Uncomfortable Arguments

A university professor in Canada tries to show his students what they do not want to see:
I got interested in ideology, in a large part, because I got interested in what happened in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Cultural Revolution in China, and equivalent occurrences in other places in the world. Mostly I concentrated on Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. I was particularly interested in what led people to commit atrocities in service of their belief.... One of the things that I’m trying to convince my students of is that if they had been in Germany in the 1930s, they would have been Nazis. Everyone thinks “Not me,” and that’s not right. It was mostly ordinary people who committed the atrocities that characterized Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Well, but people learn from history, right? Does he have any good examples of a similar ideology that is crushing freedom and that his students are rushing to embrace?

Yes, he does.
The university has told me that that every time I insist that I won’t use those [gender neutral] pronouns [like 'xe' and 'xir'], the probability that I’ll be teaching in January decreases.... My opponents say ‘you’re just scare-mongering. We don’t really have that much power.’ Then why change the criminal code? Why put the hate speech amendments in there? The final word in law is incarceration.

There is no question about this. When I made the video on September 27th, and I said, ‘probably making this video itself is illegal’. Not only that, the university is as responsible as I am for making it, because that’s in the human rights code. The university read the damned policies and had their lawyers scour it, and concluded exactly what I concluded. That’s why they sent me two warning letters.
No free speech, no free expression, no free association, and no earning a living if you deviate from the imposed speech codes. Your employer is on the hook for you, so they can't afford to employ you if you won't comply.

This is where they were trying to go here, too. McArdle was just talking about that.
“Sure, the government won’t actually shut your church down. But the left will use its positions of institutional power to try to hound anyone who attends that church from public life. You can believe whatever you want -- but if we catch you, or if we even catch you in proximity to people who believe it, we will threaten your livelihood.”

I’ve heard from a number of evangelicals who, despite their reservations about the man, ended up voting for Donald Trump because they fear that the left is out to build a world where it will not be possible to hold any prominent job while holding onto their church’s beliefs about sexuality. Discussions I’ve had in recent days with nice, well-meaning progressives suggest that this is not a paranoid fantasy.
Well, just look north.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Not just North

“I’ve just flown in from California, where they’ve made homosexuality legal. I thought I’d get out before they make it compulsory.” -Bob Hope

If you are wedding photographer, you better not say no to working a gay wedding.

If you are a cake maker, you better not say no to a making a gay cake.

Compulsion to violate individual conscious. This is new territory. Even during War, that insane time where ends justify the means, we've still honored conscientious objectors to some extent.

Suggests we must be in an existential war, because the rules of the spirit of war is in effect. Lie to confuse, hit soft targets, break the spirit of the enemy in the confusion. It's not even a bloodless war limited to words, just ask the aborted.

-Long Time Lurker Michael

douglas said...

Maybe you should comment more, Michael. Well said. I'd have to agree, as I've seen precious few signs of reconsideration or acceptance on their side, just shock and retrenchment.

Grim said...

Indeed, it makes us happy when our long-time lurkers join the conversation. People don't come here to see what I have to say. It's the conversation that makes it worthwhile.

Anonymous said...

Thank you for your kind words on something I wrote with some heat. I've lurked as you all cover the ground well and rarely do I see much that I can add to the conversation.

I would have to agree that the left is entrenching. Watching my more liberal facebook friends feeds, they aren't reconsidering their positions, but instead encouraging each other that they are of course right and that the science denying racists have dragged the country into evil times. When a voice arises stating the liberal ethos is incorrect, they double down on their position. Facebook doesn't appear to be a place of gentle persuasion.

In my mind, optimally, over the next 18 months, a political war needs to be waged to continue to drag us to a limited, law based, federal government. The economy needs to improve beyond the doubts of the undecideds, leaving the entrenched left with minimal fodder. The voter rolls have to be cleaned up to minimize fraud. Cleaning the voter rolls in "sanctuary cities" will have to be partly done be deporting illegals. These places will not clean up their own nest as they use the corruption of law for their own purposes.

This is dimmly what I see, but I'm not a man of war. I want peace and the blessings of God. They seemingly despise God and by that rejection, end up at war. God help us.

-Short time commentor Michael

Ymar Sakar said...

People don't come here to see what I have to say.

I do and have since the beginning.

Of course it is a war. But it is a war you don't believe in Grim, although when you object to its classification depends on the time stream.

The Leftist alliance has deployed at least 15% of their strategic reserves, so people should be asking where the rest of their war assets are and what it is doing. People should have asked what the ATF was doing after Waco 1 and 2. People should have asked what the IRS were doing before Hussein's 2012 stolen election.