Category Archives: Progressives

The New Religion

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The Rachel Dolezal story is hilarious for a boatload of reasons. There’s the obvious comparison to people who insist we pretend they are of another sex. If you can pretend to be the opposite sex, why not another race? More precisely, if sex is a social construct, then why is race not a social construct? Of course, for decades the war on white people has been based on the assertion that race is a social construct.

It used to be that we need not worry about such things. Biology was real and people accepted it. Those who did not were deemed mentally ill and treated accordingly. Rachel Dolezal was not fooling anyone, I suspect. People are not that stupid. They are that polite, however, and no one wants to get in a spat over race, even if it involves someone fraudulently using race to game the system. Elizabeth Warren pulled the same stunt and got away with it for the same reasons.

It’s fun to make sport of the internal contradictions, but it is even more fun to watch the Cult attack itself over something like this. Rachel Dolezal believes all the right things and has literally committed her life to them, but in doing so she has made a mockery of the one true faith. But, condemning someone for not being black enough sounds a lot like the paper bag test or the one drop rule.

Aside from the humor, it does reveal the basics of the New Religion, at least at this stage of its development. The New Religion is based on three principles: egalitarianism, multiculturalism and anti-racism.The order is important as the first two principles are the oldest and most important. Egalitarianism goes back to Rousseau and is at the root of all radical movements since the French Revolution.

If all men are the same, logically all cultures are the same. Multiculturalism is not logically possible without accepting egalitarianism. On the other hand, like Marxism, multiculturalism is a solution to the obvious problem that people will notice that not all cultures are the same and not all people seem to be equal. By ennobling the embrace of all cultures and condemning ethnocentrism, noticing becomes a defect in the noticer, rather than in the noticed.

If everyone is the same and no cultures are better than any other, inequity must be due to something other than biology and culture. Since white societies are the richest and most dominant, they must doing something to upset the natural order. That’s where anti-racism comes into the mix. The sin of racism is what allows whites in particular and white society in general, to rule over the rest of the world.

Therefore, white people of the New Religion jostle with one another for who can be the most ethno-masochist. The ultimate expression of that is to change ones race from white to black. We can all agree that Rachel Dolezal is nuts, but her choice here is not entirely irrational from the perspective of the true believer. Some white women marry black men, but she went even further and converted to blackness!

You see the same thing happening with trannies and homosexuals. In the mythology of the New Religion, women have been oppressed by white men almost as bad as blacks. This cult is, after all, a female cult. That makes white men the ultimate evil. How better to address that than proving maleness is a choice. If Bruce Jenner can choose to be female, then all of those terrible white men are choosing to be terrible white men.

All religions work backwards. By that I mean they begin with an endpoint and layout what must be done to reach that endpoint. For Christians, getting into heaven is about following certain rules and “living a Christian life.” For members of the New Religion, the goal is the earthly utopia where everyone lives in a paradise of equality. Therefore, the anointed are those who work to achieve it, through any means necessary.

Religions also always have a certain amount of hypocrisy and irrationality, too. They are human institutions, after all. The New Religion will ignore Elizabeth Warren’s trans-racialism because she is in the elite. Rachel Dolezal is just a provincial in flyover country. That means the good folks at NPR and the NYTimes can make sport of Rachel Dolezal, while celebrating Elizabet Warren.

It’s why cases like this will not have a lasting impact on the evolution of the New Religion. Hypocrisy, it turns out, is a great adaptation. It solves a lot of problems for human religion. Whether it is Catholic Bishops living like royalty while railing against earthly pleasures or Progressive pundits championing Bruce Jenner while condemning Rachel Dolezal, hypocrisy lets the faithful get past the internal contradictions and outright lunacy of their faith.

Speaking in Tongues

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You can’t help but notice that the New Religion is developing its own language. It sounds like English and much of it is understandable to English speakers. Much of it is a weird jumble of sounds that have magical properties for the faithful, but sound like nonsense to normal people. Check out this letter to the editor in the NYTimes.

To the Editor:

We are militant about justice, but the justice we seek and enact looks like healing, reparation and care. We do have demands, but not that you submit to our “etiquette,” rather that you join a culture of compassion and acknowledge vulnerability.

College students are volatile, and if our “safe spaces” seem more for hiding from ideas than for shelter from oppression, it is because we occasionally confound structural injustice (which hurts, badly) with being-in-the-world (also hurts). We are obliged as social individuals to fight the first and weather the second, and also to help others do the same.

We do have a settled philosophy. It combines an understanding of power structures with the golden rule. Do unto others as you would if you wanted to heal the pain of injustice. We ask no more than David Brooks does: to defer to the complexity of reality, and to find in our deference the kindness to care for one another’s vulnerabilities and to be honest about our own. HANNAH McSHEA

Durham, N.C.

The writer is a student at Harvard.

I understand that I’m just an unfrozen caveman lawyer, but this confuses and frightens me. I do like the implied threat in this bit:

“We do have demands, but not that you submit to our “etiquette,” rather that you join a culture of compassion and acknowledge vulnerability.”

How can that be read as anything but “join us or die”??

That’s the thing with new religions. When they can’t convert the heathens, they settle for killing them. Fortunately the little princess who wrote that letter and her coevals lack the stones to do it, but that will not always be so.

Shrieking at Nature

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First wave feminism was about giving women legal rights to reflect the changing nature of social life in the industrial era. Obviously, giving women the vote was a tragic mistake, but it is an understandable one. In the industrial age, there were a lot of unattached adult women that had to work and participate in the economy. They needed the same rights and privileges as men in order to do that.

In some respects, second wave feminism was just a mopping up action to address things not adequately addressed in the first wave. But, it was mostly focused on crotch issues like birth control and abortion. This is where feminism began to lurch into madness, claiming that biology was just a social construct. For example, women could be as sexually profligate as men, as long as men invented and provided adequate birth control and abortion services.

Third wave feminism, what is behind the social justice warrior phenomenon, arose partially as a response to the perceived failures of 1960’s feminist causes. It turned out that biology was not a social construct after all. Freeing males from the responsibility of fatherhood and the proper treatment of women, women suddenly found themselves living with cats and wondering why that guy in the office never asked them out for a beer.

The result is a movement that has been reduced to a temper tantrum, where feminist womyn scream at anyone that foolishly notices boys and girls are not the same. Here is an example a friend sent me the other day.

Czech Republic-based bike manufacturer Superior has incurred the wrath of cyclists worldwide after making a host of seriously sexist remarks in its blurb for its new women’s mountain bike.

Superior claim that female cyclists ‘do not generally need to push their limits’ and that they ‘just want to enjoy the time spent in nature’ when they ride downhill trails.

The blurb reads: “Female cyclists do not generally need to push their limits, race against time and increase their adrenaline when riding rough downhill trails.

“They just want to enjoy the time spent in nature on the bike, and their expectations from the bike are completely diff erent than men’s. They look mainly for safe, easy and, of course, stylish bikes that have good and natural handling.”

Unsurprisingly, and justifiably, this hasn’t gone down too well, with cyclists taking to Twitter to share their surprise and distaste for the context of the blurb.

The only thing unsurprising here is that the pussified editors of Cycling Weekly would turn themselves into pretzels condemning what they and everyone knows is true. Women are just not that into physical competitions, nor are they very interested in pushing themselves to extremes. That’s much more of a male thing. Companies that sell athletic gear know this and they make their products accordingly.

There are exceptions, of course, as there are exceptions to most rules of human behavior. I know plenty of men who were soft and afraid of competition in their prime years. I know a few gals I ride with on occasion who love pushing themselves physically. Most men my age are fat slobs sitting on the couch waiting for grim death. I’m an exception. The rules, however, still stand and cover most people.

I think that’s what is at the core of the histrionic response to nature by the social justice warriors. These are women marinated in feminism from the cradle through college, just like many of their mothers. Unlike their mothers, third wave feminists truly believed what they were told. They got into the world only to find that reality is not going to yield to their 32-page senior thesis on gender as a tool of the patriarchy.

The novel element in all of this is feminism, like most Progressive causes, used to rely on the turtlenecked liberal arts types in the social science departments to call their thing science! Real science has moved the field into the lab, in the hands the numerate. The result is a staggering volume of data contradicting most of what feminism has been arguing for the last fifty years.

Faced with disconfirmation, the true believer will seek the comfort of coreligionists for support in the face of what they cannot possibly accept. The group then responds to the disconfirmatory evidence by proselytizing against it. The social justice warrior business is just the age old response of religious cults, updated to use the tools of modern communications. If Dorothy Martin were alive today, she would be all over twitter.

The Mind of the Maniac

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Whenever controversy breaks out over some new Progressive lunacy, a daily occurrence of late, the normal community struggles to explain what is happening, without writing it off to insanity. Usually, the old tropes are deployed as a way of labeling it as nuts so everyone can move on. “Marxism!” “They just want power!” “It’s the radical Progressive agenda!” “The Chicago way!”

Frankly, I think the next person who mentions Saul Alinsky should be pushed up against the wall and shot. But, that’s why I refrain from watching Fox News or listening to talk radio. I know those people are, for the most part, on my side of the fight, but I just can’t take the repetition of catch phrases that has become what passes for Conservatism these days.

That aside, the more thoughtful outside the fever swamps struggle to come to grips with what’s going on. After all, the people hooting and bellowing about the use of pronouns with regards to Bruce Jenner seem like sensible people. They went to college. They have respectable jobs in the media. They function in their day-to-day lives without a custodian. How can they not see the madness of our age?

Take for example this story about Ranger School. The short version is, in the name of fairness, girls were allowed to enter Ranger School and all twenty washed out the first time. Eight were invited back and they washed out again. Three were invited to give it a third shot. Strongly hinted, but not explicitly said, is the plan to maybe lower the standards so the girls can pass and become Rangers.

The Rangers are the best of the best, and being a Ranger means passing a physical test that pushes body and mind to the breaking point. If women can’t do it, the argument goes, then they shouldn’t be Rangers.

But there is another opinion quietly being voiced as well: that Ranger School is more akin to a rite of passage – an opportunity for men to “thump their chest,” as one Ranger puts it – than a realistic preparation for leading in war. That women can actually make Ranger units more effective. And that the standards that keep them out are outdated.

This, of course, is an attempt to move the goal posts. Ranger school was designed to cull the weak from the strong, both physically and mentally, so the remainder is an elite corp of fighters. This is not unique to the US military or to modern militarizes. Germanic tribes utilized a form of special forces against the Roman Legions. The Spartans organized their society around segregating their elite warriors into special units.

The question, therefore, is why in the world would the military want to risk degrading these units in an effort to include women. You’ll note that it is just assumed that inclusion of women would make the units more effective. Nowhere will you find anyone providing a reason why that is so. It is just a given like the laws of thermodynamics or gravity.

The question remains. Why?

Normal people would look at this and conclude the obvious. That is, point of the spear soldiering is the most physically and mentally demanding thing a human can do. Men are larger, stronger and possess greater cardiovascular capacity so men will dominate women in the physical aspects. Men are also more aggressive and violent, characteristics that come in handy when trying to kill people.

The members of the New Religion, however, believe biology is an illusion and that sexes are an artifact from a bygone era. There are no “men” or “women” in a strict sense. People are “assigned” a sex at birth and that colors their development into what we think of as men and women. That’s why the “women” are failing Ranger School.

Further, perfect equality is the optimal result of humanity, the true nature of man. Therefore unequal results must mean we’re doing something wrong. Our society is arranged in an immoral or unjust way causing these variations in results. That’s key to understanding the worldview of these people. They have a mystical vision of the perfect human society, which drives them to keep rearranging things in order to achieve it.

That’s why Ranger School will eventually be turned into diversity seminar. It’s effectiveness as a fighting unit is of no concern to the New Religion. What is of ultimate concern, the all consuming concern, is that the unit is perfectly equal and there is no difference between the members, regardless of what “sex” they were assigned at birth. If it is impossible to achieve such a thing, then it must be destroyed. An offense to the great spirit cannot be tolerated.

That’s the other part of the New Religion. Their destruction of social institutions without the slightest idea of how to replace them is not nihilism. Much like fanatical Muslims, fanatical Progressives see the elimination of that which offends their beliefs as part of the march to perfection. The Mohammedan thinks that end is to dwell with Allah for eternity. Progressives see the end as the eschaton, which can only come about when the imperfections are removed.

Sanders-nistas

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Bernie Sanders is now running for president. First he tied an onion to his belt because that’s what they did back when his ideas sounded fresh and original. Soda pop cost a nickel and you could get a good haircut and a shave for two bits. Back then, the Party stood up for the working man against the syndicates, dadgummit!

Listening to clips from his  announcement, I could not help but think that Michael Savage is right and liberalism a mental disease. Bernie Sanders is an old man, 73 to be exact. That means he has seen every idea of the American Left tried multiple times, all of which failed exactly as predicted. Yet, he’s still demanding we spend more money on roads and bridges, the poor and the environment.

His big idea is to spend a trillion dollars on road building. That’s a about what we spend in seven years on roads. Bernie claims that will create 13 million jobs. Assuming those jobs pay roughly $40K per year, that means his big new roads program will keep those 13 million people working for two years. Of course, most of the money would be stolen by local pols, just like the stimulus money was stolen, so those numbers are all mythical.

It’s something an old man should know, particular an old man who has lived off the state for most of his life. That’s the thing with his cult. These guys are always arguing from the position that their ideas have never been tried and their cult has never had political power. The big lefty stimulus bill was just a few years ago, yet no liberal ever mentions it. Instead, they talk about the need for a stimulus spending program.

It’s easy to dismiss a fossil like Sanders. After all, his schtick was tired in the 1970’s when Phil Donahue was a big deal on TV. Forty years on he’s like seeing a guy in a denim leisure suit with a perm. The thing to remember, though, is that the middle-aged harpies on the cable news channels will one day be old commie fossils like Sanders. No amount of failure will ever change their minds. There’s no cure for this form of madness.

The news coverage is worth noting. Sanders has no chance of winning and 90% of America thinks he is a nut, but he gets the favorite uncle treatment. I guess that would be Uncle Ho. If a similarly fringe candidate announced for the GOP nomination, the media would be giving him the business and claiming it is proof the GOP is lurching into madness.

Anyway, Sanders will get some votes. The wool socks and sandals crowd now has an option on the menu. These are the people who think Ralph Nader would have been a great president. Given the state of the Democrat party, that’s probably worth 10% of the vote. That’s coming out of the voter pool to be divided between O’Malley and Clinton. My guess is those are votes that would have gone to O’Malley so Team Clinton has to be happy.

The real benefit to Clinton will be the debates. O’Malley is young and smooth, which would be big trouble for a run down old bat like Clinton. Having Bernie on stage will make Clinton look young and sane by comparison. It will be hard for O’Malley to draw easy comparisons between himself and Clinton. The worst thing for a challenger is a crowded stage, especially when one of the crowd is a crazy old man from another century.

Aside from the entertainment factor, those of us outside the Left will get a chance to see inside this fall. Cankles is the candidate of the aging boomer crazies. These are the folks who cut their teeth in the late sixties and early seventies. Butch O’Malley will be going for the younger moonbats. I’m on the mailing list and it is already clear he plans to be the white Obama.

The difference is O’Malley is probably more authentically black than Obama, given their backgrounds, but O’Malley will have to run as a pale penis person. Cankles is older now and her voters are older and crankier. Eight years of watching the young whipper-snappers run things has been tough.

Sanders is sure to throw some hay-makers at both camps, hopefully working as a catalyst for full-on moonbat-on-moonbat violence. Imagine the Democrat convention of 1968 except with walkers and middle-aged fat guys in cheap khaki shorts screaming about Fox News. The riot will need to be wrapped up by four so the Cankles supporters can make it to the early bird.

I welcome the man from the past into the Democratic race.

The Inevitable End of Lunacy

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One of the least discussed big stories in American politics has been the transformation of one party into a purely ideological party. Anglo-Saxon politics has generally resisted ideological parties entirely. The few that have turned up have been short lived. The pattern has been coalition parties with an ideological wing.

We tend to focus on the ideological wing of parties and define them as such, but the people running the parties have always sought to broaden their appeal. The result has been that the major parties differ very little ideologically. That’s not to say there is no difference. It’s just that the difference are much smaller than the hooting and hollering would suggest.

The most obvious example of this is in Britain. Up until the last election, the Tories, supposedly an extreme right-wing party of the most right-wing kind were in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, allegedly a collection of Marxist hippies. If the things said about these parties were anything resembling the truth, there’s no way they could cooperate on anything.

In the US, the two-party system has always been between two coalition parties with just a blush of ideology. Democrats were the home of Progressives, but included blacks, Jews, urban ethnics and rural whites. Up into the 80’s there were plenty of pro-life Democrats, socially conservative hawks, along with the liberal urban voters. I’m fond of pointing out that Ted Cruz would have been a typical Democrat in the 1980’s.

The Republicans have always been the party of business, traditional Americans and monied interests. Even today there are very liberal Republicans who are pro-abortion and homosexual marriage. Despite the rhetoric, Mitch McConnell has done more in six months to advance Obama’s legislative items than Harry Reid has done in six years.

That changed in the 1990’s. One of those quirks of history, where attempts to stem a great sea change ended up advancing it, was the election of Bill Clinton. He was heralded by Progressives as their generations JFK, but he was also the leader of the DLC, a group trying the free the party from the ideologues.

Instead of re-centering the party, the Clinton years saw the Progressive wing take full control of the party and transform it into an ideological party. The election of 1994 wiped out the moderates from the South and Midwest. That left the field clear for howling fanatics like Pelosi, Reid, Schumer et al. Inevitably, anyone not fully committed to the one true faith was purged making the Democrats the first purely ideological party in American history.

I guess because the American media is universally Progressive this transformation has not been noticed. Instead it was cast as a triumph of the light over the darkness. It’s easy to forget that Obama said at his inauguration that physical reality would be altered now that he was on the throne. The natural world, according to him, would suddenly change in response to the triumph of the one true faith.

Ideological parties have a problem, which is why they tend not to have long lives. That problem is narrowness. Piety is defined relatively speaking. One is pious in relation to others. Imagine a herd of zebra all competing to be in the center. Those at the fringe are sloughed off after every reshuffling. Before long, you run out of zebra.

That’s what happens to ideological parties and what appears to be happening with the Democrats.

One of the most underappreciated stories in recent years is the deterioration of the Democratic bench under President Obama’s tenure in office. The party has become much more ideologically homogenous, losing most of its moderate wing as a result of the last two disastrous midterm elections. By one new catch-all measure, a party-strength index introduced by RealClearPolitics analysts Sean Trende and David Byler, Democrats are in their worst position since 1928. That dynamic has manifested itself in the Democratic presidential contest, where the bench is so barren that a flawed Hillary Clinton is barreling to an uncontested nomination.

The trend, of course, dates back much further but 1994 was like so long ago and stuff. The ’94 election wiped out most of the Southern Democrats. The 2000 election solidified the Democrats as the party of coastal urban areas. The 2006 election was one last attempt by Rahm Emmanuel to bring authentic populists back into the party, but that collapsed in 2010 and 2014.

But less attention has been paid to how the shrinking number of Democratic officeholders in the House and in statewide offices is affecting the party’s Senate races. It’s awfully unusual to see how dependent Democrats are in relying on former losing candidates as their standard-bearers in 2016. Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold, Pennsylvania’s Joe Sestak, Indiana’s Baron Hill, and Ohio’s Ted Strickland all ran underwhelming campaigns in losing office in 2010—and are looking to return to politics six years later. Party officials are courting former Sen. Kay Hagan of North Carolina to make a comeback bid, despite mediocre favorability ratings and the fact that she lost a race just months ago that most had expected her to win. All told, more than half of the Democrats’ Senate challengers in 2016 are comeback candidates.

The irony missed here is that Progressives like to pitch themselves as the young hip party fighting the old squares, but take a look at the presidential candidates. The favorite is an old white dinosaur from the 60’s and the dream candidate is an old white dinosaur from the 70’s.

The rest of the piece is worth reading. What is not discussed is that demographic collapse is what looms around the corner for Progressives if they don’t quickly arrest this trend. A lack of qualified candidates means a surplus of unqualified candidates. The result is an increasing number of people representing the one true faith who are viewed as crazy or stupid.

I’m fond of comparing Progressives with Islamists, but in this regard they are opposites. Islam is surging because they have a surplus of young people. The Cult of Modern Liberalism has a dearth of young people and as a result is hollowing out as the boomers begin to age off.

Nothing lasts forever so even if this version of the one true faith fades, something will replace it. Most likely the Democrats revert back to being a coalition party of some sort once the GOP detonates itself in the coming decade. The new religion will evolve once again into something less toxic. What seems to be clear is this Great Progressive Awakening is reaching its end and a return to normalcy is upon us.

Moonbat Child Abuse

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I’m not a big fan of rounding people and shooting them, but I can understand the temptation. This story about a demented parent torturing her child and then demanding everyone else indulge her is sickening. This is how indulging lunacy ends up as something much worse.

Bobby Montoya wanted to join the Girl Scouts, setting off a national debate.

The Girl Scout cookie can’t seem to catch a break.

Under fire in years past for including trans fats, high fructose corn syrup and palm oil in its cookies, the Girl Scouts‘ current cookie selling season is under fire because of policies that have nothing to do with the actual composition of the cookies.

A group calling itself HonestGirlScouts.com has posted a YouTube video calling for a boycott of Girl Scout cookies in response to a Colorado troop’s decision to allow a 7-year-old transgender child into its troop. Gay rights and transgender rights groups have reported a grassroots LGBT movement of supporters buying Girl Scout cookies in response to the video.

“I’ve decided to purchase as many boxes as my modest budget will allow and donate them to the local LGBTQ community center,” says Mara Morken, a lesbian stay-at-home mom in Fargo, North Dakota. “I want to show support for GSUSA in their honorable decision to allow all girls to participate in their programs. However I do not want that support to show itself on my thighs, so I will donate the entire cookie order!”

After an initial burst of publicity around the nearly 8-minute video featuring a teen Girl Scout wearing a Girl Scout sash, the video has been made private on YouTube. However, it’s still available for viewing elsewhere on the Internet.

“I ask all fellow Girl Scouts who want a true, all-girl experience not to sell any Girl Scouts cookies until GSUSA (Girl Scouts of the USA) addresses our concerns,” says the girl, identified as a teen named Taylor, a troop member from California, in some news reports. “I ask all parents who want their girls to be in a safe environment to tell their leaders why you will not allow your girls to make any more money for GSUSA.”

The video was prompted by the case of Bobby Montoya, whose mother told a CNN affiliate in October that a troop leader initially told her that Bobby couldn’t join the troop because Bobby “has boy parts,” even though her child identifies as a girl.

The Girl Scouts of Colorado blamed the initial decision to exclude the child on ignorance of the scouts’ policy. The state scouts said Bobby was welcome to join Girl Scouts. “If a child identifies as a girl and the child’s family presents her as a girl, Girl Scouts of Colorado welcomes her as a Girl Scout,” said the Colorado Girl Scouts, in a statement to a CNN affiliate.

The Honest Girl Scouts website says that the Girl Scouts use cookie income to promote “abortion and LGBT agendas,” introduces Girl Scouts to “the concept of sexual rights for children without parent consent” and is rewriting badge books to include “radical activists and gay role models.”

On its website, HonestGirlScouts.com states that the group is comprised of current and former Girl Scouts, leaders, parents, volunteers and lifetime members. When contacted via its listed Gmail account to comment, someone replied that the group’s “legal counsel has advised us not to comment or do interviews until further notice.”

Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, dismissed the video as an attempt by conservative activists to raise funds. “This issue not withstanding, the Girl Scouts is a really good organization,” says Keisling. “It’s been a really good place for kids to learn things. (This controversy) will die down. We as a society are progressing and the outdated reactionary attitude that poor girl was put up to in that video, those attitudes are dying out.”

Other LGBT groups are taking a tongue-in-check approach to the debate, encouraging people to eat more Girl Scout cookies. “Girl Scout cookies may not be so great for your waistline but they are great for being inclusive,” says Liz Owen, spokeswoman for Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (P-FLAG). Owen reports hearing from people who decided to break their New Year’s resolutions to go on a diet with a Girl Scout cookies purchase.

It’s one thing for adults to play dress up, pretending they are the other sex. That’s weird and slightly disgusting, but it is a free country. When they demand the rest of us go along with the lunacy, a line has been crossed. Humans come in one of two sexes, male and female. Yes, there are defects where humans posses both a Y-chromosome and two X-chromosomes, but that is rare and not the case with “transgendered.”

When adults begin to subject children to this lunacy, we’re talking about child abuse. The demented woman claiming her boy child is female is just trying to get attention for herself at the expense of her child. The poor kid will end up needing years of therapy to overcome what his mother has done to him, in addition to having to deal with the bad genes he inherited from this nut.

The Mind of the Moonbat

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When I was a kid, my mother was friends with a woman who was not all that right in the head. It was never discussed, but every once in a while I’d hear my father make mention of the fact that she was a nut. Even as kids we got the sense that she was a bit of a kook. At some point she went back to college to study psychology and it became her obsession. I recall she left her husband to go find herself or some such nonsense.

Looking back, the thing that was the root cause of her nuttiness was her difficult relationship with herself. She was always defining herself in some way. By that I mean every conversation would feature a section where she told you what sort of person she was as it related to the topic. As a kid I always found that to be very odd so I guess it’s why it stuck in my head.

Later in life I ran into other people like this and started to figure it out. People who are quick to sign up for the latest trends or join the latest fads are searching for an identity they can embrace. They either don’t know themselves or they hate themselves, I’m torn on the idea, but they seek to adopt an identity that they think is imbued with qualities they lack naturally. My mother’s wacko friend got into psychology looking for a cure and instead she joined a cult.

Anyway, that came to mind when reading this link I saw posted by a commenter on Sailer’s site. The post about Baltimore tells me the writer does not have any black friends as that’s the sort of thing I see from white people who love black people from a great distance. As a minority surrounded by black people, I know racism is the least of their problems.

I decided to look at his bio and that’s when I was reminded of the crazy women of my youth. These types of unbalanced people invest a lot of time in projecting their desired identity. You can be sure that within five minutes of meeting this guy for the first time he will tell you he is an atheist. After that it will be feminism, anti-racism, science! and whatever else the Left is peddling at the moment.

I have a friend that is a moonbat and he displays these same qualities. He’s mad at me for mocking his cult so he sent me a long e-mail declaring me a non-person the other day. In it he praised himself for science!, rationalism and lack of ideological fervor. Reading the Statement of Principles from that site, I wonder if my moonbat friend is one of his readers.

These guys always pitch themselves as perfect logic machines that arrive at the exact same conclusions as every other Progressive by pure reason. My moonbat friend got mad after I kept pointing out that his journey of self-discovery looks exactly like the op-ed section of the NYTimes. For some reason it is vital to the well being of the moonbat to believe they discovered these truths independently.

What I’ve always found amusing about my moonbat friend is the great gap between what he thinks he knows and what he actually knows. It’s fun to call it the Dunning-Kruger effect, and that may be the case, but I also suspect the Interwebs plays some role. My moonbat friend, like many of them, has declared himself a climatologist, sending me links from science articles that I know he never read. He thinks because he can find it on Wiki, he knows it.

This passage is a good example:

On the level of society and how best to organize it, I consider myself a classical liberal in the Enlightenment tradition. In the matter of human self-government, the only fair and feasible choice is representative democracy, which gives all adult members of a society an equal say in how that society should be governed. To safeguard the rights of minorities, however, every society should agree to bind itself by a constitution which guarantees fundamental human rights and puts them beyond the shifting dictates of popular will. All groups should rationally agree to such a bargain, in recognition of the Rawlsian argument that today’s majority may be tomorrow’s minority.
It’s clear he does not know what the terms “classical liberal” and “Rawlsian” mean, but they sound cool so they make excellent decorations. When you are pitching yourself as a moist robot, it’s important to sprinkle your personal statement with references to things you think smart people know. My bet is he thinks classical liberal is like classical music, your know, really old and stuff.

I suspect what the Internet has done for these people is make it much easier for them to get conformation. My mother’s crazy friend had to head off to college to find people she could join in a search for a new identity. Today, she would just join a Facebook group and read the array of moonbat sites on-line. David Lee spends his time reading fever swamp sites.

Lunch as a Religious Statement

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This post the other day on NRO is a good reminder about how religions work, how they have to work. That is, every choice and every action is set against the tenets of the faith to be judged. Born Again Christians used to wear WWJD bracelets as a reminder that their faith commands them to live as Jesus would live. Muslims pray five times a day in order to remain in communication with god and, presumably, obedient to god.

That’s the way it has to be with religions. They are either all consuming or nothing. After all, if you can be a part-time Catholic, for example, what’s the point of Catholicism? Similarly, if you can pick and choose what parts of the faith to follow and which to reject, you cannot plausibly be of the faith. You can’t be on the team unless you follow the rules, all of the rules, exactly as described.

It’s why faithful Christians worry about watching Game of Thrones (apparently). The Bible makes no mention of the show so it is not clear if God condemns it or supports it. That leaves the faithful to puzzle through it looking for the correct answer. It strikes the secular ear as weird and silly, but when everything is experienced through the lens of a religion, religion is everything.

It is why I argue liberalism is a religion. It demands the adherents immerse themselves in the faith and judge everything through the lens of the faith. When you talk with a moonbat, it does not take long before they are hectoring you about some outrage or another. Even discussions of the weather will eventually turn into a debate about global warming. They may not sport crucifixes, but they are going to signal their commitment to the one true faith and proselytize if the chance arises.

A good example is this innocuous story about McDonald’s. The burger chain is the quintessential symbol of core America. it is the place where suburban moms have been taking their kids for fifty years. People around the world know the golden arches better than any other symbol of America. But, tastes change  and, like America, McDonald’s is on the decline. The article contains some “solutions” to their decline.

People are increasingly seeking out vegetarian options, even if they’re not converting into strict vegetarians, said Paul Shapiro, a spokesman for The Humane Society of the United States. He said that means it’s time McDonald’s offers a vegetarian option.

Shapiro noted that many other chains already court people who feel like skipping meat. Chipotle introduced a vegan topping called Sofritas. Denny’s and Johnny Rockets have veggie burgers, and White Castle recently said it would make veggie sliders a permanent part of its menu after their popularity as a limited time offer.

“So many of McDonald’s competitors are serving plant-based entrees, and McDonald’s is lagging behind,” Shapiro said.

Despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary, faithful Progressives still believe vegetables please the gods in some magical way.

In a column in The Chicago Tribune, Easterbrook said he wants to transform McDonald’s into “modern, progressive burger company on many fronts,” focusing on perceptions about its food and workers.

It came right after McDonald’s said it would raise the starting wage for workers to $1 above the local minimum wage. But labor organizers — who are calling for $15 an hour and union — said the move falls far short especially since it only applies to company-owned stores, which account for a tenth of U.S. locations.

Robert Reich, former labor secretary and a supporter of the Fight for $15 campaign, said raising wages across the chain would not only mend the chain’s image as an employer, but lower its worker turnover and help business.

Here’s you see the lunacy of the progressive faith. Fast food is for working class people, for the most part. Jacking up wages means jacking up food prices. But, that’s a big part of the liberal faith. Deep down, they hate poor people. Therefore, their preferred solution for McDonald’s is to transform it into something not McDonald’s.

Ronald McDonald has been a source of tension among some who say the chain uses its mascot to market unhealthy food to children. By retiring the red-headed clown, McDonald’s could start rebuilding its trust with many moms, said Jesse Bragg, spokesman for Corporate Accountability International, which has criticized the company’s marketing practices.

“It’s clear this brand has lost the trust of people,” he said.

Those who make a career of impersonating Ronald shouldn’t worry, though. Although he had faded to the background for a couple years, McDonald’s has defended its spokesclown as a “force of good.” Last year, it even gave him a new outfit and said he would be appearing on its social media sites more.

One of the more bizarre aspects of modern liberalism is the duality. On the one hand they give lip service to the old commie themes of anti-capitalism like marketing and sales. On the other, they really love money, as we see with liberal lions like Elizabeth Warren and the Clintons. The disdain for overt money chasing works best when the adherent has money. That way they can pretend their riches are due to their goodness, not their greed. McDonald’s using a clown to sell burgers is gauche.

Immigration & The Moonbats

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My office manager is a communist. She’s not a young nitwit with a head full of nonsense. She is an old women who grew up wishing her parents were communists. From what I can gather, she has signed up for every crackpot scheme to bubble forth from the Cult of Modern Liberalism since her glory days as a teenager.

Whenever we discuss politics, which is something I try to avoid, her preferred solution is for the men with guns to impose a uniform solution on all of us. The phrase “single payer” pops out of her mouth anytime health care is mentioned. She has Moonbat Tourette’s.

Today we were talking about current events and the subject of immigration came up, regarding the lower classes. We were having some moving done and the crew that showed up was mostly Hispanic, with a few blacks. The guy running the show was Eastern European. My guess is he hits one of the many open air labor markets for day labor. The moving business is a tough way to make a living so Sergei can’t worry about the niceties of the current labor laws. He needs cheap labor.

I fully admit to being a bit torn on the issue of immigration. My grandparents were immigrants. Even though I now “identify” as African American on government forms, my genome says my people come from Eurasia. They fled the Bolsheviks and set up shop in America.

I kind of dig the fact that my country welcomes those who can’t seem to get along with the folks back in the old country. I love thinking about what the rest of the world thinks when all those mutts wrapped in Old Glory march into the Olympic stadium. You just know a lot of them are thinking, “I wish that was me.”

In my mind, I see that as a big old middle finger to the rest of the world. I get that from my grandfather. He was never a rich man, but he loved the “fuck you” side of being an American. He came here, learned perfect English and made a life for himself as an American. As far as he was concerned, the folks back in the old country were losers.

That bit of sentimentality is not intended to get your patriotism up. I’m just stating my bias. I have an unreasonable bias toward immigrants, at least the ones trying to be Americans. But, that only works if citizenship has any value. If anyone can wander over the border and get all the same rights and privileges as me, the citizenship has no value. Further, my loyalty to my country evaporates.

Anyway, that’s where I come from on immigration issue. Talking with my commie office manager, I was surprised at how strongly she is opposed to immigration. Her reasoning is that it hurts blacks and poor whites. I get the sense she is new to the subject, at least this side of the topic. She’s up on all the latest Progressive trends so I doubt she has arrived at this position independently. She’s getting this from somewhere.

The other thing she said is that immigration is a tool for corporations to exploit the middle-class. She is a big Elizabeth Warren fans so I suspect all of these new opinions from my office manager are coming from the Fake Indian side of the fever swamp. Warren has voted in line with her party on immigration, but I don’t recall her saying much about it.

Warren’s faculty lounge populism mostly appeals to credentialed Progressives who resent not making more money. A rich white woman standing on the steps of her mansion, ranting about the rich strikes normal people are laughably absurd. I think Progressives understand that this brand of populism has a small audience so they are looking to expand into other areas.

The idiots in the GOP may be focused on winning Hispanic votes, but the Progressives know better. They need to get white people voting for them again and an easy way to do that is the immigration card. They can even pitch immigration restrictions as a way to help immigrants, thus avoiding the charge of xenophobia.

There’s always been a Star-Bellied Sneetch quality to American Progressives. By that I mean they get revved up on a fad and it eventually fades, to be replaced by a new fad that often contradicts the old fad. In that regard, liberals are like teenage girls. In order to distinguish themselves from the Old New New Left of the Obama years, the New New New Left is embracing immigration restriction.

The polling on the issue makes clear that a hawkish position on immigration is the safe one and that may be what’s happening here. As both parties gear up for 2016, they are figuring out that the mood of the public is running away from them so they need to catch up. Whether or not the people in charge will follow on is unknown, but we may be seeing a paradigm shift over the next 18 months on the issue of immigration.

Or, my office manager will be burned at the stake by her coven for the crime of apostasy.