Linky Linky Linky

I am pasting the links separately because Blogger's upgrade interface is junk and often will not publish them embedded. 

1.
How the Democrats collude to enable voter fraud, at Powerline
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/06/how-the-democrats-collude-to-enable-voter-fraud.php

One of the most pernicious phenomena of modern times is the collusive lawsuit. This is how it works: a left-wing organization sues a government agency that is also controlled by the left. The lawsuit alleges that the agency is obliged to do something that the agency would like to do, but the Democrats can’t get it passed. Then the parties–supposedly adverse, but actually in collusion–“settle” the case by having the agency agree to do what it wanted to do all along. If all goes well, a court enters an order enforcing the settlement. So the net effect is that a policy that the Democrats couldn’t get passed is now a court-ordered mandate. This happens often.

Read the whole thing, but take your blood pressure meds first. It is absolutely in the Dem playbook for November.

2.
Black Lives Matter Is A Radical Marxist Organization. Who says so? Well, its founders.
https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=44832 and on camera here: https://youtu.be/5J9l6VOxYeE

3.
The sanctification of George Floyd, which is really much less about Floyd than the aftermath.
https://thecritic.co.uk/the-sanctification-of-george-floyd/

Another example of the relation between sentimentality and brutality has been the use of very young children in demonstrations. There are videos of two girls, nine and seven, one making a speech at a demonstration and the other marching in a demonstration, her pretty little face contorted with hatred, chanting a horrible slogan, ‘No justice, no peace’ (a justification in advance of further looting, or worse), and making aggressive gestures.

Clearly they had been put up to all this by their parents. If they had been born in Nazi Germany, they would have rushed up to the Fuhrer to present him with flowers. And no doubt the parents of the little girls, in the pride of their self-righteousness, will continue to indoctrinate them into becoming mental clones of themselves, in the belief that decerebrate rage and resentment are really a manifestation of generosity of spirit.

The little girls themselves, deeply unattractive as they have been made, are of course not themselves to blame. But what kind of fathomless sentimentalism is it that believes that a cause is justified or strengthened by the use of parroting children of nine and seven? It is not what the children parrot that counts, horrible as it might be, but that the children parrot it, that they have been turned (presumably by their parents) into mere instruments.

4.
The New Truth - When the moral imperative trumps the rational evidence, there’s no arguing.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/new-truth-rationalism-religion

Or as Stalin's abject apologist, the NYT's Walter Duranty, said of Joseph Stalin:

But – to put it brutally – you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, and the Bolshevist leaders are just as indifferent to the casualties that may be involved in their drive toward socialization as any General during the World War who ordered a costly attack in order to show his superiors that he and his division possessed the proper soldierly spirit. In fact, the Bolsheviki are more indifferent because they are animated by fanatical conviction. (The New York Times, March 31, 1933, page 13)

5.
Member of an ethnic minority tells a white BLM supporter that he is oppressed and wants reparations. As in right now, from the white guy's wallet. Pop some popcorn before watching!


And a companion video:


6.
What Happens When the Madness Ends? Since it is by VDH, no excerpt is necessary.
https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/21/what-happens-when-the-madness-ends/

7.
What is your woke breaking point?
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/statues-woke-breaking-point-law-of-merited-impossibility/

In progressivism, only some black lives matter

All the links herein are corrected and will work. No thanks to Blogger.

If you call Planned Parenthood and offer to make a donation to fund abortions specifically for aborting black unborn children, they will accept it. If you tell them the reason you will donate is because there are too many black people in the country today, they will still accept it without protest. 
https://www.facebook.com/liveaction/videos/3140269152701373/

But of course, because Planned Parenthood was formed for that very reason, to kill black people. Just google Margaret Sanger, its founder. Or you can just read why Margaret Sanger's Fans Work to Clean Up Her Racist Past.  
https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2020/may/they-have-to-reinvent-her-margaret-sangers-fans-work-to-clean-up-her-racist-past

Then there are these mostly white BLM activists who consent to the claim made to them that some black lives matter and the rest do not. Namely, black people murdered by other black people do not matter. And like Planned parenthood, black persons killed in the womb do not matter.
https://twitter.com/OntWtf/status/1273760666365710338
  

And there is Niger Innis, spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality, who says that Black Lives Matter  doesn't have a 'd*** thing to do' with saving black lives.  
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/niger-innis-black-lives-matter-agenda-doesnt-have-a-damn-thing-to-do-with-saving-black-lives

More and more black Americans are no longer afraid to speak out publicly against the  real oppressors of black people in America today.  

"These Democrats, and I'm sorry to say this, they hate black people," she continued. "These are the same people who fought to keep slavery in. These are the same people who built the KKK. The Republican Party is the party of the blacks."

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/they-hate-black-people-street-preachers-decry-democrats-outside-seattles-chaz 

Once again:

The real enemy of black Americans

Related: 

Read this long review of The Vision of the Anointed - Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, by Thomas Sowell. 

Comforting Abstractions, by Kevin Williamson

Who is responsible for the mess in Minneapolis? The answer to that question is not unknowable — but it is, in many political quarters, unspeakable.

 

Minneapolis’s municipal government, its institutions, and its police department are what they are not because of the abstract Hegelian forces of capital-H History, but because of decisions that have been made by people. Who these people are is a matter of public record. We know their names: Jacob Frey, Betsy Hodges, R. T. Rybak, Sharon Sayles Belton, Medaria Arradondo, Janeé Harteau, Tim Walz, Mark Dayton . . . the rogues’ gallery is practically inexhaustible.

 

But, oh, the transmuting magic of partisanship! Minneapolis is a Democratic city, with a Democratic mayor and a Democratic city council (0.0 Republicans on that body), in a state with a Democratic governor and a Democratic state house; these are the people who hire police chiefs and organize police departments, who specify their procedures and priorities, who write the laws that the police are tasked with enforcing — Democrats and progressives practically to a man. (Not every member of the Minneapolis city council is a Democrat — there’s a Green, too.) That’s a lot of lefty power, hardly anything except lefty power — but, somehow, the bad guy in this story must be Donald Trump. ... 

...  one of the problems here is the power of police unions, which resist efforts to increase accountability and oversight of their members. There is a political party in this country that is very much committed to increasing the power of public-sector unions, that has worked hard with some success to do that, and that is enormously dependent upon the financial and political support of those unions for its campaign efforts — and it is not called the Republican Party. It’s the other one.

Oh, wait... 

The fiction of the riots

The Sole Justification Offered for the Riots Is a Fiction

Rioters and their enablers claim that the present disorder is justified by an epidemic of police shootings of unarmed black men. But no such epidemic exists.

Harvard economist Roland Fryer conducted a now-famous systematic review of police violence, and found that cops were more likely to use low-level force against black suspects than against white suspects, but no more likely to use lethal force. The racial disparities in the use of low-level force shrank when Fryer accounted for differences in group behavior, but a gap remained between white and nonwhite suspects even after such controls. And the fact that the police are more likely to place their hands on a black suspect, push them into a wall, or shove them to the ground no doubt contributes to the sense of hostility between law enforcement and African Americans.

But the central claim advanced by those defending the riots is not that police are disproportionately likely to use low-level force against black suspects. The central claim advanced by those defending the riots is that “they are killing us,” that blacks are “hunted” by racist police departments and are in danger every time they leave their homes. The evidence simply doesn’t back that up. And as stores are burned and livelihoods destroyed, churches desecrated and precincts set ablaze, evidence is something we must insist on.

As I said earlier, Rioters don't care about George Floyd.

One result: Another black man murdered.

Will there be vigils held for him? Protest marches at the injustice of his death? Enormous media coverage of the particulars? Leaders of the Congress demanding a full-scale investigation?

Will a massive national public outcry demand his murderer be arrested and brought to justice?

To ask the questions is to answer them.

 

Connecting dots for Nov. 4

I posted earlier of how the Gleichshaltung is interested in you. Gleichschaltung is a German word that means “coordination.” Politically, it means "to get every institution to sing from the same hymnal." Gleichschaltung is the political modus operandi of the Left, wherever it springs up - Germany, Russia, China, Italy. 

In America today, it is Socialist-Leftist template campaigning to gain and consolidate their power in the 2020 election. And the preparatory "coordination" is going on now. And so some connected dots thereunto:

The Winter of Our Discontent:

One wonders if the unique American experiment in liberty is already too far gone to save. One must wonder if Lady Liberty is just a zombie, unaware she is dead as she wanders the landscape. Many of our elitist punditry class say that our current separation is due to a stark partisan divide – but in my observation, that separation is at a far more fundamental level and when understood, explains much of our current crisis. 

The separation is due to the segregation of Americans into two groups – the first are people who define their political objectives by their principles, the second are people who define their principles by their political objectives. ...

The latter group, those who define their principles based on their political objectives are historically the most dangerous to a system of liberty and they are always the most susceptible to the seductive siren call of collectivism (which includes socialism, Marxism, and communism) because this is the way collectivism works. Collectivism always begins with an objective, then a plan, then total subservience to the plan.

Everywhere the Left has bent to power, it has never demanded agreement with its goals, actions, or requirements. The Revolutionary Vanguard is very happy for you to give those things, but what they absolutely require is compliance, not agreement. 

I explored this in some detail back in The empty abyss of emotions and feelings: Ignorance is power for rule makers.

Not only is there no such thing as Truth, it is unforgivable even to speak as if there is. You have your truth and I have mine, and can't we all just get along? We are almost at the point achieved by the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union, when everyone knew that they were being fed lies and distortions but no one knew how to do anything about it and the price for trying to do so is much too high, anyway.  So everyone went along because they saw no other avenue.

And it's happening right before us: A Racially “Woke” Agenda Is Now Hardwired in Public Schools.

At Santa Monica High School, students organize and carry out “a systematized campaign” for social justice that can take the form of a protest, a leaflet, a workshop, play, or research project. They demonstrate their mastery of the subject matter by teaching about social justice to middle school students. Students at Environmental Charter High School are assigned to write a ‘breakup letter

with a form of oppression,’ such as toxic masculinity, heteronormativity, the Eurocentric curriculum, or the Dakota Access Pipeline. Students are asked to “persuade their audience of the dehumanizing and damaging effects of their chosen topic.” Students at schools in Anaheim, San Jose, Oakland, and San Francisco are taught how to write a manifesto to school administrators listing “demands” for reforms. [Italics original]  

Those “ethnic studies” classes are not about teaching facts about history. They’re about casting a certain mindset in students, one that will incline them to activism against Progressivism’s designated villains. Murawski quotes Professor Julia Jordan-Zachery of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who said, “I oftentimes think of ethnic studies as radical social action.” That’s exactly what leftist educators want.

Yes, because compliance is the goal. And it is the only goal.

Changing subjects, let's talk about cell-phone technology. By the always on=-top-of-things David Goldman: 5G policy ‘biggest strategic disaster in US history’

And now, let's talk about money. 

What are the odds the market will crash during your retirement years?

Researchers have devised a precise formula for calculating this possibility

As it turns out, it's a good guide, but it is not "precise." Worth thinking about, though.

What happened to the Babylon Bee? It used to publish funny stuff, not serious commentary like this: Christians Face Clear Choice Between Party That's A Hypocritical Mockery Of Their Faith And One That's Openly Hostile To It.

"It's a really interesting choice," said Christian Tanya Lloyd. "By supporting the Republicans, I'm giving people further ammunition to dismiss my beliefs as an empty cultural pose. At least they like to pretend to be Christian, though, while sometimes it seems like the only thing keeping the Democrats from hunting me down with hunter-seeker drones like from The Terminator is lack of technology."

Always leave 'em laffing department:

And Epstein didn't kill himself.

What you need to know today - 8/29

OK, you don't want Trump. But exactly what do you want? And the answer is that you do not know. 

To counter every signature Trump issue, there is almost no rational alternative advanced. That void helps explain the bizarre, three-year litany of dreaming of impeachment, the emoluments clause, the Logan Act, the 25th Amendment, the Mueller special-counsel investigation, Stormy Daniels and Michael Avenatti, Trump’s tax returns, White Supremacy!, Recession! — and Lord knows what next.

When the family is vanishing, you only have "identity." ‘The Great Scattering’: How Identity Panic Took Root in the Void Once Occupied by Family Life 

Let’s try a new theory: Our macro-politics have become a mania about identity because our micropolitics are no longer familial. This, above all, is what happened during the decades in which identity politics went from being a phrase in an obscure quasi-radical document to a way of being that has gone on to transform academia, law, media, culture and government.

Yes, racism, sexism and other forms of cruelty exist, and are always to be deplored and countered. At the same time, the timeline of identity politics suggest another source. Up until the middle of the twentieth century (and barring the frequent foreshortening of life by disease or nature) human expectations remained largely the same throughout the ages: that one would grow up to have children and a family; that parents and siblings and extended family would remain one’s primal community; and that, conversely, it was a tragedy not to be part of a family. The post-1960s order of sexual consumerism has upended every one of these expectations.

Who am I? is a universal human question. It becomes harder to answer if other basic questions are problematic or out of reach. 

There are fires in the Amazon. But "the Amazon" is not burning. The Great Amazon Fire Fraud

Hysterics (like President Macron) robotically describe the Amazon rain forest as the Earth’s “lungs.” And it is true that over the years, there has been some deforestation in Brazil and other countries in the Amazon region, as they continue to develop. But what liberals never mention is that overall, the Earth is getting greener. Forested areas, worldwide, are growing, not shrinking, in large part due to the increasing concentration of CO2–plant food–in the atmosphere. (CO2 is great for the environment.) You can see this easily in satellite photographs. Deserts are shrinking and vegetated areas are growing.

Segregation today. Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever! Kentucky district to open STEM school to support girls of color

The district plans to open the academy for the 2020-21 school year. It will initially serve about 150 sixth graders with plans to expand to serve grades six through eight. The district expects the school to serve a total of 450 students from all over the county. The district opened a similar school last year aimed at supporting boys of color.

So racial segregation is official government policy in Kentucky. Well.

Today's "tell me another one" entry.  From presidential candidate Kamala Harris:

Let's fill in the rest of the story.

"The root of this is the strange obsession with racism that has become a religion of its own over the last two decades. The anointing of Obama as the completion of the Second Founding, the event that was supposed to wash the stains of slavery, segregation and racism from America, instead ushered in an era of race panic. The Left is in a near frenzy over racism, which they now see everywhere. It is an obsession to the point where even the so-called Right is infected by it." Read the rest at Civic Anti-Racism.

I got that from Gerard's link-fest so go there and read all his good stuff (after you are done here, of course!).

And finally:

Der Link zeug tägliche Post

Hey, ya want ya some Medicare for All? Well, a self-described "left wing liberal" physician who worked for several years in one of the federally-funded test locations says to do this:

OK, actually, she wrote this in I Was a Physician at a Federally Qualified Health Center. Here's Why I No Longer Believe Government Health Care Can Work.:

So, I put my head down. I shut my mouth. I stopped suggesting improvements or changes that might make the system more efficient and improve patient care. I humbled myself before my managers and administrators, saying “yes, sir,” and “no, ma’am.”

This technique worked like a charm. No one screamed at me anymore. I even got a large raise.

But inside I seethed. My blood pressure spiked. My neck ached. I was anxious and depressed.

The day that my government contract expired was one of the happiest days of my life. I was free. Never again would I sell myself into indentured servitude—not to the government or any other agency.

Because doctors bail when they become serfs of the state. Why the UK Suddenly Is Suffering from a Physician Shortage -- If only someone had warned them.

The NHS is in a state of perpetual crisis characterized by doctor shortages, long wait times, and rationing. The UK lost 441 general practitioners last year and had 11,576 unfilled vacancies for doctors as of last June.

But in the last six years, 585 surgical practices have closed down, affecting 1.9 million patients. Last year alone, 138 surgery facilities closed their doors, up from 18 in 2013.

But it's okay, comrades, because fairness!

Speaking of socialism, what this country needs is to make pencil manufacturing great again! Elizabeth Warren's Pitch for 'Economic Patriotism' Is Full of Intellectual Dishonesty and Economic Fallacies

"There are a lot of giant companies who like to call themselves 'American,' but face it: they have no loyalty or allegiance to America," she says in the video.

As proof, Warren points to the "famous no. 2 pencil," which is mostly manufactured in Mexico and China. Her video doesn't make clear why pencils should have to be made in America—or why that lack of good, pencil-making jobs in America is a problem.

That Warren chose to use pencils to illustrate the supposed need for "economic patriotism" is darkly hilarious to anyone familiar with "I, Pencil," Leonard Read's 1958 parable about the merits of free markets and comparative advantage. Reed's lesson is that no one on the planet has the means or knowledge to make an item as mundane and ubiquitous as a simple pencil. A pencil requires wood, graphite, brass, and rubber, but each component part is the result of supply chains that might stretch around the world—from the forests of the Pacific Northwest to the mines of Mexico to the factories of Indonesia.

But what does that have to do with election sound biting? We need a pencil factory here, dang it! And Warren is going to build that!

First thing we do is keep all the poor people poor. If you were a national leader and decided to make sure that poor people stayed that way, what would you do? Well, this, of course: 7 Things I'd Do if I Wanted to Keep Poor People Poor

First on the list? Socialism, baby! Because remember:

Speaking of destruction of the nuclear American family, The tragic — and overlooked — fallout from the ’60s sexual revolution.

The fracturing of the post-1960s family and the flight to collective identities have not only been occurring at the same time. As the timeline and other evidence show, they cannot be understood apart from one another.

Identity politics is also a product of the revolution in another way. Whether one looks left or right, to politics or culture, the question, “Who am I?” has become the most frantic of our time. Traditionally, that question has been answered at least in part via primordial relations: I am a sister, a daughter, a cousin, a mother, a grandmother.

When answers that revert to family identity are more attenuated than ever before, “Who am I?” gets answered in a different way. 

White privilege check!

But s'okay because the Obamas Strike Blow for Economic Justice, Donate Millions in Exchange for Massive Beachfront Estate: Former president conquers ‘wealth anxiety.’ 

What a relief, because for awhile there I was afraid that America was too racist for the Obamas to move to Martha's Vineyard. But I was wrong!

What are the seven deadly sins of progressivism? PEWSLAG, of course.

Long ago, there was a mnemonic for the seven deadly sins, PEWSLAG. In order, it meant Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Lust, Avarice, and Gluttony.  So common have the elements of PEWSLAG become in our time that they can no longer be considered as ‘The 7 Deadly Sins,” but rather as the PPAF, The Progressive Platform for America’s Future.

Let’s review the PPAF in greater detail:

Explained in detailed by the inimitable Gerard Vanderleun, who was a founding member of the SDS at UC-Berkeley back on the 60s and so knows what he is talking about.

Finally, some Truth here by the late Nabeel Qureshi.

Your long read of the day

What is going on with mass shootings? Lessons from past solved problems.

Read the whole thing.

Also these two essays that complement one another:

No-One's Life Matters. That's Why There Are Mass Shootings

America’s Nervous Breakdown.

And another: The crisis of American loneliness

Mass shootings and white supremacy

How many mass shootings occurred in America between July 16 and July 28th, 2019? What was the race of the shooter identified by police?

There were 36 mass shootings across the United States during that two-week period. A white was named as the shooter in one of them. An Hispanic was accused in another one. In the other 34, police identified a black suspect as the shooter.

Violent-crime victims weapons used, Chicago, 2019 so far

All of these shootings were reported in the media, mostly local media only, although the NYT has generally reported them (usually buried in a back page). Here is the list.

The day after the Gilroy shooting, NY Mayor (and presidential candidate) Bill de Blasio was asked by a reporter whether the Gilroy shooting resembled the mass shootings in New York.

"Not all, said de Blasio. “We don’t really count them that way.” 

Why doesn't the Left count them that way? The Chicago Tribune explains that there is no way to politically weaponize black men shooting other black men. But they can weaponize El Paso and Dayton.

Those angry loner white boys with guns, this time in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, have again erupted on the body politic.

And those with eyes to see are reminded that the American culture is ill.

But what of the mass shootings in Chicago, the 55 people shot over the weekend, with seven hit near a park and then eight more not far away?

You might think these are “mass shootings” too, but, in political/media terms, they’re not treated as such. The victims, and in all likelihood the shooters, are black. And Democratic politicians find no political advantage in weaponizing the victims of everyday street violence in a Democratic town. So Chicago’s dead are stepped over by national media and national Democrats on the way to 2020.

Black men killing other black men? That's not news. Middle-class white shooters killing white middle-class shoppers or club hoppers, now that's news!

A clergy colleague of mine wrote me of my observation,

This discussion is beginning to rise among African American pastors, at least in my neck of the woods:  

• There's lots of talk *now* about studies on mass murderers because *white* people are killing folks.
• Why haven't folks been as outraged about gangs?
• Black on black killing?
• Nobody cares about our public schools, where gangs recruit while white folks send their kids to "academies."
• A lot more people have died in urban violence than in mass school killings. Are we not as important? 

It needs to be a both/and where school shootings and urban violence are concerned. But our outrage seems to be selective - and for that, we must repent.

HT: Gerard Vanderleun, who also offers this collage of mug shots of every mass shooter in the US arrested by police from January - July of this year.

Yep, mass shooters are motivated by "white supremacism" all right.

Updates:

"You don't have to be a detective why the liberal media would rather have this story [about the political views of Dayton killer Connor Betts] just fade away. It's not the right kind of mass shooting."

"The Dayton Murderer Is Proof We Need To Take Left-Wing Violence Seriously"

Reuters: FBI finds gunman in Dayton, Ohio, rampage was obsessed with violence

Hollywood Film Depicts Trump Supporters Being Hunted for Sport by Liberals

Universal Pictures is set to release a thriller called The Hunt on September 27, which features left-wing “elites” hunting Trump supporters for sport. 

In the past few days we’ve been hearing a lot about how Donald Trump’s rhetoric is apparently to blame for the El Paso shooting, yet Hollywood apparently lacked the foresight to think that a movie promoting violence against “deplorables” might be in bad taste until after the shootings in El Paso and Dayton, as only now is Universal rethinking their promotional strategy for the film.

"Did anyone see what our ratf**ker-in-chief just did?" one character asks early in the screenplay for The Hunt, a Universal Pictures thriller set to open Sept. 27. Another responds: "At least The Hunt's coming up. Nothing better than going out to the Manor and slaughtering a dozen deplorables."

Update:

Secular, godless "churches" are dying

Explains The Atlantic: "They Tried to Start a Church Without God. For a While, It Worked. Secular organizers started their own congregations. But to succeed, they need to do a better job of imitating religion."

For religious communes, the more sacrifices demanded, the longer they lasted; however, this connection didn’t hold for secular communes. The implication, Norenzayan said, was that challenging rituals and taxing rules work only when they’re part of something sacred; once the veil of sacrality is removed, people no longer care to commit to things that demand their time and dedication. “If it’s ‘Come and go as you wish,’ that’s not going to work,” he said. Even if secular congregations could create a sense of the sacred, they tend to attract people who are explicitly looking for a community without costly rituals—one that lets you do what you want.

They will never imitate religion enough to compete on Sunday morning with league sports for children and teens, even though sports for minors is rapidly becoming the exclusive privilege of richer and mainly white families.

Update: Longtime friend and retired Marine infantry officer David H. emails,

Akin to "secular churches" that lose any imperative nature without a compelling underpinning, it is always amusing to see business, social, sports, or other groups attempt to adopt military trappings to recreate the commitment and sacrifice of actual military organizations...but always fall short of evoking similar commitment. Unless the very real price for not equaling the standard is, ahhh, DEATH, it is hard to sharpen the focus of the wannabe participants.  

Which helps explain why, for example, environmentalism is a religion in its own right, though godless, because extinction is the preached consequence of non-adherence. Remember, according to AOC, we have only 12 years to save the planet!

In that, environmentalism does have a god, though: Gaia, Mother Earth. But Gaia is not a god who saves us, but a god whom we must save. Environmentalism is an inversion of religion in its usual sense, in that it makes us gods, and conveniently, some of us are "woke" gods and therefore must take charge. All humans are gods, but some are more godly than others, to paraphrase Orwell.

Tribalism is here to stay

Tribalism is the basic self-organization of the human species and will not be overcome until the eschaton. Judaism has not done it. Christianity has not done it. Islam has not done it. No political ideology has done it.

The truth? It cannot be done.

Leftist thugs have Second Amendment rights, too, ya know

The New Republic: "Antifa Is Arming Itself Against a Trump Crackdown"

... many leftists and even some liberals are beginning to reconsider their feelings about firearms, joining a loose amalgamation of gun groups, from John Brown Gun Clubs (which take their name from the abolitionist) to the Pink Pistols (an LGBTQ group), Liberal Gun Club, and Socialist Rifle Association. Some of these organizations are moderate and traditionalist, others radical and revolutionary. But all share one implicit goal: to normalize firearms ownership and training among liberals. Some of their members hope such efforts will at least make Republicans think twice before attempting a massacre.

At least one organizer understands the paradox:

“We’ve got liberal folks, politicians and people in the media, saying, ‘the government is becoming a fascist regime,’ and then turning around and saying, ‘You can’t have your guns, we can only have guns in the hands of people we’re calling fascists,’” said Alex Tackett, the SRA’s 22-year-old president.

Second Amendment advocates have been saying for many year, even decades, "If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns." So is the Left coming around? It reminds me of what Robert Heinlein wrote many years ago: "Pacifists" do not really exist, when the wind changes, everyone will hoist the Jolly Roger. So no wonder that The Left Escalates Violence as Antifa Arms Themselves.

It is, of course, Trump's fault. After all, Leftists are men and women of peace and love -- you know, like the ones who commit more than two-thirds of all firearms murders in the United States.

And these men of peace and love and tolerance:

Ft.Hood shooter Nidal Hasan – Democrat
Adam Lanza – Liberal, hated Christians
Columbine High School freaks – too young to vote but came from very liberal families
Virginia Tech shooter, Seung-Hui Cho – liberal
Virginia Tech decapitater – liberal
Colorado Theater shooter James Holmes – liberal
Live on air Roanoke VA TV station shooter Vester Lee Flanagan – liberal
Navy shipyard shooter Aaron Alexis – liberal
Arizona Gabby Giffords shooter Jared Loughner – Liberal, hated Bush
The DC snipers back in 2003 – Liberals
Chattanooga TN Marine Recruiting center shooter – Democrat
Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) – Leftist
Occupy Wall Street – over 8,000 arrests, 3 murders, 2 arson, 10 plus reported rapes – a hardcore leftist movement

But remember: it is Republicans who are fascists.

Yes, I helped ruin America

I am a mid-gen Boomer, born 1955. I wrote in 2016 that my generation should be called the Meathead Generation (not a term original with me). And now The Atlantic has the facts and rationale mucu better than I did: "The Boomers Ruined Everything -- The mistakes of the past are fast creating a crisis for younger Americans."

Read the whole thing.

The corruption of our language is deliberate

How Orwell Foresaw the Disintegration of Our Language

“In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing.”

This is the takeaway quote from George Orwell's essay “Politics and the English Language,” which has become popular as a guide for writers throughout the English-speaking world.  In the essay Orwell advocates a plainspoken, straightforward and no-nonsense writing style.  He heaps scorn on what he calls “meaningless words,” pretentious diction (including foreign-derived words and phrases), clichés, and vagueness of any kind.  He praises precision and simplicity.

Orwell saw the increasing sloppiness of language in his day (he wrote the essay 1946) as directly related to the hyper-politicized environment which was then taking shape.  Politics, after all, is “a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia” and will naturally make use of language in order to deceive people.

Orwell's essay has been highly influential.  The writer and historian Richard Pipes—best known as expert in the history of Communism—tells us that when he writes he strives for the “greatest economy of words,” chiseling his sentences until he has achieved maximum clarity and precision.  He calls this style of writing “classical” and contrasts it the “elaborate, rich” writing style of turn-of-the-century authors like Henry James.

At the same time, Orwell's prescriptions have been widely questioned.  Is simplicity everything? Is it right to shun Latinate words and phrases? English, after all, is a hybrid of Anglo-Saxon and Latin and is richer for it.  Are words like “predict” or “extraneous,” which Orwell deems unnecessary accretions, really so bad?

While one can take Orwell's strictures against Latinate vocabulary with a grain of salt, we can appreciate the sentiment behind them.  For Orwell, Latin-derived words have less concreteness and immediacy than Saxon ones. An over-reliance on such words can easily lead to a fuzzy vagueness.
And it's here that Orwell put his finger on something deeper: our increasing tendency toward abstraction and over-sophistication in our thinking, turning the concrete into the metaphorical and thence into the unreal.

As Orwell predicted (or “foretold,” if you prefer) language is often used to dress up shabby or bankrupt thought—a tool of evasion rather than communication.  We lose contact with the real world and live within the confines our minds.  Effete over-refinement and airy abstractions rule the day.  Theory trumps reality.  This is particularly true of Marxist and Communist theory, as Orwell would no doubt have pointed out.

For Orwell, it was a vicious circle: “[Language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
And so our language is dominated by technical jargon, “bureaucratese,” academic-speak, and politically correct circumlocutions.  Verbosity is the operating principle.  Not only is language used to inflate flimsy ideas, it is used as time-filling chatter to make the writer look busy and necessary.
Orwell's rules for writing still ring out loud and clear, in their essence if not in their every detail.  Choose your words with care.  Say what you mean and mean what you say.  Be sure you have a clear meaning in mind before you write.  And remember that language is about communicating truth, not propping up your ideology or your ego.

This post How Orwell Foresaw the Disintegration of Our Language was originally published on Intellectual Takeout by Michael De Sapio.

Why Islam is winning in the West

Briton Jacob Williams explains why he wanted to become a Christian while a student at Oxford but rejected it and converted to Islam instead.

I had plenty of opportunities to engage with orthodox Christians, and I sincerely wanted Christianity to be true. It was clear to me that what the authorities in my world celebrated—the collapse of family life, the slaughter of the unborn, the deterioration of high culture—were, in truth, social evils that followed from the decline of the Church. Christianity seemed the natural alternative to secularity.

But when I entered the chapels and listened to the ministers, the regeneration I sought didn’t happen. Christian voices sounded all too agreeable and compromising. I wanted something stronger, something that didn’t ­bargain with secularism. I found it in Islam.

Read the whole thing. And weep.

The killing fields of western civilization

If this is true, there are three broad areas that constitute the killing fields of modern civilization: academia, the churches, and corporate practices.

For academia, read "Decline & fall: classics edition -- On identity politics in classical studies."

Well, this year, [Donna] Zuckerberg noted, the magazine would aim to make sure that “at least [at least] 70 percent of our contributors be women and 20 percent of our writers be poc,” i.e., “people of color,” i.e., not white. (But isn’t race merely a “social construction”? No, silly, that was last year.) And just how are those percentages going to be achieved? Well, going forward, Eidolon will ask people pitching stories for “demographics,” i.e., are you black or white? Male or female? “I have no interest,” Zuckerberg sermonized, “in providing bland and false reassurances that we only care about good ideas and good writing and not who our authors are.” Who would doubt it? And what about merit? “[A]ppeals to merit,” she said, are “often . . . white supremacist dog-whistles.” So: “If you’re white and we publish you, you will know, for maybe the first time in your career, that it was because of the merit of your idea and not because you’re white.”

 We’d like to know if there are any cases of anyone anywhere being published in a classics journal because he (or even she) was white. 

The article's writer, btw, is not white.

For churches, "Why Social Justice Is Killing Synagogues and Churches -- Data suggests that the more a religious movement is concerned with progressive causes, the more likely it is to rapidly lose members."

Ultimately ... religions, including Judaism [and churches - DS], can only hope to thrive if they serve a purpose that is not met elsewhere in society. It is all well and good to perform good deeds, but if religions do not make themselves indispensable to families, their future could be bleak. [boldface added]

For the business world, the account of an information-technology security engineer, no link, this was posted on a closed Facebook group, but I am pasting all of what he wrote (protecting his name).

Fellow Members,

I just experienced a disturbing couple of days with my employer that I would like to share with you.

I work for the security unit of one of the largest consultancies in the world. Essentially, I help companies to secure their websites.

Once a year, our entire organization gets together for teambuilding, planning, networking, and that sort of thing. I went to the same event this time last year, and I found it rewarding and inspiring. I came away with many ideas on how to do my job better, and many new relationships with peers.

This year was different. While there were certainly many of the same networking opportunities, the overriding theme of the two days was inclusion and diversity. Essentially, we just spent thousands of dollars to fly everyone to one place to spend two days learning how to be more inclusive and more diverse.

As I’ve mentioned here before, my organization has a goal of being 50% women by 2025. I can’t imagine how we can reach such a goal, given that university technology programs are not graduating anywhere near 50% women.

Don’t misunderstand me. People want to come and work for us, so we have added some great women to our organization. It’s been a pleasure to work with them. However, it seems obvious to me that we are going to have to begin to forgo some great male talent soon if we hope to reach this 2025 goal.

I shared with you a couple of weeks back that an internal recruiter was complaining to me that she now has a diversity goal for talent which she is struggling to meet. So, again, our goal is no longer to find the right people, but to find the most diverse people. Our company gives referral bonuses if you were for good people who are hired. That number is now doubled if you refer “diverse“ candidates.

I have managed technical people for nearly 30 years. I’ve managed people of different races, nationalities, sexual orientation - whatever. As a manager, if you can help me reach my goals, you can work for me. I have been a popular manager throughout my career, because I take care of my people.

However, this is different than adding people to my team simply because of their gender, nationality, or sexual orientation. Why the hell should I even care about their sexual orientation? What does that have to do with securing some company’s website?

About 50% of the two days was spent on exercises related to inclusion and diversity. I was given a spreadsheet, and asked to fill it in with the names of the six people I trust the most (other than family). I was then asked to check boxes when the attributes of those people were the same as mine. The attributes were age, race, gender, nationality, and sexual orientation. I was then asked to look at all the checkmarks and ask myself if I should “re-think” the list of the people that I trust the most.

My list was filled with my oldest friends in the world – guys I went to high school with. I’ve been lucky enough to maintain those friendships over the years. I value them as much as anything else in my life.

My employer just asked me to re-think those friendships, because my friendships are not inclusive and diverse enough, in their opinion.

The reason they gave me is that we hire people we trust, and we won’t hire with an eye toward inclusion and diversity if we only trust people like ourselves.

Well, I’ve never hired any one of my old friends. They are my friends. These are not professional relationships. I trust many people professionally of many races, genders, national origins, etc. Again, my litmus test is simple. Can you help me sell my software and delight my customers?

I’m proud to be a good mentor of people younger and less experienced than myself. I’ve trained many people to be better technically, and better with soft skills, such as public speaking. The people I have trained have included people of many races, genders, and national origins. Some I know to be gay, simply because I found out somehow. One woman who worked for me shared with me, over a beer, that she was gay. She opened up to me because, she wanted to tell me how comfortable she was working for me, when other male managers were uncomfortable with her. Frankly, I can’t imagine how anybody could be uncomfortable with her. She did a great job, and every customer loved her. It was her choice to open up to me about her sexual orientation, and that’s fine, but it had no bearing on my view of her. Had another event, I met her partner. This woman was as I have it a baseball fan as I am. We hit it off completely.

This person doesn’t work for me today, but we’re still in touch. She reaches out to me sometimes for career advice, and she has used me as a reference.

We had a number of other exercises, such as putting little shapes on our shirts and then grouping ourselves in any way we thought appropriate, to “prove“ that we naturally go toward people like ourselves. What it proved to me what is that, to get done with the exercise, we’ll go stand next to the people who are closest to us.

I had a funny experience right after this exercise. The exercise was right before lunch. There was a woman ahead of me in the lunch line. I had spoken to her for a while in a different breakout session, and I thought she was great. I made a mental note to keep her in mind for a future project.

However, in the lunch line, she suddenly became very angry due to the lack of a vegetarian option. I looked at the lunch selections. There was a large salad, including a great deal of variety, plus carrots, potatoes, and potato pierogies. Weren’t these vegetarian options? This woman threw her tray down in disgust and stormed off.

I couldn’t help but wonder if all of the inclusion and diversity exercises we had just completed pushed her out of her “teambuilding“ mode, and into her “identity” mode. It was night and day. She was like the guy in the Snickers commercial who turns into Betty White when he’s hungry.

Then, the part that really disturbed me. After the exercises were completed, a woman got up and explained that we were going to begin to have Ask Anything webinars. Executives would essentially be put on the hot seat, and lower level employees could ask them anything. Examples cited were sexual orientation and religion.

So, executives in our organization are going to be forced to go on webinars and talk about their sexuality and their religion? Really?

And, while you would not be forced to attend these events, you would get a “flair” on your personal page if you did. Remember Jennifer Aniston in that movie where she was a waitress, and she kept getting in trouble with her boss because she wouldn’t wear enough flair? This is the same idea.

I don’t want to hear about somebody’s sexuality or religion, so I would be unlikely to attend such an event, but now everyone in the company would be aware of my choice, simply due to the lack of flair on my personal page. Will this be career limiting for me?

Of course, I’ve probably reached as high as I’m likely to go in this organization, given that I’m a 55-year-old white guy. I don’t meet the current leadership criteria.

Frankly, I think this whole idea is a lawsuit waiting to happen.

I work with some great people, and we do great work for customers throughout the world. I came away from these two days concerned that leadership is going to destroy the great thing we have by this over the top focus on inclusion and diversity.

Doesn’t it make more sense to grow our organization by bringing in great talent without consideration for all of these other attributes?

Well, I guess that’s my unconscious bias talking.

I posted earlier this excerpt from Victor Davis Hanson's essay, The Return of Ancient Prejudices.

What is behind the rebirth of these old prejudices? In short, new, evolving prejudices.

First, America seemingly no longer believes in striving to achieve a gender-blind, racially and religiously mixed society, but instead is becoming a nation in which tribal identity trumps all other considerations.

Second, such tribal identities are not considered to be equal. Doctrinaire identity politics is predicated on distancing itself from white males, Christians and other groups who traditionally have achieved professional success and therefore enjoyed inordinate “privilege.”

Third, purported victims insist that they themselves cannot be victimizers. So, they are freer to discriminate and stereotype to advance their careers or political interests on the basis of anything they find antithetical to their own ideologies. ...

And what fuels the return of American bias is the new idea that citizens can disparage or discriminate against other groups if they claim victim status and do so for purportedly noble purposes.

Oh, my: "Why Diversity Programs Fail," at Harvard Business Review.

It shouldn’t be surprising that most diversity programs aren’t increasing diversity. ...

In analyzing three decades’ worth of data from more than 800 U.S. firms and interviewing hundreds of line managers and executives at length, we’ve seen that companies get better results when they ease up on the control tactics. It’s more effective to engage managers in solving the problem, increase their on-the-job contact with female and minority workers, and promote social accountability—the desire to look fair-minded. That’s why interventions such as targeted college recruitment, mentoring programs, self-managed teams, and task forces have boosted diversity in businesses. Some of the most effective solutions aren’t even designed with diversity in mind.

To vast swaths of the Political Class, this is a feature, not a bug: "Millennial Males with Degrees are Getting Crushed in the Workplace."

Wokescolds, tribal victimhood identities, and class enemies

The Return of Ancient Prejudices, by Victor Davis Hanson, surveying the political and social landscape:

What is behind the rebirth of these old prejudices? In short, new, evolving prejudices.

First, America seemingly no longer believes in striving to achieve a gender-blind, racially and religiously mixed society, but instead is becoming a nation in which tribal identity trumps all other considerations.

Second, such tribal identities are not considered to be equal. Doctrinaire identity politics is predicated on distancing itself from white males, Christians and other groups who traditionally have achieved professional success and therefore enjoyed inordinate “privilege.”

Third, purported victims insist that they themselves cannot be victimizers. So, they are freer to discriminate and stereotype to advance their careers or political interests on the basis of anything they find antithetical to their own ideologies. ...

And what fuels the return of American bias is the new idea that citizens can disparage or discriminate against other groups if they claim victim status and do so for purportedly noble purposes.

And what might those "noble purposes" be? IMO, they call come down to dependency on the Marxist-Leninist doctrine of "class enemies."

Beria was Stalin's chief of internal security. He said quite simply that anyone could be arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced without knowing anything about him or her except their Communist class identity. This idea is waxing strong in America today:

One of the echoes of Marxism that continues to reverberate today is the idea that truth resides in class (or sex or race or erotic orientation). Truth is not something to be established by rational inquiry, but depends on the perspective of the speaker. In the multicultural universe, a person’s perspective is “valued” (a favorite word) according to class. Feminists, blacks, environmentalists and homosexuals have a greater claim to truth because they are “oppressed.” 

Favored classes have the virtue of having "revolutionary truth" ascribed to them, while unfavored classes have no redeeming virtue within or redemption without.

Party members signed death warrants for “enemies of the people” knowing that the accused were innocent, but believing in the correctness of the charges. In the 1930s,collective guilt justified murdering millions of Russian peasants. As cited by Robert Conquest in The Harvest of Sorrow (p. 143), the state’s view of this class was, “not one of them was guilty of anything; but they belonged to a class that was guilty of everything.” 

As, for example, Caucasians and the concept of "while privilege." Inveighing charges against class enemies is the "noble purpose" behind the nearly-countless victimization hoaxes being perpetrated today. But the hoaxes continue - Jussie Smollett's arrest and potential prosecution do not signal the end. Why? Because, as Quillette explains,

[I]f you don’t follow conservative media, you may not have a sense of how often stories of hate crimes turn out to be false or a sense of what the false cases tend to look like.

Even fairly incompetent hoaxes might therefore succeed, which brings us to our second point: Hate crime hoaxes aren’t hard to pull off.

Especially with a compliant mainline media and Left-wing political establishment that wants the hoaxers' claims to be true.

No segment of American society is off limits for striking against class enemies. Recently, the Southern Baptist Church was stricken with details of child sexual abuse and assault made public, committed by some church workers and some pastors. That such acts deserve investigation and punishment surely needs no justification. But according to Stephanie Krehbiel, there is a class of church member who simply needs to be quiet, namely men. All men. Because an individual Baptist man may have abused or assaulted no one and so be personally innocent of anything -- except being a member of a class that is guilty of everything.

I covered earlier that we are seeing the the birth and growth of a new kind of social dynamic that never existed before: the victimhood culture. It never existed before because its birth and growth depend on social media and its enabling of instant tribal grouping across and without regard to bloodlines.

As Quillette explains,

... the third thing to know is that hate crime hoaxes thrive in a culture of victimhood. We use the term victimhood culture to refer to a new moral framework that differs from the older cultures of honor and dignity. Honor culture refers to a morality that revolves around physical bravery. In honor cultures one’s reputation is important, and it might be necessary to engage in violence to protect it. In the dignity cultures that replaced honor cultures, morality more often revolves around the idea that people have equal moral worth. Insults and slights don’t lower one’s status as they do in honor cultures, and people can ignore many minor offenses and go to the police and courts for more serious ones. Victimhood culture, which is in its most extreme form among campus activists, is different from both honor and dignity cultures. Its morality revolves around a narrative of oppression and victimhood, with victimhood acting as new kind of moral status, much like honor was a kind of moral status in many traditional societies.

Something like a hate crime hoax would make no sense in an honor culture. You might falsely accuse someone of insulting you so that you have a chance to display your honor, but you’d be trying to get them to engage in a duel or some other kind of fight. You’d be trying to demonstrate strength, to show you can handle your conflicts on your own. The last thing you’d want to do is claim to be a victim in need of help. Hate crime hoaxes make a little more sense in a dignity culture. Hate crimes are offenses against dignity, and perhaps you’d have something to gain by falsely claiming victimhood. But in a moral world less focused on praising victims and demonizing the privileged, the benefits are lesser and skepticism is greater.

It is in a victimhood culture that hate crime hoaxes are most attractive.

As I wrote before,

Victimhood culture is literally childish. It is a dynamic that resides at elementary-grade level, although, as the professors explain, college students today are far more adept and energetic in it than small kids.

 A better explanation of how the child-students in college today practice this is given by Rod Dreher in "Life Among The Wokescolds," in which he recounts what a college professor-friend related.

In one of my classes yesterday we were talking about current events, and a student mentioned that the soldier in the famous Times Square kissing photo had died. “Yes,” I said. “Too bad. Such a beautiful image, and such a moment of joy.” One of my least favorite students, a smug know-it-all in the back row, piped up. “You actually like that photo?” she said. “Well, yeah,” I replied, a bit taken aback. “That’s an iconic image of a moment of unbridled joy.”

“And do you think she consented to that kiss?” she said icily. “No, no she did not. That is a photo of an assault. That man should have gone to jail.”

Now, this happens with some regularity in classes these days. I don’t use Twitter, but I’m familiar with the term “wokescold,” and it’s incredibly accurate. Most of my students are just pure scolds. They’re deeply puritanical (though they have no idea who the Puritans were, given their virtually nonexistent awareness of history). ...

It seems to me that totalitarianism is not arriving in the U.S. via the stern face of Big Brother staring down from the screen. It’s coming from the college student who says we shouldn’t view a photo of pure, untrammeled joy. And the thing is that they can’t see that joy, not just because they’re puritans, but because they have no historical consciousness. They have no sense of what so many Americans sacrificed in the years leading up to that famous kiss because they never really learned it. ... 

... We are crazy if we don’t think for one second that the things we consider good and just today will be denounced as oppressive in 30 years. To say that we shouldn’t look at an image that shows the joy of having just defeated the f’ing Nazis is just insanity.

My students are generally pleasant, but they’re never any fun. Where’s the joy in their lives? They live to denounce. It’s like having 25 Robespierres around you three times a week. They’re always on the lookout for something to be outraged about. 

 I'd love to have some fine ending, full of hope and promise. But I do not. As Notre Dame Prof. Patrick Daneen wrote,

Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts — whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about — have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide. The end of history for our students signals the End of History for the West.

Hard to put a happy face on that. Want to watch the perpetual infantilism of our children in action? The consider no more than Democratic California Sen. Dianne Feinstein's visit by elementary school kids and adults where she encountered wokescolds of all ages.


Update: Commentary: Politicized Schools Are Radically Transforming Our Nation. Well, as Prof. Daneen said, that's what the education establishment considers its most important goal.