Archive for June, 2017

Definitions of Wonderful, Mega-Awesome People

Friday, June 23rd, 2017

For many years now I’ve been going on like a broken record about definitions. I simplify the schism between left and right, depicting the left as opposed to definitions and the right being invested in them; the left seeks to destroy the definitions we have already and prevent new definitions from being recognized, whereas the right relies on definitions in order to do the work they do, within & outside of politics.

Yes it simplifies, some would say grossly.

What exactly does conservatism seek to conserve? Civilization, the blessings that come from having it, and the definitions that make civilization possible. From what does liberalism seek to liberate us? Those things — starting with the definitions.

But it doesn’t misrepresent. Not even a tiny bit. Watch left & right argue for awhile, you’ll notice it very often comes back to that. We saw it with gay marriage. Saw it with their perverse defense of Bill Clinton. We see it with illegal immigration. Over and over again we see it…

But never does the left controvert common sense — this is REALLY saying something — more than when they put together their hagiographies of their own still-living people. Elizabeth Warren! Joe Biden! Ooh, so great!! Okay…let us say for sake of argument that this is so. How come that is, liberals? What’s great about Biden? Specifically. Respected everywhere? No. He’s not. Not even close. Warren? She gives a great speech? Not even. She doesn’t have the right voice for it and the things she says are stupid. She’s a clown.

And the Clintons have a great marriage…

Ted Kennedy was the Conscience of the Senate…

Barack Obama has a wide range of interests and is thoughtful…

Such sentiments are measurably empty, because they can all be effectively refuted with a dismissive snort and nothing else. In the liberal echo chamber, they’re really “true” because inside that cloister you’ll find your own social status on the wane if you dare to contradict them, indeed if you merely fail to agree with them, or just hesitate too long to do so.

Outside of it though, they’re a joke.

We live in a universe that has definitions. So, opposing them is going to get you in trouble. It’s the kind of thing where you start telling lies, and you find you have to keep telling more lies to keep the other lies from being discovered. The same thing holds for opposing, seeking to obfuscate, to dismantle, definitions. You’ve got to keep doing it.

Now the liberals have to struggle with this, as they try to recall what’s good about Nancy Pelosi. They’re up to a solid decade plus acting under orders to think she’s wonderful and awesome, in some kinda general sorta way, without ever having established a reason why.

“Dad” is One of Those Nouns That Should Be a Verb

Sunday, June 18th, 2017

Today there’s supposed to be some huge contrast between all the things I have to get done any other day of the year, or any other Sunday, and today. It’s supposed to noticeably drop off to a zero as I get spoiled. Well, that’s not going to happen because I get spoiled all the time, especially on Sundays. And I’ve got stuff to do today that nobody else can do, so work-n-play-wise it’s going to be a Sunday like any other Sunday. Conventional wisdom is that I’m supposed to stretch out in a hammock with a milkshake, or something stronger, and luxuriate in the fact that Father’s Day has FINALLY arrived, and I can stop working at stuff until tomorrow.

From whence did this expectation arise?

The plain truth of the matter is, it has come from the understanding other people form about what it is Dads do; understandings that are not entirely accurate, because they are formed by people who are not Dads. We are to take break from all that strange, unknowable, whatever-it-is-we-do…which we do ALL of the time. And I see an implication that this is hamster-in-a-wheel stuff, activity without discernible progress; if “work” is to be defined in some way that has to do with an object changing state, this falls short. Dad gets a break from idly puttering around.

Well, being a small-dee dad doesn’t involve a lot. Being a capital-dee Dad is the ultimate “work that involves object state change”: The child is not ready to go out into the world, then the child is. That’s the goal.

I put it up on social media awhile ago. The day is young, but I have to say I’m not entirely encouraged with the popularity, or lack thereof, of the observation: Two likes no shares. I guess Father’s Day is only for positive thoughts, and I’m guilty of crapping all over it? Dunno. You decide:

I have high hopes for this Father’s Day. It’s nice to see all the pictures-of-dads, and all the wishes for a happy day, admonitions to “put your feet up” etc. Me? Well, I’ve already had my feet up, already relaxed. You know what would really make MY Father’s Day, on social networking anyhow, is people talking about what they LEARNED. What do they know how to do, that they wouldn’t know how to do if they didn’t have a capital-dee Dad?

How do we matter?

I’ll start. My Dad taught me how to turn a wrench. Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey. Probably the most useful thing I learned, next to the computer stuff. I’d put teaching me how to drive a stick shift ahead of that, but Mom helped with that part a little. Third place would be cutting wood with various devices, chainsaws, axes, hatchets, wedges…not something I need often down here in the 38th parallel, but it’s good to have the basics down if I need them.

Hopefully my son has a list of his own, for when he calls me today. Which he’d better do.

Fatherhood, lest we forget, is in TROUBLE. It has been put under attack for the last five decades by feminism, which has been holding back nothing in its attempts to transform the Human Equation into the Bovine Equation…just momma cow & baby calf against the world, after the papa bull does what it takes to become a papa, and moves on to someplace else. Well, there are humans that do that, but those are small-dee dads, not capital-dee Dads. And we’re not there yet! Dads still matter…I think. Could be wrong.

But in my world, we have much more important work to do than lie in a hammock and enjoy a damn nap. We can do that any time out of the year. Being a Dad means you have an EFFECT on someone. That is what I would like to see.

In a way, the job has been defined: Being a Dad means, your wants, desires, satisfactions, feelings come last. All fine & good, but the trouble with that is this defines any “job” out of existence. One of those desires is to see to it the job is done, right?

Dad says: I wanted this other thing, but heck with it, being [blank]’s Dad is THE MOST IMPORTANT JOB I HAVE on Earth! And everyone cheers. Then we test to see if the object has changed state; did Dad get the job done? And everyone scatters like cockroaches when you turn on the light. Because, again, everyone else’s feelings come first. To admit the kid learned something from Dad, and could not have learned it from anywhere else, would make the single-moms feel bad. And, the stepdads. And, the kids who were raised by single-moms. They would all feel bad, and their feelings are more important.

So, we pretend Dad is just a hamster in a wheel, doing a bunch of whatever. Activity without purpose. Happy Father’s Day Dad, why don’t you take a breather?

Well…I can’t speak for everyone, but for those who are coping with similar situations and similar concerns, a break is not what we want. If we’re doing work, the work is for someone we care about or else it’s for ourselves; in either case, our primary want is going to be for the job to be successfully done.

That’s exactly same things the Moms want. Get the job done, the job that never ends…

What we want is to have adult children who are prosperous, independent, principled, kind, self-fulfilled, and have that extra something going for them that they learned from us. That is our most important job. Not chopping away at a lawn or kickin’ back with a nice tall glass of lemonade.

ThatIsAll.

Liberals and Their Ideas

Saturday, June 17th, 2017

John C. Goodman:

What do these events have in common?
:
[Easily-gathered list of liberal individuals and advocacy-groups being unhinged]
:
Since Donald Trump’s name figures prominently in each of these events, is the president to blame? Remember, Trump is not a traditional Republican or even a traditional conservative. In the past he gave money to Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer and other Democrats. So why are Trump’s critics going through the emotional equivalent of the St. Vitus dance?

To answer that, look at the critics, not at Trump.

This has been on my mind a great deal lately. According to conventional wisdom, and the narrative liberals like to push — also, not completely unfounded by the anecdotal evidence we see if we pay attention across time — liberalism pushes us along in one direction, sometimes at warp-speed and sometimes at a glacial pace. But, being “progress” that is inevitable, it doesn’t retreat. It relies on the ratchet effect. From Hell's Heart, I Stab at TheeAnd, to the envy of everyone else who’s struggling to get something done, liberalism as a movement always seems to know what to do next, even when it’s being dealt its most bitter defeats. It’s like the metaphorical fiddler, with the “pay me now or pay me later” attitude. It appeals to a constituency of intellectual lightweights, of drama queens, hysterical types, who have no long-term plan, seem to exist in a constant state of agitation and despair, looking at life through a straw. And yet as a political movement it’s always playing for the long-game.

Why, then, in the wake of this latest defeat, is it so evidently not the case? They’re like the villain from a science fiction movie, or corny old comic book, reaching up to grab the hero off a high scaffold with an evil snarl and spiky speaking bubble that says “I don’t care if I live so long as you die!” A first-term President Trump having to contend with a Senate and House dominated by the opposition party after 2018, seems like a near-certainty if the democrats can manage things right. Is that the vision? Gum up the works, let the whole country SEE THEM DOING IT, and then hoping the voters forget who’s been making it this way when the time comes to vote?

How do the foolish video “beheadings,” and real-life active-shooter events, figure into it I wonder?

Why are they so much off the deep end? Shouldn’t they be busying themselves with circulating propaganda, like they did after Reagan beat Carter and then Mondale? I mean, granted that took awhile, but it at least went off in the direction they wanted…worked eventually. A new generation of idiot voters reached the age to cast a vote, the women got all lovesick and swooning over this cutey-pie Arkansas Governor, and he got elect President. That would not have worked if the electorate was being reminded all week long every week, how democrats can’t carry a thought any better than a the party drunk can carry a tune. Like they’re being reminded right now.

Goodman continues with his reasons. He doesn’t seem to think there’s a plan behind this, that the liberal movement is a victim of its own innate insanity. I’m undecided about this, but I find his summaries to be persuasive:

Liberalism without Ideas. During the last election, Donald Trump raised a number of issues – some of which were unusual in presidential politics…Some of Trump’s solutions were standard Republican fare…But here is the important question: Can you say with any confidence what Hillary Clinton proposed to do about any of these problems? I bet you can’t.

As for Bernie Sanders and the left wing of the Democratic party, there seem to be some concrete proposals. But I can’t think of one that is different from what the left was saying back in the 1930s.
:
A Party Without Ideas.…Today, identity politics is all there is. In the last election, Hillary Clinton asked women to vote for her because they are women. Blacks because they are black…This is the new racial politics and it’s been going full throttle for some time.
:
Campuses Without Ideas. Historically, colleges and universities in this country represented fountainheads of free inquiry. They were places where the free exchange of ideas was permitted and encouraged…But no more…Instead of debating whether vouchers would help liberate poor minority kids who are attending bad schools, for example, some campus protestors are claiming that even hearing the case for vouchers “marginalizes” black students. Ditto for welfare reform, or just about any other reform proposed by someone who is right-of-center.

Further, we are increasingly told that speech itself is a form of violence. So, physical violence is justified to silence speech that is “offensive.”

Anti-intellectualism is so consuming campus life that even a slight deviation from political correctness on questions of identity can provoke scathing condemnation.
:
A Culture Without Ideas. What is happening on college campuses is a barometer of what is happening in elite culture as a whole. Writing in the New York Times, Kenan Malik reports that:

Hal Niedzviecki, editor of Write, the magazine of the Canadian Writers’ Union, penned an editorial defending the right of white authors to create characters from minority or indigenous backgrounds. Within days, a social media backlash forced him to resign.

You can see I’m struggling here to excerpt fairly, retaining the structure of his critique without copying verbatim. You should really go RTWT, the parts I dropped out are not throwaway by any means.

As Goodman closes in for the kill shot, I find myself entirely unable to whittle it down in a way that would work. Every single word is meaningful, and important.

Bottom line: having lost all interest in ideas (because basically they have nothing to say) the political left has turned to identity culture — asserting that people have rights and obligations based on their genes or their ethnicity or their gender. If you disagree with them, they will not debate the merits of the case. They will instead attack you as an enemy of the groups for whom politically correctness requires sympathy. And they will encourage members of those groups to lash out against you — violently in some cases — because in the world of the mindless, brute force is the only thing left.

“The Distraction of Priorities”

Saturday, June 17th, 2017

Allen B. West, writing in Townhall, puts together easily the most blog-able thing I’ve seen this week:

It is always interesting to hear what the American people outside of the DC beltway and media centers such as New York City deem a priority, as opposed to those inside these bubbles. The everyday American citizen is witnessing a reality TV show, a sick sort of soap opera that undermines their confidence in those elected officials to govern our Constitutional Republic, according to our rule of law. The public firing of Comey and the ensuing hearings are not unlike The Apprentice where the punchline is “You’re fired.” This insidious “Kabuki dance” that Washington DC has become provides a grave cause for concern but will it continue, or ever subside? Will there be a return to the priorities affecting the lives of our citizens?

I’m of the opinion that while most people recognize this is a bad thing, there is still widespread ignorance of just how bad. You read history of the middle ages and at some point you have to come to grips with the fact that while the American system of electing a President is an improvement over “He gets to be the King because he’s the first-born son,” there’s a harsh limit to how much. A lot is still missing. Kinda like Microsoft Windows 3.0 over 2.11.

The most important features of the new, were present in the old. In choosing a leader, the advantage of the Electoral College is removal of ambiguity. We-ell…that was present in the old. The old King’s marriage was a matter of public record, the fact that he was King tended to be a settled matter — first living thing that pops out of there that’s male, that’s the successor. Simple? Simple. Well not so much — there is the additional wrinkle that if the heir to the throne is a real poopie-head and you get get a lot of important noblemen to agree about that, maybe things can be changed. That was a flaw. Our system has this flaw, and that’s what we’re seeing in Washington lately.

Revolts against President Trump, not because there’s a good solid case against him, legal or logical. Just because of the overwhelming consensus, inside the bubbles, that he doesn’t belong where he is.

Inside the bubbles.

That’s the problem. These people, the modern Bolingbrokes, don’t seem to understand how much damage they’re doing, or care. Love Trump or hate Trump, you have to come to terms with the rhetorical question that if it all comes down to a high-school popularity contest, inside some “bubble,” then why are we bothering to have elections at all?

The American people are beyond tired of the distraction of priorities. They want their Nation secured in this day of Islamic jihadism. They want a secured border. They want a refocus on what should be the main priority of the federal government: providing for the common defense.

I just have to ask, why do we not see the media sensationalism when the top military leaders testify before the House and Senate Armed Services Committees on the deplorable state of our military capability and capacity? I suppose if it does not make the ratings blossom it is not deemed important.

However, the real culprit to this is ourselves, we have succumbed to the distraction of priorities because we, as an American society, lack a focused attention span. Just as Roman Emperor Commodus resurrected the gladiator games to distract the citizens of Rome, so it is happening today. We cannot survive as a society with a soundbite mentality seeking only to be entertained, not intellectually engaged.

Bulls-eye.

This is our fault. At least, the fault of those outside the bubble who sense an opportunity to overturn the election.

It takes far fewer of these people to create a “wave” of sorts, and give the boat-rockers inside the bubble the sense that they’re representing some meaningful constituency, than it does to actually become any sort of meaningful constituency. Not that I disagree with the idea there are a lot of people who personally dislike PDJT. Many among his voters are in that crowd: They personally don’t like him, but voted for him anyway. It wasn’t just because Hillary was an execrable candidate, although there is that.

If I may presume to speak for others, I speculate they/we were and are hungry for change. “This is a boat that has to get rocked,” I said last year as I settled on my vote, and I meant it. I’m doubting like the dickens I was alone in saying so…

…and, that brings us right back to what Col. West is talking about up above.

The American people aren’t Donald Trump’s best buddy, but they want change and they want him to get it done. The beltway crowd, which includes a number of unproductive people looking at the real possibility of their gravy train coming to a stop, have found a way to keep it from happening. It’s up to the public to make the determination of whether that succeeds or not.

And if it succeeds, because they have empowered it to succeed or have passively allowed it to succeed, then all fine & good I suppose.

But it shouldn’t be that way just because too many people couldn’t be bothered to pay attention, or only paid attention when & where they were told to pay attention.

“They Out-Believe Us”

Tuesday, June 6th, 2017

Bill Murchison, Townhall:

The terrorists out-believe the rest of us. That is likely the heart of the thing, far more so than, say, the nonsense propounded this week by Oxford University’s professor of Islamic studies as cures for terrorism: Seek international “justice”; quit oppressing; do something about Israel. It was a dreary list of misdeeds and misunderstandings imputed to the West by its self-described “victims.”

Victimhood or oppressor status — such things are not intellectual points to be digested. The terrorists believe this bilge. We, the rest of us, sort of do, too. At any rate, we don’t disbelieve it with enough firmness and precision to permit moral opposition of a truly effective sort. To repeat myself, they — the terror fraternity — out-believe us. They believe so passionately that nothing matters to them more than destroying as many perpetrators, or bystanders to all the perpetrations, as they deem feasible. To die for these perverted ideals is an honor — a tribute to belief.

Belief, of one kind and another, is the glue, the Stickum, of society. It informs action. Belief, in every circumstance, save the most accidental, precedes action. What you believe, you do — or don’t do. It gets no simpler than that.

I see another layer of rot. The problem, in my opinion, is not that people fail to understand belief is the forerunner to action. I think everyone gets that just fine.

The problem is that people can see it coming, and too many among us have opted to change our beliefs in order to customize the action-required, into nothingness. “If I believe A then I’m going to have to get up off the couch, and get started doing B…therefore, !A.” It’s one of those things you can’t see at first, until you learn how to notice it. And then it’s everywhere. “If we believe immigration rules are important, then we’re going to have to do something, therefore they are not important.” “If I believe in God then I should go to church, therefore there must not be a God.” “If the rules of mathematics bind me, then I will have to spend less money than I take in or else face the consequences, therefore math itself is a nullity.”

Believing in sloth, is a belief. Nobody’s going to want to admit that this is their premium-value, their “Hill I Wanna Die On” value. But suppose someone did establish that for themselves, but also had the balls to at least admit it to themselves. After awhile, a few years of life serving up consequences, they’d have to stop. They’d eventually have to embrace some other value, something that involves getting up off the couch and doing something…or, making decisions that “most” people pronounce to be disliked and unpopular.

But if they didn’t have the balls to admit it, even to themselves, they could go on forever. Making decisions that counsel toward non-actions…sitting…rationalizing…mooching…endlessly…

Hmmmm…

Ontario and Gender Confusion

Tuesday, June 6th, 2017

What exactly does conservatism seek to conserve? Civilization, the blessings that come from having it, and the definitions that make civilization possible. From what does liberalism seek to liberate us? Those things — starting with the definitions.Me

The latest example, we find by way of William Teach at Pirate’s Cove:

Isn’t it awesome that a government has decided to side with a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of people who are, for the most part, mentally ill?

America's Hat(Daily Caller) Ontario passed a law Thursday that gives the government the right to take away children from families that don’t accept their kid’s chosen “gender identity.”

Parents who oppose or criticize the LGBT agenda will be considered potential “child abusers” and may have their children taken away by the state, according to the new bill. If the parents are ruled to be abusers by failing to wholeheartedly support their child’s gender choice, that child “can be removed from that environment and placed into protection where the abuse stops.”

Bill 89, also known as “The Supporting Children, Youth and Families Act of 2017,” received Royal Assent and was passed in Ontario by a vote of 63 to 23.

The old law allowed parents to “direct the child’s education and religious upbringing” but now says a parent must influence a child’s education and upbringing “in accordance with the child’s or young person’s creed, community identity and cultural identity.”

Why are they doing this? They’re nuts. The law could even stop people from fostering and/or adopting kids if they disagree with the LGBTQ agenda

Of course, let’s never forget that these unhinged radical leftists will gladly throw the same LGBTQ folks, along with women, under the bus in order to patronize and protect Islamic extremists.

American Lens goes on to note (using an article from Gender Trender) that Canada is looking to legalize gender confusion nationally with Bill C-16, which “would establish a government recognized class of people based on their personal feeling that sex stereotypes form an integral and desired component of their legal identity.” This would be a part of the criminal code, so, it should turn out great, right?

Like any bad idea, it falls apart when you take it seriously.

We have these kids who have somehow attained sufficient maturity to opine about their gender-identities while they’re still very young, and also, somehow, about how they’re confused about it. So that’s the first problem: The people who know, must defer to the opinions of the people who do not.

Second problem — and this could be just me, maybe some important piece of information has yet to find its way to me, although given how much chatter there is about gender lately I doubt it — it doesn’t seem like those who are culturally and ideologically invested in this gender confusion business, are putting a lot of effort into curing confusion. It seems to me they view the confusion less as a problem, and more like a tool by which they can achieve cultural triumph. And this Ontario law is a pretty good example of what I’ve been noticing. Take the children away from the parents…to…what? To go live with someone else who believes the right things, of course, but what else? Gender reassignment? Hormone therapy? Fixing the problem doesn’t seem to be one of the goals. Rather, it looks like the goal is to make sure parenting is done solely by people who don’t believe in or don’t understand the concept of male & female. Whoever understands it, shall be barred from the practice of parenting.

The blind leading the not-blind…

What could possibly go wrong?

Our Selective Bully Culture

Saturday, June 3rd, 2017

So three big things happened this week. The Wonder Woman movie came out, and it’s more than above-average, it’s fantastic. Seriously, go see it. This is a model for how all superhero movies should be, and everyone who worked on it deserves congratulations, especially given the challenges. Wonder Woman, lest anyone forget, has gone three quarters of a century without a big-screen movie for a reason, and no sorry feminists but the reason is not just because she’s female.

That actually was not a handicap at all. There’s no national or world-wide conspiracy to keep movie productions male-saturated, or cast only with women who are weak-willed, incompetent, in need of constant “mansplaining” — or if there is such a conspiracy then it isn’t very effective. No, the feminists themselves long ago became Wonder Woman’s big problem, perhaps her biggest problem, although there are others. She’s probably the most poorly-defined superhero ever; certainly, among the classic-era, high-profile superheroes in the DC and Marvel universes. Worse yet, the definitions she does “have” she doesn’t really have. They’re ambiguous.

What happens if she tries to deflect a bullet with her bracelets, and misses, is she bulletproof? And can she fly like Superman, or just leap around? (Non-spoiler spoiler: Even with the movie out now, one might say those questions remain unanswered.) Does she really have an invisible jet. And if so, why. Does twirling around have anything to do with costume changes? Oh and what happens if someone catches her…is it a big secret that Diana Prince is her secret identity?

Wonder WomanEvery time there’s an incarnation of Wonder Woman, there has to be full or at least partial resolution to these. And, the feminists get ticked off and start rocking the boat. This doesn’t happen to Batman, Superman, Spider Man, X-Men, Daredevil, Green Lantern…you get to just make the movie, go see the movie, enjoy the movie. With the Champion of Themyscira you have to answer questions, including the ones that arouse the feminist ire. Is she gorgeous and appealing to men? Well of course she is dumbass…but, the tolerant progressive feminists can’t tolerate this. Does she shave her armpits? Yeah. Deal. Well, they won’t. What’s her cup size? Well, it’s generous enough you can tell she’s a woman…that freaks them out again. Is her uniform a uniform, as in, the same all the time? And does it cover up her legs? Yes, and no. All the worst possible answers.

And so, feminists do what they do. They bully.

Contrary to popular belief, the feminist movement hasn’t done anything for Wonder Woman at all, not for a very long time. And surveying the wreckage of the timeline during which the two have co-existed, on balance, they’ve been more a hindrance to her than a help.

Nevertheless, the Alamo Drafthouse has ignited a firestorm of controversy…on purpose, in my opinion, for promotional purposes…with their “women-only” Wonder Woman screenings. I think that’s a dumb move, but I don’t hold out any sort of hope that it will be recalled that way. They’re going to get a net win out of this, probably, and if they do then it’s hard to call it “dumb” from a business perspective. But whoever thought it up probably hasn’t read a lot of Wonder Woman material. Has this character ever stood for female safe-spaces? The one thing on which all her origin-stories agree, is that she willingly left one, against the wishes, advice, or maybe even direct orders of her Mother. And this is something that goes back to the very first publication: Wonder Woman is built around a vision that men and women can coexist, after all.

Feminism, as we know it, is here to guarantee that all thinking persons who believe in this, maintain at least some serious doubt.

Well the bullying continues, I see, because a Google search for “women only screening” at this moment harvests at least a full page or two of results that, if you click and read each one, you quickly find are supportive of this dumb move, and harshly critical of anyone who finds fault with it. Nevermind that it’s expressly illegal to discriminate in this way, in many of the jurisdictions in which it’s being done. I guess it’s not within the intellectual capability of a progressive to say “Oops, if we ratify this rule about ‘discrimination,’ it turns out we have to abide by it too, so we’d better re-think this”…if they had what it took to realize such a thing, they wouldn’t be progressives.

Conservatives, on the other hand, as I’ve pointed out before are invested in conserving civilization. Their argument is one of “civilization cannot indefinitely survive this.” And so the idea has been advanced — probably to make the point, more than anything else — that some of the screenings for Star Wars, should be men-only. Another Google Search reveals how hot and trendy it is to offer the last word to the opponents of such an idea, with the status of complete saturation taken by a female “Lucasfilm Executive” who offered this witty retort:

We ladies who work at Lucasfilm will still see it before you.

Huzzah!! Fist pump! You go girlfriend!

No sauce for the goose vs. gander? Are there not men who worked on Wonder Woman? Ah well…there I go, applying critical thinking again…

Silly me. These days, what you’re supposed to do is know the answer up-front and ahead-of-time, after finding out what the Kool Kids have to say about it…just like back in middle school or something. Those would be, I’m guessing, the authors of the snarky thought-pieces showing up in Page One of those Google searches. It’s very fashionable to set up the “gay law professor” filing his grievances as some sort of kook-burger, so I guess one needs to develop a natural resistance against intellectual whiplash too. But then, one is suppose to find rationalizations, however thin they may be, for making discrimination going in the “right” way, compatible with written law. Given the nature of written law, that can be challenging at times, that’s why we have these brilliant legal-beagles ready to talk to the Washington Post…

After reviewing Austin’s municipal code, Stacy Hawkins — an associate professor of law at Rutgers University who specializes in employment law, civil rights and diversity — told The Post that the theater’s management finds itself in an increasingly common position. As public and private sector organizations look for opportunities to celebrate diversity and embrace historically disadvantaged groups, they run the risk of violating laws that were designed to respond to overtly racist, exclusionary practices. Hawkins said anti-discrimination law is increasingly being used to attack diversity efforts through allegations of “reverse discrimination.”

Women-only movie screenings, Hawkins said, are not the same as “old boys” clubs that excluded minorities and women. Intent matters, Hawkins said, but the law is not nuanced enough to distinguish between malicious and benign intent.

“This new focus on diversity and inclusion is not really accounted for by the laws of civil rights and discrimination,” Hawkins said. “Law is not calibrated for our new political paradigm of diversity and inclusion.

“As far as public accommodations are concerned, I can tell you in no uncertain terms that the reason this case was filed under the Austin city code is that it prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex.”

But Hawkins said she remains unconvinced that the women-only screenings violate male employees’ rights. In order for a cause of action under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a male employee would have to show a “material action,” such as losing a job or suffering the loss of pay. As long as male employees are assigned to other screenings in the theater, they aren’t losing their jobs, hours or pay, Hawkins said.

“I don’t think that would constitute an adverse employment action,” she said.

Hawkins said the entire controversy could have been avoided with a simple tweak in the theater’s advertising.

“Just eliminate ‘no men welcome’ language,” she said. “You try to make sure you demonstrate this is an event for and about women and, most likely, men aren’t going to show up.”

This is complicated thinking. I’m probably too lazy to keep up with it, because to a sluggard like me, up is up and down is down. I can’t play these twisty-turn mind games that pretend “diversity” has something to do with women-only audiences. But it looks to me like she’s deliberately conflating Austin city code with the CRA of 1964, to leave a false impression that as long as no dudes lose any hours off their shifts, everything is A-Okay. That’s shifty and deceptive, as is this gibberish about “historically disadvantaged groups,” language meant to legitimize discrimination in one direction even as it excoriates the exact same discrimination running in the opposite direction.

She’s just another passionate advocate, setting herself up as a neutral, adjudicating authority. It’s a problem we encounter so frequently nowadays, we’ve become numb to it. And now, if you read this summary again, you’ll notice she’s subtly changing her focus from what the law says, to what she wishes it would say. We’ve become rather acclimated to that too.

The other thing that happened was that Kathy Griffin’s career probably ended, terminated by her own stupidity. As you certainly know by now if you haven’t been living under a rock, she did an ISIS-sympathetic video in which she held up a bloody Donald-Trump head…

She bizarrely did some damage-un-control with some Gloria Allred wannabe lawyer, where the two of them broke all the rules. And not in a good way. They started off fracturing the rule about how, if you have to explain the punchline, the joke is a fail and it would’ve been much better left untold…sheesh ladies, even I get that one…

Toward the thirty-minute mark, she breaks down in tears and weeps away about how President Trump “broke” her. This is after, earlier in the clip, she goes off with some tough talk about nobody can tell her what to do, yadda yadda yadda…I’m not going to sit and type in some words suggesting I’ve watched every minute. It wouldn’t be honest.

But again, the whiplash. I’m a swaggering, edgy comedienne and I’m going to show PDJT what’s what…to ++whimper++ he broke me and he’s picking on me. How many minutes to go from one extreme to the other? Does it even matter.

While we’re taking it all in, a side-point: Ms. Griffin, according to her earlier comments, only meant to nudge up against the line, and by mistake, some kind of “oopsie” she went WAY over it and is now incredibly sorry and stuff…And of course before being elected President, Trump himself crossed the line, repeatedly, and this was going to be the end of his campaign FOR SURE this time! …a whole bunch of times…

There is an opportunity here for our evolving society to rouse itself from a drunken stupor. Can we get rid of this concept of a line now? Are we that mature now? Or do we have to keep lying to ourselves…

Shock-jocks like Griffin “earn” their way in the world, and establish their whole identities, by making other people as uncomfortable as possible without bringing consequences down upon themselves, and Griffin is “sorry” because she found out in this case there are consequences. Can we stop pretending? If there weren’t consequences, she wouldn’t be sorry and she’d do it again.

This is the trouble with mob rule. It is inherently dishonest and it inspires more dishonesty. You have to swagger around with this nonsense of “I do what I like and no one can tell me what to do”…once in awhile it turns out there are consequences. Then you have to do this whiplash move, suddenly be all contrite and obedient, genuflecting before the false god of consensus. With a bunch of bullshit about how you didn’t mean it and will never do it again…

How do people tolerate this?

Kathy Griffin upset people for one reason and one reason only: It is what she intended to do.

Speaking of which: This week, PDJT crossed yet another line, doing something un-presidential, by — get a load of this — doing something with which some of the people over whom he presides, disagree. It’s outrageous! He pulled out of the Paris accords, which were going to…uh…not sure what. Make rules? No, not even that, not legally-binding ones anyway. Set the stage for some bullying, I guess is the most accurate summation. Overseas bullying. America better do this, America better do that…a bunch of functionally anonymous busybodies four-to-eight time zones away, have decided it. Away goes the money, and to never-never-land go the jobs. Must do this, can’t do that. Someone’s decided we need more of this stuff…

Trump had the nerve to disagree. Well again, if your aim is to “download an opinion,” and get told by some guy on the Internet what you’re supposed to be thinking, thanks to search engines you can get that done pretty darn quickly. But to get some informative run-downs about it along with some quality thinking, that’s a bit tougher. Therefore, it’s worth the time to bookmark this, since it’s the best I’ve seen about it…

Reuters reports that President Donald Trump is set to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement. And writers are apoplectic.

Todd Stern at The Atlantic says such a move would be “indefensible.” At Slate, David McKean and David Wade said pulling out would be a huge mistake “because our planet is currently on a collision course with Mother Nature.” At the Washington Post, Greg Sargent complains that Trump’s rationale is “based on lies.”

You can read for yourself the claims of these authors, but here are a few facts you are unlikely to find.

1. The Senate never signed the agreement

This is kind of a big deal in a democratic republic. At least America’s Founders thought so.

The U.S. Constitution states that the president “shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur” (Article II, section 2).

When the deal was completed in 2015, President Obama never sent it to the Senate to be ratified.

2. Emission reduction targets are not binding

Then Secretary of State John Kerry made this fact quite plain. Reporting is mandatory, but actual reductions in fossil fuel emissions are not. Why? Because most nations are not interested in actually reducing their carbon footprints.

“[If] there had been a penalty, we wouldn’t have been able to get an agreement,” Kerry bluntly said. “So we did the best we could…”

This is precisely why climate activists, such as former NASA scientist James Hansen, called the agreement “a fraud”: “It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’”

3. It Costs Roughly $100 billion (Annually)

You’ll not find this fact in many of the stories you read. But as the Wall Street Journal reported at the time, “developed countries have to help provide at least $100 billion annually from a variety of sources after 2020 to help developing countries cut their emissions.” (As a point of reference, Trump’s wall was projected to cost about $33 billion less than this.)

Anyone have a guess who will be picking up the bulk of the check on this one?

4. The (non-binding) targets are totally arbitrary

The emission targets are not just non-binding; they are self-made. As John Cassidy of the New Yorker gloomily pointed out at the time, nations can select their own emission targets.

“Not only is the accord voluntary but countries got to set their own targets for carbon emissions. As I noted a couple of weeks ago, the Paris talks were a bit like a potluck dinner, where guests bring what they can.”

5. The agreement relies on self-reporting

The teeth of the agreement comes in mandatory reporting. But what if you can’t trust it?

It was only a few years ago, after all, that China was caught fudging underreporting its coal burning by a whopping 14 percent.

While there is talk of one day creating an independent body to monitor and verify pollution levels, no such body is in place, and the New York Times reports that it just might be staying that way, since “several countries, including China and India, are expected to push for a more lenient system that is reliant on self-reporting.”

6. The U.S. will almost certainly not meet its target—and that could have an adverse impact

Everyone knows the U.S. will not meet the ambitious carbon reduction targets laid out by the Obama administration. As the Washington Post reports, “it’s clear that the Trump administration will fail to meet the climate goals that the Obama administration established under the agreement — namely, a pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent below their 2005 levels by the year 2025.”

This could be problematic, assuming some nations actually do take the targets seriously.

“A great power that willfully misses its target could provide political cover for other laggards and weaken the soft power of process,” said Luke Kemp, a climate and environmental policy expert at Australian National University

And it’s not just the U.S. The New York Times reported that “Russia put forth a plan that is essentially business as usual, requiring no new domestic policies.”

7. The jury on carbon dioxide is still out

Like most of the people reading this article, I don’t have a degree in climate science. But there are people unafraid to point out an obvious fact: Our climate models over the last decade were way off.

The question is: Why?

Believe it or not, there is a community of scientists who contend that the dangers of CO2 emissions have been grossly exaggerated. In fact, some research suggests that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere actually helps the environment more that it hurts it.

Among these scholars is Indur Goklany, a U.S. delegate to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and an IPCC reviewer, who in 2015 published a paper titled “Carbon Dioxide: The Good News”.

In his paper, Goklany concludes that many climate impact assessments suffer from three primary flaws.

“Firstly, they rely on climate models that have failed the reality test. Secondly, they do not fully account for the benefits of carbon dioxide. Thirdly, they implicitly assume that the world of 2100 will not be much different from that of the present – except that we will be emitting more greenhouse gases and the climate will be much warmer.”

None of this says the move away from an international climate agreement must be permanent. Proactive action may be required as we glean new evidence.

But the Paris deal was poorly devised and passed without proper constitutional consent. It’s better left behind. In the meantime, perhaps we’ll learn more about the alleged dangers of climate change.

Well the thing is, I don’t think we’re even ready to start discussing that. You can’t put together a plan if you haven’t defined the goal.

There’s a lot of dishonesty here about the goal. That much isn’t something we have to wonder about; it’s proven. In response to the Trump Administration’s public statements calling for a “renegotiation” of the non-treaty treaty, Europe cries “Non!”

The European Union has rejected Donald Trump’s offer to renegotiate the Paris Treaty, proving it was always about bleeding the U.S. dry and appointing globalists as our governing bodies.

The Paris climate agreement is written so as to be an endless drain on the U.S. economy. If they cared about the climate, they’d work with us…

So the narrative that international cooperation is required to keep the planet livable, therefore we’re all going to work together because we have no alternative — simply doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because it isn’t happening, and it’s the alwarmist camp that’s not doing it.

This is about control.

And that’s true of all three of these very significant things that happened last week. This demand for special privilege, this over-arching theme of “my message is SO important that it cannot, nor will it have to, survive the everyday challenge of my opposition being allowed the same level of privilege I demand for myself.”

Well…no, not “message is so important.” More like, “message is so fragile.”

It’s good that we’ve got Trump in there and it’s good that we’re pulling out of this treaty-that-is-not-a-treaty. But this has got to be the next thing on the to-do list. This whole idea we’ve allowed to seep in, that “this person must really believe in what he or she is saying, because we’re seeing them demand special accommodations and special allowances, and also that their opposition should be muzzled, this suggests that their platform is particularly worthy of our attention.”

Again, we have become acclimated to it. Slowly but surely. We have come to think of elitism as associated with worthy ideas. We’ve come to believe the best plans are hatched in a cloister. That the defining distinction of Wonderful Thinking That Will Turn Out Good And Stuff, is this formulation that everyone must participate, but that privilege of input is limited only to a few. That this is the birthing condition of the ideas that will move us forward, make us better.

And it is the exact opposite of the truth.

The truth is, good ideas don’t have to be argued that way. “Take your opinion out of here but leave your wallet behind” is what we should be looking upon, with scorn. And no small amount of ridicule.

Think of it as kindness. It’s rather vicious and mean of us, is it not, to passively allow a bunch of crazy-cat-ladies to think they’re making some sort of message heard, merely by watching a movie all by themselves and not allowing any big nasty mean old men in there with them? How did this ever become popularized. It’s truly a mystery. “I refuse to have contact with anyone who isn’t exactly like me” is bigotry, and it is not how you communicate anything at all, certainly no ideas that are ground-breaking. Silly twits, isn’t this just obvious? Wonder Woman wouldn’t do that…