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It's a mashup of styles, yielding such as upper floor exterior columns:
A hotel will go up in its place:
Monday, August 28, 2017
Before and Crasser
The United Workmen Temple in Portland was built in the 1890s for the Ancient Order of Workmen, and eventually became the Tourney Building. Falling into disrepair it was declared unsafe and taken off the historical register in 2015. The city cited the cost of earthquake retrofitting and now it's under demolition.
The style is something called Richardsonian Romanesque, the exemplar of which is Trinity Church in Boston:
It's a mashup of styles, yielding such as upper floor exterior columns:
A hotel will go up in its place:
It's a mashup of styles, yielding such as upper floor exterior columns:
A hotel will go up in its place:
Saturday, August 26, 2017
Show of Hands Schadenfreude
Some things are more deservedly viral than others. This segment where the narrative gets away from CNN for instance. It appears Alisyn Camerota assembled a panel of Trump supporters for the purpose of affecting po-faced bemusement at each turn in their defense of Trump. I have a hard time believing she got anything other than what she expected; but she seems genuinely gobsmacked when not a one of them agrees the president's remarks about Charlottesville are an outrage.
Watching her encounter with the Trump supporters feels like coming upon the exact spot, the fault-line between proscribed values--the "narrative"--and objective constitutional principle. And it's the common man, not the elitist, counseling calm principle in the face of barely contained hysteria.
Camerota keeps putting it to them the way the media has been conditioning them to see it: when confronted with this question of guilt, it isn't who did what, but who is who.
They put it back to her at the level of (what used to be) middle-school civics: it's a question of who did what.
She's lucky nobody pins her down on this fundamental point. Comically at points she dances around it--the guy in the suit says something about antifa setting fires and Camerota corrects him. They didn't use "those tactics in Charlottesville".
Now, distinguishing between arson and assault (and of course one resourceful Angry Black Man did, notoriously, bring a homemade flamethrower) here is something for which she should probably still be receiving a logical beat-down, but she was bailed out by the black woman who--rightly--says "I blame the government".
Sure, she loses this exchange, after asking, with all the confidence of a Buzzfeed intern, "how do you blame the government for a white supremacist mowing down a crowd of people..."
There it is again. But what, she pleads, if it's a white supremacist...? In destroying your ability to think objectively, political correctness destroys your ability to see context.
So it seems not only is antifa allowed political violence if they oppose Nazis, the authorities are relieved of their duty to public safety--if it involves Nazis. The authorities don't have to protect Nazis, and they don't have to protect you from Nazis. They don't have to protect the Nazis from you.
In our minds the Nazis become like a force of nature; hey man, it's Nazis! What are you going to do? Nazis are like an Act of God. Nazis are sharks with laser beams attached to their heads.
Camerota is too conditioned to see she lobbies for a radical departure replacing individual rights with ideological guilt. She keeps asking in one form or another, comically, but these are Nazis, don't you get it?
It's heartening to see the clueless elite schooled by clued-in common folk.
Watching her encounter with the Trump supporters feels like coming upon the exact spot, the fault-line between proscribed values--the "narrative"--and objective constitutional principle. And it's the common man, not the elitist, counseling calm principle in the face of barely contained hysteria.
Camerota keeps putting it to them the way the media has been conditioning them to see it: when confronted with this question of guilt, it isn't who did what, but who is who.
They put it back to her at the level of (what used to be) middle-school civics: it's a question of who did what.
She's lucky nobody pins her down on this fundamental point. Comically at points she dances around it--the guy in the suit says something about antifa setting fires and Camerota corrects him. They didn't use "those tactics in Charlottesville".
Now, distinguishing between arson and assault (and of course one resourceful Angry Black Man did, notoriously, bring a homemade flamethrower) here is something for which she should probably still be receiving a logical beat-down, but she was bailed out by the black woman who--rightly--says "I blame the government".
Sure, she loses this exchange, after asking, with all the confidence of a Buzzfeed intern, "how do you blame the government for a white supremacist mowing down a crowd of people..."
There it is again. But what, she pleads, if it's a white supremacist...? In destroying your ability to think objectively, political correctness destroys your ability to see context.
So it seems not only is antifa allowed political violence if they oppose Nazis, the authorities are relieved of their duty to public safety--if it involves Nazis. The authorities don't have to protect Nazis, and they don't have to protect you from Nazis. They don't have to protect the Nazis from you.
In our minds the Nazis become like a force of nature; hey man, it's Nazis! What are you going to do? Nazis are like an Act of God. Nazis are sharks with laser beams attached to their heads.
Camerota is too conditioned to see she lobbies for a radical departure replacing individual rights with ideological guilt. She keeps asking in one form or another, comically, but these are Nazis, don't you get it?
It's heartening to see the clueless elite schooled by clued-in common folk.
[reposted from years ago]
An obnoxious, industrial version of what sounds like Wagner, reverberating at ear stinging volume and smothered by an overwhelming, testicle vibrating bass, has me cringing and cupping my hands over my ears. Ballerinas with shaved heads wearing brown shirts and black leather tutus are flitting toward me (somehow they manage to glide gracefully in their high boots), their jeté movements resembling a goose-step; they are chasing me around a massive stage shrouded in an oppressive, garish black-light. I'm dodging in and out of other dancers that are scattered about the stage standing stock-still in arabesque postures modified to angle their arms in a Nazi salute.
A bald man with ashen gray skin and wearing an oversized monocle startles me by appearing via a trapdoor at my feet; he’s shouting at me, silent under the din of the music which is now distorting like an old, straining movie soundtrack. He’s trying to feed me a line of dialogue, repeating it over and over with increasing impatience, but I can’t hear him. Reading his disembodied black lips I can make no sense of them, I suspect he's not even forming words. Still, I’m certain what he’s saying is something terrible, intolerable, vital; shaking his head in disgust he disappears with a resounding clap of the trapdoor that echoes until it morphs into a metallic drum machine sound that becomes part of the music, driving it to a manic, unbearable tempo.
I break into a full run, trying to maintain a straight path, figuring I'll eventually find my way offstage, but soon become aware that I'm passing the same dancers over and over again. I realize the stage is a globe that I'm repeatedly circumnavigating; now I can see its curvature. I’m getting sick, I'm looking for the trapdoor, for a crack in the floorboards, for any means of escape. I look down and see I'm wearing leotards and jackboots. The music reaches an abbreviated crescendo and stops; a split second of silence is abruptly terminated by a thunderclap of deafening applause...
An obnoxious, industrial version of what sounds like Wagner, reverberating at ear stinging volume and smothered by an overwhelming, testicle vibrating bass, has me cringing and cupping my hands over my ears. Ballerinas with shaved heads wearing brown shirts and black leather tutus are flitting toward me (somehow they manage to glide gracefully in their high boots), their jeté movements resembling a goose-step; they are chasing me around a massive stage shrouded in an oppressive, garish black-light. I'm dodging in and out of other dancers that are scattered about the stage standing stock-still in arabesque postures modified to angle their arms in a Nazi salute.
A bald man with ashen gray skin and wearing an oversized monocle startles me by appearing via a trapdoor at my feet; he’s shouting at me, silent under the din of the music which is now distorting like an old, straining movie soundtrack. He’s trying to feed me a line of dialogue, repeating it over and over with increasing impatience, but I can’t hear him. Reading his disembodied black lips I can make no sense of them, I suspect he's not even forming words. Still, I’m certain what he’s saying is something terrible, intolerable, vital; shaking his head in disgust he disappears with a resounding clap of the trapdoor that echoes until it morphs into a metallic drum machine sound that becomes part of the music, driving it to a manic, unbearable tempo.
I break into a full run, trying to maintain a straight path, figuring I'll eventually find my way offstage, but soon become aware that I'm passing the same dancers over and over again. I realize the stage is a globe that I'm repeatedly circumnavigating; now I can see its curvature. I’m getting sick, I'm looking for the trapdoor, for a crack in the floorboards, for any means of escape. I look down and see I'm wearing leotards and jackboots. The music reaches an abbreviated crescendo and stops; a split second of silence is abruptly terminated by a thunderclap of deafening applause...
Thursday, August 24, 2017
What's in a Name?
In denying Robert Lee a desirable assignment because his name incidentally causes a (questionable) racial offense between two groups, neither of which he belongs to, did ESPN violate civil rights law?
Lee is discriminated against by default: Asian man can't do this (granted, very particular, silly-ass) thing, because it would constitute an offense upon blacks by whites. Well, I would argue, just what did Mr Lee (a venerable Chinese name, which must not be other-ized) do wrong? How is White Supremacy his fault?
Absurd as it is, it's just a unique manifestation of a daily occurrence: Asian guy gets shunted aside by the Diversity Express. It's all perfectly consistent with the current diversity zeitgeist; it's just the law hasn't caught up yet, perhaps.
Presumably a white man named Robert Lee would have been denied the assignment, sooner and with greater trepidation. In the current frenzy they might've caught it and not assigned him in the first place, sparing themselves the embarrassment--but they know now; we can rest assured ESPN will avoid entirely such potential mass microaggressions, and we'll be spared the terror of such as a Jeff Davis calling University of Kentucky games.
But--would have a black have been denied the Virginia gig? I'm not so sure--and I'm certain if he was denied the gig, he would have a case, for which he would easily find an experienced attorney. Is there any doubt black Robert E Lee (the E is for Eazy) would have a case? It's silly in concept but sinister in practice: under the guise of fairness we're carving out more privileged spaces, such as professional opportunities, for favored ("protected") groups.
Whites are being robbed of their national and cultural patrimony as well as their fair shot through merit. Asians, alone among major ethnic or racial types, share with them that second outrage. Robert Lee getting shunted aside by the Diversity Express is standard practice. It happens all day every day, in less comic ways.
There is a message here, to Asians and other non-black minorities, about the hierarchy of grievance; they must know their place. ESPN and others genuinely take for granted their prosperous, law abiding and boring Asian countrymen. They are, in the quaint phrase ridiculously applied to black Americans, "invisible". In the language of critical theory, our elite routinely "otherizes" Asians in this way. The undeniable message for Asians is you don't count in this context.
What does the law say?
As we all know under Title VII a "disproportionately negative effect" of otherwise "neutral" policy is how troublesome objective employer requirements, like IQ tests, are outlawed because of their dispareate negative impact on, usually, blacks.
Clearly Lee demonstrates a disproportionate negative effect on his own protected class, Asians, by policy--but is it "neutral"? What does that mean in this context? And if ESPN had to make this argument in court--that exceptional policy in deference to black feelz is "neutral"--well, I'd just like to hear it, that's all.
Lee is discriminated against by default: Asian man can't do this (granted, very particular, silly-ass) thing, because it would constitute an offense upon blacks by whites. Well, I would argue, just what did Mr Lee (a venerable Chinese name, which must not be other-ized) do wrong? How is White Supremacy his fault?
Absurd as it is, it's just a unique manifestation of a daily occurrence: Asian guy gets shunted aside by the Diversity Express. It's all perfectly consistent with the current diversity zeitgeist; it's just the law hasn't caught up yet, perhaps.
Presumably a white man named Robert Lee would have been denied the assignment, sooner and with greater trepidation. In the current frenzy they might've caught it and not assigned him in the first place, sparing themselves the embarrassment--but they know now; we can rest assured ESPN will avoid entirely such potential mass microaggressions, and we'll be spared the terror of such as a Jeff Davis calling University of Kentucky games.
But--would have a black have been denied the Virginia gig? I'm not so sure--and I'm certain if he was denied the gig, he would have a case, for which he would easily find an experienced attorney. Is there any doubt black Robert E Lee (the E is for Eazy) would have a case? It's silly in concept but sinister in practice: under the guise of fairness we're carving out more privileged spaces, such as professional opportunities, for favored ("protected") groups.
Whites are being robbed of their national and cultural patrimony as well as their fair shot through merit. Asians, alone among major ethnic or racial types, share with them that second outrage. Robert Lee getting shunted aside by the Diversity Express is standard practice. It happens all day every day, in less comic ways.
There is a message here, to Asians and other non-black minorities, about the hierarchy of grievance; they must know their place. ESPN and others genuinely take for granted their prosperous, law abiding and boring Asian countrymen. They are, in the quaint phrase ridiculously applied to black Americans, "invisible". In the language of critical theory, our elite routinely "otherizes" Asians in this way. The undeniable message for Asians is you don't count in this context.
What does the law say?
Under the laws enforced by EEOC, it is illegal to discriminate against someone (applicant or employee) because of that person's race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information. It is also illegal to retaliate against a person because he or she complained about discrimination, filed a charge of discrimination, or participated in an employment discrimination investigation or lawsuit.
The law forbids discrimination in every aspect of employment.
The laws enforced by EEOC prohibit an employer or other covered entity from using neutral employment policies and practices that have a disproportionately negative effect on applicants or employees of a particular race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), or national origin, or on an individual with a disability or class of individuals with disabilities, if the polices or practices at issue are not job-related and necessary to the operation of the business. The laws enforced by EEOC also prohibit an employer from using neutral employment policies and practices that have a disproportionately negative impact on applicants or employees age 40 or older, if the policies or practices at issue are not based on a reasonable factor other than age."[D]iscrimination in every aspect of employment" is as broad as it is clear.
As we all know under Title VII a "disproportionately negative effect" of otherwise "neutral" policy is how troublesome objective employer requirements, like IQ tests, are outlawed because of their dispareate negative impact on, usually, blacks.
Clearly Lee demonstrates a disproportionate negative effect on his own protected class, Asians, by policy--but is it "neutral"? What does that mean in this context? And if ESPN had to make this argument in court--that exceptional policy in deference to black feelz is "neutral"--well, I'd just like to hear it, that's all.
It is illegal for an employer to make decisions about job assignments and promotions based on an employee's race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information. For example, an employer may not give preference to employees of a certain race when making shift assignments and may not segregate employees of a particular national origin from other employees or from customers.
An employer may not base assignment and promotion decisions on stereotypes and assumptions about a person's race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information.
It seems ESPN is guilty at least of name discrimination. `Honor and Grace
From Dreadnought, Robert Massie's history of the German-British rivalry leading up to World War I, an account of Lord Kitchener confronting Captain Marchand's small, beleaguered French force at Fashoda, where they were attempting to establish a colonial outpost in defiance of Britain's mandate for Egypt:
Herbert Kitchener was a Francophile who spoke French well. He admired Marchand's achievement in crossing the continent. Marchand's regard for Kitchener, who had defeated the Dervishes and in so doing eliminated a threat to his expedition, was equally great. They spoke in French.
"I have come to resume possession of the Khedive's dominions," Kitchener said.
"Mon General, I , Marchand, am here by order of the French Government. I thank you for you offer of conveyance to Europe, but I must wait here for instructions."
"Captain, I will place my boats at your disposal to return to Europe by the Nile."
"Mon General, I thank you, but I am awaiting orders from my Government."
"I must hoist the Egyptian flag here," Kitchener observed.
"Why, I myself will help you hoist it--over the village."
"Over the fort."
"No, that I shall resist."
"Do you know, Captain, that this affair may set France and England at war?"
Marchand bowed without replying.
"You have achieved something remarkable, very remarkable, but you know the French Government will not back you up."
Marchand replied that, in any case, he would wait for his government's instructions. In the meantime, he declared, he would die before hauling down the flag of France.
Kitchener then turned slowly around and gazed at his own expedition of thousand of officers and men, flushed with victory. "We are the stronger," he observed. Marchand bowed again. They reached a compromise: the Egyptian flag was raised over an outlying section of the fort and the French flag remained where it was.
Monday, August 21, 2017
Police Tactics and Performance Art
Characterizing last Saturday's "free speech" demonstration in Boston as a dangerous "white supremacist" gathering, opposed by principled, peaceful protest, is an open conspiracy.
The conspiracy isn't just open to public view, it's open to public participation. The mayor and media's histrionics prompted tens of thousands to turn out, as if to a casting call for a reality show where everyone is assured of being picked. It's performance art. It's postmodern. We participate in our own delusion, manipulation (alienation, dispossession...).
I'm not sure there's a historical precedent.
With its more provocative players scared off or kept away, twenty or so not overly white and not very nationalist demonstrators who came to give speeches in support of free expression (in the manner of previous "free speech" rallies in response to antifa shutting down Milo at UC Berkeley) huddled in a gazebo from which they were ejected before they could--small point missed by media--actually exercise their freedom of speech and assembly.
In a sane world this would be a victory for the demonstrators, and lend real weight to their assertion that freedom of speech is under threat.
Yet rather than acknowledging at least the courage it took this tiny band facing off against an angry mob of thousands, the media response was to gloat that the "white supremacists" had been turned away by an inspiring outpouring of resistance to Hate. That same resistance turned their wrath and piss on the police for two reasons: for protecting the "Nazis" from them and for being police, which they equate with Nazis. The mayor and police chief were nonetheless grateful for their service in opposing Hate.
It's notable that no press appeared to be inside the original demonstration. All the available documentation comes from participants. The rally itself is barely noted in media accounts focusing on the massive counter-rally and the relationship to Charlottesville.
In this production you only see the bad guys from a distance. It isn't as if liberal media wouldn't like to give us close shots of Real Live Nazis. Unite the Right gave it to them. They must have been hugely disappointed in Boston.
I'm reminded of a joke in the film Tootsie: a director with a homely actress asks his cameraman how far he can pull back. The cameraman responds, "how about Cleveland?"
To make these Nazis look good they had to pull all the way back to Atlanta, DC, Manhattan.
The rally was to feature Joe Biggs, formerly of Info Wars, Kyle "Based Stickman" Chapman and writer Cassandra Fairbanks (who cancelled because of death threats).
The Boston police chief thanked the mob for its performance (overall, I presume):
Boston couldn't help but bring one thing into the light. The Charlottesville Police cannot pretend they didn't know how to handle last week's rally.
There is a model; I've witnessed it myself in Cleveland at the RNC last year and here in Portland more than once. It isn't complicated. You form police lines between hostile groups, keep the streets clear and don't take any shit from antifa. What should be standard but isn't, and wasn't in Democratic Virginia despite a law on the books (fittingly, an anti-Klan law), and would be huge: banning masks.
Here in Portland we had a similar standoff, when another alt right group held a "free speech rally" across from City Hall June 4.
The city pressured that demonstration to cancel too. Weeks before a lunatic stabbed two men on a commuter train who had interceded when he was verbally abusing a Muslim woman. That man had turned up at a rally somewhere with a Nazi flag recently. Naturally, it was argued, the free speech group (Joey Gibson of Vancouver, who seems to be some sort of Christian conservative, organized the rally featuring Baked Alaska and the same Stickman character who was supposed to appear in Boston), would have to stand down in shame because the madman was identified as One of Theirs.
Not that it should matter, but the commuter train killer was all over the map politically; a Bernie supporter and wild virtue-signalling anti-racist at points. He seems to have been angry at everyone. There's also the problem of what exactly happened: the knifeman wasn't attacking the woman when the two intervened.
The city has endured strange paroxysms in response to Trump; there really is no conservative institution or faction to take it out on. The annual Rose Parade was cancelled rather than risk antifa attacks on the mild Republican chapter that was scheduled to march.
There's the police, of course, always the police, especially now that corporate America and what used to be called the Establishment is behind the demonstrators almost without qualification; even the police, to the extent they're part of the Establishment (which is really crazy when you think of it) are behind them, when they stand before them and endure their abuse. They are Tom Wolfe's "flak catchers", government agents on hand to endure abuse from angry minorities.
Of course any such gathering now is violently anti-police. It is that way because of the perception of how the police treat blacks. When the leftist American terrorist Weatherman group, experiencing a crisis of legitimacy, leveled up to attempted murder, the police were their target, and for the same reason they are now:
Many of the right-wingers came in provocative armor, inspired by Kyle Chapman, who spoke (the parts of speeches I heard were uninspiring and barely provocative, much less "hateful"). The atmosphere inside the rally was light. My impression was there was a good deal of LARPing going on, with a few serious characters. Oathkeepers worked the perimeter co-coordinating with police.
They were surrounded on three sides: one demonstration before City Hall to the west, one before the ugly federal building to the east, and one large, menacing antifa group to the north:
Caches of weapons and projectiles were found around the park. When antifa began taking apart a brick wall and clashing with police they were cleared out:
The park where the rally was being held was cordoned off by police with entry and exit limited to one street corner. I walked freely between demonstrations (dressed in bland non-partisan fashion) and wasn't noticed, much less hassled:
Trouble was anticipated after the rally dispersed and, presumably, antifa would seek out smaller groups to attack. Most contention was contained. Antifa did not reappear in significant numbers after being driven off the first time.
Here's some more bad converted Periscope video, wherein I'm briefly harassed by a salt and pepper pair, a suspiciously over-exuberant Black Panther LARPer and his antifa-masked pal. I write "suspiciously" also because I saw the same character hand someone over to cops on video someone else took.
Unfortunately there's no sound. The local BLM faction arrived late (insert Dark Time joke here) and blocked a street briefly (that's what you see at the start of this) and a girl was pepper-sprayed:
I can't imagine this going off without significant violence now. The part of social justice warrior, never clearly defined, has changed. It's been modified through competitive improvisation. Now the actor so cast considers the possibility of tolerance and thinks no, that wouldn't be consistent with the character.
And he would be right.
The conspiracy isn't just open to public view, it's open to public participation. The mayor and media's histrionics prompted tens of thousands to turn out, as if to a casting call for a reality show where everyone is assured of being picked. It's performance art. It's postmodern. We participate in our own delusion, manipulation (alienation, dispossession...).
I'm not sure there's a historical precedent.
With its more provocative players scared off or kept away, twenty or so not overly white and not very nationalist demonstrators who came to give speeches in support of free expression (in the manner of previous "free speech" rallies in response to antifa shutting down Milo at UC Berkeley) huddled in a gazebo from which they were ejected before they could--small point missed by media--actually exercise their freedom of speech and assembly.
In a sane world this would be a victory for the demonstrators, and lend real weight to their assertion that freedom of speech is under threat.
Yet rather than acknowledging at least the courage it took this tiny band facing off against an angry mob of thousands, the media response was to gloat that the "white supremacists" had been turned away by an inspiring outpouring of resistance to Hate. That same resistance turned their wrath and piss on the police for two reasons: for protecting the "Nazis" from them and for being police, which they equate with Nazis. The mayor and police chief were nonetheless grateful for their service in opposing Hate.
The Siege of the Gazebo
It's notable that no press appeared to be inside the original demonstration. All the available documentation comes from participants. The rally itself is barely noted in media accounts focusing on the massive counter-rally and the relationship to Charlottesville.
In this production you only see the bad guys from a distance. It isn't as if liberal media wouldn't like to give us close shots of Real Live Nazis. Unite the Right gave it to them. They must have been hugely disappointed in Boston.
I'm reminded of a joke in the film Tootsie: a director with a homely actress asks his cameraman how far he can pull back. The cameraman responds, "how about Cleveland?"
To make these Nazis look good they had to pull all the way back to Atlanta, DC, Manhattan.
The rally was to feature Joe Biggs, formerly of Info Wars, Kyle "Based Stickman" Chapman and writer Cassandra Fairbanks (who cancelled because of death threats).
The Boston police chief thanked the mob for its performance (overall, I presume):
[Police Chief] Evans became the most animated after a reporter said organizers alleged speakers were unable to get to the “free speech” rally.
“We had a job to do; we did a great job,” he said.
“I’m not going to listen to people who come in here and want to talk about hate. And you know what, if they didn’t get in, that’s a good thing ’cause their message isn’t what we want to hear.”
Overall, Evans called it a “great day for the city.
“I’m really impressed,” he said.Already forgotten the embarrassing part about police being doused with urine. You have to wonder if Boston's rank and file cops feel the same way. Don't hit me with a urine cocktail and tell me it's raining, Chief.
“We probably had 40,000 people out here, standing tall against hatred and bigotry in our city, and that’s a good feeling.”
Boston couldn't help but bring one thing into the light. The Charlottesville Police cannot pretend they didn't know how to handle last week's rally.
There is a model; I've witnessed it myself in Cleveland at the RNC last year and here in Portland more than once. It isn't complicated. You form police lines between hostile groups, keep the streets clear and don't take any shit from antifa. What should be standard but isn't, and wasn't in Democratic Virginia despite a law on the books (fittingly, an anti-Klan law), and would be huge: banning masks.
Here in Portland we had a similar standoff, when another alt right group held a "free speech rally" across from City Hall June 4.
The city pressured that demonstration to cancel too. Weeks before a lunatic stabbed two men on a commuter train who had interceded when he was verbally abusing a Muslim woman. That man had turned up at a rally somewhere with a Nazi flag recently. Naturally, it was argued, the free speech group (Joey Gibson of Vancouver, who seems to be some sort of Christian conservative, organized the rally featuring Baked Alaska and the same Stickman character who was supposed to appear in Boston), would have to stand down in shame because the madman was identified as One of Theirs.
Not that it should matter, but the commuter train killer was all over the map politically; a Bernie supporter and wild virtue-signalling anti-racist at points. He seems to have been angry at everyone. There's also the problem of what exactly happened: the knifeman wasn't attacking the woman when the two intervened.
The city has endured strange paroxysms in response to Trump; there really is no conservative institution or faction to take it out on. The annual Rose Parade was cancelled rather than risk antifa attacks on the mild Republican chapter that was scheduled to march.
There's the police, of course, always the police, especially now that corporate America and what used to be called the Establishment is behind the demonstrators almost without qualification; even the police, to the extent they're part of the Establishment (which is really crazy when you think of it) are behind them, when they stand before them and endure their abuse. They are Tom Wolfe's "flak catchers", government agents on hand to endure abuse from angry minorities.
Of course any such gathering now is violently anti-police. It is that way because of the perception of how the police treat blacks. When the leftist American terrorist Weatherman group, experiencing a crisis of legitimacy, leveled up to attempted murder, the police were their target, and for the same reason they are now:
The people Weatherman intended to kill were policemen..."(w)e didn't want to do things just around the war. We wanted to be seen targeting racism as well, so police were important."
(...)
The decision to attack policemen was an unspoken act of solidarity with the group whose approval mattered most to Weatherman leadership: Movement blacks, especially the Black Panthers, who reserved a special hatred for urban police. The death of Fred Hampton and the brutality of the Chicago police in general made almost everyone in the leadership eager to seek revenge against policemen.
"In our hearts, we all wanted to be Black Panthers...what the Panthers wanted to do, which is what the Black Liberation Army did later, and that's kill policemen. It's all they wanted to do."Portland Police Bureau operates under federal injunction for its supposed mistreatment of the mentally ill. The city all but went looking for a federal decision showing racial bias, but having more crazies than blacks, had to settle.
Many of the right-wingers came in provocative armor, inspired by Kyle Chapman, who spoke (the parts of speeches I heard were uninspiring and barely provocative, much less "hateful"). The atmosphere inside the rally was light. My impression was there was a good deal of LARPing going on, with a few serious characters. Oathkeepers worked the perimeter co-coordinating with police.
They were surrounded on three sides: one demonstration before City Hall to the west, one before the ugly federal building to the east, and one large, menacing antifa group to the north:
Caches of weapons and projectiles were found around the park. When antifa began taking apart a brick wall and clashing with police they were cleared out:
The park where the rally was being held was cordoned off by police with entry and exit limited to one street corner. I walked freely between demonstrations (dressed in bland non-partisan fashion) and wasn't noticed, much less hassled:
Trouble was anticipated after the rally dispersed and, presumably, antifa would seek out smaller groups to attack. Most contention was contained. Antifa did not reappear in significant numbers after being driven off the first time.
Here's some more bad converted Periscope video, wherein I'm briefly harassed by a salt and pepper pair, a suspiciously over-exuberant Black Panther LARPer and his antifa-masked pal. I write "suspiciously" also because I saw the same character hand someone over to cops on video someone else took.
Unfortunately there's no sound. The local BLM faction arrived late (insert Dark Time joke here) and blocked a street briefly (that's what you see at the start of this) and a girl was pepper-sprayed:
I can't imagine this going off without significant violence now. The part of social justice warrior, never clearly defined, has changed. It's been modified through competitive improvisation. Now the actor so cast considers the possibility of tolerance and thinks no, that wouldn't be consistent with the character.
And he would be right.
Thursday, August 17, 2017
Christians and Lions
I'm still at a loss to find what the Unite the Right rally organizers did that was legally or morally wrong. They are guilty of provocation. Antifa called their bluff. They should've known better. They hurt their own cause. All true. But they still did nothing objectively wrong. It's astounding that in just half-acknowledging that, President Trump has had to show heroic fortitude. The moment he asks whatever foolish reporter the question that is supposed to be so outrageous--are we going after the Founders next?--was presidential--presidential now is raising your head above the muck of pc idiocy to ask a sensible question.
Do note none of those scoffing reactions to Trump's so-outlandish suggestion Washington and Jefferson might be next, are coupled with the author's declaration of opposition. He should have asked in return: do you approve of removing statues of the Founders (actually I think he did--did the reporter answer?)?
But regarding (what I believe is) Unite the Right's innocence of criminal or moral culpability, I say things are dire enough that this must be all that guides you. That is, you cannot abandon anyone who shares the worthy goal of saving white America--and that's what it is, sadly--because they've embarrassed you.
Still, I'm not saying people shouldn't be mad. Richard Spencer and Unite the Right created a fait accompli for both sides. Things are different now. Accelerationists should be pleased.
It's either the end of Trump, the end of the alt right, the end of Trump and the alt right, or, the end of the mainstream. They now "own" antifa. Or do they? Having banished so much of the country now from the moral high ground, there's no one holding power accountable--there's no real political opposition in this country. A stranded president and an inchoate movement trying to affect him.
The Left doesn't so much as apologize for its militants, and neither should the Right--and I'm still not sure the Right has them in significant number. I sure wouldn't put Spencer's NPI or Unite the Right in that category. The Left has a violent street-fighting wing now and they don't have to explain themselves to anyone.
Here's what would change things in a world-historical way: if people identified as "white nationalists" showed up at these rallies completely unarmed, walk in and out, to the extent they can, accepting any and all abuse. If that level of discipline could be observed--two hundred people, say, wearing white to emphasize any bloodshed, who could commit to allowing themselves to be beaten without striking back. Antifa and assorted thugs wouldn't be able to control themselves. The world would see this horrendous brutality and would have to then condone that. I mean, they're halfway there, right?
No, they'd never condone that that.
Right?
Do note none of those scoffing reactions to Trump's so-outlandish suggestion Washington and Jefferson might be next, are coupled with the author's declaration of opposition. He should have asked in return: do you approve of removing statues of the Founders (actually I think he did--did the reporter answer?)?
But regarding (what I believe is) Unite the Right's innocence of criminal or moral culpability, I say things are dire enough that this must be all that guides you. That is, you cannot abandon anyone who shares the worthy goal of saving white America--and that's what it is, sadly--because they've embarrassed you.
Still, I'm not saying people shouldn't be mad. Richard Spencer and Unite the Right created a fait accompli for both sides. Things are different now. Accelerationists should be pleased.
It's either the end of Trump, the end of the alt right, the end of Trump and the alt right, or, the end of the mainstream. They now "own" antifa. Or do they? Having banished so much of the country now from the moral high ground, there's no one holding power accountable--there's no real political opposition in this country. A stranded president and an inchoate movement trying to affect him.
The Left doesn't so much as apologize for its militants, and neither should the Right--and I'm still not sure the Right has them in significant number. I sure wouldn't put Spencer's NPI or Unite the Right in that category. The Left has a violent street-fighting wing now and they don't have to explain themselves to anyone.
Here's what would change things in a world-historical way: if people identified as "white nationalists" showed up at these rallies completely unarmed, walk in and out, to the extent they can, accepting any and all abuse. If that level of discipline could be observed--two hundred people, say, wearing white to emphasize any bloodshed, who could commit to allowing themselves to be beaten without striking back. Antifa and assorted thugs wouldn't be able to control themselves. The world would see this horrendous brutality and would have to then condone that. I mean, they're halfway there, right?
No, they'd never condone that that.
Right?
Wednesday, August 16, 2017
Mondoweiss
Mondoweiss on the standard hypocrisy:
Israel acquired her Palestinian problem as a matter of recent conquest. It's a traditional dispute over land aggravated by history, religion and culture. In the United States a white majority created "the greatest nation on earth", and now we're parceling it out to people who hate us--many with the same fervor and intensity with which the Palestinians and Arabs hate the Israelis. That's happened at the same time Israel has risen from barely more than an idea to the proud nationalist state it is.
During the same period the ethnic people of the US have deliberately (if we're not to believe "conspiracy theories") decided to gradually blend themselves out of the human mosaic. They do this because of the post-Holocaust definition of Enlightenment values, and that definition is a Jewish definition, invoking, as many proud Jews will tell you, historic Judaic values.
There is no faction within Judaism demanding an end to Judaism as an ethnicity. Judaism as a religion has not been chased out of the lives of Jews over the past half century. It hasn't been assailed legally, politically and socially to the point it humbly accepts a second rate position behind the secular order that replaced and openly mocks it still. Indeed; Judaism has the respect of that secular order, and Jews determine that order, now.
So God bless Mondoweiss for his uncommon honesty. But it's a little like Trump's press conference--despite the fact he's still humoring the villians with his denunciations of the victims, to merely name the Left and the perpetrators is downright heroic.
But we do need to be clear.
The neocons are right. There's no comparison. This is moral equivalence.
Meanwhile, the same senators are united by their ardent support for a racist regime that is no less inspired by racial supremacy and an ideology that demands ethnic cleansing. All have signed on to a bill that would protect the state of Israel by imposing civil and possibly criminal penalties on anyone who protests its ongoing violations of Palestinian rights, including illegal settlement and dispossession, by advocating for the boycott of its economic, academic and cultural institutions. In doing so, they have placed protecting Israel and its racially discriminatory policies above the rights of activists who are inspired by the same commitment to justice as the demonstrators who opposed the open display of racism and anti-Semitism in Charlottesville.
Israel acquired her Palestinian problem as a matter of recent conquest. It's a traditional dispute over land aggravated by history, religion and culture. In the United States a white majority created "the greatest nation on earth", and now we're parceling it out to people who hate us--many with the same fervor and intensity with which the Palestinians and Arabs hate the Israelis. That's happened at the same time Israel has risen from barely more than an idea to the proud nationalist state it is.
During the same period the ethnic people of the US have deliberately (if we're not to believe "conspiracy theories") decided to gradually blend themselves out of the human mosaic. They do this because of the post-Holocaust definition of Enlightenment values, and that definition is a Jewish definition, invoking, as many proud Jews will tell you, historic Judaic values.
There is no faction within Judaism demanding an end to Judaism as an ethnicity. Judaism as a religion has not been chased out of the lives of Jews over the past half century. It hasn't been assailed legally, politically and socially to the point it humbly accepts a second rate position behind the secular order that replaced and openly mocks it still. Indeed; Judaism has the respect of that secular order, and Jews determine that order, now.
So God bless Mondoweiss for his uncommon honesty. But it's a little like Trump's press conference--despite the fact he's still humoring the villians with his denunciations of the victims, to merely name the Left and the perpetrators is downright heroic.
But we do need to be clear.
Sunday, August 13, 2017
Today in Dispossession
Yesterday at the annual Netroots Nation conference a white candidate for the Democratic nomination for Georgia governor was "de-platformed", in-the-parlance-of-our-time, when a gang of black activists surrounded her and shouted her down, demanding we "trust black women."
Stacey Evans is a state House representative running for governor against Stacey Abrams, Who Is Black, Peace Be Upon Her (as well as national party support). Whatever goodwill White Stacey has in the bank won't be available for withdrawal for the time being, maybe forever.
As for her part, Black Stacey is Totally Cool with what happened to Becky:
I suspect a lot of the political hatred for white women on the left is rationalized resentment of white women by black women, going unchallenged. Whatever the case right now white women are sinking conceptually in the Democratic hierarchy. As "white" becomes increasingly negative, that sort of half-share of it they were allowed as allies gets heavier; and while having a vagina is still applied like a premium the same way as for ethnicity, black women deploying the double-premium of sex-race cancel them out, ethnic men cancel them out, and the remaining white men against whom it is a trump card are only going to grow scarcer.
White Democratic women are left only with the whiteness they've worked so hard to stigmatize.
Hillary Clinton and now Elizabeth Warren have abandoned young white women in their embrace of identity politics. Within the Democratic Party the betrayal of younger whites by aging boomers plays out just as it does in society and politics as a whole. White women are being cut out of the deal in the Democratic Party--is this what your feminist grandmother signed on for?--as part of white people being cut out of the deal in America--is this really what your liberal grandparents signed on for?
Black Stacey's core advocacy is "voter suppression"--but of course, when you consider the video above. That she's the establishment candidate, on a mission to turn Georgia blue, means the Democratic Party effectively shut down one of their own candidates. Nowadays it's hard to see the outrage for all the outrage.
Her battle with Evans is a skirmish in the broader conflict within the party between altruistic economic progressives who wish to remain on speaking terms with working class whites, and those who see one party rule in identity politics.
The elite has always quietly disdained the working class, now they openly disdain whites (even those thus afflicted); true progressive policies are still anathema to corporate America; thus we arrive at our weird new world marrying the corporate world with radical identity politics in the Democratic Party.
Here Black Stacey and Chris Hayes gloat over Hillary Clinton's upcoming blowout of Donald Trump in the 2016 election and the progress of white demographic displacement (and the importance of white women to come out to vote):
White Stacey presents an alternative to the all-identity-politics-all-the-time model which lost Hillary Clinton the presidency but to which the Democrats remain committed. She'll try to coax across white working class voters with Clintonian (Bill not Hill) rhetoric and maybe even policy.
It's hard not to assume at this point the Democrats don't want to win with whites now, when they still only need wait to safely ignore them and enjoy one party rule. If someone wins by wooing whites now someone else will try it; before you know it, the practice is a legitimate alternative.
But Democrats don't want to stretch to accommodate working class whites when they can just wait them out or, better still, hasten them--and their needs--out. Besides, accommodation of working class whites complicates the demonization of whites--which is non-negotiable (and is directed against working class whites, really, a source of embarrassment if nothing else). There isn't room for both schemes. That's why Stacey Evans and her audience were denied their civil rights; she's messing up the program.
Netroots, began in 2006, was always destined to lose its "grassroots" legitimacy and be co-opted by the Democratic Party. Now the Democratic Party is being co-opted by Black Inc, which holds a majority voting share.
It was at Netroots in 2015 that black protesters shut down Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley when he flubbed the shibboleth "black lives matter." Bernie Sanders refused to be bowed completely and managed to get off his prepared speech.
DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas himself explained why that Aggression Would Not Stand (Bernie's, of course) and in the process gave his own game away a bit:
We see the Left already hopelessly tied in knots by 2015: Moulitsas' "predominately white" readership was scandalized that Bernie Sanders' campaign was predominately white.
That those "Bernie Bros" were volunteering their time out of altruism, working against their self interest for an agenda that devalues them, in contrast to women turning out for Hillary and blacks turning out in racial solidarity, wasn't enough to break the spell (and less so now), so it can't be said, but from the progressive point of view blacks and women aren't pulling their weight.
The contrast of selflessness to selfishness is striking; no one sees it. Not even the Right. We're so conditioned such thoughts cannot form in the mind.
How far down the rabbit hole is Netroots? Does it matter? Netroots is about to become as relevant as The Roots.
Whatever the case, Bernie Sanders got the message after standing up for himself at that 2015 conference. When what looked like a pair of mediocre community college students bore down on him at a podium in Seattle he knew what to do: nothing. Standing bowed with hands clasped in front of him he looked like a penitent.
Black people have been the soul of the Left for a long time. From Bryan Burrough's account of sixties terrorism, Days of Rage:
Either the blacks give the Left its romance and energy, its vitality, and deserve the preeminence it has earned them, or blacks have been hustling whites for about a half a century through the Democratic Party.
But seeing how little we have learned in our fascination with blacks, one thing is undeniable: the more things change, the more they stay the same.`
Stacey Evans is a state House representative running for governor against Stacey Abrams, Who Is Black, Peace Be Upon Her (as well as national party support). Whatever goodwill White Stacey has in the bank won't be available for withdrawal for the time being, maybe forever.
As for her part, Black Stacey is Totally Cool with what happened to Becky:
Abrams said in a statement that she would not “condemn peaceful protest” and that the demonstrators were voicing their concern with Evans’ support for a Republican-led effort to give the state new powers over struggling schools. “From what I observed from Savannah, activists in Atlanta peacefully protested this morning on the critical issue of preserving public education for every family in our state,” she said.This would be a noteworthy endorsement of thuggery by an establishment candidate if anyone was paying attention. It's unclear if anyone's dared ask Abrams if she has any connection to the protesters.
“The mantra of ‘trust black women’ is an historic endorsement of the value of bringing marginalized voices to the forefront, not a rebuke to my opponent’s race.”
I suspect a lot of the political hatred for white women on the left is rationalized resentment of white women by black women, going unchallenged. Whatever the case right now white women are sinking conceptually in the Democratic hierarchy. As "white" becomes increasingly negative, that sort of half-share of it they were allowed as allies gets heavier; and while having a vagina is still applied like a premium the same way as for ethnicity, black women deploying the double-premium of sex-race cancel them out, ethnic men cancel them out, and the remaining white men against whom it is a trump card are only going to grow scarcer.
White Democratic women are left only with the whiteness they've worked so hard to stigmatize.
Hillary Clinton and now Elizabeth Warren have abandoned young white women in their embrace of identity politics. Within the Democratic Party the betrayal of younger whites by aging boomers plays out just as it does in society and politics as a whole. White women are being cut out of the deal in the Democratic Party--is this what your feminist grandmother signed on for?--as part of white people being cut out of the deal in America--is this really what your liberal grandparents signed on for?
Black Stacey's core advocacy is "voter suppression"--but of course, when you consider the video above. That she's the establishment candidate, on a mission to turn Georgia blue, means the Democratic Party effectively shut down one of their own candidates. Nowadays it's hard to see the outrage for all the outrage.
Her battle with Evans is a skirmish in the broader conflict within the party between altruistic economic progressives who wish to remain on speaking terms with working class whites, and those who see one party rule in identity politics.
The elite has always quietly disdained the working class, now they openly disdain whites (even those thus afflicted); true progressive policies are still anathema to corporate America; thus we arrive at our weird new world marrying the corporate world with radical identity politics in the Democratic Party.
Here Black Stacey and Chris Hayes gloat over Hillary Clinton's upcoming blowout of Donald Trump in the 2016 election and the progress of white demographic displacement (and the importance of white women to come out to vote):
White Stacey presents an alternative to the all-identity-politics-all-the-time model which lost Hillary Clinton the presidency but to which the Democrats remain committed. She'll try to coax across white working class voters with Clintonian (Bill not Hill) rhetoric and maybe even policy.
It's hard not to assume at this point the Democrats don't want to win with whites now, when they still only need wait to safely ignore them and enjoy one party rule. If someone wins by wooing whites now someone else will try it; before you know it, the practice is a legitimate alternative.
But Democrats don't want to stretch to accommodate working class whites when they can just wait them out or, better still, hasten them--and their needs--out. Besides, accommodation of working class whites complicates the demonization of whites--which is non-negotiable (and is directed against working class whites, really, a source of embarrassment if nothing else). There isn't room for both schemes. That's why Stacey Evans and her audience were denied their civil rights; she's messing up the program.
Netroots, began in 2006, was always destined to lose its "grassroots" legitimacy and be co-opted by the Democratic Party. Now the Democratic Party is being co-opted by Black Inc, which holds a majority voting share.
It was at Netroots in 2015 that black protesters shut down Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley when he flubbed the shibboleth "black lives matter." Bernie Sanders refused to be bowed completely and managed to get off his prepared speech.
DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas himself explained why that Aggression Would Not Stand (Bernie's, of course) and in the process gave his own game away a bit:
Sanders supporters and #BLM protesters waged battle on Twitter for days. It was an unfortunate turn of events, one that exposed a racial rift between Sanders’s highly educated, white and mostly male supporters, and the younger, more diverse crowd fueling the fight against police brutality in communities of color.
Progressive activists have engaged on issues of unequal justice, police militarization and violence against people of color with an intensity I’ve never previously witnessed.
At Daily Kos, coverage of those issues is nearly guaranteed to receive viral hits and has driven the site’s record growth.
Nothing else comes close to capturing community interest, not even Donald Trump, even though our audience is predominantly white. Sanders was utterly unprepared to discuss the topic that animates today’s progressive activism. [boldface added]Moulitsas is probably being indiscreet here in admitting he's determining newsworthiness and a movement's integrity entirely on its ability to generate business through hits. But it's notable who's hitting and demanding that coverage: white progressives.
We see the Left already hopelessly tied in knots by 2015: Moulitsas' "predominately white" readership was scandalized that Bernie Sanders' campaign was predominately white.
That those "Bernie Bros" were volunteering their time out of altruism, working against their self interest for an agenda that devalues them, in contrast to women turning out for Hillary and blacks turning out in racial solidarity, wasn't enough to break the spell (and less so now), so it can't be said, but from the progressive point of view blacks and women aren't pulling their weight.
The contrast of selflessness to selfishness is striking; no one sees it. Not even the Right. We're so conditioned such thoughts cannot form in the mind.
How far down the rabbit hole is Netroots? Does it matter? Netroots is about to become as relevant as The Roots.
Whatever the case, Bernie Sanders got the message after standing up for himself at that 2015 conference. When what looked like a pair of mediocre community college students bore down on him at a podium in Seattle he knew what to do: nothing. Standing bowed with hands clasped in front of him he looked like a penitent.
Black people have been the soul of the Left for a long time. From Bryan Burrough's account of sixties terrorism, Days of Rage:
An even more prevalent myth, however, is that the radical violence that commenced in 1970 was a protest against hte Vietnam War. In fact, while members of this new underground were vehemently antiwar, the war itself was seldom their primary focus. "We related to the war in a purely opportunistic way," recalls Howard Machtinger, one of the Weather Underground's early leaders. "We were happy to draw new members who were antiwar. But this was never about the war."
What the underground was truly about--what it was always about--was the plight of black Americans. Every single underground group of the 1970s, with the notable exception of the Puerto Rican FALN, was concerned first and foremost with the struggle o f blacks against police brutality, racism, and government repression. While late in the decade several groups expanded their worldview to protest events in South Africa and Central America, he black cause remained the core motivation of almost every significant radical who engaged in violent activities during the 1970s. "Helping out the blacks, fighting alongside them, that was the whole kit and caboodle," says Machtinger. "That was what we were all about."
"Race comes first, always first," says Elizabeth Fink, a radical attorney in Brooklyn who represented scores of underground figures. "Everything started with the Black Panthers.The whole thrill of being with them. When you heard Huey Newton you were blown away. The civil rights movement had turned bad, and these people were ready to fight. And yeah, the war. The country was turning into Nazi Germany, that's how we saw it. Do you have the guts to stand up? The underground did. And oh, the glamour of it. The glamour of dealing with the underground. They were my heroes. Stupid me...we were so, so deluded."
(...)
"I think in our hears what all of us wanted to be," former SDS leader Cathy Wilkerson recalls, "was a Black Panther."
Either the blacks give the Left its romance and energy, its vitality, and deserve the preeminence it has earned them, or blacks have been hustling whites for about a half a century through the Democratic Party.
But seeing how little we have learned in our fascination with blacks, one thing is undeniable: the more things change, the more they stay the same.`
Friday, August 11, 2017
Appropriate that which is Appropriate
It's important to understand we're in the appropriation phase of "civil rights", a period of wealth confiscation and privilege transfer from white to non-white. From culture to commerce new terms and limits are being rationalized as necessary racial justice as professions, cultural domains and even physical spaces are carved out from which whites are to be excluded. The language is all theory and romance (and sinister; at some point black "scholars" started talking about the white "role"in the New America to come) but the result is very much material and economic.
It began in earnest with the Obama Administration, and was well on its way to finalizing a sort of post-white order, with whites serving as a legacy oppressor even as their numbers dwindled. Most importantly it was about the orderly transfer of that wealth and power--it had to go to the right people after all. Needless to say Trump derailed all that, if only for the moment.
This is what all this talk of cultural appropriation and representation is about. It's why Google is convulsing right now under its own attempts to transfer half of its employment opportunity to favored groups. It's everywhere, and a proper economic analysis of its cost, and the costs to come if we continue on this path, would probably make our collective head explode.
The initial fervor that greeted Obama's rise was based for many whites on the notion it would solve America's race problem, reassuring black Americans finally of our sincerity and inspiring them to do better. It's as if the average liberal really understands it isn't white racism holding people back; he just thinks black people don't know it yet. Once they do, things will sort out. Eight years after Obama black people show less signs of catching on. The myth of white racism is more jealously held than ever.
If blacks generally hadn't been paying attention to the culture's positive encouragement Obama certainly had. He took up the archetype he learned on TV and it worked better than any amount of authenticity. A little fake inflection here, a little pretending to like hip hop there. Authenticity is overrated.
The notion that he, in turn, would inspire, finally, black America to pull its weight resembled something like an economic stimulus program, without even the temporary bump. The "Obama Effect" purported to find its positive effects, and quickly fizzled out. Another social justice perpetual motion machine never got going.
Not that blacks weren't inspired by Obama's election. Urban blacks responded right away, discovering and improvising on the flash mob concept. There was a new confidence and energy in black America, but it wasn't expressed by black America becoming more law abiding and successful, whiter; it was expressed--but of course--by more confident blacks being blacker. As usual, blacks had a whole different idea of what things meant than their white "allies".
Their position as a group will not be improved through thrift and industry--even if mere discipline and effort were all it took to equalize us economically and every which way, in so succeeding it would remove the source of black America's unique power and position: their suffering.
But they can't compete with whites at being white and most importantly they don't want to. What they want is to be themselves, to assert themselves, to mold their world--just like anyone else--to make it more amenable and less alien. You can't blame them.
Authenticity--the authenticity Obama lacks, can never attain, is more important than any quality of life metric. To the extent to which the average person feels alienated from his culture--and who doesn't now?--might be directly proportional to the degree to which that culture has been absorbed by other cultures. Consider the degree to which black culture has molded American culture.
Black America's position as a group is improved through political power–they’ve already managed to carve out an out-sized degree of autonomy and influence purely through political action and demagogy. That demagogy--BLM and the rest of what passes for black civil rights--complements perfectly the pre-existing violence and mayhem that produce its martyrs.
The malice behind Obama's toothy grin came out after the Democrats got pummeled hard in Obama's first mid-terms. The fake gloves came off. The Trayvon Martin campaign was whipped up heading into the 2012 elections and produced Black Lives Matter, by 2016, whipped into a frenzy by the presidential campaign, its supporters were assassinating the same police working security at its demonstrations.
At the same time the seemingly petty grievances grew greater in number and fury. In Google trends the term "cultural approproation" went from obscurity to relevance 2012 with Obama's second presidential run, increased up to the administration's second mid-term elections and remains at that plateau now in the time of Trump.
Another conversation we won't have: the failure of the promised Obama Effect and the scandal of the actual Obama Effect. The reality is racial resentment has gotten so much worse over the last eight years it's hard to measure because the terms of debate have had to change that much to keep up with it--resistance not being an option.
The effect of eight years of Obama has been to render the race problem insoluble. On the good side, his policies and rhetoric hastened the rise of the alt right and Trump.
It began in earnest with the Obama Administration, and was well on its way to finalizing a sort of post-white order, with whites serving as a legacy oppressor even as their numbers dwindled. Most importantly it was about the orderly transfer of that wealth and power--it had to go to the right people after all. Needless to say Trump derailed all that, if only for the moment.
This is what all this talk of cultural appropriation and representation is about. It's why Google is convulsing right now under its own attempts to transfer half of its employment opportunity to favored groups. It's everywhere, and a proper economic analysis of its cost, and the costs to come if we continue on this path, would probably make our collective head explode.
The initial fervor that greeted Obama's rise was based for many whites on the notion it would solve America's race problem, reassuring black Americans finally of our sincerity and inspiring them to do better. It's as if the average liberal really understands it isn't white racism holding people back; he just thinks black people don't know it yet. Once they do, things will sort out. Eight years after Obama black people show less signs of catching on. The myth of white racism is more jealously held than ever.
If blacks generally hadn't been paying attention to the culture's positive encouragement Obama certainly had. He took up the archetype he learned on TV and it worked better than any amount of authenticity. A little fake inflection here, a little pretending to like hip hop there. Authenticity is overrated.
The notion that he, in turn, would inspire, finally, black America to pull its weight resembled something like an economic stimulus program, without even the temporary bump. The "Obama Effect" purported to find its positive effects, and quickly fizzled out. Another social justice perpetual motion machine never got going.
Not that blacks weren't inspired by Obama's election. Urban blacks responded right away, discovering and improvising on the flash mob concept. There was a new confidence and energy in black America, but it wasn't expressed by black America becoming more law abiding and successful, whiter; it was expressed--but of course--by more confident blacks being blacker. As usual, blacks had a whole different idea of what things meant than their white "allies".
Their position as a group will not be improved through thrift and industry--even if mere discipline and effort were all it took to equalize us economically and every which way, in so succeeding it would remove the source of black America's unique power and position: their suffering.
But they can't compete with whites at being white and most importantly they don't want to. What they want is to be themselves, to assert themselves, to mold their world--just like anyone else--to make it more amenable and less alien. You can't blame them.
Authenticity--the authenticity Obama lacks, can never attain, is more important than any quality of life metric. To the extent to which the average person feels alienated from his culture--and who doesn't now?--might be directly proportional to the degree to which that culture has been absorbed by other cultures. Consider the degree to which black culture has molded American culture.
Black America's position as a group is improved through political power–they’ve already managed to carve out an out-sized degree of autonomy and influence purely through political action and demagogy. That demagogy--BLM and the rest of what passes for black civil rights--complements perfectly the pre-existing violence and mayhem that produce its martyrs.
The malice behind Obama's toothy grin came out after the Democrats got pummeled hard in Obama's first mid-terms. The fake gloves came off. The Trayvon Martin campaign was whipped up heading into the 2012 elections and produced Black Lives Matter, by 2016, whipped into a frenzy by the presidential campaign, its supporters were assassinating the same police working security at its demonstrations.
At the same time the seemingly petty grievances grew greater in number and fury. In Google trends the term "cultural approproation" went from obscurity to relevance 2012 with Obama's second presidential run, increased up to the administration's second mid-term elections and remains at that plateau now in the time of Trump.
Even the kitsch element in black politics, always profound, got cornier--Ta Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me came out it 2015.
Another conversation we won't have: the failure of the promised Obama Effect and the scandal of the actual Obama Effect. The reality is racial resentment has gotten so much worse over the last eight years it's hard to measure because the terms of debate have had to change that much to keep up with it--resistance not being an option.
The effect of eight years of Obama has been to render the race problem insoluble. On the good side, his policies and rhetoric hastened the rise of the alt right and Trump.
Tuesday, August 08, 2017
Death Wish
The trailer for the upcoming Death Wish remake has me holding out hope Eli Roth flubbed it and made a good, relevant even, film.
That hope got a little more slender reading Roth's defense of it from the predictable anticipatory outrage. Like the original, the film can't escape the charge it's "fascist":
It's remarkable: just as with the original, the film's liberal detractors now are reading race into the story for us, and making the "racist" assertion that crime is necessarily a black problem.
The first film over-represented white or white-ish bad guys, including the primary villains. Roth's trailer reassures us almost all of the villains are white, and the one black bad guy we see getting smoked we can confidently tie to the adorable black waif in the hospital who tells Bruce Willis about the drug dealer who won't let him walk to school (the Ice Cream Man).
It's enough for some to see a white guy wielding a gun, of course, but in rejecting the authors' proffered white villains, the liberal critics are comically implying the worst, essentially saying: of course you're talking about black criminals. You're not dealing with morons here.
The first Death Wish came out in 1974. The very first--let's call it--urban fascist western came out in 1971, Dirty Harry. That film followed the same pattern, sort of controlling for race to make it about "crime" by making it ultimately a story of a white hero and a white villain.
Somewhere along the line this genre went away; now you couldn't make Dirty Harry. But then I would have thought that of Death Wish. Come to think of it, that's exactly what the film's detractors are saying: you can't make that film now.
The Left wasn't buying it then and they aren't buying it now: these films were right wing paranoid fantasies about black urban savagery. Of course they're right about everything but the paranoia part.
By 1970 white America had gotten its first real taste of the black boot. The riots of the late sixties and the first massive pulse of black crime released by enlightened policy and liberal judges was emptying out the inner cities; white America was still being introduced to the humiliation of black malice. Of course we wanted a film about a gunslinger who goes in and straightens them out (and still waiting, really).
The "fascist" charge was always pointless. The problem then, as now, is you're not allowed to offend blacks. Call the films racist (by implication, again) all you want, they are, I don't care, but Callahan--like Paul Kersey--is a rogue set against the state and society. Do the stories of Kersey and Callahan impugn the liberal state, and imply the necessity of authoritarian control? That might qualify them as "fascist", but I think only if you think liberal democracy can inflict no degradation on society and order that is too great. There's never been a better time for a revisiting of these films, but they would have to be "fascist" and certainly racist to be worth a damn.
Both films are laments of the helplessness of modern man in the urban environment at the onset of the Seventies, abandoned by a corrupt state to the mercy of a perverse and cruel enemy. It's forty-odd years on, and the America facing the catastrophe of black urban violence now seems positively quaint in comparison. The enemies have only multiplied.
Dirty Harry introduced the trope that became a cliche--the bad guy gets out on a technicality because of a liberal judge. Well, was the US legal system not letting a lot of bad guys out on the streets in the name of liberality in the Seventies? The liberal critics were entirely right that the films arise out of white fear of black crime. That, to them, is enough. They wouldn't allow then that this fear was justified; they won't allow it now, four decades later.
It's still enough, only now, where there was once the dull, cheery confidence of those disastrously naive Norman Lear-era liberals we have the mean, unflinching paranoia of black Twitter and the whole brood of aggrieved they somehow spawned. Not a one of them bears a resemblance to their nice white parents. They must have adopted them from the Third World somewhere.
Social justice has taken on the role of vigilante, punching nazis, assembling mobs, assassinating cops; and it won't have any cinematic vigilante justice that isn't socially conscious. Of course at this point many a story has been degraded by social justice, and we can expect it's only the beginning.
Will it be that Eli Roth "ruined" Death Wish by laying it on too thick?
Or will it be that he couldn't help himself?
He doesn't even have to cast racially accurate bad guys. The Left helpfully reminds us if not who he's talking about who he should be talking about. They document it for posterity. Without them, future generations might read from these films that crime really wasn't a black thing in our time.
That hope got a little more slender reading Roth's defense of it from the predictable anticipatory outrage. Like the original, the film can't escape the charge it's "fascist":
"...many on social media have taken issue with the clip, with some branding its depiction of violence as "fascist propaganda". The movie's director, Eli Roth, has now hit back, arguing that the movie is "not about race" and that those accusations were not his intent when making the movie.
"I got to say, it's just the 'alt-right' amount of controversy, because that was the number one trending video on YouTube this morning," he told TMZ.
"Do I like it? You know what, I'm really proud of the movie, and when people see the movie in context, I think this is all going to evaporate."
"Everyone is very sensitive, everyone is ready to take a stance against something, but c'mon guys. You have to be aware of your audience, if you want to handle that subject matter, you have to be smart about it. And we do.
"When you see the film, you'll see exactly how we handle the killing, how it's not about race. It's about good, it's about bad. He's going after bad guys, he's going after the guys that did this to him. But you know what, everybody gets a taste of justice in this movie."Roth's lame-punning name-checking of the alt right shows just how much times have changed. Before Trump the average normie didn't know from "alt right"; now it's a Thing. But the director has another problem: he might accidentally create the first alt right classic.
It's remarkable: just as with the original, the film's liberal detractors now are reading race into the story for us, and making the "racist" assertion that crime is necessarily a black problem.
The first film over-represented white or white-ish bad guys, including the primary villains. Roth's trailer reassures us almost all of the villains are white, and the one black bad guy we see getting smoked we can confidently tie to the adorable black waif in the hospital who tells Bruce Willis about the drug dealer who won't let him walk to school (the Ice Cream Man).
It's enough for some to see a white guy wielding a gun, of course, but in rejecting the authors' proffered white villains, the liberal critics are comically implying the worst, essentially saying: of course you're talking about black criminals. You're not dealing with morons here.
The first Death Wish came out in 1974. The very first--let's call it--urban fascist western came out in 1971, Dirty Harry. That film followed the same pattern, sort of controlling for race to make it about "crime" by making it ultimately a story of a white hero and a white villain.
Somewhere along the line this genre went away; now you couldn't make Dirty Harry. But then I would have thought that of Death Wish. Come to think of it, that's exactly what the film's detractors are saying: you can't make that film now.
The Left wasn't buying it then and they aren't buying it now: these films were right wing paranoid fantasies about black urban savagery. Of course they're right about everything but the paranoia part.
By 1970 white America had gotten its first real taste of the black boot. The riots of the late sixties and the first massive pulse of black crime released by enlightened policy and liberal judges was emptying out the inner cities; white America was still being introduced to the humiliation of black malice. Of course we wanted a film about a gunslinger who goes in and straightens them out (and still waiting, really).
The "fascist" charge was always pointless. The problem then, as now, is you're not allowed to offend blacks. Call the films racist (by implication, again) all you want, they are, I don't care, but Callahan--like Paul Kersey--is a rogue set against the state and society. Do the stories of Kersey and Callahan impugn the liberal state, and imply the necessity of authoritarian control? That might qualify them as "fascist", but I think only if you think liberal democracy can inflict no degradation on society and order that is too great. There's never been a better time for a revisiting of these films, but they would have to be "fascist" and certainly racist to be worth a damn.
Both films are laments of the helplessness of modern man in the urban environment at the onset of the Seventies, abandoned by a corrupt state to the mercy of a perverse and cruel enemy. It's forty-odd years on, and the America facing the catastrophe of black urban violence now seems positively quaint in comparison. The enemies have only multiplied.
Dirty Harry introduced the trope that became a cliche--the bad guy gets out on a technicality because of a liberal judge. Well, was the US legal system not letting a lot of bad guys out on the streets in the name of liberality in the Seventies? The liberal critics were entirely right that the films arise out of white fear of black crime. That, to them, is enough. They wouldn't allow then that this fear was justified; they won't allow it now, four decades later.
It's still enough, only now, where there was once the dull, cheery confidence of those disastrously naive Norman Lear-era liberals we have the mean, unflinching paranoia of black Twitter and the whole brood of aggrieved they somehow spawned. Not a one of them bears a resemblance to their nice white parents. They must have adopted them from the Third World somewhere.
Social justice has taken on the role of vigilante, punching nazis, assembling mobs, assassinating cops; and it won't have any cinematic vigilante justice that isn't socially conscious. Of course at this point many a story has been degraded by social justice, and we can expect it's only the beginning.
Will it be that Eli Roth "ruined" Death Wish by laying it on too thick?
Or will it be that he couldn't help himself?
He doesn't even have to cast racially accurate bad guys. The Left helpfully reminds us if not who he's talking about who he should be talking about. They document it for posterity. Without them, future generations might read from these films that crime really wasn't a black thing in our time.
Monday, August 07, 2017
Don't be Google
And the ass saw the angel of the Lord standing in the way, and his sword drawn in his hand: and the ass turned aside out of the way, and went into the field: and Balaam smote the ass, to turn her into the way.
--Numbers, 22:23
The notorious Google memo Gizmodo calls an "anti-diversity screed" (elsewhere it's a "fulmination", "sexist twaddle", and, even, "lengthy") is neither. It opens with a sort of standard genuflection to diversity that seems earnest enough (not that being earnest would be enough). Somehow despite seeing and outlining the impossibility of diversity as a reality, the author and his defenders accept its necessity as a goal. The goons who shut them down while shouting nonsense only look like the stupid ones. They get it: the way in which diversity efforts fail--women and minorities proving inadequate--reveals the absurdity and injustice of diversity as a goal.
"If we can’t have an honest discussion about this, then we can never truly solve the problem." He pleads. But the real problem is we can't have an honest discussion that doesn't ultimately reveal there is no problem. Indeed, if the honesty goes long enough, we might find that diversity as an idea is the problem. Even, maybe, diversity is a problem. Monsters dwell here. That's why you can't even draw maps of this place.
The problem here is the problem with "white privilege" entire: if you accept the inherent value of enlightened Western values over ignorance and hunger, and you accept the idea that this West is nonetheless uniquely hostile to such as blacks (for one)--this dissonance is conventional opinion--then you necessarily imply blacks aren't as well suited for enlightenment values. This is why we can't have nice conversations. The floor always ends up strewn with our prettiest lies. But we should have them. For one thing, those enlightenment values are being pawned off to pay the interest on our debt to black America, as the West and the US are deformed to meet their cruder biases and values. From the black vantage, civil rights are rationalized ethnic warfare contorting the law and culture to conform to black values.
That's why the line, for the moment, holds against honest public conversations about any of it. But social justice is like football. You have to move the ball. So its proponents keep advancing. Anything else is taking a knee, truth be damned.
If the memo author's sentiments in favor of diversity are real, they are about to be a severe stress test such as an engineer can appreciate and understand. Of course all bets are off when we're talking social justice. If the hammer comes down at Google--and the standard move is to double-down every time the Narrative is challenged: "sensitivity" training, firings, expansion of diversity efforts and staff--I suspect that faction of discontented White--and likely Asian--men will grow in size and impatience.
How big is the discontent? How "angry" are the white males? They've been incanting "white male anger" into the electronic ether so long they are about to conjure it up in reality. It's long overdue. The scandal isn't the excess of white male anger it's the absence of it.
Consider the absurdity of Danielle Brown, thirty-something, riding her triumph in increasing "diversity" in just two years as diversity honcho at Intel ("...hit its goal of retaining diverse employees, with a 15 percent exit rate for women and people of color compare to a 15.5 percent exit rate for employees in majority groups"),
Her linkedin page suggests she was saved from having to rely on her own education in finance and sales by being plucked out of relative obscurity at the biotech firm Gilead (she was the bomb in Gilead) and put on the diversity fast track (Intel's "accelerated leadership" program) in 2011. Six years later she's a VP at Google, and if she doesn't know computer code from the DaVinci Code it doesn't matter; she's in charge of the conversation. Nice work if you can get it.
That work involves maintaining a culture of shaming and coercion. The memo writer complains:
"While Google hasn’t harbored the violent leftists protests that we’re seeing at universities, the frequent shaming in TGIF and in our culture has created the same silence, psychologically unsafe environment."
Update: The author has already been sacked.
That culture of shaming is going to have to get a lot harsher. I suspect Google will take measures to root out like-minded individuals where it can and rely on the power of the non-disclosure agreement. The company is on its way to becoming Scientology.
--Numbers, 22:23
The notorious Google memo Gizmodo calls an "anti-diversity screed" (elsewhere it's a "fulmination", "sexist twaddle", and, even, "lengthy") is neither. It opens with a sort of standard genuflection to diversity that seems earnest enough (not that being earnest would be enough). Somehow despite seeing and outlining the impossibility of diversity as a reality, the author and his defenders accept its necessity as a goal. The goons who shut them down while shouting nonsense only look like the stupid ones. They get it: the way in which diversity efforts fail--women and minorities proving inadequate--reveals the absurdity and injustice of diversity as a goal.
"If we can’t have an honest discussion about this, then we can never truly solve the problem." He pleads. But the real problem is we can't have an honest discussion that doesn't ultimately reveal there is no problem. Indeed, if the honesty goes long enough, we might find that diversity as an idea is the problem. Even, maybe, diversity is a problem. Monsters dwell here. That's why you can't even draw maps of this place.
The problem here is the problem with "white privilege" entire: if you accept the inherent value of enlightened Western values over ignorance and hunger, and you accept the idea that this West is nonetheless uniquely hostile to such as blacks (for one)--this dissonance is conventional opinion--then you necessarily imply blacks aren't as well suited for enlightenment values. This is why we can't have nice conversations. The floor always ends up strewn with our prettiest lies. But we should have them. For one thing, those enlightenment values are being pawned off to pay the interest on our debt to black America, as the West and the US are deformed to meet their cruder biases and values. From the black vantage, civil rights are rationalized ethnic warfare contorting the law and culture to conform to black values.
That's why the line, for the moment, holds against honest public conversations about any of it. But social justice is like football. You have to move the ball. So its proponents keep advancing. Anything else is taking a knee, truth be damned.
If the memo author's sentiments in favor of diversity are real, they are about to be a severe stress test such as an engineer can appreciate and understand. Of course all bets are off when we're talking social justice. If the hammer comes down at Google--and the standard move is to double-down every time the Narrative is challenged: "sensitivity" training, firings, expansion of diversity efforts and staff--I suspect that faction of discontented White--and likely Asian--men will grow in size and impatience.
How big is the discontent? How "angry" are the white males? They've been incanting "white male anger" into the electronic ether so long they are about to conjure it up in reality. It's long overdue. The scandal isn't the excess of white male anger it's the absence of it.
Consider the absurdity of Danielle Brown, thirty-something, riding her triumph in increasing "diversity" in just two years as diversity honcho at Intel ("...hit its goal of retaining diverse employees, with a 15 percent exit rate for women and people of color compare to a 15.5 percent exit rate for employees in majority groups"),
Her linkedin page suggests she was saved from having to rely on her own education in finance and sales by being plucked out of relative obscurity at the biotech firm Gilead (she was the bomb in Gilead) and put on the diversity fast track (Intel's "accelerated leadership" program) in 2011. Six years later she's a VP at Google, and if she doesn't know computer code from the DaVinci Code it doesn't matter; she's in charge of the conversation. Nice work if you can get it.
That work involves maintaining a culture of shaming and coercion. The memo writer complains:
"While Google hasn’t harbored the violent leftists protests that we’re seeing at universities, the frequent shaming in TGIF and in our culture has created the same silence, psychologically unsafe environment."
Update: The author has already been sacked.
That culture of shaming is going to have to get a lot harsher. I suspect Google will take measures to root out like-minded individuals where it can and rely on the power of the non-disclosure agreement. The company is on its way to becoming Scientology.
Friday, August 04, 2017
Golden Archers
"Drunk girls wait an hour to pee..."
--LCD Soundsystem, Drunk Girls
Steve Sailer on America's Current Year Qualified Navy:
But Steve is on to something regarding projection and the act of urination. Camille Paglia was here years ago. From her Sexual Personae:
One of the impulses behind feminism, I believe, and one for which I have sympathy, is the need for women to retreat from and recover from the company of men. Men are exhausting, precisely because we are so different from women, of course, and in the worst way for feminism: men act (they project), and women contain, as in pregnancy--indeed, in the sex act the man projects and the woman draws.
The penis is reassuringly comic in its vulnerability: it's exposure to the elements (and reaction to them), its reliance on the mechanics of the erection, its homely appearance, its double-duty as ignoble drain spigot and intrepid ram-rod. Tragic, too. The whole masculine tragedy is in the penis: in its endless rising in assertive hope, reaching the goal only to fall back spent, lessened, always "leaving it on the field", equally diminished whether victorious or vanquished. The penis, like a man, is expected to achieve; the woman to receive and rate. How's that for inequality?
There's no room for that in the Current Year, but politicizing the inherent inequality of our plumbing is perfectly consistent with feminist notions of fairness. Thus it was inevitable that it would be assailed as a political problem. Bathroom equity became a small "thing" a long time ago when women started lobbying for more restrooms, or the right to use men's rooms, to equalize the time burden. The Seat Liner Ceiling was set to be assailed. Whatever came of that I don't know, but obviously it's now superseded, and made incoherent, by the trans movement for bathroom "equality".
Momentum is taking us to something like borderless bathrooms--you can't discriminate in any fashion, so all are open to all, by law. As Bill Murray says, "cats and dogs, living together..."
But the broader movement really doesn't care about women's rights, and has performed an end-around feminism's project of creating a privileged identity for biological women, and is of course going after the very idea of sexual identity. Don't envy the fun and convenience of the outtie, girls; lots of girls have them, now. What do you mean they don't? Current Year.
--LCD Soundsystem, Drunk Girls
Steve Sailer on America's Current Year Qualified Navy:
Boys like everything about projecting (in the physical sense, rather than that useful Freudian sense of “projection”). That’s why many (male) toddlers will immediately pick up a stick as soon as they step outdoors and brandish it about like the winning Killer Ape in 2001.
The latest Navy supercarrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, launched its first jet this week, in another demonstration of the Pentagon’s ability to project power globally. But the Ford’s seamen are not to project so much lavatorily.
But while urinals are being installed in the Ladies Rooms of luxury resorts, urinals are not being installed in the latest American aircraft carrier. From Business Insider:
Seamen will have to project their stream (and woe to the aged, er, hand) more accurately and carefully on the pitching high seas now. Brings to mind an unfortunate association from youth, obliterating the enemy flotilla of Dad's unfiltered Pall Mall cigarette butts, before they could turn the tide of the war or my stream failed.The Navy’s newest, most sophisticated aircraft carrier doesn’t have urinals Amid all its upgrades and advances, the US Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, is lacking one feature: urinals. Every bathroom on the Ford is, for the first time, gender-neutral, equipped with flush toilets and stalls, according to Navy Times. Bathroom-design experts have said sit-down toilets are less sanitary...
But Steve is on to something regarding projection and the act of urination. Camille Paglia was here years ago. From her Sexual Personae:
Concentration and projection are remarkably demonstrated by urination, one of male anatomy's most efficient comparmentalizations. Freud thinks primitive man preened himself on his ability to put out a fire with a stream of urine [I'm willing to bet I'm not the only American youth to witness one or more of his fellows demonstrating their ability to, say, clear a brick wall]. A strange thing to be proud of but certainly beyond the scope of a woman [thus a source of, mostly, unspoken female resentment, a small but significant tributary contributing to feminism's Amazon], who would scorch her hams in the process. Male urinatinon really is a kind of accomplishment, an arc of transcendance.Harper's magazine ran a pre-print excerpt with that part about transcendance, with a get-a-load-of-this wink, before the book was published and landed like a small meteor in 1990. She goes on:
The cumbersome, solipsistic character of female physiology is tediously evident at sports events and rock concerts, where fifty women wait in line for admission to the sequestered cells of the toilet. Meanwhile, their male friends zip in and out (in every sense) and stand around looking at their watches and rolling their eyes. Freud's notion of penis envy proves too true...I've personally known women who were nearly obsessed with the penis--this is not salacious, they were objectively fascinated with, and amused by, its non-sexual workings. Male appreciation of the vagina is necessarily fraught, channeling, I suspect, fear of disease for one thing into such as the vagina dentata myth.
One of the impulses behind feminism, I believe, and one for which I have sympathy, is the need for women to retreat from and recover from the company of men. Men are exhausting, precisely because we are so different from women, of course, and in the worst way for feminism: men act (they project), and women contain, as in pregnancy--indeed, in the sex act the man projects and the woman draws.
The penis is reassuringly comic in its vulnerability: it's exposure to the elements (and reaction to them), its reliance on the mechanics of the erection, its homely appearance, its double-duty as ignoble drain spigot and intrepid ram-rod. Tragic, too. The whole masculine tragedy is in the penis: in its endless rising in assertive hope, reaching the goal only to fall back spent, lessened, always "leaving it on the field", equally diminished whether victorious or vanquished. The penis, like a man, is expected to achieve; the woman to receive and rate. How's that for inequality?
There's no room for that in the Current Year, but politicizing the inherent inequality of our plumbing is perfectly consistent with feminist notions of fairness. Thus it was inevitable that it would be assailed as a political problem. Bathroom equity became a small "thing" a long time ago when women started lobbying for more restrooms, or the right to use men's rooms, to equalize the time burden. The Seat Liner Ceiling was set to be assailed. Whatever came of that I don't know, but obviously it's now superseded, and made incoherent, by the trans movement for bathroom "equality".
Momentum is taking us to something like borderless bathrooms--you can't discriminate in any fashion, so all are open to all, by law. As Bill Murray says, "cats and dogs, living together..."
But the broader movement really doesn't care about women's rights, and has performed an end-around feminism's project of creating a privileged identity for biological women, and is of course going after the very idea of sexual identity. Don't envy the fun and convenience of the outtie, girls; lots of girls have them, now. What do you mean they don't? Current Year.
Thursday, August 03, 2017
A Confederacy of Dindus
HBO announces it's developing an alternative history of the South. The show-runners from something called Game of Thrones, that appears to have had a bit of success, are writing and producing. Let the games begin. They're White Guys!
If only it were so; I'm always a little depressed for our side to learn, as so often, it's just another pair of talented Jews. Of course you would never know it--the average normie doesn't, and if he did, he wouldn't allow himself to think it relevant. That is, the average white normie--the only demographic not allowed a self-interested response.
The real outrage is that whites and American history get screwed twice: by the Jewish writers pushing an anti-white narrative, and then when those same writers are deployed as "white" straw men. This isn't just a case of the latest silly outrage, either. This was a skirmish in our ongoing, disguised ethnic warfare, a looting.
HBO hasn't started shooting and can be counted on to do two things: hire more black "talent" to go with the two black writers they brought in already as window dressing, and be much more wary about the content of the show. HBO is already acceding to the bullying.
Another alternative history show about an independent black American country has been revealed to be in the works at Amazon. In an alternate present a small independent black country has won its independence in the South. Someone joked on Twitter they could call this state "Liberia" (at this rate, if it's made in two years, it will feature pyramids levitating on futuristic rockets, and eventually be shown in schools).
Salon:
The "concrete fantasy" that "slavery never ends" has become the founding myth of the black American nation. Slavery "systemic", and in the reality of mass incarceration. Critical race theory of course doesn't stop there.
It's not clear whether someone like Reign or Reid understands that Weiss and Goldman could be expected to express something like this, better and more persuasively than any black writer. They've publicly committed to making of their intriguing idea fashionable political propaganda (no attendant controversy).
It's a relatively new sub-genre: if history can be retconned (as Steve Sailer likes to say) in fiction to create the illuison of, say, black achievement, the present can also be pro-conned in such but-only-if alternative history story.
But it doesn't matter to blacks. Weiss and Goldman themselves probably get it better than black activists, who tend toward stereotypically emotional analyses and arguments.
The history of the South, for starters, is now a sort of cultural property, proprietary to black Americans. It is a material power grab in the disugised ethnic warfare that is modern America. We can expect more of it, and more creative attempts to formalize and expand it. In a fit of absentmindedness we're creating a regime of non-white privilege, with blacks at the apex.
If only it were so; I'm always a little depressed for our side to learn, as so often, it's just another pair of talented Jews. Of course you would never know it--the average normie doesn't, and if he did, he wouldn't allow himself to think it relevant. That is, the average white normie--the only demographic not allowed a self-interested response.
The real outrage is that whites and American history get screwed twice: by the Jewish writers pushing an anti-white narrative, and then when those same writers are deployed as "white" straw men. This isn't just a case of the latest silly outrage, either. This was a skirmish in our ongoing, disguised ethnic warfare, a looting.
HBO hasn't started shooting and can be counted on to do two things: hire more black "talent" to go with the two black writers they brought in already as window dressing, and be much more wary about the content of the show. HBO is already acceding to the bullying.
Another alternative history show about an independent black American country has been revealed to be in the works at Amazon. In an alternate present a small independent black country has won its independence in the South. Someone joked on Twitter they could call this state "Liberia" (at this rate, if it's made in two years, it will feature pyramids levitating on futuristic rockets, and eventually be shown in schools).
Salon:
During Sunday’s episode of “Game of Thrones,” #OscarsSoWhite creator April Reign and her swath of followers took to Twitter to express their disappointment with the network’s decision. Reign argued the series is racist as it ignores the systemic enslavement black people currently face.The irony in Joy Reid's response trailed like a piece of toilet paper from her oblivious heel: “It plays to a rather concrete American fantasy: slavery that never ends, becoming a permanent state for black people. Repugnant.”
The "concrete fantasy" that "slavery never ends" has become the founding myth of the black American nation. Slavery "systemic", and in the reality of mass incarceration. Critical race theory of course doesn't stop there.
It's not clear whether someone like Reign or Reid understands that Weiss and Goldman could be expected to express something like this, better and more persuasively than any black writer. They've publicly committed to making of their intriguing idea fashionable political propaganda (no attendant controversy).
It's a relatively new sub-genre: if history can be retconned (as Steve Sailer likes to say) in fiction to create the illuison of, say, black achievement, the present can also be pro-conned in such but-only-if alternative history story.
But it doesn't matter to blacks. Weiss and Goldman themselves probably get it better than black activists, who tend toward stereotypically emotional analyses and arguments.
The history of the South, for starters, is now a sort of cultural property, proprietary to black Americans. It is a material power grab in the disugised ethnic warfare that is modern America. We can expect more of it, and more creative attempts to formalize and expand it. In a fit of absentmindedness we're creating a regime of non-white privilege, with blacks at the apex.
Wednesday, August 02, 2017
A Narrative's Progress
The project to erase the West--globalism, multiculturalism, critical race theory, the "Narrative"--is like a revolutionary army that's advanced too far too fast. It is stretched thin. It's gotten too far out ahead of popular acquiescence and demographic change. The unified horror of the vast mainstream of punditry in reaction to Trump's Poland speech revealed the extent to which the elite felt, with some comfort, that white Americans had already been killed off, rendered passive or are complicit in their demise. Mostly what offends, appalls and terrifies is the thought of a primordial enemy roused.
What had been a neat trick--manufacturing consent in the populace for radical social change by presenting the illusion of it first in film, television and media news, creating and occupying the moral high ground, worked quite well as long as things kept moving in the right direction. Conservative reaction would happen, was helpful even, became a useful fall guy for the Narrative, creating the illusion of progress against ignorance, but would never challenge its core assumption--blank slate theory holding racial and sexual differences meaningless--until Trump came along offering an alternative.
What my cynical self suspects will save the Narrative after all is apathy. That there is no popular movement taking to the streets to defend Trump against the open coup progressing against him contradicts what I just asserted. What is surreal about the times isn't Donald Trump as president (and as the last defender of the West), or the absurdity of BLM against a backdrop of black hate, or even the trannies; what defies reality is the fact we put up with it all.
And yet there is Trump, and there is the fact the only political way out for him is to pursue the policies that got him elected. Losing on Obamacare is nothing compared to losing on immigration. The counterrevolution he represents tripped the Narrative up, if only for the moment, by suddenly presenting an alternative. It's way too easy to submit to the lethargy of electronic culture, and it's still too easy to get by economically; the Narrative should have been home free. Early triumphalism may have doomed it and opened the way for Trump.
(Personally I recall one particular moment, a minor controversy: a black host on one of the liberal cable outlets said something dismissive about white people trying to regain their demographic health, something about breeding; a panel of POC mediocrities sat smiling nervously. They knew it would be controversial, but they were far more afraid of the lead POC mediocrity to say anything. You had to see it, perhaps, but the moment was grim, and I can't imagine a white person viewing it without, not alarm but outrage.)
Trump suddenly presented an option and it seemed, to too many, an easy one. Simply elect him and sit back. His own bombastic self-promotion hasn't helped. But the fact is he is in out of his depth--arguably less Obama and Bush II, but they had help. Trump has needed to convert more mainstream politicians, somehow cobble together a competing elite adopting nationalism.
We're seeing now the historic, still hard to believe Trump election victory was the easy part. He presented that sudden option but it can't be viable without either significant defections from the mainstream to Trump's nationalism or popular demonstrations in the streets.
What had been a neat trick--manufacturing consent in the populace for radical social change by presenting the illusion of it first in film, television and media news, creating and occupying the moral high ground, worked quite well as long as things kept moving in the right direction. Conservative reaction would happen, was helpful even, became a useful fall guy for the Narrative, creating the illusion of progress against ignorance, but would never challenge its core assumption--blank slate theory holding racial and sexual differences meaningless--until Trump came along offering an alternative.
What my cynical self suspects will save the Narrative after all is apathy. That there is no popular movement taking to the streets to defend Trump against the open coup progressing against him contradicts what I just asserted. What is surreal about the times isn't Donald Trump as president (and as the last defender of the West), or the absurdity of BLM against a backdrop of black hate, or even the trannies; what defies reality is the fact we put up with it all.
And yet there is Trump, and there is the fact the only political way out for him is to pursue the policies that got him elected. Losing on Obamacare is nothing compared to losing on immigration. The counterrevolution he represents tripped the Narrative up, if only for the moment, by suddenly presenting an alternative. It's way too easy to submit to the lethargy of electronic culture, and it's still too easy to get by economically; the Narrative should have been home free. Early triumphalism may have doomed it and opened the way for Trump.
(Personally I recall one particular moment, a minor controversy: a black host on one of the liberal cable outlets said something dismissive about white people trying to regain their demographic health, something about breeding; a panel of POC mediocrities sat smiling nervously. They knew it would be controversial, but they were far more afraid of the lead POC mediocrity to say anything. You had to see it, perhaps, but the moment was grim, and I can't imagine a white person viewing it without, not alarm but outrage.)
Trump suddenly presented an option and it seemed, to too many, an easy one. Simply elect him and sit back. His own bombastic self-promotion hasn't helped. But the fact is he is in out of his depth--arguably less Obama and Bush II, but they had help. Trump has needed to convert more mainstream politicians, somehow cobble together a competing elite adopting nationalism.
We're seeing now the historic, still hard to believe Trump election victory was the easy part. He presented that sudden option but it can't be viable without either significant defections from the mainstream to Trump's nationalism or popular demonstrations in the streets.
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"Antifascist" demonstration Portland, Oregon. August 17, 2019. The two sides squared off across a field, defined by police cord...
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Another six hours monitoring livestreams last night. Courtesy of: AustinZone LiveNow Media JacobSnakeUp
