Deconstructing "Progressive " thought

[a_majoor]

And this. The root cause of the progressive world view:

http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.ca/2016/07/traits-are-no-substitutes-for.html

Traits are No Substitute for Accomplishments
If you've been paying attention, you've noticed an increased amount of insanity in the population.  This insanity manifests itself in many ways, resulting in a relentless onslaught of what is seemingly an incoherent potpourri of madness.

31 flavors of pansexual genders.
Why everybody else has "privilege" and should let blood for those who don't.
Interstates blocked by Black Lives Matters (though it is seemingly only white people).
Majoring in the world's easiest, but most worthless degrees...and then expecting a banker-like bailout.
Feminists carrying mattresses as they throw out false rape accusations.
Leftists getting raped by Muslim invaders...and doing nothing about it.
Priding oneself on going green as we ban plastic bags and Styrofoam.
Claiming we're black or native American when we're not.
Blaming your poverty, student loans, illegitimate children, and STD's on "CIS-gendered white males."

And the list goes on and on.

But while to the untrained eye there doesn't seem to be any logical rhyme or reason to this insanity, there is most certainly is.  And once you figure that out, it not only grants us sanity by explaining precisely what is going on, it also allows us to actually attack the problem, and hopefully, resolve it.

The first clue you should have is that NONE of this is coming from the political right.  Triggly Puff, the student loan crisis, mattress girl, blaming Orlando on Christians, refusing to report your Muslim rapist, and accepting a monthly terrorist attack as "the new normal" are ALL, 100% the hallmarks and patents of the left.  You don't see the engineer-majoring sons from nuclear families who likes Ronald Reagan demand the taxpayers bail them out of their stupid mistakes.  You don't see the daughters from father-present families who want to perhaps get married and raise a stable family get raped and then not accuse her rapist.  And you don't see your recent trade-school graduate who landed a job as welder block traffic on an interstate like his 40 year old leftist counterparts.  This insanity, and that's PRECISELY what it is, is all owned by the left.

Now we can simply write them off as being leftists and, therefore because we disagree with them politically, flippantly dismiss them and say, "well, they're just crazy."  But the truth is there is something much more pathological happening here.  And that is my "Universal Theory of How Laziness Explains Everything in Politics and History."

It is no coincidence the cacophony psychotic behavior of today hails from the left, because...well...quite simply...they're lazy.

They don't want to work.
They don't want to study hard subjects.
They don't want to try at life.

Be it Barack Obama or the spoiled suburbanite Seattle scum panhandling in Pioneer Square, the left is simply lazy and doesn't want to work.

But, unlike a truly indifferent welfare bum, who just wants to collect his government cheese, sleep in and play video games, the majority of leftists cannot abide that fact mentally.  Their pride and ego cannot live with the fact that they are nothing more than parasites.  But since their laziness and sloth prevents the obvious solution (work), how do they solve this problem?

With the insanity and mental acrobatics mentioned above.

If you look at the list above (or for that matter ANY example of craziness coming from the left) the one thing they have in common is deflecting responsibility.

That black woman isn't poor because she never graduated from high school, or had 4 kids from 5 different fathers, or never gets off her fat ass to attend trade school and make something of herself.  Not, it's "racism."

The student with $200,000 in student loans for her doctorate in "Women's Studies" can't find a job NOT because she's a worthless, self-absorbed narcissist who was just too lazy to do math.  No, it's "sexism."

And anybody who isn't doing well in life, either because they don't show up to work on time, majored in a stupid subject, can't save money, can't find a second job, etc. etc., certainly DON'T blame it on their lack of work ethic.  No, blame it on "the corporations maaaaan!"

These pretty lies they tell themselves spare their undeserving egos the truth that would otherwise crush them.  They have no agency or responsibility in their lives.  Their problems are ALWAYS somebody else's fault.  So all is forgive and they can feel good about themselves.  But whereas this mental-trick falsely absolves them of guilt, their egos, pride, and mania can't just settle for a guilt-free parasitic lifestyle.  No, they need more.  They need a purpose.  And not just more, but something that makes them superior WITH the added benefit of not having to work.

Introduce traits.

Traits are an amazing thing.  Everybody has them.  Each trait is unique to oneself.  And you can even identify yourself with traits.  But the one thing about traits leftists have seized upon like a lamprey is that....

you're born with them.

In other words, you don't have to do anything to get them.

And that's PRECISELY why the left champions traits over genuine accomplishment.  Because they don't have to work for them.

For example; "diversity."

The biggest canard I believe I will ever see in my life is the concept of "diversity."  Starting in the 90's they shoved this down our throats claiming that somehow "diversity" had an intrinsic value unto itself.  Common senses says it doesn't.  Reality says it doesn't.  And it's also immoral, racist, and sexist to place value on mere traits one was born with over others without said traits.  Still, this hasn't stopped the education system, government, media, even the private sector from capitalizing off of this lie either to garner votes, or use as a faux marketing campaign.  The democrat party has masterfully enslaved their voting bloc by dividing the country up via traits.  It has also (quite unbelievably) gotten the idiot sheeple masses to blame ALL their problems on white males.  And whereas you'd think/hope the for-profit private sector would resist this, they've instead capitalized on it using it as a means to virtue signal their pro-not-white-male credentials to get lazy sheeple to buy their crap.

Another example: "pansexuality."

I lost count after 38, but if you're confused about the ever-increasing numbers of gender, don't be.  It's just lazy leftist psychopaths who don't want to work, and instead pin their entire life's value on their recently-made up gender identity.  Of course, if you grab a mirror, put it in front of their faces, and point this fact out, they'll throw a temper-tantrum and scream that you're an "ist" of some kind.  But their emotional theatrics aside, doesn't make it any less true, just more cowardly.

And then there's leftist religions.

Like a zealot or religious fanatic, leftist fanatics worship and use their made-up religions to fill the hole of nothingness that is otherwise known as their life.  This is why you NEVER see the captain of the football team with a 3.8GPA join the "anarchist/marxist/minarchist" trench-coat wearing, movie-theater-shooting, nerd crowd.  Or the studious Asian engineering major block the interstate near campus.  They have lives.  They have meaning.  They have purpose.  They have agency.  They have value to the rest of society.

But again, those things require work, effort, rigor, math, and intellectual honesty.

Ergo, why do all that hard stuff when you can just claim a religion?

You're a feminist!
You're going green!
You eat only organic/non-GMO/gluten-free/whateverthefrickthey'llcomeupwithnextweek!
You're fighting racism!
You're helping the poor!
You're a pacifist!
You have a ADDHDHHDH Autism or Aspergers are bi-polar or whatever you want to tell yourself. 


You can claim allegiance to any one of an increasing number of bogus leftist religions and simply wear that trait on your sleeve like a badge of honor.  And the best thing about it, so AWESOME in fact that leftists masturbate to it, is...

you didn't have to expend one calorie of energy on work to get it.  You simply "declared" you had this trait or believed this religion.  And now, not only does your worthless life have faux-worth.  You are a more intelligent, superior person to those troglodytes who don't understand "intersectionality."

Of course, there are consequences for being veritably delusional and living a life of lies.  The black community has made no progress to close the gaps with whites because they value their egos more than the taxing lifestyle it would take to have legitimate children, keep a father in the house, major in the right subjects, and bear responsibility for their actions.  Generations of blacks have now suffered the lowest standards of living in America for living this lie.

Women, notably of the Baby Boomer and increasingly Gen X variety, swallowed whole the "you can have it all" propaganda, throwing away their lives...not to mention shot at having a family or husband...all so they could get that masters degree and become a professional non-profit something or other at the age of 40.  These women also voted to replace men with the state, essentially wedding themselves to government.  This is all well and fine as long as you remain attractive and your eggs remain fertile.  But when that ends, and reality comes crashing down, it's sad how quickly they scramble to validate the feminist lives they've led by simply telling themselves more lies.  40 is the new 20!  Test-tube babies!  MILF's and Cougars!  When, frankly, it just means nobody's visiting you in a nursing home in the end.

But where the delusional lives of leftists run into reality full-force and there is carnage on top of consequences, is when leftists meet diversity in the form of Islamic culture.  The monthly scheduled French attacks, Orlando, refugee workers getting raped, Malmo, Cologne - be it merely a butt being groped or 50 innocents slaughtered, leftist voting and leftist delusion is to blame.

But here you see just how deep their mental illness goes.

If you, I, or anybody else were attacked, we'd seek vengeance, retaliation, and justice. I carry a gun, and like Creasy, I'm intending to get at least 6 before I get taken down.  But what has the response of the left been?

In the case of Orlando, some leftists (though not all), blame guns, blame racism, they even blame Christians.  In the increasing number of cases where some leftist idiot bint is raped they fail to mention who their rapists were.  And some politicians are so wedded to their ideology when the perpetrator is NOT a Muslim they use it as a means to score more political points with Muslims.  And while certainly some of this insanity could be chalked up to the fact they're more afraid of Muslims than they are non, the truth is even more pathetic and sad than that.

They lack such meaning, purpose, and reason in life,
They are such worthless, pointless people,
That when their ideology rapes them, or even kills them,
They will still stand by it because...

that's all they have life.

It appalls me just how powerful the force of laziness is.  Where you see millions of people, entire generations waste their lives, endure hardship, seeth in hatred for white males, even suffer rape and murder because they'd rather do that than own up to their own decisions, take responsibility, and get a job.  But there is a silver lining.  If you ever think it's hard being a conservative or libertarian is this increasingly parasitic world, just imagine what your life would be as a leftist who is so worthless that they'd prefer getting raped than giving up their ideology because you literally have nothing else in your life.

Enjoy that decline!

 

[OrganishChemiker]

A Toronto Police constable earned $244,095 last year.

That must have taken a lot of paid-duty work.

=============
Merging two posts
=============

s. The "progressive" hiring plans to meet quotas mean a lot of very good candidates don't want to bother to go through the process only to be told "too white/male", or "We'd like to hire you, but we can't".

I don't understand why any organization would advertise their hiring practices like that.
I think the whole concept of race should just be ignored.  The problem is that you can't ignore it face to face.  I certainly think hiring policies should be race-blind.

Thucydides, that blog is kind of nuts. Every 'leftist' or 'progressive' is a lazy, entitled, whiny, etc.?  Most people I know don't fit into either category perfectly, but I've not seen anything in real life that fits with what that blog is saying.  Plenty of people are lazy regardless of political affiliation.  Many on the 'left' do have a tendency to blame their problems on others or forces outside their control and people on the 'right' tend to do the exact same thing except the reasons they cite for hardship are different. 

The blog says something about how the lefties don't want to study hard subjects like math.  Most of the people I met while getting my chemistry degree, including students, graduate students and professors, worked hard and were far more left-leaning than right-leaning.  I think most scientists tend to be left-leaning.  Yes, there are a lot of people who I think are getting Arts degrees and expect automatic payoff just because they have a degree and it doesn't work like that, but it's not like all Arts students don't work hard (though I have to say that I found it much easier to get a BA than a BSc).

As for the thing about not reporting the muslim rapist that peaked my interest.  Do you know what that's all about?  It wouldn't surprise me if a rape report hadn't been filed for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with the attacker being muslim.  Plenty of women don't report sexual assaults and I'm sure it has nothing to do with who their attacker was, so I'm curious about this case.

 

[OrganishChemiker]

My apologies for the double post.

 

[a_majoor]

Instapundit on Socialism. Headline is the money quote:

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/240917/

IN CAPITALISM, THE RICH BECOME POWERFUL. IN SOCIALISM, THE POWERFUL BECOME RICH.

Shot: “We expect revolutionaries to be indifferent to money. Yet in reality the Left thinks about nothing but money…the ambition of all true Communists should be to become billionaire revolutionaries.”

—Richard Fernandez at the Belmont Club in May.

Chaser: “It is a common misconception that socialism is about helping poor people. Actually, what socialism does is create poor people, and keep them poor. And that’s not by accident. Under capitalism, rich people become powerful. But under socialism, powerful people become rich. When you look at a socialist country like Venezuela, you find that the rulers are fabulously wealthy even as the ordinary citizenry deals with empty supermarket shelves and electricity rationing.”

—Glenn Reynolds, USA Today in May.

Hangover: “‘Not bad, comrade’! Bernie Sanders’ socialist cred just took a BIG hit…The Burlington resident last week plopped down nearly $600,000 on a lakefront camp in North Hero. Sanders’ new crib has four bedrooms and 500 feet of Lake Champlain beachfront on the east side of the island — facing Vermont, not New York. The Bern will keep his home in Burlington and use the new camp seasonally.”

I’m sure if the writer had been able to concentrate a bit more, he would have chosen a word other than “camp” to describe real estate being put to use by a man whose totalitarian worldview blends nationalism and socialism, but to each his own – at least for the time being.

 

[a_majoor]

How they gain power. This is a review of another book about the Great Depression, and how group of zealots forced their preferences on the American diet, of al things:

http://freebeacon.com/culture/canned-foods-banning-big-gulp/

From Canned Foods to Banning the Big Gulp
Review: ‘A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression’ by Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe
BY: Joseph Bottum

September 10, 2016 5:00 am

Here’s a curious fact: The single most revisionist account of the Great Depression may be a recent book about American cuisine. A fairly light book, for that matter, aimed at a popular audience. But somehow, in the pages of A Square Meal, the story of the Great Depression—and the lessons the nation took from the hardships of the 1930s—gets told in a new and unexpected way.

Perhaps that’s less surprising than it seems. Down at its root, economics always has something to do with food: To understand an era in history, we need to measure not just its coins but also its calories. Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe, the husband-and-wife authors of A Square Meal, may have begun their project with the notion of recounting the odd recipes promoted or adapted in the 1930s—an idea no more sophisticated than the ideas behind any number of texts in these days when every fourth or fifth book seems to have the word cuisine in its title. But along the way, they manage to offer an explanation for why the nation reacted to the Crash of 1929 so strongly—and how the nation drew so many wrong conclusions from the resulting depression.

The answers, Ziegelman and Coe believe, can be found in food. They’re not the first to think so, in some ways. Food formed the basis of a vast expansion of government power when, in its 1942 Wickard v. Filburn decision, the Supreme Court interpreted Depression-era law to mean that government had the constitutional power to limit the amount of wheat a farmer could grow, even for his own use. Food formed the most potent image in The Grapes of Wrath—itself perhaps the most potent work of art about the Depression—when John Steinbeck shows his readers a woman feeding a starving man with her breast milk. “Food, like language, is always in motion, propelled by the same events that fill our history books,” Ziegelman and Coe conclude, but their own account shows that this formulation may have it backward: Food is not just the effect but the cause of many of those events in history books

A Square Meal sets up its story of the 1930s by opening with an image of plenty: farmstead tables overflowing with roasts and breads and vegetables. Pies at every meal. Eggs and bacon. Milk and cheese. Potatoes from the cellar, tomatoes from the garden, and preserves from the pantry. The sheer amount of food in farmstead America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was staggering, by global standards. Visitors from Tocqueville on often expressed their astonishment at how well peasant America ate, and one of the great unacknowledged causes of immigration was letters back to the old country describing what a farm could raise. The American soldiers in the First World War expected—and received—perhaps a thousand calories more per day than French or German soldiers. Food, we thought, was our birthright. Food was the given fact of a nation that still imagined itself as primarily rural.

It wasn’t true, of course. Or, at least, not entirely true. For decades after the Civil War, the South knew hunger, and its sharecroppers’ near mono-diet of corn was a leading cause of the niacin deficiency known as pellagra. The immigrants who packed the cities found food costs a huge burden—sometimes 70 percent of a working-class income—and the tenement kitchens were too small and useless to do the kind of canning, salting, smoking, and pickling that kept farm families through the winter. During the First World War, the Army found itself turning away conscripts too undernourished or malnourished to serve as soldiers.

Still, if we start with the picture A Square Meal paints—a national self-image of America as a land of plenty, with waving fields of endless grain—we begin to see why Americans found the Great Depression so soul-rending: People were hungry. The cities were filled with hungry people, yes, but so was the countryside. Even given the kind of weather effects that produced the Dustbowl, American food production at the rates of the 1920s was still possible. The economic conditions of its raising and distribution, however, seemed to have disappeared. And if we were not a people of abundance, then what were we?

In many ways, we were just hungry folk struggling to get by. With pictures from cookbooks and quotations from newspapers, A Square Meal reminds us that the Depression is when loaves and casseroles entered the mainstream American diet, as a way of extending more expensive ingredients and using up leftovers. With the bankruptcy of the old railroad system, the distribution of fresh food became more difficult, and only in longer lasting forms—dried or canned—could ordinary people afford fruits and vegetables.

It’s at this point, however, that there enters the villains of Ziegelman and Coe’s account: the progressives who understood that they shouldn’t let a serious crisis go to waste and used the Great Depression as their chance to force all kinds of things down the nation’s throat. I said that they are the villains of the story, but it would have been better to say villainesses, for they were almost all women.

Ever since Fanny Farmer took over the Boston Cooking School in 1891, a set of American women had been trying to reform the American diet. They were, for the most part, members of the middle to upper class, dynamos of frustrated energy, Social Gospelites, and utterly confident of the new science of cooking—the enlightenment of the modern age brought at last into the medieval darkness of the kitchen. And while they had their share of early successes, the Depression drew them out in droves. Worse, thanks in good part to Eleanor Roosevelt’s friendships with many women of that ilk, the Depression installed them in the government, just at the point at which the New Deal was claiming vast new powers for government. “In one colossal push,” A Square Deal notes, they used the Depression to try to transform the way America ate.

Cornell’s Martha Van Rensselaer and Flora Rose are among the figures Ziegelman and Coe describe, along with eating-guides author Hazel Stiebeling and the Good Housekeeping Institute’s Katherine Fisher. But for chief villainess A Square Deal nominates Louise Stanley, who led the federal government’s Bureau of Home Economics in the 1930s. Cracked wheat, she decided, the nation should eat. Canned goods, because they were more scientifically precise. Plain food, as properly digestible. White bread, as sufficiently purified. “Built on self-denial,” Ziegelman and Coe claim, “scientific cookery not only dismissed pleasure as nonessential but also treated it as an impediment to healthy eating.” Government existed to tell people what to eat, and, by God, to make them eat it. The result was the bleakness of American food for decades after. For that matter, later governmental campaigns against salt, cholesterol, and overly large sodas all have their roots in the puritanical certainty of these women, empowered by the growth of federal regulation.

Now, it’s possible to read A Square Meal as simply another salvo in the culinary wars that have been fueling the publishing industry for several years. Ziegelman and Coe have a purpose behind their account of an America that ate well before the 1930s and has eaten poorly ever since. What they’re seeking is historical evidence to support gastronomic localism, a school of cooks and food writers who urge a return to traditional diets, by way of eating locally raised food. A Square Meal decries “the onslaught of modernity” and the birth of “science, efficiency, technology, consumerism.” The book’s authors sneer, with the kind of racial metaphor they wouldn’t dare use for any other group, “Who but a WASP could think up a diet based around milky chowders and creamed casseroles?”

But I think A Square Meal is better read as an account of the psychological and political effects of the Great Depression. Back in 2007, the marvelous libertarian scholar Amity Shlaes published The Forgotten Man, a history of the Depression and, especially, an argument that the economic policies of the 1930s failed. More than failed, in fact: The Forgotten Man claims that the government’s takeover of much of the economy actually hurt the chances of recovery, extending a brutal economic downturn into a great depression, which lasted years longer than it should have—years longer than such previous financial crises as the Panic of 1873 or the Depression of 1920.

Shlaes’s book appeared during another economic downturn, within shouting distance of the election that would give us President Obama, and whether it was attacked or praised seemed mostly to depend on the politics of the reviewer. In the midst of a belated but particularly angry review of the book in 2009, the journalist Jonathan Chait insisted that “the real point” of The Forgotten Man was “to recreate the political mythology of the period.” And Chait was at least right that Shlaes had a profoundly revisionist goal in mind. She wanted us to rethink the New Deal’s responses to the Depression—and the way the essential rightness of the New Deal has become the standard history, the political mythology, of the era.

What Amity Shlaes doesn’t quite explain, however, is why the nation reacted so strongly to the Depression, electing Roosevelt to four terms in office despite the history of an unsolved economic crisis that she relates. For that, we need an even more revisionist account.

Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe’s A Square Meal gives us, in some ways, a small case study of the New Deal that Shlaes pictures: a set of governmental interventions that both failed to solve an immediate problem and created future problems. Even more, however, A Square Meal offers an explanation for why the nation responded to the Depression with such intense support for the changes of the New Deal. Down at its root, economics always has something to do with food—and the fact of hunger, in a nation that had believed itself the land of plenty, seemed to require a new way of national acting. A new way of national being. A new way of national self-understanding. And a group of reformers used that hunger as an excuse to reshape American culture into something more to their liking.

 

[a_majoor]

More proof that SJW's are not only totalitarians, but also insane. From Mark Styen:

http://www.steynonline.com/7565/punching-back-twice-as-hard-oz-version

Punching Back Twice as Hard (Oz version)
by Mark Steyn
The War on Free Speech
October 21, 2016

I believe our headline was first coined by the Instapundit, who was kind enough to apply it to my book "A Disgrace to the Profession". But I'm glad to see, following the latest attempt to use Australia's disgraceful Section 18C to throttle freedom of speech Down Under, that The Australian's Bill Leak is introducing the concept to the Antipodes. His latest cartoon (right) features Tim Soutphommasane, the totalitarian hack who trousers a third of a million a year as Oz's "Racial Discrimination" Commissar. Mr Leak invites Commissar Tim Jong-Un to sue him for "facial discrimination".

~As for "facial discrimination", in my column on Mr Leak I mentioned Commissar Soutphommasane's thuggish bullying of a young basketball player, who made the mistake of going to a fancy-dress party as her fave pop star, Kanye West. When I spoke in Sydney a little while back, I brought up a similar and even nuttier outbreak of hysteria from one of America's many loony campuses:

Two Australian basketball players, Alice Kunek and Tess Madgen, went to a fancy-dress party – one in blackface, one in whiteface. The one in blackface was meant to be Kanye West, the one in whiteface was meant to be ...I dunno, nobody cares ...Heath Ledger as the Joker? But Australia's race discrimination commissioner has weighed in and said he's deeply disturbed. This young lady is 25, and the state – the Government of Australia – is weighing in on how she went to a fancy-dress party.

But there's a lot of blackface about. A couple of days ago, Beverly Kopper, President of the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, released a very serious statement:

'Last night a disturbing racist post that was made to social media was brought to my attention... This post was hurtful and destructive to our campus community." The Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, Dr Tom Rios, has formed a group that has already begun meeting with students, researching these issues, and working on the development of an action plan for moving forward. The group will meet next week to plan a series of events across campus "to capture the student voice and develop a collective response to these issues...

'You have my promise that these steps are only the starting points and together, we will determine actions that will ultimately create a long-term cultural change.'

This was because of a racially-charged picture that two female students had posted of themselves in 'blackface'. In fact, they weren't in blackface. They were getting a facial. So they had that gunk all over their face and a couple of cucumbers or whatever on their eyes – and when they took the cucumbers off they had a giggle about how funny they looked and took a selfie. And Beverly Kopper, a complete bloody moron who happens to be a university president, is perfectly happy to destroy their lives over this. The girls are not guilty of racial discrimination; the university is guilty of facial discrimination.

This chump has now announced that, although the great big express train of outreach committees and working groups is rumbling down the track and can't be stopped, the two young ladies will not be 'disciplined'.

Disciplined? For what? Beverly Kopper blamed the students for 'failing to think about the implications' – of having a facial. Because we live in a world where a facial is one step away from a minstrel show.

I'm an effete nancy-boy, and I get a facial from time to time, because I want my skin to look good for brutal close-ups on nights like this, and it's well known that 'Can I get a seaweed wrap?' is code for 'I'm a big redneck southern bigot who wants to look good under my Klan hood'. If you go to any luxury spa in Sydney right now and kick open the door there'll be whole roomfuls of people covered in algae coconut moisturizing exfoliant capering around going 'Oh, my darling little mammy, down in Alabammy...'

Sometimes a society becomes too stupid to survive. What this college president, Beverly Kopper, means when she says these students 'failed to think about the implications' of their racist exfoliating is that professional grievance mongers like her have so incentivized the taking of offence that there are now far more people who need to be offended than the number of people willing to offend them: Demand far outstrips supply. So in ten years' time these two students will be applying for jobs and their potential employer will Google them and the first 200 pages that come up will be about how racey-racey-racist they are.

The problem is not these young ladies in either Wisconsin or Australia. The problem is the likes of Beverly Kopper and Tim Soutphommasane. Because they're bonkers, and they're totalitarian. Which is a dangerous combination. Hence, that Kim Jong-Un cartoon.

~The Australian's letters page is devoted to Commissar Soutphommasane's assault on free speech. Anthony Smith of Rainbow Beach, Queensland:

Mark Steyn made a pretty good fist of it ("The war on free speech", 19/10). He reminds us that each day we see our freedoms being eroded is bad enough, though the irony is that we have a supposedly conservative government in office, doodling when it should be exercising power.

What is being lost sight of is that there are those in our midst all too ready to exert state power by silencing intellectual rigour. It is anathema to a free society and like a boil, needs to be lanced with alacrity.

Tom Biegler of St Kilda East, Victoria:

What a brilliantly argued attack by Mark Steyn on the enemies of free speech. More power to him and to his encouragement of The Australian to frame its defence on the right to have a position rather than the position itself. Suppression of free speech encourages something worse than the threat of feeling offended. It encourages the harbouring and festering of secret hatred. Surely it is far better for any hatred to be out in the open so that we know who our detractors are and on what grounds, and that we are able and free to respond.

Indeed. Tony Griggs of Hallston, Victoria:

After reading Mark Steyn's article, I wonder if I am living in a nation with thought police cajoling people to lodge complaints against a cartoonist doing his job...

A world away from the country I knew as a young man is a nation seemingly aligning itself with despotic values... The Prime Minister seems oblivious to this — the right to say what you think without fear or favour.

My old friends at The Spectator also weigh in on Australia's thought-crime regime and their victims:

Even if the [Queensland University of Technology] students are found innocent, which clearly they must be, nothing will make up for the blight on their young lives, their careers and the intolerable stress that has been placed upon them and their families by this vile action. If they are found guilty, we are no longer living in a free society, and every white Australian must accept that they are no longer free to voice any opinion whatsoever on anybody of any other racial group. It's that simple, and that stark.

When Canada's Mark Steyn faced a similar attack under similar legislation, the Canadian public got behind him and the end result was that the legislation was repealed. Every decent Australian must now rally behind Bill Leak, and at every opportunity mock and ridicule the Wile E. Coyote villainy of Dr Soutphommasane and his ACME human rights trap.

The lads at the Speccie are overstating it a wee bit there: I wouldn't say "the Canadian public" exactly "got behind" me, but it soon became clear that no self-respecting person was willing to get behind the "human rights" commissions - which is why they were reduced to being defended by Warren Kinsella, Bernie Farber and Canada's leading ovine fornication specialist "Dr" John Miller. Notwithstanding "the Canadian public"'s general antipathy to me and Ezra Levant, the "human rights" racket was too obviously malodorous to withstand publicity. So we gave them publicity - lots of it, non-stop. And a year later they had no friends, and a couple of years after that the law was repealed. It's good to see Bill Leak and The Australian doing the same.

~Next week I'll be returning to the North American airwaves, starting on Wednesday with a live appearance on AM640 with Toronto's Number One morning man John Oakley. If you're within reach of the receiving apparatus, the fun starts at 8.30am Eastern.

 

[c_canuk]

Here's something to make your head explode:

One of my troops was ordered to take this course before doing mod 1 on his PLQ.

http://www.swc-cfc.gc.ca/gba-acs/intro-en.html

 

[Flavus101]

You know, if you remove all of the catch phrases and general bullshit that panders to the "Activists" of today it actually looks like that course could have some interesting information. It seems like a rebranded COA developer. Here is what the mission is, here is what you have available to accomplish the mission, the constraints and restraints in place, etc. Just rebranded for what's cool in the new age (gender vs sex, equality between the genders, etc).

Do I think this is something that should be mandatory before PLQ, no. Do I find it somewhat interesting, yes.

 

[c_canuk]

I don't disagree that there is a kernel of information there, there always is.

I told my troop that completing it will help him understand where we are going as an organization, nonsensical as it's presentation is. I also told him that while exercises like researching GBA+ as it pertains to your boss asking for a briefing note on heart disease is an odd assignment, but to look past the subject matter, because it will teach/test him on how to do briefing notes and basic research.

I'm a little concerned how they're un-ironically using elements similar to George Orwell's 1984's "Newspeak".

You should see the certificate you get at the end of the course. It's exactly as new age re-educated-y as you'd expect.

 

[Lumber]

Here's something to make your head explode:

One of my troops was ordered to take this course before doing mod 1 on his PLQ.

http://www.swc-cfc.gc.ca/gba-acs/intro-en.html

Free PER points for "Professional Development". This is a win on so many levels.

 

[dangerboy]

Here's something to make your head explode:

One of my troops was ordered to take this course before doing mod 1 on his PLQ.

http://www.swc-cfc.gc.ca/gba-acs/intro-en.html

If you go onto the CANFORGENS this course is mandatory before you go on any leadership training (PLQ, ILP, ALP and whatever the officer courses are). I am at home so don't have the CANFORGEN number.

 

[Flavus101]

If you go onto the CANFORGENS this course is mandatory before you go on any leadership training (PLQ, ILP, ALP and whatever the officer courses are). I am at home so don't have the CANFORGEN number.

Do you know when this came into effect?

 

[Lumber]

Do you know when this came into effect?

CANFORGEN 154/16 - 24 Aug 16

ADDITION OF GENDER BASED ANALYSIS PLUS (GBA PLUS) TRAINING TO CAF COMMON PD PROGRAMMES

THEREFORE, AS AN INTERIM MEASURE, PENDING A HOLISTIC REVIEW OF THE LONG-TERM TRAINING REQUIREMENT TO FULLY MEET THE REQUIREMENTS SET OUT IN REF A, THE COMPLETION OF THE ON-LINE TRAINING FOUND AT REF C IS UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE A PREREQUISITE FOR THE FOLLOWING CAF COMMON PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMMES:

PRIMARY LEADERSHIP QUALIFICATION(PLQ)

INTERMEDIATE LEADERSHIP PROGRAMME(ILP)

ADVANCED LEADERSHIP PROGRAMME(ALP)

SENIOR LEADERSHIP PROGRAM(SLP)

SENIOR APPOINTMENT PROGRAM(SAP)

 

[Flavus101]

Thank-you kindly!

 

[a_majoor]

Wow. We have "no time" to teach navigation with a map and compass, and only shoot once a year if we are lucky (and PWT 1 through-3 if we are luckier), many other training events are out of reach for lack of resources, but......

 

[cavalryman]

Wow. We have "no time" to teach navigation with a map and compass, and only shoot once a year if we are lucky (and PWT 1 through-3 if we are luckier), many other training events are out of reach for lack of resources, but......

At least male CF members haven't been ordered to walk about in cadpat and red high heels yet.  >

 

[a_majoor]

Nothing like good old English snark:

https://life.spectator.co.uk/2016/10/a-handy-guide-to-left-wing-people-for-the-under-10s/

A handy guide to Left-wing people for the under 10s
CULTURE FEATURES HOME NEWS
Andy Shaw
28 Oct 2016
Left-wing people in the olden days

Left-wing people used to like working-class people.

Lots of left-wing people used to be working-class people. These people were known as socialists and joined trade unions.

Sometimes working-class people used to frighten left-wing people, but they pretended that they weren’t frightened and were nice to them.

Left-wing people supported working-class people, gave them money, sat in rooms with them and wore badges to show that they cared more than right-wing people, who wore ties instead of badges and didn’t care.

Nowadays

Nowadays, working-class people are bored with socialism because it hasn’t made them rich and happy.

Nowadays left-wing people are middle-class people. Working class people are a big disappointment to left-wing people.

Left wing people now think that working class people are:
a) Simple and easily led
b) Un-enlightened and susceptible to short-term pleasures
c) Terribly sad and struggling, unable to cope on their own
d) All of the above

Education is a life-long task

Left-wing people think that working-class people are unable to think for themselves and require life-long education to help them make informed decisions.

Left-wing people work tirelessly on education programmes to encourage working class people to buy expensive food and clothes and not cheap food and clothes. They are disappointed that working-class people are un-ethical.

Working-class people like to drink alcohol, have sex and eat tasty food. They do not understand that these activities are dangerous and need continuous education from left-wing people.

Working-class people need to be protected from newspapers, even though they don’t read them anymore. They are easily influenced and their happy-go-lucky ways can be turned into bigoted nasty ways. Left-wing people are needed to help them use Facebook carefully and not make mistakes.

Left-wing people like to be sad and unhappy

Many left-wing people have a very nice life, but they like to be sad. To help with this, they choose to be sad for other people. Sometimes these people are far away and sometimes they are nearby, but different to them.

In the olden days, left-wing people tried to make it better for other people. Nowadays, they like to protect them by being offended when a working-class person doesn’t behave properly.

Left-wing like to help other people by being offended on their behalf. This means that the other people can carry on with their lives and the left-wing people do all the work. This isn’t really fair, but the left-wing people seem to carry on doing it, so they must enjoy it. Despite all this effort left-wing people are still very sad.

Left-wing people care more than other people

Left-wing people care so much that they love the whole entire planet. Other people don’t care about the planet, they only care about themselves and other people that they know. This means that left-wing people have to love the planet even more, even more than they actually like other people.

Left-wing people show that they care by telling other people about how much they care. They send special “I care” signals to other people. Forwarding videos on Facebook is one way that they can show how much they care. The videos often show people far away who are living miserable lives, but pictures of cute fluffy chickens in nasty factories are considered sufficient.

Left-wing activists (see below) are very helpful. They make lots of “I care” videos which makes it quick and easy for left-wing people to send their “signals”. They do this several times throughout each day when they are not busy.

Sometimes Left-wing people are made angry by other people

Left-wing people care so much, it makes them hate people who don’t show that they care. These people are right-wing people. Left-wing people have given them a name. It is “Tory scum”. Left-wing people like to shout at the right-wing people and tell them that they are scum even when they aren’t listening.

Shouting at the Tories is another way to show that they care. Caring is very important to left-wing people.

Left-wing people care so deeply that they don’t have time for thinking and convincing. They use their precious time for shouting about caring.

Also, working-class people don’t know what left-wing people are saying, so it is helpful when they point to the right-wing people and shout “scum”. They think that working-class people do understand shouting and caring.

If you have observed someone and you are not sure if they are a left-wing person, seek their opinion on “the Tories”. If they start to shout and care, they are left-wing.

Left-wing activists are helpful

Left-wing activists are left-wing people who have an internet connection. They make the internet very loud.

Left-wing activists help other people care on the internet. They are very helpful in pointing out when people have forgotten to show that they care. They help people in many ways – watching videos, commenting on things and clicking on buttons called “start a petition”. Left-wing activists sometimes go outside their houses and meet other left-wing people and they care together and shout at the Tory scum.

Left-wing people are funny

Left-wing people have “enlightened comedians” who make jokes on “panel games”. These are broadcast on the television and BBC Radio 4.

The enlightened comedians make people laugh at right-wing people, whom they consider stupid. In the olden days, comedians made jokes about Irish people, but these comedians weren’t clever like the enlightened comedians.

Instead of the Irish people, the enlightened comedians make jokes about working-class people.

Because they care, they use special words like “Glaswegians”, “Sun readers” and “UKIP supporters”, so the working-class people will not notice.

Working-class people do funny things like drinking Monster energy drinks, eating Haribos and watching television. This is funny and the enlightened comedians are helpful because they point at them and laugh, so we know who to laugh at as well. It is very funny and we all laugh because we are enlightened too.

Further reading

In the 1930’s George Orwell wrote about the left-wing people he knew in “The Road to Wigan Pier”. It is very funny.

I have known numbers of middle class Socialists, I have listened by the hour to their tirades against their own class, and yet never, not even once, have I met one who had picked up proletarian table-manners. In his heart he feels that proletarian manners are disgusting…he hates, fears, and despises the working class.

 

[a_majoor]

The articles are somewhat long, but quite illuminating.

Link one is from Gab.ai, a newer alternative social media site which was formed as a reaction to Twitter etc. banning and manipulating people based on their political expression and beliefs:

https://medium.com/@Torbahax/our-interview-with-fake-news-publication-the-new-york-times-33fafbbaf5b2#.fjhf2dwws

Link two is the resulting article based on the written interview:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/arts/the-far-right-has-a-new-digital-safe-space.html?_r=0

I tried reading both as to half of the same thing, but the NYT piece looks like it came from a parallel universe (maybe Spock has a beard there?). No wonder the media has lost almost all credibility and is no longer able to act as the gatekeeper of information and opinion. this also goes a long way to explaining how they got polls and coverage of the election campaign so wrong; they were simply making stuff up with no reference to reality (not much different from Russian propaganda techniques in Hybrid warfare: filling all available channels with noise to swamp out signal).

Of course reality penetrating the bubble is going to be far more painful for them the longer they try to stay insulated from reality.

 

[ModlrMike]

I'm putting this here, but the mods can move it if it's in the wrong place.


As usual, Rex gets it right:

Rex Murphy: There are fascists on campus. Protesters don’t realize it’s them, not Milo Yiannopoulos

I suggest, as a corollary to Orwell’s prescient observation that (I’m paraphrasing) some things are so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them...

 

[a_majoor]

From the mouth of a leftist. Of course you may find some of the premises this individual believes in to be rather incredible, but this is how they think and operate. The fact that he has seen outside the bubble may be a hopeful sign, but far more likely is he will be branded a "heretic" and expelled from the Progressive movement:

https://medium.com/@freddiedeboer/the-iron-law-of-institutions-and-the-left-735da96f61d3

the Iron Law of Institutions and the left

During the Democratic presidential primary and the general election, you may have heard reference to the Iron Law of Institutions. It’s a really essential idea articulated by Jon Schwartz in a blog post that I recommend you read in full.

The Iron Law of Institutions is this: “the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution ‘fail’ while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to “succeed” if that requires them to lose power within the institution.”

The past year saw a lot of criticism of Democrats and liberals from the radical left, the political tendency I belong to, and for good reason. The Iron Law of Institutions was invoked frequently in regards to the Bernie Sanders campaign and the antipathy towards it from members of the Democratic establishment. The hatred that people like Neera Tanden and David Brock felt for the Sanders movement, and the political tendency it represented, caused them to undermine that movement, despite the fact that the passion, organizing, and money that came from it was to the benefit of the Democratic party. Why? Because of the Iron Law: for Clintonite centrist Democrats, the priority of retaining control of the party came before the priority of winning the election. So Sanders and his supporters were vilified and marginalized in the party, to the detriment of the party, and to this day many establishment Democrats work to sap the Sanders movement of its strength even as the party desperately needs that kind of youth and vitality.

The left was correct to criticize liberals for these failings. And yet I think that it’s the left, as much as liberals and Democrats, who have failed to understand the Iron Law and how it reflects on their own project. Because if you think of the radical left as an institution, made up of a set of social and discursive communities that are loosely affiliated with various left-wing organizations, you can see that the radical left is if anything even more captured by the Iron Law, and to even more destructive effect.

So take the discourse of freedom, liberty, and rights. This discourse is very, very important to ordinary people, particularly Americans. You can lament that fact, but it is a fact. A radical left movement that wants to win would be careful in how it talks about freedom. To me, the message is obvious: socialism is desirable in part because it’s only socialism that guarantees true freedom, the freedom to live and behave free of want. We’re the movement that can make people really free because once in power we can let them pursue their own interests free of hunger, homelessness, and so on.

Is that the message in socialist spaces? Not at all. In fact if I talk about freedom in many radical left spaces, both real and virtual, I will often be told that “freedom is a bourgeois concept” or something similarly fatuous. The left typically disdains the discourse of freedom — and not in spite of the popularity of that discourse, but because of it. Why? Because of the Iron Law: to be dismissive of freedom might hurt the left movement overall, but because such dismissal is a part of left-wing culture, acting this way elevates you within left social spaces.

Right now, the left is in the process of rejecting freedom of speech as a reactionary concept. Freedom of speech has been a cherished left-wing virtue for decades, advanced by people like Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, and many other radical luminaries. But lately the concept has come to be associated with the right, thanks to the vagaries of our political culture. If we were a smart, we would recognize not only that freedom of speech is consistent with left-wing principles, but also that appearing to be against freedom of speech is a sure-fire way to lose the support of potential adherents. But this kind of strategic thinking serves only to advance the movement itself; it does not advance the interests of the people within the movement. Indeed, the more that we drift into a “free speech is conservative” frame, the less people will be willing to defend the concept, even if doing so would be in our strategic political self-interest. This is the Iron Law at work.

Take campus activism. Campus activism can be a site of a lot of really important work. But campus activism has really powerful constraints, too. For one, it’s seasonal: college politics are deeply constrained by the cycle of summer, spring, and winter breaks. Momentum is constantly lost as students head out to Cabo or back home to Virginia. What’s more, college students are constantly cycling in and out thanks to graduation, making it hard to build durable groups or have consistent leadership. Most uncomfortably, college campuses in the United States have a class composition that is not in keeping with typical left priorities. When Middlebury College students protested Charles Murray violently, many leftists nominated them as the vanguard of today’s left movement. But this is a curious attitude, given that more students at Middlebury come from families in the top 1% by income than from the bottom 60%. That’s not a reason to dismiss them entirely, of course. But it is a condition that we have to ask serious questions about. When I’ve tried to ask such questions in left spaces, it’s been very unpopular, to say the least. Yet I’ve simply been making a core left-wing point: class matters.

In recent years, a dogged, no-exceptions, don’t-ask-any-questions attitude towards campus activists has taken over the radical left, to the extent where college student organizers are expected to go entirely uncriticized in left spaces. That hurts our movement, but because criticizing college students risks losing status within the left movement, lefties are afraid to do so. That’s the Iron Law of Institutions for you.
Or take random outbursts of street violence against the right. This has been a matter of absolute obsession within the radical left for this entire year. The amount of attention spent on, say, the minor dust up at Berkeley would seem totally bizarre in comparison to the actual material impact on the world of such violence. As Marxists we are, of course, materialists, and thus are meant to privilege the objective facts about material conditions above emotional and cultural commitments. As an objective matter the salience of right-wing political street violence to our constituencies is very low. Compare the number of victims of neo-Nazis, in this country of 315 million, to the victims of poverty and homelessness. Our priorities should be obvious. Meanwhile, our ability to actually create positive change through violent force is incredibly limited even under the most optimistic reading of the facts.

Yet for months, we’ve fixated on the potential for left-wing victory through antifa tactics and street violence. Why? Because of the Iron Law. Loudly braying on social media about how we’re going to punch and kick our way to socialism has if anything net-negative effects on our movement. Indeed, dismissing the left as thugs who are unable to win through the actual process of democracy is a constant right-wing canard, one they have used to great effect for decades. But for people already within the left’s social spaces, arguing for political violence is associated with a kind of cool or cachet. It marks you as a radical, as someone who’s in favor of “really doing something.” It brings with it a sense of left-wing machismo. And so the incentives for the left are misaligned: to advance the movement, we should treat political violence as the distraction that it is, but to advance inside the movement, people have to showily associate themselves with the tough guys calling for armed revolution.

Letting people fixate on their fantasies of righteous violence hurts the cause. But asking them to do otherwise hurts your position within the cause.

This condition can be found in real-world spaces, but it particularly flourishes on social media. Left Facebook and Twitter spaces are almost entirely absent of strategic thinking about how to actually build the kind of mass movement necessary to take real power. Instead, they often function as sites of competition to be as insular as possible. Again: it is more to your social advantage to be the Ultimate Lefty than it is to set your statements up in such a way that they advance left-wing causes, which will often entail, whether we like it or not, playing to people who do not already believe what we believe. It will often entail, whether we like it or not, letting go of the in-jokes, memes, and in-group lingo that are so much a part of left discursive spaces.

But those jokes are valuable if what you care about is being a lefty celebrity. George Ciccariello-Maher’s white genocide joke did absolutely nothing to advance the interests of any actually-existing person of color, but since the joke gained him notoriety within the left, it fulfilled its function — that is, he sacrificed the good of the movement for the good of himself. That’s the general way of the Edgelord Left.

People say, well hey, you’re paying too much attention to the internet. But as someone who does not go a week without attending an organizing meeting, union meeting, or protest (and usually goes to multiple every week), I find that social media is changing real-world left discourse, not the other way around. And this attitude supposes that there’s far more of a line between our online rhetoric and our offline personas, as if these things don’t bleed into each other constantly — especially given how important online engagement has become for organizing and advertising real-world events.

People talk a lot about the current moment as the beginning of a nascent left ascendance. I would love to believe that’s true, and I do think that the material conditions have worsened in this country to the point where people are getting fed up. But I’ve been working in left activism, in one way or another, since I was 14 years old. In those 20 years, I have never encountered a time where the discursive conditions within the radical left were less conducive to building a mass movement through appealing to the enlightened self-interests of the persuadable. I fear that the internet has simply made it too easy for leftists to find each other and build mutually-therapeutic communities which encourage people to regress into them, rather than to spread their message slowly through society. And I fear that replacing the union hall with the college campus as the center of left intellectual life has made class struggle seem like an intellectual exercise rather than a day-to-day matter of life and death.

I think there’s real problems within the left — theoretical, political, discursive, pragmatic. I say these things out of a deep and sincere belief that we must fix our own problems before we can hope to gain power necessary to fix the world. Some people disagree, which is fine. What I find disturbing is how few other people are willing to take on a role of within-group critic, and how many are willing to excommunicate anyone who performs such a role. Who is allowed, within the left, to tell the left things it does not want to hear? The Iron Law helps explain the absence of such voices. As for me, almost none of the people who most need to hear this message will bother to read it. Instead, they’ll tell the same sad jokes to the same group of the already-convinced, preventing the possibility for effective introspection and reform. And that’s exactly the problem.