Elsewhere (149)
Kevin Williamson on lifestyle leftism and class disdain:
Progressivism, especially in its well-heeled coastal expressions, is not a philosophy — it’s a lifestyle. Specifically, it is a brand of conspicuous consumption, which in a land of plenty such as ours as often as not takes the form of conspicuous non-consumption: no gluten, no bleached flour, no Budweiser, no Walmart, no SUVs, no Toby Keith, etc. The people who set the cultural tone in places such as Berkeley, Seattle, or Austin would no more be caught vaping than they would slurping down a Shamrock Shake at McDonald’s — and they conclude without thinking that, therefore, neither should anybody else… There is no meaningful evidence that organic foods are more nutritious or safer, but the lifestyle progressives who run the Boulder schools insist on them, along with yoga. What’s banned? Chocolate milk.
And Charles C W Cooke on leftist in-fighting and the endless search for ideological purity:
“I am out of ideas,” the socialist blogger Freddie DeBoer admitted yesterday afternoon, before inquiring rhetorically what he is supposed to conclude when he sees so “many good, impressionable young people run screaming from left-wing politics because they are excoriated the first second they step mildly out of line?” Among the things that DeBoer claims lately to “have seen, with my own two eyes,” are a white woman running from a classroom simply because she used the word “disabled”; a black man being ostracised for suggesting that there is “such a thing as innate gender differences”; and a Hispanic Iraq War veteran “being berated” for using the phrase “man up.” Worse for him and his interests, perhaps, DeBoer also claims to have under his belt “many more depressing stories of good people pushed out and marginalised in left-wing circles because they didn’t use the proper set of social and class signals to satisfy the world of intersectional politics.” What, he asks in exasperation, is he supposed to say to them?
I daresay that if I had been in any of the situations that DeBoer describes, I would have walked happily out of the class. Why? Well, because there is simply nothing to be gained from arguing with people who believe that it is reasonable to treat those who use the word “disabled” as we treat those who use the word “n***er”; because there is no virtue in arguing with people who refuse even to entertain the possibility that they might be wrong.
If you want to find bad faith theatrics and unshakeable idiocy presented as virtue, head for the Clown Quarter of the nearest university. It’s where you’re most likely to find the word “privilege” deployed as an ad hominem device. A way of saying, “Your opinion doesn’t count (or doesn’t count as much as mine) because you have a certain level of melanin, or a penis, or the wrong kind of upbringing, or an insufficient number of hang-ups and fashionable pretensions.” Think of it as a kind of Maoist snobbery, in which, as Jesse Walker notes, the unwary are denounced for the rhetorical equivalent of using the wrong cutlery.
In my experience, the personalities to which such things appeal aren’t terribly interested in civility or justice, “social” or otherwise. What they seem to be interested in is opportunist scolding and one-upmanship, that all-important social positioning. And so what you see, and see quite often, isn’t concern for the supposedly vulnerable; it’s an assertion of status and a pay-off for all that wound-up dogmatism. It’s how professed egalitarians let us know they’re better than us. Because they really do have to let us know.
Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.
the rhetorical equivalent of using the wrong cutlery.
No one expects the
Spanish inquisitiontone police!No one expects the
Spanish inquisitiontone police!I remember an exchange I had some years ago with a child who had evidently been schooled by his parents in The Kind Of Progressive Attitudes One Ought To Have™. We were talking about food and at some point the conversation turned to McDonald’s. I mentioned that I occasionally indulged, maybe once every couple of months, and generally enjoyed it. I was told – immediately and quite firmly – that eating at McDonald’s, however rarely, was very bad indeed. It was something one shouldn’t like.
It was quite funny, being scolded, piously, by an eleven-year-old. And the tone of his reaction, which presumably copied that of his parents, suggested I’d committed a terrible social gaffe, like belching in church.
I read DeBoer’s blogpost a day or so ago, where he inelegantly started blubbering about Chait’s words, not forgetting to call Chait a “jerk”, before he basically goes on and on whimpering about “W-w-w-what should I doooo?” when leftists’ feelings are hurt by the angry word-salad rants of social justice warriors.
What the ridiculous whiners like DeBoer should do is sit there and take it. The Political Correctness patrols and SJWs are doing what they were created to do, and they were created thanks in part to airheaded leftists like DeBoer. It was ilk like DeBoer who helped create and support the Perpetually Indignant modern leftists for years as they set about targeting crimethoughts & crimethinkers on campuses. Now that they’re running low on non-liberal targets, what are a bunch of people who consider spending hours angrily Tweeting as activism supposed to do?
Of course, they’ll find new targets and deliver the same empty-headed, thoughtless, buzzword-riddled zero calorie snarky assaults peeps like DeBoer happily applauded for years they were aimed at more acceptable conservative targets. Oh who could face down being called names or lectured to by ridiculous leftists and Gawker bloggers? Who could stand up that that sort of bullying? Besides, you know, anyone whose emotional/mental maturity isn’t terminally stuck at 12 years of age.
Meanwhile DeBoer got into a tiff with another academic nobody socialist here: http://studentactivism.net/2015/01/29/stop-whining-freddie-deboer/
Both of them finding themselves on the butt-end of the PC/SJW/leftist grievance industry machine, they’re reduced to this sort of slapfighting with each other. DeBoer mentions he doesn’t know what “mansplaining” is and Angus Johnson steps up with “There is literally an entire Wikipedia article devoted to this topic”
LITERALLY AN ENTIRE WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE
and they go at it for a bit more
I shall treasure the mental image of these people slapfighting.
Interesting to see the left sorting themselves into Jacobins and Girondists at this early stage in the revolution.
Perhaps someone should point out to Mr DeBoer, (and Mr Chait), that, while people eventually tire of all the bloodshed, (especially when there’s a bread shortage), the Jacobins have, by then, ensured that the Revolution has happily ‘eaten its own’.
Dammit, Kevin B. It was my turn to have a reference to Jacobins and Girondists.
Looking at the little ‘slapfight’ these two are having, one of the things that strikes you is the underlying assumption that the purpose of their classes is to produce new leftwing robots. They will protect people who express leftwing ideology through unfashionable vocabulary, but it clearly never enters their heads that someone could actually disagree with them. Presumably it isn’t allowed. (Or more likely, the people who would disagree are learning real things in real classrooms, and don’t have the time for this twaddle.)
“leftist in-fighting and the endless search for ideological purity”
Back when I was in university, some students liked to make sarcastic jokes about an Ideological Purity League.
Living back in my hometown of Vancouver between 2004 – 2013, I was frequently chastised by a young wealthy “Progressive” couple for my views that Man-made Global Warming might be made up. They would frequently go on passive-aggressive environmental attacks on me, trying to imply that they were “pure” and I was not. This, at a time, when I had no car, by choice, and they had a high-end luxury Mercedes.
One day I remember saying to the wife: “Hey Anna, how is it that you constantly chastise everyone for not being green friendly enough, but yet you & Alex frequently go on trips to Europe?” Without any reflection, she repeated [by rote], “Oh, we buy carbon credits.”
Yet another example of how Leftists go about justifying their hypocrisy.
the unwary are denounced for the rhetorical equivalent of using the wrong cutlery.
That.
Oh, and this … though it’s slightly off topic:
Paul Mason’s gets overexcited . It’s not pretty. You have been warned.
‘there is simply nothing to be gained from arguing with people who believe that it is reasonable to treat those who use the word “disabled” as we treat those who use the word “n***er”…’
Or with people who write ‘n***er’. Yes, it is a crude racial insult; but do we really have to asterisk it – particularly when no insult is intended? Asterisks seem so censorious and pious.
Asterisks seem so censorious and pious.
It was part of the quote, so I copied it as is.
Paul Mason gets overexcited. It’s not pretty.
For some, the Great Marxoid Revolution is always on the horizon, throbbing and imminent. Mr Mason was only recently gushing over the Occupy fad, describing it as a “new global revolution,” a “wave of revolt… sweeping the planet.” And then it was the 2011 London rioters – mostly career criminals with records as long as your arm – whose looting and thuggery he described as “political trailblazing… a massive political demonstration against the capitalist state.” The “so-called ‘rioters’” – his words – weren’t just predators, thieves and opportunist vermin; they too were part of a “global revolution,” giving it to The Man.
So, obviously, he’s the man to heed.
And unfortunately Mr Mason isn’t some random fantasist. He’s the economics editor of Channel 4 News. Before that, he was the economics editor of the BBC’s Newsnight. This is the chap whose laughable pronouncements we’re expected to take seriously – by both the nation’s state broadcaster and its supposedly hip alternative.
[ Edited. ]
Quite so, David. And, in doing so, you let Mr Cooke reveal a little about his own pieties.
BGKK, I went and looked at the Mansplaining article on Wikipedia. The first thing that popped into my head was “FUCK OFF!!-splaining” as the most appropriate rejoinder to the use of “mansplaining”.
David Thompson is performing a valuable public service by cruising these Lefty sites looking for this drivel. Its saving me literally millions of liver cells that would otherwise be getting burnt up by excess choler if I had to do it myself.
Quite so, David.
Well, I suppose you also have to bear in mind that many people read blogs while at work, maybe on work computers, and some employers may not take kindly to browser histories with overly salty language.
It would be inhumane to airily dismiss self-flagellating leftists like DeBoer and say, “let them eat cake”…
…because their gluten-free, Certified Organic, Fair-Trade cakes taste like roof shingles. I know because I’ve had one, or at least a bite of one.
. . . which in a land of plenty such as ours as often as not takes the form of conspicuous non-consumption: . . .
Weeellll . . . not entirely exactly . .
The actual case, noting lots of experience with Berkeley, is more often as not takes the form of my conspicuous non-consumption . . .
Hipsters with hipster pacifiers–or cigarettes–are all over the place, as are their opposite numbers . . . and the overall issue remains My form . . .
“Campus censorship is often painted as a minor issue – a problem of students’ union muppetry and kneejerk university risk-aversion. Banning pop songs and keeping far-right nutcases at bay may be bad things on principle, say the critics, but they hardly impinge on the cut and thrust of university debate. The [Free Speech University Rankings] shows that precisely the opposite is true. As soon as you allow the principle that universities should be places of unfettered learning and discussion to be breached, even in the most trivial of circumstances, then censoriousness soon spreads.”
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/exposed-the-staggering-scale-of-censorship-on-campus/16658#.VM9P_52sVsI
Social Justice talk is Mornington Crescent for blood.
He’s the economics editor of Channel 4 News. Before that, he was the economics editor of the BBC’s Newsnight.
I’d be curious to know if Jon Snow headhunted him.
While I confess that C4 News is the only TV news I really bother to watch (when watching it at all), I frequently come away with the distinct impression that Snow treats that news service as his own personal fiefdom.
Re Paul Mason (I thought he just made cheap wine?) and this:
Yeah, I’m guessing this is really his biggest wet dream. But where is this great Greek army going to come from? Or do they plan to march out on the battlefield dressed like this with the hope that whatever army the EU can muster will collectively laugh themselves to death:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/Greek_guard_uniforms_1.jpg
These Social Justice Warrior people don’t know my story as a person who has struggled against society’s oppression of high-IQ people who can do calculus and write software. They should check their privilege as grunting epsilon-minus semi-morons and not impose their hegemonic Stupid People’s agenda on me. I am so triggered right now.
For your delectation – the war of words between transsexuals vs feminists:
http://takimag.com/article/feminists_to_trannies_stay_off_our_terf_jim_goad
Interesting to see the left sorting themselves into Jacobins and Girondists at this early stage in the revolution
And you know the Jacobins will slaughter the “Menschovics” and then start reeducating the general population.
Dreary feminist comedy show cancelled after dreary feminists protest.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/02/02/feminist-comedian-kate-smurthwaite_n_6593342.html
you let Mr Cooke reveal a little about his own pieties.
More like National Review‘s.
NR is still trying to rehabilitate its reputation from its failure to denounce segregation enthusiastically enough 50+ years ago. A couple of years back they turfed a writer for an article that was less than obsequious to the racial grievance industry.
Ooohhhh!!!! A new way to get thrown out of school!!
All that’s needed is to tell a classmate about quite fictitious jewelry in a movie!
Theatrical provocateurs Ontroerend Goed take on gender inequality in their new show. Three members of the all-female cast discuss shouting about everyday sexism
This is a must see, a theatrical tour de force that is transcendent, indeed, in their own words, “… a metaphor of a concert.”
At this link, you may view some snippets of this bit of magnificence. I recommend that you be seated, and perhaps have a defibrillator handy. Myself, I was trembling and feared I might swoon as I typed this.
A full accounting of this awareness raising event that would humble lesser cisnormative patriarchal musical mortals such as Bach, Beethoven, or Seasick Steve, please clickez vous ici.
“… I suppose you also have to bear in mind that many people read blogs while at work, maybe on work computers…
Outright thieves, stealing time and resources that belongs to their employer. But the rationalize it, humans rationalize really well.
They’re diverse and inclusive, but not that diverse and inclusive:
witwod: “Dreary feminist comedy show cancelled after dreary feminists protest.”
I’ve read the article. More like “Dreary feminsist comedy show cancelled after selling no tickets. Dreary feminist comedian tries to spin it like she’s a heroic free speech martyr.”
According to Wikipedia, in 2010 the same dreary feminist comedian protested at the funeral of a writer who wrote about hiring prostitutes. That’s stooping to Westboro Baptist level, and only marginally less low than Michael Stone because she didn’t bring any hand grenades. And still the university feminist society voted 70% to support her.
Patrick Brown: “In 2010 the same dreary feminist comedian protested at the funeral of a writer who wrote about hiring prostitutes.”
Oh God, that was her. I knew I’d heard the name before. What a lovely human being.
Looking at the little ‘slapfight’ these two are having, one of the things that strikes you is the underlying assumption that the purpose of their classes is to produce new leftwing robots.
I’m glad you can identify it because I was reading it thinking “What the hell is the class actually for?!” Then again, I studied engineering and we generally shut the fuck up and listened or fell asleep in lectures, not engage in petty squabbling over a non-PC term.
Interesting that people who would use ‘n****r’ for the crude racial epithet / insult ‘nigger’ give word a reverence pious Jews apply to the Hebrew name for God – often abbreviated to four dots •••• and never spoken out loud.
give word a reverence
Oh, that ain’t reverence: that’s an acknowledgment of the deeply obscene connotations the word communicates along with a desire to not sully one’s prose with such filth. I don’t know another English word that expresses the same degree of contempt and dehumanization as that word. Not in America, anyway. (I recently re-read Huckleberry Finn and flinched every time I read the word, even though I was fully cognizant of its meaning in that context.)
Hebrew concepts about language are largely alien to Americans: consonants representing the flesh, vowels the spirit, Kabbalistic study of names (as opposed to the Saussurian disconnect of sign and signifier).
Christians have only been wary of using the names of God as expletives, not of uttering/writing them at all.
So you’ve got two similar-looking conventions with entirely different intentions and origins.
Analogy fail.
Unless you want to assert that asterisks are reserved for the extremely holy and the extremely obscene.
That would be fruitful discussion, actually. I’ll think on it.
According to Wikipedia, in 2010 the same dreary feminist comedian protested at the funeral of
Why’s she on wiki anyway? She seems remarkable only for her insignificance. A good number of far more important pages get wiped off wiki for being unimportant.
Let’s not forget, of course, those “correct wikipedia” campaigns that feminists occasionally organise. Because wiki is, as we know, too male-centric, persons of very little importance get the honour of having a wikipedia page devoted to them, just to balance things up a little.
Sounds like the sort of thing this lady might busy herself with …when she’s got a spare moment from entertaining all those packed venues, obviously. Who knows, perhaps she put her own page up..
Oh, that ain’t reverence: that’s an acknowledgment of the deeply obscene connotations the word communicates along with a desire to not sully one’s prose with such filth.
Errr, No.
Charlotte Brontë there, being quoted in the Guardian, where another paper reprints the Guardian.
Even the mere Colonial Chronicle agrees, and then there are rounds of commentary on various and assorted forums.
I was quite surprised at how salty the language was in Jane Eyre. The shootout at the end read like it had been written by Quentin Tarantino.
‘My biggest fear is that the Greek crisis reaches a critical denouement because the two key players — ECB boss Mario Draghi and Mr Varoufakis — are not only reading from different playbooks, but two different rulebooks: one written by Robert Schuman , the 1940s architect of European integration, and the other by military theorist Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz’.
Has Mason read Clausewitz? I doubt it.
Here’s a quote from the Prussian Art Garfunkel lookalike.
‘The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish by that test the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature’.
So in this case the Syriza government thinks it can force its creditors to abandon fiscal controls and forgive Greece’s debt. Right. Because it’s really in the electoral interests of Germany and other Northern EU governments to give into the Greeks again. And because none of them will calculate that maybe Greece needs the Eurozone and the EU more than the latter need it.
Oh well. Clausewitz had some pretty scathing words for naive theorists who dreamt up concepts and ideas at odds with reality. Maybe Mason’s researchers can find some of them for him.
Recent news from the bleeding edge of the creative art movement: Where one relative piffle managed to tie up an entire storefront for apparently absolutely unending hours, someone else quite casually managed to merely thoroughly tie up street traffic across apparently all of Atlanta for merely a half a day . . .
Or better yet, for the
Burning ofGreat Traffic Jam of Atlanta, see All of the stories.I came across a similar example a while back when reading an article about a computer game. The tone of the article and the comments was light, with people discussing the game mechanics and story. One person said when talking about fighting a monster who was too strong “He just raped my party.”. So someone posts a reply taking issue with him using the term “rape” and how this is gender offensive and also denigrates rape victims. He then also has the gall to suggest he isn’t being a “social justice warrior” and doesn’t want to derail the thread, but that he basically feels duty bound to correct this misuse of the word.
I pointed out that there was no way this wasn’t going to disrupt the thread or change anyone’s opinion on the use of the word. Also someone had referred to fighting a boss as “suicide” yet that seemed to be ok with our terminology correcting friend. Then there is also the fact that “rape” can just refer to violent destruction and doesn’t need to reference sexual violence.
The point is this guy was not trying to educate, did not actually take any personal offence as a victim (or claim to even know someone on whose behalf he felt compelled to act), and chose to take the word in context that suits his agenda. The only point in his post was to bring to our attention how great and moral he is for noticing the word “rape” was used, and voicing his objection
Errr, No. … Charlotte Brontë there [plus numerous linkses]
Oh look: I disagree with a truckload of people who are more prominent than I. I must be wrong.
Feminists take a lot of abuse here and I’d probably be about the last one to say it isn’t deserved, but then I ran across this:
http://iwriteaboutfeminism.tumblr.com/post/25818972926/i-finished-50-shades-of-grey
I think I may be in love. Would need to get to the bottom of her Amanda Marcotte references, though.
Has Mason read Clausewitz? I doubt it.
So do I – but I’m sure he knows his Marx and his Gramsci and those other usual suspects, so I’m sure he sees it as a nugatory point to have much knowledge of anything else.
As Sowell might put it, he’s one of those who sees himself on the side of the angels.
Christopher Snowdon takes a big stick to government health advisor Professor David Nutt:
And then the whumping continues.
Oh, that ain’t reverence: that’s an acknowledgment of the deeply obscene connotations the word communicates along with a desire to not sully one’s prose with such filth. I don’t know another English word that expresses the same degree of contempt and dehumanization as that …..
Only if the speaker is the wrong color. In the ‘hood it’s a term or endearment. If the speaker posesses a socially acceprable level of melanin, of course.
@fnord
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3PJF0YE-x4
Not quite an endearment.
Has Mason read Clausewitz? I doubt it.
+11. Oh, the hell with it: +12.
Nutt claims that “the cost of alcohol misuse in the UK is around £30 billion per year —about £1000 per tax-payer.” This is wrong on so many levels.
Once upon not so long ago in the US, progressive feminists [tautology alert] used the fact of over 6,000 young women’s deaths per year due to eating disorders as an indictment against cis-gendered male bourgeois dominated suburban society.
Until someone noted that there aren’t 6,000 deaths of young women per year in the US of all causes.
In the ‘hood it’s a term or endearment.
Somehow, I read that as “hood ornament”.
I have no idea what that might mean.
There are important economic advances in one of the glorious revolutions . . .
The redoubtable Eric S. Raymond on “Social Justice Warrior” Shanley Kane: