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Over at National Review the other day, I commented on Rabbi Marmur's recollection of his role in the Great Toronto Show Boat Wars of the 1990s:

This was my stance more than a decade ago when Show Boat was staged in Toronto and some members of the black community objected on the grounds that it was racist. Many of my friends thought otherwise. For all I know, they may have been right, because it's difficult to describe Show Boat as a racist musical. Nevertheless, I felt that if some blacks thought that it was, their feelings were more important to me than my own artistic judgment. I think tolerance is also about that.

And as I wrote in response:

If you throw over Show Boat, one of the great works of the American theatre, because somebody's "feelings" (however manufactured) are more important, what else are you prepared to lose? In such a world, there will be nothing left. 

Watching a grown man congratulating himself for placing "their feelings" over rational objective analysis, Kathy Shaidle put it more bluntly:

It is sad to see someone like Dow Marmur still stuck in that illusory mindset, all these years later, trying, in public, to talk himself into believing something he knows full well is absolute rubbish.

In a letter unconnected to the rabbi's thoughts, British reader Peter Monro nevertheless reminded me of something that seems relevant, Orwell's far-sighted concept of 1984 - "Crimestop":

Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc*, and of being bored and repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.

There's a lot of that about.

*"Ingsoc" is a contraction deriving from "English Socialism". Poor old Orwell didn't foresee that "English" would be designated as too baldly ethnic a term to pass the sensitivity test in contemporary Britain. But it's not hard to imagine a smiley-face government agency called, say, "Canval", as in "Canadian values".   

...for "I'm inventing what you said because it's easier than quoting you". Deborah Gyapong writes:

In the case of Mark Steyn, for example, critics such as Elmo's spokeschildren, Johann I-shag-Islamists Hari make up vile writings, attribute them to Steyn and accuse him of hatred he has never spewed. It's as if they think they spot code words, so they supply what they assume is the interpretation. This is slanderous and disgusting.

Indeed. It's also potentially life-threatening, but maybe that's the point.

UPDATE: On the other hand, this guy says I'm only a "semi-racist". Hey, it's a start. 

Here's a prophetic piece from 2005. Gilles Marchildon of the gay lobby group Egale makes a lot more sense than Professor Darren Lund did yesterday in The Globe And Mail (see previous post). Perhaps that's because Mr Marchildon is an actual gay rather than, like Professor Lund, a straight who gets offended on gays' behalf. Writing on the suit Lund brought against Stephen Boissoin, Mr Marchildon observes:

While it is difficult to support Boissoin’s right to spew his misguided and vitriolic thoughts, support his right, we must.

If Boissoin was no longer able to share his views, then who might be next in also having their freedom of expression limited. Traditionally, the LGBT community’s freedom has been repressed by society and its laws.

Plus, it is far better that Boissoin expose his views than have them pushed underground. Under the glaring light of public scrutiny, his ideas will most likely wither and die.

Mr Marchildon's position is right: You defeat bad ideas in honest vigorous debate conducted in the open, not "pushed underground". What is it about received progressive wisdom that makes it such a wee delicate bloom that it cannot withstand any criticism without resorting to the thought police?

Just to recap, if you don't believe in freedom of speech for speech you loathe, you don't believe in freedom of speech at all. Mr Marchildon does. If, on the other hand, like far too many Canadians, you only believe in freedom of speech for fluffy approved pieties, you better be pretty sure that your nice approved speech will remain approved.

Compare this stew of cliches with this rollicking dissection thereof. It's no competition. I've no idea why my pal Natasha Hassan chose to inflict Mister I'm-not-gay-but-I-play-one-in-human-rights-cases Yawneroo on her readers but in future she might institute a useful rule: Raise the old shouting-fire-in-a-crowded-theatre line, and boom, you're spiked. As my critics like to point out, a musical-comedy critic like me can't be expected to understand war and demography and Europe stuff, but I was there for the first night of Hitchy-Koo Of 1917, and I know this fragrant Victorian gaslit allusion was obsolescent even when it was first uttered.