There have been only two sure ways to determine whether someone is a fascist or not.
In the 20th century, you ask someone. If he says he’s a fascist, he’s almost certainly a fascist.
in the 21st century, you ask someone. If he says he’s an anti-fascist, he’s almost certainly a fascist.
All other methods require careful analysis and consideration.
twv
Canada lies just to our north. But politically, it’s much further distant.
This summer many Americans took notice of Canada because of its wildfires. But what was worse? The conflagrations of 68 churches the previous summer.
These works of arson occurred after stories spread about presumed unmarked mass graves of native children. It was merely a conjecture, this idea of mass native graves from when Canadian government worked with churches to educate native children into modern, “white” ways. But the initial reports, based on ground radar scans, were repeated as the gospel truth, and the hysteria over “genocide” quickly spread — and so did the fires. No mass graves have been found. None. It was all bad science, horrifically irresponsible journalism, and murderously anti-Christian propaganda.
And sitting atop the Canadian hierarchy was Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who bent over backwards seeming to excuse the arsonists — he “understood” the anger, you see.
Meanwhile, as the country openly anguished about a past (non-existent) genocide, Canadians blithely accepted a policy of state-subsidized, medically-supervised, and bureaucratically-encouraged euthanasia, called medical assistance in dying (MAiD). So far, well over thirty thousand Canadians have used their government to kill themselves. The biggest scandals, however, have focused on cases where the MAiD functionaries were encouraging citizens to end their lives with this program. “Medical death” is cheaper than subsidizing health care.
While burning churches and killing citizens is creepy, a different kind of shiver runs down my spine upon learning of the latest Dr. Jordan Peterson news. A Canadian court has ruled that the psychologist and social media guru must “undergo social media sensitivity training” for expressing opinions on social media.
Thankfully, Dr. Peterson has options: he owns an $8 million estate in Florida, so his free speech rights are something he can keep no matter what his native country tries to do, our First Amendment still being in operation. And, further, it’s really a professional licensing issue, and the worst that can happen to him, so far, is he loses his license to practice clinical psychology — a different level of wrong.
But still, it all seems very “cultural revolution,” no?
Which suggests where Canada has placed itself on the political map: dystopia.
twv
On July 14, 1933, Germany’s Nazis enacted the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases. This was a murderous eugenics law, and it had strong support from Germany’s doctors — one of the blocs that supported statism at the time — and widely in the west, including the U.S.
It is often forgotten that eugenics was “in” at the time, just as environmentalism is “in” today, with many of the same classes of people. Progressivism in America, like Fascism in America, Nazis in Germany and social democracy throughout Europe, prided itself on the up-to-date character of social engineering and the importance of “taking control“ of the anarchic forces of society. Though they talked up evolution and Darwin and the like, they all spurned sexual selection, a key component of Darwinian thought, as an adequate check on disease and misery.
It is kind of funny. After the destruction of the Nazi regime, some of these views flipped, but the general abhorrence of freedom remained, and social engineering became more of a limited economic program, leaving aside culture wars for a generation, when the left and the elites took up free love and abortion and birth control. This shift is the major metamorphosis of progressivist statism in the last century, the decadence of which is now obvious to over half the population.
We’ve come a long way from the Nazis. But the new horrors are sometimes eerily similar. The most striking similarity then and now is the medical obsession, the subject of “public health” rather than medicine as a private good. Fifty years or more of pressing the socialized medicine idea has fed this.
twv
I never went on about my reservations regarding transsexuals, transvestites and similar “transgender” creations until the trans movement
This latter was especially galling.
Note that I did not express umbrage with “transwomen” who were deceitfully trying to engage in sexual intercourse with straight men. I let that one go for decades. But these new developments in the culture wars were too much to bear.
So I began to apply my usual critical faculties against a movement I regarded chiefly in cultic terms, as examples of a post-Christian salvific faith with ties to postmodernism and Marxism and radical feminism and the notions of political as well as social revolution.
Key concepts have been to attack the very idea of gender and distinguish it from sex, and to undermine the imperialism of the slippery gender concept and its use to subvert biological science and common sense.
Now I am more than willing to tell a transgender person that he or she is more mad than anything else, more crazy than honestly struggling with perversity.
But perversity is there, and the general trans transgressions are fraud and contempt for the basic reality of human nature.
Which I can also sympathize with. For I too am a mutant. Just not spiteful enough to pretend to be something I’m not. Not seriously pretend. Jest, I will. But these trans activists are as deadly serious as a communist.
twv
I don’t consider the transgender mania, lockdown policy and mask mandates, or the “climate change” hysteria to be all that different in form.
And I believe every earnest supporter of these crazes to be dupes at best, and much, much worse . . . at worst.
It’s all based on a deeply misconstrued understanding (a misunderstanding) of “science,” which in each of these cases is dominated by social pressures to conform to norms and an authoritarian, elitist view of knowledge acquisition.
I understand how “normal” people can get caught up in this nonsense, but when I see smart members of my own political tribe, I just shake my head.
I suspect these are all in part the result of a feature of human beings we gained an inkling of in Fifties’ and Sixties’ rat and mouse studies, about the effects of crowding (high-density populations) and hedonic feedback loops in contrived circumstances.
This element is not unrelated to risk homeostasis, where our personally acceptable risk levels retain a baseline even as levels of risk change, and we, at the margins of behavioral change, become more risky in our behavior. This accommodation to changing circumstances seems perverse, but as economist Sam Peltzman demonstrated, it goes on without our conscious awareness. And it is rational, in a sense: in that it is explainable in rational terms and to the individual in any given instance likely appears a reasonable reaction.
The process of cultural decadence goes on at a micro-micro level, but exhibits its perversities at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels. On the macro level it appears as full-blown cultural decline, sending our civilization, pel-mel, into destruction.
The only counters to this, as far as I can tell, is better understandings of reason and norms. And criticism of the lazy, evil, witless, and perverse.
twv
Pointers; setters: picture the two relevant dog breeds . . . their images adorning the usual set of restroom doors. Men and boys are pointers; women and girls are setters. Get it?
Such humorous, quasi-vulgar noms les toilettes for sex-segregated restrooms were brought to mind this week, after the squabbles regarding urinals in New Hampshire’s Milford Middle School and Milford High School.
The regulations that the New Milford School District placed upon restroom and locker rooms in the New Hampshire public school were indeed bizarre, goofily bizarre, but entirely in accord with woke transgenderism. That they had to be rescinded, because of protest, is a good sign. But the premises of wokist demands are still held by most “earnest” people, and the consequences of those premises will keep resurfacing so long as they are held by people with some sort of power, legal, political, or “merely” cultural.
So this is what had been done:
All this was protested. And the school board caved to the protests. But the threat of some new goofy policy was not removed.
What our pathetic post-moderns cannot accept is that sex is more important than “gender,” and hetero-normativity better served than the demands of the neurotic. They also do not see that sex is a Schelling Point issue on matters like who gets to use what public restroom, while “gender” is far too flapdoodlish to serve, and trying to make it do so causes huge problems, like the threat of rape and gross inefficiency of restroom use — and general “grossness.”
What is especially interesting are issues like modesty and shame, both huge drivers in all this. The trans “boys” apparently experienced shame, or at the very least modest repulsion, over actual boys using urinals. Hence the original complaint. This element is bad enough for boys and girls with members of their own sex (we’ve all seen Woody Allen discuss urinal etiquette), but add in members of the opposite sex pretending to be members of their sex, and the micro-social negotiations become quite difficult. Surely we can all sympathize.
Or pity. At least.
One thing the transgender crowd hasn’t accepted yet is that some men will game their new system.
Earnest transgenderists set up gender-segregated rather than sex-segregated bathrooms. They say it’s to honor and respect and acknowledge the dignity of trans boys and trans girls, trans men and trans women. But that’s not to say that all men who pretend to be women or all boys who pretend to be girls will be in earnest.
Cross-dressing transvestite men have long been a separate, quite distinct class from “transsexuals” (as we used to call them). For them, it’s about “the kinks” . . . it’s very sexual, and it’s not at all respectful. I say their behavior and comportment is parodic of women and disrespectful of members of the sex; it is indeed astoundingly sexist; and it is brinksmanship in this context.
Until the transgenderists can distinguish earnest from the malign gender-benders, the whole issue is, well, problematic.
Meanwhile, real pointers and setters — the canines — do their “business” outside. Is that where we’re headed?
twv
I know, let’s take from some folks and give the loot to others, turning the most deserving into — millionaires!
This variety of political reasoning is so popular that, instead of being laughed out of the public arena, add in a dollop of “race” and it’s a headline.
At least in California.
“San Francisco’s reparations committee has proposed paying each Black longtime resident $5 million and granting total debt forgiveness,” explains the Fox News Digital story.
But why just “Black” residents?
Oppression. Racism. The Usual Suspects of the woke: “due to the decades of ‘systematic repression’ faced by the local Black community.”
What happened to “systemic”? Why “systematic”? Maybe the inconvenient fact that there was no long tradition of chattel slavery in California requires that extra syllable.
The San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee’s notion is, we’re told, “to address the public policies explicitly created to subjugate Black people in San Francisco by upholding and expanding the intent and legacy of chattel slavery.”
So Blacks in former slave states should get ten million each?
Or fifty.
Do I hear $100 million?
Fortunately, the report will likely be shelved, as feared by its supporters.
Unfortunately, sufferers of commonsense deficit syndrome don’t realize how their all-too-familiar program negatively affects the actual people they say they serve. When you look at San Francisco’s mass lootings, which group of people do you see stealing garbage bag loads off Walmart shelves?
The looters are mostly racial minorities who’ve been encouraged to believe they “are owed.”
So they steal.
But any person — man or woman, black or white — who resorts to open theft throws a monkey wrench into his or her future. It’s no way to get ahead.
Which increases the wealth and income gap.
The utopians themselves make sure the cycle of dysfunction never ends.
twv
Ah, word choice: “been with.”
And “trans canine” is indeed a gruesomely hilarious result of the gender movement, and the left’s desperate anti-natalism which I see lurking behind its insane forms of trendy identitarianism.
Shakespeare’s Polonius advised: “To thine own self be true.” But few seek this kind of individualistic humanism any longer, and the cultural path led us to a place where fewer and fewer bother cultivating their own selves with any degree of success. So, as if to turn poor Polonius on his head, they have reversed day and night to become false to all people.
“I just want friends and a crowd” — this does capture the group categorization frenzy that youngsters seem unable not to engage in. Though this statement would have been more apt had she used “pack” instead of “crowd.”
Bestiality farded up as “trans caninism” is at least funny.
I haven’t been reading many satires recently since the artless satires of our reality appear daily for our amusement.
The cult of freak-flag sexuality seems to be approaching stefnal bizarrerie. And I confess: I am not in the least interested in coercing her not to fuck her dogs. I assume that if a male dog will eagerly go at it with her, it is consensual enough for me. But it remains absolutely vital for the main run of society to mock this bitch and laugh at her antics, and warn children from becoming as horrific as she is eager to become.
Of course, this could all be a joke: a sick, twisted joke. A parody of leftist transgenderist identitarianism. Or some come-on for an OnlyFans account. Hers is the first naked pussy I have seen on Twitter, so the chance that this is some form of put-on is quite high.
If so, congratulations? Made us look:
But the best part of all may be “her” claim to be a scientist, and thus smarter than the rest of us:
Would a practicing scientist say such a thing?
Not likely. Though Fauci came close. But that merely proved he was a trans scientist. Not a real one.
twv
My late friend Noel used to say that the real division in society was between those who thought “we should pay and pay and pay for sex” — by which he meant sexual intercourse — and those who thought that “sex should be ‘free.’”
The first time I heard him say this, I minimized its profundity. I immediately translated this maxim as being about sexual responsibility, and I did not see why one couldn’t be free and responsible.
Of course, I was thinking as an individualist, and most people are not individualists. The “right,” by and large, thinks responsibility can only be inculcated in society by limiting sexual freedom, while the “left” seeks to reduce the burden of sexual responsibility in the pursuit of freedom. Individualists, on the other hand, tend to find both attitudes a bit hard to take.
The sexual revolution was launched as a liberatory enterprise, but chiefly succeeded in reducing the bite of responsibility with a handful of innovations:
1. improved contraception and prophylactics, decreasing the pinch of natural consequences for multiple-partner sexual activity;
2. increased frequency of abortions, through legalization, which made it easier for sexually active members of both sexes to avoid the burden of taking care of the natural by product of heterosexual unions; and
3. extensive “welfare” benefits given to women without spouses but with children.
These three things allowed the sexual revolution to really take off. But the political elements of these three developments — and the second and third are largely political in nature — were not demanded by the masses. They were pushed by the elites, who themselves, historically, tend to lean left on cultural and sexual matters.
But driving this idea was not merely that perennial and quite ancient temptation, freedom-without-responsibility. Deep in the heart of modern life another idea lurked, hidden just barely: over-population worries.
The sexual revolution has been pushed by elites as part of an anti-natalist agenda, a frank and sometimes cruel demand for general population reduction. Pushing the ideology of hedonism and the legal policies that helped help thrive served to curb population growth. Especially among whites, which allowed post WWII eugenicists to feel less Nazilike and more racially altruistic. Many elite thinkers and politicians frankly pushed an anti-Caucasian agenda as part of their neo-eugenics.
The arc of the implementation of this agenda has been breathtaking to watch, but I do have two predictions.
1. I think that now, with trans, we’ve arrived at the penultimate absurdity — the ultimate having been described by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, but which I don’t think we can advance towards at present, because of limitations of current biotech. And trans will seal the end of the sexual revolution. It is too ridiculously absurd as well as manipulative of decadence: it too frankly defies the basic habits that maintain the civilization that encourages it. In ten years it’ll be worse than a deep embarrassment. There will be a crisis of consequences, yes (I predict suicides and mass revenge murders), which will lead to no longer being promoted. And the politico-cultural left will have suffered its second major comeuppance, after the fall of the Soviet Union (which itself echoed the post-socialism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries — see David Ramsay Steele’s book on Orwell).
2. But the elites will not give up. Their commitment to population reduction is classist and a matter of “identity.” So they will continue to support their agenda in the revolution that is now following the sexual revolution: the death revolution. Canada has already taken it up in a big way: the promotion of medically assisted suicide in a big, bureaucratized way.
We’ll see a lot more on encouraging suicide. Time to read Gore Vidal’s Messiah again, or watch, for the umpteenth time, Soylent Green.
Decadence is not just a matter of sex. It is food and death, too. Cannibalism and entomopophagy, and a whole lot more, too, will likely feature large in the near future. Our civilization seems to sport a death wish. And it is going to get ugly before it turns around.
twv
Most of the reviews on Goodreads of Gore Vidal’s Myron miss the point. These reviews have apparently been written by leftists who do not understand that Vidal points most of his satire not rightward, in this novel, but at leftist sexual [tranny] tyranny. The title character of the previous book, Myra Breckinridge, rapes and castrates her way to cultural power on a Club of Rome de-population agenda, made quite explicit. This is not “sexual liberation” but sexual tyranny and . . . propaganda by the misdeed. But Vidal does croak out the last laugh at conservatives in the final pages. Myron, Myra’s alter ego (they share the same body), literally has no idea that the world has changed and that he has lost his battle of personal identity and identity politics with Myra, hung up as he has been on defending Nixon.
The clue to the interpretation is that leftists seek to emasculate America and rightists have no “powells” (Vidal’s term for testicles — it’s a long story: see below).
Vidal spins a Lewis Carroll-like fantasy to make a grisly point about left and right in America, and straight-left readers would be too clueless to suspect such a thing from the pen of socialist Gore Vidal.
It is a Menippean satire, perhaps. The caricatures that are Myra and Myron make an almost allegorical tapestry, but with no reverence or piety or patriotism whatsoever. This is as thoroughgoing satire as I’ve read from an American. It tops James Branch Cabell’s Hamlet Had an Uncle (if not Jurgen), anyway.
Vidal employed similar technique — that is, a satire based on fantasy and gloriously fabulisitic and ultra-silly sci-fi — in his later send-up of early Christianity, too, Live from Golgotha . . . the best thing about which were the two pages explaining the Cleansing of the Temple in terms of loose and tight monetary policy.
These usually ignored fictions by Vidal are, from what I can tell, the novelistic stand-in for satyr plays. I could perhaps write more persuasively about this literary diptych had I read Myra Breckinridge (1968) a few years ago, not, as is the case, a few decades ago: my memory is not reliable about the first book. I have just finished reading Myron (1974) today. But I can offer advice for those who choose to read Myron: read the first edition, where Vidal uses an amusing set of euphemisms for the traditional set of naughty words. In later edition he jettisoned this comic apparatus. Pity. It is indeed funny. Vidal explains, in his helpful prefatory note to the first edition, which I read:
Wirkman Comment 