Refreshing insightful discussion- Unwoke - Douglas Murray and Titania McGrath

I still want to give him a big hug but that’s probably no less annoying for him 😂

blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/11/holly-rigby-and-the-ignorance-of-the-corbynistas/

The Spectator has kindly offered me a free trial this weekend and I am making the most of it. Douglas Murray sounds very fed up with the invective he has been receiving. When will people realise insults are not debate.

Murray's book on immigration contains a couple of jaw dropping accounts of what some people have done to show "atonement" to certain countries. I'm sorry I can't recall precise details, but non-politicians arranging trips abroad to go through a sort of ceremony to apologise to people whose countries their ancestors upset 400 years ago.

though if anyone saw the Helena Bonham Carter thread yesterday, you'll know what I mean!

Reminds me of Mother Teresa being paraded about as a saint and an amazing person, when she actually didn't really want to relieve the pain and suffering of poor people, but did her best to glorify it instead.
Identity politics doesn't seem concerned with actually helping people who are marginalised or oppressed. They prefer perpetual suffering because it keeps the 'oppression matrix' going.

It's almost as if they want to see certain groups as being so oppressed, we will never ever be able to get out of it.

I've been told many times to "take advantage" of the fact that people are so obsessed with "diversity".

I hope these two can take on the endless form filling. I am amazed how many people think this is helpful. As it say, it winds up that I don't know if someone is being sarcastically racist to me, spectacularly stupid, or just hasn't thought at all and got taught some really unfortunate woke lessons.

And I do feel very sorry for the generations being told "no debate" even at school level.

This kind of identity essentialism undermines the idea of universal humanity

It always surprises me when I think of the decades of the Civil Rights movement striving to instill understanding that people are effectively the same and should be treated equally being supplanted easily with an ideology obsessed with identifying the differences between groups and putting in place hierarchies of rights.

This isn't the problem. It might be a problem but it's dwarfed by the real problem. The real problem is people who are not marginalised (in the lingo these would be called people who have privilege) weaponising identity politics to damage those who they perceive as the enemy, who can be anyone, privileged, marginalised, whatever.

Both of these things are part of why the whole concept is problematic though. There is no awareness that human nature, people who are privileged or oppressed or somewhere in between, will use any kind of hierarchical social structure to advantage. So where we have those structures they need to be balanced in a way that protects against that.

That's not to say it is always or usually easy to achieve that, arguably it's the ongoing and never-ending project of political history. But if you actually believe at the outset that some groups of people are too pure or good or powerless and so there is no need, I can guarantee that people will take advantage of that at some point.

This kind of identity essentialism undermines the idea of universal humanity and entrenches whatever differences of identity that are named and validated as vectors for power. It's inevitable they will function that way, and also tend to encourage the creation of more categories.

@DuMondeB

thank you, I will watch that.

I spoke out against "positive discrimination" and that time and got roasted. Did anyone see the play "Great Britain"? There's someone there who got his job to fill a quota about skin colour - something I say on here about myself which seems to upset people - and the character and the problem were very well portrayed. My writing group and my social group absolutely hated me for agreeing with that. I apologised to one man in the writing group because he was so upset at how funny I found that character.

I rarely go to writing groups now for many reasons but one is choking on the woke.

re the writing, I did pitch my novel to a couple of agents who were positive, but within writing groups I was asked why I was writing an English historical novel, with a clear implication that it's not my heritage because of my skin colour. It becomes impossible to tell if you're being trolled by a racist or if someone really believes they are "right" in their approach.

The one that really seems naive now is the idea that people from a marginalised background would never be in a position to take advantage of such laws and protections in a way that was detrimental to others.

This isn't the problem. It might be a problem but it's dwarfed by the real problem. The real problem is people who are not marginalised (in the lingo these would be called people who have privilege) weaponising identity politics to damage those who they perceive as the enemy, who can be anyone, privileged, marginalised, whatever. The knitting wars is a good example of this.

It's no coincidence that transgender erupts like this immediately after women have achieved considerable social and economic advances.

What man would bother if it meant you were stripped of your vote, rights, and work opportunities?

they have missed the obvious, that trans ideology mostly benefits white affluent men, and differs from any other identity politics, in that it was pushed from the beginning by some of the richest, most powerful people in the world

This ^

It's lumping everything in together. Inescapable reproductive and bodily differences, and the shit women have always suffered because of them, is nothing like the ideology of gender and the apparent oppression certain biological males are purporting to be suffering from.

My biology is not an identity.

I think it's more like a form of entryism than a backlash.

I find it embarassing that academia is not recognising this. Though obviously, there may be more than we think who do recognise it, but are scared of speaking up.

I'm seeing three groups in academia. The aggressive woke who are pushing this stuff hard, and the scared who know what is going on but keep their heads down are two of them.

But a third are people who are basically good, but their tendency is to think that there must be some kind of goodness to come out of this moment in history, they have a sort of faith in people and progress. They keep trying to fit what they see into that mould.

The fourth, the loud objectors, are pretty small, too small to call them a group. Mostly people who can't be fired.

I don't think I would say that it's a backlash. But there has been a real danger in the tendency to want to claim privileges or rights for some people based on some kind of marginalised or oppressed status.

What this does in essence is set up another hierarchy of value, sets of people with special protections. Perhaps it's been profoundly naive not to think that over time this would create its own, new set of privileged people. Whether they are the people who were previously marginalised and are now able to use the system to their own advantage, or people who are able through power or advantage to get themselves included into categories they aren't entitled to.

In hindsight, this was a problem some people gave warning about back when we were seeing a lot of special named protected categories in laws and constitutions, hate crime laws, affirmative action policies etc. That together this direction could be problematic, that it was creating essentialist categories of people. At the time the general response of progressives was that these were overblown fears, probably coming out of bigotry. The one that really seems naive now is the idea that people from a marginalised background would never be in a position to take advantage of such laws and protections in a way that was detrimental to others. In fact there almost seemed to be a sense that such people would not behave that way because of some kind of solidarity.

What we seemed to be really seeing was the beginnings of identity politics, which have been completely toxic. Even women's rights, which ought to be a material category, have been brought under the identity politics tent in many cases.

I've just listened to two of the TRIGGERnometry podcasts on a similar theme after listening to the one Posy Parker did.

The Rod Liddle and Douglas Murray ones were interesting but a bit hard to listen to, but Posy also mentioned something about identity politics at the end of her interview.

It does make sense that trans activism is a backlash to equal rights.

Autumn you might enjoy this one, then!

I was also glad Douglas mentioned Lionel Shriver

I’m in a creative writing group and the vitriol directed against her is really alarming. This was following an incident where she was annoyed that she had to answer a diversity questionnaire from her publisher, which I agree is a right lot of shite.

I really enjoyed watching this. Thank you.

I enjoyed this. It's great when people have time to talk properly not in sound bites. There was a great Titania column in the Times the other day, I hadn't come across Doyle before.

Great discussion, don’t agree with all their politics but pretty much onboard for what they discuss here. Thanks for the link, passing it on.

I see Lots of parallels with the Little Red Guards and Cultural Revolution in China.

Yes, and with this coming at a time of growing inequality, the parallels with 1930’s Germany are equally frightening.

I find it embarassing that academia is not recognising this. Though obviously, there may be more than we think who do recognise it, but are scared of speaking up.

Re lacking critical thinking, increasingly I think more people are worried about the woke but can’t say so.