Steve Sailer writes: Here’s a funny clip from MSNBC: the professional Hispanic named Alfonso praises Paul Ryan for being pals with arch-immigration advocate Luis Gutierrez and for being a “hard worker.” Professional (sort of) black lady Melissa Harris-Perry reads him the riot act about how the phrase “hard worker” is racist.
Don’t you know that Melissa Harris-Perry has to work twice as hard as Tim Wise?
It’s almost as if these folks don’t really like each other and if they didn’t have the cisgender straight white man to hate, they really wouldn’t get along.
Comments to Steve Sailer:
* Melissa Harris-Perry, who easily passes the brown paper bag test, must work double-plus hard to demonstrate her affirmative action bona fides. Our beloved leader, BO, and all his affirmative action colleagues e.g., Eric Holder, all share the same predicament. They must out-Negro the Negro to retain their places. All this would be LOL amusing if it were not having such a corrosive effect on culture and society.
* I think there’s a certain psychopathy to many crusader types in that they feel a compulsion to tear others down to build themselves up, and on the other hand to turn every conversation into an opportunity to pontificate, and finally to have everything be about them and their concerns. People with such enormous egos (or ego requirements) tend to be avoided by sane people.
I’m not sure the typology for the kind of person Melissa H-P is acting out is completely satisfactory. “America’s most foremost public intellectual” (as TNC dubbed her) definitely ain’t it. I’m sure there are some names in psychology or elsewhere to apply to this kind of syndrome.
Meanwhile, thinking about it, it reminded me of a couple of characters I saw on SNL years ago when my kids were growing, I found a couple of clips for Kristen Wiig’s Penelope and Rachel Dratch’s Debbie Downer. These are just representative, not necessarily the best ones. In short, M H-P is kind of a cross between the two.
* Ya know, if ya really want to troll NBC/CNBC/MSNBC—-and any non-lefty going on those shows should know the only way you’ll come out ahead is if you realize they’re just one giant lefty propaganda machine and not a news organization, and therefore deserve trolling—–you should just start spouting off every micro-aggressive “triggering” word/phrase you can think of to set they amygdala on fire:
hard-working
ladylike
feminine
articulate
clean
civilized
savage
lazy
manly
gay
homosexual
male
female
normal
disordered
southern pride
IQ
etc. I’m sure the Stevosphere readers could come up with reams of more words that we’re “not supposed to say” around lefties. Then keep saying them around lefties till their heads explode. Seriously, these people are mentally diseased.
* From Harris-Perry’s website, writing about her own mother:
A white woman in a Mormon family [isn’t that redundant?], my mom was raised in the racially homogenous enclave of Spokane, Washington and in 1960 went off to college at Brigham Young University. People are typically incredulous when I share this part of my mother’s biography. After all, if they know me as an outspoken, progressive, feminist, black woman, it might be hard to believe that I am the daughter of someone with these beginnings. [Regression to the mean?]
But my mother, Diana Gray, possesses an unmatched commitment to fairness, an unflagging belief in hard work [RACIST!!!], and more than a casual relationship with profound personal transformations.
These people are insufferable. No wonder Trump gets great applause by denouncing Political Correctness. The Republican nominee needs to make make Black Lives Matter Hillary’s running mate, to paraphrase Lee Atwater.
* Yeah, we’ve all met those “hardworking moms” who don’t got no healthcare, who plop out 3 kids with 4 different fathers by their 21st birthday, who set on da couch all day watching Judge Judy and Family Feud and whose kids wander around the house making messes that don’t get cleaned up for years, if ever.
* Even at the sharper end of African-American socio-political analysis, there is an erroneous perception that everything must have come easy to those who succeeded in life.
Ultimately this thinking leads to Zimbabwe, where the blacks took over all the farms and factories and thought it would be easy to make big money that way, because, well, whites did it, so how hard can it be?
We’ve seen the results. South Africa is 3/4 of the way down that path, and in the not too distant future, so will follow the US and western Europe. Then its ‘goodnight nurse’.
* Here’s a hint for the Republican party: when professional ethnic grievance jockeys on MSNBC are touting a guy for Speaker of the House, maybe he isn’t the guy your constituents want.
* I must admit MHP is a guilty pleasure. The Sylvester the cat speech impediment, her stumbling bumbling attempts at reading the Teleprompter, her half white guilt or whatever the hell it is that makes her need to be the blackest person in the world. It is so spectacularly awful I can’t turn away.
* Did MHP forget to take her retainer out before she went on the air. That lisp is pretty distracting.
Cotton fields? Why doesn’t she keep a picture of a black welfare recipient with her six kids by eight different fathers on the wall, if that’s such hard work?
* The progressive left is trying to put together a society where people would have to tiptoe around not noticing things and only speaking in approved platitudes so as not to inadvertently micro-aggress. It sounds exhausting, to to mention completely fun-free.
* Making absurd claims is simply an another attention-gaining gambit in the very competitive libtard mediawhore sharkpool. It’s an attempt to one-up her colleagues, preen for her bosses, and make herself the sole viewer spotlight. Unfortunately, these mediawhores get paid a salary for spouting this Democrat party-line nonsense, which only encourages even more ridiculous statements.
* If you think that is narcississtic then you should meet Britain’s newest high profile feminist MP Jess Phillips. A Conservative MP (male) proposed a debate on men’s higher cancer, suicide and unemployment rates to balance the debates on International Women’s Day.
Ms Phillips chose to take umbrage at this, ignored the thrust of what he said and harrumphed at length about how there are still more men in the House of Commons than women.
Note the smirking and giggling she did at 4:15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Z60LUV3V0E
For another taste of her solipsism watch her speech in which she says it is disgraceful that her husband – an elevator engineer – got paid more than her when she was running a women’s sexual abuse charity.
* I have a thesis about this which I’m finding it difficult to articulate. If I try to put it into words, it’s going to sound sufficiently similar to many other things that have already been said that I’m afraid it will simply be taken as my own harrumphing assent to the general alt-right platform, and will not capture the subtle distinction I’m trying to express. However, let’s give it a shot. To sum the matter up in one pithy line:
The world is now run by former Student Council members.
In every arena upon which they have laid their befouling hand, but especially in mass media and education, the typical SJW crusader seems to me to embody the spirit of a high school student council member. And what are the distinguishing features of that spirit? It begins with the willingness to arrogate to oneself an entirely unmerited and excessive degree of social importance. The student council is important by definition, you see, not because it does anything that normal people would consider necessary or useful. This exaggerated self-regard needs some sort of field in which to operate, but that obviously cannot be any endeavor where skill, talent, or experience are required, where it would simply evaporate like the morning mist. Therefore it seizes upon “justice” and idle rule-making as its own particular gift to humanity; and, after gaining access to class time and to the PA system by representing itself as the organ of student life, busies itself by forcing a captive audience (the students) to listen to its edicts and pronouncements. Invariably these have to do with inculcating sensitivity and delimiting “abusive” (read: clear, expressive, and accurate) language. It’s not because these students are especially sensitive and high-minded themselves that they take this course; it is because inventing distinctions, assigning values to them, and crusading for a reordering of such values gives them something to exalt and feel engaged about. It is really just the outward extension of their ego. Thus, during Ramadan, the student council will tap its token Muslim member to inform the 2,000-strong student body via the PA system to be especially aware of the other Muslim students (which probably consist of half a dozen Somalians), because they will be weak and distracted from their fast (which they probably aren’t observing); and then, for good measure, will repeat the entire message in Arabic (which nobody, not even the Somalians, still less the teachers and administrators who are the principal enforcers of the sensitivity, understands).
From top to bottom this whole exercise was nothing but an ego trip. First of all, the spiritual value of a fast becomes void if you demand special treatment from others while enduring it. When you fast, you must keep it to yourself and “appear not to fast,” otherwise the attention you seek from others will be your only reward. Second, the only function of the Arabic version of the announcement was to showcase the speaker’s bilingualism. Since the intended audience of the message was ostensibly the “insensitive” white students and faculty who are unaware of the Ramadan fast, they could not possibly benefit from hearing it in Arabic. The content of the message was something quite the opposite of its iport, which was “Look at me, I’m different and I’m special.” O, how the teachers, such few sane ones as remain, must love having their class time commandeered for such high jinks!
And when you look at the media the student council chooses for its self-expressions (other than crashing the AV club to produce those 3rd period student news bulletins–another fine use of class time), you inevitably find wall posters, collages, and decorations as the preferred substrate. If battles are won on the playing fields of Eton, leftist ideas are first born and executed in the timeless media of Elmer’s glue and glitter. Natural propagandists all, the burgeoning leftists have an instinctive feel for the value of their gaudy displays. This childishness never departs from them. The modern news broadcast, in its content as well as its production values, is precisely what you would expect from the poster-makers once they finally got their hands on the expensive toys.
It eventually transpires that the individual members of the student council try to outdo one another in the application of their “fairness” ideology. The cleverer they can be in highlighting distinctions and asymmetries to be eradicated, the greater a claim they can lay to the true currency of their trade, viz. the ability to monopolize other people’s time and attention and extract tribute from them. Zany ideas like the transgender bathroom are the natural outcome of such a process–an internal leftist arms race to see who can be the biggest SJW.
If you’ve ever seen an activist judge in action, or if you can recall Obama’s first few months in office when he actually used to order Congress to have seminars and breakout sessions (there was a classic and highly illuminating video of this that I wish I could find), you will recognize this atmosphere of the schoolroom, the budding busybodies alongside the mature denizens of the faculty lounge, snickering to each other as they discoursed on fairness and justice, as if the real world ever paid the slightest attention to their theories.
* Social justice vectors colliding there. This is very telling, because it isn’t just any other fringeist co-traveler there but an Hispanic daring to use the W word. Melissa is nuts and impulsive but this outburst comes from the deep; she’s signalling him and his ilk that blacks are not pleased with them and their white defenders touting their work ethic, that blacks know just who it is they implicate by omission when they invoke this, and that they won’t be having any efforts by Hispanics to advance up the hierarchy either by overt or implicit suggestions they’re the harder working new brown folk. By bringing up slavery it’s as if she’s acknowledging this narrative but implying blacks, having had their turn, have earned a pass from “hard work”.
But how is it an executive of sufficient authority for this network doesn’t see this embarrassing display and immediately get on the phone to ask someone why in the f— is this crazy person on our network, already?
* Listening some days ago to a local NPR affiliate (?) I heard this clip, which I couldn’t locate on NPR, but tracked down.
The article, unfortunately, isn’t transcribed. It’s about the reduction of testing proposed by the Obama Administration. Around 2:00 into the audio they begin interviewing a teacher from a Title 1 school in Charlotte, NC. She makes some good points about how there is a lot of time spent prepping for tests. She says, perhaps correctly, that they must focus on teaching kids how to pass a test and thus aren’t spending enough time on teaching kids how to pass the biggest test, i.e. life. To prep them for college or the workforce.
Ok, no problems so far….
Around 3:20 into the audio she says that there is less time for literature and novels or things the students “enjoy” because they need to keep scores up. Regrettable, and understandable…
So around 5:00 we learn that she has taught in places without such time constrictions, starting from 5:36 we learn about “what actually matters” and what she would do with we learn what she would do when given time (and why I have no sympathy for, and I pray fervently for such a day, when nice white ladies all lose their jobs or insanely more demands and stress are placed on them).
One of her favorite unit/topic is diversity and stereotypes.
Ok, so basically, no quizzes. Just gripe sessions.
So, while No Child Left Behind was an exercise in colossal stupidity, one positive [most certainly] unintended consequence was preventing time for activities like this teacher would engage in.
* Yes that is pretty much the black narrative: only they have suffered slavery, only they can work hard – no one else has any idea what hard work is except a black who has never worked, etc.
No one else is allowed to claim these because blacks wouldn’t be unique and special in all the world.
It’s all about promoting BS narratives so one can practice emotional and monetary blackmail or extortion on others.
* Her chastising the Hispanic guy is to put Hispanics in their place. That blacks were, are, always will be, top of the racial grievance pecking order. Because only blacks were slaves (and worked damn hard! in the sun!!! picking cotton!) while Hispanics were not. And at any rate they just got off the banana boat.
