Good news everyone: we finally did it. The culture war has hit its apex, there’s no way it can possibly get any stupider. If you’ve picked up a Murdoch newspaper recently, or even just looked at the front page of one out of boredom while standing in line at the supermarket, you have likely seen some staggeringly unhinged takes in the service of eliciting outrage from aging conservatives whose brains can only produce dopamine when they are physically shaking their fist at the sky. You have likely not seen one as unhinged as this take from The Sun, though:
“Snowflake“, a pejorative term you might be familiar with from its constant usage by the most irritating and vapid people alive, is usually reserved for things like ‘saying racism is bad’ or ‘saying sexism is bad’, but The Sun has seen fit here to bust it out for people who… got the point of a 200-year-old novella?
In case you assumed the best and thought this was some sort of joke or the headline was in some way misleading, I am sad to announce this is not the case, citing their grievance as originating from an introduction to a re-release of Frankenstein:
In it, scientist Victor Frankenstein’s monster gets snubbed by society and then murders his creator’s brother, pal and bride. But an academic has revealed growing support for the beast in the introduction to a 200th anniversary edition of the book.
Prof Nick Groom, of Exeter University, said: “When I teach the book now, students are very sentimental towards the being. But he is a mass murderer.”
He then asked: “If he’s not human, but he is intelligent and sentient, does he have rights?”
This might seem incredibly stupid, but I don’t see any other media organisation brave enough to report on the “growing support for the beast” despite the fact that he is a “lab-created murderer“.
Their readers clearly share the same concerns though, with commenter Daveyh suggesting that this dangerous trend needs to be wiped out: “It’s the Sinistre / Siniter (sic) Hard Left tutors within the education system who need eradicating…………..before this becomes the norm.”
He also, somehow, construed all of this to be an inability on the part of uni students to distinguish reality from fiction which is an, uh, interesting reading of the piece:
Seeing that it’s a fictional character, perhaps the UNi’s should all be closed down and make it illegal for anyone to employ these Snowflake ex-uni students, who don’t seem able to see the diferrence between fiction and reality…………..the Far Left have really destroyed our education system…………………but that was their intent all along.
Obviously, a lot of people are taking the piss out of The Sun:
[Dr. Frankenstein creates a Monster from spare body parts in a miracle of science, and the Monster is granted intelligence, but his ghastly visage drives away humans in fits of horror, setting him on a horrible path of retribution]
THE SUN: oy. speak ENGLISH— Matt Pearce 🦅🇺🇸 (@mattdpearce) March 7, 2018
https://twitter.com/Jeff_Sparrow/status/971179332549750784
What an incredible time to be alive. It turns out the real Frankenstein’s monster was us, all along.
