RUTHFULLY YOURS

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Civilization moves inexorably forward. Over centuries, more and more people have enjoyed the freedom that democratic forms of government offer, and the fruits that industrial and technological advancements and free market capitalism provide. But bumps and potholes inhibit progress. The United States (and the western world) must not allow the disruptions by a few to impede the rights of the many. In the midst of chaos, we ask: Is anybody in charge?

Reminiscent of the takeover of deans’ offices in 1968, college students at UCLA, already granted safe spaces where they are protected from white-privileged professors and students, demand a “no-harm” grading system, shorter exams and extended deadlines for Black students. As a form of virtue signaling, corporations empower activists, in hopes of reducing the threat of litigation. The New York Times, at the instigation of the staff, fired James Bennet, a white, male editor for publishing a Republican Senator’s op-ed. A headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “Buildings Matter, Too,” led to the resignation of a top editor. In a dozen and more cities, like New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and Des Moines protests turned into riots, and looters took to the streets, burning cars, smashing windows and robbing stores. Police stepped aside and knelt in obeisance to protesters.

Mayor Jenny Durkan of Seattle has allowed a vigilante group to take over six blocks in the residential area of Capital Hill, which includes a police station, as an autonomous zone (CHAZ). They patrol its border with weapons, demand rent control and reverse gentrification. They want to abolish the police force and receive free healthcare, and they want the release of all those imprisoned on marijuana charges. Under the banner of Black Lives Matter, mobs have defaced and destroyed statues across the country. While their preferred targets are Southern Civil War Generals, they have been indiscriminate in their targets. In Los Angeles, a statue of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who saved the lives of thousands of Jews during World War II was marred with irrelevant slogans: “BLM” and “Free Palestine.” In Washington, D.C., vandals defaced the Lincoln Memorial and the World War II Memorial. World War I American doughboy statues in Birmingham, Alabama and Pittsburg, Pennsylvania were vandalized. The Sacred Heart of Jesus statue at St. John the Evangelist Parish in Wasco, California had its head ripped off.

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-new-norm.html

“Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control.”

As I have queried elsewhere: Will Americans reclaim their freedom to go about their lives without the government or the “experts” on the virus “crisis” dictating how they must conduct  their lives, as they had decades ago? Do they even remember the time?  I’ve said it before: This is not my culture, and it seems to be becoming worse;  statists have jumped at the opportunity to impose more and more restrictions and controls, and proclaim that they are the “new norm.”.

One blog offered this advice on how to submit: 

“You can start over again! Don’t even think about quitting now! It is easy to replay in your mind how things did not work, how much you lost, what you are going through, how angry you are. There is no amount of conversation or magic that is going to wipe the slate clean. You are wasting valuable time and energy that could be used to regain a new normal and start another version of your life. Even though you are hurt and you may be feeling down — stop kicking yourself! Face what has happened. Make the decision to start over again.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/advancing-nihilism-and-rot-post-modernism-west-jason-d-hill/

Much has already been written on the horrific and tragic killing of George Floyd, and much has been written and debated about the existence or non-existence of systemic racism in our society and in the police departments of the United States of America. I submit that reasonable people can have reasonable disagreements about that issue; they can offer reasonable counterfactuals and equally compelling rejoinders. I am a philosopher by training, and one possessed of a cold, unsentimental mind by temperament. Therefore, I take it that an absence of a consensus about issues that are far from unassailable truths can exist without civic life and social trust and cohesion falling into total disarray. 

What bothers me about the culture wars taking place in the streets of American cities as I listen (not unsympathetically to the cries of the hearts of people who have genuinely suffered from prejudice and brutality in their lives) is a number of things. First and foremost is the unchanneled rage and directionless anger that is harming not just innocent citizens of all races, but also the very people in whose names the protests and riots are offered up as a form of both restorative and retributive justice, and as invisible victims in systemically corrupt institutions: black people.

When black and white protestors indiscriminately tear down or deface the statues of slaves traders and white abolitionists with equal abandon; when Winston Churchill, a gallant war hero and indisputable defender of Western civilization who, along with the United States, saved the West from the rapacious ravages of Hitler’s expansionist design for racially-dominated Aryan rule, is considered morally indistinguishable from racial separatists; and when the latter are lumped with white abolitionists who gave their lives for black emancipation, there is no lower place to sink in terms of both cognitive dissonance and moral depravity. In an imperfect world, moral and conceptual distinctions must be made. In London, the statue of Abraham Lincoln was vandalized at a Black Lives Matter protest.