Bill Maher For President - 2028

[ZiprHead]

Hey, let's not leave out jinns.

 

[Swammerdami]

I love websites that agree with my thinking!

Here's a link to another article at unherd.com, along with its first three paragraphs:
unherd.com/2019/09/how-identity-politics-drove-the-world-mad/?=refinnar
(Anybody know what the "?=refinnar" is for? Should I strip such options off when posting a link?)

We thrive on disagreement, but only if we do not also feel threatened by it. In every period of history, therefore, there have been opinions and customs that are dangerous to question, since they provide the firm foundations on which our disagreements rest. Whether religious or political, these established ways of thinking and acting have been protected by law, and embedded in the educational curriculum and the daily customs of the people.

But our situation in Western democracies today is a novel one. There is no shared religion, and the old customs have been torn asunder by a culture of repudiation, which encourages people to shape their lives according to an “identity” of their own. Socialisation no longer means joining or obeying, but “becoming who you are”, regardless of the surrounding norms. This novel situation, which advertises itself as a kind of liberation, has instead produced in my lifetime a totally new kind of censorship and intimidation.

Thirty years ago I naively assumed that, with the collapse of communism, we would no longer see the persecution of dissidents or the imposition of official doctrines, and so I have been as astonished as everyone else by the mass denunciations and targeted character assassinations that enforce prevailing orthodoxies today. They seem as frequent and comprehensive here in Britain as they ever were in the world of totalitarian government.

I was curious how I stumbled on unherd.com in the first place, and went browsing through my Firefox history. Although most of my message-board browsing is right here at IIDB, there are a few other boards I browse; I came to unherd.com via this post on another message-board:

As a hard left Jew this is what I'm hearing in hard left Jewish circles. And I genuinely don't know if I'm crazy and spending too much time in feedback loops, or if the people like the one in my link have a very real and very good point.

I do know that the way people have responded to the latest conflict fills me with a genuine existential dread. I know that in Brooklyn yesterday a prominent Jew had her home vandalized with pro Palestinian garbage, and she has been vocally critical of Israel.

I have had some of my family members in Israel go no contact with me for not being vocally pro Israel enough on social media. I have had left wing friends go no contact with me for being too pro Israel. Things sort of suck right now.