The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

In Which @AceOfSpadesHQ Expresses an Unexpected Distaste for Blood

Posted on | December 21, 2013 | 50 Comments

Just in case you missed The Big Thing on Twitter, a P.R. person named Justine Sacco was about to depart for a holiday trip when she decided to share with her 100 or so Twitter followers this joke:

“Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS.
Just kidding. I’m white!”

This is, as Ace of Spades pointed out, a familiar sort of ironic liberal hipster humor: Sacco was mocking white privilege, get it?

But then a funny thing happened, and by “funny,” of course I mean, sadistically cruel. About three hours later, Andrew Kaczynski of Buzzfeed jumped on Sacco with this comment:

Kaczynski has more than 100,000 followers, and whatever controversy had previously attended Sacco’s joke turned into an uncontrollable firestorm. Then, evidently, BuzzFeed assigned a reporter to “report” on the conflagration that BuzzFeed had itself done so much to ignite. I mean, when you call something “the worst tweet of all of time” . . .

Without regard to the tastefulness of Sacco’s joke — which was, as I say, a liberal kind of joke — since when did “Let’s Get Somebody Fired for Christmas” become a popular sport?

Of course, there are those who have made the obvious and ironic point that Sacco works in the field of public relations and therefore should have known better than to go “edgy” with her online humor, but on the other hand, I kinda noticed Kaczynski is enthusiastic about “marriage equality,” and maybe this was about political ax-grinding: “How dare you joke about AIDS, you hetero woman!”

Maybe? Just throwing that out there, because we have been reminded in recent days that some varieties of special pleading are treated as a universal crusade for Social Justice: It’s not enough that gay people should be zealous for gay rights. Everyone must as zealous as GLAAD, or else you risk a diagnosis of homophobia.

Bullshit.

Anyway, for all I know, Andrew Kaczynski’s straight, but I’m sick of the expectation that We’re All Down for the Gay Agenda Now.

The larger point that Ace was making is, whence this unseemly gusto for destroying random nobodies on the Internet? And I’m sure maybe you think you catch a whiff of hypocrisy, because some of us don’t mind throwing a few elbows online.

Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passey, anyone?

But there was a rationale there. Ms. Passey had posted a preposterously egotistical self-description that began:

I am a very high-quality woman. I know that sounds arrogant, but let’s consider the facts . . .

That was 2006 and Ace’s reaction is still funny as hell today, which is an important point, the difference between:

  1. Making fun of somebody; and
  2. Trying to get somebody fired from their job.

And there was also the matter of equivalence: Ms. Passey was a blogger and Ace is a blogger, so this was one blogger using his own blog to criticize another blogger whereas by contrast, Andrew Kaczynski was wielding the BuzzFeed flamethrower against a lady with 100 Twitter followers because she made a dumb joke.

Twelve words! A joke on Twitter and, hey, let’s get her fired.

Have I been wantonly cruel to people online? Sure, but I don’t think I’ve ever barbecued somebody merely for 12 words on Twitter.

Most of my digital hate crimes have been aimed at feminists, which is so much fun because they never really expect it. By which I mean that my typical target is a 20-something Women’s Studies major who only recently escaped the campus cocoon and is employed in a workplace where the tenets of feminist ideology are just taken for granted. Kill babies because patriarchy!

Also (and maybe I’m the only one who’s noticed this) feminists are accustomed to having their cake and eating it, too. On the one hand, women are entirely equal to men in every way, but on the other hand, how dare you say mean things to a girl?

Feminism is not only a dangerous and misguided ideology, it’s also a scam, a hustle, a racket — a dishonest attempt to gain personal advantage by disguising selfishness as humanitarian philanthropy: Generating quota hires and professional sinecures for women from which they can never be fired, no matter how incompetent they are, because that would be sexist discrimination. And don’t you even dare talk back to these wicked little entitled monsters.

Heads, she wins. Tails, you’re a brutal misogynist.

When people begin declaring that it is immoral to disagree with them — which is what feminists mean when they hurl the epithet “sexist” at their critics — excuse me for thinking I hear, in the distance, the sound of hobnailed boots marching on broken glass.

Totalitarians nowadays speak the language of “fairness,” and these distaff brownshirts can expect no courtesy from me.

Sonny Bunch at Free Beacon rounded up some of the more bloodthirsty remarks aimed at Justine Sacco, none of which I endorse, unless someone could produce evidence that Justine Sacco supports Planned Parenthood, in which case, to hell with her — she should have her eyes jabbed out with rusty knives and rabid jackals should feast upon her bloated festering corpse.

Hahaha, just kidding — satire!

UPDATE: John Nolte at Breitbart:

Sacco is a young, professional, New York woman. Chances are about 99.9% that she’s a BuzzFeed-loving, Obama-voting, MSNBC addict.
Which leads to the most important question…
Why Sacco?
Why did BuzzFeed and others gin up a journalistic assassination squad to hit some nobody named Justine Sacco? . . .
Is this group now so addicted to the taste of bloody scalps that no one is safe — that any obscure citizen with only 174 Twitter followers can have their social media door broken into and lives ruined by the likes of BuzzFeed: Speech Detectives?
Or maybe it is something else.

It could be pointed out that Sacco was employed by IAC, the same company that owns The Daily Beast, which is sort of generally a competitor to BuzzFeed, which would provide an incentive. Or maybe somebody at BuzzFeed just hated Sacco for personal reasons. On the other hand, it may have been entirely random.

 


Category: Ace of Spades

Comments

50 Responses to “In Which @AceOfSpadesHQ Expresses an Unexpected Distaste for Blood”

  1. gntlman
    December 21st, 2013 @ 6:16 pm

    RT @smitty_one_each: TOM In Which @AceOfSpadesHQ Expresses an Unexpected Distaste for Blood http://t.co/R2WnoEUiYy #TCOT

  2. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 21st, 2013 @ 6:33 pm

    “Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passey, anyone?

    But there was a rationale there. Ms. Passey had posted a preposterously egotistical self-description that began:

    I am a very high-quality woman. I know that sounds arrogant, but let’s consider the facts . . .

    That was 2006 and Ace’s reaction is still funny as hell today, which is an important point, the difference between:

    Making fun of somebody; and

    Trying to get somebody fired from their job.

    And there was also the matter of equivalence: Ms. Passey was a blogger and Ace is a blogger, so this was one blogger using his own blog to criticize another blogger whereas by contrast, Andrew Kaczynski was wielding the BuzzFeed flamethrower against a lady with 100 Twitter followers because she made a dumb joke.”

    Spot on. Funny how lefties, decrying racism, are so into lynch mobs.

  3. GadsdenJazz
    December 21st, 2013 @ 6:40 pm

    A contingent in this nation zealously practices “polichondria”, a weird amalgam of hypochondria & political correctness (I might have made that up). The group enthusiastically claims injury from imagined slights unearthed in un-PC commentary & appears to anxiously anticipate victim-hood with glee.

  4. Steve Skubinna
    December 21st, 2013 @ 6:40 pm

    Okay, ignite in internet wide firestorm to publicly humiliate a previously unknown person for making a bad joke. Cool, that’s only as it should be.

    Then, have her fired, four days before Christmas. Serve the bitch right.

    But that isn’t enough, is it? How can we ensure this hateful criminal spends the rest of her life suffering? Suppose she tries to make a new start, how can we prevent it, how can we continue to draw blood and rub salt in her wounds?

    Oh, wait – she is a Republican, right? I mean, an actual Tea Partier, isn’t she? God, I sure hope so… the real tragedy would be if this were a Blue-on-Blue engagement. If is is, the only way to fix this is to have Sarah Silverman hire her as a writer.

  5. I.m. Strandedinsonoma
    December 21st, 2013 @ 6:56 pm

    I wonder what would have happened if she had changed, in her original tweet, the word white to the word woman?

  6. laura_PH
    December 21st, 2013 @ 7:00 pm

    I’d like for it to be personal – maybe someone showed that tweet to Kaczynski to get the ball rolling and he’s spent so many years stewing in liberal outrage that he’s incapable of realizing it was just a lousy joke and telling the person to get over it. Or Sacco pissed Kaczynski off somehow and he waited until she’d be off the grid for twelve hours to get even. (That’s sufficiently diabolical that I would kind of admire it. Revenge IS best served cold, after all.) Because the thought that it was an entirely random Two Minute Hate is very disquieting.

  7. laura_PH
    December 21st, 2013 @ 7:00 pm

    Phil Robertson would have sent her a nice thank you card, that’s what.

  8. CPAguy
    December 21st, 2013 @ 7:07 pm

    It was a distasteful joke.

    But, WTF!!! Fired over a distasteful joke? That is insane.

  9. Steve Skubinna
    December 21st, 2013 @ 7:16 pm

    We seem to be approaching some sort of critical mass of intolerant outrage, that so far is slated by mere loss of employment. I think the jackbooted progressives have become drunk with their power.

    In this particular case I believe there’s a strong likelihood of it being Blue-on-Blue. Perhaps we’ve reached the stage in all progressive revolutions, where they eat their own. So far we haven’t actually gone through the revolution… but they can’t wait. Now is the time for purges, comrade!

  10. DaveO
    December 21st, 2013 @ 7:23 pm

    Che Guevera only got more thirsty for murder once he had power. Serial killers accelerate their killing to feel complete. Online twittermobs and the trolletariat are virtual serial killers: they must have blood very regularly and they will eat their own to satisfy that. It’s a mental disease, not a cultural norm.

  11. DaveO
    December 21st, 2013 @ 7:25 pm

    By the way, the Prognazis also go Steve Martin for a racist tweet, so they’re glutting.

  12. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 21st, 2013 @ 7:33 pm

    It is almost like Lord Jim. Almost

  13. TylerNull of YouTube
    December 21st, 2013 @ 8:04 pm

    I had no idea that controlling one’s feral impulses was about “privilege”, white or otherwise. The lame leftist satire DOES however grant a poignant insight about CULTURE, albeit by accident http://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/templates/browse.aspx?lvl=3&lvlid=70

  14. robcrawford2
    December 21st, 2013 @ 8:05 pm

    Thing is, Ace will be grabbing a pitchfork and torch, rushing to the front of the crowd next time a Democrat cuts a commercial that misquotes a Republican in order to gin up outrage. Especially if that Republican is conservative, and ESPECIALLY if that Republican is from flyover country.

  15. laura_PH
    December 21st, 2013 @ 8:09 pm

    A purposeful misquote by political operatives for political gain SHOULD provoke that kind of reaction, it’s totally dishonest and they should be called out as the liars they are. We put up with it way too often. But we can give some twit with <200 followers a little grace for simply making a bad joke. Twitter is full of idiots who try to be funny and fall flat; why send a baying mob after this woman?

  16. Freddie Sykes
    December 21st, 2013 @ 8:11 pm

    I read her tweet with the following in mind:
    1. South Africa is one of the rape capitals on the globe.
    2. Many South African rapist are HIV positives.
    3. South African women carry rape insurance to enable them to afford an after the fact, intensive anti-HIV routine.
    4. Most of the women, but not all, raped in South Africa are not white.

    She may have been confessing an unspeakable truth such as Jesse Jackson did when he admitted to a sense of relief when he discovered the guy walking behind him was white. Jackson got away with it ( being black trumps being a woman ) but she has learned that non-PC reality must not be acknowledge.

  17. laura_PH
    December 21st, 2013 @ 8:13 pm

    Holy crap, rape insurance?

  18. Freddie Sykes
    December 21st, 2013 @ 8:46 pm

    This link is a little old but from UC Bekeley so it must be true.

    http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/safrica/adapting/rape.html

    Where HIV Skyrockets, a Market for Rape Insurance Emerges

    … Fifty-four thousand people reported rapes to South Africa’s police in 1998. Here, a woman is five times more likely to be raped than in the United States.

    HIV-AIDS is also spreading faster in South Africa than anywhere else in the world. According to South Africa’s government, four million of its 43 million people have HIV and 1,700 more are infected daily. Here, rape can be more than just a devastating act of violence. It can be a death sentence.

    But many South African women are saying it shouldn’t be. A course of anti-retroviral drug treatments could cut a rape victim’s risk of contracting HIV, but these drugs are not covered by the government’s health system. Five insurance companies have stepped in, helping women with means to take care of themselves….

  19. robcrawford2
    December 21st, 2013 @ 9:18 pm

    No — Ace won’t be calling for the DEMOCRATS’ heads, but that of the Republican who was slandered.

  20. K-Bob
    December 21st, 2013 @ 9:19 pm

    That stupid, shamanistic claim that raping a virgin will cure AIDS made the epidemic even worse. The men targeted underaged girls and made their victims pay the price for their recreant lifestyles.

  21. Freddie Sykes
    December 21st, 2013 @ 10:01 pm

    In American, AIDS is mainly a homosexual or drug related disease. In sub-Saharan Africa it is more a heterosexual diseased spread all too often by rape. And, of course, the majority of victims are black infants, children and women.

    Taken it this light, I find it hard to condemn the Tweeter’s concern regardless of how poorly formed her thoughts were expressed..

  22. Andrew Kaczynski May Be the Worst Person on the Internet | Blackmailers Don't Shoot
    December 21st, 2013 @ 10:48 pm

    […] the way, Justine Sacco lost her job. Four days before Christmas. Well played, Evil Genius. Well fucking […]

  23. PensativeGuy
    December 21st, 2013 @ 11:12 pm

    RT @TylerNull: “I had no idea that controlling one’s feral impulses was about ‘privilege’, white or…” http://t.co/6XODS8Bpi7

  24. ECHackett
    December 21st, 2013 @ 11:20 pm

    In Which @AceOfSpadesHQ Expresses an Unexpected Distaste for Blood http://t.co/6kzPDueRFC

  25. Jeanette Victoria
    December 21st, 2013 @ 11:25 pm

    Offending a liberals sensibility off to the gulag of unemployment. They’d kill you if they could.

  26. laura_PH
    December 21st, 2013 @ 11:27 pm

    No, I believed you (who could make something like that up?), I was just… holy crap, seriously, rape insurance? Because rape is THAT much of an issue for these women, and I guess, yay capitalism, for helping provide a solution for dealing with the aftermath… but good Lord, that’s horrific.

  27. Steve Skubinna
    December 21st, 2013 @ 11:28 pm

    However poorly her thoughts were expressed, there is real evil in this world.

    A badly phrased tactless Tweet doesn’t even budge the scale. It does give the likes of this Kasczynski person a safe outlet for his self righteousness.

    So somebody got fired. Meanwhile, AIDS still runs rampant in Africa. And the paragons at BuzzFeed smugly pat themselves on the back, brave crusaders for social justice that they are. Point out to them that they only bullied a person half the planet away and they’ll look puzzled and say you just don’t get it.

    Ms. Sacco may be dumb, but Kasczynski is beyond contemptible.

  28. cmdr358
    December 21st, 2013 @ 11:29 pm

    Screw the polichondriatic (good one GJ) totalitarian professional grievance industry.

    Screw Justine Sacco too actually. Not because of what she said but because she felt the need to be witty about her trip to a sh-thole anyway. She’s one of these smart-asses who just has to be soooo clever all the time.

    Her employer most likely fired her not for what she said but for her poor judgment in saying anything at all. If she did this, what might she say in the future. It’s sort of like MSNBC hiring Alec Baldwin despite his past, what’d they expect? IAC just saved themselves a little future grief.

  29. cmdr358
    December 21st, 2013 @ 11:37 pm

    Misquote? WTF is a misquote?
    Progressives routine report things out of context just to stir things up in their favor.
    That’s called dishonesty, you know, LYING.

    ( And just so we’re clear- when conservatives do it it’s also called LYING.)

  30. Freddie Sykes
    December 21st, 2013 @ 11:46 pm

    And the only ray of light in Africa this century was due to George W Bush. My Dear God, how that would burn their butts… if only they could bring themselves to admit it.

  31. Steve Skubinna
    December 21st, 2013 @ 11:53 pm

    They fired her fir the same reason A&E dumped Phil Robertson. They were afraid she’d damaged their brand.

    Beside, this Sacco is of the class that views everything through the filter of “irony.” Irony is the smug slacker’s substitute for wit.

  32. Freddie Sykes
    December 22nd, 2013 @ 12:02 am

    It gets worse. I left out some of the more horrendous parts of the link. Ask K-Bob above. The only known cure for AIDS, according to old shaman tales, is sex with a virgin and the only way to ensure you have a virgin is sex with a child or an infant.

    Unholy crap, indeed!

  33. laura_PH
    December 22nd, 2013 @ 12:03 am

    Well, then.

  34. Steve Skubinna
    December 22nd, 2013 @ 12:03 am

    Some of them do think they can. Christopher Dorner, Aaron Alexis, Karl Pierson, Floyd Corkins for example. Eventually more of them will make that leap of logic, especially once they realize their chances of herding us into the gulags are nil.

    Bill Ayers’ gang expected they’d need to exterminate 25 million of us to create their utopia. I wonder what the revised estimate would be today?

  35. Steve Skubinna
    December 22nd, 2013 @ 12:04 am

    I might have gone with Heart of Darkness, myself.

  36. darlingdelilah
    December 22nd, 2013 @ 12:17 am

    In Which @AceOfSpadesHQ Expresses an Unexpected Distaste for Blood http://t.co/Pz3bA0y8fA

  37. Neo
    December 22nd, 2013 @ 12:46 am

    This story does tell me that InterActiveCorp, the now former employer of Ms Sacco, certainly didn’t have her back. Firing her without a hearing or face-to-face is the despicable act of a cowardly organization.

  38. Freddie Sykes
    December 22nd, 2013 @ 1:04 am

    Well, darling, as old and as fat and as ugly as I am. I do.

    But rather than relying on shamans, I will rest in the 46th Psalm.:”Be still, and know that I am God:” and rely on the promise of the 139th Psalm “If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.”

    Where ever you are, I Am. And by that I don’t mean fat ugly old me.

  39. Adjoran
    December 22nd, 2013 @ 2:16 am

    The PC Left can tolerate NO deviations from its thought policing from ANYONE, lest the whole system collapse.

    It’s not about stopping discussions about race, sex, or sexuality. It’s about stopping any discussion that might challenge leftist dogma in ANY way.

    Leftists are all either Totalitarians, or their unwitting tools.

  40. Steve Skubinna
    December 22nd, 2013 @ 3:20 am

    I wonder if she at least got a return ticket back from Africa.

  41. Xmas
    December 22nd, 2013 @ 8:41 am

    When you fly down there you pretty much have to have a return ticket. ZA does 90 day visas, and has hard rules for work visas. Their process is still easier than the US though.

    Most of South Africa is nice. Most of the crime occurs in the shanty towns, were blacks live in abject poverty. Half of the shanty town residents are illegal immigrants, refugees from the corrupted and collapsed countries of sub-Saharan Africa. They bring in a lot of the violent criminal element while the native South African blacks are still trying pull themselves out of the mire of two generations of Apartheid “education”.

  42. Jeanette Victoria
    December 22nd, 2013 @ 9:24 am

    And if they can’t get you fired (as in myself) they claim victimhood and may lie to get a conservative committed.

  43. Radicalized Gay Bigotry and Weekend Links
    December 22nd, 2013 @ 1:30 pm

    […] Other McCain has many good blog posts up including this one by Stacy on “In Which @AceOfSpadesHQ Expresses an Unexpected Distaste for […]

  44. Steve Skubinna
    December 22nd, 2013 @ 3:12 pm

    When I first saw District Nine, I thought, “Oh, an apartheid parable.”

    Except that didn’t make sense – it’s set in present day SA, with a majority black government. So what was Blomkamp really getting at?

    Later I read an interview with him, and the inspiration came fromt he flood of Rhodesian/Zimbawean refugees entering SA. They were resented and exploited by their fellow black Africans, especially by Nigerian gangs (just as in the film).

    Anyway, I’m pretty sure Sacco has a return ticket. I was applying snark.

  45. So, Justine Finally Landed … : The Other McCain
    December 22nd, 2013 @ 3:24 pm

    […] The unfortunate Justine Sacco, whose Friday tweet inspired the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet, went into full grovel mode: […]

  46. TylerNull
    December 22nd, 2013 @ 6:59 pm

    “I had no idea that controlling one’s feral impulses was about “privilege”, white or otherwise. …” http://t.co/i1qnrGemVZ

  47. K-Bob
    December 22nd, 2013 @ 10:57 pm

    …or at least volunteer to man the guard towers.

  48. K-Bob
    December 23rd, 2013 @ 3:49 am

    Kathy Shaidle linked a similar sort of story about another chick who pretended to be a “teabagger” for a costume party in college.

    There’s lots of lessons we can all learn from these folks’ mistakes, that’s for sure. (Not being the first to pile on is certainly one of them.)

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