Azealia Banks & the New Nadir of Social Justice ideology

For an ideology with such lofty goals, social justice ideology certainly manages to stoop to some shocking lows. Every time you think this ideology has reached it's nadir, it manages to stoop even lower.

Enter Azealia Banks.

Azealia Banks would really, really like people to think that she's all about teh social justice. She's openly declared herself a feminist and anti-racist. (Yet she assailed Iggy Azalea under the vaguely-racist guise of "cultural appropriation.") Yet while she quickly built an audience among the LGBTQ community, she's quickly alienated them with her own ignorant behaviour.

She seems to love the word "faggot," and spits it with the zeal of the most stereotypical homophobic redneck you could possibly imagine.

This has led to torrents of criticism from an audience -- gay men -- that Banks seems to think she had locked up. And so in an effort to stave off the criticism, Banks has apparently chosen to shield herself from criticism of her homophobic behaviour with feminism.

"The word 'faggot' came to me from my mother. And it was never a thing about a guy being gay. It was always just a man who hates women. You can be gay or straight. You can be a straight faggot… Faggots are men who want to bring women down, fuck with their heads, control them.

I definitely think a lot of the time with the 'white gay media' – especially with female artists – in order for you to seem successful or seem feminine you have to desire their approval. I feel like a lot of times gay men can be way more misogynistic than even straight men. Even how they come to you picking at your hair, telling you you're fat, telling you all this other shit. Telling you how to be a woman. What the fuck do you know about being a woman?

To be homophobic would imply that I'm, like, 'I can't sit next to a gay man cuz Imma catch the gay, but I already caught the gay. I feel like when I use the word 'faggot,' it comes from, like, a feminist point of view, not a homophobic point of view. It's really just kinda like you feel attacked as a woman."

So to Banks it isn't all gay men she hates. It's just white gay men. The gay white devil. That's supposed to make it all better one imagines, intersectionality and all.

Of course in theory intersectionality is supposed to teach social justice advocates that oppression exists across a wide variety of identities, all of which intersect throughout the population of people who the ideology considers oppressed.

This often also leads to an almost-mathematic tallying of alleged victimhood, wherein people who consider themselves oppressed rank their oppression over the oppression of others. For example, Azealia Banks is a black bisexual woman. Allegedly oppressed as black, bisexual, and a woman. So of course she feels she may disparage those who allegedly not as allegedly-oppressed as she.

But as a general rule, feminists -- even those who believe in intersectionality -- do not accept or tolerate homophobia. So attempting to excuse homophobia by hiding behind feminism shows only how out-of-touch she is with feminism.

Of course feminism isn't the only subvariant of social justice ideology that Banks attempts to hide behind, yet is oddly non-compliant with. In a 2014 feud with Australian rapper Iggy Azalea, Banks accused her, as a white person in hip hop, of "cultural appropriation."

Banks earned any fandom she had in the gay community by absorbing influences from the sub-culture of black gay men into her music. Azealia Banks is not a black, gay, man. Ergo, she herself is guilty of cultural appropriation. You need not believe in the uniquely-bigoted concept of cultural appropriation to realize that Banks is non-compliant.

So should Azealia Banks be excused for her rampant racism and homophobia? Well, I'm not a gay man so it's not up to me to decide. But for any such person who is thinking of forgiving Banks, it seems necessary to remind them that social justice ideologues would suggest that perhaps they've internalized the oppression that is at the root of Banks' behaviour.

Unless social justice ideologues are prepared to expel Banks from under their ideological umbrella this will simply represent a new low these identity zealots have stooped to; a new nadir for social justice ideology.

NDP Support, Low-Effort Thinking Linked in New Study

So, stop me if you've heard this one: left-wingers are smarter than conservatives. There are even studies that prove it.

Right? Right?

Well, not so much, really. Pretty much none of those studies show what their authors say they do. Each of these studies is crippled by incredibly flawed methodology.In some cases, the authors have even had to refer to political conservatism as a "latent" variable -- which means that it is actually unobserved.

But in particular, perhaps the most flawed study was one that linked conservative political beliefs to "low-effort thinking." It's a favourite among left-wingers. To start with, the study conflated casual, distracted, or even disinterested thinking as "low-effort thinking," and seemed to preclude the idea that whatever beliefs expressed by study participants -- whether in the bar or in the laboratory -- had been decided, through careful deliberation, before the study was ever conducted. After all, Arkansas -- where the study was conducted -- is a so-called red state.

For just a moment, let's set aside the flaws in the study and consider merely its conclusion: low-effort thinking leads to conservative political beliefs. If this were true, shouldn't it be said that left-wing political beliefs don't result from low-effort thinking?

Well, a readership poll conducted by Poletical might give cause to think about that.

The poll zeroed in on the ultimate form of low-effort thinking: prejudice. The poll examined reader beliefs about conservatism and homosexuality, and they found some remarkable things:

Only 7 percent of NDP-supporting Poletical readers thought being gay and conservative is not a contradiction. 88 percent of Conservative-supporting Poletical readers thought that being gay and conservative is not a contradiction.

So the prejudicial thinking in the study essentially shaped up like this: if you're gay, NDP supporters think you shouldn't be conservative. Apparently to be so is to be a hypocrite. Conversely, Conservative supporters think that if you're gay you can be conservative if that's what you believe in. Or to put it another way, if you're conservative you can still be gay. It's OK, you were born that way.

I would say that it takes a good deal more thought to be a member of a party and movement perceived by some (NDP supporters mostly) to be oppressive to homosexuals and instead open your party and your movement up to homosexuals and welcome them into it than to tell someone they should hold your political beliefs based on that particular detail. I'd say we can extrapolate from this poll that NDP supporters are low-effort thinkers.

For bonus giggles, 73 percent of NDP supporters told Poletical that conservatives "lack intelligence."

There's some irony in this as well. If conservatives really lacked intelligence, and left-wingers were really more intelligent, they certainly wouldn't feel so much pressure to trump up junk science in order to "prove" it. They would have better ideas and arguments, and would be content to allow their intelligence to be self-evident according to the hypothetical superiority of those ideas and arguments.

That instead they rely on the aforementioned trumped-up junk science is very much a sign of the hollowing out of the left-wing intellect. But really, what else can be expected from such low-effort thinkers?

Oh, Thomas Mulcair. What Would Tommy Douglas Think?

Consider this a tale of two Tommys.

One Tommy was a government Minister in Quebec. The other Tommy was the Premier of Saskatchewan. One Tommy is the current leader of the federal NDP. The other Tommy is a former leader of the federal NDP. In fact, he was the first NDP leader. One Tommy seems to have a mad-on for evangelical Christians. The other was an evangelical Christian. In fact, he was a baptist minister.

Of course we're talking about Thomas Mulcair and Tommy Douglas.

Tommy Douglas passed away in 1986. Thomas Mulcair stepped in it in 2013.

See, Mulcair is upset that Christian Crossroads Communications -- the same company that produces 100 Huntley Street -- recently received a CIDA grant of approximately $500,000 to drill and repair water wells in Uganda. He's very angry about it because CCC considers homosexuality to be sinful -- an opinion that, for the record, I disagree with -- and on those grounds he thinks that CCC should not receive the grant.

Mulcair declared that evangelical Christians "go against" Canadian values.

So what does that say about Douglas, the man who NDP campaigning propelled to the summit of the CBC's "greatest Canadian" poll?

Mulcair might not like the answer. First off, Douglas was not only a Baptist -- which is an evangelical denomination of Christianity -- but he was in fact a Baptist minister. And Baptists are hardly known for their tolerance of homosexuality.

Then, of course, there's Douglas himself. Now, he didn't believe that homosexuality is sinful, as the folks at CCC do. Rather, he believed homosexuality is a mental illness.

So now, nearly two years after Mark Bonokoski first asked the question, we must ask it again: is Tommy Douglas still the Greatest Canadian? Or, perhaps we must ask this question differently: does Thomas Mulcair, of all people, still think that Tommy Douglas is still the Greatest Canadian?

Keep in mind that Douglas' position -- that homosexuals should be treated with sympathy -- isn't all that different from CCC's. They condemn anyone who uses violence against homosexuals.

Which, sadly, isn't as Mulcair has it. "We don't understand how the Conservatives can ... subsidize a group in Uganda whose views are identical to those of the Ugandan government," he declared. But considering that  the government of Uganda is -- and should remain -- under fire for their infamous "kill the gays" bill, and CCC opposes the use of violence against homosexuals, we can already see that isn't the case.

Unfortunately for Thomas Mulcair, this is more egg on the face of an opposition leader whose face is already looking very eggy indeed.