Actor-comic Patton Osawalt is multi-talented, intelligent, and gives hope to all the homunculi in the world by being happily married to former teen heart-throb Meredith Salenger (above). But he is a smart-ass and an arrogant progressive. In his stand-up comedy Oswalt is like Janine Garafalo, David Cross or Bill Maher, half-clown and half political and social propagandist, relying on the demographics and biases of his audiences to get away with all sorts of dubious assertions.
In a a riff I just heard on one of Sirius-XM’s comedy channels. Oswalt argued that being “woke” is a short-lived virtue. Inevitably, he said, you are not sufficiently woke because “progress” always makes what was once virtuous and ideal no longer good enough. In other words, today’s progressives are doomed to become tomorrow’s stick-in-the-mud conservatives, because “progress” always pulls to the Left.
What Oswalt was saying is what today’s militant, doctrinaire, Orwellian progressives believe: all of their radical left agenda is “progress,” as in a boon to society and the human race. It is the duty of today’s woke to get with the program and support the next “advance,” whatever it is, because if the Left advocates it, it must be right. Critical thought is not required.
What arrogance! hose of us who are not brain-washed, knee-jerk followers or ideologues know better. Often what the Left sees as “progress” (“We’re on the right side of history!”) is really a terrible idea that their mob has been steam-rolled into supporting on faith. Coming up with a list, an incomplete one, is pretty easy:
- De-incarceration
- Open borders
- Banning firearms
- “Good” discrimination (DEI)
- Critical race theory
- Encouraging gender “transitioning” before puberty
- Procreation without marriage
- De-emphasizing discipline and attendance in the schools
- Recreational drug legalization
- Advocacy journalism
- Unregulated abortion.
That took me 38 seconds, and would have taken less if I could type.
There are many more proven bad ideas belonging on the list, including the failures of such “progress” as Communism, once flirted with (or more) by American intellectuals (Jack London, Dalton Trumbo, Roscoe Pound) and artists, and today by an increasing number of “Democratic-Socialists.” A group that is incapable of honest self-evaluation and unable to recognize its own mistakes and flaws is untrustworthy. In Patton Oswalt’s arrogant version of “woke,” the Left’s agenda is always right, always progress, by definition.
How can a democracy function with so many people who think that way?
Ethics Alarms 