During the dark days of Soviet oppression, there was a joke that did the rounds in Russia. ‘ Homosexuality is a crime and the punishment is seven years in prison locked up with other men. There is a three-year waiting list.’Fighting fire with fire, the UK passes [planning to pass] more hate speech laws :: International Free Press Society
Don’t laugh too loudly. It could soon be illegal to repeat a joke like that.
4 comments:
If that photo is of a purple pansy, then I think we're banned in Britain.
Puritans, though. I wonder what we mean by it. Puritans are utopians looking for a pure theocracy. Throw away the Bible, and do we still call them puritans? I think it's a matter of small-minded and even stupid people looking for an identity, of a label for themselves, "I'm a ----." And it gives the hollow man a sense of importance he really doesn't earn of his own self. All his thoughts are simple and pre-made. It's ideological thinking, already sorted out by formula. It ha internal logic ready-made, and it's moralistic, not moral, so the speaker can spout off and seem both smart and moral without ever having to think beyond his limited capabilities. The moralistic pedant can lord it over anyone, given that no one can ever be perfect in public. There's always someone to correct and feel superiour to and about. What a deal.
It's why I encourage public screaming. Idiot pedants thrive on self-satisfaction, and to be shouted down in public, to be humiliated in public, is the best way to rid ourselves of them quickly, an on-going battle. They're not puritans, they're just fools with attitudes too big for their minds.
Tell them: "Shut the fuck up!"
It's all they deserve.
It's a photo of a purple pansy thriving in the sunlight, but with a shadow creeping up on it. I've always wondered why pansies are the symbol they are: they are tough flowers you plant when it's still cold in the early spring. They grow well, their colours are best, in the cool and they only go all weedy and decadent in the warm weather.
Anyway, the problem with giving puritans with a totalitarian streak their just reward is that it's not just about them. There is a larger society that must be built up by a form of justice that is more than the primitive justice (often true justice but justice limited in its freedom, or self-understanding) that the puritan deserves. In other words, if you just keep hanging them from lampposts, metaphorical or even real, that becomes the focus of attention and scandal and you aren't making a contribution to the larger conversation all kinds of people need: all those young and even old people who don't yet get it, and those who do get it but are always in need of getting it again in terms and references that are illuminating of our particular times.
Deferring quick and easy retribution, through a careful elucidation of the problem of the Puritan, in this day and age, can be a way of building up the reason that we need if we can really hope to make ground on the PC brigades. Yes, it's tiring and frustrating that one must dwell on these perennial problems and so needs a perverse faith in the absurd hope the weed can be seriously tackled. But maybe that's the only kind of faith that works.
Consider, for example, Bertonneau's way of talking about the Puritan: Beatty’s refrain of “Burn it” in Fahrenheit 451 indicates another element of Bradbury’s carefully constructed parable. Political correctness involves, as we have seen, a new primitivism of purpose-designed mandates and injunctions of a ritual type. It corresponds to something tribal and pre-civilized, which Bradbury rightly opposes to the literate and literary – one might say to the Scriptural – imagination. We see in political correctness a type of Puritanism, to which every difference is both foreign and intolerable and cries out for the swiftest and fullest purgation. In that context, an individual harboring his own judgment must seem to the right-thinking majority to be either a witch or a warlock. As such he or she falls subject to extreme sanction as undertaken by all those who adhere to the dogmatic order of things. Fahrenheit 451 indeed proffers the reader many counterparts of the Salem witches, from Clarisse McClellan, bumped off by the authorities for her intellectual vivacity, to the stalwart martyr of an old woman who refuses to leave her library; the latter burns with her books when the firemen unleash their flame throwers.
-my point being we don't just need to fight fire with fire but show the world our own literacy, our own Bertonneau. Otherwise, why should they be inspired to fight for their own intellectual freedom? It's not like we can inspire them on other subjects: what else is there for humanistic thought to write about but the clash of good and evil? A deferred justice serves the cause of human freedom.
I think small gang of widely dispersed loud-mouths are spoiling the world with their need to hector the average person. It's a personality flaw that's taken on a religious veneer, a gloss of holiness that most citizens are afraid to challenge for fear of seeming "insensitive." It's a fad running rampant across Modernity, and it's not harmless or simply foolish and obnoxious: it kills. It's not complicated, it's just a gaggle of fools who have nothing in their own minds, and they need a reason to feel good about themselves, which they fed by hectoring others who are basically minding their own business. It's out of control, and it needs stopping. There's no deep understanding needed, no great plan involved, it's just childish behaviour on the part of the few and it's taken hold of people's fears. Few are willing to be singled out for harm by the CHRC, for example, but it's necessary for some of us to stand up and fight back. These are childish people, and one needn't make more of it than that. Just tell them to shut up. It's that simple, and they'll slink away in embarrassment. They are bullies and nothing more.
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