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The statue of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, stands over his grave in Health Sciences Park in Memphis, Tennessee, August 17, 2017. (Karen Pulfer Focht/Reuters)

A few weeks ago, I posted here on the Corner about how masterfully Governor Bill Lee has managed the removal of a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest from the Tennessee state capitol. Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, is an example of someone who really should be canceled by a civilized society. No amount of Cancel Culture Comes For Nathan Bedford Forrest headlines would have me clutching my pearls and fretting over the immanence of a totalitarian police state. We should cancel him proudly, just as General Lovell H. Rousseau did when he sent Forrest and his men running for the hills like a bunch of frightened little girls at the Third Battle of Murfreesboro.

But it seems as if a few of Tennessees state senators disagree. Because less than two weeks after the states historical commission voted to remove the bust of Forrest, these senators have drafted a bill that would remove all 29 members of the commission and replace them with twelve new members. Under the proposed changes, the governor would have less authority over who sits on the commission. Evidently, some state senators were sorry to see Forrests likeness go from the state capitol, and theyre unhappy with the leading role Governor Lee took in making it happen. Senator Janice Bowling of Tullahoma basically confessed as much. In our culture today it seems there is a desire to cancel history, cancel culture, cancel narratives that are just based on fact, she said. I think that thats a dangerous precedent.

What a damnably cynical ploy. As if removing Forrests bust from a place of reverence and veneration will cast aspersions on the fact of his existence, or suddenly disappear all of the primary documents relating his deeds to posterity! Judging from the above statement, youd think that William Tecumseh Sherman had risen from the dead two weeks ago, donned Thanoss infinity gauntlet and wiped all memory of Forrest from the historical record, just as he wiped Forrests pretend country from the face of the earth a century and a half ago.

We need to get better at having direct and honest conversations about the ethical boundaries of our culture. If we could do that, we would rob bad actors of their ability to reach for lofty-sounding, fake process arguments. Theyd have to argue straight out why Confederate generals shouldnt be canceled. Our present discourse is far too focused on the fact of cancellation rather than the criteria. We need to talk about substance rather than process. Im sure if we put our heads together and tried some public moral reasoning for a change we could come up with a way of canceling the Klan without canceling Dr. Seuss. The question isnt whether or not were going to have a cancel culture, its what were going to cancel peoplefor.

Read more from the original source:
A Cynical Ploy in the Cancel-Culture Wars - National Review

In the past week, the police was deployed as an instrument in Boris Johnsons increasingly authoritarian agenda, argues Maheen Behrana

Strongman politics is firmly embedded in British politics, as the past week has confirmed.

Shocking scenes at the Clapham Common vigil held for Sarah Everard last weekend reveal the shaky foundations of Britains notion of policing by consent. As Londoners took to the streets the following day to protest the use of excessive force by police, the country looked on in bewilderment as police officers stood guarding a statue of Sir Winston Churchill something that was neither the focus of protestors nor the locus of a particular safety threat.

Just days later, the controversial Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which will increase police powers to curb protests and offer extra protection to statues, passed its second reading.

In essence, over the past week, the police have been deployed to the frontline of a phoney culture war not as a passive bystander, but as an aggressive actor.

When we saw the police move in to the centre of Sarah Everards vigil and physically remove protestors, this was not a tactical error. It was a deliberate decision made with the aim of depicting the force as powerful and able to crush dissent. When the same police force decided to guard Churchills statue the very next day, the message was clear: power, tradition and the trappings of British vanity are to be upheld at all costs.

Yet these actions are not just empty gestures they obstruct progress. For example, if the Metropolitan Police were genuinely concerned about COVID-19 safety, it would have allowed the crowds at Clapham Commons to naturally organise and disperse through the night. Pushing into the crowd and stirring up tension had an actively detrimental effect.

The Government has now suggested placing plainclothes police officers in nightclubs to protect women. Once again, this seems to be an attempt to use the police as a symbol of authority, without actually considering the intended outcome keeping women safe. Charities and campaigners very much suggest that it wont.

The police are being used as a vehicle through which the Government can drive forward the narrative that Britain is torn between woke leftists and common-sense ordinary people on the right.

However, in manufacturing and stoking this War on Woke, the Government is dancing with authoritarianism.

This isnt a surprise, given the events of recent years. A 2016 study found that American voters with a propensity for authoritarianism were far more likely to vote for Donald Trump. Such affinities also correlated with a high fear of terrorism with this actually pushing former non-authoritarians into modes of authoritarian thinking. It is therefore no coincidence that Home Secretary Priti Patel recently announced a new state-of-the-art anti-terrorism centre.

Indeed, similar surveys carried out in the UK suggest that pro-authoritarian attitudes are uncomfortably mainstream. A Hansard Society study from 2019 found that 54% of the Brits surveyed felt that the UK should have a strong ruler willing to break the rules.

The actions of the Government and the police over the past week are actively, shamelessly playing to this latent authoritarianism what Hardeep Matharu has called the soft fascism within.

This trend has been seen since Boris Johnson took control of Downing Street in July 2019 and shows no signs of reversing.

Also in the news again this week was Shamima Begum, who left the UK aged 15 to join ISIS in Syria. Her citizenship has been revoked, despite the fact that she now repents of her choice and has essentially been left stateless. This was a rule-breaking decision that might have brought the Government some short-term popularity, but the longer-term consequences for democracy could be highly damaging.

There was also the recent story of a school which finally dropped legal action against a family after sending their daughter home repeatedly for wearing a skirt that was too long. Muslim student Siham Hamud was sent home every day for three weeks on account of her skirt length, something that she had chosen for religious reasons. Not only was her school clearly intolerant of her expression of her religious beliefs, it used the same strongman tactics currently deployed by the Government.

Sending Siham home will have eroded the chances of co-operation between her school and family and severely disrupted her education. Yet, despite these obvious negative consequences, the school opted to appeal to the idea of a culture war benefitting absolutely no one in the process and stalling genuine progress.

Bad leadership is sadly a strategy in itself. The 2019 Hansard Society reports speculated that this could be explained by the way that trust in the political system has been systematically eroded in recent years. When people begin to doubt politicians and to tire of a barrage of failed policies, they turn to alternative modes of governance including authoritarianism.

The events of the past week appear to be the opportunistic endpoint for a nation that has been browbeaten by so many failings that it just wants simple answers. And strong but simple answers that sidestep meaningful reform are something that Johnsons Conservatives are all too happy to provide.

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Strongman Politics and Culture Wars Purposefully Derail All Chances of Progress Byline Times - Byline Times

For author, commentator and Telegraph columnist, Douglas Murray, one country is to blame for global attempts to sanitise history. Ive always been very pro-American in my life, he tells fellow columnists Allison Pearson and Liam Halligans Planet Normal podcast, However in recent years my views of that have started to change, primarily because of the negativity of the American export of its cultural problems to the rest of the world, and an attempt to overlay them onto problems that we may or may not already have.

For Murray, an example of that is the tearing down of statues - an issue on which Frances leader was quick to take a strong stance: Emmanuel Macron was straight out of the gate, saying not one memorial or statue will be brought down in France and we will not be eradicating our culture, Murray notes. The French are totally right about this. I enormously admire them.

You should be able to say no, our history is different from yours.

Listen to Douglas Murray's full interview, as well as analysis of the AstraZeneca vaccine debate, lockdown restrictions and police intervention at the vigil of Sarah Everard, on Planet Normal,a weekly Telegraph podcast with Allison Pearson and Liam Halligan, using the audio player above.

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The French have rejected the American culture wars. Why can't we? - Telegraph.co.uk

The scandal broke in The Wall Street Journal, two and a half years ago. Three self-described "left-leaning liberals" had fooled feminist and gender studies journals to accept a number of absurd and horrific hoax papers for publication. One paper was billed as a rewrite of a chapter from Hitlers "Mein Kampf," but using feminist theory.

Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckroses endeavors were praised in some quarters as an essential satire of fashionable jargon and theories, and a brave expose of academic journals openness to publishing "intellectually vacuous as well as morally troubling bullshit," as Yascha Mounk put it.

Others slammed the authors hoaxes as mean-spirited attacks on leftist scholarship; 11 of Boghossians Portland State colleagues described them as "fraudulent, time-wasting, anti-intellectual." When Boghossians university opened an ethics investigation against him, Jordan Peterson (of intellectual dark web infamy) declared only Boghossians critics could be accused of "academic misconduct"and not the philosophy professor himself.

What is clear is that the hoax and its controversy propelled Boghossian and his co-writers into the media limelight, big time, with multiple article in the mainstream press and a particularly warm welcome from right-leaning platforms: Dave Rubins show The Rubin Report and Petersons own YouTube channel, but also from more centrist outlets like Joe Rogans podcast.

Boghossian deepened his longstanding allyship with right-wing provocateur, Andy Ngo, and won a phalanx of new fans from Richard Dawkins to Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan to Megyn Kelly.

But did the trio really demonstrate that contemporary academia is receptive to an "intersectional 'Mein Kampf'"? What did the stunt actually prove? What were the underlying motivations of the hoaxers, and the conservative media stars who embraced them so eagerly? What light does this saga throw on todays culture wars and the so-called "anti-wokeness" and cancel culture campaigns? Whom did the three writers really hoax?

Let's go back to the stated aims of the three writers themselves.

Inspired by physicist Alan Sokals famous 1996 hoax paper in the journal Social Text,these "concerned academics" saw themselves as critiquing "an ongoing problem we see in gender studies and related academic disciplines," a problem they name as "grievance studies": the effort to inflame the grievances of "certain identity groups" on subjects such as race, gender and sexuality.

Their aim was, they claimed, to "reboot" the academic conversation, to "reintroduce scepticism" about core assumptions, and provide a safe space to challenge the "increasing power of grievance scholars."

Over a period of 10 months, they wrote 20 papers: seven were accepted for publication, and four were published.

To excavate the controversy, and as a historian studying Hitler, and, I've chosen to drill down into one of the hoax articles: "Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism," the piece flagged by the WSJ as based on "Mein Kampf."

It was sent to the journal Feminist Theory but was rejected; it was accepted by Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work in the fall of 2018, but never actually published. On The Rubin Report, James Lindsay airily hypothesized that it was "probably days away from actually being published when the WSJ broke their story."

Clearly, the idea that an article based on "Mein Kampf" could be published in a serious scientific journal is certainly an appalling prospect and generates instinctive outrage. So let's dig a bit deeper: What does "based on 'Mein Kampf'" actually mean?

First and foremost, the source material. The chapter the hoaxers chose, not by coincidence, one of the least ideological and racist parts of Hitler's book. Chapter 12, probably written in April/May 1925, deals with how the newly refounded NSDAP should rebuild as a party and amplify its program.

According to their own account, the writers took parts of the chapter and inserted feminist "buzzwords"; they "significantly changed" the "original wording and intent of the text to make the paper "publishable and about feminism." An observant reader might ask: what could possibly remain of any Nazi content after that? But no one in the media, apparently, did.

Indeed, in public, the trio constantly downplayed the amount of re-writing they did to the original text. On Joe Rogans podcast in October 2018, Lindsay described how they'd "modified the words and added theory around it so that it would fly," and in another interview explained that this was to "get past plagiarism."

Chapter 12, he noted, included sentences like: "This is why we need the Nazi Party, and [this is] what is expected of people who are going to be part of it." What did they change? "We took that out [the Nazi party reference] and replaced it with intersectional feminism." What's left is an entirely anodyne sentence, stripped of any identifiable Nazi vestiges. Hardly "owning the grievance warriors."

So what did the text in the article accepted by Affilia actually look like? Was it, as Fox News claimed, a "feminist Mein Kampf", suggesting men should be treated the same way as Hitler victimized Jews?

It is surprising, to say the least, that none of the journalists reporting on the controversy actually bothered to compare the two texts. If they'd done so, they would have found that the Affilia article didn't contain anything that could be recognized as "Mein Kampf" even by a Hitler expert, let alone a lay person.

The best way to illustrate this is to highlight a section of what remained of Hitler's text, spread out as it was over several paragraphs on several pages:

[] to appeal to [] contented and satisfied, [] to embrace [].

[] half-measures, by [] a so-called objective standpoint, [] the goal []. That is to say, [] in the sense [] many limitations, []. [] countered only by an antidote, [] only the []. [] people [] neither [] nor []. [] abstract knowledge [] directs their []. [] is where their [] lies. [] receptive [] in one of these two directions [] never to a [] between the two.

[] emotional [] stability. [] than respect, [] is more [] than aversion, [] weakness) [], [] will [] power.

The future of a movement is [].

The lacunae between these preserved pieces of text were filled with material that was either re-written, or entirely new (including references to bona fide scholarship). This created the convincing illusion of an original philosophy paper. Neither the words nor the intent were comparable to "Mein Kampf"; indeed, the intent was the very opposite.

If the idea was to showcase the 'absurdity' of feminist theory, and the ideology-fueled laxity of editors, why didnt they choose to work from a much more ideological or racist part of "Mein Kampf," say chapter 11: Volk und Rasse ("People and Race") instead? Well, Lindsay told Rubin, revealingly, it was "too extreme" to be useful.

If the point of the experiment was to prove that radical theory was so unhinged it could pass as Nazism, they failed. If the point was to hoodwink a feminist journal to run "Mein Kampf" dressed up as feminist theory, but denatured the text to be unrecognizable from the original, then they didnt prove their contention at all. What they did prove was that there are workaday sentences with nouns and verbs and adjectives in "Mein Kampf" that can be repurposed.

Ironically, the figure whose 1996 hoax inspired the "Mein Kampf" stunt, Alan Sokal, was lukewarm on whether the later hoax had actually proved anything of importance, precisely because the authors had gone so far out of their way to mask their core contention in order to get published. He noted in a 2019 interview that the problem with the grievance studies hoax "may be that the authors did too good of a job of imitating the style of other articles in the field. In which case the articles [] wouldnt prove much of anything."

In fact, the trio wrote two articles based on "Mein Kampf." In one of them they claimed ) to have "essentially" just replaced references to "Jews" with "white men," although their own fact sheet states the article was a more comprehensive "rewrite": they exchanged "Jews" with "white people" or "whiteness," and "added plenty of jargon and critical race theory."

Why didn't this article get any media traction? Because it was never accepted by any journal, let alone published. That failure meant two out of three journals chose to reject "Mein Kampf" articles.

Nevertheless, the trio's stunts garnered them enormous attention. Besides Rogan and Rubin, they were interviewed by Jordan Peterson (at the time at the pinnacle of his fame), and their results spread through largely uncritical reporting in leading newspapers all over the world.

Riffing off Lindsay's framing, an op-ed in The New York Times falsely claimed that not only had the "Mein Kampf" piece been published, but that they had "simply scattered some up-to-date jargon into passages lifted from Hitlers 'Mein Kampf'"; in The Washington Post, an op-ed incorrectly stated that it "was literally a partial chapter of 'Mein Kampf' rewritten using womens studies buzzwords."

Right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro called the stunt "genius" and asked, unself-consciously, when "true power" would be restored to educators not engaged in "navel-gazing mental masturbation and toward a renewed intellectual search for knowledge."

The online magazine Quilletteoffered a prcis of the scandal that indicated its self-appointed status as savior of free speech wasn't bothered by obvious factual inaccuracies, stating that all seven papers had actually been published (false), one included a 3000 word excerpt from "Mein Kampf" (false) and that the latter had been published in Affilia(false).

But it was in Sweden that perhaps the most egregious write-up appeared. The country's second largest daily newspaper, the liberal Svenska Dagbladet, featured an editorial headlined, "The Feminazis at Our Universities," and it went downhill from there.

Editorial staff writer Ivar Arpi didn't bother to fact-check his claims about the Mein Kampf piece, regurgitating the same mistakes as Quillette, and then claimed the article accepted by Affilia was nothing less than "feminazism, literally."

"Feminazi" was the go-to slur for feminists coined by right-wing Christian shock-jock Rush Limbaugh back in the 1980s but its use in a Swedish newspaper was shocking and extreme; no other news outlet in the world (not even Fox News) used "feminazi" in connection with the hoax. Arpi, however, brought the term into mainstream, liberal parlance as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

Perhaps Arpi's foul language was a harbinger of Sweden's growing anti-feminist backlash. A poll last month showed 41 percent of Swedes somewhat agreed with the statement: "It is feminisms fault that some men feel at the margins of society and demonized," the highest rates among eight European countries surveyed. According to Nick Lowles, chief executive of the anti-racist group HOPE not Hate, that anti-feminism is "wrapped up in the growing right-wing culture wars" and exhibits increasingly aggressive, even violent, rhetoric.

Feminism and gender studies are in the crosshairs of neo-fascism, and Sweden just so happens to have the worlds largest far-right party, the Sweden Democrats, formed by ex neo-Nazis, and one actual Nazi (an SS volunteer on the Eastern Front in WWII). The party won no less than 17.5 percent of the popular vote in the country's 2018 general election.

The "Mein Kampf" hoax itself is embedded within these wider culture wars, and is revealing about their dynamics and the strange-looking self-declared liberals-and-right-wing alliance pushing so much of the outrage machine.

That is best seen in the hoaxers own parsing of their stunt as they bathed in the glow of right-wing adoration. It had a far cruder, nastier edge, and goes to the heart of why the trio so deliberately chose "Mein Kampf" to "expose" the left.

On the Rubin Report, Lindsay offered an explicit analogy between "Mein Kampf" and so-called leftist "grievance studies": He claimed that Hitler, too, "was pushing the politics of grievance."

Perhaps Lindsay thought this was the winning tell of the whole endeavor. But it resembles far more what philosopher Daniel Dennett calls "pseudo-profound bullshit": To the extent it is true, it is trivial to the extent it is not trivial, it isnt true. All politics is based on some form of grievances; that is why we engage in political struggles in the first place: to correct a perceived wrong in the world.

Ironically, the trios whole stunt was based on their grievances towards "intersectional feminism" and gender studies; so are their grievances also the same as Hitlers? Of course not. Hitlers grievances and feminist grievances are not the same, and it is absurd to claim that they are. They are fundamentally different in every possible way except for them being termed "grievances."

This ludicrous equivocation does, though, illustrate just how widespread the relativization of Nazism and its crimes has become, and the nave ease with which it is being spread by people who are far from being fascist themselves.

To imply in any way that feminism and Nazism can be put on the same footing is a reductio ad absurdum: to relativize the atrocities of Hitlers regime. The right-wing media constantly replays the same equivalence dynamic, comparing cancelled events on campus, sanctioning platforms publishing threats of violence or just losing followers on Twitter as Nazism, Kristallnacht or the Holocaust.

But the use of the Hitler analogy is also intended to valorize the current-day "victims" of the so-called "feminazis" conservatives, Trump supporters, the "anti-woke" and their self-declared liberal fellow travelers. They are now framed as the "Jews," the victims of a totalitarian left which, not coincidentally at all, is often equated by the right-wing fringe to Nazism (the "National Socialists were socialists" idiocy.) Much of the outrage at this ravenous but nebulous "left" has now transitioned from attacking feminist theory to the all-encompassing bugbear of "critical race theory."

All this, despite the evidence of the real world where the right-wing was just in power, where in 2020 the GOP won nearly 47 percent of U.S. votes, where conservative churches, universities and think tanks are as solid as ever, and where an enormous and influential right-wing media ecosystem thrives a fact hardly peripheral to the careers of Dave Rubin, Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson themselves.

So, what did the "Mein Kampf" articles actually prove? Ironically, they showed that the journals they targeted rejected both of their papers; only after major revisions to one of the texts and after having been emptied of all traces of Nazi ideology and no longer had any resemblance to "Mein Kampf" did they manage to get it accepted.

If anything, it proved a remarkable resilience on the part of these journals to withstand pseudo-scientific bullshit. Moreover, the article Affilia accepted was a philosophical paper not premised on outrageously obvious forged data, as some of the other articles did. The fact that they managed to fool some reviewers with fraudulent content, and in some cases fabricated data, is not exactly earth-shattering news.

As Science reported, by late October 2018 more than 18,000 papers have been retracted by peer-review journals since the 1970s, about 60 percent due to fraud. The problem is arguably much bigger in the natural sciences than in the humanities and social sciences. Yet, we dont see Boghossian, Lindsay and Pluckrose berating natural science journals for publishing bad science.

When Inside Edition featured an experiment where a comedian read Hitler quotes to Trump supporters, who were told they were from his speeches - and most agreed with the statements. The prankster didnt even tweak the quotes.

That didnt demonstrate that Trump supporters were Nazis, but that people are naturally gullible and suggestable, and will accept a persons framing (especially if it comes from an academic or a friendly journalist) unless they have strong reasons not to, or information that contradicts it. The same is true in this case; reviewers assume that their peers dont brazenly lie and fabricate content for the sake of an ideological prank.

No, the campaigns against gender studies, the study of racism and "intersectional feminism," and the gleeful efforts to humiliate other academics has nothing to do with a wish to preserve the integrity of science; it is an ideological and political crusade against an entire field of science simply because of its connection to feminism, social justice, and the fight for equality. Dont be fooled by it.

Mikael Nilsson is an historian based in Stockholm, Sweden, specializing in Hitler and National Socialism. His latest book is "Hitler Redux: The Incredible History of Hitlers So-Called Table Talks" (Routledge, 2020). Twitter:@ars_gravitatis

View original post here:
'Mein Kampf' and the 'feminazis': What three academics' Hitler hoax really reveals about 'wokeness' - Haaretz

Long-timeroad.ccblogger Jo Burt, the artist and illustrator behind the much-loved Mint Saucemountain-biking sheep cartoons, knew Reilly well, having been a regular customer over the years, with both based in Brighton. Here's his tribute...

Its terrible having a frame builder that lives in the same town as you. Mark has designed and built several frames for me over quite a few years, the single speed town bike thats been in almost daily use for nearly two decades, the magenta road bike, the deliberately twitchy MTB, the single speed cyclo-cross bike, the like a cyclo-cross bike but with bigger tyres before Gravel was even a thing bike that was ridden to the Bespoked bike show in Bristol the day after it was built, the bike-fit that took a lifetime of his experience and three minutes of my time to create the most like-a-glove bicycle Ive ever owned

Mark knew about bikes, hed been dong them all his life, he knew what worked and what didnt and when it came to chatting about dimensions and geometry he was very diplomatic about any ideas you might have but youd always listen to him in the end, because he knew. He also had an eye, that eye that craftsmen have after years of hands-on experience and he couldnt help himself when it came to making a beautiful machine. It was also a pleasure, a privilege and a learning experience to hear his views about bikes especially when at a framebuilding show where he could spot genuine craftsmanship versus a nice paint job covering a multitude of sins at 50 paces.

While I will miss meeting Mark on the odd occasion and cheerfully talking bollocks about bicycles it is through his bikes that he will be remembered by me and countless others. It may be a cliche but he will live on in the miles and adventures his bikes go on and Im pumping up the tyres on his orange one now.

Here's the full story...

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Criticism floods in for BBC's "one-sided" LTN piece "fuelling culture wars"; The usual anti-cycling letter to local paper gets...