“I really will not allow the simple 
gesture to belong to the moronic dogwhistling catfishing foghorning frogmarching pigsticking dickwaving few who attempt to appropriate it for their own fatuous fantasies.”
—–British actor, writer, wit and all-around smart person Stephen Fry upon being warned that some people may think that he’s a white supremacist because he flashed the “OK” sign on Twitter.
Good for him. He didn’t grovel. He didn’t apologize. He simply said, in essence, “Oh, sod off, you fools,” and that was that. He rejected the right-wing trolls and the leftist speech police simultaneously, with open contempt. And that’s how to deal with political correctness bullying. Someone put him in touch with Harvard College.
On the down side, he’ll probably never be able to see the Cubs play in Wrigley Field.
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Pointer: Jim Treacher
Ethics Alarms 
Good for him. I have argued myself online that we should not allow a commonplace, decades-old sign that is understood worldwide to mean simply, “A-Okay” to be appropriated by extremists of any kind.
Otherwise, the terrorists win…or the racists…or the thought police…
Sheesh, when did we get so many villains?
I believe that there are lots and lots of non-racists also spreading the rumor that the sign is being used by white supremacists. I have no way of getting actual numbers, but I’d bet it’s MOSTLY not white-supremacists, since there really aren’t very many of those.
It’s being used mostly as a way to troll the Left. “Let’s tell everyone that various innocent things are the work of white supremacists, and they’ll believe it, which proves that they’re stupid and paranoid.” Mission accomplished, but actual white supremacists and racists enjoy getting in on the game as well. Really, they enjoy any attention they can get for their cause. When just being talked about equals a win, this means they get a win.
I actually think Stephen Fry is part of the problem.
“I really will not allow the simple 👌 gesture to belong to the moronic dogwhistling catfishing foghorning frogmarching pigsticking dickwaving few who attempt to appropriate it for their own fatuous fantasies.”
In this quote he AFFIRMS that there are ‘dogwhistling conservatives’ and ‘white supremacists’ who are trying to appropriate the OK symbol as a symbol of white supremacy. This is incredibly misleading and buys right into leftists lies. Has anyone asked how ‘right-wing dogwhistles’ work if only leftists can hear them?
If he had said “I am not going to let the mainstream media and the professional outrage industry appropriate the OK symbol for white supremacists”, he would have an accurate statement. Who has said this symbol is a symbol of white supremacy? So we add up the total and get…15 white supremacists and 75,347,723 leftists*. Yes, let’s blame it on white supremacists!
*not real numbers
But it’s impossible for anyone to unravel a mess like this. I can’t figure out who’s trolling and who’s serious; and I bet I’ve done a lot more research than Fry. It’s enough that he didn’t apologize, grovel and back down.
Since the advent of social media.
It still boggles my mind. If you’re genuinely against white supremacists or whatever this is supposed to promote, why would you validate their appropriation of a common hand gesture? Wouldn’t you want to reduce their prominence and dismiss it as easily as you could? Even under the worst case scenario – wouldn’t you want to mock that person as playing a child’s game rather than validate and spread their appropriation?
Simply bonkers to me. It’s another form of the Streisand Effect.
Facts no longer matter to progressives. Nor does logic or reason make any difference in their march to the sea, like the lemmings they are.
(Yes I know the lemming thing is an urban legend… the legend has overtaken the story)
Absolutely correct. Most of the Left’s responses are based on emotion, not logic. That’s why being offended trumps reason for the majority of them. Their utopian programs are not based on will this actually work but on dreamy fantasies of a perfect society where we all sing kumbaya.
Exactly.
My theory is that it’s just another thing to get you lots of approval on Facebook and Twitter. The addiction to virtue signalling, particularly on the Left, never ceases to amaze.
“The healthy man atimes knows not the nature of health – until he falls prey to illness. In disease, in degeneration, the true standards become clear in a way they could not when they were merely presupposed; and in the present malady, perhaps even moribundity, of the West, we must relearn, or learn for the first time, our Occidental virtue, for the benefit of a future Occidental Man.”
This is a statement that can be broken down. I will try. It is an assertion that there are some on the ‘right-wing who are ‘trolls’. The purpose of this statement — and this reminds me how both Zoltar and Slick have used the term when arguments do not go their way — is to isolate and dismiss what this ‘right-wing’ (I take this to mean ‘right-wing extremists’ as that is the term used generally in the Media) and to imply that what they say, and their activism, is ridiculous and dismissible. But that is *just opinion*. Whether it is true or not is really another matter.
It is true though that *someone* (they certainly seem to be on the progressive left) are definitely trying to ‘shut down free speech’ and the free communication of ideas. And what is their main focus? What ideas do they have the most contempt for? What upsets them the most? Well, it is what the Media have labeled ‘the extreme right’.
The assertion in the above-quoted paragraph is that each side has a position of ‘political correctness bullying’, and it is implied that the ‘center’ position is the best one, or perhaps the ‘right’ one.
I would suggest — in contradiction — that the above-quoted phrase is laden with denial about *what is really going on* and what the implications are. Denial is defined as a ‘refusal to see and understand what is going on’ and a psychological need to hold to an erroneous, mistaken view through insisting on a kind of fantasy-view of what is or what should be. I assert that this is the basic position of the American Conservative who is also, I might note, of European stock. The denial of reality is a complex issue, I have come to understand. I have made many efforts to describe what I see and, here, have not gotten very far.
To begin to unfold the ‘truth’ about the present, and to present this truth to a person or some people who refuse to see it and to understand it, is an odd endeavor. One is not very rewarded for the effort! And one gets mostly ‘contempt, silence & ridicule’. But that fits, I think. People who are in denial do not, by definition, desire to see things as they really are and prefer the phantasy of their cherished and imagined world. If someone is coming along who even *suggests* that they are in denial, it stands to reason that they lash out and beat away the one trying to ‘awaken them’ to the truth.
The American Radicals are right on the verge of ‘winning the day’. Their project is that of the remaking of America and a large part of this has been through demographic dilution. Once enough ‘people of color’ come into the American demographic, and when they are corralled into the Democrat system, the ‘final assault’ on the white demographic will go forward, just as it is now. Everyone on this blog is in near-total denial that this is happening, and they refuse to see and understand the consequences.
They are as ‘deers frozen in headlights’. They are immobilized by a number of things, perhaps they are mostly ‘sentiments’, I am not sure. One primary one is “It was not supposed to turn out like this!!!” They were told that if they allowed the demographic to shift it was the fulfillment of the ‘dream’ of Americanism: the open republic that received the benighted masses. They opened their own front doors and invited the stranger in. They ‘marched with’ MLK and the absorbed his high-crafter rhetoric. They agreed in a host of different ways with the American economic dream of a vast mass-econo-republic held together by ‘the American proposition’, and they really & truly believed that would be enough. What happened among these people, and why they agreed to ‘all this’, really requires a sort of cultural saga. It is not easy (nor advisable) to express it in brief terms, in pithy paragraphs. But they were tricked! And they tricked themselves! And their self-deception leads them to trick others!
They are not part of a solution, therefore, and they are part of the problem.
Therefore, the whole declaration that “We represent the sane center’ and around us these lunatics are dancing like enraged barbarians!” is questionable, certainly, and potentially absurd.
To get clear about *what is really happening* I would suggest going right to the heart of the matter. I suggest it is very clearly expressed by Charles Blow who has been repeating it in every opinion piece of his for months if not for years!
White Supremacy Beyond a White Majority
He clearly shows, he explains without holding anything back, what is ‘the plan’ (if you will) that is being enacted in the present.
“No! No!” you say, “This is a mistake! The ‘extremists’ have got control! All we need to do is to expose them and their project will deflate! Things will return to normal! They must! Oh, Why did things have to turn out this way?!?”
Denial! It is an amazing thing.
The larger battle is a huge cultural & civilizational battle and it is unfolding ‘before your eyes’. It has to do with meta-political issues. To see and understand these meta-political issues one has to transcend, through a deliberate intellectual choice, the narrow boundaries of ‘conventional Americanism’. One has to break out of intellectual & perceptual fetters that keep one’s vision focused on a wall upon which limited. dancing shadows flicker. One has to ‘turn around’ and begin to notice what ‘meta-politics’ means and what the implications are of what is being carried out in our present. It is rigorous, intellectual work and it demands seriousness and focus.
Five years of solid work. FIVE YEARS! And zero help from any one of *you*. Just resistance. Hatred. Contempt. Diversion. (I am saying this for rhetorical effect! so please don’t image that I did not fully understand all of this, at least mostly, right at the beginning).
There is a tremendous amount of arrogance one encounters here. It is almost hubris! Have I done wrong in explaining myself?
This goes out to a dear ‘rotund Canadian genius’:
God Bless Stephen Fry! He is a superior white man! These days, he is virtually supreme.
Fry has signaled his virtue most virtuously ad hominemly. He has successfully mocked the phony virtue of the phony virtue-signaling, wannabe speech controllers (who are also wannabe controllers of everything else white and male and English-literate). His eminently quotable, defiant dismissal of the Gesture-Control Police and their censorious ways rivals a pluralized version of the (ostensibly, mistakenly experienced by a customer paying for an argument) “retail abuse” in a Monty Python skit:
“WHAT do you want? DON’T give me that, you snotty-faced heaps of parrot droppings…SHUT yer festering GOBS, ya TITS! Your type really makes me PUKE, you vacuous, coffee-nosed, malodorous PERVERTS!”
Today, thanks to Stephen Fry, I am ever more proud of my race. (That’s…the human race.)
Bravo Stephen Fry. He’s an outspoken advocate for libraries (go literacy!) and now he shows that he won’t bow to social media bullies. My admiration has only increased.