Hate is Exploding in North Seattle

Dear Councilman Strauss:

I am writing to you about a disturbing eruption of hate in North Seattle.

I well remember my phone conversation with you a couple of months ago. You mentioned your concern with police brutality, in particular the use of tear gas on mostly peaceful protesters during the 1999 WTO meetings in Seattle. Since you were 23 at the time I can well understand what a brutal experience it was for you. And you demonstrated your opposition to "hate" in the way you pronounced that word with remarkable affect.

So here is a "tag" under the bridge on Aurora Av. N. at N 63rd Street just a few blocks from my home.

Pretty special isn't it. Perhaps your eyesight isn't quite up to snuff this morning. I will translate:

The "tag" reads: FUCK / THE UNCLE / TOM ASS / KAREN / NOSEY / ASS RICH / ASS PEOPLE.

I think you will agree that this sort of racist sexist homophobic hate has no place in "our community" in Seattle. I wonder if the tagger was incensed that the nice liberal ladies that live west of Green Lake are beginning to demand that the City "Do Something" about the homeless that live about 20 feet away from the "tag."

I think we can all agree that anyone that slanders nice liberal ladies has no place in "our community."

However, I am bound to notice that the "tagger" seems to be confused. He talks of "Uncle Tom," no doubt from his extensive reading of anti-slavery literature. Uncle Toms are black. Yet he is also incensed at "Karen." We all know that "Karen" is a pejorative for "bossy white woman." The word "Nosey" is clearly anti-semitic. The use of the word "Ass" I interpret to be simple and outrageous homophobia.

Really, how bad can it get? In North Seattle? Racist hate. Sexist hate. Anti-Semitic hate. Homophobic hate. What are you doing about this abomination, Councilman Strauss?

By the way, I observed a "tag" on the path around Green Lake the other day. It read "ABOLISH COPS BILLIONAIRES." And I thought of you when I read it, because of your earnest concern about police brutality.

But, for me, as a racist-sexist-homophobe from way back, the ABOLISH COPS BILLIONAIRES was merely comical. If you abolish cops then what you get is vigilante groups and gangs. As a wise politician, I am sure you are deeply conscious of this. If you abolish billionaires then you abolish the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years. As a wise reader of history I am sure you are deeply conscious of this.

By the way, I read that noble lefty Antifa types on May 28, 2020 pursued and beat up an Asian man they thought was the notorious white supremacist Any Ngo. Oh wait! Andy is Asian and gay. So those Antifa mostly peaceful protesters were racist homophobes. Who knew? Of course, since the mostly peaceful protesters were masked it could be that they were really Proud Boys haters impersonating mostly peaceful progressive protesters in order to blacken the noble name of Antifa.

One of my maxims is an answer to Oscar Wilde's famous question: "What Do Women Want?" As a racist-sexist-homophobe I declare that Wilde got it wrong. It is not what women want, it is what women expect. And what women expect is:

Women expect to be protected.

At some point in the near future, I predict, the nice liberal ladies in your uberliberal district in North Seattle will demand that you act to protect them as they expect. They will throw away their #WeBelieve signs and plant #SaveOurCity signs in their front yards. I don't know what will set them off, but I expect it will be an intersection of the homeless -- that are building magnificent tented residences west of Green Lake that will soon rank with the finest tents and yurts of Central Asian warriors -- and crime. You see, women expect to be protected, from vagrants and criminals. I wonder why.

Did you know that the home invasion we suffered here on April 24, 2021 was not the only disturbance of the peace in "our community." Just across the street last week a neighbor who is a single woman found that someone had been trying to break the lock on her door.

Yep. A couple of criminal incidents our our street in a couple of months. And the Seattle Police Department is down how many peace officers right now? I'm sure you know the exact number. And I am sure that you are Doing Something about it.

When women realize that the protectors -- the politicians and the police -- are not going to protect them then they can turn overnight from nice liberal ladies into veritable Maenads.

I imagine that nothing is more important to you than doing your job. When it comes down to it, you have one job, Councilman Strauss. And that is to protect the women of North Seattle as they expect to be protected.

And that means, finally, that you, Councilman Strauss, declare war on hate: hate on our very doorstep here in North Seattle.

How could you have let this happen? That is my question.

Perhaps you could reply with a thoughtful answer that does not include your favorite phrase: "I have a meeting in five minutes."

Sincerely,

Christopher Chantrill

Where the Biden Budget Bites

I'm getting the Biden Budget online on usgovernmentspending.com. You can tell what is going on by comparing the Trump FY21 budget with the FY22 Biden Budget.

For instance, health care. Here is how it used to look in the FY21 budget.

And here is how it looks now in the FY22 budget.

See? There's a permanent uptick in health care spending.

Then there is education, in the FY21 budget:

And now in the FY22 budget:

Hey, those heroic teachers deserve their loot and plunder, and don't you forget it.

How about welfare? Here's the FY21 budget:

And here's the FY22 budget:

See what's going down? After the COVID unemployment checks have ended, welfare will be twice what it was before COVID. You think that is a good idea? I gotta bridge to sell you.

Then there is transportation, in the FY21 budget:

And in the FY22 budget:

I am sure that all that additional transportation spending will really make a difference in saving the Earth from climate change.

Yep. Government does not change. You can call it fighting climate change, or fighting systemic racism. But it all comes down to loot and plunder for your supporters. Right teachers?

But I suspect that the American people will not like the result of the Biden Budget.

But then, I am biased.

The Worse the Better

When Vladimir Lenin said: "the worse the better," he meant what Nikolay Chernyshevsky meant when he used the phrase in the middle of the 19th century

to indicate that the worse the social conditions became for the poor, the more inclined they would be to launch a revolution[.]

But Chernyshevsky got it from John Adams.

Let us borrow the phrase and use it in our own time. If you are a racist-sexist-homophobe like me that wants the American people to rise up against the unjust rule of the educated gentry class in a Great Rebellion then you understand that rebellion is impossible if the left is gently pursuing its march through the institutions.

What we need is something like the sudden lurch to teach critical race theory and LGBT in elementary schools. Because that is what it takes to get ordinary suburban moms angry enough to push back.

So when I read the American Spectator piece on "The Radical Reshaping of K-12 Education: Gender Redefinition and Self-Selection," I was actually encouraged. You cannot beat an ideology with no ideology. You need an citizenry aroused to action by a sudden realization that the kids are not all right.

Extreme ideologies are quickly taking root in U.S. K-12 public schools through new school policies, practices, and curriculums — with devastating effects on students. Unfortunately, Americans are mainly turning a blind eye instead of speaking up against political and social indoctrination that threatens our children’s education and the very fabric of our nation.

Actually, of course, the extreme ideologies have been working their way through the woodwork for decades. But now -- probably provoked by the Trump effect -- the ideologues are going for broke.

So this gives us racist-sexist-homophobes a chance to "take our schools back" from the education blob. 

The point is that all government institutions and programs naturally tend to go with the trends in ruling class culture. And right now the ruling class is captured by the radical racists of critical race theory and the radical LBGTs of transgender activism. Nothing remarkable, you understand. This is the sort of thing that happens to human communities. Call it the "herd effect." Ideologically committed leaders in the ruling class get a movement going, their followers in the ruling class go along, and all-of-a-sudden, "our kids" are being taught to hate their whiteness and adjust their personal pronouns.

This is all perfectly well understood by my reductive Three Peoples theory. The People of the Creative Self are always trying to reinvent themselves and come up with new things and try them out on the rest of society. If they do a business startup and see whether the consumers want their cool new product, or if they form a religious cult that organically grows in society, no harm done. But if they decide to force their idea on the rest of us by commandeering the government to force their ideas down our throats, then we have a problem right here in River City.

We racist-sexist-homophobes have been concerned for ages about the left's "long march through the institutions." La Wik credits Sixties activist Rudi Dutschke with the notion and a bunch of other lefties include Antonio Gramsci. The strategic brilliance of the notion is its slow and steady progress. If it doesn't provoke serious opposition then it just grows, year to year, until it takes over the world.

And there is the truth that the only people that get to work in the ideology business are the ruling class and the educated class. Nobody else has the authority and the reach to promote ideas throughout society.

So the only way that we racist-sexist-homophobes get a chance to push back again ruling-class ideologues is when the ideologues violate the Mr. Brooke maxim and go a "little too far." That is when ordinary people get angry and push back.

I got to see how that works yesterday watching the 2020 Russian movie Dear Comrades! It's about a strike in 1962 at the electric locomotive factory in Novocherkassk, near Rostov, a few miles northeast of the Black Sea. 

What was the problem? Why were the workers striking? It was simple. The Soviet government was increasing food prices and reducing worker wages, and people were frightened and angry. 

The movie is mainly focused on the minor Communist Party officials, in the city government and the KGB, and how they are basically powerless idiots in the monstrous Party hierarchy that descends upon the town to put down the worker rebellion.

The question for us is whether our Inner Party hierarchy here in the good old USA has the chops and the ruthlessness to put down the current populist rebellion just like the Soviets when they put down the Novocherkassk strike. Can they ram through their CRT and their LGBT ideology or will they provoke a rebellion that gets too hot to handle?

Obviously, We Don't Know. We don't know how much power our ruling class has; we don't know how ruthless they are prepared to be; we don't know what kind of pushback is possible.

Over at Taki's David Cole thinks that the MAGA movement is useless. Because, organic though it might be, it has no answer except "Trump!" It needs money and backing and a coherent ideology, he proposes.

Indeed. And just like the workers of Novocherkassk, no doubt our rulers will suppress any rebellious movement. Until the day that it doesn't, like 1989 in the Soviet Union. 

It's interesting that in Dear Comrades! the Soviet government chooses to put down the rebellion not with the army but with KGB sharpshooters firing on the mob from concealed locations high up in buildings that panics the mob into running for cover. And then hides the number of deaths. And makes everyone sign Sergeant Schultz statements that they know nothing. And then stages a dance festival in the town square where the rioters were killed.

In other words, the ruling class is usually afraid to display its ruthlessness in living color. It seems to need to preserve the fiction that it rules for the benefit of the people in the name of the people.

Just like our ruling class needs to assert that the stolen election is a Big Lie and the MAGA crowd of January 6 was an "armed insurrection," and that COVID did not originate in a Chinese lab. 

Oh, wait. Now, all of a sudden it is OK -- and not racist at all -- to say that COVID originated in a Chinese lab. And Twitter and Facebook and the mainstream media fact checkers will allow what was banned in early 2020. 

So that's all right. Boy, thank goodness we live in a free society.

But at least we know that our rulers are running scared.

Advice to Progressives on Memorial Day

Vice President Harris has been properly cautioned for a tweet just prior to Memorial Day that said "enjoy the long weekend.

What, you may ask, is wrong with that? Thank you for asking.

The simple answer is this. Memorial Day is not a long weekend. It is the holiday -- as in "holy" day -- on which we make a pathetic effort to make amends for all the young lives uselessly thrown away in the nation's stupid wars.

But we never admit this truth. We cannot; we must not. For, it cannot be that the men and women that gave their lives in America's wars died in vain.

Now, of course, if you are a progressive you think that they all died in vain and it is an offense against social justice. And you feel "silenced, broken, and limited" by the systemic racists that insist that every American should honor the fallen.

Quite so. But here is my practical advice to you moral exemplars in your next mostly peaceful protest against America's wars.

It is that it cannot be that the sons of average American women, the mothers of which you've heard tell, lost their sons in vain.

Yes, I know. They did lose their sons in vain in stupid wars for America's imperialist agenda. And slavery. And colonial domination. And racism. And so on. But do not ever suggest to ordinary American women that their sons are or were mere cannon fodder. They are heroes; they were heroes. Period. Full stop. End of story.

That is the point of Memorial Day, first called Decoration Day for decorating the graves of the fallen in the Civil War, as opposed to Veterans Day. Veterans Day is about celebrating all who served in the nation's wars. Memorial Day is about honoring the fallen.

See, the thing about all women, except wokey upper-class feminists, is that the children that they conceived, bore, and raised are the most important achievement of their lives: really the only achievement of their lives; really the definition of their lives.

So, to suggest that the sons died in vain is the same as to say that the mothers lived in vain, that they were fools ever to get married, ever to conceive children, ever to bear them, ever to raise them. Don't do it, lefties.

By all means blame the racist sexist homophobic politicians. By all means blame the fascist military leaders. By all means blame the capitalist war profiteers. By all means blame the monstrosity of systemic racism. But do not blame the young men that joined the colors and died.

Do not be misled by the upper-class women who have accepted the leftist narrative. Do not be misled by women of "oppressed peoples" that have been carefully taught to hate their homeland. Remember that for the vast majority of ordinary women their children are the light of their lives and cannot have lived in vain.

So, go to a Memorial Day parade and listen to the VFW worthies and the service at the graveyard and the invocations and the prize speeches by student essay-contest-winners. And look around at all the ordinary people in attendance and think about their lives and the meaning of their lives

And think about how those ordinary people are way less privileged than an educated, evolved person like you.

Then remember always to honor the fallen on Memorial Day. Because.

"Progressive Fatalism?" How to Miss the Point

The culture war, writes Samuel Kronin at Quillette, is characterized by "a deepening progressive fatalism about race in America." That's where BLM and the current cultural hysteria comes from.

I Don't Think So. But here's what progressives think.

Before 2008, many believed the country was simply too racist to elect a black president. And then, just like that, it happened and Americans forgot what it felt like before it happened. For progressives, the optimism that came with a two-term black presidency in a white majority country with a recent history of overt racism was thwarted by the realization that racism hasn’t gone away and black disadvantage abides.

Hey, I know. Maybe the problem is that the left's whole religion on race is a false religion, that for decades liberals have gone to church on the notion that America is irredeemably racist and that only liberals have the moral chops to redeem America.

And then when we elect a black president and the "black disadvantage" -- liberalspeak for black dysfunction -- doesn't go away, why, as the primitive mind has it, according to Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return,

The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

America's blacks cannot be dysfunctional fools, ruined by half a century of liberal post-civil-rights-era politics. Oh no. Systemic white racist-sexist-homophobes must be to blame. Let's recast Eliade's notion.

The liberal... cannot conceive of flat-out black dysfunction issuing from unjust liberal policy. It arises from the systemic immoral malevolence of gap-tooth white bitter-clinger deplorable white oppressors in their insurrectionary far-right terrorist cells. There has to be a right-wing fault at the bottom of it -- at the bottom of everything -- otherwise maybe the whole liberal project is a wrong turn, a moral horror, and an unjust monstrosity.

Liberals have to believe that "racism hasn’t gone away," because if it has the world doesn't need liberals any more.

Earth to liberals: ordinary American Commoners all wish that liberal race politics would just go away so they could get on with working and wiving and thriving without looking over their shoulder to make sure that some liberal isn't about to cancel them for a wrong word 20 years ago. And without ever thinking about race again.

The current left-wing ideological terror is not just "the sharp cultural turn toward identity issues in the 2010s." It's been there all along. Here's what Paul Kengor wrote in The American Spectator about liberals circa 1990

I recently happened upon a folder of my columns for my college newspaper in the late 1980s. I was the editorial page editor for our daily newspaper (published Monday through Thursday), The Pitt News. My goodbye column in May 1990 lamented the liberals who reflexively called conservatives names like “Nazi,” “fascist,” “racist,” “homophobe,” “hater.” Yes, way back then. This was when the political correctness movement really launched. We were already referring to liberals as the Thought Police.

I mean. When you are calling the opposition names, using pedal-to-the-metal pejoratives like "RACIST," we are not talking "progressive fatalism." We are talking people that think that the "other" has no place in polite society, and that the "other" needs to be purged from the public square.

Did I mention that pejorative comes from the Latin pejorare meaning "to make things worse?"

We are talking about the human need for a moral narrative, the need for a meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." And that every moral universe needs a Satan, an Old Scratch, a scapegoat upon which to blame all the evils of the world.

And if your need for a moral narrative comes from a need to justify your status as a ruling class, then, in the modern era, that requires you to pose as the educated enlightened lightbringers, the allies of the oppressed peoples fighting the white oppressors for justice.

So, if you have passed your civil rights acts, if you have elected your First Black President, if you have midwifed a second rate race narrative called the "1619 Project," if you have railroaded a poor dumb cop to jail for not preserving the life of a drugged out black habitual criminal resisting arrest, why, the last thing you are ever going to do is declare victory and give up the game to a new, improved ruling class.

You tell me: when has any religion declared that Satan or the Evil One has been decisively defeated, so now we can wind up the old religion and hang out in cafés drinking lattes until the next religion comes along?

Like old soldiers: religion never dies. It only fades away as the believers, one by one, fail to turn up at regular Sunday services.

If you want to call that "fatalism," be my guest.

"Wittgenstein's Vienna:" When a Ruling Class is Losing It

Do we care about Wittgenstein's Vienna by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, which is all about putting philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's life and work in the context of the fin de siècle Vienna in which he grew up?

Well, I do, for several reasons. First, I am interested in the decline and fall of a ruling class, and what it looks like. Second, I am interested in better understanding the context of Wittgenstein's philosophy and thought. Third, I am interested in the cultural clash between the feudal-era Hapsburgs, the 19th century Viennese bourgeoisie, and the creative class chappies from Karl Kraus the journalist, Adolf Loos the architect, Arnold Schönberg the composer and, of course, Ludwig Wittgenstein the rich-kid philosopher and dropout. Fourth, I want to believe that our current ruling class is as clueless and myopic as the ruling clique in Hapsburg Vienna.

Decline and Fall of a Ruling Class: The Habsburgs were perhaps the most successful ruling class in history. Habsburg Castle was built in 1020, and Habsburgs were heads of the Holy Roman Empire from 1440 to 1740 and produced kings of Bohemia, Hungary, Croatia, Spain, Portugal and Galicia-Lodomeria. At the end of the 19th century the emperor Franz Joseph I ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire from Vienna. You can imagine that all the lefty rich kids chattering in the cafés of Vienna absolutely hated this tottering remnant of feudalism into the modern era.

The Habsburgs ruled on the basis of Hausmacht which translates as house-power, and I interpret as governing to preserve and protect the power of the House of Habsburg. That is to say, everything that Franz Joseph did was an act to keep the Habsburg thing going. And so it did, until the defeat in 1918. Hey, it worked, keeping the ancient family in power until World War I swept the old order away.

Philosophical Context: Philosophically, I am a Kantian: I believe that we humans cannot know "things-in-themselves," only "appearances." Put crudely, I think that we cannot know the real reality, whatever it is -- if it is. Between things-in-themselves and appearances are all the theories and assumptions and science and philosophy that flesh is heir to and that we have such a grand old time arguing about.

Now Wittgenstein grew up in the era when all the science that we now take for granted was being proposed and argued about. For instance, Heinrich Hertz  was developing a "model" theory of science and Ludwig Boltzmann was developing the idea of statistical mechanics that is now the core of quantum mechanics.

Then there was Ernst Mach who proposed to reduce "all knowledge to sensation;" so "the world is that sum total of what appears to the senses." 

Hertz in his Principles of Mechanics proposed a "model" theory of science, that tests of "a representation of mechanical phenomena are logical consistency, correspondence with empirical data, and simplicity or elegance of presentation." Wittgenstein used Principles in his university studies.

Boltzmann's statistical mechanics is too complicated to discuss here, except to note that Max Planck picked up on it.

In this way, one could eliminate finally all subjective references, to "sensations of warmth" and the like, which lingered on in Machian accounts of heat theory and replace them with rigorous mathematical descriptions.

Needless to say, Wittgenstein was a Hertzian and a Boltzmannian, not a Machian.

Cultural Clash: Let us propose the following clashing cultures: the feudal Habsburg monarchy, the various nationalities in the Habsburg empire, the rising bourgeoisie, the rising industrial workers, the Jews, the rising intelligentsia. The Habsburgs were trying to manage all this to stay in power; the nationalities were each agitating to advance their separate national interest; the bourgeoisie was creating wealth and prosperity in the new industrial era, and building ornate houses to reflect their satisfaction; the new working class was having problems because of a severe housing shortage in Vienna; the Jews were shooting into the stratosphere after centuries in the ghetto; the creative intelligentsia was fit to be tied by the insult of Habsburg power, the mindlessness of the rich bourgeoisie that thought that just copying the fashionable taste was the way to organize life, and the need to create the world anew.

Wittgenstein's family history is canonical. His father, Karl, rebelled against his father, wanting to get a technical education, which his father considered beneath his status as a "gentleman." So Karl want off to America, and went to technical school on his return.

Over the next twenty years the financial world of Vienna witnessed the meteoric rise of Karl Wittgenstein to the heights of business success. He had an extraordinary capacity for utilizing his technical knowledge to transform failing factories into booming and productive enterprises.

But this immensely creative man -- he took his violin everywhere and just about everyone in the family was a talented musician -- would not allow his children to go their own way, Elder brother Hans wanted to be a musician; dad said no, and eventually Hans committed suicide. "His second son, Rudi, committed suicide in similar circumstances[.]"

Karl Wittgenstein had all his kids educated at home by tutors. But this meant that Ludwig could not go to a Gymnasium, because he didn't know Greek. So he went to Realschule and then engineering school (like Einstein) where he read, learned, and inwardly digested The Principles of Mechanics of Heinrich Hertz.

And of course, there was the intellectual culture of chaps like Kraus, Loos, and Schönberg.

There was Karl Kraus, the polemicist and satirist, who, the authors assert, held that the "tender fantasy [of womankind]... forms the unconscious origin... of all inspiration and creativity." And what he hated was the hypocrisy of the bourgeois culture that harassed prostitutes and homosexuals.

There was Adolf Loos, the father of modernist architecture, who hated decoration and the bourgeois "craze for totally meaningless articles of decoration" in their houses, "all purely for show."

There was Arnold Schönberg, the composer that gave us "the twelve-tone row" and whose music represents "attacks on the pseudo-sophistication of bourgeois aestheticism." See, Schönberg, like the critic of Wagner, Eduard Hanslick, "considered the question, how a composition sounds, as having no importance."

So the "beautiful" in music is, for Schönberg, a by-product of the composer's integrity, a function of his search for truth[.]

Notice the compulsion to épater la bourgeoisie. And note how the young sprouts of Vienna represent an emerging creative class desperate to break out of their embarrassing bourgeois origins and streak across the sky as creative gods of creation.

Myopia of Our Ruling Class: Steve Sailer has a piece on "The Future of Floydism" where he ponders what on earth our ruling class thinks it is doing with the "the worship of the holy martyr George Floyd and his racial brethren." Hey, writes, Sailer, gun murders are up by 34.4% in the year After Floyd. And we don't know what proportion of the murderers were blacks. Not yet.

Unsurprisingly, nobody in The Establishment is stepping forward to forthrightly apologize and admit that, yeah, the bad people (like, say, me) were right: America’s biggest criminal justice problem is not police brutality, it’s black brutality.

But is it all a conspiracy to screw us all over, a Macchiavellian plot by the Ruling Class? Sailer thinks not.

As reassuring as it is to imagine that when disasters befall America they must be the work of an all-knowing conspiratorial deep state out to get you, it seems more likely that there is no Inner Party. Nobody knows how things really work because, like the courtiers in The Emperor’s New Clothes, anybody who expresses doubts about Floydism is, as Hans Christian Andersen said, “unfit for his office.” 

Maybe that's a good thing; maybe our ruling class doesn't have enough of a culture of Hausmacht to guide it in maintaining its power. Maybe its determination to get rid of Trump at all costs was not such a good idea. Maybe making liberal urbanist urban dwellers less safe will not end well for the rulers.

Of course, I would rather not have our ruling class exit stage left like the Habsburgs after losing a World War. That might not be too much fun. 

I have in mind that one day soon some Trump or DeSantis will get up and, like Cromwell tell our ruling class: 

Go, get you out! Make haste! Ye venal slaves be gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.

In the name of God, go!

And, like the Good Little Boys and Good Little Girls they are, our ruling class will do just that. 

"Equality Never Hurt Anyone"

When COVID shut down the gym last year I had to figure out: how does a 74-year-old keep exercising and stay healthy? The answer was to take a 45-minute walk up to the top of Phinney Ridge here in north Seattle, go down the other side and then climb the hill again. And let me tell you, after the second hill I am really panting and breathing to the depths of my ageing lungs.

Part of the walk involves walking north along the street with the best views -- and the most expensive houses -- at the top of Phinney Ridge. I won't say that the houses along the street have more than their share of Black Lives Matter and #AWeBelieve and Be the One yard signs, but they certainly display their share.

But one house in particular seems to have gone the extra mile. As well as BLM signs in the window, it has a hand-painted "Black Lives Matter If Not Now When" sign and a "Equality Never Hurt Anyone" sign that sports a BLM clenched-fist logo. On top of that the house sports a RV trailer parked partially on the sidewalk planting strip.

Last Saturday was "Garage Sale Day" and as I came up to the BLM house I noticed an older man putting out stuff to sell on a table in the middle of the sidewalk (since the planting strip was already blocked with the RV trailer).

And sitting on a bench was a thirtyish man with the usual wokey beard. I asked the young man if he was the author of the racist signs, and he retorted that there was nothing racist about "equality."

I then spewed my fancy-pants argument from Hegel that "the thing is the same as its opposite." Thus, racism, anti-racism: both indicate an obsession with race. I ended by recommending that he get out and read his Hegel.

Well, maybe, in l'esprit d'escalier I should have suggested that in the interests of equality he should sell the fancy-pants house at the top of the hill and buy an equivalent one at the bottom of the hill and give the difference to Black Lives that Matter.

And I could have mentioned that it is really curious that right alongside his innocent slogan is a clenched fist, suggesting ever so innocently that unless we get Equality real soon a little fisticuffs might be in order.

But really, the point is that, as Jordan B. Peterson pointed out in his lobster story, all animals, even primitive animals like lobsters, do hierarchy. And the point of hierarchy is to reduce violence, reduce the number of occasions when hierarchy is established or re-established by force. Why? Because violence is expensive and costs lives.

In other words, if you have Equality then the next thing that happens is that the males will start a fight to reestablish a hierarchy.

And whatabout elections? An election is all about which politician and which political party shall be first and have power to tax people and spend money on people. How does Equality fit in with that? Where do the losers go to get their Equality back?

And so on.

Sometimes I think that the left is driving us all into a cruel and merciless one-party state. But then I also think that their current hysteria is really an unconscious realization that their whole project has gone wrong and is heading into the ditch.

Which is it? I dunno. Probably a bit of both.