No End in Sight to the Agonies of the Left
He’s not allowed to call her that.
A first world problem.
And don’t say seminal.
Or lunatic.
For Laurie, nothing less will do.
Wealthy people have distorted minds. If they’re wealthier than him, anyway.
A priestly caste.
You don’t get to do it. Because of her genitals.
The unending jollity of identity politics.
Because, obviously, the insufficiently leftwing want women crushed under their heel.
Secular worship.
And yet it’s difficult to burgle houses from inside a prison cell.
It rather depends on what you say.
Part 7 in our series. Do please keep them coming. Oh, and feel free to use the buttons in the sidebar. I have mambo records to buy. 
Conservatives relentless anger at women for wanting equality
I’ve never met any conservatives who are angry about that. Does Amanda Marcotte actually talk to any conservative people?
I’m uninterested in equality between women and men within a dehumanising capitalist system. I want a global work- and gender- revolution.
Because global communism wouldn’t be dehumanising…
Because global communism wouldn’t be dehumanising…
Well, Laurie is forever telling us that she wants “full communism,” and that now is the time for “upsetting the police” with “a radical youth movement… for revolution,” thereby toppling the “bruised superstructure of patriarchal capitalist control.” So I’m sure she must have thought it through.
But given that so much of Laurie’s public persona is based on competitive posturing and pretentious disaffection, this presents a few problems for our plucky heroine. Which may explain why her stated goal must always be vast and unattainable. I’m not sure what she’d do if her radical utopia were actually delivered before she hits thirty. Where’s the subcultural kudos in being a communist when every other bugger is, whether they wish to be or not? Where’s the drama in that? But if her professed utopia remains out of reach, Laurie can play at being radical for as long as she likes. She can just talk the talk and never have to pick up the tab.
Can’t help getting my comparative rage on about how hard it is for a woman to be taken seriously in the British press these days.
It helps if you’re not a communist ‘riot grrl’ who says really stupid stuff whenever she’s in print or on TV.
“Critical race analyst..”
Can anyone be one of these or must one be born into it?
Is Fiqah pronounced ‘thicker’?
“Critical race analyst”. Cut harder, cut deeper.
As for conservative thought being “grievance-based”, that’s as clear a case of projection as I have ever seen.
“I’m uninterested in equality between women and men within a dehumanising capitalist system.”
If memory serves well, she’s also uninterested in paying her research assistants the minimum wage within a dehumanising capitalist system.
“nearly 200 public sector workers held a minutes [sic] silence in memory of Hugo Chavez”
nearly 0 public sector workers chose to relocate to Hugo Chavez’s socialist paradise.
“I have better insight into alladat than a lay person of any race”
“What you DON’T GET TO DO is tell a woman or girl that YOU are in ANY WAY, better equipped to understand life in a sexist patriarchy. EVER.”
Argument from authority and argument ad hominem logical fallacies. I wonder if anyone on the left is aware their entire grievance mongering method of reasoning has been discredited thousands for years before they even conceived of it?
David, the last one made me laugh out loud. Thanks for improving an otherwise dull morning.
“Can anyone be one of these or must one be born into it?”
I believe it’s a little like the left’s view of the artist. One awards oneself the title, then presume it gives you special insights and wisdom not accessible by the common rabble.
I would LOVE them to know how much I laugh at their stupid posturing, chortle with derision and point at their idiotic claims. I would love them to know the exact lack of seriousness with which I take their pensées. Or is that ponces?
I suspect it would make them stamp like Rumpletstiltskin and shout: “Take me seriously goddamit! I’m a public intellectual and a serious thinker!”
Bart,
What you DON’T GET TO DO is tell a woman or girl that YOU are in ANY WAY better equipped to understand life in a sexist patriarchy. EVER.
Yes, it’s a bold philosophical position. Unless you’re clutching The Stone of Grievance™, you’d better say nothing, because, by convenient definition, you aren’t “equipped” and can’t possibly have any insight into How Things Are™. Presumably the object is to pre-emptively invalidate opinions from half the population, thereby reducing the odds of anyone questioning Ms Fiqah’s self-flattering boilerplate. The idea that “as a man you have no right to speak” is common enough and variations of it can be found in the archives. As when we were told that only the self-designated victim has the “necessary perspective” and should therefore be deferred to and indulged, regardless of the facts. And so the basis for grievance (and leverage, and compensation) becomes whatever the Designated Victim Group says it is. As I said, it’s bold. But you can see the appeal to insecure dogmatic types. “You aren’t allowed to judge me or challenge any of my claims, no matter how bizarre or question-begging they may be, because you have the Wrong Level of Melanin™ and Oppressive Genitals™.”
“Do increased sentences result in less crime?”
At minimum increased sentences are keeping criminals off the streets for a longer period. To paraphrase Dilbert: if less criminals should not mean less crime – does that mean that the remaing criminals are commiting more crime to maintain average for society?
Unless you’re clutching The Stone of Grievance™,
Another classic. Bravo!
To paraphrase Dilbert: if less criminals should not mean less crime – does that mean that the remaing criminals are commiting more crime to maintain average for society?
Well, of course. You see when crime decreases, it creates a “crime-vacuum” hole in the space-time continuum. As is well known, nature, much like dogs, abhors a vacuum. Think about it. Police, attorneys, judges, social workers, prison guards all depend on that criminal activity to provide them with jobs. And if all those people were to lose their jobs, the butchers, the bakers, the candlestick makers who sell to those folks lose some of their income. And so it goes on down the line, rippling through the economy like the aftermath of a tsunami. Criminal activity is actually a service that, come the revolution, will be subsidized. Damn, you conservatives have zero understanding of economics.
>I’ve never met any conservatives who are angry about that. Does Amanda Marcotte actually talk to any conservative people?
Conservatives have false consciousness. Obviously.
Commie dilettantes. Booooo-ring.
doesn’t make me want to stab myself in the eye
Sightist.
I bet he has two eyes to begin with anyway, so even if he stabbed the one, in his lands he’d still be the sexist patriarchal overseer of a dehumanizing capitalist system.
Speaking of that saying, this looks interesting.
“nearly 200 public sector workers held a minutes [sic] silence in memory of Hugo Chavez”
nearly 0 public sector workers chose to relocate to Hugo Chavez’s socialist paradise.
Bart wins this thread.
It’s as if they have no idea what Chávez actually did (as opposed to what they all go around saying he did). That, or it’s the usual blithe Leftist assumption that they, being the (self-)Elect, wouldn’t be on the sharp end of the stick. Given his (and, since we’re on the subject of Latin American dictators, Castro’s) history with those who don’t conform to sexual stereotypes, well… good luck with that.
Question: is the term “mass hysteria” effectively misogynistic and unusable in a figurative context by dint of its origin?
Speaking as a disgruntled owner of a “hyster,” I can testify that its derivative term is entirely appropriate. Nothing like having your brain chemistry radically altered by one’s reproductive system, which does what it’s going to do with no consideration for the well-being of its owner.
No, I wasn’t hoping to quietly weep while watching treacly commercials, but I get to anyway. Yay me.
So yes, “hysterical” is a misogynistic term, because Nature obviously hates women.
Argument from authority and argument ad hominem logical fallacies. I wonder if anyone on the left is aware their entire grievance mongering method of reasoning has been discredited thousands for years before they even conceived of it?
I am informed that Logical (Ph)allu(sies) [QED! QED!] are a Straight White Christer Cissexual Patriarchal construct designed to keep Teh Other in chains.
Presumably the object is to pre-emptively invalidate opinions from half the population, thereby reducing the odds of anyone questioning Ms Fiqah’s self-flattering boilerplate.
The appeal to solipsism has me convinced. Anyone who possesses such a level of gnosis must be taken more seriously than the Pope Himself.
WHOEVER THAT IS!
(For the nonce, “Is the Pope Catholic?” has become an invalid rhetorical question. I suggest you all take full advantage.)
I denounce my Oppressive Genitals™.
I wonder if lefty #2, the guy who thinks the words “mass hysteria” are “misogynistic”, realizes that the words he used instead- “shared insanity” -will now be denounced by lefty #3 as “ableist”?
It’s a minefield.
I denounce Karen’s clarity of thought. And myself, obviously.
David 10:41 “Well, Laurie is forever telling us that she wants ‘full communism’…”
Then let her be sent to a gulag now. If she objects, it can only be due to Incorrect Thought caused by lingering False Consciousness. 🙂
a dehumanising capitalist system
Nothing could be more dehumanising than people like Laurie Penny telling others what to do.
I posted the above to Facebook, and a friend directed me to this:
http://debunkingwhite.livejournal.com/794697.html
It’s like peering into the mind of a flagellant, less the whip and the god.
Franklin,
I’m sure you can get a wristband for that. One that chafes, presumably.
I know, I know. I denounce myself again.
Wear a white wristband as a reminder about your privilege, and as a personal commitment to explain why you wear the wristband.
I’ll wear it, I don’t think the agonized left is going to like my explanation.
Franklin,
I looked at your link and I honestly can’t tell if it was serious or some sort of weird joke. Either way I feel like I need a shower now, so thanks for that.
I’m pretty sure the LiveJournal thing was in earnest. No parodist could stand to write like that for that long without tipping his or her hand.
Or self-immolating, whichever is most convenient.
IMO, this is the only valid definition of “privilege”: if you can publicly berate and humiliate a perfect stranger–simply because you are X and the stranger is Y–and the stranger has to sit there and take it or suffer the wrath of the larger society, then “privilege” is in play.
Back in the day (here in the U.S.) a white person could berate any black person for any reason (including blaming the black person for what the white person just did), and the black person had to remain quiet and accept the castigation without “sassing” (aka “defending themselves”). Any whites observing the situation would support the other white person, and any blacks would look the other way to avoid trouble.
European aristocrats could do that to their inferiors. Higher castes in India (I imagine) can do it to lower castes. Muslim men can do it to women.
But these days, if I tried to publicly berate a black person for any reason, that black person would be free to tell me how and where to step off, and none of the observers of any race would take my side unless I was actually right, nor would they think the black person was “uppity” or out of line.
Lesser “absences”–such as not wondering whether my race is a factor in getting hired/not hired–don’t rise to the level of “privilege.”
MAN, people will go a long way to engage in moral preening. Don’t they ever get tired?
Laurie is forever telling us that she wants “full communism,” and that now is the time for “upsetting the police” with “a radical youth movement… for revolution,” thereby toppling the “bruised superstructure of patriarchal capitalist control.”
Please tell me she’s a parody.
Joan,
Please tell me she’s a parody.
No, she’s quite real. Though not very realistic. When she’s not telling us about the politics of trainers, or telling us that smashing glass onto random people “isn’t violence,” Laurie needs us to know that “we” live in a “violent, frigid anti-woman culture.” Because, well, Laurie says so. Laurie says a lot of things, and is – how shall I put this – not entirely trustworthy.
Though none of this stops her having groupies at our utterly impartial BBC.
Re: the definition of “privilege”, the Left flattens it into “anything good you have that someone else doesn’t have”. This is what we were told in my graduate education course last year, which consisted mainly of working public (i.e., US “State”) school teachers. To borrow David’s device, as Everyone Knows(TM), “privilege” is a Bad Thing(TM). How convenient for the Left, then, to define “privilege” essentially as the right to make use of your own individual talents and private substance without their interference.
Incidentally, this was the same course where I was cornered into a tedious post-class 3-on-1 harangue-disguised-as-a-discussion wherein among other things I was told by an African-American woman (in the same course for the same price at the same university for the same kind of degree for the same kind of job prospects) that I was more privileged (i.e., guilty) than she because my non-slave-holding immigrant parents and grandparents nevertheless benefited from dominant white culture in a way that her ancestors did not. While I don’t doubt that that is in many ways true, I was a bit confused as to what it had to do with us in that classroom. I suppose the implication was that were it not for the inveterate structural racism of the US, she wouldn’t be in precisely the same academic/career position as I or the other “white” people in the class (I’m actually part-hispanic, but that never really counts), but rather would be much farther ahead (i.e., more “privileged”?).
The other fun tidbit from that episode was the final couplet between me and the professor. In desperation, I ended with something like, “When you come down to it, what you’re dealing with are [individual] people, not structures.” The professor replied, “Hmmm…I’m not so sure.”
That’s actually a bit frightening.
JeremiadBullfrog,
I ended with something like, “When you come down to it, what you’re dealing with are [individual] people, not structures.” The professor replied, “Hmmm…I’m not so sure.”
It’s one of the obvious defects of this “privilege” voodoo. Setting aside the obnoxious racial fixation and relentless question-begging, it presupposes a menu of cartoonish social groups, with the members within each group being somehow generic and interchangeable. It simply doesn’t hold water if you deal with people as individuals, which, you might think, is preferable to treating them as targets to abuse, humiliate and make idiotic. Or as objects to position and rearrange in order to comply with leftwing racial prejudice.
JeremiadBullfrog,
I’m sure I’ve mentioned this here before, but it was over 15 years ago here in the US that I was kept after diversity training class to be berated by the trainer because I rolled my eyes at the urban legend stories she was trying to “teach” us that basically implied that Africans were too illiterate and stupid to understand that a picture of a baby on a can of baby food did not mean that the contents of the can consisted of ground up human babies or that American women were not buying trucks for the petty, easily resolved “problem” that driver-side visor had no makeup mirror. I’ve been speaking up and fighting this crap ever since. It’s a lonely battle. Glad to have you aboard.
It’s the left’s same old social positioning exercise, wrapped in a pantomime of contrition. “I am better than you because I pretend to feel worse.” And the end result of all this linguistic one-upmanship and institutional psychodrama – the ideal result of it – is an incoherent self-satisfied tool like Mr Arun Smith.
Wealthy people have distorted minds. If they’re wealthier than him, anyway.
There could be something to it.
Whenever I read a post like that I emerge from it feeling that I am extremely privileged. I’m privileged to live among people who don’t constantly bang on about privilege.
BenSix,
A person would have to be fairly credulous to believe that the object of all this ostentatious “privilege-checking” (or Privilege Top Trumps) is to make the world a kinder, fluffier place. It seems much more likely that the object is to indulge in some passive-aggressive browbeating, whereby people like Arun Smith become gatekeepers of virtue and Corrected Thinking. They want a Brave New Hierarchy and they want your deference.
I notice the public sector employees had 1 minute of silence in honour of Hugo Chavez.
Chavez was a union buster of the first order, and was planning to outlaw unions altogether.
These employees don’t even have the common sense to stand up for their own interests. Stupid, delusional, or some toxic combination – you decide.
Said dicentra:
But these days, if I tried to publicly berate a black person for any reason, that black person would be free to tell me how and where to step off. . . .
And it’s been that way a good while. I grew up in a small Southern U.S. town (where small = less than 4,000 citizens)in the ’70s and ’80s. An old-fashioned free-range childhood. Sandlot baseball, ad-hoc football, wasting hours riding bike up and down the old railroad spur etc. Half my play, sporting and time-wasting companions were Black.* A good, reliable way to get in a fight was to cop any of the attitude of the older White generations. You’d have a fight; outcome this or that; if you were the White offender and lost everybody would nod because of course you had it coming. Now start the ball game back up. If you were the White offender and won** the fight, then the other White kids would berate you for being such a jackass. And start the ball game back up.
*This was true of my parents’ generation, too; especially boys. Children being in many ways instinctively egalitarian. The difference was that after a certain age, you stopped socializing with each other, and if a White kid did put on airs over a Black kid the fight didn’t naturally ensue.
**These fights were fierce but otherwise typical kid-fights in that they usually ended in a draw after the kids wore themselves out. Lots of rolling around on the ground. We’re not talking eye-gouging, kidney-punching stuff here.
Does Amanda Marcotte actually talk to any conservative people?
No. She does talk AT them and ABOUT them (or at least her caricature of them … non-left men as mustachioed neo-rapists and non-left women as self-haters who let the aforementioned men own their vaginas.
She is a walking parody of Ugly Feminist from the inside out.
linguistic one-upmanship… all this ostentatious “privilege-checking” (or Privilege Top Trumps)…the left’s same old social positioning exercise, wrapped in a pantomime of contrition
That’s exactly it. Check your tip jar, Mr T.
Artie,
That’s exactly it.
Well, it’s certainly a big part of it. Following these tweets in real time does tend to reveal certain patterns. One-upmanship and catching each other out is very much the point of the game. It’s the reward for all that piety. Because they’re so liberal and so tolerant. And you mustn’t laugh because any scepticism about the game just proves how evil you are. Only through deference will you be saved.
Check your tip jar, Mr T.
May your sandals remain sweet on even the hottest of days.
What an astounding thread. One can feel them all being slowly sucked into a vortex of madness.
I sure wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of Laurie Penny’s “comparative” rage.
We breed them young in Australia. And we have a lot of fun with them.
One-upmanship and catching each other out is very much the point of the game. It’s the reward for all that piety.
I’ve seen these ‘privilege’ competitions first hand. It’s amazing how all that tolerance suddenly disappears if you make one tiny slip up.
Joel,
It’s amazing how all that tolerance suddenly disappears if you make one tiny slip up.
Absolutely, and I can’t help thinking that rather gives the game away. And the more competitive and pretentious it gets, the more suddenly the mood changes. The Feministing blog, for instance, has plenty of examples where the merest hint of equivocation, however thoughtful and polite, results in barked accusations of oppression and general bitchery.
It’s basically a game of Gotcha! with intellectual pretensions. Which can be quite funny to watch, if you like that kind of thing.
You have to admire the left for its ability to be so continually angry. It shows a remarkable level of consistency, though many suspect that even if they get what they want they would still find reason to be angry.
Watcher,
Previous instalments have featured people who say they “long for pure, uncomplicated political anger,” which seems an odd thing to long for, given the possibilities. And Laurie Penny’s fixation with anger and apocalyptic hyperbole is well known to regular readers. But then Laurie’s view of anger, theft, harassment and violence is oddly non-reciprocal. Her tribe is apparently entitled to be violent – like many of her peers, she’ll even redefine the word so as to exclude anything from physical assault to rioters smashing glass onto terrified people. Which makes me wonder which came first: the adolescent politics or the delinquent disposition?
I always find it amazing that I earn so much less, and have almost no power compared to these ‘un-privileged’ people.
I tried ringing up the BBC the other day, to see if I could offer my opinion on Newsnight, but they weren’t interested.
Must be the colour of my genitals.
even if they get what they want they would still find reason to be angry.
Most of them do not know what they want, other than to keep telling everybody how angry they are.
Previous instalments have featured people who say they “long for pure, uncomplicated political anger,”
Anders Breivik engaged in pure, uncomplicated political anger.
Somehow, I have a feeling that’s not what they want.
Somehow, I have a feeling that’s not what they want.
Funny. I assume exactly the opposite.
” But then Laurie’s view of anger, theft, harassment and violence is oddly non-reciprocal.”
Indeed. I remember her being distinctly un-chuffed to be on the receiving end of David Starkeys ‘Comparative Rage’.
Perhaps one day we will have witch-hunts rooting out people who committed atrocious acts of Language Abuse.
One can dream…
Oh wait, we’ll need to keep a few lefties for that.
/back to the drawing board…
Would it be possible for you to put all the agonies into one long post please? And keep adding them to the end.
Matt.
I think this falls under the “Agonies of the Left” category, but in this case it’s a genuine agony they’re inflicting rather than an imaginary one they’re affecting.
At the “Good Men Project”, some arsehole writes that he told his four-year-old son he shouldn’t have tried to kiss a girl at school who, as it turned out, didn’t want to be kissed, because that was rape. He also says he’s more comfortable using the word “rape” than “sex” around the poor kid.
http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/hesaid-a-father-son-talk-about-rape-and-reteah-parsons/
With parental guidance like that, how is this kid ever going to grow up not seriously sexually and personally dysfunctional?