Milo Yiannopoulos And The State Of American Conservatism

Milo Yiannopoulos was a troll and a peddler in offensiveness, but the fact that he became a star on the American right was the result of a transformation of American conservatism that has been entirely unhealthy.

Milo Yiannopoulos

The 2017 version of the Conservative Political Action Conference is scheduled to begin on Thursday, and it has already managed to generate controversy. The latest incident started when it was announced over the weekend that Milo Yiannopoulos, a controversial writer associated with Breitbart News who seems to have created his own niche as someone who, much like Ann Coulter, says things for the sake of causing controversy and outrage and then revels in the outrage he causes, would be delivering the Keynote Address at the conference. Almost immediately, the invitation to Yiannopoulos stirred controversy even among conservatives given his ties to Breitbart, his loud and outspoken support for Donald Trump, and the contents of his writing and speeches in which he clearly champions ideas that fall within what has come to be called the “alt-right,” a catch-all term that describes a branch of conservatism that is at the same time nationalist, xenophobic, and in many cases outright racist. Given the fact that Yiannopoulos’s appearances at places such as the University of California at Berkeley and other locations have been the subject of heated protests that have often devolved into violence, it was anticipated that his appearance at CPAC would be similarly controversial.

The invitation turned out to be far more controversial than even first anticipated. Early yesterday morning, videos were released via a conservative blog that appeared to show Yiannopoulos excusing pedophilia and advocating in favor of sexual relationships between adults and children as young as 13 years old. The outrage was quick and vocal, with voices on both the right and the left calling on the American Conservative Union, which runs CPAC, to withdraw the invitation. By the end of the day, that’s exactly what happened as Yiannopoulos was disinvited from CPAC and quickly faced other consequences from having his past words made public:

WASHINGTON — Milo Yiannopoulos, a polemical Breitbart editor and unapologetic defender of the alt-right, tested the limits of how far his provocations could go after the publication of a video in which he condones sexual relations with boys as young as 13 and laughs off the seriousness of pedophilia by Roman Catholic priests.

On Monday, the organizers of the Conservative Political Action Conference rescinded their invitation for him to speak this week. Simon & Schuster said it was canceling publication of “Dangerous” after standing by him through weeks of criticism of the deal. And Breitbart itself was reportedly reconsidering his role amid calls online for it to sever ties with him.

Mr. Yiannopoulos’s comments, which quickly created an uproar online over the weekend, put many conservatives in a deeply uncomfortable position. They have long defended Mr. Yiannopoulos’s attention-seeking stunts and racially charged antics on the grounds that the left had tried to hypocritically censor his right to free speech.

But endorsing pedophilia, it seemed, was more than they could tolerate. The board of the American Conservative Union, which includes veterans of the conservative movement like Grover Norquist and Morton Blackwell, made the decision to revoke Mr. Yiannopoulos’s speaking slot and condemn his comments on Monday.

“We initially extended the invitation knowing that the free speech issue on college campuses is a battlefield where we need brave, conservative standard-bearers,” Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, said in a written statement.

Regarding Mr. Yiannopoulos’s comments, Mr. Schlapp called them “disturbing” and said Mr. Yiannopoulos’s explanation of them was insufficient.

Late Monday, Mr. Yiannopoulos said that he would hold a news conference on Tuesday to discuss his statements.

Mr. Yiannopoulos, who has railed against Muslims, immigrants, transgender people and women’s rights, is a marquee contributor to Breitbart News, where he serves as senior editor. He has amassed a fan base for his stunts and often-outrageous statements. But by Monday afternoon, his future at the website was being intensely debated by top management.

One Breitbart journalist, who requested anonymity to describe private deliberations, described divisions in the newsroom over whether Mr. Yiannopoulos could stay on. There was some consensus among staff members that his remarks were more extreme than his usual speech, the journalist said, and executives were discussing by telephone whether his apology was enough to preserve his position at the site.

A Breitbart representative declined to comment.

After the video was leaked on Twitter by a conservative group called the Reagan Battalion, Mr. Yiannopoulos denied that he had ever condoned child sexual abuse, noting that he was a victim himself. He blamed his “British sarcasm” and “deceptive editing” for leading to a misunderstanding.

But in the tape, the fast-talking polemicist is clear that he has no problem with older men abusing children as young as 13, which he then conflates with relationships between older and younger gay men who are of consenting age.

“No, no, no. You’re misunderstanding what pedophilia means,” Mr. Yiannopoulos says on the tape, in which he is talking to radio hosts in a video chat. “Pedophilia is not a sexual attraction to somebody 13 years old who is sexually mature. Pedophilia is attraction to children who have not reached puberty,” he adds, dismissing the fact that 13-year-olds are children.

The notion of consent, he says, is “arbitrary and oppressive.”

At one point in the video, an unknown speaker says that the behavior being defended by Mr. Yiannopoulos is akin to molestation by Catholic priests. Mr. Yiannopoulos responds, in an ironic tone, by crediting a priest for having helped develop his sexual technique.

Conservatives reacted with near unanimous disgust at the comments. Some expressed bewilderment that conference organizers would extend an invitation to Mr. Yiannopoulos in the first place, given his history of statements that have been offensive to blacks and Muslims, and have generally pushed the bounds of decency. Twitter has banned him.

In addition to losing the opportunity to speak at CPAC, Yiannopoulos also lost a multi-million dollar book deal with Simon and Shuster, and, by the end of the day, it was reported that as many as a half-dozen top Breitbart employees were threatening to quit if the site didn’t end its relationship with him because of the comments. This afternoon, it was announced that Yiannopoulos had “resigned” from his position at Breitbart.

I haven’t written about Yiannopoulos before largely because, while I was unfortunately well aware of who he was and what he was saying, I didn’t think it was necessary to give the man more of what he quite obviously craves, which is publicity whether it’s positive or negative. Much like Ann Coulter and similar provocateurs on the right, he seemed to thrive on negative press and opinion most of all and, slowly but surely, he went from being a guy who wrote a badly edited column at Breitbart to a media star among certain segments of the right, largely thanks to the negative reaction he would create among people that conservatives viewed as their political enemies.

As I noted above, he had become especially well-known for his appearances on college campuses, usually sponsored by some official or unofficially recognized group of conservative students on some of the most politically liberal campuses in the country. These protests usually resulted in protests that would accomplish little more than draw even more attention to Yiannopoulos and his cohorts. Additionally, his column and other posts at Breitbart would be frequently passed around on social media both despite and because of the controversy that they aroused. Yiannaopoulous also became one of the earliest and most vocal supporters of Donald Trump at the Breitbart site and, arguably, was one of the major forces behind the process that turned that site into the advocates for the Trump campaign and outlet for the so-called alt-right that it has become over the past two years.

Despite the fact that Yiannopoulos specialized in being particularly offensive, and the fact that he often brought up topics that at least the socially conservative wing of the GOP would find offensive from other sources, he nonetheless had become a star for many on the right. To a large degree, it appeared that this stardom derived from the fact that he was purposely seeking to offend people that conservatives considered political enemies. In addition to that, however, there were clearly other things involved in his rise to fame that had little to do with his deliberate offensiveness, just as there was more to the fact that Breitbart News has become one of the most heavily viewed websites on the right. Namely, as much as some conservatives preferred not to recognize it, Yiannapoulos and Breitbart were speaking for an increasingly growing segment of the right while what became the “Never Trump” movement that sought to divorce the right from their rhetoric found that they didn’t have nearly the power or numbers they thought they did.

To be fair, not everyone on the right fell for Yiannopoulos’s act. Just as there is still a group on the right that is standing up and criticizing Trump, there has always been a part of the right-wing in the United States that rejected the things that people like Milo, Coulter, and others stand for  In many cases, though, these people remained quiet in no small part because it quickly became politically and personally risky to speak out against the rising paranoid populism that began popping up on the right with the rise of the Tea Party movement. Additionally, many commentators refrained from speaking openly against people like Milo due to the fact that doing so would often lead to online threats and harassment from supporters who seemed to have few scruples about what they said. Finally, one gets the sense among many of these dissidents that it wasn’t clear just how many others agreed with them. Because of all of this and more, they remained quiet. As a result, the cancer that people like Milo, Coulter, and Donald Trump represented was allowed to fester and grow to the point where it has become so powerful that it has a seat in the White House in the form of both Trump and his right-hand man Steve Bannon.

Matt Lewis, a conservative political writer who wrote a book about the state of the GOP and conservatism called Too Dumb To Failexplains why it was that so many conservatives fell for Milo’s act:

The invitation to speak at CPAC tells you all you need to know about the state of American conservatism and why it was so easily co-opted by Trumpism. So why was he invited in the first place? Yiannopoulos, like Trump, is a paradox. On one hand, he brings a certain cosmopolitan flair to a group of people accustomed to being thought of as unsophisticated; on the other hand, he reinforces every negative stereotype imaginable. I was among those who criticized CPAC’s decision to baptize Trump by inviting him to speak at its 2013 meeting. Now, that seems quaint. Once arguably too wonky and prudish, today’s conservatism, judging by CPAC’s invited speakers, is increasingly crude, vulgar, and lowbrow.

(…)

Yiannopoulos’s invitation was, perhaps, the logical denouement for a cause that prioritizes provocateurs over polemicists and entertainment over substance. His appearance could be seen as a microcosm of a movement that became everything it used to hate—that defines deviancy down.

True conservatism has been replaced by a fetish for fighting political correctness. Along with a penchant for showmanship, this seems to be Yiannopoulos’s entire shtick―and it’s a good one. The enemy of your enemy is your friend, and since Yiannopoulos says horrible things about radical feminists and other annoying leftists, he is, ergo, a conservative hero. This was the initial message from Schlapp. Before rescinding Yiannopoulos’s invitation (in response to a critical tweet from conservative writer Jonah Goldberg), Schlapp said the “1st amendment is dead on campus. Conservatives should fight back. As radioactive as milo is he is fighting back.”

If “fighting back” means using the weapons of identity politics and victimhood is the name of the game, then Yiannopoulos is bulletproof. He’s gay and (he says) part Jewish (and he likes ” black dick,”  so you can’t call him a bigot or a homophobe). He also has a British accent, which American conservatives mistake for sophistication, so he can’t be labeled a rube. He’s also a martyr who evokes sympathy when his intentionally provocative behavior sparks even more outrageous (and intolerant) behavior. Not only do these characteristics provide him cover to say anything outlandish he likes, they also provide cover for his fans. After the news broke that he had been disinvited to CPAC, Yiannopoulos posted a statement on Facebook. Quite tellingly, he begins by casting himself as both a sympathetic minority (a gay man) and a “child abuse” victim.  The problem is that we too often confuse being politically incorrect with being a hero. It is one thing to defend someone’s right to say something vile; it is another thing to reward him for it.

It’s unlikely that Yiannopoulos would have had his CPAC invitation revoked, or lost anything else, had it not been for the revelations that were released Sunday night. Instead, he would have been celebrated  as a hero who is bravely standing up for freedom of speech against the forces of “political correctness,” his book deal would have gone forward and probably been a best-seller among conservatives, and he would have continued to get invited to speak publicly. That is where the problem that Milo and his like represents to the American right lies. As Lewis puts it, the problem with conservatism today isn’t the fact that Yiannopoulou made some clearly insane comments about pedophilia and sexual relationships between adults and children. The problem is that he was invited to speak at CPAC and considered a celebrity on the right to begin with. To a large degree, Yiannopoulos rose to fame for the same reasons that Donald Trump did, because he said things that an uncomfortably large segment of the American right agrees with and because he annoyed people who were considered political enemies. This isn’t the sign of a healthy political movement that is concerned with the future of the country, it’s the sign of a self-absorbed group of people who believe what they believe not for strong intellectual reasons but because it feels right and because it offends people. While people like this have always existed, they’ve become an increasingly vocal segment of the American right, and people like Milo and Trump are the end result of the transformation of the American right from the largely intellectual movement it started out us under the leadership of people like William F. Buckley Jr. and others into the populist outlet for rage and xenophobia it has turned into. Again, this isn’t true of all conservatives, but it’s something that they let happen to their movement. Unless and until they act to take that movement back, it will continue to drift even further into the fringes of American politics, and that will have serious consequences for American politics.

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Doug Mataconis
About Doug Mataconis
Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.

Comments

  1. KM says:

    To a large degree, Yiannapoulous rose to fame for the same reasons that Donald Trump did, because he said things that an uncomfortably large segment of the American right agrees with and because he annoyed people who were considered political enemies. This isn’t the sign of a healthy political movement that is concerned with the future of the country, it’s the sign of a self-absorbed group of people who believe what they believe not for strong intellectual reasons but because it offends people.

    Bravo, Doug. Most conservatives nowadays care only for how much they can hurt, insult or get on up on “libruls” (hereby defined as anybody they currently dislike) instead of any dedication to a set of principles. Troll culture is assh*ole culture by definition so it’s embrace into the conservative heart speaks deeply about their priorities in life. Republicans have had *so* many chances in the last few decades to get their agenda pushed forward, with now being the pinnacle of their power. What are they doing then? Wasting countless bandwidth and terrabytes of data celebrating librul tears at their LOL WE WON!!!

    It’s all about letting your inner 5yr be the jerk you’ve always wanted to be instead of caring about government.

  2. gVOR08 says:

    Just shows once again that conservatism is whatever they think pisses off liberals, updated weekly.

    He also has a British accent, which American conservatives mistake for sophistication, so he can’t be labeled a rube.

    Funny. Buckley did the same thing with his fake Mid-Atlantic accent.

  3. Moosebreath says:

    “To a large degree, Yiannapoulous rose to fame for the same reasons that Donald Trump did, because he said things that an uncomfortably large segment of the American right agrees with and because he annoyed people who were considered political enemies.”

    Or as was said years ago:

    “Today’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today, updated daily.”

  4. SKI says:

    Let’s be crystal clear what just happened: The Conservative Right has zero problem with shunning Milo for his pro-pedophilia comments. They just don’t think bigotry, antisemitism, racism or misogyny are worthy of shunning – because they don’t think those are bad things.

  5. Mr. Bluster says:

    But endorsing pedophilia, it seemed, was more than they could tolerate.

    Of course sexually molesting adult women is totally acceptable to these same principled, conservatives.

    And when you’re a star you can do anything…grab them by the pussy…
    President Pud

  6. Pch101 says:

    This began with George HW Bush, Barry Goldwater and Strom Thurmond in 1964. Bush used his (feigned) opposition to the Civil Rights Act to turn Texas Democrats into Republicans. Goldwater used his genuine opposition to the Civil Rights Act to appeal to grassroots conservatives. Thurmond used it as a catalyst for changing parties.

    Reagan then accelerated it by building relationships with then-new Religious Right and extolling the alleged virtues of “states rights”

    American conservatism today is ultimately driven by intolerance and self-centeredness. It is more of a cultural movement than a political one.

    Yiannopoulos is just the loudmouthed tip of an ugly and old iceberg. Ayn Rand was more verbose and less crude but was ultimately just as nihilistic. She has long been a patron saint for these people, which should tell you something about how deep it runs.

  7. michael reynolds says:

    Very well-written, Doug.

    Look, fundamentally this is a fight between smart and stupid, future and past, reality and fantasy. Conservatives started with a set of ideas which have proven to be either silly or unworkable or simply cruel. They’ve lost ground steadily on social issues, their ‘daddy party’ cred was blown out of the water by George W., and their libertarian economics landed us in a ditch it has taken us eight years to climb out of.

    The essential problem of conservatism is that their ideas are wrong. They believe things which ain’t true. Their fantasies are sad, juvenile and poorly-imagined. Conservatism is brain-dead, which is why the allegedly conservative party, the GOP, so quickly abandoned everything they claimed to believe in and instead devoted themselves to hating liberals for the crime of being right.

    I yield to no one in my contempt for PC fanatics and the social justice warrior Twitter thugs. No one’s hackles rise faster than mine at yet another insufferable lecture from some half-smart college professor talking PC nonsense. (I write young adult books and if you think the social justice warriors are obnoxious in the larger community, take a look at the nitwits I deal with professionally.) There is no question that liberals turned being correct into being humorless trolls.

    But we are still right, and conservatives are still wrong, and the intolerable assholery of the campus Left does not justify racism, anti-semitism, misogyny, gay-bashing, trans-bashing and fascism on the Right. That’s a wee bit of an overreaction.

    The reason the country is so intractably divided is that conservatives simply cannot face reality. Just as the race problem is a problem of white people, and misogyny is a problem of men, this divisiveness is a problem of conservatives. We liberals are not at fault for being right, however much conservatives don’t like us rubbing their noses in it. And they cannot justify being wrong just because they think we’re smug.

  8. Scott says:

    I was only vaguely aware of Milo until I listened to him on Bill Maher show. Seemed to me to be a typical outrage monger who worked this way for the cash. Being a real motor mouth who strived to fill up all the sound spaces, he seems to be to be basically Ann Coulter or Kelly Anne Conway in drag.

    Anyway, now he’s free to work in Communications in the Trump Administration.

  9. DrDaveT says:

    Mr. Yiannopoulos’s comments, which quickly created an uproar online over the weekend, put many conservatives in a deeply uncomfortable position.

    Don’t worry, Doug. I’m sure they will quickly reacquire their comfort, without any bothersome changing of actual opinions or behavior.

    They always do.

  10. Franklin says:

    @michael reynolds:

    No one’s hackles rise faster than mine at yet another insufferable lecture from some half-smart college professor talking PC nonsense.

    Andrew Sullivan was just writing a day or two ago that this is the sort of thing that turns moderate conservatives into doubled-down douchebags like Milo and Coulter. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/02/andrew-sullivan-the-white-house-mole.html?wpsrc=nymag

  11. KM says:

    @michael reynolds:

    We liberals are not at fault for being right, however much conservatives don’t like us rubbing their noses in it. And they cannot justify being wrong just because they think we’re smug.

    I’d take that a step further, Michael. It’s not just that they hold us accountable for them being wrong, they want to punish us for it That’s why its *always* a liberals fault in conservative world – even now, they are howling liberals screwed over their beloved Milo when it was a conservative group that aired the videos, a conservative group who cancelled his speech and a third who yanked his book deal. The main difference is lately, instead of just whining about it, they’ve decided to start visibly lashing out against their “enemies” with little to no restraint.

    Getting even is always more important than serious policy. Doesn’t matter what they are getting even for, the country can go to hell as long as some liberal or affiliated group suffers. That’s why the trolls are running gleefully around for a month when His Tweetiness is singled-handed running up their tax bill and ruining long-standing alliances. Trump sassed back at a reporter so it’s all good for them. They’ve had to “shut up and take it for 8 years” so now America isn’t supposed to point out the dangerous moron with the nukes’ latest cray cray. They’re rather die in a fire and block the entrances rather then listen to a librul telling them we can smell smoke.

  12. Franklin says:

    BTW, at least this episode has taught me the difference between pedophilia, hebephilia, and ephebophilia.

  13. CSK says:

    Well, I hopped over to my favorite pro-Trump website, Lucianne.com, and the consensus is that that Milo was torpedoed by Soros-funded saboteurs posing as conservatives.

    Yeah, yeah, I know.

  14. KM says:

    @Franklin:
    Nobody likes a nag, especially an over-entitled SJW nag. But trying to claim getting nagged turns you to neo-Nazism and fascism? BS.

    He claims they adopted “bratty positions” to annoy people almost as a defensive mechanism. No, they chose to be be brats. It’s a personality thing – a kind-hearted person doesn’t turn into a troll because someone mocked them…. but a born assh*le does. They glory in hate and causing strife because it appeals to them deep down inside. Plenty of hassled conservatives came out of college without the attitude Breitbart’s crowd wears like a badge of pride.

    It’s pretty simple: if your response to be shown you are acting like an asshat is to go “Yeah, well FU!!!” and get worse, then you are most likely an asshat. QED. Once again, it’s not liberals’ fault these people show us what ugliness lies inside them.

  15. al-Alameda says:

    Excellent article Doug.

    Two observations:

    I must admit, the 1st thing that came to my mind when Milo was brought down was: How come campus liberals and progressives didn’t vet Milo and come up with this information?

    The second thing was pure schadenfreude.

  16. Monala says:

    @KM: Furthermore, this quote in Sullivan’s article may not always be true:

    I am noting merely that right-of-center students are often mocked, isolated, and anathematized on campus, and their response is often, sadly, a doubling down on whatever it is that progressives hate.

    I am thinking about this article a few months ago about how the son of Stormfront founder and godson of David Duke went off to a liberal college, and instead of isolation and mocking, found friendship and acceptance (along with some vigorous debate about his beliefs). It caused him to rethink and ultimately repudiate his white nationalist views.

  17. Moosebreath says:

    @SKI:

    “The Conservative Right has zero problem with shunning Milo for his pro-pedophilia comments.”

    As cleek points out, not because he is pro-pedophilia. Because he is pro-gay pedophilia.

  18. Pch101 says:

    @Monala:

    A neo-Nazi girl duo named Prussian Blue (those who are familiar with Holocaust denial will understand the name) publicly announced their rejection of white supremacy as they got older.

    Some of the kids can be saved as they get old enough to separate themselves from the nonsense that their parents sold them. But the adults are probably not reachable.

  19. bandit says:

    Finally something for the POS comment circle jerk at OTB to be happy about!! And it involves their favorite club NAMBLA!!!!

    So funny seeing the ignorant POS commenters calling other people out – hataz gotta H8

  20. Liberal Capitalist says:

    Liberals protest racism, sexism and outrageous speech – we are “sensitive snowflakes seeking a safe space“.

    They don’t know what they are marching for but it must be good because it’s a march. Everything for them is on an emotional level. Thus the melting snowflakes

    I’m slightly looking forward to seeing all the angry snowflakes out there

    GET TO YOUR SAFE SPACE SNOWFLAKE. YOU’RE MELTING!

    Two weeks later, conservatives discover same and… ?

    Yeah.

  21. Kylopod says:

    I guess I’ll reiterate what I wrote in the other thread, which is equally applicable here:

    Milo is the culmination of something that has been going on for a couple of decades, where “conservatism” has gradually morphed into trollism. Limbaugh planted the seeds in the ’90s, and Ann Coulter helped bring it to fruition the following decade. Baiting liberals wasn’t just something they did, it became practically their defining philosophy.

    The trick was to make reactionary attitudes seem cool and subversive, to make intolerance attractive by casting it as rebellion against an oppressive elite. Above all, it was a strategy for dealing with the way racism, sexism and other -isms were driven underground in the late 20th century. Since modern Western culture has long thrived on the destruction of taboos, the key to reviving traditional bigotry was to present it in a similar light. Trollism was the perfect vehicle for this revival because it was devilishly fun and provided them with an airtight excuse for anything that came out of their mouths–can’t you take a joke, people?!

    As Milo put it in his laudatory piece about the alt-right last year, “For the meme brigade, it’s just about having fun. They have no real problem with race-mixing, homosexuality, or even diverse societies: it’s just fun to watch the mayhem and outrage that erupts when those secular shibboleths are openly mocked.”

    Never mind that in practice the right, including the alt right, is pretty damn serious about its basic beliefs. And when you consider what happened to Leslie Jones, the idea that this is all fun and games becomes harder to justify. But it’s convenient for them to think of themselves as pranksters showing up humorless scolds (a category that now apparently includes SNL comics), because it relieves them of the need for intellectual integrity or moral responsibility while enabling them to think of themselves as the true sophisticates who are the only ones in on the “joke.” It sure beats arguing about tax rates.

  22. An Interested Party says:

    And it involves their favorite club NAMBLA!!!!

    Oh really? That must be in the same way that the favorite club of conservatives is Stormfront…so where’s your swastika, asshole…

  23. Paul L. says:

    Yiannopoulou made some clearly insane comments about pedophilia and sexual relationships between adults and children.

    Milo didn’t defend pedophilia with prepubescent boys, but pederasty with post pubescent boys, 13 and older.

    Still Creepy But LoveIsLove.

  24. CSK says:

    @Paul L.:

    It’s called ephebophilia. And you’re okay with a 13-year-old boy and a 55-year-old man engaged in a sexual relationship?

  25. Argon says:

    Milo is not a ‘flaw’. He’s a ‘feature’ for Breitbart.

  26. Gromitt Gunn says:

    @Paul L.: Ugh. No.

  27. Gromitt Gunn says:

    Ann Coulter already figured out a way to blame what is happening to Milo on liberals. You can check out her twitter feed for yourself if you want, but I don’t really want to give her any more hits.

  28. Paul L. says:

    @CSK:

    And you’re okay with a 13-year-old boy and a 55-year-old man engaged in a sexual relationship?

    No, But I am what progressives call intolerant.

  29. Gustopher says:

    I think it is worth noting that the people who call themselves conservatives aren’t actually conservative. It’s like how anyone who says “America First” isn’t putting America first, and that anyone who says “I’m just trying to be fair” is completely screwing you over.

    The fact that the so-called conservatives are willing to carry water for people like Milo Yiannopoulis, Bannon, Flynn, and Trump shows that they are something else entirely. I don’t think there was a sudden change in the past year — I think it’s been an increasingly rapid decline since the Clinton presidency, but I do think that they have stopped even pretending to be conservative by any rational definition.

    But, Conservative has a better ring than Weird Mix Of Cultural Revanchist And General Troll.

  30. Lit3Bolt says:

    The problem with American conservatism is that they concluded that acting like Nazis was not the problem; instead, the problem was everyone calling them Nazis.

    If conservatives had shown the slightest bit of sanity in the past twenty years, SS and Medicare would have already been slashed, Hispanic Catholics would be a firm GOP voting bloc because of immigration amnesty, and Barack Obama would still be a State Senator in Illinois. Instead, they wanted to get high on their own supply.

  31. Lit3Bolt says:

    @michael reynolds:

    Didn’t you know liberal smugness drove Real Americans to spray paint swastikas on Jewish tombstones?

  32. Katharsis says:

    @Moosebreath:

    … not because he is pro-pedophilia. Because he is pro-gay pedophilia.

    This is exactly what I started thinking. Is Ted Nugent still popular in CPAC world?
    Huffington Post, 2014

  33. David M says:

    I’m glad bandit and Paul L could show up, more evidence that the GOP are nothing but trolls at this point.

  34. James in Bremerton, WA says:

    @bandit: …said the ugly hater…

  35. Liberal Capitalist says:

    @Katharsis:

    Is Ted Nugent still popular in CPAC world?

    Oh… Do you mean potential Senator Nugent ?

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ted-nugent-2018-senate-run_us_58a74da8e4b037d17d27a476

    What is shocking to the senses is that he is originally from Jaclkson, MI, the home of Lincoln’s Republican party, bastion of liberal thought.

    However, with the Nixon Southern Strategy, central and western Michigan became so much more a southern confederate state that Ted just fits right into the Zeitgeist.

    After all, after this Milo incident, a republican draft dodging heterosexual child molester probably would be accepted with open arms.

    Working with a President that is a two time adulterer with 5 children from 3 wives… no problem!

  36. An Interested Party says:

    Working with a President that is a two time adulterer with 5 children from 3 wives… no problem!

    That certainly gives a whole new meaning to the term “family values”…

  37. Mr. Bluster says:

    Anyone can be an azzhole.
    It doesn’t take any talent and it’s nothing to be proud of.

  38. Terrye Cravens says:

    @Paul L.: Paul, sex with 13 year old teens is a crime. And as a recovering Republican I am proud to say that at least I was smart enough to see who and what Milo is. And I also know that Ann Coulter is not daring, she is just a bigot. A loud mouth run of the mill bigot. Nothing special about these people.

  39. michael reynolds says:

    @Paul L.:

    I think you need to go stand over there. Somewhere that’s not here.

  40. Jim Brown 32 says:

    @Kylopod:

    Limbaugh planted the seeds in the ’90s, and Ann Coulter helped bring it to fruition the following decade.

    Morton Downey Jr was the prototype who showed the rest how to monetize the troll format. He was every @$$hole crackas hero in the 80s.

  41. Dazedandconfused says:

    Been wondering how we got here of late. Right now I suspect it’s the allowance of even the rankest of BS to be a valid “part of the conversation.”

    The primary cause: 24 hour cable news.

    Those folks live in abject fear of dead air, and they have been tasked with filling massive amounts of that. This has led to two significant changes: The selection of people who have the gift for gab above all other qualifications, and they’ve been conditioned to say nothing which will “end the conversation”. Every iteration of “getdafugoutahere” has been removed. This condition has now been exploited, hopefully to it’s nth, by trolls.

  42. Jim Brown 32 says:

    @An Interested Party: Nah a regular sausage fest is boring to them these days. The new favorite club is “Cucks”– with a premium paid for large black “service providers” (especially those that resemble Trayvon Martin or Mike Brown)

  43. bill says:

    milo is funny, and not to be taken seriously for the most part. how anyone can say he’s a product of how bad conservatism is must not get it.
    you have a gay jew from england (with greek heritage) who dates black men, liberals had no idea what to do with that…..

    he was classy enough to resign from breitbart, i’d imagine if he was a liberal and worked at a popular rag he’d be able to just issue a teary eyed apology and all would be forgiven. but that’s not what conservatives accept.

  44. Liberal Capitalist says:

    @bill:

    …i’d imagine if he was a liberal and worked at a popular rag he’d be able to just issue a teary eyed apology and all would be forgiven. but that’s not what conservatives accept.

    Nice straw man you built for yourself to knock over.

    Tell me more about what those big bad liberals do, running around your mind. I bet they do all kinds of nasty little things!

  45. Davebo says:

    @bill:

    milo is funny, and not to be taken seriously for the most part.

    Hence he’s CPAC’s keynote speaker. Since CPAC obviously stands for Conservative People Acting Comedy.

    he was classy enough to resign from breitbart

    Umm.. Yeah. Just like Flynn resigned.

    It’s OK bill, everyone’s used to the contortions you’re willing to go through in an attempt to make some sense of your even more twisted thought process.

  46. An Interested Party says:

    you have a gay jew from england (with greek heritage) who dates black men…

    Ahh, a self-loathing gay man who is Jewish but makes anti-Semitic comments with an English accent (as Doug noted, this seems to impress conservatives even when spoken by an idiot) who dates black men and seems to think that excuses his racist comments (much like how you excuse your racist comments by telling us that you have a black girlfriend)…liberals know exactly what to do with this hypocritical phony douchebag…

    he was classy enough to resign from breitbart…

    As if he had a choice…jeez, you’re delusional…

    …but that’s not what conservatives accept.

    BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Actually, what they do except is a racist, sexist, anti-Semitic gay Stepin Fetchit…but they do draw the line with an attitude that approves of sex between adults and minors…what incredible integrity they have…

  47. michael reynolds says:

    @Jim Brown 32:
    There was another guy, too, a radio guy. I want to say Joe Pine. (Googling) Joe Pyne with a ‘y.’ It seems he did also have a TV series which lasted until it was replaced by Hollywood Squares. I’m trying to decide what the moral of that story is.

  48. Mikey says:

    @bill: @Paul L.: Unbelievable. You creeps are making lame, stupid excuses for a pedo.

    Apparently there’s no level of disgusting, abhorrent, criminal conduct you “conservative” assholes won’t excuse if one of your fellow assholes does it. What a bunch of goddamn hypocrites you all are.

  49. Kylopod says:

    @bill:

    a gay jew from england

    He’s actually a Catholic. He claims to be of partial Jewish ancestry, but that claim has not been verified (and given that he’s a self-described troll, why should you accept anything he says at face value?). In any case, he only ever brings it up when he wants to say stuff like this: “They may have some prejudice about Jews, like the Jews run everything. Well, we do. The Jews run all the banks. Well, we do. The Jews run the media. Well, we do. You know they’re right about all that stuff.”

  50. Pch101 says:

    @Kylopod:

    Joe Pyne was the grand daddy of shock broadcasting during the 50s and 60s.

    Paul Harvey was not confrontational, but he started blurring the line between news, conservative commentary and advertising during the 50s.

    The concept is nothing new, it has just grown in volume and nastiness. The end of the fairness doctrine and the migration of music programming from AM to FM radio caused it to metastasize.

  51. Mr. Bluster says:

    Joe Pyne once started his interview with Frank Zappa by saying So I guess your long hair makes you a woman. to which Zappa responded So I guess your wooden leg makes you a table!
    https://www.pinterest.com/pin/337770040784478132/

  52. Gromitt Gunn says:

    @bill: This is the same guy who got kicked off of Twitter for his series of coordinated attacks on Leslie Jones.

    Far from harmless.

  53. Guarneri says:

    He seems like the male member of The View, or a Lena Dunham.

    What kind of a person takes people like this seriously, spends serious time analyzing them, or draws broad conclusions?

  54. David M says:

    @Guarneri:

    The GOP and conservatives take people like this seriously, or they wouldn’t have invited him to speak.

  55. Jake says:
  56. Jake says:

    @bill:

    You mean like Lena Dunham

  57. Jake says:

    The way people are reacting, you’d think Milo came out in support of Roman Polanski or something.

  58. rachel says:

    @Kylopod:

    The trick was to make reactionary attitudes seem cool and subversive, to make intolerance attractive by casting it as rebellion against an oppressive elite.

    You reminded me of C.S. Lewis warning against the dangers of flippancy in The Screwtape Letters.

    Only a clever human can make a real joke about virtue … any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour-plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy: it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it.

  59. Kylopod says:

    @Jim Brown 32: @michael reynolds: @Pch101: I’m well aware that this sort of thing has a number of precursors. Indeed, despite the term being a product of the Internet age, “trolling” is in fact an ancient concept. Actually, the example I had in mind was when Malcolm McLaren (who was Jewish) was handing out swastika armbands to the Sex Pistols back in the ’70s. The ostensible notion was that it was for the shock value and not for actual sympathy toward Nazi ideology. In retrospect that’s a very Milo-esque explanation. Of course, the neo-Nazi skinheads originated as a punk subculture.

    I mentioned Limbaugh because he was the one who really helped make this part of the conservative mainstream.

  60. dxq says:

    Limbaugh mocked the democrats for ten years, then gingrich showed up and got the entire republican establishment to endlessly repeat “treason, traitor, unamerican, decay…” etc…lookin back, the groundwork for fascism was being laid, whether or not the fascism arrives.

  61. bill says:

    @An Interested Party: actually it hearkens back to when comedians could actually make jokes about anything and not be branded racists/homophobes/etc.
    so yeah- some of us miss those days. “comedy” is sanitized now, and the humor is dying like microbes being pasteurized!

  62. Just a Lurker says:

    My take-away from this whole thing is that Milo misjudged the size of the gap between “edgy, way-out-there” exhibitionism and more traditional look-how-brave-I-am-telling-truth-to-power exhibitionism like Coulter or Beck. He thought he could make the jump to a larger audience and greater affluence. Life must have looked pretty damn good about a week ago – book deal and CPAC invite = wingnut welfare for life!

    Of course, Milo got it wrong, he’s not nearly as smart as he thinks he is. Good luck with that whole poverty thing, man.

  63. Moosebreath says:

    @Mikey:

    “Apparently there’s no level of disgusting, abhorrent, criminal conduct you “conservative” assholes won’t excuse if one of your fellow assholes does it. ”

    More proof that Republicans are truly the Party of Moral Values. Just ask them.

  64. MrsH says:

    @Mr. Bluster:
    You mean like Bill Clinton did.

  65. Pete S says:

    @bill:

    actually it hearkens back to when comedians could actually make jokes about anything and not be branded racists/homophobes/etc.
    so yeah- some of us miss those days. “comedy” is sanitized now, and the humor is dying like microbes being pasteurized!

    -Republican ideology in two sentences from bill. Essentially, the world was better when we could say racist things and nobody would call us a racist.

  66. KM says:

    @Just a Lurker:
    Play with fire and you get burned. Start fires for a living and there’s a good chance your crispy arsonist ass will be found in the ashes of your making. He burnt himself on a conservative pyre and they’re trying to blame the liberals two towns over.

    He thought he had it made – look at the smirk on his Sonny Crockett wannabe face in the pic above! The idea that the knives would come from behind, not in front, didn’t seem to occur to him. Now others are making money on his outrage and victimhood without him getting a dime. Irony!

  67. Matt says:

    @Monala: I’m deep in the heart of a red state and I’ve been working my way though a couple degrees for years now. I have no seen any behaviour of the sort. There are occasionally the loud and proud conservative reactionary who tries to be inflammatory during class discussions. They were always met with polite responses and when proven wrong they either shut up or kick into full on victim mode. Complaining how everyone is attacking them just because they believe in falsehoods (demonstrable falsehoods where the facts are clear). Based on my years of experience in college I have to agree with KM here. @KM:

    If you dare to challenge a conservative’s beliefs they either triple down and scream that they are a victim or they reasonably approach the evidence and adjust their views. Adjust their view enough and they eventually lose their adherence to conservative orthodoxy. Progress can be lost to some degree when they visit their family back home during a break.

    It’s kind of funny to go to ratemyprofessor after I have a class with one of those loud and proud conservatives. Because you can usually guess who the person is that just gave the professor a terrible rating.

    One of the campuses I go to belongs to one of the biggest colleges in Texas.

  68. JohnMcC says:

    @Jim Brown 32: Troll so stupid he never heard of Joe Pyne. (Edit: I was too late. Well done, folks.)

  69. Paul L. says:

    @michael reynolds:
    @Mikey:
    Milo is Gay. Pederasty is just part of the deviant package.
    I enjoy how he drives Progressive crazy. he is right that Feminism is Cancer.
    But you are portraying him as someone who likes to have sex with prepubescent boys and that is just wrong.

  70. JohnMcC says:

    Did I steal this remark from someone here? It’s one of the best lines I’ve heard about this Milo business: “I guess Rep Foley and Speaker Hastert were just being edgy.”

  71. Pch101 says:

    Conservative “wit” in a nutshell:

    SJW FART. Libtard FART. Feminazis FART. Look at me, I’m such a rebel FART. PC sucks FART. Blah blah blah FART.

    Milo ain’t no Lenny Bruce, although he could be the headline act at the Dunning Kruger Theater.

  72. SenyorDave says:

    @JohnMcC: A later shock talk radio guy, with a very large audience since he was on ABC in New York City, was Bob Grant. He was finally removed from the air when, after Ron Brown’s plane went down (former Commerce Secretary under Clinton), Grant said he assumed there would be one survivor, Brown himself, because Grant was a pessimist at heart. Grant was an overt bigot, consistently expressing the view that black and Hispanic people are genetically inferior to whites.

    I remember flipping on the radio and hearing him for the first time, thinking it was some sort of put-on. For a while he had huge ratings, which seemed to fuel his descent into full blown racism. I think the beginning of the end was when Disney bought ABC. Grant referring to MLK as “Martin Luther scumbag” started to become a problem. No ABC in NYC has a steady diet of Hannity, Mark Levin and the like.

  73. al-Alameda says:

    @bandit:

    Finally something for the POS comment circle jerk at OTB to be happy about!! And it involves their favorite club NAMBLA!!!!

    So funny seeing the ignorant POS commenters calling other people out – hataz gotta H8

    Amazing, you never seem to tire of crapping in your pants.

  74. Franklin says:

    @KM: OK to all that, but I read comments on the Internet. There’s either a lot of born assholes, or they’re not being engaged in a helpful manner.

    I don’t really have a solution here. It seems everybody here agrees that overbearing SJWs are annoying. If there was only a way to turn off the gene that makes every college kid a know-it-all …

  75. James Pearce says:

    @KM:

    Nobody likes a nag, especially an over-entitled SJW nag.

    You said it, not me. 🙂

    Just skimming through the comments, I, for one, have to say that I’m glad Milo has been part of the conversation. He’s forced the left to debate campus free speech and the perils of political correctness, and on the right, he’s forced them to debate the fine line between pederasty and pedophilia.

  76. al-Alameda says:

    @Lit3Bolt:

    Didn’t you know liberal smugness drove Real Americans to spray paint swastikas on Jewish tombstones?

    Not only that, now we have post-election handwringing by many conservatives, who are telling liberals that they really need to understand these people and their grievances.

  77. Gustopher says:

    @bill:

    actually it hearkens back to when comedians could actually make jokes about anything and not be branded racists/homophobes/etc.

    Well, if your joke is racist or otherwise bigoted, and you tell it around people who aren’t, then people are going to call you on it or just assume you’re a bigot, if your joke isn’t funny.

    Being funny, however will get you a free pass for almost anything, with any audience. You should try it sometime.

  78. KM says:

    @Franklin :

    There’s either a lot of born assholes, or they’re not being engaged in a helpful manner.

    I’m of the opinion that many are born to asshattery but are socialized out of it as a matter of basic human interaction. The Internet has given us GIFT: the Great Internet F*ckwad Theory aka anonymity brings out our dark impulses. Human civilization is designed from the ground up to force moderation of behavior in exchange for a variety of benefits – you want that paycheck, can’t call the boss a $&$^%^$*&&^ no matter if they really, really are. It’s much easier to indulge in our repressed asshattery when nobody can see (and subsequently punch) your face for horrible behavior so trollism exploded from delinquents who can/will physically fight to any old idiot with the internet. Much like guns, hiding behind a wall of text gave bravery to those who’d *never* start anything without that safety net.

    What’s been remarkable about this whole thing is the transition for anonymity to prime time. Having successfully built themselves a stable safe space, trolls now feel they can venture out into the real world, start sh^t and then run back to giggle over their success or whine about how they were treated. Milo can say and do what he wants because he has a crew watching his back, supporting and egging him on…. or at least he did, until the trolls turned against him. You’re one of them until you suddenly aren’t – no honor amongst thieves, after all.

  79. Gustopher says:

    @James Pearce: pederasty is the act, pedophilia is the attraction. I think you mean the fine line between pedophilia and ephebophilia.

    (As an aside, if homosexuality is generally not a choice (except in prisons), I would assume that pedophilia is also generally not a choice (except in the clergy). It must really suck to have one of your strongest natural instincts be wired so you cannot act on it without hurting someone)

  80. Scott says:

    @KM:

    It’s much easier to indulge in our repressed asshattery when nobody can see (and subsequently punch) your face for horrible behavior

    In the early days of the Internet, it was posited that enhanced communication would empower people. I think the opposite is true. It has made people realize their individual insignificance and that enrages them.

    Human civilization is designed from the ground up to force moderation of behavior

    You hinted at the solution here. To keep civilization, we have to enhance in-person interaction. Unfortunately, those are skills that have to be practiced early and often.

  81. KM says:

    @James Pearce:
    Not political correctness, per se but overindulgence in a good thing. I grew up in a very conservative area and a lot of what is labelled PC nowadays we called basic manners. Address someone by their correct and respectful name or title (now pronoun), the one they tell you to use. Defer to another’s sensibilities and preferences as to not be a bad host /guest. Apologize if you offend someone unintentionally and ask how not to repeat the mistake. Don’t pick at sore wounds or attack another’s pain. If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. Respectfully defer and bow out of a situation if you can’t or won’t deal with it properly.

    I think this obsession with PC-ness on the right is bitterness at being reminded how uncivil they are acting. At the same time, there is truth to the conservative claim that some liberals use PC like a hammer instead of the basic social expectation it is. We have asshats too and they can be just as cruel as their counterparts in abusing power. It’s important to call out both for consistency’s sake.

  82. panda says:

    I am noting merely that right-of-center students are often mocked, isolated, and anathematized on campus, and their response is often, sadly, a doubling down on whatever it is that progressives hate.

    People have discussed this at length, but I just want to comment on the hideous immorality of Sullivan’s comment. As a “fiscal conservative” he wrote thousands of words on how welfare stems personal responsibility, yaddah, yaddah. And here he is, defending people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, on the grounds their behaviour now should be understood as reaction to people being mean to them when they were 18. And those people dare call their opponents snowflakes!

  83. panda says:

    Not political correctness, per se but overindulgence in a good thing. I grew up in a very conservative area and a lot of what is labelled PC nowadays we called basic manners.

    The thing is that good manners used to be something you extended to people who deserved it – there was no socail stigma in calling the disabled names, unless you did so in mixed company and all that. What enrages conservatives is that we have extended to circle of good manners to involve groups who they feel ought naturally be derided.

  84. Kylopod says:

    @KM: We probably ought to distinguish between the two types of trolls: Internet trolls and professional trolls. The boundary between the two has been blurred somewhat in recent years by the development of social media. Hence, professional trolls like Trump and Milo are on Twitter and are therefore also Internet trolls.

    Still, professional trollism, it should be remembered, long predates the Internet. It was never a function of anonymity. It came from the way public figures discovered how they could utilize outrage to their advantage, under the theory that there’s no such thing as bad press. It was helped along by the collapse of social taboos in the ’60s and ’70s. Little over a decade after Dylan was causing outrage by simply plugging in his guitar, celebrities were turning to increasingly extreme measures to have that effect on a public that was increasingly numbed to such antics. At the same time (as I mentioned before), traditional modes of bigotry that were once socially acceptable were increasingly becoming taboo, and for some people, that made them seem to occupy the same space that other challenges to common decorum had in the past–and so it provided a golden opportunity to market boorish behavior as brave truth-telling.

    And then there was the whole backlash against “political correctness” from the ’80s onward. People now are critiquing Bill Maher for his softball interview with Milo last week, but we ought to remember the name of Maher’s first show. Though ostensibly a liberal, Maher is in many ways a descendant of the same style that we’ve been identifying in figures like Joe Pyne. He’s always been an unabashed iconoclast who loves bringing on controversial guests and kvelling about how controversial they are. (Ann Coulter has long been a frequent guest, and he has described her as a friend.) And he makes a point of going after social taboos, and to that end, the line between bravery and boorishness can get just as muddled as it does with the figures of the right. While no fan of the man who described Megyn Kelly as having “blood coming out of her whatever,” his criticisms lose some of their force when you remember this is the same guy who once called Sarah Palin by the C-word.

    That’s basically the dynamic with all trolls, the professional ones or the Internet ones: it has to do with the deep need to provoke, and to take advantage of what happens when you step on social barriers, even if those include what used to be referred to as common decency.

  85. Liberal Capitalist says:

    @bill:

    hearkens back to when comedians could actually make jokes about anything and not be branded racists/homophobes/etc.
    so yeah- some of us miss those days.

    Yeah, preach brother! Remember when we could own people, beat them, and then work them to death to create value?

    Good times.

    Maybe Trump will Make America Great Again so we can get back to those core values you miss so much.

  86. James Pearce says:

    @Gustopher:

    I think you mean the fine line between pedophilia and ephebophilia.

    Aren’t they really just a “distinction without a difference” though?

    @KM:

    I grew up in a very conservative area and a lot of what is labelled PC nowadays we called basic manners.

    That’s not the stuff I think of when I think of “PC.”

    Shepard Fairey’s “We the People” posters are PC. Complaining about Matt Damon being cast in The Great Wall is PC. Proudly proclaiming that you will now only read women authors is PC. Being interested in NASA scientists as long as they are black women, that’s PC.

    Using racial slurs and sexist language, that’s never been PC and the guys doing that aren’t anti-PC warriors, they’re just assholes.

  87. Jake says:
  88. Liberal Capitalist says:

    @Paul L.:

    Milo is Gay… But you are portraying him as someone who likes to have sex with prepubescent boys and that is just wrong.

    So, let’s look at the constitution, and the laws that apply:

    The Equal Protection Clause is part of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The clause, which took effect in 1868, provides that no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction “the equal protection of the laws”.

    Originally, the Fourteenth Amendment did not forbid sex discrimination to the same extent as other forms of discrimination. In 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Reed v. Reed, extending the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect women from sex discrimination…

    The Court’s decision in Romer v. Evans (1996) struck down a Colorado constitutional amendment aimed at denying homosexuals “minority status, quota preferences, protected status or [a] claim of discrimination.” The Court rejected as “implausible” the dissent’s argument that the amendment would not deprive homosexuals of general protections provided to everyone else but rather would merely prevent “special treatment of homosexuals.”

    In 2015, the Supreme Court held in a 5–4 decision that the fundamental right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples by both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and required all states to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and to recognize same-sex marriages validly performed in other jurisdictions.

    (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Protection_Clause )

    Now we get to your point: That somehow “gay” is wrong… and according to the equal protection clause of the constitution, it’s not.

    However, we do recognize “adulthood”:

    The 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution endows Americans who reach age 18 with nearly all the privileges of adulthood.

    Sex between an adult and a minor is not consensual, as the minor is not an adult and not recognized as being able to make that decision.

    Weather it’s a male / female, female / male, male / male or female / female, if it is between an adult and a legally non-consenting non-adult, it’s rape.

    So…

    But you are portraying him as someone who likes to have sex with prepubescent boys and that is just wrong.

    YOU could not be more wrong.

    We don’t have a problem with him being gay.

    We have a problem with him being an ass of an individual and a proponent of molstesting children.

    HOWEVER, we do have one thing that you may not notice working for us: We will ABSOLUTELY defend his right to say ANYTHING that he wants, and will COMPLETELY fight for his right to say it, without fear of persecution from the government.

    We will however ridicule and minimize him for being an ass, because, well he is.

    The First Amendment allows you to be a complete ass, it doesn’t protect one from paying a personal penalty.

  89. Jake says:
  90. Pch101 says:

    @KM:

    I think this obsession with PC-ness on the right is bitterness at being reminded how uncivil they are acting.

    It’s more simple than that. Racists resent being told that they aren’t allowed to articulate their racism.

    At the core of bigotry is the power of the majority to dictate how the minority is labeled. The ability to slap a demeaning term onto someone else establishes the hierarchy within the relationship.

    These guys don’t want to refer to Mexicans as Hispanics or Latinos, they want to call them wetbacks and spics, because they feel empowered by the ability to use the power to label in order to weaken someone else. It’s a sense of entitlement.

  91. Just 'nutha ign'int cracker says:

    @bill:

    milo is funny, and not to be taken seriously

    Wow! That clears up a lot. All this time, I thought Breitbart was a NEWS site; now that I understand that it’s just the Howard Stern Show…

  92. Neil Hudelson says:

    @Gustopher:

    Cracked.com has a fascinating “Personal Experience” series, including one on pedophilia, specifically pedophiles who do not pursue their attraction. It’s an informative read: http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-1658-5-ways-were-making-pedophilia-worse.html

  93. Jake says:

    You could care less about abuse it’s only because Milo like Trump and worked for Breibart.

  94. Gustopher says:

    I am honestly slightly curious about what lies next for Milo — is he a true-believing troll, or a huckster? He’s just been dropped by CPAC and the alt-right establishment, and that was a decent meal ticket, and a man needs to eat.

    Will he double down on his “conservative” values and settle for a diminished spot on the wingnut welfare circuit? Or will he drop everything other than free speech and try to appeal to the people who dislike the alt-right that just rejected him?

    I expect a trashy tell-all book exposing the “hypocrisy” of the alt-right, and accounts of Senators lusting after the young conservatives that come to CPAC dressed in their cute little suits. I mean, that’s pretty much a given. But will it be a rejection of the far right, or will it be a call to purify the far right?

  95. Kylopod says:

    @James Pearce:

    Shepard Fairey’s “We the People” posters are PC. Complaining about Matt Damon being cast in The Great Wall is PC. Proudly proclaiming that you will now only read women authors is PC. Being interested in NASA scientists as long as they are black women, that’s PC.

    Yeah, and you know what’s also PC? The idea that we shouldn’t torture. The idea that we shouldn’t use disparaging terms toward women. Repugnance at doctrines of genetic racial superiority. The notion that the Holocaust did in fact occur.

    I was once reading a blog post reviewing some book, and one of the commenters called the author of the book an idiot. The blogger said he agreed with the criticisms but added that there was no need to engage in ad hominem attacks. The commenter retorted, “Oh, don’t be so PC.” The book and the discussion had nothing to do with politics. The commenter was using the term “PC” the way pretty much everybody uses it: to suggest the other person was avoiding speaking what he really was thinking out of fear of offending.

    I don’t deny there are some troubling trends on the academic left or that there are some laughable examples of oversensitivity in our society. The problem is that there’s no objective way of distinguishing when sensitivity goes too far: it’s all in the eye of the beholder. “I’m not PC” can be used to excuse literally any behavior or speech–and it has been. The way you’re distinguishing it is entirely how you see things; the next person will see it differently.

    So, for instance, when Trump or other Republicans say that failing to use the term “radical Islam” is evidence of PC excess, I think they’re wrong–but there isn’t any clear-cut objective way of resolving the dispute. On the other hand, even to liberals complaints about white dominance in Hollywood aren’t all equally valid: some are on point, some are excessive. And we aren’t all going to agree on which is which.

    So why don’t we actually resort to good old-fashioned arguments to support our positions instead of falling back on a slippery term like “PC”?

  96. Kylopod says:

    Please rescue my comment from moderation; it contains four links, which probably did it.

  97. Pch101 says:

    @Gustopher:

    There’s an excessive concern about “trolling” around here.

    These people are a**holes. They are behaving in ways that in a fashion that one would expect of a**holes.

    They may or may not be hyping it up, but most of them ultimately mean it. We used to have lynch mobs, now we have Breitbart and the Tea Party. The mindset is the same and these people have always existed, but now they are on the defensive because they realize that their all-white-all-the-time vision for America is in the ICU.

  98. Franklin says:

    @KM: You may be talking about most of the PC stuff, but I saw an associate of mine post a message in all seriousness that we shouldn’t use master/slave terminology when referring to internal computer parts. Why? Because pieces of metal can get offended or something?

    Regardless, we’re arguing almost the same thing here. I agree people would learn civility through natural human interaction. Let me ask you this: do you agree with the mob who angrily shouted down Yale professor Nicholas Christakis because his wife dared to suggest the following in reference to some Yale directive on Halloween costumes? She wrote: “Have we lost faith in young people’s capacity—in your capacity—to exercise self-censure, through social norming, and also in your capacity to ignore or reject things that trouble you?” (emphasis mine)

    Sorry, but I believe their behavior encourages right-wing asshattery. Go ahead and bring the downvotes.

  99. michael reynolds says:

    @Paul L.:

    You are a sick man. Seriously, you’re creeping people out.

  100. Jake says:

    Take this guy Milo out of the picture and replace him with any politically incorrect name you choose, and you’ll see the concerted effort to remove his influence is not about him, it’s about the underlying threat he represents.

    Those who control the levers of the DC Swamp municipal system are determined to defeat the highly outlined objectives of a President Trump administration. Milo is merely a concentric circle outlier of their real target. The transparent objective here is to isolate, ridicule and marginalize Mr. Milo to create a door to the next circle.

    Pass through the door that is Milo and proceed to the door that is Breitbart Media. Deploy detonation devices….. open door. Pass through the door that is Breitbart Media and proceed to the door that is Steve Bannon. Deploy same detonation devices (same approach)…. open door. Pass through the door that is Steve Bannon and eventually they get to the desired destination, President Trump.

    It would be severely intellectually dishonest not to admit this road map.

  101. michael reynolds says:

    @Jake:

    Yes, Jake, so long as people like you continue to worship racists, misogynists, homophobes and pedophiles we’re going to keep knocking them down. You are absolutely correct. You are not going to be allowed to spread your disease any further. Your idiot man-baby may have the White House, but we control the culture. We will continue to stand for tolerance and diversity, and we will continue to try to use government to improve people’s lives.

    Your desperately longed-for race war isn’t going to happen. Your desperately longed-for fascist government isn’t going to happen. We’re going to stop you. You’re getting nothing out of Trump.

  102. David M says:

    @Jake:

    It’s kind of sad you think that drivel has any insight into anything. Maybe stop taking advice from Sarah Palin and you’ll be able to make coherent points again.

  103. Liberal Capitalist says:

    @Jake:

    The Left

    http://www.scoopnest.com/user/StefanMolyneux/834260909598072832

    So, the question: “How can a woman rape a man?” asked in a snarly way, by a political debate starter.

    First, is 14 years old “a man”? No, not according to the 25th amendment.

    Then, those who study rape agree that it is not about sex, but about power. Clearly in this example, the 35 year old woman is likely in power in this relationship.

    Finally, at the time of this video recording, the woman was in Jail for breaking the law.

    So the discussion between the conservatives and liberals of the panel was: is that right? should she be in jail?

    The answer is: yes, without question. And the only one that decided to split hairs was the conservative: Kennedy (remember her?) who asked if the boy had his Bar Mitzva, which indicated that he was a man…

    However, in the USA, the 25th amendment stands, not the Torah.

    Jake – Are you suggesting otherwise? Is sex between an adult and a minor condonable? is this your point in looking for the left’s equivalent of a shock jock in asking the question?

    I don’t think it is, so you may as well quit pounding sand.

    If you really want to know what the left thinks in today’s environment, I would suggest that you read this:

    https://medium.com/@EpiRen/to-my-most-conservative-friend-81acd0257f38#.oc8u79tbb

    Seriously, I get it. I see the world through your eyes. I see a world in flames where all the Muslims and their math and astronomy made no contributions to the Civilized World. I see a world in flames where immigrants have brought nothing to this nation but terrorism, smallpox, and genocide. I see a world in flames where you have to carry your gun to go buy coffee at Starbucks because the delicate snowflakes in there have hurt your feelings about your guns and your Bible.

    Really great article. Hope you get to read the whole thing.

  104. Pch101 says:

    @Jake:

    Thanks for the plagiarism. It’s funny how you supposed independent thinkers are incapable of independent thought.

  105. Scott says:

    @Jake:

    defeat the highly outlined objectives of a President Trump administration

    Well, yes. Since I don’t agree with the objectives of the Trump Administration, of course I want to defeat them. What’s your point?

    P.S. I like your metaphor of circles of hell with Trump at the center. Most appropriate.

  106. Pch101 says:

    @Scott:

    Jake didn’t have any metaphors. He copied and pasted that from elsewhere.

  107. grumpy realist says:

    @Kylopod: I think what used to keep the professional trolls in place was the fact that insulting the ruler might result in your head being chopped off, or similar fall from the heavens.

    Beau Brummell’s downfall supposedly started when he said “Alvanley, who’s your fat friend?” when referring to the Prince Regent.

    (I find it ironic that the Brits are the ne plus ultra when it comes to using politeness, both for diplomacy and as a dagger–and they also have the rudest yobs around.)

  108. DrDaveT says:

    @Jake:

    You could care less about abuse it’s only because Milo like Trump and worked for Breibart.

    I’m sure you really believe that, since gang loyalty seems to be the only motive you actually understand.

    Alas, you’re totally wrong — but you have succeeded in highlighting, in bold relief, the fundamental difference between the two camps here.

  109. KM says:

    @Franklin :

    Let me ask you this: do you agree with the mob who angrily shouted down Yale professor Nicholas Christakis because his wife dared to suggest the following in reference to some Yale directive on Halloween costumes? She wrote: “Have we lost faith in young people’s capacity—in your capacity—to exercise self-censure, through social norming, and also in your capacity to ignore or reject things that trouble you?” (emphasis mine)

    I am unaware of this incident so I can’t really speak to it. My take, based on the quote alone, is the rejection was most likely because young people and norms are… iffy. That how you get young love that lasts for two days, peer pressure, binge drinking, frat behavior, etc. Society as a whole does not trust the young to do the “right thing” – that’s why its 18 to vote but 25 to rent a car. We’ve never had faith in our youth or we wouldn’t have built the social structures we have. Young people do dumb things and society tends to step in to correct that. If their social norm is going around kicking each other in the nuts (college!), do you let them figure it out on their own how not OK that is or do you stop them before they kick someone who’s norm is not theirs? Remember, Milo was behaving acceptably according to the social norms of his group.

    As for rejecting and ignoring things that trouble you, there’s a difference between politely ignoring the ignorant mistake and the in-your-face outrageousness that most likely triggered the comment. I’m gonna take a stab that the costumes were blackface or in a similar vein and the wife was defending their right to be young and stupid. It’s like defending someone’s right to be an asshole: great theory, wonderful ideal but terrible practicality. I prefer the Marine way: In God we trust – Everyone else, keep your hands where I can see them. We trust that young adults are capable of making good decisions and here’s the list of what we think “good decision” means for you to double check against. Just in case your “good decision”… isn’t.

  110. James Pearce says:

    @Kylopod:

    So why don’t we actually resort to good old-fashioned arguments to support our positions instead of falling back on a slippery term like “PC”?

    I’d love to have merit-based arguments on a whole host of subjects, but political correctness can sometimes make it difficult.

    PC allows no arguments on a whole host of subjects. PC says the question (whatever it may be) is settled and there is only one thing left to do: get on board.

    And I just can’t.

    Nothing is settled. Every day is a new opportunity to challenge your assumptions.

  111. dxq says:

    Franklin says:
    Wednesday, February 22, 2017 at 13:56
    @KM: You may be talking about most of the PC stuff, but I saw an associate of mine post a message in all seriousness that we shouldn’t use master/slave terminology when referring to internal computer parts. Why? Because pieces of metal can get offended or something?

    Next time say, “As a member of the BDSM community, I am offended you would try to silence our voices with your American-Colonialism.”

  112. KM says:

    So, the question: “How can a woman rape a man?” asked in a snarly way, by a political debate starter.

    OMG I *hate* this little canard. Every time some idiot says men can’t be raped., I ask them if they’d ever sleep with Rosie O’Donnell / Hillary / female I know they personally can’t stand. When they say no, I ask if they were knocked out, tied up, and were used like a toy / had toy used on them, would they agree that they willingly scored? What happens if your female boss threatens to ruin your career if you don’t sleep with her? Go on, report it to HR – oh wait, men can’t be coerced so what do you think they’ll do for you?

    Guys seem to think their drinks can’t be roofied, their body can’t be restrained, they can’t be coerced or threatened. Can’t be tricked, persuaded, lied to, or have their biological reactions turned against them. They keep thinking that right up until they’re the ones trying to convince everyone of what just happened to them.

  113. dxq says:

    And as far as anecdotes about PC-crazed campuses, do you know how many colleges there are in the US? Over 4,000. Do you know how many students they have? Over 20 million. I’d be gobsmacked if you couldn’t find a few examples of some 20-yros who’d overdosed on LIt Crit or whatever who were hassling some administrator about some newfound offense, somewhere, on some campus, every single day of the week. So what.

  114. dxq says:

    “These phallic burritos are offensive to the Latinxs community!” -Some 18-year-old idiot named Catielyn, probly yesterday.

    Calm Down conservatives. She’s 18. She’ll grow out of it.

  115. al-Alameda says:

    @Jake:

    Those who control the levers of the DC Swamp municipal system are determined to defeat the highly outlined objectives of a President Trump administration.

    Our new minority-elect president and his administration is the Swamp.
    They’re not there to drain it, they’re Ebola and Zika, they’re there to infect and destroy Washington.

  116. Lit3Bolt says:

    @James Pearce:

    Ideally, that would be the best perspective, but in today’s partisan environment it puts you in a camp of people who bemoan they can’t say the N-word in public and think women have it better than men.

  117. charon says:

    @James Pearce:

    Nothing is settled.

    Really? The laws of physics, e.g. the law of conservation of energy.

    The laws of thermodynamics.

    The Strfan-Boltzman laws..

    And these being settled law, global warming is settled likewise, regardless how many ignorant jackasses bray otherwise.

  118. panda says:

    @James Pearce:

    Nothing is settled. Every day is a new opportunity to challenge your assumptions.

    This is BS, pure and simple. Plenty of questions that used to be fair game are no longer so, and very few people want to bring them back: ” Do Jews control the banks?” “Are Negro bucks too strong and sexually unrestrained to seat next to white girls,” “should the bourgois be destroyed as a class?,” “should adults have sex with children and adolescents?”

    As TNC Coates said once: “I will not debate the question of whether I am human or not.”

  119. charon says:

    @charon:

    Typos … Stefan-Boltzmann

  120. Kylopod says:

    @James Pearce:

    I’d love to have merit-based arguments on a whole host of subjects, but political correctness can sometimes make it difficult.

    PC allows no arguments on a whole host of subjects. PC says the question (whatever it may be) is settled and there is only one thing left to do: get on board.

    What you’re saying would apply to all the extreme examples I provided. People in the mainstream do not, for example, take Holocaust denial seriously for a second. No publication of repute would publish a piece advocating it; no major college would invite a prominent Holocaust denier to speak. Does that make “belief” in the Holocaust, therefore, an example of political correctness? Your logic would suggest it does.

    Moreover–and this is a point that isn’t made nearly enough–the backlash against PC in many ways does exactly what it accuses PC of doing: it is an attempt to push certain views outside the conversation. The trick is to make the supposedly PC thing seem silly. It’s especially so since a lot of the supposed examples of PC run amok over the years are in fact urban legends, or sometimes things that started out as jokes. (For example, nobody ever seriously advocated that short people should be called “vertically challenged.”) Attacks on PC are largely a strategy of marginalization through trivialization.

    The essential point is that there are always going to be ideas which are widely considered to be unworthy of being taken seriously. There are always going to be views that are widely shut out of mainstream discourse, both through outright policy and through social stigma. Everybody makes these distinctions; it’s only a question of where each person draws the line. Attacks on PC are an attempt to distract from actually defending one’s position, by turning it into an issue of censorship–which 9 out of 10 times it simply isn’t.

  121. James Pearce says:

    @Lit3Bolt:@charon: @panda: Here’s a perfect example of “nothing is settled.”

    The N-word.

    Is it an offensive racial slur? Is it a colloquialism that in some contexts might mean “friend” or “buddy,” and in other contexts might mean “man” or “person?” Is it both? Can it be both?

    This is what I mean by “nothing is settled.”

    @panda:

    As TNC Coates said once: “I will not debate the question of whether I am human or not.”

    Slow down, Buckbeak. Nobody’s questioning anyone’s humanity….

  122. Pch101 says:

    @James Pearce:

    As you aren’t one of them, it isn’t your business to decide the terminology that African-Americans prefer.

  123. Mikey says:

    @Paul L.:

    Milo is Gay. Pederasty is just part of the deviant package.

    No, it isn’t, you bigoted moron.

    Add that to the extensive and detailed list of things about which you are utterly, boneheadedly, and willfully ignorant.

  124. Liberal Capitalist says:

    Please release comment from moderation / spam / commentary prison

  125. James Pearce says:

    @Pch101:

    As you aren’t one of them, it isn’t your business to decide the terminology that African-Americans prefer.

    Calm down, Captain Justice.

    I used the euphemism and didn’t point it at anyone. I have fulfilled all requirements of white people discussing the word.

  126. Pch101 says:

    @James Pearce:

    As usual, you miss the point.

    You don’t get to decide whether the terminology is offensive. Your job is to respect the wishes of the group who is on the receiving end of that slur.

    They get to decide whether it is offensive. You don’t.

  127. Lit3Bolt says:

    Shorter James Pearce:

    “Everyone’s assumptions but my own must be challenged.”

  128. James Pearce says:

    @Pch101:

    You don’t get to decide whether the terminology is offensive.

    Oh, trust me. If it were up to me, that particular word would have fallen out of popular usage a long time ago.

    But as you point out, it ain’t up to me.

  129. Lit3Bolt says:

    @dxq:

    Didn’t you hear that college age kids acting goofy is the defining issue of our time?

    Let’s put the shoe on the other foot. How many times has Oral Roberts University invited Louis Farrakhan or Noam Chomsky or the Dali Lama to speak at their campus? Why isn’t that an example of “political correctness?” Why isn’t that “censorship?” Why oh why must religious conservatives be so close-minded and not have their assumptions challenged?

  130. Pch101 says:

    @Lit3Bolt:

    Pearce also feels oppressed by these images: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/shepard-fairey-launches-people-poster-campaign-trumps-inauguration/

    Apparently, a poster with a woman on it is an attack on his free speech. Go figure.

  131. Lit3Bolt says:

    @Pch101:

    This is why white dudes make the worst victims. They’re just plain BAD at it.

    “Oh no, a film biopic about the 3 black women at NASA, this devalues the work of every white male in human history going back to Socrates. When oh when can the white male perspective get a seat at the table?”

  132. An Interested Party says:

    This guy nails it

    Actually it was a gal and she didn’t nail anything, she simply whined…very few people are going to feel sorry for a troll who got hoisted by his own petard…that this person did doesn’t say very much positive about her…

    Milo is Gay. Pederasty is just part of the deviant package.

    Oh look, someone else is making a specious connection…since you are probably a conservative, you must also be a member of Stormfront, so where’s your swastika, asshole…

    Those who control the levers of the DC Swamp municipal system are determined to defeat the highly outlined objectives of a President Trump administration.

    BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!! Are you serious? With the people he’s put in his cabinet? To concur with al-Alameda, Trump is expanding the stench and the decay of the swamp much more effectively than any of those who “control the levers of the DC Swamp municipal system” could ever hope to…

  133. Jake says:
  134. Jake says:
  135. dxq says:

    Sen. Chris McDaniel
    ‏@senatormcdaniel

    When liberals are angry, I’m satisfied. It means we are heading in the RIGHT direction.

    linky to tardy

  136. James Pearce says:

    @Lit3Bolt:

    “Everyone’s assumptions but my own must be challenged.”

    The exact quote was “Every day is a new opportunity to challenge your assumptions.” Understand what that means. It’s not a requirement to challenge your assumptions. It’s an opportunity. You don’t have to take it. You don’t have to take it every day. But every day presents you a new opportunity.

    The reason to challenge your assumptions is to see if they can withstand scrutiny, to see if they’ll respond to new information, to see if they can account for weaknesses. It’s a good mental practice.

    @Pch101:

    Pearce also feels oppressed by these images

    You wish. I appreciate what Fairey is saying with his images, but you have to admit, they are about as PC as you can get. An American flag hijab. I dunno, isn’t that haram?

    And of course he had to do three of them. Couldn’t leave anyone out…

    @Lit3Bolt:

    “Oh no, a film biopic about the 3 black women at NASA, this devalues the work of every white male in human history going back to Socrates. When oh when can the white male perspective get a seat at the table?”

    You may think Hollywood studios are the big tastemakers, but they’re just chasing dollars. They’re chasing last year’s fad. They’re content to pump out Xmen 17 and Batman 12 as long as you’re content to buy the tickets.

    Now that a film like Hidden Figures has finally made them some money, they’re going to make more of them. I suppose you could pat yourself on the back for that.

  137. Franklin says:

    @KM: I appreciate your responses here, and am considering your points.

    BTW, I actually know if there were previous incidents specifically at Yale, or if they were responding to known incidents elsewhere. There would certainly be an intimidation factor if a load of frat boys were dressed in blackface, but that’s so obvious that you’d have to assume intent.

    On the other hand, I saw a poster this past Halloween with examples of offensive costumes. It had some of the more obvious questionable things, like dressing up as a Mexican or a Native American, but then it also had a geisha. Is that really offensive? If so, is a ninja also offensive? They both represent some part of Japanese culture. But I don’t know a single Japanese person who would feel bad if they saw a ninja costume.

  138. Pch101 says:

    @James Pearce:

    I appreciate what Fairey is saying with his images…

    I doubt that.

    …but you have to admit, they are about as PC as you can get

    Yep, I’m going to double down on my doubt.

    You think that depicting women and minorities as Americans is silly. How can anyone who isn’t posting under the handles of “Bill” or “Jake” possibly take you seriously?

  139. James Pearce says:

    @Pch101:

    You think that depicting women and minorities as Americans is silly.

    I think this statement is silly, considering what I wrote.

  140. KM says:

    @Franklin:

    It had some of the more obvious questionable things, like dressing up as a Mexican or a Native American, but then it also had a geisha. Is that really offensive? If so, is a ninja also offensive? They both represent some part of Japanese culture. But I don’t know a single Japanese person who would feel bad if they saw a ninja costume.

    This depends on two factors: (1) how reasonable the complainer is and (2) the stereotypical-ness or cultural managling the costume represents. Most Mexicans don’t wander around in sombreros, ninjas don’t wear skintight black spandex, and anything with “sexy” in its name is just winging it. Most women trying the geisha look think geisha = asian hooker and just wanna flash skin or boob. They don’t understand and so cause upset in their ignorance. Think of how a pious Catholic feels at the pregnant nun get-ups or god forbid, sexy nun.

    Full disclosure: this blonde white girl owns 5 kimonos, 2 yukatas and one insanely expensive furisode for formal occasions (gift from a very grateful customer). Yes, I wear them at our company Halloween party along with 3 of my Japanese co-workers – we do a little skit every year. All are authentic and appropriate to my age, education, job and social status, thoroughly vetted by said co-workers since we mingle with customers during this. Everything from the tie on my obi to the fit is proper (no flashing a figure, straight lines preferred). I’ve never gotten any complaints but rather complements for my attempt to be…. well, normal. Because its as normal as jeans and hoodies to some people, not an exotic dress or fetish. I respect it, what it represents and learned how to do it right. It doesn’t hurt that many Japanese individuals take great pride in their culture and tend to see me as trying to emulate greatness instead of stealing / appropriating.

    There will eventually be someone who objects, I’m sure of it. When that happens, I will consult with my group and my bosses to see if this is something they still want to do. Until then, I know what I’m wearing in October. 🙂

  141. Pch101 says:

    @James Pearce:

    Of course. There are so few depictions of white males in American culture that an artist who provides three alternatives is throwing the entire system out of balance.

    Keep up the good work. I’m sure that Eric “Obama Is a House Ni**er” Florack is nodding his head vigorously in agreement.

  142. panda says:

    You wish. I appreciate what Fairey is saying with his images, but you have to admit, they are about as PC as you can get. An American flag hijab. I dunno, isn’t that haram?

    This a reminder that OMG PC is at this point, a meaningless term used by people who are at best clueless, at worst, vile. To the extent that term has meaning, it’s negative, about terms one can’t use. Here, Pearce refashioned it in to a positive : the usage of symbols he dissaproves of is a form of PC ,and therefore oppressive.

  143. James Pearce says:

    @Pch101:

    There are so few depictions of white males in American culture that an artist who provides three alternatives is throwing the entire system out of balance.

    Don’t tell me how they’re PC and then tell me they’re not PC.

    @panda:

    the usage of symbols he dissaproves of is a form of PC ,and therefore oppressive.

    It’s not about me.

    It’s about how Shepard Fairey isn’t a Muslim, and if he were, he’d be preoccupied by a different set of sensitivities.

  144. Pch101 says:

    @James Pearce:

    Er, I never claimed that Fairey’s posters were “PC” (which is a term that I find to be absurd, anyway.) You did that all by yourself.

    No, I pointed out that white males do not have a monopoly on being American. I realize that it offends your tender sensibilities to see anything to the contrary or to share the country with these pesky minority females, but you need to get over it.

  145. James Pearce says:

    @Pch101:

    Er, I never claimed that Fairey’s posters were “PC”

    No, but you unwittingly described exactly what makes them PC, even if you don’t like the connotation.

    See, you’re kinda smart…but more condescending than smart.

  146. Pch101 says:

    @James Pearce:

    I would suggest that you have PC on the brain, but the brain part of the equation appears to be missing.

    The country has minorities in it. They aren’t invisible anymore. You need to get over it.

  147. James Pearce says:

    @Pch101:

    The country has minorities in it. They aren’t invisible anymore.

    They never were, young’un, they never were…

  148. Pch101 says:

    @James Pearce:

    I realize that racism, misogyny and Jim Crow are ignored on Planet Pearce. But on the planet where this blog is hosted, we’ve had all of those and then some.

  149. KM says:

    @James Pearce :

    You wish. I appreciate what Fairey is saying with his images, but you have to admit, they are about as PC as you can get. An American flag hijab. I dunno, isn’t that haram?

    Well, officially one shouldn’t be wearing the flag as clothing but if an American flag hoodie or bikini is now socially acceptable, a flag hijab should be as well. Whether or not its haram would be up to their individual interpretation but I’ve seen some beautifully patterned and brightly colored hijab so I’m guessing no.

    Liberty has always been portrayed as a female in old-fashioned, draped clothing. Columbia is depicted with a hat or head-covering when she’s not doing the long-hair, free-flowing wildchild thing. Both often wear the flag or our colors, same as Uncle Sam. Our forefathers would have been more receptive to the hijab imagery then to a bare-headed, boob-flashing bikini chick. One would have been seen as wearing foreign but modest garb and the other as a immodest harlot. So in a traditional sense, it’s not nearly as PC as you seem to think.

  150. Just 'nutha ig'rant cracker says:

    @Jake:

    Those who control the levers of the DC Swamp municipal system

    Just so you’ll know for future reference, although your phrasing is clever and creative, the current term for that group has been changed to “the Obama shadow government.” Rush has been using that term for a couple of weeks and just a few days ago, he reported that some yahoo on some RWNJ blog or journal has now successfully proven that there is an actual shadow government that is being run from behind the scenes by Obama himself.

    You can’t troll well if you don’t keep up with the jargon. I’m here to help.

  151. James Pearce says:

    @Pch101:

    I realize that racism, misogyny and Jim Crow are ignored on Planet Pearce.

    I realize that you can’t help but insult my intelligence, but if you wouldn’t mind, please stop insulting me.

  152. Pch101 says:

    @James Pearce:

    Hang tough. I’m sure that “Jake” appreciates your effort to protect you and white men from a poster that has the gall to portray a Muslim woman as an American.

  153. Franklin says:

    @KM:

    Full disclosure: this blonde white girl owns 5 kimonos, 2 yukatas and one insanely expensive furisode for formal occasions (gift from a very grateful customer). Yes, I wear them at our company Halloween party along with 3 of my Japanese co-workers – we do a little skit every year.

    OK, wow. Guess that answers my question and more!

    When asking my question, I didn’t mention that a couple Halloweens ago that my son and the Japanese neighbor boy both went out as ninja. (Yes I just debated whether to add an ‘s’ there …) In any case, the neighbors were thrilled, not mortified.

  154. Lit3Bolt says:

    @James Pearce:

    So do you read those weird books written by guys that only have guy characters in it who do nothing but guy things to each other?

    I mean, when did being NOT politically correct mean you could only write/draw/think of your own culture and perspective? That if I’m a white male, I can’t imagine how a lesbian might feel about Trump? Wouldn’t that be another form of political correctness? I mean that’s some rigid, caste-like thinking there.

    Also, your reasoning is a tautology. Shepard Fairey isn’t a Muslim, so therefore he was wrong to imagine a Muslim woman with an US Flag hijab…says James Pearce, who is also not a Muslim, yet knows how they think and what they would approve. How convenient.

    Funny how grumpy white dudes get to be the final authority about what is “PC” and what isn’t. Let’s not think about the power dynamic there! Kind of like how grumpy old dudes get to decide what’s “consent” or not.

    I think the more important issue isn’t whether or not a cultural offering is PC, but why do you feel such hostility to political correctness, and especially political correctness from the Left or minorities.

    Look I get you to an extent. A Social Justice Warrior killed your parents in a dark alleyway when you were ten. From that day onward, you dedicated yourself to hunting them wherever they might hide on the Internet, because they are a cowardly and superstitious lot. =P

  155. Pch101 says:

    @Lit3Bolt:

    Apparently, PC = anything that doesn’t glorify white males.

  156. James Pearce says:

    @KM:

    Well, officially one shouldn’t be wearing the flag as clothing but if an American flag hoodie or bikini is now socially acceptable, a flag hijab should be as well.

    Thank you, KM, for your always thoughtful responses.

    Just for the record, I am not offended at all by the American flag on the hijab, nor am I offended by the hijab itself, nor am I offended by the posters themselves. To me, they’re kind of like those pictures of Jesus standing behind Trump in the Oval Office. Competent execution, but poor conception.

  157. James Pearce says:

    @Lit3Bolt: @Pch101: The way you two talk about “white males” reminds me how my racist grandpa used to talk about black people, the Mexicans who shopped at his leather shop, and the Japanese he fought in WWII.

    He knew he was a bigot and he was a little ashamed of it, while you guys seem so proud to be so “woke.”

  158. Pch101 says:

    @James Pearce:

    There is nothing wrong with being a white male.

    There is something wrong with being a white male whiner who pretends that his race makes him part of an oppressed class and who takes offense at anyone who does not offer pity or bring glory to his club.

  159. James Pearce says:

    @Pch101:

    There is something wrong with being a white male whiner who pretends that his race makes him part of an oppressed class and who takes offense at anyone who does not offer pity or bring glory to his club.

    And another straw man falls….

    Look, dude, don’t pull that “I’m not talking about all white people, just the ones who have ten kids and wear their pants around their ankles” crap.

    Just don’t racialize it at all. Racism is stupid. You’re not.

  160. Grewgills says:

    @James Pearce:
    You and people like you is who Dr King was talking about when he said,

    First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;” who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.”

    Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

    Expand this to include women and other minorities and it sums up the criticism you receive here.

  161. Pch101 says:

    @James Pearce:

    Muslim American women wouldn’t have to assert themselves if we didn’t have a faux-president who demonized their faith and showed contempt for their gender.

    You aren’t going to lift a finger to help them — you’re too busy using that finger to flip them off as you play victim — so don’t be surprised if they don’t follow your not-so-sagely advice.

  162. Pch101 says:

    @Grewgills:

    Pearce is worse than that.

    He doesn’t think that there is such a thing as white privilege because Kobe Bryant earns more than he does.

    In his view, any minority group that dares to defend itself without including white guys is “PC.” In effect, it’s a white guy’s world and anyone who dares to challenge that status quo is worthy of contempt.

  163. Lit3Bolt says:

    @James Pearce:

    Oh yeah, I’m down with the “hip-hop” crowd. I hang out at the “‘hood” everyday. Yo yo yo.

    You’re trying to parody us and you’re parodying yourself. Just like when you were paternally telling Pch101 to “calm down, Captain Justice” then start whining about being insulted a few posts later. You’re…not very self-aware about this issue.

    Still waiting for an explanation for the why on your opinions on PC culture. I mean, it can be reasonable. An H-1B visa worker take your job? You hate modern pop culture? Colin Kaepernick kneeling enraged you? You’re in agriculture, construction, or the restaurant business and deal with non-English speakers? Deal with insufferable Hollywood leftists all day and simply assume that they share a monolithic Hive-Mind that must be pushed back against, however ineptly?

    Going back to my original point, in a Platonic Ideal World, yes, we should have discussions about the harm of the word “n*gger” causes, especially when white people use it against black people. The reason PC culture has skipped all of that and now is just telling people to “get on board” is because that issue is beaten to death, and every African-American is tired of white dudes whining about their ignorance about the issue, and being burdened with the task of educating ignorant white people who refused to be educated. It’s the same with feminists who are burdened with the task of educating men about how to conduct themselves around women, while at the same time defending themselves against a tide of death-threats, rape-threats, and stalking threats.

    So I GET the perspective of how this world seems bewildering and threatening to a white man who has refused to educate himself or police his language in a pluralistic society. Say the wrong thing, or hit on the wrong girl, and you could be fired/divorced/ostracized! And it typical guy fashion, the fault cannot be internal, it must be external. It’s the entire Culture keeping you down, and threatening you to “get on board,” stifling your free speech, and refusing to have its assumptions challenged. And it’s absolutely true that people take these viewpoints for granted, they ossify and decay, and the Left becomes equally intolerant to the very thing it was fighting against…Intolerance! Oh the delicious irony!

    It’s also deeply sad in way too. The Great Wall can’t make money unless a white dude is in it. Hidden Figures was an “untold story” because it couldn’t make money until now, in 2017. Harriet Tubman on the 20 dollar bill is PC instead of an inspiring figure for any gender or race. The assumption that culture and race/gender relations has to be this zero sum game instead an enriching experience for all.

    At the same time, as the Milo controversies prove, the alt-right is attempting to use “PC culture” as a rallying cry to attract disaffected young men who feel alienated by a culture they don’t fit in. So just note who’s railing about “PC culture” with you, which include people who think there are some women too ugly to be raped, Christianity and Islam must wage crusades against each other, Nazi symbols need to make a comeback, black people are genetically inferior, and there needs to be merit-based debates about how much a husband needs to hit his wife.

    In an earlier thread Michael Reynolds made the great point of how African-American musical culture in the twentieth century will be recognized as a Renaissance in later history books. And part of the reason for it was that they were not allowed to be good at anything else, just like Jews were the only ones allowed to perform usury in Renaissance Europe. You could be a musician or a sharecropper. Then magnanimously by white culture, African-Americans were allowed to be athletes, writers, actors and politicians as well as musicians in the latter part of the twentieth century.

    That’s what PC culture boils down to. Let people be stuff. Let black women be rocket scientists. Let women be misanthropic, alcoholic, comedic boors. Let a Muslim be a cowboy. Let a black guy play James Bond. Let an Asian guy be the Incredible Hulk. Let Batman be gay. (How’s that for coming full circle!) Let a lesbian be Captain Kirk. And I understand the “it won’t make money” arguments. Just like how pizza and tacos and stir fry never became staples of the American diet. Instead, the American people stuck to boiled cabbage, fried apples, and beef steak, just like Maw and Paw. And they would never vote for a black President.

  164. James Pearce says:

    @Grewgills:

    You and people like you is who Dr King was talking about

    MLK was talking about a very different America that doesn’t exist anymore. We’re not fighting segregation anymore, ya know.

    @Pch101:

    Muslim American women wouldn’t have to assert themselves if we didn’t have a faux-president

    Patently untrue and rather naive. In other words, about what I’ve come to expect from you.

    @Lit3Bolt:

    Just like when you were paternally telling Pch101 to “calm down, Captain Justice”

    Yeah, well, if it’s any consolation, I regret that. I’m usually much more witty than that and chalk that up to losing my cool when dealing with an utterly exasperating personality.

    As for this:

    That’s what PC culture boils down to. Let people be stuff. Let black women be rocket scientists. Let women be misanthropic, alcoholic, comedic boors.

    Do we let Ryan Gosling be a jazzman?

  165. Pch101 says:

    @James Pearce:

    If you can’t figure out that Trump is Islamophobic and a misogynist, then you are more dim than even I had thought.

  166. Grewgills says:

    @James Pearce:
    Apparently we did. He was crap at it, but there he was making jazz white again.
    What you can’t seem to wrap your head around is that white men have always been allowed to play non-white and for much of the time only white men were allowed to be the lead even if it was a non-white lead. Fricking John Wayne played Genghis Khan. Recently all of the Egyptian deities were played by white men. You were seemingly upset that anyone thought this was ridiculous. You seemed less upset by the caterwauling over a black man playing a Norse deity. Imagine the outcry if all of them were black. Look at the outrage over the thought of Idris Elba playing Bond. In your world it seems that would be a ‘PC’ choice, making any caterwauling by white critics reasonable (after all even though Bond is fictional he’s fictionally Scottish).
    I know it’s hard for you to believe with Jim Crowe being over an all that there is still systemic racism that needs to be fought against, yet there is and it does. If you can’t help the people fighting against that systemic racism, sexism, etc, the least you can do as someone who says he believes in equality is step out of the way and stop whining about how the people actually working are going about that work.
    Shorter: Yes the quote still applies today and it applies to you on virtually issue touching on social justice.

  167. Lit3Bolt says:

    @James Pearce:

    We’re not fighting segregation anymore, ya know.

    The fact that you just throw this assertion out there and assume it’s true is deeply depressing.

    I don’t have time to address this blindspot of yours, but let me throw this out there for you to consider: isn’t it interesting that Southern Baptists started becoming political and founding their own private schools in the 1970’s?

    I would provide you links, but I’m not your teacher. Go educate yourself. Challenge your assumptions everyday. Because by your recent coyness and evasiveness and reluctance to engage, you seem shy to pursue your own advice to others.

  168. Lit3Bolt says:

    @Grewgills:

    Don’t bother with effort…I’m becoming convinced he’s just a 4chan troll out to bait “teh real racists” with juicy out of context quotes.

  169. Lit3Bolt says:

    @Pch101:

    See my point about conservatives unwittingly destroying their own culture with climate change denial. All those brown people are eventually going to move somewhere livable, and it’s going to be next to some girl next door white girls. Human nature will do the rest…

  170. Mikey says:

    @James Pearce:

    MLK was talking about a very different America that doesn’t exist anymore. We’re not fighting segregation anymore, ya know.

    Well, I have to admit you’re right–we’re no longer fighting legally-codified segregation.

    But:

    We have Republican legislatures making direct and focused efforts to deny voting rights to black communities. We still have deeply-rooted systemic discrimination. We have a President who enjoys the enthusiastic, full-throated support of the most openly and overtly racist Americans. We have a President’s right-hand man who is actually one of them. And the list could go on.

    So, yeah, we’re not fighting segregation anymore.

    Just everything short of it.

  171. Jim Brown 32 says:

    @James Pearce:

    MLK was talking about a very different America that doesn’t exist anymore. We’re not fighting segregation anymore, ya know.

    You’re right and that’s part of the problem. The compassionate, sensible white man and woman stopped fighting segregation as soon as black people could shop in any restaurant or shop in any store they wanted. When the time came for Blacks to enter trades that represent cultural pillars, the dog conveniently had no bite left. Do you know what the percentage of black doctors are? That’s what segregation looks like today.

  172. Jim Brown 32 says:

    @Mikey: My wish is for Democrats to move on from the voter suppression diversion and understand how the tactics have changed. The goal is to isolate black/Hispanic voters into minority districts. This gives Republicans safe voting districts and they can use their other districts to margininalize the minority legislators. I know there is such a thing as multitasking but the priority of effort should be in challenging district boundaries than voter ID nonsense.

  173. Mikey says:

    @Jim Brown 32: The two are inextricably intertwined, two pieces of the same overall effort. Neither is a distraction from the other.

    However, voter ID requirements are much easier to address. They are immediately alterable by legislation. District boundaries are redrawn only once every decade.

  174. Jim Brown 32 says:

    @Mikey: Voter ID is easier……and irrelevant to most election outcomes. Mostly because likely black voters have ID. I’ve looked at the “data” used by democrats to justify the juice being worth the squeeze and frankly it’s dubious….one study…small sample size. The Party of facts and science should hold themselves to the same standards they levy on Republicans.

    Gerrymandered voting districts, on the other hand, are illegal and can be challenged in court. North Carolina is doing a redraw this year because of court challenges…where are the parallel state efforts? Anyone? Bueller?

  175. James Pearce says:

    @Grewgills:

    He was crap at it, but there he was making jazz white again.

    White jazzmen are not interlopers. And they never were. Back in the 1930s, “Jazz is black music” would not have been the enlightened position. Progress?

    Recently all of the Egyptian deities were played by white men.

    I saw that movie. I’m not sure what those white men were playing (Chadwick Boseman was among them, and he’s not Egyptian either) but it wasn’t Egyptian deities…

    I guess the next time some one wants to pitch some weird fantasy with historical undertones, the studio can point to the outcry over The Great Wall and Gods of Egypt as they say no.

    @Lit3Bolt:

    The fact that you just throw this assertion out there and assume it’s true is deeply depressing.

    I assume it’s true. Post Civil Rights Amendment, do you think the fight is the same? Or has the territory shifted somewhat?

  176. Lit3Bolt says:

    @James Pearce:

    I guess you’re referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which came nearly a century after the original “Civil Rights Amendments.”

    You assume it’s true. Then I assume you are unaware of the consequences of the Roberts’ Court ruling on Shelby County vs. Holder.

    I’m not your teacher. Go challenge your assumptions for yourself. Thus far, you’ve refused to do so. So I’m assuming your “principled” position is hand-waving bullshit.

  177. James Pearce says:

    @Mikey:

    So, yeah, we’re not fighting segregation anymore.

    Just everything short of it.

    I would agree. Which is why I think it’s incredibly stupid to get bogged down in making sure everyone is sufficiently PC. There are actual issues on which to spend our energies instead of engaging in superficial BS like complaining about casting decisions or which black artist got robbed of their Grammy.

    @Lit3Bolt:

    I guess you’re referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which came nearly a century after the original “Civil Rights Amendments.”

    Yeah, I had a bus to catch. (White people problems.) You’re smart. I’m hasty. Let’s move on…

    Let’s talk about voting rights. Let’s talk about voter ID laws. Let’s talk about how we can deploy political correctness to protect the voting rights of minorities. I’m all ears.

  178. James Pearce says:

    @Jim Brown 32:

    When the time came for Blacks to enter trades that represent cultural pillars, the dog conveniently had no bite left. Do you know what the percentage of black doctors are? That’s what segregation looks like today.

    What do you think accounts for that? Is it segregation, per se? If so, how does it work?

  179. Mikey says:

    @Jim Brown 32: If I recall correctly, former President Obama is making the redrawing of gerrymandered districts one of his primary post-Presidency issues.

    Also, to be clear, I wasn’t referring only to voter ID as an issue–there are also big pushes in Republican-led states to decrease the number of polling places in minority areas and make them more difficult to get to. They’re generally trying to put together a “package” of things that make it harder for minorities to vote.

  180. Mikey says:

    @James Pearce:

    There are actual issues on which to spend our energies instead of engaging in superficial BS like complaining about casting decisions or which black artist got robbed of their Grammy.

    These things are superficial TO YOU. Don’t assume they’re equally superficial to people who have seen members of their group consistently marginalized.

    And some things are important even if only symbolically. Symbols refer to tangible things. They help motivate people. We can put attention on them at the same time as working to repair the structural issues.

  181. Paul L. says:

    Looks like the US’ premier eugenicist Ruth Bader Ginsberg supports Pederasty.
    So does George Takei and Bill Maher have Pro-Pederast Comments.

    Denounce these “sick” people @michael reynolds:

  182. grumpy realist says:

    @Franklin: You’ve reminded me of the notorious episode of Parco (large Japanese department store) putting out a Christmas holiday poster sometime in the early 80s…

    ….with a crucified Santa Claus.

    One of my friends was working in Japan at the time, and he swears he actually saw this late night in one of the train stations. He thought about it, and went back 15 minutes later to sneak off with the poster, but by that time it was already gone.

  183. grumpy realist says:

    @Grewgills: By the way, speaking as a heterosexual white female, Idris Elba as Bond? Yum yum.

  184. Mikey says:

    @grumpy realist: And a few years ago there was this…

  185. James Pearce says:

    @Mikey:

    They’re generally trying to put together a “package” of things that make it harder for minorities to vote.

    Yes, and it’s absolutely ludicrous that their “package” could result in fewer votes cast. You can’t suppress the vote with voter ID laws alone. You need voter ID laws + voter complacency.

    Also:

    These things are superficial TO YOU.

    They’re superficial even to the people who think they’re important.

    I mean, if we were talking about young children, and only young children, there might be something to that. It’s reassuring for a six year old who just got glasses to know that Arthur got glasses, too.

    But if the kid is older, I think it’s important to emphasize that this stuff isn’t real. Arthur isn’t real. Baze Malbus isn’t real. Spider-man is a fictional construct, a fantasy, an escape from this world, not a representation of it.

    We can put attention on them at the same time as working to repair the structural issues.

    The problem with this is that you can spend so much time and energy focusing on the symbolic, that voters elect the other dude and you don’t get to work on the structural.

    Work on the structural. The symbolic will take care of itself.

  186. Pch101 says:

    @Mikey:

    On Planet Pearce, you should consult a white guy to know what works best for minorities.

    Pearce suffers from a white man’s savior complex. It’s a self-inflicted disease, and residents of his planet are not looking for a cure.

  187. James Pearce says:

    @Pch101:

    On Planet Pearce, you should consult a white guy to know what works best for minorities.

    On Planet Pearce, the only thing that separates white people from minorities is a handful of inheritable traits.

    Don’t tell me they’ve speciated on your planet…

  188. Pch101 says:

    @James Pearce:

    I’m mixed race.

    On Planet Earth, that hasn’t always made things particularly easy.

    But please, feel free to teach me all about what it’s like to be a minority. I always love learning from people who don’t know anything.

  189. James Pearce says:

    @Pch101:

    I’m mixed race.

    Who isn’t?

  190. wr says:

    @Jim Brown 32: “The goal is to isolate black/Hispanic voters into minority districts.”

    You have this absolutely backwards. The drawing of districts to isolate minorities goes back decades. The voter ID scam is a much more recent invention to stop those minorities from voting even in their rigged districts.

  191. wr says:

    @James Pearce: “I saw that movie. I’m not sure what those white men were playing (Chadwick Boseman was among them, and he’s not Egyptian either) but it wasn’t Egyptian deities…”

    Hmm, if only there was some way to unlock this puzzle… to decipher the riddle of what these white men were playing. If only that film had a title… you know, something like “Gods of Egypt.”

  192. wr says:

    @James Pearce: “But if the kid is older, I think it’s important to emphasize that this stuff isn’t real. Arthur isn’t real. Baze Malbus isn’t real. Spider-man is a fictional construct, a fantasy, an escape from this world, not a representation of it.”

    And what if that kid is, you know, an actor? Spiderman is a fictional construct, but he, like all the other fictional constructs in movies, is played by a human being, and for the most part blacks have been shut out of the big parts in the big movies.

    As black writers, directors and producers have also been shut out.

  193. Kylopod says:

    @James Pearce:

    On Planet Pearce, the only thing that separates white people from minorities is a handful of inheritable traits.

    That just might be the most revealing thing you’ve said thus far.

    Biologically, race is almost meaningless. But sociologically, it matters quite a bit. You really think the experience of living as a minority in the contemporary US is fundamentally similar to that of a white person?

  194. James Pearce says:

    @wr:

    you know, something like “Gods of Egypt.”

    Did you see the movie?

    Spiderman is a fictional construct, but he, like all the other fictional constructs in movies, is played by a human being, and for the most part blacks have been shut out of the big parts in the big movies.

    Oh, I get that part. But it begs the question: If we’re tying to get work for black actors, why mine a canon populated almost exclusively with white characters?

    Seriously, you’d think folks who think hairstyles can be culturally appropriated might be a little more sensitive on this score…

  195. James Pearce says:

    @Kylopod:

    You really think the experience of living as a minority in the contemporary US is fundamentally similar to that of a white person?

    It depends. A lot of privileged minorities and a lot of poor white trash suggest this might not be the question to ask.

  196. Kylopod says:

    @James Pearce:

    It depends. A lot of privileged minorities and a lot of poor white trash suggest this might not be the question to ask.

    There are different kinds of privilege. Economic privilege is one kind. Another is the privilege of passing a cop on the street without being automatically suspected of a crime.

  197. James Pearce says:

    @Kylopod:

    Another is the privilege of passing a cop on the street without being automatically suspected of a crime.

    Cops don’t even think like that, man.

  198. Lit3Bolt says:

    @James Pearce:

    Another blanket assertion, man.

    Do tell. Who’s a privileged minority in Trump’s America?

  199. Grewgills says:

    @Kylopod:
    There is an impenetrable wall between that part of Pearce’s mind that incorporates new information and the concept of privilege as anything other than an ultimate free pass that guarantees a good life regardless of effort to white folk. He will not process that having a privilege or having privileges doesn’t mean having all the privileges. There is something about the word that closes him off to all rational argument.
    He has on separate occasions acknowledged every particular of what most people and all sociologists mean by privilege, but won’t admit that privilege is real. He also seems unable to realize that when there is systemic discrimination that to look at every case as though it is a single case in isolation only perpetuates that systemic discrimination. He is entirely unreachable on this point. If your purpose is to educate him or change his mind, you are spinning your wheels. If that isn’t your goal, proceed.

  200. Matt says:

    @James Pearce: hahahaHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAH

    Not all but it certainly is ingrained in far too many cops.

    Remember a decade or so ago when cops in I think New York got into major trouble for having a forum where they posted all kinds of racist stuff? Yeah they limited access to that forum real quick once someone started leaking posts and screenshots.

  201. James Pearce says:

    @Lit3Bolt:

    Who’s a privileged minority in Trump’s America?

    Right wing trolls.

    @Grewgills:

    He will not process that having a privilege or having privileges doesn’t mean having all the privileges.

    The concept of white privilege, if anything, is an adjective, not a noun. You keep telling me I have it, but check my pockets and see if you can find it.

    @Matt:

    Not all but it certainly is ingrained in far too many cops.

    A shocking number of people insist on conforming to stereotypes, it’s true.

  202. Grewgills says:

    @James Pearce:

    The concept of white privilege, if anything, is an adjective, not a noun.

    Privilege is a noun and what you have. Privileged is an adjective and what you are.

    You keep telling me I have it, but check my pockets and see if you can find it.

    Check those same pockets for your integrity. What did you find?

  203. James Pearce says:

    @Grewgills:

    Check those same pockets for your integrity.

    It would be easier, I think, to give in to the social justice warrior mindset, to accept what I think is oversimplified nonsense, than it would be to continue these arguments.

    It has not exactly been cost-free taking the positions I’ve taken on this, nor has it been easy. My integrity is intact.

  204. Grewgills says:

    @James Pearce:

    It has not exactly been cost-free taking the positions I’ve taken on this, nor has it been easy. My integrity is intact.

    But is it in your pockets? You are just as likely to find it in your pockets as your privilege.
    What exactly has it cost you, other than time and a small amount of frustration on comment threads? It has certainly cost you less than lacking privilege has cost most women and minorities in our society.

    It would be easier, I think, to give in to the social justice warrior mindset, to accept what I think is oversimplified nonsense

    You think it is oversimplified and nonsensical because you refuse to accept any nuance in what is actually being argued (ie there are multiple types of privilege and having one isn’t a panacea). Rather, you argue against a simplified and nonsensical reading of what is being said by whatever just took their first ___ studies course in college SJW stereotype.
    Once again, challenge your beliefs. READ what sociologists write about privilege rather than constantly responding to the right wing stereotypes of what the construct means.

  205. James Pearce says:

    @Grewgills:

    You think it is oversimplified and nonsensical because you refuse to accept

    I think it’s oversimplified and nonsensical because I have a more complex view that accounts for the human experience, not just the American one.

  206. Mikey says:

    @James Pearce: Holy shit! Did you seriously just invalidate the experience of millions of Americans by appealing to “the human experience?”

  207. Pch101 says:

    @Mikey:

    Life is very different on Planet Pearce. And the air is a bit low on oxygen up there…

  208. James Pearce says:

    @Mikey:

    Did you seriously just invalidate the experience of millions of Americans by appealing to “the human experience?”

    Um…..not exactly.

    Whenever I’m told that I, a white man, just can’t understand the black experience in America, I think, well, I can look at a Minoan mosaic put together three thousand years ago and understand that despite coming from a completely different millennium and speaking a completely different language. But because I’m white and privileged, I can’t understand people who are literally my neighbors, who live in the same culture as I do, who are basically the same as me, minus some minor differences?

    I’m not “invalidating” anyone’s experiences. I’m saying I experience them too.

  209. Grewgills says:

    @James Pearce:

    I think, well, I can look at a Minoan mosaic put together three thousand years ago and understand that despite coming from a completely different millennium and speaking a completely different language.

    Do you really think that you can understand that mosaic as the contemporary Minoans did? Do you think you will extract all of the shades of meaning it had for them? Do you think you will have the same visceral reaction as someone that lived in that time and in that place? If you actually have convinced yourself that you know what it was to be Minoan because you’ve looked at some artwork I can understand why no one here can get through to you in the least bit.

    I’m not “invalidating” anyone’s experiences. I’m saying I experience them too.

    No, you don’t experience them too. You have an experience and some part of that experience is shared. You don’t experience their life, so yes, you are invalidating their experience by claiming your superficial exposure means you understand their life.

  210. James Pearce says:

    @Grewgills:

    Do you really think that you can understand that mosaic as the contemporary Minoans did?

    Yes, I do. Not only do I have a scientific belief in the knowable, I recognize that as foreign as the Minoans were, they were still people. It’s true, you may not satisfactorily answer every question, but there’s no reason to go full Giorgio Tsoukalos on it. It wasn’t aliens.

    You don’t experience their life, so yes, you are invalidating their experience by claiming your superficial exposure means you understand their life.

    This is precisely why I don’t buy into this stuff. The only thing I am “invalidating” is progressive social justice rhetoric.

    I am actually empathizing. I am looking at them, these foreign unknowable people, and seeing someone like me.

  211. Pch101 says:

    @James Pearce:

    You’ve done a nice job of explaining why you can’t be taken seriously. You’re far too much in love with the sound of your own voice to have empathy for or to learn from anyone.

  212. Grewgills says:

    @James Pearce:
    No you don’t understand or experience the mosaic as the contemporary Minoans did. It is ridiculous to think otherwise. You do not have anything approaching the same social context. Humans aren’t just near identical bundles of DNA, culture matters and it shapes our perceptions. No one with even a passing understanding of the human condition doesn’t understand this. That we have different experiences that make our lives substantially different doesn’t mean that we can’t empathize with people who’s experiences (even of the same event) are very different from ours, but our lives and our experiences are different. It is a profound failure in empathy to not understand this. So no, claiming you experience things in exactly the same way as someone else is erasing their experience. Try to show some actual empathy. Maybe listen to how others experience things differently from you rather than living on planet Pearce where we are all just our DNA.

  213. James Pearce says:

    @Pch101:

    You’re far too much in love with the sound of your own voice to have empathy for or to learn from anyone.

    @Grewgills:

    Maybe listen to how others experience things differently from you rather than living on planet Pearce where we are all just our DNA.

    Ya know, it’s funny. This whole conversation I’ve literally argued one point: racial equality. And you two are too stuck on screaming “you have white privilege” to apparently notice. Tell me again what a horrible person I am.

    I’ll tell you again why the social justice wars makes you stupid.

  214. Grewgills says:

    @James Pearce:
    Arguing that all races (or religions, or genders) have an equal experience in a society with systemic racism (sexism, etc) is not the same as arguing that all races (or religions, or genders) have the same ability and should be afforded the same rights. The former erases their experience and acts to undermine efforts to achieve equal treatment in our society, the latter I hope we agree on. That you can’t seem to tell the difference in what we are saying is your willful blindness.
    BTW, you are the one getting riled here. I’m rather calmly sipping my morning coffee and pointing out how wrong someone is on the internet.

  215. Pch101 says:

    @Grewgills:

    That you can’t seem to tell the difference in what we are saying is your willful blindness.

    Pearce thinks that he has 20/20 vision even though he gouged his eyes out.

    He’s never going to get it. He can’t be educated, he can only be mocked.