I believe children are the dystopian future

"We need to be allies to children. Children do not have the capacity to articulate their feelings, they do not have power over their own beings to come to the rallies...they are not in control of their own destiny. They need to see you, transgender children need to see you, transgender children, even those who are not out yet, need to see you, they need to know that you are there and that you will fight for them and that they can talk to you. Immigrant children, and children, I work with children, I work with children who are homeless in the city, I work with children who face food insecurity in the city, I work with children who come up to me every day and tell me they're hungry, I work with children who do not have a bed to sleep in at night and it is the last goddamn thing that breaks my heart that the one thing in this world that keeps these children going, their parents, they now fear will go away." 

The above is from a vigil the day after Donald Trump's election at Portland's downtown riverfront park. Children as political allies is somehow not controversial, at least where the epic struggle for bathroom equality is concerned.

The swiftness with which children have become props in the transgender rights movement demonstrates how little resistance there is, still, to cultural Marxism. Concern for children, real, feigned or imagined, naturally finds its way to the forefront of social manias such as the transgender fad we're experiencing now. It recalls the the satanic abuse panic of the late eighties/early nineties that reached its nadir with the McMartin Preschool trial. But in that earlier case concern for children was the catalyst; now it the putative concern for children comes not as a catalyst but as one component, of questionable validity, of a movement dominated and driven by grown men carving out their own grievance identity.

The trans movement's conspicuous concern for children seems of a different order than the earnest if naive parents and police who--perhaps sublimating broader, and I think legitimate, fears about children and modern decadence--were led to believe in a vast network of satanic cults operating out of America's preschools (whatever Pizzagate is, and it does look at the least bizarre, it probably doesn't lead to your neighborhood daycare), but, to the naive who actually think they're protecting trans children against some onslaught, perhaps it's no different.

Now that generation of kids who were the subject of their parents' coddling and concern in the eighties and nineties--coddling that did nothing, by the way, to halt our slide into decadence--are parents. The social milieu of the post sexual revolution has beaten out of them, as much as it can, any residual traditional morality or resistance to the miasma of popular culture that exists today (google searching the literature on moral panics yields an entire literature devoted to ascribing all of it to moral paranoia of the sexually hung-up in outdated Kinsey-ian thought-language) with the time-tested tools of ridicule and pseudo-scholarship. This started long before Reagan, whose election was in some part a reaction to social decay and as we see now did nothing to slow, much less arrest, its progress.

But you can't obliterate human nature; there's probably a genetic, biological component to a parent's concern for the moral behavior of children. Why would biology program us, amidst all this biological yearning to pass on genes, to be indifferent toward whether or not our daughters are sluts and our sons are gay? Where does a parent now, surrounded by propaganda demanding that feeling in his gut at the sight of psychological disorder is just his own psychological disorder? For the most part he smiles and pretends that nothing is wrong, all the while hoping it will not touch him, not touch his family, and that his children will be more or less "normal"--most people still are, after all--and, maybe even bear him healthy grandchildren.

But what do you do when the only place to sublimate your fear of a thing is in the service of that thing?

 Tomoki Martens plays the violin across from the downtown library in Portland Oregon.

Portland

Police will only say robbery suspect Quanice Hayes had a replica gun on him when he was shot three times and killed earlier this month. A grand jury gets another two weeks to decide. This protest was on the 16th.

Reality's Trump-et

Is this Washington Post article trying to imply Donald Trump's recent comments on Sweden's Muslim problem provoked Muslim rioting afterwards?

Just two days after President Trump provoked widespread consternation by seeming to imply, incorrectly, that immigrants had perpetrated a recent spate of violence in Sweden, riots broke out in a predominantly immigrant neighborhood in the northern suburbs of Sweden's capital, Stockholm.

It's unlikely the Post writer's opening with "[j]ust two days after" is an affirmation of Trump's larger point after all. Would that it were. I wonder if he considered just how much better it works as such. I've given up hope on his ilk recognizing how absurd their defenses have become: we're to believe that Sweden's Muslims being provoked to riot over the gaffe of a US president--despite Sweden's own establishment coming so quickly their defense--isn't in itself cause for alarm. They've been spinning so long they don't know whether they're coming or going.

I don't think Trump is playing "4-D chess" with the opposition, beyond placing himself in position to get lucky by being right on the larger point--here, Muslim immigration degrading Europe--while being imprecise enough to leave himself open to "fact checking" and spin that has to wrestle openly with that broader point and wither under the inevitable dramatic refutation such as Sweden's most recent Muslim rioting.
Because Trump is right about an ongoing catastrophe the opposition press renders itself plausibly accurate and comically irrelevant (here, nothing major or dramatic happened "last night in Sweden", but just wait a couple of days). Trump isn't playing the opposition press, reality is.

As for "widespread consternation", in the US it's no wider than the Acela corridor. In Sweden, if the Post's somewhat cravenly implication is to be taken seriously, "consternation", for Sweden's Muslims, is expressed by burning cars, attacking police and general rioting. The source of their consternation leading to "bouts of anger" (phrasing designed to prevent further consternation, perhaps) can be attributed to that universal constant, the inadequacy of the host population to integrate newcomers.

At the very least these efforts to refute by pointing out an irrelevant lack of precision force the opposition press to expose that which it would rather leave completely in the dark. Optimal for them would be complete ignorance; the mere act of "fact checking" Trump's latest constitutes a severe degradation of their position. Emphasis added below:

The neighborhood, Rinkeby, was the scene of riots in 2010 and 2013, too. And in most ways, what happened late Monday night was reminiscent of those earlier bouts of anger. Swedish police apparently made an arrest around 8 p.m. near the Rinkeby station. For reasons not yet disclosed by the police, word of the arrest prompted a crowd of youths to gather.
In 2015, when the influx of refugees and migrants to Europe from Africa, the Middle East and Asia was highest, Sweden took in the greatest number per capita. By and large, integration has been a success story there, save for incidents such as Monday night's, which have taken place in highly segregated neighborhoods.

Integration has been successful except where it isn't (here, and there, and over there...) and where there is segregation which is all over (notice how assimilation isn't even mentioned any more--that failure is no longer even recognized as such--you're a racist for even thinking it's a failure). It's gotten so they can't even get out a coherent sentence. "Protests were peaceful until some started rioting" is the template.
Trump is Br'er Rabbit, reality is the briar patch.

Portland anti-Police Protests

There has been at least one protest in the city of Portland every day since the election of Donald Trump. Today's demonstrators are protesting the fatal police shooting of robbery suspect Quanice Hayes, who police say pointed a realistic-looking replica handgun at them. Here protesters taunt police as they pull out of a standoff on the campus of Portland State University.

Demonstrators at these things tend to be at their autistic screechiest when berating the police. There's a curious outpouring of aggression for them that I cannot fathom. As for the police I've seen nothing but restraint from them so far. But it will likely take only one losing his cool for the entire story of this protest season to turn against them.

Periscope Chat, Feb. 16, 2017

Pirating Social Justice

When I first saw this quoted on Twitter I assumed it was satire--someone had simply substituted "Chinese" for "White".

One reason for that is I've found myself making this argument to SJW friends and family: "this white privilege business is silly. Go to China and you won't see people arguing about 'Han Chinese privilege'." Well, almost there.

It turns out Ms. Thanapal is in fact an activist in Singapore (Muslim Malay, I think).  Here she is teasing out of a Singaporean official's sympathetic remarks the stuff of narrative outrage in language we'll all find familiar:

 When Mr Shanmugam first posted about Ms Thanapal's remarks, he said the point he actually made at the event was that the Malaysian education system was not good for integration. 

"The Chinese leadership in various local areas in Malaysia want to maintain control over the Chinese population. It suits them to have Chinese students go to Chinese schools instead of mainstream Malaysian schools. And the schools are more Chinese (because they are effectively single race)," he wrote. 

 "At the same time, many mainstream schools in Malaysia are becoming more Malay (because the students are largely Malay) and Islamic (e.g. through the way some principals and teachers handle matters) which discourages the Chinese from going into those schools. So you end up with having more Malays going to mainstream schools, and more Chinese going to Chinese schools. As a result, the different races are kept apart from a young age." 

Ms Thanapal's Facebook post appeared to take issue with Mr Shanmugam saying that mainstream schools in Malaysia were "becoming more Malay and Islamic".

 She wrote: "The only reason you would consider this important enough to make statements about, is if you are an Islamaphobic bigot who thinks Malay-Muslims are a threat."

And here she is hitting all the right notes in Chinese Privilege, Gender and Intersectionality in Singapore. 

Chinese privilege in Singapore is unique because it occurs outside of mainland China and territories which it has historically controlled. In this manner, our interview is intended as the beginning of an examination of a larger Chinese privilege, with its own histories of colonialism and migratory communities. We note that in order to zero in on the current racial and political structures in Singapore, as well as specifically on the complex role of gender, our interview does not focus on the historical development of this privilege per se, or on the obviously important, historically motivated distinctions between different groups of Chinese in Singapore. In the nineteenth century, under British colonialism, southern Chinese immigrated from China to Singapore and Malaysia to escape famine and the effects of the Opium Wars back home, and arrived to a colony in which they were brutally subjugated: the majority of male Chinese immigrants experienced great abuse under a system of indentured labor (the “coolie” system), and many of the (comparatively few) female immigrants were forced into prostitution. While this interview is intended to open up a conversation about monolithic Singaporean Chinese privilege today, we plan a more comprehensive critical historical genealogy of comparative Chinese privilege in our future work in order to elaborate upon these distinctions and developments.

Somehow I don't think the Chinese will endure much of this sort of thing in the Mainland, but one can hope.