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24 Types of Progressive Mousepads

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Barry gets a cut of all t-shirt and mousepad proceeds, btw.

In the spirit (and using the artwork) of Barry Deutsch’s “24 Types of Libertarian”, I present this mashup: the 24 Types of Progressive.

(It’s cool that I used his art. He even lettered it for me. It’s a joint project. That being the case,  I can’t resist hassling Barry a little bit and apologizing for the mostly-male, mostly-white cast. Barry’s just sexist and racist that way, saying “I could revise the artwork to more accurately reflect the gender and racial balance of the progressive movement. But I would rather sit here playing Civ4 and guzzling bourbon.” Shocking, but what can you do.)

I have to say this “cartooning” thing seems pretty easy. I wrote up a few ideas, sent them off to Barry, went to bed and poof, in the morning a cartoon magically appeared. What’s all the complaining about, artist-type people? Just get yourself a Barry!

Click the image to see the full-size version.

At Alas!, Amp posts this (rather on-point) cartoon basically pointing out that it isn’t black people’s job to reassure white people that the white people are on the side of the angels. A fair point, and it’s a pretty funny cartoon too, esp. the last inset panel, where the black lady asks “do you even hear the words I say?” and the white lady responds “the ones I like”.

A few days later, Amp’s coblogger Mandolin makes a post discussing white views of racism, and making the interesting historical point that white opinions about racism and race relations haven’t changed very much in the last 40-50 years, and that arguably this demonstrates a large degree of disconnect between white people’s experiences and black people’s experiences on race in the US. (Short version, in the 1960s white people thought racism wasn’t a problem even though nowadays we pretty much all recognize that it was; today white people still think racism isn’t a problem, and Mandolin’s argument is that this indicates that we should be cautious about validating that perception.)

In the discussion following the post, yet-another-coblogger Myca writes in response to a white commenter’s dismissive opinion of Mandolin’s point:

Well, and this is why I think it’s so important to privilege the words and experiences of PoCs in conversations about racism…When you have zero skin in the game, it’s easy to be cavalier. Maybe we should listen to the folks whose skin is the game.

Also a fair point. So a couple of comments later, an African-American commenter named BluntHammer comes in and posts a long comment, not so much disagreeing with Mandolin’s argument as saying that the black community has made its own contribution to white perceptions.

And, well, wow. Mandolin’s response is basically an unbelievably snotty, educated white liberal’s dismissal of a black person’s contribution to the conversation. She starts off by mocking his (completely innocuous) handle. She then goes on to explain why this man’s life experience is irrelevant to the discussion, because it disagrees with “the sociology”, and says that he is “gloating” about his success in escaping the ghetto. She tells him that his opinion is at variance from what the majority of black people think, and that therefore she doesn’t have to take it seriously. She expresses doubt that he is actually black. She…oh, go read it for yourself, it’s quite a remarkable text. (I’m going to go ahead and reproduce it below in full, just to have an archival record, because I wouldn’t be surprised if she ends up editing.)

So I guess that privileging the words and experiences of people of color in discussions of racism…kind of depends on the content of those words and experiences. Black people who don’t buy into the progressive worldview of racism? Deluded tools, explicitly compared to UFO abductees.

Progressives love to listen to black people. At least, the black people who say the things that progressives want to hear.

Read the rest of this entry »

An interesting Craigslist ad for any of my Denver-area bloggy/journo friends.

http://denver.craigslist.org/wri/1502872237.html

Ann Althouse and her beau Meade have tied the knot, right here in beautiful Colorado (where the law permits people to conduct the ceremony themselves)! Well done, thou good and faithful bloggers.

Amanda Marcotte isn’t bitter about, nor are she and her blog buddies at Pandagon obsessed with, Ann Althouse’s impending nuptials. Not even a little bit!

Ever get sick of the long anti-materialist “you Americans with your SUVs and your big-screen TVs” rants so popular among the hard economic left?

Him too.

Full of awesome. Go, read.

I have been a long-time reader and occasional commenter over at Hugo Schwyzer’s blog. Although I disagree with much of Hugo’s writing and belief system, I’ve found his work to be challenging to me as a Christian and as a man. Less nobly, I’ve been amused at his moralistic self-contradictions; just as one example, like many people with his type of uber-Green views, Hugo flies all over the world with nary a twinge of conscience, completely blind to how discrediting his behavior is to his ideals. (But he buys carbon credits, so that makes it all right. Eye-roll.)

Hugo embraces the animal rights movement and is personally a vegan – a welcome sign of consistency, I suppose, since one might expect him to advocate for animal rights while eating meat constantly and buying “vegetable credits”. However, his elevation of the moral status of animals has gone past the point of reason. It is arguable that research on vole behavior and brain chemistry (involving the killing of the animals) might not be justifiable; certainly, it is a reasonable position to be opposed to such research. (Although Amanda Marcotte, of all people, chimes in with a comment that points out why such research is valuable.)

In the comments, though, Hugo goes on to make a point that is simply, incontrovertibly, around-the-bend moonshine batshit insane. Regarding his father, who died a few years ago, Hugo writes:

I would not sacrifice the life of a single vole or monkey or rat so that my father could have lived. And I loved that man with all my heart — but I know, in the final analysis, that all living and sentient, pain and joy-feeling creatures are equally valuable.

I have to say that, with sympathy to Hugo’s hypothetical moral dilemma, I don’t know a meaningful definition of “love” which would prioritize a vole’s life over a person’s. “I love you, but not enough to kill this little hairy rat to save your life.” Yeah, great, thanks. There’s probably a Hallmark card for that.

But it’s the closing phrase that is truly mad. All sentient life is equally valuable? A dog is a pig is a rat is a baby? Two ferrets trump one human infant? This is Singer-esque, and it’s morally insane. Valuing life is a good thing. Doing so in a hyper-egalitarian, “everything is equal” fashion, is nuts. Hugo is aware, not that his position is crazy, but that his advocacy for it is turning people off; he’s announced a moratorium on animal rights blogging for the rest of the year. Hopefully in that time of reflection he will come to a more moderate place.

Jesse of Pandagon decides it’s hilarious to mock John McCain as “Manhug McCain” after seeing this photo of McCain hugging Bush.

Jesse doesn’t know – or perhaps he does – that the reason McCain hugs people like that is because while he was fighting in Vietnam, he was shot down, breaking both his arms, which were never properly treated. While he was a POW, he was brutally tortured by the Viet Cong, further damaging his arms. He can no longer raise his arms very high; this is about as good a hug as he can give.

The radical left: bringing class and style to political snark since 1968.

I wonder if the competence with which the conventions are run correlates with the competence of the campaigns that are going to be run. I just found out today that BNN won’t be credentialed for the Republican National Convention; just finding this out was a hassle, since they never actually responded to our request the first time and had to be prompted three times to get us a damn answer. Yeah, guys, wait until the last minute. It’s not like your convention is in another state, or that we’d need to make arrangements in advance.

The Democrats, by comparison, were downright solicitous of blogs in general and us in particular. They invited all the bloggers to the press walkthrough of the convention facility months ago, long before they even had a credentialing process in place. They set up a multiply tiered system of credentials to get the largest possible number of bloggers through the doors. After we got our application in, they promptly let us know they received it, and they got us an answer quickly. I don’t recall exactly when we applied – it was around the same time for both conventions – but the Democrats advised us we were credentialed on May 29 – that’s more than two months ago, Republican National Guild of Procrastinators – giving us plenty of time to arrange housing, travel, and make other plans. They also set up, in conjunction with some big liberal blogs, a blog working zone outside the convention center for those bloggers who didn’t get credentialed but who want to cover the convention anyway.

The only bobble on the Democrat side was that it took a couple of phone calls to get the convention rate for our housing. Other than that, it’s been smooth sailing. Perhaps the credentialed organizations are being well-treated on the Republican side, not that we would know (sob).

In any event, the bottom line is that BNN will be extensively covering the Democratic convention with live on-the-spot blogging, interviews, etc. Our coverage of the Republican convention will be limited to (maybe) our Minneapolis-area writers doing whatever they can on a drive-by.

I hope the rest of the Republican organization does a better job going forward.

Well, this turns out to be a hoax. I’m glad. And, the cracks about the obtuseness of those of us who fell for it aside, Ann’s evisceration of this foolish young “artist” is classic, and I endorse every word.