Janice Fiamengo on complaints of “microaggression” and other recreational outrage:
Browsing Category
Psychodrama Ace ruminates on leftist piety as a kind of status signalling:
I’ve heard it called “Luxurious Concerns.” That is, your concerns mark your social status. If your concerns are about keeping your job, paying your rent, or whether your kids’ school is any damn good, you’re worried about Big Things, and therefore you are marked as a Struggling Person. Only those who have really made it — who are at the top of the economic and social order — have the luxury of worrying about the Small Things. And if you worry about the Very Small Things, or indeed the Microscopic Things, then, well and truly, you have arrived… If you can’t afford a Luxury Car, or a Luxury Apartment, you can at least adorn yourself with Luxury Worries. It’s very cheap. Easy, too… Our modern class of intellectually-insecure social climbers are posing as connoisseurs of offensiveness.
See also Kristian Niemietz and Daniel Hannan on the same.
The attempt to cultivate pretentious guilt and pretentious indignation, and to balance grief and umbrage on a very tiny thing, the tinier the better, is of course a Guardian staple. It gives the left’s national organ its distinctive tone – that tinny, unconvincing high-pitched whine. Affecting woe, especially improbable woe, is how many leftwing columnists signal their position in their own moral hierarchy, relative to you, the heathen rabble. As I said some time ago,
It’s important to understand these are not just lapses in logic or random fits of insincerity; these outpourings are displays – of class and moral elevation. Which is why they persist, despite getting knottier and ever more absurd. Crudely summarised, it goes something like this: “I am better than you because I pretend to feel worse.”
And this is why, for instance, a tearful Theo Hobson tells us, “There is no excuse for failing to feel liberal guilt about race and class.” Because until “this problematic world” has been purged of all vice and inequity, however unrelated to your own behaviour, a heavy, heavy heart must be worn on the sleeve. How else will people know how superior you are? According to Mr Hobson, if you aren’t ostentatiously fretting about the eating of meat and “affluent lifestyles endangering the planet,” and if you aren’t “anxious about your status as a comfy bourgeoisie” and ashamed of earning more than some other random person, then there must be something wrong with you. And so you should feel guilty for not feeling guilty about things you shouldn’t feel guilty about. It’s the Guardian way.
Lifted from the comments following this and somewhat pertinent, from the pages of the student newspaper of Brown University:
“There are people breaking down, dropping out of classes and failing classes because of the activism work they are taking on,” said David, an undergraduate whose name has been changed to preserve anonymity. Throughout the year, he has worked to confront issues of racism and diversity on campus. His role as a student activist has taken a toll on his mental, physical and emotional health… David spent numerous hours organising demonstrations with fellow activists. Meanwhile, he struggled to balance his classes and social life with the activism to which he feels so dedicated. Stressors and triggers flooded his life constantly, he said.
Poor lamb. All those triggers. Perhaps someone should take our stressed-out little warrior to one side and explain to him, quite firmly, that neither his parents nor the taxpayer are forking out $60,000 a year for a narcissistic clown to piss about playing activist by railing against phantom “oppression” and non-existent “violence” in one of the most cosseting environments in human history.
Update:
Speaking of students who’d rather be acting out fantasies of oppression than preparing for exams, let’s not forget the Oberlin student activist Della Kurzer-Zlotnick, who was emotionally devastated by a two-letter word that was apparently unknown to her, and which she later described as “violent and triggering language.”
The word, by the way, was no.
No doubt inspired by this defining moment in intellectual discourse, Milo Yiannopoulos is continuing his tour of US campuses. Last night the venue was the University of Minnesota, where Milo was joined by Christina Hoff Sommers, whose work has been mentioned here previously, to have a debate optimistically titled Calm Down: Restoring Common Sense to Feminism. Needless to say, the event was lively, with several short-lived attempts at disruption, including chants of “You’re an asshole,” raised middle fingers, and repeated brandishing of air horns, including one, clutched by a male feminist, that failed to launch and instead emitted a feeble whine, much to the amusement of both speakers and the audience.
I’d imagine full video of the event will materialise later today. Meanwhile, it’s perhaps worth pointing out that while the “social justice” protestors favoured the standard ritual of drowning out dissent with klaxons and repetitive shouted slogans that bordered on incomprehensible, those being protested against articulated a case, invited questions and had a discussion.
Photo of the three wise men by Leila Navidi.
Update: Full video of the event is available here. The Q&A starts around 45:35.
Oh, and filmed outside afterwards, Air Horn Warrior #2 (pictured above) shares his feelings with passers-by.
Mark Steyn on the power and indecency of the ‘progressive’ narrative:
It is remarkable how easily vast numbers of people now accept that truth is subordinate to the needs of ideological conformity – as we saw in Europe on New Year’s Eve, when politicians, police and press colluded to cover up mass sexual assault – and, as their cover-up unravelled, self-described progressives and feminists indignantly insisted that the cover-up had been the correct call. In the end, the official lies will cost you your world.
Janice Fiamengo on mythical “privilege” and its mandatory confession:
The idea of a bunch of PhDs in astronomy having to publicly confess their sinful [male] “privilege” at the opening session of a radio astronomy research conference is shockingly indicative of ideological totalitarianism.
Related: Daphne Patai on the normalisation of bad ideas.
Josh Gelernter follows the twisted logic of “cultural appropriation”:
History’s first recorded sandwich was invented by the Jewish sage Hillel, who proposed celebrating Passover by eating the commemorative sacrifice of lamb sandwiched between two soft pieces of matzoh — which reminded Jews of the exodus — along with bitter herbs, to remind them of slavery. Jews [should therefore] demand that non-Jews renounce sandwiches… Of course, it was a Christian — Newton — who discovered Newtonian physics, and a Jew — Einstein — who discovered relativistic physics. Jews and Christians invented the majority of modern medicine and the majority of advanced mathematics. The automobile was invented by the Jew Siegfried Marcus, and the airplane by the Christian Wright brothers, who were the sons of an Evangelical bishop. Christians and Jews [should therefore] demand that young leftists renounce science, medicine and transportation.
And further to the Great Kimono Outrage of 2015, Franklin Einspruch mingles with the cultural authoritarians:
The goal of Decolonise Our Museums and related efforts is not to end prejudice. It is to remain in a permanent state of antagonism around issues of identity. [Protestor, Xtina] Wang essentially admitted this when she said that it was an American thing to want to come up with a “final solution” to these problems.
On Twitter, Franklin has been attempting a civil debate with the authoritarians in question. So far, I can’t say the exchange has been mutually enlightening, but you do have to admire his patience.
Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.
Lifted from the comments:
A nasty non-leftwing man said that we can’t handle unflattering non-leftwing ideas or even debate rationally. So we smeared paint all over ourselves and screamed so that no-one could hear what the nasty man said. Then we walked out, giving everyone else the finger and leaving a mess for the janitors. Because we care so very much about everything.
Evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad casts an eye over politically corrected academia:
There is a disorder known as Munchausen syndrome, wherein I fake illness and I go to the hospital because that will garner me a lot of attention and sympathy… I think this hyper-victimology poker is a manifestation of this type of syndrome. I can garner a lot of sympathy by constantly seeing life through a prism of endless victimhood. People respond to that. “Oh, it’s okay, you’re protected here.” It’s hard to argue this stuff with me, though, because I can always use the card of “I escaped execution in Lebanon, therefore you better have a really strong victimology story to outdo mine.” And usually they run away. So this is what happens when people are using their identity for these types of purposes. It’s grotesque.
Dr Saad’s recent lecture at the University of Ottawa can be viewed in full here. A brief taster, with illustrations by Matthew Drake, can be viewed here.
Meanwhile, on feminist Tumblr…
Someone wants to buy a shirt that bears the immensely radical slogan “you cannot weigh beauty” and is promptly horrified to discover that said shirt is available in different sizes.
Apparently, sizing clothes is triggering and oppressive.
Katherine Timpf on when blue hair and facial piercings just aren’t enough to get a girl noticed:
A Norwegian woman is claiming that she is actually a cat trapped in a woman’s body — and that the fact that she has a human body is a “genetic defect.” […] Because Nano believes that her true identity is as a feline, she sees no choice but to live her life as one, even wearing cat ears, a tail, and fluffy pink paws that she grooms herself with in order to express her true self. Nano claimed to have feline characteristics such as superior hearing, better night vision than day vision, the urge to hunt mice (although she’s never actually caught one), and a fear of water. In fact, she even said that some of her catlike behaviours are involuntary. For example, she claimed to have no real control over how she started hissing at a dog in the middle of her interview.
Happily, there’s a video.
Kevin Williamson on the inadvertent comedy of identitarian Oscars protests:
The protest rhetoric inevitably has been concentrated into a Twitter hashtag, #OscarsSoWhite, which invites the longstanding and sometimes uncomfortable question of who is white — and who decides. The 88th Academy Awards are hardly an all-Anglo affair: Alejandro González Iñárritu of Mexico has been nominated for best director; Rosa Tran, an Asian-American, shares a nomination for Anomalisa; Gabriel Osorio Vargas and Pato Escala Pierart of Chile share a nomination for Bear Story. There are Danes and Irish and Welsh and loads of Brits, and the nominations were announced by Guillermo del Toro of Mexico and Ang Lee of Taiwan… The convolution necessary to maintain #OscarsSoWhite–type thinking is substantial. If excessive whiteness is the offence, then “white” needs to be defined in such a way that it includes Alejandro González Iñárritu and Pato Escala Pierart.
And Jacob Kohlhepp on the farce and dishonesty of “diversity” classes:
[Psychology professor Anna] Lau recalled a situation during which a foreign student asked “what if the reason black males are incarcerated more than whites is because they commit more crimes?” She said there was a total silence in the room. She then stated she wished she knew how to answer, because hard questions should be asked. Shortly after, Assistant Professor Safiya Noble stated “we cannot let unsophisticated comments stand.” She said that as a faculty in residence for the “Afrikan Disapora” dorm floor, she has learned that “those questions outside the norm make black students feel not just microaggressed, but actually aggressed.”
Yes, those unsophisticated questions can really be a bitch. By most credible estimates, black males aged 15-24 – around 2% of the U.S. population – are responsible for around 5o% of U.S. murders, and for disproportionately high rates of other violent crime, including rape, armed robbery and assault. The disparity is so great that even if one assumes police bias and differential rates of conviction, despite evidence to the contrary, one still has to wonder why the victims of such crime - whose descriptions match rates of arrest and who are themselves very often black – would lie about the appearance of their attacker.
Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.
I am a truth-teller, if nothing else.
So says Meghan Murphy, whose frankness and modesty entertained us quite recently. Not least with her belief that the world needs “a feminist revolution… an end to masculinity,” and that “it’s time to consider a curfew for men.” Our self-effacing Amazon and speaker of truths, and editor of “Canada’s leading feminist website,” is once again sharing her wisdom with the world’s downtrodden womenfolk, with “Ten things every woman should know by the time she’s 36.” The nuggets on offer cover a spectrum of womanly woes, from the prosaic – buying shoes that fit as opposed to ones that don’t – to matters more profound:
(3) Love, marriage, and heterosexual couplings will not complete you or make you happy.
Specifically,
I’m not saying that having positive, loving relationships with men is impossible. But it’s very hard.
Because,
First of all, most men are men… They are men who have been socialised as men in a world that teaches them male entitlement… As much as a man might be good and kind and loving, he’s still going to exhibit certain behaviours that will remind you that, oh right, I’m a woman living with a person who has spent their whole life in a position of power over me and my sisters and he will never fully understand what that’s like.
You see,
Patriarchy makes heterosexual love next to impossible. Do your best to live the life you want regardless of whether or not there is a man in it and remember that having a man in it won’t necessarily make your life any better… Often, in fact, it makes it worse.
At which point readers may wonder if this severely jaundiced view of men – in which masculinity is something to “end” as a matter of urgency, and in which a male presence in one’s life is deemed likely to make it worse – is an obvious aid to success in the world of heterosexual romance. With heterosexual love being “next to impossible,” despite it occurring frequently across much of the planet’s surface. And some of you may be wondering whether the wholesale regurgitation of radfem boilerplate, including demands for male curfews, may give potential suitors the impression of being seated with a woman in need of medication. A perception unlikely to enhance any hopes of contented lifelong coupling.
However, if attempts to attract a male life partner fail – possibly as a result of explaining to him, at length, why he and other men are so ignorant, oppressive and dysfunctional – there is a consolation prize:
(10) You should get a dog.
So. Not a total loss.
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