From Last Year: Politics in Comics

(4/17 Note: Resurrecting this post because folks are still writing politicized trash.)

I'm sure you've heard this one a million times before: "Comics have always been political. Don't you remember that time Captain America punched Hitler in the face?"

The latest purveyor of this canard is Kurt Busiek, who took to Twitter this week to lecture #Comicsgaters for our supposed failure to understand this fact. But bruh -- as much as I loved your 1998 runs on Iron Man and the Avengers, you're revealing your ignorance about our true position.

No one is actually saying comics should be completely apolitical. First of all, that's impossible. We can't help but inject our worldviews into our creative work. Secondly, that would be boring. The reason why we human beings get exercised over politics is that we're fighting over things that actually matter. And stories? Yes, they need to talk about things that matter -- which means, at times, they need to address politics.

But there are good ways and bad ways to incorporate politics into comics -- and here's where we get to the meat of what #Comicgaters are really saying. When we bitch about Current Year comics being "too political," we are are complaining about the following:

• an excessive reliance on political themes.
• a lack of subtlety in addressing those themes.
• a boring uniformity of perspective.
• the warping of established characters to serve political ends.

Let's discuss each of these in turn.

An excessive reliance on political themes.

Comics in earlier eras sometimes got political. But most of the time, our heroes battled archetypes -- such as the lowlife thug or the megalomaniac with ambitions to dominate the world. Tony Stark, Light of My Life - just to pick one example - was most often pitted against organized crime, unscrupulous business competitors, and - oh, yes - a dude wielding ten alien rings. And that's when he wasn't battling his own psychological maladies! Indeed, the very best Iron Man comic in history, in my view, is one in which the only villain is Tony's own alcoholism.

Today, however, creators seem hell bent on injecting their political views into everything. As I observe in a video I uploaded to YouTube yesterday (which will be linked here in this Sunday's post), this very tendency is what ruins last week's Rescue 2020. What could've been a fascinating reflection on the feasibility of scientific resurrection is disrupted by annoying, off-topic feminist twaddle. And this is not an isolated case. This kind of storytelling failure can now be found everywhere.

A lack of subtlety in addressing political themes.

Sometimes, earlier comics would be on the nose -- particularly during wartime when the demand for patriotic propaganda was high. But be honest: are those the comics that truly endured? Or are they just looked upon as amusing historical curiosities -- or as convenient examples to deploy when you want to justify your own bad writing?

No: comics that last universalize. The X-Men absolutely were an allegory for the marginalized. But that's the point: they were an allegory. They allowed writers in earlier eras to tackle themes of prejudice and discrimination from a timeless distance. The upside to this approach? Those comics don't have an expiration date. They're always accessible.

Writers these days, on the other hand, seem to have no patience for subterfuge. Instead, they slap you right across the face with their so-called "resistance." Thus, their comics are both dated and extremely parochial. Like the Hitler-punching comics of World War II, they will not be endlessly re-read.

A boring uniformity of perspective.

Yes: the comics industry has always had a leftward lean. But in earlier eras, there was still an observable diversity of thought among writers and artists. Steve Ditko, the Objectivist, was allowed a place at the table. And more recently, so was Chuck Dixon.

In Current Year, meanwhile, the left is doing everything it can to purge the comics industry of even vaguely contrary voices. Hell: regardless of your own views, if you even so much as talk to a known dissenter, you're now a prime target for cancellation. See also: Blake Northcott, who's being stalked right now by a bitchy comic book Karen who imagines herself to be a legitimate political commissar. The result of campaigns like this? A monoculture. If you work at one or more of the major publishers, you can only be out and proud if you're an adherent of the D.I.E. religion and agree that Orange Man Bad.

And the more strict and picayune the enforcement of the aforementioned monoculture becomes, the more radical - and more predictable - the books become. When political topics are addressed, they're almost always addressed in the exact same way -- to the point that we all make jokes now about the ubiquity of the straight, white male villain; the female character who wuvs da science; or the butch, black lesbian.

For Christ's sake, do something else.

The warping of established characters to serve political ends.

It's fair to say that the comics of earlier eras, for the most part, expressed a broadly liberal worldview. But what did that mean exactly?

Well, for one thing, it meant that Captain America went on record defending free speech for bigots:

Click to embiggen.

It also meant a rejection of retaliatory, supremacist attitudes, as we see here with Machine Man:

The comics of earlier eras were generally pro-Civil Rights, pro-worker, and skeptical of war. Tony Stark - to once again dip into the lore I know the most about - eventually left the weapons business for more idealistic pursuits, was very generous with his employees, and always demanded ethical conduct from his corporate board. But to suggest that you can draw a straight line from this sort of classical progressivism to today's radicals is to pull a fast one. No: SJW writers have more in common with an Iron Man villain like Firebrand - the guy who wanted to start riots and tear down the system - than with the legacy heroes.

And because a bunch of Firebrands are now in charge of the comics sold in the direct market, said legacy heroes? They're being absolutely butchered. The most recent simulacrum of Tony Stark is dead now (sorry about that spoiler), but before his demise, he was leading a terrorist movement. Steve Rogers has been deconstructed and consequently robbed of his agency. She Hulk has apparently become a violent feminist vigilante. The X-Men are now segregationist mutant supremacists. Need I go on?

TL;DR: There's no continuity between early canon and the present. On the contrary, there's been a fundamental rupture.

Conclusion:

To be sure, none of the above commentary is meant to suggest that there are no readable comics coming out of the mainstream industry. There are -- but they're getting increasingly harder to find amongst all the dreck. And yes: we contend this is because comics have become "too political" in all the ways described in this post.

If you're going to argue against this charge, at least take the time to accurately comprehend what we mean.

Hail Lobster!

"Clean your room." - Adolph Hitler (Supposedly)

Many other people have been rightfully mocking Ta Nehisi Coates' latest issue of Captain America for its risible - and not at all camouflaged - take on Jordan Peterson (including Peterson himself). But I'm going to jump in too in the hopes that, at the very least, some of my remarks will entertain my regular readers (and any newcomers who happen by).

Coates can write opinion pieces with some felicity of expression. But he is neither a deep thinker nor - more importantly for the subject of this post - a good storyteller. A good storyteller approaches the world and the people in it with a fundamental humility and a desire to understand. He realizes that his subjects are complex (because they are human subjects), seeks to dig up and display the contradictions and oddities that make his individual characters who they are, and leaves himself open to surprise. He doesn't regard our earthly existence with the airs of a know-it-all. And if he has a message, he certainly doesn't insult the reader's intelligence by stacking the deck in his own favor or by making his designs so blindingly and obtrusively clear that no thinking (on the part of the reader) is necessary.

The best Marvel comics of earlier eras were written by good storytellers. Said creators dreamed up disabled heroes like Iron Man (in his earliest iteration) and Daredevil -- and then proceeded to think about their likes & dislikes/their foibles/their deepest desires/etc. instead of seeking congratulations for being "inclusive." Moreover, they tackled real-world issues with at least some subtlety. Yes, older X-Men comics did highlight the evils of prejudice -- but they did so with universal depictions that the marginalized of all stripes could recognize and appreciate. (For more of my commentary on the "political" comics of yesteryear, please see this post in particular.)

Coates, on the other hand, doesn't have the talent - or the desire either, probably - required to craft an ingenious, suggestive allegory. Instead, he smacks us in the face with his opinions in the clumsiest way possible, thereby leaving himself open to deserved criticism:  

So let's beat this down, shall we?

1. Steve didn't embrace service to his country because he was weak and looking for purpose. His desire to enlist was a function of his greatest strength: his steadfast morality. Yes, he was shrimpy before the serum, but that had no bearing on his motivations. He's Captain America because he recognized evil and cruelty in the world and desperately wanted to confront it head on. And actually, if you really think about it, the whole story of Steve's transformation and proceeding commitment to upholding liberal values in every corner of the world is pretty damned Petersonian. Steve had to become dangerous (i.e. take the serum) before he was fit to do good.

2. "He tells them what they've always longed to hear. That they're secretly great." No: Peterson says the opposite -- repeatedly. Though he believes that each person has a capacity for greatness, he also stresses - in all of his books - that each person has a coequal capacity for malevolence that must be acknowledged and controlled. And he further argues that such dueling with the Adversary (a.k.a. our evil inclinations) is a laborious and often painful endeavor. Peterson, in short, doesn't puff people up with phony praise; to be heroic in the Petersonian frame is to work towards genuine goodness and competence.

3. "That the whole world is against them. That if they're truly men, they'll fight back." No: Peterson says the world is against everybody -- in the sense that life for every human being is unavoidably difficult and tragic. And then, crucially, he adds that our response to this misery should not be resentment but gratitude for what we do have and a firm determination to better our own little corners of the cosmos by focused work on our own flaws. He would absolutely condemn Red Skull's followers for indulging in their anger and sowing mayhem.

4. If I recall correctly (it's been a while since I've read Maps of Meaning), Peterson originally became interested in archetypes and stories because he was horrified by the evils of Nazism and Communism and wanted to explore the mental architecture that led to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Holodomor, and other such atrocities. As he tells it, confronting those 20th century horrors disturbed him so profoundly that he decided to embark on a life-long project to examine and comprehend them. So: maybe you think all that talk about rescuing our fathers from the underworld is weird. Maybe you take issue with his use of Jung and Nietzsche. Maybe you think he's wrong when it comes to feminism or novel pronouns or other controversial issues. Or maybe you simply think his Kermit voice is annoying. Whatever: I'm not some starry-eyed idol-worshipper who thinks no one has a right to dislike the man. But to insinuate that Peterson's thought has anything in common with the Nazi ideology of the Red Skull is to utterly invert his intentions. He pleads constantly for moderation and balance and decries extremism on the left and the right (though his criticisms of the radical left are more visible because, quite frankly, it's the left that's presented the biggest threat to our liberal order in recent years).

In sum, what the incurious Coates has done here - besides revealing his utter inability to write a story worth reading or to grok Cap's essence (see point 1) - is attack Straw Peterson and his purple-monkey-dishwasher remarks.* (Straw Peterson may be even more diabolical than Straw Larry Correia, International Lord of Hate. Damn that monster!) Oh: and he's engaging in IMAX levels of projection too -- because what is his leftist ideology but a worldview that insists the entire world's arrayed against you (if your "identity" puts you near the top of the progressive stack) and that you should rise up and overturn the "system" that keeps you down? Peterson has actually helped people**; it's critical social justice that's a refuge for the weak and incompetent. It's critical social justice that's stoking the lion's share of our present-day hate.

But here's the good news: at least the memes are fire -- and so is the merch. Hail Lobster, indeed! 

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*a classical reference 

**The most appalling thing about Peterson's detractors is their open disgust that Peterson would dare care about men or seek to inspire them. (He actually cares about human beings in general and has inspired people of all genders -- but that's neither here nor there.) How heartless and depraved must these people be that they 1.) deny that men could ever have challenges deserving of our sympathy and 2.) howl down anyone who looks at a guy in trouble and decides to lift him up?  It just goes to show that Peterson's right about ideology at the very least: it really does twist your soul.  

Handling Racism in Comics

One better-than-average modern example -- and one that is execrably bad.

The "representation" crusade that has taken over the mainstream comic book industry is, in my view, a blundering, incompetent attempt to "fix" a "problem" that wasn't especially pressing (and probably would've resolved itself organically given enough time if publishers continued to hire people on merit). Strong non-majority heroes have existed for decades -- and they've existed in enormously popular books (like the X-Men series) at that. If anything, what today's writers and artists have done is strip said non-majority characters of their dimension by excessively hammering present-day politics and forgetting about the fun. Got a comic featuring a black character? Inevitably, it has to bring up police brutality and Black Lives Matter. Got a comic featuring a Hispanic character? Nine times out of ten, it'll be about illegal immigration. Got a comic featuring a LGBT+ character? Well, is he/she/they even queer if it isn't mentioned in some awkward and ham-fisted way? It's boring and predictable, this relentless no-escapism, and in many cases, it trashes the visions of these characters' original creators, who sought to create inspiring and complex role-models for their diverse audience.

Once upon a time, characters like Nubia, Static, and T'Challa were written as intelligent, powerful, and emotionally rich. They weren't forced to serve as constant avatars of racial grievance. (Click to embiggen.)

Now, having said all that, I do think it's possible to, every once in a while, write an okay - or even good - comic that tackles a controversial social issue. As a matter of fact, I read just such a book earlier this week: Superman Smashes the Klan, an all-ages graphic novel by Gene Leun Yang and Gurihiru. 

The message of Superman Smashes the Klan is not especially subtle -- but unlike most other books in its niche, it avoids Manichaean demonization - or sacralization - of entire subgroups of people in favor of treating its characters as individuals. Roberta, the lead, resents the pressure she feels to assimilate -- but her older brother Tommy is more easy-going and willing to joke about his Chinese heritage, and her father (also eager to fit in) repeatedly demands her mother refrain from speaking her native Cantonese. I strongly suspect the author favors Roberta's point of view -- yet at no point are Tommy and Dr. Lee portrayed as anything but sympathetic. In other words, Yang reveals that Chinese-American views on assimilation are not monolithic, and he does so without unfairly vilifying approaches with which he does not agree. 

"But what about Yang's white characters?" you may ask next. Well, they too vary in their beliefs. The clergymen who founded the Unity House are clearly racially progressive, and the white kids who hang out there are also well-meaning (if occasionally insensitive). And then you have Chuck; his family members are mixed up in the activities of the local Klan, but even he is depicted as a confused, misguided boy who fundamentally wants to do the right thing. The upshot? Yes, there are over-the-top Klansmen here, but they are definitely outnumbered by the white characters who are principled, moral, and/or capable of redeeming themselves. 

In every way, Superman Smashes the Klan outclasses the recently released Nubia: Real One, another graphic novel targeted to young audiences that attempts to address racism in the US. Yang's work allows for layers and nuance; L.L. McKinney's hateful book, on the other hand, does not. 

In Nubia: Real One, every white character is racist and evil -- and every black character is a saintly victim. According to McKinney, white society would largely reject a young black woman with superhuman abilities -- even though, once again, Storm (just to take one example) has been a central X-Man since Claremont (who, by the way, is white -- as was Jack Kirby, who created T'Challa). According to McKinney, BLM-associated riots are the fault of white outside agitators -- even though plenty of real-world cases demonstrate that this is not wholly the truth. According to McKinney, a black girl would obviously be blamed for a convenience store robbery regardless of the surveillance footage or the many witnesses who could provide evidence in her defense -- a contention even black reviewers have challenged as patently ridiculous. According to McKinney, there's nothing a black girl needs to do to develop herself and become a better person -- even though wise people would say that self-improvement is an obligation for every human being.

Advice like this is bound to breed terrible people who are simultaneously helpless and narcissistic. Even if you are "oppressed," you still have moral responsibilities. Victimhood does not make you infallible, and rejecting personal responsibility until the entire world has been perfected in your eyes is unconscionably lazy. By all means, agitate for justice where it's needed and achievable -- but in the end, God helps those who help themselves. (Click to embiggen.)

In short, Nubia: Real One insults the reader's intelligence with flat caricatures and nonsense premises that fail the test of verisimilitude, whereas Superman Smashes the Klan gives us, for the most part, actual human beings. Moreover, while Superman Smashes the Klan is blessed with visually appealing art, Nubia: Real One assaults our eyes with atrocious Tumblr-style drawings that make Diana Prince look like a pug-nosed hag and similarly rob Nubia of her beauty and femininity. No one should be satisfied with such a deliberate destruction of the heroic. The entire point of a superhero comic is to give the reader something to aspire to -- not to wallow in the base and prosaic.

As long as comics like Nubia: Real One continue to be churned out by open racists and segregationists, people will continue to chafe at the idea that we should talk about race in our comic books. It's an infinitely better choice to produce books like Superman Smashes the Klan. It's an infinitely better choice to hire people with actual talent and hold everyone to the same exacting editorial standards. 

Edited to add a related video:

Yeah, I imagine that is how they be. No-escapism infests all media.

Don't Destroy Cultural Artifacts. Contextualize. - Round II

Or: Dr. Seuss and the Hygiene Hypothesis.

I know I'm late to the party when it comes to commenting upon the Dr. Seuss brouhaha. Forgive me, but it took me this long to track down some of the forbidden books so that I might revisit the so-called "offensive content" - and its context - for myself. Unlike The Very Smart Set, I'm not inclined to follow, sheep-like, whenever the clerisy declare that some popular American writer or artist is "problematic." No: our blue check twits are currently encouraging a moral panic that outpaces the Red Scare in its cultural destructiveness -- and its detachment from anything resembling reality. I'm not going believe that the books that taught my brother and me how to read are racist simply on these commentators' say-so.

So I read four of those books again (I couldn't find the other two): McElligot's Pool, If I Ran the Zoo, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, and Scrambled Eggs Super. My conclusion? Some of the content would never pass muster today because it's dated at best and - yes, in a few cases - racist at worst. If I Ran the Zoo is the biggest offender on this score (for relative values of "big"). But in none of these books - not even Zoo - were the questionable bits so omnipresent that they completely overshadowed the benign elements of the text in which they were embedded. In fact, in three out of the four books, I could only find one page that featured words or art that would offend the politically correct. Why pull a book out of print for one controversial page out of 20-30? Why not simply add an introductory disclaimer (if you absolutely must)?

And yes, before some Very Smart Person says it, I know this was the choice of the Seuss estate, I know they have the right not to publish certain works if they choose, blah blah blah. It's still overkill driven by a craven and eminently critique-worthy fear of sociopathic bullies -- and I think it's only going to do more damage in the long run to the people our censors say they're trying to protect. According to the hygiene hypothesis, asthma, allergies, and autoimmune conditions may be more common in the developed world because, given our public sanitation and almost obsessive personal cleanliness, we no longer train our developing, antifragile immune systems to fire on the right targets. Similarly, purging our cultural space of anything deemed offensive seems to be making people more upset and uncomfortable, not less. Granted, some SJW's claim to be traumatized by, say, simple mentions of the n-word because they know the victim card confers the power to intimidate -- but I also think the younger folks who've been swept up in this are dead serious. Because they have not been taught how to confront less egregious instantiations of cultural insensitivity in a measured, confident way, they sincerely process every such "microaggression" as a Thanos-level threat. This is not good for them; it locks them into a state of permanent anxiety that prevents real empowerment and productive activity. Better, I think, to allow kids to encounter the questionable in the relatively safe context of old picture books than to bubble them up and deny them the chance to build their resilience.

"That's easy for you to say, RG." Is it, though? Do you think I've never had the experience of being the only X in the room? Because I have bad news for you: as a conservative-leaning Catholic Christian, I get "hit" all the time in fannish spaces - and in many of the books and comics I read - with casual, unthinking misconceptions about my political and religious beliefs. Do I complain about it? Yes. Do I wish writers and my fellow fans would actually do some research instead of embracing cheap stereotypes? Of course. Does the "hitting" inspire me to lift up people and works that actually get my worldview right? You bet. But I while I hope that fandom one day learns to respect the conservative minority in its midst and will continue to write posts that challenge fandom's endemic bigotry, I will never ask that any book that contains a problematic representation of conservatives and/or Christians be pulped for the sake of my feelings because, over time, I've learned to attribute such nonsense to ignorance -- and I've learned not to take them as intentional, malicious attacks on me as an individual. (At least, not without very good evidence.)

What's more, I have a couple intellectual questions about the assumptions beneath these censorship efforts that I think deserve real answers. First, have we actually demonstrated that pop culture has a significant impact on our behavior or beliefs? Or is this something we merely assume because it appeals to our common sense? Do our books/movies/television shows/etc. actually shape us as a people, or do they merely reflect a cultural reality that already exists? I don't think this is an idle line of inquiry. After all, I've been told repeatedly that there's no reliable evidence that violent video games lead to increased aggression in children. And those historical figures who've launched campaigns warning the world about the corrupting influence of novels/games/comic books/etc. are - in fandom at least - universal targets of ridicule. So what's the logic here? How can pop culture make us racist -- yet not make us violent, antisocial, or sexually promiscuous?

Secondly, how exactly does a drawing of a Chinese man wearing a conical hat and eating with chopsticks cause harm? What is the mechanism? And is this result truly inevitable? Traditionally, many Chinese did wear conical hats -- and even today, many Chinese do eat with chopsticks. What's the harm in observing something that, in certain times and places, is true? Mere acknowledgement of cultural differences in dress and eating style need not lead to disparagement of those differences (fortunately for any school that's held a multicultural fair). It certainly didn't in the context of And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. The boy in said book added the Chinese man because he thought such a person was more interesting than one of his American neighbors. "Orientalism!" cry the activists. "It's objectifying the so-called 'exotic'!" Or, if you would permit me to blow your minds, maybe this depicts a spark of child-like curiosity that could be fanned into a fire of genuine cultural appreciation and - just maybe - friendship and peace. Yes, the visual shorthand in that Mulberry Street illustration would not be used by an artist in current year -- but a child growing up today is not going to look upon such a picture and conclude that the Chinese are rightful targets of prejudice unless he is told by idiot adults that this is what the picture means by default. Or, to put it another way: we as teachers, parents and mentors can, through careful guidance, absolutely change how the young folks in our charge interpret a book like Mulberry Street and thereby squelch any bigotry before it takes root. The Wokerati seem to regard pictures and words as magic charms that instantly re-wire our brains at the moment we encounter them, but that's not what happens at all. Top-down processing exists -- and it can be molded.  

Ultimately, am I saying suck it up and deal? When it comes to openly prejudicial actions perpetrated with malice aforethought, no. When it comes to lingering inequalities that should be tackled with smart public policy, no. But when it comes to art? Yes, especially if you have to pull out an electron microscope (or take a class in critical theory) to see what's offensive -- or if you have to yank the troubling thing out of its exculpatory context in order to argue that it's beyond the pale. By all means, do what I do and - within reason - argue for more accuracy and more sensitivity in our current books.  But it's crossing a bright line to say, for instance, that a historical work like McElligot's Pool deserves to be unpublished because on one page, the point-of-view character imagines a school of "Eskimo fish." No, we don't use the word "Eskimo" anymore. Yes, we now perceive it as derogatory. But lots of innocent people didn't see it that way at mid-century. All a teacher or a parent need do is point out that we don't use that word anymore because we wish to respect the Inuit people -- and then move on to enjoying the beautifully illustrated story about a boy with a sense of wonder who doesn't judge a pond by its outward appearance.

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And ICYMI, here's the second stream in my dystopian fiction series. Here, we discuss The Giver and its relationship to the worship of perfect order, the rise of safetyism, the tension between rationalism and romanticism, and many other topics!

The Controversy Regarding Baen's Bar: My Response

(ETA: I wholly endorse Larry Correia's open letter. Every. Single. Word.)

BLUF: Looks like somebody is angling for a Hugo Award in the Related Works category. 

Quite a few folks associated with Baen - including David Weber, Eric Flint, Larry Correia, and Toni Weisskopf - have already responded to this transparent attempt to cancel a significant SFF publisher -- but I'd like to add my $.02 because the cherry-picking, the hypocrisy, the ideologically-induced reading comprehension failures, and the princess-and-the-pea prissiness of this guy's post are all deeply offensive and should be called out as often and by as many people as possible.

Let's take each claim in turn.

Major Claim #1: "Baen’s Bar has also become well-known in the genre community as a place where racism, sexism, homophobia and general fascism continually pop up."

The link provided in this sentence takes us to a forum thread on another website in which the transgender originator shares screen caps of people in Tom Kratman's conference being rude to her. Now, I'm no fan of rudeness as a general rule, but there are a couple of things I notice about this link:

1. It's from 2014. If this behavior were a persistent and wide-spread problem on the Bar, surely more recent evidence would've been provided.
2. The complainant at the link self-servingly elides her own contributions to the flame war while insisting that she's been perfectly reasonable the whole time and that the response of the folks in this conference is an over-the-top and bigoted reaction to what she said. Yeah, sure. Because the Bar is down, I can't search for the entire argument. However, the Barflies I know don't pop off like that for absolutely no reason.   

Now to zoom out a little bit: When a leftist claims that something is -ist, my first instinct is not to believe it. And, I think, I have a very good reason to initially approach such assertions with skepticism. As we all know, bourgie progressives like the writer of the above "exposé" (and the individual whose negative run-in with the Kratskeller he's using as an example) are absolutely obsessed with how we all talk to each other. But in my personal view, policing our words is often a way to look like you're doing good while actually unconscionably imposing upon other people's freedom and peacocking about your superior social status. 

The pronoun thing, for instance, definitely falls into this category. I will use people's pronouns if I know them. But it should be said that pronouns are only used when you're talking about someone -- so demanding that we use your preferred pronouns is in fact demanding control over how we talk about you beyond your earshot. Who gave you the right to expect total acquiescence to your preferences at all times and in all places from people who most likely have no personal relationship with you whatsoever? Further, people who aren't from one particular rarefied class in our society don't really understand radical gender ideology (because it's mostly nonsense if we're being perfectly frank) and find the singular "they" (or the ever expanding slate of invented pronouns) confusing -- so taking people to task for resisting pronoun edicts is, in many cases, taking people to task for being poorer and less "educated" than you are. (And I put "educated" in scare quotes here because a sheepskin is no longer a reliable signal that you are genuinely learned. I've got one of those things - and from a pretty prestigious public Ivy too - but I don't even think I'm truly educated. And I've been trying to fix that for my entire adult life.)

From what I've observed in my own interactions with the Barflies, a lot of the people who are active on the Bar come from working class and/or military backgrounds; in said milieus, rough discourse is a way of life. Indeed, as a military brat myself, I have personally witnessed how our servicemen routinely roast each other using epithets that would absolutely get a lefty upper-middle-class fella's ears all a-smokin'. At the same time, I have also witnessed how well people handle racial and cultural differences in the very same military contexts. A group of diverse Marines may toss no-no words around like they're candy, but fundamentally, respect reigns among them regardless of race.

Mind you, I'm not trying to say that the people in Kratman's conference at that link were somehow being respectful in a different way. They weren't. Nor am I trying to say that we should just drop all concern about the language people use. We shouldn't. But I still think it's worth pointing out that different classes in our society have different communication styles because it speaks to the shallowness of the left's linguistically-focused approach to justice. Judging people solely by their adherence - or lack of adherence - to the exquisitely sensitive standards of speech of the progressive Brahmandarins is a piss-poor way to find real racists/sexists/homophobes/etc. You have to look deeper. You have to consider action, intent and context. And that brings me to...

Sub-Claim #1a: "For example, a Baen’s Bar user from India was nicknamed “The Swarthy Menace” on the forum by author Tom Kratman. People on the forum thought that was the height of clever humor."

This is what I mean when I say this take-down of the Bar is prissy. The user in question was a willing participant in this particular joke. "The Swarthy Menace" has the same exact energy as "White Mormon Men with Fantastic Racks," which is what we lady-Pups called ourselves in response to false claims that the Sad Puppies were all cishet white men. From the link provided: "This came about due to a left winger from Space Babies claimed Arun was afraid of the Swarthy Menace while debating one of the Colonels books. What made it funny is that Arun is from India." (sic) As you can see, in both cases, the intent was perfectly legitimate: to make fun of people's stupid assumptions. Yet here come the conversation cops to tell all of us that ackchyually, we're being super racist and having fun wrong -- even though literally no one involved was insulted. Mind your own bee's wax, you buttinsky.

Sub-Claim #1b: "Racist comments and innuendos frequently appear in many forum discussions. In a thread last year titled 'Soft Civil War & Trump’s Army,' user Captrandy wrote that political conflicts in the USA could be solved if 'all the angry and non angry white males should stop going to work for a month or so.'"

Okay, let's consider the context in which this was uttered. For the past several years - or more - the commentariat has pushed the idea that white people - especially white men - are the fount of all evil. And in response, the education system, the corporate boardroom, and the government have all consented to the further propagation of this toxic worldview by bankrolling so-called "diversity training" in which whites are singled out solely due to their skin color and subjected to Maoist struggle sessions in which they're forced to confess to crimes they did not commit and to prejudices of which they are not aware.* If you're shocked that this has led to resentment - and to a desire to assert (truthfully, I might add) that white men have contributed and do contribute in a positive way to our nation and the world - then you, cupcake, have zero idea how human beings actually work.**

(*Note: I'm happy to talk to folks about the unique disadvantages certain groups face in this country -- but not if it involves blaming all living white people for circumstances most of them had no hand in generating or holding them responsible for things that might lurk deep inside their ids. Most white people - particularly po' whites - are not all that powerful. And berating people for so-called "unconscious bias" is like throwing people in jail for their dreams. It's ridiculous -- and abusive.) 

(**And now the boogaloo: I think it's a bad idea for white people to develop a "white identity." But if you want to stop that from happening, the last thing you should do is start treating white people as if they're an undifferentiated mass of malefactors. As we can see right now in freakin' real time, all that does is remind white people that, waitaminute, they're white.) 

(And now I think it's time to put a jump on this before this post eats my whole front page...)

Video: SJW's Bring Back Segregation

Induced Learning Disabilities

Critical Theory teaches its adherents how not to understand texts, art, or speech like neurotypical human beings. Under the influence of its doctrines, people lose their God-given ability to discern key non-linguistic features of communication and consequently become learning disabled.

As I've observed in other posts, words and symbols take on meaning from the context in which they're deployed. As I wrote around this time last year:

"Words are not completely comprehensible on their own; they also take on additional - or sometimes even new - significance from the gestalt in which they sit -- much like tofu soaks up the flavors of the other ingredients in an Asian dish.

"Take a sentence like 'I love my mother.' This sentence is composed of four utterly prosaic words -- yet do we really know what it means? Don't we need to hear the inflection with which it was said? Don't we need to see the speaker's body language? Don't we need to know why/where/when/etc. it was said? If this sentence appears in a poem lauding the beauty of Mother Earth, 'mother' likely does not mean our female parent. If this sentence is uttered with a particular stress after a long sigh, most of us effortlessly intuit that it's meant to be ironic."

All of this richness gets lost, however, once the social justice bully gets to work. Suppose, for example, you decide to write a protagonist who starts off with a few unconsciously bigoted notions but eventually learns to cast such mistaken ideas aside. Sounds like great fodder for a redemption arc, no? Nope, sorry: if you attempt to publish this seemingly innocuous, morally upright story, some motivated busybody on Goodreads is going to tear you apart. Why? Because critical social justice impedes one's ability to comprehend how character development works.

Or let's consider works written in other eras. Many historical texts that tackle the subject of race - including those written by black civil rights champions! - use the dreaded n-word. Those of us who aren't ideologically-possessed realize that norms have changed over time and therefore filter such usages out to get to the central point. But the social justice bully doesn't want us to do this. The social justice bully encourages us to get distracted - and upset - by the surface features of a piece of writing without digging deep to parse what's actually being said. That's how they're able to portray pro-black works (like Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird) as somehow anti-black and beyond the pale.

Social justice bullies also deliberately blur the lines between characters and authors, heroes and villains, heroes and anti-heroes, etc. If the bad guy says something racist, then our would-be censors behave as if the author endorses that statement -- even though such a conclusion is patently ridiculous. Assholes say asshole-ish things. That's how writers establish that they're assholes. How else are we creators to delineate villainy?

Social justice bullies, in short, have trained themselves to deliberately misconstrue what writers and artists mean to convey. And that's why they can never be trusted to control the levers our popular culture. Their attempts to warp the things we make need to be beaten back with severity and speed.

I Refuse to Live in Fahrenheit 451

"Now let's take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca..."

It's becoming increasingly clear that Ray Bradbury's dystopia is the social justice bully's end game. But I have to believe that most Americans don't want this future. I have to believe that most of us don't want our entertainment sanitized to the point of absolutely uniformity. I have to believe most of us want to keep Blazing Saddles, Tropic Thunder, Gone with the Wind and other older, potentially uncomfortable products of our popular culture available and free of fussy edits.

So what do we do? Honestly, I think we might have to consider being as obnoxious as the Control Left. We need to start actively punishing these media corporations every time they bend the knee to whiners who apparently don't understand the "don't like, don't consume" principle. What should this punishment look like? I don't know. I'm not sure what will be effective. But we may need to become as unyielding and as intolerant as our censorious opponents in order to get our way.

Whatever we do, we must make these people understand that they have no right to decide for the rest of us what we're allowed to watch or read. No. Right. Adults handle things that offend them by discussing the offense and/or walking away -- not by trying to coerce everyone around them to conform to their moral sensibilities. This was true back in the 80's and 90's when it was religious fundamentalists trying to censor our crap, and it's just as true now that the other side is wielding the ban-hammer.

Fahrenheit 451 was a warning, not an instruction manual. We must be militant in defending the freedom of the artist from political persecution of all types. If we fail in this endeavor, we will lose everything in our art that is sincere and genuinely creative.

Don't Destroy Cultural Artifacts. Contextualize.

When I was in college back at the tail-end of the 90's, I took a class on the earliest days of cinema, which covered everything from the very first silent films to, roughly, The Wizard of Oz. Among the movies on the syllabus? The Birth of a Nation. Yes, that's right: I was required to watch D.W. Griffith's paean to the Ku Klux Klan. My professor didn't impose this requirement because he was eager to indoctrinate us all on the glories of white supremacy. Like 99% of the academics in his field (probably), he was a proper lefty. No: we were required to watch this movie because, regardless of its repugnant message, my professor believed it to be a seminal work from a purely artistic standpoint. Now, I'm sure other students of film will take issue with this aesthetic judgment, and that's perfectly fine. Debate to your heart's content. But personally, I'm glad Dr. What's-His-Name didn't expunge The Birth of a Nation from the record simply to soothe our modern-day, more enlightened sensibilities.

Now let me veer off in another direction: A few years ago, I visited Stone Mountain in Georgia -- not because I, a transplanted Yank, have any real love for the traitorous Confederates pictured there, but because I was concerned about its possible loss. (I literally texted to a friend that I wanted to see it before "some apparatchik decides to sandblast that thing.") Whatever you may say about its subject matter, said carving took the work of multiple artists and several decades to complete and shouldn't simply be ground into powder to satisfy our current moral impulses. (And I'd just like to note, for the record, that every single person in my Sky Car could separate the artistic achievement of the carvers from the problematic history just as easily as I -- even though I was the only one who was white. Weird. It's almost like normal people of any color can look at questionable artifacts from bygone eras without getting the vapors.)

It's creepy, this yen our radicals have for erasing our history -- this Year Zero mentality that imagines we can eradicate racism forever simply by clearing away everything that's been tainted by it. And it's also wrong-headed. All that icky stuff that dots our cultural landscape? If you advocate for the disposal of such things, you are, quite frankly, missing many important nuances. Gone with the Wind might overly romanticize the Civil War-era South -- but, as many on Twitter have observed, it also netted the first Oscar ever awarded to an African American. Erase Gone with the Wind and you erase the achievement of Hattie McDaniel.

There's a better path than wanton, feral iconoclasm. You can put Confederate statues in museums -- or, if that's not possible (perhaps because, like the Stone Mountain carving, they're much too large to transport), put plaques beside them that fully explain their existence. You can erect accompanying installations that honor civil rights activists and abolitionists. You can put content warnings in front of uncomfortably racist movies. (I'm honestly okay with this compromise if it means we avoid outright censorship.) Do whatever you want -- so long as it's creative and not simply destructive.

After World War II, Poland could've razed Auschwitz to the ground and nobody would've objected. But instead, it's been left as a memorial to human cruelty. Similarly, if permitted to remain, our offensive statues and reprehensible movies could provide opportunities to critically reflect upon our mistakes. We should consider this option before we start applauding today's leftist vandals.

Keep Cops Visible in Our Media

Strong majorities agree that our police departments should be reformed -- that there should be more accountability when officers behave badly. But I think most reasonable people also agree that not every cop is a villain -- that holding all cops responsible for the actions of George Floyd's killer is a gross miscarriage of justice. Why? Because that's simply not what we do in a liberal democratic society; we don't declare an entire collective guilty for the actions of a few.

It's this foundational American philosophy that drives my positively revolted reaction to the new moral panic: the craze to expunge all positive portrayals of the police in our entertainment, our toys, etc. Cops has already been canceled, and a clamor has arisen to purge our airways of the Law & Order franchise (and similar crime dramas) as well. Further, I've seen calls for Lego to stop selling its police-related building sets -- and whining claims that Zootopia and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse are now totes "problematic" because they both feature characters who work in law enforcement and yet aren't complete bastards.

Honestly, I'm just waiting for the day the Discovery Channel decides to cave and completely shutters its Investigation Discovery offshoot.

Sorry, you theory-addled utopians, but the police are here to stay. That means they do have a place in our popular media whether you like it or not. And because good and bad cops both exist, both should be depicted. In fact, since the era of Hill Street Blues (at least), both have. I'm not really an expert on crime dramas - my tastes run more to hospital shows and science fiction - but even so, I'm pretty damn sure that said dramas have been grappling with the issue of police brutality and corruption for decades. So the idea that the mere existence of a cop show is going to somehow lie to the viewer about the reality of policing in America is pure nonsense. That hasn't been true for a long, long time.

Consider too what would happen if we made overreactions like this routine. What if a white doctor, for example, killed a black patient through his malice and/or gross incompetence and the story was covered in the national news? Would that mean we'd have to wipe out every hospital show currently in existence? Would that mean the Discovery Channel would have to black out Tales from the E.R.? And lest you think this is a bad analogy: no, the ideology that's presently driving this anti-cop madness claims that our health care system is also irredeemably racist, so a high profile murder of a black patient would certainly be seen as emblematic of a larger issue that requires a radical response.

I think those of us who are normal - those of us whose brains haven't been pickled by grievance studies BS - need to rise up and push back against these new cultural revolutionaries and their attempts to "purify" our recreation. These wild-eyed idiots need to be told in no uncertain terms that if they don't like seeing cop shows, then they shouldn't watch cop shows -- and that they don't get to decide for the rest of us what we can enjoy in our spare time.

Eff censorship.

Essential Listening: The Purity Spiral

The Purity Spiral is a BBC Radio program that covers what readers of this blog will surely recognize: social justice activists' using well-meaning attempts to diversify hobby groups to colonize and destroy said groups. This particular journalist covers controversies in the knitting and young adult literature communities, but we've seen the very same thing occur in gaming, in science fiction literature, and in comics -- all fandoms that are generally liberal in outlook and are thus ripe for the taking.

Towards the end of this program, the question is asked: how do we identify the warning signs of a potential purity spiral? To answer that question, I'd first like to point to my post on Toxic "Diversity;" many important signs are discussed there, including emotional reasoning (as revealed by the rejection of criticism and/or contradictory evidence), bullying and censorship, and the like. To that, I would add that if activists within your particular hobby group can't articulate a clear, achievable end goal, you're definitely looking at the makings of a spiral and should take whatever steps are necessary to stop that shit in its tracks.

BFTP: The Trouble with Grand Sociological Theories

Since delegates at a recent event for the Democratic Socialists of America were using what I recognized to be the language of radical disability activism, I think this rerun (originally published in 2016) is timely once again:

This is another post that will likely attract ire. However, my own personal experiences - and the experiences of loved ones, friends, and students - compel me to speak up and counter what I feel is a dangerously distorted "theory" of the world whose accuracies are marred by much that is partially or wholly false.

Which personal experiences are germane to this discussion? When I was in my early twenties, I developed a severe, systemic, and rapidly progressive form of rheumatoid arthritis. It started with swelling and pain in the first two fingers of my right hand. Within months, it had rendered both my hands barely functional claws. Only a year later, I walked like an eighty-year-old lady, as the disease had taken out my feet, ankles, and knees. Fortunately, it was at this point that I was finally diagnosed and prescribed my first medications, and as a result, my condition now can be best described as "stable." I have never experienced a full remission and have never recovered full functionality, but at least the condition has been substantially slowed and I can actually move.

I know I am better off than many; I'm still basically ambulatory, for one. But there are limits beyond which my body cannot go and many ordinary activities that my body simply cannot do -- which is why I have often chosen to rent a cart for large conventions and why I have trouble at subway stops that lack elevators. I do know, intimately, how tough it is to navigate, say, Dragon Con when you're wheelchair-bound. I do know, intimately, that many spots in older cities are essentially inaccessible if you have mobility issues. I remember, vividly, breaking down one night after discovering that a certain retro party my friend wanted to attend in lower Manhattan could only be reached by climbing three flights of very steep stairs.

I also have two immediate family members who are in far worse straits than I. My mother suffers from an as yet unidentified immune deficiency that has left her open to a number of nasty infections, including one that has damaged a lobe of one of her lungs, one that has damaged her hearing in one ear, and one that basically destroyed what was left of her right knee (which had already been disabled by arthritis and replaced). She also has severe degenerative disc disease, which means, like me, she deals with limited mobility and chronic pain. My brother, meanwhile, was born albino and consequently has a vision impairment that has left him unable to do many things that we sighted folks take completely for granted. 

Here's the thing: Matt's experiences and mine are different. I will never be able to see exactly what Matt sees with his eyes, and unless Matt also develops my disease (or something similar), he will never know precisely what it's like to walk around in my skin. But because we lived under the same roof for roughly twenty years and we care for each other profoundly, we both still understand, at least on some level, the challenges the other one faces. Over the course of our relationship, we've developed imaginations capacious enough to comprehend, imperfectly but still sincerely, not only the differences we find in each other but also the differences we find in others. This is what happens when love leads the way.

All of these experiences - in addition to others I have yet to share - helped to drive my deeply disturbed and even angry reaction when a self-described "disability activist" visited my blog and started pushing a very aggressive view of the relationship between disabled persons and the larger society that is influenced, according to his own description, by the "social model of disability."

Read more at the original post.

You Can't Bring About a More Just World by Lying

I've been a teacher in a majority-minority community for fourteen years. In all that time, I've been unable to avoid noticing certain patterns among the students who succeed and the students who fail.

The success profile: Engaged parents (usually two). A family ethos that emphasizes education. Consistent attendance. Consistent homework completion. A respectful, cooperative attitude.

The failure profile: Absent or hostile parents. No pressure from family to succeed in school. Comes whenever he or she feels like it. Never does homework. Treats the whole educational enterprise with distrust.

There are subcultures within my community that tend to produce kids who fit the first profile, and there are other subcultures that tend to produce kids who fit the second. I can't not see this. But I also can't talk about this forthrightly without being tarred as a racist. This is deeply frustrating because, in the end, the differences I notice have blessed little to do with race. I've worked with fresh-off-the-boat families from West Africa (read: black and speaking with foreign accents) whose kids go on to enroll at our state's flagship school (average SAT score: 1400) -- or even, in one case, Harvard. But no: discussion of this is apparently verboten.

Also verboten: Discussing the fact that my best friend in high school was repeatedly called an Oreo because she a) hung out with me and b) actually gave two shits about school.

It was even proposed to me, once, that simply bringing up the existence of the academic achievement gap is itself a racist aggression.

I'm not surprised, then, that ideologically-possessed leftists have been falling all over themselves this week to defend Baltimore. I'm not surprised that it's now verboten to discuss all the things I personally witnessed while living there, including the rampant drug use, the crime, the crumbling town homes, and - yes - the rats.

But folks: it's bug-crap crazy to actively cover up the truth just because Orange Man said it and Orange Man Bad. As a matter of fact, I think we should all be screaming at the top of our lungs about the decay of Baltimore. That decay is a monument to our failure to get urban policy right; if we don't face it, how will we ever empower the people who live there?

Question Trump's motives for bringing it up all you want. It's still profoundly unjust that there are people in America today who've been relegated to trash-and-vermin-filled slums. We should be coming together to come up with solutions instead of banishing each other for highlighting the problem. And yes -- we should be questioning government officials who supposedly represent these people on their manifest failure to help their constituents.

Grumpy Thoughts, 7th Edition

First, before the grumpiness:

Happy Easter to my Christian friends -- and chag Pesach kasher vesame’ach to the Jews!

Now let the perturbed muttering commence.

---

I hope everyone who's reading this is praying for the victims of the terror attacks in Sri Lanka. That the perpetrators chose to murder innocents who were gathered to worship the risen Christ just further highlights, for me, the fallen nature of our world -- and the need for the Crucifixion.

---

To Macron and the rest of the French government:

From what I hear, your countrymen are already very upset with you. If you ruin a central landmark of the French nation (and of Christianity) by adding glass or any other modern bullshit, you will only make things worse.

We have complete 3D models of Notre Dame before the fire. You don't need a redesign competition. You don't need an architect. What you need are skilled tradesmen who can repair what was damaged and restore the cathedral to its former glory.

Sincerely,
Me

---

So apparently, library collections are evil now because they're just so hu-white. Clearly, what we need to do is throw out all those dusty tomes to make way for the "marginalized." After all, it's not as if old books can teach us anything of universal importance.

SIGH.

Ideas don't have skin colors, you unbelievably racist buffoons. To be sure, it's true that, for a good chunk of our history, certain races were barred from full participation in our educational institutions and consequently don't appear often in the products of our intellectual patrimony. But once upon a time, prominent people-of-color still claimed so-called "white ideas" as their own; indeed, they were rightfully angered to be denied access to those ideas. W.E.B. Dubois, a firm African-American critic of the U.S. and a leftist, once famously wrote:

"I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out of the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed Earth and the tracery of stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?"

Though Dubois struggled mightily with the dual consciousness brought on by his second-class status, you can see here that he still considered the works of Shakespeare and the others to be his by birthright. Why? Perhaps because we all have a common humanity that these writers, in their brilliance, brought to the fore.

If you want more people-of-color to be represented in our libraries - a worthwhile goal, I think - don't start by tearing down what's already there. Instead, tell kids in minority communities that "white" books belong to them too -- that conversing with "dead white men" does not make them any less authentically themselves. Allow them to plunge into a knowledge-rich curriculum that interrogates whether certain notions are true or false -- not whether certain notions are advanced by writers of the proper shade. Do this and you will equip these kids to enter university as skilled, confident scholars ready to go toe-to-toe with their white peers. Do this and you will see the demographics of library collections and journal citations organically shift.

---

And lastly, a Twitter thread:

I would like to echo the frustration I've seen in my TL regarding the equation of "strong woman" with sassy bitch. BRITTLE women are bitchy. Strong women can assert themselves w/o resorting to rudeness, and they generally don't get in a lather over minor insults.

— Stephanie Souders (@TheRightGeek) April 19, 2019

Bonus Dad Post: Misused Words

Since he's clamoring for it, I'm going to let Dad have the floor again:

I DISAGREE and refuse to go along.
-- Spike Souders

If you control the language, you can control the dialog. The leftist (Socialist/Communist) elite has known this truth and used it for more than 40 years. The time has come to take back our "common" American English from the misuse and changes pushed on us by our leftist "betters". Here are several examples of overstretched terms I refuse to use any longer:

FIRST - Racism/Racist and the very wrong expansion of race to way beyond:

"a category of humankind that shares certain distinctive physical traits; or : an actually or potentially interbreeding group within a species; also: a taxonomic category (such as a subspecies) representing such a group"

I refuse to subscribe to the growth of the term RACE to apply to any cultural sub-group seeking preferential treatment from our government -- or the growth of the pejoratives "RACIST" and "RACISM" to apply to the perceived privileged class (like me).

(My privilege was to work steadily for 45.5 years before retiring. One job was 7 days a week -- with a shift from 0645 until 2300 on 6 of those days. I used to joke I had 23 good days in that job: the 22 days of leave my boss allowed and the day I left.

On another job, meanwhile, I carried a pager and was on call 24/7. I was paged away from dinner with my wife multiple times to handle a problem with a sensitive, high-value system for a national agency. And by the way, I was on salary, so I got no bonus for answering middle-of-the-night calls.)

Hispanic or Puerto Rican or Islamic are different CULTURES -- and often several races are included in each culture. (Remember the "white Hispanic" when the liberal propaganda machine got a muscle cramp trying to demonize a law-abiding citizen assaulted by a thug of color?)

SECOND (and more subtle): JUSTICE.

That word is misused as a more palatable substitute for RETRIBUTION. Frequently those calling for "justice" don't want that, as it would result in a long prison term or execution for serious crimes (like aggravated assault or battery or attempted murder). They want retribution without any examination of the facts and undeserved punishment meted out to the people protecting ME from their mob -- or to the people who happen to share an immutable characteristic with historical malefactors.

I will just use retribution when discussing the leftist mob's desires from now on.

THIRD: SEXISM.

An important military leader (who happened to be black) once remarked:

"there is nothing more benign than the color of a persons skin; nor anything more fundamental to human behavior than their sexuality . . ."

The leftist elite's effort to broaden the definition of sexuality to cover an ever-widening array of alphabet soup identities (LGBTQPAN+) makes most of us confused and on the defensive lest we impugn a privileged sub-group. Foo on that. What you do among yourselves is of no concern to me -- but try to demand special status for your sub-group and I JUST SAY NO. There, I knew I'd find a spot to say that.

Further examples of corrupted words are welcome in the comments.

Communication Disorders

For many years, the verbal portion of the SAT has featured a question type with the following format:

In line [#], the word […] most nearly means...

In the thirteen-plus years that I've been an after-school tutor, I have come across this question so often that my advice to students has become automatic: "You have to look at the sentence in the passage." What the College Board is testing here is not the student's ability to parrot the common dictionary definitions of words; instead, it is testing the student's ability to understand context.

Meditating upon a task such as this - a task beloved by bubble-test writers - reveals something very important about the way we converse. Words are not completely comprehensible on their own; they also take on additional - or sometimes even new - significance from the gestalt in which they sit -- much like tofu soaks up the flavors of the other ingredients in an Asian dish.

Take a sentence like "I love my mother." This sentence is composed of four utterly prosaic words -- yet do we really know what it means? Don't we need to hear the inflection with which it was said? Don't we need to see the speaker's body language? Don't we need to know why/where/when/etc. it was said? If this sentence appears in a poem lauding the beauty of Mother Earth, "mother" likely does not mean our female parent. If this sentence is uttered with a particular stress after a long sigh, most of us effortlessly intuit that it's meant to be ironic.

What I'm talking about here is pragmatics -- the transcendental, often non-linguistic aspects of our communication. These features seem to be preferentially processed by the right hemisphere of the brain -- at least if the peculiar deficits of patients with right hemisphere injury or hypofunction (for example, loss of the ability to understand sarcasm, idiom, and metaphor) are anything to go by. Their comprehension is also essential to our social functioning and the development of our common sense.

They are also the very features that the radical left seems bent on forcing us not to recognize.

Thus, we have Rep. Ilhan Omar (and her apologists) defending her speech at a CAIR event by comparing it to President W. Bush's extemporaneous speech at Ground Zero immediately after 9/11 -- as if a superficial similarity in word choice means anything at all. No: Bush's "people who knocked these buildings down" was uttered in the context of remarks that took the attack very seriously indeed -- remarks that honored the anger and grief of the devastated New Yorkers picking through the rubble. Omar's "people did something," on the other hand, was part of a speech that focused on the grievances of her own identity group -- a speech dripping with the bitter self-righteousness that is typical of activists of her stripe. To be sure, I certainly don't think all Muslims should be held responsible for terrorist attacks like the one perpetrated on 9/11, nor do I think they should be denied the right to practice their religion as they see fit (with, of course, a few important exceptions). But when you insist that the story of the post-9/11 world is all about your people and their pain, then yes -- I think you deserve criticism. Respect should be a two-way street. If radical Catholic terrorists were killing thousands across the world, I wouldn't urge my fellow Catholics to "raise hell" and "make people uncomfortable." I would feel convicted, I would be humble, and I would do whatever I could to make amends.

Moving on to another manifestation of the left's induced communication disorder: the okay hand sign hysteria. As everyone knows, it was originally trolls on 4chan who invented and spread the meme that the okay hand sign really stood for "white power." But according to Blizzard (and others), now that idiot white supremacists are using the symbol to signal their group identification, suddenly the gesture is permanently tainted and should be forever banned. So quick question: If white supremacists decide to start signaling each other with the code-phrase "I like cupcakes," does that mean we have to radically change how we announce our dessert preferences? No, that's ridiculous!

Over at The Post Millennial, Roberto Wakerell-Cruz has it exactly right (his column is in fact one of the inspirations for this post):

In one sense, of course words matter. Words are incredibly important, and a tool that we as humans are incredibly fortunate to have. To convey a message to one another in such detail is a unique trait. But what are words without context?

Which sentence is worse? “I think it’s retarded that fags can’t get married,” or “with all things considered, and it is indeed my own personal opinion, I believe that those who engage in homosexual acts and wish to marry their lover should be forbidden to do so!”

Although the first sentence contains naughty words, the second sentence actually contains far less progressive ideas. In my opinion, the first person is actually forward thinking, whereas the second is stuck in their old ways.

Context is incredibly important. Sentences are like icebergs. There is what appears on the surface, the letters you see printed on paper. But underneath the words, there’s more than what appears. Sentences can be extrapolated to no end, and interpreted in countless ways.

Focusing your attention purely on which words are being used is just wrong, and unproductive.

Amen, good sir! Condemning any word or sign in isolation is deeply foolish. We don't have to pretend we're suffering from right hemisphere dysfunction; we're perfectly capable of parsing when the use of a certain word, phrase, or gesture is innocuous and when it is not, and we should go on exercising that faculty to its fullest extent.

Dad's Corner: JUST SAY NO (Again)

I was pretty busy this week, so I'm going to allow my father to take the floor today.

Liberals would like to move my country away from a Federal Republic of the Several States organized as a limited government and into a pure "Democracy" where the enlightened majority of "right thinking" people will set the laws for all of us.

I DISAGREE.

Changing the Constitution is a non-starter, as too many states would be effectively disenfranchised by the large, liberal states like New York and California and their foolhardy policies that are already wrecking their state's economies and causing smart people to flee. Let's NOT make those policies national so we can wreck the whole country's economy and so there is no where to flee to.

Too many of the smaller states would NEVER approve a constitutional amendment that effectively signs away their voice. Thus, the sneaky way the left is attempting the subversion of our Constitution is to get the individual states to assign their electoral college votes to the winner of the national majority vote. So far, fourteen states have already agreed to do this. (Including mostly Democratic (or Socialist) bastions like California.)

So far Virginia (my current home) and Pennsylvania (the state of my childhood) have not fallen for this. I want the citizens of the states I'm associated with to JUST SAY NO.

I've said it before and I'll keep saying it: the winner of the presidential election should be (and always has been) the individual who got the majority of votes of the citizens IN THE MAJORITY OF THE STATES*. The last two times the Republican "lost" the national popular vote, they lost overwhelmingly in California but "won" the net majority in the other 49 states. The "National Popular Vote" is a propaganda construct of the leftist (Socialist) elite and their propaganda arm and is correctly of no importance in a diverse country. That is why we have the electoral college.

We need the electoral college to prevent the tyranny of a CALIFORNIAN super-majority from controlling the other 49 states.

-- Spike Souders

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* Except for John Quincy Adams, who was elected by the Congress when no candidate won a majority of electoral votes (according to our constitutionally prescribed procedures).

More Boring Rhetorical Tics the Left Needs to Retire

(Consider this a continuation of the post here.)

5. Incel

Ever since Elliot Rodger, SJW's have been using this slur to insult every man who dares to disagree with their opinions on pop culture. But like "alt-right," "incel" describes a fringe group of radicals with a clear ideology. Actual incels believe they are failing in the dating rat race because women are shallow bitches who just want attractive "chads" with money and fast cars. People who hate The Last Jedi or Captain Marvel, on the other hand, are often happily attached men with kids -- or, shocker of shockers, they're women.

Sorry to be crude, but last time I checked, I had tits and a vag. And yet - and yet! - when I went to see Captain Marvel, I found it to be, at best, an aggressively average hodgepodge of ideas that could've been good if their treatment had been more than cursory. Carol's discovering that she's been fighting on the wrong side of an intergalactic war all this time, for example, could've led to some intense guilt and soul searching that would've made her interesting as a character; instead, the twist in question is just thrown in there without any exploration of its implications. Similarly, the movie never really gives you a chance to appreciate the past relationship between Carol and Mar-Vell; thus, when Mar-Vell dies, there's no emotional impact.

When it comes to recent female-led superhero movies, I believe Wonder Woman is far superior to Captain Marvel. Not that Wonder Woman is perfect, mind you; I do think the development of the romance between Diana and Trevor is oddly abrupt. But on the whole, Wonder Woman is a more unified, more epic story. Hell, even Wonder Woman's score leaves Captain Marvel's 90's nostalgia in the dust.

So, SJW's: Given that I fiercely disagree with you and yet cannot, by definition, be an incel, isn't it possible that those hated men on YouTube also don't like the things that you like for perfectly valid reasons that have nothing to do with sexual frustration and misogyny?

6. Educate Yourself

Whenever an SJW makes an over-the-top claim that, say, they "struggle to survive" every day in a country that's irredeemably -ist and filled with -ism, their favorite way to worm out of explaining what they mean is to spit that their doubters are not entitled to their "emotional labor" and that, instead, said skeptics should "educate themselves." What a diabolically clever way to render their worldview impervious to critique!

Of course, we should never feel guilty for asking for evidence whenever one of these ideologues alleges something extraordinary. We should never feel guilty because most of their assertions are patently ridiculous. It's reasonable to say, for instance, that police officers are more suspicious of black men for reasons that are complex and generally not conscious and that perhaps this should be mitigated by better training or more community involvement. It is not reasonable, however, to say that, in 2019, racist police are routinely gunning innocent black men down in the streets and that therefore all black men should be in constant fear for their lives. It's horrific whenever a genuinely innocent black man is killed by the cops, but it turns out such cases are pretty rare -- so rare, in fact, that the Washington Post has to add clearly justified killings to its database to maintain the left's preferred narrative.

We lead remarkably comfortable, safe lives here in the United States; vanishingly few of us are actually "struggling to survive" in any real sense. Does that mean there aren't still ways we can improve? Of course not. But if you're a well-dressed, well-groomed college student with an iPhone, I consider it my right to question you when you scream that you feel endangered -- and if all you can do is condescendingly tell me to "educate myself," I'm going to dismiss you as delusional. I'm not obligated to believe you're oppressed simply because you say so.

7. White Privilege/Systemic White Supremacy

Since #MyWhitePrivilege is trending on Twitter this weekend, let's talk about why the left's obsession with this concept is both aggravating and unhelpful.

First of all, many supposed "white privileges" don't even exist. Nude bras and Band-Aids don't match my almost translucent Northern European skin tone. And I hate to break it to you, but unless you're named "Mike Smith" or something, whiteness won't necessarily protect you from the horror of having your name mispronounced. Trust me: When I was growing up, my last name (whose first syllable rhymes with "cow") became "Saunders", "Sounders", or "Sooders" during many a roll-call. I shudder to think what might've happened if I were Polish or Czech!

Secondly, "white privilege" is often better described as majority privilege. If you are one of the few people of color in a majority white society, then yes: often times, you will be the only non-white individual in the room and you will feel like the odd man out. But most of the time, this imbalance is not malicious, and your feeling of "otherness" is not being purposefully imposed upon you; it's just the result of a combination of raw chance and your own insecurity. How do I know this? Because, thanks to the unique demographics of my neighborhood, I've been the only white person in the room many times and have also experienced that sense of being on display as some sort of exotic specimen. Don't worry: the feeling eventually goes away if you don't dwell on it.

Then, of course, there are the "white privileges" that are really just indicators that you're rich. Yes, some white people have gotten off lightly for criminal behavior that would guarantee prison time for others. But as Jussie Smollett has taught us, you don't have to be white to escape sixteen felony charges despite the overwhelming evidence arrayed against you; you just have to have connections. By the same token, the fact that a white kid can slip into an Ivy League school despite less-than-stellar credentials as long as his parents pull out their checkbook and make a phone call is also not evidence of his "white privilege"; an equally white coal-miner's son in West Virginia certainly can't pull off the same cheat.

And lastly, there are the "privileges" that are the consequences of people's good choices. I had no control over the fact that my parents were happily married and invested in the education of their two children, so yes, in that sense, I suppose I am privileged. But that doesn't have anything to do with my being white. As it turns out, Asians have even lower unmarried birthrates than whites, and they're kicking our asses when it comes to median income and educational attainment. Are Asians the beneficiaries of "white privilege" and "white supremacy"? That's a bizarre proposition in light of the Chinese Exclusion Act, "yellow peril," and the Japanese internment.

I'm not suggesting here that there aren't some lingering racial issues that require thoughtful response (see my comment above regarding police bias). What I am suggesting is that SJW's radically oversimplify what's happening instead of examining the complex truth and crafting reality-based solutions.

Of course, clinging to a simple, univariate explanation for apparent racial disparities makes it a hell of a lot easier to gin up conflict and seize power for yourself.