‘Puerile … Progressive Hackery’: @BrianBeutler and Our Moral Superiors

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Donald Douglas at American Power:

Brian Beutler’s more recent piece on “the right’s black crime obsession” is one of the most puerile pieces of progressive hackery I’ve ever read. Beutler’s simply yapping incoherently in the mode of holier-than-thou leftist claptrap.

Please read the whole thing, because Dr. Douglas is not just a blogger but an honest-to-God Ph.D. and yet, to borrow a phrase from Marvin Gaye’s “Trouble Man,” he came up hard, babe.

He did not travel the smooth path, and has an appreciation of exactly how wrong this “holier-than-thou leftist claptrap” is. The mentality of the Left is an obstacle to achievement and upward mobility. If any man wishes to overcome hardship, he must reject bad doctrine.

Also, “puerile” is one of my favorite words. Having been taught Latin diction in the classic manner, I know that the word puer (“boy”) is pronounced poo-air or pwehr. When I subsequently encountered the word “puerile” (boyish, immature, juvenile) in written text, it seemed to me it should be prounounced poo-air-ile or pwehr-ile. So then I pronounced it that way in a discussion and had someone correct me, saying it was pronounce pure-ile.

To hell with that. Miss Dismer taught me Latin, and I am her student still. You don’t get to tell me how to pronounce that word, son.

As for Beutler, certainly his “argument” was childish nonsense. Here is the fool being made welcome on CNN:

Brian Beutler is hailed by his fellow liberals as a genius — a man of brilliant insight — for exactly one reason: He is a liberal.

And he expects us lowly mortals to be impressed.

 

63 comments

  1. The fact that Beutler was shot by criminal thugs… STILL thinks that guns are icky, gross things that cause crime somehow by merely existing, while Beutler refuses to support people’s right to defend themselves… words fail me. Beutler keeps on claiming that guns are the generation of the crime problem of thus country. And he screams at the political right that’s just, well, ‘pointed out’ some of the real nature of the damn crime problem.

    I’ve heard of the line “liberal mugged by reality” from ‘Commentary’. This is more like “liberal mugged by reality… and begs for reality to give it to him again, and harder- baby- harder {pants / whines}.”

  2. Mrs. Smith taught me 3 years of Latin, and we pronounced it the same way you do. It’s like saying Nee-jair instead of Nigh-jer for the country, Niger.

  4. It’s really a town-vs.-country thing.

    If you are from the rural culture, raised by people who grew up where the sheriff’s department was miles away, you were taught to cherish the right and ability to defend yourself, your family and your property. On the other hand, if you identify with the effete, civilized, “citified” culture, the very thought of armed self-defense frightens you.

    Today’s anti-gun campaigns led by urban elites resemble nothing so much as they resemble the pacifism and appeasement of the West in the ’30s, convincing themselves that if they themselves repudiated war, then the Fascist powers could be persuaded to negotiate like well-meaning gentlemen. But Hitler and Mussolini were not gentlemen, they were “gangsters” (as Churchill called them) and could only be deterred by superior force.

    What surprises me in Beutler’s experience is that these D.C. street thugs were evidently packing some light weapon — a .22, .25 or .32 — rather than a serious gun, e.g., 9-mm.

    A light pistol like that — the kind of “girl gun” that a woman might keep in her purse — is really a scary noisemaker. Sure, you could kill somebody with a .22 revolver or a .32 auto, but tactically, it’s the kind of weapon that is only useful to defend against an unarmed attacker. A man without a weapon, or armed only with a knife, will generally high-tail it if a woman pulls a pistol. He’s not going to stick around to find out what caliber she’s firing. Even the crack of a .22 can be scary as hell, so a “girl gun” is ample protection and can be kept in a purse. Damn the gun-control laws, sweetheart: Better to be judged by 12 than carried by six.

    But no experienced criminal would prefer such a light-caliber pistol in any situation where his intended victim might be armed. Beutler’s muggers knew damned well a couple of a yuppies wouldn’t be packing heat, and picked their targets accordingly. Beutler doesn’t say what caliber weapon they used, but it sure as hell wasn’t a 9-mm, or he would not have been hit three times and lived to tell the tale.

  6. So this Douglas guy doesn’t have anything to say other than “Nuh uh” either?

    I wonder what makes lefties so smart?

  7. I do recall reading about people hit with a 9mm several times and having lived… but those are pretty sad, scary, and disturbing.

  8. As Instapundit would say, “they’re impressively ‘credentialed’.” ‘Credentialed’ by having the ‘right’ friends and having spent time int he ‘right’ places… not ‘educated’.

  9. Actually it more depends on where he was hit than the caliber. Remember a bullet simply puts a small hole in you (yeah, exit wounds are bigger). What stops you is the drop in blood pressure. Moral of this is “Keep pulling the trigger till the danger passes”. The thug didn’t which is why Beutler is alive today.

    As to the self defense aspect, I am the product of an upper middle class neighborhood. A few years I learned the hard way how to recognize a bad neighborhood by moving into one. I could see the police station from my back yard, less than 50 yards away. Early one morning I called the police on a domestic dispute that had woken me up. It still took the police 20 minutes to get there. I was better off with the sword I walked outside with than a cell phone.

  11. I just looked it up, and dammit it IS pure-aisle. I’ve been saying it wrong all this time as well. How embarrassing….

  13. What I learned in school is that there is an Anglican pronunciation, and a classical pronunciation. We went with the classical. I refuse to say “pure-aisle.”

  15. I suppose what the Left really fears is that its key constituencies would slaughter themselves into extinction within a fortnight if the Second Amendment was honoured as intended…

  17. ” Beutler’s simply yapping incoherently in the mode of holier-than-thou leftist claptrap.”

    I take it slightly differently. Beutler rattles off a steady stream of “progressive” shibboleths designed to validate certain positions just by saying them. He’s the guy at the front of the crowd going on and on about how wonderful the fabric is for the emperor’s new clothes which convinces those who are unsure that there really must be such clothes that only the “kewl kids” can see so they go along and repeat the same things in order to appear to be “kewl kids” themselves.

    Many of the “rank and file” Democrats don’t “get” what the elitist “progressives” are yammering about and it sounds like babble to them but they nod and parrot it lest someone think they are in league with the “evil” conservatives (or worse, the libertarians).

    It’s pure 100% horse malarkey.

  18. Sometimes the things the left says aren’t really aimed at the right. Sometimes they are aimed at their own people and are designed to keep them in line. While on the surface it might look like a rather harsh criticism of the right, when they devolve to name-calling what they are saying is that they are afraid of losing their own base of support and they are saying that “unless you take our position on this thing, that name applies to you, too” as a way to keep people from making up their own minds.

    For example, when they start calling black conservatives “uncle Toms” they are really saying to their own black base that they had better not adopt conservative positions or they will become “uncle Toms” themselves. They do it with women, too. A conservative woman isn’t a “real” woman. Those messages are aimed more at keeping their own base constituencies in line than anything else.

  19. I suppose, for myself, being a partial product of rural-ish / small town Iowa and Illinois (although I’ve spent a ton of my life also in cities) really has affected me. Knowing that I’m around ordinary working class people with guns seems normal to me. To others, I’m sure, it would feel like landing on an alien planet.

  20. CNN is normalizing a whole new pack of miscreants, not the least of which is Van Jones. How demented is your panel when Don Lemon is the voice of reason on it?

  22. Moral of this is “Keep pulling the trigger till the danger passes”. The thug didn’t which is why Beutler is alive today.

    That posits that Beutler was a threat. I’m guess that only would have been the case in Colorado where claiming that you’re menstruating and peeing on the bad guy are effective defensive measures.

  23. I recall hearing someone in the media once referring to a prominent conservative black (Clarence Thomas?) as “not an authentic black man”…

  24. I figured out here in Atlanta a rule to smoke out bad neighborhoods before moving into them: go to a nearby pizza place and ask if they will deliver to the area you’re thinking of moving into. If they won’t deliver there, you don’t want to live there.

  25. My Dad, a product of schooling in the ’30’s and ’40’s and thus having learned Latin in public school, does get annoyed at Latin words pronounced according to Italianate or modern Church Latin practice.

    Hence I try to be careful (especially in earshot of the Old Man) to pronounce Cicero as “Kickero” and Veni vidi vici as “Wenny weedy weeki.”

  27. You seem to be assuming that the left looks at the gun issue through rational thought. Of course they don’t. It’s all blind emotion.

  28. They’re not worried about it. It’s their intention. Why do you think they want to ignore b-on-b violence? Why do you think they’re pushing PP into black neighborhoods ?

  29. Alas, we shall never really know how the Romans actually pronounced their Latin… The phonemic long vowels, since they are rarely indicated in the written language are particularly vexing for me. I can recite roughly the first halves of Cattus Petasatus and Virent Ova! Viret Perna! from memory only because that was about all it took for my infant son to fall asleep! And yes, I use the presumed classical pronunciation as well!

  30. I do think the Left knows exactly what it’s doing… And I await an epiphany amongst the minorities in this country wherein they realise who their oppressors truly are!

  32. What’s PP? Searched it but couldnt find anything that seemed right, just “very quiet” and “polynomial something or other.”

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