This time, courtesy of dicentra, who has “transcribed a bit of Andrew Breitbart’s journey in to the maw of hell (from the top video) as a first-class demonstration of what it looks like when someone else decides what you mean.”
As dicentra observes, as as I’ve observed of Dyson for years, note how Dyson runs out the clock by refusing to let his opponent get a word in edgewise. This isn’t “debate,” it’s fillibuster.
But do watch and read and see if you can spot where the leftist language tricks I’ve described occur. I’ll give you one place to look: compare how Dyson characterizes Obama vs. Clarence Thomas in terms of their respective “representativeness.” Dicentra has included that portion of the video in her transcription.
Consider this like a midterm or something.
You may pick up your pencils and begin at any time.
Hey, wait, I don’t remember sighing up for this class.
Breitbart started out well, but he should not have backed down. When Dyson said “I get to finish my point”, he should have said “No, because you just said something that isn’t true. You don’t get to make a point based on an untruth.”
Let me get some ice on my eyes. They’re swelling up after the beatings I’ve taken. But in the mean time I will say in thumbnail that the problem here is Republican have to stop stepping into forums with every intention of taking the beating I have taken today. Especially when they aren’t getting paid to get the hell beaten out of them, like I was. If you aren’t paid to take a dive…don’t. Go in to win or don’t go.
Politeness only counts with polite people who are telling the truth. Once you’ve seen that your opponent isn’t about that you go to war…or shut up.
You can only win with a squirrel case if you can get the judges to accept your definitions.
cranky — I was just telling my wife about that dream. I’ve had it so many times — always math or physics class.
Code words? CODE WORDS?
I’m not sure what’s more depressing; the fact that this guy Dyson is a professor at Georgetown and is infecting kids with this garbage every year, or the fact that the audience acted like trained seals at even the slightest hint of conservative/racist comparisons.
Stuff like this makes me weep. And yes Jeff, this video couldn’t do a better job of defining what you’ve been railing about if you wrote the script yourself.
In my bad dreams people come back from the dead and want their money back.
I was wishing the whole time I saw that clip, the first time, that a crane would careen over the set and drop you into a chair next to Mr. Breitbart, Jeff.
The frustrating part is that people like Dyson utter such boilerplate pablum that there’s really no excuse for a conservative being unprepared for it. But because lefties control what constitutes acceptable discourse, noting that, say, the prison population is disproportionately black because black men are disproportionately CRIMINALS bears the perverse duality of being true and confirming your racism to them.
The goose flies at midnight. Mid *NIGHT*, Mr. Dyson.
Wow, I get that dream all the time. It’s the end of the semester and I’ve completely forgotten to go to a class.
Luckily my dreams lately have featured a strikingly handsome talisman-like Othello who soothes me with dulcet readings from what appears to be crystal rectangles floating in midair.
Then I wake up with a used condom in my ass.
I liked the “missed class” dream better.
“Code words” are, uh, code words for “you don’t really mean what you’re saying; you mean what I say you’re saying”, leading inexorably to argumentum ad stramentam
Damn it Jeff! – I swear I recall the course as specifically stating no math!
Heck, I’ve dreamed I had to go back to high school, and in my dream I knew I already had my college degree. Once I even dreamed I had to go back to grade school.
I’m sure Freud would have something to say about it, but he’s been fully discredited anyway, right? He’d probably have more to say to kelly, though.
Damn cranky, I had that dream today!
And I dreamed I had all these hysterical hypocritical morons for professors, and that I had paid all these morons off to leave me alone, but they didn’t leave me alone anyway.
Or maybe it wasn’t a dream…
cranky-d – I sent you an email via your website.
Code words and the way the Leftist use that has to be one of the more insidious rhetorical tricks that they use. Even the MSM lets them get away with it. By couching their overt and brazen lies and deceptions under the cloak of a “code word”, they get to reinvent language to suit their goals. Nifty.
I can’t be the only one with this recurrence can I, cranky?
I liked the part where….
Got a quarter?
Is meya ever anything short of mendoucheous?
It’s the end of the semester and I’ve completely forgotten to go to a class.
Oh, wait until you’ve been to grad school. Then it’s the end of the semester and you’ve forgotten to teach a class. And forgotten to attend two or three more.
Can “eloquent” be a code word now? Clear and eloquent = nasally teleprompter skillz?
Remember when Oliver “I eat a side of beef for breakfast” Willis told us that articulate is a code word and it is racist?
I think it starts at the beginning, to tell the truth about it.
JD, multiple choice
A.Money
B. Attention span
C.Offers in marriage
D. a few bricks in the smokehouse
F. None of the above
E. all of the above
I can’t wait, actually. I’m up for parole in 37 months.
I must be feeling cranky. Time for a nap.
Breitbart tried to fight back on the code words thing, but they had no intention of letting him do so. I wonder how many of them are conscious of how incredibly oppressive that construct is and keep using it because they relish Teh Powar.
It’s no different from how bigots would write off evidence of black intelligence back in the day by saying that they were just parroting things they heard from their White Betters. And funny thing, that’s what Clarence Thomas is: a ventriloquist’s [dummy] with a white hand up his back.
Breitbart should have pointed out that Thomas Sowell is considered an intellectual genius in conservative circles and that we all parrot him.
And I would like to see a rematch, this time Dyson against Alfonzo Rachel, he of the many Hot Air videos.
Thanks for the linky, Jeff. I figured it would resonate.
It’s encrusted with boilerplate and Whitey backpatting, but there’s a hidden — encoded, even — honesty in that cliché.
Thomas has always reminded me of all the old black guys who lived in my neighborhood when I was a kid. They aren’t the kind of people white lefties associate with; my commie parents disdained them for “representatives,” too. Obama reminds me not even so much of those, but of me when I was a kid (except for the part where I knew some black guys).
But if I only knew Professor Fake Dreadlocks, President Morgan Freeman, and Telegenic Representative Blackguy, I’d see Obama as one of them, and I’d find Thomas alien in the manner of “white trash” — precisely the cultural ghostface that’s put on him.
The barer “Uncle Thomas” stuff is adopted for the frisson of taboo. It’s exciting to hate a black guy in an explicitly racial way right in front of everybody. And getting away with it is one of our culture’s highest status markers. Those people have to do all their “black people are like this”-ing, and use terms like “negro army,” in secret.
(Yes, they don’t. That doesn’t matter.)
Note when Maher interjects, and what with — and that there’s not an argument in sight, or even one side of one.
‘Bart can’t handle this shit. When someone calls you a racist, you yack his fuckin’ jaw, in silence. There is nothing to say.
I remember seeing the trial of some potbellied white supremecist asshole back in the ’80s, accused of inciting some other like-minded fellow to murder someone. One of the pieces of evidence against him was a graphic from his newsletter that had a cartoon section of a black man’s head and the caption, “What’s on a Nigger’s Mind?” There was the usual stereotypical stuff: watermelon, white women, etc.
Now I see that that was all wrong, and that, pace Dyson, real black men have on their minds completely different things: grievance, statism, identity politics.
I guess this is progress, at least to the Left.
Sarah W – I am missing something. no lo comprende, bonita.
I think it starts at the beginning, to tell the truth about it.
sdferr. I didn’t feel like doing more than the bare minimum. But yeah, there’s this kind of linguistic dishonesty throughout.
Query, Jeff: If you were there instead of Breitbart, what would you have done?
Test time for
I see you are late and naked to class.
late and naked is how I go through life.
#36 for #34,
which was referring to #28,
a response to #23.
Times pi.
dicentra @ #35. I would pay to see that. Would likely end with a mushroom bruise.
Some GOOD news from the O!bama Regnuum:
“Obama backs down on vets insurance billing
The Obama administration waved a white flag of surrender Wednesday, dropping a budget proposal that would have billed private insurance companies for treatment of service-connected medical problems at Veterans Affairs Department hospitals and clinics.”
http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2009/03/military_vetsinsurance_reversal_031809w/
So, does this count as a flip or a flop?
Ah, but they oppress in order to liberate.
Apple pi?
i can haz pie ?!
I thought that Michelle Biceps was taking all of our pie.
Shit, I was cadging a smoke behind the gym and didn’t hear the bell and now my pencil broke.
Teach, can I do a makeup?
Hey, Teach,
I’ve been working on extra credit.
I would have asked Dyson what he’d be doing for a living if he was white.
Ooh, burn.
…if he were white.
not very articulate of me
RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACIST !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
What me?
As a matter of factual information, does anyone happen to know where the Oscar Grant shooting (“murder” says Dyson) investigation or prosecution stands today? Have charges been brought? Is a trial scheduled? Has a plea been entered?
I think Ted Baxter did it.
Sdferr – Facts do not really matter to Teh Narrative !!!
Buck,
You have to follow the links at the top of the post.
Accused them both of anti-semitism.
LOL
Does the dude over at XKCD read this blog?
Because look at today’s entry.
Accused them both of anti-semitism.
Oh, sure, that works for
Jewyou. But what would a helpless old white guy do? Me, I guess I could use the sexism angle, but now that Hillary’s worn that out…If indeed “Oklahoma is out of ammo”, it is because people are afraid that the Federal Government under Obama/Pelosi/Reid will manage to restrict the sale of ammo in the future and that this administration appears to be leading us into a complete collapse of the economy and the social order. This has nothing to do with race and the inference that it is, is it’s self a racist statement.
The statement Limbaugh made on ESPN was about the media. The statement was that the sports media had created such high expectations for McNabb, had put him on such a high pedestal, that no quarterback could ever constantly live up to those expectations. He said the media were hurting McNabb, pressuring him in a way they didn’t do to other similar quarterbacks. This was a complaint about the sports media not McNabb who Limbaugh said was a gifted quarterback.
As far as Limbaugh having problems with Black guys “who run things”. Clarence Thomas is his close friend, he admires Dr. Thomas Sowell and Dr. Walter Williams is a regular to run the show when Rush is away.
Between Dyson and Maher I am hard pressed to find a single statement that is factual. Every word they say is a lie including “and” and “the”.
For then Left, intention is tied to your group identity. No further investigation into your intent in an utterance is needed, wanted, or to be allowed to take place.
Dyson is a typical leftwing douchebag blowhard.
Do I get an “A”?
Sorry, wrong identity used there.
mendoucheous is now my favorite word of the moment. =D *does the happy happy neologism dance*
btw, how’s that finishing school manners and lawyerly reasonable arguments thing working out for you well mannered lawyerly types? right. cuz that shit only works in the highly structured and completely artificial environment of a courtroom. or on a high school debate team. but other environments call for other tactics.
is there no one on the not dirty socialist side who can face these mendoucheous tools and rudely say, ‘shut yer lying pie hole! and keep it shut while i explain just how big a lie that is…’?
Does anyone else remember the Shelby Steele column from years back about how the standard left-wing view was becoming synonymous with the standard African-American view and that criticism of leftism in an African-American would soon be demed racist?
We have arrived.
I like how louchette thinks, even if that sounds French ;-)
Consider this like a midterm or something.
Crap. Is it open-note?
They will next slip it in as a small sub-clause, in handwriting, added to the next 2000+ page “stimulus” bill. Then deny any knowledge it was there.
Geoffb – Spot on. This bit of idiocy will show up again.
I like this little bit:
What Breitbart said:
Breibart says – black intelligensia intimidates black conseravtives
Dyson interpets- Breitbart just made the racist suggestion that African-American Studies professors are incapable of reason.
Nice trick, and the crowd apparently ate it up.
Honestly, the issue as far as intentionalism isn’t in how Breitbarts communicates. Whether or not he’s saying things that can be interpretated the wrong way (WITH A REASONABLE STANDARD), but that these assholes are out-and-out interpreting what he says in whatever manner works for their argument.
This, honestly, illustrates the idiocy of those who believe we need to watch what we say. It doesn’t matter HOW it is said. They hear what they want. Or they twist and distort.
Am I late to the party? Are we onto something else already. I was at the gym. Which was DEAD. I’m assuming it was a Post Shamrock Day thing.
Carin – Breitbart could have said,”Ahi Tuna and Toro sashimi is sublime”, and Dyson would have had the same response.
thank you JD. it’s a made up name i originally made up for one of my sleazier AO toons. and louche is a perfectly good word in english too. i just tiny girlified it with the diminutive ending.
and yeah it makes me both livid angry and full of dispair when i see ‘decent’ people trying to not upset the tea party decorum while they’re being majorly reamed by a bunch of lying liars.
Exactly. That is why this whole “I hope he fails” debate has been … idiotic. I mean, Jeff has made the correct argument, but it is not as if – most of the time- it isn’t an error of misunderstanding. It is intentional.
did anyone ever see the charechter from “in living color”
i believe it was damon wayans
who used all those high-falutin words [erroneously]
and the listener just shook his head and said / like/
Yeah!/Right-on!
shee-it…
or the haitian skits….
hilarious!
i wanna make fun of black people too
and indians..
casino owning injuns…
Breitbart could have said “Barack Obama is the best president we’ve ever had” and they’d call it racist.
Because……{channeling the Progressive uber-mind} All those “service related injuries” occurred during the Bush Regime and that illegal war in Iraq. So wrecking Obama’s budget due to them wouldn’t be fair. It would be a social injustice requiring all those smart enough not to have participated in that illegal war to have to pay even more for those idiots injured there. /progressive-socialist thought machine>
Sort of a “Let them eat cake” kind of thing.
There’s an aspect to all this that never gets discussed with any seriousness and as a result it breeds timidity among certain Republicans and enables the left to conduct themselves in a manner so dishonest that I find civilty towards them to be somewhat impossible.
There’s no question that conservatism gives aid and comfort to people who are bigoted. When you’re against affirmative action, think “diversity” is a manufactured batch of nonsense, have serious issues with illegal immigration/manufactured obstacles to assimilation and hold various other positions you are undeniably putting out the welcome mat for all manner of yahoos who share these sentiments for baser reasons.
The left uses this to cynically construct a narrative whereby there’s no intellectual or moral basis for conservatism and, thus, the bottom of the right-wing barrel is the face that animates their rhetoric. God forbid some inbred, big-belt-buckled high school dropout shows up at a McCain rally with a monkey doll, as the left fancies this to be the ultimate confirmation of our illegitimacy.
Of course, the irony in this is that – as opposed to the trailer park yahoo – the nut fringe on the left comes from the ranks of the educated. The moonbats who riot at WTO meetings, are stupid enough to think Mumia Abu Jamaal is innocent, who placed a bomb at the Republican convention, who give tenure to people like William Ayers and Bernadine Dorn, and every other purveyor of left-wing asshattery from people who shout down conservative speakers to pseudo artists who liken Bush to Hitler are not people culled from the ranks of the disadvantaged.
Democrats give aid and comfort to all manner of despicable people as well, but because we are enveloped in their narrative, conservatives are the ones with the burden of justifying their existence. You’d think that the conduct among their educated class as well as the dysfunctions among their benighted would be ample evidence of their movement’s bankruptcy, but instead we’re minimized as a gaggle of code words in polite society to communicate with the unwashed masses as some sort of cynical will to power.
It’s really fucked up, juvenile and immensely dishonest but a pretty amazing sleight of hand nonetheless.
I’m copying off Carin’s #71.
Do we pass?
I think the biggest problem for conservatives in these situations is their decorum. They need to go into filibuster mode themselves, only louder than the other people on the panel (all leftists naturally).They need to start yelling at the start and never shut up through the whole thing.
The only person from the right who seems to hold their own in these situations is Ann Coulter. She should teach a class.
Nah. As Maher says the first sentence lean over, give him a full on the lips kiss, then a hard slap across the face. Saying, “That was to get your attention you ignorant racist cracker.” Then sit down and say “Now you were saying what? Shithead.”
I’m not sure that it is wise to try to get people like Maher and Dyson to dialogue in good faith.
The only way to fight fire is with fire, and the most direct route is to hammer away at Dyson being “yella” and passing the brown bag test, and probably that white folks liked him and that made him feel guilty and not authenticly black, and this is why he says the most outrageous things – to prove his black-ness, that he has to be Blackzilla. He doth protest too much and so forth. And then you tell Maher to say something “politically incorrect” about black people right then and there and call him a pussy when he won’t, which he won’t. I remember when he had “The Queens of Comedy” on PI and he backed down from every stupid fucking thing they uttered.
Then, you whip out a wooden match and strike it on Dyson’s face, blowing cigarillo smoke in his face a’cause you’re an outlaw.
I couldn’t get through have of that first one. Crap like that is why blogging has lost its appeal and other forms of defense have gained appeal for me.
[…] via Jeff G […]
Comment by lee on 3/18 @ 6:54 pm #
Listen to Dennis Prager sometime. Where Ann Counter uses an IED, Prager’s a world class sushi chef who has ’em filleted to the bone and spead out on a plate before they realize what just happened.
u people here make such sense
but when i talk to [fairly] normal people…
it turns into an arguement[ cuz i get pissed that there so ill-informed]
i don’t wanna be a jerk…that’s y it bums me out…
to hear repeated falsehoods…
gets my gander up
then i lose it…
some of my best arguements-the kind that make my friends stop for a second[ i see a dim bulb lighting up over their heads]
is
the democratic party has been in control of every major urban city/ mayors/school boards/ councilors 4 40 years…
how’s that working out?
sometimes i don’t have the energy…
pick ur piece/tis Always an uphill struggle…
i used to have faith…
whaa!
i need some changey meds
thanks
Any truth to the rumor that Patterico denounced Breitbart for being insufficiently precise in choosing his words?
SmokeVanThorn,
Heh.
I disagree. The position that all are equal before the law, regardless of their origins, is hostile towards the yahoos. That some yahoos may attempt to attach themselves to the conservative movement is no reflection on conservatism itself, anymore than John Wayne Gacy’s membership in the Democrat party says anything about Democrats in general.
The left uses [the existence of right-wing yahoos] to cynically construct a narrative whereby there’s no intellectual or moral basis for conservatism
We could have a party filled with nothing but glow-in-the dark, walk-on-water saints, and they’d still come up with nasty strawmen and other lies. Because the darkness hates the light worst than life itself.
I pity the folks who are caught in their thrall, though.
Tried to watch but I just can’t stomach Maher.
There are some genuinely smart and insightful fuckers who read this site.
Juliette —
I am SO hearing you.
I couldn’t get through have of that first one. Crap like that is why blogging has lost its appeal and other forms of defense have gained appeal for me.
But why? From my POV, the “debate” that occurs in meatspace is filled with transactions like that. What did Breitbart achieve by going on that show? You heard the crowd cheering. What impression did they leave with?
Here, the cheering crowd is limited to echo-chambering commenters. And, the fillibusters-as-answer can’t really occur.
“I disagree. The position that all are equal before the law, regardless of their origins, is hostile towards the yahoos. That some yahoos may attempt to attach themselves to the conservative movement is no reflection on conservatism itself, anymore than John Wayne Gacy’s membership in the Democrat party says anything about Democrats in general.”
You’re talking from a conservative POV whereas I’m speaking of how the left organizes their narrative. The fact that powerless yahoos resent advantages being conferred on people they see as direct competition is, while basic human nature, secondary to the fact that the manner in which this frequently finds expression among the lesser educated is used as a means to delegitimize conservative thought at the top of the food chain. It is how academics and other haughty lefties summon the temerity to characterize conservatism as “dangerous.” It’s how they perpetuate this laughable link between our core beliefs and European fascism. Its why they can suppress speech, filibuster and yet see no irony in their contrived protestations of encountering likewise.
Do you not ever wonder why lefties reduce every serious argument about race, etc. on the right to code? Or in the very least reduce every argument or set of facts about anything else to some nefarious funding source? Its because they’ve reduced everything down to pure greed and will to power at the heart of our movement and to stupidity and intolerance underneath. And per Jeff’s whole argument about language, as long as there are conservatives who enable this narrative to somewhat peacefully exist we will always be forced to justify our existence.
And, if you’ve been following the intentionalism debate, I’m refusing to accept their framing.
I hear that, Rob. But I’m not sure its adequate to reject their framing if there isn’t a concomitant effort to destroy the “logic” that undergirds it.
Well, you have to follow the rejection with an explanation of why you’re rejecting it. If they won’t let you make the explanation, then refuse to “discuss” the matter with them and deal directly with the audience.
That part is easy. “That’s a fucking lie, and you’re a fucking liar.”
My husband likes to use the old standby:
You are so fucking stupid.
I usually opt for #96 or 97 myself, but figured as long as we’re building an army of OUTLAWS! it was worth thinking about how rejecting their language would be aided by hacking off their “intellectual” legs and stuffing their genitals down their windpipes.
My favorite part is in the fourth segment where Dyson says
“…because y’all talk to each other; you talk to each other. You live in a bubble…not you, necessarily, but collectively.”
In other words, y’all look pretty much the same to me.
My favorite part is when Dyson is talking about how education requires housing support when what he means is that it requires parenting.
Breitbart was on Andrew Wilkow’s show discussing his eperience with Dyson, Maher, et al. Audio here. And they play the clip I’m referring to.
“…because y’all talk to each other; you talk to each other. You live in a bubble…not you, necessarily, but collectively.â€
Imagine if Breitbart had said the exact same thing to Dyson.
Exactly
Breitbart should have hijacked the conversation after he heard the “One black man in public housing” crack.
An obvious rhetorical trick, framed as a joke. This is one of those times where the speaker deliberately tries to mask his intent. Breitbart should have stopped right there and forced him to explain the “joke”.
From what I read and saw, Dyson is really in love with that line, he’s used it or heard it before. If Breitbart had played dumb and begged for an explanation, “Wait, who’s the black man in public housing? I don’t understand. The President? Why would you call the President that? That makes no sense” etc..etc. Essentially doing to this jerk what they did to Rush Limbaugh.
Isolate that statement and make him explain it. What would a reasonable person think if they heard him say that? Is he disrespecting the office of the President? Obama? Black men in public housing? Why would he use that strange turn of phrase? Even as a joke?
If his intent was to smear all conservatives as racists, make him say it.
And no one asked what it was that Rush Limbaugh said that they all thought was racist. You know why? Because all people remember is that Rush said something racist, and they are taking it on the authority of a guy who probably doesn’t watch football or ESPN.