Cultural Dementia by David Andress
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
One of those books which function as a magnifying mirror.
The older you get – and the more mistakes you’ve made, the less you like of what you see when facing it.
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Archives for category: politically correct
My friend and coworker asked me the other day:
“Why do these people hate each-other so passionately?”
“Because they are rational. They have reached their present convictions as the result of a rational process. Hence they are convinced they are absolutely right. Then, when anybody expresses a different opinion, they interpret ‘dissent’ as a personal attack. My ‘truth’ having been reached in a rational manner means that all other opinions must be false. Defending them – against all ‘evidence’, means that these people are either provocative or, even, outright destructive.”
“But being rational doesn’t include being open to the possibility of being wrong?”
“I’ll have to rephrase. ‘They are convinced they are acting in a rational manner’. In fact, we, humans, are ‘rationalizing’ rather than ‘thinking rationally’. We use whatever arguments/information we have at our disposal to justify whatever conviction we already harbor. And only when reality slaps us in our faces we ‘open up’. Even science and justice work out this way.
“Innocent until proven guilty”. Only scientists and law-enforcers are already accustomed to the possibility that things may not be exactly as they previously thought they were. Politically minded people are still learning.”
Some of my right-of-center friends maintain that political correctness is a leftist aberration while some of my left-of-center friends are convinced that most conservatives are bigoted male chauvinists cum white supremacists cum LGBTQ+ haters.
I’m afraid both are mistaken.
The way I see it, none of this has anything to do with left nor right and everything to those on each side of the divide driving themselves into self allocated and mutually exclusive corners.
Otherwise said, this dichotomy is a consequence of populism.
People residing in each ideological corner are constantly barraged with messages telling them exactly what they have prepared themselves to hear.
People residing in each corner are constantly barraged with messages deemed appropriate by those who reckon there is something to be gained, by ‘them’, from keeping those people as far apart as possible.
Maybe now, that Cambridge Analytica has just hit the fan, we’ll start to understand how fake this whole thing is.
And I can’t wrap this up without mentioning something which really bothers me.
Scott Adams, blog.dilbert.com
The ‘run of the mill’ populism is directed towards the ordinary people. Which have a valid excuse for not knowing what’s happening to them.
Political correctness is a self sustaining bubble which was generated and is maintained inside a supposedly more sophisticated medium.
Intellectually more sophisticated medium….
Hopefully, Zizek’s arguments will help us puncture this bubble!
Click on the picture above and see for yourself.
My close friends know that I’m a strong supporter of the Second Amendment.
In a mature enough society, gun ownership promotes both individual responsibility and social cohesion. As intended by the Founding Fathers.
At the time when the US Constitution was drafted, the American state didn’t have a proper army, nor any real need for one. The neighbors were few and very far away, in contrast to what was going on in Europe at that time.
It didn’t make sense, at that time, for a strong army to be mentioned in the Constitution but the Founding Fathers very aptly told their constituents to build up a strong self defense capability. You never know what might happen in the future.
Hence the “well regulated Militia” which was deemed “necessary to the security of a free State”. NB, for a “free State”, not for any random individual citizen who wishes to free himself from a democratically elected government…
In this sense, the Second Amendment should be primarily defended as a stringent need of the entire society, instead of being promoted mainly as an ‘individual right’.
And it should be enforced accordingly. Keeping in mind the needs of the entire society, not only those of particular individuals.
Periodically, we are reminded of what may happen when society forgets to actually ‘regulate’ itself. When rules which have been agreed upon are put in practice in a ‘creative’ manner.
One has to pass ‘back-ground checks’ if he wants to buy a gun from a store but he can also buy one anonymously from a gun show.
Assault guns have been forbidden yet until this very morning those who ‘needed’ one could legally buy a ‘bump stock’. A “device” which “causes the gun to buck back and forth, repeatedly “bumping” the trigger against the shooter’s finger. Technically, that means the finger is pulling the trigger for each round fired, keeping the weapon a legal semi-automatic.”
Not only that people kill themselves using their own guns. Not only that gangsters kill each others in turf wars. Not only that policemen get killed in the line of work.
Not only that from time to time individuals attempt a particularly murderous form of suicide – by indiscriminately shooting people and waiting for the police to shoot them back.
Time and time again students, some of them very young, are brought back from school in coffins.
And after each of such incidents, various ‘authors’ attempt to put things into ‘perspective’.
It’s exactly this kind of warped perspective which makes it perfectly intelligible what’s going on. Some people would say anything which seems to prove their point. Only to make it obvious how wrong they are.
Cars are meant for transportation and are widely used by their owners. For the reason they were meant to. Therefore, death by car accident is just that, an accident.
Guns are meant to be deadly. Reasonable people use them for for practice and, only when they absolutely have to, to defend themselves. In theory, death by gun shot would exclusively be accidental or as a result of people rightfully defending themselves or their property.
So, should we compare those two numbers?
15,549 more or less intended gun related murders – this figure doesn’t include most suicides, with the 41,000 of more or less unintended car accidents?
Are these two figures really comparable?
If we compare apples to apples, then yes, guns are less accident prone than cars. 2,015 shootings – let’s assume all of them were fatal, versus 41,000 death by car accidents.
We can also say guns are a little less deadly than cars. According to the CDC preliminary published data, in 2016 the total number of gun related deaths – including suicides, was 38,000. Almost 10% smaller than the number of car related deaths.
But then again, how many cars have been used to intentionally kill someone? Or to commit suicide?
And since it’s true that guns don’t kill by themselves, it’s obvious that’s up to us to solve the situation. For no other reason than ‘we are the ones who might get killed otherwise’!
The current “Me too” campaign – long overdue, should be an eye opener.
Pointing out the perpetrators is a good start and we have a long way to go.
If we want to significantly reduce sexual harassment we need to examine ourselves, men and women, in a mirror.
How many times, as men and women, have we heard other men bragging about their sexual exploits, and said nothing?
How many times have we learned about other men using their rank/position to sexually impose themselves upon women, our colleagues, and did nothing?
And these were the easy ones…
Who raised and educated the present generation of sexual predators? Their mothers and fathers? Their teachers and neighbors? Who had put together the ‘sex sells’ culture which currently permeates everything?
How many women had voted for the ‘American Pussy Grabber’, despite the fact that he had proudly bragged about the whole thing? Why so many women, including ‘his’ wife, agreed that receiving oral sex in the Oval Office was something completely different from ‘having sex with that woman’?
How many women, including actresses, have used their charms to snare their bosses/business partners? And got away with it?
Why is it that in most countries the legislation which punishes the ‘working girls’ does not incriminate their clients?
Specially after more of his antics have came to light…
I couldn’t find any current data so I’ll have to make do with what the Atlantic had published a month ago.
So, a little over 12% of his votes come from college, or higher, educated women while the total is no less than 48%.
Now, would you care to guess which of these women will continue to disregard his being ‘automatically attracted to beautiful’ and keep rooting for him?
Would you even consider Hillary Clinton as a likely candidate?
At that time Clinton had been ordered by a judge to defend a rapist – which all practicing lawyers can expect to be asked to do.
“Once she no longer had a choice in the matter, Clinton said in a 2014 interview that she had a professional obligation to give Taylor the strongest possible defense.
“I had a professional duty to represent my client to the best of my ability, which I did,” she said.
In this sense is it possible that even a college educated woman, like Hillary Rodham Clinton, might vote for somebody like Trump, simply because she might consider other things to be more important than his bragging about ‘grabbing beautiful women, who allow him to do it because he is a “star”, by their pussies’?
OK, you’ll tell me that in the voting booth each of us should behave in a ‘personal’ rather than a ‘professional’ manner.
I’ll up the ante and ask you what kind of person is able to efface his/her personal self so efficiently, simply in order to ‘help establish his/her professional reputation’?
Or accept a gleeful ‘pussy grabber’ as the most powerful person on Earth?
A lot of pundits on both sides of the aisle are bending over backwards trying to explain how come Trump has captured so many ‘hearts and souls’.
Here’s a very poignant explanation from a seemingly independent minded, hence free, commentator who calls himself Tonkerdog1:
Frank Luntz, the Republican’s spin doctor, concurs:
“This is a different cat. This is a different phenomenon,” Luntz told reporters after conducting the focus group. “This is real. I’m having trouble processing it. Like, my legs are shaking,” he added.
What we seem to have here is a classic case of people so fed up with what they perceive as happening around them that they fall for the first con man callous enough to grab the opportunity.
I’m not going to bore you with facts about how many times Trump changed his mind and things like that. You can read them by yourself. Just click here. I’m not even going to ask you why didn’t you saw this coming when he said that:
‘You have to take out their families’
What I am going to ask you is:
What if he’s actually sincere when he says that he doesn’t really care (for anything else but his own ego)?
And why should he?
It seems that his ‘bellowing’ followers do not read much.
“Trump Wrongs the Right”?
So what?
The Internet is choke full with ‘the Media is full of shit’ messages. Why should people start believing what the media publishes now?
When are we going to understand that the Trumps of this world don’t come out of the blue?
Not a single one of them could have become what he is today without enough of us giving him a lot of credit.
Despite the fact that not a single one of them cares a iota about any of us.
A twenty year old intern was “fired for posting a photo of herself and a friend in a cotton field with the caption, “Our inner [n–ger] came out today.” She later apologized invoking a “lack of my better judgment.”
Looking from the other side of the Atlantic this is rather exaggerate.
OK, I understand why calling someone a ‘nigger’ could be seen as an insult. But if you refer to yourself as such?
In fact, all what she said was that the two of them were doing work which not so long ago was done by ‘niggers’. While they seemed to be enjoying performing their duties.
I don’t think she erred there. She just doesn’t seem to understand (anymore?) the world as people our age do. Could this be a sign for us to let the old ghosts find some peace?
‘Politically correctness’ hits again, and some of us are not even aware of what’s going on.
I know, it’s easy for me to speak like this. I don’t live there. But what if my emotional detachment from this issue allows me to look deeper into the matter?
And no, we should not simply forget what had happened. Just learn the lesson – so that we’ll never have to repeat it – and move on. If we keep pestering that wound in an inappropriate way (nigger is just a word, we give it its meaning) it will stay open. For as long as we encourage it to fester. Do we really want this?
PS Politically correctness “involves changing or avoiding language that might offend anyone“. If we keep sliding down this slope we’ll soon end up unable to open our mouths. It’s damn hard not to offend ‘anyone’, sooner or later.
