The Weekend "Wokes": Hobbyist "Revolutionaries" Having Their Comfortable Fun
Absolutely rollicking read as the Brits might say, but it's in an Aussie paper and it's by the fabulous Lionel Shriver.
Headline: "Wildly, madly, the West is destroying itself." It's a long piece but half of it takes on "the Marxist Trojan horse of BLM zealotry," and notes, "We may be tempting an implosion."
The widespread COVID-19 lockdowns and the increasingly venomous Black Lives Matter movement are both destabilising phenomena instigated by people suffering from a perilous complacency. A surfeit of Western security, with no major wars and nearly uninterrupted prosperity for 75 years, has created an ahistorical under-appreciation for the fragility of order. Perhaps the hyper-racialising of the West in the second half of this year will prove a temporary mania, at the end of which we'll have fairer, more sensitive societies. But somehow I doubt it.We don't commonly characterise folks who want to altogether overturn the way a country works "systemically" as complacent. But I would argue that most of this year's abundantly white, middle-class protesters embody the epitome of complacency. These are not people who expect to make any personal sacrifice to make the world a better place. To the contrary, by positioning themselves as "allies" on "the right side of history", they expect to reap rewards, and to jettison older, purportedly prejudiced generations even more rapidly than younger generations do as a matter of course. BLM bandwagoners assume they can change everything while everything they fancy stays the same.
Weekend revolutionaries imagine they can bring an end to capitalism and still keep all the fruits of capitalism that they take for granted. They think they can install a neo-Marxist equality of outcome, boot out all the wicked old white guys like Tim Cook, and keep their iPhones, replete with regular OS updates. They imagine they can pack faculties and student bodies with minorities regardless of qualification and "decolonise" the curriculum to rid it of "white knowledge" and still have prospective employers regard their degrees from Harvard as meaningful commendations. They want to undermine the means by which their parents earn a living yet still expect to crash back home when they're low on cash, where they can always raid the refrigerator when feeling peckish. Woke white activists want to demonise "whiteness" as the sole source of all evil, while mysteriously believing this does not entail demonising themselves. Apparently the joyful embrace of one's own "fragility" grants the right to hector others while triggering a racial opt-out clause.
The same brand of white activist helped draft "open letters" to Princeton and Stanford, the Poetry Foundation, and a beleaguered liberal bookstore in Denver, to name a few. The signatories reliably demanded aggressive, instantaneous affirmative action, often well in excess of regional or national demographic proportions. Yet if governments, schools and businesses embrace "anti-racism" as their sole prime directive, as opposed to producing a saleable product or performing a valuable service, competency is bound to decay at what was once these entities' driving purpose: to provide for the common defence, to educate students for viable careers, to manufacture products that consumers want to buy. Should most Western institutions and corporations devote their principal energies to "anti-racism", China will clean up. As a result, "equality" zealots will level the playing field by making everybody poor. Forgive me for stating the self-evident, but advocates of wealth redistribution need wealth to redistribute.
Rioters are dependent on a functional society or they have nothing to disrupt. Hoodlums still assume that if they get thumped with a truncheon a well funded and skilfully staffed hospital will patch them up. Looters rely on a generous supply of operational businesses whose premises can be ransacked and which are chock-full of the fruits of capitalism like high-end trainers. Eager to acquire more free stuff, looters blithely expect these businesses to replace their windows and restock, the better to get ransacked again.
As with cake, this northern summer's activists wanted to have their police and defund them, too. We can take it as a given that none of these often well-off white protesters have any desire to live in truly lawless cities -- where their phones are snatched on the street and their homes are repeatedly burgled. Where women are raped with impunity and petty grudges are settled with violent assault. Where everyone lives in fear of arbitrary injury or even death because this is a city without legal recourse. By the time this summer's failed utopian project nicknamed CHOP in Seattle had lived with no police presence for three weeks, four shootings had occurred within the zone's mere six blocks, one of them fatal. With chastened, demoralised police forces embracing passivity as a means of self-protection, murders in Chicago, Minneapolis and New York have been soaring. Yet according to a core tenet of the BLM-inspired American medical students in White Coats for Black Lives, "Policing is incompatible with health." You've got to be kidding me. Nothing is less healthy than being dead.
Read the whole thing, as Glenn Reynolds would say.
Free link:
https://www.ramsaycentre.org/news-and-media/announcements/wildly-madly-the-west-is-destroying-itself/
Ken McE at October 12, 2020 5:18 AM
Better Link:
https://www.ramsaycentre.org/news-and-media/announcements/wildly-madly-the-west-is-destroying-itself/
Author will be doing a lecture on Wednesday the 14th.
Ken McE at October 12, 2020 5:28 AM
He wrote exactly what I've been thinking. At least in Russia in 1917 the communists had a point because it was a feudal society with the serfs being just one step above slavery. Claiming the US is evil is just crazy town--but I think I can explain their logic. In the absence of religious morality, they have turned to social justice as a moral framework. In this frame, everything is about exploitation. The only way to make money is to exploit (they never see that the relationship goes both ways--you get paid for your labor). This makes every business evil and doubly so because they see racism everywhere. Thus capitalism must be destroyed. Given their black-and-white view of things, they cannot see that people can be basicly good but flawed too. Nope. You are either with the woke or must be destroyed. This is what happened in the Terror in France and in Russia and China when millions died. This is where their logic leads. They simply will not see that in communist societies the elite are still rich and the poor really are exploited. Want to start a business or be a consultant in 1970 russia? Sorry, we are a collective.
cc at October 12, 2020 8:25 AM
This.
Collectivist societies have not, in the past, been noted for their consumer-level product innovation, preferring to put government resources into prestige fields.
And the collectivist society that BLM/Antifa wants to implement is going to be even worse, as it insists on equality of outcome for graduates in STEM fields vital to the development of future innovations in both theoretical and applied research.
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Barely even a step. Russian peasants were tied to the land. They could not leave it and were sold with it when the owner sold the land. Peter I's reforms had ended outright slavery, Peter III had freed the serfs belonging to the Orthodox Church, and Catherine's reforms enabled the serfs to file a complaint if the landowner did not live up to his part of the landowner-serf bargain, seemingly giving serfs legal protection and status in the Russian bureaucracy.
A Russian landowner could sentence his serfs to hard labor or send them to Siberia. The only thing a landowner could not do to his serfs was kill them; they belonged to the state. A landowner could send them away to be educated in a trade or to work at a business that paid wages - enabling him to "sell" his serfs to those who could not legally own them.
This is probably one of the best explanations I've seen in a while about what's happening to US (and Western) society.
Conan the Grammarian at October 12, 2020 10:00 AM
“A Russian landowner could sentence his serfs to hard labor or send them to Siberia. The only thing a landowner could not do to his serfs was kill them; they belonged to the state. A landowner could send them away to be educated in a trade or to work at a business that paid wages - enabling him to "sell" his serfs to those who could not legally own them.”
I’ve always found it interesting that Russian and Chinese communism was nothing more than feudalism with a different set of people in charge, mouthing different platitudes.
They even banish the trouble makers to the same place,
Isab at October 12, 2020 10:06 AM
It also disturbs me that our common references used to be Biblical, mythological, and even canonical, but are now almost solely Harry Potter.
In only a few years, we could be living in a society in which references to Shakespeare, the Bible, or Greco-Roman mythology will sail over the heads of the audience, if they're made at all.
In the absence of religion or a classical education, Millennials and Gen-Zers have embraced a shallow piece of YA fiction as a guide to morality and life.
I can't wait for the first presidential campaign in which a candidate refers to himself as "a total Hufflepuff." /sarcasm
Conan the Grammarian at October 12, 2020 10:28 AM
Common references require a common education or experience. Once the schools got rid of Shakespeare and the Bible of course references to them went away. Just be glad that the pop culture commonality is Harry Potter, you could be getting Brittney Spears references instead.
Ben at October 12, 2020 3:14 PM
> now almost solely Harry Potter.
Are you declaring the Matrix era concluded? Including the Inception-types and their Zimmer-wannabe derivative orchestral scores, and their bogus undergrad metaphysics? All that stuff had to end sometime, right?
Was it Game of Thrones that made a couple of generations of Americans smirk "Winter is coming!!" for the past few years? Because that shit got old real fast as well. Anyway, please post a comment when you see a new trend worthy of belittling. The Harry Potter lady is already cancelled, fer cryinoutloud.
I keep waiting for TV & film to die the kind of death where these tropes aren't reinvented, because people will have moved on to better sources of stimulation.
Having the global population locked into their homes without the engagement of productive working lives is probably not going to bring that about.
Crid at October 12, 2020 3:48 PM
I just made a Harry Potter reference in the other thread... I mean a car in a tree?! C'mon!!!!
NicoleK at October 13, 2020 6:08 AM
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