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Notes -
Could you talk more about this?
Sure. For example, in the office my girlfriend shared with some other students, there was a map on the wall that was an equal area projection with Africa in the middle. The title was something like, "Socially Just Map of the World", and the heading under that said that usual projections of the globe onto a map "disadvantage Africa and South America, and Asia" (their words) by making them look smaller than they are by land-area comparison, and by placing them at the edge of the map, either horizontally or vertically. This level of pettiness over race was then new to me, and I chuckled and asked how anyone was "disadvantaged" by having a smaller land area on someone else's map halfway around the world. My girlfriend looked at me like I had blasphemed in front of a Bishop. She wasn't surprised that I had the thought (which was roughly as obvious to her as it was to me); she was appalled that I broke the taboo of questioning a bit of PC craziness in front of her classmates, and that she might be implicated by association ("Do you let him say things like that at home?"). This was in 1990, in the clinical psychology department at the University of Georgia, and it was the water they swam in every day.
I would emphasize that, at the time, she knew almost as well as I did that this stuff was silly, but lived in a state of ketman every day for fear of cancel culture. She gradually became more woke on the inside, though. If you think you can pretend to be something for long without becoming that thing, talk to a man who's been through a mock POW camp in SEER school (or else read "The Lucifer Effect" by Philip Zimbardo).
The leftist fundamentalists in the psych department in 1990 felt the same sense of entitlement to control other people as they probably do now, as long as they were in their element. We were going out to dinner with a group once, and one female grad student said, "If anyone orders veal, I am going to have a real problem with that." If veal had been on the menu, I'd have ordered it to find out the exact nature of the problem she was going to have -- but I suspect in my absence that would have been considered General's Orders. Another time, another girl said she had a problem with anyone who hunted. I asked if she was a vegetarian, and she said 'no', looking (1) guilty and (2) surprised, as if to say "you're not supposed to ask such things".
I only observed this directly for one semester, because my girlfriend -- who I had had a long-distance relationship with for four years of college -- broke up with me 3 months after we moved in together for grad school. There were several reasons for it, but I think one of them was that, while I was not particularly conservative at the time, my indefatigable Gomer-Pyle common sense (as I came from the math department were none of this was going on yet) was not only an embarrassment to her, but a danger to her career by way of voluntary association.
This sounds similar to that one scene at the beginning of Cryptonomicon (granted it's been a few years since I read it).
I think even at the time people knew what was up if they wanted to.
You mean the scene where Randy the Dwarf gets into it G E B Kistivik the Hobbit over the Information Superhighway being a stupid metaphor? I freaking loved that scene, one of many that I freaking loved throughout the book!
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