Tag Archives: Political Correctness

Safe Spaces Aren’t Just for SJWs

Culture, Democrats, Dumbasses and Authoritarians, Election '16, Media, Political Correctness, Politics, Republicans, Theory and Ideas

spAs much as I despise Donald Trump, on some level I understand why he has die hard supporters. The most popular reason for this phenomenon is he seems to be the answer to the political correctness of our time. Trump may be many, many, horrible things, but being politically correct isn’t one of them.

Indeed, political correctness is a significant problem in our culture. Participation trophies, zero tolerance, and the very Orwellian PC language in which the Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) insist we use in our public discourse are doing great harm to the Millennials. The concept of ‘safe spaces’ on college campuses wraps all of the above (and more) in one tidy bow which infantilizes young adults. Not too long ago, college campuses were once considered the place to debate and explore controversial ideas, now have spaces to protect the precious Millennial snowflakes from debate and controversial ideas.

Yes, the SJWs certainly do suck. I’m sure that SJWs who read the above two paragraphs are angry I didn’t include a trigger warning before challenging their world view but here’s the thing: it’s not just SJWs who retreat into safe spaces nor just the generation raised in this very PC culture. As it turns out, some of the very people who are most critical of political correctness, Millennials, and safe spaces don’t want their worldviews challenged either!

I can’t speak for anyone else’s social media feed other than my own but I have seen people leave controversial comments followed by something to the effect of ‘I’m not going to debate this, if you post something that disagrees with me on my wall it will be deleted.’ Or s/he will simply delete the post without explanation (I’ve seen this behavior from conservatives and progressives alike).

Of course, having different opinions and refusing to debate opinions is one thing; being upset that someone shares an inconvenient fact completely destroying the basis of an opinion is another. Around Memorial Day Weekend, someone posted on my FaceBook wall about how awful it was that President Obama went to Hiroshima, Japan on Memorial Day instead of the traditional laying the wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. There was just one problem with this person’s complaint: it wasn’t true. All it took to see if this person had a legitimate beef with Obama was a five second Google search (in the age of information, ignorance is a choice). In fact Obama visited Hiroshima on Friday, May 27, 2016 and visited the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on Monday, May 30, 2016 (AKA Memorial Day).

In response to my posting readily available news articles reporting that Obama attended both of these ceremonies, I received a private message asking me: ‘Why are you always defending Obama?’ I don’t remember my exact response but it would have went something like ‘I’m not always defending Obama but the truth matters.’

The same sort of thing happened when someone blamed Obama for pulling the troops out of Iraq too soon and I dutifully pointed out that Obama was carrying out the troop withdrawal signed by President Bush.

These were just two examples off the top of my head; there are certainly other examples I could have used. As we are getting mercifully closer to the end of the 2016 campaign, conservatives, progressives, and yes, even some libertarians are retreating to their safe spaces refusing to be challenged at all.

The worst offenders IMO are the Trump supporters who are oh so critical of safe spaces on college campuses and Trump himself. The Trumpster divers tell us that all of Bill Clinton’s sexual assault accusers are to be believed while Trump’s accusers are all liars. Why did they all wait to come forward until a month before election day? Surely, they are all either opportunists and/or working directly for Hillary!

This is entirely possible. It’s possible that some if not all of them are lying. It’s also possible that because the world has now been exposed to Trump being Trump, these women now feel like the public will listen when prior to the leak the public otherwise would not.

Then there’s the issue of Trump’s poll numbers. As I look at my FaceBook feed, I see several Trump supporters posting articles from Trump friendly sites claiming that Trump is polling at 67% to Hillary’s 19%. In contrast, Real Clear Politics, averaging the leading scientific polls show Hillary leading Trump 44.7% to 39.4%.

Of course in terms of the election itself, it’s the electoral college map that matters not the popular vote. How are the candidates fairing on the electoral map? The Real Clear Politics Map is showing 262 electoral votes for Clinton, 164 for Trump, and another 112 are considered toss ups. The candidate who receives a minimum of 270 electoral votes becomes the next POTUS. By my math, that means that HRC is within 8 electoral votes of the magic number in this projection. This doesn’t provide much room for error for Mr. Trump. In order for Trump to win based on the above, he would have to win just about every one of the toss up states and not lose a single state projected to be in his column. If he wins all of the toss up states except for Florida, Trump still loses.

Clearly, either Real Clear Politics with its scientific polling or Trump biased Arizona Freedom Alliance will be proven wrong on Election Day, safe spaces be damned. One would think that but with Trump openly saying he won’t necessarily accept the election results (whatever that means!), he and his supporters will remain in their safe spaces for a bit longer.

It’s not too difficult to see how damaging the safe space phenomenon will be to our culture. Verifiable facts are ignored while rumors and provable falsehoods are considered truth when it aligns with an agenda.

As a people, we need to realize that being skeptical isn’t a bad thing. We must be careful of confirmation bias. We should read articles we disagree with and have friends we can argue important issues with (and remain friends at the end of the day).

And if you want to take a short break in your safe space (we all do, don’t kid yourself), then do so. Just don’t make it your permanent address. One can deny reality but cannot escape its consequences.

Stephen Littau
http://fpffressminds.blogspot.com/
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Nicholas Kristof Betrays Liberalism

General

In a recent column, Nicholas Kristof criticized strongly Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the unbelievably brave Somali intellectual who has dedicated her career to pursuit of an Enlightenment in the Islamic world. Kristof apparently sees Ali as fomenting bigotry towards Muslims, casting aside the very legitimate and pressing criticism of the fastest growing religion that Ali posits.

Kristof has shown himself before to be more dedicated to political correctness than pointing out evil in the world. He may be more consistent in his P.C. attitude than the average liberal, as evidenced by an article from May called “More to Catholic Church than Vatican’s old boys club.” In it, he puts in full effort to be touchy-feely and offend absolutely no one:

Yet if the top of the church has strayed from its roots, much of its base is still deeply inspiring. I came here to impoverished southern Sudan to write about Sudanese problems, not the Catholic Church’s. Yet, once again, I am awed that so many of the selfless people serving the world’s neediest are lowly nuns and priests — notable not for the grandeur of their vestments, but for the grandness of their compassion.

As I’ve noted before, there seem to be two Catholic Churches, the old boys’ club of the Vatican and the grass-roots network of humble priests, nuns and laity in places like Sudan. The Vatican certainly supports many charitable efforts, and some bishops and cardinals are exemplary, but overwhelmingly it’s at the grass roots that I find the great soul of the Catholic Church.

Reading that, I’m left thinking of the open-ended question, left largely unanswered, by Christopher Hitchens about religion – What act of philanthropy has been made by a religious organization that couldn’t have been done by a secular organization? If both the Catholic Church and Islam are corrupt and oppressive at their very core, which there seems to be quite a bit of evidence for, the fact that many very wonderful people identify with those religions is fairly meaningless, especially considering that religions are more often part of someone’s heritage and not something they sought out independently.

In his review of Ali’s book Nomad, Kristof accuses Ali of “religious bigotry” that leaves him “uncomfortable and exasperated.” Bigotry is certainly something I am not a fan of, but a quick definition of bigotry from Wikipedia shows a bigot to be “person obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices.” Seeing as Ali spent much of her life as a Muslim, escaped from an arranged marriage and cannot speak with any of her family members without having them clamoring for her to return to Islam, it is the height of confusion to label Ali a bigot and then call for some sort of enlightened condescension to a religion whose holy book provides chunks of feminist wisdom such as “I looked into Paradise and I saw that the majority of its people were the poor. And I looked into Hell and I saw that the majority of its people are women.”

In his criticism of Ali, Kristof disgustingly says “she never quite outgrew her rebellious teenager phase.” This is beyond reprehensible. To be a rebellious teenager in an environment of religious orthodoxy takes a courage that Kristof appears to be a stranger to. Kristof is a well traveled man, certainly more than myself, but seems to have a naivety about the close-minded nature of the extremely religiously dedicated (and, being a faith that requires you to pray five times a day, travel from any destination in the world to Mecca in order for pilgrimage and potentially give up your life, Islam makes Christianity look like a part time gig).

Kristof either never really looked inquisitively into Islam or is in denial. I once dated a beautiful woman from Saudi Arabia. Though she no longer wore the hijab, the mystic parochialism of her home country still haunted her. She had been sexually terrorized in her past and still carried with her a depth of depression over not being able to be with a past lover who had been a member of a different clan. (She said quite frankly of her experience, “our culture sucked.”) Though we spent a lot of time together, she would make efforts not to be seen with me in areas where there were a good deal of Muslims (though there are many white Muslims, it would be really hard to claim me as anything but kafir).

While it is disappointing that the rigidness of political correctness has caused Kristof to suspend reality, there are heartening laments from other liberals in the media. Bill Maher has been very welcoming to Ali, calling her a “hero” and was unrelenting in the absolutely ridiculous response by radical Muslims to an episode of South Park portraying the Prophet Mohammed in a bear suit.

Liberals would be wise to realize that Islam being a religion primarily of third world people of color doesn’t endow it with some nobility not afforded the Christian faith of midwestern and southern white Americans. This soft racism may sound a whole lot better than the hard racism that still pops up in all cultures, but in the long run is just as destructive and a threat toward liberalism.

TomStrong
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