Tortoise wins, hare left town long ago

 

I had to smile at an award recently conferred in New York City.  It reminded me of Aesop's famous fable.

The M42 Crosstown was just crowned the slowest bus in the Big Apple — a title that its riders say comes as no surprise.

The MTA shuttle earned the first “un-coveted Pokey award” from the New York Public Interest Research Group in three years after clocking in at an exhausting 5.25 miles per hour on average.

At that pace, the M42 would have fittingly finished in 42,232nd place of the 59,226 runners at this year’s NYC Marathon.

At a press conference Monday, MTA Chief of Policy & External Relations John McCarthy acknowledged the M42’s Pokey win, but said the award should have been given to 42nd Street instead of the shuttle.

“It’s really not the bus’s fault. The bus wakes up in the morning and it wants to provide great service; it wants to go fast. That’s what it’s equipped to do and the bus operator wants to drive the bus quickly. The problem is that things are in the way,” said McCarthy.

“I’d like to take this award and hand it to 42nd street because it’s the street, it’s the road and it’s the vehicles that are blocking buses that are the problem and continue to be the problem.”

There's more at the link.

The report amused me, but I had to concede that the explanation offered by Mr. McCarthy was most likely all too accurate.  I've driven in New York and Massachusetts, and almost universally drivers there proved to be the least polite, most aggressive and unhelpful of any I've found in the rest of the United States.  In New York, there seemed to be a competition among drivers over who could be the most obstructive and just plain nasty to tourists and visitors.  I loathed my time on the road in those two states, and won't willingly return to them for that reason.

I'm sure city-proud New Yorkers will object to my comparison, and insist that it's really not that bad there.  To that, all I can say is that if the average New York City driver of my [admittedly limited] experience tried to drive as he's accustomed in Dallas or Houston, he'd be jailed in short order by the local cops - if, that is, local drivers hadn't administered a short, sharp lesson in manners before then!

Peter

An alternative point of view concerning extremism

 

Yesterday I cited Rod Dreher at some length concerning right-wing extremism.  As usual, the responses were mixed:  some for his views, some against.  I find it concerning that some were absolutely dogmatic in their views - it was their way, or the highway, and their agreement or disagreement was absolute.  That's very dangerous.  You'll recall Oliver Cromwell's words to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1650:

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.

Too many of us (including me, sadly) can assume that we are not mistaken, whereas our opponents are.  In many (but by no means all) cases, it would be a lot better for us to listen to the other side and see whether there's any common ground to be found, or a better approach to achieving something of importance to the society in which both of us live.

An anonymous reader, commenting on yesterday's article, provided a link to this post on X.com by a user calling himself "Wokal Distance".  I thought it made sense.  The reader who posted the link thought it rebutted Rod Dreher's perspective, but I think it does more to sustain it overall.  I decided to re-post the whole thing here, so you could compare and contrast them for yourselves.

I despise the Groyper movement, but if you want to understand where Fuentes gets purchase with young men I will tell you how it happened by telling you about my experience at the orientation night when my son joined elementary school band:

My 11 year old son son joined the elementary school band, and so I went to the parents orientation night which was held at a local high-school. As the night went on it became obvious to me why young men rage against the larger social system.

The classrooms were inundated with DEI messages and trans pride flags. On the walls there were posters, stickers and various decorations that all invoked the various totems if diversity. Black lives matter messaging, decolonization messaging, LGBTQ+ messaging, and basically ever sort of race and gender social justice messaging you can imagine was present. The advertisements for post secondary opportunities featured social justice education prominently, including advertising a course on indigenous ways of knowing" as something grade 12 students should pursue upon graduation.  Many of the teachers has "this is a safe space" sticker son their doors, and others had variations of "in this house" messaging on their doors or on the walls of the classroom.

The entire aesthetic which dominated the decoration of classrooms was the progressive leftist coded "in this house" and "be kind" aesthetic. As soon as you walked into a classroom there was no doubt as the the political leanings of whichever teacher occupied that classroom. The only way I can describe it is to say that progressive social justice activists have colonized the school and marked their territory. 

A woman in a mask (who was in charge) got up and read a number of land acknowledgements before acknowledging the contribution of indigenous people to ways of knowing. Standard leftist land acknowledgement boilerplate. Additionally, every interaction was done in the style of HR style professionalism mixed with progressive leftist coded gentle parenting.

When it comes to how the teachers behaved I am going to draw on both that night and the other times I have been at my sons school in order to explain it. To begin, the boys are treated almost as though they are defective girls. The feminine modes of interaction and socialization are treated as though they are the only legitimate modes of interaction and serve as the taken for granted way to properly interact and navigate the world. Almost all the authority figures at my sons school are women with almost no exceptions. One day my son found out that the school had hired a single male education Assistant, and my son came home and told me, in wondrous amazement, that he saw a "boy teacher" at school. The level of wonderment and surprise he expressed was on par with what I would expect if he had walked into school and seen a triceratops walking the hallways. 

My son often comes home from school and expresses utter frustration at the fact that his preferred way of communicating, as well as the things that are aligned with his temperament are treated as though they were somehow inferior. As he is 11 (and being assessed for autism) he lacks the correct technical language to describe this, so it generally shows up as him getting in trouble for being insufficiently "gentle" and "kind" in response to various passive aggressive power plays and instances of bullying carries out by his more socially developed (often) female peers. 

To say that band night was feminine coded would be an understatement. It would be more accurate to say that feminized modes of behavior and communication were embedded in every single interaction. It was a totally alien environment for anyone who isn't well versed in navigating the social codes of progressive leftist institutional spaces. It was like the slogan "the future is female" was taken to be a command delivered from God Himself turned into an education program.

Now, I want you to imagine what it is like for an 11 year old boy to be saturated in that environment day after day. he is an alien in his own school who is treated essentially like a ticking time bomb who needs to be effectively managed rather than engaged with an taught, and he knows this is happening. It is hard to overstate the level of hostility towards boys that is  floating around in the ambient culture of the school system. It isn’t so much that there is an explicit form of anti-male bigotry (although examples of that exist) it is more that there is an overall attitude of distaste for anything masculine and an utter indifference towards the interests, fortunes, and inner lives of young boys. The expectations, norms, rules, and standards of behavior cater to the sensibilities of girls and women.

This is the entire social system that a young boy goes through from when he is 6 years old all the way until he is graduated from university.

It’s an old trope on the right to say “imagine if the roles were  reversed,” but that would be to miss the point. I know that many on the left will say that all of this is perfectly acceptable because of historical injustices and the pursuit of Social Justice. What I want to  point out to you is how absurd the world must appear through the eyes of  the average 11 year-old boy. He is basically told he has a host of social advantages (white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, etc) that he has never experienced and will never benefit from, and this justifies the system which he is immersed in. And the worst part is, if young men point any of this out, the very people who are doing it will look them in the eye with a straight face and deny that any of this ever happened. Making matters worse these men begin to figure out that the institutions have been used to advance a leftist political agenda that scapegoated their group (young white men), and when they point this out everyone in authority calls them evil bigots.

And all this happens during their formative years.

Now, Imagine you are a young white male.

You graduate from the school system and are released into the world only to find that the feminine modes of socialization pushed on you are entirely unfit for purpose. That the social skills you were taught fail utterly in both the job markets young men tend towards (construction, engineering, building, landscaping, etc) and have no purchase in the dating market where highly agentic, masculine, wealthy men have a huge advantage over the passive, docile "nice boy." On top of that, imagine that a great deal of the job listings that you peruse make it clear that preference will be given to women and "diverse" candidates, and that the job interview itself is full of shibboleths, coded statements, and trap questions meant to elicit responses that allow the hiring party to exclude anyone who isn't sufficiently versed in and aligned with the priorities of the DEI/Woke/Social Justice paradigm.

On top of that, that if a you do get a job you will exposed to various sensitivity trainings, DEI trainings, and intersectionality workshops in which your group (straight white men) are repeatedly scapegoated as the source of all the worlds pathologies. Laid at your feet are patriarchy, colonialism, racism, sexism and a great number of other social evils for which you are taken to be complicit in and have a responsibility for fixing in virtue of being a white male.

While all this is going on a series of scandals (COVID, Men in womens' sports, trans kids, etc) reveal to you the degree to which the institutions that make up the society you live in have adopted an ideology that is actively hostile to you because you are a straight white male, and have been denying you opportunity while scapegoating you for all societies problems and treating you like you are a defective girl.

Once you understand this, the real question is not "why are some young men radicalizing?" the real question is "why are there any young men at all who have not been radicalized?"

None of this is to excuse any of the extremist radicals who are attempting to harness the resentment and anger of young men for their evil purposes. The point is to get you to understand why young men will attach themselves to any voice who is willing to stridently call for the obliteration of the social system and ideology which lied to them during their formative years and is currently doing things which rob them of opportunities for advancement and success.

The institutions have totally blown their credibility with young men, and have completely destroyed young men's trust in institutions. Young men view the current set of social institutions as ideologically corrupt and totally illegitimate, and they view the narratives that emerge from those institutions as being expressions of as nothing more then a story told to legitimize an ideology which seeks to hold them back. As such, the institutions and their narratives have absolutely no normative pull on young Gen Z men. 

I am not saying the situation is hopeless, but unless you acknowledge what I have laid out here, and engage in a good faith attempt to understand what the school system, Universities, non-profits, HR departments, and other civic institutions have done to young men, you will never be able to gain their trust enough to lead them away from guys like Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate, Andrew Torba, and other pathological influences.

That certainly highlights why so many of our young men are attracted to extremism in one form or another.  It's a chilling condemnation of what we've allowed our schools to become:  institutions where our children are brainwashed and propagandized, rather than educated.  I can't think of a better argument for home schooling than the description above.

Compare and contrast that to Rod Dreher's perspective, as covered in these pages yesterday and ten days ago.  What do you think, readers?

I've come out of a background where differences of opinion led - literally - to civil war, mass murder, and the utter destruction of the fabric of a nation.  I've seen it at first hand in the Third World far too often to be under any illusions about how bad it can get.  I would far rather talk than start shooting, unless and until the latter option becomes the only way to defend what one believes in - and yes, I've done that, too.

Only those who've seen and experienced how bad it can get have any real idea of the ultimate development of the mess we're in.  Ask those who served in Mogadishu, or "hot spots in Afghanistan or Iraq.  They know . . . and they don't want that to come here . . . but if we don't get a handle on extremism on both the left and the right wings of our body politic, it's going to come here.

Peter

Extremism redux: what's happening in Washington D.C.

 

About ten days ago I published an article titled "The tragic poison of extremism".  I quoted Rod Dreher at length, and his warnings about how anti-semitic and far-right-wing thinking were becoming real dangers on the right wing of American politics.  A lively discussion ensued in Comments, with some for and some against those views.

Yesterday Mr. Dreher published a follow-up article titled "What I Saw And Heard In Washington".  Here are a few excerpts.

It was an intense and busy long weekend for me in the capital city. I learned a hell of a lot about the new radicalism racing through the young Right there. What I’m going to say about it is to inform you. Nobody talked to me on the record. What I say is my impression of a number of conversations I had with people (conservatives) who are directly involved in this world. Every one of them is appalled by what’s happening (well, maybe not one of the guys, but he always plays his cards close to his vest), and all have serious doubts about the ability of the institutional Right to deal with it. It’s easier for me simply to do a mash-up of all the things I heard, rather than try to attribute them to people I can’t quote by name anyway. Remember, this is a diary, not a newspaper.

. . .

I asked one astute Zoomer what the Groypers actually wanted (meaning, what were their demands). He said, “They don’t have any. They just want to tear everything down.”

Then he went on to explain in calm, rational detail why his generation is so utterly screwed. The problems are mostly economic and material, in his view (and this is something echoed by other conversations). They don’t have good career prospects, they’ll probably never be able to buy a home, many are heavily indebted with student loans that they were advised by authorities to take out, and the idea that they are likely to marry and start families seems increasingly remote.

Moreover, they grew up in a country that had lost its common culture. Many of these young men are fatherless. Most of them spent their youths being told that as whites, and especially as white males, they are what’s wrong with the world. Their own speech was policed with Stasi-like ruthlessness for racism and bigotry, while people on the Left routinely slandered whites, males, Christians, and heterosexuals — and were even rewarded for it.

F—k that, seems to be the reaction now.

. . .

The inability of us older people — Boomers, Xers, and older Millennials — to comprehend the world through the eyes of Zoomers is a big, big problem. Another strong theme: while it’s important to take a clear stand against anti-Semitism in the ranks, there is no way to gatekeep our way out of this. You cannot simply point at the Zoomers and say, “Thou shalt not,” and expect it to work. The problems are too deep and complex, and anyway, they have learned to have no respect for authority.

Why should they? The institutions of our society, as they see it, have lied and lied and lied, and still lie. They still lie in many ways about race (e.g., refusing to be honest about black crime), they lied about Covid, they lied about males and females, and they forced the insanity of gender ideology on us all. The military lied about Iraq. The universities embraced and enforced ideologies of lies. The Catholic Church lied about sexual abuse, and the connection to the prevalence of sexually active gay priests honeycombing the institution. They lied about the benefits of mass migration and diversity. They lied about Trump and Russia. The political parties and their corporate allies lied about what globalism would mean for ordinary people. The media have lied and do lie about most things.

. . .

I could go on — boy, could I — but you get the idea. Trust in the system is gone. Hell, I share most of these conclusions myself! The difference is that I am not a nihilist; I don’t want to tear it all down, but rather reform it. There are no historical examples in which “tearing it all down” produced a better, more just, more functional order. The Zoomers don’t seem to have any knowledge of history, nor do they care about it.

They don’t even take Trump all that seriously, it appears. They see him as an out-of-touch Boomer whose value lies in how he can be used to achieve the system’s destruction. It has not escaped their notice that the ten months into Trump’s second term, the economy is still crap. As an American living abroad in a more affordable country, going to coffee shops, bars and restaurants, I was stunned by how expensive everyday life is in the US. The recent opinion polls showing that by a large margin, most Americans (not only Zoomers) are down on the Trump administration’s handling of the economy — that reflects the good judgment of the American people, I’m sorry to say. If the Republicans don’t get their act together, and fast, they’re going to be shellacked in the 2026 midterms.

There's more at the link.

As I said in my earlier article, I highly recommend that you click over to Mr. Dreher's latest essay and read it in full for yourself.  You may not agree with all that he says, but he'll certainly give you plentiful food for thought.

Peter

Armistice Day

 

All over the world (except the United States), this date, November 11th, is solemnly commemorated as Armistice Day.  On the eleventh day of November, 1918, at the eleventh hour, the guns fell silent across Europe as World War I, the so-called "War To End All Wars", finally ground to a halt.

Both of my grandparents fought in that war.  My paternal grandfather and his wife came to live with my mother and father in their declining years (as was common in an earlier generation - they weren't dumped into old-age homes).  One of my earliest memories was of my grandfather's constant hacking cough, the result of injuries sustained from a German gas attack on the trenches during that war.  His lungs never fully recovered, and the injury shortened his life appreciably.  Thus, even though the war had finished decades before I was born, it still touched my memory.  He died when I was three or four years old, I don't recall precisely which.  The house was somehow very still without his coughing . . .

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Peter

Happy birthday, USMC - and thanks for helping to keep me alive

 

Today is the 250th birthday of the United States Marine Corps, founded on 10 November 1775.  Congratulations to the Corps and all its members.

I have a particular reason to thank the Corps.  After the Vietnam War, a number of former US Marines didn't want to go back to the USA, because anti-war sentiment was rampant and they were fed up with being accused of being "baby-killers" and sundry other pleasantries.  Instead, they wanted to go on "killing commies", as some of them put it.  A number of them made their way to southern Africa, joining the armed forces of South Africa and Rhodesia.  I met several of them in both countries.

I've never forgotten one of them in particular.  I won't name him, at his request some years ago.  I was a raw recruit, lying prone on the firing line during basic training.  I was bored, shooting a few rounds, waiting for score, then doing the same again ad nauseam.  The blistering hot African heat didn't help matters.  I muttered something to the man alongside me, something like "When are we going to stop wasting time on this **** and do something more interesting?"

I felt a kick on my outstretched boot. Rolling halfway over and looking up, I saw one of our instructors, a former US Marine now wearing South African Warrant Officer insignia.  I shriveled internally, waiting to be reamed for talking out of turn and assigned punishment PT.  Instead, the Warrant Officer just looked tired.  Glaring down at me, he said, "Recruit, an amateur practices until he's got it right.  A professional practices until he can't get it wrong!"  He didn't wait for a reply, but turned away to sort out another recruit who wasn't doing what he was supposed to be doing.

I've never forgotten that moment, or his words.  They became a mantra for me, and I'm sure they kept me alive in some engagements during my military service and afterwards.  From 1976 through 1994, South Africa was plagued with constant internal unrest, terrorism and authoritarian crackdowns.  I had the misfortune to be on the scene, in and out of uniform, for over 100 shooting engagements.  I bear some of the scars of those years to this day.  I kept that former Marine's advice firmly in mind through it all, and that mental and physical preparedness (as well as, of course, the grace of God!) is probably the only reason I survived those years.

So, thank you, USMC.  I have personal cause to be grateful to you!

Peter

Memes that made me laugh 285

 

Gathered from around the Internet over the past week.  Click any image for a larger view.

Sunday morning music

 

Back in 1988, the world was more than usually in turmoil.  The Soviet Union was in its death throes, with political instability the order of the day.  Economies all over the world weren't doing great, and a lot of people were very uncertain about the future.  Amid all that, the 1992 Barcelona Olympics organizing committee decreed that songs wanting to be considered for the anthem of the Games had to be published and submitted no later than 1988, so as to give adequate time for them to be compared and considered.

Freddie Mercury of the rock band Queen (already dying of AIDS) and Montserrat Caballé (whom he regarded as the best soprano of the time) launched a bombshell hit into all that.  Their duet "Barcelona" was an instant hit, and would undoubtedly have been the primary anthem of the 1992 Olympics if Freddie had lived that long and been able to perform it live at the opening ceremony.  Sadly, his illness was too far advanced.  Nevertheless, it's remained a perennial favorite among his fans, and one of mine as well.

Here's an extended live version of "Barcelona".

I'm very sorry we lost Freddie Mercury when we did.  He might have brought us several decades more of his unique style in music.  However, this was a heck of a swan song for him.

Peter

"The Internet was a mistake"

 

So postulates Stephan Pastis, anyway.  Click the image to be taken to a larger version at the "Pearls Before Swine" Web page.

On the other hand, the modern world literally could not function without it, so I guess we have to put up with its quirks and quibbles . . .

Peter

EDITED TO ADD:  The cartoon above reminds me of this 2008 classic from XKCD:

Nothing much has changed, has it?