The most coherent speaker of the day, by my reckoning:
Wednesday, July 20, 2016
Joyeux Noël
Not exactly German and British soldiers calling and unofficial Christmas truce, but I was heartened to find political opponents in Cleveland playing an impromptu game of capture the flag.
Tuesday, July 19, 2016
Open Carry Crew
My exchange with this reporter at the end here:
"I'm a reporter. Look me up."
"Who are you? I read a lot."
"I'm a reporter."
Saturday, July 16, 2016
Rambling
I doubt Barack Obama's a "secret Muslim". If he's a secret-anything it's a secret atheist. He's feigned Christianity in a longtime American tradition--and will likely be one of the last to find that a necessity, to no small part due to his own successful efforts to demographically "transform" America. I wonder if he relishes that thought.
But he's unique in having economically piggybacked a traditional political necessity, feigned Christianity, onto one of his own choice (and becoming its own tradition), feigned blackness; it's as if the Reverend Wright's church was created just for him, a safe space for him to learn to be black.
If Barack Obama is a believer in anything beyond Barack Obama, it's Blackness. And Blackness has been very, very good to Barry.
But this is all old hat.
I was thinking of the oft-quoted, and misquoted, paragraph from Obama's slick second book, The Audacity of Hope (there's the Reverend again, in the kitsch title):
Of course, not all my conversations in immigrant communities follow this easy pattern. In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging.
They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific assurances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.
He means he'll defend them from such as "internments"; fair enough. But reading this I think I see past the ghostwriter, past the notes, to the man on the cover, and I can't help but think the quote kind of reveals how he's he's congenitally incapable of seeing the world through any but the political lens. Barack Obama, ironically, has to be understood as being very narrow-minded.
It's all "political winds" to him, and while he makes as if standing on principle against their "shift" in an "ugly" direction, and even believes it, his political career was built on and is committed to fanning political winds; which he sees as naturally converging, from all directions, on a white core swept up in the ensuing tornado. He knows it isn't the wind at all but entirely about where you stand. As he said.
If Obama through his signature racial justice effort Black Lives Matter has achieved anything, it's having disabused all but the most naive of us that anything in our democracy will be settled by consensus derived from appeal to objective principle. It will be won by hook and crook. Objectively speaking, I believe it's better if it's won by traditional white America and allies, and not the hip hop faction, but I no longer make appeals to objective principles regarding racial justice. It hasn't worked for my entire lifetime.
Black Lives Matter is not a travesty and crime because they've gone too far, or because they exaggerate a just cause, but because they are wrong, front to back. No one is allowed to say publicly it's not that "racism" is exaggerated, but that it's a bogus concept. Black people have done more than anyone to reveal that. As awful as that sounds to tender ears, it isn't the worst of it.
It isn't merely that BLM is objectively wrong in its analysis and charges and outrageous in its demand; it's enough that BLM has marked out a line--in blood--identifying themselves as an entity committed to violence against white Americans as such. That's all that's needed. After that, I don't care if they're right; I don't care that they genuinely, and stupidly, believe we are committed to violence against them. We did not mark out this divide but we can't ignore it; but that's multiculturalism: many such divides, none of the majority's choosing, there to bait it into the inevitable conflict, for which it will be blamed.
But that's a peculiarly Western masochistic predilection--to appeal to our fellows on behalf of those who have a historic grievance against us. Any people with a sufficient self-preservative instinct would understand, for instance, that any validity to an historic claim to the American Southwest harbored by Mexicans is all the more reason to keep them out of there. Other groups defend themselves to themselves; whites defend themselves to God.
I honestly believe Obama and his ilk haven't the intelligence or character to see the evil. They are true believers and that explains their white-knuckle grip, somewhat, on the Narrative. Barack didn't find Jesus in that church because he wasn't looking. Did he find blackness?
But he's unique in having economically piggybacked a traditional political necessity, feigned Christianity, onto one of his own choice (and becoming its own tradition), feigned blackness; it's as if the Reverend Wright's church was created just for him, a safe space for him to learn to be black.
If Barack Obama is a believer in anything beyond Barack Obama, it's Blackness. And Blackness has been very, very good to Barry.
But this is all old hat.
I was thinking of the oft-quoted, and misquoted, paragraph from Obama's slick second book, The Audacity of Hope (there's the Reverend again, in the kitsch title):
Of course, not all my conversations in immigrant communities follow this easy pattern. In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging.
They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific assurances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.
He means he'll defend them from such as "internments"; fair enough. But reading this I think I see past the ghostwriter, past the notes, to the man on the cover, and I can't help but think the quote kind of reveals how he's he's congenitally incapable of seeing the world through any but the political lens. Barack Obama, ironically, has to be understood as being very narrow-minded.
It's all "political winds" to him, and while he makes as if standing on principle against their "shift" in an "ugly" direction, and even believes it, his political career was built on and is committed to fanning political winds; which he sees as naturally converging, from all directions, on a white core swept up in the ensuing tornado. He knows it isn't the wind at all but entirely about where you stand. As he said.
If Obama through his signature racial justice effort Black Lives Matter has achieved anything, it's having disabused all but the most naive of us that anything in our democracy will be settled by consensus derived from appeal to objective principle. It will be won by hook and crook. Objectively speaking, I believe it's better if it's won by traditional white America and allies, and not the hip hop faction, but I no longer make appeals to objective principles regarding racial justice. It hasn't worked for my entire lifetime.
Black Lives Matter is not a travesty and crime because they've gone too far, or because they exaggerate a just cause, but because they are wrong, front to back. No one is allowed to say publicly it's not that "racism" is exaggerated, but that it's a bogus concept. Black people have done more than anyone to reveal that. As awful as that sounds to tender ears, it isn't the worst of it.
It isn't merely that BLM is objectively wrong in its analysis and charges and outrageous in its demand; it's enough that BLM has marked out a line--in blood--identifying themselves as an entity committed to violence against white Americans as such. That's all that's needed. After that, I don't care if they're right; I don't care that they genuinely, and stupidly, believe we are committed to violence against them. We did not mark out this divide but we can't ignore it; but that's multiculturalism: many such divides, none of the majority's choosing, there to bait it into the inevitable conflict, for which it will be blamed.
But that's a peculiarly Western masochistic predilection--to appeal to our fellows on behalf of those who have a historic grievance against us. Any people with a sufficient self-preservative instinct would understand, for instance, that any validity to an historic claim to the American Southwest harbored by Mexicans is all the more reason to keep them out of there. Other groups defend themselves to themselves; whites defend themselves to God.
I honestly believe Obama and his ilk haven't the intelligence or character to see the evil. They are true believers and that explains their white-knuckle grip, somewhat, on the Narrative. Barack didn't find Jesus in that church because he wasn't looking. Did he find blackness?
Tuesday, July 12, 2016
Cognitive Dissonance and Cowardice
When Lavish "Diamond" Reynolds live broadcast the death of Philando Castile some whites were puzzled by her calm demeanor in the circumstances, narrating events in a stereotypical ghetto monotone normally associated with passive aggressive customer service agents of a certain demographic. When I saw it on Twitter I thought at first it was a hoax; Reynolds comes across as a bad amateur actor. Her behavior is not normal. Anyone can see it's calculated. But no person of consequence dare say that, obviously. It looks suspiciously like Reynolds' calm is callousness and that she was quickly taking advantage of the situation. In the 'hood she would be described as One Cold Bitch. You have to admire the steely nerve it takes. I know: how dare I. Yet still.
The average white American still projects onto blacks as a group and individually his own innate sense of normalcy, produced over centuries of culture and evolution and reflected, for the time being, in the laws and customs of, for instance, the United States.
The average black American projects onto whites a cruder innate sense of value and normalcy, produced by the same processes. That's why blacks presume the worst intentions of whites regardless of good faith efforts. Much political agitation is subsuming the humiliation and frustration of living under restrictive and unnatural white norms, hence black America's continuing obsession with individual authenticity.
Anti-racism, armed with disparate impact theory, hasn't a chance. In the post civil rights environment of moral license, it can only chase black misbehavior downward and drag us to some extent along with it.
The consequences of this are now proving disastrous. Black behavior gets worse the longer it's un-moored from white norms, and one result is the daily urban body count. For those few, such as the president, capable of seeing and making the calculation, the carnage of an unrestrained black America must be an acceptable price of autonomy--perhaps they even understand its value, as a bludgeon by which whites are shamed into granting more autonomy, more accommodation of the black norms it represents.
I appears few black leaders make this nuanced a calculation; they are either true believers or indifferent hustlers. White leaders like, well most of them, operate at a higher level of moral corruption. For the individual black American, authenticity and group autonomy are justly sources of pride, as they should be for anyone. But something's always got to give. In Obama's and Hillary's America it's--but of course--whites and all their decency, that is, White Privilege.
To accommodate black norms to achieve equality white America has been gradually conditioned to accept that which it once found revolting, collectively and individually. And it's killing us.
The problem is clearly that black America places a much lower value on life and property than white America, combined with a much higher value on group loyalty and honor.
Black Lives Matter is black America, with much help, trying establish a precedent: we can kill as many of ourselves as we want, as many of you as we want, but you can't kill one of us.
The average white American still projects onto blacks as a group and individually his own innate sense of normalcy, produced over centuries of culture and evolution and reflected, for the time being, in the laws and customs of, for instance, the United States.
The average black American projects onto whites a cruder innate sense of value and normalcy, produced by the same processes. That's why blacks presume the worst intentions of whites regardless of good faith efforts. Much political agitation is subsuming the humiliation and frustration of living under restrictive and unnatural white norms, hence black America's continuing obsession with individual authenticity.
Anti-racism, armed with disparate impact theory, hasn't a chance. In the post civil rights environment of moral license, it can only chase black misbehavior downward and drag us to some extent along with it.
The consequences of this are now proving disastrous. Black behavior gets worse the longer it's un-moored from white norms, and one result is the daily urban body count. For those few, such as the president, capable of seeing and making the calculation, the carnage of an unrestrained black America must be an acceptable price of autonomy--perhaps they even understand its value, as a bludgeon by which whites are shamed into granting more autonomy, more accommodation of the black norms it represents.
I appears few black leaders make this nuanced a calculation; they are either true believers or indifferent hustlers. White leaders like, well most of them, operate at a higher level of moral corruption. For the individual black American, authenticity and group autonomy are justly sources of pride, as they should be for anyone. But something's always got to give. In Obama's and Hillary's America it's--but of course--whites and all their decency, that is, White Privilege.
To accommodate black norms to achieve equality white America has been gradually conditioned to accept that which it once found revolting, collectively and individually. And it's killing us.
The problem is clearly that black America places a much lower value on life and property than white America, combined with a much higher value on group loyalty and honor.
Black Lives Matter is black America, with much help, trying establish a precedent: we can kill as many of ourselves as we want, as many of you as we want, but you can't kill one of us.
Wednesday, July 06, 2016
Narrative Autopilot in Antebellum America
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Sanity Fair
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