Michelle Goldberg diagnoses what increasingly ails us at The Nation:
It’s increasingly clear that we are entering a new era of political correctness. Recently, we’ve seen the calls to #CancelColbert because of something outrageous said by Stephen Colbert’s blowhard alter ego, who has been saying outrageous things regularly for nine years. Then there’s the sudden demand for “trigger warnings” on college syllabi, meant to protect students from encountering ideas or images that may traumatize them; an Oberlin faculty document even suggests jettisoning “triggering material when it does not contribute directly to the course learning goals.” At Wellesley, students have petitioned to have an outdoor statue of a lifelike sleepwalking man removed because it was causing them “undue stress.” As I wrote in The Nation, there’s pressure in some circles not to use the word “vagina” in connection with reproductive rights, lest it offend trans people….
At times like this, politics contract. On the surface, the rhetoric appears more ambitious and utopian than ever—witness, for example, the apparently sincere claim by Suey Park, creator of the #CancelColbert hashtag, that Twitter activists intend to “dismantle the state.” But at the same time, activism becomes less about winning converts and changing the world and more about creating protected enclaves and policing speech.
As exemplified about four posts down.
No shit, Sherlock.
That’s what you get when enough generations of kids have grown up coddled, overprotected, helicopter-parented, and never unsupervised.
It sounds like a WTF tangent but I assure you it’s not. http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/…
Where she said Dan Savage “Dehumanized” her for not agreeing.
https://twitter.com/mikeomalleymohr/status/451508582270255104
Ain’t no feelings like hurt feelings!
And the Mozilla CEO thing, and the Sellwood Grocery thing, and I remember there was a blowup when the Florida Room posted a lame joke on their sign “suck it ancient peoples” when the Mayan apocalypse didn’t happen, and there’s been an ongoing campaign by some folks against the president of City Bikes because one of his friends thinks 9/11 is a Jewish conspiracy. Shit is getting fucking ridiculous.
We’re surrounded by crybabies that really need to find a hobby to redirect their energy into. Any hobby.
The funny thing is the bigots and bigot bigots have so much in common to those of us on the outside they appear to be effectively identical.