Bookworm Beat 9/26/17 — the Progressives on Parade edition

With Progressives fighting for cultural ascendance, we are entering an ideological Twilight Zone that’s bad for America, but really great for a blogger.

Progressives on paradeHold onto your hats, my friends, because this is going to be a huge collection of all things interesting, mostly relating to the madness emanating from today’s Progressives. I’ve been compiling posts all day  and I’ve finally bestirred myself to stop collecting and start writing.

Before I dive into my material, though, my friend Wolf Howling sent me an amusing email replete with wonderful links, mostly about those crazy Progressives:

The latest in grievance theater from the dumber than dirt: “Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee kneeled during a speech on the House floor Monday . . . ” as she accused Trump of racism. Of course, she has competition. Take a knee against white supremacy, Dr. Gu. Of course, Paul Joseph Watson hits the right notes:

In what can only be described as a headline for our time: “Far-right lesbian mother of two AGAINST gay marriage is set to take on Angela Merkel after triumph in German elections.”

From Annenberg Public Policy, Only a quarter of Americans surveyed could name the three branches of government. Idiocracy was supposed to be a movie, not prophecy. That said, I am coming to believe that this is not a failure of education, but a goal of substituting social justice, white privilege and white supremacy for civics in k-12.

Instapundit’s latest at USA Today echoes what Bookworm has been saying for years about her Marin neighbors: They get ahead by practicing bourgeois values, but then defend to the death dysfunctional cultures as their equal.

Well, it’s probably cheaper and easier to eat your Tinder date as the barbecue than to take your Tinder date to a barbecue.

Kim Jong Un take note: The Dummies’ Guide to Creating A Fusion Bomb. If only a single fission bomb wasn’t enough to generate a catastrophic electro-magnetic pulse.

The proggies don’t embrace science, they manipulate it. ‘A British University has blocked an academic studying a reported surge in people regretting transgender surgery, claiming a “social media” backlash to the “politically incorrect” research could harm the institution . . .”

Ann Althouse makes a point about experts — in our Founding and in Climate Change. It’s fascinating that the academic in question who rightly stated the facts on a truly arcane point of American history is an academic in Ireland. If you want to find a true student of your nation’s history, seek out a foreigner.

And now to my finds:

Progressives are never responsible. I used to date a man who would periodically lob offensive comments my way. I’d answer back, he’d respond, and before you know it, we were fighting. He told me that all of the fights were my fault. His theory was that, just because he pitched, I didn’t need to swing. In his world, you either agreed with his offensive comment or you offensively started a fight. I thought of that when I read Dennis Prager on the NFL spat:

Apparently, the question, “Who started it?” means nothing to the journalists, politicians and NFL players, coaches and owners who call the president “divisive.”

So, before discussing Trump’s reaction, our fellow Americans on the left need to answer some pretty simple questions: Has the behavior of those athletes has been divisive? Is kneeling while tens of thousands of people are standing divisive? Is publicly showing contempt for the American flag for which innumerable Americans risked their lives, were terribly injured, or died divisive?

The answers are so obvious that if someone denies that those actions are divisive, it inevitably raises another question:

Why would anyone deny it?

Progressives identify the wrong slave masters. One of the things my German father loathed about American football was the stench of the slave auction that hung about it. By the 1970s, no home team really had home team players. Instead, the “home” team was composed of people (as often as not black people) who were bid for at auction and then traded all over the country. Sure, one can say that the players get big salaries in exchange for this indignity, but that merely makes them analogous to house slaves, rather than field slaves.

And who are the slave masters in this human trade? The NFL owners, of course.

Given the reality of American football, it’s therefore incredibly asinine when some Progressive talking head announces that Trump is a slave master over NFL players.

A worthwhile review of Ken Burns’ “Vietnam War” documentary. I’ve done a couple of post on two of the three episodes I’ve watched in the Ken Burns’ documentary, taking the viewer through Kennedy’s assassination. (The posts are here and here.)

Because my brain sometimes seems like a vast, echoing chamber, rather than a repository of useful information, I completely forgot to check out what should have been a “go to” site for insights about the show: Maggie’s Farm, where Bruce Kesler, a Marine who served in Vietnam and worked with John O’Neill to rebut John Kerry’s calumnies, blogs. Bruce hasn’t (yet) offered his own insights, but he does offer an analysis from Dr. Nguyen Ngoc Sang, countering some of the things that Burns says or left unsaid.

One of the main things it reminded me of is the fact that it gives more weight to interviews with Viet Minh and Viet Cong than it does with South Vietnamese military personnel (who are presented as almost uniformly corrupt and inept).  Likewise, the only Americans interviewed are those who thought the war was a bad idea at the time or who have since decided it was a bad idea. No one is interviewed who says that the war was a good idea and, had it been handled competently, would continue to have been a good idea or, at the very least, could have been won.

A black Army officer opines about a practically perfect Constitution in an imperfect world. Wolf Howling already suggested that everyone should read an opinion piece that a black Army officer wrote in which he distinguishes our American system, which is great, from the imperfect people who have over the years implemented or perverted it. If you haven’t taken Wolf Howling up on his suggestion, please take me up on my suggestion that you read it.

“I’m Jeff Sessions, the great and powerful; bow before me!” Honestly, when you look at this photograph of Georgetown faculty members kneeling in protests as Jeff Sessions arrives, doesn’t it look as if they’re all humbling themselves before him?

Our modern Progressives are too dumb and historically illiterate to understand that in all cultures, we take a knee, not in protest, but as a sign of submission. In America, since we bow to no man, we take a knee only to God:

When players on the football field take a knee, they do so to show that they are disarmed in the face of someone’s injury. It’s not a sign of protest or strength; it’s a sign of passivity.

I love seeing all these morons groveling. The more who do it the better. They ought to be bowing down as a confession of their moral and intellectual deficits.

Rich white man Gregg Popovich is right — I do feel uncomfortable. Popovich, a very successful white guy who coaches the San Antonio Spurs, has embraced the “white privilege” narrative. He now argues that the protests are a good thing insofar as they “make people uncomfortable ” Indeed, he feels that “people have to be made to feel uncomfortable.” Obviously, he means white people.

And you know what? I am uncomfortable. I’m uncomfortable watching people expose to the world their stupidity, pettiness, anti-Americanism, and ignorance in exactly the same way I’m uncomfortable at a restaurant watching stupid, vulgar people acting out or when I see someone have an unfortunate mishap, such as someone with toilet paper trailing from the back of their pants. It’s deeply uncomfortable to see people actively or passively embarrass themselves.

That’s how I feel uncomfortable. Are you satisfied, Gregg?

VDH reminds us how grotesquely dishonest Obama’s minions were and are. As the Progressives increase the frenzied pace of their attacks against Trump and his administration, never mind that the attacks keep coming up dry, Victor Davis Hanson turns his attention to the four most dishonest people in the Obama administration. They were dishonest then and they’re doubling down on their dishonesty now.

A West Point cadet too dumb and dangerous to have a gun. You’ve heard about Spenser Rapone’s celebration of all things communist, despite his being a West Point grad and currently serving Infantry Officer, right? In addition to the fact that he’s committed gross military infractions by aggressively advocating a political viewpoint, I’d just like to say that anybody who believes what he believes is too dumb and too dangerous to have a gun, let alone be a leader of men (and women).

Daniel Greenfield on the self-serving mythology Progressives are building around Hillary’s defeat. Trust Daniel Greenfield to come up with an important historic concept and apply it perfectly to a modern American political ideology. The concept is “Dolchstosslegende or the Stab-in-the-Back theory,” the idea that Germans seized in the aftermath of WWI to explain their defeat. Basically, they satisfied themselves that it had nothing to do with their policies. It was everybody else’s fault. Having stated the premise, Greenfield beautifully develops it:

Hillary has become another Hindenburg touting her own Dolchstosslegende. Her latest book, ‘What Happpened’, will put the Dolchstosslegende into print. It will list everyone who lost the election for her. ‘What Happened’ may be an awkward title, but calling it ‘Mein Kampaign’ might have been a bit much.

The Hillary Dolchstosslegende tearing apart our country passes itself off as patriotism. The Nazis claimed that they were patriots too. But Dolchstosslegendes aren’t patriotic. They’re exercises in divisiveness by losers who don’t want to take responsibility for their stupidity, incompetence and hypocrisy.

Hillary went from pressing a reset button with one of Putin’s minions to a posthumous political campaign claiming that Putin had rigged the election. Never mind that even if Russian hackers did leak Podesta’s emails, less than 1% of Americans have any idea who Podesta is or cared about the contents of his chats. But Podesta’s emails embarrassed the future promoters of the Dolchstosslegende.

And that’s why the Dolchstosslegende’s humiliated inventors are obsessed with their own emails.

Two revolutions that didn’t eat their own. On a vaguely related subject, you’ve probably noticed, if you’ve studied history, that revolutions always eat their own. The first generation revolutionaries breed a second, more fanatic and purist generation, and that generation attacks the revolution’s originators. We’re certainly seeing the truth of this principle when we watch blacks turn on the Democrats, Hollywood people turn on Hillary, dykes turn on Jews, etc. Having grabbed the spoils, they’re now fighting over them.

The only exceptions I can think of to this principle are Britain’s Glorious Revolution in 1688 and the American Revolution. I think that’s because these were the only two revolutions ever in which the revolutionaries were dedicated — truly dedicated, not just mouthing slogans — to individual liberty. All other revolutions have been power struggles between two entities determined to take complete control of a nation and its people.

Speaking of power-hungry revolutionaries. While the Progressives are taking to the streets, the Deep State continues its power grab through the medium of agencies that essentially pass laws without public or Congressional input:


Of cows, milk, men, and women. If you were a girl, did your mom or dad always say “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” whenever the subject of premarital sex arose? Mine did. It turns out that good old mom and dad were right:

In a nutshell, over the past few decades, the traditional relationship exchange has broken down. It used to be that men and women each had something the other really needed. Men needed access to sex. Women needed access to resources. Men couldn’t get steady access to sex unless they had resources to offer, so they worked hard for them. The partnership between men and women was a grand bargain that (usually) left both sides better off.

For men, sex was traditionally expensive. The price tag was a long-term commitment to provide for a woman (and children). But today, sex is cheap. And that changes everything.

This is the premise of a bracing new book, Cheap Sex, by American sociologist Mark Regnerus. Sex got cheap because of three technological developments: the advent of the Pill, which divorced fertility from sex; the onset of mass-produced, high-quality pornography; and the arrival of online dating sites, which make it easy for men to find willing sex partners.

Sexual liberation is a fabulous thing – in some ways. But it can also turn men into louts, because women don’t expect much in return for access. Today, most men can have all the sex they want for very little cost – no fancy dinner required. The irony, as Mr. Regnerus writes, is that today’s mating market is probably more dominated by men’s interests than ever before.

[snip]

A lot of women seem to have their act together these days. But a lot of men don’t. “I think the greatest, most astonishing fact that I am aware of in social science right now is that women have been able to hear the labour market screaming out ‘You need more education’… and men have not,” MIT economics professor Michael Greenstone says in Cheap Sex.

What might explain this puzzling fact? Men don’t have to prove themselves as providers any more. They can get all the sex they want anyway – including online porn on demand that can make the real thing feel mildly disappointing. (Ask younger women about men and porn. You’ll get an earful.)

Like it or not, women have always been the gatekeepers for sex – not because they don’t like sex, too, but because (no matter what you learned in gender studies) men’s sex drive is innately higher. This means it’s up to us to make the rules. “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” my father used to say. It drove me crazy when he said that. Now, it’s dawned on me that he was right.

And to leave things on a low (but funny) note, did you know about the Mad Pooper? The Mad Pooper is a story that’s been out for a while. In Colorado Springs, in a nice neighborhood, a family became aware that, once a week, a woman would jog up to their home in the morning, pull down her pants, poop, and run away. They videotaped the woman and publicized the tape asking for help identifying the woman. They also got the police involved. The story, natch, went viral.

Well, today, it ratcheted up to a whole new level of disturbing humor when a man purporting to be the Mad Pooper’s representative came out with a defense:

He said Shirley is sorry for desecrating people’s lawns but claimed her actions are not her fault.  He said she has a traumatic brain injury and after gender reassignment surgery, can no longer control herself.

The “spokesman” also claimed that her actions are protected under the First Amendment and the government cannot control where and when she relieves herself.  He compared the action to breastfeeding in public.

You do realize that, for someone like me, it’s hard to find anything more wonderful than a single sentence that contains those three phrases: “traumatic brain injury,” “gender reassignment surgery,” and “can no longer control herself.” That pretty much sums up the whole problem I see with the transgender movement and its enablers.

I do find it disturbing, though, that this man is incapable of understanding the difference between breastfeeding, which pours nourishment into a child, and public defecation, which deposits bacteria laden, odoriferous mounds on the street. It’s bad enough when people don’t pick up after their dogs (which is normative in my community); it’s revolting when they don’t pick up after themselves.

Photo credit: D.C. Women’s March by Liz Lemon. Creative Commons license; some rights reserved.