It’s a Southern Thing
Published 21 Dec 2021Up on the housetop, click, click, click.
Down through the chimney comes UPS … and FedEx, USPS, and Amazon Prime.
December 23, 2021
If Delivery Companies Were Santa
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December 22, 2021
Repost – “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays” versus “Happy Midwinter Break”
L. Neil Smith on the joy-sucking use of terms like “Happy Midwinter Break” to avoid antagonizing the non-religious among us at this time of year:
Original infographic from Treetopia – https://www.treetopia.com/Merry-Christmas-vs-Happy-Holidays-a/304.htm
Conservatives have long whimpered about corporate and government policies forbidding employees who make contact with the public to wish said members “Merry Christmas!” at the appropriate time of the year, out of a moronic and purely irrational fear of offending members of the public who don’t happen to be Christian, but are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Rastafarian, Ba’hai, Cthuluites, Wiccans, worshippers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or None of the Above. The politically correct benediction, these employees are instructed, is “Happy Holidays”.
Feh.
As a lifelong atheist, I never take “Merry Christmas” as anything but a cheerful and sincere desire to share the spirit of the happiest time of the year. I enjoy Christmas as the ultimate capitalist celebration. It’s a multiple-usage occasion and has been so since the dawn of history. I wish them “Merry Christmas” right back, and I mean it.
Unless I wish them a “Happy Zagmuk”, sharing the oldest midwinter festival in our culture I can find any trace of. It’s Babylonian, and celebrates the victory of the god-king Marduk over the forces of Chaos.
But as anybody with the merest understanding of history and human nature could have predicted, if you give the Political Correctness Zombies (Good King Marduk needs to get back to work again) an Angstrom unit, they’ll demand a parsec. It now appears that for the past couple of years, as soon as the Merry Christmases and Happy Holidayses start getting slung around, a certain professor (not of Liberal Arts, so he should know better) at a nearby university (to remain unnamed) sends out what he hopes are intimidating e-mails, scolding careless well-wishers, and asserting that these are not holidays (“holy days”) to everyone, and that the only politically acceptable greeting is “Happy Midwinter Break”. He signs this exercise in stupidity “A Jewish Faculty Member”.
Double feh.
Two responses come immediately to mind, both of them derived from good, basic Anglo-Saxon, which is not originally a Christian language. As soon as the almost overwhelming temptation to use them has been successfully resisted, there are some other matters for profound consideration…
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December 20, 2021
Even libertarians can fall victim to progressive hysteria
In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sean Gangol mourns the discovery that Penn Jillette has abandoned his libertarian beliefs due at least in part to a bout of Trump Derangement Syndrome:
In the last three years I have found myself becoming increasingly disappointed with certain organizations and people who have called themselves libertarian. My first disappointment was Christopher Cantwell, a libertarian who joined the Free State movement in New Hampshire. I used to be a regular listener of his podcast up until he got involved in the so-called Alt-Right movement, where he found himself mixed up in the fiasco that took place in Charlottesville. To this day I still can’t comprehend how a no-nonsense Anarcho-Capitalist like Cantwell could trade the principles of individual freedom for the principles peddled by a neo-fascist group. Then there was Reason magazine, who blamed Trump for the death of a young protestor in Charlottesville, which led to me cancelling my subscription. I also got tired of libertarians constantly belly-aching about how Trump is far from their ideal president, which is why I stopped watching Kennedy. Though I would say that my biggest disappointment was Judge Andrew Napolitano who had an obvious vendetta against Trump since he seemed to support any charge that was made against the former president no matter how bogus it seemed. At least Napolitano was my biggest disappointment, up until I heard about Penn Jillette’s recent abandonment of his libertarian principles.
When I first discovered Penn & Teller’s Bullshit on Showtime back in 2005, I not only fell in love with the show but with the witty duo. They were never afraid to pull any punches when it came to the subjects that they went out of their way to debunk. It didn’t matter if the subject was gun control, The War on Drugs or just about every form of pseudoscience that Western Civilization had to offer. The most controversial episodes involved slave reparations, climate change hysteria and AA meetings. The episode on the AA meetings was so controversial that their own film crew threatened to go on strike over it. I had the pleasure of getting my picture taken with the duo back in 2008, when I went to see one of their magic shows in Las Vegas.
I can definitely say that I take no pleasure in criticizing Penn Jillette, but I couldn’t believe that he actually said these words on an episode of Big Think : “[A] lot of the illusions that I held dear, rugged individualism, individual freedoms, are coming back to bite us in the ass. It seems like getting rid of the gatekeepers gave us Trump as president, and in the same breath, in the same wind, gave us not wearing masks, and maybe gave us a huge unpleasant amount of overt racism.” When I heard those words, I wanted to ask Penn, “who the hell he was and what did he do with the real Penn Jillette?” This statement sounded like it came from somebody like Edwin Lyngar from Salon, who claims to be a former libertarian, but seems to know very little about the ideology that he now trashes. If I didn’t know anything about Penn Jillete, I would have thought of him as big of a phony as Lyngar. It’s hard to believe that this is the same man that went to a TSA checkpoint at the airport with his pants around his ankles to protest the invasive security measures that that they put the passengers through on a daily basis. What happened to that man?
I find it disappointing and perplexing that Penn Jillette would associate any damage caused by the CORONA virus to individualism, when it was a totalitarian government that caused the whole mess in the first place. I don’t know if anyone every explained this to him, but China isn’t renowned for their individualism. I also find it perplexing that a hard-nosed skeptic like Penn can have such a fixation with masks. I remember a time when Penn Jillete would criticize people who put their faith in certain ideas without evidence. It didn’t matter if it was a belief in a deity or a misguided faith in alternative medicine. Yet, he seems to believe in the same quackery that he and Teller used to routinely debunk on Bullshit. Yes, I do believe that masks are a form of pseudoscience and for that matter I believe that most of the measures that have been shoved down our throats for the past year and half are complete bunk. I assume these things are complete bunk because the officials pushing those measures have yet to show a single shred of evidence that they have been effective in reducing infection rates.
I’ve had the same disillusionments with former libertarians, and Penn’s conversion to progressive nostrums was certainly one of the most disappointing. I’m not renewing my more-than-30-year subscription to Reason magazine — in fact, I haven’t read many issues in the last several years, as I keep finding arguments that might appear in The Atlantic or other consciously progressive organs rather than the libertarian reporting they used to be so good at delivering.
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Ross WWI Sniper Rifle w/ Winchester A5 Scope
Forgotten Weapons
Published 23 Aug 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.forgottenweapons.com
The standard Canadian sniper’s rifle of World War One was the MkIII Ross fitted with a Warner & Swasey “musket sight” purchased from the United States. However, armorers in the field did create sniping rifles using other scopes — in particular the Winchester A5. The A5 was a popular commercial rifle scope at the time, and it found its way onto military rifles for many nations — I have seen examples on Lebel and SMLE rifles as well as of course American Springfields and this Ross.
The A5 was a 5x magnification scope with external adjustments. We don’t know when this example was built into sniper configuration, but it’s provenance is solid (this sort of thing would be relatively easy to counterfeit). Personally, I would much prefer a Winchester A5 over the Warner & Swasey pattern…
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle 36270
Tucson, AZ 85740
From the comments:
Cole Harris
1 hour ago
The famed Francis Pegahmagabow used a Ross during his service with the Canadian Expeditionary Force during WWI. While the Ross was considered a pretty terrible service rifle because of reliability/durability concerns, on the range it was a superb rifle that he used to great effect. I don’t know if he used irons or not, but he built quite a reputation for marksmanship with the Ross.
If you’d like more information about Francis Pegahmagabow, The Great War channel did a bio special about him and more recently Sabaton wrote a song called “A Ghost in the Trenches” about his military service.
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December 19, 2021
Remember the megabucks Andrew Cuomo received for his (ghostwritten) book? It’s going to New York State instead
Back in November, Kenneth Whyte reported on the unlikely pay-off for Andrew Cuomo and his American Crisis. In this week’s SHuSH newsletter he’s delighted to report that the state government — which effectively funded the research and writing of the book — will be the eventual recipient of the whole advance:
Sorry to keep harkening back to previous SHuSHs but I can’t overlook the latest on the Andrew Cuomo shambles.
You’ll remember that now-disgraced former governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, played dirty with his publisher and the public while landing a lucrative book contract. More specifically, he suppressed bad news about pandemic deaths in his state while coaxing a $5.1 million advance out of Penguin Random House for a book about his heroic activities as a COVID-19 fighter.
I mentioned that it was astonishing that the governor of America’s hardest-hit pandemic state could produce a fat manuscript in just three months, and that media reports suggested his staff and a ghostwriter authored the book for him. The same reports said he was in danger of violating state ethics prohibitions against the use of state resources or personnel in producing his book.
I also noted that weeks after the grandly titled American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic was released in October 2020, Cuomo was hit with the first in a long series of sexual harassment allegations. He was forced to resign his office in August 2021. By then, it had also emerged that Cuomo’s office had covered up roughly half of the fatalities among state nursing home residents during the pandemic.
Penguin Random House took a bath on the project. American Crisis has sold only about 50,000 copies, about a tenth of what the publisher needed to cover the advance it paid the author.
This week it was Cuomo’s turn in the tub. An ethics panel ruled that he had broken his promises not to use state resources or government staff to write his self-congratulatory book, and gave him thirty days to hand over to the State of New York the $5.1 million he earned with the book.
‘Tis the season to be jolly
Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la
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Guadalcanal Life Expectancy: 30 Days- WW2 – 173 – December 18, 1942
World War Two
Published 18 Dec 2021Just a few weeks ago massive offensives were launched in North Africa and the Soviet Union, against the Axis. These operations and offensives have now morphed into fully fledged campaigns, and the nature of these theatres of the war has been transformed.
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Canada’s almost functional flying saucer; the story of the Avro Canada VZ-9 Avrocar
Polyus Studios
Published 14 Jul 2018Support me on Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/polyusstudios
The Avro Canada VZ-9AV Avrocar: Canada’s first attempt at vertical take off and landing aircraft. Although the concept ultimately turned out to be a dead-end, the engineers and designers at Avro experimented with bold new ideas. Their concepts would push the limits of the imagination and reflected the extreme technological optimism of its time.
Music:
Denmark – Portland Cello ProjectResearch Sources:
“Declassified: America’s Secret Flying Saucer” – https://www.popularmechanics.com/mili…
Avro Canada VZ-9 Avrocar – https://www.aviationsmilitaires.net/v…
Avrocar: Canada’s Flying Saucer: The Story of Avro Canada’s Secret Projects by Bill Zuk (2001)
How to Build a FLYING SAUCER – https://declassification.blogs.archiv…
LaesieWorks – AVROCAR VZ-9AV – http://www.laesieworks.com/ifo/lib/AV…
The Living Moon – Project Silverbug – The Avrocar – http://www.thelivingmoon.com/49ufo_fi…Footage Sources:
Avrocar I Progress Report 01/02/1958 – 05/1959 – US National Archives (~1959)
Disc Flight Development, Avrocar I Progress Report, 05/02/1959 – 04/12/1960 – US National Archives (~1960)
Avrocar Continuation Test Program and Terrain Test Program, 06/01/1960 – 06/14/1961 – US National Archives (~1959)
Tiltwing Versatility – San Diego Air and Space Museum (~1971)Aircraft mentioned:
Project Y
Project Y-2
Project PV 704
Project 1794
Project Silverbug
Weapon System 606A
VZ-9AV Avrocar
CL-84 Dynavert#Avrocar #CanadianAerospace #Polyus
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QotD: Sun Tzu’s Art of War reworked for the 21st Century by General Mark Milley
… here at The Babylon Bee, we’re legit journalists, so we’ve got the exclusive scoop. Here are some excerpts from the upcoming revision of The Art of War:
“If you think you might attack an enemy, pick up the phone and give ’em a heads up. It’s only fair.”
“You have to be careful not to surprise your enemy. They really don’t like it.”
“Treason is not treason if it is the lesser of two treasons.”
“Know thy pronouns, and know thy enemy’s pronouns.”
“The supreme art of war is to surrender to your enemy without fighting.”
“All war is white rage.”
“If you surrender, you can never lose.”
“If thy commanding officer sends mean tweets, thou need not follow orders or the chain of command.”
“The enemy of my friend is my friend.”
“Keep your friends close and your enemies on speed dial.”
“You can not betray the one to which you were never loyal.”
“Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for China.”
“When retreating, leave most of thy armaments behind so you know what you’ll be up against next time.”
“Chinese bros before American hoes.”
“He who turns on bad orange man gets big book deal.”
“General Milley Is Releasing A Revised Version Of The Art Of War — And We’ve Got Exclusive Excerpts”, BabylonBee, 2021-09-17.
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December 18, 2021
QotD: The Game of Life
Life, as it is often called, was conceived as a modern take on a board game designed in 1860 … called the Checkered Game of Life …
By 1960, the Checkered Game of Life had disappeared from most American game tables. It had been replaced by such as entrants as Monopoly, which rewarded winners with riches, punished losers with penury and became one of the top-selling board games in the United States during the Depression. Mr. Klamer’s task, as assigned by the Milton Bradley Co., was to create a game to mark the company’s 100th anniversary … With the assistance of colleagues … Mr. Klamer updated [the Checkered Game of Life] for the aspirations of contemporary players. For instance, players of the new version would choose between a “business” route, which afforded an immediate salary, and “college”, which promised a larger but delayed one … To board game enthusiasts, the Game of Life was a beauty: a marvel of topography with raised roads that players traversed in their station-wagon game pieces. According to the volume Timeless Toys: Classic Toys and the Playmakers Who Created Them, by Tim Walsh, Life was “the first three-dimensional game board using plastic.” … Destinations in the 1960 version included “Millionaire Acres” — or the “Poor Farm”.
From “Reuben Klamer, toy inventor who created the Game of Life, dies at 99” (WaPo).
I played that game when it was new in the 1960s, and I guess those 3-dimensional aspects and the built-in spinner were pretty exciting. But what a drag it made life seem! You’re a peg in a car and you gather family members to fill the hole in the car and keep driving till you get to the end. At least the end wasn’t called Death.
And it seems that this is where we Baby Boomers learned we’d better go to college. The game had determined the income difference. But you didn’t even have any fun in college or learn anything deep. You just upped your earning potential, and the point of life/Life was to make the most money. What an awful game!
Ann Althouse, “Life as it is often called, was conceived as a modern take on a board game designed in 1860 … called the Checkered Game of Life“, Althouse, 2021-09-17.
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December 16, 2021
Fallen Flag — the Chicago Great Western Railroad
This month’s Classic Trains fallen flag feature is the Chicago Great Western Railroad (CGW) by H. Roger Grant. Not being over-familiar with the US Midwest, while I’d heard of this railway I had no real background knowledge about it. The earliest charter was granted to the Chicago, St. Charles & Mississippi Airline in 1835, but no construction took place under the original management and the charter rights were passed on to the Minnesota and North Western Railroad (M&NW) in 1854. Actual construction of the line did not begin until 1884, connecting St. Paul, Minnesota with Dubuque, Iowa. The M&NW was taken over by the Chicago, St. Paul & Kansas City Railroad under the control of Alpheus Beede Stickney, a St. Paul businessman. By 1892, when the system adopted the Chicago Great Western name, there were routes to Omaha, Nebraska, St. Joseph, Missouri and Chicago.
The Panic of 1907 ended Stickney’s control of the railway and it ended up in the hands of J.P. Morgan:
Even though Stickney had imaginatively assembled a Midwestern trunk line, he ultimately lost his railroad. The brief but severe Bankers’ Panic of 1907 threw CGW into receivership, a fate the company had avoided during the much more severe Panic of 1893. The nation’s financial wizard, J.P. Morgan, took control, and in 1909 a reorganized Chicago Great Western Railroad made its debut. Morgan wisely placed Samuel Morse Felton in charge, because the new president excelled as a railroad manager. His greatest triumph before joining the Great Western had been to turn the Chicago & Alton into a profitable property.
[…]
The Felton years in Chicago Great Western railroad history resulted in a rehabilitated physical plant. Changes in rolling stock caught the attention of thousands of on-line residents. In 1910, for example, CGW purchased 10 Baldwin 2-6-6-2 Mallets (“Snakes”, as employees called them), and the road’s own shop forces at Oelwein, Iowa, rebuilt three F-3 class 2-6-2s (CGW had 95 total Prairie types) into three more 2-6-6-2s. Unfortunately, these giants did not work out, and in 1916 the Baldwins were sold to the Clinchfield and the homebuilds were rebuilt into 4-6-2s. In the Mallets’ place appeared reliable yet powerful 2-8-2s, of which CGW owned 35.
The railroad became a leader in the use of gasoline and later diesel motive power. Before World War I CGW assembled a small fleet of McKeen motor cars, knife-nosed “wind-splitters” that replaced steam-powered branchline and local trains. Its 1924 gas-electric car M-300 was the first unit of any type sold by the Electro-Motive Co., and it helped replace steam on trains 3 and 4 on the 509-mile Chicago–Omaha run. In 1929 CGW remodeled three McKeens to make up a deluxe gas-electric train, the Minneapolis–Rochester (Minn.) Blue Bird. CGW was mostly satisfied with its pioneering internal-combustion equipment.
1906 advertising blotter for the Chicago Great Western Railroad’s passenger trains.
Wikimedia Commons.
CGW’s independent life came to an end in the same era as a lot of small to medium sized railways disappeared into corporate mergers, take-overs, or bankruptcy:
Being a small road in an era when competitors were expanding through mergers led to the corporate demise of the CGW. Saying that shareholders “must be protected”, the board sought a partner. Although the expectation was union with KCS or perhaps the Soo Line, the aggressive Chicago & North Western, headed by resourceful Ben W. Heineman, made an acceptable proposal, and in 1968 Chicago Great Western Railroad history ended with it becoming a Fallen Flag.
C&NW operated CGW switchers and F units for a short time, and assimilated Great Western’s only second generation diesels — eight GP30s and nine SD40s, all painted in the final solid “Deramus red” seen also on KCS and Katy — into the yellow fleet.
Although for a short time much of the former Great Western maintained its identity as C&NW’s Missouri Division, that operating organization ended and its lines started to disappear. By the 1980s much of the trackage had been retired, and at the start of the 21st century only about 145 miles remained. Survivors include portions of the main lines in Iowa (Mason City to the Fort Dodge area; Oelwein–Waterloo; and a leg into Council Bluffs); the Cannon Falls (Minn.) branch; and terminal trackage around South St. Paul, Minn., and just west of Chicago.
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Supersonic Firsts
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 20 Aug 2021On August 20, 1955, United States Air Force Colonel Horace A Hanes set the world’s first supersonic world speed record in a North American Aviation F-100C Super Sabre. Although we are well into the supersonic age, aircraft that can exceed the speed of sound are still rare machines, and marvels of engineering and pilot prowess. The early aviation pioneers who tested the terrifying sound barrier have helped scientists better understand the dynamics of superfast speeds.
This is original content based on research by The History Guy. Images in the Public Domain are carefully selected and provide illustration. As very few images of the actual event are available in the Public Domain, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.
You can purchase the bow tie worn in this episode at The Tie Bar:
https://www.thetiebar.com/?utm_campai…All events are portrayed in historical context and for educational purposes. No images or content are primarily intended to shock and disgust. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Non censuram.
Find The History Guy at:
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TheHistoryGuy
Please send suggestions for future episodes: Suggestions@TheHistoryGuy.netThe History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered is the place to find short snippets of forgotten history from five to fifteen minutes long. If you like history too, this is the channel for you.
Awesome The History Guy merchandise is available at:
teespring.com/stores/the-history-guyScript by THG
#history #thehistoryguy #airforce
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December 15, 2021
QotD: Suppressing intellectual heresy
The young people at Middlebury who shouted down Charles Murray and assaulted a faculty member who had tried to engage him in civil debate were, in effect, suppressing the ideas of a heretic. After all, a heretic’s ideas are too dangerous to be heard.
Dangerous ideas are, of course, interesting ideas, especially to young people. When we fail to address dangerous ideas in our courses, we add to their mystique. When activists shout down or assault heretical speakers they send two messages. The first and intended message is a display of righteous disapproval. The other, unintended message, is that there is something so menacing about the idea being expressed that it cannot simply be laughed off or even argued with, rather it cannot be allowed to be spoken.
Consider how that looks to someone who is starting to question the premises of the liberal orthodoxy on race, gender, diversity and so on. Why, our alt-right curious person might wonder, are there some ideas that are so laughably false that one need not even mount a counter argument (a flat earth or the financial benefits of college athletics), some ideas that are considered contentious but still open to debate (supply-side economics), and some ideas that are so outré that they can only be met with back turning, shouting, or by punches to the face?
Might it be, our waverer must wonder, that these people don’t want me to hear this idea because they don’t have a good answer to it?
Erik Gilbert, “Liberal Orthodoxy and the New Heresy”, Quillette, 2019-02-04.
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December 14, 2021
Michael Nesmith, RIP
In Monday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh paid tribute to the late Michael Nesmith:
Michael Nesmith, the Monkees’ toqued Texan, died on Friday at the age of 78. It’s probably fitting that Nesmith died at a moment when the Beatles are back in the forefront of public consciousness: being hired as a fake Beatle for a television show was the beginning, for him, of an epic American life. It’s a sequence of events that defies belief in retrospect.
The Monkees were a corporate creation — four guys pulled together in order to be vaguely Beatles-like and serve as the public face of a series of glorious hit singles written (and largely played) by others. They had a period of truly enormous stardom, but they began to attract criticism when word of their sham-like nature filtered out into a world of increasing concern with authenticity. Meanwhile, they were themselves revolting against the Monkees machine and its Svengali, Don Kirshner — a revolt of which the sharply intelligent Nesmith was the acknowledged leader.
The Monkees got control of their performing lives — and began to make distinctly inferior records. There is a reason “Last Train to Clarksville” went to number 1 on the charts, and “I’m a Believer” (written by Neil Diamond) went to number 1, and “Daydream Believer” went to number 1, and Nesmith’s “Listen to the Band” went to number 63. Nobody really had much use for authentic Monkees. By all rights they ought to have ended up as Milli Vanilli.
Yet Nesmith had one rock-‘n’-roll standard, one bright gemlike classic, in him. This was “Different Drum”, a record Nesmith had written in 1964 before anyone had invented the Monkees. He couldn’t get Kirshner and his hired tastemakers and arrangers to turn it into an actual Monkees record. It did appear on an episode of the show in 1966, but in an astonishingly humiliating way: Nesmith’s character, “Mike Nesmith”, plays a few bars of it very haltingly while pretending to be an inept country-folk singer, “Billy Roy Hodstetter”.
A country-folk singer was, of course, what Nesmith actually was when not in front of the cameras. The result is a media puzzle worthy of the brainpower of a dozen French deconstructionists. Nesmith, in this handful of seconds, is a real musician in a fake TV band pretending to be a real TV musician on a fake show-within-a-show, mangling his own genuine material.
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December 12, 2021
“[T]oday’s antiracism paradoxically requires the crudest of racist categories to justify and explain itself”
Andrew Sullivan on the racism of modern “anti-racist” movements and his hope that Hispanic Americans may provide a way out of the current political deadlock:
Of all the acronyms, euphemisms and sophisms pioneered by critical theory, one of the most revealing is the term “black and brown people”. You hear it all the time now. Whether it’s about “the lack of Black and brown representation in Hollywood”, vaccine hesitancy in “Black and brown neighborhoods in large cities”, the right to vote for “Black and brown people”, or “allyship between Black and brown people”, the “B&b” formula is now yet another ubiquitous media virtue-signal. It’s subtler than some others. It doesn’t shriek woke like “BIPOC”; it isn’t as instantly risible as “2SLGBTQIA+”; it gives “Black” a Capital Letter, and “brown” feels a bit like a lower-case add-on — but at least it uses actual English words, and doesn’t end in an X.
Still: what does it tell you that a staggering and brilliant array of totally different ethnicities, races, religions, histories and cultures can now routinely be reduced to just two drab colors?
I think it speaks to two things. The first is that today’s antiracism paradoxically requires the crudest of racist categories to justify and explain itself. A whole kaleidoscope of immigrant difference — from Kurds and Mexicans and Somalis to Dominicans, Chileans, Nigerians, and Pakistanis — has now been turned into one monochrome racial “brown” — just to fit into an oppressor/oppressed, white/black narrative.
Equally, a diverse African diaspora — ranging from Nigerian immigrants to descendants of Southern slaves to biracial men and women with mainly European ancestry who go back to this country’s miscegenated origins — is now just “Black”. And this new racial unit has one politics: left-Democrat. Individuals disappear; diversity of opinion within groups evaporate; all that matters is a single skin color and oppression.
The second aspect of critical theory that “B&b” helps reveal is that the crude binary of “black” and “white” simply has less salience with every passing day, as more and more races, ethnicities and cultures complicate and enrich our society, and render it structurally, demographically and culturally unrecognizable from even the recent past. To give one example: 60 years ago, four percent of Americans approved of inter-racial marriage; today, it’s 94 percent. Or check out the rapid decline in the “white Christian” share of the population — from 80 percent in 1996 1976 to 44 percent today. Look around you and you’ll see how the crude rubric of “white supremacy” is, in fact, wildly out of date.
This is why so many of the most passionately woke are so obsessed with history in America, and the further back the better, as the 1619 Project shows. The past is a world they are much more comfortable in than the present, a place where the racial divide was infinitely simpler, and racial inequality both brutal and actively enforced by the government. Before the Civil Rights Act in 1964, before mass non-white immigration began in 1965, before mass non-white illegal immigration since the 1990s, the “white supremacy” rubric had some lingering traction.
But in the 21st Century, it’s been hopelessly compounded by layer upon layer of mass immigration from every conceivable corner of the planet. The Latino population in the US is now larger than the African-American one; and Asians, of many different varieties, are now immigrating in higher numbers than Latinos. Before too long, the black/white dynamic may disappear into the multi-colored, multi-hued background entirely.
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One Year Since Pearl Harbor – WW2 – 172 – December 11, 1942
World War Two
Published 11 Dec 2021The Japanese try and fail to supply their starving soldiers. The Allies fail to break through in Tunisia and New Guinea. The fighting in the USSR is bloody, but the Axis prepare for a new offensive there.
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