Anti Political Correctness Quotes

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...These politically correct language initiatives are misguided and harmful. They create highly entitled professional “victims” who expect to be free from any offense, and they engender a stifling atmosphere where all individuals walk on eggshells lest they might commit a linguistic capital crime.
Gad Saad
The concept of “microaggression” is just one of many tactics used to stifle differences of opinion by declaring some opinions to be “hate speech,” instead of debating those differences in a marketplace of ideas. To accuse people of aggression for not marching in lockstep with political correctness is to set the stage for justifying real aggression against them.
Thomas Sowell
Political correctness is anti-empathetic because it has correctness in it. We all have biases, we all have prejudices and if we cant talk about them openly - if we get attacked for it then this is an anti-empathetic movement and therefore it cannot complain about a lack of empathy.
Stefan Molyneux
What we are against will unite us, while what we are for divides us. Therefore, we should emphasise what we oppose. The common enemy unites us, while the positive values each of us are defending actually divides us. Therefore, we must create strategic alliances to overthrow the present order of things, of which the core could be described as human rights, anti-hierarchy, and political correctness – everything that is the face of the Beast, the anti-Christ or, in other terms, Kali-Yuga.
Alexander Dugin
It’s time for students to learn that Life is Triggering. Once they leave college, they’ll be constantly exposed to views that challenge or offend them. There are a lot of jerks out there, and no matter what your politics are, a lot of people will have the opposite view.
Jerry A. Coyne
That a work of the imagination has to be “really” about some problem is, again, an heir of Socialist Realism. To write a story for the sake of storytelling is frivolous, not to say reactionary. The demand that stories must be “about” something is from Communist thinking and, further back, from religious thinking, with its desire for self-improvement books as simple-minded as the messages on samplers. The phrase “political correctness” was born as Communism was collapsing. I do not think this was chance. I am not suggesting that the torch of Communism has been handed on to the political correctors. I am suggesting that habits of mind have been absorbed, often without knowing it. There is obviously something very attractive about telling other people what to do: I am putting it in this nursery way rather than in more intellectual language because I see it as nursery behavior. Art — the arts generally — are always unpredictable, maverick, and tend to be, at their best, uncomfortable. Literature, in particular, has always inspired the House committees, the Zhdanovs, the fits of moralizing, but, at worst, persecution. It troubles me that political correctness does not seem to know what its exemplars and predecessors are; it troubles me more that it may know and does not care. Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to examine our assumptions, there are 20 rabble-rousers whose real motive is desire for power over others, no less rabble-rousers because they see themselves as anti-racists or feminists or whatever.
Doris Lessing
The seventh type of guerrilla organization is that formed from bands of bandits and brigands. This, although difficult, must be carried out with utmost vigor lest the enemy use such bands to his own advantage. Many bandit groups pose as anti-Japanese guerrillas, and it is only necessary to correct their political beliefs to convert them. In
Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-Tung On Guerrilla Warfare)
Diagnoses of the malaise of the humanities rightly point to anti-intellectual trends in our culture and to the commercialization of universities. But an honest appraisal would have to acknowledge that some of the damage is self-inflicted. The humanities have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, self-refuting relativism, and suffocating political correctness. Many of its luminaries—Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, the Critical Theorists—are morose cultural pessimists who declare that modernity is odious, all statements are paradoxical, works of art are tools of oppression, liberal democracy is the same as fascism, and Western civilization is circling the drain.54
Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
I co-created the Huffington Post and the Big sites as part of a grander strategy to knock down the false edifice that is the mainstream media, that is built upon the false proposition of “objective” journalism and the grotesque anti-American proposition of political correctness. My mission isn’t to quash debate—it’s to show that the mainstream media aren’t mainstream, that their feigned objectivity isn’t objective, and that open, rigorous debate is a positive good in our society.
Andrew Breitbart (Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World)
During the years 1945-1965, there was a certain way of thinking correctly, a certain style of political discourse, a certain ethics of the intellectual. One had to be on familiar terms with Marx, not let one's dreams stray too far from Freud.
Michel Foucault (Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia)
As all this suggests our relationship with evidence is seldom purely a cognitive one. Vilifying menstruating women bolstering anti-Muslim stereotypes murdering innocent citizens of Salem plainly evidence is almost always invariably a political social and moral issue as well. To take a particularly stark example consider the case of Albert Speer minister of armaments and war production during the Third Reich close friend to Adolf Hitler and highest-ranking Nazi official to ever express remorse for his actions. In his memoir Inside the Third Reich Speer candidly addressed his failure to look for evidence of what was happening around him. "I did not query a friend who told him not to visit Auschwitz I did not query Himmler I did not query Hitler " he wrote. "I did not speak with personal friends. I did not investigate for I did not want to know what was happening there... for fear of discovering something which might have made me turn away from my course. I had closed my eyes." Judge William Stoughton of Salem Massachusetts became complicit in injustice and murder by accepting evidence that he should have ignored. Albert Speer became complicit by ignoring evidence he should have accepted. Together they show us some of the gravest possible consequences of mismanaging the data around us and the vital importance of learning to manage it better. It is possible to do this: like in the U.S. legal system we as individuals can develop a fairer and more consistent relationship to evidence over time. By indirection Speer himself shows us how to begin. I did not query he wrote. I did not speak. I did not investigate. I closed my eyes. This are sins of omission sins of passivity and they suggest correctly that if we want to improve our relationship with evidence we must take a more active role in how we think must in a sense take the reins of our own minds. To do this we must query and speak and investigate and open our eyes. Specifically and crucially we must learn to actively combat our inductive biases: to deliberately seek out evidence that challenges our beliefs and to take seriously such evidence when we come across it.
Kathryn Schulz (Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error)
Yes, Donald Trump arrived just in time, when our nation needed him most, when we needed to be protected and inspired. To be sure, Trump was not your typical, politically correct candidate. Unlike the two-faced parasites in Washington, he really wanted to make America great again. They tagged him with every negative characterization they could. They called him a fascist, a racist, and twisted everything he said. Why? Because he was a threat to the greedy, corrupt Washington insiders who had captured our government. And he did what other candidates wouldn’t dream of. In addition to the Establishment, he took on the media. They said it was suicide. They were wrong.
Jeanine Pirro (Liars, Leakers, and Liberals: The Case Against the Anti-Trump Conspiracy)
.. evidence from around the world shows that political gender quotas don’t lead to the monstrous regiment of incompetent women. In fact, in line with the LSE study on workplace quotas, studies on political quotas have found that if anything, they ‘increase the competence of the political class in general’. This being the case, gender quotas are nothing more than a corrective to a hidden male bias, and it is the current system that is anti-democratic.
Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
According to a study published in 2018 in The Atlantic, some 80 percent of Americans have a negative view of PC culture and the dangerous paths and objectives it pursues. No wonder Trump’s anti-PC stance has found an audience. The numbers are similar even among younger Americans: 74 percent for ages twenty-four to twenty-nine, and 79 percent for those under twenty-four. There is a reason for this. Eighty percent of Americans understand that the cornerstone of a free society is the free exchange of ideas.
Gianno Caldwell (Taken for Granted: How Conservatism Can Win Back the Americans That Liberalism Failed)
Okay, I’ll give you this: Sometimes the president isn’t as politically correct as LIAR Obama. But isn’t it refreshing to finally be able to listen to someone who says what he thinks? To hell with political correctness. A nation exhausted after eight years of Obama’s “I say what I mean and mean what I say” doubletalk were starving for the straight talk Trump delivered. Sometimes his wording is a little rough around the edges. But Donald Trump feels the way much of America feels, and that’s why he was elected our president.
Jeanine Pirro (Liars, Leakers, and Liberals: The Case Against the Anti-Trump Conspiracy)
Despite my having grown up in the south, Portland is the most racist place I have ever lived. This is because being anti-racist isn't about using politically correct buzzwords and giving lip-service to sensitive conservation topics. Being anti-racist is about constructing a landscape that is safe for dark people to inhabit. It is not about white people trying to prove they are "woke" by putting up yard signs. That is not even what "woke" means. "Woke" is a territory of open-eyed, unsuperficial, cultural awareness white people are nowhere close to occupying; they are not even in the neighborhood. But being anti-racist in this dangerous era is something they can do, by going out of their way to make non-white people feel safe.
Shayla Lawson (This Is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, and Being Dope)
The anti-gun control minority is correct when they say that gun violence is caused by the irresponsible or unhinged people who use guns, but to say that guns do not cause gun violence is no less ludicrous than saying that cars do not cause car crashes or that cigarettes do not cause lung cancer. Not every person who drives a car will be in a crash, not every cigarette smoker will die of lung cancer, and not every gun owner will use his gun to maim or kill himself or someone else. But people shoot other people with guns because they have guns, and people commit suicide with guns because they have guns, and the more guns there are to be bought and the more people there are to buy them, the more people will kill themselves and others with guns. This is not a moral or political statement—it is a question of pure mathematics
Paul Auster (Bloodbath Nation)
The future of democracy in developed countries will depend on their ability to deal with the problem of a disappearing middle class. In the wake of the financial crisis there has been a rise of new populist groups from the Tea Party in the United States to various anti-EU, anti-immigrant parties in Europe. What unites all of them is the belief that elites in their countries have betrayed them. And in many ways they are correct: the elites who set the intellectual and cultural climate in the developed world have been largely buffered from the effects of middle-class decline. There has been a vacuum in new approaches to the problem, approaches that don’t involve simply returning to the welfare state solutions of the past. The proper approach to the problem of middle-class decline is not necessarily the present German system or any other specific set of measures. The only real long-term solution would be an educational system that succeeded in pushing the vast majority of citizens into higher levels of education and skills. The ability to help citizens flexibly adjust to the changing conditions of work requires state and private institutions that are similarly flexible. Yet one of the characteristics of modern developed democracies is that they have accumulated many rigidities over time that make institutional adaptation increasingly difficult. In fact, all political systems—past and present—are liable to decay. The fact that a system once was a successful and stable liberal democracy does not mean that it will
Francis Fukuyama (Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy)
the conventional wisdom about the alt-right might need some serious adjusting. It’s doubtful that the real force of the movement consists of young trendy college students kicking against political correctness on their snowflake-covered campuses…maybe the hardcore ethno-nationalists aren’t tapping into some youthful surge. Maybe they’re drinking in some of the energy of older white nationalist movements, capitalizing on the general Western anti-establishment feeling, drawing in social outcasts and the bitterly disappointed, and perhaps- catching a few alienated digital natives in the process
Wendling, Mike
And having a cleaner is nothing to do with feminism. If a middle-class woman is engaging in anti-feminist activity by hiring a woman to do the cleaning, then surely a middle-class man is engaging in class oppression when he hires a male plumber? Feminism has had exactly the same problem that ‘political correctness’ has had: people keep using the phrase without really knowing what it means.
Caitlin Moran (How to Be a Woman)
Which begs the question: how many degrees of separation are there between an anti-Semite and a politically correct anti-Christian?
David Gustafson
The way we reach decisions today, the manner in which we dialogue about issues, and the political correctness we see all around us are dehumanizing expressions of the anti-intellectualism in modern society when it comes to broad worldview issues. Rhetoric without reason, persuasion without argument are manipulation
J.P. Moreland (Love Your God with All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul)
Anti-pornography (or radical) feminists will consider me a heretic-fit only for burning. Or, to put it in more politically correct terms, I am a woman who is so psychologically damaged by patriarchy that I have fallen in love with my own oppression. My arguments will be dismissed. In other words, if I enjoy pornography, it is not because I am a unique human being with different preferences. It is because I am psychologically ill.
Wendy McElroy (XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography)
Now anti-pornography feminists are trying to turn back the clock and shut women's sexuality away behind the locked doors of political correctness. Their first line of attack is to define the debate in their own terms. The first line of defense is to flatly reject such maneuvering.
Wendy McElroy (XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography)
Parents and schools are teaching children how not to think, but how to be good little groupthinkers and people of faith, how to be liberal, multicultural, and politically correct. The idea of quality, excellence, glory, is anathema. It’s the love that dare not speak its name. The exceptional make the mediocre feel bad about themselves, so the mediocre use their force of numbers to demonize the exceptional. The mediocre cannot and will not be made to feel inadequate. Instead of making themselves adequate – God forbid! – they kill the exceptional and then no one notices their inadequacy. Hallelujah! Job done. Amen, Namaste, Brother!
David Sinclair (Locusts, Hollywood, and the Valley of Ashes: Individualism Versus Collectivism)
We could add privilege theory to Žižek’s long list of fake left ist “radicals” who bombard the existing system. As with “ Médecins sans frontières , Greenpeace, feminist and anti-racist campaigns,” privilege theory runs the risk of falling prey to what Žižek names “interpassivity”: the risk of “doing things not in order to achieve something, but to prevent something from really happening, really changing. All this frenetic humanitarian, Politically Correct, etc. activity fi ts the formula of ‘Let’s go on changing something all the time so that, globally, things will remain the same!’ ” The problem with privilege theory—especially as vulgarized in liberal universities—is that it ends up becoming “an empty gesture which obliges no one to do anything definite.” White liberal multiculturalists put on display their “progressive” leanings by calling for inclusivity and tolerance, parading their own self-critique—in a pleasure-ridden act of virtue signaling—as a model for others to follow. Whiteness or white privilege is treated as a reified thing that could be singled out and denounced, and not as “a set of power relations,” as Charles W. Mills insightfully puts it. Privilege-checking does not necessarily translate into campus radicalism. It remains utopian and impotent when it fails to confront capitalism itself: “The true utopia is the belief that the existing global system can reproduce itself indefinitely; the only way to be truly ‘realistic’ is to think what, within the coordinates of this system, cannot but appear as impossible.” The advocates of privilege theory are today’s “true utopians.” They muzzle ideology critique, believing that gradualist reform is the key to social transformation. But privilege theory’s antiracist insights are diluted, never really touching the reality of domination and exploitation, never “demanding ‘impossible’ changes of the system itself.
Zahi Zalloua (Žižek on Race: Toward an Anti-Racist Future)
This is the second way in which women in the industry are said to be victims of violence. They are said to be so brainwashed by white male culture that they cannot render consent. Thus, they are de facto coerced. Consider how arrogant this statement is. Although women in pornography appear to be willing, anti-porn feminists see through this charade [...] If a woman enjoys performing sex acts in front of a camera, it is not because she is a unique human being who reasons and reacts from a different background or personality. No. It is because she is psychologically damaged and no longer responsible for her actions. She must, in effect, become a political ward of radical feminists, who will make the correct choices for her.
Wendy McElroy (XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography)
13). This is a really quite extraordinary piece of insight on Paul’s part, one which I would not believe myself, were the disguise not so common (e.g., celibate priests focusing on birth control and abortion as the core of evil, heterosexuals seeing gay marriage as the ultimate threat to society, liberals invested in some current political correctness while living lives of rather total isolation from the actual suffering of the world, Bible thumpers ignoring most of the Bible when it asks them to change, a nation of immigrants being anti-immigrant, etc.).
Richard Rohr (Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps)
the anti-political correctness types are really just trying to enforce their own standards of acceptable discourse and are furious at their inability to do so (6/5/2020 on Twitter)
Adam Serwer
When historians look back at that era, they sometimes describe those views as Orthodox, but that term is slanted. Literally, it means “right teaching,” and, of course, everyone believes that his or her particular views are correct. The main reason we call these opinions orthodox is that they were held by the Roman Church and the papacy, and over time, that church survived the political disasters that overwhelmed other once-great centers like Antioch and Alexandria. In the great debates over Christ’s nature, anti-Chalcedonians also called themselves Orthodox, and if matters had worked out differently, perhaps that faction would have won out. At least in their own minds, everyone is always “orthodox.” English bishop William Warburton explained the difference frankly: orthodoxy is my doxy; heterodoxy is another man’s doxy.
Philip Jenkins (Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years)
To the question ‘Would you envisage living with a Jewish partner?’, 8 per cent of the total questioned replied ‘No, I couldn’t envisage this for myself’, and Brenner notes that this response was given by 24 per cent of those of Maghrebian origin (a difference of 16 points). The figure for those individuals classified as ‘right-wing’ was 16 per cent (a difference of 8 points). If this does indeed confirm a more pronounced anti-Jewish prejudice among young people who class themselves as ‘right-wing’, for the question on the media the difference is less significant on the basis of our own ideological reading. Furthermore, the advantage here is more distinctly in favour of Brenner’s ethno-cultural hypothesis, which is not relativized by a high degree of equality on other questions (as above for the areas of politics and economics). This is why Brenner remarks that ‘the cleavage is most clearly marked by the question dealing with the personal sphere’, though we now have to correct this by making clear that only the personal sphere seems to mark such a ‘cleavage’, at least so far as validating his explanatory hypothesis is concerned. But the correction does not stop here. This would in fact mean forgetting that these figures do not offer any enlightenment at all as to the origin of this negative response on the part of young people of Maghrebian origin – at least, until we know how many of them would respond negatively to the broader question ‘Would you envisage living with anyone who is not Muslim (or not Maghrebian)?’ For it is only in so far as the percentage of young people of Maghrebian origin who would not envisage living with any non-Muslim (or non-Maghrebian) is clearly lower than the percentage of the same young people who would not envisage living with a Jewish person that the difference is significant. In other words, if 24 per cent of these same young people of Maghrebian origin would no more envisage living with any non-Maghrebian or non-Muslim, then the ‘cleavage’ would not be a sign of anti-Jewish prejudice, but simply the assertion of a Muslim or Maghrebian identity. Since this question was not asked, it is impossible to draw any conclusion.
Alain Badiou (Reflections On Anti-Semitism)
Who, in particular, is responsible for this decimation of our history? - The provincial ministries of education for preaching and practising parochial regionalism and for gutting their curricula of content. - The ministry of bureaucrats who have pressed the "whole child" approach and anti-élitist education. - The ethnic communities that have been conned by Canada's multiculturalism policy into demanding an offence-free education for all Canadian children, so that the idea that Canada has a past and a culture has been all but lost. - The boards of education that have responded to pressures for political correctness by denuding their curricula of serious knowledge and offering only trendy pap. - The media that has looked only for scandal and for a new approach to the past, so that fact becomes half truth and feeds only cynicism. - The university professors who have waged internecine wars to such an extent that they have virtually destroyed history, and especially Canadian history, as a serious discipline. - The university presses and the agencies that subsidize professors for publishing unreadable books on miniscule subjects. - The federal governments that have been afraid to reach over provincial governments and the school boards to give Canadians what they want and need: a sense that they live in a nation with a glorious past and a great future.
J.L. Granatstein (Who Killed Canadian History?)
Our founding fathers recognized self-evident truth for what it was, and because of this, they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. But with great Truth comes great responsibility, and our founding fathers were willing to die to preserve the natural laws of God and Nature. Indeed many of them made the supreme sacrifice for each and every one of us, and their blood cries out to us now from the ground they fought to free! Their blood cries out to every politically correct, brain-dead American who takes his freedom for granted, and who passively accepts without question the anti-American sentiment so prevalent in our society. Their blood cries out to us in outrage! ‘Did I die in vain! I gave my life, my fortune, my sacred honor so that you and your family could be free!
Skip Coryell (We Hold These Truths)
All things considered, it is difficult to see Julius Evola as any kind of fascist at all. … Evola never was any kind of fascist. He was neither a ‘cryptofascist,’ a ‘parafascist,’ a ‘superfascist,’ nor a ‘neofascist.’ He was and always remained an occultist, a pagan ‘magus’. … The fact is that because fascism is considered so reprehensible, Anglo-American academics do not feel themselves obliged to treat the subject with any professional detachment. Cavalier and irresponsible claims can and have been made. … Since Fascism is almost universally held to be an unmitigated evil, no one really expects to be held accountable for their treatment of its ideas. The results are apparent. Very few academics would tolerate similar treatment of Marxist, or Marxist-Leninist, ideas. The consequence is that, more often than not, we are treated to a caricature of Fascist thought. Few academics bother to read the primary literature. That is held to be an unconscionable waste of time, since everyone knows, intuitively, that Fascists never entertained any real ideas. It is a common judgment among many that Marx, Lenin, Mao Zedong, and Fidel Castro had real ideas, but Fascists never did. As a result, we have no idea what to expect of the thought of ‘neofascists.’ As we have suggested, some see ‘neofascism’ in the political thought of Reagan Republicans, tax protesters, soccer thugs, skinheads, graveyard vandals, militia members, antisocialists, anti-egalitarians, and anyone who refuses to conform to the strictures of ‘political correctness.’ The results have been intellectually embarrassing. The nonfascist thought of an occultist such as Evola is conceived fascist, while ideas having unmistakable fascist properties often fail to be so considered. This is nowhere more evident than in the treatment of patterns of thought that are somehow insulated from criticism. In the United States, an abundance of revolutionary political thought is just so insulated. Black protest thought is hardly ever considered in a comparative context. More often than not, it is treated as though it were sui generis, a unique product reflecting incomparable experience. Actually, more fascism is to be found in black protest literature than in all the works of Julius Evola —and yet, one is at a loss to find any of it, or any mention of it, in the anthologies of neofascist reflection
Neema Parvini (The Prophets of Doom)
At the end of an interview for her first post-PhD job Tessa abandons the politically correct answers and says, "The doctrine of equity sounds good--and maybe the hearts of some of those who profess it are in the right place. But in reality, it's immoral, unfair, harmful to academic standards, and deeply paternalistic. So in response to your question, Dr. Franco, I do not promote equity in the classroom. I promote education instead.
S. Stiles (The Adamant I: An Anti-University University Novel)
If you want a picture of the future; imagine a skinny man who belongs to a race with the lowest birthrates in human history fucking the latest model 300 robot pussy whilst a TV blares in the background announcing a 2% increase to white privilege tax, all the while the man is careful not to utter any misogynistic words like 'bitch' or 'whore' to his robot companion as he gets close to orgasm; lest he gets reported by said robots anti-hate speech monitoring software in doing so receiving a fine and not being allowed access to the robots simulated snatch for 30 days.
The Britiannic Scribian
In 2012, psychologists Richard West, Russell Meserve, and Keith Stanovich tested the blind-spot bias—an irrationality where people are better at recognizing biased reasoning in others but are blind to bias in themselves. Overall, their work supported, across a variety of cognitive biases, that, yes, we all have a blind spot about recognizing our biases. The surprise is that blind-spot bias is greater the smarter you are. The researchers tested subjects for seven cognitive biases and found that cognitive ability did not attenuate the blind spot. “Furthermore, people who were aware of their own biases were not better able to overcome them.” In fact, in six of the seven biases tested, “more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.” (Emphasis added.) They have since replicated this result. Dan Kahan’s work on motivated reasoning also indicates that smart people are not better equipped to combat bias—and may even be more susceptible. He and several colleagues looked at whether conclusions from objective data were driven by subjective pre-existing beliefs on a topic. When subjects were asked to analyze complex data on an experimental skin treatment (a “neutral” topic), their ability to interpret the data and reach a conclusion depended, as expected, on their numeracy (mathematical aptitude) rather than their opinions on skin cream (since they really had no opinions on the topic). More numerate subjects did a better job at figuring out whether the data showed that the skin treatment increased or decreased the incidence of rashes. (The data were made up, and for half the subjects, the results were reversed, so the correct or incorrect answer depended on using the data, not the actual effectiveness of a particular skin treatment.) When the researchers kept the data the same but substituted “concealed-weapons bans” for “skin treatment” and “crime” for “rashes,” now the subjects’ opinions on those topics drove how subjects analyzed the exact same data. Subjects who identified as “Democrat” or “liberal” interpreted the data in a way supporting their political belief (gun control reduces crime). The “Republican” or “conservative” subjects interpreted the same data to support their opposing belief (gun control increases crime). That generally fits what we understand about motivated reasoning. The surprise, though, was Kahan’s finding about subjects with differing math skills and the same political beliefs. He discovered that the more numerate people (whether pro- or anti-gun) made more mistakes interpreting the data on the emotionally charged topic than the less numerate subjects sharing those same beliefs. “This pattern of polarization . . . does not abate among high-Numeracy subjects. Indeed, it increases.” (Emphasis in original.) It turns out the better you are with numbers, the better you are at spinning those numbers to conform to and support your beliefs.
Annie Duke (Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts)
The Gates’ charity implies the formula: respect all cultures, your own and others. The Rightist nationalist formula is: respect your own culture and despise others which are inferior to it. The Politically Correct formula is: respect other cultures, but despise your own which is racist and colonialist (that’s why Politically Correct woke culture is always anti-Eurocentric). The correct Leftist stance is: bring out the hidden antagonisms of your own culture, link it to the antagonisms of other cultures, and then engage in a common struggle of those who fight here against the oppression and domination at work in our culture and those who do the same in other cultures.
Slavoj Žižek (Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed)
I thought it idiotic that people fighting for their lives should have separate parties; my attitude always was, ’Why can’t we drop all this political nonsense and get on with the war?’ This of course was the correct ’anti-Fascist’ attitude which had been carefully disseminated by the English newspapers, largely in order to prevent people from grasping the real nature of the struggle.
George Orwell (Homage to Catalonia)
What we can be sure of is that the gun debate is a boon for politicians on both sides of the aisle. Whether they are pro- or anti-gun, politicians get to use this emotionally charged issue in their bids for office. And they need never fear that the issue will go away because data suggest that the solution they debate – restricting access to guns – has no effect one way or the other. The short, but real lesson here is that even when we commit to using the powerful tool of coercion, even when we are convinced its use is utterly warranted, we might not get anything resembling the results we intended. Coercion is not a magic wand, it is simply a tool. If there is actually no effect one way or the other, as the data indicate here, the only effect coercion achieves is to limit people’s freedom. Where gun violence is concerned, coercion is simply not the correct tool for the job, and emotive posturing will never change that.
Antony Davies (Cooperation and Coercion: How Busybodies Became Busybullies and What that Means for Economics and Politics)
Yet the Woke messaging keeps flying. Speaking in New York’s Washington Square on September 18, 2019, Senator Warren let fire this zinger. “We’re not here today because of famous arches or famous men. In fact, we’re not here because of men at all.”20 But if Warren ever arrives in the White House, it will be because of men—not all of them, obviously, but sufficient numbers of them. And the lesson of the Trump presidency is that insulting voters loses their votes. Those who aspire to conjure up a counter-Trump movement of militant progressive forces imagine that American demographics have tilted to the point that a politics of (in their view) righteous grievance can outvote the (in their view) wrongful grievance that Trump has summoned up. They are kidding themselves about their math, but even if they were correct, what kind of answer would that be? Trump is president not only because many of your fellow citizens are racists, or sexists, or bigots of some other description, although surely some are. Trump is president also because many of your fellow citizens feel that accusations of bigotry are deployed casually and carelessly, even opportunistically. Anti-racism can easily devolve from a call to equal justice for all into a demand for power and privilege. We speak, you listen. We demand, you comply. We win, you lose.
David Frum (Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy)