The luvvy left set just love to congratulate themselves for their “dangerous ideas”. They even have a “festival” for it: you know, those tiresome wine-and-cheese beanos where bien pensant lefties trouser five-figure “appearance fees” just to tell a marquee full of bien pensant lefties exactly what they all already agree with each other about.
The left don’t want “dangerous ideas”, and they certainly don’t want open debate. In fact, they’re terrified of debate, because just five minutes of open debate would destroy every one of their most dearly-held orthodoxies.
Here’s my shortlist of the five most ring-fenced issues this year, which means they are most in need of being tested, explored, contested.
Sadly, the trans issue tops the list. It’s built on the flawed and dangerous foundation that showing respect for trans people must preclude being concerned about medical treatments involving kids or caring about a woman’s right to her biology[…]
Last week, the American Booksellers Association apologised for a “terrible”, “serious” and “violent incident”. Steady yourself. The ABA sent its members Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage: the Transgender Craze Seducing Our Teens.
Yet, at the same time, unrestrained transgender madness is leading to soaring numbers of teenage girls — as young as 13 — having their breasts cut off. Now that sounds terrible, serious and violent to me — but we’re not allowed to talk about that.
Black Lives Matters ranks second as an issue that is not open for business in the marketplace of ideas.
Jim Goad wrote, very early on, that “the entire Black Lives Matter phenomenon is moored in lies and rampaging innumeracy”. He was right then, he’s still 100% correct, now. Not one of BLM’s claims survives an instant’s contact with rigorous statistics.
Nuance, complexities and facts would dismantle the movement. Like the fact a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black man than an unarmed black man is to be killed by a police officer. Or the fact, according to The Washington Post’s 2019 database, police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites.
Rivalling pandemic porn as the greatest scam in modern history is climate change alarmism. Yes, climate change is real: and so what? It’s always been real — and a hard look at the scientific facts is enough to demolish the notion that it is an imminent threat of any great magnitude, let alone an “extinction” threat.
Those are just lies. But we’re not allowed to say that.
Climate change activists sit in third spot, especially with their new motherhood statement that the world must commit to zero net emissions by 2050. Without a debate about how to get there and how much it will cost, it’s a monumental policy fraud. Feels good and means nothing.
“Feels good and means nothing” — no wonder Jacinda Ardern is such a committed fan. That phrase sums up her entire political career.
No.4 on my list is sexual harassment. It has become the unassailable weapon to attack a person, an organisation, a political party.
Once an allegation is made, little interest is shown about the truth of the claim.
The infantile idea that we must “believe women”, no matter what, has not only sent many innocent men to jail, it’s dangerously weakened legal safeguards. Operating under the assumption that women never lie about rape (oh, boy, they do!), laws have been watered down to allow less and less rigorous scrutiny of accusers — an almost complete reversal of everything our legal system is supposed to stand for.
But we’re not allowed to say that.
The fifth issue that deserves more reason and less emotion is death. Or, more particularly, Covid deaths[…]Witness what happened when Virgin Australia’s chief executive said we needed to face the reality that Covid would be part of the community, people would get sick and people would die. It was an entirely rational observation. Instead of introducing a dose of reality, Scott Morrison shot down her claims. NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said “no death was acceptable”.
What emotional nonsense.
The Australian
The Chinese pandemic has unhinged people in a way that even climate change did not. Many, many more people died of the flu, in Australia, in 2017, than have died here of COVID. Do any of the pandemic panickers even remember? Did we shut down entire cities?
Or did we just put on our big-boy pants and get on with it, accepting that risk is part of living a free life?
But we’re not allowed to talk about that.
We’re not allowed to say anything the left-media elite don’t want us to.
And that’s the most dangerous thing I could imagine.
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