Two recent controversies have shown a particular pathology of the left. The first is the fight over the Washington Redskins, and how the Redskins have lost their trademark for being disparaging. The second is the strong reaction of the left to Miss Nevada saying women should learn to defend themselves from rape.
First, the Redskins. Look at their logo:
Are those logos in any way disparaging or insulting?
No. The first shows a strong, proud man with a calm, dignified bearing, the second shows a a strong, proud warrior raring for action. Both are rather complimentary to Aboriginals.
I am part Norse, so the Vikings team has a mascot of my heritage.
Is this disparaging? No, because, as with the Redskins logo, he’s a strong, determined man. In fact, although I don’t follow NFL at all, my team(an extremely shallow allegiance) is the Vikings, simply because they are the Vikings, and they celebrate my heritage.
So the question is why do leftists think portraying Aboriginals as strong, proud men and celebrating their strength is disparaging?
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Next we come to Miss Nevada. She stated a very sane and rational opinion:
But I think more awareness is very important so women can learn how to protect themselves. Myself, as a fourth-degree black belt, I learned from a young age that you need to be confident and be able to defend yourself. And I think that’s something that we should start to really implement for a lot of women.
The feminists freaked out.
Here’s one example that really shows the absurdity of this condemnation: a male feminist condemns a man who teaches women to protect themselves from rape as a misogynist, while at the also praising someone who raped children.
So why do leftists think that teaching women to be strong and to protect themselves is misogynistic?
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The answer to both of these is the same, the words ‘disparaging’, ‘racist’, ‘misogynist’, etc. are not used for their literal definition, they are used merely for their exo-semantic meaning of ‘bad’. They carry the same semantic meaning as a pack of monkeys pointing and hooting.
The words don’t mean much in themselves, but the reason for the pointing and hooting is what’s important.
The left needs women and minorities to remain victims.
If one points the Aboriginal back to his heritage, the proud brave, independent, strong, and free, the impoverished and beaten-down Aboriginal on the reservation may look at his life and ask, “Why are we so broken, so dependent, when our ancestors were so strong, so proud?”
If a young woman learns to protect herself and avoid drunkenness, she won’t have need of the rape hysteria of feminists. If she learns self-responsibility and takes control of her own life, she won’t need feminism and its war against personal responsibility at all.
This is what the leftists fear. They fear Aboriginals might decide to get off the reservation, that women will stop feeling victimized, that blacks will leave the welfare plantation, etc. Leftists need people to feel like victims so they will cry to others, ie. the government, for help.
The leftists strategy is and always has been to expand the state. Victims are dependent on the state, they need the state to protect them, to provide for them. If leftists run out fo victims, they no longer have the cover they need to continue expanding the state.
Leftists hate the Redskins because they need Aboriginals to feel victimized and to not be able to remember the proud warriors and leaders their ancestors were. They hate women protecting themselves, because a confident self-realized woman does not need the state to protect her and provide for her.
Without victims the state is unneeded; without those who make their livings in the victim- and welfare-industrial complexes would not have such cushy jobs.
Leftists need victims to continue their long march.
Some people have pointed out that the logic of “teach rapists not to rape” rather than “teach women to defend themselves” could easily extend to “teach murderers not to murder” rather than “teach people to defend themselves.” And I think that analogy holds.
With that in mind, it’s pretty bizarre to think that socially discouraging rape and murder (which, of course, we already do) on the one hand is in some sort of zero-sum competition with self defense on the other. But that’s how they want to conceive of it. And it’s beyond bizarre, it’s infantile to think that by protesting loudly enough we’ll solve this problem overnight so there’s no need to teach anyone to protect themselves in the brief interim between right now and the imminent utopia that our protests are about to usher in. But that seems to be their implicit stance.
Obviously very few mature or thoughtful people are going to buy into such a tack. So I think you’re on to something. I think it’s snake oil salesmen on the top and useful idiots on the bottom.
“This is what the leftists fear. They fear Aboriginals might decide to get off the reservation, that women will stop feeling victimized, that blacks will leave the welfare plantation, etc. Leftists need people to feel like victims so they will cry to others, ie. the government, for help.”
I don’t think that is correct.
Progressives aren’t worried that women will become responsible or that black people will gain 160ccs of brain matter. Black people can’t give up welfare. Women won’t or can’t choose to give up what progressives have offered them – a 10 year shot at the ultimate dream of all women – an ultra high status man.
What they do worry about is that white men will get sick of paying for the party.
Unfortunately the particular word “Redskin” was used exactly like “Nigger” “Cracker” or “Honkey” (et. al) was used in the past. If the name of the team was Aboriginals or the name of a tribe or the name of a particular man like Sitting Bull it would be a lot less offensive to a lot more people. Using Government to enforce political correctness is wrong in any case.
The goal of the left is to find a way to use the strong arm of Government to control people’s behavior. Owning guns and having an unsavory opinion about someone based on some class distinction are things to suppress because we should all be equal in every way. Since they are afraid to own guns no one should have guns. Of course this is projection because they know had they a gun, they’d shoot someone over a dropped fork in a restaurant. Suppressing “hate speech” is all projection too as Lefties are some of the worst most racist folks on the planet. And clearly if people have opinions about other people then someone might think more highly of someone else ergo not equal.
Their dream is the militarized police state in which everything is illegal, and the police are everywhere to enforce all of the laws, to the maximum degree all of the time. Except against real criminals because they are just misunderstood and need love … they aren’t equal because they just need a chance. So we must give them that chance to be equal by going easy on them and just trying to understand and reason with them.
Leftists are insane.
Statists need a large victim class dependent upon the state, which will continue to support the expansion of government at the ballot box, and will never complain about the atrocities committed by said government.
To the government dependent, Uncle Sam is Daddy, and they will side with Daddy no matter how tyrannical or abusive he acts.
“why do leftists think portraying Aboriginals as strong, proud men and celebrating their strength is disparaging?”
I got thinking about this when a meme popped up about Comanche, Blackhawk, and apache helicopters which wondered how we’d like it if the Nazis (oops) used Jewish related terms to name their implements of war.
Seriously, armed forces are not going to name their tools for something that doesn’t command respect. Same for football teams. You don’t hear of the Ohio Daisies or the Pittsburgh Puppies. And if the left subjugates the manosphere, do you think there’d be the Michigan Misogynists?
Don’t listen to the progs so much, fella.
Mina Smith wrote: “Unfortunately the particular word “Redskin” was used exactly like “Nigger” “Cracker” or “Honkey” (et. al) was used in the past. If the name of the team was Aboriginals or the name of a tribe or the name of a particular man like Sitting Bull it would be a lot less offensive to a lot more people. Using Government to enforce political correctness is wrong in any case.”
If you have to educate people that something *is* offensive, then it isn’t offensive. The term redskins may have been used in the past, but that doesn’t make it equal with cracker or nigger. The most devastating war fought on North America, by population percentage, was King Philip’s War. The term redskins is simply a quick identifier of some of the people who fought in that war. Red isn’t the color of Native skin. Furthermore, we should expect that if the Natives had wiped out the white colonizing forces, they may have used “whitey” or “whiteflesh” as an identifier or team name years after the fact, as it would utilize linguistic memory to recall memory of a conflict in which many people died. Proper warriors respect their enemy. Failing to respect the enemy is akin to underestimating him. Actual disrespect would be to simply forget that they ever existed. Recalling the name of a group in a combative sport is a way to honor the better qualities of a group that–while ultimate they lost–fought with a ferocious spirit that reminds the winning group of their own best qualities, perhaps the qualities that made them victorious themselves.
I’ve not yet meet the injun who disapproves of the Redskins being named Redskins, but we have Cherokee in my immediate AO. Lumbees are notorious for playing the victim game so who knows?
Of course progressives do not want women to defend themselves from rapists, or men defends themselves against murders. That would get folks to thinking they could defense themselves against the government….. Which really posses them off. Since 1860, the.federal government likes to launch genocidal wars against folks who resist the expansion of federal power. White Southerners, Indians, Randy Weaver, Bonus Marchers, coal miners in Appalachia. It’s a damn long list
In a similar vein, widespread use of the euphemism “horizontal tango” might result in banning of the word “tango” from a polite conversation. Silly, isn’t it?