… back in 1968 the Media convinced themselves they held the whip. Between the “Chicago Police Riot” (in reality a bunch of SDS goons finally goading the cops into cracking down) and the Tet Offensive (in reality, a communist catastrophe that all but destroyed the Viet Cong as a fighting force), the Media convinced themselves they truly were the shapers of the nation’s hearts and minds. From then on out, the Media assumed their primary job was not to report the news, but to instruct us how to feel about the news. They anointed themselves as a secular priesthood, and from that moment forward, people went into “journalism” specifically to change the world.
That suited the Democrats’ short-term interests just fine. Then as now, the Democrats were a bunch of fellow-traveling wannabe-totalitarians. The difference, though, is that in 1968 grownups were still in charge of the party. Being intimately familiar with the concept of “useful idiots”, the grownup Dems were happy to encourage the journo-kids’ delusions of grandeur. The kids might not have been able to stir up enough shit to get Hubert Humphrey elected — that would’ve been a tough sell for Josef Goebbels — but they could make life hot for Richard Nixon. In other words, the Democrats thought they held the whip.
1972 should’ve been a wakeup call, but to be fair, all the campaign wonks were still reeling from The Great Magic Party Switch of 1964. Both halves of the failed Democratic ticket from 1968 ran in the 1972 primaries, and so did George Wallace (who actually won more primaries than either Humphrey or Muskie — 6 to 5 and 4, respectively). Which left George McGovern, a goofy hippie from a nothing state who was so bad at politics that he got outflanked as a peacenik by Richard Nixon, the man who was right at that moment actually running the goddamn war. […]
[McGovern’s platform was], in short, “amnesty, abortion, and acid,” a Donald Trump-level linguistic killshot if ever there was one.
The point isn’t that McGovern was a goofy hippie. The point is that McGovern was The Media’s fair-haired boy. Hubert Humphrey was no one’s idea of a steely-eyed realist, but he was a grown-up. When he attacked McGovern as too radical during their primary debates, he was expressing America’s frustration with bratty, coddled, know-nothing college kids and their bong-addled, patchouli-soaked nonsense. But since it was the aforesaid spoiled, stoned college kids who wrote the election coverage …
Viewed from this perspective, Democratic Party politics up to now can be seen as the increasingly desperate attempts of the few remaining grownups to fend off The Media’s increasingly frantic grabs for the whip. Take a gander at these goofballs from 1976. Remember the “Scoop Jackson Democrats” all the National Review types kept gushing about when they needed some Democratic cover for W’s imperial misadventures? “Scoop” Jackson was a real guy, and probably the only adult in the room in 1976. Jimmy Carter, the eventual nominee, could at least fake being a serious, mature human being when he wasn’t being chased by enraged, swimming bunnies. The Jerry Brown of 1976 is the very same Jerry Brown who is putting the finishing touches on the shitholization of California here in 2019, and guess who The Media just loooooooved back in the ’76 primaries?
See also: Every other election through 2016. Sometimes The Media and the Party moved in tandem — e.g. Bill Clinton — but more often it played out like 1988, when the Party had to drag a bland nonentity (Mike Dukakis) over the finish line in the face of a Media darling (Jesse Jackson). This dynamic also explains the weird “enthusiasm gap” of Democratic voters starting in 2000 — nobody actually liked Al Gore or John Kerry, but since W. made The Media lose their tiny little minds, they went all-in on painting those two human toothaches as The Saviors of Mankind.
Severian, “Which Hand Holds the Whip?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-07-17.
October 18, 2022
QotD: The US media and the Democratic Party since 1968
October 16, 2022
The concept of “childhood” changes over time
Chris Bray on the steady changes in how adult societies have viewed their children from the “better whipped than damned” views of the Puritans to the “childhood is sexy” views of today’s avante-garde opinion pushers:
Childhood is mercury.
Puritans thought that children were born in a state of profound corruption, marked by Original Sin. Infants cry and toddlers mope and disobey because they’re fallen, and haven’t had the time and the training to grow into any higher character. The devil is in them, literally. And so the first task of the Puritan parent was “will-breaking”, the act of crushing the natural depravity of the selfish and amoral infant. A child was “better whipped than damned”, in need of the firm and steady repression of his natural depravity. Proper parenting was cold and distant; parents were to instruct.
By the back half of the 19th century, children were sweet creatures, born in a state of natural innocence, until the depravity of society destroyed their gentle character. (“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”) Meanwhile, the decline of family-centered industry changed the household. The historical father, present all day on the family farm and guiding his children with patriarchal modeling and moral instruction, left for work at the factory or the office, and mom occupied “the women’s sphere“, the nurturing home.
Depraved infants, stern and firm parents; innocent children, nurturing mothers. Those two conceptions of childhood and the family can be found less than a hundred years apart at their edges. There are some other pieces to layer into that story, and see also the last thing I wrote here about the history of childhood. But the briefest version of an explanation is that the changing idea of what it meant to be a child was a reflection of growing affluence and security: Calvinist religious dissenters living hard and unstable lives viewed childhood darkly, while the apotheosis of Romantic childhood appeared in the homes of the emerging Victorian management class.
So childhood is mercury: It moves and morphs with societal changes, becoming a different thing in different cultures and economies. It tells you what the temperature is.
In the febrile cultural implosion of 2022, childhood is sexy, and legislators work hard to make sure 12 year-olds can manage their STDs without the interference of their stupid clingy parents.
Or click on this link to see a fun story about a teacher in Alabama who has a sideline as a drag queen, reading a story to young children about a dog who digs up a bone and then cleverly telling the children, “Everybody loves a big bone.” Wink wink! I mean, really, what could be sexier or more fun than talking to very young children about thick adult erections, amirite?
Update: Corrected link.
October 12, 2022
The two traditions of the American political left
Chris Bray responds to a post by Leighton Woodhouse that declares that “left libertarianism” has won the battle for the soul of the American left:
I see two traditions on the American political left.
One is a tradition skeptical of authority, or aggressively hostile to it: Striking miners battling Coal and Iron Police, or Pinkertons, or Colorado sheriffs, or the National Guard; Wobblies fighting cops in the street; Great War-era socialists attacking the military draft, and going to prison for it; the Weatherman planting bombs in police and military offices. This tradition on the left views government as authority, a repressive servant of the status quo — “the executive committee of the bourgeoisie”. Leftists in this tradition say that of course government serves capitalism and corporate power, and of course the government isn’t on our side. Go back to the Coal and Iron Police to see how radical labor activists saw them: state-sanctioned police, with badges, on the private payroll of the industrialists. The young radical George Orwell, writing about his time fighting in Spain: “When I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.”
The other is a tradition centered on the supposedly inherent decency, wisdom, and fairness of government, a tradition that runs through the capital-p Progressive Era and Woodrow Wilson, to the New Deal, and onward into the Great Society. In this tradition, state power is benevolence itself, and points its kindness downward. Government interposes itself between the downtrodden worker and the power of the wealthy, ensuring the dignity of the poor. Tax the rich! In this tradition, government represents our best selves, our highest yearning for a better world. Why, just look at how much more equitable the progressive income tax made our social order, back when marginal tax rates were so much more fair at the top. Government serves, protects, nurtures: It’s the tool of the ordinary man, offering the noble guarantees of Social Security and Medicaid. Of course government is on our side, fellow downtrodden, and we need more of it.
Those two traditions don’t fit together, though the obvious way to square the circle is to say that a Bill Ayers opposes the power of the state when it opposes him, and embraces it if he thinks his side has come to control it. This would mean that there aren’t two ideological traditions — just two different instrumental postures. But no one who survived the Ludlow Massacre thought the government was a benevolent servant of the working man.
As Leighton Woodhouse notes, we have a good deal of what looks like anti-authority leftism in our cities, in the form of movements that call for the end of mass incarceration, the defunding of the police, and the transition to a social services model in response to homelessness and drug addiction. In this view, rising crime and growing homelessness are signs of urban leftists rejecting authority as a tool. Homelessness is not a crime, you fascists!
But I’ve written before about the incredible strangeness of progressive political columnists denouncing Donald Trump’s vicious authoritarianism, and then proudly pivoting to an expression of their approval of the warm and caring Justin Trudeau — who cracked down on incipient Trumpism in his country by boldly freezing the bank accounts of dangerous participants in the evil right-wing truck convoy. When government freezes the bank accounts of protesters, government is fighting against authoritarianism, obviously. More government power means less authoritarianism!
QotD: Luxury beliefs
An easy way to show that you’re not a member of the riff-raff, the masses, is to hold the opposite opinion, or a strange opinion that maybe doesn’t make sense, because it shows you’re not one of them. It’s not just the opinion itself, but the way that you express it. If you express it using vocabulary that no-one has ever heard of, for example … You often are not paying the price for your luxury beliefs, but even if you do, it’s still not nearly the same as the cost inflicted on the lower classes if they were to adopt those luxury beliefs too. […]
I talked to a friend of mine who was telling me, “When I set my Tinder radius to one mile, just around the university, and I see the bios of the women, a lot of their profiles say things like ‘poly’ or ‘keeping it casual’ – basically, they’re not interested in anything too serious.” He says something like half of them have something like that in their bio. And then he said, “But when I expand the radius on my Tinder to five miles, to include the rest of the city and the more run-down areas beyond the university bubble, half the women are single moms.” And basically, the luxury beliefs of the former group, the educated group, trickled down and ended up having this outsize effect on the people who are less fortunate, who don’t have the [social and] economic capital of the people who can afford that belief.
David Thompson, quoting from the transcript of a TRIGGERnometry interview with Rob Henderson, David Thompson, 2022-07-11.
October 6, 2022
QotD: Life in grad school
After a few years of this, you forget what normal life is even like. You come to understand the deep and longstanding grievances the Poststructuralist Feminist Marxists have with the Marxist Feminist Poststructuralists. Oh, there’s scads of “diversity” on campus — all those recruiting brochures they mail to dumb parents in the ‘burbs aren’t lying — but there’s one thing you’ll never, ever find: The thought that maybe politics doesn’t matter all that much.
That’s the answer, right there. Academic “humanities” work is mostly bullshit because most people just don’t care about politics. To normals, if they think about “politics” at all, it’s in Schoolhouse Rock terms — some guys in Washington vote on some stuff, and that’s how a bill becomes a law. They certainly don’t mean ideology, which is pretty much the only thing academics mean. That a normal person could walk into the voting booth without really knowing if he’s going to pull the lever for Trump or Hillary fries an egghead’s circuits…
… and yet, as we all know, the majority of American voters do this, every single time. There’s something profound about normal person behavior that academics just can’t — or won’t — grasp.
Severian, “Ignoring the Human Factor”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-08-14.
October 4, 2022
“… apparently the future of science is BAJEDI (Belonging Accessibility Justice Equity Diversity and Inclusion), which is quite a bit cooler than mere DEI”
And you thought the stuffy old National Science Foundation was only supporting pale, stale, cisgendered white male research? Think again!
I’ve written many times about the National Science Foundation and its increasingly politicized conception of “science”. As an independent federal agency with a nearly $9 billion budget, the NSF is a behemoth in the world of academic science, shaping research agendas and the future of the professoriate. And apparently the future of science is BAJEDI (Belonging Accessibility Justice Equity Diversity and Inclusion), which is quite a bit cooler than mere DEI. Here’s a current funding opportunity for scientists:
The federal agency that funds research projects like “Probing Nucleation and Growth Dynamics of Lithium Dendrites in Solid Electrolytes” is moving hard into the business of social justice, with career-making grants that will focus STEM researchers on the problem of racial grievances. Here’s how much money is available for that racial equity program:
The premise underlying this turn toward equity-focused science projects is that “science scholars who are underrepresented in STEM produce higher rates of scientific novelty”. Innovation is grounded in race and ethnicity; the more gloriously intersectional you are, the more creative you become. Imagine the boldness of a transgendered Asian Pacific Islander astrophysics, and how much newer and fresher our conception of the universe is when it doesn’t come from straight white males.
And so the NSF wants to fund “diversity champions” who will freshen up our science with BIPOC innovation — which means adding more sociologists to the team of geophysicists: “When developing proposals, the PI team should acknowledge the need for increased engagement from social and behavioral science experts to address issues related to BAJEDI in the geosciences and include these best practices and experts in proposed projects.” […]
It’s a real cultural revolution in the world of academic science.
October 1, 2022
QotD: The Left does not handle political reverses gracefully
The Left is absolutely right to fear all of this because these things represent the furtherance of a growing trend towards decentralisation that I’ve been talking about recently. This is bad for them because the Left’s whole program — and I’m talking about going back for at least two centuries — has been based on the centralisation of power into its own hands. Everything the Left does is predicated upon the “principle” of coalescing power into its hands in government, NGOs, woke corporations, and a constellation of other institutions that all coordinate together to advance the progressive agenda. Due to our place in our current demographic-structural secular cycle, this decentralisation is nigh inevitable, but that doesn’t mean the Left won’t (literally) burn through a lot of social capital fruitlessly trying to stop it.
These recent Supreme Court rulings represent real loses for their program at the most sovereign level in our government. This, in turn, signals openly their loss of control over that institution. This is why we’re seeing increasingly desperate ideas being floated for ploys to take back the SCOTUS, from packing the Court to (somehow) convincing 2/3 of the states to gut it completely. They know they’ve lost control over it as an institution, so they’re perfectly willing to dynamite it (hopefully not meaning that literally), like an ex-girlfriend who takes a baseball bat to a guy’s X-Box rather than just giving it back to him like a sane person would do. In the space of a few short years, the SCOTUS has gone from hero to zero in the Left’s eyes, since for them everything is situational in nature. Once something, anything, outlives its usefulness to them, it goes up against the wall.
The thing to understand from this is that these losses the Court has handed to the Left are real things. They’re not just some kind of plot to “mobilise their voters” to win the midterms in November. While lefties may often be cunning, they are also arrogant and in many ways kind of dumb. These people are really not out here playing some grandmaster game of four-dimensional chess. They’re desperate, which is why they’re willing to engage in such blatant attempts at gaming the system through naked procedural manipulation. They’re the ones who are suddenly finding themselves in the place of having to operate outside of “our sacred norms” by refuting the legitimacy of institutions that go against them.
Bear in mind that the Left’s entire view of legitimacy is predicated on this “ever-forward march of progress”. To “move backwards” is to show weakness, to reveal a chink in the armour of the dialectic of inexorable progress. This sense of legitimacy, in turn, was based upon their capture of the various power-generating and power-wielding institutions, including the Supreme Court, since the “right” people now had possession of the means to remake society. What a lot of people forget is that the whole “march of progress” since the mid-1960s occurred because of this institutional takeover. Their judicially imposed agenda has never really “won the argument” on any issue. They just used social and political force to achieve their goals, followed up by media-driven social pressure and anarchotyranny to “encourage” conformity among the general population. So yeah, especially with something like the repeal of Roe v. Wade, their whole program is in jeopardy. The post-Roe stance on abortion adopted in 1973 was the truly radical stance on this issue, but they don’t want you to realise this.
Theophilus Chilton, “The Left Is in a Precarious Place”, The Neo-Ciceronian Times, 2022-06-29.
September 28, 2022
QotD: Yearning for the “endless now”
By the (I think) 16th, and certainly by the 17th, centuries, you’ve got portraits of people as Classical throwbacks — contemporary figures tricked out in Roman togas and whatnot. This is the full acceptance of linear time — you can move a distinct individual both forward and back along not just the course of his life, but the course of linear history.
Contrast this to the Juggalos, whose first impulse in any situation is to take a selfie … but who never, ever look at those selfies. Basic College Girl “culture” is often described as narcissistic — lord knows I’ve done it enough myself — but the funny thing is, for as self-involved as they are, they have almost no pictures of themselves hanging around. They don’t decorate their office cubicles with pictures of their families. Nothing could be easier than “flipping” through a digital photo “book”, but they never do. They go to extraordinary lengths to arrange the perfect selfie … but then they could instantly delete it, for all the impact it has.
I think this is because they actively shun the idea of linear time. When I was a young man, every girl had a photo album in her dorm room, and part of the “getting to know you” process was flipping through it with her. Half the fun was seeing the brutal fashions of yesteryear; you both had a good laugh over it.
I think that would be actively painful for Juggalos, and not just because they can’t stand to have others see them as less than 100% perfect at all times. Rather, I think the problem is the fundamental one — they don’t want to be reminded that time passes.
They want the endless now. They want to be ghosts.
Severian, “The Ghosts (II)”, Founding Questions, 2022-05-18.
September 27, 2022
QotD: The Poor Law Reform Act of 1834
One of the law’s architects, Edwin Chadwick — a man who made Mr Gradgrind [Wiki] look like one of the Cheeryble brothers [Wiki] — infamously commented that it was vital that the inmates of workhouses should be given the coarsest food possible. William Cobbett, a leading opponent of the bill, gleefully seized on this, nicknaming the Whigs, who pushed the legislation hardest, the “Coarser Food Party”. The idea of all this — rooted in the principles of utilitarianism, political economy and Malthusianism — was, as future Archbishop of Canterbury John Bird Sumner put it, to encourage the labouring poor to do everything they could to avoid the “intemperance and want of prudent foresight” that creates poverty, the “punishment which the moral government of God inflicts in this world upon thoughtlessness and guilty extravagance”.
In the 1830s, these ideas were at the very vanguard of progressive thinking. They were promoted by the metropolitan liberal elite of the age, men such as James Mill, Jeremy Bentham and David Ricardo, the forward-thinking “Philosophic Radicals” who spewed out reforming and “improving” ideas through their famous organ The Westminster Review. Other contributors included happy-go-lucky eugenicist pioneer and social Darwinist Herbert Spencer, as well as Harriet Martineau, the sort of woman who would cheerfully have put her “enlightened benevolence” into practice by personally taste-testing workhouse food to ensure it was sufficiently coarse.
These ideas were gleefully leapt upon by a large swathe of the Church leadership, who endorsed the grim dogmas of political economy with an alacrity that would only surprise anyone unfamiliar with the long history of our episcopacy’s lamb-like submission to secular liberal orthodoxies. As E.R. Norman pointed out many decades ago, the Church of England’s leaders have, again and again since at least the eighteenth century, “readily adopted the progressive idealism common to liberal opinion within the intelligentsia, of which they were a part”. They have “always managed to reinterpret their sources in ways which have somehow made their version of Christianity correspond to the values of their class and generation”, a process intimately connected to the fact that bishops are nearly always tied (by personal links, economic interests and a desire to conform) to their secular peers who set the broader cultural and political agenda.
Capel Lofft, “The closing of the Episcopal mind”, The Critic, 2022-06-21.
September 26, 2022
“We’ve credentialed people for membership in a series of high-cultural-status groups on the basis of their ability to chant slogans and perform rituals; they are coreless”
Chris Bray on Vivek Ramaswamy’s book Woke, Inc.:
Vivek Ramaswamy was trying to close a deal, so he went to do some relationship building over dinner at an investor’s house. As dinner ended, the investor’s son came downstairs to greet the visitors, and he turned out to be a high school senior who was applying to Harvard. By the most remarkable coincidence, Vivek Ramaswamy is a Harvard grad, so the kid asked for some advice on getting in. Stand out, the Harvard grad told the Harvard applicant. Have something that makes you different than all the other applicants. Oh, the kid said, yeah — I got that. It turns out the seventeen year-old son of a venture capitalist had started a non-profit to fight against global sex slavery, which did indeed impress the admissions office and did indeed get him into Harvard. When Ramaswamy ran into the kid again, a few years later, he was shopping for Wall Street internships — and had moved on from the whole sex slavery thing, which had by then served its purpose.
Ramaswamy’s book Woke, Inc., a title published last year that seems to be gaining new momentum now as its author takes on corporate ESG posturing, accurately promises to take readers “inside corporate America’s social justice scam”, though I don’t love everything he offers as a solution. He clearly is reporting from inside: He’s a Harvard grad, a Yale Law grad, a former hedge fund employee, and a former pharmaceutical CEO. (Those credentials make you trust his argument, right?)
The thing the kid did, dummying up a quick thing to fight global sex slavery to get it into his admissions package, is a version of a maneuver that Ramaswamy finds all over the woke corporate world. The highly woke consumer products company Unilever is passionate about taking deep notice of intersectionality and serving women of color, and it partners with UN Women, “a nonprofit branch of the UN dedicated to advancing gender equality and empowering women”. Also, dozens of women who work on a Unilever tea plantation in Kenya were gang-raped in front of their families, an event that was coupled with a dozen or so murders, and Unilever declined to provide them with substantial support or assistance: “Unilever said the attacks on its plantation were unexpected and therefore that it should not be held liable”.
Unilever provides money to UN Women, Ramaswamy concludes, and UN Women provides Unilever with “moral cover for the Kenyan massacre”. Woke Unilever is a façade for, you know, Unilever. It’s a strategy, one example of many, and Ramaswamy argues that the “arranged marriage” between wokeness and corporate capitalism was born out of Occupy Wall Street: Here’s a check, now let’s stop talking about TARP and start talking about white privilege.
You should read Woke, Inc., so I won’t go on summarizing. But without going deeper into Ramaswamy’s argument, which reflects a series of increasingly familiar observations about social class and the function of wokeness, the point is the inauthenticity and shallowness of corporate social justice posturing, all of which is meant to protect the core of the project — to provide cover for business practices that might otherwise be criticized. It’s a show, a performative and manipulative posture. You could easily make comparable arguments about wokeness and power in academia, media, or government.
Now, to take all of this and pivot to an argument that will satisfy absolutely no one, if the social justice façade is a façade — shallow, performative, calculatedly purpose-serving — then there’s a good chance the branch managers of the globalist project will drop it when it slides out of fashion. The kid who, wanting a career on Wall Street, did the sex slavery nonprofit thing just long enough to get into Harvard: That kid is a middle manager now, and he’ll recite slogans about white privilege or not, as Current Thing demands, as long as the checks still cash. We’ve credentialed people for membership in a series of high-cultural-status groups on the basis of their ability to chant slogans and perform rituals; they are coreless.
September 23, 2022
Sarah Hoyt on the Overton Window
At According to Hoyt, Sarah considers the Overton Window:
Diagram of the “Overton Window”, based on a concept promoted by Joseph P. Overton (1960–2003), former director of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. The term “Overton Window” was coined by colleagues of Joe Overton after his death. In the political theory of the Overton Window, new ideas fall into a range of acceptability to the public, at the edges of which an elected official risks being voted out of office.
Illustration by Hydrargyrum via Wikimedia Commons
The Overton window is not natural to human society. It is the product of the mass-information-media-entertainment era.
No?
Sure, in some villages, or some other places, there are things you can’t see/say. That is usually because someone in that society, be it a village or a nation, is going to get under your nose for saying it. (At one point, you could get arrested in Portugal for shouting “Portugal is a sh*tty country!”)
Having “Unsayable” and “Unthinkable” and “if you say that in public you’ll be shunned” is always a sign of an oppressive society, whether the punishments are physical or mental, beatings or mere shunning.
Having beliefs that are beyond the pale — in fact, the existence of the pale — are a sign of an unhealthy society, one in which a truth is being enforced that is different from reality.
No? Fight me.
Look, yeah, sure, there are things people in all eras didn’t discuss in certain company due to manners or delicacy. One didn’t discuss sexual acts in front of children, not equipped to understand them, in most of the west since the onset of Christianity. One didn’t say certain things in front of elders either. “Gentlemen don’t discuss politics or coitus”. But that was a matter of — in a small gathering, or a confined society — keeping the social gears lubricated, and keeping disagreements at bay. What “couldn’t be said” varied.
However, the Overton window is something else. It is “you can’t report certain things, even if they are true, at the risk of becoming a social pariah”.
It avoids discussions of really important things, like how our kids are being sodomized by public education. Or how welfare really doesn’t contribute to the welfare of anyone. Or how Child Protective Systems is a money-laundering scam, in which kids die. Or how our government-funded science has become all government and almost no science. Etc.
It encourages rape rings like Rotherham, and has most of the black population of the US believe they are more at risk of police shootings than whites, which is plainly not true, but can’t be said, because the media has deemed saying so is “racist” (Somehow.) So people live in fear, rather than knowing they’re not at higher risk than anyone else.
And while speaking of risk, the media, and its control of information and encouragement of shunning dissenters, has led to fear of a “slightly more dangerous” flu, and led to elderly people living their last years in isolation and terror, and also led to our kids being isolated into loss of social function.
Furthermore, the only way to keep the Overton window over a whole country is to enforce strict control over the media, and even social media, and to ruthlessly crush down dissenters, so that everyone appears to agree, leading to shock-rejection of those who manage to break through the wall of government-encouraged-enforced lying.
A wall that they try to keep even when the lies are patently absurd and harmful. (Like the idea anyone who dislikes the Biden reign of terror is a terrorist or insurgent, or for that matter racist.)
The Overton window can suck what I don’t have.
September 18, 2022
QotD: Late night TV’s negative impact on US national culture (aka “Clown nose on, clown nose off”)
Shows like Saturday Night Live, the Daily Show, late night television …
They take the news, spin it through a comedy filter, and present it to the masses. This presents an easily digestible, and thus easily believable, simplified and polarized view of events, that their viewers are then encouraged to apply to the news that is coming from real news sources. Anyone who objects to this is “overreacting, or doesn’t have a sense of humor” and thus is dismissed as irrelevant.
And thus the culture of lies continues, and gets ramped up as it spreads.
It’s sickening.
James Resoldier, posting to MeWe‘s “Hoyt’s Huns” group, 2022-06-16. (private group, so no public URL available)
September 15, 2022
The promise of grand “green” plans versus the reality when the plans are implemented
Elizabeth Nickson on the contrast between how things like the “Green New Deal” are represented by their proponents and the media and what their actual real-world outcomes are like:
“Forest fire” by Ervins Strauhmanis is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
.
Ever wonder what happens to a region once it is “preserved”? Right now, all through the US and Canada, governments are taking giant bites of land, and locking them down under the guidance of the UN’s Agenda 2030, which means a full 30% of the land and waters will be “saved”. If anyone notices, the local media preens and praises itself. Aren’t we all so wonderful and enlightened and caring, the PR says, and the newspapers copy it line-for-line.
No, it’s terrible. It is possibly the very worst thing ever. Set-aside land degrades. There aren’t enough bureaucrats in the world to take care of it. Besides out in the forest or up on the ranges is decidedly not where a civil servant wants to be. As a result none of them know what they have done. It’s a loop, politicians, stupid women and beta males, civil servants engaged in a masturbatory celebration of their goodness and triumph over commerce. From hipster neighborhoods all over North America a song of self-praise rises like smoke into the air.
Except now, right now, I sit in a smoke haze courtesy of the set aside forests in Washington State which are burning. Look, this is simple to think through. In the early 90’s Clinton ratified the spotted owl preservation plan and hundreds of millions of acres of forest were left to themselves, no cutting, no grazing, no firewood collection, no thinning, no fire breaks, no removal of dead trees, especially not beetle-killed trees. In fact, no touch.
What happens when a formerly industrial forest is left to itself? A thousand tiny trees start to grow right up against each other. They grow like carrots that haven’t been thinned. They grow so thick they can’t get light. They draw all the water from the ground, they end up like tinder. Around them brush grows — it too cannot get light or much water so it too is desiccated. It grows up the trees, trying to get at the water in the trees, and acts as a fire ladder
Boom.
Massive canopy fires, which, since they decommissioned the roads into the forest, are very very difficult to either brake or put out.
On every single environmental metric, in every single system, these people destroy the land. What they do is exactly the opposite of what they claim. They take massive amounts of tax money to “save” land and then they destroy the resource. And the towns in the resource area. And the families, and the tax base.
I could go through every environmental goal, and tear it apart. None of them use science that is provable. It can’t be duplicated, its assumptions are wrong, its statistics fiddled. Tens of thousands of papers are used to create these policies, written by the environment movement through its NGOs, funded by rich morons from old families, most of whose ancestors created environmental devastation themselves. I can refute the math and assumptions of EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM given a maximum of four hours and one phone call. No one challenges these studies, and these abominations then become law. Law that destroys the water and land.
“Presentism is … a disease, a contagion here in America as infectious as the Wuhan flu”
Jeff Minick on the mental attitude that animates so many progressives:
My online dictionary defines presentism as “uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes, especially the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts”. To my surprise, the 40-year-old dictionary on my shelf also contains this eyesore of a word and definition.
To be present, of course, is a generally considered a virtue. It can mean everything from giving ourselves to the job at hand — no one wants a surgeon dreaming of his upcoming vacation to St. Croix while he’s cracking open your chest — to consoling a grieving friend.
But presentism is altogether different. It’s a disease, a contagion here in America as infectious as the Wuhan flu. The latter spreads by way of a virus, the former through ignorance and puffed-up pride.
Presentism is what inspires the afflicted to tear down the statues of such Americans as Washington, Jefferson, and Robert E. Lee for owning slaves without ever once asking why this was so or seeking to discover what these men thought of slavery. Presentism is why the “Little House Books” and some of the early stories by Dr. Seuss are attacked or banned entirely.
Presentism is the reason so many young people can name the Kardashians but can’t tell you the importance of Abraham Lincoln or why we fought in World War II.
Presentism accounts in large measure for our Mount Everest of debt and inflation. Those overseeing our nation’s finances have refused to listen to warnings from the past, even the recent past, about the clear dangers of a government creating trillions of dollars out of the air.
Presentism has led America into overseas adventures that have invariably come to a bad end. Afghanistan, for example, has long been known as the graveyard of empires, a cemetery which includes the tombstones of British and Russian ambitions. By our refusal to heed the lessons of that history and our botched withdrawal from Kabul, we dug our own grave alongside them.
H/T to Kim du Toit for the link.
September 13, 2022
Society would be happier if we all paid even less attention to “the tossers of Tinsel Town”
Ian O’Doherty on the malign influence pretty people who mouth other people’s words for the cameras still exude in our popular culture:
Tucker Carlson … the man from Jennifer Lawrence’s nightmares, apparently.
They never learn, do they? If the tumultuous events we have all watched with growing horror over the past few years taught us one thing, it is this – people don’t care what the pampered starlets of Hollywood have to say about politics. If we did, then Hillary Clinton would be comfortably enjoying her second term as the pantsuit POTUS, Jeremy Corbyn would be prime minister of the UK and we would all be driving electric cars.
But regular people are smarter than actors, which seems to drive the luvvies wild with fury. Rather than accepting that maybe, just maybe, there is another side to the argument, the tossers of Tinsel Town insist that anyone who doesn’t fully embrace the so-called progressive agenda is simply a monster.
We saw this recently when Jennifer Lawrence, who used to be quite refreshingly down to Earth, proudly admitted that she had to “work so hard … to forgive my dad and my family” for voting Republican. She also, quite wonderfully, spoke about having “recurring nightmares” about Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson.
In the course of her interview for the cover issue of Vogue magazine – that renowned bastion of proletarian agitation – the Hunger Games actress claimed that she was born a Kentucky Republican, was raised as a Kentucky Republican and had considered herself to be a Kentucky Republican, until she watched an episode of 30 Rock. And then her worldview completely changed.
Now most of us would agree that 30 Rock was a brilliant sitcom. After all, it was so ingenious in its construction that it even managed to make Alec Baldwin look likeable. But would anyone think that Liz Lemon’s line, “I’m not a crazy liberal – I just think people should drive hybrid cars”, would be enough to utterly transform someone’s political beliefs?
Apparently, this is what changed everything for Lawrence. She even seemed proud of the fact that a throwaway line in a sitcom triggered some sort of Damascene conversion to what is now so tediously known as “the right side of history”.
Predictably, following the Vogue interview, Lawrence was hailed as a modern-day Joan of Arc – for refusing to be “passive about politics”. But there is no real bravery involved in simply having the courage of other people’s convictions – she knows which way the political wind is blowing and is bending to it. That’s not all that brave, is it?
