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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16559 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 28, 2026

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Your comment is missing some links. Brussels Times:

Unia to take 'race realist' researcher Nathan Cofnas to court

Unia, Belgium’s independent centre for equal opportunities, plans to file a complaint against Nathan Cofnas, a US researcher at Ghent University, over remarks it believes repeatedly breached the country’s anti-racism law, De Morgen reported [in Dutch] on Thursday.

The centre’s board agreed last week to take the case to court, one month after Ghent University opened disciplinary proceedings against Cofnas.

In comments to De Morgen, Unia said the US philosopher was spreading ideas in Belgium that rank people in a hierarchy on the basis of supposed scientific knowledge.

It said those ideas were being used to justify discrimination based on origin or skin colour, and to encourage forms of segregation.

However, Nathan Cofnas’s position as a researcher could complicate the case, according to Stefan Sottiaux, a KU Leuven professor specialising in anti-discrimination law.

“The anti-racism law requires malicious intent,” he said. “The mere dissemination of shocking or racist opinions is therefore not punishable on its own.”

My favorite part about this is there is zero discussion of whether is it true; just whether they dislike the content.

Where possible there is a push to create laws about speech that causes offense as a means of sidestepping the truth as a defense. They wish to make speaking 'offensive' truth a crime.

I’m reminded of the Cathy Newman Jordan Peterson interview where she asks why should his right to speech be more important than her right not to be offended.

And to me that is the core conflict between Europe and the New World captured in a single exchange.

Jordan Peterson is Canadian and Cathy Newman is a resident of the planet Idiot - it's too pat to boil it down to New and Old Worlds.

Especially since free speech is defended by law in both England and apparently Brussels, as it says in the article. The defendant wins most of their cases if they actually get to court.

The issue is informal sanctions and discrimination producing a chilling effect, something which is at least as prevalent in the US as it is in the 'Old World'.

Very much agreed. If you are dependent on PAYE/W-2 employment to put food on the table, you de facto have more free speech in the UK than the US, at least if the online accounts of the Great Awokening from non-leftist Americans are accurate.

Are you saying that in the UK it's possible to work for a leftist industry (like say film or publishing), say "black people have lower average IQ" and keep your job?

It's illegal to fire PAYE employees for out-of-work political speech in the UK (and almost everywhere apart from the US), the law is enforced, and the norm it implements is generally accepted to the extent that cancel mobs don't even try to get e.g. baristas fired over social media posts. Despite the campaign against him, Cofnas was able to keep his job at Cambridge until his contract expired - and I think we can agree that academia is a leftist industry.

This wouldn't help you in film, because temp and contract work is ubiquitous in that industry and I agree that a known racist who was not already a megastar would not be able to get gigs in the UK - as in the US.

The Maya Forastater case held that views on sexual morality are protected by anti-discrimination laws by analogy with religion, so "Gays will burn in hell" or "Transwomen are actually men" enjoy an even higher level of protection. (Forastater herself sued over the non-renewal of a temporary contract). She was working in a centre-left thinktank, which is another obvious example of a leftist industry.

But the difference that is visceral if you hang out with PMC people on both sides of the pond is the impact of hostile environment law on normie white-collar workplaces. The idea that an employer is expected to be seen to be preventing a very broad range of potentially offensive speech doesn't exist in UK workplaces which are general corporate and not explicitly leftist. In the UK, it is possible to work for a centrist industry like accountancy and poast "black people have lower average IQ" (though incidentally that probably isn't true in the UK) and keep your job. Motteposters who do this in the US have said that they are relying on not getting caught and putting an appropriate level of effort into opsec.

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