We're not allowed to hate others, but we can despise them

Is it okay to openly despise the despicable? To call out what's offensive and ridiculous?

An article in Quillette describes the "training" foisted on employees in the Office of the Ombudsperson of BC. When one press-ganged participant raised questions about the partisan "decolonizing" language being used, he was attacked and shut down by the two-spirit trans trainer. (No, I don't know what two-spirit is either ...)

It seems that in public service jobs adults are treated like delinquent children. (At the same time, actual children are brought up to believe they're mentally ill, with quite a range of phobias, anxieties and traumas to choose from, and if they haven't had any actual trauma in their lives they can always fall back on an inherited "inter-generational" or societal one. 

"Ombuds-" is Swedish for investigator of complaints, but only some kinds of complaints get investigated. In the BC government training session there was a complaint against "hate" and against white supremacy (which, confusingly, you're obliged to hate. ) You know you've encountered white supremacy when you see someone "being on time”, and displaying “manners” or “perfectionism.”

We've all noticed how workers today feel entitled to be late, rude, and incompetent, but those who point it out are being "bullies". Regarding punctuality, remember the phrase "90 percent of success in life is just showing up"? (I'm not going to mention which comic first said it, for we're definitely supposed to hate him.) Now employees don't always turn up (note how often BC Ferries sailings are cancelled due to staff absenteeism). But "being on time" is white supremacy, right?

Children too are taught that if they put down their smart phones and do their school work in school (i.e. their job), they are being victimized and subjected to emotional trauma. Literacy and education are colonialist bullying. "White" values.

There are despicable prejudices folded into all this -- in the way kids are brought up to be fragile instead of resilient and workers are ideologically brain-washed through "training" (bringing to mind Maoist re-education and "self-criticism" camps?) 

Woe betide the employees at the Ombuds Office training who questioned whether trans men who identify as women and are still sexually attracted to women, are lesbians? If you express surprise at this imaginative use of definitions, you're guilty of hate. That means no one can beg to differ or freely exchange ideas, because that would be hate speech and hate speech (aka speech somebody else doesn't like) must be censored. 

So to preserve their jobs, commentators don't "hate" other people -- though they can't help but despise a lot of them.

From "Do Humanities Care About Academic Freedom?" in City Journal: "the three parts of the trio of free inquiry, intellectual diversity, and civil discourse are antithetical to the new holy trinity of diversity, equity, and inclusion."

A List of Permitted Words Is As Censorious As a List of Banned Words

Even worse than a list of banned words, is a list of permitted words. Adoption of approved speech (policed speech) causes starvation of language and poverty of thought. 

Take the simple but richly evocative word “field”, used in physics, consciousness studies, scholarship, professional accreditation, agriculture … as well as in casual speech. In French as well as English, we see the array of connotations: “le champ’, “la domaine”, “le terrain”, and in Spanish “arena” (seaside or sand). Will we never again be allowed to refer to these things because “field” is considered (at least at the University of Southern California) a “trigger” word? USC departments will no longer present subject areas as "fields" of study.

 

Will ornithologists no longer be allowed to mention that pheasants are found in fields – and we must look in grassy spaces of variegated photosynthesizing plants with seasonally changing green-brown blades?

What word isn’t a trigger, to somebody? Who can account for every association every person might make as a result of memory and emotion? If you fear the possibility of giving offence, simply keep your mouth shut (forever?). There will always be somebody somewhere who has an anxiety attack at the existence of vocabulary. This is tough on someone whose vocation (from “vox” – voice, sound, calling) is communication. Shall we then adopt mass self-imposed censorship?

 

The problem with “field”, according to politically correct academics, is that it can by a few associative steps call to mind places where slaves once worked. Slavery is of course horrendous, a blight on world history going back to primitive tribal times (and recent tribal times), but due to current media obsessions we ironically read and hear astronomically more often the word “slavery” than ever before. So why censor “field” when we throw “slavery” itself into every narrative?

 

And before anyone denounces use of the word “primitive”, please consider that it simply means “first” – from the word “prime”. If we create a list of only the words we are allowed to use it will naturally become an ever-dwindling one, until no one may speak or write at all. Perhaps then we should all take a vow of silence, or communicate only through pictorial symbols such as pre-literate tribes used.

(Speaking of ornithology, a related lunacy is taking place around changing genus and species labels throughout the life sciences – removing the names of the “colonial” collectors who first identified and described them for scientific classification.)

See also: some ideologues would no longer even permit the use of the word “the” when describing a group of people -- https://satiricalscene.blogspot.com/2023/02/will-we-be-allowed-to-say-ridiculous.html