"Being a victim doesn't make you special. Doing something about it does."

Sarah Hoyt writes at PJ Media,

...the idea that being a victim is somehow the same as being a hero and deserves respect and adulation is one of the craziest paradigms (it applies this time) to infect our civilization.

...Yes, sometimes victims need to be freed, usually by heroes who risk their lives in the process. That makes us wish to help the victim and make them whole. It shouldn’t make them heroes or people deserving of reverence. They can choose to become heroes afterward and go on to save others in similar predicaments, and then they are worthy of some reverence and respect in measure with their deeds. But simply suffering, simply being a victim, doesn’t make you special. Doing something about it does.

Read more here.

Got your card?

hat tip Never Yet Melted

Asserting dominance

David Thompson brings us the story of

Do Not Feed The Narcissists
Some people are just really hard to please:

When they showed up carrying racial protest signs to the university’s annual DePauw Dialogue on Wednesday, the audience started applauding. “Stop fucking clapping!” some protesters yelled, a student who was near the commotion told The College Fix. They later complained about the applause on social media. The protesters’ irritation with the spotlight didn’t end there. At the end of their campus march, they “asked a photographer to stop taking pictures and confronted him when he refused,” The DePauw student newspaper reported.

So, to recap. Forty or so “social justice” protestors disrupt a keynote address at DePauw University, holding signs that scold the audience for being insufficiently deferential to the protestors’ racial fixations and delusions of being oppressed. Being schooled in “privilege and identity,” and therefore suitably cowed and pretentious, the audience starts applauding the disruption, and applauding the scolding being aimed at them. And then those applauding are promptly scolded for doing so.

After the event, protestor Justin Collado announced via Facebook:

It was very shocking and upsetting when the student body and faculty… decided to clap at our struggle, our voices. It felt as if we were not taken seriously. We are here, as a community, to make a change and see difference on this campus. We will not be looked as a joke [sic].

Approval is oppressive. Also grammar. But for God’s sake, don’t laugh.

Another protestor, resident assistant Amata Giramata, denounced the applause as a display of “white sympathy,” which is apparently the wrong kind of sympathy, and is therefore offensive:

Dear DePauw, why is your first reaction to my protests, clapping? My activism is not a show.

Oh madam, I beg to differ.

Update, via the comments:

As to what type of show is being staged, let’s look at the dynamics. Forty or so middle-class students, including beneficiaries of DePauw’s policy of racial favouritism in hiring and admissions, decry the “burden” of being brown-skinned at said university, while holding up signs that read, “DePauw = unsafe,” “Don’t kill me,” and “Our situation is intolerable.” If you dare to disagree with the protestors, denunciation seems inevitable, most likely involving accusations of “white privilege,” and possibly racism. If you sit quietly and try to ignore the protest, then, it turns out, you’re on “the side of the oppressor.” And if you signal your approval of the protest – say, by applauding it – then this too is offensive, an insult to the protestors’ heroic struggle.

Taken at face value, the “social justice” howler monkeys seem difficult to console. Even if you agree with them, they will complain about it. Apparently, those whose event was selfishly interrupted are expected to welcome the protestors’ disdain for everyone present. Specifically, by pretending to feel bad for an absurd made-up reason - i.e., by agreeing that the university is a dangerous and oppressive environment for brown-skinned devotees of “social justice.” Expressions of compliance are demanded, but may only take the form approved by the protestors. (No clapping is allowed, only standing “in solidarity,” for however long is necessary, while remaining mute.) Any other response – from applause to indifference – will be deemed a hostile act and mark you as an enemy. It therefore seems unlikely that such people could be kept happy for any length of time, even assuming one were sufficiently credulous to attempt it.

However, if you think of the above as a kind of bad-faith theatre, an exercise in in-group positioning, it becomes a little more comprehensible. The object, it seems, is to whine and scold, and to indulge in emotional browbeating, thereby asserting dominance over others. The more improbable the grievance, and the more numerous the hoops through which one has to jump, the sweeter the game is, for a certain kind of person. And as this theatre of victimhood is the basis of the protestors’ status and self-importance, and the thing that excuses all that lovely scolding, it must continue indefinitely. It is, therefore, pointless to engage with such people on their own terms, as if you could ever find some mutual accommodation short of perpetual deference and self-abasement, or as if you could change their minds, or make them less obnoxious.

The only question is which party is the more wretched and degenerate. The vain little scolds who claim to be oppressed at a university where tuition fees are a mere $50,000 a year, or the cowed and pretentious dupes who applaud their own scolding.

How can I be a professional victim today?

Steven Crowder goes after the "silly liberal fruitcakes" and social justice warriors at Umass.

Grow up, college students!

I have been hearing about a Halloween controversy at Yale, but I did not take the time to read about it. So, thank you to James Kirchick at Tablet Magazine, who writes,

Several days before Halloween, Yale University’s “Intercultural Affairs Council” distributed an email to all undergraduates advising against the donning of costumes “that threaten our sense of community” through offensive “cultural appropriation.” After imploring Yalies to “consider their costumes and the impact it [sic] may have,” the Council, a body comprising 13 administrators ranging from Yale’s Jewish Chaplain to its Office of LGBTQ Resources, provided a helpful list of “Costumes to Avoid.”

Understandably feeling a bit patronized about their wardrobe choices, a number of students wrote to professors Nicholas and Erika Christakis, the master and associate master, respectively, of Silliman College, one of Yale’s 12 undergraduate residential houses. “I wonder if we should reflect more transparently, as a community, on the consequences of an institutional (which is to say: bureaucratic and administrative) exercise of implied control over college students,” Erika Christakis wrote to the Silliman community. A child developmental psychologist, Christakis shared her concern that a proscription on “objectionably ‘appropriative’ ” Halloween dress was not far removed from preventing “a blonde-haired child’s wanting to be Mulan for a day.” Christakis ended her email with a heartfelt plea: “Have we lost faith in young people’s capacity—in your capacity—to exercise self-censure, through social norming, and also in your capacity to ignore or reject things that trouble you?”

If the reaction of the over 700 students, alumni, family, faculty and staff who signed an open letter denouncing Christakis is any measure, the answer to that question is a resounding “yes.” Days later, another, separate, racially charged controversy heightened tensions on campus, when a student alleged on Facebook that the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity had hosted a “white girls only” party, and not for the first time. News of the discriminatory frat house spread like wildfire on social media and attracted international condemnation. A subsequent investigation by the Daily Beast, however, raised doubts about the story when it revealed that the sophomore who sparked the hullaballoo with her Facebook post had not attended the party in question. As to the retroactive claim of personally experiencing a similar indignation, as indicated by her having belatedly “remembered and realized the same thing happened” to her a year prior, that too was complicated by the testimony that “a lot of my memory is blurred because I was drunk.”

All this unease bubbled to a crescendo last Thursday, when hundreds of students dramatically confronted both Jonathan Holloway, the first black dean of Yale College, and Nicholas Christakis, the professor whose wife had sent the offending email on Halloween wear. Encountering Holloway on Cross Campus, Yale’s gothic heart, the students “said they respected Holloway and the weight of his responsibilities, but they were disappointed in him both as a black administrator and as a black man,” observed the Yale Daily News, which noted that one of the crowd’s demands was, “the provision of Dean’s Excuses for students suffering from traumatic racial events.” Finished with Holloway after “three hours of emotional confrontation,” this open-air struggle session migrated to Silliman College, where Christakis was ordered to “apologize” and confess to his crimes. In one widely circulated video, a student can be seen screaming at Christakis, calling him “disgusting” and asking, “Who the fuck hired you?” To the whoops and cheers of her peers, she decries his failure to create a “safe space” for students and informs him that he “should not sleep at night.”

With her bravura performance of both “victim and victor,” alternately denunciatory and self-pitying, this young woman is a sterling example of the “cry bully,” what British writer Julie Burchill classifies as one who “always explains to the point of demanding that one agrees with them and always complains to the point of insisting that one is persecuting them.” The following day, one of Christakis’ students published an op-ed in the Yale Herald stating that his stewardship of the college made her “feel that my home is being threatened” because he had failed to apologize for his wife’s email that “marginalized many students of color.”

Let me preface the following by stating that going to college is a challenging experience. And I don’t mean to downplay the difficulties that some students from historically disadvantaged communities may encounter at an institution like Yale, which for most of its history was not a friendly place for minorities of any sort, never mind people of color. But when I hear, in 2015, students complain about feeling “marginalized” at Yale due to their racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, or any other identity—and, on top of this, demanding institutional retribution against those who mildly express viewpoints they don’t agree with and sartorial injunctions on pagan bacchanal holiday garb—I can’t help but think of James Meredith. Meredith was the first black student to attend the segregated University of Mississippi and had to do so under the cover of heavily armed federal marshals. When I see photographs of Meredith and other black students of the civil rights era staring down state-sanctioned American racism—not the rumored antics of inebriated frat boys or emails from well-meaning child developmental psychologists about the propriety of certain Halloween costumes—I don’t see people pleading for Dean’s Excuses so they can huddle in a “safe space” to recover from “traumatic racial events.” I see unbelievably courageous young men and women who, by keeping their heads high, exposed their spittle-flecked antagonists as the bigoted Neanderthals they were and changed this country for the better.

...my initial anger eventually gave way to disappointment, as I realized that these students have not been equipped with the intellectual or emotional tools required for operating in a disputatious society. That inability to confront ideas one doesn’t like and engage respectfully with those whom one disagrees with is not only a failure on the part of the individual students, but of the society that has produced them. What we’re witnessing at Yale are the abysmal consequences of a decades-long inculcation of identity politics and grievance mongering, which hold that the relative virtue of an argument is directly proportional to the professed “marginalization” of its proponent, and it is destroying the ideal of a liberal education.

...apparently no adults in these young peoples’ lives have informed them that shouting in the face of a professor, hurling imprecations at those who question their assumptions, and then demanding refuge from the tempestuous waves of intellectual discourse in the form of a “safe space” where their fatuous notions go unchallenged, is behavior befitting a toddler, not an undergraduate at one of America’s premier institutions of higher learning. No less a figure than President Barack Obama has assailed this rising tide of intolerance on university campuses, saying that “anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with them, but you shouldn’t silence them by saying you can’t come because I’m too sensitive to hear what you have to say.”

...Unfortunately, Yale appears to be letting the inmates take over the asylum. Instead of explaining to these students how their behavior is inconsistent with the minimum requirements of responsible adulthood, various administrators, including the University’s president, have pandered to the heckler’s veto, lauding their “thoughtful and constructive suggestions.” If the administration is truly committed to equipping young people for the real world and not a chimerical fantasyland where they never have to hear something disagreeable, the best thing it could do, both for their sake and Yale’s sacred mission, is tell them to grow up.

Read more here.

Squandering the blessings of being born in America

Lloyd Marcus writes in American Thinker,

...Rather than honestly dealing with the issues plaguing urban blacks, my relatives foolishly believe racial loyalty means turning a blind eye or blaming whitey.

...The Bible tells us that when people simply refuse to accept truth. God turns them over to a reprobate mind. In other words, stiff-necked, hateful, and racist blacks are doomed to squander the blessing of having been born in America – the greatest land of opportunity on the planet.

Read more here.

Could you be a cop?

The Palm Beach Florida County Sheriff's office released this video of a woman who felt she was entitled to drive 51 miles per hour in a school zone during school hours.

Read more here.

The ultimate product of the left’s microaggression society

Reporters Marisa Schultz and Frank Rosario write in the New York Post about the t.v. reporter who killed another reporter and cameraman:

The words are a part of everyday conversation — “swinging” by an address and going out in the “field.”

But in the twisted mind of Virginia gunman Vester Lee Flanagan II, they were pure racism — and saying them became a death sentence for Alison Parker.

The 24-year-old white reporter, who was murdered on live TV along with her cameraman, used the phrases as an intern at ­WDBJ TV in Roanoke in 2012, according to an internal complaint filed by Flanagan, who was black.

“One was something about ‘swinging’ by some place; the other was out in the ‘field,’ ” said the Jan. 21 report by assistant news director Greg Baldwin, which refers to Parker as Alison Bailey (her middle name).

Parker was never disciplined over the remarks, but Flanagan never forgot them.

Hours after gunning her and Adam Ward down during their broadcast Wednesday, Flanagan revealed in tweets that the comments were still fresh in his mind.

“Alison made racist comments,” Flanagan posted while he was on the run from cops.

“They hired her after that??” he wrote.

But colleagues said that it was all in Flanagan’s head and that Parker was as far from racist as they come.

“That’s how that guy’s mind worked. Just crazy, left-field assumptions like that,” Ryan Fuqua, a video editor at WDBJ, told The Post.

“[Those words are] just common, everyday talk. [But] that was his MO — to start s- -t,” Fuqua ­explained. “He was unstable. One time, after one of our live shots failed, he threw all his stuff down and ran into the woods for like 20 minutes.”

Flanagan made the accusations a month before he was fired in February 2013. The document was part of his unsuccessful discrimination lawsuit against the television station.

Trevor Fair, a 33-year-old cameraman at WDBJ for six years, said that the words Parker used are commonplace but that they would routinely set Flanagan off.

“We would say stuff like, ‘The reporter’s out in the field.’ And he would look at us and say, ‘What are you saying, cotton fields? That’s racist,’ ” Fair recounted.

“We’d be like, ‘What?’ We all know what that means, but he took it as cotton fields, and therefore we’re all racists.”

“This guy was a nightmare,” Fair said. “Management’s worst nightmare.”

Flanagan assumed everything was a jab at his race, even when a manager brought in watermelon for all employees.

“Of course, he thought that was racist. He was like, ‘You’re doing that because of me.’ No, the general manager brought in watermelon for the entire news team. He’s like, ‘Nope, this is out for me. You guys are calling me out because I’m black.’ ”

Flanagan even declared that ­7-Eleven was racist because it sold watermelon-flavored Slurpees.

“It’s not a coincidence, they’re racist,” he allegedly told Fair.

A black former classmate of Parker at James Madison University was stunned by the allegations, saying Parker was kind to people of all races during their time at the Harrisonburg, Va., school.

“When I took [my journalism] job, she recommended me,” Jessica Albert told the Associated Press. “She did that for me, so she’s definitely not a racist.”

Meanwhile, authorities revealed Thursday that Flanagan planned on getting away after the murders, and that suicide was a last resort.

Inside the rental car where he killed himself during a police pursuit, cops found a briefcase with three license plates, a wig, a shawl, an umbrella, sunglasses, a black hat, and a to-do list.

Cops also discovered a Glock 19 pistol with multiple magazines and ammunition, a white iPhone, several letters and notes, a “powder residue” and “bodily fluids.”

Police identified Flanagan as a person of interest in the murders when he sent an unnamed friend a text message “making reference to having done something stupid,” according to a Virginia State Police search-warrant affidavit.

At Flanagan’s house in Roanoke, cops found evidence that he was a self-absorbed slob who indulged in gay porn in his spartan living space.

They found unwashed sex toys, cat feces and several pictures of himself on his refrigerator, according to the Daily Mirror.

Prior to their search, officers entered the residence through the balcony, fearing Flanagan might have left booby traps.

Images obtained by the British newspaper show that his home — just 500 yards from the WDBJ studios — had little furniture aside from a leather couch and chair.

A neighbor said Flanagan was often “rude and arrogant” and that he would throw cat feces at apartment doors during disputes.

Ben Shapiro writes at Breitbart,

Bryce Williams may have been mentally ill. But he was the ultimate product of the left’s microaggression society, seeking offense everywhere and then lashing out at others based on a perceived sense of victimization. Some victimization is objectively true, but that doesn’t mean that all claims of victimization are. The notion that subjective self-assessment of victimization should take precedence over objective fact is deeply dangerous.

Leftism requires widespread perception of victimhood, because without that perception of victimhood, no government corrective would be required. There’s only one problem: glorifying self-appointed victims makes them more common. It encourages people to find their victimization. Then, once self-appointed victims have punched their ticket for first class seats on the politically correct train, they feel justified in criminal activity – and sadly, leftists often grant them the freedom to pursue that criminality. Bryce Williams subjectively appointed himself one of those victims, and then used that status to murder his real, objective victims.

Read more here.