Monthly Archives: June 2015

On Tolerance, Disapproval, Respect, Acceptance, and Living Your Own Damned Life

So I got into a bit of a kerfuffle over this post on HKB.

Not exactly a kerfuffle, since the guy involved is an old friend, a really good guy — who cares about his gay friends and his straight ones as well.  He wasn’t being combative, really.  I think he just really missed my point. Which is not surprising given the way the argument’s been framed for a decade.

Here it is:

“It is not enough for the Left to live and let live. You must change your mind. You must not hold disfavored views. You must be the right sort of person. If you’re not, you will be muzzled.”

This is what has me worried.  Not dudes lying with dudes and chicks lying with chicks.

read more here.

To which I added this:

If you say anything that can possibly be construed as being “meh” on the practicality of gay marriage (which was, in practical terms, already “legal”*) and just not agreeing with the route taken by the activists, people will assume you hate gays and want to keep them from being happy.

So you can’t even have a proper discussion about it. The discussion was bypassed because, Shut Up, and the bullying worked on 5 justices.

*I’ve asked several people in the past several years just what is it, in real terms, that gays are not being allowed to do? Can they have sex with each other and not be thrown in jail? Can they have a ceremony that is to everyone there a real wedding ceremony? Can they call themselves “married”? Can their friends and anyone who is sympathetic with them call them married? Are they not being served in restaurants? Can they not spend the night in motels and hotels? Are they being turned away from hospitals? Just what, exactly, is “illegal” about it? That they can’t get a “license” to do these things? Why the hell do they need a license? (Why the hell do *I* need a license for that matter?)

Hell, they could apparently even force people to bake them cakes and take pictures of them if those bakers and photographers had moral objections to participating in the event.

No, it has *ALWAYS* been, for the activists at least, about *forced* acceptance — NOT tolerance. Tolerance is, “meh, I don’t care.” Acceptance is, “yes, this is good and right.” What they’ve wanted all along is to force everyone to say “yes, this is good and right” by force of law.

This is what is wrong with it. Has nothing to do with the Bible, or what kinds of “marriage” arrangements have existed in various cultures throughout history. It’s about government coercion.

This was the wrong way to do it. They already effectively had what they SAID they wanted, which is tolerance, and even acceptance by a good chunk of the population.

Just to make sure we’re clear on what I’m saying and what I’m not saying… read my actual post again. Is my problem with gay people, or with leftists? I think I’m pretty clear on that.

But because of how the entire argument has been successfully framed by the leftists, people cannot separate criticism of the court decision, or apprehension on what is to come without assuming they hate gay people, or at the very least don’t care about them.  If you express sympathy for the majority of Americans and frankly, people in the world that Marriage is between people of opposite sexes and with very few exceptions in history — always has been… when it’s been demanded that they toss their worldview out the window to accommodate this one … you’re just a hater.

It bugged me more this time because it was a friend and you want your friends to at least understand your position.  It was pretty clear we were talking about two different things.

In the discussion he asked if I knew any gay people.  I do.  I think the assumption is that I had some sort of misconception that they were all combative and out to destroy society.  Again, because of the assumptions injected by the Lakoffian language strategy of the left.

So as I lay there thinking (I do that a lot.  It’s not good for your sleep habits) trying to come up with a way to break out of the assumptions that come with the language constraints that have been successfully imposed on the subject, I suddenly (thankfully) came up with a perfect example that was right under my nose, literally. I hadn’t thought of it because I don’t dwell on it. I don’t feel victimized by it.

Here’s the deal.

In our eyes, my wife and I have been married for 23 years. In my parents’ eyes, due to their religious beliefs, we’re not married at all. You see, she is a divorcee, and there was no annulment. They wouldn’t come to our wedding. I knew they wouldn’t before I even invited them, but I invited them anyway, telling them I completely understood if they did not want to come.

Now, they still have us out to the house. We visit. We talk. We have a good time. They don’t hate me. They don’t hate her. Matter of fact they love her. Dad made it a point to pull me aside several months ago and tell me so.

But … if we were to spend the night there, we would be asked to sleep in separate beds. Because in their eyes, we are not married. I understand and respect their beliefs. I do not demand, much less ask that they accommodate us. Similarly, they wouldn’t come visit us in our home because of our living arrangement. They disapprove. They don’t condone it. I respect their beliefs. I do not feel ill treated. I do not feel humiliated. I do not feel “lesser”. That is what tolerance and respect looks like.

You see, disapproval is not the same thing as hate. Tolerance does not mean acceptance. In this story there is love, tolerance, disapproval, and respect. They are not mutually exclusive. The leftists have purposely, in a very Orwellian 1984-ish New Speak way (in the real world it would be more like Lakoffian way) — mainly through the media have shaped the way we even talks about this by choosing the language with which we talk about these things – and people have gotten very confused.  It’s no accident.

Keep in mind I myself am not sitting here saying gays should or shouldn’t be married, or that they’re not married. What I’m saying is that this will not be enough for the leftists. They are out to destroy, and this was just one issue they have usurped to help get that done.

There are gay leftists. And there are straight leftists who will wear the mantle to help destroy people they don’t like — namely the good people who love everyone but do believe that certain behavior is wrong, or that marriage is only between men and women. After all, it’s not exactly a radical view.

Tolerance is a two-way street. My prediction is that it will only go one way. Or else.

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… and vanished in a puff of logic

donezalSo the Progressive deconstruction of America continues. The president of the Spokane, WA NAACP – Rachel Dolezai … has resigned. She’s genetically white as her two white parents (whom she has disowned) pointed out in the picture on the right. But I guess she’s “identified” as black.

Which raises some questions. If a white woman colors her face to look black, is she guilty of the dreaded “crime” of appearing in “black face” … or not — just because she “identifies” as black? If it’s ok to liberals to “identify” as any number of gender pronouns, why not “trans-racial”?

After all, they’re the ones who came up with the term “`white` Hispanic” when they needed to “white-ify” a guy who they so desperately wanted to be white after he had killed a black man — when he turned out to be half Hispanic. And liberal hero Elizabeth Warren listed herself as a minority (a Native American one) in professional directories that are commonly used by recruiters …

caitlynscatIf gender is a social construct, why can’t race be a social construct?  As a matter of fact, it largely is thanks to our progressive betters.  If you don’t behave or believe, socially, the way your particular race is “supposed” to according to the social construct progressives demand, then you’re not REALLY that race.  You’re an Uncle Tom.  An Oreo.  A “White Hispanic”.

If black conservatives such as Thomas Sowell or Herman Cain or Larry Elder or any of a host of others can be considered “not really black”, why can’t a white woman be considered “not really white”?

If you can pick your race or gender, even from 50+ invented genders that only you yourself may understand but still demand to be referred to as … why stop there?

If you can be trans-racial, can you be trans-national? Are illegal aliens coming here really “Americans” who just happened to be born in the wrong country? Can I sue you for discrimination if you won’t hire me and I just happen to identify as “black” or “Hispanic” or “Native American”?

contradictionsCan you keep me out of the women’s restroom?  Can you kick a woman out of a gym for complaining that a man is in the womens’ locker room?

My question is, have we finally reached a point where the progressive deconstruction of language and logic must finally collapse on itself?  Or will we continue to allow ourselves to be bullied into submission to the bizarre?

What are the rules?  Are there any rules?  If so, who gets to make them?  Courts? Bureaucracies?

We the People?  Naahhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!! 

mansplainingBefore you go accusing me of “white–man-splaining“, I should let you know.  I’m really a genderless alien.  From a species that used to inhabit this planet before humans arrived and pushed us out.  I’ve always felt that way.

And I’m royalty.

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Das Kapital, Imperialism, Genocide and Trading Stuff

I saw a post that linked to an article with commentary saying that the thrust of the article was right. I think one of the seeds of the article was sort-of right — that being I never learned about King Leopold’s genocide and I don’t remember dwelling on the trail of tears. But the article itself basically blames those things on capitalism, which it equates with imperialism and by proxy with racism … and of course that’s where it lost me.

Since the commentary asked that people look these things up — and look them up they should — I thought I should provide some counter-commentary to help balance some of the propaganda one would likely encounter looking these things up. It’s ubiquitous.

Now some of what I say here, especially regarding the origins of the term “Capitalism” I must give a hat-tip to Severian – otherwise I wouldn’t have known, but I have also verified it in articles such as this one.

I learned about the Trail of Tears in history class, though I never connected it with Jackson (mainly because as teenager I was, sadly, as most teenagers are — not that interested since it didn’t obviously directly affect me) until my guitar instructor brought it up over a $20 bill I was paying him with.  I’d never heard of Leopold, either. But I don’t think either of them have anything to do with “Capitalism”.

It seems as though mixing “capitalism” up in this — to me and others like me, it’s a nonsequitur — though when you understand the origins of the term itself, it’s not surprising that a piece like this would incorporate it as a “cause” of slavery and genocide and all sorts of things.

Before that word came about, it was just people trading stuff they had for stuff they wanted, where basically both parties gleaned some advantage over their previous situation, in other words, the both “profited” from the transaction. Under a monetary system where currency is used as a versatile storage device for such transactions, profit became synonymous with money, money with wealth and on up.

But the label was pretty much invented by Marx to smear free markets — in other words, people owning property and being free to trade it for property others had as described above … in other words, being human. It means you and I work out what stuff we each have is worth rather than having some arbitrary value set by some third-party bureaucratic price-panel. Or, as Severian put it, people flipping terms as switches in a giant Econ 101 equation and pretending that the equation dictates peoples’ behavior instead of the equation being a feeble attempt to describe real behavior.

The word first came into use not long after the publication of “Das Kapital”. But to me it just means what von Mises thought it meant, “if it means anything, it means the market economy”. To equate it with imperialism, slavery, and genocide is to misunderstand it, and it’s no accident that that equivocation has been made over and over again. That’s exactly why the word was invented.

Lots of atrocities against massive numbers of people have been carried out over the years, long before this “capitalism” word came up. Ethnocentrism has been around ever since different groups of humans noticed that other groups of humans looked or talked differently. Ethnocentrism has been used (and is still used by some societies today -though not generally in the West) to justify treating others as sub-human and therefore not subject to the rules which govern societies (internally) that champion market economies.

Internally, don’t steal, don’t kill, don’t enslave … that’s been around for a very long time and those rules applied (and even then, as with all rules, the rules were broken by some). It was ethnocentrism that was the problem when it came to dealing with other peoples — whether it was market economies, Imperial states, or National Socialism (for those reading along but haven’t spent a lot of time thinking and reading about this stuff, that’s the Nazis, Fascists, and others like them). Over the years, it has been more and more recognized, not less and less recognized — that we’re all made of the same stuff by the same God (though more and more deity is being smeared out of it, probably to our own demise)… say, it kind of goes back to “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”.

A fact lost in the past several decades is that the concept came directly from Adam Smith et al when they talked about those rights being to “life, liberty, and property”. One of the sad legacies of the fact that our nation was born with the cancer of slavery already burned into the fabric (which was hardly unique at the time or in previous times) was that the wording was changed to “pursuit of happiness” mainly to leave the door open to abolition. Since slave owners pretty much considered their slaves “property”, they would easily be able to argue that their right to that “property” was protected. So it was a deft move and a good one for the time being … but today that wording gets abused for different purposes. Destructive ones. But — I digress, as I often do. What I mean to say is that things have gotten better, not worse in that regard.

When I and other defenders of capitalism say “capitalism”, we don’t mean “anything goes” or even “anything goes as long as I can pull the wool over your eyes.”

We mean what I said above. I get to own stuff, you get to own stuff, and that means we have control over what we own — including trading stuff we own with each other so that we now have different sets of stuff than what we started with, but we’re happier with our respective new sets of stuff. And when I say own stuff, I also mean we own ourselves, and that we can trade our labor as a form of “stuff” for other stuff.

That’s it.

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