A new category eclipsing my commentary on the presidential campaign. As I sit 5 hours a night and 4 or more on the weekends watching MSNBC, brilliant thoughts occur to me and I thought I would shower the world with them by making a fairly immediate response. Let’s see how it goes.
April 20, 2017 Watching Alex Jones fulminate against a congressman who ridiculed him, threatening him with bodily harm, goes right along with the John Wayne mentality that if you don’t like what someone says, you hit them. As a young person, I noticed how often John Wayne would suddenly turn and swing on someone, clocking them with no warning. The underlying value there is that if someone says something that violates your principles, it’s a perfectly normal and effective response to hit them. Notice how torturers frequently have no goal in torturing their victims other than just “to show them”. Show them they can’t get away with uttering blasphemy.
eodem die: Obama as an appeaser. This ties into the John Wayne mentality in that diplomacy is a sign of weakness. This comes out of the school yard orientation of conservatives who see immediate action as the only response to a threat and someone who wants to talk is just hiding their weakness.
eodem die: Obama’s list of failures is so absurd that it makes it impossible to discuss with a conservative Obama’s real shortcomings, e.g. in education. Declaring the Iran deal appeasement in the face of every military, scientific, and diplomatic praise for it knocks the support for a possible conservative critique of Obama’s policies right out from under them.
eodem die: Our electors failed us. Their purpose was to keep the unwashed masses from putting a buffoon or dictator into the White House. We got a twofer with Trump b/c the electors went with tradition rather than the Constitution.
eodem die: the support for serial sexual harassers like Trump and O’Reilly among conservatives fits with their view of relations between men and women. There are two types of women for men to choose between and they may choose one or the other at a given time: saints and whores. A friend described to me one of those non-coms in the military who knows how to work the system to set himself up. This one non-com frequented and perhaps owned a bar. One of the waitresses was compensated for allowing the non-com’s friends to grope her as she served them. This is a typical adolescent fantasy of adolescent men who cannot have a mature sexual relationship with a woman: the sort of guy who hangs out watching for a waitress to bend over and show her stuff. I certainly don’t except myself from such fantasies but to take it to the level of paying some desperate woman to allow men to grope her is not only immature on the men’s part but disgusting in any moral sense.
ex diebus anterioribus (like last week) – Arkansas executing people en masse. This is a thread throughout Southern history. I have little more to say about it. There must be textual evidence such as newspaper editorials and so on that revel in executing en masse. My only guess is that it is a way of treating those executed like animals in a slaughterhouse to underscore their utter worthlessness.
ex diebus anterioribus (like last week) – following this note I find one on the desire on the part of conservatives to humiliate Obama. I got the connection. For a White man to be dominated by a Black man in the hierarchy is so unacceptable that every opportunity must be taken to humiliate this uppity Negro. We must constantly remind ourselves that no matter what, Obama is still just another one of them, not worthy of individuation nor of personal respect.
ex diebus anterioribus (like last week) – any time illegal immigrants are mentioned the accompanying pictures are always of Latinos. While Latinos predominate, they are by no means the only immigrants here illegally. Immigration has been, as it always has in this country, racialized. I doubt many people are aware of racist diatribes directed against the Irish, the Italians, etc. This is why less educated voters are easily fooled: they don’t read books and so can be led around by the nose with pictures from our southern border.
ex diebus anterioribus (like last week) – law enforcement has shown signs of greater aggressiveness. If you watch the reports of immigration roundups, assaults on citizens, and threats against vulnerable people coming in from overseas, etc. you will see less concern to be seen following the law and procedure on the part of officers. That’s my impression. The ejection of a passenger from a flight got me to thinking when I saw the man was Asian. Just something to watch. We hope our officers are professionals.
ex diebus anterioribus (like last week) – Fukuyama says the basic governing force is a war leader and his retinue. The war leader steps up in time of crisis with a group of followers who are fighters. They spearhead the group’s defenses. Trump has taken several opportunities to be seen in uniform. At least George Bush actually was a pilot in the USAF.
April 24 Following links, I glanced at a couple of articles by Ron Unz in The American Conservative. It made me realize how many middle-of-the-road people believe that racists have tobacco juice dribbling down their chin and speak in Hillbilly accents. Untrue generalization, but of equal importance is that those are not the people who make public policy, who decide if your school gets funding for special programs. It is the Unz types, with degrees from Harvard, positions as CEOs of think tanks, publishers of journals of public opinion, and so on. That is, they are not marginalized. They may not be quite mainstream, but plenty of people rely on their research and studies to back up their claim that American schools have been turned over to low-IQ minorities, that low-IQ immigrants are lowering the cognitive capacity of our nation, that politicians are catering to people who do not have the work ethic or cognitive skills of European-Americans. Few of them will wear Nazi helmets and wave Confederate flags.
So here’s an appeal (this is where I wish a lot more people read my blog): if you are 70 or over, have lived in this country all those years, and have paid some attention to what used to be called “race progress”, would you search your brain for the ways in which someone at their peak in the 70s would be able to look around and ask, “Where are the Blacks in management, in the top ranks of the military, in the professoriate, in the sciences and engineering,” and on and on, listing those fields of endeavor from which Blacks had been systematically excluded, but then go on to look around now when Blacks are seen in all these positions and more and still say, “Low IQ”. IOW, when I married into a Black family in 1964, you saw, if you were paying attention, headlines in Black-oriented newspapers and magazines, “First Black Coast Guard Commander”, “First Black CEO of a Major Company”, “First Black Director in a Major Studio”, and so on until we had astronauts and spelunkers and brain surgeons and top spies. But by the 21st century, you saw photos of important people in all sorts of high-level positions in all fields who are Black.
The important question is not how that happened – it was the Civil Rights Movement that said it was not OK to have no Black hospital administrators nor to keep Blacks out of college majors in hospital administration; the question is, how do racists now explain their assertion that, despite an exception here and there, Blacks simply do not possess the cognitive abilities, inborn, inherited abilities, that Whites possess and, therefore, cannot fill those slots in our society. There are just too many. Back in the 70s and 80s, racists could explain Blacks heading up traffic engineering departments or the municipal accounting office by the Black mayors who appointed them out of cronyism, Black mayors elected when major cities were drained of non-Whites by White flight and Black voters and Democratic machine politics got Black mayors in. You still hear pointed references to depleted Rust Belt cities as being run by Democrats, code for Black Democrats who cannot handle the cognitive demands of running a city.
But all those excuses have faded into history now. The question still remains: how do racists explain the fact that when institutional barriers to Blacks were removed, Blacks moved into slots supposedly restricted on the basis of IQ. And they’ve been there long enough that some deep cognitive time-bomb would have detonated by now, leaving a trail of wrecked institutions, done in by incompetent Blacks put in charge by teary-eyed liberals practicing affirmative action on steroids. It hasn’t happened. So, the assignment: please explain.