by Sean Parker
Under 35s tend to see social media news as very serious – as long as it’s about human rights – or else not serious at all. Over 35s tend to see it as baffling and very serious, but also not serious at all if the topic appears light to them.
While an older person might not see an eating disorder post as particularly crucial (‘just eat a meal, girl’), younger ‘digital natives’ have been told that this is the moral meat of life itself. This feeds into a new value system which is as far from Abrahamic moralism as is atheism.
Words can now be ‘non-crime hate incidents’, their wielders sacked, cancelled, fined or imprisoned. If you are being harassed by people reporting your social media use, is there any comeback? This entirely depends on who gets their allegation in first. In tandem with the world becoming statistically less violent – possibly due to less lead and mercury in the water and air (see Steven Pinker) – people are increasingly turning to rhetoric, allegation, offence and cancellation to silence ‘the other side’.
The Postmasters scandal in the UK, in which more than 700 sub-postmasters were found to have been falsely accused due to Fujitsu’s Horizon software, about which the authorities involved knew (many going to prison, some suicides) and nu-safetyism go hand in hand here. If something or someone is too expensive or rich to fail, any excuse will be found not to point the finger, even when it is clear to everyone where the system failure lies.
People like then-Post Office boss (and ordained vicar) Paula Vennells will use any excuse to see a project through, rather than point out the naked Emperor. This used to be called cowardice, now it’s called damage limitation. If unquestionable tech becomes the new religion, then praying that it is infallible is as effective as any other kind of prayer. There is an obvious lesson in the Horizon affair in relation to the new PR rollout of artificial intelligence – humans must always be the final checker. When any one system becomes all-powerful we are in big trouble.
Exonerations since 2020 have actually been fairly positive in terms of a post-identitarian righting system, as the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard case showed a pop culture world the reality of allegations of non-gendered domestic violence. Since then there have been exonerations of Kevin Spacey (twice), Andy Malkinson (after seventeen years wrongfully in prison), Brian Buckle and the Postmasters. Hollywood pull and ITV dramas help however, to the point of being absolutely necessary in the age of instant-response spectacle.
Multitudes of Lords of the Stripes are at work on Britain’s streets, as the nightmare of ‘community policing’ stalks the land, blithely self-important in its new woke application of the Equality Act. The main pre-crime suspects of these nu-laws tend to be indigenous Brits, gender critics and heteronormative males – the unholy trinity of the source of all socio-political ills. These new rozzers, often resplendent in Pride flags and Vogon-like legal decrees – however inaccurate or unlawful – seem to be the gender studies arm of the College of Policing, direct from trauma-informed seminars at Imperial College London.
Some particularly depressive progressives claim that humour, something which these community police people seem to abhor, is nothing more than a cover for wrongdoing, a mere projection. This new Thin Blue Line appears to be made up of such types, tearing up the social code in pursuit of their think-tanked version of social justice.
Rehabilitation from miscarriage of justice is never what justice reformers or rehabilitation professionals mean when they talk about being kind to prison-leavers. Justice reform is as woke-progressive an area as any other, but has difficulty countenancing that the law might be an ass until a number of newspaper front covers have featured the same story, i.e. Malkinson and the Postmasters. The 1400 other wrongful convictions per year (DPP Max Hill, 2019) can apparently go whistle.
Is men being forced to do courses for various kinds of alleged offending a form of genocide? If you take your cue from trans activists, Uiygar reporters or BBC headliner writers, it might as well be, so far has that ‘ultimate wrong’ term been stretched in recent years. By that measure it would be possible to construct fraud as the ultimate deviance in about 6 months, and have that replace the more salacious, headline-grabbing stories so familiar. It certainly can do much more, often hidden, damage.
Subjective human rights are everything to digital natives, the female half of which tend to be ideologically almost radical left. The males are more of a mixed bag – ‘simps’ who agree with the girls in order to get into their good books, and Andrew Tate fans on the other side of the wall – and that’s just in the White West. All are apparently vulnerable to the ravages of social media bullying and harassment however, and the old adage of sticks and stones breaking bones but words never hurting has been apparently rendered redundant.
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