Category Archives: Political Correctness

Universally Accepted

To the Editor:

In his recent review of Amor Towless wonderful The Lincoln Highway (Nov. 7), Chris Bachelder says, The book lacks a prominent female traveler and readers might wish

If readers wish that, they should read a different book. In high school English class, most of us were introduced to the concept of universality, which holds that the job of an author is to create characters with whom all readers, regardless of race and gender, can identify.

As a woman, I am far more concerned about the treatment of women and minorities in decisions about which books should be published and reviewed than I am about their inclusion in books where they really dont belong. I cant count the novels written by men that Ive read where I felt that had they been written by women, we wouldnt even be hearing about them.

It is depressing to realize that the creative process and literary criticism are now falling victim to political correctness.

Lupi Robinson North Haven, Conn.

To the Editor:

John Plotzs review of Fiona Sampsons Two-Way Mirror (Oct. 31) praises how the book, a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, pushes back against the neglect, bordering on amnesia, that has descended on a poet once widely celebrated.

Explore the New York Times Book Review

Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start.

On the contrary, a Barrett Browning revival has flourished in academia for several decades. In the 1990s, in the respected Dictionary of Literary Biography series, Beverly Taylor devoted almost 30 pages to her. In 1995, Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds published their anthology of Victorian Women Poets, whose 66 pages of Barrett Brownings poetry pretty much demand a place in relevant course syllabuses. Also in the 90s, publishers of the good old Norton anthologies put out a critical edition of her long but brilliant Aurora Leigh.

Plotzs hope that Two-Way Mirror will inspire a new generation of readers neglects the past 25 years, during which students of Victorian poetry would have needed an especially stubborn amnesia to avoid the possibility of finding inspiration in Barrett Brownings poetry.

Kathleen McCormackWayne, Pa.

To the Editor:

In his review of Evan Osnoss Wildland (Nov. 7), Angus Deaton describes Greenwich, Conn., and its transition from the Greenwich of Prescott and George H. W. Bush to one that largely favors Trump.

The data reflect no such transition, however. After supporting Republican presidential nominees in 11 of the 12 previous presidential elections, including Mitt Romney in 2012, Greenwich voters preferred the Democrats Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 over Trump, each time by a decisive margin. Similarly, Greenwichs Republican voters showed less enthusiasm for Trump than other Connecticut Republicans in 2016; while Trump won the statewide G.O.P. primary with over 58 percent of the vote, a majority of Greenwich Republicans cast ballots for other Republican presidential candidates.

Brice H. PeyreNew York

To the Editor:

Each Sunday, the first section I reach for is the Book Review. And on most Sundays I squirm in frustration with more than half of the fiction reviews because they are littered with detailed plot descriptions. As this is a consistent practice, I must conclude that it is an editorial decision coupled with sheer laziness on the part of many reviewers.

What happened to sticking with a books theme, style, context and quality (in the reviewers mind)? A primary joy in reading fiction is to turn a page not knowing whats going to happen next. Why spoil that?

Pete WarshawChapel Hill, N.C.

To the Editor:

I have often decided to read books based on reviews in the Book Review, but never before because of a single sentence.

I was inclined to skip Steven Pinkers 400-page Rationality, having long ago read Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, until one line in Anthony Gottliebs review (Oct. 31) changed my mind: His deployment of perhaps the finest of Jewish sex jokes as a tool to explain the concept of confounding variables may deserve some sort of prize.

I have ordered the book.

Steven LubetChicago

Originally posted here:

Book Spoilers, Sex Jokes and Other Letters to the Editor - The New York Times

Last week news outlets and social media were abuzz with the announcement of plans to establish a university dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth and forbidden courses. The new school, the University of Austin not to be confused with the fully accredited public University of Texas at Austin is being created by a group of moderate and conservative intellectuals and writers who are frequently critical of what they see as groupthink on college campuses. Higher education, they argue, has been broken for a long time, and this school is an attempt to begin to fix it.

Accusations of political intolerance and indoctrination on campuses and in the public discourse have been with us for decades. Woke young people have aroused the choreographed indignation of leaders as different as Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama. Every president since George H.W. Bush has earned points by attacking political correctness.

In 2019, Mr. Obama drew considerable attention for opining: I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people and this is accelerated by social media there is this sense sometimes of: The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people, and thats enough. He added: If all youre doing is casting stones, youre probably not going to get that far. Thats easy to do.

Yes, that is easy to do whether we cast those stones at the longhaired protesters of the 1960s, the environmentalist tree-huggers of the 1990s or the judgmental pronoun policers and woke college students of today. Scapegoats like these are politically useful; they inspire solidarity by providing an object for hostility or derision. But educators, civic leaders and elected officials should know better than to play along with this strategy. Instead, they should strive to cultivate the robust exchange of ideas across differences. Given the extraordinary polarization in the country today, these exchanges are more important than ever.

Like all stereotypes, the image of the woke college student suppressing the speech and thought of others is wildly misleading. My 40 years in higher education have shown me that no student wishes to fit such a stereotype, and the reality is that few actually do.

Sure, there are cases of students and professors who are enraged by the expression of ideas they find objectionable. And they dont just criticize the ideas; they sometimes go after the platforms that publish them. At Wesleyan a few years ago, for example, the editors of the student newspaper were harshly denounced for publishing an op-ed critical of some Black Lives Matter protesters. Students threw newspapers in the trash, and because of the intensity of the reaction, editors became fearful.

Some believed that these students protesting the op-ed had gone too far, that they were more worried about giving a platform to unpopular opinions than they were about the free exchange of ideas. That may have been true. But these worries led, as they often do, to serious reflection and lively debates on campus, and eventually to the hard work of thinking through what editorial autonomy should mean for student journalists.

In the end, the protesters recognized the importance of having a newspaper free to publish unpopular opinions and had succeeded in drawing attention to the barriers that kept some students from seeing the newspaper as a vehicle for their views. But these sorts of healthy debates can be hard to come by; political polarization has made them even more difficult.

Concerns about the intolerant left have been around for a very long time. At Wesleyan, where Ive been president for almost 15 years, political correctness was already being satirized in the 1990s see the film PCU. Its true that conversations about bias, sexual assault, climate change or the winner-take-all economy are complex and tend to elicit strong emotions. But the fear of bruised feelings or the threat of offense is no reason to cut off a genuine discussion, or to censure faculty or students for engaging freely in these conversations. I have argued for some time that colleges must be much more intentional about creating intellectual diversity.

Some students dont shy away from disagreement or argument. I have met conservative students who love standing up to their progressive classmates. As a government major told me recently with a grin, I have fun debating with my classmates, and my professor finds me fascinating.

But some dont want to be outliers as has always been the case. There are students and faculty who complain that they dont want to express centrist or right-wing views because they fear being criticized or stigmatized. They may not see themselves as hypersensitive, but they do crave some protection from students and colleagues whom they perceive as demanding leftist ideological conformity.

Those who complain of such conformity should recognize that their fear isnt the fault of anyones wokeness or hostility toward free expression. It is a sign that they need more courage for it requires courage for students, or anyone, to stay engaged with difference. Whatever your political position, embracing intellectual diversity means being brave enough to consider ideas and practices that might challenge your own beliefs or cause you to change your views, or even your life.

The idea that woke students are merely performing political engagement without truly acknowledging the realities of American life is flatly wrong. During the elections of 2020, students across the country were not just out canceling others they were organizing to create change. According to research from the Institute for Democracy & Higher Education at Tufts University, undergraduates registered in higher numbers and turned out to vote more often than in previous election cycles. More than two-thirds of college students voted in 2020, up more than 10 percentage points from the previous presidential election. Many also helped others get to the polls.

In the current climate of political pessimism and manufactured outrage, we can work with students to reject the tired tropes of the past and embrace what many in the older generations have forgotten: how to engage with and, yes, debate people who have a variety of points of view and who imagine the future with a mix of hopes sometimes very different from their own. No scapegoats required.

See the article here:

Opinion | The Woke Student Is Just a Scapegoat - The New York Times

The bomb blast outside Liverpool Womens Hospital last weekend has thrust the terror threat in Britain today back into the spotlight.

The suspect who died in the explosion 32-year-old Emad al-Swealmeen had first failed in his application for asylum in 2014. During his stay in the UK, he was sectioned under the Mental Health Act for six months over a knife-related incident. Having supposedly converted from Islam to Christianity in 2017, his case has shed light on previous warnings made by senior Church of England clerics that some Muslim asylum seekers were trying to become Christian converts in order to avoid deportation from the UK to Muslim-majority countries where they could be charged with apostasy.

Following the Liverpool terror blast and the recent killing of MP Sir David Amess, the national terror threat has been raised from substantial to severe meaning that the authorities believe that another terrorist attack is highly likely to take place in the UK.

So, what is fuelling ideological extremism in the UK? And what can be done by the UK government to counter the spread of extremism and enhance national security?

According to leading counter-terrorism officials, such as Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner Neil Basu, the fastest-growing terror threat is far-right extremism. But this does not mean it is the prevailing terror threat in modern-day Britain. Far from it.

MI5s broader terror-related watchlist contains 43,000 individuals. In 2020, it was reported that the vast majority of these suspects as many as 39,000 are Islamist extremists. A few thousand were classified as far-right extremists. Little wonder that an independent review of terrorism acts in 2019, by Jonathan Hall QC, concluded that Islamist terrorism remains the principal threat in Great Britain. The review also looked at cases going before the family courts in 2019, and noted the relatively high number of parents seeking to indoctrinate their children many of whom were very young with (mainly Islamist) terrorist sympathies.

Prison-population patterns also demonstrate that Islamist extremism represents the prevailing terror threat in the UK. As of 31 March 2021, there were 215 persons in custody for terrorism-connected offences. Of those in custody, nearly three in four 73 per cent were categorised as holding Islamist-extremist views. This dwarfs the one in five people in custody for terrorism-connected offences who were categorised as adhering to extreme right-wing ideologies.

The centre-piece of the governments counter-extremism strategy is the Prevent programme. This requires teachers, lecturers and many other professionals to report those they believe to be at risk of radicalisation to the authorities. Those deemed most at risk are then referred to Channel, which provides more intensive support.

Yet, recent data suggest that there is a fundamental mismatch between the ideological composition of cases referred to Prevent (and eventually diverted for de-radicalisation through Channel) and the overall nature of the national terror threat. So, while the prevailing terror threat in the UK is Islamist extremism, this is not reflected within our counter-terrorism structures.

From April 2020 to March 2021, over half of Prevent referrals fell into the mixed, unstable and unclear ideology category (51 per cent). The percentage of Islamist-radicalisation cases referred to Prevent (22 per cent) was lower than the share falling into the right-wing radicalisation category (25 per cent). When cases referred to Prevent are upgraded and discussed at a Channel panel, right-wing radicalisation and Islamist radicalisation account for 42 per cent and 25 per cent of cases respectively. Of the 688 cases adopted as fully fledged Channel cases, fewer than one in four cases (22 per cent) were associated with Islamist radicalisation, while nearly half 46 per cent were categorised as cases of right-wing radicalisation.

Why do the types of cases referred to the UKs de-radicalisation programme not reflect the ideological character of the overall terror threat we face? It is likely because the main organisations involved in referring cases to the Prevent scheme police forces, educational institutions, healthcare agencies and local councils have succumbed to the prejudices of identity politics and political correctness. It is entirely plausible that the UKs left-leaning public institutions feel more comfortable referring potential cases of right-wing radicalisation to Prevent than they do referring cases of Islamist radicalisation. It is also hardly far-fetched to believe that individuals in politically correct settings are concerned about being accused of racism or Islamophobia if they air their suspicions that an individual is at risk of Islamist-inspired radicalisation. Such accusations especially in the public sector can ruin ones career.

The public discussion of the terror-related killing of David Amess provided further evidence of a country paralysed by political correctness. The killers alleged link to Islamist extremism has been routinely ignored in favour of blaming other factors. Some have blamed the UKs confrontational political culture. While others have bizarrely asserted a tenuous connection between the killing of Amess and people posting abusive messages on social media. These narratives, in which an adversarial political culture and online rudeness have been held responsible for an MPs murder, are scarily divorced from reality.

Perhaps this refusal to look Islamist terrorism in the face is down to fear. Our elected representatives have seen one of their colleagues stabbed to death by a suspected Islamist extremist they may be frightened of reprisals if they stress the dangers of religiously inspired extremism. Nevertheless, if politicians cannot bring themselves to discuss the ideological underpinnings of the UKs principal terror threat, then they are letting down the public.

Some British parliamentarians may feel that by robustly discussing the threat posed by Islamist extremism, they will offend British Muslims. This is the bigotry of low expectations. Being concerned over the most significant terror threat facing the UK is not a form of anti-Muslim prejudice. Indeed, a report by Crest Advisory found that much like the wider public a comfortable majority of British Muslims are concerned about Islamist extremism. It is also worth noting that when compared to the general population, British Muslims are more likely to say that they would report someone at risk of radicalisation to the relevant authorities. For example, before the Manchester Arena bombing, the perpetrator, Salman Abedi, was banned from a local mosque over his radical views on ISIS and reported by Muslims to the authorities.

Political correctness must not obscure our efforts to tackle violent jihadism. But at the moment, that is exactly what is happening.

There has also not been enough discussion over the role in the rise of Islamist extremism played by state-backed multiculturalism which has encouraged the segregation of communities and cultivated parallel societies.

Indeed, British Islamism has taken root as a serious problem in Englands two largest cities London and Birmingham. Londons eastern boroughs Tower Hamlets and Newham are a particular cause for concern. Both contain largely segregated Muslim communities, whose members originated in deprived agricultural parts of Sylhet in north-eastern Bangladesh. Several Birmingham wards, such as Springfield and Sparkbrook in the citys Hall Green parliamentary constituency, contain deprived, poorly integrated, predominantly Pakistani-origin neighbourhoods. Much of Birminghams Pakistani-heritage population originates from economically dislocated rural villages in the Azad Kashmir region.

In Manchester, Libyan-origin communities have provided breeding grounds for Islamist extremism. Leading counter-terrorism officials, including Neil Basu, have even suggested that the British-Libyan jihadi nexus had not been given sufficient attention by the authorities.

The existence of these segregated hubs of anti-British ideological extremism is telling. It shows how the British political establishment has overestimated the willingness of people from vastly different religious and cultural contexts to integrate into British society. There is therefore a clear need for any counter-extremism strategy to have social cohesion at its heart.

The difficulties of successfully integrating refugees and asylum seekers from unstable Muslim-majority countries have been laid bare in recent years. The case of Emad al-Swealmeen is merely the latest in a string of terror-related incidents involving foreign nationals who have either claimed or been granted asylum in the UK. This includes Libyan refugee Khairi Saadallah, who was convicted of a string of criminal offences before stabbing three park-goers to death in Reading in 2020.

Iraqi teenage asylum seeker Ahmed Hassan was sentenced to life, with a minimum prison term of 34 years, for planting a homemade bomb on a London Underground train and injuring 51 people in 2017. Recent research by the Henry Jackson Society found that, since 1998, around a quarter of foreign nationals convicted of Islamist-related terror offences had an asylum background.

This clearly shows that the UK has a dysfunctional asylum system that is contributing to the terror threat.

The reality is that the UKs border-security system is not fit for purpose. It signally fails to prioritise national security. The UK should take pride in its rich history of re-homing some of the worlds most persecuted peoples. But openness should not come at the expense of public safety. Existing vulnerabilities within the asylum system exploited by a brigade of profit-making legal firms and human-rights activists must be identified and addressed. And the Home Office should investigate localised clusters of Muslim-to-Christian religious conversions among asylum seekers.

But it is the threat of homegrown Islamist extremism that should really trouble us. The combination of the UKs disorderly immigration system and the laissez-faire approach to multiculturalism has been toxic from both a national-security and social-cohesion perspective. In Britain today, there are segregated pockets of anti-British radicalism counter societies which are separated from the rest of society and have produced far more than their fair share of Islamist extremists. The British political class has seriously underestimated the security risks that come with failed integration.

Britains metropolitan political establishment is plagued by identity politics and paralysing forms of political correctness. If politicians are unwilling to acknowledge terrorisms potential association with Islamist extremism, even when one of their own colleagues is stabbed to death at a constituency surgery, then we are serious trouble.

The government needs to grasp the nettle and embark on a courageous agenda of radical reform. This should include: identifying the parts of the country that are socially segregated, materially deprived and have a history of Islamist activity; developing localised social-cohesion and counter-extremism plans; and addressing the corrosive effect of official multiculturalism.

Above all, we need to address the failings of our counter-extremism system and its failure to prioritise public safety. And all too often, those tasked with the rehabilitation of Islamists convicted of terror offences have overestimated their ability and willingness to change their beliefs.

There is much work to do for those in positions of power and influence. It is time they showed some courage and faced up to the reality of the Islamist terror threat.

Rakib Ehsan is a research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.

Picture by: Getty

Excerpt from:

We need to get real about Islamist terrorism - Spiked

Trigger warnings have been built into a new device developed for classrooms and social gatherings that sounds an alarm when it detects offensive language and jokes.

The lamp-sized gadget is an attempt to manifest political correctness as an ideology into a product, developers have said, and it is being trialled for potential use as a tool to moderate debate in settings like UK schools and universities.

Branded the Themis, the device is intended to be placed amid a debate setting and to emit a warning when it is triggered by the sound of banned language, racial terms and comments about body image.

Dinner parties and family gatherings could be also policed by the product, its designer has said, as the device could speak up for those at the table offended by certain topics of conversation and encourage self-critique in others.

Zinah Issa, who unveiled the product at Dubai Design Week, told The Telegraph: Through the use of speech recognition and sound sensors, we were able to program Themis to detect offensive terms and sentences - racial slurs, offensive jokes - through the microphone.

She added that extremely bothersome alarms triggered by such language last approximately two minutes, after which Themis turns off, allowing then an open understanding discussion among people on the possible trigger matter and the potential reasons behind Themis's activation.

Research is ongoing to see what terminology buyers would wish to have trigger the alarm on the Themis, which shares its name with a Greek goddess of justice and social order.

Research is also being conducted to assess the best market for the device, with an aim to explore its application in educational settings like universities, which faced calls for lecturers to issue trigger warnings ahead of teaching potentially offensive material.

Ms Issa, based in the UAE, said: Themis was designed to be placed in intimate social settings, such as dinner parties or family gatherings, because based on our research people are less likely to speak up when they get offended, unlike settings where people could be held accountable.

However, after exhibiting in GGS (Global Grad Show at Dubai Design Week) a lot of people were interested in having it in workspaces and even classrooms, so this is something that we want to develop Themis around.

Well plan on sending out more surveys to further understand Themiss target market and the audience it could reach and potentially testing it out within educational and work settings such as universities, schools and offices.

Remarks deemed offensive in educational settings have been a course of increasing controversy, with Prof Kathleen Stock recently subjected to a campaign calling for her sacking from Sussex University over her comments on gender.

Designers of the Themis are hoping to market the market product alongside hundreds of inventions and innovations unveiled at the annual Dubai Design Week, at which more than 500 companies have exhibited new work.

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The thought police have arrived with 'trigger warning' alarm that goes off at every offensive remark - Telegraph.co.uk

College is supposed to be the best years of your life which may or may not be true (it's okay to peak later), but it's undeniably an exciting new chapter. For many, college is their first time away from home and family, a chance for reinvention and independence, no matter what you choose to do with it. College stories, a dime a dozen in Hollywood, tend to be fairly formulaic, but HBO Max's The Sex Lives of College Girls promises the rich, raunchy storytelling that this unique stage of life deserves.

Created by Mindy Kaling and Justin Noble, The Sex Lives of College Girls follows four first years at a prestigious Vermont college: Student athlete Whitney (Alyah Chanelle Scott), aspiring comedy writer Bela (Amrit Kaur), legacy brat Leighton (Rene Rapp), and the kind but naive Kimberly (Pauline Chalamet). They find each other the way so many college soulmates do: Randomly, in this case thanks to a dormitory assignment.

Despite a somewhat reductive title, The Sex Lives of College Girls is a rollicking good time and a rare TV show that really delves into the multifaceted and endlessly entertaining world of undergraduate shenanigans. Scott, Kaur, Rapp, and Chalamet have the kind of chemistry that lights up a scene and invites you in. Kaur's raucous energy and Chalamet's meticulous delivery run away with most of their scenes. Any combination of two or three of the girls works just as well as the full squad, like a Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants where the focus is also on other people's pants.

Female friendship :')Credit: HBO

Fans of the Kaling oeuvre will recognize her comic rhythms, on display here with a knack for subverting our first impressions of these characters. Demure Kimberly doesn't hesitate to stand up for herself, while prim and proper Leighton loves a good expletive. Bela is the most forward about her horny determination, but how it will manifest from a naked party to a library meet cute to a concerning power move to get a writing job will never be what you expect. There are pockets where the comedic tone shifts without warning, but the characters are at least at the same party (literally and figuratively) which sells those scenes instead of disorienting the viewer.

HBO provided critics with the first six episodes, during which the show is still uneven in handling the girls' individual journeys. Some are romantic or sexual, some academic, some socioeconomic or familial, but no one is written out fully enough to have it all. Whitney feels the most underwritten for the first half of the season, where the focus is on a predictable relationship more than her athletics, academics, or the pressure of being a Senator's daughter.

The show gets a little tenuous when it comes to such serious subjects: Whitneys life beyond romance, Kimberly's financial struggles, Leighton's journey to accept herself. The bones are there, but so is the modern comedy reflex to speak to progressive ideas but still comfort those who fear political correctness. Leighton's hours working at a women's center provide stereotypical hypersensitive depictions of LGBTQIA+ students that never really go away, even as she immerses herself in their world.

But Sex Lives is, simply put, a whole lot of fun. After a one-hour premiere the 30-minute episodes fly by in a whirl of frat parties, one-liners, and deeply relatable subplots like obsessing over an Instagram comment or corroborating lies to please parents. It might look exactly like your college experience or not resemble it at all, but anyone who was ever that age can relate to the infinite, terrifying possibility of newfound maturity or lack thereof.

The Sex Lives of College Girls is now streaming on HBO Max, with three weekly episodes Nov. 25 and Dec. 2, and the final two on Dec. 9.

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'The Sex Lives of College Girls' on HBO Max is a hilarious, sexy treat from Mindy Kaling - Mashable

Afrofuturism and the decline of our art museums nice use of the pronoun blares the headline of Gilbert T. Sewalls October 26 review in Spectator World, the international edition of the archconservative British magazine The Spectator. That imperious our gives the game away: The lesser breeds are desecrating the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Capitoline Hill of high (read: White) culture.

Sewall is a conservative chronicler of American decline. He tut-tuts, in all the usual outlets (The American Conservative, The American Spectator, National Review), about the dire state of the nation, affecting that rueful but knowing tone every patrician right-winger aspires to. Imagine William F. Buckley in a toga, channeling Edward Gibbon in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and youve got the general idea:

The hill of the Capitol, on which we sit, was formerly the head of the Roman Empire, the citadel of the earth, the terror of kings . This spectacle of the world, how is it fallen! how changed! how defaced! The path of victory is obliterated by vines, and the benches of the senators are concealed by a dunghill.

Seventy-five and still fulminating, Sewall cranks out jeremiads like theres no tomorrow which there wont be, he assures us, if schools using children as critical race theory guinea pigs and Woke California (which is banning boys and girls toy sections in a monstrous scheme to erase gender) have their way. Now, hes spotted another sign of the end times: Afrofuturism in our Metropolitan Museum, of all places.

Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room (2021) is a collaboration between the production designer Hannah Beachler, best known for her Oscar-winning vision of Black Panthers Wakanda; consulting curator Dr. Michelle Commander, associate director and curator of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; and Met curators Ian Alteveer and Sarah E. Lawrence. The title alludes to African-American folktales about slaves who fled lives of bondage by (literally) taking flight. Beachler, Commander, and their collaborators use Afrofuturisms faith in the radical power of speculative fictions as their launch pad. Inspired by the 19th-century Black settlement of Seneca Village, which thrived a few hundred yards to the west of the Met until the city razed it in 1857, invoking eminent domain, to create Central Park, the installation imagines an alternate future for Senecas residents.

Its a magical-realist domestic interior where 19th-century household items from the Mets American wing, African objects from the same period, and works by contemporary African-American artists coexist in what the cultural theorist Saidiya Hartman calls a state of temporal entanglement the Afro-diasporic experience of historical time, in the world after slavery, as one in which the past, the present, and the future are not discrete and cut off from one another. As the curators note in their essay for the Mets quarterly Bulletin, the Afrofuturist period room invites museumgoers to recollect a disrupted past and reclaim an alternate future.

Sewall isnt having any of it. Before Yesterday We Could Fly comes from nowhere and no time and is therefore not really a period room, he grouses, with the irascible bafflement of Abe Simpson in an Oculus headset. Apparently, he didnt get the memo posted on the Mets website: Unlike these other spaces, this room rejects the notion of one historical period and embraces the African and African diasporic belief that the past, present, and future are interconnected Hes scandalized by what he sees as the curators flagrant disregard for historicism, denouncing them for abandoning their trust and abusing their artifacts. None of the objects I saw in the Afrofuturist period room, from the Dahomean royals staff, to the 19th-century Venetian glassware, to the nail-studded Kongo power figure, to William Coles Shine(2007), a witty exercise in Afro-surrealist bricolage that jigsaws a pile of shiny black high-heeled shoes into the uncanny likeness of a Cameroon mask, seemed especially abused. Of course, for Sewall any use other than the reverent display of worthy artifacts in context is abusive.

No surprise there: Conservatives want to conserve. If the dingy period room recreating the 18th-century bedroom from the Sagredo Palace, with its putti frolicking in the gloom, is the hill you want to die on, be my guest. But if you value history, shouldnt you value all histories? Yet Sewall begins his review with an eye-roll at the (for him) farcical notion of an Afrofuturist period room that transforms a 19th-century interior into a speculative future home of historically oppressed blacks and pours scorn, a few paragraphs later, on the rooms weepy, semi-fictional backstory of historical injustice.

He doesnt put historically oppressed and historical injustice in ironizing quotes; he doesnt have to. His readers will supply them. Far to the right and, if I know the Spectator, overwhelmingly White, they share Sewalls indignant contempt for the spirit of the times, as he calls it, when some in White America are beginning to confront the racism, personal and institutional, that is part of this nations DNA. For Sewall and his readers, the very idea of historically oppressed blacks, in this best-of-all-possible post-racial worlds, is just so much weepy, semi-fictional liberal bunkum.

Ceding one square inch of the culture-war battlefield say, a small room at the Met to a hopeful myth that rewinds the demolition of a Black community and imagines a more radically empowered future for its inhabitants is mere pander[ing] to the current vogue for racial justice. From that pinched, parochial perspective, an Afrofuturist period room cant be anything more than a scheme to provide a racial learning moment for a maximum number of museumgoers clearly a bad thing or, better yet, an anti-historical fantasy in the Disneyland of social justice, like, you know, the Jungle Cruise, with its spear-chucking, headhunting Africans.

But what really winds him up is the curators reckless shift from preservation to political messaging. This is pretty rich, coming from the Antonin Scalia of cultural commentary. Sewall is nothing if not a rank ideologue, from his media appearances as the expert face of the American Textbook Council an innocuous-sounding independent, non-profit, research organization launched in the Reagan 80s and funded by ultraconservative foundations as part of a far-right strategy to beat back multiculturalism and any reckoning with the historical legacy of white supremacism to decades of paleoconservative diatribes about the LGBT lobby, trannies (who are, he implies, mentally ill), the calculated and cynical outrage of Black student race hustlers mau-mauing the administration at UCSD, and the trauma of white Americans, badgered ceaselessly, told to renounce their heritage and confess ancestral sins by diversitys inquisitors.

Sewall wants to make the Met great again. Under the new director, Max Hollein, activism and anti-European prejudices are alarmingly ascendant. In a gauntlet-throwing break with the historical lily-whiteness of the Mets curatorial staff, Hollein hired Denise Murrell, who is African American, for the position of associate curator for 19th- and 20th-century art. (That makes three full-time curators who identify as African American out of approximately 200 yet more evidence of Holleins brazen anti-European prejudice, no doubt.) Even more alarmingly, hes commissioning works by artists of color: Wangechi Mutus imposing bronze sculptures of Afro-alien women with lip plates and cyberpunk headgear, The NewOnes, will free Us (2019); the Cree artist Kent Monkmans Resurgence of the People (2019), a high-camp send-up of Emanuel Leutzes Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) that replaces Washingtons soldiers with a boatload of Indigenous people and displaced migrants and the general himself with the artists gender-fluid, high-heel-wearing alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, whose name alone is enough to give Sewall fits.

Sewall yearns for the days when the Napoleonic director Philippe de Montebello kept an aristocratic eye peeled for outbreaks of political correctness and postmodernist trespassing across the border between high and low culture, worthy artifacts and now-art. But those days are behind us, and the mau maus and the trannies terms that mark the user, at this late date, as a dotard or a troll are inside the gates.

Right-wingers like Sewall will have to take courage in the Churchillian stoicism theyre always extoling and resign themselves to the decline of the Met another White Mans Burden, heroically borne.

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An Archconservative Magazine Discovers Afrofuturism at the Met and Is Not Pleased - Hyperallergic

Earlier this year Dave Eggers announced that the US hardback of his latest novel, The Every, would not be distributed via Amazon, presumably recognising that it would be absurd to boost the fortunes of the omnipotent online retailer while at the same time setting out to satirise it mercilessly. I dont like bullies, he told the New York Times. Amazon has been kicking sand in the face of independent bookstores for decades now. But no novelist who actually wants their book to sell can avoid Amazon for long, and Eggerss boycott contained some fine print: unlike the hardback, the US paperback and ebook versions of The Every will be available on the US website, and there will be no restrictions on selling the UK editions. The Everys thesis is that big tech represents a 21st-century form of totalitarianism to which resistance can only ever be symbolic, and therefore futile. One might well wonder whether this half-hearted boycott was designed to prove that point.

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The novel is a follow-up to Eggerss 2013 dystopian satire, The Circle, in which Mae Holland joined the eponymous social media company, a mashup of Facebook and Google, and rose through its ranks. It opens after the Circle has acquired an e-commerce behemoth named after a South American jungle and rebranded itself as the Every hinting as it did at ubiquity and equality. This time, our heroine is Delaney Wells, who joins the company with the goal of finishing its malignant reign on earth. She plans to destroy it from the inside by seeding ideas so repellent that rational people will surely turn away in droves. Humanity, she reasons, will finally turn away from the endless violations of decency, privacy, monopoly, the consolidation of wealth and power and control.

One of Delaneys most diabolical suggestions is Friendy, an app that measures the trustworthiness of ones friends by analysing facial expressions, eye contact and vocal intonations, assigning a numerical value to the quality of the friendship: Think of how much more genuine and authentic our friendships could be if we just apply the right metrics to them. But other ideas begin to proliferate, among them the introduction of a beauty metric for paintings, music, poetry or any art form and an app called HappyNow? designed to answer, in real time, whether the user was happy. Not even the development of sinister surveillance technology, HereMe (a Big Brother version of Alexa), designed to pre-empt abusive behaviour in the home by eavesdropping for key words, is considered a step too far.

Eggers sets out an Orwellian vision of a near future in which big tech has transformed proud and free animals humans and made them into endlessly acquiescent dots on screens. The Every is housed on a California campus with the look of a hastily assembled film set. The wholesale adoption of Lycra (every curve and bulge articulated) is a running gag that symbolises the abandonment of individuality. Large screens propagate Every ideology: Sharing Is Caring; Secrets Are Lies; The World Wants to Be Watched. Employees, known as Everyones, are burned out from unrelenting surveillance in the guise of self-improvement apps that monitor everything from physical activity to political correctness. Consumers sacrifice privacy on the altar of an endless accumulation of apps.

All of this should paint a terrifying picture, but it doesnt (though I will concede that the possibility of eye-tracking technology that prevents you skimming War and Peace is genuinely scary). The problem is that none of the characters is given anything resembling a personality, let alone an arc except for the purpose of tracking when they start to give in to the Everys ethos. There seem to be no inner lives. Not only are the characters subordinated to the plot, but they are subsumed entirely by the novels polemic, so theres nothing at stake. The Everys other problem is that in the wake of big techs own self-parodying behaviour Amazons anti-union scandals, the Elon Musk-Jeff Bezos space race, Facebooks rebranding as Meta and launch of the Metaverse satire begins to feel redundant. (Meta surely proved this with those October launch videos that launched a thousand memes.)

Eggers is a gifted writer who couldnt write a bad novel; even if this isnt a great one, it contains several funny sequences threaded together with skewer-sharp sentences: Everything God offered answers, clarity, miracles, baby names the internet does better The one question that could not be answered, until now, is Am I good? And it does administer a sharp Juvenalian lampooning of big-tech venality, though this would be far more successful were it not also so lengthy. During Delaneys probation period, an Everyone says: No book should be over 500 pages, and if it is over 500 pages, we found the absolute limit to anyones tolerance is 577. This kind of self-conscious metafictional wink is an Eggers hallmark, but here it had the distracting effect of reminding me that there were still 370 pages to go to reach his self-allotted 577, which made the novel feel 370 pages too long.

The result of all this is that The Every is often entertaining, but not effective. It issues an urgent injunction to save humanity without ever really evoking the kind of humanity that youd remember after turning the final page the kind that may be the only weapon we have in the fight against big-tech totalitarianism. Early on, when Delaney ponders possible ways to destroy the Every from the outside, her friend Wes deadpans: Maybe one of us writes a novel. What a shame, then, that this novel feels like a damp squib.

The Every is published by Hamish Hamilton (12.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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The Every by Dave Eggers review big tech is watching you - The Guardian

Theres never been more choice about what to watch, from TV shows and documentaries to films and original series.

With the start of a new month, and Christmas just around the corner, the new additions to Netflix in November promise to be binge-worthy.

Each month, Netflix introduces a wide range of new title to the platform.

Here are 10 of the best new shows and films on Netflix this month. In the UK, new shows and films will be available to stream at 8:01am on day of release.

This list is in no particular order.

Big Mouth has been a huge hit on Netflix, and season five is set to drop on bonfire net. Expect fireworks.

Photo: Netflix

Joe Exotic vs Carole Baskin - the biggest personal grudge of century. Wondering what has happened to Joe since his imprisonment? You'll be able to find out on November 17. Tiger King 2 is sure to be wacky and bizarre as ever.

Photo: Netflix

The fifth season of popular animation F is For Family see comedian Bill Burr and Emmy award-winner Michael Price, transport back to the 1970s, a time when political correctness, helicopter parenting and indoor smoking bans werent part of the character's vocabulary.

Photo: Netflix

Sure to be another Netflix hit, Hellbound is a story about otherworldly beings who appear out of nowhere to issue a decree and condemn individuals to hell.

Photo: Jung Jaegu | Netflix

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10 of the best Netflix new release series available this November - The Scotsman

Media top headlines November 15

In media news today, Kamala Harris' spokeswoman hits back at CNN, an MSNBC anchor gets slammed on Twitter for arguing Americans can afford more expensive groceries, and Axios warns about a 'reckoning' on news outlets that touted the Steele dossier

Chinese dissenter and artist Ai Weiwei warned that political correctness has begun to show shades of similarities to Mao Zedongs infamous Cultural Revolution in China.

Weiwei sat down for an interview Friday with PBS reporter Margaret Hoover on "Firing Line" to discuss authoritarianism in China. During the discussion, Hoover noted a quote from his book when he referenced former President Donald Trump.

Paramilitary solders stand guard at Tiananmen Square where the portrait of late Chinese chairman Mao Zedong is seen, on the 50th anniversary of the start of the Cultural Revolution in Beijing, China, May 16, 2016. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon (Reuters)

GEN KEANE URGES BIDEN TO SEND MESSAGE TO CHINA THAT THEIR AGGRESSION WILL BE CONFRONTED, COUNTERED

"In your book, you were describing the directives of Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution that would be distributed publicly every night. And then you write this is your quote They served a function similar to Donald Trump's midnight tweets in office. They were the direct communication of a leader's thoughts to his devoted followers, enhancing the sanctity of his authority," Hoover quoted.

She then asked, "So do you see Donald Trump as an authoritarian?"

Despite referencing Trumps tweets, Weiwei disagreed with the comparison, though he did say the U.S., in many ways, has behaved like an authoritarian state.

"If you are authoritarian, you have to have a system supporting you. You cannot just be an authoritarian by yourself. But certainly, in the United States, with todays condition, you can easily have an authoritarian. In many ways, youre already in the authoritarian state. You just dont know it," Weiwei said.

FILE PHOTO: Chinese artist Ai Weiwei poses for a portrait in front of his new work titled 'Pequi Tree', a 32-meter-high iron tree displayed at the park of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art as part of his exhibition "Intertwine" in Porto, Portugal, July 22, 2021. REUTERS/Violeta Santos Moura/File Photo (Reuters)

When Hoover pressed further, Weiwei responded that efforts for people to be "unified in a certain political correctness" have shown themselves to be more dangerous.

"Its very philosophical. With todays technology, we know so much more than we really understand. The information [has] become jammed. But we dont really and really have the knowledge, because you dont work. You dont You dont have to act on anything. You just think youre purified by certain ideas that you agree with it. That is posing dangers to society, to an extreme divided society," Weiwei said.

When asked how the U.S. could fall into authoritarianism, Weiwei said, "I think, for a long time, the West is material. We have much more than we needed. And we are not caring about global situation. But, eventually, all the policies and the politics we play has to be examined under the global situation, such as China become a very powerful state. And how the West should deal with it."

Freshmen take part in a military training at Southeast University on October 22, 2021 in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province of China. (Photo by Yang Bo/China News Service via Getty Images) (Yang Bo/China News Service via Getty Images)

Weiwei has frequently criticized Chinas policies against cultural dissenters and has spoken out against the authoritative government. In 2020, he infamously created a secret film documenting Chinas brutal measures when trying to control the coronavirus outbreak.

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Chinese dissident warns Americans: Youre already in the authoritarian state...you just dont know it - Fox News

Conservatives have long ridiculed liberals for their political correctness, characterizing it as a deliberate avoidance of unpleasant truths to promote extreme left ideology. For decades they have railed against gender-neutral pronouns, identity politics, wokeness, trigger warnings and cancel culture.

Despite these protestations, however, the far-right has developed its own lexicon for discussing race, a set of buzz words and catchphrases that make bigotry sound more respectable.

In the 1990s conservatives weaponized political correctness to attack liberal intellectuals allegedly policing language to promote an ideological agenda and stifle opposing views. The January 1991 cover article of the New York Magazine, provocatively titled Are you Politically Correct? decried the rise of new fundamentalists comprised of multiculturalists, feminists, radical homosexuals, Marxists, [and] New Historicists who insisted that Western culture and American society are hopelessly racist, sexist, oppressive.

Such arguments, based largely on hyperbole and anecdotal evidence, misrepresent an effort to respect diversity and promote inclusion. Political correctness recognizes that language reflects what we believe and affects how we behave. If elementary students read sentences referring to doctors, lawyers and politicians as he, that will discourage young women from entering into those professions. If calling an adult male a boy is unacceptable, referring to a grown woman as a girl is equally offensive. But critics saw inclusive language as ideologically driven and an attack on free speech.

Politicians quickly glommed on to what began as academic debate. Since the Democrats promoted civil rights, affirmed action and gender equality, Republicans labeled them peddlers of political correctness. No politician made greater use of this strawman than Donald TrumpDonald TrumpStoltenberg says Jan. 6 siege was attack on 'core values of NATO' Christie says only regret about Trump debate prep is catching COVID Woman who trespassed at Trump's Mar-a-Lago deported to China MORE, who employed it to deflect criticism from his own outrageous statements and mobilize angry white voters.

While political correctness has been identified with the left, conservatives have been master manipulators of language to suit their political needs. During the Oct. 11, 2000, presidential debate, the moderator asked then-Gov. George W. Bush if gays and lesbians should have the same rights as other Americans. Yes. I dont think they ought to have special rights, he answered, but I think they ought to have the same rights.

With a clever turn of phrase, Bush dodged the question while appearing to answer it and reframed the debate. LGBQ rights were not equal rights or human rights, they were special rights. Once elected president, Bush supported an amendment to ban same-sex marriage.

Nowhere has coded language been used more effectively to hide the truth than in the far rights effort to promote its narrow vision of American identity. Extremist groups, unaffiliated individuals and even mainstream politicians insist that the United States is a white Christian nation. Rather than openly vilify minorities, however, they employ euphemisms to make racism sound less offensive.

Identity Evropa, for example, frames its racist rhetoric in innocuous-sounding terms. Our main objective, its mission statement proclaims, is to create a better world for people of European heritage particularly in America by peacefully effecting cultural change. The group eschews racist language and denies emphatically that it advocates white supremacy. We do not believe White people should rule over non-White people, it maintains. Rather, we are ethno-pluralists: We believe that all ethnic and racial groups should have somewhere in the world to call home a place wherein they can fully express themselves and enjoy self-determination. The message is clear: People of color dont belong in the United States.

Proud Boys have also taken great pains to phrase their bigotry politely. They not only avoid explicitly racist terms but have an antibias statement. We do not discriminate based upon race or sexual orientation/preference, they insist. Their agenda says otherwise. They hide their misogyny behind the claim to be venerating the housewife, and their racism beneath the cloak of reinstating the Spirit of Western Chauvinism.

Coded bigotry is not confined to extremist groups and their followers. Conservative politicians also use it to get away with racism and sexism.

In July 2020, Jim HagedornJames Lee Hagedorn'Legacy American' is the latest catchphrase in the racist lexicon Ethics watchdog finds 'substantial' evidence Rep. Malinowski failed to disclose stocks House Ethics panel reviewing Rep. Malinowski's stock trades MORE (R-Minn) declared The Democrat 'Black Lives Matter' Party, along with armies of rioters, are at war with our country, our beliefs and Western culture. When people of color march, they are rioters and looters. When white people do the same thing, they are peaceful demonstrators.

In August 2019, Trump declared: I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty. He invoked the well-established antisemitic trope that Jews cannot be loyal Americans. The great critic of political correctness had his own version of it.

Now Tucker CarlsonTucker CarlsonThe Memo: Rittenhouse trial exposes deep US divide 'Legacy American' is the latest catchphrase in the racist lexicon Buttigieg says administration will keep fighting for family leave MORE has added a new term to the coded racism lexicon: Legacy Americans. In a September broadcast, Carlson accused President BidenJoe BidenUS bishops to weigh whether Biden should receive communion Congress barrels toward end-of-year pileup Biden taps former New Orleans mayor Landrieu to spearhead infrastructure MORE of encouraging immigration of non-Europeans to dilute the voting power of Euro-Americans.

In political terms, he asserted, this policy is called the great replacement, the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries. The Great Replacement, is a white supremacist conspiracy theory that dark-skinned, non-European people are replacing those of European descent. Neo-Nazis expressed a version of this theory when they chanted Jews will not replace us during their tiki torch parade at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. The man who murdered 51 Muslims in Christ Church, New Zealand and the one, who killed 21 in an El Paso, Texas Walmart also subscribed to replacement theory.

While replacement theory is decades old, legacy Americans is a relatively new term. Carlson did not define it, but his meaning seems clear from the context. He is referring to white Americans whose ancestors have lived in the country for a long time, the people he and his followers consider real Americans.

With an average of 4.33 million viewers during the second quarter of 2020, Carlsons show gained the largest audience in the history of cable news. The failure of Fox News to take any action in response to his racist comments shows how mainstream such views have become. Coded racism works.

Tom Mockaitis is a professor of history at DePaul University and author of Violent Extremists: Understanding the Domestic and International Terrorist Threat.

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'Legacy American' is the latest catchphrase in the racist lexicon | TheHill - The Hill