Tuesday, February 21, 2017

The Milos We Shall Always Have Among Us


That is from the Bible of Echidne, and the Milos refer to Milo Yiannopoulos*, but also to Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing performance artists.  Who knows what their real values are, whether conservative or not,  other than the desire to stand in the glaring limelight of politics and to own several beach properties?  But that type will always be among us, and Milo himself is not gone.

Yes, the CPAC dis-invited him as a keynote speaker,  because of his support for pederasty, even though he was initially invited because of his support of white heterosexual cis-male supremacy and because of his misogyny and open racism.  It's always interesting to find what the unacceptable might be, and pederasty support still qualifies.

Milo also lost his book deal with Simon&Schuster.  I always wondered why Simon&Schuster initially bothered defending the book deal by saying that the book would contain no hate speech.  It's the hate speech its potential market wanted to read, after all.  But never mind.  Once it looked bad for Simon&Schuster, the deal was off.  Probably not enough money now.

And Milo resigned from Breitbart.  But I very much doubt he is gone.  After all, he gets tremendous publicity right now, including from my scaly fingers.  Even if he is gone in this incarnation, another will pop up tomorrow.  Those people are just too much fun as the mouthpiece for festering hatreds, and punching downward is always much the safest form of humor in the society.

Indeed, it's actually the most politically correct form of humor, unlikely to lead to a political assassination with, say, a poisoned umbrella tip.

When I scanned the recent Yiannopoulos headlines I noticed that several of them called him "a provocateur."  That made me imagine what I would be called if I had an act like his but in reverse **.  Probably some much nastier things.  It's always salutary to learn which opinions are called "controversial" and which people are called "provocateurs."

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*  I have discussed Milo, at least in part, in these three blog posts.  The last one links to some of his thoughts on feminism and women.

** Yes, I could easily create one if I was willing to use false generalizations, bad data and call people names and take small isolated incidents and argue that they prevail everywhere.