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."

Censorship -- first Roald Dahl, now Dilbert (Scott Adams)

Last week the victim was a kids-lit author, this week a cartoonist:  https://vancouversun.com/news/world/media-drop-dilbert-comic-after-creators-black-hate-group-remark/wcm/cfc72a46-200d-4ee2-aa28-81211ff6059d

Media de-platforming is itself a version of hate -- hate by censorship.

Some ethnic groups are allowed to denounce "hate", others are not. (Blacks accusing whites of hate nevertheless eagerly hate them back.) It's part of the "privileged" vs "marginalized" rhetoric that plays out in social discourse.  

Censorship is a lost cause anyway: governments and corporations can ban speech but they can't ban emotion. They can only replace hate speech with hate silence. People feel what they feel. 

Systemic Erase-ism and Hate Speech Against the Dead

 In Canadian law hate speech against the living is a crime, so why is it acceptable to express hatred for the dead, in speech and writings? 

The minute you die, your obituary can legally be riddled with hateful innuendo, if not outright condemnation. Your obitus (death, in Latin), if you're from a white colonial background, is an occasion for legal abuse and character assassination. So be "obitu-wary", if you've ever stuck your neck out for a traditional cause: yesterday's hero is today's "racist", "eugenicist" or trans-phobic. 

The name of a former hero might be erased from schools, government buildings, theatres, streets and parks, by people who feel "triggered" or "hurt" by this person's existence. If that's not an expression of hate, what is it?

Take, in Victoria BC, the names on schools built in the early 20th century, such as Frank Hobbs, Margaret Jenkins, Elizabeth Buckley and Edward Milne. Probably most people in the third decade of the 21st century don't know who these figures were, but that won't stop their names being systemically erased from schools and streets. (They were educators, councillors, and humanitarians who had emigrated from England, Scotland and Wales respectively.)

The outgoing Council of Victoria BC has de-platformed Canada's first Prime Minister: Sir John A. Macdonald has been exiled-in-effigy, his statue shipped in a box right out of town because a group of aboriginals decided to hate him.

Name-blanking is one of history's time-honoured ways of hating figures who have fallen from fickle grace, and this Systemic Erase-ism is reaching epidemic proportions in Canada. Even the very plants in our gardens and the birds in our skies are threatened with scientific re-classification, if named after "colonial" specimen collectors. (The AUDUBAN movement?)

We do have to wonder why it's slander to hate-speak about the living but not the dead, who can no longer defend themselves. It's up to the fair-minded historian without a tribal identity-agenda to do it for them. And it's up to the ordinary citizen to resist the knee-jerk Systemic Erase-ism which is meant to re-arrange the past.

We Ban Hate-Speech and Substitute Dislike-Speech

Everyone has inner censors, unconscious and conscious. An author's conscious self-censor is practical, knowing what not to say if you want what you say to be read. This means focus on core messages and don't repel readers at the outset. 

Controlling your tongue has always been wise. Remember those old-fashioned phrases: "least said, soonest mended", and "if you can't say anything nice don't say anything at all". 

Some would call this muzzling, yet would simultaneously like to silence anyone quoting such Euro-cultural phrases. (Ironic, or what?) But those who really care about free speech like to analyze what frees it. "Softly softly" goes further in enhancing communication than does furious shrieking that offends others. 

There's a lot of hysteria about "hate speech" at present, and by accusing others of it ideologues are killing the messenger whenever they don't like a message -- for instance, if it's about a history they deny and for tribal reasons pretend didn't happen, or shouldn't have. Scholarship in universities is more deeply injured by that kind of censorship than social media chatter is.

The knee-jerk "Hate Speech" accusation is disingenuous, but what may be more corrosive, and no one is objecting because it may be their favourite rhetorical tool, is Dislike Speech. How should we calibrate the distinction between "hate" and disapproval?

Love and hate, like and dislike, are emotions, and we can't abolish emotion. Whether expressed or hidden, it's there.

People who hide their hatred often feel free to convey serial dislike (hatred-lite), directing it at values they object to. This Dislike Speech colonizes space from which full-on free expression is driven out -- casting a pall of negativity over communication everywhere. 

So what is the result of all this? Speech law can control what people say, but not what they feel. We need to create an atmosphere of honesty plus courtesy, without letting the heavy-handed "tone police" take over. These are speech-suppressors who call honest feelings of dislike which they don't share, "hate". 

There have also arisen two classes of hate speech -- the permitted (against white, "settler" and "colonial" people) and non-permitted (against anyone else). If you put someone in any sort of "privileged" category, you get a free pass to hate him or her -- and to say so.

When the targeted group dislikes the tone of what's being said they must reserve the right to say so … even if they hate to be disagreeable.

 

.