Rants From Runts, Pants That Punt, and Cant From...Oh, Never Mind

If you’ve been waiting for the:

• Social Justice Warriors
• Professionally Aggrieved Feminists (i.e., the angry ugly girls)
• “glittery hoo-hah” owners

(Pick your preferred moniker for them from the list above, or supply your own)...to beclown themselves terminally at long last, your moment has arrived:

...I want to talk about the incident that, somehow, in the realm of the internet, made me into a Lesbian, Thai, Social Justice Warrior....

I’m still wearing my “Wait, WHAT?” face from when Amanda told me about the comment that said this troll – variously identified as Requires Hate and Winterfox and a two-part name I can’t even spell – must be me, because of the “similarity in our rhetoric.” I haven’t read the comment. It might magically suck me through the internet and I might find myself with my fingers clapped around this creature’s neck strangling him while demanding he explain what in heaven’s name he means. (Though I think I know, and I’ll explain later.)

Anyway, after this Requires Hate creature had abused them and called them names and caused them to grovel, and enlisted the cowed cooperation of Alex-no-binary gender and our old friend Damien so-dense-that-I’m-afraid-a-blackhole-will form around me, people started comparing notes and getting mad, because they realized this creature was the same who under the two-name moniker had been sucking up to them. They also claim she had waged whisper campaigns to have them banned from conventions, that she tarnished their reputations with the same whisper campaigns and that she made some people give up writing altogether.

And of course their problem – as explained in this article – is not that she did all those things, but that she used the tactics against the “wrong people” i.e. fellow “social justice warriors”, people who want to eliminate patriarchy and who are sure white privilege is hiding under their bed, ready to pounce out as soon as they relax — People who think that everyone who doesn’t think like them commits thought crime and should be silenced. That is, they are upset because tactics they sanction and use against people like us are being used against them.

That is so delicious that I’m going to let it stand alone...at least long enough for me to get control over the spasm of incapacitating laughter it’s caused me.

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“You can’t say that!” is the battle-cry of the contemporary American fascist. (Yes, they’re leftists, but so were Hitler and his followers; that’s why they called themselves the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.) Their inclination toward censorship is so relentless, and so extreme, that they’ve even got a bright fellow like PJ Media’s Charlie Martin saying idiotic stuff like this:

"they" to include the singular has a long and honorable history, and "his or hers" or worse "his/her" are atrocities.

...just to avert the wrath of the SJW / angry ugly girl / “glittery hoo-ha” crowd. Mind you, I have some sympathy for those who’ve quailed beneath the lash:

My friend Dave Freer, over at Mad Genius Club has a blog about Political Correctness in literature. I confess I have agreed with him ever since I was first trying to break into writing and found myself reading manuals on how to be politically correct in my writing.

I’ve learned to use the execrable he/she or worse, they instead of he in the type of sentence that now goes “one shouldn’t do that, lest they” simply because it’s not worth to endure screams of outrage over what’s at worse inelegant and agrammatical. And the type of person who thinks her worth lies in not being referred to under a generic “masculine” pronoun – as dictated by the rules of most indo european languages — inevitably also thinks screaming about it is an act of civic duty if not virtue.

...but only some: enough to wish them a replacement spine for Christmas.

A writer who allows the SJWs to dictate his choice of words has ceded the greater part of the field of battle. Granted that the SJWs constitute a sect not even the IRS is willing to go after, nevertheless their only weapons are screaming and vituperation. -- and if the Internet hasn’t numbed you to that yet, look around you: those vertical thingies are probably the struts on your crib.

But it’s not just writers tugging the forelock, is it?

So how are things going for feminism? Well, last week, some feminists took one of the great achievements of human history — landing a probe from Earth on a comet hundreds of millions of miles away — and made it all about the clothes.

Yes, that's right. After years of effort, the European Space Agency's lander Philaelanded on a comet 300 million miles away. At first, people were excited. Then some women noticed that one of the space scientists, Matt Taylor, was wearing a shirt, made for him by a female "close pal," featuring comic-book depictions of semi-naked women. And suddenly, the triumph of the comet landing was drowned out by shouts of feminist outrage about ... what people were wearing. It was one small shirt for a man, one giant leap backward for womankind.

The Atlantic's Rose Eveleth tweeted, "No no women are toooootally welcome in our community, just ask the dude in this shirt." Astrophysicist Katie Mack commented: "I don't care what scientists wear. But a shirt featuring women in lingerie isn't appropriate for a broadcast if you care about women in STEM." And from there, the online feminist lynch mob took off until Taylor was forced to deliver a tearful apology on camera.

It seems to me that if you care about women in STEM, maybe you shouldn't want to communicate the notion that they're so delicate that they can't handle pictures of comic-book women. Will we stock our Mars spacecraft with fainting couches?

“Forced?” Taylor was forced to apologize weepily on camera? Who forced him? How? By threatening more screaming and vituperation at one of the technological heroes of the age? After his epochal achievement, Taylor should have felt free to smile and say “Go fuck yourselves” to his detractors through that camera, perhaps while grabbing his crotch for emphasis. As matters stand, someone should grab his crotch, just to determine whether he’s missing an important organ or two.

Cowardice of that magnitude shames the entire human race.

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It cannot be said too often that to allow your adversary to dictate what you may and may not say – even at the level of supposedly offensive words and phrases – is to surrender before battle is joined. A worthy adversary, in politics or anywhere else, would not do any such thing; he’d say “Choose your weapons,” brandish his own, and charge. But the SJWs / angry ugly girls / glittery hoo-ha types are not worthy adversaries. They deserve nothing but contempt...certainly not an abject apology for one’s sartorial preferences.

Censorship is the fundamental privilege of an aristocracy. It underpins all other privileges allowed to such an elite, for if you can’t make critical note of a phenomenon, you’ll never be able to mobilize a force against it. It’s so important to deny that privilege to anyone who asserts it, regardless of the reasons proffered, that when someone tells me “You can’t say that,” I reply with a hearty “Go fuck yourself” even if my would-be censor is nominally in agreement with me on the substance of the topic under discussion.

And so, to the:

• Social Justice Warriors,
• Professionally Aggrieved Feminists,
• “glittery hoo-hah” owners,
• ...and any castrati that might think to side with them out of hope for sexual access,

Go fuck yourselves.
Do it now.
Please.