Category: Wokery

Death by DEI

Politicians are especially in danger, although we are all  at risk.  Christopher Rufo:

To say it plainly: there is no need for women in a president’s security detail. The Secret Service is an elite institution that can funnel down a large number of candidates to select the few who will protect the president. The best candidates—the strongest and fastest, the best marksmen—will be men. That’s just reality.

It’s a reality that the Secret Service is determined to circumvent. The agency itself has published its fitness standards in two parts: one for men, and a separate, less rigorous one for women.

And who is involved in "assassination prep?" Quite obviously, the Left:

The June issue of The New Republic is explicitly devoted to comparing Trump to Hitler, one of the greatest mass murderers in human history. It’s full of essays about how grim life will be under Dictator Trump. The editors justified this by saying, “Today, we at The New Republic think we can spend this election year in one of two ways. We can spend it debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, ‘He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.’”

Chicago under Democrat ‘Control’

Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Born in Chicago  

I was born in Chicago in nineteen and forty one
I was born in Chicago in nineteen and forty one
Well my father told me
Son you had better get a gun.

True then, truer now. 

And you still be ridin' with Biden? How stupid can you be? How self-destructive? How willfully self-enstupidated? And of course the scourge is not upon Chicago alone but upon every Dem-'controlled' city, county, state, and jurisdiction.

Chicago shooting gallery

The humorous meme is now a reality:  ammo vending machines are coming to stores.  That's no joke.

I'm a staunch supporter of 2A rights, but this cannot be a good development. What's next? Ammo sales at drive-through liquor stores? "Would you like a box of ammo to go with your bottle of Hornitos tequila?  Today's special is Federal 115 gr FMJ 9 mm hollow point."  

To vote Democrat is to vote for more crime and the defunding of professional law enforcement  The more crime,  the more the burden of personal defense is placed on the citizen. But the average citizen is unlikely to get the proper training and to devote the time needed to become proficient in the use of firearms.  The upshot is more accidental negligent discharges. In a well-functioning society, the laws are enforced and the criminal element is kept in check so that the citizen can go about his business without the need to, and the grave responsibility that comes with, 'packing heat.'  

And you are still a Democrat? WTF is wrong with you?

Related: Shooting Up Chicago

Of DEI and the Devil

Top o' the Stack. Excerpt:

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 little white balls into holes, and other forms of Pascalian divertissement.

Historians Need Not Apply

At the intersection of academia and wokery lies academentia. 

I have one quibble with Hinderaker. He writes,

But the phenomenon at work here–a huge cadre of well-educated people who think they are entitled to make good money, be treated with deference, and play a significant role in public life, but who in fact are not very employable and whose expectations are doomed to be frustrated–explains a lot about the demented quality of our current culture.

The phrase "well-educated people" is surely out of place. This "huge cadre" is not well-educated by any reasonable, historically-based standard.  But you've heard this sort of thing from me before, for example, here. Tony Flood offers some excellent commentary.

Will a Perfect Storm Soon be upon us?

Anthony Flood thinks so.  Here is how his piece begins:

The dictionary defines a perfect storm as an “unusual combination of events or things that produce an unusually bad or powerful result.” The latter, as I see it, is life as we’ve become accustomed to enjoying it.

Four years ago, I stated my grounds . . . . 

And now Flood adds to the list:

My list didn’t give sufficient attention to the open southern border of the United States, which is being invaded daily in great numbers, or the explosion of urban crime.

I was not thinking of the resurrection of Nazi-level, genocidalist  antisemitism within the walls of the institutions tasked with handing on civilization’s treasures.

I inexcusably paid no attention at all to the moral depravity that acquiesces in (if not celebrates) infanticide and the gender confusion that spits on the revelation of God (Genesis 1:27, 5:2; Matthew 19:4-6) Whom the “perfect stormtroopers” hate because they love death (Proverbs 8:36). Structural instabilities have followed the culture of death as the night the day. (I’ll let others decide if the charge of post hoc, ergo propter hoc is relevant.)

The world-historical figure who may win the general election in 168 days (to which victory I will contribute) may slow the rate of decline and postpone some of its consequences, but he can’t reverse it.

On November 6, 2024, no perfect stormtrooper will say, “Well, you beat us fair and square! Better luck next time!” No, they’re prepared to “accept” such an electoral result the way the PLO famously “accepted” the state of Israel, that is, an enemy to be destroyed and whose people are to be exterminated. Their plans to destroy Western Civ in general and its American outpost in particular will be pursued.

Like Napoleon, Trump may reshape the trajectory of a post-revolutionary era and bevel a few of its sharp edges. In the offing, however, I see no counterrevolution worthy of the name. As I wrote in the cited post:

Call me a secular pessimist (although I’m an eschatological optimist), but I see no liberation in this dispensation, libertarian or otherwise, from those scourges. God will stop the wicked in their tracks:

So shall they [God’s enemies] fear the name of the Lord from the west, and his glory from the rising of the sun. When the enemy shall come in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord shall lift up a standard against him (Isaiah 59:19).

He’ll lift it. God’s promised government is a future intervention that God, not man, will inaugurate; its blessings will be manifest to all, and delivered directly. “Thy Kingdom come” (Matthew 6:10).

Think you can cheer me up in the short run? Have at it.

Leftists Love Criminals

You will never understand the Left until you understand that they reliably take the side of  criminals, who comprise their clientele and path to power, over the law-abiding.   And with lefties it is always about power and control, first, foremost,  and forever.

Here we read about a 78-year-old Englishman who, in defending himself against a screwdriver-wielding home invader, caused the miscreant's death and is now facing a murder charge.

Dear old England, the mother country. It is sad to see your mother, senile and decrepit, go down the toilet, having lost all her moral sense and the will to live.

Examples such as this one, like entities, are easily multiplied; unlike entities, however, citations of leftist assaults on justice  are not likely to be multiplied beyond necessity.

Here is another example, a recent one, from Minnesota, for your delectation, or rather, disgust.

Once again one sees the justification for my political burden of proof:

As contemporary 'liberals' become ever more extreme, they increasingly assume what I call the political burden of proof.  The onus is now on them to defeat the presumption that they are so  morally and intellectually obtuse as not to be worth talking to.

Actually, that is far too mild a statement. Perhaps tomorrow I will tell you what I really think.

Who Are These Hamas Supporters?

This just in from Tony Flood:

"From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” chant the useful idiots at elite institutions and parades in the West. Who are these people? Atheists who support theocratic lunatics, democrats who endorse medieval tyrants, feminists who defend misogynists who parade with the desecrated corpses of women, gays who defend maniacs who would joyfully hang them or toss them off the roof of a tall building. They talk of a secular, democratic and socialist Palestine. As George Orwell observed: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.” 

Walter E. Block, "The Moral Duty to Destroy Hamas." (Emphasis added.) This is the text of the 927-word WSJ op-ed, published October 11, 2023, behind their paywall; Block posted it the next day on his Substack. 

Austrian School economist and first-generation Rothbardian (i.e., anarcho-capitalist libertarian), Block is a co-author of the 962-page The Classical Liberal Case for Israel (Springer 2021). For me, this book is prohibitively expensive; its argument, however, can be read for free in a documented-to-the-hilt article that the authors had published five years earlier in a peer-reviewed journal: Block WE, Futerman AG, and Farber R, The Legal Status of the State of Israel: A Libertarian Approach, Indonesian Journal of International & Comparative Law, No. 11, July 2016, 435-554. This link will open a 119-page pdf. 
I reiterate my stock disclaimer: Linkage does not constitute plenary endorsement.  I stand for free speech and open inquiry, and thus against those leftists, and in particular those leftists in cahoots with Islamists, who dishonor these classically liberal and traditionally American values. That being said, I fully endorse the material from Block quoted by Flood supra.
 
Addendum. Here is Hans-Hermann Hoppe's reply to Walter E. Block's "The Moral Duty to Destroy Hamas," above cited.  I am not qualified to enter this debate, but I will repeat the following from my partially autobiographical essay From Democrat to Dissident:
We were friends for a time, but friendship is fragile among those for whom ideas matter. Unlike the ordinary nonintellectual person, the intellectual lives for and sometimes from ideas. They are his oxygen and sometimes his bread and butter. He takes them very seriously indeed and with them differences in ideas. So, the tendency is for one intellectual to view another whose ideas differ as not merely holding incorrect views but as being morally defective in so doing. Why? Because ideas matter to the intellectual. They matter in the way doctrines and dogmas mattered to old-time religionists. If one’s eternal happiness is at stake, it matters infinitely whether one “gets it right” doctrinally. If there is no salvation outside the church, you had better belong to the right church. It matters so much that one may feel entirely justified in forcing the heterodox to recant “for their own good.”
 
Related (5/11):  Douglas Murray, Choose Life, not the Death Cults.  If, like me, you have no time to spend during working hours listening to slow-moving speeches, Murray provides an article adaptation of his speech before the Manhattan Institute, which adaptation is accessible via an internal link. 
 
 
Finally, I see that Malcolm and 'Jacques' are debating, civilly but trenchantly, over at Pollack's place.

Health Equity?

Well, why not? 

Students in their first year of medical school typically learn what a healthy body looks like and how to keep it that way. At the University of California, Los Angeles, they learn that "fatphobia is medicine’s status quo" and that weight loss is a "hopeless endeavor."

Those are two of the more moderate claims made by Marquisele Mercedes, a self-described "fat liberationist," in an essay assigned to all first-year students in UCLA medical school’s mandatory "Structural Racism and Health Equity" class. Launched in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the course is required for all first-year medical students.

The Left destroys everything it touches, and it touches everything. Problem is, few physicians, comfortable and lazy as they are in their tony suburbs, have the civil courage to speak out against this nonsense.

The Intifada Comes to America

Well, what did you expect?

Intifada refers specifically to two separate uprisings of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank over the past four decades, but more broadly, it pertains to the continued resistance of the Palestinians to the existence of Israel. When they shout “Death to Israel,” they mean it. It should be a top priority of Congress now to determine whether they mean it when they shout “Death to America.”

The rise of pro-Palestinian hatred in the United States should not be a surprising development to anyone. Even before President Biden opened the southern border to millions of unvetted “newcomers,” as the global elites like to call the invaders, there has been a reckless U.S. policy going back two decades to resettle Muslim refugees from Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and Afghanistan in the U.S. heartland. And because immigration policy no longer treats assimilation as a worthwhile goal, many of those refugees are loyal to their homeland and their religion much more than to the nation that offered them safety and security.

I suppose that is an inevitable result of the globalist agenda of border dissolution and the merging of disparate populations for the purpose of sharing wealth and assuaging billionaires’ guilt.

But it is only inevitable if the rest of us tolerate it.

Quotations from Chairman Maher

Christopher Rufo has her number.

The new CEO of NPR, then, is a left-wing ideologue who supports wide-scale censorship and considers the First Amendment an impediment to her campaign to sanitize the world of wrong opinions.

Maher is no aberration. She is part of a rising cohort of affluent, left-wing, female managers who dominate the departments of university administration, human resources, and DEI. They are the matriarchs of the American Longhouse: they value safety over liberty, censorship over debate, and relativism over truth.

Here, Rufo interviews Larry Sanger about NPR CEO Maher. Excerpt:

Sanger: The fact that she is not immediately hounded out of her job—and she won’t be, I’m sure—shows you how profoundly and how quickly the culture of not just the Internet, but of the United States and the West in general, has changed.

The fact that you had to do some research and surface these videos, that they weren’t immediately caught as smoking-gun evidence of how bad things have gotten, shows you that the attitudes that she expresses are what we expect these days.

Poor Maher! She suffers from both TDS and Truth Decay.