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contemplatingoutlander · 1 year

Video

youtube

The Overton Window: How Trump and the MAGA movement normalized autocratic, theocratic, and neofascist ideas

According to Vox:

There’s a concept in political theory developed by Joseph P. Overton which suggests that there’s a “window” of acceptable ideas and policy proposals in public discourse. Everything inside the window is normal and expected, while everything outside the window is radical, ridiculous, or unthinkable. And Overton argued that the easiest way to move that window was to force people to consider ideas at the extremes, as far away from the window as possible. Because forcing people to consider an unthinkable idea, even if they rejected it, would make all less extreme ideas seem acceptable by comparison -- it would move the “window” slowly in that direction. [emphasis added]

I thought I would share this old video from Dec. 2017 that looks at how Trump’s first year in office moved the Overton Window much farther to the right than it had before Trump became president.

The video is well worth watching, because in retrospect, it was prescient of the huge right-wing shift in today’s political discourse and policies in which:

Election deniers came very close to becoming secretaries of state and governors in swing states.

Red states have passed numerous bills that prevent the discussion of racism, sexism, and LGBTQ+ issues in schools.

The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and numerous red states passed draconian laws banning abortion.

The Supreme Court is poised to support the discredited Independent Legislature Theory that could decimate the ability of the American people to elect a president of their choosing.

The Supreme Court has crippled the Voting Rights Act and red states are passing numerous voter suppression laws.

The gun lobby (and their acolytes in the Supreme Court) have created a nightmare where open carry laws are multiplying and gun control laws are being overturned.

Red states like Florida are legislating (or pushing to legislate) the teaching of a distorted, whitewashed history of the U.S., that emphasizes its founding as a “Christian” nation.

The Supreme Court has made it much harder for the Environmental Protection Agency to do its job at this critical time when the disastrous effects of climate change are accelerating.

Republicans are openly talking about dismantling programs like Medicare and Social Security.

The Supreme Court seems poised to overturn affirmative action in universities.

Some republicans are openly talking about banning birth control and same sex marriage and reinstituting sodomy laws.

[edited]

#overton window #gop #us politics #trump #autocracy #right-wing ideas #theocracy #neofascism #vox #video

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correctopinionhaver · 5 months

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not now kitten daddy's busy shifting the overton window

#not now kitten #overton window #honestly my posts are not coherent enough to even try doing this but #kitten

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ramveins · 3 months

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Whenever I see tweets like the one below, I get so confused because it feels like people just want to move the Overton window over but for... writing tropes? Instead of simply picking a less extreme trope to read from???

(Also the implication that people who read more "problematic" types of e2l stories must love oppressors and bullies in real life is a little... 😬)

^My badly done visualization for reference that does Not include all forms of (thing)-to-lovers just fyi lol

#i do think e2l got a bit sanitized by people labelling every popular ship with it #so now whenever sometimes has an actual e2l ship it seems more shocking #maybe. Thats just my theory .a game theo—#twitter #trope meta #tropes #overton window #enemies to lovers #e2l #rivals to lovers #discourse #shipping #fandom #fandom meta #writeblr #bookblr #writing #anti anti #text tag

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beardedmrbean · 5 months

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Gangland shootings and bombings that have plagued Sweden's biggest cities have spread to quieter suburbs and towns, shattering its reputation as a safe and peaceful nation.

Half an hour north of central Stockholm, Upplands-Bro features lakeside boat clubs, copper-red wooden villas and apartments flanked by pine and spruce trees.

But a 14-year-old boy was found dead in a forest here in August, and since January there have been several shootings and bombings targeting houses and apartments.

"It's awful. We've [been] woken up by explosions in the neighbourhood and it's scary," says 42-year-old Anna Petterson, who lives in Bro and has three children. "It's very much something that we're aware of, and we talk about a lot, and are afraid of."

Sweden has been a European hotspot for gang-related shootings and bombings for several years. But recently the violence has shifted beyond low-income, vulnerable urban areas and police say one reason is that gang members are increasingly targeting rivals' relatives.

Detectives suspect some of the latest violence has been organised by criminal leaders based in other countries, including Turkey and Serbia.

More than 50 people have been killed in shootings so far in 2023, and there have been more than 140 explosions. Last year, more than 60 people died in gun violence, the highest number on record.

"What started out as gun violence between young gangs looking to defend their territory has turned into a vicious circle of firearms trafficking and gun violence," explains Nils Duquet, a firearms researcher based at the Flemish Peace Institute in Brussels.

"Gangs have also matured and are no longer just the street criminals, but are often connected to higher-level criminals as well."

Innocent bystanders are also among the dead.

In September, a 70-year-old man and another man aged 20 were killed in a pub shooting in Sandviken in central Sweden, and a newly graduated teacher, 24, died in an explosion just outside the university city of Uppsala.

Soon afterwards Sweden's Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson gave a rare national address admitting that "no other country in Europe" was experiencing this sort of situation, and promising tougher penalties for deadly violence.

Evin Cetin, an author and lawyer who has represented teenage shooting victims and suspects, says boys as young as 13 or 14 are being recruited by gangs, often through social media promises of money and designer clothes.

"Children are using their own bags not to carry books, but they carry the drug markets in Sweden on their own shoulders," she tells the BBC on a visit to Upplands-Bro, part of a nationwide schools tour to more than a dozen areas affected by gang crime.

Others are trying to tackle the problem by organising street patrols in areas affected by drugs and violence.

"That we're out and go around chatting with our kids and young people - it increases safety," says Libaane Warsame, during a night walk in Jarva, northern Stockholm, on a wet, windy Friday night.

Jarva looks like a lot of Swedish suburbs, with well-maintained apartment blocks, a few shops, and a nearby forest. The main difference is that it is more multicultural than many neighbourhoods, and it has Stockholm's highest unemployment rate.

Mr Warsame began patrolling the streets after his 19-year-old son - who police say was not in a gang - was killed in a shooting in December 2020.

"It's hard for [young people] to sit at home for hours without any income, any work. So they go out and stand around and there's a big risk that they will be recruited."

He also runs an organisation that supports families who have lost loved ones in deadly violence.

This year there have not been any fatal shootings in Jarva, but many locals say they remain on edge.

"I haven't been outside so late… because I don't want to make my mum worried," says Gizem Kuzucu, 17.

She often spends her evenings studying at Framtidens Hus, a youth centre, and says none of her friends have been in trouble with the law. But she has been exposed to crime on social media.

"I've seen a lot of videos on TikTok [in which] people are, like, talking about crime. They are like saying 'follow me on Instagram, I'm gonna post like a rapper that got killed'."

Another teenager at the youth centre, Libaan, says he grew up around older criminals and "did commit a few crimes" when he was younger.

"Kids here, they are really, really mean to each other…they don't know how to speak about their emotions, so what they do instead is that they lash out," says the 18-year-old.

Swedish police do not currently map gang members' nationalities, but research for the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention in 2021 showed young people born in Sweden to two parents from abroad were overrepresented as suspects in murder cases and robberies.

The right-wing coalition government, elected in September 2022, believes the rise in gang violence in recent years is directly connected to Sweden's earlier immigration policies. Until 2016, it had one of the most generous asylum laws in Europe.

"We can now see that 'outsideship' and lack of integration, in combination with trade of narcotics and organised crime is creating this very, very toxic mixture," Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom told the BBC in September.

The government wants to make it harder for immigrants from outside the European Union to get social benefits, and to make preschool compulsory for children with two foreign parents in some areas, in order to improve Swedish-language skills.

Earlier this year, it became an offence to recruit children to participate in criminal activities. Stop-and-search zones are set to be introduced in early 2024 and ministers want to double prison sentences for offences including gun crimes and explosions.

The BBC was not granted a government interview to discuss these plans, despite multiple requests.

At the state-funded Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, researcher Klara Hradilova-Selin believes tackling gang crime "should have been a more important issue earlier" for previous coalitions on both the right and left of the political spectrum.

"There are colleagues of mine who were actually warning like decades ago [about] this kind of development of growing marginalisation in the deprived areas."

Worries about how gang conflicts are impacting the country's international image are also growing. "Sweden has always been viewed as an extremely safe country. Maybe one of the top safe countries in the world. And this image is falling apart," says Hradilova-Selin.

According to a recent survey for the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce, eight out of 10 Swedish companies questioned believe it will get harder to attract foreign talent, investment and visitors due to the ongoing violence.

At Framtidens Hus youth centre, teenagers are being offered the chance to drive, dance and make podcasts. Former criminal Libaan says he would like a job that involves writing, or helping others, but he believes his future is also dependent on how he is treated by other Swedes.

"I don't feel included in the culture even though I'm born here. They kind of see me as this ghetto kid who has no future."

#nunyas news #overton window #has shifted in europe #a bunch of europe at least

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no-passaran · 1 year

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(Link to the Mastodon thread)

#💬#id in alt text #antisemitism tw #kanye west #ye west #twitter #elon musk #antifascism #antifa #overton window

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mk-cultured · 3 months

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#dnc #democrats #electoralism #overton window #manufacturing consent #inventing reality

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odinsblog · 10 months

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One About The Atmosphere: Want to change minds? Stop trying. Change the atmosphere instead.

Donald Trump in 2016 greets a screaming horde of ecstatic white christian nationalists

Minivan was a nice enough guy. He was easygoing; a happy guy with a frequently deployed smile. I don’t recall much anger from him, nor many strongly held opinions. I wouldn’t call him a philosophical type. No deep late night talks with Stove Minivan is my recollection.

This is the sort of dude I’d hang out with at a party, if there were a party we were both at, but not one with whom I’d maintain a relationship if we both graduated and then moved to different places—which I know for a fact, because that’s what happened. We drifted.

So then what happened is twelve years or so later I got on The Facebook, and Stove Minivan was there, too, and before long, we were friends again, he and I, and so were me and my other college friends, and them with him, and … look, you know the drill. It was The Facebook.

Minivan was no longer a pre-med student at a small northern liberal arts college. He was a doctor—a general care practitioner, if memory serves—in a smallish plains state town, very much like many other towns in the great plains or elsewhere in the country, I imagine.

Anyway, before long I noticed something about Minivan. Even though his feed was full of pictures of him and his lovely family, and he was smiling in them just the same as he always had in college, he was angry.

He was *enraged*

What was he angry about? The Demonrats.

Minivan was absolutely enraged about everything the Demonrats did. He also was out of his mind angry about Killary, and Obummer, the leaders of the Demonrats—or at least they were the front for the real leader of the Demonrats, who even back then I believe was George Soros.

What did the Demonrats do? Oh my heck, what *didn’t* they do? Mostly they hated America and American security and American economic strength, it seems. They engaged in corruption and bowed to foreign powers a lot. They shredded the dignity of the presidency, that’s for sure.

Minivan’s worldview wasn’t particularly coherent, if you want to know the truth.

I couldn’t help to notice that the Demonrats weren’t actually doing many of the things that Minivan thought they were doing.

And I noticed other things.

For example, I couldn’t help but notice that a lot of the policies Minivan supported were directly *causing* the sorts problems that made Minivan so angry.

And I couldn’t help but notice that well-sourced information enraged him more than pretty much anything else.

There was a lot of linking to sites I’d never heard of, like Breitbart and Newsmax, and of course plenty of Fox News. There were a lot of memes. There were a lot of conspiracy theories (a big birther, was Minivan).

Some of his posts contained subtle bigotry. Most of the rest contained not-subtle bigotry. Several of them contained slogans and statements that were, very simply, neo Nazi and white supremacist memes and shibboleths.

There was a lot of commentary accompanying these posts from Minivan, who was saying shocking stuff for a small-town family doctor … the sorts of things that it seemed to me would make people not want to use this person as a doctor, or or sit next to that person on a bus.

I hadn’t heard of Alex Jones, yet, but Minivan sounded a lot like Alex Jones, word for word and beat for beat. He’d even start his posts like a right-wing radio host: Sorry folks, but you can’t even make stuff like this up—ironically, accompanying things that had been made up.

This was all pretty distressing to those of us who had known Minivan back in the day, before he had become so obsessed with Demonrats.

So, a lot of us, myself included, did exactly what The Facebook wants.

We engaged with him.

At the time my belief was, you defeated bad ideas with better ideas, by confronting the bad ideas directly with the better ideas. Debate was for changing minds. You presented your ideas, they presented theirs, you countered, they countered, eventually everybody saw the truth.

But the intention was that I’d change his mind, with facts presented logically, delivered calmly and patiently.

This was my belief.

What happened confounded me, but perhaps you can predict it.

Minivan escalated any correction, however calmly stated or bloodlessly presented, into scorched earth territory. He rejected all proofs by rejecting the source outright as irrevocably tainted by bias, or he’d spiral into non sequitur, spamming our feeds with more misinformation.

He would claim he never said things he had just said, even though the statements were still there for anybody to read, one comment earlier in the thread.

He’d claim that I said things I'd never said, as anyone foolish enough to read through our conversations could discover.

He demonstrated a complete dedication to his ignorance and anger, and a total disinterest in anything like observable truth that contradicted his grievance.

It was confounding and unfamiliar behavior to me, at the time.

At the time.

All of it was larded with grievance, a sense that people like him had never wronged anybody, and everybody else had done nothing but wrong people like him.

The bigotry and authoritarianism grew.

And all the time, on Facebook, he and his family kept smiling their perfect smiles.

I’ll admit that over time my interactions stopped being polite and bloodless, and I’m not particularly sorry for it. I told him some things about himself he seemed not to know, but which I thought really ought to be said.

I have a bit of a penchant for sarcasm, which you may have noticed.

I employed this skill, and you can feel how you want to about sarcasm, but I think it helped convey the correct posture to take toward someone who says the sorts of things Minivan was saying.

The correct posture being "you have proved yourself to be a person who should not be taken seriously, and your positions do not deserve even a modicum of respect."

I found this a more healthy message to convey about Minivan to anybody watching, and I still do.

Eventually he blocked me, and he was out of my life forever. It was the right choice, and I'm very glad he did that.

I’ve pondered the incident since, as it’s become more and more relevant to “the way things are.”

A few things had become clear over time.

Minivan was not somebody whose intentions could be trusted. He was not operating in good faith, and I believe he well knew it, because many of his favorite sources of information have written instruction books on how to engage with people in bad faith.

Minivan was not debating; he was using debate to inject his counterfactual beliefs into the discourse, which were designed to further marginalize already marginalized people while simultaneously cloaking himself in self-exonerating grievance.

More, he was exerting an active effort to not know things that could be easily known, and to demand to be convinced out of deliberate ignorance, not because he was interested in having his ideas challenged, but because he demanded a world in which he got to decide what was real.

Further still: Minivan *learned* from me. The effect of telling him he was using one or another logical fallacy was not to sharpen his reasoning, but to teach him about the existence of logical fallacies, which let him (incorrectly) accuse others of those same logical fallacies.

So Minivan was deploying the language of logic, in ways that betrayed a total lack of understanding about what those fallacies were, granted, but in ways that likely made him seem more knowledgeable and reasonable to a casual or sympathetic observer.

He learned to ape our phrases and arguments, in much the way he’d learned to ape the style of Alex Jones and all the various Breitbart and Newsmax contributors he used to inform himself.

And these days it occurs to me: I hear a lot about "groomers."

We were not changing him by engaging with him thoughtfully.

We certainly weren’t changing him by engaging with him in kind.

Rather: we were making him better at what he was doing, and we were validating his world view—to himself and others—as one that merited engagement.

And week after week on Facebook, Minivan kept smiling and smiling and getting angrier and angrier, at us and Obummer and all the other Demonrats and liberals and every member of every minority group who dared to fail to ceaselessly assure him that he was right about everything.

I don’t miss Minivan's black-hole-sun smile. I think of it as my first hint of MAGA: politically overrepresented, socially coddled people, often living outwardly happy privileged lives, while seething inwardly that other people might be getting anything, anything at all.

Indeed, soon enough, another figure would come on the scene, whose behavior matched that of Minivan almost exactly, a perfect avatar for this spirit of aggrieved bigotry and supremacy that seemed to be moving through my former friend.

And sure enough, as I saw, there were millions and millions of smiling seething people who loved him.

And that guy became president.

Nobody believed he would. And then he did.

Because Stove Minivan, it turns out, wasn’t some weird outlier.

He was part of a growing new normal, a group of people who had been offered a chance to immigrate from observable reality and enter a dark world of constant hostility, misinformation, and self-loving grievance.

It's an invitation they leapt at, to which they cling even now.

It's a constituency immune to proof, angered by equality, cheered by cruelty, who blame others for the foulness of the shallow puddle of reasoning within which they have demand to be seated, even though we can all see them fouling it themselves, every day.

And afterward, a huge number of those shocked by this development decided the proper reaction was to accommodate it, in the name of unity—a belief, it seems, grounded in the idea that what you choose to get along with isn’t as important as getting along no matter what.

I’ll finish with the question that all of Minivan’s former friends would eventually ask, whenever they gathered together long enough for the subject to arise.

"What the hell happened to Minivan?"

Here’s the answer, I think: nothing.

Nothing happened to Minivan. Nothing at all.

He was always that guy, and he always thought the things he thought.

What changed was that he was given a lot of language with which to express those ideas, and access to enough other people who thought that way too, that it created a critical mass of permission.

The permission allowed him to change his attitudes and actions, and created a lot of other people willing to accommodate and normalize his antisocial anti-reality behavior, rather than reject it out of hand.

In college you could be pretty conservative, honestly. It was a pretty conservative place. But you couldn't behave like Minivan later would.

You’d be understood to be a far-right extremist, and people would then treat you like a far-right extremist.

Which is what you'd be.

I think it just wasn't possible for Minivan to be what he later became, because the atmosphere wasn't conducive to the possibility.

But then the atmosphere changed.

If we want to change it back, it's worth thinking about how atmospheres change.

(source)

#politics #republicans #donald trump #overton window #stove minivan #authoritarianism #deplorables #trumpublicans #maga

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rainbowpopeworld · 1 month

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This and the Cassandra-like pointing out of where we are heading are the summary of my political existence

#overton window #image description in alt #Cassandra #leftist #anarchocommunism #anarchocommunist #ancom #it is possible #even if you think it isn’t

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 1 year

Video

youtube

Andrew Doyle: 'You can’t have a coherent society when the rules are being set by the fantasists'

It's becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between reality and fiction.

Politics in particular seems to have taken a surreal turn. In the USA you have a president who recently claimed that there are 54 states, had addressed a dead politician at a White House conference, and at one public event, managed to mix up his wife and his sister. Which is not just grounds for divorce, but possibly a criminal inquiry.

The UK hardly fares any better, with a government that appears to be trying to set a new world record for the number of Prime Ministers and Chancellors it can get through in one year. When Joe Biden recently referred to the new UK Prime Minister as Rasheed Sanuk, maybe he wasn't mistaken after all. Maybe this was just a premonition of someone we haven't seen yet.

But even though the world of politics has become self-saturizing, that's nothing compared to the world of identity politics. This week on Norwegian television, on a show called Good Morning Norway, there was a sympathetic interview with a 53 year old able-bodied man who identifies as a handicapped woman. Despite having no physical disability, he uses a wheelchair most of the time.

Is this a ruse? A way to get access to the more spacious public toilet facilities? It seems not because this man says he's always wished that he was born a woman who was paralyzed from the waist down and that's his truth. Or her truth, or whatever it is we're meant to say.

So now it seems that we can be trans-disabled and find ourselves a platform on TV to have our delusions validated. This of course, is reminiscent of Rachel Dolezal. You remember Rachel Dolezal, artist and civil rights activist, who was formerly president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. There was just one problem.

Yes, it turned out that this trailblazing African-American activist was in fact white. Dolezal was rightly criticized for this, even though it does seem that this could be a genuine feeling that she has, some kind of psychological condition.

And yet, identity politics has reached such heights of absurd contradictions that Dolezal is considered a monstrous fraud, and yet an able-bodied Norwegian man is celebrated for calling himself disabled.

A while ago, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins posed a question on Twitter about the inconsistencies of identity politics. He said:

"In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified If you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss."

As he pointed out, Dawkins wasn't attempting to disparage trans people, he was just trying to initiate a conversation about what the rules are here, because it can be quite confusing. But by tweeting this, by simply posing a question, Dawkins had had committed an act of heresy. He was rebuked by the American Humanist Association and had his Humanist of the Year award formally rescinded.

But aren't scientists supposed to ask questions? Isn't that something we're all allowed to do? Because let's be honest, we all seem to instinctively know when not to take someone's identity seriously. For instance, there was the case of Stephanie Walsh, the 46 year old man who, after 23 years of marriage, suddenly realized he was actually a six-year-old girl and left his wife to live with some new adoptive parents.

Now look, I didn't realize that it worked that way. You know, when I was a child and I was trying to sneak into horror films at the cinema, it would have been really easy if I knew that I could just identify as 18.

Well these of course are all just extreme examples, you might say, and yes I would agree with that. But the extremes of identity politics are rapidly becoming the norm. Last week, TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney had a public televised meeting with the President of the United States. And why? Because Dylan identifies as a “girl.”

Now it seems pretty clear to me that that's probably a hoax, because that kind of ditzy prancing scatterbrain depiction of girlhood is too obviously based on misogynistic stereotypes to be real. Isn't it? I mean, I can't be sure. Does he believe it? Is he pranking us? If so, this is expert level trolling.

And was the Instagram influencer Ollie London being sincere when he claimed to be trans-Korean, even though he was white? I mean he had surgery to look Korean, and in doing so sparked accusations of indulging racist stereotypes.

And then what about the woodwork teacher in Canada who wears huge prosthetic breasts to school? Now many people have pointed out that this looks very much like fetish gear. But the school defended him saying this was her gender identity, and must be validated.

And this is the point. The culture wars have reached the point where we just don't know what is truth and what is fiction anymore. And this is what happens when identity becomes solely a matter of individual truths. Which don't exist by the way; truth isn't subjective. And of course there are people who struggle with their body, who feel they have to present as the opposite sex or even undertake painful and expensive surgery in order to have a chance at a happy life. And we've always been sympathetic and accommodating to such people.

But with various governments around the world now changing their laws so that anyone can self-identify as whatever sex they like and gain access to women's only spaces, people are pointing out that this creates a loophole that is clearly open to exploitation. No one is saying that trans people are predators. They are saying that predators are predators and will use any means available to gain access to victims. It's already happened. Convicted sex offender Karen White, a male who identified as female, was transferred to New Hall Prison in West Yorkshire and went on to sexually assault two female inmates. And this is not an isolated incident, far from it.

So it isn't transphobia to point out that identity politics in its current form has some serious consequences. I keep hearing that right-wing comedians only have one joke and that's something to do with identifying as an attack helicopter. Actually, that's a seven-year-old online meme and I've never heard any right-wing comedian use it as a punchline, but I understand why people pretend that they do. It's always much easier to attack a straw man.

But is that joke all that far from the reality? If activists are going to claim that identity is all about the choices one makes for oneself, and that these should be implemented in law, then surely they have to include the trans-Koreans, the trans-disabled and the teacher with the immense prosthetic breasts.

And this means we all have to live in a world in which we're constantly questioning our own judgments where the lines of reality and satire are so blurred that we can never be sure where we stand.

That doesn't sound sensible to me. So rather than embrace the chaos of extreme identity politics, let's fight instead for the primacy of truth. Let's restore reason and objectivity and evidence-based analysis.

Because you can't have a coherent society when the rules are being set by the fantasists.

We’re being overrun by people acting out their fantasies and fetishes, and demanding that we facilitate or even participate in their alternate reality.

"The culture wars have reached the point where we just don't know what is truth and what is fiction anymore” and “questioning our own judgments”. This is not by accident. It’s not a bug of postmodern activism, nor even merely a feature. It’s the entire point. To make people accept falsehoods as truths. and truths as falsehoods.

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the world ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.”

-- George Orwell, “Nineteen Eighty-Four”

As to whether “scientists [are] supposed to ask questions? Isn't that something we're all allowed to do?” No. No, not any more. To ask certain questions is no longer to evaluate the evidence for a claim, debate the policies created on the basis of a claim, or even to merely try to understand the claim, but to debate certain people’s very existence. Apparently.

More insidiously, the US’s NIH now has a policy of denying access to a taxpayer-funded genomic dataset where the answers, and thus the questions, might be politically or ideologically awkward. There are questions you’re not allowed to ask, and answers you’re not allowed to find.

This shrinking of the Overton Window is not accidental.

“Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. ... Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.”

-- George Orwell, “Nineteen Eighty-Four”

#Andrew Doyle #Free Speech Nation #self identification #objective reality #fantasy #reality vs fantasy #fantasy vs reality #reality #subjective reality #lived experience #postmodern religion #Overton Window #cult of woke #woke activism #wokeness as religion #wokeism #woke #religion is a mental illness

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