A Few Desultory Thoughts

"If you’re voting for Biden over Trump because you’re tired of having a president who’s a septuagenarian with an outdated frame of reference just blurting out whatever pops into his head, regardless of whether it has any connection to reality . . . I have some bad news for you." Jim Geraghty's Morning Jolt
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The Supreme Court has ruled that half of Oklahoma belongs to Native Americans. I read that the word Oklahoma actually means "Red People." Uh, oh.

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Will Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway and Flannery O'Connor be next on the PC chopping block? All three authors used the forbidden N-word in their novels, so we can soon expect calls from the progressive Committees for Public Decency to demand that their books be purged from all libraries, their statues taken down and their names forever shrouded in guilt and shame.

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Black lives Matter and the left in general are eager to defund the police, which is ironic since  Marxist nations, which is what both BLM and the left yearn to establish, often wind up as police states.

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The AP and other progressive media outlets have decided when writing on racial matters to capitalize Black but not white. How this will help to bring people together in unity and harmony is hard to figure, but maybe progressives don't much care about unity and harmony. The reasoning behind this decision is, to put it kindly, awful. 

David Marcus at The Federalist writes about why the AP thought this change was appropriate. He writes:

The AP says, “Most notably, people who are Black have strong historical and cultural commonalities, even if they are from different parts of the world.” This is absolutely bizarre. It suggests that people with black skin in Nigeria, the Caribbean, and the United States somehow have more in common culturally than people from Ireland, Poland, and the United States. Of course, this assertion is not backed up with any real evidence because there is none. 

Not only is this assertion laughable on its face, but it is also remarkably condescending to the many unique cultures of the world created by black people. For some reason, the AP thinks Irish and Italian culture stand alone, distinct enough to mean that the Irish and the Italians are not really part of a larger cultural group. But for some other reason, Jamaican and Ghanaian cultures are not distinct enough to warrant the same treatment, they just get lumped together as black. 

In fact, the AP kind of gives this game away later in the guidance when it writes, “capitalizing the term white, as is done by white supremacists, risks subtly conveying legitimacy to such beliefs.” Clearly, it is insane to give white supremacists a veto on how we use language, but it also basically negates the cultural argument made above, since if that argument were true, they would not need to resort to this one.

This distinction between how we're supposed to write racial descriptors is simply one more wedge progressives are using to drive us further apart rather than bringing us closer together. The more we stress our differences rather than our commonalities, the more we treat one race differently from how we treat another, the more we promote an us vs. them mentality and the more resentment and hostility we engender between the races.

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Meanwhile, over at Mind Matters there's an interesting piece which asks the question, "Do animals grieve?" The article is based on a piece at Sapiens by anthropologist Barbara J. King, author of How Animals Grieve (2014). She offers a compelling argument in support of the belief that animals do in fact grieve and love, and that these emotions are not unique to humans. 

The difference, though, is that human grief is based on an understanding of what death means. Death, the cessation of bodily existence, is an abstraction that animals don't grasp, or at least there's little evidence that they do.