Author: Robert Mariani

Send me a tweet: @robert_mariani Email me: rjmariani0 AT gmail DOT com

Isn’t the ACLU responsible for deaths that result from “hate-filled, anti-choice” rhetoric?

The National Rifle Association is the villain that everyone likes to remember every time a mass shooting happens. It makes sense, since blaming a conspiracy for policy you don’t like creates much less cognitive dissonance than blaming a majority of the electorate for it (you don’t hate democracy, do you?).

This is embarrassingly common, and is so mainstream that it almost doesn’t seem like a conspiracy theory. The NRA is supposed to have a never-specified hold on our government that prevents all the good stuff that every reasonable person wants implemented from actually being implemented.

But the Colorado Planned Parenthood shooting has been a little bit different. Since the target was a place that performs abortions, there is another layer of politics that spoils the already-political soup: pro-life rhetoric is mostly the bad guy here.

Ilyse Hoge, president of abortion advocate NARAL, summed up the hundreds of thinkpieces on the tragedy pretty well in a Facebook post, saying that pro-lifers and people behind the Planned Parenthood baby parts video were ultimately responsible:

Sorry, David Daleiden. You don’t get to create fake videos and accuse abortion providers of “barbaric atrocities against humanity” one day and act shocked when someone shoots to kill in those same facilities the next.

…

It’s America. You are free to have your speech. The language you choose matters. You are not free from the judgement of the consequences of your hate-filled rhetoric. ‪#‎ColoradoSpringsShootings ‪#‎DomesticTerrorism

One of the replies to the post got a great deal of likes and took the idea a step further: “Hate thoughts + hate speech = hate violence.”

So we’re getting somewhere. This time it wasn’t the NRA. It was the bad rhetoric of people who don’t like abortion, and it’s being made clear that the “violent anti-choice rhetoric must end,” as Jessica Valenti put it.

So what’s getting in the way of a speech justice? Just like the NRA’s overly-broad interpretation of the Second Amendment is to blame in most shootings, the ACLU’s overly-broad interpretation of the First Amendment – logically speaking – must be the culprit here.

The civil liberties organization has defended neo-Nazi groups, oppose regulation of violent video games that Hillary Clinton has blamed for shootings, and opposes hate speech laws that many (most?) progressives think the First Amendment should not protect.

And presumably, they support the right of people to hold strong pro-life views and produce pro-life videos.

So if violent pro-life rhetoric is responsible for shootings just as much as access to weapons is, the ACLU – which is holding our country hostage like the Koch Brothers and the NRA, or something – gets a free pass for no apparent reason. Isn’t blood on their hands?

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Conservative boogeymen and the progressives who love them

I have an article over at The Daily Caller concerning the recent bouts of hysteria that have hit academia and the media.

This stuff is way, way bigger than college students being fragile babies, but Alexander correctly notes that, not for the lack of material, the media can’t seem to find an angle on it.

But it’s interesting to see the polemical contortions my favorite blogger had to tie himself into to save his article for polite society. He starts the blog post off with a caveat about how he started criticizing social justice back in 2010, saying that back then, only “wingnutty lesbianism-causes-witchcraft” circles bothered criticizing it.

He’s gesturing toward a quote made by Pat Robertson back in 1993, which has gotten lot of mileage since then as an example of a conservative being stupid.

“The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women,” the televangelist said. “It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

It’s important to note that that happened once, decades ago. And before we even know what he’s talking about, Alexander has to reassure readers that he isn’t right-wing bigfoot, like he needs to do that to get dispensation to have an opinion on people who are at the intersection of crazy and fashionable.

The fact that it’s expected to have these caveats isn’t the fault of Alexander or any other particular writer. But it speaks to nature of our cultural assumptions and of the parameters that define these debates. We live in a culture that uncritically believes in right-wing boogeymen.

We saw it at Yale with the boogeymen that wanted to legitimate the oppression of students by refusing to crack down on Halloween costumes. Mizzou had a supposed shit-smearing Nazi boogeyman that led to someone acting like an injured soccer player and going on a multi-day hunger strike. And then we had to have otherwise reasonable people reassure us that might be looking at these instances of boogeyman hysteria with the wrong kind of critical eye.

Go check it out.

Power Word: Blackface

Movement conservatives have this thing that they do whenever someone is questioning the latest steps toward military aggression. They compare it to appeasing Hitler, because Hitler was appeased and Hitler was bad. So like a lawyer making his closing arguments to a jury, they say, “But what about… WORLD WAR TWO!?”

I call this Power Word: World War 2, like those spells from Dungeons and Dragons that were power words that could not be resisted by their target. Similarly, Power Word: World War 2 ends the discussion, because non-interventionism is obviously wrong, since it’s a proof by contradiction. Everyone has to believe in World War 2 as the good intervention (duh!).

But all the beautiful people know that neoconservatives are stupid, so I will focus on a power word that the beautiful themselves love to use. And that is Power Word: Blackface.

A week or two there was a story about a white man named Michael Derrick Hudson who got a poem published in one of the most prestigious journals of poetry in the country. Hudson had previously had the poem rejected from lesser journals about 40 times. So he used the name Yi-Fen Chou because he thought that appearing to be something other than a white male would get his poem published.

He was right.

“Bluntly stated, I was more amenable to the poem because I thought the author was Chinese American,” the (non-white) editor of the journal, Sherman Alexie, explicitly stated.

Despite the overt favoritism toward poets because of their non-maleness and non-whiteness, in bizarro Twitter world, people took this fiasco as proof that Hudson actually had some sort of unfair advantage.

The contradictions between the narrative and the reality are obvious. But the issue for the commentariat is that this ordeal had:

  1. A white man coming out on top
  2. A white man doing it by seemingly outsmarting people of color, and most, importantly
  3. A white man turning a left-wing narrative on its head.

They couldn’t turn to him getting something because of his privilege, since the exact opposite happened 40 times. So where could the thinkpiece industry find its outrage release valve? Power Word: Blackface.

Blackface was a bad thing. It degraded black people by portraying them as buffoonish and contemptuous. It’s obvious that blackface not being socially acceptable is a good development. Yellowface was a bad thing as well, and Hollywood had quite a few examples of dressing up white people to make them walking stereotypes of Asians, like in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (the header pic). People who write by-the-numbers outrage thinkpieces aren’t very smart, and so they lazily painted Hudson with this brush.

The poet-troll didn’t wear yellowface though, despite the shrieks of the folks at Salon and the Guardian. No stereotypes or degradation happen. In fact, even the editor of the journal that there was nothing “Asian-seeming” about the poem he accepted. Hudson just beat a”no white males allowed” filter that apparently exists at a lot of places, and this made those who want to see those gates do their job very angry.

The absurdity of this becomes evident when considering that 19th-century female authors adopted male pen names to get published and read. It’s not a secret that George Eliot was actually a womann named Mary Ann Evans. Even J.K. Rowling supposedly adopted a gender-indeterminate name to appeal to broaden her appeal. Were these women degrading men and wearing “manface”? No, that’s obviously ridiculous. It’s equally ridiculous to say that Hudson was being a racist and wearing yellowface.

The blackface smear happens lot, and it happens when the contradictions in cultural Marxism are laid bare. People couldn’t quite articulate why Rachel Dolezal is evil and Caitlyn Jenner is brave, so they said “remember that blackface thing? That was bad! And this looks similar!”

Pointing out superficial similarities in things is something that every first grader has mastered. So why are adults paid 100 dollars per article to do it and why do we all pretend that it’s thought-provoking?

GitHub implements policies to please social justice warriors

GitHub is the most popular central repository for open-source projects in the world. They also just implemented a ridiculous terms of use. These highlights seem like parody, but they’re dead serious.

Harassment includes:

  • Unwelcome comments regarding a person’s lifestyle choices and practices, including those related to food, health, parenting, drugs, and employment
  • Physical contact and simulated physical contact (eg, textual descriptions like “hug” or “backrub”) without consent or after a request to stop
  • Deliberate misgendering. This includes deadnaming or persistently using a pronoun that does not correctly reflect a person’s gender identity. You must address people by the name they give you when not addressing them by their username or handle

Remember that misgendering is real, and it’s dangerous. Also:

We will not act on complaints regarding:

  • ‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’

They also recently removed a repository for having the word “retard” in the code, which seems to be contrary to the spirit of open-source software. Check out GitLab if you’re looking for a good alternative that hasn’t kowtowed to ideological fanatics.

I’m glad these kind of overplayed hands keep happening. The media isn’t going to report on what a joke it is, but it’s going to make more conservatives than the Koch brothers could ever hope to.

When we worry about our persecutors

A few weeks ago, the image of Charleston shooter Dylann Roof standing in his cell with two armed guards behind him was live-streamed to the courtroom occupied by the family, which was in turn broadcasted to news networks. Something kind of amazing happened. The teary-faced family members forgave him, and in fact said that they were worried about him. Why should they be worried about the rotten-to-the-core white supremacist that just murdered their loved ones?

“I pray God on your soul,” said the sister of one of the victims.

There’s actually some kind of symmetry in this scenario, even if it doesn’t initially look like it makes any sense. If the trick to being being a good person is to do more good things than bad things, Roof has an astronomically negative balance, approximating the national debt of the United States. So if anyone’s soul is in need of prayers, it’s Dylann Roof’s.

Before he committed the massacre, Dylann Roof took pictures of himself posing with the Confederate flag (actually the second Confederate Navy Jack, but whatever) which led to a wave of vandalism with text reading “black lives matter” over memorials honoring the Confederate dead. A more polite kind of iconoclasm came in the form of calls to remove Confederate monuments and rename landmarks.

Gloria Victis

The monument in the header image of this post, Spirit of the Confederacy, was one of the targets. It depicts an angel carrying away a defeated and dying Confederate soldier, who appears to need help standing. the base inscribed with the words “Gloria Victis,” which means “Glory to the vanquished.” It’s an uplifting reassurance that even the dead who fought on the wrong side were cared for and granted immortality.

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Excerpts from Diary of a Man in Despair

Friedrich Reck’s Diary of a Man in Despair is simultaneously one of the most difficult and most rewarding books I’ve ever read. The author is an aristocrat, a writer and a genteel reactionary who had a truth to tell about the character of life in Nazi Germany. He had a hatred for the Nazis that is peculiar to the traditionalist right.

The first few pages are concerned with Reck’s encounters with Oswald Spengler, who, apparently, was pretentious and took himself too seriously.

I still remember our first meeting, when Albers brought him to my house. On the little carriage which carried him from the station, and which was hardly built with such loads in mind, sat a massive figure who appeared even more enormous by virtue of the thick overcoat he wore. Everything about him had the effect of extraordinary permanence and solidarity: the deep bass voice; the weed jacket, already, at that time, almost habitual; the appetite at dinner; and at night, the truly Cyclopean snoring, loud as a series of buzz saws, which frightened the other guests at my Chiemgau country house out of their peaceful slumbers.

This was at a time when he was not really successful, and before he had done an about-face and marched into the camp of the oligarchy of magnates, a retreat which determined his life from then on. It was a time when he was still capable of being gay and unpreoccupied, and when he could sometimes even be persuaded to venture forth in all his dignity and swim in the river. Later, of course, it was unthinkable that he expose himself in his bathing suit before ploughing the peasants and farmhands, or that he climb, a huffing and puffing Triton, back onto the river bank in their presence!

He was the strangest amalgam of human greatness and small and large frailties that I have ever encountered. If I recall latter now, it is part of my taking leave with him, and so I am sure it will not be held against me. He was the kind of man who likes to eat alone – a melancholy-eyed feaster at a great orgy of eating. With a certain amusement, I recall one evening when he joined Albers and me for a light supper. It was during the final weeks of the First World War, when there was not a great deal one could set before one’s guests. But, discoursing and declaiming the whole time, Spengler finished an entire goose without leaving us, his table companions, so much as a bite.

His passion for huge dinners (the check for which was later picked up by his industrial Maecenas) was not his only diverting attribute. After I had met him, still before his first major success, he asked me not to come visit him at his little apartment (I believe it was on Agnesstrasse, in Munich). The reason he gave was that his apartment was too confined, and he wanted to show me his library in surroundings appropriate to its monumental scope.

Then, in 1926, after he found a way to the mighty rulers of heavy industry and had moved to the expensive WIdenmayerstrasse on the banks of the Isar, he did, indeed, invite me to see the succession of huge rooms in his apartment there. He showed me his carpets and paintings, and even his bed – which was truly worth seeing, because it looked more like a catafalque – but he became visibly disconcerted when I said that I was still looking forward to seeing the library. After overcoming his reluctance to show it to me, I found myself in a rather small room. And there – on a well-battered walnut bookstand, alongside a row of Ullstein books and detective stories – stood what are commonly called ‘dirty books’.

But I have never known a man with so little sense of humour and such sensitivity to even the smallest criticism. There was nothing he abhorred so much as humbug; yet along with all the magnificent deductions in The Decline of the West, he allowed a host of inaccuracies, inadvertencies, and actual errors to stand uncorrected – such as that Dostoyevsky came into the world in St Petersburg rather than in Moscow, and that Duke Bernhard of Weimar died before Wallenstein was assassinated – and important conclusions were drawn from these errors. Mistakes like these could happen to anyone; but woe to the man who dared make Spengler aware of them!

… To repeat, he was truly the most humourless man I have ever met; in this respect, he is surpassed only by Herr Hitler and the Nazis, who have every prospect of dying of a wretchedness compounded by their own deep-rooted humourlessness and the dreary monotony of public life which, under their domination, has taken on the rigidity of a corpse and is now in its fourth year of suffocating us to death. But h who believes that I want to do Spengler an injury by recounting his many weaknesses is in error. I need not cite his indispensable early work on Theocrates, nor the fact that he gave form at least to the presentiments of an entire generation. Whoever has met him knows about the nimbus of the significant that attached to him and that was not dissipated even in his off-guard moments; knows that in him lived the representation of the best in humanist pedagogy; knows about his countenance, which reflects the same stoicism found in busts of the late Roman period.

He also has an encounter with Hitler himself, a man whom Reck believes to be the embodiment of the proletarianized elite. You get the idea that Reck is disturbed by the virtue-shaped void that characterizes Hitler and his regime.

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