I was reading a post at Pharyngula about the “Intellectual Dark Web” idiots, and came to an abrupt halt over these sentences:
There is also an irritating but genuine grain of truth deep beneath the layers of whining. Campus leftists and their allies in the media are often no more open to alternative perspectives than the New Republic white male elite of two decades ago; they can behave badly too.
This was my comment in response:
I came to a screeching halt in front of this disgusting apologia. The rest isn’t worth my time. This is utter bullshit, there’s no “irritating, genuine grain of truth” there at all. “Alternative Views” is nuspeak for the same old evil bigotry and discrimination that people keep trying to resurrect. Sticking an “alt” in front of these old chestnuts doesn’t change a fucking thing. I can’t even say just how much I’ve come to loathe the word alternate, thanks to all the immoral, evil, toxic assholes embracing it, as if it heralded new ideas. All the whining is because people recognize their crap for what it is, and they aren’t interested in hearing it, or providing a venue for it. It’s about damned time, too.
Let them fucking whine, but don’t be trying to sell their shit as some sterling truth that’s truly new. Farrell should be smacked for writing such idiocy.
This is an ask, an ask to consider their brave, “new” views, which are exactly the same as the very old views, which place almost all people firmly in the inferior camp for one reason or another. It’s pushing the colonial mindset with its genocidal bigotry, the same old fucking bullshit people have been fighting against for much of history. There are always more smug bigots than there are thinking, accepting people, because bigotry is easy. We all live within frameworks of institutional and systemic racism of some sort, here in Ustates, it is the framework, and has been from the start. Just getting some people to even see that framework is a serious, brain-breaking chore. That framework makes it very easy to slide into bigotry, it’s a very comfortable fit for many people, and some of them just insist on justifying their “alternative, radical” views. Those views are not alt-anything, they are as old as the hills, and firmly status quo mainstream. They are not radical, they stink of the banality of evil.
These are people who are waving the Persecution Banner, while pulling down obscene amounts of money, most of it from bigoted fans who are stuffed full of aggrieved entitlement. These are people who are so damn desperate for power, they will say anything, and do anything for a chance at real power. I suspect at least some of them are laughing their arses off on the way to the bank every month, but this does not make them less harmful. They embrace obscurantism while smiling and claiming “science” backs them up. They want to be seen as great leaders, carrying the one and only torch of knowledge, only they understand enlightenment, and that enlightenment is in silencing and oppressing those deemed inferior, dismissing the hordes of the great unwashed with a faint wave of a hand. Bring up the days of the gentry to them, and you’d no doubt hear a chorus of wistful sighs.
It’s all bullshit. It’s not even alternative bullshit, just the same old centuries long song. There is not one alternate thing about it, not one truly new view, not even a hint of originality. These are people who long for the bad old days, and cry at every opportunity because they can’t have that.
Bullshit. Piles and piles of bullshit.