But then some clever people noticed that one tolerates only what one dislikes or disapproves of, and tolerance was quietly rusticated at about the same time that classes in civics had to make way for sermons about the virtues of multiculturalism and so-called “global citizenship” (exactly what civitas is involved in “global citizenship”?) Today, the customary demand is no longer for tolerance but rather for wholesale approbation or celebration.
#No red ink clever free#
It used to be that in Civics 101 we were taught about the virtues of toleration and its importance to a free society in which competing interests thrived. well, about almost anything that matters and that people may disagree about. That is an oblique way of saying that we seem to find it harder and harder to tell the truth about. It turns out all the bottles were empty or mislabeled. We thought we had plenty of red ink in the cupboard, ready for use. If we return to it yet again now, it is because the threats to free speech seem suddenly more numerous and multifaceted. Last month, we took up the subject again in this space. And he is right, too, that language, a prime tool in our quest for understanding, has been perverted, emasculated, rendered strangely incapable of achieving traction with the realities it attempts to describe.īack in 2008, we published a special pamphlet on the subject of “Free Speech in an Age of Jihad.” In our January issue, we devoted seven essays to the subject of the fate of free speech in the West. But he is surely right to suggest that we are in the midst of a great mystification. As we say, we suspect that we would supply a very different account from Slavoj Žižek about the moral, conceptual, and political incapacities to which our “lack of red ink” condemns us. “Etc.” What do you suppose belongs in that capacious codicil? Hold that thought. But he touches on something essential when he observes that “What this lack of red ink means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict-‘war on terror,’ ‘democracy and freedom,’ ‘human rights,’ etc.-are false terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it.”
Nor are we confident that he understands this story in quite the same way we do. Let us acknowledge straight away that Slavoj Žižek, that beacon of polysyllabic academic leftism and menacing inscrutability, is not a thinker to whom we generally look for enlightenment or, indeed, for humor, except inadvertent.
#No red ink clever movie#
A friend called our attention to this classic specimen: In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: “Let’s establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true if it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter, written in blue ink: “Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theaters show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair-the only thing unavailable is red ink.”
#No red ink clever archive#
Generously represented are various chestnuts from the grim archive of totalitarian humor. Alert readers will recall a review by Christie Davies in our January issue of Slavoj Žižek’s book Žižek’s Jokes, a philosophically oriented chrestomathy of jests, anecdotes, fables, allegories, and one-liners (“Did you hear the one about Hegel and Negation?”). We are not praising the wrong side of the accounting ledger. NoRedInk Premium provides a complete adaptive writing curriculum to students in grades 5-12.No, not that sort of red ink. The site is currently free for everyone – teachers, students, parents, tutors, school administrators, and all who want to improve their grammar!
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