If Martyn Bradbury continues to write sensible posts, it may be time to offer him a guest slot on Whaleoil. For a writer who earned Cam’s moniker of Wrongly Wrongson when it came to political matters, Bradbury seems to be seeing what is wrong with the left’s thinking. Perhaps he secretly reads Whaleoil?
Quote.Here comes the Green Stasi where free speech is white cis-male privilege and micro aggression lead directly to macro violence.
I think Millennials are so feral about policing micro aggressions for three reasons.
The first is that they are the first generation totally brought up by neoliberal values of selfishness above all else. […] Millennial?s were brought up believing only their special little selves mattered. The Individual uber allas. […]
The second reason is that Millennials, for all their rage, can?t do a damned thing about the neoliberal economic hegemonic structure, can?t change climate change, can?t move out of perversely insecure working environments, can?t gain a foothold on the property ladder ? the only thing they can challenge is how individuals interact directly with them and so every interaction they don?t like becomes subjectively raised to the level of war crime with all the hysteria that demands.
The third reason of course is social media, where debate is shaped by outrage olympics and algorithmically fuelled by subjective rage.
Allowing this Millennial micro aggression policing culture to define hate speech is deeply dangerous because it could easily become horribly counter productive and actually help create the very fascism it is claiming to fight.
If a micro aggression is the birth place of sexist and racist violence, then killing the micro aggression is the obvious answer.
This was Susan Devoy?s response in the wake of the Christchurch atrocity on the Millennial Spin Off to Jacinda?s rallying call that this was not us ?
?Do not write an op-ed today crying about how shocking [the Christchurch] murders were. Because you helped make it happen. You helped normalise hatred in our country. You helped those murderers feel that they were representing the thoughts of ordinary New Zealanders.?
?let those words drip onto your consciousness. As far as Devoy is concerned, all white people in the media are directly to blame for a foreign white supremacist agent provocateur?s terrorist violence.
That?s a lot of people who will need to go to re-education camps under Devoy. […]
How many times could you disagree with Lizzie Marvelly or Alison Mau before it becomes hate speech against women?End quote.
How many times could you disagree with Gholriz [sic] before it becomes hate speech against migrants?
How many times am I allowed to ask these questions before simply asking the question is suddenly a hate crime?
This is the kind of middle class woke identity politics crap that only ends up alienating voters while feeding and empowering racists! Climate change is an existential threat to our species and they want to waste time on limiting free speech? No wonder the Greens are stalling in the polls.
Climate change is something perfectly normal, Martyn. It has always changed and it always will. That said, we can agree that the Greens should be campaigning against pollution, for clean rivers and swimable beaches, not their current left-of-Marx policies.
Quote.Could you imagine the woke green activists roaming like morality police across social media policing these new free speech infringements? Do you really want the Wellington Twitteratti defining hate speech based on their subjective feelings?End quote.
Apart from this woke censorship enabling and feeding radicalisation, the real danger in allowing Millennial micro aggression policing culture to define hate speech is that is likely to go the other way.
We all think these new hate speech laws will protect the weak, but it rarely ever works out that way. If groups can be redefined as needing hate speech protection from the State, you can immediately see where this will go. Imagine Bob Jones taking someone through the hate speech process because they claimed he exhibited white male privilege. […]
You would have thought after the colossal [failure] the free speech debate caused last year where the woke inadvertently empowered Don Brash and two crypto-fascists that they would be far more careful treading on fundamental rights within a democracy.
Apparently not.
Mark my words, unless cooler heads with sharper minds prevail, this will explode in the face of the Left.
And the sooner the better, Martyn.
