Quotulatiousness

June 29, 2020

Today on NeoNaziHuntingExpeditions, we track down Neo Nazi Bronies

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Quillette, Daniel Friedman examines the claims made in a recent Atlantic investigation into Nazis in the My Little Pony community (that is, adult fans of the show, not little girls … I think):

Image found by searching for “Neo Nazi Bronies”, listed URL – http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014960111

The evidence of this Nazi problem in the My Little Pony fandom is that, on a My Little Pony imageboard called Derpibooru, over 900 images were tagged as “racist,” and images mocking Black Lives Matter were upvoted by users while images supporting the movement were downvoted, even as the site’s administrators made a statement of support for the protests. After much controversy, the imageboard banned uploading images “created for no reason other than to incite controversy” and removed the 926 images tagged “racism” or “racist.” This move was extremely controversial within the Derpibooru community, many members of which oppose any moderation.

Atlantic reporter Kaitlyn Tiffany suggests that the strong free-speech norms of the Derpibooru boards stem from its origins on 4Chan, which Tiffany describes as “the largest den of chaos and toxic beliefs available on the Internet.” She describes the Brony community as being divided between those who “genuinely enjoy My Little Pony and the wholesome escapism it provides” and trolls who think it is “edgy and provocative to be an adult obsessed with cartoon ponies.” This frames the Derpibooru imageboard as a place where innocent cartoon fans are unknowingly subjected to subversive, racist memes and images that may send people down a rabbit hole of far-right content.

However, claims that a significant portion of the Brony community are Nazis, or that a significant amount of the content on Brony imageboards is right-wing propaganda or racist memes has to be put in the proper context. First of all, the 926 images tagged “racist” exist on a board that hosts over two million images. If you order all the site’s various tags by how many images fall within their categories, there are 12 full pages of other, more popular tags you have to scroll through to find the “racism” tag. One thousand two hundred and seventy-five images are tagged “politics” and include images both supporting and opposing Black Lives Matter. Discussion of these issues is a tiny fraction of one percent of the content on the My Little Pony imageboard.

By contrast, 315,867 images on the Derpibooru forum are tagged as sexually explicit, a further 127,414 images are tagged as sexually suggestive and 105,521 images are tagged as containing “questionable” sexual content. The truth is that Derpibooru’s lax moderation norms and anti-censorship culture don’t exist to protect objectionable political content; this imageboard is unmoderated because it is an enormous repository of fan-made My Little Pony pornography.

The Atlantic article fails to place the 926 racist images in the context of the larger scope of the two million images hosted by the Derpibooru board, because less than one-quarter of one percent of the site’s content is of a political nature. And the Atlantic article avoids mentioning the half-million pornographic images the site hosts, because doing so reveals that the community’s widespread opposition to content moderation on their imageboard is about protecting sexually explicit content rather than creating a space for hateful politics to flourish, and it further reveals that the Bronies are 500 times more interested in having sex with My Little Pony characters than they are in spreading racist pony memes.

The article creates an impression that the alt-Right is using seemingly-innocent cartoon fandoms as a Trojan horse to conceal and spread a sinister ideology, but the truth is that the only thing these guys are interested in hiding inside a horse is their dicks.

June 26, 2020

The rise of the Karenfinder General

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brendan O’Neill on the recent phenomena of the Karens and the anti-Karens:

The most important thing here is the question of where the Karenfinder Generals derive their power from. It comes from the insatiable appetite among identitarian reactionaries for mis-speakers or wrongthinkers they can ritualistically denounce and destroy. It is this warped social-media appetite for spectacles of shaming, for being part of a virtual mob that takes to task an allegedly evil person, that bolsters and empowers people like Karlos Dillard. It is reported that he has a strange obsession with Karens and he is even selling anti-Karen t-shirts through his Instagram page. This speaks to the extent to which Karen-shaming has become a kind of industry. There are memes, there is branded clothing, and there are of course the videos of exposed and shattered Karens which are watched and shared millions of times. Dillard was able to reduce Leah to a weeping wreck desperately trying to remain anonymous because of this broader, entrenched and increasingly misogynistic culture of seeking out white women to revile and tear down.

One of the great ironies of the witch-hunting of Karens is that the people doing the filming and public shaming are far more Karen-like than the women they humiliate. The Karen prejudice is built on a view of certain middle-class, often middle-aged, white women as uncouth and arrogant and given to complaining. They always want to “speak with the manager”. But no one wants to “speak with the manager” as gleefully as the Karenfinder Generals. Their entire mission is to report on “problematic” people to the managers of acceptable thought, to the bosses of correct-think: the new PC elites. Their thirst for tearing people down for doing or saying something wrong utterly overshadows the instinct to complain that any middle-class white woman might have.

Consider the recent Central Park incident in which a woman called Amy Cooper called the cops on a black man called Christian Cooper (no relation) and claimed that he was harassing her when in truth he was reprimanding her for letting her dog off its leash in a part of the park where you’re not meant to do that. Amy behaved badly in this incident. But as Robert A George argued in the New York Daily News: “[Christian] is the ‘Karen’ in this encounter, deciding to enforce park rules unilaterally and to punish ‘intransigence’ ruthlessly.” Amy Cooper’s life has been shattered by this Karen-shaming incident: she lost her job and her dog.

Or consider the case of Lisa Alexander, the CEO of a San Francisco-based cosmetics company who was recently filmed by a Filipino man after she asked him why he was writing “Black Lives Matter” on the wall outside a private residential property. Alexander may have been wrong to presume that this Filipino man couldn’t possibly live in one of these plush private residences, but she is polite, patient and not remotely racist during their encounter. At one point the man even suggests that she call the police and she looks shocked and says: “I don’t want to call the police.” And yet she was put online, shamed across the world, lost business as a result, and then issued a self-denouncing confession in which she accepts, essentially, that she is a witch. “I did not realise at the time that my actions were racist”, she said. “I am taking a hard look at the meaning behind white privilege and am committed to growing from this experience.”

It all gets more Salem-like by the day. Just as accused witches of old could never deny the accusations against them – denial often carried a greater penalty than confession – so Karens today must immediately confess to the sin of racism if they want any hope of at least partially saving their reputations and their futures. As in earlier outbreaks of witch-hunting, Karen-hunting puts women into a bind. If they deny the charge of racism, that is held up as proof of just how racist they are. If they confess to the charge of racism, that is of course also proof of their foul, evil minds, of their possession by the demon of race-hatred. Lisa Alexander’s confession of wickedness and promise to re-educate herself on the evils of white privilege sums up how religious the identitarian outlook has become. She is in essence on her knees begging for salvation, pleading for redemption, offering to do the intellectual penance of learning the horrible truth about her “white privilege” – that is, her sinful state, her fallen nature.

June 11, 2020

Current year Iconoclasm

Filed under: History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In an Areo article from last year, Alexander Adams discusses the phenomenon of iconoclasm:

The 1931 demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow.
Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.

Behind any campaign is the campaigner: the activist convinced of his own righteousness.

The political activist reserves to himself the right to retrospectively edit our history for his satisfaction by removing monuments, those fixtures of civic life, embedded in the memories of generations. The activist often knows almost nothing about the object of his hatred — merely a garbled caricature of a person caught up in the conditions of her age — but the activist acts as if he were not also caught up in the conditions of his own age.

Iconoclasm is an expression of domination and a demonstration of willingness to act — illegally and unethically — to impose the will of one group over an entire population. It asserts control over all aspects of society. It sets a challenge that will elicit a strong reaction. Iconoclasm is a warning that the protection of law and social conventions no longer applies and that the cause will be promoted through physical force if necessary.

The campaigner argues that public art, accumulated piecemeal over 1,000 years of history, must reflect our society and values today — even if that means altering or erasing stories of the values our past society expressed via its monuments, or suppressing evidence of how we arrived at our current situation. The left-wing activist wants to celebrate current-day multiculturalism, but mostly he wants to erase evidence of the historic monoculturalism that preceded it.

Our willingness to live with historical relics we feel ambivalence towards is a demonstration of our toleration of dissent. Likewise, an openness to imagining ourselves in past times — constrained by the conventions and laws of a different era — forces us to question common assumptions about the completeness of our knowledge and our moral certainty. If we can make this leap of empathy, we can free ourselves of ideological possession. We have the ability to empathize with both slave and slave owner. Empathy makes it harder to justify destruction of the cultural relics of an older age or silence the voices of individuals, who might share insights into life.

The toleration we extend towards symbols of former regimes and proponents of ideas with which we disagree shows our willingness to be honest about our nations’ pasts. To accept our flaws as a necessary part of our development is to display the maturity, restraint and empathy that define the confident yet self-critical nation. For if we cannot stand the sight of a dead political opponent carved in stone, how can we restrain ourselves in the face of a living political opponent who speaks against us?

May 27, 2020

QotD: “Hate speech” is the new secular heresy

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The cynical category of “hate speech” is openly used to police the parameters of acceptable thought and to punish those who are considered to hold heretical views that the guardians of moral correctness oppose. So not only are critics of Islam denounced as “hate speakers” — so are feminists who question the cult of transgenderism, Christians who disapprove of same-sex marriage, right-wing people who want stricter immigration controls, etc. These are all entirely legitimate political or moral opinions. The branding of them as “hate speech” — and therefore undeserving of the protections of freedom of speech — is really a way of calling these views heresy. And of course heretics must be cast out. Feminists, Catholics, critics of Islam — hound them off campus, get them off the airwaves, report them to the police for their crimes of hatred. This is an intolerant assault on heresy of the kind that has appeared many times throughout history. Those who say “It isn’t censorship” protest far too much. Deep down they know it is. Deep down they know they are to the 2020s what Joe McCarthy was to the 1950s.

Brendan O’Neill, “Why we must win the fight for free speech”, Spiked, 2020-02-26.

May 10, 2020

QotD: “Shirtstorm” and other forms of systematic patriarchal oppression of women

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Shirtstorm was more of the same. Rose Eveleth, Vagina Vigilante, might not know much about probes or comets, or have much interest in them. One gets a feeling in her mind aerospace is that icky thing that sweaty, nerdy boys do. So, forced to cover it (or snatching it up as a prize assignment) for her paper, she paid attention to the one important thing in the world: herself. And since she’s female, she projected her prejudices onto all other females, and decided women everywhere would be put off science by a man’s shirt decorated with “space pinups.” A shirt made by a woman. A shirt worn amid a team whose leader was a woman who saw nothing wrong with it. But Vagina Vigilante was on the job! One gets the feeling she didn’t do very well at science, and now she had a REASON. It was the sexism of the field, manifest in a shirt.

Which totally justified making a rocket scientist cry on the day of his greatest triumph. After all, people like him had ruined her life, right?

But it gets worse than that – there was an entire campus filled with supposedly educated (ah!) women terrorized by the statue of a sleep walking man.

And then there’s the ever-elastic definition of “sexual assault” which – I’m not making this up – can now be ratcheted down to “Looked at me in a way that made me feel uncomfortable” or, for that matter “failed to sexually assault me.” Oh, sorry, that last was the definition of racism. Some Palestinian woman looked at rape statistics and found that Israeli women are raped by Palestinian men in much higher numbers than Palestinian women are raped by Israeli men, and immediately concluded this is because Israelis are racist. It beggars the mind.

Another thing that beggars the mind is the progressive image of women as great warriors. You know, in all the movies and half the books (often without supernatural explanation) a 90 lb chick can beat 300 lb men. And women were always great fighters throughout the ages. And, and, and …

And yet, women are peaceful – peaceful, d*mn it. This is why “peaceful planet of women” is a trope on TV tropes. Not just a trope, but a dead horse one.

Attempts to square that circle have included the explanation that women are only violent because patriarchy. There needs be nothing else said because in this context, and with apologies to the ponies, Patriarchy Is Magic. Honorable mention on trying to square the circle must go to Law and Order‘s attempted episode on Gamer Gate where the game the woman designer had written was about Peaceful Amazon Warriors.

Sarah Hoyt, “Give Me My Smelling Salts, Ho! A Blast From The Past From April 2015”, According to Hoyt, 2020-01-22.

April 9, 2020

QotD: Collective narcissism

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[P]eople who score high on the collective narcissism scale are particularly sensitive to even the smallest offences to their group’s image. As opposed to individuals with narcissistic personality, who maintain inflated views of themselves, collective narcissists exaggerate offences to their group‘s image, and respond to them aggressively. Collective narcissists believe that their group’s importance and worth are not sufficiently recognised by others. They feel that their group merits special treatment, and insist that it gets the recognition and respect it deserves. In other words, collective narcissism amounts to a belief in the exaggerated greatness of one’s group, and demands external validation.

Collective narcissists are not simply content to be members of a valuable group. They don’t devote their energy to contributing to the group’s betterment and value. Rather, they engage in monitoring whether everybody around, particularly other groups, recognise and acknowledge the great value and special worth of their group. To be sure, collective narcissists demand privileged treatment, not equal rights. And the need for continuous external validation of the group’s inflated image (a negative attribute) is what differentiates collective narcissists from those who simply hold positive feelings about their group.

[…]

When their own group is involved, collective narcissists have no sense of humour. They are disproportionately punitive in responding to what they perceive as an insult to their group, even when the insult is debatable, not perceived by others, or not intended by the other group. Unlike individual narcissists, collective narcissists cannot dissociate themselves from an unpopular or criticised group. Once their self-worth is invested in the greatness of their group, collective narcissists are motivated by enhancing their group rather than themselves.

My team researched collective narcissism as a characteristic that pertains to an individual. We believe that there will always be a proportion of people in any given population who meet the criteria. But collective narcissism can also seize an entire group, resulting in seemingly sudden and unprovoked outbursts of intergroup rage or prejudiced reactions towards minority groups. We believe that collective narcissism is most dangerous as a group syndrome – when the belief that the righteous group is not given its due acknowledgement becomes shared by the majority of group members and becomes a dominant narrative about the group’s past and present.

Agnieszka Golec de Zavala, “Why collective narcissists are so politically volatile”, Aeon, 2018-01-18.

April 3, 2020

“And what are your personal pronouns?”

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Last week, Amy Alkon considered the demands of “pronoun authoritarians”:

Personally, I’m disturbed by the whole notion that we “include” people through calling them the right pronoun, which requires all this “homework” about a person before you say one word to them.

This new requirement for doing this seems to be a sort of religion that allows people to have power over others — to push them around and deem them thought and speech criminals, even if they simply forget to use somebody’s requested “pronoun.”

This also seems to be a way for people to feel special without earning it — to require people to find out all sorts of information about them, on penalty of being accused of a thought or speech crime and then cancelled.

It seems outrageous to me that some stranger would be required to prep for conversation by investigating my history — that my family are Eastern European Jews, that old friends call me “Flamey” or “Flame-o,” that I eat keto, that I blah, blah, blah, blah, blah — and that they would be seen as disrespectful and even bigoted for failing to find out all the ways I’m (heh) unique and special.

But that’s what we’re requiring people to do with this notion that we have to ask “what is your preferred pronoun?”

And again, this is done now with threats embedded — with the threat that you will lose your job and be deemed a bigot if you don’t make this “What’s your pronoun?” business a priority.

Oh, and I will be very clear on this again: If you want me to call you “zhe” or “they” or “lemon pie with a slight dusting of confectioner’s sugar on top,” I will do my best to remember that and do it, because it’s kind.

But I think the considerations above are important, and I think it’s too easy to just accept the demand to ask people for their “pronouns” as a requirement for being considered decent — with the possible penalty of losing everything as the penalty for failing in some way, even by forgetting.

March 30, 2020

QotD: Free speech is the safety valve we must not eliminate

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[W]hen you’re a peddler of Utopia, you can’t admit you’re wrong or that your methods are crazy. After all, your cult of Marx (a college-professor friend recently shocked his students by pointing out Marx is a 19th century western idea — born of the mechanical age and the idea you can make everything just so — and that imposing this interpretation on non-Western systems is colonialist) promises eventual paradise and world domination. You can’t be wrong. It would mean your whole life has been in vain, and everything you’ve been taught is a lie.

The system might have moved the downtrodden from those “exploited” by the industrial revolution, to “minorities” “third world people” and people with interesting colorations — mostly because the “exploited” workers kept rising up in the world and spitting in the eye of Marx, the ungrateful bastages — but it’s totally still true and the way of the future. Even if it requires conceptualizing a future where no one works and everything is free, since they’ve now tossed the “workers” out of their ideal society. (Again, ungrateful bastages who don’t know how “good” the intellectuals are for them.) But it is totally the future!

So all those people who say that it’s still spinach and to hell with it? They’re just trying to destroy the train of happiness leading to the station of utopia.

Which means they must be silenced. If they’re just silenced, then the system will work fine, and everyone will be happy and joyful.

So the latest attack is on free speech. Because free speech can be hurty and say things the left doesn’t want to hear. Bad bad free speech must be stopped.

They already have laws against “hate speech” or “harassment”, which according to a comment here is “saying something I don’t like more than once” in most of the world.

The US is holding fast in our unreasonable devotion to the first amendment which irks the left as much as our devotion to the second. Don’t we understand that bad speech hurts people? And leads to bad think?

In any institution they control, from companies code of conduct to deplatforming people on twitter, to Google strangling hits to dissenting blogs, etc, they are already silencing that nasty, evil feedback.

Because if only they don’t hear the whistles of rising steam, the engine will never explode.

Cotton stuffed in their ears, they keep feeding more coal to the engine of public opinion and stopping up the steam vents.

The end of this is what happened to Ceausescu and his repulsive wife: “Beloved leader of the morning, pile of cooling, bullet riddled meat in the afternoon.”

But they don’t see it. They’re convinced if they just stop the feedback, the machine will work fine.

And they’re going to take all of us into the explosion. Mind you, in the end we win, they lose, but it’s going to get very rough there for a while.

Unfortunately when dealing with true believers, there’s nothing you can do but let them utterly prove their system wrong, before sane people can build again.

Sarah Hoyt, “Breaking the Gears”, According to Hoyt, 2018-01-03.

March 23, 2020

The world of woke crossword-puzzlers – a place of horrible, unintentional microaggressions

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Thompson takes us on a scary trip to the heart of the woke crossword world:

The world of woke crossword-puzzlers — because that’s a thing that exists — is one in which enthusiasts, via social media, grumble about white men, bemoan the insufficient prominence of “queer or POC colloquialisms,” share “off-colour jokes about hypothetical titles for a Melania Trump memoir,” and fret about the exact ratio of male and female names used as clues. Because a lack of “gender parity” in crossword puzzle clues constitutes one of “the systemic forces that threaten women.”

Crossword puzzles can do that, apparently.

The list of possible crossword-puzzle wrongdoings is, of course, extensive, ever-growing and not entirely straightforward.

Transgressions include clues for ILLEGAL (“One caught by border patrol”); MEN (“Exasperated comment from a feminist”); and HOOD (“Place with homies”).

I’ll give you a moment to steady yourselves, to recover from all that gasping.

A New York Times puzzle triggered agitation with the clue “Pitch to the head, informally,” the solution to which was “beaner.” Given sufficient effort, said word could also, it seems, be construed as a mild and antiquated racial slur, albeit one that had escaped me and which I had to look up. Inevitably, apologies and public prostration ensued, despite both the puzzler-writer and editor confessing their own ignorance and intending no harm. Needless to say, the apology immediately resulted in further hissing and rending of garments by people whose Twitter bios include preferred pronouns and the words liberal and feminist.

Unlike almost every other site on the web, I do encourage you to read the comments at David’s blog … he has a great group of regular commenters (commentators? commentistas? Whatevs…)

February 27, 2020

Toby Young’s Free Speech Union (FSU)

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brendan O’Neill explains why Toby Young’s FSU is so important right now:

The beautiful thing about the mad reaction to Toby Young’s Free Speech Union (FSU) is that it proves why the union is so necessary. No sooner had Young unveiled his censorship-busting union than the illiberal liberals were out in force to mock it and ridicule it and to insist that, actually, there is no free-speech crisis in the UK. It’s a right-wing myth, they claim. There is no widespread censorship. People aren’t being shipped off to gulags for expressing an opinion. Apparently, the free-speech “grift” – God, I hate the word “grift” – is just a bunch of pale, male and stale blokes pissed off that they can no longer say the N-word or talk openly about women’s boobs. Freedom of speech is not under threat, the Young-bashers claim, and anyone who says it is is probably just an Islamophobe, transphobe or some other breed of phobe itching to spout bile with “no consequences”.

This rank denialism, this blinkered insistence that free speech is not in danger in 21st-century Britain, is exactly why we need the FSU and as broad a discussion as possible about the importance of the liberty to express oneself. Because the fact that so many inhabitants of the chattering-class bubble can’t even see that free speech is dying right now confirms how naturalised and uncontroversial the new censorship has become. They don’t even see it as censorship. They see it as perfectly normal, and good, in fact, that certain views cannot be expressed in public life or on social media. That’s how cavalier the new war on heretical opinion has become. At least in the past, from Torquemada to the McCarthyites, authoritarians were honest about being censors. Today’s self-elected moral guardians of correct opinion are so hubristic, so taken with their own mortal rectitude, that they don’t even see themselves as enemies of freedom, but rather as decent, unimpeachable maintainers of a natural intellectual order.

Things have come to such a pass that these people will literally seek to censor you in one breath and then express alarm at being called censors in the next breath. Hence the Guardian could publish a piece last week claiming that the idea that there is a culture of censorship in British universities is a “right-wing myth” while simultaneously defending censorship on campus. In an act of extraordinary moral contortionism, Evan Smith mocked the “idea that there is a free-speech crisis at British universities” and then, without missing a beat, he defended the policy of No Platform and the creation of safe spaces because “the university cannot be a place where racism and fascism – as well as sexism, homophobia and transphobia – are allowed to be expressed”. The Orwellianism is staggering. “There is no censorship on campus. Except the censorship I approve of. Which is not really censorship.” That is what is being said here. The intellectual dishonesty is almost impressive.

This Orwellian denialism of the existence of censorship by people who actually support and enact censorship cuts to the heart of the free-speech crisis in the UK. The reason the illiberal liberals and woke McCarthyites and Twittermobs don’t consider themselves to be censors – even as they gleefully agitate for the censorship of feminists, secularists worried about Islamist extremism, and right-wing people opposed to mass immigration – is because they have convinced themselves that certain forms of speech are not free speech. That certain beliefs should not be afforded the liberty of expression. You hear it in their telling, baleful mantra that “Hate speech is not free speech”. And if “hate speech” is not free speech, but rather some kind of toxin, a pox on public life, then crushing it is not censorship. It is more like an act of public health: cleansing the public realm of diseased thoughts that are liable to harm certain groups. These people see themselves not as censors, but as public-health activists delousing the community of germs spread by evil men and women.

January 21, 2020

QotD: “Safe spaces” do not produce strong people

Filed under: Education, History, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

What, after all, is the effect of shielding people from contrary opinions by designating and maintaining, under color of law or regulation, “safe spaces” for this or that minority? Does it make them stronger? Better able to deal with a harsh world? Does it change that objective world to something less harsh? No and no and no; it does none of that. Do you gain grit in a safe space? Ha. Do you learn endurance in a safe space? Oh, please.

No, It merely makes of them mollycoddles, weaklings, and in some important ways barely or not even human. That’s the effect of a safe space, to render those who hide in them weak and ignorant.

There are things worse than the safe space, though. That only weakens your brain by making sure you never have to reason about or argue in defense of your beliefs. And, at least, this moral weakening and brain-deadening thing is voluntary. Much worse is the movement to restrict free speech and to manipulate speech for political ends. This does what the safe space does, of course, but a simple saunter down memory lane shows it does so much more. Want to starve ten or twenty or fifty million of your own people to death? Want to gas a few million members of a despised minority? Want to hack to death half a million countrymen? Job one is attack speech.

Don’t you find it odd that your teachers have led you away from any history that would tend to show you that destruction and perversion of free speech is generally followed by massive murder? Don’t you find it a little odd that they place offending someone as worse somehow than starving, gassing, or shooting them to death?

Tom Kratman, “It’s Up to You, Millennials. Deflect or Be Doomed”, Milo, 2017-12-06.

January 16, 2020

QotD: Progressive hatred

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Something that has been noticeable for a long time now is that the Left is in a perpetual state of rage. The smallest things send them into spasms of anger. They hate Trump and they really hate his voters. They will go rummaging around in the social media history of people, looking for reasons to hate them. It’s not a general all-encompassing hate, like hating the fans of a rival sports team, but a very personal and cruel hate. They want the victim to suffer and they want to enjoy his suffering.

One reason for this, obviously, is that many people attracted to the Left are mentally unstable, so their politics are just a vehicle for their pathology. Many of the Antifa people, for example, have no coherent political thoughts. They just like being crazy on the streets and causing mayhem. This is the type of person who was attracted to the riots that used to follow the big economic summits. There was never any purpose to their rampages, other than the thrill of smashing things and causing mayhem.

Another more important reason for the rage is the nature of leftist politics in our post-national age. Being on the Left no longer means joining a group that has a tangible enemy, against whom the group throws themselves. The days of unionist, socialists and communists operating as collectives are gone. Even the post-modern movements like climate change and sexual politics is atomized. Much of it is backed by the sorts of people the Left used to oppose like rich people and business.

The Z Man, “It’s Personal”, The Z Blog, 2019-11-12.

January 10, 2020

Brendan O’Neill on “Megxit”

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

He calls the Duchess a “woke Wallis Simpson”:

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle visit Titanic Belfast in March 2018.
Photo from the Northern Ireland Office via Wikimedia Commons.

So Harry and Meghan are stepping back. They’re resigning from The Firm. They’re ducking out of the Sovereign Grant and royal duties and going it alone. They’re going to split their time between the UK and North America – think of all the CO2! – and become more “independent”.

Why? Come on, we all know why. Forget the tripe about them fleeing the racism of the UK tabloids and the nonsense about the first DOC (duchess of colour) not being made to feel welcome in the stiff, white House of Windsor. No, H&M, the most right-on royals in history, are breaking off so that they can foist even more woke bollocks on the plebs without having to worry about receiving a tutting phone-call from Her Maj’s press secretary reminding them that they’re royalty and not virtue-signalling Hollywood celebs.

Megxit, as this royal bombshell is wittily being called, is a striking sign of the times. What Harry and Meghan are doing is virtually unprecedented in the history of the royals. They are jacking in their jobs (I say jobs) as senior royals and pursuing a more “financially independent” path that will allow them to earn, travel and – this is important – jabber on about their pet concerns and causes as much as they like.

Even leaving aside the fact that they won’t actually be financially independent – they’ll still get wads of cash from the Duchy of Cornwall and will still stay in that Frogmore Cottage us British taxpayers just splashed 2.4million quid on – still their move is a startling and concerning one.

What it fundamentally reveals is the incompatibility of the modern culture of narcissism with the values of duty, loyalty and self-negation traditionally associated with royal life. To someone like Meghan, who sprang from celebville, who sees herself as the embodiment of right-on goodness, and who loves nothing more than advertising her eco-virtue and performing her PC credentials, life in the British monarchy was never going to be a good fit.

Yes, the woke agenda Meghan expresses so well shares much in common with the old-world elitism of the monarchical system. Both obsess over inherited characteristics (the woke bang on about race and gender, the monarchy is all about bloodline). Both have a penchant for looking down their noses at the little people. And both have an instinctive loathing for modernity, from Charles’ longstanding conservationism to H&M’s humanity-bashing eco-hysteria.

January 6, 2020

Gerontophobia – “the most acceptable, widespread prejudice in society today”

Filed under: Britain, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Spiked, Ella Whelan discusses one form of prejudice that is not only common, it’s practically proselytizing for new members:

Have you found yourself grimacing at Zimmer frames on the bus? Do you revel in checking the latest census data to see the average age of the nation? Do you retweet sarky comments about “youthquakes” shaking out the old fuddy-duddies? If so, you might be suffering from gerontophobia – the fear and loathing of old people – which is the most acceptable, widespread prejudice in society today.

Ageism is the one “ism” that is given a free pass. Hating on granny is all the rage. Recently, former US president Barack Obama made headlines by talking about “old people … not getting out of the way”.

The 58-year-old is not the only older politician to turn against his age group. Since the Brexit vote, 76-year-old Vince Cable has been railing against older Leave voters. On a panel with me at the How the Light Gets In festival last year, he drew laughs from a Hampstead crowd for mocking Brexit as a “Zimmer-frame revolution”. The author Ian McEwan also denounced his fellow septuagenarians when he delightedly predicted that by 2019, “1.5 million oldsters, mostly Brexiters, freshly in their graves” could swing public opinion towards remaining in the EU.

The phrase “OK Boomer” went viral last year after a young person posted a clip of herself reacting to a “baby boomer” complaining about “snowflakes” and overgrown teenagers. This derisory response of “OK Boomer”, used to shut down the so-called Baby Boomer generation, was also used by Netflix in one of its social-media posts. It was even used earnestly in the New Zealand parliament by Green politician Chlöe Swarbrick in response to an older colleague.

The instant popularity of the phrase signalled how normalised generational divides have become. There have always been tensions between younger and older generations, but never before has there been so much celebration of youngsters deriding their parents. Rather than rebelling against the old and changing the world, the OK Boomer phenomenon shows how little young people want to interact with older generations, instead preferring petulant put-downs.

Perhaps the most pronounced and sinister ageism came from the wave of interest in Extinction Rebellion (XR), Greta Thunberg and the climate-emergency panic. From Thunberg being named Time person of the year after blaming older generations for stealing “my dreams and my childhood” to XR Youth proclaiming that “adults need to be accountable to the young people”, climate activism isn’t very oldie friendly. Instead of asking questions about what political changes might be made to help the planet, and, more importantly, the people living on it, environmentalism has veered towards a cultish celebration of youth. Fawning adults have handed over all moral authority to schoolchildren.

Greta Thunberg at the EU Parliament, 16 April, 2019.
European Parliament photo via Wikimedia Commons.

January 3, 2020

Magical thinking in names

Filed under: Education, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Theodore Dalrymple relates the rather odd story of a young girl’s media-publicized objection to a math problem in school and then considers the girl’s given name in the larger context:

Popular first names in the United States, 2010.
Image from Behind the Name.

My attention was also caught by the first name of the politically-correct child: Rhythm. This is not a traditional name, though not actually ugly; but her parents have evidently accepted the increasing convention of giving a child an unconventional, and sometimes previously unheard of, name. This is a worldwide, or at least occident-wide, phenomenon. In Brazil, for example, parents in any year give their children one of 150,000 names, most of them completely new, made up like fake news, and in France, 55,000 children are born every year who are given names that are shared by three or fewer children born the same year. This latter is all the more startling because, until 1993, there was an old Napoleonic law (admittedly not rigidly enforced) that constrained parents to choose among 2000 names, mainly those of either saints or classical heroes.

What does the phenomenon of giving children previously unheard-of names signify — assuming that it signifies something? I think it is symptomatic of an egoistic individualism without true individuality, of self-expression without anything to express, which is perhaps one of the consequences of celebrity culture.

I performed an internet search on the words Rhythm as a given name. I soon found the website of a group called the Kabalarians, who believe that the name given to a child determines, or at least contributes greatly, to its path through life, especially in conjunction with the date of birth:

    When language is used to attach a name to someone this creates the basis of mind, from which all thoughts and experiences flow. By representing the conscious forces combined in your name as a mathematical formula, one’s specific mental characteristics, strengths and weaknesses can be measured.

It invited readers to inquire about the psychological characteristics and problems of people with various given names. I invented a child called Rhythm of the same age, more or less, as Rhythm Pacheco. This was the result:

    The name of Rhythm causes this child to be extremely idealistic and sensitive. She will find it difficult to overcome self-consciousness and to express her deeper thoughts and feelings in a free, natural way. She is too easily hurt and offended, and will often depreciate her own abilities. Because of her lack of confidence and her sensitivity, she will go to great lengths to avoid an issue. True affection, understanding, and love mean a great deal to her, as she is a romantic and emotional youngster. Often she will resort to a dream world when her feelings are hurt. She could be very easily influenced by others, for she will find it difficult to maintain her individuality. This problem could become more predominant during the teenage years. Although there is much that is refined and beautiful about her, the lack of emotional control could bring much unhappiness, repression, misunderstanding and loneliness later in life. Tension could also create fluid and respiratory problems. Because of the sensitivity created by this name, she will find it difficult to cope with the challenges of life.

There is, in fact, a semi-serious theory of nominative determinism, according to which a name may influence a person’s choice of career: two of the most prominent British neurologists of the first half of the twentieth century, for example, were Henry Head and Russell Brain. A recent Lord Chief Justice of England was called Igor Judge. And surely it must work in a negative direction too: no poet could be called Albert Postlethwaite. However rational one believes oneself, one might also experience a frisson of fear on consulting a doctor called Slaughter — as was called the doctor and popular novelist Frank G. Slaughter.

When I first went to Africa, I encountered patients whose first names were Clever, Sixpence or Mussolini. The first of these names was presumably an instance of magical thinking, while the second two were chosen merely because the naming parents liked the sound of them. Years later, during the civil war in Liberia, I met a constitutional lawyer called Hitler Coleman, who presumably desired to live his name down by concerning himself with the rule of law.

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