Isegoria

In Well, hush my mouth, conservative MP, Boris Johnson, describes his sparring session with the New York Times editor handling his piece:

“Booris,” said Tobin, “we love it! Everybody loves it. But we have, uh, a few issues of political correctness that I have to go through with you.”
[...]
I had said something to the effect that you don’t make international law by giving new squash courts to the President of Guinea. This now read “the President of Chile”. Come again? I said. Qué?

“Uh, Boris,” said Tobin, “it’s just easier in principle if we don’t say anything deprecatory about a black African country, and since Guinea and Chile are both members of the UN Security Council, and since it doesn’t affect your point, we would like to say Chile.”
[...]
So I began the piece with the words, “Gee, thanks, guys,” and Tobin wanted those words removed. For the life of me, I couldn’t see why.
[...]
“OK, Booris, I’ll tell you what the problem is. Our problem is that ‘Gee’ is an abbreviation for Jesus. For a century this has been a Jewish-owned paper, and we have to be extremely sensitive about anything that might offend Christian sensibilities.

“We can say ‘God’, ‘God’ is fine, but we have to be very careful about anything that involves the name of the Lord and Saviour.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” I said, “this is insane. This is utterly insane. I really think we ought to try to get that one in….”

There’s no end to the sad stories coming out of Africa. From The Jewel of Africa:

Southern Rhodesia had fine and functioning railways, good roads; its towns were policed and clean. It could grow anything, tropical fruit like pineapples, mangoes, bananas, plantains, pawpaws, passion fruit, temperate fruits like apples, peaches, plums. The staple food, maize, grew like a weed and fed surrounding countries as well. Peanuts, sunflowers, cotton, the millets and small grains that used to be staple foods before maize, flourished. Minerals: gold, chromium, asbestos, platinum, and rich coalfields. The dammed Zambezi River created the Kariba Lake, which fed electricity north and south. A paradise, and not only for the whites. The blacks did well, too, at least physically. Not politically: it was a police state and a harsh one. When the blacks rebelled and won their war in 1979 they looked forward to a plenty and competence that existed nowhere else in Africa, not even in South Africa, which was bedeviled by its many mutually hostile tribes and its vast shantytowns. But paradise has to have a superstructure, an infrastructure, and by now it is going, going — almost gone.

One man is associated with the calamity, Robert Mugabe.

I definitely recall a college humanities course that “educated” me on witch hunts and patriarchy. Here’s another take. From the victims of the witch hunt history would rather forget:

Between 1450 and 1750, approximately 110,000 people were tried for witchcraft in Europe and America, of whom 60,000 were executed; the trendy name for this persecution is the “witch craze”. Towards the end of the 20th century, historians fell on these statistics in their own form of witch craze, and came away with the sort of neat and provocative theories that give history a bad name. The witch hunts were produced by mass hallucinations, economic insecurity, early modern state-building or religious fundamentalism. Take your pick.

The hypotheses were mutually incompatible, but they usually made room for one central assumption. The witch craze was directed against women, and therefore expressed misogyny and patriarchy. Feminist historians pioneered this approach, then the usual suspects jumped on board: Margaret Murray, Barbara Ehrenreich and Andrea Dworkin. In all this, an inconvenient detail was overlooked. Between a fifth and a quarter of those executed for witchcraft were men. This is not news to historians; they just don’t want to know about it.