The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

In Case You Haven’t Noticed Yet, Everybody Recently Went Crazy

Posted on | April 9, 2012 | 29 Comments

Everybody but me and you, that is, and one of us is probably on the verge of cracking up under the enormous stress that seems to be driving people off the deep end lately.

Either we’re in the midst of an epidemic of mass hysteria, or else all these people jabbering like magpies on the Internet are describing a reality with which I’ve lost touch, because it makes no sense to me:

Mitt Romney: He’s Inevitable! Electable! Invincible!

Crazy, right? But kooks who believe such things seem to be everywhere nowadays, especially on the Internet:

U.S. Senator Calls President ‘Stupid’ on Twitter

 You don’t even have to look for this stuff. It’s everywhere:

Toddler on Easter egg hunt stumbles on live GRENADE…
which has to be blown up by bomb squad

It’s impossible to parody such madness. For instance, some crazy people still believe stereotypes about black people being good at basketball, but you’d better keep your distance from such wackjobs, or else you’ll never get a job at National Review. (Did somebody say “rim shot”?)

Jeff Goldstein won’t be sending his application to National Review any time soon, because if he was ever in the same room with Rich Lowry, he’d never be able to resist the urge to punch him out.

Some kook — and the Internet’s full of ’em lately, I tell ya — will almost certainly interpret that link as an “endorsement” or “defense” of what John Derbyshire wrote, which is a popular game crazy people play: Demanding that you denounce something somebody else wrote or said or did as if you’re in charge of what other people write, say and do.

Mandatory denunciations were part of the Moscow Show Trials and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The attempt to impose intellectual conformity, under threat of denunciation if you don’t conform, is totalitarian. It wasn’t necessarily suprising, then, to find myself today denounced as an Enemy of the People here and there for refusing to agree with Big Brother that We Have Always Been at War With Eastasia. And people seem to be so stressed-out about this that even the mildest disagreement causes them to erupt in fury. You’d never believe the indignant tone of the e-mail I received today from a liberal atheist, to which I tried to respond as calmly as possible:

I made no “assertion that atheists are more likely to be bigots.” I said there was a significant overlap between “the New Atheism” and evolution-based “Scientific Racism,” an overlap of which Derbyshire is an example.
There are certain people — I’ve met them — who have gotten off into the pessimism thing, reading a lot of Nietzsche and Spengler, etc., and thus are filled with a doomsday horror about the Decline of the West, the kind of theme that inspired Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz.
While I am not necessarily of the opposing school (which we might call Pollyanna Conservatism), the market for right-wing pessimism is overcrowded already and I never cared much for Nietzsche anyway. If I were offered a six-figure fellowship at the Declinist Foundation for Doom and Gloom, I’d take it, of course, and please let me know if there’s a publisher interested in my idea for a book called Where Are We Going? And Why Are We in This Handbasket?
Nevertheless, I see no reason to apologize for observing that fanatical atheists are usually also fanatical about other things. Some atheists are fanatical environmentalists, and some are fanatical racists. Some of them are even fanatics about bicycling.
Me? I’m just trying to make a living, buddy. And it’s a damn hard dollar.
— RSM

It’s important not to take these liberal kooks too seriously, but at the same time, you want to keep a close eye on them, because you never know when one of them will snap and start spouting profanities and racial slurs on national TV, like Susan Candiotti on CNN:

Category: CNN, Fear. Loathing.

Comments

29 Responses to “In Case You Haven’t Noticed Yet, Everybody Recently Went Crazy”

  1. AnonymousDrivel
    April 9th, 2012 @ 7:51 pm

    “Demanding that you denounce something somebody else wrote or said or did as if you’re in charge of what other people write, say and do.”

    I do believe there’s already a canned response to such pleas: FYNQ.

    Or, to be a bit more sophisticated, you could say, “You know, I read Alinsky’s book, too… so FYNQ.”

  2. Asian_chic
    April 9th, 2012 @ 8:25 pm

    What’s crazy is when you comment on a subject, even if  SHE agrees with you, you’ll have a comment below saying you are wrong. Then makes comments on another posts, essentially agreeing with you. 

  3. Ford Prefect
    April 9th, 2012 @ 8:46 pm

    The libs and race baiters (but I repeat myself) have become a caricature of themselves and they don’t even realize it.  The level of totalitarian intolerance displayed by people like “Zandar” while they whine about Derb’s “racism” would be comical if not for it’s overt Orwellian subtext (can a subtext be overt?)

    Again, this is the left (and spineless RINOs) trying to show how all superior they are to the rest of us. They know racism when they see it and they are going to let everyone know how insightful they are for pointing it out.  Such is the product of an illiberal education.

    Meanwhile, out here in realityville, we’re laughing at the sophomoric world view of the Zandar’s of the world. People with too much education for their double digit IQs to see that we are laughing at their “superior intellect”.

    Morons.

  4. Matthew W
    April 9th, 2012 @ 8:47 pm

    It takes a bomb squad to detonate a hand grenade??
    What happened to “Pull pin, toss”???

  5. Matthew W
    April 9th, 2012 @ 8:49 pm

     “Demanding that you denounce something somebody else wrote or said
    or did as if you’re in charge of what other people write, say and do.”HA!!That was a famous “smear trick” over at LGF a long time ago !!

  6. rebl stevn
    April 9th, 2012 @ 8:50 pm

    Susan Candiotti reporting the words of a suspect in a “racially motivated crime”  How dare she not censor those un PC words.  I feel sorry for the Injun with an Anglicised name.  England was the originating point of all those white people who shoved the Native Americans aside, no?  To have the last name of England must be a source of anger.  Since he may have committed the crime, by the rules of the Federal Government, he must be listed as a white man.  Luckily there was a white co conspirator, so this makes it probable that two “white” men went on a revenge killing spree against those poor harmless put upon minorities that weren’t doing nothing wrong, after suffering hundreds of years of slavery, Jim Crow, etc.  Blacks are almost justified for their criminal activities against the whites.  New rule!  When a minority commits a crime against a minority, the victim will be classified as a minority.  When a non black minority commits a crime against a black minority, the perp will be classed as a white.  When a black minority commits a crime against a white female,  an attempt to classify the black as a white perp will be attempted by Fox News

    http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/04/05/suspect-arrested-after-mutilated-body-found-inside-mississippi-casino/

    The suspect has been identified as a black male. 

    THIS IS A NEOCONSERVATIVE WEBSITE WHOSE PRIMARY CONCERN IS FOR THE WELL BEING OF ANOTHER NATION AT THE EXPENSE OF THE UNITED STATES. 

  7. Adobe_Walls
    April 9th, 2012 @ 9:06 pm

    I don’t think you can lay that Easter egg handgrenade thingy on the interwebs. As for crazy people all over the internet, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

  8. Confutus
    April 9th, 2012 @ 9:28 pm

    Nope, it’s everybody that’s gone crazy, you and me included.  I trust your delusions are only a temporary condition,  although it may take another two months before you recover. As for me, I gave up the pretense of sanity years ago.
     

  9. robertstacymccain
    April 9th, 2012 @ 9:40 pm

    Which site is “neoconservative,” mine or Fox News? Because they’ve been in the tank for Romney the past few weeks, and if you want to throw them under the bus, OK. But what the hell does this have to do with foreign policy?

    Oh, wait — I forgot — YOU’RE FUCKING CRAZY.

    Suddenly, it all makes sense …

  10. Taxpayer1234
    April 9th, 2012 @ 10:18 pm

    RSM is NOT in the tank for Iran!

  11. richard mcenroe
    April 9th, 2012 @ 10:55 pm

    They’re all mad, Starbuck, save thee, and me… and thee’s a little queer…

  12. I’ve Noticed, And So Has the Pope, and So Has Rick Santorum, and So Has Sarah Palin
    April 9th, 2012 @ 11:20 pm

    […] In Case You Haven’t Noticed Yet, Everybody Recently Went Crazy Everybody but me and you, that is, and one of us is probably on the verge of cracking up under the enormous stress that seems to be driving people off the deep end lately. […]

  13. Pathfinder's wife
    April 9th, 2012 @ 11:22 pm

    People always go crazy right before things fall apart (or appear most definitely to be falling apart without much hope of redemption).  That’s just the way things are.
    It’s probably going to get much, much worse; if gambling was still a hobby I’d be tempted to go all in on that bet and then sit back, watch it all unfold.

  14. McGehee
    April 9th, 2012 @ 11:39 pm

    Well, I know I’m not crazy, because when I talk to the voices in my head they answer me in lucid, complete sentences.

  15. Adjoran
    April 10th, 2012 @ 12:24 am

    An interesting take on the inability of people to get outside the limits of their own belief systems is the old South African comedy, The Gods Must Be Crazy.

     Derb, with his Chinese wife, was royally screwed by the spineless Lowry, who lacks any principles beyond what his leftist pals Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias tell him he can have.  He’s been at NR forever, and the “offending” article wasn’t posted there.  But Lowry couldn’t bear the stigma from the Beltway elite if he didn’t prove his craven acquiescence to PC authority immediately – it couldn’t wait the holiday weekend.

  16. Adobe_Walls
    April 10th, 2012 @ 12:43 am

    Always a good sign. As for me I don’t deny being crazy just not in that narrow clinical sense of the term.

  17. Adobe_Walls
    April 10th, 2012 @ 12:44 am

    Would that be the “coward Rich Lowry”?

  18. JeffS
    April 10th, 2012 @ 1:05 am

    Everyone went nucking futs back in 1996 with the re-election of Bubba to the Ovum Office. 

    So, like, this is news, dude?

  19. Bob Belvedere
    April 10th, 2012 @ 8:26 am

    Take heart, Stacy.  There is one good thing that has come out of this: you, me, Jeff Goldstein, and Dan Riehl have been denounced by The Village Voice!

    Just call me Bob ‘Shorthand’ Belvedere from now on.

  20. Bob Belvedere
    April 10th, 2012 @ 8:28 am

    Well, Rich Lowry Is A Coward, ’tis true.

  21. ThePaganTemple
    April 10th, 2012 @ 8:29 am

    That’s just the problem, we laugh and snicker at them in private, but when we’re confronted with it, suddenly we cringe and join in with the left and the spineless RINOs, because deep down we’re afraid of them. If we’d laugh at them openly, actually belittle them, and did it often, maybe eventually they’d shut the fuck up.

  22. Bob Belvedere
    April 10th, 2012 @ 8:30 am

    Absolutely not, you’re right: he’s bucking to be the First Gentile President Of Israel!

  23. Bob Belvedere
    April 10th, 2012 @ 8:31 am

     We noticed.

  24. Bob Belvedere
    April 10th, 2012 @ 8:36 am

    In no Paradise myself, I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should’st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can’st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can’st not go mad?

  25. Tennwriter
    April 10th, 2012 @ 9:42 am

    That IS an honor.  Not quite as cool as a fatwa, but definitely cooler than a politically motivated audit.

  26. richard mcenroe
    April 10th, 2012 @ 10:17 am

     Those are Romney attack ads.  Turn off the TV.

  27. rebl stevn
    April 11th, 2012 @ 10:04 pm

    You are a neo conservative RSM, and Fox News is too.  Where the fuck does foreign policy enter into this? I’m poking my finger at you,  the poseur posturing of feigned disgust at a “liberal” news outlet for using the exact quote of a twitter or face book post.  

    “FUCKING NIGGER”  was it?   The politically protected minority apparently did kill the American Indians father, another class of protected minority.

    Tell me about how you marched with the minorities in the 60’s civil rights struggle.  Martin Luther King and all that.  Earn some brownie points with the left at your disgust with the conservatives transgressions for wanting to maintain a life for their children that looks like 1950’s.  Brow beat us about how backwards 1950’s Southern States were.  And then explain again why the jews deserve a nation/state of their own.

    Steven

  28. rebl stevn
    April 11th, 2012 @ 10:09 pm

     And you are Teaching college kids to think since 1984?  No wonder high school drop outs are more productive than college kids.  I’m pretty sure my comments had nothing to do with Iran, other than the neo con accusation which obviously the neo cons are the ones that have a problem with Iran, since what,,,1953?

  29. Taxpayer1234
    April 12th, 2012 @ 2:26 pm

    Wow, that went straight over your head. You need to go back to school.