Category: Wokery

Let Them Eat Woke

Alex Castellanos:

Democrats, your party has a product problem, not a marketing problem. Don’t look around. Look in the mirror. Your problem is staring back. You’ve lost the ability to govern your country. That’s why your party expired in 2024 with Kamala Harris. That election was not a changing of the guard, it was the end of an era. The organizing principles that have defined the Democratic Party since the 1930s are now exhausted and near the grave.

Right. The Dems persist in thinking that their problem is one of 'messaging.' In a sense, it is: they have no message and they have no messenger.  I heard Jen "Circle Back" Psakis last night describe Kamala Harris as "brilliant." Truth is, she's a lazy, inauthentic know-nothing, and the opposite of brilliant. Just listen to her speak. She thinks the Cloud is a physical object up in the sky!

And you voted for her? What were you thinking? Were you thinking? Or were you emoting?  I understand that you don't like Trump.  Do you live your whole life on the basis  of likes and dislikes? Do you make major life decisions on the basis of knee-jerk reactions? Perhaps you are spending too much time on Facebook. Thumbs up! Thumbs down! Don't be a knee-jerk jerk off.

Addendum

My claim that the Dems have no message is not quite right. They have a message, a nefarious one that they wisely do not broadcast plainly, knowing that it would not sell well among the majority if honestly presented.  Hence all the vacuous and obfuscatory nonsense spouted by Kamala and Tampon Tim, together with merely performative clownish gyrations, pantomimed page-turnings, and expressions of unhinged hilarity and 'joyousness.' They must think we are idiots. But the joke is on them since expressions of contempt do not win votes.

As for their message, it is garbage from the git-go. Leading the cavalcade of Unsinn: the claim that there is no biological difference between men and women, a falsehood that underpins the morally offensive policy that biological males must be permitted to compete in women's sporting events. 

Integration, Free Association, Open Immigration

An addendum to The Integrationist Fantasy.

Forced integration violates the right to free association. To add to both the irony and the outrage, the integrators refuse to integrate with the integrated.

Open immigration is not only in open defiance of the rule of law, it also leads to a particularly offensive form of forced integration, as when illegal aliens are shipped to various locales to the detriment of the citizens who live there, citizens who lack the political clout to prevent the invasion.

It is no surprise why Trump garnered such strong support from the the black, Hispanic, and working class demographics.

Hats Off to Huntington Beach, California

It was the summer of '65. I was lying in the sand at Huntington Beach, California listening to the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, sing about hot rods, surfing, boy-girl relations and such when a song came on that "blew my mind" in the parlance of the day. But what I want to say, today, is that the city so-named 

. . . voted to approve the initiative brought by Mayor Pat Burns to Declare the City of Huntington Beach a “Non-Sanctuary City for Illegal Immigration for the Prevention of Crime.” As the City Council Members commented, the intent of this Resolution is to deliberately sidestep the Governor’s efforts to subvert the good work of federal immigration authorities and to announce the City’s cooperation with the federal government, the Trump Administration, and Border Czar Tom Homan’s work. This new City policy and Declaration are common sense, supports our law enforcement, and advances public safety throughout the City. What the Governor is doing does not.

Read it all. (HT: Fellow native-Californian, Ingvarius Maximus of Alhambra)

What is Fueling the L. A. Fires?

The obvious answer in terms of tinder-dry flammable materials, the Santa Ana winds, etc. does not cut deep enough. Ideologically, nature idolatry plays a major role in the ferocity, force, and human impact of the L. A. fires.  Their source is in radical environmentalism. Radical environmentalism, as opposed to a wise stewardship of nature, is an anti-humanism. This species of wokery issues in extreme misanthropy.  By radical environmentalism I mean positions like that of David Foreman, founder of Earth First.  His extremism is displayed in the following quotations:

  • “Our environmental problems originate in the hubris of imagining ourselves as the central nervous system or the brain of nature. We’re not the brain, we are a cancer on nature.”
  • “Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.”
  • “Humanity is the cancer of nature.”
  • “I believe that human overpopulation is the fundamental problem on Earth Today” and, “We humans have become a disease, the Humanpox.”
  • “The optimum human population of earth is zero.”

This AI-generated list may be verified at AZ Quotes.

Quote-the-optimum-human-population-of-earth-is-zero-david-foreman-78-94-43

Now not every environmentalist on the Left embraces the late Foreman's absurdities. But the mitigated forms of leftist environmentalism are also objectionable.  Here is a paradox worth thinking about. A sane environmentalism cannot be anti-human. It must promote human flourishing. But this will require various violent interventions in nature including drilling, mining, farming, dam-building, tunneling, road-building, and the like.  These are anti-environmental actions. To refuse to manage nature for the sake of human flourishing by engaging in these anti-environmental actions will lead, as it has in the case of the California conflagration, to a worse environmental outcome.

That is the paradox. A sound environmentalism must be in some measure anti-environmental.  But a paradox is not a contradiction, and this is one that must be accepted.

So, even apart from arson, the L. A. inferno is in large part man-made by the likes of Governor Hair-Style and Mayor Dumbass. (Those choice epithets courtesy of Kurt Schlichter.) Wildfires there will always be. Their benighted policies, however,  have made things worse than they had to be.

The Integrationist Fantasy

Top o' the Stack.

E pluribus unum? Out of many, one? It can work, and it did work for a time, though not perfectly. But thanks to ‘progressives,’ regression has set in. Whether a One can be made of Many depends on the nature of the Many.

A viable One cannot be made out of just any Many.

To think otherwise is to succumb to what I call the Integrationist Fantasy. This is the dangerous conceit that people can be brought together peacefully and productively despite deep differences in their languages, religions, cultures, traditions, and values.

Read it all; it's short: your Twitterized (X'ed out?) brain will be able to process it.

Culpably Ignorant Dems

Is a soupçon of Schadenfreude justifiable? He who lives by DEI can expect to die by it.  Michael Shellenberger at X:

I’m not suggesting that Democrats consciously sought to destroy Los Angeles. The entertainment industry professionals in Malibu, Topanga Canyon, and Pacific Palisades, who voted overwhelmingly for California’s progressive Governor, Gavin Newsom, and LA’s radical Left mayor, Karen Bass, thought they were voting for social justice and sustainability. They didn’t imagine their vote would result in their homes burning down.

And yet that’s what their votes resulted in.

Too tepid for my taste. The Dems in question are not inherently stupid, but they deserve to be condemned for their culpable ignorance. They should have known better than to support the likes of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, Karen "Go to the URL" Bass, Kristin Crowley, George Gascon, Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the reprobates that populate their once-respectable party. They should have by now seen through the scam called 'social justice.'

The trouble with these people is that you cannot reason with them no matter how calm, fact-based, and rigorous your arguments. These Hollyweirdos do not inhabit the plane of reason and common sense.  They need to experience at their bodies and in their lives the consequences of their willful self-enstupidation.  Only then will some of them see the light.

Does the current LaLaLand conflagration have an upside? It does: it came at just the right time to galvanize the MAGA forces so that they can hit the ground running, take back the country, restore the republic, and defeat the depredatory Dems. May the Winds of Woke not prevail against them.

 

Leftists as Political Retromingents

A retromingent is an animal that urinates backwards.

Posturing as 'progressive,' the leftist pisses on the past, seeking to erase its memory by destroying monuments and redacting the historical record.  There is no piety in the leftist, no reverence. Try using those words at a Manhattan or Georgetown cocktail party and see what happens.

This political retromingency helps explain the leftists' lack of respect for language. 

If you erase history, however, not only will you not be able to learn from it, but you won't have anything left to piss on, either.  Your retromingency will cut counter to your benighted and backwards  modus vivendi et micturendi.

Instructive story here. 

The New Yorker‘s Cavalcade of Ignorance

The rag has high production values. I'll say that much for it. Otherwise, the current issue is a tsunami of folderol.  Sample:

“American Fascist,” Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s contribution, uses some variation on the word “fascist” 44 times across two and a half pages, along with 15 combined mentions of Hitler, Mussolini, and Putin. One imagines the interior of Snyder’s brain as a scarcely endurable popcorn machine, a rhythm of repetitive hissing and clicking that produces buckets of nearly identical thought kernels. Perhaps silence would be even harder for Snyder to endure. He offers one accidental moment of reflection, which serves to frame the entire New Yorker feature: “A fascist is unconcerned with the connection between words and meaning … When a fascist calls a liberal a ‘fascist,’ the term begins to work in a different way, as the servant of a particular person, rather than as a bearer of meaning.”

Snyder believes himself a meaning-bearer in a landscape of lies. He is hardly alone. Exempted from the need to understand or even bother to describe the objects of their disdain, the magazine’s chosen blatherers accuse the invisible masses of the worst possible affronts to democratic order, language, and perhaps reality itself before an audience that is presumed to share their prejudices and to have uniformly voted the same way that they did. They are on one side, with “bad America” arrayed on the other. Snyder quotes the historian Robert Paxton, who warns that “the Trump phenomenon looks like it has a much more solid social base, which neither Hitler nor Mussolini would have had.” This is a ludicrous, ahistorical, paranoid, self-discrediting, and of course convenient statement for Paxton and Snyder and The New Yorker. It allows them to stand bravely against an entire nation of monsters, and just sorta leave it at that.
Read more if you can stomach it.
 
Dems urge Biden to sabotage Trump.
 
Debunking the Debunkers. That reminds me of Joe and Mika who paid a visit to Hitler in his bunker.  Did they make it out alive?

Stealth Ideologues: Hillary and Kamala

On 21 October 2016, I laid into Hillary for lying about the Heller decision. The post concluded:

Hillary is a stealth ideologue who operates by deception. This is what makes her so despicable. If she were honest about her positions, her support would erode. So not only are her policies destructive; she refuses to own them.  She is an Obamination both at the level of ideas and at the level of character.

'Kamala' is substitutable for 'Hillary' salva veritate as the philosophers say.  In plain English, if the first name is substituted for the second in the above passage, its truth is preserved.  

If you complain that my tone is polemical, I will reply that of course it is, and justifiably so: we are at war with our political enemies. The cadre Dems I have just mentioned are not mere political opponents who share with us a commitment to the principles and values of our great constitutional republic, but revolutionaries out to replace that republic by way of a "fundamental transformation," as Barack Hussein Obama put it. To imagine that we are  engaged with them in a gentle(wo)manly debate under the umbrella of shared commitments is to play the useful idiot as so many rank-and-file Dems still do. You are a superannuated sucker if you still think it is 1960 or even 1980.

I leave undecided whether Heraclitus the Obscure of Ephesus was right when he wrote, "Polemos (Πόλεμος) is the father of all and the king of all . . . ." (Fr. 53 from G. S. Kirk and J E Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers, Cambridge UP, 1969, p. 195)

And then there is this from the same date (21.X.16):

Leviticus 19:15: The Lord versus Hillary

“You shall not do injustice in judgment; you shall not show partiality to the powerless; you shall not give preference to the powerful; you shall judge your fellow citizen with justice."  Alternate translations here.

In the third and final presidential debate, Hillary Clinton said the following about Supreme Court  nominations.  "And the kind of people that I would be looking to nominate to the court would be in the great tradition of standing up to the powerful, standing on behalf of our rights as Americans." 

This is the sort of leftist claptrap according to which the judiciary assumes  legislative functions and the Constitution is a tabula rasa on which anything can be written.  The purpose of the court is not to stand up to the powerful or take the side of the powerless, but to apply the law and administer justice.  

 There must be no partiality to the powerful. Might does not make right.  But neither does lack of might. There must be no  "partiality to the powerless." 

(Credit where credit is due:  I am riffing on a comment I heard Dennis Prager make. Plagiarism is another mark of leftism.) 

Related: Weakness does not Justify

Homophobia and Carniphobia

Meat phobia triggerOne of the purposes of this weblog is to resist the debasement of language and thought, and to recruit a few others to this worthy cause. The term ‘homophobia’ is an excellent example of such debasement. Worse than a question-begging epithet, it is a question-burying epithet. That is, its aim is to obliterate or at least occlude the very question of the morality of homosexual practices. For the term implies that any opposition to such practices can only arise from an irrational fear, which is what a phobia is. 'Homophobia' implies that there can be no rationally-based opposition to homosexual practices.

My point is not that homosexual practices are immoral, or the opposite. My point is one that should strike any rational person as entirely uncontroversial, namely, that there is a genuine moral issue here, an issue that no one has the right to legislate out of existence by a merely verbal maneuver.

Suppose a bunch of meat-eaters band together to advance their cause. Instead of mustering whatever arguments they can for the moral permissibility of meat-eating, or rebutting the arguments against its moral permissibility, they hurl the epithet ‘carniphobe’ at their vegetarian opponents. Then they try to get laws passed banning ‘carniphobia.’ Clearly, their aim is to obliterate the very question of the morality of meat-eating and to suggest that there cannot be any rationally-based opposition to it. My point is not that meat-eating is immoral, or the opposite. My point is that there is a genuine moral issue here, just as there is a genuine moral issue regarding homosexual practices.

But how many who can be convinced that ‘carniphobia’ is a term to be resisted, are clear-headed and honest enough to see that the same goes for ‘homophobia’?  

Not to mention 'Islamophobia.'

Thanks to Catacomb Joe for supplying the above 'trigger image' as he call it.

Misplaced Moral Enthusiasm

Languishing in the archives of one of the early versions of this weblog is a post bearing the above title. I shall have to resurrect, refurbish, and re-post it.  An excellent recent example of misplaced moral enthusiasm is well-described in Spring the Felon, Kill the Squirrel.

This short article may help you leftists understand why you lost big yesterday.  Some forms of leftism are border-line respectable, but the wokeassery of Kamalism is not one of them.

Related:  From Gunman to Squirrel Man: Bernie Goetz Thirty Years Later

You do remember Bernie Goetz, don't you?

William James had a squirrel problem. You are aware of it, are you not?

If you like to think, you'll like my blog. If you don't like to think, you need my blog.

Red World, Blue World, and the Orange Man

David Brooks, Confessions of a Republican Exile:

In Red World, people tend to take a biblical view of the human person: We are gloriously endowed and made in the image of God—and we are deeply broken, sinful, and egotistical. [. . .] You belong to God; to your family; and to the town, nation, and civilization you call home. Your ultimate authority in life is outside the self—in God, or in the wisdom contained within our shared social and moral order.

In Blue World, by contrast, people are more likely to believe that far from being broken sinners, each of us has something beautiful and pure at our core. As the philosopher Charles Taylor put it in The Ethics of Authenticity, “Our moral salvation comes from recovering authentic moral contact with ourselves.” In this culture you want to self-actualize, listen to your own truth, be true to who you are. The ultimate authority is inside you.

Brooks sees good in both worlds, and does a fair job of characterizing the differences between them, but nowadays he finds himself "rooting for the Democrats about 70 percent of the time." But why the tilt toward the Blue?

You guessed it: the Orange Man.  Brooks speaks of "Donald Trump’s desecration of the Republican Party."  Desecration? But surely no political party in a non-theocratic system such as ours is sacred. You can't desecrate what is not sacred. But let that pass. There is far worse to come.

We are told that Blue World "has a greater commitment to the truth." Really? "This may sound weird," Brooks admits, but it is worse than weird; it is incoherent. One cannot both support the Blue commitment to "your own truth" and invoke the truth. If there is the truth, it cannot vary from person to person. What can so vary is only one's personal attitude to the truth, whether by way of acceptance, rejection, doubt, etc.  The truth is invariant across personal attitudes.  Truth cannot be owned. There is no such thing as my truth or your truth, any more than there is my reality and your reality.  Claudine Gay take note. This is an elementary point. Philosophy 101. Brooks needs to think harder. But then what can you expect from a journalist who writes for The Atlantic?

But not only is Brooks embracing incoherence, he is also maintaining something manifestly false.  If there is anything that best characterizes the current Blue World  in action it is the thorough-going mendacity of the members of the Biden-Harris administration from Biden on down. Do I need to give examples? It is enough to name names: Biden, Harris, Granholm, Mayorkas, and the list goes on.  In Mayorkas, the Director of Homeland Security, the mendacity takes an Orwellian turn into the subversion of language: "The border is secure, as we define 'secure."  His very title is an Orwellianism: he is actively promoting, as is the whole Biden-Harris administration, homeland insecurity.

The truth is that truth is not a leftist value. Leftists will sometimes speak the truth, of course, but only if it serves their agenda. Otherwise they lie.  What animates them is not the Will to Truth, but the Will to Power.  

Brooks again:

But today the Republican relationship to truth and knowledge has gone to hell. MAGA is a fever swamp of lies, conspiracy theories, and scorn for expertise. The Blue World, in contrast, is a place more amenable to disagreement, debate, and the energetic pursuit of truth. 

I hate to be so disagreeable, but that is just preposterous.

Could Brooks define 'lie'?  Does he understand the distinction between a lie and an exaggeration? Has he given any thought to the difference between a lie and a counterfactual conditional? After winning in 2016, Trump famously boasted, 

Had it not been for all the illegal votes, I would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral college vote.

Leftists, who compile long lists of Trump's supposed lies, had among their number some who counted the above — an accurate paraphrase of what Trump said, not an exact quotation — as a lie.

But it is obviously not a lie. The worst you could call it is an unlikely, self-serving speculation.  He did not assert something he knew to be false, he asserted something he did not know to be true and could not know to be true. For there was no underlying fact of the matter about which he could have even tried to deceive his audience.  Counterfactual conditionals are about merely possible states of affairs.  That is why they are called counterfactual.

Has Brooks ever thought hard about what a conspiracy theory is? 

The Blues are "more amenable to disagreement, debate, and the energetic pursuit of truth"?  How's that for a brazen lie what with their de-platforming and cancellation of their opponents  not to mention the recent assaults on the First Amendment by John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.