In the 1985 novel by Margaret Atwood, she tells the story of a dystopian society. In Atwood’s telling of the story, the United States has been overthrown and replaced with a totalitarian state; the Republic of Gilead. Gilead was crafted as a theonomic military dictatorship. To put it simply; the United Stated was taken over by crazy Christian autocrats. Male autocrats. You see, the women in the Republic of Gilead were enslaved by the men of the Republic. When set in centuries and millenia long past, it’s a story told many times. Atwood was writing of this dystopia within modern day America.
This is a book-cum-TV series known as The Handmaids Tale. You may have heard of it.
Many Christians see such programming as anti-Christian and to viewers it does read as clearly anti-Christian. Still, if you were to ask author Atwood, she’d think you were being kinda silly, “So what you could point out about Christianity was some of the earliest people supporting it were women. And the reasons that they supported it as women was it made more room for them at that time.”
Even with this in mind, Handmaids Tale leaves you with a bitter and intellectually unsatisfying taste. To those that think modern Christian beliefs can fall close to the line delineated in the ‘Tale’, consider that the movement now existing as the woman’s movement was an outgrowth of the First Wave movement of a century ago. Of which, Christian women were a substantial part.
Which makes the Handmaidens at the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing pretty silly.
You see, as confusing as this might be to the protesters, Christianity got woman so much further in society than any other ideology. Not only did author Atwood call this out biblically but also the First Wavers would not have been successful were it not for Christianity.
The dystopia these protesters see with a Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court is due to a justice that, claimed by the protesters, will take away what is referred to as reproductive rights. Specifically, limiting abortion. Not realizing that even an overturned Roe v. Wade does not outlaw abortions.
Still, these leftists see a very dark world. As do I but for very different reasons.
Ignoring that liberal talking heads and leftist legislators have termed the mere existence of Donald Trump a Constitutional crisis; lefties everywhere are willing to ransack the Constitution merely because it is an inconvenience to their agenda.
Kavanaugh is that type of inconvenience.
In recent weeks, Kavanaugh has been ‘charged’ as a sexual assaulter. By ‘charged’, I mean to say, Professor Christine Blasey Ford has, in recent years, claimed that the potential SCOTUS jurist attacked her decades ago but otherwise has no evidence of this high school aged attack. She has never engaged law enforcement.
From this we are told by the leftist media and legislators that Professor Blasey Ford must, and I emphasize must, be believed. You’ve heard a litany of Senators (Blumenthal, Schumer, Gillibrand, Harris, Hirono et al) telling that she ‘must be be believed‘.
Believed.
Herein lies the problem; what rights of due process does that give Kavanaugh? A true constitutional crisis is ignoring the 5th amendment’s right to due process. Belief is extracted from compelling evidence. None yet exists. Though a congressional hearing does not ensure Kavanaugh due process per se, as law makers, it would be nifty if they adhered to the spirit of the Constitution.
But I ask too much.
What should be granted to Ms. Blasey Ford is not (just yet) the designation of being believed. She deserves to be taken seriously. I take the claim she makes very seriously. To move me to belief, I need more information. None has been compellingly provided and more so, much has been refuted. Still we’re told that we must believe.
Despite the ceaseless leftist flailing of Trump’s constitutional something-or-other, if rights are to be trampled, the left is is going to strap on the jackboots and get to work.
In recent years, the left has made the trampling of individual rights an art form. Much in the way that Pete Townsend made an art of destroying guitars, the left also takes something beautiful and of value and destroys it. Dennis Prager has noted that, “Whatever the left touches it ruins.”
The current dystopic neo-fascist hash being cooked these days is in the frying pan of academia. In an effort to completely mix metaphors; much in the way the fictitious capital, Panem, was home to elite citizens of the Hunger Games, universities are a lot like Panem (the other ‘Games’ districts were definitionally dystopia). The capital in the story is a place where people can party, act like fools and think themselves special. In other words, a university.
According to Harvard professor Steven Pinker, “…universities are becoming laughing stocks of intolerance, with non-leftist speakers drowned out by jeering mobs, professors subjected to Stalinesque investigations…” and he continues, “Many of these illiberal antics come from a radical fringe of students, egged on by an autonomous student-life bureaucracy.”
Though Pinker correctly suggests that universities are laughing stocks, he misdiagnoses the problem; the blame is not on student life autonomy but the instructors themselves. Nonetheless, students take the bait so as to appear ‘woke‘. Dave Rubin will tell you, debate be damned.
Stupid doesn’t fall from the sky. This illiberal gruel is being fed to the kids somehow.
In recent years, we’ve been led to believe that the campus is home for a so-called ‘rape culture’. This was a talking point repeated at all levels of progressivism up to even President Obama. The claim was that one in five women was a victim of rape. For clarity, the data was from an online survey and not a peer reviewed study. According to the Department of Justice, the actual number is one in forty. That equates to 2.5%.
You might say this is a small number. Consider a major campus of 30,000 students, it’s an astounding number of 750 yearly sexual assaults! The problem here is that; instead of employing a real data point stating that hundreds of women are being assaulted a year (and words are not strong enough as to how unacceptable that number is), progressives led with the shocking, but ultimately unbelievable, headline.
The failure of the left is within its talking points. Inasmuch as leftists stew in the broth of Alinskyism, they failed to notice what Alinsky said about the use of words, “(A person) refrains from rhetoric foreign to the local culture: he knows that worn-out words (emphasis mine)…have been so spewed about that using them is now within the negative experience of the local people, serving only to identify the speaker as “one of those nuts” and to turn off any further communication.”
The poison of our politics is simplification. As noted by Jordan Peterson, this can be referred to as low resolution thinking. The idea that you can simplify an idea to remove its depth. Useful when the intent is the summary of a thought. However, it’s a horrible practice when applied to complex social challenges.
For a progressive, it’s much easier to lament a ‘white racist patriarchy’ as the root of all social ills than to look at the social and economic complexities, for instance, of many of our urban communities.
Even if our universities look like the Hunger Games ‘Panem’, they function more like Oceania of Orwell’s novel, 1984.
When progressives reduce complex issues to sloganeering, what’s the ultimate outgrowth? I’d suggest Antifa and the like. Radical leftist protesters. When you have no depth of understanding, you shake your fist and scream. If that doesn’t work, you resort to violence.
Recall in the spring of 2017, the spectacular cowardice of Eric Clanton. Otherwise known as the Bike Lock Professor. Clad in ninja garb, leaned from behind a woman, then bashed a Trump supporter in the head with a bike lock and chain. This is called assault with a deadly weapon. In the California justice system, this translated to reduced charges and three years probation.
The 28 year old Clanton was a professor of ethics. Irony. Pardon my heteronormativity but he wasn’t even man enough to step out from behind a girl.
“There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.” -Ayn Rand
Key to Orwell’s Oceania was the word-salad known as ‘Newspeak’. Big Brother of 1984 only wanted you to use certain words. For instance, nothing was referred to as ‘bad’ but referred to as ‘ungood’. Having it’s genesis in political correctness, progressive ‘newspeak’ seeks to change historically, as defined by leftists, unacceptable language.
Much the way Americans defined persons illegally entering the nation as illegal immigrants, in progressive newspeak, they are ‘undocumented’. ‘Illegal’ obviously denotes as something bad. ‘Undocumented’ is merely a clerical oversight.
The intent of 1984’s Newspeak is to limit ideas that Big Brother deemed improper. Specifically, by eliminating some words, was to make unacceptable thoughts impossible. If there is no word for a thought, then such a thought does not exist.
If we no longer are to believe that walking unannounced across the border is not considered illegal, we’ll stop enforcement. Change the idea, change the action.
No more dangerous the idea of word modification is it’s application to sex and gender.
Like many, I thought sex and gender were the same thing. According to sociologist Dr. Zuleyka Zevallos, “Sex are the biological traits that societies use to assign people into the category of either male or female…” whereas, “Gender is more fluid – it may or may not depend upon biological traits…Gender is also determined by what an individual feels and does.”
Not that I’d argue what folks feel isn’t important. It is. But is there a danger in fostering non-scientific definitions? Leftist progressives may tout their scientific bonafides, but social ‘sciences’ are where feelings supplant scientific study.
Found within an extensive study on gender by Lawrence Mayer and Paul McHugh, they noted, “There is no evidence that gender identity is an innate, fixed property of human beings that is independent of biological sex (e.g., “a man trapped in a woman’s body”). The consensus of scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports the proposition that a physically and developmentally normal boy or girl is indeed what he or she appears to be at birth.”
That is currently the baseline science. The so-called ‘party of science’ (the leftist wing of the Democratic party) eschews science when interfering with an agenda. In the endless list of leftist rights, transgender is one of them.
The issue is not that someone doesn’t feel comfortable on their own body. I assume that feeling to be very real. I do not discount such a feeling. However, it is spectacularly misguided to make social and political assumptions based on a feeling. Moreover, to avoid referring to your child based on their birth sex so as to allow them the ‘choice’ later.
Further in the Mayer-McHugh study, “The rate of lifetime suicide attempts across all ages of transgender individuals is estimated at 41 percent (emphasis mine), compared to under 5 percent in the overall U.S. population.”
If I were to cite the above statistic in a gender debate, I would be called transphobic. Yet, it is specifically science. Leftists have boiled transgenderism in to bathroom laws. Yes, the biggest problem in someone’s life is a bathroom (sarcasm) and not the psychological difficulties that underly a 40% suicide attempt rate (not sarcasm).
In lieu of science, it is more important to align with the word-salad fascists who will otherwise reduce a legitimate debate of transgenderism to name calling. Ask Jordan Peterson.
Unless, of course, it’s settled science. You probably guessed that said settled science is referring to climate change. You’d be right. Remember when it was called global warming? Being labelled global warming became a problem when the globe stopped, well, warming. Seeing the failure of their progressive nomenclature, the leftist marketing department got to work on rebranding their cause. I mean, you can’t have global warming without, you know, warming. Even leftists understand truth in advertising. Funny enough, even though the left stopped calling it global warming, climate change is still about…the warming of the globe.
The pretzel of logic on this one; ‘we’re going to change the name of the thing that best describes it (warming) to a more generic and malleable term (change) even though it really means the original thing (warming)’.
In the Wizard of Oz, we were told to ‘pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!’. His reasoning was to have Dorothy and company believe the fearsome facade of the Wizard as the foreboding large apparition and flames of hellfire. Not the rather old and bumbling carnie.
Ask a reasoned questions about the sun’s impact on climate or the role of AMO (Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation) on the earth’s temperature and you are branded a ‘client denier’. If you don’t know where ‘denier’ comes from, it is an offshoot reference to being a Holocaust denier. If you look behind the curtain of the climate-change-global-warming thing, you’re told to not look at the man (science) behind the curtain.
Leftist double dip in to the buffet of word-salad; you are both anti-science and a ‘crazy’ denier and prone to conspiracies.
Orwell’s 1984 was particularly prescient in its identification of how the twisting of words can corrupt independent thought. Leftist corruption of thought is nothing more than control. It is a tool of control and moreover, a weapon of control. Leftist progressives would prefer you adhere to ‘duckspeak’, Orwell’s Newspeak for parroting a political orthodoxy without thinking.
This is why abortion is referred to as reproductive rights, or why liberal leftists now call themselves progressive, or where guilt of a crime no longer requires a witness or even evidence.
This returns us to the Supreme Court confirmation of Judge Kavanaugh.
What the soulless Democrats on the Judiciary committee don’t want you to know is that they have virtually nothing on Kavanaugh, even after the recent Ford/Kavanaugh committee hearing. Save for some adolescent Yearbook entries and Senator Whitehouse’ riveting question about ‘boofing’, we learned that Brett Kavanaugh acted like a 17 year old when he was…17 years old. He drank, he goofed off a bit and joked about farts.
The horror.
Democrats on the committee repeated ad nausea that the FBI was needed to get to the truth. This is a Hail Mary maneuver to stall. You see, if truth mattered, the Democrats had in front of them the key witness in the alleged sexual assault of Christine Blasey Ford; that being Christine Blasey Ford. If truth mattered, they need only ask a simple question; do you have anything to prove the allegation?
Not a single Democrat asked. Zero. They never wanted truth, just more Spartacus moments. More soundbites for their elections and possible presidential aspirations. Truth will never come unless you ask the question. Whether the FBI or local law enforcement, all will ask the victim for details of the crime. Of which the professor offered none.
One question was not asked and it still bothers me; Dr. Ford stated, “I left the bathroom, went down the same stairwell, through the living room and left the house. I remember being on the street and feeling an enormous sense of relief that I had escaped that house and that Brett and Mark were not coming outside after me.”
So she escaped. How did she get home? Granted, I don’t always recall how I arrived somewhere if I wasn’t driving. If I am left to fend for transportation home, at some point, I’ll need to know where I am. How did she get home?
The question digresses from a larger point; when meaning is changed, there is no longer any meaning to anything. Only what the powerful want word meaning to be. That was the lesson of all dystopic stories herein; powerful determine the truth. Logic be damned.
Leftists recoil at the concept of objective standards irrespective of their protestations otherwise. When faced with an opposing view, leftists get the lock and chain and look for some heads to bash.
The key to a dystopia is not simply the bastardization of words and logic but that there is an eventual outcome which requires screaming, demonization and eventual violence. All in support of the oppression of opposing ideas.
At the gates of dystopia are self-styled compassionate leftists who require that you feel as they do and if you do not, will take a bat to you until you comply.
