Maverick Philosopher

Anarcho-Tyranny in the USA

Here by Auron MacIntyre at The Total State (Substack):

The city of Philadelphia has announced an agreement to pay a $9.25 million settlement in connection with the police response to protests after the death of George Floyd in 2020. While dozens were killed and billions of dollars of damage were done during the riots that raged across America for weeks in the summer of 2020, it is the participants themselves who will be paid restitution by the government.

Law and order in the United States have now descended to a level of anarcho-tyranny in which the government funds rioters with the tax money of their victims. The slow death of the rule of law in America would be ugly enough, but what we are witnessing instead is the twisted, grimacing corpse of a system that was once designed to protect the safety of Americans now being used to punish us for disagreeing with our political elites.

UPDATE 3/24

This fellow and I so far appear to be 'on the same page.' Two days ago, before I had heard of him, I spoke of our time as 

. . . a time when those in control of the state apparatus have forgotten, or rather willfully ignore, the purposes that justify government in the first place, namely, the tasks of securing the life, liberty, and property of those governed. But the Orwellian wokesters now in charge invert these values in the Orwellian manner and aid and abet those who aim at the opposite.

As MacIntyre points out, what we are witnessing is "more than the slow death of the rule of law," but the inversion of our founding values. And yet brazen liars such as Nancy Pelosi yammer on about the rule of law while her shills in the media intone in unison the scripted mantra, "No one is above the law," as they pervert the law Soviet-style to destroy Donald J. Trump.  Thankfully, Nancy dear is no longer with us (nor against us) politically speaking; others, however, far worse and more dangerous because less stupid, will take her place.

And as usual the Left Coast leads the way. (Because it is closer to China?) Here is Substacker David Zweig on lockdown and surveillance Santa Clara-style.

Kato Crews: 'Wokified' but not Qualified

Another example of how qualifications do not matter to wokesters. 

Academentia in excelsis

DEI and the collapse of the universities.

Substack latest.

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?

Of Wokery and Merit

Destructive, anti-civilizational wokesters are not just against merit, they are positively for anti-merit, dysfunction, incompetence, stupidity, corruption, malevolence, and more. Qualifications don't matter; 'wokifications' matter: being black, female, lesbian, cognitively impaired, truth-insensitive, reality-denying, physically feeble, morally corrupt.  Mayorkas, Fetterman, Buttigieg, practically the whole of the Biden administration.  After watching this C-SPAN video will you tell me that Phil Washington is qualified to head the Federal Aviation Administration? Qualified or 'wokified'? Is being 'woke' and 'diverse' a qualification? 

Suppose you question whether John Fetterman is qualified to be a U. S. Senator given his mental and physical impairment. You will be called an 'ableist.' What's next? 'Qualificationist?' "You're a white-spremacist qualificationist! You believe people need to be qualified for the positions they apply for!"

You will never understand the Left until you understand that they reliably take the side of losers, underdogs, and criminals, who comprise their clientele and path to power.  And with lefties it is always about power, first and forever.

Here we read about a 78-year-old Englishman who, in defending himself against a screwdriver-wielding home invader, caused the miscreant's death and is now facing a murder charge.

Dear old England, the mother country. It is sad to see your mother, senile and decrepit, go down the toilet, having lost all her moral sense and the will to live.

Once again one sees the justification for my political burden of proof:

As contemporary 'liberals' become ever more extreme, they increasingly assume what I call the political burden of proof.  The onus is now on them to defeat the presumption that they are so  morally and intellectually obtuse as not to be worth talking to.

Actually, that is far too mild a statement. Perhaps tomorrow I will tell you what I really think.

UPDATE (3/17).  I say above that leftists reliably take the side of criminals. More proof, as if more proof is needed:

THE AGE OF REASON?

I wrote here about Hennepin County, Minnesota’s left-wing prosecutor who let off two juveniles (the older aged 17) who murdered a woman in the course of a home invasion. This was part of her stated rationale:

[County Attorney Mary] Moriarty has said she is simply “following the science,” which she says is conclusive about adolescent brain development. According to Moriarty, the human brain is not fully developed until 25 years old.

Which is why, according to Moriarty, “we need to treat kids like kids.” As opposed to treating murderers like murderers.

Read it all. Why is 'Minnesnowta' such a hot-bed of anti-civilizational wokeassery? Does the cold clime freeze their brains unto willful self-enstupidation?

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.

Tucker Carlson Exposes the Malevolent Lies of the Biden Admin re: Jan 6th 'Insurrection'

Neither  deadly nor an insurrection.

Trump's take.

Diana West's commentary.

Tucker Carlson Tonight - Wednesday, 08 March 2023

Surveillance Video Dismantles January 6th Narrative

Narratives and the Left

Leftists love narratives because a narrative needn't be true to be a narrative. Their assessment criteria are identity-tribal rather than logical.  A good narrative is a coherent  story that enhances the tribe's power. Whether true or false is not to the point, the point being power. Truth is not a leftist value. It is not a norm that constrains their speaking and thinking.   That is not to say that leftists don't sometimes speak the truth; they do when it serves their purposes. They don't when it doesn't.  Truth for a leftist has a merely instrumental value, not an absolute value.

Addendum (3/9).  I wrote to Tony Flood anent Tucker's exposure of our government's police-state tactics:

I think that the U.S. has finally completed its transmogrification into the S.U.

And Tony reined me in a bit with this response:

Analogies with trajectories to totalitarianism (total statism) lose in precision what they may offer in rhetorical bite. We have our near-equivalents of Pravda and Izvestiya. (You know the old joke: Pravda has no news; Izvestiya, no truth.) But we also still have Tucker, Diana [West], et al. When the transmogrification is complete, we won't, and the result won't be Sovietization or Nazification, but probably given the technological means something even worse. I cannot measure the distance yet to be traveled, and hope we never do. I hope we're at a turning point and we'll turn the right way in light of the recent exposures.

Yes. Here's hoping that Carlson's display of serious testicular fortitude will have some positive effect on his journalistic colleagues who, most of them, have utterly forgotten the important role of the Fourth Estate in a democratic but constitutionally-based republic and are now shills for the ruling power-hungry, greedy, anti-democratic, globalist elites.  To gauge just how far we have sunk in this country, give a listen to this exercise in mendacity and misdirection by Senator Charles Schumer.

So Carlson invited Schumer to come on TV and talk about it.

But Schumer said he will appear on Carlson’s show only if Carlson takes back everything he has said.

The rest of the good senator's crapweaselry here.

Addendum II (3/9) Tony Flood adds:

Bill, a thought about your suggestion: Lysenko, the Stalin-era Lamarckian biologist who denied the reality of genes, was a poster boy for political interference in science. The current popular denial of the reality of chromosomal distinction (as though xx can "transition" to xy or vice versa) puts me in mind of this episode. Unlike the imposition of Lysenkoism, however, the ascendancy of the latter denial (and other, equally insane denials of reality) cannot be explained as a top-down affair. Contemporary ideologues conspired outside the corridors of political power until they wormed their way inside whence they can put finishing touches. We're living through something like Bolsheviks patiently working their way through generations of Romanovs and Russian nobility, undermining traditional institutions and beliefs one by one until society falls into their laps. No need to storm the Winter Palace if you already control the institutions that maintain it. Over time, one cultural hegemony replaces another. At least that's what I think they've been trying to do, but reality hasn't been cooperating.

I think you are on the right track, Tony. The capture of our culture and our institutions is not top-down, but bottom-up. It is akin to the "long march through the institutions" that David Horowitz often refers to. The student radicals of the '60s wormed their way into the professoriat, the entertainment and news media,  the churches, the schools, the judiciary, etc. and now -- horribile dictu -- into such precincts as before they were not to be found: the military and corporate business worlds. Thus the bizarre phenomena of 'woke' capitalism  and a 'woke' and therefore weak  military as promoted by the likes of 'General' Milley under the 'control' of the demento-puppet, Joey B. What's next? Bespoke pacifist generals?

Sorting through this socio-cultural garbage is a challenging intellectual exercise. We shall continue. But now I am going to take Bro Jackass out for a hard ride.

'Equity' Can Get You Killed

Here

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.

Of DEI and the Devil

The genitive of deus. Advocates of D.E.I. being slanderers, they are properly labeled diabolou (διαβόλου, genitive of διάβολος), "of the devil." (Anthony G. Flood)

I am as little an etymologist as I am an entomologist, but to extend Tony's riff, I have often suspected an etymological connection between the German Zweifel (doubt) and the German Teufel (devil) via the zwei (two) in the first word. The Father of Lies is duplicitous. Latin duplex, duplicis means twofold, double, divided.  Latin duplicitas, duplicitatis can mean doubleness, duplicity, deceit, ambiguity.

You have heard me say that doubt is the engine of inquiry. Admittedly, though, doubt is two-faced in that it can, driving inquiry, lead to truth, but also degenerate into denial of truth. Leftists, being duplicitous, regularly conflate doubt and denial as when they tar the right-thinking with 'climate denial' when we merely question their hysterical claims about the imminence of "boiling oceans" (Al Gore at Davos, Switzerland recently) and such other nonsense as they spew.

Hypocrisy is a from of duplicity, and who more hypocritical than the climate summit attendees who travelled by private half-filled jets to Davos when, if they themselves believed their climate claims, could have much more easily and 'environmentally' convened via Zoom. And note where they convened: in a country that, unlike the USA under the 'leadership' of the brazen liars Biden, Harris, Mayorkas, et al. actually controls its borders.  

And you still vote Democrat?

The hard Left, which now controls the Democrat Party, is evil at its core. I don't say that every  leftist, 'progressive,' and wokester is evil. Most of these folks are useful idiots. A large subset of them are superannuated, low-information, life-long Democrats who are pissing away their 'golden years' in empty socializing, hitting white balls into holes, and other forms of Pascalian divertissement.

I am talking about the drivers of this demonic, duplicitous assault on civilization. Prime example here in the 'City of Angels.'

The Age of Feeling and Proto-Wokery

Over the last few years I have spoken often of the Age of Feeling in which we now live, here for example. The feeling fetish is downstream from the feminization that has been in flow for quite some time.  These are ingredients of the proto-wokery now 'flowering' into full-on wokery.  An excerpt from an article in First Things you should read:

The emphasis on “feelings” is rooted in a deeper ideology of Safetyism. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, in their 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind, define Safetyism as “a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people are unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns.”

While Haidt and Lukianoff focus their analysis on proto-woke novelties like “trigger warnings” and “micro-aggressions,” the cult of Safetyism is best exemplified in our response to the pandemic. Think of the litany of violations of our basic rights to personal freedom and choice over the last two years that were justified on the basis of harm reduction. The economy, our dying loved ones, our faith practices, our children's education, all of it served up on the altar of Safetyism. Think of the Covid Karen: Triple-masked. Quad-boosted. Self-confined for months on end. Hyperventilating in panic as she ventures to the grocery store for the first time in a year. Then scolding the rest of us for wanting to send our kids back to school, and demanding instead that we all abide by her hypochondria, on pain of punishment by the bureaucratic state. This person—who is as often male as female—is the avatar of the Longhouse.

Look out for Longhouse Karen who will report you to the WokeState apparatchiki.

Depredatory Wokery: Resist and Refuse

The good Baron over at Gates of Vienna has some worthwhile suggestions. (HT: Bill Keezer)

My main suggestion is that you vote with your wallet. For example, if your alma mater requests money, tell them, politely but firmly, no dice as long as they support DIE. 

('Die' is the singular of 'dice.' Surely DIE is more fitting an acronym that DEI, which, technically speaking, is not an acronym at all, but a mere abbreviation.)

In other news: no self-defense allowed in Canada.  

To Those Fleeing California

DO NOT come to Arizona! It's just too damned hot here for you snowflakes. And on top of that everybody is packing heat. That's why you don't hear any honking on the highways and byways. "An armed society is a polite society."

We are racist to the core in this rattlesnake-infested inferno which is also home to the scorpion, the Gila monster, and other venomous critters no librul would want to tangle with. There is nothing here but hot sand and dirt lightly covered with some dessicated but still prickly-as-hell vegetation such as cat claw.

Everything here either sticks, stings, or stinks.  Go elsewhere! Oregon and Idaho would love to have you.  Or better yet: wallow in the shit you shat. Enjoy the sanctuary that your sanctimonious silliness has built. Receive the wages of wokery.

 

 

California lost a Congressional seat due to mass exodus. Excellent! Geographically beautiful, California is now a political craphole to rival the People's Republic of Taxachusetts. I say that as a native Californian who lived for most of the '70s in Boston.

Membership Trends in U.K. Churches

I recommend this informative and characteristically well-written post by long-time friend and correspondent, Malcolm Pollack.

It appears that among the wages of wokery are a decline in enrollment.

Related: UK Christianity Out With A Whimper

The Wages of Woke

Here

If White Supremacy is Everywhere . . .

. . . why is it so hard to find a Latin mass?

Left, Right, Sex, and Gender

Top o' the Stack.

Conservatives especially need to push back against linguistic wokery. And yet how many so-called conservatives continue to conflate sex and gender, race and skin color!  

He who controls the terms of the debate controls the debate.

The subversion of language is the mother of all subversion.

Conservatives are long on talk, but short on conservation.

Recommended article: Thomas D. Klingenstein and John Fonte, Woke Revolutionaries Versus Americanists.

And just for fun, here is proof that James Carville -- remember him? -- is still a class act after all these years.

Abdication of Authority?

Or something worse?

Substack latest.

Academentia in excelsis

It is fitting that a demented man should 'preside' over the decline and fall of our republic and in particular over the decline and fall of its once-great universities.  No one other than Joey B among American pols could better represent a nation in steep decline by every measure, a nation that has lost the will to defend its borders both on the ground and above it -- I allude to the Chinese spy balloons -- and to maintain domestic order within its borders. 

Here:

The Ohio State University is currently seeking a professor of “Philosophy of Race,” an area of expertise that includes “the epistemological significance of race or racism” and “race in the philosophy of science.” Its Department of Physics seeks a professor whose main focus is “issues relevant to educational equity.” And its Department of Anthropology recently sought an archaeologist whose work emphasizes “decolonization, feminist theory, queer theory, critical race theory, and/or Indigenous ontologies.”

The sheer destructive lunacy of the DEI agenda reaches its apogee in the Physics Department's quest for a professor whose main focus (!) is on educational equity.  'Equity' is Wokespeak for equality of outcome or result. So the search is on for a candidate who will dumb down physics to the extent necessary to insure that each student, regardless of race or ethnicity gets the same grade, presumably an 'A.' For of course any other result would be -- wait for it -- racist! We are all equal in every respect, hence any inequality of outcome as between, say, Asians as a group and blacks as a group, can only be explained by the Original Sin of systemic, institutional racism visited upon us by the Founders.  (This is why the monuments to them must of course be destroyed.) 

And so physics, the least ideological of the natural sciences, must be ideologized, politicized, and racialized.

The insanity of this is evident. But what explains it?  We like to think of university faculty and administrators as intelligent and sane people.  So what's the explanation? Perhaps it is like this.

There is a hard-core of committed, strong-willed leftists who are positively evil and bent on destroying the USA and the West in general.  They enlist and manipulate a huge cadre of useful idiots and fellow-travelers who are not evil but are moral mediocrities who go along with the revolutionary vanguard for one or a combination of the following reasons: fear of losing their jobs and perquisites; laziness and inattention; a strong need to be liked and accepted; conformism; inability to think critically; misplaced white guilt; absorption in private life. 

Essential to my explanation is the conservative conviction that evil is a reality with deep metaphysical roots, and that some of our fellow mortals are, in the main, agents of evil.  They are few in number but very powerful due to their ability to manipulate half-way decent, timorous and ovine, moral mediocrities. The latter are the useful idiots and fellow-travelers, latter-day 'pinkos' if you will. 

Do you have a better explanation?  If so, I'd like to hear it.

On 'Illegal Alien' and 'Illegal Immigrant'

Substack latest.

The Republic is probably beyond saving at this late date. So why do I bother to write pieces that underscore what really ought to be obvious? One reason is selfish: I like to write and then re-read what I have written. But having taken the time to write something clean, coherent, and sensible, why should I hide my light  under a bushel? It is not impossible that a half-dozen readers will actually read what I have written and be led to think a bit more clearly and act a little more responsibly.  

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.  

Down with Tobacco, Up with Marijuana

Why down with the first (I allude to the menthol cigarette ban) and up with the second?  Why the differential treatment and the misplaced moral enthusiasm? The locoweed I smoked with band members in the late '60s was tame stuff, poor in tetrahydrocannabinol as compared to the potent THC-rich product on the market today.  Since then, cigarettes have been wussified what with the addition of filters and lower nicotine levels.   

So why the differential treatment? The short answer is that it is not in the interest of a police state to promote alertness and attention, which is what nicotine does, while it is in such a state's interest to promote dopiness and lethargy and escapism and every manner of vice.  

It is the tried-and-true panem et circenses principle. Keep the masses fat and stupid, doped up on hooch and weed, distracted by mass sporting events such as the Stupor Bowl and pornography, expectant of regular initiative-inimical handouts and 'freebies,' and they will be easy to control. 

Sate the peoples' blood-lust with HollyWeird brutality and gun violence while at the same time stripping law-abiding citizens of their Second Amendment rights.   Alec Baldwin easily serves as poster-clown for this sort of thing: he make big bucks in movies that celebrate violence while knowing nothing himself about firearms and their safe handling. The nimrod is on record as opposing the National Rifle Association, an outfit that promotes gun safety and defends constitutionally-protected (not constitutionally-conferred) natural rights.  Baldwin is a contemptible fool whose willful self-enstupidation resulted in a young woman's death. He has been brought up on charges of involuntary manslaughter, which sounds just right to me. (It's a stronger charge than negligent homicide.) 

We saw the same panem-et-circenses pattern with the COVID-19 lockdown. The churches were targeted for closure while the liquor stores stayed open. Police states brook no critique or competition from organized religion, but a liquored-up citizenry is kept distracted and manipulable.

Similarly with Biden's wide-open border policy. It is not just to flood the nation with 'undocumented Democrats' so as to insure in perpetuity the hegemony of what is now a hard-Left party, but also to allow in as much fentanyl as possible to poison and kill off the native population, and in particular the poor white trash of Appalachia and elsewhere in fly-over country, the people Hillary spoke of as deplorables and Obama as clingers to guns and Bibles.

A government worth having promotes virtue in the people and in particular the virtues of self-reliance and self-control. A totalitarian state, however, works best by promoting vice. A reader sent me to this perceptive article portions of which I will now share:

Remember that the “government,” as I describe it, is much more than just the state. It includes schools, banks, and corporations, collaborating with the state to govern a population. This need not be a conspiracy — although it often is — it can simply occur because of a shared set of objectives and priorities. For the government to cooperate correctly with itself, it needs maximal data and predictability in the population.

That’s why modern governments exert an inverted form of pastoral power to promote vice. Greed, lust, and vainglory are very predictable: if you know that every merchant will do anything to maximize profit, then you can predict their trading patterns with precision. The “rational actor,” the utilitarian automaton, and the pleasure-maximizer are the ideal constituents of the modern population. This means we can expand Dr. E. Michael Jones’ well-known dictum that “sexual liberation is political control”⁴ by saying: manipulation of any vice is political control.

This is why the government is promoting Impossible burgers, even though the company loses money: they want to centralize all protein production. Impossible is a tool to nudge the population’s behavior through a desire for “meatiness” in food. The government seeks to steer the rudder of our vices until all protein comes from patented software and gene edits. They won’t even have to pass a law.

To summarize and expand upon three of the main points made in the above quotation:

1) The government is not just the State but the latter together with all its adjuncts and extensions including Big Tech and Big Pharma. But 'adjunct' might not be the best word given the regulatory capture of the former by the latter.

2) If the interests of different groups align and they move in the same direction, this need not be due to any  conspiracy among the groups. It follows that anyone who alleges a commonality of direction, towards increasing wokeness, say, is not automatically a conspiracy theorist.

3) ". . . modern governments exert an inverted form of pastoral power to promote vice." A genuine insight beautifully expressed.  I hope you won't take it amiss if I nominate that good Catholic, Joe Biden, for the annual Pastor of Vice award.

You may recall that in 2016, Joey B. received the University of  Notre Dame's Laetare Medal. Read this for a good laugh:

“We live in a toxic political environment where poisonous invective and partisan gamesmanship pass for political leadership,” said Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., Notre Dame’s president. “Public confidence in government is at historic lows, and cynicism is high. It is a good time to remind ourselves what lives dedicated to genuine public service in politics look like. We find it in the lives of Vice President Biden and Speaker Boehner.

Might we call this the 'regulatory capture' of a once-great university by the WokeState and its puppets and pimps? (Or is that going too far?)  The (so-called) Catholic universities are the most corrupt of all, for they have fallen the farthest. They are in dire need of defunding by sane and reasonable alumni. Not a dime for those who support DEI.

The churches, the RCC in particular, the universities, the once-great ones especially, and the Fourth Estate should serve as checks on the State and its omnivorous appetite for power and control.  They should function as bulwarks against and critics of the government and its metastasizing octopus of grasping and sucking agencies and agents.

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.