Sunday, September 25, 2011
'Political-Correctness' talk, Sheffield Skeptics-in-the-Pub, Jan 16.
PC bigots have a handy way of playing into your hands, don't they?
There is a powerful reason why we never hear talk about 'the workers' any more: it's that they never 'rose up' as Marxist theory prescribed and predicted; leaving egg on the faces of those with a political-left mindset. Reducing this 'cognitive-dissonance' could be achieved in the classic way of not blaming either one's own gullibility or the belief itself, and instead to blame others.
A few (who don't identify themselves or their 'arguments', of course) have lobbied Dale Williams of Sheffield Skeptics-in-the-Pub to be highly un-sceptical and to pull my talk on 'Political Correctness' scheduled for January 16, thereby showing in as clear a way as possible the great need for discussion of this topic, and the absence of free-speech at a forum specifically set up to facilitate the challenge to hegemonic positions with reasoned argument (and, in my case, peer-reviewed science data and multiple converging lines of evidence across disciplines).
As is often pointed out, the only free-speech worthy of the name is that which may 'offend' a common or majority stance. Everyone is in favour of speech that doesn't 'offend', so it's only in respect of that which 'offends' where free-speech is at issue.
If Dale doesn't come to see his ironic error, then the talk will go ahead elsewhere, with the helpful publicity this amusing debacle provides.
Those interested can contact me at stevemoxon3@talktalk.net.
Here is the blurb for my talk from the Sheffield Skeptics-in-the-Pub website .....
'Political correctness' – PC – can accurately be considered the new fascism (as will be fully explained).
Contrary to its tenets, it's the ordinary person, the Average Joe, we are prejudiced towards, and who indeed is disadvantaged and 'oppressed'; not women, ethnic minorities and gays.
* Women have always been actually privileged, and if in some way some women lost out as social conditions changed, then this was amended with a speed hampered only by inertia itself caused by the very strength of the arrangements already in place to provide female advantage but now anachronistic.
* Many ethnic-minority groups fare better in education and in work than the average citizen, often in the context of the sort of community cohesion now lost to the host culture.
* 'Gays' likewise benefit from community cohesion, are notably over-represented in nice-jobs-if-you-can-get-them, and don't have the costs of compromising with the opposite sex.
The hard-done-by group in any and every society is the mass of (necessarily) lower-status males.
* Women have always been actually privileged, and if in some way some women lost out as social conditions changed, then this was amended with a speed hampered only by inertia itself caused by the very strength of the arrangements already in place to provide female advantage but now anachronistic.
* Many ethnic-minority groups fare better in education and in work than the average citizen, often in the context of the sort of community cohesion now lost to the host culture.
* 'Gays' likewise benefit from community cohesion, are notably over-represented in nice-jobs-if-you-can-get-them, and don't have the costs of compromising with the opposite sex.
The hard-done-by group in any and every society is the mass of (necessarily) lower-status males.
The deepest of reasons account for this: the root function of the male across biology (as will be explained). But synergistically with this, in our own culture there has been a pathological all-pervasive political development.
There is a powerful reason why we never hear talk about 'the workers' any more: it's that they never 'rose up' as Marxist theory prescribed and predicted; leaving egg on the faces of those with a political-left mindset. Reducing this 'cognitive-dissonance' could be achieved in the classic way of not blaming either one's own gullibility or the belief itself, and instead to blame others.
Given that the typical worker was male and white, so it became imperative to erase this sub-group from consideration as being in need of 'liberation', and to substitute sub-groups that are non-male and non-white. Hence women, ethnic minorities and gays were latched on to as the superficially plausible new 'oppressed'; not merely displacing 'the workers' but inverting their role in ideology to be the new 'oppressor' class, whilst transforming the state in political imagination from the tool of the 'boss' class to the supposed agent of social change. On the standard principle that a turncoat is reviled even more than an enemy, enmity transferred from the 'boss' class to the mass of ordinary people (less the abstracted aforesaid sub-groups).
The process began long ago, in the late 1920s, when it was first realised that the Soviet experiment was failing economically, and that therefore a cultural rather than an economic theory of Marxism was required. Academics in central Europe (who took themselves and their ideas to the USA and its Ivy League universities) rationalised the failure of theory regarding the 'proletariat' by utilising then current (but now entirely discredited) pseudo-scientific ideas of Freud concerning repression and the family. 'Capitalism' was deemed to 'repress' the 'worker' through the agency of the family, which itself was falsely regarded as a 'capitalist' creation.
These idiotic notions filtered down through the vastly expanding university systems across the West in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, through highly influential writers such as Herbert Marcuse, ready to fully 'hit the pavement' at the time that the political-Left collapsed first as an electoral force (circa 1980 with the end of the post-war settlement and the rise of Thatcher and Reagan), and then as a forcible imposition (in 1989 with the spectacular implosion of the Soviet empire). In the 1990s, if not before, PC became the new religion of the government-media-education elite, and then, as ever, the rest of the establishment – not least the police and the judiciary – fell into line behind the new order.
It was never a question of 'political correctness gone mad': PC never made (any rational) sense in the first place. In pretending to be about being nice to people but actually despising us, it's the deepest and widest, most serious political fraud in history; that may be – is clearly meant to be -- the death of our culture. PC is the quintessential example of expressing pique in the time-honoured manner of 'throwing the toys out of the pram'.
