What’s hard for normal people to wrap their heads around, I think, is how modern liberalism is not a set of fact-based opinions, but a crazy quilt of beliefs that are untethered from reality. Normal people tend to assume that people can look around, see the world as it is and act accordingly. Those who fail to acknowledge reality are either mistaken or insane. For as long as anyone reading this has been alive, conservatives have assumed liberals are mistaken and therefore they can be corrected.
Over the last decade, many on the right have come to the conclusion that the people we call Progressives are suffering from a mental disorder. Maybe it is the nutty aunt who thinks Obama is Jesus. Maybe it is that neighbor who has covered his Prius in “coexist” bumper stickers. These are not people with whom you can have a conversation because they find some way to preach Progressive craziness at you, even over the damned weather.
I tend to think of it a third way, which is as a religion. I call it the Cult of Modern Liberalism because what we call politically correct is what we used to call “pious” in another age. The PC enforcers deeply believe in egalitarianism, anti-racism and multiculturalism as pathways to salvation. It’s Congregationalism with God removed from the cosmology. Here’s a good example of it in the Washington Post.
This month, Jennifer Cramblett lost her “wrongful birth” lawsuit, which centered on a troubling ideology that has been creeping into mainstream discussions in ways not seen in decades. Cramblett claimed that the sperm used to inseminate her came from the wrong donor, leading to a biracial child, which she had not wanted. Her lawsuit claimed that this mix-up in the lab caused her and her family personal injuries of various kinds.
This lawsuit was shadowed by a troubling logic: the idea that race is a biological reality with particular traits and behaviors that can be avoided through proper breeding practices. In doing so, Cramblett’s claims echoed arguments made in a darker era of global history of “scientific” racism.
Here’s how the argument goes. Some people are born with outstanding talents, easily mastering basketball, mathematics, languages or piano, if given the right environment in which to grow. What biologist or social scientist could argue with that? But alongside that genetic understanding, an old and pernicious assumption has crept back into the American conversation, in which aptitudes are supposedly inherited by race: certain peoples are thought to have rhythm, or intellect, or speed or charm. That’s a fast track toward the old 19th- and early 20th-century problem of “scientific” racism.
First off, you’ll note the tone. These are two deeply religious people speaking to an audience they assume to share their religion. If instead of “racism” the bogeyman was the devil, it would be something you would expect from certain Christian sects. If the bogeyman was Western decadence, then this would read like a sermon from the local imam. Instead, the bogeyman is biology so it is a boiler plate lecture we’ve all come to expect from people who enjoy diversity seminars.
You’ll also note that the authors are both professors with degrees in nonsense fields like racism and sociology. These are not fields of study that add to the stock of human knowledge about the world. These are fields dedicated to enforcing religious orthodoxy. When your kids go off to college, they are forced to sit through diversity lectures by these types of people as part of the “orientation.”
The Washington Post gobbles up submissions like this because it helps the faithful resist the temptations of biological science, which is becoming a real threat to the Cult of Modern Liberalism. When genetics can trace your genealogy back to the home country by merely taking a mouth swab and correlate physiological attributes to intelligence, biology becomes the same sort of threat to the New Religion as it was to the Old Religion.
Because this new religion inherits so much from the old religion, it even comes with an apocalyptic element. This breathless story on “climate change” is a daily feature in Progressive media. Christianity used to keep people in line by promising eternal damnation in the fiery pits of Hell if you broke God’s laws. Progressives promise an extremely high air conditioning bill if you keep using the lawnmower.
The interesting thing about the New Religion is it is a throwback to the pre-Christian days. Before the Jews gave us a fixed, rational God who created a fixed and rational world, people truly thought appeals to the gods would change the laws of nature. Hang a bull’s penis around your neck and your next kid would be a son. Burn a couple of heretics and the rains would come and end the drought.
Climate change is paganism for guys and gals on the private jet circuit. They force the state to pass some regulation making it hard for you to cut your grass because that will appease, well, whatever is in the blank spot where Elagabalus used to sit. As has always been the case, the rich guy making the sacrifice to the gods is never sacrificing anything of his. It’s always some other guy stretched out on the altar, having his heart ripped out.
You should listen to Zeropean leftards…their systems of beliefs belie belief…by the way, they all think “Liberals” are capitalists…
As for:
“the idea that race is a biological reality with particular traits and behaviors that can be avoided through proper breeding practices.”
Tell that to dog breeders…the more pure breed a dog is(inbred) the more unhealthy they are…also to tell it to zeuropean far rightists…they think America is terrible due to race mixing and are horrified by the muslim invasion, not noting that all middle eastern men are lily white…
Maybe that lunatic woman should have copulated with her brother, her daddy or her uncle…the resulting mongolian brat would have been perfectly pure bred with full approval of dog breeding genetic experts!
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Interesting that Prof. Pan-African Studies and Prof. Sociology should highlight the “wrongful birth” case as an example of the renewal of “scientific racism” because the case hinged on nothing of the sort, as the article at the link reveals plainly. In that case, a couple of butch lesbians decided to play house but got a black guy’s sperm instead of the donor selected at the fertility clinic. The clinic paid some restitution for the mix-up, but the damages alleged in the suit were not related to any claims that a black genes put the child at a mental or emotional disadvantage. Rather, the suit alleged that the mixed race child would be subject to discrimination because Mr. and Mrs. Lesbian lived in a predominantly white neighborhood. The case got tossed because the kid is otherwise in good health and the lesbian mom and dad could offer no proof that the alleged discrimination had occurred or was likely to occur other than silly anecdotes about the supposed difficulty of getting the kid a haircut. The judge did say the case could be refiled as negligence claim, however. Why it wasn’t a negligence claim in the first place, given the obvious negligence, is surprising and telling.
So what we really have here is a lot of progressive whistling in the dark (sorry) on two counts: 1) the myth of bad whites and their racist ways bites the dust because their isn’t any proof of it; and, 2) profs. attempting clumsily and cluelessly to dismiss out of hand all the HBD research that shows the scientific reality of race by using a case that, if anything, reaffirms the faith (gay marriage, bad whites) rather than undermining it.
Talk about cognitive dissonance.
The most useful part of abstractions are the shadows they create to hide a vacuum-
Joseph Joubert
Propaganda does not deceive people, it merely helps them to deceive themselves. To most of us nothing is so invisible as an unpleasant truth-
Eric Hoffer
There is no more fertile ground for sanitizing public opinion than the democratic equality. The bad guys get it, the good guys don’t even want to consider what democracy actually is. We are trapped and then manipulated inside our own legends.
Yes! I tell my ultra-liberal relatives (professed atheists) that they are the most religious people I know. They believe in the most ridiculous things imaginable without a shred of evidence. Big government actually working, climate change, etc…
They get mad and deny it, but as in everything else, they supply no logic or proof.
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The true progressive has a religion-like mode of thought known as an ideology. The progressive ideology provides the logic for his conclusions. His logic is not based on rational processing of the natural world so he cannot be argued out of his political or cultural positions. To get him to change an epiphany is required. Unfortunately progressive-ism is the most dynamic religion of the modern era (per Prager) with more converts coming on stream from colleges every year. Non-believers come in three types: those who prefer to not contest progressive ideas, those who are fighting it as hard as they can and those who don’t know that there is a fight. For this reason, the fight is probably impossible to win.
And the same cultural Marxist psychopaths went into derangement mode because Sarah Palin loved her child with Downs syndrome unconditionally, in public even on the national stage. But what was an ever egregious “sin” to the sonofabitches, was she didn’t get an abortion.
Your dead nuts right about everything you wrote Zman.
Me, I believe their insanity is a collective human extinction movement. They will never be satiated, nothing will ever be perverted or destroyed enough till the entire world is nothing but race of savages living in mud huts eating each other to survive.
These cultural Marxists are the cannibals of the world.
Look at Lenin Trotsky and Marx, at Mao, Hitler. Megalomaniacs bent on extermination of entire civilizations. And the fuckers we got in America, they are like the invasion of the body snatchers. They appear like human beings, but the truth is they are as alien to the human race as something from another planet.
But where, and why, are their so many of them. Its like a plague on God’s green Earth.
Everything they can get their greasy meat hooks on they corrupt or destroy. Nothing is sacred.