Sunday, October 31, 2021

America -- Who We Are

Politicians often say we are a nation of immigrants, and lecture us about "who we are". That is worth examining, as we are not, and have never been, a nation of immigrants.

Reece Jones writes in the NY Times:

The truth is that the mass deportation of nonwhite people and immigration bans based on nationality, religion or race are quintessentially American. From the beginning, the United States was built on the dual foundation of open immigration for whites from Northern Europe and racial subordination and exclusion of enslaved people from Africa, Native Americans and, eventually, immigrants from other parts of the world.

In the years after the Revolutionary War, the fledgling states continued to exploit enslaved people and recruit more free white settlers from Europe. Racial exclusion was first codified in the Naturalization Act of 1790, which restricted citizenship to “any alien, being a free white person.”

So we are a nation of White people with Northern Europe ancestry, with a history of excluding the rest of the world.
“Our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually,” Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts said that year. “The ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.”

Mr. Kennedy’s pledge turned out to be wrong: The provisions of the 1965 act have led to more diverse immigration to the United States.

Yes, the pledge was a big lie to facilitate the replacement of Whites with foreign non-whites.
Although the anti-immigrant language of the Republican Party and the violence at the border today may make some Americans uncomfortable, this is exactly how America has treated nonwhite immigrants throughout its history. It is who we are.
Some people do not agree with this, and maybe think that it would have been better if American Indians ruled North America, with no White people. But nearly everything that is great about America followed from Whites and pro-White policies.

Any argument about "who we are" should come to terms with this. If you hear someone say we should let in some Third World immigrants because of who we are, the response should be that we are the opposite.

Now, Pres. Biden wants to pay reparations to illegal aliens, at $450,000 per head. The NY Times reports:

Migrant families separated at the border by the Trump administration may be eligible to each receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation for the damage inflicted on them by the policy, according to several people familiar with the matter.

Some families could receive as much as $450,000 for each member who was directly affected, the sources said.

This is the most anti-American thing I have seen in a long time. American children get separated from their parents in family court every day. No one compensates them. Instead Biden is paying money to child-smuggling criminals, and thereby giving huge incentives for more dangerous child smuggling. This is an example of Biden giving more rights to criminal aliens than to law-abiding Americans.

Saturday, October 30, 2021

Trump-haters Stage False Flag Event

RT reports:
With the Virginia gubernatorial campaign down to the wire, Democrats pointed and shrieked at “Nazis” allegedly supporting their opponent in Charlottesville. The Lincoln Project then admitted to the false-flag stunt.

The election has gone from a sure thing for Democrat Terry McAuliffe to a possible upset by Republican Glenn Youngkin in recent weeks. On Friday, as Youngkin came to Charlottesville for the final campaign push, reporters were drawn to a group of people posing in front of his bus in pouring rain. All five wore hats, sunglasses, white shirts, khakis and tiki torches – in what seemed to be a reference to the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ rally that ended in violence.

This is why the new platforms promising free speech, such as Rumble, Gab, Trump's social venture, etc., cannot deliver. As soon as they open up, they will be flooded with Jews and Trump-haters posting neo-Nazi comments. It happens every time.

I don't think that there are any real neo-Nazis, but there are lots of fake neo-Nazis trying to discredit free speech, and frame right-wingers. They will use bots to post thousands of offensive messages. As a practical matter, the platforms have to censor the neo-Nazi spam, or the interesting messages get crowded out.

Also, it is almost impossible to get free of the companies controlling core internet and banking services. They have proved their ability to blackball right=wingers, and they will do it again.

Politico reports:

Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, one of the most prominent critics of former President Donald Trump in the House Republican Conference, announced Friday he won’t seek reelection next year.

Kinzinger is one of 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach the then-president in January after the riot at the Capitol and his announcement marks the second member of that group to say he will retire from Congress, joining Rep. Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio.

There are more grounds for impeach Pres. Biden, than there were ever grounds for Trump. Those 10 Republicans are a disgrace.

Friday, October 29, 2021

Genital Preferences are Transphobic

The NY Post reports:
State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a statement that all passport applicants will be able to choose to identify as “X” rather than “F” or “M,” for “female” or “male,” once the department completes the required “system and form updates” early next year

“I want to reiterate, on the occasion of this passport issuance, the Department of State’s commitment to promoting the freedom, dignity, and equality of all people — including LGBTQI+ persons,” Price added.

No, there is no dignity in this.
The State Department’s denial of Zzyym’s passport prevented them from being able to go to two Organization Intersex International meetings.
Really? Those meetings discriminate against those labeled as M or F?
At least a dozen other countries offer passports with gender markers other than “M” or “F,” according to Lamba Legal. They include Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Iceland, India, Malta, Nepal, New Zealand and Pakistan.
The world is going mad.

The UK BBC reports:

Is a lesbian transphobic if she does not want to have sex with trans women? Some lesbians say they are increasingly being pressured and coerced into accepting trans women as partners - then shunned and even threatened for speaking out. Several have spoken to the BBC, along with trans women who are concerned about the issue too. ...

Several people got in touch with me to say there was a "huge problem" for lesbians, who were being pressured to "accept the idea that a penis can be a female sex organ". ...

Another lesbian woman, 26-year-old Chloe*, said she felt so pressured she ended up having penetrative sex with a trans woman at university after repeatedly explaining she was not interested. ...

"[They] threatened to out me as a terf and risk my job if I refused to sleep with [them]," she wrote. "I was too young to argue and had been brainwashed by queer theory so [they were] a 'woman' even if every fibre of my being was screaming throughout so I agreed to go home with [them]. [They] used physical force when I changed my mind upon seeing [their] penis and raped me."

While welcomed by some in the LGBT community, Angela's report was described as transphobic by others. ...

"genital preferences" are transphobic. ...

She asked: "Would you date a trans person, honestly? Think about it for a second. OK, got your answer? Well if you said no, I'm sorry but that's pretty discriminatory."

Apparently trans people get rejected by both heterosexuals and homosexuals. For trans women, this is the "cotton ceiling".

Thursday, October 28, 2021

Defining Whlte Culture

Sometimes people question whether there is such a thing as White culture. Of course there is. Here is a list of the prominent features, in alphabetical order.
  1. Art
  2. Capitalism, market pricing
  3. Christianity
  4. Clean living
  5. Communication, phones, tv
  6. Contracts, trust, honor
  7. Democracy, representative govt
  8. Education
  9. Electricity
  10. Entertainment
  11. Exploration, maps
  12. Future time orientation, schedules
  13. Individualism, autonomy
  14. Invention
  15. Math, logic
  16. Money
  17. Music
  18. Nuclear family
  19. Politeness, respect
  20. Private property
  21. Rule of law
  22. Science
  23. Sports, hobbies
  24. Transportation, vehicles
  25. Universals, philosophy

You might object that some of these are not uniquely White. People play soccer and other sports all over the world. But they learned from White people, and play soccer according to British rules.

They also play music all over the world, but the best is with tones, chords, and instruments perfected by Whites.

A recent NY Times article quoted:

“This idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated,” she replied.
That was not on my list.

Wednesday, October 27, 2021

Pinker on Rationality

Steven Pinker wrote a new book on Rationality, and includes this argument:
“It’s wicked to treat an individual according to that person’s race, sex, or ethnicity.”
I probably agree with 90% of this book. It is good to be rational. He actually explains why an objective Bayesian would profile people based on race, sex, and ethnicity. Nearly everyone on Earth does this, to varying degrees.

The traditionalists have been doing it for millennia. The feminists and anti-racists are very much in favor of taking race and sex into account. Much more than conservatives, today. I have never even heard of anyone who does not take these things into account.

But then he says that it is wicked to do so. And so he says it is not rational.

Frank Furedi writes in Spiked:

Transgenderism has emerged as one of the most influential ideologies of our time. It is shaping people’s behaviour and thought in pursuit of a specific political objective – the erosion of the significance of biological sex. And it is undermining long-held cultural assumptions about what it means to be a man or a woman.
So is Pinker joining this ideology? I don't think so, as the transgender ideologues very much believe in distinguishing according to sex.

Or do they?

Transgenderism is making itself at home in the most unlikely of places. Rejecting long-held scientific assumptions, both Nature and Scientific American ‘have denied that there are clear criteria for classifying humans as male and female’ (2). The British Medical Association has also fallen in line. In its guide to ‘inclusive language’, it advises its members to use the term ‘pregnant people’ instead of ‘pregnant women’. Just recently the prestigious medical journal, the Lancet, decided to call women ‘bodies with vaginas’. It seems that, even in the scientific, medical domain, biological reality is being sacrificed at the altar of transgender ideology.
Here is another famous rationalist who has gone off the deep end:
Penn Jillette, the tall half of the hugely successful magician duo Penn & Teller, is one of the entertainment industry’s most outspoken atheists. For decades, Jillette has smugly condemned all manner of religious, psychic, and pseudoscientific irrationality. He also has a fan base on the right, because as a self-described libertarian, Jillette’s often mused about how “taxation is theft” and government compulsion is bad.

Penn Jillette: a man with no gods, including government. A man who falls for no (to use the title of his Showtime series) “bullshit.”

Then his teenage daughter decided that she’s a man. And the world witnessed how quickly the “smug” vanishes from the rationalist when the bullshit hits too close to home.

About a year or so ago, Jillette’s daughter, Moxie Crimefighter (yes, that’s her name), decided that she’d been “assigned the wrong sex at birth.” And she demanded that her parents no longer use female pronouns for her, like, ever.

This is madness. Our leading science publications, skeptic intellectuals, and other big levers of power and influence, have joined in saying nonsense about sex.

The big Leftist fear about Artificial Intelligence is that it will be too objective and rational. It will not accept the nonsense about race and sex being social constructs, and use the available data to distinguish people.

A Congressman was just kicked off Twitter for saying:

The title of first female four-star officer gets taken by a man.
Twotter's explanation is that it reinforces a harmful stereotype.

The argument is sometimes made that banning such speech is necessary because it causes harm and even death to those publicly advertise their gender changes. I do not believe that there is any research to support this. The closest I found was this USA Today article:

Do words directly cause harm?

According to a study by the American Academy of Pediatrics, on-screen violence causes increased aggressive thoughts and behavior as well as decreased empathy in viewers. The same could be said of hate speech, whether it's by politicians, celebrities or people you know. 

"When people hear other people saying things that are hateful, for whatever reason and whatever group it's aimed at, it gives them permission, basically, to think that's true and to imitate that kind of speech," says Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Center for Health Research. 

But this is just speculative opinion.

Saying that the 4-star officer is a man or a woman might encourage others to express similar opinions, or it might encourage opposing views. It is not hateful to say that someone is a man when everyone agrees he was a man 10 years ago. Okay, maybe he is less than a man today, depending on what was done to him.

Some people prefer to distinguish sex and gender. Some use terms man and woman for the sex, and others for the gender. In this case, it appears that the officer is now male sex and female preferred gender identity, for those who make that distinction. The term man is correct for the male sex.

This is not causing harm to him. Perhaps it might cause some reluctance by some parents to take their kids to a transgendered pediatrician to examine their naked bodies. But no one opposes calling this person transgendered.

Update: Here is an explanation of why AI is racist.

Monday, October 25, 2021

Human Origins are in Europe

Matthew Cobb gives an informative lecture on Genetics and human evolution.

At 18:35 he explains that Neanderthals were cousins to human, not ancestors, and died out in Europe about 30,000 years ago. The last common ancestors were at least 800k years ago.

Later he explains that non-Africans today have Neanderthal DNA, and that this necessarily means that we non-Africans are all descended from Neanderthals.

So Neanderthals were not cousins. They were direct ancestors.

He also explains how Neanderthals were more advanced than the African so-called humans. Neanderthals buried their dead ceremoniously, made tools, wore jewelry, and drew cave art. The Africans of the time did not.

He keeps saying that humans came out of Africa, but the facts show the opposite. The earliest beings that could be called human were the Neanderthals, and they lived in Europe.

The argument that humans came from Africa is based on it having a greater variation of ape DNA. That is true. If you trace humans back to ape ancestors, then those apes lived in Africa. But the human ancestors lived in Europe.

The recent Science Friday discussed research on modern inheritance of Neanderthal genes. He also referred to Neanderthals as our extinct relatives, but they are not really extinct since they have billions of descendants living today. He said we have about 2% of our genome directly traceable to Neanderthals, but the rest of our genes are shared with Neanderthals also, as all mammals have mostly the same genes, with minor differences.

Anthropologists like to talk about our supposed African ancestor humans, like Hollywood likes the Magical Negro trope. I am not sure why this trope is so effective.

I am also not sure why experts would call Neanderthals cousins, extinct, and non-humans, when those are plainly false. They were the most human of our ancestors of 100k years ago.

Sunday, October 24, 2021

NY Times Opinion Recommends Quitting

The NY Times published an op-ed by a Jewish woman bragging about how she was a good person to divorce her husband for selfish reasons. Now it posts a video on quitting:
The Bravest Thing You Can Do Is Quit | NYT Opinion

And now, finally, we’re quitting.

We are quitting our jobs. Our cities. Our marriages. Even our Twitter feeds.

And as we argue in the video above, we’re not quitting because we’re weak. We’re quitting because we’re smart. ...

the extraordinary Simone Biles are barely old enough to rent a car but they are already teaching us about boundaries.

It mostly praises Biles for quitting the Tokyo Olympics, to deal with her personal mental health problems.

There was no mention of her withdrawal symptoms from performance-enhancing drugs.

The video also says Stephen Breyer should quit the US Supreme Court, so that a suitable leftist can be appointed to replace him. The speaker is a woman.

No, this is crazy female leftist silliness. Biles did not quit because she was smart or strong. She quit because she is mentally ill, and could not perform at a top level without her performance-enhancing drugs.

Saturday, October 23, 2021

Putin Speaks against American Leftism

Moscow Times
Here are some quotes from his speech. Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a tirade against Western values in his speech at the annual Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi late into Thursday evening.

Putin outlined his view of Russia’s ideology as a counterbalance to what he derided as cancel culture, reverse racism and the “monstrous” forcing of transgenderism onto children.

“We’re surprised to see things happening in countries that see themselves as flagships of progress… The struggle for equality and against discrimination turns into aggressive dogmatism verging on absurdity.”

“Opposing racism is a necessary and noble thing, but the new ‘culture of abolition’ turns into ‘reverse discrimination’…Here in Russia the absolute majority of our citizens don’t care what color a person’s skin is.”

“People who dare to say that men and women still exist as a biological fact are almost ostracized… Not to mention the simply monstrous fact that children today are taught from a young age that a boy can easily become a girl and vice versa.”

“Let's call a spade a spade: This simply verges on crimes against humanity under the banner of progress.”

Full speech.

Too bad we do not have any leaders this sensible.

Friday, October 22, 2021

The Color of Classics

A Princeton U. magazine reports:
Especially among younger classicists, there is “a real energy and a real desire to transform the field into something that is avowedly anti-racist and anti-white supremacist,” says Christopher Waldo, an assistant professor of classics at the University of Washington-Seattle and co-chair of the Asian and Asian-American Classical Caucus. ...

Crucially, the ancient cultures studied by classicists, as well as the European culture those ancients were said to have founded, were understood to be white. Classics, along with Egyptology, “developed as the teaching arm of the ideology of white supremacy,” says Shelley P. Haley, a professor of classics and Africana studies at Hamilton College, who is the first Black scholar to serve as president of the Society for Classical Studies. “We need to examine the context in which classical studies grew up, and that’s what we need to dismantle.”

The racial suppositions implicit in the original conception of the discipline represented a historical distortion, scholars say. Classical historians today agree that the ancients had no concept of “whiteness” in our modern sense: Although ancient societies were hierarchically organized and sometimes oppressive, those hierarchies were not based on skin color. In the Renaissance, “scholars were perfectly aware that ancient Rome was an ethnically varied city and that people of African and Jewish and Arabian descent became Romans,” Grafton says. “In the 19th century, there was a great effort not to recognize that.” ...

Contemporary right-wing extremists and conspiracy theorists similarly root their identity in an imagined lily-white classical past.

It is funny how none of those extremists and theorists are quoted. It appears to be all a big hoax.

CNN showed a special on The rise of White identity politics. You might think that this would be all about skin color, but no. It is about people who want to Make America Great Again, and have no particular antagonism towards other races. Race is just a social construct. That is what CNN says.

It also said that Black and brown people are less intelligent that Whites. There was a light-skinned mixed-race CNN woman who said this was not believable, but made no attempt to rebut it, and appeared to not understand the assertion.

CNN also said that people of color were replacing Whites, and that there was concern that the colored would treat the Whites badly. It showed some monument protesters chanting "Jews will not replace us." Of course the Jews on CNN are always saying that the replacement is a good thing.

CNN doesn't spell this out, but the main promoters of White identity politics today are leftists who are always talking about punishing Whites for their White privilege. Lots of people say that they did not even think of themselves as White until some BIPOCs demanded a racial reckoning.

Here CNN brings on a lesbian with two adopted kids to defend Pete Buttigieg taking a two month paternity leave from his cabinet post, and attacking Tucker Carlson for not understanding the concept of bottle feeding. Buttigieg also says it is "pro-family" for two homosexual men to quit work to bottle feed adopted babies.

Bottle feeding newborn twins only takes a total of about an hour per day

Thursday, October 21, 2021

Psychiatry is a vehicle of Satan

Roosh V. writes:
From my research and firsthand experience, psychiatry is a vehicle of Satan to destroy minds, sterilize women, and ultimately condemn souls to hell.

The secular world makes people ill by denying the presence of God, and then the secular world gives the solution of psychiatry and its obsession of prescribing anti-depressant and anti-psychotic drugs which fleece billions of dollars from patients via recurring monthly payments for those who become dependent on them and simply cannot quit. The situation has become so bad that even the leftist media is starting to highlight a problem that is called antidepressant discontinuation syndrome, where some people must take pharmaceutical drugs for the rest of their lives to avoid mental incapacitation, “brain zaps,” total psychosis, and even permanent brain damage.

Psychiatric drugs are hard to get off of because the brain reworks itself around the artificial chemicals it finds itself bathed in daily, and as soon as those chemicals are withdrawn, the brain cannot adapt fast enough to create a neurochemical balance that does not result in a variety of terrifying mental symptoms which many patients cannot handle without severe disruption to their lives and overall health. ...

Did you know that psychiatric drugs were explicitly targeted to women, particularly white women? ...

Feminism is demonic because it inverts the natural order by trying to make man as coming from the woman’s rib instead of the other way around, and here comes the psychiatrist to further enable this inversion with a heavily-marketed drug that keeps the independent woman working, without a husband, while just functional enough to take care of her pets and social media accounts that are replacements for children she cannot have because of a spiritual condition made worse by the secular authorities she should never have trusted.

How can a woman, who is chemically numbed in the brain, have the discernment to pick a husband?

He is banned just about everywhere. I do not necessarily agree with what he says, but he has good insights, and should be heard.

Wednesday, October 20, 2021

Attempt to Define Wokeism

The Russian-Jewish-feminist-Trump=hating-American Cathy Young attempts to define wokeism, and writes:

But perhaps the most alarming aspect of Social Justice, as far as its effect on a liberal society, is the extent to which this ideology provides a justification for pervasive, quasi-totalitarian policing of speech, thought, and private behavior.

The language seems hyperbolic, since “wokists” are not throwing anyone in the gulag. But Social Justice is totalitarian in spirit in the same way that Trumpism is authoritarian: at least for now, both, fortunately, lack the power to enforce their will.

For one thing, Social Justice demands de facto banishment of “wrongthink” from the public square. Plenty of political movements seek to silence critics and dissenters; but Social Justice makes such silencing a moral imperative, since “bad” ideas and words are seen as inflicting “harm” or “violence.”

Trump was President for 4 years, and he was the least authoritarian President in decades.

Just compare to Biden, who is regularly issuing vaccine mandates, admitting aliens, and even violating court orders.

She calls herself a Libertarian-conservative, but any real libertarian or conservative would see that Trump's 4 years were vastly superior to Biden or other recent Presidents.

Wokeism is, above all else, an attack on White culture. White=hating underlies everything.

Wokeism celebrates craziness such as this:

Assistant Health Secretary Rachel Levine made history Tuesday by becoming the first openly transgender four-star officer in America’s eight uniformed services. ...

“Admiral Levine’s historic appointment as the first openly transgender four-star officer is a giant step forward towards equality as a nation. This is a proud moment for us at HHS,” department secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement.

I didn't know that we had 8 uniformed services.

According to Wikipedia, Levine is Jewish, his parents were lawyers, he attended Hebrew school, he married a woman and fathered two kids, attended Harvard undergraduate, and he became a pediatrician, before transitioning to whatever he is now. His main expertise is in girls' eating disorders.

Would you want your kids to be in the care of this pediatrician? Is this really a proud moment?

Like Pete Buttigieg, this appointment seems to have the only purpose of showing off how the Biden administration tolerates and promote sexual customs contrary to mainstream culture. In other words, wokeism.

Tuesday, October 19, 2021

Debate over US Interventionism

I enjoyed this video debate:
Bill Kristol and Scott Horton Debate U.S. Interventionism

A leading proponent of the invasion of Iraq vs. the editorial director of Antiwar.com.

The audience was overwhelmingly against Kristol and his neo-con interventionism.

Horton blamed every foreign debacle on some previous US interventionism. I am not sure that is right either. He kept arguing that we could do more displomacy, but I am not sure how that works if we never intervene in anything.

I was struck by how they were both Trump-haters, and they both had long lists of specific gripes about American foreign policies, but none of those gripes were about anything Trump did.

Kristol still defends the Iraq War, and criticizes interventions as not going far enough. But he seems to concede that the Iraq WMD intelligence was bad. The Wikipedia article on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction had indeed failed to destroy its WMD materials, just as the USA had claimed.

The one most accused of lying was Colin Powell, who just died at age 84. In Jan. this year, he announced "I can no longer call myself a fellow Republican." No one else considered him a Republican for a long time, as he last endorsed a Republican in 2004. He endorsed Barack Obama in 2008, with the main argument being that they are both Black. Obama is half-Kenyan, and Powell is Jamaican. That is the way American politics today. All non-whites just vote according to their ethnic allegiances. Only White believe in universal justice.

NY Times obituary:

“Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option, not in a post-September 11th world,’’ Mr. Powell declared. The speech failed to persuade many skeptics in the international community, but Mr. Powell’s personal appeal swung many Americans to support the war, however reluctantly. After American troops invaded in March 2003, however, it became clear that there were no weapons of mass destruction. The intelligence had been wrong.
The speech did not persuade because the evidence presented was thin. The weapon stockpiles appeared to not exist in March 2003, as they were discovered in 2005. See Wikipedia on this, as the source is several NY Times articles.

Sunday, October 17, 2021

Biden DoJ holding Political Prisoners

ABC News:
Like many Donald Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, Dona Sue Bissey has promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory on social media. But the judge sentencing her Tuesday to 14 days in jail said it was for her actions, not her beliefs.

Bissey, 53, pleaded guilty in July to parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building, a misdemeanor punishable by a maximum of six months' imprisonment. ...

Justice Department prosecutor Joshua Rothstein said Bissey appears to be an avid consumer of other conspiracy theories, including that the coronavirus is a "hoax pandemic" and that the COVID-19 vaccine is part of a Jewish plot to murder people. She also appeared to believe the pandemic was foreshadowed by "predictive programming" during the opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics in London. ...

Bissey was jailed for two days after her arrest in February. In a letter to the judge, Bissey said some of her neighbors in Bloomfield, Indiana, have shunned her since the riot. She called herself a "God fearing, country loving, law abiding, hard working patriot."

"I am not and never have been a violent individual," she wrote.

Some QAnon-linked defendants face significant prison time. Sentencing guidelines for Arizona resident Jacob Chansley, the "QAnon Shaman," who pleaded guilty to a felony, could call for a prison term ranging from 41 to 51 months, according to a prosecutor.

Update: A comment points out that I did not explain why she should be considered a political prisoner.

She may have committed trespassing, or some other minor act of civil disobedience, but we do not normally treat political protesters harshly, and we condemn other countries that do.

For example, here was another DC protest this week:

Demonstrators with climate change-focused protest groups turned out around the District Thursday, with large banners and fake oil, as part of ongoing protests against a perceived lack of action on the issue of climate change.

The Extinction Rebellion protest is one of many in a weeklong string of climate protests that have led to more than 300 arrests so far this week. ...

Similar protests were held at government buildings around D.C., including the Department of the Interior.

An Interior Department spokeswoman said a group of protesters rushed the lobby, injuring at least one security officer who was taken to a nearby hospital. Police and protesters clashed outside the building, and a spokesperson for the protest group accused officers of using stun guns against several unarmed protesters.

This was almost as many arrests as Jan. 6, but I bet that none of them get held without bail or charged with serious crimes. The DoJ will probably drop the charges on all of them.

Here is another political prosecution. Jason Kessler's worst offense appears to be that he once said, “Our entire country would be better off if the South had won the Civil War.” I disagree, but he has a right to his opinion.

Saturday, October 16, 2021

California law requires sex neutral toys

There are feminists and leftists who somehow find it upsetting that toy stores have separate aisles for boys and girls. Of course hte customers are free to buy boy toys for girls, so it is hard to see how anyone is hurt by this.

California has passed a new law:

55.7. The Legislature finds and declares both of the following:

(a) Unjustified differences in similar products that are traditionally marketed either for girls or for boys can be more easily identified by the consumer if similar items are displayed closer to one another in one, undivided area of the retail sales floor.

(b) Keeping similar items that are traditionally marketed either for girls or for boys separated makes it more difficult for the consumer to compare the products and incorrectly implies that their use by one gender is inappropriate.

55.8. (a) A retail department store that offers childcare items or toys for sale shall maintain a gender neutral section or area, to be labeled at the discretion of the retailer, in which a reasonable selection of the items and toys for children [defined as age 12 or younger] that it sells shall be displayed, regardless of whether they have been traditionally marketed for either girls or for boys.

This is bizarre. California stores can still label toys for boys and girls, but must have a gender neutral section, whatever that is.

Those findings are not true. There are no unjustified differences. The separation does not make it more difficult for consumers. No one is implying that anything is inappropriate. The stores are happy to sell toys for boys and girls.

The separation is greater than it was 20 years ago. Presumably the stores are meeting consumer needs.

With all the problems California has, why is it bothering with such foolish laws? I do not think that they can seriously believe that the law will make consumer shopping more convenient. This is just wack leftist ideology at work.

For an even worse example of leftist ideology at work, see this:

The Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), one of the world’s finest art museums, harbors (or rather, harbored) 122 highly skilled docents, 82 active ones and 40 “school group greeters.” All are volunteers and are all unpaid. Their job is to act as guides to the Museum’s collection of 300,000 works, which they explain to both adults and schoolchildren. I’ve seen them in action at the Museum, and they’re terrific.
Now they have all been fired, to be replace by less competent paid Blacks.

Friday, October 15, 2021

Dave Chappelle may be Canceled

The NY Times reports:
That’s all changed. Internally, the tech company that revolutionized Hollywood is now in an uproar as employees challenge the executives responsible for its success and accuse the streaming service of facilitating the spread of hate speech and perhaps inciting violence.

At the center of the unrest is “The Closer,” the much-anticipated special from the Emmy-winning comedian Dave Chappelle, which debuted on Oct. 5 and was the fourth-most-watched program on Netflix in the United States on Thursday. In the show, Mr. Chappelle comments mockingly on transgender people and aligns himself with the author J.K. Rowling as “Team TERF,” an acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist, a term used for a group of people who argue that a transgender woman’s biological sex determines her gender and can’t be changed.

He is the leading comic about the Black experience. He is funny.

The people who work for Netflix and the NY Times are horrible leftist racist people. They say that because Chappelle is Black, then he is supposed to certain opinions about trannies.

His show is not against transgender rights at all. He is all in favor of such rights. He is just not on board with some of the demands of the extreme transgender activists.

Too bad. He was one of the last Americans with free speech. Not anymore, I guess.

In the show, Mr. Chappelle comments mockingly on transgender people and aligns himself with the author J.K. Rowling as “Team TERF,” an acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist, a term used for a group of people who argue that a transgender woman’s biological sex determines her gender and can’t be changed.
That is not correct. I don't think Chappelle or Rowling ever said that sex determines gender. Gender, as the term is commonly used, is an identification choice, and obviously a man can choose to identify as a woman. Others may still consider that man to be a man.
On Wednesday, GLAAD criticized Mr. Sarandos’s claim that on-screen content does not lead to real-world violence. “Film and TV have also been filled with stereotypes and misinformation about us for decades, leading to real-world harm, especially for trans people and L.G.B.T.Q. people of color,” the organization said in a statement.
No, film and TV have not been filled with transgendered folks for decades. Maybe three years. And no opinions like Chappelle's have led to violence, as far as I know.

If anything might lead to violence, I would suspect organizations like GLAAD and opinions like this NY Times article. They portray transgender people as anti-social perverts who aggressively try to bully everyone into accepting their peculiar lifestyle choices.

Update: I watched to the end, and Chappelle reveals that he had a trans friend who was driven to suicide by Chappelle-haters. Amazing.

Thursday, October 14, 2021

The Latest Jewish Conspiracy Theories

The Jewish censorship is getting crazy again.

The Intercept reports:

To ward off accusations that it helps terrorists spread propaganda, Facebook has for many years barred users from speaking freely about people and groups it says promote violence.

The restrictions appear to trace back to 2012, when in the face of growing alarm in Congress and the United Nations about online terrorist recruiting, Facebook added to its Community Standards a ban on “organizations with a record of terrorist or violent criminal activity.” This modest rule has since ballooned into what’s known as the Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, a sweeping set of restrictions on what Facebook’s nearly 3 billion users can say about an enormous and ever-growing roster of entities deemed beyond the pale.

They leaked the list, and it include a lot of conservatives who merely express political opinions, and never advocate or facilitate violence. Facebook even blocks right-wing links in private messages.

The Guardian reports:

Parallels can also be drawn between antisemitic conspiracy theories about Covid-19 and the development of vaccines, and pamphlets blaming “Jewish financiers” for the first world war or suggesting they would gain from the second world war.

David Rich, the director of policy at the Community Security Trust (CST), a charity providing security for the Jewish community, said the pandemic had resulted in people with antisemitic views taking central roles in the campaign against Covid vaccines and public health measures.

A Jewish-atheist professor argues it is anti-Semitic to point out that "Diversity and multiculturalism are mostly Jewish-led efforts". When he agrees with those efforts, he praises Jews, but when he doesn't, he says it is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

Jews just love to call something a "conspiracy theory" or a "racist trope", as if these terms means something. A conspiracy is a a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful. Jews openly push diversity and multiculturalism, and there is no secret about it, except to the extent that critics get censored.

The Jews are even prosecuting a teenager for a private joke he made on his own time:

According to the facts in the case, C.G. went to a thrift store on an evening in 2019. While trying on WWII military caps, he wrote to Snapchat “Me and the boys bout to exterminate the Jews.” The post was made off school property.

A Jewish student saw the post and had their parents report it to the police, the Israeli lobbyists at the Anti-Defamation League, Rabbi Richard Rheins, and school district officials. The post, even after being deleted, was circulated widely throughout the Jewish community, which whipped them up into a hysteria and prompted a witch hunt.

This led to C.G. being investigated by the police for the “hate speech,” but they concluded that no law was broken.

School administrators initially only suspended C.G. for a few days, but the ADL then got involved and got to decide on how to punish the student following the incident. Despite C.G. being highly apologetic and the ADL’s Scott Levin admitting that the post was just a joke, the Jewish District Director had C.G. expelled from the school anyway.

Jon Gruden, the NFL's highest paid coach, just got fired for a private comment ten years ago about a man having big lips. The man was Black, and we aren't supposed to notice his lips. Gruden also supposedly made some anti-gay comments, but his team is the only one in the NFL with an openly gay player, so it is hard to see how anti-gay he could be.

The Charlie Kirk Show, ..., mentioning recent comments by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) after the latest debt ceiling deal. ...

“You think we’re still living in the same country, don’t you?” sneered Kirk. “You think we’re still living in the 1980s, where the Democrats actually want what’s best for America?”

“The Democrats want to destroy the country, we know this,” he continued. “They want to see America completely obliterated, the Constitution shredded, and remade in their own San Francisco-Brooklyn-Malibu-Manhattan image, where there is no cultural identity, where you live in sexual anarchy, where private property is a thing of the past, and the ruling class controls everything.”

Is this a conspiracy theory? Schumer would not say that he wants to destroy the country, but he certainly does say that he wants changes that many consider destructive.

Wednesday, October 13, 2021

Why we Celebrate Columbus Day

Here is my list of the most important events in world history for making modern civiiization possible.
  • Invention of mathematical proof. As shown in Euclid's Elements, 300 BC. Perfected in the early XX century.
  • Roman Empire converted to Christianity. 323 AD.
  • European discovery of America. 1492.
  • Discovery of Calculus and Mechanics. Newton's treatise published in 1687.
  • Electromagnetic theory. Maxwell's treatise published in 1873.
  • Invention of semiconductor transistor. 1947.
It is hard to imagine modern civilization with any of these things.

Pes. Joe Biden proclaimed:

President proclaim the second Monday of October of each year as “Columbus Day.” Today, let this day be one of reflection — on America’s spirit of exploration, on the courage and contributions of Italian Americans throughout the generations, on the dignity and resilience of Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities, and on the work that remains ahead of us to fulfill the promise of our Nation for all.
No, Columbus Day is not about any of those things. The holiday commemorates a voyage that made modern civilization possible.

If you want to honor Amerindians, here is a suggestion:

I have a better name for the holiday, which preserves the tradition of giving credit to a single man, in this case, an “indigenous person” named Opechancanough. He became chief of the Jamestown colony’s Indian neighbors when his older brother, Powhatan, died in 1618. Under Powhatan, whose favorite daughter had married an Englishman, there was an only sporadically violent peace.

Opechancanough was different. In 1622, he hatched a plot to exterminate every white man, woman, and child. By then, there were about 1,200 colonists, and many had Indian helpers and employees. On March 22, the Indians came to work with weapons hidden under their clothes, and rose up and massacred the whites. Fortunately for the colony, the main population at Jamestown got wind of the plot. Men kept weapons handy, and the Indians did not attack.

Even so, Opechancanough’s men managed to kill about 400 whites, or one-third of the colonists. ...

The slaughter began a year-long war with the Indians, but Opechancanough sued for peace, and whites and Indians slowly started mingling again. Amazingly, in 1644, Opechancanough ordered an identical sneak attack, and managed to kill between 400 and 500 English. This time, the colonists went on to kill so many Indians, including Opechancanough, that two years later, the Virginia General Assembly noted with satisfaction that the natives were “so routed and dispersed that they are no longer a nation, and we now suffer only from robbery by a few starved outlaws.”

Opechancanough was a patriot and freedom fighter, a defender of his people against the rapacious white man.

Tuesday, October 12, 2021

Biden Covid Deaths Catching up with Trump

The Wash. Times reports:
More Americans have died from COVID-19 during President Biden‘s first nine months in office than during the first nine months of the pandemic under Donald Trump’s presidency, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
No, I don't think this is true. According to CDC data, 433,801 died of covid-19 under Pres. Trump, and 268,375 under Biden. If deaths continue at the present rate, with 53,514 in the last month, the Biden will catch up in a little over 3 months. But deaths will probably not continue at the present rate.

Monday, October 11, 2021

How Medical Lobbyists Manipulated the Election

There are still some people who doubt that the Nov. 2021 election was stolen.

There were millions of people wo voted against Pres. Trump because the news media kept saying that thousands of Americans were dying from him not doing anything about the coronavirus. He said that a vaccine was in the works, but the press said that he was lying.

Soon there will be more covid deaths under the Biden administration than there were under Trump.

It turns out that there was a Trump-hater conspiracy to suppress what was supposed to be public info about the vaccine.

MIT Technology Review reports:

After being released from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on October 5, US President Donald Trump praised the doctors who treated him for covid-19 and promised that the public would soon have a vaccine against the deadly coronavirus. “We have the best medicines in the world, and very shortly they are all getting approved, and the vaccines are coming momentarily,” he said in a video statement shared with millions of Twitter followers.

Across the country, in California, a doctor named Eric Topol was responding in real time on social media. He questioned the president’s health, his doctors’ actions, and even his mental status.

By that point Topol, a heart expert and researcher with a huge Twitter following of his own, was already weeks into a personal campaign to make sure the administration could not rush a covid-19 vaccine through regulatory authorization before Election Day on November 3.

The article goes on to say that the drug companies were scheduled to release favorable news about vaccine trials, but Democrats in the govt and industry conspired to suppress the data in order to try to make Trump look bad for the election.

This article shows Topol and others bragging about something that should be criminal. The public had a right to know the status of govt agencies considering covid health measures. If the news had been bad, then maybe Republicans would have wanted to suppress the news, but that would have been wrong. That would be like NY Gov. Cuomo covering up nursing home deaths. As it turned out, the news was good, and Democrats successfully suppressed the news.

Another plot to manipulate the election was the 4-year push to impeach Trump. The effort was almost entirely led by Jews, with one notable exception: Robert Mueller.

Now Congressman Adam Schiff has a new book out, and he reveals that Mueller was just a puppet of the Jewish Trump-haters, and they kept him out of the public eye because he was a senile fool. In an NPR Radio interview:

(On regretting that he asked special prosecutor Robert Mueller to testify about the investigation into interference in the 2016 election)

I did understand immediately why his staff had been so protective and why they were so reluctant to have him testify. And I immediately told our members, "We need to cut down our questions. We can't ask for narrative answers. We need to be very precise in what we ask. We need to have the page references of the report ready." And it was painful, honestly, it was painful. And if I had known, I would not have pushed for his testimony.

So why was Mueller leading an investigation of the President, if all the insiders knew that he was incompetent?

The obvious answer is that Schiff and the others were carrying a coup. Their gripes against Trump were dishonest and meritless, so they needed a front man with sterling non-Jewish credentials and with no ability to resist orders.

They have the same thing in Joe Biden. Long record of public service. Not Jewish. Too senile to give a coherent narrative answer to a question. All of his important advisers and officers are Jewish. They control him much better than they would control some actual Jew, like Bernie Sanders.

Sunday, October 10, 2021

Hunting for Evidence for Adam and Eve

Evolutionist Jerry Coyne writes:
This is one of the most bizarre book reviews I’ve read in Science (or Nature). It’s a long (a full page) review of theologian William Lane Craig’s new book on Adam and Eve, supposedly a “Biblical and scientific exploration,” according to the book’s title
Having established that he should believe in Adam’s existence, Craig sets out to locate him. ...

Craig argues, for example, on the basis of brain size, that the first humans could not have lived before the time of Homo heidelbergensis and late Homo erectus. A number of facts about Neanderthals—symbolic behavior, ability to cooperate and plan, probable linguistic capacity, possession of human-specific genetic modifiers of brain development—convince him that they qualify as human. He therefore concludes that humanness was a trait inherited by Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Homo sapiens from their common ancestral populations and that Adam must have lived circa 700,000 years ago.

This is ridiculous for several reasons, the most obvious being the criteria for “humanness”, which, even if you accept them, must have evolved gradually, not appearing in one instant when Adam was born from a not-yet-human mother less cognitive than he. ...

Part of Craig’s “creditable synthesis” is to obviate the “bottleneck data”—population-genetic analysis showing that the smallest bottleneck in our species in the last several hundred thousand years must have been at least twelve thousand individuals. That is, the human population was never even close to one or two persons, much less Noah’s band of eight.

I am not sure this is so ridiculous.

First, there are a lot of scientific papers on the Eve Hypothesis.

Second, if it is possible to define human, as opposed to other apes, then there must have been a first human. That is simple math. A million years ago there were no humans.

Third, if Neanderthals were human 700k years ago, we have no idea what population bottlenecks might have occurred then.

It appears that it is conventional evolution wisdom that humans are just modern apes, differing in degree but not kind. They might deny that it makes sense to talk about whether Neanderthals were human.

But it does make sense. Neanderthals had larges brains and were qualitatively different from apes.

It seems unlikely to me that some Neanderthal man was suddenly a lot more conscious than the others 700k years ago, but it seems possible, and I don't know how we would know. If human traits did appear suddenly, they probably would have spread rapidly.

Saturday, October 09, 2021

White Women all went Nuts in 2014

This Quillette interview of Jonathan Haidt explains that White leftists went nuts, starting in about 2014.

He attributes the cause to Iphones and Facebook, but cannot prove it.

He says at 26:40 that now 54% of young liberal White women now answer Yes to the question: Has a doctor or mental health professional ever told you that you have a mental health problem?

This is stunning. If you told me that some group has X% admitting to a diagnosed mental health problem, then I would assume that the true mental illness incidence is more like 2X% or 3X%. But that would make them all mentally ill!

Haidt says these trends are happening all over the Anglosphere and in many other countries, but not everywhere.

He says the trend pre-dated the Donald Trump campaign, and helped make his election possible.

I am not convinced that this can be blamed on Iphones and Facebook. Maybe there was some infectious agent or alien brainwashing. Maybe it is the culmination of several decades of feminism.

This is another reason to rethink democracy. I do not see how it can work, if half the population is mentally ill. Haidt gives examples of crazy things that are commonly told to women, and which women believe.

Friday, October 08, 2021

Trend Towards Secession

The NY Times reports:
On Sept. 30, for example, the University of Virginia Center for Politics and Project Home Fire released a survey showing unexpectedly large percentages of voters agreeing with this statement: “The situation in America is such that I would favor states seceding from the union to form their own separate country.”

Among Trump voters, 52 percent agreed, with 25 percent in strong agreement; among Biden voters, 41 percent agreed, 18 percent strongly.

Presumably, this includes those who want their own state to secede, and those who want other states to secede.

I am not in favor of secession, but we are headed in that direction, and I don't see how the trend will be reversed.

Thursday, October 07, 2021

AG Garland Forces Teaching Racist Ideology

Lots of parents are protesting the teaching of Critical Race Theory in their local public schools, and now the feds are trying to intimidate those parents into silence.

The Conservative Treehouse reports:

AG Merrick Garland’s Daughter Married to Co-Founder of Education Company Selling Critical Race Theory Resource Material to School Districts

Well, well, well… This is interesting.  U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland recently instructed the FBI to begin investigating parents who confront school board administrators over Critical Race Theory indoctrination material. The U.S. Department of Justice issued a memorandum to the FBI instructing them to initiate investigations of any parent attending a local school board meeting who might be viewed as confrontational, intimidating or harassing.

Attorney General Merrick Garland’s daughter is Rebecca Garland.  In 2018 Rebecca Garland married Xan Tanner [LINK].  Mr. Xan Tanner is the current co-founder of a controversial education service company called Panorama Education. [LINK and LINK]  Panorama Education is the “social learning” resource material provider to school districts and teachers that teach Critical Race Theory.

Xan is an unusual name. The NY Times says they were married by a rabbi.

Christopher F. Rufo explains Critical Race Theory: What It Is and How to Fight It, and is being chased off Twitter for saying the Biden administration is investigating parents for being domestic terrorists. Okay, maybe the parents aren't being called terrorists yet, but what else would be the grounds for the FBI getting involved in local school board disputes?

Here is Sen. Ted Cruz accusing the US DoJ of treating protesting parents as domestic terrorists. Tucker Carlson explains this DoJ move is so outrageous.

Wednesday, October 06, 2021

Capitalist Exploitation of Land and Bodies

New book:
Not "A Nation of Immigrants": Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion (Hardcover) ...

Most of us have heard America referred to as a “melting pot” or a “nation of immigrants.” While these self-congratulatory phrases paint a rosy picture of our past and present, they obscure or downright ignore some of the core tenets of this nation: white supremacy, settler colonialism, and capitalist exploitation of land and bodies. ...

This book is one of our eight selected titles for our 2021 Fall Reading Challenge. ...

This is not in the book, but perhaps the greatest capitalist exploitation of bodies is going on right now, in the form of immigration for cheap labor, and the student loan program.

Today's teenagers are convinced that they must complete a college education, or they will never own a home or share in the American dream. To pay for college, they must incur large debts that may take a decade or more to pay off. The debts cannot be removed by bankuptcy.

Capitalism works by dividing the people into an investor class, and a debtor class. Large punishing debts are what keeps the debtor class working productively. It starts with student loan debt, then credit card debt, and finally mortgage debts. Employer-based health insurance and child support orders are also very effective at turning citizens into wage slaves. The debtors are kept working to payoff the debts, but with new purchases and refinancing, hardly anyone becomes debt-free.

The above book is correct that the USA is not really a nation of immigrants. That is just a slogan concocted to perpetuate the importation of cheap labor. The USA was created and built by White settlors and native Whites.

Monday, October 04, 2021

Non-racial Explanations for European Superiority

Jerry Barnett writes in Quillette:
Guns, Germs, and Steel is a Powerful Anti-Racist Book. So Why Doesn’t the Left Love It?

[Jared] Diamond went on, six years later, to publish his best-known book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. It set out to explain in vivid detail, region by region, and era by era, how some branches of humanity came to dominate and even eradicate others. ...

GGS provides an account of the entirety of human history over the past 13,000 years, since humans began to transition from hunting and gathering lifestyles into food-producing ones. ...

GGS opens by considering an apparently simple question that Diamond had been asked years earlier by Yali, a New Guinean politician: Why did Europeans have so much cargo (technologies and manufactured goods), while New Guineans had so little? To extend the question: Why are some societies so much more technologically and economically developed than others? It seems astonishing that such an obvious question about human history should still be either difficult or controversial to answer, but it is both.

The real problem with the book is that its explanations are speculations for things that happened millennia ago, but he has nothing to explain the last 500 years, when Europe leap-frogged way ahead of the rest of the world.

Diamond doesn’t try to deny that there may be marked genetic differences between different branches of humanity—indeed, early in the book, he makes a strong (possibly devil’s advocate) case as to why he believes New Guinean highlanders may have evolved to be more intelligent than Europeans.
Okay, I guess that is why leftists were supposed to like the books. Europeans are less intelligent than the most primitive people on Earth.
If the racist Right believed that global disparities resulted from innate differences in ability, then the anti-racist Left would provide its own counter-explanation. The answer it found was systemic racism—the idea that white success and dominance resulted from oppression by whites of all other groups.

Systemic racism can explain, at least partly, the significant economic gap between blacks and whites in the United States, and also in South Africa, but this idea applies in few other parts of the world.

It does not apply in the USA either, as systemic racism does got explain any of the White/Black gaps.

Barnett goes on to discuss Diamond's theories for what happened 13,000 years ago, but all of the developmental advantages were in China, Persia, Mideast, Africa, and India.

A similar case against white superiority is made by the New Guinea highlanders, who by 9,000 years ago (long before agriculture had reached Europe) had developed one of the most sophisticated systems of agriculture on the planet.
Again, none of this explains why Europe passed up everybody 500 years ago.

There are explanations available, and I have posted some on this blog.

I think that Diam was a big hero to the Left for this book. It won many prizes, in spite of many defects. He has many dubious generalizations about ancient societies lacking a written record.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust and the atrocities committed by European empires, the Western world awoke to the horrors that humans are capable of committing against those they perceived to be inferior.
Barnett is losing me here. XXth century atrocities were not particularly European, as they were also in Russia, China, Cambodia, Turkey, Africa, etc. And they were not against those perceived to be inferior. There were usually ethnic and political reasons.
It is not surprising in this context that postwar liberals set out to eliminate the concept of race from Western thinking.
On the contrary, liberals do everything to try to force everyone into racial thinking. The conservatives are the only ones trying to be race neutral today.
But in doing so, the Left has progressively painted itself into an ideological corner. Guns, Germs, and Steel advanced the discussion by providing a powerful explanation for disparities in outcome that relied neither on racial differences nor on a belief in invisible power structures, and on that basis deserves to be seen as an important contribution to the ongoing battle for equal rights.
Except that Diamond's arguments are scientifically dubious, that they fail to explain modern disparities anyway, and that they do not do anything to support the racial hatred that today's Left is founded on.

I am glad to see Quillette try to address these grand questions of human history, but I don't think the Left of today has much interest in non-racial explanations for European advancement. They would be all about hating Whites, no matter how Whites got where they are.

MIT just canceled a big invited geophysics lecture, because the speaker expressed opinions of race neutrality. So favoring race neutrality does not help with today's Left.

Sunday, October 03, 2021

Leftists Trigger White Racial Consciousness

David Bernstein writes:
I discovered that if one googles "white racial consciousness" you will find many articles praising it and encouraging more of it–the vast majority not from right-wing white nationalists, but from progressive academics, who somehow think this is a good thing that leads to positive social outcomes. The idea seems to be that if you make people more conscious of their whiteness, they will recognize their white privilege, and this will lead them to be allies in the cause of anti-racism.

I suppose this should not come as a shock. Back in 1991, I saw the late Professor Derrick Bell, a well-known Critical Race Theorist from Harvard Law School, talk about how proud he was that he got his students, including a specific Jewish woman, who did not think of themselves as white, to recognize and become much more conscious of their whiteness.

What strikes me about this literature is how it ignores what seems to me to be the obvious dangers of encouraging a majority of the population to emphasize and internalize a racial identity, and, moreover, to think of themselves as having racial interests opposed to those of the non-white population.

That ship has sailed, I am afraid.

The non-white political groups have gone fully anti-white. The famous Ibram X. Kendi book starts:

The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.
That's right. He wants more goodies for Blacks by discriminating against Whites.

There is no political room for race neutrality anymore. Kendi says you are either a racist or an antiracist. And they are really the same thing, as they are just advocating for one's own race.

It is surely true that a lot of White do not identify as White, until they see that they want no part of the White-hating leftist activism of today.

Saturday, October 02, 2021

Divorce is an Act of Radical Self-Love

I mentioned that Jewish law very different ideas about marriage and family, and now a NY Times essay explains:
Divorce Can Be an Act of Radical Self-Love
Sept. 30, 2021

By Lara Bazelon

Ms. Bazelon is a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law and the author of the forthcoming book “Ambitious Like a Mother.”

I used to believe that divorce is a terrible thing, particularly when children are involved. Growing up, I absorbed cultural tropes about absent fathers in efficiency apartments, mothers struggling to support themselves, and awful stepparents and unwanted stepsiblings. To this day, divorce is portrayed as precarious and grim. Parents whose marriages break apart are made to feel they have failed catastrophically. Divorce is shameful, traumatic and Bad For The Kids.

But I’ve learned that divorce can also be an act of radical self-love that leaves the whole family better off. …

Recently I asked my daughter, now 10, how she felt. She told me: “Some of my friends spend more time with their parents, but I have to give you a lot of credit because those kids are in two-parent families. Our criminal justice system is horrible and messed up, and you are trying to help it get fixed.”

Wow, she seems to really believe that radical self-love is a good thing, and that her daughter is persuade of the goodness of divorce because mom is a law professor pursuing Jewish social justice work.

Bazelon is the grand-daughter of a famous Jewish judge who actively worked to change American law.

An anonymous describes the result of this sort of thinking:

Legally, marriage is fundamentally broken. I would be interested if anyone has insight into how family law has changed over the years, but what is clear is that it creates all the wrong incentives. There are no negative consequences to divorce, and least for the non-breadwinner (typically the woman). To the contrary: there’s only upside for her. Divorce gets her 1) independence 2) custody of the kids 3) half of the man’s assets 4) typically the house and 5) abundant financial support in the form of alimony and child support. Why would she *not* get divorced at the earliest chance, at the first spat or bump in the road? She’d be crazy not to. Why would she not explode her own relationship by withholding sex, or being nasty, or humiliating her spouse in public, or having an affair? It’s no skin off her nose. She has all the power, she knows it, and the way she treats him proves it.

Given these incentives, unsurprisingly, most divorce is initiated by women: men don’t want to lose their house, kids and retirement. They don’t want to support an ungrateful woman in perpetuity while she sleeps with other men in the home he built. I would wager that the majority of husband-initiated divorces are, essentially, because she’s become so unbearable and his life so miserable that he’ll do anything to escape. Or, he has nothing to lose perhaps because he was smart enough to get a prenup.

In any event, and being as blame neutral as possible: the correct construction of a “life long” commitment is not to architect it such that by its very design it incentivizes one or both parties to blow it up. Crazy that this is not already the case.

Besides these points, marriage has become godless and often childless. If you’re not gonna have kids, why get married? So you can throw a big wedding party and she gets to be a narcissistic princess for a day? A marriage which isn’t about something bigger than yourself, like god, children and the union of two families, is vapid, narcissistic and built on sand. The marriages which still work are those in deeply religious communities who ostracize the women who initiate divorce or otherwise become so nasty as to justify it. Secular marriage is completely broken. It’s no surprise that most fail.

Friday, October 01, 2021

Australia Loses Guns, and Freedom

Anti-gun advocates often point to Australia as a White country that successfully banned guns.

The story is exaggerated, as you can read here. People used to say that it stopped mass shootings, but that is no longer true.

The ban only reduced gun ownership from 8% to 5%, so it is not applicable to the USA, where everyone has guns:

So, could such a system work in the United States? The answer is likely no.

There are several reasons; as The New York Times reported, “Australians, on the whole, were happy to give up their guns and accept the new restrictions.” Americans, who, unlike their Australian cousins, have a Second Amendment that provided the right to keep and bear arms and that has been in place for nearly 240 years.

Okay, but Australia is still a free country, right?

Nope. As Tucker Carlson explains, freedom is dead in Australia.