Retired, sometime civil servant, sometime consultant, active intellectual, former lawyer, active property manager, and on rare occasions in the past a political activist. He has recovered from the experience.

Retired, sometime civil servant, sometime consultant, active intellectual, former lawyer, active property manager, and on rare occasions in the past a political activist. He has recovered from the experience.

The woke revolution isn’t over

The Woke revolution isn’t over. This is a deeply depressing and well thought out article. I recommend it warmly.

N.S.Lyons, at the substack source called The Upheaval, writes

“One would think that by now all these anti-woke conservatives and moderate liberals would have learned at least some of the bitter lessons from the last decade about how political power and cultural change actually work, but I guess not. They could have taken note of all the fundamental factors driving this ideological belief system, all of which had to be painstakingly uncovered, layer by layer, even as it swept through every institution. But they have not.”

Wokeism is defined as

“The world is divided into a dualistic struggle between oppressed and oppressors (good and evil); language fundamentally defines reality; therefore language (and more broadly “the word” – thought, logic, logos) is raw power, and is used by oppressors to control the oppressed; this has created power hierarchies enforced by the creation of false boundaries and authorities; no oppression existed in the mythic past, the utopian pre-hierarchical State of Nature, in which all were free and equal; the stain of injustice only entered the world through the original sin of (Western) civilizational hierarchy; all disparities visible today are de facto proof of the influence of hierarchical oppression (discrimination); to redeem the world from sin, i.e. to end oppression and achieve Social Justice (to return to the kingdom of heaven on earth), all false authorities and boundaries must be torn down (deconstructed), and power redistributed from the oppressors to the oppressed; all injustice anywhere is interlinked (intersectional), so the battle against injustice is necessarily total; ultimate victory is cosmically ordained by history, though the arc of progress may be long; moral virtue and true right to rule is determined by collective status within the oppression-oppressed dialectic; morally neutral political liberalism is a lie constructed by the powerful to maintain status quo structures of oppression; the first step to liberation can be achieved through acquisition of the hidden knowledge of the truth of this dialectic; a select awoken vanguard must therefore guide a revolution in popular consciousness; all imposed limits on the individual can ultimately be transcended by virtue of a will to power…

I could go on, but the real point is that these are faith-beliefs, and ones capable of wielding an iron grip on the individual and collective mind.”

Point 19 of his argument is as follows:

“19. None of the levers of power have changed or will change hands. At the risk of sounding like one of them conspiracy theorists: who really controls the power centers in the United States? The intelligence agencies; the domestic security services; the military officer corps; the diplomatic service; the regulatory administrative state; the Ministry of Information [sic]; and so on. Are all these run by elected representatives accountable to the people, including an elected president and his appointees, who then set a policy direction which is faithfully executed? It may be worth considering that this is simply not the case. That, instead, these power centers are run by a certain interchangeable class of people who already staff them permanently and run them as they think best and only cooperate if they so please. …”

JDs are Juris Doctor degrees. Elite overproduction, or the new clergy is being created.

 

 

The Rule of Midwits, by Brian Chau at Tablet Magazine, seeks to explain why things keep going leftward and downward.

Between the two of them, these articles give no reason to hope that political change to the Republicans will affect the forces that are driving cultural and social dissolution.

How many megatons?

The explosion of the volcano off Tonga Island is said to have been bigger than that of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. The earth is a massive pressure cooker. Expect a small drop in global temperature from the scattering of ash in the upper atmosphere. See how much this fact will be played up or ignored.

Satellite image of the eruptionPost script:  It now is said to have measured 6 megatons in power. The message is at the 2:15 mark in the video below.

Ry Cooder

I had forgotten for a time how good a musician Ry Cooder is. I promise to play more of his music in future. Having come across him this morning in YouTube, I immediately ordered a CD of his. Such outstanding music in all dimensions.

Directed Evolution

Jordan Peterson, Heather Heying, and Brett Weinstein discuss evolution in a way I have been waiting for, for decades. That is to say, they move the discussion off the idea that evolution – the natural kind expounded in Darwin’s Origin of Species – is undirected.  Only sexual selection, which Darwin propounded in his The Descent of Man, or Selection in relation to Sex,  allows for directedness: mate choices drive evolution. As Weinstein says, evolutionary theory is now at stage Darwin 10.0.  Or consciousness is directing evolution through mate choice, as Peterson says.

The discussion starts at minute 33:07. It gets into the issue directly at minute 35:00

How does evolution 10.0 explore design space?

All of which makes Dawkins and his materialist notions of selfish genes ridiculous and obsolete.

 

Czeslaw Milosz on “The Captive Mind”

 

Czeslaw Milosz (pronounced roughly as Cheswav Miwosh) wrote The Captive Mind in 1950, when Stalin still had three years to live. He was an escapee from Communist Poland, where he had served in the post war Polish communist government for a time as a diplomat.

In the era of Wokeness, it is important to recall that we have been through this before,  albeit on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

I am reading it with great enjoyment.

One chapter of the book concerns a practice call “ketman”, which is taken from Islamic Persia. It was described by the French diplomat Arthur de Gobineau in the 1850s. Ketman is a term for the practice of total deception as regards one’s adherence to Islam. Ketman had to be practiced in the era of total control of thought by the Islamic mullahs (in which we have seen no change in Iran since the 1850s).

Milosz quoting Gobineau (at page 57)

“The people of the Mussulman East believe that “He who is in possession of truth must not expose his person, his relatives or his reputation to the blindness, the folly, the perversity of those whom it has pleased God to place and maintain in error”. One must . therefore. keep silent about one’s true convictions if possible.”

The Ketman of the 20th century was of course the degree of necessary deception regarding one’s adherence to Communist doctrine. Milosz writes “nevertheless, Ketman in its narrowest and severest forms is widely practiced in the people’s democracies. As in Islam, the feeling of superiority over those who are unworthy of attaining truth constitutes one of the chef joys of people whose lives in general do not abound in pleasures.” (p. 60)

[Ideological] “deviations… are not an illusion. They are cases of accidental unmasking of Ketman; and those who are most helpful in detecting deviations are those who practice a similar form of Ketman. Recognizing in other acrobats the tricks they themselves employ, they take advantage of the first occasion to down an opponent or friend. Thus they protect themselves; and the measure of dexterity is to anticipate by at least one day the similar accusations which could be levelled against them by they man they denounce. Since the number of varieties of Ketman is practically unlimited, the naming of deviations cannot keep pace with the weeding of a garden so full of unexpected specimens of heresy.”

Now apply this to contemporary universities in the grip of Wokeness and watch for the practice of systemic Ketman , and for it to be exposed by other practitioners of the same devious arts.

New Media: Joe Rogan and the rest

Our federal regulator  (the CRTC) could not be persuaded to call the Internet the Internet; it was always called “new media” because it was a technology invented in the 1970s, not the 1950s, and it came to prominence with the adoption of the world wide web in the 1990s.

In this case, however, it is appropriate to call the Internet “new media”. Legacy TV technology is starting to show its age. There are still people who get most of their information from television, and they are roughly 70 years of age and older.  They end up believing the Narrative in its entirety, for want of competing visions. As Jordan Peterson said, “the younger generation would not even recognize the corpse of the television system if they saw it”.

 

Which leads me to the article by the self-confessed leftie journalist in the Post today: Tara Henley: why I quit the CBC

You don’t need to read the article to know why: racial and sexual identity politics has taken over completely. But why be concerned with the CBC? Its viewership is dropping as its subsidies are climbing. The key to staying misinformed: watch broadcast or cable television.