Bookworm Beat 6/18/20 — Idle thoughts of an irritated mind

I’m in a Festivus mood: My Airing of the Grievances has me saying “I got a lotta problems with you leftists, and now you’re going to hear about it!”

Sometimes victim-blaming is appropriate: I found the following statement circulating among my leftist friends on Facebook and it irritated me more than it ought to have:

WHEN PEOPLE SAY THAT IF RAYSHARD BROOKS HAD NOT RESISTED ARREST HE WOULD BE ALIVE TODAY, IT MAKES ME SICK. IT REMINDS ME OF WHEN PEOPLE USED TO SAY THAT IF SHE HADN’T WORK THAT SKIRT SHE WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN RAPED. IT’S CALLED BLAMING THE VICTIM.

No. Just no. Morally wrongful “blaming the victim” happens when someone is doing something safe, innocuous, and normal, and nevertheless falls afoul of an evil criminal, only to have people say “You shouldn’t have walked your dog in a safe neighborhood in broad daylight,” “You shouldn’t have worn clothes that are slightly form fitting without revealing any flesh,” “You shouldn’t have walked down a street in Atlanta because you’re black.” That’s victim-blaming.

It is not victim-blaming to say that, while the criminal actor must always be blamed, people are nevertheless responsible for their stupid choices. As I always told my daughter, “You don’t dance naked in a Hell’s Angels’ biker bar and then act surprised if you get raped.” Likewise, you don’t brutally attack the police, steal their taser, and try to shoot one of them with the taser, and then have people posthumously say that you weren’t a contributing factor to your own death. Brooks was a victim who deserved to be blamed.

One of the problems with America today is that we’ve told people they’re never responsible for their own choices. Here’s the standard for victim blaming: If any sane, reasonable person would’ve and could’ve known better, you should have too.

Too many American blacks have no father in Heaven or on earth: I’ve always liked The Lord’s Prayer, which I think is beautiful poetry. Lately, I’ve had the first line running through my head: “Our Father, who art in Heaven….”

One doesn’t have to be Christian to recognize the important message in that line; namely, that whether we’re talking about the Jewish God or the Christian God, there is a God out there who has sent us a moral code and who will, in this life or the next, judge us for running afoul of it. (And yes, I know that Judaism is a little squishy on Heaven, but I’m with Dennis Prager, who believes that God is too good to be cruel enough to deny his faithful a glorious afterlife given how much yucky stuff we deal with in this life.)

While blacks overall are still a religious people (although their churches have been taken over by leftism; see, i.e., Rev. Jeremiah Wright), I suspect that criminally-inclined black men do not believe that their lives are being overseen by a moral and, at the end of the day, judgmental God. For them, there is no divine presence keeping them on the path of righteousness.

Leftism killed God, their father.

Leftism also killed their actual fathers. Over 70% of black children have no biological father in their life. This means that they’re more likely to live in poverty. It means that they’re at greater risk of getting assaulted or killed by their mother’s boyfriends. And it means that girls are more likely to be promiscuous and boys are more likely to be criminals. Also, and this is my theory with no data to back it up, just a gut feeling, boys are more likely to be homosexuals or claim to be transgendered because they over-identify with their mothers.

Dad energy is different from mom energy. Moms nurture but dads guide. Dads tell their daughters how beautiful they are, so the daughter doesn’t go from one man to another seeking the affirmation all women need from a loving man. And dads tell their sons to be strong and loyal and hard-working.

Dads do important negative things as well. They scare predatory men away from their daughters. It’s unlikely that the Muslim rape and prostitution gangs in England would have fared as well as they did if the girls on whom they preyed had fathers who would have stood up for them. My understanding is that most of the girls didn’t.

Another “negative” thing dads do is scare the living daylights out of a boy when he commits some petty crime and his parents have to pick him up from the police station. Moms are sympathetic and might even blame the police. Dads, though, are punitive. A good dad will come down on his son like a ton of bricks, even while letting the boy know he still loves him.

In the black community, 70% of kids don’t have the loving, positive dad or the angry, negative dad in their lives. It’s just mom, and maybe a bunch of half-siblings. When these kids look up at the sky, they don’t imagine a Heaven in which there’s a loving, positive God or a moral, judgmental God. There’s just space. Nothing, absolutely nothing, constrains kids who feel unloved and unwatched.

This is what leftism has done to the black community with its hatred for faith and its relentless push to get black women on welfare, making dads extraneous. I’ve said before that, while President Trump’s crime bill might indeed put more criminals back on the street, its saving grace could be that it puts more dads back in the home, especially the black home.

I think John Roberts is being blackmailed. Some people think John Roberts hates Trump, which is why he consistently rules against Trump on things that matter to Democrats. I don’t think that’s what’s going on because he started this pattern early, long before Trump.

Roberts is either a really weak conservative or, as I believe, he’s being blackmailed (my feeling is that it’s about his children). That’s why he’s conservative on the edges but, whenever it really matters to the leftists, suddenly he comes out strong as an activist justice who has no time for the Constitution or the laws of this land.

And yes, of course I know that my claim that he’s being blackmailed about his adopted children is completely unfounded. I’m not arguing otherwise. This is a feeling, not a theory.

I’m running out of things not to buy and places not to go. Chick-fil-A’s CEO announced that I need to wash black people’s feet. No, they can wash their own feet.

I’m not surprised, though. Remember the kerfuffle when it turned out that the Chick-fil-A Foundation was run by a hard leftist? Management pretended to be surprised by that revelation, but they’re not that stupid. Chick-fil-A has figured out that, if it promotes a few overtly Christian behaviors, it can get away with leftist murder.

I won’t go to Chick-fil-A anymore.

I don’t ever want to shop from Amazon again, given that it refuses to support mainstream conservative causes and that Bezos doesn’t want customers who don’t support the Black Lives Matter movement. I support the civil rights of every individual in America. I do not support a hard-left group that’s using race in lieu of class as a way to impose Marxist ideology on America. Screw you, Bezos.

I’m grateful I’ve never used T-Mobil, which dumped Tucker Carlson because Carlson has said the same things about BLM that I believe.

I never buy Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, or Mrs. Butterworth, so I can’t stop buying them as a way to let their parent companies know that their cowardice is not appreciated.

I won’t stand in line to buy anything other than food or to exercise my Second Amendment rights. It enrages and disgusts me that stores are still meekly going along with edicts limiting the numbers of customers allowed, thereby risking their economic destruction, after the BLM and Antifa marches and riots. There’s no product I want enough to stand in line for other than life’s very basic necessities.

I’m staggered that, judging by my Facebook page, leftists in California are still going along with Gavin Newsom’s edicts. His latest is mandatory masks. I have friends speaking about their gratitude that their children sneaked into their houses to visit them. Again, how in the world can these sheep act that way in light of the marches and riots?

When I run errands I notice three classes of people wearing masks: The elderly, who clearly should; blacks, who probably should (although I do believe that they might need more Vitamin D); and young, affluent white people, who are at low risk and are either virtue-signaling or made totally paranoid by their daily consumption of the New York Times. The Times makes people paranoid and fills them with self-loathing.

Middle-class people risk the most in a cancel culture. We in the middle class have big chains around us. I noticed that in Marin with divorce. The very poor divorced because they were poor before and remained poor afterward. The very rich divorced because they were very rich before and remained very rich afterward. For the middle class, especially women with children, divorce could be an economic death sentence.

It’s the same with being open about our politics. The poor and the rich do not change status when they speak up. Today’s cancel culture means that we in the middle risk everything when we stand against the mob.

Grumble, grumble, grumble. Running errands today soured me.