In The Mailbox: 09.30.21

Posted on | September 30, 2021 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 09.30.21

Silicon Valley delenda est.

Cognitive dissonance

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Another Fake Hate Crime
EBL: The Largest Ostrich Subspecies Is Victim Of Good Intentions
Twitchy: Eric Swalwell Claims “Every Poll” Shows Americans Support Biden’s #BuildBackBetter, Gets Rekt, also, “NOT A Republican Vs. Democrat Thing”- Thread Goes into Detail About How Bad Government Is At Everything
Louder With Crowder: Biden Booed At Congressional Baseball Game – May Have Been By Own Party
Vox Popoli: Welcome To The Unvaccinated, Third World People, and The Nurses Know

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: Navigating NYC’s COVID Mandates
American Greatness: The Coordinated Attack On Ivermectin Is A Crime Against Humanity, also, Democrat Attack Ad Against DeSantis Backfires Badly
American Power: Inside Biden’s Controversial Decision To Abandon Bagram, also, The Authoritarian Left
American Thinker: The Saladin Paradigm – Finding The “Good” In Islamic Terrorists, also, Choosing Senility Over Substance
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Tax & Spend News
Babalu Blog: Equity In Communist Cuba, also, The Smackdown Heard Across Latin America – Uruguay Puts Cuba In Its Place
BattleSwarm: Matthew Dowd Running Against Dan Patrick For Texas Lieutenant Governor
Behind The Black: Today’s Blacklisted Americans, also, A Mars Mesa Carved By Floods & Lava?
Cafe Hayek: Bryan Caplan Pens An Open Letter To University Presidents
CDR Salamander: Words Begat Actions Which Create History, also, Diversity Thursday
Da Tech Guy: The $64,000 In New York, also, My Strategy For Fighting COVID Lockdowns & Mandates
Don Surber: Only 45% Trust Biden On COVID, also, #BLM Increased Black Murders By 2,164 (28%) In 2020
First Street Journal: Feminista Jones Calls out The Philadelphia Inquirer, also, The Lexington Herald-Leader And Photos Of Accused Criminals
Fred On Everything: FDR’s Secret Plea to Hitler
The Geller Report: Manchin Trashes Democrat Spending Bill – “Fiscal Insanity”, also, Marine Who Rescued Baby In Kabul Under Investigation For Appearing With Trump
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, My Upcoming Work Schedule
Hollywood In Toto: Did Joe Rogan Just Become The Media’s Public Enemy #1? also, Why Many Saints Of Newark Is For Sopranos Fans Only
Legal Insurrection: The College Fix Launches New Database To Track Cancel Culture On Campus, also, Legal Scholars Detail The Fight Against CRT In Public Schools
Nebraska Energy Observer: TV Democrats
Outkick: Good News Chicagoans! Now, When You Get Shot, There Are Local Bleed Stations, Farewell To Our Friend Matt Loede, and Paul Finebaum Thinks Clemson’s Dynasty Is Over
Power Line: COVID Morgue RIP, The Manchin Proviso, and How Crazy Are The Democrats? This Crazy
Shark Tank: Byron Donalds – House Spending Bill Is “Not What America Needs”
Shot In The Dark: School Daze, also, You May Ask Yourself
The Political Hat: Corona-Chan Madness In Australia – Door To Door Interrogation, Choking The Maskless, & Firing On Protesters
This Ain’t Hell: Nazi On The Run, Milley Confirms The Most Egregious Part Of Woodward’s Book, and PTR, Kahr, Mossberg…
Transterrestrial Musings: Milley’s Dishing, also, Self-Replicating Protocells
Victory Girls: Border Patrol (But Not Illegals) Faces Jab Mandate, also, Our Supply Chain Is Hanging By A Thread
Volokh Conspiracy: House Votes To Apply Mandatory Draft Registration To Women
Weasel Zippers: “No Need To Dumb This Down”, also, Officials Believe Over 350,000 “Migrants” Heading For Border
The Federalist: How Turning Christianity Into A “Nice People Club” Is Destroying The Church, also, Leftist School Board Association Begs Biden To Target Concerned Parents With Domestic Terrorism Laws
Mark Steyn: Live Around The Planet, also, The Post-Democratic Era

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Identity, Opposition and Hate

Posted on | September 30, 2021 | Comments Off on Identity, Opposition and Hate

The ‘Killing Fields’ of Cambodia

Did you study developmental psychology when you were in college? For a couple of semesters, I changed my major to secondary education — thinking I might become a high school teacher, before realizing I lacked the temperament for it — and one of the courses I took was Childhood Psychology. This provided me a lot of insights on how human personality is developed during childhood, especially identity formation.

This is the crucial question of youth: “Who am I?” If you think of classic teen comedies — Animal House, The Breakfast Club, Mean Girls, etc. — you realize how membership in a particular clique or adolescent subculture is part of the struggle to develop a sense of identity. When I was in high school, had one foot in the nerd subculture (playing trombone in band, etc.) and another foot in hoodlum subculture (smoking dope, etc.). Kids naturally form cliques, and part of what goes on in this adolescent tribalism is defining one’s own identity in opposition to The Other — you’re a Jock because you’re not a Nerd, or you are a Hoodlum because you’re not a Goody Two-Shoes, and so forth.

Because identity is so closely connected to group membership, and defined in opposition to The Other — “I’m a Delta, not an Omega” — this often gives rise to a sense of competitive rivalry inherent to one’s identity. And thus identity may lead to conflict and violence. We can see this, for example, in urban gang warfare — Crips vs. Bloods, or Gangster Disciples vs. Latin Kings — but it also explains, for example, the 1999 Columbine Massacre, where the killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold defined their identities in opposition to the more popular cliques in their high school. Columbine was a typical suburban high school where the football team was a focus of school spirit, and there was also a strong culture of evangelical Christianity, with many kids involved in church youth groups. Harris and Klebold, who were associated with a loosely identified clique of outsiders known as the “Trench Coat Mafia,” hated jocks and cheerleaders and Christians, and their bloody day of vengeance could be seen as a particularly toxic expression of adolescent identity.

This kind of antisocial identity — formed in opposition to the values of one’s community — can be understood as the consequence of psychological alienation, which generally involves the rebellion against (or rejection of) parental role models. Nearly all teenagers, in some way, go through rebellious phases, but for the antisocial personality, this kind of rebellion becomes the basis of identity. In the mind of the antisocial youth, there is a clear binary of values — the parental value system, which they reject, and the polar-opposite values the teenager adopts as an act of rebellion. A famous line from The Wild One comes to mind:

Mildred: “Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against?”
Johnny: “What have you got?”

The adolescent rebel lacks the ability to view his situation objectively. His rebellion is driven by emotion, and there is a mindless quality to the destruction that typically ensues — it makes no sense, for example, that a nice suburban kid like Dylan Klebold would become a mass murderer.

All of that is preamble to my main point, which is understanding how these factors play out when identity becomes the basis of politics.

Of course, it is entirely natural and understandable that, for example, farmers care about how government policy may affect agricultural interests, while auto factory workers are concerned with how legislation might help or harm the automobile industry. Likewise, we can understand that women will take a particular interest in issues relating their lives, that racial minorities are focused on issues that affect them, etc. Anyone who has read Federalist No. 10 knows that our system of government was established with the idea of balancing out the various interests of different factions, and far be it from me to deny to anyone the basic right to judge their own interests and to advocate for policies favorable to their interests. That’s just normal politics.

What we call identity politics, however, is something else entirely, involving activism and propaganda intended to incite collective resentment — the victimhood mentality — and to demonize others as perpetrators of oppression. Identity politics is simply organized hatred, and it follows a distinctly destructive pattern of logic.

Anyone who has studied formal logic sees how claims of “systemic racism” incite antisocial attitudes. If racial minorities are universally victimized in a more or less automatic manner — because, it is claimed, “white supremacy” is ubiquitous and omnipotent — then nothing can end this oppression except the destruction of society itself.

Such is the nihilistic syllogism embedded in the work of Ibram X. Kendi, et al., and students of history know where such hateful logic tends to lead: “Year Zero” in Kampuchea under the reign of Pol Pot.

We might also mention in this context Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RLTM), otherwise known as “Radio Genocide” in Rwanda.

What is so infuriating about those who incite this kind of genocidal hatred — the logical consequence of what we call identity politics — is that they do it for mere political advantage, to obtain power by “energizing their base.” That’s what last summer’s Black Lives Matter riots were really about — generating turnout to elect Joe Biden. And yet the “base” which Democrats seek to “energize” this way is so irremediably stupid that many of them actually believe the “social justice” propaganda.

Say hello to Shardé Nabors, Oregon project manager for a Seattle-based activist organization called Social Justice Fund NW. Curious readers may ask, “What sort of ‘social justice’ does Shardé advocate?” And the answer is, the destruction of the United States of America.

So they’re straight up calling to completely destroy America pic.twitter.com/Rdduyc8Sr9

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) September 27, 2021

“So, earlier this week I made a post saying that it doesn’t sit right with me that there are white people who own property — multiple properties, at that — in the United States of America while black and indigenous people are experiencing homelessness. And I want to expand on that, especially for my new followers who are white, who followed me because of my anti-racist content. I’m glad that you’re listening to me, but I really want to make sure that you’re hearing what I’m saying. There will never be black liberation or indigenous sovereignty as long as the United States of America exists. If you want black folks around the globe and in this country liberated, if you want indigenous folks to be able to have sovereignty over the lands that they’re indigenous to, then the United States of America needs to cease to exist. And I don’t know if y’all are ready for that, I don’t know if that’s what y’all signed up for. I’m not sure if anti-racist work is just something you do to lessen the inconvenience of racism in your life, but I hope you’re ready for this. It’s not for the weak.”

That’s the kind of 501(c)3 tax-exempt “activism” she gets paid for. This is where the logic of the “social justice” narrative leads — hatred and destruction, advocating genocide as the Final Solution.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

Category: Racism

The Fall Harvest of Books

Posted on | September 30, 2021 | Comments Off on The Fall Harvest of Books

— by Wombat-socho

When last we visited the Tonopah town library, I was fortunate enough to find Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files anthology Brief Cases; this time I found a copy of Galaxy: Thirty Years Of Innovative Science Fiction. Essentially a compilation of the various Galaxy Reader anthologies published throughout the 1950s and 60s, with some stories from the 1970s added, this is a good sampler of the kind of SF that Galaxy published until its demise in the late 1970s. Edited by former editor Fred Pohl along with Martin Greenburg and Joseph Olander, this is an all-star collection of stories from the magazine that was founded as a deliberate counterpoint to John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction, and includes short stories by Isaac Asimov, Algis Budrys, Jerome Bixby, Larry Niven, Zenna Henderson, and many other outstanding authors. Out of print, but used copies are widely available for cheap.

Alexis Gilliland is probably better known as a BNF* and cartoonist, but the man could write. In addition to the excellent Rosinante trilogy, he penned a fantasy trilogy about the adventures of the water mage** and (reluctant) adviser to royalty Wizenbeak. W.W. Wizenbeak is originally sent off to the northern wastes to found a farming colony for the kingdom of Guhland, but just as he manages to get things started, a civil war breaks out and he finds himself the target of the vengeful Witchfinder General and protector of the heirs to the throne. Managing to survive this and place his apprentice on the throne as Regent, Wizenbeak finds his troubles have only begun in the sequel, The Shadow Shaia, and they only get worse in the trilogy’s conclusion, Lord of the Troll-Bats.*** Unfortunately, the latter two books aren’t available from Amazon, but you can find them very easily and somewhat inexpensively through Alibris, which a lot of used book stores deal with in preference to Amazon. The flavor of the trilogy is more Three Musketeers than the usual medieval elf & dwarf crap (N.B.: there are no elves or dwarves in the trilogy, but there are dragons) and there’s plenty of political skulduggery if you like that sort of thing, and I strongly recommend it.

Since I’m currently in a protracted struggle with the 1969 major league baseball rosters, it occurs to me that I should recommend a few of my favorite baseball books. starting with Bill James’ New Historical Baseball Abstract. This is a huge mulligan stew of a book, containing snapshots of baseball history through the decades, spiced with sly jokes, amusing and terrifying anecdotes about the players, and pages upon pages of comments about the hundred best players at each position. Since it’s not trying to be the exhaustive reference book that Total Baseball is, the Kindle edition is probably okay, more so if big thick books strain you arms and your bookshelves. Another excellent read from Bill James is Whatever Happened To The Hall Of Fame? Frankly, I liked the original title, The Politics Of Glory, better, but it’s not my book so I don’t get a say. Anyhow, this is a history of the Baseball Hall of Fame, the players elected to it, and how they got there, along with some ways of thinking about what players are likely to go into the Hall, what players probably should have been elected, and quite a few players who arguably don’t belong there but were lucky enough to have friends in the right places. All of the preceding will probably piss people off, along with his comments on the Negro League players (in the Hall and out), but like almost all of Bill’s books, it will make you think.

There are three newer editions of Jim Bouton’s Ball Four out there, not to mention the sequel I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally, which is mostly about the screams of outrage and other reactions to the original book, which is a fun and funny look at Bouton’s season with the hapless expansion Seattle Pilots and contending Houston Astros in 1969 as a knuckleball pitcher. The great thing about Ball Four, you see, is that Bouton told the truth – he didn’t sugarcoat anything, he didn’t lie, and quite a few people – not all of them his teammates – never forgave him for it.

There has been very little good baseball fiction, in my opinion. Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association is the kind of self-indulgent mainstream garbage you would expect from a third-rate Professor of Literary Arts at a second-rate Ivy League school, so of course the critics loved it. The UBA is the creation of a miserable accountant who loses himself in a self-invented baseball game and becomes entirely too wrapped up in his fantasies about the imaginary players in the eponymous early 20th-century league. Couldn’t finish it. Bernard Malamud’s The Natural is better, but still a downer with a depressing ending; the movie with Robert Redford is orders of magnitude better. On the other hand, W.P. Kinsella’s The Iowa Baseball Confederacy is arguably better than his better known Shoeless Joe, perhaps because it’s less tied down to reality. A tale of one man’s quest to prove that a 2000-inning game between the 1908 World Champion Chicago Cubs and the amateur players of the I.B.C. actually happened, this surrealistic tale immerses you in the superstitions of the age and takes you on a strange trip into a fantastic world where a good-natured challenge leads to a seemingly endless nightmare – and yet, all ends well, for almost everyone concerned. I was also amused by his story collection Box Socials, which is mostly about small-town semi-pro baseball players and their lives off the diamond.

*Big Name Fan.
**”Like a civil engineer, except with spells instead of bulldozers,” as one reviewer put it.
***How was this not a Meat Loaf album title? Jim Steinman, you got some ‘splainin’ to do!

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Category: Books

In The Mailbox: 09.29.21 (Evening Edition)

Posted on | September 29, 2021 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 09.29.21 (Evening Edition)

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.

4chan’s solution for obnoxious camgirls

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Of Course There’s A Live Action Cowboy Bebop
EBL: Separated By Karma
Twitchy: The Onion Forgets It Used To Be A Humor Site
Louder With Crowder: Not Just For College Football Any More
Vox Popoli: Convergence Has Its Costs, also, Kneecapping The Tech Giants

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Suffering For Our Sins As A Nation

American Conservative: A Bald Man Loses His Toupee, also, The Most Dangerous Man In America
American Greatness: Kristi Noem Shows Why Republicans Can’t Have Nice Things, also, Top Generals Contradict Biden, Testify He Was Advised Not To Withdraw All Troops From Afghanistan
American Power: LAUSD Shows Sharp Decline In Attendance, also, Stocks Close Sharply Lower As Bond Yields Hover Near Three-Year High
American Thinker: COVID-19 Is The New Global Warming, also, The Case for Optimism
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: Spanish Court Asked To Investigate Links Between Cuban Dictatorship & Basque Terrorists, Seventh Player Defects From Cuban National Baseball Team While Playing In Mexico, and Meme Of The Day – Manager of Cuban National Team Waits For His Players
BattleSwarm: Border Crisis Update
Behind The Black: Today’s Blacklisted American, also, Government Shutdown Endangers Lucy Asteroid Mission
Cafe Hayek: Fighting Back Against Panic Porn Reporting, also, Choice In Markets & Choice Under Government Compulsion
CDR Salamander: Oh, So The UN Will Make Afghanistan Work?
Da Tech Guy: The Very Best Thread Of COVID I Have Read, also, How Can People Continue To Be Shocked At Democrat Marxists Acting Like…Marxists?
Don Surber: Lies They Told Us About COVID, If Navel-Gazing Were An Olympic Sport CNN Would Be The Dream Team, and Hatriotism
First Street Journal: Judge Emmet Sullivan Needs To Recuse Himself From All 1/6 Cases, also, Biology Is Politically Incorrect
The Geller Report: FL Gov DeSantis Orders Investigation Into Facebook’s Election Law Violations, also, Sen. Tom Cotton Makes General Milley Squirm – “Why Haven’t You Resigned?”
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, An Ultracompact Dwarf Galaxy
Hollywood In Toto: Why Ghost World Is One Of The Best Comic-Book Movies Ever, also, (Mostly) Woke-Free Bond Sparks No Time To Die
The Lid: We’re On The Verge Of The Greatest Shortage Of Healthcare Workers In American History
Legal Insurrection: Despite Local Pushback, Obama Breaks Ground On “Presidential Center” In Chicago, Poll Finds Majority Of Jewish Students Feel Unsafe On Campus, and UCLA Prof Sues After Suspension And Smears For Refusing To Provide Preferential Exam Treatment For Black Students
Nebraska Energy Observer: Not Fear Mongering
Outkick: Bears Sign Agreement For Arlington Park Property – Exit From Soldier Field Looms, Ole Miss’ Lane Kiffin Fires Back At ESPN’s Michael Wilbon For Calling Him “A Clown” & “An Embarrassment”, and Katie Nolan Done At ESPN
Power Line: Hispanics Hate Biden, also, Break On Through (To The Other Side)
Shark Tank: Scott Says Biden’s Foreign Policy Is “To Leave Americans Behind”
Shot In The Dark: Point Of Light, Coming Soon To A DFL Meeting Near You, and Watching The Tectonic Plates Shift
STUMP: Revisualizing The Financial State Of The States, 2021 Edition
The Political Hat: Open Advocacy Of Eco-Terrorism
This Ain’t Hell: Wednesday FGS, Last Marine WSOs Get Their Wings, and Generals Testify To Congress That POTUS Lied
Transterrestrial Musings: Facebook, The “Space Cowboys”, and Early Voting In Virginia
Victory Girls: Terry McAuliffe Thinks Parents Should Have No Say In What Schools Teach
Volokh Conspiracy: Today In Supreme Court History
Weasel Zippers: VA Governor’s Race Is A Dumpster Fire, NY Dem Gov – God Wants You To Get Vaccinated, also, Texas Troopers Arrest Thousands Of Illegals, Democrats Big Mad
The Federalist: Kash Patel, The Trump Staffer Who Exposed The Russia Hoax, Aims New Fire At The Deep State, also, Pelosi Echoes White House Lie That Democrats’ Spending Spree Costs “Zero”
Mark Steyn: Gender-Neutral Human Sacrifices, also, The Decoupling Party

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In The Mailbox: 09.29.21 (Afternoon Edition)

Posted on | September 29, 2021 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 09.29.21 (Afternoon Edition)

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.

Vox Day notwithstanding

OVER THE TRANSOM
Red Pilled Jew: Quick Takes
357 Magnum: Women & Minorities Embrace Self-Defense – Leftist Stereotypes Hardest Hit
Ninety Mils From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #1490
EBL: Whip It
Twitchy: Terry McAuliffe’s Comments On Who Shouldn’t Have A Say In What Schools Teach “Should Frighten Every Parent”
Louder With Crowder: Pelosi’s Brain Turns To Mush, Forgets Who’s President, Says They’ll be Voting On The Obama Agenda This Week
Vox Popoli: The End Of Avoidance, also, And Which God Is That?
Gab News: Building Technology To Power A Parallel Christian Society

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The Death of Doctors, also, Do Not Succumb To The Black Pill
American Conservative: Why Aren’t Men Going To College? also, It Looks Like We Forgot
American Greatness: Democrats Repeat The Mistakes Of 2016, also, Marine Officer Who Demanded Accountability From Pentagon Leaders Thrown In Brig
American Power: Red China Plays Hardball To Get Back Arrested Executive, also, Krysten Sinema – The Enigma At The Center Of Democrats’ Spending Talks
American Thinker: Does Biden Believe That Laws Should Only Be Observed Selectively?
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Dog Trade News
Babalu Blog: Dissident Cuban Artist Forced Into Exile In Poland Speaks To Press, also, Cuba’s Socialist Revolution – Over 70% Of Families Must Survive On Less Than $4/Day
BattleSwarm: What If There Was An Austin Shootout & Nobody Noticed? also, Supply Chain Disruption Update
Behind The Black: Red Chinese Long March 3B Successfully Launches Satellite – Which Immediately Fails, UK’s New Comprehensive Space Strategy – Develop A Robust Private Sector, and Today’s Blacklisted Americans
Cafe Hayek: Asking “Why Don’t You Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is?” Is A Test Of Legitimacy
Da Tech Guy: Report From Louisiana – Bouncing Back After Ida, Musings About 7-0, and I’m Old Enough To Remember
Don Surber: 54% Of Black Parents Want CRT Removed, also, We’re Preparing To Bomb The Hell Out Of Afghanistan
First Street Journal: Killadelphia Passes The 400 Mark, also, Another Capitol Kerfluffler Pleads Guilty
The Geller Report: Sports Fans Aren’t The Only Ones Ramping Up The “F*** Joe Biden” Chants, also, Trucker Blockade Developing, Ohio Highway Patrol On Notice
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, Moving Back To The Third World?
Hollywood In Toto: How To Feed Your Sopranos Fix After Many Saints Of Newark, also, Insane Clown Posse – First Amendment Heroes?
The Lid: NY Governor Hochul Says God Wants Us To Get The Jab – Did They Talk On The Phone?
Legal Insurrection: Legal Insurrection Now On Telegram, also, McKenzie, Milley, & Austin All Confirm Biden Received Recommendation To Leave 2500 Troops In Afghanistan
Michelle Malkin: What Every Parent Must Know About Pfizer
Nebraska Energy Observer: Manhood & The Green Knight, also, Lupus Tenebrosus, Chapter 8
Outkick: NBA Players Continue To Reject League’s Jab Mandate, Dez Bryant Blasts Colin Kaepernick For Creating Awareness But Doing Nothing, and Sexual Assault Charges Against Don Lemon Finally Going To Court
Power Line: Joe Biden’s Free Breakfast, Lunch, & Dinner, Chamber Of Commerce Tries To Rein In Democrats It Endorsed, and New Frontiers In The Whopper
Shark Tank: Mucarsel-Powell Endorses Janelle Perez For Congress
Shot In The Dark: Prophets Of Manufactured Rage, also, When Reality Is Absurd, Parody Is Impossible
The Political Hat: Adoption Is Racist Now
This Ain’t Hell: Marine LTC Who Went Viral Speaking Against Biden’s Bugout Arrested, Tuesday FGS, and Update On Slapped Sailor Incident
Transterrestrial Musings: Biden’s World
Victory Girls: Democrats Sending Country Off A Fiscal Cliff, Republicans Finally Unite
Volokh Conspiracy: City-Organized Veterans’ Parade Can Exclude Confederate Flags
Weasel Zippers: WH Defends Biden Banning Horse Patrols Based On Lies, also, Autistic Green Jesus Babbles
The Federalist: The Texas Heartbeat Act Is Saving 100 Babies Every Single Day, Americans Are Done With Biden’s Pandemic Incompetence, and Media Outlets That Called Hunter Biden Laptop Russian Disinformation Ignore Confirmation It Was Real
Mark Steyn: A Greasepaint Medley, also, Lost In Translation

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‘The Negro Problem,’ Then and Now

Posted on | September 28, 2021 | Comments Off on ‘The Negro Problem,’ Then and Now

For about four decades, Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (1841-1906) was among the leading professors of science at Harvard University. In 1884, Professor Shaler published in The Atlantic Monthly a lengthy article entitled “The Negro Problem,” which begins with this paragraph:

When the civil war determined by its result the political position of the black people in the Southern States, there was a general belief among their friends that the race had thereby received a complete enfranchisement as American citizens; that they were made free to all our national inheritances; that all the problems of their future involved only questions of a detached nature — such slight matters as their rights in hotels and railways, in fields of labor, or at the polling booths. But those who by their eagerness to bid the negro welcome to his new place in the state did so much credit to the spirit of hope and friendship of our time could not see the gravity of this problem. Never before in the history of peoples had so grave an experiment been tried as was then set about with a joyous confidence of success. Only their great military triumph could have given to our hard-minded, practical people such rash confidence. Here, on the one hand, was a people, whose written history shows that the way to the self-government on which alone a state can be founded is through slowly and toilfully gained lessons, handed from father to son — lessons learned on hard tilled and often hard fought fields. The least knowledge of the way in which their own position in the world had been won would have made it clear that such a national character as theirs could be formed only by marvelous toil of generations after generations, and an almost equally marvelous good fortune that brought fruit to their labor. There, on the other hand, was a folk, bred first in a savagery that had never been broken by the least effort towards a higher state, and then in a slavery that tended almost as little to fit them for a place in the structure of a self-controlling society. Surely, the effort to blend these two peoples by a proclamation and a constitutional amendment will sound strangely in the time to come, when men see that they are what their fathers have made them, and that resolutions cannot help this rooted nature of man. . . .

You may read the rest, and I suppose both the current editors of The Atlantic and the current leadership of Harvard University would vehemently disavow the entirety of Professor Shaler’s arguments. Nevertheless it is always helpful, in studying the origins of social problems, to consult in the original text the opinions of our predecessors, rather than to rely on modern interlocutors to summarize or interpret those views. One of the problems with the teaching of history nowadays is that most students just absorb the Cliff Notes summary of the past — reading only whatever is assigned, as necessary to obtain the desired grade — and thus we have millions of “educated” Americans who are almost entirely ignorant of vast amounts of history, despite having gotten A’s in the subject, even at our most prestigious universities.

Professor Glenn Reynolds today calls attention to a dispute between Princeton Professor Sean Wilentz and Nikole Hannah-Jones of the infamous “1619 Project.” The latter’s authorial purpose was to impugn the United State, per se and in toto, as hopelessly stained by “white supremacy.” Wilentz’s criticism is that Hannah-Jones goes too far — indeed, she goes so far as to completely outrace the historical evidence, which does not support her outlandish claim that our War of Independence was waged to prevent a threat to slavery from the British homeland (a fictitious threat that Hannah-Jones manufactures from whole cloth, a threat which the Patriots in such places as Vermont and Massachusetts certainly never mentioned). Wilentz is correct in this. However, I would argue that the real issue is not that Hannah-Jones goes too far, but rather that she is going in the wrong direction.

Hannah-Jones’s argument is wrong because her intentions are wicked — motivated by a hatred of America which is, in turn, informed by a hatred of white people (never mind or, at least, leave to examination by psychoanalysts, the fact that her own mother is white). Hannah-Jones began her project with an anti-American (and anti-white) agenda, and having made hatred the premise of her argument, everything else followed logically. Wilentz speaks of Hannah-Jones’s argument as exhibiting such “perversity” that, if it were submitted as a high school history paper, would automatically receive an “F” grade.

It can be easily demonstrated that Hannah-Jones is factually wrong about America, but why and how did she get it so wrong? And the answer is that her hateful purpose led her into these errors. She is wrong because she wants to judge the America of 1619-1776 by a standard of radical egalitarianism by which our forefathers are condemned as racists, and never mind that the word “racist” did not even exist at the time.

Anyone familiar with the history of England would see, in the Patriot cause of 1776, a sentiment that can be traced back through the Whig cause in the Glorious Revolution — principles delineated by John Locke — and further to the Parliamentary cause as exemplified by the heroic figures of Algernon Sidney and John Hampden, among others.

What the Patriots believed was that the home government was denying to them the rights which their English ancestors had fought so hard to obtain. Even while proclaiming it to be a “self-evident” truth that “all men” were “endowed by their Creator” with these rights, the signers of the Declaration were aware that such rights were not recognized in most of Europe, to say nothing of the lack of recognition of these “self-evident” rights in more remote regions of the globe. But I digress . . .

What is important is that we try to see the past as it actually was, rather than trying to impose our moralistic views on the past, in order to congratulate ourselves on our superiority to dead men who are not here to defend themselves against our accusations of “racism,” etc.

Read the original texts, let dead men speak in their own voices, and you’ll learn a lot more than you can from any tendentious intellectual presuming to interpret (and usually, to condemn) the motives of historic figures. For example, Ibram X. Kendi, author of the popular BLM/CRT diatribe How to Be an Anti-Racist, previously published Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016). In the process of explaining how he got the title of his first book, Kendi linked an online text of The Congressional Record from April 1860. What he meant to call attention to was the “Racist Ideas” of one of the senators who was participating in that debate. There was a proposal to use federal funds for public schools in the District of Columbia, a measure that the Senator opposed. But someone (and I haven’t gone through the entire legislative history of that bill) then amended the legislation to specify that the proposed public schools would be for both white and black children.

Here is an excerpt from the Senator’s remarks:

“Mr. President, the propositions, both the main one contained in the bill and that contained in the amendment, I think, rest on two fundamental errors: in the first place, that our Government was instituted for eleemosynary purposes, and in the next place, that it was instituted for a mixed race. This Government was not founded by negroes nor for negroes, but by white men for white men. It was not founded for eleemosynary purposes, but as an agent of the States; and there is no right to take one dollar from the Treasury to appropriate it to public schools. . . .
“The errors are fundamental on which the bill rests; and these errors have been developed by the alliance which it has brought from the other side, developing, as a consequence of the very proposition, this controversy as to the rights of whites, and the equality of the negroes. I do not choose to argue with any one who thinks proper to assert the equality of the negro and the white man. The man who makes the assertion may prove to me his equality with the negro. He proves to me no more; and I accept his argument only for so much.” [Emphasis added.]
— Sen. Jefferson Davis, April 12, 1860

The highlighted sentence, you see, is offered by Davis as a statement of fact — the same fact that Chief Justice Roger Taney expressed in the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision. So far as I am aware, no one has ever provided evidence that Justice Taney and Senator Davis were wrong about this. Examine the writings of the Founding Fathers and see if you can find anything indicating that they desired or intended (or even imagined in their wildest dreams) a future in which the descendants of African slaves would obtain, en masse, full political equality with whites.

What has happened, you see, is that most Americans have been taught our own history in such a way that they don’t even recognize the importance of something that was apparent to Professor Shaler in 1884 when he spoke of the “experiment” that necessarily followed emancipation.

If we experience difficulties — political, social and economic — as a result of trying to integrate such diverse people into a single body politic, this should not cause surprise or dismay, simply because no one else anywhere has ever attempted anything remotely like it. Well, yes, you can speak of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as an experiment in “diversity,” but how did that work out? Our problem in America, I suggest, is that our expectations are too high, that we have been encouraged to think it should be easy to arrive at some utopian ideal of Equality (with a capital “E,” denoting its religious significance to liberals).

Utilized as a weapon by dishonest partisan agitators, “Equality” tends to make people unhappy, to cause resentment and suspicion — those evil rich people are exploiting us, we are told, as we sit in our air-conditioned homes with high-speed Internet connections and giant flat-screen TVs. It’s not just racial hatred that is incited by these “Equality” agitators, but every imaginable species of hatred, fear and envy.

We must live in reality, rather than in our political fantasies of an ideal condition of “Equality” that, so far as I know, has never existed anywhere at any time in all of human history. This utopian fantasy is harmful in that it breeds irrational discontentment, no matter how objectively splendid our actual circumstances may be. Some of the most bitter people in America are rich liberals whose affluent lifestyles would have been unimaginable to their grandparents or more remote ancestors. My own grandfather plowed the red clay hills of east Alabama behind a mule team. He had no indoor plumbing or electricity or central heat. Rather than make myself miserable by comparing my situation to that of Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, I prefer to make myself happy by thinking how much easier my life is than that of my grandfather. Right now, I’m drinking a fruit smoothie and eating a meal I warmed up in the microwave, while preparing to hit the “publish” button and communicate with a readership of thousands. What have I got to complain about, if I pause to compare my situation to my grandfather’s life in rural Alabama?

Couldn’t the same be said for Nikole Hannah-Jones? She’s employed by the most influential newspaper in the world, yet it seems she’s made herself miserable by dwelling upon her alleged oppression.

“The errors are fundamental,” as Jefferson Davis said, and I don’t think Nikole Hannah-Jones is doing much to prove Davis wrong.

But “I do not choose to argue,” et cetera.

Category: History, Intellectuals, New York Times, Racism

Crazy People Are Dangerous

Posted on | September 28, 2021 | Comments Off on Crazy People Are Dangerous

Say hello to Alexandra Souverneva, a 30-year-old California woman whom the Monterey Herald describes as a “scientist,” because she has a bachelor’s degree from California Institute of Technology and later enrolled in a Ph.D. program. However, Souverneva describes herself as a “shaman,” which is relevant to the criminal charges against her:

A California “shaman” charged with starting a wildfire that is threatening thousands of homes claimed it started by accident — while she was boiling bear urine to drink, according to local reports.
Alexandra Souverneva, 30, faces up to nine years in prison for allegedly sparking the Fawn Fire, which has destroyed 41 homes and 90 smaller structures and is threatening 2,340 others, officials have said. She has pleaded not guilty.
She is now being eyed for possibly starting other fires across the Golden State, according to the Redding Record-Searchlight.
As the fire in Shasta County raged on Wednesday, Souverneva claimed she’d been hiking and trying to get to Canada, according to documents obtained by the outlet.
She told forest officials that she was thirsty and had come across a puddle of what she believed to be bear urine — and tried to make a fire to boil it, according to documents obtained by the outlet.

What? You wouldn’t drink a puddle of bear urine, even after it was boiled? Don’t you believe in science? Ask any shaman about this.

By the way, police say a search of Souverneva’s backpack found “a green, leafy substance she admitted to smoking that day” — entirely legal in California, of course — and no self-respecting shaman would pass up a chance to smoke “a green, leafy substance.” Because science.

Further background on our scientific California shaman:

She may be linked to other recent fires in the state, Shasta County District Attorney Stephanie Bridgett said during a press conference on Friday morning. Souverneva has declined an interview request from the Bay Area News Group.
Souverneva graduated from Palo Alto High School in 2009 and the California Institute of Technology in 2012 with degrees in chemistry and biology.
She enrolled in a Ph.D. program at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry but did not complete studies. She then worked in medicinal chemistry as a research associate at the biotech companies Gilead Sciences in Foster City and Nanosyn in Santa Clara.
A former Palo Alto yoga instructor, certified scuba dive master, piano teacher and camp counselor, she most recently tutored Bay Area students in the sciences at Palo Alto’s AJ Tutoring, a respected SAT test prep business.
Souverneva’s LinkedIn profile, which features a photo of a forest, lists her occupation as “shaman,” a religious term for a person who believes themselves connected to the transcendent world and acts as a healer and diviner. She’s registered to vote as a member of the Green Party.
But she has run into legal trouble before. In Santa Clara County, court records show she faced misdemeanor charges in 2017 and criminal charges in 2015. Details were not available on Sunday.
Earlier this month, Souverneva was arrested on Interstate 5 near Red Bluff and booked into the Tehama County Jail on suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol and drugs and obstructing and resisting arrest. A week later, she was arrested in coastal Oregon for criminal trespass, which means unlawfully entering another’s enclosed or fenced-in property.
The Fawn Fire was ignited Sept. 22 in a remote canyon on property adjacent to Shasta County’s JF Shea Quarry. Earlier that day, Souverneva was seen trespassing on the property by a quarry employee and asked to leave. She ignored the warning and continued walking into the hills, according to a report filed by CalFire.
The quarry employee reported that she was acting strangely, said Bridgett.
That evening, as firefighters were battling flames, she walked out of the brush and asked for water and medical help, according to the CalFire report. . . .
At the Friday court appearance, an attorney said Souverneva had made statements to law enforcement that indicated a possible mental health crisis “or something to do with drug abuse,” according to the Redding Record-Searchlight.

A Green Party member was “acting strangely”? I’m shocked, shocked! However, as to the scientific value of this incident, I’d say it proves one thing: Crazy People Are Dangerous. But we already knew that.