Postmodernism! We Hardly Knew You!

We all know that postmodernism is the movement that... Yes, what exactly does it say?

I would say that postmodernism argues that every narrative about Life, the Universe, and Everything is ultimately a narrative of power, the way a ruling class, every ruling class, creates a story that proves conclusively that it has a divine -- or historical -- right to rule.

In part this movement was part of the German Turn, a movement away from the rationalism of the Enlightenment and from the notion that you could establish a just society on Earth from rational principles. A philosophy of reason was just as much an apology for rule as the divine right of kings.

In part, of course, the postmodernists saw themselves as heroic resisters against bourgeois supremacy, pushing against the notion that the philosophy and faith of middle-class property and business owners was the highest and best form of life.

So in the little book I picked up on Nietzsche and Postmodernism by Dave Robinson, we are to understand that 

Postmodernists like Jacques Derrida celebrate difference, diversity and the marginal, those things that flourish in a pluralist and tolerant democracy.

Derrida is against "logocentricity," the idea that languages rule.

The conviction that language can create stable and "total" certainties is dangerous as well as misguided. Language can only be made to do this by excluding alternative readings by excluding what is considered to be "other." 

Quite right, Jacques, mon vieux.

In practice this has usually meant the establishment of hegemonies that marginalize all those whose values and beliefs don't conform to some limited and contingent world view. 

Well, we are certainly a couple of marbles short of the celebration of difference from establishing norms where your average white working-class deplorable is concerned right now. Shall I go on?

Ethical and political doctrines are always founded on some essentialist myth about human nature. But language cannot establish essentialist "truths", so ethical values and political doctrines are nearly always the constructs of authoritarian institutions imposed on the rest of us.

Exactly, Jacques. So that helps us understand the current notion from gubmint "bioethicists" that access to the COVID vaccine should be prioritized according to race. It's just the current ruling class of educated Gentry imposing its world view on the rest of us, because systemic racism.

Or Jean-Francois Lyotard, who decided after 1968 that "Marxism had inbuilt authoritarian tendencies" and that "the latent passions of human beings will always make it impossible for them to be marshalled under some theoretical doctrine."

Guess what postmodernist Lyotard wants instead.

Lyotard himself recommends a society that is tolerant, pragmatic and pluralist, libertarian and anarchist, one which again celebrates difference and avoids monolithic certainties. 

Good luck with that when you chat with our wokey friends, Jean-Francois.

Jean Baudrillard thinks we are all living in "a fragmented world of alienated individuals with no sense of self or history" but "just consumers of media in a world of signs without signifiers." Well, not if our "trained Marxists" at Black Lives Matter have anything to do with it.

Robinson's Nietzsche and Postmodernism was published in 1999, at the last moment before we could begin to speak of "woke leftism" as a movement of neo-Marxism devoted to imposing a single ruling-class world view on the rest of us, because systemic racism.

The funny thing is that all the critiques of the postmodernists, which were sorta true back the bad old days of the patriarchy, now apply in spades. And the reason is that while the old ruling class was indeed a hegemony that dominated society as any ruling class does, it did not do so with a deliberate strategy of liquidating certain groups and classes, and enforcing its class supremacy, but in reaction to actual rebellions and opposition.

The new ruling class -- from its "trained Marxist" at Black Lives Matter to its educated Gentry with a divine right to salaried tenured pensioned positions of power of the rest of us -- has a direct faith in domination and hegemony, that derives from its essentialist doctrine of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors."

The "allies" movement has a transparent argument for power that blithely ignores the findings of the postmodernists. It denies "difference" and imposes the "monolithic certainty" of systemic racism. It shows, I suppose, that people will believe anything so long as it is to their personal advantage.

In American Greatness, Edward Ring proposes an end to the bitterness and rancor of the last four years by "reaching out" to the good people on the other side and trying to find a common ground upon which to move forward together.

But I think he misunderstands the situation. Right now our educated Gentry friends are in the grips of a religious prophecy, a prophecy that decrees that the world is on a trajectory to climate disaster, unless we act now, and decrees that America is on the way to a racist hell of white supremacy, unless we act now.

They don't just argue this. They believe it as a saving truth.

The point about prophecies is that you can't argue rationally about them. You can only move forward when the prophecy has collapsed in ruin, as argued in When Prophecy Fails, by Festinger et al.

And right now our globalist friends are determined that we must end fossil fuels, because end of the world. What can you say to them? That Derrida says that they have got it all wrong?

What can you say to our Wokie friends that are determined that systemic racism is tearing us apart? Because anything you tell them just confirms their conviction that you are a racist and that racism is systemic, just as they believe.

Humans do not respond to argument. They respond to ruin.

Now You Know Why the Germans Did Nothing

When our liberal friends are in a mellow moment, taking time out from canceling everyone for racism, they like to emit moral lectures about the Germans under Hitler. How come millions of Germans said nothing and did nothing while Hitler's thugs were beating up the Jews in the 1930s.

Let's take the German philosopher Martin Heidegger as a case in point. All the following is official revealed truth from La Wik.

• Heidegger was a student of the Jewish philosopher Husserl.
• Heidegger was rector of the University of Freiberg for a year in 1933. A week before his appointment, his predecessor had suspended all Jewish professors at Freiberg, including Husserl. Heidegger did nothing.
• Heidegger joined the Nazi Party a week after his appointment as rector.
• Heidegger resigned his rectorship in 1934 after about a year on the job.
• Heidegger did not go to Husserl's cremation in 1938.

Here is a quote from Hans Sluga, in La Wik.

Though as rector he prevented students from displaying an anti-Semitic poster at the entrance to the university and from holding a book burning, he kept in close contact with the Nazi student leaders and clearly signaled to them his sympathy with their activism.

You mean, like today's university administrators and politicians turn a blind eye towards BLM and AntiFa activism, "clearly [signaling] to them [their] sympathy with their activism?"

And look: Heidegger had published his Being and Time in 1927 and established his reputation as a philosopher for all time, so why didn't he have the guts to be a Sacrificial Hero against the murderous Nazis? To this day, there is a black cloud over Heidegger.

And to this day, our liberal friends have dined off the horrors of Heidegger, and the Germans "who did nothing," and the Americans who did nothing during the McCarthy period.

Yes, liberals. But now the shoe is on the other foot, as you liberals allow ordinary Americans to be canceled by left-wing Twitter mobs, while university administrators and university presidents do nothing. Here's the latest, a girl's university admissions offer canceled from because of a 3-second SnapChat video she sent in 2016 when she was 15: "I can drive, n***a". I assume that she used the word n***a and not n****r, but you never know. Says The New York Times,

[The young woman] was among many incoming freshmen across the country whose admissions offers were revoked by at least a dozen universities after videos emerged on social media of them using racist language.

Pretty cool, liberals isn't it. You chaps boost gangsta rap as really cool, and then your brave college admissions administrators do the cowardly thing and whack a naive little girl for taking you up on it. 

Because, like Heidegger, you wouldn't want to lean against the political wind, no siree.

Earth to liberals: the current leftist cancel culture is exactly like Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Prudent, ordinary administrators and bureaucrats and industrialists go along to get along. Hey, it's the prudent thing to do! After all, who could have known in the 1930s that it would all end in the Holocaust?

The kid that outed the girl on the n-word is proud of what he did.

“I wanted to get her where she would understand the severity of that word,” Mr. Galligan, 18, whose mother is Black and father is white, said of the classmate who uttered the slur, Mimi Groves. He tucked the video away, deciding to post it publicly when the time was right.

Of course he is proud. That's what he has been carefully taught: to be a noble activist and fight, as an ally, against white supremacy and systemic racism.

Or you could say that he is a dupe of the ruling class, that wants to use blacks as their political tool: on the one hand getting 90 percent of the black vote, because racism, and on the other permanently cowing the ordinary white working class into subservience, because racism. 

Here's a question for you scholars and philosophers. How come the naming and shaming of someone as "literally Hitler" carries a real zing, while calling someone "literally Stalin" doesn't have quite the same canceling power?

And calling someone "literally Mao" has even less zing. Yet, Mao was a bigger mass murderer that Stalin, and Stalin was a bigger mass murderer than Hitler. What gives?

You know as well as I do. It all comes down to what we have been carefully taught. And our noble and dedicated teachers have been more interested in teaching us about the crimes of Hitler than about the crimes of Stalin and Mao. I wonder why?

And meanwhile, all across America noble philosophers and academicians and administrators are "doing nothing" to stem the tide of neo-fascist leftism.

Towards a Critique of Meaning

One of my little conceits is to parrot Douglas Adams' line in his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy about "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." Only, I got it wrong.

I just looked it up in my five-books-in-one Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide, and that is not how it is presented. Chapter 24, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"O Deep Thought computer," he said, "the task we have designed for you to perform is this. We want you to tell us..." he paused, "The Answer!" 
"The Answer?" said Deep Thought. "The Answer to what?"
"Life!"urged Fook.
"The Universe!" said Lunkwill.
"Everything!" they said in chorus.
Deep Thought paused for a moment's reflection.
"Tricky," he said finally.
"But can you do it?"
Again, a significant pause."
"Yes," said Deep Thought, "I can do it."
"There is an answer?" said Fook with breathless excitement.
"A simple answer?"added Lunkwill.
"Yes," said Deep Thought. "Life, the Universe, and Everything. There is an answer. But," he added, "I'll have to think about it."

Now, at La Wik, they phrase this as the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything." And the Answer, of course, is 42.

So I got it wrong. And so did La Wik. But I am going to have to change my quote. I think that I will henceforth refer to "the meaning of  'Life, the Universe, and Everything.'" Just to make it fair.

The thing about the meaning of Life is that everyone wants a short-cut. And why? Because you need to have some idea about the meaning of Life before you get up in the morning. It is much harder to live life in the knowledge of ignorance, that you don't have a clue what is going on, than living life when everything has been decided on the meaning front by your local priest or your local activist.

The fact is that the meaning of Life is unfathomable. Indeed, the more we know about "the Universe, and Everything" the more we wonder. How is it possible? How did it come to be? How big is it? Is there Life elsewhere? What is Life? What is the Universe?What is Everything? And what does it all mean?

Also, the question of the meaning of Life only occurs for a being that has a conscious mind. If you are a dog or a lion or a mosquito, you just live the life you are programmed to live, as we now think, by your DNA. You don't think about it; you don't worry about it: you just wake up in the morning and go about your business.

So our primitive forbears didn't think about the meaning of Life. They just went about it. And as they began to acquire the glimmerings of a conscious mind, they initially attributed all the angst of life to evil spirits. Notice that, at this stage, the human does not yet feel responsible for his life. Therefore, he does not really need to know the meaning of Life. The gods have decided all that. All the primitive human has to do is get on with it. And suffer, if the gods will it.

It is only with the gods of the Axial Age that humans get to be responsible for their own lives. Even then, God has decided pretty well everything you need to know about the meaning of Life. God just says: now you are responsible for organizing your Life according to the meaning of Life that I have vouchsafed to the Prophets.

Indeed, I would say that down to the Protestant Reformation, all the Average Joe had to do was listen to the priests, and do what he was told.

But with the Reformation a new concept arises. With the advent of printing, your bourgeois citizen wanted to read his own Bible. But that meant that the bourgeois citizen was taking on the new responsibility of trying to figure out what it all means in the Bible.

And now, with Nietzsche's Death of God, we are on our own. It's up to you to figure out the meaning of Life on your own.

Only, of course, most people don't do that. If they can't believe in God anymore then they pick up the secular gods of their school teachers. Or the meaning of Life revealed to them by a political leader, or a religious guru.

I would say that the urgency of knowing the meaning of Life has increased radically in the last century. It is not an accident that with Freud and Jung we see the beginning of a new age in which we have highly trained specialists to help us with our angst. And it is not just a question of taking the word of a priest or a guru to solve your existential problems. With "analysis" it is the patient, the analysand, that is supposed to do the heavy lifting, not the expert psychologist.

The less that society has already determined the meaning of Life, the more the responsibility falls on the individual. And the heavier the weight on the shoulders of the individual.

Even so, nearly everyone picks up a pre-packaged Meaning of Life kit at the store, or the church, or the meeting, or the activist group. Because, really, the alternative, to stand in the full horror of not knowing what you are here for, and what you should do next, is a terror that few of us have the resources to deal with.

But I think with my reductive Three Peoples theory, that we should at least begin to recognize that different people need different meanings of life.

In my reductive system, we can say that your average Subordinate should not worry about such things, but just do what his lord orders him to do. The average Responsible has the overall divine plan all set out for him, but he has to fill in the details, and that is not easy.

Obviously we can see that the Creatives, that are supposed to be figuring it out for themselves, are in completely over their heads. That is why, for the last 200 years, they have been grabbing whatever half-baked canned cults and religions are on offer, like passengers on the Titanic grabbing for life-belts.

Maybe that's as it should be. I just wish that the cults and religions that the Creatives have been grabbing for were, as the Brits say, "fit for purpose." That is what my Great Reaction theme is all about. It is about Creatives grabbing for something to steady their lives: only time and time again, they lurch back to the primitive, to belief systems that are more primitive than the Axial Age religions that they can no longer believe in. Because they are not yet ready to face the Universe without he comfort of a ready-made belief system.

That is the real challenge and the real problem. How do you face the world if you accept that you do not know the meaning of Life and never will, and accept that it is a cop-out to just buy a ready-to-wear suit right off the rack?

How About a Critique of Critique?

We all know that everyone who is anyone has created a "critical theory." The current rage for "critical race theory" is just the latest effort from the global sophomores.

Now, in the official introduction to its Critical Theory page, La Wik writes that critical theory is

an approach to social philosophy that focuses on reflective assessment and critique of society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures.

Very commendable. In case you weren't aware, 

critical theory was established as a school of thought primarily by the Frankfurt School theoreticians Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Max Horkheimer. 

And we can't leave La Wik's article without this gem:

Horkheimer described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."

"Challenge power structure." "Liberate human beings." Couldn't agree more, Max old chap. Because I'm sure if you were alive today you'd agree with me that today's "power structure" is a lefty power structure, and its objective is to enslave the minds and the bodies of so-called "deplorables." For their own good, of course.

Now "critique" starts with Kant and his Critique of Pure Reason where he argues that we cannot know things-in-themselves, but only appearances.

Then along came Marx with his "critique of political economy," that is to say the economics of the classical economists. He was only just in time, because his critique was exploded in 1870 when the marginal revolution in economics completely set aside the opposition of exchange value and use value that the classical economists used and that Marx critiqued. You could look it up.

Our modern critical theory is a post-WWI phenomenon, based upon the post-Marx reality that needed a non-economic basis for its critique.

And in my opinion it is just as wrong. Here's why. It was crazily wrong for Marx to propose that capitalism was an essentially oppressive system. Why? Because in the first place the market economy rewards people for serving the consumers. Because in the second place, capitalism is associated with an unprecedented rise in income, over 30 times in 200 years. Thirdly, because the capitalists then and the ordinary middle class today are not that interested in power.

So, to develop a critical theory based on the theoretical foundation that the one thing needful is to attack and destroy "power structures" misses the point. Under the market system, power structures come and go.

We see this with the fairy tale of "systemic racism." We made systemic racism illegal half a century ago with the civil rights acts. We made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race or sex. And ever since we have had lefty activists, funded by lefty billionaires, running around looking under every rock to find discrimination and root it out.

Oh, there's discrimination still, of course. People are wary around young black males. And when young black males mostly peacefully protest a lot of people head for the suburbs.

Actually, city people have been wary around young uneducated unemployed males since whenever. Because young unassimilated males are dangerous and violent. What do you think Dickens' Oliver Twist was about?

So you can see that for me, there is a desperate need for someone to come along and liberate lefty minds "from the circumstances that enslave them."

Now, when I awoke from a dream during the night the book's chapters presented themselves to me thus:

A Critique of Meaning 

A Critique of Religion 

A Critique of Creativity

A Critique of Morality 

A Critique of Revolution 

A Critique of Activism 

A Critique of Politics 

A Critique of Force 

A Critique of Responsibility 

A Critique of Slavery

I think that will do for a start. Of course, you can see what I am about. I am trying to find a framework in which to fit my overwrought ideas, from my reductive Three Peoples theory, to "downstreamism" -- that politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from the meaning of life, the universe, and everything -- to my critique of the left as a Great Reaction, to my critique of Activism Culture, to my various critique of the Left's Conceits, Crimes, and Errors, to the problem of the Little Darlings.

And it all starts with the eternal question: why do humans seem to need, nay demand, a sense of "meaning?"

Understanding Gender Madness

Guess what! The schientists at the New England Journal of Medicine are proposing that “sex designations on birth certificates offer no clinical utility, and they can be harmful for intersex and transgender people.”

Well, that settles it. The worst thing in the world -- after systemic racism -- is harm experienced by "intersex and transgender people" from the bigotry of transphobes. To paraphrase Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY), "if we reduce harm to just one intersex/transgender life..."

But what I want to know is: who is the boss here? I should have thought that the interests of ruling class bureaucrats and administrative Pooh Bahs would come before the interests of the woke radicals. And the more finely graded the data that our rulers have about us, the more wisely they can rule us. But what do I know? Perhaps this is a deeper thing than I can understand.

Maybe as the Biden administration sets forth on its glorious war on climate change and systemic racism, the honor of marching in the vanguard will properly be exchanged between the Imperial Guards Regiment of Administrators and Experts and the Battalion of Intersectional Activists of the Global Guards. These high-status guards regiments tend to be very touchy about the honor and vanity of protecting the monarch. I dare say that back in the day there were a lot of heated words exchanged between guardsmen of the various guards regiments about the size and the shape of their shakos and busbies and bearskins.

Now, I have explained the whole procedure of the left's critical theory stuff, about how it is really a mutton-headed misunderstanding of the whole German Turn in knowledge inaugurated by Kant's notion that we cannot know things-in-themselves but only appearances, driven mainly by a primitive yearning for the good old days of the Age of Politics. Not to mention the tremendous fun of rape-age and pillage in the good old days of the Vikings. I have categorized my critique of the left into the Left's Conceits, the Left's Crimes, and the Left's Errors. And sometimes, when I'm all confused, I just categorize as Liberal Oppression.

One important thing not to be left out of this analysis is George Lakoff's analysis in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. See he says that we initially categorize the world using "basic-level" categories like "dog" and "table." We become expert at this by age 2. But then we get sophisticated, and understand that "dog" is a kind of "animal." But the further we get away from the basic level, the more questions arise, for instance when we are dealing with a form of life that seems to be part animal and part vegetable.

You can see how the gender bender thingy fits into this.  Boys and girls are "basic-level" categories. You know which is which by the time you are 2. But, as you learn more, you get to realize that boys and girls are alike in a lot more ways than they are different. I mean, when you get down to the X and Y chromosomes, you get the notion that the only different between men and women is that out of the total of 46 chromosomes, men have one that is different and that women don't have. Such a tiny difference!

And the point of the "basic-level" category is that it is just an appearance that we humans, from an early age, learn to differentiate. These basic level categories seem to be significant for us at a basic level. But maybe not. And if you are a creature with X-X chromosomes but experience yourself as a man, well, why not?

And how dare -- How Dare -- transphobic bigots suggest that such "intersex and transgender people" are living in a fantasy world!

Mind you, some people might object to the "allies" of "intersex and transgender people" making gender-binary people feel "unsafe." After all, don't believers in traditional morality have their rights too?

It's all very well to invoke Mrs. Patrick Campbell's rule of "do whatever you want but don't frighten the horses in the street." Unless, of course, you are a street urchin and the best fun in the world is frightening the horses in the street.

But the point of moral rules and science is ultimately the survival and thriving of the human race. I mean, the whole point of climate change politics is that, unless we act now! Well, something. And the whole point of traditional gender-binary and traditional morality is that it happens to be the way we get children on the ground and survive to the next generation.

So, if we are going to have carbon taxes and stop the production of fossil-fuel-powered cars by 2030 and stigmatize skeptics as "climate deniers," because climate change, then maybe we should likewise apply force and name and shame and shun people that don't seem to be too serious about getting the next generation on the ground.

C'mon man! We don't know whether carbon pollution will lead to the end of civilization as we know it, but sure as heck-fire we know that if everyone became "intersex and transgender people" then humans would be outta here in less than a century.

COVID: NY vs. FL; Herd Immunity vs. Lockdown

At Manhattan Contrarian, Francis Menton compares the COVID experience of New York State and Florida. New York is a poster boy for maximum lockdown and mask-wearing; Florida is the poster boy for back-to-normal and don't sweat the masks. They are similar sized states, with about 20 million people each.

COVID Deaths Per Million through 12/20/20:

Florida: 966 

New York: 1,886

Yes, but, New York has a very dense city with mass transit and it is further north. 

Unemployment at the end of November:

Florida: 6.4% 

New York: 8.4% (NYC: 12.1%)

Whatabout state and local government spending in 2018, from usgovernmentspending.com?

Florida: $188 billion 

New York: $367 billion

But, according to our cultural and political elite, Gov. Cuomo (D-NY) is a hero, and Gov. DeSantis (R-FL) is a wretch. You tell me.

Then we have the dueling experts, interviewed by UnHerd.com. Swedish expert Johan Giesecke says that:

“I don’t think you can stop it,” he said, “it’s like a tsunami sweeping across Europe.” The real death toll, he suggested, will be in the region of a severe influenza season — maybe double that at most — so we should do what we can to slow it so the health service can cope, but let it pass.

Then there is British expert Neil Ferguson, who wants lockdowns.

Much as he’d love to be proved wrong, he said, the UK fatality rate of Covid-19 is likely to be 0.8-0.9%, which  will lead to more than 100,000 deaths later this year. We need to prepare for a long fight, a new socially-distanced normal, potentially for years to come.

So what should we do? Let nature take its course? Or work to protect everyone and prevent transmission of the disease? The question comes down to this, writes Freddie Sayers.

Alongside all the metrics, and the vital assessments of the human cost of different policies, where you stand on this wretched virus also comes down to attitude — your world view. Are you more Giesecke or Ferguson? The expert that most resonates is unlikely to be entirely down to your assessment of the science — more likely a complex combination of your politics, your own life experience, your attitude to risk and mortality and your relationship to authority. 

Well, what I say is that it really comes down to men or women. Women, as I say, "expect to be protected," and clearly, from my personal experience, are more likely to go along with the crowd and the pronouncements of political leaders. Men, as I say, "know they are expendable," and they are right.

But I fear that the concentration on the death rate has rather hidden the suffering rate. The sudden lockdown has grievously hurt the less skilled and the less motivated. It has been worse than a war. In war, you draft the young men and the rest of the country flocks to the colors to make themselves useful.

In the COVID crisis, the well-off have done fine, working from home, or seeing their stocks soar in response to economic stimulus -- my net worth is up 25 percent since the end of 2019. But people with marginal skills and without the will to make something happen have been hammered.

So, all is proceeding as Charles Murray analyzed in Coming Apart. The top 25 percent is doin' fine. The middle half is doin' so so, and the bottom 25 percent is being hammered. 

And whatabout you allies in the "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" moral equation? I haven't heard or seen much of you in this disease epidemic. Oh, I've seen a lot of mostly peaceful protesters waffling about George Floyd, but I haven't seen folks on the ally front proposing anything that would really help the traditionally marginalized. Does that mean that "allies" take care of themselves before venturing back out onto the Activism trail?

The Woke Cancel Culture is Nothing New

We conservatives and deplorables are just now rather annoyed at the ruling class for insisting that there ain't no election steal, no sir, and you are a racist.

After all, aren't we supposed to have a First Amendment, and aren't we supposed to have free speech?

Truth is: we don't and we never did. If you publish views offensive to the ruling class, in any place and any era, you are headed for oblivion. Oh, maybe not to a concentration camp, but certainly out of the sweet spot of celebration and publicity.

There's an amusing piece about China's lies about COVID from "hacked documents." For instance,

In early February, a directive from President Xi himself directed the CAC [Cyberspace Administration of Chine] in Zhejiang Province to exert efforts to control messaging on COVID-19 domestically and to “actively influence international opinion.” 

Why, the Chinese even pay their citizens $0.40 for flagging a harmful media post!

Gollygeewillikins! You mean the Chinese actually have to pay people to do this? Here in the US we have the bearded @jack and the Zuck that seem to be eager to censor harmful media without even being asked to. And the Twitter wokerati mobs are just slobbering for the chance to cancel someone making wrong comment. Absolutely free!

So then I got to read a Quillette piece about how, sorry chaps, all the systemic racism stuff is a bunch of baloney. Who are doing best in America? Asian immigrants. And whatabout Muslims?

For example, the latest Census data indicate that the median earnings for full-time, year-round female Palestinian American workers ($52,061), female Iranian American workers ($64,220), and female Turkish American workers ($67,759) were all higher than those of white women ($45,581). Turkish and Iranian women also out-earned white men ($57,003). The vast majority of these women have not two but three “oppression variables” because of their gender, ethnicity, and religion (Islam).

Or whatabout this on household income in 2019? 

Indian Americans	$126,705
Taiwanese Americans	$102,405
Filipino Americans	$100,273
Indonesian Americans	$93,501
Pakistani Americans	$87,509
Iranian Americans	$87,288
Lebanese Americans	$87,099
Chinese Americans	$86,281
Japanese Americans	$85,007
Turkish Americans	$83,375
Israeli Americans	$81,901
Korean Americans	$76,674
Syrian Americans	$74,047
Vietnamese Americans	$72,161
White Americans	$69,823

Heck! Who cares? Well, our pal Joe Biden is going to go pedal to the metal on "systemic racism" in the next four years. And you are not allowed to disagree with him, unless you are a racist. And if you are a racist you are going to be canceled, so shut up.

Then there is World War II. Ron Unz has written about the writers of the 1930s that just disappeared. For WrongThink. From them you get the heretical notions that both Churchill and Roosevelt wanted war, to erase their failures. That Churchill started the bombing in 1940 because he was afraid that the British people didn't want the war to continue. So he bombed German cities and the Germans responded. Is that true? And Roosevelt wanted war to erase the utter failure of his New Deal; that FDR provoked the Japanese by freezing Japanese assets and embargoing oil shipments; and by omitting to tell the Navy on Oahu about the fleet steaming towards Oahu to attack the fleet in Pearl Harbor.

Is any of that true? Are you allowed to discuss it?

Or will the official history continue down to the day that our current regime is shown the door?

So yeah. If you are outraged by the narrative control being exercised in the wake of the election, it ain't nothin' new.

But it is so much easier to go with the flow.