Let’s get something straight from the start. I despise middle class left wing social justice warriors. I also despise the phrase ‘social justice’ as it is not only a cover for the word ‘socialism’ but is all about group justice rather than justice for individuals. Another reason to dislike and disparage social justice warriors is their arrogance and also their dishonesty, especially their dishonesty in the use of statistics. That doesn’t mean that I don’t support things like women’s rights, LGB rights or speaking out against racialism, I really only object to the leftist take on these. If people wonder why reasonable people such as myself have an issue with SJW’s then read on.
Many readers of this blog will probably be well aware of the case of the woman who became known on the internet as ‘Trigglypuff’. I came across her when viewing some You Tube videos of Dr Christina Hoff-Sommers who is a feminist thinker who I’ve come to greatly admire recently. If you haven’t come across Dr Hoff-Sommer’s YouTube videos entitled ‘The Factual Feminist’ then I would urge you to watch them. Dr Hoff -Sommer’s ‘equity feminism’ is a world or even a universe away from some of the dishonest guff that is being fed to students on Gender and Women’s Studies courses at universities in the USA and UK.
Now back to the story of ‘Trigglypuff’. Dr Hoff-Sommers was appearing at the University of Massachusetts at Amhurst along with the comedian and radio broadcaster Mr Stephen Crowder and the Tech editor of Brietbart Mr Milo Yiannopolous. Milo made his usual spiel about ‘feminism being a cancer’, something I don’t agree with personally, and the hall erupted. Next to take the stage was Dr Hoff-Sommers who said that ‘feminism was not a cancer but campus feminism was madness’. This reasonable observation of the far left feminist/gender studies/queer studies scene on American campuses was also met by howling and screaming from the audience. I fear that many of the audience of Leftists there would not recognise the right to free speech if it jumped up and slapped them round the face.
There was one particular protester there whose behaviour was so bad, so outrageous and so much more like that of a toddler than a grown woman that film of her flailing her arms about rapidly went viral.
Here’s video of Trigglypuff whining about ‘hate’ and ‘triggering’ and ‘hate speech’. Trigglypuff, by the way, is I believe a play on a Pokemon character who is weak but sends people to sleep by their singing and the words ‘trigger’, ‘triggering’ and ‘trigger warning’
I loved the way that this adult toddler ‘Trigglypuff’ was dealt with by Dr Hoff-Sommers. When Trigglypuff screamed ‘stop treating us like children’ Dr Hoff-Sommers said: ‘Well stop acting like a child then’. Come to think about it Trigglypuff was behaving worse than a toddler. I think that my 15month old son, ‘Laughing Boy’, behaves better than Trigglypuff did.
As The Rebel Media said of Trigglypuff, she really is the physical embodiment of all that is wrong with the social justice movement. Rebel Media said:
Imagine the very embodiment of radical feminism, fat-shaming, white privilege, safe spaces, trigger warnings and queer studies. This is what you get with Trigglypuff.
The rare creature was first spotted in a viral video by Campus Reform. The protester was attempting to disrupt an event at the University of Massachusetts in which Steven Crowder, Christina Hoff Sommers and Milo Yiannopoulos were speaking.
The radical protester passed out literature that claiming all three of the speakers, “demonstrate either that you don’t give a shit about people’s trauma and pain and think it’s funny to thrust people into states of panic and distress OR that you fundamentally do not understand what a trigger is, what it means to be triggered, and what a trigger warning is meant to prevent.”
When asked by Campus Reform to elaborate, she claimed, “Campus Reform causes death and death threats due to its extreme language.”
I have to say that I’ve read a fair bit about the Campus Reform group and I can’t see anywhere where they have engaged in ‘extreme language’. They’ve spoken of things that the Left may disagree with, and also called for an end to the misuse of legislation designed to make things more equitable for both men and women. Campus Reform have also spoken out against the abuse of ‘due process’ by college authorities when young men have been the subject of false accusations of sexual assault or sexual misconduct.
None of these things in particular strike me as the sort of things that would cause death threats.
Trigglypuff’s comment that it’s wrong to mock people’s ‘trauma’ in colleges by using words or talking about subjects that ‘trigger’ them makes me ask this question: If someone is so mentally fragile and damaged that they need trigger warnings from lecturers before reading ‘The Great Gatsby’, as happened in one case spoken about by Dr Hoff-Sommers in one of her videos, then are they suitable for university? University should be a place where you are exposed to different points of view, different opinions and different knowledge. It is not a safe space and nor should it be.
In another case raised by Dr Hoff-Sommers at a lecture she did at one particular university, 30 adult women felt so ‘triggered’ by hearing a different point of view to the one given by their Gender Studies professors, that they retreated to a ‘safe room’ full of soft toys, Playdoh and whale song. If these women are so fragile that they cannot hear an opposing opinion to the one they have been given, then what use are they going to be on the outside world, the world outside the academy? In that world they are going to hear stuff they disagree with all the time and they are going to find that there is no safe space in the real world for them. They are either going to grow up very fast and get very angry about the wasted time and money they spent at college and the BS they’ve been given, or they are going to be mental health casualties. Neither path is a good one.
I believe that Trigglypuff is going to regret her outburst a lot in the future. In the age of the internet nobody is completely anonymous for long. I look back and feel that I’m lucky that the left wing knobwittery of my younger self wasn’t done in the age of the internet. I know I’m not totally anonymous on here (waves to the boys and girls at Cheltenham) but I guard as much of my privacy as I can, mostly to protect my family from assault by Islamic psychopaths. Trigglypuff is not so lucky, her tantrum is out there and has not only gone viral, but has become a meme. Already a large number of tech savvy people have been digging into her background and come up with some interesting snippets of information including the names she uses, her OK Cupid dating website profiles (interesting), how much she, or her family, is paying for her college tuition (US$41,000/year) and what causes she is involved in (fat acceptance). The bulletin board linked to below claims to have an awful lot of data on her.
https://kiwifar.ms/threads/trigglypuff-cora-gales-cora-miriam-cora-segal-real-name.20111/
Trigglypuff has been revealed to be in real life Cora Segal, and that’s how I’ll refer to her from now on in this piece. Encyclopedia Dramatica and Kiwi Farms, a site dedicated it said of itself to ‘eccentrics on the web’ have both revealed her real name along with other names that she has used. This tantrum is going to follow Ms Segal throughout her life now. Whenever she goes for a job, goes on a date, introduces her self to people, when they meet her they will be thinking ‘trigglypuff tantrum’. In a way I feel sorry for her but she is an adult, she should have known that kicking off in the manner that she did would be picked up, commented on and distributed.
Ms Segal is the living, breathing embodiment of the loud, intolerant, aggressive, single-minded, brainwashed automatons that that social justice movement is producing. It is to be hoped that Ms Segal’s unfortunate and mirth causing actions go some way to discrediting the social justice movement and social justice warriors themselves. I look at Ms Segal and her actions and I shudder to think of what could happen if her or someone like her was given power over others. She may have screamed ‘freedom of speech’ during her rant but her attitudes and that of other SJW’s are the antithesis of the idea of freedom of speech and open debate. Ms Segal may on they other hand have inadvertently done the cause of freedom, and the cause of dealing with a dishonest politically motivated Left dominated academia, a great service. Ms Segal showed the world what those who believe in academic freedom are up against and for that we should all say thank you to her. She has shot herself and her cause in the foot, which is better that having her and those like her shooting the rest of us for saying the social justice emperor has no clothes.
Links
The Trigglypuff video excerpt that is going viral around the web
The Rebel Media’s take on this story
Campus Reform that highlights and fights against aggressive Leftism on US campuses.
Encyclopedia Dramatics on Cora Segal aka Trigglypuff
https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Trigglypuff
Kiwi Farms bulletin board which I believe was one of the first sites to make public some of Ms Giles online persona’s
https://kiwifar.ms/threads/trigglypuff-cora-gales-cora-miriam-cora-segal-real-name.20111/
The speeches by Dr Hoff-Sommers, Mr Yiannopolous and Mr Crowder at Amherst College
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCcp36n2cDg
The Factual Feminist a series of Youtube videos by Dr Hoff-Sommers. These are well worth watching.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLytTJqkSQqtr7BqC1Jf4nv3g2yDfu7Xmd
We briefly mentioned Trigglypuff, Ms Segal earlier and agree that this my well haunt her for the rest of her life. I am currently reading Taleb’s ‘Antifragility’ and one of the points he makes is that politicians and academics have ‘no skin in the game’, that they will not be impacted by their policies but others are.
Ms Segal will probably complete her studies, gain a degree or higher degree but if she is not one of the lucky ones who gets a place teaching at a university, she will find herself in a very harsh and unforgiving world. From my days at Poly no-one would have had to have a ‘safe-space’ to recover from a lecture.
The question is that will these courses and the ‘safe-space’ students wither away and not literally die? The survival rate for these people if they are that fragile is very very low and not many employers even in the public sector are prepared to tolerate such infantilism.
One of my neighbours, one of the most normal blokes you could meet had been torpedoed three times on the same convoy, the first ship had been the one the first Wrens to get killed on active service were aboard. (The SS Aquilla iirc.) I cannot imagine any of this lot achieving the same level coping.
“I also despise the phrase ‘social justice’ as it is not only a cover for the word ‘socialism’ ”
I despise social justice in it’s current Western, well-heeled form as well, but that’s a pretty broad brush you are using to tar all left-spectrum political philosophies with. Socialism/social democracy is also responsible for good as well, something you need to keep in mind the next time you pull out your NHS card.
I spent two and a half years on two different kibbutzim in Israel during the 1980s. The first one was founded in the mid 1930s by European Jews fleeing the impending Holocaust. Whether you agree with the politics of it or not, kibbutzim like this one were absolutely essential to the founding of the state itself. I remember quite vividly some of the original founding members, most of whom were in their 70s heading out to the avocado fields whilst semi-drunken or severely hung-over English volunteers barely out of high school (many of whom were proud to announce that they were politically conservative) were still staggering into the worksheds before puking all over the floors of the trucks and trailers that took them out to the fields where they would attempt to do something productive.
My points? First, the elderly kibbutzniks were socialists through and through, and proud (as they had every right to be) of their collective accomplishments, but I never heard any of them once ever espouse any of the nonsensical crap coming out of the wordholes of this current generation of supposed “leftists”. Secondly, I never equated the tiresomely boorish (and at times borderline anti-Semitic) behavior of a lot of the male English volunteer workers as being indicative of contemporary British conservatism as a whole. I saw it for what it was-young people doing typically stupid young-person kinds of things. There are some differences, of course (most notably the censorious inclination of SJWs and the chilling effect it is having on academic discourse), but equating social justice with socialism as being one in the same is not only way off, it’s flat-out ignorance.
If you want to criticize SJWs and social justice, by all means have at it. I’ll cheer you on. But if you are using SJWs to imply some false equivalency with socialism in order to invalidate socialism as a political ideology, that’s laughable.
Hi AA, sorry about the delay in getting back to you but I have been working on some technical upgrades to the backroom bits of the blog. I also despise socialism even though I was once a socialist myself. It took me a long while but I eventually saw it for what it really is, which is an authoritarian ideology that if left unchecked robs individuals of their agency. Unfortunately I am seeing groups, such as Citizens UK, which are banging on about ‘social justice’ but many of the causes that they are supporting are socialistic or worse. Another reason why I dislike social justice as a term is it often put s group rights above individual rights and that bothers me.
You mention the health service. Hmmm, where do I start on this. If you’ve read some of my posts on the health service on here you will understand that I’m no great fan of the NHS. In fact I hate it. Having the government plan, run, provide and oversee the public’s healthcare is probably the worst ever way of providing mass healthcare. What we’ve ended up with is a one size fits all ‘service’ that too often treats patients (especially patients from non-favoured groups in some areas) like dirt. Neither the experience of myself nor my family of the health service has been good. Healthcare choices are not in the hands of the patient and are too often decided on for arbitary administrative reasons or political expediency. I’ve no problem with everyone having a ‘health card’ or a lifetime health budget (adjusted for inflation of course) which they can spend on whatever doctor or hospital they choose. I’e also no problem with everyone paying into a national healthcare insurance scheme but the Govt has made an absolute balls up of providing healthcare and there needs to be radical change to how healthcare is provided. Those of us who have experienced or have seen their families experience the NHS in all its shittyness are immune to the use of the NHS as an example of how collectivism works.
I’m afraid that socialism, like Communism and fascism are appalling anti-individual, anti-freedom ideologies.