Mach
02-20-2019, 04:31 PM
The Strange Paradoxes of Our Age
By Victor Davis Hanson
From race, to environmentalism, to wealth, the gulf between ideological rhetoric and reality has rarely been wider.
Modern prophets often say one thing and do another. Worse, they often advocate in the abstract as a way of justifying their doing the opposite in the concrete.
The result is that contemporary culture abounds with the inexplicable — mostly because modern progressivism makes all sorts of race, class, and gender exceptions for politically incorrect felonies, an appeasement that ensures an absence of deterrence and thus even more transgressions.
Paradox No. 1: Merchants of Hate. We are told that white, racist young men are preying on people of color, obsessed with skin color (and gender), and emancipated by Donald Trump’s Klan-like MAGA army. In truth, the purveyors of such theories are themselves merchants of hate, who stereotype and demonize on the basis of skin color. And they do so, largely for anticipated career advantages, on the principle that supposed victims of white bigots can translate such ill treatment into publicity and, with it, attention and career enhancement. How did this epidemic of hate happen in 2019 America?
Answer: a) There are not enough racists left to fuel the current insatiable appetite of the anti-racism industry. So both victimizers and victims have to be invented — as we see with the Duke lacrosse lynching, the Virginia fraternity hoax, the Covington-kids invention, and the recent Jussie Smollett fraud. b) There are few punishments for fraud, but lots of rewards for being victimized, and so deterrence is lost and the merchants of hate assume they are free to invent what they please. c) Anything useful to destroy the presidency of Donald Trump is seen as a moral act, whether equating the Covington MAGA-hatted teenagers as veritable Klansmen or fitting out Smollett’s hired thugs with lynch rope and red hats.
Paradox No. 2: Green Filth. Ecology and environmentalism are supposedly efforts to prevent the natural world around from being spoiled by man and his modern-day lifestyle. Nowhere is green power stronger than in urban California. And yet nowhere are major cities (such as San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco) dirtier, more dangerous, and more festering as a result of human indifference — or public policy.
Medieval plagues such as typhus and tuberculosis ravage street people in California cities, so much so that Los Angeles City Hall had to be deloused to ensure that it did suffer the flea-borne epidemics akin to those of Constantinople in the sixth century a.d. Feces, trash, urine, discarded needles, and rotting food scraps stain downtown streets; primeval carriers of disease such as rats and scavenging birds feast and defecate among the flotsam and jetsam.
Why the progressive tolerance for such environmental desecration in the age of the Green New Deal? Why would it be felonious to defecate on a Yosemite trail or leave a used hypo at a river bank in Yellowstone, while it’s condoned on Market Street in San Francisco where the potential for human injury is far greater?
Answer: a) Perhaps the primeval stink and disease are seen as organic and are therefore not a dreaded cause of global warming. b) Wealthy, urban people can navigate around the homeless with private security and chauffeured transportations, and by doing business away from hoi polloi. c) The ecological assault is the work of purported victims, not rich white males — a fact known to the homeless who know very well that they are exempt from the law that applies to the middle classes. d) Cleaning up the cities, ensuring modern hygiene, and dealing with the homeless would require lawmakers to make conservative and traditional choices and judgments about human nature — taboo in our relativist society.
CONT.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/strange-paradoxes-race-environmentalism-immigration-gulf-between-rhetoric-and-reality/#
By Victor Davis Hanson
From race, to environmentalism, to wealth, the gulf between ideological rhetoric and reality has rarely been wider.
Modern prophets often say one thing and do another. Worse, they often advocate in the abstract as a way of justifying their doing the opposite in the concrete.
The result is that contemporary culture abounds with the inexplicable — mostly because modern progressivism makes all sorts of race, class, and gender exceptions for politically incorrect felonies, an appeasement that ensures an absence of deterrence and thus even more transgressions.
Paradox No. 1: Merchants of Hate. We are told that white, racist young men are preying on people of color, obsessed with skin color (and gender), and emancipated by Donald Trump’s Klan-like MAGA army. In truth, the purveyors of such theories are themselves merchants of hate, who stereotype and demonize on the basis of skin color. And they do so, largely for anticipated career advantages, on the principle that supposed victims of white bigots can translate such ill treatment into publicity and, with it, attention and career enhancement. How did this epidemic of hate happen in 2019 America?
Answer: a) There are not enough racists left to fuel the current insatiable appetite of the anti-racism industry. So both victimizers and victims have to be invented — as we see with the Duke lacrosse lynching, the Virginia fraternity hoax, the Covington-kids invention, and the recent Jussie Smollett fraud. b) There are few punishments for fraud, but lots of rewards for being victimized, and so deterrence is lost and the merchants of hate assume they are free to invent what they please. c) Anything useful to destroy the presidency of Donald Trump is seen as a moral act, whether equating the Covington MAGA-hatted teenagers as veritable Klansmen or fitting out Smollett’s hired thugs with lynch rope and red hats.
Paradox No. 2: Green Filth. Ecology and environmentalism are supposedly efforts to prevent the natural world around from being spoiled by man and his modern-day lifestyle. Nowhere is green power stronger than in urban California. And yet nowhere are major cities (such as San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco) dirtier, more dangerous, and more festering as a result of human indifference — or public policy.
Medieval plagues such as typhus and tuberculosis ravage street people in California cities, so much so that Los Angeles City Hall had to be deloused to ensure that it did suffer the flea-borne epidemics akin to those of Constantinople in the sixth century a.d. Feces, trash, urine, discarded needles, and rotting food scraps stain downtown streets; primeval carriers of disease such as rats and scavenging birds feast and defecate among the flotsam and jetsam.
Why the progressive tolerance for such environmental desecration in the age of the Green New Deal? Why would it be felonious to defecate on a Yosemite trail or leave a used hypo at a river bank in Yellowstone, while it’s condoned on Market Street in San Francisco where the potential for human injury is far greater?
Answer: a) Perhaps the primeval stink and disease are seen as organic and are therefore not a dreaded cause of global warming. b) Wealthy, urban people can navigate around the homeless with private security and chauffeured transportations, and by doing business away from hoi polloi. c) The ecological assault is the work of purported victims, not rich white males — a fact known to the homeless who know very well that they are exempt from the law that applies to the middle classes. d) Cleaning up the cities, ensuring modern hygiene, and dealing with the homeless would require lawmakers to make conservative and traditional choices and judgments about human nature — taboo in our relativist society.
CONT.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/strange-paradoxes-race-environmentalism-immigration-gulf-between-rhetoric-and-reality/#