Wednesday 7 October 2015

The 'Disinvitation Game'

So, it happened again. Another invited guest speaker to a campus near you was 'disinvited' at the whim of an over sensitive kill-joy hidden somewhere in the seditious halls of a university this week, to the shock and awe of less people than the last time. It really is getting all too familiar.

Julie Bindel, an outspoken, some-say, inflammatory Feminist was 'no-platformed' from speaking at University of Manchester Student Union, due to her views on Transgenderism. The fact that a talk titled “From Liberation to Censorship: does Modern Feminism have a Problem with Free Speech?” could lead itself to quite a rich assortment of irony is not entirely lost on me.

What were these people thinking? Did they think they were the punchline to a bad joke?

But, to add insult to insult, the same unnamed group of malfeasant revolutionaries (I use that term loosely here) that blocked Julie have turned their cross-hairs to another speaker due to be at the same event: Milo Yiannopoulos.




This would not have been surprising had he been the first head to roll, given his right-of-centre politics, irreverent humour and all around dissonance with the Social Justice movement. But, trying to guess the actions of a mind-set that sees things to dissect and pathologise in the most mundane of things would give you very uneasy odds that Julie Bindel would come in first in that particular race. I don't bet, but, don't bet on which turn these people will take next. They eat their own. And they eat indiscriminate of  political ideology, so it seems.

It's astonishing that the 'Free Speech Movement', born on a Berkeley, California campus in the 60's, that included cross-partisan support (Rep/Dem) pushing for civil rights and an extension of our right to vocalise criticisms towards social and political establishments of the day, is now being spiritually and literally cast aside in the name of so-called 'Progressivism'.

The political 'Left' won the culture wars in the 20th Century through student activist sacrifice, on campuses just like Manchester's, via the application of 'Free Speech'. The 'student movement' was built upon the foundation of being able to 'speak truth to power' FFS.

So it grates me hard to see now, campuses everywhere in the English speaking world, especially, are eroding this liberty at the edges to silence 'wrong think', to destroy debate and to coddle themselves in the warm blankets of an elitist echo chamber. Fuck this shit! I stand with Julie, Milo, Bahar Mustafa and anyone else who is given the 'Disinvitation' treatment or out-right censored, just to preserve the obscure vanities of a small group of child-like, pampered little babies.

How is it fair that a screeching minority get to dictate the buffet options at the market place of ideas with mere nit-picking and pedantic umbrage taking? How is it okay that lives are re-arranged into fantasies dreamed up between the wet-ears of coward-like invertebrates on Social Studies degrees?

Social Justice Warriors have learned that the squeaky wheel gets the oil. That's how. And in the age of outrage, the currency for gaining favour is to uncover every rock, stone or debris for any last remaining remnants of gold the civil rights movement of the 60's may have left behind.

A generation without a war, if ever there was one.

Here is a link to an online petition to reinstate Milo Yiannopoulos which is also a hyperlink to Julie Bindel's one too.

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