Anatomy of a Cancellation
We’re publishing a guest post today by longtime contributor Dr. Sinéad Murphy, an Associate Researcher in Philosophy at Newcastle University, about having a lecture cancelled because the title was thought to be too provocative: “Our Age of Vanishing Gender”. She was told her talk – due to be given at a student conference hosted by the Newcastle Philosophy Department – couldn’t go ahead due to concerns for students’ ‘mental health’. Here is an extract:
I thought of ending my presentation to the students with some recent examples of the demonisaton of gender, with the Conservative Woman’s report on September 25th 2021 in which Isabel Logan described how a teacher at her daughter’s all-girls school apologised to the class for having addressed them as “Girls”, with British Airways’ recently reported decision to stop using the phrase, “Ladies and Gentlemen”, with the Scottish Government’s publishing of its Covid vaccination statistics for “pregnant people”, and with Californian governor Gavin Newsom having last month signed a new law compelling large toy stores to provide gender-neutral toy sections.
As part of a conference entitled “Thinking Differently”, I judged that it might be worth ending by asking whether these apparently progressive moves against the alleged straitjacket of gender might not rather represent a further and final erosion of our greatest hope for aptitude and autonomy: our gendered bodies.
As it happens, however, I am no longer to give a presentation to students of Philosophy on November 17th this year. Having been asked to submit a title for my talk by the member of staff overseeing the event and having submitted the title “Our Age of Vanishing Gender”, I was informed a couple of days later that the students who were designing the poster for the event had resigned from their participation in it on account of my presentation’s title and that the event had been cancelled out of concern for students’ “mental health”.
Thinking differently? Only so long as we are thinking the same.
As with all Dr. Murphy’s pieces, this one is worth reading in full.
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I have never studied philosophy, we had the option at school but I chose RE.
So, my question: Isn’t philosophy the art of thinking about a topic from different angles and considering different view?
This makes me mad!!!
My son studied Philosophy at a highly respected philosophy dept within the last decade.
we read a fair bit of his work, and some of the academic texts he studied.
it was , frankly, very rigorous stuff intellectually .
The same cannot be said for an approach to philosophy which regards cancelling presentations on these kinds of spurious grounds as in any way acceptable.
Philosophy is essentially that, yes. It is the study of argument and thought itself. By extension it is the study of things which can be spoken about.
Granted, you can make a case in philosophy for ‘cancel culture’, but it is an anti- philosophical position.
” No Platform” as it used to be called needs to be for really exceptional ( and hard to define) cases , doesn’t it?
Well, who decides what is “exceptional”? I think the starting point has to be no restrictions beyond libel, slander and specific, direct threats of violence.
How to be viewed as a dangerous heretic living in the age of NEW NORMAL…
7 zero points on your Social Credit index.
The word is Normative.
Well Karen
You’ll be delighted to know from now on M&S is defo your kind of safe space…
https://www.nytimespost.com/ms-gives-staff-pronoun-badges-so-customers-know-how-to-address-them/
Absent a proper title I shall address Levine and other gender confused persons as ‘Oi you’ or ‘my dear’.
‘Thing’
I’m not advocating it, merely pointing out that one can legitimately argue for it. Doesn’t mean it’s right though. That’s the same for everything in philosophy. I guess on that basis you could argue that philosophy, as a discipline, is the sum total of all possible arguments.
“No platform” is a phrase worthy only of a totalitarian mindset.
Nobody ever forced anyone to attend a Jordan Peterson presentation or one by Naom Chomsky(sp).
Don’t like it? Don’t go or leave.
Free speech is the cornerstone of philosophy. Without freedom of speech, the freedom to express ideas freely and uncoerced, there can be no philosophy. As such, there is no case to be made for cancel culture in philosophy.
Excellent point.
Point? My god that’s so masculine and patriarchal offensive… How dare you!
Greta? What are you doing up so late? 🙂
That in itself is a contradiction. You can’t have freedom of speech without the permissability of the advocation of its negation.
Anyhow, I think Nietzsche’s opinion on philosophy and philosophers just about nails it.
Not sure what you mean by “negation”, but freedom of speech doesn’t mean that you have to accept someone else’s speech as if it’s true. You are free to refute it. You are free to disagree with it. You are even free to not listen to it. But you are not free to shut them up.
But if by “negation” you mean censorship, then I do not believe that for a second. I would ask you to explain how censorship is needed for freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech is precisely what it says on the box: freedom of speech. This includes the freedom to argue for censorship. By ‘negation’ I mean that freedom of speech entails the freedom to advocate restrictions on freedom of speech. Philosophy, a subject which should, if done authentically, allow for any argument that can be made, similarly allows space for you to make the case for ‘cancellation’, censorship, de-platforming or whatever the hell you want to advocate.
The distict point, and one that is not a freedom of speech issue, is what is morally right. Just because someone advocates restrictions on speech doesn’t mean they are morally right. The moment you allow ethics to limit speech (exceptional circumstances exluded, e.g. incitement) you lose freedom of speech. In a just and freedom of speech loving society such advocates of speech limitation will be laughed out of court. In a morally maladjusted state such people will achieve positions of influence.
I didn’t say you’re not allowed to argue for censorship. I said you have no solid ground on which to stand. Those are very different things. I see no contradiction.
You said:
I take this to mean that any such argument cannot be termed ‘philosophy’? Is that not what you meant?
You should take it to mean that no case can be made for cancel culture in philosophy, because one cannot put together a coherent argument for why a field based in freedom of speech must abolish freedom of speech. It doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to argue for it, just that you won’t make it very far.
Then we argue somewhat at cross purposes.
That does however assume of course that you believe philosophy is worthwhile. There are plenty of philosophers who’ve argued it isn’t, at least in part. Such cases can easily form the rationale behind the drive to abolish such ideas, so I’d hardly say that it means you won’t get far. I’d argue that analytic philosophy got very far with cancelling so called ‘continental’ philosophy in the English speaking world in the 20th century.
Firstly, there is a use to philosophy. I wouldn’t make it the object of my academical studies, but it is not completely useless. That being said, philosophers really cannot agree on anything, it seems. It is a field where no facts really exist.
Secondly, just because a field of knowledge may have rules and practices in place, it doesn’t mean they will be followed. The scientific method governs almost every field of science, and it is the best tool we know of for discovering new, valid knowledge. But as the many peer review scandals that have been popping up in recent years indicate, scientists are not very good at applying the scientific method. So just because philosophers are doing a great job of killing philosophy, it doesn’t mean that free speech is not of vital importance.
Freedom of speech is not a principle of law either, it is a culture. When people’s ears are collectively open you have freedom of speech. When they are closed you get de-platforming.
Freedom of speech is not a principle of law in the UK, despite people falsely claiming otherwise. But it is a principle of law in the US. This is I keep saying that we have a lot to learn from the US, both from all of the things they got right, but also from all the things they got wrong.
Trick or Treat wrong
Thanksgiving right.
IMHO.
I like reading about new and different ways of thinking. I took a fantastic course in literary critical theory at Uni about 40 years ago. The main take away was that there is always a different way of looking at things, often only revealed by very smart people in universities.
there was never a suggestion that there wasn’t something to learn from other approaches, even if in the end we decide that the approach doesn’t really work fos us as an individual.
it seems that this is now outmoded thought. Or perhaps it is thought that is outmoded.
oops
Stuff smart people at Universities, just read the book and come to your own conclusions.
Literary Critical Theory >>
Critical Race Theory >>
Critical Law Theory ( whatever TF that might be).
I was rubbish at pouffy French in 2nd year so had to take Biology instead of German, which I wanted in 3rd year, that made me mad!!!.
Sinéad came to our Stand in the Park in Bracknell in the summer as her friend’s mother live in the area. The friend’s mother still comes to the Stand in the Park sometimes
*************************************************
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Tuesday 9th November Very special and important event
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I enjoyed the full article.
Yes, the last line summed it up nicely. You can think differently, as long as it fits with whatever agenda is being pushed.
What’s worse, however, is the idea that people would be “offended” or would have their “mental health” affected by “thinking differently” about “thinking differently”. If the students can’t handle a mere idea, God help them when they face the Real World 🙂
Challenge their perceptions and they look something like this:
So, so true.
…
Which is exactly how it is done in China.
University lectures have commented to me that their Chinese students want to be taught the ‘right answer’, not how to think for themselves.
They will go home with their BA in Business Management knowing most of the right answers but f*ck all about managing a business.
That’s thousands of them from throughout Western Academia which might eventually be to our advantage. Let’s hope it’s the same thing in their military academies.
Everything inside the agenda, nothing against the agenda, nothing outside the agenda.
Not going to read the full article because both sides of the argument will be as bad as each other. Like listening to Trotskyists and Moaists rowing 40 years ago and thinking anyone is listening.
Serves her right for playing their game, this Professor of Philosophy deserves no sympathy for getting cancelled.
IMHO.
I don’t do
fictiongender. Gender is an academic fabrication, there are 2 sexes, enough said.That’s my philosophy, funnily enough, it mimics both biology & fact.
You’re not “thinking differently” enough. Minus 100 points on your Social Credit Score. I believe that means you can no longer enter B&Q, although check your VaxxApp for details.
It’s Homebase at weekends. Please watch the briefings more carefully.
Don’t try to get a job in publishing any time soon, is my advice.
orthodoxy trumps all in that world.
Surely it defeats the purpose of those who have transitioned from male to female or female to male if they identify as anything other than one of the two genders they have elected to be operated on to join? Anyone identifying as anything other than male or female has mental issues because they don’t acknowledge what’s currently in their pants as being a bit of a strong biological hint.
If you’re confused, look down.
Or ask a friend to tell you…
Or your wife.
Or husband?
I first (and just that once so far as I am aware) came across a trans person about twenty years ago when one of my male field worker colleagues got a job in the office for his ‘girlfriend’.
At first it was assumed that ‘Tara’ merely had big hands until the truth emerged.
One chap tried to give ‘Tara’ abuse until he was shouted down by theys co-workers (dread phrase). We did not need telling how to treat an individual with respect and ‘Tara’ just wanted to get on with life without attracting attention or demanding special treatment.
Until recently I always assumed when I heard the word “gender” that it was a puritanical euphemism for the word “sex” and that we had imported this silliness from the Americans.
it is wrong to use gender when sex is the correct term, and this seems to me to be being done even in the article ATL.
When re-signing into the NHS Mycare Patient Information Portal recently I was asked to define my
Sex
Gender
Sexuality
From the dropdown lists of choices I self identified as ‘other’ for the latter two.
This appears to have had absolutely no bearing upon my subsequent treatment by our NHS.
I’ve a friend who is a GP. He is now required to spend a couple of minutes going through a form with every patient about “gender race sexuality pronouns etc”. This is in a consultation of 10 minutes. 90% of his consultations are with people over the age of 75, but he still has to ask “Mrs Smith” whether in the last 3 months since he’s seen her she’s decided that she’s in fact a gay male black man called Fabio. He then has to write it all up/insert it in a database.
He used to see 15 patients a day, now 7.
Gender is a combination of fashion and personality. Nothing more.
A fad.
“Gender” was used as a synonym for “sex” (in one of the meanings of that word, and in addition to its use in the study of language) for a long time before the crazy sh**clown usage started. It’s cognate with “generate”, as in sexual reproduction.
As far as I am concerned, a person with Y chromosomes has male sex aka gender, and a person without them has female sex aka gender. Changing what’s down your pants doesn’t change your chromies.
No-one has the right to insist that mental illness is socially recognised as just a choice, nothing to do with illness, as valid and “true” as any other choice. (Otherwise the voices in a psychotic person’s head would all deserve their own passports.)
It might be possible to use the word “gender” as the cultural twin of biological “sex”, bearing in mind that there should be, and still to some extent is, despite the efforts of crazies, some amount of positive feedback between culture and nature. But that might be to give too much ground to the adversary…
I cannot give precise dates here, but I think the term “gender” is relatively new, appearing in the ’60s or ’70s. And while in the beginning it was used to differentiate between biological sex and social presentation, that is no longer the case. Even 2 years ago, a transgender woman’s sex would be considered male, while “her” gender would be female. But these days that line has been completely erased. These days everyone is insisting that there is no difference between someone born a woman and someone that “became” a woman. We now hear how lesbians are TERFs because they don’t want to have sex with a transgender woman who has not had gender reassignment surgery.
As the right has been saying for a long time now: this was a slippery slope, and we’re picking up speed, and I’m afraid we’re nowhere near the bottom yet.
Let they eat theyselves and pass the popcorn.
“Mandatory Vaccination & International Law” interview with UK’s Senior Lawyer Anna de Buisseret
https://www.bitchute.com/video/mGOkpsIjtpLO/
Well I took a dive & expired far too many neurons (frankly I don’t have that many to spare) trying to grasp this nonsense of debating the demise of an abstract designation that only exists in the minds of tormented academics.
I came to the conclusion, being polite in an attempt to not offend only gets you into trouble & the best policy is to be rude & truthful, then at least schizophrenic liberals will cancel & ostracize you, but then at least they will leave you alone, its a win-win, it’s what I dream of!
I’d like to start a philosophical debate of my own, I hope everyone is offended. Why do intellectuals think it’s clever to make themselves look stupid?
“Why do intellectuals think it’s clever to make themselves look stupid?”
In answering that question, let’s look closely at the use of the word “think” 🙂
The image I keep getting in my head is of white-collar work meetings under Stalin. At the end of a meeting, attendees had to cheer exuberantly in support of the official policy – to cheer and cheer, and nobody wanted to be the first to stop. Eventually whoever was chairing the meeting, after himself having cheered for a suitably long time, and being keenly aware of what might happen if disgust or even a lack of sustained enthusiasm showed in his eyes, would bring the cheering to a stop.
Live like that and anyone’s mental health will soon get f***ed.
A pattern of behaviour repeated to this day in N.Korea.
The opposite, though with the same end in mind, is shown in a film of Saddam Hussein addressing a meeting of Ba’ath loyalist bigwigs.
Suddenly he points to one and denounces him as a traitor. The traitor is dragged from the hall as all the others clap and cheer the Great Leader until he does it again, and again and again until about a third have gone while none of the survivors know when it will stop or if he ( they are all ‘he’ of course) will be next.
To confirm his psychological victory Hussein then obliges the undenounced to personally take part in the execution of their erstwhile colleagues. Not very ‘intellectual’ but the point was made.
Those who started the tradition of ‘thinking’ at each relevant juncture in history were usually answering questions or challenging an oppressive status quo, but then you get the followers on who do it for money. That’s where we are at.
If the title of a lecture affects students’ mental health I see them being unable to cope with any set-backs that they may face when they grow up, but of course growing up would seem to be a long way off for these delicate little flowers.
And they talk about mental health! It’s enough to drive a person up the wall, spending time in an institution where language is used such as “birth parent” and “women and people with cervixes”, both of which are used in at least some parts of the NHS.
Foul disrespect is being shown here for mothers and for women in general.
Gender is binary. It takes a man and a woman to make a baby, and if a person over the age of about three thinks otherwise there is something seriously wrong.
Over to George Orwell: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four.“
Also it’s a short step from saying that telling an obvious truth is bad for the listeners’ mental health to saying that the author or utterer of the obvious truth is themselves mentally ill…and then depriving them of certain types of employment, or locking them up.
Not so, cue genetic engineering and transhumanism.
How is the CCP on gender swapping?
As far as I know (which isn’t very far, so don’t quote me) this is exactly the Islamic republic of Irans view. As soon as you’re caught in flagrante with a member of the same sex you’re whisked off to the gender reassignment clinic, thus keeping up the claim that there are no homosexuals in Iran.
I recently posted a photo link showing Americas first issue of a gender neutral pronoun ‘X’, Passport, asking how the bearer might get on trying to enter Russia. The same question is applicable to China.
Imagine being a philosophy student and becoming mentally deranged when someone makes a proposition you don’t agree with…
Or imagine holding an academic position in a philosophy department and cancelling a presentation that asserts there are only two gender for fear of mental harm to your many-gendered students, but you don’t consider for even one second the mental harm the many-gendered students talking about their many genders are causing to the other students.
These people have gone off the rails. They are acting in a highly irrational manner. I believe that anyone suggesting that discussing gender should be cancelled for fear of mental harm is not capable of integrating into society in any capacity. Such a person must receive counselling and they must be psychiatrically cleared. I do not see how a normal, sane person can operate under such extreme irrationality.
Why would you discuss a none existent subject, that is under threat of extinction. She would have been wiser to cancel the lecture herself & let gender die a natural death. If we’re lucky, those that subscribe to the existence of something that doesn’t exist will die off with it too.
If you think this subject is “under threat of extinction”, you need to get out more. This is getting more and more traction every single day. Using “them/they” as a neutral singular pronoun is pretty much commonplace these days. No one even bats an eye when they hear “gender inclusivity”. Laws are being passed on it. It’s on the polls, it’s on the census. It’s beginning to dominate the media and entertainment sectors. This is not going away by itself any time soon.
No my home is my safe space, there’s no gender here to threaten me.
This stuff gets far too much attention, if no one engaged in it, it would disappear overnight. This lady is just encouraging it by talking about it.
In fact so are you!
Yep. Like I said. You need to get out more. Humza Yousaf was suggesting in the Scottish Parliament that hate speech should be banned even in private homes. How exactly, one might wonder? Whilst Mr. Yousaf did not get into specifics, I am sure Google, Apple, and Amazon would be very eager to help. How long until the far left Scottish Parliament decides to implement this? How long until Westminster realize what a brilliant idea that is? In the mean time, here you are, thinking your home is somehow impervious to these lunatics. Well, you are free to bury your head in the sand, if that is what you wish to do. We here in the real world are not going to let this go unchallenged.
Alexa would also be of great assistance in cases of in-home hate speech/ misgenderism.
Like Humza Yousaf you should perhaps relax more & learn to recognize satire.
The best way to kill this nonsense is to deny it oxygen. Just don’t engage with them.
Many of them are just attention seekers.
You don’t seem to understand. This isn’t some fringe minority. It is a minority, yes, but one that holds a lot of power. People not engaging is why we are in this mess in the first place. Which part of “laws are being made on this topic” do you not understand? There are hate speech laws in the UK in place right now. Police are showing up at people’s doors for saying mean things online. Marion Millar ended up in court cause she got in an argument on Twitter. Mark Meechan also ended up in court over a stupid joke.
You seem to be completely oblivious to the world around you.
Hung on her own petard covers it.
Sounds like the ancient Chistians getting in tizz about Angels passing through the eye of a needle. Eventually it got so daft they all gave up and started asking more useful questions like how to design a better plough.
The problem with that is that when Christians were asking themselves those silly question, they ruled the western world. I hope you can see the irony in your words.
See above. And, when Jesus said this, he was speaking to his disciples. There weren’t any ‘Christians’ as such at that time. In fact if there were they would have been given a very hard time. ‘Christians’ certainly didn’t rule the western world. Hundreds of later, people CALLING THEMSELVES Christians ruled over a lot of it.
The problem is that you both are conflating two phrases. “Angels dancing on the head of a pin”, which is what Christians were “getting in a tizz” over, and “camel passing through the eye of a needle”, which is what Jesus said.
The phrase “angels dancing on the head of a pin” appeared in the 17th century. This was in reference to something Thomas Aquinas said in 1270. As such, this is not something Jesus said, speaking to his disciples or otherwise.
There has never been any “getting in a tizz” over the camel bit.
No I don’t actually.
Not my downtick btw
The irony is that you are trying to make it seem as though these arguments are not at all important, and as such we shouldn’t waste our time on them, when in fact the example you use comes from a time when Christianity dominated the western world, and as such, that wasn’t a silly argument put forth by an obscure minority of people.
Used to Christiantiy being a soft target, being ridiculed, of course. But, for your information, the Christians were not ‘getting in tizz about Angels passing through the eye of a needle’. What was said was that it was harder for a rich man to get to heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle (but that he could with Christ). It was a ‘figure of speech’ used to illustrate just how hard it was.
So, if you’re going to make fun of the words of Christ, could I just ask you to check out what he actually said? I do understand though why people hate Christiantiy, make fun of it. This is because most Christians are not anything of the sort. (Evil masquerading as ‘angels of light’.) Here’s a true Christian. Chicken Licken Finds Safety and Freedom in the Land of Covidia (theblogmire.com)
If you’re going to get offended at what other people say Jesus said, could I just ask you to check out what he actually said? You know, like, he said “camel through the eye of a needle”, not “angels through the eye of a needle”… The initial comment is an obvious mis-remembering of the 17th century argument of “angels on the head of a pin”, which is something they used to argue about back then. So… maybe loosen up a bit, stop being offended over nothing.
And I really have to ask… Do the parents of these students know?
They should do since they started it.
How fragile their minds must be, poor things!
How tragic too will be their future when life comes crashing in on them.
Sadly life in the business world seems already to have surrendered to them.
Pity the approved response to the Coronavirus had no concerns for the mental health of the population. Still a few suicides doesn’t matter to TPTB does it?
Thinking differently? Only so long as we are thinking the same.
Maybe that should be the title? Surely they couldn’t cancel that.
https://freeworldnews.tv/watch?id=6185b407e19ed5372ded8319
Peter McCullough on Alex Jones.
Myocarditis cases in the US 10 thousand. Long discussion on cardiac injury and the spike persists in the body post vax for up to 15 months. Post vax myocarditis very dangerous, post natural infection any harm is minimal.
I’m sorry for what happened to Dr Murphy, and.. I’m not surprised. The so-called Generation Z seems to consist of (young) people who are wholly and absolutely not capable of facing any contradiction to their ideas, probably due to the fact that their social relationships are at the same time very intense: public life in social media, very brave revealing facts from life – and non-existent. My generation used to “hang out” with closest friend for hours, doing homework In each other’s home, eating dinners with each other’s families. These days young people are very lonely in the crowd of “social media virtually connected” “friends”( of whom they have sometimes hundreds on certain websites). As a result this is generation that simply doesn’t know how to handle human relationships, they only know about them from manuals. When they don’t like something they simply switch off, close the website or.. cancel. And although being rebellious and “anti” should be synonymous with being young, there is something more happening here. These young people push for the official narrative, not something contradictory to it (like former generations did). I suspect that they would never protest a Vietnam war (or something like that). That… Read more »
They need to study the Chinese Cultural Revolution in which Chairman Mao encouraged younger party cadres to denounce their older colleagues for counter revolutionary thought which required rooting out together with reverence for imperialistic icons of the evil past. This started out as his attempt to regain authority within his own party but span out of control as uneducated thick as sh*t youngsters took the opportunity to hound and denounce anyone with glasses or speaking a foreign language as ‘decedent bourgeoisie’ deserving of humiliation or death and the wholesale destruction of Chinas own cultural legacy. Eventually reason prevailed and Mao was sidelined until his demise but not until untold damage had been done to the Chinese intelligentsia not to mention the country’s physical historic legacy. This why the CCP takes no part in the current debate about the reparation of cultural artifacts. They would rather buy them back on the quiet rather than admit that it’s just as well that the West plundered some of it. It’s also why Chinese students at Western Universities are shy of being seen to talk to Quwellows (that’s us) in English, each of them will have had a grandparent who suffered in the Cultural… Read more »
Speaking as a relatively young person (late millenial) I can say this is absolutely the case. Most of my friends are older 40’s+ with an average age I’d say of about 65. This is because I just don’t get on with people my own age, I mostly find them maladjusted, dull and overly complicated. They are too preoccupied with hoop jumping and ‘acceptability’ and are constantly insecure because their friendships and relationships are so prone to fracturing due to having no basis in a concrete culture or community. I’d say I’m not innocent, I think all people my age and younger are damaged in this way to an extent, even older people are being sucked into these behaviours now, but most of the young are lost causes in my opinion. People my own age who I do get on with unfortunately tend to live far away because they are so far and few between.
I frequently ask myself: “where are all the young people my age?”.
I dread to think what it’ll be like when I’m old, I’ll be surrounded by my contemporaries…
Feelings?
My introduction to philosophy aged 11+3/4
From the article “California Governor . . . compelling large stores to have a gender neutral toy section”
This presumes that dolls in gingham frocks are ‘girls toys’ and that model road trucks are exclusive to boys.
Both of these assumptions are highly subjective and sexist themselves. Would anyone care to draw the line between girls and boys toys?
I was was partial to using a skipping rope (as an infant I might add) and some girls quite liked using (toy) guns to join us playing Cowboys’n’Injuns, oops sorry, racist.
Ed. Oppressed ranch co-workers racially abusing First Nation Americans.
What is a gender neutral toy anyway? Pregnant Dad Action Person?
Tracy Island? Thunderbirds is a bit blokey and definitely Patriarchal but with a nod to gayness with that one in the space station.
The token woman Lady Penelope merely an ostentatious representation of outdated semi feudal oppressive socio-economic exploitation not to mention her unsustainable Rolls Royce depicted solely to taunt honest sons, daughters and gender neutral offspring of the plough and workbench.
Sucks the life out of playtime don’t it?
Tracy Island? Thunderbirds is a bit blokey and definitely Patriarchal but with a nod to gayness with that one in the space station.
Only John?!?!? The whole family’s camper than Pontins. It’s Tintin I feel sorry for.
It is not ‘gender’ that is vanishing. ‘Gender’, ie behavioural stereotypes that used to be associated with sex, but are now apparently connected to some intangible ‘feelz’, is all pervasive. What is vanishing is acceptance of the biological reality that humans, along with all other mammals, are either male or female and cannot change from one to the other. Cancelling a lecture which points out that reality, on the grounds that it might damage ‘mental health’ is absurd. Debate and intellectual rigour are healthy and encourage resilience, which is what these creatures need.
I was quite offended by a comment BTL. Life goes on.
LOOK in all seriousness. You will never win this neoliberal “elite” sponsored culture war by being reactive, polite, civil or compromising.
You have to stop sheepishly defending your own beliefs, take the fight to them, advocate your own values & principles stop being so fragile about bruised egos from their name-calling, so what if you’re a transphobe, homophobe, bigot etc. in their eyes.
If you continue to just be defensive at every assault you will lose, whilst you’re giving your casualties first aid they move on to target & maim their next victim, leaving the battlefield littered with casualties on your side, whilst they grow in strength.
If you don’t believe Homo sapiens can change sex then actively push that message! These cultural attacks are a fight for survival, competition for domination of the human race. They are attacking the very foundation of nature, humanity, civilization, society, THE FAMILY!
A family is two adult humans of opposite sex & offspring. It’s scientifically, biologically, impossible to be anything else, FACT. Don’t facilitate any other narrative! Or you will become history.
As the human race would have become history if the ‘family’, in the days before IVF became widely available, was comprised of homosexual partners with no offspring.
IVF is an egregious crime against nature & humanity. But it doesn’t change the fact every human being on this planet has started life from a woman’s (adult female) womb.
It still requires an ovum & spermatozoa to create human progenies, & that still requires two sexes, a woman (adult female) & a man (adult male)! These are Inescapable facts.
The function of Marriage is a bond between 2 people to start a family to pass on their genes! A family = two adults of opposite sex + their offspring. Evidently, same-sex marriage is a sham, it can be nothing more than a pseudo family, Same-sex couples can not have genetic offspring, males can not become female!
Talking of ‘cancellations’, not sure why the ‘Free Speech Union’ is being advertised on this forum, when I see posts being deleted if they do not ‘fit the agenda’.
Looks like the plan is to get people discussing Philosophy and Religion and anything else other than Lockdowns which was the original aim, was it not?
If students can’t attend a talk where they learn how to rationalise and debate ideas, they why are they even at university? They are there to learn and not impose their unrationalised world view. However, the finger should point at the university authorities and staff. It is they who should be insisting that students are exposed to ideas, and that it is not students who decide what is and isn’t presented. How else are they able to separate reality from politics? Perhaps it’s about that time this was made clear in their contract of education, that if they accept a place, they have no right to dictate what is and isn’t taught, what views are and are not discussed and no right of speaker cancelation. If they disagree with a topic, they need to learn to express why in calm debate. This cancel culture must stop, and they must learn to be subject to authority.
Aren’t the students there to learn, to learn how to think, discuss, evaluate, and form opinions and views after due consideration?
At least that is what they used to do in my day; now, it would seem, the whole university intellectual experience is wasted on them as there no desire to think, let alone evaluate.
Already formed views based on no actual intellectual enquiry is like existing only on ready made meals, and turns university in to the intellectual equivalent of Deliveroo.
This futile exercise is a waste of everyone’s time and money, and it is a wonder that tutors like the author manage to keep going in such an environment, as it must be very disheartening to say the least. Here at least, most, if not all, appreciate her efforts and articles.