Remember Dinesh D’Souza? The dude who blamed American progressives for 9/11 and who thinks some kinds of discrimination is totally okay?
Well, he’s baaaaaaaack:
D’Souza took down the Trayvon tweets within an hour, but strangely left the ahistorical and totally sexist tweet stand.
Also on today’s #TWiBRadio: San Jose State students handles hate-crime poorly, don’t buy this scented candle for your black friends, and even after watching 12 Years a Slave Kanye West still has only an abstract of idea of slavery.
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And this morning on #amTWiB: Obama’s speech was interrupted by a student (23:54), USA Today joining media boycott of White House’s official photos (28:12), and the creation of a fake slum for tourists (47:09).
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MikeJ
Perhaps we were too hard on Richard Cohen.
Nah. More than one person can be a complete moron.
Comrade Dread
But it’s not about race, because it’s never about race. Also some of his best friends are black, right?
Zifnab25
Man, I love that one at the bottom.
“If blacks and whites are equal, then why don’t I see any black people at the lunch counter? Bwhahaha!” Truly, an intellectual titan, that one.
Amir Khalid
Obama said that if he had a son, that son might look like Trayvon. I wouldn’t really call that likening himself to Trayvon.
BGinCHI
Any news yet on whether D’Souza is still beating his wife and fucking chickens?
GregB
Some of D’Souzas’ best friends are douche-bags.
Randy P
What point is even being made by the Trayvon comparison? That there are a bunch of armed low-IQ bigots who’d love to shoot Obama? I think we’ve known that since 2008. Not sure why D’Souza is making the point though.
Gene108
Fuck D’Souza. I know an Indian man, who did his PhD in Florida, in the 1950’s, and we were treated like Trayvon Martin would’ve been, with going to separate fountains and all.
It got better in the late 1960’s, somehow, because the friends and family I know who studied here in that time frame could sit where they wanted on the bus, for example.
KG
There’s a certain level of stupid… Then there’s Dinesh D’Souza… And then there’s Jonah Goldberg
Another_Bob
Forget Sarah Palin. Someone should shit in Dinesh D’Souza’s mouth.
PIGL
It isn’t “feigned outrage,” you poltroon. It’s loathing and contempt.
Litlebritdiftrnt
Saw that today and said WTF? When did calling the POTUS a “boy” become acceptable. Never mind, did all my shopping for Thanksgiving today (cause I don’t want to brave the grocery stores tomorrow) we are having Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding, Cauliflower Cheese, Steamed Asparagus tips with garlic/herb butter, mashed taters, roast taters, home made bread, and Pumpkin Pie (which I will not eat). My fridge is so full of food I can barely get the door closed. Stocked up for four days because there is no way I am going out on Grey Thursday, Black Friday, or whatever color Saturday is.
Chris
@Amir Khalid:
More to the point, the outrage isn’t that Obama is being compared with a violent street thug, since as far as we know there’s zero evidence that Trayyvon was a violent street thug – the outrage is that Dinesh (and half of America) considers the comparison an insult.
cmorenc
Judit Polgar (rating 2677) should whip Dinish’s butt for saying that. She regularly competes on peer-level with top-ranked chess grandmasters, e.g. Polgar v Anand
ranchandsyrup
Kanye is having an interesting day. http://gawker.com/watch-kanye-west-repeatedly-get-his-ass-handed-to-him-1472190612
Then he went on Sirius and screamed at the host for a while until the host (Sway) said he’d gladly take it outside.
Anya
I don’t speak self-hating wingnutia, what is D’Souza trying to say?
Also, what’s the obsession with the WH photographer? Why does the media hate Obama so much? It’s really strange.
James E. Powell
@PIGL:
It isn’t “feigned outrage,” you poltroon. It’s loathing and contempt.
And it isn’t feigned. This is a guy who makes money telling other people how they ought to live their lives.
kc
I usually reserve the appellation “douchebag” for white guys but Kanye West has really earned it . . .
jenn
I mentioned in the thread below, that while I understand the insult DD’s tweet was trying to convey, what that tweet really makes me think is – who knows what Trayvon could have grown up to be. Who’s to say he couldn’t have grown up to be President. And what a damn tragedy it is that he didn’t get to find out what his future held.
kindness
What is up with that? Being proud of being a stupid asshole?
Hal
Yeah, I’m not getting the Trayvon comparison either. Obama said he could have a son that looks like Trayvon, not that he was Trayvon himself. But that’s beside the point. If I guessed, D’Souza is thinking he is being clever and calling the President a thug. If so, why be a pussy and not just say it?
Suffern ACE
@Randy P: I think the point is that Trayvon’s life ended early. Who knows what the adult Trayvon’s life held. Perhaps D’Souza is lamenting a life of potential lost.
Aji
@BGinCHI: I thought his wife bailed after his shortcomings in the fidelity area (don’t know about other areas; don’t want to know) were exposed.
Chicken fucking: I dunno. Are they dressed like hot young Republican underlings? Maybe if he’d gone that route, he’d still have a job.
Matt McIrvin
@jenn: In the right-wing fever swamp, it’s accepted that Trayvon Martin was a violent thug who had it coming. What else D’Souza might therefore be kinda sorta passive-aggressively implying about Barack Obama, while not saying it strongly enough to alert the Secret Service, is left as an exercise for the reader.
Aji
@Anya: “Say” is kind of a stretch. As I said elsewhere, D’Souza’s excreta don’t even qualify as dogwhistles. They’re straight shots to the limbic system of pants-wettingly terrified, rage-filled, impotent, resentful teabagger types.
Napoleon
@Hal:
Several people in this and past threads have said something like this and it simply is not true. He in fact at one point said something to the effect “it could have been me.”
Chyron HR
Because I get my kicks above the waistline, sunshine.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
From University president to troller of the Twitterverse. Should have kept it in your pants, D’Ouchecanoe.
Napoleon
Obama on 7/19/13: “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,”
http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/19/politics/obama-zimmerman
Chyron HR
Is this a thing now? True Progressives love Dinesh D’Souza? Go figure.
rk
Actually my heart breaks for Trayvon Martin’s family. They lost a child and it is sad that so close to Thanksgiving they have to hear this. I hope he one day suffers the way that Trayon Martin’s family has suffered.
Mike G
@Randy P:
The point being that Dinesh D’ouchebag can fling poo to get attention. Don’t try to make more sense out of it.
Quaker in a Basement
Early start on the holiday weekend, D-man?
gnomedad
It’s like kids trying to see who can make the loudest underarm fart, except with racism instead of fart noises. Hee-hee-hee!
Frankensteinbeck
It’s not just that to conservatives Trayvon Martin was a druggy street thug who got what was coming to him, it’s that they believe Obama’s comments on the subject were stupid and racist. This is a ‘Neener, neener, you said butt!’ thing. Conservatives are massively childish, while proudly proclaiming themselves mature.
EDIT – @gnomedad:
Yeah, pretty much.
JustRuss
I saw DD speak once. He must think he’s psychic, because he kept telling us about all the terrible things Obama believes, with no evidence to back any of it up. Now he’s mocking the memory of a murdered teenager to insult the POTUS, in celebration of Thanksgiving. Monstrous.
In a sane world he’d be shouting on a street corner, not a junior member of the punditocracy.
schrodinger's cat
People like Dinesh D’Souza and Tunku Vardarajan give me a glimpse into how the British managed to rule India despite their disadvantage in numbers.
TriassicSands
It’s true that few women can compete on the international grandmaster level of chess, but in what bizarre world is chess seen as the pinnacle of intellectual life?
Chess is chess. No more. No less.
Oh, and D’Souza is a pig and an intellectual midget. Like so many of his ilk on the Right, he’s a thoroughly despicable human being, if that title can any longer be fairly attributed to modern conservatives.
Pam
Maybe because I asked him if he was screwing his wife or mistress on Thanksgiving? Also too I called him an asshole.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@TriassicSands:
I think it was on the earlier D’Souza thread, but someone posted an open letter from a former (woman) chess player that explained why so few women make it to the top levels. It’s not that they “can’t” compete, it’s that the constant, persistent harassment (even actual physical assault, in some cases) from players, judges, and coaches wears them down and causes them to choose to quit.
There’s a separate women’s championship because it’s the only way to prevent the male players from ogling their female opponent, commenting audibly on her cleavage, trying to grab her ass, etc. etc. etc.
TriassicSands
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
A fair point. Perhaps “don’t” would have been a better choice than “can’t.” Personally, it wouldn’t bother one way or the other if women could or couldn’t compete with men in chess. I have a hard time thinking of anything that matters less to the real world concerns of people (or animals) than competitive chess. It’s basically war confined to a little board and it wouldn’t be surprising if men were better at that than women. I’d like to think that as humans we’re (slowly) getting to the point where being good at war is not seen as something to hold in high esteem. (That’s one of the reasons why the constant thanking military personnel for their service is not something I support. I am a veteran and I have never wanted anyone to thank me for my service, nor do I think any less of anyone who hasn’t served.)
Judit Polgar has been the most successful female chess player in history (by far), but when I read what kind of dedication it takes to chess, to the exclusion of so much else, it doesn’t strike me as something I would want for any child. The film “Searching for Bobby Fischer” is a thoughtful examination of this subject and ought to give any parent pause before pushing a child into the world of competitive chess. I use the word “pushing” because that’s often what it seems to be — children want to please their parents, after all.
Another Holocene Human
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): So basically just like atheist conferences or the compsci world. When compsci was new it was disproportionately women; now, the women who don’t turn away in disgust from the get-go get poked, harassed, raped and threatened with rape, death threats, etc. Plus the pig coworkers you have to put up with.
There’s a reason I’m not in IT and it has nothing to do with my erstwhile computer and/or math and/or physics skillz.
(Actually my disgust response went to 11!!! and I just couldn’t take it when bullshitting assholes got paid more than me to deliver fucked up code, we’re talking code so bad that it’s obvious that they were painfully unclear on the concept … fuck … it was all about lying dumbasses pursuing a paycheck at the expense of customers and I wanted no part of that.)
Another Holocene Human
@TriassicSands: I would only call it war in the sense of being highly competitive, and that can come out in ugly ways. But the game itself is very abstract and mathematical.
My best friend in junior high taught me to play but then #ragequit, I guess because I gloated too much when I won. That took the fun out of it for me…. But my brother who is on the autism spectrum and a math major got into it as a hobby. You can play other people online so that’s perfect for him. All the gambits and shit are not that different from reading up on algos and other things that computer science geeks and math geeks do anyway. It hits all the same parts of the brain.
My other problem with chess and games like it is that I think hard all the time and just can’t square complex game theory/memorization/high competition with, you know, relaxing. I’m the sort of person who turns minesweeper or tetris into a stressful obsession. I refuse to play video games, also, too.
MJ
Douchebag D’Souza’s twitter feed is just full of fail. It is very funny to see how few supportive comments he gets on his twitter feed and how many people correct him on information he gets wrong. He can’t even troll properly.
Well, the last time D’Souza got any public attention, he had his tail tucked between his legs after getting fired from his college job after bringing his mistress to work, so he’s probably craving attention – any attention – that comes his way that is not wife-mistress-related.
The Other Chuck
@Another Holocene Human
Yep, people like Richard Dawkins in particular. After his “Dear Muslima” letter, I lost every shred of respect I had for the man. And having been to a few atheist/skeptic/freethinker groups, I find they have all the dour self-righteousness of a church with none of the fellowship or community.
Cervantes
@schrodinger’s cat: People like Dinesh D’Souza and Tunku Vardarajan give me a glimpse into how the British managed to rule India despite their disadvantage in numbers.
Do tell.
Cervantes
@TriassicSands: It’s true that few women can compete on the international grandmaster level of chess […]
This whole sub-thread reminds me of Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King.
AxelFoley
@Suffern ACE:
You can’t be fucking serious.
C.V. Danes
Undoubtedly, some cultures are still much more racist and sexist than ours. Someone should perhaps enlighten this asshole to that fact.
schrodinger's cat
@Cervantes: The British ruled India with the help of Indians, aside from the highest level bureaucrats and administrators, the bureaucracy, the army, the apparatus that made India run was staffed by Indians. Many of those Indians went on to become leaders in the Independence struggle, like Nehru and Gandhi, who were both educated in England. There were some who adopted the affectations of the British and were crappy to their less fortunate countrymen and women. DD and TV are the intellectual progeny of those Indians.
Cervantes
@schrodinger’s cat: Of course. That was/is the colonial experience virtually everywhere, not just in British India. But are you saying that D’Souza’s and Varadarajan’s ilk were a major factor in “how the British managed to rule India despite their disadvantage in numbers”? That is, are you ascribing the longevity of the Raj to Indian self-hatred?
Not saying you are — but if you are, then you might want to consider other theories as well.
schrodinger's cat
@Cervantes: Not the only factor at all, it is one among the many. Colonization is a corrosive experience. The British had a technological advantage over the Indians, in fact before the British India did not exist as a political entity. But the Brits did run India with the help of armies Indian babus, mostly upper caste Indians. In fact in addition to the examples I gave before Nehru, Gandhi and many Indian freedom fighters were lawyers or civil servants with an English/British education. So I did not say that every Indian who worked for the British Raj or was educated by the British was self hating. But there is a breed of self hating Indians as exemplified by DSouza, the ones who identified more with their oppressors rather than the fellow oppressed countrymen and women.
Shakti
Dinesh D’Souza is a sad broken man who self-hates and keeps spinning and spinning so he can stay on that gravy train and so all the racists he caters to will forget that he’s not white. He wrote a book called the End of Racism but couldn’t mention Wong Ark (Asians born in the US can be citizens) or Bhagat Singh Thind (Indians are not Caucasian enough to be citizens) or the Immigration and Nationality Amendment Acts of 1965 (the end of country and race quotas) or the fact he went to a high school in Arizona near the border because that’s inconvenient or painful. Not even convented Indians buy that load of crap that British colonialism was “good” for India.
Early Thanksgiving thankfulness: Thank you mom, for making sure I knew something about Indian history.
schrodinger's cat
@Shakti:
They exist, they are however a dying breed, since the ones who have had any actual experience of the British rule had to have been adults before 1947.
brantl
I’ve seen Dihesh D’souza on Bill Maher, and he’s a genuing asshole.
Uncle Cosmo
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
I played (low level) tournament chess from roughly age 13 to 30, & that would jibe with my observations then that most of the younger competitors were socially inept–I guess today we’d say they were on the autism scale. My take on separate chess tournaments for women has always been that they existed primarily to provide a comfortable environment in an effort to persuade them to stay with the game on a serious level (i.e., not necessarily playing at a top level but taking the time & making the effort to play as well as one can). And that seems to jibe too.
My question is why anyone cares anymore about a game that computers play better than humans. So much better that the best programs seem to develop an emergent “understanding” of best strategy that even the strongest human players can’t grasp as they’re getting stomped. At that point chess becomes a somewhat more challenging version of checkers or tic-tac-toe, useful for whiling away idle time but ultimately vacuous.
Cervantes
@schrodinger’s cat:
Hardly a factor, I would say — but you may be right.
This would be news to Indians who remember their own history, from the age of Chandragupta Maurya ca. 325 BCE, to the Moghul Empire, whose disintegration was sought by the British and gave them a foothold. (In fact, both the Maurya and Moghul domains occupied as much or more of what we now call South Asia than the British did.)
It’s more complicated than that. D’Souza comes from a Goan Catholic background, a very small minority in India. Goa was never British. It was a Portuguese colony, Catholic since before Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation — and did not become part of India until the year D’Souza was born. So if he feels alienated from other Indians, there are a number of possible explanations apart from (or in addition to) self-hatred.
None of which excuses his foolishness, which is epic.