Category: Wokery

The Assault on Reality

Man wins first place in women's cycling event.  Why not, if there is no biological difference between a man and a woman?  If a man can 're-imagine' himself into woman so as to enter into athletic competition with them, then surely an adult can 're-imagine' himself into a child for the same purpose, as in the prescient Seinfeld episode in which Kramer dominates the dojo.

And if there is no biological difference between men and women, how could anyone reasonably kvetch  that 'man,' 'men,' and 'he' exclude women? You can't exclude what doesn't exist. By the same token, 'woman' does not exclude men.

What Motivates George Soros?

What could motivate anyone to use his billions to bankroll the unravelling of the fragile fabric of civil society?  

Miranda Devine explained last night on Fox that Soros is a utopian who believes that only after the status quo is razed to the ground can we start over and build utopia. But utopia is "Like, nowheresville, man" as Maynard G. Krebs once remarked. Or at least it is nowhere we can get to by individual or collective effort. The eschaton is not up for immanentization. 

The deepest metaphysical error of the Left is the conceit that there is no reality antecedent to human beliefs and desires, and that everything is susceptible to human manipulation and production, to something like Heideggerian Machenschaft. 

Devine on Soros. Check out the photos. "Birds of a feather flock together." 

Kamala with Soros scion.

Memo to useful idiots: if you vote Dem, you should know what you are voting for.  You need to wake up to wokery.

Confuse Hate and Dissent and You Will Find Hate Groups Everywhere

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Addenda (6/9)

Dan Bongino: The Police State is here. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Hinderaker: Trump Indictment Watch

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

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

No, Mr. Hinderaker. You are writing nonsense and I can prove it to anybody:
Turn all that you opine around and ask: "Do you want anyone so weak towards the heat in the kitchen, in the kitchen?" I sure don't.
 
Trump, no if's and's or but's, has the best and best enduring interests of the United States at heart, full speed ahead. And that's best for all the nations of this world as well.
 
Now let's examine a little more the track of 'candidates' along the lines you favor. They're thinking of that brass ring out there so they are NEVER focused on the task at hand. 
 
Hence you can count on two things, 1. their work is not their best, or, 2. they fob it off on someone else, so it's not really their work, they sit as a figure head, you know, that statue on the prow of an old sailing ship, a superstitious talisman. To sum up your favored candidates self-screening process: one finger in the wind, one eye looking backwards, the other eye looking WAY down the road at their all-along real goal.
 
Trump alone can turn things around. He has proven over four years that he can.  He cannot be bought. He is tough as nails and can withstand the withering hatred directed at him from all sides. He doesn't need the job. He is not a career politician. He can have at most one term in office. He loves his country, and, contrary to the brazen lies of the filthy Dems, he is moderate in his views. There is nothing extreme about them.
 
The question to put to well-meaning useful idiots like Hinderaker and so many other yap-and-scribble never-trumping pseudo-cons is: which side are you on, man?  Grow a pair and man up. Are you not embarrassed to be a lapdog of the Left?

Anti-‘Woke’ Parents versus Antifa ‘Wokesters’

Here:

Antifa members who showed up outside a public meeting for the Glendale, California school system on Tuesday got beat down by the Armenian parents who showed up to voice their opposition to LGBTQ+ curriculum in the classroom.

Andy Ngo comments:

Local sources tell me it was this use of Armenian colors/symbols mixed with LGBTQI+, pup play pride in the shape of a Christian cross that incensed Armenian-American families in Los Angeles & caused them to mobilize against the school boards.

Historical comparisons are tricky and in any case I'm no historian. Are we in something like a Weimar period? You know what came after that.  Or are we in something like the waning days of the imperium romanum? You know what came after that too. 

Is there an historian in the house? 

One thing is clear: we have a government that gives aid and comfort to anti-civilizational elements.  At the head of this government we have a man who is not only morally corrupt personally, but also in dereliction of his constitutional duties. A little south of this entry I quoted David Horowitz on Joe Biden:

He began with a brazen lie that he would unify the country and represent both those who voted for him and those who did not.

Then he issued a series of executive orders that illegally and unconstitutionally nullified our immigration laws, and welcomed a flood of unvetted illegals from 200 countries to invade our country. This was the greatest crime ever committed by our government against its own people.

The fish stinks from the head as the proverb has it, and in this case it stinks to high heaven.

More footage.

The Moral Depravity of the Democrat Party

David Horowitz:

“Woke” has become a term to describe the enemies of our country who have colonized our schools and taught our next generations to hate America, hate white people and trash our history and national pride. How to explain this travesty? It began fifty years ago when the anti-American, Marxist left set its sights on taking over our schools.

[. . .]

Many of you may have thought that the takeover of our educational system by anti-American Marxists happened overnight. It didn’t. It was five decades in the making. But conservatives and Republicans chose not to notice it. And when they did notice it, they were reluctant to fight.

If you want to understand the disasters that have befallen our country, you have to begin with the failure of Republicans and conservatives to aggressively wage the political war necessary to defend it.

The anti-American left attacks patriotic Americans as “white supremacists,” “racists” “domestic terrorists” and “insurrectionists.” And we respond by calling them “liberals.” There is nothing about them that is liberal. They are vindictive bigots, determined to demonize and destroy us.

[. . .]

The Democrat Party is no longer controlled by a liberal left but by Marxist zealots who willfully disregard the Marxist atrocities and failures of the past. Democrats no longer respect the sovereign individual, the rule of law, or the primary values of the Constitution –the equality of races, the spirit of compromise or the decentralization of power.

Instead, Democrats regard the Constitution as a white supremacist document written by rich white slaveowners, designed to oppress all other genders and races. Its mentality is that of European fascism and Soviet communism, and its immediate goal is a one-party state.

{. . .]

January 6th was the date set to certify the electors. On that day Trump gave his famous “Stop the Steal” speech, which has been maliciously described by Democrats as a criminal “incitement to insurrection.” This was absurd on its face, since Trump had offered the Capitol Police and Nancy Pelosi 10,000 national guardsmen to control the crowds. Trump’s offer was duly noted by the Inspector General who attended the meeting. Pelosi and the Democrat-controlled Capitol Police rejected the offer.

[. . .]

Biden’s inauguration was January 20. He began with a brazen lie that he would unify the country and represent both those who voted for him and those who did not.

Then he issued a series of executive orders that illegally and unconstitutionally nullified our immigration laws, and welcomed a flood of unvetted illegals from 200 countries to invade our country. This was the greatest crime ever committed by our government against its own people.

[. . .]

Read it all and propagate it. Do your bit. Vote with your feet and your wallet. Study the many works of David Horowitz to understand the depredations of communism and its latest incarnation as 'wokery.'

Budweiser and the Roman Catholic Church

They have this much in common: they don't understand their respective clienteles. 

Who drinks Budweiser? Connoisseurs of the brewer's art? No. Different sorts, but mainly country folk, rednecks, Hillary's deplorables, and Barack Hussein Obama's "clingers" to guns and Bibles.  So what were the head honchos thinking when they enlisted Dylan Mulvaney to promote their swill?  You know, that cute little narcissistic sweetie-pie who wants to grow up to be a girly-girl.

Beats me.  Apparently, drinking Bud makes you none the wiser. The 'suits' seemed shocked by the predictable boycott and backlash and have reversed course with an appeal to Harley riders. They should have gone 'whole hog' with  an appeal to outlaw bikers.

As for the RCC,   I have vented my spleen and blown my stack over at the Stack:

People who take religion seriously tend to be conservatives and traditionalists; they are not change-for-the-sake-of-change leftist utopians out to submerge the Transcendent in the secular.  The stupidity of the Vatican II 'reforms,' therefore, consists in estranging its very clientele, the conservatives and traditionalists.  

The church should be a 'liberal'-free zone.

The Assault on Merit

Here:

In the case at issue, the leaders of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, or TJ—a highly selective public magnet school in Fairfax County, Virginia—bemoaned the demographic imbalance that resulted from the school’s academics-focused admission policies. (The class of 2024, for example, is more than 70 percent Asian, and Hispanics and blacks fall far short of their general-population proportions in the overall school district.) The school board then switched TJ to a different system that, while not considering race directly, reduced Asian admissions by about a quarter. Among other changes, the new policy ditches standardized testing and guarantees admission to at least 1.5 percent of each middle school’s eighth-grade class.

For the record, I am not now and never have been Asian.

I will now pose a question to those of you who have taught high school or college classes, a question none of you will answer. Who were your best and worst students by race/ethnicity? Comments enabled.

‘2A’ a Terrorist Marker?

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

I have written sentences like this:

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

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

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

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

 

Masculinity

Out and about yesterday, I caught a bit of Dennis Prager's radio show. He defended Daniel Penny's behavior in his confrontation with Jordan Neely as masculine, using the word correctly. In our infantilized, feminized, and left-dominated and therefore crime-tolerant society, Penny's behavior will be called toxically masculine by our political enemies. But to anyone who can think straight, there is a difference between the masculine and the toxically masculine.

On the other hand, there are people to my right, politically speaking, who deny that there is any toxic masculinity.  I must oppose them too.  I say to them: Are you seriously going to maintain that there are no instances of machismo that are not reasonably described as 'toxic'?

Consider the sad case of Cynthia Garcia. This foolish middle-aged woman and mother thought it would be fun to party with the Hells (no apostrophe!) Angels in their Mesa, Arizona clubhouse of a Saturday night. The 'Angels' of course demanded sex; she showed disrespect, even after they stomped her, and so they brutally murdered her. There are differing accounts of the exact details.  But the upshot was indeed brutal. Two of them stabbed her to death and attempted to cut her head off,  dumping her remains in the desert proximal to the Rio Salado shooting range.
 
Of course, normal masculine behavior such as that displayed by Penny is not toxic, and the feminization of boys is a serious threat to social stability and the survival of the Republic. But just as a Nazi is no cure for a commie, a biker brute is no cure for a feminized boy.
 
The subversion of language is the mother of all subversion. 
 
You should no more allow the Left's theft of perfectly good English words than you should allow their question-begging and question-burying coinages such as 'Islamophobia' and 'homophobia' and 'transphobia.' I have gone over this many times and I am not in the mood to repeat myself.  Enough compromising with our political enemies; resist them on every front.
 
Addendum
 
William Voegli weighs in on the Penny-Neely encounter at City Journal: 

Are New York’s subways safer, its homeless population less dangerous, than is generally believed? Than Tarannum and, perhaps, Daniel Penny seemed to think? The Times pointed out in February that the rate of violent felonies on the subway system was twice as high in 2022 as it had been in 2019. The system saw ten people murdered in 2022, compared with an average of two per year from 2015 through 2019. On the other hand, the Times pointed out that even after this increase, there were 1.2 violent crimes for every 1 million subway rides, which works out to about the likelihood of being injured during a two-mile automobile trip. Readers deliberating how much reassurance to derive from such statistics may reflect on the Times’s utter lack of such restraint and sobriety following the death of George Floyd in 2020, when the paper made no attempt to caution against sweeping generalizations based on the anomalous death of an unarmed black man in police custody.

You might want to bear in mind that truth is not a leftist value, and that leftists have a strange propensity to celebrate the dysfunctional, the transgressive, the grotesque, and the socially worthless as part of their nihilist drive to normalize deviant behavior, all the while attacking the sane, the decent, the socially useful, including the subway commuters on their way to work.  

This brings up a second point raised by Rahnuma Tarannum, about how the authorities not doing their job puts civilians in a position where they either do it themselves or suffer the consequences of no one doing it. 

Abdication of authority has dire consequences. Leftists unwittingly (or is it wittingly?) promote vigilantism. Remember Bernie Goetz, the subway gunman? In the same way, leftists unwittingly (or is it wittingly?) promote increased gun ownership among civilians. Either unable or unwilling to distinguish weapon from wielder, lefties unrelentingly repeat that guns cause crime. But then demonstrating their lack of common sense, they agitate for the defunding of police, the ratcheting down of criminal penalties, etc. So the people arm themselves. Surprise! How stupid can a 'liberal' be?

I am a staunch supported of 2A rights, but being sane and reasonable I don't want more and more untrained civilians packing heat.

It is true, as Bouie says, that no one on Jordan Neely’s subway car had any way to know that he had been arrested 42 times, including at least four times for punching people, two of which occurred in the subway system. Nor could they have known that Neely was on “the ‘Top 50’ list,” which, the Times explained, is a “roster maintained by the city of . . . people living on the street whom officials consider most urgently in need of assistance and treatment.” Lacking such knowledge, Bouie contends, Neely’s fellow passengers were obligated to give him the benefit of the doubt. 

Ann Coulter and Heather Mac on the Anti-Civilizational Left

No Biggie, Just the End of Civilization

When Race Trumps Merit …

Ann Coulter

May 10, 2023

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

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

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

[More below the fold.]

Continue reading “Ann Coulter and Heather Mac on the Anti-Civilizational Left”

The Insanity of the Left: Reparations

For California 'residents.' Given that California is a sanctuary state, those 'residents' will include 'black' illegal aliens. There is a bit of a problem with that.

Should those who reside illegally in the U. S. pay reparations to blacks?  Why not? Don't the illegals benefit from the putative legacy of slavery like everyone else?  On the  other hand, if you think that only the  descendants of slave holders should pay reparations, then we citizens who are are not descended from slave holders are off the hook. None of my ancestors held slaves. Hell, some of them probably were slaves themselves, members of the Spartacus rebellion who ended up crucified along the Via Appia.  

And what about the blacks who are descended from blacks who held slaves? Do they get reparations too? And who is black anyway? Rachel Dolezal?  If race is just a social construct, can I re-identify as black and get in on the goodies? If I can identify as a girl and then compete in an all-female athletic event, why can't I identify as black?

There will never be black reparations for slavery. The idea is just too incoherent for implementation. And it perpetuates the victim mentality that keeps blacks on the bottom. Nor should there be reparations for slavery. See the following. Trigger warning! They are exercises in reasoned discourse.

David Horowitz on Black Reparations

On Black Reparations

Rockland County to NYC

A massive middle-fingered 'salute.'

Quite rightly. ('Quite rightly' is in my head because I heard Donovan's Mellow Yellow on the way to the range Friday morning. Donovan uses 'quite' to mean entirely, but in American English at least it also can mean somewhat.  Does it have both senses in British English?)

The article mentions 'migrants.'  Conservatives should not acquiesce in leftist-prog-'woke' language abuse. There are two distinctions here that ought to be respected: illegal-legal; immigrant-emigrant.

'Migrant' manages to elide both distinctions in one fell swoop. Par for the course for a leftist journo. But dumb is the conservative journalist who plays along.

'lllegal immigrant' and illegal aliens' are the correct terms for what the article calls 'migrants.'

Language matters. It's a war. Subversion of language is the mother of all subversion. Don't let the 'mothers' get away with it.

"But no person is illegal!" But who ever said that any person was? (I can explain the point here if you need it explained. Better yet: you tell me what my point is in the combox.)

Rockland County