FROM A FRIEND: “When dog parks begin replacing playgrounds, it’s a good indicator your society has lost the plot.”
Archive for 2022
January 3, 2022
IF YOU HAVE NO FRIENDS, look at yourself and ask (1) do you really want them? (2) what are you doing to get or keep friends, and to be a friend yourself?
JIM TREACHER: AOC Knows You Want Her.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Colleges Shutting Down for Spring Semester are Betraying Students.
IS IT HYPOCRISY, GASLIGHTING OR JUST INSANITY? I suppose one might embrace the power of “and.” You remember George Zimmerman, the “White Hispanic” accused and acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin?
Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg certainly do, and they each utilized the February 2020 anniversary of that tragedy to play the race card on Twitter. Here’s Saint Peter’s tweet:
And here’s Elizabeth Warren’s:
That’s seemingly innocuous and makes me want to sing “Kumbaya” or “Climb Every Mountain.” Unfortunately for Warren and Buttigieg, George Zimmerman doesn’t see it that way, and filed suit against the two, claiming that because of the natural association in readers’ minds between him and Martin he was defamed. A federal court dismissed Zimmerman’s case a few weeks ago with leave to replead because of certain procedural errors in his Complaint.
Here’s the interesting part: While several infirmities in Zimmerman’s case may see him lose — this time with prejudice — buried in the judicial opinion is a discussion about how Warren and Buttigieg claimed …wait for it, wait for it… that calling someone a “racist” is not defamatory. Let that sink in.
In today’s political and media environment, no statement will expose a person to “shame, ridicule, scorn or opprobrium” as much as being called a “racist.” People lose their careers over it, and businesses are ruined when that allegation is splattered on them. You stand a better chance of maintaining the left’s respect if you rape a child (See, e.g., Polanski, Roman) than if you are caught making a bigoted remark.
That may be right, that may be wrong, but in CrazyWorld, Warren and Buttigieg filed arguments to the court claiming that “an allegation of racism or white supremacy is a matter of opinion and therefore not even actionable.” Say what? On the one hand it’s the worst thing you can call a person, but when it come to accountability, no, it doesn’t count.
It gets worse. The Court rejected Warren and Buttegiegs’ argument, holding that their assertion that “the implication that someone has racist or white supremacist attributes is not defamatory at all, let alone defamatory per se is without merit.”
As I said, there are many reasons Zimmerman could or should ultimately lose his case. But at the same time, I don’t ever want to hear either of these two craven liars take anyone to task for being a bigot, because, according to them, it’s apparently “just” opinion and can’t possibly — as a matter of law — be a bad thing.
YES: Why You Should Continually Maintain Your Everyday Carry Gear. I just dropped off one of my backup carry guns with the armorer for a full inspection and ultrasonic cleaning. I do that every couple of years for all my guns. I field strip them and clean them myself, of course, but now and again I want to go beyond that.
MAYBE WHEN HE PLAYS A WHINY COWARDLY LOSER ON TV, HE’S NOT ACTING: Patton Oswalt apologizes for being friends with Dave Chappelle.
CORN, POPPED: Hard Left Already Plotting 2024 Primary Challenge Against Biden. “Chatter about a challenge from Biden’s left flank suddenly erupted in recent days, likely because Sen. Joe Manchin killed the president’s social welfare bill two weeks ago.”
Well, it’s only mostly dead.
THAT’S STILL A LOT OF PEOPLE: Only the most brainwashed True Believers will cling to the failed narrative.
WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH CHRIS MATTHEWS IS A VOICE OF SANITY: Chris Matthews to Dems: “I Tried to Warn We Were Headed Too Far Left.” “The leftists on Twitter immediately pounced on Matthews. It’s hilarious because you can tell no one bothered to Google his past comments.”
EVERGREEN HEADLINE: It’s Jan. 6 week.
The final question: What about November’s elections? Voters are deeply concerned about the economy, about inflation, about COVID, about crime, about education, about President Joe Biden’s competence, and other issues that are becoming increasingly difficult for Democrats. Some in the party seem to know that fixating on last year, and on a former president, might not be the best way to address those concerns. Last month, Politico reported that Democrats “hoped the [January 6 committee] would wrap up its work this spring, leaving the party plenty of time before the midterms to pivot its focus to kitchen-table issues that resonate with voters.” That is not going to happen.
So yes, this is Jan. 6 week. But if some Democrats have their way, every week of 2022 will be Jan. 6 week. And then voters will have their say.
Some on the left see January 6th week as also being good for business:
“DISRUPTIVE CONTENT”: Facebook Blocks Conservative Children’s Book Publisher from Advertising.
Here’s their website where you can still order their books.
MATHEMATICS IS THE LANGUAGE OF NATURE: What if Math Is a Fundamental Part of Nature, Not Something Humans Came Up With?
MARK STEYN: America Sticks Out Its Tush.
America has cut to the chase — indeed, beyond the chase. We have reached that moment in Blazing Saddles when Mel Brooks throws away the script, and the brawling cowboys on one Hollywood soundstage crash through the wall into the next soundstage and start slugging the gentlemen of the chorus rehearsing a dance number called “The French Mistake”:
Throw out your hands!
Stick out your tush!
Hands on your hips
Give ’em a push
You’ll be surprised
You’re doing the French Mistake…America has literally lost the plot. On the last soundstage, all parts are interchangeable: Men become women, and the grizzled butch coaches of college athletics can’t wait to put ’em on the ladies’ track team. Women become men, and then pregnant men, and then threaten the hospital for the humiliation of having to give birth in a “maternity ward”. Warner Bros gives J K Rowling the bum’s rush for being so out of it as to think periods are something women have. In the TERF wars, lesbians are transphobic because they don’t wish to date women with penises. At dark on the streets of US cities, wispy, spindly, elderly eternal “college” boys cheer on hefty psycho-trannies with purple hair and hirsute cleavage as they light up precinct houses. Indulgent prosecutors release them without bail – or, if bail is still quaintly required, Seth Rogen or a Joe Biden staffer will cover it. Stories with less helpful narratives – Democrat Congresswomen getting carjacked, or blacks slaughtering blacks every weekend in Chicago, or black criminals (sprung from the big house by woke DAs) mowing down white grannies at a Christmas parade – are instantly memory-holed. Even real people adjust their actual lives to conform with the needs of the greater narrative: Thus the Vice President of the United States, the first in history to announce her pronouns on Twitter, purports to have celebrated “Kwanzaa” during her childhood in, um, a high-caste Indian household in, er, Quebec.
This is a way more surreal finale than Blazing Saddles. In today’s America, everything’s ablaze[.]
* * * * * * * *
Pace Mel Brooks, it’s not a “French Mistake” but an American one: Emanuel Macron may be a metrosexual globalist dinky boy but he denounces “le wokisme” more vigorously than any anglo leader, because he grasps that it infects everything, and in America and Her Majesty’s dominions has already done so.
In France, le wokisme comes a massive case of deja vu: “But why now, and why in a country like France, with its very different history from the United States? For that matter, why has wokeism taken hold in other European countries, where the radical movement seems in many ways to be an imitation of its American counterpart? In France, there’s an oft-noted irony within the answer. Despite vocabulary that seems appropriated from American academia, the main concepts originated with a group of leftist French academics in the 1960s and 1970s, who became the rage in many American universities and whose ideas, though simplified and sometimes caricatured, have been enthusiastically reimported into France.”
THIS YEAR, CANCEL CULTURE COMES FOR — hang on, checking notes — NORMAN MAILER:
Unfortunately, Wolff’s article is behind a Substack subscriber-only paywall, but we’ve seen this movie numerous times before by now, including Woody Allen’s autobiography and (almost) Jordan Peterson’s sequel to his best-selling 12 Rules for Life. It’s all the more astonishing when Mailer’s “White Negro” essay is readily found online, and Baldwin’s response is available for Esquire subscribers.
Regarding the former, Roger Kimball wrote in 1997:
Mailer’s flirtation with criminals like Gary Gilmore and Jack Abbott must be seen as the fulfillment of his celebration of the “psychopath” as an existential hero. In his notorious essay “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” first published in Dissent in 1957, Mailer definitively articulated an ethic that underlies not only his own view of the world but also the view that would inform the cultural revolution of the 1960s. In tone, “The White Negro” is a panoply of “existentialist” rant. In content, it is a manifesto on behalf of moral nihilism. Mailer speaks casually of “the totalitarian tissues of American society” and invokes “the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years.” The only authentic response to this situation, he says, is “to divorce oneself from society” and “to encourage the psychopath in oneself.” This is the strategy of “the hipster,” who has “absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and [who] for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro.” (Mailer’s stereotypical portrayal of blacks as beastlike sexual athletes is one of the many distasteful things about the essay.)
The rest of “The White Negro” is a glorification of the hipster and his ethic of promiscuous sex, drug-taking, and criminal violence. The hipster, Mailer explains, is part of “an elite with the potential ruthlessness of an elite, and a language most adolescents can understand instinctively, for the hipster’s intense view of existence matches their experience and their desire to rebel.” Mailer conjures the image—it is what made the essay infamous—of eighteen-year-old hoodlums who “beat in the brains of a candy-store keeper.” For Mailer such behavior is acceptable, even laudable, because the psychopath, by murdering, demonstrates his “courage” and “purge[s] his violence.” To the objection that it does not take much courage to kill someone older and weaker, Mailer explains that “one murders not only a weak fifty-year-old man but an institution as well, one violates private property, one enters into a new relation with the police and introduces a dangerous element into one’s life.” Mailer goes on to explain that “at bottom, the drama of the psychopath is that he seeks love.” Not, however, “love as the search for a mate, but love as the search for an orgasm more apocalyptic than the one which preceded it. Orgasm is his therapy—he knows at the seed of his being that good orgasm opens his possibilities and bad orgasm imprisons him.” This is one reason that the hipster adores jazz: “jazz,” Mailer tells us, “is orgasm.” The hipster’s quest “for absolute sexual freedom” entails the necessity of “becoming a sexual outlaw.”
It is not only sexual morality that the hipster discards. “Hip abdicates from any conventional moral responsibility because it would argue that the results of our actions are unforeseeable, and so we cannot know if we do good or bad. … The only Hip morality … is to do what one feels whenever and wherever it is possible, and … to be engaged in one primal battle: to open the limits of the possible for oneself, for oneself alone, because that is one’s need.”
“The White Negro” adumbrates practically everything that went wrong with American society under the assault of left-wing radicalism in the 1960s, from the addiction to violence, drugs, pop music, and sexual polymorphism, to the moral idiocy, jejune anti-Americanism, and mindless glorification of narcissistic irresponsibility and extreme states of experience. Although many critics took issue with Mailer’s exoneration of violence, the real message of the essay—if it feels good, do it!—was just then beginning to sweep the country with irresistible force. “The White Negro” represented an important opening salvo in the war on convention, restraint, and traditional morality. This, not his literary accomplishment, was the ultimate secret of Mailer’s broad appeal. Mailer, as Joseph Epstein observed, “was one of the key men responsible for releasing the Dionysian strain in American life.” He promised his readers what they longed to hear: that ultimate, self-centered ecstasy was theirs for the taking. Mailer once said that he would “settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.” He did not make the revolution, but he assuredly became one of its most egregious emblems.
Apparently, today’s puritanical left aren’t interested in exploring the worldview of their grandfathers to see how we got here, and are content to airbrush Mailer from history, 14 years after his death. Hopefully, as with Woody Allen’s autobiography, a smaller publisher will release what Random House was bullied out of publishing. In the meantime, as Andrew Sullivan asked his fellow leftists last year: What Happened To You?
“A NUCLEAR TRUTH BOMB”: Working-Age Deaths Up Whopping 40% Says Life Insurance CEO and NOT Just COVID.
NEWSWEEK: 2021: The Year of the Ruling Class’s Crackdown on Dissent.
The year 2020 was the year of the lockdown, when the Ruling Class arbitrarily, capriciously and selectively suspended the natural rights bedrock upon which American life—indeed, life itself—relies.
The year 2021 closes as the year of the crackdown, when the Ruling Class weaponized its powers to crush dissenters from its Wokeist-Scientist orthodoxy in arguably the most far-reaching, brazen and lawless assault on Americans by the state and its private-sector adjuncts in our nation’s history.
This was the year that the campus became the country. Those engaging in speech that ran afoul of the Ruling Class’ party line were treated as physical dangers to the homeland, demanding the full force of the public and private sectors to deter, punish and subdue them.
Many in our ruling class see what’s happened in Hong Kong as a role model. They need to be made to regret their choice.
CLEAN ENERGY: Chinese Utility Terminates ‘Green’ Energy Plant in Xinjiang Due to Pollutant Emissions. “In a Dec. 28 filing to the Shanghai Stock Exchange, the company said that owing to the malfunction of an exhaust gas purification system, the operation of its Hami Xuanli Gas Power project had improperly discharged a considerable amount of wastewater containing phenol, or carbolic acid.”
PBR’S SOCIAL MEDIA STAFFER APPARENTLY SLAMMED TOO MANY PBRs FOR BREAKFAST: Pabst Blue Ribbon helpfully suggests a NSFW substitute activity for those of you who are ‘not drinking this January.’
Alternate explanation: Antonio Brown lined up his first post-NFL job surprisingly fast! Curiously, it goes on in that vein for numerous tweets. (The one above which kicked things off was deleted after more sober heads prevailed at the Pabst Brewing Company.)
THE LAPTOP CLASS GETS COVID.
For nearly two years, we’ve wondered how this will end. In retrospect, the clue is in how it began.
The initial lockdowns had a strong class-based component. The working classes were assigned the job of delivering groceries, tending to the sick, driving the trucks filled with goods, keeping the lights on, and keeping the fuel running. The professional class, among whom were the people who pushed lockdowns in the name of disease avoidance/suppression, were assigned the job of staying home in their pajamas and staying safe.
It all happened seemingly in an instant. We all had to figure out whether our job qualified and what we should do. More striking at the time was the very notion that government bureaucrats could slice and dice the population this way, deciding what can open and what cannot, who must work and who must not, what we can and cannot do based on our station in life.
So it now seems obvious to me. This whole disaster would finally come to an end (or at least the end would begin) when it became obvious that the great strategy of class division and demarcation would fail to protect the Zoom class from infection.
That day has finally arrived, with cases soaring in many parts of the country and hitting everyone of every class, whether they are being “careful” and adhering to the “mitigation measures” or not. What’s even more striking is how even the vaccines, which were supposed to codify the wisdom of class segregation, have not protected against infection.
All of this seems to have taken place over the course of December 2021, with the arrival of the seemingly mild Omicron variant. Still the other variants circulate widely, causing various degrees of severity with or without hospitalization much less death. In other words, millions from among all classes of people are finally getting sick. At this point, we seem to be seeing a big shift in attitudes.
A lot of this comes from casual conversation. A person comes down with Covid, perhaps confirmed by the newly fashionable at-home tests. “Did you get vaccinated?” the person is invariably asked. The answer comes back: yes and boosted. That’s when the chill happens. It appears that nothing can ultimately protect people from this. In which case, it is time we change our tune.
“Thousands who ‘followed the rules’ are about to get covid. They shouldn’t be ashamed,” headlines the Washington Post.
Feeling ashamed about getting covid-19 isn’t healthy or helpful, experts agree…. Remember: You’re not a failure. “Millions of other people have gotten sick,” (Seema) Varma says. “Unfortunately, you’re not alone. You’re not the only one. You’re not the first one to get covid, and you won’t be the last.” And that positive test, she reiterates, “doesn’t make you an irresponsible person.”
So on the piece goes, with a complete flip of the narrative they have long preached: anyone who gets Covid has failed to comply, disregards of Fauci’s advice, probably lives in a Red state, rejects the science, and otherwise bears the mark of selfishness and the desire to put freedom ahead of public health.
Getting Covid has heretofore been part of a human stain, consistent with the very long history of demonization of the diseased and the attempt to attribute sickness to moral sin.
Plus: “The driving ambition here, though never explicitly stated, was to assign the burden of bearing the disease to the lessers among us. That is a conventional model used in illiberal societies throughout history. The elites who had both granted and benefited from lockdowns took it as axiomatic that they deserved disease purity and health more than those who worked to keep society running. And that scheme seemed to work for a very long time. They stayed home and stayed safe and kept clean while the virus circulated in season after season.”
But the press is rushing forward in its commonplace role of helping the gentry class feel good about itself.
Flashback: America’s elites are waging class war on workers and small biz. “Lockdowns — where the laptop class stays home while working-class people bring them stuff — were enacted in many states. States that had them did no better, and often worse, than states that did not. This became obvious early but resulted in no change of policy. . . . So is it fair to call the overclass response to the pandemic a failure? Well, certainly not for the overclass, whose members are richer, more powerful and more secure in their positions than a year ago. For America? Well, that’s another story.”