Category Archives: Culture

Their God is Dead

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I love stories like this one. The staggering lack of self-awareness by our elites is breathtaking at times. A good bookend to that story is this one from earlier in the week. Put the two together and we have smart people holding all the same prejudices as everyone else, but acting on them in a covert way. That is unless they try to automate their decision making, then those prejudices come percolating up as the efficiency of the machine drops the pretense, signally and customs. The HAL9000 in question was just following the logic of its programming, which will always reflect the logic of its programmer.

I posted a comment on Marginal Revolution where I saw the story. The longer version starts with the understanding that all human societies have an organizing ethic. Religion has usually filled the role to one degree or another. The Greeks had a range of cults based on capricious gods. They also had philosophical schools that reinforced the generally accepted morality. Athens also had a civic ethic that was centered on the assembly. All of this reflected the general understanding, the beliefs, of what it meant to be a Greek and what it meant to be a good Greek. It also provided the enforcement mechanism to keep good Greeks in-line and exclude non-Greeks.

For 1500 years, European people relied upon Christianity to provide the framework of the organizing ethos of the people. The Catholic Church defined what it meant to be moral and elites of Europe particularized it to their time and place. In the 11th century, the life of the peasant, the merchant and the noble was the same across Europe. Language differences and minor customs were different, but the big stuff was the same. Civil society was organized along the same hierarchical lines as the Church. The elites were all devout Catholics and derived their identity from their faith.

That began to change in The 100 years War. National identity began to supplant religious identity. As is always the case, the ruling elites went first. By the end of the war, the idea of an English king of France or even part of France was absurd. The French could only be ruled by the French. The Thirty Years War brought this to the remainder of Europe. More important, national identity became the dominant organizing principle of the ruling elites in Europe for the next 400 years. The blood bath that was The 30 Years War convinced them that war over who defines the one true faith was madness. Christianity began to die in Europe, starting with the ruling classes. The new organizing faith was nationalism.

In America, Christianity remained a central component of the ruling class through the Civil War. If you read the propaganda of the Abolitionists, it is shot through with Christian appeals. The elites of the north truly believed they were on the side of God. The lyrics to the Battle Hymn of the Republic are a good example of the religious fanaticism behind the abolitionist movement. By the end of the war, no one with the IQ of a goldfish could believe they were on the side of angels. From that point on reformist Christianity ceased to be the central organizing tenet of the American ruling class.

Today, the organizing faith of America is what Jonah Goldberg labeled Liberal Fascism. It is a mix of cultural Marxism, managerial socialism and economic corporatism. The proper American is judged by his antagonism toward Christianity and nationalism. You see it with Obama. He is our first overtly non-Christian President. His attendance at the racist church in Chicago was a way to signal to his peers that he understood the impulses of the prols, but rejected their primitivism. His early rejection of American Exceptionalism was a nod toward the elite’s loathing of nationalism. Obama is the quintessential member of the ruling elite.

Of course, it animates the elite’s desire to reshape society. One of the strange aspects of America’s adoption of European socialism is how it is spiced with those old puritan and evangelical instincts. Our rulers live like Victorians and are always proselytizing about restraint. Mayor Bloomberg has made his final term about self-denial as a virtue. Then there is the evangelism. Like 17th century Puritans, our elites spend a lot of time making sure we are thinking the right thoughts. Bias is the witchcraft of the 21st century.

Thus I have circled back to the start of this post. The religion of our ruling elites is like all religions at all times. A big part of it is the claim that if we organize things the right way, conduct ourselves the right way, we will gain salvation from the human condition. Their belief they can purge themselves of tribal bias is as superstitious as believing elves and sprites occupy the forest or that demons take over young girls causing them to break the rules. The shock for the folks in the first story is that they were confronted with the fact they have been lying to themselves. God is not, in fact, on their side.

Religion & IQ

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For as long as I have been alive, the Left has been trying to “prove” they are the smartest kids in the room. One tactic is to attack religion and by extension the religious, who they naturally see as their enemy. This makes some sense, given that Progressivism is nothing but a poorly defined civic religion. Stuff like this is the sort of thing they like to wave around to prove they are super-smart.  I’ll assume the authors of this study are making a good faith effort, but 30-plus years of this act naturally makes me skeptical.

I’m not a particularly religious person so I don’t have a dog in the fight. I just think the Left’s war on Christianity is a lot like what we see in the Arab world. Islam, like all living religions, is intolerant of other religions. After all, if you are sure your faith is correct and others are in error, or worse, an offense to god, then how can you in good conscience tolerate these false religions? The answer is obvious, which is why all religions, with the exception of race-based faiths, always try to dominate other religions through proselytizing or worse.

Of course, Muslims really hate Jews, because Jews put a lot of effort into pitting one Muslim against another, as part of Israel’s survival strategy. American have been taught that Muslims hate Jews because Hitler, but that’s nonsense. Muslims don’t hate Jews on religious grounds or even geopolitical grounds. That’s part of it, but the real issue is that faithful Muslims believe in unity of the faithful. Therefore, they look at Israel’s geopolitical shenanigans as a war on Islam itself. For Muslims, hating Jews is self-defense.

Now, in the case of this study, assuming it is a serious effort at examining the issue, is they start with the assumption religion is strictly about the super natural. Even more specifically, they narrow religion to Christianity. It leaves out secular religions like Marxism and anti-religions like atheism. Both are mass movements that hold the same appeal for adherents. They trade their identity for that of the group. My bet is if we broadened the scope of religion to include secular faiths, the difference in IQ would be trivial.

I’m fond of pointing out that even the most brilliant people subscribe to magical thinking and superstition. Blaise Pascal, the father of probability, computer science and statistics was a heretical Catholic fanatic. Many of the men who worked on the Manhattan Project were religious Jews, as well as Marxists. J. B. S. Haldane was a communist, were many intellectuals of his day. Belief in the worker’s paradise is every bit as wacky as anything the Bible believing Christians can muster. Belief is not just about religion.

That said, Jason Richwine is probably right. Higher IQ could lead to greater skepticism and therefore lower religiosity. The reason is high intelligence often has a strange humbling effect. Once you get outside the normal range, the genuinely gifted can see the limits of human intelligence more clearly, as they tend to be in frustrating fields like math and science. That’s inevitably going to result a great deal of skepticism about everything, not just religion. IQ and skepticism are probably co-dependent cognitive traits.

A caveat to that would be people with an exceptional verbal IQ and average quantitative reasoning. That would explain the high number of Jewish communists, for example. A people bred for solving complex word games as a part of their status system are probably inclined to accept magic as within the domain of possible answers. People with high spatial, could also be an exception. In other words, the empirically minded will probably be the most skeptically minded, and therefore the least religions, with some exceptions.

None of this really matters much. Most people are not so smart as to fall beyond the line between belief and skepticism. That’s certainly true for the hooting fanatics of the Progressive cult, who fall for every nutty fad that springs from egalitarianism and the blank slate. it much more reasonable to believe a Jewish hippy was the son of God, than to think better pre-school is going to solve black crime. The Left still think you can talk people out of mental illness. To be on the Left means the total suspension of disbelief.

The Left Side of the Bell Curve Again

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Given the tiny audience I have at this stage of my blogging career, I’m surprised to get any responses to post, but it does happen once in a while. Once I figure out how to work the commenting system here, maybe I will get responses that way, but for now e-mail is the only way to respond. Anyway, this was in the mail in response to my post about the left side of the bell curve. Here’s the text, without identifying the sender:

Putting aside from the odd subservience to IQ as a rational measure of intelligence and ability (not to mention the implicit assumption that IQ is static), its odd that you don’t mention investment in education at all. Seems like the obvious solution is to restructure our education system to acknowledge that consistent and rapid changes in technology, automation, and cybernation–that is, rapid increases in productivity–will require rapid increases in people’s access to efficient methods of learning.

I feel like this is all rather simple: people whose skillsets are made obsolete require access to resources and assets that enable them to acquire new, needed skillsets.

I’m going to assume that English is not the first language of my correspondent and assume what he meant in the first bit is “reliance” and not “subservience.” Relying on IQ as a rational measure of intelligence is good enough for neuroscience so it is good enough for me. We have a tremendous amount of data on human intelligence thanks to a century of testing. Unless and until someone comes up with a better way to measure intelligence, IQ is what we have. It’s one piece of the puzzle, but an important and reliable part.

Now, the next bit is one area where there is great debate. Can you structure a society-wide education systems to lift the average IQ of the population? Maybe. Ron Unz has written some excellent essays on the subject. Richard Lynn is a good recent example of the counter argument. We can throw Jason Richwine in the mix as another recent combatant on the topic of IQ and education. Then of course we have the dismal results from such programs as Head Start, which is a complete failure.

I’m of the opinion that the data and the science support the argument that no amount of education will alter one’s intelligence. I’d go even further and point to the many urban school systems that spend enormous sums on students. If there is one place where we would see a causal relationship between spending on education and educational outcomes, it would be the urban school systems.  Education could have a non-trivial impact on overall IQ, but so far no one has been able to find evidence of it.

While that debate is interesting, it has absolutely nothing to do with the central problem facing modern technological societies. There will always be a left side of the bell curve, no matter how you view education. Not even the most rabid blank slate fanatic argues that we can raise the IQ level of the bottom half to match that of the top half, resulting in everyone being average. Well, maybe George Bush thinks that, given that he once argued that the goal of his education policy as to make every kid above average.

The fact remains that even in Asian societies that lack a significant African or Amerindian population, there are a lot of people with IQ’s below what will be required in the technological future. This assumes automation progresses as everyone seems to think it will in the coming decades. Even if education can make some difference, all you can do is increase the size of the smart fraction. You will still be left with a large number of adults in the labor pool unable to master anything beyond mundane tasks.

The bit in the e-mail about the obsolete getting new skills is the standard refrain from libertarians to my question. It is merely a dodge. Instead of addressing the question, they answer a different, unasked question. Every human society has a subset of people with a very low ceiling. You cannot ship them away to a colony. You can’t send them off to the lithium mines. They cannot be taught to trade mortgage backed securities or teach gender studies at the community college. Every society has to figure out what to do with them.

Having a small percentage of the population, say ten percent, that is useless either because they are dumb or lack self-control is manageable. When fifty percent of adults have no role in the economy because they lack the IQ to do useful work, that’s a problem no society has had to solve. A large population of idle dimwits getting into trouble is a very new problem that advanced technological states will probably have to solve or they will be destroyed by it. That means a very different form of political organization in the future.

Smart Guys With Dumb Ideas

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I’ve always been fascinated by the phenomenon of very high IQ people believing utter nonsense. We have been indoctrinated to think that smart people not only believe the right things, they never indulge in crazy fads or nutty politics. The former is obviously the important part of the proselytizing we hear from our rulers. Only dumb or evil people question the Progressive theology. Even putting that aside, most people assume smart people are too smart to fall for crazy ideas, conspiracy theories and so forth.

Way back in my youth I was dating a gal who had a brilliant uncle. The guy worked for NASA and had a PhD in physics. He started out from a working class family and went through college on scholarships and a love of mathematics. He was also very well read in a variety of subjects, which is unusual for math guys. He was also a communist. Every conversation would eventually lead to him ranting and raving about private property and the abuse of the poor by the rich. It was strange hearing a smart guy celebrate Marxism.

Of course, lots of very smart people were communists in the last century. I took a graduate class from a guy who was a Marxist believer. The class was on Marxism, so it worked out pretty well, but it was strange hearing an otherwise smart guy talk reverently about the worker’s paradise. The Cold War was still going so it was even more jarring, especially since he had traveled to the Soviet Bloc. All these years later I wonder how he managed to square what he saw in his travels with what he sincerely believed.

Anyway, I’ve become a fan of Tyler Cowen’s blog Marginal Revolution, mostly because it is that strange conflict of smart people not seeing the obvious.. He appears to do most of the posting, but maybe he has graduate students doing the work. Even though he is in the pseudoscience of economics, he does have a broad range of interests. Being a libertarian economics professor living off the public dime leaves a lot of time to be curious about stuff. Funny how all of the big foot libertarians tend to live off the sweat of others.

Anyway, this post caught my eye today. The first thing was the reference to left-wing blogger Matt Yglesias. I continue to marvel at his ability to fool people into thinking he is smart and interesting. Signalling on the Left is a highly developed part of how they reinforce their faith in Progressivism. Lefties put on the smart, smug guy outfit signalling that they are super smart. Then they go about repeating all the approved bits of the catechism, but with a cheeky twist. Everyone feels good about being in the faith.

A good example of it is the liberal blockhead Janeane Garofalo. She is as dumb as a goldfish, but she has been trained to play make believe on screen. She kits herself in the bohemian outfit, pretends to be smart, while repeating whatever she heard from the TV clown Jon Stewart. Of course, Steward is another great example of the mediocre mind spouting conventional liberal lines in a highly choreographed manner intended to cast him as brilliant. Maybe Yglesias is just doing a form of this that is lost on me.

Anyway, what go me posting about this is how Alex Tabarrok, the other half of the Marginal Revolution blog, starts out great, quickly summarizing that Yglesias post and then his own position on the topic. Then in the last paragraph he veers into the madness of climate change and the need to placate the sky gods. I admit I have a strong bias against the topic of climate change. It’s pretty much just neo-pagan nonsense that fills a spiritual hole for people who fancy themselves as the intellectual elite of the West

That’s the thing. Tabarrok seems like a smart guy, maybe not a genius or even brilliant, but certainly smart enough to be a tad skeptical of climate change. Instead, he is eager to show how deeply he believes in it. It raises the question as to why he, and other above average intellects, feel like they need to repeat this stuff. Maybe it is social pressure or maybe it professional concerns. Politics in the academy can be nasty. Still, simply ignoring this stuff and sticking to safe topics would seem like the better option.

Belief, of course, plays a big role in this stuff. The communist physicist I knew in my youth was not a religious buy, as communism was his religion. For many modern academics, the sub-cultures within Progressivism fill the role of religion for them. Belief is one of those hard to quantify traits in humanity that drives much of what we do. It plays a huge role in social status, which in turn means it plays a role in reproductive fitness. Being seen as pious has always been and important part of establishing social status in settled society.

This is a long way to go to juts point out that smart people often believe nutty things, but it is something that cannot be said enough. People can be wrong and be smart. Even smart people get things wrong. At the same time, even brilliant people need to believe in something and often they believe in crazy stuff. It may be that the lack of a formal, retrained religion for the elites results in smart people searching around for something to fill the void and landing on kooky new age fads and destructive civic religions.

 

Playing Diogenes of the Blogosphere

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This topic over at Marginal Revolution is amusing, mostly for the comments. Much of it brings to mind Steve Sailer’s bit about Occam’s Butter Knife. That is, instead of looking for the simplest answer to a modern social problem, the comments are a hunt for the most complex and least plausible explanation. There’s a healthy bit of solipsism in the post, as well as the follow on comments. They can’t figure out why tough divorce laws evolved in some societies, so they just assume there is no rational reason for it.

The English figured out before most that easy divorce is bad for human society. The people who post and comment over at that site are very bright. Yet, the idea that easy divorce is bad for society has never occurred to them. I guess they have been in a marriage negative culture for so long, they know nothing else. Of course, my taunt about monogamous heterosexual marriage being the best way to propagate the species was a turd in the punch bowl. That upset a few of them.

It also has the benefit of being true. For most of human history, people have understood that strong families make for a strong society. The definition of strong family, however, is not universal and not all people evolved culturally to the point where they can think about things. Africans did not evolve marriage customs like in the rest of the world, as monogamous pairing was never an advantage for the humans living in Africa. In Europe, monogamy is common, which is a reminder that evolution is always local.

As to marriage in the West, it was assumed to be so obvious up to about last week, so no one thought it needed to be discussed. It is like the importance of the sun or the act of breathing. One of those things everyone knows by the time they are five or six years old. Yet, we now live in a time when this has to be explained and many of our brightest cannot accept it. My guess is the typical intellectual under the age of 50 thinks marriage is about having someone to share the bills and a bed. Children are merely a lifestyle choice.

The response to my assertion about the English vexed quite a few of them. Again, a plainly true point that raises hackles. As far as human species go, the English have punched way above their weight. They settled and created five countries in addition to their own. They turned India into a modern state and rescued Hong Kong from the Chinese, which in turn may have rescued China from the Chinese. Their language is a universal tongue. I could go on, but the evidence is clear on that point.

As far as human culture goes, few can claim the same success as the English. Yet, Western intellectuals are hell bent on reversing all of it. That touches on the most taboo of subjects, so there is no point in raising it in a public forum. As soon as anyone starts talking about Jewish influence in American high culture or even something like the Frankfurt School, the pointing and sputtering starts. Even if you are ambivalent about Jews, as I am, you get called an anti-Semite and shut down for even mentioning it.

There are still ways to shine the light on the obvious though and that’s worth doing as long as their are still people worth convincing. The role of the dissident thinker these days is mostly to operate as a subversive, undermining faith in the prevailing orthodoxy. That’s the point of this blog and the point of commenting on other blogs. Throw some sand in the gears, cast doubt on deeply held beliefs, get those who can be saved questioning the dominant culture. Maybe enough break loose to form a useful counter-culture.

 

Weiner Goes Limp IN NYC

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I saw this posted on the former Half Sigma blog. If you were hoping Anthony Weiner would win the democratic primary, it looks like you will be disappointed. There’s a month to go and people tend to forget quickly that one of the candidates is a mental patient, but even New Yorkers have too much self-respect to give Weiner a third chance. The next mayor will be the dreary socialist, the dreary bureaucrat or the flamboyant communist. The New York Times is backing the communist, to no one’s surprise, so he is the pick

The fact is the forces that drive the fortunes of a big city are beyond the control of the political class. A city is measured by its crime rate, public school system, unemployment rate, property values and culture. There’s some other stuff that we judge a city by, but that’s enough. Demographics drive the crime rate. San Francisco is 43% white and 33% Asian. Both groups have very low crimes rates so San Francisco has a low crime rate. Detroit is 80% black and has a crime rate commensurate with the black population.

Schools are similar, but median income pops up here. Areas with a solid middle class composed of families will have good public schools. Areas with a big underclass full of baby mommas and absentee fathers will have crappy public schools. You can’t fix that with good policy. These class and race issues are beyond the reach of government. Even if you gave city government dictatorial power, they could not fix the broken families that make up most of Newark or Camden or Baltimore. Government is not God.

Of course, the local economy is entirely driven by serendipity. If your city is lucky to be based on industry with a future, your city has a future. Cities in New England, for example, that depended upon making shoes or paint were looking good 100 years ago. When the banks sold off those industries to foreigners, those cities collapsed. Lowell Mass was a great mill town into the 20’s and 30’s, but textiles moved South and Lowell went down the crapper. No amount of good government was going to fix that problem.

I could go on, but the fact is the big things affecting a city are out of the reach of politicians, unless they are willing to be immoral or corrupt. For example, Giuliani gets credit for reviving New York by lowering crime. What he really did was ride the financial boom to push out the blacks from Manhattan. The newly rich were willing to look the other way as the cops hassled young black males with the policy of stop and frisk. They also agreed with polices to drive off businesses that cater to the lower classes.

The great credit boom that blew up Wall Street filled NYC with rich people and rich people like a nice places to live. Rudy did fix the police department, but he could not have done it without the support of the army of bean counters filling the ranks of the booming financial houses located in the city. The next mayor will have no impact on the city. As long as the free money keeps flowing and the demographics keep going this way, the next mayor will do just fine, regardless of their ideology. Even a commie will not screw it up.

The War on Science

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I’ve been reading this article by Steve Pinker in The New Republic. It has been ages since I have had a reason to pick up a copy of TNR. Maybe that says more about me than it does about them, but I actually check into Mother Jones and The Nation once a week, so maybe TNR just got dull. There was a time, probably in the late 1980’s, that The New Republic was a must read journal, if you wanted to know what the ruling class was thinking about policy. Anyway, the Pinker piece is interesting to me for two reasons.

The first is that he starts with the claim the great thinkers of the Enlightenment were all scientists.That’s more than inaccurate. He gives the impression that they were pure empiricists and not influenced by philosophy or religion. Blaise Pascal was a Christian fanatic in addition to being a great scientist. Locke and Hobbes were certainly men concerned with philosophy, economics and politics. I suspect the great men he lists in his opening would have viewed their science as a hobby, a sideline to their real work.

It is one of the things I find irritating about materialism. Pinker carries on at great length about the war on science, but it reads like a jeremiad against the humanities. I think what he sees as a rejection of science is really just a rejection of the absolutism we get from guys like Pinker. It’s similar to how atheists turn the religious into straw men. The critique is not about explaining the object of the critique, as it is celebrating the critic. Maybe the humanities are nothing but magical thinking, but there’s a reason for that too.

Anyway, that’s not why I started this post. Pinker brings to mind the real trouble for science and that is the corruption of science. Putting economics, for example, in the same bucket as chemistry is the sort of corruption I have in mind. Economics is not astrology, but it is probably closer to wine tasting than it is to physics. A lot of economics is wishful thinking dressed up with mathematics. It gets even worse when it comes to other so-called soft sciences like psychology or sociology.

For the same reason counterfeiting used to be a hanging offense, fake science should be given rough treatment from the empiricists. The only way the folks over in the philosophy department are going to respect the folks in the chemistry department are when both sides know the boundary. That’s where Pinker goes wrong. He thinks there is some great fusion to be had between the two. There’s not. Science is an explanation of the knowable. The scope of what is knowable expands as science expands.

The point being is that the defenders of science never stop to think that maybe they have some hand in the reaction against their work. They seem to lack any respect for the common man and his skepticism of science. The public used to hold science in the highest regard, but decades of corruption and unaddressed hucksterism has made the average guy into a skeptic. The old gag is, “where is my flying car.” The first place to start in the defense of science is to clean out the corruption in the sciences.

That said, Pinker is right to attack the ridiculous straw man of “scientism.” This just made up nonsense from neo-Christians. They also rail against “Darwinism” which they conveniently define as a religion. The people pitching this stuff almost always call themselves Bible-believing Christians, which means they practice a bespoke religion based on whatever they like form the New Testament. There is a good argument to be made that they are not Christian, but actually post-Christian pagans.

Regardless, they are noisy, not serious. The defenders of science would be wise to ignore them in the same way evolutionary biology ignores intelligent design. They are not making arguments that can be refuted. They are simply hooting like primitives about things that confuse and frighten them. Let them hoot. It’s harmless. The world is no more going to spin off its axis if some small minority believes in voodoo than if some small minority are young earth creationists. Pinker is thinking like a totalitarian here.

 

Banishment

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This story is a cornucopia of crazy. For starters, the guy who was arrested is obviously a complete loon. It is one thing to wave around a rebel flag. It is another to do so in the middle of a Camden street, yelling at black people. The Confederate flag stuff is just anti-white agit-prop. That said, the South did lose the war. Why would anyone adopt the symbols the losing side?  In all other times and places, people hold up their losers as objects of derision or simply ignore them. People celebrate winners, not losers.

For some reason racist rednecks went the other way. In fairness, lots of Southerners simply see the Rebel flag as part of their heritage and culture. The racist goofballs simply hijacked the symbol. Putting that aside, the fact that this racist redneck is from Pennsylvania, a northern state, makes it even funnier to me. Maybe he is from Alabama originally, but I doubt it. The story strongly suggests that this guy is just an idiot.

The truly scary part of the story the crime. Camden apparently has a law against thinking bad things about black people. Or, maybe it is a law against saying bad things about black people. Interestingly, Camden is 17.59% (13,602) white, 48.07% (37,180) black and 47.04% (36,379) Hispanic, according to the Wiki. That’s mathematically impossible so I’m going to assume a lot of “white Hispanics” in those numbers. Either way, it is more Latin than I would have expected. I wonder if the Latins know about this magic black guy law

Of course, the Hispanic presence may be the root of the law. Blacks hate whites, but they fear Hispanics. Once the brown guys start moving ion, the black guys start moving out and not always by choice. The crime rate is sky high and Camden is considered one of the ten most dangerous places in America.  I’m thinking these hate crime laws are a tribal thing. The in group makes laws to protect them from the new arrivals.

The best bit is what the city is planning for this knucklehead. They intend to banish him from the city. That’s a pretty good punishment. I wish we did more of this. It is not easy in a nation of 300 million to house all of our criminals. Banishment would solve the problem of prison over-crowding. Instead of just barring this dope from Camden, how about shipping him off to a penal colony? It would be cheaper and pretty good deterrent.

Sometimes a Banana is Just a Banana

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The race hoax is becoming something of a trope these days. Usually it is the alleged victim who is behind the hoax. Sometimes it is the alleged victim simply interpreting a normal event as a racial assault, just to get attention. This looks like an example of the latter. In fairness, he could really believe he was the victim of a racist taunt, but most likely he is just doing what all blacks are trained to do these days and that is cry racism. it is not a matter of conditioning, as much as a part of their identity as former slaves.

Cameras cover every inch of a modern ballpark including the stands, concessions, gangways and bathrooms. If it did happen, they will quickly find video of it and locate the monster who did it. I watch a lot of baseball and the announcers always mention when something is thrown on the field. The fact that this player is currently the only witness makes me suspicious. The desire for victim point is so overpowering now, even black millionaires cook up scenarios where they are victims of down scale whites.

At some point, ESPN will hold a town hall meeting on this so we can get lectured by them on banana etiquette. That’s one reason for the escalation in hate hoaxes. The Progressive media is so thirsty for these tales, they never stop to ask any questions. Of course, the demographics of the media make them especially receptive to anything that casts whites as immoral. The resulting pattern is a claim is made, it accepted on face value, then a long lecture from our betters and finally the truth is revealed and the whole thing is forgotten.

Putting my skepticism aside, there is something else going on here. The player is on social media looking for people to agree with him and tell him he is a good guy. It would appear some have decided he is a pansy who has over reacted. Others think he is mistaken. Some just think he needs to toughen up. His reaction to that is to threaten to leave social media. We now have black snowflakes, who fall to pieces whenever anyone tries to hold them to civilized standards of behavior. That seems to be an issue here.

The thing is, if it did happen the person who did it probably just happened to have a banana and chucked it on the field. This is San Francisco for goodness sakes. Anyone who has been to that park knows the stands are full of hipsters eating healthy. To an east coast guy used to grimy ballparks like Fenway, the first trip to San Fran was weird and unsettling. People bring their damned dogs to the park. The fan threw the banana because he was not done with his soy latte or his arugula salad.

Update:  Looks like I was mostly right. It had nothing to do with race. Jones is free to place that chip back on his shoulder and continue his hunt for the great white devil.

Liberal Fundamentalists

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Listening to sports radio this morning, I heard two knuckleheads on a Boston channel blabber on about about Tim Tebow. They want Tebow cut from their favorite team and they cannot sleep knowing he may make the roster. They did not put it that way, but it was obvious. Both jock sniffers were standard issue lefties that you see throughout the mass media. These are the type of folks who walk around convinced they are middle of the road moderates or maybe libertarians, when in reality they are solidly on the Left.

Anyway, listening to the two idiots rant and rave about Tebow, I was reminded of something about Liberals I have always found irritating. That is, they never want to be around contrary opinion. They don’t want to see it anywhere in their lives. If they are in a group of people that includes a non-liberal and the conversation turns to politics or current events, they will walk out of the room. Often they put their hand up in that  way women do to indicate they don’t want to hear anymore. It’s like they will melt by hearing bad-think.

In the case of Tim Tebow, his mere presence as an adherent of another religion so upsets them they demand he be cut from the team. That’s really what it is with him. He’s a vocal and unabashed Christian. He’s also very southern, which is a second strike against him in the case of Boston liberals. For liberals, his very existence is an abomination that has to be removed from their site. Heck, they would probably be OK with having him removed from earth. They see him as a mockery of what they believe to be holy and true.

This is why liberalism needs to be viewed as a religion. It’s got a lot of similarities to Islam, which is mostly defined by what it opposes. Muslims are nuts about eradicating non-Muslims from their ranks. It’s not enough to simply know they are right. They don’t want infidels anywhere around them. Of course, the Bolsheviks maintained a rigorous internal exile system to accomplish the same thing. The totalitarian mind is defined by those borders, as well as their purity. That means the heretics are either expelled or killed.

That’s the liberal mind and why they hate guys like Tim Tebow.