Maverick Philosopher

Leftists as Political Retromingents

A retromingent is an animal that urinates backwards.

Posturing as 'progressive,' the leftist pisses on the past, seeking to erase its memory by destroying monuments and redacting the historical record.  There is no piety in the leftist, no reverence. Try using those words at a Manhattan or Georgetown cocktail party and see what happens.

This political retromingency helps explain the leftists' lack of respect for language. 

If you erase history, however, not only will you not be able to learn from it, but you won't have anything left to piss on, either.  Your retromingency will cut counter to your benighted and backwards  modus vivendi et micturendi.

Instructive story here. 

The Battle is Just Beginning

Walk the line. Don't back down.  It's going to be a long twilight struggle against the forces of darkness, my friends. (Wo)Man up, gear up, but be of good cheer. Long live the Republic!

JFK Inaugural Speech, 1961:

Now the trumpet summons us again--not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need -- not as a call to battle, though embattled we are -- but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, 'rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation'--a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.

Of the four, tyranny is greatest threat at the present time, the tyranny of the deep state operatives who control the Democrat Party and pull the strings of the puppet-in-chief, Joe Biden, and who desperately tried, but failed, to replace him with the puppet Kamala Harris.  Despite the stinging rebuke visited upon the anti-democratic Dem cadre, they will not give up. Their nihilism has deep and mephitic sources.

I was hoping to uncover an etymological connection between mephitic and Mephistopheles, but I found no evidence of one.

.......................

UPDATE (12/18).  Further political 'infusions' to 'get your blood up' in this season of peace and joy. Si vis pacem, para bellum.

Why They Hate Kash Patel.  They hate a 'person of color'? What racists  they are!

After Penny.  Excerpt:

Instead, the left and the weaponized government institutions under its control used Penny’s race, gender, and courage to try to make him a national pariah and a living symbol of its twisted ideas of “white privilege” and “systemic racism.” He had to entertain daily the possibility that he could spend up to 20 years in prison for protecting himself and others, and then live out the remainder of his life as an ex-con whose alleged crimes were rooted in purported racism. He had to live in the knowledge that the elected judicial authorities of our country’s largest and supposedly greatest city—with the unreserved support of many civic leaders, criminal justice theorists, and major leaders of one of our country’s two major political parties—did everything in their power to impose just that outcome on him. He likely realized that if they succeeded—and even if they failed, as they did—they would be emboldened to  punish others with the same process.

Tucker versus Pompeo

Trump's Vengeance Tour?  

Last week, I noted with alarm that House Republicans were shrugging off—or even approving of—Donald Trump wanting to jail some of their past and current colleagues who served on the January 6th Committee. As it turns out, I underestimated their bloodthirstiness.

Apparently these embittered losers are incapable of distinguishing between revenge/vengeance and retributive justice. Are these two-bit Bulwark journos unaware that 'retribution' has two importantly different senses in English? 

Whence drones?

I am not able [not able, Rod, or not willing?] to tell you where this idea comes from, but I can assure you that, from my sources, it’s not idle speculation. Thesis: the drones are from China.

China is taunting us, showing us how advanced its technology is, and that it can violate US airspace with impunity. We don’t have the ability to detect these things before they arrive, and they can cloak themselves from our radar. I had wondered why China or any nation would reveal its advanced technology in this silly way. A possible answer: it could be a display of power in advance of an invasion of Taiwan, as a kind of “Are you sure you want to mess with us, Yanks?” way. Doing this could be a shrewd way of firing a warning shot.

Is Dreher suggesting that Alejandro Mayorkas, Director of Homeland (In?)Security, has been lying to us, along with the rest of the Dementocrat regime about the provenience of drones? Dreher's thesis is the most plausible explanation I can think of.  

Thomas Sowell Quotation

Remember Dr. John Jay Ray? He is a like-minded blogger buddy of mine from the early days. I received some traffic today from one of his sites, Dissecting Leftism. Over there, I found this:

 

Stealth Ideologues: Hillary and Kamala

On 21 October 2016, I laid into Hillary for lying about the Heller decision. The post concluded:

Hillary is a stealth ideologue who operates by deception. This is what makes her so despicable. If she were honest about her positions, her support would erode. So not only are her policies destructive; she refuses to own them.  She is an Obamination both at the level of ideas and at the level of character.

'Kamala' is substitutable for 'Hillary' salva veritate as the philosophers say.  In plain English, if the first name is substituted for the second in the above passage, its truth is preserved.  

If you complain that my tone is polemical, I will reply that of course it is, and justifiably so: we are at war with our political enemies. The cadre Dems I have just mentioned are not mere political opponents who share with us a commitment to the principles and values of our great constitutional republic, but revolutionaries out to replace that republic by way of a "fundamental transformation," as Barack Hussein Obama put it. To imagine that we are  engaged with them in a gentle(wo)manly debate under the umbrella of shared commitments is to play the useful idiot as so many rank-and-file Dems still do. You are a superannuated sucker if you still think it is 1960 or even 1980.

I leave undecided whether Heraclitus the Obscure of Ephesus was right when he wrote, "Polemos (Πόλεμος) is the father of all and the king of all . . . ." (Fr. 53 from G. S. Kirk and J E Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers, Cambridge UP, 1969, p. 195)

And then there is this from the same date (21.X.16):

Leviticus 19:15: The Lord versus Hillary

“You shall not do injustice in judgment; you shall not show partiality to the powerless; you shall not give preference to the powerful; you shall judge your fellow citizen with justice."  Alternate translations here.

In the third and final presidential debate, Hillary Clinton said the following about Supreme Court  nominations.  "And the kind of people that I would be looking to nominate to the court would be in the great tradition of standing up to the powerful, standing on behalf of our rights as Americans." 

This is the sort of leftist claptrap according to which the judiciary assumes  legislative functions and the Constitution is a tabula rasa on which anything can be written.  The purpose of the court is not to stand up to the powerful or take the side of the powerless, but to apply the law and administer justice.  

 There must be no partiality to the powerful. Might does not make right.  But neither does lack of might. There must be no  "partiality to the powerless." 

(Credit where credit is due:  I am riffing on a comment I heard Dennis Prager make. Plagiarism is another mark of leftism.) 

Related: Weakness does not Justify

“You shall not do injustice in judgment; you shall not show partiality to the powerless; you shall not give preference to the powerful; you shall judge your fellow citizen with justice."  Alternate translations here.

In the third and final presidential debate, Hillary Clinton said the following about Supreme Court  nominations.  "And the kind of people that I would be looking to nominate to the court would be in the great tradition of standing up to the powerful, standing on behalf of our rights as Americans." 

This is the sort of leftist claptrap according to which the judiciary assumes  legislative functions and the Constitution is a tabula rasa on which anything can be written.  The purpose of the court is not to stand up to the powerful or take the side of the powerless, but to apply the law and administer justice.  

 There must be no partiality to the powerful. Might does not make right.  But neither does lack of might. There must be no  "partiality to the powerless." 

(Credit where credit is due:  I am riffing on a comment I heard Dennis Prager make. Plagiarism is another mark of leftism.) 

Related: Weakness does not Justify

More Proof of Leftist Scumbaggery

From The Atlantic

Analysis

Red World, Blue World, and the Orange Man

David Brooks, Confessions of a Republican Exile:

In Red World, people tend to take a biblical view of the human person: We are gloriously endowed and made in the image of God—and we are deeply broken, sinful, and egotistical. [. . .] You belong to God; to your family; and to the town, nation, and civilization you call home. Your ultimate authority in life is outside the self—in God, or in the wisdom contained within our shared social and moral order.

In Blue World, by contrast, people are more likely to believe that far from being broken sinners, each of us has something beautiful and pure at our core. As the philosopher Charles Taylor put it in The Ethics of Authenticity, “Our moral salvation comes from recovering authentic moral contact with ourselves.” In this culture you want to self-actualize, listen to your own truth, be true to who you are. The ultimate authority is inside you.

Brooks sees good in both worlds, and does a fair job of characterizing the differences between them, but nowadays he finds himself "rooting for the Democrats about 70 percent of the time." But why the tilt toward the Blue?

You guessed it: the Orange Man.  Brooks speaks of "Donald Trump’s desecration of the Republican Party."  Desecration? But surely no political party in a non-theocratic system such as ours is sacred. You can't desecrate what is not sacred. But let that pass. There is far worse to come.

We are told that Blue World "has a greater commitment to the truth." Really? "This may sound weird," Brooks admits, but it is worse than weird; it is incoherent. One cannot both support the Blue commitment to "your own truth" and invoke the truth. If there is the truth, it cannot vary from person to person. What can so vary is only one's personal attitude to the truth, whether by way of acceptance, rejection, doubt, etc.  The truth is invariant across personal attitudes.  Truth cannot be owned. There is no such thing as my truth or your truth, any more than there is my reality and your reality.  Claudine Gay take note. This is an elementary point. Philosophy 101. Brooks needs to think harder. But then what can you expect from a journalist who writes for The Atlantic?

But not only is Brooks embracing incoherence, he is also maintaining something manifestly false.  If there is anything that best characterizes the current Blue World  in action it is the thorough-going mendacity of the members of the Biden-Harris administration from Biden on down. Do I need to give examples? It is enough to name names: Biden, Harris, Granholm, Mayorkas, and the list goes on.  In Mayorkas, the Director of Homeland Security, the mendacity takes an Orwellian turn into the subversion of language: "The border is secure, as we define 'secure."  His very title is an Orwellianism: he is actively promoting, as is the whole Biden-Harris administration, homeland insecurity.

The truth is that truth is not a leftist value. Leftists will sometimes speak the truth, of course, but only if it serves their agenda. Otherwise they lie.  What animates them is not the Will to Truth, but the Will to Power.  

Brooks again:

But today the Republican relationship to truth and knowledge has gone to hell. MAGA is a fever swamp of lies, conspiracy theories, and scorn for expertise. The Blue World, in contrast, is a place more amenable to disagreement, debate, and the energetic pursuit of truth. 

I hate to be so disagreeable, but that is just preposterous.

Could Brooks define 'lie'?  Does he understand the distinction between a lie and an exaggeration? Has he given any thought to the difference between a lie and a counterfactual conditional? After winning in 2016, Trump famously boasted, 

Had it not been for all the illegal votes, I would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral college vote.

Leftists, who compile long lists of Trump's supposed lies, had among their number some who counted the above -- an accurate paraphrase of what Trump said, not an exact quotation -- as a lie.

But it is obviously not a lie. The worst you could call it is an unlikely, self-serving speculation.  He did not assert something he knew to be false, he asserted something he did not know to be true and could not know to be true. For there was no underlying fact of the matter about which he could have even tried to deceive his audience.  Counterfactual conditionals are about merely possible states of affairs.  That is why they are called counterfactual.

Has Brooks ever thought hard about what a conspiracy theory is? 

The Blues are "more amenable to disagreement, debate, and the energetic pursuit of truth"?  How's that for a brazen lie what with their de-platforming and cancellation of their opponents  not to mention the recent assaults on the First Amendment by John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.

Kimball on Kolakowski on Marxism as a Bogus Form of Religion

I have argued time and again that Marxism is not a religion. But many have a burning need so to misunderstand it. What the great Kolakowski says below reinforces me in the correctness of my opinion.  As for Fredric Jameson, whom Roger Kimball discusses in his Guilt of the Intellectuals, I haven't read him and never will. Theodor Adorno, on the other hand, I have read with care.  I rate him higher than Roger Kimball does, who is more of a public intellectual (a very good one!) than a philosopher. (PhilPapers lists only seven works of his.) I consider Adorno worth reading and evaluating, as I do in Contra Adorno: A Preliminary Plea for Omphaloscopy.

Kimball:

Whatever Professor Jameson’s personal commitment to Marxist doctrine, there can be little doubt that his habits of thought were deeply tinged by the gnostic contempt for everyday experience and faith in a secular apocalypse that has characterized Marxism from the beginning. As the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski noted in the third volume of his magisterial study Main Currents of Marxism, this is the ultimate source of Marxism’s Utopian dreams and its great seductiveness for suitably disposed intellectuals. “The influence that Marxism has achieved,” Kolakowski wrote,

far from being the result or proof of its scientific character, is almost entirely due to its prophetic, fantastic, and irrational elements. Marxism is a doctrine of blind confidence that a paradise of universal satisfaction is awaiting us just around the corner. Almost all the prophecies of Marx and his followers have already proved to be false, but this does not disturb the spiritual certainty of the faithful, any more than it did in the case of chiliastic sects. … In this sense Marxism performs the function of a religion, and its efficacy is of a religious character. But it is a caricature and a bogus form of religion, since it presents its temporal eschatology as a scientific system, which religious mythologies do not purport to be.

That the Marxist apocalypse is declared to be the inevitable result of inscrutable “scientific” laws only means that its partisans are potentially as dangerous as they are mystifying: the revolutionary is one whose possession of “the truth” is impervious to experience. For him, “History” speaks with a voice beyond contradiction or appeal.

By the way, 'magisterial' is exactly the word to describe Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism. It is the work of a master, a magister. But would it have killed Kimball to provide a page reference? If he had, the editors would probably have deleted it.  Why do you think that is?

The Integrationist Fantasy

E pluribus unum? Out of many, one? It can work, and it did work for a time, although not perfectly. But no longer. Whether a One can be made of Many  depends on the nature of the Many. 

A viable One cannot be made out of just any Many. 

To think otherwise is to succumb to what I call the Integrationist Fantasy.  This is the dangerous conceit that people can be brought together peacefully and productively despite deep differences in their languages, religions, cultures, traditions, and values.

To integrate is to bring together into a whole.  But a functioning whole, whether political, social, or of any sort, cannot be assembled from any old assortment of parts. In terms of an outworn metaphor from yesteryear, there have to be some constraints on the range of ingredients thrown into the melting pot. Your stew will not be improved by the addition of ground-up spark plugs or enhanced by a liberal dose of WD-40.

Keeping with the gustatory metaphor, wide-open borders is a recipe for disaster.  

Michael Walzer on Religion

At least one lefty gets it, somewhat. Top o' the Stack.

Who Are These Hamas Supporters?

This just in from Tony Flood:

"From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” chant the useful idiots at elite institutions and parades in the West. Who are these people? Atheists who support theocratic lunatics, democrats who endorse medieval tyrants, feminists who defend misogynists who parade with the desecrated corpses of women, gays who defend maniacs who would joyfully hang them or toss them off the roof of a tall building. They talk of a secular, democratic and socialist Palestine. As George Orwell observed: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.” 

Walter E. Block, "The Moral Duty to Destroy Hamas." (Emphasis added.) This is the text of the 927-word WSJ op-ed, published October 11, 2023, behind their paywall; Block posted it the next day on his Substack. 

Austrian School economist and first-generation Rothbardian (i.e., anarcho-capitalist libertarian), Block is a co-author of the 962-page The Classical Liberal Case for Israel (Springer 2021). For me, this book is prohibitively expensive; its argument, however, can be read for free in a documented-to-the-hilt article that the authors had published five years earlier in a peer-reviewed journal: Block WE, Futerman AG, and Farber R, The Legal Status of the State of Israel: A Libertarian Approach, Indonesian Journal of International & Comparative Law, No. 11, July 2016, 435-554. This link will open a 119-page pdf. 

I reiterate my stock disclaimer: Linkage does not constitute plenary endorsement.  I stand for free speech and open inquiry, and thus against those leftists, and in particular those leftists in cahoots with Islamists, who dishonor these classically liberal and traditionally American values. That being said, I fully endorse the material from Block quoted by Flood supra.

 

Addendum. Here is Hans-Hermann Hoppe's reply to Walter E. Block's "The Moral Duty to Destroy Hamas," above cited.  I am not qualified to enter this debate, but I will repeat the following from my partially autobiographical essay From Democrat to Dissident:

We were friends for a time, but friendship is fragile among those for whom ideas matter. Unlike the ordinary nonintellectual person, the intellectual lives for and sometimes from ideas. They are his oxygen and sometimes his bread and butter. He takes them very seriously indeed and with them differences in ideas. So, the tendency is for one intellectual to view another whose ideas differ as not merely holding incorrect views but as being morally defective in so doing. Why? Because ideas matter to the intellectual. They matter in the way doctrines and dogmas mattered to old-time religionists. If one’s eternal happiness is at stake, it matters infinitely whether one “gets it right” doctrinally. If there is no salvation outside the church, you had better belong to the right church. It matters so much that one may feel entirely justified in forcing the heterodox to recant “for their own good.”

 

Related (5/11):  Douglas Murray, Choose Life, not the Death Cults.  If, like me, you have no time to spend during working hours listening to slow-moving speeches, Murray provides an article adaptation of his speech before the Manhattan Institute, which adaptation is accessible via an internal link. 

 

And then there is this: Why Edmund Wilson Saw Judaism as the Key to America's Cultural Survival.

 

Finally, I see that Malcolm and 'Jacques' are debating, civilly but trenchantly, over at Pollack's place.

Quotations from Chairman Maher

Christopher Rufo has her number.

The new CEO of NPR, then, is a left-wing ideologue who supports wide-scale censorship and considers the First Amendment an impediment to her campaign to sanitize the world of wrong opinions.

Maher is no aberration. She is part of a rising cohort of affluent, left-wing, female managers who dominate the departments of university administration, human resources, and DEI. They are the matriarchs of the American Longhouse: they value safety over liberty, censorship over debate, and relativism over truth.

Here, Rufo interviews Larry Sanger about NPR CEO Maher. Excerpt:

Sanger: The fact that she is not immediately hounded out of her job—and she won’t be, I’m sure—shows you how profoundly and how quickly the culture of not just the Internet, but of the United States and the West in general, has changed.

The fact that you had to do some research and surface these videos, that they weren’t immediately caught as smoking-gun evidence of how bad things have gotten, shows you that the attitudes that she expresses are what we expect these days.

Poor Maher! She suffers from both TDS and Truth Decay.

Signposts on the Way to the Insane Asylum

• Looting is shopping without money.
• The 2022 riots were peaceful.
• The border is secure.
• Trespassing is insurrection.
• Dissent is hate.
• Free speech is hate speech.
• Barring candidates from the ballot is democratic.
• Abortion is health care.
• 'Migrants' are newcomers.
• The only purpose of guns is to kill people.
• Math is racist.
• There is no 'migrant' crisis.
• Diversity is our strength.
• 'DEI' is the new 'N' word.
• Coercive confiscation of firearms is gun buy-back. 
• Sex of a baby is not biologically inherent but a matter of 'assignment.'
• Race and sex are social constructs.
• To oppose the sexual mutilation of children is 'transphobic.'
• '2A'  is a terrorist marker.
• White supremacy is the greatest threat we face.
• 'Blind review' denigrates the sightless.
• The disabled are 'differently abled.'
• To argue against the moral acceptability of homosexual practices is 'homophobic.'

I am just getting warmed up. But I'm sure you've caught the drift by now. Each of these bullet points can be nailed down with numerous references which I have supplied elsewhere in many a post.

It is now your turn to do something in defense of civilization. 

The Insanity of the Left

A vote for Democrats is a vote for such leftist/'woke' insanity as this:

JK Rowling has thrown down the gauntlet to the Scottish police. On 1 April, the day the new Hate Crime Act came into force in Scotland, Rowling, who lives in Edinburgh, dared officers to arrest her. She posted a thread on X / Twitter in which she ‘misgendered’ various men who have pretended to be women, from a rapist who tried to be housed in a women’s prison to a balding footballer who cheated his way into a women’s team. ‘If what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act’, she wrote, ‘I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment’.

There could hardly be a greater demonstration of the authoritarianism and absurdity of the SNP’s hate-speech law than the fact it could well lead to the arrest of the author of Harry Potter. The new law has the potential to turn this mild-mannered, left-liberal children’s author into a criminal hate-speaker. Not because she is a racist or a homophobe or a transphobe. But because, as a feminist, she believes in the material reality of biological sex. Because she believes that men cannot become women. Because she believes women’s sex-based rights must be protected. Because she believes in scientific truth.

Dissent is not hate. If I dissent from your VIEWS, it does not follow that I hate YOU. Even a 'liberal' should be able to make that distinction.

Economic Gaslighting

The Left's economic gaslighting  is well-exposed and refuted by Jeffrey H. Anderson at City Journal:

“The economic news in 2023 was almost miraculously good,” the New York Times’s Paul Krugman enthuses, as the American “economy continues to look like an amazing success story.” The title of a Financial Times article emphasizes the “strange lack of electoral reward for the success of Bidenomics.” CNN’s MJ Lee reports that the president himself is confused by the “significant gulf” between an economy that seems to be “humming along” and “the public’s stubbornly grim sentiment.”

In an article for Time, Lee Drutman opines that the disconnect between the economy’s performance and voters’ attitudes “is bad news for our democracy,” as it “means that performance doesn’t matter for presidential incumbents.” Walking out even further on a limb, MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle asks, “Is it the ‘economy’ Americans are talking about, or is that code for life itself? In other words, how do people feel about life right now? . . . Here’s an example: Connecting with friends and family.” Who knew that the perceived shortcomings of the economy are really attributable to shortfalls in personal intimacy?

And you are still a Democrat?

Another by Anderson: A Border Crisis by Design

Alan Dershowitz, Thomas Nagel, and David Benatar

What do they have in common?

Top o' the Stack.

'Racism': Supply and Demand. 'Cultural Appropriation'

Because the demand exceeds the supply, new variants of 'racism' have to be invented by leftist race-hustlers. One of the latest is digital blackface.  (I wrote this in March of last year.) What might that be?  Here:

Digital blackface is a practice where White people co-opt online expressions of Black imagery, slang, catchphrases or culture to convey comic relief or express emotions.

[. . .]

Digital blackface involves white people play-acting at being black . . . 

The complaint seems to be that whitey engages in 'cultural appropriation.' If that were a legitimate complaint, then so would the retort: but then so does blacky.  Black folk regularly play-act at being white when they  practice self-restraint, show respect for legitimate authority, are punctual, work hard, defer gratification, speak correct English, are self-reliant, reasonable and objective, study mathematics and science, save and invest, plan for the future, act responsibly towards themselves and others, listen to and play classical music, enjoy the fruits of high culture, and so on.

So one might ask, rhetorically, "By what right do blacks appropriate OUR culture? OUR white values and virtues?"

But I don't ask that question. 

What I have insisted on, again and again in these pages, is that whites do not own the above values and virtues. They are universal and available to all.  It is just that whites are better at isolating, describing, and implementing the values that belong to all of us.  

Blacks will always be on the bottom as long as they think that they are 'acting white' when they practice self-restraint, show respect for legitimate authority, are punctual, work hard, defer gratification, speak correct English, are self-reliant, reasonable and objective, study mathematics and science, save and invest, plan for the future, and so on, as per the above litany.  You are not 'acting white' if you live in accordance with the above values and virtues; you are acting humanly and optimally, and in a manner that will lead you to success and happiness.

Whitey wants you black folks to be happy! Do you know why? Two reasons, the first self-interested: happy people don't cause trouble, and we don't want trouble in the form of criminal behavior directed against us.  That happy people don't cause trouble is a generic statement. I explain what a generic statement is here: but you will need an attention span, above-average intelligence and a modicum of philosophical savvy to follow it.  That happy people do not cause trouble is a Dennis Prager riff. I borrow it; I endorse it. (Always give credit where credit is due. It's the decent thing to do. Plagiarism is to be condemned, whether done by the president of the USA or the president of Harvard.)

The second reason is that most of us genuinely want you to do well for yourselves.

Cultural appropriation? What could possibly be wrong with that? Appropriate, i. e., make your own, whatever is good from any culture. Take it on board. Develop it. Profit from it, intellectually, spiritually, and morally. 

Authoritarianism from the Left

Michael Anton

I solicit comments on the following excerpts (bolding added):

The greatest factor in hastening the end of American-style democracy over the past 125 years (at least) has been increasing government centralization and administrative rule. To answer the question posed by Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein’s edited volume, Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America: it already did happen here! The project all along has been, and still is, to end politics. That is, to foreclose as illegitimate public debate and disagreement on issues allegedly settled by science and administered via expertise. As our personal freedom to abuse our bodies, sate our appetites, and neglect our duties ever expands, our actual freedom to govern ourselves and determine our collective future radically contracts. The people writing these ostensible democratic laments are all in the intellectual lineage of those who brought us to this point. Their aim is to complete the project. Trump’s aim—however inchoate or implicit—is to reverse it. Who’s the real anti-democrat?

Earlier in the piece we read:

In any event, it’s rich to read the Left fret about the end of “democracy” when they have spent so much conscious effort undermining its necessary preconditions. They have done so, I think, for two reasons. First, they long ago came to equate liberty with license. Philosophically, once nature was discarded as the standard by which to guide and judge human life, the satisfaction of appetites became the only conceivable end. Hence in matters of personal morality, the contemporary Left is a curious combination of libertine and censor. Any physical—especially sexual or pharmaceutical—act that does not draw blood or pick a pocket is permitted. There are no mores that are simply necessary to society or to personal well-being. If you’re not directly harming someone else, then no one has any business even passing judgment on what you do. But you deserve to be crushed for thinking or saying the wrong thing—especially for passing judgment! Witness the recent massive freak-out over Penn Law professor Amy Wax’s praise of the once-commonplace concept of “bourgeois norms.” How dare she!

My take on Amy Wax:

Amy Wax on Free Speech

I am afraid Professor Wax does not appreciate what she is up against. She writes,

It is well documented that American universities today, more than ever before, are dominated by academics on the left end of the political spectrum. How should these academics handle opinions that depart, even quite sharply, from their “politically correct” views? The proper response would be to engage in reasoned debate — to attempt to explain, using logic, evidence, facts, and substantive arguments, why those opinions are wrong. This kind of civil discourse is obviously important at law schools like mine, because law schools are dedicated to teaching students how to think about and argue all sides of a question. But academic institutions in general should also be places where people are free to think and reason about important questions that affect our society and our way of life — something not possible in today’s atmosphere of enforced orthodoxy.

Of course I agree with this brave little sermon.  But it is naive to think that it will have any effect on the leftist termites that have infested the universities. They don't give a rat's ass about the values Wax so ably champions.  Wax doesn't seem to realize that civil discourse is impossible with people with whom one is at war.

Liberals Need to Preach What They Practice

Liberals who have amounted to something in life through advanced study, hard work, deferral of   gratification, self-control, accepting responsibility for their actions and the rest of the old-fashioned virtues are often strangely  hesitant to preach these conservative virtues to those most in need of them. These liberals live Right and garner the benefits, but think Left.

They do not make excuses for themselves, but they do for others. And what has worked for them they do not think will work for others. Their attitude is curiously condescending.  If we conservatives used 'racist' as loosely and irresponsibly as they do, we might even tag their attitude 'racist.'

It is the 'racism' of reduced expectations.

It is not enough to practice what you preach; you must also preach what you practice.

Law professors Amy Wax and and Larry Alexander have recently come under vicious fire for pointing out the obvious: many of our social problems are rooted in a collapse of middle-class cultural norms. But it is a good bet that the leftist scum who attacked them live by, and owe their success to, those very same 'racist' norms. It is an equally good bet that they impose them on their children.

Now let me see if I understand this. The bourgeois values and norms are 'racist' because blacks are incapable of studying, working hard, deferring gratification, controlling their exuberance, respecting legitimate authority and the like?  

But surely blacks are capable of these things. So who are the 'racists' here? The conservatives who want to help blacks by teaching them values that are not specifically white, but universal in their usefulness, or the leftists who think blacks incapable of assimilating such values?

Or is it something like the opposite of 'cultural appropriation'? Is it that whites  violate and destroy black 'culture' by imposing on blacks white values that blacks cannot appropriate and turn to use? But of course the values are not 'white' but universally efficacious.

Just as self-control helps keep me alive, self-control would have kept Trayvon Martin alive if had had any. And the same goes for Michael Brown of Ferguson. 

Higher Education or Higher Enstupidation?

In case you haven't yet had your fill of academic insanity, take a gander at Heather MacDonald's Higher Ed's Latest Taboo is 'Bourgeois Norms.'

Apparently, such norms are white-supremacist, misogynistic, and homophobic.  And what norms might these be? Why, "hard work, self-discipline, marriage and respect for authority."

Apparently you are a 'racist' if you advise blacks to "Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. . . . Eschew substance abuse and crime."

As stupid as this is, it perhaps gives us a clue as to the 'liberal' criterion of racism: Something is racist if it is something blacks can't do. So deferring gratification, working hard, saving and investing, refraining from looting, showing respect for legitimate authority are all racist because blacks as a group have a hard time doing these things.

To promote and recommend these life-enhancing values and norms is to 'dis' their 'culture.'  After all, all cultures are equally good, equally conducive to human flourishing, right?

Are these the implications here?  I'm just asking. I am trying to understand. I am trying to get into the liberal head. So far it seems like diving into a bucket of shit. Or am I being unfair?  Am I missing something? 

I am afraid Professor Wax does not appreciate what she is up against. She writes,

It is well documented that American universities today, more than ever before, are dominated by academics on the left end of the political spectrum. How should these academics handle opinions that depart, even quite sharply, from their “politically correct” views? The proper response would be to engage in reasoned debate — to attempt to explain, using logic, evidence, facts, and substantive arguments, why those opinions are wrong. This kind of civil discourse is obviously important at law schools like mine, because law schools are dedicated to teaching students how to think about and argue all sides of a question. But academic institutions in general should also be places where people are free to think and reason about important questions that affect our society and our way of life — something not possible in today’s atmosphere of enforced orthodoxy.

Of course I agree with this brave little sermon.  But it is naive to think that it will have any effect on the leftist termites that have infested the universities. They don't give a rat's ass about the values Wax so ably champions.  Wax doesn't seem to realize that civil discourse is impossible with people with whom one is at war.

Liberals Need to Preach What They Practice

Liberals who have amounted to something in life through advanced study, hard work, deferral of   gratification, self-control, accepting responsibility for their actions and the rest of the old-fashioned virtues are often strangely  hesitant to preach these conservative virtues to those most in need of them. These liberals live Right and garner the benefits, but think Left.

They do not make excuses for themselves, but they do for others. And what has worked for them they do not think will work for others. Their attitude is curiously condescending.  If we conservatives used 'racist' as loosely and irresponsibly as they do, we might even tag their attitude 'racist.'

It is the 'racism' of reduced expectations.

It is not enough to practice what you preach; you must also preach what you practice.

Law professors Amy Wax and and Larry Alexander have recently come under vicious fire for pointing out the obvious: many of our social problems are rooted in a collapse of middle-class cultural norms. But it is a good bet that the leftist scum who attacked them live by, and owe their success to, those very same 'racist' norms. It is an equally good bet that they impose them on their children.

Now let me see if I understand this. The bourgeois values and norms are 'racist' because blacks are incapable of studying, working hard, deferring gratification, controlling their exuberance, respecting legitimate authority and the like?  

But surely blacks are capable of these things. So who are the 'racists' here? The conservatives who want to help blacks by teaching them values that are not specifically white, but universal in their usefulness, or the leftists who think blacks incapable of assimilating such values?

Or is it something like the opposite of 'cultural appropriation'? Is it that whites  violate and destroy black 'culture' by imposing on blacks white values that blacks cannot appropriate and turn to use? But of course the values are not 'white' but universally efficacious.

Just as self-control helps keep me alive, self-control would have kept Trayvon Martin alive if had had any. And the same goes for Michael Brown of Ferguson. 

Higher Education or Higher Enstupidation?

In case you haven't yet had your fill of academic insanity, take a gander at Heather MacDonald's Higher Ed's Latest Taboo is 'Bourgeois Norms.'

Apparently, such norms are white-supremacist, misogynistic, and homophobic.  And what norms might these be? Why, "hard work, self-discipline, marriage and respect for authority."

Apparently you are a 'racist' if you advise blacks to "Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. . . . Eschew substance abuse and crime."

As stupid as this is, it perhaps gives us a clue as to the 'liberal' criterion of racism: Something is racist if it is something blacks can't do. So deferring gratification, working hard, saving and investing, refraining from looting, showing respect for legitimate authority are all racist because blacks as a group have a hard time doing these things.

To promote and recommend these life-enhancing values and norms is to 'dis' their 'culture.'  After all, all cultures are equally good, equally conducive to human flourishing, right?

Are these the implications here?  I'm just asking. I am trying to understand. I am trying to get into the liberal head. So far it seems like diving into a bucket of shit. Or am I being unfair?  Am I missing something? 

Liberals who have amounted to something in life through advanced study, hard work, deferral of   gratification, self-control, accepting responsibility for their actions and the rest of the old-fashioned virtues are often strangely  hesitant to preach these conservative virtues to those most in need of them. These liberals live Right and garner the benefits, but think Left.

They do not make excuses for themselves, but they do for others. And what has worked for them they do not think will work for others. Their attitude is curiously condescending.  If we conservatives used 'racist' as loosely and irresponsibly as they do, we might even tag their attitude 'racist.'

It is the 'racism' of reduced expectations.

It is not enough to practice what you preach; you must also preach what you practice.

Law professors Amy Wax and and Larry Alexander have recently come under vicious fire for pointing out the obvious: many of our social problems are rooted in a collapse of middle-class cultural norms. But it is a good bet that the leftist scum who attacked them live by, and owe their success to, those very same 'racist' norms. It is an equally good bet that they impose them on their children.

Now let me see if I understand this. The bourgeois values and norms are 'racist' because blacks are incapable of studying, working hard, deferring gratification, controlling their exuberance, respecting legitimate authority and the like?  

But surely blacks are capable of these things. So who are the 'racists' here? The conservatives who want to help blacks by teaching them values that are not specifically white, but universal in their usefulness, or the leftists who think blacks incapable of assimilating such values?

Or is it something like the opposite of 'cultural appropriation'? Is it that whites  violate and destroy black 'culture' by imposing on blacks white values that blacks cannot appropriate and turn to use? But of course the values are not 'white' but universally efficacious.

Just as self-control helps keep me alive, self-control would have kept Trayvon Martin alive if had had any. And the same goes for Michael Brown of Ferguson. 

Higher Education or Higher Enstupidation?

In case you haven't yet had your fill of academic insanity, take a gander at Heather MacDonald's Higher Ed's Latest Taboo is 'Bourgeois Norms.'

Apparently, such norms are white-supremacist, misogynistic, and homophobic.  And what norms might these be? Why, "hard work, self-discipline, marriage and respect for authority."

Apparently you are a 'racist' if you advise blacks to "Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. . . . Eschew substance abuse and crime."

As stupid as this is, it perhaps gives us a clue as to the 'liberal' criterion of racism: Something is racist if it is something blacks can't do. So deferring gratification, working hard, saving and investing, refraining from looting, showing respect for legitimate authority are all racist because blacks as a group have a hard time doing these things.

To promote and recommend these life-enhancing values and norms is to 'dis' their 'culture.'  After all, all cultures are equally good, equally conducive to human flourishing, right?

Are these the implications here?  I'm just asking. I am trying to understand. I am trying to get into the liberal head. So far it seems like diving into a bucket of shit. Or am I being unfair?  Am I missing something? 

In case you haven't yet had your fill of academic insanity, take a gander at Heather MacDonald's Higher Ed's Latest Taboo is 'Bourgeois Norms.'

Apparently, such norms are white-supremacist, misogynistic, and homophobic.  And what norms might these be? Why, "hard work, self-discipline, marriage and respect for authority."

Apparently you are a 'racist' if you advise blacks to "Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. . . . Eschew substance abuse and crime."

As stupid as this is, it perhaps gives us a clue as to the 'liberal' criterion of racism: Something is racist if it is something blacks can't do. So deferring gratification, working hard, saving and investing, refraining from looting, showing respect for legitimate authority are all racist because blacks as a group have a hard time doing these things.

To promote and recommend these life-enhancing values and norms is to 'dis' their 'culture.'  After all, all cultures are equally good, equally conducive to human flourishing, right?

Are these the implications here?  I'm just asking. I am trying to understand. I am trying to get into the liberal head. So far it seems like diving into a bucket of shit. Or am I being unfair?  Am I missing something? 

Wolff on Anti-Natalism

Top o' the Stack.

A glimpse into the mind of a leftist activist.

Where to Send Illegal Immigrants

Send them to 'sanctuary' jurisdictions.

Eric Adams, mayor of NYC, would be happy to show his hospitality and humanity. I am using 'jurisdiction' to cover cities, counties, and states.  Here is a nifty map and a list brought to you from the fine folks over at the Center for Immigration Studies. I am proud to report that no city or county in Arizona is on the list. 

Note the clustering of 'sanctuary'  counties. The nastiest such cluster appears to be in the Pacific Northwest in Washington and Oregon with an increase in the density of clustering as you 'migrate' toward the Left Coast.  

From the map, I judge that the majority of the 'sanctuary' jurisdictions are coastal with most of the 'fly-over' jurisdictions in THC-rich Colorado.

A state is composed of counties, and counties are composed of cities (towns, etc.).  Would I be wrong to infer that if a state is a 'sanctuary' state (Illinois, e.g.), that every county  in that state has the same status, and every city in every county? OR can counties and cities in a 'sanctuary' state retain non-'sanctuary' status? I don't know, which is why I am asking.

(By the way, it annoys me when I ask someone a question of the form 'Do you know why ___?' and he responds, 'Why?')

Now for a trio of polemically-intended witticisms:

There  is more of sanctimony than of sanctuary in a 'sanctuary' jurisdiction.

It is easy to be sanctimonious if you have no skin in the game.

Only the inmates of an asylum could confuse an illegal immigrant with an asylum-seeker.

Mockery is a weapon not to be sneered at in our battle with our political enemies. And throw in a little contumely for good measure.

 

A Lefty Sees the Light

Sasha Stone, An Ex-Democrat's Case for Trump

Good advice:

What the Democrats and Never Trumpers want now is to push Trump and MAGA back into the danger zone. They want more violence. They want riots. They want an uprising [so] that they can then bring in the military, weaponize dissent, speech, and ideology, and have the full backing of the American public. We’re almost there now.

But don’t take the bait, MAGA. You can defeat them by being the calm, reasonable side. Make them the crazy ones. They are just waiting for any chance to exploit the law more than they already have. Don’t give them that chance.

That's right. Stay calm. Speak out but don't overreact. No violence! No threats!  Don't fuel the fascism of our political enemies. You must  realize that they are not good people.* They hate you and they will crush you if they can. Step on their toes and you will get a jackboot to the face.  Anyone who will cancel your livelihood will cancel your life. Quietly prepare.  Hope and pray for the best, but prepare for the worst. Be ready should SHTF. These are very dangerous times. The fate of the Republic hangs in the balance.  Cf. Civil Courage and Practical Dissidence.

The case for Trump is simple, four words on a red hat: Make America Great Again.

Make America able to take a joke again. Make America understand basic biology again. Make America the land of the free and home of the brave again. Make it okay to be white, a Christian, a male, a Jew, a woman, a mother, an American again. Make Thomas Jefferson a hero again. Make movies watchable again.

Make America a country where we can still say what we think without fear of banishment, public humiliation, or the loss of our jobs. Make America tolerant again. Make reality cool again. Make it okay to reward merit. Make it okay to be friends with people you don’t agree with.

---------------------

*That's a generic a statement.  Of course there some good people on the wrong side, but they are useful idiots.

Real and Merely Apparent Incoherence on the Left

Substack latest.

Four examples.

Radical Islam's Threat to the Left

Substack latest.

Why don't leftists — who obviously do not share the characteristic values and beliefs of Islamists — grant what is spectacularly obvious to everyone else, namely, that radical Islam poses a grave threat to what we in the West cherish as civilization, which includes commitments to free speech, open inquiry, separation of church and state, freedom of religion, freedom to reject religion, universal suffrage, the emancipation of women, opposition to cruel and unusual penal practices, and so on?   In particular, why don't leftists recognize the grave threat radical Islam poses to them?  Why do leftists either deny the threat or downplay its gravity? Given their atheism and pronounced libertine ‘wobble,’ they would be among the first to lose their heads under Islamic law (Sharia).

Here is a quickly-composed  list of twelve related reasons based on my own thinking and reading and on discussions with friends. 

Wolff on Israel

Robert Paul Wolff, 30 October 2023:

I have found the series of comments on the Israeli situation interesting and helpful. I have not responded to them because I am so upset by what is happening that I can barely watch the news reports of it anymore. Let me make one small observation. There has been talk by Israeli officials and others about how this is an existential threat to the state of Israel. Let us just keep in mind that Israel is the only nation in the region with nuclear weapons and more generally is far and away the most powerful militarily. The attack on October 7, horrific and ugly and sadistic as it was, was no more a threat to Israel's existence then [than] was the attack on the twin towers on September 11 a threat to the existence of the United States.

Two points by way of rebuttal.

First, while it is true that Israel is the only nation in the region with nuclear weapons at the moment, that is very likely soon to change thanks to the concessions and fecklessness of the Obama-era appeasement policies vis-à-vis Iran promoted by puppet Biden and his (mal)administration. 

Second, the October 7th massacre was not an isolated event, but part of the larger project of clearing the space "from the river to the sea" of Jews and their state once and for all. This larger project is part of a still larger one that without exaggeration can be  called genocidal: to exterminate the Jewish people.*  And beyond this there is the anti-civilizational project of destroying our superior Western culture, one pillar of which is Judeo-Christian, and whose last bastion, bloodied, decadent, and tottering though she be, is the Great Satan, the USA.

I will leave it to others to comment on the psychology of Jews like Wolff who embrace leftism.  Some will say that he is a self-hating Jew who has internalized Jew hatred and turned it upon himself. I take no position on that speculation, but I do think a distinction is called for, namely, the distinction between a self-hating Jew and a Jew-hating Jew.  Obviously, a Jew could hate himself  for reasons other than his being Jewish. But every Jew who hates himself because of his Jewishness is a self-hating Jew.

__________

*To characterize the October 7th attack as "genocidal," as I heard one commentator do this morning, is a semantic stretch of the sort that is frowned upon here. Precision in the use of language is essential to intellectual hygiene.

The Axis of the Human Heart

Rod Dreher quotes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an un-uprooted small corner of evil.

This free Substack article by Dreher is one of his finest. Please do read it for your own good. And read it all: pay attention to the account of the unspeakable savagery of the American Indians, a savagery typically downplayed or unmentioned by leftists.

Billionaire Donors Withholding Loot from Leftist Seminaries

Long-time donors are finally waking up to the wokeassery* of once-great universities that have for decades been transmogrifying into leftist seminaries. ('Seminary' is etymologically related to 'semen' and in the seminaries in question the origin of the jism is masturbatory: nothing productive comes from these seed beds.)

I predicted the donor revolt on 13 October about a week after the Hamas savagery of 7 October. Case in point: Leon Cooperman.  He's given some $50 mil to Columbia but will give no more citing the cranial feculence (my polite phrase, not his) of the Hamas-supporting  students. 

What is astonishing to many of us, however, is how the Cooperman cohort could be so clueless for so long. Cooperman just now discovered what has been going on since the '60s, namely, the "long march through the institutions"? Only now you decide to stop funding the anti-civilizational scum?

Better late than never, but no fool like an old fool.

Copperman's 80. The elderly tend to live in the past.  They tend to be fat, lazy, complacent, inattentive, and lost in the petty particulars of their self-centered quotidian round, even if they are not, like Joey B., physically decrepit, non compos mentis, morally corrupt to the core, and a disaster for the USA and the world.

___________

*A coinage of mine which I am sure has occurred to others. Modelled on jackassery, a word recognized by Merriam-Webster. The donkey or jackass is the symbol, an aptro-symbol if you will, of the Democrat party in the USA which, once respectable, is now hard-Left and destructive of our republic as she was founded to be.

The State of Things When the 'Leader' of the 'Free World' is a Puppet

I asked Dr. Vito Caiati, historian, whether Donald Trump's being in office would have made any difference to the present geopolitical mess, and this is what he wrote:

As for the present miserable state of the world, I think that had Trump remained in office neither the war in the Ukraine nor the war in the Middle East would have occurred, or if the former occurred, it would have been resolved on the basis of a territorial compromise concerning the Crimea and robust autonomy for the eastern, Russian majority oblasts.  Leaving aside the origins of the conflict (US interference in the internal politics of the Ukraine and the expansion of NATO eastward), Trump would have put Zelensky and company on tight rein. As for Israel, can we doubt that the appeasement of the Obama-Biden regime towards Iran encouraged the reemergence of terrorism? Now, the plan is to provide public support to Israel, while privately restraining her once again to conduct the war in a way that would deny the complete victory that she requires. With Trump, the war would have not occurred, and if it did, he would not have tied Israel’s hands.

As for the danger of WWIII, it appears to me that the Ukraine mess is a potential trigger for it.  There is no way that the Ukraine can defeat Russia, and I fear that a protracted conflict could lead to further American involvement and the real chance of a great power clash.

With regard to demons and such, I call your attention to what appeared on the Vatican Synod website this week (page 29): “What is a merciful heart? It is a heart on fire for the whole of creation, for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for demons, for all that exists.” Thus, the diabolical evil that first showed its face with the Pachamama desecration of St. Peter’s advances further in the Bergoglian Church.    

I agree in the main, but Caiati's final sentence prompts me to ask: Is Bergoglio proposing mercy for demons in which he believes? Or is the truly Bergoglian termiticism and diabolism due to his tacit denial of the reality of demons?

No doubt demons are creatures, but does Bergoglio and his fellow clerical termites believe in their existence? I don't know but I suspect he doesn't and they don't. How many Catholic priests today believe in the  preternatural? I suspect it is a minority.  The preternatural is the sphere within which demonic agents operate. It lies between the natural  and the supernatural.  See Ralph Weimann, Sacramentals: Their Meaning and Use, p. 196: "In the period after the Second Vatican Council, and under the influence of rationalism, it was increasingly considered 'unscientific' to speak about angels and even more unscientific to speak about demons."

At a time when the RCC should be standing as a bulwark against the anti-civilizational forces of Chinese Communism, Islamism, and  Leftism, it is transforming itself under the termitic influence of Bergoglio & Co. into just another pile of secular leftist junk. 

But how could anyone in this enlightened age believe in such medieval superstitions as the existence of demons?  Hasn't humanity finally put paid to this old nonsense?  Maybe not. Maybe there is no naturalistic explanation of the depth and depravity of human behavior. Perhaps an adequate explanation must posit the preternatural. See my Substack article, The Holocaust Argument for God's Existence wherein I write:

As a sort of inference to the best explanation we can say that moral evil in its extreme manifestations has a supernatural source. It cannot be explained adequately in naturalistic terms.  There is an Evil Principle (and Principal) the positing of which is reasonable. The undeniable reality of evil has  a metaphysical ground.  Call it Satan or whatever you like.

In that passage I am using 'supernatural' to cover both the supernatural proper and the preternatural. 'Preternatural' would have been the better, because more specific, word choice. But then I would have had to explain 'preternatural' which would have lengthened the piece. Brevity is the soul of Stack and not just of blog.

Now I would like you to take a gander at this Daily Mail article and rub your noses in recent Hamas-Islamist barbarity. Could the source of this evil be merely natural?

Left and Right: Morally Equivalent?

Leftist evil-doers are becoming ever more brazen in 'outing' themselves. I hand off to Hinderaker:

My opinion of leftists is so low that I am hard to disappoint. But I admit to being shocked by the reaction of many leftists and liberals to the Gazan invasion of Israel. In many instances, they feel no obligation even to disavow the Gazans’ mass murder, gang rapes, kidnappings and beheadings of infants. They go straight to denouncing Israel for imagined crimes and, in some instances, attacking anticipated actions that Israel hasn’t even taken yet. People who are so twisted that they witness the Gazan atrocities and can only fault Israel are moral monsters. Many liberals have self-identified as such.

The case of Dr. Mika Tosca can stand for many others.

 

Rod Dreher on Leftism

Here:

What a clarifying moment this is in the West. We have all seen the jaw-dropping alacrity with which so many leftists, especially within the academy, have rushed to defend the Hamas storm troopers. If you think this is merely about Israel and Hamas, you need to wake up. The people who are celebrating the massacre of innocent Jews in the name of “liberation” are the same people who would celebrate the massacre of you, if they had the chance.

You think I’m wrong? Today, I write in The European Conservative about the situation in 2017 with Tommy J. Curry, a radical black professor who at the time was on the philosophy faculty at Texas A&M. A reader of mine at The American Conservative who was also either a student or faculty member at A&M brought to my attention how the university flipped out about the racist white activist Richard Spencer coming to campus, but tolerated a black professor making racist comments even more extreme than Spencer. I looked into it, and this, excerpted from my TEC piece today, is what I found:

As usual, Dreher makes a number of good points, but in the end, as usual, it is all just talk. The one and only person who can turn things around, Donald J. Trump, he hates and refuses to support. And for no good reasons that I can discern. So what's the point, Rod? Are you just going to float above the fray forever? Which side are you on?

You know it is a war to the death, and yet you refuse to take sides.  We scribblers enjoy the hell out of our daily word-slinging. And if you can turn a buck from it, all the better. So I understand why you write, write, write, and then write some more. You're good at it and people value and like to do what they are good it. But how does this cohere with your 'Benedictine' side? What sort of spiritual life can you possibly have given all this frenetic writing that yet issues in no practical commitment?  When do you have time to pray, meditate, shut off the verbal flow, and enter the Silence? "Be still and know that I am God." (Psalm 46:10)

White Flight and Racism

Does racism explain white flight? Here is an interview with Jack Cashill. Excerpts:

Your book challenges the conventional “white flight” narrative. In brief, what were whites fleeing, if not black Americans moving into their neighborhoods?

I got the book’s title from a childhood friend, the last guy to leave our block. When I asked him why he left, he said, after a moment’s reflection, the neighborhood had become untenable. When I asked what “untenable” meant. He said, “When your widowed mother gets mugged for the second time, that’s untenable. When your home gets invaded for the second time, that’s untenable, too.”

Newark had become untenable for people of all races. Cissy Houston, Whitney’s mother, writes “Our home no longer resembled the safe haven we had envisioned for our children. After the riots, John [Houston] and I started thinking about leaving Newark.” Three years later, they left.

[. . .]

Is there any truth to the conventional narrative that racial unease drove the exodus?

I did not address the South, but in the Northeast and north-central U.S., attachment to neighborhood was a more powerful determinant than racial unease. The unease rarely caused flight until it became tangibly associated with crime and school disorder. Homicides in Newark increased sixfold from 1950 to 1972. That is a hard indicator to dispute or overlook.

[. . .]

What did you think of the depiction of the 1967 riots in David Chase’s Sopranos prequel, The Many Saints of Newark?

Glad you asked. As a major fan of the series, I was stunned by the clumsiness of the film. Chase grew up liberal deep in the Newark suburbs and rooted for the rioters. The George Floyd mania apparently revived his inner wokeness. In 1967, even Alabama police did not behave the way that he accused Newark cops of behaving. As the son, nephew, and cousin three times over of Newark police officers—one of whom gave me a two-day tour of the city for this book—I register a hearty protest.

Here is a review of Jack Cashill, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Fight from America's Cities. Excerpt follows. Note the references to James Burnham and Simone Weil.

What about racism, though? Surely, some taint of it must have been there, but what role did it play, exactly? We’ll never know because no one ever inquired into the motives of the only people who could answer: Bill and Sandy, Artie and Mario, Hannah and Jack.

All the social experiments instituted for our benefit by our betters—forced busing, urban renewal, public housing, interstate highways—cascaded together in Newark in just a few mind-boggling years. They were ginned up in Washington and sold on the basis of social science. But when you attempt to explain, predict, or alter human conduct on the basis of numbers, you make mathematics into metaphor.

When you’ve finished crunching numbers, you move on to crunching people. Little Italy is flattened and replaced by a housing project that’s just a slum in the making; an elevated superhighway is plunged through the heart of Roseville; and more drugs circulate through the schoolyards than in Bogotá. When, at long last, people find all these conditions “untenable,” they leave. The exodus is then labeled “white flight,” and the people leaving get labeled “racists.” But what label should we affix to the geniuses in Washington who conceived and executed the whole cock-up? We call them “experts.”

The experts never pause to talk to Bill and Sandy, Artie and Mario, Hannah and Jack. Why would they? The experts aren’t really there to protect the interests of the purported beneficiaries of their projects. In The Managerial Revolution, James Burnham wrote that all large organizations eventually come to serve the interests of their permanent staffs. Ronald Reagan said that the most frightening words in the English language are, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Here to help themselves, says Burnham. They look on the working stiff not as the object of the beneficent program but as an obstacle to it.

Worse than the selfishness of the administrator is his solipsism. The federal agency hardly notices that Bill and Sandy, Artie and Mario, Hannah and Jack actually exist. Before the managerial revolution arrived, back in 1934, Simone Weil, then a Marxist, wrote an article saying that Marx had failed to foresee one form of oppression: bureaucrats could crush working people at least as badly as the most exploitative capitalist. As Weil wrote elsewhere, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. It is given to very few minds to notice that things and beings exist.” Members of the expert class seldom  notice.

The End of Liberty is Nigh: The Digital Pound and Cancel Culture

And to add insult to injury, irony to outrage, the end of liberty is being ushered in by the mother country.  Here:

The digital pound would be a new type of money issued by the Bank of England for everyone to use for day-to-day spending. You would be able to use it in-store or online to make payments. 

This type of money is known as a central bank digital currency (CBDC). You may also hear it being called ‘digital sterling’ or even ‘Britcoin’. We call the UK version of CBDC the digital pound.

The digital pound would be denominated in sterling and its value would be stable, just like banknotes. £10 in digital pounds would always have the same value as a £10 banknote.

If we introduced it, it would not replace cash. We know being able to use cash is important for many people. That’s why we will continue to issue it for as long as people want to keep using it.

And you can take that italicized paragraph to the bank! (Italics added.)

In a parallel assault on liberty, the Brits are going cancel-crazy. Dreher:

It’s a country that gave the world George Orwell, but now, it’s a ‘Brand’ new world for free speech in once-great Britain, which these days specializes in doling out the unwelcome gift of Orwellianism.

Dame Caroline Dinenage, the chair of a British Parliamentary committee, has been writing to social media platforms Facebook, TikTok and Rumble, asking them if they plan to follow YouTube’s lead and demonetize the accused sex pest Russell Brand. On committee letterhead, Dame Caroline wrote to express the committee’s concern that Brand will not be able to make money on the platform and thereby “undermine the welfare of victims of inappropriate and potentially illegal behavior.”

Potentially illegal. This Conservative MP is using her powerful position to attempt to crush Brand’s ability to make a living, even though he denies the allegations, and they have not been subject to any sort of trial. This member of the British government is attempting to demonetize Russell Brand himself, based solely on allegations.

If this outrageous intimidation is allowed to stand, no one is safe in Britain. All it takes is for the right people to level fashionable accusations against you—ones having to do with racism, sexism, LGBT-phobia, ‘toxic masculinity,’ and whatnot—and you could see your livelihood evaporate overnight. You could even see your own government persecute you, as the committee headed by Dame Caroline, Baroness Lancaster of Kimbolton, is doing to Brand.

The Anglosphere is lost, and America is no exception. The push-back is too little, too late. But it ain't over 'til it's over.

We fight on in the gathering gloom. No defeatism! On the other hand, don't be a fool who sacrifices his life on the altar of activism. We have but one night to spend in this bad inn.  But a night is not nothing. I'll leave it to you to figure out the right mix of commitment to the fight and Gelassenheit. And it is up to you to balance praeparatio vitae and praeparatio mortis.

"So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."

"War, children, it's just a shot away."

Leftism Exposed

The following statement is both well-written and accurate in every particular (emphasis added):

Leftism is a totalitarian force. Wherever leftism is in a position of power it tends to invade every private corner and force every thought into a leftist mold. In part this is because of the quasi-religious character of leftism: everything contrary to leftist beliefs represents Sin. More importantly, leftism is a totalitarian force because of the leftists’ drive for power. The leftist seeks to satisfy his need for power through identification with a social movement and he tries to go through the power process by helping to pursue and attain the goals of the movement. But no matter how far the movement has gone in attaining its goals the leftist is never satisfied, because his activism is a surrogate activity. That is, the leftist’s real motive is not to attain the ostensible goals of leftism; in reality he is motivated by the sense of power he gets from struggling for and then reaching a social goal. Consequently the leftist is never satisfied with the goals he has already attained; his need for the power process leads him always to pursue some new goal. The leftist wants equal opportunities for minorities. When that is attained he insists on statistical equality of achievement by minorities. And as long as anyone harbors in some corner of his mind a negative attitude toward some minority, the leftist has to re-educate him.

Let me add a second example to the one the author gives in illustration of the general point expressed in the italicized passage. His example is that equality of opportunity is not enough; a new goal must be posited by the 'progressive' who cannot rest content with anything, the goal of so-called 'equity' or equality of outcome, and this in defiance of the ineluctable reality of individual and group differences in attitudes and abilities.

My example is the one presently paraded before us by the so-called 'pride' contingent. Unsatisfied with being tolerated and left alone, they now demand to be accepted, affirmed, and celebrated for their depravity and corruption of children. But even this won't be enough for them: driven by a vicious intolerance at odds with the toleration they initially demanded,  they aim to replace the superior culture whose excesses spawned them and whose decadence is seemingly impotent to stop them. But it ain't over til it's over and we who are sane and reasonable have not yet begun to fight. Too many of us, lost in our private lives, have yet to wake up to the 'woke' madness. But wake up we will.  

But who made the statement quoted above?  You may be surprised.  I was. I now hasten to add that the truth of a statement and the soundness of an argument are logically  independent of the psychology of the one who makes the statement or gives the argument. To think otherwise is to commit the genetic fallacy.

My Pronouns?

Up yours!

The point, of course, is to not validate, by answering, the stupid question.

This can be done in more or less polite ways.

You might say, politely, "Your question rests on a presupposition that I reject, namely, that the DEI agenda is a good thing. Now move along and have a nice day."

Yesterday I received a solicitation for funds from an alma mater. I wrote back, "I am in a position to make a substantial contribution, and will do so, but only on condition that you publicly renounce the DEI agenda and return to the true purposes of the university." 

Confuse Hate and Dissent and You Will Find Hate Groups Everywhere

Did you know that Moms for Liberty is a hate group?  

At least that’s the view of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a far-left political organization, which is drawing scorn for labeling Moms for Liberty and other parental rights organizations as “extremist organizations,” including them on the same “hate map” as neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.

Like many SPLC critics, [Vivek] Ramaswamy dismissed the attack as “a farce.”

“The SPLC is a tentacle of the woke-industrial complex,” he told NHJournal. “I’m proud to be the first candidate to sign the Moms for Liberty Parent Pledge. Tomorrow [Thursday, June 8], I’ll be in New Hampshire hosting a Parents Rights Town Hall with my favorite ‘hate group’ (badge of honor).”

Here is what these domestic terrorists and insurrectionists look like. Call me naive, but they strike me as sweet, loving, and lovable suburban mommies who want what is good for their children and have a healthy sense of the difference between good and evil.

Just for fun check out this SPLC Hate Map. It includes a nifty search utility. Look up how much hate is in your state! Fun for the whole family. In Arizona in 2022 there were 39 hate groups, including a chapter of Moms for Liberty in Pima County. Yikes!

The SPLC calls these groups "anti-government groups." The SPLC-ers are the kind of people who think that being FOR limited government is being AGAINST government. 

Are you anti-government? I'm not. I'm anti-police state. Can you wrap your head around the difference? 

ComBox open. I want your opinion. Is the USA at the present time a police state? Dan Bongino says it is. Agree? Adduce evidence  for and against.

Addenda (6/9)

Dan Bongino: The Police State is here. 

"You have to understand what's going on," Bongino added. "The timing here is not accidental. Evidence came out today, hard evidence that the president of the United States, while he was Obama's vice president, was involved in the biggest political payoff in human history and a political scandal.

"This is all about making Trump go away and covering up for not just Biden, but covering up for Obama. Remember, Biden was the vice president. If he was paid a bribe for policy decisions, what policy decisions? He can't make them. He was Obama's vice president.

"Everything is about covering up for the Obama-Biden regime. That's all this is. The timing here is not accidental."

Rudy Giuliani: We're a 'Banana Republic,' 'Fascist'

"We have these allegations of massive bribes to Joe Biden," Giuliani said. "I mean, I've seen them. I know them. I've heard them. I've heard them on tape. To me, it's astounding. And the FBI has been investigating these for four years. And done nothing.

"Never did a search warrant. Never interviewed a witness, and now they're taking a document dispute, and trying to make it into a federal crime. I mean, there's no comparison between the $5 million bribe and a document dispute; the $31 million from China and the document dispute.

"It's ridiculous. I mean, we're a banana republic and a fascist country. If we do things like this and let them get away with it."

John Hinderaker: Trump Indictment Watch

The criminal prosecutions of Trump are thin if not entirely baseless, and they obviously are politically motivated. Nevertheless, they illustrate why Trump should not again be president.

Reader J.I.O comments and I basically agree:

No, Mr. Hinderaker. You are writing nonsense and I can prove it to anybody:

Turn all that you opine around and ask: "Do you want anyone so weak towards the heat in the kitchen, in the kitchen?" I sure don't.

 

Trump, no if's and's or but's, has the best and best enduring interests of the United States at heart, full speed ahead. And that's best for all the nations of this world as well.

 

Now let's examine a little more the track of 'candidates' along the lines you favor. They're thinking of that brass ring out there so they are NEVER focused on the task at hand. 

 

Hence you can count on two things, 1. their work is not their best, or, 2. they fob it off on someone else, so it's not really their work, they sit as a figure head, you know, that statue on the prow of an old sailing ship, a superstitious talisman. To sum up your favored candidates self-screening process: one finger in the wind, one eye looking backwards, the other eye looking WAY down the road at their all-along real goal.

 

Trump alone can turn things around. He has proven over four years that he can.  He cannot be bought. He is tough as nails and can withstand the withering hatred directed at him from all sides. He doesn't need the job. He is not a career politician. He can have at most one term in office. He loves his country, and, contrary to the brazen lies of the filthy Dems, he is moderate in his views. There is nothing extreme about them.

 

The question to put to well-meaning useful idiots like Hinderaker and so many other yap-and-scribble never-trumping pseudo-cons is: which side are you on, man?  Grow a pair and man up. Are you not embarrassed to be a lapdog of the Left?

James Lindsay on Critical Theory

Accurate. About eight minutes long.

Here he is on Critical Race Theory. Longer and better. PragerU, about 18 minutes.

'2A' a Terrorist Marker?

It emerged in the Congressional FBI whistleblower hearings that the abbreviation '2A' is a "terrorist marker." That came as news to me. (But see here.) I have been using '2A' from time to time as an innocuous abbreviation of 'Second Amendment.'  The context, of course, is the Bill of Rights which are the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution.

I have written sentences like this:

2A does not confer, but protects, the citizen's right to keep and bear arms.

My use of the harmless abbreviation makes me a terrorist, a white supremacist, and what all else in the eyes of the regime.  What does it make the regime? A police state.

So I suppose it is a good thing that it has been a very long time since I attended a Latin mass. These masses, as is now well-known, are notorious gathering points for insurrectionists, militiamen, and other violent extremists out to overthrow 'democracy.'  Much less known, however, is that these masses are conducted, not in old Church Latin, but in coded Latin.  Thus hoc est corpus meum is code for create mayhem. De mortuis resurrexit means: he rose up and committed insurrection.  There really are very few threats to the powers that be stronger and more insidious than the Latin mass, which is why Pope Francis, that faithful custodian of the depositum fidei, is such a staunch defender of the old mass against the forces of reform.

Sarcasm aside, part of understanding  the destructive Left is understanding their commitment to the hermeneutics of suspicion.  You can learn about said hermeneutics, and cognate topics, from my essay From Democrat to Dissident section 16.4. It is published in Hillman and Borland, eds., Dissident Philosophers: Voices Against the Political Current of the Academy, Rowman and Littlefield, 2021.  Available via Amazon where you can read some editorial reviews.

 

Negativity: The Spirit of the Left

Top o' the Stack.

Ann Coulter and Heather Mac on the Anti-Civilizational Left

No Biggie, Just the End of Civilization

When Race Trumps Merit ...

Ann Coulter

May 10, 2023

Whatever you had planned to do for the rest of the day, please drop it and read this right now: Heather Mac Donald’s new book, “When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives.”

     It seems that in the hysteria that followed George Floyd's death in 2020, we agreed to destroy all of Western civilization -- law, music, art, education, policing, science and medicine -- to make up for black people not doing well on standardized tests.

     Mac Donald cites not hundreds but thousands of institutions that have flung aside standards in order to more fully dedicate themselves to the sole, driving purpose of our nation: boosting black people’s self-esteem.

[More below the fold.]

Globalist-Capitalist Woke Leftism II

On 26 January I wrote:

The new global-capitalist woke leftism (GCWL) is very different from the old socialist-humanist leftism (SHL, which I take to include both the Old Left and the New Left). I want to understand the similarities and the differences.

GCWL versus SHL

1) Both are secular and anti-religion.  Since 1789 the Left has been virulently anti-clerical and anti-religious. Nota bene: an ersatz religion is not a religion! So stop calling leftism a religion, Dennis Prager.

2) Both target the middle class.

3) Both are internationalist  and anti-nationalist.

4) The main difference seems to be that SHL is humanist while GCWL tends toward the erasure of humanity and humanism via anti-natalism, paganism, nature-idolatrous environmentalism, misanthropy, Orwellian subversion of language, and leukophobic ethno-masochism and much else besides.

So that's a start. Inadequate, no doubt.

James Soriano responded this morning:

I liked your January 26 post on the Globalist-Capitalist Woke Leftism, as well as the comments.

Here are a couple of points on the dissimilarities of the “Woke” compared to the “Old” and “New.” 

(1)  Both the Old Left and the New Left were hostile to capitalism, whereas the Woke Left finds it a useful tool.  Today corporations big and small have become “woke” and are friendly to the Woke agenda.  Any corporation insufficiently sympathetic to the Woke agenda is bullied until it wakes up.

(2)  The Old Left got a Russian assist.  After WWI, Russia secretly supported Communist parties and allied organizations in Europe and elsewhere.  These subversive activities continued after WWII and into the New Left period.  By contrast, the Woke Left gets an American assist.  It is not secretive in any way.  It’s in the open.

(3)  The Old Left and the New Left thought of  “revolution” as something that originates in society and then goes on to take over the state.  But “woke” attitudes have already penetrated into the state.  To a “woke” leftist, a revolution can also be something that moves from the state back into society for the purpose of stomping out pockets of resistance.

——

On this last point, we can make a distinction between a revolution BEFORE power and a revolution AFTER power.  

Revolutions taking place before the revolutionaries consolidate power:  Americans in 1776, Mao in China, Castro in Cuba, and Khomeini in Iran.

Revolutions taking place after the revolutionaries consolidate power:  

— 1917.  A small group of Bolsheviks take over the seat of government in St. Petersburg.  The Russian Revolution took place after that event; there was no Bolshevik uprising prior to it.  

— 1932.   The National Socialist German Workers' Party came to power by democratic means.  The Nazi transformation of Germany took place after that event; there was no Nazi uprising prior to it. [It was 1933 -- BV]

— Historian Martin Kramer makes this revolution-before-and-after distinction regarding “moderate” Islamists.  Many people in the Arab World fear that “moderates” like the Muslim Brotherhood would use democratic means to take over the state.  They would then go on to Islamize society after they take power.  Wokesters are like that, too.

 

American Restoration

Substack articles by Bruce Abramson. From his About page:

Suppose you think that it’s wrong to discriminate based on race. To the Woke, you’re a racist.

Suppose you say that humans are either male or female. To the Woke, that’s dehumanizing.

Suppose you champion free speech. To the Woke, you’re promoting hatred.

Suppose you think that the ends don’t justify the means. To the Woke, you’re impeding justice.

Suppose you believe in God. To the Woke, you’re an unstable superstitious bigot.

The list of such absurd defamations is long, and it grows longer every day. But it’s no joke. Once the woke have labeled you a hateful, dehumanizing, unstable racist whose mere existence stands in the way of justice, they will treat you as if that’s who you really are. They will work to destroy you—terminate your personal relationships, professional aspirations, and financial possibilities.

Worst of all, the Woke are winning. The United States is mired in a Second Civil War. The country no longer functions as either a free society or a constitutional republic. Every single one of our major institutions has been corrupted: Academia, K-12 education, the media, the civil service, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the legal and medical professions, and nearly every important professional society. Recent years have even uncovered deep Woke rot running corporate boardrooms, the IRS, FBI, CIA, NSA, and the military.

Leaders and organizations that are not Woke themselves cower in fear and fall in line. More than 60% of American report being afraid to voice their opinions; they fear woke reprisal.

This situation is neither tolerable nor sustainable. If we don’t move quickly to restore the free society America was born to be, we will slide irretrievably into an autocratic, elitist oligarchy.

We are beyond the time of timidity and prudence. We have become both the counterculture and counterrevolutionaries. Very little of what we have done in the past is suited to those roles. If we are to restore America, we will need new lessons, strategies, tactics, and priorities.

This essay series is for those who want to master the techniques we need.

Is Abramson exaggerating? I'd say he isn't. What say you?

DIE: 'Equity' Can Get You Killed

Here:

America’s top medical schools, worried [that] they have too few minority students, are doing something about it. They are lowering academic standards for admission and trying to hide the evidence. Columbia, Harvard, the University of Chicago, Stanford, Mount Sinai, and the University of Pennsylvania have already done so. The list already tops forty, and more are sure to follow.

A 'progressive' would call that progress. I suggest that you never use 'equity' or 'progressive' without the sneer quotes. 

Question for the syntactically punctilious: In the sentence immediately preceding, are the inverted commas being used to mention, to sneer, or both?

'Equity' is an obfuscatory woke-left coinage the purpose of which is to elide the distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome.  The tactic is to promote the confusion of equality of opportunity -- which everyone is for -- with equality of outcome. The latter would be good if it naturally came about. Unfortunately, the various hierarchies of life make that impossible without massive governmental interference.  For it is a plain fact that individuals and groups are not equal by any empirical measure. (People are loathe to admit this because the admission sounds 'racist,' 'sexist,' 'ageist,' 'ableist,' etc., and being fearful, they fear being tagged with these pejoratives. But in a contest between a smear word and Reality, the latter wins in the end.) 

The achievement of equality of outcome requires equalizing agencies with vast power centered in a Sino-styled Sicherheitsstaat, a security or police state with social credit scores and omni-intrusive surveillance. But note that even then you would not have 'equity,' i.e., equality of outcome, because the equalizers would not be equal in power, position, pelf, and perquisites to the equalized. Would-be socializers, equalizers, and top-down planners typically imagine themselves ending up among the socializers, equalizers, and planners and not among the socialized, equalized, and planned.  More importantly, history shows that outcome-equalization from the top down leads to inanition as in the good old USSR the menus of whose restaurants listed many a dish only one of which was available: borscht. Yum!

Leftists are semantic smugglers. They are trying in this instance and in others to pass off something destructive under cover of something appealing.  Equality of opportunity, equality of political rights, equality before the law, etc. appeal to almost all of us. So what the stealth-ideological leftist does is to use this attractive wrapping to smuggle into uncritical heads the pseud0-value, or disvalue, 'equity,' understood as governmentally enforced equality of outcome or result.

Now my dear friends: if we we don't punch back hard against this destructive nonsense we are 'screwed,' all of us, even the wokesters themselves, and their usefully-idiotic fellow travellers, though their evil and cooperation with evil disallows their cognizance of the fact.  

If you haven't had enough of this delightful topic, here is an exchange between Bill Maher and Bernie Sanders in which B. S. demonstrates what a clueless and/or mendacious specimen he is.

A 'Progressive' Paradox

Leader of the Stack.

Leftists like to call themselves 'progressives.'  We can't or rather ought not begrudge them their self-appellation any more than we can begrudge the Randians their calling themselves 'objectivists.'  Every person and every movement has the right to portray himself or itself favorably and self-servingly.  "We are objective in our approach, unlike you mystics."

But if you are progressive, why are you stuck in the past when it comes to race?  Progress has been made in this area; why then do you deny the progress that has been made?  Why do you hanker after the old days? Why, Mr. President, do you go on about lynching?

Read it all. Pithy, on target, true.

resist, Resist, RESIST!

Seemingly, no day without a 'woke' outrage.  See below. Beneath refutation. There's no point in trying to engage these clowns on the plane of reason. Mock, deride, resist, and above all: ignore the A.P.'s  asinine recommendations.  By the way, 'asinine' is spelled exactly as I just spelled it, and not 'assinine' despite the fact that L. asinus mean ass or donkey. So if  I call you a wokeass, I am saying inter alia that you are donkey-dumb, the ass being the totemic animal of the Democrat Party. 

Write and speak sentences like this: "The Germans are more rule-bound than the Italians." Not only does this sentence violate the A. P. recommendation, thereby resisting willful wokester self-enstupidation, it is also offensive to the wokeassed on the ground of its being a generic statement. "One must never generalize!"  But I just did, and so did you. The difference is that my generalization is true whereas yours is self-refuting. Try thinking for a change, and you just might think your way out of your wokeassery. Since I care about and you and your sanity, I recommend that you study my Substack article Generic Statements.  

Globalist-Capitalist Woke Leftism

Here are some half-baked thoughts that perhaps Vito C. and Ed B. can help me formulate. The new global-capitalist woke leftism (GCWL) is very different from the old socialist-humanist leftism (which I take to include both the Old Left and the New Left). I want to understand the similarities and the differences.

GCWL versus SHL

1) Both are secular and anti-religion.  Since 1789 the Left has been virulently anti-clerical and anti-religious. Nota bene: an ersatz religion is not a religion! So stop calling leftism a religion, Dennis Prager.

2) Both target the middle class.

3) Both are internationalist  and anti-nationalist.

4) The main difference seems to be that SHL is humanist while GCWL tends toward the erasure of humanity and humanism via anti-natalism, paganism, nature-idolatrous environmentalism, misanthropy, Orwellian subversion of language, and leukophobic ethno-masochism and much else besides.

So that's a start. Inadequate, no doubt. Come on boys, help me out. Why do I have to do all the work?

The Ersatz Religion of 'Wokery': What is to be done?

The short answer is that the cure for an ersatz religion is genuine religion.

Colin Dueck in a review of Joshua Mitchell:

So, what is to be done? Mitchell’s answer in American Awakening is the observation that an essentially theological problem requires a theological solution. If the destructive ersatz religion of left-wing identity politics rests on a mistaken premise of all-encompassing group innocence versus group guilt—as it obviously does—then the answer is to recover that older spiritual awareness and humility that all human beings are flawed sinners as individuals. Here, Mitchell is in the best tradition of leading 20th-century conservative philosophers, who understood that the ideological authoritarian movements of that era could not only be stopped by political method; they also had to be confronted through a deeper understanding of their spiritual roots.  [The idea is better conveyed by replacing 'could not only be stopped by political method' with 'could not be stopped by political method only.']

Why is 'wokery' an essentially theological problem? 

Mitchell says that twenty-first century progressives believe in a kind of hierarchy of human sin and transgression based upon a series of group dichotomies: male versus female, white versus non-white, straight versus gay, Western versus non-Western, and so on. In each pairing, the latter group is the historical victim, and the former group the victimizer. Sin or guilt, like innocence, is therefore assigned by group. For oppressor groups, sin cannot be washed away, other than by apologetics ['apologies' works better here] that never end. For oppressed groups, there is no guilt or transgression in the first place, only the innocence of victimhood.

As Mitchell notes, identity politics removes the traditional religious scapegoat and finds a new one. In the older understanding, the sacrifice of the guiltless Christ—the one true innocent—is needed because all human beings are irredeemably sinful. In the newer progressive understanding, some groups are sinful, and some are not. This unleashes a new form of political activism. To be specific, it encourages a form of politics that is collectivist, utopian, and revolutionary—really an ersatz religion. We have seen their kind before. It does not end well.

As you can see, this article is of high quality. You really should read the whole of it. One quibble, though. On Christianity, human beings are not irredeemably sinful; if that were the case they could not be redeemed. The Christian idea is rather that human beings are all so deeply and originally sinful that they cannot redeem themselves by their own individual or collective effort and so need a divine Redeemer.

'Spirituality' and 'Religion'

What explains the bien-pensant substitution of the first word for the second? I give three reasons.

Substack latest.

The God Question and the Christian Proposition

A conversation between Alain Fikielkraut and Pierre Manent.  Very French and very flabby, but here is an excerpt that I approve of (emphasis added):

P.M. What is the nature of Islam’s challenge for us? And who is this “we” being challenged? The challenge lies in the fact that what is happening is that Islam is exerting considerable pressure on Europe, which should not have happened according to the grand progressive narrative elaborated since the eighteenth century—this philosophy of history, according to which humanity, under the leadership of the European avant-garde, was supposed to emancipate itself irresistibly from religious claims, dogma, and doctrine. The vitality that Islam as a whole has maintained, or rather reinforced, goes against a historical perspective that the weakening or “secularization” of Christianity seemed, to many, to validate. Islam is, in any case, the religion that refuses to come to an end and that affirms itself in ways that are manifestly public and triumphalist, casting doubt at least on the grand narrative of secularization. This challenges the consciousness upon which the self-confidence of modern Europe once rested.

Progressivism will not reconsider its approach to the religious question. What, then, does it do? On the one hand, it radically modifies its definition of progress in order to make Islam a part of the grand narrative. Europe no longer represents progress as the framework for the coming forth of a new association of humanity, of an industrial or socialist society, as August Comte or Karl Marx thought; on the contrary, it now represents progress because it has totally renounced self-affirmation and has reinvented itself as unlimited openness to the other—even when this other goes as directly as possible against our principles, particularly those concerning the equality of men and women. Since we now measure the quality of our progressivism by our disposition to welcome Islam unconditionally, Islam obliges us by confirming our grand narrative rather than refuting it. But since it is necessary all the same to take account of the fact that Muslim customs conflict with some of our essential principles, we decree with confidence (in a complementary strategic move) that secularism will take care of the problem by requiring Muslims to remove at least the visible signs of the subordination of women. While the first move boasts of its acceptance of Muslims as they are, the second promises that secularism will make them what they ought to be. Thus is removed all limitation on the welcoming of Islam, whether in the name of its present difference or in the name of its future similarity. Of course, this similarity will be slow in coming; progressivism lives by waiting.

MavPhil 'intervention': European progressivism is so progressive that it transmogrifies into ethno-masochism and cultural suicide. The progressivity of this progressivism is that of  a progressive disease. With the exception of Hungary, Europe is decadent-unto-death, and there is no decadent like a French decadent. (Am I being fair, Vito?) Of course, we over here are decadent as hell as well, but not as decadent, since about half of our population is willing to punch back against ethno-masochistic wokery, 'critical' race-delusionality, reality-denying social constructivism, the celebration of grotesquerie, the canonization of worthless individuals, the destruction of monuments to the great and noble, the destruction of the family, the moral corruption of children, the excusing of brazen mendacity at the highest levels of government, and all the rest of the depredations of cultural Marxism.

As for the "complementary strategic move," good luck with that! Do you Frenchies have the WILL to defend your superior culture against that of the Muslim invaders? Will European secularism "take care of" Muslim barbarism? Maybe. But addiction to la dolce vita is vitiating, weakening in plain English, and you Europeans may end up in dhimmitude. (My use of the Italian phrase may be inappropriate given the current 'stiffening' in my ancestral country, powered by a fiery Italian female.)

The rest of the discussion is pretty good too.

Le Figaro: The Catholic and Republican frameworks that hold together French society have become dislocated, as Jerome Fourquet explains at the beginning of his work L’Archipel francais. And so, we seek alternative religions. The philosopher Jean-Francois Braunstein recently published La religion woke. Alain Finkielkraut, what do you make of the idea of looking at wokeism as a religion?

A.F. I am not comfortable with this metaphorical use of the term religion. I am not convinced by the concept of secular religions. The promise of a radiant future is not religious. In his book, Pierre Manent sets up a very illuminating debate between Pascal and Rousseau. Original sin occupies a central place in Pascal’s thought. Manent writes: “The claim to overcome human injustice by ourselves, the injustice in which we are born and in which we will live as long as God has not delivered us, is the beginning and indeed the height of our injustice.” Rousseau says the opposite; he excludes the hypothesis of original sin: “I have shown that all the vices imputed to the human heart are not natural to it; I have stated the manner in which they are born. I have followed their genealogy, so to speak, and I have shown how through the continuous deterioration of their original goodness, men finally become what they are.”

Rousseau replaces original sin by the original crime: property, inequality. Those we call the oppressors are the successors of this crime. For Rousseau, politics must take responsibility for the whole of reality, and its final purpose becomes the elimination of evil. This project can take no other form than the elimination of the wicked; this is what the totalitarian experience teaches us. This is why we see the unexpected return of a meditation on original sin in late nineteenth-century thought. We human beings do not have the strength to deliver ourselves from sin.

Now, with wokeism, we return to the original crime, as if totalitarianism had never happened. With wokeism, evil has an address: evil is the male, white heterosexual over 50. Evil must be eliminated at all costs. Thus, cancel culture arises and spreads.

P.M. The new ideology no longer sees in human bonds the expression and fulfillment of human nature, but what threatens freedom and injures the rights of the individual. The new progressive finds his way in society as in a suspect country. The sole common cause is the protection of nature—but protection against whom? Against human beings, who stain or destroy nature, in one way or another. Political ecology introduces a principle of distrust or of limitless enmity between human beings and with respect to humanity as such. The desire for an earth without people turns humanity against itself and thus feeds the project of effacing what is special about humanity, of making human beings animals like the others, and so, in the end, inoffensive. Thus, at the moment when we claim to base all collective order on the sole principle of human rights, we wish to remove from humanity all that is distinctive by promulgating the rights of animals, plants, and rocks against humanity. Those who speak on behalf of species incapable of speaking need fear no refutation. All of nature provides them with an inexhaustible supply of motives in their accusations against other human beings.

As I have said, contemporary progressivism would have us admit that our species has no real or legitimate privilege over other species, which ultimately have as many rights as we do. And yet there is one point concerning which progressivism absolutely refuses to consider us as animals like the others: it rejects the idea that our lives should be organized according to the difference between the sexes, the natural polarity between males and females. How can we be animals like the others if the human order must construct itself on the basis of the negation of this natural difference that we have in common with animals? In this way, contemporary ideology succeeds in combining a radical contestation of the human difference with a radical contestation of the animal part of our natures. We have only to open the Bible to the book of Genesis to recover a bit of common sense.

 

Is Reason a White Male Euro-Christian Construct?

I lay into John D. Caputo in my latest Substack article.

Fetterman Unfettered: Against Ableism

In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, John Fetterman is currently competing with Dr. Mehmet Oz for a seat in the U. S. Senate. Any objective person who observes both men in action can see that Fetterman is mentally, morally, and politically unfit for office.  (I won't comment on the 'hoodie,' the ugly forearm tattoos, the neck bulge, the man's lack of a career outside of politics, or his 'anti-gravitas': the man's overall thuggish appearance.)

Mentally, he has trouble formulating clear sentences.  A recent stroke has left him impaired. Morally, he is a brazen liar: he recently stated in a debate with Dr. Oz that he supports fracking when it is obvious from his previous assertions and his overall position that he does not. Politically, he supports destructive hard-Left positions with respect to drugs and crime and everything else.

But let's say you believe in 'equity' as wokesters use the word. You believe in equality of outcome and proportional representation regardless of merit and qualifications.  If 'equity' is your concern why shouldn't a stroke-impaired man be a U. S. senator? After all, if dementia is no bar to high office, why should stroke-impairment be?  Fetterman's fit with the Biden bunch couldn't be tighter. To demand qualifications for high office or for any job at all is to discriminate against the unqualified, and we now know that discrimination is among the worst of sins. We are all equal and the supposed accomplishments and talents of Dr. Oz the heart surgeon really ought to count for nothing in an equitable society. We have made progress in the 'progressive' sense of the term. And we are better people for it. 

The disabled are just as qualified as the rest of us. For they are not really disabled at all; they are differently abled.  I myself was born with only one functioning ear. But this birth defect gives me the ability to block out sound in bed by putting my good ear down on the pillow. Clearly, this wonderful ability of mine compensates for all of the drawbacks of monaural hearing such as the inability to tell from which direction a sound is coming. The point generalizes: all disabilities are really abilities in disguise. No one should ever be evaluated in any way on the basis of supposed 'talents' or 'qualifications' or 'abilities' or 'accomplishments.' What I said in my first paragraph convicts me of the thought crime of 'ableism.'  I ought to check myself into the nearest 'progressive' re-education camp.

Marxism and Pelagianism

If Pelagianism is the false belief that man can save himself without help ab extra, then Marxism is a latter-day secularized form of Pelagianism. Among the central  pillars of Marxist and indeed all leftist delusion is the conceit that human beings are fundamentally good. The blood-drenched attempts at the remaking of humanity in the image of this destructive doctrine are the clearest proofs of its falsehood.

Leftist Omni-Politicization

For the Left, everything is either political or to be politicized, including that which is non-political. Take this to its logical extreme and you end up with 'woke' mathematics. This reductio ad absurdum will cause a sane person to reject the premise. The sane will point out that some things, by their very nature, cannot be politicized. There is nothing political about the Poisson distribution or Rolle's theorem.

 

Will the leftist back off? Hell no, he will deny that anything has a nature, and affirm that everything is subject to social construction. For example, a typical leftist will state that a conservative black is a traitor to his race. Now that makes no sense. 'Traitor' is a political notion; 'race' is not. Race is not like political affiliation. You can quit your party, and if you are a Democrat you should; you can't, however, quit your race. Not even Rachel Dolezal could pull it off.

 

Being a leftist, however, means that you don't have to make sense. Herewith, a case of 'leftist privilege,' to give it a name.

 

You say you've forgotten who Rachel Dolezal is is? Too much Twitter! A weapon of mass distraction. Soon you'll be a tweeting twit with a mind fit only to flit.  The Left is all about the erasure of memory, collective and individual, except for what serves their agenda. To refresh your memory, see Rachel Dolezal, The Black White Woman.

 

I make a mistake at the end that I will now correct. I represent Elizabeth Warren as the author of Pow Wow Chow when in fact she is merely a contributor to that by-now-famous recipe book. Her contribution, however, a recipe for lobster bisque — Cherokees were into haute cuisine? — was plagiarized!