Godstud wrote:[The trouble starts when campaigns over-reach, alienating moderate supporters. It is easy to see how this has happened. Examples include toppling statues of wartime leader Winston Churchill – cherished as a hero by many in the West – or companies being “advised” to stop using the word “mother” by LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall, which operates a “Workplace Equality Index” in the UK. To large swaths of the general public, this all screams of political correctness gone mad.
So the argument is that Desantis is justified in silencing academics and critics because a statue of a racist guy was not respected, a company was suggesting using more inclusive language, and a company provides a service by measuring workplace equity.
If that is the argument, then it is very poor.
also implies that those not in the club are asleep, deluded or wrong. This instant judgement forms a dividing line, forcing the other side to become defensive and further entrenching the debate. The moral superiority platform is hardly a way to bring sceptics on board, especially when wealthy and privileged campaigners who have co-opted wokeness do not even follow their own standards, such as celebrity Dame Emma Thompson, who flew across the world to join an Extinction Rebellion protest about climate change in London in 2019. This particular protest involved blocking bridges and roads in the heart of London, including stopping ambulances, and the public outrage was so great that it damaged its own cause, as it provided the impetus for a new Police Bill which will restrict noise levels and timings for future protests.
Ty quoque fallacy.
Another example is the turbulent debate about trans-rights and gender identity. Trans people want to be accepted for who they are, including being legally recognised as the gender they wish. The UK already provides a Gender Recognition Certificate, through which one can change their legal sex but only after time requirements and medical checks, which many in the trans community consider demeaning. Trans activists are therefore campaigning to reduce these checks in order to make it easier to legally change sex. These voices deserve to be heard. However, it is also reasonable to listen to the women who are expressing concerns about what this might mean for women in private spaces, such as in changing rooms, toilets and, more significantly, prisons and services such as domestic violence shelters.
So we should do something we are already doing, but this still justifies depriving people of rights.
Unfortunately, the instinct of modern wokeness seems to be to shut down such debate. The famous author of Harry Potter, J K Rowling, found herself at the centre of a woke storm after liking a tweet by Maya Forstater, who lost her job in 2019 after tweeting that “male people are not women”. The reaction was immediate, with some accusing Forstater of “killing trans people with her hate” for simply expressing an opinion. Rowling penned an emotional essay to explain her rationale for supporting Forstater. In it, she confessed that she had once been in an abusive relationship and could therefore see why single-sex spaces for vulnerable women should be protected.
British tabloid The Sun shamelessly jumped at the chance to sell more papers by producing a front-page interview with the man who had abused Rowling, under the headline: I slapped JK and I am not sorry. The woke response to Rowling’s essay had essentially provided a platform in the right-wing media for a domestic abuser to gloat about his abuse.
This has less and less to do with Desantis.
The aforementioned Maya Forstater took her former employer, the Washington-based, Hillary-Clinton-friendly, international development think-tank, the Center for Global Development, to an employment tribunal to contest the decision not to renew her contract. But it ruled that her views were “incompatible with human dignity”. This was recently overturned after an appeal, meeting the legal test that Forstater’s right to express her views was protected under the UK’s equality laws. So, she is protected by the law, but at the end of the day, she still lost her job.
So, people should not be allowed to fire people for being bigots. Anything else is wokeness gone mad.
Wokeness can also shut down good causes. In 2019, Canada’s oldest women’s domestic violence shelter, based in Vancouver, was stripped of local authority funding because it refused to accept trans women (who were biologically male). Perhaps the shelter should have handled the issue differently, as the local authority won a short-term victory in the name of “inclusion”. But the crippling of an essential service only meant further division and long-term damage to the cause.
Lol. Desantis never gave a crap about Vancouver women being beaten.
It seems some civil society institutions have also become more radical, leaving even their original champions flustered. Simon Fanshawe, a pioneer in equality rights and founder of Stonewall, was disowned by the very charity he founded for merely highlighting concerns from women about the introduction of self-ID for trans people, signalling that the charity now mandates only rigid conformity to its new focus on gender ideology and a hierarchy of wokeness that is splitting the progressive agenda.
Social media has also raised the stakes. Where an offensive remark may once have resulted in a scolding from a friend or foe, people are now only a tweet away from being “cancelled” – a relatively new term for withdrawing one’s support for a person – which could result in losing your job or worse. Marion Millar, a “gender critical” feminist and accountant, was arrested by Scotland Police earlier this month for posting tweets expressing her views. One of them was a picture of a suffragette ribbon tied to a fence, which a complainant had described as a noose. Her tweets may have been poorly phrased and deeply offensive to some, but she now faces a potential jail term of up to six months – the same maximum length as a common assault charge against an emergency worker – with the possibility of her autistic children being taken into care.[/i]
The term ‘woke’ has become so divisive that it is harming support for the issues it is meant to be highlighting.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021 ... e-so-toxic
If this is the evil of wokeness, it is not enough to justify any of the violence and attacks anti-wokeness has enabled.
But you found a British opinion piece that agrees with you. Next time, try to find a piece that is not an editorial.
It is about protecting children, but then you've bought into that rubbish about "transphobia", as well. These laws are objectively good.
- By FiveofSwords
- By Unthinking Majority
- By Potemkin
- By Doug64