Category Archives: Leftism

Woke Activist Inroads In School Books & “Charities”

05 Thursday Aug 2021

Posted by in Campaign Finance, Election Fraud, Leftism

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Not long ago I wrote about the “woke middlemen” who are corrupting our institutions, especially education. A few related and disturbing stories have come to my attention since then, upon which I’ll elaborate below.

Lefty School Books

One of these stories has to do with the most obvious of educational middlemen: book publishers. Some of them have joined forces with the #DisruptTexts movement among leftist teachers, helping it to gain headway. These teachers are eliminating great literature from the curriculum on the thin pretext that those books are “too white” or involve “white saviors”, like Atticus Finch of “To Kill a Mockingbird”. The publishers are only too happy to help, offering Zoom seminars on teaching “anti-bias literacy” for a fee and selling new texts for the classroom and guidebooks for teachers that promise to help them make the transition to a curriculum focusing on “advocacy”. That includes a fat dollop of “LGBTQIA” advocacy. One example:

“… replacing ‘The Great Gatsby’ with ‘Juliet Takes a Breath’–a book about a ‘queer Latinx woman’ interning under a feminist writer in Portland.”

Tony Kinnett, co-founder of The Chalkboard Review, is quoted extensively at the link above. He says:

“Take all the racial stuff and set it aside. The Western canon is just objectively better literature. It is a higher form of language. It requires you to think. The plots aren’t spoon-fed to you. The moral of the story isn’t so black and white that it’s like watching a PBS after-school special. … In the #DisruptTexts movement, the big thing you’re going to see is ‘Culturally Relevant Pedagogy’, which is, at best, a pandering concept, and at worst, a horribly racist concept”

This is not confined to middle or high school. The idea is to inculcate “woke activism” from K-12 and beyond. To put it bluntly, the #DisruptTexts crowd promotes activist dumb-assery to our children to the exclusion of traditional lessons and the great writers of the past.

As Tom Knighton warns, the effort to get critical race theory (CRT) into schools is sometimes made with a cunning, as if designed to escape parents’ attention. It might be called by names other than CRT, but it is a danger to your child’s education and well being.

Not on Our Backs

Better news came in a recent article about a college that thumbed its nose at an accrediting association by simply eliminating a social work program, rather than complying with requirements that compromised the school’s values. Cairn University, a Christian school near Philadelphia, rejected the demands for accreditation by the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE). Accreditors like CSWE are middlemen organizations that sometimes attempt to leverage educational institutions as tools for advocacy. A statement from Cairn explained that the CSWE standards are objectionable because they embody:

“… a set of critical theory and intersectionality assumptions and values inconsistent with our biblical view of humanity, human nature, and the world.”

In May, the CSWE claimed that Cairn’s president was exaggerating the changes in the Council’s requirements, and noted that it was aware of efforts in various states to limit education in “racism, diversity, and equity”. Apparently, Cairn’s response was SO WHAT? The new standards are what they are, as noted at the link above. Good for Cairn U!

Big Charity

Finally, I previously overlooked another obvious set of “woke middlemen”: the charitable establishment, which often serves to promote and fund leftist causes, including election activism. The article at the link, by Hayden Ludwig, focuses primarily on the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF), which he describes as a 501(c)(3) “pass-through” philanthropy. It is funded by still other donor-funded vehicles and supported by such Big Tech luminaries as Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, among others. And to whom does SVCF “pass” these tax-privileged funds? According to Ludwig, some of the recipient organizations are local universities and arts organizations. However, billions of dollars have been awarded to the likes of the following left-wing nonprofits:

Voter Turnout

Political Dark Money

Other Leftist Political Grants

Ludwig rightly warns about the potential that large donors can alter election results by providing funds to activist organizations like these, quite apart from the pernicious leftist influence of their social media, news, or other business organizations:

“Those are just the seven-figure grants from a single year, from a single organization. The left has dozens of mega-funders just like it, feeding hundreds of activist groups. Can the right boast the same? In my experience, the answer is a resounding ‘no.’ … Too few realize that the professional left in this country is the best-funded, most well-coordinated political machine in the world, thanks to its weaponization of America’s generous nonprofit sector.”

These days, leftist mega-donors like George Soros and Tom Steyer are even helping to field “fake-Rs” in Republican primaries in districts that Dems could never win. Fortunately, they haven’t prevailed … yet!

Conclusion

The kinds of “woke middlemen” I’ve discussed here and previously are too easy to overlook, often flying “under the radar” of both libertarians and conservatives. Unfortunately, they are highly effective and extremely dangerous to the education of our children and the information available to potential voters. They are a threat to our election process, and ultimately to all of our political institutions, not to mention individual freedom. Our republic’s saving grace is that the people often recognize when elites are pushing bad ideas or trying to gaslight them. But ultimately, the fight to preserve election integrity, educational balance, free speech, and individual rights is likely to require greater firepower.

The Left Always Hurts the Ones They “Love”

28 Monday Jun 2021

Posted by in law enforcement, Leftism, Lockdowns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The policies foisted upon the country by the Left always hurt those constituencies they think they’ll help, and they backfire in very predictable ways. There are too many instances of that truism to recount, but just a couple of examples follow.

Economic Perils of Precaution

We can start with the interminable non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) imposed in many states during the pandemic. These included shelter-at-home orders, limits on public gatherings, school closures, and the like. These lockdown measures were more severe in so-called blue states controlled by the Democrat Party. But NPIs were a policy failure and did little to stem the pandemic or excess deaths. Moreover, they resulted in the closure of many businesses and massive job losses. The economic burden fell especially hard on low wage earners, as the following chart shows:

For high earners (the red line), the employment decline at the start of the pandemic was small and relatively brief. Less fortunate were those earning under $27,000 annually (the blue line). They suffered a much larger initial decline in employment and had a continuing loss of almost 24% of jobs. While those who lost jobs ultimately received enhanced unemployment compensation and other benefits, the idleness and loss of work experience inflicted long-term damage to health, psyches, and future prospects. Thus, the party with pretensions of championing the cause of the downtrodden was pleased to intervene with policies that undercut the working poor.

But Some Precautions Are “Racist”

Another prominent case in which leftists have harmed those for whom they claim to advocate is the effort to “defund the police”. Low income and minority populations do not favor such a policy because they understand the value of protection against criminal elements who victimize their communities. The residents of these communities are most at risk from gangland violence and homicide. Furthermore, nearly all “victims” of police homicides are armed, and police homicides are closely associated with crime. And again, the sad fact is that crime is heavily concentrated in minority neighborhoods. The statistics do not support assertions of bias in policing. Obviously, these citizens have taken notice that the riots cheered on by the Left have been destructive to their communities.

Crime has spiked in Minneapolis and elsewhere since last summer, when George Floyd’s death sparked interest in the “defund the police” mantra promoted by the Left. And there followed a reduction in police budgets of about 5.2% in aggregate in the 50 largest cities in the country (though not all of these cities made cuts). Moreover, the effectiveness of policing has been undercut more broadly by the substantial legal risk now facing officers who earnestly attempt to enforce the law, as well as more restrictive use-of-force policies.

These changes are an unambiguous disaster for so many good people having the misfortune to live in high-crime areas. And the political disaster is starting to sink in among Democrats, who are already attempting to change the narrative (and see here). It’s pretty transparent that the “black lives matter” dialectic appeals to Democrats primarily as a selling point of convenience, and not so much when there’s actual blood in the streets.

Only the Obvious Matters

Destructive lockdowns and efforts to “defund the police” are just two examples of a perverse phenomenon. It’s well known to keen observers of the history of Marxism in action that it usually victimizes its presumed beneficiaries. That dynamic is at play under school discipline policies that seek to avoid “disparate impacts” on minority students, leaving other minority school children in disruptive learning environments; gun control initiatives making it difficult for minority residents and businesses to protect themselves; rent controls leading to a deteriorating stock of low-cost housing; wage floors causing low-skilled workers to lose hours, benefits, and jobs; energy policies with regressive impacts on household budgets; tax policies destroying incentives for job creation; and a welfare state creating disincentives to work and promoting family instability. This list goes on and on.

The difficulty leftists have in coming to grips with these unintended consequences is that they can’t see past first-order effects. Like spoiled children, they grasp only the ostensible benefits of their demands. And like bad parents, they behave as if to seek approval of the most spoiled among their presumed charges.

Not My President, Not Your’s Either

24 Thursday Dec 2020

Posted by in Censorship, Election Fraud, Leftism

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Now why would I say such a thing? Well, 1) the presidential election was rife with fraud, as many of us feared would be the case (and see here); 2) the supposed winner, Joe “The Plagiarist” Biden, is a figurehead, and he will remain in the White House only as long as he toes the line set down by the Left; and 3) the figurehead is badly compromised by Chinese and other foreign influence: Chairman Xi Jinping of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is undoubtedly pleased that such a pliant American president will be taking office.

Those who deny the fraud that took place in the election keep insisting “there’s no evidence!” In fact, there is ample evidence to convince any fair-minded person that massive fraud took place across a number of states (see here, here, here and here). We knew that massive adoption of mail-in ballots was an invitation to fraud. There are many hundreds of affidavits (yes, they constitute evidence) stating that Republican election officials and poll watchers were obstructed in their attempts to observe the counting process on and after Election Day, and worse. There is video evidence of activities coincident with late-night lockouts of Republican poll watchers and outrageous, instant jumps in Biden’s vote totals. There is definitive evidence of process “shortcuts” in several states that led to a large number of unverified ballots. These shortcuts were often taken in contravention of state law. There were failed chains of custody for thousands of ballots across several states. There were dead and out-of-state voters. There were irregularities associated with vote tabulations by Dominion machines. There are hand recounts in a few counties that demonstrate miscounting of ballots. And of course, there was a willful effort to suppress this information by the news media, and outright censorship of this information by social media platforms.

No matter what has or will happen in the courts, state legislatures, or Congress, a large share of the voting public believes there was fraud in this election. In fact, a significant share of democrats believe the election was stolen from President Trump! The fraud goes beyond the electoral process as well. Polls show a substantial number of Biden voters would not have voted for him had they known about the escapades of Hunter Biden and Joe’s role as the family cash cow. The mainstream media and social media platforms also deliberately suppressed the information about Hunter Biden’s pay-for-play scandal prior to the election. And that came after months of avoiding any real scrutiny of Biden’s policy agenda and his fitness as a candidate. Instead, the media asked Joe tough questions about his favorite ice cream.

Not your president? The Hunter Biden saga creates doubt about who Joe Biden is likely to serve as President. To whom is Joe beholden for “taking care” of “the big guy’s” family? How about Hunter’s deals in the Ukraine and Russia? How heavily was the CCP involved in Hunter’s business ventures? How much is Joe compromised by these unfortunate ties? What kind of compromises might it be worth to Joe to avoid further exposure? Should the Biden Administration overlook the plight of the Uhygers? Turn the cheek on Hong Kong? Sacrifice Taiwan? Allow Chinese technology to be embedded in U.S. communications hardware? Cede international rights in the South China Sea? Perhaps Joe will be Chairman Xi’s President. And perhaps others hold cards, such as the hostile Iranian regime. Not our president.

Finally, if you *think* you voted for Joe as president, be aware that he is, even now, a doddering figurehead, a puppet of the Left whose strings might well be clipped when he demonstrates even a hint of incapacity. It might not be long. Perhaps the Left will adopt Hunter’s imbroglio as an excuse to take Joe down. It seems more than a little suspicious that the media, post-election, has finally begun to talk about Hunter’s miscues and Joe’s “possible” involvement.

But even if Joe remains in the Oval Office through a first term, just who will be in charge? Joe? No, he is captive to the interests that helped put him there. We might just as well call him “Any-Way-the-Wind-Blows Joe”. Angela Davis, former VP of the Communist Party USA, said during the primaries that she supported Biden because he:

“… can be most effectively pressured into allowing more space for the evolving anti-racist movement.”

Well, Joe better not compromise with anyone or accept any policy that Angela Davis deems “racist”.

Let’s consider a few influences expected to be paramount in pulling Joe’s strings: Barack Obama, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Julian Castro, and Black Lives Matter. Bernie Sanders will also loom large, and of course Kamala Harris will be there to push the leftist agenda, and she’ll be waiting in the wings when Joe loses his tentative grip on the reins of the progressive machine. Joe better not resist these forces: he can be manipulated, and if he strays from the path, he and his presidency can be cancelled.

If you are a member of the Marxist wing of the coalition, you might have him just where you want him. If you are a member of the CCP, then he might be your president. But he is not the president of the disenfranchised voters whose majority was outstripped by the mailed ballot fraud. And if you are a centrist Democrat, you should awaken to the reality of the hard-left movement with which you’ve joined forces. Do not accept it as a legitimate governing force. No, Joe Biden will not be your president.

As I’ve noted in the past, apologists willing to look past Joe Biden’s domestic and foreign controllers and the fraudulent election are not to be trusted. Indeed, they have been willing to look past Biden’s personal status as a fraud, from his many lies about his family to his admitted plagiarism, to his denial of sexual aggression toward female staffers. In summary, I can’t put it any better than Newt Gingrich does here:

“… I have no interest in legitimizing the father of a son who Chinese Communist Party members boast about buying. Nor do I have any interest in pretending that the current result is legitimate or honorable. It is simply the final stroke of a four-year establishment-media power grab. It has been perpetrated by people who have broken the law, cheated the country of information, and smeared those of us who believe in America over China, history over revisionism, and the liberal ideal of free expression over cancel culture.”

Coronavirus Controversies

11 Saturday Apr 2020

Posted by in Health Care, Leftism, Pandemic

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The coronavirus and the tragedy it has wrought has prompted so many provocative discussions that it’s hard to pick just one of those topics for scarce blogging time. So I’ll try to cover two here: first, the question of whether coronavirus deaths are being miscounted; second, the politically-motivated controversy over the use of hydroxychloraquin to treat severe cases of Covid-19.

Counting Deaths

I’ve been suspicious that Covid deaths are being over-counted, but I’m no longer as sure of that. Of course, there are reasons to doubt the accuracy of the death counts. For example, there is a strong possibility that some Covid deaths are simply not being counted due to lack of diagnoses. But there are widespread suspicions that too many deaths with positive diagnoses are being counted as Covid deaths when decedents have severe co-morbidities. Members of that cohort die on an ongoing basis, but now many or all of those deaths are being attributed to Covid-19. A more perverse counting problem might occur when public health authorities instruct physicians to attribute various respiratory deaths to Covid even without a positive diagnosis! That is happening in some parts of the country.

To avoid any bias in the count, I’ve advocated tracking mortality from all co-morbidities and comparing the total to historical or “normal” levels to calculate “excess deaths”. One could also look at all-cause mortality and do the same, though I don’t think that would be quite on point. For example, traffic deaths are certainly way down, which would distort the excess deaths calculation.

Despite the vagaries in counting, there is no question that the coronavirus has been especially deadly in its brief assault on humans. New York has experienced a sharp increase in deaths, as the chart below illustrates (the chart is a corrected version of what appeared in the Reason article at the prior link). The spike is way out of line with normal seasonal patterns, and it obviously corresponds closely with deaths attributable to Covid-19. It is expected to be short-lived, but it might taper over the course of several weeks or months, Once it does, I suspect that the cumulative deaths under all those other curves in the chart will exceed Covid deaths substantially. Also note that the yellow line for the flu just stops when Covid deaths begin, suggesting that the red line probably incorporates at least some “normal” flu deaths.

Once the virus abates, we’ll be able to tell with a bit more certainty just how deadly the pandemic has been. It will be revealed through analyses of excess deaths. For now, we have the statistics we have, and they should be interpreted cautiously.

Hydrochloraquin

A more boneheaded debate centers on the use of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloraquin (HCQ) to treat coronavirus patients. There have been many successes, particularly in combination with a Z-Pak, or zinc. Guidelines issued by the American Society of  Thoracic Surgeons last week call for HCQ’s use in advanced cases of coronavirus infection. These and other therapies are being tested formally, but many are prescribed outside any formal testing framework. Remdesivir has been prominent among these. Plasma therapy has been as well, and several other possible treatments are under study.

With respect to HCQ, it’s almost as if the Left, much of the media, and a subset of overly “prescriptive” medical experts were goaded into an irrational position via pure Trump Derangement. Just Google or Bing “Hydroxychloraquine Coronavirus” for a bizarre list of alarmist articles about Trump’s mention of HCQ. To take just two of the claims, the idea that Trump stands to earn substantial personal profits from HCQ because he holds a few equity shares in a manufacturer of generic drugs is patently absurd. And claims that shortages for arthritis, lupus, and malaria patients are imminent are unconvincing, given the massive stockpiles now accumulated and the efforts to ramp-up production.

So much lefty hair is on fire over a potential therapy that is both promising and safe that the media message lacks credulity. But more ominously, the Democrat governors of Michigan and Nevada were so petulant that they banned HCQ’s use in their states, though at least Nevada’a governor rescinded his order. It’s almost as if they don’t want it to work, and don’t want to give it a chance to work. Or do I go too far? No, I don’t think so.

Victoria Taft has a good summary of the media backlash against President Trump’s hopeful statements about HCQ. Not only was the FDA’s authority over the use of HCQ misrepresented, there was also a good bit of smearing of various researchers who’d found preliminary evidence of HCQ’s effectiveness. Let’s be honest: the quality of medical research is often inflated by the research establishment. And the media eat up any study with findings that are noteworthy in any way. Over the years, a great deal of medical research has been based on small samples from which statistical hypothesis tests are shaky at best. That’s one reason for the legendary replication problem in medical research. In the case of HCQ, there has been widespread misuse of the term “anecdotal” in the media, prompted by experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci, who should know better. The term was used to describe clinical tests on moderately large groups of patients, at least one of which was a randomized control trial.

Every day we hear stories from individual patients that they were saved by HCQ. These are properly called anecdotal accounts. But we also hear from various physicians around the country and world who claim to be astonished at HCQ’s therapeutic efficacy on groups of patients. This link gives another strong indication of how physicians feel about HCQ at this point. These are not from RCTs, but they constitute clinical evidence, not mere “anecdotes”.

By virtue of state and federal right-to-try laws, terminally ill patients can choose to take medications that are unapproved by regulators. Beyond that, FDA approval of HCQ specifically for treating coronavirus was unnecessary because the drug was already legal to prescribe to cover patients as an “off-label” use. That’s true of all drugs approved by the FDA: they can be prescribed legally for off-label uses. When regulators like Dr. Fauci, and even practicing physicians like Dr. Jeffrey Singer (linked below) claim that the FDA hasn’t approved HCQ specifically for treating Covid, it is a technicality: the FDA can certainly “approve” it for that specific use, but it’s already legal to prescribe!

While it won’t end the silly argument, which is obviously grounded in other motives, Dr. Singer brings us to the only reasonable position: treatment of Covid with HCQ is between the patient and their doctor.

 

 

Bernie Sanders and the Brutal Bros

24 Friday Jan 2020

Posted by in Collectivism, Leftism, Tyranny, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Some of Bernie Sanders’ most devoted fans have an unfortunate brutalitarian streak. The violent strain of so-called Bernie Bros aren’t as isolated as one might hope. First, of course, there was James Hodgkinson, the BB who attempted to assassinate Republican members of Congress at a congressional baseball game practice, seriously injuring Rep. Steve Scalise. Now, campaign field organizers for Sanders in Iowa and South Carolina have been captured on film proposing gulags, re-education camps, sentencing billionaires to hard labor, and shooting or beheading those opposed to Sanders’ policies. And much more. And they say this in all seriousness. What nice people have been assigned positions of responsibility within the Sanders campaign organization! Watch it for yourself at the link above.

Should we be surprised? No: these are advocates of forced collectivism, and if their favorable perspective on coercive power wasn’t enough of a tip-off, recent history suggests that many among them are truly ready and willing to do violence. The brutal and murderous history of collectivist regimes the world over demonstrates the tendency well enough. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro and too many other leftist tyrants left bodies strewn in their wake as they sought to enforce their ideology. It’s no coincidence that the American Left holds the murderous Che Guevara in such high esteem. Black Lives Matter and Antifa have both perpetrated violent acts, and members of the Leftist media have openly advocated physical attacks on their political opponents. And then we have these Bernie Bros.

I feel compelled to review a bit of background on Bernie Sanders, the batty old communist who has managed to convince large numbers of poorly educated “intellectuals” that he knows the path to utopia. The nicer ones imagine that he’s a man of the people, though he hasn’t worked a day in his life at anything except agitation and rent seeking. He is an inveterate public mooch. His life history as a politician and as a person is rather unflattering.

I’ve used this Iowahawk (David Burge) quote about Sanders before:

“Who better to get America back to work than a guy who was actually fired from a Vermont hippie commune for being too lazy.”

Apparently, Barack Obama is not a Bernie Bro:

“Obama has told people in private that Sanders is both temperamentally and politically unfit to beat Trump in the 2020 general election, these people say. Among his concerns are Sanders’ strident form of politics and confrontational manners where he was known not to seek compromise during his long years in the US senate.”

And say what you will about Hillary Clinton, but her opinion of Sanders comports with much of what we know about The Bern:

“He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done.”

At least the Bernie Bros have taken their masks off before getting too far. Give Leftists power and they all will.

Scorning the Language of the Left

12 Sunday Jan 2020

Posted by in Censorship, Leftism, Political Correctness

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

It’s hard not to ridicule some the language adopted by our lefty friends, and it can be fun! But it’s not just them. We hear it now from employers, schools, and otherwise sensible people too eager to signal their modernity and virtue. Lionel Shriver dissects some of this “Lefty Lingo” in an entertaining piece in Harper’s. It’s funny, but it aroused my contempt for the smugness of the “wokescenti” (a term Shriver attributes too Meghan Daum) and my pity for those “normals” simply desperate to project progressive sophistication.

Here are a few of Shriver’s observations:

“Privilege”: makes you incapable of understanding that which you criticize.

“Whereas a privilege can be acquired through merit—e.g., students with good grades got to go bowling with our teacher in sixth grade—privilege, sans the article, is implicitly unearned and undeserved. The designation neatly dispossesses those so stigmatized of any credit for their achievements while discounting as immaterial those hurdles an individual with a perceived leg up might still have had to overcome (an alcoholic parent, a stutter, even poverty). For privilege is a static state into which you are born, stained by original sin. Just as you can’t earn yourself into privilege, you can’t earn yourself out of it, either. … . it’s intriguing that the P-bomb is most frequently dropped by folks of European heritage, either to convey a posturing humility (“I acknowledge my privilege”) or to demonize the Bad White People, the better to distinguish themselves as the Good White People.

Meanwhile, it isn’t clear what an admission of privilege calls you to do, aside from cower. That tired injunction ‘Check your privilege’ translates simply to ‘S.T.F.U.’—and it’s telling that ‘Shut the fuck up’ is now a sufficiently commonplace imperative to have lodged in text-speak.”

“Cisgender”: “Cis-” is a linguistic shell game whereby the typical case is labelled cis-typical.

“Denoting, say, a woman born a woman who thinks she’s a woman, this freighted neologism deliberately peculiarizes being born a sex and placidly accepting your fate, and even suggests that there’s something a bit passive and conformist about complying with the arbitrary caprices of your mother’s doctor. Moreover, unless a discussion specifically regards transgenderism, in which case we might need to distinguish the rest of the population (‘non-trans’ would do nicely), we don’t really need this word, except as a banner for how gendercool we are. It’s no more necessary than words for ‘a dog that is not a cat,’ a ‘lamppost that is not a fire hydrant,’ or ‘a table that is actually a table.’ Presumably, in order to mark entities that are what they appear to be, we could append ‘cis’ to anything and everything. ‘Cisblue’ would mean blue and not yellow. ‘Cisboring’ would mean genuinely dull, and not secretly entertaining after all.”

“Microaggression“: Anything you say that bothers them, even a little.

“… a perverse concoction, implying that the offense in question is so minuscule as to be invisible to the naked eye, yet also that it’s terribly important. The word cultivates hypersensitivity.”

“_____-phobic”: the typical use of this suffix in identity politics stands “phobia” on its head. To be fair, however, it started with a presumption that people hate that which they fear. Maybe also that they fear and hate that which they don’t care for, but we’ll just focus on fear and hate. For example, there is the notion that men have deep fears about their own sexuality. Thus, the prototypical gay-basher in film is often compensating for his own repressed homosexual longings, you see. And now, the idea is that we always fear “otherness” and probably hate it too. Both assertions are tenuous. At least those narratives are rooted in “fear”, but it’s not quite the same phenomenon as hate, and yet “phobic” seems to have been redefined as odium:

“The ubiquitous ‘transphobic,’ ‘Islamophobic,’ and ‘homophobic’ are also eccentric, in that the reprobates so branded are not really being accused of fearfulness but hatred.”

“LGBTQ“: Lumping all these “types” together can be misleading, as they do not always speak in unison on public policy. But if we must, how about “Let’s Go Back To ‘Queer'”, as Shriver suggests. The LGBs I know don’t seem to mind it as a descriptor, but maybe that’s only when they say it. Not sure about the trannies. There is a great Libertarian economist who is transsexual ( Dierdre McCloskey), and somehow “queer” doesn’t seem quite right for her. Perhaps she’s just a great woman.

“The alphabet soup of ‘LGBTQ’ continues to add letters: LGBTQIAGNC, LGBTQQIP2SAA, or even LGBTIQCAPGNGFNBA. A three-year-old bashing the keyboard would produce a more functional shorthand, and we already have a simpler locution: queer.”

“Problematic”, “Troubling” and “Inappropriate”: I’m sure some of what I’ve said above is all three. I must confess I’ve used these terms myself, and they are perfectly good words. It’s just funny when the Left uses them in the following ways.

“Rare instances of left-wing understatement, ‘problematic’ and ‘troubling’ are coyly nonspecific red flags for political transgression that obviate spelling out exactly what sin has been committed (thereby eliding the argument). Similarly, the all-purpose adjectival workhorse ‘inappropriate’ presumes a shared set of social norms that in the throes of the culture wars we conspicuously lack. This euphemistic tsk-tsk projects the prim censure of a mother alarmed that her daughter’s low-cut blouse is too revealing for church. ‘Inappropriate’ is laced with disgust, while once again skipping the argument. By conceit, the appalling nature of the misbehavior at issue is glaringly obvious to everyone, so what’s wrong with it goes without saying.”

Here are a few others among my favorites:

“Patriarchy“: This serves the same function as “privilege” but is directed more specifically at the privilege enjoyed by males. Usually white, heterosexual males. It seeks to preemptively discredit any argument a male might make, and often it is used to discredit Western political and economic thought generally. That’s because so much of it was the product of the patriarchy, don’t you know! And remember, it means that males are simply incapable of understanding the plight of females … and children, let alone queers! Apparently fathers are bad, especially if they’re still straight. Mothers are good, unless they stand with the patriarchy.

“Hate Speech“: This expression contributes nothing to our understanding of speech that is not protected by the Constitution. If anything its use is intended to deny certain kinds of protected speech. Sure, originally it was targeted at such aberrations as racist or anti-gay rhetoric, assuming that always meant “hate”, but even those are protected as long as they stop short of “fighting words”. There are many kinds of opinions that now seem to qualify as “hate speech” in the eyes of the Identitarian Left, even when not truly “hateful”, such as church teachings in disapproval of homosexuality. There is also a tendency to characterize certain policy positions as “hate speech”, such as limits on immigration and opposition to “living wage” laws. Hypersensitivity, once more.

“Sustainability“: What a virtue signal! It’s now a big game to characterize whatever you do as promoting “sustainability”. But let’s get one thing straight: an activity is sustainable only if its benefits exceed its resource costs. That is the outcome sought by voluntary participants in markets, or they do not trade. Benefits and costs “estimated” by government bureaucrats without the benefit of market prices are not reliable guides to sustainability. Nor is Lefty politics a reliable guide to sustainability. Subsidies for favored activities actually undermine that goal.

There are many other Lefty catch phrases and preferred ways of speaking. We didn’t even get to “safe space”, “social justice”, and the pronoun controversy. Shriver closes with some general thoughts on the lefty lingo. I’ll close by quoting one of those points:

“The whole lexicon is of a piece. Its usage advertises that one has bought into a set menu of opinions—about race, gender, climate change, abortion, tax policy, #MeToo, Trump, Brexit, Brett Kavanaugh, probably Israel, and a great deal else. Reflexive resort to this argot therefore implies not that you think the same way as others of your political disposition but that you don’t think. You have ordered the prix fixe; you’re not in the kitchen cooking dinner for yourself.”

 

Yes, The Left Eats Its Own

04 Monday Nov 2019

Posted by in Leftism, Social Justice

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

Here’s a piece worth reading, published this weekend in The NY Times: “Those People We Tried To Cancel? They’re All Hanging Out Together“, by John McDermott. It provides some great illustrations of caretakers of “woke” culture forming circular firing squads. That’s exactly where social justice warriors have led themselves.

One very sore victim of cancellation is a conservative named David Marcus who, in his life before cancellation, worked in the New York theatre scene for years. Marcus  writes in The Federalist that he found McDermott’s article disgusting because it doesn’t convey the real damage done by this sort of treatment. I’m not sure that’s a fair criticism of the article, though it’s true that McDermott can’t resist taking swipes at a few individuals, including Dave Chappelle and Scarlett Johansson (“provocative or clueless or callous“).

The article adds value, however, in showing that there’s life after intellectual tyranny, speech suppression, and “othering”, especially if you just don’t give a damn about the self-annointed thought police. Many of them will have their own days of reckoning just around the corner. It doesn’t take long in that sort of poisoned environment. Of course, they might go after poor McDermott first!

The Leninists Among Us

29 Sunday Sep 2019

Posted by in Leftism, Marxism, Tyranny

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I suggested recently that the pursuit of zero-sum gains, and zero-sum thinking generally, is a form of social rot. How timely that Gary Saul Morson has offered this interesting essay on “Leninthink” in the October issue of The New Criterion. It validates my conviction that a zero-sum view of the world invites social brutalism and economic cannibalism. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Vladimir Lenin, was of course the first premier of the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. His philosophy was a practical derivative of Marxism, a real-world implementation of a “dictatorship of the proletariat“. Morson describes Lenin’s view of social relations thusly:

“Lenin regarded all interactions as zero-sum.To use the phrase he made famous, the fundamental question is always ‘Who Whom?’—who dominates whom, who does what to whom, ultimately who annihilates whom. To the extent that we gain, you lose. Contrast this view with the one taught in basic microeconomics: whenever there is a non-forced transaction, both sides benefit, or they would not make the exchange. For the seller, the money is worth more than the goods he sells, and for the buyer the goods are worth more than the money. Lenin’s hatred of the market, and his attempts to abolish it entirely during War Communism, derived from the opposite idea, that all buying and selling is necessarily exploitative. When Lenin speaks of ‘profiteering’ or ‘speculation’ (capital crimes), he is referring to every transaction, however small. Peasant ‘bagmen’ selling produce were shot.

Basic books on negotiation teach that you can often do better than split the difference, since people have different concerns. Both sides can come out ahead—but not for the Soviets, whose negotiating stance John F. Kennedy once paraphrased as: what’s mine is mine; and what’s yours is negotiable. For us, the word ‘politics’ means a process of give and take, but for Lenin it’s we take, and you give. From this it follows that one must take maximum advantage of one’s position. If the enemy is weak enough to be destroyed, and one stops simply at one’s initial demands, one is objectively helping the enemy, which makes one a traitor. Of course, one might simply be insane. Long before Brezhnev began incarcerating dissidents in madhouses, Lenin was so appalled that his foreign minister, Boris Chicherin, recommended an unnecessary concession to American loan negotiators, that he pronounced him mad—not metaphorically—and demanded he be forcibly committed. ‘We will be fools if we do not immediately and forcibly send him to a sanatorium.'”

The ruthlessness of Lenin’s mindset was manifested in his unwillingness to engage in rationalizations or even civil debate:

“Lenin’s language, no less than his ethics, served as a model, taught in Soviet schools and recommended in books with titles like Lenin’s Language and On Lenin’s Polemical Art. In Lenin’s view, a true revolutionary did not establish the correctness of his beliefs by appealing to evidence or logic, as if there were some standards of truthfulness above social classes. Rather, one engaged in ‘blackening an opponent’s mug so well it takes him ages to get it clean again.’ Nikolay Valentinov, a Bolshevik who knew Lenin well before becoming disillusioned, reports him saying: ‘There is only one answer to revisionism: smash its face in!’

When Mensheviks objected to Lenin’s personal attacks, he replied frankly that his purpose was not to convince but to destroy his opponent. In work after work, Lenin does not offer arguments refuting other Social Democrats but brands them as ‘renegades’ from Marxism. Marxists who disagreed with his naïve epistemology were ‘philosophic scum.’ Object to his brutality and your arguments are ‘moralizing vomit.’ You can see traces of this approach in the advice of Saul Alinsky—who cites Lenin—to ‘pick the target, freeze it, personalize it.'”

This offers a useful perspective on why it’s so difficult to have civil discussions with leftists today. They have inherited versions of Lenin’s polemic style. You’re more likely to be verbally attacked by the Left than to be engaged in a productive exchange of ideas, as I’m constantly reminded by observing the behavior of SJWs on social media. Leftist retribution is swift. Glenn Reynolds has mused, “As the old saying has it, the left looks for heretics and the right looks for converts, and both find what they’re looking for.” That might be too optimistic!

The richest source of zero-sum gains is through the levers of government, which possesses the necessary coercive power to achieve that aim. When coercive power is so ruthlessly exercised, the appearance of loyalty to those in power becomes paramount for survival. This can make it necessary to display an outward acceptance of fanciful claims:

“Lenin’s idea that coercion is not a last resort but the first principle of Party action. Changing human nature, producing boundless prosperity, overcoming death itself: all these miracles could be achieved because the Party was the first organization ever to pursue coercion without limits. In one treatise Stalin corrects the widespread notion that the laws of nature are not binding on Bolsheviks, and it is not hard to see how this kind of thinking took root. And, given an essentially mystical faith in coercion, it is not hard to see how imaginative forms of torture became routine in Soviet justice.

Dmitri Volkogonov, the first biographer with access to the secret Lenin archives, concluded that for Lenin violence was a goal in itself. He quotes Lenin in 1908 recommending ‘real, nationwide terror, which invigorates the country and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory.'”

Morson provides this revealing quote from the madman Lenin himself:

“The kulak uprising in [your] 5 districts must be crushed without pity. . . . 1) Hang (and I mean hang so that the people can see) not less than 100 known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers. 2) Publish their names. 3) Take all their grain away from them. 4) Identify hostages . . . . Do this so that for hundreds of miles around the people can see, tremble, know and cry . . . . Yours, Lenin. P. S. Find tougher people.”

At least today the Lefties try to dox people first, rather than #2. The hanging might have to come later.

There is a real danger in encouraging such zero-sum notions as redistribution and class warfare. Even today’s preoccupation with identity politics is one of zero-sum emphasis. Furthermore, the concepts of mass victimization and social justice promote a delusion of righteousness, a necessary precondition to the kind of monstrous acts of a Lenin. Anyone truly interested in promoting an atmosphere of social cooperation should recognize the echos of Leninism we see today from Leftists on social media and in the streets. These tyrants must be resisted before we’re all on the wrong side of the ultimate zero sum outcome.