They Come To Teach Us
And behold their glittering minds:
“You shouldn’t even have an opinion about this.”
The above exchange was filmed at the Boston Free Speech Rally, August 19. A longer, even more educational version, with lots of additional shoving and liveliness, is embedded below the fold. And remember, these Children of Marcuse, the ones demanding “empathy” while laughing at accounts of random beatings, have been educated, quite thoroughly.
Update, via the comments:
The longer video does, I think, capture a basic dynamic, a root pathology.
While professing their compassion and high-mindedness, and therefore their superiority, the Mao-lings seem determined to out-group Polite Guy and tar him as an interloper, a “white supremacist,” etc., based on nothing at all, except for the fact that he’s white. When this characterisation fails as implausible, and Polite Guy remains polite and pointedly unthreatening, the Mao-lings then get even more hostile and menacing, before assaulting him from behind as he’s trying to leave. Presumably because he made their preposterous self-image more difficult to sustain. And so he must pay.
But such is Mao-ling psychodrama. There’s no point trying to engage with it rationally, except to reveal what it is, and no reward for being civil. It’s just a ball of vanity and malice. And so the Mao-lings who are shrieking at Polite Guy demand to know, “When have you ever been oppressed?” And they ask this while laughing at his assault, mocking his politeness, and shortly before assaulting him themselves.
Update 2:
In the comments, Daniel Ream notes,
We have entire institutions dedicated to producing hordes of young people with a kind of artificial cluster B personality disorder.
Well, yes. And I suppose that if you were feeling charitable, which may be a big ask, you might register the sadness of it all. In that, if you take lots of young people who are credulous and/or narcissistic, or who actually have cluster B personalities, and whose expectations of status are at odds with their capabilities – and you tell them, repeatedly, for years, that any personal failure or shortcoming, any difficulty or mental discomfort, is a result of oppression and therefore someone else’s fault, someone they should punish, then the behaviour seen above will tend to be the result. That, or something very much like it.
And once you’ve cultivated this level of dysfunction, this self-flattery and vindictiveness, it’s hard to see how it can be undone. Those seduced by it may well remain broken.
Via Obnoxio.
The US is an absolute basket case. The sooner that country implodes the better.
Why are so many of these psycho scumbags women?
Avoid crazy bitches with purple hair.
He’s very brave. I think this really beings home the horror of the Maolings and their hateful ideology. I’m quite shocked.
Mao-ling: “Have you heard of what empathy is?”
Polite guy with camera: “I had the shit kicked out of me for being white.”
Mao-ling#2: “Good.”
[ Laughter, sneering. ]
I’m quite shocked.
It does, I think, capture the basic dynamic, the pathology of it.
While professing their compassion and high-mindedness, and therefore their superiority, the Mao-lings seem determined to out-group Polite Guy and tar him as an interloper, a “white supremacist,” etc., based on nothing at all, except the fact that he’s white. When this characterisation fails as implausible, and Polite Guy remains polite and pointedly unthreatening, the Mao-lings then get even more hostile and menacing, even assaulting him from behind as he’s trying to leave. Presumably because he made their preposterous self-image more difficult to sustain. And so he must pay.
But such is Mao-ling psychodrama. There’s no point trying to engage with it rationally, except to reveal what it is, and no reward for being civil. It’s just a ball of vanity and malice.
These are toddlers in the bodies of adults. They need their legs slapped.
I’m quite shocked.
I suppose that if you were feeling charitable, which may be a big ask, you might register the sadness of it all.
In that, if you take lots of young people who are credulous and/or narcissistic, or who have borderline personalities, and whose expectations of status are at odds with their capabilities, and you tell them, repeatedly, for years, that any personal failure or shortcoming, any difficulty or mental discomfort, is a result of oppression and therefore someone else’s fault, someone they should punish, then the behaviour seen above will tend to be the result. That, or something very much like it. And once you’ve cultivated this level of dysfunction, this self-flattery and vindictiveness, it’s hard to see how it can be undone. Those seduced by it may well remain broken.
if you were feeling charitable, which may be a big ask,
Watched the video and I’m not feeling much charity to be honest.
it’s hard to see how it can be undone. Those seduced by it may well remain broken.
If current theories on personality development and neuroplasticity bear out, then yes.
Regular readers will be aware that I work a lot with people who suffer from borderline personality disorder. The prevalence of this is tragic enough, implying as it does a level of juvenile sexual abuse that seems staggering.
That we have entire institutions dedicated to producing hordes of young people with a kind of artificial cluster B personality disorder, and the societal prolonging of adolescence well past the point where personality is believed to become fixed and immutable…this does not bode well for the future, when a significant proportion of the next generation can be credibly described as mentally ill.
entire institutions dedicated to producing hordes of young people with a kind of artificial cluster B personality disorder,
That.
The US is an absolute basket case. The sooner that country implodes the better.
I would disagree. The Mao-lings are a vociferous bunch (to put it mildly) but they are still a tiny minority and as ineffectual as Spencer’s neo-Nazis. Their malignant and narcissistic idiocy has now gone mainstream; my guess is that within ten years the majority of Angry Studies Depts. will have been shut down, not least because (America being America) the lawyers are going to get involved seeing as how ASDs have churned out several thousand unemployable pillocks, many of whom have wealthy parents. That would entail a few hundred class-action suits which, irony of ironies, would be defended by pleading First Amendment rights.
Start stockpiling popcorn now.
Lancastrian Oik
God, I hope you’re right.
But history is full of temporary insanities taking over populations. I’m not sure how much of a consolation it is, when one is kneeling in a cellar waiting for the neck-shot, or strung-up on gallows to know that sanity will eventually be resumed.
I fear this is going to get a lot worse before it gets any better.
That we have entire institutions dedicated to producing hordes of young people with a kind of artificial cluster B personality disorder…
Daniel, you may find yourself being called as an expert witness for the plaintiffs.
1. “We’re here for equality”
2. “You shouldn’t even have an opinion about this”
#SocialJusticeBrainstorm
#SocialJusticeBrainstorm
“When have you ever been oppressed?” they asked the polite man, while laughing at his assault, mocking his politeness, and shortly before assaulting him themselves.
It isn’t politics. It’s pathology.
“This is a HATE-FREE ZONE!”
#AllTheIrony
The US is an absolute basket case. The sooner that country implodes the better.
No, the areas west of I-5, east of I-95 north of Norfolk, and certain big cities are full of loons, the problem is that all the “media” are among those in those benighted areas, and hence the loons get all the press. It is rather a do-loop of stupidity. Here in the vast middle between I-5 and I-95 things are generally normal.
Meanwhile, I’m not seeing much difference.
It’s interesting, the way the chunky, purple-haired She-Mao-ling shrieks and jabs her fingers at Polite Guy, interrupting him and generally being obnoxious, while pointing to the black woman next to her as if she were a talisman. A universal excuse for any kind of behaviour.
That was f*cking awful. I’m actually upset now.
I’m actually upset now.
Well, watching malevolence is upsetting. If you watched the full video and didn’t find it disquieting, at all, that would be more of a concern, I think.
And yet people will tell you eugenics is wrong.
They’re hyenas. Call pest control.
If anyone has trouble with comments not appearing, email me and I’ll prostrate myself before the spam filter, a capricious deity.
I think it was the blogger Neo-NeoCon who came up with the idea that some people serve as kind of plaque discloser, in that their own innocuous behaviour reveals the unthinking hostility and dysfunction around them. In that respect, I think Polite Guy did a great job.
The US is an absolute basket case.
Meanwhile in the UK, Toppling statues? Here’s why Nelson’s column should be next.
Hysterically removing statues = “frenzied debate”. OK, it is The Guardian…
We should start by defunding Higher ‘Education’ completely. If people want to render themselves unemployable and repulsive let them pay for it. It is an outrage that potato packers in Idaho or street cleaners in London are forced on pain of imprisonment to hand over a single penny in tax when our government misuses it so.
If people want to render themselves unemployable
And yet someone is being commissioned to write all those tediously uniform “woke” articles for Gizmodo, io9, Mic, Teen Vogue, et al., in which disdaining “whiteness,” and using “white” as a pejorative, is a sign of sophistication and moral status.
I noted with interest an early part of the exchange, where Polite Guy asks the simple question, “Why should I join you?” The reaction that question elicits is truly disturbing. None of those people can actually explain his/her position. Oh sure, they’ve got the jargon down. They withdraw words like “oppression,” “hate,” “white supremacy,” etc. from a basket easily enough, but the simple question “Why” sends them into a rage. As Farnsworth alluded to above, there can be no dialogue with such people because they are espousing a secular religion to which one must immediately submit without question or suffer the consequences.
And yet someone is being commissioned to write …
That would be employment of a sort, but I tend to think of those articles you mention as being not so much written as expectorated.
The cognitive disonence (spelling?) was astounding, telling him to shut up and criticizing him for having nothing to say. They were like a pack of cowardly hyenas, none were brave enough to engage his words or physically attack. You could see the desperation in their eyes and body language in that they so wanted him to respond physically so they could pounce.
I wonder what they would have done if he had replied to their polite inquiry to his gender and ethnicity that he was a transsexual native indian, I mean if the faux squaw can pass for one then anyone can.
As a few of you may know, I’m writing a book loosely based on my experiences with a deranged Brooklyn-based feminist I encountered last year. I don’t know if she would go to these sort of protests, but her friends – older women with green, red, and purple hair who exert considerable influence over her – most certainly do. When I showed a draft of the book to a friend of mine – a professional, extremely decent Turkish woman – she asked if the conversations actually took place as depicted. I said they did, more or less, and she remarked that she couldn’t believe a woman would use so much profanity. I didn’t realise it at the time, but this woman’s chat was littered with profanity and sexual obscenities.
The same is true for her friends, at least if their Facebook accounts were anything to go by (I no longer look at them): their posts were chock full of immature profanity-ridden outbursts such as “I’m so fucking tired of this shit right now!” as if they were a teenager being told to clean their room rather than an adult nearing forty. Almost every time I see a bunch of women SJWs protesting something this sort of language is used constantly, to the point that’s often all you hear. I watched a minute of the above video and already several women have been swearing incessantly, unable to make a point without the words “fuck” or “shit”.
Tell me, how many decent, properly educated, functioning women have you met in your lives who speak like that, who use the words “fuck” or “shit” continually when trying to deal with an everyday situation? I have several women colleagues, professional engineers, not one of them speaks like that. I don’t mind women swearing occasionally, but if one is using the language of a sailor as a matter of course, you’re likely dealing with trash.
Tell me, how many decent, properly educated, functioning women have you met in your lives who speak like that, who use the words “fuck” or “shit” continually when trying to deal with an everyday situation?
Well, indeed. But for some kinds of personalities, being continually and absurdly angry, or pretending to be such, makes them feel important.
Possibly relevant.
Possibly relevant
Exactly. They think it makes them appear hip, edgy, modern, passionate. Instead it makes them look ignorant and trashy. Coupled with visible tattoos on the arms and neck and the image is complete.
There are groups for which constant swearing is more the norm, and one would be those with a cluster B personality disorder as Daniel indicates – correct? Mad people swearing are so cool in how they’re disconnected from normal mores, you see. Ought to emulate them/learn from them as with the rest of the Mad Person’s Starter Kit.
Also, it’s a substitute for real sharpness in rhetoric and allows lazy pantomime “rage”, which as we all know is holiness, c.f. Laurie Penny.
There is a lot of avocado in those California rolls.
[T]heir posts were chock full of immature profanity-ridden outbursts such as “I’m so fucking tired of this shit right now!”
It’s all part of their Épater la Bourgeoisie schtick. It, along with the strangely colored hair, and self-mutilation is the obligatory uniform in their army telling the world they’re nonconformists. Further its a substitute for reasoned discourse, simply because they are intellectually incapable of engaging in same.
< Desperately tries to close the eff-italics tag. Fails. Slowly exits the room. >
[ Fixes avalanche of italics. Points to sign above bar. ]
They think it makes them appear hip, edgy, modern, passionate. Instead it makes them look ignorant and trashy.
Well, I suspect Laurie and her sister both imagine that being randomly, gratuitously and ostentatiously abusive makes them terribly iconoclastic. When in fact it signals a cartoonish unrealism, and a desperate conformity. Someone whose trajectory in life is much more predetermined than many of the people she disdains as bourgeois.
Reminder
You can’t define us by *class* with all your *rules*, man. Now hold off while I quite deliberately enter the lower class and adopt all its trappings.
Interesting point about the cussing. That and the yelling really annoys me. People who cuss and yell are generally bullies. (Unless they cuss and yell re: stubbing toes, as I do.)
I can’t watch the whole thing right now; already grinding my teeth.
And the fat white chicks are totally using the black chick as cover for their jerkiness.
And the fat white chicks are totally using the black chick as cover for their jerkiness.
She’s their talisman. A blank cheque for misbehaviour. I wonder if she realises how she’s being used.
I’m looking at these screeching women and wondering what in God’s name their fathers are thinking right now. If *that’s* what you’ve raised as a daughter, you’ve failed, and badly.
I’m looking at these screeching women and wondering what in God’s name their fathers are thinking right now.
Absolutely. You also have to wonder what the ladies themselves will make of the video, which presumably they’ll see. Will there be a flickering of recognition, of embarrassment, of remorse? Or, as suggested upthread, are they too far gone to risk any hazardous reflection?
I mean, breaking people, creating these monsters, that’s the easy part.
Will there be a flickering of recognition, of embarrassment, of remorse?
I doubt it. This isn’t a case of teenage rage, the women in the video are in their twenties. As I said, I know women in their thirties and forties who not only behave the same way, they’re proud of it. I even saw one of their mothers write “I’m so proud of my badass daughter”. Alas, there was no word from the father. Whatever the case, they’ve utterly failed as parents.
She’s their talisman.
I’d accuse them of following Derbyshire’s advice, but they’d probably blow a gasket if they read the relevant essay.
Like morphine, righteous anger can be useful in the proper circumstances. But it’s also an addictive drug that cripples its addicts, feeding their arrogance and stripping them of judgment and common decency.
stripping them of judgment and common decency.
That is what’s missing, isn’t it? Common decency. How proud they must be.
Peter Sellers stage whisper: “There used to be a decency, but I had it surgically removed!”
I doubt it. This isn’t a case of teenage rage, the women in the video are in their twenties.
The etiology for cluster B personality disorders is that the child’s emotional development essentially ceases at the time of the trauma, because their entire psyche becomes dedicated to developing coping mechanisms. With practice, it’s often possible to estimate when someone was traumatized by their overall level of emotional maturity.
There are groups for which constant swearing is more the norm, and one would be those with a cluster B personality disorder as Daniel indicates
It’s not so much that BPD, etc. implies swearing as much as it implies emotional immaturity, being permanently stuck as an emotional adolescent. For some, adolescence comes with an awful lot of acting out so as to shock Daddy. So with apologies to Tim, I contend it’s very much a case of teenage rage. These people will be teenagers for the rest of their life.
These people will be teenagers for the rest of their life.
That’s going to get quite sad, quite soon.
Will there be a flickering of recognition, of embarrassment, of remorse?
I wonder. I recall when the Evergreen (I think, I’m losing track of all the crazy) struggle session video came out, all the woke people complained that the evil right-wing was evilly using the video to, er, show people reality. So although they pathetically rationalise their behaviour within their own ideological conspiracy beliefs they have some conception of how this plays in the real world.
I wonder, have the righteous social justice warriors have demanded the linked video be taken down yet – claiming “privacy rights” or some such rubbish?
It’s not so much that BPD, etc. implies swearing as much as it implies emotional immaturity, being permanently stuck as an emotional adolescent. For some, adolescence comes with an awful lot of acting out so as to shock Daddy. So with apologies to Tim, I contend it’s very much a case of teenage rage. These people will be teenagers for the rest of their life.
Yup, that all sounds rather familiar.
Will there be a flickering of recognition, of embarrassment, of remorse?
No. They are sufficiently self deluded that they will view the video and see themselves as a cross between Marianne, Horatius, and the 101st at Bastogne.
OT, but I immediately thought of you guys:
Remember, kids: it’s the President who’s crazy.
I’m looking at these screeching women and wondering what in God’s name their fathers are thinking right now.
I wish I hadn’t spent all of that money sending her to that college…
I wonder, have the righteous social justice warriors demanded the linked video be taken down yet – claiming “privacy rights” or some such rubbish?
Such complaints aren’t unheard of. But that’s the flavour of the drama. One minute, it’s masks, mobs, and Sturmabteilung tactics. The next minute, it’s, “That’s just so unfair – you’re violating our self-esteem!”
[ Added: ]
Remember our old friend Idiot Hat Guy from Occupy’s Denver contingent? He starts off with boasts of impending mob force and of how he and his comrades are going to “disallow” people from getting to work, or getting home to their children. But when he realises that he’s being revealed as the vain and selfish little prick that he is, he gets all whiny and upset, claiming that the filming of his threats somehow “violates” his rights.
This is who they are.
Sometimes there is karma for this lot.
Sometimes there is karma for this lot.
Plum shot. Maximum points.
Remember, kids: it’s the President who’s crazy.
Worth repeating.
I’m beginning to think that we have been lied to and that, in fact, you can judge a book by its cover.
Just sayin’.
So although they pathetically rationalise their behaviour within their own ideological conspiracy beliefs they have some conception of how this plays in the real world.
No. They are sufficiently self deluded that they will view the video and see themselves as a cross between Marianne, Horatius, and the 101st at Bastogne.
Let me theorize here, because I think you’re both right and both wrong.
People with BPD have psyches that are entirely, monomanically focused on Not Getting Hurt Again, which means a host of dysfunctional coping mechanisms concocted by an immature child’s brain. People with BPD, as I think Tim can attest, will cling to their “I HAVE DONE NOTHING WRONG” defense mechanism even in the face of overwhelming forensic evidence. I’ve seen “that video is fake” or even “that isn’t me” being used, but that’s not all that common.
More likely, they don’t think they’ve done anything wrong but they do recognize that the video makes them look bad (this is distinct from “reveals actual bad behaviour”, mind). Making them look bad is triggering because it might presage more Getting Hurt in their child-brain, and so the video has to be suppressed. What’s in the video is irrelevant; it threatens them and they’ve learned that they can defend themselves by deflecting attention away from themselves and onto you by calling you a bad person.
That sudden switch from arrogant posturing to mewling demands for sympathy? Any parent of a toddler will recognize that.
An X-ring shot. Well done, that cop.
Ironically, the champ was wearing a gas mask.
Good to see the US cops doing their job: one has the impression that lately, they have been hiding up a close, as we Scots say.
Of course, I wrote “chump”, but the spam filter was in a mischievous mood.
Gosh, that Phoenix PD riot squad seems to have what could be called a peppery temper.
but the spam filter was in a mischievous mood.
For God’s sake, don’t upset her.
[ Pulls out basket of fresh puppies as an offering. ]
Let me theorize here, because I think you’re both right and both wrong.
People with BPD have psyches…
The difficulty is that these people tend more closely to fit the diagnostic criteria for histrionic personality disorder rather than borderline personality disorder and do not see themselves as bad, or doing anything bad, whereas the borderline personality persons would.
For God’s sake, don’t upset her.
You used to be authoritarian towards the filter. What happened? Did you get a sinister, and disturbingly threatening message, like “I can’t let you do that, Dave”? Has she recruited the hench-lesbians to her side?
What happened? Did you get a sinister, and disturbingly threatening message, like “I can’t let you do that, Dave”?
There was a brief spell when, inexplicably, my own comments were being trapped by the thing too. You can imagine the indignity.
The difficulty is that these people tend more closely to fit the diagnostic criteria for […]
That’s the problem with symptom-based diagnoses instead of etiology-based ones. Distinguishing between the various cluster B disorders is fraught because of this.
To be clear, I don’t think the majority of these people are suffering from a real, diagnosable mental illness. They’re immature and have been taught a form of malignant narcissism that shares most of the symptoms with the cluster B disorders. Put these people in a context where there are immediate negative consequences for negative behaviour and they’ll change. True BPD/cluster B’s can’t.
Put these people in a context where there are immediate negative consequences for negative behaviour and they’ll change.
Sadly, as we’ve seen many times, that’s the exact opposite of what academia’s Clown Quarter does.
The paucity of such contexts is not doing society any favours, I’ll grant.
…a brief spell when, inexplicably, my own comments were being trapped by the thing too.
“Who run Bartertown?”
To be clear, I don’t think the majority of these people are suffering from a real, diagnosable mental illness.
Indeed. Some people are just arseholes.
On the “We useless Social Justice Warriors are going to throw a useless tantrum and you can’t stop us!” front, a gas-mask-wearing “protestor” kicks a tear gas canister back at the police and gets a pepper ball in the yarbles for his reward , much to the delight of the interweb smarty-pants.
“Pulls out basket of fresh puppies as an offering”
Hey, leave some for Glenn Reynolds!
These are 2nd or 3rd hand Alinsky tactics performed by people who never read Alinsky or know anyone who did. Alinsky was not about wrecking the institutions of power, but using them to his ends. The degradation of society includes the degradation of its enemies.
Regarding Mr. Yarbles, the Interwebs are having some fun with the video: http://www.dailywire.com/news/20140/top-5-versions-antifa-protester-being-hit-balls-jacob-airey?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_content=062316-news&utm_campaign=dwbrand
Jeepers.
What with their jostlingg and kicking and punching, interspersed with shouts of “you shouldn’t even have an opinion!” and “you belong over there!” is it any wonder some people say, “f*k it, I’m joining the alt-right”?
Put these people in a context where there are immediate negative consequences for negative behaviour and they’ll change.
Which is where their parents have failed them, even before ‘society’ supposedly did. More often than not, I would suggest that these children are the sum product of their parents enabling indifference.
Posted by Stuck-Record: “But history is full of temporary insanities taking over populations… I fear this is going to get a lot worse before it gets any better.”
The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15#.vm65ehvdr
I watched a clip at the first underlined Twitter page. I think the good news is that neither of the two main women involved (the one who did most of the screaming and the one who said “Good”) showed a level of commitment or of hatred that really marks them as SJWs. They would probably have acted the same way had they been Chelsea supporters facing a camera guy in a Man U shirt.
The coward in the bandana however is probably a different matter.
So, the police pretending to arrest him in order to defuse the situation… Was that a good idea? Now all these little bastards think they won; worse, they think their actions will bend the police to their will. How’s that going to help next time?
Not to mention that there’s not much difference between a phony arrest and an actual one. What if he’d have said, “No, I’m not leaving, I have the right to be here” – would they have had to give him a phony clubbing for resisting arrest? I dunno, I can’t help but feel uneasy that, whatever their reasons were, the police still came down on the side of the mob rather than help the law-abiding citizen exercise his rights.
Daniel Ream – The etiology for cluster B personality disorders is that the child’s emotional development essentially ceases at the time of the trauma, because their entire psyche becomes dedicated to developing coping mechanisms.
Could a sense of having been traumatised be artificially induced? Say, by university lecturers convincing a gullible teenager that actually, some perfectly ordinary disappointment that life served them was actually some terrible instance of oppression… I’m thinking of things like Lena Dunham deciding, years after the fact, that an unpleasant sexual encounter was actually a rape.
MC – “Some people are just arseholes.” Yep.
It’s all part of their Épater la Bourgeoisie schtick. It, along with the strangely colored hair, and self-mutilation is the obligatory uniform in their army telling the world they’re nonconformists.
Over the last few months I’ve been seeing more and more utterly undeniably obvious hipsters in more and more camouflage fabric bits of clothing, from baseball caps to trousers, sometimes with random military insignia. I keep seeing more and more with military variety epaulettes that no civilian is going to be wearing—no adult at any rate— In all such circumstances, every single wearer was quite clearly nowhere near having had any experience or interest in actually being in or of the military . . .
I’ve been among groups of ex-military on many occasions—they’re all dressed exclusively civilian adult . . .
I just tried a bit of googlemancy to see if there might be any commentary about, found nothing useful.
Has anyone run across any commentary or come up with any reasonable guesses on this oddity?
Presumably because he made their preposterous self-image more difficult to sustain. And so he must pay.
That.
Could a sense of having been traumatised be artificially induced?
I see what you’re getting at, but that’s akin to asking “is it possible to fake a broken arm?” Real PTSD is a permanent alteration of the brain’s autonomic responses because neuropsychiatry blah blah blah.
What you can do is convince sheltered adolescents who have never experienced any real hardship and are experiencing the big wide scary world out there for the first time (albeit in a university, one of the safest spaces – pun intended – one can imagine) that the anxieties they feel are Real Trauma, and that they should be feeling and acting the way Really Traumatized people do, with hysterical overreactions, demands for appeasement of their neuroses, etc.
So to club the metaphor to death, you can’t artificially induce a broken arm. You can convince a credulous person who has never actually had a broken arm that that mild bruise on the back of their forearm is a broken bone, that they should wear a cast, be entitled to opiate-based painkillers, and get all the sympathy and special treatment anyone with a broken arm should get, and anyone who points out that a mild bruise is not actually a broken arm is just being a big Hate Hate Hatey McHaterson who should be yelled at for being so callous and insensitive.
That such a person would consume limited treatment resources that would normally go to people with real broken arms, and that their ostentatious demands for consideration would diminish people’s sympathy for real people with real injuries, is also part of the metaphor.
That.
It’s not an uncommon reaction. Something not dissimilar happens in this infamous exchange between Laurie Penny and David Starkey. She interrupts his answer to a question with a gratuitous personal smear – an immensely self-satisfied claim about racism and tax avoidance. He responds and points out how revolting and dishonest she’s being, which makes her illusion of piety rather difficult to sustain in front of the audience. Laurie is then reduced to a mix of fury, humiliation and pretentious, rambling victimhood.
The debate, supposedly about national character, becomes all about her: “I really don’t appreciate being stood on stage to be personally attacked,” says she in a comically whiny voice. The fact that she started the personal attacks, needlessly, thinking it would be clever, and then lied, repeatedly, and was promptly repaid in the manner she initiated, is somehow proof of her victimhood. And it’s all because she’s a woman, of course, and so terribly, terribly brave.
What you can do is convince sheltered adolescents who have never experienced any real hardship… that they should be feeling and acting the way Really Traumatized people do, with hysterical overreactions, demands for appeasement of their neuroses, etc.
I sometimes think of it in terms of pollution. In that, the Angry Studies Industry is belching out large numbers of insufferable, dysfunctional people. Thereby stinking up the culture.
Your fellow blogger Kate MacMillan has an aphorism that nicely summarizes this: “They say the children are our future…and that’s why I’m sticking up on canned goods and ammunition.”
Incidentally, in case it’s unclear, and contrary to the Mao-lings’ hysterical fantasies, the Boston Free Speech Rally was by no means a gathering of neo-Nazis.
Laurie is then reduced to a mix of fury, humiliation and pretentious, rambling victimhood.
I thought she was going to cry. 🙂
There never appear to be that many of these Mao-lings, in the sense that the true believers who take part in protests and the like are quite small in number. What is more worrying to me is that the general population doesn’t seem able to take on board just how malevolent they are.
It seems so obvious to anyone who pays attention that the Mao-lings’ weaponisation of ‘niceness’ is bogus and totally at odds with traditional morality. Yet huge numbers of ordinary people seem to swallow this pose whole, just as they can’t see that Corbyn and Sanders are talentless charlatans.
I keep waiting for the penny to drop that you can’t appease these people and that they don’t accept apologies because they don’t really care about forgiveness so much as power. But the hard left’s ability to generate sympathy for its lies keeps rolling on.
take on board just how malevolent they are.
A point that I hope I’ve underlined over the years.
that you can’t appease these people and that they don’t accept apologies because they don’t really care about forgiveness so much as power.
That too. See, for instance, this, at DePauw University.
More karma, or, “Everyone I see is a nazi”.
However, if Mr. Tattoo McPiercehead is taken out by a little booboo like that, I don’t think antifa are exactly Dr. Klahn’s Fighting Force of Extraordinary Magnitude.
“Everyone I see is a nazi”.
From what I can make out, his crime was that he wouldn’t denounce all white people on demand.
…his crime was that he wouldn’t denounce all white people on demand…
Yes, as always, wrongthought among party members must not go unpunished. Clearly he was not a 33rd degree Woke.
So, the police pretending to arrest him in order to defuse the situation… Was that a good idea? Now all these little bastards think they won; worse, they think their actions will bend the police to their will. How’s that going to help next time?
Not to mention that there’s not much difference between a phony arrest and an actual one. What if he’d have said, “No, I’m not leaving, I have the right to be here” – would they have had to give him a phony clubbing for resisting arrest? I dunno, I can’t help but feel uneasy that, whatever their reasons were, the police still came down on the side of the mob rather than help the law-abiding citizen exercise his rights.
This. It’s not just the little bastards who think they have won. The police, or whomever thought to call/send the police to the “rescue”, will insist that they are being the “responsible” ones. The “grown ups” who are above it all. They walk away shaking their heads at the childish behavior that has forced them, ever so reluctantly to once again come in like Jesus Peacemakers ™ and calm the waters. They pretend/lie to themselves that they are doing the good work on the side of “reason” all the while, as Dr. T says, handing the mob a victory.
It disturbs me how often I find myself using irony/scare quotes but the absurdities of what goes on anymore, combined with the Orwellian erosion/deterioration/destruction/obfuscation of language I just don’t understand how to differentiate the current meaning of words from what I and the folks at Merriam-Webster understand them to mean. Of course, Google is taking that job away from them…[ Movie Narrator Voice ] In a world where the word ‘literally’ has ceased to literally mean ‘literally’…