What The Sanctimonious Left Doesn't Understand (About (Much Of) The Anti-Left)
...Where I guess...but don't know for sure...that this includes at least a good bit of the alt-right:
The sanctimonious / PC / SJ left is now the rough analog of fundamentalist Christians / the "Moral Majority" of days past. They're the unctuous, pharisiacal, holier-than-thou nuts who are intent on micromanaging the lives of others and forcing their crackpot theory on everyone else. They're the ones more-or-less at the helm of the culture...
...And there will always (thank God) be a segment of the population that is revolted by brainless pieties and sanctimonious bullshit. It's like waving a red flag in front of them. As Moral Majority used to be, the PCs are now the most salient group of cultural crackpots/bullies, and this makes certain people pull out the hammers and start sounding out idols. I don't think there's any doubt that some of the racism/"racism" etc. mixed in with it all is real. But what the sanctimonious left doesn't understand is that a lot of it is bullshit--it's chain-yanking. It's their chain. It's the rough equivalent of the posturing pseudo-Satanism that so exorcised the fundamentalists back in the day. And I'd bet money that at least some of the Nazi salutes and so forth are the equivalent of the pentagrams and inverted crosses of that tongue-in-cheek "Satanism." Pepe the frog certainly is. As the PoMos used to like to say, it's "transgressive." It's people--especially young people--especially young males--doing what they're told not to do...and doing it because they're told not to do it...and because they can see that something (something even basically reasonable) has been blown out of proportion so badly that it has become a grotesque parody of its original. It's become laughable. It's become repulsive. It's become a superstition. It has itself become something irrational and dangerous that must be opposed. It's overreached so far that it's become almost irresistible to Judo its ass to the ground. It's so overextended that it takes so little trolling to troll it into hysterical overreaction...thus exposing its irrationality ...that... well... seriously... who can resist? It's not the people who can't resist I worry about...it's the people who can...they're the ones with something wrong with them. Resisting the urge to trip up fanatics is wrong. We ought to be tripping them up. We are obligated to trip them up. Tripping them up is part of what I try to do around this ridiculous joint. I just do it in a more buttoned-up, less humorous, less evocative way ... a less effective, less courageous way.
I mean, look: as I've said in the past, my father was a racist. I grew up around that shit. I have never had a bit of tolerance for it. Or...rather...I didn't used to... Honestly, what neo-PC madness has made me realize is: you can go too far. You can even go to far with anti-racism. Racism is bad. But one can take even that thought too far. In fact, that's exactly what we've done--courtesy of political correctness. If you think (as the PCs do) that it's obligatory--or even permissible--to attempt to ruin someone's life because they said something poorly-thought-out, which has, among other, more reasonable interpretations, a strained interpretation that at-most-suggests something vaguely possibly racist...then you're an insane person. Racism is bad...but if you think that even the tiniest bit of even merely possible racism makes a person irredeemably evil...you're nuts.
Many people poking at the sanctimonious left are poking at something that desperately needs to be poked. Which is, you'll note, no kind of blanket endorsement of everything in that vicinity--and the very fact that I need to say that shows how crazy everyone has gone.
But here's something you can take to the goddamn bank: this is what's driving a lot of pro-Trumpery. But that's a different crackpot story for a different day.
I could be wrong but I'm not.
The sanctimonious / PC / SJ left is now the rough analog of fundamentalist Christians / the "Moral Majority" of days past. They're the unctuous, pharisiacal, holier-than-thou nuts who are intent on micromanaging the lives of others and forcing their crackpot theory on everyone else. They're the ones more-or-less at the helm of the culture...
...And there will always (thank God) be a segment of the population that is revolted by brainless pieties and sanctimonious bullshit. It's like waving a red flag in front of them. As Moral Majority used to be, the PCs are now the most salient group of cultural crackpots/bullies, and this makes certain people pull out the hammers and start sounding out idols. I don't think there's any doubt that some of the racism/"racism" etc. mixed in with it all is real. But what the sanctimonious left doesn't understand is that a lot of it is bullshit--it's chain-yanking. It's their chain. It's the rough equivalent of the posturing pseudo-Satanism that so exorcised the fundamentalists back in the day. And I'd bet money that at least some of the Nazi salutes and so forth are the equivalent of the pentagrams and inverted crosses of that tongue-in-cheek "Satanism." Pepe the frog certainly is. As the PoMos used to like to say, it's "transgressive." It's people--especially young people--especially young males--doing what they're told not to do...and doing it because they're told not to do it...and because they can see that something (something even basically reasonable) has been blown out of proportion so badly that it has become a grotesque parody of its original. It's become laughable. It's become repulsive. It's become a superstition. It has itself become something irrational and dangerous that must be opposed. It's overreached so far that it's become almost irresistible to Judo its ass to the ground. It's so overextended that it takes so little trolling to troll it into hysterical overreaction...thus exposing its irrationality ...that... well... seriously... who can resist? It's not the people who can't resist I worry about...it's the people who can...they're the ones with something wrong with them. Resisting the urge to trip up fanatics is wrong. We ought to be tripping them up. We are obligated to trip them up. Tripping them up is part of what I try to do around this ridiculous joint. I just do it in a more buttoned-up, less humorous, less evocative way ... a less effective, less courageous way.
I mean, look: as I've said in the past, my father was a racist. I grew up around that shit. I have never had a bit of tolerance for it. Or...rather...I didn't used to... Honestly, what neo-PC madness has made me realize is: you can go too far. You can even go to far with anti-racism. Racism is bad. But one can take even that thought too far. In fact, that's exactly what we've done--courtesy of political correctness. If you think (as the PCs do) that it's obligatory--or even permissible--to attempt to ruin someone's life because they said something poorly-thought-out, which has, among other, more reasonable interpretations, a strained interpretation that at-most-suggests something vaguely possibly racist...then you're an insane person. Racism is bad...but if you think that even the tiniest bit of even merely possible racism makes a person irredeemably evil...you're nuts.
Many people poking at the sanctimonious left are poking at something that desperately needs to be poked. Which is, you'll note, no kind of blanket endorsement of everything in that vicinity--and the very fact that I need to say that shows how crazy everyone has gone.
But here's something you can take to the goddamn bank: this is what's driving a lot of pro-Trumpery. But that's a different crackpot story for a different day.
I could be wrong but I'm not.
posted by Winston Smith at
11:48 AM
3 Comments:
This desperately needs to be said, because so much of what I see as "racism" is pretty obvious, and self-admitted, shitposting.
Whenever I see someone hyperventilate about online "hate-speech", I always am struck by the utter lack of any coherent political movement to, say, segregate colleges or ban interracial marriage. I do see a lot of people high-fiving each other after triggering SJWs, which strikes me as not only permissible but really quite necessary considering the flagrant irrationality of SJWs.
An astute observer of politics will not expect evil to come in a known form, like a KKK outfit or a Nazi establishing concentration camps. That is too obviously unpalatable to ever accomplish anything, and so someone trying to create havoc will avoid it because they still possess a brain capable enough to realize that. A really effective evil will instead pervert something that is widely accepted as good, like German national identity circa 1930 or Southern heritage circa 1900 towards inhuman ends.
And at the risk of assuming the consequent, right now the most easily pervertible common good is anti-racism.
"An astute observer of politics will not expect evil to come in a known form, like a KKK outfit or a Nazi establishing concentration camps. That is too obviously unpalatable to ever accomplish anything, and so someone trying to create havoc will avoid it because they still possess a brain capable enough to realize that. A really effective evil will instead pervert something that is widely accepted as good, like German national identity circa 1930 or Southern heritage circa 1900 towards inhuman ends."
Holy crap, Anon... This is a really important point. I never ever thought of this. This point needs to be promulgated all over the damn place.
Even if it isn't/weren't applicable to Our Current Predicament, it's a really important idea.
I wonder what about this response: no, it repeatedly comes around in the same form and we still never react properly...?
That's a pretty lame response, probably, but just thinking out loud.
I see it as a different way of expressing the adage that you shouldn't fight the last war.
There are some cases where a widely known evil still seems unavoidable, like the Thucydides Trap, but it is pretty clearly a different case. A Thucydides Trap basically requires that all pragmatic choices lead to war, a genuine trap.
But can you think of a single historical example where a nation's most noticeable deficit is what they considered most evil? I honestly can't.
Medieval Europe didn't have a witch/pagan problem (but it did have a witch hunting problem, mixed with a serious issue of bankrupt religious authority). 19th Century Europe seemed to be preoccupied by the decline of religious authority, but ended up being devastated by the overreach of empire and a perverse new racial morality. 20th Century America is obsessed with racism, but what seems like the most obvious failure, at least to me, is the reemergence of class boundaries that are entrenched by genetically determined IQ differences (and the use of anti-racist speech codes to morally enforce the class divide, damn racist Red Staters have it coming to them).
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