Induced Learning Disabilities (Cross-Post)

This was originally published on my media blog, but it applies to general politics as well.

Critical Theory teaches its adherents how not to understand texts, art, or speech like neurotypical human beings. Under the influence of its doctrines, people lose their God-given ability to discern key non-linguistic features of communication and consequently become learning disabled.

As I've observed in other posts, words and symbols take on meaning from the context in which they're deployed. As I wrote around this time last year:

"Words are not completely comprehensible on their own; they also take on additional - or sometimes even new - significance from the gestalt in which they sit -- much like tofu soaks up the flavors of the other ingredients in an Asian dish.

"Take a sentence like 'I love my mother.' This sentence is composed of four utterly prosaic words -- yet do we really know what it means? Don't we need to hear the inflection with which it was said? Don't we need to see the speaker's body language? Don't we need to know why/where/when/etc. it was said? If this sentence appears in a poem lauding the beauty of Mother Earth, 'mother' likely does not mean our female parent. If this sentence is uttered with a particular stress after a long sigh, most of us effortlessly intuit that it's meant to be ironic."

All of this richness gets lost, however, once the social justice bully gets to work. Suppose, for example, you decide to write a protagonist who starts off with a few unconsciously bigoted notions but eventually learns to cast such mistaken ideas aside. Sounds like great fodder for a redemption arc, no? Nope, sorry: if you attempt to publish this seemingly innocuous, morally upright story, some motivated busybody on Goodreads is going to tear you apart. Why? Because critical social justice impedes one's ability to comprehend how character development works.

Or let's consider works written in other eras. Many historical texts that tackle the subject of race - including those written by black civil rights champions! - use the dreaded n-word. Those of us who aren't ideologically-possessed realize that norms have changed over time and therefore filter such usages out to get to the central point. But the social justice bully doesn't want us to do this. The social justice bully encourages us to get distracted - and upset - by the surface features of a piece of writing without digging deep to parse what's actually being said. That's how they're able to portray pro-black works (like Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird) as somehow anti-black and beyond the pale.

Social justice bullies also deliberately blur the lines between characters and authors, heroes and villains, heroes and anti-heroes, etc. If the bad guy says something racist, then our would-be censors behave as if the author endorses that statement -- even though such a conclusion is patently ridiculous. Assholes say asshole-ish things. That's how writers establish that they're assholes. How else are we creators to delineate villainy?

Social justice bullies, in short, have trained themselves to deliberately misconstrue what writers and artists mean to convey. And that's why they can never be trusted to control the levers our popular culture. Their attempts to warp the things we make need to be beaten back with severity and speed.