Via Instapundit:
Also, from Taranto:
It’s not that hard to categorize Wendy Davis: She was among the category of “single mothers” who are married to rich dudes.
Heck, if you don’t have to be single to be a single mother, it stands to reason, or whatever [WaPo columnist and Davis apologist Liza] Mundy is substituting for it, that you don’t have to be a mother either. That would make your humble columnist a single mother. So don’t judge us.
I think piling on is utterly appropriate.
You know, this is a tough situation to know who to favor.
Liberals claim to be free thinkers who love to challenge authority but they embrace a stricter hierarchy than the Catholic Church when it comes to Victims. The More Victimized person has greater moral authority and must be honored.
Black trumps Women, hence Obama gets nominated over Hillary. I’m hazy on how it goes from there on down. Does Women trump Cripple? Where does Single Mother fall versus Unfit Mother? I think we need a definitive ruling on the lower rung rankings.
Gay trumps all. Why the DFL heirachy were not happy to see a Somalian get the gay seat on the Minneapolis city council.
JD
from this site (I think gay has moved up this ranking):
http://dscottanthony.newsvine.com/_news/2010/05/16/4290964-the-lefts-hierarchy-of-victims
” For people interested, here is the current victim hierarchy.
blacks
hispanics (temporarily moved up due to arizona law)
muslims
leftist women
teachers unions and academics
gays
unions
hollywood
Native Americans
Asians
Conservative white women
Conservative white men
Christians
Sarah Palin
Conservative Blacks
In effect, any group can attack (physically or verbally) any group that is lower on the victim scale with impunity. There is almost no chance the act will be noted as a hate crime, or given any national media coverage.”
Chuck’s remark reminds me of the typical World War 2 movie, where the squad or the bomber or PT Boat crew would usually have a similar cast of characters; a wily and wiry Brooklyn boy, a rangy westerner, a dim but jovial southerner, a buttoned-down and reliable midwesterner, and usually a buttoned down military guy in charge.
I think we’re seeing a new version of this in DFL politcs. Every DFL-dominated political body has an assortment; the gay guy, the humorless female WASP, the black guy, the asian or latino (but rarely both), the dour lesbian, almost always led by the dweeby white male Ivy league lawyer.
“Gay trumps all. Why the DFL heirachy were not happy to see a Somalian get the gay seat on the Minneapolis city council.”
Hope he wiped it off with bleach before he took it. Seriously, for all the left’s talk of diversity, that is one seriously white city council. How can they live with themselves?
It’s also worth noting that moral authority can (a) be evanescent and (b) being wrapped in it can be somewhat like being wrapped in Charmin. In 2005 Cindy Sheehan had Absolute Moral Authority as she cavorted in the ditch in Crawford. The minute she started to criticize Obama, she found out about the Charmin Codicil.
Kel, thank you, that’s exactly what I was looking for. But that chart is not complete so it doesn’t answer my question for this specific election.
Where does Straight White Woman Harvard-lawyer rank against Straight White Male Wheelchair?
I assume it’s like algebra so the Straight Whites cancel each other leaving Woman Harvard-lawyer versus Male Wheelchair, right? Ordinarily, Woman beats Man; but is Harvard-lawyer a More Victimized class than Wheelchair? The President and First Lady notwithstanding, is there any evidence for that?
Also, does her Victim Plus One cancel his Victim Plus One? Are all Victim points equal or are Victim Points weighted (for example if Fat and Ugly both are of equal rank – lower than Gay but higher than Christian – are Fat points weighted more than Ugly points within that rank)?
Basically, I need to know where to place Wheelchair on the list so I can calculate the two candidates’ respective Victim Status and decide who to favor.
It’s a conundrum, for sure.
Mr. D. nails it. It’s not about any moral authority, but rather the categories are not part of a strict hierarchy. Rather, the categories are useful only in imposing an automatic penalty when the left decides that someone needs to be slapped down. So Walter Williams or Thomas Sowell rising from the projects deserves no sympathy; Barry Soetoro riding the wallet of his rich grandmother (while abusing her in his autobiographies) gets our sympathy.
And of course, a side note; the difference between Sowell, Williams, and Obama is not primarily their politics. It is that Sowell and Williams have actually done something useful in the area of civil rights.
Mr D, a conundrum yes because we have a conflation of mutable and immutable victimhood.
for instance all the following attributes are immutable:
black
Asian (problematic; china, india, persia, arabian peninsula, indonesia,etc)
american indian
caucasian
Semitic
homosexual (again problematic: could be argued as mutable behavior)
heterosexual (again problematic: could be argued as mutable behavior)
hispanic (problematic; just means you were born in bogota not munich)
male
female
the mutable attributes could be even more challenging;
single mother (divorced or never married)
christian
muslim
Jew
Harvard educated vs Stanford vs Oxford vs Indianhead Area Technical
crippled (at birth, through accident, by violence etc)
union member (this one is really tough – there is a secret internal ranking)
academic
communist
conservative
I think we’ll need a matrix, a weighting scheme and a clever algorithm.
I think we’ll need a matrix, a weighting scheme and a clever algorithm.
I don’t think so, kel. All that is required is knowing which particular idiot is most useful at any given moment.
“I think we’ll need a matrix, a weighting scheme and a clever algorithm.”
An especially clever algorithm, that can discern the difference between Elizabeth Warren’s Native Americanism and Bristol Palin’s.