Like shooting fish in a barrel, like stealing candy from babies

[bellatrys]

...like a battle of wits with the unarmed...

Oh wait, that last one isn't a metaphor.

Via World-O-Crap, I see that Dr. Grabar's piqued defense of her "ravished virgins" rhetoric is to claim that we who are in stitches over this Just Don't Get It - we are too stupid to grasp that she was only using a Literary Device, and thought she was really

Comments

[kynn]

Why do they write these kinds of things? I've wondered about that myself. Is it internal fantasies of persecution and rebellion, casting themselves as the heroes standing up to violent tyranny? Is it propaganda meant to justify extreme "resistance" to the hate enemy? (After all, if what they're doing is the same as raping our virgins, we're justified in doing whatever we want to them.) Or is it some of both? Has the conservative movement come to the point where basically it's feeding on itself and the only way they can about these things is this manner, because that's all they know and believe?

Short answer? Yes.

[bellatrys]

Long answer: Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes.

Seriously, as someone who was raised to think this way from 1974 on, with nearly all the magazines my parents subscried to being of this ilk - The Wanderer, New Oxford Review, National Catholic Register, Columbia (Knights of Columbus magazines) and many more - and yet started having massive cognitive dissonance with the whole They Are All Out To Get Us Faithful Defenders of Western Civ/Believing Christians at age 13 or 14 when I started volunteering in the public library (ironically as a family-mandated 'safe' volunteer space, for the mandatory CCD confirmation community service requirement.) The Secular (TM) world "out there" just didn't match up with what our group accepted as The way It Was

[lyorn]

Why do they write these kinds of things?

Two-thirds getting carried away by the sound of their own nonsense, with one-third writing for the reality-challenged audience, including themselves, I guess.

Ayup.

[bellatrys]

technical term being, iirc, "feedback loop."

(BTW, I know you're not Dutch like Nath, but in the minds of the folks I'm snarking at, of whom Tacitus is a not-unrepresentative sample, "Old Europe" is one solid rhetorical entity.)

[fledgist]

My academic regalia includes a bonnet instead of a mortarboard, so do I count as part of said Silver Horde or not? I do not like mortarboards.

I guess, if you can tie it like a Pyrate Scarf somehow

[bellatrys]

That would also fit with the pillaging Barbarians motif, though I do like the thought of Mortarboards with Horns, or at least tassels of human hair. (For full effect maybe you could wield as a boarding pike one of those poles with the little hook at the end for opening the transoms on tall classroom windows?)

Re: I guess, if you can tie it like a Pyrate Scarf somehow

[fledgist]

*snort*

Since I'm not at Oxbridge, my everyday uniform is actually a lanyard with a flash drive on it, on which are my PowerPoint presentations (which I use instead of writing on a board with chalk or an erasable marker).

I suppose I could use the lanyard as a garrote (a vile garrote if I were a Spanish executioner). As for Pyrates, might I remind you -- fully-paid-up Eville Leftiste Academique that I am -- that:

Old Pirates, yes they rob I.

the lanyards are good for the binding part, too

[bellatrys]

not so much for the gagging, but maybe the USB drive might work... The main thing (after the Ravishing of Virgins) is I think this business of stealing the Dean's Thrones (you didn't know that the administration *had* thrones, perhaps, but they keep them in closets and take them out at night for sekrit academic ceremonials, unless it's "throne" as in jocular reference to toilets, which might explain why they're sought after, private bathrooms in colleges being a commodity) which oddly reminds me of a certain bit of moderately well-known AS poetry...

Old Pirates, yes they rob I.

Away wi' yore recursive pop-culture references! Everyone knows that TEH LEFT has no respect for history!

Fear of Ouds?

[voxwoman]

Holy Shades of the dramatization of the St Valentie's Day Massacre, Batman!

Can't have those brown-skins using the toilets, now!

I wish people would find REAL things to worry about, like drivers who are talking on their cell phones and trying to put on mascara, while eating a big mac.

I'll start to worry when they publish instructions about how to build an explosive device with only an oud, saz, clay doumbek and an accordion. Because you can't even bring a bottle of WATER on a plane anymore, unless it's been purchased within the "Sterile Area", at prices even more expensive than gasoline.

This post has led me to many "it would be hilarious if these people weren't serious" places on the net today. Thank you. (Although I probably would be happier if I weren't reminded these types actually exist)

Oh yes, Annie was quite the blogospheric celebrity at one point

[bellatrys]

tho' not all the attention was quite to her liking - or the WSJ's, which promoted her phobic rantings. OTOH, it did get some good recs for fans of Middle-Eastern music circulating, along with all the speculation about whether or not the ever-popular "Zildjian" t-shirts (among percussionists, at least) might get one into trouble in our Brave New World...

This post has led me to many "it would be hilarious if these people weren't serious" places on the net today. Thank you. (Although I probably would be happier if I weren't reminded these types actually exist)

Tell me about it! I used to console myself with the fact that I *knew* a lot of these folks, either personally or at Kevin-Bacon-separation removes, and I knew how incompetent they were, so they surely couldn't affect anything! I didn't factor in all the wealthy supporters or the long-entrenched in DC effect. Which reminds me, I need to deal with Michelle Malkin's success vs. Rachel Ray & Carlyle Group, aka Dunkin Donuts, and the Fear of Paisley Scarves... gah.

Not to mention the irony

[deiseach]

That the actual raping, pillaging and what-not went on in Ye Goode Olde Dayes Of Yore before the liberals got their hands on the reins of power

shutupshutupshutup!!!!1!

[bellatrys]

everything was PERFECT!!!1! in Ye Good Olden Dayes of Christendom, only a wicked H8TER of all that is Good and True would suggest otherwise (with those diabolical inventions, Citations and Footnotes, no less!)

...actually, I *didn't* know all of that, at least not what was *behind* the battle of Carfax - understandable that the Universities of Oxford would want to downplay their (literal) privilege and make it seem like it was unreasonable Town & Gown rivalry, when I was there, but still. Thank you for that enlightening! (is it wrong of me to think that PH3AR Y3 L33T CL3RKs needs to be suggested as a macro over at Geoffrey Chaucer's blog?)

Considering that a good chunk of Chaucer...

[deiseach]

... represents the wicked depradations of those naughty university boys (see "The Reeve's Tale" and the battle of wits between the Miller and the two students), I think that would be fitting

Re: Considering that a good chunk of Chaucer...

[fledgist]

You should read your fellow Irishwoman Helen Waddell's The Wandering Scholars for some of the more interesting high mediæval scholarly verse. The Irish, in particular, seem to have got around quite a bit.