Mainstream conservatives are such pussies. When the left-liberal / multi-culti crowd says “Jump!” your main-con just wants to know how high.
We’ve had a nasty little example over Christmas. Some wits associated in some way I can’t be bothered to figure out with Human Events posted a spoof of the Christmas song “Feliz Navidad” on the Human Events website. You can hear the song and read the lyrics here, along with some leftist hyperventilating.
Jose Feliciano, who popularized the song, complained that the spoof was “racist” and so on. “I am revolted beyond words,” he said, at his song being used as “a vehicle for a political platform of racism and hate.”
Instead of telling Feliciano to go boil his head, the girlies at Human Events pulled the post and groveled. Score one for the multi-culti fanatics, intimidators, and speech code enforcers.
I’m up to here with this b-s about “hate.” There are supposed to be languages with only two color words, “black” and “white.” To express “blue” you have to say “white like the sky”; for “red” you say “black like blood”; and so on.
There is some similar lexical reduction being pressed on us by the multi-cultis, with no nameable attitudes to human groups, perhaps even to human individuals, other than “love” and “hate” — no “disapproval,” no “wary acceptance,” no “rather fond of,” no “grudging respect,” no “annoyance at being imposed upon,” no “get on with all right but wish they were better behaved.”
Political Correctness is, as several people have noticed, basically a campaign of enstupidation. It seeks to prevent us from noticing, talking about, thinking about, or — heaven forbid! — analysing features of the human world.
A good way to prevent us talking about things is to collapse complicated ideas down into single words with a strong emotional coloring. That’s what’s going on with the “hate” business.
In quite a long life, I am aware of having hated only half a dozen people, each one a person who had done me some definite wrong with malice aforethought. In cherishing that original, restricted use of the word “hate” I am, of course, hopelessly behind the times.
I’m not even sure that actual hate is inappropriate for foreigners who scoff at our laws. If someone breaks into my car and steals my iPod, I think I can legitimately hate that person. If someone breaks into my country and steals my job, my emergency-room care, my school places, my public utilities, my jail cells, why shouldn’t I hate that person? Probably I don’t, because the losses are at several removes from my everyday sense of possessing a thing; but I can’t see why I shouldn’t.
As for poking fun at foreigners in general and their habits, well, if that’s “hate,” then most of the things I’ve been laughing at most of my life are “hate.” Yet in fact it’s normal, natural, and harmless to make fun of peoples with different customs and languages. Human beings have been doing it for ever. Has our doing it contributed to history’s manifold inter-group outrages? I seriously doubt it. To the contrary, I think the attempt to stifle and shame ordinary, mild human responses is far more socially harmful, generating resentment against both the stiflers and the objects of our responses.
It sometimes seems as though one big goal of the leftist bullies is the stamping out of all humor. Making parodies of popular songs is a fun and harmless pastime. I’ve engaged in it myself now & then, and have used illegal immigration as one of my topics a couple of times: see here and here.
But I guess there is to be no laughter in the Left’s utopia — in that polished, perfected City of the Sun where everybody loves (or “loves”) everybody, with “loving” speech codes enforced by pursed-lipped schoolmarms and sneering commissars, their “conservative” poodles trotting along obediently at heel.
The left makes the social rules and enforces them; the right goes along meekly, with anguished, whining, sniveling apologies when the enforcers crack their whips.
And so we advance towards that City of the Sun, that Kingdom of Heaven on Earth … except that it is a mirage, and every attempt to reach it has ended with an ocean of tears and a mountain of corpses. Still we march on to the precipice, pretending that we are what we are not, and can become what we cannot become.
The death of mankind is not only a conceivable result of the triumph of socialism — it constitutes the goal of socialism.
— Op. Cit., p.285
I don’t know why you had to throw “socialism” in there at the end being as one could support a safety net that precludes homelessness or even living with cavities without having to shut down inter-tribal forms of jesting, joshing and even jeering (to say nothing of being opposed to an invasion that robs the lower and middle classes of their jobs) but otherwise nice piece and excellent tone.
mnuez, your friendly neighborhood supporter of 100% taxation of all inheritance above the 750K mark in order to provide basic housing and food along with top notch medical care for every American.
mnuz, are you serious? Or were you being sarcastic? If serious…
Take a roomful of second graders, a roomful of seventh graders, a roomful of 12th graders (or any darned roomful of schoolkids you wish) and give them each an equal quantity of something they consider valuable (like video games, money, athletic shoes, iPods, cars, whatever.) In one week, then one month, then a few months, then a year, take note of who still has any of those valuables or their equivalents.
Take all the wealth in America, yeah all of it. Throw it into a pot and stir, then divide by the number of all people in America 18 years of age and over. In a few months, then a year, then five years, take note of who has grown their wealth, who has the same amount they were first given, and who has nothing.
The poor–they will always be with us…no matter what they start with.
Wow, I have never seen Derb so agitated. The funny thing is I would bet Jose Feliciano makes fun of some group without thinking he is being hateful. I recently saw Seth McFarlane make fun of Mary Maitlin , who is deaf, on a TV variety show and to her credit she handled it beautifully. In a way it was kind of a tribute that he did not feel the need to pull punches with her. It was incredibly funny too by the way.
mmuez, how do you feel about sustainability and the environment? I don’t care myself but I have the feeling that a large number of those who support wealth redistribution are also concerned about the environment. Do you think supplying unlimited funds (seemingly unlimited anyway) eliminating economic barriers to population growth is a good idea?
I’m up to here with this b-s about “hate.”
I think the “hate” rhetoric is psychological projection; it’s pretty obvious that activist liberals are nasty and mostly hypocritical people.
It sometimes seems as though one big goal of the leftist bullies is the stamping out of all humor.
That’s probably a good part of their motivation – check out Orwell’s essay (name=?) about how various Nazi/Marxist clubs (SS, whatever) couldn’t have taken hold in England because people would’ve laughed at the goofy uniforms and “silly walks.”
mnuz, are you serious?
To dream the impossible dream!
Spinning a damning indictment of multiculturalism from the rantings of the Feliz Navidad guy rings a little hollow to me, but the overall point against multiculturalism (a worldview not held, at least currently, by any of the liberals I know) strikes me as sound.
It’s a good thing The Derb didn’t aim that gun at Santa and his heavy-carbon-footprint team. They’d have been blown out of the sky.
More of the insensitivity training, Derb. It feels so…so…strangely liberating after the hundreds of hours of the other kind I’ve received. Like having a cigarette in the high school bathroom.
Freedom!
As a thoroughly multicultural liberal, I enjoyed Brads hyperventilating.
@mnuez
Re: >750k death tax.
Xperience sez: You only get the small fish that way the big ones lawyer their way around it.
Well of course… there is no such thing as racism or hatefulness and there are certainly no such things as racists, there are only the poor mistreated victims of political correctness. That was quite a whine my friend and an unfortunate post in which to accuse someone else of being a pussy….
We all may have had it up to here, there, or anywhere, but a lot of good it does us.
Here’s a couple more (first one much better):
“We’re Beginning to Look A Lot like Marxists”: http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=34737
“Sasha Obama’s Big Mouth”: http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=28220
You clearly do not understand Newspeak. There is no “love”, there is only hate and unhate.
Jose Feliciano sullied his own song back when he not only let it be turned into a jingle for a third-rate “Mexican” fast food chain (“from the bottom of my heart… and from Taco John’s”), but even sang TJ’s bastardized version for their TV spots, which still run every December. So, I’d say he doesn’t have much to complain about here.
I have useful meme to suggest (that is if we actually want to win this damn thing and get our countey back rather than to lazily ‘ditto’ on about it) and that is that:
“The business and media elite are colonizing the United States of your parents and grandparents with third-world Mexicans who speak Spanish in the EXACT same way that the Chinese elite are colonizing Tibet with Han Chinese and thus erasing the country that had existed to that point.”
That sentence isn’t phrased to intelligently or tightly because it needs to be able to appeal to a wider array of people. The cheif point is to note that America is being colonized.
Extra points for
– By a nefarious “business and media elite” (people need to SEE that there’s a powerful enemy doing this to them and they won’t be able to do if you point the Mexican colonizers themselves as the enemy – people aren’t too up on their American, Australian or other colonial histories and tend to see “colonists” as immensely powerful folk rather than understanding that first generation colonists were often the opposite of such. So, again, let them SEE those powerful ones as the enemy. Cover both “Business” and “Media” elite so as to be able to get through to both liberals and conservatives).
– Make them SMELL and and get nauseous from the foreigness of these colonizers. Don’t stop talking about “Mexican” and “Spanish”. Make them understand that their country is being irrevocably changed by their enemies (the Elite and comfortable ones in their all white gated communities) in THEIR very generation and that their grandsons and granddaughters will be strangers in the USA and prey to the foreigners.
– Tibet! Tibet is a perfect example of a country (or land or whatever) being colonized away by the uncaring lard-guzzling fat cats far away who care nothing for the locals. Conservatives are only a problem when it comes to immigration if they’ve been tainted by the pseudo-libertardians or if they’ve been vaccinated into believing that the Republicans are on their side by the lying “we’re fighting with you!” Snivvling of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the leaders of the Republican Party – all of whom are actually doing their utmost to ensure that the colonizing never ends and nothing effective is ever done to stop it. For the most part though, the problem is Liberals and they know a thing or two about Tibet. Make the Tibet connection.
So – The Business and Media Gods are COLONIZING your grandmother’s and granddaughter’s United States with Spanish Speaking Foreign Mexicans just like Tibet has been COLONIZED by the Han Chinese by the Fatcats of the Communist Party.
The COLONIZATION meme is one we should get out at every single moment. For it is true. Your grandson’s country is being colonized by wholly distinct and different and dangerous colonists before your very eyes.
mnuez
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@mnuez I have useful meme to suggest Not THAT old Rush Windbag chestnut, I’m losing respect for you Señor
That “vent” really felt an awful lot like how it feels here in Minnesota in winter when the furnace has been overdoing it for a while, and you finally realize you can’t stand it any more, and, even though it’s 10 degrees outside (maybe Al Gore’s in town…), you open up a window and let some cold air in, and it feels very, extremely refreshing.
Cold, to be sure.
But darn refreshing.
Thanks, and Amen.
Mainstream conservatives are such pussies.
C’mon, Derb. Tell us what you really think. 🙂
Mr Derbyshire,
Perhaps you can help here. This is something I’ve always wanted to know. Is there a reason we don’t just explain this reflexive, populist, politically correct response to the parody– and in fact much of liberal philosophy– as being nothing more than mindless egalitarianism and intellectualized intuition? I believe the center and even some current Democrats would be more responsive to arguments like that which point out such ways in which liberals, far from deserving to be considered the core of the so-called “thinking man’s party,” are in fact the enemy of independent thought almost as often as the proponents of right-wing political correctness (e.g., fundamentalists).
Yes, yes, the coming Hispanopocalypse will destroy us all. Because buying soup on the “sopa” aisle at the alien “supermercado” is so cripplingly difficult that we must create artificial crisis — tout de suite!
In free markets with limited government, it is sometimes economically efficient to trade goods and services with people of different ethnic backgrounds. If that horror is too difficult to bear, you might want to switch to socialism and a command economy. Mandatory domestic sourcing worked *great* for the Soviets, I’m sure it will work for you, especially if you like long lines. You like long lines, right?
Bradlaugh:
Thanks for a most extraordinary and powerful Op. Cit.
Mainstream conservatives are such pussies.
Come to think of it, maybe, like G. Bush, they’re not actually conservatives.
COLONIZING your grandmother’s and granddaughter’s United States …
My grandmothers’ U.S. was England and Sweden (tho I’m a Native American) and I’m advising my 20-something daughter to think seriously about moving somewhere else – the problem is, where?
mnuez:
The “capitalist system” is the fundamental organizing principle of human civilization (and has always been so despite having only relatively recently been named or recognized). Essentially, the principle recognizes that progress–improvement, melioration of want, etc.–require, in the main, that sacrifices (reduced consumption, extra expenditure of labor, etc.) be countenanced in order that the necessary improving “capital” be brought into existence; and, further, that regular and thought-out further and similar restraint be exercised toward maintenance of each item of that capital (quite independently from but as a necessary prerequisite for production of additional such capital). That the human race (more in some places than in others) has furnished itself magnificently in this respect cannot be seriously denied. But it’s relatively unrecognized (even in the better-supplied areas) that whatever diminishes capital or discourages its maintenance and further formation makes everyone–as a whole–poorer. And, like it or not, that’s exactly what your proposal (for the wholesale confiscation–through taxation–of the capital accumulations of the very wealthiest) would accomplish (and for a variety of reasons, which I’ll attempt to treat briefly here).
First and foremost is that capital is a phenomenon of the creativity of the human mind, even in those cases where it comes almost accidentally as a “gift of nature,” needing only an instance of recognition of its potential by some more-mentally-agile (than his fellows) man. In a party of men intent on spearing fish for food, it might happen that one chances to notice that certain stones in the stream have been eroded, fortuitously, in the shape of a human foot and that such might be taken and employed as “lasts” upon which to shape animal skins into protection for feet; further. that such might be, eventually, gotten in a gradation of “sizes” upward from that of a child. Such would be collective capital if employed indiscriminately by any member of the group; or, if kept by an individual to be loaned or rented to others or employed by him in his personal efforts to produce shoes for himself and others–private capital. “Maintenance” would be a “snap” (stones don’t wear quickly), consisting primarily in not losing it (or them). He might ask to be rewarded with fish for whatever he did for the others. If they wanted shoes made (or to use a last to enhance their own effort), they’d have to either reduce their fish consumption somewhat (or work a bit of “overtime” to get the extra required).
The stone lasts “turn a profit.” That is to say, our sharp-sighted hero of industry perceives that the others all patronize him to the extent that he’s got more fish than he and his family need consume (even with the extra baby they’ve been able to afford) and even has a whole day “free” each week, leaving him to consider what other wonderful improvements he might
make to gainfully utilize this added opportunity. And, if in exercising imagination during a period of leisurely reverie, he thought of a screen or “net” he might put across the stream, into which the fish might be quickly driven, and, if, further, he devised some handy materials from which it might be constructed, and, even further, used some of that time gained to actually create such a thing, then what this primitive entrepreneur would have launched could be considered the very basis of civilization IF he did not neglect to repair the net when worn (or get others to do so); otherwise, his society would (due to capital decumulation) need revert to its more primitive state of production (and might even suffer the starvation of the increased “mouths to feed” dependent on the higher level of nutrition).
That’s the beginning, mnuez–and we’re never so very far from that point that we can contemplate the destruction or consumption of capital with equanimity. But there’s more–which I will get to following, though with a lapse in time of some hours.
Yes, yes, the coming Hispanopocalypse will destroy us all. Because buying soup on the “sopa” aisle at the alien “supermercado” is so cripplingly difficult that we must create artificial crisis — tout de suite!
Don’t be glib. Having grown up in the border region of Texas, I can tell you, it’s not just a matter of parallel phrasing. It’s a matter of creating two parallel and often competing societies. At best you have places like Switzerland that confederalize, then places like Belgium and Canada which constantly have to placate linguistic minorities with federal bribes, and finally you have situations of mutual violence and war.
What a great comment thread! Thanks to all who joined in.
It’s 1:30am so I’m pretty well pickled. (Is anyone sober at 1:30am? Why?) The main thing I want to say to you all is: BUY MY BOOK! I have a family to feed, dammit.
Whoa, I’m still logged in & now one hour MORE pickled. YWHW bless us every one. The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream …
3:00am barely coherent … trouble finding the keys … fading out … happy new year ,,, Old Crow RULES …
@Polichinello
Glibness aside, I’m truly sympathetic to the problem on the border; as an entry point for illegal aliens and criminals, it is certain to see the worst that central and south America have to offer. And I’m entirely in favor of normalizing the border situation by various means, ranging from enforcement to faster avenues to guest worker and citizen status.
But I’ve lived in communities with large Spanish-speaking populations my entire life — Houston, San Antonio, Los Angeles. The ethnic violence that everyone predicts just isn’t happening, crime continues to go down, hispanic-descended people are darn good citizens who value family and property and all that, and in a generation or three, everybody is going to wonder what the big deal was, just like we all forgot how much we hated the Irish and Italians for coming over here and stealing our jobs.
Yes, there are challenges in the hispanic community — lack of educational ambition, for example — that may still be an issue in future generations. But dang it all, I’m *living* in ethnically mixed communities all day long and I’m telling you the problems just are not there.
The illegal alien problem has essentially stabilized. It’s become a seasonally migrant community, smaller than the community of legal aliens and not growing any more. The illegal alien problem we have now is about as bad as it’s going to get, and it’s a problem that could essentially be legislated out of existence overnight if there was will to do it.
Dear Sir: My apologies. I was born here but when I was born neither I nor my parents were aware that you owned the whole country. Now that I read that people are breaking into your country and stealing your job I understand that you are king of America, well I guess you were the king of America since you are now unemployed as they stole your job. However, I have good news for you. NOt long ago one of those people who broke into your country and stole your job was here cleaning our yard. The Good news is that the yard needs cleaning again. When can you show up and do your job? I am happy to give it back to you.
Seriously: you sound like a collectivist speaking in the perpetual we as if you own everything. This is the problem with anti-market, anti-freedom conservatives.
“Political Correctness is, as several people have noticed, basically a campaign of enstupidation. It seeks to prevent us from noticing, talking about, thinking about, or — heaven forbid! — analysing features of the human world.”
Well, I guess this is what a conservative would consider “analysis”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS_A9TORcYw
After all, conservatives are basically fucking idiots.
Feliciano was complaining that the song was racist, it was, and the people who put it up took it down after facing criticism for it.
People like you simply afraid of criticism for believing stupid shit, and you cry about being persecuted by the evil liberal leftist socialists when someone points that out.
cls: Clean your own damn yard. As I do. When did manual work fall beneath the dignity of American citizens?
Alex: Bite me.
Amen, Bradlaugh! I did my little-kid American lawn-mowing duty. I hated it, but I did it. Now, as a grownup, I can’t shove the job on to anyone else, being all alone in the world except for my kitteh, but I still have to do it: We need to keep the underbrush cut down low on the glacis so as to see who’s sneaking up on us.
I goofed up and failed to reproduce, so I reckon I’ll have to ply the mower m’self. (You can’t hire neighbor kids for this anymore, they’re either at soccer practice or it’s against the law. I refuse to hire foreigners, even were I to have the money to do so.)
I concur. My dad mowed his own lawn until us kids could handle it. Now I mow it, and look forward to when my kids will do it. Once they’re out of the house, I’ll probably do it myself again. Grandpa mowed his own lawn into his 70s. There is no way I’m going to pay someone $40 to do an hour and a half of work that is decent exercise anyway. I take out my own garbage too. Is that what’s next?