Fisking That Infamous White Culture Infographic, END!

 Continued from here. (Or you can start at the beginning.)

Communication:

• The "King's English" rules

Back in the 18th century, the language of international diplomacy was French. Anyone who wanted to represent his country in the courts of Europe had to conduct his business in that language regardless of his own native tongue. Granted, this was a way that France asserted its dominance as a colonial power -- but there's no denying that the existence of a lingua franca increased efficiency in communication between foreign powers.

The same is true of the "King's English" in the United States. That there is a commonly accepted grammar in which we conduct cross-subgroup communication allows us to understand each other more easily. This doesn't mean, of course, that we should denigrate local dialects as somehow inferior or indicative of a lesser intelligence. But if we jettison any standardization in our academic/public writing, the result will likely be frustrating and confusing for all participants in our discourse.

(Notice, reader, that the people who created this infographic did in fact use the "King's English" to convey their nonsense ideas. If the "King's English" is so oppressive and has no practical use whatsoever, then why didn't these folks write this in AAVE or some other woke-favored dialect instead? Yeah: don't hold your breath waiting for a straight answer.)

The hidden "issue" this bullet addresses is code-switching. Code-switching refers to the fact that Americans who speak non-standard dialects must learn and use the aforementioned "King's English" in order to participate in wider society. These activists erroneously believe that code-switching is something only speakers of AAVE have to do -- that the code-switching expectation therefore uniquely oppresses black people. But of course, white people who speak deep Southern or Appalachian dialects also discover they must code-switch to be taken seriously. My AP US History teacher back in nineteen-mumble-mumble, for example, spoke the "King's English" while at the lectern -- but, he told us, every time he went back home to rural West Virginia, the way he spoke radically changed. "Here, I'm Mike. Back home, I'm Maaaahk."

No: the "King's English" thing is not racism. It might be classism. But it might also be a necessary evil in a complex, pluralistic society.

• Written tradition

Well, yeah? Western culture has had writing for thousands of years, so we're naturally going to have a written tradition. I think that's true of every society that has ever developed writing, white or no.

This bullet, of course, comes from the activists' conviction that oral tradition has been unfairly ignored in favor of documentary proof. The problem, though, is that - at least as far as I know - they have yet to present a case in which the conclusions of an oral tradition were more reliable than those of our written one. I do know of cases in which oral tradition has aided our understanding of more tangible evidence -- which is why it shouldn't be completely dismissed out of hand. But I suspect the reason why these people champion oral tradition and decry the written is that the former is far more protean than words on parchment -- which suits their history-erasing agenda most beautifully.

Writing is a technology like other technology. Just as gas-powered vehicles essentially superseded horse-drawn carriages, writing superseded the oral wherever it appeared. This is not a sign of some nefarious racist conspiracy; it simply happened because the peoples who adopted writing took note of its numerous advantages.

Quick question: are we now to cancel to cancel Sequoyah because he invented a written language for the Cherokee Nation? Or should we, in fact, recognize the truth? Sequoyah was a Native American patriot who thought "talking leaves" would actually help his people and advance their interests. He was no more a "white supremacist" than the Chinese who invented kanji -- or the Korean emperor who invented the hangul alphabet.

• Avoid conflict, intimacy
• Don't show emotion
• Don't discuss personal life

But wait: wasn't extroversion also a sign of "white supremacy"? Like I suggested in the previous post, these people are so stupid, they don't even realize when they're straight-up contradicting themselves. It would be hilarious if they weren't so powerful and so unbelievably threatening.

• Be polite

Yep. There it is. The mask is off. These radical leftists want the freedom to bully others without being called on it. But of course, being "polite" is not the same as being a pushover. You can be very firm in defending your rights and your beliefs without resorting to online or street harassment. Bringing about a more just world does not require you hound people in restaurants and intimidate them into raising black power fists. It does not require that you dog-pile people on Twitter, call them filthy names, and attempt to drive them to destitution or suicide for saying the "wrong" thing.

Politeness is the glue that holds all societies together. Demanding it is not plot to suppress the "marginalized."

---

Whew! At last, I'm finished with this monster!

So what's the BLATE, as my late father used to write? These activists are uneducated, parochial hooligans who know nothing of world history, human evolution, or normal patterns of technological development but are nonetheless very, very certain that things like time-keeping are white plots to keep the black man down. They are also condescending gits who, fundamentally, think black people are somehow unable to learn math, science, and academic English grammar and therefore need to have separate spaces in which none of that knowledge is required for advancement. And in the end, they are losers who wish to justify their rudeness, their failure, and their laziness by dressing it up in the language of social progress -- while also denying simultaneously that forward-thinking is beneficial and that progress is possible.

They are, in short, evil, brain-dead grifters who should be dismissed with extreme prejudice -- and mockery.

My Epoch Times Contest Entry:

Why I Love America

I love America because of Iron Man.

Wait! Before you put this little missive down and seek out an entry with a little more “gravitas,” allow me to explain. For you see, I do believe, sincerely, that Iron Man is emblematic of what is great about America — and I believe, in this essay, that I can conclusively present my case.

Iron Man - who first appeared in the pages of Marvel’s Tales of Suspense in 1963 at the height of the so-called “Silver Age of Comics” - was the brainchild of four New Yorkers who, essentially, wanted to stretch themselves by creating an “unlikely” superhero whose backstory fell well outside their usual comfort zone. In what way was the Golden Avenger a challenge? Tony Stark – the man inside the Iron Man armor – was a defense contractor, a wealthy industrialist, and a man-about-town who embodied everything Marvel’s generally left-leaning readership was ideologically inclined to despise. “I thought it would be fun,” Stan Lee once remarked, “to take the kind of character that nobody would like, none of our readers would like, and shove him down their throats and make them like him.” And did Lee and his compatriots succeed in this endeavor? Yes! While Iron Man has never been a leader when it comes to comic book sales, he has nonetheless endured for almost sixty years and - thanks mostly to the Marvel Cinematic Universe - has become a globally famous icon.

So how exactly does Iron Man embody what makes America exceptional?

Let us first consider biography. Iron Man’s creators – Lee, Larry Lieber (Lee’s younger brother), Jack Kirby, and Don Heck – all hailed from working class backgrounds. None of these men grew up in fancy digs or attended tony art schools. Each had to climb his way up the societal ladder through hard work, determination, and vision. Yet in America, Lee and the rest ultimately found their paths to prosperity — because in America, even the children of poor urban immigrants can rise.

Consider too what it says about America that a fellow can make it big by selling cheaply printed – and admittedly melodramatic – four-color fantasies. Such a seemingly ridiculous occupation can only exist in a place that is free. To put it another way, the fecundity and ever-present joy behind Iron Man and his fellow Silver Age superheroes have as their necessary antecedent a culture that values open artistic expression and economic liberty. The Soviet Union of the same era could not have created Iron Man — and neither could Maoist China.

But the most important reason why Iron Man perfectly exemplifies America’s singular personality is the broad-mindedness that animated his origin. As noted above, his creators did not settle for crafting heroes with whom they could readily identify. Instead, they deliberately sought to understand the Other — and in the process, they imbued Iron Man with a profound and genuinely moving humanity that transcended his externals. Even a well-to-do “playboy” who seems to have it all, the comics said, can still struggle with chronic illness, alcoholism, and a gnawing, desperate loneliness. Even a well-to-do “playboy,” the comics argued, can have a heart. In the earliest Iron Man comics, no space is given for Marxist diatribes about the evils of the rich; there is only recognition of the universal travails of all mankind. If that’s not a terrific illustration of the American soul, I don’t know what is.

Unfortunately, there is a significant faction in the America of 2020 that wants to do away with the special “American-ness” that made Iron Man great in his original incarnation. This faction wants to limit what we may write and draw, wall off former avenues of advancement and restrict our taste for risk and enterprise, stick us in homogeneous ghettos based on our immutable characteristics, and sow conflict between the supposedly “privileged” and the “marginalized” for the purpose of effectuating revolution. And sadly, this faction now commands the heights of the entertainment industry, including the editorial staff of Marvel Comics. I suppose that’s one unconscious reason why I keep reading and re-reading the old Silver and Bronze Age Iron Man issues; in a way, I suppose I’m trying to remind myself what precisely, as a classical liberal, I value most.

Induced Learning Disabilities (Cross-Post)

This was originally published on my media blog, but it applies to general politics as well.

Critical Theory teaches its adherents how not to understand texts, art, or speech like neurotypical human beings. Under the influence of its doctrines, people lose their God-given ability to discern key non-linguistic features of communication and consequently become learning disabled.

As I've observed in other posts, words and symbols take on meaning from the context in which they're deployed. As I wrote around this time last year:

"Words are not completely comprehensible on their own; they also take on additional - or sometimes even new - significance from the gestalt in which they sit -- much like tofu soaks up the flavors of the other ingredients in an Asian dish.

"Take a sentence like 'I love my mother.' This sentence is composed of four utterly prosaic words -- yet do we really know what it means? Don't we need to hear the inflection with which it was said? Don't we need to see the speaker's body language? Don't we need to know why/where/when/etc. it was said? If this sentence appears in a poem lauding the beauty of Mother Earth, 'mother' likely does not mean our female parent. If this sentence is uttered with a particular stress after a long sigh, most of us effortlessly intuit that it's meant to be ironic."

All of this richness gets lost, however, once the social justice bully gets to work. Suppose, for example, you decide to write a protagonist who starts off with a few unconsciously bigoted notions but eventually learns to cast such mistaken ideas aside. Sounds like great fodder for a redemption arc, no? Nope, sorry: if you attempt to publish this seemingly innocuous, morally upright story, some motivated busybody on Goodreads is going to tear you apart. Why? Because critical social justice impedes one's ability to comprehend how character development works.

Or let's consider works written in other eras. Many historical texts that tackle the subject of race - including those written by black civil rights champions! - use the dreaded n-word. Those of us who aren't ideologically-possessed realize that norms have changed over time and therefore filter such usages out to get to the central point. But the social justice bully doesn't want us to do this. The social justice bully encourages us to get distracted - and upset - by the surface features of a piece of writing without digging deep to parse what's actually being said. That's how they're able to portray pro-black works (like Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird) as somehow anti-black and beyond the pale.

Social justice bullies also deliberately blur the lines between characters and authors, heroes and villains, heroes and anti-heroes, etc. If the bad guy says something racist, then our would-be censors behave as if the author endorses that statement -- even though such a conclusion is patently ridiculous. Assholes say asshole-ish things. That's how writers establish that they're assholes. How else are we creators to delineate villainy?

Social justice bullies, in short, have trained themselves to deliberately misconstrue what writers and artists mean to convey. And that's why they can never be trusted to control the levers our popular culture. Their attempts to warp the things we make need to be beaten back with severity and speed.

2+2 = 4 (cont.)

More essential listening on the post-modern left's ongoing diabolical attempt to undermine our ability to communicate with clarity.

Fisking That Infamous White Culture Infographic, VII

Continued from here. (Or you can start at the beginning.)

Competition:

• Be #1
• Win at all costs
• Winner/loser dichotomy

Not in my white America. In my white America, good sportsmanship and hard work (independent of winning) is highly prized. We don't love Rudy because the guy was the best football player Notre Dame ever had. He wasn't. He only played in one game, and only for a little while. But we're inspired by him anyway because he tried despite a whole host of debilities that would've discouraged other boys with less courage.

In my white America, stories abound of athletes falling back to assist beloved teammates who are struggling, of less able kids being included in games to honor their spirits, of teams being celebrated for stunning efforts despite tragic losses -- basically any kind, cooperative gesture you can name. Then there are the millions of white Americans who loyally follow teams that have never won a championship -- that, in fact, represent the bottom rungs of their respective leagues. (My brother, for example, loves the Seattle Mariners. When have they been #1?) 

We are not all about winning. We like to win, but we definitely don't think it's worth abandoning good morals or community pride. So which white people, exactly, have you been talking to?

• Action orientation
• Master and control nature

Yeah, see, this is coming from the noble savage myth. Many maleducated folks mistakenly believe that human societies lived in harmony with nature prior to the era of European dominance and industrialization. But that's not true. Every human group has attempted to mold nature to its purposes. The fact that these other civilizations didn't have paved roads, smoke stacks, and the like doesn't mean they were not clear-cutting forests, decimating wild animal herds, clothing and sheltering themselves against the elements, etc. 

• Must always "do something" about a situation

So you prefer we sit there passively and just let the chips fall where they may? What are you even talking about?

• Aggressiveness and Extroversion

Where's your evidence that these individual personality traits follow a racialized pattern? As a white introvert who has read many books on the upsides of introversion written by other white introverts, I reject your proposition that extroversion is somehow indelibly linked to my color. On the contrary, the most aggressive, extroverted people I've ever met have all been black.

(And by the way, this bullet completely contradicts another bullet we will discuss in the next post.)

• Decision-Making

Never make decisions, kids. Dithering uselessly is more properly anti-racist.

• Majority rules (when Whites have power)

Excuse me, but we're not the ones proposing that our Electoral College and our Senate be abolished so the urban majority can lord it over the rural minority. That's you.

No: the American system was specifically designed to slow down the passions of the majority so minority interests wouldn't be forgotten. Our Founders had a deep fear of pure democracy because in their studies of history, they'd seen how such a system repeatedly led to widespread abuses of the 49% by the 51%. 

Did the real-world results, historically, always reflect the aforementioned principal intent? No -- but we've been continuously evolving in that direction thanks to the blueprints those dead white men laid. The rights of many minorities are now far more respected, institutionally, than they have ever been.

Majority rules my butt.

Next