SCENE: Mitch BERG is at a local roastery, picking out some bourgeois coffee. Avery LIBRELLE walks in. BERG can’t quite react fast enough.
LIBRELLE: Merg!
BERG: Oh, f…for crying out loud, it’s been a long time, Avery. What’s…
LIBRELLE: (Interrupting) You say Democrats have trouble with critical thinking…
BERG: (picking a medium roast, ordering a half pound ground for french press) Yup.
LIBRELLE: …and that conservatism takes more mental energy…
BERG: …and it absolutely does, for people in modern society…
LIBRELLE: and that the modern left is hopelessly reductionistic.
BERG: You bet.
LIBRELLE: That is so wrong.
BERG: Nah. Here’s one of the modern left’s intellectual thought leaders at work:
BERG: Boiling a complex argument with lots of real world context down into an evil cover of a nursery rhyme is…
(BERG looks at LIBRELLE – who is happily clapping along and whispering the words)
(BERG silently pays for his order, leaves)
(And SCENE)
(
I’ve called in sick the last three all-staff mandatory training session days. I just can’t handle them. Don’t know how much longer until they catch on.
The hardest part isn’t listening to the prattle, it’s keeping my mouth shut. I keep wanting to ask, “And therefore what?”
White people have white privilege. Systemic racism exists. Yeah, okay, and therefore what? You want me to be less White? How? Tanning bed? Spray tan? Oh, you aren’t talking about actual skin tone, you’re talking about behavior: you want me to Act less White. Okay, happy to oblige, but what does that mean?
I should rid myself of White behaviors? Which ones – the ones the Smithsonian identified? Stop working hard? Stop being on time for work, stop meeting deadlines? Stop respecting authority? Stop being frugal?
Or maybe it’s not about stopping old behaviors – maybe it’s about starting new behaviors? Start breaking the law more often, start spending profligately on trinkets, start having children out of wedlock, start . . . what, exactly?
That’s the problem I have with the chick in the video. She’s convinced me the problem exists, and therefore . . . what? But she doesn’t have an answer. She’s on a loop, endlessly stuck on the same tune. Not helpful.
Systemic racism exists. Yes. It’s called affirmative action.
There are two ways to create equality: you can tear people down or build them up. Education Minnesota believes the former.
BTW, what impressed me about the Tweet was the smugness. You don’t get that kind of smug from plain old ignorance, it takes willful ignorance with a really, really strong will.
……or just a lot of Twitter friends.
You want me to be less White? How?
Start by being less articulate; stick to single syllable words, and misspell them when you write them out.
Talk LOUD in public settings.
Put some glue in your hair.
Sneak up behind old people and knock them tfo…then laugh and post it to your Tic Toc account.
Eat more fried fast food.
It’s not really that hard; you just have to want to do it.
Going along with Dr Strunk’s points, this article appeared on HotAir yesterday:
https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2021/02/25/another-revealing-school-board-hot-mic-moment-returning-school-like-slavery/
One of the board members was opposed to forcing teachers to return to the classroom. Someone else said “You know you can vote no, correct?”
Bell-Fontenot interjected that she knew what she could do but she said what the board was doing was “wrong.” After another cut in the video, Bell-Fontenot said the plan seemed like white supremacist ideology to her: “So how are we forcing what seems like a very white supremacist ideology to force people to comply with, you know, and conform…So I don’t want to be a part of forcing anybody to do anything they don’t want to do. That’s what slavery is. I’m not going to be a part of it.”
So, forcing kids to be properly educated is white supremacist. Got it. Nice to know that lack of education is a community value and a cultural hallmark in the leftist BIPoC community.
We already knew that, but thanks for the confirmation.
Mitch,
I’ve got to say that I’m really worried about your lack of situational awareness in these encounters with Avery. You seem to be always at condition green – has it been so long since you were a carry permit holder (back before all your guns were lost in that horrible boating accident) that you’ve forgotten rule number 1?
Brad wins comment of the day!
Bizarre woke statement of today:
Cynicism, at scale, makes democracy’s most basic demand—seeing one another as we are—impossible.
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/02/tucker-carlson-cancel-culture-cynicism-winning/618138/?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4
Democracy’s “most basic demand” is nothing like “seeing one another as we are.” Maybe try “free and secure elections”? Or “secret ballots”? Or maybe just “One person, one vote”?
In context, the quote is even more damning.
I mention Carlson’s act not because it is extraordinary, but because it is banal. Topple the media is about as Propaganda 101 as it gets. It’s the Lügenpresse, it’s Newspeak, it’s the coup leaders heading straight for the TV station. Cynicism is, among other things, a habit of disordered vision: It looks at friends and sees foes. It looks at truth and sees deceit. Cynicism, at scale, makes democracy’s most basic demand—seeing one another as we are—impossible. And America, at the moment, is saturated with it. Cynicism makes daily appearances on Fox (and on Newsmax, and on One America News Network). It was the molten core of Donald Trump’s presidency, and the only real message Rush Limbaugh had to give. It lurks in the language of QAnon. It lives in the Big Lie. It seethed in the violence of the Capitol insurrection. It has made suspicion an easy sell. “From falsehood, anything follows,” posits a law of classical logic. It is called the principle of explosion.
Recall that the author, Megan Garber, is a “Russian collusion” truther, and could not write anything about Trump without an insane level of cynicism. She does not believe that Trump really believes that the election was stolen from him, and believes that Trump, knowing this, manipulates his followers.
Hard to get more cynical than that.
So what you see is the Lefty abuse of language. She is not against cynicism, she wants to license it.
MO, you quoted The Atlantic is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, a woman who is worth billions by virtue of being pretty and dumb.
The very fact that that teacher went on TikTok reinforces what I observed back in college; when a young man or woman couldn’t hack it in engineering or the hard sciences, they very often took a walk to the school of Education. Her little bit of doggerel backs up that she could never have gotten an English major–well, at least back in the 1960s, when they took things like literature and poetry seriously.