Even the least-masterful debater knows you can’t win an argument by simply calling your opponent ugly. That’s not a argument; it’s an insult, an ad hominem.
Ok, but what if you call them ugly dozens of times in rapid succession; does that make it an argument?
That;s the approach one writer for the genteel racist site The Occidental Observer recently tried, bashing out a post of some 2000 words on the alleged evils of the leftist “Cult of Ugly.” Tobias Langdon managed to use the word “ugly” or a variation more than 50 time. And it’s still just a bunch of ad hominems in a row.
Langdon posits a world-historical battle between the forces of Ugly and the defenders of the “indissoluble Trinity of Truth, Beauty and Goodness,” to borrow a phrase from Hilaire Belloc. (No, quoting Hilaire Belloc doesn’t mean you’ve won the argument either.)
Let’s take a look at the opposing forces in this cosmic battle, at least as Langdon sees them.
On he side of Ugly we find:
Leftists:
Leftists do indeed hate beauty, which is why ugliness is the most obvious feature of leftism and its art, culture and acolytes.
George Floyd:
In life, Floyd was at war with Truth, Beauty and Goodness; in death, he became a leftist icon not despite his ugliness and criminality, but because of them. …
From his dark skin and thick lips to his low intelligence and immorality, the destructive and criminal Floyd is the antithesis of a creative and law-abiding White. He represents Black savagery against White civilization.
A random women who was photographed offering her prayers to George Floyd:
It’s a perfect image for our insane and ugly age: an overweight gender-fluid Black woman in a Wu-Flu mask pressing her head in worship against a giant mural of George Floyd at the site of his martyrdom in Minneapolis. The martyr is ugly, the mural is ugly and the mourner is ugly.
Jews:
I agree with a fascinating article at National Vanguard arguing that “Jews themselves are an unattractive and, on average, ugly people”
Jewish ideas:
[U]gly Jewish brains have consistently created ugly ideologies that war on the “indissoluble Trinity of Truth, Beauty and Goodness.”
Jewish sociologist Jerzy Sarnecki:
Sarnecki is very well-suited to serve as a high-priest in the lying leftist Cult of Ugly, because he has an ugly and unappealing punim (Yiddish for “face”). …
And it isn’t coincidental that Sarnecki is both Jewish and ugly. He’s Jugly, as you might say: that is, he’s ugly in a characteristically Jewish way.
“Jewish psychoanalysis”
Jewish psychoanalysis did sterling work on behalf of lies, ugliness and immorality, and is now a prime ingredient in the poisonous stew of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the Transgender-Industrial Complex, where Jugly and immoral Jews are once again massively over-represented.
Menorahs:
I’ve been struck by the ugliness of the menorahs with which Jews have increasingly laid claim to public space in Western cities.
Antifa:
Steve Sailer has noted that Antifa “tend to be ugly people with bad teeth and even worse taste in grooming.” The Cult of Ugly has ugly acolytes, just as one would expect.
Ruth Bader Ginsberg:
But even as they wage war on Whiteness, Jews accept White beauty as the ideal. The … very gentile actress Felicity Jones was chosen to play the very Jewish lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a recent biopic. RBG’s ugly [face] reflected her ugly politics and Jewish-leftist Hollywood didn’t want that reality to appear on screen.
Have you guessed the identity of the mystery woman at the top of this post? It’s none other than “Ugly Jewess” Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her younger years, when she was conventionally quite attractive. Langdon is basing his assessment of her alleged “ugliness” on photos of hers in her eighties. Literally no one looks their best at 87.
Now, not everything in Langdon’s world is ugly. Here are some of the things that he considers beautiful — and thus worth fighting for.
Soccer:
In my opinion: I would place soccer among the great artistic achievements of White Western civilization. … The beautiful game is a White creation whose best and most intelligent players and coaches are still disproportionately White.
Dutch artist Jan Vermeer/Dutch soccer-player Johan Cruyff (tie)
The paintings of the great Dutch artist Jan Vermeer (1632-75) are sublime and so, in a lesser but comparable way, were the skills of the great Dutch soccer-player Johan Cruyff (1947-2016).
Those are the three things that are apparently the most beautiful of anything in the world: Soccer, Vermeer and Johan Cruyff.
You may wonder where all this is going. It’s not really going anywhere; Langdon has basically put together a long-winded list of purportedly ugly people and things contrasted with a small and strange list of beautiful things.
You may also find yourself wondering what on earth is supposed to be the connection between physical ugliness and ugly ideas and ugly politics? It’s all in the face, according to Langdon.
What is the exact relationship between ugly faces and ugly ideology? And why are Jews and leftists “on average, ugly people”? If you consider that ugliness is a matter of asymmetry and ill-proportion, it would follow that there is some correlation between an ugly face and an “ugly” brain. The same biological factors – disease, inbreeding and harmful mutations – that distort the geometry of faces will also distort the geometry of the brain.
This is the closest that Langdon gets to making any sort of argument and, true to form, it’s a pretty bad one. There’s no data indicating that asymmetrical or “ill-proportioned” faces have any connection with ideoloogical awfulness or personal immorality that Langdon likes to attribute to leftists and Jews and a Supreme Court Justice who was 87 when she died.
Speaking of the ill-proportioned, here’s a photo of a number of the leading lights of the “scientific racism” movement at a conference held by the white nationalist journal American Renaissance several years ago. I don’t mean to cast any aspersions but if right-wingers want to call Jews and leftists ugly maybe they should take a look at some of their colleagues first.
Glass houses, you know.
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Ironically, there has been studies that showed a fairly strong correlation between beauty and conservatism, at least when it comes to politicians and figureheads. Similar studies have shown that conservativism is negatively correlated with intelligence, so each side can make a pointless boast to something if they want to.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29355104/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289609000051
Presenting Los Angeles’ Linda Lindas (ages 10 through 16) with an unassailable opposing argument:
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J5AhU5Q7vH0
In my opinion: I would place soccer among the great artistic achievements of White Western civilization. … The beautiful game is a White creation whose best and most intelligent players and coaches are still disproportionately White
Mbappe, Mane, Neymar, Fernandinho, Pogba- what do those guys know about football?
@galanx:
I‘ve never even remotely followed soccer, and have nonetheless long since heard of this gentleman:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelé
@epronovost – I don’t think those studies ever control for the less homogeneous standards of grooming among progressives (progressive subcultures aren’t trying to appeal to a broad demographic), and they usually focus on the tastes of a few relatively privileged undergraduate subjects who don’t realise eyebrow styling is not a sign of gifted genetics. Back in the 90s I had one guy tell me he liked Pamela Anderson because she didn’t wear much makeup. Ie. They don’t control their subjects preference for heavy styling in a style particularly favoured by Conservatives, partly because its intended to be a marker of time and leisure not afforded to most undergraduates.
I think it’s clear that conservatives in politics do focus a lot more on physical appearance and have very narrow definitions of acceptability. Trump himself was a bit of an aberration, but almost all Republican politicians appear to aspire to a traditional Barbie and Ken look. They generally have very similar hairstyles, make up and body types to each other, especially the women, who have to also convey adherence to traditional standards of femininity.
Whether that counts as beauty is of course, entirely subjective.
No, no, he’s right about Jews being ugly because when I was 17 (which was like 10 years ago) one of my brother’s classmates (who was 15 at the time) said I was a brown-bagger (someone you’d have sex with as long as their face was covered). So he’s very correct about Jews being ugly.
/S
Allow me to apologize in advance: My family is Irish back to when The Mind of Man Recalleth Not to the Contrary.
Five years ago my beloved Judy, proud daughter of Jewish parents and, obviously, Jewish herself, passed away. She taught me more about being a human being than anyone else, so fuck this guy. He is a puling little boy afraid of a world that justifiably considers him an asshole, and now he has to blame some other ethnic group for his own assholery.
There simply isn’t room among the sane and human people of this world for such idiots. And I’m sick of it.
Day after day we are bombarded with the infantile rantings of damaged humans who cannot recognize the reality around them, and have to construct fictitious villains to explain their own failures.
Guess what? You aren’t a genius. Being white means nothing. You are insecure little people, so stop trying to enlist us in your pathologies.
You’re a natural-born asshole. That’s on you, not anyone else. And if you’d worked in the places I’ve worked, you’d have got your ass kicked, repeatedly.
“What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people’s faces as unfinished as their minds.”
― Eric Hoffer
Speak for yourself, I’m gonna be a bombshell.
@Nequam
Ooo, I love that quote! I flatter myself I’d be missing only my jaw and an eye or something by now.
I hate people who use “ugly” as a dogwhistle for “not white”. Which they do here.
@epronovost : given that intelligence isn’t a well defined concept, saying that a group is more intelligent is risky. Scienfitically, you want more say “with a better memory” or “higher IQ”, or “better at math”, because theses concepts are both better defined, and show more visibly that they are non neutral and culturally charged.
(I would not say I am more intelligent than any soccer player, but there’s probably more than one I can school on math)
There’s also the argument of Mog that theses studies aren’t well run. I didn’t double check, but that’s very common for sociologie.
I wouldn’t disagree. However, it’s a bit more complex than that.
First thing to note, Vermeer produced what were known as tronies. They were generic pictures for the newly emerging middle classes to hang on their walls. Tronies were considered to be quite tacky by the artistic elite at the time.
But the more interesting question was, how did someone with no painting skills whatsoever; suddenly start producing such amazing works?
Well, one explanation, which I very much subscribe to, was it was a mechanical process, that didn’t require any actual artistic ability.
One chap, called Tim, set out to prove that. His results were staggering. This is what he was able to come up with using the hypothesised technique. Remember, Tim, isn’t an artist either. He’d never even used a paint brush before his experiment.
There’s a great documentary about it all. Short review here.
On a not too related topic, I have found that :
https://nitter.pussthecat.org/spakhm/status/1398783257542492160
(somewhat long thread)
That smell bullshit (the whole “system is rigged against white” alway smell bullshit to me), but not to the point I would dismiss it without trying to double check. Is it 100% wrong, or just somewhat exagerated ?
It occurs to me people might want some brain bleach after reading that screed.
So here’s a bloke who gives foot massages to lions rescued from trophy hunters.
To be fair, speaking as someone who does think that football is one of humanity’s great pleasures, Johann Cruyff is on a similar level of Greatest of All Time to Pelé. Was Cruyff better than Pelé? That would be like asking if this guy’s other choice of “good beauty” – Vermeer – is better than Da Vinci or Picasso? Some people would say yes, some no. The important thing is that all would be considered amongst the great masters of their craft.
Because I do agree that Vermeer and Cruyff provided moments of sublime beauty, I just don’t quite follow this guy’s path to go from that to feeling that this precludes others from doing beautiful things in different ways.
Also, if he thinks leftism and “the Jews” represent all that is wrong and ugly, maybe he needs a different idol; because Cruyff, who grew up in a poor, working-class and predominantly Jewish district in Amsterdam, was famously anti-fascist and a notable supporter of Jewish culture. And, yes, Cruyff was a great coach, but that was apparent in the diverse international selection of players in his 90s Barcelona Dream Team. It’s not like his best players were all white. Afro-Brazilian striker Romário was World Player of the Year and the star of the Brazil World Cup winning team in 1994 while playing for Cruyff’s Barcelona. Today a senator, Romário’s post-football political career has seen him representing socialist and centrist parties, but always in opposition to the far-right populism of Jair Bolsonaro.
Just what is the process of discovering that lions like their feet massaged? How many prior ‘what will lions like’ practitioners fell by the wayside, so to speak? I anticipate that you will know the answer to this, @Alan
@ lizzie
Yeah, you sort of wonder if there’s a memorial board to former keepers. Maybe with a list of other animals they tried.
CrocodileHippoLion
RhinoBut apparently it came about when they had to treat lions for a leg infection. That involved rubbing cream on the lions’ legs. They originally did that with all the usual big animal vet precautions and restraints. But then they noticed that as soon as they started massaging the lions they went all soppy anyway.
So now the lions just act like big kitties in exchange for rubs and scritches.
Oh, hey. I used to use this as a forum signature back in the day, on some now-defunct site.
More a sign of gifted economics. As in “born on third base”.
These are indications of poverty vs. wealth. Antifa tend to be poorer people who can’t readily afford American health insurance and dentistry, nor the time, effort, and expense at “grooming” that it takes to have fancy eyebrow styling and suchlike.
Eyebrow styling correlates with “a privileged enough background that you can afford not to care that much about politics”, in short. You’ll likely land on your feet no matter who is in power, short of extreme purges where even the wealthy of the “wrong” ethnic background get dispossessed, run out on a rail, or killed, and those seem to be much rarer events than despotic regimes in general.
So … different priorities. If you’re poor, and especially poor “of color”, eyebrow styling and expensive dental work will have to take a backseat to political activism against the far right, and everything will have to take a backseat to food and shelter. If you have a decently wealthy background, “keeping up with the Joneses” and fitting in while avoiding rocking the political boat will usually let you do okay for yourself under almost any political regime, especially if you are white-passing or white; and voting your own best interests likely means voting center-right. You also likely fear the far left more (they’ll take my stuff! I’ll end up like them … a precarious position!) rather than the far right, unless you’re nonwhite.
That is why the “white moderate” has been such a “stumbling block”, of course. For them the status quo is safe, and they will oppose all activism, but especially activism from the left. And that puts a finger on the scale in favor of the far right, which effect is cumulative over time, slowly nudging the Overton window to the right over decades until a crisis situation like Trump’s election occurs.
@Surplus : your description is sound, but have a key error : center right *isn’t* in the interest of the white moderate. But they get a ton of propaganda to believe it is. Same thing as believing that far left will confiscate all their stuff ; maybe they will pay a little more taxes, but almost all of the white moderate aren’t rich enough to be the main target of an old school communist revolution, and even less for a more reality-grounded far left movement.
So, the article doesn’t even manage to rise to the (bad) level of phrenology?
@Ohlmann: Disagree. For the suburban-dwelling white-collar-job-performing middle class, the center-right policies lower their taxes and prop up their property values relative to center-left policies; and a far left “old school communist revolution” would bust them down to working class: they might retain managerial and knowledge-worker jobs, but they’d be housed in the same projects as construction workers and bus drivers, and making the same kind of pay. A definite step down in lifestyle for them.
@Surplus : as a member of exactly the social you think of (well, probably a bit higher than the average, I am among the 15% best paid of my country IIRC), I disagree.
The thing that you forget (but that is also forgotten by way too many people, in no small part because of propaganda) is that the current center-wing politic is eating away at the lifestyle and wealth of pretty much everyone who isn’t in the 1%. That’s actually very visible when I do my budget and compare year per year. My salary technically go up, but so do the cost of a lot of thing, and there’s more I actually have to budget for too.
The part about “being housed in the same kind of housing as construction worker” smell of A – unrealistic, URSS-like far left, which probably isn’t gonna happening (the big, simili-egalitarian housing project are actually more a show of power from the state than a useful and realistic goal) and B – forget that a ton of theses same white collar guy are struggling buying a house, or are currently struggling paying for the loan.
The american dream, even the low key one where you just have a nice house and children in the suburb, isn’t a realistic goal for the suburban-dwelling white-collar-job-performing middle class, and center-right policies make it even less realistic. That’s one of the big political lie of the time, and one of the hardest to make understand to people.
“Beauty” (i.e. meeting very conventional standards of appearance) is so, so very much connected with class.
Dental care is considered a privilege, not basic health care, but having bad teeth has a huge negative impact on both health and income. Bigotry against people with bad teeth is perfectly acceptable.
Fresh, nutritious food is expensive and is hard to find in urban food deserts. The working class is tired at the end of the day. Gyms are expensive. Not everyone lives in a place where outdoor exercise is possible. Being a Black runner is dangerous. And I’m going to say it again, the working class is tired.
Botox is expensive. Fillers are expensive. Laser hair removal, tooth whitening, hair replacement, fancy-but-natural-looking dye jobs, manis and pedis, lipo, blah blah blah, they all take money and TIME. The expectations just keep getting higher. It turns out the Eloi didn’t evolve to be naturally prettier than the Morlocks; the Eloi are just Morlocks with enough time and money to make themselves over completely.
TBH this one hits pretty close to home for me. Growing up I got an intense level of antisemitic harassment aimed at my appearance, to the point that it still shocks me when other people think I’m pretty.
And OTOH count the number of Hollywood actors and other famously beautiful celebs who are Jewish, but use goyisch stage names! The goyim don’t hate our appearance, they covet it – and claim it as their own, erase those of us they envy, and ridicule the rest as ugly and diseased. Insecurity is the foundation of empire, or something like that.
@Miri
Ugh, so much sympathies. “Butterface” is one of my least faves, TBH – I don’t think I’ve ever been called that, but I’ve heard it plenty, and it gets under my skin.
@Ohlmann, re the Nitter thread
I mean I’m not going to dismiss his experience, TBH I’ve heard very similar from people who’ve been poor and/or disabled. But as far as “social safety nets” being garbage to interact with, well… I wonder how much better he thinks things would have been if those safety nets hadn’t existed at all. The answer to a welfare state being shit isn’t to not have welfare, it’s to fund it and legislate it properly so it doesn’t suck.
Also more specifically? A lot of his complaints are the result of the US being obsessed with means testing, making sure people don’t get welfare who don’t “deserve” it. He claims half the people he saw were lifers, but how does he know? Even if they were, how does he know they weren’t e.g. so disabled they had trouble finding work? Nevermind that bigotry about laziness runs so deep in the US that if you do get on unemployment, disability, etc. it’s almost impossible to get back in the workforce.
The US welfare state absolutely sucks, he’s right about that. Especially in red states TBH, but even in blue strongholds like Massachusetts. For a lot of people though it’s the only thing keeping them alive, without it they would literally not be able to live. And for many it’s still inadequate, and they don’t survive.
This fellow? He seems like a “by my own bootstraps” type, an immigrant who was smart, skilled, and lucky enough to drag himself out of that hole. Sure, good for him, but a lot of people can’t do that, because the govt won’t give them the resources and the bare minimum of trust, or they’re just physically or mentally incapable from disability. Or, often, they’re disabled in ways that can be treated or accommodated very well, but don’t have access to those treatments or accommodations.
If someone in the US needs a power chair, you know much that costs? As much as a new car. Do you think insurance will pay for it? LMAO no. They’ll pay for the cheapest, shittiest wheelchair that will wreck your body from prolonged use.
Ohlmann – IIRC you’re in a country with nationalized healthcare, right? We don’t have that. A lot of people outside the US are like “oh you’re living in the imperial core, you’re all rich and have it so easy…” LOL no. The US does not watch out or provide for the poor, the disabled, the just plain unlucky. Until the ACA was passed, we had ~40,000 people dying per year due to treatable illnesses, that they could not get treated due to lack of insurance. Insurance companies could blanket deny applicants for “preexisting conditions” including almost any chronic illness, pregnancy, and being beaten by one’s husband. Even now, it’s very, very common for people to die from lack of access to care for treatable conditions like diabetes or asthma – many states deliberately fucked up their implementation of the ACA, and state provided insurance is often hard to get. Last time I applied to the Mass Health Connector, they got back to me only months after the enrollment period was already over. You want to actually get Mass public health? You have to go to their offices in person. You’re too disabled, too far aware, too busy? Then you can basically fuck off, or buy private health insurance for an arm and a leg (which won’t cover jack shit anyway).
If this white dude who dragged himself up by his bootstraps, with the help of the extant welfare state, wants to trash that same welfare state? Okay, but he’d better have answers for improving it. If his answer is “LOL throw it away, people who can’t bootstrap themselves don’t deserve help anyway” – then fuck him and the horse he rode in on.
And if I come across as really angry – well, I am. I’m middle class, newly disabled, and very downwardly mobile, but a lot of my friends are worse off (and have been for a long time). People shitting on the concept of a welfare state are shitting on the idea that I, and people I love, should be able to survive at all.
That guy sure has a lot of things he thinks are ugly, but menorahs?
I mean, maybe I’m in the minority in thinking that most human faces are pleasant to look at, which is fine, but I’ll venture that a lot of folks find patterns and geometrical figures pleasing, so it seems weird to object to a menorah as “ugly.” I mean, I’m sure some are, but how is the concept of a symmetrical candle holder ugly?
I mean, if he’s objecting to shapes associated with Judaism, I’m curious to hear his explanation of why five-pointed stars are inherently prettier than six-pointed ones.
I’m thinking too hard about this. 😛
@Alan, re Vermeer – oh, it’s that camera obscura thing, right? Focuses an image of the room on the canvas? I remember reading about that, thought it was very cool!