For their own protection
Students calling for the resignation of Kathleen Stock have said their campaign has been “cloak and dagger” in order to protect their own members from online harassment.
Ahhhhh I see – they want to protect themselves from harassment…so that they can harass Kathleen Stock. Interesting take.
But after all, Kathleen is the tyrannical unelected head of state who tortures and imprisons protesters and poisons her critics, and is protected by a heavily armed military.
Just kidding. She’s an academic, a professor and writer. She tortures and imprisons no one and is protected by no one. She has opinions on the fungibility of sex that the brave “cloak and dagger” students don’t like, so they hide their identities while they try to bully her out of Sussex University.
Organisers of a protest planned in the centre of campus have advised attendees to “conceal your identity to protect yourself and others”. One of the campaign leaders said that activists did not want to reveal their identities for fear of opening themselves up to abuse or potential defamation claims.
Just as bank robbers don’t want to reveal their identities for fear of ending up in prison.
[Rio] Jacques, who is the first activist from the campaign to speak openly, added: “It’s very much cloak and dagger, but that’s not the way we want it to be. The masks — it’s not meant to be threatening. It’s just for the protection of the people that want to be vocal.”
It’s for the protection of the people who want to abuse and threaten Kathleen Stock with no cost to themselves.
“No one wants to lose their place at university, but at the same time we don’t want to sacrifice our right to defend ourselves with our words.”
Defend themselves from what? Stock doesn’t bully or threaten them. They are the aggressors here.
In its manifesto, Anti Terf Sussex describes Stock as “one of this wretched island’s most prominent transphobes, espousing a bastardised variation of radical feminism”. It claims she is harmful and dangerous to trans people adding: “We’re not up for debate. We cannot be reasoned out of existence.”
The group’s suggested reading includes an essay by Christa Peterson, a PhD student at the University of Southern California. For the past two years years, Peterson has led a Twitter campaign against Stock, culminating in the essay published earlier this year.
Christa Peterson is an absolutely poisonous individual, and she does indeed spend an astonishing amount of time shouting at Kathleen on Twitter.
In the university environments of times past, holders of different philosophies and intellectual positions would engage in more or less civil and traditional academic dialogue with one another, more on the model of Plato’s Academy rather than say, the various minor variants within the Catholic Church; or at the other extreme, the primary school playground, or the western bar room as portrayed in countless movies. There were exceptions of course, particularly when paradigm shifts or significant cultural tectonic movements were under way, such as in the mid-Nineteenth C furore over the theories of Charles Darwin. Then the play got rough.
The poet Percy Shelley in 1811 lobbed a grenade in the form of an anonymously authored book entitled The Necessity of Atheism into the otherwise serene environment of Oxford University. At that time the content was so shocking to the authorities that, along with a friend and supporter, he was “rusticated for contumacy” (ie temporarily chucked out for stubborn refusal to deny authorship.)
It would seem to me that Christa Peterson and sundry other twitterati are trying to repeat that process, but with the boot on the other foot. It is they who are campaigning to silence their dissenting intellectual opponent. They bring to mind Orwell’s assessment of the Stalinists of his day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Necessity_of_Atheism
Apparently not even her own union.
This idea of wearing masks to protect themselves. Am I being too cynical in suspecting they are wearing masks to convince people they need to protect themselves because they are not really at risk but need that to (1) get people behind their ridiculous cause; and (2) make it look like they are the most marginalized and oppressed?
I’m afraid I’m not overly cynical, but I’m willing to listen to dissenting voices.
“One of the campaign leaders said that activists did not want to reveal their identities for fear of opening themselves up to abuse or potential defamation claims.”
I’m not following this regarding abuse. What kind of abuse do they fear will happen? From whom? Is it different from the way they are abusing Ms. Stock? Trying to get someone fired because you don’t like her speaking up because you disagree with her opinion is petty and abusive.
I’d say you could keep defamatory claims at bay, but our legal system (I don’t know about Britain) is so expensive, that the threat of them does keep people from speaking their minds in the US. People use them to harass others and force them to keep them quiet. Donald Trump did it routinely.
No one wants to lost their place at university, no. That’s why Kathleen Stock, for example, isn’t busying herself committing sackable offenses.
No UK university is going to expel a student for protesting. Not even for protesting against the university itself. For illegal, threatening or especially egregious defamatory actions while protesting, possibly, but for simply protesting? Absolutely not. Not even now, as UK Universities rapidly become the punchline of their own joke.
I’m sure, as iknklast speculates, that the mask-wearing is performative but would add a (3) they are children playing dress-up.