Eric Erickson writes at Town Hall:

Destruction Because of Offense

It is a growing phenomenon, and it was on visible display last week. A group of terrorists was so offended by a publisher that the publisher had to be destroyed publicly as both an act of vengeance and an act of instruction.

The act of vengeance was directed against the publisher directly. He came under attack for his personal actions. He published something that offended the group. He published something that enraged them and, consequently, he needed to be punished.

The punishment could not be minor. It could not be something like heaping scorn on him. It could not be a public disagreement, a challenge or a debate. The subject, after all, is not debatable. The publisher had to be crushed, his livelihood taken, and he had to be ruined.

Ruining him, though, is not enough. There had to be instruction for others. The dictionary defines terrorism as “the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.” One of those political aims is to let others know that if they speak out, they will be ruined, too. The terrorist must teach the public that if any of them causes offense, they too will be taken out. It is more than that, though. It is also instruction to self-regulate against offense.

Once a person has been visibly ruined with no grace and no mercy because, in this example, he dared publish something that offended the terrorists, the lesson is clear. Polite society does not want that violence and cannot abide the violence. So the public will step in, as agents of the terrorist under duress, to shut up any others who might stand in the town square and risk offending.
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In November of 2013, Kelvin Cochran, a former Obama administration official turned chief of the fire department in Atlanta, Georgia, published a book titled “Who Told You That You Were Naked?” The book expounded on the fire chief’s faith and encouraged people to turn their lives over to Christ.

In the book, Cochran said his chief end was “to glorify God.” He said that was his first duty even in his job at the fire department…
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…He said gay sex, like heterosexual sex outside of marriage, is a sin. For saying his job was to glorify God and gay sex is a sin, gay rights activists screamed loudly that he could not do his job. They accused Cochran, with no evidence, of proselytizing on the job.

The offended group of activists had to destroy Kelvin Cochran’s livelihood because his published work offended them. Mayor Reed of Atlanta complied.

These people, as Erickson points out, feed off the need of the rest of us to preserve civilized society. We see this over and over again, because it works. One day you say something, next day someone is clamoring for your head — and purely in passive-voice, as in, it isn’t worth remembering or commenting on who exactly is doing this clamoring, how many kindred spirits they represent in their passions, whether they’re even putting their names under something or remaining cowardly anonymous.

The day after that they have your head, and the day after that, someone else’s speech is being compared…again, in passive voice, it doesn’t matter who’s doing it because it seems like everyone is…to the contraband you spoke before your own head fell. It’s “over the line” or “beyond the pale.”

The power to destroy is symbolized in the power to unify without doing any actual unifying. What if the people who wanted to kill that editor in France, got together with the gay activists who managed to take down Kelvin Cochran? They wouldn’t play dosey-doe or give each other high-fives, would they.

J.R. Dunn writes in American Thinker:

American leftism has gotten an awful lot of mileage by monopolizing the moral high ground. It is the sole force in American that favors the poor. The sole enemy of racism. The sole comforter of rape victims. The sole protector of defenseless Muslims. The sole guardian of the environment, and so on ad nauseum.

It all falls apart eventually — with friends like the left, nobody needs enemies. But often overlooked is that fact that it’s bogus from the start. Any prolonged glance at the left reveals it to be an ideology of power, its major tool violence, its goal revenge.

Leftism has always been about revenge. The works of Marx are filled with fantasies of retribution and judgment. Their tone reeks of resentment and paranoia, with blame cast for even the most trivial. “The bourgeoisie,” Marx once declared in a letter to Engels, “will remember my carbuncles until their dying day.” That’s leftism in a nutshell.

When you and I want to send a message, we send it. We act as a force of light, starting with the intention that our audience should know something they previously did not know. This messaging works the opposite way, with a perpetual theme of “Don’t Say That.” The right thing to do is to marginalize it, trivialize it, perhaps study it. That thing in France illustrates vividly that our lives may depend on that someday.

But the more common way to handle it, unfortunately, is to integrate it, and to most emphatically integrate it where we earn our living. Do you work in a place where men have to fear for their jobs if they put a picture of a woman in a swimsuit on their desk or office wall, even if it’s pictures of their wives or girlfriends on vacation? You probably do. Just about everybody does, everyone who works in an office anyway. That’s actually wrong. It’s part of the problem. “I find that offensive…or, I’ve managed to cook up a scenario in which some person, who may or may not exist, could be offended…so you have to go.” That ought to be the way it works in some faraway land, of which we heard from some friend of a friend of a friend, some place we have no intention of visiting even if we want to travel the entire world someday. Should be a work of fiction for all practical intents and purposes, as realistic as Rapunzel offering access to her cloister by way of letting down her long hair.

Once again we see: liberals aren’t. In a truly liberal society, “offense” would be no big deal. We wouldn’t relish it, but it would be a paltry unpleasantness, an unavoidable thing, the price to be paid for living in a place that has freedom. Liberals are quick to make the claim that this is exactly how they feel, ironically, about taxes. But offense? Off with your head. We have all the one-liners memorized. “That might not be cool, know what I’m saying?” “I dunno, do we really need that?” “Someone might complain.”

That’s the real tragedy. Decent people, who genuinely appreciate freedom, live out their entire lives in the light and not in the darkness, become willing dupes of the darkness. We end up having ninety-nine more non-public spectacles, for every public one. That’s why there is the destruction. As Erickson points out, the destruction is not the point, it is merely a tactic. The point to it is the public spectacle, the message to be sent to everyone else. The publisher who is shot, or the prisoner who is beheaded, or the guy who said something wrong or displayed something wrong and has to be forced into administrative leave or early retirement; these are just ways to get that done. Gay activists, Islamic extremists, frumpy women who don’t want any pictures of girls in bikinis around, they all just want to open a can of whoopass…but to do that, you have to open and wreck at least one can.

Did I post this one already? Can’t believe I would’ve passed on it…

From Geeks are Sexy.

What’s really great about this sketch is it shows what’s motivating the other four people in the room. The narrative for success has already been written, the consultation with the expert is the formality added on to the end, as an afterthought. Dealing with details is a task relegated to the expert, nobody else is bothering with them.

By the end, Walter has learned his place: Reality is fine, but don’t screw around with the narrative.

Now what would have been even better, is if they tossed in a XINO who, out of incompetence, political expediency or just plain malice, gives the group the answer they want to hear about whether it’s possible to draw a straight line in the form of a kitten, parallel to six other straight lines that are red and not-red at the same time. Then of course they’d turn on Walter with something like “You call yourself an expert and yet you say it can’t be done, well Charlie over here found a way to get it done!” Or, at least he said he can, which is good enough. Certainly that’s all they wanted to hear. You haven’t long to wait to see this scenario play out, too.

From Bird Dog at Maggie’s Farm.

I wonder if someone went through and made sure each one of these assembly-people is a good cultural fit? I dunno…in my own experience, I’ve seen a formula played out again & again, something like

…where A is the fretting & concern over what people are, and D is the care to be taken about the things they do.

This blog, which nobody actually reads anyway, is proud to have a “spinoff” of sorts called Rotten Chestnuts. It’s a side-project within a side-project. It was supposed to be a group-blogging thing, and I don’t want to disparage the efforts of some others involved, depending on your point of view it still is one. Another legitimate point of view is that it is dwindled, or yet another legitimate point of view would say it has exploded and blossomed, into a fountainhead of the thoughts coming from severian.

If there was some kind of “publish or perish” quota in place, the other four or five of us would be in big trouble. Fortunately there isn’t, we offer up something that might be worthy here & there, now & then, about whatever. This is in accordance with the original design intent when we started the thing, so that’s a success in my book. But, one might say it has kinda-sorta morphed into becoming severian‘s blog, or at least, he has become the primary contributor.

Anyway. The Christmas season just past, started up a big ol’ debate both on the Hello Kitty of Blogging (somewhere), and on RC (here), about atheism. Because severian went after atheism. Note that a debate about atheism is not the same thing as a debate about the existence of God, although these two things are related and certainly do arouse the same passions. As G. K. Chesterton famously said,

Blasphemy is an artistic effect, because blasphemy depends upon a philosophical conviction. Blasphemy depends upon belief and is fading with it. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor. I think his family will find him at the end of the day in a state of some exhaustion. [emphasis mine]

It’s a good thing to bear in mind when one reads and evaluates this comment…oh my…I’m just dazzled. Bedazzled. Not only impressed, but bowled-over, mind blown, at what a splendid — what other word could I use — chestnut it is. How fitting that it fell where it did.

You know that Atheism isn’t the BELIEF that no god exists, but the LOGICAL CONCLUSION that no god exists, right? Atheism is as much of a religion as off is a TV program.

I do believe the cuttlefish have been out-cuttled! Not that this is all anything new. The second half of it certainly is not. I grew up in a college town, and if I’ve heard it once I’ve heard it a thousand times: “Atheism is a religion the way bald is a hair color.” There are even bumper stickers.

The first part is the part that fascinates, that is the “business end,” like the lit end of a match. The move is mundane: Let us tease out this minuscule difference, this distinction so fine it requires an enlightened mind to see that it’s there. Not a belief, but a logical conclusion. Oh yes, the scales are falling from my eyes, the atheists don’t believe differently, they simply have noodled out the proper and logical answer to the question while the rest of us continue to stumble around & bump into each other…

This brings to mind when a young father and his two very small children sat next to me at Starbucks. I was engrossed in some project on my laptop and wasn’t paying much attention to them, then I realized he was playing the same game with them that I played with my own lad back when he was about six or seven. The daughter, who was the older of the two but still on the light side of five, it seemed, was fixated on the meaning of the word “opinion” so the father was teaching them the difference between opinion and fact. Then he started teasing her: “It is a fact that Star Wars is great!” She looked at him a little bit sideways, started to figure out this was so much balderdash, but wasn’t quite sure. Being a fan of Star Wars myself, I thought it not out-of-bounds to interject: “Hey, that’s not a fact, that’s an opinion! Although it happens to be quite correct.”

And the capital-dee Dad completely got it, rolled with it, and the kids got it. Lucky kids. There is a difference between an opinion being correct, versus an opinion going through some transformation like a caterpillar into a butterfly and becoming a “fact.” Kids who are taught this at a very young age, have an advantage. It is an advantage not shared by the “atheism is just a logical conclusion” people.

They are the ones who lack the ability to tease out subtle but meaningful distinctions. This is proven easily. If we start out with the premise that they “get” something, and everybody else is stumbling around in this cloud of ignorance failing to grasp it, we remain in the smug-atheist’s comfort zone but that’s about all we manage to accomplish, and in so doing we encounter one contradiction after another. It’s a mess. Start with: How many other “beliefs” should we find, by applying this magical elixir of transformation-of-belief-into-fact, are not beliefs at all but actually logical conclusions? Well, just about all of them. In fact, I have a tough time thinking of any exceptions to it. Even the cargo cult people, who “believe” that building a replica of an airplane out of wood and straw will summon food and supplies from the sky. We would have to elevate that, along with all other beliefs benefiting from supporting evidence, to the next threshold of “fact,” or “logical conclusion.”

On the other hand. If we proceed from the assumption that it is the snotty-atheist who has missed out on something, and his deniers are the ones who get it — a funny thing happens. Everything falls into place. The first satisfying “click” we hear is this: The secular dude, along with everybody who agrees with him for the most part, is swimming eyeballs-deep in a brine of self-satisfaction which he’s all too eager to display to his opposition. There’s no uncertainty at all, not even trace amounts of it, no inquisitiveness. It is a zenith to which I have only rarely ascended, myself, and there’s something that impresses me about this, too: I do not think back on these occasions of ascension with the self-satisfaction, now, that I had back then. Learning did not follow; ignorance did. How can learning follow from an intellectual state in which one denies the necessity of learning anything? We should expect the arrival of new knowledge to be a happy occasion, enjoyed exclusively only by those who are ready for it. The first step is to say “I don’t know.”

Atheists, at least atheists like this guy, are just people who aren’t ready to say that. Somewhere they’ve picked up on this credo, that the first step to answering any question is to eliminate the option of saying “I don’t know.” That’s my impression anyhow. They seem to be saying “Okay when we’re done puzzling out this thing, we’re going to know the answer, whatever it is, with complete, absolute certainty, with not even a trace residue of question.” Now then with that out of the way, what’s the answer?

It’s silly. I don’t know how they get started on that. It must be from taking written exams, maybe? It’s like the storm being endured by the hardened brittle dead tree versus the mighty oak that bends. Those who have preliminarily excluded any reckoning with the basic human-knowledge concept of uncertainty, time after time, reach some laughable conclusions. Not only that God does not exist, but other things. Like the planet is in danger and we can save it only by unplugging our cell phones and coffee pots, those are two of my favorites. But those are not the only ones, there are others. We can end racism in this country by electing a black President, and treating Him more like a movie star than an elected official. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Conclusions so risible, they can arouse feelings of fidelity only from those who have preliminarily disclaimed any reckoning with this basic human-knowledge concept of uncertainty. They are bad ports, docked only by boats whose captains have sworn off any other port.

But I was particularly fond of this rejoinder:

No wait, hold on. This is bull****.

Let’s take your metaphor and run with it. So in this metaphor, religion would be like a fandom (or Star Trek or Supernatural or Firefly etc) and fandom does all sorts of things like hold conventions and hang out at websites and clubs and read material related to the show (so all that would be faith conventions, websites, church, holy text etc).

So atheism is like the “Off” tv ‘program’? But there’s conventions going on that are all dedicated to “Off”. One can find entire campus groups all devoted to “Off”, they even have buildings and incorporations. There’s countless websites devoted to “Off” and large amounts of fanfiction on it. That’s not even getting into the spokespeople that bill themselves as the biggest fans of “Off”.

In other words, if people can’t really have any devotion to the “Off” show, THEN WHAT THE HELL IS THAT HUGE GROUP OF PEOPLE DOING EXACTLY THAT???

To play with a Chris Rock quote: “Atheism may not be a religion, but it’s wearing the uniform of one.”

Seems to me it’s not the religious that need to be convinced atheism isn’t a religion, but the atheists themselves.

He devastated the claim simply by taking it seriously.

Dr. Jonathan Wai condenses the advice from the “Father of Advertising” David Ogilvy:

In 1963, Ogilvy wrote: “Nowadays it is the fashion to pretend that no single individual is ever responsible for a successful advertising campaign. This emphasis on ‘team-work’ is bunkum — a conspiracy of the mediocre majority. No advertisement, no commercial, and no image can be created by a committee. Most top managements are secretly aware of this, and keep their eyes open for those rare individuals who lay golden eggs.”

Joshua Wolf Shenk recently argued in the New York Times that “the lone genius is a myth that has outlived its usefulness,” and instead advocated for the idea of a creative network or collaborative approach. Apparently 50 years later, the emphasis on collaboration and teamwork continues to be popular. But Ogilvy argued that creativity comes from the mind of the individual.

Seems to me we’re talking about two different things here. Shenk cites an example of Shakespeare co-opting Romeo and Juliet from Arthur Brooke. Which might mean something if anecdotes were data. They’re not, but let’s look at it another way. Have you got a fighting chance at coming up with such a renowned tale, shutting yourself up in an attic with a quill pen and ink fountain all by your little lonesome? For such a product, the team environment displays obvious advantages, most prominent of which is the benefit of feedback. Without that, you can scribble acts and scenes to your heart’s content, but how do you know they’re any good?

Everything creative, however, is not necessarily a play. Some of these works have to appeal not to the desires of large numbers of people from different backgrounds, but rather to nature. They work or they don’t work, as complex systems enjoining simpler things that either work or don’t work. In such cases, the committee is pretty much useless except perhaps for providing money. To make it work, figure out if it can work, how it can work, what needs to happen for it to work, someone needs to sit his happy ass down and get busy. A guy or a gal.

But that isn’t the real story of what’s happening here. The real story is the desperation. We have these people running around who are desperate to engage this “conspiracy of the mediocre majority,” to proliferate the mythology. The best evidence that it is indeed a mythology is the conspiracy itself. If committees were the fountainhead of true creativity, they could simply get to work and the proof would be in the pudding. There would be no need for articles of the sort Mr. Shenk has written.

So the protesters block a busy highway during rush-hour as part of the “police brutality” franchise-protest-fad…local news network follows some of them home to find out who they are, what’s their story, and do they have anything further to say. As in, something coherent.

This Noah character with the white-guy dreadlocks avoids discussing anything biographical about himself, insisting it’s not about him. Which is interesting, since according to the justification being pieced together here and there about the protest, the inconvenience deliberately placed on the rush hour commuters is insignificant compared to what is being endured by those subjected to the police brutality and stuff (As a consequence of doing things like robbing liquor stores and resisting arrest). And yet, young Noah feels uncomfortable with this conversation being caught on film.

Eh, I think in my book that does make it all about you, Mr. McKenna. Inconvenience, discomfort…such little bumps in the pathway of life are for others. You’re too good. That puts you above all the rest, and somewhere in here is a story because there has to be a how, what, and why to this difference between you and everybody else. That means it’s news.

I can certainly promise such questions would be foremost in my mind, if I was ever blocked by a living menagerie of snots from nice neighborhoods with nothing to do, while I was trying to get somewhere.

Hat tip to Kate at Small Dead Animals.

Or…we could research into the ongoing Internet feud about whether Martin Luther King was a Republican or a democrat. Seems there isn’t any definitive evidence on that question going in one direction or the other, so it drags on a bit. Although it has not escaped my notice, that those who insist King was, would be today, or should have been a democrat, seem to be simply reaching the conclusion they want. They start with a premise of “democrats good, Republicans bad,” and quoting from Martin Luther King III, who is just doing more of the same.

On discrimination, which ties into this, let’s first define what it is.

1. an act or instance of discriminating, or of making a distinction.
2. treatment or consideration of, or making a distinction in favor of or against, a person or thing based on the group, class, or category to which that person or thing belongs rather than on individual merit:
“racial and religious intolerance and discrimination.”
3. the power of making fine distinctions; discriminating judgment:
She chose the colors with great discrimination.

The definition of note, here, would be the second one: Making a distinction on the basis of class rather than on individual merit.

Would Martin Luther King be a democrat today? I have a tough time buying that, because I think even democrats would admit this would require King to morph and mutate his own understanding of discrimination, according to what the party apparatus told him to do. From the famous Dream Speech:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream…I have a dream that one day in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

The observation we can make today, that I’ve made before, is that when democrats and left-wingers accuse Republicans and right-wingers of discrimination, when you look into it awhile you find they are not accusing the opposition of straying from King’s dream, that we join hands as sisters and brothers, the ugliness of the past put forever behind us. On the contrary: When you look into it, you’ll invariably find people on the left today are accusing people on the right of failing to discriminate the way the left-wingers want the discrimination to be done. They don’t put it that way, of course, but that is the structure of the complaint. Has someone got an exception to offer against that? I haven’t seen any.

The problem Martin Luther King emerged to confront, existed in the first place because of an ancient denial-against-definitions very much like this one, and King made reference to it in the excerpt above: “Live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘…all men are created equal’.” Out of political expediency, in order to get the American Revolution underway, the founders of the republic had to say one thing and do another. They had to act like liberals, applying “liberal” definitions of things, in this case, “equal.” This directly led to all the ugliness that followed. And here we notice that some things haven’t changed, in all that time. We manage to agree, across the political spectrum, on verbiage alone, and then the disagreement comes about when our friends the liberals start to play games with definitions. Equal doesn’t really mean equal, so equal treatment doesn’t really mean equal treatment. Discrimination actually is non-discrimination. All sorts of things start to become opposites of themselves.

And then they keep on keeping on. Because Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when color wouldn’t matter, and we would all join hands as a common people, the social strife behind us forever, sitting down at the table of brotherhood.

Problem is, if that’s going on, it gets really, really, really hard to get any democrats elected.

So would Martin Luther King be a democrat today? It’s possible. But if that were the case somehow, one thing we know for sure is that he’d have to be embroiled in conflict with party platform-makers, as they not only resisted the sentiment of his dream, but nurtured personal and career ambitions to ultimately defeat it.

Ara Maxima, via Gerard:

Liberals and leftists love to proclaim this to rightists of any kind, or even insufficiently leftist left-wingers. A veiled threat — you don’t want to piss off history, do you? Huh? Huh? Punk. Sign this petition for gay rights, bigot. Yeah, that’s right.

Unfortunately for liberals, this little sentence proves nothing beyond the liberal leftists’ own total illiteracy. They’ve clearly never read a history book if they think history’s side involves gay marriage, voting women, and mass immigration.
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History has been extremely unkind to all kinds of leftisms, except that one that still dominates Washington DC, Brussels, and Boston. This is an uncomfortable truth for the Left. History produced all the Left’s bogeymen. Leftists imagine they can take control of the planet, abolish their enemies, and thenceforth history will be on their side.

Reading history, I am doubtful.

Just arrived in my e-mail, again, this time from the Brother-In-Law. In trying to find a source, which is an effort that has yet to bear fruit, I came to find out Allen West had also been engaged in the same search.

The word conundrum is defined as a complex problem that is often puzzling or confusing. Here are six conundrums of our contemporary United States of America:

1. America is capitalist and greedy – yet almost half of the population is subsidized.

2. Half of the population is subsidized – yet they think they are victims.

3. They think they are victims – yet their representatives run the government.

4. Their representatives run the government – yet the poor keep getting poorer.

5. The poor keep getting poorer – yet they have things that people in other countries only dream about.

6. They have things that people in other countries only dream about – yet politicians (mostly progressive socialists) claim they want America to become more like those other countries.

And consider these following three observations about the direction of our current government and cultural environment:

1. We are advised not to judge ALL Muslims by the actions of a few lunatics, but we are admonished to judge ALL gun owners by the actions of a few lunatics. Funny how that works, as we see the liberal progressives already jumping on the tragedy from Santa Barbara California. So what about the three victims who were stabbed to death, should we ban knives?

2. We constantly hear about how Social Security is running out of money. How come we never hear about welfare or food stamps on the verge of running out of money? Maybe the first group “worked for” their money, but the second didn’t. It is a simple case of printing money for political bribery and extortion.

3. Why are we cutting benefits for our veterans, giving no pay raises for our military and cutting our forces to a level lower than before WWII, but are expanding and increasing the benefits to illegal aliens? It is all about pandering for votes – and who cares about national security or veterans dying at the hands of their own Veterans Administration?

This morning I was reviewing some old e-mails, and discovered a comment thread I’d abandoned last month over on the Hello Kitty of Blogging continued to smolder after my departure. I had exited the conversation and re-directed my attention to more promising tasks, after one of those “moderate not a liberal” types had questioned my dismissal, as a model of the way we want things to be in this country, of the city of Detroit. Her rebuttal had something to do with Detroit being quite nice. She and her friends leaped to the conclusion that I must be entirely unacquainted with Detroit. On my way out, I decided to just let that one go, although it is in fact untrue; I’ve seen the place up close. It’s a warning to the rest of us, more than anything else.

I can resolve some of these conundrums: #5 explains #4 and #6. People gain a sense of direction out of a perceived need for having a sense of direction; you want to know where the waterfall is, when you gather the impression that your boat is becoming perilously close. By the same token, nothing anesthetizes against a sense of direction like a decent standard of living. What statement manifests an anesthetized sense of direction, like “We wanna be like Detroit”?

The problem with this nowadays is people don’t think they’re in that situation. They look at their hourly wages or their annual gross, and count themselves as “middle class” or “poor.” But in relation to the rest of the world, they’re not poor. When it comes to getting hold of the things they want & need from day to day, or hour to hour, they’re not poor. In fact, they’re “rich” enough that they feel like they can screw around with reality a little bit.

I’ve spoken with them.

Them: “Elizabeth Warren wins elections because she hears the voice of the little people, like us.”

Me: “If she wins elections because little people vote for her, then all politicians like her are always going to want more of these ‘little people’.”

Them: “Hmm hey what? Me no understand.”

When you can’t tell the difference between people fixing something and people breaking something, you are very far gone.

From Miss Cellania, who opines: “…it will be remembered, which is all that matters in advertising.”

But what about the globular wormening?

“…into the soul of progressivism.” Jonah Goldberg, author of Liberal Fascism, expounds on his research into the leadership and background of President Woodrow Wilson:

Wilson’s racism, his ideological rigidity, and his antipathy toward the Constitution were all products of the progressive worldview. And since “progressivism” is suddenly in vogue — today’s leading Democrats proudly wear the label — it’s worth actually reviewing what progressivism was and what actually happened under the last full-throated progressive president.

You want a more ‘progressive’ America? Careful what you wish for.

The record should give sober pause to anyone who’s mesmerized by the progressive promise.
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The old conception of absolute truths and immutable laws had been replaced by a “Darwinian” vision of organic change.

Hence Wilson argued that the old “Newtonian” vision – fixed rules enshrined in the Constitution and laws – had to give way to the “Darwinian” view of “living constitutions” and the like.

This is a period of America’s history that, for all of its influence on subsequent events, doesn’t get a lot of attention. That span of time between the two Roosevelts; to a casual and passive observer of history, it’s a dark foggy period.

There is a reason for this. If more Americans had a better understanding of this time period, they’d also have a better understanding of the true conflict between the right and the left. And the left, for the most part, represents those who have the incentive and the resources to get the final word in about what “history” has to say. They have the time to make sure they get to win all the arguments. Their opposition is busy living in that history, providing products and services to other people, which frees up the lefties to write up their essays and get them published as documents of record. Whatever might make lefties look good, is not only true, but “history.” Whatever might make lefties look bad, not-never-happened. Down the memory hole it goes.

On the teens and twenties, they haven’t got anything to say. So you have to take the initiative and study it yourself. Schools won’t teach it. They’ll insert a blurb about Teapot Dome Scandal, call it good, and move on to FDR saving the economy and defeating Hitler.

From Liberal Logic 101.

Thing I Know #52. Angry people who demand things, don’t stop being angry when their demands are met.

A somewhat tongue-in-cheek — somewhat, but not completely — high-level overview of the homeland I used to want to visit, with most emphasis on Denmark and some held in reserve for Sweden, in the
NY Post (by way of Bird Dog at Maggie’s Farm).

Let’s look a little closer, suggests Michael Booth, a Brit who has lived in Denmark for many years, in his new book, “The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia” (Picador).

Those sky-high happiness surveys, it turns out, are mostly bunk. Asking people “Are you happy?” means different things in different cultures. In Japan, for instance, answering “Yes” seems like boasting, Booth points out. Whereas in Denmark, it’s considered “shameful to be unhappy,” newspaper editor Anne Knudsen says in the book.

Moreover, there is a group of people that believes the Danes are lying when they say they’re the happiest people on the planet. This group is known as “Danes.”
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An American woman told Booth how, when she excitedly mentioned at a dinner party that her kid was first in his class at school, she was met with icy silence.

One of the most country’s most widely known quirks is a satirist’s crafting of what’s still known as the Jante Law — the Ten Commandments of Buzzkill. “You shall not believe that you are someone,” goes one. “You shall not believe that you are as good as we are,” is another. Others included “You shall not believe that you are going to amount to anything,” “You shall not believe that you are more important than we are” and “You shall not laugh at us.”
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In addition to paying enormous taxes — the total bill is 58 percent to 72 percent of income — Danes have to pay more for just about everything. Books are a luxury item. Their equivalent of the George Washington Bridge costs $45 to cross. Health care is free — which means you pay in time instead of money. Services are distributed only after endless stays in waiting rooms. Pharmacies are a state-run monopoly, which means getting an aspirin is like a trip to the DMV.
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Scandinavia, as a wag in The Economist once put it, is a great place to be born — but only if you are average. The dead-on satire of Scandinavian mores “Together” is a 2000 movie by Sweden’s Lukas Moodysson set in a multi-family commune in 1975, when the groovy Social Democratic ideal was utterly unquestioned in Sweden.

In the film’s signature scene, a sensitive, apron-wearing man tells his niece and nephew as he is making breakfast, “You could say that we are like porridge. First we’re like small oat flakes — small, dry, fragile, alone. But then we’re cooked with the other oat flakes and become soft. We join so that one flake can’t be told apart from another. We’re almost dissolved. Together we become a big porridge that’s warm, tasty, and nutritious and yes, quite beautiful, too. So we are no longer small and isolated but we have become warm, soft and joined together. Part of something bigger than ourselves. Sometimes life feels like an enormous porridge, don’t you think?”

Then he spoons a great glutinous glob of tasteless starch onto the poor kids’ plates. That’s Scandinavia for you, folks: Bland, wholesome, individual-erasing mush. But, hey, at least we’re all united in being slowly digested by the system.

The News Junkie follows along, and adds a link:

Naturally enough, the architecture of the welfare state was designed and developed with European realities in mind, the most important of which were European beliefs about poverty. Thanks to their history of Old World feudalism, with its centuries of rigid class barriers and attendant lack of opportunity for mobility based on merit, Europeans held a powerful, continentally pervasive belief that ordinary people who found themselves in poverty or need were effectively stuck in it — and, no less important, that they were stuck through no fault of their own, but rather by an accident of birth. The state provision of old-age pensions, unemployment benefits, and health services — along with official family support and other household-income guarantees — served a multiplicity of purposes for European political economies, not the least of which was to assuage voters’ discontent with the perceived shortcomings of their countries’ social structures through a highly visible and explicitly political mechanism for broadly based and compensatory income redistribution.

But America’s historical experience has been rather different from Europe’s, and from the earliest days of the great American experiment, people in the United States exhibited strikingly different views from their trans-Atlantic cousins on the questions of poverty and social welfare. These differences were noted both by Americans themselves and by foreign visitors, not least among them Alexis de Tocqueville, whose conception of American exceptionalism was heavily influenced by the distinctive American worldview on such matters. Because America had no feudal past and no lingering aristocracy, poverty was not viewed as the result of an unalterable accident of birth but instead as a temporary challenge that could be overcome with determination and character — with enterprise, hard work, and grit. Rightly or wrongly, Americans viewed themselves as masters of their own fate, intensely proud because they were self-reliant.

To the American mind, poverty could never be regarded as a permanent condition for anyone in any stratum of society because of the country’s boundless possibilities for individual self-advancement. Self-reliance and personal initiative were, in this way of thinking, the critical factors in staying out of need. Generosity, too, was very much a part of that American ethos; the American impulse to lend a hand (sometimes a very generous hand) to neighbors in need of help was ingrained in the immigrant and settler traditions. But thanks to a strong underlying streak of Puritanism, Americans reflexively parsed the needy into two categories: what came to be called the deserving and the undeserving poor. To assist the former, the American prescription was community-based charity from its famously vibrant “voluntary associations.” The latter — men and women judged responsible for their own dire circumstances due to laziness, or drinking problems, or other behavior associated with flawed character — were seen as mainly needing assistance in “changing their ways.” In either case, charitable aid was typically envisioned as a temporary intervention to help good people get through a bad spell and back on their feet. Long-term dependence upon handouts was “pauperism,” an odious condition no self-respecting American would readily accept.

Right, the local widow and the town drunk. Both without means, one through no fault of her own, after a lifetime of doing what she was supposed to do; the other one impoverished by choice.

Suffice it to say, the United States arrived late to the 20th century’s entitlement party, and the hesitance to embrace the welfare state lingered on well after the Depression. As recently as the early 1960s, the “footprint” left on America’s GDP by the welfare state was not dramatically larger than it had been under Franklin Roosevelt — or Herbert Hoover, for that matter. In 1961, at the start of the Kennedy Administration, total government entitlement transfers to individual recipients accounted for a little less than 5% of GDP, as opposed to 2.5% of GDP in 1931 just before the New Deal. In 1963 – the year of Kennedy’s assassination – these entitlement transfers accounted for about 6% of total personal income in America, as against a bit less than 4% in 1936.

During the 1960s, however, America’s traditional aversion to the welfare state and all its works largely collapsed. President Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and his “Great Society” pledge of the same year ushered in a new era for America, in which Washington finally commenced in earnest the construction of a massive welfare state. In the decades that followed, America not only markedly expanded provision for current or past workers who qualified for benefits under existing “social insurance” arrangements, it also inaugurated a panoply of nationwide programs for “income maintenance” (food stamps, housing subsidies, Supplemental Social Security Insurance, and the like) where eligibility turned not on work history but on officially designated “poverty” status. The government also added health-care guarantees for retirees and the officially poor, with Medicare, Medicaid, and their accompaniments. In other words, Americans could claim, and obtain, an increasing trove of economic benefits from the government simply by dint of being a citizen; they were now incontestably entitled under law to some measure of transferred public bounty, thanks to our new “entitlement state.”

The expansion of the American welfare state remains very much a work in progress; the latest addition to that edifice is, of course, the Affordable Care Act. Despite its recent decades of rapid growth, the American welfare state may still look modest in scope and scale compared to some of its European counterparts. Nonetheless, over the past two generations, the remarkable growth of the entitlement state has radically transformed both the American government and the American way of life itself. It is not too much to call those changes revolutionary.
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By 2012, the most recent year for such figures at this writing, Census Bureau estimates indicated that more than 150 million Americans, or a little more than 49% of the population, lived in households that received at least one entitlement benefit. Since under-reporting of government transfers is characteristic for survey respondents, and since administrative records suggest the Census Bureau’s own adjustments and corrections do not completely compensate for the under-reporting problem, this likely means that America has already passed the symbolic threshold where a majority of the population is asking for, and accepting, welfare-state transfers.

It’s sad when a passion dies. My desire to visit the “fatherland” has evaporated for the most part, and I note that any need to do so seems to have vanished along with it. We’re all cooked now; what’s the necessity involved in visiting from one bowl of soft slimy porridge, to another?

What’s the solution? There has to be some sort of “uncooking.” That seems unrealistic when one views it from the porridge analogy. Which sadly fits, because once a grain of barley has been cooked and softened it’s no simple matter to get it firm and “flaky” again.

But, the problem was created by way of an errant, extremist, and therefore fragile, mindset. We imported from Europe the mindset that, when a woman at a dinner table shows pride in her son won first place in his school, she should be scorned. And, that a “fundamental transformation,” to coin a phrase, into a welfare state is some sort of laudable ambition for a head of that state to hold. So topsy-turvy is this Weltanschauung that the quickest way to get to it is to see any object or concept connected with it as the opposite of what it truly is. Excellence is to be mocked, independence scorned the way we are supposed to scorn crime. Reliance on public assistance is somehow the dream of a lifetime…and on and on down the line. Such a way of looking at things cannot endure without a lot of support, from within and without. Reality will not offer a helping hand. The solution to the problem is in there. Somewhere.

The point to all this, in my mind, is: The “victimology” complex, the “I’m poor because I was born that way” thing, is an offshoot of aristocratic stratification that existed over there, but never over here. We don’t have any business clinging to it, because we don’t have the historical underpinnings to support it. It’s been said that in America, you can be anything you want to be. That isn’t just a bumper-sticker slogan. It will never be reduced to an empty rhetorical nugget, some sort of laughable nullity, unless we allow it to be.

Hot Air:

Organizers in France estimated that upwards of 3.7 million people attended a Sunday unity rally in Paris in response to the attack on the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. Among those marchers were a variety of world leaders, but President Barack Obama was not among them. Nor did the president send any ranking administration officials to represent the United States. Not even Attorney General Eric Holder, who was in Paris at the request of French authorities, attended the march. The United States was utterly absent from this global event.

Obama did not even bother to attend a solidarity march for Paris that was held in Washington D.C. yesterday despite the participation of American officials like the State Department’s Victoria Nuland. “Obama wasn’t far from the march in D.C. on Sunday that wended silently along six blocks from the Newseum to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial,” Politico reported. “Instead, he spent the chilly afternoon a few blocks away at the White House, with no public schedule, no outings.”
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“I say this as an American — not as a journalist, not as a representative of CNN — but as an American: I was ashamed,” CNN anchor Jake Tapper wrote. He noted that it was an oversight of the first order that no prominent 2016 prospect, Republican or Democratic, chose to join the Parisian marchers either.

“You let the world down,” read the front page of the New York Daily News on Monday.

Even the often staid and demure participants on CNN’s politics panel on the morning show New Day were animated over the absence of America from this pivotal symbolic event.

“If there was ever a picture that says ‘Our policy is leading from behind,’ that’s it,” said CNN anchor John King as he showed video of a variety of world leaders locking arms while marching in solidarity with average French citizens.

From the comments:

Reminder…Obama sent three, THREE, representatives to Michael Brown’s funeral.

My stock phrase I have been molding & shaping over the last couple years or so, although there has been some truth to it since around the early nineties, give-or-take…

Our “civilization” at the moment…is embroiled in a cold civil war…between people who refuse to define things, and people who MUST see to it that things are strongly defined before they can do what they do.

That’s a pretty simplimified summary, but lately I’m thinking even that tiny, heavy nugget may be overly complexificated.

The cold civil war is between people who must resist strong definitions before they can do the things they do, and the people who rely on the strong definitions to do what they do.

The technology that enables us to communicate with large numbers of our fellows rapidly has introduced, as it always has and always shall, new dynamics into this conflict. To do the things you cannot do unless things are left undefined, you have to get them sold, and that means we have ideas being exchanged that are not salable unless things are left undefined. The same goes for things that rely on the stronger definitions, they rely on the sale of ideas that in turn rely on these strong definitions being suggested, accepted, and then enforced.

As a general rule, you need to keep things undefined in order to do things that only look like they help people but don’t actually help anybody — except parasites. To do things that really do help people, before the mission is accomplished you’ll need to define something. “Is it a good idea to drive a three ton truck across a bridge that supports five thousand pounds?” is not a question you’d want to answer, without a good understanding of how many pounds are in a ton.

Definition, by its very nature, relies on shared and verifiable understanding.

Well, actually they did answer that question…it’s one guy.

I don’t know if it’s any more than that one dumb guy in Ms. Jenneke’s case, but the mindset is certainly out there that if a woman is highly accomplished in the looks department she can’t be highly accomplished anywhere else. I find this to be not only idiotic, but as “sexist” as anything can possibly be. Certainly more than anything else we like to go around labeling with that word these days. I mean, what could be worse? Oh, she’s good-looking…well then, keep her out of the Olympics, or any other athletic competition, or anything that isn’t strictly fixated with looks. She wants to be a model or a beauty contest champion, make sure she isn’t anything else.

Because you have to be frumpy and pear-shaped to be a winning hurdler? That is literally not going to fly. You have to be fit. And — I think, this is where the problem really is — fit people are going to be better-looking.

There’s a tennis player named Anna Kournikova who once started going around making a higher profile for herself, wearing attention-getting clothes both on & off the courts, posing for photoshoots, and so on and so forth. Then I recall someone somewhere pointed out she got beat here, there, and a bunch of other places…this is a little outside my base of knowledge, but it seemed there was a good deal of evidence provided that she wasn’t actually all that good of a tennis player. Although I’m sure she’s better than I am. But, no one that I can recall ever questioned whether she was a “serious athlete.” Nor should they have, if she was still picking up sponsorships, still playing well enough to at least compete.

That’s Anna K. Now Michelle Jenneke, and my base of knowledge is limited here as well — she’s winning quite a lot of the time at what she does, isn’t she? The one-critic doesn’t seem to be asserting otherwise.

What more do you need to do to be a serious athlete, other than be a serious athlete? I’m missing something here. Or, I hope I am anyway. You have to be a butterface or a frump-a-dump to be a serious athlete now?

Now if he wants to say the music in Michelle Jenneke’s video is not real music, well then…that has the potential to be a different conversation entirely.

Every time I look at it I think the same thing…

…that against all odds, we survived this decade. And Jimmy Carter too, at the same time.

It fills me with hope. If we can survive that, we can survive anything.

Bill Maher’s use of the word “liberal” in this clip — which is an unorthodox use, although it should not be — further stimulated some thoughts I’ve been having about the proper role of government over the last few months. Although the original ignition point came when I saw the very first blows being traded between establishment Republicans and the Tea Party types, in what is surely a ramp-up to the 2016 elections.

Continuing this thinking a bit further, I took to the Hello Kitty of Blogging and pointed out…

“Get (and keep) religion out of government.” Sounds good, but I have a question: How come it continues to be necessary for someone to say so? What is this force that blends religion together with government?

My observation is that religion, practiced the way it should be practiced, really hasn’t got anything to do with government, practiced the way IT should be practiced. The two are literally about two different worlds. This imbroglio about same-sex marriage is a perfect example of what I’m noticing: What happened, that we now need to be concerned with how government defines marriage? Something. It didn’t start out that way. And the things that happened, were not good things.

And my conclusion is: Government, practiced the way it should NOT be practiced, is exactly the same as religion, practiced the way IT should not be practiced. Bad religion and bad government share the same goal, differing only in tactics, and this is what blends them together: To socially elevate a targeted class, clique or individual, above everyone else.

Is it fair to shoehorn these two visions into the terms “left wing” and “right wing,” at least in the United States? Having read all of the opinions available to me about it, including the Wikipedia entry, I’ve come to the conclusion: Yeah, sure, whatever. There is no contradictory definition that’s actually stuck.

The terms left-wing and right-wing are widely used in the United States but, as on the global level, there is no firm consensus about their meaning. The only aspect that is generally agreed upon is that they are the defining opposites of the United States political spectrum. Left and right in the U.S. are generally associated with liberal and conservative respectively, although the meanings of the two sets of terms do not entirely coincide. Depending on the political affiliation of the individual using them, these terms can be spoken with varying implications.
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In general, the term left-wing is understood to imply a commitment to egalitarianism, support for social policies that favor the working class, and multiculturalism…
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In general, right-wing implies a commitment to conservative Christian values, support for a free-market system, and traditional family values…

This is mostly, consistent with the understanding that “left wing” involves an elevation of selected persons and classes, whereas “right wing” does not — if anything, it involves an elevation of certain actions and a derogation of certain other actions.

The hitch in the giddyup is this business about the left-wing and “a commitment to egalitarianism.” It isn’t hard to resolve this, though: It is a promise on which they haven’t been delivering. In fact, you’ll find when left-wingers accuse right-wingers of this non-egalitarian vision, the inequality, the discrimination, the “ism” — if you take the time to really look into it, you’ll find the right-winger is being accused of “discrimination” because he isn’t discriminating the way the left-winger wants him to discriminate.

So when all’s said & done, the distinction holds. Left-wing policies, in achievement as well as in intent, foment inequality, castes, and special privileges. To the extent “right wing” means anything at all in the US of A in Anno Domini Twenty Fifteen, it is a mild to severe reactionary refusal to recognize these castes. No thank you, I don’t think I want Kathleen Sebelius making my health care decisions for me. No, I don’t want to buy carbon offset vouchers and send my money into some black hole to be managed by perfect strangers when I light my house. No, actually, I have listened to the “experts” on “global warming” and I’ve concluded they’re full of crap; no, I think I’d prefer not to forget about all the failed predictions they’ve made.

There are two visions for government here and they’re both quite old. In fact, one of the things that has impressed me the most about history of civilizations, especially recent, industrial-age history, is that governments tend to do this shift over time from the one, to the other. Ours is no different. They start off providing the minimal essentials of civilization, the laws against murder, theft and harm, the redress of grievances, etc. Then they do this shift: There seems to be a lot of power lying around, unused, how can I/we use this to elevate my/our standing in the community?

Then there follows a lust for power. It starts off as a quest for greater influence; anybody participating in a decision making process within a group, particularly a group that involves multiple competing interests, is going to want greater influence. It’s only natural. But influence is not power. I might even go so far as to argue they have an oppositional relationship with each other: Influence has to do with the actions of people who still have choices they can make. Power has to do with the actions of people who have been “liberated” from their choices. If I have power over you, that must mean I can make you do things even if you don’t want to do them. If my power doesn’t extend into the realm of making you do things you otherwise wouldn’t do, “power” isn’t really the right word.

The point is, we have this tipping-point, within each participant, where they stop trying to acquire influence and start trying to acquire power. President Obama is past that, it seems to me; His influence is clearly on the wane, and it doesn’t seem to bother Him even a tiny bit, but He sure seems to like acting out this little routine He’s got going where He “decides” on this, that, or some other thing…and that’s it. Whatever anybody else has to say about it, is reduced to a nullity. It’s been an impressive experience watching Him go through this transformation, but it isn’t just Him doing it. And when enough of the influencers give up on acquiring influence, and shift to the acquisition of power, it has an effect on the government as a whole. This endeavor to acquire more power, for those in a position of acquiring it, becomes a newer, displacing purpose.

So when left-wingers explain they are for progress and going “forward,” and their opponents the right-wingers are about resisting this “progress,” interpreting it this way you can see they’re quite correct. These civilizations are rather like harvested fruit — starting out delicious and beautiful, ending up colorless, decayed, foul, unfit for anything but compost. It is a depressing thought to entertain that perhaps this transition is unavoidable, the only question outstanding being how soon. The left wants it to happen faster, the right wants it to happen more slowly, or not at all.

Now that we have these intra-factional shouting matches about Establishment vs. Tea Party, I’m seeing this proven again and again, with increasing frequency and intensity. The “right wing” within the Republican party is seeing the decay happening, looking for ways to forestall it, hopefully get back to the point where we could decide things for ourselves — and get back to operating our businesses, building our services and products, helping others, doing the things that made the country great in the first place. The “moderates,” on the other hand, are losing the characteristics that had distinguished them from the “left wing,” to the point it’s hard to tell those two apart. They’re both hung up on this idea that so-and-so is uniquely-qualified to rise above the rest of the country, and lead it into…well…there’s the part that furrows the brow with concern, and maybe a bit of distress. They won’t say what. They want to monologue away endlessly about the who, but not the what, the why, or how it’s all gonna work. Certainly, not about any benchmarks or milestones by which the Grand Master Plan can be subsequently evaluated, with its planners, architects and overseers held accountable for the results.

Which of course raises the question: When did the definition change?

From The Daily Beast.

Prof. Sowell is asked to define what an intellectual is:

An intellectual is someone whose end product is ideas. Not everybody who produces an idea is an intellectual because there are many intellectually demanding ideas that end up as products or services such as brain surgery or computer operating systems, etc. But those kinds of things differ in the sense in that there is an external test of the validity of the ideas, other than the approval of one’s peers. For deconstructionists, the only test is whether other deconstructionists like what he is saying. But for a financial wizard, he may be held in awe by his contemporaries and yet if he goes broke his ideas are regarded as failures. Consider that between the two World Wars, intellectuals promoted pacifism to the point they impeded the military build up of any military deterrents against Hitler or Japan, and yet men paid with their lives in the beginning of the war especially because Britain and America had far inferior military equipment. Men died needlessly but no one ever held them accountable for what they said.

Perhaps it is still unclear? If you need to see it in action, look no further than Harvard (via American Thinker):

For years, Harvard’s experts on health economics and policy have advised presidents and Congress on how to provide health benefits to the nation at a reasonable cost. But those remedies will now be applied to the Harvard faculty, and the professors are in an uproar.

Members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the heart of the 378-year-old university, voted overwhelmingly in November to oppose changes that would require them and thousands of other Harvard employees to pay more for health care. The university says the increases are in part a result of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act, which many Harvard professors championed.

The faculty vote came too late to stop the cost increases from taking effect this month, and the anger on campus remains focused on questions that are agitating many workplaces: How should the burden of health costs be shared by employers and employees? If employees have to bear more of the cost, will they skimp on medically necessary care, curtail the use of less valuable services, or both?

“Harvard is a microcosm of what’s happening in health care in the country,” said David M. Cutler, a health economist at the university who was an adviser to President Obama’s 2008 campaign. But only up to a point: Professors at Harvard have until now generally avoided the higher expenses that other employers have been passing on to employees. That makes the outrage among the faculty remarkable, Mr. Cutler said, because “Harvard was and remains a very generous employer.”

In Harvard’s health care enrollment guide for 2015, the university said it “must respond to the national trend of rising health care costs, including some driven by health care reform,” in the form of the Affordable Care Act. The guide said that Harvard faced “added costs” because of provisions in the health care law that extend coverage for children up to age 26, offer free preventive services like mammograms and colonoscopies and, starting in 2018, add a tax on high-cost insurance, known as the Cadillac tax.

Richard F. Thomas, a Harvard professor of classics and one of the world’s leading authorities on Virgil, called the changes “deplorable, deeply regressive, a sign of the corporatization of the university.”

Mary D. Lewis, a professor who specializes in the history of modern France and has led opposition to the benefit changes, said they were tantamount to a pay cut. “Moreover,” she said, “this pay cut will be timed to come at precisely the moment when you are sick, stressed or facing the challenges of being a new parent.”
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“It seems that Harvard is trying to save money by shifting costs to sick people,” said Mary C. Waters, a professor of sociology. “I don’t understand why a university with Harvard’s incredible resources would do this. What is the crisis?”

Gee, I dunno. What could it be?

The power of the horse blinders is just dazzling, mind-blowing. Especially with that professor-of-classics guy whining about “corporatization.” Corporations have been around for a long time. What does it take to live through the last six years and watch this “landmark reform” of the health care system, by government, with the government legislation and the government enforcement and the government scandals and government this and government that…soon afterward there follows a change you don’t like, and you leap to the “corporatization” angle to explain it? Corporate action on this has been passive and reactive. That’s how it works with the law. Corporations sit around, and watch, see what they’re required to do & what they’re allowed to do, then they make a plan to navigate through it all. So if there’s a sudden change in ultimate effect, coming after a sudden change in the law, it’s probably not a coincidence and it’s probably not because a corporation rolled out of bed with a hot new idea.

There are those who may complain, with some legitimacy, that a bit too much energy is expended on noticing how self-deluded today’s Obama supporters and ObamaCare supporters and hippies and proggies and lefties and liberals really are. I can certainly see the concern. But it’s episodes like this that provide the rebuttal, that show the necessity of noticing. Just look at the simplicity of the ideas that aren’t taking hold, somehow: “If you pay for more stuff, or force someone to pay for more stuff, it’s going to cost more money.” Intellectual or not, you have to be standing in a very low position for an idea such as that to go sailing over your head. But you can tell from the quotes that these intellectuals managed to get ‘er done. Outrage in year N that such-and-such a thing is “not covered” and the suffering do not have “access” (kaching, kaching) to health are. Then government rolls out the plan, and we have outrage in year N+1 that costs are going up. Uh, yeah costs are going up. Of course they are. They’re supposed to; the system is paying for more stuff. Duh.

The takeaway from this? Ideas shape the mind, just as the mind shapes the ideas. We all know this is true, we just don’t talk about it as often as we should. There is a certain discipline involved in doing the brain surgery, computer operating systems, other “intellectual” pursuits that aren’t intellectual in vocation because they involve some external test validating the merit of the idea. There is an entirely different discipline involved in the formation of ideas that are never to be put into practice, never to leave the realm of ideas, in the manufacture of consensus that is “right” because, and only because, it is consensus. When “the only test is whether other deconstructionists like what he is saying.”

It rots the brain.

TIME. Typical lefty balderdash, the kind of nonsense one should expect to culminate from an appeal to emotion, laboring under the guise of appeal to reason:

““The figure was made up by someone working at the UN because it seemed to her to represent the scale of gender-based inequality at the time.”

It isn’t just feminists. You have to be very careful accepting “facts” from someone who perspires away under a bit too much of an afterglow that comes from winning arguments. Not too much terrain is traversed before winning-the-argument is all that matters anymore.

Feminists do love to win arguments, though. As the five chestnuts make abundantly clear, they are not to be trusted.

Judith Levine writes in Counterpunch:

If it’s true that all seven of the football players arrested for hazing in the Sayreville, New Jersey, War Memorial High School locker room are students of color, that is one more reason not to prosecute them as sexual felons.

I don’t mean not to prosecute them in adult court. I mean not to prosecute them at all.

If they’re guilty, they should be disciplined by the school, kicked off the Bombers team, and held accountable to their victims by making amends in words and deeds.

But the punishment the state will mete out far outweighs the transgression. For kids who are 15 to 17 years old, it will be life crushing.
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Now we find that a disproportionate number of the people on the registries are also African-American. This is surprising only because the popular image of the sexual “predator” is a “pedophile,” and the pedophile is white.

In fact, whites represent two-thirds of registered offenders—the unique criminal category in which whites show up in proportion to their demographics in the general population. But on the public registries, “blacks appear to be over-represented,” according to an ongoing analysis by University of Washington criminologist Alissa Ackerman and colleagues of over 445,000 sex offenders on public registries in 2010.

Nationally, African-Americans comprised 22 percent of the Ackerman sample, compared with only 13 percent of the U.S. population. Among the states with the greatest mismatch was New Jersey.
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The age of the greatest number of people involved in the criminal justice system for sex offenses is 14. Thank age-of-consent laws for that. Because the laws deem minors categorically incapable of consenting to sex, any sexual contact with a minor is considered an assault. Indeed, if the victim is a minor, sexual assault becomes “aggravated” sexual assault. Aggravated does not mean more sadistic or lengthy. It can just mean the “victim” of a touch or chat room conversation was 13.

Fourteen is also the age at which the federal government requires committers of certain sex crimes to be listed on the Internet registries.

And in a nation already overflowing with prisoners both juvenile and adult, the vast majority of them black and brown, do we need to lock up more black and brown kids?

So weird how proggies do this. “Such-and-such a law is unfair, so do not enforce it — in this one particular case, in which I hope to whip up emotional agitation with my prose.” If a law is unjust, how do we go about any hopeful process of reform, that begins with class-based selective exemption from the unjust law? That’s the one question they’re never able to answer.

Tim Worstall, writing in Forbes, critiques a New York Times piece:

Blue states, like California, New York and Illinois, whose economies turn on finance, trade and knowledge, are generally richer than red states. But red states, like Texas, Georgia and Utah, have done a better job over all of offering a higher standard of living relative to housing costs. That basic economic fact not only helps explain why the nation’s electoral map got so much redder in the November midterm elections, but also why America’s prosperity is in jeopardy.

Red state economies based on energy extraction, agriculture and suburban sprawl may have lower wages, higher poverty rates and lower levels of education on average than those of blue states — but their residents also benefit from much lower costs of living. For a middle-class person , the American dream of a big house with a backyard and a couple of cars is much more achievable in low-tax Arizona than in deep-blue Massachusetts. As Jed Kolko, chief economist of Trulia, recently noted, housing costs almost twice as much in deep-blue markets ($227 per square foot) than in red markets ($119).

Worstall points out the obvious:

Yes, sure, income inequality might be important in a way, wealth inequality should have a place in our thoughts. But what really matters to people about how life is lived is consumption. Levels of consumption and also consumption inequality. That last is important in a political sense currently because consumption inequality just hasn’t widened out as much as income and wealth inequality have. And levels of consumption: well, that’s really what income or wealth is, the ability to purchase consumption. And if you’re in a place where prices are lower, leading to greater consumption (whether of food, or square feet of housing, or leisure, or whatever), well, then you’re richer, aren’t you?

And thus is our conundrum solved. The red states aren’t in fact poorer than the blue states. They’re richer: that’s why they vote more conservative and more right wing.

This is something that often gets ignored in the comparison between red-state and blue-state economies: $119 is just over half of $227, that’s a pretty big spread. What good does it do you to make $150k a year as opposed to $60k, if you can’t buy as much with it? And don’t these “poor” people who need the help from these blue-stater policies, have to live somewhere?

The blue-state/red-state split, these days, ultimately comes down to a conflict between immediate gratification and delayed gratification. We therefore should not show any surprise on learning of higher salaries in the part of the country that lusts after immediate gratification. It goes with the territory. Just as we shouldn’t be surprised to find a more self-sustainable economic system, in which consumers are empowered to do more consuming, in the part of the country where delayed gratification is more highly valued. That, also, goes with the territory.

Five years of dust on this one, but it’s a fun headline.

And, it offers an excuse to embed an image of Olivia Munn’s “Atari” photo shoot, and who can ever complain about that.

Pretty vicious. But when devastation is heaped upon an argument merely by taking the points seriously, the damage was deserved.

Remember, if it’s a statistic, and democrats repeat it over and over again, it’s probably bullshit. It’s a simplistic formula, but it works.

Reynolds University. The university where nobody gets raped.

From about a month ago, the New York Times has an animated graphic that will shock the shit out of you.

In the late 1960s, almost all men between the ages of 25 and 54 went to work. Only about 5 out of every 100 did not have a job in any given week. By 2000, this figure had more than doubled, to 11 out of every 100 men. This year, it’s 16. (People in the military, prison and institutions are excluded from these figures.)

Of course, the economy was stronger in 2000 than it is today, with a lower official unemployment rate — the share of people not working and actively looking for work — than today. But for prime-age men, the rise in official unemployment explains only about one-third of the increase in not working.

The remaining two-thirds is made up of those who are not working and not looking for work. [bold emphasis mine]

Now, why is that? We would be well served to, before working too long & hard looking for the answer, first acknowledging: There are a lot of loud, noisy people who like it that way. Or think they like it that way. Men working: Bad. Men not working: Good.

I dissent. Item #3 of my 42 definitions of a strong society:

3. Men do things. Able-bodied men, of all ages, are knights. They defend women, children, old and handicapped people, from trifling inconvenience as well as danger and bodily harm. They never, ever remain sitting when a lady approaches.

And…they work.

Bill Flax, writing at Forbes, linked by Trevor Loudon:

In Argentina, everyone acknowledges that fascism, state capitalism, corporatism – whatever – reflects very leftwing ideology. Eva Peron remains a liberal icon. President Obama’s Fabian policies promise similar ends. His proposed infrastructure bank is just the latest gyration of corporatism. Why then are fascists consistently portrayed as conservatives?

Well obviously, the answer is: Because it is friendly to the liberal agenda to portray fascists as conservatives, and what liberals want, they get. But that raises the question: How come it is that liberals keep getting what they want, when it comes to writing down history?

The short answer is, because they do most of the talking.

Long answer is, we have reached an era in which talking has become more-or-less mutually exclusive from doing. If you can manage to do enough talking, and recruiting others to do your talking for you, within a bureaucratic mess that will tolerate no dissent, you’re probably not a producer of consumable goods. If you’re a producer of consumable goods, you are probably too busy to do much talking. Which is a shame, because as a producer of consumable goods, you have to make sure your shit works or else you aren’t going to have a paycheck tomorrow. Which suggest that when you do get around to talking, your talking might be on the boring side, but there’s merit in it and it’s a worthy decision others make to go ahead & listen to it.

When you talk for a living, on the other hand, your paycheck comes in when you…talk. And you know what you’re saying must be right because you…we-ell…say so. Your friends all say so. And they know they’re right because they agree with you. They know you’re right because you agree with them.

It even works with economics, in which we can see with our own eyes what works and what doesn’t. Nevertheless we still have “economists” who say Obama’s policies are good, and would be even better if only He could get more power. In other words, they say the precise opposite of what the evidence says, and in this so-called “science” they get away with it. Well, on the ladder of testability, it turns out history is on the next rung down. We “know” whatever someone took the time to write down. As far as verifying it? All we can do is recall, footnote where we can, and guess. There’s a lot of uncertainty involved; some people choose not to acknowledge it just because they can’t comprehend uncertainty, which ends up being a very silly way to go about studying history.

But we have a wedge driven between academe and reality now. And that’s how it’s done now, through the magic of manufacturing consensus by booting out dissent, and then calling it science. That is why fascists are portrayed as right wing, even though the evidence clearly shows they are left wing.

Chris Hernandez on the changing definition of the word in the title, and how it’s affected by all this noise about so-called “microaggressions” and “trigger warnings.” He starts off with several paragraphs of anecdotal example to define what his own understanding has been. Since this includes experience as a cop and a U.S. Marine, these are not stories for timid readers. Teen suicide, people burning to death in helicopter crashes, toddlers getting decapitated in car accidents, et al.

Then he begins to inspect what has been changing lately (H/T: Instapundit).

I suppose I’ve always defined “trauma” the traditional way: a terrible experience, usually involving significant loss or mortal danger, which left a lasting scar. However, I’ve recently discovered my definition of trauma is wrong. Trauma now seems to be pretty much anything that bothers anyone, in any way, ever. And the worst “trauma” seems to come not from horrible brushes with death like I described above; instead, they’re the result of racism and discrimination.

Over the last year I’ve heard references to “Microagressions” and “Trigger Warnings”. Trigger Warnings tell trauma victims that certain material may “contain disturbing themes that may trigger traumatic memories for sufferers”; it’s a way for them to continue avoiding what bothers them, rather than facing it (and the memories that get triggered often seem to be about discrimination, rather than mortal danger). Microaggressions are minor, seemingly innocuous statements that are actually stereotype-reinforcing trauma, even if the person making the statement meant nothing negative.

Finally, he goes in for the kill:

I’ve reviewed these reports of “trauma”, and have reached a conclusion about them. I’m going to make a brief statement summarizing my conclusion. While I mean this in the nicest way possible, I don’t want victims of Microaggressions or supporters of Trigger Warnings to doubt my sincerity.

Fuck your trauma.

Yes, fuck your trauma. My sympathy for your suffering, whether that suffering was real or imaginary, ended when you demanded I change my life to avoid bringing up your bad memories. You don’t seem to have figured this out, but there is no “I must never be reminded of a negative experience” expectation in any culture anywhere on earth.
:
If your psyche is so fragile you fall apart when someone inadvertently reminds you of “trauma”, especially if that trauma consisted of you overreacting to a self-interpreted racial slur, you need therapy. You belong on a psychiatrist’s couch, not in college dictating what the rest of society can’t do, say or think. Get your own head right before you start trying to run other people’s lives. If you expect everyone around you to cater to your neurosis, forever, you’re what I’d call a “failure at life”. And you’re doomed to perpetual disappointment.
:
If your past bothers you that much, get help. I honestly hope you come to terms with it. I hope you manage to move forward. I won’t say anything meant to dredge up bad memories, and don’t think anyone should intentionally try to harm your feelings.

But nobody, nobody, should censor themselves to protect you from your pathological, and pathologically stupid, sensitivities.

People have been getting traumatized, according to both definitions, for thousands of years now. How come the definition is morphing lately? It’s only obvious that the liberals are bringing it about, partly because we’ve been watching them do it if we’ve been paying attention; if we haven’t been paying attention, we can simply notice that all of the ingredients are there. A cultural change that brings with it a lot more grievance-mongering and complaining, and very little else. The melding of the well-intentioned, who make poor decisions, with those who seek to destroy society as it currently exists and are capable of hardening and executing brilliantly-conceived strategy. Useful idiots sending their own usefulness into an arc of decline. “Education,” formal as it may be, leaving those who are “educated” with less capability to get anything done in life, rather than more.

You watch it awhile and you begin to see where Sen. Joseph McCarthy got off with his famous observation: “If he were merely stupid, the laws of probability dictate that part of his decisions would serve this country’s interest.” You ask yourself: If I wanted to ensure the next generation did absolutely nothing productive, what is the difference between how I would seek to affect them, and what I’m seeing happening?

And then you talk to some of those in favor of the transformation, and you realize these aren’t people who want to destroy anything at all. They truly do care about the feelings of kids who are being (modern-version) “traumatized.” They just don’t seem to understand how people find maturity before doing productive things in adulthood, and because of this lack of understanding they make awful, terrible decisions. Then, you realize you’re watching the ultimate nightmare juxtaposition: The poorly-intentioned leading the well-intentioned, but poor decision makers, around by their dumb noses. And, you realize our society is attacked from within on yet one more front. You realize what you’re seeing is liberalism, which destroys everything it touches. Everything.

Christopher Chantrill writes in American Thinker:

I don’t mean that the president should be a Polly-Anna and pretend that everything is hunky-dory in America. I just want a president that wants to fix America because he loves America.

Unlike our liberal friends and their poster boy, President Barack Obama.

The problem with our liberal friends is that they think that they are too evolved to descend to the celebration of a nation-state and its flummeries of patriotism and flags and Pledges of Allegiance. And so thinks President Obama. Liberals are globalists; they are cosmopolitans. And so is President Obama. They believe in supranational governance with the EU and the UN. And so does President Obama.

They do not love America; they sneer at America.

An idea whose time has come?

So, this happened…

Number Eleven, yay! Our proggie friends will be quick to remind you, though…along with our hippie friends, and who can blame them…there’s a dark side to this. “Don’t encourage him, nothing good can come from it!” Heh. They’re right. Or, mostly right anyway.

On the other hand, there is one good thing about it. If you follow the link, and you have a Facebook account that allows you to read, you’ll notice there is a lively discussion ensuing under the statement that won this coveted honor. Said lively discussion is drawing topic drift the way a new wool sweater attracts cockleburs, and cat hair. So the award offers the opportunity to pick up where the earlier observation gave way to all these charged agendas…like, thou shalt not speak ill of ANY immigration, legal or otherwise…makes us look like racists…what broke Detroit…

Here’s the full statement, in context:

We have things that are supposed to be illegal that “really” are not, like sneaking across our national border, and we have things that are supposed to be allowed but are “really” against the “law,” like for example forming a Young Conservatives group on a college campus, smoking cigarettes, or wearing a “Proud to be American” tee shirt to a high school on Cinco de Mayo.

It is dangerous, living under two sets of laws like this. It’s not an Obama problem, it’s a baby-boomer problem. The hippies have reached the age where they’re expected to be in charge of things, but they still want to rebel against authority when they are the authority. Their generation has manufactured a contradiction which, I’m afraid, is not finished with doing all its damage yet.

Elsewhere, I waxed lyrically of the great schism that is taking place: People are arguing about definitions. I summarized it more elegantly off-line, in an e-mail:

Our “civilization” at the moment…is embroiled in a cold civil war, in part because it has grown quite the appetite for young people who are not curious, youth who have little or no use for definitions, who can easily be told what to think. This cold civil war is between people who refuse to define things, and people who MUST see to it that things are strongly defined before they can do what they do.

Architects and Medicators. People who solve the problems they encounter by way of thought, versus people who address every thought-challenge by way of feeling, often losing sight of the difference between feeling & thought. The “cold civil war” is still cold, but it’s been heating up for awhile, and is approaching an ignition point as we close out Anno Domini Twenty Fourteen.

I continued this observation in Thing I Know #435:

I notice there is an ability some people have and some people do not have. We might think of it as the ability to comprehend definitions that have provide no objectively discerned meaning, applying interpretations that require the human element. Is this room tastefully decorated, is that joke funny, is it fun to watch that person give a speech. In our time, this ability is generally mutually exclusive from the ability to perceive truth. It isn’t hard to demonstrate: Was so-and-so only kidding when he said such-and-such. We see people heckled, ridiculed, scolded, for failing to “get the irony” or for having taken something too literally. The danger involved in diagnosing learning disabilities in, and prescribing medication for, these people is that it sidelines most of the people who might have the ability to get something useful built. An irony-genius, or denizen of a relative-reality universe, isn’t in a good position to build anything involving any level of complexity because you have to perceive hard, concrete, cause-and-effect relationships to do things like that.

People like me who entirely lack that other ability, that “comprehend fuzzy definitions” ability, actually can get irony pretty well. Matter of fact, we can see irony better than those who accuse us of not being able to get irony.

For example: The irony of this cold civil war, in which those who seek to avoid definitions, find they must labor toward entirely defrocking the other side of any status or influence whatsoever, so that nobody of note or significance is taking the time or trouble to define anything — is this. Should they win this cold civil war, they will lose everything. I mean everything. The things they want, the things they need, all these things rely on something being properly and meaningfully…defined.

But the cold civil war is approaching some sort of flash-point. Or anyway, it’s in some state of ascension, unprecedented ascension, about to get as bad as it can get. Because those who have worked their entire lives to rebel against authority, now find themselves in the position of being the authority. It’s on them to find some way to reconcile this. It’s a job that can only be done poorly, or not at all.

And so, as I said, we have two sets of laws. We have things that are illegal but “really,” wink-wink nod-nod, aren’t. And other things should be legal — in fact guaranteed rights — but actually are, wink-wink-nod-nod, Verboten.

Right or wrong, good or bad, that’s where twenty-fifteen finds us. Can’t wait to see what happens next. Happy New Year!