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Slippery

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Clarissa

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As we have heard many times by now, racism is a major threat to public health.

If it’s OK to put things into your body against your will to benefit public health, why isn’t it OK to put things into your mind to benefit public health?

If it’s OK to persecute “anti-vaxxers”, why isn’t it OK to persecute “racists”? With the definition of “racist” provided by Ibram Kendi and co?

Forcing you to read or say something – or not to read or say something else – is, by every measure, less radical than forcing you to put something inside your body. What is the framework within which you can be for Pfizer mandates and against coerced speech or political censorship?

If you support me being kept out of a restaurant or an airplane because I didn’t put something I don’t want inside my body, how will you prevent yourself being excluded tomorrow on the basis of your online history or book purchase history? Seriously, what is the argument you are going to make? That racism kills fewer people than COVID? Good luck with that. Racist.

What do you think the purpose of these endless proclamations that “racism is a public health threat” is? Why were BLM protests declared the only mass public gathering that wasn’t spreading COVID?

And one last thought. People who call for coercive measures to be deployed against others are always very stunned when coercion is deployed against them next. Always very, very stunned.

10 responses to “Slippery”

  1. Demotrash Avatar
    Demotrash

    I think anything that can be considered “public health,” will. I’m trying to make a list of what that could be. Racism and guns are obvious. What else?

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      I think they hit the mother load with racism. There’s not a single constitutional freedom that can’t be removed using appeals to racism.

      Liked by 1 person

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  2. el Avatar
    el

    There is not a single country without political censorship.
    In Israel it is not racism but
    https://www.ynetnews.com/article/hyc8u00zey

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      This used to be a country where we had a bill of rights. It’s the loss of that grand and important tradition that I mourn. Americans are throwing something wonderful away to speed up their enslavement. And nobody is forcing them! That’s what I can’t get over.

      Liked by 1 person

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  3. MT Avatar
    MT

    I hate the slippery slope argument. Isn’t it also true that societal acceptance of premarital sex was just a step on the road to acceptance of gay relationships, which led to gay marriage, which brought us to what you would call “transgenderism”? Any change in society can be described as sliding down a slippery slope towards some kind of horror.

    I got married at 31 (for practical, not philosophical reasons). I will gladly take the 21st century society that didn’t censure me for having sex outside marriage against the perfect bill of rights you say we had earlier and a society that would have openly condemned me.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Sometimes things develop in a positive direction. Sometimes they develop in a negative one. I believe that the current one is very negative.

      The sexual revolution in the US happened in the 1960s and coexised with the bill of rights for 60 years perfectly well. So I’m not sure I’m seeing the connection between our sexual freedoms and the fact that I am being forced at work publicly to admit that my “white way of greeting people” is causing immense harm to “BIPOC folx.” (True story.) I’ve been sexually free for two decades without having to do this kind of penance in return.

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      1. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        The “white greetings” are, by the way, not the only thing I am being coerced into publicly admitting. There’s also the oppression I engage in with my white smile, white punctuality, and a myriad other oppressive white things.

        But I can have sex with anybody I want after undergoing the ritual ceremony of public racial humiliation. That’s undeniably true. I hope that thought will help me bear the ceremony more easily.

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      2. MT Avatar
        MT

        No, the connection is between our sexual freedoms and today’s transgender kids and biological males competing in women’s sports.

        Look, I am truly sorry about what you’re describing. I just have a personal dislike of the slippery slope argument because it has been used to argue against every positive change people have tried to make. The point of the word “slippery” is that no move in a given direction is safe, no matter how small, because you won’t be able to control yourself and will go overboard.

        For example, one of the first steps down the slippery slope to you being forced to perform public penance for your “white way of greeting people” was clearly the abolition of slavery.

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        1. cliff arroyo Avatar
          cliff arroyo

          “the first steps … clearly the abolition of slavery”

          No. Considering that both “anti-racism” and “trans-kids” are methods of corporate control (covered on this blog often), the first step down the slippery slope to today was the Reagan era push to get corporations onto university campuses. I remember the early stages of that in the 1980s and thought it was a bad idea (as did many who were told it was accept corporate involvement or find another job).

          Americans are uniquely hung up on sex and race and so that’s what’s being used to humiliate people to keep them in line. It gets exported to other countries but doesn’t have the same…. fertile soil there and sometimes gets modified (like the imperial/colonial past of the UK)..
          In other countries it would be something else… (in Poland church and I’m not sure what else… maybe affluence or modernity).

          You can’t dismantle anti-racism or trans-kids alone… the common denominator is corporate control of public space and public discourse.

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          1. Clarissa Avatar
            Clarissa

            Absolutely. This started in the Reagan era and already back then there were people who were warning about the developments that we are seeing today. They sounded like lunatics and spoke in a very academic language that was next to impossible to decipher, so people weren’t catching on. This is why I’m trying to explain this in normal language here on the blog, in my public speaking, and in class. I have made a decision to explain it as calmly as I can at that anti-racist meeting we are having at work.

            But it’s absolutely true that you can’t cure one symptom without diagnosing the entire disease. Trans kids, CRT in schools, masking of toddlers, the immigration debacle, the infrastructure bill, vaccine passports, pregnant people – it’s all part of one coherent, relentless whole. And you are either working for it or against it. I’m asking people to be against it.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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