Slouching Toward the Slow, Muffled End...

In keeping with the recent reports of the slow, but sure, suppression of free speech in the Netherlands and the UK (see below), Steve Sailer offers a truly depressing long-term forecast for Western Civilization as multiculturalism and political correctness (driven by the absolute need to deny ethnic and cultural differences) slowly strangles the West.

So, I suspect that, outside of the United States and its First Amendment protections, the word "crimethink" will continue to slowly move from metaphor to reality as the police power is brought down upon heretics.

Within the U.S., outspoken dissenters won’t be investigated by the police. But they will be rendered largely unemployable because institutions will worry that they present too much risk of the employer losing job discrimination lawsuits.

In pockets of the Internet, obscure or anonymous individuals will continue to exchange facts and ideas. But, really, how many people like to look for truth for its own sake?

The long-term outcome will be an increasing stultification of intellectual life in the West—rather like in Brezhnev's Soviet Union. Mathematicians and astronomers at the abstract end were relatively free. At the practical end, engineers were, too. But any Soviet scientist or intellectual in the middle, who tried to theorize about human beings, was in danger of losing his career or his liberty.

Sailer's prediction is all the more frightening, because it seems increasingly likely.