On the rebirth of socialism

The New Neo Posted on by

This column by Matthew Continetti had such a promising title: “What to Do About the Rebirth of Socialism: Where it came from and how to stop it.”

Well, maybe that’s biting off too big a hunk to chew in such a small essay—but still, I was surprised that Continetti failed to discuss two of the very biggest elements in socialism’s resurgence: the inherent surface attractiveness of socialism, and the fact that the left has taken over education in this country.

Continetti sees the rise of socialism as fools rushing into the cultural gap made by the withdrawal of religion, and that’s certainly a significant part of the picture:

The bourgeois values of honesty, fidelity, diligence, reticence, delayed gratification, and self-control that once reigned supreme have been contested for many decades by an ethic of self-expression, self-indulgence, instant gratification, and demanding the impossible. Our politics is a competition for control over what Michael Novak called the “empty shrine” at the center of pluralist democracy.

As far as I can see, Continetti is also ignoring the fact that a great many religious denominations today have become dominated by leftist thought (some of the Protestant ones, the current Pope, and Reform Judaism, to name just a few).

I’ve written several posts on the attractions of socialism; it appeals to certain basic aspects of human nature that will always be with us: covetousness, anger, guilt, a desire to feel righteous, and the need for simple-sounding solutions. But there’s also the obvious fact that many many decades ago the left set its sights on taking over the educational system, and has done so successfully.

Lenin is alleged to have said: “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” Well, “never” is a long time. But the basic principle of early indoctrination is there, and the leftists have been wildly successful in that particular arena.

About Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran

The New Neo Posted on by

I have my doubts about this article. The author may be dreaming, or making much too much of some events that have much less significance than he thinks.

But it’s certainly interesting, and so I bring it up for discussion. An excerpt:

The Warsaw conference on peace and security in the Middle East dealt primarily with the Iranian threat to that region and its highlights were undoubtedly the unprecedented signs of continued thaw in relations between Israel, represented at the highest level by prime minister Netanyahu, and the states of the Arabian Peninsula, represented at the foreign minister level…

What is the cause for these developments that are as unprecedented as they are unreported by the American media? One word: Trump. Trump did three things that forever changed the political makeup of the Middle East…First, he swapped out the plaque on the American Consulate in Jerusalem for one that said EMBASSY OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. With this move Trump signaled to the Arabs that the US had no more tolerance for scenarios in which Israel was not a permanent presence in the region…Second, Trump allowed the full might of American technological innovation to be brought to bear in extracting marginal oil deposits,..Finally, Trump withdrew from the so-called Iran deal, making it clear that in the holy war between the medieval Shia and the slightly more modern Sunna, the US was going to help the forces of sanity rather than the forces of eschatological craziness.

“Forever”? Not so sure about that; couldn’t any of these things be undone by future President OAC (or some other Democrat so inclined)? And are the Saudis really the forces of sanity? In comparison to the Iranian government, perhaps, but the Saudis have been (or at least used to be) a huge sponsor of Wahabism and therefore an inspiration for a large swath of terrorists.

Well, in the Middle East, there probably aren’t a whole lot of great choices for an alignment.

The author goes on to posit an apocalyptic and Manichean battle brewing

And so the battle lines are drawn, the battle of Gog and Magog, of the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness, as the Dead Sea Scrolls have prophesied, is just about ready to commence. On the side of light we have an unlikely coalition of Sunni Arabs, Israel, and the newly minted American nationalist movement under the leadership of president Trump. On the side of darkness, there is the Shia Persians and their auxiliaries in Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, the neo-Ottoman Turks, the corrupt and criminal “Palestinian” leadership, be it the PLO or the Hamas, neo-Imperial Russia under the leadership of its cohort of kleptomaniacs, the anti-Semitic Western Europeans, and the neo-communist and equally anti-Semitic American progressives represented by the Democratic Party.

Only three-quarters of a century after the last battle for the soul of mankind was fought and won by the Sons of Light, albeit with tremendous sacrifice and near world-wide destruction, a new battle of similar proportions is brewing.

I used the word “Manichean” to describe the battle this author envisions. It’s a word I learned long ago, and so I decided to check on its more precise meaning. What I found indicated it’s even more apropos to the author’s prediction—and especially his metaphors—than I’d originally thought:

Manichaeism was a major religious movement that was founded by the Iranian prophet Mani in the Sasanian Empire.

Manichaeism taught an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness.

Is the country outraged about the soft coup…

The New Neo Posted on by

…or is it only the right that’s outraged?

That’s a rhetorical question; I’m pretty sure of the answer, and it’s door #2. That in and of itself is disturbing, because it’s evidence of the fact that way too many people would—in the words of Sir Thomas More in “A Man For All Seasons” addressing William Roper—“cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil.”

The Devil, of course, was Donald Trump. What was his great crime? Nothing; he fired Comey, something he had every right to do. But the DOJ and the FBI didn’t like it and they didn’t like him, so these supposed guardians of our legal system decided to cut a great road through the law. And my guess is that most Democrats these days would approve heartily, because they are unaware (or don’t care) about what Sir Thomas More says to Roper next in the play:

Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down — and you’re just the man to do it — d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?

Actually, I understand why the big muck-a-mucks in the FBI and DOJ who planned and executed all of this thought they would be able to stand upright. After all, they’ve got the power, and they were doing it in secrecy, and if they were successful, other people such as Hillary Clinton would be in even greater power and would almost certainly protect them. If their plans had succeeded, it would have been just fine for them. It was only the election of Trump combined with a Republican Congress that brought some of this out of the shadows.

The thing that’s more difficult to understand, although hardly impossible to understand, is why run-of-the-mill Democrats, the far less powerful, don’t see themselves as potentially vulnerable to that blowing wind. But I think it’s difficult for people in general to stand back and look at things abstractly, and then imagine a turn of events. Instead, if a particular approach harms a person you consider the enemy, it’s no-holds barred.

Or maybe they think that Trump really is the Devil or some earthly equivalent. Perhaps they really think he is Hitler, American-style. The fact that there’s no reason to think so doesn’t matter; let’s just say they really think so. Then, working clandestinely to bring him down in nearly any way possible—as in the real Resistance during World War II, and all the plots against Hitler—would be applauded by nearly everyone.

Which is probably one of the main reasons that it’s important to the left to label Trump as Hitler in the minds of as much of the public as possible. Then just about anything feels justified in working against him.

There are many articles I’d recommend in order to get up to speed on what we know so far about the soft coup. I’d suggest this one by Roger Kimball for starters:

The FBI didn’t like the President. so they plotted to remove him from office. That is the irreducible minimum, class, that you should take away from this whole sordid lesson.

For more detail, please go to Byron York’s piece, if you haven’t already read it.

And of course, Andrew C. McCarthy:

The reason for the collusion label is obvious. Those peddling the “Putin hacked the election” story have always lacked credible evidence that Trump was complicit in the Kremlin’s “cyber-espionage.” They could not show a criminal conspiracy. Connections between denizens of Trump World and Putin’s circle might be very intriguing, and perhaps even politically scandalous. But only a conspiracy — an agreement by two or more people to commit an actual criminal offense, such as hacking — would be a reasonable basis for prosecution or impeachment…

Because [Rosenstein] had written the memorandum originally used to justify Comey’s dismissal, congressional Democrats slammed him for complicity in what they portrayed as Trump’s obstruction of the Russia probe. Rosenstein wanted to appease them by appointing the special counsel they were demanding.

Special counsels, however, are not supposed to be appointed unless there is a solid basis to believe a crime has been committed. Rosenstein was lawyer enough to know that a president’s firing of an FBI director — a firing that Rosenstein himself had argued was justified — could not be an obstruction crime. And he knew that there was no proof that Trump had conspired in Russia’s cyberespionage. So . . . how to justify appointing a special counsel?

Easy: Make it a counterintelligence probe. That way, there would be no need for a crime, since such investigations are just intelligence-gathering exercises.

What’s that? You say there’s no basis in the special-counsel regulations to appoint one for counterintelligence? You say the Justice Department does not appoint prosecutors for counterintelligence investigations, which are the FBI’s bailiwick? So what? The special-counsel regulations expressly say that they create no enforceable rights enabling anyone to challenge the Justice Department’s flouting of them. Rosenstein knew he could ignore the rules and there was not a thing anyone could do about it…

What is “collusion,” then? Increasingly, it looks like the criminalization of policy disputes.

“The criminalization of policy disputes” is a great summary of what’s been going on—that, and the planting of false evidence to support that criminalization.

In other words, cutting a great road through the law to get after the opponent you’ve labeled as the Devil. And at least half the country is happily walking down that road that’s been cut.

[ADDENDUM: Here’s another article on the subject that’s worth reading.

And the intrepid Alan Dershowitz, likewise.

Dershowitz is practically alone among Democrats, however.]

Ocasio-Cortez: let’s help the workers by losing them some potential jobs

The New Neo Posted on by

But oh, we can all feel so self-righteous about it, as AOC does:

Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez rather perfectly embodies the point Margaret Thatcher was making here about the far left:

Even Mayor de Blasio seems upset with AOC:

A hot-under-the-collar Mayor Bill de Blasio tore into Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Friday as he blistered both the online giant and local politicians who opposed bringing it to Queens.

“As a progressive my entire life — and I ain’t changing — I’ll take on any progressive anywhere that thinks it’s a good idea to lose jobs and revenue because I think that’s out of touch with what working people want,” the mayor said on WNYC radio.

Pelosi says a Democratic president could declare a national emergency, too, so you better watch out

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “huxley.”]

Nancy Pelosi reacts:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday issued a warning to Republicans poised to support President Trump’s decision to declare a national emergency at the southern border: the next Democratic president, she said, could do the same on guns.

“A Democratic president can declare emergencies, as well,” Pelosi told reporters in the Capitol. “So the precedent that the president is setting here is something that should be met with great unease and dismay by the Republicans.”

Oh, really?

First of all, a Democratic president certainly wouldn’t restrain him/herself from declaring a national emergency just because a Republican hadn’t done it yet.

Secondly, of course any president has the right to declare a national emergency, and many have done so already. The real questions are: (1) under what conditions can a president declare a national emergency; and (2) what is a president allowed to do when that emergency is declared?

So, let’s get some facts.

The power of a president to declare a national emergency is a statutory one, enacted in 1976 to supersede a previous hodge-podge. Such a declaration needs to be renewed annually to be in effect, and Congress can revoke it “with either a joint resolution and the President’s signature, or with a veto-proof majority vote.”

Prior to the passage of that National Emergencies Act:

…[P]residents [had] asserted the power to declare emergencies without limiting their scope or duration, without citing the relevant statutes, and without congressional oversight. The Supreme Court in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer limited what a president could do in such an emergency, but did not limit the emergency declaration power itself.

Since the signing of that bill, there have been 42 national emergencies declared; most of them limited trade in various ways in accord with another act of Congress.

Under what conditions can a national emergency be declared? It’s pretty broad:

The Act authorized the President to activate emergency provisions of law via an emergency declaration on the conditions that the President specifies the provisions so activated and notifies Congress.

There are certain exceptions, but they don’t apply to the current case (one, for example, is regulating transactions in foreign gold and silver}. But Pelosi’s rhetoric aside, there are also 136 enumerated and relatively specific powers granted, and you can find a list of them here (written in December of 2018):

Unknown to most Americans, a vast set of laws gives the president greatly enhanced powers during emergencies. President Donald Trump’s threats to bypass Congress and secure funding for a wall along the border with Mexico by declaring a national emergency are not just posturing. The Brennan Center, building on previous research, has identified 123 statutory powers that may become available to the president when de [sic] declares a national emergency, including two that might offer some legal cover for his wall-building ambitions (10 U.S.C. 2808 (a) and 33 U.S.C. 2293 on our list…).

Here is 10 U.S.C. 2808(a):

Secretary of Defense, without regard to any other provision of law, may undertake military construction projects, and may authorize Secretaries of the military departments to undertake military construction projects, that are necessary to support such use of the armed forces.

And the one I consider more relevant, 33 U.S.C. 2293:

Secretary of the Army may terminate or defer any Army civil works project and apply the resources, including funds, personnel, and equipment, of the Army’s civil works program to authorized civil works, military construction, and civil defense projects that are essential to the national defense, without regard to any other provision of law.

Looking at that, I think it’s relatively straightforward that the president has very broad powers to declare national emergencies and that what Trump proposes to do—if he uses the Army’s civil works program—might be fully legal under 33 U.S.C. 2293, if the argument is accepted that the wall is essential to the national defense or if it is found to be an “authorized civil work.” Naturally, there will be a legal challenge that the wall and the immigration situation is not the sort of immediate and threatening emergency that would justify such a declaration, and/or that it’s unnecessary for national defense and/or not an authorized civil work.

In addition, there’s the question of whether Trump can use the military to do this; here’s a discussion of that. Suffice to say the answer is “maybe,” and the issue is likely to be settled in court, as well.

And lastly, there is the question of obtaining the land for the wall through eminent domain (written January 7, 2019) [emphasis mine]:

The United States has a long tradition of authorizing the military to seize private land for a federal project…

…Congress has delegated the power to seize private property to many military branches, including the Army Corps of Engineers to construct military bases and the Department of Navy to acquire land for airfields and gunnery ranges…

If Congress passes a budget that includes Trump’s $5 billion in border wall funding, then technically it is possible that the Army Corps of Engineers could begin seizing land and constructing the wall…

One-third of the land is owned by the federal government, while the rest of the land is owned by states, private property owners or Native American tribes.

It occurs to me that the value of the bill that Trump signed today (in addition to its ending the shutdown issue for a while) is that it contains statutory authorization for the building of a wall, and therefore can help with the near-certain court fight over the eminent domain issue. Despite its restrictions and “poison pills,” its enactment means that Congress has authorized a wall and this may give the authority for the eminent domain taking.

The judiciary will be kept very very busy. For starters, I fully expect several circuit courts to enjoin part or all of Trump’s declaration, and then the Supreme Court may have to take up the overarching question of whether a circuit court can issue such an injuction for the entire country on matters of national importance. This is a question SCOTUS has ducked so far, but it may not be able to duck it for long.

The storm and drang around this, the hue and cry, are just beginning.

[NOTE: By the way, statements such as Pelosi’s, with its false equivalence, are wrong (although they are par for the course). As far as I can tell, and unlike building a public work for national defense—gun control is probably not something that can be fit into one of the presidential powers listed under the National Emergencies Act. In addition, if there’s not a controlling Congressional law authorizing the action, such as is in effect with bills authorizing the building of the border wall, that could be another problem for Pelosi’s plans.

Of course, where there’s a will, there may be a way. And in that sense—which may be the most practical sense of all—Pelosi is right. The National Emergencies Act, and its 136 provisions, can probably be effectively stretched by a president of either party, if conditions are right and especially if there is a simpatico SCOTUS majority in place:

In the past several decades, Congress has provided what the Constitution did not: emergency powers that have the potential for creating emergencies rather than ending them. Presidents have built on these powers with their own secret directives. What has prevented the wholesale abuse of these authorities until now is a baseline commitment to liberal democracy on the part of past presidents. Under a president who doesn’t share that commitment, what might we see?

I’m not so sure about that “baseline commitment” thing (see NOTE at the end of this post), at least not in recent decades, and even going quite far back. Lincoln was bitterly criticized for suspending habeas corpus during the Civil War, for example. Harry Truman lost a court battle to be allowed to seize the steel mills during the Korean War. President Obama expanded presidential power to do an end run around Congress via executive orders.]

National emergency?

The New Neo Posted on by

As expected, President Trump signed the budget bill and declared a national emergency in order to move additional funds towards the task of building a wall.

(And I have some outside obligations for the next few hours, so I may take this up again in the late afternoon or early evening.)

But here’s my quick take—

I’m not sure why Trump signed a budget bill that so many people seem to think contains poison pills, except that he wanted to avert another shutdown crisis. I’ve long thought that the Democratic Congress held the winning hand on that because all shutdowns are automatically blamed—with a huge assist from the MSM—on the GOP, whether it’s the GOP controlling the House or the GOP controlling the executive branch. The rule is that it’s always the GOP at fault no matter which part of the government, and therefore which side of the argument, they represent.

And I’m also not sure why, having signed the bill, Trump’s going the national emergency route if—as many have previously suggested—he has other ways to move the money into wall-building. The national emergency route is the one I see as most fraught with political and constitutional peril. No doubt some of Trump’s legal advisors have said it will work out. But I think it gives the Democrats in Congress and elsewhere much ammunition to declare him a tyrant who must be stopped, and it does this at a time when the Democrats were busily engaged in sinking themselves in so many ways. This allows them to change the emphasis entirely.

Then again, no matter what Trump did about this issue (except, perhaps, for caving entirely), the Democrats would say he was being a tyrant.

Also, if the shoe were on the other foot, I have no doubt that the Democrats would defend a Democratic president who did the equivalent of what he’s doing (it wouldn’t be to build a wall, of course, but to some other purpose) and declare it perfectly fine.

And yes, national emergencies are declared all the time and we don’t notice. That’s because they are on relatively minor issues and involve relatively minor things. This involves the clash of two large principles—Congress’s power to pass a budget, and the presidential power to protect our borders.

The underlying problem is even bigger than that—it’s the breakdown of government into warring factions that have stripped away all pretense of comity and cooperation, all sense of “we’re in this together.” I used to think [see *NOTE below] that we had that general sense, and that it was not an illusion.

And the loss of that is the real national emergency.

*NOTE: I’m adding this note because I realize that the phrase “I used to think” needs clarification, although I hadn’t thought it did when I wrote it.

I don’t mean that “I used to think” we had a spirit of cooperation until last week. I don’t mean I used to think it until last month, or last year, or even last decade. When did I first realize it was gone? Perhaps during the 1990s or perhaps even earlier. I’m not sure, and there was no “aha!” moment when it struck me. It was a slowly growing perception that developed over several decades, and there were many elements and events and reactions to those events that fed into it.

So, when was it that I had thought that most of the nation felt that we’re in this together and needed to cooperate, at least on the really big things? I suppose I felt it very much when I was a child, during the 50s and then the early 60s. The disruption in this feeling began in the late 60s, of course, in dramatic fashion, but it still seemed (to me, at least) to recover somewhat during the 70s and 80s.

Perhaps that was an illusion. I also know I wasn’t paying close attention during those in-between years, when I was a young adult raising a child. It was during the 90s when I felt something was beginning to be very very wrong again. Then there was a brief period of togetherness (illusory togetherness, as it turns out) for a short while after 9/11, except for the vocal left. The more basic disunity problem came not too long after 9/11, and it has been growing and growing ever since.

Now it has reached a fever pitch, but by no means has it topped out.

The FBI, the DOJ, and the soft coup against Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ll make this quick, and I may revisit the topic in a future post, but this is well worth reading on the subject of the FBI’s and DOJ’s actions against Trump:

There are new revelations about what took place in Washington during the extraordinary period from May 9, 2017, when President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, to May 17, 2017 when Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed.

The short version is: The reports were true. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein really did discuss wearing a wire to secretly record the president. Rosenstein and others did discuss invoking the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office. And the FBI did adopt an aggressive new investigation strategy, targeting the president himself, almost instantly after the Comey firing…

“It’s just like we thought all along,” said one House Republican upon hearing the news. “If McCabe’s account is true, it confirms what we thought, that Rod Rosenstein was serious when he talked about wearing a wire and invoking the 25th Amendment. Rosenstein should be under oath answering our questions. We need to know who was in the room and what was said.”

Covington teens exonerated by Diocese report

The New Neo Posted on by

The Diocese of Covington has issued a report:

The Diocese of Covington proclaimed Wednesday that Covington Catholic High School students recorded on viral videos during a school trip to Washington, D.C., did nothing wrong after releasing a report prepared by a private investigation firm.

Attorneys for the diocese hired Greater Cincinnati Investigation to look into the incident…

Four licensed investigators from the firm interviewed 43 CovCath students, nine faculty chaperones and four parent chaperones; sought out third-party witnesses; and reviewed social media posts, news articles and videos. They said they spent about 240 man hours on the investigation.

Investigators reported that they were unable to obtain surveillance video from the Lincoln Memorial. Sandmann offered a written statement, rather than an in-person interview. A person who posted several videos online didn’t respond to them. Neither has Phillips, despite investigators showing up at his home and leaving a note.

Not surprising that Phillips didn’t respond. His day in the sun has ended for now, and he may wind up paying the piper whatever he happens to have, which probably isn’t all that much.

In a letter to CovCath parents, Bishop Roger Foys wrote that the investigation “has demonstrated that our students did not instigate the incident that occurred at the Lincoln Memorial.”

“I am pleased to inform you that my hope and expectation … that the results of our inquiry … would ‘exonerate our students so that they can move forward with their lives’ has been realized,” Foys wrote.

Despite the initiation perception by many people online, the students actually “were placed in a situation that was at once bizarre and even threatening,” Foys wrote. “Their reaction to the situation was, given the circumstances, expected and one might even say laudatory.”

The entire letter written by Foys can be found here.

Note, however, that Foys had initially added to the excoriation of the boys when he had issued this statement at the outset of the fracas:

We condemn the actions of the Covington Catholic High School students toward Nathan Phillips specifically, and Native Americans in general, Jan. 18, after the March for Life, in Washington, D.C. We extend our deepest apologies to Mr. Phillips. This behavior is opposed to the Church’s teaching on the dignity and respect of the human person. The matter is being investigated and we will take appropriate action, up to and including expulsion.

It turns out that “appropriate action” was to praise them.

Now, I don’t actually expect Bishop Foys to have praised the teens initially; there wasn’t enough information available yet to go that far. But there was nowhere near enough information available to condemn them, either. And yet that’s what the Diocese did, jumping on the liberal propaganda bandwagon.

So I’d like him to answer this question: Why did you do it? And did you learn something for the future, and if so, what?

Bishop Foys had already issued an apology on January 25. This is what he wrote:

We apologize to anyone who has been offended in any way by either of our statements which were made with good will based on the information we had…

We should not have allowed ourselves to be bullied and pressured into making a statement prematurely, and we take full responsibility for it…

I especially apologize to Nicholas Sandmann and his family as well as to all CovCath families who have felt abandoned during this ordeal. Nicholas unfortunately has become the face of these allegations based on video clips. This is not fair. This is not just.

I don’t expect Bishop Foys to have aired his entire thought process in public, but I really hope that he inwardly explores how it is that someone of his stature succumbed so very easily to what he calls “bullying” and “pressuring.” He’s not a child. Shouldn’t he have the ability to withstand those things? Isn’t there a contradiction between his saying that he made the initial statements “with good will” and saying he succumbed to bullying and pressure in making them?

And isn’t it just plain wrong for Bishop Foys to assert that “the information we had” indicated culpability on the part of the Covington teens? After all, all they did was smile on the video. Everything else was based on the word of Nathan Phillips, who even the simplest and most cursory bit of research would have revealed to have been a longtime activist and instigator and possible liar. Why believe his testimony over anything else,and so soon? Why succumb to the Twitter mob?

And why say that you were bullied into it, at the same time (actually, in the very same sentence) that you state that you take full responsibility for succumbing to that pressure? There is something about his use of the word “bullied” for what happened to him that seems highly inappropriate to me. Bishop Foys is a powerful man of mature years (73), not a little schoolchild. He is supposed to be spiritually advanced. If he can’t resist bullying—and in particular if that lack of resistance to bullying causes him to pile on and participate in the bullying of innocent teenagers—then he needs to discover a way to resist it, and pronto.

Two formerly perfectly good words of which I’ve become heartily sick…

The New Neo Posted on by

…are “dialogue” and “conversation.”

Unfortunately, the left has turned the first into Orwellian Newspeak for I will harangue you for your failings as a member of a privileged or doubleplusungood group and you will sit there and listen respectfully without defending yourself, and the second into we are going to talk about some leftist agenda/issue that’s been talked about a thousand million times before but I’m claiming we need to talk about it some more in the guise of the aforementioned dialogue (see first definition).

Now, let’s have a conversation about that.

The philosophy of transgenderism

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a piece in Commentary I found quite intriguing, about the supposed philosophy behind transgenderism. Here’s what I see as one of the article’s main theses:

As the Princeton philosopher Robert George has written, today’s trans activists hold “an understanding of the human being – an anthropology – that sharply divides the material or bodily, on the one hand, and the spiritual or mental, on the other.” And more than that, they posit that the mind is superior to the body – a radical but logical extension of Rene Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am.” For their part, both George and Anderson characterize the trans anthropology as a contemporary version of Gnosticism, the ancient Christian heresy. But it is also a postmodern anthropology, in that it is on a warpath against traditional sexual categories as well as objectively knowable truth. The trapped mind, the activists say, trumps the Book of Genesis and modern biology. Can it?

That’s not only interesting, but I think it’s a good point and mainly true of the transgender movement, at least its many and vocal activists. However, I don’t think it’s the whole story (not that the author says it is), for two main reasons. The first is that I think one must draw a line between transgenderism as a radical movement—one with political and philosophical aims, roots in the left, and that is “on a warpath against traditional sexual categories as well as objectively knowable truth”—and individuals who are on a much more personal road, with personal histories and motivations, people who are not necessarily political or activist and who just want to live a life with less suffering. Such people mostly see transgenderism as a way out of some personal dilemma (although the political winds deeply affect them, whether they know it or not), and for some transgenderism seems to end up fitting the bill and for some it does not.

My second reason is that I am under the impression that at least some transgender activists believe that trangenderism does not represent a strictly mind/body dichotomy, but can be a misfit between one body system (the chromosomes, genitalia, and hormonal output) and another (the feminization or masculinization of the corporeal brain affecting but not constituting the incorporal mind), and that the brain/mind gender identification should win over the genital/hormonal/chromosomal one.

Whether or not this brain-transgendered idea is a true depiction of the way the body works is not at issue in this post. The author of the linked article discusses the research on it, which is certainly not probative or anywhere near it. But the point is not whether it’s true or not—the point is that some transgendered people believe there is an empirical basis for believing that transgenderism (or gender dysphoria) is physically based in the brain, and not just a triumph of noncorporeal mind over corporeal matter.

[NOTE: Former transgender activist Jamie Shupe—who never had the surgery, lived as a woman (with hormonal assistance) for quite some time, and then won a lawsuit to be designated as “non-binary”—has declared himself a man. It’s quite an article describing one man’s long and winding road, and involving both mind and matter.]

AOC must think this announcement from Governor Newsom is really badly timed

The New Neo Posted on by

New California governor Newsom appears to be pulling the plug on California’s high-speed rail:

During Gov. Gavin Newsom’s first State of the State speech Tuesday, he surprised listeners by announcing he would put the quest for high-speed rail connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles championed by his predecessor far on the back burner.

Instead, Newsom offered a consolation prize: high-speed rail between Bakersfield and Merced.

“Let’s level about the high-speed rail,” Newsom said. “Let’s be real, the current project as planned would cost too much and, respectfully, take too long. Right now, there simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to L.A. I wish there were.”

I wishes were fishes…

Again, you can see the emphasis on the aspiration of it all. But, at least for the moment, Newsom is letting that old dream-downer, reality, intervene.

Newsom isn’t abandoning high speed rail entirely, however—and after all, some of the proposed line has actually been built. He says:

“Abandoning the high-speed rail entirely means we will have wasted billions and billions of dollars with nothing but broken promises… and lawsuits to show for it,” Newsom added, explaining he wouldn’t want to send the $3.5 billion in federal money the project has been granted back to the Trump administration.

But then—but then—the article ends with this:

By afternoon, however, Newsom’s office said that he is fully committed to building a high-speed rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco, despite his comments during his State of the State speech.

Is this a backtrack? Perhaps not exactly. I think what “fully committed” means is “fully committed in the aspirational sense—that is, he wishes we could do it, and he knows that a great many of the Democrats of California think he should be committed to trying.”

Looking for further explanation of the governor’s seeming reversal, I found this:

Governor Gavin Newsom’s office is clarifying statements made at Tuesday’s State of the State Address on California’s high-speed rail project.

The governor’s office confirms he is fully committed to building a high-speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles…

Newsom said the project would cost too much and take too long. But his spokesman Nathan Click said he’s not walking away from it.

Some in the Bay Area believe the governor’s new approach isn’t derailing development.

“The idea is to keep the project going and to have the central valley connection from Bakersfield to Merced,” Bay Area Council President and CEO, Jim Wunderman said. “For a spine from which the rest of the system can grow.”

Hey, I have an idea! Let’s try it on a huge, nationwide scale. That’ll work.