THAT CANCEL CULTURE THING

We live in horrible times, when we have to pretend the worst that can happen is to offend people with words.

Kids are dying in Yemen and Palestine and humans are sold as slaves on the black market in Libya but academics and journalists want to admonish and get us cancelled from life for “unconscious bias”. You know, that thing which cannot be detected with the naked eye, so you need to look for traces of it in your pancreas.

I was found guilty of having nano anti-Semitism in my urine so the Labour Party suspended me. Others lost jobs. Many were made pariah for raising polite objections on certain taboo topics.

Twitter and Facebook have also eagerly become a hand in this new censorship but disguised as prudish fatherly corporate concern.

Corporations exploit us, churn and spit people out like they’re lab rats. Then they preach to us on Facebook about our use of pronouns.

They retire whitening products, because whitening toothpaste is where racism really comes from as opposed to the industrial exploitation machine they’re proudly part of.

We live in a scientific era but when it comes to public discourse the worst that can happen is adopt the scientific/engineering method of naming the problem and going for it, solution wise.

But we must not name problems as that’s deemed to be racist/ sexist/ transphobic etc. We are instead expected to wish problems away by erasing them from speech. The consequence being that when problems pile up, and they do, those who suffer them will have been stripped of the “unpleasant”, “insufficiently diverse” and “inclusive” politically correct speech to point them out.

This is gaslighting. The equivalent of punching someone in the face when they yell “fuck!”. It is the aggressor claiming victimhood because the real victim used bad language.

Levels of historic prudishness piling on top of post-modern political correctness and Clintonian identity politics brought us here. Now society’s divided and censored because of them. Gagged and whipped senseless.

Saying harsh words about harsh realities is verboten, as if saying it wills Satan into being.

What happened to the deeply refreshing and healthy philosophical principle of “calling a pig a pig”? Well, someone will accuse you of being something somewhere for using that obviously literal idiom. Probably that if you utter the word “pig”, you must hate Jews and Muslims. How is this different from the magic but authoritarian thinking of the historic Catholic Church?

Things are so dire that intellectuals have decided to write a letter about it, such as the one signed by Noam Chomski and J K Rowling and published in Harper’s Magazine.

People on the left AND the right hated it even though lefties and right wingers signed it.

The letter makes a few good points about the loss of freedom of speech and its dangers.

Predictably the left thought it racist. Nuance is long dead, and paranoia in full bloom, so the “respectable” middle class commentariat don’t have it in their heart to imagine you want freedom of speech for less sinister reasons than to uphold vile opinions about victim demographics. If you stand up for freedom of speech, the only possible reason is that you are a Nazi KKK scumbag who wants to eat children. Assumption of guilt and all that.

Bit of cassandrafreude to see that and for the Labour Party to start re-education camps for wrongthink and thoughtcrime. Or as they call them, training sessions for “unconscious bias”.

It was John McDonnell who first spoke of that utterly Stalinist idea, suggesting it came from Andrew Gwyne. Now it makes sense that Starmer is enforcing it. The Blairite will Blair.

Enjoy your hipster gulag, Albion. I am going to have an offensive bacon sandwich, join me?

P.S. All the exaggerations in this piece is taken from real events and conversations. Some people do believe it is islamophobic to use the idiom “call a pig a pig”. If you clutch your hair in despair and ask, but why? — that is islamophobic and anti-Semitic. There is no innocence.

After this went online, someone told me there was a debate about the Miliband ‘anti-semitic bacon butty’.

It seems whatever satirical exaggeration I come up with for the purposes of writing a pisstake will have been surpassed by reality.