American University in Washington D.C. (Full disclosure: I once taught legal ethics at the law school there) employs Ibram X. Kendi as a history prof and Director of the Antiracist Research & Policy Center. He writes, and thus advocates, utter nonsense like this, from his recent opinion piece in Politico:
To fix the original sin of racism, Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution that enshrines two guiding anti-racist principals: Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy and the different racial groups are equals. The amendment would make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials (with “racist ideas” and “public official” clearly defined). It would establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.
This agitprop gibberish demonstrates a near complete absence of critical thinking, logic, support for individual rights, comprehension of the inevitable abuses of government, and responsible advocacy. For a history professor at an American college, it is the rhetorical equivalent of ripping off your clothes, painting yourself puce and baying at the moon with a Cobb salad on your head. Presumably a professor who did that would be suspended from teaching duties, yet American University allows this lunatic anti-democratic demagogue not only to leach funds from the school, thus increasing its already excessive tuition, but to continue to warp young minds and indoctrinate weak thinkers with his race-obsessed, totalitarian theories.
It is unethical for a university to allow someone like this within 50 yards of an impressionable college student, much to give him a salary to engage in educational malpractice.
________________________
Pointer: Amy Alkon
Ethics Alarms 
Formalized, government-enforced, undemocratically created and maintained, subjectively determined without recourse, social justice.
The result: real fascism when even the possibility of a future unequal racial outcome as defined by the aforementioned process means anyone and their policies are disqualified from the political arena.
Note there is no quarter for unequal outcomes being the result of any racial group simply underperforming or outperforming another.
My post here would appear, by the criteria offered by the professor, to disqualify me from acceptable public discourse as one who is racist by my simple opposition to the folly and dangers of his proposal.
Let’s see, disciplinary tools in the event they do not changes ideas we don’t like voluntarily. Hmmm.
What if we changed the concept of equity to mean equal inputs rather than equity in outputs. And, we would have disciplinary tools to effect input equity in the event the person did not voluntarily contribute equally. That would be the question I would pose to this idiot professor
His amendment would be DOA
I thought that acronym was a little on the head as well.
Yes, I wonder if he was even aware enough to notice?
I don’t know, I think everyone associated with something called “the Antiracist Research & Policy Center” should rip of their clothes, paint themselves puce and put that Cobb salad hat on. They can bay at the moon on their own time.
It seems to me this entire effort by the Left to impute racism into every area of American life and advocate for legal action against this racism that they are certain exits is part of a larger effort to undo the freedom of speech, religion, and even thought. We have all complained about the reality of the indoctrination that happens in higher education these days, replacing the educational values we used to hold dear — critical thinking, analysis, the scientific method, and even the “soft” skills of social interaction.
These days, we are essentially told that college must be a “safe space” in the sense that students will not be exposed to conflict that will make them angry, ashamed, or fearful no matter how irrational those emotions might be in the context of the offending impulse. It is more important that students feel safe than it is for them to learn anything, and what they do learn is more and more driven by ends-justify-the-means social justice models, identity politics, and emotional expression. The Socratic method is just too confrontational for today’s children, and far too likely to upset their delicate sensibilities. Critical thinking requires exposure to too many “scary” things to be properly embraced by today’s institutions of higher learning.
College has become a farce. It has been of dubious value relative to its costs for some decades, but now it is coming off the proverbial rails. This is just more evidence of that.
Perhaps if we required colleges to certify that fair and equal time for ideas to be expresssed or lose eligibility to participate in federal student aid programs.
Sort of a “fairness doctrine” for colleges, eh?
I think FCC v. League of Women Voters of California, 468 U.S. 364 (1984) might make implementing that a bit tricky.
Not surprised. These kind of ideas have been around for decades, but they are now just getting to be mainstream since the radicals not only moved into the faculty lounge, but took it over completely. They can file this proposal next to the one about creating a Department of Peace that could overrule the Department of Defense, the one about converting the US military into a worldwide relief organization, the one about creating a Department of Gender Equality, the one about reserving half of all political posts to be filled by women, and the one about splitting the west coast off into Pacifica.
In the circular file.
Hey, that ‘Pacifica’ thing has merit… if we get to place the wall THERE to keep them in, especially when the system fails, like happens EVERY SINGLE TIME SOCIALISM IS TRIED.
“AHHH!!! AH! AHHH!” -Sam Kinison
Behold the majestic equality of a society where a select few get to dictate the conduct of all others according to own whims and ideology.
It’s awesome majesty is certainly awesome in its utter awesomeness. 🙂
Wow. Just wow.
That encapsulates my reaction almost exactly.
Sheesh.
The left never seems to understand the Modified Golden Rule: what they do can be done unto them.
Does this idiot really think that the wind will never blow the other way, and white supremacists (his definition, which I do not need to hear expressed to be quite sure of) will take the levers of this power? Not that this attempt at total and final control of the political process, American lives, and even our thoughts? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes is a concept he never considered?!?
It is like he really WANTS to be oppressed, in the same ways he both whines about historically and wants to do to others with this proposal. Perhaps he has been so insulated from reality his entire life that he really does not understand world history (as in what *actually* happened), let alone American history.
Moreover, cities burn before this happens. Oh, the cities themselves might welcome this tyranny, being controlled by progressives and populated by their brainwashed, government dependent serfs. You see, the cities are mostly consumers of the necessities of life. Food, energy, housing, you name it are rarely produced in a city. These are ‘fly over country’ products.
The ones who feed, clothe, provide raw and manufactured materials, essential services, and control the means such are delivered to the cities* will not willing accept slavery, economic or otherwise. Those who vote for progressives, the serfs, have no hard job skills on purpose, and are afraid or guns. The very forced dependence upon the elite works against them in this scenario.
“He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing.” – Paul Atreides
This proposal is a pipe dream within the lifetime of my children, let alone mine. Middle America would reject this measure, and would violently retaliate if it were imposed upon them.
On the other hand, we owe this fine fellow are great debt, just as we owe Beto: they both have broken the covenant kept by progressives the world over.
‘Never tell the people what we really think, until we are in absolute power and can kill opponents with impunity’
Change my mind.
*Roads cannot be guarded. The effort would destroy those who tried it. Bridges are easy to destroy, and every road needs them. Railways are easier to destroy than roads. Air travel is too expensive to rely on for every need. Rivers only help those close to them, and are likewise vulnerable. Trucks, ships, trains and airplanes are all easy to destroy. Pipelines and dams can be destroyed, with varying degrees of difficulty. Communications fibers can be cut: satellite communication cannot provide all of the needs alone in today’s interconnected society. Cell towers cannot be guarded, there are too many. Ports have to rely on all of this even if the resources reach our shores. Americans fight dirty when threatened existentially, unghinders by progressive politicians: ask the city fathers of Hiroshima, or the Taliban leaders… if you can summon them from their graves.
As I commented on Facebook this week about Greta Thunberg: If you allow children to make policy, you will have childish policies.
jvb
Is the Cobb Salad balanced on the head, or turned over and smooshed onto the head? This is perhaps the most important and key distinction.
Questions must be asked:
1) What critical thinking, whose critical thinking, is the proper critical thinking? I have read a great deal of critical thought — such as Jared Taylor or Greg Johnson — on the topics of race, racism, race-realism, and the importance of arriving at critical understanding of what faces ‘us’ in the present. I have suggested that if one really wanted to engage in ‘critical thinking’ one would have to consider the perspectives of critical thinkers like Wilmot Robertson (The Dispossessed Majority).
Additionally, one would have to deliberately return, intellectually, to another period of time before the mass social engineering began, and notice, clearly and rationally, what happened and why it happened. That would be ‘critical historical analysis’. In fact one would have to construct a sound, alternative position to the entire construct and narrative of so-called Civil Rights. The entire era. Including of course the perspective that was brought out and concretized vis-a-vis South Africa. If my understanding is right nearly the entire American culture was opposed to the rule of white-run South Africa and participated in the ideological undermining of the same. Now, the Rainbow Nation has risen up and is showing what it really is capable of: all that it is capable of. It would be virtually, or closely, the same if Ibram X. Kendi et al were able to attain to power. You have to start from the assumption, one based in critical thought, that ‘these people’ are not capable of creating the same sorts of systems that ‘we’ have created and which we value. That is a very difficult hurdle right there, because to get to that critical thought, to see it clearly and to believe it, and to allow one’s inner knowledge that one holds to in secret to become part of one’s externalized discourse: that is a bridge-too-far for many.
In order to confront Hyper-Liberalism and its intricate ideological roots, one has to subject oneself to ideological deprogramming: and this will turn, radically I suggest, against ‘the tenets of the American civil religion’ and its determining ideological forms which has all of us in its grip.
But to get there, will that not require ‘critical thought’? Or, will it be asserted that those who do undertake that ideological deprogramming, and reprogram their ideological tenets along other lines, are not really thinking critically but are making ideological or perceptual errors?
The question then turns on: What is the proper foundation for proper ‘critical thinking’?
The problem with describing dear Ibram as a lunatic is that there is no ‘argument’ in that approach. Therefore, there is nothing in the assertion of ridicule that is really critical. It is a complaint, not a critical proposition. It is not unlike SNL skits.
2) For a history professor at an American college…
Wait, this seems to imply that there is some *settled* historical perspective that any sane person can refer to as if it is written in the sky by the Creator’s own hands. False. Absolutely and thoroughly false. In fact, to make this statement involves uncritical thought. One has to think uncritically to accept that what you (and and nearly the entire indoctrinated nation basically) propose as the ‘proper American historical conclusion’ has already been determined, settled. It has not. In my incomplete and somewhat superficial glossing (which is all I can say it had been) of Civil War historiography the historical perspective changes with each generation. Historiography has a relationship to novel-writing. I can make this absolutely clear by reference to the film 12 Years a Slave. That movie is an example of an absolute, a chemically pure injection into the historical past of content that is absolutely modern. It is a ‘history’ if you will with a specific and militant purpose in our present.
Now I can easily say that *we* must — we are ethically bound, *we* are morally bound, *we* are bound by the demands of responsibility to our children — to revise our ideological positions, and to countermand the ideologically-determined positions that now have us in our grip. But how? By employing critical thinking and critical terms.
To ‘take the Red Pill’ means to begin from an initial contradiction; and later involves asserting, as a primary act of consciousness, just one countermanding critical idea. But to do that means going back in time to when and where these mistakes were made. That is, after-all, critical historical and also ‘self’ analysis.
Let’s see:
1. The salad, in a bowl, is balanced on the head, like a hat. Nobody would dump a Cobb salad on one’s head. Don’t be silly.
2. “What critical thinking, whose critical thinking, is the proper critical thinking?” Irrelevant here, and sophistry. The professors rant was devoid of any critical thinking at all, of any kind.
3.”Wait, this seems to imply that there is some *settled* historical perspective that any sane person can refer to as if it is written in the sky by the Creator’s own hands.” No, Alicia, it means that a history professor in this country is presumed and required to know enough about this nation’s history to realize the existence of the Bill of Rights and the Constitutional amendment process, both of which render his plan impossible and ridiculous, and thus a waste of time to read or consider.
It’s my opinion that Martin Luther King Jr. would look straight into Ibram X. Kendi’s eyes and tell him, Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to my goals. Ibram X. Kendi is another 21st Century dumb-down fool bastardizing King’s “I Have A Dream”.
The 21st Century’s Bastardization of “I Have A Dream”
This shows, in a beautiful, a chemically-pure form, thoroughly uncritical thinking:
King was, as it turns out, a corrupt individual, corrupt down to his core. Surely the sexual revelations of late demonstrate something rather untoward, yet something essential, but he also is known (and there is no doubt about this) to have plagiarized significant portions of his doctoral thesis and in addition key parts of his most important speeches. He was an actor, in an age that brought forth many social actors. Standing behind ‘King’, and closely allied with him, were a range of mostly Jewish, revolutionary-minded, often openly communist or Marxist-oriented activists, and for this reason, among the Dissident Right, there is intellectual criticism of the entire movement. Not only did it inspire social revolution, but every other form of revolutionary motive is to be discovered in this Sixties Radicalism. King presented himself as a religious man and he offered a religiously defined program — highly emotionalized — to challenge and attack hierarchies. But this was deception. In this sense — and this is true with most or all revolutionary movements that I am aware of — his program and the so-called Civil Right Movement is linked, in spirit, to the French Revolution. In the end, heads roll.
Just as the Enlightenment empowered activists, intellectually and ideologically, to topple the established Haitian hierarchy in 1791, which resulted in the thorough ‘dispossession’ (and annihilation) of the white rulership, and thus led to the total destruction of the country for all intents and purposes, similar Black revolutionary movements inspired by Marxist principles devolve, in all instances I am aware of, to destructive outcomes. One only has to study closely what happened in South Africa, and what continues there and where it leads.
Here, with Zteve’s ‘declaration of his righteousness’, ‘virtue signaling’ and to being on the ‘right side of history’ we see not intellectual strength, but intellectual cowardice in its most virulent form. It’s all bluster and emotionally driven. He is totally invested in progressive categories which have led, among numerous things, to ‘the dumbing down of the nation’, and a whole range of other destructive effects that arise from attacking conservative categories. But — and this is important — he cannot see any of this. He wills not to see it through a most amazing internal mechanism. Oddly, this is how many ‘conservatives’ define themselves today, and these are their terms. They are effectively slightly ‘right’ leaning Progressive Leftists. They can be nothing else because they have no intellectual backbone (in the sense of defined, articulate-able inner structure).
Actually, you have merely absorbed a ‘narrative’: a narrative is a pre-fabricated structure through which an ideological position is expressed. Just as the ‘narrative’ that structured the radical social movement in South Africa led (is leading) the destruction and africanization of a very fine nation built over 300-400 years, was based in ‘tropes of righteousness’ and ‘egalitarianism’, a similar narrative structure was set in motion in the US. Zteve has merely repeated it, like a trained parrot, like hundreds thousands and millions of dumbed-down citizens under the heel of social coercion, and the end result is nothing short of exactly what we are seeing now in our present every day. It is a movement that will eventually rise up to slit his throat (at one point or another) and yet he 1) cannot see and understand it, nor the ideological roots of it, nor 2) develop any sort of counter-proposal to it. This is where ‘cowardice’ combines with foolishness.
What is interesting, from where I sit, is that Zteve’s position is functionally non-different from that of any SJW. There is not really much more of a point to be made. Just to see this, and understand it. In this sense it is ‘white America’ that has invited its own undermining, dispossession, and disaster. It is unfolding right in front of you, and — amazingly! — you are intellectually powerless against it.
Only a fool could have two eyes and actually believe that ‘all men are created equal’ if that is taken to mean that all people come into the world through a woman’s womb. Equality definitely exists in that sense, and also that every human being has a life and has a body. But in no sense are human being ‘equal’. They do not desire the same things, create the same things, they do not think the same, believe the same, nor should we ever wish that they do! There is a perversion of Christian doctrine (often noticed in the Marxian versions such as King’s was: Black Liberation Theology) which is very common today and it is one of the strong motivators for the religious zeal toward destruction of necessary hierarchy, but there is also an older, reason-based Christian doctrine that has the wherewithal to defend conservative categories and hierarchy. The website linked to through my name has presented a group of articles that show how that theology functions.
In no sense is King an ‘American hero’. He is the opposite of a hero, if one were really to be accurate. He was a pervert, a liar, very strongly likely a Communist, and also a pawn in larger machinations which, as we all see, have matured and crystallized in our present. To see this means to be capable of analyzing causation. I will admit that the rhetoric is captivating, as were the thunderously righteous speeches. Except that at a point one easily punctures them and they deflate. The ‘songs of righteousness’ of that era also were quite captivation, and again so was their rhetorical effect. Yet they were not, not necessarily, constructed on ‘conservative’ or even ‘intellectual truth’. If you think that creating a Multi-Ethnic Multi-racial culture that adheres together is really going to work, then I guess you are duty-bound to continue with the Gran Rhetoric. But right now it is cracking at the seams because it should not have been put in motion in the first place. It will crack further and it will not *heal* as the modern trope insists. It takes a strong, centered individual to see and understand this, and to plot another course.
In any case — and excuse the polemics for which I was born! — my task is to define a counter-proposition to this distorted ‘thinking’ that is routine in the present. It is not easy given the immense opposition and the ‘blaming and shaming’ that inevitably results.
Correction: Only a fool could have two eyes and actually believe that ‘all men are created equal’ if that is taken to mean other than that all people come into the world through a woman’s womb.
I almost gave up on your post when you declared that South Africa was a perfectly fine country for 300 to 400 years. But, I soldiered on. I wish I hadn’t. This is one of your weakest posts, Alizia. Anyone arguing in support of apartheid is delusional and has no credibility. The remainder of your post is simply nonsense, even though you couch it in some intellectual superiority because you are the only one “willing to ask the hard questions and think the hard thoughts”. Sorry.
As an aside, why do you insult Steve by misspelling his name. Have respect, Alizia. It is unbecoming of one so intellectually mighty.
I will grant that King was not a saint by any stretch of the imagination. I will also grant that he has been elevated to mythical hero status. But, he was not a Black Liberation activist. And, no, he would not have countenanced slicing the throats of the white community in furtherance of Black Domination. In fact, his main thesis was that Blacks were entitled to the “American Dream”. He did not argue for equality of outcome, as you suggest; he argued that Natural Law impels society to conclude that all people, irrespective and regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, etc., are created with, and endowed by that same law, to equal agency, with the equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – yeah THAT American Dream. Slavery and Jim Crow laws denied that fundamental agency to Blacks. To King, that denial was a fundamental error on the founding of the country. He believed that recognizing Blacks’ fundamental rights would move the country toward that “more perfect union”.
jvb
Thanks for your calm, measured response. Dealing strictly on the ideas is always welcome and much appreciated.
I guess I am forced to accept that I am ‘delusional’ and ‘without credibility’ for my thoughts on the matter. What I see, now, is the destructive result of South Africa’s social revolution. My understanding is that what communists do is to mask their actions and goals in rhetoric that, in the end, is abandoned from ‘strict power principles’. I understand the rhetoric of opposition. And I understand how undermining functions. I don’t ask that you change your views, whatever they are, to conform to mine. What I try to do — simply because I am allowed to have a platform and to express contrary ideas — is to tell *you* what *we* are thinking and why.
The remainder of your post is simply nonsense, even though you couch it in some intellectual superiority because you are the only one “willing to ask the hard questions and think the hard thoughts”.
Time and again people say the same thing. But it must follow, mustn’t it? Because I am delusional, and because I am without any credibility, the way I write can only be suspect. It can’t be intellectual, nor rational, and must therefore be just what you say. I would only suggest that you notice the way you have set this up. This is what I call ‘metaphysical certainty’. You know, beyond any doubt, that you are ‘right’. There can be no alternative to what is ‘right’. Any other view must be delusional. It is very circular really.
I will stick with the assertion that I show the willingness to do more of the hard thinking than many. But this is because I am relatively certain that indoctrinating narratives have ‘captured’ us, and I do not exclude myself. I would mention to you an interesting fact. It seems that Ronald Reagan clearly saw what was happening in South Africa and placed himself on the side that I support. Just an interesting fact that I encountered. The people who supported, and in many ways enabled, the semi-communist social revolution to go forward as it did were of other political colors. My understanding is that contempt for South Africa became a sort of cultural fad: it was necessary, unless one wished to be condemned, to support an anti-Apartheid position. And I agree that the tremendous rhetoric that stands behind this emotionalism is very hard — perhaps impossible? — to resist. Except that now South Africa is veering toward the pit. Just as America will — eventually — when minority interests, and minority demographics, essentially take over. I know that what I say here is so horrifyingly grating to our delicate sensibilities. But you have not presented any substantial counter-argument (and I accept that in this medium this is largely impossible). So, the ideas I present are ‘suggestions’, nothing more.
In my view King was a sort of front and as I said an ‘actor’. He was a fraud, this I have largely concluded, and he was definitely a sexual pervert (but there are numbers of them in religious circles, as we all know). I agree that one would have almost no choice, if one were drenched in his rhetoric like in an Evangelical church-meeting and one were trembling and right on the verge of spirit-possession, to fall under the spell of this powerful rhetoric, delivered in high-spiritual terms. Yet I resist that. Just as I am training myself to resist a great deal of Sixties radicalism. You just have to see the results. Then, you turn your gaze back to what produced it. The way to solve ‘the race problem’ is to separate the races. As Lincoln proposed, and as many Black activists also propose. That is my ‘delusional’ view. And in my understanding this only means starting now to limit immigration (to zero if that were possible), and to inculcating properly grounded white-identity ideology in the weakened, but still numerically dominant, majority population. And as I have said elsewhere: the reconstruction of the white demographic with the goal to reattaining super-majority status. Here in the US, in all the former colonies of England, and in Europe. I admit that this is a radical position when compared to what is served up, but it is not irrational.
I love beautiful rhetoric, and I love beautiful poetry too. You may think that I am arguing against anyone’s ‘fundamental rights’ but the opposite is true. I have been influenced by the intellectual position expressed in The Dispossessed Majority. And I desire to explore, and do explore, the ways that alternatives to the ideological poisons operative so strongly in our present can be developed and articulated. This is going on, of course, and people are thinking in very different terms than *your generation* (if I am right about what generation that is). I am trying to point out how we are looking at things differently, and why we are very very opposed to what is taking shape in the present. You are too, but you have no ideological structure, nor the will, to oppose the present. You float along in it like on a raft with no rudder, maybe even no sail.
[My dear friend Zteve — the Z is there for obvious reasons — has insulted me so many times that he has earned *eternal punishment*! If I see him, I beat him over the head. But it is still offered with a light, springy, friendly-bubbly sort of way, and no blood flows. 🙂 ]
Your argumental* error, which I know you should, and do, understand is that there is an “Us vs. Them” response. Read me out: white apartheid in South Africa is immoral but Black apartheid is moral. I don’t argue that. In fact, what ANC had done since apartheid was dismantled is just as immoral. Confiscation of white lands in some form of reparations is unjustified and unjustifiable. As an aside, the reparations movement in the state’s should look at that as an example but we know they won’t because reparations is about power, power to wield it over whites to pay for slavery.
jvb
*If you can make up words, so can I.
Making up words is funnish. If Shakespeare can do it, why can’t we?
In my view, one has to start from the long-range picture, and then work one’s way back in order to then arrive at a *true* sense of what is ‘moral’ and what is ‘immoral’. So, I will assert that life for Whites in South Africa will with each passing year become more and more untenable. Right now, if one is within relative privilege, life is still livable for Whites within the system they created. To the degree that one can remain separatist, and carry on within those systems, patterns and traditions that are natural to one.
The trajectory of present events points to an eventual catastrophe. People that I read and listen to seem aware of this. The situation is seen as dire.
Therefore, it seems to me that what was done in South Africa, though ‘pleasing to the eye and the ear’, in the end will amount to what I call a ‘destructive choice’. But here is my point, and it is an interesting, if general, point: in our (what I deem) perverse culture we often make decisions based on momentary considerations, considerations involving the *short-term* or immediate satisfaction or pleasure. This occurs in a wide group of different areas. It is a ‘symptom’ of a non-intellectual, dumbed-down culture.
It is in my mind simply a fact that the conservative choice is always the ‘hard’ choice. The conservative choice is not necessarily the pleasing choice and not the one the multitude applauds. And the reasons are simple: the conservative and the hard choices involve an analysis of benefit or deficit over a long period of time. This involves a mind that is ‘historical’ and circumspect and one that also (permit me to say) ‘respects its elders’ and respects the wisdom of those who have lived through length of time.
I could name a dozen different arenas in our present where corruption, desire, appetite have thrust forward and bad choices have been made in our distorted, perverse, decadent present. You would agree, no doubt, yet I discern that you have few or little tools with which to oppose this flow, this current.
‘Ideas Have Consequences’ and our choices definitely have consequences. True conservatism, as I define it, involves the cultivation of a mind that understands both causation and consequence. The Sixties Movement involved choices made through desire and through appetite. They involved irreverence, revolutionary spirit, disrespect for elders and for traditions and certainly for hierarchy. This ‘mood’ infected a whole culture. This was like a ‘wave’, a massive current that pulls everyone into it. I started here with a critique of Zteve’s (ridiculous and childish) essay on MLK. Zteve is an emblem for a kind of blustering, virtue-signaling, pretentious and assuming non-intelligence that I might say defines America in the present. I do not say this to be mean, I say it because I believe it to be true. And I propose that it is possible to counter it, to countermand it, to oppose it, through resurrecting conservative categories, understanding them, and making the difficult choice to live out of them and in accord with them.
If I speak of South Africa (a unique, strange, difficult situation) I am of course speaking about, or referencing, America in our present. The Sixties Revolution did not work out, is not working out, because right now you and me and everyone is now witness to where it has led. It is now *rising up* to continue the work of destruction that was begun, which came through a causal chain of choices.
I am trying to alert you and anyone who will bother to read what I write of a developing Dissident Right and more authentically conservative-minded movement that is developing. It is structured, rational thinking, but yes it is predicated on a different foundation than the loose, emotional *thinking* that has gone on and which is now flowering as ‘evil consequence’.
This makes sense to almost no one here — astounding! — because almost no one is really conservative here. They are — you are — slightly right-leaning liberals who are nearly uniformly allied with the central tenets of Left-Progressivism.
Let me accentuate that:
They are — you are — slightly right-leaning liberals who are nearly uniformly allied with the central tenets of Left-Progressivism.
The trajectory of present events points to an eventual catastrophe. People that I read and listen to seem aware of this. The situation is seen as dire.
Reading back over what I wrote — if I cannot reach anyone then I can at least feel pleased that I work to clarify my definitions and this provides some satisfaction — I notice that what concerns me, and what concerns *us* is the sense of ‘eventual catastrophe’. To see what is developing and to see where it goes, what it results in. It is interesting that recently Jack condemned the man who coined the phrase ‘replacement theory’. Jack feels that the entire idea is false. But R. Camus said:
Now, in various important major cities in Europe replacement theory is not theory but a fact. It should be a cause of concern for any thinking person and yet it is not. Structures of denial rise up within the individual to oppose *seeing*. This is an amazing feature of indoctrination: it controls what is seen and what is not to be seen. I refer to ‘the great replacement’ because *you* can only see it as the projection of a paranoid hallucination. But it is not only to ‘replacement’ that I refer, that we refer, but to a wide group of consequences that stem from bad choices made.
Similarly, America in a quite short space of time has been utterly transformed, transmogrified to use a more dramatic term. How, why? Well, through ‘the transvaluation of values’. This is a complex topic, I admit, and requires more thought than most of you seem willing to undertake. But that is not true for *us*. We are willing to undertake the effort to analyze consequence by reference to causation — while the general population, let’s face it, masturbates in addiction to immediate gratifications as a result of being truly ‘dumbed-down’. That is what libido dominandi refers to: seduction as a tool of political control.
We see this. You do not. This concerns us. It does not concern you. We develop our ideas in opposition to these eventualities. You remain drunk and stoned and numb. You are *our elders*. You are the ones that allowed this to happen. We have to deal with the consequences of your choices. You see, we structure our contrary ideas within this ‘mood’.
The strongest ‘mood’ that one encounters on this blog, to generally speak, is one of complaint. It is merely complaint though, as you are pulled with the current into those consequences which take shape around you. Victim. Powerless. In cahoots with the Liberal-Progressives fundamentally and ideologically.
This is the truth.
The comments are very interesting, if somewhat sad:
It is not that I do not also see and understand the alternate visions and versions of supposed positivity in the social transformation, it is only that I am aware that, with time, the destruction will eventually fulfill itself. A really amazing culture and civilization was created through the work of Europeans. And year by year it will progressively be destroyed.
And the same thing, on a different scale of course, is now happening in the United States. And the same thing is also happening in numerous important European cities, such that they are unrecognizable.
What might have been the solution? What other road might have been taken?
Just to see what I see, and to talk about what I see, gets me labeled as a ‘racist’. But there is a larger and more important question: How can different peoples retain their difference and diversity, and create their own systems?
Well said JVB
JVB — in my humblish opinion — does not so much ‘speak truth’ as he encapsulates a general misunderstanding. It sounds good in a folk song but it plays out very very differently.
From my perspective, it is interesting to see how *you-plural* construct your elaborate defenses, which are essentially those of progressivism-in-motion; and bolster each other as a strategy to avoid the hard analysis of the consequences of choices made. One comes out in ‘support’ of the other like team-players. You two are generally polite, others go immediately for the darkest insults and for blame & shame.
That is, of course, one of my points: to get to *truth*, to get to more fundamental and more solid intellectual ground, one has to battle *you*. And there are millions and millions of *yous*. That is to say, heavily indoctrinated people who have internalized their indoctrination. To use the word ‘indoctrinate’ is not intended as an easy insult, and definitely not as ad hominem. The core tenets of American progressivism involve various layers of indoctrination. It can be challenged and opposed, but it is difficult, and more so for the ‘victim’ of it.
This is interesting; on March 31, 2019 I wrote…
To which Alizia replied in part…
Of course Aliza’s usual screeds followed those two sentences.
Well I did exactly what I said I was going to do, I stripped the parts of that blog that were directly related to King’s personal character and focused on his public persona and then I posted a follow up blog ten days later. Maybe Alizia should have dug a little deeper into my blog, she could have easily come up with the blog post that was posted 10 days later titled, The Hidden Mr. Hyde that included this nice little Nobel Foundation photo of King that I bastardized with Photoshop.
Here’s just one quote from the blog post that you’ve cleverly ignored so you can ignorantly say that I’m “thoroughly uncritical thinking”…
Your passion to stalk my comments and troll me as you do with verbose generalities, tangents, cosmic puzzles, dancing angels and navel-gazing exercises is tiresome but pretty easily ignored for the most part but you might consider that what you’re doing could be an unhealthy obsession.
As for the real core to your ever expanding tangential reply:
Do you actually understand what signature significance is? To quote Jack; “signature significance posits that a single act can be so remarkable that it has predictive and analytical value, and should not be dismissed as statistically insignificant.” Your comments show us on a routine basis that you appear to be an actual racist. You’re welcome to your own thoughts and opinions even when they’re an evil scourge upon the Earth.
I only read your post and did not ‘dig deeper’, my beloved son. And keep in mind that my analysis, and the sort of comments I make, really are directed to a general attitude or view. My purpose is to discern the macro within the micro. Your post, above, is only a take-off point. Don’t take it too personal.
I have a tough row to hoe. I am actually interested in the preservation of the races and the racial categories though. I do admit to being a ‘race-realist’ and, more and more, I am opposed to the American Project if it is one of establishing and encouraging a multicultural blending of races and peoples.
At the same time you might also take into consideration that I am working on theory and am not an advocate for a specific state policy. I am interested in the conversation (about race, culture, etc.) in the widest sense possible.
This is my *ground* for working out my ideas and, if I determine it necessary, I may ‘turn on a dime’ and put forward other ideas. One think I have learned is that ideas change with time and experience. It is unwise to be too invested in one absolute view.
The Age we live in seems to have those characteristics. The Vedic sages speak of an age of ‘quarrel & hypocrisy’.
Jack wrote:
“This agitprop gibberish demonstrates a near complete absence of critical thinking, logic, support for individual rights, comprehension of the inevitable abuses of government, and responsible advocacy.”
While I agree the good professor’s video is entirely devoid of reason, that is the main point of the Left’s ideology. Only the Left would promote that “women need men like fish need a bicycle”. The Left destroys everything it touches, especially the academies of higher education. The Left has worked slowly, diligently, and methodically to rip out the foundations of the country/society. This is about power, and the ability to wield it absolutely and without regard to objection. Opposition to the Left is not principled or ideological. It is evil and must be destroyed.
This professor knows exactly what he is saying: A Department of Anti-Racism (whatever that means) is about conformity of thought. It is George Orwell’s “1984” writ large. You will not have racist thoughts because the Left will smash your ability to think those thoughts. You will conform or you will obliterated.
jvb
The Left destroys everything it touches, especially the academies of higher education. The Left has worked slowly, diligently, and methodically to rip out the foundations of the country/society.
It could be interesting for you to understand the influence of Karl Marx on American radicalism in that time period: mid Nineteenth century. If you did, you would better understand that the ‘radicalism’ now maturing had its origins then, in the Radical ideas of the Republican radicals.
Therefore, if one really were interested in researching and understanding how ‘the Left’ destroys what it touches — if what you say is true — one has to turn back the clock to those former times when radical ideas took root.
The Left has worked slowly, diligently, and methodically to rip out the foundations of the country/society.
Yes, you complain, just as nearly everyone writing on this blog complains. And you have zero ideological structure, and zero will, to confront what is happening and why it is happening. And you have absolute metaphysical certainty that you are *right* in holding to that.
See? Once it begins to unravel, then the intellectual work begins.
What I suggest to you — who sees so sharply, so clearly, what ‘the other’ does — is to imagine yourself under the same, or a similar, spell. Hard isn’t it? When the Self gets wedded to its certainties they become a feature of the self. And to see what the self has wedded itself to involves pain.
It is too easy to refer to Orwell — everyone does it! — without taking the harder path of seeing how we participate in social coercion and how we contribute to the obliteration of sound reasoning and how we demand conformation.
I hope that you can see that I am not so much speaking to you-singular as to a generality, a you-plural. I am speaking to a ‘mood of the time’ or something like that.
When I read what you have written here — and I have seen it a hundred times on these pages (a complaint about ‘the other’) — I have been inspired to consider my own complicity and to then develop a countermanding idea, a contrary, oppositional idea.
You guys are radicalizing me! 🙂 Google should put a stop to you.