The latest thing the hipster Millennial commentariat wants you, their adoring public, to stop doing is “punching down.” They want you to know it ranks just below violating a safe space but above microaggressions on the graduated scale of Not OK. Totally problematic. And what exactly is “punching down”? Well, punching down is where a big guy picks on a little guy (or girl). It’s where someone from a position of power or privilege makes and argument or a statement or even a joke that comes at the expense of someone from a lower social stratum, where the well-situated mocks the marginalized.
I’ll admit that, as a card-carrying cisheteropatriarchal shitlord, that sort of prohibition appeals to my inborn sense of chivalry. I don’t know that I’ve read enough Nietzsche—or even could read enough Nietzsche—to cheer on the depredation of the weak by the strong. I think that those able to have an obligation to watch out for those vulnerable ones whom God has put providentially under their care. Men to women. Adults to children. The community to a member of it who has fallen on hard times. So the quibble here is not really with the “don’t bully your inferiors” formulation but rather with the bizarre calculus by which the various pundits and writers who market that line go about establishing the hierarchy. In other words, their idea of marginalized groups doesn’t exactly jibe with my idea of reality. Most of the time, in fact, they’re radically out of sync.
You see, according to our moral betters on sites like Gawker or Salon, I shouldn’t mock a guy like Michael Sam because he’s part of an oppressed group—two, in fact. He’s already double “stigmatized,” already a social pariah, eking out a marginal existence on the scraps that drop from the dinner table of polite society. And I suppose they might have a point. I mean consider his ordeal. Upon coming out of the closet, he was subjected to fawning op eds and adulation from Hollywood, media figures, and politicians. He had instant celebrity cruelly foisted upon him, interviews with nationally syndicated magazines and news shows. He got a shot at the NFL despite an underwhelming showing at the combine and a spot on Dancing with the Stars afterwards. He even got a congratulatory phone call from the President of the United States. Imagine if you will the fortitude it would take to endure such slings and arrows. Imagine the bravery required. Sam is obviously approaching the end of his rope. Some mean-spirited ridicule from an anonymous internet poster might be the last straw for a man so beset and hounded by the world.
Then compare Sam’s travails to the kid-glove treatment that a walking, talking concentration of privilege like Brendan Eich enjoyed even after it came out that he had donated money to a popular and successful campaign for a state constitutional amendment in California. All he got was an online lynch mob and a public smear campaign that involved even employees from his own company, that he co-founded and built from the ground up. All he got was fired and forcibly separated from his life’s work. So everyone should feel free to pile on him, since his obvious status as darling of American society insulates him from any negative outcomes.
Obviously the notion that a black homosexual is ipso facto socially inferior to a white male doesn’t match up with the cultural contours of contemporary America. Instead, it’s a function of the strange cosmology of the social justice Left. Theirs is a worldview where Hate and Bigotry are nigh omnipotent, charting the course of civilizations, driving generations of men and women to fundamentally misappraise their fellow human beings, fighting against the very arc of the moral universe and frustrating its bend towards justice. To them, as I’ve argued here and elsewhere, these concepts have a massive explanatory power, are the keys to understanding great swaths of human history. And so anyone who allies themselves with hatred or bigotry (or racism or homophobia or misogyny or whatever the flavor du jour is) is obviously in league with the powers and principalities that hold sway over our vale of tears. And anyone who belongs to one of the designated victim groups that these powers wage their eternal war against are just that: victims. They are the underdogs, despite the testimony of your senses. They are the bullied, damn your lying eyes. And thus they are sacrosanct under the no-punching-down commandment.
If you were so inclined, you could compile quite a list of these instances of bait-and-switch. Our recent history is rife with them. A lot of early anti-discrimination rhetoric, for instance, promised a fairer, more meritocratic States. And to many well-intentioned people this seemed perfectly in line with the ethos of our founding fathers, one where no one was disqualified from the pursuit of excellence by a so-called “accident of birth.” Let everyone pursue happiness to the best of his ability, uninterrupted by governmental interference! But nowadays we recognize meritocracy for the white supremacist construct that it is and instead engage in a top-down, totalitarian effort to pave the playing field and smooth every last point of “disparate impact” out of existence. We leverage the full strength of DC to make sure no actual meritocratic fair play takes place. The same could be said of the “question everything” rallying cry of the Left’s revolution in higher education. That appealed to many aspiring scholar’s sense of intellectual curiosity. But a little while later it became clear that certain dogma were quietly exempted from that directive. There are certain “truths” that you were not only discouraged from question but stood liable to lose your welcome on campus if you did so.
In a sense, then, this week’s ruminations are just an extension of last week’s. It’s important to realize that even when the enemy is speaking words that seem to resonate with you, he isn’t actually referencing ideas that will not, visions of a future that don’t. The signifier might be identical, but the things signified are not. Because the fundamental assumptions, the worldview of the Left creates contradictions where we see none and erase contradictions that we’re positive exist. We see a mostly unremarkable football player enjoying the favor of all the good and the great in contemporary American society, with the entire media-government complex in his corner. The Left sees an outcast bravely fighting against the implacable tides of bigotry. Well.
There’s really no use in trying to have a discussion where you find some common ground between these two poles. And it’s clinically insane to follow the other side’s prescription for having such a discussion “ethically.” There’s nothing doing there. Personally, I say find a better use of your time. Pick a worthy target. Punch away.
John Glanton and others,
scroll down the linked page and you see a graph about Finnish political parties. The colored lines are listed on the right side. They are in order: 1) Blue; care / harm morality 2) Red; fairness / injustice morality 3) Green; loyalty / betrayal morality 4) Violet; authority / subversion morality 5) Light blue; sanctity / degradation morality.
https://blogs.aalto.fi/tunnepolitiikkaa/2015/04/10/moraalivaalikone-kuvio-puolueiden-vertailusta/
What you see in the graph is the morality of more liberal / leftist parties on the left, and more conservative / right parties on the right. What it means in practice is that for the liberals care / harm and fairness / injustice considerations are way more more important than loyalty / betrayal, authority / subversion and sanctity / degradation considerations. Thus liberals are fairly fanatical in their care and fairness policies and they devalue, oppose, leave unnoticed or scorn loyalty, authority and sanctity policies and considerations. Conservatives appreciate more loyalty, authority and sanctity than liberals, but for them too care and fairness considerations are more important than loyalty, authority and sanctity (the only little exception is Christian democrats on the “far” right, who evaluate sanctity little higher than justice). So what you see here is why the conservatives are forever the losers with their present mindset; the situation is the same in north-America and elsewhere in Europe. Liberals advocate fairly extreme or extreme fairness and care policies, and conservatives object a little bit because of loyalty, authority and sanctity considerations, but because fairness and care considerations are the most important for conservatives too, they eventually give up to the liberals arguments, conservatives slightly reluctantly or more slowly agree with the liberals. In essence conservatives are politically just one variation of the liberal political spectrum, products of liberal upbringing, propaganda and policies. To change this situation, to create genuine conservative politics, capabilities and results, conservatives must evaluate loyalty, authority and sanctity higher than fairness and care, especially loyalty to ethnic, racial and religious groups, including endogamy. Conservatives main authorities should be historical (dead) conservatives, because they often have timeless wisdom; they dont have self-interest and cannot be corrupted; they are not swayed by present fashions, illusions and propaganda; they cannot establish tyranny, repressive totalitarian system or kleptocracy; and they lead with advice and knowledge, not with commanding power. Conservatives should sanctify those things which they value and/or which deserve sanctity, and make them inviolable, especially against any liberal policies. What does this mean in practice? It means that generally conservatives defend their own groups, not abstract, universal and “disinterested” ideas of justice, which in the end defend mostly those liberals interests, who hold the highest power. This doesnt mean that conservatives abandon the idea of general justice in their own country, but they view and evaluate it from their own groups position and interests. It is propitious to us conservatives to stop looking upward politically, waiting that the political authorities make the arrangements that we want, and start to make our own groups arrangements by ourselves in the grassroots and middle level.
Addition, my party is third from the right, Perussuomalaiset = True Finns Party, opposes among other things liberal immigration policies, federal policies of Eu, redistribution inside Eu, development aid to developing countries (which is counterproductive and without results, by the way) and supports various conservative policies. Some of its politicians are economically on the right and some are on the left, so it is in this respect a curious cross-section of economic views. I am more on the right in economic matters.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/spiegel-interview-with-african-economics-expert-for-god-s-sake-please-stop-the-aid-a-363663.html
And punch the Reactosphere continues to do. Even if they knock down one, there are ten more who are immersing themselves in Reactionary thinking.
It has always been peculiar how even when one ‘oppressed’ strata of society becomes quite clearly more financially and culturally powerful as well as more liked in the demotic sense than their ‘oppressors’, the daynamic remains the same. The left are saying that no matter how high various minority ‘oppressed’ groups are elevated they will ALWAYS be ‘oppressed’. But this is a paradoxical indictment of their own ideology. It’s a testament to their failure if they truly believe this to be the case, for all their efforts are for naught.
The truth however, is that the people in charge know this is bogus. How could they not? They just use the ‘oppressor’/’oppressed’ narrative as a tool to manipulate the masses, who have been taught from birth to root for the underdog, regardless of what he represents or who he is.
Their actual ideology can be most simply defined as:
1) The evil must oppress
2) The righteous must be oppressed
3) No lie is too big, no cost too great, to see goals 1 & 2 realized
The goal of the left from square one, regardless of what they say, has always been the same. To turn the entire Traditional political order on its head. Humanity’s greatest souls and minds must be crushed underfoot, and those who yesterday were muckrakers must be the new vaunted class. If reality has to be done away with to secure this objective, so be it. All hail progress! Kali demands it.
I hope someone relayed to you some details of Anal Dish’s exit conversation with Pax at BI. It is significant because it happened to be the meeting he had just come from on the evening I first met him. But this “ya gotta punch up”/”don’t dare punch down” was literally what the Good Brahmin was telling him that afternoon. And of course, “punching down” was exactly Anal and all the Feminist Overlords were doing to Pax right that second. And to make a good punchline, Pax pointed out something to the effect, “Hey I’m the powerless one here, I’m the one getting sacked for violating your sacred sensibilities.” And stranger to irony that he is, Anil said something like “Yeah, and don’t you forget it!”
The whining scream of the Puritan, recognizable in any century.
John, jive is niggerish for bullshit. Jibe(to shift course while sailing before the wind, i.e. to track with my thoughts) is the word you want. Also, kiddie gloves are not the same as kidd (kidd: a young goat) gloves. One is an atrocity the other is soft and gentle. Perhaps you are the victim of autocorrect? Enjoy your twitter feed and long form work. MPC lurker crew, FEMA camp latrine scrubber checking in.
I wish I could blame those on autocorrect, but, no, just good old-fashioned ignorance. Both those are actually very interesting etymologies, too, in retrospect. Thanks for the drive-by vocab lesson.
Victims of autocorrect unite: that is kid gloves not kidd gloves.