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.
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.)