April 17, 2016

Michelle Obama

Michelle Obama

Source: Wikimedia Commons

As everyone with two brain cells to rub together is well aware, a tremendous amount of social injustice exists in this so-called world of ours. To rectify this unfortunate situation, many among us who are devoted to enforcing equality by all means necessary have taken to wielding our smartphones like Star Wars lightsabers against all the big fat mean rich white male capitalist sexist scum-sucking cisgender pigs who need to be brutally tortured in public and then wiped off the planet because they think it’s cool and funny to dehumanize others.

Hashtag activism is a relatively new weapon in the arsenal of social justice warriors who seek to erase national borders, do away with greed, abolish ethnic conflict, eradicate hate speech, criminalize transphobia, foster a harmonious global community under one benevolent governmental taxing agency, and all other manner of, like, totally realistic and absolutely plausible goals.

From the comfort of their dorm rooms and mothers’ basements all across this bounteous planet, they largely take to Twitter, which with its 140-character limit per post is tailor-made for oversimplified solutions that appeal to people with short attention spans. A “hashtag” uses the pound sign, AKA the tic-tac-toe sign, followed by a short phrase”€”for example, #HashtagsAreStupid. Once a sufficient number of people use that hashtag in their Tweets, it becomes a “trending topic” and allows everyone who uses it to feel as if they are important and part of something greater than themselves”€”which is especially soothing to people who don’t feel they’re that great in the first place.

“As of this writing, our girls have yet to be brought back.”

As a social-justice hashtag activist, you can invade someone’s privacy, get them fired, encourage lynch-mob bullying tactics, shut down dissenting opinions, and feel like a good person all at the same time.

Herewith is a handy guide to some of the more popular social justice hashtags of the past few years.


#BringBackOurGirls
By all accounts, Nigeria is a fun place full of child witches, penis panics, killer phone calls, and car thieves who transform themselves into goats. But this vibrant and sprawling African nation also harbors the gun-toting Islamic militant group Boko Haram, who are most famous for their late-1960s classic-rock hit “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” Never mind the fact that early in 2014 Boko Haram had already killed about 1,000 Nigerians”€”most of them young males, some of whom were burned alive. No, the news story that captured the large hearts and tiny minds of hashtag activists was the kidnapping of some 200 schoolgirls and their forced conversion to Islam. Thus was born the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls, which was retweeted around two million times. First Lady Michelle Obama even frowningly posed for a selfie holding a placard that said BRING BACK OUR GIRLS.

As of this writing, our girls have yet to be brought back.


#Kony2012
Even though he’s black, Joseph Kony is a bad, bad, EVIL African militia leader who helmed the Lord’s Resistance Army and became a fugitive of the International Criminal Court. In 2012, a slacktivist named Jason Russell produced a half-hour video which at the time became the most viral video in Internet history and currently has been viewed on YouTube over 100 million times. The video called for the capture of this Black Hitler by the end of 2012. Jason Russell was quoted as saying, “We can have fun while we end genocide.” He even suggested producing T-shirts that read AFRICA IS SO HOT RIGHT NOW and AFRICA IS THE NEW PINK. However, at the height of his cheap fame, it was Russell rather than Kony whom police captured. It seems he became “dehydrated” and did what any sane dehydrated person would do”€”he tore off all his clothing and ran around naked in Pacific Beach, CA, taunting passersby. Russell has faded into a well-deserved obscurity while Joseph Kony remains at large.


#BlackLivesMatter
Black Americans enjoy a far higher standard of living and live much longer than blacks in any majority-black nation on Earth. Black males comprise about 6% of the American population and routinely commit more than half of America’s homicides. During any given year, police kill about twice as many white Americans than they kill black Americans. And in the vast majority of these cases, the “victims” were armed. Oh”€”and around 93% of black murder victims are killed by other blacks, not by police.

But none of this matters to Black Lives Matter.

Their troglodytic rage is directed at the relatively tiny number of yearly murders in which a white cop kills a black person. They remove all mitigating circumstances”€”such as, you know, whether the lumbering beast of the mid-American Plains was grabbing for the cop’s gun rather than peacefully holding his hands up and begging the cop not to shoot him“€”and use such statistical anomalies and outright fabrications to loot and pillage and burn their cities to the ground. And what happens in cities such as Baltimore and Ferguson after the Black Lives Matter creeps leave nothing but a scorched carcass of a metropolitan wasteland? The cops back off, businesses move out, and more black people kill one another than ever.


#StopGamergate
Since feminist activists are fanatics, and since fanatics can’t keep their beaks out of anyone else’s business until everyone is either scared into silence or as fanatical as they are, the squalling harpies of female supremacy began infiltrating the once musty, dudely realms of video gaming to inject feminist messages that promote a feminist narrative and make boys feel ashamed to be sexually aroused by “sexist” (i.e., attractive) images of scantily clad females being rescued by impossibly muscular video-game he-men.

The original “reaction” to this full-frontal pudendal assault was dubbed “GamerGate” and initially had something or other to do with some girl allegedly using her female wiles to seduce a male gaming writer into giving her game a good review. It was about “ethics in gaming journalism” or some such. Mind you, that’s from memory”€”it’s all so annoying at this point that I can’t even be bothered to check the specifics.

The feminists and gamers began shouting at one another. The feminists claimed that “ethics in gaming journalism” was merely coded speech for “all women should be raped by me while I’m playing video games, after which they should fix me a sandwich.” They depicted the boys of GamerGate as a lonely agglomeration of unfuckable lads with tiny wee-wees.

In the end nothing was solved and everyone, on all sides, wound up more sexist than ever.


#YesAllWomen
In May 2014, young half-breed Elliot Rodger fatally gunned down two women and five men, including himself. A self-proclaimed virgin”€”but not for a lack of trying”€”Rodger had left a rambling written manifesto and a skin-peelingly creepy video of himself vowing vengeance against two groups of people: 1) the women who refused to fuck him; and 2) the men these women chose to fuck instead.

Despite the fact that he killed more men than women, women of course turned his rampage into strictly a women’s issue. After Rodger’s killing spree when someone started the hashtag #NotAllMen to explain that very few men were woman-hating spree killers, a woman countered with #YesAllWomen, which essentially meant, “Yeah, well, OK, technically not all men are rapist psychopaths, but ALL WOMEN have to worry EVERY DAY about being raped and killed by one of you fellas who is a serial butcher of female bodies.”

Can all women be annoying? Yes.


#JeSuisCharlie
Twelve people died in January 2015 when our spiritual brethren who practice the beautiful religion of Islam shot up the offices of French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo. While the blood was still drying, hashtags such as #JeSuisCharlie and #IAmCharlie became some of the most popular Twitter hashtags ever. Across the planet, people who, if you want to get technical, actually weren’t Charlie were expressing their phony solidarity by pretending to be the recently deceased staff members of a French newspaper.

One thing is for sure: Except for all of us who aren’t Charlie, we are all Charlie.


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