic hair. Apparently it is because pornography has programmed these women to turn themselves into hairless overgrown cherubs for the delectation of weird men. "Why do 21st-century women feel they have to remove their pubic hair? Because everyone does in porno", she says.
So Moran's refusal to shave — her possession of what she calls a "retro vagina" — becomes yet further proof of her immunity to the lure of porno culture and, by extension, her intellectual superiority to the drones of womankind who dutifully queue up for a Brazilian. This is why she goes on and on about her "big, hairy minge", her "lovely furry moof", the fact that it looks like there is "a marmoset sitting in my lap"—because this all speaks to her ability to do what millions of women are apparently incapable of doing: prevent the "the mores of pornography [from] getting into my pants".
Moran's chief contribution to feminist thinking is to argue that porn brainwashes women as well as men. Where 1980s feminists fretted like latter-day Victorian chaperones over the power of porn to turn men into rapacious beasts, Moran panics over its transformation of women into slavishly hair-free freaks. I guess this is progress of sorts, a more equal-opportunity form of sneering, in which both men and women are seen as automatons shaped by filthy films.
There is a powerful if unspoken class component to Moran's fear for modern womankind. She's particularly agitated by the kind of sexual language used by women from the lower orders. She hates their use of the word "pussy", which is a product of the fact that they "get all their sex education from pornography". In contrast, "I personally have a cunt", she says.
She doesn't like the word "boobs" either, because "boobs are, by and large, white and working class". She prefers to call her breasts "Simon and Garfunkel", because one is bigger than the other. She is bemused by "vajazzling", whereby a woman's pubic hair is removed and replaced with stick-on jewels, which is a popular practice in… guess where? In working-class parts of Britain, of course.
She hates lapdancing, in which largely working-class women strip for cash, but predictably she loves burlesque, in which largely middle-class women strip for cash. Burlesque is "lapdancing's older, darker, cleverer sister", she says, which is another way of saying what is implied throughout the book — that the sexual practices of Moran's social set are so much better and healthier than the sexual practices of that other social set. Moran praises Iceland for being the first country in the world to outlaw lapdancing clubs for feminist rather than religious reasons. Yeah! State authoritarianism! That's so 1960s!
Does Moran think she's being radical when she says women are driving themselves nuts keeping themselves hair-free and dolled up and when she depicts working-class women's sexuality as something peculiar, possibly even dangerous? If so, she couldn't be more wrong. Because both of those ideas are carbon copies of the sort of waffle promoted by respectable lady writers in the Victorian era.
Those long-dead snobs also fretted over women's obsession with prettification. The 1857 book Etiquette for Ladies said: "It is not too much to say that women in general, from a dread of falling into coarseness, neglect a good deal the care of their health." Today it is rad feminists like Moran who fight the "dread of falling into coarseness".
Also, just like Moran, decent Victorian ladies looked upon working-class women's sexuality as more animalistic than their own. As Elizabeth Langland put it in her book Nobody's Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture, in the Victorian era "women of the working class became vested with a dangerous sexuality, and middle-class women… became the guardians of spirituality". Moran, with her practiced rock-chick style and her constant railing against saucy mass culture, very clearly sees herself as a modern-day "guardian of spirituality".
Now we can see where the title How To Be A Woman comes from: Moran's book is, at root, a new etiquette manual for ladies, an instruction from on high, from far outside the Sea of Bullshit, about how women should speak, live, shave and fuck. Moran's treatise confirms the unstoppable backward march of feminism into the snobbery, sexlessness and censoriousness of the Victorian era.
Brendan O'Neill is editor of spiked in London.
The post Caitlin Moran Knows How To Be a Woman and You Don't appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Penn recently condemned Britain's "colonialist, ludicrous, and archaic" attitude towards the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, which Britain has claimed dominion over since 1833, and hinted that maybe it was time to hand the islands back to Argentina. Cue much fury in British media and political circles, where Penn has been branded "egotistical", "an idiot," "a fool," and a "vainglorious and ill-informed Hollywood actor" who should be "fed to crocodiles."
The crocodile thing might be going too far, but who can doubt that Penn is egotistical and vainglorious? This is, after all, a man so pompous that in 2002 he visited Iraq in order to see some of the people whose blood might one day be "on my hands" (nice, Sean), and he is so hilariously humorless that he couldn't even let Chris Rock's wisecrack about Jude Law being a non-entity pass uncommented on at the 2005 Academy Awards. ("Jude Law is one of our finest young actors", retorted Penn, proving that he's a liar as well as a fool.)
So no one could have been surprised when Penn, following a meeting with his buddy and president of Argentina, Cristina Kirchner, decided to hold a press conference at which he pontificated about British claims of sovereignty over the Falkland Islands. That is what bigheads like the former Mr. Madonna do. What is surprising, though—remarkable, in fact—is the impact that his comments made. They seriously rattled Britain. They provoked anger among leading British politicians. And they galvanized the actual inhabitants of the Falkland Islands to organize an anti-Penn motorcade. If Penn is just an idiot, how come his remarks delivered such a kick in the balls to the once-mighty U.K.?
This is the most revealing thing about the Penn affair—not that modern-day actors are arrogant enough to believe that their two-bit views on international affairs really matter, but the fact that their views do matter. The splash made by Penn's comments confirms the awesome and quite terrifying power of celebrity today, and shows that even the serious business of international sabre-rattling must now come with celebrity endorsement if it is to be taken seriously.
It is striking that, for a couple of weeks prior to Penn's pronouncement, the Argentine president had been trying but failing to land a blow on Britain. Following Britain's recent decision to send more military ships to the Falkland Islands, and its posting of Prince William there in a military role, Kirchner had made lip-wobbling statements about British "militarization" of the South Atlantic and had even sent her foreign minister to make an impassioned anti-British speech at the United Nations. These maneuvers made ripples, sure, but it took the deployment of the A-bomb (or perhaps A-List bomb) that is Sean Penn for Kirchner to properly grab the world's attention.
Kirchner's Penn-pushing suggests she is a wily leader. She has gradually come to the realization that, these days, getting a celeb to make a comment will make a far bigger dent in international consciousness than readying a warship or giving fist-waving talks at the UN or doing any of the other diplomatic bits and bobs of the B.C. (Before Celebrity) era. Clearly having encouraged Penn to say something provocative about the Falkland Islands, Kirchner was effectively saying to Britain: "I see your Prince William and raise you Sean Penn…" And if the response to Penn's comments is anything to go by, it seems pretty clear that Pinkos of Hollywood carry far more weight than Princes of Wales in international celebrity smackdowns.
At last, Kirchner had Britain in a stranglehold, and the world's eyes upon her. A minister in Britain's Liberal-Conservative government felt moved to condemn Penn. The British media went apeshit. While American outlets mulled over "Sean Penn's Falklands War" and made him their quote of the week, British papers yelled "Save us from these egotistical stars who think they are world statesmen" and railed against the "bleeding heart actor" and his "explosive remarks".
Most remarkably of all, the few thousand inhabitants of the Falkland Islands felt moved to organize a mile-long, pseudo-militaristic motorcade, at which they waved the U.K. flag and placards saying "Falk You, Sean." You could be forgiven for thinking that Penn was on his way to the islands in a warship, perhaps with a mercenary army of likeminded Concerned Celebs such as George Clooney and Matt Damon (whose name I still can't say in a normal voice, not since Team America: World Police).
Kirchner has discovered that, in international face-offs, the Penn is now mightier than the sword. The Penn affair reveals something very important about today's speedily growing celebrity culture—it shows that it is motored, not so much by voyeurism amongst the lower orders and white-trash magazine-readers, as we are so often told, but rather by a profound crisis of authority among our rulers and betters. It is the upper echelons' lack of moral authority, their estrangement both from the public and from the old, accepted ways of doing politics, which has encouraged them to cultivate celebrity as a new source of authority.
More and more political leaders now outsource authority to celebrities. George W. Bush aided and abetted in the transformation of Bono into spokesman for the whole Third World, to the extent that Bono was invited to a G8 gathering (as "the People's Republic of Bono", joked one British journalist). Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown once had a chat with Angelina Jolie about what to do with Africa. The Hague made supermodel Naomi Campbell testify at the trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, partly because it wanted to bring the "spotlight" to this important political matter.
Again and again, leaders who feel they lack the purchase or gravitas or old-fashioned moral authority to make certain claims or front certain campaigns call upon celebs to do their dirty work for them. As a result the prefix "celebrity"—as in celebrity campaigner, celebrity doctor, celebrity chef—now enjoys far more clout in the public realm than old-world prefixes such as "political", "royal," and even "elected".
Kirchner has simply taken this trend to its bizarrely logical conclusion, so that we now have celebrity warfare. Whether Penn will be brave enough actually to board any ship that Argentina sends into a future Falklands war remains to be seen.
Brendan O'Neill is editor of spiked in London.
The post Why World Leaders Call On Celebrities to Do Their Dirty Work appeared first on Reason.com.
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