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Friday, November 25, 2011

Eliminationist Rhetoric

Goddammit. Just. Goddammit. [Via Dohiyi Mir]

Look, we all get that Ann Coulter's role in this here game is that of agent provocateur. The factoid that Coulter and Bill Maher (both Cornell alumni) are supposedly close friends may be a tip of sorts that Coulter is cheekily aware that her obnoxious jabber is simply lucrative schtick.

But it's possible to point out that there is a line of sorts, fine or not, between schtick and open hostility, the sociopathic hostility of indifference to the murder of defenseless coeds by vicious thugs. Despite Coulter's implicit assertion, there is no debate whatsoever here -- the murdered college students were unarmed, period, end of sentence. The notion that someone would try to "humorously" walk that one back to Schtickville just says more about them than the subjects of their anemic jape.

I dunno. It's one thing to advocate physical violence against the authors of economic violence against the abject masses. Perhaps impolitic, but you get whence it originates.

But to advocate death for the people who have the temerity to agitate against the manifest economic injustices being perpetrated upon them, this is a different animal. This is the rhetorical arrogance of making a goof about kids being killed at school, about people who were dumb enough to believe that their national institutions would do the right thing when confronted -- despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary -- and were murdered in cold blood as a consequence.

Sooner or later something's gotta give, the question is on which side it falls initially. Do frustrated, beaten-down peons strike back against feckless, armored thugs, or do the latter just decide to stomp down the former? Sadly, you can always count on someone to inexplicably defend the latter, to trade their humanity for a couple of shekels and a sack of magic beans.

1 comment:

M. said...

It's yet another sign of the moral corruption that has engulfed this country -- not only that she gets away with it (truly civilized countries would have exiled that toxic shemale to New Caledonia a long while ago) but that she's allowed anywhere near a TV studio.

But the moral decay of the people who allow her to show her face (not the savage animals on the Right, but everyone else complicit to her shtick) is too advanced to fix by persuasion. I say, we should extend your proposal to unplug and have it cover mass-media outlets too. In a future that's rapidly becoming all-digital, these fucks will be vitally dependent on links and clicks. With more discipline and organization on the Left (I know, I know) that fact could be turned to our favor -- just have a small, competent group of people (e.g., long-time bloggers or people who work for them) scan the mainstream media for relevant content, summarize and excerpt what matters, and present it on blogs, with no links to the original source, to starve them of clicks (most readers would be too busy or unmotivated to look up the original articles on their own).

This is a historical opportunity for the Left to do what Nixon and his animals did with the mainstream mass-media from the Right: bypass it, undermine it, and replace it with a parallel structure that works for you. Unfortunately, there's still too many liberals who believe in quaint things like fairness, playing by the rules, that kind of stuff -- basically, as you put it, bringing a spork to a gun fight.