There is a lot of talk about Toxic Masculinity. No one ever talks about Toxic Femininity. Though every woman who is a functional human being knows about it, as does anyone who has ever lived or worked in a predominantly female environment.
So, why does no one talk about it? Well, mostly because the left believes that “designated victims”™ are sacred and must never be called on their own bullshit, no matter how smelly. Hence also the bizarre idea of racial “privilege” that tells you holocaust survivors should be attacked for “white privilege” but the Obama girls raised as the creme de la creme, and never facing a day of privation in their lives don’t have any privilege and are victims.
But there’s also other stuff going into it. To an extent — to the extent that historically for biological reasons men dominated public life — the fact that no one talks about the bad side of female modes of being in society is the result of patriarchy.
Men are ridiculously, idiotically, insanely blinkered about women. They don’t really see women as they see other men, but through rosy glasses as much better than men. The “oh so smart” former president with the depth of a rain puddle in Colorado told us that women are so much better than men and that the world would be better under women. Which means he’s basically a bog standard male who has never given the matter a thought, and is going on what “everybody knows.” (It occurs to me this man, if he’d been born to an ultra conservative Arab family in one of the ultra conservative Muslim countries would also be telling us that women’s hair emits seductive rays. He’s a suit that speaks. Or an empty chair, if you prefer.)
Of course it is right evolutionarilly that men should feel that way about women. It keeps the species going. It is also bizarre though, and leaves men curiously defenseless now that women view themselves as an aggrieved class and are trying to take over public life and exclude men.
In fact it leaves as the only defense in society that most women — even the feminists who pretend otherwise — unless completely and extensively broken and indoctrinated know what other women are and therefore will not trust any of them. As they shouldn’t. I can’t imagine a worse hell than what Obama is proposing.
Sarah Hoyt, “Toxic Femininity”, According to Hoyt, 2019-12-18.
March 23, 2020
March 21, 2020
QotD: The reason people don’t get a say in how the rulers carry on
The People keep giving the wrong answer, in other words, so The People will not be asked anything of importance. Same as it ever was.
The problem with democracy, though, isn’t that people are fools. People are fools, of course, but since that’s as universal as gravity, any human institution will be staffed entirely with fools. But … just as the general characteristic “great leader” doesn’t necessarily translate into any specific competence, so the general truth “people are fools” doesn’t mean everyone is a fool about everything. Since we all know at least one other human being, we all know a blithering idiot who’s remarkably shrewd about one little slice of life. Junkies, for example, are idiots — taking hard drugs is a remarkably stupid idea, as every addict I’ve ever met readily confessed. And yet, when it comes to getting their drug of choice these morons are endlessly inventive. Billy Bob up the holler has six teeth and a fourth grade education, but he can MacGyver up methamphetamine out of household products like a Chemistry PhD.
The problem with democracy is twofold. The first — that it’s the best technique ever devised for organizing self-righteousness — deserves a book in itself. The second, though, is covered by a single word: ultracrepidarianism. It means “the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge.” Peter Strzok, for example, was probably a perfectly competent FBI agent, when it came to doing the things the FBI actually hired him to do. But he decided that he was also some kind of political science expert, as well as a human love machine, and here we are. See also: our “elected” “representatives” What else would you call sending someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose areas of expertise are “mixing drinks” and “having big tits,” to Congress, where she’s expected to make decisions of war and peace? Ultracrepidarianism is a feature, not a bug, of democratic systems, which is why even the very best “representatives” fuck up everything they touch.
Combine required ultracrepidarianism with real shrewdness and you get Stephen A. Douglas.
Take those, add in religious fervor, and you get the suicide cult that is the Democratic Party.
And here we are.
Severian, “Impeachment Thoughts”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-12-19.
March 19, 2020
QotD: Everybody knows the good guys lost the war
Anyway, the song is called “Everybody knows” and it’s a marvel of double-meaning.
What the song says explicitly is a bunch of stuff people like my brother — look, European, left — believed at the time. Stuff like “Everybody knows the war is over/everybody knows the good guys lost.”
Bizarrely, before they went into hysterical denial of communism being the regime in the USSR and starting to call those seeking to re-establish it “right wingers” the left kept insisting the good guys had lost the cold war. Apparently we just look richer and more concerned for the right of the individual, but the evil Kapitalism of Amerika (it’s much more scary written with a K) kills more people than the Gulag and destroys everyone’s soul in the process. We’re just sneaky about it. So sneaky, in fact, that we don’t need to prevent people from leaving, we need to prevent people from coming here. That’s how sneaky we are.
Stop laughing. There’s a good chance your college student believes this. There’s also a good chance your college student is stupid enough to buy Bernie’s line that bread lines are preferable to our over abundance of food, because at least “everyone is equal.” Someone should ask comrade Bernie about the State stores for very important functionaries that crop up everywhere that has tried the communist slimming diet (It is to die for) and which has goods comparable with what the low middle class in America can afford, sprinkled with a few gold geegaws which is the communists idea of classy.
Sarah Hoyt, “Everybody Knows”, According to Hoyt, 2019-12-11.
March 18, 2020
What is really driving the Wuhan Coronavirus panic
… besides the wall-to-wall hysteria in the mainstream media, I mean. Severian discusses the insights of “perverted old cokehead” Sigmund Freud on anxiety and its effects, then segues to our current, shared, plight:
Photographic portrait of Sigmund Freud, signed by the sitter (“Prof. Sigmund Freud”) by Max Halberstadt (c. 1921)
Wikimedia Commons
Everyone who has thought about it for five minutes knows that something’s not right. […] As y’all have noted, actual hard information on the coronavirus is hard to come by. Is it fully air-transmissible? What are the infection rates? Hell, what are the death totals? And speaking of the death totals, even if you trust China’s figures (which no reasonable person can possibly do), they seem … low. Like, really low. I actually trust Italy’s government to deliver some vague approximation of the truth, and even there, where they’re in full-blown freakout mode, it seems to kill off old folks with compromised immune systems and lung problems at a fractionally higher rate than your garden-variety flu.
So, you know … it’s the flu. Not great by any means, and more infectious (possibly) than some other flus in our recent past, but for all that just the flu. The ongoing sky-is-falling global freakout has next to nothing to do with the actual bug. We live in a deeply anxious age, and that anxiety has to discharge somehow. It’s global hysteria — classic hysteria, Freudian hysteria, an excess of stress that must be discharged by “converting” it into behavior.
The people who are freaking out about it aren’t worried about dying from it. No, really, they’re not. Nor should they be — no reasonably healthy person under age 70 has any reason to be worried about that. Instead, what they’re worried about is powerlessness. We’ve all long suspected that we’re ruled by idiots and grifters. We’ve all long sensed that our “leaders” hold us in deep contempt. And we’ve long known that none of our problems are worth anything to the global pirate capitalist class. The only reason those bastards care if we all drop dead from the plague is that they can’t sell enough iCrap to each other to keep the company stock price up.
We know this. But we can’t say it, and we can’t act on it, because doing so goes against our self-image. Our media, our education system, our “culture” (such as it is) has spent the last half-century telling us what special and unique snowflakes we all are, even as it’s forcing us into ever-greater conformity. We’ve broken all the taboos, transgressed all the boundaries, liberated all the oppressed. If there ever were to be such a thing as “social justice,” then truly we’ve achieved it, here in this best of all possible worlds where you can lose your job for not addressing your co-worker as a wingless golden-skinned dragonkin and 6’2″ dudes with beards down to their collarbones can go wee-wee in the little girls’ room …
… and yet. And yet. And yet feminists (just to stick with a theme), despite running everything for the last 30 years, still can’t get that lousy 25 cent raise. Seven out of every five college girls are sexually assaulted the minute they step on campus, despite boys being as rare as sasquatches on most campuses (and despite the ever-growing clamor for free college for everyone). You’re free to — hell, you’re practically required to — make up your own pronouns, but you’re not allowed to ask just how a degree in “gender studies” could be worth even one dollar in student loan debt, let alone one hundred thousand dollars. We keep agitating for change, keep voting for it, keep tweeting about it … and nothing happens.
That profound sense of powerlessness is exactly, and I do mean exactly, what screwed up Anna O. She hated her father for not allowing her any personal agency. In her heart of hearts she wanted him dead. And yet she knew herself to be a loving daughter, so that overwhelming sense of relief — indeed, of joy — she felt when he kicked the bucket sent her around the bend.
March 16, 2020
Cognitive dissonance, family style
Severian has some fun discussing current events with a nephew:
Image from Castle of Chaos – https://castleofchaos.com/blog/5-tips-for-surviving-a-zombie-apocalypse/
Just recently I had some fun with one of my nephews, who’s unexpectedly home for “Spring Break.”
Let’s take this Wuhan Flu thing seriously, I said. But since that hits a little too close to home, let’s pretend it’s a zombie outbreak. I want you to take it 100% seriously. The zombie virus has made it to our shores. It’s not too bad yet, but there’s definitely a walking dead situation. So … what do you want the government to do?
Nephew of course starts rattling off all the Chuck Norris fantasies young college guys have. Close the ports, call out the army, firebomb the streets wherever infected are sighted, yadda yadda. All of this is translated from the teenager, but you get the gist of it:
Me: Ok. Now, since we’ve stipulated that we’re taking this 100% seriously: Do you really want to give the government the power to do all that?
Nephew: Of course!
Me: Ok. Well then, do you really want to give Donald Trump the power to do that?
Nephew: Oh my god no!!! Orange Man bad!!!
Me: Now wait a minute, Nephew. You just said you’re taking this 100% seriously. You just said you want the government to have the power to set up flamethrower checkpoints on all major roads. Well, who is the current head of the government?
Nephew: But … but … but … Orange Man BAD!!!!
Me: Remember, Nephew, you promised to take this 100% seriously. So are you seriously telling me that the first thing you’d do, in the event of the zombie outbreak, is call an emergency presidential election, in the hopes that someone — Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, somebody — would win, so that the right kind of person could take all those measures you said were so very, very, very immediately necessary?
Nephew: Uhhhh … no, I guess not.
Me: So you do want to give Donald Trump that power, since he is, in fact, the current head of the United States government?
Nephew: Oh my god no! Orange Man BAAAAAAADDDD!!!!
Me: Well then I guess you’re just not serious about this zombie outbreak, are you?
QotD: Company incentives to prevent sexual harassment
The funny thing about this is that anyone with two eyes and a modicum of understanding of the world knows that this is not where the crazy is headed. As the attempt to drown out the legitimate cases of harassment — mostly by leftists, in leftist-dominated institutions — by claiming #metoo and that all men were essentially harassers becomes more frantic, it has become obvious that any man can be accused of harassment at any time by anyone.
So, here is a genuine prediction: I predict that instead of giving HR more power, this will give companies pause before hiring women, which will lead to a lot of decent and qualified women being left unemployed.
The second-order effect of that, for companies that can’t avoid hiring women, is two-fold: they’ll either hire women to “make-believe” positions, in which they interact only or primarily with other women, creating a drain on the bottom line, or they will allow a lot more work-at-home by both men and women. I predict we’ll see a great move towards that in the next year. Sure, it’s still possible to claim someone is harassing you via the phone, but one-party consent states at least will allow men to record everything in order to defend themselves.
Weirdly, I believe the long-term result of this will be the dismantling of the daycare and child-warehousing practice which has led to a lot of the left’s ascendency in education.
This is because no matter how much you wish to wishful think that companies will just give Human Resources more power, people who actually live and work in the world know this isn’t likely. Human Resources would mostly just make it impossible for anyone to get any work done.
Sarah Hoyt, “Nobody Expects These Predictions”, PJ Media, 2017-12-31.
March 14, 2020
“The people who write such things are thinking with their epidermis and genitalia, which is to say they’re not thinking at all”
In Quillette, Matt Johnson remembers the great anti-identitarian writer and speaker, Christopher Hitchens:
Christopher Hitchens speaking at The Amaz!ng Meeting held at the Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada on 20 January 2007.
Photo detail by ensceptico via Wikimedia Commons.
Hitchens thought fearlessly. As Martin Amis put it, he liked “the battle, the argument, the smell of cordite.” This is why he told the publisher of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything to organize a book tour that ran through the pulpits of the American South instead of remaining confined to the coasts. It’s why he relished every opportunity to lambaste Bill and Hillary Clinton in front of liberal audiences. It’s why he went after Mother Teresa and Princess Diana. He was an inveterate iconoclast — if there was a bloated reputation to puncture or a cherished dogma to deflate, he saw it as a duty and a pleasure to do so.
It’s no surprise that this oppositional inclination, coupled with blistering rhetorical ability, made Hitchens a deadly debater. After his death in December 2011, countless tributes and articles about Hitchens emphasized what a force he was in the studio and on the debate stage — his erudition and wit, his fluency, his seemingly superhuman memory. Hitchens is unforgettable for all these reasons, but people don’t miss him because he could turn a phrase or win an argument on CNN — they miss him because he thought for himself and refused to apologize for it. He didn’t want to write and speak as the representative of a community: “My own opinion is enough for me,” he told the audience at a debate on free speech in 2007, “and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority.”
“Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban,” Orwell wrote in his original introduction to Animal Farm (which was, ironically, suppressed). He continued: “Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness.” While there was far more official censorship in Orwell’s time, we’re living through an era of pervasive self-censorship, and as Packer explains, this type of silencing is “more insidious than the state-imposed kind, because it’s a surer way of killing the impulse to think, which requires an unfettered mind.”
[…]
Hitchens detested tribal and parochial feelings of any kind, which is why he was dismayed when he witnessed the emergence of identity as a catalyst for political mobilization in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In his memoir, Hitch-22, Hitchens attacked radicals who thought it was “enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic ‘preference,’ to qualify as a revolutionary.” When Hitchens first heard the expression “the personal is political,” he knew “as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was — cliché is arguably forgivable here — very bad news.” As he put it in a 2008 article:
People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of ‘race’ or ‘gender’ alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason.
It’s easy to imagine what Hitchens would have thought about a recent New York Times headline that declared “The Next President Should Not Be a Man” or a prominent writer and activist who announced that she “will not support white male candidates in the Dem primary.” The people who write such things are thinking with their epidermis and genitalia, which is to say they’re not thinking at all. You don’t have to bother defending candidates’ principles and positions when gender and race are the only relevant variables.
The still-secret “settlement” between the federal government and five hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en
Chris Selley points out some of the disturbing features of the as-yet-unrevealed agreement between Her Majesty’s Canadian government and five unelected First Nation chiefs that eventually got the railways running again:
“DSC02285” by Bengt 1955 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
For starters, we still don’t know the details of the arrangement, struck earlier this month between Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs and federal and provincial government officials, that allowed for pipeline work to resume. Those details could well represent positive progress on establishing just what the Wet’suwet’en’s legal claim on their lands — affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1997 — really means. But did the government have any business negotiating with the chiefs in question in the first place?
Tait-Day doesn’t think so. The Office of the Hereditary Chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en, she told the committee, is “not accountable to the (Wet’suwet’en) nation.”
“By refusing to hear from elected councils, these governments have without merit prevented the most credible current governing voices from being heard,” she told the committee. “The Indian Act system must be reformed, but that does not invalidate the role of the elected councils. While imperfect, they continue to speak for the people until a better model is implemented.”
Even setting aside the exclusion of elected councils, the negotiations were of dubious legitimacy. They weren’t with the hereditary chiefs per se; rather, they were with the hereditary chiefs who oppose the pipeline. Not all do, and some support it — including Tait-Day, Gloria George and Darlene Glaim, founders of the Wet’suwet’en Matrilineal Coalition. For their apostasy, male chiefs simply stripped them of their titles. This is not in dispute: “We’ve stripped the names from three female hereditary chiefs for supporting the pipeline,” John Ridsdale, whose hereditary title is Chief Na’Moks, told APTN News in 2018. “A name is more important than money.”
Using the title of Chief Woos, Frank Alec has become the leading public face of the anti-pipeline hereditary chiefs. On his behalf, Canadians both Indigenous and non-Indigenous have shut down rail lines and blocked access to the B.C. legislature and marched in the streets. Until 2018, the title of Chief Woos belonged to Glaim. He took it from her precisely because she dared support the pipeline and the benefits that will flow from it to her people.
“By negotiating directly with (the Office of the Hereditary Chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en), Canada and British Columbia give legitimacy to a group of bullies and abusers of women,” Tait-Day told the committee. “We cannot be dictated to by a group of five guys.”
March 12, 2020
Comrade Sanders
Arthur Chrenkoff points out the amazing double-standard that has helped Bernie Sanders become a major candidate for the Democratic nomination:
Imagine a credible candidate for a significant elected office – never mind the Presidency of the United States of America, the elected office in the world – who has spent his career cheering on Mussolini, Franco and assorted Latin America authoritarian strongmen, who admires Nazi Germany’s record in job creation and public infrastructure, and who, while eschewing excesses of the past, proclaims himself a proud national socialist, but to reassure all he says he is a democratic national socialist.
Now think of Bernie Sanders and you can once again understand the pervasive double standard in our politics. The hypothetical candidate from the previous paragraph – and he or she are very much hypothetical – would be considered a political and social pariah. Bernie, on the other hand, is lionised by millions and until very recently, prior to the miraculous, Dr Frankenstein-like reanimation of Joe Biden, has been considered a probable presidential candidate by a major political party (coincidentally, of which he has never been a member in his entire career).
To the best of my knowledge, Sanders has never expressed any regret, misgivings or second thoughts about a lifetime of cheerleading for virtually every socialist/communist government around the world, from the Soviet Union to Vietnam and from Cuba to, most recently, Venezuela. It is not like the true nature of these regimes has been a secret until now. Anyone with any modicum of knowledge and common sense could see all long these were all totalitarian dictatorships and mass abusers of human rights, which nationalised poverty and whatever their meager economic or social progress it has been achieved at an unacceptable cost.
[…]
That an old Chomskyite like Sanders came so close to being the Democrat presidential candidate tells of a sickness at the heart of a major political party. Democrats still staunchly believe that Donald Trump is a Russian asset but almost ended up with an actual communist sympathser in charge. History didn’t end in 1989; it repeats itself like vomit rising in your throat.
On a lighter note, Larry Correia is amused at the current top two Democratic contenders:
That is about the most pathetic match up of losers to ever occur in any political contest in the history of ever.
Sanders is a Marxist doofus. His plans are gibberish. His philosophy is bullshit, designed to appeal to wishful thinkers who can’t do math, and greedy ass mooches. But don’t worry, he’s a total squish without an ounce of fight in him, so the DNC’s just gonna roll him over to make from for their chosen one …
Joe Biden! Who is either suffering from dementia, or is just really really dumb. (insert porque no los dos? meme girl here)
They can’t let Joe speak for more than five minutes because they know he’ll go off script and start babbling incoherently. And I’m not talking Trumpian style stream of consciousness yammering, but weird ass, dog faced pony soldiers, corn pop, hairy legs, girl sniffing, finger biting, he’ll slap you, fight me IRL, you wanna step outside?
I’ve known people who worked with Joe Biden years ago, and they all said the same thing. With him, what you see is what you get. There is no act. That’s how Joe Biden is. And he was a weird scoundrel back then, but I’m pretty sure his mind is going now.
On the plus side, Jill Biden moves faster than the Secret Service, and that lady will throw hands. Respect.
All the DNC needed to do was find somebody decent and dignified to run against Trump, but oh no, they went batshit crazy instead, and their anointed one is a doddering, senile, fool, who is so corrupt his son, Crackhead McStripperbang makes millions of dollars for imaginary jobs not at all related to his dad’s position, and they don’t even try and hide it. But don’t worry, Biden’s gonna come from behind, because nothing wins swing states like threatening to slap construction workers who are suspicious that Beto O’Dork actually does want to take their AR-14s.
As somebody who would rather reach into his own chest and pluck out his heart than vote democrat, I will admit that I find it terribly amusing all the liberals I know who are weeping, wailing, and gnashing their teeth about Old Rich White Guys There Are No Women Or People Of Color Running … While Tulsi Gabbard is over there, like WTF?
Sorry, progs. She said hurtful things about Hillary, so the media and Google basically Thanos-snapped her into dust. Meanwhile, the right are eagerly betting on whether Nikki Haley is going to run in 2024 or not … So who are the real misogynist bigots?
March 11, 2020
Canadian National’s perfect storm
In Trains, Bill Stephens highlights the terrible time Canada’s largest railway has been having since the beginning of the year:
“DSC02285” by Bengt 1955 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
It would be hard to imagine a worse start to the year for Canadian National, whose volume is down 16% due to a string of events that’s mostly odd, unrelated, and unrelenting. CN is taking it on the chin, as no other North American railroad has seen its volume fall by more than 10% this year and rival Canadian Pacific’s traffic is up 10%.
First, there was Mother Nature. Winter arrived in January with eight days of deep cold in Western Canada, forcing CN to restrict train length. Then powerful rainstorms lashed southern British Columbia starting Jan. 30, washing out CN’s main to Vancouver for six days.
The major washouts occurred in the rugged Fraser River canyon directional running zone where CN and CP share trackage, with CN hosting westbounds and CP carrying eastbounds. The railways had to resort to running directional fleets of 15 to 20 trains at a time over CP’s line. The single-track bottleneck caused eastbound traffic to stack up at the Port of Vancouver and westbounds to be staged as far away as the Prairies. The directional running zone ranks among the top three freight mains by tonnage in North America, alongside BNSF Railway’s Southern Transcon in the Southwest and Union Pacific’s triple track across Nebraska. So this blockage was, by itself, a big deal.
Then came nearly a month of civil protests. On Feb. 6, as CN began digging out from the washout backlog, the first of several First Nations blockades set up camp on CN’s tracks. The blockades, protesting a proposed natural gas pipeline in British Columbia, halted traffic on CN’s Montreal-Toronto mainline in the East. Also ultimately affected: CN’s line to Prince Rupert, British Columbia, which was blocked by protests for six days. Other protests came and went in Edmonton, Alberta; Winnipeg, Manitoba; Quebec; and British Columbia. CP was affected, too, but to a much lesser extent. CP even hosted detour traffic for CN between Montreal and Toronto.
As if that wasn’t enough, then came regulatory woes. The same day the protests began, a CP crude oil train derailed and caught fire in Guernsey, Sask., the second such wreck in the area since December. Hours later Transport Canada issued a ministerial order that restricted key trains – those with 20 or more cars of hazardous materials – to 20 mph in metropolitan areas and 25 mph elsewhere. With the stroke of a pen, Transport Minister Marc Garneau’s knee-jerk reaction effectively reduced CN’s overall capacity by a third. You could call this slowdown “Whoa Canada!”
March 8, 2020
QotD: The essential difference between intentions and results
The results can be uproariously funny, like the “push model” in publishing leading eventually to the success of indie ebooks. (The short explanation is this: the push model is where, in dealing with chain bookstores, the publishers, who are overwhelmingly leftist, realized they could push them to stock whatever books they wanted to succeed, and then the customers would have to buy them because they were the only thing available. The end result was a nosedive in book sales, the death of Borders, and eventually the success of indie-published ebooks.) However, even there, on the way there, there was the tragedy of people not being able to find good things to read for a long time. (I remember us calling bookstore trips “going to be disappointed by Barnes and Noble.”)
Other times, their carefully laid plans are foiled by new technology — see, for instance, their slow-crawl through news reporting and other institutions being nullified by the internet and blogs, and a bunch of us bums working in their pajamas. […]
But often the tragic/comic effects of their action lead directly to their undoing, in a beautiful, almost Shakespearean effect.
Sarah Hoyt, “Nobody Expects These Predictions”, PJ Media, 2017-12-31.
March 7, 2020
KidLit is woke, woke, woke
Ed West on the amazing amount of propaganda that has been pumped into books for children:
“New Spin on YA” by Salem (MA) Public Library is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
When my daughters were around six and seven, they started French classes at a children’s library in our borough; I had been to our local library countless times but had mainly confined myself to the infant section, and older children’s books were something of a revelation. The entire front desk area was made up of hagiographies of Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela.
And hagiography is the most accurate term: these books were just like the ones I used to read in church. Here Blessed Nelson forgave his jailors, here St Barack healed America of its racial sins – and these are just a couple of examples.
It was a bit of a surprise — learning just how much the tone of kids’ books had changed since I was young and we wore onions on our belts. Nowadays, progressive politics is ever-present in children’s books. Which is fine, if you’re a believer; but if you’re a conservative, you’re faced with raising your children in a culture which is filled with messages you disagree with — sometimes misleading, sometimes anecdotally true but not representative, often just anti-wisdom, giving children the worst possible advice in life. And it’s becoming worse: since about 2016, children’s books have grown way more explicitly political.
Last month, a friend went to Tate Modern and took a picture of the young children’s section. Among the books on display are biographies of Greta Thunberg, something called Queer Heroes, another work called The Rainbow Flag, books about refugees, the bestselling Good Night Book for Rebel Girls — and its countless imitators. Whether you support it or not, this is propaganda; the aim is to raise a generation of progressives just as those Lives of the Saints were designed to bring forth young Christians.
And it works. Conservative ideas are very much in retreat, the subject of a brilliant new book I recently read (which, admittedly, I also wrote).
From a very young age, children are read books and shown films that teach them the core progressive messages: that we are all basically good and only behave badly because of circumstances; that borders and barriers are bad, stereotypes are wrong and girls ought to adopt traditional male gender roles if they want to be respected.
Stereotype inaccuracy is a popular idea — and a false one; in so many kids’ stories the unusual stranger or alien or wild animal who turns up in the neighbourhood will defy the small-minded pessimist who expects the worst. When it comes to gender politics, no self-respecting children’s book in the 21st century has girls aspiring towards being a princess and living happily ever after; to the post-ironic upper-middle-class parents who are the publishers’ main audience, that would just be lame.
March 6, 2020
“[A] decision of such absolutely mind-boggling stupidity and irresponsibility that it could only have come from Justin Trudeau, himself”
Ted Campbell on the Trudeau government’s apparent abject surrender to the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs (“apparent” because we still don’t have any details of the “deal”):
The Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs’ agenda seems simple enough to me. They don’t like the notion that the Wet’suwet’en people can elect band councils that might act for the good of the people and < quelle horreur > the people might even disagree with the hereditary chiefs. Some (male) hereditary chiefs seem to have managed to strip some other (female) chiefs of their titles because they, the female chiefs, sided with the elected councils. This is, in 21st century British Columbia, something of a replay of 17th century Europe and the end of the divine right of kings, except that the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs might succeed where Charles I and Louis XVI failed because they have the dimwits in the Trudeau cabinet on their side.
To make matters worse, as John Morris of the Canadian Press points out in an article published in the Globe and Mail, the government negotiated with the hereditary chiefs, only ~ with the people who broke the law; and they ignored the elected leaders ~ the people who played by the rules.
How typically Trudeau: he surrenders, cravenly, to the reactionary, anti-democratic lawbreakers and, simultaneously, shuts out the elected representatives of the Wet’suwet’en peoples. Is that the Canada in which we all want to live? Is that the sort of “leadership” for which millions of Canadians voted in 2019? I think not. Justin Trudeau is both a fool and a coward and his party, the Liberal Party of Canada, has a duty to Canada: throw the bum out!
But, not to worry, the Trudeau regime’s
propagandistspress agents will tell us that it’s all good, we “won,” something or other … didn’t we? And who cares if we lost something nebulous like honour and responsibility? It’s all about reconciliation, isn’t it? What do trivialities like democracy and the national interest matter when really important things, like preserving the power of hereditary chiefs over elected councils, are at stake? But that reactionary system seems to have been strengthened, and so “It was a famous victory.”
March 5, 2020
“Maybe … Trump’s victory caused an unusual number of spontaneous abortions in Ontario”
Colby Cosh on the recently published findings of a p-hacking conspiracy study on how the election of President Donald Trump was reflected in the birth ratio of liberals in Ontario:
Front view of Toronto General Hospital in 2005. The new wing, as shown in the photograph, was completed in 2002.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
On Monday there came a surprising piece of science news from BMJ Open, an open-access title affiliated with the British Medical Journal. It seems two researchers from Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, an endocrinologist and a statistician, have convinced themselves that the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency in November 2016 had a nerve-shattering effect on Ontario. The province of Ontario, that is, not the Los Angeles suburb.
Trump’s victory, according to the researchers, was so awful that, like a war or a disaster, it briefly altered the sex ratio in live births in the province. This is, I should say, a fairly well-established effect of extreme social traumas. When mothers experience physiological stress, the uterine environment becomes less hospitable, and male fetuses, more vulnerable to such changes, become less likely to survive pregnancy. (This makes sense from a Darwinian standpoint, because girls are more valuable than boys in replacing population after a calamity.)
In 2020 nobody should need me to say that a cute, counterintuitive scientific “result” like this, appearing in the newspapers on literally the day of its publication, should be greeted with extreme skepticism. The sex ratio at birth, always expressed in medical literature as a ratio of boys to girls, tends to hover around 1.06 under natural circumstances. (Even in an advanced civilization, things even out within the age cohort over the next 20 years as the lads explore dirt bikes, rock fights, and roofs.)
The Mount Sinai researchers, Ravi Retnakaran and Chang Ye, had records of the sexes of all children born in Ontario from April 2010 to October 2017. Even in a place as large as Ontario, the ratio naturally bounces around randomly between 1.1 and 1.0, and there are seasonal effects that the duo corrected for.
There is no obvious signature of a Trump effect in a scatterplot of the adjusted data, which serves as a warning that the effect being claimed may be an artifact of analysis. But when you apply “segmented regression” using the same parameters as Retnakaran and Ye, you find that the (unadjusted) ratio dipped to 1.03 in March 2017, the fifth month after Trump’s win, and then climbed to 1.08 in June and July before reverting to the long-term norm.
Chain Your Woman to the Stove – Feminism in the 1930s | BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1938 Part 2 of 4
TimeGhost History
Published 4 Mar 2020Under the yoke of economic depression and more and more authoritarian rulers, Western women face renewed misogyny, patriarchy, and decreasing independence. But not all women think this is such a bad thing.
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Spartacus Olsson
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Spartacus Olsson
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek KamińskiSources:
Bundesarchiv_Bild:
101III-Alber-174-14A, 102-04517A, 102-17313, 102-17818,
111-098-069, 137-055879, 146-1973-010-31, 146-1975-069-35,
146-1976-112-03A, 146-2006-205, 146-2008-0271,
183-2000-0110-500, 183-2005-0502-502, 183-2005-0530-500,
183-E10868, 183-E20457, 183-H28245, 183-J02040,
183-S08630, 183-S68014, 183-S68021, 183-S68029,
noun_pipe By Icon Lauk,
noun_company By wardehpillai,
noun_Farmer By Francisca Muñoz Colina.Colorizations by:
– Daniel Weiss
– Norman StewartSoundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
– “Sophisticated Gentlemen” – Golden Age Radio
– “The Inspector 4” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “Magnificent March 3” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “Last Point of Safe Return” – Fabien Tell
– “Step On It 5” – Magnus Ringblom
– “First Responders” – Skrya
– “Step Lightly” – Farrell Wooten
– “Try and Catch Us Now” – David Celeste
– “Not Safe Yet” – Gunnar Johnsen
– “The Dominion” – Bonnie Grace
– “The Charleston 3” – Håkan ErikssonA TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
TimeGhost History
2 days ago (edited)
So, we take a little break from the geopolitical developments in 1938 to look at the situation of women in the Western World in 1938. We’ve received a lot of requests on the WW2 channel to cover the situation on the home fronts. While we do mention it in the weekly episodes, and War Against Humanity covers the horrid parts of it, WWII was so much more. It literally changed the world’s culture in just six years. To do that subject justice we have asked Anna to join us as host for a new monthly WW2 series: On the Homefront.A few years back Anna was a regular feature on German YouTube on her own channel and some of the bigger YouTube entertainment channels. She left YouTube to finish her studies, and because she was searching for more depth than YT entertainment content was offering her. As Astrid’s and my daughter, and having grown up with Indy around all the time, she has a passion for human history form childhood, especially cultural history.
She also has a personal relationship to this time through her grandparents, Herbert and Renate, Astrid’s parents who served in Germany during the war, on the front and at home. Herbert, a career administrator and later NCO in the Wehrmacht engineer corps, went on after the war to work for the British as translator, and then as a public servant supporting the creation of the Bundeswehr, the German defense forces, and eventually Germany’s contribution as NATO member.
Renate’s father, a bank director, died under mysterious circumstance in 1936 after repeatedly refusing to pay out money belonging to Jewish families to the Nazis. Her mother and sisters soldiered on under the Nazis as best they could, When the war broke out they first suffered under the Allied bombing, losing their home three times. When the bombing became a daily occurrence, Renate was drafted to the German flak and only barely survived the war.
Several years after the war Herbert and Renate met and started a family together. They both passed away only a few years ago, late enough so that Anna had a chance to spend countless hours over 23 years listening to their war stories, and what they took away from it: hope for a better world, and the knowledge that what happened in Germany between 1933 and 1945, must never happen again. Please join us to welcome Anna, our daughter to TimeGhost.
Spartacus
