Category Archives: “H8”

The Right to Flip Off the President

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In an Op-Ed in the Washington Post by about “her right to flip off president” by one Juli Briskman who was photographed doing just that and got fired by some company called “Akima”, she concludes thusly (sounds deep, but it’s not):

“Let’s call this “autocratic capture.” Autocratic capture is not new to the world, but it is new to this country, and it is up to all of us to keep it from taking root. Our democracy depends on it. As James Madison warned in the early days of the United States, the “value and efficacy” of free elections “depends” on Americans’ “equal freedom” to examine the “merits and demerits of the candidates.”But if Americans can keep their jobs only when they refrain from criticizing the president, then that freedom is lost. And once the freedom to speak is lost, then the rest of our constitutional rights will not be far behind.”

Wrong, lady. You already have a right to flip off the president. The president isn’t retaliating against you. The government isn’t retaliating against you. And your employer has a right to hold you to certain standards of behavior to remain in its employ (I know this is a opinion that’s increasingly frowned upon, but that’s the way it ought to be.)

Now, you weren’t fired for “criticizing” the president. Flipping someone off isn’t criticism. “Criticiizing” involves pointing out where you differ in opinion with someone and providing an argument supporting your position over theirs.

Flipping someone off is just rude, especially in public. You weren’t “examining the merits and demerits of a candidate”.

An employer has the right to look at that behavior and say, “hmmm, if people know she’s one of my employees and she’s this rude in public and millions of people find out, that reflects poorly on my company. I don’t hire rude people. I hire well-adjusted adults. I don’t need this.”  Which is why the company had the policy you violated in the first place.

Your right to free speech does not protect you from the social consequences of that speech. It just means *the government* can’t do anything about it. That is the extent of your constitutional(ly protected) right.

Now that right is increasingly put in danger, but not from the direction you think it is. “Hate Speech” laws, which people are attempting to morph into “Compelled Speech” laws — that’s where the real danger is. And regardless of what you think of the rest of his politics, that is not coming from the President.

Since you brought up James Madison, yes, he would agree you can’t be fined or put in jail for flipping the president off. But he would not agree your employer couldn’t terminate you over it. In fact, I suspect he himself would have terminated you over it.  People didn’t tolerate public rudeness very well back then, and that was not a bad thing, IMHO.

Here’s a thought question… flipping someone off is a sign of disrespect. Perhaps the ultimate sign of disrespect. And I, at least, think everyone (including you) has the right to show disrespect for people they don’t like. That being said .. isn’t that “hate speech”?

Freaks and Geeks

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I’ve often said there’s a kernel of truth in every crazy idea the academic Left has crapped out.  Here’s one the feminists got right:  Modern technology imposes impossible beauty standards.

Now, I most certainly do NOT mean “swimsuit models make girls anorexic;” “porn turns men off normal women;” etc.  I mean that apps like Facebook, Tinder, OK Cupid, etc. have skewed everyone’s mating expectations, with bad results for everybody.

Skim Chateau Heartiste for the gory details, but the upshot is: Since women are mainly driven by ego-inflation, and since any halfway presentable girl can get scads of attention from doofy hornballs just by posting a cleavage shot, Plain Janes quickly convince themselves they’re hot stuff, and so only the Fifty Shades of Gray guy will do in real life.

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Meanwhile, men have been indoctrinated since birth by their let-your-freak-flag-fly feminist teachers (BIRM at least 3x) to believe that the whole “M’lady” fedora-tipping act really works in the brave new social media world:

He white-knighted for you on the Internet, so please for to make with the sex.

She thumb’s-upped your thumb’s up of her cleavage shot, so you’re thiiiiiis close to true love!

Which brings me to this.  I can pretty much guarantee you that the “lesbian trapped in a man’s body” a) isn’t a lesbian; b) knows full well he’s really a dude; and c) would’ve found himself a girlfriend back in my old high school.  No, not because I attended some fantasyland campus, but because I matriculated back in the Jurassic, when the only people who had heard of the Internet were using it to argue about Star Trek and/or exchanging missile schematics with other Defense Department contractors.

While most of us were vaguely aware there’s a big wide world out there, it was entirely theoretical.  Ever seen one of those movies from back when, where the kids all swear that the minute they turn 18, they’re on the first bus out of this lousy one-horse town?  That was really a thing back then… and so was the way the movie ended (for all but the sensitive artistic protagonist): Everyone still stuck in the one-horse town, working shit jobs and making do.  We’re social creatures by nature; inertia is the strongest social force; “making do with the society you have” has been mankind’s default since we first figured out agriculture.

Admittedly my high school was larger than most one-horse towns, but no matter how much of a dork you were, you had at least one peer.  And since they knew the social value of bullying back then, the bonds between peer groups were quite strong.  Short of actual, Elephant Man-level disfigurement or florid psychosis, then, you could find a friend or two (even Jeffrey Dahmer had high school buddies, for pete’s sake).  Math being what it is, chances were good that at least one of those friends was of the opposite sex, and — teenage hormones being what they are — chances were high that one thing would eventually lead to another….

Nowadays, though? Fughettaboudit.  Your “lesbian trapped in a man’s body” has neither the incentive nor the opportunity to go out and make a friend in the real world.  Not to get all Baudrillard here (speaking of another Lefty with a kernel of truth in his metric tons of bullshit), but for folks like this, the Internet’s “virtual reality” is far more “real” than actual Reality.  When you can instantly get in touch with a worldwide community of folks who’ve arranged their entire lives around their socio-sexual hangups, why not embrace it?

Sure, you’ll be miserable in ways nobody stuck making do in their one-horse town will ever understand, but at least you’ll be permanently disfigured by surgery and hormone “therapy”….

 

SNUL: There’s a Little Weinstein in All of Us

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I commend two pieces to your attention: Agnostic on the outrage (or lack thereof) over Democrats’ victims, and Porter on Liberal passcodes.  Both are worth reading, as are both those sites in general, but they’ll get you fired if you’re caught reading them at work, so be careful.  They’re hateful.  So, so hateful.

Synthesizing the two, I conclude that there’s a little Harvey Weinstein in all of us.  I mean that in both the ethical and physical senses.

The reason there’s not more outrage over Weinstein isn’t that he’s a Leftist, and his fellow Leftists in the Media, Academia, and Politics (henceforth: The Cathedral) are all covering for him.  They are, of course — cf. Our Betters’ Betters, the Europeans, rallying around Weinstein, and have you noticed that everyone else who has gotten fired is a minor-league nobody, or someone already almost put out to pasture?  But that’s not the real reason there’s little outrage compared to the magnitude of the crimes alleged.

Rather, it’s that “everybody does it.”

There’s a reason vaudeville performers used to be considered just a very small step up from actual prostitutes.  The “casting couch” has been a joke since the Restoration; it used to be taken for granted that anyone who appeared in a movie, male or female, got their role via horizontal audition.  Even now, most folks’ reaction to the Weinstein revelations wasn’t outrage, but bewilderment — why did he feel he had to coerce anyone?

Leftism in general works like this.  If you want a ticket to the good life, as Porter notes, you need to let well-connected Liberals have their way with you.  Especially if you’re a non-STEM smart guy.  All the institutions where you can get the cushy life you want — media, academia, politics — are controlled by Liberals; you have to mouth their platitudes if you want in, and you’d better fake a mean orgasm, too.

Time was, you could let the mask slip a little bit once you were in.  Before the Borg took over completely (that is, before the mid-1990s or so), the Elite used to have a little bit of a sense of humor about it — professors, for instance, would joke that the nicest car in the faculty lot always belonged to the wildest-eyed Communist.  But now the Cult has entered its death spiral phase, and facts don’t compute — the Diversoids literally can’t see that their faculty lounges, editorial boards, and gated communities are as mayo-on-Wonderbread white as they can possibly make them.  Even if you’re a STEM smart guy, you’re required to at least keep your mouth shut.

Do you live a nice middle class life?  Do you have a college degree?  You’ve bent over for a Harvey Weinstein.  Maybe just the once, for the grade you just had to have to pass that one required class, but… you did it.  So did I.  Theodore Dalrymple sums it up:

In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

Equations vs. Upvotes

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Those of us who went to primary school back in the Jurassic were taught to think, for lack of a better term, in equations.  In History class, for example, you spent the junior high years memorizing a bunch of crap that happened, so that in the high school years, you could begin figuring out why the crap happened.  You take the facts, infer a rule, and test it, like a scientist.

For example, you can get a decent handle on 18th century European history with a phrase: The mercantile system.  Mercantilism funds the large standing armies and navies that newly consolidated nation-states need.  Militaries are meant to be used, though, and are savagely expensive either way, so states begin fighting each other, not over dynastic politics (though the wars are often confusingly called “War of the ___ Succession” or “King So-and-So’s War”), but over access to markets (which leads to further state consolidation).  Colonies are essential to markets, and colonial expansion opens up whole new venues for fighting — North America, India, the Caribbean.  This in turn leads to internal political conflict, e.g. the American Revolution… you get the idea.  It’s not perfect, but you won’t go too far wrong by trying to figure out where X event fits into the framework of the mercantile system.

This way of thinking has its disadvantages, to be sure — Marxism appeals to limited thinkers who long to appear deep, because it’s an easy way to see “what really happened.”  All you have to do to get an A+ from your idiot socialist teachers is to find the exploitation in a given situation… and if you can’t find any, or if people in the situation appear to be getting freer, healthier, richer, and happier, you say “false consciousness.”  Still, following the money, Marxist-style, gets you in the neighborhood of right often enough that pretty much all modern history is “Marxist” history in that sense.  It’s an easy, workable equation.

The Millennials, though, aren’t taught that way.  I’m not sure how they are taught, as by the time I get them, they’re already so far gone that I spend far more of my time correcting old misinformation than I do presenting new information.  My guess, though, is that they’re taught via PowerPoint and think in Facebook thumbs up.

They absolutely cannot correlate the contents of their minds.  Lovecraft called that a blessing, but in a Cthulhu-less world it’s actually quite the curse.  Now, putting two and two together is something we all struggle with from time to time, but they’re uniquely terrible at it.  It’s not political, necessarily, though almost all college kids necessarily spout SJW platitudes.  They just have never been taught that it’s good, desirable, and frequently necessary to connect the disparate facts in one’s head.

Example: I have never, in all my years of teaching, gotten anyone to venture that “Inclusion” is anything but a universal good.  Ditto “Racism” as a universal evil.  And Eugenics is also a universal evil, because Racism.  And, of course, everyone says they’re ProChoice.  But when I point out that the “birth control” movement was always, and primarily, a Eugenics movement…. their brains shut down.  Their eyes glaze over, their jaws drop, they look like someone blew up the mothership.  Vaya con Dios, and will the last one out please flip off the lights?

I think they think in upvotes exclusively.  The first four items on my list are Chestnuts, things “everybody knows.”  You’re not going to get banned from Facebook or kicked off YouTube for saying Eugenics is bad or Inclusion is good.  In fact, you’ll get upvoted and retweeted and have all kinds of praise heaped upon you, because it’s all just virtue signaling.  That “pro choice” leads directly to eugenics — and socialized medicine is guaranteed to make that happen in the long run — just doesn’t compute, because one is upvoted and the other gets you reported to the Thought Police.

One cannot, in other words, correlate the contents of her mind, and remain in good standing on social media.  So they never do.

Mob Justice and Defense of the Rights of Detestables

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It’s stupid that I have to prefix this with “I completely reject the KKK and *any* racial supremacy ideology” — that should just be understood, but such is the environment we live in today. That being said …

There was an incident in St. Louis a couple of nights ago … video is below.  Watch it.

I have this nagging suspicion that a similar thing triggered the guy in Charlottesville and that he didn’t really go there with the intent of mowing people down with his car.  But the organizers of the counter-protest and the left-wing media saw an opportunity to spin a narrative that was politically advantageous to them.  It’s what they do.

Update: Nope.  I’ve seen other videos of the incident, now I’ve just seen this one. This dude needs to go to jail.  There is definitely zero excuse for what he did.  But at least I asked the question. The day we are routinely threatened with our livelihoods for asking questions, it’s over.

But here, in St. Louis, a guy driving down the street is stopped by a protesting mob in the street. Several of them surround his car and start beating on it.

It is not unreasonable to believe the driver was in fear for his life or serious bodily harm.

Over the last 8 years or so, a new narrative has gained a foothold … and it spreads farther than the hard-core people in these groups — that violence is justifiable in a protest where oppression is the alleged issue. This is something new as far as any sort of “mainstream” understanding of what America is about. So agitators in leftist mobs have been encouraged if not deployed … to cause fear and chaos, to promote violence.

The shamelessness of the spin that is put on these things … for instance, Dana Loesch’s NRA video where she talks over actual footage of leftist mob violence where people are actually wounded – often pretty badly — and says we must fight this with “the clenched fist of truth”.

The spin was focused entirely on the metaphor she used, “clenched fist”, not on the actual … documentary … content of the ad itself. To hear the media response, one would think (because this is what they told us to think) that she was showing something akin to revellers whacking pinatas and was encouraging armies of white knuckle draggers to go bust some heads. What the ad was was showing leftists actually busting heads, and encouraging people on the right to speak the truth about it.

But until Charlottesville, virtually all of the head-busting had been done by left wing groups, who were given a pass, because they’re on “the right side of history” as Obama put it several years ago when excusing Joe Biden’s remark about Asians and 7/11’s. See, he’s a Democrat, so his racism can be excused.

The same rationalization is used here. These are Nazis, so violence against them can be excused. Who is a Nazi? Anyone who disagrees with left-wing ideology. Wait… what? Who gets to decide this?

The Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) used the Charlottesville incident — which was perfect because nobody (especially me) will defend the KKK or other White Supremists, but they can, have, and will continue to — spin any defense of their rights… as defense of their ideas. It’s like Christmas to the left.

But defending peoples’ rights is what the Republican Party and the modern Right in America has been about all along. Yes, we have our morons like everyone else. And we don’t defend our morons. But we do defend their rights. Because their rights … are our (everybody’s) rights.  Preserving ours means preserving theirs.

Time was everybody knew this.

Fisking JuliasGoat

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I saw this post come across my facebook feed touting some SJW’s twitter screed.

I couldn’t take it.  I don’t ram cars into crowds of people.  But I have a pen.  And I’m not afraid to use it. 🙂

Listen up. Someone with the Twitter handle @JuliusGoat just dropped one of the best Twitter threads in history, about the white supremacist/Nazi march in Charlottesville

I’ve compiled all of it here for your reading pleasure and education:

Well no, JuilasGoat fan, not exactly.

While very (very!) few people have anything but disgust for white supremists and Nazis, this tirade is really just another re-hashing of the litany of leftist screeds against America and American Culture.  Which, by the way, has no color.  “White culture” is a term leftists came up with to delegitimize western culture.  This is the backdrop against which these damaged people, these Alt-Righter white supremists  are taking the stage.  They are reacting poorly, but directly, to the perpetual 8-track tape looping of this kind of screed of half-truths disguised as facts for the last 40, 50 years.

Since this screed is the same screed directed at America in general, I can only see it as trying to identify anyone who values American Culture as one of these sick punks that could only gather, what, 150-200 people, to some stupid rally that everyone should have ignored in the first place.  These people feed on hate, and counter-protests and news coverage feeds that hate.  They are otherwise universally rejected.

If you want to go back in history to find out where “they” (whom this guy conflates with “we”) … came from, a lot of them were people from Europe basically driven out because of their religous beliefs.  We outlawed that sort of thing here.  We outlawed burning churches and hanging innocent people from trees, too.  Oh, sure, some people still did it, as some people still murder and steal.  But it wasn’t because we “allow” it. We don’t “allow” murder and yet it still happens.  Some people are evil in any population.

Imagine if these people ever faced actual oppression.

Nobody is trying to legislate away their right to marry. Nobody is trying to make them buy insurance to pay for ‘male health care.’ 

Neither were “they”. Somebody *was* trying to legislate away The People’s right to define what they recognize as marriage and not have that definition forced upon them from the top. The proper way to do this would be through discussion and working it out in the culture — and eventually legislation. The legislation kept failing to pass, so they had the courts make the rule by fiat based on a Constitutional amendment that addressed slavery and racism, and whose authors would laugh at the idea that they meant what the courts interpreted today.  Most people are willing to live and let live.  The people who got this ruling do not, and they, in fact, are using it to oppress people who have religious objections to lending their businesses to events they feel it would be wrong for them to lend them to.  And now the same people want us to learn 87 different gender pronouns or be fired.

And people, for what it’s worth — men included, are being forced to pay for “female health care”.

The law never:

Enslaved their great-grandparents
 Robbed their grandparents
 Imprisoned their parents
 Shot them when unarmed

All tragedies when they happened. While it is true that some people’s great grandparents were enslaved and this enslavement was protected by law, the fact of the matter is that very few of our great grandparents owned slaves, many of them were vehemently against it, and that the founders founded this country in the midst of slavery with ideals that demanded its abolition.  A lot of our great grandparents put their lives on the line (and often lost them) to finally rid this country of this sick practice during a period where it was also ending in other (Western) nations.  Of course this practice does still exist in the world today.  Just not in the West.

To have blame laid upon you that you had nothing to do with solely on account of your skin color is racism.  It’s practically the definition of racism.  If you’re really against racism, you should be against all racism.  If not, you’re a racist.

There is no massive effort at the state and local level to disenfranchise them of the vote.

There is no massive effort at any level to disenfranchise anybody of the vote.  This is an invention of the left. Although Democrats’ history of doing just that in the south means they are familiar with how to do it. This probably makes them feel guilty, so they project that guilt on their opponents today. So they strive to make and keep voter fraud easy and undetectable, and accuse anyone who objects of disenfranchising minorities.

There is no history of centuries of bad science devoted to ‘proving’ their intellectual inferiority.

Bad science which virtually nobody buys today, and which was rebuffed by other scientists even while it was going on.

There is no travel ban on them because of their religion. There is no danger for them when they carry dangerous weaponry publicly.

There is no travel ban on people because of their religion.  There is a travel ban for non-Americans coming into the country from a few, but hardly all, and not the largest, middle-eastern countries because they don’t have strong enough governments to support any kind of meaningful vetting process.  There is certainly a strong correlation between these tumultuous countries and their primary religion, but that’s not our fault.  There are 50 Muslim majority countries.  The travel ban applies to 7.  And nobody who is an American Muslim is inhibited by America from travelling anywhere any other American is inhibited to traveling to.  If it is a “Muslim Ban” it is a piss poor excuse for one.

There should be no danger for anyone to carry a dangerous weapon publicly.  There probably is more danger for a colored person doing this than a white person.  This stems from a cultural correlation which could be overcome in a generation or so by assimilation into the mainstream culture rather than the constantly encouraged posturing against it.

Their churches were never burned. Their lawns never decorated with burning crosses. Their ancestors never hung from trees.

You might be surprised to learn that the KKK hated more than black people. When I was a little kid, I lived in terror of the KKK.  I was told they wanted to tar and feather me.  The thought of having burning hot tar applied to me because someone hated my religion … when you’re 8, that’s pretty terrifying.

But we drove the Democrats who did all of this out of office long ago, and would shame and throw anyone who did in jail today, probably wishing we could legally do worse.

Their mothers aren’t being torn away by ICE troopers and sent away forever. They won’t be forced to leave the only country they ever knew.

That’s on the mothers who broke immigration law getting here in the first place and a risk they took coming here improperly. It is sad.  But it is also preventable.  Don’t break the law, and law enforcement won’t come take you away.  Or your kids.

The president has not set up a hotline to report crime committed at their hands.

There are crime hotlines all over the country and have been for a long time. And none of them say “only call if the guy isn’t white”.

They are chanting ‘we will not be replaced.’

Replaced as … what?

Well, you know, these particular people are not particularly deep and I have no room for their ilk.  But … let me ask you….

  • Does a country have a right to decide who they allow to become “one of them”?
    Is it a cultural thing?
  • Does, say, Peru have a right to exclude people who want to become Peruvian?  Why?
  • Has the United States historically had its own culture?
  • Has the United States allowed people from all countries, cultures, races, and creeds to immigrate?
  • What were the implied conditions of that immigration? (hint: read the citizenship pledge).
  • Would Peru have the right to disallow Americans from immigrating to Peru?

The deal is, a culture in a country has a right to self-preservation and self-determination.  When we bring people here from wildly different cultures and do not expect integration into our famous “melting pot” and instead remain more like a salad bowl, we do not have a cohesive culture and in turn become a nation in name only.  It turns out multiculturalism is a lie.  It does not work.  It cannot work.  But promoting the idea as a central goal is a very good way to destroy a culture.  And none of this has a thing to do with race.

I’ll tell you.

Replaced as the only voice in public discussions. Replaced as the only bodies in the public arena. Replaced as the only life that matters.

THIS is ‘white people’ oppression: We used to be the only voice. Now we hold the only microphone.

This “us” and “them” stuff is what divides us. America has been integrating since its inception because of her values, and it is one of the few countries that has had to do this on any kind of scale. Posts like this only serve to keep us divided.  You are a big part of the problem.

THIS is ‘oppression’ of white Christians in this country. Christmas used to be the only holiday acknowledged, now it’s not.

Not even remotely true.  Plus … it’s not only white people who are Christian or who celebrate Christmas.  This obsession over race you have.  It’s not healthy.

Americans have historically adopted holidays and customs from the cultures of immigrants who have assimilated.

I would so love to see these people get all the oppression they insist they receive, just for a year. Just to see.

You’re that hateful, eh?  Besides, if what passes for oppression on the left actually were actually applied to “white Christians”, you would have to admit that it’s pretty rampant.  Most of the stuff brought up in this screed was stamped out by … wait for it … “white Christians” … a long time ago.

Give them a world where you ACTUALLY can’t say Christmas. A world where the name “Geoff” on a resume puts it in the trash.

You mean, like, say, in a lot of Middle Eastern countries?  And we … we are headed in that direction.

Give them a world where they suddenly get a 20% pay cut, and then 70 women every day tell them to smile more.

Ah, the old, thoroughly debunked “Women make 78% of what men make for the same work.”  It’s not true.  Not even close.

Give them a world where their polo shirt makes people nervous, so they’re kicked off the flight from Pittsburgh to Indianapolis.

How about a world where people assimilate into the culture they adopt or are born into, kind of like the rest of the planet, rather than be encouraged not to and then harbor resentment for not being accepted by the culture they allegedly voluntarily immigrated into?

Give them a world where they inherited nothing but a very real understanding of what oppression really is.

Probably because this is all they’ve been taught by their leftist “betters”, so that they will look to them as children look to parents for protection rather than to take their lives into their own hands and make what they can out of them — the only real path to self-respect and honest respect from others.  Give a man a fish and he eats for a day … and eventually becomes your slave.  Teach him to fish, and he becomes his own man.

Give them a world where if they pulled up on a campus with torches lit and started throwing hands, the cops would punch their eyes out.”

I think we’re misrepresinting what happened in Charlottesville here – which can be excused a little because the media has only given us some of the facts.
according to the cops, there were plenty of people “throwing hands” on both sides, and judging from past Antifa rallies, I’d lay bets it wasn’t even the idiot white supremists who threw the first punches (the linked video shows this). Cops don’t typically do anything until the flaming bottles and bricks start flying.  Or somebody pulls a gun.  Or somebody tries to pull one of the cops’ guns on them.

Today’s SJW is Tomorrow’s Obergruppenfuhrer

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Back in the 19th century, Marxism billed itself as science.  That was its appeal — 19th century science, especially physics and Darwinian biology, was destroying the old certainties.  You even had guys like Ernst Mach — a heavyweight scientist, for whom the speed of sound is named — arguing that ideas themselves evolve organically, much like organisms do.  The old world was dead; the old certainties were gone; what could be over the horizon?  Karl Marx pretended to know, with scientific certainty (yes, even back then they “fucking loved science”).

In a world where every day brought news of another of life’s certainties being overthrown by some egghead in a lab, Marxists’ dogmatic certainty kept them grounded.  That’s why so many confused young people were Marxists.  As Orwell observed back in the 1930s,

One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

Marx said there is nothing but stuff in the world.  Material possessions.  Marx said that the old certainties were all lies, designed to keep The People from demanding more stuff.  Rejigger life’s material arrangements, he said, and we shall have social Utopia, just as the fruit-juice drinkers etc. shall, by rejiggering their biochemical arrangements, have physical utopia.

Then a funny thing happened: World War II.  We won, and all of a sudden an unimaginable level of material prosperity was available to everyone.  Nobody has involuntarily gone to bed hungry in America since about 1957, and it was soon obvious that Orwell’s Socialist dream of the 1930s was the Capitalist reality of the 1960s — those Wigan Pier miners all had clothes, shoes, three hots and a cot, and the National ‘Ealf….

…. and they still weren’t happy, any more than the Baby Boomers were, though warm and safe and full and secure on their local college campus.  But instead of concluding from all this that man does not live on bread (and socialized “healthcare”) alone — because that would entail that their parents had been right all along — they concluded that Racism was the cause of all their badfeelz.  How can you enjoy yourself, even with free love and righteous bud, while poor Negroes aren’t voting in Mississippi?  So they engineered the Great Magic Party Switch of 1964, passed the Civil Rights Act, and a funny thing happened: They still weren’t happy.  Must be Vietnam.  So they ended that….

…..and they still weren’t happy, just as they weren’t happy with second-wave Feminism, New Age spirituality, gay rights, animal rights, fruit-juice drinking, nudism, sandal-wearing…

The problem with all these things is: There’s no certainty.  No end state.  At least in the old, horrible, racist-sexist-homophobic-whatever world of a century ago, you knew what you were, and had your place in the world.  Here’s Orwell again, on the “radicals” of the interwar years:

The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that
Socialism, in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle classes. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years’ time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting.

We all know who those prim little men with white-collar jobs and cushy social positions are: The professors, the race hustlers and poverty pimps, the flunkies of the Big Government Uniparty, who preach the wonders of Diversity from behind the ramparts of the whitest, tightest gated community they can find.  Focus on the others, the youthful snob-Bolsheviks.  Do they sound familiar?

A Marxist student group at Swarthmore College disbanded itself earlier this year after realizing that its members were too rich and too white to be real commies.
According to screenshots confidentially provided to Campus Reform by an individual with access to the group’s private Facebook page, the demise of the Swarthmore Anti-Capitalist Collective (SACC) came in the wake of a farewell letter from a member who had decided the group could never be an effective proponent of “unproblematized anticapitalist politics” due to its “history of abuse, racism, and even classism.”
“From my understanding SACC disbanded because they realized the makeup and tactics of their group was at odds with their espoused principles,” Swarthmore Conservative Society President Gilbert Guerra told Campus Reform. “Their main support base was middle-upper class white kids who enjoy jogging.” . . .
Arguing that “low-income people of color should never be an afterthought in a group whose politics supposedly focus on their liberation,” the author [of the letter disbanding the group] then went on to accuse SACC of having a “history of abuse, racism, and even classism that was never adequately addressed or recognized despite constantly being brought up as an issue.”

“A history of abuse, racism, and even classism” is just a list of buzzwords.  The badfeelz must be coming from somewhere, because it certainly can’t be us!  We’re the good ones.  We’re against racism, “classism” (whatever that can possibly mean in a country where our poor people drop dead from diabetes and obesity-induced coronaries), general whatever-ism.  Like Marlon Brando said in that old movie: What are you rebelling against?  What have you got?

This is the end-state of Postmodernism, which has been the reigning dogma on campus since the late 80s.  As Stephen R.C. Hicks points out, Postmodernism is the only way to hold on to faith in Socialism in the face of logic, math, history, experience, and common sense.  And that’s fine for professors and Uniparty flunkies — they have a place in the world.  But what about the kids?

They’re told for a fact that there’s no such thing as a fact.  They’re told that everything is relative, that anything and everything is a “social construction.”  In other words, Social Justice seems to provide an explanation for why teenagers feel so alienated from everyone and everything.  There’s Reality — that’s just how life is, circa ages 12-19 — and there’s Social Justice, and since Social Justice allows you to blame someone, anyone, for your problems, it’s no surprise they embrace it.  You’re unattractive to the opposite sex?  Must be patriarchy.  But wait, you’re not so sure you even want to be attractive to the opposite sex?  Oh, you’re asexual.  But wait, you’ve got a good friend who feels the same way.  Maybe you’re homosexual?  Or transsexual?  Whatever it is, Society made you that way.  It can’t be “just the way kids are,” because that’s biology, which is Racist.

The problem is, people crave certainty.  Kids — above all — want to know their place in the world.  All the behaviors we used to call “being a teenager” are about finding that place.  Parents, teachers, scoutmasters, Little League coaches, etc., exist primarily to provide safe venues for “rebellion.”  It’s a process of differential diagnosis — “I’m not this [nerd, skater, jock, etc.], so I must be that [scout, cheerleader, goth, whatever].”  Done right, the teenager learns the hard-but-not-permanently-damaging way that the old certainties exist for a reason, and that Mom and Dad were basically right about most things (adjusted for changing times).

Social Justice short circuits all that.  To be an SJW, you are required to believe, simultaneously, with fanatical zeal, that

  • Everyone is exactly what xzhey claim xzhey are, immutably, forever; and
  • That can change without warning, in an instant, because everything is a “social construction.”

Is it any wonder they’re so screwed up?

Soon enough the snob-Bolsheviks like the ex-members of Swarthmore’s Commie Cosplay Club are going to cotton to the fact that Social Justice is a dead end.  What seemed so certain in high school (or even junior high) is revealed in college to be just one more pose, one more deception, one more mask for the ideopathic “injustice” that must be the cause of all your problems.  There is certainty in the Dark Side….

…which is why the Dark Side will win.  Today’s SJW is tomorrow’s obergruppenfuhrer.

 

The Psuedo-Intellectual Myopia of a Trump-Derangement-Syndrome Victim

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Our friend and co-blogger Morgan threw out a Matt Walsh quote,

“Tolerance is not a virtue. Diversity is not a goal.”

This makes lefties’ heads explode.

Morgan went on to bring up Chesterton’s Fence, which he instructed us to read up on Ace’s blog.

Left leaning dude chimes in that Morgan must be using Chesterton’s fence to defend Trump’s fence.

Swing and a miss, strike one!  and boy we could feel the breeze from that one in the upper deck behind the third base line.

He said he was struggling with its relevance to … I guess the Matt Walsh quote.

This got me to thinking, and I posted a response that I am posting here … mainly because I think it’s a train of thought worth posting.  So here it is:

If you’re looking for something that has something to do with Trump’s fence, which does not exist, then I would suggest you take a few steps back and shake off your myopia. You are looking too closely.

It has much more to do with the Michael Walsh quote Morgan posted.

I will risk trying to spell something out to somebody who either can’t or won’t see it …

Chesterton’s fence has nothing to do with damned fence. This is a thought exercise where the fence is merely a placeholder. Chesterton’s fence is something that exists that someone who doesn’t know why it exists and doesn’t like it wants to get rid of.

If you don’t know why something that somebody built exists, you MIGHT want to ponder why that somebody or those sombodies built it in the first place in the course of assessing its value.

Of course, when a modern progressive sees a post that questions diversity as a sacred value, they immediately see racists — because that’s what they’ve been taught to see by their clergy.

In this case, the thing that exists is intolerance. Why is there intolerance? What purpose does it serve? If you haven’t thought about this, you have no business instructing us not to tolerate intolerance.   (Never mind that it’s fundamentally hypocritical – an that’s also a clue that might actually get you to start thinking about the purpose it serves).

Diversity is such a catch phrase. If you haven’t considered why every culture has a characteristic realm of relative homogeneity, you don’t understand culture. So you certainly don’t understand its value. And you don’t understand that the whole concept of a “multiculture” is an oxymoron.

Diversity of race is a symptom of a great culture. It is not a cause. Further, the left has conflated (ironically) race with culture, and insist that particular cultures are inherent in particular races, and to reject elements of such a culture is to reject the race. This is an extremely racist worldview. It is dangerous. It is destructive.

Which is why the left embraces it. Postmodernism is about deconstruction, which is a method of destruction. It seeks to destroy what has been built, for it does not see the utility of what has been built. It employs diversion and obfuscation to direct hate at order. “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go!” You can get hundreds or thousands chanting that in a couple of minutes at ANY big leftist rally. They have been taught that mindless destruction is a virtue — and they don’t even realize that is at the core of their worldview.

This is key to fomenting revolution, which is ultimately what the bigwigs behind the left want.

They lemmings don’t learn. They ended up with Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Guevara, Moussilini, Castro, Pol Pot and the like.

Do not destroy what you do not understand. The minions do not understand what it is they are helping destroy. The leaders do … in the case of western civilization, they are destroying obstacles to absolute power for themselves.

Asking For It

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Our friend Robert posted this on HKB (facebook) … I had a comment on it that I wanted to save in case I or others wanted to refer to it in the future.  Incidentally, I once found this very fabric.  I thought about buying some and having someone make me a shirt out of it just because….

consentYou know, when people point out that when you dress a certain way you might expect certain unwanted attention (you certainly want the attention, or you wouldn’t dress that way) and sometimes that brings along assholes that go beyond just looking … we’re not saying it’s OK for the asshole to touch you. We’re just telling you you are increasing your chances due to the nature of assholes.

If I’m backpacking in the Rockies, I wouldn’t take a pound of bacon with me and lay it all over my clothes and backpack, because I know the nature of bears. It’s a danger to me whether it should be or not.

And no, I’m not comparing all men to bears, I’m comparing assholes to bears, because both will engage in behavior I wish to avoid, and I have some control over how much and what kind of notice they take of me.

Today’s SJW is Tomorrow’s Obergruppenfuhrer

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or why nothing is anybody’s fault, part III.

As Marxism is Calvinism minus God, so modern “social justice” ideology is Marxism minus Marx.

Calvinism’s two fundamental tenets are:

  1. mankind’s total depravity, and
  2. predestination

Only a tiny fraction of mankind is destined to be Saved; you’ll know you’re one of them if you hate the rest of humanity almost as much as you hate yourself.  Since this is not a psychologically sustainable creed, even for such world-class haters as the Puritans, in practice Calvinism was endless, frantic displacement activity – the famous “Protestant work ethic.”  Drop God, and Puritans become Yankees — dour, hectoring pharisees who call you a whore while they’re fucking you over to make a few bucks.

Marxism’s two fundamental tenets are exactly the same.  Social classes, not God, do the predestining and the hatred gets called “revolutionary consciousness,” but it’s the same thing, with the same result — read any academic Marxist work and try to stay awake through the endless theoretical discussions of A’s version of B’s critique of C’s revision of D’s misunderstanding of the relationship between base and superstructure….

Just as 18th century science killed Calvin’s God, so 20th century history killed Marx’s.  Marx’s nonsense “economics” and sub-Hegelian worship of History are so laughably wrong that hardly anyone without a second PhD can mention them with a straight face.  Drop Marx, and Marxists become Social Justice Warriors — people who know xzhemselves to be on the right side of History, despite also knowing that there are no facts, only discourses.  They become, in effect, nothing but power worshipers.

And that’s where it gets interesting.  Marx’s disciples, e.g. Lenin, were power worshipers too, but they at least had the excuse (if that’s the word) of thinking they’d tapped into a real, existing power — the irresistible Force of History — in the same way the Puritans knew they were Saved.  SJWs know there’s no History; History is, after all, the narrative unfolding of Truth.  There are no facts, only discourses; and hence no Truth, only the provisional “truths” of whatever temporary coalition has the power to enforce them.

These days, of course, the SJWs still believe themselves to be that coalition.  BUT: it doesn’t have to be that way, as they know best of all (not consciously, of course, but in their secret hearts).  How could it be otherwise?  Hence the ongoing apocalyptic freakout over the rise of Donald Trump.  Trump uses language better than they do — Hillary’s campaign, it’s becoming clear, was over from the moment he uttered his famous “because you’d be in jail” quip.  Trump’s coalition might well twist language in such a way that his discourse prevails.

At that point, they’d be consistent with their philosophy — Trump’s discourse triumphed; therefore Trump’s discourse is right.  And so they’ll do what they always do, jump out in front of the parade and pretend to lead it by being More Radical Than Thou.  And so today’s blue-haired bicurious vegan slam poet is tomorrow obergruppenfuhrer.  I give it maybe three more years before they start trading in their pink pussy hats for red and black armbands.