The Ignoranti Speak

Brendan O'Neill shows the lack of comprehension that afflicts mugwumps, RINOS and the ignoranti:

It's becoming so clear now why the war of words between SJWs and the new white nationalists is so intense. It isn't because they have huge ideological differences -- it's because they have so much in common. Both are obsessed with race, SJWs demanding white shame, the alt-right responding with white pride. Both view everyday life and culture through a highly racialised filter. SJWs can't even watch a movie without counting how many lines the black actor has in comparison with the white actor so that they can rush home and tumblr about the injustice of it all. Both have a seemingly boundless capacity for self-pity. Both are convinced they're under siege, whether by patriarchy, transphobia and the Daily Mail (SJWs) or by pinkos and blacks (white nationalists). Both have a deep censorious strain. And both crave recognition of their victimhood and flattery of their feelings. This is really what they're fighting over -- not principles or visions but who should get the coveted title of the most hard-done-by identity. They're auditioning for social pity. "My life matters! My pain matters! I matter!" The increasing bitterness and even violence of their feud is not evidence of its substance, but the opposite: it's the narcissism of small differences.

"...not principles or visions..."? That is the most inaccurate statement which could possibly be made. If he believes it, then he is a fool. As the Left continues to deny venues to speech other than their own racist, fascist, violent eliminationist rhetoric - now focused on all whites - the necessary reaction to that is not an audition "for social pity". And to state that it is, is inexplicable except due to unconscionable ineptness of observation.

The Left's tactics go far beyond denial of venue, and include brutality at events of the Right, from Trump rallies to the rally to stop the destruction of Democrat history in the south. Antifa needn't schedule events nor obtain permits: they go to the meetings of the Other and bring mayhem, fire, bloody attacks - which are abetted by the police, usually by "standing down" (hell, just go home, cops!), or by actively forcing the Other into the weaponry of the antifa goons. Afterwards, the antifa rioting and brutality is blamed on Trump, of course, as the Leftist MSM and politicians cover for their nouveau-KKK.

But as for O'Neill, if he gets caught up in an actual culture war fray it won't be the Right that cold-cocks him. It will be antifa terrorists purging the world for Leftism and the lies the Left believes.

Marxism, Antifa, and Utopian Fundamentalism

It is not uncommon for a Leftist (Atheist by definition) to deny the existence of objective morality and yet still claim the moral high ground and moral superiority to ancient moral codes which have been in place for millennia (the exception being Islam, which can do no wrong). The AtheoLefist moral code is purely pragmatism and personal proclivity which is put in place at the convenience of the individual.

Not only can the individual's moral code change at a moment's notice, it can also change based solely upon the person being addressed. This has been made nakedly obvious with the advent of the successful revolution of the Deplorables in the elections of 2016. It seems impossible not to observe daily the hatred and foulness of the language of the AtheoLeft, yet accompanied by the attendant moral hyperventilation of a self-evident presupposition of moral authority vested totally in AtheoLeftism.

Leftism is thus a fundamentalist religion. It incorporates personal moral authority to make moral judgment in the social Darwinists who must, morally of course, drive humanity in the perpetual progress toward values-free, total equalitarian, hive-think and top-down social/political/economic control of the New Man. In other words, progress toward communist utopia.

The 20th Century communist utopias which actually came forcefully to fruition are ignored due to their mass-murders, genocides, population control through internal purges, failures to feed populations which starved, political prisons, political assassinations and other discomfiting facts which always accompany dictatorships. Communism, say the professors, has never been really tried.

Well, Marxist class war in pursuit of violently enforced communes certainly has been tried.

The current AtheoLeft is true to superficial equalities, those of skin color (but not cis-white), sex/gender (but not cis-male), sexual preference (but not cis-hetero-), and NOT equalities of thought, moralities, or first principles. BadThink is punished, and the new KKK quasi-terrorist arm of the AtheoLeft is the black-masked Antifa enforcer band of political thought thugs. The analogy to the KKK is astonishing, right down to the masked, anonymous, burning and destruction, and attempts to instill fear through violence. It's all in service to the bigotry of denying the validity and rights of those who they hate. For the AtheoLeft, such violence and hatred is moral, even morally required, in order to preserve the march of progress toward the communist dictatorships of utopia.

Each communist experiment of the recent historical past had its equivalent of the KKK/Antifa. Whether they were KKK, Brown Shirts, Red Army, Cultural Revolutionaries, Shining Path, Sandinistas, or just communist mountain guerrilla rebels, they are all the same: genocidal killers in pursuit of utopia, which they will control. Some have even been elected, only to ultimately set the troops on the now starving electorate. In their essence, they all are the same: morally endowed to enforce utopia, even with the blood of the populace.

The AtheoLeft is the fundamentalist religion of utopia through violence and conquest.

Purported Antifa Pamphlet, purging the white race by eradicating the white children in a necessary eugenic genocide, to enable utopia:

Watch This Twice...

...Or more. He Gets It.

A Binary Nation

Vox Day, on national unity:

The purpose of democracy is to avoid violence in the transition of power. But if the Left doesn't wish to play by those rules anymore, the Alt-Right is more than ready to meet them on the field of politics by other means.

Understand that healing and unity are not in the cards. This is not an ideological struggle between one people. The mask has been removed and the veil has been withdrawn. What cleaves the USA is an identity conflict between rival nations competing for power over each other. Read Huntington. Read Fukuyama. Read Gibbon. Peaceful unity is no longer a possibility and the best that can be hoped for now is a wary, short-term cessation of hostilities that will inevitably flare up again.

The Left is totally intolerant of any deviation from their self-derived "moral imperatives". Will that change overnight into tolerance? Will they "come together" in order to unify the nation? Of course not. To do that is completely outside of their identity: elitist, self-righteous, intolerant. They can only be contained, and that, not by rational argument nor appeals to community.

Both sides cannot be "right" simultaneously. That is why the constitutional Americans have been derided and sidelined for the past - what - 40 years or so. Now the constitutional Americans has risen up, so will the derision and deprecation cease? Or will it intensify? If it intensifies, as I believe that it will, how should it be dealt with? If rational argument and appeals to community fail, then what remains?

Is it possible that the coming civil war will be started, not by the Right, but by the Left?

Remember that in the 1861-5 Civil War, federal troops were deployed on American soil, in abundance. So the precedent exists.

A final thought. The nation has been binary ever since the Democrat Party was created to preserve slavery. That evil led to the Civil War, as Democrats fought to preserve their "right" to hold humans as slaves. The Democrat Party has promoted evils ever since, spawning the KKK, Jim Crow and segregation, perpetual welfare, and many foreign wars and aborted peace, culminating in global terrorism. The Democrats are who they are; the appeal to be civilized will not faze them.

Comment of the Day

Headline:

Students told term ‘be a man’ represents toxic masculinity

From the comments:

"What about masculine women? Are the toxic?

Bonus Headline:

High schooler records teacher’s racism lecture: ‘To be white is to be racist, period’

The Culture War in Two Frames

And I'm much more equal than you, too. Unless you are a black, female, tranny, Muslim, bi-coastal, homeless rape-victim, with a computer program which proves that climate change is caused by flyovers. In that case, get in line.

English Grammar is a MicroAggression

Never mind that concise meanings in language usage are required for actual comprehension of received concepts; good grammar is insulting these days.

"Let’s set aside for a moment the perennial discussion of whether or not English is the “official language” of the United States and ponder if, in the public square, it’s too much to ask that we simply allow the language to be spoken properly where it’s in use. Apparently so, at least if you ask the Social Justice Warriors. “Vietnamese femme” Alex-Quan Pham has taken to the pages of Everyday Feminism (?) to lecture us on how sticking to the accepted rules of grammar is offensive to those who are uncomfortable with how English makes them feel. In a piece titled, “3 Ways Language Oppression Harms Us (And How We Can Heal)” the author reminds us of the damage we can do by attending English class.

We are told that there is one correct form of English, and deviating from grammar and pronunciation rules associates us with the working class. Not only is this classist, but it fortifies the idea that English has a “proper” form — even though every variation of English has been constructed.

The kind of English that is privileged in job interviews, for instance, was made up like every other kind of English; it has no special value. But we’ve been taught that the version of English that middle-class white people speak is “correct.”…

Immigrants of color are especially made to feel ashamed of their own languages, because their languages remind them that they are not white. Their languages remind them that who they are and where they come from will always taint them in the eyes of America.

Pham is clearly quite concerned about this because he goes on to describe the concept of Language Justice and how we can all work together to remove the yoke of oppression from those who don’t conform to racial and “heteronormative” standards.

I’ll save myself a considerable bit of ranting by referring you to the response from Katherine Timpf at National Review. There’s no need or desire to discriminate against people who are dealing with English as a Second Language (ESL) issues, but that doesn’t make it offensive to speak English properly either.

Hey, Pham? Nice try, but — nope. What constitutes correct English has nothing to do with class or race, only with whether or not it complies with that unbiased, hard-and-fast rules of the language. It’s completely objective, and the fact that you insist on putting quotation marks around the word as if it were some sort of subjective idea is insane…

Now, clearly, anyone who would judge someone such as an immigrant or a person who has not had access to proper education for not knowing perfect English is a complete jerk. But to deny that there even is a correct version? Well, that’s just denying facts.

Note: To be fair, Pham’s piece isn’t entirely made up of whining. No, they also offer a solution — “use PayPal to send twenty or more dollars to an Indigenous femme” — which is definitely something I will get right on now that I am done writing this."

Actually it's the fact that whites even exist in the originally-white western democracy to which aliens flock that is the problem for these racists against whites. Non-assimilation is just refusal to accept the culture into which you attach yourself. Demanding that the culture change specifically for you is culture war.

The Abortion Slippery Slope Is Real: Time to Abort Ethicists

Killing one's progeny is now so common that it is just another thread in the social fabric, which is a shroud.

Declaring War on Newborns

The authors point out that each of these conditions​—​the baby is sick or suffering, the baby will be a financial hardship, the baby will be personally troublesome​​—​​is now “largely accepted” as a good reason for a mother to abort her baby before he’s born. So why not after?

Yes. People who are personally troublesome should be aborted... at any age. That is the ethic of the totalitarian elitist, the one who is able to decide life/death for others, all for the common good of, well, that doesn't matter: "Common Good" is enough, and it is non-specific, a benefit to any rhetoric.

“When circumstances occur after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible.” (Their italics.) Western societies approve abortion because they have reached a consensus that a fetus is not a person; they should acknowledge that by the same definition a newborn isn’t a person either.

And of course we need to tell everyone exactly how "person" should be defined:

Neither fetus nor baby has developed a sufficient sense of his own life to know what it would be like to be deprived of it. The kid will never know the difference, in other words. A newborn baby is just a fetus who’s hung around a bit too long.

And an ethicist is just an arrogant elitist who has "hung around too long". Not a real person; a parasite. What parasite is defined as a person?

As the authors acknowledge, this makes an “after-birth abortion” a tricky business. You have to get to the infant before he develops “those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.” It’s a race against time.

The article doesn’t go on for more than 1,500 words, but for non-ethicists it has a high surprise-per-word ratio. The information that newborn babies aren’t people is just the beginning. A reader learns that “many non-human animals … are persons” and therefore enjoy a “right to life.” (Such ruminative ruminants, unlike babies, are self-aware enough to know that getting killed will entail a “loss of value.”) The authors don’t tell us which species these “non-human persons” belong to, but it’s safe to say that you don’t want to take a medical ethicist to dinner at Outback.

But what about adoption, you ask. The authors ask that question too, noting that some people​—​you and me, for example​—​might think that adoption could buy enough time for the unwanted newborn to technically become a person and “possibly increase the happiness of the people involved.” But this is not a viable option, if you’ll forgive the expression. A mother who kills her newborn baby, the authors report, is forced to “accept the irreversibility of the loss.” By contrast, a mother who gives her baby up for adoption “might suffer psychological distress.” And for a very simple reason: These mothers “often dream that their child will return to them. This makes it difficult to accept the reality of the loss because they can never be quite sure whether or not it is irreversible.” It’s simpler for all concerned just to make sure the loss can’t be reversed. It’ll spare Mom a lot of heartbreak.

Now, it’s at this point in the Journal of Medical Ethics that many readers will begin to suspect, as I did, that their legs are being not very subtly pulled. The inversion that the argument entails is Swiftian​—​a twenty-first-century Modest Proposal without the cannibalism (for now). Jonathan Swift’s original Modest Proposal called for killing Irish children to prevent them “from being a burden to their parents.” It was death by compassion, the killing of innocents based on a surfeit of fellow-feeling. The authors agree that compassion itself demands the death of newborns. Unlike Swift, though, they aren’t kidding.

Because "progress" requires more change away from norms, it will never stop. Every change, such as abortion, becomes a norm, and therefore in order to have progress the culture must change even further from that norm. Constant change evermore toward the darkness is required in order to pursue progress. And that's why darkness is rationalized as "good", and the darkness is redefined as "light".

If You Stand For Nothing, Then You'll Fall For Anything

The Third Cultural Revolution

Chait: Victimhood culture explains what is happening at Emory

Jonathan Chait and these sociologists are recognizing this a little late. Sowell has published several books on the phenomenon. I have recognized it and written about it for several years. It is a form of cultural Marxist Class War, and that has been recognized for well over a century. The “Progressives” of the early 20th century were waging their own form of Marxist three-class warfare, with themselves as the messiahs, and women as a Primary Victimhood Class, but also with the white race as a Victimhood Class being persecuted by anti-racist Republicans, and free blacks. The result of that was Democrat Jim Crow laws for controlling the blacks, and birth control, which Margaret Sanger, creator of Planned Parenthood, also heavily focused on blacks, but also for liberating women from childbirth. Both efforts were population control of oppressor classes, in favor of victimhood classes. And eugenics was practiced on “defective” humans, in the form of sterilization, by official government actions.

Today the Left has completed its “long march through the institutions”.(1) In the early 20th century, Antonio Gramsci generalized Marxist economic three-class theory into “Cultural Hegemony” theory, meaning that the “Ruling Class” determines the type of culture that is forced upon the “Ruled Class”, for the benefit of the Ruled Class. The intellectuals, which include self-selected journalists, form into a class of activists against the culture imposed by the hegemonic ruling class.

Hence the three-class system according to Gramsci meant the “cultural hegemonic class”, the victims of the cultural hegemons, and the intellectual activist class working against the cultural hegemons.

When thinking about the ongoing culture war, it becomes useful to think in terms of a designated Victimhood Class, one which contains subclasses (women; blacks; homosexuals; miscellaneous sexual disordereds; Gaia; homeless; and others as it is advantageous). Because victims must be oppressed by someone, there is the Oppressor Class which is the status quo class, which is jealous of its hegemony and power. And there is the self-ordained, self-righteous Messiah Class consisting of those who wish to be known as the ultra-moral saviors of the Victimhood Class, although all their efforts produce is the status quo of the Victimhood Class, rather than their salvation.

Chait has reduced the work of two sociologist authors, Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, regarding Microaggressions in the Victimhood Class War, into a condensed form. The essence is that the culture has moved from honor culture, through dignity culture, and into Victimhood.

Chait:

”In brief: We’re beginning a second transition of moral cultures. The first major transition happened in the 18th and 19th centuries when most Western societies moved away from cultures of honor (where people must earn honor and must therefore avenge insults on their own) to cultures of dignity in which people are assumed to have dignity and don’t need to earn it. They foreswear violence, turn to courts or administrative bodies to respond to major transgressions, and for minor transgressions they either ignore them or attempt to resolve them by social means. There’s no more dueling.

Campbell and Manning describe how this culture of dignity is now giving way to a new culture of victimhood in which people are encouraged to respond to even the slightest unintentional offense, as in an honor culture. But they must not obtain redress on their own; they must appeal for help to powerful others or administrative bodies, to whom they must make the case that they have been victimized. It is the very presence of such administrative bodies, within a culture that is highly egalitarian and diverse (i.e., many college campuses) that gives rise to intense efforts to identify oneself as a fragile and aggrieved victim. This is why we have seen the recent explosion of concerns about microaggressions, combined with demands for trigger warnings and safe spaces, that Greg Lukianoff and I wrote about in The Coddling of the American Mind.”

I think that the following point is key:

”When the victims publicize microaggressions they call attention to what they see as the deviant behavior of the offenders. In doing so they also call attention to their own victimization. Indeed, many ways of attracting the attention and sympathy of third parties emphasize or exacerbate the low status of the aggrieved. People portray themselves as oppressed by the powerful – as damaged, disadvantaged, and needy. [They describe such practices going back to ancient Rome and India] … But why emphasize one’s victimization? Certainly the distinction between offender and victim always has moral significance, lowering the offender’s moral status. In the settings such as those that generate microaggression catalogs, though, where offenders are oppressors and victims are the oppressed, it also raises the moral status of the victims. This only increases the incentive to publicize grievances, and it means aggrieved parties are especially likely to highlight their identity as victims, emphasizing their own suffering and innocence. Their adversaries are privileged and blameworthy, but they themselves are pitiable and blameless”
[…]
[Reminder: All text not in brackets is from Campbell, B., & Manning, J. (2014). Microaggression and moral cultures . Comparative sociology, 13, 692-726]
http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/15691330-12341332

The two classes, Victimhood Class and Messiah Class, are absolutely drowning in self-righteousness. And in addition, the Victimhood Class is filled with moral cowards; they appeal to the Messiah Class to both affirm their Victimhood virtuousness, and to punish the Oppressor Class with restraints as well as very real punishment.

This leads naturally to creating the reverse Victimhood effect, where the Oppressor Class itself becomes the victim of the axis of Messiah/Victimhood Classes, and some attempt to claim their own Victimhood status and need for redress.

From the conclusion:

”What we are seeing in these controversies is the clash between dignity and victimhood, much as in earlier times there was a clash between honor and dignity…”

Hence, the dignity of ALL Lives is subsumed by the Victimhood dogma, “black lives (only) matter”, as Bernie Sanders discovered and was forced to capitulate to.

There is a very interesting point made by this commenter:

”Baldur Odensen on March 27, 2016 at 10:00 pm

For the long form you can see my reply below, but I suspect it has to do more with the increased number of females at university, where they are now the majority. Even in cultures of honor, females were expected to be hypersensitive to insults but were not expected to defend themselves – rather, they were expected to go get a guardian to do it for them – exactly as these students are doing.”

Observation: The government schooling system is dominated by females, with feminism and Title IX victimhood compensation by affirmative actions often mandated by the government. Modern students are preconditioned to the Victimhood disposition (as well as egalitarianism) well before entering the Leftist, Feminist universities.

Another observation: the tactics used by the Messiah Class to attack the Oppressor Class need further analysis, because they are frequently onerous and outside the realm of reason and compassion, much less human rights and free agency. The strategy of the Messiah Class is obvious: decimation or elimination of the Oppressor Class, and the perpetuation of the Victimhood Class dependency. In other words, the reversion to hegemonic rulership, but this time with the Leftist Messiah "Intellectual Class" in the Ruling seat of power.

This has been a serious truncation of Chait’s truncation of a sociological study. So obviously if you want more depth, go to the sources. I also recommend Thomas Sowell’s groundbreaking works, including the book, “Vision of the Anointed”. The self-anointed messiahs have to be in place and responsive in order to exploit the Victimhood Classes into a full-blown cultural revolution. I think that point should be emphasized. It is not so much that the Victimhood whiners exist; it is that the messianic class affirms them, affirms their virtue, and affirms the evilness of the Oppressor Class. Currently the Messiahs control schools and universities, journalism, much of social media, and the government. When they have full control of the FCC, they will control the internet. When they control Congress and the Supreme Court, they will produce thought crime laws to match those already in place in universities. And if tolerance of the Victimhood class, Islam, is mandated, then the risk of universal Sharia becomes realistic, and the Fourth Cultural Revolution will occur.

Notes
1. Quote attributed to Rudi Dutschke, a German student of Gramsci and “alternate forms of Marxism”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudi_Dutschke

The Justice Dichotomy Between Left and Right

It is now OK to break the law in order to save Gaia:

Can Breaking the Law Be a Legal Defense?

...last Friday a group of Seattle-area jurors found the so-called Delta 5 not guilty of obstruction for blockading a regional oil facility in 2014. The protest and the acquittal were notable as part of a growing wave of anti-oil-gas-and-coal citizen actions that has swept the country in the past few years, and the courtroom in Snohomish County was treated to a master class on why principled lawbreaking is just the tonic needed to cure our government’s woeful inaction on warming.

But what law students of the future will learn about the Delta 5 trial is something a bit more arcane, if no less momentous. For the first time in the United States, a jury heard testimony that defendants’ criminal actions were justified by “climate necessity”—that is, the argument that it’s better to break the law while getting in a few punches at the fossil fuel system than to sit back and lawfully watch the world burn.

But of course that's just for the Left:

Harris grand jury indicts pair behind Planned Parenthood videos

A Harris County grand jury probe into Planned Parenthood of the Gulf Coast ended Monday with the indictments of two anti-abortion activists.

David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt were both indicted for tampering with a governmental record. An additional indictment for prohibition of the purchase and sale of human organs was issued for Daleiden, according to a release from the Harris County District Attorneys Office.

WAIT! WHAT?? These dead things are HUMAN?? Who knew?

I predict that this pair will have the book thrown at them.

ADDENDUM:
Closing the dichotomy in Missouri?

Mizzou Media Professor Melissa Click Charged With Siccing 'Muscle' On Reporter

The University of Missouri media professor who drew scorn for siccing "some muscle" on a campus reporter was formally charged with misdemeanor assault Monday.

Melissa Click was charged with third-degree assault and faces up to 15 days in jail if convicted, Kristina Wolf, a spokeswoman for the city prosecutor's office in Columbia, Missouri, told NBC News.

Click was caught on video last fall trying to block reporter Mark Schierbecker from covering a protest by a group called Concerned Student 1950 about the school's handling of a series of racist incidents on campus.

Interesting times...

Excerpt of the Day

This is who profits from perpetual outrage:

This Is the Hollowed-Out World That Outrage Culture Has Created

Shamelessness. That’s the key.

Shamelessness is what our system is actively selecting for. You might even say we’re breeding for it. You have to breed for it, when you think about it. What normal, well-adjusted person would sell their soul, exaggerate their worst tendencies, suppress their self-awareness, just to get attention? What sane person would willingly subject themselves to a system that flays and mocks and criticize and screams? Who finds being yelled at or publicly derided simply a cost of doing business (poorly)?

A shocking amount of people, it turns out.

Unfortunately, none of them are the people you might hope for. The cartoonist Scott Adams, apologizing during a major incident over a minor flap a few years ago, wrote that “Ideas are society’s fuel. I drill a lot of wells; most of them are dry. Sometimes they produce. Sometimes the well catches on fire.” People like Adams—valuable cultural contributors—are losing the ability to take creative risks. A good person who happened to have said something dumb in an email once, or took a private naked photo, might have their willingness to drill those wells (as Adams put it) utterly destroyed, while others—due to their calculated shamelessness and delusional imperviousness—continue to operate with impunity, untouched.

Just look at Donald Trump. A Yale Professor is driven to resign over the microaggressions in an email while someone like him can stand on the national stage and spew ignorance and hate.

It’s a hollowing out of our world. The good employees are quitting and the terrible are made intractable and untouchable. The people who thrive are the ones who we wish would go away, and the people we value most as cultural contributors lurk in the back of the room, hoping not to get noticed and hurt.

At this point, everything in-between—vulnerability, nuance, truth—may as well not exist. When our culture encourages the fakeness and stupidity and trolling it is supposedly trying to rail against, there is no room for anything else.

And with these incentives we have decided to create, it’s almost certain this point will fall on deaf ears. It’s too subtle to cut through the noise.

The race-baiters, the man-hating feminists, the abortionistas, all of these cannot be touched: they are shameless. Shame requires both an objective, external moral code and a conscience. When the moral code is Consequentialism, there is no conscience required. Atrophy of the conscience results, and shamelessness is inevitable.

The Profit in Hatred

The screaming, shrieking hatred of their own open society is a career path for western Leftists in academia and politics:

Hating the West, Inc.

Victor Davis Hanson
Western elites and Third World critics both enjoy Western largesse.

"Paradoxes arise in attacking the West in general and the so-called European diaspora in particular. First, there is the obvious question: “Compared to what?” There are plenty of alternative cultures unstained by past Western imperialism and colonialism. Are their legacies more congenial to the present politically correct progressive agendas?

Do Islamic republics — Iran, for example — have a more reputable record of protecting gays or urban young women than does Europe or the United States? Is the venerable tradition of China more tolerant of religious and racial minorities? Would Michael Moore be permitted to be an edgier propagandist in Beijing? Are there safe spaces in Cuba or trigger warnings in Nicaragua?

In truth, the entire idea of self-criticism and self-reflection is mostly a Western aberration, not found elsewhere in the contemporary or indeed the ancient non-Western world. So critics of the West must resort to disparaging dead Westerners of a less liberal era even though there are plenty of present-day racist, homophobic, nativist, misogynist, and xenophobic cultures that would offer far easier targets for their wrath. Why pick on the fairly liberal Western societies of the past and ignore the thoroughly illiberal societies of the present?

Second, why did a million Africans and Middle Easterners freely seek out Europe last year, and why do hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Central Americans crowd the southwestern American border? Japan is as affluent as Europe, and so is Singapore. Perhaps oil-rich Kuwait or Saudi Arabia might be preferable destinations? Why does immigration flow largely to the West? Its affluence is no longer a monopoly. But rather than affluence alone, is it respect for the individual, tolerance of dissent, and freedom of expression and religion that draw a Libyan or Pakistani toward London or Paris rather than Beijing or Mumbai? Immigration is the most concrete of all polls, in which millions vote not over their cell phones but with their feet.

Third, why do the fiercest critics of the Western and European tradition rush, like moths to a flame, to seek it out? Why do even radical Muslims migrate to largely Christian countries, while Christians do not relocate to Islamic societies? Collate what is taught in ethnic-studies classes with concurrent advocacy for illegal immigration, and the result is inevitably nonsense: By identity-politics logic, why would anyone advocate that indigenous peoples should live in a country with supposedly a long record of unfairness to indigenous peoples?

Should not immigration more logically flow in the opposite direction, as millions of those sickened by the Western pathologies seek superior models of racial and ethnic tolerance to the south, where there should be more economic opportunity for the Other? Should not ethnic-studies activists station themselves on the border, urging newcomers to turn around and avoid the racism, sexism, and classism endemic in El Norte? Should not a Chicano Studies professor urge deportation to spare illegal aliens the American ordeal that is the stuff of university seminars?

How bizarre to see the critics of capitalism line up for the newest iPhone or the most recent Air Jordan sneaker! Why would hard-left professors in California jet to Europe when they could drive to Oaxaca? Or drive Volvos when Civics are far cheaper and as reliable? Both the elites and the masses — cf. Facebook, video games, and fast food — seem to worship at the altar of capitalist excess. Ponder the progressive Obamas, whose vacations are regal in Louis XIV style; they enjoy, to the hilt, downright mean luxury — and yet seem never more proud of themselves than in the course of such indulgences. Is the logical trajectory of disdain for high-horse Christianity and typical-white-person investment really two weeks on Martha’s Vineyard?"
[Emphasis added]

Much more at the SITE...

Sarah Hoyt on the Impending Collapse

Excerpt; the coming separation will be very, very messy; read the whole thing at her site:

The Great Divorce

"You see, for years being a leftist has been a positional good. What I mean is for years (probably more than a century) it’s been assumed that the caring, etc. man is the one who wants to subjugate humans to the whim of the state. This is partly because it is typical of humans to trust in the man on the white horse, and the peculiar form of it in the twentieth century was the “government bureaucrat.” Possibly because the economic and industrial conditions meant the people doing the trusting (the “intellectual class”) were educated much like government bureaucrats.

But for years, certainly before I came here in the 80s, being leftist was the mark of education and breeding.

Because any views that disagreed with the left were considered “stupid” this by definition meant to be considered smart you had to make the right (left) noises. A lot of upper class families, and certainly most of the intellectual establishment was all but communist by the 40s and 50s. (To believe Heinlein.)

And you’d think that they’d become less leftist since the USSR fell, but they didn’t. They went around muttering that the good guys lost, for a while, and then set about carrying on their bizarre faith, now transmuted into radical feminism, radical environmentalism, etc, before they’d gotten far away enough from the debacle that was the USSR to come up with the witty idea that real “communism has never been tried.” (I tell you what byotchs. We’ll try it right after we try unfettered capitalism. If the very fettered version of the thing we had in the US lifted the entire world out of historical misery, imagine what the unfettered version would do.)

Their social signaling remained the same. The more left you were, the “smarter” and “more educated.” (This is true so far as more educated in these days can mean more indoctrinated.)"
[Emphasis added]

Daily Beast: 50 Intelligence Analysts Say Their ISIS Reports Were Changed To Fit The Administration's Narrative

In a culture war, image is everything and facts must be made to fit or eliminated altogether:

Exclusive: 50 Spies Say ISIS Intelligence Was Cooked

"It’s being called a ‘revolt’ by intelligence pros who are paid to give their honest assessment of the ISIS war—but are instead seeing their reports turned into happy talk.

More than 50 intelligence analysts working out of the U.S. military’s Central Command have formally complained that their reports on ISIS and al Qaeda’s branch in Syria were being inappropriately altered by senior officials, The Daily Beast has learned.

The complaints spurred the Pentagon’s inspector general to open an investigation into the alleged manipulation of intelligence. The fact that so many people complained suggests there are deep-rooted, systemic problems in how the U.S. military command charged with the war against the self-proclaimed Islamic State assesses intelligence.

“The cancer was within the senior level of the intelligence command,” one defense official said.

Two senior analysts at CENTCOM signed a written complaint sent to the Defense Department inspector general in July alleging that the reports, some of which were briefed to President Obama, portrayed the terror groups as weaker than the analysts believe they are. The reports were changed by CENTCOM higher-ups to adhere to the administration’s public line that the U.S. is winning the battle against ISIS and al Nusra, al Qaeda’s branch in Syria, the analysts claim.

That complaint was supported by 50 other analysts, some of whom have complained about politicizing of intelligence reports for months. That’s according to 11 individuals who are knowledgeable about the details of the report and who spoke to The Daily Beast on condition of anonymity.

The accusations suggest that a large number of people tracking the inner workings of the terror groups think that their reports are being manipulated to fit a public narrative. The allegations echoed charges that political appointees and senior officials cherry-picked intelligence about Iraq’s supposed weapons program in 2002 and 2003."

Only it didn't actually happen in 2002/3. Saddam did have WMDs; now ISIS has them. And some of Syria's WMDs probably came from Saddam's Iraq.

Never Waste A Crisis: Illegal Immigration As SJW Culture War

This is obvious in the USA.

Don’t make a moral melodrama out of the migrant crisis

"The hyper-moralism of the sad-for-refugees narrative wrenches this large-scale movement of people from its political, global context, meaning even some of the contributing authors to the exodus from Syria (Western governments), and those who have traditionally been cagey about migration (the Labour Party, tabloids, trade unions), can assume the role of humanitarian saviours. The bad-faith depiction of this swell of humanity as a kind of politics-free natural disaster, or something whose origins lie entirely Over There, means it can be casually moralised, turned into a platform for posturing by the concerned classes.

Such moral preening is now widespread. Indeed, the value of the refugees seems to lie in the extent to which, through playing dutiful humanitarian victims, they might help Western politicians assume the role of smiling saviour and in the process repair their flagging moral authority. It’s well known that sections of the hard right have a tendency to dehumanise asylum seekers, treating the complex human beings who cross borders as an amorphous threat. Over the past week we have seen that the other side in this discussion, those who pose as friends of migrants, also play the dehumanisation game. Where the right criminalises migrants, liberals infantilise them, reducing them from moral agents who have made a decision to migrate to childlike victims in need of rescue by virtuous Westerners. The much-shared, wept-over photo of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi spoke to the new Western view of the migrant: as hapless, helpless; pathetic; children requiring our care. The hard right juxtaposes itself to the threatening migrant; the pseudo-humanitarian left presents itself as lifesaver to the childish migrant. Both sides dehumanise them, for self-serving reasons."

And, Class War against Euros, by Euros:

"It isn’t only virtue signalling we’re witnessing; it’s moral differentiation, the creation of a new dividing line between those who care about refugees (Us) and those who don’t (Them). The migrants are being marshalled to the culture wars by European observers keen to distance themselves from sections of their own societies. This is why observers talk ominously of the problem of ‘public attitudes’, by which they mean the racism, as they see it, of the masses. Why Yvette Cooper calls on the political class to avoid giving into ‘the politics of fear’ promoted by sections of the media. Why EU officials warn against the use of inflammatory rhetoric. Because in their eyes, there are good, humanitarian people who are willing to welcome refugees, and bad, fearful, isolationist people who pose a threat to refugees. They have turned refugee-friendliness into the new moral litmus test, separating the well-informed from the public and its bad ‘attitudes’.

The refugee crisis is also being used to resuscitate the moral divide between civilised Western Europe and allegedly backward Eastern Europe. The Guardian calls on Brussels to ‘counter and denounce’ Hungary for its refusal to treat refugees fairly, warning that Hungary’s anti-refugee stance ‘enjoys support among other central European governments’. The attitudes of these nations are ‘a disgrace’. Both within individual nations and across the EU, the refugee crisis has been turned into an opportunity for moral differentiation. Increasingly, being ‘pro-migrant’ is a cynical means of advertising one’s own probity through handwringing over the attitudes of one’s own native masses and the ‘disgraceful’ policies of bovine Eastern nations. Thus are migrants made into fodder for a culture war.

Most depressingly of all, the new narrative is explicitly about evading public engagement on this issue. A democratic discussion is the last thing Euro-officials want. But if Europe is to be turned into the new home for dispersed humanity, with hundreds of thousands coming here, surely publics should get to discuss it first? Seems not. After all, ‘public attitudes’ are bad. And so we have Angela Merkel, Francois Hollande and EU officials devising quotas for each EU nation, effectively instructing us on how many refugees we must take. This highly undemocratic solution to the refugee crisis shows how utterly distrusted European publics are. Indeed, through the refugee crisis EU officials are seeking to recover their moral authority, which was called into question during the Greek financial crisis of recent months, particularly their authority to impose on nations, and their publics, preordained political set-ups. The pseudo ‘open borders’ approach among European officials is not a genuinely liberal sentiment; it is the latest expression of the EU’s long-term project of weakening national and popular sovereignty and concentrating decision-making on important political matters in the hands of elites, far from ‘public attitudes’."

The huge culture war opportunity for the SJW Leftists is both the obvious Class Warfare of nouveau-Marxism, and blatant anti-democracy in action. The EU has been anti-democracy from the get-go, being ruled from Brussels by unelected bureaucrats. It is the perfect cauldron within which to eradicate remnants of free thought and action. Islam, which shares the anti-democracy ideology of the Left, will provide the stew in the cauldron. It will come to a boil at some point.

Klavan on Cecil and the Narcissists

Loving Animals, Loving People

"Those competing inner visions humans have — other outlooks; conflicting opinions — that’s what narcissists can’t stand; that’s what really offends them. It’s not enough for a narcissistic tyrant that you do what he says, you also have to profess what he believes. It’s not enough that you leave him alone, you have to bake the cake for his wedding too. Narcissists can’t abide the Other. Competing inner worlds drive them to insane levels of cruelty, brutality and even murder. Animals never pose that problem for them. That’s why so many people who preen themselves on their love of animals are such rotten imbeciles when it comes to other humans. The PETA types who assault people for wearing fur, say. Philosopher Peter Singer who believes a baby may be morally killed but not a dog. Such love of animals is not love at all; just narcissism made flesh.

Narcissism should not be confused with self love, no matter what the dictionary tells you. Narcissism grows out of a sense that the self is fragile, that it will shatter in the presence of hostility or even bland contradiction. True love of self, used wisely, is a virtue. True love of self is the school of our affections. The Gospels tell us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves because it’s in true self love that we first learn forbearance, tolerance and kindness to someone very dear to us. With true love of self as a guide, our love for our pets can be a perfect training ground for a love of others.

In this, the love of animals is very like another kind of love: the love of a mother for her baby. That love, too, has a measure of narcissism in it. That love too attaches itself at first to a creature with no inner consciousness of its own.

But a good mother knows that people don’t just live in space, they live in time as well. (This is the great point Peter Singer misses, by the way.) You are not just who you are, but also who you’ve been and who you will be. Likewise, a fetus is not just the creature it is, it is also the child it will become, and likewise the child is the adult it will grow into."

Har! Just... Har!!

You Know You Live in a Conservative State When . . .

"Over in Williamson County, Tennessee — just north of my home — prosecutors actually filed a motion asking the court to order a defense attorney to stop calling them “the government” in open court. Yes, that’s right — in my home state, it’s apparently now a slur to call the government by its name. In its motion, prosecutors claimed:

“The State has noticed in the past few years that it has become commonplace during trials for attorneys for defendants, and especially Mr. Justice, to refer to State’s attorneys as ‘the Government,’ ” [prosecutors wrote.] “The State believes that such a reference is used in a derogatory way and is meant to make the State’s attorney seem oppressive and to inflame the jury.”

This is a great little story by itself, but then the defense attorney, Drew Justice, went and committed an act of pure awesomeness. He filed a motion with his own request:

He demanded his client no longer be referred to as “the Defendant,” but instead be called “Mister,” “the Citizen Accused” or “that innocent man” — since all defendants are presumed innocent until a judge or jury finds them guilty. As for himself, clearly “lawyer” or “defense attorney” wouldn’t do him, well, justice.

“Rather, counsel for the Citizen Accused should be referred to primarily as the ‘Defender of the Innocent.’ … Alternatively, counsel would also accept the designation ‘Guardian of the Realm,’ ” Justice wrote.

And since prosecutors are often referred to formally as “General” in court, Justice, in an effort to be flexible, offered up a military title of his own.

“Whenever addressed by name, the name ‘Captain Justice’ will be appropriate.”

Gathering steam, he went on to say that even “the defense” wasn’t adequate and that “the Resistance” would be far more appropriate.

He then concluded his motion, returning to the formal language of court documents — sort of.

“WHEREFORE, Captain Justice, Guardian of the Realm and Leader of the Resistance, primarily asks that the Court deny the State’s motion, as lacking legal basis.”

According to Captain Justice, the court denied both motions. So the government is still the “government,” but Captain Justice, Guardian of the Realm, lives on in print – but not in court. Well done, Captain. You’ve made the Tennessee Bar proud."

Atheism and the Culture Wars

Contrary to what any and probably every Atheist might claim, there is no such thing as a common set of “Atheist moral principles”. Atheism is purely a rejection of the source of morality and normative institutions for western culture. And the rejection is done without any logical argument or empirical evidence in support of that rejection, and it is thus not based in rational principles, but is merely rejectionism.

When an Atheist claims a set of moral principles, those principles are always those which the Atheist either creates for himself, or which the Atheist has co-opted from somewhere because those principles are compatible and congenial to himself. The Atheist is not stressed in any manner to meet his own specifications for his own behaviors. Whatever principles he adopts for himself are congruent with his existing behaviors, and further, the principles can be amended immediately when a different behavior is desired. What the Atheist does consider to be fixed and rigid are his principles for the behaviors of others who are not himself or his tribe. These are not to be violated or invalidated, and to do so will be met with righteous indignation suitable to the Atheist’s presumed moral superiority.

The rejection which characterizes Atheism extends to all worldview principles, including the principles of Truth. For the Atheist, any declaration of truth is subjective, regardless of its substance and validation, unless it is a truth uttered by the Atheist himself. This leads to the de facto declaration that “it is true that there is no truth”, which under traditional, Aristotelian and Enlightenment thought is a self-refuting, paradoxical fallacy. But for the Atheist, for whom truth is not so determined, it is easily accepted as a First Principle.

There being no truth, hence there are no lies; and there is also neither good nor evil, except that which is so designated by the Atheist. There is nothing new about this; it was fully explored by Friedrich Nietzsche well over a century ago, and is fully explained in his book, “Beyond Good and Evil”. It is not an arbitrary declaration which he makes; it is an inevitable condition of Atheism.

”But if he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, Sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.
Samuel Johnson; Boswell’s “Life of Samuel Johnson” 1791.

Atheism is more than a mere rejection of the culture and norms of western civilization. It is also a simultaneous rejection of logic and morality, neither of which the Atheist wants applied to himself. Because the Atheist sees onerous restriction on himself by such logic and morality, he must reject everything which attaches to either. So logic and morality, having been rejected, must be inverted in order to avoid them in their standard forms. That is the genesis of Leftism, the rejection of Enlightenment principles.

“When I was a young man, being anxious to distinguish myself, I was perpetually starting new propositions. But I soon gave this over; for, I found that generally what was new was false”.
Samuel Johnson, quoting Goldsmith; “Boswell’s ‘Life of Samuel Johnson’”, 1791.

To be sure not all Atheists are Leftists, although most of them are. Christopher Hitchens was the standard bearer for non-Leftist Atheism. But what we see in common between them is the strident illogic with which both sides are afflicted due to their basic, same rejectionism of all prior normative standards.

Atheists usually respond, “You don’t know anything about Atheism”, and that right after (or before) having claimed that “Atheism is nothing but a lack of belief”, which itself is a claim of several facets: first, notice that there is no claim of morality attached to the “lack of belief”. Next, notice that they will not admit to having rejected any contrary arguments or evidence, which is because they don’t want to defend their own lack of arguments and evidence as well as find themselves required to use actual logic and/or science in their own defense of their rejections. In fact, the “lack of belief” concept is perfectly extensible to all “onerous” forms of “repressive” institutions which are rejected without rational cause.

Rejectionism extends to Free Thought, as well. Free Thought is anything but free; it is the Hegelian antithesis of free. Free Thought is just a name for a particular dogma. Free thinkers do not accept much thought at all, certainly not if it does not conform to their self-derived principles. The dogmatism of Free Thought is obvious and palpable. Normative cultural principles are not even acceptable topics for Free Thinkers except as objects of ridicule and hatred.

Which brings us to normative cultural principles and their treatment by Atheists, Leftists and Free Thinkers.

The primary normative cultural principle under attack today is the principle of “tolerance”, originally the Voltairian principle of defending the right to disagree, no matter to what degree. As they commonly do, the Atheist, Leftist, Free Thinkers use the word in an inverted fashion. What tolerance means to them is that all of their antics, regardless of the extent of purposeful insanity and provocation, must be tolerated to the point that those antics are the New Norm, fully accepted by everyone without exception. This naturally morphs into a moral position, and the contrary of that moral position (dissent) becomes the only evil known to the Atheist, Leftist, Free Thought self-designated moral policing juggernaut. Dissent must be eradicated by the defenders of the New Morality. These view themselves as Messiahs who are morally obligated to produce salvation through purges. And all prior normative institutions and their subscribers qualify is being purgeable as opportunity presents. Tolerance, the Votairian version, is swamped by self-righteous assertion of censorship.

Which brings us to the concept of “Free exercise of religion”, a phrase so potent and incorruptible that has had to be changed – to “freedom of worship”, the new Leftist term which conceptually is far different. Those afflicted with allegiance to the prior normative institutions and their meanings are now confronted with having to worship only as they are allowed, under “positive liberties” to worship, namely where such worship does not make the Atheists and Leftists physically ill and cause lawsuits such as the dozens of “cross” lawsuits filed by the FFRF, in the attempt to destroy by bankruptcy those who dissent from the all new cultural progress.

Thus the corruption of the language of moral principles, starting with corruption of the concept of tolerance into intolerance, and moving into the corruption of any other principle at the whim of the Atheist/Leftist, becomes the driving provocation of culture war, the war to eliminate all prior notions of morality and logic and to obtain total assent to the new inversions.

The second response to this revelation is always, “that’s not true”, “you are deluded”, and other useless denials. Notice that the response is never one of accommodation in the form of actual tolerance. Nor is there any logic, grounded and testable argument presented, nor are there any empirical experimental results presented. That is because they have none, and they know they have none.

If Atheists could refute all of this using science and logic, they would. But they can’t and they don’t, because their faith in science is a fallacy – ideological Scientism – and their use of logic is inverted into self-refutations. So what they resort to, again, is merely intellectual intransigence: the avoidance by redefining who they are, into who they are not: holders of non-beliefs.

Boswell: “He is totally unfixed in his principles, and wants to puzzle other people. I said his principles had been poisoned by an infidel writer, but that he was, nevertheless, a benevolent, good man.
Johnson: ”We can have no dependence upon that instinctive, that constitutional goodness which is not founded on principle. I grant you that such a man may be a very amiable member of society. I can conceive him placed in such a situation that he is not much tempted to deviate from what is right; and as every man prefers virtue, when there is not some strong incitement to transgress its precepts, I can conceive of him doing nothing wrong. But if such a man stood in need of money, I should not like to trust him; and I should certainly not trust him with young ladies, for there is always temptation. Hume and other skeptical innovators, are vain men, and will gratify themselves at any expence. Truth will not afford sufficient food for their vanity; so they have betaken themselves to errour. Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull. ”
Samuel Johnson; Boswell’s “Life of Samuel Johnson”

The Frankfort School; How Marxism was Married to the Culture

The birth of culture war in America was imported.

Make time to watch and absorb this information. Then pass it on.