What is the problem? Why is downtown San Francisco a homeless encampment? And why is Pittsburgh such a mess as reported to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette?
"In all my years of living in and visiting Pittsburgh, I have never seen the Downtown look so bad. Empty, dirty, and unsafe. Personally, I experienced an attempted homicide in the lobby of my hotel on Forbes Avenue and was accosted twice walking to my office in Gateway Center,"
What the heck?
Even in dark blue Oregon they have had enough with their drug de-criminalization Measure 110.
“I do think there are a lot of people like me, left of center, who are realizing it was a mistake,” said Lisa Schroeder, a downtown Portland restaurant owner who voted for Measure 110. “If I could turn back time and repeal Measure 110 tomorrow, I would do it.”
I know. Bless her heart.
Meanwhile the gods of the Great Reset at the WEF are having their annual meeting in China. Simon O’Connell spoke to the assembled demi-gods on Mt. Olympus:
In a talk entitled “Why cooperation is the key for the energy transition,” he informed his audience that “[t]o come up with the right kind of solutions we need the right kind of partnerships, including NGOs, development actors, civil society organizations. But it is vitally important to also have the private sector and governments at all sorts of institutional levels.”
I was disappointed in his remarks. There is nothing about “tackling” the “energy transition,” and that is shocking. Every partnership, NGO, development actor, civil society organization knows that you never get anything done unless you “tackle” it.
I was watching the latest Tucker Carlson episode, with RFK Jr. He’d been down to the border and viewed busloads of illegal immigrants being sent across the border by the cartels. Very few are from Latin America; they have been flown to Mexico City from all over the world and then flown up to Calexico and then into buses: 7 million since the beginning of the Biden administration. A bargain for the cartels at $10,000 per immigrant, you might say. Then DHS flies them all over the US and they have to appear for an interview in seven years. But why, asked Tucker? Maybe because it’s the opposite of what Trump was doing, replied RFK Jr.
You wonder: what do our Democratic friends think they are doing? I mean, if you care about the “oppressed people” surely you don’t just let them fester in a drug-infested hell-hole or force them to compete in the job market with illegals? I mean, surely you whack all the “white oppressor” racists to the wall, dust your mostly peaceful hands off, and then go to help the “oppressed” ones.
But, in fact, where the homeless are concerned, what happen is lots of jobs for clean-up crews, for social workers and mental health professionals and activists. In other words, we whack the enemy white racists — that’s Job One. Then we gift our government employees and social service agencies — that’s Job Two. But somehow actually helping the homeless get out of their hell-hole is clearly Job Three.
Obviously that is a “tell,” but what?
Then there is policing. Here, Job One seems to be saving the “oppressed people” from police brutality and reducing incarceration. I suppose the idea is that our rulers are fighting the oppression and injustice and domination of the “white oppressors.” But, in fact, the result is that they turn inner cities into violent, crime infested hellholes for all the “oppressed people” who are not gang-adjacent young men. And most obviously, you are not protecting the “oppressed people” women.
Of course, you know what I am going to say. I say that if you are an activist then you believe that the way to Fundamental Transformation is through activists fighting injustice. And I don’t think that our activist friends think beyond that. The only thing that exists for them is political and, as we know, the political is the distinction between friend and enemy.
Then there are the ordinary educated class that, let us say, is educated to recite the Narrative. Let’s put Lisa Schroeder, downtown Portland restaurant owner, in that category. She trusts the word from on high, in the media, from the education system. I mean, they are the experts; they know. Then there are the bureaucrats and administrators, and the worse the better, as far as the security of their careers in government administration are concerned.
Finally, at the bottom are the people that are supposedly the beneficiaries of the Fundamental Transformation. Do you mind if I say that the record is 0 for 100 on the victim front, whether we are talking about the workers now dying of despair, the you-go-girl and “safety” feminists less happy than the Fifties suburban housewives, the blacks whose family has been decimated by gubmint handouts. Next up, we will find that the lives of our LGBT friends have been blasted to hell. But I suspect that the LGBT hellhole will not really become blindingly obvious for another generation.
I say that the solution to this disaster is rather simple. It is to reduce the political sector — government — to the basics. And really, apart from the enemies on the other side of the border between Russia and Ukraine the only enemies out there today are young gang-bangers that are usually the sons of single women.
And so we revive the other distinctions in human society, and dig them out from the friend / enemy distinction of the political.
There are the other distinctions from Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt: the aesthetic distinction between beautiful and ugly; the religious distinction between good and evil and the economic distinction between useful and useless, and the legal between legal and illegal.
Then there are a couple that I have come up with. There is the cultural, which I define for men as the distinction between OK and not OK, and for women as the distinction between nice and not-nice. Do you see that the cultural is one step in urgency below the religious and two steps below the political. We disapprove of people that don’t observe cultural norms; we reject people as evil that don’t observe religious norms. And we incarcerate or kill people that we classify as the enemy.
When you think about it in these terms, it seems to me that this gradation of social relations and distinctions is pure genius. How did we humans come up with this?
Well, we know. We humans developed all these distinctions because they work. We have figured out that a human society needs all these different distinctions. Wait! We blundered around trying this and that, and most of the things we tried didn’t work. But some things did work, and if you look around you you will notice them. They are amazing.
And guess what, all you devoted political activists! Collapsing human social relations into the political doesn’t work. If you are not sure, just ask the 100 million that died, because communism.
But how do we get off the road to political activist hell and start on the road to recovery?
I will tell you. It will be women that do it. Why? Because everything that men do is nothing but war and fighting and the domestication of war into careers and sports. Indeed, I suggest that careers and sports are an amazing human adaption to keep men off the battlefield and out of harms way as much as possible. But the culture of women captures everything else that we humans do, from babymaking to homemaking and keeping the other women in the community on the straight and narrow through universal women’s social practices like gift-giving and helping and judging.
How will this happen? I have no idea.
But I Have a Dream, that one day… women will lead us out of the hell of politics-with-everything into the heaven of ordinary human socialization.