Extracts from recent readings. And some not so recent.

Extract: 

"Cancel culture" has become so prevalent and damaging to free speech one of Australia's top philosophers has set up an academic journal in which contributors can publish under a fake name. ... "I certainly think that recently the majority of threats to freedom of thought have come from the left, and I regret that, of course," said Professor Peter Singer, a professor of Bioethics at Princeton's Centre for Human Values (and former Greens candidate).

Extract:

Richard Dawkins has been stripped of an award by the American Humanist Association which said that his statements on transgender rights "demean marginalised groups". ... (Dawkins said), "Some men choose to identify as women and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss." 

Extract:

Any brave soul who dares oppose those stalwarts of the left ... are immediately stoned to death in the virtual world.

Extract:

Nick Cave ... beholds ... yonder on the horizon, but drawing ever closer, a revolutionary mob making an all-out assault on the citadels of popular culture, the sound of tumbrils on Jubilee Street as they carry more and more important works of art and literature to the guillotine. ...

Extract:

"Once you begin by banning (an author's) poems not because you object to them but because you object to him," (Auden) warned, "you will end, as the Nazis did, by slaughtering his wife and children."

Extract:

"We will create a nation of cretins awash in a world where they have no understanding of the history of civilisation, human thought, human philosophy, values, or principles which have produced lessons  to be acknowledged by all societies," (University of Queensland emeritus professor) Professor Wiltshire said (of the new school curriculum proposed by acronymed bureaucracy ACARA, dumping large parts of ancient history and Western civilisation).

Extract:

"To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weight evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction. ... If we are not careful, our colleges will produce a group of close-minded, unscientific, illogical propagandists ..."