This week, I noted several different blogs and bloggers commenting on Jazz Jennings, the reality TV star and poster-child for juvenile transition to the sex they (or their parents) think they want to be, rather than what their genitalia dictates. That the kid doesn’t appear to be the least bit happy in female skin is something that was predicted by anyone paying the slightest bit of attention. It doesn’t need Ray Charles to have seen that coming. A number of other, less-well-known transitioners have come out into the open, publicly regretting how they were hustled into making decisions as teens wrestling with various issues which have permanently damaged their bodies, their reproductive functions and their general mental well-being. Well, the young, unwary and easily duped (or their parents) falling for a fad does have that result, although usually fads aren’t quite so permanently damaging as the trans mania has proved to be. I would cautiously hope that this one is on the deflationary spiral, although I am afraid that whatever appears to replace it in shallow public awareness might prove to be even worse.
On another strain of public madness, I see that a major purveyor of Whiteness Madness, Robin “White Fragility” Diangelo is advising black people to stay away from whites for their own safety, just as Scott Adams has suggested that white people do the same with regards to blacks on similar grounds of safety. (It’s perfectly plain to me that high-status white race warriors like Ms Diangelo are compensating for their own upper-class privilege by dumping on lower status whites.) Ms Diangelo’s suggestion strikes me as being particularly rich, since I suspect that a fair number of white working-class people who have figured in the news lately would prefer such distancing for their own safety and well-being. (Links to particular recent stories here, here, here, here and to a book detailing even more incidents, here.)
As an aside, it’s axiomatic these days whenever one sees a story on mainstream media or on blogs and aggregation sites that there has been a mass looting of a retail establishment, an organized smash and grab robbery of a higher-end retail outlet, a mass brawl in a fast-food outlet or in an entertainment venue/amusement park/pop music concert as I wrote last year in this post if there are no pictures of the perpetrators initially … everyone knows. And when there are pictures almost immediately, everyone thinks, ‘About what I figured…’ The points that I raised, and that came out in the discussion thread which followed, made for an interesting exchange. Several of us made the point that in the end, the problems of the inner-city black demographic can really only be fixed by themselves. The best that the rest of us can do is to quietly avoid the inner city black demographic a softer kind of self-segregation, which people like Diangelo would have helped bring about. Where will race relations be in another six months of this? Discuss as you wish.
Race relations were getting better until Obama. He used racism as a way to get blacks to stick with the Democrat Party although it had not had their best interests in its policies for years. Lyndon Johnson was right when he said of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, “that will keep those N****s voting Democrat for years.” Notwithstanding that Democrats had filibustered the bill and it passed only with Republican help.
When I was in high school, about age 18, several friends of mine and I used to spend a lot of time in an all black bar in Chicago named “Ella Mae’s Hideaway.” We were there on the theory that the black patrons and owners could not tell our age. We played bumper pool and got very good at it. Finally, my buddy and I got so we never lost a game. The guys in the bar would line up to play us for beers. Beer was a quarter. We would play on Friday nights until 1 AM and never buy a beer. There was never a hint of danger or hostility. Everybody was drinking and having fun. We were the only white faces in there. I would not dream of doing something like that now.
The difference between the “minorities” that Sgt. Mom describes and that Mike K. remembers is that Mike’s got up every morning to go to work, Sgt. Mom’s don’t.
Seem to remember seeing somewhere that the portion of the brain that handles long term risk/benefit assessments doesn’t fully mature until about age twenty five. Asking/telling people under that age to make dramatic, life changing decisions only appears to work with a massive support mechanism. Not something you get with what I’ve seen in the sex change industry.
As for who do you trust, there was an interesting meme showing the standard split as seen in most publications, as opposed to a different split between those who want to leave you alone versus those who want to micromanage your life for you. Then look to see their supporters/adherents.
Nothing pushes people into making panicky, irrevocable decisions faster than the conviction that some appalling threat is guaranteed to happen if they hesitate.
For dysphoric youths, that threat is suicide if they don’t “transition”. For COVID, it was waves of death if lockdowns weren’t imposed. For climate change, it’s cities sunk under water if we don’t give up gas stoves and internal combustion engines now. And the great advantage of using fear is that you don’t have to prove the threat, only present it as plausible– if our fear reflexes required us to check first whether there actually was a lion in every patch of waving grass by the waterhole, we’d have gone extinct before making it off the savannah.
I personally thought Obama made race relations deteriorate significantly. He could have made it all go away but chose to exacerbate the situation for his left wing fantasies.
The Democrats have always been about “managing” race relations, one way or another. The idea of downplaying the importance of race and adopting a more hands-off approach is anathema to them.
Stephen J:
In the wake of George Floyd’s death, I saw a sign saying that there was no time to waste in debating the best course of action with black lives at stake. Let that sink in: No time to worry about the possibility of aggravating the situation.
That is why I found it believable in My Little Pony: A New Generation that Sprout Cloverleaf (who seems more mentally ill than bad) would say that “This is no time for sober thinking.” That’s just the message of the sign in a nutshell.
And just this very day, there are two more incidents of black violence against hard-working and responsible citizens – against a Hispanic uber driver in California, and a Vietnamese widow in Houston – both of whom, I am certain, would be accused by Ms. Diangelo of reveling in their white privilege.
I was born and raised in Philadelphia. I lived their until age 32. I then moved 45 years ago to a rural Appalachian County in central Pennsylvania for reasons having nothing to do with race, but the population here is more than 99% white and people here vote Republican by 3 to 1. It’s working class from one end to the other. Life here is so much better! I did the math. Adjusting for population, we should expect about 10 homocides per year if we had Philadelphia’s homocide rate. It’s zero, and that’s in an area where more than 80% of houeholds have guns.The last homocide was maybe 10 years ago. Same goes for all other categories of crime. What about all those awful white supremacists, clansmen, militiamen, Nazis, etcetera? In 45 years I’ve never met anyone in any of those categories. Not one. There may be a couple of knuckleheads out there somewhere, but maybe Bigfoot’s out there too. Of course there are tradeoffs to living in a county like this, but none would compell me to live in Philly. I wouldn’t live there if you gave me a free house in posh area. My advice to urbanites is to get the hell out. But please spread yourselves out thinly.
I have seen in the news a couple of incidents of black on white altercations during traditional hand shaking ceremonies after some women’s college basketball tournament games. Apparently, white women in college basketball still represent the actual demographic of the white female population as opposed to men’s basketball. Can’t have that, now. Not diverse. Must be divisive.
Frank,
“Seem to remember seeing somewhere that the portion of the brain that handles long term risk/benefit assessments doesn’t fully mature until about age twenty five.”
I’ve “heard” it too, and while the number seems plausible from my experience, I wonder if there’s more than one study to back it up.
Accepting the figure, and analogizing from human development in other areas, it’s probably more useful to think of it as an upper limit, or even better, a median. Considering the impossibility of not being assaulted by evidence of people far older than 25 making making incomprehensibly bad decisions, it may only be an ideal.
Still, based on other areas, there are almost certainly two prerequisites. The first is the development of the innate perception that’s likely to be somewhat uneven. Even more important is “exercising” and practicing the skill of avoiding disaster. Inevitably, mistakes will be made. The essence of parenting might come down to arranging things so that these mistakes are painful enough to provide teaching moments while avoiding life changing or ending mistakes.
As an example: A small tattoo in a place normally covered by clothing, not a big deal and maybe no deal at all. A larger, more prominent tattoo of an ex boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s name, painful and embarrassing, but correctable. Tattooing “Adolf Hitler” with a death’s head on the forehead or undergoing castration…
Then, as with every other part of human development, some portion of the population will never develop it at all. Some will learn to fake it, most won’t.
As Mike K. has said, this “transgendermania” is about to come to a screeching halt as the medical “professionals” necessary to perform these atrocities run up against legal liability.
Liberals, progressives and democrats have been wishing away reality for generations. I don’t see it changing until the ice age comes again and even then they’ll still be moaning about man made global warming.
My daughter’s experience wih a wise (if eccentric and monomanic) ballet teacher seemed to me what all children need to learn – it may not be pleasant (in my daughter’s case in this skill it was pleasant – she didn’t want to dance as a career and she loved lessons, but children stoked with fantasies about ballet may come out of it less happy). Mrs. Gee adored Alena and she was remarkably beautiful and capable of dancing on her toes before she got toe shoes and found most of the poses natural (in addition she spent an hour every day in junior high doing Pilates in a dedicated manner). Mrs. Gee (who had taught Margot Fontyn and as a young woman had danced with major Russian and English groups; dancing a solo she stepped on a loose board’s nail and ruined her ability to do classical work; she became a teacher early and stayed at it until she was wearing a drip to try to forestall the cancer eating away at her 80+-year-old body as she supervised the buying of my daughter’s first toe shoes).
What she did was put her two “best” young students into a rigorous regieme of 4 classes a week – two with much older dancers and two with those their age. They saw the limits of their abilities and the need for more practice in the one class and they honed their abilities on basics in the other. That was a learning experience for my daughter. The next learning experience happened after Mrs. Gee died and Alena started taking classes in Houston; it was a long commute and a bit wearing for those 3 days a week, fortunately in a car pool. There she soon was not criticized as much because those teachers saw less potential – in between she had gone through puberty, she was very tall, very broad shouldered. She looked very much post-puberty as she moved through high school. She also found a variety of intellectual interests (even in her earliest stage, before she started with Mrs. Gee, I found her crying in the bathtub during an intense summer workshop – she said, everyone wants to be a prima ballerina, I don’t, I want to go to high school, I want to do some of this, but I dont want that. At that point, the teachers were trying to instill such dreams in them and seemed, I suspect, to see a potential in her that wasn’t there and not the great potential that was.) She learned there were things at which her healthy strong body could excel but one of them was not likely to be classical ballet, especially after the years of influence by choreographers that seemed to encourage anorexia.
Arts and sports (neither of which I had more than minimal contact with) brought all my daughters to take pride in their strengths and recognize their limitations, to get a solid sense of the proportionality of life. It made them somewhat stoic. It gave them a sense of limits and a desire to use their talents fully. I can’t imagine any of them saying, well, I don’t like my body = I want to mutiliate it. It was a given, and what was given to them was to make the most of that given.
Since so much of teacing theory now ignores the “given” it really can’t help people live up to their true potential, but instead, it encourages the most superficial, the most gheneric of fantasies. While it is nice if someone is the belle of the ball or the quarterback that took the team to state, these are, it seems to me, a bit too generic to be attractive goals for someone in touch with their own talents (unless, of course, they really have the ability that can be developed for those things). Think of Condelezza Rice, who hasn’t done badly even if she didn’t become a professional concert pianist. Accepting the given means you don’t fritter away your time on regrets and it does mean you can concentrate on the potential you do have, which may be quite remarkable in itself.
A few random thoughts….
I remember reading something from Michael Barone back in the early 90s, it might have been in his Almanac of American Politics, creating the analogy between blacks and various immigrant groups that had previously assimilated into American societies. Barone wrote a brief history about several of these groups (Irish, Italians, Jews..) and yet over several generations were able to become fully integrated into the American fabric. His analogy to blacks was that he said blacks had only truly entered American society with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act; his point was that assimilation was generational and given several decades we should start to see that occur.
As far as a national conversation , didn’t seem to happen that way, did it?
I think part of the reason is that there is much more profit to be made in stoking racial division and keeping blacks from assimilating than on the other side of the bet. Some here have mentioned that Democrats have thrived stoking racial division which keeps blacks in their camp. Of course there are the hucksters such as Hannah-Jones, Kendi, and DiAngelo who make literal profits in speaking fees and book sales. Of course there are others through-out media, government, and business who enhance their position by pushing racial issues. In reality, the pro-division camp is really a coalition of various interests (monetary, power, prestige)
However there is another element that is even more ominous and that is the group which seeks to undermine the existing political structure. These are people who see the American constitutional order based on the principles in the Declaration of Independence as , if not illegitimate, than as an obstruction to a societal reordering with its separation of powers and protection of natural rights. John Marini has this as an underlying theme in his “Unmasking the Administrative State.” Keep in mind that these subversives aren’t hidden, they are in every facet of elite power and have been publicly calling for the elimination of the American constitutional state as “racist in its DNA” in order to provide a pretext for its replacement. The Democrats came close to achieving this in 2020 but failed to get the necessary Congressional majorities, but you see the pressure building again for 2024.
Speaking of hucksters check out Steve Heyward’s link to Glenn Loury’s takedown of Kendi. https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/03/loose-ends-216.php Amen
To Sgt. Mom’s original point of where race relations will be in next 6 months? Foreboding, deep and dark given 6 months take us through the summer. I see 2 trends converging just in time for summer. The first is reparations. The speed with which various cities and local governments have taken up reparations is truly astonishing, even if it is only in very blue jurisdictions; this was an issue that had been considered absurd several years ago. You see a lot of numbers being tossed around in the news ($5 million lump sum payments, annual annuities…) and while the numbers are crazy, they are being discussed and as well as recognize from our past experience with past “discussions” (see the historical record in California or now with gas appliances) that this is the first step down the slippery slope.
The other trend line is well… summer, the season for violence. What worries me is that the breakout moment for reparations is for a national commission or even one at a state level and the pressure on Biden and Gavin Newsom ins heating up. What happens if we get another summer like 2020 or even just Ferguson in 2014? A cop shooting an unarmed black man with plenty of people out there who have everything to benefit from creating another summer of love and every belief that politicians like Biden and Newsom will buckle. Of course no one is talking about actually doing reparations, not at first, just a committee to study it… and the Overton Window shifts again
Oh as far as racial relations 6 to 12 months down the road? What happens to Left’s “People of Color” coalition when Hispanics and Asians find out that they are on the hook for paying reparations?
Frank…”Seem to remember seeing somewhere that the portion of the brain that handles long term risk/benefit assessments doesn’t fully mature until about age twenty five.”
I’ve also seen it reported that this maturing happens earlier, on the average, with women than with men.
Which doesn’t really seem to fit with high incidence of the self-reported mental health problems on the part of a high % of young women.
Ginny,
“especially after the years of influence by choreographers that seemed to encourage anorexia.”
Balanchine was notoriously misogynist, androgyny was his ideal and girls that looked like girls offended his aesthetic. Part of it was probably from his dancing during a time when male dancers were treated as mere props and supports for the ballerinas but a lot had to do with his being so very gay. He dictated and distorted American Ballet for a generation.
Mike,
“What happens to Left’s “People of Color” coalition when Hispanics and Asians find out that they are on the hook for paying reparations?”
You don’t expect all the black taxpayers are going to get a rebate do you? They’ll be paying with the rest of us. Along those lines, how do you suppose they’ll react to truly wide spread taxpayer resistance?
David,
“Which doesn’t really seem to fit with high incidence of the self-reported mental health problems on the part of a high % of young women.”
Maybe you have to have highly developed maturity to recognize when you’re crazy. More probably, it’s a product of every passing feeling of insecurity and self doubt being pathologized and medicated, with further drugs to mitigate the bad side effects of the original medicine. Have trouble sleeping? Take this but let me know if you suddenly feel the urge to commit suicide or come to with your air bags deployed, miles from home with no memory of how you got there. If so, one of these other meds will fix you right up, You don’t have any guns in the house, do you? A rare side effect is homicidal rage.
Of course no one is talking about actually doing reparations, not at first, just a committee to study it”¦ and the Overton Window shifts again.
Overton window… You know, I recall reading somewhere on the internet that what inspired the Armenian genocide was that the majority Turks believed that Armenians were the vile functionaries of the hated Ottoman regime that had brought them to ruin. The Turks went seeking revenge and found it.
I certainly don’t approve of what happened- to put it mildly- but I think of that whenever I see idiots like this DiAngelo person claim blacks should evade whites for their own safety, or whatever imbecile in California who recently said that whites are polluting the air colored people breath.
Back when I believed the US had real elections, I would have said that the left keeps power by assembling a coalition of minorities to be harnessed against the majority. The 90% of the black vote they get was and remains a key part of that, especially since other groups haven’t been so willing to keep voting left post Trump.
Hence, the left is highly motivated to do whatever it takes to keep blacks on the demonrat plantation. Whatever it takes.
Encourage rioting for every occasion? You bet. Make shoplifting legal? Yep. Glorify career criminal George Floyd? Of course. Put Maya Angelou on the quarter? Sure. Name an aircraft carrier after a black guy, just because? Absolutely.
I think they’re running out of tricks to play. There isn’t enough wealth in the US to pay out $5 million and an annuity to 13% of the population, period. If they come up with some lower but vaguely possible number, then they’ll quickly have the usual suspects demanding more and claiming the low payments are yet more proof of systemic racism.
Meanwhile, the rest of the country still remains, and will no doubt be expected to just pay up without comment or complaint. I’d bet few people are pleased by the prospect of paying yet more in taxes for reparations, especially immigrants who have no particular reason to care about black history.
The Constitution, as amended, would seem to be an insurmountable barrier to reparations. Since I’m not on the Supreme Court, my opinion doesn’t count for much. I’m not seeing national legislation either, certainly not with a Republican House and even without.
Honestly, I’m looking forward to seeing how California proposes to square the circles of billions in “reparations”, billions in lost tax revenue, further billions of deficits and strict scrutiny. They can’t just print money unlike the Federal Government.
Even when the brain’s risk assessment fully matures, if the thinking process the brain is using has serious issues then the thoughts being produced would have serious issues as well.
Getting someone to change thoughts is easier than changing the thought process, as the process runs behind the scenes and is less noticeable. It’s hard to fix what you can’t/don’t see.
Reparations will never be paid. That’s not the purpose of discussing them.
The value of reparations to the Democrats is that they will talk loudly and enthusiastically about them, profess a willingness to pay them, and then they will decry that the damned dirty Republicans killed the idea.
And thus, Republicans must hate blacks.
This approach has worked for a century. Why change?
A note on judgement.
Friday night I cut open a bagel and now have a healing cut at the base of my left index finger. I even admit this is not the first time. I remember partaking of a hotel “free” breakfast recently and silently scoffing at their bagel guillotine.
Yet, I have made my living, low these many years, operating all sorts of heavy equipment and powerful machine tools. I’ve spent hours troubleshooting energized, open, 480 volt control panels. I still have all my fingers and toes and both eyes.
When I sliced my bagel for this morning’s breakfast, I hesitated and took a plate to support it while I cut. So I am capable of learning from experience. How long before I cut myself again?
@Howy — The BYU “incident”, where it was claimed, and shouted from Twitter and the rooftops, that a spectator at a women’s vollyball match was yelling racial slurs at the opposing team, with the tacit approval of the crowd, that was totally fabricated and a lie, yet it is held as truth by a huge portion of the liberal left. And of course an important example of how racist everything is.
Surely the same people who already decided that Racial slurs are raining down on black female athletes, despite that never happening (*), also believe that sabotaging the whole idea of athletic competition is actually a bold stand for Freedom. Or something.
It’s both interesting and unsurprising that you note women doing this. Recent (to me) research on how deeply women are motivated by personal grudges and intra-sex competition was astonishing to me. Basically, female NCAA athletes would make in-game decisions (pass to another player vs. shoot, set-up another player for a spike, etc.) based not on helping to win the game, but based on their personal feelings about the other woman/player. By contrast, men’s professional sports is full of stories about great teams whose players hated each other but put all that aside for every game.
I wonder where “percieved” racial animus ranks on the “reasons to hate and act out against another woman to the detriment of my team and the sport” scale of emotional motivation for these women.
BR
* — I am referring to today, of course. Certainly in the past racial slurs *WERE* hurled at black athletes, horribly and shamelfully. The fact that does not happen now, and the idea is anathama to 99% of all Americans, makes those inventing and promoting such stories even more awful. They deserve a solid minute under the icy stare of the late Bob Gibson, perhaps, as punishment.
Article in Politico re: New York about to impose a statewide ban on gas appliances for new construction. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/23/new-york-gas-stoves-ban-00088648
That’s how you start to normalize something, taking away gas stoves, that seemed unthinkable well just yesterday
I would imagine we will see some more bans like these so that when CPSC drops its impending report on the health dangers of gas stoves, the gas banners can point to those already leading the way. What you want to keep your gas stove? You baby killer! No doubt the media is already looking for the perfect image of some per kid hooked up to Oxygen because his parents wanted to cook.with gas, selling out their kid’s health for a well-Heated wok. Trust me by this time next year GE, Whirlpool, and the rest will be seen as 21st Century equivalent of Philip Morris
That’s how you get a weaoonized narrative, one step at a time. Now apply it to the Left’s agenda
It is simply horrifying to see how the ‘abolish gas stoves!’ is working out. My god, being able to cook when the electricity is off – using cheap and readily available gas; this simply can’t be permitted for the regular citizens, and that old, old, old ‘think of the children!’ excuse already being run out to the flagpole.
Can the administration and a weaponized media push this through – when so many households are perfectly fine, outfitted for gas – gas stoves, gas heat? I suppose they can try, Mike. I suppose they can try. The major media are loosing their grip, though, on all but the almost brain-dead.
We have a vintage Chambers stove out in the shed, waiting to be overhauled and installed in proposed house in the Hill Country.
Alas, I think that Bobby is right – reparations will never be paid, but the noise bruited about the possibility will have an effect. OTO – I honestly think that the sensible black opponents to the proposal know already how dangerous it will be, and are horrified. Given black inner city crime landing on practically everyone else … the prospect of shoveling more money and more racial privilege on a demographic who can’t even be arsed to make an effort, academically or otherwise … just sitting up and begging for a degree of race-hate that hasn’t been seen since the end of the Civil War.
Only a tiny minority of white (and an even tinier minority of blacks) even owned slaves in the US to start with. Claiming that everything meaningful in the US was built on slavery (when slavery actually retarded just about everything useful) and that huge numbers of immigrants from every country imaginable somehow miraculously benefitted from slavery, even if they arrived well after the Civil War … those claims by grifters like Ta-Hissy-Fit Coates and Robin Diangelo are increasingly resented by people … oh, like me. (Three of four grandparents arrived in the 20th century, and the one who had a Penn land grant in the 1600s were ferociously abolitionist.)
The value of reparations to the Democrats is that they will talk loudly and enthusiastically about them, profess a willingness to pay them, and then they will decry that the damned dirty Republicans killed the idea.
Bingo. I think this is the most likely outcome. But getting from here to there is likely to be a bumpy road.
If these folks repeat the tactics they used in the recent scheme to forgive student loans, they’ll likely take it to the point where they’re running ads telling people where to sign up for reparations, making this an endlessly hyped topic of the day on every news outlet, discussing a likely high and impossible payout, and of course attacking Republicans as racist and condemning anyone who objects to the scheme as bigots.
When the inevitable lawsuits against it occur, I expect most judges will turn thumbs down- but I’d bet some won’t. Eventually, though, it will be shot down. This time.
But imagine the riots after that court decision. Imagine if they happen during the 2024 campaign for the next set of sham elections. Imagine if Trump is the nominee. Both the demonrats and the gopes will blame Trump and his supporters.
Ugly times. But this is The Fourth Turning so it is to be expected.
The Dark Money Behind The Gas Bans
https://robertbryce.substack.com/p/the-dark-money-behind-the-gas-bans
I remember some years ago hearing some prominent black man, forget his name, but saying he felt safer in white neighborhoods than urban black ghettos.
Years ago (1983) I was in Nairobi, staying at a famous hotel – the Norfolk – where the likes of Hemingway used to stay.
I, along with 4 others, got bumped from the Egypt Air that was taking the group top Cairo – and having a day free in Nairobi, just decided to take public transport and look around.
While at a corner – I had a strange epiphany: I was the only white face in a sea of 100s of black faces and yet I did not feel in any kind or danger.
How different it is over there.
I think Johnson did more to screw up our society than any other President, with his “War on Poverty”. It almost destroyed the black family. I can’t think of one positive thing Lyndon Johnson did for the country.
I think you may be remembering Jesse Jackson, who was cited as having said that when he hears footsteps behind him and turns around and sees a white man rather than a black man, he is relieved, and ashamed of his relief. Or words closely to that effect.
Sometime in the 1980s- it was widely reported.
Random observer-I think you are correct