Culture wars Archives | Page 7 of 16

Freedom of speech struggles not to die in Islamophobic darkness

October 13, 2019October 13, 2019 MelanieAPPG, France, Islamophobia, Policy Exchange

In December 2018, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims (APPG) published its “Report on the inquiry into a working definition of Islamophobia / anti-Muslim hatred”. This decreed that “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.” The government’s response was wary. It observed that the MPs’ proposed definition “has not been broadly accepted – unlike the IHRA [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance] definition of antisemitism before it was adopted by the UK government and other international organisations and governments. This is…

Culture wars Global conflict USA

How black and white thinking clouds realpolitik

October 11, 2019 MelanieDonald Trump, George Soros, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Kurds

Black and white thinking, which divides the world into absolute camps of good and evil, is associated with religious fanaticism from medieval Christianity to the Islamic world. There are now troubling signs that a secular equivalent is contributing to our current political turmoil. There appears to be an increasing inability to grasp that people are capable of both good and bad acts. There is a corresponding failure to acknowledge that just because someone is the target of falsehoods or bigotry, that person may not always be in the right. Recent…

Culture wars

The weaponisation of western children

September 24, 2019September 25, 2019 Melaniechildren, Extinction Rebellion, Greta Thunberg, propaganda

To watch the teenage climate-change zealot Greta Thunberg at the UN was a distressing experience. Not, though, for the reasons she intended. What was so distressing was to see this very vulnerable child’s anguish and rage at the world’s failure to put modernity itself into reverse, in order to combat a supposedly unstoppable apocalypse for which no plausible evidence whatever exists but over which nightmarish vision she and countless others are being terrified out of their wits by worthless or outright fraudulent studies which they have been led to believe…

Culture wars

Fleabag lays bare the demons of feminism

September 24, 2019September 24, 2019 MelanieEmmys, Fleabag, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, The Times

After Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s TV series Fleabag landed no fewer than four Emmy awards this week, its writer and star said how much it meant to her that a “dirty, pervy, angry, messed-up woman can make it to the Emmys”. Indeed, the genius of the show is that it taps into widespread insecurities about worthlessness and failing to make it in a world seemingly populated by the glittering and the successful. It’s an attitude with which many millennial women in particular are said to identify, expressed through resentment at the manifold…

Culture wars

The extinction of reason

September 20, 2019September 21, 2019 MelanieBBC, climate change, Extinction Rebellion

On a day like today, when there are protests and demonstrations in country after country against governments’ alleged failure to tackle “climate change”, you feel as if you have stepped into a looking-glass world in which people have collectively taken leave of their senses. If, that is, you are someone like me for whom the whole climate change hypothesis is a mad, nightmarish cult in which an infantile (literally) view of the world, peddling ludicrous theories of imminent apocalypse which owe more to medieval millenarian sects than modern science, is…

Britain Culture wars

The need for a new Enlightenment

September 12, 2019 MelanieBible, Enlightenment, gender, reason

A BBC film to be shown in schools to pupils aged between nine and 12 claims there are “more than 100 gender identities”. How have we arrived at a situation in which, under the rubric of spreading tolerance, freedom and reason, people who challenge this kind of thinking are told they are bigots and bullied off public platforms and out of their jobs? The introduction of such ideas can be traced to the seismic impact of the Holocaust and the Second World War. The fact that genocidal Nazism had arisen…

Culture wars

Darwinism, Judaism and the clash between science and religion

September 6, 2019 MelanieDarwinism, Gelernter, Judaism, Maimonides

Yale University professor of computer science David Gelernter has renounced his previous belief in Darwinian evolution. Writing that he was sad to give up on “a brilliant and beautiful scientific theory,” he said he had concluded that it couldn’t explain the big picture—not the fine-tuning of existing species, but the emergence of new ones. Whether or not his argument is well-founded is a discussion for another time. The point here is that it’s unsayable by anyone who isn’t prepared to risk professional and social suicide. Darwinism, said Gelernter, had passed…

Britain Culture wars

Tearing up the sexual contract

September 5, 2019September 5, 2019 Melaniedivorce, marriage, single parents, The Sex-Change Society

I am publishing on this blog a series of excerpts from three of my books in which I have tried over the years to explain why western society seems to be tearing itself up by the roots. You can read the first one, about our secular inquisition, here. Today I’m reproducing excerpts from The Sex-Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male which was published by the Social Market Foundation in 1999 and is now sadly out of print. These excerpts deal with how we have torn up the bargain…

Culture wars

The secular inquisition

September 1, 2019September 1, 2019 MelanieJohn Gray, Roger Scruton, The World Turned Upside-Down

A few days ago, the philosopher John Gray wrote on the Unherd website a bleak but precisely directed analysis of why the humanities can’t be saved. It used to be said, he wrote, that the humanities taught people how to think. No longer. “Students learn an intra-academic argot – intersectionality, hetero-normativity and the like — that has zero utility in the world in which they will go on to live.They also learn that disagreement in ethics and politics is illegitimate. Anyone who departs from the prevailing progressive consensus is not…

Culture wars USA

The New York Times becomes an unambiguous engine of wickedness

August 21, 2019August 21, 2019 Melaniejournalism, New york Times, racism, trump

The New York Times has long been known for its routinely vicious anti-Israel propaganda and more occasional overt Jew-bashing. It has also been in the forefront of demonising President Donald Trump through its twisted reporting. Now, however, it has jumped the shark. It has repudiated journalism altogether by turning itself instead into a conduit for the denial of truth, the smearing of millions and the fabrication of history. It has become an unambiguous engine of wickedness. The first eye-popping evidence of this occurred ten days ago when the paper’s executive…