Screaming Into A Mirror
Further to the last item here, and various rumblings in the comments, here’s Nanette Asimov on The Screeching Left versus Ben Shapiro (and anyone who wants to engage him in debating ideas):
For many protesters, the specifics of what the opposition says is not the point. “It doesn’t matter what the guy’s going to say,” said Michael Heaney, a professor at the University of Michigan who studies the sociology of protest movements. “He could talk about the joys of apple-picking. What matters is that the counter-movement is trying to use the energy of the (event) to grow. This is an opportunity for them — and they are likely to seize upon it.”
And hence the conceit that any disagreement is an act of “violence,” to be repaid in kind, violently. For the hyperventilated protestors, it’s all about them and their psychodrama. Because it always is. And so we see self-styled ‘progressives’, the self-imagined woke, calling a Jewish man “Nazi scum” and a “fascist xenophobe” because he opposes racism and thuggery, and wants to have conversations in which students consider issues of basic humanity.
See also, Charles Murray, Heather Mac Donald, Janice Fiamengo, etc., etc.
self-styled ‘progressives’, the self-imagined woke, calling a Jewish man “Nazi scum” and a “fascist xenophobe” because he opposes racism and thuggery,
These people are ignorant hysterics.
These people are ignorant hysterics.
Yes, the vehemence of the howling is matched only by its factual inaccuracy and general dementedness. The backpacked person of indeterminate gender – the one bellowing that, “The very nature of the world, of the planet, of humanity, is at stake” – doesn’t seem to know anything at all about Mr Shapiro’s actual views. It’s as if wildly disparate people and opinions were being liquidised into some kind of mental slurry. The reference points are so confused, so unmoored from reality, it’s hard to know to where to start.
Related:
Mr Shapiro’s talk and the subsequent Q&A – the one that was pre-emptively denounced in hysterical terms as “fascist,” “misogynist” and “xenophobic” – can be viewed in full here.
I’m a longtime lurker who doesn’t usually comment, but I’m horrified by the degraded idea that speech is a form of violence. It doesn’t seem like it should be hard to challenge and address this, but I fear that this is simply the top rung of a very long ladder of inference.
There was a rather good comment by Aquinas on Spiked the other day, arguing that in this post-modern, relativist world the Left are clinging onto “discrimination” as being the only absolute. It’s the first comment under http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/a-killing-in-harlow-the-shame-of-remainers/20327#.Wb5VXdHTXmo
As a practical person, I want to challenge this nonsense, but I’m at a loss how to. Depressing times.
I’m a longtime lurker who doesn’t usually comment,
Welcome aboard.
but I’m horrified by the degraded idea that speech is a form of violence.
And note that it’s the supposed educators and academic bureaucrats who are actively encouraging this poisonous conceit. This is the Long March, and look at its fruit.
…the one bellowing that, “The very nature of the world, of the planet, of humanity, is at stake” – doesn’t seem to know anything at all about Mr Shapiro’s actual views.
Doesn’t seem to know anything at all about the world, the planet, or humanity either.
It’s almost hard to be that ignorant. Yet it seems epidemic. That’s what makes the people pulling their strings so dangerous. Every generation seems to have its Lenin, Pol Pot, Castro, or Chavez.
Who’s the monster behind Antifa?
These people are ignorant hysterics
More like histrionics, but it is a fine distinction, though the ignorance cannot be denied as demonstrated by the fact, as has been repeatedly pointed out, that if the present administration really was fascist, racist, sexist, insert boilerplate leftist claptraphereist, they would all now be laboring in the beet fields in the Montana gulags.
Little know fact – his real name is Beauregard Robert E. Jefferson Davis Lee, he just goes by Naweed to make it look like there is a non-white Republican.
For many protesters, the specifics of what the opposition says is not the point.
I think it has gotten to be, judging by the people we have seen, basically a club for those who were too weird to have been in clubs or had any kind of social life in high school.
if the present administration really was fascist… they would all now be laboring in the beet fields in the Montana gulags.
Heh. I very much doubt that realism or a sense of proportion are assets in such circles.
As we’ve seen many times, this isn’t about politics so much as status and psychodrama. It’s about role-play, self-flattery and power. And so there’s no way to please the competitively indignant, who must forever be aggrieved, short of total and ongoing deference. Endless prostration and self-abasement, bending the knee to each new whim, however risible and erratic.
Attempting to appease such people, in the hope that they can be satisfied and made reasonable, is a futile endeavour and absurdly naïve.
I want to challenge this nonsense, but I’m at a loss how to.
I find that “fuck you” is a good starting point.
They dream of a society where the rat cage is strapped to everyone’s face, and they get to tell us how many fingers they are holding up.
Dhimmitude comes to mind.
Attempting to appease such people, in the hope that they can be satisfied and made reasonable, is a futile endeavour and absurdly naïve.
No, it’s worse than that. Appeasing these people teaches them that what they’re doing works, and so they’re going to keep doing it.
Appeasing these people teaches them that what they’re doing works, and so they’re going to keep doing it.
Well, yes. One might reasonably infer that indulging opportunist tantrums and outright thuggery is the Clown Quarter’s core function and loftiest ambition, and certainly its most titillating.
If anyone has trouble with comments not appearing, email me and I’ll take a broom to the spam filter.
Take the train to the spam filter–it’s cheaper and you get there about as quick.
I see what you did there.
In the Howard Zinn version of things, David, we hear about you from the spam filter’s point of view.
You come off pretty well, actually.
Appeasing these people teaches them that what they’re doing works, and so they’re going to keep doing it.
Related, President of Lipscomb College grovels to students “offended” by a centerpiece featuring cotton.
Of course Lipscomb College* is in Nashville, and cotton is a Tennessee crop, and it is getting to be cotton harvest time, so it was a seasonal thing, but hey, anything to throw a fit.
(*Lipscomb College is not affiliated with noted blues singer Mance Lipscomb whose father as an ex-slave and was raised in Texas cotton country and knew from cotton picking)
President of Lipscomb College grovels to students “offended” by a centerpiece featuring cotton.
Today’s word is gratitude.
Also, fuckers.
This nonsense must not inconvenience rich, powerful adults at all; if it did, the tear gas, dogs, and fire hoses would have already been deployed. Maybe it’s the rentier class’s version of The Kids Letting Off A Little Steam?
“…we SEEN cotton as the centerpiece…”?
What’s this kid doing in college?
The students were also angered by the home-cooked meal they were served.
I wonder. Given that these churlish little shits evidently have a taste for identitarian leverage, and once they’ve become accustomed to their power games being indulged, will they ever grow out of them? Or will they spend years being chippy and obnoxious, seething with petty resentment? As if their vanities and spitefulness should be flattered on demand.
They’re the children of the ruling class. Of course they feel their vanities and spitefulness should be flattered on demand. ‘Twas ever thus. This generation has simply found a particularly inane way to do that. And unless human nature changes bigly, no, they won’t grow out of it, though they may switch to more traditional methods of bullying the peasantry.
The joker in the U.S. deck is that the peasantry, while certainly outgunned by their betters, is still sufficiently well armed to stage a pretty fair insurrection. I hope I’m dead before that happens, as it’ll make life very unpleasant for everyone.
Hello, Magnesium Person! I took my first pill yesterday and I did fall asleep sometime after oh-dark-thirty; I don’t know whether this is coincidence, placebo effect, or magnesium, but it’s encouraging enough to keep trying.
(A while back I read an interesting article to the effect that a placebo can still work even if the patient KNOWS it’s a placebo!)
It’s as if wildly disparate people and opinions were being liquidised into some kind of mental slurry.
This brings to mind Blair’s Law:
“the ongoing process by which the world’s multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force.”
The students at Lipscomb apparently also had to stand to eat because that is unheard of at an informal gathering of large numbers of people.
Fortunately there was none of this sort of thing around or a psychiatric mass casualty situation might have ensued.
Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton
Where microaggressions are not forgotten…
Who’s the monster behind Antifa?
Well…
Also, this.
The students at Lipscomb obviously have no clue about the history of picking cotton. The poorer classes of people of all races in the cotton states all resorted to doing it to make ends meet. My very pasty grandmother and her siblings all carried nine foot sacks dragging on the ground behind them in the early ’20s filling them up with cotton buds. Because they were children, they were only paid about a third of what the adults made because they couldn’t carry as much and couldn’t work as fast. At the end of the row, they’d dump the sacks onto a burlap sheet which then would be tied up to make the bale shown above.
“but I’m horrified by the degraded idea that speech is a form of violence.”
Leftists have been telling me for decades that speech is violence, so the current wave of leftist thuggery to silence dissent does not surprise me.
What’s this kid doing in college?
Hey, don’t oppress him with your cis, white, patriarchal grammar…
David said: “The reference points are so confused, so unmoored from reality, it’s hard to know to where to start.”
By now I think we can safely start from the notion that these Antifa people and campus “radicals” generaly are essentially mercenaries in the pay of a foreign power. When you accept that they’re in it for money, everything else comes into clear focus.
Well, that $5,000 stereo isn’t going to pay for itself.
It’s almost hard to be that ignorant
Yes. It takes years and years, decades even, of education to make people this ignorant. And they managed to find some poor schmucks to pay for it. Suckers all around.
What strikes me about the young man questioning Shapiro about abortion is how shallow his (young interlocutor’s) thinking is. It’s obvious he only a litany of talking points, but had never taken the time to actually ponder the philosophical or practical application of those points. Also interesting (and typical of your average collegiate leftist) was the shifting goal posts mid-argument. The young man was civil certainly, but moving from “sentience” to “societal burden” arguments is yet another example of the Left’s refusal to engage in good faith. And, note well, the young man’s refusal to concede the points well-made by Shapiro. He simply sits down. One wonders whether he learned anything.
Meanwhile at Georgia Tech, a tale of a student described by his mother as, “very, very bright.”
We’ve had little to no care for the mentally ill in the U.S. since the late ’60’s. Even though a few asylums still exist, in some states it’s virtually impossible to commit anyone. That’s why tragedies like this are so frequent here.
Meanwhile on line . . . .
—Couldn’t resist the straight line there. . .
. . . a centerpiece featuring cotton.
‘k, fine, have an entire field of cotton. Quite highly recommended, all three parts.
One wonders whether he learned anything.
Give him a chance, he’s at least attempting to engage in civil discourse rather than standing outside REEEEEEing. There is hope for some of them.
What strikes me about the young man questioning Shapiro about abortion is how shallow his (young interlocutor’s) thinking is
Well, baby steps. The student did at least thank Shapiro. And I suppose this is why Shapiro devotes most of his allocated time to the Q&A session, and why students who disagree with him are invited to speak first. It’s telling, I think, just how often the students who seem confident in their assumptions, and in the rightness of their feelings, also appear to have difficulty even phrasing a question, despite having days to prepare one. As if questioning their own assumptions is a novel experience and not much practised.
There’s also a tendency, as illustrated by the second student to speak, to beg the question, or to assert as self-evident and unassailable something that’s either untrue or by no means clearly true, or just sweeping and nebulous – “societal discouragement” was one of the terms used, as if it were some rhetorical and logical full stop, as if no actual evidence or specific example need be offered for the purposes of testing. What’s funny is how often these claims of “systemic” or “structural” oppression jar with everyday experience – even the experience of the students making such claims.
Still, it’s certainly an improvement on some of Shapiro’s other attempts to debate ideas on campus.
I’ve shared this video before, filmed last year at Cal State, where leftist students physically prevented anyone entering the venue and assaulted several would-be attendees. The video, which I think is quite symbolic, shows a Shapiro supporter trying to start a civil conversation with one of the protestors, who claims that discussion itself – and particularly, any questioning of campus identity politics – is “violence” against black people. Note how, after mouthing his slogans, the protestor pointedly turns his back on the person he’s supposedly debating, so as to show his virtue in not listening to anyone who might show him to be wrong. Or indeed an idiot.
It’s the new intelligentsia, as developed by the left.
[ Edited. ]
a tale of a student described by his mother as, “very, very bright.”
I have some sympathy for the parents here. Their son was clearly suffering from severe mental health issues and I have no doubt that any parent is going to be distraught and searching for answers after their child apparently commits suicide-by-cop.
That said, not stepping in and getting your child therapy when “[…] born male, [Scout] preferred ‘they’ and ‘them’ gender pronouns and identified as bisexual, non-binary and intersex” means there’s some responsibility to go around here.
I have no idea how rigorous an engineering school Georgia Tech is, but given that Scout was a 4th year engineering student who planned on going to grad school while heading one of the more politically activist clubs on campus, I’d be looking at his grades to see if he hadn’t perhaps recently found out his activism was interfering with his aspirations.
Actually, GT was one of the top engineering schools in the country. Considered best in the South when I applied but didn’t get in back in the late 70’s. The best engineers that I have personlly known were Tech grads and never met a bad one. I have had suspicions lately that standards have slipped, but I think this is true across the all universities. Cultural degeneration has consequences. Trying to point that out 20 years ago was not socially acceptable and could cause “educated” people to question such a person’s grasp of reality. Now an entire generation or two has been steeped in leftist idiocy. Good luck reversing it now.
Goodness me. Here’s a thing.
Vlogger Nuance Bro interviews some of the gathered thinkers protesting the talk by Ben Shapiro. There’s an Empathy Tent and everything. Oh, and several students who announce, proudly, that they’re “resisting ignorance,” seconds before admitting that they know little, almost nothing, about the man whose presence they’re protesting against.
Here’s part two.
several students who announce, proudly, that they’re “resisting ignorance,” seconds before admitting that they know little, almost nothing, about the man whose presence they’re protesting against.
Berkeley only takes the best.
Berkeley only takes the best.
I have to keep reminding myself that these people are supposedly our cognitive elite, attending a supposedly prestigious institution of higher learning. And yet, based on their obliviousness, it’s doubtful they could find their own arses in the dark.
Berkeley only takes the best.
Certainly. The best at taking input and regurgitating that input back out at a later date. This is what education has mostly been about for quite some time. Using thinking and reasoning and especially physical interaction with the real world to test if what it is you think you know is actually something you really know just wastes teacher’s time. Foolishness is what it is. You’re supposed to sit in a lecture hall of several hundred people, listen to what the old guy at the front says, and write it down in your notebook. Then a couple weeks later you take what was written in your notebook, cram it back into your head (short term/long term memory, makes no difference), and spill it back out on another piece of paper. If you do that right, after four, five, six, seven years they give you another piece of paper that you can then use to refute any challenge to what you have to say. Thus we have the rules of Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock.
these people are supposedly our cognitive elite, attending a supposedly prestigious institution of higher learning
I can’t help wondering whether it’s precisely an awareness of the very same point that leads, ironically, at least some of those students into a far less rigorous questioning (if any at all) of the arguments presented to them.
A point made quite succinctly – and somewhat acerbically – here.
Of course, when questioning certain orthodoxy may lead not only to poor grades from the tutor, but also being made a pariah of by one’s peers, the path of least resistance becomes clear.
A point made quite succinctly – and somewhat acerbically – here.
Heh. The smug student doesn’t even seem to register that his attempt at a gotcha moment – itself a logical error – is backfiring terribly. Shapiro even warns him, but Mr Self-Satisfied just ploughs on, unsteadily, repeating the same blunder, three times, still looking pleased with himself.
Again, impervious.
It’s a plausible shorthand for the wider phenomenon. The left-leaning students in Shapiro’s videos obviously know what kind of political noises they’re expected to make, and make loudly, and happily comply, but so many of them seem genuinely unable to formulate a rational argument. Just as the protestors in the Nuance Bro videos know that they’re supposed to be denouncing Shapiro as a “fascist” and all-round monster, and happily comply, but they don’t even feel obliged to know anything he’s said or written. Anything at all.
Pogonip,
We’ve had little to no care for the mentally ill in the U.S. since the late ’60’s. Even though a few asylums still exist, in some states it’s virtually impossible to commit anyone. That’s why tragedies like this are so frequent here.
A question for which I have no definitive answer of my own: Given a psychology/psychiatric/legal/medical system as we have at present … have the teachers confused you, little 10 year old? Have some hormones and a surgical brochure … how would we avoid a complete soviet-style politicization of mental illness were we to return to the old system? It ran on trust.
Have we, even inadvertently, picked the better of two onerous possibilities?
Hatefacts strike again:
http://legalinsurrection.com/2017/09/third-world-quarterly-publishes-the-case-for-colonialism-leading-to-censorship-demands/
“People claim to be frightened and unsafe”
Of course.
From Shapiro’s talk at Berkeley.