One additional connection here. The question then arises why the Woke fight so hard specifically for a strain of Islam that is very much against the very people that make up the Intersectional Blob. There is no sect of religion on Earth that is more homophobic, more anti-woman, or more cisnormative than the radical Islam practiced by Hamas. BUT. The hatred of Western civilization is the tie that binds. For the Woke it’s the capitalist system (if you accept that the underlying philosophical understanding of Intersectionality as Michael outline is Classical Marxism) and for Hamas it’s the Christian foundations.
"Certain feminisms." Thank you for not throwing various women into a globular mass of "The feminists." As a 62-yr-old feminist, I'm fighting all of the above. I go with the assumption that anyone who calls herself a "feminist" should share a belief in self-determination, civil rights and opportunities for all. Just like with various men's rights groups, that is not necessarily how some "feminists" think. As long as I'm alive I will fight the Blob.
Attached to all of this is the admonition that certain people must "sacrifice" in the name of equity or intersectionality. The demographically privileged must give away what they have and do with less in the name of all that is just and right in society.
The aggrieved people taking the lead in whining--or of late in calling for a violent end to their political enemies--are no different than the Red Guards. They are here to accuse the "privileged" and persuade them to voluntarily "sacrifice" for the ambiguous greater good. And those that don't sacrifice voluntarily will be made to do so.
Without a clearly expressed goal and a direct means of achieving the goal, sacrifice (as exhorted by these enlighted people) for an amorphous "good" is wrong. In fact it is the most vile obscenity.
Great piece, Mike. I was there at that NEA convention where Becky Pringle belted out her sermon. I felt embarrassed and a bit harassed by her words and her tone. I keep paying my union dues so I can have a seat at the table and continue to fight the capture of two institutions I struggle to recognize anymore: my education union and public education!
James Lindsay is declarative: the blob is coming for us, our children, our institutions and our systems of governance. The blob did not arise in a vacuum. It is a counterforce. What is it in reaction to? What collective force gave birth and life to the blob? The blob seeks to dismantle that collective force through a “critical” revolution that replaces that system with a new one in order to find repair and establish equity. Might the blob be pointing out a genuinely oppressive and exploitative force, a collective sociopathic force within imperialist Western civilization which allows for the kind of blatant genocide were seeing on the world stage right now in Gaza? This is one iteration of what the blob is reacting to, and if the war escalates, the blob's subversive activism will fracture the Western world in a major way, and importantly, from within. If you think for one second the blob is on the wane, think again. Liken it to an adolescent, just now maturing. It's revolution is only just now warming up, gaining traction. The ideologues have done, and continue to do a very good job of indoctrinating the Western mind. Looks to me like the blob for all its fallibility is pointing out something valuable, a fundamental, perhaps fatal flaw in how our species is progressing collectively. We dismiss its message at our peril. While these ideological movements since Marx have failed spectacularly, at the cost of millions of lives, we would do well to examine what they were opposing. They emerged in reaction to an illness, a collective sociopathy, alive, flourishing and ascending in the modern world. And if we don't face that illness, history will certainly repeat itself, just with a different flavor in America. Lindsay says we're next, and in my looking it's utterly inevitable. The messenger is obviously deranged but let's not dismiss the message. There is a collective sociopathy in Western civilization driving its collapse, and the rainbow blob is the bellwether.
A Ritual to Read to Each Other
If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.
And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
"This reductive, mechanistic conception of culture is Woke’s biggest tell. Underneath all the hypnotic academic jargon lies the same simplistic model, repeated again and again - Cultural norms are “systems” that produce disparate outcomes and we need to reengineer them to produce equity."
I liked very much the use of the word "robot" in the movie TAR, when Lydia Tár calls out her student for his (or they I can't remember the pronoun of choice) closed mindedness. Watching the video above with the robotic pedagogues reminds me of the word "robot" again. Robots need programming, and engineered systems. I wonder if a tendency to feel afraid and not able to deal with uncertainty is feeding the Rainbow Blob.
In his book “Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution,” David Horowitz, a New Left movement founder in the 1960s, refers to a member of the radical Students for a Democratic Society who “once wrote, ‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.’ In other words the cause – whether inner city blacks or women – is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution.” Now apply that to the tussle over man’s impact on the climate and things become much clearer.
One additional connection here. The question then arises why the Woke fight so hard specifically for a strain of Islam that is very much against the very people that make up the Intersectional Blob. There is no sect of religion on Earth that is more homophobic, more anti-woman, or more cisnormative than the radical Islam practiced by Hamas. BUT. The hatred of Western civilization is the tie that binds. For the Woke it’s the capitalist system (if you accept that the underlying philosophical understanding of Intersectionality as Michael outline is Classical Marxism) and for Hamas it’s the Christian foundations.
"Certain feminisms." Thank you for not throwing various women into a globular mass of "The feminists." As a 62-yr-old feminist, I'm fighting all of the above. I go with the assumption that anyone who calls herself a "feminist" should share a belief in self-determination, civil rights and opportunities for all. Just like with various men's rights groups, that is not necessarily how some "feminists" think. As long as I'm alive I will fight the Blob.
Attached to all of this is the admonition that certain people must "sacrifice" in the name of equity or intersectionality. The demographically privileged must give away what they have and do with less in the name of all that is just and right in society.
The aggrieved people taking the lead in whining--or of late in calling for a violent end to their political enemies--are no different than the Red Guards. They are here to accuse the "privileged" and persuade them to voluntarily "sacrifice" for the ambiguous greater good. And those that don't sacrifice voluntarily will be made to do so.
Without a clearly expressed goal and a direct means of achieving the goal, sacrifice (as exhorted by these enlighted people) for an amorphous "good" is wrong. In fact it is the most vile obscenity.
Great piece, Mike. I was there at that NEA convention where Becky Pringle belted out her sermon. I felt embarrassed and a bit harassed by her words and her tone. I keep paying my union dues so I can have a seat at the table and continue to fight the capture of two institutions I struggle to recognize anymore: my education union and public education!
To borrow from “Barbie”, now that we have spoken it, it can lose its power.
Also, major props for this line:
“Like a leotard at a Lizzo concert, the oppressive construct is stretched and contorted to its absolute limit.”
*tasty
James Lindsay is declarative: the blob is coming for us, our children, our institutions and our systems of governance. The blob did not arise in a vacuum. It is a counterforce. What is it in reaction to? What collective force gave birth and life to the blob? The blob seeks to dismantle that collective force through a “critical” revolution that replaces that system with a new one in order to find repair and establish equity. Might the blob be pointing out a genuinely oppressive and exploitative force, a collective sociopathic force within imperialist Western civilization which allows for the kind of blatant genocide were seeing on the world stage right now in Gaza? This is one iteration of what the blob is reacting to, and if the war escalates, the blob's subversive activism will fracture the Western world in a major way, and importantly, from within. If you think for one second the blob is on the wane, think again. Liken it to an adolescent, just now maturing. It's revolution is only just now warming up, gaining traction. The ideologues have done, and continue to do a very good job of indoctrinating the Western mind. Looks to me like the blob for all its fallibility is pointing out something valuable, a fundamental, perhaps fatal flaw in how our species is progressing collectively. We dismiss its message at our peril. While these ideological movements since Marx have failed spectacularly, at the cost of millions of lives, we would do well to examine what they were opposing. They emerged in reaction to an illness, a collective sociopathy, alive, flourishing and ascending in the modern world. And if we don't face that illness, history will certainly repeat itself, just with a different flavor in America. Lindsay says we're next, and in my looking it's utterly inevitable. The messenger is obviously deranged but let's not dismiss the message. There is a collective sociopathy in Western civilization driving its collapse, and the rainbow blob is the bellwether.
A Ritual to Read to Each Other
If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.
And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
-William Stafford
"This reductive, mechanistic conception of culture is Woke’s biggest tell. Underneath all the hypnotic academic jargon lies the same simplistic model, repeated again and again - Cultural norms are “systems” that produce disparate outcomes and we need to reengineer them to produce equity."
I liked very much the use of the word "robot" in the movie TAR, when Lydia Tár calls out her student for his (or they I can't remember the pronoun of choice) closed mindedness. Watching the video above with the robotic pedagogues reminds me of the word "robot" again. Robots need programming, and engineered systems. I wonder if a tendency to feel afraid and not able to deal with uncertainty is feeding the Rainbow Blob.
Say, They Want A Revolution …
I & I Editorial Board
November 2, 2023
https://issuesinsights.com/2023/11/02/say-they-want-a-revolution/
In his book “Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution,” David Horowitz, a New Left movement founder in the 1960s, refers to a member of the radical Students for a Democratic Society who “once wrote, ‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.’ In other words the cause – whether inner city blacks or women – is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution.” Now apply that to the tussle over man’s impact on the climate and things become much clearer.
(Snip)
It is so strange that as ideology takes over, political dogma rises and logic goes out the window.
"The Rainbow Blob." I like it!!! Been looking for a shorthand way of explaining what I've (WE'VE) been seeing. The Rainbow Blob s It!.