Category Archives: culture wars

Instant Classic

Ace brings teh funneh:

Thanksgivingmanship: Your Guide to Surviving The Progressive Imbeciles Who Have Spent a Week Cramming on How to Survive You

Oxford Don Stephen Potter introduced the world to the principles of Gamesmanship, the way to win at games by resort to cheap ploys which were very close to cheating without being technically cheating. He later expanded his inquiries into the general field of “Lifemanship,” the discipline of embracing life in a dickish and hostile spirit, sabotaging social rivals without quite breaching social etiquette.

Given that the progressive elder-children-yet-not-quite-adults you’ll be encountering this Thanksgiving (who I will henceforth refer to as “grownchildren”) will be armed to the teeth with Vox explainers and Obamacare propaganda, I herewith humbly submit these first sketches of a new branch of Lifemanship I call “Thankgivingmanship,” which I define as the gentle art of insulting the stupid without alerting them to the fact that they’ve been insulted at all.

It is the goal of the dedicated Thanksgivingman, then, to achieve the sublime art of giving offense without offense being taken.

A study in contrasts

Putin-pwns-Obama-copy

Contrast this with 0bama’s fecklessness yesterday:

Putin: ‘To Forgive The Terrorists Is Up To God, But To Send Them To Him Is Up To Me’

I know that Putin isn’t exactly a “good guy,” but my word do I love these quotes from him. They’re both awesome and hysterical. He’s a world leader who is really a movie character. “To forgive the terrorists is up to god, to send them to him is up to me.” Who talks like that? PUTIN DOES!

“I am Jack’s complete lack of perspective”

Because “microaggressions” and “white privilege” are such massive problems, next to Mohammedans on the warpath.  Yeah, I’ve got your microaggressions right here!

Mizzou Activists Complain About Paris Stealing the Spotlight

Campus activists in America showed their true faces during an international tragedy last night: they are the selfish, spoiled children we always knew they were.

Black Lives Matter and Mizzou protesters responded to the murder of scores of people in Paris at the hands of Islamic extremists by complaining about losing the spotlight and saying their “struggles” were being “erased.” Their struggles, remember, consist of a poop swastika of unknown provenance and unsubstantiated claims of racially-charged remarks somewhere near Missouri’s campus.

So debased has the language on American campuses become that these incidents, which many observers believe to be hoaxes, just like previous campus scandals celebrated by progressive media, are being referred to as “terrorism” and a “tragedy” by moronic 20-year-olds who have never been told, “No.”

Click through for their greatest Twatter hits, which have been preserved should any of them try to memory-hole them.

“Social Justice” Whiners are effin’ unbelievable

How about a little perspective, you useless eaters? YGBSM:

UN-EFFING-BELIEVABLE! Mizzou protesters are ANGRY Paris terror attacks stole their MEDIA SPOTLIGHT!!!

It’s mostly a roundup of Twatter activity, cached elsewhere because the special snowflakes tried deleting it when they were caught. Their $50k/year indoctinationseducations didn’t clue them in that the Internet is forever.

Guess what’s making a comeback?

segregatedRegressives were behind these the first time around, and it looks like they want to bring them back:

Mizzou Demonstrators Segregate White Allies to Form ‘Black Only Healing Space’

Student protesters at the University of Missouri asked white supporters to leave Wednesday night in order to create a “black only healing space.”

Steve Schmidt, an activist who was at the protest, tweeted that Concerned Student 1950 group were “asking white allies to leave.”

Prominent Black Lives Matter activist Johnetta Elzie seemingly confirmed those with Caucasian skin were asked to leave the area, tweeting that the group had created a “black only healing space for the students to share, decompress, be vulnerable & real.”

Bullshit Alert

Maybe you’ve heard of this study that the usual suspects have latched onto as “proof” of their superior virtuousness, or something to that effect.  I suspected something wasn’t quite right; with these sorts of things, it usually isn’t.  Then this turned up this morning:

Don’t blithely believe the study that allegedly “proves” that religious kids are not nice people

Suspicion confirmed.  “Bull…shit…bull…shit…it all sounds like bullshit to me, to me…”

[Regressives] are tremendously excited about a study that purports to show that kids raised religiously are less nice than atheist children:

[quote snipped]

Please, please let me count the ways in which I part ways with what I perceive as a ridiculous excuse for science.

First, I distrust any sociological study that proves conclusively that conservatives and religious people are mean, stupid, selfish, cruel, etc. As a starting point, we know that the vast majority of these sociological/psychological studies can’t be reproduced, which is one of the basic requirements for the validity of any purportedly “scientific” study. That means that the findings here are inherently suspicious.

Second, these lab studies are suspicious when their results run counter to the real world. For example, endless lab studies from Leftist institutions show that conservatives are dumb and ill-informed.  The problem is that actual data derived from real world subjects reveals that they’re better informed than their Leftist peers. And with specific regard to religious people, the reality, outside of children in the psychologist’s lair, is that religious people give much more generously to charity than their non-religious peers, something shown, not by little games, but by the hard numbers of actual donations.

Third, the “dictator game” the kids played had nothing to do with the real world because kids understand the difference between real and pretend.  Here’s an example:  when my cousin and I were little, we loved playing poker. We’d wager tens of thousands of imaginary dollars and cheat like crazy. Those behaviors, however, were not predictive of our actual approach to the world. In real life, my cousin and I are, and always were, both honest and financially conservative.

There’s more at the link.

The state of free speech in academia

Nazi book burningNot much different than shown in the photo:

How Wesleyan’s Attempt To Stamp Out Words Inflames Them

For anyone interested in freedom of the press, October 18, 2015 is a day that deserves to live in infamy. That night, for what may be the first time in the United States, the student government of an elite American university stripped funding from that university’s campus paper—for the offense of running a conservative op-ed.

The Wesleyan Argus published the op-ed in question on September 14. Conservative student columnist Bryan Stascavage’s article was titled “Why Black Lives Matter Isn’t What You Think.” Stascavage, who, by his own admission, was conflicted about his opinions on the movement, raised some rather moderate concerns about its propensity towards excusing, or even encouraging, violence toward police officers. He invited students to question if a more considered approach to police violence was necessary.

For his efforts, he was branded a racist, and a group of radical “student of color” activists started a petition to defund the campus paper that published his piece, and—and I swear I’m not making this up—to burn any copies of the paper found carrying the offending article. Yes, apparently publishing an op-ed that was merely undecided about the question of #BlackLivesMatter was enough for some activists to argue for book burning and press closure.

This would explain all the “safe space” bullshit on our college campuses…

…among other such nonsense.  The New Left has been all about creating a generation of spoiled brats unable to handle an opposing viewpoint, shouting them down at every turn.  Want to know where the left-wing noise machine got its start?  Look no further:

How Marcuse made today’s students less tolerant than their parents

When Samuel Stouffer first wrote on political tolerance during the McCarthy era, he concluded that Americans were generally an intolerant bunch. Yet, finding that younger people were more tolerant than their parents, he also concluded that Americans would become more and more tolerant over time, due to generational replacement and increases in education.  However, Stouffer did not predict the rise of the New Left, which I argue has reframed our collective notions about free expression, resulting in a significant decline in political tolerance among America’s youth.   I develop this argument in a chapter I wrote for Stanley Rothman’s last book, The End of the Experiment, (Rothman, Nagai, Maranto, and Woessner, 2015)   My findings are outlined below.

First, I make the case that young people are less politically tolerant than their parents’ generation and that this marks a clear reversal of the trends observed by social scientists for the past 60 years.  Political tolerance is generally defined as the willingness to extend civil liberties and basic democratic rights to members of unpopular groups.  That is, in order to be tolerant, one must recognize the rights of one’s political enemies to fully participate in the democratic process.  Typically, this is measured by asking people whether they will allow members of unpopular groups, or groups they dislike, to exercise political rights, such as giving a public talk, teaching college, or having their books on loan in public libraries.

Americans have not, in fact, become more tolerant.  Rather, they have shifted their dislike to new groups.  For example, “Muslim clergymen who preach hatred against the United States” are now the least liked group included in the General Social Survey (GSS), followed by people who believe that “blacks are genetically inferior”.   Most importantly, compared to those in their 40s, people in their 30s and 20s actually show lower tolerance towards these groups.  According to the 2012 GSS, people in their 40s are the most tolerant of Muslim clergymen who preach anti-American hatred: 43% say a member of this group should not be allowed to give a public speech in their community.  Among people in their 30s, the number who would prohibit this group from speaking climbs to 52%, and for those in their 20s it jumps to 60%.  Young people are also less tolerant than the middle aged groups toward militarists, communists, and racists.  This is not true for tolerance towards homosexuals or atheists, because younger people simply like these groups more. (Political tolerance is not a measure of liking someone, but the willingness to extend political freedoms to those one dislikes).

Second, I argue that youthful intolerance is driven by different factors than old fashioned intolerance, and that this change reflects the ideology of the New Left.  Herbert Marcuse, considered “The Father of the New Left,” articulates a philosophy that denies political expression to those who would oppose a progressive social agenda.