Welcome to another Friday Flurry. This fortnight, enjoy me railing against cancel culture whiners, some anthropological musings about the social usefulness of oppression, and a few book recommendations. Plus: a picture of me in the bath.
Dangerous opinions about dangerous ideas
Last weekend, I was in Sydney for the Festival of Dangerous Ideas - a terrific multi-day extravaganza of lectures, panels, film, art, and music. There were more sessions than I could possibly get to, but I filled my dance-card with a nourishing line-up of lectures and panels on politics, media, culture, morality, technology, freedom of speech, social services, and conspiracies.
In all, I've written over 10,000 words of notes about everything from AI moral panics to state censorship, which have spawned more rabbit holes than I can hope to cover in a year of writing. Safe to say, I'm delighted with the intellectual ROI of the festival!
I left with some dangerous opinions of my own - mostly about how what counted as a dangerous idea was pretty tame and liberal-elite coded, and how we can't seem to help overestimating the importance of the time we happen to be alive (and writing off current and historical disasters of far graver proportions.)
Picking which rants to dive into wasn't easy. In this Flurry, I present five dangerous ideas worth chewing on - in draft form, and definitely not fit for non-paywalled consumption.
Dangerous ideas for your consideration in this piece:
- Complaints about cancel culture are mostly tiresome whinging.
- Universal disgust of far-right populism will only fuel it.
- Oppression is socially useful.
- There is a real threat to freedom of speech - but it isn't online trolling.
- Social service delivery is moral judgement cosplaying as concern for taxpayer funds.
Please forgive any minor editing errors, I've banged this out at pace, with the fire of a thousand suns. Let's go.