Or, Things That Will Not Be Tolerated On Twitter.  

The thing in question this time is a cartoon, an illustration of an idea. It was shared, briefly, yesterday by biologist and Quillette contributor Colin Wright, and was promptly censored by Twitter’s moderators. Mr Wright has apparently been suspended from said platform until a confession of hateful wrongdoing – as yet unspecified hateful wrongdoing – has been extracted. Given the cartoon’s scandalous properties, I’ll reproduce it below the fold. Do feel free to grip the arms of your chair.

Come, let us dip a toe in the world of woke theatre criticism. From the pages of Intermission magazine, where the Toronto Star’s theatre critics, Aisling Murphy and Karen Fricker, applaud each other, and thereby themselves, for seeing an indigenous play and submitting to conditions on what they may say about it:

We both responded really positively to the show. But the reason we’re not writing a traditional review is because [playwright and director] Kim Harvey did not invite reviews of this Toronto premiere production of Kamloopa. This follows on from the world premiere production in 2018 in Vancouver in which she invited Indigenous women to write love letters to the show but did not invite traditional reviews.

You see, for Ms Harvey, our unflinching and very indigenous creative person, “staging theatre productions is a form of Indigenous ceremony,” and is therefore, conveniently, exempt from customary feedback, i.e., reviews of a kind that paying customers might have found useful, had they been available. And so, reviewers of pallor, should they be permitted, must first attend a circle, in which they will be told, in advance, how artful and profound the work in question is, and what they should say about it. After all, it’s so much easier on the ego, and any teetering vanity, if no acknowledgement of any shortcoming is permitted.

Despite not being brown and magical beings themselves, Ms Murphy and Ms Fricker are keen to show their approval of, and deference to, this artistic innovation:

Here, white critics were invited, but with the caveat of listening and bearing witness to Kim’s artistic philosophies first: to me, that felt not only fair but really rich.

Bearing witness, you say. To artistic philosophies. Because you can’t just turn up with tickets in the hope of entertainment.

In diverse-identity news,

Ex-soldier exposed her penis and used wheelie bin as sex toy in public.

If you detect dissonance in the headline, you’re a very bad person, obviously.

Chloe Thompson, 42, was caught rubbing herself on a public wheelie bin before using a sex toy on herself in an alley in Middlesbrough, Teesside, on August 13 last year. A couple shouted at her and she ran away. On the same day, she exposed herself on the street where she lives and thrust her hips into a fence. A witness said Thompson looked at her and the group she was with “as if Thompson wanted them to notice her.” Once she was inside her house, she exposed her bum and thrust against her window.

And remember to steer clear of the words mental health issues. These are merely “challenges,” according to Judge Stephen Carroll.

Update:

In the comments, Mags highlights the woke dishonesties in the quoted paragraph:

Chloe Thompson, 42, was caught rubbing herself himself on a public wheelie bin before using a sex toy on herself himself in an alley in Middlesbrough, Teesside, on August 13 last year. A couple shouted at her him and she he ran away. On the same day, she he exposed herself himself on the street where she he lives and thrust her his hips into a fence. A witness said Thompson looked at her and the group she was with “as if Thompson wanted them to notice her him.” Once she he was inside her his house, she he exposed her his bum and thrust against her his window.

FTFY

It is faintly surreal, even setting aside the novel use of a wheelie bin. And Thompson’s history of indecency and molesting children.

I can understand the reluctance to appear indelicate or to cause needless offence, and in some situations there may be scope for polite fudging. But pretending-as-default, or worse, pretending-as-law, can lead to unhappy farce and a kind of collective derangement. And the media presenting the reader with an obvious distortion of reality, and seemingly an expectation that we should all pretend too, is also rather offensive.

Also, open thread.

Ben Sixsmith on the blurring of identity and mental illness: 

Of course, it is good to understand the choices people make. But is it always necessary to respect those choices? Some people who have sought out castration claim to be much happier and calmer for it. Yet auto-castration is well-known to be a sign of chronic paranoid schizophrenia. One study in the Journal of Sexual Medicine suggested that in others, the desire to castrate themselves was correlated with “abuse sustained during childhood, including parental threats of castration” and “religious condemnation of sexuality,” among other things. Would anyone insist that there are not healthier means of dealing with such traumas?

Leor Sapir on transgender swimmer Lia Thomas – and when politeness becomes unhinged: 

The Human Rights Campaign warns that “contrasting transgender people with ‘real’ or ‘biological’ men and women is a false comparison” that “can contribute to the inaccurate perception that transgender people are being deceptive or less than equal, when, in fact, they are being authentic and courageous.” This is a strawman wrapped in a non sequitur. Critics of gender self-identification do not argue that people like Thomas are “being deceptive,” but rather that they are themselves deceived. HRC’s use of “authentic” here really means “sincere”: transgender women are being sincere, not deceptive, when they say they have a strong inner sense of being a woman. But that sincerity is irrelevant unless one first assumes that what makes a belief true is the fact that it is sincerely held, rather than its correspondence to objective reality.

Emil Kirkegaard on mental health and political leanings: 

Back in May 2020, I published a paper provocatively titled Mental Illness and the Left. It was based on the common observation (stereotype!) that conservatives seem less prone to mental illness… Since my study was published, replications have come out. The fact that this replicates is not at all surprising because the samples were very large, representative, and results not p-hacked and with tiny p values. Here’s an overview of recent replications…

Statistical chomping ensues. And I’ll leave these items here for no reason whatsoever.

Razib Khan reviews Charles Murray’s Facing Reality: 

Comfortable white people—“nice white parents” in affluent neighbourhoods who support efforts to “defund the police”—can refuse to look into the data or insist that those data are the product of racist systems and structures. They can “interrogate their privilege” and “confront their white supremacy,” or better yet, demand that others do so. But they won’t be any closer to understanding why poor African Americans and Latinos in inner-city neighbourhoods want more police officers in their neighbourhoods and not fewer, nor why poor African American parents clamour for access to strict charter schools that activists condemn for being “anti-black.” Principled ignorance might be a costless gesture for affluent progressives, but they’re heaping additional injustice onto the backs of those who can least afford the wages of social signalling.

Ben Sixsmith on when paedophilia was avant-garde: 

The German Green party was especially notable for its enablement of child abuse. As the Times of London reported in 2015, “a paedophile network was active in the Berlin branch of the Green party until the mid-1990s, with potentially hundreds of victims.” Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a leading student activist in the 1968 unrest and a prominent member of the Greens, wrote fantasies about sexual contact with children which he later awkwardly described as “irresponsible” and “a type of manifesto against the bourgeois society.” Cohn-Bendit was not, as you might assume, a hair-brained student when he wrote that filth, but 30 years old. Perhaps the bourgeois society had something — at least something — to be said for it.

Hans Bader on woke bigotry and a dishonest news media: