'I Still Find That Offensive!'

by Claire Fox

Overview

How did we become so thin-skinned? In this new and updated edition of her acclaimed polemic I Find That Offensive! Claire Fox addresses head on the possible causes of what is fast becoming known as ‘Generation Snowflake’ in a rallying cry to toughen up, become more robust and make a virtue of the right to be offensive.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781785904165
Publisher:	Biteback Publishing, Ltd.
Publication date:	04/02/2019
Series:	Provocations
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	4.70(w) x 7.25(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Claire Fox is the director of the Institute of Ideas, which she established in 2000 to create a public space where ideas can be contested without constraint. A panellist on BBC Radio 4’s The Moral Maze, Claire is regularly invited to comment on developments in culture, education and the media on UK television and radio. She is also a columnist for the Times Educational Supplement.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“At the beginning of each new academic year every fresher, indeed every student, should read this book!” Times Higher Education

“A pithy, punchy contribution to Biteback’s “Provocations” series.” Spiked

Interviews

"At school or university events, I have noticed an increasingly prickly willingness to take offence – and the corrosive effect that this is having on attitudes to free speech. This trend, to be easily offended, is now exploding into public consciousness with the unravelling madness that has taken over so many American universities, and is now emerging on British campuses.

It is time to create something more positive and robust than today’s offence wars: a critical climate that really is in opposition to some of the more destructive social and cultural trends that this generation has come to exemplify.”

A whole new lexicon of words and phrases, such as ‘fake news’, ‘post-truth’, ‘virtue signalling’, has sprung up to dismiss others’ opinions as not worth engaging with … Millions of voters have been demonised as deplorables, low-information xenophobes, populists. Populism itself has moved from being a political science category to the insult de nos jours.

But if you can’t vote freely – without being classified as beyond the pale – what hope for speaking freely? This has contributed to a febrile culture war, with serious implications for engaging civilly with those we disagree with.”