"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)
These losers are attempting to reverse the verdict of history by playing on the consciences of the victors – nay, the descendants of the victors. Were there excesses? Yes. Were there atrocities? Yes. But they occurred on both sides of every confrontation. In any event, the guilt for any of those things that properly attaches to persons born long afterward is zero.
Fuck the American Indian. His heritage is one of utter savagery, in war and in peace.
Fuck the black savages of Africa. Their heritage is of superstition, rampant irrationality, slavery, and cannibalism – and those things are still being acted out today.
Fuck the Arab / Muslim Middle East. Westerners are so greatly their superiors that they should drop to their knees and tug their forelocks when a white European passes them on the street.
Some incidents can justly be taken as representative of larger trends in human relations. They elucidate significant currents in attitudes, beliefs, convictions, desires, or fears. It’s therefore valid to interpret them – their contexts, the stimuli, and the responses – in a wider, brighter light than “just one of those things.”
But such events aren’t the whole of human intercourse. They’re not a majority thereof. They might even be a small minority. Nevertheless, those with an axe to grind will promote them as revelations of overwhelming truths, often with an eye to founding a political thrust upon them.
It was July 2014, Nashville Tennessee. I was walking into a gas station for a bottle of water when the man behind me stepped up to open the door for me. With that act of kindness, something inside me snapped and I flew into a blind rage. I began screaming at him at the top of my lungs.
“No, you can not open this door for me! You wouldn’t have opened it two years ago, so you damn sure can’t open it now!” I scowled and stormed away, completely enraged.
Typical gender-war feminist behavior, you might say...until you’ve read further on into the article:
Two years before this, in July 2012, I weighed 365lb, which roughly translates into 26 stone. I was enormous, and had been my entire life. I grew up an obese kid, was an obese teenager, an obese young adult, and by my mid-40s I had ballooned into a hugely obese adult.
But that summer I started a massive journey to lose 220lb, or almost 16 stone, over the course of four and a half years. As I sit here today, I’m literally a third of the body mass I used to be. I am an average-sized woman who wears a size medium pretty much across the board. And, I am happy to report, I am also a fairly happy, confident person.
So previous to the incident reported above, the author was dangerously, even morbidly obese. And at that point in her life, men did not open doors for her:
I had been disregarded, overlooked and ignored because of my size for so long that I didn’t even realise it until people started being nice to me – until, in other words, I was “normal sized”. No one had ever done those things for me before.
He opened that door for me because I wasn’t physically offensive to him, and I knew. And it was in that moment that I realised how terrible we are as a society to people, based solely on their appearance. This realisation broke me. It broke me in a way that I’ve never been broken before. He certainly didn’t deserve my outburst, but in that moment I couldn’t help myself.
The idea that the size of my trousers had had anything to do with simple politeness was heartbreaking to me. Never mind men actually asking me on dates, career advances, better opportunities and much cheaper clothes (big girls get done over by the fashion world).
The contrast is striking...but is it valid to generalize from it? Does it mean what the author wants the reader to take it to mean, or something else, or nothing at all?
Time for more coffee.
Many reactions are possible to the events related in the cited article. But whether the story is broadly relevant or a mere vignette is a personal judgment. Moreover, one of the factors that will color such a judgment is the tenor of the time, about which not everyone will agree.
At 365 pounds, author Stacie Huckeba probably looked awful. She probably dressed badly and moved sluggishly. Her overall behavior might have differed from her more recent, svelte self as well. Whether or not men opened doors for her – let’s assume that in the main they did not – I have no doubt that few of her male acquaintances asked her out on dates. (Zero would be a plausible estimate.)
We make many, many quick decisions about strangers from their appearance. We always have and we always will. In our time, many an obese woman harbors an intense hatred for others, particularly for men. Men are aware of this and tend to avoid such women. We certainly don’t seek to date or mate with them.
The opening-doors business is a shadow-zone case. I open doors for everyone, regardless of familiarity, sex, age, height, weight, or appearance. It’s a personal quirk of mine that if I reach a door before someone trailing a little behind me, I automatically hold it open for him. It probably arises from my years as a door warden at my Catholic grammar school. (The shortest guy in the class always got that particular duty.)
However, there are men who will only hold a door open for others on conditions:
For a woman;
For an elderly person;
For someone “mobility challenged;”
For a priest, minister, or public official.
...with the unstated proviso that they expect the gesture to be greeted indifferently at worst, courteously at best. That’s public deportment as it once was in these United States of America: say about 1950.
(The cars, computers, and the canned soups are better today than they were in 1950. The same cannot be said for average public conduct. I have spoken.)
In this nation in the Year of Our Lord 2017, the probability that a strange woman, no matter of what age, height, weight, or appearance, will react contemptuously toward a courteous gesture from a man is appallingly high. Many American men have experienced such unconscionable behavior, and have understandably become loath to court another such reaction. Such a man will pass through a door without taking note of a woman even if she’s only two steps behind him.
Can you blame him?
“What you are speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Another of the developments of recent years is the ascendancy of victimism as a political force. The victimists are determined to compel you to apologize and do penance for things done by others – and sometimes the “others” are the victimists themselves.
Consider the 365-pound version of Miss Huckeba. Who made her that way? I can assure you that it wasn’t I; I rather doubt that it was you. Inasmuch as she did succeed in slimming down and staying that way, the natural inference would be that she did it to herself:
She overindulged in food and didn’t do enough to work it off;
Rather than correct her problem early on, she continued on a destructive course;
Yet she did eventually take stock, change her habits, and shed more than 200 pounds;
However, as many self-afflicted persons will, she’s decided that she wasn’t responsible for her former wretchedness and isolation.
After all, if Miss Huckeba were to accept herself as the responsible party, it would occasion some introspection: a look at the attitudes, habits, and miscellaneous self-indulgences that had made her a land whale. She might have reflected on how natural was her matelessness. She might even have wondered about her similarity to women such as this one, their behavior toward others, and the consequent behavior of others toward them:
Do you think the...person in that brief video enjoys a robust romantic life? How many of the men who encounter her in casual circumstances bother to open doors for her? And whom does she blame for those things, or for her considerable mass and volume?
The collaboration of feminism and victimism has been wholly horrible for the West. Stacy McCain writes about it frequently and eloquently. Its political ramifications are unpleasant enough. When it pollutes the self-perception even of a woman who obviously has realized what she’d done to herself and took effective steps to correct it, it descends to a new plane: that of moral and ethical villainy.
So yes, the events in Miss Huckeba’s article are meaningful. They tell us that we’re teetering on the brink of a moral abyss. Should we embrace the canard about not being responsible for our own health, wealth, and happiness, we’ll step over the edge. Should we proceed thence to treat others – putatively innocent others, at least – as the true agents of our sorrows, we’ll plunge headlong into it, never to emerge.
Breitbart tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos made an appearance at Rutgers University, and his ideas and rhetoric so traumatized the delicate flowers who heard him that many of them attended a "group therapy" session afterward.
According to the paper, students and faculty members held a wound-licking gathering at a cultural center on campus, where students described “feeling scared, hurt, and discriminated against.”
“A variety of different organizations and departments were present to listen, answer questions and show support” to the apparently weak and vulnerable students, who just a few days prior had disrupted Yiannopoulos’ event by smearing fake blood on their faces and chanting protest slogans.
One student at the event told the Targum that they “broke down crying” after the event, while another reported that he felt “scared to walk around campus the next day.” According to the report, “many others” said they felt “unsafe” at the event and on campus afterwards.
Please read both the above-linked stories in their entirety.
I’ve written before about victim status having become a negotiable currency. Anyone who thinks the whining students in the above story are sincere is a thrice-damned fool. They’re claiming to feel “scared” and “unsafe” to get something for it: possibly a relaxation of Rutgers’ rules or academic requirements. Not even the tenderest eighteen-year-old from the most sheltered imaginable environment could plausibly claim to have been frightened by a speaker’s expression of an opinion contrary to his own at an event no one was required to attend.
But that’s what will predictably follow when students learn that “feeling scared, hurt, and discriminated against” has become the coin of the realm.
Believe it or not, this is actually the better of the two possibilities. Imagine if the students whining above really were sincere. Imagine what that would portend for their futures – and ours, given that the Rutgers environment is about average for American colleges and universities in our time. For them to support themselves by that most realistic, unforgiving undertaking known to Man – employment – would be inconceivable. Expecting them to run a country – and make no mistake; their generation will be doing that in about thirty years – would be beyond parody.
Whether I’m right or wrong about what’s really going on at Rutgers and other places that have embraced the “safe space” cant, I repeat my original proposal for treating the political diseases American “institutions of higher learning” suffer: Wall them off impenetrably. Allow no further ingress nor egress. Cut off their access to the Internet, as well. Throw some packets of seed and a few rakes over the walls and let the denizens scratch their suppers from the ground. Shoot anyone who attempts to escape; it would be the merciful thing to do.
Perhaps a century or two from now we could break through the walls at a couple of representative institutions and see how things have been going within. But for the present, there is no good to be had from any college or university that has succumbed to this virus. Should it get loose into the general population, may God help us all.
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.
[A] story that relies on “right think” to justify its right to exist might not bother with less glamorous bits of craft such as making sure your reasoning makes sense throughout, or that you have established the character’s traits to evoke an emotional response from the reader and catharsis at the end of the story....[I]ntroduce a minority character, be it racial, sexual or religious, in one of the approved “categories” and the readership, which are “fans” of social justice will immediately imbue that “victim character” with all the characteristics of noble victims ever penned since Jean Jacques Rousseau rode the noble savage into the sunset.
Because of that, “message writing” will always be inferior to “entertainment writing” when viewed in the dispassionate cold light of day....
But there is more moral peril to “message writing” because of the very mode of thought it encourages amid its practitioners; a mode of thought best described as “seeing oppressors under every bed.”
Sarah's target in the above-cited essay is the "social-justice writing" crowd that seems to be entrenched beyond all possibility of removal at the conventional publishing houses I usually call Pub World. Both her points are valid, but it's the second one that has enduring importance.
When your culture screams that you're a victim, you're far more likely to accept that that's what you are, unalterably. When a culture tells an entire demographic that it's a victim-group, that group is likely to exhibit all the most unfortunate features of such groups throughout history. The worst of those features is the "victim's" tendency to define himself in relation to his "oppressors."
The case of a true victim class, the enslaved Negroes of pre-Civil-War America, is most illustrative. The Negro slave defined his entire existence relative to that of his owner. He had no choice in the matter, for his owner dictated the conditions of every moment of his life. Even once the slaves were emancipated, the former slave tended to view his cone of possibilities from the vantage point of his prior enslavement. That persistence of outlook gave rise to the tenant farming / "sharecropping" economy that flourished in the South for some years after the war.
In contrast, members of the ersatz victim classes of today voluntarily adopt such a perspective. Some of them do so insincerely: i.e., in pursuit of advantages available to officially recognized, legally privileged groups. Some do so for reasons deriving from their personal circumstances, for there are still social pockets in America where the great majority exhibits disdain for members of certain minorities and treats them unfairly. But a great many, perhaps most, do so because the culture in which they're immersed tells them loudly and multifariously that they're oppressed.
The culture, be it ever remembered, swaddles all of us at every instant of our lives. It's embedded in our journalism, our entertainment, our commercial and social conventions, our prevailing modes of dress and conduct, and our habits of speech. Though it cannot dictate with godlike force, it can condition us, cause us to look away from certain possibilities, and refuse to admit that certain alternatives to "the way things are" even exist.
Culture, like motivation, is a field-like force. It presses all of us in the same direction.
“A mechanical process can reverse a bit at random, but motivation acts like a field — the elements won’t change unless the field does.” — James Tiptree, “Faithful To Thee, Terra, In Our Fashion”
Some will resist the urgings of culture, and some of those will be successful. But the pressure will still be there.
One of the best reasons for conservatives to reclaim the American culture is that it's probably the only way, short of mass bloodshed, to put an end to the cult of victimism that pervades today's legal and political environment. The proliferation of self-nominated victim-groups has become absurd. Everyone seems to want to be classified as a victim of some sort, and why not? There are legal privileges to be had. There are social accommodations for victims, all the way from support groups and twelve-step programs to victims-only movie nights, dating websites, and fetish clubs. (Watch out for that "Fifty Shades" stuff; there's no telling what could follow it into your neighborhood.) Companies large and small chafe under de facto hiring quotas designed to mollify victim groups -- and once hired, many such victims demand and receive special accommodations. If we omit government itself, there's no more noxious influence on our social order.
A reclaimed culture that emphasizes individualism and self-determination is the winning counterforce to the victimist tide:
A journalistic culture that refuses to treat crimes differently according to the races, sexes, and creeds of the perpetrators;
An entertainment culture that refrains from valorizing characters because of their group membership;
A commercial culture that ignores group membership and recognizes only performance;
Social conventions that recognize race, sex, and creed without privileging particular ones;
True tolerance of freely chosen "roles," especially traditional masculinity and femininity;
A lexicon and a diction that are indifferent to the assumed sensitivities of various groups.
The heart of this prescription is individualism. Your membership in a group means only that you're a member of that group: i.e., that you conform to the genus and differentia that define the group. If the group is known for certain disagreeable patterns of conduct, it's your job to demonstrate that you diverge from that pattern. This is especially important in matters of race, sex, and creed. It becomes critical when stereotypes are involved.
Something the celebrated Judith Martin, a.k.a. Miss Manners, once said strikes me as apposite. A mother had written to her about worries about her teenage daughter's social circle. Apparently that group was trending in a destructive direction -- the specifics elude my memory at this time -- and Mom was worried that her daughter would succumb to "peer pressure." Martin's reply was stunning: "Tell your daughter, 'You're a peer too, so why not start some pressure in the other direction?'"
Why not, indeed?
The connection to my personal concerns is, of course, through fiction. Sarah's essay reminded me of a complaint I got from a reader about the religious connotation attached to the name of an antagonist character in one of my books. I was nonplussed. My reader was offended by the idea that a person of her faith might ever turn out to be a villain. Though I let her complaint slide off my back, it has remained with me as a reminder of the insistence activist groups have placed on being represented in some venues and being excluded from others.
Have you noticed how seldom the villain in a contemporary police or detective drama turns out to be a Negro? Yet I can't name a show in which none of the good guys are black -- possibly because I only watch television between paragraphs -- and to cap the irony, the black character is usually cast as a master of technology or some other sort of bulging brain. Impossible? No, not at all. But given what we know about academic proclivities and occupational distributions, how likely is it?
That's rankled me for quite some time. I allowed it to influence certain decisions I made in the Realm of Essences books -- in the reverse direction. Call it my contribution to re-establishing true proportionality. After that set of adventures, when I tackled the Spooner Federation saga, I resolved not to mention race at all.
That's how our fictional culture is formed. Those already in the arena have made their decisions. It's high time those of us who love freedom got in there, too. But, please: always make entertaining the reader your first priority. Don't risk boring or alienating him for "a pot of message."
The removal of punishment as a deterrent to crime and antisocial public behavior would be bad enough if it were absolutely uniform. But it is not, and the situation is accordingly far worse.
When a society makes special provisions for a particular class of persons, such that those persons have a good expectation of not suffering for illegal or antisocial behavior, it has committed the worst imaginable injustice against the persons in that class who honor their society's laws and norms: it has equalized the legal, social, and moral positions of good citizens and thugs. Thus, if ninety percent of such a class is law-abiding and decorous while ten percent is violent, dishonest, or disruptive, the latter category will come to overshadow the former in the perceptions of persons outside the class -- not because ten percent is a majority, but because that anti-social subgroup is identified with the class's special set of privileges.
A class is defined by its legal and social privileges. The aristocrats of medieval times were not distinguished by their lineages or their deeds, but by the things they were allowed to do, without penalty, that commoners were not. There is reason to believe that the majority of medieval aristocrats were fairly responsible stewards of their lands and of public order within them. That does not justify the creation of a class of men who could wield high, middle, and low justice over others, but who would normally escape all consequences for deeds for which a commoner would be severely punished.
The American response to the failings of traditional aristocracies was the Rule of Law: the fundamental principle that the law must treat all men impartially, regardless of their identities or station in life. The old shorthand for this principle was "blind justice," meaning that the law must not see one's person, only one's deeds. In a society that respects the Rule of Law, a king would stand in the same dock as a trash-hauler, were the two accused of the same offense. All that would matter would be the evidence for their guilt or innocence.
In the absence of a scrupulously observed Rule of Law, classes with differing degrees of privilege will emerge. The flourishing of the members of each class will be influenced, often heavily, by the class's privileges and how effectively they can be exploited. Men being what we are, we will be moved to use those privileges in our own interest, both against competitors within our class and against other classes.
Success breeds emulation. If there are advantages to be had from the ruthless exploitation of a class privilege, over time more and more members of the class will be drawn into doing so. Thus, the coloration given to the class by its privileges will become stronger and more inclusive over time.
This is not an unbounded progression; as in all other things, a tendency toward equilibrium will ultimately assert itself. However, the mechanisms by which equilibrium is restored are always unpleasant. The deterrents that curb full exploitation of a class privilege, if any exist at all, will be applied by other classes, whether through the law, other social institutions, or "informally." "Informally" usually means lynching: the application of extra-judicial, often unmerited punishment to members of one class by members of another. In the usual case, the lynchers come from a more numerous class than the lynchees, though there are occasional exceptions.
Lynching, if it goes unpunished, is itself a class privilege. There are satisfactions in it that are incomprehensible to moral men who live in ordinary times. As with other activities with innate satisfactions, the popularity of the practice will grow over time. A mob that's tasted the blood of one aristocrat is seldom satisfied with just that one sip.
Lynching writ large is genocide.
That was written long before the troubles in Ferguson, Missouri.
Now ponder what hangs on the impending grand jury decision over whether to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for the murder of Michael Brown:
I’m not thinking near-term here; I fear a genuine campaign of genocide by American Caucasians against American Negroes. There’s no way to know in advance how much violence and lawlessness would be required to trigger such a reaction. Nevertheless, I maintain that the train of reasoning in the previous section is sound; there is a threshold which, if crossed, will evoke outright genocide. If that should come to pass, who would be more to blame than Leftist luminaries Barack Obama, Eric Holder, and the “unofficial” race-hustlers stoking the fires in Ferguson, Missouri?
The Left is heavily invested in victimism: broadly speaking, the proposition that all of us are either oppressors or oppressed, and that the former owe the latter an unlimited debt. In no case are they more relentlessly strident than in matters of race relations. Thus, it should surprise no one that prominent leftist voices have been egging on the “protestors” in Ferguson, edging asymptotically close to condoning violence and looting, while ceaselessly insisting that the fault for any such occurrences would belong, not to the “protestors,” but to the rest of us for “not doing justice for Michael Brown.”
The original New Segregationist pieces focused on racial segregation and how the media's suppression of important facts about trends in dissolution, profligacy, and criminality among American Negroes has contributed to it. Yet any collectivity designated for "help" will exhibit a comparable set of trends, more or less dramatically according to context and prior socialization. As always, it's a matter of incentives.
The late Clarence Carson, in his landmark book The American Tradition, made a critical set of points about the "civilizing of groups." Groups, he noted, can overwhelm individual rationality and morality, a point made with equal force by philosopher Eric Hoffer. Therefore, they must be denied legal and political standing; they must never become capable of asserting privileges or immunities that non-members don't possess. This parallels Isabel Paterson's penetrating partition of sociopolitical orders into Societies of Contract, where individuals are the sole recognized actors within the legal and political order, versus Societies of Status, where membership in one or another group dwarfs every other consideration about what an individual can do, or to what he can aspire.
Plainly, Leftist thought and policy departs completely from that insight; the creation of politically privileged and empowered groups is virtually the whole of Leftist politics. But that departure rests upon Leftists' need to see themselves as morally superior to the rest of us, in which effort their politicized "good intentions" are the indispensable element.
Whereas the media merely suppressed news about the sort of incident that might elicit a doubt or two about the unanimous good will of Negroes toward Caucasians and the safety of the latter among the former, the activist Left seeks a multiplication of such incidents, preferably as large and dramatic as possible. More, when such incidents occur, its sympathies and protective efforts are openly with the lawbreakers. Yet according to the Left, we who want only to see the guilty apprehended and punished as prescribed by law – who want nothing but peace with those who’ve remained within the law, regardless of their race – are the villains!
Is it possible to draw any conclusion but one? Given that conclusion, if the tide of violence should reverse and a wholesale slaughter of American Negroes result, who would be properly to blame? Who are the real racists here?
It’s well that the residents of St. Louis are arming themselves. Indeed, I hope the trend is nationwide, and nationally publicized. Consciousness of the potential consequences might be the only effective deterrent of a second Civil War – this one color-coded not by artifice of uniform, but by the flesh of the combatants.
ANTONIO : Well, Shylock, shall we be beholding to you?
SHYLOCK: Signior Antonio, many a time and oft
In the Rialto you have rated me
About my moneys and my usances:
Still have I borne it with a patient shrug,
For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.
You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog,
And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine,
And all for use of that which is mine own.
Well then, it now appears you need my help:
Go to, then; you come to me, and you say
“Shylock, we would have moneys:” you say so;
You, that did void your rheum upon my beard
And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur
Over your threshold: moneys is your suit
What should I say to you? Should I not say
“Hath a dog money? is it possible
A cur can lend three thousand ducats?” Or
Shall I bend low and in a bondman’s key,
With bated breath and whispering humbleness,
Say this:
“Fair sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last;
You spurn’d me such a day; another time
You call’d me dog; and for these courtesies
I’ll lend you thus much moneys”?
ANTONIO: I am as like to call thee so again,
To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too.
If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not
As to thy friends; for when did friendship take
A breed for barren metal of his friend?
But lend it rather to thine enemy,
Who, if he break, thou mayst with better face
Exact the penalty.
[William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice]
We see in the above a truly iconic pair of characters, each an archetype of his times: Antonio, a Christian noble much given to reviling Jews; and Shylock, a Jewish moneylender, sick of the abuse he and other Jews have received from Christians and determined that he should have either redress or revenge.
Most persons dimly aware of the play think of Shylock as an unmitigated villain. This, to put it gently, is not the case, as Shakespeare makes plain throughout the play (which few have ever read in its entirety):
SHYLOCK: There I have another bad match: a bankrupt,
a prodigal, who dare scarce show his head on the
Rialto; a beggar, that was used to come so smug upon
the mart; let him look to his bond: he was wont to call
me usurer; let him look to his bond: he was wont to
lend money for a Christian courtesy; let him look
to his bond.
SALARINO: Why, I am sure, if he forfeit, thou wilt not
take his flesh: what’s that good for?
SHYLOCK: To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else,
it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and
hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses,
mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my
bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and
what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath
not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections,
passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same
weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the
same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter
and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we
not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you
poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we
not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will
resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what
is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew,
what should his sufferance be by Christian example?
Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me, I will execute,
and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
Have a gander at a brilliant execution of Shylock's soliloquy:
Shylock has clearly had enough from the arrogant nobles of his time and place, and has determined that if he must suffer loss from their cupidity and dissipation, he will have revenge. Perhaps after that, he might well reason, spendthrift Christian nobles will think twice about abusing a Jewish moneylender to whom they might later need to apply for aid when in financial distress.
I find Shylock a sympathetic character, much more so than bigoted Antonio or his spendthrift friend Bassanio. But a little historical perspective is required for a full explanation:
Yes, the Jews of Europe were generally reviled and abused by the Christian majority, as usual for no good reason whatsoever.
The great majority of occupations were barred to European Jews, as the guilds that controlled those occupations would not admit them.
Goldsmithing, the trade that led directly to banking, was one of the few that was open to Jews, which is why so many Jewish families went into goldsmithing and later banking.
Christian nobles of the period were notorious for:
Abusing and humiliating Jews;
Lending political support -- including force of arms -- to measures that kept Europe's Jews in subjection;
Forcing Jewish moneylenders to lend to them;
Defaulting on the loans;
Often refusing, even when they were able, to repay what they had borrowed.
Wherefore, then, should "Shylock" be considered an anti-Semitic slander? When it's used to refer to supposedly unscrupulous bankers without any mention of race, creed, or origin? Simply because Shylock, enraged by yet another failure to repay funds he had loaned to a Christian, had decided at long last to exact a penalty for it, hopefully not only for his satisfaction but to the improvement of Christian attitudes toward his badly oppressed people?
Conservatives have long decried "political correctness" and the victimist mentality. In particular, we've condemned the treatment of ordinary words and phrases as racist, sexist, or otherwise bigotry-indicative "code words," when they're used by conservatives. But sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. He who is impaled on a politically-correct lance is the true victim regardless of his political affiliation. A liberal in such straits deserves to be defended quite as much as any conservative.
Consider how many commentators have taken acerbic note of the way liberals refuse to criticize one another for the very things they pile on conservatives' heads, most especially verbal "misdeeds." Consider how often we have called for even-handedness in this realm and many others. Why should we be granted what we will not grant to others?
If conservatives turn censorious toward a Joe Biden merely because he's not a conservative, we are committing the very sin for which we so frequently castigate the Left: elevating partisanry over justice.
Some wag whose name escapes me at the moment observed that you cannot claim to be a defender of rights if you're not willing to defend the rights of sons of bitches. How, then, stand we?
Enough censorious horseshit, brethren of the Right. Look to your own souls instead. Few among us can claim our souls need no attention.
"I love Mankind. It's people I can't stand." -- Origin unknown
Good morning, Gentle Reader. I'm in perhaps the foulest mood I've ever occupied -- persistent pain in all your major joints will do that to you, trust me on that -- so for today, let's have a brief survey of those charming types, seemingly multiplying beyond all limits, who feel the rest of us owe them and deem no tactic beneath them in seeking what they want.
First up are those lovable guys we simply can't get enough of, the Muslims:
DEARBORN — This week’s city council meeting started out on a positive note as the city honored former Seattle Seahawks assistant coach and Dearborn native Robert Saleh for his recent Super Bowl victory. However, the atmosphere at City Hall took a bizarre turn after a local Arab American confronted the council on what he said were “troubling issues in the city.”…
The highlight of the evening came at the very end during the public comment section, when a local Arab American took the podium to address concerns he had with the city. The man, who identified himself as Hassan, stated that he lived in Westland but had concerns he wanted to address as an individual who works in the city. He refused to publicly give his address fearing for the safety of his family.
After referencing Prophet Muhammad and loudly chanting Islamic prayers, Hassan said that the city needed to monitor neighborhood parks around the clock because people have been using them to conduct sexual activities. Council President Susan Dabaja, however, told him that the city doesn’t have the resources or money for increased security at parks and asked him to move on to his next point.
Hassan also stated that there were magazines and newspapers at the public libraries and civic center that can “cause colossal damage to a child’s health,” asking the city to review and monitor literature before they are distributed.
According to another report, "Hassan" cited shari'a law as the proper basis for his demands. However, that citation has not been confirmed by an independent source.
This is Muslim arrogance in its clearest, least obscure form: All shall conform to the dictates of Islam. The Prophet said it; how dare you barbaric Westerners defy him?
There are several million of these dictatorial savages in this country. More arrive daily. With every increment to their numbers, their demands become louder and more self-assured. Let that thought sink in for a moment or two.
I have little use for Ezra Klein but I applaud him here for two things:
1. Hiring a guy who he knew would write things that his intended audience would react intolerantly towards.
2. Then defending his hiring of the guy, and imploring "liberals" to practice what they preach as regards tolerance for dissent.
The writer, Brandon Ambrosino, angered many on the intolerant left for writing that despite expecting to be shunned at his alma mater, Liberty University (a Christian institution founded by Jerry Falwell), his preconceptions were in fact wrong, and most at Liberty University didn't seem to care all that much that he was gay.
But then he truly crossed the line when he dared to venture the idea that not all on the left are perfect moral paragons with impeccable levels of psychological and emotional centeredness, but sometimes -- get this -- demonstrate their own form of ugly hostility to those perceived as The Other:
The world and the people in it are really wonderful with just a smidge of ugliness about them. I think the really vocal anti-gay Christians display this smidge, but I also think the really vocal anti-Christian gays display it as well.
In resisting the activist homosexuals' demands that young Mr. Ambrosino be tarred, feathered, and run out of the Web on a rail, Klein demonstrated the operation of a law of combat that operates at all times and in all venues, including politics:
Success Breeds Failure.
Denunciations and condemnations for "homophobia," "racism," and other imagined offenses have worn out their target audiences. However, those slinging them have become habituated to them because of their previous efficacy. The tribes that wield those epithets -- used quite as often to keep their own "members" on the plantation as for any other reason -- haven't yet grasped that their blades have been blunted by overuse.
But anyone stupid enough to think his preference for one orifice over another entitles him to anything from anybody is unlikely to grasp that.
A Premier League footballer cleared of gang rape allegations has lashed out at women he sees as targeting wealthy footballers as cash cows.
French international Loic Remy, who plays for Newcastle United, says wannabe WAGs go after players like him for their cash - however they can get it.
'These girls are vicious and greedy,' he told The Sun's Rachel Dale, in his first public comments on his ordeal since he was first arrested nine months ago.
Twenty-seven-year-old Remy was one of three men last year accused of the champagne-fuelled gang rape of a 34-year-old woman at his rented flat in Fulham, West London.
He denied the allegation, and last month the Metropolitan Police finally said there would be no further action taken against him.
He admitted he should have been smarter, but said: 'When you're a footballer, single and want to have fun, you can have any girl you want.
'Before it was not like that. I see things that make me afraid. I see these girls - what they can do.'
Doing your bit to get a little back for the Sisterhood from that nasty old White Male Capitalist Patriarchy, eh, Brittie birds? Never mind that Remy is black and was born into poverty. Never mind that all the forensic evidence was in his favor. He has it; they wanted it. As with Crystal Gail Mangum, the idea of a false rape allegation just popped out of the slot.
(Never mind which slot. Get your mind out of the gutter.)
As the #BBUM movement gained traction at the University and attention across the nation, one student began working behind the scenes to tackle diversity from inside the classroom.
Public Policy junior Carly Manes, an LSA representative on the CSG Assembly and current CSG presidential candidate for FORUM, has met with University administrators since October to reform LSA’s Race and Ethnicity requirement, gathering a coalition of student activists along the way to promote the cause.
The group met Tuesday night to draft an initial proposal for a new “identity requirement” — its official name is still in the works — which the group’s members will present to the LSA Curriculum Committee on March 18.
The proposal is two-pronged: aiming to both expand the breadth of classes that satisfy the current R&E requirement as well as implement the component into the curriculum of all University colleges.
“It would highlight and it would focus on intersectionality as the core component of the educational model,” Manes said. “So, insuring that intersectionality is highlighted in every class that counts for this new requirement.”
According to Manes, intersectionality is meant to envelop a number of identity-based themes including sexuality, gender expression, religion, documentation status and race.
When it suits race, sex, and ethnicity activists, "we are all the same." Race is a fiction; sex is a social construct, and everyone is an immigrant from somewhere else. But when there's an opportunity to seize the brass ring of political power -- and don't kid yourself; political power exists in many institutions nominally outside of formal government and politics -- those things come roaring back, objective and irrefutable totems before which all must kowtow.
Michigan taxpayers had better know about this. Particularly the ones who've sent their progeny to the University of Michigan in the belief that its former reputation as one of America's top "institutions of higher learning" continues to apply today.
A few closing thoughts about the victimism / entitlement syndrome illustrated above:
It's everywhere. You can no longer get away from it.
It generally goes unchallenged, which is why it's important to take up cudgels against it.
Challenge a mouthy victimist only in the midst of rational types, never when he's surrounded exclusively by his fellows. This is especially important if you left your gun at home.
In all such encounters, define victory as embarrassing the living daylights out of the victimist. Don't imagine that you can persuade him away from his conceit; it's been embossed on his soul.
Refuse to allow the subject to be diverted from what the victimist claims is owed to him and those like him, and why. You're not demanding anything; he is.
Remember that the alternative is surrendering the field to the victimists. It comes with consequences. I doubt you'd like them.
