Offending the easily offended
There’s no choice but to run the introduction of Taki’s post in its entirety:
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If this isn’t the most easily offended civilization in world history, I’m glad I missed whichever one was worse.
Still, our modern thought police—those prigs and fussbudgets and censors and tattletales and hall monitors and snitches and meddlers and natural-born teacher’s pets—insist that “political correctness” was a brief blip on America’s cultural radar that evaporated sometime in the mid-1990s.
As with everything else, they are wrong.
Whereas PC was still somewhat a fringe phenom in the 1990s, it has become the very fabric of our dying civilization. It is now so pervasive and dominant that it only seems invisible. It has metastasized into the popular narrative and continues expanding with no end in sight.
Never has so much bitterness and hostility been expended in the service of kindness and compassion. Oh, how I loathe the desiccated, humorless souls of the neo-tolerant, those whose endless capacity for getting offended has itself become offensive, who are morally outraged at the mere suggestion that they are absurdly prone to gross public displays of moral outrage.
Hear them spout off about their dimly conceived and shabbily articulated notions of human rights, ones that conveniently always seem to trample on the rights of other humans.
One need not try to offend them. Even if you don’t try, they’ll get offended. Even if you make a conscious effort NOT to offend them, they’ll get offended. The very air they breathe offends them. They are offended by everything except their own existence.
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There is a saying which underpins this blog’s attitude to the legion of perma-offendees: “If we’re treading on thin ice, we may as well dance.”
Filed under: Politics & economics
“our modern thought police—those prigs and fussbudgets and censors and tattletales and hall monitors and snitches and meddlers and natural-born teacher’s pets”
A fine post for the New Year – spot on.
Excellently said!
Fuck ‘em.
My thoughts precisely.
Jeremy Vine had a phone-in yesterday on the subject of a young lad who had dressed himself up in honour of his favorite football star (see Daily Mail apparently).
As is the modern way his dad published a picture of him on Facebook (or somesuch) which resulted in a Twitterstorm by outraged offence takers. Said football player is black therefore the boy was Blacking Up, just like the bad old Black & White Minstrels.
Some female Guardianista studio guest came on mouthing the usual guff (introducing me to the word “misnuanced” btw) but every single e-mail and phone respondant told her to get lost especially when it emerged that the footballer himself was not offended and regarded it as ‘a bit of a laugh’. Those callers included some who identified themselves as black.
Perhaps the country is growing up a bit.