Being a dick

In this post Johan has touched on something very powerful. In allowing reactionaries to frame the debate about inclusive language, we’ve empowered them to portray themselves as the committed realists and us as the sheltered crybabies.

Johan turns this on its head.

if you have no gay friends, if you don’t know any parents with a disabled kid, then who’s really in that cotton-ball cocoon?

I think this reframing is very exciting.

Gay people are being beaten up and murdered every day with nobody reporting on it, while every single instance of someone walking up to a professor and being “triggered” has been quickly snatched up and reported to absolute death by the ever-present modern outrage industry because the story is just too good to pass up. If you’ve fallen for that… well, again, I have to ask: who has the soft and overprotected mind here? Who’s too quick to take offense?

You can see little instances of this kind of idea here and there in all kinds of progressive spaces. For whatever reason this one has caught my attention in a new way.

I’m very interested in all the various ways the reactionary right has succeeded at promoting itself as the assertive, positive freedom-fighter, and all the ways the progressive left has conceded that ground and retreated into passive critique and negativity.

This right here is a piece of the puzzle.