Culture – Page 15 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

July 10, 2022July 10, 2022

America’s Ya’nan Rectification Campaign

May be an image of 5 people and text that says 'CRITICAL RACE THEORY: Racism is "systemic" and present in every aspect of life. Your "identity" is function of your skin color. America's 19th century westward expansion was the shameful product of "Whiteness.' White people give blacks opportunities only when its in their own best interests. RACIST.'

1986 became the pivotal year when American universities began the process of turning American’s young people into illiterates of their own national and cultural inheritance. It was the year when political entrepreneurs like Jesse Jackson arrived on the Stanford University campus to chant “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go.” Their target was instruction in the western way of life, the cultural legacy of advanced science, personal liberty, intellectual enlightenment, Judeo-Christian spirituality, economic prosperity, and popular sovereignty. Jackson and his student audience demanded to chuck it all.

May be an image of 1 person — Jesse Jackson in 1980.

Jesse Jackson at Stanford University in 1986 joining in a protest against a western civilization curricular core at the school, famous for the chant, “Hey Hey, ho ho, western culture has to go”.

The 1980’s core requirement of a multi-quarter Western Culture curriculum for all students had replaced Western Civilization after the uproar against western civilization by 1960’s left radicals. Shortly after Jackson’s appearance on campus, anything exclusively western would be expunged as a universal core requirement. Eventually, the Stanford faculty senate replaced Western Culture with the nebulous Cultures, Ideas, and Values. The signal for the ostracization of western civilization has since permeated everywhere down to the instruction given to the kindergartners of today. Don’t dare place a mic before a college senior on spring break to describe the Constitution’s three branches of government. You’ll get jibberish.

And look at what replaced it, for something did. Nature hates a vacuum and so does the mind. In crept a neo-Marxist self-loathing. On the heels of the incessant assault on western culture and history came the full-throated “Rectification” program of the 2000’s that mirrors what Mao did in China, which started in Moa’s remote base of Ya’nan, Shaanxi province, in the 1940’s, and was called the Ya’ana Rectification Campaign. It was a ghastly campaign that slaughtered an estimated 10,000 people before Mao was done. It was Moa’s megalomania on parade. Of interest here isn’t the bloodthirsty escapades, even though that’s bad enough. It’s his methods of inculcating the incipient Marxist/Maoist mush.

May be a black-and-white image of 1 person, standing and outdoors — Mao in Ya’nan in 1939

See the source image — One of many public denunciations and humiliations during Mao’s Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. An example Mao’s earlier “rectification campaign”, only this one lasted 10 years and stretched across the whole country.

The isolation of groups by identity, the “struggle sessions”, the bizarre confessions, the identification of abstract enemies, the pounding indoctrination, and the denunciations goes beyond thought control and right into emotion control. It’s sickening, and it’s replicated today. Mao’s target at the time was the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but for today’s revolutionaries, the entire society is the target. Don’t worry, Mao got there quick enough.

Under the labels of “CRT”, “Critical Theory”, “Anti-racism Training”, “Understanding White Privilege”, etc., our modern revolutionary theorists are treating the minds of Americans up and down the social pyramid from classrooms to corporate boardrooms as clay. Employees are subjected to Anti-racism training, essentially the works of revolutionary theorists such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin Deangelo. The kiddies in their classrooms go through lessons that heap shame on them for their “whiteness”, and doubly so if they happen to be male. The shaming of “heteronormativity” knows no bounds. The victimology is relentless. Watch as your kids know more about Belgian colonialism in the Congo than they do about the American founding or the Protestant Reformation. How can young minds withstand the withering assault?

I say that they don’t. They are befuddled as they are made ignorant of the West’s great gift of the probing mind that has ballooned the food supply, pulled millions out of living in the dirt, expanded the frontiers of medicine, pushed back disease, spread freedom of conscience, etc. Software engineers’ “rectified” minds are as toxic to that legacy as anything described in Orwell’s “1984” or Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon”.

They have succeeded in importing Mao into America. We are having our own Cultural Revolution and it will end in the same place: stunted minds and stunted lives.

Sources:
*The 1980’s abandonment of Western Civ at Stanford University: https://stanfordreview.org/the-case-for-a-western-civilization-requirement-at-stanford/
*The debate between Donald Kennedy, president of Stanford University, and William Bennett, Secretary of Education in 1988: https://archives.stanforddaily.com/1988/04/20?page=1

July 9, 2022July 10, 2022

The Un-Unhinged Left

I have this question. You can join a political movement, but how do you join a sex? The seasoned actor Alan Alda used to call himself a proud feminist, but would it be reasonable for him to announce that he is now a woman, if he was so inclined? The thought came to mind after reading about some celebrity leftists coming to the conclusion that the ultimate of identity politics, self-identity, has its limits. The prospect of former men, now declaring themselves to be women, shattering women’s NCAA and Olympic records and sidelining women who were born women may have revitalized the obvious truism that chromosomes matter in physical activities. At some point, politics must face reality.

J.K. Rowling was one of the first lefties to the realization of the reality. She noticed that trans-ideology was the invasion route of men into women’s athletics and the obliteration of the athletic prowess of “menstruators”. As such, she has come under withering fire from hyper-activist “trans”-women. Other brave female voices have joined her as they too confront “cancellation” from the usual sources. That’s why they are courageous.

May be an image of 2 people, people standing and text that says 'ERLIME' — Bette Midler and Macy Gray

Recently Bette Midler tweeted the following: “WOMEN OF THE WORLD! We are being stripped of our rights over our bodies, our lives and even of our name! They don’t call us ‘women’ anymore; they call us ‘birthing people’ or ‘menstruators’, and even ‘people with vaginas’! Don’t let them erase you! Every human on earth owes you!”

The singer Macy Gray was succinct when she stated in an interview, “I will say this and everyone’s gonna hate me, but as a woman, just because you go change your parts, doesn’t make you a woman, sorry.”

See below:

NY Times columnist Pamela Paul, no right-winger by any stretch, echoing Gray, said, “Even the word ‘women’ has become verboten.” And further, “In its place are unwieldy terms like ‘pregnant people,’ ‘menstruators’ and ‘bodies with vaginas . . . . [this is a] bitter way to mark the 50th anniversary of Title IX.”

The Left may be unhinged in many of their social, economic, and political views, but they aren’t so crazy as to accept the move to make women’s sports an offshoot of men’s sports. Call these brave voices the un-unhinged Left.

May be an illustration of indoor and text

RogerG

*Bette Midler’s tweet: https://twitter.com/BetteMidler/status/1543979948611981313?s=20&t=O37Tc0ny2mm7Zx2ooddPzg
*Macy Gray’s comment on Piers Morgan’s “Uncensored” show: https://youtu.be/K3eWYEaOqDk
*Paul’s statement: https://news.yahoo.com/pamela-paul-criticized-anti-trans-192133188.html
*Great piece by columnist Madelein Kearns on the subject: https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/trans-skepticism-goes-mainstream/

July 7, 2022July 10, 2022

Too Much Faith in Government. Highland Park Is Proof.

Police officers walk through the crime scene the day after a mass shooting at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Ill., July 5, 2022. (Photo: Cheney Orr/Reuters)

Biden’s poll numbers are in the toilet. The celebrity-activist base of the Democratic Party screams at White House operatives in Zoom sessions to do something about the coming red wave in November. They complain that Biden seems mentally adrift, the administration is slow, the messaging is off – which is true to some degree. But here’s the kicker: their problems have little to do with presentation but has everything to do with the message itself.

What ties the crowd on the left together is a fanatical belief in government’s ability to accomplish anything. Thus, we have the peddling of the $5-trillion Build Back Better in an economy heating up after COVID, inflation, shortages, a full-frontal assault on affordable energy, ending wars in catastrophe, crime spiking all over, schools as lefty indoctrination centers amidst plummeting test scores, and a childish and obsessive campaign to eliminate inequalities in socio-economic numbers (statistical disparities). The problem is not the form of message presentation. It’s the message! Ideas certainly have consequences, and bad ideas have bad consequences.

The Highland Park shooting is a case study in the error of following false political gods. It didn’t take long for the bright stars of the Illinois political firmament – Gov. Pritzker and the state’s two Senators – to blame the gun. So, they trot out the banal litany of rhetoric about “gun violence”, “assault weapons”, “weapons of war”, and high-capacity magazines while they ignore their own culpability. Yes, culpability: their responsibility for not enforcing their own laws or recognizing that many of their go-to ideas are pointless.

The new so-called “bipartisan” federal gun control law parallels much in Illinois state law. Illinois has a comprehensive red flag law, a gun ownership permit system, universal background checks, bans on straw purchases, and a prohibition on conceal carry at most public gatherings. Highland Park chimes in with their bans on “assault weapons” and “high-capacity magazines”. The state and town are covered in gun laws, and none of it stopped the killer’s rampage.

And where did all of this end up? The killer still purchased his gun, in spite of documented run-ins with police, a red flag law, and a robust list of prohibitions in the state’s gun-purchase check system. The streets of Chicago would remind anyone of Baghdad at the height of the insurrection in 2003. 15 people were murdered in the city on the day of the Highland Park shooting. Other Democrat-run fiefdoms with similar Byzantine entanglements of gun laws have become war zones. 2022 has already witnessed “250 murders in Philadelphia, 175 murders in Los Angeles, and 102 murders in Washington, D.C.” (see below for source)

The reason for the progressive failure is something that never crossed the mind of the participants of the Zoom call between Biden hirelings and the party’s high-profile activists. It is the simple fact that laws must be faithfully executed (in the words of the US Constitution) before they become real. It’s the human factor. With Democrat governance comes permissive law enforcement, particularly in the form of non-prosecution, selective prosecution, or reduced prosecution. Honestly, it could be that their favorite gun laws can’t be enforced without running afoul of their other cherished ideals, like reduced incarceration rates. Regardless, we end up in the same place: urban hellscapes.

In the end, the miscreant in Highland Park still got his hand on a gun for a sniper’s nest to kill July 4th revelers. Pritzker and company should first examine their own derelictions before they harass the general public with more laws that they’ll fail to enforce or won’t make any difference.

Simply passing a law and then a retreat to their uptown soiree and exclusive gated community won’t cut it. For me, passing laws that they refuse to enforce is grounds for impeachment. Are you listening people of Illinois?

RogerG

*Source:

An excellent column on the gun issue and HIghland Park: When Gun Laws Don’t Prevent Gun Crime | National Review

July 5, 2022July 10, 2022

People Don’t Know Roe and Dobbs

Pro-life demonstrators celebrate outside the United States Supreme Court as the court rules in the Dobbs v. Women’s Health Organization abortion case overturning Roe v. Wade in Washington, D.C., June 24, 2022. (Photo: Michael Mccoy/Reuters)

Journalism is a disgrace. Their job is to inform. They don’t. They have become a platform for their collective biases and prejudices, which are about as well-informed as the general public that they serve. Thus, when opinion polls are conducted on the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe, glaring contradictions stand out in public perceptions of Roe, Dobbs, and abortion. We may as well disregard the polls except as proof of the press’s dereliction of duty.

Take the recent Harvard-Harris poll after the announcement of the Dobbs decision. We certainly can hold two ideas in our heads at the same time, but what if they are contradictions? In the Harvard-Harris poll, 55% opposed the overturning of Roe, yet 72% would limit abortion to 15 weeks. So, they want abortion possibly up to birth which is the essence of Roe and the later Casey decision, but then say that they don’t. Go ahead, try to square that circle.

Let’s further pick apart Roe and Casey and Dobbs and the poll. Roe has a “health of the mother” standard wrapped into a trimester scheme. Casey replaced that concoction with an admonition against placing an “undue burden” on a woman’s choice. Either way, there’s enough room to authorize abortion at birth. That’s Roe/Casey, and where 55% are. . . until they aren’t.

Then we have Dobbs. It affirmed the constitutionality of the Mississippi law that allowed abortion up to 15 weeks, where 72% of the public stands. 55% or 72%, which is it?

The American press, what a mess, what an embarrassment.

RogerG

*The Harvard-Harris poll here: https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/HHP_June2022_KeyResults.pdf
*More on the poll in Charles Cooke’s column here: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/harvard-harris-americans-dont-know-what-roe-did/

July 5, 2022July 5, 2022

Running Out of Puff

May be an image of 1 person, outdoors and text that says 'MAR NIWING 35 VEHIGLE WEMISSION GNP POLICE CE POLICE FXI8 FXI8EEN EEN' — UK police EV

Yes, that’s right. The UK’s Daily Telegraph reported on July 5 “Electric police cars ‘running out of puff’ on way to emergencies”. It’s the kind of thing that Democrat politicos wish for America. Just think, as an angry neighbor is about to go postal and you call 911, the 5-to-6-minute response time turns into . . . never. The cops’ EV ran out of juice on the way. It’s time to call the coroner.

It seems that all the EV’s accessories such as a/c, heater, radio, computers, lights, and siren run off the same battery as the one powering the wheels. The existential crisis of climate change turned into the existential crisis of a dead family member.

Following Biden’s lead, who is following the lead of California, who is following the lead of the UK – a pied piper of delusionals – the “best and brightest” have either outlawed the production of diesel and gas vehicles by date certain (2030 in the UK) or a target date of 2030 or 2035 is set for achieving 100% EV fleets. Utopians are habitual central planners and love numbered targets to force other people into meeting, no matter the disruption or loss of life.

Officers responding to emergencies in EV’s report the well-founded worry of not getting to the crisis. Batteries drain, charging stations haven’t kept up with the government mandates for EV’s, god-awful charging times (45 minutes to 8 hours), and the grid providing the power is being made more precarious at the same time by the same clowns.

It’s a cascade of absurdities. Going all-electric is quickly turning into all-farce, and a deadly one at that.

RogerG

July 4, 2022July 5, 2022

Happy Birthday America

The United States is a credal nation, a creed that we haven’t always lived up to, but what nation ever has? The creed of liberty is a high bar, a perfection that blemished human beings may never fully achieve. But it’s the striving that counts.

Liberty is not the sole possession of any one race, ethnicity, or gender. It’s a universal moral aspiration as shown by the waves of humanity risking life and limb to get here. The fact that our nation more than any other has a decent sense of liberty as its North Star welcomes all who wish to follow our laws in getting here. We are not a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of liberty-loving human beings.

We must remind ourselves that liberty is not license. Liberty without morals is like faith without works. It’s dead! Today, we run the risk of liberty becoming license, and the securing of the blessings of liberty is under assault by a noxious ideology that pits one group of Americans against another. We must resist this infection from the 19th and 20th centuries that undermines the blessings that have attracted millions. Americans beware of false mental idols that incite incessant group warfare. Every generation has its challenge. That’s today’s challenge.

God bless America.

I couldn’t settle on one rendition of Irving Berlin’s classic, originally composed in 1918. Here’s Kate Smith with a stirring performance from World War II.

RogerG

June 30, 2022June 30, 2022

Update: Video of Supt. Cheryl James-Ward Removed from YouTube (see previous post), But Here’s Another

To all, the video of Cheryl James-Ward exhibiting her woke approach in managing the district has been removed by the uploader according to YouTube. Sad. I once thought that transparency, the necessary quality of democratic-republics for the public to know what their paid public servants are up to, was still held to be a good thing. Not any longer. We’re back to the veil of secrecy.

Here’s a local tv station’s report on the controversy which includes the redacted video. Parents attended a school board meeting to call for the firing of Supt. Cheryl James-Ward. There’s more than one way to get around the censors.

RogerG

June 29, 2022

The Times They Are A-Changin’

See the source image

That’s right, for the times they are a-changin’. We are in a moment similar to the era of Bob Dylan’s youth. Back then, the target of his ire was the hideous Jim Crow. The same lyrics could equally apply to the reign of the radical left from the halls of power in Washington, DC, to big metropolitan areas and deep blue states. Signs are everywhere that “the times they are a-changin’”.

The lyrics of Bob Dylan’s first stanza are poignant:

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.

San Fransisco voted world's filthiest slum — San Francisco homeless encampment in 2018

Watch as the smash and grab phenomena sweeps the country in 2021-2022:

I’ll give you three indications that the ruling radical left of the donkey party might “sink like a stone”: (1) 1.7 million voters changed their registration from Democrat to Republican, a net gain of a 1 million to the R’s, from 2021 to 2022; (2) Arizona’s Gov. Doug Ducey signed a bill that allows the state’s students to take $6,400-per-pupil to a school of their parents’ choice; and (3) a San Diego school district dumped their identity-mongering, DEI-loving Superintendent. Let’s take a closer look at each one of these horsemen of the apocalypse.

The Democrats have a problem: they have a “smell of death” around them (to borrow from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “That Smell”), thanks to “defund the police”, their destruction of livelihoods and standards of living in greenie radicalism, constant campaigns of race and gender warfare, homoerotic curriculums to 7-year-olds, willful refusal to enforce laws, the erasure of the borders of the United States, a concerted effort to suspend the laws of economics in order to bribe and coerce the people into the preferred lifestyle of a fashionable clique, and . . . you get the picture.

The pungent odor that proceeds them has caused 1.7 million voters to flee the smell of the Democrat ship and crawl on board the USS Republican Party. Some 600,000 went the other way for a plus-1-million gain for the GOP, something not seen since the Elder Days (Lord of the Rings lingo). According to the AP, who broke the story, the biggest change occurred in the suburbs, by people who previously found Trump repulsive. Well, Trump’s no longer at the head of the parade. It’s Biden and his cohorts of lefties and greenie utopians at the tiller of state. It’s not a good look for moms and dads who have to regularly fill up the family sedan and balance the checkbook. And what awaits them as they go for a walk? Try ducking stray bullets, avoiding the long strings of homeless encampments, the random assaults by the criminally insane, staying clear of the parks for the drugs and filth and crime, the incessant car and home break-ins, and the schools that aren’t any better, if they’re allowed to be open. It’s heathier to hunker down with Netflix, popcorn, and a 45. As Lynyrd Skynyrd put it, “Ooh-ooh that smell”.

And, boy, did parents get a whiff of what’s happening in their child’s classroom. The lockdowns not only forced parents to sacrifice making ends meet but the end to in-person instruction also showed to many that they could live without the offerings of the teacher unions and the captured education Borg. “School choice” became more popular, and Gov. Ducey of Arizona and legislative Republicans responded with an expansion of the state’s voucher-like Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA’s). If an off-the-charts lefty San Francisco school board majority could be sent packing in, of all places, San Francisco, what do you think can be done in saner locales?

Arizona Governor Doug Ducey in Pheonix on June 17, 2022

It’s amazing to know that the unions’ agitation for school closures also exposed their shenanigans. It took away the barrier of gates and walls that protected them from any scrutiny. Parents are awake everywhere from Loudon County to San Francisco. Arizona has reacted, with other states soon to follow.

Simply put, all that Arizona did was to empower parents with the ability to walk away. Lets’ see how the Borg survives without the gravy train.

All of the ideological bile that runs the schools came to a head in another place, Sand Diego. The San Dieguito Union High School District Superintendent let the cat out of the bag, the feline of identity-mongering that is. The mental straitjacket of diversity-equity-inclusion (DEI) that runs the district came out on YouTube. Take a peek below.

In a training session last week, Superintendent Cheryl James-Ward reduced the kids to a collection of groups. And as groups, the children’s individuality was smothered under generalizations and racial, socioeconomic stereotypes. Like a true Marxist, the main target was the successful, the successful who happen to be labeled Asians. Asians are the Kulaks of Stalin’s fevered imagination in the fevered imagination of James-Ward. Not enough D’s and F’s for Asians and too many for the oppressed, a problem to be corrected by bureaucratic intervention. There you have it: the script for bringing one group down and artificially elevating other groups, all done to make the charts look good. James-Ward would make for an excellent colleague of Orwell’s Winston Smith in the Ministry of Truth of “1984”. The world of Oceania, though, is not to the liking of most people, Asian or otherwise.

San Dieguito UHSD Superintendent Cheryl James-Ward in a local tv interview on April 23. 2022.

She’s gone, fired by the school board, and so are 1.7 million from the Democrat voter registration rolls, and many Arizona parents who now have the financial heft to escape the Borg’s monopoly. To borrow again from Lynyrd Skynyrd:

Oo-oo that smell
Can’t you smell that smell?
Oo-oo that smell
The smell of death’s around you

Bob Dylan got a whiff of the same smell and it drew him to the conclusion that the “The Times They Are A-Changin’”.

Lynyrd Skynyrd performing That Smell:

RogerG

Bibliography:

*AP story on the Democrat’s loss of 1.7 million voter registrations in the past year: https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-biden-covid-health-presidential-e50db07385831e67f866ec45402be8b9

*The story of Sand Diequito School District’s firing of Supt. Cheryl James-Ward: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/california-school-district-fires-superintendent-for-divisive-comments-about-asian-students/

*The story of Arizona’s expanded school choice plan: https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/arizona-passes-universal-school-choice-for-1-1-million-students/

June 25, 2022June 25, 2022

Dobbs vs. Corporate America

Well, the Supreme Court finally reversed the silly, convoluted jurisprudence of Roe/Bolton/Casey. The claptrap joined the ash heap of history with the Dred Scott decision, fascism, the USSR, and disco fashions. Or has it, and they? These things are the closest to vampires that reality has produced. They never really die.

And corporate America is in a fever over Dobbs. Many have instantly proclaimed their Planned Parenthood bona fides. Tucker Carlson of the Fox News commentariat puts the blame on corporate greed: corporations hate families because they get in the way of the wage slaves’ total commitment to the firm. Besides sounding like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and The Squad, he is as wrong as they are. The c-suite may be ambivalent about marriage and kids, but their wokeness has been evident for years. Remember their real and metaphorical kneeling after George Floyd, their donations to BLM Inc., their growing tendency to funnel streams of cash to the Democratic Party, Zuckerbucks, their support for woke indoctrination, and their campaigns against election integrity laws? It could be the equivalent of political ransom money pioneered by the Mob and Jesse Jackson, but I doubt it. There appears to be not a scintilla of worry over a backlash from at least half the country. Where’s the greed interest in that, unless the corporate mavens are completely unaware?

These latest unvarnished declarations on the Dobbs decision are rooted in something else. The explanation can be found in the fact the c-suite has more in common with the college faculty lounge than the lives of everyone underneath their self-declared status level. Indeed, they aren’t likely to be aware of a different and prevalent perspective because they never see anyone with one. Charles Murray has written extensively on the “super zips” and their increasing self-isolation from the rest of the country. For the denizens of the super zips (as in super-wealthy zip codes), mostly metropolitan, the ladies of The View reflect a national consensus. To put it bluntly, the c-suite is as cocooned as the Duchess of Sussex (Meghan Markle).

How else can one explain the lurch of Disney to protest laws that protect 7-year-olds from sexualized instruction in the rudiments of gay sex? The Mouse and sodomy? It’s jaw-dropping . . . unless one’s social universe is limited to conversations populated with progressive clichés.

See the source image

How else to explain Delta and American Airlines, Coca-Cola, MLB, and a raft of others opposing wildly popular laws that do nothing but protect elections from fraud? What’s wrong with measures that ensure a vote of the people is actually a vote of the people? In the cloistered world of high-end gated communities, elite prep schools, the Ivy League, and business-class air travel, the air is thick in unchallenged lefty banalities.

So, Dobbs is seen in the silk-stocking enclaves as just another revolt of the rubes, people whose crudity in the eyes of their “betters” discounts their opinions. These aristocratic prejudices emanate from stupidity immersed in ignorance. Their social isolation leads the c-suite into minefields.

Thus, following the mental script of their isolated social world, ending a pregnancy isn’t much different from removing a hang nail. If their employees want to end the life of the baby within, Disney pledges to foot the employee’s bill for abortion shopping around the country.

Speaking of shopping, depending on the consumer’s choice, never before has the purchase of goods and services been so closely tied to something two-thirds of the American public finds abhorrent. A trip to Disney World now constitutes an unwitting consumer subsidy of abortion. How could a good Catholic ever again by a ticket to the Magic Kingdom for their kids? The parishioner would be compromised in taking communion.

The progressive activism doesn’t end with Disney. Paramount, Meta, Warner Bros., and Netflix announced their abortion subsidy. Uber, Lyft, and Apple are likely to follow suit.

Dick’s Sporting Goods earlier joined the “assault weapon” crusade. Now, they expressed their financial fealty to employee abortions. Think about that when shopping for Little League equipment. If they get their way, future Little Leagues would be a lot smaller. One would think that a different tack would do better to fatten the bottom line.

Amazon is fully onboard to the tune of $4,000 in travel expenses for an employee to find an abortionist or mutilate their bodies in sex-change therapies and surgeries. The progressive-industrial-complex is brought to you by the costumers of Amazon, Citibank, Uber, and the complex’s abettors in the related entertainment-industrial-complex. All of them managed by mentalities from out-of-touch secular monasteries.

Dobbs vs. corporate America is essentially flyover country vs. corporate America.

See the source image

RogerG

June 15, 2022June 15, 2022

The Tangle of Our Mind

A protester holds his fist in the air during a protest against racial injustice and police brutality early in the morning on August 23, 2020 in Portland, Oregon. — A rioter clad in the black of Antifa raises his fist during the August 2020 riots in Portland. (photo: Nathan Howard, Getty Images)

“God made the angels to show Him splendor, as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But man He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind.” – Sir Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons”.

May be an image of 2 people and people standing — Paul Scofield as Sir Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons”

Sir Thomas More in the movie was correct. The witty tangle in our heads exists, but the congeries of thoughts, memories, emotions, and facts can generate ideas that can redound to mankind’s credit or condemnation.

Gosh, our present age is amply illustrative of the tangle gone wildly astray. Ideas, oh, those ideas, of the destruction of moral standards that led an 18-year-old to storm into a classroom to kill 19 10-year-olds and 2 teachers. Personal grievance cancels human life. A community’s historical memory is erased by mobs who are angered by the fact that the past doesn’t match the climate of opinion in a college ASB. Defacement of cherished memorials ensued. Waves of crime, violence, riots, and general disorder have turned many urban areas into wastelands that would stretch the imagination of sci-fi writers. The facts of biology are said to play second fiddle to the fancies in our mind. Chromosomes are made irrelevant by chemical and surgical interventions. Thus, a mockery is made of girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports. Blatant, revolutionary indoctrination is openly disseminated to the very young in their classrooms and is heartily embraced in corporate boardrooms. The laws of economics take a back seat to highly contestable utopian visions as expressed in climate-change ideology and coerced group equality. Fuel costs skyrocket; broad inflation is unleashed; supply chains break; shortages appear; livelihoods are threatened; the work ethic is weakened; and depopulation continues apace as fertility rates plummet and pews become vacant. Get the picture?

May be an image of 1 person and text

Something is at work. It’s ideas that emanate from the tangle in one person’s mind and enters the tangle of another. Frequently, if history is any guide, the results aren’t pretty.

These thoughts came to me from a reading of “Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography” by Julian Young (2010 ed.) and a subsequent viewing of Stanley Kramer’s “Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961).

May be an image of 1 person and text that says 'A Philosophical Biography Friedrich Nietzsche Julian JYoung Young'

May be an image of 4 people and text that says 'አ JUDGMENTA MELHOR ATOR /ROTEIR INDICAÇOES NUREMBERG JULGAMENTO EM NUREMBERG VENCEDORES OVENCIDOS ÁUDIO PORTUGUES 5.1 INGLÊS 2.0 BURT LANCASTER MARLENE DIETRICH SPENCER TRACY "OSCAR" marca oistrada da Academia de Ciencias Hollywood Um filme de STANLEY KRAMER'

The one is an account of high-minded philosophy and the other is about the vile ends that philosophical ideas can be put. Nothing like the Holocaust, the underlying subject of “Judgment at Nuremberg”, was the intention of Nietzsche in his late 19th century writings. Nonetheless, the Holocaust happened, and Nazi belief was scented with Nietzsche’s ideas: the will to power, the Supermen, his aristocratic radicalism, the need to be hard, the grotesque eugenics, the rejection of Christianity’s “slave” morality, a monolithic ideology supposedly promoting “community health”, and the condemnation of democracy and pluralistic societies, referring to them as “motley cows”. It’s all there in Nietzsche’s published musings.

May be an image of 3 people and people standing — Elizabeth Froster-Nietzsche, sister of Friedrich Nietzsche, who preserved his legacy as her life’s mission, joyfully receiving Adolf Hitler who honored Nietzsche for his contributions to Nazi belief.

The lesson: a person can control what they write; they can’t control how others use what they wrote.

The whole of the twentieth century into this new one is a museum of the evil that men and women can do . . . from the tangle of their minds. The demeaning of standards and the institutions that buttress them is the primary culprit. Revolutionary dogmas – communism, fascism, CRT, transgenderism – were, and are, the excuse to replace the old social fabric with these new (relatively speaking) shiny objects of the mind.

“A Judgment at Nuremberg” put on display only one consequence – Nazism and its Holocaust – while ignoring its competitor, communism. It was easy to do. Invading armies into Germany produced ample eye witnesses as they came upon the scenes when the ovens were still warm and the gas chambers had yet to be demolished, something not true for the victims of Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet Union – and to think that they were our allies (!?). We only had the writings of Solzhenitsyn and a few others to chronicle the horrors of Marxism: Katyn, Kurapaty Forest, 30,000 gulags, the unrestrained secret police, show trials, mass executions, state-manufactured famines. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then experiencing it with your own eyes, nose, ears, and hands is worth a thousand pictures.

Don’t think for a moment that the horrors arising from the tangle of our minds are only matters for the history books. The dialectics of Nazism and Marxism are present in our time’s woke brigades. Yes, dialectics: the alleged truth that everything boils down to open and hidden coercion – the “system” so to speak – of people into the categories of the oppressed and oppressors. Merit and free will have no role. Group guilt dominates all. It’s the pith and marrow of critical legal theory in law and critical race theory for everything else in public policy. It shows in your child’s school in the forms of teacher training, curriculum, textbooks, and school management. It shows in banal euphemisms such as “equity” which then bleeds into nearly everything that government does.

Much of our lives are to be turned upside down to fit someone’s incoherent abstraction. In the end, we are guided down the well-traveled road to societal decay, to places occupied by the likes of the USSR, North Korea, the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia, Xi’s surveillance-and-gulag state, Castro’s Cuba, and Maduro’s Venezuela.

It’s great for the high priesthood of the woke for they’ll get rich as they feed on the rotting social corpse.

For the rest of us, welcome to the Middle Ages. See, the tangle of the mind can be made to pay, even as it destroys.

May be an image of 1 person and text

RogerG

*Also in my Substack feed, “The Golden Mean”, at rogerlgraf.substack.com/.

*Also in my Facebook page under Roger Graf.