Even More Agonies of the Left

Yes, but Ms Moosa seems to imagine that deservedness – in this case, of a spacious house in an agreeable location – is utterly unrelated to being the one who has to work to pay the bills. We’ve long had a situation in which modest households making, say, £20,000 a year are seeing an amount equivalent to their total annual income being paid in housing benefit to just one household. And when the average taxpayer’s bill for housing benefit is roughly equivalent to the cost of an extra average mortgage payment, people start asking questions.
But when some working people ask why it is that other people get to live in much nicer and more expensive houses in locations of their choosing by virtue of not paying the bills, or by virtue of having more children than they can plausibly support, and who get to do this on an indefinite basis at the expense of the people asking these questions… well, this confuses Ms Moosa.

Oh god DON’T use that term (fishy), it’s sexist and cissexist.
What the…?

On “fishy”. The joke when I was an ignorant High Schooler (mid-teens) was that the nether regions of women were supposed to smell like fish. Hence using the term “fishy” presumably means “like a vagina”. Not sure how that’s “cissexist” (what a horrid neologism), but I doubt there are any words at which Penny and her ilk can’t, or at least *won’t*, take offense.

Jason,
But when people say such-and-such sounds (or smells) a bit fishy, they aren’t implying that such-and-such sounds (or smells) like a lady’s panty parts. What are a lady’s nethers supposed to sound like, anyway?
[ Added: ]
I suppose, then, the thinking goes like this: Some schoolboys have at some point laughingly imagined that vaginas smell like fish. Therefore no-one must ever be allowed to use the term ‘fishy’ to suggest that something is suspicious or questionable. Lest the rest of us immediately assume that ladies’ nethers are also suspicious, questionable or seething with pure evil.
Seems rather presumptuous and a tad doctrinaire.

It seems to me it’s the kind of passive-aggressive browbeating that so many lefties seem to enjoy. For some, it’s practically a sport. As when the Guardian’s Zoe Williams insisted that “hoodie” is in fact a “sleight-of-hand” and a “sinister racial code word.” Apparently, it’s “a way to be racist without having to appear it.” She later insisted that public concern about dangerous dogs has “a political subtext” and actually signals a fear of “young, ideally black, men.” In neither case was any evidence deemed necessary.

“Let these two asses be set to treading grain.”

This is precisely what atheist and secularist groups on university campuses across the UK are currently on the receiving end of. Those who dare to criticise Islamists, especially the hate preachers who promote the killing of gays and Female Genital Mutilation, are accused by the far left nutters of being racist.
Btw Trimegistus – that comment was absolute gold. Really made me chuckle.

“I wish we were at a point where we could admit we’re all shaped by societal racism, and could discuss that.”
Oh, if only we had reached a point where leftists felt at ease to drone on and on and on and on about racism continuously, at the slightest provocation, on the feeblest pretence, and to see the hidden hand of racism in the most bizarre and ridiculous of places, and habitually accuse people who try to argue with them of being racist in order to silence them.
Just imagine how different such a society would be to ours. Just imagine…

The ‘generally speaking’ is a bit of a giveaway. He’s able to speak on behalf of ‘we’ (all men) but is much better than the rest of us, by virtue of his acquiescence to standard lefty politics.

Men that really, really want to talk about, gender,sex, and the experience of of being a male (all in a safe way) are not really men, at least in the way us traditional hunter-gatherer, woman loving types like to think of ourselves. Maybe in the metro-sexual sense they are. I’m sure PennyRed would be appalled if one of the former ever stumbled into her world of leftist navel gazing narcissism. Or perhaps more correctly if she ever looked up from her navel gazing at the world around her and caught sight of one.

And speaking of the competitive side of leftist rhetoric slinging, I vote Laura Terry as the winner of this particular flurry of conspicuous pc peacocking.
The tetchy scolding attitude, the finding of offensively oppressive terminology in the most innocuous of phrases, the discovery of ever more obscure and ridiculous forms of hitherto unrealised oppression (cissexist? Seriously? Did it not occur to you that a normal might read your tweets and give you the merciless mocking you so thoroughly deserve?) and the arrogant conceit that if only Ms Penny followed her tweets, the pearls of wisdom therein would elevate her to ever greater heights of enlightemnent.
Congratulations, Ms Terry! You are officially more absurdly pretentious than the other posturing buffoons you hang out with.

Further to my comments about Zoe Williams and her ability to hallucinate racist intent, it’s worth bearing in mind how the absurd becomes quite sinister when played for bigger stakes.
Earlier this year, Nation editor Christopher Hayes tweeted: “When people use the word ‘illegal’ as a noun, it sounds to me like saying ‘coloureds’.” For Hayes, then, criticism of illegal immigration is little more than a pretext for racial bigotry because regardless of context or the speaker’s intent, that’s what he chooses to hear. The current crop of House Democrats are actually being trained in how to race hustle and denounce phantom subtexts using much the same tactics. It’s a strategy for power. And so any number of statements, even statements of fact, can be attacked as “racially coded” and therefore malign – regardless of mere logic or the speaker’s intent. And if an opponent’s statement can be construed as “racially coded” – given sufficient squinting and contortion – it almost certainly will.

This weeks tasks:
1. Learn what ‘cissexism’ is.
2. Come up with some cissexist jokes and statements.
3. Find a sufficient number of far-left hags who have the first clue what it is.
4. Deploy jokes.

Cis: Latin, for “inside” or “this side of”: opposite of “Trans” – “Cisalpine Gaul”
example: “Cislunar space” would mean inside the moon’s orbit

19. As a woman, I am unlikely to lose my hair before middle age.
It’s amazing how much you can inflate the idea of privilege before it pops.
21. As a woman, I don’t have to dilate the rest of my life.
Say what?
22. I am more likely able to achieving orgasm.
Grammar is an oppressive social construct, I see.

TimT
“In the first case it seems Laurie Penny’s respondent is one of those left-wing chaps who agrees to everything a pretty left-wing woman says, out of some forlorn fantasy of future romance”
I think so, though I doubt that saying “We fail to see our privilege” will do the trick, but what do I know…
I think this was when LP did a Twitter survey of men on ‘talking about sex’ or whatever. She claims she was ‘inundated’ with responses, and duly wrote a piece in the Independent the next week which I’m sorry to say I read.
What she doesn’t realise is that her responses will have been from this limited group, and with this sort of dynamic, or from followers who want to get an approving response for whatever reason. So hardly a representative sample

Damnit! I can’t fly like a bird by flapping my wings. Who can I blame for oppressing me this way?
Thank you for making this Friday morning a little more ephemeral, David.
-S