Category: Wokery

DIE: ‘Equity’ Can Get You Killed

Here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neither  deadly nor an insurrection.

Trump's take.

Diana West's commentary.

Tucker Carlson Tonight – Wednesday, 08 March 2023

Surveillance Video Dismantles January 6th Narrative

Narratives and the Left

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

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

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

And Tony reined me in a bit with this response:

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

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

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

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

The rest of the good senator's crapweaselry here.

Addendum II (3/9) Tony Flood adds:

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

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

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

A ‘Progressive’ Paradox

Leader of the Stack.

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

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

Read it all. Pithy, on target, true.

Of DEI and the Devil

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

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

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

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

And you still vote Democrat?

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

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

The Age of Feeling and Proto-Wokery

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

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

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

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

Depredatory Wokery: Resist and Refuse

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

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

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

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

To Those Fleeing California

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

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

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

 

 

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

Left, Right, Sex, and Gender

Top o' the Stack.

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

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

The subversion of language is the mother of all subversion.

Conservatives are long on talk, but short on conservation.

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

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

Academentia in excelsis

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

Here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On ‘Illegal Alien’ and ‘Illegal Immigrant’

Substack latest.

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