Dear NatPo Opiner: Please Check Your Hectoring

Quite often the National Post will publish something designed to rile up its core readership. This, a piece about the need to "check our privilege," is the sort of thing I mean. The opiner, a journalist associated with academe, lectures--hectors--those of us who don't slot neatly into one or another "victim" group, and who therefore (according to the "geniuses" of academe) have an innate and unfair advantage over others. What's amusing here is that she's willing to swallow some of academia's mumbo jumbo, like this privilege stuff, but not all of it:

Let’s be clear: To acknowledge the role of privilege does not negate the role of self-determination and personal responsibility. They are understood. Even I cringe at new speech-policing concepts such as trigger warnings, which are used to control speech on university campuses. And those on the losing end of privilege could stand to watch how they couch their argument when calling it out. Often, they, too, possess some form of privilege. I know I do. Sometimes people elevate their victimhood to suggest that’s the extent of their value and comes across as a form of emotional blackmail others cannot access. 

The beautiful thing about being part of a democracy is the notion of perfecting it...

Wrong. The beautiful thing about being part of a democracy is the notion of living your life as you see fit, without busybodies pushing you around and trying to micromanage every aspect of your thought and behavior.

The beautiful thing is the freedom.

The notion of perfecting society is, quite frankly, frightening, as it invariably leads to nutty "trigger warnings" and efforts even far more horribly totalitarian.

Update: Adam Carolla had a great comeback when an NPR dude tried to pin that "white privilege" crap on him:

“By the way, I’m you’re worst nightmare. I’m the guy whose mom was on welfare, I’m the guy who got the free lunch meals over at the school, I’m the guy who got the government cheese, and I’m the guy who picked up garbage on the construction sites, and I’m the guy who was told, ‘you can’t be an L.A. fireman because you’re a white male’ … So don’t try to paint me into this white privilege bulls**t … I’m never going to buy into it, I lived it!”