Short Take: Greatness was too Contrary to Niceness
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You should be deeply suspicious of anyone who can come up with elaborate ideological theories... Yet NEVER points to an institutional mechanism for their propagation.
James Lindsay wrote HOW many books and made appearances for HOW many years on "Cultural Marxism"?
Yet He's horrified! Agast! If you point to the simple fact that all of wokeness, social justice, and DEI are enforced, funded, and legally mandated through Anti-Discrimination/civil rights law and the tort system.
Somehow Marcuse, Horkheimer, Adorno, and the Frankfurt school were able to summon this all through communist Critical Theory magic spells with no laws being passed and no institutional mechanism put in place, just the strength of their psychic will from beyond the grave....
And there was not a thing wrong with the legal system surrounding universities, the American Bureaucracy, or corporate America that they could summon a racial and sexual caste system merely by writing obscurantist works of cultural criticism...
Of course, the answer Libertarians, Paleocons, and the old right have been screaming SINCE THE ‘60s... is that Antidiscrimination law, the 64 Civil Rights Act, and MLK life's work, made it so that no matter what there'd be a racial and sexual caste system, no matter what bureaucrats and government apparatchiks would be assessing every detail of American life to create "equity"... And the Frankfurt school just happened to supply some of the language that maximised their power (largely unwittingly)
Turns out bitter failed Communist German Jews writing in the 1950s didn't actually wield that much power that from beyond the grave they could summon affirmative action in the 70s then political correctness in the 1990s and third-wave feminism in the 2010s.
It was the US federal courts usurped the Constitution to effectively write employment regulations (something precluded by the division of powers, 10th Amendment restrictions on the federal government, and 1st Amendment freedom of association).
Congress opened up the tort system to vague employment lawsuits for "Hostile work environments" with the 1990 Civil Rights Act.
and the combination of Obama's "dear colleagues" letter with Obergfell vs. Hodges made same-sex marriage a legal right, and THE REAL INTENTION OF THAT LAWSUIT make sexual orientation a protected category such that it was now illegal to "discriminate" Ie. freely associate, against homosexuality or any gender-based identity, This is why Masterpiece Cakeshop came about immediately after Ogberfell, and why all the gay jokes suddenly disappeared only for every single institution to start pushing Trans stuff...
The Supreme Court with ONE decision decided Sodomy and child sexual transition was AS protected by anti-discrimination laws and their bullshit reading of the 14th amendment as a black man is. Thus anyone who acted like it was 2000 and made a trans joke at work in 2017 would have their business, jobs, careers, and lives ripped from them by lawsuits and armed agents of the state.
If you are a business owner and you try to let your employees freely associate or make off-color jokes you will be sued, if you do not surrender your business to pay off the suit you will be foreclosed, if you try to defend your business when they come to take it from you you will be arrested (and you'll have the book thrown at you bigot) and if you resist the arrest you will be shot.
You can be SHOT in America for exercising your First Amendment right to call a trans person ugly if you do it on your own property, in your own business.
This is Martin Luther King's legacy. This is what anti-discrimination and the Orwellian-ly named "Civil Rights" has accomplished: The establishment of a communist race and sex totalitarianism! In which everyone has a right to your property except for you; in which everyone can control your voice except for you the speaker; in which everyone can demand an association except the person associating; and in which everyone can demand a job except for the person actually competent to hold it.
This is MLK’s legacy. This is the legacy of all centrist moderates who were happy to bargain away their constitutional natural rights to not be racist, this is the legacy of the "greatest generation" who "fought for their country" in Europe and Japan but NOTHING for which it stood at home.
And this is the legacy of the boomers who were willing to trade away EVERYTHING, the greatness of those who came before, the futures of their children, their dignity in the present... Just so long as they never had to be mean. Just so long as they never had to actually have a confrontation or deal with any consequences or hard tradeoffs... As long as they could keep the illusion their parents had built of an eternally happy opportunity-filled conflict-free America going FOR THEM, until they could hit the grave and leave the remenants of their balkanized collapsing debt-ridden empire of incompetence to their children.
The Boomers and America's elites concluded technological and industrial progress... it just happens.
No need to Jealously protect property rights, no need to ruthlessly fire and insult people who fail at their jobs, no need to judge anyone by their appearance, or any of the external signifiers of “the content of their character”.... no need to offend anyone's feelings in the pursuit of greatness, and certainly no need to tolerate the mean ruthlessly efficient disagreeable autistic men who ACTUALLY invent the future and don't give a damn if they make the office girl cry when they curse and swear and demand results.
Greatness was too contrary to niceness... so the boomers and their forebearers carefully excised that part of America.
This is why Lindsay would sooner block Sargon than engage with him. This is why “ClAsSiCaL LiBeRaLs” (Which bears no resemblance to anyone who was part of the racist, sexist, propertarian, anti-government movement that was 19th-century liberalism) will not engage with it...
Because that would involve actually picking fights, actually offending people, and actually alienating wide swathes of institutional and cultural life.
That would involve admitting that freedom and equality are not compatible and that any legal system that guarantees the freedom of all people "Equality before the law" (as if anyone living has ever known it) would result in the grossest and most brutal of inequality because people are not the same and true freedom mercilessly amplifies that.
Lindsay can't admit that. He can't admit he's been wasting all the concerned boomer's time on comforting fairy tales about evil Communist German Jews in the 50s when he should have been attacking the boomers themselves as the authors of their children's wokeness, and letting them know their children’s state-mandated "Non-binary" gender identity is no different than the boomer's state-mandated "color-blind" racial identity.
But hey he’s still perfectly acceptable in polite society. As far as we know He’s NEVER said “Nigger” in anger. Likewise, he’s never called a gay man a faggot, a woman a cunt, a Jew a kike, a Transwoman a man. As far as we know he’s never expressed hatred for his fellow man, harbors no prejudice in his heart, no deep-seat preference for his own kind (however he conceives his kind). As far as we know he’s never thrown a fist in anger, raised his voice in hatred, denounced another as less than human (if only in a momentary rage), nor, as far as we can tell, has he ever frightened or disturbed a child, woman, or sensitive man, never greatly shocked the elderly or mentally unwell, or those who may have heart conditions, never lost his composure in a fit of passion, nor made enemies in a pique of rage.
He is a perfectly inoffensive and respectable man, in tune with America in the 21st century… The very image of what Americans just 10-30 years ago might hope a public intellectual to be, saying more or less the things which they might, even then, have hoped he’d say.
Now be honest with yourself… does that make you respect him more? Or less?
If a public intellectual says nothing offensive, shocking, challenging, or even surprising…Then for what did they use their intellect?
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Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak
And the boomers' beloved Home Owners Associations have changed from exclusionary buttresses of the traditional social order to just another crooked make-work bureaucracy that takes your money and threatens you for not mowing your lawn.
I think one could intellectualify and dress-up an anti-anti-discrimination-law post to make it Fit for Discussion