A misnomer if ever there was one. It’s the time of year (Halloween) when the ritualized faux outrage, the pearl-clutching virtue-signaling, often emanating from naively rationalistic and vain “Chardonnay socialists”, reaches fever-pitch. Conceptually lazy and illiterate concerning complexity and the evolutionary dynamic of spontaneous order (i.e. culture, for better or worse), they are doomed (pardon the colloquialism) to “pissing in the wind”. Since everything they do is viewed through a crude gobbledygook matrix of power relations, their frustration is manifest in doubling-down on their illiberal fundamentalist authoritarian tendencies — their characteristic monomaniacal energies misspent on banalities such as dress codes not to mention enforced speech codes. Here is a popular piece by the excellent Liane Gabora in Psychology Today and here too is a paper she did for us a while back entitled “The cultural evolution of socially situated cognition“. By way of an update here is Jerry Coyne’s poll on supposed offensive costumes.
manwithoutqualities 