In the course of my flashbacks, I finally realized that what I am reading and hearing from my once grounded friends on social media or when I make the mistake of trying to talk to them is just history repeating itself, as it tends to do. Suddenly no one can distinguish terrible ideas and unethical, even dangerous conduct from what history and experience have taught us, in the process of developing civilization, what is productive, rational, ethical and logical.
In Los Angeles, people are really going to vote for Karen Bass to be mayor of Los Angeles again. By any reasonable standard, she has been an unmitigated disaster. LA is overrun with crime, homelessness and illegal immigrants; the Democrat allowed the city to burn while she fled overseas during wildfires, which her fire chief mishandled, and is saying things on the campaign trail like, “We really need to buy new teeth for fentanyl-addicted homeless people.” In the same week the U.N.’s climate change hustlers admitted that none of their dire predictions were scientifically supportable, Bass suggested that her top priority was installing solar-powered street lights.
Meanwhile our scholars, who are supposed to bring society back to metaphorical earth when fads and social pathogens (like the trans epidemic) threaten to make us as mad as King Lear, do things like this: University of Miami law professor J. Janewa Osei-Tutu authored a paper called “Protecting Cultural Personality” in “Race, Racism and the Law.” Her thesis is that copyright law needs to be expanded to punish “cultural appropriation” without the “knowledge, consent, or involvement of the cultural group” in question. How dare Elvis sing gospel? How dare Dave Brubeck play jazz?
Well, I suppose the bright side is that Kamala Harris could be sued when she starts talking jive to black audiences….
Osei-Tutu argues that intellectual property laws are “underinclusive — at least in relation to valuable intangible cultural heritage from indigenous communities and local communities from the global south [which] allows corporations and those outside the community to capture and monetize this unprotected resource, which means that it is exposed and subject to misappropriation.” This is a law professor claiming that “intangibles” need protection by the law. Good luck with that.
To protect “cultural personality rights,” Osei-Tutu says cultural groups should have “sufficient boundaries and markers, or indicia” by which to identify them. It’s “not necessary for the public to have significant knowledge of the group” for their vague “indicia” to be legally protected, but such laws would, for example, allow the Cherokee Nation to “have greater recourse” to demand compensation for the name of the Jeep. Of course, this genius notes, these are only “theoretical justifications” for an expansion of intellectual property law, not “precise applications.”
Oh.
What the hell is she talking about? We give law degrees to people taught by this lunatic? Yet her crazy theory is no more bats than deciding that someone can and should be recognized as female simply by deciding one day that he is and his pronouns are she/her/ and them. Bad ideas are like viruses, and sometimes, like now, they run through the society and culture like cholera. Sometimes they kill millions and destroy nations.
Bad ideas make people stupid, they cause lasting harm (as the Sixties did here) and there is no sure cure. Who is responsible for the idea that open borders is anything other than national suicide? How did the idea catch on that biological males should be able to compete in women’s sports? How did so many Americans conclude that discriminating against whites and men was good discrimination that should go on forever?
I don’t know the answers, but at least I know that the Great Stupid has spread its dark wings over the land before, and we survived.
Well, sort of.
Ethics Alarms 
I might say that society is suffering a relapse, that it never truly recovered from the ills of the 60’s and 70’s. Instead, the illness went into remission for a time. But that would start an inquiry into whether the illness of the 60’s and 70’s was itself a relapse of an illness that plagued us a generation prior to that, and so on.
Translation: People are stupid. They always were and they always will be.
Human civilization as a whole seems to be able to right itself in the very long run. Chock it up to divine providence or just the nature of our species. It’s kind of like how the stock market is farily stable long term.
But…
Those shocks and tremors can be brutal short term. Bad ideas take a long time to play out because many human beings operate ahistorically and have to learn things for themselves. Call it the great woke mind virus or something else.
I think much stems from a misguided sense of compassion. You can show compassion to people who are transgender and still not agree with biological men in women’s sports. You can even be pro trans while doing so. There is a position that advocates for using people’s pronouns (not by force but by politeness) while also acknowledging this giant game of pretend does have limits and deep down acknowledging a trans person is in their own weird category rather than an actual man or woman. You also definitely don’t teach this kind of stuff to kids and NEVER trans any kid. Gender drugs and surgery can be outlawed until 18 or 21.
Same with open borders. If the left really wanted to help the “good immigrant” while also caring about border security, some kind of loose amnesty program for those who haven’t been convicted of any major crimes may be an option WHILE ALSO completely shutting down the open border and only allowing people in who have followed the rules for all future immigrants. That position would show some kind of fair-mindedness to it.
There’s an old theory that civilizations tend to oscillate between hyper conservative and hyper permissiveness. The hyper conservatives can be too harsh so it leads to people wanting to loosen things up. Humans, inevitably, will usually push the rules a little past where they currently are, so loosening continues all the way down into madness. The madness then causes people to be so exhausted that they want strict order. Perhaps we are in the downward madness spiral now and strict order is coming in the future.
Like you said, we are still living with the 60’s. My generation (the millennials) are the part of the reason why all these crazy positions have been mainstreamed. We all went to college and got indoctrinated by a bunch of hippies because we were told college is full of the smartest people and we should all go.
So, the millennial indoctrination and Gen Z apathy also have to play themselves out. We’ll see where that lands us in the long run. I assume it will get worse before it gets better, but I sincerely hope I am wrong. Gen Z has some weird conservative tendencies that could help us right the ship.
Do modern liberals really strike you as genuinely compassionate, albeit in a misguided way? Or, is It virtue-signaling masquerading as compassion, without real empathy, sympathy, altruism, benevolence, decency, self-reflection, or humanity? Don’t worry, I’m grading this test on a curve…
This post made me realize the Baby Boom oldsters currently protesting ICE and going to “No Kings” demonstrations and putting Harris and Walz stickers on their cars and goofy Ukrainian wooden flags on their front gates are the same people who were doing all sorts of stupid stuff in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies! It’s as simple as that. They never grew up; they simply got older.