I think a lot of people have deliberately confused "culture is socially constructed" with "we can dictate what culture is because it is socially constructed."
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
I forgot that guy existed. Probably because I quit twitter, where he was a magnet for people who post in the "look at this guy saying something stupid" genre.
"Sartre had a twitter" sounds like the beginning of a Primus song.
Here's a non-paywalled version of the Economist piece.
I don't think Lindsay's goof on the Christians succeeds. I didn't read much past the first paragraph, but here is the first sentence:
A rising spirit is haunting America: the spirit of a true Christian Right.
The original:
"A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of communism."
You change the words, you change the meaning. It's almost like he's making an analogy, and we all know about analogies ...
I'm not surprised to see in the other link that he made his name in part as a New Atheist. Superficial analysis is the New Atheist thing.
"The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind."
The bigger problem is all the mental effort being expended to justify cruelty to the weak. Being stupid isn't a problem in Christianity.
10 made me look at the link to the satirical manifesto. Parts of the Communist Manifesto read pretty well (to my ears). I don't know if Lindsay's just a bad writer or if he didn't want things to be too obvious from the start but his version of the preamble doesn't flow well at all and it doesn't look like things get much better after that.
It seems like the most damning thing for the duped publication is that they apparently don't verify that the authors of things they post exist.
Is this that Conceptual James guy? It didn't say in the SPLC report.
If I have my students read Marx and Engels these days, it's always sections from the remarkably well-written Manifesto, and then some of what Engels had so say about the history of women's oppression.
I read a comic book version and it's really been great preparation.