In relation to 2014’s ‘summer of rage’ over the Lovecraft statuette, this last week saw the publication of two detail analyses of the tactics used. They lay out the leftist ‘attack playbook’ for this sort of emotion-driven attack, over at Spiked magazine and at Slate Star Codex…

It’s in activists’ interests to destroy their own causes by focusing on the most controversial cases and principles, the ones that muddy the waters and make people oppose them out of spite. And it’s in the media’s interest to help them and egg them on.”

Too often the “cases” turn out to be simply fabricated, or the inconvenient hard facts quickly become heavily obfuscated, I might add. Overall these tactics are a morbid symptom of the activist left’s weakness and decay, their inability to make and defend rational evidence-based arguments, or to cohere their raggle-taggle bands around more challenging targets. The best defence against such tactics seems to be not to take offense at leftists’ ‘offense’.