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War on Woke: Conservative Cultural Campaigning

The Todd case was interesting because what actually happened is all the other speakers at the conference pulled out due to her appearance, which meant the organisers had to choose between cancelling the event or asking Todd not to speak. It's hard to know how any new rules could address that. If they cancel the event are they liable to get fined? Should they be compelled to go ahead with just one speaker? Or do they have to find a way to force those who've pulled out to attend and share a platform? I don't really know how they'd do that. A lot of these cases have been more complex than presented in the press, I suspect any attempts to legislate may stumble once that becomes apparant.
 
The other speakers who pulled out need to be forcibly brought to the conference and compelled to deliver their speeches, possibly using shackles and cattle prods. That's what free speech is all about.

Also, obviously not the first such instance and won't be the last, but you'd think Williamson's cheerful line about "every Ngole, Carl or Todd" must be profoundly fucking embarrassing for anyone aligned with that LGB Alliance, "We're the real defenders of lesbians and their interests", kind of position.
 
The Todd case was interesting because what actually happened is all the other speakers at the conference pulled out due to her appearance, which meant the organisers had to choose between cancelling the event or asking Todd not to speak. It's hard to know how any new rules could address that. If they cancel the event are they liable to get fined? Should they be compelled to go ahead with just one speaker? Or do they have to find a way to force those who've pulled out to attend and share a platform? I don't really know how they'd do that. A lot of these cases have been more complex than presented in the press, I suspect any attempts to legislate may stumble once that becomes apparant.
I don't think any of this will ever meet a court of law; it all seems entirely legally untenable. Trouble is, just because it's all bullshit doesn't mean it doesn't do any damage. It helps in perpetuating existing bullshit prejudice which does.
 
I don't think any of this will ever meet a court of law; it all seems entirely legally untenable. Trouble is, just because it's all bullshit doesn't mean it doesn't do any damage. It helps in perpetuating existing bullshit prejudice which does.

It's a blunt stick to use to justify withholding funding from anyone who gets out of line.

It won't see a court case but if you want paying you don't do the cancel culture fandango.
 
I don't think any of this will ever meet a court of law; it all seems entirely legally untenable. Trouble is, just because it's all bullshit doesn't mean it doesn't do any damage. It helps in perpetuating existing bullshit prejudice which does.
While I don't think many meaningful cases will reach court, I fear that a bunch of chancers will try to build careers in being dicks off the back of it. Get an insider to invite you to a university where you know you won't be welcome, which sparks protests against you, give the uni a choice of having loads of aggy protests against you, or cancelling and a court case. You win either way. Columns in the Daily Mail and regular spots on GB News and kerching.

What I'm hoping is the test case is a holocaust denier or supporter of man-boy love or something and the government ends up looking aligned with them...
 
you cannot put a tory mp in every uni across that nation

you have to sub it out to hangers on and companies that pay contributions to the cause

like track and trace
 
While I don't think many meaningful cases will reach court, I fear that a bunch of chancers will try to build careers in being dicks off the back of it. Get an insider to invite you to a university where you know you won't be welcome, which sparks protests against you, give the uni a choice of having loads of aggy protests against you, or cancelling and a court case. You win either way. Columns in the Daily Mail and regular spots on GB News and kerching.

What I'm hoping is the test case is a holocaust denier or supporter of man-boy love or something and the government ends up looking aligned with them...
This was basically Milo Yannopoulos’ entire MO in the states until he just went too far even for his contrarian fan base.
 
Anyone who has been prevented from speaking.

In a democracy, everyone has the right (within the constraints of the law) to be heard. If you don't want to listen, don't go, but you have no right whatsoever to block speakers because you don't approve.

Nobody's obliged to invite them to do so, though.
 
This bloke Evan Smith@evanishistory has written a lot about no platform and its history in universities. He's got a book, here's a shorter version pdf No Platform: A History of Anti-Fascism, Universities and the Limits of Free Speech and a recent article ( excuse the Guardian link) The university ‘free speech crisis’ has been a rightwing myth for 50 years | Evan Smith

That first article is really good. I've often shared it to left and right-wing people alike, who abuse the notion of no platform either in a minimal or maximal sense.
 
There is a whole cess pit of "anti-woke" twats in a America - peterson, Harris, and the rest. They claim to be silenced but make about 100k a month off of their youtube accounts. Caught in a perpetual victim mindset whilst raking in far more money than any left wing public intellectual. There's a big difference between "being silenced" and just seen for what they are: empty vessels and 9 times out of 10, grifters. Maybe if they actually produced new research and wrote half meaningful books, they might get more invites at Unis etc. But they can't do that because producing stuff of value will mean they will loose their audience by about 90%. So easier to man cry over feminism or something.

The grift is paying mortgages for mansions in LA.
 
and yes, scratch beneath the surface of this stuff, and there's "race science" lurking away.

where as once these sorts of wankers were confined to rooms above pubs and the odd book in a library, they are now being watched by millions.

the world is great at the moment, isn't it?
 
free speech means you have to listen to any speaker wherever they are without heckling or shouting them down or standing outside slagging them and their ideas off. Those are the rules now, and they will I'm sure be applied equally to all viewpoints and not just the cunts desperate to mainstream race science again.
Letting them speak so everyone knows what cockwombles they are. Then destroying their arguments seems better than giving them publicity of victimhood. Aoart from Nazis obviously.
 
Letting them speak so everyone knows what cockwombles they are. Then destroying their arguments seems better than giving them publicity of victimhood. Aoart from Nazis obviously.
I believe in free speech and free expression. But there is a range of things that people seem to mean by that. To the right, it seems to mean: bigots get to say whatever they want where ever they want, whenever they want, and there must be no reply.

To me, free speech means not only the speaker has it. The listeners have it too. Telling a bigot they’re full of shit is not removing their freedom to speak; it’s exercising mine.

Furthermore, if the bigot were to walk into a synagog and expect to be able to explain why Jews are behind all that’s wrong with society, then they are sadly mistaken if they think they will not be, let’s say, forcibly ejected. Freedom to speak does not mean there will be no consequence to your words.

So that is within communities. Free speech should expect the free speech of others, and the free expression from others, including anger and other consequences. A community under attack from hatred, for example, can be expected to respond, not just sit there letting the speakers “make them self look ridiculous”.

However, as ever, we have an entity we call the state where the power of the ruling hegemony resides. If that gets to decide who can speak and who cannot (as opposed to individual clubs, organisations, places of worship), then we are in very different territory. That is when we need to take great care that our own speech is not the next to be curtailed by the powers that be.
 
Corbyn delivered an eighty seat majority to one of the worst PMs we have ever seen. Quite a feat.

And yet, some posters here feel that Corbyn's policies weren't radical enough.

I gather though that people who left the Labour party under Corbyn, have re-joined under Starmer. Swings and roundabouts.
TBF, Corbyn didn't do that. We did. The fact of the matter is that Corbyn, via popular support, represented something that a lot of people wanted - a Labour party that wasn't just Tory Lite, which is what we have had for too long now, and which looks to continue indefinitely.

If anyone gave us a Tory 80 seat majority, it was the loud voices of the right wing press who set out to monster Corbyn at every turn. I'd lay a fairly hefty slice of blame at the door of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, too, who have not exactly been subtle in conflating Corbyn's not-unreasonable objections to the behaviour of Israel with straight-up-and-down antisemitism. This government got in on lies and unachievable promises, and the press let them. And, of course, the parliamentary Labour party didn't exactly help themselves - I think they reached a point where they chose to "throw" an election rather than risk Corbyn being in charge.

Add to that the appalling overselling of Brexit, with some pretty cynical political chicanery, and which persuaded far more people to vote Tory in the last election. Now, we're seeing how empty those promises were. So there's another reason for that majority - lies. Blatant, barefaced, cynical ones.

A simplistic view, perhaps, to those who take their politics more seriously, but perhaps not as simplistic as the notion that the reason we're in this clusterfuck now is solely the responsibility of Jeremy Corbyn.
 
I believe in free speech and free expression. But there is a range of things that people seem to mean by that. To the right, it seems to mean: bigots get to say whatever they want where ever they want, whenever they want, and there must be no reply.

To me, free speech means not only the speaker has it. The listeners have it too. Telling a bigot they’re full of shit is not removing their freedom to speak; it’s exercising mine.

Furthermore, if the bigot were to walk into a synagog and expect to be able to explain why Jews are behind all that’s wrong with society, then they are sadly mistaken if they think they will not be, let’s say, forcibly ejected. Freedom to speak does not mean there will be no consequence to your words.

So that is within communities. Free speech should expect the free speech of others, and the free expression from others, including anger and other consequences. A community under attack from hatred, for example, can be expected to respond, not just sit there letting the speakers “make them self look ridiculous”.

However, as ever, we have an entity we call the state where the power of the ruling hegemony resides. If that gets to decide who can speak and who cannot (as opposed to individual clubs, organisations, places of worship), then we are in very different territory. That is when we need to take great care that our own speech is not the next to be curtailed by the powers that be.

Very well put Danny.

I'd only add that access to platforms is extremely unequal.
 
I believe in free speech and free expression. But there is a range of things that people seem to mean by that. To the right, it seems to mean: bigots get to say whatever they want where ever they want, whenever they want, and there must be no reply.

To me, free speech means not only the speaker has it. The listeners have it too. Telling a bigot they’re full of shit is not removing their freedom to speak; it’s exercising mine.

Furthermore, if the bigot were to walk into a synagog and expect to be able to explain why Jews are behind all that’s wrong with society, then they are sadly mistaken if they think they will not be, let’s say, forcibly ejected. Freedom to speak does not mean there will be no consequence to your words.

So that is within communities. Free speech should expect the free speech of others, and the free expression from others, including anger and other consequences. A community under attack from hatred, for example, can be expected to respond, not just sit there letting the speakers “make them self look ridiculous”.

However, as ever, we have an entity we call the state where the power of the ruling hegemony resides. If that gets to decide who can speak and who cannot (as opposed to individual clubs, organisations, places of worship), then we are in very different territory. That is when we need to take great care that our own speech is not the next to be curtailed by the powers that be.

This is spot on, as is Danny’s reminder that a much better thread already exists to discuss this.

All I’d add is that we need to recognise that ‘the culture war’, in terms of political economy, acts as a useful and increasingly powerful field within the neoliberal project. All sides involved are seeking recognition within the established terms of liberal democratic capitalism. Some are seeking to preserve historical entitlements under the system, others for disparity correction under it. Movements which challenge the project itself increasingly fall away.

What we can confidently therefore say is that this is precisely the type of debate neo-liberalism is comfortable with because all sides accept that the debate must be confined within its parameters, and are effectively an appeal to it, thus further embedding it as the natural order.
 
This is spot on, as is Danny’s reminder that a much better thread already exists to discuss this.

All I’d add is that we need to recognise that ‘the culture war’, in terms of political economy, acts as a useful and increasingly powerful field within the neoliberal project. All sides involved are seeking recognition within the established terms of liberal democratic capitalism. Some are seeking to preserve historical entitlements under the system, others for disparity correction under it. Movements which challenge the project itself increasingly fall away.

What we can confidently therefore say is that this is precisely the type of debate neo-liberalism is comfortable with because all sides accept that the debate must be confined within its parameters, and are effectively an appeal to it, thus further embedding it as the natural order.
Precisely.
 
This is spot on, as is Danny’s reminder that a much better thread already exists to discuss this.

All I’d add is that we need to recognise that ‘the culture war’, in terms of political economy, acts as a useful and increasingly powerful field within the neoliberal project. All sides involved are seeking recognition within the established terms of liberal democratic capitalism. Some are seeking to preserve historical entitlements under the system, others for disparity correction under it. Movements which challenge the project itself increasingly fall away.

What we can confidently therefore say is that this is precisely the type of debate neo-liberalism is comfortable with because all sides accept that the debate must be confined within its parameters, and are effectively an appeal to it, thus further embedding it as the natural order.
Yes. It amazes me the mental and emotional investment some sacrifice in regards the culture war - literally eating away at their own health in hatred as they endlessly trawl the spittle online...all the way they are still being paid just enough to survive and are one missing pay check from losing everything. It is as you say a very convenient "war".
 
A reading age of nine is an appalling reflection on those paid to educate our children.
No, Sass. It's an appalling reflection, yes - but I think it is a cheap shot to immediately assume it's the people doing the educating that are responsible.

We have endured 30 years of government tinkering with our education system, at the same time as the sector has been grievously under-supported, and then we had the whole debacle of Gove et al deciding to put the boot in, with the result that schools are struggling to recruit - and, more worryingly, retain - teachers. So, even if it is the quality of teaching that is responsible for the low average reading age (it isn't), even that failure can be laid squarely at the Government's door...and particularly this one.

We could say the same about doctors and nurses, and the way the NHS has been used as a plaything and political football as it suits the present Government, while at the same time it has declared war on the very people who operate and support it.
 
I believe in free speech and free expression. But there is a range of things that people seem to mean by that. To the right, it seems to mean: bigots get to say whatever they want where ever they want, whenever they want, and there must be no reply.

To me, free speech means not only the speaker has it. The listeners have it too. Telling a bigot they’re full of shit is not removing their freedom to speak; it’s exercising mine.

Furthermore, if the bigot were to walk into a synagog and expect to be able to explain why Jews are behind all that’s wrong with society, then they are sadly mistaken if they think they will not be, let’s say, forcibly ejected. Freedom to speak does not mean there will be no consequence to your words.

So that is within communities. Free speech should expect the free speech of others, and the free expression from others, including anger and other consequences. A community under attack from hatred, for example, can be expected to respond, not just sit there letting the speakers “make them look ridiculous
Aren't universities supposed to be places of debate?
 
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