Dis Course We're on Ain't Good

We are all, by now, very familiar with, not to mention thoroughly sick of, the trend to shut down any kind of opinion that doesn’t follow the wokey brick road (because, because, because, because, because, because of the tolerant woke there is).¹

Opinions that were, only 5 minutes ago, utterly mainstream, unobjectionable and acceptable are now deemed to be hateful (whatever that means) with some mystical ability to cause harm - or, as in the case of the picture above, the British Police Farce arresting someone for “causing anxiety”.

This actually happened. Hard to believe, but it did.

The critical theorists emphasize the notion of discourse - and it’s an important thing because, as Orwell noted, language is a powerful tool for shaping how things develop and how people frame things. If you can control the discourse you have considerable power. These days it’s increasingly a case of :

Discourse? What discourse?

As we shall see, unless you intersperse your vocabulary with all of the right woke buzzwords, you won’t even get a chance to talk in the first place. You have to tick all the right boxes before being allowed a platform.

They pretend this is all the name of protection, or preventing harm, but we all know it’s because their frameworks and interpretations cannot, and do not, stand up to scrutiny. To put it crudely, if you take everything except shit off the menu, then that panfried turd begins to look appealing.

Limiting true discourse (as opposed to discourse only within certain narrowly defined boundaries) is the only way for their ideas to succeed, and they know this. Totalitarians throughout history have understood this only too well. Bad ideas can only really succeed in the long term if you prevent good ideas from happening. You end up having to force people, one way or another, into “accepting” some ideology they disagree with.

In Islam, for example, apostasy was traditionally punishable by death. It’s a religious version of Hotel California, I guess. You want to check out, Sir? Certainly, would you prefer to check out via lethal injection or the electric chair? Might I suggest a simple beheading as an increasingly popular option?

In Academia, if you’re a woke apostate, or heretic, you’ll be condemned to an academic death.

The wonderful, brilliant, Helen Pluckrose² talks about one recent case in which Dr Alka Sehgal Cuthbert was prevented from giving her talk at a conference because some people said they would feel unsafe if she went ahead with it. HP’s subtitle to her article really says it all - Psychological Safety, My Arse.

HP dissects the “justification” of the conference organisers more completely, but I want to just emphasize some of the things in this extraordinary document

Unfortunately we have taken the difficult decision to ask Alka Sehgal Cuthbert not to attend the conference tomorrow . . .

As an organisation, Rethinking Education values freedom of speech and we recognise the importance of free and open discussion . . .

At the same time . . . we have a duty of care to our speakers and delegates . . . we have been contacted by several people . . . who communicated very clearly that they would not feel safe to speak at or attend the conference . . . When someone tells you that they feel unsafe, you need to listen.

. . . we strongly believe that we need to have difficult conversations and that people should be prepared to subject their ideas to scrutiny and challenge.

. . . when multiple people came to us at short notice to express very clearly that they did not feel safe to appear at the conference, this placed us in an incredibly difficult position.

. . . We are prioritising the safety of our speakers and delegates . . . but once the matter was brought to our attention, safety considerations needed to be our primary focus.

So, basically, all you have to do to avoid these difficult conversations in which your ideas are subject to scrutiny is to claim you “feel unsafe” and some weak and spineless wobble blob of an organiser will pander to your (alleged) inadequacies. Right. Got ya.

“Incredibly difficult position”, my arse.

I mean, c’mon man, how difficult is it to say “oh just fuck off, you prat” to anyone who claims they feel unsafe because of some lecture? Obviously, one would express this more professionally (or perhaps not), but this is the appropriate sentiment one should have when dealing with these woke wobble blobs.

When someone tells you they feel unsafe you need to listen.

Do I?

Why?

Did you ask them to explain how, precisely, they were going to be rendered “unsafe” by someone giving their academic opinion?

I can imagine someone feeling unsafe if they’re on the edge of a cliff, but unsafe when hearing an opinion they don’t agree with or like? What is this? Kindergarten?

I’ve known 3-year olds who don’t get this upset over something someone says (and we’re talking about something someone might say - the conference hadn’t even happened).

It is, as most of you already know, a fucking joke. In many ways it’s beyond a joke now. We really need to stop pandering to this celebration of (apparent) weakness.

Grow up and grow a pair you brainless spineless turd biscuits³.

safety considerations needed to be our primary focus

And if Dr Cuthbert was going to whip out an Uzi and gun down her audience, then I might agree with you. But how does giving a talk in any way impact safety?

And, not to be outdone, across the pond the American Anthropological Association (AAA) is having its big annual conference in Toronto in November this year. A previously accepted panel discussion about how sex (the real thing, not the make-believe fantasy of self-ID stuff) is still important in anthropology was cancelled because of . . . (I’ll give you three guesses).

Yet more of that cancellation stuff that just never happens because it’s all a right-wing hullabaloo over nothing.

So just for the shits and giggles, as they say, I went to have a look at what anthropologists are getting up to these days. You can read the conference programme on the conference website. It’s very long - and I lost the will to live about 10% of the way through - so if any brave and hardy readers do get further and spot things I’ve missed then I’d love to read them.

It’s a shame I won’t be able to attend this conference, because there are too many gems to choose from.

Here’s just a little teaser to whet your appetite

Palimpsestous Analyses: Mapping Geographies of Racialized Encounters using the “New Latinx South”
In this conceptual article, we advance the palimpsest as a heuristic and tool of inquiry for analyzing the competing, multiplicitous, layered, and relational becomeings of Latinidad(es). Contributing to timely theorizations about (un)ruly Latinidades that insist on theorizing Latinx in ways that push back against marginalization, oppression, and erasure within and outside of Latinidad, the palimpsest offers an important spatial lens to this scholarship. Grounded in critical Black, Latinx, and Indigenous geographic thought, we argue that the palimpsest foregrounds the possibility of the versatile and dynamic, rather than linear, assimilative and bounded, (path)ways to examine, intervene toward, and fight the erasure of constellations of (multiplicitous Latinx) relations that are always already seeping through, bleeding into, writing over, and reproducing previous relations.

After reading that I can tell you’re just so excited and want to learn more.

And because I’m something of a foodie, I was simply stoked with this one.

Decolonial Cuisine: Entangled Politics of Food Revitalization in Native-led Culinary Organizations
This paper follows three Minneapolis-based Indigenous culinary organizations—a market, a culinary education non-profit, and an award-winning full-service restaurant—and examines how they are utilizing a variety of methods to internally decolonize their culinary offerings and business practices while supporting their communities in a collective effort towards food revitalization and sovereignty. Significantly, Native culinary organizations exist at a tenuous crossroads, for they occupy complex political spaces as expressions of Indigenous identity and decolonization, and yet, the businesses are also subject to colonial capitalist market demands

I’m ahead of the trend here. I’ve been de-colonizing my food every morning before a shower for years now.

And talking of bodily functions how about anthropology as applied to liver transplants?

The Specter of Cure: Transforming Liver Transplant Narratives and Temporality Through Multimodal Digital Storytelling
Conventional biomedical narratives of the liver transplant experience follow a linear temporal structure with a distinctive before, during, and after transplantation. Transplant recipients however, express something closely akin to a pantemporal experience of illness in which transplant time is multiple, disjointed, and patchy. Drawing on the theoretical framework of hauntology, this research study examines the friction between what is present and what is absent within transplant narratives. I aim to complicate singular narratives using ethnographic interviews and short digital stories co-created by long-term liver transplant recipients to expand our understanding of the transplant experience.

I simply can’t wait for the movie - a remake of A Liver Runs Through It, perhaps? Where’s my fava beans and a nice chianti?

And be careful if you want to learn Arabic - it could lead to whiteness

Learning Arabic as a Path to Whiteness
This paper reflects on how the discourses of Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, a prominent Muslim-American leader, reshape the identity politics in some Muslim-American communities. I have argued that Yusuf’s highly ideological conception of the Arabic language is mobilized to create powerful imaginaries of a “Golden Age” of Islamic history, which creates possibilities for new imagined social space-times and images of personhood (Elshaikh, forthcoming). Here, I extend this analysis to examine how these imagined histories and images of personhood produce possibilities for alignment with whiteness, demonstrating how language ideologies differentially stratify the Muslim-American community along racialized and classed axes. These stratifying effects reinforce existing imperialist power differentials that value whiteness, middle-classness, and their associated cultural practices and values. However, these positionalities are reassigned and redistributed in mostly non-white middle-class Muslim communities, with power and prestige accruing along linguistic and economic lines, which I argue are intertwined

There’s pages and pages and pages of this stuff - all liberally sprinkled with the latest woke jargon - and, as I said, I only got through maybe 10% of the programme.

But, apparently, if you want to talk about sex, actual sex, as being somehow important - it’s practically equivalent to inviting a terrorist to your conference.

Do you think I could claim that I would be “unsafe” if I attended this conference? After all, I’m sure I’d rapidly lose IQ points and slip into unconsciousness as my brain liquefied into some useless goo.

We need to fix this. This inability to even talk without having to spout some woke gibberish, otherwise you’ll be deemed to be “unsafe”, is rotting everything.

Discourse is important - but it needs to be free and unfettered.

1. I now have this tune stuck in my head and I can’t remember how many becauses to put in.

2. HP is a hero of mine ever since she exposed the woke nonsense during the “grievance studies hoax” work she did with Lindsay and Boghossian. Or perhaps she’s a heroine? Or, better still, in these woke times, perhaps we ought to call her a Herox.

3. You might be able to discern that I’m somewhat annoyed at this rampant infantilization of our society and way of life.