None of this is to be taken as a denial of continuing inequalities in society. One of the cruel ironies of the new puritanism is that it relies on strategies and conceptualisations that are almost guaranteed to perpetuate and even exacerbate the very injustices they seek to counteract. The claim that the power structures embedded in society can not only be detected, but quantified and regulated, is bound to exasperate those who remain unconvinced that they exist at all. It is as though the argument stage has been entirely bypassed; activists assert what they know to be true, without even the
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