The left/right, progressive/conservative dichotomy is dead. The new political dichotomy is between authoritarians and libertarians and it’s the authoritarians that have the upper hand.
The authoritarians have established their position beginning at universities and spreading throughout much of the media by use of virtue signalling, conspicuous moralism and selective outrage. They believe themselves to be better equipped intellectually and morally to grapple with the issues of the day and by virtue of their intellectual and moral superiority, they have no compunction in forcing their decisions on lesser folk when those lesser folk won’t take them voluntarily.
By presenting their position as being morally superior, they attempt to shut down any discussion and foist their preferred outcomes onto a largely supine populace.
The resultant outcomes are over-regulation and a loss of privacy and liberty with a stifling of any debate.
===
On the day before the Brexit referendum, I was discussing the upcoming vote with my Japanese teacher (my Japanese has improved from woeful to dreadful). She asked my opinion on whether Britain should remain or leave.
I prevaricated for a time and eventually said that I think the sensible thing to do would be to remain. On balance, I still think the same, but to me at least it’s not a clear-cut choice. There would seem to be enormous benefits from the trading advantages given to EU members and it would also seem that Britain’s best chance of influencing the EU would be to participate in it.
On the other hand it does seem that the EU creates an unnecessary additional level of regulatory complexity for business. In addition to that, the influence of the EU on its member states seems to continue increasing and threatening the sovereignty of those countries. The argument for sovereignty is more an emotional one than a logical one, but it’s a strongly held view by many.
I was surprised then to see a Facebook post the day after the election that started with “I hope all the small minded racists in England enjoy their independent uk.”
It annoyed me because it ascribes to the leave proponents the attribute of racism and in doing so presumes to negate any counter argument on the basis of moral superiority. It’s a common mode of argument in current politics and it is the preferred method of argument for the rising authoritarian elite. Essentially it consists of overt virtue signalling, a sort of conspicuous morality that lets the listener know that the speaker is a person of high ethics and morals and flags any disagreement as coming from a base, selfish position.
The keywords are usually racism, sexism and homophobia, but there are plenty more besides. These keywords are used as a sort of signal that reasoned discussion is no longer necessary (or even civilised) as the user of those words has good intentions and therefore any counter argument would be boorish and uncivilised. It’s most clearly at work in the universities.
There was a time when universities were a hotbed of thought, when genuinely radical ideas were heard. Now the thoughtcrime of failing to accept the authoritarian elite’s infallibility is prosecuted to the fullest extent. And the universities themselves are the biggest supporters of these prosecutions.
Consider the recent shooting at an Orlando nightclub. It was a tragedy of the first order, however discussion of the incident was derailed and stifled by the authoritarian elite.
Here are some undisputed facts about the incident;
- The gunman was a 29 year old male named Omar Mateen
- Mateen had been raised as a muslim and remained a practicing muslim
- Mateen entered the building at around 2:00am and over a period of three hours killed 50 people and injured 53 more.
- He carried a semi automatic rifle and a semi automatic pistol.
- He targeted a gay nightclub.
- During the attack he swore allegiance to ISIL and to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (the putative leader of ISIL)
- He demanded that the USA stop bombing Iraq and Syria
However neither the article, nor Neff and Hickie managed to "discuss the complex debate.” Rather they conducted a tedious competition to outdo each other for confected outrage and self-indulgent righteousness. The article itself at no stage used the word 'Islam' nor the word 'Muslim'.
The University was afraid to even notice that such crimes are committed by Muslims in the name of Islam and it’s not alone in it’s fear. Every time an act is committed by a muslim, regardless of the circumstances, there will be a chorus of authoritarian elite denouncing anyone who calls it Islamic Terrorism.
The usual approach of the authoritarian elite is to draw some sort of moral equivalence between Islam and the west in general or Christianity in particular. This metaphoric donning of sackcloth and ashes is accompanied by proclamations that “we” are just as bad.
For example, in an appalling show of bad taste the day after the Orlando shooting, Father Rod Bower of the Gosford Anglican Church posted a sign at the front of the church reading “We Denounce Extreme Radicalised Christians.” The point, presumably being to equate the actions of devout Christians with the actions of devout Muslims. Gerard Henderson subsequently pointed out that “there are some, not many, right-wing extremists in the West. But few are motivated by Christian beliefs. The term “Allahu Akbar” is heard at many attacks these days. But not “Long live Christ the King””
When a young man shot and killed a buddhist accountant leaving the NSW police headquarters, he had just come from his mosque and shouted “Allahu akbar” during the shooting. Yet there was an instant chorus of voices denouncing anyone who claimed that the event was motivated by islamic beliefs.
On another occasion a gunman held 18 people hostage at a cafe in Sydney. He held up a black flag bearing the Islamic creed and his demands included the delivery of an ISIS flag. He pledged his allegiance to the “Muslim Caliph” and announced that this was an attack by ISIS. Despite all of this, the overwhelming instinct of the conspicuous moralists was to portray members of the Islamic community as victims. The hashtag #Illridewithyou actually started while the siege was still in progress. While a self-proclaimed Islamic terrorist actually held people at gunpoint, the virtue signallers were tweeting their support, not for the poor folk held at gunpoint by Man Haron Monis, but for the Islamic community.
The fact of the matter is that incidents like the one in Orlando, the one in Sydney and many, many like them have an Islamic perpetrator. It's a common thread and it should be reasonable and even expected to discuss this common thread. Somehow though it is deemed unacceptable.
There are parallels here with some of the feminism campaigns. So called social justice warriors (SJWs for those of you not up to date in internet-speak) seem to pick a complaint of the month and crusade against that complaint, invariably from a standpoint of moral superiority. Recent complaints have included “manspreading" (the act of a man sitting on public transport with your knees apart) and mansplaining (which I honestly struggle to understand. I think it’s when a man uses logic to a feminist). Both of these seemingly innocuous acts are considered part of a wider “everyday sexism”.
This idea of “everyday sexism” seems to have been adopted in order to fill a gap in real complaints. This year for example, April 12 was declared “Equal Pay Day” in the USA. “Equal Pay Day” is declared as the day to which women will have to work in order to earn the same as men. In the USA, women earn 79% of what men earn and so April 12th was calculated as the day.
The fact is though, that women’s wages are now as much or more than men's. In terms of salary or wages (as opposed to earnings), young women are actually earning more than young men. Young women are more likely to attend higher education than young men and they get better scores when they do.
So why do they earn less? It’s not sexism, it’s that they work less. Women have babies, something men rarely do, and when they have babies they tend to take some time off afterward. Women tend not to work in the riskier professions and they tend to work less hours than men. They tend to prioritise their families more than men. In general, women value flexibility in their profession where men value upward mobility.
Despite this, any argument against the idea that women are ill-treated in some way is met with outrage. It’s odd because women are not a minority, but the SJW will see any suggestion that women do not face daily discrimination in the workplace as a sign of your ethical paucity.
Sexism, like racism and homophobia, is no longer systemic in any advanced country. Certainly not in the USA, the UK, Europe, Australia, Canada. It exists, there is no doubt about that, but it is no longer systemic.
And so if you support the leave camp, if you acknowledge the “Islam” in “Islamic terrorism” or if you question the received wisdom of unequal pay, you are immediately shut down by those assuming their moral position is greater. You are shut down not by reason, but by outrage. Debate is shut down because the SJW holds a higher moral position and therefore your counter argument is immoral and should not be heard.
Why does this lead to authoritarianism? Because the same approach that is taken to the introduction or laws and regulations that infringe on our everyday freedoms and liberty.
It’s impossible to have a rational discussion on gun control without emotional pleas over one gun incident or another and because the discussion starts from the standpoint of the moral superiority of the gun control lobby, any facts that contradict their viewpoint are dismissed out of hand.
For example if you suggest any relaxation of gun control in Australia, you will be presented with the ‘fact’ that the extreme gun controls introduced in 1996 in response to the Port Arthur tragedy have been so effective that there has not been a mass shooting since. This might be so depending on your definition of mass shooting, but it is only part of the truth.
Homicide rates in most advanced countries have been declining for several hundred years and Australia is no exception. Yes the homicide rate has decreased since the introduction of the gun control laws, but there was no increase in the rate of the decrease. The percentage of homicides committed with guns has certainly decreased, but there is no evidence that the introduction of some of the strictest gun control laws in the world had any effect on the overall rate of homicide.
Nonetheless, one additional freedom was removed from Australians with barely a whimper to accompany it.
Another example is the introduction of compulsory bicycle helmets in Australia. In the early 1990s bicycle helmets were made compulsory Australia wide. This followed a series of parliamentary and governmental committee reports. In 1985 the Final Report on the Motorcycle and Bicycle Helmet Safety Inquiry was released which stated; “unless there are persuasive arguments to the contrary introduce compulsory wearing of helmets by cyclists on roads and other public places”
In other words unless you can find a really good reason why we shouldn’t reduce your freedom, we’re going to do it. Think about that for a moment. A government proposes to remove a liberty from its citizens. The government does not see any reason why it should justify the removal of that liberty but rather insists that someone should demonstrate to the contrary.
You might think it a trivial liberty, but no liberty is trivial.
There is, in fact little evidence that bicycle helmets do a great deal to protect casual cyclists and a great deal of evidence that they discourage people from cycling. Australia has one of the lowest rates of bicycle usage in the world and we have the absurd situation where some of the major cities (Melbourne and Brisbane notably) have made rental bicycles available but the take up is about 10% of that found in other parts of the world as a casual renter is unlikely to be carrying a helmet.
I could go on. Sydney’s drinking laws have just about killed an entire industry. Plain packaging on cigarettes seized a valuable asset from the manufacturers (their brand) without compensation and without any evidence that it would have the desired effect. Governments, supported by the indignant and outraged moralists, are further restricting our freedoms every day and they justify their actions on the basis that doing it for our own good. Seemingly we are incapable of making decisions for ourselves.
Perhaps the most insidious of these restrictive laws are the laws regarding hate speech. Hate speech laws vary around the world, but the goal is commonly to criminalise or make unlawful certain opinions or viewpoints. These typically include opinions that denigrate people on the basis of their race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, gender or disability. It’s a noble quest and it’s a short step to include laws that prevent denial of certain agreed facts such as the holocaust.
Making a certain point of view illegal or unlawful is done for one of two reasons; to protect those hearing that view from being offended or to prevent the wider dissemination of that view. Neither of these reasons is any justification for restriction of free speech.
The fact that I am offended by what you say is no basis for restricting your right to say it. If I decide tomorrow that I am offended by vampires being depicted as pouty teenagers, that should not prevent Stephenie Meyers from writing yet another Twilight sequel. Being offended by a viewpoint is a choice made by the listener and need not have any affect on the one holding the view.
Nor is dissemination of an opinion any justification for outlawing it. If the view is disseminated widely it will be examined. In being examined, the view will either be accepted or rejected. The concern from the authoritarians on this point once again betrays their contempt for the great unwashed for they fear that these people, being less clever and less moral than themselves, might be duped into believing the erroneous view.
In France the laws extend beyond holocaust denial and include certain agreed crimes against humanity. Denial of one of these can land you in jail for up to a year. In Germany it’s not just speech but includes such things as the display of swastikas or other emblems or symbols of the Nazis (the Nazi party is euphemistically referred to as an “unconstitutional organisation”. Spain has the odd circumstance of holocaust denial being legal, but holocaust justification being illegal and Austria has the more dubious distinction of being home to perhaps the most famed of the holocaust denial cases.
In November 2005 David Irving visited Austria and was arrested and eventually pleaded guilty to charge of "trivialising, grossly playing down and denying the Holocaust”. The charges actually related to speeches given in 1989 and had been pending since that time. Irving was sentenced to three years imprisonment (although he served only 13 months) and permanently banned from re-entering Austria.
At the time of his imprisonment, Irving was largely discredited and while the imprisonment raised his profile for a brief period, he quickly slipped back into obscurity. However at the time the charges were laid, back in 1989, he had a rather higher profile and still enjoyed some academic standing. Furthermore, the criminal charges levied against him made him, if anything, a more sympathetic character. At around the same time as the charges in Austria, he was fined for holocaust denial in Germany and banned from the country. He was refused a visa by Italy, Canada and Australia among other places. A key point in all these charges was that there was no real test of the truth of his claims. This was hate speech and a specific view was deemed illegal. There was no need to test the facts of his view, it was simply a matter of testing whether he had expressed it.
His supporters portrayed him as a martyr, a man demanding that the truth be heard in the face of governmental wrath and punishment. It raised his profile tremendously at a time when he should have been drifting from the public eye.
In 1996 however, that all came undone and it came undone not by way of government prosecution, but rather in the course of a libel trial that Irving initiated himself.
Deborah Lipstadt, an American historian and academic had published a fairly comprehensive and systematic dismantling of the entire holocaust denial movement while paying special attention to Irving’s claims. If sunlight is the best disinfectant, Lipstadt’s book was an especially hot day in Coober Pedy.
Irving filed suit in the English courts, where libel laws are more favourable to the aggrieved as defendants have the burden of proof. The defendants (both Lipstadt and Penguin Books) would have to justify any statements made about Irving that could be considered defamatory.
The defence team engaged eminent historian Richard Evans to review Irving’s work and Evans spent almost two years on that task. Evans' findings were scathing. He concluded that “not one of [Irving's] books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject. All of them are completely worthless as history”
Evans noted Irving’s lack of qualifications or training as an historian and notes the inconsistent approach to source materials. He gives examples such as Irving praising a source document as accurate when it agrees with him and dismissing the same document as irrelevant when it disagrees with him.
The court ruled in favour of the defence team, finding that Irving had “deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence”. The burden of costs fell to Irving who eventually declared bankruptcy. In addition, many of his earlier works began to attract additional, sceptical scrutiny and they did not stand up to it especially well.
So it was not “Hate Speech Laws” that brought the truth to light but open and unambiguous truth. Lipstadt herself when told of Irving’s imprisonment said “I am not happy when censorship wins, and I don't believe in winning battles via censorship… The way of fighting Holocaust deniers is with history and with truth.”
You might think these restrictions are trivial or that they don’t affect you, but every restriction of freedom affects every person. I don’t ride a bicycle, so I don’t mind. I don’t want a gun, so I don’t mind. Who cares if trashy people want to make outrageous suggestions?
It’s a fair point. Why speak out on something that doesn’t affect you?
==========
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
- Pastor Martin Niemöller
Photo courtesy https://pixabay.com/static/uploads/photo/2016/01/07/10/46/freedom-1125539_960_720.jpg
When a young man shot and killed a buddhist accountant leaving the NSW police headquarters, he had just come from his mosque and shouted “Allahu akbar” during the shooting. Yet there was an instant chorus of voices denouncing anyone who claimed that the event was motivated by islamic beliefs.
On another occasion a gunman held 18 people hostage at a cafe in Sydney. He held up a black flag bearing the Islamic creed and his demands included the delivery of an ISIS flag. He pledged his allegiance to the “Muslim Caliph” and announced that this was an attack by ISIS. Despite all of this, the overwhelming instinct of the conspicuous moralists was to portray members of the Islamic community as victims. The hashtag #Illridewithyou actually started while the siege was still in progress. While a self-proclaimed Islamic terrorist actually held people at gunpoint, the virtue signallers were tweeting their support, not for the poor folk held at gunpoint by Man Haron Monis, but for the Islamic community.
The fact of the matter is that incidents like the one in Orlando, the one in Sydney and many, many like them have an Islamic perpetrator. It's a common thread and it should be reasonable and even expected to discuss this common thread. Somehow though it is deemed unacceptable.
There are parallels here with some of the feminism campaigns. So called social justice warriors (SJWs for those of you not up to date in internet-speak) seem to pick a complaint of the month and crusade against that complaint, invariably from a standpoint of moral superiority. Recent complaints have included “manspreading" (the act of a man sitting on public transport with your knees apart) and mansplaining (which I honestly struggle to understand. I think it’s when a man uses logic to a feminist). Both of these seemingly innocuous acts are considered part of a wider “everyday sexism”.
This idea of “everyday sexism” seems to have been adopted in order to fill a gap in real complaints. This year for example, April 12 was declared “Equal Pay Day” in the USA. “Equal Pay Day” is declared as the day to which women will have to work in order to earn the same as men. In the USA, women earn 79% of what men earn and so April 12th was calculated as the day.
The fact is though, that women’s wages are now as much or more than men's. In terms of salary or wages (as opposed to earnings), young women are actually earning more than young men. Young women are more likely to attend higher education than young men and they get better scores when they do.
So why do they earn less? It’s not sexism, it’s that they work less. Women have babies, something men rarely do, and when they have babies they tend to take some time off afterward. Women tend not to work in the riskier professions and they tend to work less hours than men. They tend to prioritise their families more than men. In general, women value flexibility in their profession where men value upward mobility.
Despite this, any argument against the idea that women are ill-treated in some way is met with outrage. It’s odd because women are not a minority, but the SJW will see any suggestion that women do not face daily discrimination in the workplace as a sign of your ethical paucity.
Sexism, like racism and homophobia, is no longer systemic in any advanced country. Certainly not in the USA, the UK, Europe, Australia, Canada. It exists, there is no doubt about that, but it is no longer systemic.
And so if you support the leave camp, if you acknowledge the “Islam” in “Islamic terrorism” or if you question the received wisdom of unequal pay, you are immediately shut down by those assuming their moral position is greater. You are shut down not by reason, but by outrage. Debate is shut down because the SJW holds a higher moral position and therefore your counter argument is immoral and should not be heard.
Why does this lead to authoritarianism? Because the same approach that is taken to the introduction or laws and regulations that infringe on our everyday freedoms and liberty.
It’s impossible to have a rational discussion on gun control without emotional pleas over one gun incident or another and because the discussion starts from the standpoint of the moral superiority of the gun control lobby, any facts that contradict their viewpoint are dismissed out of hand.
For example if you suggest any relaxation of gun control in Australia, you will be presented with the ‘fact’ that the extreme gun controls introduced in 1996 in response to the Port Arthur tragedy have been so effective that there has not been a mass shooting since. This might be so depending on your definition of mass shooting, but it is only part of the truth.
Homicide rates in most advanced countries have been declining for several hundred years and Australia is no exception. Yes the homicide rate has decreased since the introduction of the gun control laws, but there was no increase in the rate of the decrease. The percentage of homicides committed with guns has certainly decreased, but there is no evidence that the introduction of some of the strictest gun control laws in the world had any effect on the overall rate of homicide.
Nonetheless, one additional freedom was removed from Australians with barely a whimper to accompany it.
Another example is the introduction of compulsory bicycle helmets in Australia. In the early 1990s bicycle helmets were made compulsory Australia wide. This followed a series of parliamentary and governmental committee reports. In 1985 the Final Report on the Motorcycle and Bicycle Helmet Safety Inquiry was released which stated; “unless there are persuasive arguments to the contrary introduce compulsory wearing of helmets by cyclists on roads and other public places”
In other words unless you can find a really good reason why we shouldn’t reduce your freedom, we’re going to do it. Think about that for a moment. A government proposes to remove a liberty from its citizens. The government does not see any reason why it should justify the removal of that liberty but rather insists that someone should demonstrate to the contrary.
You might think it a trivial liberty, but no liberty is trivial.
There is, in fact little evidence that bicycle helmets do a great deal to protect casual cyclists and a great deal of evidence that they discourage people from cycling. Australia has one of the lowest rates of bicycle usage in the world and we have the absurd situation where some of the major cities (Melbourne and Brisbane notably) have made rental bicycles available but the take up is about 10% of that found in other parts of the world as a casual renter is unlikely to be carrying a helmet.
I could go on. Sydney’s drinking laws have just about killed an entire industry. Plain packaging on cigarettes seized a valuable asset from the manufacturers (their brand) without compensation and without any evidence that it would have the desired effect. Governments, supported by the indignant and outraged moralists, are further restricting our freedoms every day and they justify their actions on the basis that doing it for our own good. Seemingly we are incapable of making decisions for ourselves.
Perhaps the most insidious of these restrictive laws are the laws regarding hate speech. Hate speech laws vary around the world, but the goal is commonly to criminalise or make unlawful certain opinions or viewpoints. These typically include opinions that denigrate people on the basis of their race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, gender or disability. It’s a noble quest and it’s a short step to include laws that prevent denial of certain agreed facts such as the holocaust.
Making a certain point of view illegal or unlawful is done for one of two reasons; to protect those hearing that view from being offended or to prevent the wider dissemination of that view. Neither of these reasons is any justification for restriction of free speech.
The fact that I am offended by what you say is no basis for restricting your right to say it. If I decide tomorrow that I am offended by vampires being depicted as pouty teenagers, that should not prevent Stephenie Meyers from writing yet another Twilight sequel. Being offended by a viewpoint is a choice made by the listener and need not have any affect on the one holding the view.
Nor is dissemination of an opinion any justification for outlawing it. If the view is disseminated widely it will be examined. In being examined, the view will either be accepted or rejected. The concern from the authoritarians on this point once again betrays their contempt for the great unwashed for they fear that these people, being less clever and less moral than themselves, might be duped into believing the erroneous view.
In France the laws extend beyond holocaust denial and include certain agreed crimes against humanity. Denial of one of these can land you in jail for up to a year. In Germany it’s not just speech but includes such things as the display of swastikas or other emblems or symbols of the Nazis (the Nazi party is euphemistically referred to as an “unconstitutional organisation”. Spain has the odd circumstance of holocaust denial being legal, but holocaust justification being illegal and Austria has the more dubious distinction of being home to perhaps the most famed of the holocaust denial cases.
In November 2005 David Irving visited Austria and was arrested and eventually pleaded guilty to charge of "trivialising, grossly playing down and denying the Holocaust”. The charges actually related to speeches given in 1989 and had been pending since that time. Irving was sentenced to three years imprisonment (although he served only 13 months) and permanently banned from re-entering Austria.
At the time of his imprisonment, Irving was largely discredited and while the imprisonment raised his profile for a brief period, he quickly slipped back into obscurity. However at the time the charges were laid, back in 1989, he had a rather higher profile and still enjoyed some academic standing. Furthermore, the criminal charges levied against him made him, if anything, a more sympathetic character. At around the same time as the charges in Austria, he was fined for holocaust denial in Germany and banned from the country. He was refused a visa by Italy, Canada and Australia among other places. A key point in all these charges was that there was no real test of the truth of his claims. This was hate speech and a specific view was deemed illegal. There was no need to test the facts of his view, it was simply a matter of testing whether he had expressed it.
His supporters portrayed him as a martyr, a man demanding that the truth be heard in the face of governmental wrath and punishment. It raised his profile tremendously at a time when he should have been drifting from the public eye.
In 1996 however, that all came undone and it came undone not by way of government prosecution, but rather in the course of a libel trial that Irving initiated himself.
Deborah Lipstadt, an American historian and academic had published a fairly comprehensive and systematic dismantling of the entire holocaust denial movement while paying special attention to Irving’s claims. If sunlight is the best disinfectant, Lipstadt’s book was an especially hot day in Coober Pedy.
Irving filed suit in the English courts, where libel laws are more favourable to the aggrieved as defendants have the burden of proof. The defendants (both Lipstadt and Penguin Books) would have to justify any statements made about Irving that could be considered defamatory.
The defence team engaged eminent historian Richard Evans to review Irving’s work and Evans spent almost two years on that task. Evans' findings were scathing. He concluded that “not one of [Irving's] books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject. All of them are completely worthless as history”
Evans noted Irving’s lack of qualifications or training as an historian and notes the inconsistent approach to source materials. He gives examples such as Irving praising a source document as accurate when it agrees with him and dismissing the same document as irrelevant when it disagrees with him.
The court ruled in favour of the defence team, finding that Irving had “deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence”. The burden of costs fell to Irving who eventually declared bankruptcy. In addition, many of his earlier works began to attract additional, sceptical scrutiny and they did not stand up to it especially well.
So it was not “Hate Speech Laws” that brought the truth to light but open and unambiguous truth. Lipstadt herself when told of Irving’s imprisonment said “I am not happy when censorship wins, and I don't believe in winning battles via censorship… The way of fighting Holocaust deniers is with history and with truth.”
You might think these restrictions are trivial or that they don’t affect you, but every restriction of freedom affects every person. I don’t ride a bicycle, so I don’t mind. I don’t want a gun, so I don’t mind. Who cares if trashy people want to make outrageous suggestions?
It’s a fair point. Why speak out on something that doesn’t affect you?
==========
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
- Pastor Martin Niemöller
Photo courtesy https://pixabay.com/static/uploads/photo/2016/01/07/10/46/freedom-1125539_960_720.jpg
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