This week, two examples of “woke” political correctness shot across my visual field.
First, there was another classic 20th century writer bowdlerized by publishers and copyright holders so as not to offend the easily offended: Dame Agatha Christie.
As Robby Soave wrote in Reason, the great mystery writer has had her texts altered before, in the form of the title to her 1939 novel, And Then There Were None, which was originally published as Ten Little Indians. No, that’s not right. It was something far more offensive in America — but in U.S., one edition did use the less-offensive Ten Little Indians.
But now interior content of a much more innocuous sort has been changed. “A character in The Mysterious Affair at Styles who was referred to as a Jew — because, well, he is a Jew — is now just a person,” Soave explains. “And a servant identified as black no longer has a race at all.”
Nicety-mongering went much further in the second case, however, after the shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee. The young woman who murdered three students and three adults at the school, and was then herself shot dead, sported, online, the pronouns “he/him.” In between blaming Republicans and the talking heads of The Daily Wire for this trans-gendered person’s suicide-by-cop murder spree, some journalists couldn’t help but scold others for mis-gendering . . . him?
At least one report referred to the perpetrator (whose name I see no reason to publicize) as a “trans-woman,” though, in current lingo, she (“he”) was a “trans-man.”
It does get confusing — but as sad as it can get, there’s no mystery here.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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4 replies on “No Mystery, Just Confusion”
Better find the originals before they are actually burned.
And so it goes in the modern and accepting world, this individual pre-meditated mass murderer is not claimed to be a victim, as opposed to prescient and self-responsible soul responsible for all volitional activities.
I suspect that the ultimate judge of this individual was not as merciful as the present press.
It is time to accept personal responsibility and the fact there are no valid excuses!
The mystery is that they want respect for their religion while insisting on being unencumbered from having to respect other religions, like Christianity.
And the Constitution protects against them enforcing their religious human secularism.
This shooter represents a special problem for the mainstream narrative.
The very first of the present wave of school shootings was effected by Brenda Ann Spencer in 1979; but part of the journalist dogma is that these shooters are always male. And, yes, I heard a journalist explicitly say as much (and without correction from the expert whom she was interviewing). One of the reasons, then, that multiple major journalist outlets described this latest shooter as a “trans-gendered woman” — id est as a biologic male — was that they were clinging awkwardly to the narrative element that the shooters are not girls or women. But, of course, this latest shooter was biologically female, and did not look otherwise.
The narrative also presents trans-gendered people as victims, and seeks to quash any discussion of cases in which a victimizer was accepted by authorities to be trans-gendered. But attempts to present this shooter as a victim will of course provoke derision and outrage.
(In the mainstream discourse about the actual victimization of trans-gendered people, the narrative steers the audience away from the point that this victimization is generally perpetrated from within communities of homosexual and sexually dismorphic people.)