It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
Originally posted by intrepid
Maybe your opinion is unpopular because it needs work.
Over and over it happens, like incurable migraine. A public figure slips up and says something that One Doesn’t Say, something that upsets one tribe or other of the sacred and sensitive—blacks, Jews, women, homosexuals, American Indians. The offender is always a white male. The press attack him like hyenas dragging down a crippled zebra. Invariably, he apologizes profusely, squirming and abasing himself. Invariably he says he didn’t mean it, though invariably he did. Invariably he reminds me of nothing so much as a puppy who knows he shouldn’t have wet the rug.
It is positively kinky. It is D&S, domination and submission, which is sadomasochism without the whips but with the same delight in abasement and abasing.
Truth has nothing to do with these curious performances. When the former president of Harvard, Larry Summers, said that men were better than women at mathematics, he was stating a fact, well settled among those in the field and consonant with historical performance and current experience. (And if he had been wrong, so what?) Yet he spent weeks publicly writhing and licking the feet of any woman who couldn’t outrun him.
It wasn’t honest apology. It was something much more twisted.
[...]
The press, without whom none of this would happen, are not just hypocritical. They positively revel in watching the victims crawl. Their indignation is bogus. I have known all manner of reporters and editors. Few of them are shocked, appalled, horrified and so on at “slurs.” They are not delicates. After forty years in a big-city newsroom, they know the score.
They also know that a lot of the alleged slurs aren’t. For example, when a white football coach says that blacks are better runners, it is (a) true and (b) a compliment. Yet when this happened, the response of the press always was a delighted “Gotcha!” after which they dog-packed the guy.