Archive for 2021

OF COURSE THEY ARE. YOU CAN’T HAVE A PROPER INVASION UNLESS IT GOES EVERYWHERE:  WaPo: Biden Admin Planning To Fly Migrants From Mexican Border To Northern States.

And I can’t — can’t — underscore the stupidity of people coming in enough. Because you know what? Most of these people come from sh*tholes. They can sniff the air and see the signs when things are about to go very very wrong. If I can do it, they can do it.  And they’re here…. because they think they’re tougher than us, I guess?  They’re not. They won’t like what comes next.

YOU KNOW THE WAY TO STOP RACE PROBLEMS? STOP TALKING ABOUT RACE:  The Weaponization of Race And The Asian Model Minority Myth.

Take it off the forms. Stop demanding people conform to the slot you’ve assigned a race. Stop obsessing about. Stop talking about it.  No one talks about injustice against redheads. And yet for years centuries gingers were a despised minority with horrible slanders attached to them.  And then we stopped talking about it. We stopped considering them a separate race.

Stop talking about it. Just stop.

A LOT OF CREATIVE PEOPLE HAVE BEEN WRESTLING WITH DEPRESSION: In the face of the last year of covidiocy a lot of my friends — not all writers, but most of them in creative professions — have been having trouble working, concentrating.  Part of this, of course is hubris. We keep feeling if we had shouted louder, done more, if we could just have explained where this was headed more clearly, none of this would have happened.

This is stupid, of course. As I’ve found in the last year, there is a limit to what you can do, see you things ever so clearly, in the face of irrational mob panic stoked by experienced demagogues.

A couple of days ago a friend pointed me at this post by my friend Robert Bidinotto (link takes you to the first book of his thriller series.)  I don’t know why Facebook didn’t show me this post, except the site is the most counterproductive thing ever, and I only stay on it till most of my fans migrate.  But I’m glad I was pointed at Robert’s post.

Yes, I know the post is long but he’s right. And we all need to listen to him. And maybe find our heart and our vision again.  All we can do is all we can do. But we need to keep doing it.

A BRIEF, OPTIMISTIC THOUGHT ABOUT CULTURAL CHANGE.
I have heard a great deal of despair lately about the state of our culture. Reading self-defined “cultural conservatives” (such as Rod Dreher) wailing that “all is lost,” it is easy to give in to pessimism.
Such pessimism seems warranted if you define the cultural battlefield in terms of *existing institutions.* After all, evidence of decadence and decline is pervasive within our political, economic, educational, entertainment, and social institutions. Most have become captives or accomplices of the left-nihilists.
But is that really the battlefield?
History reveals to me different lessons. Such as: how a Renaissance and Enlightenment can emerge from the tribalism and mysticism of the Dark Ages, in which all institutions were hopelessly corrupt and coercive. Or how America itself could emerge from the historic swamp of universal despotism.
We can learn from our enemies, too. The so-called “Frankfurt School” started as a mere school of thought — a bunch of Marxist professors in Germany. Ditto, the Fabian Socialists in the UK. We should study how they accomplished what they did, and take notes.
We also should take lessons from what the military calls “asymmetrical warfare”: how a small group of insurgents can fight a much larger, better equipped and supplied force to a stalemate — and even eventually beat them. (Study George Washington and Francis Marion, for examples.) No, I’m not being literal; I’m arguing that the military analogy applies to the cultural battlefield, too: the battle over ideas and values.
But creating new ideas, arguments, perspectives, and inspiring *visions* is not a numbers game. The creators of new ideas are always few, and usually solitary. Yet those few can eventually serve as navigators for an entire society. It was that truth that led Percy Shelley to say that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” The same can be said of an influential religious leader, philosopher, or narrative artist: think Jesus, Aristotle, Homer. Throughout history, these visionaries have been the de facto “asymmetrical culture warriors” of the world.
Today, would-be asymmetrical culture warriors have access to technology, even at the individual level, that those earlier purveyors of ideas and values couldn’t have dreamed of — technological innovations that the military would call “force multipliers.” So, rather than gnash our teeth at the reach of mainstream- and social-media giants, or the influence of big corporations, schools, and governmental bodies, we “outsiders” can use technology to “hit them where they ain’t” — to spread our ideas and values in new forms, among receptive target audiences
This is way too big a topic for a Facebook post. But those of you with individualist perspectives in our collectivist era — especially, those of you in the storytelling arts — ought to think creatively about this. Above all, remember the unstoppable power of a captivating idea or perspective — and the fact that it takes only a single creative visionary to give it life in the world.

READER BOOK PLUG: From Evan Sayet, The Woke Supremacy: An Anti-Socialist Manifesto.

Here’s the blurb from Kurt Schlichter: “You owe it to yourself to read this vital new book by a true legend in the movement.” (Sorry, not available at Barnes & Noble.)

GOVERNMENT- AND MEDIA-INDUCED NEUROSIS: Why we’re scared for the pandemic to end. “Nearly half of Americans say they feel uneasy thinking about in-person interaction once the pandemic ends.”

OPEN THREAD: It’s up to you.

SPACE: Elon Musk shows off SpaceX’s 1st Starship Super Heavy booster. “Starship and Super Heavy will start flying soon, if all goes according to Musk’s plan. The billionaire entrepreneur recently said that SpaceX aims to launch Starship to orbit sometime this year, and that he envisions the Starship-Super Heavy duo being fully operational by 2023.”

WHY IS WESLEY LOWERY SUCH A RACIST? “Why does Lowery think he knows what how white people will think and feel if they read Don Lemon’s book? Why wouldn’t we look at one another and unemotionally remark, ‘Yeah, we already knew that’? Why does Lowery stereotype us as wearers of pearls? Why is he painting a picture of us shocked by things that are well-known? What does he think white people might not be ‘willing to believe’? This is casual smearing of a racial group.”

The answer, of course, is because he can get away with it. And even get praised for it. In other words the same reasons we’ve always had for people being publicly racist.

SO MUCH FOR THE “ANTI-ASIAN” SPIN: Tracy Quan: Don’t Forget The Atlanta Shooting Is A Hate Crime Against Sex Workers.

Mainstream Americans, including many Asian Americans, are quick to blame racism yet unready to discuss an older hatred — what my French friends call “la putophobie” (a term more pleasing to the eye than the clunky compound “whorephobia”). It’s the last acceptable form of hate speech, someone once told me, and persists within minority communities where being a good immigrant is conflated with sexual virtue. Speculation about the spas where the massacre occurred is fed by prejudice. Amplified by so-called antitrafficking voices, this prejudice is dangerously toxic.

Fueled by religious fanaticism and illiberal forms of feminism, by punitive laws and tabloid headlines, this bias breeds self-loathing in young men who should be learning how to nurture, not extinguish, the varieties of human connection.

But Democrats need the “anti-Asian hate crime” storyline because they’re starting to lose Asians over affirmative action.