This is so the worst thing you're going to read all day.

[Content Note: Language policing; harmful language.]

Former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett: "The Culture of Shut Up: Too many debates about important issues degenerate into manufactured and misplaced outrage—and it's chilling free speech."

Yawn.

Evey single thing about this shit is the worst, from the author's contention that self-censorship because you don't want to harm people or get yelled at constitutes an encroachment on free speech to his absurdly tiresome invocation of green, aqua, and purple people to avoid meaningful racial disparities, but my "favorite" part has to be where he gives a minute to the subject of how marginalizing language can harm people, but then skates on by it to the typically horseshit conclusion: OH WELL. Chaos is for sure ultimately better for everyone because it allows me to say whatever I want and then discredit critics by calling them hypersensitive thought policers.

Without a trace of fucking irony.

Many of the things that people like Lovett want to be able to say without consequences are the sorts of things that are disallowed by the commenting policy here, which regularly attracts accusations of thought policing. And I will say once more: I am not the thought police.

Challenging someone to think about things in a way in which they may have never thought about them before isn't thought policing.

The entire rest of the world, with its privileging of men and heterosexuals and cisgender people and thin (but not too thin!) and tall (but not too tall!) and able and healthy white bodies and religious people and people who have sex and people who can and want to be parents and the wealthy and the educated, and all the ways in which the rest of the world facilitates and upholds that privilege, and all the ways in which the rest of the world marginalizes and demeans and treats as less than all the people who deviate from those privileged "norms," and all the ways the rest of the world indoctrinates you into that system of privilege, and socializes you to believe it's the natural and right and immutable state of the world, and all the shills for the kyriarchy who fill the ether with self-reinforcing rubbish on a constant loop so you swim in a sea so thick with the detritus of Othering that you don't even notice it on a conscious level anymore, and all the bullies who appear to kick you back in line if you do, if you have the temerity to question the message, and all the other bits and bobs of the brainwashing to which we are all subjected since the day we're born as part of scheme, nearly incomprehensible in scope, to ensure that challengers to these traditions are never made, and, if they're born, are squashed with the weight of mountainous tidal waves of blowback in the other direction…? The purveyors of that shit are the goddamn thought police.

And you know what one of the biggest lies they tell you is?

That it's the other way around.