Or perhaps and I dearly hope, only takes a small nibble and backs off in revulsion, once the target customers for the item in question have their say. I speak of the American Girl book imbroglio. A book by an in-house writer with all the proper and up-to-the-moment proggie qualifications and sympathies has been distributed as part of toy behemoth Mattel’s American Girl brand. The book, aimed at pre-teens and tweens, openly suggests changing gender by chemical and surgical means, should they not feel comfortable in their bodies as girls. By the term girls, I mean the pre-mature of the female sex. (Honestly, looking at the picture of the author, I am not surprised at her proggie leanings. Facial piercings anything but a small hole in each earlobe for earrings now constitutes a social warning for me.) Look, puberty as it is, remains a miserable and confusing enough experience for many teens. Encouraging and enabling girls to take powerful drugs to delay puberty and have their breasts surgically removed if they are a little unhappy with the form that their bodies have or are assuming … this is not helpful. Appearing to countenance keeping parents in the dark if they do not support this chemical and surgical mutilation … even more so not-good. This development with American Girl is horrifying, but, alas, not particularly surprising, given how just about every long-time and supposedly family-friendly mass establishment such as Disney has gone all-in woke for the latest social media fad. Those fond parents and grandparents who buy American Girl merch for their daughters and granddaughters are not the least bit happy about this development not the least because it’s coming on to Christmas, where indulgent generosity is expected, not least by retail outlets hoping to make up for an otherwise bleak economic year.
Civil Society
Quote of the Day
“E.g it would help America/Britain far more to close 99% of ‘conservative’ think tank activity in DC/London and put the energy and money into expanding school choice and breaking the state’s grip on education by creating new institutions, given how much of politics is downstream of education and how ineffectual most conservative thinking/activity is.”
Anti-Concepts
One often reads that “gun violence” is a unitary concept, as in a recent paper entitled “Trends and Disparities in Firearm Fatalities in the United States, 1990-2021“. Yet once you go beyond the headlines, you quickly realize that (perhaps aside from some gun-related accidents) there are two primary and very different categories: homicides and suicides.
According to the paper, in 2021 the homicide rate was highest among black men age 20-24 (141.8 fatalities/100,000 people) especially in urban areas, and the suicide rate was highest among white non-Hispanic men age 80-84 (45.2 fatalities/100,000 people) especially in rural areas (check out the “heat maps” in the paper). Aside from the fact that men were involved on both counts, young urban black men and old rural white men have very little in common with regard to their activities and their reasons for pulling the trigger.
Because calling members of both categories victims of “gun death” makes as much sense as saying that people who die in floods and people who die in boating accidents are both victims of “water death”, it’s pretty clear that the anti-concept of “gun violence” is meant to serve the agenda of those who want to outlaw firearms, not to provide any useful guidance on how to prevent homicides and suicides.
What are some other good examples of such anti-concepts?
The Tipping Point Cometh? Maybe?
I speak of the tipping point, when toleration of what is euphemistically termed ‘gender-affirming medical care’ for minor children and teens (otherwise known as chemical and surgical mutilation) flips hard over from the trendy, laudable and even fashionable into the “Oh, Hell NO!” side, after so many years of being put out there as trendy, laudable, etc. by all super-tolerant, oh-so-progressive activists in the media, politics and the oh-so-superior intellectuals.
It all rather reminds me of the great satanic day-care ritual abuse panic of the mid-1980s, where a combination of guilt-stricken parents, manipulative “experts”, amoral prosecutors, buffaloed law enforcement and a news media panting for sensational headlines all combined in a great storm of panic … a panic which everyone eventually realized, with a sense of mild shame was wholly without grounds. But not before a lot of innocent people were railroaded, tried, found guilty and had their lives and livelihoods thoroughly wrecked. Only a very few news reporters stood against the panic. One of those few was a woman reporter for, of all things, New York’s uber-lefty tabloid, the Village Voice, who was following a local case, and basically saying, “Hello! How is this even remotely possible, the baroque and improbably ornate stories of abuse that these kids are reporting? Seriously are you all out of your minds?!” (Yes, I read the Village Voice the Stars and Stripes bookstore carried it, along with all the other periodicals. I liked Nat Hentoff’s column.)
Casting the Oracle Stones
So the voters go to the polls tomorrow well, those who haven’t done early voting or mailed in their ballot and possibly by Wednesday, we will know the results from those places which have it together in tallying up the ballots. (It might take days and weeks longer, for results from places that don’t have all their ducks neatly lined up.) I see two possible outcomes, both grounds for considerable foreboding.
Number one: Organized, systematic, blatant ballot fraud on the part of Democrat party operatives in precincts and cities most particularly open to it; fraud that is so naked, open and in-your-face that it can’t be hidden, disguised or explained away fraud which allows the Democrats to claim an overwhelming victory, aided and abetted by a tame national media.