Student fights at West High School, Bakersfield, Ca., 3/15/2017.
Today, there seems to be a concerted effort to make-believe everyone is the same, not just equal: among the sexes, genders (?), racial and ethnic groups, social classes, everyone. Of course, this is a flagrant contradiction to multiculturalism’s worship of differences. But, pushing the incoherence aside is the pogrom against any real or imagined bigotries. It takes the form of a jihad to eradicate “disparate impact” – or the presence of unequal outcomes. If we are more than equal, but the same, too many of one group in an unsavory category is said to be proof of amorphous and shadowy forces of bigotry. The only problem: It’s all nonsense and, when implemented, a hot mess.
Recently, the Kern High School District in California was sued by the Dolores Huerte Foundation for a negative “disparate impact” in its discipline policies. Too many minorities were said to be kicked out of school. Now, in caving in to a judicial shakedown, the District implemented PBIS. Don’t fret over its meaning. It can be translated to mean more mothering for hellions. Too bad if you’re a good student or well-meaning teacher.
Bakersfield High School teachers expressing their fear and dismay:
Here’s a clip of fights at neighboring West High School from last year:
You see, hellions aren’t evenly distributed in a population any more than the social conditions that give to their rise.
Read the article: “‘Out of Control’: Teachers describe KHSD schools after anti-discrimination settlement”, Jeff Platt, Eyewitness News staff, BakersfieldNow.com, http://bakersfieldnow.com/…/out-of-control-teachers-describ….
STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering, Math. And, if given freedom of choice and abundant opportunities, more women prefer other fields. Conversely, straitjacketing women through poverty, and cultural and legal devices, ironically means more STEM women (More or less is a percentage of a study population). The upshot: depressed countries meet the modern feminist ideal more than free, open, and prosperous ones. So, should we adopt the Sub-Saharan African model of social and economic organization to boost our female STEM numbers? And/or, should we continue our efforts to artificially construct the new woman according to recent Hollywood stereotypes?
Check out the articles:
** “Countries with greater gender equality have lower percentages of female STEM graduates MU study finds”, News Bureau, U. of Missouri, 2/14/2018, https://munews.missouri.edu/…/0214-countries-with-greater-…/
** A good synthesis: “Gender equality paradox: fewer women in developed nations go after STEM degrees”, Philip Perry, BigThink, 3/1/2018, http://bigthink.com/…/the-downside-to-greater-gender-equali…
Sorry, I can’t leave the gun debate alone. The reason: the people most stridently supporting gun-control are simultaneously most ignorant about them. They say stupid things like, “These guns [AR-15’s] are killing machines” (Stephanie Ruhle of MSNBC, last week in a radio interview).
Stephanie Ruhle, MSNBC
Here’s a question: Comparing the 2 gun pictures below – #2 and #3 – which one is more likely to kill you? Answer: It depends on which one is pointing at you. Dahhhh! A bullet out of a “killing machine” (Stephanie’s words) acts the same way as one heading toward a deer.
Hunter with a bolt-action rifle.Sighting-in an AK-47.
Okay, one is a semi-auto AK-47 (pic #3) and the other is a bolt-action hunting rifle (pic #2). But many sport rifles are semi-auto. Depending on the direction of the barrel, either one could be a “killing machine” (Stephanie’s words). See below, pic #4, of a Browning semi-auto and an AR-15.
SILVER SPRING, MARYLAND – FEBRUARY 21: Students from Montgomery Blair High School march down Colesville Road in support of gun reform legislation February 21, 2018 in Silver Spring, Maryland.Red Guards — high school and university students — wave copies of Chairman Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book during a parade in June 1966 in Beijing’s streets at the beginning of China’s Cultural Revolution.
CNN’s townhall (2/21/2018) on guns was staged in Broward County, the scene of the shooting, and also a Democrat bastion in a state trending Republican. Remember, Al Gore tried to cherry pick friendly counties like Broward County for never-ending recounts for manufacturing votes to reverse his loss of Florida in the 2000 election, only to be stopped by the Supreme Court.
Broward County canvassing board member Judge Robert Rosenberg looks over a questionable ballot, 25 November 2000, at the Broward County Courthouse in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. AFP PHOTO/RHONA WISE / AFP / RHONA WISE (Photo credit should read RHONA WISE/AFP/Getty Images)
On 2/21, CNN conducted a theatrical display of ritual humiliation reminiscent of Mao’s Red Guards during the weighty days of the Cultural Revolution. Go view CNN’s tape of their event and compare it to this 7-minute exhibit of rage, youthful exuberance, and inhumanity from Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
Today’s young firebrands, in their bullying antics towards Southern statues and the NRA/guns, has striking similarities to Red Guard attacks on bourgeois decadence and, of course, statues.
Toppling a statue in Durham, NC.
We don’t have to look far into the pages of history for evidence of adolescent cruelty. Movements built around coercive utopias have frequently found a receptive audience among the young. Italy’s Fascist Party youth, the National Socialist Hitler Youth, Stalin’s Young Pioneers, Mao’s Red Guards, Bela Kun’s Lenin’s Boys (Hungarian Soviet Republlic, 1919) show the capacity for enthusiastic intolerance among the young. The spectacle of orchestrated hate depicted on CNN is true to form.
Bela Kun’s Lenin’s Boys, the enforcers of the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919.
We must understand these things for what they are. They are not forums for calm deliberation, but devolve into kangaroo courts for compulsory humiliation. Let’s stop the pretense of calling it a “townhall”.
David Hogg has thrust himself into the difficult gun control debate. There’s a reason for the age distinction of minority/majority in law. There’s a reason for the separate existence of juvenile courts. There’s a reason for the determination of minors to be not fully capable in law of “consent”. It’s the same reason they cannot be a representative, senator, or president. Mental immaturity, raging hormones, and victim status aren’t qualifications for the seat of Solomon.
Hogg has been treated with “kid” gloves (pun intended) as he has thrust himself onto the public stage. His opinions have the depth of reasoning of a kid’s Christmas wish list. His demands should be confronted and dispatched, not indulged. There’s too much at stake for millions of others to let rantings go unanswered.
David, you wanted a debate; now you should get it.
Nikolas Cruz and Douglas Stoneman High School on the day opf the shooting spree, 2/14/2018.Missoula, Mt., student protest against guns, 2/21/2018.
The children’s marches in the wake of Douglas Stoneman High School shooting elicit gut-wrenching sympathy for them. Let the aggrieved have their mourning. But the traumatized may not be a proper catalyst for good public policy. It’s a reason for the elevation of the issue, not the dictate for a particular approach … if any.
Parents wait for news after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Joel Auerbach
I’m loathe to raise the matter as many are in the grips of great sadness. Nonetheless, many are exploiting the event to pursue their own pet causes. They must be confronted before trauma is allowed to escalate into bad policy.
Protest at the Florida State Capitol building on February 21.
Reasonable analysis of mass school shootings goes way beyond guns. We have created a breeding ground for alienated and disconnected young males. Girls infrequently appear on the lists of mass killers and suicide bombers. What’s happening to our young men?
Elliot Rodger, Dylann Roof, and Adam Lanza (l to r).
A toxic culture permeates: fatherless homes, the decline in traditional spirituality, a biased and incomplete education, the pervasive emotional detachment of a digital world, absentee parents, a girls-girls-girls contemporary obsession to the exclusion of boys, an emphasis on extreme behavior in pop culture, etc., etc. I could go on, but it is a culture of our own making.
Next, we have been softened to accepting state aggrandizement. This happenstance is partly a product of urban lifestyles, of a large part of the population acclimated to a coddling government. It goes further, though. Our schools propagate the benign state. As a result, our discussion is limited to the different ways to expand the powers of the state.
Progressivism’s view of government is approvingly taught in our classrooms (an advanced placement U.S. History teacher at Appomattox High School).
Lost in the debate is the reality of government’s potential for great malevolence and huge waste. “Civil servants” can be what Churchill was alleged to say of them: they can be neither civil nor servants. Whether a person is employed by the state or elsewhere, deep down we are the same, with all our flaws.
More waiting periods, gun bans, gun registrations, and liability regs will not repeal human nature, will not reorient the disoriented, or do anything to create an informed citizenry in dealing with traumatic situations. Until we get a handle on our toxic culture, all the state embellishments will be worse than wishful thinking.
What to do? First, up-armor the schools to survive in a toxic culture. Next, get parents back into the home and into the kids’ lives. Next, more church-going will help. Next, the relationship between an armed citizenry and a free state must be taught to counter progressivism’s state-love. And more could be done, before we ever get to the assault on “assault weapons” as a realistic option.
Nikolas Cruz being subdued about an hour after the shooting spree.Students gather at a memorial in Pine Trails Park in Parkland, Fla., in honor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting victims. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times).
A school shooting reflexively leads to calls for gun control, and currently for Trump to be a “Nixon-to-China” emissary to the NRA to make gun ownership more difficult. Lost in the noise is whether any of this will do any good, and any suggestion that there be a Pelosi-to-the-Gun-Control-Lobby or Schumer-to-the-Gun-Control-Lobby. It’s only Trump-to-the-NRA.
This boilerplate, one-sided prescription ran at the top in “Axios AM” for 2/16 by MIke Allen: “1 big thing: Why Trump drags his feet on guns”. According to Allen, a Trump delegation need only go to the NRA. I’m waiting for Bernie, Nancy, Chuck, and the rest of the Democratic Party apparatchiks to be envoys to the Brady Campaign. Allen’s blinders don’t seem to allow a place for moderation of gun control zealots in his field of vision.
Probably Allen’s blinders has much to do with the sociopolitical nest that he inhabits. Speaking of sociopolitical nests, we’ve got a national one that goes further to explain the gun violence than anything off the lips of Nancy Pelosi. The straws of the nest include: (1) many no-dad-in-the-home families; (2) insular lives in an obsessively digitized world; (3) a craven fixation on girls, girls, girls that leaves little room for boys – except for Ritalin; (4) the attempt to embed morals through secular means only; (5) the segregation of faith into the home and sanctuary; (6) absentee parents in pursuit of material comforts, etc., etc., etc.
The Dems’ only answer is some form of chant about gun control. If guns were confiscated or regulated and priced out of society, would we be any safer? In other words, would making the whole country into one big soft target be preferable? I doubt it. The preferred method of mayhem would shift to cars, machetes, pressure cookers, box cutter/commercial jets ….
Here’s a suggestion: Let’s turn our schools from soft to hard targets. It’s what we might have to do in a culture of our own making.
The following is a reply to “Where are Americans Moving?”, 2017, https://www.northamerican.com/migration-map.
*************
The map says it all according to a report issued by North American Van Lines for 2017.
Coupling the data about moves with economic rankings for states, Hillary country in the last election is a scary place for people wishing to better themselves. Take a look at the charts in the previous article and the map in this article and a picture crystallizes of people fleeing the Dems’ poison. Long term Dem control of the state legislature is a sure signal to look elsewhere to live.
“If a fact comes in that doesn’t fit into our frame, you’ll either not notice it, or ignore it, or ridicule it, or be puzzled by it – or attack it if it’s threatening. ” — George Lakoff, cognitive linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, as quoted in National Geographic Magazine, June 2017 issue. (1)
One of my main reasons for maintaining a National Geographic Magazine subscription is to keep tabs on the animating infatuations in that part of America politically colored “blue”. The magazine seldom fails to disappoint, perhaps unwittingly and unknowingly. The infatuations are a product of a favoritism, encoded into blue-America’s urban and academic “betters”, arising from a pervasive mix of social tastes and a grand ideo-philosophy. It operates as a kind of mental impairment for its devotees.
Susan Goldberg, Editor in Chief, National Geographic Magazine.
The above quote from page p. 50 of the magazine was meant to describe others not so enlightened according to the author of the piece from which it was taken. It could just as easily apply to the author, editors, and staff of the magazine in their Washington, D.C., bubble.
“The pot calling the kettle black”: A phrase from at least the 1600s meant to convey hypocrisy. It would be better understood if we experienced life in a medieval kitchen.
On the “affective filter”
Are the publication’s content producers immune to the presence of half-baked assumptions and prejudices that they assign to others? I think not. The affective filter concept of learning theory comes to mind. The filter functions as an emotional Polaroid lens as we consciously try to attain new knowledge. Our emotions, the theory asserts, are said to make learning difficult, and, by implication, operates to facilitate passage of those stimuli and facts that comport with our previously entrenched hunches about how the world works. If true, it is universally operable beyond the “bitter clingers” of Pres. Obama’s famous characterization.
The affective filter theory was devised to explain student second language acquisition.
The magazine’s staff could benefit from a mirror.
There is a strong emotional attachment to our deep, unquestioned, and strongly held beliefs. While we may convince ourselves that we are paragons of scientific inquiry, the reality may be quite different.
On materialism
So, what are the basal beliefs pervading the upper reaches of the status hierarchy in our urban and academic clusters? One attachment is a broad conviction for the philosophy of materialism. No, I’m not referring to materialism as a synonym for greed. Alternatively, materialism as accepted wisdom attempts to explain everything as a product of matter and material forces. Modern practitioners of science could be weaned into this line of thought by the very nature of their preoccupation. Science is focused on the physical world. The temptation is to reduce wisdom to an understanding of matter, its forces and processes.
The stage is set for a full-throated assault on anything seemingly not in tune with the current state of scientific understanding as presumed by some practitioners momentarily at the top of the science popularity pyramid.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, a popular pied-piper of science-as-wisdom.
A death sentence for tradition and rise of subjectivism
To no great surprise, nearly anything old – morals, traditions, institutions, established religion – will sooner or later fall under the crosshairs. If its antique, it can be explained away as something not worthy of our “enlightened” age. For these acolytes, it’s become like a reflex, as in the blinking of the eyes.
The old sexual morality is a victim of this popular turn of mind, a bent very popular in metropolitan and academic surroundings, and anywhere else under their sway – which means almost everywhere. Cohabitation is up; virginity is down; chaos in the home is up; and genital compatibility (heterosexuality) no longer necessary.
In fact, genital diversity (again, heterosexuality) is made irrelevant. Since an orgasm is the penultimate in this brave new world, sodomy is to be sanctified alongside the Church’s preferred option. Anything is okay if the desired end is achieved. Such is the logic of the mind unmoored from anything higher.
In these stunted minds, a belief in something higher is as expendable as a zipper that won’t zip. God? What god? Morality? Whose morality? These questions are regurgitated as readily as terns vomiting for their young.
“Nothing is written in stone.” — the quintessence of moral relativism when taken to an extreme.
The result, though, is a confusion of knowledge with wisdom. While we have the knowledge to expeditiously abort a late-term fetus, “ought” we? Even though we have the ability to euthanize the momentarily depressed, “ought” we? While we can treat people as livestock for their stem cells, “ought” we? Should we use our knowledge of genetics to manufacture custom-made human beings? Many of the most profound questions in life cannot be answered by a sole reliance on the knowledge of synapses and molecules. The reference point for such decisions must lie in something other than ourselves. Some would call it “wisdom”. A scientist may have the knowledge but be completely lacking in the wisdom.
The absence of anything higher, something outside of us, elevates each person into the the role of Creator of our own personal standards. The subjective, and relative, reigns supreme. The love of an unbounded individualism – the uninhibited self – lies here. The combination of science, materialism, and now subjectivism pushes the mind toward unlimited possibilities, a benign concept if kept abstract; a pernicious one if allowed to undermine limits.
On transgenderism, the gay agenda, and the uninhibited self
Seemingly, now even the physical limits of chromosomes can be discarded. We are in the age of transgenderism and 40 or so genders. We have come full circle when the individual as emperor of reality is liberated from science, chromosomes and all. Have we entered an epochal phase when subjectivism has put a gun to the head of science? If an idea or feeling gets locked into our head, even our physical bodies must be made to give way.
This heap of notions is so taken for granted in the confines of academia and among our self-styled cultural elites that counter-ideas are hubristically dismissed as ignorance. The 3,000 years of Judeo-Christianity and Greek philosophy must bend a knee to a new god and faith: the uninhibited self and its modern priesthood of shortsighted PhD’s and media mandarins.
The ladies of the View, 2017.
Their arrogance is astounding. They claim a monopoly ownership of science, while unintentionally dismantling it. In fact, it’s a semi-science that functions as a cover for their biases … or, more accurately, prejudices. For instance, National Geographic Magazine devoted its January 2017 issue to the “Gender Revolution” (as was covered in a previous blog post).
While reading the article, I was struck, when you cut through the excess verbiage, by the gullibility of a cluster of academics to accept a person’s claims in interviews as proof of the existence of a condition (gender dysphoria) on a par with schizophrenia and diabetes. When it involves children, the psuedo-diagnosis is very disturbing. Common adolescent confusion now can lead to permanent genital and bodily disfigurement. Efforts to less drastically treat the internal turmoil through therapy are made criminal acts in some jurisdictions.
In the same issue was a piece about female genital mutilation (FGM). The practice is resurrected in the West under the guise of “gender reassignment surgery”. Board certification and a scalpel doesn’t make the practice any less horrifying.
Is this the new wisdom?
Using their position at the commanding heights of contemporary culture, the socio-political nomenklatura seek to rub out opposing views on other subjects as well. A defense of traditional marriage – a viewpoint not very well articulated as of late – is pounded into submission by an alliance of our cultural aristocracy and the fashionable victims’ group du jour: the L-G-B-T-Q …. movement (The presence of 40 or so genders makes an acronym difficult).
One of their signature issues is gay marriage. Yet, we can only get to the idea of same-sex matrimonials if we skip over some obvious questions. Like, what is marriage? Is it simply a union of adults? Gayness, by its very nature, makes their unions only about the adults. It can be about nothing else. Last time I checked, sodomy can’t produce offspring. So, childbearing is out of the question. Yes, yes, gays can adopt, but the simple existence of those children is ipso facto proof of a heterosexual coupling. If marriage exists for the purpose of family formation, it’s incoherent to sanction as “marriage” a genus of union that can never do it (produce children).
What of the heterosexual unions who either can’t, or won’t, produce children? Are they marriages? Most emphatically … Yes! Heterosexuality is the essential condition, not the decision to have children. As for infertile couples, medical interventions are a tacit recognition of the absolute necessity of the very essence of heterosexuality: sperm meeting egg, in one way or another. Being childless doesn’t repeal the legitimacy of a marriage; and holding a ceremony and exchanging rings, by itself, can’t make one. Heterosexuality is written all over the institution.
Marriage as a mixing of the only 2 genders having any basis in chromosomes – leaving aside the unusual, but not unexpected, chromosomal abnormality – was remarkably obvious to our ancestors who lived at a time when they couldn’t be afflicted, as we are, with the hectoring of our cultural “betters”. The idea of marital bliss applying to 2 men was so outside the pale that it never came to mind to anyone coming before Justice Kennedy’s term on the Supreme Court. Marriage of the 2 genders is all that we find mentioned in the historical record. While scanning historical documents, I ran into this juicy bit from Emperor Justinian’s reforms of Roman law, Institutes, Title II, “Of The Law of Nature, the Law of Nations, and the Civil Law”:
“The law of nature is that which she has taught all animals; a law not peculiar to the human race, but shared by all living creatures, whether denizens of the air, the dry land, or the sea. Hence comes the union of male and female, which we call marriage; hence the procreation and rearing of children, for this is a law by the knowledge of which we see even the lower animals are distinguished.” (Emphasis added) (8)
Gay marriage is an inanity to logic and to our predecessors.
On Hegel, “progress”, and historicism
G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), rector and holder of the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin.
The growing acceptance of same-sex unions is a testament to the wrongheadedness of Hegel’s 19th century view of history as the unfolding of increasing rationality – i.e., “progress” (sometimes referred as “historicism”). We aren’t getting smarter, or more rational, or more contented. Instead, we’re proving that history has no arc. It’s filled with unexpected zigzags and stumbles, and chic journeys into nonsense.
In castigating historicism and any other form of determinism in the manipulation of history, the philosopher Karl Popper had it right when he said that there are no “inexorable laws of historical destiny”. (6,7) Marx/Engels (meaning the present converts of the pair), Obama, Hillary, Thomas Piketty, Robert Reich, and all self-styled Progressives please take note.
“Trend is not destiny”, Karl Popper. The old saying, “crap happens”, is the roadblock to any universal trend in history. It’s something Obama should keep in mind before he lectures us about being on the “right side of history”.
On “climate change”
For our brethren at the top of our urban and academic status pyramid, maybe the thought that they could be wrong never occurred to them. Maybe they’re blinded by their own arrogance. Well, sadly for us, their arrogance isn’t limited to the LGBTQ … wishlist. A favorite in their panoply of causes, when they aren’t yammering against homophobia, is “climate change”.
If left alone as a two-word phrase and without any of the ideological baggage that so often attends it, it’s rather innocuous and acceptable to most people. Though, our haughty “betters” couldn’t leave it alone. It’s freighted with “apocalyptic”, “catastrophic”, “solely anthropogenic”, and with sub-agenda terms like “green”, “sustainable”, etc., etc.
Al Gore as the climate change Jeremiah.
With their ever-present faith in “progress”, they’re fully on-board with upending the settled arrangements of a free people. Their confidence in politicized “experts” knows no bounds. Indubitably, government – with themselves at the helm, of course – is expected to have free reign to bring about the “green” world. The crusade has breathed new life into the disaster that is socialism. It also bequeathed to us the juiced-up social engineer.
The social engineer of the progressives’ imagination, appropriately papered with degrees and certificates, will be ensconced in administrative bureaus with sweeping and unconstitutional powers to legislate, execute, and adjudicate. It’s government by papal bull and czarist ukase. What would James Madison think?
If Madison was reanimated into today’s world, he might be struck by more than a sovereign people’s willingness to surrender their sovereignty over to Harvard’s graduating class. He’d be smacked with the glaring hypocrisy of the situation’s cheerleaders.
My blue-America barometer – National Geographic Magazine – unconsciously revels in the duplicity. Going back to the “Why We Lie” cover story (June 2017 issue), I found this gem:
“Researchers have shown that we are especially prone to accept lies that affirm our worldview. Memes that claim Obama was not born in the United States, deny climate change … and spread other ‘alternative facts’, as a Trump adviser called his Inauguration crowd claims, have thrived on the Internet and social media because of this vulnerability.”
“Deny climate change” as a lie? Is it a lie or simply a disagreement? “Lie” is used to cover a difference of opinion with our cultural suzerains. Grand prognostications in science, if its real science, should be met with a “Yes, but ….” or a “No, but ….”. Qualifiers abound in a field for which there is much unknown, and definitely so regarding those grand prognostications.
The resort to cocksure “lie” labeling is heartily exhibited by those with the least expertise in science. Al Gore is no scientist; he’s a politician/lawyer. Leonardo DiCaprio is an actor. The author of the NGM piece, Yudhijhit Bhattacharjee, is a “writer” according to the bio on his website. And since scientists, like everyone else, aren’t resistant to the surrounding cultural zeitgeist, and since politicized government largesse is widely available, today’s science can be easily hijacked by its celebrity and political non-practitioners possessing huge megaphones.
Leonardo DiCaprio as Democratic Party booster, from the 2004 campaign.
Here’s the hypocrisy: opposition to the crusade is fitted with the “liar” label while a concerted campaign in 2009 of lying was uncovered in spirited emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, Houston Control for the “climate change” enterprise. Maybe intimidation to suppress is more accurate. Still, the episode exposed the effort to misrepresent the truth. Do we dare call it “lying”? (9)
The scandal involved partisan scientists bound-and-determined to shoehorn data into a prefab outcome: climate change is apocalyptic . It included efforts at hiding data and methods from scrutiny outside a narrow, mutually reinforcing group. Further, the emails bring to light the attempts at manipulation of their models to produce their preferred results, and the frustration when they don’t. In addition to hiding and statistical messaging, intimidation and excommunication of critics from the field is plotted among the climate change clerisy’s brethren.
Putting the best face on the scandal would be to recognize the emails were taken out of context and only blunt expressions among close-knit colleagues. However, the exculpation is only limited. At a minimum, it illustrates the behavior of a highly partisan claque of scientists. It’s an example of what happens when science becomes a partisan movement and then a political industry.
Is any of this to be seriously considered – even if made aware – among the lords in their Hollywood/west Los Angeles/Manhattan/campus castles? I think that we now know the answer to that question.
Why even have a magazine issue devoted to “Why We Lie”? Why now? Why did the topic come up and demand so much of the magazine’s resources and time? I suspect a political motive. The subject of “lying” is a particular obsession in the hot nodes of lefty political activism. Blue-America’s most prominent inhabitants are busy trying to delegitimize the shocking result of the 2016 election.
I’m reminded of one of the historian Henry Adams’s witticisms from his book, The Education of Henry Adams.
“Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”
The organization of hatred can occur with or without a patina of science. Susan Goldberg, chief editor of National Geographic Magazine, please take note.
RogerG
Bibliography and references:
“Why We Lie”, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, National Geographic Magazine, June 2017, pp. 30-51.
“Fox Says It Won’t Interfere With National Geographic’s Editorial Content”, Andrew Beaujon, Washingtonian, 9/9/2015, https://www.washingtonian.com/2015/09/09/fox-wont-interfere-with-national-geographic-editorial-content/
“The End of Identity Liberalism”, Mark Lilla, New York Times: Sunday Review, 11/18/2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html
“Input hypothesis”, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis. The affective filter concept arose from Stephen Krashen’s research into second language acquisition and is part of his broader “input hypothesis”, first published in 1977.
“Gender Revolution”, National Geographic Magazine, June 2017 issue.
A brief summary of Karl Popper’s critique of Hegel’s “historicism” can be found in wikipedia under the article “Historicism”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicism
A fuller description of Popper’s critique of historicism can be found here : “The Central Mistake of Historicism: Karl Popper on Why Trend is Not Destiny”, Farnam Street, https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2016/03/karl-popper-mistake-of-historicism/
As a pdf file: “Justinian, Institutes“, http://amesfoundation.law.harvard.edu/digital/CJCiv/JInst.pdf
An interesting op-ed about the U. of East Anglia email scandal can be found here: “Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation”, Christopher Booker, The Daily Telegraph, 11/28/2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6679082/Climate-change-this-is-the-worst-scientific-scandal-of-our-generation.html
The Education of Henry Adams, Chapter 1, Henry Brooks Adams, 1907.
A current incarnation of the urban sophisticate is the “hipster”. If I may be excused for engaging in a loose generalization, like other versions of the breed, they are equal parts confident, media-savvy, and clueless. Prime examples of the cross-fertilization of fashion and politics, they are susceptible to pleas to prohibit almost anything presented as irritating and outside of their lifestyle experience. They are one for the constituencies for ban-o-mania.
Don’t like something? Ban it! Why ban it? Simple: it’s too jarring to the mind of your average urban and self-anointed sophisticate. That mind is riddled with the prejudices, half-baked ideas, and unexamined assumptions of a person limited to the secular equivalent of a mountaintop monastery … without the serious study of real monks (“echo chamber” keeps popping into my mind). Ban-o-mania reigns supreme as the preferred option for anyone within the materialist abbey, while adversely affecting everyone not so mentally and geographically insulated.
The locations for the secular monasteries generally matches the 2016 election map. Below is a precinct-by-precinct rendering of the 2016 election results. (1)
2016 election results by precinct. Blue is for the Democratic candidate, red for the Republican.
The blue dots on the map are outposts serving as the intersection of radical chic in culture (some might call it “lifestyle”) and politics. The journalist and essayist Tom Wolfe had a great time back in 1970 with an exposé of cosmopolitan affections for radical left politics of the time. (2)
New York Magazine cover, 1970, with Wolfe’s “Radical Chic” essay.Leonard Bernstein (seated at center), his wife Felicia Montealegre (left) and Don Cox (standing), Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party in the Bernsteins’ 13 room penthouse on Park Avenue in Manhattan, January 14, 1970
I won’t speak to the map’s much rarer blue blobs – I suspect these to be mostly concentrations of post-1965 Immigration Act ethnic and racial minorities and Indian reservations- but today’s metropolitan islands have persisted in the habit exemplified in Leonard Bernstein’s fête to the Black Panther Party.
Though, a vocabulary update to “radical chic” is in order. Yesterday’s “radical chic” is today’s “cosmocialist”, a marriage of “cosmopolitan” and “left-liberal”, typically among our tech elites but also littered throughout most of our corporate and academic boardrooms (hosannas to Reihan Salam for bringing the term to my attention [3]). The “left-liberal” side of the equation is an infatuation with imperial environmentalism, high taxes, and almost anything “anti-poverty”. “Cosmopolitan” is a reference to suspicion about regulation (except, of course, of the enviro variety, a huge contradiction), big labor (even though the teachers’ unions are 100% socially and 80% politically aligned) , and a fondness for open borders and multicultural everything.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (left) with California AG Kamala Harris in 2015. (Reuters photo: Robert Galbraith)
Oh, let’s not forget their contempt for traditional institutions. The Bible as the Word of God, Christianity as understood for millennia, marriage, and morality don’t stand a chance in these micro-universes. Currently, transgenderism has pride of place. As a matter of fact, they have conjured “equality” into behavioral license. Any coupling and self-concept among and within humans must be granted sanction by the state. Those who disagree face ostracization, loss of livelihood, and censorship. Is confinement next? Has it already started?
Now we are well on our way to ban-o-mania – the frenzy to prohibit counter-thought, and counter-things. If only Orwell was here to see it.
It’s become next to impossible to talk about these kinds of things without mentioning California, ground zero for cosmocialist social and political tinkering. Bans on things previously considered innocuous are becoming increasingly common in this political zoo. Examples are many. The state couldn’t refrain from an assault on, of all things … free plastic shopping bags. The usual suspects crafted Prop 67 – the always fashionable environmental lobby – and the always fashionable electorate, dominated by its always fashionable coast, approved it in 2016.
Grocery shopping in the not-so-golden state instantly changed from this:
to this:
Bring your own bags: filthy, torn, too small, not enough, or spill out cash to buy some more. People in the zoo will adapt, no doubt. But grocery shopping instantly became a bit more of an annoying experience.
Another example, this time from the elected “geniuses” in the state’s madhouse, called a “legislature”: marketed as an animal welfare measure, the inmates passed AB 485. It would ban the sale of dogs, cats, and rabbits if they didn’t come from shelters. In essence, due to the way the law is written and it’s probably effects, say “bye, bye” to the ritual of taking the daughter down to the pet store to buy a puppy. For Patrick O’Donnel (D-Long Beach), the bill’s author, pet militants like him can’t envision themselves doing it, so ban anyone else from doing it. Such is the auto-reflex of the ban-o-maniac. The legislation’s fate is in the lap of Gov. Jerry Brown, another cosmocialist. (4)
Assemblyman Patrick O’Donnell, D-Long Beach, and rescue dogs.
For the cosmocialist, dogs are cute; Christian fundamentalists are not. The progressive fatwa against them has already begun. With dim-witted sleight of hand, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher (D-San Diego) sought to impose her social opinions on the entire faith community in California. Through legislation, she tried to nullify the Supreme Court’s Hosanna-Tabor decision that buttressed a church’s religious freedom exemptions to government’s contraceptive and abortion mandates. (5) She preposterously claimed that the Court didn’t say what it said. For the Court, religious freedom reaches out to longstanding church functions beyond the sanctuary. She didn’t get the message. Fletcher’s logic is the equivalent of a child’s attempt to make a parent’s admonishment of “no” into “yes”.
If mangling the Court didn’t convince, she tried the gender equality angle. For her, the moral code in the Torah, Quran, and the Old and New Testaments must be sacrificed because a woman can show the results of a sleepover with her boyfriend. Since women get pregnant, and men can’t (there’s no place to put the fetus), scripture must now go into the garbage disposal. The minister can preach God’s law from the pulpit – I think – but, according to her, he shouldn’t be able to do anything about single moms and womanizers staffing his school (Was she trying to improve the job prospects for Bill Clinton?). And this passes for serious thought in the California legislature?
A reprieve for Baptists was granted by Gov. Brown’s veto of Fletcher’s abortion to logic. Don’t think for a moment that she and her compatriots have given up.
The Old Testament, evangelicals, pet stores, and traditional institutions are verboten to the tin-eared metro-chic. Similarly verboten is a healthy skepticism about wild-eyed climate-change apocalyptics. They won’t shrink from criminalizing, or subjecting to civil forfeiture, anyone who happens to make the mistake of conjoining a position of authority with cynicism about enviro end-times. Metroplex electorates appear to have affection for Maduro-type (of Venezuela fame) DA’s and AG’s to accomplish the desired end.
Former California Attorney General Kamala Harris in September 2015.
Not wishing to leave California out of the scrum, former AG Kamala Harris (now Senator) joined the AG’s of New York, Eric Schneiderman, and Virgin Islands, Claude Walker, and Massachusetts, Maura Healey, to form an Inquisition to ferret out “counter-revolutionaries” to Al Gore’s fashionable doctrine. It’s the latest craze sweeping the blue-dot jurisdictions: spend millions of dollars to haul into court the petroleum industry for questioning the supreme leader. (6) Ban-o-mania encompasses the campaign to silence opinions.
For everyone else without a corporate lawyer, loss of tenure, livelihood, or excommunication awaits. It’s a reincarnation of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. They’re making Mao proud … if the old bloody tyrant was alive today.
Public humiliation by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).Cultural Revolution poster. Smashing the old to make way for the new.
The same is true for guns. Guns are as gauche to the chic denizens of metropolis as the climate views of anyone not in tune with the fashionable orthodoxy. Not surprisingly, respect for the 2nd Amendment fades as fewer and fewer people among the self-described “betters” in urban America have knowledge and experience with the things. This is their mental picture of gun owners, a product of too much late-night tv viewing (late-night comedians, SNL).
Yes, it’s a plain old prejudice, but it matches their ignorance. They live a life without firearms and so conclude nobody needs them. It’s easy for urban electorates to grant the state’s vast prosecutorial powers to AG’s giddy with the prospect of hanging a few gun manufacturers. The aforementioned Maura Healey of Massachusetts set her sights on Glock.
Massachusetts AG Maura Healey with Eric Schneiderman, NY AG, 2016.
Whatever their rationale, come on, it boils down to, “We don’t own them; therefore, you can’t either”. Really, lifestyle is their governing north star.
The corporate boardroom is as populated with hyper-sensitive ban-o-maniacs as deep blue state attorney general offices. The tekkie industry is particularly infected with them. “Caution” is the watchword for any true free-thinker in these occupational habitats. Just as Brendan Eich, co-founder of Mozilla, learned in 2014. He was run out of his own company when it came to light that he contributed $1,000 to the California Prop 8 campaign to defend traditional marriage in 2008. The lefty hive in Mozilla and Silicon Valley swarmed at the knowledge.
Brendan Eich
Ideological cleansing targets anyone outside the metro groupthink. In Eich’s case, he cavorted with those who think that marriage is by nature heterosexual, and can only be homosexual if sodomy is accepted as the act of consummation. Of course, consummation could be dispensed with, but then marriage is reduced to a state-sanctioned friendship pact with the option of wide open conjugal behavior. The whole concept of “gay marriage” enters the grammatical territory of “non-sequitur”. Such thinking, though, is assigned to the Klan in the blinkered imaginations of cosmocialists.
The lefty piranha weren’t satisfied with the corpse of Brendan Eich. They will always need to feed on anyone with the temerity to express a different point of view. James Damore fell into the infected waters at Google when he sought to explain the small presence of women in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) industries in words different from the politically correct orthodoxy. (8)
James Damore and Google
He presented the proposition that women are underrepresented due to the fact that fewer girls have inclinations for STEM, not because of some overhanging pall of misogyny. (9) The snowflakes erupted and the impromptu inquisitors at Google went on a rampage. Damore found himself out of a job, fired by Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
Steve Jobs juxtaposed to Google’s Sundar Pichai amid the Damore firing, by LA street artist Sabo.
The “diversity” police went into action mode to defend the sanctity of the party doctrine. Every one of the tech biggies has a Ministry of Diversity Truth. They sprang in defense of Google. At Google, its commissar is Danielle Brown. Intel has commissar Barbara Whye. Maxine Williams is installed at Facebook’s commissariat. Helping the biggies is a nomenklatura of consultants. Paradigm’s Joelle Emerson is an example. All of them are the keepers of the diversity holy grail.
Paradigm Consultancy’s Joelle Emerson
The whole diversity shtick is profoundly open to question. Yet, it is accepted as the closest thing to a self-evident truth among a class of people who have long ago rejected such truth when Thomas Jefferson in 1776 tried using the concept. Their’s is a pseudo-science meant to perform an ideological function: widely propagate the dogma while simultaneously swamping disagreement. They are the practitioners of the ban-o-mania of thought.
The tennis aficionado John McEnroe recently stepped in it when he declared what is obviously true. Men and women aren’t physical equals on the tennis court. For that, this time it was the equality police that leapt into action.
John McEnroe appearing before the press about controversial remarks.
McEnroe offhandedly stated in response to a question that Serena Williams would be ranked 700 among professional men’s tennis players. (10) Boy did that get the ant hill all abuzz. But for the equality commissariat, there was the disconcerting face-off in 1998 with a 203rd ranked men’s player, Karsten Braasch of Germany. The Williams sisters were teenagerly brash and over-confident, bragging in the ATP men’s office that they could whip any tour player ranked in the top 200.
Karsten Braasch (center) and the Williams sisters at the 1998 Australian Open.
Braasch, ranked 203 at the time, overheard the remark and took up the challenge in a lark. After playing a round of morning golf, Braasch arrived to play each sister one set. The event attracted quite a crowd. During changeovers, he smoked a cigarette and drank a beer. He bested Serena 6-1 and Venus 6-2. The Williams’ points had all the appearance of gifts. (11)
Was McEnroe all that wrong?
There is a sense of unreality in the blue-dot world. The here-and-now must be made to conform to ideological fantasies. In movies, women punch out burly men with skeletal and muscle structures that would collapse on contact if it didn’t occur before cameras and with the assistance of computer assisted graphics. We might be able to accept these illusions since, after all, it’s the movies. But the fantasies don’t dissipate after leaving the theater. There’s legions of prosecutors, politicians, consultants, and academics devoted to making the movie unreality a real life reality.
To make it happen, massive mind control and social engineering are required. All the tools of ban-o-mania are enlisted in the effort. Ostracize, prosecute, legislate, fire, and propagandize (the Bolsheviks called it “reeducation”) anyone not in conformance with the cosmocialist zeitgeist. The sad part is their push to take the campaign national. Their appetites won’t be satiated with dominance over metropolis.
Watch out red America. You’re one election away from being forced into living and thinking like a Greenwich Village hipster. You may not know it, but you have a metaphorical bulls-eye planted on your forehead.
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
The 2016 precinct map was garnered from “Creating a National Precinct Map”, 4/30/2017, https://decisiondeskhq.com/data-dives/creating-a-national-precinct-map/
“Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s”, Tom Wolfe, New York Magazine, June 8, 1970, http://nymag.com/news/features/46170/
Reihan Salam is executive editor of National Review, contributing editor of National Affairs, advisor to the Energy Innovation Reform Project and Niskanen Institute. “Cosmocialist” first came to my attention in his article, “Democrats and Plutocrats”, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/451463/democrats-silicon-valley-rich-entrepreneurs-changing-partys-working-class-image
“California pet stores may be required to only sell rescue animals if this bill passes”, Courtney Tompkins, The Los Angeles Daily News, 9/15/2017, http://www.dailynews.com/2017/09/15/california-pet-stores-may-be-required-to-only-sell-rescue-animals-if-this-bill-passes/
“Anti-discrimination measure or blow to religious freedom? California bill sparks debate on employer codes of conduct”, Melanie Mason, Los Angeles Times, 3/29/2017, http://www.latimes.com/politics/essential/la-pol-ca-essential-politics-updates-an-anti-discrimination-measure-or-blow-1490826757-htmlstory.html
“Left-Wing AGs Are Playing Politics with the Law”, Jim Copeland and Rafael A. Mangual, National Review Online, 9/29/2016, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/440542/state-attorneys-general-political-abuses-power
“Mozilla CEO resignation raises free-speech issues”, USA Today, 4/4/2014, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/04/mozilla-ceo-resignation-free-speech/7328759/
“Google Episode Sends a Message: Diversity Is a Tough Sell in Silicon Valley”, Georgia Wells and Yoree Koh, WSJ, 8/10/17, https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-episode-sends-a-message-diversity-is-a-tough-sell-in-silicon-valley-1502383625; also at http://www.4-traders.com/INTEL-CORPORATION-4829/news/Google-Episode-Sends-a-Message-Diversity-Is-a-Tough-Sell-in-Silicon-Valley-24924773/.
The complete text of James Damore’s offending email can be found here: “Here’s the Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google [Updated]”, Kate Conger, Gizmodo, 8/5/2017, http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320/amp
“John McEnroe: Serena Williams world’s best female tennis player but would rank ‘like 700’ among men”, Scott Allen, The Chicago Tribune, 6/25/2017, http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/breaking/ct-john-mcenroe-serena-williams-tennis-20170625-story.html
The episode is recounted here: “Serena Williams once challenged men’s player at Australian Open”, Sandra Harwitt, USA Today, 1/21/2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/tennis/aus/2017/01/21/serena-williams-nicole-gibbs-australian-open/96876832/
