Political correctness is an existential threat not just to the West, but all of human civilization. How did something which may have begun with good intentions, turn bad?
Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, carried out one of the most famous experiments in psychology focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience.
Milgram studied the justifications for genocide of the accused at the Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Their defense was often—obedience—they were “just following orders” from superiors.
Participants of the Milgram Experiment were led to believe that they were assisting an unrelated experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a “learner.” These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that had they been real would have been fatal. Some participants continued electric shocks long after the learner appeared to have died.
If you can be told what to say, you can be told what to think, and that makes you little more than an actor playing a part in someone else’s theatre.
The Milgram Experiment showed any human is capable of a heart of darkness
Maya Forstater, 45, lost her job after saying that people cannot change their biological sex.
Ms Forstater said, “Framing the question of transgender inclusion as an argument that male people should be allowed into women’s spaces discounts women’s rights to privacy and is fundamentally illiberal (it is like forcing Jewish people to eat pork)”.
Author JK Rowling was among those who came out to support Ms Forstater.
“Dress however you please,” Rowling wrote on Twitter, where she has over 14 million followers. “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 #ThisIsNotADrill.”
Neither were suggesting transgender people cannot self-identify as they choose, merely that biological sex is immutable. This isn’t about trans rights. It’s not about anyone having the right to call themselves the gender of their choice. It’s about the regressive-left forcing people to deny science.
When a tissue sample is analyzed, it will come back as male or female. Sex is the simplest thing DNA can tell you. Apart from some very rare cases, this doesn’t even involve looking at their DNA sequence—all you need to know is whether they have X and Y chromosomes (making them male) or a pair of Xs (making them female). Test results will never come back non-binary or gender neutral. A trans woman’s DNA will say biologically male, if that’s what they were born as. This is a scientific fact, not up for debate.
Fact-denial reeks of Stalin’s show trials where victims were required to admit offences they knew weren’t true. Like being forced to say the sky is green when everyone knows it’s blue. If you can be told what to say, you can be told what to think, and that makes you little more than an actor playing a part in someone else’s theatre.
I had a second cousin who transitioned from David to Sonya in the seventies. Not the most liberal climate. I recall members of my extended family commonly referring to Sonya as “he” or “it”. Many of whom had little moral leeway to pass judgement on others. But that is usually the way of bigots.
Despite growing up as products of the conservative fifties, my parents always called Sonya by the pronoun “she”. My mother responded to people as she found them. She taught me the lesson—treat people how you want to be treated. Sonya was a little uncertain of people probably because she had received a lion’s share of abuse, but she’d always come out and speak to my mother because I guess she realized she was safe. The fact is, it doesn’t take much sense of right and wrong, to be good to people good to you, to respect their choices, and abide by their wishes.
It’s possible to support trans people’s choices without forcing the population into the rejection of undisputed facts and scientific consensus in favor of non-evidence based notions—denialism. Other examples of denialism include climate change denial, COVID-19 denial and denial of evolution. Evolution is considered an undisputed fact within the scientific community and in academia, where the level of support for the Earth being only 6,000–10,000 years old as promoted by religious zealots is so practically close to zero that it is zero.
Similarly, when a body’s dug up by archaeologists, the bones will be identified as biologically male or female. Those who deny biological sex are little different to your run-of-the-mill climate change sceptic.
The rather obvious observation is that the Handmaid's Tail is portraying life for women under Islamic theocracy
The Handmaid’s Tale, both the popular Hulu series and the classic novel by Margaret Atwood, has become a symbol for feminism and the global fight for gender equality. Third wave feminists bandy it as a parable of the same oppression women experience in Western culture…
But…
In the United Arab Emirates, men have the right to beat their wives and daughters to discipline them—”provided that the beating is not so severe as to damage her bones or deform her body,” in the words of Chief Islamic Court Justice Falah al Hajeri.
In 2020 in Iran, a man, “defending my honor, family, and dignity,” cut off his thirteen-year-old daughter’s head. The victim, Romina Ashrafi, had run away from home following her father’s opposition to her marrying a man she had fallen in love with.
In July 2016, 26-year-old Qandeel Baloch was strangled to death by her brother, who said he killed her because she “brought dishonor” to their family through her flamboyant online videos. Pakistani rights activists estimate there are around 1,000 “honor killings” in Pakistan each year.
Honor killing. Genital mutilation. Forced child marriage. Culturally approved rape. Girls barred from education. Women stoned for adultery. Women prohibited from leaving the house unless accompanied by a male relative. Woman as property of men.
All met by feminist silence.
This is Islam. Where’s the outrage? Here is your Gilead.
These horrors have long since vanished from Western society, but for women growing up under Islam, they are an everyday occurrence.
So why then are feminists so silent?
Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been called a “far-right Islamophobe” by the far-left. Let’s be clear, if you have your genitalia mutilated, you’re allowed to criticize the religion and culture which did it. The regressive-left has an impressive record of landing on the wrong side of right and wrong.
Considering the appalling miseries of being female in the Islamic world, the question bears repeating: Where are the demonstrations, the articles, the petitions, the resolutions, the vindications of the rights of Islamic women by third-wave Western feminists?
They have averted their eyes from the brutal oppression of millions of women, preferring to contently gaze into the mythical Western patriarchal abyss, incensed over rich female executives who earn a few thousand less than male colleagues and colleges who don’t have a women’s lacrosse team.
Delve more deeply, and you realize that the sound of silence has a darker logic. The silence is a direct outgrowth of the way regressive-leftist theory has devolved in recent years. Now mired in self-righteous multicultural sentimentalism, and internationalist utopianism, feminism has lost the will to make universalist moral claims of equal dignity and individual freedom for those outside Western culture.
It has fallen into the perversely racist view that while it’s expected that Western culture refrain from everyday brutalities, the same cannot be expected of other (often brown) cultures. While Morgan Freeman can be slammed for creating a “toxic” workplace for inappropriate comments or staring at women’s breasts, the phenomena of Muslim male gangs in the UK who conducted decades long rape and sexual slavery of white female children cannot even be addressed because “they didn’t know any better”.
Holding Western culture up to a high standard, and other cultures up to a lesser standard because the people may be black or brown, is the most racist and reprehensible world view imaginable, and it is one continually perpetrated by the regressive-left and third wave feminism.
Ditto Muslim homophobia. In 2019 Birmingham’s Anderton Park primary children were pelted with eggs by Muslim protesters when they attempted to tie rainbow ribbons to their school gates. Muslims were objecting to the teaching of LGBT-inclusive content and told parents entering the school: “If you take your kids to school today, you’ll burn in hell.”
So where was the regressive-left? What do they do when one group they want to protect (Muslims) is bigoted against another group they want to protect (LGBT)?
Nothing.
Netflix cancelled If Only, a Turkish drama, when the Muslim government blocked filming in Turkey because it featured a gay character. Mahir Unal, the deputy chairman of Turkey’s ruling party, tweeted that he believed that in the future Netflix would “show greater sensitivity to Turkish culture and art”. What? Netflix will curtail and make bigoted and homophobic television to reflect Islamic culture? Imagine for a moment the outcry if a Western government even suggested to filmmakers that shooting a series with a LGBT character couldn’t happen? There must have been an outcry from the regressive-left, right?
No, because these situations crack the facade of their incoherent and illogical ideology and complete paralysis results. When push comes to shove, feminists will support a woman-hating, gay-hating ideology like Islam out of fear of “racism” and this trumps the rights of women, children, and LGBT people—the irony being, that this thinking is itself blatantly bigoted.
The feminist movement from the 1800s to the 1980s changed the lives of Western women forever and showed the obvious truth that women are due the same rights and dignity as men. The rights of all women is a universal demand—that shouldn’t be based on where they were born, or the color of their skin.
That it is today is another unpalatable, and illogical aspect of regressive-left ideology.
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There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.
—Madeleine Albright
Nazis were obsessed by race and believed that certain races were privileged and matter more and everything came back to race. Regressive-leftists are obsessed by race and believe that certain races are privileged and matter more and everything came back to race. CNN often has so many stories with the angle: it’s all about racism, that it becomes impossible to take their reporting seriously. Probably why Fox News is the #1 source of news for Americans.
Nazi and regressive-leftist groups’ understanding of ‘race’ are inherently flawed, ignoring fact, history, and human nature. First, race isn’t real. There’s no science to back up difference races. Humans made it up. We are all, at least genetically, the same.
Over 60 years ago M. F. Ashley Montagu conclusively destroyed the concept of “race” in his book, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (1945). Like many a bad idea, the notion persists that there is some useful purpose in classifying humanity into man-made categories. Modern humans share too recent a common ancestor for there to be deep-seated biological differences among us.
From an evolutionary point of view, we’re all Africans.
I grew up in a multi-cultural extended family. Thing is, as a kid, you don’t notice differences. It’s adults who later enforce these concepts upon children. My cousins were Maori. With the colour blindness of childhood, I never noticed ‘colour’. As a five year old kid I recall saying that my Maori aunt was my favorite auntie. I noticed things like she was the one who was nice to me. Some of the ‘white’ ones, weren’t. And this makes the difference when you’re a child.
The misconception of race is compounded by failure to understand tribalism. Tribalism is ingrained in humans. It’s been with us from our inception in Africa. At some point it played an important role in survival, since rival tribes were literally the enemy, and likely to take food or life from you. And it’s only been a period of a few hundred years in Europe since that fear of rival tribes invading, raping, and pillaging was an everyday reality for our ancestors. When discussing racism (or homophobia, or other bigotries) it’s tribalism that’s being talked about. Religion too is tribal, and little surprise that it leads to bigotry.
A few steps away from violent, tribal, primitive primates, you won’t knock that out of our species with a few glib slogans and sensitivity training. Like a psychiatric patient in treatment, humanity has to first recognize the real problem, not continue to lie to themselves. That race is real, is a lie. That people of color cannot be racist, is another lie.
The answer to tribalism is child-like color-blindness as Dr. King envisaged. To make race a non-issue. The problem is regressive-leftists think it’s all about color, and character doesn’t matter. They believe they know better than Martin Luther King, Jr. For those who want to continue racial division—we’ve trod this path for millennia—how’s that worked out?
Insanity is not listening to history and doing the same thing over and over.
Racism isn’t the problem; it goes far deeper. Race is the problem. Categorizing humans into groups without scientific bias, race is another of humanity’s bad ideas.
Like the skin of an onion, humanity must peel back the layers of bad ideas. Strip away everything that’s leading to division. Strip away everything that’s not real. Strip away all that’s been tried and failed. Religion. Race. Capitalism. Political correctness. Peel it all away, layer after layer. What might be left? Something fresh and clean and real?
In the wake of COVID-19 Pope Francis has urged world leaders to seek changes that go beyond a return to pre-pandemic business-as-usual. “Anyone who thinks that the only lesson to be learned was the need to improve what we were already doing, or to refine existing systems and regulations, is denying reality,” he wrote.
Individuals who bemoan COVID-19 restrictions desiring only a return to life as it was, making money, consumerism, meeting buddies for a plate of meat for which animals suffered and rainforests were burned, virtue signaling outrage at inequality on iPhones, accepting all the trimmings of capitalism, the most unequal system devised, accepting all the bad of the past, all that’s contributed to the state the world’s in, are missing the point nature is doing its best to make: bad ideas are the reason we’re where we are.
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.
—MLK
...the chief cause for the impending collapse of the world - the cause sufficient in and by itself - is the enormous growth of the human population: the human flood. The worst enemy of life is too much life: the excess of human life.
― Pentti Linkola, Can Life Prevail?
Of all the mammals on Earth, 96% are livestock and humans, only 4% are wild mammals. The destruction of wild habitat for farming, logging and development has resulted in the start of what many scientists consider the sixth mass extinction of life to occur in the Earth's four billion year history
Until humans begin respecting the inherent worth of all living beings regardless of their instrumental utility to human needs, there isn’t much hope of people respecting each other. Many writers, including Jewish Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer have drawn the comparison between the treatment of animals and the Holocaust. In Singer’s The Letter Writer the protagonist says “In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka.” Ingrid Newkirk, the president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), made the comparison unambiguously, saying: “Six million Jews died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughterhouses.”
Saying ‘black lives matter’ or ‘white lives matter’ or even ‘human lives matter’ is the height of speciesist arrogance. It’s the faded mentality of primitive ancestors that got us in this mess. We need to move beyond this outdated mode of thinking, and instead become conscious for the first time in human history that ‘all life matters’—and that includes non-human life.
Deep ecologist, Pentti Linkola saw radical change as the only course that can prevent ecological collapse. He contended that the human population, regardless if they’re developed or developing societies, don’t deserve to survive at the expense of the biosphere as a whole
In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka.
—Isaac Bashevis Singer
We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.
—R. Buckminster Fuller
Lookism is a little spoken of prejudice: the discriminatory treatment of people who are considered physically unattractive, mainly in the workplace but also occurs in relationship and other settings. Not only is there a premium for prettiness in Western culture, there’s also a penalty for plainness.
“We face a world where lookism is one of the most pervasive but denied prejudices,” according to Nancy Etcoff, a psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Studies on newborns have found that human infants as young as 14 hours from birth prefer to look at attractive faces rather than unattractive faces.
Research by Professor Dan Ariely showed that American women exhibit a marked preference for dating taller men, and that for shorter men to be judged attractive by women, they must earn substantially more.
A beautiful person, no matter the color of their skin, is privileged. Dark traits are ingrained in humanity.
Coming from a small town, working class background, I did a bunch of blue-collar jobs to pay my way through university. A major difference with blue-collar workers is they’re more realistic and honest. If someone doesn’t like you, they’ll literally punch you in the face. In a white collar space, you’re more likely to be figuratively stabbed in the back. I worked in a courier company. Morning banter included any complaint being met with the ongoing joke: “Stop being a soft cock.” A hard cock, presumably, being the preferred state to be.
“I’ve got two vans’ worth of parcels today! How am I going to cope?”
“Don’t be a soft cock. Just deliver your fucking freight.”
“I’ve got a headache.”
“Take a Panadol soft cock.”
You get the idea.
What would these hard men of the courier depo make of university students crying about hate speech, any differing opinion being termed violence, and demanding safe spaces?
Get out into the real world and you’ll see that other humans aren’t welcoming to you. The world isn’t hearts and flowers. People don’t exist to be your friend. Being a “soft cock” in the immortal words of the couriers won’t help you. You will meet those who take a dislike to you because of varying varieties of tribalism. Maybe you’re the wrong color. Maybe you’re wearing the wrong color. Maybe you’re not attractive enough. Maybe you’re not rich enough to fit their clique. And it may not be their fault, instead acting upon millennia of biological programming that can’t be nipped in the bud by a little social policy and Twitter outrage.
“We talk about civilization as though it’s a static state. There are no civilized people yet, it’s a process that’s constantly going on... As long as you have war, police, prisons, crime, you are in the early stages of civilization.”
—Jacque Fresco
Part of the Mankind’s mistake is the whole idea humans are special, above nature and deserving of special almost religious reverence. And it’s without merit. So then there’s a desire within each subset of humans to feel more special than others. One group believes it’s owed special treatment for its specialness within the specialness of being human. While there is no such thing as white privilege, there is such a thing as human privilege. Human privilege puts us above nature, and above each other.
Embracing instead the obvious reality that we’re not all that special would be a good step towards recovery and sanity. Perhaps then we could realistically consider what could make us civilized?
Ultimately, the question is, if human life is to persevere, what kind of world do you want? A world where people keep their thoughts hidden, a world without free speech, where you must deny science and accept obvious lies to get by, where truth cannot be spoken, full of people who know nothing of the past where history is erased? Like communist Czechoslovakia, the Land of Forgetting, where disgraced party members disappear from history, literally airbrushed from past photographs.
Marx was correct: capitalism will only survive with the enslavement and division of the masses. And there will never be a united movement against capitalism, to achieve real equality, while political correctness and the regressive-left are focused on division and division and division again.
The regressive-left has become an enemy which must first be removed to defeat the right, to move beyond capitalism, and save the planet. Real leftists have to take back the left, and grow an inclusive movement which tackles inequality, that is secular and science based, that is robust enough to take criticism and accept diverse opinion. The new left? The old left? The classic left? A movement of the 99% against the 1%. Not the 99% divided and turned like pitiless dogs on each other. The current regressive-left is creating equality for no one… working class… black… white… gay… trans… everyone is losing. People keep silent, hiding their real beliefs, stating things they know to be untrue, because they are in fear, just as surely as the accused witch. We need to stop being afraid of cancel culture and call these regressive-leftists bullies out for what they are. For that is what the left has descended to: a bunch of totalitarian playground thugs.
Appeasement won’t work; in the words of Winston Churchill, it’s just feeding the crocodile hoping it will eat you last.
In the eternal rebellion movie Marlon Brando, leather jacket and bike, is asked: “Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?” To which he replies: “Whadda you got?”
Rebel. Think. Read. Listen. Challenge stupid ideas. Don’t go with the masses, saying yes when you mean no.
Liberal values must triumph over oppressive ones. That is what the left once stood for, and must again.
I’m a leftist.