The title of today's blog is meant to catch your attention - it is a phrase that has become a joke because it belongs to the old and the reactionary. I'm pretty sure that someone will quickly be able to track down The Donald having said it. The Overgraduate would not, of course, ever use it himself unless being ironic - ironic in the sense of being drunk and yet still talking.
So let's today provoke some thought and invite you to read these two items:
Faye's piece in The Guardian ends with a really well-made summation,
'No-platforming is as valid a means to exercise free speech as any other. We are not in a declining era of free speech - but we appear to be in a golden age of entitled hypocrisy.'
As a man who used to earn his living making cause for some fairly unpalatable types, I rather admire the spare, compelling quality of those words. Read his article and reach your own conclusion and see if you share my inference that this is bilge, stylish and persuasive, but bilge nonetheless.
The second link is to guidance given by a leading university to its students about how they should express themselves 'appropriately'. I've read it a couple of times now and it really is a magnificent specimen of Orwell's Newspeak. 'He who controls the past controls the future.' Aye, you're not wrong there son.
Tomorrow I shall share with you parts of my doctoral paper on 'Bogshite's Theorem: or precisely how many wrongs do make a right'.
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