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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Wow! I literally thought that was a photo of Hedy Lamar
@Ohlmann: that’s because the modern American “center-right” has gone way, way further to the right than the true center-right, to where the modern American “center-left” is somewhat to the right of center-right now.
I converted to Judaism and people on the internet and sometimes offline too suddenly started to attribute “ugly” stereotypical Jewish (and/or middle eastern and/or eastern european) features to my face, hair and body. What I actually look like and my extremely monochrome genetic background hadn’t changed at all – but some people’s perception of me changed hugely.
Left-wing Hollywood actors and musicians: so notoriously unattractive.
My kids play for a soccer club that is based on the philosophy and playing style of Johan Cruyff. They regularly play against kids from Central America and East African countries whose vision, skills, and creativity are just astounding. Around here, white kids mostly dabble in soccer as something to do for an hour or two on a fall morning, but kids who come from cultures where soccer is a lifestyle are passionate about it. Most were juggling soccer balls almost as soon as they could walk. I don’t know how this guy explains Brazil being the leader in men’s World Cup titles if it’s such a white sport.
Because when you walk through life wearing ugliness goggles, that’s all you’re ever going to see. Furthermore, conflating beauty with goodness is the sort of cognitive error that leads to eating poison mushrooms, petting pretty toxin-filled tree frogs, and voting for pedophilic GOP politicians.
@Alan – I imagine there’s a similar board of treatments that former keepers tried:
AcupunctureCraniosacral AdjustmentsFoot Massage
Crystal healing@ buttercup
Light jazz
Classical piano
1812 OvertureAmbient chill
@cyborgette : no problem with being angry. I actually liked the read, because as a reasonably privilegied person for which everything so far have dodged all bullets, I alway fear not being grounded enough. People explaining their problems is alway instructive in that regard.
@Epitome : I agree with the idea that America don’t have truly left wing party. That being said, middle classes need policies that swing the pendulum back from corporation to people, and as long as you don’t go directly into revolutionary parties, that mean that at worst they don’t benefit from theses policies but theses same policies stop the erosion of their wealth.
(and revolution-style left parties have a ton of issue that make me wary of them ; one of them being that I am a pacifist)
@Alan : that add to my suspicion that social predators are the easiest type of animal to make as companions.
The social bit help with them liking other individual ; and predators, especially apex one, are much less afraid of everything trying to eat them.
Plus, there’s the whole part that humans are basically social predators, so the thoughset is closer to begin with.
Of course, don’t try to befriend orcas or lions without backup and/or an armor :p
(albeit it’s unlikely that the chainmails used against sharks is of much use against orcas, given how big theses animals are)
@Ohlmann
Have you seen the rest of the tweets on that account? You should. Do that and then come back and tell us if he’s a good source for reality in general.
@ epitome of incomprehensibility
That’s the one. I got very convinced the theory, prima facie, when I heard David Hockney talk about it. The theory also explains a few distortions and colour aberrations in some paintings. A few artists had sort of replicated the idea for demo purposes. They just did little isolated examples though. So it was pretty cool to see someone do the entire painting.
I’m also a believer that Caravaggio may have used actual proto-photography. The idea is you have the same sort of camera obscure setup. But you cover the canvas in a primitive photo emulsion. They didn’t have fixers back then it appears; but the image would have been on the canvas for maybe a few minutes or so before it overexposed. That’s long enough to slap your initial paint on.
The emulsion is speculated to be mercury fulminate based. I don’t know if anyone has done any testing for that though.
Not as easy as (social) parasites.
@ ohlmann
You’ve got me wondering whether there might be some truth in the story of Androcles and the Lion. Maybe it’s a distortion of an old folk memory or similar. There are a few modern day examples of lions remembering, years later, people who’ve been kind to them.
Wow, that’s a piece of data.
@Alan
I remember seeing a video about two guy who kept a lion as a pet until it got too big so they gave it to a wildlife preserve. Years latter they when to visit the lion but the staff told them the loin would most likely not remember they. The second the Loin saw the Men it ran over to them pretty much gave them a hug.
@ fabe
Christian the Lion!
Back from when you could buy a lion in Harrods.
@Makroth : good point. Oh my god I regret having done that on your prompt, even if I should have had.
@Alan : hard to say if there’s a real story at the origin of Androcles, but it’s certainly not impossible. The less likely part for me is that both the lion and the slave having been sent to Roma at about the same time ; but pretty much any predator remembering a specific man after several year would seem possible to me, even more so for a social predator known for being reasonably intelligent
Now I want a pet again. Probably not something able to kill me tho. No offense to lions, bears, and pythons, but it’s probably best to left them either to the wild or to people actually proficient in dealing with them.
Oh my.
@Ohlmann
Glad you didn’t find my rant offputting. And yeah – that dude is pretty hardcore conservative and social Darwinist, though I’m sure he’d call himself a “classical liberal” or something like that. He even openly questions the worth of giving women the right to vote (https://nitter.pussthecat.org/spakhm/status/1393742997104123904#m). Absolute piece of shit.
With people like him, their life experience can sometimes be taken at face value. Their conclusions, though? Never. It’s like the whole “listen to the white working class about Trump” bullshit. Or for that matter on the left, accepting anti-science rhetoric or ethnic nationalism at face value because the person spouting them is of a colonized people.
That final photo is like white racists tried to recreate a portrait of the Addams family (cartoon version), but missed out on the irony and humor entirely.
Well, that was a load of nonsense from a man who clearly thinks he
s very smart. Soccer is a white sport? WTF?
@Epitome, he finds menorahs ugly but I’m sure he’s fine with crosses which are instruments of torture. Weird.
@ Alan
Fulminate of mercury?
So many ways that could go wrong. Short term-fire/explosion. Long term-‘hatters’ madness,’ at the very least…
@ epitome of incomprehensibility:
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?
@1Q84:
That final photo is like white racists tried to recreate a portrait of the Addams family (cartoon version), but missed out on the irony and humor entirely.
Darned if there isn’t a fanfic on AO3 that postulates Jewish! Morticia and Castillan Spanish! Gomez (and their Karen-non-compliant holiday traditions), and that features a decidedly asymmetrical menorah(1); it’s steeped in the author’s own Judaism, and draws clear parallels between “We gladly feast on those who would subdue us” and “They tried to kill us; we won; let’s eat.”
https://archiveofourown.org/works/28277988
(1)Which exists in real life, and is regarded as an art treasure and collector’s item:
http://a.1stdibscdn.com/david-palombo-1950s-brutalist-iron-and-stones-sculpture-menorah-for-sale/1121189/f_216012621606874276089/21601262_master.jpg
I love it when they use terms like “high priest” because it betrays the hierarchy of that group and also shows how little they actually understand progressives.
I hear all the time that the European left is so much more left than the American left. This is all based on the times when each European community was more monotype. Just see France now that they have a much larger Muslim presence than back when I was in college. It is easier to take care of the sick and the poor when you believe that they are the same tribe as you.