Jordan Peterson inflames the Assemblies of Wokeness
Leftists can be reduced to tears by a book they have not read! How come? Because they are complete authoritarians. They slavishly accept what Leftist authorities say. Rather than think for themselves they have a few themes handed down to them that govern all their responses. Their opinion leaders in the media and elsewhere declare somebody or something to be bad and the Leftist followers acccept that as a simple all or nothing rule. If their leaders declare someone to be a racist they fully accept that regardless of what the evidence indicates. They are essentially robots.
So their tears make sense if you allow for their crippled minds. Peterson has been declared to be a "racist" (etc.) by Leftist information sources so they completely accept that as truth. And being disturbed that your employer is supporting racism is reasonable enough by itself. It is the deficient information source about racism that is the problem. Slavish acceptance of what Leftist information sources say is the problem. It is essentially a problem of empty heads
If you don’t have any matches handy, let alone a book to burn because it is not yet published, then maybe crying in anticipation of publication makes sense.
Scrap that. Little of what happened at Penguin this week makes good sense. This single small episode shows that little cliques from the Assemblies of Wokeness have big aims to kill off a vibrant, free and intellectually diverse culture. The timing was perfect too. Just as Donald Trump (almost) conceded his defeat, it has become clear why Trumpism is here to stay.
On Wednesday VICE World News reported that emotion boiled over at a staff meeting when employees of publishing firm Penguin confronted managers about its decision to publish Jordan Peterson’s latest book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life.
Some Penguin employees spoke to VICE about their reasons. One mentioned a co-worker who thinks Peterson “radicalised” their mother and father. Another mentioned how publication will “affect their non-binary friend”.
Another staff member described the heightened emotion: “People were crying in the meeting about how Jordan Peterson has affected their lives.”
Penguin employees followed a well-worn path: to prove that diversity in the 21st century cannot make room for the likes of Peterson, Penguin staff accused him of being transphobic, an icon of hate speech and white supremacy.
It is true that Peterson once stood next to a fan who wore a T-shirt that said: “I’m a Proud Islamaphobe.” And that is evidence of precisely nothing.
Another employee criticised Penguin for not acknowledging that it wants to make money from Peterson’s book. Ye Gods, a company wants to make profits from goods it sells in the open and free market.
Then Twitter exploded. More woke warriors tried to tear down Peterson and his upcoming sequel to Twelves Rule for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Peterson was accused of being an anti-communist. And the problem with that is … what exactly? The author was also accused of being anti-Semitic. Again, no evidence is mentioned.
Peterson in an interview in June posted on his YouTube channel.
Since news of the brouhaha at Penguin broke on Wednesday, many have suggested that the emotional staff members objecting to the publication of Peterson’s book should find a job outside publishing, or at least read his first book before wanting to ban his new one.
That overlooks the fact that the woke are, if nothing else, strategic. Reading the book would strip them of blissful ignorance. And there is a reason they choose to work in schools, at universities, in bureaucracies, at public broadcasters and in the arts, too. There is no creative space for pursuing a woke agenda if you’re a welder, a plumber or running a pizza shop.
As one literary agent told The Times last month, the tension arises “from an industry in which staff are left-wing but the structures are entirely capitalist and market-driven”.
“The main way for the young to express their idealism is through protest,” said the agent, adding that this tension created headaches for publishing bosses.
Not to mention the bigger headache for a functioning democracy. Wokeness has moved beyond the university campus. For many fully fledged adults, it is their secular religion, call it the Assemblies of Wokeness. The movement is tribal, increasingly well organised and, importantly, premised on a new morality. Not all woke pursuits are bad. But those parts that undermine basic values in a democracy are rotten. For example, when followers of the Assemblies of Wokeness dismiss dissenters as immoral apostates who must be silenced. Unlike many other religions, wokeness often struggles to offer redemption to sinners.
The staff uprising at Penguin is part of a much deeper and broader battle over diversity waged inside a growing number of industries and institutions. Most people are understandably attracted to nice ideas such as diversity and tolerance. These people often fall prey to more canny members of the woke movement, whose dual aims, like most religious leaders, are power and control. They colonise different spheres of public and private life, from corporations to the kitchen table, if Gillian Triggs had her way. And taken to its logical conclusion, they will usher in a stifling, intolerant puritanism that will beat historical antecedents hands down.
In a modern-day parody of Orwell’s 1984, they use phrases such as “diversity” and “inclusion” to cleanse ideas from dissenters so that their utopian vision is not threatened. For them, a Peterson book cannot be ignored, it must be pulped.
These visionaries employ “sensitivity readers” to ensure new books won’t “upset” people by presenting different views. They shame authors such as Lionel Shriver for cultural appropriation because, as a middle-aged white woman she dares to write fiction that deviates from her own life experience. Shakespeare would not survive woke culture. And JK Rowling is their numero uno nemesis for pointing out that some trans rights impinge on the rights of others.
On the other side of this raging battle are people who understand that genuine progress is messy, exhilarating, nonlinear and beyond the wit of authoritarian social engineers: that progress relies on a robust marketplace of ideas where even a weird chap who consumes only meat, salt and water can write freely about his 12 rules for a good life.
Slowly, more people are coming to realise that a great deal rides on maintaining such a healthy marketplace of ideas. While zealous adherents of wokeness may not be well suited to listening to other points of view, others might be prevented from joining the hardliners if they are encouraged to wonder about where wokeness leads.
Who, for example gets to call the shots in a woke world? And who will be left standing when a woke mob come for you if you question their increasingly dogmatic diktats? How can we work out that a consensus has become both wrong and dangerous, except through dissenting voices? A few chats about courage of dissenters from the past, and the empowering morality of freedom of expression won’t go astray either.
To its credit, Penguin put out a statement this week defending its right to publish diverse points of view. What a win-win week for the publishing company. Given the ideological make-up of its staff, Penguin surely knew that a town hall-style meeting would become a platform for emotional outbursts, public controversy and lots of free publicity. Job well done.
Apart from guaranteeing healthy books sales, Penguin employees have also boosted Peterson’s celebrity. Just as more people might be questioning Peterson’s credibility as a role model for his earlier preaching about an ordered life, the behaviour of Penguin staff reminds us why this deeply flawed Canadian psychologist speaks for those who are marginalised and mocked by woke folk. These will include many who voted for Trump in 2016, and many who added nine million more votes to Trump’s final tally, even as he lost to Biden.
Interesting, the staff disturbance at Penguin over Peterson erupted the day after Netflix released Hillbilly Elegy, a movie that surely overlaps with Peterson’s base. Ron Howard’s movie is based on the memoir by JD Vance, a bestseller in 2016 as elites in coastal metropolises struggled to understand the rise of Trump. The movie and reaction to it offer more evidence of a continuing cultural divide that can only fuel Trumpism.
Vance grew up poor in the midwest rust-belt of Middletown, Ohio. He spent summers with his mother’s family, a ragamuffin crowd of hillbillies from Kentucky. There is no father, only a revolving door of men who hook up with his drug-addicted mother. And a smoking, cursing, loving grandmother — his “Mamaw” — who extracted him from a destiny where kids leave school early and end up jobless and hopeless. Teenage pregnancies are rife, along with crime, addiction and violence. Against all odds, Vance joined the military, served in Iraq and went to Yale Law School.
The movie recaptures the social decay of deindustrialised America in Vance’s memoir. Though Trump is not mentioned in the book, or the movie, Vance’s bootstrap story of survival and success explains why millions of Americans, left behind by globalisation and other elite obsessions, sided with a wealthy insider who campaigned for the working class as a boisterous and shameless outsider.
Curiously, critics who have panned the movie complained that it has been cleansed of politics. What, precisely, do these highly educated writers need S-P-E-L-L-E-D O-U-T for them? In one scene, at a Yale dinner for prospective interns, an urbane law partner from New York asks the young Vance what it’s like when he returns to home to the “rednecks” in Ohio. He may as well have called them deplorables.
The movie is a two-hour screen adaptation about politics being downstream from culture. So is the tearful outburst of staff at Penguin. At polar ends of the spectrum, both show that dysfunctional cultures produce dysfunctional politics.
Politics might become less polarised when there is less mocking and more genuine engagement by people trying to step into the shoes of others, regardless of their class and cultural backgrounds.
For all their years of higher education, the woke have not worked out that while Trump will soon be gone, Trumpism thrives on their misguided quest for power.
Be Grateful for Capitalism This Thanksgiving
Yes, we've got the pandemic, lockdowns, a worsening deficit, etc.
But we still live in a relatively free country at the most prosperous time in human history.
The pandemic showed that when people are faced with crises, we adjust. Restaurants switched to takeout and outdoor dining. Grocery stores began curbside pickup. Companies mass-produced masks, hand sanitizer, ventilators, and, now, vaccines. I hide from COVID-19 by staying home; yet, thanks to new services such as Zoom, I can research this column and make my weekly videos from my couch.
That's brought benefits. I no longer have to deal with traffic congestion.
Traffic jams are a good example of what ecologist Garrett Hardin called the "Tragedy of the Commons."
Because roads are free, more people drive, and roads are often congested. If roads were subject to "peak-load pricing, charging higher prices during times of peak demand and lower prices at other times," Hardin wrote, then we'd have fewer traffic jams.
I bring this up now, before Thanksgiving, because a similar Tragedy of the Commons nearly killed the Pilgrims. When they landed at Plymouth Rock, they started a society based on sharing.
Sharing sounds great.
But sharing, basically, is collective or communal farming, which is socialism. Food and supplies were distributed based on need. Pilgrims were forbidden to selfishly produce food for themselves.
That collective farming was a disaster. When the first harvest came, there wasn't much food to go around. The Pilgrims nearly starved.
Since no individual owned crops from the farm, no one had an incentive to work harder to produce extra that they might sell to others. Since even slackers got food from the communal supply, there was no penalty for not working.
William Bradford wrote in his "History of Plymouth Plantation" that the colony was ridden with "corruption" and "much was stolen both by night and day, before it became scarce eatable."
People eager to provide for their families were less eager to provide for others. Bradford wrote, "young men, that were most able and fit for labour, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense."
Ultimately, said Bradford, shared farming "was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort."
The Pilgrims "begane to thinke how they might raise as much corne as they could, and obtaine a beter crope (so) they might not still thus languish in miserie."
Languishing in misery is what people in Venezuela do now.
The Pilgrims' solution: private property.
In 1623, the collective farm was split up, and every family was given a plot of land. People could grow their own food and keep it or trade it. "It made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been." wrote Bradford. "Women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability."
The Pilgrims flourished because they turned to private property.
So, this Thanksgiving, be grateful for private property, a foundation of capitalism.
Your grocery may not have the small turkey you wanted this year, but they have much more of what you want than people in the Soviet Union ever got.
When you're shopping for dinner or stocking up for Lockdown 2.0, be glad that you have so many options available.
If government controlled the production of turkeys and toilet paper, this would be a very, very unhappy Thanksgiving.
https://reason.com/2020/11/25/be-grateful-for-capitalism-this-thanksgiving/
Late-Night SCOTUS Ruling Saves NY Religious Groups From Onerous COVID RestrictionsThe Supreme Court worked late going into the holiday weekend, ruling in favor of New York Roman Catholic and Orthodox Jewish groups that sued over the state’s COVID-19 limited religious service attendance rules.
Yahoo! News:
WASHINGTON (AP) — As coronavirus cases surge again nationwide the Supreme Court late Wednesday temporarily barred New York from enforcing certain attendance limits at houses of worship in areas designated as hard hit by the virus.
The court’s action could push New York to reevaluate those restrictions. But the court’s action also won’t have any immediate impact since the two groups that sued as a result of the restrictions, the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodox Jewish synagogues in Brooklyn and Queens, are no longer subject to them.
The groups sued to challenge attendance limits at houses of worship in areas designated red and orange zones, where New York had capped attendance at 10 and 25 people, respectively. But the groups are now subject to less-restrictive rules because they’re now in areas designated yellow zones.
As we have seen, these zone situations can be fluid, so both groups may yet need this reprieve.
More importantly, this ruling puts the spotlight on the arbitrary nature of the actions of the petty tyrants, which don’t have anything to do with science:
Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio have been among the worst of the tyrants, often seeming to target the Orthodox Jewish community. Their actions have definitely appeared to be more about religious persecution than public health policy.
Chief Justice John Roberts continued his express ride to David Souterland:
The justices split 5-4 to bar the state from enforcing the restrictions against the groups for now, with new Justice Amy Coney Barrett in the majority. It was the conservative’s first publicly discernible vote as a justice. The court’s three liberal justices and Chief Justice John Roberts dissented.
This court really isn’t going to be the 6-3 conservative majority that liberals have been fearing. Roberts simply can’t be trusted. It’s going to end up being more like a 5 1/2-3 1/2 conservative split, with each important decision being held hostage by Roberts’s inconsistent, fickle nature.
I’m writing this in the early hours of Thanksgiving Day morning. At the moment, I’m thankful for President Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Amy Coney Barrett.
Coronavirus Australia: Wake up and smell the sickly stench of government control
Lucky we seldom use cash any more; it would be impossible to physically swirl the dollars fast enough between taxpayers and governments. For instance, if I spend $10 at a local Sydney cafe, one dollar heads to Canberra as GST, while perhaps another one will cover company tax on any profit; some of the federal tax is funnelled back to the cafe for JobKeeper payments and most of the GST dollar is returned to the NSW government which, after an initiative in its post-COVID budget this month, then sends some of it back to me in vouchers to be spent at a local hospitality businesses — such as my local cafe.
It might have been simpler to just let my barista keep the $10 — or are we worried that leaves too many work-from-home state and federal public servants with too little to do. Imagine the money wasted and the efficiencies forgone in this endless churn; it is a wonder cash is not turned into butter.
Yes, this is a simplistic and stylised example, but it illustrates the never-ending expansion and reach of government. While the mortality rate from COVID-19 is trending downwards worldwide, the virus has proven lethal against pre-pandemic notions of small government.
On the macro scale, the impact is frightening; where once we were traumatised by Wayne Swan’s $50bn deficits we have flipped this year from a projected $7bn surplus to an $85bn deficit — a record shortfall that will be almost tripled next year with a $213bn dollar deficit. Swan can finally have a Christmas where he fancies himself as Scrooge.
Government spending as a percentage of GDP snuck above 25 per cent in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, after which even Labor agreed it should be kept below that mark. But it surged to 27.7 per cent last year, and will hit almost 35 per cent next year. So, while we once considered it prudent to keep federal spending to less than a quarter of the economy, Canberra’s splurge is about to account for more than a third of GDP.
When John Howard lost government, 13 years ago this week, the nation had cash in the bank — negative net government debt. We started to worry when debt rose above $150bn after the GFC, ballooning to more than 10 per cent of GDP. Now it has hit $500bn — half a trillion dollars, or 25 per cent of GDP — and within five years it will top $1 trillion, or equivalent to 44 per cent of the national economy.
Never before has the federal government sent more money to more people and more businesses. We are reacting to the coronavirus pandemic like it is a once-in-a-lifetime challenge that we can bet the bank on — best hope there is not another pandemic, natural disaster, global depression or war around the corner.
While interest rates are at record lows, we have been prepared to burden future generations with enormous risks. The big privatisations are behind us and all hopes hinge on the tumultuous cycle of economic growth. Most of us under 80 years of age can thank previous generations for the prosperity we have enjoyed — yet we seem happy to do the opposite, make ourselves comfortable in the here and now, while forwarding the bill to future generations.
The same people who argue it is immoral to leave behind a carbon footprint for future generations have no qualms about leaving them more debt than has ever been imagined. There must be an argument that we could have been more prudent and avoided any sense of intergenerational theft — but this discussion seems absent from the political debate.
Perhaps even more debilitating than the lifetime of debt is the rapid and unbridled escalation of the Nanny state. What has long been an alarming trend has run rampant since Wuhan first shared its virus with the world.
We have long observed the politicians’ predilection for increasing spending, launching new initiatives, imposing new rules and inveigling themselves into every aspect of our lives in order to win our gratitude and boost their prospects. Yet it is even more disturbing to see how great swathes of the population have lapped this up and played along — “gimme more free stuff”.
Nonsensical interventions
Worse still is the way we see people enthusiastically yield to the feverish and often nonsensical interventions imposed upon them. Melburnians heeded a drastic, inconvenient and muddle-headed curfew slapped on the city with no medical imprimatur. They also were forced to wear face masks outdoors, even many metres away from fellow citizens.
Daniel Andrews and his barrackers claim the absence of infections as vindication, when the whole point was supposed to be about controlling the pandemic without crushing communities, businesses and livelihoods. Around all the states except NSW, signs are that these lessons are yet to be learned.
Worryingly, police officers in Victoria and elsewhere enforced curfews and other nonsense with ruthless disregard for civil rights — officers on horseback and in patrol cars moved people on in Sydney parks, pregnant women were arrested over Facebook posts in Melbourne, drones spied on Western Australians in the streets, and there were Checkpoint Charlies set up along a string of interstate borders.
Most of us accepted these intrusions. People compliantly kept their children home from school, for months on end, when there was no medical basis for doing so. We stayed apart from family because of closed borders, we cancelled overseas holidays, worked from home, and kissed goodbye to a wide range of social activities.
Curfews weren’t enough
But it was not enough; governments wanted more control. They banned people in Adelaide and Melbourne from leaving their homes; restricted how many people could visit our houses; set stringent attendance limits for funerals, weddings and church services; demanded we did not sing; or dance; made us commemorate Anzac Day on our own but let the protesters do as they pleased; and they shut beaches
All this in a blessed Land Down Under where the people were once renowned for their self-reliance and anti-authoritarian streak. Has the Nanny state eaten away our resilience and national character?
Sure, most of us have understood the aims and surrendered to authority, in part because we believe in the project of “flattening the curve”. But much of what has been imposed has been irrational, over the top and not based on science — yet we went along with it anyway. Were we too compliant, too ignorant, or too frightened to object?
There are Australians right now, kept apart or sweating it out in home isolation in Western Australia because Mark McGowan still insists on hard borders with Victoria and NSW, even though there has been no community transmission for weeks in the two most populous states. Some will be proud of this — “we are all in this together” — but it speaks more to fearmongering and ignorance.
Politicians have spoken of a “dangerous” situation and how they need to “keep people safe” which is a ridiculous way to frame attempts to control a virus that is mild to asymptomatic in more than 95 per cent of cases, makes a small percentage of people seriously ill and, in the main, is only life-threatening to people who are very old or already very ill.
This is not to dismiss the vulnerable — it is a call to focus on protecting them instead of trying to scare children and paralyse communities.
No such thing as a free lunch
Have we become so mollycoddled that we look to governments to prevent us from getting sick? Are politicians so conceited they believe they can manage all risk out of our lives? Do they fret about paying a political price because a virus hops from one person to another?
Ideas for government intervention have proliferated like a contagion. We have governments siphoning taxes from us only to regurgitate some of it back as vouchers to cover kids’ sport fees or, now, for us to spend in restaurants. There is no such thing as a free lunch — we are paying for these gimmicks ourselves.
Governments now proffer paid sick leave for casual workers, subsidies for wages, bonuses for employing people, refunds on car registration, funding for solar panels, bonuses for first-home buyers, freebies in childcare, schooling, healthcare, social housing, public broadcasting, and whatever else. We are dining out on the taxpayers of 2050.
No matter how successful or futile the vaccines turn out to be, no matter how far this pandemic has to run, we can say one thing about its duration. It will never outlive the propensity for governments and bureaucracies to constantly mutate and expand, infecting every aspect of our lives.
***************************************
My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
*****************************************
/>
Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
No comments:
Post a Comment