A second day of the mandatory rainbow flag on my WordPress editor. At first, the status signaling was mildly amusing; the longer it lasts, the more awkward and funny it will get. Lots of companies are showing their gay pride, and no doubt feeling warmly sanctimonious about it. But life goes on. Still, you know the old joke about nobody wanting to be the first one to stop applauding at the end of one of Stalin’s speeches?
Listen up, WordPress. If you really care about gay rights, I’d better see that rainbow flag tomorrow. I mean, of course everybody expected it yesterday. If you’d just had it for one day, people might have thought you were just doing the bare minimum to keep the SJWs off your back. Which means that really having it up two days is the bare minimum to avoid people thinking you don’t really care about gay rights. So if you really care about gay rights, you’ll go above the bare minimum and have it tomorrow. But now that I’ve pointed this out to you, I think tomorrow is the bare minimum, and you’d better exceed that. Most important of all, though, you’d better keep an eye on other companies’ websites and keep rainbowing at least as long as they do, because if you don’t, we’ll know that you don’t really care about gay rights as much as those other companies do, and you’ll be scheduled to be eaten.
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Throne and Altar 
[…] Don’t want to be the first one to stop clapping […]
That’s the thing about those rainbow-sodomy uniforms: once put one on, taking it back off is inherently hateful and bigoted. Failure to continually escalate validation of and support for sodomy is a cultural ‘tax cut’ which cannot be tolerated. Public signs in support of anal sex on the storefront are forever: once one has taken on the visible public mark he will not be permitted to buy and sell in the public markets without it.
I don’t know if visible signs supporting anal sex are “the” mark of the beast, but they are certainly “a” mark of the beast. That strikes me as highly appropriate in its baseness, actually: that the beast gives it to his followers and toadies, visibly and publicly, in the anus — and they must display it for all the world to see.
It certainly makes for an interesting twist on the Mark of Cain….
The flag has become a symbol of cultural poison. Your comparison to Stalin’s speeches is remarkably apt.
Yesterday I saw rainbow flags popping up all over people’s pictures on Facebook. So, I did the logical thing, announced that I would not buck the trend of flag displaying, and blended my picture with…the Confederate battle flag.
It certainly makes for an interesting twist on the Mark of Cain
Or a mark described in Revelation
So, I did the logical thing, announced that I would not buck the trend of flag displaying, and blended my picture with…the Confederate battle flag
I recall the Moscow Music Peace Festival in the waning days of the Soviet Union. What was interesting was not a bunch of ’80s hair-metal bands having a last hurrah before Nirvana showed up in ’91 to destroy the genre, but rather that in the audience people were waving Confederate flags. How the Hell did they get them? Anyway, whether Americans feel Heritage or Hate, the Stars and Bars seem to have become a universal symbol of defiance of the powers that be.
Scott W. – The flag of Novorossia features the bars without the stars. Russians have a positive view of the Confederacy typically, and the flag is popular all over Eastern Europe.
[…] draped themselves in the rainbow flag in a figurative standing ovation, Bonald warns them that they Don’t want to be the first one to stop clapping. Then he follows up with a fantastic piece on how Opposing gay marriage is already worse than […]
I can’t recall if I posted this here before, but “Don’t want to be the first one to stop clapping” reminds me of a pretty close anecdote.
When my parish organist was getting his degree in a music program at a college in buffalo, they assembled everyone for a faculty/student meeted where one of the professors announced he was going transgender. Everyone gave a standing ovation. My organist and a few others remained seated not clapping. Later, he was summoned to a star chamber of faculty because someone reported it. They proceeded to threaten his academic career unless he took sensitivity training. Being still young and intimidated, he took the class.
Scott, unfortunately this is all too common nowadays. I have to say I am very tempted to maneuver myself so that I am forced to take one of these classes. Someone should do some reconnaissance and document exactly what the enemy is doing.
@Mark Citadel:
If it’s the case that you can’t take one voluntarily, that’d be pretty interesting in itself.
If it’s the case that you can’t take one voluntarily, that’d be pretty interesting in itself.
It would. I do remember the author of Among the Truthers: A Journey through America’s Growing Conspiracist Underground voluntarily taking a class on racism. He describes a hypothetical situation offered to the class:
Sandy, Jim, and Karen work at a downtown community center where they help low-income residents apply for rental housing. Sandy has a bad feeling about Jim: She notices that when black clients come in, he tends to drift to the back of the office. Sandy suspects racism. (She and Jim are both white.) On the other hand, she also notices that Jim seems to get along well with Karen, who is black. As the weeks go by, Sandy becomes more uncomfortable with the situation. But she feels uncertain about how to handle it. Test question: What should Sandy do?
If you answered that Sandy’s first move should be to talk to Karen, and ask how Jim’s behavior made her feel, you are apparently a better antiracist than I am: That, for what it’s worth, was the preferred solution offered by my instructor at Thinking About Whiteness and Doing Anti-Racism, a four-part evening workshop for community activists, presented in early 2010 at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore.
My own answer, announced loud in class, was that Sandy should approach Jim discretely, explaining to him how others in the office might perceive his actions. Or perhaps the manager of the community center could be asked to give a generic presentation about the need to treat clients in a color-blind manner, on a no-names basis.
The problem with my approach, the instructor indicated, lay in the fact that I was primarily concerned with the feelings of my fellow Caucasian Jim. I wasn’t treating Karen like a “full human being” who might have thoughts and feelings at variance with her superficially friendly workplace attitude.
Moreover, I was guilty of “democratic racism”– by which we apply ostensibly race-neutral principles, such as “due process”, constantly demanding clear “evidence” of wrongdoing, rather than confronting prima facie instances of racism head on. “It seems we’re always looking for more proof,” said the instructor, an energetic thirtysomething left-wing activist named Sheila Wilmot who’s been teaching this course for several years. “When it comes to racism, you have to trust your gut.”
I felt the urge to pipe up at this. Racism is either a serious charge or it’s not. And if it is, as everyone in this room clearly believed, then it cannot be flung around casually without giving the accused a chance to explain his actions. But I said nothing, and nodded my head along with everyone else. I’d come to this class not to impose my democratic racism on people, but to observe.
Democratic racism, eh?
BTW, I’ve noticed a couple sites still flying the rainbow flag, now 4 days out from the ruling:
Artsy (an art auction and news website)
Soundcloud
It’d be interesting to list as many as we can find and see who’s the last one clapping. I expect some will just remain clapping forever, incorporating the rainbow into their branding permanently.
I know a few people who protested the Supreme Court decision by blending their avatar with the Vatican Flag. (current Pope notwithstanding). I thought it was brilliant, and it’s somewhat less inciting than the Stars and Bars.
there are a hundred more ‘trigger warning micro aggression’-inducing flags worse than the Stars and Bars, but it is the most well known. I invented an ultra-microaggressive take on the Confederate flag. Liberals avert your eyes.
http://s288.photobucket.com/user/Mark_Citadel/media/RX%20Flag2_zpskwwvfuzd.jpg.html
@Mark Citadel:
You left off the swastika and the “Don’t Tread On Me” snake.
Seriously though, I wonder if the reaction I have to seeing the gay rainbow flag (a bit of a shiver, an aversion, a weak desire to stay away, like I might feel if I saw a bloated animal carcass by the side of the road) is similar to what, say, white liberals feel when they see the Stars and Bars.
I think it’s likely that the emotional reaction is not analogous, only similar in scale. But is there any way to find out? And if it is analogous–if what I’m experiencing when I see a rainbow flag is a “microaggression”–does the fact that I wouldn’t in a million years think of asking the government to take down rainbow flags mean anything?
NZ, maybe the difference in your reaction to the rainbow flag and the white liberals’ reaction to the Confederate flag is that you understand the meaning of the flag which repels you: celebration of sodomy. It is good to have a visceral, emotional reaction to such a thing, though I hate to see the rainbow associated with such a vile act. I remember drawing them all over the place when I was a girl and too young to know what sodomy was.
The vast majority of people bandwagon jumping on the Confederate flag-hate don’t even know that 2015 is the 150th anniversary of the ending of the American Civil War, much less what the government of the South or North fought for and what some of those individual soldiers believed they were fighting for, nor do they really know why people and state governments still fly it today.
Also, the snake flag is called the Gadsden flag and I would not be surprised if they went after it next. It has long been associated with “right-wing extremism”, whatever that means. I have less sympathy for it than I do for the Stars and Bars but it is a cultural relic from the founding of this country. The powers that be will have to rename some stuff in Alabama at the very least to appease the frothing hordes.
Apparently, there is a Ronald Reagan legacy foundation whose major purpose is to get all kinds of things named after Ronald Reagan. It makes me wonder how many other similar organizations there are and how many of them are for Confederacy-related things, and what kinds of conversations are going on in those board rooms as they prepare for battle.
*American heritage-related things too.
[…] These are not idle worries. Silence may not always protect us. At colleges, it won’t. From commenter Scott W.: […]
[…] On June 27th Bonald joked in Don’t want to be the first one to stop clapping: […]
Bonald, you called it. Brett Favre was the first one to stop clapping.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/07/bruce_jenner_brett_favre_and_the_cultural_totalitarians.html
Steve Sailer picked up on the Jenner story as well, with an even closer headline:
Old QB Brett Favre Revealed as Wrecker When He’s First to Stop Applauding Comradette Jenner
[…] everybody, or at least everybody important/relevant, has to do some hollow signalling. The popular rainbow flags and Brett Favre were examples of […]