The fantasy land of Utopia has been a plague on humanity. If we could only do this, or believe that, everything would be just ticketyboo.
It’s not too bad if the idea just stays in your head. It can remain as a relatively harmless daydream, like winning the lottery or being able to fly.
The problem comes, as it inevitably does, when you try to impose your vision of Utopia on others. When you have enough power and influence to make your dream come true, or at least attempt to make it come true, Utopia becomes a very perilous idea indeed. Everyone must behave like I say - or else. It’s a twisted kind of benevolence because the thinking is that my version of Utopia is good and better for society and any who oppose are, therefore, necessarily harmful and dangerous.
It’s why we have the moronic policies surrounding carbon net-zero, or zero covid, or misinformation. These are all Utopian dreams - and not necessarily bad in themselves. Zero covid would be a great thing (so would being able to fly). Absolutely everyone only giving out honest, truthful and complete information would also be great. The bad part comes about when reality intercedes and it is necessary to impose the Utopian vision, whatever particular flavour of Utopia that might be, because reality and people just aren’t playing along with your delusions of adequacy. So you have to shape the world to fit your noble fantasy.
A vision that isn’t grounded in reality, or pragmatism, is going to lead to all sorts of daftness. There was the example of the Muslim cleric, from Iran I think, who, a decade or so ago, blamed the apparent rise in earthquakes on sexual promiscuity. It brought a whole new meaning to the question “did the earth move for you, darling?”
There seems to be a particularly weird idea doing the rounds, and being taught in some schools, that the ‘gender binary’ was invented by white people to suppress the noble people of colour, and the noble people of kaleidoscopic genders, who were, presumably, all historically walking around bathed in the rainbow light of the Utopian gender smorgasbord.
Until nasty whitey came along, that is, and imposed the gender binary.
It’s hard to fathom how anyone with even half a functioning brain can believe this utter horseshite. It’s even harder to figure out how to have a meaningful dialogue with such a person.
You’d get a more meaningful conversation with a shopping trolley.
It will come as no surprise to anyone that we haven’t reached peak wank yet. They are, I believe, only just warming up.
A recent video on Twitter demonstrates this quite nicely.
The person holds up a white envelope every time the word “white” is needed but she/he/xi/xer/they/them/who gives/a shit doesn’t actually say the word.
As my Dad would say : daft as a brush
I never understood that saying. Are brushes, somehow, daft? It’s like the saying “there’s more than one way to skin a cat”. When was cat-skinning such a popular pastime that several different ways were invented?
The people who espouse such delightfully daft views must have some idea in their heads of the way they want society to be; some Utopian dream of eternal societal bliss, if only we could be a bit more like, . . . errrrr, . . . . something.
I don’t think we need to censor daft views - I think we need to amplify them. Just as Libs of TikTok is doing very nicely. Sure there’s going to be some shopping trolleys with wonky wheels, or triangular wheels who’ll be swayed - but they’re mostly lost causes anyway. The vast swathe of normal people are going to be perplexed, to put it mildly, by all of this. It isn’t going to be a vote winner, that’s for sure.
Despite the deranged banshees on Twitter, it’s abundantly clear that most people do not want possessors of trouser truncheons anywhere near a woman’s bathroom, for example.
But there are good, practical solutions to the gender confusions and issues. Here’s the way to solve the ‘bathroom’ issue :
AFAB : assigned female at birth
AMAB : assigned male at birth
Not to be confused with ACAB (all cops are bastards)
We can use their daftness as a weapon if we’re smart enough.
Can't. Stop. Smiling. Like. The Joker. Utopia, meaning ideal perfect society. Eutopia, meaning no place in existence. Thomas Moore used both knowing full well why he did it. Sadly (since he was a white man?) he is no longer read.
Plato sure has a lot to answer for, inventing the entire genre and idea of the perfect society being something you strive towards by setting up a scaffold of principles and moral codes. Which is to use analogy as if you'd put a lantern on the bowsprit and called it a lighthouse. No matter how you turn, as if by magic yoy are still striving for your (e)utopia.
A better society (as perfection means eliminating all possibility of change) than the current is only ever achieved by identifying actual, factually existing problems and eliminating those. Don't like the Thames being thick enough to walk on? Build better sewers, waste handling, sluices and dams and regulate the water flow.
Not write down a visionary programme of "Clean Our Water", with lots and lots of workshops and committees and so on. When you have visions, seek a doctor as a german politician put it.
Also, that brand of racism the pox in your clips display, it is uniquely USAmerican and second or later generation migrant. The africans of various background I've met or worked with were so conservative (using western metrics) that you could have bent nails around their convictions. Any white westerners espousing views such as they did freely would have been woke-mobbed to death; the ethiopian man who daily informed his unmarried colleagues that they were going to Hell for sinning against god by being promiscous, that they shamed their parents by not marrying and so on? He was cheered and cherished for being such an honest and original old-fashined guy. It was as if my limp-wristed fellow academics just couldn't climd down from their ivory twin towers of the white woman's burden and the noble savage, really. Quite the experience, me who thinks Enoch Powell was too much a liberal on the migraton issue being disgusted by their belittling racism, while the ethiopian and I agreed on most political points - such as migrants who don't respect the laws and customs of their new nation shall be deported for life or that a people has an indelible and non-negotiable eternal right to its territory.
I wonder what a US woke-pox (POCs I guess but pox brings out the idiocy of thinking changing labels changes content )would say about that?
So all the white gay and bi people I know are actually het? They are going to be shocked when they get the news.
I had a gay neighbor who had just bought a small tractor with a backhoe to do some landscaping on his land. A few months later he told me jokingly, "I thought this tractor was going to turn me straight, but it didn't work, I'm still gay!" I told him he'd gotten ripped off. So if the tractor didn't work, apparently being white will do the job.
Irrelevant aside: I wish words like "ticketyboo" were used here in the USA. "Boffin" is another one.
Edit: I realize that the tweet was talking about non-binary, but I was extrapolating to a future where someone would claim that "white supremacy created heteronormative oppression, so you can't be gay if you're white."