Zack Morris wrote:I was tired of outrage mongering the minute I noticed it becoming a "thing" again. I'm too young to have experienced the early 90's wave of political correctness on campuses
It was already there back in the mid to late 1980's when I lived in the USA. Talk about culture shock.
Zack Morris wrote:but back then, the Internet had not gained the critical mass required to amplify this nonsense.
Indeed. The internet is a global meme resonator across the entire spectrum of crazy.
Zack Morris wrote:I would also concede that with few big battles left to fight, extremists have turned on themselves in a cannibalistic spectacle of one-upsmanship (or one-upswomanship
).
Just as the members of Red Army [Japan] and the Red Guards [PRC] ended up persecuting, and sometimes killing, each other.
Zack Morris wrote:That said, it's hard to deny that this is essentially a free society at work. The outrage, the denunciations, the boycotts, and the terminations are all within the boundaries of voluntary associations. In the old days, there were also unwritten codes about what personal opinions could or could not be voiced. Eventually, people will get tired of this, become burdened by real problems, the outrage will become a sort of white noise we all tune out, or all of the above.
As with la Terreur and the Red Guard persecutions, too many innocent individuals are losing their livelihoods and reputations over innocuous offhand remarks and/or false accusations.
If every utterance has to be considered for it's possibility of self-incrimination, then that is little different than living in a repressive dictatorship.
I recall reading some of MacKinnon's and Dworkin's writing. My impressions was that these two individuals had taken their own personal issues/failings and rather then dealing with them had assumed/projected that it was instead society that was somehow at fault. Both struck me as batsh*t crazy.
As I recall one of them was on the verge of having pr0n declared harmful [in Canada?] and just as success seemed in sight, the internet showed up and swept away their efforts like a tsunami.
It is interesting that what used to once be the counterculture has now become "The Man" or should that be "The SLGBTQQIP2SAA ".
May the gods preserve and defend me from self-righteous altruists; I can defend myself from my enemies and my friends.