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Book news Andrew Doyle reports:
Titania McGrath has written a book for children in order to teach them how to resist indoctrination and think exactly like her.
Doyle has done more than anyone else to publicise how wokery is at least as much a posh white girl thing as a downtrodden ethnics thing. Discuss.
Apparently there’s a chapter in it on Robin DiAngelo.
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I can’t help wonder if satirising the Left appears to simply have the effect of provoking them to go ever further into derangement, thereby moving the Overton Window in their direction. Nothing seems to stop the drift towards ideas that the Khmer Rouge would have tolerated.
And lefties will run out of steam for the same reason…. They will end up killing a quarter of the population.
You cannot use reason and logic to fight those who have neither and lack self-awareness.
I agree with the first three comments.
The left do not even realise that “Titania McGrath” is a satire – the average BBC watcher agrees with every word that “Titania McGrath” writes. After all they were taught these things at school and university.
Sadly the satire, therefore, has no effect of making the left reconsider their position.
I don’t think the left pays much attention to Titania McGrath. Her importance is not whatever effect she has on the left. That effect is, near enough, zero. The woke left doesn’t realise Titania McG is satire, for the simple reason that most of them don’t realise she’s anything. Her importance is that by her absurdly hilarious example, she raises the morale of the enemies of the woke left. Those enemies see the woke left being mocked, and our morale is raised.
Never forget that a thing like left wokeness only gets its power because of the unwillingness of its victims to stand their ground and tell them to get stuffed.
Not the least of Andrew Doyle’s many virtues is that he is prepared to do this while showing his own face on video interviews, behind his own name.
This and other anti-woke efforts are now working, whatever that pathological pessimist Paul Marks may say. The wokers are more and more attacking members of the softer left, their enablers rather than their real enemies. Why? Because the soft left are unwilling to tell the wokers to get stuffed. That would turn them into flat-out enemies of wokeness and they can’t bear the thought of that happening, even as they will eventually learn that they’ll have to. The left, in others words, are eating and/or expelling their own. The non-left are getting better at resisting, slowly but surely. Because of people like Andrew Doyle, and his wondrous creation.
But then, I’m a pathological optimist.
Paul Marks writes, “the average BBC watcher agrees with every word that “Titania McGrath” writes. After all they were taught these things at school and university.”
Given that according to a report from 2017 the average age of a BBC viewer was 61, I doubt they were taught that.
It is always an interesting experience to go onto the comment pages of newspapers and news websites and order the comments in order of numbers of recommendations. Of course one must remember that those readers who comment on a website do not provide a statistical sample of the population, but even in the Guardian the more “woke” writers such as Afua Hirsch get a fairly hostile reception – one reason why the Guardian no longer opens most of its opinion articles to public comments. No surprise that in the Daily Mail the comments are overwhelmingly anti-woke, but I have noticed that the commenters in the Times, until recently riven by animosity over the Brexit issue, have in the last few weeks come together in shared hostility to wokeness. There was a lot of sympathy with the BLM movement when they were seen as protesting at George Floyd’s death but as time went by and the stated goals of the BLM movement became better known, that reversed sharply.
Good point Brian M. – I am corrected. The point of T.M. is to boost morale for the enemies of the left – yes.
Natalie – I do not doubt what you say, but I am baffled as to why these people watch the BBC.
Well perhaps not baffled – as there is NO ALTERNATIVE to the leftist television stations in this country.
Kristian Niemietz, in a recent tweet:
“Always worth bearing in mind that the moment people stopped playing along with this nonsense, the tyranny of the woke would immediately come to an end. They derive their power solely from the fact that everyone kowtows to them, when there’s absolutely no need to do that.”
https://twitter.com/K_Niemietz/status/1290235218750734336
It gets better than that. If you get done over by the wokists, you can pause a little, to let people anticipate your response (thinking you might fold), and THEN you tell the wokists to fuck off and die, a little more politely than that but just as firmly. That way you get a lot of publicity for your enterprise. You can make a lot of money this way, if you happen to be selling something that’s already quite popular with a big subsection of the public, by many more of the public being told about your stuff and why people like it, at no cost to you.
“Goya”, a food enterprise I’d never heard of until the wokists had a go at it, appears to have been an example of this.
Paul. Thanks for the “Good point Brian M”. Much appreciated.
Let me now correct you on something else.
You say that “there is NO ALTERNATIVE to the leftist television stations in this country”. You are making the common error of supposing that the only competition to, the only alternative to, one television station is another television station. Not so. You can watch none of them, and watch, or do, something else entirely.
The biggest “competition” to television in this truer and wider sense is now: The Internet! There’s lots and lots of stuff on it that’s a lot like television, but not television as we know it. Social media. Big long interviews with people like Joe Rogan or Dave Rubin. YouTube reruns of long-gone sporting triumphs by your favourite teams. In my case videos of classical stars playing famous pieces at no extra charge, beyond the cost of an Internet connection.
Books that you would really like to read, thanks to The Internet and thanks in particular to Amazon, are now much easier and cheaper to obtain than they used to be. Maybe you can seriously read a book and watch TV or YouTube at the same time, but I can’t.
And so on. I hope the point is clear. Another way of making it is the title of a piece I wrote long ago called “Everything Competes With Everything Else”.
News of another business that is making a lot of money by correct handling of the wokists:
https://twitter.com/TheBabylonBee/status/1289282236928290821
Andrew Doyle has moments of near divine inspiration.
This realisation of Titania McGrath may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but the joke about Anne Frank was worth the price of admission.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5N8ibiR9o0