Quotulatiousness

August 5, 2022

“… what explains the growing enthusiasm for ‘Drag Queen Story Hour'”?

Filed under: Britain, Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In UnHerd, Andrew Doyle considers the deep weirdness of how not just “Drag Queen Story Hour” but all things drag are being pushed on children at any cost:

“One thing that drag queens don’t get on FLICKR is tips” by kennethkonica is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0 .

One Easter Sunday, many years ago, some friends and I attended a showcase of performances in a network of dank subterranean vaults. The event was self-consciously avant-garde, and many of the artists were drag queens who were exploring the more subversive aspects of their craft. This involved a great deal of screaming, bloodletting and carnal depravity. At one point I wandered into a chamber in which two naked performers were engaged in full penetrative sex. Around them a cluster of middle-class hipsters had formed, pensively observing them as though they were connoisseurs contemplating a Henry Moore.

These days we are accustomed to a somewhat tamed version of drag. But the best performers have always pushed the limits of acceptability: I once appeared at a comedy night at the Edinburgh fringe hosted by a drag queen whose interaction with the punters was not so much waspish as downright libellous. At another, I remember a drag artist smoking liberally during the performance, blowing smoke at a pregnant woman on the front row and saying “I hope you have a miscarriage”. It was a far cry from RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Traditional drag is clearly meant for adults. So what explains the growing enthusiasm for “Drag Queen Story Hour”, in which drag queens visit schools, libraries and other council venues to read to young children? For whatever reason, this bizarre subgenre has been championed by celebrities and politicians who wish to be seen as being on “the right side of history”. Last week the MP for Walthamstow, Stella Creasy, tweeted about taking her infant son to a show in which a drag queen called Greta Tude “put so much energy into story telling and entertaining local children”. Her colleague Nadia Whittome replied, describing the event as “so wholesome”.

But do fans of drag really want it to become “wholesome”? The appeal of drag shows is that they revel in sexual dissidence, as the American drag queen Kitty Demure has pointed out:

    I have no idea why you want drag queens to read books to your children … Would you want a stripper or a porn star to influence your child? It makes no sense at all. A drag queen performs in a nightclub for adults. There is a lot of filth that goes on, a lot of sexual stuff that goes on, and backstage there’s a lot of nudity and sex and drugs. Okay? So I don’t think this is an avenue that you would want your child to explore.

The sexual element of drag is impossible to deny. Even the more tepid drag queens, whose repertoire extends no further than lip-synching to Donna Summer, tend to interlace their performances with suggestive gestures, provocative quips and the occasional slut-drop.

That’s not to say drag queens can’t adapt to a younger audience — they are actors after all. It’s perfectly possible for performers of Drag Queen Story Hour to read stories to children without all the eroticised preening and pouting we have come to expect from them. But why would any self-respecting artist want to do it? There is something deeply mystifying about drag queens who choose to anaesthetise their art form in order to regale infants with tales of teddy bears and picnics.

July 26, 2022

What’s worse than having a nepotistic elite running the country? Having an incompetent nepotistic elite running the country

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kurt Schlichter isn’t a fan of the kakistocratic “elite” running most of the western world at the moment:

The things we took for granted decades ago are uncertain, and there’s always an excuse — inevitably one that blames us. Like the new take on air conditioners, which is that they are an extravagance we should learn to live without. What the hell? Why?

And don’t get me started on the bizarre insistence of the resetters that we all need to give up beef and start eating bugs. I have a better idea. How about we eat ribeyes and burgers like Americans instead of crickets and locust like Third World famine victims?

A proper ruling class would see the problems and move to solve them, because the proper relationship between the ruling class and the rest of us is that the ruling class provides prosperity and security and the rest of us let them skim some cream off the top. If they were doing a decent job, their riches and luxuries would not bother us much; but when they have failed yet still expect full pay and benefits anyway, that grates. It is unsustainable.

So why doesn’t the ruling class try to get America moving again instead of telling us that we should settle for less and less? For one thing, because our ruling class is not competent. Joe Biden is, in a way, the perfect president for the resetters — stupid and getting seniler, corrupt, yet absolutely sure of his own genius despite literally no basis for that self-regard. Look, the solutions are there. Want to fix crime? Do what Giuliani did in New York City in the nineties. Want energy independence? Do what Trump did in 2016. Want the economy roaring? Do what Reagan and Trump did. These tactics are not secrets, yet they seem to be too hard for our elite to pull off. Our reset revolt will be to embrace someone who can.

Of course, the incompetence issue assumes that our elite wants to succeed in doing what elites should do. Does it really? Does it really want us prosperous, secure and free? Oh, the elite wants to succeed for itself, and it sure has. The elite is richer than ever. And it intends to stay that way even after you are reset to “Peasant” mode. The elite won’t be taking public transportation among the hobos like you. They will be safe behind armed guards while you are disarmed and victimized — defend yourself at your peril! And they will keep eating steak tartar while you slurp up beetle paste. Yum yum, proles!

The ruling caste has no intention of you living like a civilized citizen. No, you are their sacrifice, to Gaia, the angry weather goddess or whatever other pagan idol that empty void inside them worships. Your pain is the point. Remember, bullies love the raw exercise of power. Making you miserable is a manifestation of their urge to dominate and crush. That’s the genesis of those seemingly insane moves around the world like Sri Lanka giving up fertilizer or agricultural powerhouse Holland evicting farmers. But these moves — including the destruction of our own energy industry — only seem insane if you refuse to accept their ultimate goal. They want to hurt you. Your pain is a feature, not a bug — which will be your next meal if they get their way.

July 23, 2022

QotD: “The New Journalism” and “narrative journalism”

Filed under: History, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Most of what we consider public life in modern societies is public reactions to things done by the powerful. The New York Times makes up a new hoax and the week is spent on the hoax. The usual suspects swear by the obvious lies and normal people spend days picking apart the lies. Occasionally, we get the reverse where some uncomfortable truth gets loose and the usual suspect go bananas trying to “debunk” it while normal people cling to it as blessed relief.

This is the news cycle in a nutshell. There is very little news. It has been at least a generation since the major news outlets in America have done reporting. Most of it is just stenography. The “journalist” copies what a government spokesbot has sent to them and dresses it up with some commentary. Then there are the narratives that are designed to give the public a way to repeat the official truth that sounds convincing to them and their acquaintances.

The source of this is the “new journalism” that emerged in the 1960’s. The late British reporter Chris Munnion chronicled this in his book Banana Sunday. He spent most of his life covering Africa for the Telegraph. In the 1960’s he noticed Americans showing up with pre-written narratives. They would seek out quotes and pictures to fill out the story they had prepared for the trip. Even if the facts contradicted the narrative, they stuck with the narrative because that was the new journalism.

Narrative journalism is just accepted these days. The “news” has always been a form of passive-aggressive political activism so its evolution into story telling on behalf of powerful interests seems natural. When you think of the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal as propaganda arms of their respective clients in the managerial elite, it all makes sense. Instead of the Ministry of Truth we have the mainstream media “speaking truth to power”.

That last bit gets mocked by normal people on this side of the great divide because they have woken up to the reality of this age. As if often the case, however, there is a kernel of truth locked in this media fabrication. The people inside these disinformation operations genuinely fear the public. When they say “speak truth to power” they mean broadcast their truth to you in the hopes that you will buy it. Modern mass media is mostly a defensive weapon of the elites.

The Z Man, “The Lying Liars”, The Z Blog, 2022-04-20.

July 22, 2022

Inventing historical connections with slavery where they don’t exist

Filed under: Britain, History, Railways, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Quillette, David Foster recounts the story from the National Museum of Wales which effectively fabricated a connection to the slave trade as part of their politically correct performative “decolonization” efforts:

A replica of Richard Trevithick’s 1802 steam locomotive at the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea.
Photo by Chris55 via Wikimedia Commons.

In March, Britain’s Daily Telegraph and GB News channel both reported that the National Museum of Wales would be relabelling a replica of the first steam-powered locomotive, unveiled by its Cornish inventor Richard Trevithick in 1804. Trevithick had no links to slavery, but the amendment has apparently been included anyway as part of the museum’s commitment to “decolonizing” its collection. In a statement defending what it described as the addition of “historical context”, the museum said: “Although there might not be direct links between the Trevithick locomotive and the slave trade, we acknowledge the reality that links to slavery are woven into the warp and weft of Welsh society.” The statement continued:

    Trade and colonial exploitation were embedded in Wales’ economy and society and were fundamental to Wales’ development as an industrialised nation. As we continue to audit the collection, we will explore how the slave trade linked and fed into the development of the steam and railway infrastructure in Wales.

[…]

When a society compulsively disrespects its historical accomplishments — when it obsessively seeks to turn every good thing into a bad thing — the outlook for that society is bleak. It destroys social cohesion, and sends the wrong kind of message to actual and potential opponents. The matter of the steam locomotive display in Wales may seem minor, and certainly trivial when compared with the appalling events in Ukraine or the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons. But it is not.

The behavior of the museum administrators in Wales is of a piece with other contemporary symptoms, such as the eagerness within influential circles in the US to embrace the conclusions of the New York Times‘s revisionist 1619 project. It is part of the politicization of everything. Science, technology, and art cannot — indeed, must not — be appreciated simply on the grounds of beauty, utility, or truth; everything must be reduced to race, gender, and other academically and media-approved categories of analysis.

Trends such as these have real-world implications, including the growth and decline of nations and their relative power. Writing in 1940, C.S. Lewis, warned about the dangers of what he called the National Repentance Movement, which focused on the need to apologize for Britain’s sins (thought to include the Treaty of Versailles) and to forgive Britain’s enemies.

Certainly, the British State had done many bad things during its long and eventful history — as well as many good things. But the excessive focus on its sins was part of a phenomenon manifested in a 1933 motion debated at the Oxford Union: “This House will under no circumstances fight for King and country”. To the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese, attitudes like these indicated that aggression would not meet much resistance. They also informed a policy of appeasement.

Liberals and progressives (as they call themselves) claim to be greatly concerned with physical sustainability of resources and ecosystems. But they are too eager to undercut the social sustainability of their own societies and the physical infrastructures on which those societies depend, however fond they may be of repeating the word “infrastructure”.

July 18, 2022

“Sophisticated liberals” yawning in synchrony

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed West linked to this Jacob Siegel post about the tactical use of the “yawn” response to deflect and avoid discussion of topics “sophisticated liberals” want to avoid:

An American who wants to understand how political change occurs in their country must study what I’ve come to think of as the “yawning” habit of sophisticated liberals.

The yawn is an avoidance tactic that feigns moral and intellectual superiority while exhibiting dullness and cowardice. It is deployed when some flagrantly abnormal thing is occurring, which the sophisticated liberal is too sophisticated to defend outright — since to do so would expose them to potential mockery and loss of status — but too cowardly to condemn, since that would risk placing them on the wrong side of Progress.

Here we can observe the liberal pundit Josh Marshall, yawning as loud as he can in response to questions about the precepts of gender ideology.

Marshall has not given much thought to why thousands of people, including adolescents, have suddenly decided to alter their bodies in irreversible ways. He’s not just incurious, he’s bragging about it. Only right-wing, extremist Putin lovers (of course, Marshall was a Russiagate conspiracist) would possibly care about an historically unprecedented, institutionally directed revolt against sexual dimorphism. A 2018 study by the British government found that the number of minors being referred for gender treatments, including hormone injections, increased by more than 4,000% in a single decade … How uninteresting. Yawn. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health just lowered the minimum age for children to receive puberty blockers or undergo transition surgery from 16 to 14. Double yawn.

“I’d like to know why you care,” the conservative pundit Matt Walsh is asked repeatedly in his new agitprop documentary What Is a Woman? The academics and other gender experts whom Walsh interviews clearly view this as an effective response to his line of questioning. It tells you something about the moral and intellectual vitality of contemporary liberalism that they simply assume that the people whose opinions they care about would agree there’s something very suspicious and déclassé about insisting on a definition of woman.

July 11, 2022

Well, we were overdue for another “Great Awakening”, but this time it’s woke

Filed under: Media, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the Neo-Ciceronian Times, Theophilus Chilton outlines why it’s more sensible to regard today’s progressives as devout cultists rather than persuaded political activists:

You may not have been aware of it, but a religious revival has been sweeping America for the past few years. However, rather than the old-time religion of Christian piety, it’s a new religion with new idols and a new direction. Yet, not entirely new — it’s the latest phase in an evolving revolutionary belief system that has consciously set itself against every aspect of traditional American culture and society. Whereas earlier progressivism made an effort to appear to integrate itself into earlier American paradigms even as it was acting to overturn them, the current religion of Woke Progressivism has completely excised itself from any pretension of respect for previous Americanism.

Some on the Right balk at the terminology of referring to woke progressivism as a “religion”. After all, hasn’t the modern Left been characterised by a rejection of religion? By an increasingly overt atheism that not only denies traditional religion, but actively subverts and mocks? Yet, unlike European modes of leftism that have remained more within the boundaries of orthodox Marxism-Leninism, official atheism has never been able to gain more than a toehold in the United States. The American temperament is a religious one and therefore requires some object of piety towards which it is directed.

For the Left, this new object of piety was channeled into cultural Marxism, a form of New Leftism that has successfully managed to take over nearly every institution — government, corporate, cultural — in this country. It did so by providing a more comprehensive program, one that was as much cultural subversion and replacement as it was “traditional” economic leftism, than older forms of socialism. This new leftism, which in its full floruit is the woke progressivism we see today, provides a totalising replacement ideology that seeks to sweep away everything that came before it.

But is this new belief system a religion? I believe that it definitely can be thought of as one, since it displays all the typical sociological patterns found in religions as they have been found throughout history, plus a few that are typical of cult groups as they’re observed today.

To begin, woke progressivism has a precisely defined and systematically enforced body of doctrines which are to be believed, not rationalised. The fluidity of gender, the naturalness of homosexuality, the evil of whiteness — all of these and much more are to be received by simple faith. But these aren’t randomly chosen. They have overarching doctrinal bases that fit within the larger progressive ideological agenda. Put together, these constitute an interlocking body of progressive doctrine that provides a comprehensive ideology to its followers.

Yet at the same time, woke progressivism does have a means of receiving new revelation and new interpretation via its own body of canonical authorities who then pass on this doctrine to the larger body of the woke “church”. This is done primarily through means of the narrative-shaping performed by major media outlets working in conjunction with elements within government, NGOs, and academia (the complex of which is what neoreactionaries often refer to as “the Cathedral”). Indeed, that process has been at work for decades — e.g. it is how the Afrocentrism of the 1980s went from being an odd, laughable academic quirk to being received doctrine which naysaying can cause you to lose your job. Have you ever noticed how when some new element of the progressive narrative hits, whether it’s a fundamental element of ideology or simply how to think about some current news event, that progressives seem to adopt it all at once?

There’s a reason for that. Once a change or addition is decided, the doctrine is swiftly promulgated to all of the local parishes and becomes a received and accepted part of the faith.

QotD: The sad plight of the academic

Filed under: Education, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There are lots of explanations for why college folk are the way they are. I’ve offered several of them myself. But when it comes right down to it, all the various explanations are just symptoms of the same fundamental disease: They’re boring, and they know they’re boring.

Boredom is, in fact, the modern West’s signature pathology. Nobody with a rich, full life — a rewarding job, some hobbies, family and friends — bothers about “intersectionality” and whatnot. That’s not to say that Normals don’t get bored. However, for us boredom is a temporary feature of life. We know how to handle it; we have a zillion ways of killing time. What’s more important, we know that boredom’s just a part of life; it happens to the best of us.

For them, each episode of boredom is an existential crisis. They’ve convinced themselves that they have all the answers, that to be #Woke is to be a god among men. So if their lives aren’t 100% wonderful and fulfilling all the time — every second of every minute of every hour of every day — it throws the fundamental premise of their entire existence into question. It it any wonder, then, why they’re constantly hyperventilating about everything? Without a constant infusion of drama, they have to face the fact that they’re just people, buggering through life with the rest of us.

Severian, “The Reluctant Revolutionary”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-04-05.

July 2, 2022

QotD: How To Read Lacan

Filed under: Books, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Why did I read How To Read Lacan by Slavoj Zizek?

I could answer this question on many levels. For example, the theological level: maybe I committed some sin in a past life. Maybe I was predestined to unhappiness. Maybe, having given me free will, God is no longer able to save me from my own bad choices.

On a more practical level: I’m trying to learn more about leftism, I’m trying to learn more about continental philosophy, and I’m trying to learn more about psychoanalysis. I figured I might as well get it all out of the way at once.

I was expecting this to be incomprehensible, but I was pleasantly surprised how good a writer Zizek was. He explains everything clearly, in down-to-earth prose interspersed with mildly funny Slovenian jokes that illustrate his points.

(Lacan himself is completely incomprehensible, to the point where he might as well be speaking Martian, but this book wisely avoided quoting Lacan except where absolutely necessary).

Despite being very readable, this book never really came together. Each chapter consisted of a Lacan quote, followed by Zizek’s interpretations and thoughts. The thoughts were always things like “Sometimes the act of communication itself can communicate something” or “We are never truly engaged with another person, even during sex”. These are always kind of reasonable, Zizek always does a good job proving them and relating them to mildly funny Slovenian jokes, and I came away agreeing with all of them. But I don’t feel like I understand how any of them cohere together into an object called “Lacanianism”, and none of them really seemed like a very surprising revelation, which is one reason this doesn’t get a full book review.

Scott Alexander, “Short Book Reviews April 2019”, Slate Star Codex, 2019-04-09.

June 30, 2022

What’s the military version of the saying “Get woke, go broke”?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Health, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray on the largely self-inflicted damage suffered by the US Army during the last few years, leading to (among other things) significant recruiting shortfalls:

The American military is running a social trust test for the larger society, and the results are remarkably clear.

Remember that the Biden administration opened with an ideological assault on the armed forces, ordering a training stand-down to harangue servicemembers about politics.

[…]

While the public framing was vague, the training wasn’t: It ran in a single direction. Servicemembers reporting on their “extremism” training to members of Congress described sessions in which the military warned them against white nationalism and the dangers of far-right sentiment, but didn’t mention Antifa (or ISIS, but whatever), hammering the January 6 narrative but deflecting questions about riots and arson in the summer of 2020. In uniform, troops did “privilege walks” and unpacked their white privilege in supervised discussions. Extremism, it turns out, is only one kind of thing, on a single end of the political spectrum.

Pursuing the theme of politically purified armed forces, three retired US Army generals published an op-ed in the Washington Post calling for a political commissariat in the American military: “In addition, all military branches must undertake more intensive intelligence work at all installations. The goal should be to identify, isolate and remove potential mutineers; guard against efforts by propagandists who use misinformation to subvert the chain of command; and understand how that and other misinformation spreads across the ranks after it is introduced by propagandists.” More domestic political spying will make our institutions healthy, they explained.

[…]

The result of woke leadership, politicized military service, Covid vaccine mandates that decline to take safety concerns and religious objections into account, and wars fought for no point or objective:

[…]

And a generation shrugs.

The military is only the most obvious, most centralized example of a burgeoning withdrawal from institutions crippled by lost trust. Nationwide, undergraduate college enrollment declined by 662,000 in a single year. Meanwhile, public school enrollment in California is imploding. The LAUSD, which was closing in on 800,000 students twenty years ago, is now moving in the other direction, and closing in on 400,000.

Institutions can shit on people, and push them past their limits, and make absurd and unkind demands of them. Until they can’t.

There will be more of this.

June 24, 2022

The Guardians of Free Speech

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published 23 Jun 2022

Because of the social media circus surrounding the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard defamation trial, it was easy to overlook one of the principal — yet least likely — actors in the courtroom drama: the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which ghostwrote and placed the 2018 Washington Post op-ed by Heard about surviving domestic abuse that was the basis of the trial.

——————-

It’s only the latest example of how the group has in recent years strayed from its original mission of defending speech, no matter how vile. Awash with money after former President Donald Trump was elected, the ACLU transformed into an organization that championed progressive causes, undermining the principled neutrality that helped make it a powerful advocate for the rights of clients ranging from Nazis to socialists.

It questioned the due process rights of college students accused of sexual assault and harassment under Title IX rules. It ran partisan ads against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and for Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, a move that current Executive Director Anthony Romero told The New York Times was a mistake. The ACLU also called for the federal government to forgive $50,000 per borrower in student loans.

As the ACLU recedes from its mission, enter another free speech organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE. Founded in 1999 to combat speech codes on college campuses, FIRE is expanding to go well beyond the university and changing its name to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. The group has raised $29 million toward a three-year “litigation, opinion research and public education campaign aimed at boosting and solidifying support for free-speech values.”

“I think there have been better moments for freedom of speech when it comes to the culture,” says FIRE’s president, Greg Lukianoff. “When it comes to the law, the law is about as good as it’s ever been. But when it comes to the culture, our argument is that it’s gotten a lot worse and that we don’t have to accept it.”

Lukianoff tells Reason that FIRE’s new initiatives have been in the works for years, but gained urgency during the COVID lockdowns. “Pretty much from day one, people have been asking us to take our advocacy off campus to an extent nationally,” he says. “But 2020 was such a scarily bad year for freedom of speech on campus and off, we decided to accelerate that process.” Despite 80 percent of campuses being closed and doing instruction remotely, Lukianoff says that FIRE received 50 percent more requests for help from college students and faculty. He also points to The New York Times‘ editorial page editor, James Bennet, getting squeezed out after running an article by Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) and high-profile journalists such as Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, and Matt Yglesias “stepping away from [their publications], saying that the environment was too intolerant.”

FIRE is also expanding its efforts beyond legal advocacy and into promoting what Lukianoff calls “the culture of free speech.” As Politico reports, it will spend $10 million “in planned national cable and billboard advertising featuring activists on both ends of the political spectrum extolling the virtues of free speech.”

He says that people in their 40s and 50s grew up in a country where the culture of free speech was embedded in colloquial sayings and common attitudes. “Things like everyone’s entitled to their opinion, which is something you heard all the time when we were kids. It’s a free country, to each their own, statements of deep pluralism, like the idea that [you should] walk a mile in a man’s shoes,” he explains. “All of these things are great principles for taking advantage of pluralism, but they’ve largely sort of fallen out of usage due to a growing skepticism about freedom of speech, particularly on campus, that’s been about 40 years in the making.”

Lukianoff has nothing negative to say about the ACLU (in fact, he used to work there) and stresses that FIRE has worked with the organization since “day one” and continues to do so. But unlike the ACLU, FIRE isn’t at risk of turning into a progressive advocacy organization, partly because its staff is truly bipartisan.

That pluralistic pride extends to the groups funding FIRE, too. Lukianoff thinks that despite the rise of cancel culture, most Americans still understand the value of free speech, but they need to be encouraged to stand up for it. FIRE’s polling, he says, reveals that “it’s really a pretty small minority, particularly pronounced on Twitter, that is anti-free-speech philosophically and thinks that people should shut up and conform.”

For that reason, he’s upbeat that FIRE will succeed in helping to restore belief in the value and function of free speech.

Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Regan Taylor.

QotD: “[Woodrow] Wilson was a human pile of flaming trash”

Filed under: Government, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I come now not to explain Wilson, but to hate him. A national consensus on hating Wilson is long overdue. It is the patriotic duty of every decent American. While conservatives have particular reasons to detest Wilson, and all his works, and all his empty promises, there is more than enough in his record for moderates, liberals, progressives, libertarians, and socialists to join us in this great and unifying cause.

The roll call of the worst presidents in American history includes some consensus top choices. James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce both contributed mightily to the nation’s slide into the Civil War, and Andrew Johnson did enduring harm to Reconstruction in the war’s aftermath. But all three of those men were repudiated by the end of their single term in office. They left no heirs who would acknowledge their influence, no fleet of academic hagiographers who could see themselves reflected in those presidencies.

Wilson, by contrast, served two full and consequential terms. He was the only Democrat re-elected to the job during the century between 1832 and 1936. He was lionized by liberals and progressives in academia and the media for most of the century after he left office in 1921. In my youth, and perhaps yours, Wilson was presented in history books as a tragic hero whom the unthinking American people didn’t deserve. He was often placed highly on academics’ rankings of the presidents. Princeton University named its school of international relations for him. Even in rescinding that honor in June 2020, the university’s press release declared: “Though scholars disagree about how to assess Wilson’s tenure as president of the United States, many rank him among the nation’s greatest leaders and credit him with visionary ideas that shaped the world for the better.”

Nah. Wilson was a human pile of flaming trash. He was a bad man who made the country and the world worse. His name should be an obscenity, his image an effigy. Hating him is a wholesome obligation of citizenship.

Dan McLaughlin, “The Hater’s Guide to Woodrow Wilson”, National Review, 2022-03-16.

June 22, 2022

Riding the tiger almost always ends badly for the rider

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Christian Watson considers the plight of so many consciously progressive organizations as they discover that there are no limits to wokeness:

Leftists created wokeism. They claimed it was about justice, inclusion for all, diversity, equity and more, much much more. However, this ill-defined “theology” has become a self-destructive nihilism.

Now, leftist organizations are being eaten from within over the no-bounds, no-rules wokeism.

Wokeism essentially empowers any person – except straight white males – to claim grievances. There are no limits as to what can be called a “microaggression” or upon which one can claim to be harmed. With wokeism, “my truth” matters — even if it is not at all based in reality.

A recent report from The Intercept outlined the many ways leftist organizations are imploding due to this open-ended invitation for people to claim grievances. Leftist organizations found themselves mired in “Slack wars, and healing sessions, grappling with tensions over hierarchy, patriarchy, race, gender, and power.”

Some executives claim they spend “90 to 95 percent” of their time addressing office drama. They’re being forced to address issues that have nothing to do with the organization’s mission or the donors’ wishes.

Executives at the Guttmacher Institute, the American Civil Liberties Union, Sierra Club, and elsewhere are now the targets of their own employees for failing to meet their woke expectations.

Many executives have quit, leaving behind prominent positions because they simply cannot stand their employees. As one executive put it, “This is out of control. No one can be a leader in this culture. It’s not sustainable. We’re constantly being called out from the bottom.”

“I also see a pattern of … people who are not competent in their orgs getting ahead of the game by declaring that others have engaged in some kind of -ism, thereby triggering a process that protects them in that job while there’s an investigation or turmoil over it,” a separate executive stated.

That process leads to internal divisions as employees take sides. And when the woke rules are violated, no apology is ever good enough.

June 21, 2022

QotD: The modern age of ad hominem

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Ad Hominem has become not only the prime argument of the scalawag, but, in the current intellectual climate, the only argument. It is the only arrow in the quiver and the only dart they have.

Hence, I myself have developed a particular enmity and impatience with the art of merely labeling opposing viewpoints as anathema, and dismissing them, sight unseen, with no further investigation.

These are not cases where a particular person known to have an ulterior motive or suffering a well earned reputation for dishonesty find his remarks being regarded with judicious skepticism. These are cases where to disagree with the party line or popular gossip provokes the accusation of being such a person.

While not all scalawags are Morlocks, all Morlocks are scalawags. Scalawaggery is the core of their philosophy. Morlock borrowed from the generous genius of HG Wells, for anyone who imagines himself to be evolved beyond human norms and into the realm of moral inversion, so that all rules of right and wrong, only for oneself, are flipped downside up.

In Wells, the Morlock is a cannibal troglodyte who treats other human descendants as cattle. In my wry jest, a Morlock is an intellectual trapped in a structure of reasoning he erected, at first, to justify his inhumanity toward his fellow human beings. That structure has since become for his his thought-prison. The bars and chains are mental and spiritual. Impalpable, they are unbreakable.

Their inhumanity include treating the children of other men as lab experiments and a mass attempt at sexual social engineering, namely, the elimination of the two sexes. Inhumanity also includes treating individuals as fungible and interchangeable nonentities in the great game of identity politics, so that simplistic and bigoted generalizations about minorities or majorities become not merely permitted, but mandatory. Inhumanity includes treating the prosperity and freedom of other men as optional, or even as hindrances, in the headlong panics and stampedes inspired by orchestrated ecological scaremongering and virtue-signaling.

Inhumanity includes regarding other men as meat-robots, or hairless apes, or helpless cells of blind historical forces, and hence as nothing more than the raw materials to be bred like livestock or organized like chain gangs or stacked like cordwood or slaughtered like scapegoats to create the foundations of the towers of Utopia.

The inhumanity, sadly, also and finally includes an inhumanity toward themselves, whenever a godless and soulless mind turns inward, and develops terminal narcissism. All men beyond the narrow orbit of self-absorbed self-regard are reduced to flitting shadows, and seem to Narcissus to be merely echoes, not real.

John C. Wright, “Ad Hominem and Illusion”, John C. Wright, 2022-03-18.

June 14, 2022

Gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia

Filed under: Britain, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Once upon a time, in the dark recesses of ancient history (say, 2015 or so), most of the people expressing dissatisfaction with their birth gender were male. Shortly after that, the numbers inverted significantly and today it’s predominantly females demanding “gender affirming” treatment:

Girls who reject femininity or self identify as male or “non-binary” actually have a form of body dysmorphia. Rejecting their feminine body parts, for instance by flattening their chests, shows repulsion toward the areas they feel are not fit for acceptance. The trend of “binding” to produce a flat, androgynous body is dangerous, cutting off the air supply and possibly causing permanent damage, but it is encouraged as a precursor to transitioning from female to male.

In fact, transgendered people who were born women tend to suffer from eating disorders in an “extremely high proportion”, according to the Duke University Health System.

Make no mistake, a young woman who is dieting obsessively does not wish to look feminine or capable of having children. Many women who achieve their desired weight by extreme dieting cease to have periods and even grow downy hair on the face which resembles the incoming beard of a pre-pubescent man.

So is gender dysphoria essentially interchangeable with body dysmorphia? The woke people working at the NHS and gender reassignment clinics would never admit it, and would deny any correlation despite the statistics. But they are seeing more gender dysphoric young women than ever.

According to this article, entitled “Why Are So Many Females Coming out as Trans/Non-Binary?” in recent years the proportion of young women coming out as trans as opposed to men has increased dramatically. This shows a reversal from the previous trend years ago of more men wishing to become the opposite sex. But the incidence of actual transitions carried out does not show a corresponding rise for women, and that should prove many young women eventually grow out of identifying as trans, or “desist” from the desire to become male. “Desistance” refers to the situation where a young person who experiences gender dysphoria eventually “grows out of it” and decides not to go through with a sex change.

The occurrence of desistance among youngsters supports the position that they should not be allowed to undergo irreversible operations such as mastectomy or be pumped full of hormones (including puberty blocking “treatments”) which they are likely later to regret. Sadly, many medical “experts” don’t believe the figures cited for desistance among young people and discount them as flawed due to the looser criteria for diagnosing gender dysphoria used in the past. In other words, young boys who liked to wear dresses and would have been diagnosed as transgendered in previous years would not so qualify today, but young girls who hate their bodies and want to mutilate their breasts would be eligible for such “treatments”. The reasoning goes on that a whole raft subsisted of boys who were merely “gay boys who may have been experimenting with different ways of expressing gender but who were never really transgender in the first place”.

Such conclusions defy common sense or any logic or human decency. This article cites the findings of one Thomas Steensma, a clinician and researcher at the Centre of Expertise on Gender Dysphoria at the VU University Medical Centre in Amsterdam. He conveniently found in a study that desistance rates were lower in older, female children than in young boys.

H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.

June 12, 2022

The “w-word” is no longer allowed, please update your Newspeak Dictionary, citizens

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brendan O’Neill on how the dreaded “w-word” is being actively erased from woke vocabulary [Note — to avoid being prosecuted under some progressive British law, I’m protecting the innocent eyes of my readers by substituting [the “w-word”] in this article to avoid offence]:

Two people at EuroPride 2019 in Vienna holding an LGBTQ+ pride rainbow flag featuring a design by Daniel Quasar; this variation of the rainbow flag was initially promoted as “Progress” a PRIDE Flag Reboot.
Photo by Bojan Cvetanović via Wikimedia Commons.

Over the past week we have witnessed two biological males – or men, as we used to call them – winning first and second place in a [the “w-word”]‘s cycling race. We’ve watched as the Crown Prosecution Service has hired a diversity consultant who is trans and who has previously suggested that [the “w-word”] could be replaced with “womxn”. We’ve heard that civil servants have received equality training telling them that the phrase “adult human female” – which is the dictionary definition of [the “w-word”] – is a transphobic dogwhistle. We’ve seen the publication of a new study by King’s College London which suggests that one way around sex / gender controversies might be to change the wording of questions in official documents like the census. For example, you could ask respondents “Do you menstruate?” rather than “Are you a [the “w-word”]?”.

Anyone who doubts that the word [the “w-word”], and the entire idea of [the “w-word”]hood, is being erased, sacrificed at the altar of the ideology of transgenderism, will surely have had a rude awakening these past few days. When men can claim [the “w-word”]‘s sporting prizes, it is clear that [the “w-word”]‘s sport risks becoming a thing of the past. When powerful institutions like the CPS and the civil service flirt with the idea that it is sinful to utter the words “adult human female”, it is obvious that even talking about [the “w-word”] has become a risky business. When even someone as globally influential as Michelle Obama uses the unpronounceable word “womxn”, as she did in a story shared to her Instagram page, you know that it’s not just time-rich, purple-haired campus crazies who have tumbled down the rabbit hole of genderfluidity. No, from the sporting world to the political world, from the justice system to the state bureaucracy, the idea that sex can be changed, and that language must be changed to avoid offending the trans minority, is orthodox now.

Strikingly, Mrs Obama’s use of the word “womxn” was related to the Roe v Wade controversy. She shared on Instagram a series of slides created by the nonprofit campaign group When We All Vote. One of them said: “State lawmakers will have the power to strip womxn of the right to make decisions about their bodies and their healthcare.” There is a dark irony to this comment, and one that exposes just how messed up the war on [the “w-word”]hood has become. That Obama-endorsed IG slide frets about [the “w-word”] being stripped of the right to control their bodies and yet it implicitly strips [the “w-word”] of the right to use certain words when they talk about themselves and what they need. “Womxn” is a reprimanding word, used to remind the female masses that their kind includes men now too. As Dictionary.com said of “womxn” when it added it in 2019, it is designed to be “inclusive of trans and non-binary” people. That is, blokes. In stripping out the old, supposedly problematic word “[the “w-word”]“, even as it wrings its hands over [the “w-word”] – sorry, womxn – being stripped of their bodily autonomy, When We All Vote unwittingly highlights the profound confusions and deep illiberalism behind today’s erasure of [the “w-word”]hood.

Barely a day passes without fresh reports about the linguistic war on [the “w-word”]kind. So the recent civil-service story involves a group called A:gender, which supports trans and intersex people who work in government departments. The Times got hold of some training videos A:gender has produced, which are shown to thousands of civil servants every year, one of which claims that it is impossible to define [the “w-word”] and that saying “adult human female” can be “transphobic”. Beware, these woke educators warn the civil service, of “transphobia [that] is increasingly presented as feminism”. To reiterate, this is civil servants we’re talking about, the people responsible for the smooth functioning of the nation. And they’re being told that if you say out loud what the dictionary says [the “w-word”] is, then you are a bigot. They’re being told that the likes of JK Rowling, whose great thoughtcrime is to understand biology, promote hatred dressed up as feminism.

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