I thought about Churchill's words this week past when I was listening to the now-infamous inquisition to which teaching assistant Lindsay Shepherd was subjected at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her crime? While teaching a class on pronouns, she showed a five minute clip of a debate on gender pronouns in which Jordan Peterson defended his refusal to use "ze" and "zer" to refer to transgender people. Worse, having shown it, she didn't condemn Peterson in the strongest possible terms but instead encouraged her students to discuss and debate the issue. For this, she was hauled before Social Justice Torquemada and his two besties and taken to task. She was reduced to tears by this trio of scolds who likened Peterson's refusal to speak non-words to Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, and intimated that she- Shepherd- was no better than a Nazi collaborator for showing the clip in a neutral manner. That these prigs not only felt justified in doing this, but also thought that ordinary Canadians would pat them on the back for it shows just how radically left wing and divorced from reality academia has become. They actually seem to believe that it's their duty to instruct students how they must think on certain issues and to punish those who engage in "wrong think". It's not just at Wilfrid Laurier either; they're just the ones who got caught because Shepherd had the presence of mind to secretly record these sniveling cowards. Now, faced with an outraged public and disgusted alumni threatening to pull their funding, the school is backpedaling as fast as it can, issuing grovelling apologies for the treatment to which Shepherd was subjected. She is certainly due one, but what's troubling is that they don't seem to recognize what they should predominately be apologizing for: attempting to police thought and speech... for thinking that they have the right to tell people not only what they're not allowed to say, but also what they must be compelled to say. It's a positively Orwellian idea, and it must be pushed back against. Hard. Liberum oratio omnium.
Comments
|
About MeI'm a lover of good books, classic movies, and well-written shows (as well as some pretty cheesy ones, to be completely honest). Categories
All
Archives
March 2024
Fun SitesOdds & Ends |