Category: Wokery

Where to Send Illegal Immigrants

Send them to 'sanctuary' jurisdictions.

Eric Adams, mayor of NYC, would be happy to show his hospitality and humanity. I am using 'jurisdiction' to cover cities, counties, and states.  Here is a nifty map and a list brought to you from the fine folks over at the Center for Immigration Studies. I am proud to report that no city or county in Arizona is on the list. 

Note the clustering of 'sanctuary'  counties. The nastiest such cluster appears to be in the Pacific Northwest in Washington and Oregon with an increase in the density of clustering as you 'migrate' toward the Left Coast.  

From the map, I judge that the majority of the 'sanctuary' jurisdictions are coastal with most of the 'fly-over' jurisdictions in THC-rich Colorado.

A state is composed of counties, and counties are composed of cities (towns, etc.).  Would I be wrong to infer that if a state is a 'sanctuary' state (Illinois, e.g.), that every county  in that state has the same status, and every city in every county? OR can counties and cities in a 'sanctuary' state retain non-'sanctuary' status? I don't know, which is why I am asking.

(By the way, it annoys me when I ask someone a question of the form 'Do you know why ___?' and he responds, 'Why?')

Now for a trio of polemically-intended witticisms:

There  is more of sanctimony than of sanctuary in a 'sanctuary' jurisdiction.

It is easy to be sanctimonious if you have no skin in the game.

Only the inmates of an asylum could confuse an illegal immigrant with an asylum-seeker.

Mockery is a weapon not to be sneered at in our battle with our political enemies. And throw in a little contumely for good measure.

 

Another School Shooting

And so, predictably, the gun-grabbers will howl. Their howling is music to my ears and your signal to buy more guns, ammo, supplies, to pay range fees, training fees, and so on and so forth.  

This is something concrete that you can easily do and it makes a difference.  It puts money in the hands of firearms manufacturers (and their suppliers and subsidiaries) entities which fund the NRA and other lobbying groups who defend 2A against the totalitarian shites of Swamp Land. 

You cannot reason with gun-grabbing fools. They do not inhabit the plane of reason.  We of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable  have all the best arguments; they don't have jack. 'Jack' is elliptical for 'jack shit,' an urban quantifier if you will. It means 'anything.'  A curious linguistic bagatelle: 'squat,' 'diddly squat,' 'shit,' 'jack shit,' 'jack' — all have uses as 'urban quantifiers,' a phrase I just now coined.  But you won't find these quantifiers in any logic book, which is yet another reason why you need my blog.

As for the school and other shootings, we of the aforementioned coalition are against them, and recommend that existing laws be enforced, something that won't happen as long as Dementocrats have power.

Start with Hunter Biden.  But see this Reason piece for a contrary view.

Claudine Gay Resigns

Good riddance: 

Gay, Magill and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth testified before a U.S. House of Representatives committee on Dec. 5 about a rise in antisemitism on college campuses following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October.

The trio declined to give a definitive "yes" or "no" answer to Republican Representative Elise Stefanik's question as to whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their schools' codes of conduct regarding bullying and harassment, saying they had to balance it against free speech protections.

Elise Stefanik is the hero here, a profile in civil courage. Anyone who thinks that the right to free speech includes the right to incite violence is a moral defective.

More than 70 U.S. lawmakers signed onto a letter demanding that the governing boards of the three universities remove the presidents, citing dissatisfaction with their testimony.

However, Gay received support from some of her colleagues at Harvard. Several hundred faculty members last month signed a petition asking school administrators to not bend to political pressure to fire the school's president over her testimony.

Gay has also been hit with accusations of plagiarism. She planned to submit three corrections to her 1997 dissertation after a committee investigating plagiarism allegations against her found that she had made citation errors, a university spokesperson said.
 
Is it surprising that faculty at Harvard have such low academic standards and consider plagiarism a peccadillo, if even that, when POTUS is a brazen and proven plagiarist and his wife 'Dr.' Jill Biden's dissertation is garbage? As the saying goes "The fish stinks from the head." 
 
Joey B really does set the tone, or rather the odor, of his entire malodorous mal-administration and the rest of the nation. Another prime mover of mendacity is the brazen liar and Orwellian truth-twister, Alejandro "The border is secure" Mayorkas, Director of — wait for it — Homeland Security. 

The Racism of Reduced Expectations

To tolerate and excuse Harvard president Claudine Gay's  plagiarism has been cited by some as an example of the so-called 'racism of reduced expectations' (RRE). For what you are then doing by your toleration and excusal is lowering the standard for blacks when, or rather on the assumption that, they are as capable as any other group of meeting those standards.  Such a slighting  of blacks would indeed be racist.

But is the assumption true? The assumption underpinning  RRE is that blacks as a group are the equal of Jews, Asians, and whites in respect of intelligence, intellectual honesty, love of truth, interest in the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, commitment to the traditional values of the university, respect for high standards of scholarship, and the like. If this is the case, then it is indeed racist to tolerate and excuse the bad behavior of blacks such as President Gay, and in her case 'sexist' as well.  

So whether there is racism here or not depends on whether the underlying assumption is true. Most establishment conservatives believe that it is.  They believe that blacks are the equals of the other groups mentioned in respect of the attributes mentioned. I don't doubt their good faith. Jesse Watters a few nights ago played the RRE card: to tolerate and excuse President Gay's plagiarism is to treat her as either incapable or unwilling due to her race of being objective, truth-seeking, and intellectually honest. It is to suggest black intellectual and moral inferiority when they are not inferior. Hence the racism of reduced expectations.  But if blacks as a group really are inferior when it comes to the appreciation and implementation of the values in question then the reduced expectations are justified and there is no racism of reduced expectations.

My point is that reduced expectations are racist only if the assumption is true.  If the assumption is false then a reduction in expectations is in order  and there is no racism.  One is entitled to play the RRE card only if one has already shown or given good evidence for the truth of the assumption.

Radical Islam’s Threat to the Left

Substack latest.

Why don't leftists — who obviously do not share the characteristic values and beliefs of Islamists — grant what is spectacularly obvious to everyone else, namely, that radical Islam poses a grave threat to what we in the West cherish as civilization, which includes commitments to free speech, open inquiry, separation of church and state, freedom of religion, freedom to reject religion, universal suffrage, the emancipation of women, opposition to cruel and unusual penal practices, and so on?   In particular, why don't leftists recognize the grave threat radical Islam poses to them?  Why do leftists either deny the threat or downplay its gravity? Given their atheism and pronounced libertine ‘wobble,’ they would be among the first to lose their heads under Islamic law (Sharia).

Here is a quickly-composed  list of twelve related reasons based on my own thinking and reading and on discussions with friends. 

Wokery and the Double Denial

Substack latest.

It is not unreasonable to maintain that there is no God and that nature alone exists. But suppose you take it a step further and deny nature as well. Then you are in the precincts of 'woke' lunacy.  Call it the Double Denial. On the Double Denial, everything is a social construct, including the social constructors. Could they too be social constructs? How?

Related: Gender Ideology and its Consequences

Wolff on Israel

Robert Paul Wolff, 30 October 2023:

I have found the series of comments on the Israeli situation interesting and helpful. I have not responded to them because I am so upset by what is happening that I can barely watch the news reports of it anymore. Let me make one small observation. There has been talk by Israeli officials and others about how this is an existential threat to the state of Israel. Let us just keep in mind that Israel is the only nation in the region with nuclear weapons and more generally is far and away the most powerful militarily. The attack on October 7, horrific and ugly and sadistic as it was, was no more a threat to Israel's existence then [than] was the attack on the twin towers on September 11 a threat to the existence of the United States.

Two points by way of rebuttal.

First, while it is true that Israel is the only nation in the region with nuclear weapons at the moment, that is very likely soon to change thanks to the concessions and fecklessness of the Obama-era appeasement policies vis-à-vis Iran promoted by puppet Biden and his (mal)administration. 

Second, the October 7th massacre was not an isolated event, but part of the larger project of clearing the space "from the river to the sea" of Jews and their state once and for all. This larger project is part of a still larger one that without exaggeration can be  called genocidal: to exterminate the Jewish people.*  And beyond this there is the anti-civilizational project of destroying our superior Western culture, one pillar of which is Judeo-Christian, and whose last bastion, bloodied, decadent, and tottering though she be, is the Great Satan, the USA.

I will leave it to others to comment on the psychology of Jews like Wolff who embrace leftism.  Some will say that he is a self-hating Jew who has internalized Jew hatred and turned it upon himself. I take no position on that speculation, but I do think a distinction is called for, namely, the distinction between a self-hating Jew and a Jew-hating Jew.  Obviously, a Jew could hate himself  for reasons other than his being Jewish. But every Jew who hates himself because of his Jewishness is a self-hating Jew.

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*To characterize the October 7th attack as "genocidal," as I heard one commentator do this morning, is a semantic stretch of the sort that is frowned upon here. Precision in the use of language is essential to intellectual hygiene.

And You Call for a Cease-Fire?

Take a look at the massacre map. Then read this:

The world is yet again staring at the near inevitability of another global conflagration.   The flashpoint is in the Middle East and the Hitler of our time: the Mullahs of Iran.   The West, led by Barack Obama and Joe Biden, have chosen to follow in the footsteps of the self-absorbed European leaders of the 1930’s in dealing with Iran and their terrorist legions of Hamas, Hezb’allah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Ansar Allah (Houthis) among others.

The Obama/Biden policy in dealing with Iran has been to facilitate Iran in becoming a dominant player in the region in the naïve belief that if the West, and in particular the United States, treats the Mullahs of Iran as equals, they will evolve into non-belligerent leaders who can be trusted.  Even if that means the acquisition of nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles and sacrificing America’s only resolute ally in the region, Israel.

But is the disastrous Obama-Biden policy naïve, or is it something worse: a deliberate attempt to "fundamentally transform" (in Obama's words), and thus destroy the USA?  For example, why are no steps being taken by the Biden administration to control the southern (and northern) borders when it is a known fact that jihadis are entering the homeland?

Before 7 October it was clear enough that the purpose of the open border policy was to change the demographics of the USA in such a way as to make possible the permanent ascendancy of the Democrat Party. But now it can be seen that more nefarious motives were and are at work: to increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks within the homeland.  And what would they accomplish? They would give the current regime the excuse it needs for an even more draconian assault on the middle class and traditional American liberties.

UPDATE 1 (11/1)

Senator Hawley in a Congressional hearing hammers Alejandro Mayorkas who bears the Orwellian appellation "Director of Homeland Security." Is there anyone in the Biden administration more emblematic of the abysmal mendacity of said administration? 

These are very dangerous times. You'd best prepare for the immediate here and the possibly soon-to-arrive hereafter.

UPDATE 2 (11/1)

Pope Francis has called for a cease-fire:

"Ceasefire," he said, mentioning a recent television appeal by Father Ibrahim Faltas, one of the Vatican's representatives in the Holy Land.

He then added in his own words: "We say 'ceasefire, ceasefire'. Brothers and sisters, stop! War is always a defeat, always".
What he means, presumably, is that war is always a defeat for humanity. Is Bergoglio ignorant of recent European history and in particular the Second World War? If the Allies had not defeated the Axis powers, humanity (in the normative sense) and the high civilization of the Judeo-Christian type that the good pope supposedly represents, would have ceased to exist.
 
John Lennon famously if foolishly sang, "Give peace a chance." What he and Bergoglio the Benighted fail to understand is that sometimes we have to give war a chance.
 
Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want peace, prepare for war. The price of peace is a credible deterrent. Weakness and appeasement invite attack. Joe Biden is weak on multiple fronts; no surprise then that the upshot is war on multiple fronts.  
 
Conciliation is obviously a very high value. But how conciliate those who are religiously committed to your extermination? How conciliate those who would rather die than permit you to live?
 
 
 
 

Allyship?

Explained here. Is this a parody?

Word found here:

“I started to see these intelligent, educated people, whose mission is to make our system better for people of color, suddenly posting all this anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian stuff,” Rose said. “I’m not changing my values, but screw the allyship. I will not stop fighting, because I believe in the causes themselves. But as for going out of my way to support, to post, to give money? I’m done.”

Billionaire Donors Withholding Loot from Leftist Seminaries

Long-time donors are finally waking up to the wokeassery* of once-great universities that have for decades been transmogrifying into leftist seminaries. ('Seminary' is etymologically related to 'semen' and in the seminaries in question the origin of the jism is masturbatory: nothing productive comes from these seed beds.)

I predicted the donor revolt on 13 October about a week after the Hamas savagery of 7 October. Case in point: Leon Cooperman.  He's given some $50 mil to Columbia but will give no more citing the cranial feculence (my polite phrase, not his) of the Hamas-supporting  students. 

What is astonishing to many of us, however, is how the Cooperman cohort could be so clueless for so long. Cooperman just now discovered what has been going on since the '60s, namely, the "long march through the institutions"? Only now you decide to stop funding the anti-civilizational scum?

Better late than never, but no fool like an old fool.

Copperman's 80. The elderly tend to live in the past.  They tend to be fat, lazy, complacent, inattentive, and lost in the petty particulars of their self-centered quotidian round, even if they are not, like Joey B., physically decrepit, non compos mentis, morally corrupt to the core, and a disaster for the USA and the world.

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*A coinage of mine which I am sure has occurred to others. Modelled on jackassery, a word recognized by Merriam-Webster. The donkey or jackass is the symbol, an aptro-symbol if you will, of the Democrat party in the USA which, once respectable, is now hard-Left and destructive of our republic as she was founded to be.