Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say

NY Magazine ^ | 27 Jan 2015 | Jonathan Chait

[oblomov]

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 **** 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...

[oblomov]

“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.

This is just a reflection of its authoritarian heart.

[Nervous Tick]

Coming from Jonathan Chait, this is nothing short of amazing.

[Travis McGee]

Non-PC cartoon by Branco.

[1010RD]

Call FIRE and sue. http://www.thefire.org/

[1010RD]

That needs to be posted at every southside and westside bus stop in Chicago.

[I want the USA back]

Colleges are actively promoting insanity.

[MarchonDC09122009]

Agree completely.
The left continues to ruin higher education with their hypocrisy - free speech for me, but not for thee.
The liberal author graduated from Ann Arbor 24 years ago, and even he is appalled at how absurd and intolerant political correctness has become on the left.
Academics and pseudo-intellectuals have willingly have become Big Brother’s eyes anf ears, informers and executioners of the oppressive Party.
When economic reckoning comes, we conservatives will be the target bourgeoisie, whose head’s the left will clamor for.
Justice for me, but not for thee.

[rarestia]

Orwell was one of the most prescient writers of the 20th century.

[Tax-chick]

This is a very informative article.

[SunkenCiv]

Pistol whipping seems more appropriate.

[cripplecreek]

So the people who scream "Not every muslim is a terrorist" treat one like it for expressing a little common sense.



Michigan legislative action thread

[Elsie]

Isn’t it wonderful that our schools are producing such great folks to lead our country some day?

[Flick Lives]

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.

This is called "tolerance" and "diversity" by the Left. Which is to say if you deviate one iota from their ideology, they'll fire you from your job and vandalize your property. It's all very Kristallnacht.

[lefty-lie-spy]

This was a great turnabout. I heard Omar interviewed on Matt Ckark’s conservative Clark Cast podcast from his Michigan radio show about two months ago (this is an old story). I encourage you to find his podcast on iTunes and subscribe. He’s a brilliant 26 years old Conservative that could well be the next Limbaugh in many respects.

[GOPJ]

The most probable cause of death of the first political-correctness movement was the 1992 presidential election. That event mobilized left-of-center politics around national issues like health care and the economy, and away from the introspective suppression of dissent within the academy. Bill Clinton’s campaign frontally attacked left-wing racial politics, famously using inflammatory comments by Sister Souljah to distance him from Jesse Jackson. Barbara Jordan, the first black woman from a southern state elected to the House of Representatives, attacked political correctness in her keynote speech. (“We honor cultural identity. We always have; we always will. But separatism is not allowed. Separatism is not the American way. We must not allow ideas like political correctness to divide us and cause us to reverse hard-won achievements in human rights and civil rights.”)

A full attack on the evils of politically correct thinking (totalitarianism) IS the path for a Republican win in 2016..

[GOPJ]

“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.

Amazing link... thanks Civ.

[mrsmith]

Johnathan Swift meets the new (age) Victorians...

How far Man has fallen in a few hundred years.

[aimhigh]

The best response to a Muslim is to ask them publicly if they believe the Holocaust was real.

[lightman]

That needs to be posted at every southside and westside bus stop in Chicago.

Especially if the donks were photoshopped albino.

[Billthedrill]

I hear echoes of Kurtz here: "The horror! The horror!" Really, what did Chait expect? He was warned. They were all warned.

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.

In practice liberals stand for whatever "the left" tell them to stand for. It isn't, after all, conservatives who are bearing the brunt in this article but liberals who find themselves shut down, marginalized, brutalized, and discarded much as conservatives have in the past, and at the hands of the ones who are now complaining at receiving the same treatment. Nor does the author even believe this thesis himself, for shortly thereafter we have the admission:

The internet has shrunk the distance between p.c. culture and mainstream liberal politics, and the two are now hopelessly entangled.

The Internet has very little to do with it. The two were always at least bedmates; if now the PC crowd has proven the dominant partner that isn't really all that remarkable. We plead with liberals as we plead with brutalized spouses, leave them. And they won't.

“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.

That face is now green and hideous from the poison the body has guzzled. The body is dying. It's a case of suicide.