David Thompson: Sweet Sorrows

Ace ruminates on leftist piety as a kind of status signalling: 

I’ve heard it called “Luxurious Concerns.” That is, your concerns mark your social status. If your concerns are about keeping your job, paying your rent, or whether your kids’ school is any damn good, you’re worried about Big Things, and therefore you are marked as a Struggling Person. Only those who have really made it -- who are at the top of the economic and social order -- have the luxury of worrying about the Small Things. And if you worry about the Very Small Things, or indeed the Microscopic Things, then, well and truly, you have arrived… If you can’t afford a Luxury Car, or a Luxury Apartment, you can at least adorn yourself with Luxury Worries. It’s very cheap. Easy, too… Our modern class of intellectually-insecure social climbers are posing as connoisseurs of offensiveness. 

See also Kristian Niemietz and Daniel Hannan on the same. 

The attempt to cultivate pretentious guilt and pretentious indignation, and to balance grief and umbrage on a very tiny thing, the tinier the better, is of course a Guardian staple. It gives the left’s national organ its distinctive tone - that tinny, unconvincing high-pitched whine. Affecting woe, especially improbable woe, is how many leftwing columnists signal their position in their own moral hierarchy, relative to you, the heathen rabble. As I said some time ago, 

It’s important to understand these are not just lapses in logic or random fits of insincerity; these outpourings are displays – of class and moral elevation. Which is why they persist, despite getting knottier and ever more absurd. Crudely summarised, it goes something like this: “I am better than you because I pretend to feel worse.” 

And this is why, for instance, a tearful Theo Hobson tells us, “There is no excuse for failing to feel liberal guilt about race and class.” Because until “this problematic world” has been purged of all vice and inequity, however unrelated to your own behaviour, a heavy, heavy heart must be worn on the sleeve. How else will people know how superior you are? According to Mr Hobson, if you aren’t ostentatiously fretting about the eating of meat and “affluent lifestyles endangering the planet,” and if you aren’t “anxious about your status as a comfy bourgeoisie” and ashamed of earning more than some other random person, then there must be something wrong with you. And so you should feel guilty for not feeling guilty about things you shouldn’t feel guilty about. It’s the Guardian way. (read more)

Also see Tom Wolf on status signaling. (posted by ChipA)

"University of California student government passes resolution to divest – FROM AMERICA"

“The government of the United States of America is engaged in drone strikes that have killed over 2,400 people in Pakistan and Yemen, many of them civilians,” the resolution stated. “The government oversees, by far, the highest rate of imprisonment in the world, and racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately targeted by law enforcement agencies, particularly for drug-related offences. 400,000 undocumented immigrants are held in detention centers every year, and millions have been deported since the current administration took office, and the government is directly supporting and propping up numerous dictatorships around the world with weapons sales and foreign aid.”

"The measure cited alleged human rights violations by America such as drone strikes that have killed civilians, and claimed the country’s criminal justice system is racist, among other accusations."

"The “Resolution Toward Socially Responsible Investment at the University of California” passed with an overwhelming majority vote of 11-1-3."

Politically Correct Rising

Taking care of my little nephews gives me a perspective I would not otherwise have in what exactly means to be an adult.

Letting kids have their way with everything has dire consequences.

I mean, we literally do not have any adults checking the Left these days. There is a consequence to that. Every once in a while, a leftie catches a glimpse of the mess they are making and he works up the courage to say something. Jonathan Chait is the latest... Excerpt

...it would be a mistake to categorize today’s p.c. culture as only an academic phenomenon. Political correctness is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate. Two decades ago, the only communities where the left could exert such hegemonic control lay within academia, which gave it an influence on intellectual life far out of proportion to its numeric size. Today’s political correctness flourishes most consequentially on social media, where it enjoys a frisson of cool and vast new cultural reach. And since social media is also now the milieu that hosts most political debate, the new p.c. has attained an influence over mainstream journalism and commentary beyond that of the old.

It also makes money. Every media company knows that stories about race and gender bias draw huge audiences, making identity politics a reliable profit center in a media industry beset by insecurity. A year ago, for instance, a photographer compiled images of Fordham students displaying signs recounting “an instance of racial microaggression they have faced.” The stories ranged from uncomfortable (“No, where are you really from?”) to relatively innocuous (“ ‘Can you read this?’ He showed me a Japanese character on his phone”). BuzzFeed published part of her project, and it has since received more than 2 million views. This is not an anomaly.

In a short period of time, the p.c. movement has assumed a towering presence in the psychic space of politically active people in general and the left in particular. “All over social media, there dwell armies of unpaid but widely read commentators, ready to launch hashtag campaigns and circulate Change.org petitions in response to the slightest of identity-politics missteps,” (read the whole thing)

Conservatives might rejoice in the schadenfreude, except for the problem the unaddressed PC takeover of the culture brings about. A sort of copycat effect, in that Some conservatives may exhibit PC tendencies themselves. In a way is understandable, because once PC is the norm, you either adjust to it or you are exorcised (driven to the margins) from the public square ie labeled a racist... bigot... homophobe... yadi yada.

So, no, I'm not rooting for 'casualties'.

Erica Payne's monkeyshines

Weekly Standard,

Left wing activist Erica Payne, founder of Agenda Project, is encouraging people to deface Paul Ryan's new book by replacing its cover jacket with one she designed for it. Apparently it is not enough to simply get your message out there, where dialogue fails you must shut down the voice of your opposition and  ridicule them in whatever mischievous manner your perverse little mind can concoct  by whatever funding and energy available to you. She falls back on the absurd "pushing grandma over a cliff" meme demonstrating again that she is flatly not listening, just talking over, now acting over, encouraging other to act over the rational voices that counter her antagonism.

That silly reindeer game is played by two or more, Little Sister.

Paul Ryan's actual book cover:

Erica Payne's bogus cover for Paul Ryan's book:

Ha ha ha, good one, Little Sister. That again. It worked so well on your dummkopfs before. We see that you're stuck. Keep it up, Little sister, you're going to be naughty stepped.

Thing is, you have a book too. A lot less imaginative, natch, so easy to mess with that hardly anybody will notice a difference. All that is needed is a home printer, a can of spray glue and a visit to the bargain bins, psssssst, stick, BLAM, new cover.

Ericka Payne's actual cover

Yuk. I do judge a book by its cover, and I can tell your book is a drag. Mine is better. This here is what you call satire. It looks so close to the original you can hardly make out a difference. Your satire is too obvious. Whereas one could honestly take this for the real cover. Not just another silly little girl act out. This took three whole minutes on account of your actual cover being so achingly unartistic. 

Bogus cover for Erica Payne's book. 

Erica designed a whole jacket, not just a glue-on defacement. See? There's Grandma again on the back, screaming in fake distress, and there's the cliff again on the inside fold. These silly things could become framable collector's items for complete FAIL. 

Ericka Payne's bogus jacket for Paul Ryan's book:

Bogus jacket for Erica Payne's book, some folding required: