"Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy,
And the dogs that bark revolution.
Drunk with talk, liars and believers.
I believe in my tusks. Long live freedom and damn the ideologies!"
(Robinson Jeffers)
In yesterday's general election the British have resolutely chosen to do nothing.
Before I try to make sense of what happened, let's look at some quirks of the U.K. electoral system as it operated to reward the Blancmange Party and ensure that the next five years for Britain will be a generous helping of "steady as she goes."
These are the results of the election ranked by number of seats won[1]:
Party
Seats
% of vote
Conservative Party
330
36.8
Labour Party
232
30.5
Scottish National Party (SNP)
56
4.7
Other (vegans, nudists, feminists, university professors communists, jihadis, gypsies, Vikings, pedophiles, global warmists, voodooists, Anglicans)
23
7.5
Liberal Democrats
8
7.9
UKIP
1
12.6
Listed another way by percentage of votes earned:
Party
Seats
% of vote
Conservative Party
330
36.8
Labour Party
232
30.5
UKIP
1
12.6
Liberal Democrats
8
7.9
Other
23
7.5
Scottish National Party (SNP)
56
4.7
So the most recent exercise in democratic politics in the nation that is the Mother of Parliaments gave 56 seats to the SNP (last in terms of total percentage of votes earned) but UKIP (third in terms of total percentage of votes earned) got a heart-stopping one (1) seat. Thus, the SNP got 37.3% of the votes that UKIP earned but got 56 times the number of seats as UKIP. One SNP vote compares to one UKIP vote as 11.9 compares to 0.08, a disparate effect of SNP votes relative to UKIP votes on the order of 149 to 1.
Conservatives got 330 seats for their 36.8% of the votes or 8.97 seats for every 1% of the vote. Labour got 232 seats for 30.5% of the vote, or 7.61 for every 1% of the vote. Respectively, the Conservative and Labour voter's vote was 113 and 96 times more potent than the UKIPper's vote.
Had seats been allocated on the basis of percentage of the vote, the Conservatives would have won only 239 seats, 87 seats short of a majority. Instead of sitting in the catbird seat today, the Conservatives would be in full desperation mode.
The actual, not "what if" result is, of course, due to the "first past the post" rule of U.K. electoral politics and the ability of minor parties to draw strength away from other minor parties like the proverbial "crabs in a bucket." Similar rules hinder lesser, newer parties seeking access to the ballot in U.S. elections and something can be said for electoral schemes that rewards politicians who are willing to come together under a Big Tent. This dampens enthusiasm for nutcase excess.
However . . . . . . . this U.K. result strikes me as a strange one given my ardent belief that we are living in revolutionary times. Not that anyone seems to notice all that much. Or that time might be running short.
Even so, UKIP is hardly a radical party, unless one considers challenging the sacred belief of the ruling parties in the European Union radical. Nigel Farage was an appealing fellow with extraordinary intelligence, insight, courage, and oratorical gifts and he made a point of not associating with Marine Le Pen.
The Conservatives proposed nothing of particular merit that I know of. (I didn't follow the details of the campaigns, let it be known). The only thing "bold" out of them was a commitment to a referendum on the E.U. which was, it seems to me, forced on Cameron who would rather have spent three weeks in a rowboat with Al Sharpton than risk a British withdrawal from the E.U.
The question then is why the abandonment of the excellent Nigel Garage and the ardent rush to the "safe" but flaccid center? Quirks of the electoral system aside, had the U.K. electorate been of a different mind, a vastly different result would have been served up on the current lot.
As I continually complain, European voters simply just will not support nationalist parties, will not be energized on immigration, and will not step back from the madness of the welfare state even as it is in its death throes of fiscal and monetary excess.
Yesterday's election can perhaps be seen as yet another manifestation of Britons and Europeans clinging to normality at all costs. The alternative is an unbelievably painful recognition of what a ghastly mistake they have made to dabble in the mass importation of third-world parasites, benefits tourists, grifters, and holy warriors who spit in their faces because of their weakness and naivete. Alternatively, the Treason Parties continue to deliver on the theft of resources from the prudent and productive and voters cannot bring themselves to risk cutting off the flow of gravy.
Oops! Sounds like it was a "Shooting & Cartooning" contest.
My husband and I had the "interesting" fortune of attending Pamela Geller's Mohammed Cartoon event in Garland, Texas, Sunday night, May 3rd, 2015. As you probably know, Bosch Fawstin was the double prize winner, making my entry a loser. (No worries, though, I'm already planning next year's entry and it's sure to be a winner.)
It was a very long night, with no physical injuries to either of us, just some stretching of our patience (towards its limits). Monday afternoon, after the long trip back to Garland, we retrieved our vehicle. Immediately we rushed back towards D/FW airport to get my husband off on a business trip he wasn't actually sure he could complete until finally stepping into the terminal in the nick of time.
Once I got back home - alone - it all hit me fairly hard, but in a way that quite surprised me. I was what I can only describe as despondent. I took a couple of days, during which I talked to my husband of course, but only briefly, after all he was "soldiering on" so I needed to as well.
But as my mood refused to budge I wondered, "Where online might I find people who've been in stressful situations, events that didn't go the way they'd planned...yet they'd made it through a little bit wiser for it?" And so I sought and recieved some timely advice from readers over at westernrifleshooters.wordpress.com.
I got my thoughts on the totality of Sunday's events together only after letting those readers' good advice sink in. I put it in a video for my YouTube channel which is as much confession as it may be advice for others. YouTube is where I keep up with many of the issues I'm interested in and so it's a natural place for me to share a lot of my "deeper thoughts" these days (sometimes attempting a tounge-in-cheek delivery style). I hope you'll let me know what you think of my thinking.
...is proving to be a bit more complicated than I expected.
First, there’s that whole getting-out-of-bed thing. It used to be so automatic. So effortless! Now it seems to require the assistance of a crane. Well, perhaps all I need is practice.
Then there’s the work with the animals. I don’t remember them being nearly this demanding. I can’t step away from the dogs without igniting a fury of yipping, barking, and ceremonial dancing. The cats are no better; when I cease petting them, they extend their previously cute little paws and sink their claws into my arm. Clearly, this must be made to cease, but how?
Getting the C.S.O. out the door – no, she hasn’t retired, and says at every opportunity that she intends never to do so, ever – is a multi-stage process, too. I never participated in her choices of garb, jewelry, or perfume before this; why does she expect it now? And since when is it my responsibility to see to it that she has all her required baggage in the car before she embarks?
But once those chores are behind me, the real fun begins. Straightening up – I never realized before this just how untidy we are, or how profligately the animals shed. Maybe the exhaustion of a day’s work blinded me to it. This very morning I picked three dog hairs off the couch alone. I must speak to Rufus and Sophie about this. (Yes, to both of them: the hairs were that nondescript gray that conceals the identity of the offender.) But my labors didn’t end there, oh, no. Just how long had we gone without arranging the contents of the freezer by principal ingredient and volume? And why have we neglected to label the kitchen drawers and cabinets, so we could easily locate the items we need? What laziness!
The lawn is a disgrace. Innumerable leaves of grass out there are 15% higher than the Ortho-approved standard. Either my lawn tractor is going seriously out of spec, or it was never in-spec in the first place and I hadn’t noticed. I’ll have to see to the deviants with a cuticle scissors.
Why can’t the mailman be precise about his deliveries? Yesterday it was 12:45. The day before it was 12:37. And the day before that it was 1:15. Don’t these people know how hard it is to live an orderly existence when the mail is desynchronized from everything else? It could make a man cranky.
Well, at least the major items are out of the way for the morning. I suppose I can kick back for a while now, perhaps do a little reading...but...what’s this? The traffic cameras have revealed a pothole on the LIE, just west of exit 57? Dear God, there’s simply no rest for the weary. I’ll get back to you later, Gentle Reader.
(Now where did I leave the bag of asphalt patch and the heavy tamper?)
Have you noticed how many persons – how many supposed Americans – have come out against freedom of speech lately? The media are almost unanimous against it. The following example is typical:
Looks like Pamela Geller will get her wish: More dead Americans at the hands of radical Muslims. Hell, the hatemonger finally even got ISIS to pay attention to her.
Last week Geller — whose repulsive anti-Muslim ad campaign caused the MTA to ban all religious, opinion and political ads — held a $10,000 contest in Texas. The aim? To draw caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, which she knows is forbidden by most Muslims and frowned upon by the rest.
The result? Two violent radical Muslims opened fire on the group, and the shooters ended up dead at the hands of the police. Yesterday ISIS claimed credit and vowed to kill more Americans.
Violence and its ugly brother, violent protest, is the lowest form of human expression and runs counter to what most of the great religious and philosophical prophets, from Jesus to Muhammad to Martin Luther King to Mahatma Gandhi, preached.
But so is hate-filled propaganda against any one religion. Geller, like ISIS and al Qaeda, revel in hate and nothing would make any of them happier than to be the catalyst for the killing of hundreds of innocent Americans to prove a point. Geller would be a hero to the hateful. Damn the cost in innocent lives, damn the heartache.
So if Muslim savages run amok murdering innocent Americans, it will be Pamela Geller’s fault for offending them! Amazing! Does this principle apply to domestic violence? If she says something that offends him, and he strikes – or kills – her for it, is her injury or death “her fault?” Or is that different somehow?
But perhaps that’s a bridge we shouldn’t cross, being civilized and all. (I omit any Muslims that happen to be in the audience.) If memory serves, the First Amendment was enacted with a particular purpose: to protect the freedom of speech of the press. It looks to your humble commentator as if a lot of “journalists” feel they don’t need it any longer. (Let’s pass in silence over the inclusion of Muhammad, seventh-century fantasist, poseur, warlord, slaver, multiple adulterer, and pedophile, in the ranks of “great religious and philosophical prophets.”)
Even Fox News, supposedly a media bastion of American principles, is giving space to such sentiments:
O’Reilly burnished his own anti-jihadist credentials as he said, “Insulting the entire Muslim world is stupid… It does not advance the cause of liberty or get us any closer to defeating the savage jihad.”
In fact, O’Reilly argued that it actually “hurts the cause” to fight jihad, and Laura Ingraham agreed with him that it isn’t “beneficial.” Neither of them discounted the importance of the free speech, but as far as O’Reilly’s concerned, that’s “not in play” here.
Oh? Why isn’t freedom of speech “in play” here? Does O’Reilly even understand the concept?
Sean [Hannity] had Pamela Geller on with the infamous Muslim cleric Anjem Choudary to discuss whether Geller should be put to death for organizing a cartoon contest.
Yes, you read that correctly.
ISIS has of course, vowed to slaughter Geller and “everyone who houses her events,” and “gives her a platform to spill her filth.”
The New York Daily News reported Wednesday night that ISIS said in a posting on a message board that it was sending “all our Lions to achieve her slaughter.”
“Our aim was the khanzeer (swine) Pamela Geller and to show her that we don’t care what land she hides in or what sky shields her,” it said.
Interestingly, Geller told Hannity, the FBI and Homeland Security have not been in touch with her in the wake of these threats.
Choudary argued there’s a difference between cartoons of Mickey Mouse and cartoons of Muhammad, and said Geller went in “knowing full well” many Muslims consider blasphemy an issue worthy of the death penalty. Hannity went off and shouted, “You want her to die!”
Choudary said Geller should be put before a court and tried, and she would end up punished. Geller shot back, “To blame me and say that my cartoons are controversial… murdering cartoonists is controversial.”
Not surprisingly, they ended up getting in a huge shouting match...
(Geller told him to stop interrupting and at one point said “I know you’re used to stepping over women”), and Choudary told her she “knew the consequences.”
I have no knowledge of whether anyone, in any public, recorded forum, has asked Choudary whether he regards HAMAS and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, whether Jews are the descendants of apes and pigs, or whether shari’a is the only correct law for Mankind (or whether he himself has ever raped a camel or fellated a goat). Such inquiries are generally considered “inappropriate”...meaning risky.
It is vital that Islam’s proponents be compelled to expose themselves and their beliefs. It takes both determination and skill; neither alone is sufficient. Consider how shifty were the Muslim participants in this interview:
Rod Dreher: Do you believe that homosexuals convicted in a sharia court should be killed, or otherwise punished physically?
Mohamed Elmougy: I don’t condone homosexuality. I have a lot of friends, a lot of people who work for me, just so you know. I don’t go kill them. But, you know, I don’t condone what they do outside of work, so long as it’s something not in front of me. So do I condone the sharia? We don’t apologize for our religion. If that is what our religion says, we certainly accept it open-heartedly.
Rod Dreher: But what do you think *should* be the authority. That’s what I’m asking. In an ideal situation, would you like to see sharia law be the basis for law in this country, and how would you reconcile that –
Tod Robberson: Or put it another way. In this country, the law of man takes precedence over the law of God. In your opinion, is that the way it should be?
[garbled answer by heavily accented man, saying something to effect that the law is flexible from country to country, but there are some things that we don’t have the authority to change.]
[Ghassan – did not get his last name]: President George Bush feels that he is inspired by God, and based on that he makes his policies. He made that known to us. [crosstalk] President Bush told us that law made by man is not good enough law, that we should be following God’s law.
Rod Dreher: Just describe to me your view, the Islamic view, of sharia. What role should sharia play in this society?
Mohamed Elmougy: [garbled] I don’t sit up all night thinking what the role of sharia needs to be. All I can tell you is that we as American Muslims, living in a non-Muslim country, are ordered to follow the rules of the country that we live in, no matter how much we agree or disagree with. So do I go after you if you’re homosexual, to try to kill you today? No. We haven’t seen that.
So I think to go focus on that and to leave all the other good things that American Muslims are part of, and that the religion is talking about, and only focus on things that to you sound or feel strange is just not the correct approach. Forget paranoid, it’s just not the correct approach. And it does nothing, as I said, but alienate our children from the society that they’re going to be living in, and die in.
By contrast, consider the following exchange – posted once before – between a young Muslim college student and conservative speaker David Horowitz:
When compelled, whether incidentally or by their own foolishness, to expose themselves and their vile creed to the world, Muslims show us the true face of evil – and it has nothing to do with Pamela Geller or anyone else staging a “Draw Muhammad” contest. If Islam were not styled a “religion,” it would be regarded as no better than Nazism, with which it shares many specific tenets. (Nota Bene: This is also true of left-liberalism. As Jonah Goldberg once asked an audience of left-liberal college students, “Apart from the genocide, what don’t you like about Nazism?” Of course, many on the Left would endorse genocide on the basis of one’s political leanings. After all, “re-education” isn’t guaranteed to work.)
But media luminaries such as Bill O’Reilly proclaim that "Just because you can say it doesn't mean you should say it…It is stupid. It accomplishes nothing." His face decorates millions of television screens nightly. Surely we “should” defer to his wisdom, only say what he thinks we “should” say...or think.
There is a word in all discussions of this matter whose significance is critical: the word should.
Should is routinely used about consequences: If we do this, then this should happen, or inversely, this other thing should not happen. When we’re discussing a physical process – say, the operation of a machine – should expresses our confidence in our knowledge of the applicable physical laws.
Machines, of course, are non-sentient. They lack free will. But what of men? Men assumed to possess free will and a knowledge of the law? Men who, feeling that something of importance to them has been “insulted,” decide to take up weapons and commit murder? How does should apply to them?
Megyn Kelly has a few thoughts for you:
In discussions of individuals’ rights, including their right of free expression, there’s no naughtier word than should. It’s time to banish it from all discussions about Islam. Should never applies to whether speech is free. It never applies to any individual’s exercise of his rights, for the consequences, as long as they involve no violation of anyone’s rights, are irrelevant. I’ll allow should in one specific context: What should civilized people do to expunge this seventh-century madness from our societies before it spills still more blood?
John Hawkins on one particular bad idea, namely, that "Diversity is all about skin color":
The only real value of diversity is that it interjects new ways of thinking about and approaching a problem. If you take that away, diversity is meaningless and may even do more harm than good. If you don’t have diversity of thought, then you don’t have diversity.
Hawkins lists four others. All right on the money, especially the point about public debt.
Indeed, two premises underwrite Irish, American and EU policy towards terror and Islam. The first holds that Islam is one of the world’s “great religions,” implying moral equivalence with other cultures. The second premise holds that Islam is a “religion of peace,” an assumption that ignores jihad as war, denies that Islam is at war with America and the democratic West.
If Islamic culture, in its Sunni and Shia incarnations, is “great,” how then does the West rationalize polygamy, misogyny, slavery, child trafficking, kidnapping, stoning, beheadings, crucifixions, capital homophobia, cultural vandalism, summary execution of infidels and apostates, terror in all its incarnations, bloody jihad, and a near universal intolerance that rejects Western values and culture, especially those associated Jews or Christians? How is it that the Muslim Turkish sponsors of the Armenian Genocide are not called to account after a 100 years? How [are] any Islamic state and associated clergy, scholars, mimbers [?], mosques [?], or fellaheen [peasants] “great” by any of these standards?
I'm not sure why mosques and fellahin are included. Basic point is sound, however.
Yes, yes, there I go again, making up words – we pretentious types call them neologisms -- so I can decorate one of my relentlessly boring, hyperintellectual screeds with stuff that will, as Gerard Van Der Leun puts it, “go Boing! in the brain.” Well, Gentle Reader, if you’re a regular, you’re already aware of that little proclivity of mine and have resolved to endure it for the sake of an off-chance at some low-grade humor. If you’re new here...are you sure you’re feeling quite all right? What on Earth brought you here, anyway?
Anyway, a nice fluffy neologism now and then will sometimes allow me to avert a fit of screaming, mug-crushing, soul-curdling rage, such as the one that began to creep over me when I encountered this article:
So many disputes in our liberal democratic society hinge on the tension between inequality and fairness: between groups, between sexes, between individuals, and increasingly between families.
There are your first warning signs: “inequality” and “fairness.” If you weren’t yet aware that you’re about to read a Leftist tract, you’re surely on notice of it by now.
The power of the family to tilt equality hasn’t gone unnoticed, and academics and public commentators have been blowing the whistle for some time. Now, philosophers Adam Swift and Harry Brighouse have felt compelled to conduct a cool reassessment.
Swift in particular has been conflicted for some time over the curious situation that arises when a parent wants to do the best for her child but in the process makes the playing field for others even more lopsided.
‘I got interested in this question because I was interested in equality of opportunity,’ he says.
‘I had done some work on social mobility and the evidence is overwhelmingly that the reason why children born to different families have very different chances in life is because of what happens in those families.’
So far, not too ominous, though we should remember that when a “philosopher” takes interest in a natural institution – i.e., one that arose before the State and needs nothing from the State to sustain itself – he’s highly unlikely to approach it from a non-interventionist point of view. But we haven’t gotten to the good part yet:
According to Swift, from a purely instrumental position the answer is straightforward.
‘One way philosophers might think about solving the social justice problem would be by simply abolishing the family. If the family is this source of unfairness in society then it looks plausible to think that if we abolished the family there would be a more level playing field.’
There’s that “social justice” chimera again! It appears in many places these days, but it’s indispensable in a tirade about “inequality.” (I did warn you.) But wait: there’s more!
It seems that from both the child’s and adult’s point of view there is something to be said about living in a family way. This doesn’t exactly parry the criticism that families exacerbate social inequality. For this, Swift and Brighouse needed to sort out those activities that contribute to unnecessary inequality from those that don't.
‘What we realised we needed was a way of thinking about what it was we wanted to allow parents to do for their children, and what it was that we didn’t need to allow parents to do for their children, if allowing those activities would create unfairnesses for other people’s children’.
The test they devised was based on what they term ‘familial relationship goods’; those unique and identifiable things that arise within the family unit and contribute to the flourishing of family members.
For Swift, there’s one particular choice that fails the test.
‘Private schooling cannot be justified by appeal to these familial relationship goods,’ he says. ‘It’s just not the case that in order for a family to realise these intimate, loving, authoritative, affectionate, love-based relationships you need to be able to send your child to an elite private school.’
And these...persons are not finished with the family. Everything that occurs within the family is to be evaluated and potentially banned or restricted:
‘The evidence shows that the difference between those who get bedtime stories and those who don’t—the difference in their life chances—is bigger than the difference between those who get elite private schooling and those that don’t,’ he says.... ‘You have to allow parents to engage in bedtime stories activities, in fact we encourage them because those are the kinds of interactions between parents and children that do indeed foster and produce these [desired] familial relationship goods....We could prevent elite private schooling without any real hit to healthy family relationships, whereas if we say that you can’t read bedtime stories to your kids because it’s not fair that some kids get them and others don’t, then that would be too big a hit at the core of family life....We should accept that lots of stuff that goes on in healthy families—and that our theory defends—will confer unfair advantage,’ he says.
I added the italics in the above.
Take a moment to shudder while I fetch more coffee...no, I think I’ll make it decaf this time.
In Screwtape Proposes A Toast, the incomparable C. S. Lewis mentions an aspect of tyranny that has a long and venerable lineage:
What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence — moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how “democracy” (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods? You remember how one of the Greek Dictators (they called them “tyrants” then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of grain, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level: all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus Tyrants could practise, in a sense, “democracy.” But now “democracy” can do the same work without any tyranny other than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks.
(Remember that one of the other traits of the Greek Tyrants was their penchant for enlisting philosophers as advisors. Concerning notable philosophers of that period, Plato believed that infants should be taken from their parents shortly after birth to be reared and educated exclusively by the State. Aristotle was of the opinion that the great majority of men are unfit for freedom – that they are natural slaves.)
The insertion of the State into the family unit to prevent the emergence of “inequality” is a central feature of Marxism. Here’s the brilliant Dystopic on the subject:
Some time ago, I suggested that Socialism’s greatest flaw is in its inability to scale. Two people who get married share resources, money, and expertise. This operates along principles not terribly different from Socialism. Extend this further. Many families are composes of several generations, uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins, etc… and there is a degree of sharing among them. There was a time where one’s retirement plan was the family.
Indeed, my wife’s grandparents moved in with her parents. They watched the children during the day, contributing what they could (and saving child care costs), in exchange for room and board. But since this was a family unit, it wasn’t accounted like that. It was expected that each contributed what they were able, and took what they needed. Anyone who contributed less than their ability, or took more than their share, would face the wrath of the rest of the family. No matter how Marxist this sounds in theory, it worked well, because the scale was small. Everyone knew everyone else. If someone was slacking or becoming a glutton, it was obvious to all.
Now, the reason I point this is out is not to sing the praises of Marxism, but rather to point out something many on the Right fail to understand: Marxism regards the Family unit as competition. Indeed, Marxists are jealous of the family, because it operates more efficiently and less tyrannically than Socialism does. Good families stick together and support one another in ways Socialist Revolutionaries could only dream about. We might call families Communal instead of Socialist, because families actually have some chance of working in the long term.
Families, by and large, function well – not because political Marxism is actually a practicable, scaled-up version of family life, but because the bonds of affection, interdependence, and mutual responsibility that join family members are clear, strong, and well internalized. But Marxists will hear no such objection to their schemes. Instead, they jump directly to their endgame: Man must be remade. The New Man will be a natural socialist, incapable of prioritizing his own needs and desires, or those of a loved one, above those of a faceless stranger...or those of the State. If the family stands in the way, then so much for the family! It must go...for the greater good, of course.
A commenter to Sara Noble’s Independent Sentinel notes the following:
And this comes at the same time that some Statist flunkies in Buffalo, NY are advocating for public boarding schools. It’s not a conspiracy theory if they really are out to take your children.
What’s that? You’re shuddering again? Well, I do need more decaf.
What's that you say? You want very intelligent people in government? You, sir, are a hazard to the body politic. What on Earth are you doing at Eternity Road? Don't you know what sort of mischief smart people get up to when entrusted with power? Didn't we get enough of a demonstration from the Clintons? Do you really want a reprise of that disaster?
No. No smart people in office. Please! Smart people are too good at reinterpreting their marching orders and rationalizing their way around moral or Constitutional constraints on their authority. If any of the Founding Fathers was a genius, Thomas Jefferson was -- yet he, most libertarian of them all, violated the Constitution's constraints on federal power several times in his first term of office. He rationalized his transgressions as "necessary" and "practical." So highly did Congress, and the people generally, think of him that he always carried the day.
High intelligence is almost always accompanied by a high opinion of oneself. He who thinks that well of himself is all too easily led to see himself as above the rules that bind others. If you were looking for a capsule summary of Eliot Spitzer's downfall, you have it now.
What Americans should seek in their public officials is men who can understand the duties and limitations of their offices, and will cleave to them unswervingly. This demands a routinier, an "organization man," a dullard. It's not the right billet for a genius. Very bright people chafe at taking orders, even from brighter, more knowledgeable people; they're always looking for an angle, a way to finesse their way out of doing what they've been told.
The duties of an elected official are spelled out in either the Constitution of the United States, or some similar charter subordinate to it. The powers that attach to whatever government his office pertains to are spelled out in a similar fashion, albeit not always with the degree of specificity a libertarian-conservative would like. If those rules and constraints are seriously meant, then we don't want our officeholders looking for ways to chisel around the edges. We want good, solid dullards, schooled from the Bible and the handle of a broom, who'll do as they're told, without the slightest trace of creativity.
We don't often get such men, these days.
Men who style themselves “philosophers” are the most arrogant of all pseudointellectuals. Plato – he who proposed that form precedes substance, that “horseness” is prior and superior to the horse! – is their standard-bearer. But worse by far than their arrogance about their intellects is their lust for power – their ardor for the wherewithal to impose their dictates upon others willy-nilly. The advocates of freedom – the Socrateses, Ciceros, and Ayn Rands among them – are rare and precious.
Of course, no self-nominated “philosopher” would take more than sneering notice of my contempt. He’d meet it with a single, scornfully raised eyebrow and a slight curl of the lip. Never mind that I could easily demolish any of his ideas, original or derivative, that aren’t rooted in the teachings of either Socrates or Christ. He’s a “philosopher,” I’m not, and that’s what really matters.
Now about your children...hm. Those shudders have persisted quite some time, haven’t they? Perhaps you should see your doctor...or your local guns-and-ammo salesman. Present trends continuing, you’re guaranteed to need one or the other soon enough.
The winners of this shameful display are obvious, as they always are after these riots. Local thieves, gangsters, and thugs; bourgeois white “anarchists” out on a lark; junior-high posers indulging adult-sanctioned destruction; well-heeled black politicians fanning the flames and leveraging the violence for career advancement; race-baiting vultures like Al Sharpton, and the sensationalist national media all benefitted. Most important, the false narrative of a national conspiracy of racist cops itching to murder innocent black men was yet again perpetuated by race hustlers and their progressive enablers.
After reading yesterday’s tirade, longtime reader Eskyman commented, in part, as follows:
That mean old bell curve tells no lies- though I remember (in a previous life) hearing of some psychologists back in the 1920s who gave IQ tests to Australian Aborigines; they interpreted their results as, "them guys is dumber than rocks!"
What the psychologists didn't know was that the Aborigines had no concept of passing time. There's "now" and "then" and "dreamtime." Most Aborigines were (and are) pretty unreliable on the concept of number too, and anything over 3 is uncertain.
On the other hand, if those psychologists were dropped in the middle of the Great Sandy Desert, I wonder how long they would last; no matter where they placed on the Bell Curve, it wouldn't help keep them alive.
All quite correct, and a perfect launching pad for a disquisition on the nature of measurable, abstract, generalized intelligence and its significance in a post-subsistence society.
I’m absolute death on the phrase “emotional intelligence” and similar attempts to bastardize the concept. “Emotional intelligence” is a perfect parallel to “social justice:” the first word destroys the meaning of the second one, leaving an empty phrase into which some activist can pour whatever sentiments his/her/their/its agenda requires.
Etymology makes plain why intelligence means what it does and nothing else. It comes from the Latin verb intelligere, “to understand.” But understanding is about the causes of things – and one doesn’t truly understand unless one can abstract from specific cases to a general rule, and then use that rule to analyze other specific cases and predict what will come of them.
Eskyman’s observations about the superior survivability of Aborigines in the Great Sandy Desert highlight the essential difference between the Abo context and that of a typical contemporary society. The former is a subsistence context, in which survival imperatives are immediate and paramount at all times. The latter is a far different sort of place; as a friend of mine once said of American life, “Unless you’re down – unless you haven’t a quarter with which to buy your beans – life is a game.” That statement applies to nearly every human society extant in our time. (For those with qualms about the price of beans, the context of that statement was Rockland County, New York in the fabled year of 1968.)
Consider life as a game for just a moment:
Every game has a set of rules.
Some rules, when followed, lead to success on the part of the follower.
Some rules, when violated, impose a penalty on the violator.
Though a player can “lose,” he will survive to play again (notable exception for Russian Roulette).
Now consider the nature of a rule:
It applies to a particular class of contexts.
It defines a particular class of player actions.
It specifies the consequences such an action will evoke in such a context.
A rule is an abstract statement about the operation of cause and effect within the relevant context. A player must have at least sufficient capacity to understand such a rule – sufficient intelligence -- to play the game without courting embarrassment.
A humorous counterexample: the old prank-game “Grapes.” This is typically pulled by two “players” on an unenlightened third party. For the sake of sheer blind variety, let’s call the pranksters Smith and Jones, and the third party Davis. The gag goes thus:
Smith: Say, Jones, how about a quick game of Grapes? Jones: Sure, why not? You go first. Smith: Okay: avocado. Jones: Elephant. Smith: Daiquiri. Jones: Confession. Smith: Hah! Grapes! I win!
(Davis, of course, is looking on in total confusion. Perhaps Smith and Jones play another round or two, with equally incomprehensible “plays” and “winner.” Then comes the payoff.)
Smith: Say, Davis, ever played Grapes? Davis: Uh, no, but— Smith: It’s a lot of fun. Want to give it a try? Davis: Well, I don’t really understand— Smith: C’mon, you’re smart, you’ll pick it right up. You go first. Davis: Uh...okay: avocado. Smith: Hah! Grapes! I win!
(At this point Davis is feeling completely lost. Smith urges him to try again, but this time Smith goes first.)
Smith: Avocado. Davis: Wait a minute, didn’t I just— Smith: C’mon, it’s your move, play! Davis: (flustered) Grapes. I win. Smith: (frowns) No, no, that’s illegal.
Got the idea? There are no rules. It would take a significant number of rounds for a person of average intelligence (one who’s unaware that he’s being pranked, of course) to work that out. A person of high intelligence might deduce the nature of the thing more quickly, but not necessarily, for a rule-free contest is insoluble by the methods of intelligence.
Only rule-based societies value intelligence in their common participants, for it has value nowhere else.
There are higher and lower levels of abstraction, but all center on rules: their formation (inductive reasoning), their use (deductive reasoning), and the testing of the former by experiments designed with the use of the latter.
(A slight digression. Nonhuman creatures have exhibited no provable capacity for abstraction. The sole possible exception I know of is the dolphin. The late Gregory Bateson related a tale of one particularly bright dolphin that appeared able to grasp the abstract concept new after an extended series of both conditioned-in responses and subsequent contradictions thereof. Though the story is suggestive, the effect proved irreproducible in other dolphins, and thus must be classified as an interesting occurrence, no more.)
Though one can be “under the gun” and required to solve a problematic situation swiftly in hope of great gain or at the peril of great loss, in the most important situations relevant to ordinary life in a post-subsistence society, intellectual height is more a matter of accuracy than speed. In other words, we normally have time enough for persons of ordinary intelligence – call it IQ 100 – to solve ordinary problems susceptible to cause-and-effect reasoning; what matters is the accuracy of the answer rather than how swiftly it’s found.
The scientist must possess facility with both inductive and deductive reasoning. He gathers data about some interesting observable phenomenon, notes patterns in its occurrence and absence, and formulates a hypothesis about the causal relation – the rule – that governs it. That hypothesized rule must abstract the required features of the initial conditions – the context required by the phenomenon – and the cause – the stimulus required – to produce the effect predicted by the hypothesis. The hypothesis then implies the consequences that would follow from reproducing the relevant features of the contexts in which the phenomena were observed, adding the required cause, and waiting an adequate time for the effect predicted by the rule. Should such an experiment produce the predicted results, it would constitute a confirmation of the hypothesis, but should it fail to do so, the hypothesis would be deemed to have been disproved. The procedure, first proposed by Francis Bacon, is called scientific method, and constitutes the one and only method by which one can demonstrate one’s knowledge.
The engineer, by contrast, usually works with well-confirmed rules about the physical world arrived at by generation after generation of scientists. He applies those rules to produce desired effects, for whereas the product of the scientist is knowledge, the product of the engineer is particular effects reproducible on demand. (When an engineer generates new knowledge, he implicitly crosses the boundary between the disciplines and functions, for a time, as a scientist. The categories are about orientations and applicable procedures, not about particular persons, degrees, or some other sort of “guild membership.”)
The above surveys why students of human cognition believe that intelligence is abstract. Two other characteristics integral to it remain to be surveyed.
We believe that intelligence is measurable because the results of intelligence tests – IQ tests – are highly reproducible and correlate well with the testee’s subsequent success in abstraction-oriented labors. Quibbles about “language limitations” and “cultural bindings” are easily addressed with test variants that de-emphasize linguistic skills and frame their puzzles in terms for the testee’s cultural matrix. The tests’ shared characteristic is their rule-based nature: they probe the testee’s ability to induce the rules of the puzzles presented, and to apply them deductively in comparable situations.
We believe that intelligence is generalized -- i.e., that intellectual facility can be applied to a wide variety of problems dissimilar on their faces – because the tests probe for such generality, because the possessors of high intelligence (as indicated by the tests) demonstrate such facility in their courses through life (albeit perhaps limited by perceptual or learning disabilities of particular kinds), and because abstraction itself is a generalizing process. Thus, there are both theoretical and practical reasons for believing it.
The detractors and denigrators of intelligence as conventionally understood are unsatisfied by the above, of course. There’s no way of mollifying them, for they are uninterested in evidence. Their agenda is to erect a pseudo-standard of the sort implied by phrases such as “emotional intelligence:” one that negates all possibility of measurement and destroys any distinction enjoyed by athletes of the mind. It’s a form of radical egalitarianism premised on the notion that denying a thing is equivalent to disproving it. It deserves no respect whatsoever.
The subject is large and can’t be exhausted in a single essay. Nor am I a high expert in the cognitive sciences, able to give you a glimpse of the frontiers of investigation and the horizons of knowledge therein. But the above should suffice to establish a foundation from which laymen can talk comprehensibly about intelligence and its effects on the world. It should further enable us to dismiss the shrieks of those unwilling to accept that something real, substantial, and inherently valuable undergirds the higher achievements of societies where intelligence is recognized and rewarded, such as the United States of America.
What Sam Francis once predicted, the age of Ethnopolitics, is upon us. Naked racial self-interest substitutes for even the pretense of objective policy analysis. The “New Democrats” of the Bill Clinton era are banished forever, as the Democratic Establishment is now openly aligned with the anti-police and anti-white left wing radicals they once rejected.
The title of this piece is shamelessly stolen from Neal Boortz’s book of that name. I found that particular book unimpressive, mainly a compendium of soft libertarianisms. There was little original thought in it. It was still of some value; the freedom philosophy can always use another popular voice. My theft pertains to the sort of thing I’ve been writing lately, particularly on the ever-hazardous topic of race.
We’ve been experiencing race riots. They’ve been massively destructive. They’ve inflicted injuries on both rioters, police, and the uninvolved. They’ve thrown the afflicted locales into social, economic, and political chaos, at least for a time. Yet despite the undiluted racial category of the rioters, the media have resolutely refrained from calling them race riots.
One or two other low-gauge Internet commentators have noted the correlations and have dared to speak them aloud. Here’s one:
Then there’s the other narrative, the one no one dares say for fear of being labeled a monster. On the television you see young black males mugging for the cameras as they commit pointless acts of mayhem. You see blacks running from burning stores with arms full of goods. Of course, the liquor store is robbed and you see blacks carrying away the liquor and beer. These scenes are narrated by the same old voices saying the same old things. To spice it up, they interview a local, who mumbles through the interview, confirming everything you see on TV.
This, of course, is the simple reality of places like Baltimore, Detroit, East St. Louis and so on. When the government banned private discrimination in in the 1960’s, whites fled the cities to avoid having to send their kids to school with blacks. Responsible and intelligent blacks tried to keep it together, but they threw in the towel in the 80’s and 90’s when crack turned American cities into war zones. They headed for the suburbs to live with the whites. What’s left in these urban reservations are low-IQ violent nitwits.
Of course, no one is allowed to say any of this in public. Racial solidarity requires blacks, who know better, to defend their dimwitted brothers rioting in the streets. Liberal whites think there’s profit in the riots so they cast about for a black hat on whom to pin the blame. Crime thinkers like John Derbyshire believe that the truth of things will eventually will out. I think John is right that reality will always win eventually, but I know I’ll never live to see it. Everyone alive today is too deeply invested in the myth that if we just turn the right knobs and push the right buttons, biology will be overcome. Fantasy is powerful stuff.
Z Man is probably wiser than I in his decision to go by an anonymizing Internet moniker. It’s not my style and never has been; besides, I want my readers, whoever and wherever they may be, to know that I stand behind my words. If I’m proved wrong, I’ll admit it. This is a subject on which I’d like to be proved wrong. I just don’t think there’s much likelihood of it.
The reason for my skepticism is the normal distribution.
Here is a visual depiction of the normal distribution, perhaps better known as the “bell curve:”
...where σ (the lower-case Greek letter sigma) is the usual symbol for the distribution’s standard deviation. The standard deviation is a reliable predictor of what percentage of the distribution will fall within a particular band around the horizontal axis of symmetry of the curve, which passes through the arithmetic mean. The mean indicates what it always does: 50% of the points under the curve lie to the left of that axis, and 50% lie to the right of it. (In the first graphic above, the mean has been arbitrarily taken to be 0, though this is merely for simplicity in the depiction of the curve.)
As for the use of the standard deviation:
68% of the points under the curve lie within 1 standard deviation of the axis;
95% of the points under the curve lie within 2 standard deviations of the axis;
99.7% of the points under the curve lie within 3 standard deviations of the axis.
Further than that from the axis lies very little indeed.
The important point about the normal distribution is its normality. Virtually every human characteristic is distributed among humans according to this formula -- not because we want it that way, but because the laws of probability have decreed that it shall be so. Among those characteristics are:
height;
weight;
intelligence;
strength;
speed;
agility;
propensity for aggression and lawlessness.
More, there are some notable correlations among those factors, and between each of those factors and the three anthropologically agreed-upon races of Mankind.
For as long as general intelligence – i.e., the ability to reason from abstract propositions when presented with specific cases in a relevant context -- has been measured, the scores of the races have fallen into a particular relation:
All three curves have been normal distributions;
The Caucasian race has exhibited a mean of 100.
The Mongolian race has exhibited a mean of 107.
The Negro race has exhibited a mean of 88.
The standard deviation of those three normal distributions / bell curves is 15 points.
Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray dared to discuss this openly, despite the enormous pressure put upon them by other researchers in the cognitive sciences to keep their conclusions to themselves. Those two unusually accomplished, bright, and candid men published anyway, expecting that controversy, dissension, and vilification would follow...and they got it in spades. But what none of their critics were able to do was to refute their conclusions.
The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites. The least intelligent ten percent of whites have IQs below 81; forty percent of blacks have IQs that low. Only one black in six is more intelligent than the average white; five whites out of six are more intelligent than the average black. These differences show in every test of general cognitive ability that anyone, of any race or nationality, has yet been able to devise. They are reflected in countless everyday situations. “Life is an IQ test.”
Poor John Derbyshire, an eloquent conservative and a mathematically able man inclined toward stating a conclusion when it stares him in the face, has been so viciously vilified for noting the above that he’s become anathema in conservative circles. He failed to comply with Heinlein’s Law:
Being Right Too Soon Is Socially Unacceptable.
Yet his numbers are accurate and his conclusions flow from them.
There is another correlation with race that our media refuse to allow us to draw, mainly by suppressing the data that would lead us to it: the correlation between race and propensity for lawlessness.
You will not see American Mongolians as rioters. You’ll see very few American Caucasians destroying property or looting stores. You will see an overwhelming preponderance of American Negroes at such an event. Some will even allow themselves to be filmed doing it.
Are all American Negroes willing lawbreakers? Of course not. But the bell curve seems to have put a greater fraction of them reasonably close to the mean that when given a rationale, that fraction will riot, burn, and loot. There will be some inclined to help the police to restore order. However, as The Z Man notes in his above-cited essay:
Responsible and intelligent blacks tried to keep it together, but they threw in the towel in the 80’s and 90’s when crack turned American cities into war zones. They headed for the suburbs to live with the whites. What’s left in these urban reservations are low-IQ violent nitwits.
In other words, they did what sensible, adequately perceptive people do when confronted with a dangerous situation they’ve decided is beyond their control: they fled those environs. The ones that remained there are the lawless – the “low-IQ nitwits” – who have so narrow a reasoning horizon that they cannot or will not see that their actions will leave them worse off than before.
For the purposes of this tirade, please take a collectivity to be a group of persons who share some observable characteristic and who exhibit behavioral cohesion. Following from that, the social acceptability of any collectivity will depend upon its discipline in adhering to social norms. Such discipline can only come from two places:
From within the collectivity itself;
From outside it.
In the former case, there will be minimal tension between that collectivity and the larger society. In the latter, the collectivity will be deemed “unruly,” in need of “restraint,” perhaps requiring it to be “civilized.” If the measures put to that end are sufficient, the collectivity might eventually shed its unruly ways and thereafter be accepted equally in the larger society. If not, there are only two possible outcomes:
Separation of the collectivity from the larger society;
Warfare, possibly ending in the extermination of the collectivity.
The American Negro collectivity has exhibited cohesion in several ways, but most important for the purposes of this tirade is its observable disinclination to discipline its unruly sub-cohort. The American Left, which dominates the educational system, the communications and entertainment media, and the political elite of both parties, has stood firmly against the external application of effective restraining or civilizing measures to that collectivity.
Draw your own conclusions. I stand by mine.
To suppress a truth is to give it force beyond endurance – Victor Hugo
The true genius of Hillary is that she manages to epitomize every failure of our current political life: the obsessive micro-manipulation of image, the obscene moneygrubbing, the tired cronyism, the entitlement masquerading as sexual equality. Mostly, though, she has no idea where history is taking us, in case you’re wondering at the stupefying platitudes offered up as representative of her thinking.
To those who’ve wondered why these have been infrequent in recent months: I only do them as the Spirit moves me. That hasn’t happened often lately. It happened this morning, immediately after Mass.
I was walking out toward my car when I heard a woman nearby comment on our new parish parking lot. The pavers did a beautiful job, really. The previous one was wavy and heavily cracked. Partly that was because of a lack of supervision. So this time, Father Charlie got a couple of retired civil engineers to oversee the job – and friends, there is nothing more demanding, more minutely specific, more utterly uncivil than a retired Catholic civil engineer. So it came out right.
(No, I didn’t query the paving company about whether they enjoyed the experience. They got paid a fortune; that should make up for the agita those engineers cost them.)
Anyway, my fellow parishioner noted how provision had been made for several “planters:” the little boxes of soil around a tree or a couple of bushes that are often used to break up the starkness of a parking lot. She commented that she’d have liked to see more of them.
My fey side overcame me at that point, Gentle Reader. “You never know where that sort of thing will lead,” I said. “First a few more planters here, then a dais or an outdoor pulpit there, and pretty soon you’ve got kiosks selling T-shirts, expired cosmetics, and stuff ‘As Seen On TV.’”
Apparently my voice carries better than I knew. I got several hundred parishioners laughing with that wisecrack. But none of them appeared offended, thank God.
And there might be a lesson in there, too.
Clerics were once more solemn than not, publicly at least. We’re all familiar with the caricature of the fire-and-brimstone preacher who’s constantly carrying on about the dangers of temptations, Satan’s wiles, and the need to be unsparingly disciplined about yourself. Those are important messages, doubt it not...but they’re not the only messages a good cleric, or a good lay preacher, should deliver.
Father Charlie gave us an example just this morning in his homily. I’m transcribing from memory – it’s considered a gaffe to take actual notes during Mass – but this is my best recall:
President Theodore Roosevelt once told a story that went like this: Two men were engaged in a political discussion. The first, when asked why he was a Republican, replied, “Because my father and grandfather were Republicans.” The second said, “That’s a silly reason. Suppose your father were a horse thief and your grandfather a bank robber. What would you be then?” The first pondered briefly and said, “Then I guess I’d be a Democrat.”
The congregation laughed heartily. Father Charlie added a coda: “Of course, I’ll reverse the parties for the nine o’clock Mass. Always your non-partisan pastor!” That got even more laughs...though I must hope the sentiments of the congregation are more in line with the 7:30 version.
Father Charlie is considered one of Long Island’s best pastors because of his light touch. He’s always in a good humor. I imagine he would be severe with someone who’d just confessed to murder...or horse thievery. But when he preaches, he’s a living example of something C. S. Lewis wrote in The Screwtape Letters:
The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating Pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together on the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme. He gives them in His Church a spiritual year; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before. [From The Screwtape Letters]
And again:
He's a hedonist at heart. All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses are only a facade. Or only like foam on the sea shore. Out at sea, out in His sea, there is pleasure, and more pleasure. He makes no secret of it; at His right hand are "pleasures for evermore". Ugh! I don't think He has the least inkling of that high and austere mystery to which we rise in the Miserific Vision. He's vulgar, Wormwood. He has a bourgeois mind. He has filled His world full of pleasures. There are things for humans to do all day long without His minding in the least—sleeping, washing, eating, drinking, making love, playing, praying, working, Everything has to be twisted before it's any use to us. We fight under cruel disadvantages. Nothing is naturally on our side. [From The Screwtape Letters]
When G. K. Chesterton praised Christianity for its liberality, he amazed many of his readers...because so many clerics of his time and place were humorless scolds! Those clerics were doing the faith the very worst hurt anyone could do it, albeit (probably) unknowingly and unwillingly. The great majority of men are not suited to asceticism, and God would not have it of them. Some are equipped for it – perhaps they even need it – and enter the priesthood. The rest of us live lives designed by God for Man.
To the extent that it’s possible to do so without compromising on the absolutes of the Nicene Creed and the Commandments, it’s best that Christians of all denominations maintain an attitude of good humor, both toward others and for their own sakes, about Christianity itself. Yes, we believe things we cannot prove. They can’t be disproved, either; that’s the nature of a sound religious proposition. But we can maintain our faith without becoming grim, relentlessly disapproving, and generally unpleasant to be around.
In this regard, consider the Militant Atheist of the field. He may “toil;” he probably doesn’t “spin;” but Great God Almighty, is he a revolving son of a bitch! He grants those who differ with him absolutely no peace. He insists that you’re stupid for holding to a belief in God. He strains with all his might and main to convert you...and should he fail, he slathers you with an extra helping of contempt. Who wants to be around someone like that? Even other Militant Atheists probably find him trying company.
I should avoid beating this into the ground. Let’s end on a high and funny note, from the great Tom Lehrer:
Religious institutions could be at risk of losing their tax-exempt status due to their beliefs about marriage if the Supreme Court holds that gay couples have a constitutional right to wed, President Obama’s attorney acknowledged to the Supreme Court today.
“It’s certainly going to be an issue,” Solicitor General Donald Verrilli replied when Justice Samuel Alito asked if schools that support the traditional definition of marriage would have to be treated like schools that once opposed interracial marriage. “I don’t deny that.”
Alito was continuing a line of questioning started by Chief Justice John Roberts. “Would a religious school that has married housing be required to afford such housing to same¬-sex couples?” Roberts had asked.
Verrilli tried to defer to the states on that point, but Roberts pressed him about the significance of the court’s ruling as it might pertain to federal law.
Federal law, as matters stand, overrides state law on matters of discrimination. Should the Court enshrine a “right to marry” that overrides the traditional understanding of marriage as a heterosexual union, Christian churches will be put under pressure to conform. The pressure will be financial at first – loss of tax exemptions is the obvious starting point – but should they refuse to knuckle under, I have no doubt that more forceful measures will be applied.
Nor would I venture to suggest, nor to believe the suggestion, that such pressure would only last “until we can get that prick out of the White House.” Isn’t it pretty to think so, as Hemingway surely would have said. But the IRS has been a loose cannon, endlessly and voraciously swallowing up more power and revenue wherever the prospect has been afforded it, and legal measures to rein it in have almost entirely failed of the purpose.
Now ask yourself, in full candor, whether you would expect the same pressures to be put upon an Islamic congregation.
The Left advances on many fronts. Christianity, with its demand that Man submit to the will of God as revealed in the Noachite Commandments:
Now a man came up to him and said, "Teacher, what good thing must I do to gain eternal life?" He said to him, "Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. But if you want to enter into life, keep the commandments." "Which ones?" he asked. Jesus replied, "You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false witness, honor your father and mother and love your neighbor as yourself." [Matthew, 19:16-19.]
...is the worst of its enemies, for that demand is the origin of virtually every important facet of Western Civilization – particularly American Civilization.
Ponder that, atheists and Amiable Agnostics. I’m going to Mass.
It started with “consent is sexy.” But, of course, there was no point in that—it was like saying rape is just bad sex, instead of a felony. Then there was “consent is mandatory.” It was much better, reminding us that sex is consensual, and everything else is rape. But then there was me, after a party, in a man’s dorm room. And there was “is this ok?” If we are being legal about this, I said ‘yes’ — no coercion, no imminent threat of violence, no inebriation (well, not a lot, anyway). But what I want to talk about is what happened before I said yes, who taught me to say yes, why I thought it was better to say yes, and why I really meant ‘no.’
....For me, and many others like me, consent isn’t easy. Yes doesn’t always mean yes, and we misplaced ‘no’ several years ago. This experience isn’t random, but disproportionately affects oppressed communities. Consent is a privilege, and it was built for wealthy, heterosexual, cis, white, western, able-bodied masculinity. When society has taught some of us to take up as little space as possible, to take all attention as flattery, and to be truly grateful that anyone at all could want our bodies or love, it isn’t always our choice to say yes.
Consent as a privilege doesn’t just happen in sex. It happens for those of us who give too much in friendships without knowing how to ask for reciprocation, who let doctors touch us in ways that are triggering because we don’t want to make trouble, who dance with handsy strangers because our friends already left the party, who stick around in toxic relationships because we don’t know if we’re allowed to expect better. When you’re poor, disabled, queer, non-white, trans, or feminine, ‘no’ isn’t for you. I don’t mean to insist that every person oppressed in these systems of power can’t have empowering consensual experiences, and I know many who do. What I do mean to say is that for me, finding ‘no’ is a process, consent is elusive, and sometimes, even when people don’t mean to—they hurt me.
(Link courtesy of The Other McCain.) Gee, if I interpret this in the fashion of a person taught by “society” to believe women are the equals of men in all things, it means they’re inveterate liars who should never, ever be taken at their word.
BONUS! Jordan Bosiljevac, the author of the quoted diatribe, wants the privilege of “yes meaning no” to apply to all “oppressed” communities! So we white Christian heterosexual men must withdraw all trust from any member of any group, however defined, that claims to be “oppressed!”
You know, I find an article like this refreshing. The writer has no idea just how much she’s given away. She has no idea what it implies – and would surely disavow all knowledge of its implications. Those are for us white capitalist patriarchs who reason according to the oppressive norms of logic.
If this seems harsh, just imagine how harsh we would find a regime in which a white man could not trust the word of:
A woman;
A Negro or Amerind;
A person of a different religion;
A person of a different ethnic background;
A person of a different sexual orientation.
All the above claim to be “oppressed.” Therefore, any consent they may seem to offer is really “coerced” by “society.” Slavery isn’t dead; it’s just been resting!
You can thank your local neighborhood victimist activists – of whatever stripe – for this. It’s the end they’ve aimed for from the beginning, whether they knew it or not. And it never had but one terminus.
Mood swings, depression, tiredness, fatigue, irritability, anxiety, reduced cognitive ability, aggression, anger, sleep disorders and food cravings. One of the fun things about having a womb is that the aforementioned are simply considered par for the course. That's your lot. Sorry gals, but if you've got the temerity to be biological, then you're also going to have to suffer the psychological.
The relationship between female hormones and mental health is a razor-sharp, gravel-scattered line to walk for a woman like me, because of course we should take the time to consider this shit. As Gloria Steinem argued in If Men Could Menstruate, were the bleeding tables tipped to the other gender, "Doctors would research little about heart attacks, from which men would be hormonally protected, but everything about cramps."
(Link courtesy of InstaPundit.) The author, Nell Frizzell, has produced a perfect refutation of the notion of female mental stability. But the next two sentences, for me at least, are the blockbusters:
We're not a second sex and this stuff is worth the investment of our time and attention, not to mention money. But as a woman who cries, cuts all her hair off and then realizes two days later as her gusset fills with blood that it was that pesky progesterone all along, I am extremely wary of painting women as somehow weaker as a result of our hormones.
Clearly, Miss Frizzell wants it both ways. But she can’t have that. Either female biological cycles, at least before menopause, predispose a woman to flightiness, mood swings, and irregular fits of irrationality, or they don’t. In the former case, women should receive men’s tender consideration for their vulnerability and our firm protection from it. In the latter, they should get neither of those things – i.e., they should be held to the same standards as men.
Neither set of consequences matches the demands of feminist activists.
To me, this indicates that it is vital that women – at least women in the age band before menopause strikes – should have no vote, be barred from public office, and have no say in public affairs. It’s responsibility enough (and risky enough) to let them manage a household. If it can be established scientifically that at some time after menopause a women’s mental stability rises to equal that of a man, perhaps she could have the franchise, but not before!
You, my Gentle Readers, should draw your own conclusions. But when you’ve done so, exercise caution about where and to whom you express them. Remember: as matters stand, she could abuse you physically and would probably get cleanly away with it, but should you lift a hand to defend yourself, you’d be charged with felony assault and battery.
We used to call "microaggressions" our personal peeves, but the Social Justice Warriors want to make it sound important (and give it the false sheen of academic rigor), so they called it "microaggressions." Note this word also shifts the party responsible -- it used to be understood that if you had a pet peeve, it was your pet peeve.
Now comes the word "microaggression" to make it sound like the guy who activated your pet peeve did so voluntarily and, well, aggressively -- instead of it just being you getting annoyed, because you're sensitive.
For a long time, I've heard Asians, in particular, talking about the particular "microaggression" of asking "Where are you from?" When they say "Fort Lee, New Jersey," the other person says, "No really, but where are you from?"
Several things here. One, I can see how this would be annoying.
Two, I don't think many people actually ask the question this way. I think the question is here being deliberately made to sound more stupid than it was actually posed. Like, I'd ask, "I mean, where does your family originate from?"
But I wouldn't ask that, because now I know it's the Worst Thing Ever to try to find out if the person you're speaking to is of Korean or Chinese, or Korean or Japanese, extraction, because like You Should Just Know Or Something.
“I’m going to tell you something, sir,” Burdeaux said. “Maybe you can understand if I tell you about something happened to me here. It’s a thing that would have hurt me pretty bad one time, but here...We were at a Jaspers party, sir. It was right after Willa, my girl, announced her engagement to Cal Nis. And George, Cal’s daddy, came over and put his arm across my shoulder. “Well there, Win, you old nigger bastard,” he said, “we better have us a good drink and a talk together because our kids are going to make us related.” That was it, Mr. Dasein. He didn’t mean a thing calling me nigger. It was just like...like the way we call a pale blond fellow here Whitey. It was like saying my skin’s black for identification, the way you might come into a room and ask for Al Marden and I’d say “He’s that red-headed fellow over there playing cards.” As he was saying it, I knew that’s all he meant. It Just came over me. It was being accepted for what I am. It was the friendliest thing George could do, and that’s why he did it.”
Dasein scowled trying to follow the train of Burdeaux’s meaning. Friendly to call him nigger?
“I don’t think you understand it,” Burdeaux said. “Maybe you’d have to be black to understand. But...well, perhaps this’ll make you see it. A few minutes later, George said to me, “Hey, Win, I wonder what kind of grandchildren we’re going to have—light, dark, or in-between?” It was just a kind of wonderment to him, that he might have black grandchildren. He didn’t care, really. He was curious. He found it interesting. You know, when I told Annie about that afterward, I cried. I was so happy I cried.”
A place – a community – where you don’t have to pre-censor every word you think to utter, because your neighbors are men of good will and know you to be one too. Wouldn’t you love to live in a society like that?
The Social Justice Warriors are utterly opposed to freedom of speech and thought. In case you’re wondering, you can’t have the second without the first. For reasons beyond the scope of this tirade, our thinking is tied indissolubly to our speaking.
Time was, showing a friendly interest in a new acquaintance’s heritage was considered mildly complimentary. Now that it’s been deemed a “microaggression,” a form of “othering,” there appears to be a general license to take offense at any such inquiry. Granted that there are still many persons who don’t take offense, to avoid unpleasant public confrontations one must pre-classify all one’s acquaintances as “man of good will” or “touchy bastard looking for a reason to take offense” before daring to speak.
That reality is a large part of why I limit my public exposure so sharply. When another person takes umbrage at my innocent remark, I rear up on my hind legs and bellow a war cry. The sequel is often quite unpleasant.
This, too, is part of the SJWs’ agenda: the atomization of American society into discrete, mutually suspicious or hostile groups. Persons who believe themselves surrounded by enemies will naturally look for protectors...and the State is ever ready to step into that role.
Before I close, a few words about “triggers.” This concept is exculpatory: an argument for excusing violence or other forms of disruption on the part of some Leftist mascot-group. The principal ones are, of course, Negroes, women, and homosexuals.
The “trigger” concept is tightly tied to “microaggression,” in that it is almost entirely verbal. The “wrong” word is now deemed adequate justification for an abusive or violent response. It’s not that long ago that the notion would have been laughed out of court: “Incitement to riot is not a justification for riot.” But things have changed rather dramatically, and not for the better.
Present trends continuing, this combination of SJW tactics will drive a redistribution of the American population. There will soon be regions where only one category of persons is accepted: Caucasian, Negro, Mongolian, Amerind, conservative, liberal, what-have-you. Subtle but effective techniques will be applied to exclude those “not of our kind.” Those regions will be enduringly on guard against their “different” neighbors. Such a Balkanization will spell the end of the United States as a functioning national society.
This effect is already observable in Britain, France, and several smaller European countries. It’s not making them more peaceful or more politically coherent.
Relax; this isn’t about the Eschaton. It’s about a last day of another sort.
I commuted to work this morning for the last time. As of close-of-business today, I will no longer be an engineer; I’ll be a retired engineer.
It’s a nervous-making transition. I’ve known other retirees who turned completely inert. I know of one whose wife is absolutely frantic because he watches television all day. Literally: He gets up in the mid-morning, turns on the television, and perches himself on the sofa to watch. He only gets off the couch for bathroom visits and meals...and he’s been trying to get his wife to bring him his meals.
So it’s been done badly. On the other hand, it’s also been done...I won’t say “successfully,” but to a completely opposite effect. The fellow I have in mind is busier as a retiree than he ever was as an engineer, because everyone who knows him knows that he’s “handy.” People are constantly descending on him with requests “to help with this,” which, translated from the Weaselly, means, “could you do this for me?” As he never learned to say “no,” he works harder than ever, he has almost no time to himself, and he doesn’t get paid.
Somewhere in the middle lies a happy medium. I hope I can find it.
Here are my agenda items for the next few years:
To lose 15 pounds.
To complete two more novels.
To help out more at my parish.
To reacquire my old piano and guitar skills.
To deal with various minor problems around the house.
To “keep my hand in” at my trade, so I’ll be able to follow developments.
To get around New York State more, and reacquaint myself with its features and history.
Even though they’re listed in descending priority order, I have a feeling that #1 will be the toughest of them. As it ages, the body becomes ever more “possessive” of its flesh. All the same, I intend to put in the effort. As for the rest, I guess we’ll see.
The C.S.O. isn’t retiring, which removes a potential source of stress. Two retirees eyeball-to-eyeball under the same roof can create quite a lot of friction. But she loves her job – she assists reluctant sky-divers provides accounting services to Catholic religious orders – and is determined to keep doing it for as long as she’s humanly capable. So I’ll be alone much of the week. I doubt I’ll mind, as my pursuits are solitary ones anyway.
Yes, I’ll still be writing these obnoxious screeds. I haven’t used up all my bile yet, so do keep coming by.
For the rest of it, time will tell. I’m sure I’ll need the prayers of those of you who pray. (As for those of you who don’t, now might be a good time to start.) This is the last stanza of life. We know how it must end; we just don’t know when. “You know not the day nor the hour,” as the Redeemer has told us, and surely He would know.
If I have an overarching ambition, it’s to make these final years useful to others. I still have my intellect and my storytelling powers. Perhaps they’ll wither, but they might also blossom in new and unexpected directions. I’d like that.
As I told the C.S.O. this morning, today is the last day of the first of my life. She puzzled over that for a moment, but the meaning should be clear: everything after today is pure discretion – which I hope will mean pure discovery – pure adventure.
