The Real Resistance – by Orvan Ox

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

The Real Resistance – by Orvan Ox

Racist! Fascist! Nazi! Misogynist! Xenophobe! Homophobe! Thank you!

 

Recently $HOUSEMATE and I were dining out and our server had the curious habit of saying “Thank you” during every interaction, whether it made any sense or not.  This is likely not a quirk of the server, but of a current trend in customer service. A local store suddenly has a “Thank you” policy for every customer interaction as well. Evidently they got severely dinged on a secret shopping rating of late for not having that, so now they have the policy in place. The idea is understandable: promote the idea of gratitude and polite customer service. There is a problem, though. And you’ve likely already figured it out. That “thank you” happens whether it makes any sense or not, and happens at every interaction. Thus it is both misused and overused. Misuse and overuse lead to resistance – that is, it loses the desired effect and becomes useless at best. Here, the worst is that it might be a joke shadow of itself.

 

The other words in the title are not as polite, nor used for the same purpose as “thank you” yet they have the very same issue: misuse and overuse. Racist once meant someone had an automatic negative reaction to those of some other race. (For this purpose, assume that ‘race’ actually exists and can be determined by trivial observation of skin color, even if that might not really be true). This was, and in a few cases still is, a problem. Racism lead to racial discrimination, unfair testing at polls, and all the other various Jim Crow laws. A society that does this is denying opportunity to some, and thus reducing its own potential. It wastes available manpower and brainpower to its detriment.

 

Fascist and Nazi are related to each other, Nazism being a particular brand of fascism. And back in the 1930’s and 1940’s they had a set meaning for a particular style of governance. While fascism is decidedly Not Good, the Nazis took to it with a horrifying efficiency that resulted in things so evil that it was truly unbelievable for many until newsreel footage showed things really were that bad. This didn’t merely waste potential, it destroyed manpower and brainpower.

 

Oh, manpower? In the sense of people available to do things. It’s not misogynist, it’s simply the right English word. Genuine misogyny is just like racism, only aimed at women instead of those of a particular race. This is another one of those “brilliant” ideas that permits a society, if it chooses, to artificially limit brainpower and, yes, manpower even if it is ‘womenpower’.

 

And then there are all the -phobes. Xenophobe for ‘fear’ of the other, the foreign. Homophobe for ‘fear’ of the same sex (or gender, if you must). There are likely many others, but one needs to stop staring into the abyss sometime. How much real fear is there? Almost none. There are almost certainly a few people who really are genuinely fearful of members of this group or that. A few. Not a majority. Not even a sizable minority.

 

The idea that these words apply to nearly half of society is breathtaking in its absurdity.  If discrimination truly allowed lower pay for equal work, what sane business wouldn’t be rushing to hire the cheaper labor wherever and whenever it could? Seen any “Men need not apply” or “No Caucasians” or “Non-citizens only” help wanted signs? Me neither. Maybe it’s this bubble I’ve been living in. Oh, wait, haven’t seen the furious cries of outrage that would accompany any of those, either. Hrrmmm.

 

But if you expose a population to something over and over and over, a tolerance builds up. A resistance, that protects that population from the something it is being misexposed and overexposed to. That is how new antibiotic resistance comes into being. The surviving germs survived… and then the next set will be all from those survivors, and a higher percentage will survive the same treatment. This repeats until the resistance is so effective that the antibiotic is ineffective.

 

It’s not quite the same for people, as ideas tend not to be immediately fatal – even the astonishingly bad ideas. Systems can develop resistance as well, and society is system or a collection of systems. There is a new theory of Type 2 diabetes emerging, that the problem is insulin itself. The current standard treatment deals with one symptom – high blood sugar, which is more than just a symptom and is a real problem, but doesn’t address the immediate (yes, something else has to start the initial insulin resistance) root cause. “Insulin resistance protects the cell against… insulin.” is how at least one doctor sums it up. More insulin leads to more resistance, which means yet more insulin for treatment, and yet greater resistance in a vicious cycle. Some new treatments are being tried that reduce blood sugar without increased insulin. There is hope that this might break the cycle and have better outcomes – but it’s not common practice, nor the “received wisdom” yet.

 

Resistance protects the population or system from whatever is being resisted. In that theory of Type 2 Diabetes, the population of cells uses insulin resistance to protect itself from insulin. The cells are stuffed full of glucose and here comes insulin insisting they take in yet more. What to do? Bar the doors and increase the resistance. In antibiotic resistance, germs develop protection from antibiotics. And in our society, we are developing resistance to words that once meant things, but their misuse and overuse has robbed, or is robbing, them of power.

 

Consider that in the 1970’s and 1980’s an accusation of racism was a potent thing, a near nuclear attack on character. In recent years the end of the power of the word wasn’t the election of a black President, at least not directly. The end of the power was the stimulus-response accusation by many that any disagreement with that President was purely and only racist and not a genuine disagreement on policy. If everybody is a racist, nobody is a racist.

 

Other issues also happened. Gamergate. Sad Puppies. And perhaps others still, but each had nasty accusations that bore no relation to the actual issues being raised. And the result? Immunity, resistance develops. It’s not much at first and it’s rough going, but the result of wave after after wave of misuses and overuse is that more and more see that is indeed misuse and overuse.

 

And now we have many using the terms xenophobe, misogynist, sexist, fascist, and Nazi. The result is that those words, too, will lose their power as the targeted population becomes ever more resistant to them and regards them no longer as a danger, but as meaningless drivel, or even a joke. “That’s racist!” has already been used as a joke and is its own punchline. The R-bomb has been defused by its very wielders. To them, I have only this to say: Thank you.

 

There is another problem. That is that having rendered the words powerless, what happens should the actual evils they originally described truly manifest? As some abuse one linguistic “antibiotic” after the next, they each become impotent in turn. The overused and abused tool dulls.  The disease can then run away, controlled or contained only by whatever lingering immune response society has left. Despite hysterical claims, that is NOT the case right now. Yeah, to those doing this and making future problems much harder to solve, thank you – for nothing. Great job, throwing all the antibiotics around for something not even a cold. There should be a statue to your stupidity, for it is monumental. Thank you!

399 thoughts on “The Real Resistance – by Orvan Ox”

  1. It worked in the 70s and 80s because people thought they’d accidentally insulted someone and since they were polite folk they sought to make amends. Now people are noticing that when the permanently triggered screech “-ist” and “-ism” as a rhetorical bludgeon to silence dissent.

    Even polite people can say “enough” to that sort of thing.

          2. Hey Ox: Are you a relation of Number 10 Ox? Completely unconnected to him? Something else?

            Inquiring minds WANT to know! 😉

  3. Worse, if everything you do or say is “racist”, “sexist”, “homophobic”, etc, then why shouldn’t you “embrace” the label and treat the “protected group” as the enemy.

    After dealing with some shit-headed “gay activists” I’ve found myself wondering “why shouldn’t I hate gays?”.

    While I haven’t fallen into that trap, I suspect that “hatred of gays” has increased thanks to the “defenders” of gays. 😦

    By the way, I once looked up the history of “homophobic” (the term) and strangely the term started as “fear of being seen as homosexual”. 👿

      1. I’m Scottish. We hate everyone, equally. Even each other.

        One day our numbers will be large enough… ~:D

            1. That, madam, is a base canard. Simply because you cannot discern the differences between True Scotsmen (TM) does not mean they…

              No, wait a tick… You’re actually right. It’s just that outsiders can’t tell distinguish the players, and after a bit, neither can we…

            2. As a part Scot by ancestry, I can assure you that there is no truth to the rumor, nay the foul canard, that the pointy end of a Claymore is inscribed “This end tae enemy”

    2. I don’t hate gays. I do hate the gays that used the discrimination card to cause grave harm and death to thousands of people by their efforts to derail prevention of the AIDS epidemic. Most of them have reaped what they sowed; unfortunately, they took a lot of innocent kids with them.

      I also have a severe dislike of gays that push the “normal, protected, and must be advocated” status of their lifestyle. Every human society that went down that road died. Ours will be no different. That’s not to say we should round them up and take them to extermination camps, or tattoo a big red H on their foreheads. They are ordinary people with a mental health issue that deserve to be treated with dignity, but not have their illness catered to. Heck, I have several in my family; and the amount of hostility I get from them just because I’m not bowing to the politically correct dogma is incredible.

      1. I actually read someone saying, about the push to remove the (already lowered) restriction on practicing male homosexuals, that after all, the worst that could happen would be getting AIDS and after all, we have drugs.

        someone else, fortunately, tore his head off with appropriate vigor.

    3. “I suspect that “hatred of gays” has increased thanks to the “defenders” of gays. ”

      Sharpening the contrasts and increasing polarization is a long-established revolutionary technique. The more it is used the more it diminishes the perception of commonalities and makes actual communication impossible.

      See recent stories about formerly gay liberal reporter who had the temerity to do a neutral profile of Milo Yiannopoulos, or of the Wall Street Journal’s newsroom editor advising reporters who object to neutral coverage of the Trump Administration that they ought look for work elsewhere. The goal is to erect barriers to communication, stoking fervor on both sides.

        1. It’s not just that she says things like
          “white ppl need white supremacy as a mechanism to protect their survival as a people because all they can do is produce themselves. black ppl simply through their dominant genes can literally wipe out the white race if we had the power to.”
          which makes you wonder if she thinks Birth of A Nation is a how-to guide, it’s also that she comes up with gems like this:
          “melanin enables black skin to capture light and hold it in its memory mode which reveals that blackness converts light into knowledge.”

      2. Earlier today I was reading someone’s comment that Gay Pride Parades’ chief effect is to set back the movement.

        1. Someone the other day – I think it was at Ace’s blog – recounted an incident with a lesbian friend. Due to the subject of the conversation, the friend was directed to visit Zombie’s website, where Zombie posts pictures of various events in the Bay Area (including things that make the Folsom Street Fair seem tame in comparison). The lesbian friend’s comment afterwards was to the effect that the people in the Bay Area were nuts, and she now understood why so many people didn’t like the Gay Rights movement.

        2. My favorite comment along this line comes from Camile Paglia. She reported a gay man in a NYC gay bar as saying to her that if “the straights” really knew what kinds of things went on in there, they’d burn the place down.

          When people see the Pride Parade in Toronto (I’ve never been) this is what happens. Because the loons on the floats reveal the worst possible aspects, and people (stupidly) take their kids.

          This year in T.O. of course will be #BLM horning in on the deal. I plan to be many miles away, paying no attention to any of it.

          1. Years ago John Leo reported a story about a Catholic Priest asking his “flock” to not take actions against those gays and reporters were wondering why the Priest was saying that.

            It seemed that one “Gay Pride” float included men dressed as Priests apparently having sex with men dressed as Nuns.

            Great Way To Make Catholics To Hate You Gay Idiots. 😦

    4. This comment reminds me of the Onion news article that discusses how the latest Gay Pride parade set the Gay Rights movement back 50 years….

        1. Yes, sometimes they do straight news. Unfortunately it’s because of Poe’s Law — that sufficiently powerful sarcasm is indistinguishable from a position that someone actually has — than any particular effort on their part to make themselves respectable.

          1. The Onion is simply projecting the narrative to its absurd conclusion and cannot be held responsible for the absurd-impaired failing to recognize the abyss into which they’ve fallen.

        2. It’s getting really hard to write parody today. It almost seems there’s a conscious effort to make parody news into real news before the week is out.

    5. The real threat here is that constantly being slurred does tend to make one hate the slurrer. The more inappropriate and stupid, the better – I mean, the more it tends toward making one dislike the name-caller.

      Thus, while the name-calling will increase immunity among some, it may actually create that which it incorrectly names. If I wanted, for some reason, society to be racist and misogynist, continually calling it that might tend to make it so.

      This would be merely a crazy paranoid idea. Then you read a little Gramsci and Alinsky, and the idea that something so convoluted and sick could be attempted starts to seem almost inevitable.

      1. The goal of such tactics is not to win the argument; their goal is to end the argument.

        As Ken “The Black Avenger” Hamblin used to advise, when the person resorts to name-calling they’re admitting they have no further argument to make.

      2. Remember that if they fix their problems, they need to find a new problem to activist about. Or else — shudder — go home and be quotidianly good.

      3. “The real threat here is that constantly being slurred does tend to make one hate the slurrer.”

        It might, but I refuse to allow those twerps any traction on me. Whatever they say, its just noise. Classic example, Big G and the Vilers. One visits occasionally, only to keep the disgust fresh. They never disappoint, either.

    6. In my more cynical hours, I believe that the various NGO and academic members of the racial grievance industry are aware of the phenomena described above, and are using it to their profit.

    7. Hmmm. When I was young, you could still buy un-homogenized milk in the store. Cream at the top skimmed milk at the bottom. Homogenized is too long to put on the bottle or carton so it would be abbreviated. Mom always bought HOMO MILK. That was the only place I ever saw homo. So as a 2nd grader I would have thought homophobia would have been fear of milk.

  4. The core problem is that a whole segment of society has taken and defended positions that are fundamentally indefensible, and have resorted to name calling in the hope that nobody will notice. Not a new phenomenon, by any means. The British Aristocracy, haveing taken the position that any shift of power away from them, called anyone who was growing wealty in an unapproved manner ‘in trade’ to put them beyond the pale. It only worked to a degree. The Planters, fundamentally unable to defend slavers, simply called abolitionists ‘damned Yankees’, and the sense,of superiority this masterstroke gave them encouraged them to start a war then saw their hinies stomped into a mudpuddle.

    The Left has much to answer for, and damned few actual answers.

    It is high,time the rest of us started saying “Yes, I am a racist, a sexist, and a homophobe. Fine. Not answer my goddamned question or admit that you can’t.”

    1. Years ago when I was younger and more passionate, I was in some ideological dispute on the internet. One of the people in the discussion replied to one of my points with some sort of demeaning personal name-calling. I don’t remember what point I had been trying to make or what his response was, but it wasn’t a cogent reply. I searched the dictionary for a term that meant overwhelmed by logic: and replied, sarcastically, “I am confuted”. The poor soul thought I had misspelled confused, so my comment went completely over his head. I didn’t see fit to try to enlighten him. That’s when I adopted the name “Confutus” as my Internet handle.
      Ever since I was called a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal by a committed feminist, I feel entitled to wear that one as a badge of pride.

      2. For a while there in the ’80’s I took to saying “Look, it’s mothing impersonal.mI don’t despise your race, religion, or sexual orientation. I despise YOU.

        THEY COULDN’t wrap their tiny minds around being treated as individuals. Their entire identity is wrapped up in being their group.

        Whch is why so many of them seem determined to live down to their stereotypes.

        1. I like that. “I have nothing against your identity group in general; it’s you in particular that I don’t like!”

  5. “Oh, manpower? In the sense of people available to do things. It’s not misogynist, it’s simply the right English word.”
    It’s also a staffing company. They used to be big into providing low skill burly men to construction projects. So it was probably both using man in the universal sense and also in the particular b/c not a lot of broads were signing up to dig ditches.

    1. It’s also a staffing company. They used to be big into providing low skill burly men to construction projects.

      At some point in the future we’ll have Can o’Man like in The Tick and they’ll be obsolete. Can’t search youtube right now for the appropriate clip, because work.

          1. yep. in my version, it’s the gov’t’s way of pacifying the violent tendencies of superfluous low skilled men in an increasingly automated society. The fem-bots would cook, clean, er pleasure, and gently nag the men about looking after themselves (did you see what dr. chang said about your blood pressure?). But then the men would be so happy and productive that the low skilled women would revolt and destroy the fem-bot pretenders. or something.

          3. Boy-meets-girl, boy gets shot down trying to date girl, boy builds android duplicate of girl with different hair and eye color, boy gets bout of sanity and declares android to be his sister, boy ends up dating the girl he met before. -some anime from the 90s I came across. Can’t remember the title.

    2. Don’t forget “Kelly Girl” — although I am sure that agency title has been changed to avoid demeaning women.

      1. It’s now Kelly Services but changed to that name in the 60’s apparently more because the services provided were also provided by men.

        It should be noticed that Kelly Services is not ashamed of the “Kelly Girls” name which is featured on their site as part of their history.

        2. So Kelly Services changed its name to appropriately reflect what they were offering and not defensively against targeted attacks? Good for them.

          It is a shame that today, even if a company were to make such a move for similar motives, it would be thought that it had been done because they feared the pressure that might be brought to bear against them. This fuels the harpies, harridans and bullies.

        3. My mom was a “Kelly Girl” in her late teens, early twenties. Back then it was mostly just temp secretary work. She said she enjoyed working there.

          2. I did, also – temped for Kelly for about three years between permanent job. I liked it very much because they actually provided me with jobs, unlike a lot of the other smaller temp services.

        4. They also used to tout the women drivers in the Kelly American Challenge as the Kelly Girls (Lyn St. James, Patty Moise are the two I recall and before I saw it, the series started out as the Kelly Girl Challenge, but changed it in 81 or 82).

  6. Nice post!

    On point, I’m actively looking for at least one Special Snowflake meltdown when my books -finally- get published. I’m considering it as part of the advertising campaign. I’ll re-post said denunciation as part of the blurb, if they really go nuts. ~:)

        1. I’ve read a lot of yours, Pam, and that’s NOT my impression of your work. And just to prove I do notice – I’ve tried a couple of authors lately who, though their storylines have interest, do have enough problems as to frequently bump my attention out of the story.

          1. Clearly the calls for “a better editor” (as opposed to better editing) are dog whistles indicating that the author has been insufficiently woke in her writing. Given anecdotes related by Sarah and others of demands and criticisms made by editors it is clear that the editor’s role is to ensure the work conform to contemporary ideological perspectives.

            1. Point. Hadn’t thought of Pam’s denunciations all coming from the progreader/progpublisher community. As always, when deciphering word meaning, context (of the speaker) counts.

              1. Like I say every time I plug Pam’s stuff on facebook: if you find typos, complain to me, not her, since I’m one of the lucky crew that gets to read early in exchange for hunting them down.
                Pam, you want to send your complainers my way, I’m sure we can work something out involving not siccing all your fans at my house on them at once. Pam’s my sons’ favorite author: if you’ve got kids that like science fiction without romance y’all need to buy her YA. Look for her pen name Zoey Ivers.

  7. I keep telling the red-faced, screeching pejorative “-ist”/”-ism” bomb throwers that what they’re hurling isn’t the 2000 pound blockbuster of an earlier time, it’s not even a little firecracker anymore: those terms have been defused, and all of the power has been dribbled out of them. What they’re throwing now are simply duds, and have no effect whatsoever.

  8. For “Fascist,” at least, this has a long history. I’m pretty sure that Hitler and Mussolini were still in power when Orwell made his quip about how, “Fascist has come to mean little more than ‘something not desirable.'”

    The “manpower” one is kind of interesting how fast that has come to be un-PC. There are a lot of colleges now that forbid the world “freshman” (preferring “first-year” instead) on the assumption that any sight of the letters “m-a-n” will cause all of the young ladies to get the vapors and inspire all of the young men to rape any woman they can get their hands on. (No, I’m not kidding about that. I wish I were.)

    1. I was so annoyed when some students started using “freshperson” instead of freshman. There’s already a perfectly good word they could have used instead: “frosh.” (As a side note, my city calls them “maintenance holes.” Which is an example of a PC term that actually makes more sense than the original term.)

      1. That sort of thing annoys me, too, but mostly because the same people that get all worked up over “-man” don’t notice the “-person” microaggresses against daughters.

          1. I really ran across a PC guide that said that the results of radioactive decay are called daughter particles, which is particularly bad because of women’s involvement in the peace movement.

      2. I like Frosh. I’d have had a tendency to have called them Freshies instead. Which probably would have resulted in their faces turning red and their blood pressure spiking.

        1. And now I wonder about the Haber-Frosh Process…
          (The Bacardi is only almost gone, but I think the [tiny] remainder should remain for a few more hours…)

      4. “freshperson”

        If this is to indicate general cleanliness I am all for it. When I was in college there were some people who did not understand the concept.

        If this is to indicate the general leaning of their speech, I’d prefer not.

        Oh, you mean so as not to get the speech police’s panties in a knot?

        Didn’t they notice that the new formulation is as bad as the old by their standards. So we are offended by men? How is son the solution? We had that discussion my freshman year at the Quaker College I attended when they renamed the required first year course Man in the Twentieth Century to Being Human in the Twentieth Century. No thank you to that kind of thinking. Once you start it never ends. It is the kind of nonsense up with which I will not put.

    2. I’m pretty sure that Hitler and Mussolini were still in power when Orwell made his quip about how, “Fascist has come to mean little more than ‘something not desirable.’”
      Actually that came from Politics and the English Language which was published in 1946, shortly after the war. The origin of the word fascist as an insult from the left lies with Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Before then the approved Communist line was to let the Communists and the Fascists take over the world and divide it as they saw fit in a orgy of socialist collegiality. After the invasion of the USSR, the US peace movement suddenly turned rabidly pro-war. (See Trumbo, Dalton.) Don’t kid yourself that those calling you, me, and our predecessors “Fascist!” ever gave a tinker’s damn about Hitler wiping out the Jews, Gypsies, disabled, and other “undesirables”. Ask yourself why “Stalinist!” or “Maoist!” or even “Pol Potist!” is not an insult.

      1. And boy do they get frothing-at-the-mouth angry when you point out how similar fascism and socialism are and how much leftists approved of fascists till the invasion of the USSR.

        1. Sure, national socialism vs. international socialism. There’s a good reason Stalin got along very well with Hitler until Hitler decided to go stupid.

          1. The “going along very well” is kindof funny, because both Hitler and Stalin made that agreement with fingers crossed behind their back, and it just so happened that Hitler was the first who saw an opportunity to renege on their agreement.

            But to the degree that Stalinists and Nazis hated each other, it was because they were competing for the same prize — world domination and complete control — and not because there were significant, meaningful differences between their world views.

            1. I thought it amusing when Bernie said “I’m not a Socialist. I’m a National Socialist!” Okay, you mean lke the Nazis?i

                  1. Yeah, I told my dad about that, who probably shares more politics with Mr. Eric Flint than not, and Dad couldn’t believe a politician would say that.

                    But the Democratic party apparently entirely forgot that words matter this election. I’m still stewing over someone who attends MY denomination thinking calling people irredeemable was acceptable. Did I ever tell y’all that when we went to DC in ’96 (Dad had professional meetings) Mom and I went to Hillary Clinton’s church? Most insipid sermon I ever heard. If I hadn’t already not been going to vote for her, that usurpation of divine prerogative would’ve convinced me.

                    1. It sort of leaves you wondering what could have been the meaning behind Hillary’s pushing “The Politics of Meaning” back in the Nineties.

                      Caution: Reading the following may induce schadenboners; if it persists more than four hours treat with medicinal single malt taken internally.

                      The Post-Mortem on Hillary Clinton’s Politics of Meaning
                      By Max Green
                      Rallying for community spirit in America is sort of like cheering loudly for your home baseball team to finish second in the pennant race. Those who favor a shift from individualism to community, “communitarians” they are called, do so while upholding and, indeed, giving preferred position to individual rights, the very thing they oppose. Individualism is our primary language; as such, communitarians honor America’s history of individual rights and the pursuit of private property. They would point out, however, that it’s not our only tradition, and that today Americans have forgotten a “biblical and republican tradition” which is increasingly important in tempering the noxious effects of self-interest run rampant. Communitarians believe Americans must fight to reappropriate this second tradition even though, in the end, public spirit will usually be overpowered.

                      A year ago Americans witnessed one of these battles and the theory held to be true: community spirit got trounced. In April of 1993 Hillary Clinton spoke in Austin, Texas about how American society has fragmented into competing self-interests. “We lack a sense that our lives are part of some greater effort, that we’re connected to each other,” the First Lady said. Pointing to the market economy as the cause for alienation and spiritual despair, she concluded that “we need a new politics of meaning.” The press attacked her remarks with open hostility. The Washington Post characterized them as “psychobabble”; the New York Times, labeling her “Saint Hillary,” called them “rehashed 60’s idealism.” Most vicious was the New Republic, which claimed to be “mystified” by Mrs. Clinton’s speech, observing snidely, “It’s good to know the First Lady is pro-meaning. But before signing on, one question: What on earth are these people talking about?” The story died quickly; Mrs. Clinton stopped referring to a politics of meaning. The media’s pillory might have contributed to this. More likely her silence was motivated by a New York Times story which uncovered a $100,000 profit Mrs. Clinton made on cattle futures, rendering her indictment of free market materialism a little hollow.

                      The event was small, forgettable. But it merits further consideration because it was one of the more recent tests of a new political idea on the horizon: community spirit. Sorting through the charred wreckage of Hillary Clinton’s politics of meaning may explain why it failed and tell us what to avoid next time.

                      The First Lady’s comments were borrowed from a school of thought begun a few years previous by Michael Lerner, the editor and publisher of Tikkun magazine. Lerner had been writing extensively about how the Democrats were out of touch with ordinary people’s pain because, since FDR, the party had focused on rights and entitlements. This overlooked the “meaning” needs of Americans–ethical, psychological, and spiritual–which, in the absence of any alternative, was being exploited by the Religious Right. Two processes were at work: (1) citizens are pacified by a distant, bureaucratic government which takes care of local responsibilities like welfare, thus severing the direct connection between taxpayer and recipient; (2) workers are spiritually alienated because they feel that their jobs are pointless, that they’re not contributing to a greater good. Seventy percent of workers daydream about their sex lives or what they’ll do once they leave work, according to Lerner. All too frequently, Americans escape from this day-to-day pain through TV or alcohol.

                      The solution, Lerner says, is to change from an ethos of selfishness to one based on love and caring. It’s a paradigm-shift, he says, requiring us to oppose the free market and big government institutions which cultivate selfish and narcissistic attitudes. One of Lerner’s strategies is to apply the following litmus test to every government policy: “How much does this legislation address and support spiritual sensitivity and loving relationships?

                      [END EXCERPT]

                      Emphasis added.

                    2. most politicians of a certain bent belong to a church for political reason than any need for closeness to god. 0bama was as religious as I am (an atheist) until he was introduced to Wright’s Marx flavored sermons.

                2. And nobody on their side seemed to NOTICE!

                  Admittedly this may have been analogous in some cases to the contingent of Trump voters going “I don’t want to talk about what he just said, at least he’s not Hillary.”

            2. indeed the useless idiots are convinced Hitler “Went Far Right”, when he attacked Stalin’s Soviet because that was the excuse Stalin used to explain away why he ever signed any agreements with Hitler.

            3. One gang of thugs trying to topple another gang of thugs for control. Their being enemies does not make one of the gangs the “opposite” of the other.

      2. Date of publication does not equate to time of utterance. Orwell may have written that essay prior to the war’s end, or he may have made that quip at a cocktail party in 1943.

        1. True Res, but I think my point stands that the use of “Fascist!” as a leftist insult dates to that fateful day in June 1941. It is true of course that the Nazis and Communists competed for the same set of recruits in Germany prior to the “3rd Reich”. The instant course correction of the CPUSA was truly head-spinning.

            1. That ain’t fair. Pete repudiated Uncle Joe in Summer 2007.

              I’m singing about old Joe, cruel Joe.
              He ruled with an iron hand.
              He put an end to the dreams
              Of so many in every land.
              He had a chance to make
              A brand new start for the human race.
              Instead he set it back
              Right in the same nasty place.
              I got the Big Joe Blues.
              (Keep your mouth shut or you will die fast.)
              I got the Big Joe Blues.
              (Do this job, no questions asked.)
              I got the Big Joe Blues.
              http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2007/09/joe-blues-folk-music-seeger

              2. Skimming down the lines I come past your post. It gives me a ear worm which made me smile, which the thought of Uncle Joe does not. On the principle that we can all use smiles:

                Joe Pete is in the bed, he don’t want to see no one.

          2. According to William Shirer, in “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”, Horst Wessel, the individual who’s death inspired the Nazi anthem of the same name, was apparently considering defecting to the Communists right before he was murdered by them.

    3. My college friend Alan Groupe (a libertarian before the term was invented) came up with this parody of the PC language insanity:

      “woman”, no, that has “man” in it. Ok, “woperson”. No, that has “son”, so that won’t do. So we’ll make it “woperthing”.

      2. This deliberate redefinition of “man” is just one way that language is being weaponized. Like most English words, “man” has more than one definition, that can and should be inferred from context:

        “2. a member of the species Homo sapiens or all the members of this species collectively, without regard to sex:
        prehistoric man.
        3.
        the human individual as representing the species, without reference to sex; the human race; humankind:
        Man hopes for peace, but prepares for war.
        (http://www.dictionary.com/browse/man?s=t)

        Man IS an inclusive term. Pretending that it’s sexist or exclusive only shows that person’s ignorance, whether willful or blind.

  9. Short answer: Yes, I have seen job listings where they didn’t want men, or Caucasians, etc… usually stuff labelled as ‘diversity hires’ (specifically, see a lot on highered.com- ironically, at most universities, being a conservative mostly white ex-military male should actually make me a diversity hire…)

    2. Then there was the company that in there “help wanted ad” boasted of being “female owned” and said something else that implied to me that they had a high percentage of female data processing people.

      Basically, I got the idea that they’d look at the resumes of females first.

      1. Oh, sheesh, I think I saw one of those last week. (I’m job-hunting, alas). It sounded good…up until the moment I saw “proudly female-owned and diverse!” and I immediately backed the hell away.

        (And then there was the amusing part where Monster can’t tell the difference between London, Arkansas and London, UK, and as I’m wading through their application they suddenly start asking what my gender is. And if I’m transgender. And what my sexual preference is. And my religion. And my race. And I’m going “Ummmm…you can’t ask these questions (or most of them, anyway) in the US…”)

        1. Actually, you can ask them; you just can’t require answers. Of course, if you don’t answer them correctly you won’t get the job.

      1. See, I said that in response to an article screaming about “University Press Publishing Under an Autocracy” and got smacked ’cause I pointed out that excluding half of the population isn’t a discussion and I needed to provide facts. The facts the respondent cited are that 50% US population didn’t vote, 25% each voted for Clinton or Trump, so of course I can’t claim that half of the population is excluded … he followed up with several refutations of my overall comment, so I really must have hit a nerve 🙂

        Soo, I responded by pointing out the ratio of liberal:conservative professors on college campuses, cited my two favorite climate gate frauds, and closed by pointing out the current intolerance of the college campus towards freedom of speech. My response is currently in moderation … we’ll see if it is actually let loose in the comments section or gets “lost”.

        1. Your comment is clearly hate speech, as it is insufficiently complimentary to the leftist narrative, and will therefore be dropped into the memory hole.

          1. Even worse, he not only pointed out the bubble that comprises the Liberal world, he threatened to puncture it. Any threat to introduce contrary views or (shudder) evidence is tantamount to endorsing the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

            1. Sir, you should be clearer in stating that the “911 terror attacks” were caused by the Evil Bush and the Evil Jews. [Very Big Sarcastic Grin]

            2. You mean as the NYT apparently did today, comparing the most recent presidential election with 9/11 and with Pearl Harbor?

    4. Job listings that say “Minorities Only” are a regular feature in Canada. Have been since I was a kid.

      Government jobs.

      They don’t say “no Whites,” of course, they say something like: “The successful applicant will be Native Canadian, female and/or visible minority, have a disability and/or non-conforming gender identity…”

      Which is CDN Officialese for “no white males.”

      Their dream candidate is a non-white female who identifies as a gay male and is missing a limb, preferably a leg because the wheelchair adds to the optics. Grotesque deformities an added bonus. Medical implants also a big winner.

      When you go to any Canadian government office you see the ostentatiously prominent wheelchair ramps, and Successful Applicant sitting over in the corner making aeronautical origami at $20++/hr.

      They don’t usually give Successful Applicant anything much to do, because of the soft racism of low expectations. “The poor dears can’t help it, you see. The White Patriarchy has crushed all the life out of them. We must Help them!”

      You want to hear a wheelchair user go on an extended rant, with newly invented swear words, get them talking about government jobs in Ontario.

      1. Pa had a story about a guy who figuratively kicked butt (no legs, mind) and would correct anyone saying “handicapped” or such and telling them he was a cripple. He didn’t need to tell anyone he was capable as he simply demonstrated that.

        1. And that’s the other side of the coin. When you ban certain words (like cripple) because they are “harmful”, and replace them with “nice” words like “handicapped”, eventually the “nice” word starts to mean exactly what the original word meant, and any attempt to factor out the “harm” and inject “niceness” is lost.

          Words mean things — but they only have the meaning we give them! — so when we use a certain word in a certain way, we naturally assign the meaning to the word accordingly.

            1. My dad’s elder sister was retarded, and that’s how we always described her.

              Words like crippled and retarded are pretty basic; there’s very little room for squishy interpretation. Otoh, “handicapped” can mean all sorts of things.

              1. Retarded was certainly considered nicer than mongoloid idiot.

                it took me years to understand that Bug’s insult “What a maroon!” was just a warped “What a moron!”

              2. one of my cousins is retarded. He got a severe fever when 2 or so and it damaged his brain, retarding his development. Other than that, he is perfectly healthy now, just slowed by the brain damage. He is in his 50’s now.
                Another cousin has Down’s. He is a bit over 4 feet tall (getting close to 30 yrs old), and has all the health issues associated with Down Syndrome. He is notnot what I consider retarded, as he is rather advanced compared to some with Down’s.

                1. Wouldn’t Down’s be either a deformity or a defect, rather than a retardation?

                  The DNA is deformed or defective– the growth is perfectly normal.

                  OTOH, couldn’t “retarded development” be against the normal standard, regardless of reason?

                  So my growth is “retarded,” regardless of reason, because I’m smaller than any other adult in the family.

                  ********

                  I’ve seen folks flinch at the phrase “fire retardant.” Not because anybody’s offended, but in case someone is– the histronics are just not worth it.

                  1. I’d say not retarded growth/development unless something stopped you from being taller (diet, illness etc) not genetics.
                    Doesn’t mean I’m right though (~_^)

                    1. Related, from Jay Nordlinger at National Review gangblog The Corner:

                      The Way We’ve Talked
                      Today and tomorrow, I’m writing about an unusual and wonderful ranch in Texas: Down Home Ranch, founded by Jerry and Judy Horton. It is a ranch for disabled adults. For today’s installment, go here.

                      On the Corner, I’d like to make a language note. Jerry grew up in San Jose and, when a child, had polio. (I discuss this in today’s installment.) Fortunately, his dad knew someone in the Shriners, and, thanks to this contact, Jerry was admitted to the Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children, up the road in San Francisco.

                      A few years ago, I wrote an essay called “Adventures in Lexical Fashion.” You will find it in my new collection, Digging In. (Plugola!) Let me excerpt a paragraph:

                      “Retarded” was once a progressive word — a wonderfully progressive word. It implied that the afflicted person was merely delayed. Long before that, there were “homes for idiots.” The people who founded, ran, and staffed them were not hateful. On the contrary, they were among the most loving and humane people on earth — probably more loving and humane than you and I are. Eventually, “retarded” people became “developmentally disabled,” “physically challenged,” “differently able,” “handicapable” … “Special” is a perennial — as in “Special Olympics,” and “special needs.”

                      How about the people who staffed the Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children? I imagine they were pretty loving and humane, too.

                      Anyway, forget language: Meet the Hortons and their daughter and Down Home Ranch. You won’t be sorry.

                    2. I think both my cousins, but definetely the one with Down’s, lives in a complex that caters to those like them, and while the older one works outside the system, the younger also works at a job in a place run by the same folks dealing with the housing. My uncle, the Dad to the younger cousin, has done some of the engineering for the place. depending on the person jobs run from simple make work, to sawing wood and building furniture. My cousin was making fire starters by dipping toilet paper tubes stuffed with shredded newspaper into hot paraffin. They rotate jobs, but not all are trusted to do all the jobs.
                      I’m sure he’d love the ranch. He’s visited Texas once on a trip to Arizona I think.

                    3. I rather like “special needs,” actually– it covers all of the groups that take something different, from “catatonic, has a minder 24/7” through “uses a cane.”

                  2. Down’s is a trisomy disorder, and one of the few that is survivable. (I know someone who carried a Trisomy 13 child to term. Lived about twenty minutes.)

                    Note that “tranny” is a perfectly acceptable word when used about a car.

                    1. Depends on the situation– the Navy has been infoming sailors we can’t call “Diagonal Cutters” dikes for decades, now.

                      *******
                      I just get sick to my stomach thinking of how many folks want to “cure” problems by killing those who have it, like the genetic disorder isn’t bad enough as it is.

                    2. Most trisomy disorders result in “baby soup” — i.e. the egg splits into undifferentiated “stuff”. Robert is right now studying “Everything that can go wrong with conception” and guess what I hear when I drag him for a walk? 😀

                    3. If “dikes” isn’t acceptable any more, that has to make life hard for civil engineers working in Holland…

        2. Back in the 1980s there was a panel on disabilities. I was on it.

          The members nattered on and on about “handi-capable!” and requiring all public areas to have wheelchair ramps, toilets, and water fountains. And they were enthusiastically willing to pay other people’s money to see it done.

          I suggested that the solution wasn’t more wheelchair ramps, it was developing the technology to fix those people, not cater to their disabilities.

          That was the first panel I was uninvited from.

          None of those people wanted – or would admit to wanting – to be able to walk, or see, or be able to do normal things. Their whole self-image was wrapped in in being a cripple and shoving it into over people’s faces.

          Funny, I see that sort of thinking all over the place now.

          1. Take a look at the more extreme of the deaf community. They’re not at all interested in technologies that would allow them to hear. They can get very agitated about it. Luckily, it’s a very quiet agitation. 😀

            1. Hell, the radical deaf groupies have been known to beat, shun, and insult deaf folks who got cochlear implants and got their hearing back…..

            2. You reminded me…

              This TV show is a regular after the New Year’s festivities in Japan. Basically, it’s a series of amateurs, doing various short scenarios of their own devising. For example, one of the ones this time was one young girl, doing a recreation of the story of Little Red Riding Hood. She had a recorded voice narrating, as she came out and capered in the forest, then flipped over and showed us the wolf (a head and skin hiding under her skirts, that popped up when she did a backbend!). Then she pushed the forest backdrop around, and showed us grandma’s bed. From which popped a huge wolf’s head that gobbled her up! But then she cut her way out, with grandma!

              But the one that really caught my imagination was the very last one. This was a group of deaf people, who did a very simple performance once they had been introduced. First, the background voice asked, “What is the sound of rain?” Then, in silence, they showed us a set of dark rods, and light streamed down the rods. Like rain, falling silently.

              Then the voice asked, “What is the sound of lightning?” And there was a sudden shower of golden lines in front of the lines of rain. Again, in silence.

              Finally, the voice asked, “And what is the sound of a rainbow?” This time, they cleared the rain and lightning away, and a set of dark pipes, like a musical staff, were raised across the stage. Then they scrubbed at the pipes, and the dark covering broke off and fell away, revealing a rainbow, red, yellow, green, blue. And then they lifted round golden drops against the rainbow, from lower left, step by step towards the upper right. And notes followed, do, re, me, fa, so…

              Somehow, that final rainbow, with the simple notes climbing, made me cry.

              What is the sound of a rainbow? For those who cannot hear…

            3. Cochlear implants (the only current technology that can make deaf folk hear) are a mixed blessing—because they basically work by turning up the volume. Many deaf folk who get them lose the remaining hearing that they had through damage*. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for them to be against the thinking that pushes those sorts of “fixes” over things like ASL, which will last them a lifetime.

              *Found this out from a deaf woman whose parents were instructed NOT to learn sign language, because it would only make it harder for her later in life. So she spent a lot of her childhood unable to communicate.

              1. I got hearing aids last year. They turned out to be much less useful than I’d hoped, because making voices louder simply proved that most people can’t speak intelligible English to start with.

                There’s at least one book, and many web pages, of White House transcripts, with various Presidents and politicians talking to each other. For the Johnson and Nixon administrations, it’s like reading a transcript of a bunch of people with Tourette’s Syndrome; sentence fragments, profanity, and a lot of “Huh? What?” going back and forth.

                I think that’s why so many people get upset when they hear their recorded voice played back. What they *think* they said and what’s on the tape are often vastly different.

                1. There was a point when I could speak without the intrusions. That happened to be the point when I was regularly reading news on the radio.

                  The annoyance tends to be more “that’s not what my voice sounds like!” Bone conduction changes your voice a lot, especially making it more resonant inside your head, so when you hear it recorded it sounds thin and insincere. The only way to get over it is to hear your recorded voice a lot, just like seeing photos of yourself. (Quick trick to get people to like photos of themselves—mirror them left-to-right. The annoyance in that case is that most people are asymmetrical enough that they don’t recognize the face they see in the mirror, and it’s Uncanny Valley territory.)

          2. The mall in town still has “handi-capable” parking signs outside the mall entrances, leftovers from that era.

      2. So basically if you’re a white male in Canada and want a government job, you need to find that Marine Sarah referenced in yesterday’s post and see if he has something in your size that he’d be willing to lend you…

      3. I will jump at the opportunity to quote Florence King on this one: “Feminists will not be satisfied until every abortion is performed by a gay black doctor under an endangered tree on a reservation for handicapped Indians.”

      4. Well the most importantest Broadway show evah did have a ‘no whites need apply’ at least at first.

      5. Yeah, they have that for some government jobs in the US. Specifically, they can totally get away with pretty much stating in the Bureau of Indian Affairs that if you’re not Native American, you ain’t gonna get a job. (I applied anyway, but was not surprised to get the “there were sufficient Native American candidates ahead of you…” rejection.)

        And people can–and have frequent success–claim that they didn’t get that government job because racism/sexism, and usually the hiring people cave.

        1. Not to mention that there are whole categories of “minority set-asides” in government grants and contracts.

        2. It’s hardly surprising to find BIA acting unconstitutionally, given that the simple act of walking into the door there is unconstitutional.

        3. Well, given that reservations are *supposed* to be sovereign nations, that one actually makes sense. Of course, we’re not actually treating them as such…

          1. Perhaps so, but BMI isn’t any Indian reservation. It’s a Washington nanny bureaucracy created on the racist theory that indians are unable to handle their own affairs. For example, what other population group is forbidden to own real estate, and instead has its real estate “held in trust” by the federal government?

            1. Indians are not forbidden to own property. Nor are Indians required to live on reservations. (Well, other than by the race husslers, to be counted as “real” Indians; it also neatly stacks the deck so that anybody who’s successful doesn’t count.)

              The tribal lands are held in trust– kind of like “our” parks and such.

              1. Ok, I was talking about tribal lands. That’s not like “our” parks at all. (Never mind that those parks are not constitutional either.) How can a government square the notion that Indian tribes are sovereign with the notion that they can’t handle their own property? And even if they aren’t sovereign — even if they are just US citizens with no distinct rights — denying them the right to dispose of that property is bizarre. It’s a relic of 19th century paternalism, and it’s way past time for it to be discarded as the outrageous and unconstitutional absurdity it is.

                1. You still vastly misstated the case– there are actual examples of people who aren’t allowed to own property.

                  The tribal property is probably a less problematic issue than the national parks, because the tribes didn’t have quite the same idea of property that we do. (…well, as folks here have pointed out, a lot of modern places don’t have the idea of property down that well, it’s more “if I can pry it up, it’s mine.”)

                  I have heard of tribes trading land, so it seems you’re overstating that case, as well. Individuals can’t.

  10. I’ve come to believe that people when people resort to epithets and name-calling, it’s almost invariably because they lack more effective means of persuasion. if people respond to my comments by calling me a darkophobe or a boohisst, it does not either persuade me of either the correctness of their positions or their goodwill and friendship.

    1. Judicious use can be made of insults to indicate certain lines that should not have been crossed, have been; to mock that which is mockworthy; and to ridicule the truly ridiculous (another word that has, sadly, shifted in meaning over the years.) It can also be used to break the stride of the other person’s thoughts. The key is the ‘judicious’ use of insults. In line with the over all theme of the post, over use of insults can lead to decreased effectiveness to insults in general, not just to specific insults.

      1. Judiciousness entails reason and restraint, two qualities not notably present in those prone to substitute name-calling for persuasion.

        1. You also need to keep in mind cultural differences. Ages ago, 1930s maybe, A British cricket team was touring Australia. One of the British players went into the Australian clubhouse to complain to the coach that one of his players had called him a bastard and that epithets had no plce on the playing field. The Aussie coach turned to his players and yelled out. “Which of you bastards called this bastard a bastard?” The whole nation laughed when it was reported in the press.

          1. Apparently the player had made it all the way from Britain to the pitch without actually encountering any Australians…

  11. How to recapture the meaning of the words that have become meaningless due to their extreme misuse by leftists as epithets that all boil down to, “you’re contradicting leftist dogma!”? I think the only way to do that is to say that the words have real meaning but that when uttered by leftists the meanings are removed, because leftists always lie. So when screamed by SJWs, the faux-epithets are just virtue-signaling bleatings. They might be worth considering when used by people worthy of intellectual respect, but not when used by mindless (and I’m using that word figuratively, of course) leftist drones spouting their rhetorical credos.

    1. I have to agree.
      If any of a thousand trolls online were to call me an “-ist”, they would be promptly ignored.
      But if I were accused by one of Huns, I would have to seriously consider there accusation.(Combination of respect and the knowledge that Huns actually know what these words mean!)

  12. Racism lead to racial discrimination, unfair testing at polls, and all the other various Jim Crow laws.

    Arguable not. The Democrats, not satisfied with losing a presidential election, escalated to civil war, and lost. Jim Crow was arguably motivated by a combination of lust for power and dissatisfaction with the extremely mild (relative to many other civil war losses) consequences of starting and losing a civil war. Their major opposing forces for said consequences were carpet baggers, scalawags, and the Freedman’s Bureau. Carpet Baggers no longer had balance of force after the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. Scalawags were always a local political minority, and hence eventually easy to intimidate. Segregation countered the Freedman’s Bureau.

  13. I’m calling them “ISIS supporters.” Is that fair? Maybe not, but then they aren’t being fair in calling us Nazis, racists, etc.

    1. I think “committed leftist, and therefore a liar” works just as well. Chanting “everything you say is a lie” at them in response to their shrieking might be useful too…

    3. And if they complain, you can ask them why exactly they are against supporting Egyptian goddesses? Is it because they’re racist or sexist or deityist?

      Yeah, the boys and I can’t listen to news in public because we crack up giggling every time. Did anyone ever *tell* them what their acronym means in English?

      1. Yeah, the boys and I can’t listen to news in public because we crack up giggling every time. Did anyone ever *tell* them what their acronym means in English?
        ————————–

        Could be worse.

        Are you familiar with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front? They are a very real organization in the Philippines, with links to al Qaeda.

      2. Yes– like every other thing they didn’t like, they killed them….

        I prefer Daesh, since using that one is a death sentence in their area of contol, and it worksnicely with Daesh-bags.

  14. “The disease can then run away, controlled or contained only by whatever lingering immune response society has left. Despite hysterical claims, that is NOT the case right now.”

    It’s not the case that it’s running away, but the resistant strains of the disease are already cropping up, and it’s becoming patently obvious that the supposed doctors are badly trained and just throwing antibiotics at any problems that happen to come up.

  15. How could you forget “Islamophobe”?!

    I can make a statistical observation about Islam and violence, or point out that culturally it’s very oppressive to women and minorities, and I’m a “ZOMG ISLAMOPHOBE!!!11”, but some bohemian trust fund baby can make statistically unsupportable generalizations regarding Christians and they’re lauded as a “Free Thinker! YAY!”

    I’m still of a mind that this diseased thinking isn’t going away anytime soon since they’re teaching Critical Theory as “critical thinking” in universities. It’s baked into so many present-day academic assumptions that some professors aren’t even aware of it.

    Thankfully I’m encountering a few actual young free thinkers these days that recognize the bullshit for what it is.

    1. ‘How could you forget “Islamophobe”?!’

      There are likely many others, but one needs to stop staring into the abyss sometime.

      Or: Ox slow.
      Take yer pick.

      My fear is that I might be right that one day the Islamists will get The Bomb and be stupid enough to use it… and the reply will be “Defensive Genocide” to wipe out the ‘Moslem World’ so It. Will. Not. Happen. Again. We might “hate ourselves in the morning.” BUT… we’ll be alive TO “hate ourselves in the morning.” And anyone bitching about will be asked, “So, wanna be NEXT, do you?”

      1. Seems likely. There are a few Lefty passive-ists who will be defending the bad guys even while they’re being beaten to death, but for the vast majority, “we have to understand the root causes” ends when it gets personal. There were “peace” movements that cropped up immediately after 9/11, but very few of those were in New York; there, they were more than happy to sign up for the “bomb them back to the Stone Age” campaign (or in the case of the Taliban, “bomb them forward to the Stone Age”).

      2. No question that you’re right. Nuclear genie left its bottle a long time ago. Actually surprising given the dissolution of the old USSR that a few pony nukes have not already been deployed, but so far by grace and luck we’ve dodged that bullet. But it’s only a matter of time.
        The real question, left to the students to answer for themselves, is who will be put in the role of exterminator, the US or the Israelis? I suppose it’s conceivable that it will be some third party pinch hitter, but those two seem the most likely to suffer the initial attack and have the will and wearwithall to provide an adequate response.

      3. Oh, I know you didn’t forget it. It’s just that it’s the -phobe du jour since Trump started personally deporting innocent immigrant mothers. They couldn’t quite get “racist” to stick, so they’re running with “misogynist” for their -ist and “islamophobe” for their -phobe.

        I’m sure they’ll spin the grievance wheel next week to mix it up. Gotta keep those identity grievances fresh, doncha know.

        1. Pure and innocent identity thieves who were doing their victims a favor by swelling their lifetime earnings.

          I have seen leftists who continue that line after hearing from another commenter about his disabled neighbor who would have starved without the commenter’s charity, because an identity thief stole his SSN and thus cut off his disability checks.

      4. The way things are going, if the jihadists use The Bomb, they’ll get a thank-you note. That, unfortunately, is not a joke. The reaction to the dam in California this week has been “It’s California.” When we cease to care about the well-being of our fellow Americans, the schism has perhaps become irreconcilable.

        1. Spending billions on fast rail to nowhere, literally dozens of feel good enviro positive investments to benefit some tiny endangered species, but ignoring engineering reports that a dam’s infrastructure is in desperate need of reinforcement. The pity of it all is that the ones responsible won’t be the ones to suffer the consequences.

          2. Just as Roman engineers were made to lie under their new stone bridge while the bridge was traversed by a century, as a test – it would be nice if California public-works managers had to live downstream of dams, etc. All a matter of perspective…

            1. It is (or used to be) a tradition in the USAF, that some of the maintenance crew rode along on the first check flight after a major repair.

            2. Well, they were absolutely certain and all the forecasts told them they would never have to worry about something like getting 2 1/2 years of rain in one rainy season….

          3. I was reading that they’ve allowed the evacuated people back home. And all I could think was “I…am pretty sure they couldn’t have fixed that problem in just a couple of days…”

            And if I was one of those people, I’d only go home long enough to get the irreplacable family stuff, and then I’d get the heck out of Dodge.

          4. The pity of it all is that the ones responsible won’t be the ones to suffer the consequences.
            —————————-

            Maybe, maybe not.

            After leaving the dam, the water turns south, and pretty much makes a beeline right for Sacramento.

            1. It’s not Sacramento. It’s Southern California. (They’re the ones who benefit from the water storage and they are the direct reason repairs weren’t made—they would have had to pay for them.) And the Yolo Bypass has plenty of storage capacity—it may only be 10-12 feet deep at flood, but it’s 60 miles long by 2 miles wide.

              1. You do realize that it’s the Bay Area Democrats that run the state, don’t you? Pretty much every state-wide governmental position is filled by someone from the Bay Area. In the recent contest to fill Boxer’s Senate seat, it was the Democrat from the north – Kamela Harris – that beat out the Democrat from the south – Loretta Sanchez. Blaming the state’s issues on the southern end of it is disingenuous at best.

                Also, the big black hole project right now is Brown’s High Speed Rail. That’s where all the money is going these days.

                1. Don’t even get me started on that boondoggle. I was against it when it was up for vote because no matter how much I would *love* high speed rail up and down the West Coast, I knew they were going to screw it up.

                  And gee, why is the ‘environment-loving Democrat’ the one pushing the fracking*? I wonder.

                  *While I don’t think that fracking is inherently evil, I think that using a water-intensive method of fuel extraction that has a high risk of polluting aquifers a STUPID thing to do in a state which is both water-poor and unique in its premium farming land.

        2. The FIRST time, maybe. But remember the USA is Bugs Bunny writ large (or Bugs is the USA condensed). Once… might be well met with a shrug.
          Twice… if they’s REALLY (un?)lucky… a second shrug.
          Thrice? The gloves are OFF. And the terms are simple:
          UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER .
          But if that’s unacceptable we have another option:
          THEIR UTTER AND COMPLETE DESTRUCTION.
          If they are really, Really, REALLY lucky, we’ll give them the option of taking the first choice.

          1. We’re nice people, but push us far enough and we will force you into starvation, bomb your cities into rubble, set that on fire, and hand half of you over to your absolute worse enemies to do with as they please.
            Then we will make nice after you give up.
            And note that 1930’s America was even more anti-war than the current lot.

            1. A little “nit-picking” here.

              The “anti-war” position of the 1930s was more “why should we get involved in Europe’s wars” than it was anti-war in general. 😉

          2. The FIRST time, maybe. But remember the USA is Bugs Bunny writ large (or Bugs is the USA condensed).

            Drat. I was hoping for Droopy Dog.

        3. I suspect that the reaction to California’s Oroville Dam has been some form of, “So, how’s that secession idea looking now?”

        4. (only slightly sarcastically) I din’t even realize there was any water *left* in California — I thought it was all being shunted into the Pacific to protect the delta smelt (or whatever it is)

            1. A couple of drops here and there, indeed. Now, if only the Central Valley would fill up again into the giant marsh that it was before the 1870s and drainage began . . .

              1. Or, they could get a repeat of the Great Flood of 1862.

                It started with heavy rain and snow in the mountains in early November 1861, continuing unabated into January 1862, with continuous rain for weeks. The San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys became a 300 mile-long sea, averaging 20 miles wide and up to 30 feet deep, covering more than 5,000 square miles. And then the weather warmed up and the snowpack began to melt.

                And that’s just central California. Things were similarly damp in southern and northern California, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, New Mexico and Arizona. And the state of Sonora, MX.

                1. We’ve been *this* close to a hundred year flood here. The last was in the seventies. But we got a hard freeze and that slowed things down just enough that the rivers haven’t passed six inches above banks, and they do that much pretty much every March/April.
                  Except for this being February. Which was when the last bad flood was here. So it’s an unusual but not unprecedented weather pattern.

                  Reporting from muddy and icy S.E. Idaho.

                2. They’ve modeled that. It’s called the Arkstorm. (It’s an acronym, but you *know* they picked that on purpose.) What they’re trying to do now is figure out how flood-control measures could prevent utter disaster.

                  On a slight tangent, one problem of the drought years is depleting aquifers. They’re running limited testing now to see which orchard species tolerate basically being flooded for a few months (to a depth of a foot or less) as a method of trying to replenish the aquifers through field absorption.

                  1. the only pert that is desertified is about halfway between Bakersfield and the Tejon pass, which isnt where the swamps and bodies of water were anyway

        5. Depending on where they use it, *I* may send them the note.

          You know, I think my observation of “the poor bastards think they’re winning” may work on the lefty idiots as well as on the Muslim extremists

      5. Richard Fernandez over at The Belmont Club has been writing about this (among other things) for a number of years now. He wrote up a pamphlet collecting all the material together and it is on Amazon as The Three Conjectures.

      6. As has been said before: “When a brown man rages, cities burn, when a white man rages, continents burn.”

        1. “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve”

          — attributed to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto regarding the bombing of Pearl Harbor

          1. There is no evidence that Yamamoto said it. That line, like The quote from 1776 attributed to Ben Franklin – “You should know that rebellion is always legal in the first person, such as “our rebellion.” It is only in the third person – “their rebellion” – that it is illegal.” – is in the category of “they didn’t say it, but they damn well should have!”.

    2. I usually respond to the “-phobe” shrieks with, “No, I’m not afraid of them; I’m sardonic toward them. So I’m actually an Islamo- [or whatever the identity-group-du-jour is] sardone, not an Islamophobe.”

        1. I am not, nor have I ever been, an Islamosardine. And I’ll excoriate anyone who claims otherwise. 🙂

    3. At the rate which the various -isms, -ists and -phobias are now increasing it would take several blogs to list them all, and by the time they were collected, posted and read they would be out of date.

      1. See, that’s the problem. You’re looking at the trees and missing the forest. Ignore just what they’re shrieking, and deny them any authority at all by virtue of their being leftists and therefore automatically liars.

  17. How could you forget “Islamophobe”?

    I can make a statistical observation about Islam and violence, or that culturally it’s very oppressive to women and minorities, and I’m a “ZOMG ISLAMOPHOBE!!!11”, but some bohemian trust fund baby can make statistically unsupportable generalizations regarding Christians and they’re lauded as a “Free Thinker! YAY!”

    I’m still of a mind that this diseased thinking isn’t going away anytime soon since they’re teaching Critical Theory as “critical thinking” in universities. It’s baked into so many present-day academic assumptions that some professors aren’t even aware of it.

    Thankfully I’m encountering a few actual young free thinkers these days that recognize the bullshit for what it is.

  18. Another example of the “thank you effect” in restaurants is the really annoying greeting that gets yelled across quick service restaurants as soon as you walk in the door. An employee frequently will interrupt a customer interaction to deliver the greeting. This is generally in franchises where they’ve hired the same consulting firm that the others have hired and tells them all the same damn thing. I don’t find it welcoming, but off-putting, impersonal, and distracting.

    Sort of like getting called “racist” for pointing out Obama’s policy disasters.

    2. Not just restaurants, either. I was walking into Walgreens the other day, minding my own business, when the cashier from halfway across the room, who was working on something, just had to interrupt her work and my thought processes by greeting me, loudly, and forcing me to return her greeting, in a rather lame and quiet manner. By the time she saw me, I was halfway down an aisle and well in front of her. I had to look around to see who was talking to me. Extremely annoying. And it happens each time I walk in there.

    3. Plus, the greeting (or later proforma politesse) often includes the phrase “you guys” – said to me and my wife, who is definitely not a “guy”. If I were inclined to react to microagressions as SJWs do, it would evoke a loud reaction; in my case, more like a quiet snort.

      1. Please note that “you guys” is a Yankee-ism (except in the Bronx, where it is “youse guys”) and contrasts with the innately hospitable “y’all” of the Southern states.

    4. The greeting is actually more than just being polite. At the various retail stores I’ve worked at, we were always informed that greeting someone when they first walk into a store makes it less likely that the individual will shoplift while inside the store. So what you’re encountering is practices developed to boost loss prevention of merchandise.

      Though admittedly, shoplifting is probably much less of an issue at a restaurant…

      1. “A helpful smile in every aisle!” advertises friendliness and helpfulness – and a greeting by each worker implies “we’re everywhere” as a deterrent. The lesser traveled (by employees) at a store are where the obvious cameras (and/or things that look like they are cameras) are located.

      2. I recall a period when the restaurant industry was highly concerned over the way people helped themselves to the artificial sweetener packets, although I suppose we’re past the days of silverware and salt ‘n’ pepper shakers walking out.

  19. As a tangent, there is a growing body of evidence that artificial sweeteners are a big culprit in Type II diabetes. It works like this: the body detects sweetness, makes insulin to deal with sugar, then doesn’t have sugar (sucrose, glucose, or fructose) to deal with. Too much insulin for the situation = increasing resistance.

    My theory of healthy eating is don’t try to fool your body. If you’re eating something that’s supposed to be sweet, it should have the sweeteners that your body expects. If you have something that’s supposed to be fatty, it should have fat in it. (They use skim milk to fatten hogs, you know.) All of the low-fat fat-free artificial-sweetener stuff in the American diet messes with our delicately balanced systems. (My rant on how Americans view food is very long-winded and I won’t post it here. Short version: why the hell should people feel GUILTY about eating?)

    1. There is a reason $HOUSEMATE and I now drink unsweetened tea, unsweetened cold brew coffee, or some version of water. (Alright, and the occasional drink with alcohol – but additionally sweetened stuff? Damned rare.)

      1. I’ve mostly switched to unsweetened ice tea, I’ve found it actually goes quite well with my JD.

      2. The problem is that almost every prepared food has either sugar or artificial sweetener in it. Even things that have no obvious need for it.

        To me, Stevia tastes like licking a 9 volt battery. I used to be a Cokeaholic; I had to quit cold turkey because even regular Coke (and everything else) is full of it now. (The FDA allows manufacturers to substitute artificial sweeteners for the real thing without even putting it on the label; you can find the notice on fda.gov.)

        The new kid on the block is erithrytol, which doesn’t actually taste that bad, but causes severe intestinal distress.

        Even medicines in liquid or pill form are full of sweeteners.

        1. Splenda can cause “Intestinal Distress” in me (their term under “possible side effects”). Felt like a severe case of food poisoning, and after finding the source it turns out to be true. Stevia less so, but it’s not something I an willing to try and match. One session of Stevia in a Coke, and I decided that less severe was still too severe for me. I wasn’t violently ill, but my gut was not amused afterward.

          1. The only artificial sweetener I can tolerate is aspartame. All the others either give me a metallic aftertaste or just plain taste funny in a way I can’t describe, but it isn’t sweet. Stevia is especially funny tasting.

            But then, despite both Coca-Coal INC and PEPSICO denials that it can be done, if you give me a side by side tasting of one of their sodas made with cane sugar and one with high fructose corn syrup, I can tell you which is which. As can everyone in my family. But then I have acquaintances who can’t tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi- so I doubt they can tell the difference between cane sugar and the corn syrup sweeteners.

            1. Not sure I can tell the difference, but I know some who can and they tend to describe HFCS or artificial sweeteners as having an acrid “burnt plastic” sort of flavor.

              1. I cannot abide most artificial sweeteners, and as a result try to keep myself down to one Real Coke and a bunch of water per day. The only thing I ever had any luck with was a homebrewed ratio of 1/2 cup agave nectar, a cup of Splenda and a quarter cup of sugar to get 2-cups-of-sugar sweetness. Anything else leaves a nasty burn in my throat.

                1. Brings flashbacks of the 80s New Coke disaster. Really, if you’re going to make a soda that tastes like Pepsi, I think most folk will actually go for Pepsi. And then they said they were going to go back to the Original Recipe. They lied

            2. The Woodman’s in GB sells Mexican Coke in 6 packs. Yes, Coke with Sugar is very much better.
              HEB in Texas has Sugar versions of their store brand drinks. I hate their cola, but love the sugar version, especially in glass bottles, but I even like the canned one.
              Aspartame leaves much the same after taste as saccharin does for me. I dislike diet soda, greatly.

              1. I cannot abide artificial sweeteners in any form – any soda with any form of artificial sweetener in it, I can taste immediately. Good thing that I have no real taste for soft drinks – no, I never found them particularly thirst-quenching, either. Only ice tea, or plain water works for me in the heat.
                But the HEB pure cane-sugar soft drinks are pretty tasty. My daughter likes them, And there are a couple of small manufacturers in Texas who have excellent versions of old-fashioned fountain soft-drinks. Dublin Bottling Works is one. http://www.dublinbottlingworks.com/
                And there is a little deli in downtown San Antonio, just around the corner from the Alamo that has their own root beer. Which is absolutely splendid.
                Schilo’s Delicatessen on East Commerce. I won’t post a link to their website, as this will likely put this into moderation. But their sandwiches are fantastic, the root-beer too – and the service is awesome. I even put a couple of references to Schilo’s in the Luna City books, as they have been around since forever. They are right across from a McDonalds. I simply do not see how the McDonalds gets any business at all, across from Schilos’ – it’s that good, and hardly any more expensive.

                1. Dublin sure does a lot of soda for being a little bitty town.
                  BTW, don’t try to do a motorcycle ride through Dublin on St Paddy’s Day weekend. Lucky me, I was not with that group, and came at Woody’s Steakhouse from Stephenville.

            3. Back in my Cokeaholic days I usually consumed a 2 or 3 liter bottle every day. With bottles from the same plant, I could easily tell the difference between bottles from lot to lot.

              It did make me less derisive of the wine snobs, though I still find many of their descriptions to be risible.

      3. Honey is my sweetener of choice.

        I’m almost out of the gallon that I bought last summer at the farmers’ market, and market season doesn’t start for another three months.

        *sigh*

    2. I came to the conclusion some time ago that I shouldn’t eat anything my body can’t absorb, (that it’s supposed to. Yes, I realize that things like cellulose cannot be absorbed by humans, but I’m in reference to artificial replacements.)
      And my cooking has only gotten better since.

    3. I have often wondered how safe the assumptions are, that certain things can’t be absorbed by the body. “Left-handed” sugar? What happens to the poor soul who happens to have a gene that processes it as regular sugar? Cellulose for a replacement for fat in yogurts, etc? Who’s to say that no one has fauna in their gut that would just *love* to process it, and give their hosts the sugars, in much the same way that termites have such fauna in their guts?

      I have the funny feeling that such things can backfire, which is doubly ironic when often (albeit not always) all one has to do to lose weight is to cut back on the portions.

      1. eat less, move more.
        it works.
        As does “not enough money to buy food”
        I disrecommend that last one, but it was the last time I was 180 pounds.

  21. Like hot & spicy food, the human mind becomes inured to over-used words and phrases. Each time such an accusation is hurled the “heat” of it relative to ordinary discourse diminishes.

    This also occurs in regard to profanity, where words oft used lose their power to shock. For historical portrayals this poses the problem (as explained by producers of the series Deadwood) of balancing between historically accurate language and historically reflective language — the 19th Century’s “Oh Fudge!” must be replaced because modern language fails to recognize the emotional force of that phrase in that era. Hard as it is to believe, for a very long period people believed that “Damn you” was to express a fervent wish for the target’s eternal damnation to Hell’s warm embrace.

    Even now it is difficult to recall the force such words as racist once held; one wonders what Historians centuries from now will make of its use.

    1. There is a place that was an old fishing spot a bit north of a line between Battle Creek and Ann Arbor. The men’s wives would say that the men “went to Hell” and thus was the place named. It is now more ‘tourist trap’ than anything. I did visit it, and made a point of buying a shirt there. Thus if/when someone tells me to “Go to Hell!” my reply is/will be: “Been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt.” And I did and do.

        1. According to Dante part of it’s always been frozen over, the Ninth Circle specifically. So I try very hard not to be surprised by anything nowadays. 😀

          2. Try Hell’s Half Acre, Idaho. It’s a bit north of us, and out in the Craters of the Moon area, and I doubt it was above freezing. Or that there’s a weather station there, but it’s near the INL, and they’re bound to have them.

        3. The Warner Brothers (and the Warner Sister!) paid Hell a visit and froze it. (“Do you know how long it takes to get the pilot lit?!”)

    2. South Park had an episode that touched on, among other things, how overusing profanity is a bad thing.

      (plus it apparently causes your intestines to explode out of you, or something like that)

      1. Me, I defer to the master of the craft:

        “Never use profanity or obscenity unless the profanity is so profane or the obscenity so obscene that people will be too interested to be shocked.” — Gen George S Patton Jr.

    3. The word “Damme!” was a major plot point in HMS Pinafore. The part that amuses me is that the whole chorus of sisters, cousins, and aunts, who are predictably horrified by this, repeat it several times. “He said damme!” Well, so did you…

      1. *Sigh* I miss Gilbert and Sullivan. The local little theater doesn’t do it any more, even though “Pirates of Pinzance” was their single most successful show (extended for a month, it sold out so quickly.)

  23. I find it very tiresome to be accused of making the same mistake the social justice warriors make of treating people wholesale by identity groups. I prefer to observe each person as an individual and then practice discernment in regards to them based on their individual actions. Even social justice warriors.

  24. Words still have power.
    Happened upon a TV interview the other day. What appeared to be an attractive dark haired young lady in the space of three minutes managed with her statements to transform herself into a vicious evil witch whom I would have gladly soaked in gasoline and struck a spark to. She was boasting how she and her ilk had triumphed by stopping some dude she called Milo from speaking at Berkeley a few days before. She was proud of denying him his right to free speech simply because she disagreed with his opinions. And as an added sentiment allowed as how their destruction of university property was completely justified since the school had the audacity to schedule Milo for a talk.
    My thought was, you silly stupid fool. You’re setting the Rules of Engagement with no understanding that they always cut both ways.

    2. “And as an added sentiment allowed as how their destruction of university property was completely justified since the school had the audacity to schedule Milo for a talk.”

      Not that it would be any better if she were correct, but based on what I’ve heard, the rioters didn’t destroy so much “university property” as they did local businesses, including a Starbucks–which, given that it was a Starbucks in Berkeley, was almost certainly owned and staffed entirely by people who agree with this young witch.

      1. I believe there were damages to a couple of bank branches, because, you know, access to cash and capital is so oppressive.

    3. > without regard

      That’s because nobody has ever done that to them.

      They’re in for an unfortunate learning experience.

    4. It’s unpleasant when they take their masks off.

      They are definitely in for an unpleasant shock if they continue with their antics.

  25. That “thank you” happens whether it makes any sense or not, and happens at every interaction.

    The ‘thank you’ is a symbolic substitute for providing actual attentive polite costumer service. Why would such be mandated? It is easier to require and monitor the use of form than to train in and objectively measure substance.

    1. Aye. Kind of like how BMI is a lousy measure, but it’s easy to compute/measure. Easy wins over worthwhile, too oft. Until it bites enough in the fundamental orifice.

      1. just went through this with a spirometer when I told them up front I never smoked, and in high school had the second highest lung volume even though I was 5’6″ and 150 lbs. The stupid things are made to make you cough, not measure volume. The first three tests, it rejected as too large for someone my size. after that it claimed too fast, then the coughing started, and she had deleted my first ones so none passed.
        Doc read results, listened to me, and admitted they need a different machine.

  26. My pet language peeve (in English, anyway) is the near-universal abuse of “they” as a singular pronoun. Even a very non-PC SF novelist I know has succumbed to this (maybe the fact that he’s a teacher caused the infection). At every opportunity I point out that “he” is the gender-neutral singular pronoun in English. Then again, I enjoy the computer science geek technique of flipping between “he” and “she” every other sentence.

    1. Well, I enjoyed what David Weber did in the Honorverse.

      Any time one of his characters referred to a “hypothetical” opponent, the opponent was the same sex as his character.

      IE a Male Character would refer to the hypothetical opponent as another male while a Female Character would refer to the hypothetical opponent as another female.

      1. (s)he works but there is no uncluttered form to use for “his”. “it” isn’t a gender neutral personal pronoun, it’s a word to refer to non-humans. The linguistically correct statement is that “he” (and related forms) is a word used to refer to humans either of male gender, or of unstated gender. The PC attempt to claim otherwise is a perversion of science.

        1. Hey, if they can repurpose “they” to be a singular pronoun, we can repurpose “it” to be a personal pronoun. 😉

          I’m fine with the correct “he,” of course. Just poking a bit…

          1. The problem with simply adhering to classic English usage (I am conservative: I don’t need to cater to fashion) is the distraction it allows our ideological opposition to deploy. Instead of being forced to address our actual arguments they are able to jump up and down screaming “He used a naughty word! He’s insensitive!”

            Tedious, especially as they never attempt rebuttal of our arguments anyway.

            1. Just respond, “I see that you haven’t actually responded to the issue at hand but have just whined about a minimally-important violation of your politically-correct speech code. Is this because you are unable to respond to the issue, or are you just uninterested in doing so?”

              1. No, just respond with “I know you are but what am I?” That’s a good step above the level of discourse the Left’s using when they sling their would-be insults about.

        2. It is certainly used to refer to humans. Consider the conversation:
          “Who is it?”
          “It’s the plumber.”

      2. What about the “(s)he” technique? Or the other gender-neutral singular pronoun, “it”?

        Saw someone a while back using s/h/it. I thought it was clever, but haven’t dared bust it out anywhere that matters.

    3. > they

      I was taught that in four different school systems across the country, circa 1960s-1970s.

      I read a fair bit, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen “he” used for an indefinite singular pronoun.

      1. Really? It was pretty much the only indefinite singular pronoun ever used before the 1960s. And it’s listed as such in the style manuals.

    4. “Then again, I enjoy the computer science geek technique of flipping between “he” and “she” every other sentence.”

      I’ve done that, but you have to be careful. I just alternated he and she each time I needed it, and then got asked, “Hey how come “he” did the right thing, but “she” pushed the wrong button?”

    5. I find this less troublesome than other solutions; I have come to use “they” more often than not, in part because, for better or for worse, “he” doesn’t seem right anymore when applied to both males and females. I do take some solace, however, that the use of “they” in singular predates all this PC crap, and indeed it predates the “English must be shoehorned into Roman grammar” crap that likely led to “they” being regulated to solely plural.

      (And for what it’s worth, I’ve *never* liked considering “everyone” and “no one” as singular words. They are clearly plural ones. Except for “no one”, which is the empty set, so you could treat it however you darn well please.)

      I can’t stand switching between “he” and “she”, though. When we’re talking about a single person, switching pronouns causes me to wonder who we’re talking about — and it’s especially annoying when we’re talking about the same hypothetical single person.

    6. “They” has been used as an indefinite singular pronoun since the days of Chaucer. English is not the only Info-European language to use this strategy. So it is a little late to complain about it now.

    1. If he does, I’ll disown him. I have exactly zero use for the Ford Motor Company or its products. I’ve bought two new Fords in my life, and both were disasters that nearly bankrupted me – and Ford wouldn’t stand behind either one. Never again.

      And yes, I have thought about this. Even when I was severely unemployed, and considering the uses to which fame could be put, I decided that I would refuse any sort of endorsement deal for Ford.

  28. I like how I can be a libertarian Nazi, a racist mutt, and a de-regulatory fascist, all because I think people should be free. Indeed, I have literally been called a terrorist because I think people should be free to choose their own health care.

    I have made the claim before that I’m a free-market Communist, because I’ve observed that *everything* Communists desire has been achieved in the Free Market, while actual Communist governments always create the very inequality and oppression they claim to oppose. It’s funny, too, that words like “socialist” and “communist” are seldom used as insults, despite the fact that (1) Nazis are socialist — it’s right there in their name, and (2) communists have proved to be just as bad as Nazis.

    It’s funny how a person who believes that we need to have some level of anarchy (and *all* libertarians believe that, to some degree or another) is the equivalent of micro-managing control freaks like Hitler and Mussolini, and at the same time want to starve people, destroy their roads, and keep them in ignorance because of our belief that government shouldn’t, and probably can’t, provide food, transportation, and schooling.

    1. You’re making a category error here. You seem to think that the leftists who shriek these names at us all actually know what said names correctly designate, or if they do know, care that the names are completely incorrect in describing us (and usually are much closer to describing the shriekers themselves). Such is not the case.

      1. I wouldn’t say it’s me who is making the category error, so much as this is the result of leftists making the category error, with amusing results.

      1. With respect to the critics, they only use those terms because “thought criminal” makes their actual objections too overt.

  29. I stumbled across this today, which is somewhat related:

    There are a number of places where we use the term “whitelist”, and one of them (a code comment) was flagged by Policheck. Given that our code is open I’ve gone ahead and simply fixed them all.

    The comments about it are interesting.
    https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/pull/3507

    1. *snort* Like the idiot who tried to ban all uses of the word “black” from military legal (JAG-type) work, and had to be taught that “blackmail” had nothing to do with African-Americans and was the only legal term acceptable for that crime.

        1. Remember that one person in Texas that objected to a fellow board member using the term “black hole”?

        2. Many objections have been recorded to the terms “master-slave” in servo controls and other industrial applications.

          1. Haven’t some object to “male/female” electric/electronic connections?

          2. Happily this problem has been resolved, just so long as you make sure to define it as “Sharia-Compliant” master-slave coupling.

            Professor Uses Lecture to Defend Islamic Slavery
            On February 7, Georgetown University’s Professor Jonathan Brown used his clout as an endowed chair to deliver a defense of the Islamic practice of slavery, which he claimed to be entirely different than slavery in the West.

          3. When I worked in a plumbing department at a big box, had a female customer one day ask “Why do they call them male and female fittings?” I asked, “You really don’t know?” and she said no. I held up my left hand with thumb and forefinger in a circle. Took my right hand fore finger and stuck it in and out of the circle. She got it right away, saying “You plumbers sure have dirty minds!”

            1. Many years ago, on an online forum long defunct, someone posted a pinout with instructions for wiring a high-density DIN connector. It started off, “observing the cable end from the Linda Lovelace point of view…”

            2. She grasped the reference immediately and it is plumbers who have dirty minds?

              Low sense f humour, perhaps, but she has no standing to criticize other people’s minds.

      2. Okay, for some strange reason the comments I’m posting under my (fairly new) wordpress account are ‘awaiting moderation’…is there some weird wordpress limit I’m unaware of…?

        1. They are probably held up in moderation until Sarah can authorize you as a legitimate commenter. I do not know of a certainty, but I believe nobody gets in until they’re an approved account.

          It helps keep down the spam; the trolls are left to the blog’s idiotimmune system.

        3. I wrote a comment this post which included some material on $banned_topic, and accidentally misspelled my handle, getting it stuck in moderation.

          Anyway, wordpress tends to be ‘wait for admin to let you out of moderation’ the first time you post, and I pretty much always get stuck in moderation whenever I misspell my email or handle.

          1. A lot of blogs are set to “first post must be approved” as a spam filter and troll-catcher. Doesn’t always work, but it seems to trim the numbers somewhat.

    2. Yeah, pretty much. I get annoyed at being told what an icky evil -ist I am judging from all my -ism but then I realize I am not required to be what they say nor feel shame because they fling the accusation at me.

      I follow a guilt-based culture. Being lied about merely annoys me greatly.

      1. When young I was extremely cautious of child molesters. There is evidence that my overall strategy was vindicated by effectiveness. Part of my strategy was keeping my own counsel. Any adult with a long term obsession with hurting children has more time to develop tools to help with that than I have to hinder. An adult who wanted to hurt me might have influence with many other adults. I could not simply go with what most adults I knew claimed was true. From there, extending the caution to the whole world was only logical.

      1. Yes they have, but now we hear things like “transphobic” and “panphobic”. “Gender-binary” is an insult. The use of terms like cis-, non-binary, and gender-fluid is fairly new. I recently learned that there was a phobia of “graysexuals” which had nothing to do with FSOG. Some days it feels like I need a decoder ring.

          1. A lot of these new terms are really TMI. (Yes, I know you were being humorous. I did smile at that.) They are meant to get a reaction. Even when the reaction is innocent, like “Hey, TMI,” the -phobe and -phobic suffix comes out, along with the long knives. Which makes me think, it’s the point.

              2. Oh I know, but then I’m old enough to recall when TMI was only the abbreviation for Three Mile Island. And I kinda like monkeywrenching some memeage.

    1. Pretty much– the chance of Hitler coming up is a starting position for way too many, rather than depending on the length of the conversation.

  35. The reason they use -phobia is to render their opponents’ arguments invalid. A phobia is an UNREASONING fear, a form of mental illness; obviously, if your dislike of (fill in the blank) is due to your mental illness, your reasons for the dislike can not be due to sober reflection and reasoned analysis, and can be summarily, and usually contemptuously, dismissed.

    1. There are actually leftists, amazingly enough, who are taken aback when you declare that when they start with accusations of insanity, you obviously haven’t got a strong case.

  36. Pingback: Some Links – Yard Sale of the Mind

  37. I love it when the diatribe goes as follows:

    “You’re a racist, misogynist homophobe who voted for Hitler. BTW, why don’t you like us?”

    Gee, I wonder…

    1. Look, if Hitler and Hillary were on opposite sides on the same ballot, I’d have to say, “Well, I’m only a quarter Jewish; how bad could Hitler be?”
      –Tom Kratman

    2. That is a common High School stance; the “In-Crowd” asserts its dominance by demeaning those outside its borders and invites entry to their group as a means of escaping such opprobrium. Of course, it is also commonly found outside of High School (particularly with sports teams, e.g., Red Sox Nation) and even in the political parties. It seems a fundamental human attribute, this expression of tribalism.

      Power Line cites an interesting aspect of it today, referencing a Christopher Caldwell essay in the Claremont Review of Books:

      “Trump understood something no Republican had understood in decades. The partisan division in the United States was less about ideology than about sociology. Ideology was there, of course, but it arose from the sociology: you look at life differently when you write the rules than when you have to submit to them.”
      http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/02/crb-sanctimony-cities.php

      Although it ought be noted that Peggy Noonan reported a similar dynamic some years ago when she wrote about the difference between the Protected and Unprotected classes — those immune to the collateral negative effects of the policies they advocate and those bearing the brunt of those effects.

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