One of the many goals of the left is for the words “man” and “woman” to have no biological meaning or reality whatsoever, but to be entirely socially constructed. As Orwell knew, tearing down the traditional use of words is a powerful tool, as the left is acutely aware.
I noticed a number of people in this thread who cited a reported statistic about fatherlessness and mass shootings, which is that 26 of the shooters in the 27 deadliest mass shootings in the US grew up fatherless.
I’ve written about that assertion before, here. And while I have no doubt that the presence of a father is highly important and ordinarily beneficial for children, and the absence of a father is often highly detrimental, I beg to differ with that “26 of 27” statistic which appears to be based partly on this article.
One of the things that often strikes me is that Trump is no gentleman.
Oh, he can be a gentleman. When he wants to, he can act as graciously as anyone and exhibit excellent manners. But that’s not his usual mode, particularly with people in US politics whom he disdains or considers to be outright enemies or rivals.
Other presidents have behaved that way, too – in private. LBJ comes immediately to mind, as well as Nixon. In fact, it may be somewhat true of all presidents. But they have generally been careful – at least, the ones who have been president during my lifetime – not to display that particular side of themselves to the public at large (although Obama exhibited it once or twice in gestures for the cognoscenti to interpret).
One of the hallmarks of this lack of gentlemanly behavior on the part of the public Trump is his tendency to give people nasty nicknames. Nasty and yet effective, for the most part. These nicknames often involve a level of taunting reminiscent of the schoolyard, the locker room, or the pro wrestling circuit, and involve (among many many other things) insults regarding diminutive size.
That sort of ungentlemanly behavior as well as other examples in that vein drives Trump-haters on the right nearly crazy. The left hates him for that reason, too, but they hate so much else about him that their hatred about his lack of gentlemanliness is mostly because of its effectiveness. If he fought on behalf of their side, they’d love it.
Whereas those on the right who hate Trump for his lack of gentlemanliness hate it because they don’t want his déclassé ways to rub off on them. They don’t care that he has fought for policies and judges they profess to admire. Simply put, they consider him embarrassing riffraff and they don’t want to be tainted by association.
Many Trump supporters like him because he fights. He fights for them and he fights for America. And some of the time he doesn’t fight like a gentleman. That’s the same thing that a lot of Republicans who detest Trump really really really dislike.
I’ve probably written over a hundred posts on the topic of “why they hate Trump.” I may write a great many more. It’s an almost inexhaustible topic, isn’t it?
This isn’t going to be a post bashing college students for being fragile flowers. It’s true they are more fragile than they used to be, but here’s a serious discussion in The Guardian, of all places, about the phenomenon.
Reading it, I felt a sense of sadness and came to the conclusion that today’s students are not being served by anyone very well. Politicians and the universities themselves have pushed the idea that just about everyone should go to college, and that means that people are attending who struggle with the work and remain highly stressed. It doesn’t help that secondary schools generally do much less to properly prepare them than they used to. Then there are the enormous student loans that result from a pact between government and universities, and allow students to attend while mortgaging their future earning power, all for a piece of paper that doesn’t reliably offer them a job payoff after school and yet is considered obligatory to get so many of today’s jobs. The family is much less of an emotional bulwark than it used to be, and that means a lot of students come to school with pre-existant emotional difficulties that are exacerbated by the stress of the workthere.
The article doesn’t mention it, but I bet substance abuse is part of it for increasing numbers of students, too. And of course there’s social media, which seems to do more harm than good and offers an illusory closeness and interaction, a forum for bullying, and impossible standards with which to compare oneself. Lastly (unmentioned by the article too) is hookup culture, which beckons and seduces but doesn’t fulfill. And especially for men, there is the fear of being falsely accused.
There’s probably more, but that’s enough for now. No wonder the suicide rate is up among university students.
[NOTE: The piece is about students in the UK, but I think most of it applies here, too. In the UK in particular, there aren’t enough funds for adequate mental health services at colleges, and waiting lists are long. I’m not sure that part is true in the US – yet.]
I plan to write more about Bill Barr’s recent speech, the one so many people have been talking about.
But I have a busy today today, so this is just a post to establish a thread for you to talk about it if you’d like. The link to the full text is above.
Support for the impeachment inquiry (not necessarily removal, but just the House process) was enjoying support in the 60% range not too long ago. Now, we are seeing almost 45% of Americans outright reject the process altogether. That’s a pretty big shift. Further, support to impeach and remove the President, which had peaked over 50% is now falling, down to 47%.
The splits within the polling are interesting in so far as the consolidation we are seeing. In general, what we are seeing in these numbers is almost all Democrats wanting to remove Trump and almost all Republicans disagreeing. Not shocking, but it’s important to remember that wasn’t the case in October, where a not insignificant number of Republicans were supportive of both the inquiry and removal.
In my opinion, the numbers approving of this travesty are way too high. But they’re going in the right direction.
Then there’s also the little fact that the hearings are boring. However, that can work in the Democrats’ favor. The reason is that since it’s the MSM that frames the narrative for so many Americans, the MSM gets free rein to pick and choose what facts to report in order to serve the Democrats’ purpose. If most people aren’t actually listening to the testimony or reading sources on the right, they will therefore miss all the exculpatory evidence in favor of Trump.
There have been 187 bomb attacks this year. In just 1 week in August, there were three major bombings. Much of the violence is concentrated in Malmo which experienced 58 bombings in 2017.
Malmo has a sizable immigrant and Muslim population. And it’s a center of gang violence.
Swedish authorities and its media rarely discuss or name the perpetrators, but the latest shooting left Jaffar Ibrahim, a 15-year-old boy, dead. Jaffar was shot in a Malmo pizzeria and had been part of a family of Syrian refugees who migrated to Sweden in 2016. Services for him were held in a mosque…
But Muslim gang violence in Sweden isn’t just its problem anymore.
Bombings took off in Copenhagen with explosions outside a police station and a tax office over the summer. The targets were political and the bombs weren’t fireworks or hand grenades, but commercial explosives used for demolitions. The suspects turned out to be criminals who had entered from Sweden.
The violence was probably related to gang wars involving the Brothas, Loyal to Familia and other splinter gangs. Despite the gang names, the actual gang members have names like Osman and Omar…
Much more at the link.
How is Sweden dealing with it? Mostly by making excuses for it, in order to sooth the native Swedish population:
The main components of Islamic militias, like the ones that tore apart Syria and Libya, were gangs. Islamist forces like these are often made up of gangs with grandiose names. The Copenhagen gangs are still associated with international gangs and use their names, but eventually they will go Islamic.
And then it won’t be the Hells Angels anymore. It’ll be the Islamic State of something or other.
That’s a reality that Swedish authorities are deliberately ignoring.
A government site insists that immigrants are no more likely to be criminals than anyone else. “In a study from 2013, researchers at Stockholm University showed that the main difference in terms of criminal activity between immigrants and others in the population in Sweden was due to differences in the socioeconomic conditions in which they grew up,” it argues.
As if Swedes, including the researchers of Stockholm University, are only refraining from picking up AK-47s and throwing hand grenades because of their socioeconomic conditions. The moment they lose their lucrative research grants, they too will be setting off bombs and fighting over the drug trade.
But nonsense like this sounds reassuring because it suggests that the solution to Islamic violence is social welfare. That’s a comforting message for socialists for whom social welfare is the answer to everything.
And, as the author also points out, Bernie Sanders wants to make us more like Sweden.
Of course, it helps to have Shakespeare writing your lines.
But still, words – even Shakespeare’s – are not enough to convey the experience (one that some deny, but that does truly exist) of love at first sight. Not just lust, not just attraction, but love.
You say it can’t happen that way? I’ve seen it happen, and not just in the movies. But now I’m going to talk about the movies – in particular, this scene from Zefferelli’s “Romeo and Juliet” (unfortunately the first line and a half is missing; it’s Romeo saying “If I profane with my unworthiest hand/This holy shrine…”):
It helps that the actors are both extraordinarily beautiful. That’s the lust part, which happens instantaneously. But the thing that has always impressed me about this scene and this dialogue and this version is that you see two distinct processes. You see them looking at each other and being smitten with the way they match physically. Juliet’s eyes especially convey this, although there’s an earlier scene where Romeo sees her for the first time and something similar happens to him.
But the real transition to love comes from their words, their delighted discovery – through some rather sophisticated and highly flirtatious banter – that their minds match as well, and their emotions. They are both intense, intelligent, poetic, and quick. Not only is their dialogue a sonnet, but the images they use and the juxtaposition of religion with romance is poetic and clever and a bit daring. Again, in Juliet’s eyes (she’s younger than Romeo) you see her seriousness alternating with the playful joy of discovery. Why, he’s not just the handsomest guy I ever saw, but he’s on my wavelength too!
Here’s the dialogue in sonnet form:
R: If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
J: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
R: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
J: Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
R: O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
J: Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.
R: Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take.
So brilliant, so perfect!
[NOTE: The movie changes the word “fine” in the second line to “sin.” I don’t know why they did that, but it’s not a good change.]
Victor Davis Hanson lists 10 reasons why the ongoing impeachment is really a coup. I’m particularly interested in the following items on his list, which all seem quite obvious to me and yet the MSM has been somewhat successful at protecting the public from either knowledge of them or understanding of their significance:
(2) False whistleblowers. The “whistleblower” is no whistleblower by any common definition of the noun. He has no incriminating documents, no information at all. He doesn’t even have firsthand evidence of wrongdoing…
He wasn’t disinterested but had a long history of partisanship…
3) First-term impeachment. The Clinton and Nixon inquiries were directed at second-term presidencies, when there were no more electoral remedies for alleged wrongdoing. By contrast, Trump is up for election in less than a year. Impeachment, then, seems a partisan exercise in either circumventing a referendum election or in damaging a president seeking re-election.
4) No special-counsel finding. In the past, special counsels have found felonious presidential behavior, such as cited in Leon Jaworski’s and Ken Starr’s investigations. By contrast, special counsel Robert Mueller spent 22 months and $35 million, and yet his largely partisan law and investigative team found no “collusion” and no actionable presidential obstruction of that non-crime…
7) Thought crimes? Even if there were ever a quid, there is no quo: Unlike the case of the Obama administration, the Trump administration did supply arms to Ukraine, and the Ukrainians apparently did not reinvestigate the Bidens.
That last one, number 7, is especially troubling. It’s something I’ve thought about quite a bit, and it seems to have become common when Trump’s opposition talks about him. Mind-reading has substituted for evidence, and not just during the impeachment inquiry. Courts have now institutionalized it, most obviously in a decision I wrote about here as well as here. From the latter:
In other related news, the legal reasoning several judges used to invalidate Trump’s immigration EOs – that his campaign statements were extremely relevant and indicated his supposedly discriminatory intent in issuing the orders as president – leads inevitably to preposterous conclusions such as these:
“ACLU lawyer Omar Jadwat, arguing today before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, told the court that President Trump’s travel order ‘could be constitutional’ if it had been written by Hillary Clinton…
“The last part of the audio is rather funny. Jadwat, asked whether the order on its face is valid, says No. Why? ‘I don’t think so, Your Honor, because the order is completely unprecedented’ To which one of the Fourth Circuit judges replies, with astonishment that seems mostly genuine: ‘So the first order on anything is invalid?'”
In his post, John Hinderaker calls that kind of legal argument “lawless nonsense.” But such lawless nonsense follows directly from the judicial decisions handed down against Trump’s EO. As the rulings were issued it became clear – because of the liberal judges’ reliance on Trump’s supposed thoughtcrime, as evidenced in some of his campaign statements – that no subsequent EO of Trump’s on immigration that involved any majority Muslim country would ever be held constitutional by these judges, no matter how carefully and fairly drafted. Trump had committed the original sin during the campaign, and all the perfumes of Arabia cannot sweeten that little hand.
Now we have an entire impeachment drive predicated on the idea that Trump committed another thoughtcrime. He didn’t tie the withholding of financial aid to the investigation of Hunter Biden, Ukrainian officials didn’t even know aid was being withheld at the time, and in fact the aid was given without the investigation occurring. But the Democrats get around the obvious flaws there but saying what they think Trump meant to do or wanted to do whether he actually did it or not.
Dangerous, dangerous high-stakes game the Democrats are playing.
I haven’t actually watched the hearings in real time, although every day I check the stories and exchanges that have emerged from them. Most of the focus until recently has been on the testimony of the witnesses and the behavior of the Democrats, especially Adam Schiff-who-must-be-obeyed.
But ever since the hearings have begun to be aired publicly, I’ve noticed that the Republican participants have been uncharacteristically focused and aggressive in their questioning. In particular, Elise Stefanik has been especially impressive (there are several videos worth watching at the link).
Is Trump’s fighting spirit catching? Seems that way.
The correspondence theory of truth basically states that objective truth exists and we can know something about it through evidence and reason…
In Culture War 2.0 the correspondence theory of truth—with its commitment to the idea that there are better and worse ways to come to knowledge about an objectively knowable world—is no longer common ground. For those on one side of this latest fight, the correspondence theory of truth has been replaced with more subjective ways of knowing. But this is not merely a turn away from objectivity to subjectivity. Culture War 2.0 is marked by one side’s turn toward understanding knowledge as determined by identity markers like race, gender, disability status, and sexual orientation. And—so the theory goes—the more “oppression variables” comprise one’s identity, the clearer one’s understanding of reality becomes.
So in the most recent iteration of culture wars, it isn’t just the idea that truth is relative. It’s that some truths – those stated by groups defined as oppressed – are much truthier than other truths, or at least much more worthy of respect and even of action.
Those people who accept the correspondence theory of truth (even though they may not know it by name) agree on the traditional rules of engagement (discourse, debate, dialogue) and do not view intersectionality as a necessary model for getting to the truth…These individuals are on one side of Culture War 2.0, and they include many liberal atheists and conservative Christians.
Those on the other side of 2.0 do not subscribe to the correspondence theory of truth, believe speech should be shut down if it’s hurtful or potentially harmful, and think intersectional, transformative approaches are necessary to refashion systems. These people are also predominantly atheists and Christians: intersectional “woke” atheists and intersectional “woke” Christians.
As a point of contact, I am a non-intersectional, liberal atheist. If a conservative Christian believes Jesus walked on water—and believes this either is or is not true for everyone regardless of race or gender—and if she values discourse and adheres to basic rules of engagement, then she is closer to my worldview than an atheist who believes race and gender play a role in determining objective truth and that her opponents should not be allowed to air what she considers harmful views.
Many conservative Christians understand this intuitively. So do many liberal atheists. And that’s what makes this Great Realignment of Culture War 2.0 so bizarre. It’s no longer liberals and atheists versus conservatives and Christians. It’s some atheists aligning with some Christians and other atheists aligning with other Christians. And each, in turn, believes that what’s at stake is no less than the future of Western Civilization. How this will play out depends on who wins Culture War 2.0.
It’s true that this doesn’t break down into strict divisions between Christians (or even believers) and atheists. But why should it? And what about all the agnostics in the world? Actually, those who believe intersectionality is the way to truth (or who pretend to think that) are political leftists whatever their religious beliefs may be. And although one can easily find some religious people among the leftists, the irreligious are more numerous on the left than the right (you can see how the numbers shape up here).
Religion vs. no religion is hardly the only divide in the culture wars. There’s age, sex, race, and level of education – with the college-educated more inclined these days to believe the “intersectionality” standard for truth.
Which is odd, because it used to be that universities in particular valued logic and were dedicated to the pursuit of objective truth. Back then, if professors acknowledged that the whole truth and nothing but the truth might be unknowable in many arenas, they nevertheless felt that we needed to strive to come as close as we can to the truth.
And yet now it is the university in particular that has backed away from such notions – which are felt to be racist, sexist, Westernist (is that a word?), and therefore an affront to the diversity which now seems to be the university’s most cherished and desired goal.
