Everything is offensive now. Name-calling, “racist” slurs, “climate-denying,” flag-burning, and so on. I’m so offended by everything. Where is MY safe space?
This week, Baltimore Orioles player Adam Jones complained that fans called him racist names, including the “n-word,” and one person threw a bag of peanuts at him. And this was Really Big News, all day yesterday on the AM all-news radio station, the top story. The main aspect of the story is “hurting someone’s feelings,” more than just some racist loudmouth idiot.
Now, am I the only one who thinks that this should not have been the top story at the top of the hour, each hour? Is this “racism” stuff being overplayed?
So someone called him some nasty names. And I know the “n-word” is a nasty word, even though black people get away with using the word all the time, and that’s okay. And racism is a bad thing because it comes from collectivism. But Adam Jones is a professional athlete, as well as supposedly a 31-year-old grown man. I’m sure he’s heard plenty in the locker room or in a bar room. But in this day and age, when there’s name-calling, no longer is the reaction, “sticks and stones,” etc., etc., when it comes to people using racial epithets. That’s different, for some reason. We must ritualistically make a public brouhaha about it (and then get a standing ovation by the guilt-ridden white people the next day).
Sorry. I know I’m being quite unsympathetic. But as late as the 1980s or ’90s if a baseball fan shouted some racial slurs at a black player, I’m sure that most players would just ignore the loudmouth and get on with the game.
But now we have the “snowflake” syndrome, seen on college campuses recently, transferring itself into other areas of life, such as pro sports.
So things are different now, with our society’s modern obsession with race. And yes, it seems to be an obsession. On the college campuses, it’s race, race, race, racist, racist, racist. Every little thing someone might say is viewed as “racist,” and is a “microaggression” that “triggers” some emotional reaction.
And it’s not just on one side, this obsession with race, in my view. There is the phenomenon with some Trump supporters and those “alt-right” white nationalists, or just nationalists, like the Pat Buchananite conservatives and libertarians who are concerned about America losing its white majority (perhaps by 2050, so says Pat).
Frankly, I couldn’t care less if the area in which I live has a white majority or not, as long as people leave me alone. Why are people so obsessed with skin color, like it means something? Didn’t the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. say something about not being judged by the color of one’s skin, but by the content of one’s character? Sadly, some people view skin color as important.
Currently, we have a white majority in America, but we have a tyrannical government of overlords in Washington, a police state with the NSA, FBI, CIA, TSA, all those bureaucracies and local police departments, controlled by mostly white people who do not understand the idea of due process, presumption of innocence, and who constantly violate their oaths to obey the U.S. Constitution. Yeah, those mostly white people doing all that to us. But I digress.
So our culture has changed now into a combination snowflake racist-hurts-my-feelings culture/police state. And, ironically, many among the college campus intolerance-censorship crowd are the same ones who want to sic the armed police on innocents who may have unwittingly uttered the wrong thing!
Cornell Law School professor William Jacobson has this excellent summary of the new cultural revolution on college campuses. The students engage in “robotic chanting” and shut-downs of speakers at many colleges now, even though many of the students know very little of the people they’re censoring, or the speakers’ actual views or writings.
The purge isn’t just shout-downs and shut-downs. It’s a demand that professors and other students not deviate one iota from the prevailing campus views, lest they be publicly shamed as racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, transphobic, and so on. Those labels can be devastating to careers, and fear of being labeled even when not warranted is enough to shut up most people on campus.
I happen to think that many in the younger generation now are really controlled and indoctrinated with nonsense ideology and distractions to turn their attention away from the real world. Why don’t they protest the fascist drug war, the NSA spying on innocent Americans, the Bush-Obama-Trump drone bombings and murders of foreigners that do nothing but provoke foreigners and increase the chances of terrorist acts against us? Do the kids even know about those realities? I actually don’t think so. But they do know about “climate change,” “global warming,” and that “All white people are racists” and “black people are victims.” i.e. they’re irrational, brainwashed ignoramuses.
Speaking of climate change, there was an interesting discussion by forum members responding to a news photo on the Wendy McElroy blog, with a link to this article about the recent “People’s Climate March” on PJMedia.
Those marchers consist of many brainwashed climate fanatics who believe that carbon dioxide, something we all exhale and that plant life requires to survive, is a threat. And their main goal is the further expansion of government power and control, and more taxation to steal more wealth from the workers and producers of society. That’s it. Stealing more of other people’s money away from them is the real goal with the brainwashed climate fanatics.
So, apparently some of the “People’s Climate March” activists were so concerned about the environment they left a lot of garbage and didn’t clean up after themselves. Just like the Occupy Wall Street protesters a few years ago.
On the Wendy McElroy blog, cb750 noted that, “And they cut down 5 acres of trees and created 30 tons of garbage to hold that rally.”
Brad R wrote, “Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit quoted this tweet about the science climate march, which I rather like: ‘I haven’t seen a marcher yet who looked capable of handling a quadratic equation.'”
To which gdp responded, “Most of them believe in ‘Cargo-Cult “Scientism”, ‘ not ‘Science.'” And gdp added, “‘Science’ is not a ‘value’ to them — it is a ‘fetish’.”
And gdp defined “fetish” as
1a) an object (such as a small stone carving of an animal) believed to have magical power to protect or aid its owner;
broadly: a material object regarded with superstitious or extravagant trust or reverence
1b) an object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion
2) a rite or cult of fetish worshippers
3) fixation
That’s exactly right, in my view, with these climate True Believers. They refer to “science,” even though the science they are talking about is mainly computer models which predict the future, and very inaccurately, it turns out. But they are not concerned about empirical evidence and history. No, they, and the millions of brainwashed sheeple among them who constantly label non-believers as “deniers” (as though skeptics = holocaust deniers), they worship the ideology of “climate change” that’s been instilled into them in a blind, unthinking, and unquestioning manner.
The True Believers’ other ideology that they also worship blindly that goes with climate worship, is their Government Taxation ideology: Because modern civilization is causing “climate change,” we must steal as much as possible from those who are productive, from those who create wealth and raise our standard of living!
But as I mentioned above, the emotionalism is also on the other side. I heard Dennis Prager recently say on the radio that “leftism” is a religion. And leftism is “irrational” and all emotional. But on that other side, I see some of these conservatives and nationalists with their collectivist religious worship of “America,” and who love authority, especially armed governmental authority like the police and military. They get all emotional if someone criticizes the military (and all the murders of innocent civilians the U.S. military have caused for decades and decades).
And during the past week I heard another talk radio personality Jeff Kuhner bringing up the flag-burning issue. (Ugh, not THAT again!) He’s the one I heard, twice I’ve heard now, who wants a revival of the House Un-American Activities Committee. (To bring criminal charges against George Bush Sr. and George Bush Jr. for the wars of aggression they started for no good reason? And the hundreds of thousands of deaths they’ve caused? Yeah, right.)
Anyway, Kuhner says we need to protect the American flag. No, an inanimate object does not feel pain if you set fire to it. However, if the flag-burner stole the flag, that is a matter of theft, and destruction of property. Those are the crimes, not someone expressing his anger at the U.S. government. But the flag-worshipers want to actually grab and detain, and jail someone for burning a flag, rather than see their worshiped inanimate object being “harmed.”
So, we’re getting it from all sides. From the “left” and from the “right,” backwards and forwards, and inside out. I’m offended, this or that is offensive. “You’re a racist!” Stop calling me names. Let’s jail a flag-burner, or a pot-smoker (but not a drunk), a climate “denier,” and a “microaggressor.”
Where is all this leading?