Cancel Culture Quotes

When someone else seeks to control what I see or hear, I have to assume they think they're superior and I'm too stupid to make up my own mind.

Disagreement is necessary in deliberations among mortals. As the saying goes, the more we disagree, the more chance there is that at least one of us is right.

When she gets rattled, the South really comes out. Once when Daddy tried to cancel our country club membership because he said the dues were too high, she went from zero to Atlanta burning in zero point five seconds.

I kind of hate Nick right now, too, but there's someone else higher on my list, someone I hate more than Saddam Hussein and any asshole named Bush combined, hate more than that fuckhead who canceled 'My So-Called Life' and left me with a too-small boxed DVD set that does not answer the questions whether Angela and Jordan Catalano did it, or if Patty and Graham got a divorce, or if there really was something to all that lesbian subtext between Rayanne and Sharon.

The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly. It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.

The accounts of rape, wife beating, forced childbearing, medical butchering, sex-motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and other commonplaces of female experi ence that are excavated from the past or given by contemporary survivors should leave the heart seared, the mind in anguish, the conscience in upheaval. But they do not. No matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or eloquence, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been whispered in wind or written in sand: they disappear, as if they were nothing. The tellers and the stories are ignored or ridiculed, threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt… the very reality of abuse sustained by women, despite its overwhelming pervasiveness and constancy, is negated. It is negated in the transactions of everyday life, and it is negated in the history books, left out, and it is negated by those who claim to care about suffering but are blind to this suffering. The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the existence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her suffering. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of women as significant beings. It is impossible to remember as real the suffering of someone who by definition has no legitimate claim to dignity or freedom, someone who is in fact viewed as some thing, an object or an absence. And if a woman, an individual woman multiplied by billions, does not believe in her own discrete existence and therefore cannot credit the authenticity of her own suffering, she is erased, canceled out, and the meaning of her life, whatever it is, whatever it might have been, is lost. This loss cannot be calculated or comprehended. It is vast and awful, and nothing will ever make up for it.

In his analysis of the sublime effect, Edmund Burke termed 'horror' the state of mind of a person whose participation in speech is threatened. The power which exceeds the capacity of interlocution resembles night.

It Isn’t Hate to Speak the Truth’ J.K. Rowling

Cancel culture’, as it’s become known, is one of the very worst things about modern society, and it’s driven by the same woke liberals who profess to stand for tolerance.

Cancel culture is a term bounced around by people afraid of accountability. But freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences.

The very term “cancel culture” is hopelessly non-useful, with its suggestion that the loss of status for the accused is somehow on a par with the suffering endured by the victim.

Instead of feeling any need to persuade, people who are certain they are correct can impose their beliefs by force. In theocracies and autocracies, authorities censor, imprison, exile or burn those with the wrong opinions. In democracies the force is less brutish, but people still find means to impose a belief rather than argue for it.

There are two ways to choke off free expression. We've already discussed one of them: clamp down on free speech and declare some topics off-limits. That strategy is straightforward enough. The other, more insidious way to limit free expression is to try to change the very language people use.

Suffering does amazing things to people, they become very different in a very short period of time, in many cases, they get a lot wiser an alot braver and become very much more worth listening to.

Diversity” has become a term of art, a symbol, one so powerful that the symbol is now more important than the thing it was supposed to represent. Wokeness sacrifices true diversity, diversity of thought, so that skin-deep symbols of diversity like race and gender can thrive.

A government powerful enough to control your physician or your hospital has proven it can limit your treatment choices to your detriment.

Sometimes people decide not to like me for the most arbitrary reasons. Sometimes it's just because I'm famous, and successful people make them uncomfortable. Sometimes it's because I voted differently than them. And sometimes it's because I frowned outside their favorite yogurt shop and now they want to cancel me forever because they think I'm against yogurt.

Wise people will say Daniel should like me just as I am, but I am a child of Cosmopolitan culture, have been traumatized by supermodels and too many quizzes and know that neither my personality nor my body is up to it if left to its own devices. I can’t take the pressure. I am going to cancel and spend the evening eating doughnuts in a cardigan with egg on it.

So, a mistake is made, a word is spoken out of turn, a cultural norm is broken, and all is fair in the pursuit of cancelling this person, erasing them off the face of the earth, banishing them to a world of shame and regret.

Cancel Culture doesn't really exist. It's a myth created by people who have been used to saying whatever they want without being challenged and are now surprised when there are consequences to their words. Rowling is still a very rich bestselling author with a massive platform. (7/8/2020 on Twitter)

Advocates of identity politics argue that all hate speech should be banned but then define hate speech as only applying to protected identity groups who are in turn free to say whatever they want about their purported oppressors. This leads to a 'cancel culture' that punishes those who violate the terms of identity politics.

Humans are antifragile; exposure to discomfort and uncertainty -physical, emotional and intellectual- is necessary.

Canceled checks will be to future historians and cultural anthropologists what the Dead Sea Scrolls and hieroglyphics are to us.

The cancel culture is a radicalized stance based on the insecurities of an agenda that is too weak to entertain anything other than its own indefensible platform.

Cancel culture is a real thing. Your digital footprint is your legacy, so think before you post.

People who are actually "cancelled" don't get their thoughts published and amplified in major outlets... . The term "cancel culture" comes from entitlement—as though the person complaining has the right to a large, captive audience, & one is a victim if people choose to tune them out. Odds are you're not actually cancelled, you're just being challenged, held accountable, or unliked. ― Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Aurora shuddered, her face white with anger. The only thing worse than having to compete for Gold Stars was not being allowed to compete anymore. Muting was the Neon God’s favourite punishment, for He loved to hijack human language, almost as much as He loved hijacking perfectly human societal norms. Judging people on their supposed worth was His favourite pastime, and God forbid you didn’t follow His arbitrarily-chosen set of beliefs, which appeared to change every hour. Under the Neon God’s law, innocent words such as “powerline” or “screwdriver” had become obscene, trigger words that would most definitely get you muted, thrown in a Mind Prison or killed.

They had both embraced, as had Musk, the banner of free speech in opposition to what they saw as a progressive wokeness that produced a censorious cancel culture, especially in the establishment media and elite educational institutions.

generation. They were the little pigs who built their houses of brick, whereas Gerry’s peers tended more to straw and wood. And, oh, how people loved to blow them down. Everybody huffs and puffs, intent on destruction. What do they call it now? Cancel culture.

People choose to solve the person, not to solve the problem, caused by the person. That is why cancel culture, doesn’t cancel wrong things ,but it cancels people. It is because themselves are doing the same things, for they see nothing wrong, but the person who did them ,being wrong.

Somehow each of the three bears figured out exactly what was comfortable for them. And yet despite the obvious differences, they did not try to impose their preferences on the rest of the family. And if we can take a lesson from that, maybe that would make our society a bit more bearable.

I turn books around and around in my hands like precious jewels ... staggered that someone compiled 600 pages of tiny handwritten words in an Antwerp turret in 1751. To me, its the ultimate achievement, and when I hear of the Cancel Vultures trying to rewrite the classics ... the room goes dark.

What a sad generation. In the olden days. We used to learn from our mistakes. These days you get canceled for your mistakes.

It’s an online coliseum now… we feel evolved, but we’re still throwing those we disagree with to the lions… Entertained with the social bloodshed we see.

To ‘cancel’ someone is a manifestation of our inability to defend our position, which is compounded by the fear that the one that we’re ‘cancelling’ can actually defend theirs.

Canceling’ a conversation never eliminates the opinion that you didn’t have the ability to refute.

In politics, the near future is likely to be closer to George Orwell’s 1984 than to Brave New World.

A particular lethal combo is when culture of victimization -we were wronged last week, last decade, last millennium- is coupled with a culture of honor's ethos of retribution.

For Du Bois, there was no such thing as an a priori wrong conclusion; there was only a conclusion proven wrong.

You’re your kid’s biggest role model, period. Whether you’re their best role model is entirely a function of how you behave.

Alt-right free-speech proponents have made me their cause célèbre. I and my pretty, Anglo-Saxon face have become the perfect victim of the left-wing fascist cancel-culture mob.

Canceling a differing opinion evidences the ability of that opinion to defend what you cannot.

This is not a debate about just anything', he said 'but about sanity itself'.

Everything woke, turns to shit.

Direct questions are the worst. Cops must know this--when someone asks you a question, it is really, really hard not to answer it. It's even harder when people dig up old tweets and put them side by side with new ones and you can't really explain the discrepancy. And then other people see the discrepancy and they start liking and retweeting and rephrasing. And they also see your silence, and your silence looks like an answer. It's an extremely effective interrogation tactic, and most people make either a tearful apology or an enraged counterattack. This is why Twitter callouts tend to end so badly. Apology is never enough (and probably shouldn't be), so you're basically being asked to willingly give up power for no clear end. The best people actually do that. But the real shitfucks go on the offense, and then their communities get an infusion of victimhood narratives straight into their veins.

A world where you cannot even speak to another person without worrying about what they are going to think of you, has not advanced much from the days when white people used to own slaves.

Appreciation for history is scarce today, public debate is only rarely lit by foundational principles, and there is a further reason why the needed discussion fails to get off the ground—especially in the speech code, cancel culture of many American and European universities. Debate is often ended by prejudice and a fashionable consensus that chokes it off from the start.

Winston Churchill reportedly quipped that “A lie travels around the globe while the truth is putting on its shoes.” That was before the internet. Today, the truth can’t even find its shoes.

The road to redemption is a treacherous one that the accused must walk through in darkness but if we don’t shine the light then there is no hope for anyone finding their way to the other side.

This highlights the massive difference between criticism and cancel culture. Criticism attacks ideas, cancel culture punishes people. Criticism enriches discussion, cancel culture shuts down discussion. Criticism helps lift up the best ideas, cancel culture protects the ideas of the culturally powerful. Criticism is a staple of liberalism, cancel culture is the epitome of illiberalism

Whenever I see he/him or she/her, I think fuck/you. You must be living an awfully precious life if, amid the pervasive despair of an economy in free fall, your uppermost concern is clinging to your pronouns.

What (miserably) gets called cancel culture is the contemporaneous act of telling someone that the thing they’re doing or saying is, to use Fry’s word, “nasty.” Cancel culture is, from this perspective, the most sensible thing in the world—rather than fantasizing about confronting someone in the past, practitioners of cancellation are confronting someone in the present. And such confrontations should be welcome, right?

Most of us who champion free speech also believe in the idea of etiquette and the social contract. We simply do not believe that such parameters should be legally enforced by censorship or compelled speech diktats.

Many in our culture have employed scare tactics simply because reason cannot support their agendas, therefore it is assumed that fear will press resistant individuals to accept those agendas since reason is not available to do so.

Woke and cancel culture are both signs of a judgmental culture, not a mentally mature one. A world where you cannot even speak to another person without worrying about what they are going to think of you, has not advanced much from the days when the white people used to own slaves. Let me tell you this, if you are kind, if you are compassionate, if you hold no discrimination towards people whatsoever, then you have no reason to worry about whether you are woke enough.

According to Flinders, all religious and spiritual traditions and specifically meditative practices—because they were built by men and for men—promote the following: self-silencing; self-naughting (destruction of the ego); resisting desire; and enclosure (turning inward, sealing off from the world). As a feminist, naming these four requirements of transcendence troubled her. “I realized that however ancient and universal these disciplines may be, they are not gender neutral at all. Formulated for the most part within monastic contexts, they cancel the basic freedoms—to say what one wants, go where one likes, enjoy whatever pleasures one can afford, and most of all, to be somebody—that have normally defined male privilege” (emphasis mine).

The kids of well-off parents, bored and dulled by easy pleasure, find that hit of dopamine every time they cancel a nobody or, better, a non-nobody on Twitter. It's entirely possible that the misery junkies fueling cancel culture are doing it because they have nothing else going on in their lives. And that "nothing else" could be beyond their control-- consequences of a society that paradoxically offers dwindling opportunities for fulfillment despite offering huge opportunities for distraction.

Show me an organization where people are afraid to speak up, afraid to challenge dominant ideas lest they be destroyed socially, and I’ll show you an organization that has become structurally stupid, unmoored from reality, and unable to achieve its mission.

In developed countries, we have less to fear from infectious parasites, but much more to fear from infectious memes. So, instead of opening our bodies to ambient germs, we open our minds to ambient culture, to determine if we can stay sane throughout the onslaught.

The cultural anthropologists or literary scholars who avow that the truths of science are merely the narratives of one culture will still have their child's infection treated with antibiotics prescribed by a physician rather than a healing song performed by a shaman.

The highly open expose themselves to new experiences, cultures, people, relationships, norms, ideas, worldviews, art, music, sexual practices, and drugs. They can get infected by nasty, maladaptive memes; they might end up believing in astrology, homeopathy, or Scientology.

The worst part of this obscenity, this shameless visibility, is the forced participation, this automatic complicity of the spectator who has been blackmailed into participating. And it is this which is the clearest objective of the operation: the servitude of the victims, but a voluntary servitude, one in which the victims rejoice from the pain and shame which they are made to suffer. The complete participation of a society in its fundamental mechanism: interactive exclusion - it doesn’t get better than that! Decided all together and consumed with enthusiasm.

There will always be someone whose identity is wrapped up in being offended. They're constantly searching for it. These people are the woke mob devotees. Let them be. It's all perfect. Just don't let their tears stop the important discussions from happening. [...] Good people don't go out of their way to cause suffering, but they also don't avoid upsetting people at all costs. They speak their truth unapologetically. Discussing topics that might get you cancelled is incredibly important. Let them be offended. Do not let them silence you through fear of the repercussions.

At its worst, the woke cult of transgenders is a cross between voyeurism and morbidity, a fascination with the sexually bizarre, a politically correct version of snuff pornography. It’s at the “intersectionality” of the lassitudinous culture of the Hamptons and the depraved sexual ennui of Hollywood.

Even if we manage to get rid of Trump [...] the political left still needs a course correction. We need to stop devouring our own and canceling ourselves. We need fewer sensitivity readers and more empathy as a matter of course. We need to recognize that to deny people their complications and contradictions is to deny them their humanity.

If so, is it worth my potential loss of status for victims to be able to say what happened to them? My answer is, tentatively: yes. Even though loss of status can be pretty fucking awful. This trade-off is depressing and maybe even inhuman—but, to my mind, it’s the bargain that’s on the table right now. Some people endure shaming, deserved or undeserved, so that some other people can say what happened to them. Instead of accepting that bargain, we make up an insulting and increasingly dumb name—cancel culture—that invalidates half the equation: the half where people are able to say something is wrong. Perhaps this is the wrong bargain; probably it is. But it’s the reality we live in.

Social media is the supreme triumph of the commonplace, the undiluted voice of the commonplace, the perfect means of viral transmission of the commonplace. All excellence is tracked down and exterminated. The commonplace infects everything. It grows like weeds everywhere and strangles all beautiful, exceptional flowers. All tall poppies are all cut down.

That racism still exists is taken as evidence of the failure of the liberal project, but of course nobody has made the case that it has been eradicated. If a disease is cured but a few symptoms linger, one does not claim that the treatment was ineffective. Social liberalism is an ongoing process because it recognizes the imperfectability of human nature.

I can't say anything though. Even if it’s true I’d sound like a prick. Believe that. How can we even— Christ! That’s the problem with people living however they want. When anything goes, reason is no longer credible. You can’t point out trouble. If the truth is offered, and they don’t want it, they get to say the truth is a lie. Autonomy is now prioritized over understanding.

People choose not to care about right or wrong. They only care about who did what ? They choose to only call out people they don’t like, because when the same actions done by others. They don’t see anything wrong. To them is not about what happen, Is who made it happen. It is not the problem or offence committed. They are concerned about, but It is who made the problem or committed the offence that makes them to be concern. They are not condemning the behavior or wrong actions, but are condemning Individuals they don’t like. People choose to solve the person, not to solve the problem, caused by the person. That is why cancel culture, doesn’t cancel wrong things ,but it cancels people. It is because themselves are doing the same things, for they see nothing wrong, but the person who did them ,being wrong.

Since no one can know everything, and most people know almost nothing, rationality consists of outsourcing knowledge to institutions that specialize in creating and sharing it, primarily academia, public and private research units, and the press. That trust is a precious resource which should not be squandered. Though confidence in science has remained steady for decades, confidence in universities is sinking. A major reason for the mistrust is the universities’ suffocating left-wing monoculture, with its punishment of students and professors who question dogmas on gender, race, culture, genetics, colonialism, and sexual identity and orientation. Universities have turned themselves into laughingstocks for their assaults on common sense (as when a professor was recently suspended for mentioning the Chinese pause word ne ga because it reminded some students of the racial slur). On several occasions correspondents have asked me why they should trust the scientific consensus on climate change, since it comes out of institutions that brook no dissent. That is why universities have a responsibility to secure the credibility of science and scholarship by committing themselves to viewpoint diversity, free inquiry, critical thinking, and active open-mindedness.

In the working of this parallel and in the tracing of the archetypal machine through later Western history, I found that many obscure irrational manifestations in our own highly mechanized and supposedly rational culture became strangely clarified. For in both cases, immense gains in valuable knowledge and usable productivity were cancelled out by equally great increases in ostentatious waste, paranoid hostility, insensate destructiveness, hideous random extermination.

ordinary Americans can take steps toward recovering their country by overcoming fear. Stop being afraid of everyday interactions due to COVID. Return to a healthy social life. Go out with friends or enjoy time with your family. If you’re a religious person, renew your spiritual commitments by attending a local house of worship. Most importantly, be grateful that we still live in a free country where these rights are protected by our Constitution. Do these things while being mindful about your overall risk in all health issues.

Collective guilt, the damaging impact of cultural appropriation, our servility to amorphous power structures, the primacy of identity politics; all of these concepts and more are now uncritically accepted by many of those in positions of authority. When politicians use phrases such as 'white privilege' and 'systemic racism', for instance, they are deploying the language of Critical Race Theory without necessarily understanding the full implications of the ideas behind the buzzwords. They are the unsuspecting agents of applied postmodernism.

The god of the prosperity gospelists is a pathetic doormat, a genie. The god of the cutesy coffee mugs and Joel Osteen tweets is a milquetoast doofus like the guys in the Austen novels you hope the girls don’t end up with, holding their hats limply in hand and minding their manners to follow your lead like a butler—or the doormat he stands on. The god of the American Dream is Santa Claus. The god of the open theists is not sovereignly omniscient, declaring the end from the beginning, but just a really good guesser playing the odds. The god of our therapeutic culture is ourselves, we, the “forgivers” of ourselves, navel-haloed morons with “baggage” but not sin. None of these pathetic gods could provoke fear and trembling. But the God of the Scriptures is a consuming fire (Deut. 4:24). “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb. 10:31). He stirs up the oceans with the tip of his finger, and they sizzle rolling clouds of steam into the sky. He shoots lightning from his fists. This is the God who leads his children by a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire. This is the God who makes war, sends plagues, and sits enthroned in majesty and glory in his heavens, doing what he pleases. This is the God who, in the flesh, turned tables over in the temple as if he owned the place. This Lord God Jesus Christ was pushed to the edge of the cliff and declared, “This is not happening today,” and walked right back through the crowd like a boss. This Lord says, “No one takes my life; I give it willingly,” as if to say, “You couldn’t kill me unless I let you.” This Lord calms the storms, casts out demons, binds and looses, and has the authority to grant us the ability to do the same. The Devil is this God’s lapdog. And it is this God who has summoned us, apprehended us, saved us. It is this God who has come humbly, meekly, lowly, pouring out his blood in infinite conquest to set the captives free, cancel the record of debt against us, conquer sin and Satan, and swallow up death forever. Let us, then, advance the gospel of the kingdom out into the perimeter of our hearts and lives with affectionate meekness and humble submission. Let us repent of our nonchalance. Let us embrace the wonder of Christ.

It is “trickling down” to women of all social classes from elitist schools and universities because that is where women are getting too close to authority. There, it is emblematic of how hunger checkmates power in any woman’s life: Hundreds of thousands of well-educated young women, living and studying at the fulcrum of cultural influence, are causing no trouble. The anorexic woman student, like the anti-Semitic Jew and the self-hating black, fits in. She is politically castrate, with exactly enough energy to do her schoolwork, neatly and completely, and to run around the indoor track in eternal circles. She has no energy to get angry or get organized, to chase sex, to yell through a bullhorn, asking for money for night buses or for women’s studies programs or to know where all the women professors are. Administering a coed class half full of mentally anorexic women is an experience distinct from that of administering a class half full of healthy, confident young women. The woman in these women canceled out, it is closer to the administration of young men only, which was how things were comfortably managed before.

Simply to make the accusation is to prove it. To hear the allegation is to believe it. No motive for the perpetrator is necessary, no logic or rationale is required. Only a label is required. The label is the motive. The label is the evidence. The label is the logic. Why did Coleman Silk do this? Because he is an x, because he is a y, because he is both. First a racist and now a misogynist. It is too late in the century to call him a Communist, though that is the way it used to be done. A misogynistic act committed by a man who already proved himself capable of a vicious racist comment at the expense of a vulnerable student. That explains everything. That and the craziness.

The intolerance and cancel culture have spread to outright discrimination in hiring, promotion, grants, and publication of professors and graduate students who do not abide the ideology demanded by the campus revolutionaries. A March 1, 2021, study by Eric Kaufmann of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology found, among other things: “Over 4 in 10 US and Canadian academics would not hire a Trump supporter… ; only 1 in 10 academics support firing controversial professors, nonetheless, while most do not back cancellation, many are not opposed to it, remaining non-committal; right-leaning academics experience a high level of institutional authoritarianism and peer pressure; in the US, over a third of conservative academics and PhD students have been threatened with disciplinary action for their views, while 70% of conservative academics report a hostile departmental climate for their beliefs; in the social sciences and humanities, over 9 in 10 Trump-supporting academics… say they would not feel comfortable expressing their views to a colleague; more than half of North American and British conservative academics admit self-censoring in research and teaching; younger academics and PhD students, especially in the United States, are significantly more willing than older academics to support dismissing controversial scholars from their posts, indicating that the problem of progressive authoritarianism is likely to get worse in the coming years; [and] a hostile climate plays a part in deterring conservative graduate students from pursuing careers in academia….

We know how you all want us to cancel black people when they do something bad, but you keep making excuses for people you revere. People say, “can’t we just draw the line at rapists and murderers?” But for us history is rife with horrible men and then we’ve learned that we have to sing praises to those horrible men, and we see them on our money and their names on our schools and our bridges. So horrible man is not a disqualifier. Our lives are imbued with them. When they ask us about Michael Jackson (how can you sing those songs?) and R Kelly; it’s complicated. I will get rid of Michael Jackson when you get rid of Andrew Jackson. At least you can dance to Beat It. But our stories are so full of irredeemably horrible people that it’s something we can compartmentalize. Literally, if Bill Cosby was a priest, he wouldn’t be in prison.

The great weight shift must be understood as one of the major historical developments of the century, a direct solution to the dangers posed by the women’s movement and economic and reproductive freedom. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one. Researchers S. C. Wooley and O. W. Wooley confirmed what most women know too well—that concern with weight leads to “a virtual collapse of self-esteem and sense of effectiveness.” Researchers J. Polivy and C. P. Herman found that “prolonged And periodic caloric restriction” resulted in a distinctive personality whose traits are “passivity, anxiety and emotionality.” It is those traits, and not thinness for its own sake, that the dominant culture wants to create in the private sense of self of recently liberated women in order to cancel out the dangers of their liberation.

But, for now, the university wrote back that they hardly dared do my play—it had no women in it! And the ERA ladies on campus would descend with ball-bats if the drama department even tried! Grinding my bicuspids into powder, I suggested that would mean, from now on, no more productions of Boys in the Band (no women), or The Women (no men). Or, counting heads, male and female, a good lot of Shakespeare that would never be seen again, especially if you count lines and find that all the good stuff went to the males! I wrote back maybe they should do my play one week, and The Women the next. They probably thought I was joking, and I’m not sure that I wasn’t. For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangu­tan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversation­ist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics.

The events of the last forty years have inflicted such a blow to the self confidence of Western civilization and to the belief in progress which was so strong during the nineteenth century, that men tend to go too far in the opposite direction: in fact the modern world is experiencing the same kind of danger which was so fatal to the ancient world--the crisis of which Gilbert Murray writes in his Four Stages of Greek Religion as "The Loss of Nerve.” There have been signs of this in Western literature for a long time past, and it has already had a serious effect on Western culture an education. This is the typical tragedy of the intelligentsia as shown in nineteenth century Russia and often in twentieth century Germany: the case of a society or class devoting enormous efforts to higher education and to the formation of an intellectual elite and then finding that the final result of the system is to breed a spirit of pessimism and nihilism and revolt. There was something seriously wrong about an educational system which cancelled itself out in this way, which picked out the ablest minds in a society and subjected them to an intensive process of competitive development which ended in a revolutionary or cynical reaction against the society that produced it. But behind these defects of an over-cerebralized and over-competitive method of education, there is the deeper cause in the loss of the common spiritual background which unifies education with social life. For the liberal faith in progress which inspired the nineteenth century was itself a substitute for the simpler and more positive religious faith which was the vital bond of the Western community. If we wish to understand our past and the inheritance of Western culture, we have to go behind the nineteenth century development and study the old spiritual community of Western Christendom as an objective historical reality.

High modernism is numinous through and through, as the work of art provides one of the last outposts of enchantment in a spiritually degenerate world. Postmodernism, with its notorious absence of affect, is post-numinous. It is also in a sense post-aesthetic, since the aestheticisation of everyday life extends to the point where it undermines the very idea of a special phenomenon known as art. Stretched far enough, the category of the aesthetic cancels itself out.

Grace Canceled: How Outrage is Destroying Lives, Ending Debate, and Endangering Democracy by Dana Loesch 4/ 5 stars Great book! Book summary: “Popular talk radio host and political activist Dana Loesch confronts the Left's zero-tolerance, accept-no-apologies ethos with a powerful call for a return to core American principles of grace, redemption, justice, and empathy. Diving deep into recent cases where public and private figures were shamed, fired, or boycotted for social missteps, Loesch shows us how the politics of outrage is fueling the breakdown of the American community. How do we find common ground without compromising? Loesch urges readers to meet the face of fury with grace, highlighting inspiring examples like Congressman Dan Crenshaw's appearance on Saturday Night Live.” “Socialists’ two favorite rhetorical tools are envy and shame, and the platform they build on is identity politics. It’s culturally sanctioned prejudice… Identity politics is a tactic of statists, who foster resentment and envy and then peddle the lie that a bigger government can make everything FAIRER. These feelings justify the cruelty inherent in identity politics. Democrats’ favorite tactic is smearing as a ‘racist’ anyone who disagrees with them, challenges their opinion, or simply exists while thinking different thoughts.” -p. 20 “Democrats still need the socialists to maintain power, but it’s a dangerous trade. Going explicitly socialist would doom the Democrats to the dustbin of history. Instead, they’re refashioning the party: It believes wealth is evil, government is your church and savior, and independence is selfishness. Virtue is extinct- ‘virtue signaling’ has replaced actual virtue.” -p. 24 “The socialist definition of social justice ignores merit, neuters ambition, and diminishes the equity of labor. Equal rewards for unequal effort is unjust and fosters resentment.” - pp. 26-7 “The state purports to act on behalf of ‘the common good’. But who defines the common good? It has long been the justification for monstrous acts by totalitarian governments. ...In this way, the common good becomes an excuse for total state control. That was the excuse on which totalitarianism was built. You can achieve the common goal better if there is a total authority, and you must then limit the desires and wishfulness of individuals.” -p. 27 “Socialism is the enemy of charity because it outsources all compassion and altruism to the state. Out of sight, out of mind, they may think-- an overarching theme throughout socialism and communism (and one is just a stepping-stone to the other)... What need is there for personal ambition if government will provide, albeit meagerly, for all your needs from cradle to grave?” -pp. 32-3

But this is no longer a photograph and, liter-ally speaking, it is no longer even an image. These shots may be said, rather, to be part of the murder of the image. That murder is being perpetrated continually by all the images that accumulate in series, in 'thematic' sequences, which illustrate the same event ad nauseam, which think they are accumulating, but are, in fact, cancelling each other out, till they reach the zero degree of information. There is a violence done to the world in this way, but there is also a violence done to the image, to the sovereignty of images. Now, an image has to be sovereign; it has to have its own symbolic space. If they are living images- 'aesthetic' quality is not at issue here- they ensure the existence of that symbolic space by eliminating an infinite number of other spaces from it. There is a perpetual rivalry between (true) images. But it is exactly the opposite today with the digital, where the parade of images resembles the sequencing of the genome.

Socialists’ two favorite rhetorical tools are envy and shame, and the platform they build on is identity politics. It’s culturally sanctioned prejudice… Identity politics is a tactic of statists, who foster resentment and envy and then peddle the lie that a bigger government can make everything FAIRER. These feelings justify the cruelty inherent in identity politics. Democrats’ favorite tactic is smearing as a ‘racist’ anyone who disagrees with them, challenges their opinion, or simply exists while thinking different thoughts.” -p. 20

Incremental and anecdotal infection cases are irrelevant. Total numbers are irrelevant. Most of these are not even “cases” but just positive test results. Most will experience no symptoms or mild to moderate symptoms and recover quickly. Many international studies show that countries that use HCQ as an early treatment for COVID patients have an exponentially lower mortality rate. You’ll never hear that in the United States.

Divided by fear, citizens are easier to control.

Fry was at pains to stress that although his own sympathies leaned more left than right, both sides in this ferocious culture war were to blame. ‘Is that what is meant by the fine art of disagreement?’ he asked. ‘A plague on both their houses.’ And he concluded with this advice: ‘If someone is behaving like an arsehole, it isn’t cancelled out by you behaving like an arsehole. Be better. Not better than they are. But better than you are. The shouting, the kicking, the name calling, spitting hatred, the dogmatic distrust, all have to stop.

In our earthly world we debate the idea of prison reform and rehabilitation, yet the cyber world’s ‘cancel-culture’ leaves no room for such hopes.

Humanity is fallible and every single one of us is capable of sin but if it were not for the hopes of one day being redeemed none of us will seek to understand our flaws and make the effort to rectify the damage our actions have made.

The common antimalarial drug called hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) had been shown to be effective against the first SARS outbreak close to two decades ago.

The drug can be safely taken by pregnant women and nursing mothers, the young and the old.

It’s one thing for the public at large to blindly follow someone on television who seems to know

something. But to see physicians voluntarily surrender their medical judgment was positively surreal.

I tell my friends and family to avoid the emergency department (ED) at almost any cost. While the doctors, nurses, tech and administrative staff at EDs tend to be outstanding individuals, the healthcare system as a whole is so broken that it’s harmful.

It’s one thing for the public at large to blindly follow someone on television who seems to know something. But to see physicians voluntarily surrender their medical judgment was positively surreal.

That’s when the elite media, the medical establishment, their allies in the political world, and the social media mob launched their war against a humble malaria drug.

On March 20, a day after Trump mentioned the drug, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the powerful and media-savvy director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), answered “no” when asked if he thought HCQ had promise. “[T]he evidence you’re talking about … is anecdotal evidence,” he said.

Then came a sudden and nonsensical reversal. The CDC announced on April 7 that there were no approved drugs to treat COVID-19. “Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are under investigation in clinical trials” for use on coronavirus patients and “there are no drugs or other therapeutics approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to prevent or treat COVID-19,” the agency’s updated guidelines stated. It was downright bizarre to single out HCQ like this, I thought. I began to suspect some kind of behind-the-scenes decision had been made to sideline the drug.