Rich Lowry And The Fainting Couch

12/30/2014

National Review’s Rich Lowry has come out with this attack on political correctness in national and international affairs:

2014: The Year of the Fainting Couch | North Korea joined the “do not offend” list and law students needed grief counseling, December 30, 2014
The fainting couch doesn’t have the same cachet it did in the 19th century, which is a shame, because it should be more in demand than at any time since the age of corsets and delicate sensibilities.

To put it in Victorian terms, 2014 had a case of the vapors. It was all aflutter. It needed smelling salts and a fan, and a good rest on a fainting couch to restore its bearings. It was a year when the national pastime of taking offense and of fearing that someone might be offended reached such parodic levels that Kim Jong-un got in the act.

It used to be that, of all the groups and nations that one had to worry about offending, for politically correct or commercial reasons, the North Koreans simply didn’t rate. The Red Dawn remake a couple of years ago featured cruel North Korean invaders. In last year’s Olympus Has Fallen, the White House is attacked and occupied by dastardly North Koreans. But 2014 was the year, thanks to the hack of Sony Pictures in retaliation for the spoof movie The Interview, that even the North Koreans made the “do not offend” list.

It was the year that a scientist made an abject apology for wearing a shirt that offended feminists in a TV broadcast; that Amazon Prime put a label warning of racist content on Tom and Jerry cartoons; and that various news outlets refused to say the name of the NFL team from Washington on grounds that even uttering it made them complicit in rank offensiveness.

It was a year when the nation’s colleges and …

All right, I get it. But how does Rich Lowry get to say this? An NRO Commenter:

Two and a half years ago, a National Review writer wrote something (though NOT in NR) that the NR Editor thought was offensive to all humanity. Rather than debate or refute the writer, the Editor chose to fire him. In the NRO post that announced the firing, the Editor disabled all reader comments. Then, I suppose, he took to his fainting couch.

If you've forgotten, Rich Lowry is the guy who fired John Derbyshire for an article he wrote in TakiMag about the dangers of black crime.

The post that he announced the firing in [Parting Ways, April 7, 2012 ] is full of fainting couch stuff ("nasty and indefensible … views with which we’d never associate ourselves … so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation") and it only has seven comments, but one of them is only 19 days ago, so maybe whoever turned comments off turned them back on again.

Latest comment:

I read Derbyshire’s "Talk" article in wake of Ferguson — seems MUCH more factual and useful than any "Talk" Bill de Blasio is giving his son about police violence.
Is what he wrote really beyond the pale (excuse the pun).

Is it really racist to point out the lopsided facts about violent crime and race?

Seems former Mayor Giuliani making similar arguments, no?

https://www.nbcnews.com/storyli …

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