Thursday, January 19, 2017

The Cringe Is Over


The best thing about Brexit & Trump is that it has deprived the left of their favourite weapon: the argument that liberalism is the default setting of modern life and only a few cray-cray extremists could possibly be against it. Now, for the first time in years, the left is having to make actual arguments, and it's going about as well as you'd expect. Consider Exhibit A: Red Princess Lilly Allen.

Incidentally, the comparison to royalty is exactly right. Lilly is the daughter of alt comedy luvvie Keith Allen, step daughter of Harry Enfield, and mum's a film producer. Add in the fancy private education and she makes Prince Harry look like a self-made man.

All of which is by way of saying that as easy as it is to mock silly Lilly and friends, we should never forget that the supposed Super Genii in the 'Respectable Right' have spent years telling us that we need to go along to get along with these fools. Allegedly brilliant policy wonks sneered at the bumpkins in the conservative base, telling us we needed to get with the program and triangulate away our principles. Now it turns out that globalisation is inevitable except when it isn't. The Ford driving morons in the suburbs were right and the smart set were wrong. About everything.

As ever, I ask: just what definition of 'genius' are we using here?

Wednesday, January 04, 2017

If It Wasn't For Double Standards, Liberals Would Have No Standards At All...


The Guardian carries an article from a liberal sulking about Milo's massive one.

I mean his advance, you weirdos.

They want to give his publisher the whole 'nice company you got 'ere, be a shame if something 'appened to it' treatment, but they seem kind of vague on who exactly Milo is:
During Yiannopoulos’s tenure at Breitbart – where he’s told gay people to “get back in the closet” and women to “log off” the internet – he has amassed more than 1 million followers on Facebook.
Yes, if there's one thing Milo stands for, it's opposition to flaming homos. At this point, you can't help but feel a strange respect for the honesty of celebrity weirdo Perez Hilton who filed his story about Milo under the label 'icky icky poo'. At least he didn't even pretend to have a point (other than 'I hate the right'). Meanwhile, the left's Brains Trust has to resort to arguments like this:
Why? Because rhetoric like his – which targets racial, religious and cultural minorities – invites discrimination. It arguably encourages people such as Omar Mateen and Dylann Roof to think of entire groups of people as less than human.
Yes, indeed. The right must be silenced otherwise they might encourage somebody, somewhere to do something at some point in the future. Just on first principles, it seems a little broad.... even if you don't think that some other book might have been a little more directly involved in motivating Omar Mateen to shoot up a gay club. But the humbuggery is even more blatant than that.

On the very same day as the Milo post, the Guardian ran with a softball interview with the father of the left's latest baby seal, Mohammed Yaqub.

Yep, this guy.  Needless to say, very little of the Mail's background material makes it in to the interview. Instead we get stuff like this:
The grieving father of a man who was fatally shot by police in West Yorkshire has said his family are heartbroken and questioned whether armed officers planned to “assassinate” his son.
So for those of you keeping score at home, calling Leslie Jones 'barely literate' and Melissa McCarthy 'fat' and 'ugly' - also known in Saneville as 'reporting stuff' - is inflammatory, but pushing insane conspiracy theories gets you the soft soap treatment at the Guardian.

It's not like they distance themselves from this nutcase either. Au contrair, they refer to him as 'a well-known and respected businessman' even after he's given up on all but the most perfunctory attempt at plausible deniability thing:
He said: “Look at the case in London, [Mark] Duggan – look how many protests they had to take to get answers. If it’s a peaceful protest there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as it’s peaceful.”
Except they weren't peaceful then and aren't now, so y'know... it turns out that the same paper that wants to prevent the right from writing about terrible movies on the grounds that their reviews may provoke mass murder has no problem giving house room to deranged conspiracy theories and barely disguised calls for mob violence.