Steve Sviggum wrote a real purty apology, seemed sincere and contrite. He really did.
Then he got an interview with a sympathetic reporter and said what he honestly thinks.
Sviggum, who served in the Minnesota Legislature for 30 years, said he has dedicated his life to public service and will not be pressured to resign. He said he’s concerned identity politics is ruining the country.
If the far left doesn’t ruin it, identity politics will. The woke community, the liberal community, if I may be so bold as to say, has taken [my question] and jumped on it. They say it’s racist and sexist. That’s the community that says, ‘If you don’t think like me and you’re not part of the group, you don’t belong. You’re a bad guy, and we will destroy you,’he said.
Yeah, his apology was a pretense.
Sounds like he’s a self-identified bad guy who needs destroying.
I know that I am heartily sick and damn tired of old white men whining about how the left is destroying this country, how they are being canceled in their mainstream news interviews, and how the “woke” are looking to destroy them which is really precious when you consider how many human lives white men have been responsible for “canceling” on a global level.
I’m also sick and damn tired of the use of the word “woke” to mean any point of view they disagree with. Could we please retire that damn word already and move on to the next word they’ll be driving into the ground?
He’s a bad guy alright, and deserves richly to be destroyed.
I’m confused. He used identity politics (aka racism) to imply that there weren’t enough white folks at UMM. Now he is claiming that calling his question racist is identity politics.
What do words mean?
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less. ‘
Yet another example of right wing projection (as if we needed another).
If what the “woke left” is accusing morons like Sviggum of isn’t prejudice but a difference of opinion, then what do these idiots think “racism” and “sexism” actually looks like?
That’s not a rhetorical question. I’d really like to know.
I found a link -researchers at Wurzburg have found that people with “dark” personality traits are more susceptible to fake news.
So if you are a selfish asshole you will be even more vulnerable to stories that claim nggers and kkes are destroying the country. (insert any current slur)
It would be interesting to see if this charming fellow in Minnesota had his belief system develope along these lines.
Here you have it.
https://phys.org/news/2022-10-dark-personality-traits-people-susceptible.html
@birgerjohansson Väldigt interessant, tack.
All politics is identity politics. Everyone has multiple identities. These people just use that term when they disagree with another person’s viewpoint.
“That’s the community that says, ‘If you don’t think like me and you’re not part of the group, you don’t belong. You’re a bad guy, and we will destroy you,’” he said.
Funny. That’s what lots of people have long said to us transgender people. Then when we beg them sweetly and politely to please stop, they start moaning about “identity politics”.
To which my reply has always been, “If you don’t like identity politics, stop attacking people’s identities.”
Their reaction to that conveys the notion that we’re trouble-makers who aren’t as clever as we think we are.
The reason Sviggum’s statement was called racist and sexist is because it was, in fact, racist and sexist.
College/university enrollment is down, nationwide, across the board.
Instead of asking “why is that”, Sviggum immediately concludes that’s it’s because UMM has lot of nonwhite nonmale people.
(Not because college has become increasingly unaffordable and because the ROI on a 4 year degree is dropping like a stone. Nooooo, it’s because LGBTQIA+ and of course, teh wimmins/nonbinary. Or anyone who isn’t cis het white male.)
And of course, what 18 year old perusing college offerings wouldn’t leap at the opportunity to study at an institution of higher learning whose board member(s?) general attitude is “get back to your place as a second-class citizen, how dare you seek to arise beyond your place” while simultaneously excoriating the second-class citizens for not seeking to rise up. Because just not trying hard enough, obviously.
Of all of the projection that Republicans have, the “Identity Politics” is the one that defines the Right.
“All evil comes from groups that – by sheer coincidence- are just the groups we do not like”.
And when Republicans are in power it is just bad luck that things go badly.
There are A LOT of cpincidences at play.
Mr. Sviggum, it isn’t that we actually care about what you think. It is about your actions in response to your thoughts.
Well, diversity is certainly no longer ANY problem among “conservatives,” I mean “Republicans,” I mean fascists. Then again, look at what they’re working with: they HAVE to keep things as simple – racist – as possible.
One “strategy” – “I’m rubber and you’re glue!” — They call this “projection” a LOT now
One excuse – “It’s God’s will. Or someone else’s fault.”
And they end up in the same place, eventually, though the Holocaust hasn’t been denied quite enough yet – and they want to broaden the meaning of the word to… pretty much anyone: “It’s the Jews!”
They WANT to be dead, but see everything else dead before they are.
Good comments.
It’s so very obvious that “identity politics” is exactly what people like him practice.
@#18, John Morales:
While that is absolutely true, it’s also what the Democrats often — not always, but way too often — practice. So, for example, you had people telling us in the 2016 primaries that we should choose Hillary Clinton despite her long, long history of bad decisions and bad policy because she is a woman. And Kyrsten Sinema, who literally got her state’s nomination for the Senate because she was openly bisexual and a woman and voters thought those traits would offset her open and proud history of being a Blue Dog, and were then shocked and dismayed when she kept siding with Republicans in the Senate. (Know what “surprised Pikachu face” means?) Or how Pete Buttigieg’s history of encouraging racist policy and policing was ignored in most of the discourse during the 2020 primaries because he’s openly gay. And when the party leadership gets together behind closed doors and think they can’t be overheard by the hoi polloi, they take the masks off. There are good diverse candidates — AOC and Stacey Abrams and Georges Gascon (who proved that all of Kamala Harris’ excuses about how she had to keep enforcing right-wing policy in her legal positions in California were outright lies, incidentally) and so forth (hey, remember Barbara Lee, who actually confronted Bush about the war in Iraq when all the party bigwigs in office, like Joe Biden, were toeing the line and voting for a costly obvious disaster without any questions or qualms?), but the Democratic Party is absolutely addicted to finding “diverse” right-of-center candidates and then using those candidates’ demographics as a shield to deflect any discussion of how awful they really, really obviously are. (Kamala Harris, as already mentioned, is another example of this.) And it is always — always — used to move the party to the right of where it would otherwise be.
And that’s identity politics, whether you want to admit it or not. If Democratic voters ever uniformly stopped valuing demographics over policy, there would be massive changes in the party.
@19
And how do you propose to do that?! There is a saying in my country and it goes “A village is burning and all the while, grandma combs her hair”. This looks like it. So, priorities, please.
While I agree that you should clean up your democratic party, what you REALLY should do is clean up your republican one. Because, as it stands, USA is one GOP win away from not having any sort of democratic opposition, democratic party or otherwise because they want to destroy democracy as a system and slip the whole country into some form of dictatorship.
@20 — The Republican Party is hopeless at this point. There’s no cleaning it up, except by making it no longer exist. And dealing with the problem of the Democratic party is part of what needs to be done to accomplish that. The Democratic Party establishment has been working very hard at maintaining the status quo, and the status quo is enabling the Republicans.
The Republicans are the worse of the two by far, granted, but the Democrats fight any leftward movement constantly, and far harder than they fight the Republicans. Worse, they pick fights with the left even when the lefties in question are trying to fight the Republicans if we’re doing it in any way that doesn’t involve kowtowing to the status quo. How are we supposed to keep to these priorities when the Democrats will team up with the Republicans to fight us, and refuse to team up with us to fight the Republicans?
I think there is a false dichotomy here.
Yes, one party is a bigger problem than the other.
Yes, both parties are a problem; the culture that enable and reinforces the parties existence and in turn is reinforced by them is also a problem.
Both things can be true.
You address whatever you have opportunity to address, everyone is in a different position.
If someone uses one problem to deny the other, you call them out in a way that acknowledges both problems.
@ 21
I ran into this on Twitter last month. I suggested on a thread that I looked forward to the day when the Republicans would collapse a viable socialist party could be started and this hypothetical party and the Democrats could start working together on some shared policy goals. I was immediately set up by other self-professed (at least according to their profiles) liberal Dems; Some of them whining about how Bernie (somehow) gave us Trump, one said that America was and forever would be “centrist” country, one suggesting that I get “deradicalized,” and one calling me a “genocidal maniac” before going into the standard right-wing talking point about how Mussolini started as a “socialist” and the Nazis called themselves “national socialists.”
So yeah, I don’t see much hope for cooperation or progress out of the Democrats.
So, this Boomer is my age. Against my better judgement I gave him the benefit of the doubt based on his “purdy” apology that hit all the notes a real apology should.
However, dude ain’t real, he Memorex! For the record, I do not use the word “woke” even though I actually know what the term means in today’s vernacular just as I don’t use the phrase ” ‘sup dawg? ” (as much) other than to irritate my son. I also don’t blame things on The Other, especially when one of my contrived jokes falls flat. I don’t say, “Y’all don’t get it ’cause y’all a bunch of leftist woke nazi commies!”
Therefore, it is with great pleasure after careful consideration that I say to Sviggie: Fuck you, bigot, and the horse you rode in on.
Ärtor @ 1
Lex Luthor had more style.
Okay, Let’s play!
Easy!
I, too, can play the nebulous accusation card in the game of Faux Persecution.
Louis
@Doc Bill, #24,
If a father cannot use modern vernacular in the most embarrassing way possible in order to cause psychological pain in their children, then what are we fathers even for?
Political correctness gone mad!
Louis
@24- Doc Bill
I only say “‘sup dawg” to my dog. Hopefully “woke” goes the way of the mullet. If Billy Ray Cyrus starts using it we know it will die soon. Used to be only the cool kids were in on it. Then it became a target of derision.
Lol, poor persecuted white man thinks being forced to resign from a rather prestigious and privileged role as vice-chair of UMM board of regents, due to making wildly racist public assertions, is the real social problem.
Sorry Siggy, but neither you or Al Franken get to be in positions of authority as you both proved that you are lying, special snowflake exemplars of white male entitlement.
I must say that living in a politically correct Fog of Woke, I was a bit hesitant to demean some poor, innocent horse in my curse to Sviggy. But, all things can be a teaching moment, eh Louis? Google to the fore!
“A phrase used as an intensifier added after an insult or curse. A: “Nice haircut. What did you use, a weed whacker?” B: “Hey, screw you and the horse you rode in on.” Yeah, well, same to you, jerk.”
An “intensifier.” Who knew?
Personally, I am fond of emphatic expletives, sort of “Fifty Shades of Fuck.” My favorite when cooking and discover I’ve used cayenne pepper instead of cinnamon is, “Fuck a duck!” Turns out, it’s appropriate, but just as unfair to ducks as the intensifier is to horses.
A gramatical website explains it thusly:
“Slang interjection used to express anger, frustration, or contempt. Especially insulting to ducks.”
@ ^ Doc Bill : Actually when it coems to ducks fucking there’s a rather sweet song by Garfunkel and Oates..
@SteveoR
My favorite!