RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2020/07/why-masks.html

The “new normal” is everyone wearing a mask and looking like they are victims of a pandemic of Lock Jaw.

From linda 17 July 17, 2020 in an email about her condition and status.

We have a serious but far from Black Death level infectious disease that has become thoroughly politicized and in all likelihood will remain so for the foreseeable future so long as it is Useful and/or until a Vaccine is produced, which we will likely be required to take on penalty of who knows what. I hope the situation is not so bleak in “red” states, but here in Marxachusetts my life changed forever in the middle of March.  2+2 still = 4. A much bigger, and more important, challenge than the WuFlu itself will be holding firmly to that.

They need to ceaselessly berate and harass people to whip our minds into resignation, to break our spirit, so that we accept  the New World Order of being regimented in every aspect of our lives. This is no less violent than Antifa and BLM goons beating someone until he is a writhing, prone pulp.   By Polly St. George on video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yk3xezML8Q&list=PL53b-qznUM5QQc6GNRisYVnOnEJVPmSAq

That is the core purpose of wearing the face masks, to make us invisible to each other, to render everyone into existential and political anonymity.

https://www.city-journal.org/conversation-on-race-and-equality

On June 24, amid great cultural upheaval and unrest, Glenn Yu reached out to Glenn Loury, his former teacher, to record his thoughts about the current moment. An edited version of their conversation follows.

Glenn Yu: I’ve asked to speak to you because I find myself in the awkward position of being at once uncomfortable with the liberal stance on race that seems to deny the underlying reality of the black experience today while also being uncomfortable with conservatives who seem to disdain the George Floyd-related protests in a manner that makes it hard for me to believe that they have any empathy for the problems. I am also confused about whether it’s even my place to talk about these issues.

Glenn Loury: Well, I can’t exactly answer that question, but I happen to be suspicious about the assertion of authority based upon personal identity, such as being black. Let’s take this example. Were the actions we’ve all seen of the police officer in Minneapolis, Derek Chauvin, expressions of racial hatred? I happen to think that we have no reason to suppose that about him, absent further evidence. There are plenty of alternative explanations for his actions that could be given, from negligence to him just being a mean son of a bitch. Sure, we could project a motive onto him, onto the expression on his face, onto his smirk; we could feed thoughts into his head that make him symbolically emblematic of a certain trauma or sickness in American society, and this all may or may not be true. It might be true. But it might not be.

You may or may not have an opinion about that, but suppose the question were to arise in the dorm room late at night. Suppose you have the view that you’re not sure it’s racism, and then someone challenges you, saying, “you’re not black.” They say, “you’ve never been rousted by the police. You don’t know what it’s like to live in fear.” How much authority should that identitarian move have on our search for the truth? How much weight should my declarations in such an argument carry, based on my blackness? What is blackness? What do we mean? Do we mean that his skin is brown? Or do we mean that he’s had a certain set of social-class-based experiences like growing up in a housing project? Well, white people can grow up in housing projects, too. There are lots of different life experiences.

I think it’s extremely dangerous that people accept without criticism this argumentative-authority move when it’s played. It’s ad hominem. We’re supposed to impute authority to people because of their racial identity? I want you to think about that for a minute. Were you to flip the script on that, you might see the problem. What experiences are black people unable to appreciate by virtue of their blackness? If they have so much insight, maybe they also have blind spots. Maybe a black person could never understand something because they’re so full of rage about being black. Think about how awful it would be to make that move in an argument.

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Risk is confrontation with fear. Seventy years ago, my wife, as a young girl, would put on her roller skates and, with her older brother, sail down paths in New York’s Central Park. They went unaccompanied. At the same time, on a rocky farm in southern New Hampshire, I would get on my horse, along with a brother and/or sister, and gallop off along trails through the woods, also unaccompanied by an adult. Any concern our parents may have had, they kept to themselves. They loved us as much as we love our children. We were told to be careful; we respected their advice. Nevertheless, we took risks.

Immigrants, from the early 17th Century to today’s migrants, did and do take risks. The earliest immigrants had no idea what they would find when they set sail across an unmapped sea, yet they were willing to take a chance that a better and freer life could be had than the one left behind. Social media, communications and government largesse have mitigated those risks, but emigration is still a leap into the unknown.

Success is impossible without risk. Entrepreneurs take risks, as do writers, musicians and artists. However, in all societies, risk-taking is never ubiquitous. Success comes to the talented and the aspirant – and those willing to take risks. The result is a society unequal in outcomes, but a fair one. What makes for a fair society are equal opportunities and the willingness to take risks, to grab the ladder’s rungs and make one’s way up, step by step. Consider the obstacles overcome by Americans like Abraham Lincoln and Clarence Thomas. At birth, neither had material advantage. Both were born in rural poverty. What they had was diligence, a desire for self-improvement and a willingness to take risks. They both recognized that victimhood was not the answer. While they were endowed with aspiration, dedication and intellectual talent, they knew they had to take risks and work harder than their peers.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/16/the-left-uses-junk-studies-to-show-racism/

“If unconscious bias could be demonstrated through properly designed and validated studies, it wouldn’t be necessary to rely on junk studies. Without the meddling of biased researchers and social justice advocates, our country would be much further along in the principled goal of true legal and social equality regardless of race.”

On March 23, 1989, a room full of reporters and scientists was buzzing in anticipation of an announcement of a breakthrough that, if it panned out, would propel humanity into a new era of unlimited pollution-free energy. The University of Utah’s vice president for research introduced two scientists, Dr. Stan Pons, and Dr. Martin Fleishman. The scientists then announced that a simple device using palladium and heavy water could generate energy from a type of cold fusion resulting from chemical reactions.

We still don’t know whether this “discovery” was an intentional hoax or merely wishful thinking. 

At the time, real scientists—including my father who is a professor of mechanical engineering—immediately knew to roll their eyes with skepticism. They demanded the details of the experiment so they could attempt to replicate its results. Nobody could reproduce the results these Utah professors claimed to discover and the episode remains a cautionary tale to all of science. 

Scientific studies “confirming” America to be a racist country have become the modern equivalent of the cold fusion experiment. 

A research psychologist can attain fame and lavish funding if she can publish a study demonstrating an urgent need for government intervention to correct the epidemic of systematic racism. Most calls for drastic social change rely on platitudes and, “we know”-type statements. Asking for evidence or support for charges like these can be risky and might invite retaliatory criticism. But if one is patient and drills through the links, one can uncover the allegedly scientific studies said to support these assumptions about a racist America. 

Advocates commonly cite the Bertrand and Mullainathan study from 2004 to demonstrate that racial bias has infected all hiring decisions in America. This study submitted fictitious job applicants with names associated with African Americans to real employers. The study appeared to conclude that African Americans are far less likely to receive job interviews than applicants with traditional European or American names. 

In 2016, however, scientists could not replicate the conclusions of the Bertrand study. In the scientific community, that would mean one could not use the earlier study to make any further generalizations. But this fact doesn’t stop the New York Times from continuing to cite the study to advance its social justice agenda.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/sheer_lunacy_rules_the_day.html

In a world that appears to be tottering off its axis with sheer lunacy ruling the day, here is a small sampling of the dangerous ideas gaining traction and the cowardice displayed by so many.

In Great Britain, where grooming gang crimes exist, “British women who drew attention to ‘Asian’ [Pakistani and South Asian] sex grooming gangs, are also being attacked by the ‘woke’ establishment” because “if the victim is white and the rapist is not, she is no victim at all; worse, she is a ‘racist’ and ‘hater’ who, if anything, apparently deserves what she got and more.”  In fact, far-left extremists and radical feminist academics “don’t care about anti-white racism, because they appear to believe that is doesn’t exist.”  Thus, the idea that “Western women are to blame for being raped by Muslim men” gets a free pass for fear of Islamophobia.  The “Left validates Islam’s sexual fantasies and victimization of Western women.”
Critical discussion of Islam is now deemed hate speech, so when Ortega Smith of Spain expressed concern in 2019 about the “Islamist invasion” and the application of sharia law, prosecutors worked to determine whether he was guilty of a hate crime. 
The City of Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights sent an email inviting “White City employees” to attend a training program to help white workers examine “their complicity in the system of white supremacy” and “interrupt racism in ways that are accountable to Black, Indigenous and People of Color.”  
Administrators at Princeton banned such words as “fireman,” “chairman,” and “mankind” because they omit the 32+ genders the left now asserts exist.
College students support socialism even though they can’t explain what it is. 
An adult coloring book titled “I Am So Sick of White Guys” is “a full-throated attack on white privilege and power.”

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/15/how-confident-can-we-be-of-victory-in-november/

We can’t even be sure that the best president of modern times will win reelection over a doddering fool in thrall to our society’s most dangerous elements.

In a way never seen before, America has gone mad.

The Democratic Party, having left the likes of Henry Jackson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan far behind, is being steered by the ideology of Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. It’s in thrall to a Maoist mob. It’s tacitly (and sometimes not so tacitly) accepting wholesale destructiveness. It’s in bed with the Black Lives Matter terrorist group, contributions to which end up in party coffers. While the party lets Bolshevik bullies get away with violence, it vilifies decent citizens who try to defend themselves and demonizes cops who simply want to do their job. 

In this year’s presidential election, the party—and I never in my life imagined that I would be writing such a sentence—is running a manifestly senile relic who was always a mediocre hack at best; who’s best known for plagiarizing banalities and fondling little girls, and who, at a point when he was presumably somewhat less senile, cheerfully sold out his country in exchange for payoffs to his son from China and Ukraine. 

During the last few weeks, while Joe Biden has been dithering around in his basement, local and state Democratic leaders around the country have been allowing violent radicals to run wild in the streets, set fires, smash private property, and beat people up. Democratic mayors have allied explicitly with the radicals, echoing the insane calls to “defund the police” and rounding up troublemakers only to invite them to accuse cops of misconduct.

Many political leaders have followed the rioters’ lead in tearing down and vandalizing statues—not just of Confederate Civil War generals, which was the original idea, but of Union generals, abolitionists, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Frederick Douglass, and 9/11 heroes. It’s no longer about achieving racial justice but about accomplishing a Taliban—or Reign of Terror—style eradication of the past. 

In Seattle, the mayor refused to resist a takeover of several downtown blocks until the perpetrators marched on her own house. (Her government is now forcing white city employees to take trainin

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/marxocapitalism_at_work.html

It may well be that the hoary political distinction between left and right that has embedded itself in the language since the French Revolution of 1788-89, when the radical anti-monarchists and Jacobins sat on the left side of the chamber in the National Assembly and the traditionalists on the right, is no longer pertinent. The political binary that has dominated thought for over two centuries is growing obsolete.

The right is gradually being eroded, its traditional domains in government, church, education, corporate affairs and art, as Andrew Breitbart feared, gradually but inexorably losing their cultural authority and political credibility. With the advent of global financiers intent on remaking the world and the establishment of the giant media platforms and search engines, left and right are merging into a new, corporate, non-Hegelian synthesis. Soon there may be only different shades of left, which in practice means that once the progressivist venture is fully consummated, the term and concept of “left” would no longer apply. There would be little to the right of it.

We might say that the right is spending its way into the left. One of the great enigmas of our day is the fact that the most devoted and powerful socialists among us happen to be capitalist billionaires, corporate patricians laboring to destroy the democratic structures and free-market economies that allowed them to amass their fortunes in the first place. They are the elite members of the fabled one-percent whose policies and initiatives would ideally abolish the fiscal bracket to which they belong. Moreover, they are depriving young people of the social and economic conditions that they themselves enjoyed to blaze a path to opportunity and personal wealth.

They are, in short, cultural paradoxes who appear to suffer from a critical access of cognitive dissonance, Marxo-capitalists whose political loyalties and principles work against their own economic interests — unless, of course, they can successfully transform themselves into a managerial ruling class with a personal grip on the wealth of the nation. Such is clearly their aim. At that point, they need no longer compete in the marketplace but only with one another for the best seats on the Presidium. Company headquarters coalesce into a new Kremlin.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/peak-jacobinism/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

Even the woke eventually fear the guillotine. T he Jacobin Left is just now beginning to get edgy.

A few of its appeasers and abettors are becoming embarrassed by some of the outright racists and nihilists of BLM and the Maoists of Antifa — and their wannabe hangers-on who troll the Internet hoping to scalp some minor celebrity.

The woke rich too are worried over talk about substantial wealth, capital-gains, and income taxes, even though they have the resources to navigate around the legislation from their wink-and-nod brethren. Soon, even Hunter Biden and the Clintons could be checking in with their legal teams to see how much it will cost them to get around the Squad’s new tax plan.

The lines are thinning a bit for the guillotine. And the guillotiners are starting to panic as they glimpse faces of a restless mob always starved for something to top last night’s torching. Finally, even looters and arsonists get tired of doing the same old, same old each night. They get bored with the puerile bullhorn chants, the on-spec spray-paint defacement, and the petite fascists among them who hog the megaphones. For the lazy and bored, statue toppling — all of those ropes, those icky pry bars, those heavy sledgehammers, and so much pulling — becomes hard work, especially as the police, camera crews, and fisticuffs thin out on the ground. And the easy bronze and stone prey are now mostly rubble. Now it’s either the big, tough stuff like Mount Rushmore or the crazy targets like Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.

There are only so many ways for adult-adolescents to chant monotonously “Eat the Rich! Kill the Pigs! Black Lives Matter!” blah, blah, blah. And there are only so many Road Warrior Antifa ensembles of black hoodies, black masks, black pants, and black padding — before it all it ends up like just another shrill teachers’-union meeting in the school cafeteria or a prolonged adolescent Halloween prankster show.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/07/15/how-is-the-left-of-the-60s-different-from-

How do the radical movements of today—Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and others—compare with their counterparts of the 1960s, such as the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground?

What would the leftists of the ’60s say about the rioting that followed the death of George Floyd, the toppling of disfavored statues, and efforts today to “defund the police”?

Lee Edwards, the distinguished fellow in conservative thought at The Heritage Foundation’s B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies, joins the podcast to discuss the similarities and differences of the left of then and now.

Rachel del Guidice: I’m joined today on the Daily Signal podcast by Dr. Lee Edwards. He’s a distinguished fellow in conservative thought at the Heritage Foundations B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies. Dr. Edwards, it’s great to have you on with us at The Daily Signal Podcast.

Lee Edwards: Love to be with you, Rachel. Thanks for asking me.

Del Guidice: Well, thank you so much for being with us and for taking the time. To start off our conversation, in what ways would you say the left has changed their strategy and the tenants of belief from the ’60s to today?

Edwards: Well, back in the 1960s, which I happen to know sort of fairly well, I lived through it, they were semi-organized through something called the SDS, Students for a Democratic Society. They were the youth group of the socialists. And they wanted to bring about a new world, a new America, in which there would be no more capitalism and which there would be socialism. They were not pro-communist or pro-Soviet, but they definitely were socialists.

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

As individuals, we are a combination of genetics and experience. Similarly, the United States is a product of its genetic makeup – its people, natives and immigrants – and its experiences, which includes everything that has happened over the past four centuries – the carving of towns and villages from the wilderness, the curse of slavery and its abolition, and especially the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Our experiences include the building of roads, railroads and the telegraph, the Civil War, the taming of the west, the industrialization of the economy and the rise of cities, schools and colleges, two world wars, the Cold War and its aftermath, and the internet. Our Country’s genetic makeup continues to expand as immigrants become citizens and new births add to our population. And, so do our experiences. Everything we do – the good and the bad – add to who we are.

We are a polyglot nation, not easily categorized. We are not, as The New York Times with its 1619 Project would have us be, a nation imbued with systemic racism, a country of victims and oppressors. On the other hand, we, as a nation, should be aware of the warts in our past. God, it has been said, cares little of what we have done. He cares about we do and will do.

Robert E. Lee has become symbolic of white oppression. As a defender of slavery and Commander of the Army of Virginia, he deserves reproach. But hatred for what he represented in that aspect of his life blinds us to the whole man. Like all of us, he was complex. His father “Light-Horse Harry” Lee was a Revolutionary War General and Governor of Virginia who landed in debtors’ prison around 1812. He abandoned his family and moved permanently to the West Indies. Lee was raised by his mother who died a month after he graduated second in his class from West Point, where he later served as Superintendent. When the Civil War broke out, he was torn between allegiance to the United States and loyalty to Virginia, his place of birth. (It was a time when people traveled less; so, one’s home state meant more than it does today.) In 1865, at Appomattox, General Lee surrendered his sword without animus to a younger General Grant, who had graduated in the bottom half of his class at West Point. In the aftermath of the War and at a time of bitter recriminations on the part of many Southerners toward the victorious North, Lee supported reconciliation with a reborn United States, later led by his former foe.