Category Archives: censorship

brainy, censorship

Something to consider

Being an American, I had never heard of Mary Whitehouse until a few years ago. I mostly knew her as the inspiration behind the noise band’s name. And I knew she had something to do with censorship on British TV. Most people in the media portray her as a meddling, old, religious fanatic who was out to spoil everybody’s fun. And they mocked her accordingly.

Fast forward some 30 years to 2015 and we still have a band of Mary Whitehouses, but instead of claiming Christianity as their inspiration, they do it in the name of identity politics.

You see a Mary Whitehouse in every campus classroom that practices “trigger warnings” and “micro aggressions.” You see Mary Whitehouse in the pages of your favorite clickbait websites. You see Mary Whitehouse in the faces of people like Anita Sarkeesian and John McIntosh and Coralie Alison. You see it in the latest update of your favorite web comic.

Mary Whitehouse corporally died 14 years ago. But her spirit lives in in far more rancid ways than she could have ever dreamed. While the inspiration might be different, these men and women who have made every politically incorrect utterance forbidden are every bit as much a doddering old moralist as Mary Whitehouse was, the only difference is that the people who opposed Whitehouse are the same ones who are welcoming the new totalitarianism with open arms.

brainy, censorship

Thought crimes R us

The human impulse to dehumanize by Jim Goad: 

British TV personality Katie Hopkins was born with a very unfortunate nose. Her proboscis is roughly the size of a toucan’s beak. Blonde-haired and with sparkling blue eyes, the poor maiden would actually be visually fetching if it weren’t for her giant, crooked, sloping honker.

What’s more important is that I doubt Katie Hopkins would feel compelled to call the police on me for saying any of that.

The same cannot be said of her many detractors. In recent days thousands of those who hate her—in the name of love and tolerance, but of course—have encouraged the police to arrest her for maligning fat people and Scottish people. 

… 

This new generation of insta-snitches—and there are endlessly dreary armies of them—who appear to feel justified in having human beings caged merely for hurting their feelings all seem afflicted with a self-absorbed notion that the only possible reason someone could have said something they found offensive was for the singular purpose of offending them…rather than, say, because it’s what they really believed.

But in the case of Hopkins, her allegedly “offensive” comments appear to be rooted in an ethical conviction that being fat is not only unhealthy, it unfairly burdens those who have to pay the fatties’ medical bills. “[Obesity’s] cost to the NHS is more than six billion a year,” she explained during the same televised segment where Szrodecki called the police, “and the Chief Surgeon at Guy’s Hospital said, ‘It’s killing millions, costing billions, and the cure is in our hands,’ and as a taxpayer that’s why I feel I do have a say, it’s because I’m paying for your health.” On Twitter, Hopkins has written, “My hate for fat people has grown from the fact I have to pay to make them better.”

Forgive me for suspecting that her real crime here is criticizing the bloated size of the British welfare state.

I recently mentioned that Anita Sarkeesian represents everything wrong with the modern world. I see more and more examples of this every day. Simply put, nobody has any skin anymore. Soon, everybody, and I mean everybody, will probably find their lives turned upside down for any perceived slight. And, in the case of feminists, if you didn’t say anything, they’ll lie and say you did.