Comments by "Ash Roskell" (@ashroskell) on "Slavoj Zizek on Trump and Brexit - BBC News" video.
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Rohme Giuliano Well, Rohmey baby, you attributed a vast range of views to me, whilst having no actual idea of what they are, save for my stated view that Zizek's analysis of Robespierre is monstrous. It is precisely this tendency to over-generalise on the basis of assumptions that makes me hope that reactionary student union types, such as you appear to be, never get their twitchy, unthinking fingers on the levers of power.
I guess I can picture you sitting beside Robespierre and Zizek, taking one look at my post, and then assuming away with gusto, creating a fictional back story for me and attributing your picture of my entire political, academic and professional career for me, without anything more to go on than my single statement, your overzealous instincts - enslaved as they are to your cultural prejudices - and your inability to conceive of the possibility that you could be in error or that there may be something that you could learn from the world, if you would only take a moment to stop preaching at it, and from all of this you would probably designate me a subversive and have me sent to the block.
God forbid that you would tolerate a difference of opinion and let it roam free in the world unchecked? Heaven fore fend that you might think before bleating out two or three passages from a textbook? And most of all, let us never consider that another person's view might be different from the one we, the elite, have assigned him?!
Tell you what, if you want to know what I ACTUALLY THINK, why don't you ask me? If you want to discuss something with an open mind, you are required to consider the chance that, just maybe, you don't already know what I believe before you have asked me. Do you think you can do that? Maybe remember your training (if you were or are a student of history), which teaches against assumption, and encourages a slightly more forensic approach to learning.
Let me know if I'm getting to Zizekian for your tastes, won't you, please?
P.S. I will say that Nietzsche was a worm who would have been annihilated in a society that was anything like the one he advocated, but please do not take this statement as a licence to rattle off a whole new reconstruction of my beliefs? That was a comment on the man, not his philosophy. ;-)
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***** Well, right, left & midstream politics all have their extremists, true enough. However, the two parties of the left that I flirted with in my youth were dominated by intolerant unwritten sub-ideologies. The menace of the left is that it requires each individual to sacrifice his very individuality, eventually, if not imediately. This is usually for the benefit of a tiny elite. They use prohibitive terminology as common parlance, excluding less well educated people by the use of double-speak political correctness & would manage our thoughts, bodies and very souls, if left unchecked. And, when closely studied, nearly all leftist philosophies have the seeds of dystopia written into their textbooks, confusing, as they so often do, social responsibility with sacrifice of identity, financial gain with moral ruin and free thinking with groupthink. But hey, that's just my own personal. I am guessing you lean to the left, so I will refrain from phrasing myself too bluntly (correct me if I am wrong) but I tend to find that extreme leftists, these days, are really quite badly read & poorly educated in their own philosophy anyway.
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***** Your points are good ones. We are only oppressed by the language of others when they have power over us & we are unable to address them on equal terms, in which case, it is not really their language but their abuse of power that we would prevent. If we simply want others to stop saying things that offend us, we are trying to control their freedom of speech, which fails to address what they still think and feel, only, now you can never really know what that is. Therefore, we cannot argue, discuss, educate or outside people with offensive attitudes, we can only police their behaviour, which creates the ticking time bomb. There is also the inbuilt assumption that the truth is inoffensive and that to be offensive is to be wrong, which in itself is wrong. When will people accept that you cannot prescribe remedies for the human condition? You can challenge from a position of sincerity, which entails openess to personal correction. But prescription always results in an eventual backlash, due to the inherent injustice that people feel, even if they do not have the education to express it. Which brings me to the fact that the language of PC requires the use of multi-sylable terms which do not come naturally to most people and rely on pseudo scientific references, which therefore make them inherently less accessible to those who do not have a formal education. Among the first casualties of PC are a great many common slang expressions, which come more easily to people and are more widely understood: thus PC can have a disabling effect upon the already disadvantaged. Why should we even have guidelines? If you don't like people's views or language, is that not your problem? I too agree with Zizek IN THIS CASE, though I find many of his views aphorent, but he too is warning of the way in which the left (center or liberal left) are often appearing to sneer at the dumb shit kickers on the right. P C is one of the worst offenders
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