Friday, November 4, 2016

Hillary Clinton and Robin Lakoff, the Idiot Professor

I am mad. I am mad because I am scared. And if you are a woman, you should be, too. Emailgate is a bitch hunt, but the target is not Hillary Clinton. It’s us. The only reason the whole email flap has legs is because the candidate is female.  

Robin Lakoff, Hillary Clinton’s Emailgate Is an Attack on Women



Robin Lakoff’s opinion piece in Time (excerpted above) is arguably the stupidest thing yet written about the 2016 election, and an ocean of stupidity has been flowing for months. Her piece is the mother of all non sequiturs.  

Lakoff, a professor of linguistics, of all things, leans into this screed with her raw emotion, how she is feeling. And guess what? She is not happy. “I am mad”.  Who cares? Join the crowd.  I am mad.  All of my friends are mad.  Everybody is mad these days, and for good reason. 

But wait! She is scared too, which is the reason, she says, she is mad, a curious causality. Can someone be scared and mad at the same time? Why would an arch feminist, supposedly a sophisticated thinker, jump into the fray all lathered up with the favorite unhappy stereotype of the emotional, hysterical woman?  

So far, though, we only have a very mad and very scared woman, but here is where the non sequiturs begin, a leap from a personal whiny sounding “how I feel” (fine, again, who cares) to the mailed fist feminist ukase, “if you are a woman you should be too.” We have moved now to the grand pronouncement ex cathedra. So, the deplorable status of women isn’t bad enough, they (all of womanhood) should like Lakoff be quivering with rage and fear, furiously jabbing pins into their Donald Trump voodoo dolls. Because? And off we go, a dumpster-dive into an alternative universe where facts, logic and empirical reality have no bearing on our understanding of current events.

Emailgate is a bitch hunt, but the target is not Hillary Clinton.  It’s us.” A “bitch hunt?” No, let’s try for a simpler time and channel Sargent Joe Friday – “just the facts, Mam.” The target is Hillary Clinton.  She set up the private email server, exempting herself from the law and the rules, plus lying about it. The FBI director said she was “extremely careless.” If she would have done what she was supposed to do there would be no Emailgate, no one complaining about Hillary and her emails, no FBI investigation, no pronouncements of her carelessness. You don’t have to be Noam Chomsky or Hannah Arendt to comprehend such a simple cause-effect relationship. What you do have to be to ignore it is a tenured grievance specialist, intoxicated by your own moral goodness, dedicated to interpreting your place in the world as an eternal victim, invincibly oblivious to world as it really is.

However, let us continue this journey in the land of feminist paranoid imagination.  “The only reason the whole email flap has legs is because the candidate is female.” Really? Take a peek at “Ten times people were punished for far less than what Hillary Clinton did”. These ten people listed, including Bill Clinton’s former National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger “were actually punished for similar or lesser offenses than what Mrs. Clinton got away with.” Seven of them were men. How does this square with “it’s only because she is a female” thesis?  You don’t let empirical reality intrude.

But being in a fantasy world, let us go on and pretend that in some years past Hillary had “transgendered” herself into Heinrich Rodham Clinton. Now as a man (gender is whatever you want it to be, so if you say you’re a man, you’re a man) running the Department of State now he sets up his private email system and sends out classified documents over the unsecured server. Would the FBI not pursue an investigation of Heinrich Rodham Clinton?

But enough of Lakoff's world. Being in it just briefly is too disorienting. Let’s go back and try to understand why this Berkeley professor is so scared. Mad, I understand.  Radical feminists are always mad and always will be. If and when Hillary becomes President they will be mad because of the sexist opposition. 

But what is she scared of?  She is tenured, presumably, so she has life time job security and no penalty for saying and writing whatever pops into her head, no matter how ludicrous, fatuous or absurd.  She is at Berkeley, for God sake, long a haven for the oppressed, protected by the diversity inquisitors, full of “safe spaces”, guarded by “trigger warnings”, a place where even “micro-aggressors” are ruthlessly tracked down, pilloried and ceremoniously ejected. If Professor Lakoff is scared at Berkeley, we have to be deeply, deeply sorry for her. Medication recommended.

But, as she says, “if you are a woman, you should be, too”… that is, mad and scared.  Well, Professor, good luck with that. Keep trying. There is an abundance of things for women today to be mad and scared about, but the vast majority of them do not hang out at Berkeley and they probably see things a bit differently. 

Shame on you, Time. Have you no standards? 

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