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I really wish reporters would ask victims if they support BLM and defunding the police.

Mace Windau 23 minutes ago I really wish reporters would ask victims if they support KKK and open carry laws. That’s how you sound

@Mace Windau  Not at all: The people who are doing the robbing, carjacking, smashing-and-grabbing, beating, shooting looting and vandalizing aren't wearing hooded white sheets; people who carry guns aren't doing it, either. Instead, it's lawless blacks whose lawlessness white middle- and upper-middle-class liberals have encouraged by all their talk of "criminalizing poverty" and a "white supremacist" justice system.

See, last summer when Antifa and hordes of lawless blacks were burning, looting, vandalizing, and shooting, I didn't see white elites calling for law and order. I didn't see owners of luxury goods businesses exercising their power in the Chamber of Commerce to force Jenny Durkan, Ted Wheeler, Jacob Frey, London Breed, Keisha Lance Bottoms, Eric Garcetti, Lori Lightfoot, and other miscreant mayors to increase police powers and restore order.

I want to know whether these suicidal white elites have had enough, whether they are willing to concede that they were wrong–I want to know if the chickens have come home to roost for them. If not, if they are willing to be robbed, burglarized, carjacked, beaten, shot, invaded, and so on, and still maintain that criminals should not have to pay bail, be prosecuted, sent to prison, and so on, because they are "black," then we are all fucked.

More than a thousand people have been killed so far in Chicago; are you so fucking indifferent to that carnage that you are willing to say that the KKK is behind it? You insult all the black men and women whom the KKK did terrorize before the CRM, and all those who have been murdered, raped, stabbed, robbed, beaten, and brutalized by the thugs and criminals and monsters in their neighborhoods.

You probably live some pampered existence in which you don't know anybody who owns a business, you don't know anybody who has been robbed, carjacked, beaten, invaded, or shot. You look at whites who suffer at the hands of lawless blacks and applaud; since you don't care about law-abiding black people who suffer at the hands of lawless blacks, or even about the lawless blacks who suffer at the hands of other lawless blacks, you work yourself up into indignation over the idea that the KKK still terrorizes blacks.

But do you think you're exempt from crime? You think the public places you frequent and the business you patronize will never be hit? You think that, because you live miles away from the ghetto, lawless blacks won't invade your part of town? You think that, because you shout "BLM," no black hoodlum will ever rob you? You think that, because of your political beliefs, no lawless black will ever cross your path and fuck you up? What kind of perverse, hate-filled monster are you that you don't expect black people to abide by the law?

You must think they are your moral inferiors or, if you are black, that you are morally inferior to all other races, because you don't expect blacks or yourself to want to live in a decent, orderly society, where criminals and predators, whatever their race, are put in prison.

But my bet is you're white—know why I think that? You've got one of those "genderless" first names that only middle-class white people give to their daughters, and that have three purposes: to indicate that this is a white girl, not a black girl; to indicate that this is a white girl from a privileged family, not white trash; and to try to deflect "sexism," even though everybody knows white boys don't have such stupid names—they all have clearly masculine names.

But really, "Mace"? How fucking perverse of your parents to name you after a chemical weapon.

But by all means, tell me that I sound absurd. No matter how many people around you are mugged, robbed, burgled, knifed, shot, run over, no matter how many people have their businesses ruined, you will be fine.

Enjoy your delusions, you racist.

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Brigitte Gabriel's Epic and Brilliant Answer To "Most Muslims Are Peacef...

#brigitte gabriel #radical islam

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CAN WE SHUT TEN THOUSAND PROGRESSIVE MOUTHS?

#shakespeare #laurence olivier #henry v #st. crispin's day speech #hamlet #jean simmons #western civilization

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Friendly reminder: I am not a birthing person, or a uterus-haver, or someone with a cervix. I am a woman, a whole and complete human being, fearfully and wonderfully made, and I will fight anyone who tries to define me by reducing me to my parts.

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I’m feeling suicidal

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Associationism: A postmortem for liberal decency

In the last half decade, liberal political writing has undergone a profound seachange. This has infected all strata of media: from braindead outlets like Adbusters, to intentionally digestible pap such as USA Today, to our august papers of record (only two of which remain; one is owned by the world’s richest man), all the way up to self-styled intellectual journals and peer-reviewed scholarship. This change can even be found in literal children’s media and grade school curricula. It deserves to be examined.

For lack of a better term, I refer to this shift as an adoption of associationism. Cause and effect has been abandoned as an analytical frame. The devices that used to be relied upon to adjudicate cause and effect, such as scientific method, statistical analysis, balanced reporting, and even basic “X leads to Y” logic, have likewise been marked as problematic vectors of evil.

Now, you might say this has been a long time coming. Scientific method has been used to design and excuse a bevy of historical wrongs, and balanced reporting is often deployed to obscure morally unambiguous phenomena. Those are fair points, but an astute observer will notice that these adjudication mechanisms are still deployed within liberal discourse, just that they are now used only selectively. Rigor and attention to context are now considered problematic–white, male, cis-normative, whatever–and this allows for otherwise inherently evil mechanisms of truth adjudication to be deployed only when they are guaranteed to enforce the desired narrative, often by writers who are shamelessly fabricating evidence. I mean, why not? It’s fascism to be fact checked, after all. 

Importantly, moral and factual correctness have become collapsed into one another. A statement or belief is True to the extent that it is Right, and vice versa. There exist no confounding variables or contradictory phenomena. The liberal writer’s job, therefore, is to center their own subjective perception (referred to as “lived experience”) or the subjective perception of someone in a supposedly more marginalized position, and then craft a narrative that puts this perception beyond all moral (and therefore factual) reproach. 

The liberal writer’s process is, generally, as follows:

Zero in on a moral outrage of some kind, be it pressing and manifest or petty and completely subjective–everything has the same weight within this frame. 

Narrate this outrage via the “lived experience” of a subject who shares the writer’s opinion.

Cherrypick a handful of statistics, studies, or expert opinions that appear to lend validity to the writer’s understanding of the outrage, being careful to ignore any context or ambiguities that might soften or even fully discredit the outrage. 

Demonize anyone or anything that problematizes–through their opinions or their existence–the writer’s understanding of the outrage. This is achieved typically by associating the problematizer with supposedly empowered groups, who are evil.

Clarify in no uncertain terms: anyone who does not share this outrage is a member of the evil groups, even if they are very literally not a member of those groups. 

This has all been framed as a form of radical moral clarity, providing space for marginalized voices to express their once-unutterable truths, which will in turn bring about the changes this country desperately needs. But, oh no, it turns out that every media organization in this country is stolidly against any actual reform. All of our major presses and news outlets are still owned by austere capitalist psychos, including the aforementioned richest human being in the history of the world. Universities are still MBA-run shitholes that would have students march into incinerators the moment that doing so became more profitable than providing them with resources for identity affirmation. And media aggregation–the manner through which words appear before people’s eyes, 90-odd percent of the time via a screen–is controlled by a small handful of the most megalomaniacal companies on earth. 

So, while we have indeed radically changed our practices of communication and truth adjudication, doing so has not resulted in any radical social changes, or even really any structural changes whatsoever. We’ve just made it radically more difficult to come to an honest understanding of the causes of social malignancies, which in turn has made it radically more easy for the vampires who run this country to make everyone else’s lives radically worse. Radical, dude!

There is no idea so cruel or horrible that it cannot be made to appear progressive under this new frame. Come up with any hypothetical, no matter how evil, and within a few seconds a media-savvy reader should be able to fashion an adequately woke headline: 

Hypothetical examples: 

Abolishing school lunch programs: “Should We Really Be Nourishing White Bodies?”

Pro-female genital mutilation: “The Inherent Transphobia of Those Who Oppose ‘Female Circumcision.’” 

Let’s start using napalm again: “Once Considered an Effective Tool of Precision Warfare, Napalm Was Demonized by Those Who Fear Non-Normative Bodies”

Indian Residential Schools: “Sheltered From Whiteness, These Communities Were a Place Where Native Excellence Could Thrive”

Here we see the Associative aspect of Associationism. Cause and effect no longer exist, and so malignancy is a contagion, the result of the presence of bad people who cause badness. Members of statistically majoritarian groups are presumed to be empowered, and therefore oppressive. And since majoritarian groups contain by definition a majority of people, you will be sure to find their members among the detractors of your position. And even if the members of that majority make up a minority of your detractors, that’s still okay, because context is a white supremacist construct used to obscure moral clarity, and you just so happen to be the arbiter of morality by virtue of being yourself. 

Now, to be fair, not every piece written in this style is done in the pursuit of abject evil. Some are, but a solid plurality are instead written in an attempt to remediate a genuine social wrong. The trouble is, they’re being printed in venues controlled by people who do not desire reform; written in thrall to a political party that does not desire reform; and reliant upon the subjective perspectives of academics, politicians, and NGO bloodsuckers who do not desire reform. This leads, inevitably, to an understanding of social problems that occludes all possibility of reform, only now the discoursal boundaries are so droolingly retarded that you cannot mention the fact that these discussions do not contain even a hypothetical description of how reform might take place.

The point is, radically altering the manner in which social problems are understood, measured, and discussed does not lead–automatically or otherwise–to those social problems being positively addressed. Shifting rhetorical frames can be a precondition for change, yes, but it can just as easily be a means of calcifying the status quo. Unequivocally, our embrace of associationism has accomplished the latter.  

We can easily discern the utility of associationism so far as our elite castes are concerned: it’s getting harder and harder to simply deny the existence of malignancies, so instead let’s just insist that everyone understand them in the dumbest possible way. Their popularity among the non-elites is due primarily to American Puritanism: the more upsetting and uncomfortable something makes us feel, the more we assume it must be working. 

But Puritanism is a two-way street, and the true believers tend to be the ones at the base of the food chain. Regular folx will go through the motions in an earnest desire to do something, anything, to cleanse themselves of whatever horrible brutality video they found on their timeline this morning. They can be annoying, but you can’t blame them. The real malignancy of associationism is how it’s allowed a small group of conniving cocksuckers a means of enhancing their professional status by making their cruelest impulses appear progressive.

I started this essay with the intention of digging deep into Chris Lehmann’s abominable TNR piece in which he insists that the men driven mad and homeless after participating in our genocide in Vietnam were actually doing greviance politics. By the time I finished, he had been very thoroughly destroyed. I still think it’ll be worth the effort to do a deep dive to show the machinations of his horrific essay, but has already gone long so I’ll save that for later this week. 

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When a radical feminist is right, she’s fucking right.   This is so hot I’d listen to her rave about rape culture until she wore herself out, and then I’d say, “I love eating pussy.”

This is the best think I woke up to. I love how women are being more upfront about this shit. The more women that continue to push back and call out this bs the more progress can be made!

#terf

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The concert and the audience…

#beautiful girl #classical music

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#sigourney weaver

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I suppose that “statistically safer” means that each year more black women die after the baby is due but before she can give birth or during birth than die while having an abortion; and we are asked to believe that this difference has nothing to do with the intrinsically greater variations in the point in time at which, and so in the developmental stage at which, the baby is aborted, nor anything to do with the intrinsically greater variations in health that can increase the likelihood of a particular woman or particular type of woman dying in childbirth than in having an abortion, but instead that race and race alone makes the difference because.   But even if that were so, what does the statement mean? Does it mean that, since the chances for continuing to live once she gets pregnant are so much higher if she gets an abortion than if she waits to give birth that, wishing to live at any cost, every black woman should just abort every pregnancy, because that way every black woman will have at least eliminated one of the racial dangers they face?  

 On the presumption that whenever any institution compares actuarial rates of mortality, they address their findings to people's basic sense of self-preservation, even if they know that not everyone has the will to act upon that desire, it seems proper to infer that, indeed, PPBC's officials do intend black women to infer that, in the interests of self-preservation, the statistically more rational course is to abort every pregnancy—not because every pregnancy is bound to kill, but because taking the chance is like playing Russian Roulette.  

 So, Black Women of America, choose life—only losers play Reproductive Racial Roulette; don't let the propaganda for Black Motherhood make you willing to die for the sake of giving birth to black babies—your life isn't worth that.

 That's how PPBC wants Black Women in America to roll: self-genocide is health care.  Leibefrüchtentôtung Ist Negernimmermütternlebenshut—killing the fruits of the womb is protecting the life of black nevermothers.  Abortion Is Health Care.  Say It Loud:  I'm Vacuumed and Proud!  

 I will never stop saying it:  progressives treat everybody like niggers—whether you are a man or a woman, black or white, straight or gay, ally or opponent, stranger or lover, and no matter how close in their affections and fixed in their loyalties titles like mother, father, brother, sister, child, lover, friend, or neighbor might have given you reason to believe you stood, they hold that you have no rights they need to respect, that they have the indefeasible prerogative to treat people without the use of any consistently and universally known and applied principle, ideal, value, standard, measure, scale, limit, proportions, rules, codes, policies, regulations, concepts, frameworks of interpretation, traditions, customs, conventions, or decorum; they want to reduce everyone to the position of never being able to know what moral or legal construction they, the progressives, will put on any act, of knowing that neither intention nor innocence nor inadvertence nor any other reality can limit their exposure to charges of the highest magnitude because all realities have been assimilated to the concepts that denote the evil extremes and the presumption of culpability, and that no principle of any sort requires proportion of any sort between violation under color of graduated measures and punishment under color of your abominable sub-humanity.  

#progressive racism #abortion #black women #planned parenthood

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My Dinner with Andre - Full Movie

                                                                                   Emma Grove                                                              3 months ago                                                      The one thing that always puzzled me about this film is that the main character claims he's a poor, struggling actor/writer, and Andre talks long and hard about getting back to the basics of human existence and giving up the comforts of life, and yet they eat at a fancy, posh, probably enormous expensive restaurant and eat quail and drink expensive wine. For all his pretentious dialogue, Andre is more than content to have others wait on him and dismiss them while he sips his fine wine. At heart, he's a bourgeois intellectual. Even back then, their dinner must have cost fifty dollars each, minimum.                          15                                                                                                                                eightfootmanchild                                                              3 months ago                                                      I think Andre realizes that. That’s part of why he feels terrible - he’s a man of internal contradiction, who does feel like a hypocrite. When the main course arrives, that’s when his attitude really shifts, and he starts being honest with how he feels.                          3                                                                                                                          Julius Ashcroft                                                              3 months ago                                                      One person cannot express himself in dialogue; and André's stories aren't pretentious—to what could he be pretending?  He's not some illiterate schlub who, during the Q&A session at a lecture by a famous author, tries to impress him by using words like transcendental, phenomenological, or Weltschmerz, though it is clear to educated people that he doesn't understand them.  And I hate to tell you, but most intellectuals are from comfortable middle-class homes—Marx did.  And you know why that is?  Because you need money quite in excess of the money necessary for comfortable subsistence to have the leisure necessary for the liberal reading and conversation that produces intellect.  You appear to think that when you describe someone as "bourgeois," your condemnation cannot be rebutted.                          4                                                                                                                          Emma Grove                                                              3 months ago                                                       @Julius Ashcroft My comment absolutely has been rebutted, and I welcome it. I just found it ironic that while Andre is talking about shucking off the comforts of life he's sipping expensive wine and dining on quail (an incredibly rare, expensive dish served only at upscale restaurants ... try ordering it at any diner or chain restaurant). His friend Wally is struggling (basically poor). What's interesting is Andre, who has always known the secure comfort that comes from wealth, is toying with casting it aside to try to find spiritual truth, which is great, but poor people don't have the luxury of this. For them, living a bare bones, simple, grim life is not elective, it's their only option with the resources they have. Rich people choosing to dabble in it is somewhat insulting, because they can always cast THAT aside, too, and go back to their penthouses (and dine on quail and sip expensive wine at an upscale restaurant). Wally will not give up his electric blanket because it's his one comfort in his harsh world. I find Wally to be a more sincere, honest person, and Andre a hypocrite.                          8                                                                                                                          Emma Grove                                                              3 months ago                                                       @eightfootmanchild This comment already has a few rebuttals, which I think is awesome. I like your comment, because you're right... He's a man of contradictions, which, when I think about it, we ALL are. Like a person who drives a gas-guzzling SUV and recycles, or a dozen other example. I guess NONE of us really live up to our own ideals, which maybe is one of the points of the movie. Your comment gave me something to think about the next time I watch this.                          5                                                                                                                          Julius Ashcroft                                                              3 months ago (edited)                                                       @Emma Grove Yes, the contrast between his talk and the scene is noteworthy, though I'm not sure it's ironic; and I don't think André is a hypocrite.  I'm not sure, either, that you help yourself to get at the thing that troubles you by contrasting comfortable André to the poor.

The problem is something like this:  sages have always taught people that wealth tends to corrupt because it alienates people from both the hard and the splendid realities of the elemental human condition.  That's the basic moral of the story of Shakyamuni's pampered upbringing and the four sights.  In the Hellenistic period, the Cynics and the Epicureans were both philosophical schools that appealed to men and women suffering in spite of their wealth to return to nature.

In As You Like It, Duke Frederick usurps the throne of his older brother, Duke Senior, and Duke Senior goes into exile, taking up residence, with his men, in the Forest of Arden.  At the beginning of Act II, DS says:

Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,

Hath not old custom made this life more sweet

Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods

More free from peril than the envious court?

Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,

The seasons' difference; as the icy fang

And churlish chiding of the winter's wind,

Which when it bites and blows upon my body,

Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say

'This is no flattery; these are counsellors

That feelingly persuade me what I am.'

Sweet are the uses of adversity,

Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,

Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,

Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

I would not change it.

This is one of the most famous speeches in Shakespeare;  it doesn't call for anyone to go back to nature, but it is part of a traditional poetic theme: the spiritual and moral difference between country and court.

André's attitudes don't stem from the Cynics or Epicureans, but distantly from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's work. He made a name for himself with the publication of his Discourse On The Arts and Sciences, in which he argued that the arts and sciences had not improved, but corrupted human beings; the famous first line of On The Social Contract is, "Man is born free, and is everywhere in chains."  Frederic Schiller and other romantic poets and writers were profoundly disturbed by the new industrial society that they considered to be an assault upon our natural capacities for full development, and they tried to develop an understanding of our elemental and integral relation to nature that, not being able to undo the dominion of the new type of society, would allow us at least some way for regular replenishment.

I was going to go on, but found myself struggling to remember certain things, so I decided to look up "back to nature movement 19th century," and came across this book review:   https://www.csmonitor.com/1983/1215/121523.html You'll find it interesting.

At any rate, you might want to consider whether André is a hypocrite, or someone really struggling with an important problem that he doesn't know how to do justice to; and that he's in that restaurant not because he doesn't really believe in the ideal, but because that's just where people with his money go.

After all, there are certain rich people who just love the company of ascetics, and certain ascetics who just love practicing abstinence while sitting on plush silk cushions.  That's not because they're hypocrites; it's because they don't live for that enjoyment, but they enjoy it because it is enjoyable.

But their rich hosts aren't necessarily hypocrites—they're not like Jesus' rich man who pretended to be interested in eternal life but was unwilling to renounce his riches for it; like most of us, they really enjoy noble talk and enjoy lavishing attentions on people who have what seem to them noble ideals; and when they do go on noble quests, they very often use their lavish means to bring their gurus and teachers to wider attention.  

But in general they don't give up their wealth because they would be rather lost without it; after all, if you don't know how to live poor, poor people will find you exasperating because they don't have time to take the trouble to school your fucking ass.  Even if you sincerely want to learn, it will take a long time to acquire the common sense you need, so you're really unreliable.  So if you're rich, you're better off keeping your riches if you're not going to join a monastery, because without the riches you'll just be in everybody's way,.

And don't be romantic about poor people—I'm not sure what you think is poor, but I grew up in a working-class neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago (b. 1957), and though we never went hungry, and some people were worse off than we were, we didn't begrudge rich people their riches.   My experience with poor people is that they don't at all find anything wrong with great inequalities in wealth, they just hate people who acquire wealth by fucking them or other people over.  That's generally why socialists and communists tend to find followers only in the middle class: working people would like to be rich, they just want to get rich honestly, without fucking people over.   And no matter how well or poorly they fare in life, they tend to think that, so long as they haven't fucked anybody over, things are all right.  

That's also why poor people who win the lottery tend to blow it all—they lavish the money on people they love to give them high enjoyments, or they blow it on hare-brained business schemes, or they piss it away in a storm of their vices, usually gambling and drugs.  But when they find themselves back where they started, they're not unhappy.  

I hate to sound trite, but it really is people, not things, who make life enjoyable, and you can learn to enjoy others and yourself under any circumstances.   That doesn't mean that people in poverty and hardship should accept their lot, but it does mean that, if you don't know how to find enjoyment in others, the enjoyment you take in splendid things will be troubled.   Mind you, I'm not saying that you haven't seen anything that you are justified in finding puzzling or troubling and that justifies sympathizing more with Shawn than André, just that you're working with too few considerations to get at it.  

I'll stop preaching. A parting observation.  I haven't seen the film since it first came out, and haven''t watched this upload yet, but the thing that has  stuck with me for almost forty years is the moment when André recalls looking at a photograph of his wife one day and suddenly seeing, for the first time, a profound sadness underneath her smile.  Since then I've seen that contrast many a time in others' faces, in life or in photograph, and even once in a photograph of myself taken several years earlier.  

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WHEN TIKTOK WORLDS COLLIDE 1

#tik tok #small waist pretty face with a big bank #patriarchy