Thought Police 101
Identity Politics
For Goodness Sake 2
This is the 1996 short film For Goodness Sake II, directed by Trey Parker. PART ONE IS HERE: This is the 1993 short documentary film For Goodness Sake, directed by the brilliant David Zucker and produced by Dennis Prager.
Dave Rubin for Turning Point at University of New Hampshire
(Serious Saturday) Dave goes back and forth with protesters during his entire speech to students at the University of New Hampshire. Due to security threats the University moved the venue from a 300 seat room to a 7500 seat hockey rink – without informing all of the attendees. (Caution, Language — this presentation is by a libertarian, but important and should be an exemplar to ALL CLASSICAL LIBERALS. Dave has a misunderstanding [or better yet] the application of classical liberalism. For instance, only 5-states have passed same sex marriage laws how the Constitution would have them. SCOTUS should have left this to the states.)
Ratings Hungry Media Racializes EVERYTHING
Here is a short montage via THE DAILY CALLER:
Here is TUCKER CARLSON discussing the rating whores in the media:
Trump Supporter Smashes Liberals/Identity Politics
Language Warning
Neo-Progressivism – Sargon of Akkad 3-Part Series
Just so you know — for clarity sake — Sargon is an atheist. 3-Parts (will load automatically):
Neo-Progressivism has gone unchallenged for too long and has metastasized into an authoritarian cancer that is consuming the Left…and liberals are silent.
- See also
Important Article at VOX That Should Play Into Politics
The Gutfeld video is unrelated to the article… but not unrelated to Identity Politics:
A great Breitbart posting of a progressive professor “terrified” of his progressive students:
A progressive professor says his students have become enamored of a simplistic social justice politics that makes every discussion personal and therefore a potential “threat” to their identity.
At the heart of the Vox article is the claim that something has changed on campus. In the past a student complaint about political bias would have been handled perfunctorily. The complaint would be acknowledged and then it would be ignored. But times are changing. With an increasing focus on social justice and identity politics, students now take every disagreement personally and professors feel pressure to avoid giving any offense, intended or not:
This new understanding of social justice politics resembles what University of Pennsylvania political science professor Adolph Reed Jr. calls a politics of personal testimony, in which the feelings of individuals are the primary or even exclusive means through which social issues are understood and discussed. Reed derides this sort of political approach as essentially being a non-politics, a discourse that “is focused much more on taxonomy than politics [which] emphasizes the names by which we should call some strains of inequality [ … ] over specifying the mechanisms that produce them or even the steps that can be taken to combat them.” Under such a conception, people become more concerned with signaling goodness, usually through semantics and empty gestures, than with actually working to effect change.
Herein lies the folly of oversimplified identity politics: while identity concerns obviously warrant analysis, focusing on them too exclusively draws our attention so far inward that none of our analyses can lead to action. Rebecca Reilly Cooper, a political philosopher at the University of Warwick, worries about the effectiveness of a politics in which “particular experiences can never legitimately speak for any one other than ourselves, and personal narrative and testimony are elevated to such a degree that there can be no objective standpoint from which to examine their veracity.” Personal experience and feelings aren’t just a salient touchstone of contemporary identity politics; they are the entirety of these politics. In such an environment, it’s no wonder that students are so prone to elevate minor slights to protestable offenses….
While Breitbart’s excerpt was good, reading the article myself, I will add to it. Here is more from the VOX article:
…In a New York Magazine piece, Jonathan Chait described the chilling effect this type of discourse has upon classrooms. Chait’s piece generated seismic backlash, and while I disagree with much of his diagnosis, I have to admit he does a decent job of describing the symptoms. He cites an anonymous professor who says that “she and her fellow faculty members are terrified of facing accusations of triggering trauma.” Internet liberals pooh-poohed this comment, likening the professor to one of Tom Friedman’s imaginary cab drivers. But I’ve seen what’s being described here. I’ve lived it. It’s real, and it affects liberal, socially conscious teachers much more than conservative ones….
[….]
This critic is intelligent. Her voice is important. She realizes, correctly, that evolutionary psychology is flawed, and that science has often been misused to legitimize racist and sexist beliefs. But why draw that out to questioning most “scientific thought”? Can’t we see how distancing that is to people who don’t already agree with us? And tactically, can’t we see how shortsighted it is to be skeptical of a respected manner of inquiry just because it’s associated with white males?
This sort of perspective is not confined to Twitter and the comments sections of liberal blogs. It was born in the more nihilistic corners of academic theory, and its manifestations on social media have severe real-world implications. In another instance,two female professors of library science publicly outed and shamed a male colleague they accused of being creepy at conferences, going so far as to openly celebrate the prospect of ruining his career. I don’t doubt that some men are creepy at conferences — they are. And for all I know, this guy might be an A-level creep. But part of the female professors’ shtick was the strong insistence that harassment victims should never be asked for proof, that an enunciation of an accusation is all it should ever take to secure a guilty verdict. The identity of the victims overrides the identity of the harasser, and that’s all the proof they need.
This is terrifying. No one will ever accept that. And if that becomes a salient part of liberal politics, liberals are going to suffer tremendous electoral defeat.
…If “electoral defeat” for progressives is the worst outcome you can foresee from making emotive identity politics the core of education, perhaps you’ve missed the point… (Breitbart)
Debate and discussion would ideally temper this identity-based discourse, make it more usable and less scary to outsiders. Teachers and academics are the best candidates to foster this discussion, but most of us are too scared and economically disempowered to say anything. Right now, there’s nothing much to do other than sit on our hands and wait for the ascension of conservative political backlash — hop into the echo chamber, pile invective upon the next person or company who says something vaguely insensitive, insulate ourselves further and further from any concerns that might resonate outside of our own little corner of Twitter.
A liberal professor interviewed in Indoctrinate U explains that protecting and teaching from one ideological viewpoint insulates students who are liberal to properly defend and coherently explain their views in the real world — outside the classroom. This excerpt is taken from two parts, Part 1 is here, and Part 2 is here.
New Orwellian Attack Makes the Word “Homosexual” a Slur
Gay Patriot writes about how the Left fights the BIG battles facing our nation: over spending, foreign policy pressures, terrorism, freedom, etc. Hahahahaha… just joking:
As noted before, on the right, we worry about actual issues: regulation-fueled economic decline, corruption in Government, the erosion of individual liberty, the unsustainable fiscal path of the national Government.
On the left, they worry about vocabulary.
In part, this is a mark of desperation, David Brock and his merry band of Soros-paid nutjobs desperate for anything they can fling against the one news outlet that airs opposition views to leftist hegemony. There is no real racism, sexism, or homophobia on the right. So the left, in its desperation to remain peeved and aggrieved, must constantly lower the bar and change the rules. Hence, they declare that a previously inoffensive word is now offensive, so they can have their self-righteous tantrums about it. Also, note the new phenomenon of the “micro-aggression,” defined as a behavior that would not bother a normal person, but sends a politically correct leftist into paroxysms of outrage.
Read More ~ Good stuff V-to-the-K! I loved the “micro-aggression” addition.
Camille Paglia Talks Honestly About Identity Politics and the Left (Professor Sommers @ End)
Here is a portion of the interview Prager spoke of in the above radio interview of Camille Paglia from the Wall Street Journal:
…But no subject gets her going more than when I ask if she really sees a connection between society’s attempts to paper over the biological distinction between men and women and the collapse of Western civilization.
She starts by pointing to the diminished status of military service. “The entire elite class now, in finance, in politics and so on, none of them have military service—hardly anyone, there are a few. But there is no prestige attached to it anymore. That is a recipe for disaster,” she says. “These people don’t think in military ways, so there’s this illusion out there that people are basically nice, people are basically kind, if we’re just nice and benevolent to everyone they’ll be nice too. They literally don’t have any sense of evil or criminality.”
The results, she says, can be seen in everything from the dysfunction in Washington (where politicians “lack practical skills of analysis and construction”) to what women wear. “So many women don’t realize how vulnerable they are by what they’re doing on the street,” she says, referring to women who wear sexy clothes.
When she has made this point in the past, Ms. Paglia—who dresses in androgynous jackets and slacks—has been told that she believes “women are at fault for their own victimization.” Nonsense, she says. “I believe that every person, male and female, needs to be in a protective mode at all times of alertness to potential danger. The world is full of potential attacks, potential disasters.” She calls it “street-smart feminism.”
Ms. Paglia argues that the softening of modern American society begins as early as kindergarten. “Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It’s oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially guys,” she says, pointing to the most obvious example: the way many schools have cut recess. “They’re making a toxic environment for boys. Primary education does everything in its power to turn boys into neuters.”
She is not the first to make this argument, as Ms. Paglia readily notes. Fellow feminist Christina Hoff Sommers has written about the “war against boys” for more than a decade. The notion was once met with derision, but now data back it up: Almost one in five high-school-age boys has been diagnosed with ADHD, boys get worse grades than girls and are less likely to go to college.
Ms. Paglia observes this phenomenon up close with her 11-year-old son, Lucien, whom she is raising with her ex-partner, Alison Maddex, an artist and public-school teacher who lives 2 miles away. She sees the tacit elevation of “female values”—such as sensitivity, socialization and cooperation—as the main aim of teachers, rather than fostering creative energy and teaching hard geographical and historical facts.
By her lights, things only get worse in higher education. “This PC gender politics thing—the way gender is being taught in the universities—in a very anti-male way, it’s all about neutralization of maleness.” The result: Upper-middle-class men who are “intimidated” and “can’t say anything. . . . They understand the agenda.” In other words: They avoid goring certain sacred cows by “never telling the truth to women” about sex, and by keeping “raunchy” thoughts and sexual fantasies to themselves and their laptops.
Politically correct, inadequate education, along with the decline of America’s brawny industrial base, leaves many men with “no models of manhood,” she says. “Masculinity is just becoming something that is imitated from the movies. There’s nothing left. There’s no room for anything manly right now.” The only place you can hear what men really feel these days, she claims, is on sports radio. No surprise, she is an avid listener. The energy and enthusiasm “inspires me as a writer,” she says, adding: “If we had to go to war,” the callers “are the men that would save the nation.”
And men aren’t the only ones suffering from the decline of men. Women, particularly elite upper-middle-class women, have become “clones” condemned to “Pilates for the next 30 years,” Ms. Paglia says. “Our culture doesn’t allow women to know how to be womanly,” adding that online pornography is increasingly the only place where men and women in our sexless culture tap into “primal energy” in a way they can’t in real life.
A key part of the remedy, she believes, is a “revalorization” of traditional male trades—the ones that allow women’s studies professors to drive to work (roads), take the elevator to their office (construction), read in the library (electricity), and go to gender-neutral restrooms (plumbing)…