House of Eratosthenes

One of these days, we’re gonna learn: “Equality” doesn’t mean “Freedom.” In fact, you really don’t have long to wait before you see government officials and advocates using the E-word as a cover-euphemism for TAKING AWAY big honkin’ spoonfuls of the F-word. It just happened, just now, as a lot of you were babbling away with a bunch of foolish nonsense about “allowing people to love each other.”

FTA:

City officials told Donald Knapp that he and his wife Evelyn, both ordained ministers who run Hitching Post Wedding Chapel, are required to perform such [same-sex wedding] ceremonies or face months in jail and/or thousands of dollars in fines. The city claims its “non-discrimination” ordinance requires the Knapps to perform same-sex wedding ceremonies now that the courts have overridden Idaho’s voter-approved constitutional amendment that affirmed marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

I dream of a day we can discuss, not so much whether or not these marriages should be recognized, but what is the proper scenario under which a court can make such a ruling. Yeah, that’s not a voting thing, I know; but then again, the non-discrimination thing itself also is not a voting thing either, is it? That’s been made abundantly clear.

But even viewing it through the lens that colors such an overruling proper, the deciding factor is, or is at least based on, cultural values. It’s all about reflecting the values that make us a better people. Or is it? Maybe it’s more about forcing us to be better people. I’ve lost track. Got a feeling the folks who favor such decisions lost track, too, and long before I ever did. Does the court decision reflect the fact that we’re good people, or does it make us that way? Given that it is contrary to a popularly and duly voted-upon constitutional amendment, neither premise benefits from structural flawlessness.

The article makes clear that real people are being hurt by this. Like the Knapps; and then there is a mutilated female at Wellesley who’s being hurt too.

A student who was born female felt perfectly comfortable identifying as a man at Wellesley College — until people said he shouldn’t be class diversity officer because he is now a white male.

Timothy Boatwright was born a girl, and checked off the “female” box when applying to the Massachusetts all-women’s school, according to an article in the New York Times. But when he got there, he introduced himself as a “masculine-of-center genderqueer” person named “Timothy” (the name he picked for himself) and asked them to use male pronouns when referring to him.

And, by all accounts, Boatwright felt welcome on campus — until the day he announced that he wanted to run for the school’s office of multicultural affairs coordinator, whose job is to promote a “culture of diversity” on campus.

But some students thought that allowing Boatwright to have the position would just perpetuate patriarchy. They were so opposed, in fact, that when the other three candidates (all women of color) dropped out, they started an anonymous Facebook campaign encouraging people not to vote at all to keep him from winning the position.

“I thought he’d do a perfectly fine job, but it just felt inappropriate to have a white man there,” the student behind the so-called “Campaign to Abstain” said.

Glenn Reynolds has something to say about this that I wish fit onto a tee shirt or bumper sticker. It doesn’t. So I’ll just lift it and put it in here:

When students go on about social justice, the proper response is to tell them you don’t care what they think, because they don’t know enough to have an intelligent opinion yet. If universities were run on this principle, the 3% of students responsible for 98% of the idiocy would no longer have their destructive impact. Also, it’s true: They don’t know enough to have an intelligent opinion, as demonstrated by the opinions they do have.

As one goes through life solving problems, and one’s Weltanschauung becomes more robust and in-tune with the world & how it works as one becomes more mature, there is a certain simplicity that emerges. This cute thing the young-opinionated types do, with embracing contradictions, starts to fall away. Values and objectives take on the characteristics of compass points. Think of the directions that apply to a jet taking off: When it’s on the ground, it’s something like “taxi to this runway, take a left until you get to the main strip,” etc. At 15,000 feet, it’s bearings. Bearings with relationships to one another, like, a heading of 90 is opposite from a heading of 270. You can’t head in both those directions at the same time.

This is what Reynolds’ 3% has been doing to us all. Biggest lie told over the last fifty years is, if one of us isn’t “free” then none of us are. That’s actually quite possible; that’s what the problem has been. Second-biggest lie, as I pointed out up top, is that freedom has something to do with equality.

Equality can have a galvanizing and protecting effect upon freedom. Like, the people who make the rules being forced to live under them, for example; it’s easy to lose freedom if we don’t enforce that. But somehow, I don’t think that’s what they have in mind when they’re protesting this “white male” being the diversity officer. That’s just all about preening. We’re losing freedom to this preening, at a great hurried clip, and the sooner we figure that out, the better.

Update: Related: Roosh (hat tip to Captain Capitalism) defines “Social Justice Warrior.”

The true definition of SJW is up for debate, but most generally it has become a catch-all term that describes feminists and liberals who actively try to solve the perceived social injustices of modern society by organizing in online communities to disseminate propaganda, censor speech, and punish individuals by getting them terminated from their employment. They have also been successful at positioning themselves in the upper echelons of universities, media organizations, and tech companies.

If there’s a dictionary, encyclopedia, or some other authoritative reference that defines it in a way remarkably different from this — then, that resource is wrong. In fact, are there any examples to offer, anywhere, of SJ being applied without something being destroyed as a direct result, either partially or wholly, in intent if not effect? I can’t think of one.

This cute thing the young-opinionated types do, with embracing contradictions, starts to fall away.

At the risk of boring everyone with more “it all comes back to Marx” stuff*…..it all comes back to Marx. If you study up on Marxism — not cultural Marxism, but the stuff Onkel Karl actually wrote — you see that despite its intellectual pretensions, it’s the most juvenile form of thinking imaginable. It actually seems to have been written by a very bright, overachieving teenager. Under the old dispensation, if your train of thought ran into a contradiction, that meant your thinking was flawed — back to the drawing board. In Marxism’s glorious new dawn, a contradiction means you’re doing it right!! It’s the “antithesis” to your “thesis,” that leads to “synthesis” — the brilliant new insight that only makes sense to you, but which is nonetheless Universal Truth.

So, yeah: Marxism is basically Twilight for dorky teens who aren’t quite as smart as they think they are.

*Seriously, I’ll stop with this if it’s as annoying as I sometimes fear it is. Let me know. That’s what Rotten Chestnuts is for, after all.
- Severian | 10/19/2014 @ 07:52
“….. it’s the most juvenile form of thinking imaginable”
(*sheesh* Try “The Duluth Model for Domestic Violence”)

Sput…sput….What level of “intellect” did you THINK Marx (et alia) hope to capture as “allies” and foot soldiers with such “reasoning”?

Just in case the eternal vigilance using Marx, (or L.Ron Hubbard, or Valarie Jarret, or Idi Amin,or..ad nauseam) get’s TOO insufferable…

Lord of the Flies, The Butterfly Revolution, Lord Jim, Animal Farm, (inhale) Aesop’s Fables, Brothers Grimm, Shakespeare,
Wait, the “leadership” of those cool revolutionaries of OWS in New York were living WHERE?
The “administration” of (fill in the blank) non-profit “peoples activism” charity bought a personal “retreat” WHERE?
- CaptDMO | 10/20/2014 @ 04:58
Maybe a new slogan, “Don’t trust anyone under 30.”
- Open other end | 10/20/2014 @ 05:18
Sput…sput….What level of “intellect” did you THINK Marx (et alia) hope to capture as “allies” and foot soldiers with such “reasoning”?

But that’s the problem right there. Since so many people with big fancy degrees and titles think like Marx — and because these people teach our kids — we tend to assume that this is the way smart people think. “Oh, So-and-So is a Marxist, and he has a PhD; that Marx must really be on to something deep!”

In reality, of course, they call it “the ivory tower” for a reason. Professors may be book-smart (then again, in my quite considerable experience, most are not), but most of them are still emotional teenagers. Marxism makes them feel smart and special for not getting asked to Junior Prom, and so they’re Marxists.

If we really want to turn the culture around — assuming that’s possible — we need to break up the popular association of Marx and smarts. Yeah, I can throw around words like “bourgeoisie,” too — it don’t mean nothin’.
- Severian | 10/20/2014 @ 08:09
[…] of Narratives Promulgate Moron Messaging Meta-Sloth Liberals Are in Favor of Restricting Government The E-Word and the F-Word That’s a Majority Modern Feminism: So Negative, So Toxic, it’s Just Exhausting Mutable […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 11/05/2014 @ 05:01

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The E-Word and the F-WordSunday, October 19th, 2014

The E-Word and the F-Word
Sunday, October 19th, 2014