The Other McCain

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

‘Social Justice’ Is for Homos

Posted on | February 12, 2019 | 2 Comments

 

Remember my post yesterday about Tumblr? How it’s a money-losing dumpster fire full of pornography and mentally ill LGBTQ activists? In the comments of that post, someone linked to Scott Alexander’s classic 2014 essay at Slate Star Codex called “The Toxoplasma of Rage,” which explains why Tumblr sucks so bad:

Tumblr’s interface doesn’t allow you to comment on other people’s posts, per se. Instead, it lets you reblog them with your own commentary added. So if you want to tell someone they’re an idiot, your only option is to reblog their entire post to all your friends with the message “you are an idiot” below it.
Whoever invented this system either didn’t understand memetics, or understood memetics much too well. . . .
I make fun of Tumblr social justice sometimes, but the problem isn’t with Tumblr social justice, it’s structural. Every community on Tumblr somehow gets enmeshed with the people most devoted to making that community miserable. . . .
Tumblr’s reblog policy makes it a hothouse for toxoplasma-style memes that spread via outrage. Following the ancient imperative of evolution, if memes spread by outrage they adapt to become as outrage-inducing as possible.

This was 2014, before Tumblr’s inherent stupidity-inducing qualities had made the platform a laughingstock. Five years ago, Tumblr was still considered a happening thing, especially because it was so popular with teenage girls, and social-justice madness was epidemic on Tumblr during the Ferguson #BlackLivesMatter excitement, Alexander explained:

If you’re not on Tumblr, you might have missed the “everyone who does not reblog the issue du jour is trash” wars. For a few weeks around the height of the Ferguson discussion, people constantly called out one another for not reblogging enough Ferguson-related material, or (Heavens forbid) saying they were sick of the amount of Ferguson material they were seeing.

This pressure-cooker of like-mindedness, with everyone seeking to one-up each other in demonstrating their commitment to #BlackLivesMatter, and denouncing anyone who didn’t show sufficient zeal for the sacred cause, did not appeal to healthy minds, especially teenagers.

A normal teenager doesn’t give a damn about politics. Even during times of societal crisis, the normal teenager can’t be bothered to care. When I was a freshman in high school, the Yom Kippur War produced the Arab Oil Boycott, and Watergate led to President Nixon resigning a few weeks before the start of my sophomore year. The next spring, Communists conquered Saigon, and the Khmer Rouge took over in Cambodia. And what was I doing during all this world-historic drama? Playing trombone in the marching band, trying to get to second base with a girl, smoking dope and listening to some awesome rock-and-roll. In other words, I was being a normal teenager, but we didn’t have online social-media then, so who knows what sort of mischief I might gotten into if there had been smart phones and wifi circa 1973-75? But even with the advent of all this technology, the vast majority of teenagers are still sufficiently normal that they are more or less indifferent to politics, just like I was back in the era of bell-bottom jeans, Led Zeppelin and $20-an-ounce weed.

If someone had tried to get us to care about politics when I was a teenager, we’d have called them a “homo,” which was a sort of generalized insult that wasn’t homophobic because the word “homophobia” hadn’t been invented yet. Circa 1974, “homo” (like “queer” and “faggot”) was just an insult slung around among a group of teenage friends, without any actual suspicion of homosexuality. Perhaps a sociology professor or a Gender Studies major would interpret the use of such slang insults as expressions of “toxic masculinity” or whatever, but of course all professors and Gender Studies majors are homos, by the standards of normal teenagers. When I was in high school, all the cool kids were completely cynical about politics and politicians, and considering that I attended high school during the presidencies of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, perhaps you can see why were were so cynical.

Also, we were stoned most of the time. Perhaps my adolescent association with dopehead hoodlums made me somewhat atypical, but there were a lot of teenagers who went through the 1970s in a state of altered consciousness. In high school, I sort of had one foot in the artsy nerd clique — marching band, choir, student theater, literary magazine, etc. — and the other foot in the long-haired rock-and-roll crowd. The prevalence of drug culture in the mid-1970s was such that some of the smartest kids in school also spent a good deal of time wasted on dope, including heavy stuff like LSD, PCP and mescaline. But I digress . . .

We most emphatically did not care about “social justice” when I was a teenager, and I suspect the vast majority of normal teenagers now don’t really care about that stuff, no matter how much Democrats get excited by the idea of young people being “social justice” enthusiasts. But the crew of #BlackLivesMatter maniacs on Tumblr in late 2014 calling each other out for being insufficiently “woke” were not normal teenagers. Scott Alexander quotes an SJW Tumblrina:

“If you’re uneducated, do not use that as an excuse. Do not say, ‘I’m not picking sides because I don’t know the full story’” because not picking a side is supporting Wilson. And by supporting him, you are on a racist side…Ignoring this situation will put you in deep shit, and it makes you racist. If you’re not racist, do not just say ‘but I’m not racist!!’ just get educated and reblog anything you can.”

 

That was posted in November 2014, after a grand jury investigation found that Officer Darren Wilson had acted in self-defense in shooting Michael Brown. The 6-foot-4, 292-pound Brown attempted to grab the officer’s pistol during a struggle that ensued when Wilson tried to arrest Brown, who was a suspect in a convenience store robbery. Round-the-clock cable TV coverage by CNN and MSNBC distorted the story in Ferguson to such an extent, however, that a false mythology of Brown as an innocent victim of racist police took hold in the minds of “social justice warriors” (SJWs) like the Tumblrina quoted above. This bogus narrative (“Hands up, don’t shoot”) led to violent riots in Ferguson.

 

A remarkable arrogance was required to denounce as “uneducated” anyone who didn’t take the side of the Ferguson rioters. The facts of this case, and the reality of race and crime in America, were examined by Heather Mac Donald in her 2016 book The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe. Considering that she got her B.A. from Yale and her J.D. from Stanford Law, Heather Mac Donald certainly cannot be called “uneducated.” Yet such is the climate created by the media’s social-justice propaganda that, unless you are sufficiently mature and well-informed to resist this kind of myth-making operation, you might easily believe that anyone who doesn’t share your belief is intellectually and/or morally inferior to you. So, who was this Tumblrina who declared, in November 2014, that anyone didn’t support the #BlackLivesMatter rioters in Ferguson was an “uneducated” racist?

Say hello to Abby, a 19-year-old lesbian who lives in New Jersey.

 

At the time she posted her Ferguson rant in November 2014, Abby was a high-school freshman, still a couple of months away from her 15th birthday. Abby was born on Jan. 20, a fact I know because she also had a sideblog about astrology, describing herself as a Capricorn/Aquarius cusp. So the person lecturing everybody on Tumblr on how “uneducated” they were was a ninth-grader who believes in primitive superstition about how the movements stars and planets control our earthy fortunes.

And also, perhaps not coincidentally, she’s a homo.

At the time of her ninth-grade rant about how everyone who disagreed with her was an “uneducated” racist, Abby still identified as bisexual. Having spent way too much time scrolling through her Tumblr blogging about her personal problems, I’ll spare you the details, except to say that Abby’s family seems to be so tolerant and progressive that, in order to obtain the customary adolescent thrill of teenage rebellion, she’d probably have to knife them in their sleep. Or vote Republican.

In 1975, Midge Decter wrote a book called Liberal Parents, Radical Children that explained how the extremists of the 1960s New Left originated in misguided permissive parenting styles that prevailed among who thought of themselves as “enlightened” in the Eisenhower era. (You can read Abby Schacter’s review of Decter’s book published on the occasion of its 40th anniversary in 2015.) Parents have to realize that children require structure and discipline, a system of rules and consequences, with no tolerance for disrespect or impudent resistance to parental authority. You cannot be an effective parent by trying to “be your child’s best friend”; this kind of absurd egalitarian approach to parenting produces spoiled, selfish brats. But I digress . . .

What sort of 14-year-old thinks of herself as qualified to lecture others about how “uneducated” they are for disagreeing with her? What is it that inspires teenagers to pronounce judgment on people they’ve never met, and about whom they know nothing? Well, consider that Abby mentions being in therapy, and her “coming out” as bisexual at age 15 didn’t seem to provoke any parental reaction, so that a year or so later, after deciding that boys were just too boring to merit her romantic interest, she declared herself a lesbian, and her parents actually invited Abby’s girlfriend to accompany them on their family vacation.

Without getting too deep into the etiology of homosexuality, permit me to observe that Abby is a familiar type — sexually precocious, she’d had both boyfriends and girlfriends before she was old enough to get a driver’s license and, while she’s reasonably attractive, she’s somewhat pudgy. Speculative discussion of why Abby (or anyone else) engages in homosexual behavior would be a waste of time, but what I wish to call to the reader’s attention is that Abby is a recognizable type, both in terms of her personal backstory and her physical appearance including (a) her purple-dyed undercut hairstyle and (b) her pierced nostril. When you factor in her Tumblr blogs devoted to (c) “social justice” politics and (d) astrology, Abby is a 21st-century stereotype.

There are a lot of things I could say about this observable pattern, but I’ll leave readers to draw their own conclusions, except to channel the voice of my teenage hoodlum buddies circa 1975, who almost certainly would have said, “Social justice is for homos.” Pass the bong.



 

Category: Gays, Sex Trouble

Comments

2 Responses to “‘Social Justice’ Is for Homos”

  1. RSM: ‘Social Justice’ Is For Homos | Western Rifle Shooters Association
    February 12th, 2019 @ 8:44 pm

    […] Sound familiar? […]

  2. True But Forbidden #4 - American Digest
    February 16th, 2019 @ 7:39 pm

    […] ‘Social Justice’ Is for Homos :    Without getting too deep into the etiology of homosexuality, permit me to observe that Abby is a familiar type — sexually precocious, she’d had both boyfriends and girlfriends before she was old enough to get a driver’s license and, while she’s reasonably attractive, she’s somewhat pudgy. Speculative discussion of why Abby (or anyone else) engages in homosexual behavior would be a waste of time, but what I wish to call to the reader’s attention is that Abby is a recognizable type, both in terms of her personal backstory and her physical appearance including (a) her purple-dyed undercut hairstyle and (b) her pierced nostril. When you factor in her Tumblr blogs devoted to (c) “social justice” politics and (d) astrology, Abby is a 21st-century stereotype. […]