Two quick analogies about leftist thought processes
I realized today that there are two perfect analogies for leftists: Primitive doggy logic and mad monarch behavior. Let me explain….
We’ve been installing new vinyl flooring over the broken, ugly tiles in the bathroom. The process requires that, after placing the board in position, you get a large mallet and strike the edges really hard to lock the boards together. My dog recognized that this hammering was an act of violence but, instead of attacking the person wielding the mallet, he kept attacking the mallet itself.
It occurred to me that leftists have the same primitive thought process as dogs when it comes to guns. Guns, like mallets, are just a tool. It’s the person wielding the gun, whether carelessly or malevolently, who takes an inanimate object and transforms it into something dangerous.
As Robert A. Heinlein said, “There are no dangerous weapons; there are only dangerous men.”
My second analogy came about because of the madness attendant upon San Francisco attacking Lowell High School, the oldest school west of the Mississippi, one of the best public schools in America, and a school that requires high academic standards as a prerequisite for admission. In my day, you had to grade into Lowell from junior high school. Nowadays, kids have to test into Lowell.
The problem for the left is that black students don’t get into Lowell at the same rate as other students. This is especially true when compared to Asian students, who study a minimum of three times as long as students of other races. Leftists have been trying to destroy Lowell for decades, but now they think they’re on the verge of succeeding. Flush with the success of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Wuhan virus to move all the meters in America, several San Francisco commissioners put together a resolution aimed at ending Lowell’s special academic status and turning it into just another lousy San Francisco public high school.
This destructive impulse, of course, is typical for leftists. Rather than raise people up, they tear everything down. Winston Churchill had two pertinent quotations about socialism’s impulse to drag everyone down into the gutter: “Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy” and “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
There’s more going on with the resolution, though, than mere socialism. There’s also a walk on the insane side when it comes to defining racism. Once upon a time, racism meant that blacks were enslaved or, slavery ended, they were denied their civil rights. That is, because of their skin color, governments and private institutions systematically denied them the benefits of citizenship.
Racist whites also treated blacks with overt and extreme disrespect and cruelty that fundamentally denied their humanity. Incidentally, that kind of racism occurred against other religious and ethnic groups in America over the centuries, with the Irish, Jews, Italians, Hispanics, Asians, all targeted at one time or another. (Indeed, Jewish and Asian targeting continues to this day within the Democrat party.) With blacks, though, the hatred had a longer lineage and was tightly tied to Democrat policies that institutionalized that specific racism.
Everything I described in the above paragraphs is abhorrent and should never be part of a free — and civil — society.
But that kind of racism is not what the San Francisco commissioners describe in their resolution. They’re off in la-la land and want to correct the situation with a Maoist style struggle session against Lowell going back to the school’s founding in 1856:
Several commissioners announced that the school is a center of “ongoing, pervasive, systemic racism.” Why? Because relatively few minorities qualify for Lowell; “Black, Latinx, and Samoan Pacific Islander students” don’t feel “physically, emotionally or culturally safe and valued at Lowell”; there were “microaggressions”; and Ibram X. Kendi says anything that shows that non-Whites and non-Asians don’t do as well academically is inherently racist.
For those, and other race-hustler reasons, the commissioners resolved that Lowell should become a regular high school with a lottery admission beginning in the fall of 2021. Oh, and it will also be subject to a Maoist struggle session review “to address the exclusion and ongoing toxic racist abuse that students of color, specifically Black students, have experienced at Lowell High School since the school’s creation.”
Reading the resolution, I suddenly realized that leftists in 2021, from the White House on down to San Francisco politicos, remind me of mad monarchs. Some of those monarchs, like the Hapsburgs, were mad due to centuries of inbreeding. By the late 16th century, they were routinely giving birth to children who were retarded, insane, or horribly disfigured. Charles II of Spain provides a nice example of the physical damage wrought by inbreeding:
Not only was he physically deformed, making it difficult for him to eat or talk, but he also had a markedly subpar intellect.
Some monarchs, though, were literally made mad by power. Lord Acton nailed it when he said “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
People need limits in their lives. Anyone who has ever seen a spoiled child knows that these children are deeply unhappy, miserably vicious, and extreme in their rages and demands. Now imagine taking that child and subjecting it to a lifetime of having its every want, need, or desire granted. You will quickly see that you’ve created a dangerous monster. Go through any list of worst rulers (this one for example), and you’ll see how damaging it is when people’s desires are always unopposed.
That’s where leftists are right now. In 2020, thanks to the Wuhan virus and BLM, they manipulated themselves into complete power and, having gained that power, they have lost their grip on sanity. Unless reality intervenes in a way leftists must address, nothing will stop their mad dash into a lunatic world, one in which “science means whatever I say it means,” the economy is no longer constrained by inexorable rules of supply and demand, race becomes the only metric by which to judge people (and whites and Jews are inherently evil), borders serve no purpose, etc.
Nations do not fare well when madmen are at the helm. And as a reminder, while Trump may have had an eccentric personal style, everything he did was within the rule of law, and the mainstream of American, Western, and human history. It was those who opposed him who had abandoned norms. Like the narcissist, who says that anyone who opposes his abuse is at fault for the resulting fights, the left used its media control to announce that anyone who challenged its anti-science, racist, anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian dictates was evil.
So, there are my analogies: Leftists have the logic of dogs (although, unlike dogs, they’re not lovable and useful) and, when they gain power, they lapse into madness.
Image: Lowell High School.