Why do good people ENFORCE bad ideas?

https://twitter.com/UmbertoKerouac/status/1255834450367307777

It’s a long thread so I’ll just quote the rest.

It was reported and got me a 12-hour ban from Twitter. I was forced to delete the tweet. Thing is, the people who espouse trans-activist rhetoric are, mostly, people interested in global betterment and social justice. They’re good people, aren’t they? I started thinking. Why do good people believe bad ideas? And from that base, why do ALL people believe bad ideas. And then, why do good people ENFORCE bad ideas? The answer, I think, is that they are not given any choice. There is no discourse, there is only what is permissible and what is not.

There is some choice here though. There is more than there was a few years ago. One isn’t quite so far out on a fragile limb when questioning the bad ideas now.

I am a critical theorist with two master’s degrees and a PhD. I have taught cultural studies at university level. Ironically, my specialism is post-structuralism and postmodern theory – from which much of the trans-gender studies orthodoxy of 2008 onwards emerged.

And that, folks, is literally how old this ideology is. Ten years, give or take. It had earlier antecedents but the slogans and argot with which we are now familiar – the language that is now protected. Ten years old.

How has it taken root so quickly and absolutely? One explanation is that its tenets are *memetic*. Memes, in Dawkins original sense, are transmittable units of culture. Idea-bites – rather than nuanced arguments. Ideology reduced down to slogans.

You see this in much recent ideological communication over social media. Unlike other discourse, memetic slogans are immutable. They are nuggets of dogma that are easy to transmit, replicate rapidly and are difficult to remove once embedded.

The speed of replication is as important as multiplication and simplicity. They spread fast and wide and are difficult to challenge once they become the foundations of discourse.

Does this sound like anything? They are viruses.

This mechanism has firmly entrenched the tenets of trans-activism into the permitted discourse of some institutions so effectively that any attempt to interrogate or examine them at all is now considered hate speech. They have quickly become “protected”.

A curious side-effect of this is that you cannot even ask why. You cannot interrogate the mechanism of transmission, you cannot examine evidence or nuance or meaning.

Indeed you cannot. I tried that back on Freethought Blogs and was told very explicitly that you cannot. You cannot even try to figure out exactly what the claims are, you can only repeat the correct words in the correct order.

And the final irony. Twitter is partially responsible for this cultural shift. Alongside other platforms, it has increased the reach of all ideas and reduced their complexity to a finite number of characters.

The world becomes a place where dogmatic idea-bites stand in for discourse and, once entrenched, become protected. They are protected not by law, but by cancelling, banning and blocking. By amassing a following and ending conversation.

This is not confined to trans-activism. Every extreme benefits from this. Any ideology that is absolute and inflexible. Anything that can be reduced to an idea-bite. “Build the wall”. “Brexit is Brexit”. “We can’t let the cure be worse than the disease”.

Make America Great Again. But her emails. Dirty cops. LIBERATE MICHIGAN!

H/t Your Name’s not Bruce?

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