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Midnight in the Republic, Volume 10
This series keeps coming back to the same themes. This one falls under this:
“[A] significant and growing portion of the American population is losing the virtues required to be functioning members of a free society.” – Charles Murray in Coming Apart (Page 289), 2012
I guess this should be call this the Dr. Seuss edition.
Honestly, I thought we had hit peak un-seriousness as a society in about May 2016 when the sane among us had to pretend to take a discussion about mass societal confusion regarding which bathroom to use as worthy of intellectual debate in America (an era also fittingly known as peak Obama-ism). Little did I know, we would pick up right where we left off after a four and a half year temper-tantrum by the left and mostly-left (i.e. fake right). The new peak in our sights: Theodor Seuss Geisel.
Instapundit hit on it (at least) twice yesterday. First:
The Cancellation Of Dr. Seuss Should Disturb You, Because You’re Next. “America is entering its very own Mao-like Cultural Revolution. The iconoclasm of the left’s culture war isn’t a side effect, it’s the point.”
and second:
This isn’t normal or reasonable and don’t let them gaslight you into thinking it is. This is warped and un-American and the people pushing it should be ashamed.
The meat of the first link really goes to a piece at The Federalist: The Cancellation Of Dr. Seuss Should Disturb You, Because You’re Next. Read the whole thing…here are some teasers:
But context and nuance don’t factor into the inexorable logic of the woke left, which flattens and refashions the past into a weapon for the culture wars of the present. What’s important to understand is that this isn’t simply about banning six Dr. Seuss books. All of Geisel’s work is, in the judgment of left-wing academia, an exercise in “White supremacy, paternalism, conformity, and assimilation.” It might be easy for conservatives to laugh that off as nonsense, but they shouldn’t, because this isn’t really even about Geisel. …
… The left’s war on the past, on long-dead authors like Geisel, isn’t really about the past, it’s about the future. It’s about who gets to rule, and under what terms.
There’s a predictable pattern to what we’re seeing now. It’s predictable because it has happened before in much the same way it’s happening now. …
…
So much for statues and books. At some point, the left will come for actual people, because the ideology of revolution demands that dissent—and therefore dissidents—be silenced, by force if necessary. …
So forget about Dr. Seuss. Forget about the statues and the books. Those things are just the beginning. It could easily get much worse. The woke revolutionaries of the left can’t be bargained with or appeased. They believe this is a zero-sum game, that one side will win and one side will lose. And they’re right.
(Another one worthy of a hardcopy for the files.)
The momentum is again pushing in this intellectually unserious direction and the elected ruling troika of Biden-Schumer-Pelosi (as well as their supports and enablers) are either in favor of or blind to the completely predictable ends that are now appearing on the horizon. This momentum clearly carries the will of those who now lack “the virtues required to be functioning members of a free society.”
America 2021: Into the abyss…
(See also Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Volume 4, Volume 5, Volume 6, Volume 7, Volume 8, and Volume 9)
(See also Midnight in the Republic, A Dystopian Interlude)
Published in General
Wondering who uses what bathroom seems so quaint now.
The word “virtue” doesn’t appear in their dictionary. If it did, it would be labelled “archaic.”
Why use the future tense? For several years already people have been forced out of jobs and barred from participating in society because they held the “wrong” views or associated with someone who held the “wrong” views. So far it has generally been fairly prominent people. But it’s only a change of degree, not of kind, to force “ordinary” people out of jobs and out of society for the views they hold.
When people I know have been condemning to the ash heap people who didn’t condemn slavery hundreds of years ago, I have for years pointed out that the day will come in which you will be condemned to the ash heap because of some view you hold, even if today it is a mainstream view.
Just as taxes start out applying only to the other guy but always end up applying to almost everyone, cancellation that starts on the other guy ends up hitting almost everyone.
Several problems that I see:
Many people who use logic are labeled “conspiracy theorists.” For isntance, the idea that a major step away from traditional approaches in medicine should be approached with caution is decried.
A backstory: Someone on ricochet recently posted that prior to our testing of the atom bomb in new Mexico, it was not absolutely understood whether it could or could not set off a chain reaction that would detonate the entire planet.
I had heard that story since I was in my teens. What I had not heard was the information the ricochet member posted: that prior to our detonating the first atom bomb, people worked on the issue from a theoretical standpoint. What they discovered offered major reassurance that the atom bomb would not affect more than a large local area. I found this to be a logical and needed protocol and felt reassured that the physics whiz kids of that era had thought about their actions prior to the detonation.
In our era, the exact opposite thinking prevails. I do not know how many times people have said in response to this or that theoretical advancement, will we be offering our society an improvement or a catastrophe?
And possibly as many as one third of the public has as a response, the attitude of “Well until it is proven to be a catastrophe, let’s just go ahead and do it!”
There is no problem with this line of thinking if the matter has to do with minor issues, such as changing the color of M & M candies.
But in so many matters, one third of the public is all in on a new development until it is proven to be catastrophic.
Meanwhile on the other side of the coin, a person suggests that some benign treatment for a medical problem works, one third of the public or more is all “Well until that has been categorically proven by 100% of all the medical establishment members, I wouldn’t touch that solution with a ten foot pole.”
Example: acidophilus can be utilized to vanquish diverticulitis, while a person awaits their diverticulitis surgery.
I took care of elderly patients, and they were almost always eager to try this. For one thing, older people have all been through a surgery before, and they understand that when a doctor states “It’s a piece of cake” that is often not the case. They also held assurance that it was benign to take the acidophilus, as it is something a lot of people take on a daily basis anyway. If the protocol works, the digestion issue resolves within 5 days to two weeks. If it doesn’t, then it might be necessary to see if the problem is a greater one than diverticulitis.
The people who could not be convinced this works were the college degreed crowd that is hell bent on Western medicine. They were adamant surgery was the better way to go.
End of Part One
Part Two
Another example:
So much has been lost because of this inability to logically think out of the box. I am currently half way through the book “The Body Electric” which details the electrical processes undertaken by doctors and researchers in the 1980’s. (The book’s author is Robert O Becker, MD)
These people used electrical stimulation therapies on infected and almost irreparable limbs, saving the limbs. They also worked with paralegics.
Among their number was a British woman doctor who stimulated the center of the brain so that addiction could be cleared up overnight. Miracle upon miracle has been explained inside the pages of this book. Yet these various electrical therapies stand outside the sphere of Establishment medicine. Even all these many years later, this is a field still in its infancy.
This indicates that the foundation for Western medicine is about prescription medicine, surgery and vaccines. Propose anything that is outside those three categories, and there is little interest. Curiosity seems almost non-existent in today’s medical field.
Between 2012 and 2018, terminal cancer patients came to California by the thousands before medical marijuana was legal in other states. Often they came here simply to have cannabis to dull their pain. Then they got here, found an entire group of doctors administering CBD oil – which cured even the terminally ill from such cancers as breast cancer, thyroid cancer, brain and blood cancers, colon and stomach cancers. Yet this doesn’t seem to have caught on in places outside Colorado and California – which is a shame.
Sadly, I have watched male friends whose lives were ruled by their marriage partner’s insistence on “real medicine” die from these cancers, while friends who weren’t married took the CBD oil and their cancers went away.
Might as well laugh at them while we still can:
More at the link.
So the only thing Ayn Rand got wrong was that conservatives would voluntarily disappear.