The writer on maintaining the dignity of wordsMy brain is not too fast on its feet lately,so I’ve been a fortnight figuring out what I assume about how my eminent contemporary Germaine Greer got herself ambushed by ultra-feminist students because of her opinions about trans women. The only trans person I gain ever known personally started life as the man who, when we were at Sydney University together long ago, and taught me most about literature. His house was a library and he lent me books by the score. Decades later he started life again,as a woman. She wrote a book of her own, in which she said how depressing she had once been, or how glad she was now. On that evidence I would find Germaine’s opinion at least questionable when she says that trans women don’t stop being men. But there is no question at all about the activists who wanted to stop her saying so. They gain no idea of what free speech is or what a university is supposed to be. As for the supposed irony that Germaines feminist writings helped to create her current persecutors,it’s tosh. They created themselves, like blog-trolls.
Indestructible microbial organisms, and blog-trolls copulate with themselves constantly,producing offspring in the form of lethally insolent verbal tics. In a preceding column I famous that the utilize of the word “methinks” was a sign to stop reading. It has since occurred to me that whether you glance straight away at the close of any posting and find the two-word sentence Just saying” you don’t gain to read the confident statements that lead up to it. In any left-wing posting about politics, the utilize of the supposedly satirical term “US of A” is the sure sign of a dunce. In right-wing postings, or any attempt to express the argument in the form of a poem should be taken as an instruction to stop reading instantly. whether I had started looking for these signals earlier I might gain saved a year of my life.
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Source: theguardian.com