Fashionable Malice

“White fragility” is the unremarkable fact that people by and large don’t like being slandered as racists and then assigned with some pretentious collective guilt, the supposed atonement for which requires deference to actual racists and predatory hokum merchants.
That! 🙂

“Fragility” -Why do I suspect they aren’t getting quite the amount of upset whites that they think they are and are throwing annoyed ones in to inflate the count?

Or, going on orders of magnitude, megafragility?
Clearly, you’d reach a racially superfragilistic state. Avoid high winds with that umbrella. And yes, your black umbrella is racist. How dare you appropriate “blackness” without acknowledging your role in the oppression holding back every university student of color.
Crazy is easy…and it’s fun!

For another illustration of just how unrealistic you’re expected to become, see the third item here. Because while you’re being scolded for your invisible racism and your “white fragility,” you mustn’t ask any unsophisticated questions.

Thing is, once you’ve downed the “diversity” Kool-Aid and cultivated all that exploitable pretentious guilt, and once everyone is hung-up on race, fixated by it, you may soon find yourself keeping some very strange company.
People like Dr Riyad A Shahjahan, a “social justice theorist” who wants us to believe that people with brown skin are mystical and exotic, akin to leprechauns, and who denounces expectations of punctuality, attentiveness and competence as racist and oppressive. Or Dr Caprice Hollins, who dismisses grammar and foresight as “white values” and expectations thereof as “cultural racism.” Instead of encouraging students who happen to have brown skin to articulate their thoughts, to be responsible and plan ahead, like everyone else, we must, she says, see people as “racial beings” and “teach [children] to view the world through a racial lens.”
But we mustn’t correct their grammar and spelling – even if this reduces their chances of getting a decent job.

“behaviours such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation”
I like how they covered all their bases. What other possible behavior is there?

To engage with them at any level is to admit defeat. Just ignore them, and if they attack you, beat the shit out of them.

you mustn’t ask any unsophisticated questions.
Oh, of course. If someone kept doing that people might notice the prog’s favorite social programs are wrecking ethnic groups under the pretense of protecting them.

a “social justice theorist” who wants us to believe that people with brown skin are mystical and exotic, akin to leprechauns,
Am now laughing on crowded train.

The problem with not dealing with them is that it isn’t an option for a great many people – and is becoming a larger and larger problem as this stuff has moved out of the Unis and into the ‘Real’ World.
In my business, publishing, it is no longer possible to ‘not’ express an opinion. ‘Not’-expressing is increasingly seen as agreement with the Patriarchy or Oppressive whatever is the biggest stick to beat you with. You are automatically a racist/sexist/transphobe and (increasingly) a Fascist.
You are done. Seriously. Your career is over.
Silence is no longer an option.
We need at least two different response strategies.
1. For those like myself. A way to navigate the jobs where the Witchfinders hold enormous power.
2. The brutalist street confrontations.

And, BTW, it’s interesting that those who are so keen to deploy the phrase “fragility,” are the same ones who discern “microaggressions” in the most prosaic of human interaction. Project thee much?

it’s interesting that those who are so keen to deploy the phrase “fragility” are the same ones who discern “microaggressions” in the most prosaic of human interaction. Project thee much?
Quite. But enough of such quibbles. We must heed Laurie’s wisdom:

Atone ye!

I don’t talk to nutters.
I’ve had luck with affecting a voice and expression of great concern, and telling the socialist clown that ‘Oh, I just don’t interact well with the mentally ill. Good luck, and God bless you!’
And then, of course, walking off with an insufferably pious look on my face, which I have practiced assiduously in front of the bathroom mirror.

It’s racist to have a learned response to race hectoring from all previous hectoring. Why, the very fact that you’re capable of recognizing hectoring is hectoring priviledge. Now submit and be hectored. Racist.

After all, they are simply using verbal tactics. It can’t be beyond the wit of man to come up with counter tactics.
A simple “yes, dear” works pretty well.

There is a tactic that the left has yet to find a way to defend and our friend Milo has been using it to great effect: Mockery
Mockery is my preferred weapon and it certainly adds the element of fun. I usually would stay away from Facebook because, the only friends that would post political were the lefties, the rest of us would just ignore the rants. However, there has been a shift on my FB and I have indulged myself of late with entertaining results.
One tactic that I enjoy is to feign agreement with a lefty and then take the issue to an absurd level. A discussion of Trump’s immigration EO was proceding as expected with lefties posting the media issued talking points; immigrants and refugees had not committed any attacks here (untrue, of course) therefore the EO was trying to fix a problem, that we don’t have, so I fell in with the lefties and took the argument to its logical conclusions; that I would have to see dead Americans first and lots of them before I could be persuaded that we should take preventative measures. You can imagine just how entertaining this can be. I have been enjoying myself.

“No matter how accepting someone is, that doesn’t stop them from being part of a system based on centuries of inequality.”
This, because these white people “allow” society to continue exist without working assiduously to implement Ms. Ida’s political program. (I really can’t imagine Ms. Ida letting those awful white people off the hook of her Kafkatrap by working against injustices according to their *own* moral and political judgment.)
To rephrase Ms. Ida: “You are personally complicit in racism, unless you submit to all of *our* political demands and tendentious accusations–including howsoever they be modified by us from time to time!” Or maybe just: “Do what you’re told, bigot.”

It can’t be beyond the wit of man to come up with counter tactics.
I’m sure the German Jews in the late 1920s thought they could counter anti-Jewish fervor in the universities with reasoned discourse, which they should have had the wit to invent.
Obviously, you cannot engage them on a rhetorical level because their rhetoric is crafted in intensely bad faith. It IS Kafkatrapping, which by design you will lose. Every time. You cannot out-debate the devil.
The only way to fight back is to have the power to neutralize their power as well as their aspirations for ever-more power.
Does a lone editor have the caché to slap down all of the fanatics who would crush him?
Only if he’s the top dog, and only then if he can withstand a sustained campaign of outrage that’s designed to drive him from his position.
Which, precious few people are in a position to withstand such a thing, regardless of their determination and backbone.
Sometimes the bear gets you because you’re in a cave full of bears and the exit is blocked by… more bears. The only way to win was to flee when you still had the chance.
Or not go into the cave at all.

I have to say, if being a witch isn’t supernatural, just hard, what’s the appeal?
You can float?

Oh, I’ve been at this all day: https://twitter.com/dicentra33/status/831921095036985345

Being a witch isn’t supernatural, it’s just hard.
You hope for Wanda Maximoff, in a chic tailored outfit and bending reality with her gestures, but instead you get an unemployable feminist with a bag full of sea shells and a mood disorder.

I wonder if using reverse tactics might do the trick…so do definitely agree with them: non-white people need to be protected from grammar and planning ahead, they need to never be on time and never get their work done. To ask this of them is to be completely racist! In fact, from now on we should endeavor to not teach non-white children the alphabet or numbers, nor any other “white” academic endeavor.
All of this shall be left to the whites because to do otherwise is cultural hegemony…this means that white instructors can only teach white children (and those who don’t want to can…just not teach at all) and only white children will be taught alphabets and numbers, etc. because those are white and to do otherwise is profound imperialism.
Nor should we have non-white people wear anything that could be construed as “white” so no jeans and tee shirts, no tennis shoes et al. Nor should they eat “white” food or use “white” cutlery, nor should they be forced to live in houses that use “white” construction methods, nor should they engage in buying or selling anything that was invented, developed, distributed, owned, raised, grown or marketed by a white person — that includes any money or economic instruments too. And we should definitely endeavor to make sure that white people are not habituated near non-white people; for only through separation from such creatures can the mystical non-whites be kept from oppression.
It is only by doing this that one can completely negate ones overwhelming whiteness.
If anyone points out that this is horrifically racist sounding (as well as being absolutely ludicrous and un-pragmatic), moreso than many slavers and totalitarian race supremacists have even come up with, then perhaps they may be in a position to actually be asked to revisit their line of original thinking.
Although I wouldn’t hold out too much hope there, because they’d probably like the insane notions I just mentioned.

You hope for Wanda Maximoff, in a chic tailored outfit and bending reality with her gestures
Or even Zatanna, at a pinch. I say this even having encountered rather… large Zatanna cosplay.
Yes, I know, not witch so much as woman of magic, etc.

Or even Zatanna, at a pinch
Or Amora, the Enchantress. As I recall, she had some groovy leggings.

it’s interesting that those who are so keen to deploy the phrase “fragility” are the same ones who discern “microaggressions” in the most prosaic of human interaction. Project thee much?
Faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara have been busy planning how to sabotage an upcoming talk by Ben Shapiro. After vandalising signs advertising the event and holding debates on the best methods of gratuitous disruption, and amid claims of emotional “distress” at even the prospect of hearing him speak, staff and students plan to ease their upset with poetry and candle-making.
Previously, at Marquette University.

Thank God they’re the clever ones.
These self-imagined intellectuals are rendered emotionally incontinent by even the prospect of a contrary view being heard, by anyone, even once. Which is to say, they’re outraged that it’s even being permitted. This, then, is the new benchmark of campus intellectual life. And the plans to disrupt the talk are, again, gratuitous and spiteful, and utterly disdain those who wish to hear Shapiro speak and ask questions. More than most speakers, Shapiro actively encourages debate with lengthy Q&A sessions immediately after his talk, in which he invites people who disagree to speak first. It’s hard to see what more a person could do to be obliging, short of not turning up.
And yet the ‘protestors’ are acting like it’s a visit via time machine by the Klan. Members of the Black Students Union casually smeared Shapiro as “racist,” based on nothing they cared to specify, insisting that he should not be allowed to speak on the topic of Black Lives Matter because he is a “white man.”
I mean, there’s irony and then there’s irony.

Incidentally, the “white tears” workshop, complete with loaded and condescending title, is the project of PhD student Ainsley Lambert-Swain, who teaches sociology at the University of Cincinnati, and whose background is in “critical race theory” and “racial microaggressions.” For those who want to know just how anti-rational and mentally blunting “critical race theory” is, see here and here. This, remember, is someone who presumes to teach the rest of us how to “manage emotion” while being insulted and called a racist, based on a self-flattering conspiracy theory.

Racism detected!
What other explanation could there possibly be?

Asking someone to turn their music down is now a racist hate crime.
And yet it seems to me that race is at least as likely, if not more likely, to inhibit justifiable complaints, such is the bourgeois wariness of being thought racist, even by voicing a polite request for more considerate behaviour. It’s certainly been my experience and I can think of several examples where this – dare I say it – privilege was pretty obvious.

“After all, they are simply using verbal tactics. It can’t be beyond the wit of man to come up with counter tactics.”
I can’t find an online version of Asimov’s ‘judo arguments’and I don’t have a paper copy, but it seems to me that (from memory) they might be apropos.

These self-imagined intellectuals are rendered emotionally incontinent by even the prospect of a contrary view being heard, by anyone, even once. Which is to say, they’re outraged that it’s even being permitted.
As Muhammad would put it, roughly paraphrasing, ‘Who is it who will see to this one who has insulted Allah and His Prophet?’
They like to think they have the market cornered on “critical thinking” and thus any actual critical thinking applied to them and their Narrative is haraam.
Birds of a feather do flock together.
As Abu Afak warned, “Men who overthrew mountains and never submitted, a rider who came to them split them in two (saying) “Permitted”, “Forbidden”, of all sorts of things.“

“Political correctness is just about politeness, you privileged white supremacist racist.”
Heh. Absolutely.
And what could be more polite that telling impressionable teenagers, repeatedly, arbitrarily, with no knowledge of their actual lives and behaviour, and based on nothing but the fact that they are white, that they are “personally complicit” in racism, “accomplices” to oppression? And telling them that they should want to wear badges to publicly acknowledge their complicity in racial subjugation, colonial pillage and other imagined sins. And telling those same teenagers that any objection to this accusation, any questioning of it, is proof of their “white fragility,” their “white tears,” and therefore damning confirmation of their guilt.
In a saner world, these hucksters would be pelted with soft fruit and chased out of town.

Meanwhile, in Chicago high schools.
Because that far-left indoctrination has to be seeded early, while minds are soft and yielding.

‘White people destroy everything’
The left’s chokehold on education is really paying off. Onwards!

And they have used that authority to deny the wishes of those parents.
It does rather suggest that these are not merely idiots or well-meaning people who’ve made a mistake. They are something else.

Oh, and someone made a Google extension, changing the word “white” to “black” in Salon headlines. The results are somewhat instructive.