Category: Leftism and Political Correctness

For the Left, the Subject is not the Subject: Why Math is ‘Racist’

It has often been noted that for the Left, the issue is not the issue.  David Horowitz:

As President Obama’s political mentor, Saul Alinsky, put it in Rules for Radicals: “One acts decisively only in the conviction that all of the angels are on one side and the devils are on the other.” Here is another statement from Rules for Radicals: “We are always moral and our enemies always immoral.” The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the immorality of the opposition, of conservatives and Republicans. If they are perceived as immoral and indecent, their policies and arguments can be dismissed, and even those constituencies that are non-political or “low-information” can be mobilized to do battle against an evil party. (emphasis added)

"The issue is never the issue." The issue is the gaining and maintaining of power so as to "fundamentally transform America."  For example, if leftists (Democrats in U. S. politics) were really concerned about the spread of COVID-19, they would not open the borders to illegal aliens as the Biden administration has now done. Whatever concern they have about the spread of disease is trumped by considerations of how the problem can be exploited to enhance their power.  Power first, public health second, if that. Never let a crisis go to waste; that is, never let it go unexploited for ideological leverage.  And now a further step left: never let a crisis end.  

It occurred to me the other day that something structurally similar explains the absurd claim that mathematics is racist.  No one believes this, not even the most febrile of leftists, just as no one believes that a serious health crisis will be unaffected by allowing disease-carrying illegal aliens to flow into the country in great numbers unchecked and unvetted. 

So why do so many on the Left  say that math is racist? Because the subject is not the subject. The subject is not mathematics, a discipline about as far removed from ideological taint as can be imagined, but the supposed 'systemic racism' of American society.  There is no such thing, of course, but no matter: invocation of this nonexistent state of affairs is useful for the promotion of the leftist agenda just as he inefficacy of masks and the uselessness and outright deleteriousness of lock-downs is no reason not to make use of masks and lock-downs and draconian rules to further the destruction of the American republic as she was founded to be.

Merit and ‘Equity’

Those who lack merit too often seek to achieve by political means what they cannot achieve by accomplishing something. Leftists aid and abet them. Equality before the law and equality of opportunity are not enough for leftists: they demand equality of outcome.  But this cannot arise naturally due to differences in interests, attitudes, abilities, and work habits among individuals and groups. So equality must be imposed by force by government. Thus arises what leftists now call 'equity.'  The word is an obfuscatory coinage of the sort one can expect from Orwellian language-abusers. The typical leftist is a stealth ideologue. His mendacity disallows an outright call for  equality of outcome or result, and merit be damned; he smuggles his thought into sleepy heads with 'equity' in violation of one of the traditional meanings of the word, namely, "justice according to natural law or right." (Merriam-Webster) "Equity' as used by a leftist language-hijacker has a meaning opposite to the traditional one. Hence my accusation of Orwellianism. 

(As you know, Orwell himself was not Orwellian, but the opposite. Interestingly, to call him Orwellian would itself be Orwellian.)

Among the things 'equity' obfuscates is the contradiction in enforced equality of result: the governmental agencies of enforcement are vastly unequal in power to those upon whom they seek to impose 'equity.'

Of late, Big Tech and 'Woke' Capital have proven to be exceptions  to the old rule: their Croesian* economic clout  allows them to buy off the governmental enforcers.  More on this, anon.

________________

*An adjectival form of 'Croesus.' You know who he was.  After coining the (non-obfuscatory) adjective, a little Internet pokey-wokey searching assures me that the adjective is in use in such publications as WSJ and Forbes.  

“One Man’s Datum is Another Man’s Theory”

Why do I use 'man'? To exclude women? No, to exclude leftists, both men and women. I believe in equality when it comes to the exclusion of the destructive.

In the '70s, when it first really got going, gender-inclusive language seemed to many a very good thing indeed. It showed a welcoming attitude to the distaff contingent, a salutary openness, a gracious concession to those females who felt excluded by (what in fact are) gender-neutral uses of 'man' and 'he,' not to mention a praiseworthy recognition of the excellence of many women in many hitherto male-dominated fields.  Gentlemen are considerate of the feelings of others even when said feelings are unsupported by reason.   And surely it is true that some women are superior to some men in almost every field.  And surely people should be evaluated as individuals on their merits. 

It all started out with good intentions, and many conservatives went along with it, oblivious to the unforeseen consequences. But now, a half-century later,  we see where it has led. 

And so if I use the sex-neutral 'man' and 'he' and cognates, it is not because I am a knuckle-dragger, one who hails from the valley of Neander, but because I am a man of intelligence, discernment, and high culture, a member of the Coalition of the Reasonable, who is doing his tiny bit to resist and if possible reverse the subversion of our glorious alma mater, our fostering mother, the English language.   I am resisting politicization, tribalism, and the weaponization of language.   Can I ramp up my charge to the allegation that the Left is committing matricide against our dear mother?  I'll essay this later.

For I say unto you my brothers and sisters, the subversion of language is propadeutic to the subversion of thought.  The latter, I fear, is what our enemies intend, the thoughtless being the easier to rule and control.

Denial of the Lapsus is the Left’s Main Lapse

My title above. A long-time reader sends us his thoughts. Here are some of them, with my  edits and a bit of commentary.

Every so often I reflect on causes of the Leftist mentality, and all the madness it leads to. If we scan across favourite activities of the current woke age, such as racialism and its attendant theories on the left (the evil of colonialism, white privilege, white fragility etc), the socialist project, trans-activism and biological denialism and so on, there lurks a common deep assumption which is that the (authentic) left does not accept the inherent and unavoidably fallen state of man.
Exactly right. As a result, leftists embrace such illusions as man's indefinite malleability and perfectibility.
This is equivalent to denying the human condition as a protracted battle to overcome our own worst instincts and live good lives. According to this assumption, it is possible to be individually sinless, one just has to find the correct Utopian ideology and practice it, and to evangelise it to others. If one thinks one can be personally morally irreproachable, one can be self-righteous, and one may sit on a higher moral plane.
And in judgment of others.  This goes together with a failure to recognize the depth of evil in the human heart, in every human heart, evil whose ultimate source is man's free will, the existence of which leftists also deny.
 
Now of course, only some individuals can attain moral perfection. Leftism is fundamentally  about a two level society: those who know and control the doctrine of the one true way, and those who need to be controlled. If certain chosen individuals can be perfect, there's no need for God, indeed they can create their own church. In Leftist thinking, this is usually something called 'the Party'. Those not in the Party or completely deferential to it are against it and to be castigated, publicly flogged or imprisoned.
 
From the rejection of inherent human baseness and the delusion of perfectibility spring a torrent of other terrible ideas, starting with the idea that everyone can, if correctly enabled, be equal. The idea of innate difference – of intelligence, ambition, diligence, or any other capability – is simply unacceptable. But if a person can be perfect, given the right help, all persons can be equally perfect, and thus perfectly equal. Anyone rejecting difference and thus equality is against the church, and must be punished.
This is crucially important for understanding the mentality of the Left, and in the USA, the mentality of the Democrat Party which is now an openly hard-Left party.  (Its crypto-leftism under the Clintons and Obama is now manifest and brazen.) My type of conservatism accepts the equality of persons as rights-possessors on the normative plane, but insists on the obvious fact of empirical inequality, both of individuals and of groups, on the factual plane.  While we are equal in respect of such rights as the right to life, the right to liberty, and the right to acquire (not be given) property, and others, we are manifestly not equal in respect of abilities and virtues and their implementation. We are not all equally intelligent, ambitious, diligent, conscientious, self-controlled, high-minded, sensitive to art and music, respectful, temperate, prudent, courageous, just . . . . It is therefore a fallacy to infer racism from inequality of outcome.
 
Leftists, denying these obvious differences, show no respect for reality. They want to re-make reality in their own image. They confuse the world as it is with the world as they would like it to be.  Hence their vacuous talk of imagining and re-imagining, re-imagining policing, for example, which starts, absurdly, with defunding the police.  Their inability to understand the need for the necessary evil of policing shows  a lack of understanding of human nature, which is not surprising given their denial of human nature  by their acceptance of the notion of indefinite malleability.

Sebastian Haffner: Totalitarians Intolerant of Private Life

Among the dozen or so books I am currently reading is Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A Memoir (Picador, 2003).  Written in 1939, it was first published in German in 2000. The Third Reich is no more, but the following passage remains  highly relevant at a time when the main forms of totalitarianism are Chinese Communism, the hybrid political-religious ideology Islam, and the hard-Leftism of the Democrat Party in the USA:

No, retiring into private life was not an option. However far one retreated, everywhere one was confronted with the very thing one had been fleeing from. I discovered that the Nazi revolution had abolished the old distinction between politics and private life, and that it was quite impossible to treat it  merely as a "political event." It took place not only in the sphere of politics but also in each individual private life; it seeped through the walls like a poison gas. If you wanted to evade the gas there was only one option: to remove yourself physically — emigration, Emigration:  that meant saying goodbye to the country of one's birth, language, and education and severing all patriotic ties.

In that summer of 1933 [the year Hitler seized power] I was prepared to take even this final step.  (219)

Haffner did emigrate, to England, then a free country. But where will we go when the whole world is under the yoke of the 'woke'?

Haffner Sebastian

A review of Haffner's book.

Addendum. The totalitarianism of the 20th century was hard: enforced by the threat of the gulag, etc.  That of the 21st century, soft. See Rod Dreher, The Coming Social Credit System. Excerpt:

You think it can’t happen here? As I show in the book, Google, Facebook, and other major corporations already collect tons of data from every one of us, based on how we use the Internet and our smartphones. If you have an Alexa, or any other “smart” device in your home, then whether you realize it or not, you have consented to allow all kinds of personal data to be hoovered up by the device and shared with a corporation. The technological capacity already exists in this country. The data are already being collected. 

And Covid has pushed the United States much farther down the road to becoming a cashless society.  There is an obvious safety-related reason for this. But banks have a vested financial interest in weaning Americans off of cash:

“Big Finance is the key driver moving us to a cashless society,” he said. “You’ll notice banks have been slowly closing branches and ATMs and they’re doing so in an effort to nudge us more toward their digital platforms. This saves them labor, it saves them a lot of real estate costs, and it improves their bottom line.”

What happens when you can’t buy things at stores with cash? It’s already happening now. I’ve been to stores here in Baton Rouge that will only transact business with credit or debit cards, citing Covid, or the inability to make change because of a coin shortage. It’s understandable, but you should be well aware that the move to a cashless society makes each of us completely vulnerable to being shut out of the economy by fiat.

The Main Threat of the Left to the Right

The following quotation from Rod Dreher receives the plenary MavPhil endorsement:

. . . the “major threat of the far left” to us on the right — the major threat, not the only threat — is that in power, they will go pedal to the medal [metal] on a soft totalitarian “social justice” regime that would punish dissenters by costing them their livelihoods, and ruining their churches and other institutions. The major threat is the empowerment of ideologues who believe that all white people are racist, by virtue of their being white, and that the state should intervene to arrange society to suppress those disfavored by the left (whites, non-feminists, religious traditionalists, social conservatives, etc). The major threat is that they wish to erase American history and foundational principles of our constitutional order. The major threat is that the state will use its power to force parents to allow their minor children to take cross-sex hormones, and will seize those children if they don’t. The major threat is that the left in power through professional associations (law, medical, and so forth) will make it impossible for dissenters from the social justice credo to earn a living. The major threat is that violent social justice mobs will overrun cities and even suburbs, demanding that everyone assent to their ideology, or be looted or burned out. The major threat is that the left is propagandizing the young to despise their religion, their family, their country, their history, and themselves.

In sum: The major threat is that the state, aligned with powerful US-based global corporations, an ideologized mass media, and universities — basically, all the elites in the ruling class, distributed throughout institutions — will accelerate its current evolutionary path towards a coordinated totalizing system that will seek to crush any dissent or opposition to it.

This is why sane and decent Americans absolutely must vote for Donald J. Trump.  Dreher doesn't draw this conclusion due to his irrational Trump hatred, but indications are that he too will vote for Trump come November.

Addendum (9/7). Dr. Vito Caiati comments:

Thank you for posting that long quotation from Rod Dreher, which well sums up the principal threat of the social, cultural, and intellectual threat of the Left.

Today, Malcolm Pollack calls attention to the coming post-election mayhem that the Left will unleash given a Trump victory in November  He links to Michael Anton's "alarming" essay on the form this "coup" will take (https://americanmind.org/essays/the-coming-coup/).  Anton may well be right, and if so, the threat that we are facing goes far beyond that of the "soft-totalitarianism" so often discussed by Dreher. Very dark times have arrived if even a fraction of Anton's prognostication occurs.

I am increasingly convinced that this federal republic of ours, the product of early capitalist and pre-capitalist social forces, that is, of a particular historical conjuncture in the history of early modern Europe and its colonial offshoots, is at odds with the underlying interests of contemporary corporate capital,whose ruling class and the myriad of minions who either serve it directly or are sustained and tolerated by it–all anti-national, globalist, technocratic, anti-democratic,  and anti-(classical) liberal to one degree of another–and that they are determined to sweep it away.  The Left today is bizarrely made up of the most disparate and far-flung social elements, from the anarchist or pseudo-Marxist Antifa shock troops in the streets; the apparatchiks of the federal, state, and local governments; the swarms of  ill-educated "intellectuals" in and out of the universities; the leftist heretical or  cowed"Christian" leaders of the Catholic and other churches; and of course the hacks  of the media and the culture industries.  Whether this coalition, wielded together only partially by ideology, can withstand the inevitable leftward track that would come with full power is unlikely, but in the meantime it will have reduced what remains of the Old Republic and its traditions to ruins.

PS. In my quick list of the Left's "disparate" elements, I forgot to include the significant portion of very rich corporate elite, the core of the ruling class, which have become the key funders and advocates of its ideology and policies, whether through conviction or convenience. Here, one can speak of a strange compromesso storico, one based on continued corporate dominance (for example, silence on real economic and social problems), and hence the interests of the ruling class, in return for the advancement of the tribalist, racist, anti-American, anti-Western ideology and policies of the Left. This is not the first time that capitalists and corporate elites have coalesced with anti-democratic and anti-liberal political formations; one only has to consider the accommodations of German big capital with the Nazi regime or that of Japanese zaibatu with Japanese militarism. This time, however, the dance is with the Left.

Trotsky’s Faith in Man

On this date in 1940, the long arm of Joseph Stalin finally reached Trotsky in exile in Mexico City when an agent of Stalin drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull. He died the next day.  The Left eats its own.

Read the rest.

The tragedy of Trotsky is that of a man of great theoretical and practical gifts who squandered his life pursuing a fata morgana.  His was not the opium of the religionists but the opium of the intellectuals, to allude to a title of Raymond Aron's. The latter species of opium I call utopium. 

Is the Left Out for Power Alone?

The following is a sample of (some of) what I post at my Facebook page.  I swore off Facebook for July, but I have been back in the groove since 1 August doing my humble bit to beat back the forces of darkness.  They have sicced their censor bots on me, so I have to be careful how I say things lest I get de-platformed.  My obscurity affords me some cover.  Obscurity has its uses and compensations.  The value of fame, on the other hand, may be gauged by the quality of those who confer it.

…………………….

Tucker Carlson and many other conservatives say that leftists are out for power alone, but it is not true. I grant, of course, that leftists love power and will do anything to gain it and maintain it. But why do they want it? They want it in order to implement their agenda which they believe will be good for them and their clients. It is for the sake of the agenda — the things to be done — that leftists want power.

With their hands on the levers of power, the Democrats can keep the borders open, empty the prisons, defund the police, confiscate firearms, do away with the filibuster, give felons the right to vote while in prison, outlaw home schooling, alter curricula to promote the 'progressive' worldview (by among other things injecting 1619 project fabrications into said curricula), infiltrate and ultimately destroy the institutions of civil society, erase history by the destruction of monuments, remove every vestige of Christinaity from the public square, pass 'hate speech' laws to squelch dissent, and so on into the abyss.

Old Left and New Left

A succinct differentiation:

The New Left retained the values and ultimate goals of the Old Left. They also retained elements of their philosophical framework. They then set about spreading their ideas throughout the culture by means of propaganda and institutional subversion. And they won. Aside from Cuba and North Korea, orthodox Communism is dead. Capitalism seems everywhere triumphant. And yet in the realm of culture, leftist values are completely hegemonic. The left lost the Cold War, but they won the peace.

BLM is Playing by the Book. Alinsky’s Book

Michael Brown:

In his insightful, 2009 mini-book, Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model, David Horowitz quoted an SDS radical who wrote, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

As Horowitz explained, “In other words the cause — whether inner city blacks or women — is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution. That was the all-consuming focus of Alinsky and his radicals.”

When it comes to BLM, the purported issue, namely, that Black Lives Matter, is not the ultimate issue. Instead, a larger cultural revolution is the ultimate issue. (As many have noted, the founders of BLM are both Marxists and radical feminists, with two of the three women identifying as queer activists.)

And so, the mantra that “Black Lives Matter” specifically means blacks who are victims of white police brutality. Black lives in the womb do not matter. Blacks getting gunned down in gang violence do not matter. Black toddlers killed in random shootings do not matter. Not even blacks killed by black police officers matter — at least not nearly as much as blacks killed by white officers.

Those white officers, in turn, represent the larger system, which, we are told, is fundamentally racist. And it is that system that needs to be overthrown.

Thus, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

Read it all, comrades.

Grammar is Propadeutic to Logic

So if grammar is 'racist,' then so is logic.

What is the criterion whereby a subject or activity is deemed 'racist' by leftists?  It appears to be this:  Whatever blacks and other 'people of color' are poor at is 'racist.' 

And what is at the back of that criterion?  It appears to be the assumption that we are all inherently equal, both as individuals and as groups, in all respects, and not just in respect of political rights.  Now we all believe in equality of rights, such as the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; those among us with experience of life and good sense, however, know that there are all sorts of empirically measurable respects in which individuals and groups are not equal.  To take one of many examples, Asian students are superior to black students in point of knowledge of, and aptitude for, mathematics. 

Do I need to belabor this point among my astute readers? (Full disclosure: I am not now, and never have been Asian, and it is biologically impossible that I should ever become Asian.)

But if you foolishly believe that we are all inherently equal in every respect, with the same abilities and interests, then you may be tempted to embrace the following unsound argument:

A. We are all inherently equal in every respect. But:

B. This equality does not manifest itself as equality of outcome or result. Therefore:

C. There has to be a factor that prevents equality of outcome or result. And:

D. That factor is racism, both individual and 'systemic.'

This argument is multiply-flawed. But if you read this weblog, that very fact is evidence that you have the mental equipment to determine on your own where the flaws lie.  Why do I have to do all the work?

Negativity: The Spirit of the Left

The spirit of the Left is the spirit of negativity. Any intellectually honest person following current events can see that the tendency of leftists is mindlessly to destroy for the sake of destruction what it has taken centuries to build. Transgressive of tradition and its wisdom, these 'progressives' are both hobbled and enabled by their presentism. Hobbled, because they know nothing of the past. Enabled, because their ignorance allows them to imagine themselves to be free of the moral limitations of humanity. Punks and know-nothings for the most part, they are unwitting agents of the demonic.

In Faust, Goethe gives Mephistopheles the following lines:

Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint!
Und das mit Recht; denn alles was entsteht 
Ist werth daß es zu Grunde geht;
Drum besser wär’s daß nichts entstünde. So ist denn alles was ihr Sünde,
Zerstörung, kurz das Böse nennt, 
Mein eigentliches Element. (V. 1338–1344)

I cannot improve upon Walter Kaufmann's translation:

I am the spirit that negates.
And rightly so, for all that comes to be
Deserves to perish wretchedly;
'Twere better nothing would begin.
Thus everything that your terms, sin,
Destruction, evil represent —
That is my proper element.

Mephisto Faust

Vito Caiati (7/24) responds:

In yesterday’s post “Negativity: The Spirit of the Left,” which includes an excerpt from Goethe’s Faust and which terminates with the statement, “Punks and know-nothings for the most part, they are unwitting agents of the demonic,” you obliquely suggest a lien [Vito slips into French here: link, connection] between the ongoing leftist annihilationist campaign [against] the Western cultural, historical, and religious heritage and malevolent supernatural forces or entities. Am I right in assuming that this was your intention?  Or are you employing the adjective “demonic” in a more generic, figurative sense to speak of evil?

I mean 'demonic' literally. It is not that the vandals are themselves literally demons, but that they are being used by demonic forces, the "principalities and powers" that St. Paul speaks of.  Here is a short video by N. T. Wright on the meaning of the phrase.  Leftism at bottom is nihilistic, and this nihilism has a metaphysical source in the rebellious spirit who "always negates" and can accept no legitimate authority.  So what is playing out before our eyes is something very deep and metaphysical: Unseen Warfare.  Or is that OTT, to use a going abbreviation?

Your question also raises the question whether there can be evil without agents of evil.  Aquinas held that evil is a privation with no positive entitative status, a lack of good, privatio boni.  A stock example is blindness in the eye: the blindness is a lack of sight. But it seems to that there is a positivity about evil that could only be accounted for by evil agents, with evil free wills, for example, the Antifa or BLM thug that blinds a police officer permanently by shining a laser in his eyes, as happened the other night. 

Is Grammar Racist?

It has to be. Whatever blacks and other 'people of color' are not good at is racist; blacks and other 'people of color' are not good at grammar; ergo, etc.  This also explains why logic, mathematics, natural science, chess, self-control, self-reliance, deferral of gratification, pulling up your pants, etc. are all racist.

It is also clear that in this Age of Pan-Racism, when everything is racist, grammar, etc. is racist. Racism is itself racist!

Seriously, the Rutgers English Department is in dire need of 'cancellation' or at least fumigation. Here:

In short, the Rutgers English Department wants to make sure that students who come to Rutgers with a poor grasp of standard written English not only remain in that state, but come to believe that learning standard English is a concession to racism. I remember when keeping "people of color" ignorant was considered part of white supremacy.