Elsewhere (69)

And as Daniel Greenfield explains in his article, when two Designated Victim Groups collide – say, if brown-skinned thugs assault a white-skinned gay man – calculating the relative victim values can get quite tricky. It’s like suddenly having to do long division in your head while jumping up and down. I’ve actually seen this kind of calculation first-hand, in real time. You could practically hear the grinding of mental gears as the person concerned tried to figure out which party they should pretend to care about.
See also this:

The contemporary academic majority worships the trinity of race, class, and gender. Class is clearly the third wheel – unsurprisingly given that most tenured professors are well-off financially and secure in employment, and therefore don’t have a personal connection to the preferred ideological viewpoints on the issue. The competition for primacy between race and gender, however, is less clear-cut. In a matter like the lacrosse case, where the preferred viewpoint on class, race, and gender all dictated a rush to embrace false accuser Crystal Mangum’s wild claims, the result – as we all saw with the Group of 88’s activities – can be vicious. But the rape of Katie Rouse, a white Duke student, by a local black man was met with utter silence from the Group. As I noted at the time, they seemed desperate to avoid making a politically difficult choice.

And of course this.

David,
I’m somewhat disappointed – or perhaps amazed?
How could the source of some of the best snark on the internet miss linking this issue to “Victimhood Poker”?
http://dicklist.blogspot.com.au/2006/07/tdl-gaming-world-series-of-victimhood.html

Thomas Sowell is (as usual) worth a squint:

This election is a test, not just of the opposing candidates but of the voting public. If what they want are the hard facts about where the country is, and where it is heading, they cannot vote for more of the same for the next four years. But, if what they want is emotionally satisfying rhetoric and a promise to give them something for nothing, to be paid for by taxing somebody else, then Obama is their man… There are no doubt voters who will vote on the basis of believing that Obama “cares” more about them. But that is a faith which passeth all understanding. The political mirage of something for nothing, from leaders who “care,” has ruined many a nation.

“the BBC buys more copies of the Guardian than any other national newspaper”
Who’d have thunk?
Nice review from Charles Moore recently of a book by a former Islamic militant, Maajid Nawaz. Born and bred in Britain, he joined Hizb al-Tahrir (HT), an organisation that talks of establishing a new Muslim Caliphate. Whilst in prison in Egypt, he changed his views.
“Despite his rhetorical devotion to Islam, he had been obsessively political, and knew little about the religion in whose name he had struggled and plotted. In jail, he studied. He also met lots of other people, including secularists, imprisoned for beliefs quite unlike his own. He found that he respected them”
He talks of how his extremism was tolerated in Britain:
“The liberal Left were particularly credulous: ‘How we Islamists laughed at their naivety’…In college, HT could easily turn the Islamic Society into its front organisation, and students had no trouble carrying knives at all times. ‘Hate speech’ which, Nawaz writes, would have been jumped on if it had come from the BNP, was indulged because it came from people with brown skin. In Pakistan, teaching English via the British Council was a recognised means of livelihood for HT agitators. Our host culture was so abject that it effectively incited attacks upon itself”
Well worth further investigation.

Henry,
“The liberal Left were particularly credulous: ‘How we Islamists laughed at their naivety’…”
I recall the Guardian’s Natasha Walter confidently describing Hizb ut-Tahrir as “an alternative to capitalism” and champions of women’s rights. At the time of her blathering, the group’s official on-line constitution explained how those “women’s rights” would involve compulsory segregation of the sexes, limited voting and enforced “modesty.” But Ms Walter was much too busy swooning over Angry Brown People to actually read what these obnoxious little fascists wish to bring about.
A few weeks later, Madeleine Bunting conducted her ludicrous Hello-style interview with Yusuf al-Qaradawi, during which she enthused about his “horror of immorality and materialism,” his “independence of mind” and his mastery of the internet. Bunting was of course careful to skip over the content of Qaradawi’s website, which, at the time of her interview, celebrated suicide bombing, the murdering of gay people and the beating of disobedient women. For Allah, naturally.
The above, incidentally, are two of the reasons – the many, many reasons – why this T-shirt exists.

What’s ironic about “you didn’t build that” is that it ought to be directly contradictory to all those people who think Obama is a Marxist. After all, isn’t he saying that the Labor Theory of Value is bunk?