Sunday, May 14, 2017

Thought-crime police win again

I've written about Jonathan Kay on this blog before - he was the ghostwriter for Justin Trudeau's autobiography. 
Kay made an excellent point about the thought-crime police and their tactics:
What I (and other Canadian writers and editors) am angry about is the effort by TWUC and its Equity Task Force (which released its own statement) to shame Niedzviecki, and to suggest that his liberal approach to speech is somehow outside the bounds of respectable discourse. TWUC’s over-the-top apology describes the “pain” that the article allegedly caused. It’s part of what may be described as the medicalization of the marketplace of ideas: It is no longer enough to say that you merely disagree with something. Rather, the author must be stigmatized as a sort of dangerous thought criminal. Indeed, the Equity Task Force situates Niedzviecki as an apologist for “cultural genocide,” and accuses him of peddling “a long-debunked false universalism.” The Task Force also claims that the publication of his article is a symptom of “structural racism,” or possibly even “brazen malice.”
Well apparently Kay discussing the insanity of the thought-crime police resulted in his leaving The Walrus.

I've written about the insanity and anti-free speech aspects of the forces of anti-appropriation on this blog before, but this controversy has resulted in an absolutely perfect demonstration of their sleazy, lying bad-faith arguments, by someone named Saachi Khoul in Buzzfeed:
I can’t believe I have to fucking say this, but no one, in the history of writing books, has ever suggested that white people are not allowed to write thoughtful portrayals of Indigenous people or people of colour, namely in fiction. Frankly, we encourage it.

This is purest bullshit. Telling white people what the are not allowed to do - and not just what they are allowed to write about - by claiming that what they are doing is evil "appropriation" is the very essence of the anti-appropriation position, as demonstrated by Yasmin Abdel-Magied's response to writer Lionel Shriver's speech against anti-appropriationism:
It became about the fact that a white man should be able to write the experience of a young Nigerian woman and if he sells millions and does a “decent” job — in the eyes of a white woman — he should not be questioned or pilloried in any way. It became about mocking those who ask people to seek permission to use their stories. It became a celebration of the unfettered exploitation of the experiences of others, under the guise of fiction. (For more, Yen-Rong, a volunteer at the festival, wrote a summary on her personal blog about it.)
It was a poisoned package wrapped up in arrogance and delivered with condescension.
Look beyond Abdel-Magied's anti-white resentment and what she says is exactly what Khoul says nobody has ever said.

Khoul continues:
But remember how fucking mad all of you got when you found out there’d be a black Stormtrooper in Star Wars? Remember when some of you got hot over the suggestion that Santa Claus, a literal figment of children’s imaginations, could be black?
Without any shame whatsoever, Khoul conflates those who rightly object to the insanity of anti-appropriationism's extremist anti-free speech position with racists. The people who objected to a black stormtrooper or to a black Santa Claus are not the same people objecting to the anti-appropriationists. And I doubt Khoul is ignorant of this fact. I think she thought it would be a good idea to deliberately lump all white people together as anti-black racists, because her own argument on the subject is based on a lie.

Meanwhile someone named Jeet Herr, editor at The New Republic, on Twitter called Jonathan Kay, someone who co-wrote Justin Trudeau's memoirs and clearly likes and respects Truduea a "rightwing provocateur" and compared him to Anne fucking Coulter.

Which demonstrates what ridiculous lengths those sympathetic to the thought-crime police will try to go to in order to smear those targeted by the witch-hunters.

But Jeet Heer is wrong if he believes that he has protected himself against future witch-hunts by anti-appropriationist thoughtcrime police. Because the thoughtcrime police don't base their accusations of racism, imperialism etc. based on any kind of rational thought. And this is largely because there are no boundaries for what counts as "appropriation" - the anti-appropriationists define appropriation on an ad-hoc basis to suit themselves. And anybody who is non-compliant at any time to the whims of the thought-police will be attacked and mobbed. Any media outlet is foolish to bow down to the insanity of anti-appropriationism.