Hamas should be thanked1 for reminding us, yet again, that frothing Islamist2 nutjobs exist and are still a big problem. They’re a great example of what can happen when your mind gets poisoned by an ideology. In their case it’s a particularly unpleasant and brutal interpretation of a religious ideology that glories in the death of any they deem to be opponents of their twisted fantasies.
But what are we to make of the appalling idiots in the West who either celebrate or excuse the barbarous psychopaths we witnessed livestreaming their own savagery on October 7th?
History is kind of chock full of examples of ideological poisoning and its results. Mao, Stalin, Hitler being murderous and monstrous fairly recent examples of people who were prepared to sacrifice (i.e. murder) tens of millions to achieve their psychotic and deranged visions of “good”.
The ‘woke’, too, have their own version of ‘good’. It’s probably more accurate to say that, primarily, they have their own version of ‘bad’, because it’s almost impossible to figure out what, practically, they will do to achieve their vision and other than some vague and insubstantial fluff (encapsulated by words like compassion and empathy) we have no real idea what their version of utopia will look like.
Woke proposals tend to be able to be summarized as :
Bad stuff bad. Tear it all down.
Hence we have the utterly clownish and obviously3 idiotic “policy” proposals like Defund the Police. Bad stuff bad - tear it all down.
Woke proposals flow, like magic, from the river to the sea - and somehow the woke Fairy Godbirthingperson4 of virtue will ensure that everything will be wonderful. But let’s not worry our pretty little woke heads about the details coz we iz on dur right side of ‘istory.
Of course, the people driving this movement of woke sheep have more serious plans. I’m sure that some people we’d class as ‘woke’ have a very real and concrete idea of what their “ideal” society will look like and how to get there. The useful idiots along the way, typified by the “Queers for Palestine” people, are a great human shield for their deranged and dark visions.
It’s only when you get poisoned by an ideology can you do great evil and think you’re doing a great good.
If you can get a large enough fraction of the population to agree with you, then you’ve got a real chance at power and, if you play your cards right, you can hold onto that power for a long time. Meanwhile, the people who originally liked your “bad stuff bad” thinking are wondering why there’s no bread in the shops and why they haven’t seen Uncle Dimitri since some official looking guys came round to visit him.
Many people dismiss The Culture War™ as some kind of sideshow, a mere irrelevant distraction from weightier and more serious matters. I think, however, it’s much more fundamental than the issues it often deals with.
We can all laugh when some insufferable tit of a ‘Professor’ opines that “lawns are an education in colonialism”, or writes a paper entitled “Learning Arabic as a Path to Whiteness”. These things are, indeed, derision-worthy and of such ineffable stupidity it’s hard to find a vocabulary sufficient to describe the level of idiocy involved. But in the grand scheme of things they don’t seem all that important, do they?
I beg to differ.
Our culture frames everything about how we view the world and how we operate in it.
It shapes everything about what we think is the “right” thing to do.
A whole generation of kids have grown up enmeshed, either explicitly or implicitly, in the unbelievably childishly crude version of a world in which everything can be slotted into an oppressed or oppressor class. You don’t need ‘formal’ CRT lessons to have become mired in this pathetically facile approach to the world.
This, I maintain, has poisoned everything.
Here’s the racist arch-tit of anti-racism himself, telling us who he really is and what’s in his heart.
This guy’s whole schtick is “bad stuff bad - tear it down”. The ‘bad’ here is, of course, white people. Just because they’re white.
I think we need to revise the dictionary definition of disappointment :
disappointment /ˌdɪsəˈpɔɪntm(ə)nt/ (noun):
That crushing feeling one gets upon waking only to realize that you’re not a Sowell, but a Kendi.
Of course, Kendi’s statement works better if we replace one W word with another
I don't think woke people worldwide have really reckoned with how much their own personal identity is shaped by constructions of wokeness and how much that construction of wokeness prevents woke people from connecting to humanity
Makes much more sense, and is more accurate now.
This racist drivel from Kendi is a really poisonous way of looking at the world.
We seem to be teaching our kids how to be able to determine, with great precision, their place on the Intersectional Scoreboard of Suffering™, this invisible matrix of oppressions that is said to exist. If you can’t get yourself onto the matrix, you’re probably one of those bastard oppressors. Unfortunately, the kids don’t seem to be too good at matrix algebra any more - but who needs that when there’s this bad stuff bad problem of whiteness we need to tear down?
A whole generation of kids is being taught, implicitly or explicitly, to view themselves as either an oppressor or one of the oppressed.
Teach kids that all the bad stuff in the world is caused by demons and, guess what?, they’re going to grow up seeing demons everywhere.
The tools we bequeath to our children with which to interpret, view and move through the world, are of critical importance.
It affects adults too. How many adults, these days, just uncritically accept the existence of something like white privilege? More crucially, they accept the wholly unsupported hypothetical assertion, that this, if it even exists, is a major influence on societal dynamics and works to continually hold down the oppressed (i.e. all those who do not possess this magic fairy dust of whiteness and white privilege).
But I’m very much a fan of Hitchen’s Razor which states that “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence”.
This whole binary of oppressor/oppressed is a set of evidence-free assertions made by “academics” and it’s, unfortunately, one that has leached out of the academic poisonous ideas containment lab and infected society.
Unlike the sex binary, it’s not supported by anything we used to recognize as evidence. These days, of course, “evidence” comes in the form of things like lived experience or indigenous knowledge or some other such airy-fairy bollocks.
Being non-binary in terms of sex and “gender” (whatever that is) is an exercise in asserting shit without evidence. Being non-binary in terms of the oppressor vs oppressed construction is an exercise in actually using one’s brain.
And that’s my binary ranty rejection of woke done for today. I’m off to put the Christmas lights up that I was too lazy to do the other day.
I’m using the restorative justice version of the word “thanked”, which means exterminated like the human cockroaches they are. These people didn’t just rape and murder (as if that’s not bad enough?), they gloried in their actions. Of what possible use to the world are people like this? In general, I’m all for redemption, for giving people a second chance, but do I really want to give these psychopathic fuckers a second chance to do again what they did? I hate them, because becoming part-monster ourselves seems to be the only realistic way to deal with them to prevent further harm.
One only needs read the charters of Hamas to understand that theirs is not a secular beef, but a religious one. It’s based on a philosophy that sees no real distinction between the political and the religious, which might be sort of OK except that they subscribe to an intolerant and vicious interpretation of Islam. The appalling idiots in the West conveniently ‘forget’ this overarching religious dimension and phrase everything in terms of land ‘occupation’ and ‘colonialism’ - which is a kind of mapping of facile Western woke mores onto a much more ingrained and complex issue.
Obvious, even, to a bowl of congealed custard - but not obvious, apparently, to the woke
Using the term Fairy Godmother is a hateful act of bigotry that excludes trans magic users
"not a Sowell, but a Kendi." Brilliant!
Mom, can I have a Kendi? -- No, that's not Sowell for you.
I don't care how murderous Hamas is, that's beside the point; it doesn't justify or excuse Israel's bombing the civilian population of Gaza, men, women and children and their homes into oblivion. I can only assume you think it does since an isolated and continued criticism of Hamas is all you give out. Hamas and Gazans are not synonymous. You imply a simplistic and historically binkered 'Hamas killed Israelis (on which the facts remain unclear but contended btw) so Israel has a free pass to kill as many Palestinians as it deems appropriate', an apparent Israeli exceptionalism à la USA. This is hard to stomach on simple humanitarian grounds even without taking sides and I'm a bit disappointed.