There was a talk about unconscious bias testing, even though it’s been shown to be largely bogus, and as with so many of these sessions, almost all the examples and talking points came from the US, “and there didn’t seem to be any kind of recognition from the trainers that these are two very different countries with very different histories”.
Many diversity and equality sessions instruct employees to read Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, a runaway bestseller that has become the Little Red Book of the diversity industry. White Fragility is mainly tasked with teaching white liberals that the polite ways they talk about race to avoid offence are actually proof of their deep-seated sin. Whites, says DiAngelo, are able to “infuse their racial prejudice into the laws, policies, practices, and norms of society in a way that people of color do not”, and being unconscious of this racism is merely proof of how insidious it is.
In this world, greater white average wealth in any area is a priori evidence of this racism, even though over a dozen or so ethnic minority groups in the United States are wealthier than the white average. This central inequality, according to the book, “represents power and control by a racial group that is in the position to disseminate and protect its own self-image, worldview, and interests across the entire society”.
It is an incredibly bleak worldview, and as Matt Talibi said, “sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors”.
And this is what is being taught at workplaces across Britain, a new American religion proclaiming that, whatever we do, we are damned. It goes largely unopposed partly because the British are so unused to politics intruding in these areas of life, but also because workers are scared for their jobs; the rise of woke capital has given large corporations more power over their precarious employees.
One of the things I find so alien about the new religion is the absence of humour. So much of what is called identity politics is funny in its absurdity, because fanatics are intrinsically ridiculous — but only when they can’t get at you. But most people feel that they can, they can get them sacked or publicly humiliated, and so all the humour is told in DM groups or Slack channels. True believers certainly can’t laugh at themselves, and are determined to take the public realm’s sacred space for themselves.
There is also the difference between the totalitarian mind and the liberal mind; for the former, everything is about politics. What you do in your spare time has political implications, and so no area of life is free of political discussion. The traditional English cultural taboo about not discussing religion or politics in the pub reflected a deep-seated aversion to fanaticism; the idea that workplaces might be settings for political instruction would once have struck people here as positively demented.
A friend who works for a Russell Group university in the north of England described how, since June last year, there have been “constant invitations to regular Race Equality sessions and Diversity and Inclusion sessions”. Even in department-level meetings on completely unrelated topics there are now talks “educating us about the slave trade” with videos and slides. She describes these as “just complete non-sequiturs since the majority of the meeting is about new research grants, new students in the department, recruitment for next year”. It’s not that it’s a great intrusion, it’s just that it’s…. weird.
They are also made to undergo unconscious bias training before being allowed on interview panels for new staff and students, and are told things which are either questionable or outright false. At one of the meetings a diversity and inclusion officer told faculty that “if you only have one woman on your job shortlist there’s statistically no likelihood you’ll recruit her”, and this went unchallenged, even though this is not only untrue, it’s obviously untrue. Strangest of all, they were also told to “start every lecture with a picture of a black scientist and say that they have a voice and that it’s being heard”. She finds it embarrassingly patronising.
Universities are particularly vulnerable to this sort of activism, because by nature they are political. Many privately despair, including academics who aren’t especially right-wing; whatever your politics, conformism can become intolerable in a workplace. Talking about politics all the time is tedious. And activists can be disagreeable people.
Another academic, working at a politics department, recalled that things ramped up after the death of George Floyd when a committee was set up to look at diversity and decolonisation. It ended with activists from outside the department hiring students to “review” their reading list and blaming the inclusion of John Locke and David Hume for the BAME attainment gap. The conclusion was the demand that they separate “colonial and non-colonial” political history courses, which meant in effect separate courses for white and non-white political philosophers.
The strangest thing about all this expanded HR is that there is almost no evidence that diversity officers improve outcomes for underrepresented minorities. Indeed there is even evidence of the “pharisee effect”, that people made to recite a platitude about diversity and gender equality were less likely to hire a black or female candidate; it just made them feel like they’ve done their bit, a criticism that has been made against upper-class activism since Tom Wolfe’s day.
None of this stops it expanding. Even the royal family are on board, or as it was reported last week, “Queen to appoint diversity tsar”, one of those headlines that would truly baffle someone waking from a long coma. This will not improve the life of a single BAME person except for the actual tsar, or tsarina, who gets the job; everyone knows it, it’s just the royal family conforming to the state religion, just as their ancestor George I did.
The companies hiring diversity consultants probably aren’t improving people’s lives, and they aren’t encouraging tolerance, let alone “diversity”; quite the opposite. They’re doing what people in positions of power have done since the first states were formed, ensuring that their gods and saints are the ones being revered by the subjects they rule. As for the individuals who do not believe in the new faith, they do what people in totalitarian societies have always done – they keep quiet and retreat to an inner world where the intolerance and conformity of the powers-that-be cannot reach them.
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SubscribeI read White Fragility by Robin Di Angelo just to try and know what these people are saying.
If someone asked me what kind of book it was, I would not say it was a sociology book commenting on the lives of black people or a psychological work talking about the way white people think. There is also no element of humility acknowledging that what she is writing is theory or opinion.
It`s much closer to a religious work with rules for living – say the Koran – or perhaps a political work like Mein Kampf.
Every assertion in that book is non-falsifiable. So nothing in it meets the criterion of truth.
Yes it’s the classic postmodern mind trick of removing any concept of there being truths – so therefore opening the door to not saying anything wrong.
Although I never understood how more people don’t see the self-defeating futility of that viewpoint. Or how in within that framework you could legitimately advocate horrific causes.
Ah, but it doesn’t have to. Surely you know that “Truth” is simply a white male invention designed to hold down the rest of the population.
I think you must mean ‘meaningfulness’ rather than ‘truth’.
I mean the truth. In the Popperian sense. Empirical truth which can be proven or disproven
Coming soon the new book from Robin Di Angelo “ My Struggle (with Whiteness) “
🙂
Her new book, out in 2021 is called: “Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm”. I wonder if it is an autobiography.
Haha! It may amuse you to hear that I was banned from Waterstones several months ago for repeatedly reshelving ‘Why I’m no longer talking to crackers about race’ next to Mein Kampf.
I hope you gave them the name you used above!
She is absolved because she belongs to the cast of the progressive-sinless-elite. The new apostles of the Religion of the Pure.
I have not read the book but plenty of critiques appear to verify your impression.
I assume then that this hot-selling manifesto would be ripe for a copy-and-paste treatment and by simply replacing one word or phrase could be made to suit any particular grievance bee that occupied one’s bonnet.
Christian Fragility. Jewish Fragility. Islamic Fragility. Celebrity Fragility. Corporate Executive Fragility. Star Baker Fragility.
An entire “For Dummies” series for the oppressed and envious.
Look in the Grievance Study (or Hoax) done by James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghassian. They were submitting papers to various gender/feminist journals with outrageous articles, including one that was a chapter from Mein Kampf, but written in feminist lingo. It was accepted!!!!
It is getting stupid. A friend of mine basically spends his day negotiating contracts. He says he now goes to meetings and of there is a black guy in the other team he wonders if they are the “token black” and therefore maybe not up to job and a potential area of weakness.
He says he makes a point of probing and if he is correct he suggests that they join a critical subcommittee.
In essence he is saying that the effect of all this is to increasingly make people assume that all blacks been appointed for their colour and therefore have to prove their ability, more often, before being accepted.
I have to admit the E&D people have got us all very much on edge. I have a very good black friend who finds the whole issue as crazy as I do. To treat him in a special way (his words here) is to treat everyone else in a worse way therefore promoting racism. Why can’t we all look beyond the colour of people’s skin or their sexuality FGS? The person who gets the job should be the person who’ll make the best job of it not someone not qualified enough just because they’re not white/straight/cis male etc’. The vast army of highly paid E&D teams have a lot to answer for.
Similar crap was been spouted in the late ’90’s for promoting women. It made me feel that I was part of a “quota” rather than someone who had achieved through her own hard work. Soul destroying.
I suspect this is not uncommon. Black people are understandably against genuine prejudice and disadvantage.
But it’s the crazy white people who are the problem.
Works the same with women too, or in-fact any other group, gay or minority. At least before PC, everyone knew everyone was there that could pull their own weight.
Great article, perfectly summing up the problems with the modern world.
Everyone I’ve ever met who has been committed to this ideology has been a complete pain in the backside. All they do is start arguments and fall out with people. The irony is that they generally do this to people who are pretty much on their side in the first place. This pushes people further away into the welcoming arms of people like Trump, Farage, etc. Given the choice of being screamed at by some blue haired maniac or have a civilised chat with a fellow gammon I know what I’d rather do.
The lack of humor in these people is also very noticeable. They seem to be completely miserable all of the time. I worked with a young woman like this who was very concerned about all the modern issues (BLM, climate change, gender, etc.). She rarely smiled or laughed about anything and was one of the most depressing people to be around. She just sucked the life out of any room she entered.
I’m thankful that I work for a small company run by a very reasonable Anglo-Indian who seems completely oblivious to all this nonsense. We have no HR department, no way of monitoring people’s protected characteristics and I can hire and fire who I want. Sometimes my team has a lot of minorities, sometimes it doesn’t, it just depends on who the best candidate is. What a novel idea!
‘The lack of humor in these people is also very noticeable.‘
It may not exactly be a high-brow observation, but there is a scene in an episode of Family Guy (‘ …which some viewers may find offensive’) which sums it up. In the high school canteen, a defence of an insensitive tweet – ‘It was only a joke’ – provokes the solemn responses: ‘There’s no such thing as jokes anymore’ and ‘Yeah, we live in a post-joke world.’
The upshot is a mass brawl in which nearly all the students kill each other. Is this the way we are heading?
Sir Roger Scruton wrote an article about the importance of forgiveness and irony.
Forgiveness and Irony: What makes the West strong | City Journal (city-journal.org)
It’s said that when a person loses one sense their other senses increase. For example when someone loses their sense of humour, their sense of self importance massively increases.
“Moderation in all things “
as ‘you know who said’.
“Annoy a liberal – work hard, be happy”
Very good…….all grown ups should aspire to this!
Brilliant…….clearly a company of grown ups. There is severe immaturity today, no one takes responsibility, most young people’s aspirations seem to be about becoming a celebrity and if things get tough, like who will pay my mobile phone bill, well we can all look out!
It isn’t actually America exporting it, it’s blue America (and elites associated with it) exporting it. You can actually avoid much of this nonsense in the US by living outside the places badly infected with wokeism. The vast majority of the country is perfectly normal, we do have some totally dysfunctional spots but they do not represent the country, or even most of it. You can identify non dysfunctional areas of the US by looking at gun laws coupled with gun violence statistics. In dysfunctional spots, laws are stringent and gun violence is also very high. These tend also to be areas with lots of virtue signaling/diversity training programs coupled with very little diversity itself.
The Second Amendment is the most important tool USA has to remain free, without it we are sunk. It always reminds the people we are the ultimate sovereign of ourselves, we do have control over own safety, we have not surrendered our personal defense, thus freedom, to the State Authorities. I believe in law abiding households, Black, White, Hispanic, should all responsibly own a firearm if they wish, and the people I know in my town, Black And White, all own a fire arm, and that is better for everyone, like Switzerland. Where I live it is just normal, my guess is well over half of all houses have a firearm, and we are roughly equal numbers by race, and I would guess fire arm ownership is equal. We also all get along in my town because we all feel it is our community.
The Second Amendment is the most important tool USA has to remain free, without it we are sunk.
which is why the left constantly seeks to chip away at gun rights.
I totally agree Sanford. Where I live there are lots of people with legal guns and almost no gun violence. Criminals can never be sure that their victims are not armed and they therefore stay in places where they know the law abiding types are not armed. Like Chicago. It must be fabulous to be sure that you can knock over any store or any individual and be almost positive that your victim won’t be armed. Not where I live.
Perception creates reality though. Mass movements are historically very ineffective. Revolutions (from France to Russia to Myanmar) are led by upper-middle-class university students. In short: elites are what matter because elites control the institutions the masses depend on.
Our elites have been converted to a new religion: woke-ism. That means it will be forced down the masses throats within a generation.
I’m going to disagree, perception is not reality. Reality is reality. Elites do have control over much of life in the US which is why when someone comes along threatening it, like Trump, people lose it. You are certainly right about that. I don’t think this will spread much beyond blue states, it just doesn’t sell in red states. Academia has a long history of various polluting theories, this too shall pass.
But it’s important that people sending kids to college help them understand the indoctrination. I had to do this with my own. A fraternity at one of the colleges one of my daughters attended had a cowboys and Indians party with associated inappropriate dress. It was similar to toga parties my generation had in college, lord I am dating myself. Anyway, the fraternity was disciplined and all the parents got apologetic letters from the dean. Over a party. With people dressed as cowboys and Indians. It was ludicrous. My daughter understood that. I guess I owe an apology to Romans for the toga party.
Annette I would like to think you are right, however I am in the UK and I have never seen such a change in society and in double quick time. Unfortunately, much happens while people are thinking about it!
There must be places in the UK that are not infected with these dysfunctions though. Is it truly everywhere? I recognize that the US is very much defined by different states and it’s fairly easy to live in a state that is much less dysfunctional. It’s just that the dysfunctional states get the lions share of the attention while life goes on undisturbed in much of the country.
Let’s think positive and hope the grown ups rebel!
How very reassuring, thank you.
Surely, the point is that not everyone can or will be able to live outside the trouble spots. These spots will be cancerous and will take over every neighbourhood.
In America and in the UK in the past, the people who were able to move went ahead and moved – to avoid the guns and drugs and, more recently, to miss being infected by wokeism. The rest were stuck and had to obey the rules of the moment.
Personally, I think that wokeism is a fad of youth – a dangerous fad but a fad. When everybody has the BLM t-shirt, there will be another fad – perhaps even anti-wokeism.
Reactions to wokeism vary. Young people tend to think it is very important. Middle-aged people go along with it to show that they’re still young and gravity hasn’t started to play tricks yet, older working people go along with it for a quiet life. Older, non-working people are almost unaffected and just carry on as normal.
The thinkers of the world, the ones who feel they should warn everybody else, are adamant that wokeism is bad. Why is it bad if it can’t tell you what to think? Why is it bad if presidents fill their staff with black people?
In fact, wokeism is bad because it is trying to shut down the world as we, the old thinkers, know it. Unfortunately, in the UK but not in America, the damage has already been done by the environmentalists who are trying to stop all things which involve moving from A to B, all forms of useful heating for houses, all industry, all enjoyment except looking at computer screens. The effects of wokeism will be trivial compared to the effects produced by the environmentalists.
I think the people who don’t want to live with this can and will move. Don’t forget that there are people quite happy in blue states with rioting and looting. And people are moving in droves in the US away from blue states.
I agree it’s a young thing, it’s for people with little real world experience. And people who can live on their parents money. The older people who enjoy this sort of thing are usually dead ender types with little in their lives in the first place.
Wokeism is bad because it wants you to fall into only one of two categorie–narrow binary thinking. (Racist or anti-racist, with the latter carrying certain rules of behavior). You are to be a mind reader so if someone is “offended” by your “micro-aggression”, it is your fault no matter if there was no intent to offend, placing no demands for the offended to question their own perhaps misperceptions to your words or actions. Wokeism lives in its own generalizations, and wants to keep it that way as it keeps well-intentioned people confused. Who can argue with the ideas when nothing is clearly defined? Quite simply, Wokeism is about power. Not truth. Not common human values. Just plain old political tribal power.
‘Older non working people are almost unaffected and just carry on as normal’
I can tell you us older retired people are furious! Just because we no longer work doesn’t mean our brains are depleted in some way……I may not be as quick as I was at twenty but my passion for my country, heritage and culture is as important to me now as ever. I know many older people are appalled at the lack of action on this serious change in direction, which I believe we will all pay for in years to come. Look at many countries around the world and see what happens when the governments are caught napping.
So dysfunction leads to gun violence and stringent gun laws? That I can follow.
Or is it the stringent gun laws leading to dysfunction and gun violence?
Or is it the gun violence leading to dysfunction and stringent gun laws?
What do you mean by there being very little diversity in the areas with the most dysfunction, stringent gun laws, gun violence and diversity training? Do you have a place in mind?
No, gun violence which is prevalent in places with stringent gun laws, leads to dysfunction. All the law abiding people are wide open to becoming victims as they can’t defend themselves. It makes cities unlivable. As does acceptance of homeless tent cities and graffiti and garbage everywhere all over the streets. As does poor public schools and a preponderance of single parent homes. These all lead to dysfunctional cities. Diversity training doesn’t make cities live able. It’s pure theatre with gunshots as the background noise.
Highly dysfunctional cities have very little diversity, they are all run by democrats.
Thanks for clarifying.
You make it sound as if living in a city like Chicago means constantly being exposed to criminals, rioting and looting. I have lived in Chicago for 25 years. I’m German, grew up in Bremen, then lived in Paris for 6 years and moved to Chicago when I met my husband. I wholeheartedly prefer Chicago to Paris and Germany. My husband and I have always lived in the north of Chicago – North Side, then North Shore suburbs and have never experienced a shooting, rioting, mugging or burglary, not even a car break-in. Whereas I did experience muggings and a burglary and witnessed a shooting when I lived in Paris. So, to me Chicago has always been super safe. This is a vast city and to get from my neighborhood to a bad neighborhood I’d have to drive 90 minutes. I have no inclination to do so (and neither do the criminals, they know they’d be spotted and reported right away). Chicago is also one of the cleanest cities in the world, all my friends and family who have visited me from Europe over the years have marveled at the cleanliness and beauty of Chicago’s northside neighborhoods and the gorgeous Lakefront.
Yes, you live in the nicer part of Chicago. Every city has nicer parts. Even SF has parts that aren’t covered in homeless people. But the stats don’t lie. Gun violence is rampant in Chicago. Over this past weekend, 30 people were shot in Chicago, 3 died. This isn’t normal and it doesn’t happen everywhere in the US. In 2020 more than 700 people died in gun violence in Chicago. Looters have torn through the lovely Magnificent Mile. Lori Lightfoot does not have control of the city.
btw, I loved my time in Bremen, I was working with MBB on an airbus program.
I have been told that America is immune to its own ideas.
Hmmm, not sure what you mean by that. Surely poor leadership infects many places within the US. It’s hard to characterize the whole country as one thing or another. But yes, there are many places in the US where you can live a very normal life, unaffected by crime and gun violence and rioting and looting, and bad schools and garbage piled everywhere. I’ve lived in places in the US that had those things and in places that didn’t. I can tell you that life is much much nicer when you do not have to put up with those things.
I am glad to hear but do not underestimate the woke mob! Russia was destroyed by a group of Bolsheviks who knew where to hit and how to dismantle the whole society. And Russia is a huge country, nevertheless, Bolsheviks played their cards very well.
Carlo Cipolla (The 5 Basic Laws of Human Stupidity), also warned us to never underestimate the number of stupid people in a society and the damage they can do. When stupidity is blended with evil, the mix is lethal!
White Privilege: often an accusation made by those who benefited the most from it against those who benefited the least.
Yes, The most sickening thing about all this is that it is largely pushed by very rich and privileged white people who have no intention of giving up either their riches or their privileges.
thats the whole point of woke-ism, its like that hat from Harry Potter, its sorts people in to their “correct” place, the sons and daughters of the Good people, (who just happen to be the most wealthy) get in to the correct house. And the others get kept out and branded so that the Good know to avoid them, lest their Goodness be tarnished.
Cue Sainsburys – huge disparity between those at top of company and bottom in relation to earnings – cutting staff and installing auto checkouts to please shareholders – but hey we’ve installed safe spaces for our black staff so all is well.
It’s getting worse, The Oregon Department of Education has brought into the absolutely idiotic: Math(s) is racist. Black kids apparently can’t be expected to do white man’s maths. Of course (ironically) stats show a very wide distribution of maths success within ethnicity and gender, and in the US & UK plenty of immigrants groups including Africans easily outperform whites. It’s spectacularly anti-black racism, yet these people think they’re the good
guysnon-binaries anti-racists.There is of course similar stuff out there around gender, Dawkins wrote a good piece in the Spectator about it a few months ago. In simple terms some of these people are pushing the idea that logic & reason are tools of white male supremacy, even that working hard and dedication are ‘white’ traits, thus these traits are bad. To use reason or logic to question them is to wrong too. It’s hard to know where to start with it all, historical & emprical evidence shows that they’re wrong, ironically they’re trying to associate what most people (like employers) believe are good traits with white men, perhaps it’s a cunning plan – after all the post-modernist founders were white men.
Depressing, worrying, but nothing new, I’m afraid.
I have just been looking again at a book first published as long ago as 1981 (Women’s Reality by Anne Wilson Shaef), which explains everything you could ever want to know about the White Male System.
Just for example: ‘The White Male System believes in the reality of numbers. It has to in order to support its own mythology. If numbers are not real … they cannot be used to measure, predict and control.’
See, numbers, science, logic, the rational, and all that … nothing more than a cunning trick pulled by the White Male System to keep women and non-white people under control.
So now you know.
I know, after all our modern numbers were invented by Europeans – which is why they’re name ‘European Numerals’ , and I believe it was an Englishman who invented the concept of Zero – or perhaps not.
Base 10 and other ideas were created in Egypt, when the total canon of North European intellectual thought was ironically about zero. Obvious Indian, China and other areas had massive input too.
In England we didn’t start using these numbers properly until nearly 1600. Now it turns out we’ve ruined it for everyone.
Very interesting. I didn’t know they were called European numerals. In my schoolbooks, including dictionaries, (try OUP for a start) they were always called Arabic numerals, in contrast to Roman numerals. Still, we live and learn.
As for an Englishman inventing the concept of zero (Jingoism lives OK!), you might like to look at a very brief account in Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/history-of-zero/
Oh dear, them pesky furriners. Still, maybe it’s nicer to live in a rosy glow thinking we invented everything.
I’m not sure how to put this without causing embarrassment, but Luke was making a joke. And a good one, I thought.
Although I do of course appreciate that we now live in a post-joke world.
I’m afraid you missed the sarcasm.
It’s hardly even sarcasm! I literally put – ‘or perhaps not’ It’s well known that they’re called Arab Numerals, but probably Indian.
I mean the rest of my post disparages the idea of (northern) European superiority, acknowledging that African Egypt was using base 10 when ‘we’ could barely count to it.
Having invented particular numerals does not make a culture “superior”. Western European societies presumably adopted the use of Arabic numerals over time because they were more practical and simpler than Roman ones. Still, the Roman ones worked fine for many centuries. Different indigenous European peoples all had their own numerical systems and ways of counting, which worked fine for them long before the universal adoption of Roman and then Arabic numerals.
Not sure where you get the idea that Europeans were barely able to count several thousand years ago. All human beings of normal intelligence are able to count, an ability that generally emerges in children at around age three or four, and independently develop their own methods of doing so. Complex systems of accounting and record-keeping emerged in different places throughout history as conditions for survival necessitated them. The Egyptians, inhabiting what was mostly a desert wasteland, depended entirely for their survival on their brief growing season made possible by the flooding of the Nile river. The Europeans inhabited a very different environment.
Or are you just trying to imply that northern Africans and Arabs were more intelligent than Europeans?
Of course not! to nearly all of that. You did drop off the northern bit from Europeans. For a lot of history the Med was a centre of civilization, Britain was a a foggy island far to the north.
Nice and informative reply though. Culture is so important. And yes Roman Numerals made do, but base 10 rules.
Ok I might have been exaggerating when I said that northern Europeans could barely count to 10 2000+ years ago. But I struggle to think of Northern Europe being particularly important to the world intellectually until the last 500 years.
And no I don’t think anyone is cleverer than anyone else, the fact that centres of intellectual achievement have moved about geographically is a sign to me that’s it’s culture not genes.
I think Egyptians invented” Zero” to enable their calculations? But to born an englishman,is Win Raffle of life?..
Haha! I’m a woman, and yes i always had a grudge against the decimal numerical system, finding it inept, insufficient and sloppy: it cannot even put an exacting numerical value (a ‘name’) to abstract constants, so they get called by Greek letters instead.
Not exactly the same grudge though that this Anne Wilson Shaef person has against rationality, mind you. Much au contraire.
Ah yes, life in Oregon. Churches have now removed their BLM signs in favor of Stand with Our Asian friends. I was raised a Missouri Synod Lutheran. There could not have been a more ultra conservative theological and cultural religious body in Christendom. As an adult, I looked for and joined PROGRESSIVE churches that supported gay marriage, ordination of women, etc.
Now that for the most part, Protestant churches even ordain gay women, something more is needed to justify our existence. We came up with the idea of becoming very active SJW. We march in every parade and protest which keep us all very busy since there are many of both in Portland Our social justice committees are almost as ubiquitous as after church cookie committees. It is literally dangerous to ask for Bible study, or discussion groups around Karin Armstrong’s many book etc.
II am on the lookout for a Missouri Synod Lutheran Church but doubt that I will find one in Portland.
Despite going to nominally CoE schools with prayer in assembly I’ve never been a real Christian myself. In much of the UK the church is literally the biggest, tallest and most beautiful building in the village, and 700-800 years old . You only actually go there for Christians, weddings and funerals. The joke with Covid was that they’ve been social distancing for decades.
It’s difficult to gauge how much churches should adapt and how much they should stick to orthodox views. It does make a joke of the ‘word of God’ if that word is immutable and yet keeps changing. I mean I’ve got nothing against homosexuality, but was the church prior to recent times (2000?) wrong? Or is it only wrong by today’s standards?
If you want to be depressed the modern UK churches are also full of brain dear wokies, with diversity targets and vicars making extremist racist statements, but ones which align with currently fashionable views.
An extended family member (also named Dorothy) is a Missouri Synod member of the Living Savior Church in Tualatin, south of Tigard. With a new Minister a few years back, the Church has really built up in size. Hope this is what you are looking for!
Ah, math. Certainly not a discipline we should foist upon “people of color”. This idiocy is nothing if not “the soft bigotry of low expectations”. And, it was disproved categorically in the 1980s, in the tough inner-city high schools of East Los Angeles. If you really want to see this lie exposed, read the true life story of one courageous teacher, Jaime Escalante. Or watch the award-winning movie made about him in 1988: “Stand and Deliver”. It’s awe-inspiring, and proves beyond doubt that what kids need in order to succeed is not coddling, not being told over and over again that they are oppressed, but they need people who really love them, and prove it by holding them to higher standards.
Ironically Democrats from California,flee to Oregon or Republican states and still vote for this ”Mind Control”
I’ve heard this, whats happened to California is deeply worrying. One of the richest places on earth being destroyed.
Wokeism is essentially a bastardised version of the worst aspects Christianity but i believe it’s best understood as a tool the reactionary middle classes are using, trying to hold on to their diminishing wealth and power.
Post credit crunch, the swollen middle classes, which had sustained a neo-liberal hegemony at the ballot box collapsed. With the rise of popularism amongst the now less affluent lower middle and working classes, the only way to break up this electoral threat has been for the middle class to turn to a race baiting divide and rule strategy.
Immigrant communities in the west are promised preferential treatment in return for votes with similarly deprived communities denied help on the grounds of their existing “privilege”. This however is a fragile and often unsuccessful coalition, with many of the communities actually holding heavily socially conservative views, associating more with their class than their race or disliking the patronising behaviour of their saviours.
More than anything it’s success is down to the pernicious and badly written equality and race relations laws which have not protected but elevated certain groups above others in the eyes of the law and the lack strong legal protections for employees against their employers.
These laws are what give relatively small number of true believers the ability to spread their intolerant faith because they have the power to hire and fire and even in extreme cases have their enemies imprisoned with spurious allegations.
Until this is addressed, there is no way of stopping the institutions falling one by one to this new faith.
There is little support for the movement – I think it is more of a subculture, really – in Amercia’s middle class. It is a spectre of virulent social media, academics, only certain member of the underclass, and corporate and political interests looking to exploit the foregoing at cost to everyone. However, it is all certainly dogmatic, and like most dogma it is just dressed-up excuses to exert control over others.
I agree. I see no evidence that wokeism is a middle class phenomenon, in fact, it seems very non middle class.
As far as I can tell a lot of it is being pushed by well-heeled suburban moms. Check out what’s happening in Loudon County, VA. School boards doxxing parents who speak out against Critical Race Theory being taught at their elementary schools.
Wokeism is totally Trotsky Entryism in its methods, goals, and how it works. The Trots all used this system to destroy, it is remarkably effective. Look up ‘Millitant Tendencies, which now is ‘Momentum’ to see how amazingly effective Entryism is at the few controlling the many.
Didn’t win Labour a General Election though did it – so not that successful
ALl political Parties bow down to greenism,Climateism,Wokeism only SDP,reform &Independents in Political Arena rebel ahast at orwellian SARS2 Europe ,US,Australasia,China future!
In Uk it appears to be Climate Activists,Brainwashed Teenage Schoolchildren main Political parties,(Lib-Lab-Cons-Greens-Snp) mainstream media,BBC,ITV,ch4, Sky News… Later this Year A New News Channel GB news Starts, it will Present Non opinionated news,” Just the Facts mam,just the facts”
“Wokeism is essentially a bastardised version of the worst aspects Christianity”
It actually holds no similarity to Christianity in any of its philosophies and beliefs – but as the writer used the analogy, just as a force which can drive on a militant Faith more like Jonestown than Rome. That it is entirely faith based, and thus a religion – but definitely not Christian. Christianity is always ‘God serves those who serve themselves’, and is actually exceedingly intellectual – all science as we know it came from the scientific Priests, all the Universities, the Scientific method its self, 10,000 monks hand copied the classic books in the Monasteries for centuries to educate the Barbarians and create the Reformation ultimately, 100 of the world’s most recognized Philosophers were Christians, Clergy and Lay.
No, these guys are Frankfurt School 11 Points foot soldiers, totally designed to destroy the West. Big name intellectuals created the ‘School’, google if you do not know it as it is the force in the world today, WIKI has a long, and biased, article on it, or just use my link to jump right to the 11 points.. The Frankfurt School began with Marxist intellectuals in Weimar Republic, that time/place which keeps giving, also Ant fa as well, and Hi *le r. https://celticsavageyoutube.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-11-point-plan-of-frankfurt-school.html
You have grossly exaggerated the role of Christianity.
As far a Philosophy goes the renowned British philosopher A.N Whitehead once commented on Plato’s thought: “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
In fact, as you well know, Islamic scholars made a far better job of preserving the glories of Classical Civilisation than Christianity.
In reality the monasteries were little more than a gigantic ‘typing pool’, slavishly copying out ancients texts of which they had little or no understanding.
I think some of your assertions are wrong. Christians as well as Muslims were involved in translating and preserving classical texts. The Byzantine Empire based in Constantinople had an excellent educational system based on the classics. In Palestininian monasteries men like St. John of Damascus were in volved in preserving the classics. The monastery of Mar Saba, near Jerusalem had one of the most extensive libraries of the period.
The transmission of classical texts to the West is a long and complicated one. But the philosopher Boethius (477-524) stands out as a translator of Plato and Aristotle Into Latin. So even in what we very mistakenly call the dark ages the classics were influencing western culture. We shouldn’t forget the Carolingian Renaissance of the 8th. Century and the work of Alcuin of York who brought some of its fruit to Britain enabling Alfred the Great to have access to Boethius and others.
I think medieval monasteries were a little more than “gigantic typing pools”. Thank God there were hundreds of monks who spent their lives copying texts from which later generations benefitted. Thank Him also that they were places of prayer, learning and social care and produced such great minds as Anselm, Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus.
I beg to differ, but unfortunately UnHerd is no longer a forum for such a discussion.
Under the ‘new’ system it is sadly very much a case of “fire & forget”.
This is a forum, but that doesn’t mean we have to agree with false ideas!
I read Dario Fernando Moreira’s book, “The Myth of Andalusian Paradise”, which sustains the findings of Sylvain Guggenheim who was ostracized because he dared to claim, based on facts, that not the Islamic “scholars”, helped the West to reconnect to Greek philosophy, but Greek monks escaped from the Byzantine Empire following the Ottoman conquest.
We have to rediscover our past, and avoid the false ideas promoted by the anti-Christian “intelligentsia.”
For some reason, many academics, possibly bribed, paint a rosy picture of the Islamic occupation and besmear, belittle, deride our past. Not sure what is their game? They hate their own roots, foolishly thinking that in an Islamic theocracy their life would be as prosperous and free as in the West. Honestly, I think such people need to be diagnosed.
I think you mean certified rather than diagnosed for your final word?
However both Christianity and Islam are the very antithesis of Classical Philosophy and Civilisation.
The most unfortunate triumph of blind, unthinking Faith, over Logic and Reason.
Fortunately the emergence of Protestantism in the 16th century was an essential step in the direction of Atheism and Agnosticism, which has proved so beneficial for the modern world.
Incidentally there never was a Byzantine Empire. It is a construct of a 16th century German scholar. The population of Constantinople called themselves Romanoi, as did their enemies, even on the last day, Tuesday 29th May, 1453.
Blimey, not a popular view! I up voted you.
Thanks!
The truth never is!
Truth? Based on what data do you make your claim?
I’m not sure you are correct, but I upvoted you anyway. Personally, I believe downvotes should be reserved for unnecessarily rude or insulting comments, not for those I disagree with.
Thank you. It is a fairly complex problem that dates back at least as far as Edward Gibbon.
The main problem, as always is that ‘History is written by the Victors’.
Your upvote coupled with Mark Bridgeford’s give a total of 15 downvotes. Not bad, but I was expecting more!
Upvote for that!
No! A thumb down is for false info.
See You in Batley,Yorkshire Soon?
Yes, I hope so, what a name Batley, worth fighting for!
You should read Tom HOlland’s Dominion for an interesting view of the role of Christianity by an atheist.
Googled it. The phrase originated in ancient Greece as “the Gods help those who help themselves” and may originally have been proverbial. It is illustrated by two of Aesop’s Fables and a similar sentiment is found in ancient Greek drama
As usual, the fountain of all wisdom.
As the article makes clear, it has far more in common with Calvinism than any other branch of Christianity. Non-Calvinist Christians accept salvation through faith and repentance, but to the Woke there is no salvation. You can have devoted your entire adult life to fighting against racism, but it they can find one thing that someone say you said when you were much younger, even if there is more than one interpretation that could be applied to it, and regardless of whether you admit to having said it, you will be expected to issue a firstly grovelling apology, and secondly your resignation from whatever posts you hold.
It’s reminiscent of the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s. First the confession, then the bullet in the back of the head.
The idea that it’s cynically pushed by the wealthy is unproven. Yes the wealthy and powerful have a huge amount to gain from pushing a ideology that focuses attention away from their own corrupt existence and real privileges – and makes the bottom 99% fight each other. And yes it also allows them to falsely share and dilute the the ‘blame’ amongst the majorty.
But apart from keeping hold of their privilege, power, wealth and absolving themselves of personal responsibility, what’s in it for rich people?
What’s in it for the rich people? They get to keep their riches and power over the rest of us.
Sarcasm not your strong point?
Gates,Soros,Bezos etc.., EU,WHO,UN ,CCP ALL push it they are wealthy?…
“Wokeism is essentially a bastardised version of the worst aspects of Christianity…” Please explain. By the way I tried to register a downtick on this comment but 3 upticks came up. What a joke this system is.
Yes. Click several times to no avail. Occasionally the figure increases by two or more and a red banner appears saying you have already voted. It’s rubbish.
Michael and Julia, I reported this a few weeks ago when the ‘new look’ came in. It was explained to me by the technical support people that a given person’s tick can bring up dormant ticks from previous voters. And the count seems to work on a net vote basis, so presumably a given person’s uptick could bring in a single prior dormant downtick, netting to zero. Hope that helps.
correct and it has been like that for years on many forums.
Apparently a software release is imminent to start correcting the recent dreadful removal of functionality.
Thanks A Bloke. It would be good if Unherd would be more communicative about these intricacies.
To use the vernacular, it is cr*p.
The “guilt” trip.
It is mainly a power trip for bullies, but it also is a religion, with many similarities to Christianity, such as the “guilt trip”. But an important difference is that most Christians understand that they are practicing a religion, which means that there is damage limitation. Unfortunately, many “woke” people do not know they are practicing a religion, they genuinely believe that their way is the true shining path. They also think they are clever, which makes them stupid.
Unlike Wokeism – there is an element of forgiveness in Christianity
Amen and that is a huge difference.
So, I take it that you assume that people who are practicing a religion don’t really believe that they are following a true shining path, or in other words are not true believers in it? I find your post odd and unsettling in a few different ways.
I think people really need to explain what they mean by middle classes, lower middle classes and working classes – it seems to mean different things to different people in different countries.
Increasingly people’s class is being defined by commentators based on their political views or worse, race. A trade union activist nurse becomes middle class woke and a small business owner in construction becomes white working class.
Immigrant communities in the west are promised preferential treatment in return for votes with similarly deprived communities denied help on the grounds of their existing “privilege”.
Can you point to a concrete example of this as deliberate policy in the UK?
There clearly is, and has been, a tacit understanding that police forces in the more working class areas of England will treat Pakistani rape gangs with cultural sensitivity, so long as they only rape chavvy little white girls. Been going on for years, victims in the thousands now.
Do you have a source for that?
“The race industry” – that concept is just 50 kinds of wrong. And yet you write it and I know exactly what you mean – it must therefore exist.
Now you’ve got me thinking about a bestselling erotica about a mixed-race liaison in an HR department D&I team called 50 Shades of Wrong.
Pass the brain bleach. HR and erotica shouldn’t go together in the same sentence. EVER.
Not enough diversity in that title. Should be “Fifty shades of Wong”. Or maybe even “Fifty shades of White”.
As in “two wongs don’t make a wite?”
Woody Allen’s “What’s Up Tiger Lily”? though I spell it “two Wongs don’t make a right”. I thought the film was very funny, but it’s Allen’s least favorite.
I’d recommend a degree course in “Grievance Studies”.
Yours for just £60k and guaranteed to lead to a job at an MSM outlet.
Only if taught by James Lindsay or Helen Pluckrose–who are never invited to appear on MSM, such as MSNBC or CNN..
Thank you. We are a long way from Elizabeth 1’s determination, after nearly 50 years of religious strife in England and Europe that, “I will not make windows into men’s souls.”
To be sure, there was a minimal level of conformity required, essentially linked to state continuity and power; I hope that we will eventually move to such a place but we have a long way to go and there is no guarantee that we will have a similar outcome.
In the meantime, as you rightly point-out, those who are genuinely most disadvantaged are not benefitting at all: their disadvantage being turned by one élite group into a lever to force out another; again, the 16th century Wars of Religion are a grim warning.
Vikram, before too long you too will be White, as will an other AME’s that are successful. ( god i hate that BAME acronym). Its no accident that the B is first, the whole racist progressive clericy needs to keep B’s at the bottom, as the old saying goes “give a man a fish and he eats today, teach a man to fish and he eats for life”, the progressives have been giving fish to B’s for years, they want B’s dependant on the fishgivers, they need a voting base and underclass to sustain and justify their position above the underclass. Unfortunately for the clericy every other racial , AME, group that succeeds is a direct refutation of their creed and position afforded to them because of it.
George
I was called an Uncle Tom in a high profile meeting with senior people attending. No one even flinched. I now write under a pseudonym. I am the wrong kind of minority; I don’t know my place as a perpetual victim who should gratefully accept crumbs of comfort and dollops of pity from the Gaurdianistas.
The worst kind of racists are the antiracists. They only see race and victimhood, never the individual. Despicable lot yet so smugly sanctimonious
I believe that in the US there is a school of thought that “Asians” (by which they usually mean East Asians rather than South Asians, when for us in the UK it’s the other way about) are, to all intents and purposes, white, because the average US-Asian educational attainment and income both outstrip that of the average American white, and therefore the Asians are clearly not “People of Colo[u]r”, but instead enjoy white privilege as much as any WASP.
Wait until they spot that the same applies to immigrant Ghanaian-Americans and, to a lesser degree, Nigerian-Americans. They’ll be “white” next.
You really couldn’t make it up.
Oh, and I am deeply sorry that you were subjected to a racial slur by someone who undoubtedly considers him or herself an “anti-racist”.
The article’s link between this new blanket, over-the-top intolerance and America is correct. I know because I am an adjunct professor at a leading American business school. What can be done ? Only, become like one of those people mentioned in the final paragraph: shrink into our foxholes, go on thinking our own thoughts and just hope it’s all going to blow over. I thank God that I am retired, don’t have to apply for a job, or state how diverse I am, or do diversity training.
Yes i agree Giles… thank god i am retired. I almost navigated a whole career in the NHS avoiding D & E training and the other crap industrialised training trends that preceded it. But I decided to retire early as the net closed around we, I thought to myself that one day my Celtic temperament would flare and I would end up telling these zealots to “—- —“. So rather than risk losing my pension I cowardly took early retirement…. By the way if you want to know what discrimination is like try being Welsh, English speaking welsh, short, 64yrs of age, balding and middle class – haha.
I will leave it to readers to guess what colour my skin is?
I was supposed to complete a diversity course when contracting to government agency in the past, along with a health and safety course. They were both utterly bizarre, apparenly ‘matches can cause fires’ and ‘people with missing limbs have a noticable physical disability’. Also you should consider hiring a disable person not a) because they might be great for the job and it would be idiotic and bigoted to not consider them, but b) to increase diversity.
‘Disabled Fire Officers’? Anyone; or Lift Marshals in charge of Evacuation…
“English speaking Welsh…”
Ah, yes, Welsh enough to cop the banter from us Saeson, but not “Welsh enough” for the more extreme of your own countrymen.
DEI (I almost misspelt the acronym there as DIE; Freudian slip?) training sounds like a form of mental torture, or cultish brainwashing at the very least. I strongly suspect that its main purpose, like that of all Marxist propaganda, is to confuse, terrorize and humiliate, not to make a workplace a better or safer place for anyone.
I live i hope that what I still think of as true Liberalism is the obvious truth and destination . I suppose its my version of the Whiggish/Marxist/Progressive view of history.
The scary alternative is the worsening identity group politics were seeing now, at best we end up with crap society.
The US is almost 60 years removed from having “colored only” anything, yet a group of loud (and ignorant) people insists that we are living a dystopian nightmare. I started grade school at the dawn of integration long ago, and the idea of some 20- or 30-something lecturing me on how to get on with other races is beyond offensive. Being of Greek heritage, I have been mistaken for numerous groups, and I’ve been some nice names along the way.
Regardless, this isn’t training in the traditional sense of the word. It’s browbeating, it’s shaming, it’s a means of accomplishing the exact opposite of its stated intention. A family member teaches English to Chinese children. Those kids are learning gerunds and past participles; our kids are learning to hate themselves and each other. Which group sounds better off?
I’ve been a member of the Armed Forces for about 23 years, recently in the last few years we started receiving mandatory Diversity Training. It essentially consists of gangs of “right on” people telling us to agree with and understand the things that we cant possibly understand let alone agree with.
This years session was interesting when we received no less than the August presence of the Co Chair of the Army BAME network. Capt Stephen Henry MBE. I thought this might be interesting. His highlight of the “workshop” was detailing his “lived experience” and the incident that happened to him last year. He had built this up as quite the surprise throughout, eventually after all the usual lectures and diatribes and even telling us to “dig deeper” by reading DiAngelo book on white privilege, the moment came where he would tell us last years lived experience. This turned out to be an incident on the afternoon train from London to Peterborough where he was sat down with a spare seat beside him, he motioned to a fellow standing passenger to sit down and seemingly this passenger didnt. At that point with no verbal communication whatsoever he assumed straight away that this was racially motivated and became quite engourged about the apparent snub.
Later we got the chance to eventually speak and I commented to him that “if that example of your lived experience in modern day Britain is all you can find, then we have come very far indeed in the UK”. He suggests I was ignorant to his feelings, to which I suggested that perhaps owing to the “non verbal” manner of the exchange a misinterpretation may have occurred between the two of them. Again he insisted that he had not misinterpreted this apparent racism on his courtesy. I suggested that perhaps he was “searching for insult” in the exchange and asked him if he could remember any instances of courtesy paid to him recently by white people…perhaps holding a door or be allowed to pull out in the car etc. He replied that of course he could, I suggest that the problems he tries to find are hardly endemic and systematic as he lectured us on earlier. He was utterly unable to agree with me and saw racism everywhere.
The mistake I made was then suggesting that he had done quite well for himself in the “diversity business” what with being commissioned from the NCO ranks and gaining an MBE for his work with BAME. Capt Henry then denounced everything I’d said based on this last comment, and moved away from our by now uncomfortable discussion to his closing comments. He said he felt so up lifted by this group and that we had all achieved a great amount of progress with the days session, aside from some “closed minded opinions”.
After the session I was treated to a friendly interrogation by one of the unit Majors who had heard concerns from my group that I wasn’t comfortable with the session. I repeated chapter and verse what had happened and you could literally see the common sense falling across her face as I explained how ridiculous all of this felt, she left me with the words “you have given me a lot to think about”.
I bet I have. It was the same feeling I got when I read Douglas Murrays books for the first time.
Sorry for the long post, but that it is my recent lived experience of this diversity training.
Thank you for sharing, its a real cancer and is eating common sense for breakfast.
My pleasure, it is utterly cancerous. The discussion with Capt Henry MBE was fruitless as he is completely lost, rewarded and invested in the “progress” industry. But I think I got through to at least one person, that being the Major at the end.
I just wish more could be done to fight this at a systemic level. All it achieves to my mind as a member of the armed forces, is provide an excuse for people to escape failure, punishment or a good days work in general.
So many of my colleagues have fallen foul of the complaints from juniors in the name of perceived racism, and WORSE, none upheld yet the record of the complaint is not removed, or any sanction on the complainer some of which are serial in nature.
“We are here to check your thinking”
Problems Could Arise in London Mayoral elections…Khan Gets in although 1) London assembly is an EU regional talking shop ,Uk has left EU 2) the Amount of opposing candidates 1 lib-dim 1 labour ! green 1 Tory & 10 Other candidates will atomise opposition votes
Thanks, this was very interesting first hand experience.
Thanks for this Margaret. The saddest part I felt during the exchanges above was how the attitudes of the other members of the group i was part of changed towards me. They slowly distanced themselves physically and intellectually as if I carried a live hand grenade! The signaling of their virtue extending to create this distance. I dont blame them I suppose, they have long careers ahead of them and perhaps felt threatened.
I wish some instrument of common sense would sweep all of this away before something worse comes along and blasts it away along with everything we cherish in western society.
Thank you for your very enlightening post. The circumstances you state are seen in different ways, every day in the uk now…….I am amazed how many intelligent people/ business world/academics are falling for this manipulation.
The problem isn’t that they’re already inside, it’s that they came from inside. This is being forced on the plebs by the rulers.
As an American, I can only offer my sympathy that the infection of diversity training is penetrating UK companies and institutions. It’s certainly a favorite form of virtue signaling in US corporations.
This article describes the phenomenon of diversity training. In the current issue of Unherd, Sarah Ditum explains why the left (sorry, Left) celebrate violence. It’s all good, solid journalism, but it stops short of providing any advice about how to counter these trends.
By now, we all understand the ideology and tactics of wokedom. But what do we do about it? Unherd recently had a series describing times, like the covid pandemic, when normal life was brutally interrupted and what came after. It was historically very interesting, at least to me, but what none of the authors even attempted was to use these historical precedents as a guide for responding to the challenges modern society faces post-covid, especially the rise of woke politics, except to say we must all adapt to change.
Which authors are currently writing not just about the phenomenon of woke politics, but how we can actively counter it (that’s not a rhetorical question; I’d appreciate recommendations)?
It can be countered. It just needs one person to speak up when they come across a blatant example of it. In my experience, the ‘woke’ are bullies and like most bullies they are abject cowards when confronted by someone with stronger convictions than themselves.
“It can be countered. It just needs one person to speak up when they come across a blatant example of it” – if you work for a big company do this and you’ve lost your job.
Yes. Would love to comment on this thread. But genuinely afraid about what may happen if I do. I am basically going to have to keep my thoughts to myself until I am at the point in my career when I no longer have to worry about what it might cost me. To echo what was said by J Bryant, I would love for some advice on what to do about it, because like most people I am essentially powerless to avoid the most damaging of consequences should I disagree with the corporate gospel.
I think that Helen Pluckrose has a hotline for those who want to talk about Diversity training. She said that many, many people called in. We need to start to fight back, document abuses, and compare it to what was happening in the Soviet Union and Maoist China during the “struggle sessions.”
Fight for your rights, muster courage, It is a must!
That’s why it’s important to have a plan B.
One person speaking up can have their live threatened, and their livelihood taken away. This cannot be countered by a few people, acting on their own volition.
This is true..but our politicians should be actively dealing with this and they aren’t and frankly, at least here in the Uk, irrespective of your politics, not one of them has the backbone to do it.
Only by Retired People like myself.Luckily I dont have to Work fulltime,Only bonus of being Single..However i work for My pet Cats ,hopefully they’ll never be chairman meows!
Do not go out without your red MAGA hat. I was supposed to be back in London last April, now a year later I still can not come because of the insane British lockdowns, and with my non-vax policy may never be able to return to my old home again. Otherwise look for me, face completely covered in long white hair, half bald yet lots of more white hair, six and a half foot tall,, like some mad scientist/end of earth Loon, at speakers corner in my MAGA hat – ranting at the people about how they are all worthless maggots. “There’ll Be No Butter In Hell!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5evsxRdkJw (Cold Comfort Farm)
Thats what you do to protest, but the British only let rafting migrants in, not legal returnees who can support themselves and tell it like it is.
Join the Free Speech Union.
When you hear about a crowd funding application,for somebody fighting back, support it. The Manchester charity founder, who was ousted by his board of trustees over BLM comments, has got his job back after FSU support and is now suing the trustees. Support him.
Write to Kemi Badenoch (the equalities minister), and your own MP, to express your support for her fight against unconscious bias training, and her brushes with woke journalists.
If you’re ever canvassed by a political candidate make it clear it’s a big issue for you.
Check out James Lindsay’s website.
Buy Cynical Theory by Helen pluckrose and James Lindsay and give it to your children.
If your children show woke tendencies engage with them, argue the case.
Do not self censor in purely social settings.
Complain to school trustees if there is any evidence of indoctrination.
Don’t buy goods from woke corporations.
It’s not much but it’s better than nothing.
Very good advice. Thank you.
What we need is a register of woke corporations (Coke-a-Cola and Gillette to name but two) to focus the boycott.
My children were so alienated by the woke curriculum at their school that they have moved very sharply in other direction and have opened my eyes to the fact that we cannot ignore what is happening and hope that the crocodile eat someone else.
It won’t be long before it’s re-branded Woke- a- Cola.
Smart Kids!
I would like to add in a separate issue here but with the same problem. I do not know how many of you have young children but I have an 8 year old granddaughter who will have to experience indoctrination in schools. The LGBT campaigners have also got a grip. I personally don’t care what they do but I am appalled at the materials that have been provided by stonewall to schools for material training. I thought the RSE should be a lesson a week ……it is NOT…..there are instructions how to introduce the subject into history, geography and even music. The final straw for me is material connected to bestiality……anyone who thinks I am making this up should log onto schoolgate campaign.
I was thinking recently how much the current “trans” issue resembles trans-substantiation, one of the biggest bones of contention between Protestantism and Catholicism. They both involve declaring that something is something else, despite all evidence to the contrary, just because a person has said the magic words (“This is the body and blood of Christ” / “I identify as a man/woman”). You could have been burned alive for having the wrong view on trans-substantiation. I suppose we should be grateful you can only have your career ruined for dissenting on the other.
Hah! That is a brilliant and actually quite profound comparison!
Thanks for that comparison Kevin, it’s the most intersting point that’s been made in the discussion.
O for the days of Ancient Rome, when it was “Venari, Lavari, Ludere, Ridere, Occ est Vivere” ie: To Hunt, to Bathe, to Play, to Laugh, That is to Live!*
*Roman inscription -graffiti, from a beautiful little city high in the Aures Mts, now in modern Algeria.
“As for the individuals who do not believe in the new faith, they do what people in totalitarian societies have always done – they keep quiet and retreat to an inner world where the intolerance and conformity of the powers-that-be cannot reach them.” NO. They quietly tolerate the insanity and they don’t fight back. This is how tyranny gets a foothold – you tolerate something you consider minor and then before you know it you’re tolerating the intolerable.
Look at how we’re tolerating the lockdown if you don’t believe me.
Hot weather, it looks light A fiery summer in uk seaside towns and londonium, People WILL Rebel against Scientific SAGE frauds,in UK I managed a walk Most days in lockdown. Apart from Snowstorms at beginning of February
Oh, the glory of being self-employed, a one-woman show. Although perhaps someone will come after me at some point for not having enough ethnic diversity in my business (I’m white – sin of all sins).
Yes, I am very grateful for the fact that I have not been a full time employee for well over 20 years, especially as my industry is now, apparently, very woke. Still, it’s an ill wind and I get paid to write about ‘ensuring that our company reflects the society in which we live’ etc.
just claim to be 1.56 % Native American, it worked for Elizabeth Warren and she’s whiter than white
Alas, it did not really work for her at all. And it may have cost her the presidency.
”Pochohontas” Trump Wit again…Why does biden &USA politicians continually lie about their origins, Biden is much more English,than Irish!
My concern with this ever growing trend is that the people who are driving it have NO INTEREST WHATSOEVER in achieving equality between the races.
They are not in the Equality business. They are in the Grievance business.
And business is good at the moment. There are fortunes to be made, stirring the pot, feeding the sense of guilt among Whites and feeding the sense of victimhood among the Black community.
Truly – WHO DOES THAT SERVE? Are these people looking to improve relations between communities? It doesn’t seem so. It is creating division and separating and segregating people based on which “community” they “belong” to.
Just a few years ago we were exhorted as a society to be colour-blind, to accept people simply as people, whatever their background, their lifestyle, their “differences”. What happened to that idea?
For many years I lived in London and worked in an industry (Broadcast TV) that was as diverse as one could possibly find anywhere. As far as I was concerned the arguments of Race, Gender, Creed, Orientation had been fought and largely won. We seemed at the time – perhaps naively – to be enjoying the peace.
Maybe those who are inclined to be activists feel they have to keep picking at the scab and reopening old wounds or there is no point to their existence, but it seems incredible that we’ve gone so far backwards and quite so quickly.
Some genuine recognition of the situation, thank you Ed. Things are going down.
“I believe that the good people do, small though it may appear, has more to do with the good that manifests broadly in the world than people think, and I believe the same about evil. We are each more responsible for the state of the world than we believe, or would feel comfortable believing.
Without careful attention, culture itself tilts towards corruption. Tyranny grows slowly, and asks us to retreat in tiny steps. But each retreat increases the possibility of the next retreat. Each betrayal of conscience, each act of silence and each rationalisation weakens resistance and increases the probability of the next restrictive move forward. This is particularly the case when those pushing forward delight in the power they have now acquired – and such people are always to be found.
Better to stand forward, awake, when the costs are relatively low – and, perhaps, when the potential rewards have not yet vanished. Better to stand forward before the ability to do so has has been irretrievably compromised”
“If you do not object when the transgressions against your conscience are minor, why presume that you will not fully participate when the transgressions get truly out of hand?”
Jordan Peterson from Beyond Order Rule 5 – Do not do what you hate.
I work for a classically liberal think tank in South Africa. The poltical and chattering classes claim that racism is one of our biggest problems. Given that over 90% of the population is black (by a broad definition) and less than 10% white, they mean white racism. Every year we do a survey to ascertain what the big issues affecting people’s lives. Our interviewees are representative as above. We ask open-ended questions about what they identify as the biggest issues in their lives. Unemployment is always at the top and of 12 to 14 possibilities, racism is at the bottom or penultimate from the bottom. As usual the elite have no idea of what the people think.
Meanwhile there are politicians in South Africa literally talking about killing whites.
About 50 White farmers a year and that’s OK.
Yes I heard about this some months ago, not long after the BLM demos in US and here. I have family is SA who have regularly told us about the issues they are having. So I watched the media avidly to see which outlet would be brave enough to bring the killings of white people to our attention. I haven’t seen anything yet unless I have missed it but it certainly hasn’t had the coverage that Megan Markle has got for her grievances. That tells you a lot!
I wonder who they would blame their problems on if all white people left?
I think we all know the answer to that…
When I lived in Australia 1987/88 A lot of Saffas had already worried & Taken Australian Citizenship ( George Gregan,a black Rhodesian Rugby Scrum half Moved )where Black ‘Equality’ would lead to in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and South Africa
I may be totally mistaken about this, but as a foreigner my observation is that the English (British?) nature has an obsessive-compulsive reverence for the “underdog” – the abstract notion of the underdog i mean, not actual downtrodden individuals -, bordering on religious fervour. Fetishism even, with its elaborate taboo system, liturgical vocabulary & all that. Probably a subconscious overcompensation for the class system? Or an Anglican replacement activity for Catholic guilt? Can’t think of any other European nation with this particular quirk, even though the “class system” is not a unique British phenomenon – everybody else has it too.
Postwar the country has ran out of the demographic traditionally manifesting the “underdog” idea (at around the same time as it has ran out of its empire); the working class’ livelihood and purpose having been outshored to China for profitz. So a new demographic was needed to fill the underdog-shaped void, for spiritual atonement purposes. And it better be visibly different, for easy identification: the ‘global underclass’. It came readily kitted out with the new Original Sins: slavery & colonisation. An oven-ready cult – new & improved international socialism. Internazism.
Or maybe i’m just overthinking it.
Good article; i always regarded protestantism as the precursor of latter-day wokery.
You are over thinking it.
Also Protestantism is the opposite of wokery. Protestantism is Work Ethic. Protestantism is meritocracy, it is self reliance.
Wokery is Marxism, it is ‘I have nothing because I have been held back. It is ‘I am owed’, it is redistribution, it is a ZERO-SUM GAME, where all the amount of goods and property and money is set, thus if anyone has more it is because they took more than their share, and anyone with less means someone took some of what is rightfully theirs.
I entirely agree with you.
There is a stong religious fervour about both Marxism and wokery though, and Marx was writing, more or less at the same time as Darwin. There is no doubt that Darwin’s Origin of the Species had a devastating effect on Christianity generally. I think Marxism gradually became a replacement for lost religious belief for many people, and now we have wokery with it’s superficial virtue-signalling, coupled with a deep anxiety, which fits in so well with our social media age.
The Origin of Species caused a rethink on how to interpret the first two chapters of Genesis. In the perspective of history it was done without too much fuss. To say that Christianity was devestated “generally” as a result of Darwin’s publication is not accurate I think.Today 31.11% of the world’s population is Christian and the Faith continues to grow on every continent except Europe and North America – and their turn will come.
I am a Christian Michael, I’m with you.
But historically, in Britain at least, Darwin’s Origin of the Species rocked some people’s Christian faith. By using that historical fact in my comment did not mean I personally think people were right to become doubtful, agnostic or atheist, just that it happened and had political and philosophical repercussions.
Redistribution is socialism.
Marxism is about the exploitation that takes place at the point of production. It aims to take control of production based on a rational plan.
The profit motive is based on the competition between privately owned companies, with the emphasis on privately owned. It is the privately owned basis of production that the Marxists used to base their critique of capitalism on. Nowadays its just another bourgeois morality.
Karl Marx had ‘Piles’ no wonder he was miserable..purlioned Friedrich Engels bank account..
Yes, you are right, rooting for the underdog is a peculiarly British/English thing. I have no idea where it comes from, but I don’t worry about it. I just need to know that if a team like Iceland is going to be coming up against, say, Germany in the World Cup, my English genetics are going to mean supporting Iceland wholeheartedly.
Even when they’re still butchering whales – u also should to take account of the British luv of animals esp endangered species. Conflict of interest here maybe.
The underdog idea is not ‘obsessive-compulsive reverence’, it’s much more simply a question of fairness and decency – essentially letting everyone have a chance.
I can’t see the connection between wokery and protestantism specifically, although the Woko Haram undoubtedly do exhibit the self-righteous strain of religiosity in general.
Yes, the sense of fairness and decency ARE the core British traits.
What i’m talking about though is the the woke classes’ obsession with the underdog, no matter how unfair (unethical) that is – no matter how indecent, obnoxious, and often criminal the “underdog” in question is.
An example is the left’s obsession with “punching” as a sole criterion to classify humour and comedy into acceptable and unacceptable categories. You cannot make jokes about the protected-characteristic “underdog” groups, no matter how ripe for jokes their behaviours are, or how rich / powerful the individuals you joke about are. Especially if they are intersectioned underdogs, such as Diane Abbott. No joke on the expense of the “privileged” “oppressor” groups (such as the impoverished white Northerner working class) is considered too crass though.
That’s absolutely brilliant, can i nick it? My new favourite phrase.
Well, not the current form of protestantism – but look back at what Cromwell’s lot did back in the day. Half a millenium took off the rough edges, but back in the day the newfangled puritanism must have felt not too dissimilar to nowadays’ wokery. We were all Catholics once upon a time. (Well i still am, but i’m not British – it was a hypothetical use of “we”.)
Unfortunately the Brits have got themselves entangled in a disastrous triple bind of late.
Sticking up for the underdog – formerly a noble endeavour – has descended into the soft bigotry of low expectation. Whether this is due to Marxist spouting academics or just misfortune is difficult to say. Good manners, formerly the veneer of civilisation, has descended through political correctness to the duplicity of puritanical wokery, usually via the nightmare of identity politics and to each according to the colour of their skin, sexual orientation and self identity…sorry, delusion. And, as we should already know, the religion of Cromwell – right but repulsive – was exported to the US leaving the Rule Britannia with the comfort of the Church of England (up for a hymn down for a prayer) the only religion more interested in a good sing song than the hubris and peccadilloes of a creator deity.
Consequently, is it any surprise that the Brits are perpetually confused about most things including the vagaries of critical race theory and its b*****d offspring the deranged prophets of diversity training. So, none of us should really be surprised that we now face the improbable made possible by the impossible with the unavailable now available due to circumstances.
Excellent post.
Thank you for your reply, Allons.
I can claim no proprietorship in Woko Haram, so use it to you heart’s delight. Ditto ‘Wokerati’.
To add to your further points, I think the essence of the underdog theme is an unforced natural sympathy for the individual ‘beneficiaries’; it is not part of a self-righteous systematisation to shunt every individual into a group, and then classify each group into a points-based hierarchy of grievance and oppression.
And, if you’ll excuse my repeating a point I made some weeks ago when the Puritans came up on this forum – the evidence is that in real life the Puritans were a lot jollier than their detractors would have us believe. More fun than Savonarola, for example.
Yes, the unforced, natural sympathy for the unfortunate is a universal feature of the human condition in civilised societies; and (as i see it) is most prevalent in the British nature, fairness being a very British trait. (All the more easily exploitable by the wokerati, as being seen spiteful towards the underdog elicits great shame and is a social taboo.)
I can’t find any argument against anything you wrote.
Re: the puritans, i know precious little about thenadays real-life so i will take your word on that.
Savonarola indulged in puritanism to full exuberant excess, like a true red-blooded Italian – they don’t do half measures or sensible moderation.
Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that ‘gender’ equality is about women. It isn’t, and it certainly isn’t about lesbians, who have been totally erased. ‘Gender’ equality is about men who want to dress up as women without giving up any of their male advantages. Women are nowhere and feminists are fighting this rubbish along with people on the right who would normally make very strange bedfellows!
US Republicans/conservatives are not “of the right”, that is a misnomer that was pushed by the left. It was embraced in the US and elsewhere by Trotskyites (in the US they call themselves neocons but they are not conservatives) and the Leninist left.
Do those male advantages include pay? I’ve often wondered if a trans is prepared to take the salary cut they would have to take as ‘a woman’ or if they take off their skirt and put the trousers back on when they go to work?
Isn’t this woke nonsense just a vast a make-work scheme for graduates with useless degrees?
No, it’s an attempt to reshape society by making people kowtow to ideas that are patently rubbish. If it was just bonkers graduates I wouldn’t be as worried as I am.
At this point, I strongly suspect a Chinese psy-op to undermine society in its biggest competitors. However most people involved can’t know that and it’s astonishing to me how many willingly buy into this lunacy.
Couldn’t agree more! This whole thing is completely banal! What the hell is going on as we used to say?
Woke Supremacy
Woke Fragility
Woke Neo-racism
Woke Colourism
Woke Genderism
Woke Bigotry coming to an institution near you.
At a recent Diversity and Inclusivity training session in my firm we “learned” that Europeans and Americans are individualistic and that South Asians are communal and family-orientated, and that these differences are innate and must be accounted for in our interactions with each other.
At our next session I expect we will be addressing the dangers of stereotyping people of different ethnicities.
This stuff is hard, sometimes contradictory and very confusing, but I have a mortgage to pay and I must learn to understand it.
You have a mortgage to pay so you’ll tolerate this. Then you’ll tolerate something a bit worse and worse – see how this goes? They have bought you because you don’t have FU money.
Precisely, and the sooner I can get out the better. I fear for those younger than me who’ll have to just suck it up.
That’s not even true. Many European countries are just as family oriented, the Italians for example who suffered badly in the early days of Covid because of their multi-generational dwellings.
I know but don’t expect these people to worry about truth or honesty. They are all just consultants making a buck on the latest corporate fad.
If the Jarrow workers who walked to London, had taken the same view, you may not have had a job to pay your mortgage!
The point about Critical Race Theory being a religion is accurate for the reasons given. What is perhaps not so obvious is that it also attempts to masquerade as a science, not least to be taken as credible. After all companies may actually shed out some of their profit to you. However it is not entitled to that description- as the following example will illustrate.
An online discussion on Linkedin I followed, examined a press story put out by Prince William’s office. He told of his warm friendship with a black charity worker. He was fulsome in his praise for his white friend. There wasn’t anything racist about William we were assured.
It was met with derision by many. I saw there were many commenting who were working in Diversity. The point was quite reasonably made that this did not prove William was not a racist. It is easily possible, many argued that one could be married to a black person and still be racist. You can imagine the accompanying likes and confirmation comments that followed.
But what could William do other than cite such stories and show evidence of his work in, for example the FA Kick it Out campaign? However, it remains true, he cannot prove his “innocence”.
So what are the grounds for regarding William as a likely racist? Well, theory has it that the Monarchy are the pinnacle of class and race structures. And “if you work in a kitchen you are going to start smelling of food”. Also, many countered when I protested Williams credentials as a decent chap, what grounds had I to say he wasn’t a racist?
Racist is whatever our theory says is racist. You must think and act as our theory predicts. Therefore you are a racist.
Science makes predictions which, in principle, are falsifiable. If I say “nothing goes faster than light”, I may not ever show that something can. But in principle, it could be shown. William (or anyone else) can be labelled racist because your theory predicts it. But what if that theory was wrong? Happily for the Critical Race Theorists it cannot be done. Their prejudices can be forever preserved for as long as they deflect scrutiny with charges of racism, or on grounds of insufficient “lived experience” to be a critic.
A good example! In my view ‘racism’ comes in many forms and was once called many different things, however it suits the racism counsellors to label pretty much anything under racism to justify their views. The biggest scourge of the earth is social media……….indoctrination pure and simple. It’s actually very clever, put an idea out there get your enhancers to support it and hey presto the followers will ‘follow’. In time there will be no need for battleships bombs and even cyber warfare………our enemies will just have to select their agenda, post on social media, and eventually You have a compliant society!
Beautiful last sentence. Put me in mind of this, from Vladimir Nabokov, writing in 1940, newly arrived in a very different America:
“… goodness becomes a central and tangible part of one’s world, which world at first sight seems hard to identify with the modern one of newspaper editors and other bright pessimists, who will tell you that it is, mildly speaking, illogical to applaud the supremacy of good at a time when something called H!tl3r is trying to turn the globe into five million miles of blondness and boots. And they may add that it is one thing to beam at one’s private universe in the snuggest nook of an unshelled country and quite another to try and keep sane among crashing buildings in the roaring and whining night. But within the emphatically and unshakeably illogical world which I am advertising, as a home for the spirit, Messerschmidts are unreal not because they are conveniently remote in physical space… but because I cannot imagine (and that is saying a good deal) such circumstances as might impinge upon that lovely and loveable world which quietly persists, whereas I can very well imagine that my fellow dreamers, thousands of whom roam the earth, keep to these same irrational standards during the darkest and most dazzling hours of physical danger, pain, dust, death.
…
One of the main reasons why the very great and very gallant Russian poet Gumilev was put to death by Lenin’s ruffians twenty years ago was that during the whole ordeal, in the prosecutor’s dim office, in the torture house, in the winding corridors that led to the truck, in the truck that took him to the place of execution and at that place itself, full of the shuffling feet of the clumsy and gloomy shooting squad, the poet kept smiling.”
Wokeism is fatally opposed to the most important tenets of Christianity. It’s repulsive and infuriating because wokeism weaponizes the underlying moral basis of modern Western liberal thought, and will ultimately destroy us if allowed to continue their dominance in our societies.
The vast majority of us want to be “good” people who care about each individual, and want everyone to have a decent life. The woke have seized power over us because they claim that only through their worldview can we be truly fair to the oppressed. We have ceded this false moral high-ground to them, because virtually no one wants to not be a good person who cares about the oppressed and the marginalized.
The Judeo-Christian worldview that underlies these moral principles insists that each human life is equal before the sight of G-d and each human life has equal and intrinsic worth. We are also all flawed and fall short of the glory of G-d, and because we are flawed none of us–and no group of us–should have absolute power over others. In order to get along (and in order to comport with Christianity) we must have personal humility and respect for each other, and also be prepared to nurture and forgive each other.
Everything about wokeism actively works against these principles. Only group identity matters, not the individual. Oppressors are irredeemably flawed and must be eliminated in some fashion—the woke rarely spell this out but it’s the only logical outcome of the game they have set up. We are all assigned categories and identities; we are oppressors and oppressed; there is no freedom to disagree, and there sure as hell is no compassion or forgiveness.
Please say God, it’s not a dirty word.
Jewish people do not write God in full because the word is sacred, not because they think it is dirty.
Excellent points you’ve made. Thank you.
All about further eroding the “rights” of workers. Just another reason to justify firing to replace you with a newer, lower paid worker. Criminalizing “hate speech” is the same. It’s about workers’ so called rights being further eroded on an ever expanding continuum (like genders) on behalf of the ruling class employers. The state does their bidding by expanding criminal/economic sanction with their monopoly on violent coercion to keep the workers “compliant” which never works out well for the employees because the goal posts are moved daily. The grievance factory is a new market to exploit with money to be made at the expense of the lower classes and their pay. The division keeps people from united action against this as does the threat to ability to feed oneself under this PC capitalism.
The industry is ironically based in and and round bias and prejudice but the instigators are so immersed in their various levels of wokery and cognitive cognisance they are too stupid to see it. The fact that according to the identity politics mantra, no other creed of human being is apparently susceptible to the same bias makes the entire argument completely implausible. Surely, if the cultural prejudices and white tyrannical hierarchies that are to blame for all the worlds problems exist, then how many other levels of “unconscious bias” must surely exist within many other colours and cultures as a result? One only has to listen to different cultural reference points in music and literature to suggest it’s not the white preserve at all….in fact I would say thanks to the post modernists, its become much more evident in almost everybody but..
I can only recommend THOMAS SOWELL – THE REAL HISTORY OF SLAVERY As a good counter point to the ridiculous and racist 1619 project.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWrfjUzYvPo
Also Excellent
Thomas Sowell – Conquests, Migrations, Race and Cultures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRzML4LC0xA
“Slavery was an evil of greater scope and magnitude than most people imagine and as a result its place in history is radically different from the way it is usually portrayed
mention slavery and immediately the image that arises is that of Africans and their descendants enslaved by Europeans and their descendants in the southern United States or at most Africans enslaved by Europeans in the Western Hemisphere
No other historic horror is so narrowly construed no one thinks of war famine or decimating epidemics in such localized terms these are afflictions that have been suffered by the entire human race all over the planet and so was slavery.
Had slavery been limited to one race in one country during three centuries its tragedies would not have been 1/10 the magnitude that they were in fact.
Why this provincial view of a worldwide evil? Often it is those who are most critical of a Eurocentric view of the world who are most Eurocentric when it comes to the evils and failings of the human race.
Why would anyone wish to arbitrarily understate an evil that plagued mankind for thousands of years unless it was not this evil itself that was the real concern but rather the present-day uses of that historic evil clearly the ability to score ideological points against American society or Western civilization or to induce guilt and thereby extract benefits from the white population today are greatly enhanced by making enslavement appear to be a peculiarly American or a peculiarly white crime
This explanation is also consistent with the otherwise inexplicable contrast between the fiery rhetoric about past slavery in the United States used by those who pass over in utter silence the traumas of slavery that still exist in Mauritania the Sudan and parts of Nigeria and Benin.
Why so much more concern for dead people who are now beyond our help than for living human beings suffering the burdens and humiliations of slavery today.
Why does a verbal picture of the abuses of in centuries past aroused far more response than contemporary photographs of present-day slaves in Time magazine the New York Times or the National Geographic
it takes no more research than a trip to almost any public library or college library to show the incredibly lopsided coverage of slavery in the United States or in the Western Hemisphere as compared to the meagre writings on the even larger number of Africans enslaved in the Islamic countries of the Middle East and North Africa not to mention the vast numbers of Europeans also enslaved in centuries past in the Islamic world and within Europe itself
At least a million Europeans were enslaved by North African pirates alone from 1500 to 1800 and some European slaves were still being sold on the auction block in Egypt years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed blacks in the United States indeed an anglo-egyptian Treaty of August 4th 1877 prohibited the continued sale of white slaves after August 3rd 1885 as well as prohibiting the import and export of Sudanese and Abyssinian slaves
During the Middle Ages Slavs were so widely used as slaves in both Europe and the Islamic world that the very word slave derived from the word for Slav not only in English but also in other European languages as well as in Arabic nor have Asians or Polynesians been exempt from either being enslaved or enslaving others
China in centuries past has been described as one of the largest and most comprehensive markets for the exchange of human beings in the world slavery was also common in India where it has been estimated that there were more slaves than in the entire Western Hemisphere
How and why did slavery end. The West stopped it, and stopped all other countries too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWrfjUzYvPo
Very well said
When I was about 11 I remember reading a story from New Zealand, based on a Maori legend. In the story, the main character, a young man, is traveling with another young man who is his slave. I was very surprised as I had thought up until then that only African people had been enslaved, in America. I think I asked one of my parents about it (they were both born in New Zealand), and they said that yes, the Maori people certainly practiced slavery, and that up until a century ago it was widely practiced all over the world. Even when I was a kid (which was not a short time ago), quite a lot was left out of my education.
Wokeness and conservative American Christianity are opposed to each other, not a team at all! There are quite a few Christian preachers from Reformed Church denominations (i.e. Calvinist) speaking against the social justice movement in fact.
Calvinism isn’t just a specific conservative belief system (frankly unique to USA) which results in a certain brand of hard work ethics, fervency, and narrow-mindedness.
Calvinism is a theological position started by Calvin, commonly summarised as TULIP. Total depravity, Unconditional election, Limited atonement, Irresistible grace, Perseverance of the saints.
Calvin’s form of government (tyranny really) is perhaps a controversial fruit of his doctrine, however it is not Calvinism itself.
Wokeness spokespeople come across more like they are from a cult than a member of a Reformed church. Look up characteristics of a cult: black and white thinking, “us against them’ mindset, punishment for disobedient people/ apostates, and rewards for those who mindlessly follow the teachings.
Wokeism is an inverted form of Christianity.
White skin = original sin
Gender fluidity = soul
Climate change = apocalypse
Patriarchy = Satan
Anti-racist literature = scripture
Social justice = medieval justice
George Floyd = Jesus
It has all the trappings, but none of the grace, gentleness nor forgiveness of Christianity.
I would add that the current hysteria over COVID and the insistence on mask-wearing everywhere, even outdoors (against all scientific evidence and common sense) has a religious bent. Masking is fundamentally humiliating, a form of self-abasement or bodily “mortification”, like the various punishment religious fanatics of old would inflict upon themselves.
Calvinism Originates from Scotland,explains the hatred of England,humour and even hate each other SNP faces rivalry from Alex Salmonds ‘Alba’ party in may 2021..Hopefully it will Spell the beginning of the End of EU stooges and SNP ,so will have end of ”hate” crime Thought crime in Scotland?…
Very good column.
Can people please stop writing such stupid things about Calvinism…
Firstly, no one seems to have any idea what it is… It’s as though people have never been to Wales (Calvinistic Methodists), Northern Island or Scotland (Presbyterian), or further abroad the Netherlands, Germany, Hungary, etc (Reformed). The terrible historical summaries people present as fact is astounding to me (akin to reading the Wikipedia page)
And secondly, America is probably one of the least Calvinistic parts of the Christian (or rather, Post-Christian) world. It was mostly influenced by the Anabaptist movement who came into the country from Germany and the Nordic countries. Dietrich Bonhoeffer even said of them “They have Protestantism without the Reformation”. Hardly something that could be said of the Calvinists he knew…
Meanwhile the Chinese and other continents that are not consumed by this are just pissing themselves as we go down this path.
All that wasted time, money and energy which would be better used competing with China.
This is a now ubiquitous topic, but I think that this piece articulates the problem way better than most. I am exiting my job next week in part because I called BS on this stuff and the wokesters are lying in wait for me. And I voted for Barack Obama three times, including a write-in when aristocrat John Kerry was running. It’s all so demoralizing.
The diversity training is going to backfire but not before it does a lot damage. If I was on a hiring panel and knew that everyone had gone through this training, I could reasonably assume they were going to be biased against straight white men as they are being instructed. I might then skew towards such candidates to counter this unfair bias. Likewise if I was told to not hire blacks, I’d probably hire them out of spite but then I’m a contrarian by nature and don’t like being told what to do – especially for stupid reasons. The logical thing to do – especially for a business – is to simply hire the best candidate regardless of skin color.
Then there is a problem that I have not yet heard explained. What if a person of colour disagrees with what I say? When if to placate them I agree with them, only to find i am being untrue to myself, and my values and the topic itself devalued. Or should I get into debate, but only to find they win if the race card is called up (BAME) and not the facts on the subject debated? I mention this, for in observation in the media and else where, a person of colour is deemed persecuted although may have a history of dubious misdeeds stacked up against them and where in today’s collective society a white can lose their job due to possible misinformation aired but the subject spoken about truthfull. But then to say, I now refuse to get into diversity dialogue and to see it as a somewhat pointless debate for none of us can change to neutral. So find myself returning to the old, tried and tested “Treat people as they treat you”. So will not be bullied, and if someone is incorrect about something of importance I will call them out and not get involved in racial monologue that has over recent times blurred the lines of discussion and it to result in a conclusion of absurdity on many occasions. With the icing on the cake, no one feels able to speak freely, just in case someone doesn’t like the question or the answer and is offended..
Hence the fact we no longer live in a true democracy. We do not have free speech we have controlled free speech. I do not condone what is happening in China but neither do I like the sheer hypocrisy that pervades our education, business, media, government!
The actions by universities in this pandering to woke brigade and diversity training are anti free speech and they should all be sanctioned with 100% cutting of government and taxpayer funding. As for corporations they should wake up and down size all HR departments to zero.
Within a corporate environment of diversity quotas and positive discrimination, all ‘blacks’ simply become ‘token blacks’.
This is how Woke Colourism degrades and inferiorises people on the basis of skin colour, which then ‘creates’ the need for ‘diversity training’.
The question is what will be the cure for the negative psychological impacts of ‘diversity training’?
Welcome to Woke NeoRacism, a never ending tautology of prejudism based on skin colour.
So true about the new Calvinists’ lack of sense of humour. My old-school Labour brother bot a gollocking (Spoonerism to get around the censor) from his woke wife for suggesting LGBT might mean ‘Let’s Get Bleedin’ Trashed’.
So true! I hardly dared speak about such matters in my university science department, which was fairly conservative and reasonable by the general standards of the institution. The mere thought of challenging the diversity crowd on statistics, rationality of argument and approach, or evidence of effectiveness makes me break into a cold sweat.
..”They aren’t encouraging tolerance..” But surely that is the last thing they want. Tolerance would say; I disagree with what you say but I agree with your right to say it. When is the last time you ever heard such a truly revolutionary comment like this made? Certainly not in the last few years. Diversity is the very thing that ” diversity training” wishes to eliminate. Anything that differs from the sociological piffle that passes as
truth in these dark times.
Yes you’d expect Diversity departments to be, well diverse. In fact an area of greater groupthink and mono perspective is difficult to imagine
There are good and bad in all societies, black, white, yellow etc and I do not class everyone the same in my next comment. However I do believe there are a good many black people who are not after equality………they want to do to white people, what they believe has been done to them.
Diversity training is the moral justification of a specific type of problem-solving used by public institutions and business today – ‘managerialism’. Based on the premise that solving problems through discussion creates tensions between the classes. According to Adam Curtis, Managerialism is a significant influence of our time. Trained managers set goals, then the goals are deconstructed into sub-goals and so on. Solutions to goals are chosen by economic efficiency. The only measure of overall success is profitability and economic efficiency.
This approach has had some disastrous consequences.
1. Moving the means of production to the world’s largest communist country turning it into a superpower
2. Creating social unrest in the West from lack of jobs.
3. Not dealing with Climate Change ( if your left-leaning.)
Diversity and the protection of minority groups such as LGBT have become the moral justification of this process’s continuation. The only problem, as they see it, is people’s values, not the process.
The West must self flagellate yet the ‘developing world’ would like to come here.No one wants to claim asylum in South America, the Middle and Far East or Russia yet these people don’t wonder why. Partly this is dumb ignorance-the desperately poor teaching of history. Let’s have the true history of human bondage- the millions traded North for hundreds of years through the Sudan into Ottoman Egypt; the slavery built in to the ancient West African kingdoms; the huge slave trade to Zanzibar by muslim slavers; serfdom and the slave raids by Barbary Traders on the coasts of Europe including Wales, Cornwall and Ireland. That’s for starters. As for reparations, about time the West charged properly for its cultural and technical capital.
Mr. Snowden took asylum in Russia.
Assange was granted asylum in Ecuador, until it was nullified by the US.
People want to enter in the US because of its wealth and need for low wage workers.
A good example of how really bad things can get is the trilogy on YouTube of Professor Bret Weinstein at Evergreen College (yes, it is shocking).
Part one is titled, Bret Weinstein, Heater Heying, and the Evergreen Equity Council.
In the end, I think, wokeism, or intersectionalism is a form of race politics, that compares to nazism. Intersectionalists like to call each other ‘folks’, which derives from the German word ‘volk’ (remember someone once shouting, ‘Ein reich, ein volk’?).
For further reading I suggest newdiscourses.com, which also has an encyclopedia of woke language. It is a very long list of words, so this is a work still in progress. ‘Folks’ is also in the encyclopedia.
Edit:
I understand from the Woke Encyclopedia that ‘folks’ was not gender inclusive enough, because in Spanish it would be translated as ‘la gente’, which is feminine. So the the new gender inclusive spelling is ‘folx’. Not all woke agree, but they should be cancelled off course.
That’s exactly what it is – a fascist ideology masquerading as a civil rights movement.
I would value the opinion of any American commenters as to what proportion of the large number of college graduates each year are likely to try and put what they have been taught about CRT into practice in whatever industry or vocation they may subsequently enter into.
Good question. I wonder that, too.
Interesting that you asked. A group of these credentialed misfits is complaining about the investment banking business, which typically requires long hours of new associates and of veteran partners. They want to put a cap on the number of hours worked per week. The old guard is suggesting that these people reconsider their career options. And then there is journalism where the difference between a campus paper and the New York Times is negligible.
Why the hate for campus papers?
Sadly I retired from a major accountancy firm before having to undergo compulsory unconscious bias training. I was so looking forward to completing feedback on what I had learnt with the exchange between Billy Mack and his manager Joe at the beginning of Love Actually. “This is shit.” “24 carat shit maestro!”
… how counter productive ! A now embedded racial/industrial complex to promote racialism – with lazily, cynically imported second hand tropes.
There is something very bizarre sounding about the title “diversity czar.” It sounds like an old fashioned oxymoron.
We have an ‘anti-semitism czar’ in UK. How weird is that?
How do you fit all the required diversity into one person?!
So called Anti-racism is just the photographic negative of racism – both are equally abhorrent and non racists should speak out about genuine occurrences of both without needing to fear the consequences. Diversity of thought and ideas is what delivers better outcomes, as long as there is a clear decision point and everyone abides by the decision when made. Everyone who has something constructive to offer should be included, but if you have nothing to offer shut up and listen to those who do or just piss off and do something you can contribute constructively too. Equality is a myth – we are all different so how can we be equal. Indeed where would be the incentive to work hard and improve yourself if you end up no different to anyone else who does not bother?
Hardly needs a load of time wasting courses run by over paid zealots and their mindless acolytes to get that across does it?
When I was 21 and green I got a sales admin job and experienced the upset of sexual harassment, it was vile stuff, I did burst into tears but of sheer anger at his claims of what he was going to split like a coconut and his exploits with underage Thai girls. It was a crap job so I waited until they went to the pub and left the sales figures which head office wanted every Friday and reported him to the agy . I knew I wanted to be in HR employee relations not only to channel my anger into helping tackle it and my pet hate bullying in the workplace, but also the positive aspects of employee engagement. I worked in large well known brand firms and the incidents of racism were very few and it was because blokes joking about everyone took it too far. The man concerned said it be was funny, I gave as good as I got, just want it to stop. I actually had a recruitment officer embarrassingly highlighting equality and diversity with a black candidate. The person also under marked him and I got it changed. I apologised when I called to offer and said she was an idiot but your job offer with a global oil or gas concern, that’s an amazing job. This ones yours but please don’t because you’re too good for here. Selling things in a store. Travel with management development across the globe. I could have sworn he was Head of EMEA Production on an industry magazine I clocked in a specialist book /mag shop. I say 99% I was stoked. They were the only incidents, sexual harassment reduced very quickly as we said no to it culturally and in one case we paid the guy off so as not to put the woman through an investigation when technically she could be called into the hearing because of policy. There were many women at mgt levels, a few board too. Pay was not an issue between the sexes with clear progression rates for performance standards.
The majority of time was disciplinary and poor performance not grievances about equality issues. The pay gap is due to part time v full time as they don’t pro rata the part time which women tend to do as they request it. So I earn500 for 5 days whereas a woman earns 300 for 3 days, there’s allegedly a gender pay gap between us if you assume we’re both full time but we’re paid exactly the same. That’s just stats manipulation and wrong. It’s actually good for women returners for work life balance to retain good staff with offering part time for home life at their request.
The British are not bothered about race generally but the trouble usually is London and cities, less so the workplace. Look at the number of race cases at the appeal tribunal. It was far less than most indicating there were less issues.
We did do employment law training and used screening forms all the way with 2 officers interviewing and ratifying scores and afterwards comparing all scores just to spot any scores out of line. No one would ever not give a job to someone because of race we couldn’t get high quality people as it was so they were like gold dust when excellent.
i don’t see how it’s worse but after a big improvement, staff generally became overly focussed on rights, grievances because they wouldn’t send drs notes to certify and you had monthly updates on phone to ask how are you can you remember your sick note so I can pay you and remember to call me every month ! Performance issues became stress cases. I even had a random password grievance when the machine gave him YEWFUKR! I left HR 3 years ago as I was dealing with situations where it was a constant aim of an employee to get to an ET. I made one mistake in my career at the cost of £3k. But it was like employees were children and I was obligated to them. It was a real change in attitude . And when the unions were saying to me, were sick of the unreasonableness and entitlement of many members (they were defending many claims from members), it just wasn’t fun to work anymore. The workplace has changed in a way I just went, sod it. It was anger at the employer for going far harder, employees grow up as you get upper quartile pay. I wanted to go to work for a union because I could work with them, ironically. It’s a shame but my passion has gone dealing with matters that became huge when informal approaches used to work.
God help us if there’s a war again like WW2.
OK. Early sects associated with the teachings of John Calvin were intolerant. ( As were lots of non-Calvinist sects, like the Church of England. ) The new woke sects who push critical race theory are intolerant. But to claim that America is “exporting” a form Calvinism to the world at large is a mighty big claim. And, it shows a lack of nuance or understanding regarding the theology of Calvin. But, that’s pretty much the fate of any serious theology.
The Woke activists are pushing the agenda and try to supress dissent because they know they are selling lies and the whole ideology is false, it would not survive scrutiny.
A former political prisoner from East Europe, Nicolae Steinhardt, took the wisdom to confront his deepest fears during incarceration inspired by Albert Camus’ play, The State of Siege.” And he defeated fear! Courage is a virtue, and Diversity Training will be delivered until the sane part of the population which is numerical larger than the zealots, will stand up and say, “No more!”
Learn also from Poles who in the time of communism, stood up against the criminal regime and the commies had to retreat.
We are stronger than we think. Don’t let the barbarian bully you!
I would be beyond embarrassed if, say, Andy d**k had a heart attack in the course of an arrest and became the subject of martyrdom and murals.
There is much that is tragic about the treatment of the African American “community” (if we want to treat it monolithically), however what I find most offensive in this era is how enthralled it generally is to abusive political interests; it’s like a battered woman who has convinced herself that her husband really loves her, and she won’t listen to her friends.
Regarding Calvinism, I watched Paul Schrader’s Hardcore (1979) again recently. Though a flawed film, it’s a memorable depiction of mid-western Calvinism in the Dutch Reformed Church as it was in the mid 20th century, and is obviously based on Scrader’s own life. The saved and the damned, predestination, it’s all there. Recommended!
Sign up to Helen Pluckrose’s Counterweight (having read Cynical Theories). Learn as much as you can about CRT by watching youtube videos of James Lindsay and others , including on sites such as Triggernometry. Find out about recent history that counteracts the Woke narrative. For example Google Tony Timpa , a white guy who died in exactly the same way as George Floyd in Dallas in 2016, (knee on neck for 13 minutes) where the police video cam was withheld resulting in the police being acquitted
You’ve been following much the same people as I. James Lindsay, Bret Weinstein, John McWhorter, Coleman Hughes, et al…..have saved my sanity! Benjamin Boyce’s conversation with Aaron Kindsvatter is illuminating as he’s terrified of Wokeness seeping into Mental Therapy. Boyce is an alumni of Evergreen (who fired Weinstein and Heather Heying) and Prof. Kindsvatter, who fortunately does have tenure at the Un. of Vermont, is being bullied by students to resign. The Cancel Culture Cult marches on. Hmmm…can we call it the CCC,, like the KKK?
Fabulous article. Worked in campus ministry that dun got woke-ed while I was there. Workshops became increasingly painful and humorless. (Btw, I loved your comments about woke humorlessness. Laugher and smiling are themselves an act of resistance to the management class, imo). Anyway, while Calvin could be a real stinker (you forgot to mention that he had someone drowned who believed in total immersion baptist rather than a lite sprinkling), to be sure. He was, however, more than his vices, but it is true that we Christians can turn good news into bad news with the best of em. Having said that, the gospel is still good news in spite of our capacity to twist our plows into swords. However, I’d suggest that the Christian gospel is the only way out of the simultaneous tyranny and tribalism that will ensue if the present trajectory continues. At the root of wokeism is a schizophrenic anthropological dilemma. On the one hand we ARE our bodies and as such, if my body (ethnicity, etc) differs from your, we are insurmountable DIFFERENT than one another, sharing nothing and guarding everything. On the other hand, that same body, we are told, MEANS NOTHING and can be dispensed with by a simple declaration by that, ‘I am no longer male, I am a woman…..hear me roar.’ The only way out of woke schizophrenia is to understand that we are not just our bodies. No, we are embodied souls, made in the image of a common Maker and rescued by a common Savior. Short of that we will fracture into increasingly small and particular tribes.
Worryingly, even Zero hours jobs,Like ”Stewarding” have subjected their applications and Training to ”Double think Plus Good” with ‘Unconscious bias” At the end of The Unit, the Course Said ,even though you ”Aren’t” Privileged or Prejudiced YOU ARE !! what Orwell or ”The Manchurian Candidate” think of this??…Democracy is ebbing away and We have Bread &No beer?….
Do zero hours job have zero hours pay? What a ridiculous term. You either have a job or you don’t.
Reality check on Black Lives Matter; without the alleged murder of Mr Floyd by a white policemen they have nothing. View the police bodycam video here to see what actually went on before and after Mr Floyd’s arrest. Powerlineblog. com/archives/2020/09/the-george-floyd-documentary Take out the space before com for the link to work.
I recently discovered that my diocese has made a condition of a layperson’s receiving the Bishop’s Certificate / ‘license’ (permission) to preach in a church attendance at an ‘unconscious bias’ training course. So the nightmare has begun in the Church of England too. Fortunately, the great majority of its laity are not so stupid, ignorant, or politically motivated as to swallow the nonsense. Sadly, a few of the wets and the wallies have done so. Schism looms, I think.
The absurdity of diversity training is that diversity it is the opposite of equality
Once you contrive diversity you are exercising attention to differences between people and that is the very opposite of equality
By the same token in reverse, once you pursue equality, you are denying diversity
Equality without diversity becomes boringly and soullessly racial
Diversity without equality becomes imposing (self-downtrodden minorities threateningly asserting their minority rights, leading to nervous capitulation and abandonment of a social norm established by and for the majority (eg nervous fearful upholding of Muslim protests of a cartoon that was used to stimulate debate into finding common ground on the vert question of diversity)
Predictably quota controlled diversity (eg BBC newsdesk staff, catalogue models, etc) become hilariously embarrassing as well a surefire giveaway of racial discrimination (eg we need one more black guy in the studio to meet our quota)
Excellent article.
Exactly
I can just imagine Prince Phillip saying “if announcing you have appointed one of these non-jobbers will make these w*nkers go away, then do as you must”
Seriously Ed, your attempt to put the onus on my Puritan and Pilgrim ancestors only shows how dishonest or in denial you are. If you and your nation, would remove that old chip on your shoulder against the United States of America for saying no to your oppressive government, tea, and showing the door to your king and red coats, and abandoned the obsequious crawling to globalist wannabe grand high poohbahs of upper buttcrack you might be able to deal with your problems and be an actual ally worthy of trust. It’s established fact that the very intolerant and un-diverse diversity mob is a product of the Marxist plantation slavery state, a tactic pushed by Marx, Trotsky and Lenin, and we all know how Britain embraced Marxist ideology. Your universities, etc.. have been controlled by Marxists for far longer, as have Europe’s. Soros is a product of Germany and Britain. Do you really believe the UK/European lie that Americans don’t read foreign news? We know how your parasites entitled your various diversity mobs, Antifa, who are fascist, started in East Germany 30 or so years ago, and Britain embraced that. My own mother remembers British politicians, actors, writers etc.. in the 60s, 70s basically spouting off about America being racist, inferring that we were to blame for slavery and so much more. I know my nation’s history and I know yours’. And yes I’m smirking when I type, Britons have no sense of history. If you want to go there, I am more than prepared to. Fact is, we will never be your colony again, you need to make up your mind what is more important to you.
Poor uneducated soul, I feel for you
This article attacks what could broadly be called the anti-racism industry as being ineffective and from that seems to imply that racism isn’t real – or at least is not so widespread that it needs to be dealt with.
It’s a bit like saying we thought we had a rodent problem but the mousetraps haven’t solved it so we must have imagined the rodent problem.
If you don’t think widespread racism is real then explain why you think that. Don’t use diversity training as a proxy for your real target which is the people who believe racism is real and needs to be addressed.
‘There is also the difference between the totalitarian mind and the liberal mind; for the former, everything is about politics.’ But everything is about politics which doesn’t mean the same thing as everything is only about politics..
If there is widespread racism why do the people who are mixed race (Markle, OBama, Lewis Hamilton) identify as black rather than white?
Racism is real, although not widespread (and no one has come up with any proof that it is).
Where people make a huge mistake is in their insistence that systemic racism is real. And even there it somewhat is just not in the way diversity mavens like to believe. US universities, for example, discount Asian American applications because they get in too often so they lower their “personality” scores to keep some of them, even if they have earned it, out. That’s systemic racism but if favors African Americans and disfavors a non favored race.
People who are mixed race identify as black because there are advantages to being black and brown in the US. Would Obama have been elected had he not been black? This is also why whenever a race faker is caught, it’s never someone pretending to be white, it’s always someone pretending to be black or brown. Academia is loaded with these type people.
“Racism is real”. It’s certainly real to the Somalis who hate the Afghans and vice versa
Yes, the Kenyans also hate the Somalis.
I agree with the article but a question.
““We were told that high levels of diversity were in all cases a great thing and can only lead to good outcomes,” when numerous studies point to the opposite.”
Some links, please.
>There is also the difference between the totalitarian mind and the liberal mind; for the former, everythingis about politics. What you do in your spare time has political implications, and so no area of life is free of political discussion.
This has been a long time in coming. Second wave feminists declared “the personal is political” and the spread of politics into everything is a key theme in Milan Kundera.
Indeed, the young Czech communists in the Joke are very like the wokists. And as today, a simple Joke can destroy someone’s life.
I can only pray to think this clearly and write so well. Thank you.
In the competition of life a successful strategy for winning quickly takes hold. The race inequality argument is a winning strategy leading to positive discrimination, monetary benefits and superiority over the chosen target. In a biological analysis it might be attributed to the over-success of the dominant strain which will be forced into retreat. In the long run multiculturalism will continue to churn the global population into mixed race (essentially we are all that already according to my 23andme results). In the short term the cohort under attack may consider the loss of status too much to bear and unrest will erupt. Or it may just be more media fodder.
And when the Police Officer who killed George Floyd is found not guilty ?
Who will then comment on the fact that the USA is a broken society –
Police Training , 2nd amendment , Gun Law , the corrupt political system , the fact that 74 million people voted for Trump ( even people of colour )
and none this will change – mass shootings will still occur daily and there will many more people regardless of ethnicity who will die at the hands of the Police in the great USA ………………………..
The cop will be found not guilty because he was charged with murder. Once Floyd’s toxicology report comes out no jury will be able to convict Chauvin of murder. They charged wrong.
and yes, Americans will keep their constitutional rights, including the 2nd amendment.
The nine minutes meant he had to be found guilty
There is certainly a place for diversity training but when it becomes enforced it loses its authority completely.
This begins with a pretty unpleasant and inaccurate attack upon Protestant Christianity. The picture painted of both Geneva and of the Protestant desire for godly truth in society are simply wrong. And wrong in so many ways that it is impossible to list them all.
I will simply address one, even Jesus himself was clear about “the world being divided between the damned and the saved.” This is basic Biblical truth, is evidenced by the actions of clearly fallible and frequently godless mankind, and not therefore some vicious attack upon a glorious human race.
The article is thus built on sand, it therefore fails.
What relation does ‘Bliblical truth’ bear to actual truth?
The author is referring to Nietzsche’s herd morality. When Nietzsche said, “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” He is referring to one set of values (Christian) being replaced by a new set a values(woke).
The author was showing how Christianity can be twisted and taken too far, just like wokism. You would not hang your hat on the inquisition would you?
Separate the fact that zealots run in a herd of morality from those able to think for themselves.
Read Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra to understand today’s woke children.
I’m just bored now; these articles are a waste of space and the discussion they provoke is the same repetitive nonsense. If I had made many many millions, instead of just a few, I would have looked for some more useful or enjoyable cause upon which to splurge them before I die, instead of this turgid online journal, which will neither be capable of conversion to a cash-positive business model nor ever be an opinion former.
On the plus side, the articles are not quite so bad as in TCW and the discussion board is not entirely populated by nutcases.
I’m cutting off notifications – there is nothing here I want to be alerted to.
Such a shame Freddie didn’t make more out of his acting – that showed a bit of promise back in the day.
x
I am a professional facilitator for Adult training . I specialise in Diversity training – in fact in the 1990’s I was employed at a Police Training College. Before any Training takes place there is a need to complete a Training Needs Analysis ( TNA ) to understand how you tackle a problem , issue , policy, law etc – if it is decided that Training is the best way of tackling that issue then there needs to be some kind of structured evaluation to demonstrate how the training impacted on the individual , organisation and most importantly the service user . You can guarantee that no University Organisation has actually completed a TNA nor a Structured evaluation . The Murder of George Floyd was a horrendous murder Fact – it is also a fact that on Christmas day in the USA in 2015 , 27 people were murdered with firearms the same amount for the whole year in the UK – yes only 27 people died through the use of firearms in the UK in one year . Now lets talk about Domestic Abuse in the UK – 1 women is murdered every 3 days in the UK ( this has been ongoing for at least the last 20 years ) – 27 % of all violent crime in the UK is through Domestic abuse . It costs the UK 60 Billion pounds a year due to Domestic Abuse ( Housing , loss of earnings , court , Police , Social) . S o where is the training regarding relationships , respect , the patriarchal society , Men’s perceived entitlement to know better than women ? No unconscious bias here just pure fact .
The issue here is we have a culture war polarised by the metropolitan illiberal elitist wokes – jumping on any old bandwagon that is populist and factually weak . Talking about Domestic Abuse / Violence brings an issue to close to their own homes / lives whether you are White or a person of colour .
There’s a lot of Judeo-Christian theology, Greek philosophy, and Enlightenment liberalism and humanism in social justice theory and campaigning. There’s a good argument to be made that it’s actually an attempt to reassert that influence in the face of the prevalent western religion of today – Capitalism – which is the ultimate de-humanising religion.
Andre Scrima, a Romanian Orthodox theologian and monk, wrote as a connoisseur about Marxism. In his book, Orthodoxism and the Trial of Communism (unfortunately not translated to English), he demonstrates that Marxism is a Christian heresy. It perverted Christian ideas so they are not serving people, but damage the whole society.
When you state that, “There’s a lot of Judeo-Christian theology, Greek philosophy, and Enlightenment liberalism and humanism in social justice theory and campaigning” – keep in mind that the Devil likes to pervert everything and look similar to God. But he is a destroyer. Christianity is the religion of freedom when properly understood, while communism was and is about nihilistic destruction. Greeks taught us dialogue, Communists teach us censorship and cancel debates. Enlightenment, especially the French one, left behind the corpses of tens of thousands of innocent people. Not a reason to be a fan of it.
If you are so upset about capitalism, try living in a socialist country. N Korea and Venezuela are two dramatic cases.