I want to be a woman – a short Monty Python sketch from 1979
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Yet that logic has prevailed.
“Tolerance will reach such a level that intelligent people will be banned from thinking so as not to offend the imbeciles.”
Dostoevsky’s razor-sharp prophecy critiques the paradox of modern tolerance—where fear of offence stifles truth. His irony underscores the fragility of societies that prioritize comfort over wisdom, urging us to defend reason even when it unsettles.
Since the mid-20th century, many elite institutions have rejected the philosophical orientation of empiricism in favor of a faddish postmodern view of the world. Postmodernism, alongside romanticist and fundamentalist religious modes of thought, rejects the notion that humans are able to discern what is true through data collection and experimentation.
Romanticists believe that the truth is discerned through feeling, fundamentalists through revelation—and postmodernists believe that there is no such thing as truth at all.
Our new media ecosystem blends all three of these outlooks, rendering empiricism a quaint relic of another age.
Time writer William Henry III on the subject of multiculturalism and cultural equality, states that “it is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose”.
Goldberg stated that “multiculturalism—which is simply egalitarianism wrapped in rainbow-colored paper—has elevated the notion that all ideas are equal, all systems equivalent, all cultures of comparable worth.”
He has criticized the idea of “social justice” as meaning “anything its champions want it to mean” or “‘good things’ no one needs to argue for and no one dare be against”.
Most of the above statements are from articles in The Despatch in May 2025 by Jonah Goldberg, Claire Lehmann and Nick Cartoggio. I chose them because they ring true to me.