🐱 Interesting clickbait, op-eds, fluff pieces and other smaller stories
- Thread starter CatParty
- Start date
CatParty
- Joined
- Oct 6, 2018
- Joined
- Mar 20, 2019
Shit man, just skip school or go to A-school. Don't fucking Bobby Hill IRL it.
Fucking bath salts, how do they work? Seriously though, they found him all dehydrated out and shit, either the fucker took drugs way out of his league or his brain just spontaneously gave out to dementia one day.
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2016
Update on this if anyone cares. It seems like the father that ran away and jumped a fence was initially carrying the baby. But when he heard the gunfire he dropped the baby while running, the mother stopped and picked it up and got shot in the back of the head.
- Joined
- Feb 3, 2013
The 'Bi-Chair' Is Designed for People Who Don't Sit Properly, and Som…
archived 30 Aug 2019 19:51:43 UTC
Apparently, it's a well-known fact that bisexual people can't sit properly. Sitting up with your back flush to the chair back and both feet on the ground? That's a sitting position for straight people. It's so "true" that bisexual people don't know how to sit properly that it became a meme.
And then an artist and designer took that meme and designed a chair specifically for bi people. And then a dude with a bisexual kid thought that design was so perfect and funny that he actually built it. And that's how the "Bi-Chair" became a reality.
The notion that bi people never sit normally in chairs may sound like a strangely specific stereotype, but it was actually spread by bi people themselves. Apparently, it's a thing. Sitting with one leg up on the chair, slouched down so you're almost falling off, or spread eagle and hunched over your legs is now a distinctive trait of bi culture.
It was with this hilarity in mind that Brazilian artist Má Matiazi doodled off a design for the "Bi-Chair," which is "designed for people who can't sit straight." Má posted her simple, funny design to her Instagram page on July 26.
The design truly seems perfect for people who can't bring themselves to sit upright with their feet on the floor. And I'm not the only one who thought so. Israel Walker is a Starbucks barista and former member of the Air Force who learned about "bisexual sitting" from his bi, nonbinary daughter. They all thought it was super funny and rooted in truth.
So, he did what any true ally and father would do: He reached out to Má to ask if he could attempt to actually build the "Bi-Chair," recreating her design. She said yes, and so he did it! He actually brought the Bi-Chair to life, and not going to lie, it is glorious.
Israel posted his handiwork to Facebook in a post that went completely viral. People are loving it. "THIS IS SO PURE," one commenter wrote. "Yo, you need to patent this ASAP," another business-minded commenter wrote. "It's perfect." I mean, just look at it! This person isn't wrong.
Speaking with Daily Dot, Israel admitted that his design is slightly different from Má's. It's a little bit rougher and has shorter, unfinished arms. He added a cutout for the knee rest as opposed to a two-tiered sloping piece of material. Still, it's clearly Má's innovation come to life, and, as Walker's daughter demonstrates in the pictures he posted, the chair totally works as intended.
I mean, come on! He totally nailed it! She looks so natural sitting like that in this chair made just for her. What a dad. What an architect. If the bi community has anything to say about this, it's only a matter of time before these chairs are available in stores everywhere.
So many people in the comments want to see these Bi-Chairs mass-produced. I know I do. God knows bi people have put up with enough crap over the years, what with these dumb, four-legged, one-tiered chairs. It's just not fair.
- Joined
- Jul 28, 2019
Australia to block internet domains that host extremist content during terror attacks
Australia will block access to internet domains hosting terrorist material during crisis events such as terrorist attacks, officials said on Sunday.venturebeat.com
Australia to block internet domains that host extremist content during terror attacks
REUTERS AUGUST 26, 2019 11:31
(Reuters) — Australia will block access to internet domains hosting terrorist material during crisis events and will consider legislation to force digital platforms to improve the safety of their services, officials said on Sunday.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who is in France to take part in the G7 leaders’ forum, said the government intended to prevent extremists from exploiting digital platforms to post extremely violent content.
“We are doing everything we can to deny terrorists the opportunity to glorify their crimes,” he said in a statement.
Australia and New Zealand have increased scrutiny of websites and social media companies in the wake of the Christchurch massacre in March, when 51 worshippers were killed in attacks on two New Zealand mosques.
The attack was livestreamed by alleged gunman Brenton Tarrant over Facebook.
The government said it would establish a framework to block domains hosting such material. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner would determine on a case-by-case basis what should be censored, and was working with industry on arrangements to quickly block access during an attack.
A 24/7 Crisis Coordination Centre would be established to monitor the online world for extreme violence or terrorist material.
In addition to extremist violence, domains hosting any abhorrent violent material – defined as content showing murder, attempted murder, rape, torture, or kidnapping – that is recorded by anyone involved in the conduct also would be blocked, the government said.
The government did not elaborate on what legislative options would be used if digital platforms failed to improve safety.
Tech giants including Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, Microsoft and Twitter, along with Telstra, Vodafone, TPG and Optus are expected to provide details to the government by the end of next month on how they will carry out the recommendations.
The firms are all members of the Taskforce to Combat Terrorist and Extreme Violent Material Online, which had recommended a clear framework be established.
It was not immediately clear how the move would affect media reporting of terror attacks or civil unrest.
SKY Network Television was fined NZ$4,000 ($2,560) by New Zealand’s Broadcasting Standards Authority earlier this month for showing a number of edited clips taken from the alleged Christchurch attacker’s 17‑minute livestream video.
The regulator said in its judgment that, while the broadcast was newsworthy, the clips contained disturbing violent content which could cause distress, or glorify the alleged attacker and promote his messages.
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There's no chance this will be abused is there ?
They're going to block sites hosting terrorist material. And violence. And any media outlets reporting it will be fined too. So in theory, something similar to 9/11 being broadcast live could end up with TV stations being fined ?
Shut it down.
- Joined
- Aug 4, 2018
I'd kill my mom too if I were a boy named Lindsey.
Kinda funny considering how many of these people deny bisexuality exists.
- Joined
- Jul 28, 2019
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
It's so nice to know that during a terror attack, limited law enforcement resources will be being squandered trying to shut down shitposting about it, while people are literally being shot in the streets.
- Joined
- Jul 28, 2019
Maybe I'm over thinking this but if someone live streamed a terror attack on Facebook, which then gets shut down temporarily, then isn't it possible that some people won't know what's going on & end up travelling to where the attack is taking place ? Their town centre for example ?
- Joined
- Jan 6, 2019
imagine someone coordinating a terrorist attack with fake government messaging to the censors at ISPs feeding them instructions to allow for wider damage
- Joined
- Apr 15, 2019
Why is this NOT being called a terrorist attack?
www.thesun.co.uk
Teenager dead & six injured after '2 knifemen' attack public near Lyon
A TEENAGER is dead and another nine people are injured after a knifeman went on a bloodthirsty rampage today near Lyon, it has been reported. An Afghan immigrant, named locally as Sultan Marmed Nia…
www.thesun.co.uk
- Joined
- Jul 28, 2019
Why is this NOT being called a terrorist attack?
Teenager dead & six injured after '2 knifemen' attack public near Lyon
A TEENAGER is dead and another nine people are injured after a knifeman went on a bloodthirsty rampage today near Lyon, it has been reported. An Afghan immigrant, named locally as Sultan Marmed Nia…
In case it offends the Muzz population & you know what happens when they get offended. It seems a fairly clear cut example of Islamic terrorism to me but I expect they'll put it down to "mental health."
I've not read the Sun article yet because I just read it in the Mirror, where they say that a possible motive for the attack was not known.
Jihad Watch are on the ball though & have posted a call from ISIS to Muslims in France as a possible motive :
Edit : Now I've read your link, they're saying that he gave 3 reasons for the attack but didn't mention any terrorist organisations. So why haven't they told us what his reasons were ?
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
Why is this NOT being called a terrorist attack?
Teenager dead & six injured after '2 knifemen' attack public near Lyon
A TEENAGER is dead and another nine people are injured after a knifeman went on a bloodthirsty rampage today near Lyon, it has been reported. An Afghan immigrant, named locally as Sultan Marmed Nia…
Because it's based on what the reasons for the act are. It isn't terrorism every time a crazy person does something crazy. If the unidentified "three reasons" are political, though, it's terrorism, and if it turns out the media outlet knew the reasons and they were terroristic and deliberately concealed them, then the reason it isn't being called a terrorist attack is because the media is actively covering it up because of political correctness trumping reality.
It would also probably be terrorism if there's anyone else involved like the alleged second attacker but almost every attack has these bullshit second attackers who never turn out to actually exist.
- Joined
- Jul 28, 2019
The Mirror & a French news site are both now reporting that witnesses say the attacker shouted : " They don't read the Koran" during the attack.
Well, the attacker probably read it & look what happened, so why the fuck would we want to read their terrorism manual ?
- Joined
- Jul 28, 2019
For those who've never heard of him, Murray is a gay, British, conservative, author & journalist who is one of the few Brits in the media who are willing to speak out against PC culture, mass immigration & Islam. Which in this country, is actually very brave in the current climate. I think he makes some interesting points & observations here, which are highly relevant to all Western countries.
DOUGLAS MURRAY: How did the world lose its marbles? A new dogma that has turned beliefs that once seemed common sense into hate crimes. Say the 'wrong thing' and you'll be thrown to the wolves
We are going through a great mass derangement. In public and in private, people are behaving in ways that are increasingly irrational, feverish, herd-like and unpleasant. The news is filled with the consequences. Yet while we see the symptoms everywhere, we don’t see the causes.
Various explanations have been given, usually involving Donald Trump, Brexit, or both. But these explanations don’t get to the root cause of what is happening. For beneath all the day-to-day madnesses – over race, sex, sexuality, gender and the rest – are much greater movements and much bigger events. Even the origin of this mass derangement is rarely acknowledged. This is the simple fact that we have been living through a period of more than a quarter of a century in which all our grand narratives about our existence have collapsed.
Religion went first, falling away from the 19th Century onwards. Then, over the past century, the secular hopes held out by all political ideologies followed. In the latter part of the 20th Century, we entered the post-modern era, defined by its suspicion towards grand narratives.
However, nature abhors a vacuum. People in today’s wealthy Western democracies could not simply remain the first people in recorded history to have no explanation for what we are doing here and no story to give life purpose.
The question of what exactly we are meant to do now – other than get rich and have fun – was going to have to be answered by something. The answer that has presented itself in recent years has been to live in a permanent state of outrage. To find meaning by waging constant war against anybody who seems to be on the wrong side of a question to which the answer has only just been altered.
The bewildering speed of this process has been principally caused by the Silicon Valley giants (notably Google, Twitter and Facebook). They have the power not just to direct what most people in the world know, think and say, but have a business model which has accurately been described as relying on finding ‘customers ready to pay to modify someone else’s behaviour’.
But today’s wars of ideas are not random – they are consistently being fought in a new and particular direction. And that direction has a purpose that is vast. The purpose – unwitting in some people, deliberate in others – is nothing less than to embed a new religion into our societies.
Though the foundations had been laid over several decades, it is only since the financial crash of 2008 that there has been a march into the mainstream of ideas that were previously known solely on the obscurest fringes of academia.
The interpretation of the world through the lens of ‘social justice’ and ‘identity group politics’ is probably the most audacious and comprehensive effort since the end of the Cold War at creating a new ideology.
To date, ‘social justice’ has run the furthest because it sounds – and in some versions is – attractive. Even the term is set up to be impossible to argue with. ‘You’re opposed to social justice? What do you want, social injustice?’
The attractions are obvious. After all, why should a generation which can’t accumulate capital have any great love of capitalism? And it isn’t hard to work out why a generation who believe they may never own a home could be attracted to an ideological world view which promises to sort out every inequality. The place where social justice finds its warriors is identity politics. This atomises society into different interest groups according to sex (or gender), race, sexual preference and more. It presumes that such characteristics are the main, or only, relevant attributes of their holders and that they bring an added bonus. As the American writer Coleman Hughes has put it, it assumes there is ‘a heightened moral knowledge’ that comes with being black or female or gay. It’s why people start statements with ‘Speaking as a ...’. And this new religion is something that people both living and dead must be on the right side of.
That’s why there are calls to pull down statues of historical figures viewed as being on the wrong side and it is why the past needs to be rewritten to suit any interest group you wish to champion.
Identity politics is where minority groups are encouraged to simultaneously atomise, organise and go on the attack. Tied into this is something social justice warriors call ‘intersectionality’ – the notion that there is a hierarchy of oppressed minorities and society should organise itself around correcting this.
Today, intersectionality has broken out from the social science departments of the universities from which it originated into the mainstream. It’s now taken seriously by millennials and has become embedded via employment law (through a ‘commitment to diversity’) in all major corporations and governments.
The speed at which the ‘social justice’ causes have taken over everyday life is staggering. Once-obscure phrases such as ‘LGBTQ’, ‘white privilege’, ‘the patriarchy’ and ‘transphobia’ are suddenly heard everywhere – even though in the words of mathematician Eric Weinstein, they were ‘all made up about 20 minutes ago’. The policing of these issues is an even more recent phenomenon. Researchers found that phrases like ‘triggered’ and ‘feeling unsafe’ only spiked in usage from 2013 onwards.
It is as though, having worked out what it wanted, the new religion took a further half-decade to work out how to impose its credo on non-believers. But it has done so with frightening success.
The maddening results can be seen on a daily basis. It’s why a British academic study which found muscular, wealthy men are more attractive could be headlined by Newsweek magazine as: ‘Men with muscles and money are more attractive to straight women and gay men – showing gender roles aren’t progressing.’
It’s why a previously completely unknown programmer at Google could be sacked for writing a memo suggesting some tech jobs appeal more to men than women. It is why The New York Times ran a piece by a black author with the title: ‘Can my children be friends with white people?’ And it’s why a piece about cycling deaths in London written by a woman was framed through the headline: ‘Roads designed by men are killing women.’
Such rhetoric exacerbates existing divisions and creates new ones. For what purpose? Rather than showing how we can all get along better, the lessons of the last decade appear to be exacerbating a sense that in fact we aren’t very good at living with each other.
For most people, awareness of this new religion has become clear not so much by trial as by public error. Because one thing that everybody has begun to sense in recent years is that a set of tripwires have been laid across the culture. Among the first tripwires was anything to do with homosexuality. In the latter half of the 20th Century, there was a fight for gay equality which rightly succeeded in reversing a terrible historic injustice. Then, the war having been won, it didn’t stop. Indeed it began morphing. GLB (Gay, Lesbian, Bi) became LGB so as not to diminish lesbians. Then a T for ‘trans’ and a Q for ‘queer’ or ‘questioning’ got added. Then the movement behaved – in victory – as its opponents once did, as oppressors.
When the boot was on the other foot, something ugly happened.
A decade ago, almost nobody was supportive of gay marriage. Even gay rights group Stonewall wasn’t in favour. Now it’s a central tenet of modern liberalism. To fail the gay marriage test – only years after almost everybody failed it – is to put yourself beyond the pale.
People may agree with or disagree with gay marriage. But to shift mores so fast needs to be done with sensitivity and deep thought. Yet we engage in neither.
Other issues followed a similar pattern. Women’s rights had also been steadily accumulated throughout the 20th Century. They too appeared to be arriving at some sort of settlement. Then, just as the train appeared to be reaching its desired destination, it filled with steam again and went roaring off into the distance. What had been barely disputed until yesterday became a cause to destroy someone’s life today. Whole careers were scattered and strewn as the train careered along its path.
Careers like that of the 72-year-old Nobel Prize-winning UCL Professor Tim Hunt were destroyed after one lame joke, at a conference in South Korea, about men and women falling in love in the lab. What was the virtue of making relations between the sexes so fraught? Why, when women had broken through more glass ceilings than at any other time, did talk of ‘the patriarchy’ seep out of feminist fringes and into popular culture?
In a similar fashion, the civil rights movement in America, which started to right the most appalling of all historic wrongs, looked like it was moving towards some hoped-for resolution. Again, near the point of victory everything soured.
Just as things appeared better than ever before, the rhetoric started suggesting things had never been worse.
The most recent tripwire addition, and most toxic of all of them, is the trans issue. It affects the fewest number of people, but is nevertheless fought over with an almost unequalled ferocity and rage. Women who have got on the wrong side of the issue, including notable feminists like Julie Bindel and Suzanne Moore, have been hounded by people who used to be men.
Meanwhile, mothers and fathers who voice concerns that ten years ago would have been considered common sense have their fitness to be parents questioned. People who will not concede that men can be women (and vice versa) can amazingly now expect a knock on the door from police.
Last September, a billboard that comprised the dictionary definition ‘woman: noun, adult human female’ was taken down after someone complained it was a ‘symbol that makes transgender people feel unsafe’.
Everyone knows what they will be called if their foot nicks against society’s new tripwires. Bigot, homophobe, sexist, misogynist, racist and transphobe are for starters. To avoid these accusations, citizens must prove their commitment to fashionable causes.
How might somebody demonstrate virtue in this new world? By being ‘anti-racist’, clearly. By being an ‘ally’ to LGBT people, obviously. By stressing how ardent your desire is to bring down the patriarchy.
And this creates a situation where public avowals of loyalty to the system must be made regardless of whether it’s needed. It’s an extension of a problem in liberalism identified by the late political philosopher Kenneth Minogue as ‘St George in retirement’ syndrome. After slaying the dragon, the warrior finds himself stalking the land looking for more glorious fights. Eventually, after tiring himself out in pursuit of ever-smaller dragons, he may eventually be found swinging his sword at thin air, imagining dragons.
Today our public life is dense with people desperate to slay imagined dragons. On all the big issues, an increasing number of people, with the law on their side, now pretend that all questions have been resolved, all answers agreed upon – and that no good person can have any doubts. The case is very much otherwise.
Each of these issues is infinitely more complex and unstable than our societies admit. Yet while the endless contradictions, fabrications and fantasies within each are visible, identifying them is not just discouraged but policed.
And so we are asked to agree to things which we cannot believe, and told not to object to things to which most people object, such as giving children drugs to stop them going through puberty or allowing men who self-identify as female to use female toilets. The pain that comes from being expected to remain silent on important matters and perform impossible leaps on others is tremendous, not least because the problems are so evident.
As anyone who has lived under totalitarianism can attest, there is something demeaning and eventually soul-destroying about being expected to go along with claims you do not believe to be true.
If the belief is that all people should be regarded as having equal value and be accorded equal dignity, then that may be all well and good. But if you’re asked to believe there are no differences between men and women, racism and anti-racism, homosexuality and heterosexuality, then this will drive you to distraction. That distraction is something we’re in the middle of and something we must try to find our way out from. If we fail, the direction of travel is clear.
We face not just a future of ever-greater atomisation, rage and violence, but a future in which the possibility of a backlash against all rights advances – including the good ones – grows more likely.
A future in which racism is responded to with racism, denigration based on gender is responded to with denigration based on gender. At some stage of humiliation there is simply no reason for majority groups not to retaliate with the exact same weapons that have worked so well on themselves.
DOUGLAS MURRAY: How did the world lose its marbles? A new dogma that has turned beliefs that once seemed common sense into hate crimes. Say the 'wrong thing' and you'll be thrown to the wolves
We are going through a great mass derangement. In public and in private, people are behaving in ways that are increasingly irrational, feverish, herd-like and unpleasant. The news is filled with the consequences. Yet while we see the symptoms everywhere, we don’t see the causes.
Various explanations have been given, usually involving Donald Trump, Brexit, or both. But these explanations don’t get to the root cause of what is happening. For beneath all the day-to-day madnesses – over race, sex, sexuality, gender and the rest – are much greater movements and much bigger events. Even the origin of this mass derangement is rarely acknowledged. This is the simple fact that we have been living through a period of more than a quarter of a century in which all our grand narratives about our existence have collapsed.
Religion went first, falling away from the 19th Century onwards. Then, over the past century, the secular hopes held out by all political ideologies followed. In the latter part of the 20th Century, we entered the post-modern era, defined by its suspicion towards grand narratives.
However, nature abhors a vacuum. People in today’s wealthy Western democracies could not simply remain the first people in recorded history to have no explanation for what we are doing here and no story to give life purpose.
The question of what exactly we are meant to do now – other than get rich and have fun – was going to have to be answered by something. The answer that has presented itself in recent years has been to live in a permanent state of outrage. To find meaning by waging constant war against anybody who seems to be on the wrong side of a question to which the answer has only just been altered.
The bewildering speed of this process has been principally caused by the Silicon Valley giants (notably Google, Twitter and Facebook). They have the power not just to direct what most people in the world know, think and say, but have a business model which has accurately been described as relying on finding ‘customers ready to pay to modify someone else’s behaviour’.
But today’s wars of ideas are not random – they are consistently being fought in a new and particular direction. And that direction has a purpose that is vast. The purpose – unwitting in some people, deliberate in others – is nothing less than to embed a new religion into our societies.
Though the foundations had been laid over several decades, it is only since the financial crash of 2008 that there has been a march into the mainstream of ideas that were previously known solely on the obscurest fringes of academia.
The interpretation of the world through the lens of ‘social justice’ and ‘identity group politics’ is probably the most audacious and comprehensive effort since the end of the Cold War at creating a new ideology.
To date, ‘social justice’ has run the furthest because it sounds – and in some versions is – attractive. Even the term is set up to be impossible to argue with. ‘You’re opposed to social justice? What do you want, social injustice?’
The attractions are obvious. After all, why should a generation which can’t accumulate capital have any great love of capitalism? And it isn’t hard to work out why a generation who believe they may never own a home could be attracted to an ideological world view which promises to sort out every inequality. The place where social justice finds its warriors is identity politics. This atomises society into different interest groups according to sex (or gender), race, sexual preference and more. It presumes that such characteristics are the main, or only, relevant attributes of their holders and that they bring an added bonus. As the American writer Coleman Hughes has put it, it assumes there is ‘a heightened moral knowledge’ that comes with being black or female or gay. It’s why people start statements with ‘Speaking as a ...’. And this new religion is something that people both living and dead must be on the right side of.
That’s why there are calls to pull down statues of historical figures viewed as being on the wrong side and it is why the past needs to be rewritten to suit any interest group you wish to champion.
Identity politics is where minority groups are encouraged to simultaneously atomise, organise and go on the attack. Tied into this is something social justice warriors call ‘intersectionality’ – the notion that there is a hierarchy of oppressed minorities and society should organise itself around correcting this.
Today, intersectionality has broken out from the social science departments of the universities from which it originated into the mainstream. It’s now taken seriously by millennials and has become embedded via employment law (through a ‘commitment to diversity’) in all major corporations and governments.
The speed at which the ‘social justice’ causes have taken over everyday life is staggering. Once-obscure phrases such as ‘LGBTQ’, ‘white privilege’, ‘the patriarchy’ and ‘transphobia’ are suddenly heard everywhere – even though in the words of mathematician Eric Weinstein, they were ‘all made up about 20 minutes ago’. The policing of these issues is an even more recent phenomenon. Researchers found that phrases like ‘triggered’ and ‘feeling unsafe’ only spiked in usage from 2013 onwards.
It is as though, having worked out what it wanted, the new religion took a further half-decade to work out how to impose its credo on non-believers. But it has done so with frightening success.
The maddening results can be seen on a daily basis. It’s why a British academic study which found muscular, wealthy men are more attractive could be headlined by Newsweek magazine as: ‘Men with muscles and money are more attractive to straight women and gay men – showing gender roles aren’t progressing.’
It’s why a previously completely unknown programmer at Google could be sacked for writing a memo suggesting some tech jobs appeal more to men than women. It is why The New York Times ran a piece by a black author with the title: ‘Can my children be friends with white people?’ And it’s why a piece about cycling deaths in London written by a woman was framed through the headline: ‘Roads designed by men are killing women.’
Such rhetoric exacerbates existing divisions and creates new ones. For what purpose? Rather than showing how we can all get along better, the lessons of the last decade appear to be exacerbating a sense that in fact we aren’t very good at living with each other.
For most people, awareness of this new religion has become clear not so much by trial as by public error. Because one thing that everybody has begun to sense in recent years is that a set of tripwires have been laid across the culture. Among the first tripwires was anything to do with homosexuality. In the latter half of the 20th Century, there was a fight for gay equality which rightly succeeded in reversing a terrible historic injustice. Then, the war having been won, it didn’t stop. Indeed it began morphing. GLB (Gay, Lesbian, Bi) became LGB so as not to diminish lesbians. Then a T for ‘trans’ and a Q for ‘queer’ or ‘questioning’ got added. Then the movement behaved – in victory – as its opponents once did, as oppressors.
When the boot was on the other foot, something ugly happened.
A decade ago, almost nobody was supportive of gay marriage. Even gay rights group Stonewall wasn’t in favour. Now it’s a central tenet of modern liberalism. To fail the gay marriage test – only years after almost everybody failed it – is to put yourself beyond the pale.
People may agree with or disagree with gay marriage. But to shift mores so fast needs to be done with sensitivity and deep thought. Yet we engage in neither.
Other issues followed a similar pattern. Women’s rights had also been steadily accumulated throughout the 20th Century. They too appeared to be arriving at some sort of settlement. Then, just as the train appeared to be reaching its desired destination, it filled with steam again and went roaring off into the distance. What had been barely disputed until yesterday became a cause to destroy someone’s life today. Whole careers were scattered and strewn as the train careered along its path.
Careers like that of the 72-year-old Nobel Prize-winning UCL Professor Tim Hunt were destroyed after one lame joke, at a conference in South Korea, about men and women falling in love in the lab. What was the virtue of making relations between the sexes so fraught? Why, when women had broken through more glass ceilings than at any other time, did talk of ‘the patriarchy’ seep out of feminist fringes and into popular culture?
In a similar fashion, the civil rights movement in America, which started to right the most appalling of all historic wrongs, looked like it was moving towards some hoped-for resolution. Again, near the point of victory everything soured.
Just as things appeared better than ever before, the rhetoric started suggesting things had never been worse.
The most recent tripwire addition, and most toxic of all of them, is the trans issue. It affects the fewest number of people, but is nevertheless fought over with an almost unequalled ferocity and rage. Women who have got on the wrong side of the issue, including notable feminists like Julie Bindel and Suzanne Moore, have been hounded by people who used to be men.
Meanwhile, mothers and fathers who voice concerns that ten years ago would have been considered common sense have their fitness to be parents questioned. People who will not concede that men can be women (and vice versa) can amazingly now expect a knock on the door from police.
Last September, a billboard that comprised the dictionary definition ‘woman: noun, adult human female’ was taken down after someone complained it was a ‘symbol that makes transgender people feel unsafe’.
Everyone knows what they will be called if their foot nicks against society’s new tripwires. Bigot, homophobe, sexist, misogynist, racist and transphobe are for starters. To avoid these accusations, citizens must prove their commitment to fashionable causes.
How might somebody demonstrate virtue in this new world? By being ‘anti-racist’, clearly. By being an ‘ally’ to LGBT people, obviously. By stressing how ardent your desire is to bring down the patriarchy.
And this creates a situation where public avowals of loyalty to the system must be made regardless of whether it’s needed. It’s an extension of a problem in liberalism identified by the late political philosopher Kenneth Minogue as ‘St George in retirement’ syndrome. After slaying the dragon, the warrior finds himself stalking the land looking for more glorious fights. Eventually, after tiring himself out in pursuit of ever-smaller dragons, he may eventually be found swinging his sword at thin air, imagining dragons.
Today our public life is dense with people desperate to slay imagined dragons. On all the big issues, an increasing number of people, with the law on their side, now pretend that all questions have been resolved, all answers agreed upon – and that no good person can have any doubts. The case is very much otherwise.
Each of these issues is infinitely more complex and unstable than our societies admit. Yet while the endless contradictions, fabrications and fantasies within each are visible, identifying them is not just discouraged but policed.
And so we are asked to agree to things which we cannot believe, and told not to object to things to which most people object, such as giving children drugs to stop them going through puberty or allowing men who self-identify as female to use female toilets. The pain that comes from being expected to remain silent on important matters and perform impossible leaps on others is tremendous, not least because the problems are so evident.
As anyone who has lived under totalitarianism can attest, there is something demeaning and eventually soul-destroying about being expected to go along with claims you do not believe to be true.
If the belief is that all people should be regarded as having equal value and be accorded equal dignity, then that may be all well and good. But if you’re asked to believe there are no differences between men and women, racism and anti-racism, homosexuality and heterosexuality, then this will drive you to distraction. That distraction is something we’re in the middle of and something we must try to find our way out from. If we fail, the direction of travel is clear.
We face not just a future of ever-greater atomisation, rage and violence, but a future in which the possibility of a backlash against all rights advances – including the good ones – grows more likely.
A future in which racism is responded to with racism, denigration based on gender is responded to with denigration based on gender. At some stage of humiliation there is simply no reason for majority groups not to retaliate with the exact same weapons that have worked so well on themselves.
Ideals replaced with dogma that has turned beliefs into crimes
DOUGLAS MURRAY: We are going through a great mass derangement. In public and in private, people are behaving in ways that are increasingly irrational, feverish, herd-like and unpleasant.www.dailymail.co.uk
- Joined
- Feb 19, 2018
The rubberband effect is real, and it is coming. When the howling minority groups finally press the majority to the breaking point the backlash will be violent, it will sudden, and it will be without mercy. After all, it was 'mercy' and 'decency' that allowed the abuse in the first place, and so any attempts to restrain or diminish the backlash will be resisted.
E
ES 195
Guest
kiwifarms.net
People claim religion was such a terrible thing to have as a staple of society but it's way better than SJW shit.
For one, even if you break society into an "us-vs-them" Religion is a large bucket that creates a big "us" group as opposed to SJWs who are constantly dividing groups of people into smaller groups, creating waaaay more "them"s.
Not only that but reasonable religious people tend to get along with each other as even though they don't believe in the same god often times they can share a spiritual understanding and can feel that they both have similar answers to the same questions, even if it's not the exact same answer.
This constant fracturing of society and social groups is trapping everyone in a world of hostile strangers and it's no surprise there's a lot more anger, violence, and nihilism going around than before. It's not that people no longer believe in heaven but that people now believe in hell on earth.
For one, even if you break society into an "us-vs-them" Religion is a large bucket that creates a big "us" group as opposed to SJWs who are constantly dividing groups of people into smaller groups, creating waaaay more "them"s.
Not only that but reasonable religious people tend to get along with each other as even though they don't believe in the same god often times they can share a spiritual understanding and can feel that they both have similar answers to the same questions, even if it's not the exact same answer.
This constant fracturing of society and social groups is trapping everyone in a world of hostile strangers and it's no surprise there's a lot more anger, violence, and nihilism going around than before. It's not that people no longer believe in heaven but that people now believe in hell on earth.
- Joined
- Jul 28, 2019
Yes, you're spot on & the most worrying aspect about this is that the people & groups who are doing the most pushing of the 'woke' agenda just cannot see the problems they're creating & storing up for the near future. All they can say is : " Beware of the far-right, " which to my mind, is actually an imaginary problem. I can't speak for the situation in other countries but here in Britain, the real far-right are a tiny group. The media message should really be warning us to beware of the far-left, in my opinion.
Flake452
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jul 23, 2019
If Douglas Murray wasn't posh the British media would label him a far right thug and he would persona non grata.
nagant 1895
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Mar 27, 2019
I am often as not astounded by the fact that the last vestiges espousing western, or for that matter any, masculinity that are permitted are those that come from homosexuals. It's like taking/giving it up the ass from another dude provides just enough of a shield to protect both the academe and the gym bro.