Southern Poverty Law Center Finds Fewer Militiia Hate Groups, But Hypes Them Anyway;
Needing Additonal Hate Groups to Pad Their Fundraising Emails, They Turn to History's Greatest Monsters: Pick Up Artists

Both from Reason but via Instapundit.

The SPLC is now targeting "hate" as documented in a PUA-watch site called, wait for it, Man Boobz.

t is truly sublime that a group the DHS cited in its controversial report on right-wing terrorism now turns to a website called "Man Boobz" for its hate-group reporting.

More baby talk. What these guys are doing is taking a cultural dislike of some people -- which is certainly fair enough; PUAs generally are disliked by anyone but other PUAs -- but then attempting to turn a subjective distaste into an objective trespass by calling it "hate."

And they do this again and again and again. They don't like the FRC, so the FRC is a "hate group," and then they send genuine haters over there to murder them. And of course they don't apologize for it.

I was just talking about this phenomenon, the attempt by various parochial cohorts to transmogrify their own class preferences for some sort of object standard by claiming different standards lead to hate -- or murder and rape.

What people do when they can't prove their own sense of taste or sensitivity to some issues is immediately begin postulating a ridiculous string of X leads to Y and Y and leads to Z reasoning to claim that they're not just objecting on grounds of personal, idiosyncratic, biased, and politically-motivated taste, but are in fact attempting to reduce real-world tangible evils like rape and violence against women.

See? I'm not just objecting on grounds of taste that Limbaugh said Sandra Fluke was "like a slut;" what I'm really doing is fighting rape.

So I win: My sensitivities must carry the day.

...

The fact is, there is no I Win card in matters of taste. De gustibus non est desputandum -- In matters of taste, there is no argument, as it's out of the realm of the intellectual and things that can be proven. And it's In Latin (TM), so you know it's true.

But what people are doing is trying to craft an intellectual argument -- drawing in lots of risible claims of causality -- to "prove" that their taste is not merely taste but An Fact.

Well, it's not An Fact. Never will be An Fact. And all this crap about Limbaugh's Fluke joke leading, somehow, to violence against women is just an absolutely stupid argument offered up by someone who Rilly Rilly Rilly Rilly Wants to Win an Argument Because, Rape.

I have noticed this growing tendency of people to reject the proper language when discussing things. Instead of using the language of taste in discussing matters of taste, we instead begin discussing things like "hostile environment" and "real world effects."

It's a scam. The left created this, of course (as they have created most abuses of language and conceptualization). But we should resist it. Because ultimately this sort of thinking -- that even the most trivial action (or inaction) by a person somehow results in a real world horror which we are duty-bound to avoid, by whatever means necessary -- is ultimately an argument that People Can't Be Trusted With Freedom and We Need Some Sort of Enforcement Mechanism To Make Sure They Think and Say the Right Things.

I seized upon this Onion thing [the Tweet that called the young actress a bad word] because I've been thinking about this lately -- that I can't seem to see anyone ever saying "That's tasteless" anymore. The left abandoned that 20 years ago, as every Word became a Weapon and they began their disarmament campaign against Assault Language.

...

It's all so false. There is virtually no action or utterance one can undertake now without someone who disapproves of that action or utterance, whether on the left or right, claiming it will result in some Parade of Horribles which we simply cannot abide.

It's also Baby Talk -- yes, dear, every single entry on your What's Hot and What's Not list is objectively provable to belong there. Every squeaking fart of a thought you have is An Fact, and it's furthermore An Fact of such consequence it requires Government Action.

Karl Marx on Indignation and Critique as Weapons Against the Existing State of Man: Few "respectable" people acknowledge it, but this is all just textbook Marxism.

War on the German state of affairs! By all means! They are below the level of history, they are beneath any criticism, but they are still an object of criticism like the criminal who is below the level of humanity but still an object for the executioner. In the struggle against that state of affairs, criticism is no passion of the head, it is the head of passion. It is not a lancet, it is a weapon. Its object is its enemy, which it wants not to refute but to exterminate. For the spirit of that state of affairs is refuted. In itself, it is no object worthy of thought, it is an existence which is as despicable as it is despised. Criticism does not need to make things clear to itself as regards this object, for it has already settled accounts with it. It no longer assumes the quality of an end-in-itself, but only of a means. Its essential pathos is indignation, its essential work is denunciation.

Indignation and denunciation? Well I've never seen any of that from the left...

Criticism dealing with this content is criticism in a hand-to-hand fight, and in such a fight the point is not whether the opponent is a noble, equal, interesting opponent, the point is to strike him.

Alinsky might have read that once or twice. Obama too.

Later in the essay Marx writes of the basic mindset the revolutionary must possess:

I am nothing but I must be everything!

Lot of that goin' round, eh?

posted by Ace at 06:56 PM

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