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Liberal puts PC Culture on Blast
#1

Liberal puts PC Culture on Blast

Excellent article about how PC culture is actually the antithesis of liberal ideology and that it benefits no one.

Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say, by Jonathan Chait

I'm not going to post the full article because it deserves the clicks, but here are some choice excerpts:

Quote:Quote:

Around 2 a.m. on December 12, four students approached the apartment of Omar Mahmood, a Muslim student at the University of Michigan, who had recently published a column in a school newspaper about his perspective as a minority on campus. The students, who were recorded on a building surveillance camera wearing baggy hooded sweatshirts to hide their identity, littered Mahmood’s doorway with copies of his column, scrawled with messages like “You scum embarrass us,” “Shut the fuck up,” and “DO YOU EVEN GO HERE?! LEAVE!!” They posted a picture of a demon and splattered eggs.

This might appear to be the sort of episode that would stoke the moral conscience of students on a progressive campus like Ann Arbor, and it was quickly agreed that an act of biased intimidation had taken place. But Mahmood was widely seen as the perpetrator rather than the victim. His column, published in the school’s conservative newspaper, had spoofed the culture of taking offense that pervades the campus. Mahmood satirically pretended to denounce “a white cis-gendered hetero upper-class man” who offered to help him up when he slipped, leading him to denounce “our barbaric attitude toward people of left-handydnyss.” The gentle tone of his mockery was closer to Charlie Brown than to Charlie Hebdo.

The Michigan Daily, where Mahmood also worked as a columnist and film critic, objected to the placement of his column in the conservative paper but hardly wanted his satirical column in its own pages. Mahmood later said that he was told by the editor that his column had created a “hostile environment,” in which at least one Daily staffer felt threatened, and that he must write a letter of apology to the staff. When he refused, the Daily fired him, and the subsequent vandalism of his apartment served to confirm his status as thought-criminal.

Quote:Quote:

At a growing number of campuses, professors now attach “trigger warnings” to texts that may upset students, and there is a campaign to eradicate “microaggressions,” or small social slights that might cause searing trauma. These newly fashionable terms merely repackage a central tenet of the first p.c. movement: that people should be expected to treat even faintly unpleasant ideas or behaviors as full-scale offenses. Stanford recently canceled a performance of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson after protests by Native American students. UCLA students staged a sit-in to protest microaggressions such as when a professor corrected a student’s decision to spell the word indigenous with an uppercase I — one example of many “perceived grammatical choices that in actuality reflect ideologies.” A theater group at Mount Holyoke College recently announced it would no longer put on The Vagina Monologues in part because the material excludes women without vaginas. These sorts of episodes now hardly even qualify as exceptional.

Trigger warnings aren’t much help in actually overcoming trauma — an analysis by the Institute of Medicine has found that the best approach is controlled exposure to it, and experts say avoidance can reinforce suffering. Indeed, one professor at a prestigious university told me that, just in the last few years, she has noticed a dramatic upsurge in her students’ sensitivity toward even the mildest social or ideological slights; she and her fellow faculty members are terrified of facing accusations of triggering trauma — or, more consequentially, violating her school’s new sexual-harassment policy — merely by carrying out the traditional academic work of intellectual exploration. “This is an environment of fear, believe it or not,” she told me by way of explaining her request for anonymity. It reminds her of the previous outbreak of political correctness — “Every other day I say to my friends, ‘How did we get back to 1991?’ ”

Quote:Quote:

It also makes money. Every media company knows that stories about race and gender bias draw huge audiences, making identity politics a reliable profit center in a media industry beset by insecurity. A year ago, for instance, a photographer compiled images of Fordham students displaying signs recounting “an instance of racial microaggression they have faced.” The stories ranged from uncomfortable (“No, where are you really from?”) to relatively innocuous (“ ‘Can you read this?’ He showed me a Japanese character on his phone”). BuzzFeed published part of her project, and it has since received more than 2 million views. This is not an anomaly.

In a short period of time, the p.c. movement has assumed a towering presence in the psychic space of politically active people in general and the left in particular. “All over social media, there dwell armies of unpaid but widely read commentators, ready to launch hashtag campaigns and circulate Change.org petitions in response to the slightest of identity-politics missteps,” Rebecca Traister wrote recently in The New Republic.

Quote:Quote:

Political correctness is a term whose meaning has been gradually diluted since it became a flashpoint 25 years ago. People use the phrase to describe politeness (perhaps to excess), or evasion of hard truths, or (as a term of abuse by conservatives) liberalism in general. The confusion has made it more attractive to liberals, who share the goal of combating race and gender bias.

But political correctness is not a rigorous commitment to social equality so much as a system of left-wing ideological repression. Not only is it not a form of liberalism; it is antithetical to liberalism. Indeed, its most frequent victims turn out to be liberals themselves.

Quote:Quote:

The right wing in the United States is unusually strong compared with other industrialized democracies, and it has spent two generations turning liberal into a feared buzzword with radical connotations. This long propaganda campaign has implanted the misperception — not only among conservatives but even many liberals — that liberals and “the left” stand for the same things.

It is true that liberals and leftists both want to make society more economically and socially egalitarian. But liberals still hold to the classic Enlightenment political tradition that cherishes individuals rights, freedom of expression, and the protection of a kind of free political marketplace. (So, for that matter, do most conservatives.)

The Marxist left has always dismissed liberalism’s commitment to protecting the rights of its political opponents — you know, the old line often misattributed to Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it” — as hopelessly naïve. If you maintain equal political rights for the oppressive capitalists and their proletarian victims, this will simply keep in place society’s unequal power relations. Why respect the rights of the class whose power you’re trying to smash? And so, according to Marxist thinking, your political rights depend entirely on what class you belong to.

The modern far left has borrowed the Marxist critique of liberalism and substituted race and gender identities for economic ones. “The liberal view,” wrote MacKinnon 30 years ago, “is that abstract categories — like speech or equality — define systems. Every time you strengthen free speech in one place, you strengthen it everywhere. Strengthening the free speech of the Klan strengthens the free speech of Blacks.” She deemed this nonsensical: “It equates substantive powerlessness with substantive power and calls treating these the same, ‘equality.’ ”

Quote:Quote:

The p.c. style of politics has one serious, possibly fatal drawback: It is exhausting. Claims of victimhood that are useful within the left-wing subculture may alienate much of America. The movement’s dour puritanism can move people to outrage, but it may prove ill suited to the hopeful mood required of mass politics. Nor does it bode well for the movement’s longevity that many of its allies are worn out. “It seems to me now that the public face of social liberalism has ceased to seem positive, joyful, human, and freeing,” confessed the progressive writer Freddie deBoer. “There are so many ways to step on a land mine now, so many terms that have become forbidden, so many attitudes that will get you cast out if you even appear to hold them. I’m far from alone in feeling that it’s typically not worth it to engage, given the risks.” Goldberg wrote recently about people “who feel emotionally savaged by their involvement in [online feminism] — not because of sexist trolls, but because of the slashing righteousness of other feminists.” Former Feministing editor Samhita Mukhopadhyay told her, “Everyone is so scared to speak right now.”

That the new political correctness has bludgeoned even many of its own supporters into despondent silence is a triumph, but one of limited use. Politics in a democracy is still based on getting people to agree with you, not making them afraid to disagree. The historical record of political movements that sought to expand freedom for the oppressed by eliminating it for their enemies is dismal. The historical record of American liberalism, which has extended social freedoms to blacks, Jews, gays, and women, is glorious. And that glory rests in its confidence in the ultimate power of reason, not coercion, to triumph

It's nice to see a liberal calling out the leftists for what they really are: totalitarian fascists. While this article isn't news to any of us here at RVF, this is a step in the right direction for the general populace. The end is near.
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#2

Liberal puts PC Culture on Blast

Thanks for sharing, excellent article.
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#3

Liberal puts PC Culture on Blast

Surprise surprise, Gawker posted a response:

http://gawker.com/punch-drunk-jonathan-c...1682078451

Go through the response and see how many times Cheit, the author of the article in the OP is refereed to as a white, a male, and/or straight; in a derogatory sense of course. This is a shining example of how identity politics has overtaken any sort of political discussion here in the US. What matters the most is not well reasoned and put together an argument is but who is saying it. Your position on the privilege hierarchy determines how deserving you of being listened to in good faith.
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#4

Liberal puts PC Culture on Blast

The author makes a really good point about "leftist" and "liberal" not being the same thing. It's always bugged me that the liberalism referred to in the Enlightenment seems like the complete opposite of what's called liberalism today. The reality is that social justice, feminism, and anti-racism are most properly categorized as anti-liberal Marxist leftist ideologies, since they promote the collective good over the rights of the individual.
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#5

Liberal puts PC Culture on Blast

Another leftist posts a response. Quick summary of his article: "Chait is a dick using mean words and being smug...but he's basically right"

http://fredrikdeboer.com/2015/01/29/i-do...-you-guys/

"These things aren’t hypothetical. This isn’t some thought experiment. This is where I live, where I have lived. These and many, many more depressing stories of good people pushed out and marginalized in left-wing circles because they didn’t use the proper set of social and class signals to satisfy the world of intersectional politics. So you’ll forgive me when I roll my eyes at the army of media liberals, stuffed into their narrow enclaves, responding to Chait by insisting that there is no problem here and that anyone who says there is should be considered the enemy."
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#6

Liberal puts PC Culture on Blast

Quote: (01-29-2015 11:50 PM)Wutang Wrote:  

Another leftist posts a response. Quick summary of his article: "Chait is a dick using mean words and being smug...but he's basically right"

http://fredrikdeboer.com/2015/01/29/i-do...-you-guys/

"These things aren’t hypothetical. This isn’t some thought experiment. This is where I live, where I have lived. These and many, many more depressing stories of good people pushed out and marginalized in left-wing circles because they didn’t use the proper set of social and class signals to satisfy the world of intersectional politics. So you’ll forgive me when I roll my eyes at the army of media liberals, stuffed into their narrow enclaves, responding to Chait by insisting that there is no problem here and that anyone who says there is should be considered the enemy."

Thanks for the link. It was a nice article.
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#7

Liberal puts PC Culture on Blast

Quote: (01-29-2015 11:28 PM)Wutang Wrote:  

Surprise surprise, Gawker posted a response:

http://gawker.com/punch-drunk-jonathan-c...1682078451

The person who wrote this (Alex Pareene) must be an absolute idiot. I'd love to rip it apart paragraph by paragraph, but that would be too exhausting, so instead I've chosen one excerpt which I found most ludicrous. Behold:

Quote:Quote:

As we get to the end of Chait's essay, we can tally up the casualties of political correctness. One anti-abortion protester was shoved and had her sign vandalized. A few millionaires were disinvited from college campuses, and performances of two plays were canceled. Various people feel disinclined to engage in online debates. Participants in a Facebook group had to deal with a Bad Thread. And a college student was fired from his school newspaper. That's one person whose life was in any meaningful way made materially worse by the scourge of political correctness, in nearly 5,000 words of dire warnings about the philosophical threat posed by left-wing speech policing.

So, can I ask you, Alex, how many lives are "in any meaningful way made materially worse" by microaggressions, triggering images, racially insensitive comments, gender insensitive comments, men spreading out on the subway, 4chan trolls, and all the other injustices you SJWs dedicate your lives to fighting?

By the way, in case you're curious... exactly what you were picturing:
[Image: 6a00d83452403c69e2017742e55d3c970d-pi]
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#8

Liberal puts PC Culture on Blast

I don't know who this Jonathan Chait is, but he said everything correctly. I salute that.

"Imagine" by HCE | Hitler reacts to Battle of Montreal | An alternative use for squid that has never crossed your mind before
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#9

Liberal puts PC Culture on Blast

I wonder how people would react if a minority or a woman said this.
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#10

Liberal puts PC Culture on Blast

I'm glad someone started a thread on this article. I saw it earlier and wondered why it hadn't yet appeared.

Chait raises one very interesting point: Left-wing self loathing is exhausting. They incessantly demand of themselves. Blacks can't just be called blacks; they must be called People of Color (5 syllables) or African Americans (6 syllables). I guess whites don't get to be called Caucasian Americans.

They fight themselves and this is their ultimate demise.

Quote: (01-30-2015 12:08 AM)DrewP Wrote:  

[Image: 6a00d83452403c69e2017742e55d3c970d-pi]

How I have evolved. A decade ago I wouldn't have thought much of him one way or another. Now his image promptly fills me with disgust. Everything about him, the soft face, the appeasing look, just screams weak.

If I stop and think hard, I can imagine his feelings of inferiority, because I once made myself feel the same way.

But I'd rather forget that.
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#11

Liberal puts PC Culture on Blast

Quote: (01-29-2015 11:28 PM)Wutang Wrote:  

Surprise surprise, Gawker posted a response:

http://gawker.com/punch-drunk-jonathan-c...1682078451

Go through the response and see how many times Cheit, the author of the article in the OP is refereed to as a white, a male, and/or straight; in a derogatory sense of course. This is a shining example of how identity politics has overtaken any sort of political discussion here in the US. What matters the most is not well reasoned and put together an argument is but who is saying it. Your position on the privilege hierarchy determines how deserving you of being listened to in good faith.

I realize how dishonest this is of me, but that article reminded me why I just ignore anything coming from places like Gawker.
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#12

Liberal puts PC Culture on Blast

Quote: (01-30-2015 01:02 AM)Shortest Straw Wrote:  

Quote: (01-30-2015 12:08 AM)DrewP Wrote:  

[Image: 6a00d83452403c69e2017742e55d3c970d-pi]

How I have evolved. A decade ago I wouldn't have thought much of him one way or another. Now his image promptly fills me with disgust. Everything about him, the soft face, the appeasing look, just screams weak.

Wait, is that a him, her, or an it?
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#13

Liberal puts PC Culture on Blast

Quote: (01-30-2015 04:47 AM)BortimusPrime Wrote:  

Quote: (01-30-2015 01:02 AM)Shortest Straw Wrote:  

Quote: (01-30-2015 12:08 AM)DrewP Wrote:  

[Image: 6a00d83452403c69e2017742e55d3c970d-pi]

How I have evolved. A decade ago I wouldn't have thought much of him one way or another. Now his image promptly fills me with disgust. Everything about him, the soft face, the appeasing look, just screams weak.

Wait, is that a him, her, or an it?

I stand corrected. I don't know.
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#14

Liberal puts PC Culture on Blast

Alex Pareene is a worthless leftist who was recently out of a job, ignore this critical t-deficient.

I'm surprised anyone here is forgiving to guys like Chait, he's awful as well. In case of PC there shouldn't be a small-wins-count! attitude among those on the receiving end. Chait is just being eaten by people who take PC principles to their logical conclusion: white straight males are bad and need to be fought in every form and function. If you've got two out of three (white, straight, male), you're in trouble as well. Chait will cheer the destruction of your life and career if you'd be one of those in the middle of tweetstorm mob.

Chait just wants PC to be aimed against rightwingers, not nice liberals like him. He's all for morally flogging anyone to the right of him. Fuck that guy.
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#15

Liberal puts PC Culture on Blast

Quote: (01-30-2015 01:02 AM)Shortest Straw Wrote:  

Quote: (01-30-2015 12:08 AM)DrewP Wrote:  

[Image: 6a00d83452403c69e2017742e55d3c970d-pi]

How I have evolved. A decade ago I wouldn't have thought much of him one way or another. Now his image promptly fills me with disgust. Everything about him, the soft face, the appeasing look, just screams weak.

If I stop and think hard, I can imagine his feelings of inferiority, because I once made myself feel the same way.

But I'd rather forget that.
I saved a friend from ending up like that by showing him the manosphere. He took to it quickly, having an Armenian father who would talk shit about various taboo people like Muslims, feminists, and talk about how McCarthy was right.

He can't watch sitcoms like Everybody Loves Raymond anymore, and has contempt for short hair.

Myself being raised by a fairly chauvinistic man never thought short hair looked as good as long hair, and being socially retarded had no problem saying that if asked.

What a world. We've all come far. The Blue Pill is the default after all.
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#16

Liberal puts PC Culture on Blast

Quote: (01-30-2015 05:01 AM)GeroMeroHero Wrote:  

He can't watch sitcoms like Everybody Loves Raymond anymore,

I don't understand how anyone can like that show.

Quote:Quote:

and has contempt for short hair.

Unfortunately, my last two bangs had short hair.

I'm the King of Beijing!
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#17

Liberal puts PC Culture on Blast

Quote: (01-29-2015 11:28 PM)Wutang Wrote:  

Surprise surprise, Gawker posted a response:

http://gawker.com/punch-drunk-jonathan-c...1682078451

Go through the response and see how many times Cheit, the author of the article in the OP is refereed to as a white, a male, and/or straight; in a derogatory sense of course. This is a shining example of how identity politics has overtaken any sort of political discussion here in the US. What matters the most is not well reasoned and put together an argument is but who is saying it. Your position on the privilege hierarchy determines how deserving you of being listened to in good faith.

[Image: clap.gif]
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#18

Liberal puts PC Culture on Blast

Quote: (01-30-2015 04:58 AM)Maciano Wrote:  

Alex Pareene is a worthless leftist who was recently out of a job, ignore this critical t-deficient.

I'm surprised anyone here is forgiving to guys like Chait, he's awful as well. In case of PC there shouldn't be a small-wins-count! attitude among those on the receiving end. Chait is just being eaten by people who take PC principles to their logical conclusion: white straight males are bad and need to be fought in every form and function. If you've got two out of three (white, straight, male), you're in trouble as well. Chait will cheer the destruction of your life and career if you'd be one of those in the middle of tweetstorm mob.

Chait just wants PC to be aimed against rightwingers, not nice liberals like him. He's all for morally flogging anyone to the right of him. Fuck that guy.

That was basically my conclusion as well. The ironic thing is this guy is basically teetering close to the PC line himself (race baiting, etc.), and that still wasn't good enough for the SJWs.

Quote: (01-30-2015 12:08 AM)DrewP Wrote:  

[Image: 6a00d83452403c69e2017742e55d3c970d-pi]

No more proof needed that these people make absolutely no effort to take care of themselves. This guy is obviously far from naturally handsome but he could be a lot better if he would ditch those glasses, change his hair, change his clothes, and put on a few pounds of muscle, which are all entirely doable with relatively little effort.

These people demand the world from everyone else but nothing for themselves, exactly the leftist mentality going all the way back. The proof is in the pictures of all of them.

Read my Latest at Return of Kings: 11 Lessons in Leadership from Julius Caesar
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#19

Liberal puts PC Culture on Blast

Quote:Quote:

If you maintain equal political rights for the oppressive capitalists and their proletarian victims, this will simply keep in place society’s unequal power relations. Why respect the rights of the class whose power you’re trying to smash? And so, according to Marxist thinking, your political rights depend entirely on what class you belong to.

The modern far left has borrowed the Marxist critique of liberalism and substituted race and gender identities for economic ones. “The liberal view,” wrote MacKinnon 30 years ago, “is that abstract categories — like speech or equality — define systems. Every time you strengthen free speech in one place, you strengthen it everywhere. Strengthening the free speech of the Klan strengthens the free speech of Blacks.” She deemed this nonsensical: “It equates substantive powerlessness with substantive power and calls treating these the same, ‘equality.’ ”

This really clicked with me and helped me better understand the term cultural marxism. Compared to most people in the US, and probably this forum, I am a liberal. That said, I have been feeling disgust toward PC culture and some aspects of the left.

I suspect most people that vote democratic nationally are similarly not extreme or PC, it is just the media and academic liberals that sour leftist ideals, similarly to how the religious and reactionary right do on the other end of the spectrum.

It is too bad the parties seem to be getting more extreme and moderate liberals and moderate conservatives can't come together more to find common ground on common sense issues that would increase prosperity and freedom for everyone.
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#20

Liberal puts PC Culture on Blast

I've been drinking....but here are my two points:

1) If these white SJWs hate themselves so much, why don't they just commit suicide...oh, they're too narcissistic for that...

2) ISIS/Al-Qaeda should storm the Gawker offices, I'm sure the homosexual propaganda they spew is enough to offend, right? Interesting to see the response if something like that actually happened.

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. - H L Mencken
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#21

Liberal puts PC Culture on Blast

That Gawker article reeks of a lot of hypocrisy and bullshit. The article could be summarized as "boo-hoo to my 'enemies', none of their problems are actually serious, the left doesn't incessantly excommunicate and scalp it's own ranks for no reason, that Muslim guy who lost his job at the newspaper for poking fun was straight and male so it's OK to discriminate against him, nothing to see here folks".

That guy Jonathan Chait (probably) is a whiner, but he makes a lot of salient observations that anybody on the other side of the spectrum could see immediately. It disgusts me that a movement cannibalizes itself to gain cred and becomes radical past the point of parody in the meantime.

The dingus on Gawker is wrong to criticize Chait anyway about "the nature of criticism" since he has done nothing but pathologically avoid peer criticism his entire life.
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#22

Liberal puts PC Culture on Blast

In addition to the Gawker response, Jezebel also wrote their own response which pretty much had the same thesis: calling out Chait for being a white heterosexual male and misinterpreting his piece as him whining about being corrected by the arbiters of what truth is (ie. anyone that isn't a white heterosexual male) when what he is actually speaking out against is being SILENCED - not just merely having someone to disagree with you but not being able to have your say because of simply who you are - which you think leftists would be able to understand considering how much they talk about it but their utter lack of self-introspection blinds them to what is happening

http://jezebel.com/a-note-to-chait-disse...1682017960

I know we don't want to give Jezebel any clicks but I would urge you to look at the comments in this piece and see what is happening right now, leftists are starting to turn on each other. As an example, here is a comment written in response to who expressed a sentiment along the lines of "Yeah that Chait guy is a dick BUT I have to admit he has a point":

"You should totally flee! We don't need your patronizing and condescending attitude. No movement needs a quisling. You can go be the right wing version of the "cool chick." You know, the girl who shows the bros how chill she is because she doesn't challenge their views and has nothing but hostility toward feminazis who complain about everything. They will love it. They love tokens on that side! I am sure you will find the right-wing and straight white men totally welcoming to your ideas on class, sexism, racism, gay rights, launching wars of aggression, rape culture, the right of women not to be harassed in the street, reproductive rights, healthcare, bank regulation, guns, domestic violence, evolution, climate change, and stem cells...So, go, be free to this nest of inclusiveness where your voice will be heard and you can be among people like Chait, Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, O'Reilly, Steve King, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Sara Palin, Rick Santorum, Paul Ryan, and Mitt Romney."

Which was followed by this response:

"LOL the fact that you put Jonathan Chait in the list with the rest of those people, shows how extremist you are. I bet you're one of those who think Dan Savage is a sexist who hates women and promotes rape, too, which seems to be a prevalent viewpoint among the most radical and extremist of the Jezebel commentariat."

What I take from this is now is the time to strike. 2014 was the year I started seeing a big backlash against SJW politics which was personified in movements like Gamergate. The pendulum began to change directions in 2014 and in 2015, I'm expecting it to start swinging back towards sanity. Ride the wave guys, now is the time to be on the attack while the enemy is quibbling among themselves. Guys like Roosh have been grinding for the past few years for our cause back we were written off as nothing more then angry internet virgins and we are now finally seeing the fruits. The attacks from the left will only become stronger but what that shows to me is fear - fear that they are finally losing their control on the cultural narrative of society.
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