{"id":74462,"date":"2020-06-16T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-06-16T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=74462"},"modified":"2020-06-16T06:40:15","modified_gmt":"2020-06-16T11:40:15","slug":"ripped-from-the-headlines-of-pure-fiction-honest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=74462","title":{"rendered":"Ripped From The Headlines Of Pure Fiction.  Honest."},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n<p><em>SCENE:  Debate hall at the University of Minnesota.  Mitch BERG is getting ready for a debate with Stacey HINTON.  HINTON &#8211; a white woman from Edina &#8211; is president of the group &#8220;Keep All Racists Equally Nonplussed&#8221;, a social justice group without portfolio.  The moderator takes the stage, as a small audience rustles in its seats.  <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>MODERATOR:  Mr. Berg, Ms. Hinton, you know the rules (<em>both nod <\/em>).  Let&#8217;s get started.   What do you advocate doing about the Covid virus. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>BERG:  Look, I think the only things that <em>have <\/em>worked are first, protecting the vulnerable &#8211; certainly more effectively than we do here in Minnesota &#8211; then isolate the infected, and re-open the economy for everyone else.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>MODERATOR:  Ms. Hinton?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>HINTON:  You&#8217;re white.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>BERG:   Well, yeah, I am.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>HINTON:  So that&#8217;s your privilege talking.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>BERG:  What does &#8220;privilege&#8221; have to do with observing that the places with the best combination of public health and medical performance all did exactly that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>HINTON:  Check your privilege. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>MODERATOR:   OK.  On to the next topic.  Whither Minneapolis?   We&#8217;ll start with you, Ms. Hinton.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>HINTON:   The rioting was a bunch of white boys running around vandalizing neighborhoods of color.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>BERG:  Well, there certainly were &#8220;white boys&#8221; and girls doing the rioting.  The implied message is &#8220;white supremacist&#8221; boys and girls.  If so, they were pretty ingenious &#8220;white supremacists&#8221;, coating entire neighborhoods with graffiti associated with the left. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>HINTON:  Spoken like a white boy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>BERG:   What does that even mean? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>MODERATOR:  Let&#8217;s move along.  What do we do about reforming law enforcement?  Mr. Berg.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>BERG:  Get serious about reforming qualified immunity.   It is used to excuse a lot of  horrific abuses, not just by the police, but by every other variety of public employee.  It basically turns public employees into a higher legal caste.  This doesn&#8217;t bode well for self-government.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>HINTON:  Something a white guy would say. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>BERG:  Ma&#8217;am?   Do you have any thing to add other than my ethnic background?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>HINTON:  Yes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>BERG:   Let&#8217;s hear it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>HINTON:  It&#8217;s true of <em>all <\/em>white guys. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>MODERATOR:  Let&#8217;s move along.   Ms. Hinton &#8211; what do  we need to do about race relations in this country? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>HINTON:  White people need to listen to black peoples&#8217; stories, and check their privilege.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>BERG:  Huh.   All due respect, ma&#8217;am, but that&#8217;s the kind of meaningless word salad that people like you &#8211; &#8220;progressives&#8221; who are, if I may say so, a lot whiter than I am use to try to diffuse their own white liberal guilt. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>HINTON:   Again, that&#8217;s your privilege talking, white boy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>BERG:   To the extent I have &#8220;privilege&#8221;, it&#8217;s because I was born in a functional two-parent household, with parents who stayed together until I was an adult, taught me a work ethic, and made sure I stayed in high school.   And that kind of privilege is not an exclusive club &#8211; in fact, like freedom, the more of this &#8220;privilege&#8221; society has, the more there is to go around.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But let&#8217;s cut the crap.  The concept of &#8220;white privilege&#8221; was, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=67844\">from its origins<\/a>, a way for wealthy white progressive academics to try to expiate their guilt about the privileges their <em>class <\/em>gave them.   To insulate themselves from gnawing class guilt while preserving that holier-than-thou feeling that white progressivism feeds on, they created and adopted the preposterous concept that being white meant a hot tar roofer from Arkansas has &#8220;privileges&#8221; that Oprah and Jay-Z don&#8217;t, while giving the likes of Mark Dayton and Mark Zuckerberg a moral pass, like indulgences sold by &#8220;church&#8221; that never forgives and offers no salvation.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>MODERATOR:   Ms. Hinton?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>HINTON:   Whitey white white white white white.  White white white.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>MODERATOR:  Thank you all for coming out to today&#8217;s debate!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>SCENE: Debate hall at the University of Minnesota. Mitch BERG is getting ready for a debate with Stacey HINTON. HINTON &#8211; a white woman from Edina &#8211; is president of the group &#8220;Keep All Racists Equally Nonplussed&#8221;, a social justice group without portfolio. The moderator takes the stage, as a small audience rustles in its [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,18,349],"tags":[236],"class_list":["post-74462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war","category-pc","category-urban-liberal-privilege-liberal-tyranny","tag-dramatization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=74462"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74462\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74463,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74462\/revisions\/74463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=74462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=74462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=74462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}