Yesterday I posted my review of The Origins of Woke. The author's theory is that the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and other legislation handed every dissident minority a huge club with which they could bash the white man.
There is always resentment by minorities of a powerful majority, which we straight white men certainly were in 1965. Ed Brodow writes in "The War on Whites."
Throughout most of recorded history, majorities have oppressed vulnerable minorities. Not the other way around. Jews didn’t oppress the majority Christian population in Nazi Germany. Armenians didn’t oppress the majority Turkish population. Minority Tutsi did not oppress majority Hutu in Rwanda. That would run counter to common sense. Yet the modern world offers examples that defy what we would expect from common sense. During the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks were a minority that imposed their worldview on the majority of Russians. In contemporary America, minorities are attempting to oppress the majority white population. Under the guise of ending alleged racial oppression, an effort is being made to remake whites into the new underclass. This runs contrary to common sense, but there it is.
The Blacks were the first to figure out how mighty of a club they had been given. They got affirmative action, quotas, gratuitous promotions and monetary reparations for this and that. Other groups, among them women and gays, observed how well the blacks were making out. They joined the game and found that they too could exploit the straight white male. Everybody ganged up on us.
They can't of course simply say "give me money." They have to make excuses. And despite the fact that we white men had been very contrite about our participation in long-standing worldwide practices that could be called patriarchy and racism, there were accusations that we, uniquely, were still guilty. Our detractors couldn't merely admit that we were patsies, easy targets. Whole industries developed to make excuses for bashing us. The first books I remember on this theme are from decades ago, The Holocaust Industry and Shakedown, about Jesse Jackson. These people have no shame. The hustles continues to work.
White people, blinded by our innate optimism, altruism and confidence that the superiority of the culture we had created was self-evident, were slow to recognize the realities of identity politics. Being confident about our superior ability wasn't any asset when affirmative action deprived us of the opportunity to demonstrate it.
We do not know whether Jennifer King Rice was the best candidate for Provost of the University of Maryland, Audrey Bilger would be the best for the presidency of Reed College, or Carol Crist was the best candidate for Chancellor of the Berkeley campus. We can observe that straight white men would not have been considered for these positions. I have written of my own experience to the effect that straight white men are strongly discouraged from aspiring to success in academia.
Can I blame these women for taking advantage of men's stupidity? Examples of lack of scruples and dishonesty are all around them. In my opinion they are simply exploiting the situation as they see it. Just as the blacks who are bankrupting blue city businesses with their amazingly bold shoplifting, driving taxpaying white citizens out of the cities and even out of the state, are simply taking advantage of the situation as they find it.
The whole world watches and apes what goes on in the United States. Minority preferences have taken root in throughout Europe and in Brazil. Europe and the United States are both allowing endless streams of immigrants, who are not assimilating, not carrying their weight in the workplace, disrupting education and preying on the natives.
Here is an interesting article by an Indian immigrant to Canada describing how the Indians are destroying that place. Just as only Blacks (viz. Thomas Sowell, Alan Keyes, Shelby Steele, Clarence Thomas) seem to get away with being honest about what's going on in United States, perhaps only another South Asian can be honest about what Trudeau is doing to Canada.
Alone among people of European descent, only Central and Eastern European nations such as Poland, Hungary and the Baltics seem to be resisting. And Ukraine. We are a special case – nobody wants to come here with the war going on.
Things have gotten so out of hand that even the liberals are waking up. The head of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, has reversed course and said we need to build a border wall ASAP. Mayor Adams of sanctuary city New York pleads that he cannot handle the flood of illegal immigrants. Woke companies such as Target are closing stores in San Francisco, Portland and Chicago.
Even thickheaded liberals are waking up to the fact that white is white. They cannot deny their color, and virtue signaling is no defense. You can read how the victims in these big-city murders here, here and here pleaded their solidarity, their wokeness, and signaled their virtue in vain. As I wrote above, our abusers have a psychological need to justify the way they mistreat and take advantage of us. If they can't see us as evil, then they must be evil. Can't have that.
I have long been writing that the population of liberals will inexorably decline. As Ed Brodow (above) writes
Distilled to its essence, the Left can be identified by a single word: self-hatred. For a growing number of Americans, our country sucks. “America has a deep, dark self-destructive secret: We hate ourselves. We hate America,” wrote Paul B. Farrell in MarketWatch. “A dangerous virus infects America’s collective unconscious,” he said. “This virus is spreading fast. Americans are consumed with self-hatred.”
Not wanting to perpetuate the white race, liberals are simply not having children. Well and good. It has recently been noted that the virtue signaling midwit white liberals were the most enthusiastic recipients of the gеne therapies which tend to both sterilize and kill them. Now it appears that their pets, the minorities they profess to love, are actively thinning liberal numbers. The conservative commentators in the links above shed crocodile tears for those victims.
Here's another good assessment of Richard Hanania's The Origins of Woke, offering some perspectives that I overlooked. See also my review of The Age of Entitlement. The people who read and write books – unfortunately not terribly influential in this era of mass culture – are figuring things out.
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This is a time of big turnarounds. In addition to the liberals in Europe and the United States changing their mind about the flood of immigrants, we have Bill Gates changing his mind about global warming. Maybe is not the disaster he was projecting. Or, more cynically, perhaps he has lost so much credibility on the vaссine front, and he can see opinion shifting about the climate, that he is simply covering his butt. Whatever the case, if he is giving up his geo-engineering scheme it is all for the better. Now if he would only recant about, and cough up the billions he earned from, the vaссination scam.
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Edward Slavsquat, back in Moscow, is inviting questions from subscribers only about life in Russia. I happen to be a subscriber, but I don't have any pressing questions. If you do, please write me or enter them in the comments and I will ask them on your behalf.
On this subject, people to whom I subscribe such as Kathleen Devanney often offer me free subscriptions to give away. Please email me and I will sign you up for free, usually month-long subscriptions.
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Eddie continues to ask for support with algebra and geometry. Solving the problems is usually more of a question of how much intellect he can apply more than how many procedures he has learned. Nobody jumped in with a solution to the recent geometry problem - the line segment the length of which is the diagonal minus one side of a square. Try this algebra: A man walking down a moving escalator gets to the bottom in 24 seconds. If it is stopped, it takes him 42 seconds. How long does it take if he simply rides the escalator?
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Kids are perverse. Eddie and Zoriana turn their noses up at the best childhood literature – Dr. Seuss, Beatrix Potter, AA Milne and such – and demand that Daddy read them Calvin and Hobbes and Pogo. A great deal goes over their head. The kids don't understand American football or baseball. They know nothing about wired telephones, answering machines, DVDs, or eight track tapes. Political references to Laika the two-headed Russian dog, the Cuban missile crisis, and sex education in school mean nothing to them. They don't understand Calvin's precocious vocabulary or Pogo's southern drawl. But they love it anyhow!
I think the attraction in Calvin and Hobbes is the portrayal of Calvin's mom, dad, babysitter Roslyn and teacher Miss Wormwood. This strip appeals to the insurrectionist in the heart of every young child.
On the subject of appealing to kids, I perpetuate stupid but sticky memes from my own childhood. Many of them take the form of rhymes and songs.
First, some very common ones. The kids are always calling each other names, then starting to hit when they don't like being on the receiving end. They hear from me, and they repeat
· Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me.
Zoriana is starting to learn feminine modesty. She appreciates this very stupid rhyme which seems to have appealed to kids throughout the ages
· I see London. I see France. I see somebody's underpants.
You can't let kids get swelled heads, even on their special day
· Happy birthday to you. You belong in a zoo. You look like a monkey, and you smell like one too.
And a song of complaint for when kids are getting mistreated, like being asked to pick up their clothes or clear the table. Full song, four verses, is on the Internet.
· Nobody likes me. Everybody hates me. I'm going out and eat worms. Long skinny scrawny ones. Short fat juicy ones. Itsy-bitsy fuzzy-wuzzy worms.
And the counting song
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe,
Catch a tiger by the toe.
If he hollers, let him go,
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.
My mother told me/says to pick the very best one
I don't hear anything analogous to these songs and rhymes in the Ukrainian children's culture. I notice that our kids gleefully pass this stuff on to their local playmates. I'm making a collection. Just for fun, I'm translating some of it to woke.
Sticks and stones will break my bones
But names will never hurt me
But if you're not down with my pronoun
I'm going to go berserkyJack be nimble Jack be quick
Jack jump over the candlestick
Jill be nimble Jill be quick
Jill jump into Jack's bailiwickEeny, meeny, miny, moe,
Catch a tiger by the toe.
If he hollers, let him go,
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.
My mother told me that this rhyme is so tainted by its original racist wording that I'm not even allowed to hum the music.
That's the view from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man is amused by the Washington circus. Glad to be gone. Glad that suppressed truths are leaking out, but praying that we continue to get military support.
"The general sentiment of mankind is that a man who will not fight for himself, when he has the means of doing so, is not worth being fought for by others, and this sentiment is just. For a man who does not value freedom for himself will never value it for others, or put himself to any inconvenience to gain it for others. Such a man, the world says, may lie down until he has sense enough to stand up. It is useless and cruel to put a man on his legs, if the next moment his head is to be brought against a curbstone." https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1857-frederick-douglass-if-there-no-struggle-there-no-progress/
It's pretty simple, if "conservatives" think that their society is worth defending against those who would destroy it, then they will defend it themselves, and not wait for some indefinite "others" to do so - because that wait will be in vain: "The world in which we live is very accommodating to all sorts of people. It will cooperate with them in any measure which they propose; it will help those who earnestly help themselves, and will hinder those who hinder themselves. It is very polite, and never offers its services unasked. Its favors to individuals are measured by an unerring principle in this—viz., respect those who respect themselves, and despise those who despise themselves. It is not within the power of unaided human nature to persevere in pitying a people who are insensible to their own wrongs and indifferent to the attainment of their own rights. The poet was as true to common sense as to poetry when he said,
Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow." Ibid.
The trouble is that the "conservatives" conserve nothing, they are unwilling or afraid to strike the blows, to secure their freedom. Remember these words: "... but when a long train of abuses and usurpations, begun at a distinguished period & pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government..." https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e3-d9ee-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
Rights are easy, they may be asserted by words alone, but duty is hard, it entails physical action and sacrifice and hard work. Too many conservatives have shied away from that, and we have this result. It's not the fault of the "liberals", it's that of their weak and spineless opposition.
Something from I substack I put up earlier today: "Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal." https://streamfortyseven.substack.com/p/the-woke-vs-the-anarchists/comment/41332246