RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/03/politics_and_music.html

“Politics is for old men.” Thus a Serbian friend informed me when I visited Belgrade shortly before everything fell apart. He wanted me to send him Beatles albums not easily obtainable at the time so he could listen to “happy music,” by which he meant just music. Unfortunately, politics is for young men (and women) too, and although good music uncorrupted by politics can still be found, bad music with a political or subversive agenda abounds.

As Michael Walsh argues in his magisterial The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, “we must see music and art as separate and apart from politics, no matter the quotidian circumstances that give them birth.” Certainly, aside from military marches and national anthems, music is for the most part not the right medium for political feelings, commentary and themes — except indirectly, as in Country and Western, when the singer expresses his or her love of country or commitment to traditional ways of life.

Far too much music exists to peddle a political or disruptive message, often a predictably leftist screed. Historian Victor Davis Hanson ruefully states in an essay titled Epitaph for a Dying Culture that many people now skip popular music “on the expectation that it is not just vulgar and foul, but incoherently politicalized.” As I pointed out in an earlier article for American Thinker, typical examples are furnished by such truly execrable groups as Rage Against the Machine, the violence-prone deathcore Slipknot (whose fans are known as “maggots”), the ludicrously named Prophets of Rage, the ostentatiously punky Red Hot Chili Peppers, along with Vampire Weekend and Foster the People shilling for socialist hack Bernie Sanders, the manically feminist co-ed War On Women advancing its new wave feminism agenda, and the hardcore rocker band Stick To Your Guns, the latter dedicating their piece of cacophonic rubbish “What Choice Did You Give Us” to the families of hooligans like Eric Garner, Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bioethicists-urge-animal-research-into-male-uterus-transplants/

Years ago the crassly utilitarian Fletcher — who has been called the “patriarch of bioethics” –swooned at the prospect of males giving birth in his 1988 book The Ethics of Genetic Control:

[T]ransplant or replacement medicine foresees the day, after the automatic rejection of alien tissue is overcome, when a uterus can be implanted in a human male’s body—his abdomen has spaces—and gestation started by artificial fertilization and egg transfer.

Hypogonadism could be used to stimulate milk from the man’s rudimentary breasts—men too have mammary glands. If surgery could not construct a cervical canal the delivery could be effected by a Caesarean section and the male or transsexualized mother could nurse his own baby.

It was a classic “it will never happen” argument. Nobody took it seriously. But once again, we find that if radicals envision it, eventually we will try to go there.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/op-ed-use-partner-instead-of-boyfriend-or-girlfriend-to-be-politically-correct/

Partner sounds so businesslike. How about “colleague” or “consort” or ” comrade” or “sidekick”??? rsk

Simply giving something a different name doesn’t change the fact that it’s still the exact same thing that it was before you changed that name.

According to a piece in the Daily O, people should stop using the words “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” to refer to their significant others and use the word “partner” instead — because that’s “politically correct.”

“The term ‘partner’ — with its gender-neutral connotation — is politically correct and socially appropriate,” Saonli Hazra writes in a piece titled “Why it is time to move from the conventional ‘boyfriend’ or ‘girlfriend’ and switch to ‘partner’ instead.”

“With the growth of the Internet, and a transformation in the social order where casual dating, open relationships, delayed marriages and other such practices are finding favour, terms like ‘boyfriend’ or ‘girlfriend’ have a certain undesirable vibe,” she continues. “Mostly, these set limitations of gender roles — of what each partner ought to bring at the relationship table.”

“Partner,” she argues “has a nice, positive ring to it, and neither party feels the suffocating or debilitating pressure of trying to live up to certain preset notions.”

“‘Wife’ or ‘girlfriend’ usually come with patriarchal riders, and therefore, a women’s status within the marriage is often unequal,” she explains.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/02/culture-society

By the naïve gullibility of liberals, the conceit of socialists and the deceit of Gramscian Marxists, the march through the institutions continues, all too often aided by those who should know better. With history as our guide, the result is and has always been the descent into dictatorship and tyranny.

DARWINIAN theory suggests that our ancestor Homos have lived in evolutionary continuity with even older primate ancestors over several millions of years. Friedrich Hayek, in his book The Fatal Conceit : The Errors of Socialism suggested that, at its most basic level, human interaction is still controlled by simple, early primate behaviours. Think of the ‘flight or flight’ reaction, for instance. These are not learned responses but totally conditioned reflexes.

Hayek looked at remnant, innate behaviours in modern humans and suggested they included two separate patterns of behaviours for two separately identified groups of people. These he named as an ‘inner group’, comprised of family and close relatives, who could expect generosity, charity and altruism withing their circle, while ‘outer groups’ would be met with fear, suspicion and aggression. Hayek suggested that these behaviours are hard-wired, inherited from our primitive ancestors and developed over thousands of generations from an era when people lived in very small isolated groups in direct competition with neighbouring groups. Darwin would suggest these behaviours persisted because they conferred an evolutionary advantage to our hunting-and-gathering ancestors, who only rarely came in contact with ‘outsider’ groups.

Hayek also pointed to the significance of ‘culture’. With increasing interaction between groups caused by rising population densities, culture evolved as the set of learned behaviours which sit above this earlier innate behaviour and ameliorate its consequences. Culture is the set of negotiated ‘rules of conduct’ passed down orally, rather than genetically, which allowed people of an ‘inner group’ to deal with those of the surrounding ‘outer groups’ without having to resort to aggression, suspicion and fear.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/infantile_disorder_on_the_left.html

There are many ways to measure cultural decline, but the most important one might be emotional regression to infancy. This idea is old, but it has been studied carefully since Sigmund Freud saw it in Vienna. Freud himself came home one day and saw his house surrounded by Hitler thugs. He went at them with his heavy walking stick, and they scattered.

Freud was already in his sixties, but the family realized that Vienna was no longer safe. Freud and his daughter Anna moved to England, a land he had always loved. The Freud Museum today is not in Vienna, where he lived, but in London.

Since that time, social scientists have taken a serious look at emotional “regression,” as it’s called, because it shows grownups falling back into infantile rage and “splitting.” Mature coping includes problem-solving in the real world, and also rationalizing one’s emotions and working out personal issues through the arts and work. Nobody was ever killed by rationalization, or by the arts and music.

But regressive people live in a kind of nightmare, like infants in the Terrible Twos, switching between fits of rage and demanding love and worship. Normal parents start to wonder what they did wrong, but it’s not they; it’s the kid going through a phase.

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/shall

The following is adapted from a talk delivered on board the Crystal Symphony on July 19, 2018, during a Hillsdale College educational cruise to Hawaii.

The recent news that the University of Notre Dame, responding to complaints by some students, would “shroud” its twelve 134-year-old murals depicting Christopher Columbus was disappointing. It was not surprising, however, to anyone who has been paying attention to the widespread attack on America’s past wherever social justice warriors congregate.

Notre Dame may not be particularly friendly to its Catholic heritage, but its president, the Rev. John Jenkins, demonstrated that it remains true to its jesuitical (if not, quite, its Jesuit) inheritance. Queried about the censorship, he said, apparently without irony, that his decision to cover the murals was not intended to conceal anything, but rather to tell “the full story” of Columbus’s activities.

Welcome to the new Orwellian world where censorship is free speech and we respect the past by attempting to elide it.

Over the past several years, we have seen a rising tide of assaults on statues and other works of art representing our nation’s history by those who are eager to squeeze that complex story into a box defined by the evolving rules of political correctness. We might call this the “monument controversy,” and what happened at Notre Dame is a case in point: a vocal minority, claiming victim status, demands the destruction, removal, or concealment of some object of which they disapprove. Usually, the official response is instant capitulation.

As the French writer Charles Péguy once observed, “It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.” Consider the frequent demands to remove statues of Confederate war heroes from public spaces because their presence is said to be racist. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, for example, has recently had statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson removed from a public gallery. In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio has set up a committee to review “all symbols of hate on city property.”

But it is worth noting that the monument controversy signifies something much larger than the attacks on the Old South or Italian explorers.

In the first place, the monument controversy involves not just art works or commemorative objects. Rather, it encompasses the resources of the past writ large. It is an attack on the past for failing to live up to our contemporary notions of virtue.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/state_power_now_being_used_to_force_parents_to_transgender_their_kids__or_else.html

A disturbing report from The Federalist details efforts by transgender activists to school the courts in how to deal with parents who refuse to transgender their young children. In some cases, the courts have seized children whose parents refuse to recognize their child’s “true” gender.

Margot Cleveland of The Federalist talked to Dr. Michelle Cretella, executive director of the American College of Pediatricians, who described “two waves” of this trend.

“I first began hearing from distraught parents in this situation in 2016 and in 2017, I heard from seven families in as many different states in this situation. In all but one case the child was a 15 year-old girl who never had any sexual identity confusion prior to her parent’s [sic] divorce,” Cretella said. “The other case involved 4-year-old triplet boys whose mother desperately wanted a girl. The mother was a psychologist herself and had cross-dressed one of the boys for two years, insisting that it was his idea. In each of the seven cases the guardian ad litems and judges removed the right to medical consent and/or custody from the parent who objected to transition with puberty blockers and hormones.”

The “second wave” is even worse.

We have since moved on to the second wave, Cretella told The Federalist. “The second wave is going on now, with emergency room staff, therapists, or doctors reporting parents to Child Protective Services who refuse to affirm their child’s false gender.”

More recently, Cretella explains, she has heard from two sets of parents who were accused of being “abusive parents” for refusing to consent to hormone treatments for their teen children. In one case, the parents sought treatment for their son’s suicidal depression. Their son was adopted out of an abusive family, had a long history of depression and anxiety, had been in therapy in the past, was on medications, and never had any sign of gender dysphoria.

https://pjmedia.com/video/lesbian-feminist-lgb-are-based-on-sex-transgend

On Tuesday night, lesbian feminist Julia Beck went on Fox News’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight” to explain the LGBT breakup. She insisted that the L, G, and B — which stand for Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual — are fundamentally different from the T — transgender — and that transgender identity is dangerous to women.

“The letters in the acronym share not much,” Beck told Tucker Carlson. “The L, G, and B are based on sexualities; they’re based on sex, biological realities. But the T is based on gender identity, which is not based in biological reality. In fact, I would argue it is supposed to biological reality.”

“The LGB is very different from the T, and I don’t think it’s fair to lump us into the same acronym,” Beck declared, arguing against the use of the LGBT acronym.

“Well, when we get down to it, women and girls all share a biological reality,” she insisted. “We are all female. But if any man, if any male person, can call himself a woman, or legally identified as female, then predatory men will do so in order to gain access to women’s single-sex spaces, and this puts every woman and girl at risk.”

Julia Beck was not arguing that people who genuinely suffer from gender dysphoria (the persistent condition of identifying with the gender opposite their biological sex) are a threat to women, but rather that enshrining gender identity into law would put women at risk. Indeed, voyeurs at Targets across America took advantage of that company’s transgender policy. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://pjmedia.com/trending/a-transgender-hero-breaks-ranks/

Even though it’s still young, the transgender movement has occasioned many bizarre and horrific stories. But even in that company, the saga of Jamie Shupe stands out.

Born in 1963, Shupe has been married to his wife, Sandy, for three decades; they have a daughter. He spent eighteen years (1982-2000) in the U.S. Army. In 2013 he began identifying as a transgender woman, claiming that he had struggled for years with a deep sense of being different and had been harassed in the military because he was perceived as gay. After declaring that he was a woman, he “lived for a year in Pittsburgh, got hormone treatments and a name change,” but never had a sex-change operation. Finding Pittsburgh inhospitable for a trans woman, he relocated to Portland, Oregon, where he continued living as a woman for another two years. In 2015, the New York Times profiled Shupe as part of a splashy, upbeat series celebrating “transgender lives.”

“I have effectively traded my white male privilege to become one of America’s most hated minorities,” Shupe lamented in the full-page Times testimony. “I now live in a world where radical, conservative politicians and religious groups routinely attack my very existence with legislation to deny me basic human rights such as a bathroom that matches my gender-identity….I am a transgender woman. My civil rights are fragile. I live in daily fear in a country that claims world leadership. And my trans brothers and sisters are forced to serve their nation in silence.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/virginia-democrats-controversy-intersectional-politics/

Who is the greatest victim of them all? Leave it to the mob to pick the ‘winner.’

From The Ox-Bow Incident to To Kill a Mockingbird, novelists warned of the American propensity to become mob-like and often lethally so. Our Puritan roots, when coupled to elements of Athenian-style democracy, can on occasion vary wildly between dangerous bias and equally mindless self-righteousness.

Update those traditions within the modern bane of electronically charged instantaneous social media, identity politics, the decline of journalism, and vicarious virtue-signaling, and we increasingly suffer psychodramas like the Virginia fraternity mess, the Duke Lacrosse fiasco, the Kavanaugh hearings, and the Covington nightmare.

In such cases, predictable constructs often set afire the new mob. “Vulnerable” women or minorities or both are juxtaposed against young white males who have the scent of traditionalism, conservatism, or “privilege.” I say “psychodramas,” because the point is never to assess guilt or innocence or to establish some set of objective standards by which to condemn or exempt the accused. No, the aim is to vent outrage — the quicker, the more venomous, and the more public, the more advantageous either in a careerist or psychological sense.

The result is that there are now no rules in the Roman arena of feeding the accused to the carnivores — except two. If the progressive cause can be advanced, then necessary, one-time adjustments can call off the mob. And, two, given the complex hierarchy of victimhood and the relative degrees of perceived progressive correctness, it is sometimes difficult to sort out who should be rescued from, and who served up to, the famished lions.