When Passive Aggression Meets "Microagression"

Ralph Haddad's recent column in the McGill Daily is more than just a reminder that dumb people also go to university; it's also essentially the nadir of anti-oppression ideology.

Haddad penned more than 1,000 words denouncing the Movember campaign -- in which men grow moustaches in order to fundraise to fight prostate cancer, but his column can essentially be summed up in two words: fucking stupid.

Haddad insists that Movember is "sexist, racist, transphobic and misinformed." In order to back this up he falls back on some of the most comically-flawed counter-logic to ever make it to newsprint in a Canadian newspaper, even in a student newspaper.

For example: he claims that Movember is sexist because it doesn't include women, who tend to not like growing moustaches.

And while this is certainly dumb, it doesn't even begin to match the sheer stupidity of his racism argument. Prostate cancer affects black men at a disproportionate rate. Yet it tends to be mostly white men who participate in Movember. So get this: all those white guys fundraising to help cure a disease that disproportionately affects black men? Racist.

It's the kind of logic that has become far too common among those indoctrinated into anti-oppression ideology. The flimsiness of it is actually reinforced among those who share this ideology by the need to denounce anything and everything heterosexual white males do as oppressive. And even if the evidence doesn't fit this -- even if Haddad's own evidence actually contradicts it -- then it must be warped and twisted until Haddad can at least say it supports his argument. Which he would have said no matter what. And he did.

It's enough to make you hope that this spurred one of Haddad's professors in the English and Cultural Studies department to roll up this issue of the McGill Daily and gave him a good, hard smack in the nose with it. It isn't as if Haddad hasn't embarrassed his department and his university as well as himself.

I imagine the past week has been rather tough on Ralph Haddad, but it's hard to feel sorry for him. For example, if his father is alive I imagine he has some 'splainin' to do about how he actually tried to take cover behind his battle with prostrate cancer. But that's just for starters. In writing -- and then actually publishing -- this column, he has metaphorically magnetized his own crotch and then distributed steel toed boots. Not wise in the slightest.