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Radical identity politics, homosexuality, and the irony of the new jihad

I had planned to pen a long blistering attack on both the radical pro-gay political orthodoxy, and the cowardly risk-averse actions of Mozilla, whose CEO resigned when it was learned — and some say, leaked, by way of an increasingly politicized IRS run, as is the Federal Civil Rights Division, by “progressive” activists (who in earlier times we’d simply call “authoritarians,” “fascists,” or “everything this country’s founders and framers hoped to repel from positions of power” ) — that he had given money to Proposition 8 proponents in California.

That is, because an American held a personal view that in no way affected how he would do his job, or how his company’s policies operated with the respect to the issue of same-sex marriage, he was effectively hounded into resigning by a tiny yet increasingly powerful political identity group that brooks no dissent:  to be anti-gay marriage is to be, they say, homophobic — a canard on its face.  Just as to be pro-gay marriage makes one necessarily anti-religious.  These are policy questions, questions that redound to a political system supposedly built around consent of the governed, representative government, and federalism, with the states holding enormous autonomy; and yet they are no longer considered in such a way:  today, these are the equivalent of litmus  tests that we are told factor out the “haters” and “bigots,” and they are justified by those who engage in these inquisitions, these jihads, as the actions of the goodly and righteous, those who are “intolerant of intolerance” (as they comically, ridiculously, and overarchingly ironically) claim.

The thing is, though, I’ve already written about these types of things for years — going very much into depth into how and why identity politics gathers its power by claiming control over a diverse group’s homogeneous and unassailable “official” narrative, then uses that narrative, as asserted and ascendent thanks often only to bullying, temporary consensus, or fear of being marked with a scarlet letter, to bracket out dissenters who share the same identity characteristics as either inauthentic (which is how, for instance, say, Chris Matthews can come to think of himself as more black than Clarence Thomas), or suffering from “false consciousness” or bouts of “anti-feminism.”

So I’m going to leave that essay to Liz Scalia, who does a marvelous job of it here.  I’ll quote at length:

[…] a gay CEO with a pair of brass ones needs to step up and speak truth to a growing, and most illiberal new power. He or she needs to hire Brendan Eich in some sort of corporate leadership capacity for the sake of the most fundamental of freedoms — the freedom to think what you want to think, even if your thinking is unpopular or deemed “mistaken” — and in so doing boldly declare that our society has no truck with inquisitions.

[…]

The very same people who have declared, “I yam what I yam”, and “we’re here, we’re queer; get used to it,” and who fought against discrimination on the basis of physical or emotional natures are proving themselves empty of magnanimity in victory. They are now saying “don’t be who you are,” and “you’re wrong, you’re gone; get used to it.” They’re applauding employment discrimination on the basis of an intellectual or spiritual philosophy.

What are they, anyway, philosophobes? Are they so terrified of any outlook which does not conform to theirs? I always thought a well-founded argument could withstand a little principled opposition. Apparently not.

Let’s think about this, for a second. Barack Obama only “evolved” on the issue of gay marriage when his re-election team deemed it necessary. Hillary Clinton came along even later, once the issue was clearly showing up in the “win” column. They blow with the wind, stand for nothing, but they’re given a pass. Meanwhile, as Allahpundit notes:

The difference between Eich and Obama is that. as far as we know, Eich didn’t lie to people’s faces about his views to further his own ambition. He could have publicly renounced his donation this week in the name of keeping his job, but apart from a statement about making sure that Mozilla supports everyone regardless of orientation, he didn’t. . .When forced to choose Eich evidently preferred to sacrifice his job [rather than recant].

Imagine that. A man who didn’t simply kowtow to a movement for the sake of personal or political expediency! Take a big whiff and marvel, boys and girls, because that’s a fragrance rarer than ambergris; it’s the scent of leadership in the morning, and it is almost unknown around these North American parts.

Clearly America’s successes since the 1690?s have been illusory; in reality, she has only moved her witch hunts and trials from Salem to Silicon Valley.

[…]

Let me be clear: I hold out absolutely no hope that this chill wind will be checked or reversed — too many people with money and influence and no individual courage at all find totalitarianism an alluring idea. Nevertheless, though everything is part illusion, I’ll still resist and say, as Tom McDonald so succinctly puts it, “this shit has to stop.”

Indeed; it is an execrable, detestable trend that, if unchecked, will affect every facet of our lives as “correct” thoughts and “correct” ways become ever-narrower and trap more and more people in its stinking and miserable gullies.

It has been clear to many of us — especially those who have lived and worked in a university environment — that identity politics, and the PC culture that it has cultivated as its social enforcement mechanism, was never meant to right wrongs or to fight for civil rights:  America and Americans had, for many many years, been moving of their own accord in the direction of accepting alternative lifestyles, which is of course not the same as endorsing them.  But what it is is tolerance, as it was conceived by our framers and founders. What we have now, instead, is an insistence that tolerance means something entirely else, and that failure to endorse a particular “official group narrative,” rather than merely accept it as part and parcel of a diverse society, is a sign of hatred, bigotry, and in need of shaming and a new secularist inquisition.

It’s the politics of “‘SHUT UP, they demanded” — and has as its core the totalitarian assertion that dissent from the orthodoxy of the official narrative, which becomes official and ascendant only after dissenters within the identity group are either excommunicated, shamed into silence, or denied their identity status altogether as inauthentic (that is, after the internal argument is “won” by sheer will to power and the facade of consensus), is akin to a hate crime or a civil rights violation.  And it protects its hypocrisy — here, for instance, a religious or constitutionalist  view that places certain public policy questions into the proper and essential arena of intellectual and legal debate — by claiming that “the powerful” can’t be the victims of the very kind of intolerance these politically powerful identity groups claim as their own exclusive bailiwick.  Victimization, that is, can only go one way.  And if you don’t like it, you’re a bigoted hater who hates and deserve to lose your job, your livelihood, your reputation, and often times vast sums of money defending yourself against the legal arm of these kinds of organized jihads and inquisitions.

And yes, I use those two descriptions of what is at work here quite consciously, because the irony should not be lost on anyone with even an ounce of intellectual integrity.

But this has truly been a long digression, so let me get to the actual point of my piece:  I’m through arguing these issues on the merits of equality before the law, protection of speech, and my abhorrence of hive mind political witch hunts.  In fact — and this may shock some of you — but I’m going to pause here briefly to let Andrew Sullivan speak to that, in a rare show of (partial) agreement between us two. Writes Andrew Sullivan:

Will he now be forced to walk through the streets in shame? Why not the stocks? The whole episode disgusts me – as it should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society. If this is the gay rights movement today – hounding our opponents with a fanaticism more like the religious right than anyone else – then count me out. If we are about intimidating the free speech of others, we are no better than the anti-gay bullies who came before us.

Sullivan, as is his wont, tries to draw parallels between what the contemporary pro-gay jihadists are doing and a cartoon version of the “religious right” (I’m not aware of Chic-Fil-A or Hobby Lobby, say, having any kind of policy about hiring homosexuals), but his predictable equivocation aside, his larger point is dead on, and tracks with the points many of us “wingnuts” (that is, constitutionalists, legal conservatives, federalists, libertarians, and classical liberals) have been arguing for decades:  the left’s version of tolerance is not “tolerance” at all; nor is it’s conception of “diversity” at all diverse, except in the most superficial, Crayola-esque of ways.  Instead, those who engage in identity politics demand conformity, uniformity, and “correct” thinking, which they will determine and which they will enforce.

This is at its very heart anti-American, in the strictest sense, because it is fundamentally illiberal.

Yet, we know all of this, and have decried it for years now.  To no effect.  Because this is not an intellectual endeavor.  It is a form of increasingly institutionalized and accepted tyranny.

So, here’s my answer:  Fight the jihad with a counter-jihad.  Adopt the tactics of these groups as a necessary evil for the “Greater Good” — only in this case, the Greater Good truly is just that, in that it beats back attacks on individual liberty, freedom of thought and expression, and the insistence on autonomy and protection of real tolerance, which requires that we accept that which we may disagree with, and not, as the left would have it, that we all think and believe the same thoughts that the left deems to be the correct, anti-bigoted ones.

The way I’d do this would be through a grass roots effort.  If gay-activist groups are going to attack businesses and individuals for thoughts they believe are intolerable, we as individual Americans concerned about the chilling effects of such a strategy on our founding principles should be prepared to treat this as a war against us and, frankly, our country as founded.  And in war, there will be innocents who are harmed.

I’d look at certain industries in which gays seem to flourish, and I’d begin my counter-attack there:  this can be done through boycotts, claims of intolerance against non-gays by gays in the workplace, or through reporting “discomfort” at certain interactions with gays in, say, the service or retail industries, etc.

If risk averse companies are going to fold like cowards at the political pressure applied by tyrannical groups whose power far outpaces its actual radicalized membership, I imagine they’d  have no choice but to make the same kinds of decisions should they be faced with countless complaints and boycotts against them from those who are tired of being bullied themselves, and resolve to put their attackers on the defensive.

The truth is, while there are certainly gays who still feel stigmatized, we have built into law protections against discrimination; and in my experience, most Americans, even those whose religion disavows homsexuality as legitimate, doesn’t hate the “sinner” so much as it labels the “sin.”

Until those people — and those of us who disagree with certain public policies pushed by identity politics groups for legal or constitutional reasons — enjoy the same social and, ultimately, legal protections as do groups who’ve managed to garner special political dispensation and perpetual victimhood status, we aren’t living in a tolerant or diverse society.

And since it seems that the aim of the identity politics groups — at least, their radicalized mouthpieces — is to make sure that their members are not treated equally, but rather can map their beliefs forcibly onto the rest of us, we are under no obligation any longer to turn the other cheek.

At least, I’m not. My tribe is of the Old Testament.  And we have that whole barbaric eye for an eye thing that drives the leftists crazy.  Because like honey badgers, we view their attempts to shame us, or to rely on our self-righteousness and refusal to stoop to the level of our opponents in order to save ourselves, as a non-issue. Honey badger don’t care.  Honey badger don’t give a shit.

And it’s time these paper tigers feel our wrath.

Now, if anyone read me anymore, I’d expect this kind of suggestion to be widely condemned — and I suspect many on the right would join in to condemn it, placing themselves in a position of what they’ll frame as moral superiority.  Frankly, I don’t much give a fuck.

If we don’t put an end to this kind of behavior by organized political grievance groups, they will just continue to step up their demands.  And though they may not lead to chattel slavery, it will lead to a kind of intellectual slavery that I simply will not abide. I’ve written about it for years: it works and becomes permanently viable through the misuse of language that we come to accept as coherent when in fact it is not.

A caveat:  I’d rather the outcome of all this be that there are enough in the gay-rights movement who, like Andrew Sullivan, can recognize the horrifying inevitability of what it is the mouthpieces of these movements are promoting — and that an effort is made within the group to change the official narrative.  But unfortunately, those who aren’t even identified with the movement — but are rather garden variety progressives — give aid and comfort to the contemporary tyrannical orthodoxy, because at base, they prefer enforced thought and deplore individual liberty.

So it’s going to take more than just a counter-culture within the gay community to beat back this kind of deplorable social bullying.   It’s going to take payback.  In spades.  And we need to be prepared to take the fight to our molesters or else be subsumed, and spend the rest of our days whining about how we used to be free.

I know which way I’m going.   And each of you is going to have to decide for yourself which way you wish to go.

(h/t DarthLevin)

 

 

157 Replies to “Radical identity politics, homosexuality, and the irony of the new jihad”

  1. Jeff G. says:

    Bring on the hate.

  2. mondamay says:

    Thanks for posting this.

    I’ve been pulling Mozilla products off my machines today, and expect to have a fuss with the wife about Firefox coming off the home PC tonight.

    Enough of these clowns. Fight fire with fire.

  3. bour3 says:

    While I’m reading these pieces on Eich from the pov of a guy being pushed out, and learning his history along the way, another pov forms of Eich simply saying, “Piss on all you douchbags, I really don’t need your farty scank sanctimony. You stink up the place. Losers. I meant to say just now I’m enjoying a very nice vacation. Such is my pleasurable and morally undisturbed balanced life.”

  4. jsjbst says:

    Everyone at Mozilla should lose their job because without exception they were born of the union between one man and one woman. Not one gay birth among the whole bigoted bunch of hater homophobes.

    Sons of bitches.

  5. steveaz says:

    Jeff,
    “Because this not an intellectual endeavor. It is a form of increasingly institutionalized and accepted tyranny.”

    Exactly right.

    Let’s look at the institutional aspect briefly. Ever notice how the private citizen’s submission to government institutions’ regulations renders him vulnerable to the New-Jihadis’ tactic? How they’ve hijacked the American machine?

    Exhibit A for my question is the simple fact that, if Eich hadn’t been “forced” to report his charitable donation to the IRS, then his private donation would never have entered the public domain in the first place. And Eich’s private benevolence could not be used to defile his character, which’d go a long way to disarming the Jihadi media thugs whose industry relies on deploying character assassination.

    And Exhibit B is, if the private association formed to advocate for Proposition 8 hadn’t been forced to report to the IRS its receipts (themselves private transactions between Americans that should be free from coercion, inspection and seizure) and donor lists, then the Jihadi’s couldn’t have harassed the donors and organizers alike.

    See? The New-Jihadis mine our public resources for the ammunition they use to make their “bombs!” And we stupidly keep mailing it in each year, like pigs to the slaughter.

  6. leigh says:

    This is the endgame of a larger conversation I’ve been having with my gay friends over the past few years.

    I’ve gotten several of them to admit that their quest for 100% acceptance by 100% of the world’s population regarding anything, least of all moral equivalence of homosexual unions, is quixotic.

    If I am willing to live and let live as a Christian and a classical liberal, it seems they should return the favor and not be so judge-y and hate-y.

  7. John Bradley says:

    And Exhibit B is, if the private association formed to advocate for Proposition 8 hadn’t been forced to report to the IRS its receipts (themselves private transactions between Americans that should be free from coercion, inspection and seizure) and donor lists, then the Jihadi’s couldn’t have harassed the donors and organizers alike.

    Which ties in with take on the IRS vs. Tea-Party business, and the exciting new “no political speech for 501(c)(4) orgs” regulations, and now it relates to the 2014 elections and beyond: “fuck ’em”. Unless I miss my guess, none of this would be an issue if the orgs involved weren’t non-profits, and the donations to same weren’t tax deductable. Run as a ‘regular’ corporation, and you can lobby for whatever you want, without giving up ‘donor lists’ to your political opponents. *

    Yes, your org is going to take a 40% (or whatever) haircut, and your supporters aren’t going to get a tax deduction, and yes it’s wildly unfair, but hell, if it’s war it’s war. If the cause is important (and it is), you can’t be asking permission to fight it from your enemy; that ain’t gonna work out so well.

    * I could quite easily be entirely mistaken about the ability to run an opaque political organization that doesn’t have to answer to anybody. Wouldn’t be the first time.

  8. Dave J says:

    Lets take this inquisition a step further and request that California provide a list of everyone that voted for Prop8. It was the “law of the land”.

  9. leigh says:

    It was our pals at the LA Times who published a list of donors to Prop 8 and made it searchable.

    Good solid investigative yellow journalism.

  10. dicentra says:

    Word on the street is that the straw that broke Mozilla’s back were DONATIONS TO PAT BUCHANAN AND RON PAUL IN THE 1990s!

    Well. Dodged a bullet there.

    Oh, from the Huffpo comments:

    I don’t see intimidation. I see someone who finally had to pay for the cost of their bigotry. Intimidation is when you air commercials call me and my family “a danger to children”. He would have been happy if we weren’t allowed to live equal in a society we were born into.

    Their characterization of our side is 100% certain and accurate. This can’t be a matter of competing goods, it’s KKK vs. MLK, and whatever we decide to dish out is right and fair.

  11. DarthLevin says:

    Right, leigh. According to Reason.com the IRS leak concerned the National Organization for Marriage’s donors and not Prop 8. But while that particular fact doesn’t play into the Eich Prop 8 OVTRAGE, the intent was along similar lines.

    An interesting article here outlines a potential battle strategy centered around helping principled people make lots of money:

    If you think back to all the victories had against the neo-McCarthyists (not that many, so it shouldn’t take very long) you will notice they all had one thread in common: Our Side had, in that particular instance, what analysts call “broad market support.” Chik-Fil-A (its lamentable spelling aside), Duck Dynasty, Domino’s Pizza all had the wherewithal to successfully push back.

    Capitalism* affords us the opportunity to amass such resources that would make the dark efforts of these neo-McCarthyists moot, their railings a spent force.

    I think this would be effective, if not short term in scope, in addition to Jeff’s tactical approach of “Leave us alone, or we won’t leave YOU alone.”

  12. dicentra says:

    Well, you see, Mozilla’s own employees didn’t feel safe with Eich at the helm, and “he failed to help them feel better,” so he failed as CEO, because it’s the CEO’s job to not have this kind of mistrust of his own self in the ranks.

    That’s why he left.

  13. leigh says:

    Darth, I’ve been arguing with the commenters at Reason for weeks now, mostly about their idiotic stance on legalizing all drugs while banning firearms, hailing homosexual marriage, mocking Christianity and intolerance of intolerance (as they characterize all who disagree).

    The truly ironic thing is that they can’t seem to hold two ideas to the same standards. In their quest to be non-conformist and cutting edge, they are conforming and dull as tombs.

  14. dicentra says:

    Taranto:

    For the past few years, since the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, we’ve been hearing incessantly from liberals and Democrats outraged at the notion that corporations have the right to free speech.

    This would seem an excellent opportunity for a principled and imaginative leftist to advance that argument in a way that might appeal across ideological lines. OkCupid’s boycott call — “We would … prefer that our users not use Mozilla software,” the site informed users who did — was straight-up corporate speech. So was Credo Mobile’s organizing of a petition against Eich (though no one would deny that the individuals who signed it were engaged in an act of personal expression).

    And while Mozilla’s refusal to support its CEO was in part a matter of business exigencies, in her blog post Baker frames it in terms of the corporation’s values and opinions: “Mozilla believes both in equality and freedom of speech. Equality is necessary for meaningful speech. And you need free speech to fight for equality.”

    This column does not agree with our notional principled and imaginative leftist. Our view is that the corporations involved were acting within their rights under the First Amendment. They exercised those rights in a nasty and illiberal way, but free speech protects disagreeable views as well as agreeable ones. There is nothing the government properly could have done to prevent this regrettable outcome.

    Actually, there is one thing. Eich’s support for Proposition 8 became public knowledge because of a California law requiring disclosure of personal information — name, address, occupation and employer’s name — of anybody who gives $100 or more to a campaign for or against a ballot initiative. …

    Which brings us back to Citizens United. It is known as a 5-4 decision, and most of it was, but one part of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion — upholding a provision requiring disclosure of political contributions — was for a 8-1 majority, with Justice Clarence Thomas dissenting alone.

    Thomas’s argument rested heavily on the facts of the Proposition 8 campaign, and it’s worth quoting at length:

    Some opponents of Proposition 8 compiled this information and created Web sites with maps showing the locations of homes or businesses of Proposition 8 supporters. Many supporters (or their customers) suffered property damage, or threats of physical violence or death, as a result. They cited these incidents in a complaint they filed after the 2008 election, seeking to invalidate California’s mandatory disclosure laws. Supporters recounted being told: “Consider yourself lucky. If I had a gun I would have gunned you down along with each and every other supporter,” or, “we have plans for you and your friends.” Proposition 8 opponents also allegedly harassed the measure’s supporters by defacing or damaging their property. Two religious organizations supporting Proposition 8 reportedly received through the mail envelopes containing a white powdery substance.

    If their cause were not righteous, they wouldn’t be able to do those things with a clear conscience.

    QED, h8rs

  15. dicentra says:

    Fight the jihad with a counter-jihad. Adopt the tactics of these groups as a necessary evil for the “Greater Good”

    I would amend this only to say that we should adopt the tactics that actually thwart the bullying, whether they be “the tactics of these groups” or not.

    Scalia’s suggestion that a gay CEO hire Eich is an effective pushback but it’s not one of Their Tactics.

    That said, I don’t know how you counter this kind of tsunami. The argument is framed as “civil rights for everyone,” and how do you push back against that without invoking complicated argumentation?

    I don’t mean against the jihadis, I mean against the people who have come to accept SSM because they see it as an equality issue and are willing to accept that opponents of SSM are, by definition, anti-equality. They might not throw Molotov cocktails themselves but they’ll point to where they should be thrown.

    The Anchoress is right: it won’t stop until they are satisfied, and these kinds of people are never satisfied. I’ll lose my job when the company decides to purge the undesirables from their ranks (those who won’t swear a loyalty oath to the cause, as they have to do in some gubmint agencies) and if it doesn’t come down to railroad cars and Final Solutions, it will get close.

    Our only hope is that the dollar crashes, the electrical grid fails utterly, and everyone finds more urgent things to do than police other people’s opinions.

  16. sdferr says:

    At a distant — though I think not disconnected — remove from here: What happens in the world generally speaking (including America of course) when the American nuclear hyper-power is politically utterly destabilized? That is, when what or who exactly decides whether those fearsome weapons are used or not used is entirely unknown in the world, or possibly worse, perfectly known to be impossible (or disassociated from a stable strategic imperative)?

  17. dicentra says:

    All hell breaks loose.

  18. Ernst Schreiber says:

    Has it occured to anybody on the left that Mozilla have now done what they claim to oppose when a company like Hobby Lobby does it –i. e. impose the corporate “morality” on an employee?

  19. DarthLevin says:

    Of course not, Ernst. Because Mozilla has the “right” “morality”. Which you’d know if you weren’t a filthy h8r.

  20. dicentra says:

    We can abandon the rhetorical stance that Leftist Statements of Principle resemble in any way actual statements of principle.

    Pointing out their hypocrisy, inconsistency, and other moral failings is superfluous to the discussion. They use words as weapons to destroy their enemies, not to say what they believe to be true.

    It’s like holding Obama to his anti-SSM stance: we all knew he didn’t mean it, so why waste pixels busting his chops for it?

    They are using SSM to destroy us. They will not accept compromises that would permit both sides to coexist because they don’t want to coexist with the Untermenschen. Like the Palestinians who want Israel wiped off the map, no concession or compromise will be good enough. Like Hitler who wanted world domination, they won’t stop with the Sudetenland.

    They also will not be persuaded that our point of view is in any way legitimate, that we can be wrong but still tolerable. They want it all.

    And they will get it, unless the Yellowstone caldera does us a solid.

  21. happyfeet says:

    personally i think chrome is even more fascist

  22. McGehee says:

    Gave Maxthon a try on my phone as default browser. No way to put web links on my homescreen, and the ones I already had opened in Chrome because that’s what I used to create them.

    I need to have my phone’s browser sync with my laptop’s. If I can’t use Maxthon on my phone it’s a dealbreaker.

  23. happyfeet says:

    what does uninstalling firefox really accomplish

    i like firefox ok but it hangs a lot at that “Hot Air” site – specially if I have a flash video playing somewheres

    this is probably cause of i have win64 running on this machine

    but like i said chrome is even more fascist and them and microsoft are all up in the ass of the NSA poofterboys

    american technology companies are pretty fucked up I have to say

  24. dicentra says:

    Chrome makes you sign in and harasses you if you don’t.

    Google is Skynet.

  25. dicentra says:

    Hey feets!

    Remember when I said that the pro-SSM forces would start driving people out of their jobs and stuff and you said I was worrying my little head a too much because gay peoples, they just want flowery weddings?

    And I said you just wait?

  26. happyfeet says:

    that really annoys me too

    and now they made it to where you have to start their stupid gay browser just to get to their messenger, which I do once a day to check on my friend P

    but i resent it, I really do

  27. happyfeet says:

    hi dicentra this idiot should have at least made them fire him I don’t know why he resigned like that

    if he’s not going to stand up for himself than god bless america

  28. happyfeet says:

    *then* god bless america i mean

  29. McGehee says:

    Chrome on my Win8 laptop let me browse all day yesterday w/o having logged in. Never said a word.

    Of course, it failed to sync with my other laptop, but if you want sync, logging in is what ya gotta do.

  30. happyfeet says:

    sync is same as fluoride

    it’s how they get you

  31. palaeomerus says:

    When you’ve lost Andrew Sullivan then you are near to jumping ye olde sharke. Even Sarah Palin’s perplexing and mysterious womb hasn’t lost Andrew Sullivan yet

  32. dicentra says:

    hi dicentra this idiot should have at least made them fire him I don’t know why he resigned like that

    One Mozilla employee said he did it to save the company from being torn apart. There was a strong contingent of Mozilla employees who absolutely refused to work with a “homophobe,” and they would not be placated with anything less than his scalp — not by assurances, not by 15 years of demonstrable performance, not by anything.

    If he’d stayed, he’d have had an open rebellion on his hands. One of my Twitterlocutors said that “he failed as a CEO because he couldn’t unite the company.”

    Without pointing out that those who refused to accept a “homophobe” as a CEO were the ones not budging. Dude decided that rather than be forced to recant by the Inquisition, he’d have to lose his job.

    Me, I’ll be dead chuffed when my chance to stand up for my beliefs comes to that.

    Not.

  33. geoffb says:

    4 out of 9 justices will agree that what Mozilla did was in defense of and defensible by, the 1st amendment.

    It’s important to note that when Breyer refers to “collective” rights, what he does not have in mind is individuals exercising their rights by voluntarily collecting themselves into organizations. In fact, the prevailing left-liberal view, most notably with respect to Citizens United v. FEC (2010), is that collections of individuals, at least when they take corporate form, have (or should have) no rights.

    The only “collective” that matters to Breyer is the one from which you cannot opt out except by the extreme measure of renouncing your citizenship: “the people” or “the public” as a whole. In Breyer’s view, the purpose of the First Amendment is to see that (in Chief Justice Hughes’s words) “the will of the people” is done. Individual rights are but a means to that end. To the extent they frustrate it, they ought to be curtailed. You will be assimilated.

    That resolves the conundrum we noted atop this column. Fringe political speech like flag burning, funeral protests and Nazi parades is so broadly unappealing as to have no effect on “the will of the people.” The same is true of nonpolitical forms of expression such as pornography, violent video games and depictions of animal cruelty. (Breyer’s willingness to countenance restrictions of the first two has to do with the protection of children, not of the body politic.)

    Only mainstream political expression has the potential to thwart the “collective” will, and thus, in the view of Breyer and his fellow dissenters, it alone is deserving of restriction on such a rationale.

  34. McGehee says:

    sync is same as fluoride

    Bircher.

  35. happyfeet says:

    it would have been more better for the company to have been torn apart i think

    probably very stressful for Brendan, but still he should’ve said hey I’m the ceo and what we’re gonna do is, we’re gonna do browser stuff and if you don’t want to do browser stuff oh well

    instead he went all Sarah Palin and quit

    I really don’t understand this mentality

  36. dicentra says:

    Predictions

    SSM will be eventually legalized in all 50 states, mostly by judicial fiat.

    Once that happens, the following will happen to churches who do not or cannot recognize or perform SSM, in no particular order:

    • The state will refuse to recognize weddings performed by their ministry.

    • The universities owned by those churches will lose their accreditation.

    • Their university sports teams will be expelled from the NCAA and other intramural sports.

    • Their 501(c)(3) status will be revoked or modified to cause maximum pain.

    • Vandalism of their temples, chapels, and cathedrals will go unprosecuted. Except the mosques.

    • Any other protections and courtesies that I can’t think of now will be revoked or withheld, whether de jure or de facto.

    • About half of the people expressing outrage over l’affaire Mozilla today will stop supporting their right to dissent, because get with the program.

    As for those who belong to those churches and refuse to renounce them:

    • If you have a degree from the church universities, you will have to omit it from your resume.

    • If you are suspected of being, you know, religious, you’ll have to reassure employers, friends, and colleagues that you disagree with your churches’ SSM doctrine. At first. Then you’ll have to produce evidence that you’ve been formally excommunicated.

    • Depending on location, you may have difficulty getting loans or renting apartments.

    • You will lose most of your friends. Many of your co-religionists will leave rather than face the opprobrium.

    • …

    After this, if the SMOD hasn’t hit yet, we can start talking about Yellow Fabric Stars.

  37. dicentra says:

    I really don’t understand this mentality

    Isn’t it obvious that he found a horse’s head in his bed?

    Are you new on this planet?

  38. happyfeet says:

    no it is NOT obvious

    it sounds like he let a bunch of geeky googlefags intimidate him

  39. newrouter says:

    sodomites for the win

  40. newrouter says:

    yea let’s abuse the lgbtxyz crowd by collectively calling them sodomites. have fun with language!

  41. dicentra says:

    Looks like Mozilla is getting hammered, at least initially.

    It’ll blow over, though, and they’ll call themselves successful.

  42. serr8d says:

    And it’s time these paper tigers feel our wrath.

    Operation American Spring

    TO: Patriots (black, white, red, yellow, brown, male, female, civilian, military, truckers, bikers, militias, veterans, old, young, every American that loves freedom and liberty)

    Mission: Restoration of Constitutional government, rule of law, freedom, liberty “of the people, by the people, for the people” from despotic and tyrannical federal leadership.

    Assumptions:
    Millions of Americans will participate.
    American veterans and patriots are energized to end the tyranny, lawlessness, and shredding of the US Constitution.
    Government is not the target, it is sound; corrupt and criminal leadership must be replaced.
    Those in power will not hesitate to use force against unarmed, peaceful patriots exercising their constitutional rights.
    Patriots may be killed, wounded, incarcerated.
    There is no hope given today’s technology of secrecy for the effort nor do we want it secret.

    Concept of Operations:
    Phase 1 – Field millions, as many as ten million, patriots who will assemble in a peaceful, non-violent, physically unarmed (Spiritually/Constitutionally armed), display of unswerving loyalty to the US Constitution and against the incumbent government leadership in Washington D.C., with the mission to replace with law abiding leadership. Go full-bore, no looking back, steadfast in the mission.

    Phase 2 – One million or more of the assembled 10 million must be prepared to stay in D.C. as long as it takes to see Obama, Biden, Reid, McConnell, Boehner, Pelosi, and Attorney General Holder removed from office.
    Consistent with the US Constitution, as required, the U.S. Congress will take appropriate action, execute appropriate legislation, deal with vacancies, or U.S. States will appoint replacements for positions vacated consistent with established constitutional requirements.

    Phase 3 – Those with the principles of a West, Cruz, Dr. Ben Carson, Lee, DeMint, Paul, Gov Walker, Sessions, Gowdy, Jordan, should comprise a tribunal and assume positions of authority to convene investigations, recommend appropriate charges against politicians and government employees to the new U.S. Attorney General appointed by the new President.

    *All actions in Phase 2 & 3 will be consistent with the U.S. Constitution.

    Date of Operation: “OPERATION AMERICAN SPRING – Beginning Of Tyranny Housecleaning, May 16, 2014, completion to be determined

  43. happyfeet says:

    so anyway yeah your society is increasingly fascist and brutal

    sucks to live in your shitty country what can i tell you

  44. palaeomerus says:

    Indentity should distinguish you from groups. Leftists seem to consider membership in a group as the only component of identity. Sad.

  45. serr8d says:

    Heh. Forget pitchforks, squid. We need pikes.

  46. eCurmudgeon says:

    Chrome makes you sign in and harasses you if you don’t.

    Google is Skynet.

    Which is why I went with Internet Explorer – Microsoft, for it’s myriad sins (both real and imagined) is still better-behaved than either Mozilla or Google.

    Especially for Internet Explorer 11

    (And what’s particularly galling is that during the first dot-com boom, I was rather heavily involved in the Sun/Netscape/iPlanet axis. My, how times have changed…)

  47. newrouter says:

    chrome has alot of popups to ‘enjoy”

  48. leigh says:

    I like Internet Explorer.

    But, I’m tragically unhip and unable to hate on Microsoft.

  49. newrouter says:

    >what can i tell you<

    any new good foodz?

  50. happyfeet says:

    yes

    but I tell you later

  51. newrouter says:

    went to a fish fry today. the haluski was tastey.

  52. Ernst Schreiber says:

    it would have been more better for the company to have been torn apart i think
    probably very stressful for Brendan, but still he should’ve said hey I’m the ceo and what we’re gonna do is, we’re gonna do browser stuff and if you don’t want to do browser stuff oh well
    instead he went all Sarah Palin and quit
    I really don’t understand this mentality

    Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.

    That mentality?

  53. BigBangHunter says:

    – Maxthon the first –

    “Because, well, its not about the causes. Causes are like assholes, everyone has one. Its about being as counterculture, condescending as obnoxious as possible because “Daddy” is the dude keeping me down“.

  54. newrouter says:

  55. happyfeet says:

    you know we’ve never seen Brendan and Jesus in the same room at the same time

  56. Ernst Schreiber says:

    Maybe turn the other cheek is more your speed?

    (And we’ve never not seen Brendan and Jesus in the same room at the same time t00)

  57. serr8d says:

    Beijing-based Maxthon

    Well. That cloud’s not flying in friendly skies.

  58. happyfeet says:

    I don’t know if you don’t mind I’m a take a couple days and think on it

  59. dicentra says:

    JEFF GOLDSTEIN YOU MAGNIFICENT BASTARD!

    YOU WON!!!

    YOU EFFING WON!!!!!

    Note right here that Colbert relies on his intent as his Get Out of Jail Free Card for doing this bit. While his bit was preposterously racially insensitive, it was also preposterously racially insensitive — he is so over-the-top in his racism that he believes that over-the-toppedness should signal to the viewer that he’s not on the level, and that his intent is to satirize racism itself, and not to attack Asians.

    Intent — it all comes down to his intent. If his intent is permissible, it doesn’t matter how fantastically racist he seems to be, trading, as he does, in ethnic slurs that really are tossed at Asian kids as they’re growing up. (“Ching chong” and variants are used as catcalls against Asians.)

    That’s the whole theory as to why Colbert is permitted to do this, and you’re not. His intent is pure. His intent is not to demean Asians, but to demean crochety old Asian-haters like, um, Bill O’Reilly.

    Now, Colbert’s new bit consisted of replaying this hoary Yellowface act and then issuing a mock apology, saying that, like Dan Snyder, he would start a foundation to placate angry Asians. And this foundation would be called “The Ching Chong Ding Dong Foundation to Help Orientals or Whatever.”

    Again, he relies upon the idea that the intent beneath his words removes his words from the category of “offensive,” even though the words, on their own, are in fact, inarguably, offensive.

    And you can ask Asians about that. They will tell you they’ve had the Ching Chong thing thrown at them at children, and that epithet was intended to hurt them, and much of the time, it actually did hurt them.

    But again: Colbert’s intent rescues this remark. He doesn’t mean anything bad by it, after all.

    But think about that. He’s attacking Dan Snyder’s supposedly offensive use of “Redskins” for his team name. And doing so using 1910s era coolie-jokes to do so. But Colbert’s intent must be considered here. After all, he’s just ripping Dan Snyder.

    But what about Dan Snyder’s intent? Does that save Dan Snyder?

    Does the Washington Redskins’ clear lack of intent to denigrate Native Americans save it?

    EMPHASIS.

    IN.

    ORIGINAL!!!!

  60. serr8d says:

    Mother Jones describes a machine that can determine, on a biological basis, if one is a ‘Liberal’ or ‘Conservative’. With that in mind, I left a tongue-in-cheek comment..

    Liberals, like worms, are morally weak and disgusting creatures. We Conservatives can’t take our eyes off of them for a minute. They’ve tendencies to become Communists rather quickly, because they are easily Community Organized when their Liberal Fascist leaders offer them rewards of Other People’s Money. If enough brain-stricken Liberals are present, they will weaken a society, and will cause a Republic’s eventual collapse, because they are organized to push for their own greedy self-interests, and base their organizations on unsound and unsustainable fiscal policies.

    Worms or termites, Liberals? Seen the progressive rot form in their overpopulated inner city slumburgs? Detroit, Chicago, New York, Atlanta? States too; California and Illinois, where bankruptcy always looms, because Liberals are allowed to infest, multiply and organize, unchecked.

    Put ’em in cages, these Liberals. Feed ’em paste. But whatever you do, keep ’em away from the levers controlling your societies, because, being Liberal Fascists, they desire nothing but control over every other person’s thinking. They will force their thinking and degenerate ideals on anyone daring to disagree with them (seen Mozilla’s Brendan Eich attacked by Liberal Homofascists?).

    And no, Liberals cannot survive without Conservatives tending them. If they are allowed to run free, they will self-destruct while chasing invisible, pie-in-the-sky, unsustainable butterflies.

  61. McGehee says:

    chrome has alot of popups to ‘enjoy”

    And again I say to you: Adblock Plus. They have it for Chrome now too.

  62. Eingang Ausfahrt says:

    Well. That cloud’s not flying in friendly skies.

    Only if you use the cloud part, but invented in China, at least they admit to being Commies unlike Apple. Chrome – might as well send all your info to Google direct. Internet Exploder – utter rubbish and still a virus magnet.

    Problem is unless one can write one’s own browser, there are no perfect choices, anything else is likely a variant of Chrome, IE, or Mozilla – only things I have seen that isn’t are Maxthon and Avant, and the interface on the latter is to me a PITA.

    Mozilla based but not Firefox, Pale Moon is not bad.

  63. Darleen says:

    di

    I saw that… Ace backed into the intent argument, but he still doesn’t get it. Nor has the self-awareness to offer any mea culpas for his past “but we have to watch what we say” stuff.

  64. mileycyrussays says:

    Wow, this place is still here.

    Homo haters unite.

  65. Darleen says:

    Oh look, the inane troll has shown up vomiting words it doesn’t know or even cares to know.

    Cuz Leftism is its religion which gives it license to lie, cheat & steal from The Other.

  66. Darleen says:

    inane,

    Please tell us how Sully is now a “homo-hater”. Be specific.

  67. leigh says:

    Don’t talk to it, Darleen. It just encourages it to pollute all the threads.

  68. Ernst Schreiber says:

    Like Darleen, I wouldn’t be so quick to declare victory di.

    It seems to me that Ace would be content with expelling both Dan Snyder and Stephen Colbert from the public sphere for speech crimes.

  69. McGehee says:

    I guess miley thinks everyone who disagreed with Cheney about SSM in 2008 should be fired in 2014.

    Let’s start with Barack Obama.

  70. dicentra says:

    Like Darleen, I wouldn’t be so quick to declare victory di.

    The fact that he had to employ intentionalism to pick apart Stupid Hypocrite Tricks is victory.

    Of course he didn’t realize that Jeff was the font. Of course he won’t go back and apologize or otherwise revise his earlier equivocation.

    But he got there, and he saw why he had to get there, and he twigged to the way Leftist rejection of intent is at the root of their mischief.

    That’s victory.

  71. dicentra says:

    Confirmed: Ricochet is infected with a different kind of troll, one that is less blatantly obnoxious but for that even more pernicious.

    They smoothly, oleaginously, inoffensively, reasonably minimize evil.

    Jon Gabriel @exjon’s Ricochet article about Eich is followed by comments containing dismay at having to drop Firefox, idle speculation about where Eich can get another job, how Mozilla can do what they want so what’s the problem, tactics don’t discredit the movement, etc.

    Last night I pointed out that Eich’s head was put on a pike por encourager les autres and it’s been completely ignored.

    These Oily Trolls aren’t left-wingers come to torment us but are folks ostensibly on Our Side who serve as Chamberlains to our Churchills.

    We know where this leads. Churchill prevails, if at all, only after the war starts. The Chamberlains ensure that the war will happen by keeping the masses asleep until the enemy feels confident enough to strike.

    Never go away, protein wisdom. Never go away.

  72. steveaz says:

    John,
    Leave aside the danger posed by leaked government data for a minute, and question the motivations that drive men like Eich to unquestioningly comply with government demands for private data. For the Beast to eat our data, we must first put it in the monster’s food-ball.

    The more deeply you peer into the byzantine labyrinth of IRS regulations that supposedly free men are commanded to navigate in order just to work, speak, publicize or give charity in America, the more certain you become that we are NOT free here.

    Furthermore, as you suggest, it is becoming increasing awkward for patriots to comply with non-profit regulations. It is so bad in my view that those patriotic associations (be they churches, local councils, or a gardening group) who do sign-up with the IRS’s reg’s are toeing with being traitorous: If a Pastor knows the entire game is rigged, why submit to its disclosure-regimes and suppress your own speech just so you can say your church is a 501(c)?

    You’re Patriotic Shepherd… You’re armed to the teeth… You’ve warned your flock about the tides we face… You’re convinced the excrement will hit the fan… But then you dutifully register your non-profit with the IRS! This is crazy: You’re only feeding the Beast!

    It is essential that we defund the non-profit economy if we want to redeem America. And the ring-leader of this false, unaccountable, opaque economy hides in the ringleader’s IRS’s imposed categories. Deconstruct these categories, and go to a flat-tax system, and the Gay Mafia’ll have to let off real bombs to get on Americans’ radars next time.

  73. steveaz says:

    Should be “monster’s food-bowl“. Oops!

  74. Patrick Chester says:

    mileycyrussays says April 5, 2014 at 12:22 pm

    Wow, this place is still here.

    Wow, you’re still pining for attention.

    How sad.

    *sympathetic frown*

  75. dicentra says:

    Another effed up link?

    Thanks, newrouter.

  76. fritz62 says:

    What causes and candidates did you donate to in 2008? Inquiring minds want to know.

  77. The Monster says:

    And you can ask Asians about that. They will tell you they’ve had the Ching Chong thing thrown at them at children, and that epithet was intended to hurt them, and much of the time, it actually did hurt them.

    Can someone explain to me how “Ching Chong” hurts Asians?

    It’s mocking how funny Chinese words sound to our ears, having learned American English as our first language. I’m pretty sure English sounds funny to them, too, and they have their own ways to mock it/us. Is that racist?

    Is the Muppet character “Swedish Chef” hurtful to Scandanavians for making fun of how funny Swedish sounds to us? People mock Italian, French, German, various English dialects all the time, and that’s not considered “racist” and “hurtful”. What’s the diffference?

    Is there some special rule that says people of German heritage are never ever allowed to play the Ethnic Victim Card because Holocaust? And white folks in general can’t play it because The Legacy of Slavery including Jim Crow?

  78. Mueller says:

    mileycyrussays says April 5, 2014 at 12:22 pm
    Wow, this place is still here.
    Homo haters unite.
    – See more at: https://proteinwisdom.com/?p=53204#comments

    We’re just surprised you’re able to find it. What with your limited mental abilities.
    I probably should have written that in a cartoon format.

  79. McGehee says:

    I have yet to be offended by Scrooge McDuck or his kilt-wearing adversary, Flintheart Glomgold.

  80. Jeff G. says:

    Homo haters unite.

    I read a few weeks ago where the term “homo” is intended to disparage gays by reinforcing the image of the route their sexuality takes.

    Welcome to the hater club, hater.

  81. leigh says:

    I bailed out of Ricochet several months ago when they were soft soaping about Christie and how he was the One. I’ve heard that before and don’t want to hear it again.

    Is there some special rule that says people of German heritage are never ever allowed to play the Ethnic Victim Card because Holocaust? And white folks in general can’t play it because The Legacy of Slavery including Jim Crow? – See more at: https://proteinwisdom.com/?p=53204#comment-1067134

    I’d like to know the rules on this, as well. I’ve been called a lot of unkind things due to my Germanic last name.

  82. geoffb says:

    I’d like to know the rules on this, as well. I’ve been called a lot of unkind things due to my Germanic last name.

    Just imply that you are Irish like John F’n Kerry and the German thing goes away – whoosh…

  83. cranky-d says:

    I am still a ricochet member, and will continue. James Lileks is still there and is still resisting the pragmatists. Plus, they are entertaining.

    On the last podcast, though, I was disappointed by Peter Robinson. He actually called Jeb Bush a conservative. I guess the definition of conservative has lost most if not all of its meaning.

  84. cranky-d says:

    Kerry should have changed his name to Kerry-Heinz and had his wife keep her last name unhyphenated. It would have been more honest.

    Meow.

  85. newrouter says:

    > He actually called Jeb Bush a conservative.<

    he confuses republitard with conservative

  86. Pablo says:

    We know where this leads. Churchill prevails, if at all, only after the war starts.

    Well, yeah. After the war starts…and ends. Did anyone still think it would be otherwise? If you’re not playing the long game you’re wasting your time. Which is not to say that you can’t also play the short game.

  87. Pablo says:

    Can someone explain to me how “Ching Chong” hurts Asians?

    If someone saying “Ching chong” hurts you, your Job #1 should be learning how to sturdy yourself the fuck up before you die of the vapors.

  88. dicentra says:

    Tried to tell a gay SSM supporter that I was against the imposition of heteronormativity on gays, but he wasn’t having it.

    I’m old enough to remember when the gay agenda was about rejecting heteronormativity entirely, including the very concept of marriage, pairing up, fidelity, raising kids, living in suburbia, soccer practice, domesticity…

    It was the sixties counterculture doing its most blatant and dead-level best to ruin the nuclear family for being oppressive to women, the hotbed of abuse, bourgeois, Christian, sexually repressive.

    That’s when it was OK to come out and say that marriage and family has got to go. They’d flat-out say it on Donohue and other talk shows he spawned, in the Norman Lear sitcoms, in the endless protests, anywhere they could pontificate and spout out the latest revolutionary talking points.

    But adultery didn’t catch on as a form of sexual liberation, and family never really went away, even if fathers kinda faded out. So the next barrage has to be to insist that you most certainly do need a piece of paper to prove your love, because bennies.

    And people think that “getting the government out of marriage” will solve the problem.

    As if.

    There will be no middle ground, no accommodation, no COEXISTing.

    Submit or die.

  89. Darleen says:

    I’d like to know the rules on this, as well. I’ve been called a lot of unkind things due to my Germanic last name.

    leigh

    My last name really is “Click”

    Just imagine all the nicknames I had growing up. (which I learned to not only ignore, but why I’ve kept it)

  90. dicentra says:

    Can someone explain to me how “Ching Chong” hurts Asians?

    The term would be used in conjunction with bullying aimed at a kid for being Asian. The bully would pull back his eyes and affect buck teeth and whatever else to let the Asian kid know he’s too different to be a regular kid.

    Childhood taunts hurt pretty bad when you’re a kid. I never realized that pain was being inflicted until Jr. High, when a pair of popular girls who were sitting behind me got bored and decided to amuse themselves by taunting the kid in front of them. I was stunned by how bad it hurt. I didn’t even care about them, nor did I hang out in their circles, nor was I in fear for my safety, nor were they picking on me for any particular reason. But damn.

    That said, Park Suey was way too melodramatic when she said that hearing the taunt repurposed as a joke made her go off and cry. And that as an adult it’s still an unacceptable trigger or whatever.

    Because yeah: in China they make fun of how English sounds and how Americans slaughter Chinese. They’d be stupid not to.

    Grow up, Park Suey, and learn to speak without using word salad.

  91. newrouter says:

    >Submit or die.<

    yep proggslims

  92. dicentra says:

    I’ve also got this over at David’s.

  93. newrouter says:

    and when the proggtards issue a fatwa call it a fatwa. it is a twofer language wise about so called “tolerance”

  94. McGehee says:

    Drama is for the performing arts, not actual daily-routine life.

  95. newrouter says:

    you should call it “chop suey park’s” fatwa for ching chong fun

  96. leigh says:

    In Japan, they refer to whites as Ghost People (gaijin, I think). This is supposed to be incredibly insulting, while at the same time being an inside joke since whites aren’t supposed to know this.

    Geoff, I refuse to call myself Irish. I have my pride.

  97. Dumped Firefox. I mostly use ID, but I like to have an alternative. Didn’t want Chrome, mostly on account of Google’s complete misunderstanding of that whole “Don’t be evil” thing. Found Comodo Dragon, which is apparently built from the Chrome code base, but has a bunch of privacy protection baked in. Liking it so far.

    http://www.comodo.com

  98. Danger says:

    Seems we haters have an accomplice

    Let’s play a game called who said that:

    “Marriage has got historic, religious and moral content that goes back to the beginning of time and I think a marriage is as a marriage has always been, between a man and a woman,”

    “not just a bond, but a sacred bond between a man and a woman.”

    and

    the fundamental bedrock principle that [marriage] exists between a man and a woman going back into the mists of history as one of the founding foundational institutions of history and humanity and civilization, and that its primary, principle role during those millennia has been the raising and socializing of children for the society into which they are to become adults.”

    Man, what a hater!

  99. Danger says:

    Miley,

    Ever wonder when you’ll be the next believer that the leftist aristocrats betray?

    Ever wonder how people with so little talent, effort and benefit to society got to be so wealthy?

  100. Patrick Chester says:

    @Danger: Like the Chancellor in “The Obsolete Man”?

  101. serr8d says:

    Danger, I had expected that link to expose Barack Obama’s duplicity, but as the post’s author explained, BHO’s language defending as sacred the institution of traditional marriage was rhetorically vague (as he must constantly practice to be, to keep his radical agendas hidden away from 99% of Americans).

    But the author of those quotes truly was being sincere. Since, she has shed much of her wisdom, as the disease that is Leftism has consumed her mind as inexorably as would untreated syphilis.

  102. Danger says:

    Excellent comparison Patrick!

    Serr8d,

    She has sold her soul for power. The return on her investment is certain to be tragic for her.
    Though, I’m sure Miley will like the prospectus.

  103. geoffb says:

    Sorry about the length.

    From a John Varley short story called “Press Enter.”

    “Do I frighten you, Victor?”

    “You did at first.”

    “It’s my face, isn’t it?”

    “It’s a generalized phobia of Orientals. I suppose I’m a racist. Not because I want to be.”

    She nodded slowly, there in the dark. We were on the patio again, but the sun had gone down a long time ago. I can’t recall what we had talked about for all those hours. It had kept us busy, anyway.

    “I have the same problem,” she said.

    “Fear of Orientals?” I had meant it as a joke.

    “Of Cambodians.”

    She let me take that in for a while, then went on. “When Saigon fell, I fled to Cambodia. It took me two years with stops when the Khmer Rouge put me in labor camps. I’m lucky to be alive, really.”

    “I thought they called it Kampuchea now.”

    She spat. I’m not even sure she was aware she had done it.

    “It’s the People’s Republic of Syphilitic Dogs. The North Koreans treated you
    very badly, didn’t they, Victor?”

    “That’s right.”

    “Koreans are pus suckers.” I must have looked surprised, because she chuckled.

    “You Americans feel so guilty about racism. As if you had invented it and nobody else-except maybe the South Africans and the Nazis-had ever practiced it as heinously as you. And you can’t tell one yellow face from another, so you think of the yellow races as one homogeneous block. When in fact Orientals are among the most racist peoples on the earth. The Vietnamese have hated the Cambodians for a thousand years. The Chinese hate the Japanese. The Koreans hate everybody. And everybody hates the ‘ethnic Chinese.’ The Chinese are the Jews of the East.”

    “I’ve heard that.”

    She nodded, lost in her own thoughts.

    “And I hate all Cambodians;’ she said, at last. “Like you, I don’t wish to. Most of the people who suffered in the camps were Cambodians. It was the genocidal leaders, the Pol Pot scum, who I should hate.” She looked at me. “But sometimes we don’t get a lot of choice about things like that, do we, Yank?”

    The idea that racism is only a [white] American thing is an invention of the left to use for power. It has worked for a long time.

  104. serr8d says:

    Japan is not a successful melting pot. Not many nations will get it right, ever.

    Until that day in the far-off future, when humans will all be blended to one overall hue and language and culture, we’ll have these flare ups. Evolution is just too damned slow, eh wot ?

  105. newrouter says:

    >The idea that racism is only a [white] American thing is an invention<

    proggslim narrative

  106. My memory is failing me: What was the court case involving buggery where the dissenting opinion said more or less that this decision would open the door to gay marriage, and then all the “intellectuals” pooh-poohed the very notion?

  107. bh says:

    That wiki link is well worth a read. I just did.

    On one hand you have a sodomy charge against two dudes being arrested for gay stuff discovered from cops kicking in their door.

    On the other hand you have Scalia’s extremely prudent concerns about the democratic means to resolve such issues and Thomas’ even stronger opprobrium.

    (This comment of mine is entirely based on reading that wiki entry. If it’s full of shit, so am I. Hell, I’m definitely full of shit, we all know that.)

  108. bh says:

    Edit:

    Thomas’ even stronger opprobrium [to the underlying law itself].

  109. bh says:

    Imagine being a Justice in this case.

    Clearly it’s reprehensible to arrest people on minor secondary charges after entering their premises on another. Forget the gay sex. They could have arrested them for any one of the thousands of laws that each of us are breaking every moment but aren’t generally considered worth knocking down someone’s door over.

    It’s also a dangerous path to decide that localities and states can’t make their own laws about any manner of things without the recourse being a democratic rescission of those very laws.

  110. Danger says:

    b(eee) (atc)h!!!

    Nice to have you back!

  111. bh says:

    Thanks, Danger!

    I constantly miss pw and y’all.

  112. serr8d says:

    The neighbor reported to police that the man next door “sounded like he was going crazy”. The cops were conducting a health & welfare check. Could’ve found any of a number of dangerous situations; probably they were relieved to find a couple guys doing what married couples do, only louder and without concern for their neighbors.

  113. bh says:

    I’m responding to this, serr8d: “Apparently outraged that Lawrence had been flirting with Garner, he called police and reported “a black male going crazy with a gun” at Lawrence’s apartment.”

    That might be entirely false. I’m just going off of wiki which isn’t always trustworthy.

    If that’s wrong, it weakens my case a bit because I do think cops should exercise quite a bit of discretion if they’ve entered someone’s place under another justification and then come across non-felonies.

  114. bh says:

    For instance, if you get a report of a dude who’s gonna shoot his wife and you find that he’s smoking pot I think they should just leave. If they get a false call about a dud who’s gonna shoot his wife but then they find a bunch of chained up sex slaves then they should obviously check it out.

    I suppose it’s that I think entering a citizen’s place of residence is an enormous deal. If you walk out with a couple dudes acting like sailor’s (I kid, I kid) or smoking pot then you’re just looking for ex post facto justification.

  115. Danger says:

    bh,

    Has you business endeavor generated financial independence yet, or is the independence not what it’s cracked up to be.

  116. serr8d says:

    I skimmed the wiki to get the NYT link. Missed the black-gun part entirely.

    The NYT article was more apropos to Tresspassers W’s question..

    “Although Texas itself did not make the argument, some of the state’s supporters told the justices in friend-of-the-court filings that invalidating sodomy laws could take the court down the path of allowing same-sex marriage.”

    Lawrence v Texas did open the door to the mess we have right now. Kicked it right down without even a courtesy knock first.

  117. Danger says:

    bh,

    No worries , The NSA has just the remedy for the ex post facto delio. And Obama has only the right (wing) crimes targeted.

  118. bh says:

    That’s a tough question, Danger.

    Both, I guess. I am financially independent now but I’m also the check writer for a decent number of excellent employees that I would like to keep employed in a really shitty economy.

    Let’s just say that no one should cry for me but at the same time my yacht fund has yet to reach $5.

  119. bh says:

    “Lawrence v Texas did open the door to the mess we have right now. Kicked it right down without even a courtesy knock first.”

    I might not have paid that aspect proper time in my earlier, bumbling comments, serr8d. I always sorta figure that everyone sees my viewpoint as basically Burkean and cautious.

    Wouldn’t want to be a Supreme but I figure that between Scalia and Thomas they got the right of it. It’s not an easy thing though. I wouldn’t want that job.

  120. Danger says:

    “I’m also the check writer for a decent number of excellent employees that I would like to keep employed in a really shitty economy. ”

    We’ll just have to keep Obama’s arm behind his back forcing him to delay the Obamacare business mandate indefinitely. Next president should use the precedent to just do away with it completely.

    Ted Cruz willing ;^)

  121. bh says:

    Heh, Ted Cruz willing, Danger.

    I like it.

  122. dicentra says:

    Oh hey, bh. Wondering where you’d been.

  123. Danger says:

    G’nite fellow h8ters.

    Be dreaming of the backwards concepts of liberty, justice (un hyphenated) and tax loopholes.

    Keep Firing!!!

  124. serr8d says:

    I’m guessing the Professional Left will push the GOP towards Jeb Bush, much like they helped select John McCain. Ted Cruz is more hated than even Sarah Palin now, so neither face of the Ruling Party will allow his participation.

    The Supremes might’ve not intended to do so, but they gave the GOP Elites access to a huge pile of easy money, for to crush these Cruz-Palin upstarts.

    not intended? wait..

  125. dicentra says:

    Where you been?

    Hanging out with Lisa in the Mideast without Internet?

  126. serr8d says:

    Lisa? Izzat the one with the predilection for the boxed wines?

  127. dicentra says:

    The one who thought we were all hysterical about hyped racism until she saw it done to perfection in the MidEast.

  128. bh says:

    Where you been?

    Geographically, I’m now about 300 miles north, di. Practically Canada. I can see Lake Superior from my window. (True fact.)

    In the more basic sense of “where have you been, bh”, it’s pretty simple. I cashed out of my old business and bought some others. Those others have had a learning curve that my little pea brain has had some problems with. I’m sorta slow. Exceedingly slow.

    So, I’ve been trying to learn the new things as fast as I can. Imagine a simple yet egotistical bus driver taking one of the short models out for a run and getting stuck in one ditch and then another. That’s me.

  129. bh says:

    “Hanging out with Lisa in the Mideast without Internet?”

    “Izzat the one with the predilection for the boxed wines?”

    “The one who thought we were all hysterical about hyped racism until she saw it done to perfection in the MidEast.”

    Wait, what?

  130. guinspen says:

    Welcome aboard!

  131. bh says:

    Am I being insulted?

  132. bh says:

    Guins!

  133. Danger says:

    Cynn was the cardboard claret curator.

    Lisa was the liberal (who recently saw the light) that JD referred to as “Sugar Tits”

  134. guinspen says:

    Hey. Good to see you again.

    Wasn’t Lisa “sugarwhatsits” and Cynn the one of boxed wines?

  135. guinspen says:

    Blast.

  136. bh says:

    Good times.

  137. Danger says:

    Sorry guins,

    Should have went to bed knowing that our heritage would be safely guarded.

  138. bh says:

    Okay, y’all.

    See you in another couple months.

  139. bh says:

    Be well and all that.

    (I really do prefer the Irish good bye.)

  140. geoffb says:

    With the right top men [is that sexist?], and the right policies in place, all the world over, “IT” will work perfectly this time.

  141. geoffb says:

    Be well yourself bh.

  142. SDN says:

    And if you don’t like it, you’re a bigoted hater who hates and deserve to lose your job, your livelihood, your reputation, and often times vast sums of money defending yourself against the legal arm of these kinds of organized jihads and inquisitions.

    The problem is that there are any number of people supposedly on our side who have no problem with that (or Di’s predictions either). That’s the reason I don’t post and rarely visit Bill Quick’s place any more. He and a number of his regulars can’t wrap their heads around Chesterton’s Fence as a motive for being opposed to SSM especially under the word “marriage”.

    (I don’t post here as much either, but that comes with that fatal disease called “life” and how much time it eats.)

    I happen to work for one of those “major tech companies” and fully expect to be purged some day.

  143. serr8d says:

    Wasn’t Lisa “sugarwhatsits” and Cynn the one of boxed wines?

    Isn’t the one the key to the other ?

    /denouncemePLeASe!modeOFF

  144. geoffb says:

    Doing it Soviet style.

    “We never expected this to get as big as it has, and we never expected that Brendan wouldn’t make a simple statement. I met with Brendan and asked him to just apologize for the discrimination under the law that we faced. He can still keep his personal beliefs, but I wanted him to recognize that we faced real issues with immigration [sic] and say that he never intended to cause people problems,“ Catlin said in a blog post Thursday. “It’s heartbreaking to us that he was unwilling to say even that.”

    Translated: If only Eich had recanted, publicly apologized for all gay suffering throughout America (because up until a decade ago, no one had even thought of gay marriage), and then kept his mouth shut , our kapos would have released him from the gulag and given him tacit permission to hold his beliefs, as long as he never acts on them in any way in the future.

    Read the whole thing.

  145. geoffb says:

    It, above, plays well with the views of Justice Breyer in the piece I quoted at 4/4 6:05 pm.

    Only mainstream political expression has the potential to thwart the “collective” will, and thus, in the view of Breyer and his fellow dissenters, it alone is deserving of restriction on such a rationale.

  146. serr8d says:

    Brad Thor..

    Fascists are always going to be around. They are the core of the progressive heart. http://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2014/04/06/okfascist-n1818891

  147. geoffb says:

    Floyd Abrams has weighed in” on the minority opinion that the 1st amendment is about “collective rights.”

Comments are closed.