"The 'Battle of Albert Park' has just crystallised something that's been happening for a long time. The reason we're getting so much street activity is that politicians have opted out."

"We've had 100 years of relative civil peace and ... bipartisan support for freedom of speech, and it's all just dissolved in the space of three or four years....
    "Unless someone's inciting violence, I'm all for free speech it doesn't matter what they're saying. I want to hear from people I detest....
    "[The 'Battle of Albert Park'] has just crystallised something that's been happening for a long time.... Part of the reason we're getting so much street activity is that politicians have opted out. There's a whole set of debates where ordinary New Zealanders are simply not seeing their views represented in politics....

    "Free speech definitions have been honed for several hundred years and, if someone is expressing their distaste for you and your way of life [or] claiming that you're lying or claiming that men can't become women, that's all well within the bounds of free speech as long as they are not inciting violence against you. There's never been a question about that. So I regard that [i.e., the idea that someone's speech can be a threat to someone else] as the flakiness of people who desperately want to stay within their tribe -- the liberal politically-elite tribe.. 
   "['Culture wars'] are people tribalising, finding reasons to detest each other and to dismiss each other ... [it] has become very dominant: a whole lot of language you are not allowed to use, words that put you on the wrong side of a boundary, and once you're on the wrong side anything goes in terms of the punishment that can be inflicted upon you ... tolerance doesn't have to be applied once you're in the 'wrong' culture...."

~ Stephen Franks, from his interview on RNZ's The Detail 

 

"Social media has made it far too easy for people to rail against the latest political outrage without getting their feet wet."

"Every gesture of resistance which is void of either risk or impact is nothing but a cry for recognition."
          ~ Stefan Zweig, from a 1941 interview  

Stephen Hicks on 'call-out culture': "Psychologically, chronic shamers are losers in their own eyes. Yet they get a reprieve from their self-loathing by bullying others."

"We’re all painfully aware of those who live to attack others for insensitivity, microaggressions, etc.," observes philosopher Stephen Hicks -- folk who are "constantly scanning, online and elsewhere" for deviations from whatever they deem to be norms. 

I’m reminded of this from Nietzsche’s 'The Joyous Science':

        "Whom do you call bad? — Those who always want to put others to shame."

Psychologically, chronic shamers are losers in their own eyes. Yet they get a reprieve from their self-loathing by bullying others. They feel a brief sense of empowerment — a negative self-affirmation from seeing others damaged or humiliated.
    It’s a kind of low-grade sadism, but one driven by an internal self-masochism.

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