Elsewhere (181)
Kevin D Williamson on New York City Council’s perverse choice of heroes:
The Communist movement worldwide murdered some 100 million people over the course of the 20th century. The Soviet enterprise specifically, to which Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were fiercely committed — they are described as “devoted” in the Soviet literature — had at the time of the Rosenbergs’ recruiting already intentionally starved to death some 8 million people in Ukraine for the purposes of political terror. I do not wish to include them here, but put “Holodomor” into Google images if you want a visual indicator of this.
Janice Fiamengo on toxic feminism:
Repeating the [‘male privilege’] mantra is a hazard to your mental and emotional health. If you come to believe it, it requires your shame as a man.
John Galt on leftist thuggery and tantrums:
So inured are we to the childish, yet violent behaviour of the left, that for the most part we are more disgusted than surprised, but could you imagine the opposite happening? A bunch of sneering Young Conservatives turning up to protest at the Labour Party conference? No – me neither. This is the fundamental problem at the heart of the left – that when their arguments are rejected by the electorate, they don’t seek better arguments, they just reach into their grab-bag of socialist solutions for what has worked in the past and try and apply that. The problem being that strikes and sit-ins and the rest of the panoply of student union politics seldom works in the real world for the simple fact that the real world is not made up of 20-somethings who’ve never had a job and have too much time on their hands. As the left crumbles, expect more intimidation and “Direct Action,” but the more they do it, the more the general populace will become alienated by it and contemptuous of those who practice it.
Regarding the above, our dear friend Laurie Penny offers her wisdom.
And added via the comments, Matthew Hennessey on “progressive” priorities:
How else to explain the decision earlier this year to allow 33-year-old Rebecca Wax to graduate from the Fire Academy despite having failed the Functional Skills Test five times? The FST was designed to mimic the conditions of an actual fire. Probationary fire-fighters are required to complete a gruelling six-floor obstacle course while hauling 50 pounds of gear and breathing through an oxygen tank. Wax succeeded in completing the course on her sixth try but took nearly four minutes longer to do so than is typically permitted. Nevertheless, she was allowed to graduate and was assigned to Engine 259 in Sunnyside, Queens. FDNY commissioner Daniel Nigro admitted at a city council hearing in December that the department had lowered the fitness bar to allow more women to pass the test.
Dramatically lowering standards of competence puts lives at risk, both of fire-fighters and the public, but apparently what matters is that we mustn’t have a fire department that’s mostly male.
Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.
And via SDA, here’s a thing:
The word, I think, is problematic.
#PissForEquality. http://legalinsurrection.com/2015/10/feminists-fall-for-pissforequality-hoax/
One presumes that Laurie Penny would have no problem with this.
One presumes that Laurie Penny would have no problem with this.
And if you wanted to distract drivers and cause a horrible traffic accident…
And if you wanted to distract drivers and cause a horrible traffic accident…
But class warriors care more than we do. Didn’t you read the newsletter?
But class warriors care more than we do. Didn’t you read the newsletter?
In terms of persuading the public of the supposed merits of their position, or achieving anything beneficial, their actions are ludicrous and make no sense. They do, however, make a kind of sense if you think of what they’re doing as desperately pretentious theatre, a compulsive need to display their self-imagined righteousness. And for a narcissist, the display of their piety and radical credentials outweighs any risk to passing drivers.
In case you are wondering how Bahar Mustafa MA (Gender & Media Studies)is getting on, here’s an update:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3262281/University-equality-officer-allegedly-tweeted-kill-white-men-charged-sending-threatening-message.html
In case you are wondering how Bahar Mustafa MA (Gender & Media Studies)is getting on
And so a fatuous bint experiences a taste of what she wishes to inflict on others. That said, the charge is absurd. Our taxes are paying for this farce.
Laurie’s tweet says “There are simply different standards for women, leftists, POC: we are punished for the smallest failure to be polite and sensitive.”
That’ll explain why Tim Hunt is unemployed, and you have all your columns and your scholarship to Harvard. It’s all projection with some people.
It’s all projection with some people.
Project, invert, double down.
But class warriors care more than we do. Didn’t you read the newsletter?
Funny how that “caring” does not extend to the 20 or so people whom I employ and whose families my business helps support. Those “austerity” measures, i.e. lower taxes or at least refraining from raising taxes and taking more of my money, allows me to continue to employ 20 people and perhaps hire a few more. Evidently, for me to rise to the appropriate level of concern for my fellow man, I would need to fire a third of my employees in order to flush more of my money down the governmental toilet.
I love how NOT spending like a drunken sailor on Saturday night gets re-branded as “austerity”. No, it’s called “living within your means”.
Meanwhile in Sweden, the cultural suicide on the installment plan continues.
Did you see the banner on the motorway. ‘RESISTANCE’ it said
They only thing crusties resist is soap and gainful employment.
“could you imagine . . . .a bunch of sneering Young Conservatives turning up to protest at the Labour Party conference?”
As applied to their Republican counterparts in the states, the answer is yes, I have no difficulty imagining such thuggery. In fact, I’ve experienced it personally. Long story short, was once spat on and had “baby killer” and other nice words screamed in my face by a group of George W. Bush supporters, all for the offense of holding up a rather anodyne placard in support of his opponent in the 2004 election. (The president’s motorcade was passing by the end of my street in the comfortably middle-class suburban Ohio neighborhood where I then lived. My wife and I stood at the end of my street holding the offending signs amid a group of Bush sign-carriers. Good clean election year fun we thought. We were wrong.)
See also the “brownshirt tactics” employed by young republican operatives during the Miami-Dade election recount mess in 2000:
http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,89450,00.html
The “tea party” tactics at number of events throughout the U.S. in 2008-2009 are also instructive.
Oh, Greg, how is it that I don’t believe you? Maybe it’s your invocation of the eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevul Tea Party as a brownshirt organization. Or maybe it’s that you forgot that GORE, not Bush, demanded the recount.
And I’d love to know what your sign actually said.
Quint – To your first question: my guess is that don’t believe it because it doesn’t reflect well on your team. Kind of like how Laurie Penny can see no wrong in her own side.
My point is simply that such tactics are deplorable no matter who uses them, and that a mob mentality can take hold among any group of ideologues. I hold no truck with the leftist BS spouted by Labour’s current iteration, or the antics of SJWs, feminists etc. It’s why read this blog.
To your 2nd question: the sign said “IBEW local 38 for Kerry” or something like that. (My wife’s father is an electrician). It was noticed by some woman who apparently equated being opposed to her candidate with the killing of babies. Her husband joined in and spat at me. Others piled on. My wife and I were shocked, frankly.
I don’t think the so-called tea party is evil, but a few years back some of their events (e.g., congressional “town meetings” in the states) got pretty ugly. I agree that the bronwshirt reference is over the top. It was how one of the democratic elections officials in Miami described it at the time. His point wasn’t to compare the Republican party to the Nazis, but to call attention to some thuggish behavior practiced by their version of SJWs at the meeting in question.
Oh, I can believe, to some extent, Greg’s story. Disagree with certain elements of the US right and there is much screaming and ranting and “RINO! RINO! LIBERAL!” even when expressing ideas actually more conservative than what either GOPe and GOPra (rebel alliance) currently espouse. It’s mighty damn ugly out there. But for the most part it doesn’t get much beyond that. No serious threats of violence, though the spitting is in the realm of the believable. What Greg may or may not intentionally be glossing over is the truly violent tactics taken by Union thugs, BLM, Panther-wanna-bes, etc. that are documented on film yet those in the media can’t seem to find.
https://twitter.com/LibertarianBlue/status/651798982054711296
Question answered then.
In which Laurie Penny draws conclusions from the Cameron-and-the-pig’s head story:
There is a reason David Cameron is allowed to hold office when everyone assumes he spent the 1980s getting up to weird things with pork, but Jeremy Corbyn is considered unelectable because he didn’t sing the national anthem last week.
That’s bollocks, love. You know that, I know that. Everybody who has read that sentence, including the most slavishly Leftie NS reader, knows that. Maybe it was written by some over-eager sub, anxious to become a member of your court; for that reason. we’ll let it go for now.
… but the fact is that the allegations that the Prime Minister may have put a ‘private part of his anatomy” into a dead pig’s mouth as part of an initiation ritual for an elite drinking society at Oxford University are actually a very serious matter
Singular, plural, singular… never mind. A serious matter- right.
You know, I feel for David Cameron today, I really do. Politicians’ private sex lives should never be used against them – unless their particular proclivities implicate them in gross hypocrisy or they have harmed another human being. If the rumours are true, it’s unlikely that the pig in question was hurt by the Prime Minister’s ministrations, given that it was already missing its limbs and torso.
If you did feel for Cameron, you wouldn’t be writing this article. The “sex act” (which you correctly referred to in your last paragraph as part of an “initiation ritual) was no such thing, and did not involve harming another human being. No hypocrisy is being alleged. Therefore, to apply your own criteria you shouldn’t be going anywhere near this story. And we already know that it was a pig’s head, so there is no need to point out that the beast was “missing its limbs and torso”.
Sniggering aside, this is unlikely to hurt David Cameron in the long run. He’s not looking for re-election, and besides, everyone knows posh people get up to weird sex stuff. Weird sex stuff is as British as weak tea and racism. When I was at Oxford, it was an open secret that the posh kids had naughty parties, and, of course, so did the rest of us – the difference was the much lower budget, and the fact that the posh kids didn’t seem to enjoy it as much as we did. It all seemed to be more about getting on than getting off. You didn’t shag or not shag the pig’s face because that was what you were into, you did it because you had your eye on a safe seat in Dorset in 20 years’ time and you needed to make the right friends.
Did you do the “weak tea and the racism” on a lower budget too, then?
There is a reason that David Cameron is allowed to hold office when everyone assumes he spent the 1980s taking drugs and getting up to weird things with his Eton mates, but Jeremy Corbyn is considered unelectable because he didn’t sing the national anthem last week. Cameron is part of a select group of people to whom different rules apply, and he knows it, and his friends know it, and the tabloids know it, and the whole cosy British political machine knows it. This is why Corbyn will spend the next five years being savaged for having a slightly rumpled tie by the same newspapers that reported on the dead pig allegations under the title “the making of an extraordinary Prime Minister”.
Cameron won a General Election and successfully sought the permission of the sovereign to form a government as he had a working majority. Labour lost because their campaign, and proposed policies, were unattractive, and the bloke leading them came across as being probably nice but a bit weird and useless. Your party has lurched further to the Left and elected as leader a genuinely unsympathetic figure who is out of his depth intellectually, holds opinions which will genuinely alienate the vast majority of the electorate (it’s fast becoming something of a cliche to point this out, but the electorate are all those people who don’t follow the likes of you and Owen Jones on Twitter) and allies himself with some genuinely nasty factions who hold opinions which, were they not directed against Israelis, would be deemed beyond the pale to most people of conscience of whatever political stripe. That’s why Corbyn and the party he leads will never win power. You know it really has little to do with his rumpled tie, so why pretend otherwise?
There are people out there who can spend their early twenties in close proximity to cocaine and popping their peckers in offal and not even consider for a second that there might be anyone better placed to run the country.
Does that include the Lefties who went to the “low budget” things, too?
I don’t honestly care whether or not David Cameron shagged a dead pig.
Yes, you do, and he hasn’t been accused of that as you well know. Above, you fondly imagine that the Mail and the Murdoch media empire will influence the electorate by constant references to Corbyn’s inherent scruffiness- yet you are prepared to write a piece of cynical gutter journalism such as that. Shame on you.
I don’t give a damn about what he did or didn’t do to that pig, and whether there was mood-lighting involved.
Yes, you do, as has already been pointed out.
But the fact is that a lot of people do, and they’re precisely the sort of people whose votes Cameron has relied on to shore up the power he clearly feels is his by right, might and various dodgy initiation rituals involving sex workers, smashing up pubs and knobbing bits of meat. Cameron clearly believes those people are there to be manipulated, and that’s the reason this story actually matters, beyond the immediate risk that a handful of pearl-clutchers in the Home Counties might splutter themselves to death.
Told you so. And it was the Mail which led with this piece, and according to you that’s like having the Death Star with a planet-wide brainwashing ray on your side, so Cameron ought to have resigned by now on the back of this
really significant storyunsubstantiated smear.It would surely have been a moment more important to Cameron’s career than any number of photoshoots with builders in Totnes. Power and money are accessed through the back door, or, as it may be, the pig’s mouth, and as with any kink, the eroticism isn’t about the act, but about what the act symbolises. It’s about humiliation, about control, about power play.
But you said above that it was all right to do this kind of stuff if it didn’t cost too much, or happened in Shoreditch.
Even if one ignored the shouty posturing and the hypocrisy and the psychodrama (which I know is virtually impossible), one can’t help but come to the conclusion that Ms. Penny is a monumentally shite journalist.
Last sentence should have read “Even if one ignores”. Maybe I also need an over-eager sub…
one can’t help but come to the conclusion that Ms. Penny is a monumentally shite journalist.
Indeed. But I think we both know that Laurie’s status and modishness have very little to do with penetrating analysis or logical rigour.
Shame on you
I fear you’re appealing to a sense of good faith that Laurie doesn’t have. As we’ve seen many times, Laurie lies.
“Those huge, peaceful swathes of high-gun-ownership areas show that our problem is not too many guns, it’s too many criminals.”
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6857
“Laurie lies.”
Indeed. But doubtless she conceives of her lies as ‘noble’ lies that bring us closer to her (unspecified) revolutionary utopia. Alternatively, she may have no intention to deceive but be self-deluding instead.
some of their events (e.g., congressional “town meetings” in the states) got pretty ugly.
“Ugly” meaning highly confrontational, with shouting and shoving and such. Also known as “Hey, we used to be able to do whatever we wanted at these things, and now You People are getting involved? Since when did you object to the decisions of Your Betters?”
The burnings of Baltimore and Ferguson, calling for (and getting) the murder of cops, and chasing speakers off university campuses — THAT’s par for the leftist course.
The Left hews to Alinsky’s prescriptions for upending existing power structures By Any Means Necessary; the right is still getting its shoes on.
When you’ve habitually imagined yourselves as On The Side Of The Angels, resistance to your Excellent Plans probably does feel like the work of the devil.
Dicentra, that response is, at best, non sequitur.
The whole Penny article cited above uses the same reasoning — OK, so our side does bad things, but your side is much worse. So I’m going to attack your side and ignore the directly relevant thing about my own.
If you can show that elements right in the US do not behave with aggression and violence in the way specified, go for it. Sadly, you will fail.
Burnings in Baltimore do not justify the violence (indeed murder) seen outside legal abortion clinics. “By Any Means Necessary” could easily be the slogan of the far Pro-Life groups.
Lancastrian Oik: “one can’t help but come to the conclusion that Ms. Penny is a monumentally shite journalist”
That’s indisputable. I seem to remember sort-of-sticking up for her on this blog some time ago, on the grounds that she was young and could conceivably grow up. But she’s only got worse. Seems to be the way things are going.
As I’ve said before, I’m not as to the right as some commenters here. I’m a social democrat. But the sane left, the left that believes in state-provided services but understands you need a healthy economy to tax to fund them (and that things like free speech, due process and civil liberties matter as well) seems to have been driven out of politics by a combination of New Labour’s cronyism and authoritarianism and the self-righteous viciousness of the identity politics crowd. It’s got to the point where a Bennite nonentity like Jeremy Corbyn seems like a refreshing change because, while he may be a hard-leftist who thinks you can fund the moon on a stick by printing money and is probably no more than a frontman for the extremely unsavoury John McDonnell, at least he’s civil. Expectations are that low.
His point wasn’t to compare the Republican party to the Nazis, but to call attention to some thuggish behavior practiced by their version of SJWs at the meeting in question.
Right wing, left wing, all the same and bookending the conservatives in the middle . . . . Whether right wing liberal or left wing liberal, all the same is I HAVE MY AGENDA AND I DEMAND IT IMMEDIATELY BECAUSE YOU ARE WRONG!!!!!
Whereas for those of us in between, basically, Hmmm . . . so what are the details of what you suggest? What are the costs and the benefits going to be? What are the processes and impacts going to be? And certainly, when the facts change, I change my mind.
Burnings in Baltimore do not justify the violence…
Nothing I said could possibly be construed to imply that, even barely. The idea is not to say “we are wholly innocent so they are wholly guilty” but to identify degrees of, persistence of, acceptance of, and pervasiveness of violence as a means to a political end.
…(indeed murder) seen outside legal abortion clinics. “By Any Means Necessary” could easily be the slogan of the far Pro-Life groups.
Bullshit. The vast majority of abortion-clinic protesters stand there and pray; a few call out to the women, but the harshness of the message has subsided over the years.
There was a brief spate of violence surrounding abortion clinics a few decades ago but because that violence was roundly condemned even on the right, nobody does it anymore. There’s no support for it because it doesn’t do jack to reduce the number of abortions and also because the disconnect between being pro-life and committing murder is glaringly evident to most people.
Even the videos showing dismembered fetuses in a petri dish haven’t provoked so much as a smoke bomb at an abortion clinic.
The militia-style stuff that happened at that Nevada ranch may have been supported initially on the right but that support petered out when it was discovered that Cliven Bundy didn’t have much of a legal case and barely a moral one. Hell, even Glenn Beck denounced it.
But let’s look at Baltimore and Ferguson, shall we? What kind of support does that “direct action” have on the Left? Do we not have Frances Fox Piven (of Cloward-Piven fame) expressing open admiration for the LA riots, saying that such things ought to be spread to all cities?
Was there not a massive outpouring of support on Twitter and other social media for the Baltimore and Ferguson rioters, saying that since #BlackLivesMatter, those locally owned businesses can burn?
Did not all The Usual Suspects say, “Tsk tsk, this is what happens when Racist Cops Are Racist,” long before all the facts were in? Didn’t “Hands Up; Don’t Shoot” become popular among the popular crowd, and is it not still considered to be the truth, even after forensic evidence showed definitively that Michael Brown was the aggressor?
Obama himself lent rhetorical support to the riots; he absolutely didn’t condemn the violence nor call for a stop to it, and there’s reason to believe he’s in contact with the rent-a-mobs who actually start things on fire.
Which memes and slogans arose on the right from the abortion killings? Do we even remember the names of the perps? Do we maintain against all evidence that the perps were actually the victims and so were justified in killing?
Those who promote violence and mayhem on the right are either marginalized into obscurity or are in jail, whereas the thugs on the Left end up with TENURE.
If we’re going to put the two movements into the balances and weigh their respective propensities for violence and other nasty behavior, we need to look at which slogans take root, even in the face of contrary evidence. We need to look at whom each side remembers, celebrates, and exalts.
The Tea Party loves Sowell and Hayeck; the Left loves Che and Alinsky.
Nice moral equivalence, there. Shame if anything happened to it.
Why are students now cheering about the massacre at Charlie Hebdo?
Because they are, I think you call them, gits.
Why are students now cheering about the massacre at Charlie Hebdo?
It’s perhaps worth noting that academia is where the left has had its most sustained and concentrated influence, largely unopposed. Think of it as a fiefdom, a proving ground.
Kevin D Williamson on when arts graduates attempt arithmetic.
whereas the thugs on the Left end up with TENURE.
A political worldview premised on confiscation, coercion and delusions of class vengeance will tend to attract, and then indulge, rather unpleasant personalities.
And re the above, let’s not forget the number of leftist academics who find violence titillating:
Note that Mr Linsker – a Harvard-educated class-war “poet” whose works include such gems as “Fuck the Police,” and who was caught on video punching a police officer – was back in class teaching teenagers the week after his arrest.
For other examples, and there are many, just poke through the greatest hits.
New York City Council’s perverse choice of heroes
Tar and feathers for everyone involved. Time these people learned how to feel shame.
Tar and feathers for everyone involved.
Hold that thought. Matthew Hennessey on “progressive” priorities:
Dramatically lowering standards of competence puts lives at risk, both of firefighters and the public, but apparently what matters is that we mustn’t have a fire department that’s mostly male.
From the Penny quote above, “the difference was the much lower budget, and the fact that the posh kids didn’t seem to enjoy it as much as we did.”
Oh boy. Just feel that class snobbery. We’re poorer. We’re better! Because we’re poorer. That’s it. I never have to do anything ever again in my life because I was POOOOOORER than someone else.
Oh boy. Just feel that class snobbery.
It’s as if practically all of the tics and neurotic affectations of leftist psychology have been crammed inside one small, obnoxious person.
And this slice of educational hubris is somewhere between deranged and evil. If your children attend one of the schools listed at the end of the piece, you may have a decision to make.
If there were a fire at City Hall, I would recommend sending only FD diversity hires.
The only difference between Laurie Penny and Katie Hopkins is that the latter knows that she’s a troll, and nothing more.
If there were a fire at City Hall, I would recommend sending only FD diversity hires.
It would be unkind and possibly dangerous, though not, I think, unfair.
Which came first, the “small, obnoxious person” or the “neurotic affectations of leftist psychology”?
Which came first, the “small, obnoxious person” or the “neurotic affectations of leftist psychology”?
I’d imagine it’s a feedback loop. Certain personality types are strongly attracted to platforms for their obnoxious behaviour, their obnoxious urges, which are then given a fig-leaf of legitimacy, an ideological excuse, and thereby encouraged.
Why are students now cheering about the massacre at Charlie Hebdo?
Here’s a clue:
When your tribe is ascendant or in power, your tribe loathes free speech. When your tribe is under the boot, your tribe insists on it.
Which is how you can tell who’s in power and who is not: by seeing who cries out for freedom and who says that freedom is dangerous.
The wisdom of Calvin is boundless.
From Legal Insurrection:
http://legalinsurrection.com/2015/10/feminists-fall-for-pissforequality-hoax/
Ellie Mae O’Hagan like Laurie Penny is never knowingly understated:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/08/sisters-uncut-suffragette-film-premiere-women
“At the end of every cut the chancellor makes to local authorities is a woman who will die, avoidably, at the hands of a man who promised to love her. Cuts to public spending are creating orphans who could have grown up with parents. These are political choices the government is making, and things can be different.”
obnoxious urges, which are then given a fig-leaf of legitimacy, an ideological excuse, and thereby encouraged.
I hadn’t seen that video. The sick fucks.
I hadn’t seen that video. The sick fucks.
Yes, quite. It’s worth noting that when the disabled woman, Melissa Ortiz, initially tried to leave the lobby, the ‘occupiers’ screamed abuse at her, grabbed her service dog, on which she relies, and tried to drag Ms Ortiz out of her wheelchair. Such was their righteousness, their progressive heroism. Now try to imagine yourself doing that – trapping a disabled woman, taunting her, preventing her from getting home, sneering at her plight – and doing all that while feeling pleased with yourself. Or rather, while feeling powerful and therefore pleased. What kind of person would that make you? And isn’t there a word for that kind of pleasure?
Don’t we call it sadism?
“FDNY commissioner Daniel Nigro admitted at a city council hearing in December that the department had lowered the fitness bar to allow more women to pass the test.”
Hate to be…obtuse….but just how does one pronounce that name?
Incidentally, if you think the vanity and malice shown in the video linked above was some one-off aberration, think again.
. . .the ‘occupiers’ screamed abuse at her, grabbed her service dog, on which she relies, and tried to drag Ms Ortiz out of her wheelchair.
All of which would be deemed a life-threatening assault warranting extreme measures in self-defense in some places in our country. Interestingly enough, the miscreants in the video are not heroic enough to try that shit in places with concealed carry laws.
Which is how you can tell who’s in power and who is not: by seeing who cries out for freedom and who says that freedom is dangerous.
Voltaire said something similar, along the lines of – If you want to know who rules you, just look for who you cannot criticise.
Right now here in Australia it is all but impossible to criticise Aboriginals (despite the appalling behaviour of some of their so-called leaders and figureheads), muslim terrorists (an islamic terrorist murder in the last few days is now, by some perversion of reality, a ‘politically motivated crime’), and the gaggle of cafe-au-lait race hustlers freeloading on the Aboriginal welfare gravy train. We even have a race discrimination act which makes it an offence to ‘insult or offend’ a person on the basis of their race. So there goes satire and parody. Its all our little contribution to the overall decline of the enlightenment values of the West.
Which came first, the “small, obnoxious person” or the “neurotic affectations of leftist psychology”?
Oh, clearly the small obnoxious person.
Laurie Penny offers her wisdom.
Just watching BBC’s Question Time programme while following the Tweets on #bbcqt.
It’s apparent from many of those Tweets that Conservative MP Priti Patel and Times columnist and writer Melanie Phillips could both be seen as fine examples of “women” and “POC” who are being “punished for the smallest failure to be polite and sensitive”.
Perhaps for people such as Penny and her like-minded chums, “women” and “POC” who are not also “leftists” are not to be considered ‘authentic’ as either “women” or “POC” and are therefore fair game for “the vitriol, the insults, the death threats” which “You come to expect .., as a woman …, particularly if you’re political”.
Why would you want to be a firefighter not up to the job physically? How could you live with yourself if someone died because of that?
Perhaps for people such as Penny and her like-minded chums, “women” and “POC” who are not also “leftists” are not to be considered ‘authentic’ as either “women” or “POC”
I’m not sure the “perhaps” is required there.
The Aussies Aren’t Coming!
Australian gun-grabber wants to boycott US until we abide by her idea of gun control: confiscation.
Good luck with that, Hon. And BTW, even the Aussies only gave up about 40% of their guns. So there’s that.
Honestly. It’s pathetic.
In additional news . . . .
The truth about gun deaths: numbers and actual solutions
Now try to imagine yourself doing that – trapping a disabled woman, taunting her, preventing her from getting home, sneering at her plight – and doing all that while feeling pleased with yourself. Or rather, while feeling powerful and therefore pleased. What kind of person would that make you? And isn’t there a word for that kind of pleasure?
That – a thousand times.
That – a thousand times.
It is, I think, a telling incident, one that captures a dynamic we saw repeatedly during the Occupy fad, when the left felt ascendant and revealed itself a little more than usual. I mean, how deformed does your sensibility have to be to regard such behaviour as righteous and admirable, something to copy and be seen copying? Just how much contortion and dishonesty does it take? These, remember, were the “new generation of leaders,” according to the New York Times – “a new progressive movement” for “a new progressive age.” While the Guardian cooed that “the Occupy movement are the realists,” creating a “new political space” where they were “debating an alternative future for us all.”
Which was terribly nice of them.
See also Idiot Hat Guy and his associates, who planned to obstruct a lawful business and “disallow” staff from entering or leaving their own place of work. His intended victims could, he said, still “practice their free will” – provided they didn’t actually try to earn a living or try to get home. Say, to look after their children. Note too the implication that, should reinforcements arrive, things could get physical. And when faced with the suggestion that he and his comrades are thugs forcing their will on others, Idiot Hat Guy got upset and tried to change the subject by pretending that he was the one whose freedoms were being “violated.” His flattering self-image is called into question and – pow! – suddenly, he’s the victim.
And yet some people wonder how things like fascism arise.
Watched that again. I recall Idiot Hat Guy but don’t remember the video starting with Idiot Hair Guy. Watching again, I find Idiot a Hair Guy just as, if not more, precious.
And yet some people wonder how things like fascism arise
I still blame Radiohead for the “success”, if that’s the right word, of the Occutard movement.
I first found this blog during your coverage of ‘Occupy’. Been a reader ever since.
I first found this blog during your coverage of ‘occupy’.
It was a strange time, both hilarious and dismaying. My lingering impression is of what the Occupiers’ idiocy told us about the state of their university education. Exemplified, I think, by the young lady below:
Is she even aware of the precedent she’s invoking?
With a smile.
The University of Toronto has decreased the number of gender-neutral bathrooms in one of its colleges after two women became victims of voyeurism when they were filmed while showering.
To be fair to UoT, though, this was entirely unpredictable.
This is Labour’s shadow chancellor.
http://order-order.com/2015/10/09/john-mcdonnell-praises-spitting-as-a-form-of-protest/#:KxMytyiOB_OQ4Q
And this is Zoe Williams from the Groan.
http://order-order.com/2015/10/09/zoe-williams-i-really-dont-have-a-problem-with-protesters-spitting-at-journalists/#:ZHYjNh0Es1OQ4Q
This is Labour’s shadow chancellor.
Juvenile and disgusting. He’ll fit right in.
And this is Zoe Williams from the Groan.
If some verminous rabble decides to spit phlegm across Zoe’s face, and in Zoe’s hair, I’m sure she’ll be ready to “look beyond [her] own horizon at the interplay between exclusion and anger.”
the interplay between exclusion and anger.”
So voting for the party that lost the election is “exclusion” now, is it? She’s a f*cking assclown.
So voting for the party that lost the election is “exclusion” now, is it?
Zoe has since been arguing – with her customary incoherence – that the rest of us are insufficiently empathetic and that spitting in a random stranger’s face is somehow excusable – something to be understood – when the creature doing the spitting feels “excluded” from whatever level of attention and deference they feel they deserve. She’s taken great care not to say it quite that plainly, because then it would sound foolish, but that does seem to be the gist of it, behind all the waffle.
Such is Zoe’s mind.
“Is she even aware of the precedent she’s invoking?”
At least some of them are fully aware, as I can testify from personal experience. Some will even, when there are no witnesses, enthusiastically support the Tienanmen Square Massacre, cultural genocide in Tibet, and the arrest and execution (with organ harvesting) of peaceful religious dissenters. Yes, that IS today’s Left.
that spitting in a random stranger’s face is somehow excusable – something to be understood – when the creature doing the spitting feels “excluded” from whatever level of attention and deference they feel they deserve.
I’m sure she’d be just as understanding if Labour had won and the spitters voted Tory. 🙂
I’m sure she’d be just as understanding if Labour had won and the spitters voted Tory. 🙂
Or if bearded savages were spitting at women who dared to wear short skirts in a “Muslim-only” area of Denmark or France. But you mustn’t expect Zoe to be coherent, or even sincere. That’s not what her blathering is about. It’s signalling, social positioning. She’s letting the rest of us know that she’s “trying to interrogate the accepted norms” of behaviour. The accepted norm – i.e., viewing spitting on random strangers as disgusting and contemptible – is terribly bourgeois and therefore beneath Zoe, being as she is so progressive and enlightened. According to Zoe, regarding such people as verminous and thuggish is much too unsophisticated.
We must not only hear them speak, or rather screech, we must also feel their pain. Because people who scream “Tory whore” at random women have so much to teach us.
I’m glad Zoe Williams is a Guardian journalist. Can you imagine her being paid to do something that mattered?
I remember a line somewhere along my road in life,
“Forgive them Lord, they know not what they do”
However, should one if they do?
Is she even aware of the precedent she’s invoking?
Probably not.
But what about the Canadians and their “Leap Manifesto”? https://leapmanifesto.org/en/the-leap-manifesto/ Am I the only one that thinks anything invoking “Leap” with a utopian program for the future is in very poor taste?
Probably not.
And if not, a university student is using the term “Cultural Revolution,” proudly and with a grin, but with no idea of the event to which she’s referring – i.e., one of the great horrors of the 20th century. Either way, it’s hardly an affirmation of her expensive education. Or of her belief that she deserves more of it, at someone else’s expense.
Can you imagine her being paid to do something that mattered?
See, now I’m picturing Zoe bringing her tremendous mental powers to the fields of surgery, IT or air traffic control. Or anything involving wiring diagrams.
But it’s good to know that if you feel “excluded” and denied the level of attention and deference you feel you deserve – because the party you voted for loses an election by quite some margin – and you then decide to spit at people randomly, and threaten rape, and scream “Tory whore” at any passing woman, then Zoe will regard your behaviour as something to be understood and excused. Something she “doesn’t have a problem with.” But only if Zoe can construe such behaviour as reinforcing her own, rather delinquent, class-war narrative.
our problem is not too many guns, it’s too many criminals
Again … Look to California.
Now in about our 3rd year of “Prison Realignment” aka releasing 10,000 state prisoners for county supervision plus a whole range of strategies to NOT take any more criminals into state prison and our first year of Prop 47- aka taking a whole bunch of felony statutes and kicking them to misdemeanor status, including a lot of property crime —
and crime is up 21%
UNEXPECTEDLY!!
“Forgive them Lord, they know not what they do”
They know.
They like it.
Otherwise, that kind of thing wouldn’t keep cropping up over and over and over in human history.
It never happens by accident.
Meanwhile in the world of SJWs and research critical to the betterment of all humanity, it has been determined that dildos are racist. (link probably NSFW because of photo from actual lecture on the topic at an actual university)
Greg | October 07, 2015 at 16:15:The “tea party” tactics at number of events throughout the U.S. in 2008-2009 are also instructive.
Maybe in an alternate universe. In this timeline, the “Tea Party” movement started with Rick Santelli’s comments in February 2009.
Meanwhile, the actual fascist tactics of the “Occupy” movement (i.e., physically invading and seizing public spaces, physically obstructing or disrupting activities they disapproved) went unchallenged for years, despite the costly damages they inflicted.
(Tea Party rallies were held only with proper permissions and usually cleaned up after themselves.)