“Justin Trudeau – not so much racist as slight and ineffectual”, writes Leah McLaren in an enjoyably caustic article. But good as it is, it misses the point.
When I was a kid there were a lot of cowboy movies on TV. I always rooted for the Red Indians, as the term then was. My brother had some books on the Old West and I was fascinated by such things as the Plains Sign Language and the custom of counting coup. Of course when the chance presented itself to dress up I grabbed it enthusiastically. I already had a kind of hippy top that looked vaguely appropriate. My mother and I sewed wool fringing down the sides of a pair of trousers. A headband, a feather, a tin of medium tan shoe polish, and I was all set up to enjoy the fancy dress party and be blackmailed forty-five years later had I been so foolish as to seek public office.
That is why I said Leah McLaren’s article missed the point. Justin Trudeau’s “mystifying youthful makeup choices” do not make him a racist. His only crime then was to be a year or two late to perceive that the party line had changed. His conduct as Prime Minister of Canada is less innocent. In all his many apologies has he ever apologised for using his bully pulpit to condemn others for equally trivial or unintended breaches of the ever-changing code?
A friend of mine, back in the late ’80s, decided to dress for a Halloween party as a Sikh. After a couple failed attempts at wrapping a turban, he decided (in those pre-YouTube days) to seek counsel at the local convenience store (operated, as we were under no obligation not to notice back then, by Sikhs). Not only did the staff there enthusiastically support his costume choice, and explain how to properly wrap the turban, they gave him one of the little sticks apparently used to tuck in the end.
My friend later went on to serve as a US Marshal, but also refrained from running for office.
“I always rooted for the Red Indians, as the term then was.”
Not here, it wasn’t. Here, where they reside, they were Indians. Sometimes just “savages”, if you had ever visited any of the many small-town Minnesota museums detailing the settler massacres and atrocities. Not having hardly ever seen anyone from the actual country of India, we gave THEM some additional labeling to call them out from the real Indians, such as “Indian people – you know – from over in India.”
So, you come down on the “let them persecute us for doing this, and when they do the same thing we just won’t play” school of thought? We’re better then them, so we’ll let them apply stupid rules to us with no danger to themselves? No, thanks. Burn ’em. With glee.
I think the same thing should apply to the health obsessed neo puritans too. Make them live by their own rules. Minute weekly allowance of alcohol, set amounts of exercise, weigh them regularly and tell them that they are obese. That kind of thing.
Yep, peaceful surrender for a quiet life has run its course and failed to deliver, time for Alinsky.
Make the left live and resign by it’s own rules and every time they won’t throw it in their faces till they resign.
Trudeau (Castro Junior)has enough dirt under his carpet anything can sink him….
Actually, he is a racist, he is racist by his own terms and those of the establishment he now heads. Not just once but many times over, and he cannot even say whether that’s the lot.
It is heartwarming that a so called egalitarian has the same rules applied to him as he applies to the common folk.
“His only crime then was to be a year or two late to perceive that the party line had changed.”
His crime (I’ll not say it was his only one) was to join a party where that was the party line.
“In all his many apologies has he ever apologised for using his bully pulpit to condemn others for equally trivial or unintended breaches of the ever-changing code?”
I think this is the point. He’s a member of a movement that have developed and are actively (and retrospectively) enforcing this code on others, that clearly he neither abided by nor believed in himself. But rather than admit that it’s a stupid rule and he doesn’t believe in it himself, he’s instead confessed his sins and sought forgiveness. So is he an imposter – a privileged white racist male cynically pretending to be ‘woke’ just to get elected? Or is he a reformed and repentant sinner? Are they hypocrites and liars, relentlessly seeking the scalps of their enemies (if you’ll forgive my little cultural appropriation there) for breaking their rules, but allowing the same sins among their own?
Although forcing his resignation might be used to make a point to the progressives, about the dangers of forcing standards on others you can’t meet yourself, it’s unlikely to have the desired effect. In such circumstances, the initial reaction is usually to make exceptions for one’s own side, not drop the rules altogether. If that doesn’t work, they’ll turn on him and purge him, and still keep the rules.
It’s what I’ve said before – making them live up to their own rules implicitly acknowledges that the rules should and do apply. That’s not what we want. We always have to make the point that the rules are stupid, and they shouldn’t and don’t apply, and call on him instead to defy the mob and denounce the rule. The only honest alternative to denouncing it is to resign, but in a sense if he does resign we lose, because that establishes the rule, makes it harder to resist the rule in future cases, and would result in him being replaced by someone even worse. Having seen the penalty for heresy applied to one of their own, they’ll become even more fervent in showing everyone how orthodox they are and how ardent in rooting out heresy in others. If we make him live up to the rules, that then forces us to do so as well if we are not to be portrayed as hypocrites with double standards too.
When Stalin purged even high Party members for heresy against the Party line, it didn’t make the other Party members *less* visibly enthusiastic for strictly applying the rules on their neighbours, denouncing any deviation, or any less visibly supportive of the rules. Quite the reverse! In the face of such a crocodile, the art is to be the last one to be eaten.
In short – we ought to fight the rule, not the man.
In a decent–ie socialist free society–the antics would be of no matter.
But Turdeau is Marxist scum and needs to be hung with his own petard.
There’s a world of difference between respectful imitation and disrespectful aping. Trudeau looks nothing like any middle eastern person(real or fictional) I’ve ever seen in those photos – the shoe-polish black he’s wearing is what you’d put on to imitate black people, not Arabian Nights. Combine that with a Joe Biden level of inappropriate touching, the video that seems to show him dancing like a monkey, and the absolute best case here is that he was acting like a poorly-behaved 15 year old at 29. That’s not a great starting point to run a country.
“I think the same thing should apply to the health obsessed neo puritans too. Make them live by their own rules. Minute weekly allowance of alcohol, set amounts of exercise, weigh them regularly and tell them that they are obese. That kind of thing.”
I’ve often said that the employees of the NHS should be forced to be living examples to everyone else of the State’s authoritarian demands regarding healthy living. Given that the NHS seems to be staffed largely by overweight women, such a program should be interesting to watch, and would probably kill the healthcare nanny state stone dead inside a year.
It can’t be long now before Pantomime is banned, as it breaks every rule in the Social Justice Warrior Woke Code.
Cultural appropriation, men over-represented in women’s roles, browned faces, white male heterosexual supremacist tropes, colonialism, sexism, micro aggression.
“… and the absolute best case here is that he was acting like a poorly-behaved 15 year old at 29. That’s not a great starting point to run a country.”
Sounds to me like an ideal starting point for running a country. Someone with a sense of humour, capable of having fun at a party. Normal. Not a po-faced puritan goody-two-shoes who never misbehaves, never gets dirty clothes playing in the mud, who is sat indoors debating political philosophy while all the other kids are outdoors playing coybody-and-indians, or is studying all evening while every other student is out getting drunk at parties. Granted, you don’t want someone who can’t separate the two, and tries to get drunk and party when they’re supposed to be working. But someone who recognises the value of breaking the rules sometimes, of not always having to be super-serious, that sounds ideal. It’s why we like Boris. It’s how Zaphod Beeblebrox got elected Galactic President.
No, we want someone like that. But we also want them to be honest about it, and stand up for the value of having fun and not taking the rules so seriously.
Personally, I do not find what Trudeau did wrong or offensive. He dressed up in fancy dress at a fancy dress party. Big deal.
Trudeau’s problem is that he is not judged by what I think, but by what he thinks. He is a virtue signalling snowflake, not me. He has broken the woke code. It doesn’t matter to me, but it does to him and the morons who vote for him.
I hope this is the end for the gutless little bitch. I see he is trying to deflect attention by announcing new gun controls (as if they didn’t exist yet in Canada!). The loathsome sex fiend Harvey Weinstein tried the same sort of deflection technique when his disgusting behaviour came to light: “OK, I may have raped a few women, but at least I hate the NRA.”
Didn’t work for Weinstein, I can only hope it doesn’t work for Trudeau. There must be enough Canadians who own guns and hate hypocrites to vote the whiny little puke out of office. If not, good luck Canada, you’ll need it.
Agreed. It’s not a “It’s all finez!” nor is it a “Hands off everything!” issue.
While I think the arguments over cultural appropriation can go too far, most people know what’s appropriate and not appropriate; what is respectful and what is not respectful, what is acceptable, and what is, frankly, being a bit of a knob.
A six year old girl dressing up as a Red Indian in the 70s or 80s is not a call for the Cultural Appropriation Police. Nor is using the term Red Indian.
Blackface in the 2000s? Hmmm. Shouldn’t be illegal…but by then we were all perfectly aware that at best it’s rude. You’d have to read everything that previously oppressed communities had written on the subject, and decided to ignore it. That’s behavior that should raise questions.
Cultural Appropriation is not a black and white issue (as it were). It’s not one for laws and regulations, but a sensible person can notice when someone is being genuine, and when someone is being a knob and shouldn’t be scared to speak up. And the person doing it knows whether they’re being a knob about it, or not.
That said, I’m in agreement that a person who sometimes acted like a knob and has been known to act like any other of us (who amongst us has not occasionally acted like a bit of a knob?) is a better person than someone whose gravest sin was running through someone else’s wheatfield.
“Blackface in the 2000s? Hmmm.”
Is this ‘funny’? In 2004?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Chicks
“You’d have to read everything that previously oppressed communities had written on the subject, and decided to ignore it. That’s behavior that should raise questions.”
Everyone says and does things that other communities have written on at length to complain about. And for most of them, we do decide to ignore it. Who gets to decide which ones we’re not supposed to ignore?
When the early gay rights people first came out to protest, they *knew* that what they were doing was deeply offensive and upsetting to many people. Who decides?
But I guess those were not the sort of questions you meant? 🙂
Of course!
That’s what I meant by “it’s nuanced”.
One could very easily say “Uh, neonsnake. Not being funny, but: Your username is cultural appropriation. You practice Japanese and Okinawan karate and ju-jitsu, to an apparently high level. Your philosophy is Chinese, so you say.
You cook all kinds of cuisine, apparently. And yet, you’re as white as the driven snow.”
Now, am I culturally appropriating?
If so, why?
If not, why not?
I’m going to pass on that one. Sorry brother, I’m just not in the mood right now.
🙂
The “Me Too” movement – the puritan overkill of deploring every bit of lust – would still be going strong in the US had not Senator Al Franken been caught up in it and made to resign. Suddenly after that occurred, progressives were all for “balance” and “proportion.”
And it’s only now that the three-times-a-shady Justin has been caught that I’ve heard a progressive actually say “blackface might not always be racist.”
“Turn the other cheek” mostly just means you’re going to have two sore cheeks.
Go on?
(As you’ve probably guessed, I’m not entirely about having two sore cheeks…)
bobby b
So, you come down on the “let them persecute us for doing this, and when they do the same thing we just won’t play” school of thought? We’re better then them, so we’ll let them apply stupid rules to us with no danger to themselves? No, thanks. Burn ’em. With glee.
FWIW I don’t agree at all. They are just amoral political hacks doing anything to get or retain political power. If you do the same then you are the same. We have to be able to face people and tell them why libertarianism is different, why it isn’t just another political power grab.
That isn’t to say that these sorts of situation are not useful. Next time the left calls someone out we have a chip to play. “We think that people should be free to express themselves however they like, and other’s offense is something that goes on between their ears not before their eyes.” Then you can play the “but if you really think that why didn’t you condemn Trudeau? Or is your offense situational depending on whether it advances your path to power.”
To me that is a far more effective argument than the schadenfreude approach or worse “fight dirty, abandon all principles” approach. It is the long game, not the cheap quick win.
Regardless, I honestly think the argument probably is lost already, so if you are going to sink you might as well do so with some remaining vestige of self respect. How does it go — “[democracy] can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury.” They discovered it. They discovered it good and hard.
Though, perhaps my defeatism is why you feel “fighting dirty” is the way to go.
Fraser O: “Then you can play the “but if you really think that why didn’t you condemn Trudeau?”
The sentiment is understandable — but it has not worked for anyone accused by the MeToo movement to point to Bill Clinton and his abuse of young female underlings (even within the sacred confines of the Oval Office) or the credible allegations of rape against him. Thought experiment — in a parallel universe, if Bill Clinton had been nominated for the Supreme Court in place of Judge Kavanaugh, do you think that past encounters with women would have been brought up at all in the Senate Hearings? The Authoritarians can be quite selective in their indignation.
“… perhaps my defeatism is why you feel “fighting dirty” is the way to go.”
I share your sense that the war has already been lost. There is no peaceful easy way back from the mess that has been growing since the end of WWII. The best we can do is document the lessons from the failures of universal suffrage democracy, and prepare blueprints for a future more sustainable society. Optimistically, better men than us will try to build a better world after the inevitable eventual collapse of the Far Left Authoritarianism which has won this round.
Theresa Bloody May’s greatest sin was not running through someone else’s wheatfields. She just thought it was her most electable sin. Hecworst sin was selling the British public to the EU.
As for cultural appropriation, motivation is irrelevant, it’s an arseholes rule that occasionally backfires on arseholes but mostly hurts ordinary people. When the arseholes who push it fall foul of it, they should suffer its wrath fully whatever their reason.
Eventually nobody who thinks it should be a rule will want to risk it.
Unilateral disarmament is bloodlust stupid.
First be prepared to press the launch button.
Only then can an armistice begin.
As long this shit advances just one side’s politics, it will not be given up.
The objection to Justin Trudeau is not that he was once a teenager and behaved like one. It’s that he still is, and does.
Indeed in these modern liberal times, there’s not a major objection to grown ups, who have not acquired significant responsibilities, like providing for a family, or being Prime Minister of a country, continuing to behave like teenagers. It’s just that he’s a teenage Prime Minister.
Maybe that’s the difference. I see the despairing fatalism rampant among people who live in the dense, progressive urban centers, and I wish they could be exposed to the entire rest of the country that, like me, thinks we’re going to win, and I can almost understand the “going down with dignity” theme.
Almost.
It’s not a theoretical argument anymore. The barbarians and visigoths are at the door, and I can look up out of the quicksand that my generation has allowed ourselves to sink into and easily picture my kids sinking right above me, and I’m not willing to let my self-satisfied picture of “honor” allow that to happen. “Dad brought us all to the chopping block, but, hey, at least he was polite!” Screw that.
These people seek nothing short of mass death, and if I can interfere with that in some way by acting uncivil and dropping the Marquess of Queensberry pretense, I’m all in. I owe my kids at least that much.
@bobby b
Maybe that’s the difference. I see the despairing fatalism rampant among people who live in the dense, progressive urban centers, and I wish they could be exposed to the entire rest of the country that, like me, thinks we’re going to win, and I can almost understand the “going down with dignity” theme.
I am reminded of Yes Minister, the font of all wisdom concerning matters governemnt. In the episode “Equal Opportunities” Hacker, the government minister, is horrified when he sees how few women have top jobs in the civil service and wants to reform the civil service by having more women in top jobs. Appleby, the chief civil servant and a man who considers the word “change” to be unholy, has the following to say.
Hacker: We should promote the best person for the job regardless of whether they are a woman.
Appleby: If you promote the best person for the job you’re going to create a LOT of resentment throughout the civil service.
Hacker: Ha, not among the women!
Appleby: Well, that hardly matters.
Hacker: Hardly matters? Hardly matters?
Appleby: Well there are so few of them.
Which is to say you guys in flyover country may well be passionate, but there are so few of you. And with the left’s plan to import lots of new lefty voters in from every shithole country in the world, your influence is going to diminish even more. Then when they come for your guns, and you refuse, you’ll be side tracked as psycho extremist “militia” types who want to shoot up little kids in school, or burn down your church with all your children in it if the ATF wants to just execute simple little search warrant.
So much as I might be more happy hanging out with your sort of people, back here in the land where the votes are, I don’t think your influence is all that great.
But I did think about what you and Gavin said and I am perhaps softening my position on this. Perhaps I should think of it more as a guerrilla war. A war where the enemy has so overwhelmed you that you have to abandon your moral scruples, and fight a losing battle, but at least keep a little ground on the way down.
But I’m afraid that it is more like the french resistance under Vichy rather than the D-Day. It is an assymetric war. And not because of Obama or Pelosi or even some of the more dreadful Republicans. It is Joe and Mary your next door neighbor (or my next door neighbor perhaps) who have abandoned all pretense at a love of liberty in exchange for free cookies doled out by their new masters. “A republic if you can keep it”? Apparently we can’t.
(FWIW, this is the telling truth and, insofar as there is a solution, it lies here. The root cause of the loss of liberty is not in Washington DC, it is in your local public high school. If there is any chance of a restoration of liberty it will take thirty years, and it will begin by a revolution in our public school system. I might add there is a glimmer of hope here. For many people the quality of education their children get is utterly dreadful, and they know it. That is a wellspring which if tapped could change things. Giving control back to the parents would take away the constant drumbeat of politics that drowns our schools (because much as parents in these aforemention schools tend to, self destructively, be left wing, they don’t care about politics nearly as much as they care about their kids’ education and future. So, like I say, there is a tiny glimpse of hope there. But it is tiny indeed. However, even were the whole country to turn into radical libertarians, it isn’t clear how to fix the problem. How exactly do you dig out of 60 trillion dollars of debt if your whole economy is 20 trillion dollars and bankruptcy isn’t an option.)
OK, sorry rambled on in a depressed manner too long. I am actually a fairly happy go lucky sort of chap.
True, but we’re doughty! 👿
And, remember, I joke about the vast urban SJW centers, but they’re hardly monolithic. Sure, Dems win consistently, but not always by huge margins. And Trump did win the last national election.
One more significant USSC appointment, and we’ll have that branch nailed down for decades. State governments tend to be in our hands, and recent trends (plus the lean of USSC rulings) have power moving their way from the feds. We hold the presidency, and the US Senate, and the US House is well within grasp in the next election.
This is not the picture of a few final tunneled-in holdouts trying to keep out the invasion. You and I aren’t just waiting to die off. But it’s ours to lose, and I think that leaving the field of sharp elbows to the Dems’ rule is a quick way to do so.
Where you live and travel, I suspect that you see your philosophies overwhelmed by the majority’s philosophies, and most of those dissenting do so quietly, because you have to be able to live and function in whatever society surrounds you, but it’s not so overwhelming as it appears – it’s merely enough so that they consistently win your local elections, forever.
But they’re even talking of Minnesota being in play for Trump in 2020. Minnesota! For Trump! If that’s possible, how bad can things be?
No, I think we win.
I recall our own dear Danny Baker’s remark after he was hoist by the same leftist petard over the royal monkey baby picture – “Never occurred to me because, well, mind not diseased”.
This is the real problem, Trudeau and his supporters just think they are the enlightened and can do no wrong. As with any “crime”, the issue is always intention, and as far as Trudeau and his ilk are concerned they never intend anything bad and the nasty non-leftist people always do.
Fraser Orr (September 23, 2019 at 6:02 am), given that Trump is president and Brexit won the vote, I’m not following your “there are so few of you” reasoning here. Do you think these are last gasps before the deluge (of illegals, harvested votes, propagandised youth who grow older without growing wiser, whatever)? Or are your “so few” not a general comment but advice about life in a dense urban centre, where a “we are above that” pose is safer than daring to apply the rules to their makers.
For the rest, I said most of what I have to say about this here. Some issues are lesser when it is a social rule, not an actual formal law, that is being arbitrarily enforced, but when the rule has the power that these do then the difference is not that much less.
The arbitrariness of how ridiculous rules are enforced is an essential part of maintaining them (for the same reasons as make separation of powers a technique to get more just laws), so fighting that “for thee, not for me” hypocrisy is part of fighting the rule – and (as the OP shows) does not prevent calling out the rule’s absurdity.
The conversation has gone onto whether such things are inappropriate in the general sense; I personally could care less, but who asked me?
In Trudeau (a.k.a. Sockpuppet, Shiny Potato and many, many more)’s case, it’s doubly irritating, simply because there are so many other horrific instances of the man’s utter unsuitedness for the office of Prime Minister of Canada, that he should be taken to-task for. He’s a fleering hypocrite, very much a “do as I say, not as I do” – but that was obvious when he did not resign in shame after the groping incident. He could care less about the country’s economy – his refusal (or more likely, his bland ignorance) to clean-up the mislabelling of Chinese steel as “made in Canada” and transshipping it to the ‘States put us squarely in Trump’s crosshairs, and the U.S. warned us to quit it a year before Trump tore-up NAFTA. He’s awfully profligate with taxpayer dollars, as in spending $4.2 billion on a pipeline that he’s happy to never build – and his giving $600 million to our Press, in an election year no less, is an open bribe with taxpayer dollars that nobody’s called him on. More recently, he got ‘real excited at a telethon, called the guy and said “Canada pledges $50 million – that work for you? Let’s do it!” Between taking terrorists along to party on his hubristic Awesome Indian Vacation, giving a convicted murderer $10 million here, and opening the floodgates so many, many more could move to Canada, he’s alienated numerous foreign leaders and millions of his voters at home. Oh – and his favourite answer to any domestic crisis? – “MOAR Gun Control!!!”
You might get the impression I don’t like him. And this is what ticks me off about the whole blackface thing – there are so many other things he should be burned to the ground for; is this the best we can come-up with? But I suppose, throw enough you-know-what at a teflon smiley-face, hopefully something will stick…
It’s an impressive list, Y. Knott (September 23, 2019 at 10:43 am). Some I knew, but not all (or I’d forgotten in the press of issues over here).
No, it is what the media who otherwise cover for him care about – not that they aren’t somewhat covering for him here too, but they share his views about what matters and what doesn’t. Their loudness on this is merely the obverse of their silence elsewhere. We can – and you have – come up with better reasons to despise Trudeau, but the MSM will yawn where they can.
Meanwhile, I agree with Natalie that there are things worth saying about this, while it is in the news.
Genuine question: how much was it even that? The party line changes suddenly – and then back-projects. (And then changes again.) My memory suggests to me that it was within the last decade that cultural appropriation swiftly became appalling racism – and then even more swiftly had always been appalling racism. I can hardly be bothered to research each of the increasing number of cases when the Trudeau pretended to be something he was not, so merely record my impression that many were before the racism of cultural appropriation was revealed to the world.
Perhaps, in the hothouse incubator bubble where such ideas are hatched, the change happened earlier and took longer. Perhaps, inverse to the pass the media would like to give him, Trudeau, denizen of that bubble, could be blamed more than we, who could plead ignorance more recently than he. 🙂
Via Instapundit: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/justin-trudeau-identity-politics-hypocrite/
Fraser O: “The root cause of the loss of liberty is not in Washington DC, it is in your local public high school. If there is any chance of a restoration of liberty it will take thirty years, and it will begin by a revolution in our public school system.”
A statement worthy of being carved in stone!
And you are right, Fraser — even if we were united and determined to drain the educational swamp, it would be a multi-generational challenge, because it first requires replacing most of a generation of teachers.
To be realistic (pessimistic?) about this, we are not united and we do not have time for a multi-generational reformation. The rising generation of Chinese children are getting a very different kind of education from their Western counterparts — and that is going to put the West at an even bigger disadvantage in the next few decades.
We can’t win this conflict — but we could choose to make sure a future generation has the tools they can use to raise the phoenix from the ashes of the eventual failure of Authoritarianism.
Feels about right. I don’t think the term was popular before then.
However, your phrasing has made me curious about something else – did “appalling racism” become mere “cultural appropriation” at any point?
I mean, blackface is somewhat different than, say, a couple of white girls operating a taco van in Portland, surely?
If a right wing politician was discovered to have worn blackface, “we” wouldn’t be accusing them of cultural appropriation. We’d be accusing of them of appalling racism (and with the normal caveats around context and intent, I’d personally think it reasonable to at least be asking questions along those lines).
Why is Trudeau being treated differently? (We all know the answer)
Are we making the mistake of focusing on cultural appropriation, and his apparent hypocrisy (only using the word apparently because I don’t know enough about him to be certain), when we should or could just be saying “Uh, that looks appallingly racist at first blush. Care to explain, Mr Trudeau?”
Which has the added advantage of side stepping any discussion about the rights and wrongs of “using their rules against them”.
Because we, as libertarians, hate racism, right?
And we also aren’t keen on the state.
And therefore, as libertarians, we’re certainly not fans of state-sponsored racism.
A brief Google indicates that Canada does not have a great history with state sponsored racism against it’s indigenous population (corrections welcome if my quick Google has misinformed me).
So I think bobby b, Gavin, Fraser et al are (if I may be so bold) worrying about nothing re. guerrilla warfare, moral rightness of approach, etc.
It seems perfectly libertarian to upbraid a politician, indeed the son of a politician, in a country with a history of state-sponsored racism, for an act that could be easily seen as racist.
(And we should, in my opinion, stop using the phrase cultural appropriation and replace it with “racism”, which is the basis of it. Makes it a hell of a lot easier to work out what is and isn’t racist when we’re not confusing matters by worrying whether a little girl dressed a Red Indian is racist, since we can happily just go with “No, mate. Obviously not.”
Or ending up in discussions about whether cooking a lamb dhansak is cultural appropriation. Just rephrase it as “Are you saying I’m racist because that’s what I’m making for dinner tonight?” to expose the silliness behind it – without risking actual racism being lost in the madness that is “cultural appropriation”)
Gavin Longmuir (September 23, 2019 at 3:21 pm), a mere change in the power dynamic can achieve much. If, for example, educational vouchers destroyed the layers above the local school and made the teachers in that school employees of the parents, many would need discarding and many who would not go near education today would appear, but many would be salvageable. The educational establishment hate the least hint of a voucher plan for a reason.
In a sane society, it would not be easy but very hard to see it as racism. As Y. Knott remarks above, Trudeau’s evident love of dressing up is in itself one of his more trivial and harmless characteristics, rendered vile by his PC hypocrisy only. I approve of enforcing PC bigotries equally on the PC as part of fighting them and exposing their fraud, but let’s not credit them ourselves.
To take one example from many, at a time when The Lord Chamberlain’s Men did not have, and were unlikely soon to have, any black actor, let alone one skilled and experienced enough to carry the lead role in a play, was it racist for Shakespeare to write Othello, knowing that in the England of his day the part would very very often be played by a fully-blacked-up white man? In later US history, there were places and times when the play was not that popular, and many (not absolutely all) US critics urged Othello be made up as north African moor, not a sub-Saharan negro. Many (not absolutely all) Victorian British critics ridiculed this interpretation by pointing to the ‘living-memory-of-Shakespeare’ evidence that Othello had invariably been blacked-up, not browned-up, from the earliest known performances on the English stage. Should we call it racism that they had this evidence to offer? Should we applaud modern Democrat voters for agreeing with the (also predominantly Democrat voting) US citizens of the Victorian age who wanted Othello not blacked-up (when they didn’t wish the play not be performed at all)? ( 🙂 – and also 😡 )
It was in Canada that Sitting Bull and his people took refuge after the battle of the Little Big Horn. The mounties’ reputation for interacting with Red Indians generally outperformed both the tribes themselves (Canada had its slaver tribes and tribal wars/massacres), and other nations on the northern and southern continents, and the world’s standard in such things.
“was it racist for Shakespeare to write Othello, knowing that in the England of his day the part would very very often be played by a fully-blacked-up white man?”
It’s an interesting exercise to see how you can take the analogy. Was it sexist of Shakespeare to write parts for women, knowing they would all be played by men wearing dresses? (Possibly even more controversial nowadays…) Was it nationalist for Shakespeare to write a part for a Prince of Denmark knowing that he had no actual Danes (or Princes) in the theatre company? And with the ghost, when the actor wasn’t even dead? Was it faerist for him to write a play featuring a large number of fairies, given that … well, you can see where I’m going.
Eventually, we have to ban Star Wars as speciesist because Chewbacca was not played by an actual Wookiee, but by a man in a furry suit. (Thanks to lobbying by the furries.) Acting, by it’s very nature, means pretending to be what you’re not, usually by portrayal of exaggerated stereotypes. Old man, tough man, business man, rich man, butler, cook, nurse, detective, cockney, Texan, Australian, villain, drunk, teenager, flustered mother, henpecked husband, party animal, nerd, scientist, doctor, vicar, civil servant, politician, … We know and recognise them all, and in almost all cases they’re played by actors who are not.
The same goes for dress-up at a costume party. Simply the fact of dressing up as what you’re not is the entire point, and not by and of itself offensive.
That said, there’s an argument for saying that the part being played can be offensive. Playing the part of an older woman is one thing, playing up the sterotypes of a mother-in-law could be something else. (Although it is said that when the comedian Les Dawson stopped telling mother-in-law jokes, all the mothers-in-law complained because they enjoyed them so much, so he put them back in…) Acting a part tells a story, conveys a particular message, and of course that message can be insulting, offensive, or socially inappropriate, just as it could be if you said it, wrote it, or sang it. But just because what people sing can be offensive, it doesn’t mean that singing itself is therefore offensive. And as always, just because something is offensive to certain other people doesn’t mean you shouldn’t say it. Some people need offending. Especially people who take themselves too seriously and want to ban what offends them.
Sure.
I view PC or anti-PC in the same way as I view “cultural appropriation”.
At best, it’s an irrelevance. Things are right, or they are wrong. The “PC-ness” of it is totally irrelevant to me. It’s a nonsense.
At worst, it’s allowing our feelings to be controlled by someone else’s narrative, and I’m certainly not about to let that happen to me.
By no stretch am I going to automatically go “the PC are saying this, therefore I must oppose it!”, anymore than I allow “cultural appropriation” to control my thinking.
If something appears racist, I’m calling it out. If the accused can answer, then fine.
But I’m not going to be cowed by PC, anti-PC, cultural appropriation, or non-cultural appropriation. These are concepts are all invented by the ctrl-left or the alt-right (or their forerunners) – authoritarians all – to suppress us and our ilk.
Personally, I’m not about to fall for it.
Good one 🙂
Indeed so. The hate speech laws make perception, not intent, the standard, and then are used to oppress by people who feign perceiving insult, or indulge their perpetual sense of grievance, or both. Restoring intention to its rightful place lets us distinguish the positive friendliness we see in the young Natalie playing at being a Red Indian (and when the children in Swallows and Amazons, or the young princess Elizabeth, do the same) from the intent of the German actor who played ‘The Jew Suss’ in Goebbels film.
Presumably, you’re at a point and place in life where your job, income, housing, or social circumstances don’t depend on staying in the good graces of the PC bullies. I am too. We can both laugh at such antics.
Millions cannot. Imagine being a college student today, with lefty profs and lefty student leaders, and you would like to study or discuss conservative philosophies. Imagine being a conservative government employee. Imagine living where your social situation depends on playing nicely with a majority of PC bullies.
We can’t afford to live by “they’re not bothering me, so I’ll ignore them.”
We – especially those of us who can afford to do so, who have the power to do so – need to be coming at the PC bullies, we need to be in their faces all day, for the sake of those who can’t.
And this means that we need to be forcing them to enforce their own venal rules on themselves as stringently as they do on everyone else. We need to make sure that they are their own victims whenever possible.
I mentioned above that I finally saw progressives starting to argue that perhaps blackface isn’t so goshdarn racist, only after their icon Trudeau was exposed, and you said ” . . . and so . . .?” The ” . . . and so . . .” part is that it is only through forcing them to live by their own rules that they will ever moderate those rules with some rationality. So long as we sit back and let them enforce BS rules on us and refuse to make them enforce them on all, they’ll continue. Millions will be deprived of freedoms when they do so.
But we’ll feel virtuous.
bobby b (September 23, 2019 at 10:43 pm), your point is important. In its (small, thankfully) way, it parallels the point that many a dissident complained of after (and, when they could escape, before) the fall of the Soviet Union, about western intellectuals’ complicity and a wider western indifference. (I always thought there was in this some of the understandable but not always strictly fair distress of the sufferer against people who walk by on the other side because the other side is a long way away. But I also thought it had some just content.)
In the west, nothing stopped anyone from calling out communist Russia’s lies, nothing forced anyone to pretend to believe their rubbish (except, of course, the earlier form of PC over here, which was less powerful that today’s, and even today’s might strike someone who feared the gulag as small beer). By definition, a soviet dissident had summoned all their courage to resist (and would remember other less drastic cases when they had conformed, hating their cowardice but horribly aware of the dangers). I understand well their harsh words for western useful idiots – and some words for safe westerners who were usefully silent, who dined with the idiots and were taught by them, who tolerated that decades-ago western world in which denying the holocaust rightly got you ostracised (back then!) but denying the gulag was an entree to some circles and a bar to none.
Ah, but they are bothering me, and I’m not ignoring them. But it’s not the “PC” that bothers me about “PC bullies”, it’s the “bullies”.
PC in itself doesn’t bother me. Bullying bothers me. The “anti-PC” can be just as bad with their cries of “political correctness gone mad” when a company introduces a vegan sausage roll, or has an advert showing a mixed-race couple, or (god forbid), a same-sex couple, or when a video game developer has playable characters that can be created to be any ethnicity, gender, or (god forbid) trans. It’s the same tactic, it’s still bullying and it’s still an attempt to silence an argument instead of hearing it out.
I don’t like or dislike PC. I like manners, I’m in favour of referring to people by their preferred pronoun, and not using pejorative terms. I’m in favour of vegan sausage rolls, and better representation in media, when done voluntarily.
I’m not in favour of people who either insist that we have these things, or those who insist that we don’t.
And I agree. Evidently I didn’t articulate myself well in my previous post, but I’m by no means sitting out the argument. You’re right, I could do, if I choose. I am at that stage and place where it would be very hard to cause me a significant problem, and I tick all the right boxes.
It’s just that I think we need to be in the faces of both ends of the spectrum. I’m as fearful, maybe even more so, of the alt-right movement, which appears to be growing, as I am of the “PC left”, or the “ctrl-left” as I term them.
I can see this in theory, but in practice I don’t see any alt-R rules being enforced on anyone in the way that the PC bullies enforce their rules on us. No one’s getting cancelled for NOT referring to someone by some vile racial or affectional epithet. But there are definite differences between how things are progressing over there, and here.
The alt-R people here in the US have mostly been happy facing off against the antifa goons, and I think that’s a good place for them to stay. If they’re growing here in any respect, it’s in the way they have become a bit more respectable by acting a bit more respectable. We’re all happy to see them whacking antifa on the heads, and NOT going after the groups that one might expect an alt-R to go after. Calm before the storm, maybe?
And, yeah, as you point out, here we are again, violently agreeing.
Mr Justin Trudeau has destroyed people (joined in campaigns to destroy people) for doing much less than what he has REPEATEDLY done. Mr Justin Trudeau is, therefore, a total hypocrite – as is anyone who now votes for his “Liberal” Party.
I’m with bobby b (September 24, 2019 at 10:47 am), and would add re neonsnake (September 24, 2019 at 9:47 am) that warning today of an alt-right without power to cancel in some sort of ‘balance’ with warning of the PC would seem unwise if the alt-right were ever at any future time to begin acquiring that power. Remember the fate of the boy who cried wolf.
I don’t follow your meaning, Niall?
neonsnake (September 24, 2019 at 4:09 pm), the boy who cried wolf when only sheep were near him was eaten on the day real wolves appeared and his cries were ignored by the no-longer-crediting villagers. If I ever say the ALT-right are as important to oppose as the CTL-left (not in abstract theory but in current fact – bobby b remarked this distinction), then I would hope by my prior demeanour to have ensured that those who know me would say: if Niall Kilmartin says that, there must now be some real cause to think they are acquiring the actual power to silence those who dissent from them (and will to use it).
(A separate question is who-all the ALT-right are and what-all they do or don’t believe, as opposed to who and what the CTL-left find it convenient to say the ALT-right all are and all believe. But that only relates to precise issues of abstract critique. In seconding bobby b, I was noting his distinction between what many a doctrine could theoretically do if inspiring intolerant power-possessing followers, as against which doctrine is a clear and present practical danger at this time.)
I tend to interpret it more as over a beer, with both of us going “wait wait wait hear me out. Hold on, let me change the music. Your round”.
😉
Likewise. Seems perfectly appropriate.
To say that I dislike cancel culture would be an understatement of epic proportions. Identity politics is, I believe, one of the biggest risks we face today.
Making up numbers, if 10% are far left (ctrl-left, PC left, however we choose to term it), and 10% are alt-right, and I’m probably exaggerating the numbers, then there’s 80% (roughly split half and half into left and right) that I can have a conversation with. Or a beer. I won’t agree with them on everything, but that’s okay. Free market of ideas and all that.
But that 20%, they scare me. And there’s a lot of overlap between them, despite what they might say. Antifa and the alt-right? Same coin, in some senses.
And they’re feeding each other. I’m not going to get into “who started it”, but they’re reacting to each other, and getting more and more violent and authoritarian.
I worry that the 10% will become 11 or 12%. Or 30%.
These guys, the alt-right, they’re not “cancelling” people. They’re shooting them. And there’s this weird thing going on where they’re being associated with libertarian thought, and so some libertarians are getting defensive over them.
And I can’t get my head round this. These guys are fuck-all to do with us, so I don’t understand this. They’re authoritarian. They’re anti liberty. By no stretch are they libertarian.
I can’t comprehend why people are saying “they’re not as bad”.
I’m being a bit depressed. I get that. I dunno, maybe I’m hoping for more than Libertarianism is prepared to give me.
“PC in itself doesn’t bother me. Bullying bothers me.”
Cries of “political correctness gone mad” aren’t bullying. That’s just expressing an opinion.
Complaining about vegan sausage rolls is just a different version of political incorrectness. Or more precisely, every politically partisan position is ‘incorrect’ according to the opposing politics. If Gillette get a billion wiped off their sales and are verbally attacked in forums across the internet for taking the ‘wrong’ political position in an advert (as defined by their customers’ politics) then that’s just how political correctness works.
“or (god forbid), a same-sex couple”
Heh! I saw what you did there!
—
“I was noting his distinction between what many a doctrine could theoretically do if inspiring intolerant power-possessing followers, as against which doctrine is a clear and present practical danger at this time.”
When they have the power, it’s already too late.
There are two major issues I have with this. The first is that it surrenders the argument on principles. We need to persuade people that liberty is preferable. It’s a hell of a lot easier to persuade people who are getting stomped on than it is to persuade those doing the stomping. It’s a hell of a lot easier to do something about it before they seize absolute power than after. Liberty isn’t just the right position to hold when you’re under threat, it’s right because it’s right. It would still be right even if our (left/right) side were winning, if we had the power to decide. Along the authoritarian/libertarian axis, all authoritarians are on the same side, and unless you see it that way, you’re not really on the libertarians’ side.
My second issue is that if we do that, authoritarians can see no distinction between their position and ours, and therefore assume that we’re just like them. All authoritarians support liberty for themselves. There preferences, in order are: 1) We stamp on them. 2) Liberty. 3) They stamp on us. Every authoritarian will stand up and call for 2) when the alternative is 3). Only a libertarian will call for 2) ahead of 1).
If you only call for 2) when threatened with 3), and mute your arguments when people are talking about 1), everyone will recognise you as just another authoritarian partisan, and dismiss your arguments as dishonest. You’re only calling for freedom of speech and freedom of belief because you’re losing. If you was winning you’d not be making the argument. Furthermore, they’ll feel perfectly entitled to do the same, and only actively support free speech when it’s in their partisan interests to do so.
“I may despise what you say, but I would defend to the death your right to say it.” It’s such a powerful argument precisely because it so clearly puts liberty ahead of political self-interest. But any hint that your defence of liberty depends at all on whose side’s liberty needs defending, and the argument loses all credibility. We will defend Trudeau’s freedom to go to costume parties dressed up as a black person, not because we like or agree with Trudeau or his policies, or because we think he has done anything to deserve such support, or that we don’t think it would be useful to our cause if he did fall foul of his own speech code, but because that’s the right thing to do.
Right is right. His free speech is as important as our free speech, because it’s the principle of free speech we’re defending, not any particular person or group’s use of it.
“Making up numbers, if 10% are far left (ctrl-left, PC left, however we choose to term it), and 10% are alt-right, and I’m probably exaggerating the numbers,”
Not far off! See here: https://hiddentribes.us/
Huh? Where? When?
If you added up all shooters of people here in the US, you’d find that about 95% of them were either lefties, or merely apolitical thugs.
The biggest mass murderer over here – in Las Vegas – was a confirmed lefty. Most of our mass shooters are simply mentally ill.
I’ll admit that, when a hard-rightist shoots people, it gets all of the news cycles for weeks, but that says more about our media than the shooters.
(I’m bottling my latest 15-gallon batch of mead tonight. I shall endeavor to not violently disagree with anyone while doing so. We’ll all be better off. 😆 )
Amen. Not long ago, I considered myself to be alt-right, because alt-right started out meaning the Republicans who were revolting against the mainstream anti-Trump let’s-just-get-along-with-the-Dems Republicans who have been running the conservative side of things and giving away the store for so long.
I was a Milo Republican, which made me an alt-right Republican.
But then a different group decided to claim that title, and apparently it stuck. I understand that it now means the white supremacists, but it still jars me.
As far as I can tell, the “Alt-Right” consists of everybody who is not sufficiently Proggie/SJW/Left.
F’rinstance, I am a strong believer in the right to keep & bear arms, which surely flows directly from the right of self-defence (if you believe in the “rights” of liberty at all, that is). Therefore I’m certainly of the Alt-Right even though I almost never go around wearing a beer-stained wife-beater undershirt and a beard with the G.F.-knows-what in residence in it.
.
Although I must be fair. Perhaps the Alt-Right are those who usually vote Republican but don’t usually let themselves play nice by giving in to the assorted demands (commands!) of the P/SJW/L. But they still probly wear the undershirt and conduct Satanic rituals with voodoo dolls. And have rabies.
bobby b: “I understand that it [alt-right] now means the white supremacists …”
Just out of interest, bobby, have you ever met a “white supremacist”? And what does “white supremacist” mean? How would we recognize a “white supremacist”? For example, the well-intentioned 19th Century people who set up Liberia as a place in Africa to which freed slaves could return if they so chose — were they “white supremacists”?
Personally, I have met people of several different ethnicities who really just want to be left alone — but none who seem to want to sit on the porch in comfort while those of other ethnicities bow down before them. I suspect that “white supremacist” is an invention of the media & the Authoritarians. It is just an insulting term sometimes used in place of “racist” for verbal variety, applied to individuals who don’t know their proper Authoritarian-assigned place.
Yes. Lots of them.
They believe the white race to be supreme to all other races, that all other races are lesser races, that white people should rule the world, that all others should serve white people.
Easiest for me is to pick out the word “Aryan” on their club insignia.
Look, Gavin, I don’t use the term as metaphor. I don’t mean “people who dislike hip-hop.” In a week or two, I’ll probably jump in the Class C and take a final-season two-or-three-week drive across Montana and Wyoming and Idaho before the snow sets in – I have friends and relatives out there, and it’s beautiful country, and that’s how I spend my time – and I’ll run by quite a few compounds with tall imposing gates nailed all over with copies of the Constitution and the Magna Carta and screeds against the federal government and any purported official higher than Sheriff, and this will be in areas in which a black or brown man has very little chance of having a nice day.
These people do exist. They’re not just boogymen or scary stories. And they’re the ones who have co-opted “alt-right.”
Bobby, IMHO white supremacists don’t have much media clout in propria persona. It was the left who plastered the white supremacist tag on every strand of the ALT-right – as they indiscriminately plaster it elsewhere – and of course actual white supremacists are delighted to agree but never had the media power to co-opt the label of themselves. It is inevitable that wherever the left screams ‘racist’, actual racists turn up and see if the weather seems bracing. The left are then delighted to see them (insofar as they can distinguish them from everyone else to whom they give the same label).
Like you, I noticed various strands in the ALT-right.
– The Milo-style ALT-right, which I think of as about rejecting the establishment right’s cowardice in allowing the left to define political manners. These people see the conventional right’s ‘good manners’ as a form of cowardice in the face of, or even complicity with, the left.
– The “only game the left allows in this town, so I’ll play it” ALT-righters who, with greater or lesser degrees of honesty, regard themselves as forced into defensive white-identity politics, as a peace-lover might be forced into a war. (Some then choose to be ‘happy warriors’.)
– Those who would be playing white identity politics whether anyone else was playing any other identity politics or not. (These are the ones I’d call ‘white supremacists’.)
There is a continuum between these three strands. One certainly could travel to the far end, each stage enabling the next. One could also travel in the other direction. I would agree with Nullius above that if you have the chance to debate someone towards the better direction you should take it. I suggest such argument is more effective if it is aware of these distinctions and avoids the left’s wilful error of confounding them all together.
As you can see above, Julie, my definition is less broad. For example, always polite but unyielding Rees-Mogg could be admired by the Milo-style ALT-right and perhaps the next stage along, but, for all the left’s hatred of him, I don’t think ALT-righters would see him as ALT-right. I see ALT-right as having some element of intended in-your-face acceptance and display of the manners the left claims show your racism (or whatever).
Neonsnake (September 24, 2019 at 9:00 pm), I don’t know what it was you imagined I should ‘just say’, but hopefully the above gives you more information on what I could or would ‘just say’.
I interpreted the phrase “what the CTL-left find it convenient to say the ALT-right all are and all believe” to mean that you believe the bad motives I’m ascribing to the Alt-right to be a myth made up by the ctrl-left.
However – reading Julie’s comment that she’s certainly of the alt-right, and bobby b’s note that he used to consider himself part of the alt-right, it appears that my use of the phrase alt-right is incorrect, and at best is leading to confusion, and at worst to causing offence. That’s my mistake, for which I apologise. After this post, I will switch language to make it clearer.
Combining that with your newer post clarifies your position enormously.
(Julie, bobby b, you certainly are not whom I am talking about)
I knew the word was slippery, but hadn’t realised it was slippery enough to be a word that a libertarian could comfortably use to describe themselves (which also explains, possibly, the association between alt-right and libertarianism). I think that by the time I came across it, it had already been co-opted, so I never considered that it had a previous (non-negative) usage.
The definition I was using was based largely on this kind of thing. Point Fourteen in particular hammers home the white-supremacist nature (especially if you know what the phrase Fourteen Words means).
I actually wonder if the (white supremacist) alt-right are even of the “right”. I suspect that if I tried answering one of those Nolan Chart quizzes using the 16 points in Vox Day’s post, I might end up on the authoritarian left, given that they’d need enormous government intervention in the economy to end international free trade. Maybe, anyway.
I’d agree with your three strands, most likely. My interest, and concern, is in the second, which is what I think is growing. Hopefully I’m wrong.
I think this is where we differ – having spent some time link-hopping this morning, I still do believe that the white supremacists took the alt-right label away from people like bobby b, and used it to give themselves a veneer of respectability, and are a growing threat. I don’t think they’re a boogeyman, to use bobby b’s phrase; I think they’re a clear and present danger.
(oh, and your comment re. Milo, which can now remain as in-joke between us: Of course not, but I wouldn’t argue for special treatment 😉 )
Couple of weeks ago, when talking about Generation Identity, I tried to get across that I think they and their ilk abuse the notions of free speech. This is a better articulation of what I meant, thank you.
bobby b: “They [“white supremacists”] believe the white race to be supreme to all other races, that all other races are lesser races, that white people should rule the world, that all others should serve white people.”
Bobby, the US is a big place, and we all see different parts of it. Personally, I have never talked to anyone who espouses those beliefs. I have occasionally talked with people who live in the sorts of compounds you describe, and the overwhelming impression is that they simply want to be left alone to live their own lives. They certainly don’t want “people of color” around the place serving them — any more than they would want “white liberals” around the place.
I have also talked with Americans of African heritage who prefer to live in communities where they rarely see a white face — are they “black supremacists”? Why don’t we hear from the Authoritarian media about what a threat to society they are?
George Orwell had amazing insight in “1984” into the Authoritarians desire to control language. What is surprising is that so many of us who believe we dissent from the Authoritarians’ agenda happily go along. The flipping of “Red” from Communist to conservative is perhaps the most obvious example. Labelling people who simply want to be left alone as “white supremacists” is another Authoritarians’ ploy. We should be careful about using their language.
No apology needed AFAIAC neonsnake. I learnt from Sowell, Hayek et al that we al have fragments of the truth and cognitive diversity expands on these. I took out the Milo joke at the very cusp of the 5-minutes edit period lest it seem too flippant, but am glad you saw it and liked it – so happily no apology needed from me either, it would seem.
Gavin Longmuir (September 25, 2019 at 2:26 pm) while I’d agree that the KKK and other groups are a vanishingly tiny drop in the huge US today, given absurdly out-of-proportion coverage by the left, and bobby b is right about the relative danger stats re shootings, I’d also agree with bobby (or I might say ‘confirm’, but my experience is indirect and minimal) that that tiny drop exists, and the word ‘Aryan’ in the name is a (not that subtle) clue. However, Gavin, I believe you are right about the “wanting to be left alone”, which is another reason bobby’s stats are right.
In the UK, such (also tiny) groups are thoroughly left-wing economically, just wanting to swap which racial groups get government preferences, while in France it’s notorious that you can put a Front National speaker to a left-wing audience and have them not realise he’s from a different party till he reaches the ethnic bit of the speech. (And we all know Hitler was a national socialist.)
In the US, by contrast, the groups with ‘Aryan’ in the name (I think – bobby, by all means correct if needed) pick up characteristics from a wider milieu of survivalism, anti-state “leave me alone” people and the like, so have a first-glance social feel more like these wider groups that are definitely ‘right’. This can – albeit rarely, I’d guess – work in both directions: naive survivalists who’ve burned the left’s signs of racism from their minds and don’t really know others can visit such places and be(come) aware that the group’s “It’s the Jews” party line is garbage, but not leave with quite the swiftness we’d think sane (if one ever went in the first place) because otherwise the general ambience seems familiar. (I should probably again note my second-hand and minimal knowledge of what I’m talking about in this paragraph.)
Goodness! I thought my comment was 1/3 humour, 1/3 sarcasm, wrapped around a 2/3 grain of truth.
I certainly don’t consider myself “Alt-right.” But I do think that if I came to the notice of the Usual Suspects for any of my libertarianish-conservative-ish beliefs, they’d be all over my “Alt-right” (non-)self like ants in honey.
(neon, I never thought you were talking about me! *g*)
The grain of truth is that “Alt-right” is a smear-label when used by the P/SJW/L crowd and sometimes also when emitted by some non-lefties. (“Demonize the target” — e.g., anybody who issues a little resistance to a pet position or agenda.)
But, Niall, the usage may be a bit different where you are. Perhaps I might clarify the usage of “Alt-right” of which I speak by referring instead to “the so-called Alt-right.” In other words, I’m not talking about the actual ideologies or agendas of the A-r’s members (by their own definitions); I’m talking about who gets called “A-r,” a very different thing.
I don’t think anyone who considers himself “Alt-right” according to Vox Day’s definition would accept me into the tribe, nor most of the rest of us here either.
Gavin — Agree on the language-as-control issue. “If it sounds bad, hang it on your opposition.”
. . .
This raises yet again an issue that I think we should be discussing sometime soon (yesterday would be good, 13 years ago with annual repeats would be even better), namely the usages and mis-usages of the word “equality.” I’m getting a big burr under my saddle about that. But it would get us too far O/T here.
…….
ETA: Sent this before reading your comment just above, Niall.
…….
ETA 2: I may have missed it, but I didn’t see anything anti-Semitic in Vox D’s manifesto.
None needed. It made me laugh.
At some point, I will explain exactly why. I have very good reason, and a great anecdote to tell (I always have a great anecdote to tell). Please, do not treat me, in the meanwhile, as someone who needs it taking out.
Okay? 😉
Thank you. I mean that.
I woke up this morning, read the thread from you and bobby, and went “oh fuck. Ive screwed up”.
🙂
Ma’am.
You are not alt right, as I use the term.
And I want you to understand, Julie, that when I, a low class Brit from the south east of England, use the term “Ma’am”, I really mean it (and bobby b, I’m going to through the word “Sir” in your direction, with the same intent)
bobbyb: “In a week or two, I’ll probably jump in the Class C and take a final-season two-or-three-week drive across Montana and Wyoming and Idaho before the snow sets in …”
Bobby — I meant to add: Enjoy the ride! Drive carefully (well, sort of) and have fun. 🙂
neon, 😀
That too, Gavin 😉
At some point, maybe we can drink mead together, drive too fast and live the life we want to.
And the people who judge us?
*raises a polite V-sign very British punk two fingers*
😉
Nor me. I wasn’t talking about Vox Day. My remarks were a follow-on to bobby b (September 25, 2019 at 3:18 am) re white supremacists being very rare but not non-existent, and how to spot them from their names. It chanced I had some very slight knowledge of the kind of group he was talking about.
Possibly, in many ways of which I’m not aware, but not with regard to me. We’re good.
We’re good because I knew this (and should have indicated so right up front, to save you the hassle), and I also knew that, as Niall says, the label had already been stolen, both through skill on the left (who like to apply it to anyone not of their persuasion) and by the AB. (Aryan Brotherhood types, that is. Lots of them in Idaho. They like the new label for themselves, since it brings them back into the fold, so to speak – they now get to call themselves a part of the right, satisfying their own urge to be part of something bigger, as well as the left’s urge to tar all of the rest of us with their stain. It’s all like some huge dysfunctional family drama.)
Re Vox Day: His screed almost works for me. Note that, while his point 14 talks about preserving whites, his point 15 goes on to say “The Alt Right does not believe in the general supremacy of any race, nation, people, or sub-species.” He’s not a white supremacist. He’s a nationalist. So am I.
He’s not saying that whites are better. (That makes no sense – he’s part Indian.) He’s saying that whites are the new targets, and that nations that are considered to be “white nations” are besieged. He sees high value in preserving the notion of nationality – maybe because humans are lazy imperfect beings, and being members of teams keep us competitive or something – I’m not entirely sure what he means – maybe that’s what I mean instead.
But I wouldn’t speak of him as a white supremacist. I think his Point 14 is just really badly worded.
He’s also a Milo fan/friend, which rescued him quite a bit in my mind from being a pure AHole. Milo, to me, encapsulated what I wanted the Right to be (absent his self-destructive tendencies.) He almost pulled it off, too, but the left took him out.
Yes, this is exactly right. Generally, they’re not canny enough to have driven this themselves, but they’re happy to accept it – and it would drive them mad to understand that they serve the left’s goals when they do.
I think he thinks we’re old, and thus brittle.
But brittleness peaks at about 35, and we just get more amenable as time goes by.
I suspect that we’re both really hard to offend, and you can only do it with actual intent. And once we know there’s no actual intent, fuhgeddaboudit.
Well, bobby, I’ve been trying for years to pass myself off as tender and fragile, so I suppose…. Oh fiddle, I don’t think anybody ever bought that. 😎
Oh, I know you’re not a fragile wilting flower…*looks sideways* I have my doubts about that bobby b chap though… 😉
Yes please. I have some thoughts on the subject that I would like some help with fleshing out. I think it might be on-topic in the thread about the banned book, given that the book in question touches on the subject of equality between races and genders.
One final note on this from my side:
White supremacist is not a phrase to be used lightly, definitely. The bit that tipped me was indeed that phrase:
“The Alt Right believes we must secure the existence of white people and a future for white children.”
Compare with this “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”, which is a infamous white supremacist motto known as “The Fourteen Words” (and note that Vox Day put it as point 14), coined by a guy from this bunch of charmers.
If he’s not a white supremacist, then he’s certainly not doing too much to distance himself from them…
The BBC Black and White Minstrel show.
Trudeau the clown.
I was curiously reading about the embarrassment the apparently idiot son of ex-PM Trudeau had caused himself, with “blackface” photos. The self-made idiot, himself now an elected Canadian PM (hey, don’t knock it, in a democracy the voters get the PM they voted for and whom they deserve) seems unable to bury the fact that he was apparently at least twice photographed in blackface makeup and in costume, 19 years or so ago. Apart from showing him to have probably been a typical, depressingly and disappointingly boorish unthinking teenager, it doesn’t say much else, as far as I can see, though some people (not me, you understand) might say that the fact that he was elected speaks volumes about the mentality of the Canadian plebiscite, but I couldn’t possibly comment (I’d leave that sort of thing to Hillary Clinton, who is apparently well-qualified to pass comment).
I had never understood the BBC’s predilection for dressing performers up in blackface – and I saw a lot of this predilection, as a child.
For example, the BBC have tried to expunge this from their archives and lose it down the memory hole, but they’ll have difficulty because it has always been public material in the public domain, owned by the taxpayers who compulsorily fund the BBC to produce the variously very good, the average and the very bad output that they have, over the years.
Do a search: “BBC Black and White minstrel show” .
The BBC don’t have the authority to destroy the entertainment media assets produced at the public’s expense (and that is why they sell copies of it from the archives).
As a child, I sometimes watched this rubbish program (B&WMS) and wondered why on earth it was broadcast so religiously by the BBC. I presumed the public had wanted it, but I couldn’t see WHY they would have WANTED such junk and yet for 20 years or so it was apparently religiously broadcast into British homes, without a thought for any offence it might have caused. WHY?
Looking back now, I suppose it could have been broadcast because the BBC thought the viewing public would like to see it or would enjoy watching it, or something, or – just maybe – they were teaching the public to be racist (cultural indoctrination was a role of the BBC during the war years).
I never considered that we might be being conditioned by it, but maybe that’s what was happening, with the BBC all the time push, push, pushing the racism – but goodness knows WHY.
Maybe the idea was to teach the British to think that they were somehow superior to all these black people (but why?) and really they were simply sort of making fun of them to make them seem silly in the public gestalt (but why?) – which is what it probably would have done.
Being interested in choral singing, even I – as a child – could see that the shame was that they didn’t have real black performers with their real and lovely black voices, doing their Southern black songs and music, where the result would have been of far more realistic and better quality and their voices would have been much better-suited than that of the white singers concealed underneath the ridiculous blackface makeup. It can’t have been pleasant, performing for hours under all that greaspaint either.
It would have been pleasant to have had their musical culture introduced into our homes in a native format. Maybe the problem was that it would have been too expensive to do that, shipping all those black performers over from the US. Or maybe the restrictive and racially discriminatory US laws of the time effectively prohibited such actions.
But I suppose that would have been the true racism, right there.
Occam’s Razor suggests the simplest explanation: Unthinking stupidity, like Trudeau.
There’s no evidence that it would have been intentional BBC racism, as such. The BBC’s objective may simply have been to entertain and have a good time. In any event, stupidity wasn’t and isn’t yet a crime (thank goodness) and the term racism hadn’t at that time been invented, or hadn’t come into common use/parlance in the lexicon as in it’s current/modern form/meaning. So maybe Trudeau and the BBC are similarly idiots and innocent of any real blame.
Don’t you find that interesting? I do. It’s trying to understand history objectively, from a cultural perspective – i.e., without trying to retrospectively straightjacket/enforce upon history our current laws/”norms”, political correctness, and paradigms, etc..
Slartibartfarst (September 28, 2019 at 4:52 pm), you are indeed right that this endless redefinition of what constitutes racism does indeed catch the BBC as thoroughly as the Canadian PM, albeit a few decades earlier. Their B&W troupe was still going strong at least 15 years after the Windrush arrived, and long before that, there was a sufficient black population in the UK to have recruited black performers, and indeed some black musical performers elsewhere in the beeb (e.g. The Goon Show, though as Ray Ellington was brought up as an orthodox Jew by his mother after his father died, maybe modern intersectional theory would rate him a bad zionist Jew rather than a good oppressed black).
Still, if the Democratic party can portray themselves as the anti-racists given their history in the US at the same time, I daresay the BBC can shrug this off. I think Trudeau’s issue is that he has, in more senses than one, a twenty-first-century problem.
Slarti — The Black & White Minstrel Show graduated from TV (which was itself racist Black & White at the time) and became a successful London theater show which ran for about 10 years, well into the 1980s. But it would be hard to make a case that the BBC nefariously turned the entire population of the UK into violent racists — though apparently someone (Who? George Soros?) did take it upon himself to remove golliwogs from British toy store shelves, just in case.
Long ago, when racism was real, it was bad & dangerous. Modern “racism” is merely dull & boring — mostly empty posturing by privileged fools.
@Gavin Longmuir: Yes, I hadn’t forgotten Robinson’s(?) Jam golliwogs. I had a collection of their badges. It was my favourite badge, though I couldn’t see a logical connection between gollies and jams.
I also recall the blackfaces in the music video “Putting on the Ritz/Style”, and I simply couldn’t figure out what the heck they were there for. I mean, why?
I figured I was missing something – that blackfaces were some kind of strange American custom.