Planet Of The Bedlamites
Rafi steers us to this article by Charlotte Allen on the ever-narrowing parameters of leftist tolerance. The following extract, on her attempts to cover a “white privilege” conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan, may be of particular interest:
I had already covered the White Privilege Conference for the Weekly Standard in 2013, when it had met at a Seattle airport hotel. Back then, the conference had struck me strictly as a subject for laughs… So my story had highlighted the conference’s most salient feature: that although minority-group victimologists were robustly represented, many of the speakers, and certainly most of the audience, consisted of white people feeling guilty for being white.
I gently poked fun at the George Mason University professor who got up onstage to apologise that his pants had been stitched in a sweatshop in Bangladesh; the soi-disant American Indian activist who had been ousted as tribal chief for financial mismanagement after a large sum of money went missing; and the large percentage of conference workshop leaders who seemed actually to be flogging their books and hustling for participants to sign up as paying customers for their own white-privilege conferences elsewhere. […]
I returned to the scene in 2018 because during the intervening five years “white privilege” seemed to have mushroomed from a zany preoccupation of far-left professors into a mainstream pedagogical trend. Just a few days ago elementary-school teachers in Raleigh, N.C., sent second-graders home with a sheet for their parents titled “11-Step Guide to Race, Racism, and White Privilege.” The sheet proffered such injunctions as “Drop ‘colourblindedness’ (which is arguably an ableist term anyway)” and “Only white people can be racist.” The white-privilege movement had become serious — and a serious threat to those who declined to be indoctrinated or to have their children indoctrinated.
Do read the whole thing.
Previously on the Planet of the Bedlamites.
So they charged her employer for press access (and conference registration isn’t cheap), then denied her access as press when she got there. And because process is punishment, her employer didn’t want to fight, so in the end, the conference was allowed to deny her the service that was paid for.
I forget where I read it – Insty maybe – Bank of America plans to deny loan service to businessws of which their Diversity and Environment or some such Officer does not approve: military style weapons manufacturers.
Yet a baker has to bake that wedding cake, and a little pizza shop has to cater that wedding, or their livelihoods will be ruined.
Almost makes me want to hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats.
So they charged her employer for press access (and conference registration isn’t cheap), then denied her access as press when she got there.
Even basic probity seems beyond them.
But as we’ve seen many times, these events, and the broader mindset, tend to attract people who struggle with coherence.
And note how this supposedly crippling and all-pervasive phenomenon is usually described in the most fuzzy and nebulous of terms:
Which may explain why, when pressed, attendees of such conferences often struggle to think of an actual, real-world example of the “privilege” they claim to be fretting about “every day.”
They’re not worried about coherence. Keeping you guessing is part of the screwing-you-over they’re aiming for.
The first rule of Fraud Club.
Give me your huddled privilege
So, barring a journalist whom they believe will be less than flattering is supposed to hide them from scrutiny? It didn’t seem to work out that way, did it?
R. Sherman, yes, but the alternative to insistence is argument. You can see their dilemma.
Why women live longer than men…
https://twitter.com/Hadtwohurt
Previously on the Planet of the Bedlamites.
The video’s brilliant. 🙂
They’re not worried about coherence. Keeping you guessing is part of the screwing-you-over they’re aiming for.
As the Ami Horowitz video illustrates quite vividly, the attendees have chosen to become pretentious and dogmatically dishonest, practically neurotic. It’s a kind of delusional role-play, and they wish to make those who fall into their orbit as pretentious and dysfunctional as they are, while asserting their own status as gatekeepers of piety. It makes Scientology look almost respectable. Given the efforts to imprint this dishonesty and neuroticism on children, one might consider it abuse, a kind of predation. And respond accordingly.
If I were a cynic, I’d say they’re deliberately defining and establishing the new Kulak class — white property owners of the wrong political persuasion (us evil ones) — whose assets will do nicely to fund the “reparations” that are always the true objective of this entire scam.
So, barring a journalist whom they believe will be less than flattering is supposed to hide them from scrutiny? It didn’t seem to work out that way, did it?
Sadly, it did work for them, because far fewer citizens will take note their radical agenda in the absence of specific quotes and recordings.
For those who missed it.
This is madness. I am a white male. I was born that way to white Caucasian/European parents. All my ancestors were Anglo-Saxons or Welsh Celts. All the same race of course. It is not privilege, it is genetics. I am however proud of my heritage, and proud of my culture. I am English and we have given the world far more to be proud of than ashamed of. Funny how people long to come and live in my country. Must be because of the rule of law for many centuries, the lack of corruption amongst officials, the universal freedom of thought and activity within the law, the tolerance and lack of oppression. I am proud of all these things let alone our literature, science, industry and art. Am I privileged? No. I worked for what I have got the old fashioned way. I don’t think my skin had anything to do with it.
It’s a kind of delusional role-play…
White Guy™ with the “Black Lives Matter” t-shirt and button:
1) All whites are racist;
2) My wife is black;
3) When we go to the airport I put my hand on her so people know she is with me and I extend my white privilege to her.
OK – white racist, but not him because he has a black wife, who must be guided safely in an airport because no black woman has ever flown by herself without the help of massa’s guiding hand.
Delusional, check; pretentious, double check; gate keeper of piety, you betcha; OTOH, I think his condescending attitude towards his wife sound a bit racist. He should probably report for regrooving immediately.
When we go to the airport I put my hand on her so people know she is with me and I extend my white privilege to her.
It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? A kind of grim comedy. And being so enlightened and not at all neurotic, they want to influence your children.
And remember, if you object to being slandered, or your children being slandered, and assigned with pretentious collective guilt, and if you resent attempts at brow-beating by bigoted mediocrities and peddlers of hokum, this will promptly be construed as “white fragility” and therefore, somehow, damning proof of your own seething subconscious racism.
These are not good people.
3) When we go to the airport I put my hand on her so people know she is with me and I extend my white privilege to her.
Well, if it’s that easy, why not just stand at the front door and bestow your blessings upon the lowly POC as they enter the terminal? In fact, we should all be “super-duper-ultra-woke” and just go around grabbing random black people and eliminating the taint of their darkness. Then the POC could extend their newly obtained “white privilege” to others and eventually, we’d be through with this madness. (Sounds like a zombie movie, but with a happy progressive ending.)
For a sense of how habitually unrealistic these creatures are, see the third item here.
Meanwhile in Canada: 15 mostly young men killed in a team bus accident – BUT THEY WERE YOUNG WHITE MALES SO CARING ABOUT IT PROVES RACISM.
https://goo.gl/hNBHeB
And guess what – now people are saying mean things to her! On the bright side (from her standpoint), a 16th person just died – the only woman on the bus. So there’s that.
For a sense of how habitually unrealistic these creatures are, see the third item here.
I had difficulty getting past the first item!
I’m surprised the student who dared ask such a question wasn’t hounded out of the room on the spot. That’s some Grade A Racism right there /sarc
This stuff is like a really bad wreck on the highway. You know you should just drive past carefully, eyes on the road, but that danged lizard brain just wants to have a peek.
@Jon Powers
Query how twisted and broken a human must be to think a tweet like that was a good thing? Truly, Twitter is the social media preference of the id. No control, no reason. Just pure, unbridled, emotional irrationality.
But remember, these SJWs are paragons of empathy.
Query how twisted and broken a human must be to think a tweet like that was a good thing?
It’s worth bearing in mind that these aren’t random gaffes or some off-the-cuff blunder. These are attempts at social display, at signalling their status as woke and therefore superior.
And as we’ve seen, repeatedly, it can get quite grotesque.
It’s worth noting that she was, in her own words, “the Communications and Government Relations Coordinator for the Canadian Federation of Students-Ontario (the source of most of my government-related angst) and the Editor-in-Chief of the Ryerson Free Press.” Also, has written articles for a major Canadian magazine and newspaper. So, with regards to the attention this tweet is now getting – she knew exactly what she was doing. Also, for the non-Canadian’s out there – When someone identifies their location on twitter as “traditional territory of the Huron-Wendant/mi’kmaq, Abenaki”, or whatever people, instead of saying you are in Toronto, or Edmonton, or Montreal – it is a virtual signal and shows that you are well and truly woke, and acknowledge that we are colonial occupiers and are just THE WORST.
she knew exactly what she was doing.
Absolutely. It’s in-group signalling, a kind of rhetorical jewellery. These are the sentiments that they think will make them look good, at least among their peers, because that’s what they’ve been taught.
* VIRTUE signal. Not virtual. Further to that – the ultra-woke in Canada will say they are on “Turtle Island”.
It’s worth noting that she was, in her own words, “the Communications and Government Relations Coordinator for the Canadian Federation of Students-Ontario
Reminds me of that old historian’s joke about the Holy Roman Empire.
and the Editor-in-Chief of the Ryerson Free Press.”
Rye High? Yeah. Perhaps not coincidentally, Ryerson produces most of Canada’s professional journalists.
* VIRTUE signal. Not virtual.
You were correct the first time. There’s nothing real about such claims.
Lest anyone think the reaction above is typical of Canada, this cartoon has proved to be a hell of a lot more popular.
Even basic probity seems beyond them.
They’re leftists. Human decency is beyond them.
White Privilege has one use and one use only. To shut white people in the west up, if they dare to complain about uncontrolled immigration leading to ethnic replacement.
Its fascism wrapped up in bullsh#t.
As I’ve thought about that horrid tweet, I’ve come to the realization that this . . . human. . . somehow believes that the rest of us would not ache for the families of the lost, of those lost were somehow different from us in some superficial way. That we are somehow incapable of feeling the vicarious anguish of those who’ve lost loved ones in senseless circumstances. That she somehow becomes self-satisfied by taking a shit on the grief of many, many people and the good-will of others.
If you looked upon all your neighbors as they grieved together and consoled one another, and you knew in your heart that you were incapable of any such empathy or healing, you might concoct a scenario in which everyone’s grief was “wrong” and your unfeeling coldness could be painted as a kind of stoicism elevating you above the herd.
If you looked upon all your neighbors as they grieved together and consoled one another, and you knew in your heart that nobody would mourn your passing if your flame were suddenly to be snuffed out, you might concoct a scenario in which the dead were unworthy of the kind words and sympathy you hear everywhere around you, which might provide a superficial salve for your tender ego.
If you surrounded yourself with unsympathetic narcissists, underachievers with oversized egos, fuckwits with delusions of adequacy, and adolescents in their 20s and 30s, you might find an audience willing to gobble up these fanciful scenarios, and willing to elevate the author of such as some kind of wise guru. (Not that you’d accept the label, since that would be inappropriate appropriation of a superior culture that your white-bread suburban arse has no right to look upon, much less adopt.)
One might feel sorry for these sad creatures, if they weren’t so hell-bent on bringing all the normals down to their level of dysfunction.
Now, I’ll be kind and say straight up that I don’t think these people are mentally ill….but….
A reminder: in any kind of statement, especially one meant for public consumption, everything before the “but” is meaningless and insincere, and in her case, a bald-faced lie.
The idiot woman actually believes every negative response is “literally proving the truth behind my words”.
Delusional and arrogant is not an attractive combination.
Dr Evil,
“All my ancestors were Anglo-Saxons or Welsh Celts”
Welsh you say? Knew you were evil for a reason.