Does anything say progressivism is a secular religion for the insane better than the transgender nonsense?

It changes, but this is my current go to response when confronted by unmoored from reason transgender advocacy:

You may like birds, you may like birds so much you start acting like a bird until indeed at some point you come to think that you are actually a bird and begin insisting that people who know better start calling you a bird if they wish not to offend your soft neo-avian soul - but if you jump out that window the pavement you eventually splatter against is scientific fact telling you you’re not a bird. Sure, you’re free to live in denial of that reality if you want, that’s your business - but what most decidedly isn’t your business is the right to force me out that window with you.

Who will fight the left’s wars for them?

You’re hearing a lot of talk from the left - leftist celebrities [that’s a rather silly redundancy] seem especially fond of this - talk of ‘revolution’, of armed insurrection against the fascist Trump - even though talk of violently overthrowing a duly elected president because he’s hurt your feelings would seem way more fascistic than anything Trump has even remotely done - but details, details. Of course just one problem with all this belligerent blather from angst ridden progressives - exactly which military is it the left thinks will join them in this fight? Because it damn sure ain’t the American military. I know a few Marines, and I can pretty much assure you they didn't sign up for the privilege of laying it on the line to defend transgender bathrooms. Which led to this conversation I recently had with an earnest young lefty.

“We gotta rise up against this Trump fascist!”

“When you say ‘we’, you mean…?”

“The people, man.”

“By ‘people’ you mean that half of the country made legitimate by not having voted for Trump?”

“Trump didn’t get half the vote.”

“Well, yes, Hillary did overwhelmingly carry the Mexican vote in California so you do have something of a point there. But still, in the spirit of indulging your enthusiasm, you are essentially advocating for a civil war, yes?”

“To defend our freedoms, if it comes to that, sure.”

“Again, it really seems like it’s an expression of freedom that’s got you all riled up here, so I’m not at all sure your liberty loving motives are wholly pristine. But, regardless, putting that aside, I’ve heard a lot of your type going on in this way of late and it’s left me curious about something: in this war you’re imagining, who exactly is it that’s fighting on your side?”

“The military will join us.”

“The American military?”

“If the cause is just, sure.”

“Hmmmn… have you ever served in the military?”

“No.”

“Do you know anyone who has or is serving in the military?”

“No.”

“Have you ever engaged in a serious conversation with a service member or veteran?”

“No, not that I remember.”

“Do your reading habits include journals that deal in an in-depth way with military life, military affairs, foreign policy, stuff like that?”

“No.”

“Did you major in military history at university?”

“Definitely not. I was a theater major.”

“ Of course. But did you take any course at university that would have touched on the subject of war in a serious manner, even if only in the realm of fiction?”

“No.”

“Well, then… I gotta ask… how is it you come by this extraordinary insight into the military mind that’s got you so convinced the boys will be on your side come the war you keep imagining?”

“They’ll do what’s right… they’ll do what they’re told.”

“Ah, now there’s the rub. They’ll do it because it’s right, and it’ll be right because you say so. And still, according to you, the fascist here is Trump?”

“Absolutely!”

“Then press on, my friend, press on - because there’s nothing I long for more than to see a type like you standing before the First Armoured Division and telling them to invade Oklahoma because a Christian bakery there has refused to do up a cake for a gay wedding. What a glorious sight that will be. Consecrated ground indeed.”

Of course, the whole ‘statistical inevitability’ of life elsewhere in the universe...

Of course, the whole ‘statistical inevitability’ of life elsewhere in the universe can spin the other way, can’t it - as our ability to analyse the atmospheres of distant planets improves, the longer we go without seeing signs of organic life, the more the statistical needle starts to tilt towards Earth in fact being maybe a unique thing. The Goders would I imagine hitch onto that narrative with a gleeful abandon.

Blasphemy in Denmark?

An odd confluence of things recently - 7 planets discovered orbiting red dwarf Trappist 1, ‘only’ 40 light years away - in galactic terms, that’s close. Three of the planets apparently are parked squarely in the star’s sweet spot as far as possibilities of life go. This discovery confirms what we already knew - that planets in solar systems are common phenomena, which means planets that fall into the ‘goldilocks zone’ of these suns are probably common too, which means there could be millions of planets in our galaxy alone that are potentially capable of supporting life - which means, statistically speaking, the idea that life on Earth is unique is looking like a bad bet. With gear like the powerful James Webb space telescope coming online soon our ability to look for signs of organic life in the atmospheres of distant planets is going to increase dramatically - which means that in as little as ten years proof could emerge that declares, yep, we got company.

And then, set up against that news, Denmark, a modern, left wing, secular country, decided it’d be a good idea to charge one of its citizens with blasphemy. Guy videotaped himself burning a Koran. Apparently that’s ‘offensive’ - not sure if he’d decided to burn a bible too that would have been equally offensive - can I burn the vulgate bible, is that allowed? Anyway, someone should tell the Danes, the very notion of the holy trinity is offensive to the claims of Islam, so, hey, how arbitrary is the line we’re drawing here? I mean, the Koran is hardly sparing in its contempt for ‘the people of the book’, a phrase which oozes scorn - so when’s a thing offensive and when ain’t it?

Regardless - these two bits of news don’t seem to fit well together, do they? Makes a person uneasy. On one hand we see the real possibility that shortly proof will emerge that renders all religious texts ‘inaccurate’, mythological tales in keeping with the creation stories and totemistic mutterings primitive peoples have plying their hopes and fears with since about, what, 15,000 years ago - and on the other hand Denmark wants to throw a guy in jail for blasphemy. Wow. The thing about this is, though - if proof does emerge that amounts to a kick in the head to the claims of established religions, I see Christianity and Judaism, long exposed to the enervating, mitigating effects of secularism, rolling with the punches without too much rending of garments - but Islam? Does anyone see Muslims taking this news well? They threaten to burn cities to the ground over cartoons - what happens when science demonstrates that their holy book, which ostensibly contains the precise words of an all powerful, infallible deity, is full of things that can't possibly be true? Nope, really don't see that going over well.

Given the hysterical ‘sky is falling’ response to Trump from the left...

Given the hysterical ‘sky is falling’ response to Trump from the left, both amongst mere citizens and the professional commentariat crying out from the ivory towers of progressive media, I wonder what would be the effect on their fragile psyches of an unmitigated Trump success that the left would have trouble objecting to due to its broad appeal? Would it completely unseat them from what remains of their sanity, driven into a mad despair of confusion? Or would it have a salubrious effect, as in pulling them back from the ideological extremes in which they currently roil towards a more reasoned take on things? I’m talking about a success here in the nature of the Trump team negotiating a Israeli/Palestinian peace deal - something like that, a ‘big deal’ that benefits pretty much everyone.

My guess is such a thing would torture the left with a disquiet that would look very much like a nervous breakdown. And it’d be damn fun to watch.

The demiurge of unreason stalks the body politic

“... we cannot agree to disagree because with bipartisanship being dead, what would this accommodation do for us? All you have now are people staking out their ideological tribal boundaries and going to war against anyone not of the tribe who dares cross that boundary by espousing the virtues of the totem they happen cling to. The demiurge of unreason stalks the body politic, partisanship being by its very nature irrational since it lives in denial of the antinomies, vagaries and opaque complexity that life clearly manifests on a daily basis… progressivism becomes but another failed religion, utterly unable to keep the promises it makes and therefore embracing ever more and more illusion, lies and absolutism as the means by which to enforce its will...”

Debate is an acknowledgement of the fact that there is no absolute truth - and yet in our democracies increasingly we see people acting as if they indeed are arguing in defense of some absolute truth - except it’s not an argument they’re making - it’s hectoring, demonizing, bemoaning, proselytizing, propagandizing - it’s atavistic, tribal - whatever - one thing it definitely is not though is a debate. Now, it will sound like me defending my tribe - but it isn’t, I think, since I’m no real big fan of my would be tribe or any tribe for that matter - but the worst offender in terms of the above is currently clearly the left, driven into an irrational, insane ideological tribalism by the alluring radical pull of Obama on one side and the counter reactionary push back by Trumpism on the other. The visceral response to Trump has really brought the extremism of the left - which, as idealists fed by emotionalism, comes naturally to them i think - to the surface - and the angst appears particularly acute because the illusion of Obama really excited the emotionalist idealism of their ideology - I think many on the left truly came to believe that their progressive Nirvanah was just around the corner and are flummoxed by the reality that what Obama actually led to was Trump - so agitated by this reality are they that they’ve embraced with greater fierceness the unreality that comes so naturally to their naive little souls.

This is why I watch with fascination the maniacal ‘Trump haters’ around me - and since I live in a prosperous large city it seems that everyone I come in contact with is a leftist full of hatred of Trump - as a person who is no fan of Trump’s but also not a leftist either [which to the left means regardless how I feel about Trump there must be something wrong with me] it’s requisite that I keep my political opinions to myself or face career suicide, cultural ostracism and eventually a metaphorical firing squad - this oppressive ideological orthodoxy is so pervasive that even my silence can come to be seen as suspicious so every so often I have to throw off some anti-Trump witticism to keep the ever present threat of a witch hunt from my door - that I have to behave this way in a modern city ostensibly espousing Western democratic values tells you everything you need to know about the religion of progressivism.  

But I do watch these people - and boiled down what I see is that their point of view is never a coherent, logical, fact based argument - it’s always about some ‘notion’ whose ‘truth’ they’ve been convinced of through non-rational means that ends in seeing Trump as being a manifestation of, a stand in for, something which really amounts to nothing more than a vector through which their hatred can be focused against anything that doesn’t fit into the cloistered confines of the progressive ideology they follow. ‘Follow’ is a good word, because these people are not engaged is some rational attempt to defend a viewpoint - they are merely following a prompt that has been ‘suggested’ to them and feeds their prime desire, which is to hate Trump and all of the something which they believe, ie unquestionably assume is true regarding what he ‘represents’. This assumption, which is really an article of faith and piety and therefore no different from religion, is unassailable by facts that do not fit with what they have convinced themselves is true - which is why if you try and make a reasoned argument that opposes or merely questions what they believe, they quite literally look at you as if you were speaking in satanic tongues. It’s extraordinary - and frightening, because I do not see how a democracy that cannot abide an honest debate between opposing viewpoints manages to hold together.

But is it accurate to say Christianity is inherently not political? The Catholic church was and in many ways still is very political. That’s true, and no one is pretending obviously that Christianity has never served political motives - Constantine seems clearly to have embraced Christ for political reasons - but the Reformation worked because of the political corruption at the heart of Catholic excess - and this appeal referred directly I think to the simple, apolitical nature of the Gospels, which is why Protestantism lent itself naturally to the ideas of a separation of church and state, of secularism in public life, and religious liberty - Locke and Hume etc could really only happen in Protestant England and to me that eventually is a reflection of Christianity’s inherently apolitical nature. To get to the same place in Catholic France it took a bloody revolution that explicitly targeted the church in the name of secularism. Yes, Henry VIII made himself head of the Church of England and therefore I guess technically created a theocracy - but he didn’t care about questions of theology because they didn’t much matter in any fundamental way to his political desires - in other words, Christianity, in its truest form, does not require a political component that is operative to function - Islam does - and therein lies the difference between the two and the problem.

I am far removed from being anything even remotely related to a constitutional scholar or expert or hobbyist or bemused enthusiast, although enthusiastic admirer of the American constitution I certainly am - but regardless, to me, reading the first amendment and the guaranteeing of free speech and the right of assembly etc etc - ya know, the concrete upon which democracy is built - I find it it revealing that the establishment clause precedes the free speech stuff - as if the founders saw religion as a threat to free speech and so wanted to settle that question first - which I take to be the point of the establishment clause ie this amendment is all about sanctifying not god or religion, but free speech. Seems to me in defining the threat of Islam to the western tradition it’s there where you have to start - yes, our constitution guarantees freedom of religion but it does so for the explicit purpose of safeguarding free speech - if the goal of your religion is to suppress and abrogate free speech, in other words if the goal of your religion is to void the first amendment and thusly upend the very idea of democracy as the founders understood it and attempted to enshrine in the constitution thereof - then what does that say about your religion vis a vis deserving protection? If Hitler had been a pontiff and Nazism therefore a religious movement, would the founders have judged Nazism consequently fit for protection?

Of course the founders were well educated and clearly understood the dangers of politicised religion - but also understood as christians, an inherently apolitical religion, that Judaism and Islam had robust political components to them - and so, as it relates to the first amendment, how did they view religions that were, unlike Christianity, inherently political? Did they see protection of speech as enough of an antidote to this poison? Was this an oversight, the thought of Islam and Judaism playing much of a role in American life seeming so remote at the time? Or was it that contra Islam history had bequeathed to Judaism a very different relationship with Western values and therefore it’s only Islam that the founders failed to consider seriously as a religion that did not fit very well with the establishment clause? I dunno - possibly the problem is addressed in the Federalist Papers - still, we’re getting to the kernel of why Islam is a problem, no?

Anyway, point being Andrew McCarthy over at NRO nails the ‘Muslim’ question and properly frames what I usually refer to as the rationalists’ approach to the threat posed by Islamism and Islamist ideology - the threat of Islam is not the faith per se, but rather its political component as it exists robustly in the more fundamentalist expressions of the religion. You have to focus on the political dynamic when talking about Islam, not only because that’s where the danger lies - but also because only by raising the debate to a rational argument about politics can you immunise yourself against charges of racism and open the door for moderate Muslims, who understand what the problem is, to enter the discussion. Of course the left is still going to hurl charges of racism against you because they have no other options for ‘defending’ their point of view - but at least by focusing relentlessly on the political argument you can mitigate the damage - because the debate about Islam has absolutely nothing to do with race and everything to do with a highly problematic political culture the religion advocates - and ‘advocates’ is too soft a word - as more than one prominent Muslim has said, Islam and the state are one and the same thing - and that’s a big problem if you believe in Western values and democracy.

So, how much longer will we have to wait before Trump gets sick of doing a job I’m guessing he never really thought he’d get stuck having to do and quits? In the run up to the election I, like many others no doubt, given the choice between an awful Hillary promising four more years of the awfulness that was Obama, and an utterly unpredictable Trump who could conceivably turn out to be worse, imagined that the best we could hope for was Trump winning and then, after six months or so of his erstwhile pleasant life being made miserable by the demands of the job, he feigns debilitation to some illness and resigns - given Trump’s mercurial, erratic nature, his age, and the fact he has a lot of money to console himself with should he go this route, not an entirely crazy thing to hope for. So, after three weeks of Trumpism, any signs yet that the canary really doesn’t like the coal mine?

Well, of course, way too early for that - and it’s not like he’s been a disaster so far - pretty much a mixed bag of some good and some bad stuff with one huge fuck up - the ‘anti-Muslim’ EO - thrown in. The thing is, up til now it’s all mostly been about simply signing his name to a piece of paper - the hard bits, the grind is still to come. Yeah, you waved your pen and away went the Pacific trade agreement - but in doing so you've created a strategic void that now very much needs to be filled - in other words, the hard part starts now. Bibi’s coming to town - do you have a plan? Iran’s already trying to test you - how far are you willing to go in pushing back? You’ve talked a lot about a new relationship with Putin - what’s your response gonna be when he pulls the rug out from under you as he almost certainly will eventually do? And on and on it goes. Campaigning was easy next to the grind off ‘running’ the most important country in the world, a job which offers few perks other than the awesome power that comes with it, a power that can very easily [and almost surely will] turn into a painful burden. Does Trump, a 70 year old rich guy with no true political convictions, really want to spend the next four years doing this? I dunno.

This excellent review of ‘Israel’s dilemma’ in The Israel Times has clarified the problem for me as nothing else before has. To put it in its simplest terms, I think, you’d frame the dilemma like this: Israel, given its border as it existed for a brief moment in 1948, was only going to be a viable state, ie defensible, if the surrounding Muslim populations were willing to accept it as a viable Jewish state - if the Muslims were not so inclined, and clearly they weren’t, then the border would need to be expanded - as it was in ‘49 and ‘67 - but bringing with that expansion a new set of problems. In short, an Islamist hatred of Jews that has existed in the Muslim world since Mohammed first decamped to Medina and proceeded to slaughter some Semitic tribes rendered an accomodation between Israel and the Palestinians that both could accept a virtual impossibility - and so here we are.

Seems then you have two options - Israel ceases to exist, Islam’s preferred choice but not gonna happen and therefore - Israel unilaterally establishes the borders it needs to maintain security and then as with Gaza simply withdraws and leaves to the Palestinians those territories it deems expendable. Jerusalem would be a separate and quite difficult problem to solve - can’t simply expel the Palestinians obviously, but also clearly Israel has no intention of ever again giving up control of the city, which I take to be the point of all the settlement activity around it - but having ‘control’ of the city doesn’t solve the problem of what to do with the ‘Israeli Arabs’ living there. And of course in creating a Palestinian ‘state’ in this manner you run the very high risk of creating another radicalized terrorist enclave like Gaza in the West Bank - not exactly a propitious outcome - so there’s that.

I think we see why progressives in the West like Obama so utterly fail to get Israel and therefore pursue policies that are doomed to fall short - the left cannot sympathise with Israeli security concerns in realistic terms because doing so would require them to embrace a view of Islam that is incompatible with their ideology which sees Western colonialism, capitalism, and white privilege as the roots of all that’s wrong with the world - seeing Islamism as an intolerant, supremacist political system with a special fondness for hating Jews as the problem simply would not fit the progressives’ narrative - no, Israel, acting as the West’s proxy, must be where the fault lies. This is why when the new UN Secretary General a few weeks ago stated an incontestable fact regarding a Jewish connection to the Temple Mount stretching back thousands of years and the Palestinian Authority was outraged by such a suggestion the left couldn't extrapolate from that and get to a logical ‘ah, now I see’ moment - to do so would shake the foundational assumptions upon which their worldview rests.

I commented on the Berkeley farce - but did so knowing nothing at all about this Milo character - so figured probably good idea to rectify that situation - and sadly, sad because unsurprisingly, I found nothing to justify the left’s outrage. Now, I just watched a few videos to get a feeling for his thinking in general and a sense of what his ‘act’ is all about - and maybe there’s other stuff out there that I would take exception to - but from what I did witness his ‘arguments’ amount to mainstream rebuttals of the progressive agenda and precepts - sure, delivered with a certain animation that is no doubt intended to offend and get a rise out of people - but as he would rightly say what the fuck good is free speech if you can’t offend people? Indeed, how can free speech even exist if it can be shut down simply because some jerkoff somewhere gets offended?

Ya know, I’m sure he’s said some things that I’d find problematic - but by and large I agree with the points he makes and see them as legitimate counter arguments to throw against the nonsense spewed from the liberal hivemind - which would seem to indicate the outraged left hates the guy simply because he effectively disagrees with what they believe. Or maybe it’s just because he’s an entertaining gay guy who is conservative and funny gay guys are not allowed to be anything but liberal. Whatever it is, that the left thinks it legitimate to riot over opinions being expressed that are ‘flawed’ only in the sense that they do not conform with progressive orthodoxy is truly cause to worry about where Western culture is heading. Very hard to see this ending well.

This is an interesting inside look at the refugee ‘ban’ screwup - interesting for me because it draws attention to something I think is key to how this highly unpredictable Trump presidency will go - namely, Mattis, Kelley and potentially depending on how he performs Tillerson are successful, respected, authoritative people who are likely [we hope] to find great favor in the public’s mind and maybe even the media’s, if only as a natural consequence of trying to balance their hatred of Trump  - whereas Bannon, Miller etc will never have access to that kind or type of power - which means, if how the Trump White House performs and behaves comes down to who wins between the Bannon and Mattis camps, I’d say the ‘popularity’ and ‘respect’ the Mattis camp can command gives it the upper hand - assuming Trump appreciates this dynamic and acts accordingly - which, as everything with Trump, who the hell knows. I’d say Bannon clearly has the upper hand now - but the Mattis camp has a ‘public esteem’ card to play that should at least, assuming Trump isn't a complete idiot, get us to something of a draw. We hope.

About the ‘student’ riots at Berkeley - what shall we call the increasing intolerance of the left, some brand or incarnation of a neo-tribalism fracturing the body politic? The centre cannot hold sundering of democracy under the malignant forces of bad parenting, bad schools and a media so corrupted by a leftist bias that things like ‘truth’ and ‘facts’ and ‘objectivity’ have had all viable meaning drained from them? I dunno - the extremist intolerance of the left, this cloistered ideology that treats its radical self serving emotionalism as a categorical imperative that will lift us all, whether we like it or not, to some socialist heaven, can lead only to a cultural balkanization, which is already happening, and then to political balkanization as any notion of bipartisanship dissolves away under a wave of acrimony and distrust and fear. I don’t think Trump is the first instantiation of this coming breakup - rather it was Obama, who despite his lofty rhetoric clearly saw America as two warring tribes that cannot abide each other, that brought us to this point - indeed, it was the ease with which he lied about his true ideology and the way that the media was so willing to endorse this malfeasance, that best defined this tribalism, an unholy alliance that made Trump possible. Actually, you could say this political tribalism really started to manifest itself during the Bush presidency - not because of what Bush did per se, but rather because of the way the media and liberal cultural elites responded to him - it was with Bush that you really started to see that reason and facts and objective argument for these people simply just no longer mattered - all that mattered was whether or not your political tribe was seen as winning, which meant seen as being right about everything, which meant being seen as right had absolutely nothing at all to do with actually being right. A precursor to the unhinged intolerance of today.

“Does it never trouble the ‘artistic’ types of Hollywood that for a people who claim for themselves such a magical insight into things and the world their thinking demonstrates a remarkably routine orthodoxy of unspectacular, unenlightened sameness? It’s as if they all share one mind, but it’s the mind of a not particularly clever yet still highly spoiled, solipsistic child. It amounts to a monolithic triteness utterly lacking in self awareness because there is no distinct self to become aware of. No wonder they’re all communists.”