Posts Tagged ‘liberals’

Auto-Decanted Victimhood Cant

Tuesday, February 4th, 2014

Via Will Shetterly comes the Social Justice Warrior Argument Generator. You can generate entire blogs or just Tumbler insults! Why go into six figures of debt for a Womyn’s Studies Degree to make your prose unreadable when a computer can do it for you for free?

If you’ve always wanted to auto-generate phrases like “atphobic misogynists like you deserve to die, you white-privileged ableist!!!!” or “you should quit erasing transracial & skoliosensual-identifying polykins, you middle class-elitist fascist!!!!”, now you can!

SCREAMING CAPITAL LETTERS and Way! Too!! Many!!! EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! included at no additional charge!

The Death of Stephen Krol and #JusticeForDrV

Monday, January 20th, 2014

Once there was a physicist named Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt who used her scientific background to create a radially improved putter. The only problem with the story is that pretty much every word but “putter” in the previous sentence is a complete lie.

Including “her.”

And inevitably, the very fact that Caleb Hannan would dare report that “Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt” used to be Stephen Krol ignited a firestorm of controversy among the victimhood identity politics crowd, as exemplified by the #JusticeForDrV tag.

I first saw the link for Caleb Hannan’s story on the magical putter and the serial liar behind it from Dwight, but The Other McCain has been doing the heavy lifting on the reactions. (I thought I had added McCain to the blogroll back when the story of convicted felon Brett Kimberlin first blew up, but I guess I didn’t; that oversight has now been corrected.) )(It was already there, my eyes just missed it. D’oh!) His summary nicely gets to the heart of the matter:

The #JusticeForDrV crusaders grabbed hold of the idea that “Dr. Vanderbilt” was driven to suicide by Caleb Hannan’s “transmisogynistic journalism” — a claim for which they offer no real evidence — while ignoring all evidence that (a) “Dr. Vanderbilt” was not a victim, but rather a person who victimized others, and (b) it was the failure of the pseudo-scientific putter scam, not fear of being “outed” as transgender, which motivated “Dr. Vanderbilt” to commit suicide. Of course, “Dr. Vanderbilt” had attempted suicide in 2008, before Hannan ever heard of her, but why let facts get in your way when you’re ghoulishly exploiting a corpse as “LGBT Victim of the Week”?

The #JusticeForDrV tag, of course is ironic, since, as McCain put it:

McCain dealt admirably with the substance of the issue, but I wanted to deal with the mindset behind those using the #JusticeForDrV tag, since I’ve run into it more than once.

This is another case of the intolerant acolytes of victimhood identity politics mobbing someone for daring to tell the truth. The animating idea behind it seems to be that no one has a right to say anything that might make a tranny (or any other member of a Designated Victim Group) feel bad, even if it’s the truth. They have abrogated for themselves the right to dictate to others what the acceptable limits to free speech are as regards members of said victim groups. It’s an attempt to silence critics (both actively and preemptively) who do not toe the political correct, neo-Marxist, Critical Race Theory line that the “privileged” (straight white heterosexual conservative males in particular) should not be allowed to speak on any issue that touches on the “marginalized” (i.e., the members of any left-wing victimhood identity politics group). Their terminology is Orwellian in the very specific way that it seeks to shape language and limit discourse in ways that make it impossible to object to the agenda being pushed.

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we’re not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,” he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. “Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?”

Or, put another way by the same author “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

Or, to put it still another way, “Freedom is the freedom to say that a man is a man and a woman is a woman.” Those pushing the #JusticeForDrV tag are largely the same as those who assert Bradley Manning magically became a woman by changing his name. The idea that “gender is a social construct” is a great lie that they must furiously defend, no matter how obviously absurd. Hannan’s article is unclear on whether Krol was merely a cross-dresser or had gender reassignment surgery; in neither instance would the chromosomes in the trillions of cells in his body have been switched from xy to xx.

And as for Hannan having “outed” someone who used to work at “an LGBT bar,” as McCain also notes: “When a 6-foot-3 middle-aged man gets a sex change, the result is unlikely to be particularly . . . persuasive.”

Caleb Hannan’s great crime was to commit an act of investigative journalism against a member of a designated victim group. (The whole “without fear or favor” slogan must go over social justice warrior heads, since favor is one of the defining principles of identity politics.) I’ve not seen a single credible accusation that the facts Hannan uncovered were untrue. Had Krol not been a serial liar, Hannan would never have been investigating him. His crime is he cared more about journalistic truth than politically correct guidelines on “acceptable discourse.” I would hope all journalists value truth over political correctness (though surveying the dominance of left-wing thought in the mainstream media, this is probably a vain hope).

I’ll end with the same conclusion McCain ended with:

“Facts are stubborn things, as John Adams said. And the simple fact is that Essay Anne Vanderbilt’s entire life was a huge lie.”

Liberals Continue Their Twitter Losing Streak

Wednesday, July 25th, 2012

On Twitter, you can mark any word (or combination of words) you want with a hashtag (#) #likethis. Naturally, as part of the current election season, liberals have been trying to create various Twitter tags (#ows for Occupy Wall Street, #P2 for Progressive on Twitter, etc.) Anyone on Twitter can use any hashtag for anything.

The problem for them is that there’s no hashtag they can create that conservatives can’t hijack. Frankly, I’ve never seen the right lose a serious Twitter war yet.

Today’s example of hijinks ensuing: #ThingsMittRomneyHasNeverDone. Some samples:

  • The People’s Cube ‏@ThePeoplesCube #ThingsMittRomneyHasNeverDone lost America’s AAA credit rating
  • Leah ‏@gopfirecracker #ThingsMittRomneyHasNeverDone implied that minorities are too stupid to obtain a photo ID
  • BattleSwarm ‏@BattleSwarmBlog #ThingsMittRomneyHasNeverDone Launched a political career in the home of an admitted terrorist
  • Yep, the last one is me. I had a lot of fun with that tag.

    You can see more examples of this #liberalfail on Twitchy.

    When Looking for Primary School Qualifications, “Founded by Mimes” Should Not Be a Plus

    Wednesday, June 27th, 2012

    “Parents are yanking their kids out of the ‘progressive,’ $32,000 per-year private school founded by the Blue Man Group—which has no books and no tests—because their kids are barely learning to read.”

    You mean that “progressive” education doesn’t work, even in a school founded by mimes? Who knew?

    Well, guess I’ll have to cancel my graduate school application for The Marcel Marceau School of Advanced Particle Physics…

    (Hat tip: The Daily Caller via Jim Treacher’s twitter feed.)

    PETA With Suits and Deodorant

    Monday, April 23rd, 2012

    Here’s a superb example of a viral attack ad that accomplishes everything it sets out to do: attract attention, create an impression, make viewers question their previous view on a subject, and provide a few laughs:

    Until I saw this, I had no idea how much the Humane Society had come to resemble PETA. But you start digging down into the information, and not only do you find out that they’re a lousy charity, but that they have indeed signed on to the whole anti-meat/anti-farming PETA agenda.

    (Hat tip: Shall Not be Questioned, who used the same line from the video as the headline.)

    The Two Year Anniversary of ObamaCare

    Wednesday, March 21st, 2012

    Today is the two year anniversary of the passage of ObamaCare. Note that Republicans are marking the anniversary of Obama’s signature achievement, while the White House is not. Even Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer admits that it’s an electoral liability for Democrats.

    That might have something to do with its stupendous unpopularity, not only among Republicans, but also among Democrats. Obama says that’s because of attack ads against it. Charles Krauthammer says that’s bunk:

    There’s a widespread understanding that ObamaCare isn’t good for anyone, especially young people, and it’s a budgetary disaster.

    And next week the Supreme Court will hear arguments on its constitutionality. Many are suggesting that a decision in ObamaCare’s favor will actually damage Obama’s reelection chances.

    It wasn’t supposed to work out this way. Liberals thought ObamaCare would get more popular after passage. Instead, it was one of the biggest factors in the historic wipe-out Democratic House members experienced in 2010.

    More specifically, eight out of the eleven “Stupak Block Flippers” (i.e., the theoretically staunch pro-life Democrats who swore up and down they would never, ever, ever vote for ObamaCare if it included taxpayer funding for abortion, right up until they voted for taxpayer-funded abortion) went down in electoral defeat. At the time, the insistence for public funding for abortion seemed like a tactical error on the part of liberals. After all, why bother with that tiny sop to feminists when you’re busy nationalizing one-sixth of the economy?

    But since then, the fervor with which Democrats have pursued imposing this mandate on Catholics (part and parcel of their contempt for religion), their white hot fury at Rush Limbaugh’s (admittedly foolish) remarks, and the continuing overheated, drama queen “war on women” rhetoric coming from the left side of the blogsphere suggests that yes, that was what ObamaCare was really about, and they’re willing to remain a permanent political minority to maintain it.

    So be it. If forcing taxpayers to pay for abortions is the hill they want to die on*, I suppose we should let them. (Though not at the cost of failing to mention Obama’s failure on the economy, on creating the conditions for private industry to create jobs, Fast & Furious, or his naked cronyism.) As Mickey Kaus has noted, this issue is a serious political loser for Obama, and we should keep hammering away on it, not despite the shrieks of outrage from liberalism’s feminist amen corner, but because of them.


    *”Violent, eliminationist” military metaphor offered up as free rhetorical bonus!

    In Which I Come Perilously Close to Defending Lloyd Doggett

    Tuesday, June 14th, 2011

    Paul Burka has a post up in which he basically makes two arguments:

    1. Republicans are trying to Gerrymander white Democrats out of Congress; and
    2. “Almost no one has done as much damage to the Democratic cause” in Texas as Lloyd Doggett.

    He is mistaken, to differing degrees, in both beliefs.

    As for the first, Republicans are trying to Gerrymander as many Democrats as possible out of their congressional seats, white, black, Hispanic or purple, just as Democrats ruthlessly Gerrymandered Republicans out of congressional seats when they had control of redistricting. (Remember, Texas never had as many as three Republicans serving in the U.S. House of Representatives at the same time until James M. Collins joined George H. W. Bush and Bob Price in 1969, despite Texas voters preferring Republican Presidential candidates in 1928, 1952, and 1956.) It’s just that the Voting Rights Act makes it so much easier to do it against white Democrats than minority Democrats.

    As for the second, anyone who has been reading this blog for any appreciable length of time should realize that I have no particular fondness for Rep. Doggett. However, laying the lion’s share of the Democratic Party’s precipitous decline in Texas at the feet of Doggett’s unsuccessful Senate campaign is both misguided and deeply ahistorical.

    First of all, it was a lot less obvious in 1984 that Doggett was too liberal to win (though he was) than the fact that nobody was going to beat Phil Gramm. After Democrats threw him off the House Budget Committee for supporting the Kemp-Roth tax cuts and co-sponsoring the Gramm-Latta budget reconciliation bill, Gramm resigned from his House seat and ran for it again as a Republican, winning overwhelmingly and turning himself into a folk hero for doing so. In the Republican primary he creamed Robert Mosbacher, Jr. and Ron Paul, and then thumped Doggett by 900,000 votes. Nobody was going to beat Gramm that year, even if Kent Hance had managed to defeat Doggett. And remember that after losing to Doggett in the Democratic Primary, Hance switched to the Republican Party the very next year. Even back then, it was apparent that conservatives had no future in the Democratic Party.

    Further, fingering Doggett as the cause of the Texas Democratic Party’s decline ignores the pronounced decline in the fortunes of the Democratic Party in every state south of the Mason-Dixon line over the last 32 years, as the so-called “Reagan Democrats” have fled the party in droves in both the South and Midwest thanks to its unwavering drive for bigger government and higher taxes. That can be laid at Doggett’s feet only insofar as he was one of several hundred Democratic elites pushing their party relentlessly left, no matter the electoral cost.

    And as for Burka’s starting that “How could [Doggett] have had so little self-awareness as to not know that he had was too liberal to win a statewide race?”, two points:

  • There’s a reason they have elections: you never know with 100% surety how they’ll turn out until they actually occur. Remember the infamous Newsweek poll that had Walter Mondale leading Reagan by 18 points right after the Democratic National Convention? Here’s another way to ask the question: “Shouldn’t Bill Clinton have known that Bush was invulnerable when he got into the Presidential race in 1991?” Nor did Doggett’s liberalism keep him from being elected to the Texas Supreme Court in 1988.
  • Second, not recognizing that Democrats have become too liberal for the general electorate is by no means limited to Doggett; indeed, it is arguably the defining characteristic of the modern Democratic Party. For years they’ve been listening to the likes of John P. Judis and Ruy Teixeira proclaiming them the country’s “natural majority party,” and there was no shortage of Democratic triumphalism confidently predicting how the Republican Party was “finished” after the 2008 election, and how well Democrats were going to do in 2010 once voters realized how awesome ObamaCare was. The comforting, anesthetizing Liberal Reality Bubble conspires to let them continually “get high on their own supply,” managing to convince themselves that America the Liberal is just around the corner. Even today, even in Texas: just look at all those members of the statewise MSM lamenting that Republicans are actually following the voting public’s wishes by shrinking state government rather than listening to them and their liberal friends and raising taxes.
  • There are numerous reasons why the Texas Democratic Party has gone from the overwhelming majority party in Texas to a rump minority party, the biggest one being that their misguided policies of big government liberalism are objectively wrong, financially ruinous and extremely unpopular. But Doggett is only an outstanding exemplar of the problem, not the cause of it.

    (PS: Also remember that in 1992, Burka was blaming the Texas Democratic Party’s decline on Bill Clinton’s unwillingness to seriously contest the state against Bush41.)

    Geraldine Ferraro RIP

    Saturday, March 26th, 2011

    Former Walter Mondale Vice Presidential pick Geraldine Ferraro has died at age 75. If Mondale had not made this liberal New York congresswoman his running mate, her obituary would barely be a blip nationally. If the Ferraro pick was meant to attract lavish media praise and attention it succeeded; if it was meant to help him win electoral votes, it failed, as I doubt she was instrumental in winning Minnesota.

    But the main reason I bring up Ferraro’s death is to exhume an obvious instance of biased political reporting. In 1992, when Ferraro was running in a four-way Democratic primary race against left-wing favorite Elizabeth Holtzman, Al Sharpton and Robert Abrams for the Senate seat held by Republican Al D’Amato, The Village Voice published a piece called “Gerry and the Mob,” documenting the extensive ties between Ferraro’s husband John Zaccaro and organized crime, just a few weeks before the primary. In the course of doing so, The Village Voice revealed that they had all the information back when Mondale picked Ferraro as the Vice President, but had spiked the story because of the “historic” nature of her candidacy. Ferraro ended up losing a race she had been leading to Abrams, which made her so bitter she refused to campaign for Abrams, who ended up losing to D’Amato by 80,000 votes.

    So when it comes to the liberal media reporting news, reality is whatever benefits liberals. Keep this in mind every time you read a MSM piece on Obama, and wonder just what they know and refuse to reveal until Obama is safely out of office.

    LinkSwarm for Wednesday, March 16, 2011

    Wednesday, March 16th, 2011

    A few quick links:

  • Liberals are racists.
  • Big-spending Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez recalled from office by an almost 9-1 ratio. Alvarez was a RINO that acted like a full-bore Democrat, hiking property taxes and giving big pay raises to unionized public employees. (hat tip: Dwight.)
  • In New York, unions protect state employees who sexually abuse the mentally handicapped, even when they know they’re guilty. “That’s our job.”
  • A word on the media’s amazingly poor understanding of nuclear reactors.
  • My latest update on the Sendai earthquake/tsunami in Japan.
  • Japan Tsunami/Earthquake News

    Tuesday, March 15th, 2011

    I haven’t been posting much here, as I’ve been putting up a lot of news and videos on the Sendai earthquake on my personal blog.

    But I did think this bit caught in my spam filter over there was worth sharing: the text says “Please Donate To Japan’s Quake and Tsunami Victim’s,” but the link goes to “foxnews-boycott.com”.

    You stay classy, liberals…