I walked out of the Brisbane Writers Festival Keynote Address. This is why.
Yassmin Abdel-Magied
1.3K260

You walked out, and to me that looks like pure base intellectual immaturity and intolerance. It has no place in an exchange of ideas, but it’s good political theater and you played it for all its worth.

You and those like you have a goal to suppress and curtail literary expression into a very narrow set of standards and limitations that have nothing to do at with actual creativity. They do have much to do with policing thought, and creating a new status quo for which you see yourselves as the ultimate arbiters. You and yours also stand ready to anonymously punish those that veer off the Party line via the “safe space” of the faceless places on the web.

It seems you have dutifully learned to manifest visceral, even evangelical, discomfort, at being logically challenged and opposed. Next time you should try a pretend bout of falling down in convulsions while you speak in tongues, that’s a real crowd pleaser too.

Your movement’s squeaky wheels have gotten far too much grease among money conscious college staff and administrators, and curious reporters, but fortunately many your own age are standing up to the sheer idiocy of your philosophy.

Via the comments listed here it’s a relief to me that so many people your own age are simply not falling for it.

Kudos to them.