The Danger of Safety-ism

If only experts would stop telling us how mentally ill we all are. 

"Mental Illness a Growing Threat Among Teens" is a headline we read daily. Apparently it's what readers and listeners want to hear; media outlets poll them to find out and then give them what they want. For hits and ratings, mental illness is rated highly, topic-wise. 

The "mental illness among teens" narrative feeds the reluctance of teens to grow up and be self-supporting -- it seems too dangerous. Did Covid lockdowns teach them to shun employment just as they reached adulthood and governments were pouring out free money to help people stay home? It was no training for independence.

Youths no longer drive (climate change), no longer find after-school jobs (prefer online gigs), nor if they go to college, find student housing (rents too high). Do they even become students? Apparently colleges might put them in range of "harm" due to hearing opinions in class that differ from their own. "Anxiety and depression" lurk in every lecture hall and library, where unwelcome ideas might be encountered, and discussion relabled as bullying ... 

(Check out Heterdox Academy for lots of current detail on that: https://heterodoxacademy.org/)

Young people refuse to put their security-blanket smartphones down. For them, if something can't be done by swiping, it won't be done. Scrolling is a soother, the contemporary version of the thing their mothers put into their mouths in toddler-hood. Are today's thirty-somethings still toddlers? Many seem to want the gender-fluidity of toddler-hood; take that away and you're "marginalizing" them. Maybe because you're a privileged white Boomer? 

As small children, these twenty- and thirty-somethings spent a lot of time in daycare centres; maybe the over-exposure to non-family "carers" in early childhood fed into a generational fear of adulthood? You learned in daycare to sing-along with a group, in preparation for singing in secondary school from the correctness song-sheet. Now you might be shamed and cancelled if you deviate from it. 

Better to stay home and watch Zoom (sounds like the childish noise you made with the toys in the daycare centre). The place you were banished from in early childhood (home) now seems your "safe place".

If you can't tolerate working and striving, you won't tolerate novel ideas or diverse thought. In their own day, the baby-boom generation despised the narrow-minded "establishment". Independence mattered, and they were lucky: it was easy to find jobs, afford rent, run an old beater of a car and leave home. They valued free thought, free verse, free love, they marched for Earth Day and Banning the Bomb, started communes, discovered pot, turned vegetarian. Now, they look upon the non-works of grandchildren and despair -- or shake their heads in puzzlement.

Not all youths are hiding in basement lairs of course. Some are excelling at STEM or becoming artists or studying History (learning to take the long view). Maybe it won't matter in the end because everything practical will be done by robots. The robots' intelligence may be artificial but they won't get anxious and depressed while they watch and monitor us through digital surveillance. 

Now that will be real danger.

Exclude the Exclusion Ambassadors ... please!

Some publishers employ "sensitivity readers" (editors) to police language in manuscripts which might make readers "feel unsafe". 

Sensitivity editors' role is actually to make publishers feel safe from attack by woke would-be censors. For that purpose, publishers now hire "Inclusion Ambassadors".

Bret Easton Ellis's latest novel came in for editorial correction* when his publisher's sensitivity readers complained it “was not a ‘positive’ portrayal of homosexuality”. 

Clearly, many classic books are in need of re-writing so that people can feel safe reading them. Readers don't want to be ambushed by the notion that there are more ideas in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy.

Some books that seriously need to explain their attitude:

Black Beauty, for not supplying a positive portrayal of horse-abusers

War and Peace, for a non-positive portrayal of a Napoleonic war

Far From the Madding Crowd, for being negative about crowds

Animal Farm, for implied criticism of farmers

Wuthering Heights, for insensitivity toward people with fear of heights

Treasure Island, for casting aspersions on pirates

The Mill on the Floss, for stigmatizing people who can't afford dental care

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for not portraying "them" as a young woman or trans person 

Where's our freedom of expression, once it's edited away by publishers? Like Eeyore of Pooh Corner said of a lost thing:  "Somebody must have taken it. How like them."   

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PS: A disclosure -- I've never read Bret Easton Ellis's novels* but I might now, for who can resist an author who says "I do not want to write anything with a fucking cell phone in it"?                                                                                         I'm sure tired of reading stories full of them, with characters who do nothing but talk on them, text with them, scroll through them, take pictures and solve murders with them ... So please, edit phones out, thought-pruners. ...

State of Health Care in Canada - Miss Polly and Her Dolly Would Die

Did you sing the Miss Polly tune in kindergarten? If so, that would be back in the day when the Canadian health care system could generally be relied on. Do you remember the tune? Try singing the new version:

By golly it's not jolly to be sick sick sick

When there isn't any doctor coming quick quick quick 

He won't be coming with his stethoscope

And a black bag of headache pills and fever-dope

The doctors have retired or they have gone online

So you'll line up at a clinic for a very long time

Someone walking by might frown and shake their head

And say these patients should be home and lying in bed

The health care officials never think about that

As they peck away at keyboards with a rat-a-tat-tat               

Bureaucrats regulate and germs thrive well                      

Health Departments send the bill, and taxes swell  

                                                                                

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. 

The Power Behind the Reading Chair

Librarians, contrary to their traditional image, are powerful social agents. Whether in public or university and college libraries, the collections they build to serve readers and researchers also curate today's readers and their research.

Librarians hold significant power because what they include or exclude from library collections shapes minds, which is why diversity of subject matter is vital. We are currently in the middle of Freedom To Read Week, and how freely people choose what to read depends largely on what they find on library shelves. Librarians must use their power to get beyond merely promoting what's already popular -- the ideological flavour of the moment which the fashionable influencers chatter about on social media.

Bookstores are in the business of providing what sells (a best seller is a book that sells because it sells best). Stores promote fashionable authors with large displays, and libraries do this too with "Fast Read" options (short borrowing periods that create fast turnaround) and face-out display on the Hot Releases shelves.

These books become hot because they're displayed and promoted, a self-fulfilling process which shapes public opinion about "good books".

It's up to the individual reader to go deeper into both the collection catalogue and the stacks behind the display shelves. If all the books on a particular topic, especially from earlier periods, seem suddenly to have gone missing, readers need to query the librarians about it.

Libraries cull book and periodical collections as well as build them, just like opinion-makers "cull" attitudes which the cancel-culturati deem inappropriate. There are plenty of library patrons (and non-patrons) who object to particular authors and subjects in these days of raging identity-bias. It's up to broad-minded readers and librarians together to resist these incursions on our shared freedom to read.

(Of further interest: https://cfe.torontomu.ca/page/cfla-and-cfe-work-together-library-challenges-database )

See also: https://satiricalscene.blogspot.com/2022/11/on-scroll.html

and:  https://satiricalscene.blogspot.com/2023/02/trigger-warning.html

Insensitivity Editors

The Lords of Sensitivity -- editors lording it over writers from Bowdlerizing keyboards -- have insensitively made life harder for satirists. How can satire parody something that insists on comprehensibly parodying itself? 

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/oompa-loompas-no-longer-tiny-sensitivity-readers-take-the-gnarl-out-of-dahl

The latest victim of "sensitivation" is kids-lit author Roald Dahl. His writing is certainly not to everyone's taste, but that doesn't give anyone the right to vandalize and steal it -- only the right to not read it. Would it be legal to seize your neighbour's car, give it a new coat of paint, and say -- here, this looks better, so get over it? Why is it legal thus to vandalize a writer's property and legacy? Whatever happened to copyright? 

Of course, a corporation like Netflix can (as they did) buy an author's legacy (in this case creating the Roald Dahl Story Company). So that gets around silly issues like respecting an author's ... authorship. The Roald Dahl Story Company is a branch of the international corporate chain of Cancel-Culture Inc.

Dahl, like Dr. Seuss and others, has been worked over by the "sensitivity" gang, part of a woke army which is nothing but insensitive to literature and the intelligence of readers. Aiming to be "progressive", this army is in fact regressive -- regressing back to the time of censorious Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825).

Bowdler, a British doctor, took it upon himself (with his sister) to re-write Shakespeare in a fashion "suitable for women and children to listen to when read aloud". Women! They need things well-sanitized of course -- but we get over the sexism of that today by doing it to all genders, including the non-binary ones or those in which men are women simply because they say they are ... And if that nonsense is protected from being criticized for scientific ridiculousness, why isn't Dahl protected? (At least his books won't suddenly pop up un-invited in women-only change rooms.)

If people want to enjoy role playing, gender-blending and cross-dressing, they should go for it. But why should those who enjoy reading freely what authors freely write, be forbidden from doing that?

(See best-selling word-craftsman Anthony Horowitz, British novelist, discussing the matter here: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/my-clash-with-sensitivity-readers/)

Bowdler had his own reasons for re-writing Shakespeare; here's how the current sensitivity-censors do it:

https://satiricalscene.blogspot.com/2021/11/shakespeare-for-modern-audience.html

The Food-For-Thought Bank

– Hello, is this the Submissions Editor?

– Um … who is this? 

– I wondered whether you’d received my submission.

– I wonder how you got this phone number.

– “Research”! I sent my manuscript to you two months ago …?

– Our response time is twelve months.

– Twelve? That’s a year! Don’t tell me: it’s because of the pandemic, supply chains, inflation, Russia, staff shortage, quiet quitting … How am I doing?

– (Sigh ..) What’s your title?

– Haven’t got one, I’m a commoner. I’m not Bipoc, Black, Indigenous, marginalized, gender-variant, or particularly youthful … is that why you haven’t read my submission?

– Of course not, we practice inclusion and equity. And monetization.

– Monetization?

– Yeah, you know: making money. What’s the title of your submission?

– The True Death of History.

– Oh. We don’t deal in Truth here. You can’t monetize Truth, only “truths”.

– Oh?

– All our authors are skillful self-marketing influencers. To have your manuscript accepted, you must have an existing social media audience, and you’ll reflect back to them their own opinions so they’ll share your site with others and the algorithms will give you more hits because you had more hits. They metastasize …

– Huh. Amazing. Maybe The Truly Metastasizing Logarithm would be a catchier title.

– Yes. But it’s not about the book anyway, it’s about the author. What you’re selling is yourself. 

– It’s a self-auction? 

– Yes, on Zoom, Instagram, TikTok … you must perform on them.

– I don’t do much online stuff, I do print stuff. Would the audience see me, or could I have my face blurred out? 

– Of course they must see you. Ideally your performance would include music – and dance is good – and studies have shown that when people cry online their audience grows exponentially. Also, photos of cooking are popular. And a cat or dog is a huge asset, especially if it’s a rescue and when you tell the tale of its rescue, you cry …

– Look, I’m a writer, not a dancer or actor. Don’t you market books? Ideas? Free speech? Why would algorithms like me, what would those platforms get from my audience?

– Advertising revenue, of course, earned by you telling people what they already think. Most don’t read much, they watch dancing. That’s why bookshops go bankrupt, even chains like Chapters need to devote half their floor space to non-book merchandise.

– But not to merchants of thought. I get it.

– No, you don’t. Media influencers too are merchants of thought. They sell people’s group-think back to them, so they feel heard and “see themselves” in the media. 

– So is that the “circular economy”? Nothing wasted, all recycled to consumers wanting same-again assurance that their tribe is the right-thinking one?

– Now you’re getting it! So call me next year with links to your social media sites, which could form the basis for monetization of what you quaintly call your ideas.

– But will my book be in print?

– Print? Who knows?

– I’d be better off self-publishing and setting up a sales table at a community market. 

– Maybe.

– If I don’t sell a book to a publisher or a column to a periodical soon, I’ll be at the Food Bank. Hey, there’s an idea! What if independent authors were to market books at Food Banks? (Some people still put reading right up there with eating.) Maybe the authors could be persuaded to cry as the food recipients walk by with full grocery bags, and they'd get some donations … We could call it the Food-For-Thought Bank. Thanks, Editor, you’ve been really helpful.