Without Prejudice

The Delilah Ban

So here’s my take on the Delilah thing. Welsh rugby fans banned from singing the song, senior police officers sternly telling everyone that the ban is justified and the song encourages murder.

It’s easy to discard each and every little woke moment as trivial. And we do. We laugh about how nuts these people are. We post about it. But we are rational, normal people with actual lives so we forget about it pretty quickly. And then the next crazy thing happens, and the next.

And each time we laugh, and each time they do it again.

But let’s take this example seriously. It’s hard, because the thing is inherently absurd. It’s a Tom Jones song. So many things the woke do seem trivial. But what we should realise from that is that if they seek to control every trivial thing there is, it’s because they already control everything serious, like the police forces and the legal system and the political parties and b)these are fanatics who just don’t stop.

Everything has to be controlled. Everything has to be woke.

So it’s actually terrifying that a senior police officer thinks it’s normal and appropriate to control whether people sing a Tom Jones song. It’s terrifying that this utter lunatic is in an official position with authority over anyone. Because he can’t tell the difference between a song that tells a fictional story and real life. He can’t tell the difference between telling a story and murdering someone, between fiction and reality. And that’s not surprising. Wokeness prioritises hysteria and irrationality. It celebrates the subjective feeling over the objective fact. It considers offence more important than freedom, and it’s own crazed values imposed on others rather than shared, sensible and traditional values, as what society is built on.

More philosophically, telling stories is what makes us human. For the first hundred thousand years of human existence we have no surviving record. No culture, no art, no stories. It’s just darkness, indistinguishable from the lives of any other animal. It is culture, identity, creativity that makes us truly, fully human, that realises our potential above that of other animals.

Yes, Tom Jones too.

And all we have of human culture, of humanity at its most human, is telling stories. Artists will say that 90,000 year old cave paintings were the first cultural artifacts on Earth, anthropologists might point to primitive tools. But both of these, the artistic and the practical or scientific even, relied on the human capabity to tell stories. The painting was a narrative of a hunt, or a feast, or just a hand dipped in paint and pressed against a wall. It was telling a story. I am here. I matter. These things matter and have beauty. The tool needed a story too. Somebody worked the flint, but somebody else told them what they knew about working the flint. A story.

We are built from telling stories.

The woke future, if everyone was woke and everything offends someone, is a future without stories. The least significant thing becomes the most significant thing. And we go back to the darkness, incapable of learning, incapable of distinguishing between fact and fiction, cave men before cave paintings, grunting at how everything offends us.

This is why woke literature, woke art, woke cinema is all so crap. Because woke thinking is so crap, because wokeness is a kind of perpetual anti-thinking and a perpetual rejection of the joy of creation, of song, of creativity, of stories that ‘offend’.

Ban Delilah and you’ll ban just about anything.

by Daniel Jupp

So here’s my take on the Delilah thing. Welsh rugby fans banned from singing the song, senior police officers sternly telling everyone that the ban is justified and the song encourages murder.
It’s easy to discard each and every little woke moment as trivial. And we do. We laugh about how nuts these people are. We post about it. But we are rational, normal people with actual lives so we forget about it pretty quickly. And then the next crazy thing happens, and the next.
And each time we laugh, and each time they do it again.
But let’s take this example seriously. It’s hard, because the thing is inherently absurd. It’s a Tom Jones song. So many things the woke do seem trivial. But what we should realise from that is that if they seek to control every trivial thing there is, it’s because a)they already control everything serious, like the police forces and the legal system and the political parties and b)these are fanatics who just don’t stop.
Everything has to be controlled. Everything has to be woke.
So it’s actually terrifying that a senior police officer thinks it’s normal and appropriate to control whether people sing a Tom Jones song. It’s terrifying that this utter lunatic is in an official position with authority over anyone. Because he can’t tell the difference between a song that tells a fictional story and real life. He can’t tell the difference between telling a story and murdering someone, between fiction and reality. And that’s not surprising. Wokeness prioritises hysteria and irrationality. It celebrates the subjective feeling over the objective fact. It considers offence more important than freedom, and it’s own crazed values imposed on others rather than shared, sensible and traditional values, as what society is built on.
More philosophically, telling stories is what makes us human. For the first hundred thousand years of human existence we have no surviving record. No culture, no art, no stories. It’s just darkness, indistinguishable from the lives of any other animal. It is culture, identity, creativity that makes us truly, fully human, that realises our potential above that of other animals.
Yes, Tom Jones too.
And all we have of human culture, of humanity at its most human, is telling stories. Artists will say that 90,000 year old cave paintings were the first cultural artifacts on Earth, anthropologists might point to primitive tools. But both of these, the artistic and the practical or scientific even, relied on the human capabity to tell stories. The painting was a narrative of a hunt, or a feast, or just a hand dipped in paint and pressed against a wall. It was telling a story. I am here. I matter. These things matter and have beauty. The tool needed a story too. Somebody worked the flint, but somebody else told them what they knew about working the flint. A story.
We are built from telling stories.
The woke future, if everyone was woke and everything offends someone, is a future without stories. The least significant thing becomes the most significant thing. And we go back to the darkness, incapable of learning, incapable of distinguishing between fact and fiction, cave men before cave paintings, grunting at how everything offends us.
This is why woke literature, woke art, woke cinema is all so crap. Because woke thinking is so crap, because wokeness is a kind of perpetual anti-thinking and a perpetual rejection of the joy of creation, of song, of creativity, of stories that ‘offend’.
Ban Delilah and you’ll ban just about anything.

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