The Madness of Crowds

To her audience in Boston she also explained how white people who see people as individuals rather than by their skin colour are in fact ‘dangerous’.70 Meaning that it took only half a century for Martin Luther King’s vision to be exactly inverted.

Difficult and contentious issues demand a great amount of thought. And a great amount of thought often necessitates trying things out (including making inevitable errors). Yet to think aloud on the issues which are most controversial has become such a high risk that on a simple risk/reward ratio there is almost no point in anyone taking it.

here is the first conundrum of the current presumption on the position of women as opposed to men in our societies. Women are exactly the same as men – as capable, as able, as suited to the same array of tasks. And also better.

simply assert that Western democracies include a range of groups (women, ethnic minorities, sexual minorities and others) who are structurally oppressed in a ‘matrix of oppression’. From there what the intersectionalists urge is a political project rather than an academic discipline.

Yet one of the fascinating things about the racism of the anti-racists is that it presumes that the situation of race relations is the same everywhere and always

So here is another paradoxical, impossible demand. A person who chooses to be ridiculous without being ridiculed.

Whereas gays may just want to be accepted like everyone else, queers want to be recognized as fundamentally different to everyone else and to use that difference to tear down the kind of order that gays are working to get into. It is an almost never acknowledged but completely central divide that has existed as long as ‘gay’ has been recognized as

If the foundations of the new metaphysics are precarious and the presumptions that we are being asked to follow seem subtly wrong, then it is the addition into the mix of the communications revolution that is causing the conditions for a crowd madness.

And whether or not anyone is born gay, or whether everyone who is gay is born gay, it does not follow at all that being gay is a one-way street.