Quotulatiousness

April 24, 2021

[“white” evil is] “not only objectivity, individualism, and writing, but linear thinking, quantitative reasoning, the Protestant work ethic, planning for the future, and being on time”

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

The latest post by John McWhorter at It Bears Mentioning discusses the “white” behaviours and thought patterns that many activists believe are as harmful to American blacks as outright white supremacism:

John McWhorter’s Twitter thumbnail image

The organization 1776Unites, founded by my mentor and model Bob Woodson, has tweeted out a video where various black people decry a now fashionable idea that “whiteness” includes being smart. As in, precise, objective, fond of the written word, oriented towards dispassion, on time.

Those things are all manifestations of intelligence, vigilance, discipline. But according to our Elect folk, we black people are best off channeling our Crazy Badass Mothafucka. Because that’s more “authentic.” And, I get the feeling, fun to watch.

Because so many think that the battle that I and others are waging against Critical Race Theory’s transmogrification into education for children is an obsession with something that isn’t a real problem, I want to explore a bit. Someone I deeply respect not long ago surmised to me that the idea that black kids should be exempt from real standards is something being promulgated via mere paper “handouts,” and that the real problem is censorship from the right. I just don’t think so.

First, watch this, the 1776Unites video. Just a few minutes.

And now, as to what we are referring to, it starts actually before last summer. I knew something was really wrong when in 2019 at a conference in New York City for the city’s principals and superintendents, participants were presented with an idea that to teach with sensitivity to race issues meant keeping certain issues in mind.

These included ways of looking at things that are “white” rather than correct: namely, objectivity, individualism, and valuing the written word. Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza was fine with this, happily telling the media that it’s white people’s job to do the “work” of identifying the racist assumptions in how they go about their business.

So: to stand outside of matters and analyze them with one’s own private mind, and perhaps couch one’s conclusions with the considered artifice of writing rather than the spontaneity of speaking, is inauthentic for black and Latino people. It is racist to impose such things on black and Latino (and Native American?) kids. Or at best, brown kids should be taught this uptight “white” business only as a gloomy alternative to the realness of just hanging out sharing passing personal impressions via chatting.

[…]

This view of precision and detachment as white is a view about, more economically, reason. The idea is that to master close reasoning is suspect. It is exactly the roots of the “Math is Racist” notion, and if you want a whiff of how religiously people can glom on to such ideas, take a look at my Twitter feed in the week after I posted about that here.

Yet, seeing this educational philosophy laid out in the sunlight, The Elect cannot dismiss it as fringe “kookiness” — unless they want to insult the curators of a national museum devoted to celebrating the very black people The Elect live to liberate. At the African-American History Museum in Washington, D.C., for a hot minute or two in 2020 you could see a variation on the Jones-Okun business, an expanded presentation of what we must reject as “white” evil. An educational poster was displayed that slammed not only objectivity, individualism, and writing, but linear thinking, quantitative reasoning, the Protestant work ethic, planning for the future, and being on time.

April 18, 2021

Take a moment to reflect on the plight of those poor, alienated students at Haverford College in Pennsylvania

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

In Quillette, Jonathan Kay outlines some of the issues faced by the students of an expensive elite academic institution and how it impacts their mental health:

In December, I wrote a detailed report for Quillette about the race-based social panic that had recently erupted at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. One of the reasons why the meltdown seemed so surreal, I noted, is that this elite school appears to the outside world as picturesque and serene. The average annual cost of attendance is about US$76,000. And most of these students live extremely privileged lives, insulated (physically and otherwise) from what any normal person would regard as suffering. Nor is there much in the way of substantive political discord on campus. According to survey results released in late 2019, 79 percent of Haverford students self-identify as politically liberal, while only 3.5 percent self-identify as conservative. It’s as close to an ideological monoculture as you can find outside of a monastery or cult. On paper, it resembles one of those utopian micro-societies conceived by science-fiction writers or 19th-century social theorists.

The survey results I’m alluding to originate with Haverford’s “Clearness Committee,” an excellent resource for anyone seeking to understand the attitudes of students at hyper-progressive schools. The most recent Clearness survey, completed by more than two-thirds of Haverford students in 2019, contained 133 survey questions pertaining to everything from how much students sleep, to how many friends they have, to how they feel about campus jocks. There is also a substantial section dedicated to the theme of “marginalization.” Amazingly, 43 percent of respondents said they felt personally marginalized on campus because of some aspect of their identity. This included 61 percent of gay students, and more than 90 percent of trans students.

This is an odd-seeming result given the sheer number of LGBT individuals on Haverford’s campus. No fewer than 31 percent of student respondents identified themselves as something other than straight. In regard to gender, almost six percent self-identified as trans or some variant of non-binary. Both of these percentages exceed the overall American average by an order of decimal magnitude. Despite having only about 1,300 students (smaller than many public high schools), Haverford has a resource center for LGBT students, a pro-LGBT hiring policy, an LGBT studies program, dedicated LGBT living arrangements, a health insurance policy that covers hormone replacement therapy, and numerous other resources. Outside of other similarly liberal campuses, it is hard to imagine a more welcoming environment for LGBT youth anywhere on the planet.

It’s also telling that self-reported marginalization rates for Haverford’s gay students are almost identical to those for self-described bisexuals (62 percent) and asexuals (59 percent); and that the rate for students who self-identify under the loose category of “non-binary” (89 percent) is almost identical to the rate for students who, being trans, experience actual gender dysphoria (91 percent). The report authors conclude that there is “a series of immediate crises facing Haverford’s transgender population.” Yet despite the abundant write-in information supplied by surveyed students, no real evidence of these crises appears. What we get instead are vague testimonials about perceived attitudes and atmosphere. (“As a nonbinary person, athletics is inherently exclusive because it is gendered. We need to put that phrase to rest and start talking about the real divisions on campus—such as who feels comfortable going to parties hosted by athletes and who doesn’t.”) Even amidst the melodramatic throes of last year’s student strike, at a time when every imaginable identity-based grievance was described in lengthy student manifestos, no one could point to a single recent incident of real homophobia or transphobia targeting Haverford students.

April 16, 2021

The continued evolution of the Marxist class struggle – “Goodbye the working class, hello to the wokeing class”

Filed under: History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Arthur Chrenkoff provides some background on the evolution of Marxist thought as they abandon efforts to rouse the working classes of the west against their capitalist oppressors and switch to attempting to rouse the “wokeing class” against their deplorable racist, homophobic, transphobic, sexist white male cisgendered oppressors:

In developing his philosophy, Karl Marx posited human history as a struggle of two sections of society: the minority who hold the all power and the powerless majority. In Marx’s time, the minority was termed the capitalist class, the bourgeoisie, or simply The Capital, those controlling (owning and benefitting from) the means of production, while the majority was called the working class, or the proletariat, the masses who sell their labour, and whose collective toil makes the capitalists rich. The essential dynamic of a society is one of power: who has it and who doesn’t, and how it’s exercised (or as Lenin said, “who whom?”). It’s a zero sum equation: all or nothing, the one or the other, the powerful and the powerless, the oppressors and the oppressed. There is a moral dimension to this dichotomy: the former, by virtue of their position, are the villains, the latter the virtuous. It’s also absolutist: the individual doesn’t matter and individuality is an irrelevant illusion; you are the class to which you belong.

One of the most important aspects of this group dynamic is that the dominant class uses its position and power to shape the society in accordance with its needs. Thus, all the institutions, laws, traditions and phenomena reflect the interests of the ruling class; they are designed to benefit them and only them and keep their power entrenched. And what benefits one class invariably harms the other: the masses. You can thus say that in a capitalist society everything’s classist.

The twentieth century dashed the hopes of Marx’s disciples that the proletariat would revolt against and overthrow their capitalist oppressors. The working class was bought off with better working conditions and rising incomes: a house, a car, and a football game. While elsewhere communism triumphed through coups and foreign invasions, in the Western world genuine revolutions did not happen; capitalism is still around. While the working class might have disappointed and let down Marxists, the basic Marxist thinking has not changed: the society is divided into two mutually hostile groups, the oppressors and the oppressed. Now we just need to find the different oppressed and we’ll have another crack at destroying capitalism and creating our socialist utopia. Out with the purely economic divisions, in with racial, gender and sexual ones. Goodbye the working class, hello to the wokeing class.

Fast forward to 2021, and the neo-Marxist struggle continues to gather wind in its sail. On the one side the power-holders: white, male, straight; on the other the powerless: women, people of colour, other sexualities. The actors might have been changed but the essential drama remains the same: the struggle of the virtuous but powerless oppressed majority against their dastardly rulers and the system created for their benefit and everyone else’s disadvantage. Just as in the past every aspect of society was biased against and harmful to the proletariat, so now it is against the proletariat 2.0: everything’s racist – and sexist, and homophobic and transphobic. This is also why the activists describe racism as “systemic”; not because there are still Jim Crow laws in existence, and legal segregation and discrimination, but because the system created by the “white” society by its very nature must be oppressive and hostile to anyone non-white. Piecemeal fixing problems and gradual reforms are useless; the only solution is a radical societal transformation that elevates the oppressed and casts down the oppressors.

April 8, 2021

Andrew Doyle defends freedom of speech in his new book

Filed under: Books, Britain, Liberty, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Critic, Simon Evans reviews Free Speech And Why It Matters by Andrew Doyle (who is perhaps best known on this side of the pond for his ultrawoke Twitter persona “Titania McGrath”):

    When I am weaker than you, I ask you for Freedom, because that is according to your principles; when I am Stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.
    Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

It is most peculiar. If the counter-culture had a dominant theme, it was the right to criticise the establishment and to question orthodoxy of all kinds. Back in the Sixties, it was central to its mission to Expand your Consciousness, man. And it worked. Walls came tumbling down. Yet now, everywhere you look, it seems the elements of society — students, academics, comedians — that one would most naturally associate with that freedom of expression, are introducing caveats and qualifiers to that principle faster than you can cry “Stop Little Pol-Pot, Stop!” They are turning, before our very eyes, into actual scolds.

It must be supposed that what was once the siege army, camped outside the moat like Occupy Wall Street, has captured the castle, for they are demanding that the walls be re-erected. That “hate” speech be distinguished from free speech and dealt with accordingly. That freedom of speech need not mean freedom from consequences. And a general suspicion is at large, among the young, that free speech is some sort of artefact of complacent boomer self-indulgence, like Steely Dan and second homes. No longer counter-culture, but decidedly counter-revolutionary.

I’m a comedian, and these have been strange times for our trade. Brexit saw comedians side with the mirthless neo-liberal consensus, against the humorous, sceptical grumble of the common rabble. The same thing happened in America, with bar-room stand-ups horrified by the vulgarity of Trump. And now the latest revision sees many of my fellow jesters and fools unsure whether people can really be trusted with free speech.One might have thought this issue had been settled long ago, in this country, and in liberty’s favour. But no, it seems we need to sharpen our tools once again, and Andrew Doyle’s new book is an excellent place to start.

Making the case for the defence, Doyle’s book is terse, restrained and as carefully argued as a QC’s summing-up in a top-drawer courtroom drama. Whether his command of the material comes from his doctorate in Renaissance literature or his experience of defending the comedy character Titania McGrath from infuriated wokerati, who knows? It is a beautifully balanced and comprehensive overview that will of course be read by no one who needs to hear it.

It is admirably historically literate. Doyle takes a quote from Milton’s Areopagitica as his epigram, with the old poet, declaiming over the din of the Civil War, as defiant as Satan himself, “Give me liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”

This sets the tone for the whole book, but Doyle also presents arguments intended to appeal to those who insist that we live in a society. With the compromises that entails. This was most famously recognised by notorious cis-hetero white man and free speech absolutist John Stuart Mill, who was surveying the world from the heights of Victorian Exceptionalism when he published the still unsurpassed On Liberty.

April 5, 2021

QotD: NYC goes out of its way to “afflict the comfortable”

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

In July, the city moved 700 homeless single men into hotels on the densely populated and famously tolerant Upper West Side, purportedly as a response to the pandemic. Residents were stunned to find their neighborhood turned overnight into a skid row, with nonstop open drug sales and drug use, public sex acts, and rampant street harassment of women and girls. During a contentious local community board Zoom meeting about the issue, Erin Drinkwater, a deputy commissioner of intergovernmental and legislative affairs at the Department of Social Services, spoke blandly about the need for “compassion” and implied that the concerned neighbors were racist for opposing the city’s move. Following the meeting, Drinkwater tweeted “Comfort the afflicted; afflict the comfortable.” When asked what she meant by this, she said that it was a quotation from the Bible’s Book of James, and that it spoke to her sense of mission.

One might ask why a social-services functionary in New York City would cite the Bible in defense of public policy — except that the quotation is not even from the Bible. In fact, it is from Finley Peter Dunne, a popular Chicago columnist from the 1890s who invented a humorous character named “Mr. Dooley,” an Irish bartender who delivered his wisdom in dialect.

The original quotation, in which Mr. Dooley described the function of the newspaper: “Th’ newspaper does ivrything f’r us. It runs th’ polis foorce an’ th’ banks, commands th’ milishy, controls th’ ligislachure, baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable, buries th’ dead an’ roasts thim aftherward.” Somehow, in a bizarre game of “cultural telephone,” this mock-sonorous fiddle-faddle has gathered the effulgence of holy writ for progressives, who take it as descriptive of their “joyous responsibility.”

On the one hand, it’s comical that this scrap of tabloid wit is taken so gravely by self-righteous officials. Properly speaking, isn’t it their job to make people more comfortable, not to diminish comfort? But on the other hand, it’s frightening to consider that New York is now run by progressive militants who appear to believe that their vocation is to “afflict” their constituents by disrupting their undeserved calm and comfort. Mass immiseration is not a side effect of bad policy; it is the policy.

Seth Barron, “The Politics of Affliction”, City Journal, 2020-12-17.

March 29, 2021

QotD: Modern conservatism is merely progressive policies on a ten-year delay

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

In 2000, when the Vermont Supreme Court mandated same-sex “civil unions”, American conservatives were outraged. By 2010, when the left had moved on to gay marriage, conservatives were supportive of civil unions but insisted marriage was an ancient institution between a man and a woman. Now, the left having won that one and moved on to transgenderism, conservatives profess to be a bit queasy about transitioning grade-schoolers.

So you can take it to the bank that by 2030 rock-ribbed Republicans will be on board with penises in the girls’ changing rooms, but determined to hold the line against whatever the left’s next cause du jour is: human cloning, mandatory transitioning for delinquent boys, voting rights for animals.

There really isn’t much point to conservatism that’s just leftism ten years late, is there? It’s like that ITV+1 satellite service they have in Britain that offers you the ITV schedule but an hour later, in case you were caught in traffic heading home. If you’re considering on which side to bestow your tribal loyalty, the left is right quicker; the right is left behind — but only for a few years until they throw in the towel. If you’re all headed to the same destination, why not ride first class on the TGV instead of the creaking, jerking stopping service? Justin Trudeau’s vapid modishness was perfectly distilled by his campaign catchphrase of four years ago: “Because it’s 2015.” But that beats waiting till 2025 to say “Because it’s 2015”.

Mark Steyn, “Catch-Up Conservatism”, SteynOnline, 2020-12-17.

March 26, 2021

When the science becomes problematic to the narrative

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

Alexander Riley looks at a few of those awkward points where actual “scientific” science conficts with the deeply held beliefs of the “I heart SCIENCE!” community:

… human and nature cannot so easily be pried apart. The evidence of the biological reality of the sex difference — not just in gonads and sex cells, but in personality characteristics and behavioral profiles, on average — is overwhelming, and science is daily producing more. Male and female brains are structurally different in ways that map on to the emerging neuroscientific knowledge on how brain structure affects behavior and capabilities. The feminist claim that these differences are wholly a product of socialization becomes more implausible the more we know. In societies where egalitarian gender ideology is arguably most widespread, such as in Northern Europe, there has been no disappearance of traditional sex differences in choices concerning careers. Men are still overrepresented in fields that focus on systems and objects, and women are still the overwhelming majority in fields dedicated to extensive human interaction and social services.

The radical spirit of ’90s feminism represented by [author Judith Butler’s] Gender Trouble did not stop at “deconstructing” gender in the effort to move toward a world in which gender roles are divorced from biological sex. Sex too had to be subjected to such “problematization.” Radicals used the writing of Anne Fausto-Sterling, a biologist who admitted her work was fundamentally shaped by her “1960s street-activist heart,” to suggest that the sex binary was also an oversimplified social construction. Fausto-Sterling insisted there are at least five sexes: males, females, “true hermaphrodites” with one testis and one ovary, male pseudohermaphrodites with testes and “some aspects of female genitalia” but no ovaries, and female pseudohermaphrodites with ovaries and “some aspects of male genitalia” but no testes. Perhaps, she asserted, several of every hundred people might be in one of the three intersex categories, with — the clincher — an “infinitely malleable continuum” between them.

It was quickly pointed out that Fausto-Sterling had been deceptive in her estimate of the frequency of intersexuality. Leonard Sax, in the Journal of Sex Research, noted that she had counted phenomena such as Klinefelter’s Syndrome (biological males with an extra X chromosome), Turner’s Syndrome (biological females with only one X chromosome), and several other conditions typically not recognized as intersex. One of these alone — late-onset congenital adrenal hyperplasia (LOCAH), which involves the overproduction of adrenal androgens — accounts for 90 percent of Fausto-Sterling’s claimed figure of 1.7 percent of the population that is intersex. But LOCAH is not an intersex phenomenon. Many individuals who have it are never diagnosed because the symptoms are so mild, and all who have it are born with typical male or female genitalia that correspond to the male and female genotypes. Nearly all such individuals go through puberty with the typical sexual development for their genotype, as the condition generally does not manifest in women until the early 20s and in men much later. The true estimate of intersex individuals, Sax argued, is roughly 0.018%, about 100 times lower than Fausto-Sterling’s estimate. That is, more than 99.98% of humans are clearly either male or female in terms of biological sex.

But the attack on “standard sex difference science” was undeterred by this decimation of Fausto-Sterling’s case. In Gender Trouble, Butler criticized the work of an MIT group that had just discovered the region on the Y chromosome responsible for sex differentiation, claiming these scientists ultimately had to invoke cultural symbols of patriarchy to legitimate their explanations. In her view, this betrayed the very notion of an objective science of sex difference. We are always trapped in culture, she wrote, which means we are always trapped in patriarchy. A science of sex is impossible. Radical sex/gender ideology attacked science as male knowledge and elevated female knowledge as superior on the basis that women as a class were treated as inferior. Like blacks and other powerless groups, women — at least, women with a feminist outlook — could critically understand the point of view of men and supplement its lacunae with the fuller vision of the female perspective. Marx made similar claims about the superiority of working-class consciousness, though he did not attempt to cast the very notion of science as a tool of oppression.

The MIT group’s finding that what we now know as the SRY gene determines sex is universally accepted science today, and Butler’s ideological criticism has aged poorly in scientifically literate circles. So has her wild overestimation that perhaps one in ten people is outside the normal sex binary.

March 19, 2021

Cancel culture victims on the left

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

In Quillette, Jonathan Kay looks at the attempt to cancel Jesse Singal who has repeatedly failed to follow the “party line” on Trans issues for several years:

One of the odd-seeming aspects of progressive cancel culture is that many of the figures targeted by mobs aren’t especially conservative in their views. Rather, the victims tend to be heterodox liberals who simply offer a dissenting opinion on one or more compartmentalized issues — since these liberal targets tend to operate in left-leaning professional and social milieus through which a mob can exercise leverage and demand concessions. There are numerous popular writers and broadcasters who promote deeply conservative themes without attracting any notice from cancel mobs — even as lifelong leftists within such niche genres as Young Adult fiction, LGBT theatre, and knitting-trade journalism are excommunicated on the basis of minor verbal infractions.

In some notable mobbings chronicled by Quillette, in fact, the targeted dissenter wasn’t even offering an opinion per se, but merely highlighting facts we’re all expected to ignore. James Damore wasn’t fired by Google because he gratuitously insulted women, but because he pointed out real differences between the sexes. In Canadian literary circles, Margaret Atwood became reviled among a progressive fringe when she argued (correctly, as it turns out) that falsely accused novelist Steven Galloway should have received due process before being tarred as a rapist. If you grovel enough, woke mobs might eventually forgive you for being wrong — but never for being right.

On the issue of gender, a particularly interesting case study centres on Jesse Singal, a mild-mannered and amiable (I’ve met him) New York-based journalist, book author, and podcaster whom Quillette readers may remember from his 2019 appearance on our own show. As early as 2016, well before the culture war over trans rights reached its crescendo, Singal authored a ground-breaking New York magazine exposé on the cynical takedown of eminent Toronto psychologist Dr. Kenneth Zucker (who was subsequently paid more than half a million dollars by his former employer, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, as part of a legal settlement relating to its part in that smear campaign). Two years later, Singal wrote an impeccably researched cover story for the Atlantic titled “When Children Say They’re Trans” — one of the most widely discussed features in the magazine’s recent history. In these articles, and on social media, Singal has dealt with the issue of gender dysphoria with care and sensitivity, documenting the challenges faced by those experiencing the condition. And while he is the furthest thing from an actual transphobe, he acknowledges the plain fact that some children who present as trans later “desist” to an identity that accords with their biological sex.

As anyone who follows this issue closely can guess, Singal’s measured approach doesn’t always sit well with progressive activist and journalistic subcultures, wherein the approved view is that any child’s expression of trans identity must summarily be “affirmed” by parents, educators, and therapists. Within these circles, Singal himself has written, “desistance isn’t viewed as a phenomenon we’ve yet to fully understand and quantify but rather as a myth to be dispelled. Those who raise the subject of desistance are often believed to have nefarious motives — the liberal outlet ThinkProgress, for example, referred to desistance research as ‘the pernicious junk science stalking trans kids’ … But the evidence that desistance occurs is overwhelming.”

We know from experienced psychotherapists in this area that children can present as trans for all sorts of reasons, sometimes related to trauma, sexual anxieties, or comorbid mental-health conditions. In some cases, the dysphoria is permanent, but in other cases, it isn’t (which is why the analogy with sexual orientation is misleading). Certainly, the idea that desistance is some kind of transphobic “myth” has now itself been shown to be a myth: In late 2020, British jurists upheld desister Keira Bell’s claim that the country’s Gender Identity Development Service had improperly rushed her through a medical reassignment process, at age 16, without proper safeguards. At the age of 23, Bell now is recovering from the after-effects of these treatments — including a needless double mastectomy — and confronts a lifetime of possible medical complications.

As we wrote in a recent Quillette editorial about Bell, it won’t just be doctors and politicians whose actions will be judged in relation to the excesses surrounding the transition of young people, but also those many journalists who’ve chosen to prioritize political fashion over journalistic integrity. Singal stands out as one of the few honourable exceptions. Indeed, Bell’s case is exactly the sort of tragedy that he’s consistently warned about over the past five years. To a certain kind of ideologue, such prescience is unforgiveable.

March 18, 2021

What’s the German phrase for “waiting for the other shoe to drop”?

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

Sarah Hoyt on the current situation in American politics:

As we sit here, waiting for the other shoe to drop, almost weekly, if not daily, I field the question “Why isn’t anyone doing anything yet?” This is usually followed by wails that we’ll do nothing that we’ll just sit here and take it.

There are two things to take into account. The first is that most people aren’t us. Most people aren’t political junkies who know every stupid, unjust and just plain suicidal executive order coming from on high, from the office of the vice-roi of the middle kingdom installed over us.

The second is the shock part of shocked disbelief. Which tends to delay reactions quite a bit.

On the first one “but how can they not know?” Well, because most of our media is and has been devoted to lying to the people. They are the propaganda arm of international socialism, drumming madly for their billionaire owners, who somehow have failed to read a single word of history and think they’ll end up on top.

No, forgive me. It’s not that. It’s that they don’t think at all. They want to be accepted with the “best” people, who at their level are the old aristocratic families of Europe, who of course are all on the spectrum of socialism/communism.

What our idiot nouveau riche have failed to absorb is that these more inbred and pedigreed mental midgets might not know why they support the bullshit anymore, but it all started in the early 20th century with their being convinced communism was inevitable and putting on wolf suits before they were eaten by the wolves.

So we get back to the idiot millionaires and billionaires (hi Bernie!) are stupid and have never read history. After all they made lots of money in various ways that have nothing to do with learning history, so why should they bother.

And below them are the scrambling multitudes of the upper middle class who ape what they view as the beliefs of their betters and — when they attended college — the “smart people” who in turn were taught by the fossils of the 20th century that communism was inevitable and that all smart people are communist.

All of which amounts to: most of the people have not yet found out what Zhou Bai den has been signing at warp speed, or what it saddles us with. Fear not. These people are very very stupid, bordering on mentally slow, and they will make sure everyone knows, soon enough. Why, they’re proud of it.

People are already finding out retail, anyway. Very retail. As in, they are finding out every price is going up, and what was their very nice lifestyle is now evaporating before their eyes, as is any hope of getting better.

QotD: Leftists are generally rebelling against the man … even when they’re in charge

Filed under: History, Politics, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Leftism is, and always has been, an oppositional identity. “Rebelling” against “the Man” isn’t a bug, it’s a feature, and despite a half-century of practice, Liberals haven’t figured out how to handle the situation when they, themselves, are The Man. It doesn’t compute. Hence the strange spectacle of modern life, where Lefty controls everything but carries on like he’s a tiny, persecuted minority …

That’s where religion really comes in handy, and it’s no surprise that Leftism has so rapidly curdled into a chiliastic suicide cult. Not to tell guys like Max Müller their jobs, but it’s wrong to call Christianity an “Abrahamic” faith. Yes, it sprang from Judaism in its externals, but its orientation is totally inward. Judiasm, and Islam (which IS an “Abrahamic” faith) are outwardly oriented, communitarian. They’re ideally suited for small, tight-knit communities. So are Taoism, Confucianism, Shinto, Hinduism, and so forth. All of these are best described as ethnic religions — one doesn’t convert to Judaism or Hinduism; one must be adopted into the group.

Christianity and Buddhism, by contrast, are renunciant religions. From the very beginning they were urban faiths. Their ideal figure is the hermit or stylite, but in practice these men are supported by a small, tight-knit community … as opposed, as ostentatiously as possible, to the hustle and bustle of the big city. (That Europe in the “Christian centuries” was overwhelmingly rural is incidental. Christianity took root in the only place it could — the teeming metropolises of the Roman Empire. It spread out from its urban core, such that it was well established in the hinterland by the time the Empire fell). Christians are specifically commanded to be IN the world, but not OF the world, while the whole point of Buddhism is to escape the world while still somehow being physically in it.

It should come as no surprise, then, that what I call Lifestyle Leftists — those groovy folks who aren’t really political, who only mouth the slogans because they’re still trying to live like college kids well into middle age — all adopted some vague Buddhist-flavored “spirituality” back when. They want to make a big show of being against the dominant culture, but they lack the discipline for any real religious commitment, so they, you know, meditate on their, like, auras, man. Lots of nominally Christian denominations got in on the act, too, and hey, look at that

Despite the professional musicians and the light shows, people couldn’t be arsed to go to church, because why would they? Better to, you know, just kinda, like, do your own thing, man, I’m spiritual but not religious.

Alas for them, they forgot the basic thing we noted, above — renunciant doesn’t mean “doing your own individual thing;” it means “retreating into a monastic community.” The sangha is one of the pillars of Buddhism, and the only reason anyone has heard of the Desert Fathers is because those supposed hermits had large communities built up around them. You simply can’t be a solitary Christian or Buddhist, pursuing your own individual enlightenment without reference to the wider world. It doesn’t work like that.

Severian, “Alienation II”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-30.

March 16, 2021

Mumford & [REDACTED]

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

Jack Stacey on the group-mandated self-cancellation of Winston Marshall by his band mates in Mumford & Sons at the behest of a social media mob for the mortal sin of complimenting a book publicly:

As the band’s most famous lyric goes, he really fucked it up this time. For while the book in question does describe the left’s penchant for totalitarian control disguised as benevolence, it was not the above classic [Nineteen Eighty-Four] (yet to be deemed problematic), but Unmasked by journalist Andy Ngo, which gets Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy in the name of social justice.

Following this transgression against the militant arm of wokery and pressure from the rest of the group for his “increasingly right-wing views”, Marshall the banjoist has pushed his entire Twitter feed down the memory hole leaving only a mea culpa pinned to the start. It states: “Over the past few days I have come to better understand the pain caused by the book I endorsed. I have offended not only a lot of people I don’t know, but also those closest to me, including my bandmates, and for that I am truly sorry.”

He adds in his adopted Newspeak that he will use his absence “to examine my blindspots”, and concludes: “For now, please know that I realise how my endorsements have the potential to be viewed as approvals of hateful, divisive behaviour. I apologise, as this was not at all my intention.”

You would have thought he’d had rats caged to his face to become so repentant. But no, it appears that, as ever, some people got angry on social media, after which his partners at the tweed and ‘tache firm he’d helped set up have made him genuinely believe he deserved it for mucking around in politically incorrect prole territory.

For don’t let the & Sons bit fool you. Like the band’s resulting output, their name was chosen to add an earthy patina to bely the fact that they were, as Bo’ Selecta!’s Mel B might have it, “posh as fook”, rather than as they would have you think: “common as mook”.

March 14, 2021

QotD: “Logomachia” – the use of language as a culture war weapon

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

During the Summer of Floyd, I commented to an American friend that this is the first time in my adult life that I am more optimistic about France than about America. The mass derangement of wokeness has been astonishing to watch. And the response from the right has been pathetic. Now, America has driven itself into ditches before, and found deep reservoirs of self-confidence from which to draw. I would never write off America completely. But the rapidity and fanaticism with which American elites have committed themselves to a course of what can only be called civilizational suicide — a kind of anti-American jihad — has been astonishing. Certainly I hope the Europeans take the right lessons from it and, as I mentioned, it seems that French elites aren’t buying it.

One of the left’s key weapons is what the philosopher Jean-Marie Benoist called “logomachia”, or language warfare. They invent all these words and use it to shape the ideaspace in their favor. It should be obvious to anyone who doesn’t have brainworms — at this point it is even obvious to many normies — that in contemporary American discourse a word like “racism” has as much connection to phenomena in the real world as “Trotskyite” had in Russia under Stalin. So if someone says “You’re a racist!” and you respond “I’m not a racist because X and Y and Z” you have already lost because you have implicitly conceded that there is this thing out there called “racism” which is really big and bad and scary, and one that your enemies get to define for you. And it doesn’t matter that your X or Y or Z may be absolutely correct. You still lose by dignifying the accusation e.g. (“I am not part of the Trotskyite conspiracy!”). The entire thing is transparently preposterous and should be responded to appropriately, with laughter and derision.

And let’s face it, we are so eager to say “I’m not a racist!” because we’re afraid of what will happen to us if we don’t. And people can smell fear, and it’s unattractive. Be not afraid!

Niccolo Soldo, “The Zürich Interviews – Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Unrepentant Baguette Merchant”, Fisted by Foucault, 2020-12-02.

March 10, 2021

How wide is the gap between extreme partisanship and sectarian violence?

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

Sarah Hoyt says she really didn’t want to write this post, and I completely understand why she feels that way:

The next American Civil War will be fought in a lot of places, in sudden flare ups and unexpected bursts of rage. But where most casualties will occur is in the home.

America’s civil war will be fougnt many places, but mostly in living rooms: siblings against each other, parents against children, children against parents, husband against wife, wife against husband.

If you live with a convinced leftist, how safe is your life, should the balloon go up?

And before you say “The first civil war was also between brothers!”

Sure, it was. There were mixed families. Mostly upper crust mixed families. But the war was largely a regional war, the country riven on regional lines.

Now? Bah. Now it’s a war of ideology. A war of beliefs.

And a lot of people are sleeping with the enemy, hanging out on weekends with the enemy. Visiting the enemy. Having lunch with the enemy.

At this moment a lot of you are sitting back there and going “My wife/husband/elementary school friend is not an enemy. Sure, he/she/it drank the Marxist koolaid from a hose but in every day life, in our normal interactions, in non-political things, we are very close, the best of friends.”

And maybe you are. Maybe you can trust them with your life.

But I will remind you we live in a nation where the capital is surrounded with razor wire to defend themselves from people who voted for the guy. I will remind you there are troops occupying our capital and that our secret services have so far been corrupted they keep inventing internet conspiracies (or probably referring to their very own black ops) to justify it.

I will remind you that your favorite progressive has allowed himself to be moved from “strong welfare net” to “we need full on communism, with favored races” within the last 12 years (or was indoctrinated into that state in schools.) I will remind you — and the conversations related back to me don’t help me think otherwise — that your favorite leftist thinks you’re racist/homophobic/evil. NO MATTER HOW MANY indications to the contrary.

And I can hear you sniffling: “But I love him/her/it/fuzzy.” Well, yes, and ten years ago that would have been me. I had very good friends I just classed as political idiots. I don’t wish the last 10 years on anyone, but at least they’re not living with me, 90% of them don’t know where I live. And I’ll be out of here in hopefully no more than 4 but maybe ten months, and maybe we have that long. Also, most of my close friends/acquaintances aren’t likely to cause any damage, being … not the type. On the other hand two dozen of them (easy) are friends with people who WILL.

Now to be clear: do I expect all of you in mixed political families to be in danger?

No. Any number of your spouses, relatives and friends are leftist because that’s “what good people are.” And they will turn on a dime, too, if half the crap about what the left has been doing for the last couple of decades comes out unvarnished and unspun. (The left knows it too. They’re perhaps more scared of these people than they are of us.)

Others are leftist and might hate your guts if things go hot, but simply don’t have it in them to hurt anyone. These are the “slippery” ones, because if you had asked me, even two years ago, if the media and the left (BIRM) could spin these people into wishing death on someone for not wearing a mask, when the person is not sick; there’s no proof of asymptomatic transmission (there’s reports from China but NOWHERE ELSE); and the actual disease (it’s not hard to find) might be a little more lethal than the flu but only at ages past about 80, I’d have said “no. They’re politically insane, but not stupid.” However they are “group oriented.” Turns out the type of gaslighting we’ve been enduring works really well on people who live for others’ opinions. (Which explains whey Southern Europe is still mired in the fricking crazy. Uniformly. And why women in general are more susceptible to the completely irrational gaslighting than men.) And they already believe a bunch of crazy crap. The reason that they think QANON is right main stream, it’s because it’s the mirror image of their actual main stream.

Are you sure they’ll remain inoffensive if the ballon goes up and the gaslighting switches to “If you know a Trump voter, he/she is dangerous?” How about “Turn them in, so they can be sent somewhere nice for their own protection?”

Look, guys, I hope none of this is ever needed. I still have friends on the other side, I’m just not in touch and we work on the very long finger. And there are people I no longer consider friends but whom I like very much who are buying into the entire insane bull excreta of “attempted coup” and evil “white nationalists.”

But like Peter Grant, I think we’re way past the ballot box, and just waiting for a precipitating incident.

I desperately hope she’s wrong about this, because an actual shooting war in the United States would be a disaster for western civilization.

Update: It’s apparently time to Immanentize the Eschaton!

I’m of the firm opinion that the Progressive Left believed that once Obama won his second term they were set. The eschaton night not be immanent, but it was imminent. Hillary was going to be another “great leap forward” towards the heaven on Earth promised by Karl Marx. […]

“Politics” it is said, “is the art of compromise.” “War,” said von Clausewitz, “is politics by other means.” I have repeated and repeated the observation that has made itself manifest in the nearly 18 years I’ve been writing this blog: Charles Krauthammer noted in 2002 that “To understand the workings of American politics you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.”

You don’t debate with evil. You don’t negotiate with evil. You don’t compromise with evil. You don’t tolerate evil. You DESTROY evil. You pat it on the head until you can find a rock big enough to bash its skull in.

And control of the culture, education, and the government makes for a big damned rock.

Here’s the tinfoil yarmulke part of this essay: The preparations are underway. When debate and compromise are no longer possible, then force is the only thing left. They know it, and they’re projecting it on their enemy, us.

The Progressive Left has created and exercised its Sturmabteilung (yes, I know I risk Godwinization, and they loathe such comparisons, but this one’s apt. Their outfits are black instead of brown, but the actions are the same.) They’ve been set loose in the Pacific Northwest and some other cities and have been allowed to riot, commit arson, loot and occasionally murder with little to no legal consequence (violence, after all, being free speech you know.) Andy Ngo has studied Antifa, itself with roots in radical Socialism, in depth, and says that they are preparing for war, generously supported by the more mainstream Progressive Left. Black Lives Matter, an organization founded by two open Marxists, is also part of the preparations, but these are in my opinion just the Progressive Left’s “useful idiot” shock troops – the first to go against the wall after the Revolution.

March 5, 2021

Schools told they need to “identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views”

Filed under: Education, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:15

No wonder I had trouble with math back in grade school: Math is a racist tool of White Supremacists!

“Math Class” by attercop311 is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Mandatory teaching standards that focus on critical theory and identity politics to the detriment of liberalism and individualism are already working their way through state legislatures.

Now, math education itself has been deemed “racist.” A group of educators just released a document calling for a transformation of math education that focuses on “dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms by visibilizing the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture with respect to math.”

Among the educators’ recommendations, which officials in some states are promoting, are calls to “identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views,” “provide learning opportunities that use math as resistance,” and “encourage them to disrupt the disproportionate push-out of people of color in [STEM] fields.”

Beyond activism, these recommendations also argue that traditional approaches to math education promote racism and white supremacy, such as requiring students to show their work or prioritizing correct answers to math problems. The document claims that current math teaching is problematic because it focuses on “reinforcing objectivity and the idea that there is only one right way” while it “also reinforces paternalism.”

February 22, 2021

QotD: Modern academic “life”

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

The point of all this isn’t just more academia-bashing (fun as that is, and thank you Jesus for early retirement). The point is: Life deals people bad hands. Many, perhaps most, of the people I know in academia are there because they really can’t do anything else — a combination of (as they feel it) genes and circumstance has landed them there, and while it looks like a really cushy upper-middle-class life materially, spiritually it’s the pits, because it’s aesthetically awful. The Classical Greek adage that the Good is the True is the Beautiful might not be factually accurate, but it sure feels right …

… and never more than to people who know themselves un-beautiful, therefore not good, therefore false, and locked in it. Forever.

These people hate us, not because we’re better looking, more socially skilled, or whatever — this is, after all, the Internet — but because we’ve got options. We’re not all fighting over who gets to be Big Fish in an ever-shrinking pond. We’re different things to different people; we haven’t collapsed our social context down to faculty mixers and the one or two non-hamplanet grad students who are silly enough to apply each semester. We can go days, maybe even weeks, without obsessively comparing ourselves to our peers. We don’t care that we’re not “Chad” or “Stacy,” because we’ve got other settings on the emotional dial than “smugness” and “jealousy.”

But we need to start caring. I don’t mean getting obsessive over our appearance. I mean that, since this is in many ways an aesthetic battle, aesthetics will help us win. I half-jokingly suggested a “Normal Guy Uniform” a while back – an all-white ball cap with the New England Patriots’ logo on it. I’m not really kidding now. The Left wins, in large part, because they’re fugly losers that no normal person could possibly consider a threat … until they bash your skull in, or get you fired, or send a SWAT team to your house.

Severian, “Politics for Fugly People”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2018-08-24.

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