Keeping it Regressive - January 10 - 15, 2017

The week in regressive idiocy, at home and around the world.

First off, plenty of Stupid to keep Sargon of Akkad's blood pressure good and high, as always.  Including the hysteria over fake news - that failing pile of garbage, Buzzfeed, especially, and alleged Trump-Putin connections and collaboration.  Anti-Russian conspiracy theories worthy of peak cold war hysteria a-la General Ripper abound.

Elsewhere, the regressives are on the march, as always.

Transgender Uber Alles?  The fun a creative animator or visual artist can have with that one.  I sure hope this guy (or girl or whatever) doesn't try to use this reductionist power plus prejudice line of crap in a court of law.  Because when you're "marginalized", you never have to be responsible for your actions.

Suppose you had a chick who was so damaged and broken, for whatever reason, that her natural response to being called pretty by a male was disgust and to consider the remark offensive?  Psychiatric help would be the rational response.  Just as the rational response to flattery from a suitor you have no interest in might be something like, "thanks, but not interested mate," and everybody just getting on with their day.  

Count on Salon.com to come through with the regressive thing to do, and give the chick entry into the countdown of their year's best essays. Best?  Yikes, I'd hate to see their worst.  Be warned, it's a cancerous, cringe inducing foray into love, regressive left style.

I totally understand that it’s difficult to know when it is an appropriate time to give women sexual attention. The modern woman is baffling.

This is surprisingly untrue.  Women who are not insane or sold on ego-stroking feminism are not at all baffling.  Most will respond in either a "No thanks, not interested" or "your place or mine?" to an "innocuous" gesture like being called beautiful, depending on whether the trust level is there and the attraction is mutual and reciprocated. If buddy doesn't back off after being politely dismissed, than by all means, lay into him. Most of them will not feel "exposed, trapped, degraded and simultaneously invisible and on display" unless they had either been sexually traumatized somehow, or bought into an ideology, you know, one you might run into frequently on college campuses or social media, equating male heterosexuality with objectifying and hating women.  In which case, regressive left newsblogs like Salon will then also publish them, because degradation and misogyny is what men thinking women are pretty is all about, after all.

College chick does admit that "Telling a woman that you think she is beautiful can seem very innocuous; sometimes it is. Sometimes, it will make her day" but then goes on to also add that "All this depends on context and I cannot explain when it is and is not OK."  Stop and think about that.  Chicky herself doesn't know when it is and isn't okay, but she has no problem writing a Dworkinite screed on how very awful "dudes" are for not knowing themselves, and Salon.com figures that this is so good and positive attitude towards heterosexual relationships that they ought to publish it.  Presumably between some other progressive stories attacking the religious right's ostensibly prudish attitudes towards premarital sex, and a stories about how women have more sex drive than men and how very awful it is that their fellas can't, or have no interest in, satisfying them.  Gee, I wonder why?  Frankly, I can't say I blame them.

College chick does make some concessions, and admits that she struggles with "How am I supposed to reconcile wanting men to be attracted to me with not wanting to be objectified?"

The answer to that is actually pretty clear.  It's called not being a regressive left feminist.  But that would also mean chicky giving up her Victorian era sense of moral superiority over the bestial male of the species.  I wouldn't hold my breath on that one.

Keep it regressive, Salon.

It did not matter to Michael Jackson if you're black or white, but the same can not be said of fans of the T.V show "Urban Myths" including Michael Jackson's own daughter, Paris, when it comes to the portrayal of the late musician on that show.  That's because Sky Arts, that produces the show, hired a white actor - Joseph Fiennes - to portray Michael.  In as saccharine a display of pretentious faux anger as you'd ever find on Twitter - and given what a wretched hive of contrived offense that cesspool is, that's really saying something, Paris tweets, that she was "so incredibly sickened" by it and that "honestly, it makes me want to vomit." 

Are you sure you were not also literally shaking, Paris?  Literally, literally shaking?  In another tweet, she claimed that "it was obviously intentional for them to be this insulting" not just to Paris, but to her grandmother as well.

Michael Jackson, at least in his later years, was scarcely recognizable as black.  Paris herself certainly isn't.  The only race neutrality left these days would apparently be vain social media virtue signalling.

Grow up, Paris.  

And what of her father's legacy?  Was it insulting to him as well?  "See, it's not about races, just places - Faces - where your blood comes from, is were your space is, I've seen the bright get duller, I'm not going to spend my life being a color," is just so 1991, I take it?  

To CNN, to Twitter, to Paris Jackson and numerous fans of Urban Myths, that would seem to be so.

Good job keeping it regressive, everyone.

An age old technique for keeping attention away from your own misdeeds is to attack the misdeeds of others.   "A CIA analyst has lashed out at Hillary Clinton for deliberately distracting the public with claims that Russia hacked the election, claiming that she is covering up her own mistake of stealing the Democratic nomination away from Bernie Sanders."

"Former CIA analyst John Kiraikou says that Hillary Clinton’s election loss is solely down to the fact that she committed election fraud against Sanders and has absolutely nothing to do with Russia."

"Speaking on the potential threat to American democracy ensuing from perceived Russian hacking, Kiriakou said that such estimates do not hold up, adding that it would be only the case if “Russia or any other country had actually hacked… into voting machines or hacked into the Federal Election Commission.”

When in doubt, blame the Ruskies.  Is this the John Birch society of the 1950s here?  Or is it keeping things regressive by aping the far right yet again?

The Women's march on Washington planned to protest Donald Trump's inauguration is running into more criticism for its regressive tendencies.   Nothing says concern for women's rights quite like making common cause with traditionalist religious groups that require of women to "“loose-fitting, non-revealing clothing, known as hijab, or khimar” 

"According to CAIR’s guide for educators, Muslim boys and girls may not take same-sex communal after-sport showers, and that Muslim students should not be forced to participate in coed swimming classes. CAIR also insists that Muslims may not want to shake hands with teachers and administrators of the opposite sex – but as a “sign of personal modesty”. How does CAIR know what each Muslim is thinking when he or she refuses to shake a person’s hand? It could very well be out of condescension towards women – which is prescribed in the Quran."

"While the list of inconsistencies between feminists and Muslims can go on and on, the point of this post is to highlight the fact that the Women’s March’s cooperation with Islamic groups must be one-sided, as it is impossible that they both strive for equality between males and females. Feminist groups must learn about gender inequality in Islam before either immediately kowtowing to their demands out of liberal guilt, or before assuming that American-Muslim groups strive for Western values."

Bad as he is, does whatever menace Donald Trump poses warrant co-operation against something exponentially worse on all possible indices of progressive thought?  Since he's a white male, I suppose so.  The one thing about wearing hijab, though, is that those damnable white males won't call women "pretty" if they do.  That a woman being called pretty is a terrible thing worth declaring Jihad upon is something that, by the looks of things, Islamism and Feminism might actually agree on.  Perhaps it's not so unusual an alliance after all.

Until next week, keep it regressive everyone!