1327 days ago
David Hume was a great philosopher but, writing in 1753, he made remarks about black folks which even then were a tad offensive and today are viewed as utterly racist. Given that we now judge folks’ utterances and actions of 267 years ago by the mores of today, in the year of madness that is 2020, Hume was toast. A building named after him at Edinburgh University has been renamed. I suspect that there will be calls to remove A Treatise of Human Nature from the curriculum and so future generations will come to know the man, not as I did as a student, as a philosopher but as just another dead white racist male. So where next with the purge? Might I suggest Scotland’s national poet Robert Burns?
2432 days ago
I have noted many times before how free speech no longer exists on campuses across the West. If you pursue a politically correct strict liberal orthodoxy you can say what you want. Anything goes. All men are animals and wannabe rapists, white folks must be ashamed of all their crimes and so are innately evil racists. Heterosexuals should be under-represented in Parliament. Trans is the new normal. Its okay to say you want to assassinate President Trump. The Jewish state acts like Nazis and has no right to exist. All those statements are, to me, obscene and/or untrue but on campuses across Britain and the US they are repeated and accepted as fine every day.
Those who dare to disagree whether they be evil conservatives such as Ann Coulter or uber-liberals like Germaine Greer or the great Peter Tatchell ho just slipped up (usually on Trans issues) then you get no platformed. Try saying something really controversial like the British Empire did a lot of good (which it did), Britain did more to abolish slavery than any African state has ever done (again true) or that climate change is pure fiction (which it is) and as an academic, your career is toast even if the remarks are made in private.
The latest lunacy comes from Edinburgh where a spiky law student Robbie Travers responded to news that the Americans just dropped a vast bomb on ISIS fighters with a facebook post
