dur posted:

Jesus christ.

Jesus loving Christ. That is absolutely unbelievable. It's an A. Wyatt Mann cartoon in article form. And, like, all of the comments are...supportive? Hoooooooly poo poo.

Seriously.

Jack of Hearts posted:

The whole magazine appears to be an up-market Stormfront. Although you can probably get that from the fact that Steve Sailer is published there, without reading a single line.

Aufzug Taube! posted:

Derbyshire strikes me as the kind of guy who would've supported Hitler's rise to power, but would later get liquidated for being too closely tied to the ancien regime.

Jack of Hearts posted:

I mostly see him as a cranky contrarian crank (and also shithead, obviously), less of a Nazi, more of an upper middle class Anglo-American muttering in tones of faux-gentility about the Jewish question and/or buggery.

Jim Goad posted:

But can we at least dial down the MLK-worship a little, America? Seriously! The recently unveiled monument to him in DC is 30 feet tall, which, to be honest, is 24.5 feet taller than he was in real life. If we’ve learned anything from his murder, it’s how counterproductive it can be to martyr someone. All it does is make them grow.

I find it hard to be reverent about the Reverend. Whenever such a thick cloud of sanctimony enshrouds anyone or anything, my guts tell me to reach for the air freshener. Yes, I realize that there used to be segregated drinking fountains and that in some places, poor little black kids couldn’t even buy ice-cream cones from white vendors. But I think it’s time we all conceded that many places in Africa don’t even have drinking water, much less a single flavor of ice cream.

Is it a deal? Can we, as the eager urban youth like to say, “get real” about all this?

I first encountered the word “hatefact” while drinking with someone—either “shock jock” Anthony Cumia at a grimy Midtown bar or VDARE’s erudite Peter Brimelow at the incurably snobby New York Athletic Club. These two characters are about as different as American men get, but they both ask a question a lot of Americans are asking: How did we get to the point where facts are offensive? This country started out with Thomas Jefferson saying, “There is not a truth existing which I fear…or would wish unknown to the whole world,” but today’s liberal-arts graduates have created an environment where anything that makes anyone uncomfortable is hate speech, even if it’s true—in many cases, especially if it’s true.

Here are 10 true statements that millions of Americans find offensive:

1. IT’S NOT QUITE HEALTHY TO BE A FAT PIG
Yes, some people are born with big bones and others have a disease called “burns less calories than they take in,” but anyone who’s visited China in the past 100 years can see that Americans have a disproportionate number of fat pigs. These whales complain that they are seen as human garbage, yet they treat their mouths like fast-food dumpsters. Please explain to me how that is different from putting on blackface and complaining about racism.

2. OVERPOPULATION AIN’T SO GREAT FOR THE ENVIRONMENT
When you’re a kid, you assume being Green is recycling coffee cups and putting old newspapers in a blue bin. After reading, I don’t know, one book, you realize there is nothing an infinite population can do to sustain itself. So you take a peek at who’s doing all the breeding. Turns out, in America at least, homegrown citizens are keeping their population at about zero growth, whereas immigrants are responsible for pretty much all of it—a phenomenon called “The Wedge.” When the Sierra Club was confronted with this inconvenient truth, they split into two groups. One side decided to accept this hatefact and the other decided to pretend it didn’t exist. The pretenders have done well with funding; the hatefact-mongers haven’t.

3. IT MAY BE A BIT HARDER TO SQUEEZE OUT A CHILD AS YOU GET OLDER
This is probably my favorite hatefact because if a guy who spent six years in medical school repeats what he learned, it’s hate speech. Sorry ladies, but your ovaries have a shelf life. At 30, the hourglass turns upside down and it gets progressively harder to have kids. By 35 the sand is all but gone and it’s incredibly difficult to breed. My wife had our first kid at 32 and she was wheeled through a hateful door that said “Geriatric Mothers” on it. As is always the case with feel-good propaganda, it ends up hurting the people it purports to help. I don’t know how many of my mid-30s female peers are stunned by how hard it is to procreate. Sexist facts could have drastically improved their lives, but they were hidden because the truth hurts.

4. PEOPLE WITH DIFFERENT SEXUAL PREFERENCES SOMETIMES ENJOY DIFFERENT LIFESTYLES
When Act Up!’s Larry Kramer criticizes the gay lifestyle and insists, “We are murderers, we are murdering each other,” he is seen as a crusader for justice. If the rest of us simply utter, “Jeepers, them gays sure do gently caress a lot,” we are woefully naďve. The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart scoffed at people who assumed gays live any differently than straights by pointing out he lives in New York City, where everyone is decadent. Ahem: Jon? Circuit parties go on for three days and the attendees do so much crystal meth, they are able to fornicate nonstop throughout the entire event. This seemingly infinite amount of friction their poor bums and dinks are forced to endure has consequences. Nobody’s saying anyone deserves AIDS, but it shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone who contracts the virus at one of these parties.

5. CERTAIN GROUPS MAY NOT SHINE SO BRIGHTLY ON IQ TESTS
This one feels blasphemous to even type. Who cares if blacks score worse than whites, who score worse than Asians? We’re talking about general patterns involving millions of people. I come from a long line of incredibly stupid drunks and I feel zero shame about it because I know they’re not me. We’re told the tests are culturally biased but that doesn’t explain why Asians all over the world repeatedly outscore the rest of us. I don’t care about that, either. I feel no envy for China. This data is treated like some kind of Raiders of the Lost Ark scroll that will melt your face if you look at it, but I don’t find it disturbing at all. As is made clear in the The Bell Curve, the curves have huge overlaps showing there are thousands of blacks smarter than whites and Asians, while plenty of stupid Asians are way dumber than most of us.

6. THERE’S A REMOTE CHANCE THAT INDIANS WERE NOT LIVING IN A HIPPIE COMMUNE WHEN WE GOT HERE
The accepted narrative for Native Americans is they were all playing Ring Around the Rosie until we blew germs on them and they all fell down. Though he had a helluva time getting it published, Lawrence H. Keeley’s War Before Civilization debunks that myth. The book describes common traditions such as mutilating a body AFTER it was killed to ensure the victim was doomed in the afterlife. We learn of mass graves with hundreds of scalped cadavers a good half-century before Columbus got there. Indian traditions have many wonderful traits, but let’s grow up a little and allow for the possibility they were simply incompatible with the modern world. For Christ’s sake, when we got here they hadn’t even invented the wheel. (Full disclosure: I’m allowed to consider this because the mother of my two children is a Native American.)

7. MEN END UP HAVING SEX WITH PEOPLE THEY DON’T WANT TO HAVE SEX WITH
The image of the huge black guy locked in a cell with the cowering white man is the fodder of many a bad joke, but doing the math gets unfunny really fast. The Justice Department recently came out with figures suggesting there were 216,000 victims of prison rape in 2008—that’s the number of victims rather than incidents, which are probably far higher. Even this conservative estimate puts America in the painfully uncomfortable position of being “the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.” You won’t see it on Jezebel anytime soon, but it appears it’s men who should be more offended when rape is trivialized.

8. SLAVERY DOESN’T DO MUCH FOR YOUR MORTGAGE IN 2012
The notion that the evil white man got rich stealing everyone else’s poo poo fits the great narrative and makes people feel better about themselves (including whites, the only group that derives pleasure from feeling bad about themselves). Here’s a hole in that argument wider than the Mason-Dixon Line: After the Civil War, the South had no wealth. The cotton money was spent. The cotton fields were burned. So even if slavery made us all plantation owners before the war—which is not the case, seeing as how a minority of Southern whites owned slaves even at slavery’s peak—we were all at a level playing field after it was done.

9. GUNS AREN’T ALL BAD
Several books have been written about this counterintuitive truth. Basically: The laxer the gun laws, the less crime. The infantilized left hears about a murder and sees it came from a gun so it says, “GUNS = BAD.” Then they pile on statistics about innocent kids playing with guns and soon we’re doing everything we can to rid the world of “the Devil’s right hand.” All this is obliterated by the countless times a criminal is deterred by the possibility of their victim being armed. We’re not only talking about the thousands of times a potential victim has brandished a weapon and said, “Not gonna happen,” but also the millions of times the perp has been forced to assume their prey may be armed. I’d hate guns too if they led to more crime, but they don’t, so I’m left to enjoy protecting my home and occasionally exploding the living poo poo out of a unopened can of cola using a .30-06.

10. FRIENDSHIPS BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN AREN’T EQUIVALENT TO SAME-SEX FRIENDSHIPS
Nobody’s saying males and females can’t be civil with each other and thoroughly enjoy a relationship devoid of boinking, but friends? You think a married man can be best buds with a woman? OK, try this on for size, guys: “Bye honey, me and Lesley are going camping for a couple of days. We’re going to get wasted and hunt small game and build a fire and probably crash in the same tent because that’s how best pals roll. You cool with that?” Yeah, right. Bringing this up inevitably leaves one open for a barrage of examples of platonic male/female relationships. Maybe one of them even survived a camping trip. Good for you. That’s called an EXCEPTION. The “hatefact” mentality assumes anecdotal evidence erases all the evidence of a general pattern. This crippling allergy to logic isn’t merely ignorant. It discourages people from learning, and that is one of the few things I truly hate.

Bruce Leroy posted:

Jack of Hearts posted:

I'm So Bored With MLK


This is from a few months back on that same site, but I don't think I've seen it posted. This site is a fuckin' goldmine. I gotta give credit to the author of this piece for being at once unspeakably worthless and yet capable of using The Clash in his title.

e: Having read a bunch of his columns, Jim Goad is just the thing for this thread. His combination of smugness, racism, and overall worthlessness as a human being is actually so perfect that I cannot look away. It's...it's beautiful.

Bruce Leroy posted:

To contribute, here's a recent gem from douchebag Cal Thomas:


So, you're telling me we should try to cure disease? What a brilliant idea!! I don't think anyone has ever thought of that before and we will have a revolution in medical science now that Cal has developed the idea of curing disease.

It's so simple and there should be absolutely no problems as long as these "cures" don't require any investment to develop or cost any money to implement for sick people.

Seriously, did Cal really think this was some kind of insightful or informative article to publish? Does Cal live in such a bubble with so many sycophants that no one had the balls to tell him "No poo poo, Sherlock" when he turned in this article?

Cahal posted:

I was directed to this essay via here:

Terror Sweat posted:

What the gently caress is your problem? Every thing he said is true. We should stop focusing on tertiary care and focus on primary care. It saves money and lives.

Shasta Orange Soda posted:

We need to find cures to diseases. Diseases that kill. Why isn't anyone trying to cure diseases? I mean, if we just cured Alzheimer's, Alzheimer's wouldn't be nearly so expensive! Why hasn't anyone thought of this?

This is what people like Cal Thomas say on the subject of health care when they're trying as hard as they can to avoid writing about the fact that maybe poor people deserve a little bit of health care, too.

Terror Sweat posted:

He's literally talking about focusing on the cause of diseases over the symptoms and you're complaining?

He wants to spend less on tertiary care. Tertiary care is literally the most expensive way to treat patients. Primary care saves money for everybody involved. This man is arguing for greater funding on social programs and you're complaining because hes a conservative.

Terror Sweat posted:

He wants to spend less on tertiary care. Tertiary care is literally the most expensive way to treat patients. Primary care saves money for everybody involved.

quote:

Take Alzheimer's disease. Because of medical advances, more people are living longer, and more will likely contract this slow-progressing, eventually fatal disease. According to the Alzheimer's Association (http://www.alz.org), "Medicare and Medicaid will spend an estimated $140 billion in 2012 on people with Alzheimer's and other dementias." Worse, it says, "Caring for people with Alzheimer's disease will cost all payers — Medicare, Medicaid, individuals, private insurance and HMOs — $20 trillion (in today's dollars) over the next 40 years. The overwhelming majority of that will be spending by Medicare and Medicaid." It would cost far less if we found a cure for Alzheimer's.

Terror Sweat posted:

What the gently caress is your problem? Every thing he said is true. We should stop focusing on tertiary care and focus on primary care. It saves money and lives.

Terror Sweat posted:

He's literally talking about focusing on the cause of diseases over the symptoms and you're complaining?

He wants to spend less on tertiary care. Tertiary care is literally the most expensive way to treat patients. Primary care saves money for everybody involved. This man is arguing for greater funding on social programs and you're complaining because hes a conservative.

Shasta Orange Soda posted:

DISEASES WOULD COST LESS TO TREAT IF WE CURED THEM. That is literally his argument. Cal Thomas got paid American currency to come up with that.

Armyman25 posted:

This was on my Facebook this morning.

Mr Interweb posted:

1. Right, because when people think of Hitler, the first thing that comes to mind is UHC.
2. Even if they did, Hitler didn't come up with UHC, Germany had it since the days of Bismarck, iirc.
3. Furthermore, I wonder if this person realizes that German STILL has UHC!

Dr Christmas posted:

4. The sterilizations and euthanasia were part of Hitler's plan to create a master race, not a cost-saving measure. Suggesting that it was is loving Holocaust revisionism. During the leadup to Obamacare, the entire Republican party was engaged in motherfucking Holocaust revisionism!

A Fancy 400 lbs posted:

Diseases would cost less to treat if we prevented them before they happened.

Mr Interweb posted:

1. Right, because when people think of Hitler, the first thing that comes to mind is UHC.
2. Even if they did, Hitler didn't come up with UHC, Germany had it since the days of Bismarck, iirc.
3. Furthermore, I wonder if this person realizes that German STILL has UHC!

Orange Devil posted:

Bismarck actually implemented many social safety nets and such specifically because he figured it was better to give the poor something to lose than be faced with a large mass of people with nothing to lose and everything to gain who just might decide that the country wasn't working out very well for them and if nobody was going to give them the means to survival they were going to take it.

BioEnchanted posted:

Wow, that's fairly nice in an incredibly evil way... How do you manage to pervert CHARITY of all things?

BioEnchanted posted:

Wow, that's fairly nice in an incredibly evil way... How do you manage to pervert CHARITY of all things?

Orange Devil posted:

Charity is inherently, perhaps not evil, but certainly an affront to the dignity of humanity and also a way to cover up societies ugly truths. See this RSA Animate video featuring Zizek for a good explanation.

Strudel Man posted:

...is he criticizing ethical purchasing decisions? Like, he gives the example of Starbucks advertising that it buys fair trade beans, and says that this is "cultural capitalism at its purest," that you "buy your redemption from being only a consumerist."

And then he goes on to quote Oscar Wilde, and talks about handing out bread to people, short-term cures. But how on earth does fair trade constitute an example of this?

quote:

There's also a certain hypocrisy I've always seen in the broader line of criticism (that charity only sustains the present state of affairs), which is that cutting off charity in the hopes of provoking some utopian rebellion would unquestionably result in great short-term suffering and has no guarantee of actually producing a situation any better than the one we started out with.

Orange Devil posted:

Fair trade is still based on the capitalist model of exploitation of labour.

quote:

This is why to my knowledge nobody advocates cutting off charity in order to provoke rebellion, let alone any kind of utopia. Zizek is explicitly not utopian, by the way.

Strudel Man posted:

This does not establish that it is bad, for anyone who does not subscribe to marxist views of labor.

quote:

Saying that charity is inherently immoral certainly seems to contain the implication that it should be stopped.

namesake posted:

If you approach things like Fairtrade as 'I'm doing what I can; I buy Fairtrade.' then you are still very much part of the problem and having that option of buying your redemption is actually a very bad thing to fall into because it allows you to consider yourself as helping out but in a way which doesn't solve the problem.

namesake posted:

... a real solution ... universally and unilaterally ... guaranteed success ...

namesake posted:

You can believe something is a positive factor in society without believing it's a real solution. Progressive taxation doesn't solve the problems of wealth inequality but it's still a drat good idea in the meantime.

Strudel Man posted:

There is also something of a reverse tragedy of the commons here. My own refusal to give to charity or to purchase items at a fair price is not the event that will spark The Revolution That Ends Privation Forever. Nor will it affect other people's giving. If I stop giving to charity, all that changes are the particular circumstances of the people who were helped. How, then, are the things in which I am interested (human welfare) in any way improved by my refusal to give to charity?

quote:

If you think if fairtrade as 'buying your redemption,' then you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what the point is. It is not the purchase of a karmic indulgence; it is literally meant to be paying a fair price for what you buy.

quote:

You can indeed. And if you believe that something is a positive factor in society, you probably wouldn't call it inherently immoral.

namesake posted:

No one is asking you to actually stop doing these things though, only to think bigger than the temporary buoying of commodity values to a few select communities.

A Fancy 400 lbs posted:

Paying a fair price: Good, relative to your other currently available options.

zero alpha posted:

He's just saying that lifestyle changes by Upper Class first-worlders is woefully inadequate. Yeah it's good,

namesake posted:

Yes this is back to 'I'm doing what I can; I buy Fairtrade.'. Why aren't you questioning why it's even a choice for you NOT to pay a fair value for something? Could it be a systemic problem with our system of production?

quote:

I'm not seeing where the inherent part comes into it. However if you believe that a radical re-alignment is needed to fix a desperate problem, halfarsing it with some minor reforms and then stopping is pretty immoral yeah.