WORD WARS

HOW ATTACKS ON MEANING ROB YOU OF FREE SPEECH

Morgan Moore

Life & Liberty Series

Copyright © 2021 Morgan Moore

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright

INTRODUCTION: UP IS DOWN

APOLOGIES WILL NOT WORK!

WORDS MAY BREAK MY BONES

GROWING PAINS OR SAFETY PAINS?

TRIGGER HAPPY WOKERY OVER SEX

‘SAFETYISM’ THE NEW NORMAL

SAVE THE CHILDREN - BURN BOOKS?

THE PIG IN THE WIG PROBLEM

ANIMAL FARM AND FREE EXPRESSION

MILL ON LIBERTY VS MARXISM  

ELITES AND THE PERCEPTION GAP

FAILURE OF THE WATCHDOGS

WARNING! RIGHTS OR CENSORSHIP

HOLD THE LINE FOR FREE SPEECH

THE END: SPEAK UP

One Last Thing...

INTRODUCTION: UP IS DOWN

Been wondering what is going on? Why every conversation, if you dare to have one, is like walking on eggs?

Things are a happening - things we do not like.

No, not at all, not one little syke*

Up is down & down is up, so says News at night

But we will NOT say it, no matter the fright

No, we won't, we will not, forget what we like.

*cause someone to doubt reality as they saw it at first.

May this quick Dr. Seuss improvised rhyme ward off  those who want to regulate your speech to surrender the freedoms gained after many a dark age. Because this book is not for them.

Word Wars is written for the person feeling confused, angry, and frustrated by the deluge of D.I.E. trainings at work and political ideology's infiltration into every aspect of life. People who are sick and tired of being shamed, silenced, and made to feel bad without having done anything wrong.  

The attacks on meaning and silencing of individuals in daily life have been truly destructive, because negotiating meaning is our human thing - it's what we do.

Except now we are not allowed to. A postmodern conditioned, fear-infatuated culture prone to ‘safetyism’ and emotional reasoning, who equates emotional discomfort with actual danger, have decided they can tell us what to think, what to wear, where to walk, what to do and what to say.  But what they cannot tell us - is where we choose to stand.

SAFETY FIRST!

“Yes, it will cost your livelihood and sanity, but you will be safe, no matter the cost, and should you not like it, or dare to question money not well spent, then clearly you are just a racist and a …  a colonial!”

Meanings of many common use words and concepts are under assault, and this is problematic, because…

"Without sharing common definitions of

words we cannot share a conversation"

Media mockery of people’s genuine concerns, and the censorship of free speech and open debate has led to the disintegration of the fragile fabric holding human society together, and has destroyed free expression, an essential component of democracy.

It has also interrupted one of our most important conversations – that inner dialogue we have with society within ourselves, to make sense and meaning of things as we go about lives – our deep and driven dialogic self.

Vindictive behavior and cancel culture exhibitions on social media have made inroads into social trust and rendered the social contract asunder. A deep divide has been followed by an even deeper despondency, captured by those words, why bother.

A sense of futility takes a grip as millions are forced to walk away from their jobs and what was once a functioning life and society or be forced to violate their personal autonomy and integrity.

What is truth when ideology decides what is fact and meaning and people are cancelled for not conforming? These are word wars in which there are no winners.  

CANCEL CULTURE WARS!

Just think, Richard Dawkins got cancelled and the man was a paragon of virtue. Dawkins’ 1996 Humanist of the Year Award was voided in April 2021, for the content of a 2015 ‘tweet’ that offended liberal sensibilities in 2020.

What chance stands the ordinary person to weather such storms of sanctimony? People naturally strive to be their best and live up to expectations. But what futility in aspiring now that Helen Keller is considered ‘privileged’ and Dr Seuss accused of racism despite over 60 books translated into 20 languages and over 600 million copies sold worldwide.

There was an outcry in March 2021 when Dr. Seuss enterprises announced they would stop publishing several Dr. Seuss books, which had caused woke affront. This included his first book, And to Think that I Saw it on Mulberry Street, which is poignant because his creativity and originality of thought did not bring success fast. He had to persevere. That first book was rejected 27 times.

It is this capitulation to intolerant identity politics exploited in a time of great fear fomented by the never-ending globalized pandemic of 2020 which has eaten away at society, causing great harm to good people who were just trying to get through the day, secure a home, and feed their family.

Nobody wants to live in daily trepidation they will somehow put a foot wrong and lose income and reputation on the outrage pyre. When 'to err is human' no longer. When what is error represents a moving goalpost carried about by people who see only sinners from their lofty palisades.  

However, in the end, we own our dialogic self, and it is our own journey to take, this cannot be denied. The agency of the individual is extraordinary. So, one last salute to the man who created The Cat in the Hat.

Red fish or blue fish or little fish rare,

Never, no never, not ever will we share,

In the sssh or the shush to not say what we dare!

What to Expect …

No more rhyming for one thing.

Word Wars brings the workers' perspective to the upending of meaning going on and provides insight into changes happening out of sight that will impact the lives of everyone in ways claimed to be the 'new normal'.

Many good books have been written on freedom of speech and why it matters, some which will be reviewed and discussed here. The more perspectives we can get on the large-scale attempts at societal re-engineering being rolled out under our feet, the better.

What also showed up repeatedly in reviews, was the need for a guidebook of sorts to simplify the complexities. This is just such an endeavor.

May you therefore in the space of an hour or two, with easy conversation and good humor, perhaps a good cup coffee or tea besides, enjoy gripping tales of troubles and testimonies to courage from far and wide.

Cases relayed give glimpses into word wars playing out in other Western countries since algorithm curated information can limit what people get to know about happenings in the country next door. [For language convenience case studies are from English speaking countries only, but word wars are playing out across Western societies.]

Final Warning: Satire and sarcasm may arise in response to ridiculousness. This is not a book for anyone who police others’ speech for niceness, find comedians insulting, or needs a trigger warning for Dr. Seuss books. Of course all are welcome to read it, but at your own risk.

If you want your voice to be heard, but fear getting cancelled, contact  Mooreinfo@protonmail.com with the subject line; “My Story”

Comments and recommendations are welcome. Do research anything you read here for yourself.

What I write is the truth as I observe it. I stand by your right to question my observations.

This is freedom

APOLOGIES WILL NOT WORK!

The blight on freedom of speech and freedom of expression that has served to silence good people and ensures only intolerance and ignorance, is vividly illustrated by the story of Greg Patton, a harmless professor of business communication at the University of Southern California in the United States.

The professor got suspended from teaching his business communications class for introducing his students to the Chinese hesitance marker, 'na ge' that sounded like an English racial slur to some of his master’s in business administration (MBA) students.

THE PATTON CASE

The battle waged to save society from the bad Chinese word is sketched with quotes taken from Colleen Flaherty’s report of what happened in Failure to Communicate, published September 8, 2020, on www.insidehighered.com.

The Offended MBA Students:

“We are burdened to fight with our existence in society, in the workplace, and in America. We should not be made to fight for our sense of peace and mental well-being at Marshall.”

The Dean:

“It is simply unacceptable for faculty to use words in class that can marginalize, hurt and harm the psychological safety of our students.... repeated several times a Chinese word that sounds very similar to a vile racial slur in English. Understandably, this caused great pain and upset among students.”

Thousands of Petitioners:

“For him to be censored simply because a Chinese word sounds like an English pejorative term is a mistake and is not appropriate, especially given the educational setting. It also dismisses the fact that Chinese is a real language and has its own pronunciations that have no relation to English.”

Previous Students of the Course:

“We unanimously recognize Prof. Patton’s use of ‘na ge’ as an accurate rendition of common Chinese use, and an entirely appropriate and quite effective illustration of the use of pauses. Prof. Patton used this example and hundreds of others in our classes over the years, providing richness, relevance and real world impact.”

MBA Students on the Offensive:

“in light of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the recent and continued collective protests and social awakening across the nation, we cannot let this stand.”

Student Alumni on the Defense:

“The current incident, and Marshall’s response so far, seem disturbingly similar to prevalent behavior in China at that time -- spurious accusations against innocent people, which escalated into institutional insanity…”

Patton, the Accused Apologizing:

“another deep apology for the discomfort and pain that I have caused members of our community. My intent has always been to provide a dynamic, diverse and supportive learning environment and I recently learned this has not always been the case.

I have reached out to find and include many international, global, diverse, female, broad and inclusive leadership examples and illustrations to enhance communication and interpersonal skill in our global workplace. I did not connect this in the moment to any English words and certainly not any racial slur.”

The Continuing Abject Apology:

Patton emailed the entire program to apologize. He apologized again the next morning.

“I was willing to look at whatever I could do, personally and organizationally, to help the students and their classmates heal.”

He was replaced with teaching the course.

... and to think that we once lived in a world where people thought twice about making unjust accusations, and apologies meant we acknowledged differences and injured feelings and moved on with the business of living.

WORDS MAY BREAK MY BONES

Whatever happened to... sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me?

That was before “the inversion of meaning” as Michael Knowles, the author of Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, so fittingly describes it.

As poor professor Patton discovered, not using every single Diversity Inclusion Equity keyword in the postmodernist DIEcabulary of empty token words will save you from a fall from grace on the insanely slippery slope of political correctness.

Losing income, career, or reputation in the ‘who can be most offended’-sweepstakes are not considered harms. At least not compared to the harm wrought by two tiny terribly misconstrued Chinese words.

The vitriol and intolerance inflicted by the followers of political correctness and the cancel culture mob have been very confusing to ordinary people because people in general try to have a charitable view of the foibles and failures of others - in the hopes of similar compassion for their own personal shortcomings.

Because everybody knows – nobody’s perfect -

and everybody makes mistakes.

But that was in the past.

Transgressions these days can always be found in the pure eye of the postmodernist beholder.

What Postmodernist Rhetoric is All About

In a nutshell, in the righteous politically correct postmodernist eye everything is relative and subjective. Feelings over facts. A person's ‘lived truth’ is THE truth, and logic and reason are considered symbols of colonialism and toxic masculinity.

Postmodernist rhetoric became popular in the humanities and social sciences, most likely because there they do not have to mess around with nasty objective things like gravity, density, velocity, and chromosomes, as is required in the disciplines of physics, engineering, chemistry, and biology.

The movement, propagated by disillusioned leftists when communism failed in the 1990s, spawned Identity Politics, Critical Race Theory, Political Correctness and Cancel Culture.

These grievance cultures coach world history exclusively in terms of power relations and in/out identity group hierarchies around gender, race, and sex, to gullible students who have little experience of actual life complexities or risks, who then go on to zealously propagate these ideologies in public institutions, non-profits, the workplace, and the media.

"Although conceptual change is inevitable and often well motivated, concept creep runs the risk of pathologizing everyday experience and encouraging a sense of virtuous but impotent victimhood.” (Haslam, Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology, 2016, pgs. 1-17, vol 27, International Journal of Psychological Inquiry)

Instead of using language as a link to communicate about our understanding of reality, language is perceived of as a product of culture and as such represents only power struggle and means to gain power. Words are viewed, and are used, as weapons in these culture wars.

Two good books for examining these complexities are: The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas are Killing Common Sense by Dr. Gad Saad (2020), and Pluckrose & Lindsay’s (2020), Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity – and Why this Harms Everybody.

The Destruction of Western Values

Ancient Greece is considered the birthplace of Western culture, including the development of a democratic system of government and major advances in philosophy, science, and mathematics.

It was the quest of the Enlightenment for an objective and reasoned basis for knowledge, merit, truth, and justice that brought us out of the dark ages.

But in this day and age it is no longer fashionable to teach the accomplishments of the Enlightenment, or even science. Children today are being coached into compliance with blame and shame, for a time in which they had no part, through reductive accounts of history taken out of context.

The outport of postmodern nihilism around genuine concerns about systemic racism that has come to be called Critical Race Theory (CRT) infiltrated public institutions as neo-liberal elites adopted the rhetoric to elevate their morality status in the PC ‘virtue’ wars.

What is truly egregious is how privileged identity politics elites clamor for attention and use this reductive take on history to steal the limelight, while the real drivers of disparities remain unaddressed. 

Those schooled in postmodernist rhetoric teach self-loathing through CRT to condition children to their way of thought, even though society does not agree with these misconceptions or their false altruisms.

73% of Americans Reject Critical Race Theory

These were the results of the Rasmussen Report based on a national survey conducted between June 14-15, 2021. The sentiment that makes CRT abhorrent to many is a deep dislike of being made victims, held prisoner of the past, and conditioned into learned helplessness.

In the words of the indomitable Candace Owens:

“I’ve never been a slave in this country. Stop telling us to be obsessing about our past, when we should be obsessing about our future, or the potential we have.”

People remember the struggle for civil liberties and those famous words by Martin Luther King Jr.:

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." 

CRT on the other hand insists on judging people by the color of their skin. A resurgence of racism as corrosive  and divisive as its close cousin political correctness.

“Political correctness is widely unpopular

with Americans of all ages and races”

So reads the title of an article by Baker in Business Insider on 11 October 2018, based on an interesting study then newly released by an organization called More in Common, who had been studying the fracturing of Western societies.

The information that 80% of people, no matter race or age, saw political correctness as a problem has been widely quoted in papers and news articles over the past five years.

But if most of the population disapproves of political correctness it brings to mind another question.

Who Approves of Political Correctness?

A minority very active on social media and categorized as ‘progressive activists’ in the More in Common studies on the fracturing of society and forces of division.

"What does this group look like? Compared with the rest of the (nationally representative) polling sample, progressive activists are much more likely to be rich, highly educated—and white. They are nearly twice as likely as the average to make more than $100,000 a year. They are nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree…  politically engaged, highly educated, left-leaning Americans—the kinds of people, in other words, who are in charge of universities, edit the nation’s most important newspapers and magazines.” (Mounk, Americans Strongly Dislike PC Culture, October 10, 2018, theatlantic.com)

It's no wonder with a postmodernist worldview prevalent in the humanities, the more education, the larger is the perception gap and inaccuracy with which those graduates see others along the political spectrum.

“Democrats who hold a postgraduate degree are three times as inaccurate as those who did not graduate high school. This may be due in part to lower friendship diversity, as higher educated Democrats (but not Republicans) are more likely to say that "almost all" of their friends share their political views.”  (The Perception Gap by Yudkin, Hawkins & Dixon,  June 2019, www.moreincommon.com)

In the battle of ‘na ge’ thousands of petitioners and students insisted that a Chinese word - the sound of which a handful of MBA graduate students found detrimental to their psychological safety – remains a harmless Chinese word.

Yet the ‘psychological safety’ of the thousands of petitioners and all the other students, to be able to trust reason and the intrinsic meaning of words, did not seem to carry much weight in the eyes of the aggrieved, or those who cater to their whims and exaggerations.

It is not unreasonable to expect an authority figure in an educational institution to demonstrate fairness and reason, and to see such a moment as a great teaching opportunity on the problems arising from conflation of speech with actual harms.

Most would expect an expensive education to show students how to think rationally, develop a real argument, to  teach them about the dangers of emotional reasoning – basically how to grow up and deal with life.  

“This is not a Day Care. It’s a University!”

The title above heads an op-ed by former university president, Everett Piper, that went viral. Piper explains how ideologues pretending to be educators prevent young people from becoming thinking mature adults with his book, “Grow Up!” as quoted:

“The same cultural elites no longer even attempt to hide their disdain for the self-evident truths upon which our country and culture was founded. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, freedom of expression and freedom in general are now considered antiquated and inferior ideas that should be discarded and replaced by the capricious whims of a governing class that believes the unwashed masses are too foolish to manage their own freedom. “

Do not lose hope. There are always solutions.

Professor Francis Fukuyama in his essay, Against Identity Politics, wrote thoughtfully about the rise of identity politics, and how “the left’s identity politics poses a threat to free speech and to the kind of rational discourse needed to sustain a democracy.

The focus on lived experience by identity groups prioritizes the emotional world of the inner self over the rational examination of issues in the outside world and privileges sincerely held opinions over a process of reasoned deliberation…

The fact that an assertion is offensive to someone’s sense of self-worth is often seen as grounds for silencing or disparaging the individual who made it.”

Fukuyama had some great advice on how to steer a great Western democracy like the United States back to a united society. All this division and discontent around identity could be fixed with a year of national service, like military service, or perhaps better yet…

A Year of Bricklaying for All 18-Year-Olds!

Fukuyama would have it a matter of choice, like teaching, but that would be futile.

We already have enough bad teaching and bloated bureaucracies, with working men villified while only 9% women in the U.S. choose to work in construction (with good reason since many are mothers - which is a job and a half) and only about 30% of women graduating from STEM and 16% are in Tech. It should always be a choice.

However, for that one year it would need to be real equality with hard work around the basics of human survival, such as building a modern shelter from the elements (housing), while being exposed to the elements (environment), to bring home the true meaning of risk, equality and the privilege of choice, no matter race, sex, or gender.

But just imagine that first day …

Politically Correct Conversation at the Job Site

“You broke your nail! And you haven’t been able to check Instagram in an hour! How awful for you. Why don’t we do a selfie for your social media feed.”

“How are you feeling now?”

“I acknowledge your feelings. I hear that you are saying this is distressing for you. Is the tone I am using all right?

“A little loud? Disrespectful? And I used the wrong pronoun. Oh, so very sorry. My abject apologies.”

“What! That man looked at you with a frown? Made you uncomfortable you say? Raised his voice? How outrageous. And he is white! Absolutely, you go file a complaint. This is a safe workplace after all. Safety First!”

“Of course, I respect your truth one hundred percent.”

“Oh my, did you just drop that brick on your foot… and you did not want to wear the safety boot because it is a symbol of toxic masculinity?

"Now just remember, words may break your bones, but bricks can never hurt you…”

GROWING PAINS OR SAFETY PAINS?

Life is a risky affair. Used to be at least five things that could kill you before breakfast in the old days, that was if you could catch it. And of course, for many on the planet risk is still real.

Especially for the 40 percent who do not have Internet.  But for those living in digital reflections – not so much. They live in a different world entirely - a hyper reality social media echo chamber. Feeling ‘safe’ is everything. Emotional reasoning is their normal and words that cause discomfort are compared to violence.

Instead of Growing Pains, they have Safety Pains!

As Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff put it in The Coddling of the American Mind:

“A culture that allows the concept of ‘safety’ to creep so far that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger is a culture that encourages people to systematically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in everyday life that they need in order to become strong and healthy.”

Psychological Safety and Inversion of Risk

“Risk” is an old word. It came into use in the 17th century. The Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines it to mean “the possibility of something bad happening.” Perhaps before the 1600s people were so sure something bad would happen, they did not need a word for it.

“Psychological Safety” on the other hand is the newest buzzword in the DIExicon of Political Correctness and yet another type of training consultants want to peddle to competitively virtue signaling executives to inflict on their PC-fatigued workers.

The phrase psychological safety emerged in the 1990s with the first wave of political correctness.

Incidentally, the 1990s was also when teachers started banning peanuts in schools and look what happened with that - a significant increase of kids with allergies. In 2015 a convincing study, LEAP, was published, supporting the premise that “regular eating of peanut-containing products, when started during infancy, will elicit a protective immune response instead of an allergic immune reaction.”

These types of harmful consequences resulting from the concept creep of 'safety' are expanded on by Haidt and Lukianoff in their book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.

An early concept of psychological safety was once associated with improving safety culture in the field of Occupational Safety and Health to ensure people were able to speak up and admit errors and near-misses and thereby help with identification of risks and hazards on worksites. But the workplace risk-based concept was overtaken by the fuzzy political correctness version of psychological safety which by 2020 had been captured by Mental Health organizations for a very different type of audience.

The audience for the peddlers of psychological safety are people with a risk fragile mindset;

“for me  to be safe, you should say what I want. You should not make me feel unsafe by saying things that are disagreeable to me or by disagreeing with me. I want rules and regulations to control what others say or think – to stop them from expressing anything I may feel is not what I want to hear, and to make sure that if they say anything I don’t want to hear they are punished, so they will never say things I don’t like again!”  

Or as it was put by the student government at Ithaca College who proposed the creation of an anonymous microaggression-reporting system. They did not think the system's disciplinary action against 'oppressors' would in every instance require a trial or harsh punishment, just “record-keeping but with impact.” (Haidt & Lukianoff, How Trigger Warnings are Hurting Mental Health on Campus, Sept. 2015, www.theatlantic.com)

To think the student with her 2015 ‘anonymous micro-aggression-reporting system’ has by now graduated and entered the workforce and is likely propagating this micro mindset and the silencing of others in the workplace, probably as a Diversity, Inclusion and Equity consultant.

D.I.E. trainings are painful to sensible well-balanced people. It literally forces them to employ what is considered a cognitive distortion, mind-reading, to avoid offending anyone by accident. This type of cognitive distortion wreaks havoc on relationships and causes anxiety and depression. Moreover, it has had a chilling effect on free speech and freedom of expression.

What is a Micro-aggression?

Nobody knows. That is the point. A micro-aggression is whatever is perceived as a micro-aggression in the eye of the beholder. It is therefore any action or word that may have no malicious intent on the face of it, but who someone may arbitrarily feel is after all a kind of violence.

“These terms are part of a new conceptual package that includes all of the older concepts long referred to as “political correctness” but with greatly expanded notions of harm, trauma, mental illness, vulnerability, and harassment.” (Haidt, Why Concepts Creep to the Left, 12 Feb 2016, Journal of Psychological Inquiry, Vol 27, I, pgs. 40-45)

On campuses a fearful and fear-creating culture came to dominate with emotional reasoning and ‘lived experience’ given more validity than fact among students competing in the ‘who can be the most offended’-Olympics. An irrational space where any word can suddenly be cause for ‘Trigger Warnings’ and accusations of ‘Micro-Aggression’

A Culture of Vindictive Protectiveness

This term coined by Lukianoff & Haidt may bring some clarity to the confusion many have about the vitriol and vindictiveness of the social media cancel culture mob who expects 'kindness' but will ruthlessly attack anyone for not paying the right attention to their fears and sensitivities.

Lukianoff & Haidt pointed out a crucial difference between the political correctness (PC) followers of the 1990s and their progeny in 2015.

Whereas those in the 1990s wanted to restrict speech to reduce hate speech. By 2015 the movement’s progeny had become preoccupied with mental well-being, psychological safety, and protection from any subjectively perceived threat.

The 2015 PC cadre want campuses to be ‘safe spaces’ and they expect to be shielded from anything uncomfortable and want anyone who opposes this goal in any way, to be punished.

What Makes This Dangerous?

In the past ten years, especially since 2016, partisan polarization increased dramatically, which means postmodernist indoctrinated students with their intense sense of fear further fueled by a fear mongering media, have gone into the workplace blinded by a moral righteousness that allows them to disregard democratic due process and open debate.

This monoculture, occupied with virtue signaling, is convinced they know better as they look down on a part of the population as deplorable, Western culture as racist, and rational evidence-based thought as a feature of toxic masculinity. Thereby dividing and harming society  in ways that will not easily be restored.

TRIGGER HAPPY WOKERY OVER SEX

‘Trigger Warnings’ and ‘Micro Aggressions’ are two types of speech policing hyped among students of social sciences on campuses (and now in workplaces) where the cognitive distortions of emotional reasoning and mind reading flourish.

Faculty, apprehensive about retribution from ideologues in university administration and the damage student cancel culture mobs could inflict on their careers and reputations, hesitated to correct the destructive intolerance.

Examples abound in the September 2015 article of the Atlantic, ‘How Trigger Warnings are Hurting Mental Health on Campus’ focused on Lukianoff’s & Haidt's book The Coddling of the American Mind.

"America is the land of opportunity” on a list of ‘offensive’ statements

Even making light of the extremeness of microaggressions warrants hostility, punishment, and retribution.  

“Omar Mahmood, a student at the University of Michigan, wrote a satirical column for a conservative student publication, The Michigan Review, poking fun at what he saw as a campus tendency to perceive microaggressions in just about anything."

“A group of women later vandalized Mahmood’s doorway with eggs, hot dogs, gum, and notes with messages such as “Everyone hates you, you violent prick.”

“When speech comes to be seen as a form of violence, vindictive protectiveness can justify a hostile, and perhaps even violent, response.”

You can vandalize and attack someone you don’t agree with when they say something you don’t like, but humor about the silliness of micro-aggression is considered 'hate-speech'...

It is difficult to understand this type of behavior and that infantilized rage of this sort is tolerated and even encouraged. The misandry of postmodern feminism has utilized the baton of victimhood very effectively, but not to the benefit of the grace or growth of women.

War on Words Between the Sexes

The war on words triggered over sexuality has been particularly pernicious, with demands of trigger warnings on anything from books to class syllabus and the content of professors’ lectures.

Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers, professor, and author of the books Who Stole Feminism and The War Against Boys present convincing critical analysis of what has transpired.

In an article titled, Rape Culture is a Panic Where Paranoia, Censorship, and False Accusations Flourish from May 15, 2014, Hoff Sommers point out that conspiracist feminism who insist on ‘trigger warnings’ for books like the Great Gatsby were “turning campuses into hostile environments for free expression and due process.”

Hoff Sommers introduces a concept useful to know in 2021: Regulatory Capture. Like authority creep, scope creep, policy creep and function creep, this is a bureaucratic process relating to abuse of power:

"the exercise of authority in the public interest but not for the precise purpose for which it was originally granted.”

(Koops,  The Concept of Function Creep, Law, Innovation and Technology Journal, March 16, 2021)

The regulatory capture of Title Nine will be sketched out in ten points that reveal ground zero of how and when free speech became compromised.

The summation is based on Christina Hoff Sommers review, Where Title IX Went Wrong about the 2018 book by R. Shep Melnick, The Transformation of Title IX.

It begins with the personal and intense relationship between the sexes, at a time of important growth and discovery, when authority needs to stop intervening in the personal meaning negotiation of young adults.

TITLE NINE BATTLE OVER THE SEXES ON CAMPUS

1. The title IX legislation was created in the seventies to address sex discrimination in education programs.

2. Once valuable and reasonable, the law fell prey to  “regulatory capture” by the education establishment.

3. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has the power to issue rules and regulations to deny colleges federal funding.

4. Thus, armed with economic sanction, a symbiotic alliance between government workers and activists, and ideologues within government, chipped away at the Equality- of-Opportunity law over time.

5. With ‘Dear Colleague’ letters that ‘clarified’ legislation OCR flexed their gender equity muscle.

6. April 2011, the head of OCR, Russlyn Ali, sent out a ‘Dear Colleague’ letter that effectively mandated campus ‘sex-tribunals’.

7. A new definition of sexual harassment was set: “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,” which included casual comments and jokes. But more – the entire culture of the school would have to change.

8. The letter was shocking because the U.S. Supreme Court had already set standards for what constituted sexual harassment in educational settings, and Ali’s letter effectively overruled the Supreme Court.

9. Usually, such aggressive and disturbing policy change would be preceded by commissions, congressional hearings and vigorous debate. But even those mighty institutions were silenced in the climate of discord sowed by identity politics.

10. ‘Sex bureaucracies’ developed at universities with hundreds of Title IX coordinators and investigators.

Consequences of the Title IX Battle?

Kangaroo courts where emotional reasoning sufficed as evidence to expel students and both students and faculty were routinely denied due process. Furthermore, OCR initiated investigation of the ‘socio-cultural climate’ of hundreds of schools.

Melnick’s book, The Transformation of Title IX, urged for a return to the rule of law. In the words of Hoff Sommers:

“administrators, judges and legislators to preserve and protect the fundamental principles of liberal constitutional democracy: due process, freedom of speech, academic freedom.”

To return Title IX to its original purpose – “not quirky social engineering but expanded educational opportunities.”

Betsy DeVoss rescinded Russlyn Ali's April 2011 letter and restored due process on campus. However, powerful bureaucracies had been instituted within the universities.

Bernie Sanders subsequently denounced the proposed reform and Congressional Democrats introduced an Act to enact Ali’s letter into law.

Hoff Sommers describes Melnick’s book on the tragedy of Title IX as “an act of intellectual due process” and:

“a disturbing tale of how, even in a rule-of-law nation like ours, bureaucrats and ideologues can subvert the law, wreak havoc on lives and civil liberties, and divert millions of dollars to harmful ends.“        

‘SAFETYISM’ THE NEW NORMAL

Fear has enormous political value. As such a culture of fear and ‘safetyism’ has been cultivated that makes it look as if the world has lost all reason.

Rooting out danger to perceived safety by those enthralled to emotional interpretations of events have been catastrophic. It seems the more ‘safety’ there is for those who choose not to find their courage, the less safety there is for everyone else.

“Safetyism refers to a culture or belief system in which safety is prioritized above all other values, which means that people are unwilling to make tradeoffs demanded by other practical or moral concerns. Safety is transformed into a sacred value, which means no tradeoffs can be made, no risks can be taken. This is generally accompanied by the tendency to equate emotional discomfort with physical danger.” (Lukianoff, Goldstein & Paresky, May 12, 2020)

Inflation of harms through concept creep with the "gradual semantic expansion of harm-related concepts such as bullying, mental disorder, prejudice, and trauma" has brought about investigation into the meaning changes  engineered for political ends, and their consequences, such as social conflict, political polarization and speech restrictions.  (Haslam, Dakin & Fabiano et al., Harm Inflation: Making Sense of Concept Creep, 2020, European Review of Social Psychology).

Many studies done since 2018 and published on sciencedirect.com confirm that students’ safetyism inspired beliefs - of emotional pain or discomfort as dangerous - arise from biased patterns of thought such as emotional reasoning, as well as cognitive distortions of perceived offenses or ideological challenges as harmful.

Conflation of Words with Violence

The consequences of harm inflated concept creep became sharply apparent to the parents who oppose critical race theory (CRT) in public schools in the U.S. when the education officials of the National School Board solicited the FBI to 'threat tag' parents as ‘domestic terrorists.’

This is an example of a work culture where safetyism and ideological 'othering' have become prevalent and harm inflation of speech as violence spark vindictive protectiveness to justify a hostile and exaggerated response.

It is what happens in institutions where the postmodernist trained collectivist who views the world through a lens of grievance and power struggles around gender, race and sex gets influence to promote ‘safetyism’. Because the same people who want university campuses to be ‘safe spaces’ also want workplaces to be ‘safe spaces.’

Workers Who Negotiate Real Risk

According to the oldest agency of the United Nations, the International Labor Organization (ILO), which was founded in 1919:

Workers worldwide suffer 270 million accidents each year and more than two million people die worldwide each year as result of work-related accidents and diseases. One worker every 15 seconds.

Workers take these risks to ensure their survival, and the survival of their families. In other words, to put food on the table. Because it prevents death by starvation. It is not a concept that features high on the list of activist concerns or one that gets media attention.

People generally have different personal perceptions of risk and capacity for risk tolerance. However, risk tolerance has come to be dictated by an elitist bureaucratic class who appear to believe their brittle perceptions should rule other peoples’ realities, no debate required, and no matter the consequence.

Psychologically Safe Workplace Awards

October 2021 saw the first celebration of the new Psychologically Safe Workplace Awards, sponsored by the Mental Health Commission of Canada.

An awards event seems inappropriate, considering workers were thrown to the wolves in 2020 and since then workers' organizations have failed miserably at representing or safeguarding workers’ mental, physical, or 'psychological' wellbeing. Hundreds of thousands of self-employed workers and small businesses have been ruined with 3.8 trillion losses in income according to the ILO monitors on Covid-19 and the World of Work.

Trillions were spent to help people and businesses disrupted by Covid response measures, which will be a great burden to the next generation. Only to be followed by authoritarian  mandates negating those actions and threatening workers with dismissal with complete disregard of how valuable workers are to their employers or to the functioning of society.

The dictate for workers to submit to violation of personal integrity or be fired has broken whatever tenuous bond existed between workers and employers. This breach in the social contract will have long-term impacts on societal function and psychological safety will not be one of the outcomes.

If mental health or psychological safety, was so important, why was it not used to inform on policy?

If psychological safety was a valid measure, would it not have been used for evaluating and determining the psychological harms of Covid response measures in comparison to those presented by the virus?

It would be helpful to see cost-benefit assessments stratified by age, weighing up the risk posed by a corona virus with a 98 percent recovery rate and low global mortality rate compared to the catastrophic impacts of masking, enforced isolation, home incarceration, and loss of rights, education, health, livelihoods, and economic, social and mental stability.

The Great Barrington Declaration

"As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies..."  (www.gbdeclaration.org, October 4, 2020)

Since 2020 Medical and Public Health Scientists and Medical Practitioners have been urging bureaucrats in public institutions to justify and reconsider their policy decisions.

Should consideration not be given to the expertise of 15,091 public health scientists and 44,541 medical practitioners from over 40 countries, including some of the most prominent names in their fields, who all signed the Great Barrington Declaration?

But, instead of providing justification for policies under  the principles of accountability and transparency or in lieu of that reconsidering policies so people could return to leading healthy lives, what people got was...

Psychological Safetyism for a New World Order

The Association of Workers' Compensation Boards of Canada gave their members a Virtual Staff Learning Symposium called 'Embracing the New World'.

Most of the messaging was about organizations across North America 'grappling' with Diversity, Inclusion and Equity and management of a rising number of psychological injury claims.

One sentence mentions; “new approaches to the treatment of common workplace injuries will also be reviewed.” Apparently suffering a life-debilitating injury on the job is now a ‘common’ injury compared to the harms people endure when not kept ‘psychologically safe’ in a properly virtuous and politically correct existence.

A misandrist culture has emerged who preaches equity, yet men are the most frequently injured and at risk on work sites with far fewer women engaged in dangerous work (evidenced by the mere 9% of women working in construction in the U.S.)  

Although it bears notice that giving birth used to be a high-mortality proposition for both mother and infant for most of history and may even be so again if the 'non-binary' ideologies rife in public institutions erase women's biological rights and healthcare.

"Deconstructing Normal”

In October of 2021 the Canadian Mental Health Association's conference on Deconstructing Normal stated:

“…there is so much yearning for when things will “get back to normal.” But what if normal was what got us here?  … Given that notions of normalcy have been constructed around the experiences of predominantly white, settler, cisgendered* and heterosexual men, experiences that fall outside this realm have been labeled “deviant” and in need of medical intervention.”

(www.conference.cmha.ca/call-for-abstracts)

*The meaning of ‘cisgendered’? Someone who was born a man or woman and think they are a man or woman.

The Mental Health Association's statement sends a shiver about these new visions for 'mental health’.

The statement also appears to disregard the fact that hundreds of new mental ‘disorders’ have been created with which to label people the past 50 years - duly codified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) to the pharmaceutical industry’s benefit - while women came to dominate public health and public education.

The conference included "The Transformative Power of Destabilizing Gender and Sexuality Norms," "Normalizing Mental Illness on Instagram" and "Mindset Mayhem: Build, Burn and Rebuild." It begs the question;  is this the intent with which this organization was funded?

Where is the mental health consideration? Just a 'too bad' about 'the yearning for when things will get back to normal', because what do ordinary people know, and how dare they have liked their lives, those terribly ignorant racists...

Is this about Workers' Wellbeing or $$$Wokery?

Psychological safety first began to make inroads into the workplace when the Mental Health Commission of Canada commissioned a 'health and safety' standard on the topic from the Canadian Standards Association.

It was a 'voluntary' standard and the first and only of its kind in the world because there are no regulations for psychological safety. This stands to reason since there already are regulations on violence and harassment in the workplace, PTSD is treated, and counseling and employee family assistance programs have become commonplace.

The vague and subjective concept of psychological safety, the fuzzy cousin of political correctness, can too easily be misused to claim injury from words in a culture of harm inflation. It does not meet the type of definitive rigor necessary for risk mitigation.

However, by commissioning a standard, the appearance of legitimacy was established, and the Canadian Mental Health Commission expanded its authority to gain a foothold in the world of work.

Mental health is the new buzz phrase in corporate media. As result of harms inflation and the significant impacts of Covid response measures on the population's wellbeing, an expansive and profitable market has developed.

The worldwide specialists’ market was estimated at $795.1 billion...The USA the biggest nation representing $318.8 billion or 40% of the worldwide specialists advertise. (Market Analysis on World Psychiatrists and Psychologists Conference, July 20-21, 2020, Int J Ment Health Psychiatry Vol 5, Issue 3, www.scitechnol.com)

By July 2021, a Canadian consultant who had served as Consumer Policy Committee Chair in an international standard organization (ISO), announced the 'expanded reach' of the ISO 45003 - a new International Standard on Psychological Health and Safety at Work.  And just like that, what was once a voluntary commissioned standard became a worldwide international standard.

Most people remain unaware that under the pretext of worker safety, rules are being made for ‘psychological safety’ that place private and public sector agencies central in controlling, behavior, speech and thought in workplaces, and therewith individuals, though no laws have been passed to this effect anywhere in the world.

SAVE THE CHILDREN - BURN BOOKS?

Evidence, reason, logic, tolerance, and civility were the foundational principles that led to an enlightened world where hundreds of thousands have been lifted out of poverty each day for decades. Free speech was crucial to this universal endeavor.

By now the devastating impacts of social justice and political correctness is clear - smear attacks on ‘enemies’ who do not follow their ideologies and authoritarian processes to enforce conformity and silence anyone who dissents.

The Zero Tolerance of Activists

What happens to institutions when the postmodernist trained collectivist who views the world through a lens of grievance and power struggles around gender, race and sex gets influence?

Anger exploded in August 2021 over the ‘gender audit’ of books in Scottish nurseries by the organization, Zero Tolerance and their criticism of a beloved British children’s book; The Tiger Who Came to Tea.

Or as it was described by www.theweek.co.uk’s Kate Samuelson on 25 August 2021, “Welcome to the tale of “Peak Wonky Wokery.”  

The Tiger who Came to Tea was written by Judith Kerr after she fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and is still on Amazon’s top 20 bestselling children’s book list.

Gender cancel culture hysteria about the book was not welcome. But the co-director’s comments to BBC Radio Scotland on 23 August 2021 really raised anger by inflating the perceived harms of the gender stereotype to domestic abuse, rape, and sexual assault.

Mercy Muroki with GBNews on August 24, 2021, noted:  

“So, hold on for a second, what you find unrealistic about a tiger ringing a doorbell, then sitting at a dinner table and proceeding to casually consume tea and biscuits with two humans is that the tiger is not tiger-neutral? What a skill it must be to be so utterly intolerable…  

I wonder what the late Judith Kerr, a German Jew, who saw the Nazi’s literally burning books written by her own father for being too un-German and not fitting the accepted narrative would think that 80 years on as some people still seem to want to cancel and rewrite literary works that don’t fit their narrative.”

Which is Why Those Books Must Burn!

The ritualistic burning of books for educational purposes was decided by officials in charge of elementary and secondary schools in Southwestern Ontario, Canada, in 2019.

The purification ceremony to burn books and subsequent removal or destruction of 4700 books with ‘questionable’ content, such as Tintin and Asterix comics and biographies of Jacques Cartier, a French explorer who mapped the St. Lawrence, and explorer Étienne Brûlé from 30 schools, indicates ideologically didactic behavior now parading as authority.

Books once offered the wonder of discovery and an opportunity to gain insight into the different perspectives voiced by other people in far off places, to 'hear' voices from times long past.  

The stories in books are part of our journey into sense making and meaning making in a complex world full of all kinds of peoples, beliefs, and natural phenomena.

Books awaken a love of learning and desire to explore, contemplate discoveries, and gather with others to exchange thoughts, and debate and celebrate in the great marketplace of ideas.  

Does the woke class see ordinary people as just too ignorant and morally inferior to think for themselves and make decisions for themselves or their children?                

Asra Nomani, a mother speaking up calmly and sensibly about Critical Race Theory (CRT) being pushed in schools on October 13, 2021, said:

“I fit into the intersectional world. I am a Muslim, I am an immigrant, I am a Mom of color, I am a single Mom, yet I deny all of these ‘privileges’ in the new paradigm of the oppression matrix because we are all human beings.”

The CRT consultant's perspective?

“Too many people who know little or nothing about education are trying to tell professionals who are in this industry, who have been working hard, who are coming in as weekend warriors, trying to tell them what education should look like."

It is as if those who subjugate others to D.I.E. training, seek censorship of free speech because they do not respect the journey of the individual into becoming an autonomous human being.

D.I.E. proponents do not seem to grasp, that life cannot be something mediated by self-styled 'experts' but is always and ever a journey of self-inquiry and meaning negotiation with other free members of society.

All this autocratic behavior has become profoundly disrespectful of peoples’ capacity for thought and reasoning, and humanity's innate ability for discovery and exploration in pursuit of truth and greater understanding.

It is a violation of our most intrinsic right as human beings - to negotiate meaning for ourselves.

Speech seems to no longer be about original thought or merit of argument and permitted only along a sliding scale of privilege - words given legitimacy according to skin color, sex, or sexual orientation, and most of all grievance status and exhibition of adherence to the dogma of collectivist identity ideologies.

Healthy skepticism, once the hallmark of scientific inquiry, and requests for evidence and open debate, is met with fury, ad hominem attacks and ideological purges in public institutions.  

The strangest inversion of meaning? If what you say does not conform to the ideological narrative you will be called ‘racist’ no matter your race, gender, history, humanity, or the merit and validity of the argument presented.

Those who find security in identity hierarchy appear to care little for rational debate between individuals. Despite the lip service paid to diversity, theirs is more of an everyone should look different but think the same kind of diversity.

How sad that in this era human compassion and the instinct to collaborate has been used to turn peoples’ innate benevolence against them to subdue them. And to what end?

THE PIG IN THE WIG PROBLEM

Exactly how crazy can things get when a culture allows emotional discomfort to equate with 'violence' and the intolerant pushes for laws to code giving offense as ‘crime’?

Particularly when gender identity politics already make of any interaction a battleground with woke activists policing speech online.

“Between 2014 and 2019 almost 120,000 non crime hate incidents were reported by police forces in England and Whales” (Doyle, Free Speech and Why it Matters, 2021).

According to the British author and political commentator Andrew Doyle, quoted above, this derived from a culture that developed within the UK police who began to see it as part of their responsibility to investigate language misdemeanors to make sure people were not being ‘offensive’.

The inflation of what is considered an offense and conflation of words as offense or even 'violence' has been particularly problematic in the UK where the 2003 Electronic Communications Act has brought Orwell’s 1984 dystopia of ‘thought crimes’ into reality. 

Reference to Biological Sex Now Hate Speech?

Underlying conflict around gender politics can be condensed to issues around the erasure of biological sex and transgender activism that men who identify as women should be treated the same as biological women and given equal access to women's only spaces.

Some of this is illustrated by the tokenism of political celebrities with the use of words like menstruating people or birthing people instead of being respectful to women by acknowledging that transwomen cannot menstruate, give birth, or breastfeed.

While some women seek approval through virtue signaling around gender, other women ask why on earth should their intrinsic biological identity have to be erased to pander to men who wish to present as women but are not  biological women and therefore have their own identity term – ‘transgender women’. 

None of this means that transgender people should be discriminated against. Unfortunately, it appears in the zero-sum war games of identity politics words referring to the biological sexes of men and women can now be misconstrued as ‘hate speech’ due to changes in laws activists can use to police language. Saying you are a woman has become a risky endeavor.

The changes in the UK electronics law came along early in the 21st century before social media networks became the hotbed of gossip and character assassination they are now, and before the concept creep around safety conflated the idea of harms as described in the previous chapters.

The pronoun problem caused by legislation in the UK and Canada, seeking to control and regulate peoples’ speech by mandating the use of ‘preferred pronouns’ based on ideology rather than biology is the other component of confusion and conflict in the next tale of word woes in Word Wars on how social media squabbles are turned into crimes.

THE SCOTTOW CASE

A great many articles cover the judgment of the case of Scottow v the CPS [2020] EWHC 3421, which was handed down on 16 December 2020.

The Twitter Battle:

In the small world of Identity Politics on Twitter a fierce battle rages on over words, and who can use them, in what way, between ‘second wave feminists’ and ‘transgender activists.’

The Larger Issue:

What is at stake is nothing less than male access to the female estate, as it is called in feminist circles. That men who self-identify as women have been allowed into women’s prisons despite having male genitals and a history of sexual violence, as well as into female wards in hospitals, have become a contentious issue.

The Accused:

Kate Scottow, a feminist aged 39, was arrested in 2018 in front of her two children, her children removed from her custody, sentenced to two years conditional discharge, and ordered to pay a thousand pounds in compensation to her transgender accuser for calling her a ‘him’ and insults like ‘a pig in a wig’ on social media.

The Complainant:

Stephanie Hayden, the transgender woman who took offense at Scottow’s comments on Twitter, admitted during the trial to being a serial litigator in civil courts. [Hayden had previously reported Father Ted co-creator Graham Lineham for referring to ‘her’ as ‘him’ and tweeting about her as Stephanie/Tony/Steven, earning the writer a harassment warning visit by the police.]

First Hearing:

The first judgment on Scottow by the judge at St Albans Magistrate’s Court was met with incredulity and caused great division in society.

That a mother had been separated from her 20-month-old baby and given a criminal record over some tweeted insults over pronouns and gender was not well received by the public and created furor.

The High Court:

On 10 December 2020 Scottow’s appeal went before the High Court. The case was heard by 2 judges and the conviction overturned.

Warby J observed: “These provisions were not intended by Parliament to criminalise forms of expression, the content of which is no more than annoying or inconvenient in nature….”

“The Prosecution argument failed entirely to acknowledge the well-established proposition that free speech encompasses the right to offend… 

The Judge appears to have considered that a criminal conviction was merited for acts of unkindness and calling others names.”

Bean LJ concluded; “I do not consider that under s127(2)(c) there is an offence of posting annoying tweets.”

Realities and Risks of Biology

Most of us are tied to the risks and realities of our actual biology. This does not mean we should allow biological determinism to decide our lives or discriminate against people who feel different about themselves. But it is incongruous that people should not be able to represent the biological concerns to which they are tied by biological realities.

How frustrating it must be for anyone who works with the challenges of women in poverty in developing countries, women whose hardships are invariably and intrinsically connected to their biology as women, when they find those problems sidelined by transgender activism.

As was the case for Maya Forstater, who ‘got cancelled’ and lost her job as international development researcher in 2019 when she posted a series of tweets questioning the government’s proposal to reform the Gender Recognition Act to allow people to self-identify as another sex.

JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, got a lot of flak from the cancel culture mob for the Dec. 19, 2019, tweet below:

Dress however you please.

Call yourself whatever you like.

Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you.

Live your best life in peace and security.

But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya

Maligned by Elite Activists

JK Rowling’s words showed tolerance and acceptance of difference, and courage to take on the tunnel vision and injustice of the woke mob.

The comedian, Dave Chappelle, joking about the outrage, was later taken to task by a group of Netflix employees, who claimed the company's airing of Chappelle's special in 2021 meant it was no longer a ‘safe’ work environment for them.

Can the silencing of talk about biological sex, or constructed genders, ever be ‘safe’? Especially when it concerns women who at the most defenseless moments in their lives, such as when they are ill or incarcerated are being made vulnerable because the rights of men who self-identify as women overrule women’s rights.

Just who are these attention seekers who take it upon themselves to censor and limit the right to free speech of other people and why are they being allowed to do so much harm?

What about the harms done to real trans people, those who have transitioned sexually and seek nothing more than to live their lives in peace in the very definite sex they prefer, rather than being blandly roped into woke   virtue signaling?

'When Ideology Meets Reality'

Helen Joyce's 2021 book brings to light the institutional capture of transactivism, a powerful posturing lobby group whose members far outnumber the actual transpeople they claim to represent.

"Its ideological focus means it seeks to silence anyone who does not support gender self-identification... Its overreach is likely to provoke a backlash that will harm ordinary trans people, who simply want safety and social acceptance.”

This excellent book explains how gender identity ideology has expanded to be about far more than twitter storms around the use of the right pronouns. In a mere ten years' time, schools, universities, companies and even the law have been reshaped to privilege self-declared gender identity over biological sex.

The book uncovers how social justice warriors have caused gender identity ideology to be added to the curriculum in schools, resulting in disastrously negative impacts on impressionable minors.

Until very recently, trans-identifying teenage girls were almost never seen at gender clinics, and now suddenly this demographic predominates.

These poor girls are fast-tracked to hormone treatments and surgery, even though there is no evidence that these will help – rather more evidence it will not - as this is a demographic highly prone to social contagion.

Cases of emotional contagion among girls are well documented; from outbreaks of hysterical laughter, and fainting, to the eating disorders and self-harm sweeping through social groups in schools and communities.

Helen Joyce reveals the harms done to mutilated de-transitioners;

“brought into an ideology that is incoherent and constantly shifting, and where the slightest deviation is ferociously punished...Ideas have consequences, and one of the consequences of the idea of gender self-identification is that children are being manipulated and damaged.”

She communicates compassionately on how most people in society can accommodate many subjective belief systems. Even those that are mutually contradictory. However, what should be avoided is the imposition of one group’s beliefs.

Joyce points out that in modern democracies beliefs are held privately. What sets gender self-identification ideology apart is the demand for validation by others.

Their label is described inaccurately because it is not really about self-identification, rather a singular occupation to exert control and make others identify them as whatever they choose in that moment.

"Since evolution has equipped humans with the ability to recognise other people’s sex almost instantaneously and with exquisite accuracy, very few trans people ‘pass’ as their desired sex. And so to see them as that sex, everyone else must discount what their senses are telling them.”

All this rancor on social media spiraling into society is a real pity when we have come so far as human beings and have expanded our existence beyond old social and gender stereotypes. Does this not then include going beyond the new socially created gender constructs to also respect the realities and choices of people bound to biology in work and reproduction? 

"If we recommit to our liberal values of freedom of belief, freedom of speech and robust debate, we can de-escalate this most vicious of culture wars." - Helen Joyce.

Helen Joyce, in courage and compassion, wants to reclaim the meaning previously associated with liberalism in a time when the word liberal has come to mean its opposite.

Will people be able to reclaim the meanings of words that have mattered to them in the aftermath of the cancel culture word wars?

This is the question going forward into the next chapter looking at the scale of the silencing and shaming happening to people who are trying to make sense of this aggressive, invasive, and militant attempt at redefinition of peoples' most intrinsic biological connection within themselves.

ANIMAL FARM AND FREE EXPRESSION

Not so long ago it would have been unthinkable for police resources to be spent on sending officers to a person's workplace to 'check their thinking' - especially about what amounts to gossip.

Yet in 2019 Harry Miller was visited at his place of work by the police after an anonymous Mrs. B. [who had been told by someone else about Miller’s tweets] filed a 'hate speech' complaint.

Miller, a former policeman who holds a number of degrees, was described as intelligent and highly educated in the High Court case that followed on the subject of his 'tweets' about proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act and the potentially dangerous consequences of:

1. Self-identification to existing sex-based rights.

2. Distortion of commonly understood biological concepts such as male and female through the introduction of enforced language including pronouns.

The Miller case is presented with excerpts from court www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/miller-v-college-of-police-judgment.pdf

THE MILLER CASE

“In his unpublished introduction to Animal Farm (1945) George Orwell wrote: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

In this manner began the judgment of Honourable Mr Justice Julian Knowles in the High Court of Justice in the case of Miller versus the College of Policing in Great Britain, February 2020.

HATE SPEECH?

Miller: “I believe that trans women are men who have chosen to identify as women. I believe such persons have the right to present and perform in any way they choose, provided that such choices do not infringe upon the rights of women.

I do not believe that presentation and performance equate to literally changing sex; I believe that conflating sex (a biological classification) with self-identified gender (a social construct) poses a risk to women’s sex-based rights; I believe such concerns warrant vigorous discussion which is why I actively engage in the debate.

The position I take is accurately described as gender critical.” 

Miller continued: “In this context (political reform) I want to raise awareness by stating that which used to be instinctively obvious – a biological man is a man and a biological woman is a woman. To claim otherwise is extraordinary. Extraordinary claims require both extraordinary evidence and extraordinary scrutiny prior to becoming law.”  

One of the retweets which had brought the British police to Miller's work was a verse written by a feminist songwriter that included the following lines:

“Your breasts are made of silicone, Your vagina goes nowhere,  Your hormones are synthetic, What you have is male privilege” (The full version is in the case cited.)

Miller's Exchange with the Police:

“I informed PC Gul that I was not the author of the verse and that it was simply expressing in verse the sense of imbalance of power between the sexes in the context of transgenderism.

He said by Liking and Retweeting it on Twitter, I was promoting Hate.

I again asked for, and received, confirmation that: neither the verse, nor any of the other alleged 30 tweets were criminal.

I then asked PC Gul why he was wasting my time.

PC Gul said: ‘I need to check your thinking’.

I replied: ‘So, let me get this straight, I’ve committed no crime. You’re a police officer. And you need to check my thinking?’  

PC Gul answered: ‘Yes’.

I said, ‘Have you any idea what that makes you? ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ is a dystopian novel, not a police training manual.’

'Nineteen Eighty-Four’ refers to the George Orwell novel which coined the term ‘thoughtcrime’ to describe a person's politically unorthodox or unacceptable thoughts.

Thought Police were the secret police of the superstate Oceania, who discover and punish thought crimes.

HIGH COURT JUDGMENT

By the Honourable Mr Justice Julian Knowles in the High Court of Justice [Strand, London, 14/20/2020]

In R v Central Independent Television plc [1994] Fam 192, 202-203, Hoffmann LJ said that:

“… a freedom which is restricted to what judges think to be responsible or in the public interest is no freedom. Freedom means the right to publish things which government and judges, however well motivated, think should not be published. It means the right to say things which ‘right-thinking people’ regard as dangerous or irresponsible. This freedom is subject only to clearly defined exceptions laid down by common law or statute.”

Also much quoted are the words of Sedley LJ in Redmond-Bate v Director of Public Prosecutions (1999) 7 BHRC 375, [20]:

“Free speech includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative … Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having ... “

In R v Shayler [2003] 1 AC 247, [21], Lord Bingham emphasised the connection between freedom of expression and democracy. He observed that ‘the fundamental right of free expression has been recognised at common law for very many years’ and explained:

“The reasons why the right to free expression is regarded as fundamental are familiar, but merit brief restatement in the present context. Modern democratic government means government of the people by the people for the people. But there can be no government by the people if they are ignorant of the issues to be resolved, the arguments for and against different solutions and the facts underlying those arguments. The business of government is not an activity about which only those professionally engaged are entitled to receive information and express opinions. It is, or should be, a participatory process.

"But there can be no assurance that government is carried out for the people unless the facts are made known, the issues publicly ventilated …”.

Judgment for a Free Democratic Society

“The fourth question is whether the impact of the rights infringement is disproportionate to the likely benefit of the impugned measure. I am quite satisfied that it is. The Claimant’s Article 10(1) right to speak on transgender issues as part of an ongoing debate was extremely important for all of the reasons I have given and because freedom of speech is intrinsically important.

There was no risk of him committing an offence and Mrs B’s emotional response did not justify the police acting as they did towards the Claimant.

What they did effectively grant her a ‘heckler’s veto’. As to this, in Vajnaj v Hungary, supra, the Court said at [57]:

“In the Court’s view, a legal system which applies restrictions on human rights in order to satisfy the dictates of public feeling – real or imaginary – cannot be regarded as meeting the pressing social needs recognised in a democratic society, since that society must remain reasonable in its judgement. To hold otherwise would mean that freedom of speech and opinion is subjected to the heckler’s veto.”

Judgment Conclusion  

“In his treatise On Liberty (1859) John Stuart Mill wrote:“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.”

“For the reasons I have set out, whilst Mrs B made a complaint that was recorded under HCOG, the police’s treatment of the Claimant thereafter disproportionately interfered with his right of freedom of expression, which is an essential component of democracy…”

MILL ON LIBERTY VS MARXISM  

The forces intent on destroying the beacon of hope Western liberty represents to all who live in terror and oppression, do so by manipulating the very fundamentals we employ in the making of meaning. 

Few have been a greater proponent of freedom of speech than John Stuart Mill, the 19th century philosopher quoted by Justice Knowles in the previous chapter. Still respected today for his writings on liberty, ethics, human rights and economics, Mill powerfully fended for the freedom of individuals against absolute state power.

With word wars the central assault is on the principle of freedom of speech because it is the foundation that supports all other freedoms. Which is why it’s concerning to see incongruous 2021 edits and efforts at historical revisionism attempting to associate Mill with socialism on Wikipedia.

Mill as the staunch proponent of individual liberty and free speech has been a thorn in the side of leftists and communist collectivists seeking control over the population for over a century. Both Karl Marx and the postmodern Marxist, Marcuse, detested Mill and his powerful defense of individual liberty.

No wonder Mark Levin called his best-selling book on what is happening in the Unites States, American Marxism. A deceitful ideological application of Marxism, cloaking itself in words like 'progressivism' and 'social activism'.

The deliberate misleading use of words and falseness of intent obfuscates the true intent and the consequences described with American Marxism; "the escalation of repression and censorship to silence opposing voices and enforce conformity."

It seems they believe that if they can just regulate how people speak, they can get their socialist safe space where all things will be different. Which is why they keep trying  to redefine words and turn their meanings inside out.

Tribute to John Stuart Mill and History

In an era of historical reductionism where history is taken out of context and used to manipulate people with grievance politics to stir resentment and division, it is poignant to consider that John Stuart Mill advocated for a future with rights for all when most of the population lived in brutal poverty and ordinary people had few rights – a mere 160 years ago.

To think it was only in 1867 that the Second Reform Act in the UK extended the voting privilege in boroughs to all males over 21, though still depending on whether they were house-owners, tenants or lodgers whose rent was at least 10 pounds a year.

This increased the voting population by 650,000 in 1867. Likely urban unskilled male workers not previously permitted to vote. (Berlinski & Dewan, 2010, Did the Extension of the Franchise Increase the Liberal Vote in Victorian Britain? London School of Economics and Political Science).

It seems necessary to give this example of voting right realities from Mill’s time to illustrate incremental progress because of the tendency for historical revisionism and reductivism to simplify the past from a position of present privilege.

Mill was a proponent of the ethics of utilitarianism, based on the principle that the value of a thing or action is determined by its utility. He wrote On the Subjection of Women and was one of the first members of British Parliament to call for women’s suffrage (right to vote) in elections, in order to discover the potential utility of women's full participation in society.

Debate over Public Policy is Critical

In his highly consequential work, On Liberty, John Stuart Mill argued for free speech and debate over public policy as the critical components of representative government.

Even though not widely known today, the authority of government and sanctity of individual rights on the utility of government emerged out of the political philosophy of utilitarianism as promoted by John Stuart Mill. The most important purpose of a policy must therefore always be its use to the people.

One of the saddest consequences of identity politics is that policies are now being made about identity politics instead of focusing on policy ideas that could actually make a difference to many marginalized populations.

In the August 2020 Daily Mail Australia article by Stephen Johnson, Indigenous Alice Springs town councilor Jacinta Price described a call to rename Smarter White milk as 'utter nonsense'. Ms. Price said "affluent activists 'whose lives are easy' were inventing issues to feel like victims instead of addressing family violence and sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities.”

Public policy fails because it has become tokenism and is made as result of emotions and feelings, in response to Twitter feuds - to virtue signal.

With proper debate lacking during the Covid crisis, power factions have taken advantage of public health policy for all manner of scope, function, and policy creep. The most renowned being the 2021 OSHA Rule whereby the federal government tried to unilaterally institute medical policy through workplace regulation with forced vaccine mandates.

By now most are also familiar with the censorship by social media platforms citing ‘policy violations’ where they never actually have to clarify, explain or even produce justification for any impugned ‘violation’. Censorship of this kind has badly impeded the open debate that could have averted much of the destructive consequences of bad policy response measures.

Bad Policies Mean Bad Outcomes

Policies not properly considered and debated have many undesirable consequences, such as lack of checks and balances, damage to previous function and intent, and in the end, lack of legitimacy.

Millions of dollars are invested by companies associated with the pharmaceutical and health industry, to lobby/persuade government officials, ostensibly ‘on behalf of the general public’, while citizens do not get direct access and are not having their voices heard.

Meanwhile, activists claiming they represent identity groups create further disconnect by inserting themselves into the fray with vindictive protectiveness.

The kind of neo-liberal worldview which detects only power dynamics and centers on grievances with the intent of making everything a zero-sum battle around identity, competing incessantly with other identity groups while silencing open debate, is a lose-lose scenario for everyone.  

Helen Joyce, cited earlier in relation to her book, When Ideology Meets Reality, gave the following advice to Andrew Doyle on GB News during an interview:

"I don’t think we can waste more time trying to debate these crazy, deranged things… We have to talk around them to the policy makers and actually just sideline them. Just reinforce British law which is very good, which states, we can have segregate spaces and sexual orientation is a protected characteristic and just ignore the extremists.”

Facing Up to Neo-Liberal Radicalism

People still cling to old political alliances and meanings associated with the words left or right from a time when liberalism and libertarianism were not really that far apart, and both cared about liberty.

The dangerous fragmentation of Western societies and the radicalism emerging from neo-liberal postmodernist movements necessitate coming to grips with what is happening in this era.

As Pluckrose and Lindsay explain in their book Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship made everything about race, gender and identity – and why this harms everybody:

“Understanding postmodernism is therefore a matter of some urgency precisely because it radically rejects the foundations upon which today’s advanced civilizations are built and consequently has the potential to undermine them.”

It is short-sighted and irresponsible of those who promote zero-sum politics around race, identity, gender, and sex to damage Western Civilization and the foundations on which it is built; freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, freedom of expression.

Our Western world is far from perfect, but if we disregard what has been accomplished with democracy we are at great risk.

It is even more difficult to come to terms when the very act of democracy is upended and voting that does not follow a radical agenda called a ‘threat to democracy.’   The same way an open exchange of ideas has been made ‘misinformation’ and contrary opinion 'conspiracy theory.'

This descent of beliefs into dogma and stagnation was exactly what Mill considered the greatest danger when open debate is bypassed and suppressed. Mill saw free discourse as a necessary condition for progress.

“Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”

                 John Stuart Mill – On Liberty - 1859

ELITES AND THE PERCEPTION GAP

A profound perception gap and disconnect to lived reality  now exists, making again the case for a year of national service in the form of bricklaying for all 18-year-olds, to establish common ground and a shared frame of reference around risk and equality -  with the added benefit of dealing with the housing crisis at the same time!

Rift between the Working Class and Elite Class

Many would like to believe there is benevolence at the root of 'social justice' actions - some deep-seated concern about social issues. This could be true to an extent, but increasingly it looks as if politicians and the corporate media are taking advantage of postmodern sensibilities to 'trigger' them for clicks and outrage.

Reality is likely more in tune with the explanation by Julius Krein in The Real Class War, Winter 2019, vol 3 (4) ed. on American Affairs Journal.org.

Krein brought attention to the struggles of the professional elite in Western politics resulting from a combination of increased wage stagnation and the increased costs of education and efforts required to maintain elite status.

"This underappreciated reality at least partially explains one of the puzzles of American politics in recent years: namely, that members of the elite often seem far more radical than the working class, both in their candidate choices and overall outlook. Although better off than the working class, lower-level elites appear to be experiencing far more intense status anxiety.”

"Another obstacle for left-wing upper-middle-class radicals is their own debilitating false consciousness, which easily exceeds the confusion frequently ascribed to the working class. Instead of frankly acknowledging their own professional class interests, they project their concerns onto the working class and present themselves as altruistic saviors—only to complain about a lack of working-class enthusiasm later. This blindness often prevents them from recognizing where their interests diverge from the purported beneficiaries of their projects and impedes their ability to effect any larger political realignment."

A part of the problem with seeing the world through the narrow identity lens of postmodernism is that it plays into a deep-seated need to be recognized as superior - something which lives in all of us.

Without it there would be no suburbs, or penthouses, no social climbing, no games focused on leveling up. It is what drives us, and can bring great courage and nobility of purpose, but also genocidal compulsion. It harbors our humanity and is at once what is best and worst about us.

The toxic divide we now see in society is unlikely to have come about if free speech and open debate in the marketplace of ideas had not been curtailed through political capture of the conversation with ideological suppression of speech and information flow and the chilling effects of cancel culture censorship.

Twitter Steering Public Discourse?

According to the Pew Research Center’s survey of Jan. 25 to Feb. 8, 2021, only 46% of adults in America uses Twitter on daily basis.  

Yet, news reporting of what is happening on Twitter seems to be steering much of discourse.  In both previous ‘hate speech’ chapters Twitter was the medium where activists claimed injury, leading to arrest and societal harms.

Shorthand battles on Twitter spill out into society and back in a feedback loop as elements magnified and modified by mass media, cascade into Internet social networks and peoples’ mobile phones, creating a hyper reality consciousness that users are unable to distinguish.  Furthermore, the dynamics of social media amplify concerns and create echo chambers dominated by those who are most active on those platforms.

At the Mercy of Echo Chamber Politics

In 2018 the Pew Center found only 24% of American adults said they ever used Twitter, yet at the same time up to 81% of the faction who identified as ‘progressive activists’  said they used social media as a source of news in the previous 24 hours (2018 Hidden Tribes Report).

If 'progressive activists' have leading positions in media and government, what influence does the skewed perception resulting from this kind of narrow echo-chamber experience of social interaction have on decisions and outcomes?

According to the 2018 Hidden Tribes Report Progressive Activists in the U.S. were more active on social media than any other group. This group also ranked higher on reporting they feel pressured to conform to their in-group’s political ideology.  The social media presence of this demographic was also reflected in Great Britain in 2020.

Progressive Activists are a dominant voice on social media at 55% compared to the other groups who share political content only at 9% to 12%.   (Juan-Torres, Dixon, Kimaram, Britain’s Choice: Common Ground and Division in 2020’s Britain, pg11, October 2020 Report, www.britainschoice.uk)

Many people who are influenced by the peer pressure of their echo chamber groups are not even aware they have been led by the nose with a single narrative and are therefore under false assumption they have the moral high ground with large scale societal approval. Perhaps a growing awareness of the perception gap will lead to more careful and neutral policy considerations.

FAILURE OF THE WATCHDOGS

People are disillusioned and disgusted by the media's loss of credibility and the gossip, distortions, omissions, and blatant fabrications lately called 'News'.

WATCHDOG OF DEMOCRACY

The failure of the media as the watchdog of democracy has hit society hard. Corporate and government overreach have effectively muzzled most of these once wary and wily watchdogs of democracy.

Six massive conglomerates control over 90 percent of mass media in the United States. New discoveries are constantly made about the influence of billionaires like Soros and others on the media. Mint Press News on 15 November 2021 reported over $300 million given to news outlets by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.  

How extensively are politicians and billionaires’ personal agendas controlling public information flow and discourse, and the flow of money and power?

Independent journalists seeking to establish checks and balances on the establishment like Project Veritas are raided by the FBI, while journalists who disseminate complete untruths, such as was the case with the 'Russia Hoax' are awarded Pulitzers.

Censorship and dismissal of thinkers and journalists under cancel culture, followed by the preferential hiring of malleable grievance ideologues to signal virtue with a single narrative convenient to authorities seeking to avoid accountability, has destroyed the last vestiges of mainstream media credibility.

The Human Rights Watch's World Report 2020

The 30th annual review of human rights practices of close to 100 countries highlighted the opportunistic and disappointing actions by governments in 2020 which reversed decades of progress in human rights.

The report revealed the chilling effect Australia's sweeping national security laws and police actions against journalists have had on freedom of expression. It can be speculated this has probably contributed to the disregard of human rights in Australia, which since 2020 has become one of the most severely lockdown countries in the world and hardly recognizable for the good-natured 'down under' spirit it once embodied.

However, there is a positive outcome. Because of the failure of the media as watchdog of democracy citizens have had to step up. In many ways the integrity of journalistic intent, the skepticism and search for truth, the courage to speak truth to power and the courage to reveal differing perspectives and information for the public to make their decisions, have therefore been re-emerging.

Real journalism does not come from institutions where students have been the subjects of cultural conditioning funded by billionaires. Journalists are hardy, questioning individuals whose questions emerge from the conditions of real life. Individuals, who prove their veracity and courage through their search for the truth, have taken up the role of watchdogs for democracy. This spells a significant reboot of this vital function in society.

Other news sources and platforms for social media have been developed with better focus on protecting public interest, freedom of speech and peoples’ liberties.

However, it is not only the watchdog of the media that has been under assault.

 WATCHDOG OF THE MIND

Known for the phrases; “the medium is the message” and “We shape our tools, and thereafter, our tools shape us,” Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s wrote about how new media technologies shape and reshape our associations and actions.  

“content” of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” - McLuhan.

Because when we are scared, diverted, confused, entertained, and perturbed by the salacious content, we do not notice the changes taking place as the technology medium itself influences values, norms, and behaviors across society in a cascade of secondary and tertiary impacts over time.

McLuhan emphasized, a form of media is not inherently good or bad, but it would spell disaster for any society who did not recognize its effects on users.

Clickbait Model of Social Media Platforms

The business models of the main social media companies focus on revenue from advertising. This means, the more users, and the more time they spend on the network, the higher the profits.

Those with the biggest profits derive them from selling access to data about their users, and access to their users, through advertising algorithms where advertisers outbid each other for placement along the data points for access to their selected prospects' attention.

These algorithms have collated information from hundreds of data points about each user, as people often post the most intimate details of their lives publicly.

The psychological triggers most frequently activated by social media sites are based on the need for significance, validation, status, and social approval. But they also activate another powerful mechanism, the need for variety stirred up by curiosity, novelty, and fresh gossip.

Sean Parker, a former president of Facebook, described it as follows:

“…we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's going to get you to contribute more content, and that's going to get you… more likes and comments. It's a social‐validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”

(www.axios.com/sean-parker-facebook-was-designed-to-exploit-human-vulnerability)

Social media companies as arbiters of truth and approbation, is a disturbing thought, because the woke employees of such companies take it upon themselves to censor and deliberately interfere with societal function from a misguided and ideologically biased point of view.

This happened with the alternative censor-free social network called Parler. A group of Amazon employees called Employees for Climate Justice demanded Amazon toss Parler off the web server hosting the platform because the server was owned by Amazon.

It is a common belief in these types of movements that if they can regulate how people communicate and what is said, they can make the world better. An extraordinary hubris making them blind to the harms they are causing.

"Woke Inc. Inside Corporate

America's Social Justice Scam"

The title of Vivek Ramaswamy's best selling book reflects what he sees as the great challenge of our time: the postmodernist infection of Corporate America.

Vivek stepped away from the billion-dollar company he built to speak up about corporations occupying seats of power in the marketplace of products, who then also seek a place in the marketplace of ideas for the power and influence those can yield in what could be perceived as a violation of democracy.

The usual practice of social media businesses deciding what is allowed to show up on their websites, as private businesses, became compromised when these private actors under government direction started taking down ‘hate-speech’ or ‘misinformation’  defined politically. The duplicity and hypocrisy of big corporations pretending to appear “woke” to make more money and get politically biased regulators on their side have many implications.

However, people are coming to terms with the new technologies and realize they do not want bureaucrats regulating speech, or to live at the mercy of social media gossip in a society where government bypasses constitutional constraints permitting private companies to engage in political speech discrimination online.

Exodus to Alternative Platforms

The steady increase of censorship by social media employees, whether removal of videos by world-renowned scientists on YouTube from March of 2020 onward, to the continued banning of a stream of high-profile accounts on Twitter, has resulted in millions of users abandoning these sites for alternative platforms that guarantee freedom of speech and expression.

With typical human ingenuity in the need for liberty and human connection a wide array of new applications sprung up offering freedom of choice and function devoid of censorship where users' personal data is not gathered for profiteering, user surveillance, or societal manipulation.  

DuckDuckGo offers privacy with Search Engine function, Signal instead of WhatsApp. Protonmail and Sekur for email that guarantee privacy.

Protonmail, the world's largest secure email service, developed by CERN and MIT scientists and protected by Swiss privacy law, has a free version and many privacy perks including encrypted internet access.

Privacy in the Parallel Economy

Many alternatives to Facebook have been developed. New social networking platforms offer places to connect respectful of the individual's right to free speech and free expression, like Parler, or MeWe which uses double ratchet encryption to safeguard users' privacy with chats not even visible to MeWe employees.

Free speech social network Gab, and video sharing platform Rumble also offer alternative spaces. The Twitter alternative Gettr, with its motto ‘The Marketplace of Ideas’ is a fast-growing application attracting many high-profile users.  

More will undoubtedly emerge to compete and provide places of connection as users adapt to social media choice.

Which draws into question the need for censorship legislation to be discussed next because change is already underway as people have come to realize the danger represented by any movement that attacks speech freedom and how little benefit such dystopian societies will bring to anyone.

WARNING! RIGHTS OR CENSORSHIP

Restrictions of free speech brought forward during a time of dangerous division associated with extreme public health measures are undeniably detrimental.

Ideologically biased censorship of social media has by all indications already had very negative consequences for democracy and the rights and liberties of people.  

Many factors should be considered while scrutinizing the various types of legislation currently being proposed to regulate social media in the Unites States, Britain, Canada, Australia and Europe.

First and foremost whether hysteria on social media really requires intervention? The problem is after all not so much with what is said, as it is with the inflated experience of harms by equating words with violence and calling different perspectives  misinformation.

Which brings us to the second consideration - who are these exalted beings equipped to censor fellow citizens?

Easily identified because they will use three inflated words repeatedly; safety, violence and respect, and their intention with the use of these words will be to control the dialogue and silence contrary viewpoints.

In the United States, Congressman Dan Crenshaw, former Navy SEAL and the author of Fortitude: American Resilience in the Era of Outrage, spoke up at a House Energy Committee hearing on December 1, 2021.

“One of the bills being considered is putting companies on the hook for any content that causes severe emotional injury, which remains undefined and open to interpretation.

It’s fundamentally un-American that your hurt feelings should dictate my free speech.

I think the democrat party wants to censor based on vague interpretations of harmful speech and misinformation, which invariably means things they just disagree with. They can’t legally infringe on the first amendment, now they want to bully big tech to do it for you. We can’t go down this path.”

People have strong feelings about free speech. Within 8 hours 906 comments accumulated in response to the broadcast. Some are quoted here for added perspective:

David: "Facebook went from being a social network, to being largely a (censored) discussion forum. Instead of censoring they should just put a disclaimer that users may say things that you do not agree with or (for the left) just might hurt your feelings. Anything said on the site is opinion, and not necessarily factual or true."

Posei: "So companies would be liable for allowing racist content. I would prefer that individuals be liable for false accusations of racism."

Brian: "If the first word from their mouth is "safety", safety is   the last thing on their minds."

Apple: "Any attack on free speech is against the Constitution, Bill of Rights and amendments that support the original contract between We the People and all levels of government, regardless of party!"

Joe: "Dan, let me sum this up for you. Misinformation = something that your political opponent is saying that you want to silence."

Sabrina: "I grew up with the saying "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" .. And I truly believe that to be true .. I don't give a damn what anyone says about me .. Call me a racist, call me deplorable, call me a redneck ... Why in the hell would I care? Feelings are NOT terminal unless the only world you live in is made up in your HEAD!"

Outpost: "Exactly. If you want to know who the bad guys are it's the ones you're not allowed to criticize."

Peter: "It hurts my feelings to suppress my thoughts and emotions and speech."

Andrew: "John Cleese collaborated with an astute psychologist who said "When people can't control their feelings, they have to control other people". Very insightful comment."

Alan: “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government - lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.”

Baido: "Last week, we watched a trial end and a verdict handed down and MANY were pissed off because "in their opinion, he was guilty". They didn't care what the laws state nor what the evidence was, just what their opinion was. We are seeing opinion, feelings and tantrums being the deciding factor of whether or not we have freedoms, liberties or rights. How 'bout we play by the laws, the Constitution? Those are for everyone."

Allan: "The protection of our 1st amendment right to free speech is critical to our freedom!"

Mard: "Freedom of speech, you like it or not, good one and the bad too. True or false. No exceptions, no one is the judge enough to censor Any speech. You are free to argue if you feel some false or lie but not to mute the speakers."

D F: "It's a complicated issue..." So yeah, then err on the side of free speech, not censorship."

Jay: "Facts, like our freedom of speech, don’t care about your feelings. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from offense. We cannot give in to the few offended at the cost of the many in agreement. That is in and of itself offense to the many."

Joan: "My rights don't end where your feelings begin. On the flip side, MY feelings are hurt that you have the right to censor me. See my point?"

Goog: "Don"t agree with fb, twitter, etc.? Then don't use them. Does government really need to get involved?"

goodol: ".... Hurt feelings is part of the path we tread to becoming mature, responsible adults. Mommy and daddy can't salve your feelings by what little Johnny/Janie said to you and you surely can't legislate or regulate personal interactions.

Bill: "Freedom of speech is there so that the unpopular thing can be said. Also, hearing something or an opinion that is different than yours will allow your closed or narrowly focused mind see things from a different perspective.

-----

In many of the comments, you hear an echo of the meaning negotiated by John Stuart Mill when he fought for freedom of speech and liberty for his fellows, and for us who were still to come.

“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.” - John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859

HOLD THE LINE FOR FREE SPEECH

What does it matter you may ask. It's just words after all.

Once this may have been the case. When free speech was the norm, and we took it for granted that here in the West our freedom to express our own thoughts would always be our most basic freedom.

But that was before every single liberty we had was assaulted and rights replaced with irrational and deliberate censorship and controlism. In the war on words, many of the meanings we once shared have been twisted and demeaned.

There is a singular stupidity about the kind of division we have allowed to happen. We are right to fear it. The planet is littered with places still broken and divided after decades, their reasons long forgotten, their lands rotten and their futures lost, their people mere shades. 

People simply asking questions because they were worried about their families have been called conspiracy theorists, 'flat-earthers' and even compared to drunk drivers.

"The test of the truth or acceptance of ideas depends on their competition with one another and not on the opinion of a censor, whether one provided by the government or some other authority."

The Loss of Larrikinism and Liberty

Larrikinism, that easy-going Australian archetype of good-natured irreverence, self-deprecating humor, and disregard for the rigid norms of propriety, has been an inspiring and much cherished presence in the free world.

The image is hard to match with the scenes of extreme lockdowns, Covid internment camps, and dark authoritarianism of Australia in 2021.

Is Australian larrikinism another loss in the narrowing of life that once was? Just like America used to represent the ‘Land of the Free' - a beacon of hope to those who are oppressed - now words on a list of offensive statements? The losses of symbols of Western freedom are much more comprehensive than we understand, as are the consequences.

It was distressing to see an unarmed Australian 'tradie' stand in protest before a line of riot police in Melbourne in September 2021, and when he shouted out; “You get that pay-check don’t you? You don’t care!" three armored figures descended on him, to force him to his knees and arrest him. 

Arrested why? For protesting loss of income? For speaking out in one of the most extremely 'locked down' countries in the world? Or for speaking the truth to power?

With his words the 'tradie' brought attention to one of the biggest injustices of Covid response measures - the different realities faced by the average worker, tradesman, and small businesses entrepreneur versus the public sector worker and official who get paid no matter the outcomes of their decisions.

This descent of the robust, free, and easy-going Australian society into a kind of autocratic dystopia has led many to ask: How can this be Australia?

What if this happened because Australia does not have explicit freedom of speech in a constitutional or statutory declaration of rights, apart from freedom of political communication?

Freedom of Speech is an Inherent Human Right

To voice one’s opinion without fear of censorship or punishment is protected under international law, binding on 150 nations.

United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948, Article 19:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Australia was one of the countries who insisted on reservations to Article 19 when they adopted the declaration. Perhaps 2021 revealed a fault line in the geography of human understanding that can be exploited when a once free Western society is put under undue duress.

Trust is Shared Understanding of Meaning

Trust is an old word. It came into the English language around the year 1200 with the meaning ‘reliance on the veracity or other virtues of someone or something.’ It comes from the Old Norse word ‘traust’ – meaning help, confidence, protection, and support.

It would not be surprising if the words Old Norse conjure up images of blood feuds, outlaws, superstition, and endless tribal warfare between warring factions where those who win, subject the other groups by taking their lands and making their people slaves. These are truths.

No nation, or peoples, on this earth can claim a history without bloodshed, cruelty, and misuse of power. However, by intentionally promoting divisive, reductive, and inaccurate ideas about history out of context, such as Western nations built on slavery and genocide, civility becomes impaired, and trust is destroyed.

The Loss of Trust in Society is a Serious Threat

Every new ‘cancel’ pulls yet another thread out of the fragile fabric of our social tapestry, placing our shared humanity under attack, while much that was once noble is made mud. To what end? Moral supremacy? Class Privilege?

When people engage with a business, whether private or public, they want to be assured those inside these structures are neutral agents who can remain professional and function in accordance with the purpose for which those entities were created.

The expectation is that workers and bureaucrats in these organizations will keep their personal beliefs to themselves and not abuse their positions for ideological purposes or deliberately set out to harm customers whose politics they don't agree with  or who they view as deplorable for not following the same dictates.

Lately there have been comments by politicians about 'people not wanting to get back to work'. What is seemingly not recognized is that the workplace has become a hostile environment where those in power have exceeded their authority and attempt to control every step and every thought of the working population.

A class divide emerged where a bureaucratic class live a very different reality from the millions upon millions who have been dispossessed under Covid.

Can We Reclaim Our Lives, Reclaim Trust?

The words Old Norse may be reminiscent of fierce tribalism and blood feuds, but it also gave life to the word Trust and brings to the mind courage, conviction, bravery, indomitable will, freedom, and the resilience of peoples to traverse a planet in search better places to live and thrive.

It reminds us of the irrefutable knowledge in each of us, that people then, like now, have always been driven by the needs for survival, shelter, sustenance, status, silver, significance, society, security.

Instead of  falling victim we can question the bias and ideological purging happening in institutions, ask questions and speak up for liberty.

We can reclaim our individual journeys and continue with the joint effort toward opportunities for all, where we were before identity politics put a torch to the tinder of thymos and set fire to the progress we have made.

Life as an Ongoing Endeavor for all of Humanity

Despite all the mudslinging, Western societies are still the most sought-after of places where people who live in fear, starvation and oppression seek to immigrate. 

Neo-elitists may rage at inequalities, but the past hundred years saw unparalleled progress, and unprecedented numbers of people lifted out of poverty each day.  It was an ongoing project.

It has been the bold dreams by individuals in search of improvement to actualize their human potential, and their unique achievements, that shaped societal progress. It has been the work of billions to build on that progress and ensure society works.

We can choose to continue to value our freedoms, the peace which came with democracy, and the prosperity and potential of the modern age...  

This is where we now stand, at a crossroads between individualism and collectivism, between the concept of society as serving the needs of individuals on their journeys to self-actualization or accepting rule by those who believe they can dictate how people en masse should serve ‘society’ (in other words them).

Are we going to founder in fear and futility, or shall we continue to work towards universal goals with courage and conviction and seek fair, honorable, and just ways to secure a better future for all our children?

THE END: SPEAK UP

So here we are. Things are happening. Things we do not like. No, not at all. Not one little bit.

It is important you stand up and speak up now. Politely mind you. Friendly and firmly. For small things and big.  

So, do say boo. And bah. Even bah humbug.

If the fearful remonstrate and scold, then just laugh and say, yes, I think differently. So, what. Deal with it. When they call you a name, smile and say, can you better define what you just said? Say, wouldn’t it be better if we talked about the same thing? 

And if they keep being hysterical, just say; “Tut-tut. Grown-ups here. Come back when you can reason. There is much we can discuss when you let words be words and not weapons, and people be people, not enemies. Much progress still to be made."

Tell them that throughout history we have created words to symbolize the discoveries we make of the world around us, to be able to discuss and debate meaning and evolve new insights, yearning always to seek answers to the great questions about our existence and the nature of the universe.

Explain that here in the West we have a mighty and proud tradition of freedom of thought and speech. Many who live in fear and despair look West to find hope. It works, even if not perfectly.

We have much work to do. Come back when your shoulders have borne the strain of real struggle and the hubris of posturing in pity about people you know nothing about have subsided. 

Learn by heart, those great words of John Stuart Mill from his treatise On Liberty: 

“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.” 

If all they hear is ‘mankind’ and latch onto that, say, yes, it was a different time. It was history. Imagine that. Mill fought for liberty, for men and for women, in a time it was unthinkable. Yes, we are humankind now.

You have won the right to speak openly and freely, as have we all in the West. 

Here we can say:

I live in freedom and courage, and I look to the future.

Not you, not anyone, can take from me, my right to speak.

Not you, not anyone, can silence me, or stop me from saying;

“I have a dream….”

Before you go...

please consider adding your perspective and your voice here.

One Last Thing...

If you enjoyed this book or found it useful I’d be very grateful if you’d post a short review on Amazon. Your support really does make a difference and I read all the reviews personally so I can get your feedback and make this book and the next ones even better.

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If you have any comments or concerns, or would like to sign up for new releases of the next books in the Life & Liberty series and for other special announcements and free offers, let me know at:  Mooreinfo@protonmail.com

Sincerely,

Morgan Moore