Samizdata quote of the day

Johnathan Pearce (London) · Culture Wars · Slogans & Quotations

“Political correctness is a moral atrocity and an infallible symptom of social and cultural rot, in essence, of a reluctance to confront reality and a manifestation of the unholy terror of plain honesty. It instils a fear in ordinary folk of calling things by their right names, of speaking truth, of even of telling jokes that might offend some sensitive soul or of uttering something that seems to violate yet another in a burgeoning tally of social taboos. The result is that a culture that hides from itself cannot expect to hide from its enemies. And America, probably the most litigious country on the planet, is in the grip of this mortal disease.”

– David Solway, Notes From a Derelict Culture, page 228.

January 26th, 2022 |

9 comments to Samizdata quote of the day

• NickM

  January 26, 2022 at 11:16 am

  I think it was shortly after his release from jail that some big US news source referred to Nelson Mandela as, “Nelson Mandela, noted African American leader”. They didn’t want to say, “Black”. To his credit, “Mr Mandela” was wryly amused – I don’t think he’d ever even set foot in the Americas.

• WindyPants

  January 26, 2022 at 1:04 pm

  NickM – I heard that the US feed of the US Grand Prix a few years back referred to Lewis Hamilton as a British African-American!

• John

  January 26, 2022 at 2:17 pm

  https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/01/26/carer-suffocated-suspected-burglar-citizens-arrest-cleared-manslaughter/

  Suspected wrong-doer with pre-existing medical conditions and testing positive for various narcotics is held down in (citizens) arrest for 9 minutes despite claiming “I can’t breath” and subsequently dies.

  I wonder if the race of this particular victim had any bearing on the lack of coverage and not guilty verdict.

  Interestingly in this case the blokes boss “added his weight” for a few minutes while his son was seen kicking the prone man twice (why exactly?). Neither faced any charges.

• Rudolph Hucker

  January 26, 2022 at 3:10 pm

  Who would have guessed that the first massive blowback to Political Correctness (and Wokeness) would happen in the frozen wastes of Canada in wintertime?

  Canadian Truckers for Freedom growing fast — 11 convoys, $5m, one convoy said to be 150km long

  11 convoys are converging across Canada. One convoy was claimed to be over 150 kilometers long last night and growing. US truckers are joining in, and they can’t come over the border they are going to block it.

  This is not a union organized thing. It’s grassroots and it’s come out of nowhere. People are coming out and standing in minus 20 degree weather just to cheer the trucks on. The fundraising started last Friday and has reached $5m. It has grown so fast that GoFundMe is holding funds til the organisers present a clear plan. Truckdrivers are even coming from Alaska.

  Think about this. From a standing start, this ‘army’ was mobilized, organized, financed, and shipped out in 3 days. In another 2 days it’s covered over 1,500 miles heading East, and additional columns have headed West, not sure how far they’ve traveled at this point.
  It’d take the Cdn. Forces weeks to accomplish the same thing, with the same size force.
  I’m not knocking the Cdn Forces; I’m just pointing out how incredible this enterprise is. The organizers are a folklore in the making.
  This is going down in History no matter how it turns out.

  Why?

  Last night in the -20 something of a January evening, several hundred people gathered on the side of the highway in a small Saskatchewan village, just as 1,000’s of others have done before us, and many more will continue to do. I expected only a fraction of that!
  This is not just a trucker thing, it’s not just a vax thing, it’s way bigger than any of that. People can see that there’s something wrong, and are looking for an answer. Our legal, normally accepted political process has been hijacked by those who want an unaccountable system of government that transfers the power of the people into the hands of a few. The ones we elected to speak for us are, for a number of reasons, are unable/ unwilling to exercise their obligations to us as the check and balance against a move towards tyranny.
  We are left dangling and frustrated as we don’t have a voice, and we absolutely to almost the last soul out here, know in our hearts that something must change, or we will lose most of what we, and our ancestors have worked our whole lives for. Freedom to live, work, and enjoy the amazing country we live in! Freedom to make choices that affect us and our communities. Freedom to take risks that we determine are right for our circumstances, not what some pencil neck somewhere has determined what is best for us. The evidence has been piling up for decades here, no unaccountable bureaucrat will ever be able to serve you and the best interests of your country better than an honest, community minded, unselfish individual. They almost always spend our capital building their own little empires, giving themselves raises and pensions, making themselves more visible and comfortable while the taxpayer works to support them! They aren’t accountable any more, our country cannot support this, and we all know it!
  We need hope! We need a voice, and that’s why we left our warm homes last night, to go and see if this might be a voice that we can trust! We stood there,in the cold, vaccinated beside unvaccinated, farmers beside professors, kids beside seniors, men and women, waiting to see a glimpse of hope. A hope that these people who are spending their own resources, leaving their homes and businesses behind, to drive to Ottawa to try make a difference in our lives. It remains to be seen if they will succeed in convincing the elites in power that they are out of bounds, but I can tell you from simply looking around at what I see happening, they have started something bigger than any of us could have imagined! It’s time!

  https://joannenova.com.au/2022/01/canadian-truckers-for-freedom-growing-fast-11-convoys-5m-one-convoy-said-to-be-150km-long/

  You know you are over the target when…
  https://www.toronto99.com/2022/01/26/facebook-censors-trucker-convoy-group/

  Hashtag “Truck Fudeau”

• Paul Marks

  January 26, 2022 at 11:31 pm

  To defeat something first one must have the courage to call it what it is.

  “Political Correctness”, “Woke”, “Diversity, Inclusion, Equity (DIE)” “Critical Theory” – these are all evasions. We are dealing with Frankfurt School MARXISM – the creation of Herbert Marcuse and the others, expressly designed to destroy the United States and the rest of the “capitalist” West.

  “We can not say that Paul – we can not call it Frankfurt School MARXISM”.

  O.K. SHUT UP then – because you are not going to defeat a movement if you will not even call it what it is.

  Please, have some basic courage and call Frankfurt School MARXISM, Frankfurt School MARXISM – tell Big Business (and so on) that they are playing footsie with a movement that wants to exterminate them and their families.

  Call it what it is – then you might just have a chance of defeating it.

  “But we can not close Diversity offices” – South Dakota just did, in all six universities. Not because it is against “equal opportunities” (on the contrary, they support all posts being upon to talent – regardless of race, or gender or sexual preference) – but because the “Critical Theory” “DIE” (Diversity, Inclusion, Equity) agenda has got nothing to do with equal opportunities – it is Frankfurt School MARXISM designed to turn black against white, women against men, straight against Gay, and so on.

  Frankfurt School Marxism was designed as a weapon – to get a society and kill it by internal decay.

  To get doctors who nothing about medicine, engineers who known nothing about engineering, scientists who think that the physical sciences are just branches of politics, and-so-on.

  To defeat it you must have the courage to point out that it is a Marxist weapon – designed to destroy the “capitalist” West from the inside.

• lucklucky

  January 27, 2022 at 4:03 am

  No, Political Correctness is a obfuscation of Power.

• Paul Marks

  January 27, 2022 at 4:50 pm

  lucklucky – saying “Political Correctness is a obfuscation of Power” does not achieve anything – firstly because people do not say “Political Correctness” any more, they say, “Critical Theory” (the opposite of Critical Thinking – but a term chosen because it sounds similar), or “Diversity and Inclusion” or “Diversity, Inclusion, Equity” (DIE), or just “Equity”.

  And you can not defeat a Frankfurt School Marxist weapon (which is what this is), if you will not even say it is a Frankfurt School Marxist weapon.

  “We can not say it is Marxist” is the same as saying “we SURRENDER”.

• lucklucky

  January 27, 2022 at 9:41 pm

  I was being terse due to lack of time. But Marxism and its heirs like political correctness needs to be exposed as a mechanism of power.

  I have good news from Brazil and an admirable letter defending the Anthropologist António Risério from a journalist mob of Folha de São Paulo – major Brazilian newspaper.
  Risério pen an article in said journal saying that identity politics promote black on white racism, 190 journalists pen a protest letter. more than 700 persons pen a letter defending. Journal direction also criticises own journalists.

  In the last four months, Bahian anthropologist Antonio Risério has been the target of two reactions from part of the national intellectual class for his works on race. In September 2021, his book As Sinhás Pretas da Bahia: Suas Escravas, Suas Joias was reviewed by Leandro Narloch. The review drew not only criticism, but calls for the dismissal of Narloch, to whom many attributed the book’s content. Contrary to what these critics say, there is no moral offense in the book or in its review: Risério, who has been writing for decades on the subject, publishes research on real personalities in Brazilian history that complicate the way we understand social relations from the time of slavery.

  In the writings of Risério, who is one of the best living readers of our culture, it is clear that he considers slavery a morally repugnant institution, and that he seeks to understand how human beings who are not monsters could have lived with it in the past. It takes breath to understand how former slaves became slave masters. Risério has that breath; its cancellers do not.

  In the second polemic, Risério published an article in Folha de S. Paulo about the universality of the moral error that is racism, documenting cases in which blacks were, indeed, racists. We speak of “racism” according to the classic definition, common sense and common sense, recorded in dictionaries. One of the author’s intellectual projects, the opposition to postmodernism and critical theory, which founded Identitarianism, leads him to this condemnation. Identitarians want to forcibly change, unilaterally and without consulting the speakers of the language, the definition of “racism” in order to make it unidirectional and malleable to their interests, claiming that it is a “power relationship”.

  This dispute goes beyond a mere semantic quarrel over the definition of a word. It is a new attack on the equal treatment of individuals under the social norms that we have inherited from the post-war consensus that gave us a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Risério is an experienced voice from the second camp, his concerns are more than justified, and we stand firmly against attempts to censor him.

  The unease that Risério causes is absolutely necessary so that identitarians, anti-universalists, relativists and revanchists know that the opposition exists and will not be folded, no matter how many big companies have on their side in their crusade for moral inequality. It’s not about collecting cases where blacks were slaveholders or committed racism against non-black people: it’s about reaffirming that no one is inherently good or bad because of their color, so no one has carte blanche to dehumanize anyone.

  Antonio Risério is currently one of the most important voices in the country, especially for opposing an intolerant and authoritarian ideology. We express ourselves with an appeal for their free expression to be respected.

• Unacceptable

  January 28, 2022 at 3:22 pm

  Howie Carr on the equity of snow plowing.

  https://www.bostonherald.com/2022/01/28/howie-carr-woke-snowplowing-bostons-new-hire-swears-by-it/
  “Last year Chu came out big-time for snow-plow equity at something called the National Shared Mobility Conference. She cited a study from 2012 in Sweden.
  “It’s about snow-clearing and if the concept of snow-clearing can be sexist and the answer is, yes, wholeheartedly!”
  The question we dare not ask:
  “Being an MIT grad, maybe she can someday explain how the plows are supposed to get to the bicycle lanes and the shuttered schools if the plows don’t clear the major thoroughfares first.”

  Exasperated

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