Category Archive 'Identity Politics'
20 Feb 2021

Reverse Racism at Smith

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Jodi Shaw

When I was in college, Smith College was renowned for producing wholesome Upper Middle Class good girls. I can’t recall the exact correct version, but there used to be an old saying in essence advising Yale men to “mess around with Vassar, but marry Smith.”*

Those were the days. A few decades ago, I regularly attended sporting book auctions held in Northampton, Mass., and I recall hearing of complaints about campus domination at Smith of “compulsory lesbianism.” Apparently, girls who declined to sleep with other girls were being pressured and stigmatized as reactionaries. I recall marveling at how things had changed.

Apparently, today, racial identity politics has replaced disgruntled feminist politics, and minority privilege and compensatory supremacy rules the roost.

One Smithie, at least, it seems has had the audacity to rebel. She’s given up her job, and obviously faces cancellation.

Bari Weiss published the story:

Jodi Shaw was, until this afternoon, a staffer at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. She made $45,000 a year — less than the yearly tuition at the school.

She is a divorced mother of two children. She is a lifelong liberal and an alumna of the college. And she has had a front-row seat to the illiberal, neo-racist ideology masquerading as progress.

In October 2020, after Shaw felt that she had exhausted all her internal options, she posted a video on YouTube, blowing the whistle on, what she says, is an atmosphere of racial discrimination at the school.

“I ask that Smith College stop reducing my personhood to a racial category. Stop telling me what I must think and feel about myself,” she said. “Stop presuming to know who I am or what my culture is based upon my skin color. Stop asking me to project stereotypes and assumptions onto others based on their skin color.” …

Now today, she is resigning from the college. Read the rest of this entry »

13 Feb 2021

Mathematical Equity

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Fox News:

The Oregon Department of Education (ODE) recently encouraged teachers to register for training that encourages “ethnomathematics” and argues, among other things, that White supremacy manifests itself in the focus on finding the right answer.

An ODE newsletter sent last week advertises a Feb. 21 “Pathway to Math Equity Micro-Course,” which is designed for middle school teachers to make use of a toolkit for “dismantling racism in mathematics.” The event website identifies the event as a partnership between California’s San Mateo County Office of Education, The Education Trust-West and others.

Part of the toolkit includes a list of ways “white supremacy culture” allegedly “infiltrates math classrooms.” Those include “the focus is on getting the ‘right’ answer,” students being “required to ‘show their work,'” and other alleged manifestations.

“The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so,” the document for the “Equitable Math” toolkit reads. “Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.”

The ODE, led by Colt Gill, confirmed the letter to Fox News. ODE Communications Director Marc Siegel also defended the “Equitable Math” educational program, saying it “helps educators learn key tools for engagement, develop strategies to improve equitable outcomes for Black, Latinx, and multilingual students, and join communities of practice.”

RTWT

Presumably, kiddies will get to learn “one, two, many” as the new ethnomath.

15 Dec 2019

How Marxists Invented “Hispanics”

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In a must-read article in Claremont Review, Mike Gonzalez explains how the Marxist Left successfully created a second imaginary racial category of victims and turned White Mexicans brown.

I know a Spanish count, a grandee of Spain and a descendant of the Hapsburgs, who got into Yale as a Hispanic victim of White European Oppression. He thought it was hilarious.

America’s surging politics of victimhood and identitarian division did not emerge organically or inevitably, as many believe. Nor are these practices the result of irrepressible demands by minorities for recognition, or for redress of past wrongs, as we are constantly told. Those explanations are myths, spread by the activists, intellectuals, and philanthropists who set out deliberately, beginning at mid-century, to redefine our country. Their goal was mass mobilization for political ends, and one of their earliest targets was the Mexican-American community. These activists strived purposefully to turn Americans of this community (who mostly resided in the Southwestern states) against their countrymen, teaching them first to see themselves as a racial minority and then to think of themselves as the core of a pan-ethnic victim group of “Hispanics”—a fabricated term with no basis in ethnicity, culture, or race.

This transformation took effort—because many Mexican Americans had traditionally seen themselves as white. When the 1930 Census classified “Mexican American” as a race, leaders of the community protested vehemently and had the classification changed back to white in the very next census. …

They had the law on their side: a federal district court ruled in In Re Ricardo Rodríguez (1896) that Mexican Americans were to be considered white for the purposes of citizenship concerns. …
And so as late as 1947, the judge in another federal case (Mendez v. Westminster) ruled that segregating Mexican-American students in remedial schools in Orange County was unconstitutional because it represented social disadvantage, not racial discrimination. At that time Mexican Americans were as white before the law as they were in their own estimation.

Half a century later, many Mexican Americans had been persuaded of a very different origin story. Among the persuaders-in-chief was Paul Ylvisaker, head of the Public Affairs Program at New York’s wealthy Ford Foundation during the 1950s and ’60s. Though little-known today, he wielded great power and influence to advance a particular vision of social justice inspired partly by socialism and its politics of resentment. Ylvisaker hoped, as he later put it in a 1991 essay, “The Future of Hispanic Nonprofits,” that Mexican Americans could be organized into a “united front.” That concept, formulated in 1922 by the Comintern, implied a union of disparate groups on the Left into what the Comintern’s 4th World Congress called “a common struggle to defend the immediate, basic interests of the working class against the bourgeoisie.”

Ylvisaker, who saw philanthropy as “the passing gear” of social change, set off to find out if something similar was possible with Mexican Americans. In 1968, he poured $2.2 million in seed funding into the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), a national advocacy conglomerate whose headquarters still buzz with activity in Los Angeles today.

He built on foundations laid by the organizing guru Saul Alinsky, who had begun the effort to consolidate the Mexican-American vote during Ed Roybal’s 1949 L.A. City Council election. Roybal, an army veteran and distant descendant of New Mexico’s Spanish settlers, was one of many Democrats at the time whose success in local politics owed much to Alinsky’s organizing tactics. Alinsky’s groups also trained men like Herman Gallegos, Julian Samora, and Ernesto Galarza—Chicano Movement intellectuals who used Ylvisaker’s Ford Foundation money (starting with a one-year grant of $630,000) to found the interest group La Raza in 1968.

What all these radicals sought—and were quite successful at eventually achieving—was to analogize the experience of black Americans to that of Latinos. The term La Raza, literally “the race,” by itself epitomized this process of racialization. Ylvisaker was direct on this point. In 1964 he handed UCLA researchers the then-goodly sum of $647,999 for a deep survey of Mexican Americans in the Southwest. One of the things he wanted this survey to find out was in what respect the Mexican-American experience was comparable to that of “Negroes today.”

RTWT

If you look at any university today, you’ll find that the same bad guys have also got Asian kids brainwashed into signing on as another whiny victim group fighting against White Male Oppression, quite ironically since the only real modern discrimination against Asians consists of college admission quotas created and enforced by the very same Left-Wing Establishment that leads them around by the nose.

27 Sep 2019

Yale Political Union’s Liberal Party Changes Its Name and Flees Union Over Insensitive Free Speech Policies

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The Yale Political Union in 1973. I was there.

The YPU’s Liberal Party (dating back to the Union’s founding in 1934, which had McGeorge Bundy, Dick Posner, John Kerry, and Jorge Dominguez for Chairmen) has recently (in a fit of honesty) changed its name to the “Socialist Party,” and its current chairman announced today that it’s quitting the Yale Political Union because the Yale Political Union (O! God! O! God!) allows members of the Party of the Right to say flaming un-PC things, and has no mechanism to punish WrongSpeech.

Chairman Ian Moreau explains why the lefties are seceeding:

The debate over the Union’s usefulness has long been rumbling within our Party. For years now, the Union’s debate format has rendered the meaningful development of political beliefs nearly impossible. The quality of student speeches varies wildly and a few unfocused questions at the end of each speech limits direct engagement with a speaker’s arguments. The ideas that members espouse, however, can be even worse. Just last year, members of the Union stood behind a podium to spew blatant transphobia and question whether women should have the right to vote, all without reprimand. In September 2017, the Party of the Right released a whip sheet in which they referred to Indigenous people as savages. Not a single individual was formally censured.

Such incidents have unfortunately become commonplace within the Union and have wrought significant damage on our Party. Members of marginalized communities — the people who are crucial to building an authentic Left — don’t wish to sit through the needless denigration of their identities nor should they be required to in order to participate in spaces like ours. We have watched as the constant debasement of low-income people, people of color, women and queer folks has led both members and potential recruits to distance themselves from Union and therefore from us. Although our Party has made our concerns explicit and sought reform innumerable times, the structure of the Union itself has made it resistant to change. To be clear, this is not an issue with the current Union leadership; the problem is institutional, not personal.

By leaving the Yale Political Union, we hope to revitalize our Party and construct a better leftist space for future generations of Yale students. We will welcome the people we need to create the networks necessary for thoughtful activism and solidarity-building. We will cultivate a stronger sense of love and community amongst ourselves in order to ensure that our friendships last long after we leave this university. And, perhaps most importantly, we will think, interrogate and theorize as we fight for a better Yale.

We will no longer settle for the detached debate that defines the Yale Political Union. The political nature of our university, of our world, demands to be squarely grappled with. It is not enough to question the Canon, debate the research or criticize the corporation, for intellectual engagement alone will not suffice. Real leftism is bold and unyielding in its battle for greater justice for all people. As conscious inhabitants of this Ivory Tower, we are obligated not only to envision a brighter future, but also to take part in its creation.

RTWT

Being Leftist today means that you cannot “meaningfully develop your own political beliefs” in an atmosphere that exposes them to different beliefs.

04 Apr 2019

The Left’s Attack Upon the Canon

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Alexander Zubatov, PR’97, describes, and explains, in a must-read article, the crazy Continental Left’s takeover of the Humanities.

Here… is another common sense truth, a proposition so obvious that it is bizarre that I should even need to set it forth: the race, gender, religion, sexuality or physical ability or disability of its creator is not a legitimate component of an art work’s quality. In fact, these are the very kinds of irrational social considerations that have sometimes regrettably distorted the picture of what has—and, more importantly, has not—been deemed canonical but which we, whenever we become cognizant of such errors, should try to discount.

But, in recent times, a strange inversion has taken hold of our thinking on the subject of canonicity. Instead of viewing such superficial aspects of the author’s identity as illegitimate variables the influence of which we should resist as far as possible, we have opened the floodgates in order to admit authors to the canon precisely on the basis of such considerations. Entire courses and majors have grown up around these superficial identitarian affiliations, and works of art—mistaken, perhaps, for democratic legislative bodies—have been lavished with praise because of their success in representing—in the sense of political rather than aesthetic representation­—the experience of this or that subgroup. Moreover, the same people who advocate for this identity genre literature also make a habit of assailing the canon for failures of representation, as though the quality of works could be gauged through a demographic survey. This form of philosophically unsound willful self-blinding to the hard truths of aesthetic superiority—which I would call aesthetic denialism—has become as pandemic in many segments of academia and the left as climate change denialism is on the right and has done great harm to the reputation and status of the humanities.

Lending an air of gravitas to this aesthetic denialism, there has been a proliferation of various branches of continental theory—largely post-structuralist and Marxist—that espouse a generally critical attitude towards existing hierarchies—aesthetic hierarchies included—seeing in these either the reification of indefensible and arbitrary distinctions (post-structuralism) or the pernicious reflections of power (Marxism). To adapt the argument advanced by John Guillory in his Pierre Bourdieu-inspired landmark work, Cultural Capital, during the decades between the downfall of the hereditary aristocracy and the emergence of our modern-day techno-financial elite, university education, particularly classical humanities education, came to serve as a dividing line between an educated aristocracy and common rubes and plebs. In the era of high modernism and prestigious print journalism, university departments conferring such knowledge and its attendant degrees enjoyed substantial cultural cachet and, to dispense such cachet, needed to agree upon a more or less unitary body of learning—the canon—as a boundary between education and inadequacy. But, as the old literary aristocracy gave way to a new moneyed elite, which elbowed its way into the ranks of the upper crust through highly compensated tech and finance industry jobs and needed to know how to read and write nothing more sophisticated than an office memo or PowerPoint presentation, the high school composition curriculum became more than adequate to its needs. Traditional high culture and university humanities were rendered supererogatory, becoming the devalued province of effete and useless intellectuals. Stripped of its most obvious practical function, the university’s role in what Marxist theorist Louis Althusser would have called the ideological state apparatus, serving to reproduce existing power relations—and the humanities professoriate drifted off unmoored into the great unknown. A unitary canon was no longer indispensable because the humanities themselves were no longer indispensable.

This led to two related developments. First, with the humanities no longer closely tethered to prevailing power structures, the stability and traditionalism that a close link to power demands fell away, and prominent humanities scholars with radically anti-establishment views were free to crawl out of the woodwork. Second, the new attitude of disrespect—and, increasingly, open scorn—that the techno-financial elite and much of the rest of society came to exhibit towards humanities academics led to a natural tit-for-tat. If you are disrespected, you are likely to seethe and lash out at your tormenters. You may, in fact, adopt your own posture of hauteur and disrespect, as if those people were hopelessly beneath you and will never understand you, since they are either too committed to the power relations in which they are embedded or else simpletons, blind to those power relations.

In this fertile ground for resentment, the attitude of critique took root, building on philosophical currents which first surfaced in the late nineteenth century and began to assume a simulacrum of their present-day form during the countercultural era of the 1960s. Bloom regularly fulminated against what he aptly termed these “schools of resentment,” which I discuss in more detail here. The approach of these peddlers of critique—sometimes known as the hermeneutics of suspicion—was to question all established norms and power structures, including the hegemonic structures that had allegedly informed the composition of the canon. Thus, instead of looking up toward the works they studied, these new anti-humanist humanitarians looked at them askance and endeavored to expose and unravel their inner tensions and contradictions and the hierarchies that had produced those works and entrenched them as objects of veneration. If the old humanities had once offered access to the upper echelons of society, what the new anti-humanities marketed was an attitude of superiority towards the society that had scorned them.

As new generations of students reared under the tutelage of these scholars entered the workforce and academia, the cultural capital enjoyed by the posture of critique predictably increased. Canonical lists were blown open, infiltrated by works that were aesthetically second-rate, but politically favored. A bevy of majors and departments in all sorts of identitarian oppression studies departments crystallized. Critique went corporate. Diversity became an industry: spawning seminars, consultants, initiatives and company retreats. At a time when our society had never been more tolerant, open and inclusive, media organizations, now staffed by graduates of these radicalized humanities departments, began to make a living trafficking in identitarian hysteria about racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia.

The numbers confirm this story. They show a pronounced leftward shift in humanities departments since 1990, around the same time when the tech sector, which contributed markedly to the marginalization of the humanities, began its economic takeover.

RTWT

HT: Katarina Apostilides.

22 Sep 2018

NYRB Editor Forced Out By Social Media Mob

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Ian Buruma

Ian Buruma, the 66-year-old Dutch-born writer and only the third editor in the history of the New York Review of Books, was forced to resign this week.

His crime? Buruma published a self-pitying essay by Jian Ghomeshi, a Canadian musician, writer, and talk show host of Iranian descent, who lost his job in 2014 when an ex-girlfriend accused him of non-consensual rough sex.

Buruma was quickly mobbed on social media where critics complained about the absence of fact-checking (NYRB employs no fact checkers), pointing out that, even though Ghomeshi was acquitted in court, a large number of women had come forward to accuse him of similar bad behavior and that one case was dropped on the condition that he apologize and post a peace bond promising to avoid future misbehavior.

Buruma told Slate:

    I’m no judge of the rights and wrongs of every allegation. How can I be? All I know is that in a court of law he was acquitted, and there is no proof he committed a crime. The exact nature of his behaviour — how much consent was involved — I have no idea, nor is it really my concern. My concern is what happens to somebody who has not been found guilty in any criminal sense but who perhaps deserves social opprobrium, but how long should that last, what form it should take, etc.

In the end, Buruma chose to fall upon his sword for the good of the publication when university publishers, whose advertising was vital to NYRB, began talking about a boycott.

Toby Young, at Spectator USA, notes the left’s insanity, but seems to blame it on their 2016 defeat.

My own theory is that a small minority on the identitarian Left have used various Maoist tactics, including public shaming on social media, to persuade people that their doctrinaire positions on #MeToo allegations and a range of other issues … are much more ubiquitous than they really are, thereby stifling dissent. …

Who knows how long this paranoid atmosphere will continue. America seems to go through periodic bouts of hysterical puritanism, which partly accounts for the enduring appeal of The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem Witch Trials. I think it largely depends on what happens in the mid-terms. If the Democrats emerge the victors, Trump Derangement Syndrome will start to fade and reason may creep back into America’s liberal institutions. But if the Republicans win the day, the Democrats will likely descend into civil war and the identitarian Left may capture the Party, just as it’s captured the UK’s Labour Party. If that happens, don’t expect this hysteria to die down any time soon.

I don’t think the left’s appetite for blood is the result of losing. I think it comes from too much winning. The radical left flagrantly abuses the power it enjoys due to the cowardly spinelessness of the liberal establishment because it can. The more the American institutional establishment grovels to its demands the more extravagant those demands are going to get. Leftist Reigns of Terror do not stop because the Left side won an election. They only stop after the Revolution is done devouring its own.

02 May 2018

One Prom Dress and the Left’s Insane Identity Politics

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Keziah Daum wore this quite becoming Cheongsam dress to her Utah High School Prom, and proudly tweeted some photos. And why not?

But the dress offended SJW Jeremy Lam, who reprovingly tweeted:

Note: 41,958 retweets — 178,771 likes !

——————-

Iowahawk observed sharply in reply:

——————-

And the editorials are still flying, days later. David French is perfectly correct.

As you survey pop culture, the academy, and American corporations, which side has the upper hand? Which side is defining American discourse? America’s most prominent culture-makers obsess over identity. They elevate prom dress choices to matters of national debate. And that’s why people who still possess a sense of reason, proportion, and manners (on both sides of the political aisle) need to push back. Reason can’t cede the public square to rage. Sometimes a prom dress is just a prom dress. But Lam’s tweet wasn’t “just” a tweet. It was a symbol of the incoherent anger that is tearing this nation apart.

25 Apr 2018

J.K. Rowling is a TERF!

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Tranny Phaylen Fairchild has not actually even read the Harry Potter books, but he/she/it somehow knows what they are really all about.

[T]he world of Harry Potter parallels our own. You have those bad guys with power and prestige versus the underdogs, those whose freedoms and civil rights are at risk. In every form and fashion, Harry Potter is an allegory, and perhaps more relevant today than when it was published two decades ago. There is a reason that many Harry potter fans identify as LGBT… it is one of the few pieces of literary fiction that provides us access and underscores the emotional and psychological trials of being an undesirable, an outcast.

And he/she/it is on top of every minute expression of opinion on Rowling’s part relevant to his/her/its politics of identity, and it seems that J.K. Rowling, more than once, indulged in politically-unbecoming female solidarity, “liking” some tweets on Twitter denying that real femininity can be achieved through personal choice in defiance of biological reality.

Oh, my god!

I do know who Rowling is, though, and I admired her as an artist; As a purveyor of all things good; A proverbial speck of light in an encroaching political darkness that she could have very well written about. As a writer myself, she was a beacon of hope. As a Trans person, I admired her decision to use her platform to reach across the boundaries of the Have and Have-Nots and provide us a line of defense that’s not typical of celebrities. Most are terrified of ruffling feathers or polarizing their fan base. I believed that Rowling had a distinct appreciation for the struggles we face here on the ground, and when she spoke it was not simple word-candy, but from an authentic place. Rowling had once been down here with rest of us who do the doggy paddle to stay afloat, all the while pleading for acceptance, inclusion and basic survival, lest we are swept away by the current of indifference.

It’s not the first time that someone has exhibited outspoken allegiance with women, people of color and gay men, but felt that embracing the Transgender community was stepping too far outside their comfort zone. We see it in politics all the time. There are those who supported the legalization of gay marriage, but those same people also feel Transgender individuals shouldn’t be allowed in public bathrooms. I didn’t expect to see J.K. Rowling reveal herself to be one of them.

Spokesmen for the writer were soon apologizing and crawfishing, but you know how it is: Hell hath no fury like a Social Justice Warrior with a grievance. And he/she/it is unforgiving and determined to lower the boom, concluding: J.K. Rowling is a “TERF- A Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist.”

It’s fun watching lefties fight.

RTWT

14 Aug 2017

Charlottesville: The Left, not the Alt-Right, Was to Blame

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No police intervention occurred even when black ANTIFA counter-demonstrators used aerosol flame-throwers.

My various left-wing correspondents are all energized by the violence in Charlottesville, and are demanding that those of us on the Right take the blame, apologize, and get busy denouncing all those racists and White Supremacists.

It’s sad to see left-right violence, including pepper spray and baseball bats, on American streets, reminding us all a bit of Weimar Germany. But it was obviously not the Conservative Movement, not even the Alt-Right, that brought about these kinds of poisonous national divisions, that fostered all the chauvinistic identity politics, and that provoked the violence.

Our friends on the Left are demanding that we denounce all the demonstrators protesting the removal of the Lee Statue and that we agree to identify all of them as “White Supremacists” and dismiss their motivations as “racism.” There were clearly some fringe group crazies participating in the demonstrations and some unsavory people were present, but that doesn’t make everyone who demonstrated a Nazi, a Klan member, or a White Supremacist.

I don’t recall any time I have ever heard our friends on the Left denouncing the most extreme communist radicals responsible for violence. Actually, they offer excuses, blame the anger of their radical extremists on America and the rest of us, and when their bomb-building murderers get out of jail, they give them teaching positions at universities.

So, sorry, I have no intention of identifying the generality of demonstrators as White Supremacists. I think they were mostly normal people defending their regional and cultural identity, who had been at last pushed too far, who were finally fed up with being insulted and marginalized.

I don’t think most people there had any connection at all to the crazy person from Ohio who drove his car into the counter-demonstrators or to the zanies carrying Swastika flags. And it seems obvious to me that left-wing local and state government took a partisan role, instructing state and city police to stand aside and let ANTIFA thugs intimidate and rough up the demonstrators trying to defend the monument.

The Left, today, is playing its usual propaganda games, trying to stigmatize and shame the opposition, but I think they fail to understand that they’ve been using the same tactics and techniques too long. The Alt-Right is reading Saul Alinsky, too. Their pet media has lost credibility with much of the country, and a lot of us are just completely tired of having the Left play the Race Card.

16 Jul 2017

“Do Not Cite Research By White Men”

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Carrie Mott

Washington Times:

Two feminist geographers are encouraging their colleagues to be more mindful about citing the research of white males because doing so contributes to “the reproduction of white heteromasculinity of geographical thought and scholarship.”

Writing in “Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography,” Carrie Mott and Daniel Cockayne argue that considering an author’s gender, race or sexuality prior to citation can be an effective “feminist and anti-racist technology of resistance that demonstrates engagement with those authors and voices we want to carry forward.”

The authors point out that whether an academic’s research is cited by his peers has significant implications for promotion, tenure and influence. Therefore, to cite only white men “does a disservice to researchers and writers who are othered by white heteromasculinism.”

The authors define “white heteromasculinism” as “an intersectional system of oppression describing on-going processes that bolster the status of those who are white, male, able-bodied, economically privileged, heterosexual, and cisgendered.”

Academics should practice “conscientious engagement” when citing research, the feminists assert, “as a way to self-consciously draw attention to those whose work is being reproduced.”

04 Dec 2016

Identity

yalemarchofresilience1

Enzo Selvaggi via Phillip Willian DeVous

“Identity politics is a product of individualism, and individualism is a cornerstone of Anglo-Saxon Western civilization. People used to identify with intellectual identities that were conceived in the higher self – they would say they were Christian and Jewish, capitalist and socialist, working class and job creators, nationalists. But now they are identifying with their lower animal functions – LGBT (who they prefer sexually), vegetarians (what they prefer to eat), white and black (colours that we are born into and have no intrinsic value), gender and sex (which genitals they have), millennials and non-millennials (not youthfulness, but ageism), the music genres they listen to. And these accidental identities are shaping their behaviour, their life decisions, their dress, and their relationships. This is the true Fall of man, the fall from the higher self to the lower self, from the mind and the spirit to food, genitals, and worldliness.”

26 Jul 2016

Last Night’s Democrat Convention

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DNC1

Watchdog.org:

The DNC list of “communities” — 14 in all — include African-Americans, Americans with Disabilities, European and Mediterranean Americans, a First Caucus and Faith Caucus, a gay and lesbian caucus and a Latino caucus, a caucus for youth, for seniors and for women.

All-inclusive, right? Of course, as long as you’re, uh, included.

The Pew Research Center — in a poll of 2,373 registered voters this spring — found women, in general, supported President Obama, 53 percent to 40 percent. Among 221 black people — it did not delineate between black men and black women — 95 percent favored Obama. The poll had a margin of error of 2.1 percentage points.

But the inclusion makes an important omission: white men, particularly those of working age, say between 30 and 64.

———————————-

Even former-Conservative now-Progressive, turncoat Andrew Sullivan, convention-blogging at New York Magazine, grew uncomfortable early on last night with all the identity-group pandering.

9:15 p.m. A reader is exactly where I am:

    I left the Republican party last week after 20 years of voting for, working for, and giving to its candidates. I forgot why I was for it. I heard nothing about the rule of law, limited government, or free enterprise. It has become a grotesque alternation between ambiguous bigotry and overt bigotry; I wanted nothing to do with it. I almost forgot why I am a conservative.

    Tonight it is all coming rushing back to me. Is there nowhere to go for someone who is pro-immigrant and pro-rule of law? Also, this parade of identity politics is condescending and embarrassing for everyone participating. Why can’t we just treat people like people? It would be nice if the Democrats had some African-Americans, Hispanics, gays, or women speak who did not think that their race/orientation/sex was the only interesting thing about themselves or even the most interesting thing about themselves. Couldn’t they have had a disabled girl who was not so entirely predictably and tediously just another flavor of victim?

    I remain politically homeless.

Me too.

Of course, this did not actually keep Andrew from instantly reversing himself and reaffirming his loyalty to leftism.

But we nonetheless have to back the Clintons this time. The survival of liberal democracy is in the balance.

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