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Bari Weiss / Die Welt
There are many bewildering things about the madness of “wokism”. Two questions tower above all others. Where did it all come from? And the nightmarish one is: where will it all end?
Bari Weiss is one of its victims, having jumped from the
New York Times when the incursion of the trolls into the echelons of the paper made her efforts to bring a degree of balance to its opinion pages all but fruitless.
That did not mean she was going to run and hide. She went out in a blaze of defiance with a devastating indictment of the paper which she had tried to redeem. Her open resignation letter to
PEXELS
Members of the Irish parliament have been listening to a very disturbing story. Facebook is a big player in the Irish tech economy but the underbelly of this giant is now being exposed. Within its entrails it is harbouring a monster.
Isabella Plunkett has worked as a Facebook content moderator for just over two years,
She has now told the parliament’s Joint Committee on Enterprise, Trade and Employment, about her nightmare job as a moderator, viewing graphic content up to eight hours a day. The job is so stressful that Facebook has to provide 24/7 counseling support for staff but clearly what they do is totally inadequate. Apparently she is the first moderator to speak on the record to a government hearing anywhere in the world.
The Sunday Times (London) which introduces itself to you with this
cri de coeur, “I’ve found a way to sidestep cancel culture: I’ll tell you everything I’m not thinking instead”, you can’t help feeling you are in some kind of enemy territory.
Especially when it’s someone as outspoken as the larger-than-life British journalist Jeremy Clarkson.
Clarkson’s editors were afraid to print something he had written the previous week because it might offend the safetyniks. They deleted what he had said and substituted it with a new clarksonesque paragraph “expressing an opinion which I don’t have”. So the next week, feeling that letting them do his work for him was selfish, he sat down and “wrote something that I’m not thinking instead”. Which included such gems as this:
By Mark Hamilton. So What Imprint, Dublin, 2021.
The world before Christ was a savage place. Ancient civilisations were cruel and unforgiving. In this world, despite the benign and wise voices of people like Akhenaten, Zoroaster, Socrates, Cicero and others, Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome placed very little value on human life.
Tom Holland’s
Dominion and Professor Mary Beard’s
S.P.Q.R. – to name but two relatively recent depictions of that world – illustrate the great divide between the values of BC and AD.
But if Rome was not built in a day, neither was Christendom. Peter Heather’s