Wow. Some loon yelled at me on twitter that it’s progressives who are really the racists here, not conservatives, and to prove it, he sent me this mind-blowingly stupid article. It’s textbook projection: he lists a series of progressive issues, recites what we say is the reason, and then carefully explains what he claims is our actual reason.
So, under gun control for instance, he says that our claimed reason is Gun violence is a scourge on society; easy access to killing machines unnecessarily facilitates murder and crime,
which is actually pretty close to what I think…but then, at length, he expounds on our True Reason:
White urban liberals are deathly afraid of black gangbangers with guns, but are ashamed to admit this publicly, so to mask their racist fears they try to ban guns for everyone, as a way of warding off the perception that their real goal is to target blacks specifically.
There aren’t any black gangbangers
where I live, and even when I lived in Philadelphia, I could point to crime-ridden areas I avoided that were totally white. You know who really scares me? Wayne LaPierre. I had no idea that maniac was black.
He’s got the most twisted ideas about everything. Did you know opposition to global climate change is a racist plot?
The civilizational “white guilt” motivating the voluntary wealth transfer to undeveloped nations derives from deep racist assumptions about the innate shortcomings of backward peoples.
Don’t ask me to explain that. Don’t ask me to explain anything on that guy’s site — he’s so nuts, he has to hide out of fear of squirrels.
I was just reminded that today is the day of the White Man March. Who knew that the slogan “Diversity = White Genocide” was liberal?
I don’t think gangbanger means what the author of that article thinks it means.
Horning in on the Twitter conversation, I pointed out (obliquely?) that these alleged “real motivations” do not address whether the stated positions are actually good public policy or not.
The whole article is a twisted mess of the Genetic Fallacy, Circumstantial Ad Hominem, Poisoning the Well, and Insane Troll Logic. (Emphasis on troll, I think.)
Too late! They’re already running around in his head.
Kaveh@ 1
Gangbanger has two distinct meanings in English. He was using the newer one.
Hmm, well, I went to the “PJ Media” homepage, and I noticed something. There are 20 columnists listed; 19 with photos, one without. And every one of the 19 columnists with photos appears to be white (as far as I can tell from monochrome photos).
But no — we’re the racist ones. Riiiiiiight.
The projection is especially amazing since fear of black gang members is one of the central, and as often as not explicit, motives behind the need for crazy gun hoarders to amass their arsenals, and their desire to carry deadly weapons around in public.
It’s a depressing trend I’ve noticed. Every time I talk to a conservative about issues on which we disagree, they almost immediately replace me with some Fantasy Liberal that lives only in the conservative brain, and they argue with THAT guy.
Basically it ends up in this surreal conversational limbo where I point out that the things I’ve been talking about for the last hour have nothing to do with a carbon tax and I’m perfectly willing to look at other ways to find renewable energy initiatives, and the conservative “reasons” that I want the government to take care of me and I’m jealous of rich people, therefor I want to use a carbon tax to take over the world.
And it pretty much always comes back to that point – no discussion of what the CONSERVATIVE believes, just them trying to tell me what I believe, because I guess liberals are smart enough to take over the world, but too stupid to realize why we’re doing it.
White liberals afraid of black gangbangers aside, there is a very real history of racist gun control laws in the US. It’s not exactly a liberal phenomenon though. The gun fondlers might be surprised to learn that the NRA heavily supported discriminatory gun laws in the past.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112322/gun-control-racism-and-nra-history
Who is afraid of black people with guns? Not me. It’s white men with guns who are shooting up schools, murdering teens in public spaces for having their music too loud etc.
fmitchell@2:
Of course not! Liberals are actually the trolls. They don’t believe any of their own arguments; it’s all to quench their thirst for power.
Oh my lord.
So much fucking stupidity.
The last one is just epic. Progressives supposedly want to restrict EVERYONE’S freedom, because they are racist. Logic has left the building.
Yeah, the correct conclusion is that the guy doing all the projecting is afraid of black gangbangers, has very exciting fantasies about shooting black men, and is generally impervious to facts.
I am an “White Urban” male that lives in downtown DC. I have little (I.e., no fear) of being shot by “gangbangers”. Absolutely zero. Of course, we have a strong history of gun control in this city – until some white gun fondler from Florida decided our city’s gun control was an important constitutional infringememt on his gun rights. Now, I am worried about gun fondlers from Florida exercising their gun rights with via ‘stand your ground.’
Yes, I am worried about more about white male gun fondlers than any other group.
Absolutely. The only time I’ve actually felt personally fearful of gun violence was when I was visiting a rural area and hearing from the family I was with about some of the “colorful” locals and their mishaps with “sporting” rifles.
I’m sure he have some even more interesting explanations for why many of those policies are found in Canada as well.
The comments are of course equally full of stupid, like the guy who apparently thinks Africans are the only people who have ever had large families. Guess he doesn’t know any Catholics. My aunt actually had more kids, 6, than my grandmother, who had 4.
And mormons. Mormons worship the idea of having a big family. And mormons are overwhelmingly white, in the USA anyway.
@nrdo #13:
Would those be rifles of the fully automatic sort? They’re essential for squirrel-hunting, or so I hear.
Conservative beliefs about liberals and progressives are almost all projections. I think they are almost all incapable of understanding anything outside their simplistic delusions and conspiracies. One of the biggest delusional projections is that Obama is a radical socialist leftist; if only it were just a teensy weensy bit true, if only he behaved a little left of center once in a while, it would be nice.
Way more scared of cops than of “black gangbangers.”
So the real racists aren’t the ones who advocate policies which disproportionately affect people of color but the ones who advocate policies which affect everyone equally. That’s…cute.
Er… so if we weren’t such a bunch of racists, we’d only be banning black people from having guns, instead of ruining it for white people too? Is that what he’s saying?
Speaking on behalf of all Black people ( cuz I can do that) we don’t want Wayne LaPierre. Please, keep him .
And speaking as a grown Black woman ,with a job, bills, and dependents, can I just say how especially galling it is , to be talked about by these people as if Black people were the neighbor’s mischievous kids?
Also, I’ve met more than a few smugly racist progressives. They can at least be spoken to. What I can’t stand are bluntly, malignant and heartless conservatives.
I’ve never encountered “black gangbangers” except in my GED prep classes, where they have mostly tended to be unprepared and overextended but polite. Possibly I have ridden a bus with some or stood in line at the cash register or encountered them on the street, but I don’t know, because no one ever shot me and I don’t tend to assume gang involvement unless someone hands me a writing exercise about it. I know other people have not been as lucky, but not assuming the worst has served me reasonably well through the years.
I have encountered white gun nuts who fantasize openly about “shooting bad guys,” and “defending their families” in weirdly vague and cinematic terms like a five-year-old would use, only they aren’t five and they actually own a handgun and just make a hilarious “joke” about how Democrats should be shot because they suspect I am one of those Democrats and they heard Democrats have no sense of humor.
These people scare me a lot. I’m worried for them, because they don’t seem to understand that killing another person is actually pretty serious, and I’m worried about what they might do to someone who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time while being the wrong race or the wrong level of deference to the asshole with the gun.
Also scary: walking in the country during hunting season, cops.
Gee, the local teenagers sometimes gather in front of our house in the summer as there is a streetlight, and have fun talking, telling, jokes, etc. Since some of them are black and Hispanic, the paranoid WASP conservative would think they plotting to rob his place. The same kids come around asking to mow lawns and shovel sidewalks. Yes, I am shaking with fear…not. They’re good teenagers.
Its like he has no sense of irony.
Scary: investment bankers, venture capitalists.
You could be a street thug for 100,000 years and not do a fraction of the damage an investment banker can do with one trade.
You could be a street thug
I include cops under “street thug”
When I worked in South Phoenix back in the 90’s, I never had a problem with “urban gang bangers.” On the other hand, some of the white guys I knew had their own personal arsenals, including fully automatic assault rifles and 50 caliber Desert Eagle handguns.
One of the white guys I worked with in Phoenix shot and killed his neighbor’s dog because it was barking too loud. He used a pellet gun, but he was still nuts. After that incident, if any one said anything to piss him off, his reply was “keep barking.”
FWIW, this liberal’s concern about guns isn’t even primarily about criminals having them. It’s gun accidents, and guns wielded in a moment of passion creating a lifetime of regret.
My Crazy Idea is to provide some kind of tax incentive or something to keep your guns offsite the majority of the time. So if you want to go hunting or target shooting, you have to go check out your gun. Simple as that, but it means 1) no kids getting into your guns and accidentally shooting each other, 2) no mistaking a spouse for an intruder in the middle of the night and shooting them, and 3) gives you a little extra time to change your mind before you decide to murder your cheating spouse, etc. For the minority of people who really need to have a gun on their premises (e.g. a farmer who needs to keep predators away from her livestock) they can just forgo the tax break.
Sallystrange@18:
Can I get an a-fucking-men?!?
Well, since the Right wing learned decades ago that honestly stating its positions is a losing strategy, I can understand why a Right-winger might assume liberals aren’t stating their actual positions. Projection concerning both the framing of one’s positions/ideas AND the actual positions/ideas in question: at least he’s consistent!