All Issues Are Political Issues/Quotes

""All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.""

- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

"""But everything is political, isn't it?" The question is insistent, it always comes back, in part because there is more than a little truth to the assertion it presupposes. Everything is political in the sense that any action we take or decision we make or conclusion we reach rests on assumptions, norms, and values not everyone would affirm. That is, everything we do is rooted in a contestable point of origin; and since the realm of the contestable is the realm of politics, everything is political.

But this sense in which everything is political is so general (no action escapes it) that there isn't very much that can be done with it; it doesn't tell you anything about the entities (all entities) to which it applies. If everything is political, to say of something that it is political is not to distinguish it from anything else; and if you want to know what a particular thing is or how it works, you will have to go back to the ordinary distinctions that will still serve to mark one thing off from another even if, on a very abstract level, they are both political.

Literary criticism and partisan politics are both political in this general sense -- any style of their performance will be controversial in the field -- but the point of the one is to produce a true account of a poem, while the point of the second is to win elections. If you mix them up and try for an account of a poem that will help a favored candidate or advance a political cause (unlikely but possible scenarios), you will only be pretending to practice literary criticism, and you will be exploiting for partisan purposes the discipline in whose name you supposedly act.""

- Stanley Fish, Is Everyting Political? (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

""Everything is sexist, everything is racist, everything is homophobic and you have to point it all out to everyone all the time [...]"''"

- Anita Sarkeesian (of Feminist Frequency) in a 2015 panel.

""I'm fucking sick of the Internet (especially coming into 2016) [...] and people on the Internet having this Social Justice Warrior-like mindset towards everything. Everybody gets triggered about everything, everybody gets offended about everything. You can't let out any non-filtered opinion here on YouTube without taking a bashing or without taking some kind of bullshit punishment from YouTube.""

- Joey (The Anime Man), SHOULD I JUST QUIT YOUTUBE?

""Personally, liberal students scare the shit out of me. I know how to get conservative students to question their beliefs and confront awful truths, and I know that, should one of these conservative students make a facebook page calling me a communist or else seek to formally protest my liberal lies, the university would have my back. I would not get fired for pissing off a Republican, so long as I did so respectfully, and so long as it happened in the course of legitimate classroom instruction.

The same cannot be said of liberal students. All it takes is one slip—not even an outright challenging of their beliefs, but even momentarily exposing them to any uncomfortable thought or imagery—and that’s it, your classroom is triggering, you are insensitive, kids are bringing mattresses to your office hours and there’s a twitter petition out demanding you chop off your hand in repentance.""

- White Hot Harlots, A personal account of how call out culture has harmed teaching