Here we go gathering nuts

Speaking of magazine archives, I now have access to The New Republic's archive which goes back even further than the New Yorker's - all the way back to 1914 (the New Yorker was founded in 1925.)

I've never paid much attention to The New Republic - I've always preferred the Nation for politics and the New Yorker for the arts - although there is plenty of cross-over between TNR and TNY, especially via Hendrik Hertzberg.

But my general impression of the New Republic, especially during the Bush years was that it was centrist or even at times right-leaning. As anybody who reads this blog can tell, I am allergic to rightwingers.

So considering how lukewarm I am about the magazine, why did I subscribe? Because I just had to get access to a review of Ayn Rand's "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" which is entitled, irresistably "Here We Go Gathering Nuts."

I've been out of the Ayn Rand loop since my break with Daylight Atheism and its Social Justice Warrior censorship tendencies, but was brought back in thanks to the Mighty Krug-man, who referenced the Rand book in his blog post Obamacare, the Unknown Ideal. In addition to a jab at Ayn Rand the piece contains a smack-down of the always-deserving rightwing NYTimes op-ed columnist Ross Douthat:

No, I haven’t lost my mind — or suddenly become an Ayn Rand disciple. It’s not my ideal; in a better world I’d call for single-payer, and a significant role for the government in directly providing care. 

But Ross Douthat, in the course of realistically warning his fellow conservatives that Obamacare doesn’t seem to be collapsing, goes on to tell them that they’re going to have to come up with a serious alternative. 

But Obamacare IS the conservative alternative, and not just because it was originally devised at the Heritage Foundation. It’s what a health-care system that does what even conservatives say they want, like making sure that people with preexisting conditions can get coverage, has to look like if it isn’t single-payer.

It's yet another excellent mini-essay by Krugman, by all means go read it.

So Krugman provided a link to the Wiki of "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal", and the Wiki mentioned the New Republic review and with such a great title (I LOL'd when I read it) I knew I must read it without delay.

The New Republic archives has six articles that mention Ayn Rand. Curiously, it contains no reviews of Rand's fiction but does contain reviews of her essay collections, including The Romantic Manifesto and For the New Intellectual. I'm looking forward to reading them all. Especially since I want to get my money's worth, the review of Capitalism the Unknown Ideal, while good, is pretty short for a $20 subscription.

I've discussed the book on this blog before - "nutty" is a good way to describe it, but then, it's a good way to describe Rand's "philosophy" generally. The review, written by Honor Tracy (pseudonym of Lilbush Wingfield, a British travel writer and novelist) notes Rand's bizarre habit of quoting from her own novels to support her socio-political points.

...Does she, can she, really mean all she says? And does most of what she says mean anything at all? Take this vivid little sketch of our time:

"With most of the world in ruins, with the voice of philosophy silent and the last remnants of civilization vanishing undefended, in an unholy alliance of savagery and decadence, bloody thugs are fighting over the spoils, while the cynical pragmatists left in charge and way out of their depth are trying to drown their panic at Europe's cocktail parties where emasculated men and hysterical, white-lipped women determine the fate of the world by declaring that socialism is chic."

(Rand's description of European cocktail parties sound just like the parties in "Atlas Shrugged.")

Quite a lot of the book is as funny as this and one is repeatedly tempted to quote her. She evidently feels the same, as an extraordinary amount of space is filled by excerpts from, or references to, her earlier writings, with which she takes it for granted that all are familiar. "Do you remember that scene in Atlas Shrugged etc?" she will gravely inquirer, or "Consider the growth of socialized medicine throughout the world... then read the statement of Dr. Hendricks in Atlas Shrugged..." This instruction, by the way, can be ignored: it appears on page 157, by which time the reader will easily divine what Dr. Hendricks has to say on that or any subject without troubling himself to verify.

I'll definitely be checking out more of Honor Tracy's work. 

Michelle Malkin: leading spokesperson for the Social Justice Warrior movement

Move over Mikki Kendall and Suey Park, the new leading Social Justice Warrior in town is Michelle Malkin. Here she responds to Steven Colbert with the classic SJW whine.

As we know, Suey Park considers herself a friend of Michelle Malkin - and Malkin expresses her admiration of Suey Park in her screed. Can there be any doubt that Michelle Malkin, who wrote a book in defense of Japanese internment and Suey Park are BFFs? Although Malkin does mislabel Park and her followers "liberals" - they are in fact Social Justice Warriors and have almost nothing in common with liberals. Enjoy a portion of Malkin's screed:

Question: Who are the most prominent, public purveyors of Asian stereotypes and ethnic language-mocking in America? 

The right answer is liberal Hollywood and Democrats. 

The wrong and slanderous answer is conservatives, which is what liberal performance artist/illegal alien amnesty lobbyist Stephen Colbert wants Americans to believe. Last week on his Comedy Central cable show, Colbert resurrected his “satirical” 2005 “Ching Chong Ding Dong” skit, in which he speaks in pidgin English with a grossly exaggerated accent. He used it in a bone-headed attempt to ridicule Republican football team owner Dan Snyder and others who defend the Washington Redskins’ name. 

“Oh, I ruv tea. It’s so good for you. You so pretty, American girl,” Colbert in his conservative talk show host persona jibber-jabbers in the 2005 segment. “You come here. You kiss my tea make her sweet. I need no sugar when you around. Come on my rickshaw, I give you a ride to Bangkok.” Forward to 2014: To mock Snyder’s recent creation of a foundation to benefit Native Americans, Colbert replayed the skit and jeered in character that he was “willing to show the Asian community that I care by introducing the Ching Chong Ding Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.” 

A group of diehard liberals, led by a young Korean-American writer, Suey Park, gave Colbert a hard time about his cringe-worthy act, which was accompanied by an awkward laugh track and left the distinct impression that the real Colbert enjoys crude ethnic-language mockery just a little too much. 

Park and her liberal Twitter followers tenaciously questioned Colbert’s use of “satire” that ends up stoking the racism it purports to mock and abhor. They obviously picked the incendiary #CancelColbert hashtag to force attention on their complaints. My view is and always has been that the answer to speech you disagree with is more and better speech. For me, #CancelColbert wasn’t about censoring his show. It was about exposing his hypocrisy and don’t-you-understand-satire double standards. 

Park complained that Colbert and his defenders were race-baiting liberals who hid behind their self-professed progressivism. Absolutely. Progressives of pallor – hipster racists – have said and done some of the most bigoted things I’ve ever witnessed in my life and gotten away with it. And as one Asian viewer noted, Colbert “obviously didn’t use satire very effectively because most people aren’t talking about the Redskin issue or Dan Snyder.” Indeed, many of his fans were too busy tweeting non-satirical anti-Asian bigotry, misogyny, and ugly death threats.

And no, they don't understand satire, as Colbert noted in his new hashtag #CancelSwift.

Colbert for his part eviscerated the SJWs and their leading spokesperson Malkin, discussing her pro-internment book and capping it off with this:

The good news for James, however, is that Colbert will let him return to the show for no pay as part of the “Michelle Malkin Memorial Unpaid Internment Program.”

Renata Adler vs. Sesame Street

One of the best things about having a New Yorker subscription is that you get access to all back issues of the New Yorker online - it's a veritable time capsule.

Since I was on a Sesame Street kick, I decided to see what the New Yorker had to say about Sesame Street when it was first introduced. The first New Yorker piece about the show is from June 3, 1972, three years into its eternal run, and is written by the yet-living Renata Adler. The name was familiar to me although I couldn't say anything about her so had to look her up in Wikipedia - her claim to fame is her essays.

But her essay about Sesame Street is written as if by an alien. The intense seriousness of her approach leads to some truly bizarre passages:

There is the Muppet, Ernie, neurotic, easily moved to tears, particularly by the letter "E" with which his name begins. A Muppet salesman, with a green face and blue nose, dressed in a shirt, tie, trousers, jacket, black hat, and trenchcoat, has repeatedly tried to sell Ernie the number 8. "Hang it on the wall," he suggests at the beginning of his sales pitch. "Next time you wanna know how many legs an octopus has... next time you wanna know how many reindeer Santa Claus has... next time you wanna know what time you eat your breakfast..." and, with each sinister and ingratiating phrase, he flashes the 8 inside his trenchcoat furtively toward Ernie. It costs a nickel. Ernie does not buy it. "Sesame Street's" attitudes toward consumerism are skeptical, except in the realm of learning.

This is what she was describing.

I don't know where she got the idea that Ernie was "neurotic" and cried easily. I don't remember ever seeing Ernie cry. And I'm not sure at what point she glimpsed the Muppet saleman's trousers.

Adler's writing style is even more odd-sounding when it comes to describing The Electric Company, which is also covered by the essay.

"The Electric Company" has a black hippie reading freak, called Easy Reader, who dotes on legible matchbook covers. It has a daily soap-opera parody, called "Love of Chair," in which almost nothing happens. "The boy," the sentence reads, the announcer says, the scene demonstrates, "is sitting on the chair." Or "The chair is sitting on the boy." Accompanied by conventional soap organ music, the announcer concludes, "For the answer to these and other questions (What number are you calling? And what ever happened to Naomi?), tune in tomorrow for 'Love of Chair.'" For some reason, this feature is extremely popular throughout the country. "The  Electric Company" is used in eighteen thousand schools. 

There is also an enlightening cooking lesson, given by "Julia Grownup," who once taught the "ill" syllable by producing a grilled dill pickle with chilled vanilla filling. Miss Grownup (played by an excellent moronic comedienne, Judy Graubart) produce her masterpiece when she demonstrated plurals...

Here is a "Love of Chair" segment.  

Movies






To get a real sense of how different this essay about Sesame Street is from one that might be written today, get a load of this:

A few weeks ago, in Jackson Mississippi, Big Bird conducted the seventy-five piece Jackson symphony orchestra. He lead an integrated audience of more than ten thousand children and their parents in a passionate recitation of the alphabet. He counted to ten. The audience, including a few retarded adults and spastics, clapped and counted with him. Big Bird kept addressing the regular orchestra conductor, whose name is Lewis Dalvit, as "Mr. Dingbat," recalling that other complicated political presence Archie Bunker. A Jackson policeman drove white, black, and Chicano members of the cast to the Jackson airport. The mayor had welcomed them when they came to town. Nation time. 

The Children's Television Workshop has seventeen full-time community organizers, working with local groups parents, teen-agers, teachers, anybody, throughout the country. The organizer for Appalachia, Paul Elkins, is based in Clinch Valley, beside the River Clinch, in St. Paul, Virginia, where the biggest local employer is the Clinchfield Coal Company. Mr. Elkins was once a school principal, but now he works for "Sesame Street" and "The Electric Company." When the local people suspect the programs of Communism - because there are so many black people on them - Mr. Elkins, who was born and raised in Appalachia, reassures them, and changes the subject...

In case you missed that, a policeman in Jackson MS had to drive members of the Sesame Street and Electric Company cast to the airport. And there was suspicion that the shows were Communist.

Comedians on Sesame Street

Oy, too much Social Justice Warrior kerfufflage pertaining to #CancelColbert. Let's completely change the subject - Sesame Street celebrity guest stars - there's a list on Wikipedia.

Uh oh - turns out Stephen Colbert was on Sesame Street as the letter Z.

And Jon Stewart also did a bit on Sesame Street.

Robin Williams was apparently on six times. Here's one:

Bill Cosby was also on several times:

Oh joy - I found one of my favorite all-time bits from Sesame Street. Featuring my favorite muppet Grover:

The dialog kills me - Grover keeps coming up with freakishly specific descriptions of the sound (the game show is "name that sound") only to have Guy Smiley ask him to be simple:

GUY SMILEY
Here comes sound number two. 

(sound of dog barking)

GROVER
Yes, yes. Ah, well let's see, I can tell you that uh, his name is Rover, and that he loves bedroom slippers, and uh, it is an Afghan mixed with Andalusian Lhasa Apso. 

SMILEY
I beg your pardon? 

GROVER
It is a doggy.

I literally haven't seen this for over thirty years, since I watched it with my daughter when she was a baby. But I always remembered the gag. Glad I got to see it again.

More shameless lies from Mikki Kendall - me and my "target list"

So I got into it with the clueless @studentactivism over #CancelColbert and then Mikki Kendall got involved somehow, and lied about me some more.

If you Google my name, you will see Kendall's smear about me show up at the top of the search results, on her Esoterica Tumblr account where she blogs under the name Karnythia.

Initially I thought that someone named Rebecca Scott, the Mad Gastronomer was the original source of the smear, but in fact Kendall's Tumblr account was the actual source of the Google-results smear. Not that Rebecca Scott was sorry for helping to spread the lie any more than Kendall is - when I contacted Scott privately she simply doubled-down and repeated the smear some more.

Here's Kendall lying about the situation.

Now Kendall has been aware of my beef with her since at least July 2013 when she referred to me as "this broad" and linked directly to my web site from Twitter.

Unlike Mikki Kendall, I am easy to contact. My email address is right on this web site. So if my claim that Mikki Kendall is responsible for smears against my name was a mistake, why didn't she contact me directly and say so?

But of course no matter who started it, Mikki Kendall is responsible because it's her Tumblr account that appears at the top of the search results. All she has to do is take  down that post. But she won't do that, and she won't apologize. She'll just keep lying. Shamelessly.

The important thing to be aware of though, is that although this started as a personal attack by Mikki Kendall against me, it's more than that now, because thanks to Kendall I've become aware of the pernicious evil that is the SJW movement - although I didn't have a name for it until I found Will Shetterly's site.

I should note that Shetterly and I don't agree about everything - we recently had an argument on his site about rape culture "hysteria." But I think it should be possible to disagree about something - like in my case, the disagreement with Mikki Kendall and friends on whether Lennon/Ono were/are racists - without having your name smeared via the Google-bombing power of Tumblr blog aggregation.

Clearly Kendall disagrees - she feels she is blameless in her deliberate smearing of my name. But as I've found out, Kendall is by no means alone, and it isn't really personal against me - I'm a white feminist and that's why I was a target. Just as Sarah Kendzior had no qualms about smearing Katha Pollitt - and that is exactly the term Pollitt used in her rebuttal, "smear."

It is absurd to compare me to a dictator or the Saudi regime. Two people can have different problems with the same thing. But that idea is too subtle for Sarah Kendzior, who prefers wild potshots and smears.

So it isn't only Mikki Kendall. There is an entire loosely-connected, semi-anonymous, poorly-vetted group who used to mainly congregate on Tumblr but have mostly migrated onto Twitter, who are purveyors of wild potshots and smears. Kendall, thanks to her self-publicity talents and ethics-free attacks on people based on skin color and gender, is one of the most prominent.

It's one thing to attack a nobody like me, but once your gang starts smearing Katha Pollitt shit is going to get real. Pollitt is a feminist icon and a personal hero of mine (even though we, too, have had a few very minor disgreements) for many years. She's a brilliant writer with a stellar career. And these Social Justice Warrior punks are going to attack her? Not without push-back. Not on my watch.

And once you have seen evidence that members of a SJW group praise rightwingers like Michelle Malkin while attacking progressive feminists like Katha Pollitt you have to start wondering - which side are they really on?

And that's why it's important to keep tabs on these ethics-free mobbers, who seem to attack liberals and progressives with much more ferocity than rightwing pundits or Fox News. And since Mikki Kendall personally dragged me into the SJW war she's the last person who should be whining about it.

Here she is warning @studentactivism about a "target list" I allegedly have:

Although she can't decide whether to refer to me in the singular or plural.

I have news for Kendall - it isn't me who is keeping "a list" - that's here and I have nothing to do with it.

But I will continue to criticize and mock SJWs when they attack me, or other feminists, or create bigotry-inspired hash tags, or create satire-censoring movements out of sheer stupidity. And I have that right - their words are all in the public sphere, self-published.

What's so amusing about Kendall and her gang is their sheer hypocrisy. They can attack people, for any reason, or for no reason, at will, but they whine like poor abused victims if they ever get the tiniest bit of push-back. Just Google Michelle Goldberg, Nation, Kendall if you want to see the shamelessness.

I do like the idea that Kendall is warning her fellow SJWs about being on my imaginary "target list" though - maybe it will make them think twice before smearing random strangers, not to mention important and brilliant feminist writers.

Although knowing them, probably not.

Pseudo-journalist/SJW Sarah Kendzior jumps on the satire-censorship bandwagon

Well I already knew that Sarah Kendzior was an idiot for siding with vicious bigot, liar and yellow journalist Mikki Kendall against bona fide feminist/intellectual Katha Pollitt, so I wasn't surprised that she would come out in favor of Social Justice Warrior brand stupidity like #CancelColbert - the big surprise was that it took her so long.

Kendzior will absolutely not hesitate to smear without evidence, as Katha Pollitt discovered, and as can be seen in her claim that Jezebel is out to get non-white people, above. 

Jezebel was completely on board Mikki Kendall's bigotry-fest #solidarityisforwhitewomen - which goes to show that if you are perceived as white - or a white organization - you will never be able to please Social Justice Warriors. No matter how much you suck up to them, they will eventually turn against you based on some trumped-up charge - and they won't provide evidence for your guilt either - just their own nutty paranoid unsupported statements. 

Much like Mikki Kendall's sleazy article suggesting that a doctor was out to kill her for needing a life-saving abortion. Amanda Marcotte defended Kendall against criticism by anti-abortion activists (who, I hate to admit, were right this once), and for her trouble was accused several months later by the ever-paranoid Kendall of stealing from non-white people. Naturally Kendall didn't provide any evidence of the theft.

Social Justice Warriors don't need no stinking evidence.

What Social Justice Warriors really need to do is to start a group - call it Mentally Challenged Americans, who will lobby for the right to be outraged by things you are too stupid to understand.

I mean, look at the utter, flabbergasting false equivalency of the Angus Johnston statement retweeted by Kendzior in the image above: "I'm curious if folks who think Colbert was 100% in the right think the same about Deadspin's use of the word "gook" to describe Suey Park."

It still has not sunk into Angus Johnston's thick thick skull that the folks who think Colbert was in the right do so because what Colbert was doing was satirizing the racism of the Washington Redskins owner. So yes, Colbert was in the right. 100%. Only a fucking idiot - like Angus Johnston, Suey Park, Sarah Kendzior or Michelle Pro-Internment Malkin - would fail to understand that Colbert was 100% right.

But what Angus Johnston believes is that thinking Colbert is right is a sign of racism, and so he has to ask if a racial slur was thought to be just as 100% right as Colbert's satire of racism. 

Truly mind-boggling.

The fact that Social Justice Warriors side with pro-internment Michelle Malkin against liberal satirist Stephen Colbert tells you everything you need to know about just how stupid and utterly useless SJWs are.

It's time for Mentally Challenged Americans! It's time to end the privileging of intelligence in social discourse!

Newsflash: Social Justice Warriors too stupid to get satire, want to cancel Colbert

UPDATE: apparently Suey Park Considers Michelle Malkin to be a friend of hers.

This morning I saw this story in my Facebook newsfeed: People Who Don't Realize 'The Colbert Report' Is Satire Want It Cancelled Over Asian Joke

I immediately knew it was a Social Justice Warrior - and not only that, my prime suspect was the SJW with the Asian-outrage concession, Suey Park.

I haven't written about Suey Park directly before, but her tweets are shown in a recent post where I discuss an Aura Bogado pile-on.

And I just discussed the "intersectionality" between Social Justice Warriors and the far right - here's more evidence:

How far right is Michelle Malkin? Ten years ago she published a book in defense of Japanese internment camps. 

I keep saying that I think Mikki Kendall will one day find a rightwing buddy ala Camille Paglia/Rush Limbaugh, but really, it's hard to believe that the Social Justice Warriors are not already on the Heritage Foundation payroll, in an effort by conservatives to make liberals look like idiots. And it isn't all that far-fetched a conspiracy theory - here we see Suey Park referring to Michelle Malkin as a "reasonable person" - back in January of this year.

Speaking of Kendall, does she support Suey Park? Do you have to even ask? Of course she's also too stupid to get satire:

But then, that's what it means to be a Social Justice Warrior. 

So what do the other Social Justice Warriors have to say? Well Flavia Dzodan and Mazzie seem to be quiet on the Colbert front although maybe Mazzie didn't know about the movement to cancel Colbert, but once she reads this post (she reads this site every day - and three times this morning alone - obsessed much? although thankfully for the taxpayers, no longer from her work computer) she might have something to say. 

And a member of her mean girl gang, Amanda Levitt, certainly does have something to say - she wants to demonstrate exactly how Social Justice Warriors are too stupid to get satire:

Aura Bogado, of The Nation, and probably the most obnoxious Social Justice Warrior after Mikki Kendall is completely on board canceling Colbert:

When is The Nation going to fire this moron? Maybe they could get Michelle Malkin to replace her. 

Auragasmic, the Mikki Kendall wanna-be merely retweeted Suey Park. And Lynx Saint Marie, hater of the suffragettes, merely retweeted something from Amanda Levitt.

I couldn't resist joining in on the mockery of SJW stupidity:

UPDATE! I tweeted at Bogado that she should be fired from The Nation and cc'd Katha Pollitt - well apparently I was wrong about Bogado and The Nation:

People Persons

Looks as though the Durang play is out, replaced by two Feydeaux. I had to design a new logo, of course, although the general layout of the new site is similar. And I replaced my play THE VERY DARK ROOM with one that is much closer in spirit to the wacky sex farces of Feydeau, called NEW RULES. So much so in fact that one of the Feydeau plays is called THE LADIES MAN and there is a line in NEW RULES in which someone asks: "are you a ladies man or a man's man?" The guy, who is a bisexual, answers "I'm a people person." One of my favorite lines in one of my plays ever. I actually got it from my daughter, whose high school friend Dana had been dating a girl, but then switched to dating a guy. I asked her "is your friend Dana gay or straight or what?" To which my daughter replied: "Dana's a people person." I know a good line when I steal it. 

NEW RULES is one of my oldest plays - it was performed in the first Philadelphia Fringe Festival in 1997, at the Old Original Bookbinders restaurant. It was longer then, I condensed it down to ten minutes over the years, as for this 2010 production.

You can listen to the "people person" line in this 2009 reading of NEW RULES. Actor Carl Maguire gave a nice pause before delivering the line, and got a good laugh in response. I also like the lines "3.5 on the Richter Scale. It's the Kinsey Scale you dumbass."

In the news lately - apparently the very existence of bisexuals has been doubted.

12 Angry Jurors from Queens

Jury duty is finally over! It took almost a month (I first reported for duty on March 2), and I am exhausted.

I'm thinking of writing a play called 12 Angry Jurors from Queens so at least I'll have something out of the experience, because it was not pretty - 12 Angry Men looks like a picnic in comparison to my jury experience.

In "12 Angry Men" there is definitely conflict and jurors insulting each other, and even a moment when Lee J. Cobb attempts to assault Henry Fonda. But for the most part in the movie each juror argues quietly and states their objections clearly to Fonda's not-guilty verdict, and then Fonda argues against them clearly and calmly until he convinces them, one-by-one to change their vote.

In our case, at least 8 out of the 12 jurors, including the jury foreman (and me) yelled at somebody at least once. And nobody changed their vote.

There were actually 10 good people on the jury, and two people who basically sabotaged the entire process. The case was a second-degree murder trial of an African American man. The actual crime happened in October 2008 and it's taken all this time to get to us - and it appears that it was already tried once before.

Early on in the deliberation process nine of us arrived at the conclusion that there was not enough evidence to convict the defendant. There were only two eye-witnesses and their testimony conflicted - one claimed she saw the defendant pull the trigger on the left side of the double-parked car she was in, but the other witness placed the defendant on the right side of the car that the first witness was in, and on the sidewalk, past the line of single-parked cars.

Now it's still possible that the defendant somehow was the killer, but it was very unlikely, and on top of that the first witness contradicted herself. And she was only 17 (back in 2008) when she saw the murder, and she didn't actually identify the defendant until a week after the crime, at a line-up after being shown a mug shot of the defendant.

So although we couldn't say with 100% certainty that the defendant was innocent, there was certainly a reasonable doubt about his guilt. One of the reasons why the movie "12 Angry Men" is so valuable is because Henry Fonda's character helps walk the other jurors through the concept of reasonable doubt.

It's safe to say that the two saboteur jurors have never seen 12 Angry Men. One of the bad jurors, Juror K (I forget everybody's numbers so I'll use their first initial) was an African American woman who basically refused to consider the fact that the two witnesses' testimonies were in conflict - or anything else. She believed the 17-year-old witness (prior to her contradiction) and that was that. She literally said, after several of us asked her to explain why she wouldn't consider other evidence "I'm shutting down now." Which is contrary to the judge's instructions, which were that we were to listen to each others' arguments. So that juror alone was enough to screw the process.

The other juror, whom I'll call Juror D was a real piece of work - a classic Angry White Man who insisted that the majority who voted not guilty had "closed minds." He told me, personally that I was never impartial because I was one of those people who wanted to "help the underprivileged." Which is an echo of some of the jurors in "12 Angry Men" who used the term "bleeding hearts" when jurors voted not guilty.

Juror H, a bright and street-wise young woman, called Juror D a racist to his face. I'm not 100% sure he was a racist - having been falsely tagged as a racist by Mikki Kendall for a stupid reason (I disagreed with friends of her that John Lennon and Yoko Ono were/are racists) I am not so quick to label someone a racist without hard evidence. It's true that Juror D is a science teacher in the Bronx and said many nasty things about his students - for whom, I got the impression, he has nothing but contempt - but I heard nothing specifically racist.

When we all first met I heard Juror D say he was a science teacher. I asked him if he liked Neil DeGrass Tyson and was amazed when he said he'd never heard of Tyson. How could a science teacher not know who Neil DeGrass Tyson is? I said "you know, he's been on the Daily Show" and Juror D said he didn't watch the Daily Show. That's probably when Juror D decided I was a liberal, since I said nothing about politics the entire run of the case.

I strongly suspect Juror D is a fan of Fox News - he didn't come out and say it, but some of the things he said in casual conversation sounded like right-wing talking points.

He also appeared to be homophobic. He told this joke to us:

A guy walks into a bar and says to the bartender, "I just experienced my first blowjob today." "Congratulations," said the bartender, "your next beer is on me." "Thanks" says the guy, "but it's going to take more than one beer to get the taste out of my mouth."

Get it? It's a joke because the idea of a man giving a blowjob is just so wacky it's funny!

It wasn't enough that he was aggressively attacking the other jurors as closed-minded, for no good reason, but as we were discussing the case he would mumble little insults about what we were saying, and kept lecturing us on using evidence instead of emotion to decide the verdict.

Meanwhile it was clear to all of us, by the way he kept referring to the murder victim ("Think of poor Jimmy!") that he wanted somebody to pay for the murder and the guy in custody was just as good as anybody. And he seemed to think that it was his job to solve a mystery. When we pointed out to him that the evidence was not conclusive, he would invent little scenarios to try to make it conclusive - in other words, to do the DA's job all over again.

Thanks to Jurors D and K, we knew early on that this would be a hung jury and by yesterday (Monday) morning sent a letter to the judge saying so. But the judge said we hadn't deliberated long enough and sent us back. It looked like we were in for a looong week of frustration and insults from Juror D.

I should say here that the deliberation process was dragged out more than it should have because Juror D didn't remember important details of the testimony that the rest of us all remembered and so he kept dragging us back into the courtroom to re-listen to the testimony. Which only succeeded in convincing the not-guilty jurors that we were correct in the first place.

This morning there seemed to be a glimmer of hope - Juror L, a pleasant young woman who was leaning towards guilty, initially, was actually listening to our arguments on issues of reasonable doubt and she began to try to talk to Juror D. (Nobody even tried to talk to Juror K after she "shut down.") It appeared that Juror D took this as a betrayal by Juror L and he began to get angry and started talking about how the not-guilty jurors were corrupt because the mother of Juror V lived in a neighborhood near the crime scene. Juror D suggested that Juror V deliberately withheld that information in order to get into the jury and contaminate the jury pool. He indicated he would never change his verdict from guilty ever because of the corruption of the not-guilty jurors.

I told you Juror D was a piece of work.

Well that was enough for me. I was sick of Juror D impugning the not-guilty jurors ethics in general, and mine in particular, and I said we were wasting our time - Juror D was saying he would never budge due to his allegation of "corruption." I said if he felt that way he should complain to the judge about our corruption - that's a serious issue. We all yelled at each other about that for awhile, and the foreman, who was usually a quiet and even-tempered guy, screamed at Juror D about the stupidity of claiming that Juror V was prejudiced because of his mother's neighborhood. Juror M yelled at Juror D that he was "sick of your bullshit."

But Juror D would not budge and so finally Juror D passed a note to the judge asking if he could speak to him.

Well we all went back into the courtroom again and the judge told us that jurors are not allowed to speak directly to the judge. And then, finally, he said we should go back to the deliberation room, write out a statement saying we could not come to a unanimous decision in a timely manner - if that was the case - and send it to him.

So after we went back to the deliberation room, Juror H, Juror S and Juror M and I made one last-ditch effort to argue with Jurors D and K, but it was futile. So we sent the note, were declared a hung jury, and sent home.

On Facebook today somebody posted this essay New York Doesn't Love You which refers to Queens as "the Borough of Misfit Toys." It's certainly a heterogenous place and our jury reflected that. Here is the gender/ethnicity breakdown, including the 4 alternates:

Foreman - black male
Juror L - white female
Juror K - black female
Juror Y - Asian female
Juror B - Latina
Juror D - white male
Juror H - white female
Juror M - black male
Juror J - white male
Juror N (not me) - Latino
Juror A - black female
Juror S - white female
Juror C - white male
Juror Z - black female (with distinct Jamaican dialect)
Juror V - black male
And me.

I am so glad it's over although I will miss Gary, the officer of the court assigned to our juror group. I'm not generally interested in cops, but with his salt-and-pepper hair, dimples, dry wit, and somehow Bruce Springsteen-esque demeanor, I had a major crush on Gary. Who is married, of course.

NYCPlaywrights on a roll

Usually NYCPlaywrights gets maybe one or two unsolicited testimonials to the usefulness of the web site per year, but suddenly we've been averaging one a week. I have no idea why.

My favorite one so far says in part: "the terrific resource you provide out of the goodness of your heart."

As Mae West would say, goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie. But I didn't bother to disillusion the writer - if she doesn't make the connection between Google ads and the site, well whom am I to deny the altruism of NYCPlaywrights?

Me & Chris Durang

Alright, moving along now with the evening of short plays with my buddy Chris Durang. The web site concept is now up.

In other news, my daughter and I will be running in the 5 and 10 K races in May (the week after the show) on Roosevelt Island and we were over there today training. For my first day out I managed to do 5K of jogging and brisk walking. I made all around the island without collapsing - #winning!

I mentioned Durang to my daughter who'd never heard of him (she's not into theater) and hadn't even heard of Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You.

S&G rides again

Well it looks like my buddy Tony will be doing a mini-production that will include SODOM & GOMORRAH: THE ONE MAN SHOW, which was first produced four years ago (already!) This production in early May (web site to come soon) is only four performances but it will be nice to take it out and run it again. I think it's a pretty damn tight ten-minute play, although I do intend to tweak it a little. Never hurts to tweak a little. It will be running with a Christopher Durang one-act ('DENTITY CRISIS) as well as another play of mine that's never been produced, THE VERY DARK ROOM. It should be fun.

Here is a brief clip from the 2010 production of S&G. My approach to religion is just as irreverent as Durang's so it should be a good match.

Saving Mr. Banks review

I finally got around to renting "Saving Mr. Banks" about the collaboration between Walt Disney and P. L. Travers to make Travers' Mary Poppins books into a movie.

The official web site includes video clips, including this one which demonstrates Travers' relentless bitchiness.


Never Ever Just Mary - Saving Mr. Banks Clip on Disney Video

Considering the movie was made by Disney Studios it's no surprise that Walt comes off as a lovable guy - but then, that's why they hired Tom Hanks to play him. They do play fast and loose with the actual sequence of events according to the Wiki about the movie though. But they almost make up for that with a nice little easter egg at the end of the movie - in the main movie Emma Thompson's Travers is shown demanding that her consultation sessions with the Mary Poppins' screenwriter and composers be audio taped, and during the end credits they play an excerpt from the actual Travers taping sessions. Unfortunately that isn't available online as a video clip - you'll have to see the movie.

Travers is portrayed as constantly drinking tea - which really put me in the mood for tea. At one point in the movie her driver, played by Paul Giamatti, gives her tea in a paper cup, which she calls "sacrilege" which I'm inclined to agree with.

Where the extremist rightwing and Social Justice Warriors meet

In a few of my recent blog posts about prominent Social Justice Warrior Mikki Kendall, I predicted that Kendall would eventually follow in the footsteps of another self-proclaimed "feminist" Camille Paglia in finding common cause and admiration with the extreme rightwing. In Paglia's case, it is Rush Limbaugh. The Wall Street Journal loves Paglia too for her attacks against feminism.

Kendall hasn't found a rightwing buddy (yet) as far as I know, but the rightwing is waiting for her with open arms - the extremist rightwing anti-feminist web site Return of Kings absolutely adored Kendall's "#solidarityisforwhitewomen" hashtag and is completely on board with blaming (white) feminism for all the ills of the modern world.

"Return Of Kings is a blog for heterosexual, masculine men. It’s meant for a small but vocal collection of men in America today who believe men should be masculine and women should be feminine. 

ROK aims to usher the return of the masculine man in a world where masculinity is being increasingly punished and shamed in favor of creating an androgynous and politically-correct society that allows women to assert superiority and control over men. Sadly, yesterday’s masculinity is today’s misogyny. The site intends to be a safe space on the web for those men who don’t agree with the direction that Western culture is headed. Click here to send an email to the team. 

Women and homosexuals are prohibited from commenting here. They will be immediately banned, and anyone who replies to them will also be banned...

Notice the co-option of the Social Justice Warrior "safe space" concept. And the explicit banning of women and homosexuals.

On viewing the site now, I see the headline articles are "Most Women Don't Deserve a Good Man" and "How to Date Several Girls at the Same Time" and "Stop Being Such a Fucking Faggot."

The fact that such a site would be a huge fan of Mikki Kendall's most well-known message should give any actual feminists serious pause about the "feminism" of Social Justice Warriors.

And again, nobody should be surprised if Mikki Kendall eventually makes public common cause with, or even gets hired by, some rightwing organization. Her campaign of hatred against "white" feminism is music to rightwing ears.

12 Angry Men

Since I've been on jury duty for three weeks now (!) counting the days it took for them to pick the jury, I've been thinking of 12 Angry Men, which started life as a live teleplay, then became a movie and a play. All written/adapted by Reginald Rose, whose name I never remember hearing before.

You can watch the definitive version, the 1957 movie starring Henry Fonda (and a young Jack Klugman) and directed by Sidney Lumet for free on Youtube.

It's a tightly-written, excellent piece of work. I will have more to say about it, and the case I'm on, after the case has concluded.

Cat bed

Yay Mr. Fuzz likes his new cat bed. Although he really prefers the pile of cardboard boxes I have collected for spring cleaning.

Go Nome!

My daughter completed today's NYC Half Marathon - 13.1 miles - very impressive. Although my mother (on left of photo) and I each deserved medals too for braving the frigid temperatures and icy blasts of Arctic air to watch.

This photo was taken in the subway waiting for the 4 train.

Getting my fugue on

Finally I've written a fugue. It's pretty rough but at least it fulfills the basic requisites for a piece of music to be a fugue.

The version above can been seen/heard at Noteflight.

A version with three harps and a bass - and better sounding instruments too - can be heard here.

I love Jon Stewart and his beautiful anger

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,The Daily Show on Facebook

What a beautiful exposure of the shameless hypocrisy and let's face it, pure evil, of Fox News. And how big an idiot is Eric Bolling for picking a fight with Jon Stewart?

I'm not the only one who loved this:

• Mediaite: Jon Stewart Trashes Fox News and Eric Bolling for Food Stamp Hypocrisy
• NewsHounds: Jon Stewart's Brilliant Takedown Of Fox News' War On The Poor And Eric Bolling
• Salon: Must-see morning clip: Jon Stewart destroys Eric Bolling and Fox News over ridiculous food stamp lies
• Crooks and Liars: Jon Stewart Rips Eric Bolling Over Fox's Shaming Of SNAP Recipients
• Washington Post: Jon Stewart rips Fox News again over entitlement obsession
• Daily Kos: MUST-SEE: Jon Stewart HAMMERS Fox News for attacking food stamp recipients
• PoliticusUSA: Fox News’ Attempt To ‘School’ Jon Stewart On Food Stamp Abuse Blows Up On Them
• Media Matters for America: Watch Jon Stewart Eviscerate Fox's Poor-Shaming

Mikki Kendall and the funeral home story

Since I've been paying attention to the career of Mikki Kendall (since she Google-bombed my name because I failed to agree with friends of hers that John Lennon and Yoko Ono were racists) I read reports every so often of Kendall's activities prior to 2011 when I first came to know who she was. Apparently there was an incident via Kendall's LiveJournal account.

But I can't find the actual incident, only mentions of what happened. 

I discovered there's a wiki keeping tabs on Social Justice Warriors and Kendall has her own entry, which discusses the funeral home incident:

Karnythia is especially notorious for checking up on a woman who claimed on LJ that her baby had died, going so far as to call up the funeral home to validate the story. There are Gentlefailer discussions about that here, here, and here.

And someone just commented today on this blog post of mine from last week about Flavia Dzodan, and also mentions the incident.

Does anybody out there have any screen caps or other direct evidence of what happened, as well as the name of the woman whose baby died? And the name of the funeral home?

The Catholic Church is still an evil organization

People, especially liberals have been praising Pope Francis but we must never forget that he leads the Catholic Church, one of the most hard-core misogynist organizations on the face of this planet.

A group of nearly 200 Catholic employers filed a new lawsuit in Oklahoma against the federal government Wednesday, hoping to stop parts of the federal health care law that force them to provide insurance that covers contraceptives. 

The recently formed Catholic Benefits Association, which includes archdioceses, an insurance company and a nursing home, takes issue with a compromise in the Affordable Health Care Act offered by the Obama administration that attempted to create a buffer for religiously affiliated hospitals, universities and social service groups that oppose birth control. The law requires insurers or the health plan's outside administrator to pay for birth control coverage and creates a way to reimburse them. 

The association says that still forces Roman Catholic employers to violate church teachings. 

"Religious liberty encompasses more than the right to worship; it includes the right to freely exercise religion, to allow religion to inform not merely our private beliefs, but also our public actions," the Rev. Paul S. Coakley, archbishop of Oklahoma City.

In other words, it isn't enough for the Catholic Church to prohibit Catholic women from using birth control, the evil men who control the Catholic Church in the United States will do everything in their power, including using the US justice system to try to prevent ALL women from access to birth control.

This is the evil organization that seeks to impose the Catholic Church's misogynist views on Americans - http://stage.lifeaffirmingcare.com/en/faq.html. They must be opposed every step of the way.

Stupid shit Social Justice Warriors say, mazzie and her middle-school mean girl gang edition

This is how your typical Social Justice Warrior reacts to criticism: not by responding directly, but by gathering together a group of fellow Social Justice Warriors for a catty whine-and-snipe party.

You know, like a gang of middle-school mean girl bullies but with pretensions of political relevance.

I figured @mazzie (aka "Uncle Sugar") would take the cowardly Social Justice Warriors route and sure enough... Mazzie also has a blog, but last time I checked she hasn't posted anything to it since July 20, 2013. She appears to much prefer Twitter - but then Twitter is preferred most by hashtag hate-mongers, sloganeers and people who generally don't have enough worth saying to fill an entire paragraph of text.

In standard anonymous-coward SJW fashion Mazzie doesn't reveal her identity in her "about" page and while I could probably do some research and find out what it is, it's hardly worth my time.

Here she is quoting my blog post about her, but she doesn't bother to provide a link to the source. That's how your SJW rolls: no ethics, no honor, no shame.

Since I'm not a SJW I responded directly to mazzie (and of course that inevitably includes mazzie's mean girl gang).

I'm not sure what the "mmm bagel" comment is about. Perhaps mazzie is anti-Semitic and thinks I'm Jewish? If I was a SJW I would be all over that chance at smearing mazzie with the charge of "anti-Semitism" - a SJW never ever misses the chance to argue in bad faith.

So deliberately misrepresenting people - arguing in bad faith - is a pillar of the SJW movement. But even more perniciously is the SJW principle of judging everybody not by the content of their character, but by the color of their skin.

Although Mikki Kendall very specifically targeted me by name for her Google-bombing campaign, which is the ultimate cause of my squabble with mazzie, instead of responding to me as an individual human being mazzie decided that I was a representative of "white feminists."

Mazzie herself appears to be white, but white SJWs seek to avoid being lumped into the automatic-white-racist category by appeasing SJW leaders, such as Mikki Kendall, thus receiving forgiveness for the original sin of being born a racist.

Latest J&B poster

Well it looks like JULIA & BUDDY will be produced twice in 2014. Time to get a web site up. I redid the poster/postcard to give it a less-slick look. I think this works much better - it looks like it was done with watercolors. Thanks to all the fancy hi-tech stylization features in Photoshop, of course. You can't see the textures though unless you click the image to see the full size version.

Plus new tag line - "A new play about love, dysfunction and other philosophical matters."

Milton Glaser is still hanging in there

Glaser's iconic Dylan poster

One of the first graphic designers whose name I was aware of, after Alphonse Mucha, is Milton Glaser. He was huge in the 1960s and now he's 84 years old. And since he's still around, the Mad Men producers have gotten him to do original 60s-style art for them - this is a genius idea.

From the NYTimes article:

...Mr. Glaser, 84, with his imposing bald pate, goatee and wry professorial air, could easily be a character on the show, a seen-it-all Zen master from the creative department. “I could have walked in the door of that firm,” he said, of the fictional Sterling Cooper & Partners. “I knew those people.”
Mr. Glaser still runs his small firm out of the Beaux-Arts townhouse he bought in 1965, the building where, three years later, he also helped found New York magazine with Clay Felker. The transom glass above the front door still bears the words “Art is Work,” and Mr. Glaser continues to live by the axiom. In recent years, the firm has been responsible for widely seen work, like the logo for the Brooklyn Brewery, covers for The Nation magazine and the logo and posters for Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America.”

Sightseeing in AΣTOΡIA

AΣTOΡIA is the Greek-letter version of ASTORIA. I normally don't notice a huge amount of Greek culture in Astoria in spite of its reputation, because there are so many other cultures vying for dominance. But I had always wondered why the Greeks in Astoria didn't seem to bother much with ancient Greek theater - and then I saw this poster in a window on 31st Street this weekend. It's great to have a phone with a functional camera again.

I might have to check out this show, which looks like a Mystery Play but for followers of Hellenism rather that Christianity.  It's too bad you can't see the plays of Euripides, Aristophanes, etc. here though. 

I was noticing a lot of Greek cultural artifacts during my walk around town today - the weather was a balmy 55 degrees - what a change of pace. 

This building appeared to house a Greek cultural center that was so Greek their signs in the window were in Greek too.

I found this building pretty fascinating as well, on the same street. It appears to be a Greek architectural firm. Check out the columns and the traditional Greek border design known as the meander on the window balconies. That is a handsome building.

And then right around the corner from me is a well-known local Greek bakery Boulis famous for its Greek donuts known as loukoumades. Not nearly as handsome a building but more accessible.

Fun fact: there appears to be a hotel in Thessaloniki Greece called the Hotel Astoria. No explanation for the name though.

Citizens United, Money Laundering and Castle

I found it fascinating that the latest episode of Castle "In the Belly of the Beast" (yes, I did say I was done with Castle but during a recent convalescence I got back into watching it) had a plot based on the idea that the Citizen's United decision was a perfect conduit for money laundering. As the recap says:

Someone else is behind the ring Beckett witnessed. Someone bigger. Future Forward is a political super PAC. The would-be murder victim from earlier, Evan Potter, did all the legal work to establish it for a wealthy client named Jason Cokeler, who just died of a heart attack. Millions was laundered through the super PAC. Someone is using the money to build a massive political war chest. Beckett knows that it’s Senator Bracken. 

Bracken was responsible for Beckett's mother's death, which is what made her become a cop in the first place.

I have to say, I'm very impressed by this story line. I hadn't really thought too much about the money laundering facilitation of CU, but others (besides Castle's writers) have. Here is an amazing episode in the Stephen Colbert Super PAC saga. They literally use the term:

COLBERT
I can take secret donations from my C-4 and give it to my supposedly transparent Super PAC 

ATTORNEY TREVOR POTTER
And it'll say "given by your C-4" 

COLBERT
What is the difference between that and money laundering. 

POTTER
It's hard to say.

The Brennan Center for Justice referenced the Colbert episode:

In addition to spending dark money directly, nonprofits can give unlimited donations to Super PACs for electioneering. Thus, although Super PACs are transparent, underlying donors can remain anonymous by simply routing their money through an intermediary nonprofit. Now, many—if not most—Super PACs operate with an affiliated nonprofit to give camera-shy donors a means to contribute large sums of money without public scrutiny. For instance, the Cooperative of American Physicians, a medical malpractice and medical liability insurer, has contributed $2.4 million to its own Super PAC for political ad buys—without any public knowledge of its underlying funders. [7] This practice has become so widespread that comedian Stephen Colbert has lampooned current law as essentially legalizing money laundering.[8]

Daylight Atheism, Adam Lee, censorship and Social Justice Warriors

For six months I was a frequent and enthusiastic participant in Adam Lee's ongoing discussion of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged at his site Daylight Atheism, but on Sunday, February 23 I quit because I was censored.

Although I am an atheist, I didn't need confirmation that atheists can be just as authoritarian and as devout worshippers of authority figures as any religionist - I had seen what the mostly atheist followers of Richard Dawkins had done when a woman in the atheist community dared to express an opinion with which Richard Dawkins disagreed. And then of course there is atheist hero Sam Harris, defender of torture and ethnic profiling.

From very early on in my analysis of Atlas Shrugged, it struck me that it was very likely that Ayn Rand had Asperger's syndrome. When I googled Ayn Rand and Asperger's I found one of Rand's fans making the same suggestion:

...It is almost certain that Rand had Asperger’s Syndrome, a condition that has only come into greater awareness since the early 1990s...  

...It is possible that neither  author knew enough about Asperger’s to make the necessary connections, but there is abundant evidence for this proposition, particularly in Heller’s description of Rand’s childhood. It is perhaps just as well that neither author explicitly considers this possibility, because it would be all too easy to pathologise Rand, leading to a reductionist psycho-biography that would have done disservice to her ideas and influence. 

Descriptions of Rand's character from many sources as well as video evidence make it clear that she had traits much in common with what are said to be Asperger's traits. And an important reason for why "Atlas Shrugged" doesn't work as an actual critique of real-world socioeconomic systems, is because Rand probably viewed the world through undiagnosed Asperger's syndrome. It is the theory that makes the most sense.

Now I'm certainly opened to arguments against the notion that Rand had Asperger's, but I didn't get arguments last September when I first brought up the subject at Daylight Atheism - I got abuse. And Adam Lee was perfectly fine with this - which of course should have been a red flag to me then. An anonymous coward (although his true identity appears to be Alexander Weaver) who goes by the screen name Azkyroth, who rarely made any substantial contributions to the Atlas Shrugged conversation was the worst offender:

Azkyroth  Nancy McClernan • 6 months ago

The book will make so much more sense if you look at it as revenge-porn by someone with undiagnosed Asperger's Syndrome

No, it doesn't.

And fuck you back.

If you follow the "No, it doesn't" link you can see that Azkyroth's evidence for why I am wrong is a TV Tropes article that supports everything I said - the traits listed as indicative of Asperger's are very much like descriptions of Ayn Rand in the two biographies and two memoirs by her biggest sycophants, Nathaniel and Barbara Branden. None of these authors suggests that Rand had Asperger's but their reports of her behavior aligns very much with the descriptions.

Adam Lee tried to turn this into an issue of the wrongness of diagnosing the dead. First, there is a long tradition in literary analysis of diagnoses of dead writers and Ayn Rand is certainly not the first famous dead person about whom it as been speculated had Asperger's.

But also, hypocritically, Lee never had a problem with anybody suggesting that Ayn Rand was a psychopath.

The idea that Rand was a psychopath is absurd - the reason that psychopaths are so scary is because they are masters of faking emotions they don't feel. If there was ever anybody who lacked the ability to fake, it was Ayn Rand.

Now I have no direct experience with people with Asperger's as far as I know. A cousin of mine has twin boys who have Asperger's but I've never met them. We are Facebook friends though. So I have no negative feelings about people with Asperger's and my understanding of the traits of Asperger's comes mainly from people who have Asperger's talking about Asperger's.

I explained this to the people at Daylight Atheism, but it did no good. Instead Azykyroth claimed that my speculating that Ayn Rand had Asperger's was the equivalent of being a racist. I know that sounds absurd, but here is a screen shot of the comment:

And you can see the results - rather than refuting Azykroth's bogus comparison to racism, instead Adam Lee told me to STFU. 

So it seems that as far as Adam Lee is concerned, the mere speculation that somebody that he and his friends don't like has Asperger's is the equivalent of racism.

Apparently all along Adam Lee was a Social Justice Warrior and I didn't realize it. Possibly because my understanding of SJW was that if you disagree with them about something you are accused of racism. But it seems that another method is to accuse somebody of "ablism" and then compare that to racism. So to disagree with a SJW you may be accused of racism, or alternately, one degree from racism.

Azykyroth wasn't content merely to suggest I was an "ablist" - that wasn't vicious enough:

Azkyroth's lie about me having an "obsessive need to demonize people with AS" was allowed to stand, but my defense of myself was deleted. And of course Azkyroth presents no evidence at all that I have ever harmed any living person by my speculations that Ayn Rand may have had Asperger's - but that isn't necessary. Social Justice Warriors don't have to provide evidence for any of their vicious attacks - they argue by assertion and evidence counts for nothing.

My assumption is that although I only know Azkyroth as an anonymous online coward, Adam Lee is a friend of this person in real life, and so feels compelled to side with him. But it's possible that Lee feels that the hypocritical prohibition against the topic of Ayn Rand and Asperger's is perfectly right and just without any personal considerations.

In any case, I saw no point in continuing to participate in a discussion run by Social Justice Warriors. Adam Lee has no shame about publicly siding with liars and unhinged defamers and feels no shame in censoring good-faith arguments on behalf of liars and unhinged defamers. But that's what Social Justice Warriors do.