The Brilliant Robert Wargas, In case you forgot, How identity politics works.

How do identity politics work? A quick refresher course

By Robert Wargas US politics
The Telegraph
November 11th, 2013

Tim Stanley has already drawn your attention to a perfectly odious video of Dan Savage’s recent appearance on the Australian show Q&A, in which he “jokes” about mandating abortion to combat “overpopulation.”

Miranda Devine: "THE sneering foulness of the Left is bubbling up like overflow from an unblocked sewer at the realisation the Abbott government is here to stay."

Q & A

I urge everyone to watch the video of the entire episode, which you can find here. I did so a few days ago and have been turning the detritus over in my mind ever since. The entire episode really is a marvel of political correctness and identity politics, and a few brief comments are necessary, I believe, to remind everyone of the type of attitudes and opinions that underlay such a large segment of contemporary society. Those familiar with these slimy phenomena needn’t even watch the episode to understand the following points; they will read and nod with familiarity. Call it a refresher course, then.

1) Note how crude and vulgar Savage acts in general. Early in the show he refers, in an exceptionally explicit manner, to his alleged ability in oral sex. He seems to direct this comment at Peter Hitchens. I want you to imagine for a moment what would happen if a heterosexual man appeared on a television debate show and mentioned his prowess in oral sex to a female panelist. This would quite rightly be construed not only as creepy and disgusting but as an act of harassment, especially if the obvious purpose of the comment was, as in the case of Savage’s, to make his interlocutor feel uncomfortable and humiliated.

2) Savage acts the way he does because he believes he is entitled to do so. He believes his status as a member of The Oppressed exempts him from the rules of common decency and politeness that his Bourgeois Oppressors follow. You will notice all aggrieved people act in this way: they abuse others in the most heinous way while simultaneously demanding that those they’re abusing act deferential towards them. Note also that, in Savage’s case, this contempt for common decency extends to dress as well: he doesn’t feel compelled to wear a shirt or tie or jacket to an appearance before an enormous television crowd.

3) The audience encourages the panel’s radicalism. The panellists, emboldened by the howls of approval, are therefore encouraged to outdo one another in expressions of identity politics.

4) Notice how, with the exception of Peter Hitchens, all the other panelists are categorically obsessed with their own social identities, mainly in terms of gender and sexuality. For them, there is no reality beyond this identity; it is what defines them, determines their place in life as well as their moral standing. Like all radicals, however, their obsession (and pity) is limited only to select groups. If a feminist says, “As a woman, I feel that…” everyone keeps quiet and listens. If a conservative male says, “As a man, I feel that…” he is excoriated as a reactionary misogynist. Double standards are the single standard of political correctness.

5) As a corollary to point 4, notice how all the panelists (again, excepting Hitchens) turn every answer into a speech about how some nefarious force is responsible for all their problems. Nothing is their fault. The ills of the world are due to the racism, sexism, classism, and other -isms of the eternal oppressors. Nonetheless, the panelists seem almost to rejoice in their perceived oppression. It’s almost as though they enjoy it. Why not? It defines them. Like all radicals, their worldview is an odd and toxic marriage of self-worship and self-pity.
Do I really have to remind you that such people and attitudes have controlled our universities for well nigh half a century now? If you are someone who has never attended a university, let the episode and these brief observations serve as a kind of primer on the criminal misuse of the academy. Then again, these attitudes are so widespread nowadays, a university education is no longer necessary for the dumbing down of Western civilisation.

Robert Wargas

Robert Wargas is an American journalist who lives in New York. He has written for Newsday, PJ Media and Publishers Weekly. Most recently, he worked as a historian at the renowned Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, where he helped the institution document its record in biotechnology and molecular biology.

Miranda Devine: "THE sneering foulness of the Left is bubbling up like overflow from an unblocked sewer at the realisation the Abbott government is here to stay."

Sneering Lefties love to hate Abbott

Miranda Devine 
The Daily Telegraph
November 6, 2013

THE sneering foulness of the Left is bubbling up like overflow from an unblocked sewer at the realisation the Abbott government is here to stay.

From Jonathan Biggins' agonised cri de coeur playing at the Wharf Theatre, to the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Opera House, to the live audience of the ABC's Q&A, lefties are suffering an existential crisis.

The letters page of the SMH is exploding with rage.

Refugee advocate Julian Burnside has found his vicious tongue.

Student protesters - suddenly enraged about cuts brought in by Labor - burn effigies of Tony Abbott.

Welcome back to the Howard years, those glory days when the Left laid claim to the moral high ground.

Much of the baggage Labor brought with it into office, and which eventually brought it down, was filled with progressive fancies.

The last six years was an uncomfortable time for lefties as their wishes were granted by government (hello open borders, hello carbon tax).

None of it turned out well, but they now pretend it wasn't the ideas that were the problem. Not that they want to think too hard because they're too busy revelling in victimhood, post-election.

A selection from the Fairfax letters pages shows their fighting spirit: "Abbott's neo-idiocrasy"; "Climate change deniers and coalminers will be dancing in the streets with Abbott"; "This is what happens when you send a boy to do a woman's work"; "Please, Tony Abbott, couldn't I just say an 'Our Father' and 10 'Hail Marys'?"; "Can we be sure it was The Lodge and not Rome he has been aiming for?" Oh, yes, Abbott is worse even than Howard. He's Catholic! Herewith, some tales from the frontline.

At the Wharf Theatre on Monday night the chattering classes wallowed in the rueful melancholy of Whoops - The Wharf Revue. The mystery is that: "Abbott (deficient of faculty) delights not many … And yet he rules."

In one skit "the last surviving Q&A panel", including Bob Ellis and Marieke Hardy, cower as the Abbott forces storm the citadels of culture.

Amid the sound of exploding ordnance, a football falls at their feet: "Oh no! Eddie McGuire is closer than we think." Yuk yuk. The barbarians are through the gate.

In another skit, Abbott is played as a lip-smacking Neanderthal: "a smug Catholic knob … a blokey bloke not worth two bob" whose only skill is producing "soundbites of unrelenting negativity".

The same theme was taken up by the real Q&A on ABC TV later that night.

"For me the biggest mystery is that Tony Abbott is a Rhodes Scholar," sneered Germaine Greer to howls of laughter from the audience.

The program was a classic in the genre of conservative-bashing.

The cleverest person on the panel was British conservative columnist Peter Hitchens, eloquently arguing against same-sex marriage, and other totemic issues of progressives. Or trying to.

He could barely complete a sentence without being interrupted by Greer, American homosexual activist Dan Savage (whose "dangerous idea" is making abortion mandatory for 30 years), and Hanna Rosin, author of The End Of Men.

Tony Jones gave all free rein - except to Hitchens.

"I'm stopping you," Jones told Hitchens.

"Don't stop me … I haven't finished my answer," protested Hitchens. "You haven't stopped anyone else."

It's always the way.

The audience is as bad. "It's a rally," Hitchens told them, waiting to speak over applause for a Savage interjection. "While you do this I can't talk, and you know it, and that's to your shame because silencing opponents is a very wicked thing to do."

He even told his fellow panellists they were "fantastically intolerant".

"This is the absolute seedbed of totalitarianism. When you start believing that the opinions of other people are a pathology then you are in the beginning of the stage that leads to the secret police and the gulag."

Yes, it is true that Abbott has won the election. But conservatives have never yet won the culture war.

When Labor is in office, the Left do their work, quietly, inside the corridors of power, to change the nature of the country. The curriculum, the universities, the ABC, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the National Museum of Australia.

They do it for posterity. When conservatives are in power, they keep busy fixing the economy, controlling the borders, maybe switching off a money tap or two at the ABC.

But they are too polite to seize the narrative of history. In the culture wars it's always two steps forward for the Left. The best conservatives have ever managed is to maintain the status quo.

When the conservatives are in power, the Left make merry mischief.

They bully and bluster and fill every cultural space.

Which is why, for all their moaning, they haven't been this excited for years.