Thursday, 24 November 2022

Liberalism: The best system ever invented

    

      


                                      (Pictured: A product of liberalism - Magna Carta, 1215)

Liberalism means many things to many people. It is a broad-church containing collectivists, radical egalitarians, and libertarian minimal-state intervention property advocates. This confusion, as stated by the Stanford Encyclopaedia of philosophy (including the Norther American use of the word), comes from the post-WWII renewed confidence in politicians, the seeming need at the time to redress the imbalances of capitalism, and most importantly a distrust in private property rights. In this sense then, new school liberalism is the anthesis of classical liberals such as Mill and Locke who saw property rights as foundational and mistrusted any form that state intervention that wasn’t to secure those rights. It has been said that new-school liberals like to talk about how to distribute the pie whereas classical liberalism’s theory of justice is a theory about how to treat bakers (Schmidtz, 2022). It would be helpful then, to not lump these groups in together, as they take some separating. This is the downside to using the word so liberally, if I can permit myself to use that word without infinite regress. What’s more, in using liberalism as a slur, Knowland commits a similar error to the Wokeists who insist that one is a Nazi for unintentionally misgendering someone. When you define something so broadly, it stops meaning anything. When you define it wrongly, you’re not talking about the same thing anyway.

So, allow me to define the species of liberalism that I want to defend. A Hayekian concept of liberalism, with a sprinkling of Popper. Liberalism, according to Hayek, “is concerned mainly with limiting the coercive powers of all government, whether democratic or not”. That’s it. People must be free to carry out their volitional free freely bound only by the law and the government’s enforcement of it. Its true liberalism doesn’t tell you what to do, what to think, or what to feel. It doesn’t tell you how to behave or why to behave that way. But it trusts -because it knows- that once its rules are followed, good prevails and evil is defeated. As Knowland correctly points out ‘autonomy is the citadel of liberalism.’ But where Knowland goes wrong is in thinking that this means anything goes. Knowland states that ‘the trans ‘woman’ is simply a man pursuing the logic of liberalism to its conclusion, and demanding autonomy from biology to ‘author’ himself as he chooses.’ This is false. 


                                                (Pictured: Friedrich Hayek)

Enter Karl Popper. Popper was a British-Austrian philosopher famous for popularising the criteria of demarcation separating science from non-science as well as insisting that knowledge, of which science is one part, advances by falsifiability. Popper said that we don’t create knowledge, as the rationalists believe, nor do we go into the world and verify or prove something to be true, as is the common misconception of science, but we falsify bad ideas by rigorous testing. Falsified ideas (bad ones) fall by the wayside. Unfalsified ideas (good ones) tend to stick around. Good ideas include the system which facilitates all other ideas. Good ideas include mathematical theorems, they include the respectful relationship between a father and a son and they include the computer on which you are reading these words, and all other forms of technological innovation for that matter.



                                               (Pictured: Sir Karl Popper)

Liberalism accepts that people might choose to advance bad ideas over good ones. They might cut off their genitalia and live as members of the opposite sex due to a faddish trend, but the knowledge imbued within the system tends to facilitate the aggregation of good ideas, over the long haul, unless the system becomes corrupted somehow.  Liberalism even allows for a conservative bias as it expects new ideas to undergo a high threshold of falsifiability before being temporarily promoted to the realms of knowledge, which expectation of its future demotion to the realms of falsity. Liberalism trusts that societies, on the whole, most of the time, and in the end will refrain from throwing the proverbial baby out with the metaphysical bathwater. Classical liberalism has no opinion on our genitals, but it demands that claims related to them are subject to relentless examination and scrutiny. If new ideas fail to meet this esteemed threshold, they are rejected outright. Wokeism specifically, and the decay of our cities more generally, has befallen us not because of too much liberalism, but of the failure to pressure test bad ideas.

These ideas have become dominant within our institutions because of a failure to engage with past bad ideas. Certain ideas became too politically sensitive, at first among polite conversation, and then among all conversation. It led to the cancellation of academics like Richard Murray was cancelled and treated terribly by academic and institutional elites for a fairly vanilla book on differences between group. Now, biologists squirm in their seats when talking about biological-based differences between men and women. Research funding is impossible. Because we were unable to engage in a marketplace of ideas, the market became rigged. This explains why the controversy about a gender pay gap or differential outcomes between races. The blame is put on societal injustice because no discussion regarding the grounds it’s based on has been allowed to be had. We sealed off certain conversational topics like a crime scene, we kept the sunlight away and now a hundred species of toxic mold have flowered. We built a Jenga tower of lies and misinformation.

When ideas become undiscussable or taboo – an intolerant system – new ideas are not allowed to instantiate themselves. Conservative systems preserve essential knowledge, but they also preserve bad ideas which can never be expunged, and they don’t allow for new and innovative ideas ever found because of the axiomatic foundations of the system. When conservativism is concerned too greatly, see Shariah law. When it’s not conserved enough, see modern transgender activist priests conducting services in the Catholic church. Our society is suffering not from an excess of liberalism, but from a failure to apply liberal principles evenly or consistently enough. Good luck inventing the microwave in pure patriarchy.


                         (Pictured: turning the 'knobs' too far; a lack of conservation in the Christianity)

Ignoring our biological instincts, our innate tendencies are a rejection of foundational knowledge that need not invoke God or natural law. Like the child psychologists who tell mothers to ignore the crying calls of their babies, or the atomised cities we live in away from our close-knit families and friends, we ignore foundational knowledge at our peril. Living in such a way is an affront to instinctive knowledge and we can therefore say that such types of knowledge constitute a good idea. It needs no special metaphysical category as Knowland, due to his unwavering religious beliefs, wants to give it.

One final weakness in Knowland’s argument is the conservation of a very bad idea: unquestioning loyalty out of a sense of duty to one’s father. According to Knowland, a son has a duty to his father, regardless of the morality of the father. What if the father is a violent, alcoholic drunk? On his account, the duty is God-given. A father is a father is a father. Even if that father is an abusive or dastardly one. This is where liberalism steps in and so no – a bad father is a bad father is a bad father. It allows for a way out of the cliched religious households with a God-fearing patriarch everybody in the family hates and allows people to choose another way ---- in the freedom of the knowledge that fathers, and sons are better off together. Perhaps Knowledge needs more liberalism in his view. Not only is it wrong, but in service to an ultimately inextricably service to natural laws, it’s also alienating natural allies, and therefore a mug’s game.



                                 (Pictured: In liberalism we trust. The truth will always set you free)

Thursday, 21 July 2022

The 5 Craziest Rules in South Korea (that I’ve personally experienced)

South Korea has a lot of rules, some of them better than others. In a Confucian society, rules and an obsequious obedience to them are in what keeps crime rates low and the trains running on time. But many Korean rules are birthed into this world by campus security officers, dormitory managers, company admin or other conscientious administrators seeking to demonstrate their diligence to their superiors. A case in point, my university implemented a no-kickboard (electronic scooter) rule. The reason: somebody had fallen off their kickboard on campus, and – rather conveniently enough – it was captured on camera. Banners of the accident were plastered around campus by some fastidious branch of the university’s bureaucracy, only for kickboards to become omnipresent again on the campus 6 months later, due to the overwhelming demand. Some of the rules, however, are inclined to stick around a little longer. Let’s look at five stupid rules that are alive and well today.



5. No Smoking Outdoors… unless in a designated smoker’s zone. So, if you’re a smoker, you can see the open sky above as you inhale smoke into your lungs, but you’re likely also imbibing the smoke of a half dozen other smokers standing right next to you in an open-air cattle pen, or a fetid ash-stinking metallic box, which in all fairness, look pretty cool from the outside. Honestly, being a smoker in Korea is a hard life. Having to descend Seoul’s high-rise apartments and businesses to rush out for a 5-minute smoking break, only to rush back from the huddled masses and their plumes of acrid smoke a few moments later. The difficulty of finding a place to smoke has given rise to another problem: the smoking smell in Korean apartments. People tend to smoke in their houses, and residents nearby then have to report this to the building security, often to little effect, causing a smoke-smell induced perma-migraine among some city residents.



4. No Dogs in Public Parks. South Korea and dogs have a complicated relationship. Dogs, especially Instagrammable Pomeranians, are adored by social media-savvy Koreans up and down the country. But dogs are still regularly eaten in specialist dog meat restaurants, especially by the older population. This practice stems from the ancient Chinese belief that dog meat has special medicinal properties, like being able to keep you strong and healthy during the summertime. What’s more, businesses and homeowners in the countryside tend to keep white Jindo dogs outside their property of business for good luck, often in poor or derelict dog houses. And judging by the measly rate of Korean vegetarians, animal welfare isn’t a concern to most of the Korean populace. Korea, having a very low number of public parks compared to other countries, therefore tries to keep its parks for people only, meaning that dog owners will have to find a quiet footpath or the occasional spot along the Han River to let man’s best friend answer the call of nature.



3. No Kids Zones. Many in South Korea are in favour of ‘no kids zones,’ 71 % in fact according to a December 2021 report by Hankook Research. And currently, over 400 businesses are listed as such on Google Maps with there likely to be thousands in reality. And this doesn’t just apply to kids, there are also ‘no professor zones,’ ‘no old people zones,’ ‘no middle-aged people zones,’ and my personal favourite ‘no couples zones’. As an approaching middle-aged professor who is currently in a relationship, soon half of the country may refuse to accept my hard-earned Korean won bills. These rules have been justified on the bases of unruly, boastful behaviour in student bars (professors), a disrespectful attitude towards female staff (old and middle-aged men) and just being too coupley and annoying, I would assume (couples). And these rules are able to be enforced because Korea has no anti-discrimination laws. Such punitive laws on the country’s parents are unlikely to encourage the reproductive population to start procreating, with Korea due to be officially recognised as a hyper-aged society by 2040.



2. No Foreigners Allowed.  In Korea, you might hear the word for foreigner (“waegukin”) often due to the natural distinction many Koreans make between kin and non-kin. So, as a non-Korean looking person in Korea, you'll come across it all the time, despite having lived in Korea half your life and being fluent in the language and culture. Bars and clubs often display ‘no foreigners’ signs in the window, especially if there are many foreigners with poor reputations among the locals, such as the American military, which has 40, 000 soldiers currently stationed on the peninsula. I have personally been turned away from a Daegu nightclub, turned down on a property and stopped from giving blood due to my waegukin status. So, whether you like it or not, the Korean/foreigner divide is alive in the minds and hearts of most Koreans, and although it does very often produce some benefits like extra special treatment assistance when ordering food, for example, it is discriminatory.



1. The 50/10 Swimming Pool Rule. As regular swimming, this is a rule that has traumatised me the most. Although not as consequential as some of the other rules, it’s certainly one of the most frivolous. Picture this: you’re enjoying a lovely, relaxing swim in an indoor swimming pool. Your mind is light, your stroke is strong and carries you aerodynamically through the soft, rippling waves of the local pool, your arms and legs in perfect synchrony as the water rushes past your face, and you relax into a state of unadulterated flow. Then a shrill whistle sounds, echoing gratingly around the walls of the pool, presaging a mass exodus of swimmers. The lifeguard then starts talking to you in short, sharp staccato bursts. He isn’t happy. In confusion, you pull yourself out of the pool and go home. You later find out that the reason for the palaver was that the clock just struck 50 minutes past the hour, a time of enforced rest. Why? I hear you ask. Because you might drown. Yes, that’s right. The powers-that-be in Korea, in their infinite wisdom, decided that without such a rule, swimmers would swim, swim and swim some more and then collapse from exhaustion, dragged down to the 1.6m murky depths.  


Rule 4: (50 minutes swimming, 10 minutes rest) At an outdoor swimming pool.

So, despite a country of many wonders and charms, don't be surprised to find more than your fair share of quirky, unconventional or downright irritating rules, laws and by-laws on your next trip to the Land of the Morning Calm.



Sunday, 30 January 2022

Covid and Korea: Trapped in the South Korean Quarantine System - A Personal Account (long read)

Last month I flew to the UK, my homeland, for the first time since 2016. A long overdue, Covid-delayed trip in which my girlfriend met my family for the first time, spending Christmas together. We visited the south of England, went to Oxford University, took a sleeper train up to Edinburgh and drove up snowy roads to Inverness and around the Highlands of Scotland. We contracted Covid and rounded off the trip with a long-awaited reunion (and some strong karaoke performances) with old friends in London. With the relatively mild strain of Omicron setting out its stall, we reveled in the masklessness of society and the pubs open until late. We drank wine in fine restaurants, enjoyed an excellent rendition of the Nutcracker, bopped our heads and tapped our feet to the Lion King, visited remote Scottish castles and drank in the melancholy of hauntingly beautiful battlefields. But as we suspected, the journey back to South Korea was going to have anything but the calming tranquility of a trip around the snowy peaks and sun-lit troughs of the Scottish Highlands.
                                                                                       

It was a harsh initiation to the increasingly large gorge opening up between two methodologies of government, and the trade-off between public health and individual liberty: the punctilious heavy-handed approach favoured by countries of the East, particularly China, South Korea, and Singapore, with a robust use of behaviour tracking QR codes, outdoor mask mandates and vaccine passes (in South Korea and Singapore), and anal swabbing and the welding of apartment blocks shut in China. Not to mention a citizenry far more likely to follow whichever rules imposed, in part due to a legacy of Confucianism which enshrines deference to authority and a higher degree of trust in institutions. The mostly chaotic, laissez-faire approach of western countries, Germany, Italy, Canada, New Zealand and Australia notwithstanding, seem at least a little more mindful of an individual rights, with a few hundred years of civil liberties exposure on the books.

The first hints of the diverging approaches between East and West came at Istanbul Airport appropriately enough, with Turkey long regarded the geographical and cultural middleman between these non-overlapping magisteria. Foreigners were required to join a separate queue where we completed forms that signed away our freedom of movement upon arrival. On the plane, a Korean middle-aged lady gesticulated angrily at my loose mask fitting, and then before arrival there were more forms to complete. As our sixteen-hour flight came to an end, we were greeted by a frenetic welcoming party of Korean staff decked out in full hazmat suits and face shield, and then after a slow-moving queue, there were only four additional forms to complete for foreigners (two for Koreans); a mere twelve forms total, and a small price to pay for our protection from a deadly virus. Only one or two or three more hours until home I told myself as my hand cramped from writing my address for the umpteenth time. Still, no anal swabs – yet.

Form, forms and more forms
Signing away one's freedoms:
the government's tracking application

Post-flight queues and the welcoming committee

Arrivals Assembly
Airside, a final challenge awaited my girlfriend and me. More disaster movie larpers kitted out in full end-of-the-world standard-issue uniforms explained that we had two options getting home: the first option involved taking a private bus to our respective regions of Seoul, with only the most trivial of caveats that this bus had now stopped running. The second option was an 85, 000 KRW ($60) private taxi. Looking around the arrivals hall, it was hard not to spot the Boeing 747’s worth of people slumped over, in their manifold contorted forms, like features of a terrible Hogarth painting or an Alan Seeger sonnet showing the Somme; a troupe of travellers occupying their own tranche of Dante’s Inferno, awaiting their names to be called like listless drunks, some perhaps, in the fog of misadventure, consigning themselves and their families to a restless night under the bright lights and hard seat of the arrivals hall. We jumped into the inferno and took our seats, quite fittingly, outside a McDonald’s.

The chauffeur's assistant: explaining the private taxi options with prices.

On day three of my quarantine, I tested positive for Covid-19, despite having recovered from Omicron three weeks previously, and with multiple negative tests in the intervening period (dead or attenuated viral antigens can remain in the upper respiratory tract long after recovery). This event precipitated a flood of messages, emails, and calls from my employer (a higher education intuition), local government nurses, contact tracers and other government officials. I was also party to the visit of a delightful security guard who pounded my door like he was the lead investigator on a major drug sting. One message from my employer bore the subject “emergency situation,” which sounded quite exciting until I realised, I was it. The email said, because I was “suspecting of having Covid… the police can come to find you”. The fear-o-metre cranked up to levels not seen until the following moment when, owing to jet lag, I woke up to eight missed calls from the local health office, a nurse, the university and God knows who else. When I called the local authority, I was told that there was a nearby Covid camp humbly awaiting my visitation. In a separate message not long after, a nurse told me about my delightful single room (which I wrongfully interpreted as a private room) and the bountiful excesses of vegetarian food available. As a vegetarian, I must say I found this quite alluring. I breathed in a deep, lung-replenishing breath, closed my eyes and tried to recall the satisfied expression on the face of Highland cow’s face when I fed him an apple.

A conversation with a nurse, pre-facility


I was taken to the facility by ambulance, an ambulance which offered me the full bells and whistles approach to transportation: siren, flashing lights, a sick bag, and a new friend! A Covid-positive pilgrim, as luck would have it, heading to the same place a me. “So where did you contract Covid?” I thought of asking. “In a bar? Out with friends? Which strain? Omicron? Oh cool, it’s getting pretty popular these days. What’s your number? Do you like Highland cows? I fed one an apple, only two weeks ago in fact.” Instead, I stared out the window, now car sick at the steady stream of red lights we passed. We were dropped at a Marriott hotel in the heart of Seoul and more dystopian NPCs explained in a smattering of nouns and verbs that there would be more opportunities to expand our Covid-positive gang with a new roommate. The cultural experience was even better than that because you’d be fortunate enough to eat together, share the same bathroom and witness each other in various states of dress and undress, for ten whole days. Plus, you could combine your Covid strains and become a new genetically engineered superhero, just like in the Marvel Universe.


Facility rules (left), and a steady flow of new arrivals being processed (right)

We were told immediately on arrival that “this is not a hotel,” but that we would be invited to a chest X-ray the following morning - on the house! - and so I couldn’t help but think about complementary bathroom sets in fancy hotels. This was just like that! Except with complimentary exposure to high-frequency ionizing radiation instead of dinky, fragrant soaps. We were given more freebies: a hazardous waste bucket and a box containing a pillowcase, bedding, and other mystery goods. I took my room card and went up to the fourteenth floor, an ascent with my second Covid-positive stranger of the night: an older American gentleman with whom I completed my initiation. He was a tall, well-built, wearing a flat cap and trench coat. He did not complain and walked with the air of dignity which suggested a man resigned to the full weight of his circumstances. He told me that he too was in quarantine in an apartment with a positive result and that he too was forced into this facility. A story which, judging by the experiences of British expatriates sharing their anecdotal accounts on a Facebook page, appear all too common. “Well, at least it’s an interesting experience, of sorts,” I said in the lift ride up. “I’ve had enough interesting experience for one lifetime,” he replied. “Good luck Luke,” he added, disappearing into a one of the smorgasbord of rooms of the tenth floor. The sense of foreboding was palpable, and I felt truly sorry for him.

One-four-one seven. It was the right room, the right key card, but as I tapped my key card on the door, in what was in hindsight a giant stroke of fortune, the red light of the access pad flickered dimly, the door remained shut, no sound except the pitter-patter of  telephone chatter on the other side of the door: a Covid chum that I would never come to know. My solitary descent in the lift back down to the car park allowed my disquiet to gestate enough into a moment of clarity. “Joneun yogiso salgo sipji anayo. Ganhosaga naege. Dooin hansal dago malhessay,” I said with a shake to my voice in horribly broken Korean, walking up the car park ramp back to the processing area. “I don’t want to stay here a moment longer,” I repeated in English, redundantly. I remained on that enclosed car park forecourt for many moments longer; two hours’ worth of moments in fact, which mostly involving phone call negotiations between myself, my employer, my local health office, and the facility.

A makeshift toilet
There were several firsts that evening and in the days that followed. I’d never been forced to a government facility before. I’d never been with so many people I knew had Covid before, and I had never threatened a government official with urinating on their building site before, but as the hours passed, and amidst and endless exchange of phone negotiations, my bladder swelled to bursting point and I had little other choice. Perhaps uncomfortable with the sight of a grown man chicken-dancing his way out of an unsightly puddle on the forecourt, one worker took pity on me and handed over a white hazardous waste bucket with an orange plastic bag inside. He escorted me to one of the few parts of the facility without security cameras, the back of the indoor car park. I then handed him a happy treat: a bucket full of urine, and before I  knew it, found myself in another ambulance speeding through red lights with sirens sounding, back to a building a stone’s throw from the building that I usually reside in.

Predictable fine dining
My new home was a dedicated quarantine facility ran by my employer’s infectious disease committee. Usually, home to students whose Covid status was unknown; namely, international students newly arrived. Here the spirit of complementary gift giving continued with the delivery of one two-litre bottle of water, which I didn’t know was to last me for three days. When the water ran out, the stomach pains and itchiness from the drinking of tap water eased my boredom and gave me something to do, and I learnt to reflect that my request for instant coffee being refused was a blessing in disguise, as I’d only have become dehydrated anyway. I was also grateful to receive three meals a day. And I was grateful that the meals were identical, so as not to confuse me with unnecessary ingredients: white rice, vegetables and tuna in the morning, white rice, vegetables and soy sauce at lunch and white rice, vegetables and egg with a meat sauce for dinner, and although I requested vegetarian food twice, picking fish and meat out each time, was an activity that passed the time quite excellently, and for which I was therefore grateful.

No Korean, No entry
Two days after arrival in my new home, it was time to go. My employer didn't like a 'known' Covid case being on the premises, and so I was to relocate from one part of Seoul to another, and in so doing change jurisdiction from one local health authority to another. At first my new guardian did not want me as my Korean proficiency was deemed to be inadequate. What does Korean language proficiency have to do with one’s ability to self-isolate you might wonder? Well, patients have not one but two apps to install on their phones, plus daily calls from a health official. The next day after clarifying that I would be staying with a Korean speaker, they accepted me. Better still, it was my girlfriend who tested negative for Covid one week prior, and this Covid-positive, Covid-negative arrangement didn’t even raise an eyebrow. We had a Korean speaker, after all, and another Covid success story.


Held to ransom
All that remained then was getting to my girlfriend’s place was transportation. Being Covid-positive in the eyes of the authorities, I couldn’t use public transport or a private taxi. So, what was this ostensibly Covid-positive lad to do? Hike down the hard shoulder of the motorway in full PPE while ringing a leper’s bell? No, instead I was to use the government’s favourite and most exclusive taxi service: an ambulance. I would need to pay the taxi driver – I mean ambulance driver – 100, 000 won ($83.50) for this service, for a journey which would usually cost 1, 500 won ($1.25) by subway or 10, 000 won ($8.35) by regular taxi. Walking through side streets packed full of busy students, flanked by the hazmat-clad ambulance driver and a member of infectious diseases team in a dapper navy-blue hazmat, I wondered how many people I could infect, if I actually did have Covid. Indeed, how many people asymptomatically had Covid on these streets already and weren’t flanked by those in hazmat? I used my grubby Covid paws to punch in my PIN number and extract ten crisp green bills. I didn’t get a receipt, just what I presumed to be a smile of satisfaction on the driver’s face, should I have been able to see it.

Ten days worth of PPE
Upon arrival at my girlfriend’s house, I was told that my quarantine had been extended by two days to reflect ten days from the receipt of the positive test result. At this point I’d been told so many quarantines end dates that I was exiting in a Schrodinger’s purgatory of simultaneously having all quarantine end dates and none. And then on day seven of twelve quarantine days, I received the following checklist of items from the government: Tylenol, cold and flu medication, a pulse checker, batteries for the pulse checker, sanitiser gel, sanitiser spray, four rapid antigen test kits, ten days’ worth of full protective hospital overalls and face screens, ten N94 face masks. Thirteen pages of information (written in Korean), two of which needed to be signed, dated, and photographed. I would be asked to install one additional app in addition to the one already installed for tracing my whereabouts and logging my symptoms (twice daily). I might be tempted to ask the question why I would need full hazmat gear given that I’m unable to meet others under the terms of my quarantine, but I didn’t bother. I can only assume there the exhaustive supply of items paid for by the Korean taxpayer was to be used a casual lounge wear, when watching the news, for example, doing your Tabata workouts, or having a quarantine cocktail.
A Taxpayer-funded fun bag

Let’s finish up by looking at the nonsensical rules which facilitated this misadventure. For a start, if you catch Covid in Korea, you quarantine for seven days but if you catch Covid from overseas, you must quarantine for ten days. Is Covid caught from oversea deadlier than Covid caught in Korea? The government seems to think so. This does not look like it will change, albeit belatedly. But it is revelatory of the Korean government’s kneejerk xenophobic instinct, as seen in the need for foreigners to apply for re-entry into the country, but foreigners of Korean descent (those of “Korean blood”), not to do so. Secondly, if you catch Covid inside Korea, you are entitled to claim government compensation for inconvenience and lost earnings, but not so if you’re an imported case. Foreign disease bad, Korean disease less bad? Next, those living in dormitories and goshiwons (small, cheap apartments usually mostly used by students and the working poor) must enter government facilities, but those living in apartments or officetels (large buildings containing studio apartments) do not. Apartment blocks in Korea can contain thousands of people, officetels hundreds, but societies poorest and those least likely to find representation in high offices of political power, such as foreigners, are removed. Finally, those lacking Korean language proficiency are treated like second-class citizens, and thrown into these camps. A documented case in the city of Cheonan-Asan took a foreigner quarantining at home in a three-bedroom apartment and placed him in a room with three strangers, all foreigners, in a dedicated-foreigner block. The room was small, the beds consisted of four padded mats strewn across the floor. 

The overall experience could be summarised as a series of unfortunate events laced with one or two moments of fortune. And yet, I and many other foreigners like me, and Koreans for that matter recount similar such escapades, made possible only by the magical combination of illogical government rules, a fastidious commitment to enforcing these rules from within bureaucracies that do not communicate within themselves or between competing jurisdictions. Most government workers were polite in this whole process, (with one exception). Most were trying their best. All were operating within a bloated government zealously enforcing its diktats, keen to cling on to its reputation as one of the countries that has dealt best with the pandemic, while demonstrating its failure to protect the liberty of it’s citizens and discriminating further still against non-citizens.

International commentators regularly laud South Korea’s achievements while neglecting to mention this hogwash: outdoor mask mandates, vaccine passes, smartphone tracking, the monitoring of their telephone calls and messages, their spending habits of its citizens, the prying interjection of telephone calls thrice daily, the endless submission of details on the government’s apps, and worse of all the conditioning of the citizenry to interpret this as all a good thing. I hope that my experiences and the experiences of those like me can shed enough light on the realities of testing positive for Covid in South Korea. For me though, if it’s a choice between the nonchalant charisma of an apple-munching Highland cow, or the preening, punctilious strong arm of government, there can be only one winner.


Tuesday, 13 July 2021

Anti-Racist Hysteria: A Never-Ending Story

When George Floyd was killed, the entire western world was united in defeating racism. Corporations pledged to combat it and they hired diversity officers to make this more likely. The mass outrage was palpable and bled through every column inch, each Twitter post, and the publication declarations of every Tom, Dick and Prince Harry denounced the evils of intolerance, bigotry, and racism. Promising, you might think if we lived in another time. But we live in an increasingly radicalised world and cut a little over a year post-Floyd and we find almost millions of dollars’ worth of rioting damage, thousands of dead and wounded, and hundreds and counting of gutted police forces. It has become clear that the world wasn’t primed for a positive push against discrimination, and instead, after decades of extreme post-Marxist ideologies pushed by a radical activist class, the Western world is embroiled in a full-frontal, bloody, and damaging war of ideas between the activists, who control the media and the language, and the defenders of Liberalism.

BLM Ideas Matter. Less police = more crime.

The mainstream media, deranged by over three years of Trump, gave up its position as arbiter of truth and became mouthpieces for the extreme activist class. There is no greater symbol of this than the Orwellian double-speak of the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Posts’ ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’ moniker, a newspaper which called the leader of ISIL Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi an “austere religious scholar, a paper which has a whole page dedicated to BLM activism, and which now regularly runs headlines such as ‘Calling food “exotic” reinforces xenophobia and racism,’ as it did on 8th July 2021. The rot extends to most mainstream left-leaning media, who have gone full Woke, such as the New York Times fired editors and others felt compelled to leave a toxic work environment. Now the roost is ruled by Woke activists like Nicole Hannah Jones, who attempt to re-write history and promote the neo-Marxist call to arms.

                                                                                         The whole world is problematic

Claims that ‘whiteness is evil’ haven’t yet been made so cavalierly on the BBC, you find them more commonly on media such as race grifters like Mehdi Hasan on his MSNBC show the peacock, “white supremacy is on the rise,” despite recent FBI statistics which clearly show the opposite to be the case. Hasan claimed too on his popular show that not only have the mainstream media been “too white for too long,” but that England has been too. Further still, the MSNBC anchor Joy Reid, among a whole host of lies and deceptions, says things like anyone defending the white policeman who shot Makiyah Bryant is motivated by racism. Let’s ignore the facts that Bryant was actively attempting to stab (another black girl) with a large knife at the time. It doesn’t matter: if you support the officer, you’re a white supremacist. Or look now at media commentator and Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill on his show claimed that "all white people are connected to racism”. These sentiments are now becoming increasingly comment, more flagrant and more in keeping with the moral panic of the Red Scare or anti-Jewish hysteria of the 1930s in Nazi Germany, with its all-too-familiar ending. Now even people usually opposed to Woke mobs like Thomas Chatterton Williams, hopped on board the moral outrage bandwagon. He condemned the residuum of society while he was at it – the British white working class. For a middle-class black male from the richest society on earth, an easy target.


                                                           Moral mobs can even affect the typically anti-Woke

And now we have a continued moral panic, a new furore, whipped up by the media’s attempt to serve Theory to the masses. After a football season long of Woke gesturing of footballers taking the knee before every game and continuing into the Euros 2020 (taking place in 2021), the Euros ends with a renewal of the rush to avert the dangers of racism lurking behind every crevice of British society. There is only one problem with the accounts of racism. Of all the accounts – the “vile abuse” as condemned by Prince William, and a who’s who list of other celebrities and public figures, turns out to be mostly from spambots and fake, burner accounts. According to a SEMrush analysis of racist comments and emojis posted in the hours after the match, there appeared to be coming mostly from India and the Middle East. Of the slew of supposed racial abuse, only one person has been identified, an employee of Savills, a real estate company. BBC Newsnight reported that a total of – wait for it – five UK accounts posted racist abuse to one of the three players in question. That’s right: five. 31.1 million people watched the game live and five UK accounts sent racist abuse. This is the moral emergency the media and the morally enlightened amongst us tell us must be addressed as a matter of national urgency.  
Non-UK based racist abuse

The UK’s Conservative Home Secretary Priti Patel, however, was inundated with racist abuse, and a betting man would put his money on her receiving more than five racist messages from UK-based accounts. She was a target because she opposed taking the knee, after Woke footballer Tyrone Mings posted the following on Twitter “you don’t get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as ‘Gesture Politics’ “then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing we’re campaigning against, happens”. The Marxist Left – confused deliberately or otherwise about the scale of the problem, then use this cynically to push their divisive agenda, enabled by ignorant foot soldiers like Mings. This cynical ploy is a flagrant excuse to push the divisive Woke agenda in opposition to all reason, proportion and evidence required to make sensible policy decisions in a grown-up society.

                                                              Racist abuse directed at the Home Secretary Priti Patel

Like an immune system overreacting to benign foreign bodies and having an allergic reaction, our whole country – a country that is not racist – is not undergoing this process, the process of a moral panic, a healthy body becoming diseased from a virus-engineered hypersensitivity reaction. Friends of mine, decent people too, because of the furore and moral panic, have been cast under this same, deeply divisive spell– and it’s what it is; a pernicious fantasy. It’s heartening to see the degree of support for these players, who should not be blamed for missing a penalty kick, and who are even more devastated than their mostly adoring fans, who are proud of their performance in getting the country closer to major silverware in a football competition for the first time in 55 years. But this is the panic that will now prompt a wave protests, violence and insidious measures by the Woke corporations, universities and institutions in our societies.

Despite the Woke activists repudiation of science, we must look at this permormative drama rationally, using the available evidence at our disposal. Saka, Rashford and Sterling. Pages and pages of messages of support of love, solidarity, and administrations -millions upon millions of likes, comments and supporting statements overall. Almost every message is written I’ve seen from football personalities after the game has expressed solidarity with the players. You could spend a lifetime compiling all the messages of support.

                          Anti-racist hysteria. The whole country supports the players.

We need greater accountability and transparency to identify hateful speech when it does occur online so that it can be diagnosed, discouraged, and called out. A system of identity verification on social media can help with this. But we cannot continue represented the actions of some individuals (perhaps aided by pernicious overseas actor’s intent on sewing division) to be represented at the views of a nation, or something endemic to the culture of a society. For this reason, we stand with the England players, whatever race, and oppose the Marxist activist class sewing division and with the forces of reason, rationality, Liberalism and progress.








Tuesday, 15 June 2021

In Defence of Liberalism

A response to my friend Amy

 

This is a response to my long-time friend’s response to my original article entitled ‘Why it’s Your Patriotic Duty to Boo the Knee,’ published on my blog here on 9th June 2021. You can find Amy’s response here.

My goal in this letter isn’t to convince Amy on every point of substance, as this isn’t how minds are changed or how argument advances, anyway, but rather to highlight what is at stake in these kinds of conversations. This back-and-forth isn’t just a disagreement between two people whose intuitions differ at the level of policy, it’s a discussion about the foundational principle upon all other innovations in society are allowed to flourish – Liberalism -, a body of knowledge internalised in our institutions which undergirds everything else in society, including the freedom to have this conversation and the technology on which to exchange ideas. To challenge Liberalism, as proponents of critical theory seek to do is synonyms with arguing for the benefits of broomsticks over bagless vacuum cleaners, or favouring loincloths over sportswear, or preferring to dismantle our transportation infrastructure and installing troughs for horses along our motorways. It’s even worse than this in fact because an attack on Liberalism isn’t just an attack on cleaning, clothing, and commuting, it’s an attack on everything which makes life worth living.


Liberalism - the knowledge upon which our societies are based

I’ll return to Liberalism briefly before summing up, but first I should clear up confusion in your response to my article, which is this: ‘Big l Liberalism’ is not the same as ‘small l liberalism’. Liberalism (big L) is the body of knowledge invented by the British 17th-century enlightenment philosophers such as Hume, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson and emerged from the tradition of the jurisprudence of the common law. It stands for “organic, slow, half-conscious growth and an acknowledgement that progress advancing by diagnosing mistakes of the past, and that human reason alone cannot deliberately shape its own future,” in the words of the political philosopher Friedman Hayek1. The other kind of liberalism (small l) is the type you were referring to in your response, that of political liberalism, namely being ‘on the left’, rather than ‘on the right’. It is, of course, entirely possible for a scientist to hold views from across the political spectrum. It is even possible for a scientist to have illiberal views (big L), like a BLM-supporting critical theory-loving scientist who wants to dismantle the structures of oppression, including those apparent oppressional structures defining his profession. But this scientist’s ability to do his job and to hold one view in a community of ideas, free from the ever-present threat of violence, is only possible due to the system within which he exists, that of big L Liberalism.

With that in mind, I’m going to argue to that BLM should be vehemently opposed because the theory which informs its activities and organisers, critical race theory, is antithetical to the Liberal project, by nature, and in practice. I’ll make this case by touching on three main areas discussed in your response to my original article: the meaning of taking a knee, politics in sport, and historical revisionism. I’ll then circle back for some final comments on the importance of preserving Liberalism.

Kneeling as a gesture was given a new lease of life as an act of protest was 're-imagined’ by Kaepernick, to use some of the Woke buzzwordery of the day, from an act of gesticulation or subordination to one of protest. Kaepernick was clear why he has taken the knee: “I’m not going to stand for a flag that oppresses black people and people of colour… there are bodies on the streets,” he said2. “I learnt early on in fighting against systematic oppression, dehumanisation and colonisation3.” BLM, unsurprisingly, adopted the gesture wholesale to be used in marches, public demonstrations and vigils of all flavours and types. People are motivated to kneel for a multitude of reasons. Some are card-carrying Marxists.  Others may be Marxist in spirit but will stop short of action jeopardising their nice house and running water. Others kneel because they want to oppose racism, they felt they were doing a morally virtuous thing. They like the new religion-like tribe, and despite understanding the first thing about Marxism, postmodernism or critical theory, they inadvertently cheerlead its ideas.


Colin Kaepernick, kneeling at an American football game in 2016


Superimposed on these motivations are societal incentive structures which help promote kneeling or pro-BLM activism. These include the effects of social contagion, turbo-charged by social media. It also includes the consequences of ‘a spiral of silence,’ mentioned in my original article, whereby even majority views can be persuaded into silence by a minority view due to the fear of isolation and social castigation with being tone deaf4. This is particularly pertinent because of the societal taboo which was hard-won against racism. As a result, many people, in the face of insinuations of racism should they not show the qualifying level of support, are passively coerced into quietude.

 Here it is worth noting that you accused me of harbouring a “multitude of other potentially harmful views,” for my description of BLM’s spread as being “birthed from BLM’s hoary vagina.” Now, while I admit this certainly isn’t the most elegant of metaphors ever dreamed up from my silly brainbox, it was written for comedic effect and was not a commentary on anything outside of the disdain I have for BLM as an organisation. But in this accusation, you appear to be proving my point that critics of BLM regularly face insinuations of ulterior motives, and the whiff of racism in the views of the outspoken BLM activist minority, platformed by the media class, is enough of a stench to empty the room and send one swiftly home from work with a termination of contract.

 I work at a university in South Korea which has less Woke penetration than the UK, but I suspect, for fear of being introduced to a brown-shirted ‘equity officer,' I might think twice about discussing this topic. And it's not hard to see why: people like having jobs and being not cancelled. They like not being called racists, either explicitly or by way of hallway whispers, water-cooler talk or tweet storms. So, I’m sure you wouldn’t mind clarifying this if only to unload the weight of evidence from the side of the scale which seems to be tipping the favour of the argument advanced here.


   BLM protestors shouting down a diner in Washington DC

Besides the fear of challenging BLM, and the motivations of those consciously or unconsciously further critical theories, the Marxist meme takes another hit of the crack pipe with every kneel at a football game, every column inch of media coverage and every corporate letter of solidarity. You don’t have to believe in the existence of seasonal flu to be a carrier and spreader of seasonal flu, the virus can spread through the population regardless of the epistemology of the flesh body it's carried around in. This was also very much the case with Soviet propaganda  technique known as the ‘Firehouse of Falsehoods’ which concealed lies among half-truths and ejected it with such bamboozling regularity and precision that separating facts from ‘alternative facts’ became all but impossible5. So, although I know it was added for the funnies, Trippier and Henderson standing on a soapbox reading Das Capital is the strawiest of strawmen, for very good people can spread very bad ideas, should the incentives so aligned to do so. I will concede that the Henderson and Trippier metaphor is true in two ways, however. Firstly, bad ideas are often spread by a society’s weaker players (those without the knowledge of how to perform better) just like Hendo, and bad ideas are often intruding into places they have no business being in, like on the far-left side of society’s pitch, in our universities, much like Tripps. (If this makes no sense to you, Dear Reader, please see: England Vs. Croatia, Euro 2020).

Let’s move on to our second of our topics, politics and sport. You make the case for politics belonging in sport because “politics is about all of us, everywhere, all of the time," and therefore “politics and football should [not my italics] be dancing a very sultry and intimate rumba”. Here, you do appear to be advocating the personal epistemology of every drunk uncle irritating his long-suffering extended family at a BBQ, with his outmoded political views, spouted from the tongue and shot from the hip whenever the mood suits. But besides this point, there are two main problems with the delicate politics-sporting rumba you describe. The first problem is that it’s deeply unpopular. Admittedly, this isn’t a knockdown argument against anything. There have been plenty of political gestures throughout history which have been unpopular and subsequently proven right; we only have to look as look at the activism of Emmeline Pankhurst and the Suffragettes, morally heroic civil rights campaigners like MLK, or LGBT activists like Peter Tatchell, all of whom had great successes from sustained activism at times when the bulk of society opposed them.

But a majority not wanting something isn't to be sniffed at either, and it’s clear that the majority of fans don’t want overt political messages shoved down their throats at football matches.  Footballers should have the freedom to choose to kneel, and fans should be free to boo it. In some ways, it is just as simple as putting pineapple on your pizza. Some believe it should be there, and others feel sick to their stomach at the mere thought of it (I happen to be in this camp). However, we should ask ourselves how ‘free’ this ‘free choice' is if pizza companies, advertisers, the media and universities all believe that people should have pineapple on their pizza, and tell you regularly using the full force of their institutional megaphone. Moreover, if your pizza comes already loaded with pineapple, you can pick it off, but it’s not the same as having a pineapple-less pizza, and why should you have to pick it off? Now replace the pineapple with a laxative or rat poison to witness the full scale of the problem.


Pineapple pizza: not for everyone

The second problem of politics in sport is that the performative tedium is entirely subject to the faddish revolutionary whims of the day. Applying your argument, there is nothing to stop a political alternative from coming along and impinging, to whatever degree it decides best, on something that otherwise imbues regular people's lives with meaning. Let’s illuminate this with an allegory.

 Suppose that instead of the viral spread of CRT through society, the vegetarian cause proliferated instead, prompted by a seed incident, a viral video showing a carnivore murdering a vegetarian in broad daylight. The video shakes the world and leads to an outpouring of support for vegetarians. The execution prompts protests, demonstrations, riots, the death of both and civilians, and it causes millions of dollars of economic damage and destroys the properties and businesses of many vegetarians themselves. Corporations, perhaps sensing an opportunity, jump on board and dedicate a large part of their marketing budget to oppose violence against vegetarians everywhere. They put out statements condemning it and vow, in solidarity with People of Vegetables, to opposing all mistreatment of them from now on. The media too run wall-to-wall coverage of events and invite experts who speak of a society that at its core is fundamentally oppressing vegetarians.

As a result, children’s books are written to educate children on there about how to carnivore privilege. Bestselling books entitled ‘Carnivore Fragility’ and ‘How To Be an Anti-Meatist,’ ask readers to analyse the complex interplay between their dietary status and those of a historically oppressed diet and notions such as the 'carnivore collective,’ ‘the carnivore voice,’ ‘the carnivore worldview,’ and ‘the carnivore experience’ all need to be defined and problematised, in what becomes a hugely lucrative multi-million dollar cottage industry.

This allegory is of course facetious in an important way: there has been no historical repression of vegetarians by carnivores, nor is there repression of vegetarians by carnivores today, as there was once subjugation of black people. The world would be a very different place if society one day decided that everything of importance in the world is borne from the interaction of the dominant oppressor class, the carnivore, and the repressed underclass, the vegetarian. The story’s purpose though is to flesh out (pun intended) how easy it would be to assert this should these arbitrary categories become pertinent to a section of society. If anti-carnivorism did become the mainstream view, how could you oppose it? History, in your view, “is not fixed, unchallengeable and immutable,” after all, so would one have any place to stand to oppose the repression of vegetarianism as defined by Critical Diet Theory? Indeed, if we can only interpret history “through stories which have been repurposed, repackaged and retold,” how can we have the grounds to make any meaningful claims to knowledge? Spoiler alert: we can’t.



                                   A facetious story of vegetarians fighting back against their historic oppressors, the carnivores which                 reveals an important truth: facts matter.


The crucial point to be made here though isn’t about what constitutes ‘political’ or how much ‘political’ should sexy-dance with ‘non-political,’ it goes deeper than that. It’s deeper than that because critical theory touches everything, by design. All we need to do is replace the word ‘politics’ in your earlier statement about the ‘intimate rumba’ with ‘critical theory,’ to illustrate the point: “critical theory [emphasis added] is about all of us, everywhere, all of the time;” therefore “critical theory [emphasis added] and football should [not my italics] be dancing a very sultry and intimate rumba.” You can do the same with the phrases ‘racial injustice,’ ‘systematic oppression’ ‘the violence of inequity,’ or any other Woke jargon of your choice, and you begin to see that the rumba you’re advocating is not a mutualistic ensemble between two willing dancers, but the last dance of a madman holding a ballroom dancer at gunpoint.

This brings us to the final pernicious way totalitarian theories spread, by historical revisionism. History, in your view, “is not something that we can treat as an observable science,” but rather a “complex tapestry of beliefs” that can and should be retold to sit the prevailing tastes of the day. And while I agree that the emphasis we give to stories, including the decision to teach certain histories, is culturally dependent to an extent, this caveat does not reach into the heart of a historic truth itself. Erroneous information can be discarded through backwards triangulation, detailed source analysis, text translation, the geological and archaeological record, and the principle of parsimony, among other methods, to get to the closest approximation of truth allowable with limited information. In this sense, a statement either has historicity, or it doesn’t. It’s either supported by the weight of evidence, or it isn’t. Either Jesus rose from the dead in Jerusalem in 36 A.D., or he didn’t. Either the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066 or it wasn’t. Either racism was at the heart of the founding of the United States, or it's a pernicious lie.

This postmodern stance gives us the monstrosity of the 1619 project which I'm alluding to; a dishonest project created by New York Times magazine which aims to “reframe American history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at its centre6,” and which has already infiltrated the Chicago school system and that of Buffalo, New York7. These outlandish claim, that Americans only revolted against the British to preserve slavery, (a claim made by Nicole Hannah Jones who is still employed by the NY Times), was not made by historians but by critical theorists. Slavery is described as the reason for the cruelty of the criminal justice system, the lack of universal healthcare, and the brutality of American capitalism, despite the fact that in the case of the former, that mass incarceration began in the 1970s, 100 years after the abolishment of slavery.


Nicole Hannah Jones of the New York Times Magazine, originator of the discredited 1619 project

This is not an honest attempt to educate, but a product of Theory’s attempt to view the world only in hues of black and white. One of the authors, as highlighted by Coleman Hughes (who happens to be black), Matthew Desmond wrote “when a mid-level manager spends an afternoon filling in rows and columns of an Excel spreadsheet, they’re repeating business procedures whose roots and procedures twist back to slave labour camps8.” Excel spreadsheets are rooted in slavery because some slaveowners used rows and columns to tabulate the profits of slave labour. When one rubbishes the importance of historicity, excel spreadsheets become racist. I wonder if this will give you pause the next time you pull up your balance sheet? It shouldn’t.

This historical revisionism is part of a wider revolution. To date, more than one hundred statues in the USA have already been toppled in the last year alone, including states of well-known Nazis. Mahatma Gandhi in Davis, California and even the abolitionist Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York9. The toppling and destruction of relics and artefacts, like the desecration of Churchill and Colston is a hallmark of cultural revolutions, such as the big one in China10 or smaller ones like the destruction of irreplaceable cultural relics in Palmyra and Bamiyan, by ISIL11. These represent a kind of hardware update that seeks to eliminate any iconography inconsistent with the software running on the regimes data processor.  Is this the kind of retelling of history you have in mind?



Spot the difference. From left to right, the destruction of ancient artefacts at the hands of ISIL in Palmyra, Syria, the destruction of a statue of Gandhi in California, USA, and  the destruction of Buddhist statues in the Chinese Cultural Revolution,

Socialism is an entirely respectable way of being in a Liberal system, but critical theory isn’t, because, unlike socialism or conservatism, critical theory opposes the very system which platforms it, opposing, as it does, logic, rationality, argument, justice, merit and the rule of law.  You can either be a socialist or a critical theorist, but you cannot be both. It’s not possible to be a socialist on a Monday (a political leaning I am very sympathetic to), and then put your pronouns and power fist in your bio, don your Lenin hat on a Tuesday and behave as if there’s no contradiction. As we’ve discovered, it’s possible to advance critical theory without being a critical theorist (by kneeling, supporting BLM, protesting etc). This isn’t an enviable position to be in because it speaks to a large degree of ignorance about the theory itself. So which one is it Amy, socialist, critical theorist or a hammer and sickle wearing Schrodinger’s cat combination of the two?

Liberalism was an innovation of civilisational import. Before Liberalism, disputes were settled by violence, societies operated according to codes of honour, rather than the rule of law. Going back further, tribal violence involved the raiding of rival clans, murder, rape, pillaging, child sex slaves, and much more. Gifting the state a monopoly on violence was an innovation because it removed the logic of violence by installing a deterrent in something bigger and stronger than any individual and incentivising individuals away from wanton violence and into surviving in a complex social stratum. As Steven Pinker put it in ‘The Better Angels of Our Nature,’ “Once Leviathan was in charge, the rules of the game changed…the court, basically a government bureaucracy, had no use for hotheads and loose cannons, but sought responsible custodians to run its provinces12”.

Liberalism holds within its plentiful bosom the hushed and dignified acknowledgement that knowledge can be found in the whole, rather than the individual. It is a system as described by the political thinker Benjamin Constant as the système de principes, an overarching system on which everything else – government action, law, legislation – is based; an ideal that according to Friedrich Hayek in ‘The Constitution of Liberty’ “will not be preserved unless it is itself accepted as an overriding principle and that “although we must strive to improve our institutions, we can never aim to remark them as a whole13."

A very intimate rumba: 
a modern take on
Lady Justice and
Lady Liberty enjoying 
each other's company.

Let’s take stock of the arguments put forward then. Firstly, I argued that taking the knee has become a deeply political message which advances critical theory, whether knowingly or unknowingly. I argue, firstly, that politics cosying up to sport is highly unpopular, like an uncouth imposition like a drunk uncle’s political diatribes at a family BBQ, and secondly that when dementor of religious-political opinion is invited into the house of sport (or other domains), you have to host all goblins and ghouls, all radical religions, barmy theories and illiberal creeds. 

I finally argue that your flirtation with postmodernism and the resulting rejection of historicity has the potential to threaten the very fabric of Liberal order itself. So, in this sense, your article not only, like Kyle Walker, covered a lot of ground at speed, but also proved defensively suspect and prone to frequent mishit passes. We must stand up for the oppression, downbeat, downtrodden and marginalised everywhere, of all races and skin tones, and indeed regardless whatever shade of colour we are, and we must do so while at the same time standing up for the greatest invention, we’ve ever had the dumb luck to stumble upon: Liberalism, the project which has given us everything we value, and the giant upon whose shoulders our society's house of cards precariously stands.

 

 

Citations


1.       Hayek, F.A., &  Stelzer, I.M. The Constitution of Liberty. Reprint, Routledge,

2010, p. 51.


2.       Wyche, S. “Colin Kaepernick Explains Why He Sat during National Anthem.” NFL.Com,

https://www.nfl.com/news/colin-kaepernick-explains-why-he-sat-during-national-anthem-0ap3000000691077 Accessed 16 June 2021.

 

3.       Kesslen, B. “Colin Kaepernick Is Writing a Memoir That Will Answer, ‘Why Did I Do It?’” NBC News,

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/colin-kaepernick-writing-memoir-will-answer-why-did-i-do-n1136226.   Accessed 16 June 2021.


4.       Neumann-Noelle, E. Spiral of Silence. https://noelle-neumann.de/scientific-

work/spiral-of-silence/. Accessed 16 June 2021.

 

5.       Brendon, P. “Death of Truth: When Propaganda and ‘alternative Facts’ First Gripped the World.” The

Guardian, 11 Mar. 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/mar/11/death-truth-propaganda-alternative-facts-gripped-world. Accessed 16 June 2021.

 

6.       Silverstein, J. “Why We Published The 1619 Project.” The New York Times, 20 Dec. 2019. NYTimes.com,

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/magazine/1619-intro.html.


7.       Rufo, C. F. “Buffalo Public Schools’ Critical Race Theory Curriculum.” City Journal,

23 Feb. 2021, https://www.city-journal.org/buffalo-public-schools-critical-race-theory-curriculum.


8.       Hughes, C. The 1619 Project and the Legacy of Slavery - [Bonus Partial Episode].

www.youtube.com, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q98bm64QWTc. Accessed 16 June 2021.


9.       “List of Monuments and Memorials Removed during the George Floyd Protests.” Wikipedia,

14 June 2021. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_monuments_and_memorials_removed_during_the_George_Floyd_protests&oldid=1028582207.


10.   Rohr, H. China’s Destruction of Cultural Sites During the Cultural Revolution - Nspirement.

https://www.nspirement.com/2018/08/26/chinas-destruction-of-cultural-sites-during-the-cultural-revolution2.html. Accessed 16 June 2021.


11.   Williams, A.R. “ISIS Smashes Priceless, Ancient Statues in Iraq.” National Geographic,

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/search. Accessed 16 June 2021


12.   Pinker, S. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Penguin Books,

2012, p. 75.


13.   Hayek, F.A., &  Stelzer, I.M. The Constitution of Liberty. Reprint, Routledge,

2010, p. 57.