Cards Against Humanity has castrated itself

I've enjoyed a few fun evenings playing Cards Against Humanity with friends. The premise is to play Apples to Apples using decks of purposely-offensive cards. The idea was to be without limits. Subjects in the game include the Holocaust, racism, genocide, date rape and gays.

I saw this as a late comer to the offensive humor renaissance that started more than a decade ago as a backlash to political correctness and hypersensitive social justice warriors. Sadly, it appears that Cards Against Humanity is mutating towards a social justice endgame.

Charles C.W. Cooke wrote in National Review about a card that a player thought went too far. It simply read "Passable transvestites" and the player made a blog post about it, showing himself burning the card. He didn't try to start a campaign, but the post when viral and he explained in a later interview that he was playing the game when the card came up:

"Somebody played that card, and somebody else was like, 'That's not okay.' I decided I didn’t want it in my deck."

Here's Cooke:

The entire purpose — quite literally the only point — of “Cards Against Humanity” is to be shocking and objectionable. Pretty much every single card in the pack is shocking and objectionable. The game is “offensive”? Gosh, what gave it away? Was it, perhaps, the words ”Cards Against Humanity” emblazoned on the box? Or, perhaps, the description, “A party game for horrible people”? Maybe it was that the stated aim is to be as “despicable” as possible? A card “wasn’t okay”? Well, obviously... 

Clearly, the guy who took such offense at the one card enjoyed the game too. He bought into the premise. He sat there through the rest of the rounds, which inevitably contained other “offensive jokes.” He just didn’t like it when the joke was on him... 

Do you know what we called people such as this before the age of sensitivity training? We called them people-who-could-dish-it-out-but-who-couldn’t-take-it. We called them people-who-take-themselves-too-seriously. We told them that it was only a bit of fun. We asked sarcastically when they had been appointed emperor. We told them to get over themselves and have another drink. We rolled our eyes. What did Cards Against Humanity’s creator do? He apologized, of course:

That's the worst part of this. It's amusing and completely unsurprising that hypocritical lefties would take a stance after being offended by a game about being offensive.

What's not amusing is that Max Temkin, once of the game's creators, responded by saying. “I regret writing this card, it was a mean, cheap joke. We took it out of the game a while ago.”

In an interview with Fusion.net, he added.

"It's embarrassing to me that there was a time in my life that that was funny," Temkin said... 

Temkin says he and the other creators know there's a big difference between cards that make fun of public figures and ones that victimize people in marginalized groups. 

"We talk about the idea of 'punching up, not punching down' all the time," Temkin said. "It's something that we stand behind: making fun of those power structures, because they're already powerful. Making jokes about rapes, making jokes about trans people, they don't have the same cultural power." 

To that end, some of the newer cards have a decidedly social-justice-friendly edge: You can now play "heteronormativity," "the patriarchy" and "white privilege."

So this is the future of Cards Against Humanity? Glenn Beck jokes, fight-the-power messages and cooing apologies to the easily-offended community for the tamest of jokes? No thanks. It's confusing that he would continue to work on the game while apologizing for the premise of the game. Did they cave, or did we all simply misunderstand their intention from the beginning?

I remember earlier this year when some not-funny feminists decided to make their own complaint-based version to advance social justice, complete with trigger warnings. I thought at the time they just don't get it.

Now I feel that I'm the one who just doesn't get it.
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Idiot Hunting the royal baby trans activists

If you haven't seen it yet, some (not all) social justice warriors on Twitter were offended about the royal baby announcement.

If it wasn't obvious, this is an example of idiot hunting, where someone found stupid people to mock. This doesn't mean all social justice warriors are this deranged, but it does highlight the absurdity of people who insisted that birth sex and gender identity are unrelated.
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Liberal cannibalism

If you lock enough liberals in a room together they will start to eat each other.

Last week everyone on Facebook changed their profile to a red box with a pink equals sign to show their support for gay marriage. Everyone but some rather bitter far-left extremists and me - I reject lazy activism and want to be in my profile pictures.

It turns out the Human Rights Campaign gay rights advocacy group changed their color scheme for this issue and the pro-gay critics of the group are fuming that they are getting so much attention.

My amigo Abner calls this "political hipsterism," where someone feels the need to be a contrarian out of emotional needs to be different and feel superior, but I have a different explanation. Look at this Not Even Joking HuffPo piece from Derrick Clifton:

The HRC has appeared more concerned with praising corporations and financial institutions that continue to oppress the poor and play reverse Robin Hood to screw many folks (LGBT* included) out of homes and livelihoods. 

The HRC has yet to make a strong, substantive appeal on youth homelessness, which disproportionately impacts LGBT communities. 

The HRC has a long history of throwing trans* people under the bus. Many folks still remember them dropping the "T" while attempting to push the Employment Non-Discrimination Act through Congress in 2007... and it still failed to capture enough votes to pass in the Senate and become law. They've since reverted to supporting a trans-inclusive bill, yet many still feel the sting. 

The HRC has tokenized and otherwise has given lip service to issues pertaining to LGBT communities of color. Racial justice (or even an allusion to it) isn't even listed on their website's "issues" tab as part of a broader strategy. And dare we not address how that functions from within, given the racism many people experience in LGBT* spaces and forums. Yet the HRC has thrown almost the full weight of their strategy, fundraising moolah and public platform on the issue of marriage equality. And they've done it for a while now.

Let's take these points head on:

To justify his corporatism accusation Clifton links to a moronic anarchist blog that is upset that the Human Rights Campaign gave Goldman Sachs a “Workplace Equality Innovation Award” when they should be smashing the state, d00d. Good grief, I'm all for criticizing Goldman Sachs for its role in the financial crisis but these knuckleheads live in a Thomas Nash cartoon and swing wild. If a major company has pro-gay policies one would hope a gay rights organization would give them credit for it without worrying what mouth-breathing Marxists will say.

As for transgenderism being thrown under the bus, good. I want gay rights organizations to stop mixing that issue in like gay rights and transgender acceptance are inseparable. I don't have time to do the issue justice here but transgenderism is a mental delusion, possibly a neurological disorder, and it shouldn't be treated as a normal human variation. It's the most popular in a growing list of mental problems that have activists support groups attempting to normalize them, ahead of Body Identity Integrity Disorder and people who hear nonexistent voices.

I'll tackle the youth homelessness and gay racial minorities questions together. The Human Rights Campaign is focused on gay marriage and it can't do everything at once. It makes perfect sense for the organization to try to accomplish a few goals instead of failing to do many.

I'm reminded of last month's stories about a Brown University workshop sponsored by an off-campus group titled Protect Me From What I Want that aimed to keep gays from being attracted to whites and other privileged groups. The event description included:

We are invested in generating a politics of sexuality that compels us to interrogate beauty as privilege and constructed by systems of white supremacy, ableism, capitalism, and heteronormativity...

There they go again, throwing anti-capitalist smoke signals around nonsensically, which is not much of a departure from Clifton's piece.

The anti-Human Rights Campaign stance reminds me of Arnold Kling's brilliant Three Axes political reduction: Progressives see every issue along the axis of the oppressed versus oppressors, so critics like Clifton will shoehorn this issue into that conflict because they don't know any other way to look at it. Privileged gays must be keeping transgendered folk down.

I've long said that the American left is a series of warring camps, each one fighting to say they have it worse. What we are witnessing is the unhinging of jaws as liberals attempt to eat each other.
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