Why did you do that to us? Why?
At first, I thought it would be harmless.
In the spirit of the thread, I was thinking about Octopus and “words have no intrinsic meaning.”
But I was wrong. Words mean what we collectively agree they mean and (Jefferson) Starship can go fuck themselves.
I just got back from walking the dog. Unconsciously, I was whistling The Song That Shall Not Be Mentioned.
People were throwing rocks at me.
Karma got me. Maybe a chunk of granite, too.
LONG LIVE ROCK!
This one from Coheed and Cambria? (with lyrics directly taken from Justice Scalia’s dissenting opinions, focusing on Obamacare and same sex marriage, but they could just as easily be from Coheed’s own proggy purple pen. And it features him saying “words no longer have meaning.”)
Okay, that was PFF.
You joke, but cut away the patriotic/Christian/Muslim window dressing and the ideologies are shockingly similar.
Liberal? No. However, the disdain of freedom of speech and thought that the repressive theocracies share with the ‘progressive’ left is real and dangerous. Hive has been replaced with herd in this article. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/19/opinion/herd-mentality.html, however the general premise is similar to one I’ve been making.
Glad to see left of center news finally seeing the threat ‘progressives’ pose to fundamental freedoms.
It took you 8 days to come up with this??
“I’m no longer calling you a ‘hive’. You are now a ‘herd’. And because the NYT published an editorial with this premise I get to dehumanize the Board via other animal references.”
You are not very good at this, are you?
Meanwhile, conservative governors and school boards across the country are banning books in schools, banning speech in schools about gay people, and much, much more…
Bullshit. Please give one example of a Democrat supporting government censorship of ideas or speech. The publisher of Dr. Suess voluntarily deciding to no longer sell books that contain depictions that are now recognized as racist doesn’t count.
On the other hand I can give many examples of Republicans doing this.
I can’t read the article, so indulge me: what fundamental freedoms are ‘progressives’ posing a threat to?
( Get ready for a subject change or goal posts to be moved or for this to be all blamed on your reading skills… )
Heck I read the article and can’t figure out what fundemental freedoms progressives are posing a threat to.
Here’s a gift link
The only bits that I can come up with is that among the people who are are overly secure in their own little bubbles are…
the people who cannot be budged from the fantasy that the former president Donald Trump won the 2020 election, the people fashioning themselves as eternal victims of undifferentiated masses of white people ever badgering Black people with microaggressions and the people who appear motivated to attempt to kill someone in the name of a religious leader’s declaration. The results of these impulses vary greatly in impact and import, but to differing degrees they’re all symptoms of the same preference of being part of a herd even at the expense of coherence.
Which translates through the Octopus filter as as “black people mentioning micro aggression are just as bad as suicide bombers.”
The entire rest of the article is about how much better we are getting about promoting diversity, although acknowledging that certain training methods work better than others.
I suspect Octo read the headline, saw something he interpreted as a criticism of Blacks, and didn’t actually read anything else.
If he did read it, that’s even worse because he clearly didn’t understand it.
John McWhorter’s latest book is titled Woke Racism and deals with his theory that certain elements of the cultural left have taken “anti-racism” too far, to an extent that it’s sometimes counterproductive. This NYT op-ed by McWhorter appears to a sort of sidebar to the ideas in that book.
I, too, cannot figure out what @octopus is on about. Which is not unusual; our betentacled troll routinely misrepresents cites, either obfuscating facts in an inky cloud of flailing tentacles, or else getting them exactly backwards.
As for the specific question of what fundamental freedoms evil progressives are a threat to, I would presume it’s the fundamental freedom of theocrats to establish rigid and punitive theocracies, as exemplified by enlightened conservative cultures like the Taliban that I presume are much favoured by our behatted pink cephalopod.
It’s John McWhortor who has joined Diamond & Silk as well as Candace Owens in the increasingly crowded market of rage-filled African-American conservatives grifting on the white market. McWhortor’s most famous contribution to the Discourse is Woke Racism: How a New Religion has Betrayed Black America, published in 2021 and immediately latched onto by the WRight as “Look, see?” material.
The following Amazon review excerpts much more of the book than would be allowed here, so I submit the following, surprisingly blase, review for further understanding of where the writer of the NY Times opinion piece cited above stands on these issues:
ETA: A Jutai-jatsu move by Wolfpup!
Anyway, I think I can quote this, from the Forward of his book:
Emphasis mine, JT
Anyway, I still find it funny as all hell that Octy hid from this thread all butthurt that “hive” had been taken away from him (another one of my accomplishments in that 2 hour span), and 8 days later his solution was to return with…
“herd”.
To be fair, @JohnT, McWhorter describes himself as “a cranky liberal Democrat” but he does have many views that are decidedly conservative, and he’s been characterized as a “radical centrist” – i.e.- someone politically centrist (which in the American context to me means pretty damn conservative) while also espousing radical views about institutional and social reform.
More to the point, having read several of his books, my view is that McWhorter is a passionate and highly opinionated character who is often wrong about a lot of things.
He may have nine brains, but none of them actually work.
I mostly know if McWhorter from Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language, where his education and learning seem have been directed. But outside of that I can easily see him as you wrote in your post.
Octo herd your complains and has changed accordingly. 
It IS kinda funny. I reported “hive mind” being dehumanizing a few days ago. I explicitly said that it was a goof, though.
So, instead of being compared to insects that are bound together in a group for food and procreation, we’re being compared to grazing mammals who stand around in a field, are often slaughtered for food and, depending upon the species, shit where they eat.
Yeah, that’s so much better.