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 14, 2021
QotD: “Logomachia” – the use of language as a culture war weapon
March 10, 2021
How wide is the gap between extreme partisanship and sectarian violence?
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”
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”
… 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.
February 17, 2021
Sarah Hoyt on why Progressives think Gina Carano’s tweet was antisemitic
I’m a few days behind, so I didn’t see this post by Sarah Hoyt until Tuesday morning:
My first reaction was “Oh. Actress said something, and … they cancelled her.” Which is not only “day ending in y” right now, but also has been for a long time. Part of the reason I came out of the political closet is because I’d gotten tired of watching every word I said, and every expression I made in public. Because even a slight slip would have caused my career to be completely dead. […] So, I was going “Yeah, only innocents who don’t realize what life is like in a completely taken-over industry would think this is surprising. All power to the lady, but I’m sure she knew what would hit her for stepping out of line.”
And then I came across a screen capture of what she said. And someone asking “how is this anti-semitic.”
Which is when I panicked.
[…]
The only way, remotely, no matter how much you stretch it, that what she said can be considered “anti-semitic” is this:
The left believes the Jews were innocent. (This is correct, btw.) That what happened to them was shameful and terrible, and a dishonor on those who attacked them.
BUT they also believe it’s an insult to compare them to the people the left hates FOR THEIR POLITICAL VIEWS.
Because they think the people they hate for their political views — us — are really that bad, and really deserve everything the left intends to do to them. Which is more or less—in rough outlines — what the Nazis did to the Jews.
I mean, they have already talked of reeducating us, taking our children away, and they do in fact do think of us as not fully human.
Mind you, they have absolutely no idea who we are and what we believe, but they know we don’t agree with them, and since their hearts are pure, and utopia is their objective, we must be the very devil, and terrible on principle.
They’ve been exquisitely propagandized to the point they think the only American president with Jewish grandchildren was “anti-semitic.” They think that black people who don’t want to careen into ruinous and deadly socialism are “white supremacists” (the poor things swallowed Gramsci without chewing); they think other races aren’t hetero-normative; they think America is the most racissss, sexissss, homophobic nation on Earth … and they will not listen to corrections of their appalling and atrocious ignorance of true history or foreign anthropology or … really anything. Because anything opposing the indoctrination has been trained into them is an attack on their psyche.
So, they’re ignorant. They live in a political/social universe where if you oppose the completely insane leftist version of the world, you must be evil and “a nazi” which is to say the devil. They are so completely saturated in utter inanity that they call Israel “fascist.”
BUT one thing they know, and they know it at gut level: everyone to the right of Lenin — or perhaps Mao — are untermensch who will have to be utterly destroyed, so that the final promised utopia that they were promised since elementary school will come to be.
So, in their eyes comparing innocent Jews to their political opponents is experienced as an insult to the Jews.
Because in leftist eyes, we are evil, cockroaches and sub-humans whom they have to eradicate from society.
And they will not look in the mirror, or admit that what they’re engaging in is exactly what the nazis did, only with political beliefs instead of race. And it’s complicated. These idiots have simply decided that the real master race are black people. And that all evil comes from white males. But to be fair, it shades to people like me who have “internalized oppression” and are therefore “male.”
QotD: Protectionists, left and right
“Progressives” who embrace protectionism share conservatives’ low opinion of their country’s businesses, entrepreneurs, and workers, but also mistakenly believe that protectionism “sticks it to” corporate oligarchs when, in fact, it creates corporate oligarchs.
Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2018-09-10.
February 10, 2021
“Did you know that seventy years ago, our grandparents were having an underpolarization crisis?”
Scott Alexander reviews Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein, beginning with the underpolarization crisis of the mid-20th century:
In 1950, the American Political Science Association “released a call to arms … pleading for a more polarized political system”. The report argued that “the parties contain too much diversity of opinion and work together too easily, leaving voters confused about who to vote for and why”. Everyone agreed with each other so much, and compromised so readily, that supporting one party over the other seemed almost pointless.
In 1976, three years after Roe v. Wade, Democrats and Republicans were about equally likely to support abortion restrictions. That same year, a poll found that “only 54% of the electorate believed that the Republican Party was more conservative than the Democratic Party”; 30% thought there was no difference. As late as 2004, about equal numbers (within 5 pp) of Democrats and Republicans agreed with statements like “government is almost always wasteful and inefficient” and “immigrants are a burden on our country”. Between the late 60s and early 90s, Democratic presidents deregulated the airlines and passed welfare reform; Republican presidents pushed immigration amnesties and founded the EPA.
What happened between then and now? Klein has two answers: a historical answer, and a structural answer.
The historical answer is: the Dixiecrats switched from Democrat to Republican.
When the North won the Civil War, it had grand plans to remake the South into a paradise of racial equality and universal love. After Lincoln’s death, his successor Andrew Johnson decided this sounded hard and gave up. Within a few decades, the South was back to being a racist, paramilitary-violence-prone one-party dictatorship. That one party called itself “Democrat”, but had few similiarites to the Democrats in the North. The Southern Democrats (“Dixiecrats”) and northern Democrats disagreed on lots of issues, but the South hated the Republicans so much after their experience with Lincoln that they caucused with the northern Democrats anyway. This turned into a stable coalition, with northern Democrats agreeing to support the South against civil rights for blacks, and the Dixiecrats supporting the northern Democrats whenever they needed something.
But since the Democratic party contained both northern Democrats (relatively liberal) and Dixiecrats (relatively conservative), it didn’t want to take a coherent party-wide stance on liberalism vs. conservatism. And by the median voter theorem, that meant the Republicans also didn’t want to take a coherent stance on liberalism vs. conservatism. So both parties ended out centrist and identical.
In 1964, the Civil Rights Act threatened the Dixiecrats’ key issue. It wasn’t quite as simple as “Democrats were for it, Republicans were against it” – in fact, 80% of Republicans and 60% of Democrats supported it. But that year’s presidential election pitted heavily pro-CRA Democrat Lyndon Johnson against anti-CRA Republican Barry Goldwater, beginning Southerners’ defection to the Republican Party.
Klein says this successfully got all the conservatives on one side of the aisle and all the liberals on the other, allowing polarization to begin. Essentially, he believes polarization is a natural process, which the odd coalitions of the early 20th century temporarily prevented. Once the coalitions were broken, it could begin to do its work. He spends the rest of the book talking about why exactly polarization is so natural, what aspects of modernization have made it worse, and what sort of feedback loops make it keep going
Victor Davis Hanson on Animal Farm, America’s nightmare 2021 version
Victor Davis Hanson outlines the original George Orwell novel and then contrasts today’s situation with what progressives demanded back in the 1960s and 70s:
Yes, the downtrodden pigs, the exploited horses, and the victimized sheep finally did expel Farmer Jones from America’s Animal Farm.
But in his place, as Orwell predicted, revolutionary pigs began walking on two feet and absorbed all the levers of American cultural influence and power: the media, the bureaucracies, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, publishing, the academy, K-12 education, professional sports, and entertainment. And to them all, the revolutionaries added their past coarseness and 1960s-era by-any-means-necessary absolutism.
We are now finally witnessing the logical fruition of their radical utopia: Censorship, electronic surveillance, internal spying, monopolies, cartels, conspiracy theories, weaponization of the intelligence agencies, pouring billions of dollars into campaigns, changing voting laws by fiat, a woke revolutionary military, book banning, bleeding the First Amendment, canceling careers, blacklisting, separate-but-equal racial segregation and separatism.
Conspiracies? Now they brag of them in Time. Read their hubristic confessionals in “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” Once upon a Time, radicals used to talk of a “secret history” in terms of the Pentagon Papers, or a “shadow campaign” in detailing Hollywood blacklisting. They are exactly what they once despised, with one key qualifier: Sixties crudity and venom are central to their metamorphosis.
Our left-wing American revolutionary cycle from the barricades to the boardroom was pretty quick — in the manner that the ideology of the Battleship Potemkin soon led to Stalin’s show trials, or Mao’s “long march” logically resulted in the Cultural Revolution. The credo, again, is that the noble ends of forced “equity” require any means necessary to achieve them.
The Left censors books in our schools, whether To Kill a Mockingbird or Tom Sawyer. It is the Left who organizes efforts to shout down campus speakers or even allows them to be roughed up.
The Left demands not free-speech areas anymore, but no-speech “safe spaces” and “theme houses” — euphemisms for racially segregated, “separate-but-equal” zones. “Microaggressions” are tantamount to thought crimes. The mere way we look, smile, or blink can indict us as counterrevolutionaries. Stalin’s Trotskyization of all incorrect names, statues, and commemoratives is the Left’s ideal, as they seek to relabel Old America in one fell swoop. No one is spared from the new racists, not Honest Abe, not Tom Jefferson, not you, not me.
For “teach-ins,” we now have indoctrination sessions. But the handlers are no longer long-haired 1960’s dreamy, sloppy, and incoherent mentors. They are disciplined, no-nonsense brain-washers.
The Left’s Russia is our new old bogeyman. Putin is the new “We will bury you” Khrushchev.
February 6, 2021
QotD: Political virtue signalling in everyday conversation
It wouldn’t generally occur to me to shoehorn politics into an otherwise routine exchange, or into a gathering with strangers, or to presume the emphatic political agreement of random restaurant customers. It seems … rude. By which I mean parochial, selfish and an imposition — insofar as others may feel obliged to quietly endure irritating sermons, insults and condescension in order to avoid causing a scene and derailing the entire evening. The analogy that comes to mind is of inviting the new neighbours round for coffee and then, just before you hand over the cups to these people you’ve only just met, issuing a lengthy, self-satisfied proclamation on the merits of mass immigration, high taxes and lenient sentencing. And then expecting nodding and applause, rather than polite bewilderment.
David Thompson, “The Blurting”, David Thompson, 2019-09-04.
February 4, 2021
Ace reads the upper middle class out of the conservative movement
At Ace of Spades H.Q., Ace himself explains why he doesn’t consider anyone who evinces loyalty to “the mores of the upper middle class” to be in any way, shape, or form “conservative”:
Never once do these bougie “cons” notice that the class whose class markers they are so eagerly collecting like Cub Scout merit badges are entirely created by progressives.
I’m going to say this more straightforwardly than I’ve ever said it. I’ve hinted around it, I’ve never said it straight up.
But here goes:
People loyal to the mores of the upper middle class are left-liberal. Period.
They should have no place in the leadership and “thought” leadership of any “conservative” movement. They are not conservative.
They are all pro-gay marriage.
They are all pro-abortion.
They are all in favor of shipping out every single working-class job to China, and, for those few remaining jobs which must be performed in America, shipping in workers from the third world to displace Americans.
They are all supporters of a soft version of the SJW progressive stack. They all believe in “White Privilege,” for an obvious reason — as the rich children of the prosperous upper-middle class, they’re actually the ones born to privilege, but they wish to obscure that fact. So they buy into the left’s claims about the “White Privilege” of 63% of the country, instead of focusing on the wealth privilege of 10%.
Jake Tapper will entertain he shares a kind of privilege with two thirds of the country but he will never acknowledge his real privilege, one shared by only 10% of the country.
And the social-climbing “conservative” media class is almost entirely born from the same prosperous class. They too do not want to talk about real privilege.
I always want to ask these guys, so desperate to peonize the working class: How far back in time do you have to go to find an ancestor who had a job which caused callouses to form on his hands?
Was it two generations ago? Three? It’s obvious the “conservative” media class has never had to work a shovel in their lives. The toughest job they’ve ever held was working in their dad’s law office, or valet parking Beemers at the country club.
And yes, they support the leftwing SJW claims about race. Bullshit like “minorities can’t be racist,” or at least not racist in a way that should be held against them.
That’s why they all rushed to defend notorious, swaggering racist Sarah Jeong, and refuse to even acknowledge the eyebrow-singing anti-white racism seen every single day in the media.
To acknowledge there’s such a thing as “anti-white racism,” and that it ought to be condemned, is, they’ve decided, an “alt-right” idea, and the alt-right is a lower class phenomenon, and, as I’ve noted, they really, really really need you to know they are not lower class.
The only way in which they are arguably “conservative” is that … they are in favor of oligarchical fascism directed by the billionaires signing their paychecks.
Which is of course not “conservative” at all. But that’s the one category in which they can make an arguable case for their “conservatism” — in always championing the Ruling Class’ right to rule over the downscale Dirties.
Is that the “conservatism” we want? A gonzo left-liberalism which is also thoroughly anti-republican, anti-egalitarian?
Also at Ace of Spades H.Q., OregonMuse quoted this rather timely Barry Goldwater statement:
I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is “needed” before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents’ “interests”, I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.
February 2, 2021
Well, it is a very, very cunning plan …
In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt explains why the progressives’ cunningest of cunning plans may not be cunning enough:
The left has a plan so cunning that if it were a person, it would be teaching cunningology at Oxford. And the ones who get the reference will also know that their plan is about to go pear shaped in all sorts of interesting ways, and at the end of it there might very well be a turnip or two involved, but not as the only item available in the shelves of the grocery store.
Look, someone pointed out in the comments the left are trying to follow the “plan” for other communist revolutions round the world.
He’s right. They’re trying to follow it to the letter. Partly because it’s worked before, and partly, because to be fair, they’re a cult, and cults don’t know the reason for the ritual, they just follow it.
… but it’s already going wrong. And it’s only going to get worse.
You see, part of the problem is that the cult of communism and the procedures for “the revolution” were set in the early twentieth century. And it’s designed for the early twentieth century. To the extent they worked in places like Venezuela, it is because the underlying structures of the society were still very much “early twentieth century.”
The US? Well, not so much. In fact we never were much like the early twentieth century in Europe, which is why they’ve had a hell of a time getting a foothold here.
The communist revolution is designed to work in a country that is mostly urban, with a vast urban underclass that can’t rise above for reasons both internal and external despite working unreasonable hours. It’s designed for a country with a firm aristocracy of the hereditary sort (even if that aristocracy is often from trade), it is designed for a country with a conscript army where the plum assignments go to the “good families” as a matter of course, it is designed to work — most of all and very importantly — in a country where they ABSOLUTELY control all the means of mass communication and do so without the vast majority of the people being aware of it.
The last time they could have pulled that off in the US was in the mid seventies. And my guess, honestly, is that they tried. I don’t know for sure, since the news of the time were all reported by biased sources, and besides I’m too lazy and too busy […] to spend my day chasing down hints. I bet they did try, though. I bet they gave it a sporting try. And I bet part of the issue back then — as now, btw — is that they were pinning their hopes on a race war, having both not realized how much of a minority people of African descent are in the US (last estimate is what? 14%? Sizeable, sure, but not a large minority and certainly not a majority. Also, and seriously, a lot of that minority is middle class and whatever they voice from the mouth-out as uninterested as the rest of us in having the apple cart overturned. Apples are tasty. Genocide not so much.) Mostly because that sh*t was so successful in Africa, and again the left doesn’t think. It ritualistically applies “what worked” without being able to account for changed conditions.
Anyway, that was the last time they could have MAYBE credibly have followed their little red map to revolution and have it work. And even then Americans were just too darn contrarian. Why everyone and their parents were telling us that Republicans were so dangerous, that they were going to start the nuclear war, that — And we went and voted Reagan in. (Well, not me. I only worked towards it. I didn’t vote. I wasn’t a citizen and I’m not a democrat.)
In fact, America could have engraved on its door lintel “authorities can go f*ck themselves.” The left keeps forgetting that. And sometimes justifiably. Take their Covid-psy-ops. It worked. And it was all run on the “experts” and how important it was.
Uh uh. So, they think their control is back! They’re golden again, baby!
February 1, 2021
QotD: “Useless things … do not further The Revolution”
Too bad for the Bolshies that it’s in our nature to confuse the messenger with the message. I like to think of myself as an open-minded, tolerant man who takes things as they come, but holy jeeebus, I don’t care what Emma Goldman’s deal is — if she’s for it, I’m against it. I need bleach for my eyes.
We need to use that. It’s no coincidence that Ashley Judd and now Taylor Swift are spouting off about Progtard politics — they used to be cute; now they’re not. See what Social Justice does to you, ladies?
Severian, “The Face You Deserve”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2018-10-11.
January 29, 2021
QotD: Banishing racism
We can – we must, in fact – learn to judge individuals as individuals, not as members of racial or other ascriptive groups. This has always been the right thing to do; as knowledge about genetic group differences becomes more detailed and widespread, we will need to learn how to focus rigorously on individuals with the same discipline (and the same justified fear of failure) that we now apply to averting our eyes from genetic group differences.
Part of the reason this evolution won’t be easy is that so much of our politics has been distorted by racial grievance-mongering. It’s not only the obvious bad guys like neo-Nazis, Black separatists like Louis Farrakhan, and Bharatiya Janata who are invested in racialist categorization as a lever to power. The political Left has fallen into a lazy habit of screaming “racist!” at anyone who disagrees with them, won’t readily relinquish that rhetorical club, and have a lot invested in the present system of taboo, resentment, “disparate impact” legislation, and racial identity politics; expect them, too, to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
Still, the right strategy is clear. Actual knowledge makes both prejudice and repression unsustainable. “Know thyself!” said the oracle, and behavioral genetics will allow – actually, force us – to know ourselves in ways we never have before. That way lies the pain of revelation, but also the path of redemption.
Eric S. Raymond, “A Specter is Haunting Genetics”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-06-19.
January 10, 2021
Has the United States reached the same tipping point Canada reached in 1982?
David Warren considers the 1982 tipping point in Canada to have been the implementation of Pierre Trudeau’s Constitution:
Queen Elizabeth II signs Canada’s constitutional proclamation in Ottawa on April 17, 1982 as Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau looks on.
There are two principal political parties in modern America (in which I include up here). In the Natted States, the population is divided roughly equally between those of “progressive” and “regressive” habits of mind; in the Canadas, the former have come to dominate.
The tipping point was reached much earlier up here, and the new “metapower” (Foucault’s term) was seized, politically, from within the Liberal Party. The strategy was to disenfranchise the “conservative” half of the electorate, by undermining all national institutions, and hosing down Canada’s previous identity. I’d count, say, 1982, as the point of no return. That identity was replaced, definitively, under a revised Trudeau constitution, with a new “multicultural” identity, in which citizens were themselves redefined, from free persons whose rights were inalienable, to interchangeable clients of an omnipotent State, which could dispense rights whenever it was in the mood — and withdraw them whenever the mood changed; however frequently.
This is the Democrat strategy in the larger, and still less amenable, country next door. As Andrew Breitbart and Antonio Gramsci might agree, this is an essentially cultural process. Politics are visible at the tip of the iceberg, but “progress” requires a more thorough “cleansing,” of old cultural norms. The cancer metastasized more from Hollywood, than from Washington DC. The takeover of the Democratic Party as the vanguard “agent of change” was only part of the institutional takeover of America. As important was the takeover of the mass media, and even corporate boardrooms. Those who weren’t “progressive” would now be “cancelled”: must cease to be.
All cultural change has a religious dimension. The Democrat representatives of the “powers and principalities” mentioned by Saint Paul, are characteristically godless, themselves. But they depend on a massive, core constituency of low-information, low-intelligence, easily manipulated urban voters.
Those who can still see the stars at night tend to remain in the ancient, God-fearing default. In the cities, where the masses may not grasp that milk comes from cows, let alone that someone must milk them, the belief that the economy is based on government cheques is more common. That is the god of the populous cities, and for most city-dwellers, not voting for their “godless god” of progress, seems a kind of heresy.
The idea that such heretics should be deprived of their freedom, starting with freedom of speech, does not appeal to the “rural” voter, including people like me — a “country hick” type who paradoxically lives in the city. The idea that laws and constitutions should be flexible, to accommodate the latest schemes of a progressive technocratic élite, doesn’t flourish among us country bumpkins. But to the efficiency experts in the city, what is our problem?
January 5, 2021
Lockdowns are inducing a kind of cultural autism (but especially among our self-imagined “betters”)
Last month, Douglas Murray looked at how the various shades and degrees of lockdown in most western nations have disrupted normal socialization patterns and created odd and unusual social feedback to various stimuli:
A building burning in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd.
Photo by Hungryogrephotos via Wikipedia.
This year has seen a series of extraordinary events. First and foremost are the unprecedented lockdowns, which have removed from almost all our societies not just our ability to congregate, but also almost all of our social antennae. It is not just actors, comedians or public speakers who have lost that mechanism: we all have to some extent.
“Will this statement/opinion/joke go down well or badly?” is a fine judgement call. In public and relative private we all try things out and experiment all of the time. Take away all audiences beyond your immediate household and we must all subject ourselves to some other way of testing which way the wind is blowing. The only such device left is the online world, which — as should be obvious to all by now — has its own problems.
And so, during the middle of the oddest mass psychological experiment in history, came the death of George Floyd in May and the rapid escalation of the Black Lives Matter movement. A movement that attempted to push, inveigle and eventually intimidate itself into almost every walk of life inside America and beyond.
In Britain, institutions as far away from the scene of the crime as the British Library and Cambridge University seemed to think that the death of an unarmed black man at the hands of a Minnesota police officer (currently awaiting trial on a charge of murder) demanded some kind of response, lest they be accused of being insufficiently devout.
In ordinary times, people might have been able to get a sense of where other people stood on such a matter. Did users of the British Library really feel any culpability for events in Minnesota? Were things so bad in the state of race relations in America and across the western world (only the western world, naturally) that a stance was required — indeed demanded — of everyone? For a time, it seemed so. Almost every major British institution, including all its universities, issued statements about the death of a man in police custody on another continent, in a jurisdiction over which we have precisely zero control, and similar levels of influence.
“Taking the knee” became one of the emblems of obedience, or subservience, to the cause. Soon, even questioning the reverence of that hallowed, brand new tradition was cause to be pummelled online. And when all gatherings of more than six were banned by law, what other world mattered?
