This WaPo tweet reads precisely like something you’d have read in the USSR in the ’30s, or in North Korea today:
Poverty “was”, past tense, “cut sharply”?
By $1,400 checks that haven’t been delivered yet?
Kim Jong Un doesn’t think he’s that badass.
If you believe in anything America is supposed to be about, then the phrase “The Governor is giving permission for people to…” (fill in some normal thing, like gather in groups, hug their grandparents or go back to work) should be more offensive than snuff porn.
Should government be able to temporarily pause things under a state of emergency? Under some exceptional circumstances, with legally-defined exit criteria (y’know – like Florida has, and Minnesota doesn’t), it might be a lesser evil.
Advise people to modify their behavior for the community good, and sanction irresponsible behavior? Like in Florida or the Dakotas? Much better – where “perfect” is impossible.
But grant “permission?”
The phrase – which has been popping up in mainstream media with nauseating regularity – is an obscenity that must be fumigated from the American vocabulary.
After a year of hysteria, of gaslighting, of “Karen” nagging you from behind four masks, of plush-bottom public union employees telling unemployed waitresses “we’re all in this together” via Zoom from their ranch houses in Apple Valley, suddenly, after one barely coherent speech in the wake of the signing of an immense power grab disguised as a pork barrel bill…
…everything is OK?
So let’s get this straight – after a year of dictatorial control, now Minnesota is “ready?
And “we” are “ready” after a near majority have re-opened, without their governors publicly rolling around in the glory and majesty of their own omnipotence like Scrooge McDuck cavorting about in a vault full of quarters?
Yes. Yes, they are. Suddenly, “hope” is acceptable. Quadruple-masking? Scary new variants?
Pish-tush! The only thing to fear is fear itself! Happy Days Are Here Again!
The House majority leader, as if on cue:
And finally, Ryan Winkler tells (the second cousin of) the truth. While the pandemic was and remains real, the Minnesota government’s response has been entirely contrived to sway the election, and to give the political class a “big win” (they’ll let the media handle that for them) to use to evangelize transforming society into Big Left’s vision.
… And some of them write twaddle like this.
Minneapolis pushing ahead to eliminate cops. Look at the photo to see who’s pushing the issue.
Do any of those people look like they live in Hawthorne or Phillips? Any of them look like they’ll be affected when cops stop patrolling dangerous neighborhoods?
Looks more like White people from affluent neighborhoods telling the city council what’s good for Black people living in desperate neighborhoods. “Pull the cops out of those bad neighborhoods, leave the Black people to die.”
In the olden days, instead of wearing backpacks and carrying signs, they’d have been wearing sheets and carrying torches.
Joe Doakes
Big Left always sells class conflict as cultural conflict. Today’s cultural conflict is racial. But behind it, always, is affluent honkeys with (at best) white liberal guilt and, otherwise, the kind of cynicism that is dripping from every pore of the American ruling class.
Urban Progressive Privilege includes being reasonably certain that none of the policies you promote for other people will ever really affect you.
Joe Soucheray on the Chauvin Trial and Minneapolis:
Yes, the trial, and the attendant protests, could be the end of Minneapolis. There is no political strength in place to save it. The council even exudes a vibe that suggests they are more concerned about the safety and convenience of protesters than their own citizenry.
The council cannot open an intersection because of their apparent fealty to those who occupy it. What are they going to do if rioters decide that they are going to take over six or seven square blocks of downtown, maybe the Nicollet Mall? This city let a police station burn. This is a city that called for help too late back in May 2020.
Minneapolis city council president Lisa Bender famously said that expecting public safety is a “privilege” – to which every taxpayer in that city should be saying “Yes. It Is. A ‘privilege’ I, whatever my race, creed or belief, pay through the nose for. Now provide it, stat, or get out of office and quite wasting our time”.
But they don’t ,and they won’t, and when Lisa Bender leaves the Council she, like Frey and even Alondra Cano, will be replaced by someone worse. That’s cynicism talking – well, not just cynicism. It’s the way Minneapolis politics is set up. It’s the way politics go wherever a small minority, committed to getting power at whatever cost, get their way. It’s the apotheosis of Urban Progressive Privilege.
Not even a complete apocalypse is going to change that.
It’s been a while – but my band, “Elephant in the Room”, is back in business.
After a year where we had precisely two, somewhat surreptitious gigs, we’re back in an actual bar, for the first time since February 29, 2020.
After a couple years of playing in the far northwest and far eastern suburbs, onSaturday night, we will be going north, playing at the Back To The SRO Bar and Grill in Oak Grove. It’s about 10 miles north of Anoka:
I’m not sure what the Covid rules are, other than the fact that we are playing from six until 10 rather than our usual nine until one – which isn’t entirely unwelcome.
Anyway – I’ve been there before, the food is pretty good, and the food and beverage prices have that “edge of the metro“ not-so-priciness about them.
By the way – enjoy live music while you can. Because while on the one hand states are slowly reopening, the Biden administration is doing its best to destroy the “gig“ economy. And there is literally nothing giggier than playing in a bar band.
As an American, I not only have no innate concept of “aristocracy” as a natural part of the social order, but I think it’s an anachronism at best.
As a conservative, I can see the value to a culture with a history of monarchy keeping some vestigial, ceremonial, constitutionally-innocuous version of a monarchy around. Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Spain and others use their monarchies sort of like cultural museums, means of transmitting their nations pasts to their presents and futures.
Which is why Big Left has always wanted to tear monarchies down.
Speaking of Big Left’s attempts to destroy traditions like the monarchy: could someone make these two hamsters go away?
What Liberals believe will happen:
Gangbanger 1: “Hey, man, that guy was disrespectful to me. I’m going to kill him. Give me your gun.”
Gangbanger 2: “No way, man. There’s a new law: you must pass a background check first.”
Gangbanger 1: “Dang, man. I guess I’ll go play some basketball instead.”
Joe Doakes
Joe gives gun grabbers too much credit. I doubt most of them consider the notion that there are people out there we already prohibit from owning guns. They think the good guys are the problem.
Two points
Oh, yeah – and Berg’s 20th Law of Social Justice Warmongering is not called “Berg’s 20th Impromptu Notion” for a reason:
All incidents of “hate speech” not captured on video (involving being delivered by someone proven not to be a ringer) shall be assumed to be hoaxes until proven otherwise.
I say this not to deny that hate speech happens, by the way – but to stop diluting the term.
But we saw it again: student at a posh college makes a claim against a couple blue-collar white guys. Blue collar members of the majority – a janitor, a cafeteria worker and a campus cop – get disciplined, and “cancelled”.
And then?
Then an outside investigation determined that, basically, it never happened. The campus police officer, the janitor and a cafeteria worker had been falsely tarred as racists, but they were not the beneficiaries of apologies, “compassion for everyone involved” or anything else.
“Check your privilege” is a common term around higher education, but the notion that white janitors, cafeteria workers and campus police are “privileged” in that environment is not simply absurd, but monstrous. As Smith janitor Mark Patenaude told the Times, “We used to joke, don’t let a rich student report you, because if you do, you’re gone.”
Privilege is the ability to get an employee of many years punished simply by making a complaint, even a false one.
As we’ve noted in the past, the woman who coined the term “white privilege” did it to deflect away from her absolutely colossal class privilege. And I’m not saying, flat-out, that it’s a psyop to cover a fairly deliberate class war…
…but if it were, it’d be hard to figure what they’d be doing differently:
The gentry class is in firm control of most of the institutions in America, from big corporations, to media organizations, to, most especially, colleges and universities. The Democrats are the gentry class’ party, as the GOP increasingly becomes a diverse coalition of working-class and small-business people. And the gentry class is letting the working class have it.
Barack Obama boasted about driving coal mines into bankruptcy; Joe Biden tells miners they need to learn how to [build solar panels]. There’s talk of forgiving student-loan debt, which would effectively transfer wealth from high-school educated truck drivers to social workers with graduate degrees. Biden’s open-borders immigration policy will once again open the “immigrant spigot” to push working-class wages down. Piling ruin upon ruin.
The US – at least, the “blue” parts of it – are starting to resemble Britain in the 1600s.
At best.
SCOTUS tells colleges “you can’t oppress free speech, and then drop the restrictions when someone sues you and claim there was never a problem“.
I bet administrators at Macalester, Saint Thomas and the like are popping out bricks today.
A friend of the blog emails:
As you can see you today more fencing and wire went up around the 4th Precinct in North Minneapolis.
Many traffic barriers are also set internal inside the fence in the police parking lot.
So where will all the rioters go?
It’s a rhetorical question.
UPDATE: Compare and contrast with when this shot was first taken, a couple weeks ago:
No less an authority than Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream informs me that public schools are hotbeds of systemic racism.
No less an authority than President Trump informed me that racism is evil.
Plainly, then, the conclusion must be obvious: public schools are evil.
Minnesota spends more than $13 Billion per year promoting evil.
We should stop doing that.
We should close all public schools at once.
Parents who care about education and who can afford to send their children to private school, will.
Parents who care about education but who can’t afford to send their children to private school, will home school.
Parents who care about education but who can’t afford to send their children to private school nor to home school them will be out of luck and their children will grow up ignorant and poor like their parents who probably were Trump voters anyway, so they deserve it.
Teachers, administrators, support staff laid off when the schools close, should learn to code.
Joe Doakes
The thing about calling racism “structural” is you gotta get rid of the “structure” to fix it.
SCENE: Mitch BERG is shoveling landscaping dirt into a wheelbarrow, distracted. Avery LIBRELLE pedals up the alleyway on, naturally, a recumbent fat-tire bike, catching BERG by surprise.
LIBRELLE: Merg!
BERG: Aaaaah, fffffffor crying out loud, Avery, long time no see. What’s…
LIBRELLE: America is built around structural racism.
BERG: Our “structurally racist” country elected a black president, twice, and we have a sitting Veep who is Black and South Asian.
LIBRELLE: Yeah, but that’s just politics.
BERG: OK. This country is capitalist, right?
LIBRELLE: Ugh. Yes. Ick.
BERG: And under capitalism – well, the parody of it you people observe – all things evolve back to money, right?
LIBRELLE: Ugh, yes. Awful.
BERG: Right. And there are few places in our society where “money” and the people who spend it are as attuned to peoples attitudes as in advertising.
And perhaps you’ve noticed – in advertising these days, “people of color” are represented waaaay out of proportion with their share of American demographics. And remember fifty years ago, when Norman Lear got all “transgressive” and cast a biracial couple as bit players on All in the Family? Pretty scandalous stuff, back then – but interracial couples are kinda the “it” thing in advertising these days.
Now – given the ad industry’s focus on consumer attitudes, and capitalism’s imperative to make money work, would advertisers be pushing “racial diversity” in ads if the general public, including the white middle class which makes up a large portion of advertisers targets, were just frothing with racial hate?
LIBRELLE: You notice skin color in ads?
BERG: I notice trends in advertising, a key part of the industry I grew up in and which is still my avocation.
LIBRELLE: That’s racist.
BERG: No, it’s utterly clinical. But shall I just ignore everyone’s race? Because that’s pretty much my default setting…
LIBRELLE: No, that’s racist, too…
BERG: So the only thing that’s not “racist” is shutting up and letting you tell me what to think?
LIBRELLE: Pretty much.
BERG: Naturally. Hey, loook (points into the distance) – a garbage truck!
(LIBRELLE looks around – giving BERG an opening to slip away) .
(And SCENE)
I bought my first ever food processor last week. I got it on Friday. It’s been really great for speeding up making some of the staples of my diet, like keto dough and shredded cheese, among many, many others.
One of the things I did not do last week was pre-post a lot of content for this week. During a typical week, I have a bit of a surplus of posts, the better (scare quotes assumed) of which I schedule for the following week.
Because of a pretty jammin’ work and personal schedule, I didn’t get much of that done lasdt week, or over the weekend.
Oh – in a matter that may seem unrelated, but is in fact closely related to my current situation, my band, Elephant in the Room, finally got another legit bar gig, after nearly a year of mostly off-the-cuff semi-surreptitious gigs (like, two of them). More on that later this week…
…except to tie those threads – low and cursory blog output, food processor and band gig – into a narrative tapestry.
Kid you not. I was reading the safety instructions for the food processor when, naturally, I ran my right thumb along the edge of the surgical-grade vegetable chopper, slicing open a flap of skin along the inward side of the thumb, below the last joint.
It was only four stitches. No biggie.
Except that it was right in a place with key importance for two vital activities:
So with the help of a little gauze, tape and Ibuprofen, my thumb is finally up to some (clumsy, mis-key prone) typing. Hence this apologia.
And I’m doing my best to get my thumb into shape, since ho-lee frijole, it hurt to hold a pick at practice the other night.
As you were.
To: The entire conservative / classical liberal world
From: Mitch Berg, obstreporous super-straight anti-Blueanon peasant
Re: Anti-BlueAnon Superstraight Super-Intersectioality
More of this, please.
That is all.
Here’s the team of lawyers volunteering their time to prosecute a Minneapolis police officer in the biggest racial lynching the city has ever seen.
They must all be gunning for judge, hoping to impress Tim Walz with their sterling Liberal credentials so he appoints them to the bench. Thank God I don’t live in Hennepin County.
Joe Doakes
Same. Although let’s not pretend for a moment that if this had happened in Saint Paul, the Ramco Attorney’s office wouldn’t be just as bad.
Conservative calls for boycotts are a little frustrating. Partly because boycotts rarely do much good. And largely because conservative calls for boycotts usually involve companies I’ve never patrionized, goods I’ve never bought, services that have never served me at all.
Recent example: last month’s call to boycott Disney Plus and The Mandalorian over the politically-motivated and largely counterfactual firing of Gina Carano. But I’ve never subscribed to Disney, I’ve never watched Mandalorian (the last, “first” Lucas episodes of Star Wars put me off the entire franchise – I’ve literally watched not one second of Star Wars since…er, the one where Anakin became Darth, whatever that was called), and I can’t be bothered.
With that in mind?
I’ve never really been a big fan of online shopping.
No, it’s not because I’m a technology-averse middle-aged guy. I work in tech. I not only use technology, I design it (and, avocationally, spend a lot of time critiquing bad design). It’s hard to stay near the absolute bleeding edge…
…but then, shopping on line is not the bleeding edge of technology. It’s pretty much a commonplace these days.
I’ve just never liked buying things sight-unseen.
Oh, I’ve adapted a bit – I’ll buy USB cables and printer ink off of Amazon, once in a while – convenience is truly seductive.
But perhaps not seductive enough, anymore.
No pullquote. The whole thing is worth a read.
So what’ does Karen – the iconic (and unisex) cultural metaphor for the joyless, passive-aggressive scolds who pass their time hectoring others about their masks, their distancing, their attitudes about Covid in general – do with their time?
Several possibilities suggest themselves:
One thing “Karen” has not done since, most likely, April?
Read any current research on now Covid actually spreads (that isn’t vetted first by institutions that benefit from broadcasting panic porn).
CDC study buries the lede, notes that asymptomatic transmission is very rare, even among people with extended close personal contact:
The text of the analysis is even more consequential than the CDC’s reference makes it seem: “Estimated mean household secondary attack rate from symptomatic index cases (18.0%; 95% CI, 14.2%-22.1%) was significantly higher than from asymptomatic or presymptomatic index cases (0.7%; 95% CI, 0%-4.9%; P < .001), although there were few studies in the latter group. These findings are consistent with other household studies28,70 reporting asymptomatic index cases as having limited role in household transmission” (emphasis added).
The 0.7 percent figure includes not just people who never show symptoms of COVID-19, but people who haven’t yet shown symptoms—two groups that have been alleged to be major factors driving the spread of the virus. This is a major data point often underplayed or even challenged in much media coverage of the virus.
The key, if not central, rationale for non-pharmaceutical interventions such as masking, distancing, and staying at home is allegedly significant transmission from people who don’t show symptoms. If the contagiousness of people without symptoms is not what drives the spread of SARS-COV-2, then no COVID restriction on public life besides staying home when you are clearly sick could be justified, considering the obvious negative consequences of these restrictions.
The 0.7 percent figure might even be a modest estimate of overall asymptomatic/presymptomatic transmission because the studies were among household contacts only—people who have close and extended contact with one another daily.
It doesn’t seem especially counterintuitive – spreading a disease
…might be correlated with people coughing.
Pass this along to any teachers – or at least teachers union reps – you might know .
Wow, Governor Walz is a miracle worker. Despite having the entire state economy locked down for a year with no end in sight, his administration now forecasts a billion-dollar budget surplus. So that should end his call for higher taxes, right?
“But some DFL lawmakers want Walz to stand firm in his call for higher taxes on top earners, corporations and smokers. They say it’s about tax fairness and societal opportunity as much as a deficit fix.”
Hang on, there is no deficit, there’s a surplus, so that explanation makes no sense. And taxing top earners makes top earners flee the state; taxing corporations makes corporations flee the state; and smokers are overwhelmingly lower income people making that tax the most regressive of all of Walz’s proposals. Where’s the fairness in that?
Puts me in mind of the when Minnesota Democrat legislator Cy Thao accidentally spoke the truth: “When you guys win, you get to keep your money; when we win, we take your money.”
Joe Doakes
Not to mention that time Larry Pogemiller admitted he really believes government knows better what to do with your money than you do.
The news is full of stories about the preparations for Monday’s opening of the Derek Chauvin trial.
Signally, all those preparations seem to involve fortifying government buildings.
That includes Minneapolis City Hall, where taxpayers are paying a lot of money to fortify a building wherein most of the City Council members believe the expectation of public safety is a privilege.
As to protecting the small businesspeople? Residents?
Additionally, Sasha Cotton, the director for the city’s new Office of Violence Prevention, said her department is working with the city’s Neighborhood and Community Relations Department on a preparedness toolkit—which includes safety tips and best practices, among other information—to help neighborhoods and residents.
A “preparedness kit”.
In other words, smoke ’em if you got ’em. You’re on your own.
Again. Government has its priorities. Government is government’s priority.
But it’s OK – because city officials are pointing out the precedent they’re concerned about.
January 6.
Not May 25.
“Never Waste a Crisis!”
A city’s agony is just another excuse to feed into the blood libel that there is a massive wave of “white supremacist right wing violence that’ll dwarf 9/11” waiting out there, any day now.
No, perish the thought. That’s just crazy talk.
No cultural gaslighting going on here.
Just in time for Black History Month, Amazon scrubs references to one of the most accomplished black men in America today. Clarence Thomas’s bio-doc has been disappeared:
Amazon appeared to drop the PBS title, “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words,” while still promoting a wide array of feature films under the category of Black History Month such as “All In: The Fight For Democracy,” with Stacey Abrams and two movies on Anita Hill, Thomas’ accuser of sexual misconduct who attempted to derail his confirmation. All come free to stream with a Prime membership.
The Thomas documentary released in January last year remains available to purchase on DVD. A simple search for “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words,” comes up short for the title however. To find it, users must include “DVD” in the search box, and the documentary will come up as the 10th result. A search for “RBG” on the other hand, will bring three documentaries on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s documentary to the top after promoting a sponsored post of her biography, “Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.”
Amazon did not immediately respond to The Federalist’s request for comment.
You can probably fill in the kicker I usually write after the pullquote yourself – our monthly observance of all things Afro-American should be retitled “Month With History Of The Correct Black Americans”.
A federal judge rules the federal government has no power to order a nation-wide moratorium on evictions. State governments can do it, but not the federal government. That’s a refreshing change.
Did I mention the judge is a Trump nominee? The winning continues long after The President has left the Oval Office.
Joe Doakes
Which, as a Trump skeptic, was always my best-case result.
Dana Loesch, by way of exposing the grift of the “Anti-Racism” industry, published a whistle-blower account of the Coca Cola session with Robin DeAngelo a few weeks back – the one that told Cokers to, well…
“Be less white” – a term that is couldn’t be a purer example of Berg’s 21st Law of Rhetorical Evolution if I’d designed it that way.
“When it comes to “progressive” policy, yesterday’s absurd joke is today’s serious proposal and tomorrow’s potential law.”
I harken back to a generation of Bill Murray telling his fellow recruits in Stripes [1] to “be less white” as they go through their drill routine; of a generation or two of bar bands and nightclub DJs chiding their stiff-dancing, dorky audiences bobbing along to “Slow Ride” or “More than a Feeling” or “I’m All Out Of Love”.
But Berg’s 21st Law isn’t called “Berg’s 21st Suggestion” for a reason. There’s a massive industry of grifters, rage consultants and other ideological hogs bellying up to the trough that is the upper-middle-class First World white guilt goldmine.
You’ve seen her list before, but here it is, just to jog the memory:
What this glob of word salad and gaslighting is really asking is “be less a product of Western Civilization – the most humane civilization in a human history dominated by tyrants, war, oppression, disease and early death – and shush up as we return to an era of aristocrats, knights, and vassals”.
Which is nothing new, if you’ve been reading this blog and/or have any functioning critical thinking capability.
Beyond that, though?
If I’m “less white”, aren’t I then appropriating someone else’s culture?
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