« First « Previous Comments 26 - 65 of 69 Next » Last » Search these comments
The young left is becoming even more rigid than the old. David Leonhardt of the New York Times noted that according to Kaiser Family Foundation data, “young Democrats are more worried about getting sick from Covid than old Democrats, even though the science says the opposite should be true.” He extends too much credit in assuming they actually care about “science.” Science is a process for obtaining and refining information about the natural world. Sensibly applied, it should tell you things like you don’t have to wear masks outdoors, or that children ought to be in school since the risk to them is much lower than to adults. Applied as a civic religion, it leads to huddling into confined plywood boxes on the sidewalks of restaurants so as to avoid the risk of being inside.
We are not really that divided. We just get that impression because of the media control by the left.
We are not really that divided. We just get that impression because of the media control by the left
richwicks saysI only joined the Republican party to cast a primary vote for Ron Paul, then they cancelled the vote when he was going to win in 2008.
@richwicks, are you able to explain what, exactly, happened to Ron Paul when he was about to win? I've never seen an explanation I understood.
https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/19/america-is-not-divided-its-being-hijacked/?source=patrick.net
We are not really that divided. We just get that impression because of the media control by the left.
the candidates aren't picked by individual supporters. They are picked by the parties.
Ron Paul supporters walked in (dinner wasn't mandatory to vote), and the vote was simply cancelled. That was in 2008.
richwicks saysthe candidates aren't picked by individual supporters. They are picked by the parties.
@Richwicks
That brings up a logical question..."How/why, then, was Trump allowed to get the nomination"?
richwicks saysRon Paul supporters walked in (dinner wasn't mandatory to vote), and the vote was simply cancelled. That was in 2008.
He was redistricted out of his safe R district in TX. R's in TX made it swing district to get rid of him. Strange until you understand that it is uniparty
."How/why, then, was Trump allowed to get the nomination"?
WineHorror1 says."How/why, then, was Trump allowed to get the nomination"?
Trump was hired because they thought Hillary could easily defeat him. They tried to run an unknown black man with a racist past but he beat her. They thought a womanizing playboy billionaire who was also old, white, and male would be the ticket to put the first woman in the oval office. They thought wrong.
many have marveled at the speed at which the covidian clamorers have pivoted to war frenzy. it was near instant, like some sort of phase change, a sublimation straight from solid to gas.
but this is no marvel nor is it, in fact, even a state change. it’s just a property of the new class of society that spends its lives in and derives its identity from its constant state of aversive arousal and agitation. this tribe is always and everywhere at war because its identify is rooted not in self but in “against.”
this is the agitariat.
we like to imagine ourselves as people who have ideas. this is a healthy structure. but for many, this is less and less true. many have become their ideas and woven their externalized values so deeply into the marrow and integument of their identities that the two become inseverable. the inherent tendency of social media to devolve into tribes enhances and perhaps even requires this.
i suspect it comes down to simple human drives to be perceived as virtuous (however such is currently defined) and for status (a similarly fluid hierarchy). ...
you have oppressed me, therefore i claim the moral high ground.
in a pinch, alliance with the aggrieved and championing them against others while engaging in performative self-flagellation and the “checking of privilege” will do.
... “i am kind” cuts no ice with those who demand that you demonstrate loyalty to a performative cause. “all lives matter” becomes a heretical utterance, proof that you are racist. this is a weaponized evangelical set of doctrines carried by weaponized evangelical people who must always divide the world into a fight between “us” and “them” in order to preserve personal meaning and coherence. that is the nature of deriving one’s sense of self from oppositional external validation. ...
... a week ago they all claimed to know a child who died of covid. now they all know a brave ukranian who stopped a tank with his bare hands.
last year no sane human would take trump’s bleach-based poison. today you’re a subhuman horror for refusing the beneficence of the “fauci ouchie.” ...
this has absolutely nothing to do with the underlying causes: it’s entirely about status and identity.
this is why they can all flip so instantly from one cause to another. the covid narrative is in tatters. having supported lockdowns and masking and vaccine mandates is increasingly low status. you look like a loser. you look wrong. and that is NOT a pleasing basis for an identity for those who generate their sense of self from their performative political takes. so you jump onto the first high status looking bandwagon that rolls by.
this has several weird, non-intuitive effects.
old causes suddenly vaporize and are gone from all memory. remember when i told you there would soon be a time when you could not find anyone that admitted to having been pro lock down, mask, up, and close the schools? well, this is how that works. the switch flips, the virus is gone, and we have always been at war with russia.
new causes suddenly explode. all this energy has to go somewhere and the need for new identity is acute and so new fights are entered into with the zeal of the freshly converted and the evangelism of those desperate to carve out new space and paper over what they were saying last week.
this adds a certain amount of full blown randomness to predominant social memes. had the ukraine war been this time last year, they probably would not have cared. they were still happily ensconced in branch covidianism. just about no one even noticed when the russians used chemical weapons in syria. there was no call to defend the “brave kurds.” it’s not racism. it’s just that the “jingo” slot was already full. there was no room for the meme. ask the uighurs about that one…
this means there will always be something. there is no climbdown, no cessation. this energy cannot be destroyed or dissipated because the need to put oneself in opposition as an act of self-definition is persistent. something must fill the void. they were all doing the same stuff pre-covid too.
wanna try a fun project? see if you can find anyone on twitter with pronouns in their bio that opposed lockdowns and masking. it’s all the same desire to create an identity suitable for ennobling the desire to bully as civic and personal virtue. it’s all the same people, over and over.
and that means that the clever demagogue can get in front of these issues and, at least to some extent, steer this energy. you dial back the CDC and the states out of political exigency and then immediately replace it with another meme that is fully orthogonal. covid gone. war, front and center. you hide your climb down and draw attention away from the coming news of how pointless and harmful everything you spent the last 2 years imposing was. the economy is not bad because of bad covid policy, it’s from the war! the very people who demanded that you surrender your freedom to invasive technocrats now champion freedom for ukrainians. there is so much tail to wag, it’s not even clear there is a dog in here at all anymore.
When victimhood is a game, everyone loses
Give up on a left-wing politics whose purpose is to amplify our differences
March 12, 2022
Black History Month is now over, and we’ve moved on to Women’s History Month. In April, we’ll get the best of both worlds, with Black Women’s History Month. May will be Jewish-American Heritage Month, and then in June the nation will enjoy a blowout celebration of LGBT Pride Month, if the normalization (and commercialization) of the cause in recent years is any indication.
The point of all of this is to serve as an annual national re-ratification of diversity, inclusivity and equity as America’s preeminent causes... Everyone and their racial, sexual and gender identities are to be affirmed; all identities and behaviors are to be celebrated as an essential part of the rich panoply of our national identity. It is meant to appease, honor and even glorify. Everyone, we would think, should be made happy by the never-ending tolerance parties.
But some, apparently, are not. In a March 2 op-ed for the Washington Post, Cole Arthur Riley claims that the end of Black History Month means he can “finally breathe.” The problem, says Riley, is white people (surprise!). Riley explains:
Every year, what is intended to be a time of remembrance and storytelling becomes a month of additional labor — usually with very little notice — for Black people. It becomes a season when we must sell our stories and ideas to sate the appetites of White folk who want to feel as though they’ve done the right thing.
The problem, according to Riley, is that guilt-ridden white people are so zealous in their desire to hear and understand black voices that it becomes overwhelming for black Americans. ...
Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah in a June 2020 op-ed complained about the frustrating burden of “distraught white and non-black friends who were overwhelmed with guilt and anxiety” because they might be sub-consciously perpetuating racist norms or power structures. White people simply can’t seem to get it right when it comes to showing the proper honor or deference to their black fellow citizens.
Indeed, for any white American trying to show proper deference or respect for black Americans, during Black History Month or during the other eleven months of the year, it’s a bit like trying to cross a minefield. If one tries to be “colorblind” or signals that he doesn’t care about the color of people’s skin, he perpetuates systemic racism by refusing to recognize and appreciate others’ identity and value. If a person goes out of his way to express interest in trying to understand the black experience in America, this also is problematic, because this could impose unfair burdens on blacks who tire of explaining all of this to ignorant, if well-meaning, whites. Whatever white people choose, they are bound to offend or upset someone. ...
Perhaps it was inevitable that this would happen, given the mainstreaming of “Oppression Olympics,” in which everyone in American society participates in a competition to determine who is the most victimized according to race, gender, sexual identity, socioeconomic status or disabilities. Everything, from advertising to sports to literature to entertainment is now influenced by a game that was once largely relegated to liberal activist groups and academic seminars. It is one in which participants are encouraged to discover ever more novel and obscure ways in which they suffer victimization (e.g. microaggressions, unconscious bias) from bigoted, oppressive power structures. By these rules, people win by losing. ...
All of this reinforces victimhood for one group, and encourages one of two responses from the other: a mimicry of victimhood, or even more outlandish attempts at repentance. It has to be this way, or otherwise the contest might actually approach its conclusion. And there are of course political, social and financial reasons why those playing the victimhood game — especially the winners (or do I mean losers?) — aim to keep it going indefinitely.
This won’t end well for anyone. One possible scenario is that all the contestants in the victimhood game will consume each other in a suicidal battle to the bottom, or that those identifying as victims will eventually determine their best option is social and political revolution to end oppression. Another, possibly more beneficial outcome would be for the cost of the Oppression Olympics to become so great that those expected to play the role of penitent victimizer simply won’t put up with the absurdity of it any more — although this could provoke some dramatic protest from ersatz victims that might also cause increased tensions and unrest.
The fact remains that the game by its very nature exhausts its participants. One hopes all sides might eventually acknowledge that perhaps its tiring (and tiresome) qualities are reason enough to just abandon the whole project. I have empathy for people like Riley, Attiah and many other supposed victims, who exist in an endless cycle of tokenist offense and outrage — who would really want to permanently live like this? Does life really feel that terrible for them, whose writings appear in one of the most important and popular media outlets in the country?
Wherever the victimhood game leads, I decided to stop playing a long time ago. The cynical exploitation and performative self-flagellation simply became too obvious and risible. For the sake of our republic, I hope many Americans soon come to the same conclusion.
I would have been considered by most to be "a leftist" in 2002. But I'm not a conservative.
This account is hilarious.
She also has this linked:
https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1500076163691171840?s=20&t=8td14G3fC-gDspOqR_iPhQ&source=patrick.net
"Why are a bunch of people carrying plastic bags full of junk from out from under a bridge." Seriously, they are coming out from the ruins of a bridge with various bags full of stuff. Did they live under the bridge with all that stuff? For people who just climbed out from under the wreckage of the bridge (supposed to be homes), their jackets are clean, no dust, no obvious wounds, carrying bags of random junk and the old ladies have new clean purses.
Whole thing is staged.
Apparently it never occurred to anyone on the left that perhaps they could be wrong.
The intellectual and moral collapse of the left accelerated and became complete in response to the pandemic. The left was handed a straightforward problem — a rogue federal bureaucrat, in cahoots with the pharmaceutical industry, engineered a gain-of-function virus in collaboration with a Chinese bioweapons lab that got out and started killing millions of people.
To use a baseball analogy, this was a languid fastball right over the middle of the plate. The left should have been able to crush this pitch into the outfield bleachers. Arrest Fauci; distribute safe, cheap, and effective antiviral and antibacterial treatments that the CDC already knew would work against coronaviruses; nationalize Pharma; suspend trade relations with China; problem solved. ...
Handed a golden opportunity to show that the meritocratic, progressive, regulatory state could effectively govern when it actually matters, the left went full Pharma fascist instead. All logic, reason, and principles went out the window in an instant. The party became all lizard brain all the time and rushed to set up Pharma Jim Crow, Pharma Apartheid, and Pharma Fascism in any jurisdiction under their control. The Democratic Party became the point of the spear for the most deadly and corrupt industry on earth in violation of all of their anti-corporate principles.
Nothing they tried worked because nothing they did was based on actual science.
It was not just the Democratic politicians who succumbed to Pharma junk science and propaganda. The brightest scholars on the left, one by one, announced their hatred for logic and reason and their love for Pharma Fascism.
richwicks saysI would have been considered by most to be "a leftist" in 2002. But I'm not a conservative.
Why does everyone have to be something? Why not be yourself without any labels?
In a nation pledged to equality and freedom, until a dozen or so years ago, inequalities of intelligence, wealth and talent were almost universally accepted as the human condition. Equity envisions something else. Differences in individual achievement stem from racism, prejudice and social injustice. Identities are unrestricted and self-defined, including male and female.
A fantastic, cartoonish vision of social improvement tangles into whites-only gun control, defunding the police, gender neutrality, and perhaps pet therapy for the criminally insane. Each progressive cause and craziness seems backed up by well-staffed office, a pro bono legal staff, and 501(c)(3) tax exemptions. Any effort to contain or reverse organized lunacies meets legal and judicial resistance.
What was formerly outré or unimaginable — even after the almost anything-goes Sixties — is vogue, and to resist is to court ridicule or ruin. The insensate and fantasists are not just a few sociopaths living in shadows. They might include the local junior high school principal or Episcopal minister. ...
Contemporary anomie’s most disturbing symptom is trans-mania, brought to life with Obama directives extending anti-discrimination rules in the federal workforce to cover transgender employees. The idea has been sustained through an orchestrated, well-funded political crusade, one that the NCAA and other organizations dare not negate. The “trans” narrative and what it demands take the US into neverland.
If advocates and officials can compel the nation’s institutions, legal system, agencies of culture, and common folk to resituate collectively against male and female, persuading or forcing a critical mass to abandon binary sexuality, then Americans can be made to do or believe anything. ...
What was that all about, some will ask, as if awakening from a bad dream. Others will be tidily amnesiac, and a few surgically damaged for life. The judges and lawyers, doctors and admirals, entertainers and academics who promoted the madness will do their best to sustain — if not their malevolent narrative — their power and reputations. ...
As with leech cures and lobotomies, gender re-assignment will someday be repudiated, joining other discredited, can-you-believe-it medico-social adventures. Human instinct will win. It might not be tomorrow, but whatever the narrative, defying nature and cellular science are not good bets in the long run.
Your Top Priority is The Emotional Comfort of the Most Powerful Elites, Which You Fulfill by Never Criticizing Them.
Corporate journalists have license to use their huge platforms to malign, expose and destroy anyone they want. Your moral duty: sit in respectful silence and never object.
At some point in the past decade, the pendulum began to swing back in the other direction. People like Jordan Peterson began to speak out and gained popularity rather quickly in his fight against the Canadian Parliament legislating compelled speech. A conservatism that absorbed politically homeless marooned liberals and even religious conservatism to some degree has risen to become the counterculture.
I recently observed in a piece that in the absence of religion or religious beliefs something was always going to fill that void. The obvious example often proffered here is the replacement with communism as a new religion that was just as deadly as ancient religions and led to massive human suffering in just the last century alone, and yet doesn't appear to be finished with its mission.
Today we have the resurgence of something similar with leftist totalitarian tinged functionaries that view the managerial state as its new (old/communism) religion (support, guidance, control, power) that can further its other tenets such as wokeism, the various identity movements (DIE) rooted in progressive and Marxist critical studies that explicitly undermine basic science, and even what I would call the cult of climate change or the green cult.
What they all appear to have in common (other than ideological aims to remake the world) is they claim to be rooted in academic research, even if much of it is made up or fabricated to benefit an ideological agenda, yet still peer-reviewed and published as if to merely reinforce that agenda at the level of information dissemination. I’m thinking of the "Grievance Studies Affair” here as just one event that exposed this academic corruption but as someone who has been around academia (probably for too long) I’ve seen it up close and first hand in the social sciences. The EU is particularly insidious in this regard, funding projects that tend to reinforce the dominant neoliberal views of Brussels bureaucrats, or popular beliefs of far-left activists, and any study that might challenge or undermine the social and political engineering agendas of this tribe is simply not funded.
I've seen Left-wingers go Right wing, but I've never seen the reverse except in rare cases when someone leaves oppressive religion and swings the pendulum too far the other way.
https://thegoodcitizen.substack.com/p/new-religions-and-old-heretics?s=r&source=patrick.net
A conservatism that absorbed politically homeless marooned liberals and even religious conservatism to some degree has risen to become the counterculture.
Ah yes, the original definition of “alt-right”: a marvelous term describing the hip, diverse, freedom-loving, liberal-in-spirit coalition with true respect for traditional social values and acceptance of innate differences between men and women, yet championing a society with equal opportunity for all, no special privileges based on sex, race, religion, color, or creed, and with consenting adults able to do as they please.
Of course this powerful term and the movement that it so succinctly described had to be destroyed.
There are two kinds of liberal apostates: those who claim to be a fixed point in a changed world. It’s not me it’s them, claims this sort. And those who undergo a thoroughgoing conversion. Mamet is the latter. He’s a defector.
His break from the left was decisive. “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal,’” read the headline of a piece by Mamet in the Village Voice announcing his departure in 2008. That title — not his choice — still annoys Mamet. “It just threw me out of the left,” he says. “I think [the Voice] is gone now. Rest in peace,” he adds with a little relish. Not that the headline really misrepresented Mamet’s position: “I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind,” he wrote in the article.
“I didn’t know any conservatives,” says Mamet of his younger self. “You never met a single conservative.” Coming up in theater at his age and living in big cities was to be safely cocooned in a liberal bubble. A place where, he says, bemoaning the right’s latest move was like talking about “terrible weather”: “Did you see what that son of a bitch Nixon, or Reagan, or Thatcher did today?”
And so the conservatism he would grow into was self-taught. “I started reading. I came across The Road to Serfdom,” he says. After Friedrich Hayek came Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell. (Sowell, a prominent black conservative economist and, like Mamet, a man who started his political journey on the left, is the person cited more than any other during our conversation.) “My reading got broader and broader and I thought, I’ve got to take this down to the bare paint.” Next came Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Tom Paine and the Founding Fathers. Out of that came a realization of the “extraordinary brilliance of the American experience.” ...
Mamet’s view of Washington is as unsentimental as his view of Hollywood: “People go into these professions to get power, and power to get sex, or sex to get power, money to get sex or power, and power to get money. That’s what these protected professions are all about… Trump was a countervailing force.”
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/why-david-mamet-went-right/?source=patrick.net
There are two kinds of liberal apostates: those who claim to be a fixed point in a changed world. It’s not me it’s them, claims this sort. And those who undergo a thoroughgoing conversion. Mamet is the latter. He’s a defector.
Joe Rogan happened to interview Mamet last week, did you know?
Official link:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0EGUBSTWebFwgzfr96q2Ci?si=8g82hqhwRUycV41XdaK1ZQ&source=patrick.net
Clips from the interview on Rumble:
https://rumble.com/search/video?q=mamet+rogan&source=patrick.net
Haven’t listened to any of it yet.
« First « Previous Comments 26 - 65 of 69 Next » Last » Search these comments
The left still mistakenly trusts Biden and the corporate-woke authoritarian ideology. They cannot accept that they are merely being used by large corporations to divide and weaken the voting public and to drive down wages for the benefit of the oligarchy. They cannot even think that thought. It creates anxiety in them.
What would make them lose their trust in the lies? Gas prices, inflation, shortages, humiliating chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan? I'm not sure that those made a difference yet. Maybe when they have a relative or friend die from the mandated vaxx - that might do it. Especially when children die, as many will when Newsom's order to inject children is implemented.
It's important to understand that the left has to get over a big hill of pain in realizing how wrong they've been. So they don't want to think those thoughts.
They think they have to "join the evil other tribe" in order to question to question their own, and that would be an unacceptable humiliation. But there is no need for humiliation. There is only the need to step outside that false dichotomy.
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/04/open-letter-to-open-minded-progressives/?source=patrick.net