Irrational Hatred Makes One Irrational

This is about Rod Dreher again, but it's really about, oh, a third of the country.

A third of the country has been convinced, by talk radio, by Fox News, by various other propaganda sources, that immigrants, black people, trans people, and "leftists" (as if we even had any actual leftists in this country), are criminals, fanatics, monsters who are bent on destroying them -- them, personally -- and their children, and their jobs, and everything good about their lives.

Nothing could be further from the truth. As the closest thing to a leftist most of these cowering dupes will ever meet, I can tell you I spent about ten seconds a week thinking about them -- usually just after I have checked Rod Dreher's page in a fit of boredom.

But Rod, like the rest of them, is constantly encouraged in his quivering terror by steady infusions of lies and propaganda. Here, he has been fed a pack of lies by (as he puts it) a "former" "Soviet-bloc" scientist.

This "scientist" agrees with Rod that American liberals are just like Nazis. Also, he agrees with the disinformation -- the propaganda -- being pushed by Murdoch-owned newspapers, claiming that the fires in Australia aren't, in fact, caused by Global Warming, but by the ignorant laws passed by Leftists.

So what does it have to do with the Australia fires, you ask?

Contrary to the popular belief that a fraction of a degree temperature increase set the place ablaze, there is another explanation. For millennia the Aborigines have been practicing ritual bush burning. A while ago the practice was banned because of ecology concerns, environmental protection; to save some odd shrew from being upset. Dead wood accumulated. The whole place burned to the ground. (you can google for it.

We did the same thing to the culture. We banned ritual control burns. We allowed dead wood to accumulate. A single spark and the whole place will be ablaze. We will burn.

First off, his claim is wrong. That's not what caused the fires in Australia, despite what Fox-News outlets claim. Failing to rake leaves in the forests of California is not what has caused the huge fires there, either. Global climate change, by drying out the landscape, is causing these fires.

Second, pay attention to the conclusion this "scientist" draws. The culture, he says, has banned "ritual control burns," allowing "dead wood" to accumulate. And now we will burn?

What do you suppose he means by that, this "scientist"?

And why do you suppose Rod gave him a national platform to voice such an appalling point of view?

This is the real danger of ignorance combined with a steady infusion of propaganda. That such people don't understand, or willfully refuse to understand, the cause and effect of every day events, is a problem, though not a huge one, since most of them have no real influence in the world.

No, the big problem is that ideas such as this one -- that people not like them are "dead wood" to be "ritually burned" in order to protect "us" -- gain currency among the willfully ignorant who have gorged on lies and propaganda.

And that is a real danger.

Losing Reality

It's been a while since I checked in on Rod Dreher. Frankly, he just got too bizarre to be interesting.

But I dropped by this morning, and...wow.

You'll be glad to know that trans people are a poison in our cultural groundwater.

Also that Rod is still racist, even though he's stopped screeching about how "black culture" is destroying America in favor of screeching about how Trans people (World War T, he calls this) are destroying America.

More racism here. (Multiple studies have shown that black children are far more likely to be punished and punished harshly for the same behaviors that white children are indulged in. Rod's claim that black kids are punished more often because they behave worse is simply not the case.)

And of course white men are the real victims.

So yeah, I haven't missed anything. He's just sliding further and further into Old Man Yells at Clouds territory.

Of course, that's where his remaining readers -- pretty much all MAGA Americans -- live, so he gets plenty of affirmation for these views. If you want to be really horrified, read his comment section. Horrifying bigotry and horrifying ignorance. And Rod encourages all this, because of course he does.

Obviously, none of this is worth reading, and I don't advise anyone to read it, except that it's useful for knowing exactly how appalling and hateful the "Religious Right" had become. There truly is no bottom to these people.

Why Rod Posts about Scary Trans People

Apparently Ezra Klein interviewed Rod Dreher, which first off, why? Do we really need to give a bigger platform to heaps of ignorant, bigoted nonsense?

But Ezra asked Rod why his blog was so obsessed with LGBT people, especially T people, and Rod wrote yet another lengthy screed "explaining" why.

Because LGBT people (and especially T people) have destroyed America.

I'm providing a link, but I don't encourage clicking on it. Rod's blog-site, The American Conservative, is 90% ads now, many of them pop-up, all of them annoying. So, you know, click at your own risk.

Rod's main point is that by divorcing sexuality away from its "real" purpose, which as his religion tells us is Making Babies, those Evil Liberals opened the door to Transform* America into a place where people can be whatever they want and do whatever they want with their own bodies.

I mean, the horror. As we all know, God meant only rich white cismen to have that sort of privilege.

So now we have kids growing up with two daddies, or with a trans daddy. What will become of us all, et cetera.

I'd spend some time rebutting this, but it is nonsense on its face (if sex was just for making babies, for instance, we'd only have sex, or want to have sex, when we wanted a baby -- which, come on) and I have better ways to spend my time.

The real question is why Rod spends 80% of his time screeching about trans people when there are 900 more important issues he could be spending his time on -- the wealth gap, children in concentration camps, white nationalists in our government, the increasing inability of too many Americans to tell a decent source from utter propaganda, student debt -- but of course we know the answer to that one.


*Pun not intended, but I like it

...and Here's Rod!

Rod Dreher is a little late on the screechy bandwagon, but here he is explaining to you why "Easter Worshipers" is persecution of the very worst kind and just more evidence that Christians are the most abused group ever and also liberals are Satan.

I saw a headline today discussing the "Easter Bombings" in Sri Lanka. No doubt that too is more persecution of Good American Christians. I mean, Easter didn't get bombed, amirite?

If you want to know why no one takes the screeching of MAGA Americans seriously, here you are.

Shared Mythos on the Right

For my sins, I read more RW blogs than are probably good for me, and I can attest that the common myths Camestros discusses here are right on.

One of them, the Islamic takeover of Europe, featured on Rod* Dreher's blog just today. And of course, there is the ever popular notion that at universities we do nothing but brainwash students and shriek about gender issues and racism sexism trans people. One blog I visit which makes these claims is run by someone who works at a university, so it's not that this person doesn't know better.

Of course I know why conservative bloggers push these lies and nonsense -- it gets eyes on their pages. Anything for money, I suppose, here in America, where the One True God is Capitalism.






*To be fair, I think Rod Dreher might actually believe these conservative myths. He really is that gullible, after all -- he's always running stories on his blog about how some ghost or the other spoke to someone's dying cousin, or a statue bled ichor that cured some orphan in some mountains somewhere. If he had lived in the Middle Ages, he'd have a house full of One True Crosses and finger bones from Saint Peter.

You Can't Make This Shit Up, Y'all

See, even if I had known it was a lie, I still would have posted it, because it's okay to lie about gay people and other people I don't like.

How else is a good Christian conservative supposed to save this country from the liberals?

I Know, I Know

It's like shooting fish in a barrel, but really, Rod Dreher is just getting more and more hopeless.

(1) Notice how he doesn't even link to the original source (published in that extremely credible venue, The Daily Signal), in which Scott Yenor, apparently a tenured professor of political science, produces such insightful comments as these:

 [Radical feminists] seek to eliminate the different ways boys and girls are socialized, so that they will come to have very similar characters and temperaments.
Second, they seek to cultivate financial and emotional independence of women and children from the family.

Oh, no! Women who are financially independent! Not that! Boys and girls being socialized in equal ways! The horror!

I can't imagine why Dreher wouldn't link to such a credible and reasonable argument.

What does Dreher link to?  Why, this extremely credible venue, The National Review, where we get to hear about Yenor's Dean, who mildly notes that while he doesn't agree with Yenor, he nevertheless supports his academic right to free speech, and these terrible kids today, who have the nerve to use their First Amendment right to talk back to a conservative professor!!

(2) And then he makes his usual point, which is that gay people, liberals, and trans people are going to destroy American, blah blah blah.

Sweet Jesus.

These Kids Today

Rod Dreher writes yet another ridiculous post. This unhealthy obsession with LGBT people is really damaging his ability to reason.

In "Born That Way," Dreher argues that the rising number of young LGBT people means that those people aren't "really" gay. (Apparently it's a fad, or a lie, or a conspiracy by us powerful SJWs.)

The comment section is even more ludicrous than the post --

Not Really Human

Depsite all the tantrums the Far-Right threw about Clinton mentioning that it was deplorable to be a racist and a bigot, the special snowflakes on the Right have no problem declaring that anyone who isn't just like them -- following their religious creed, believing their political theology -- is "not really human."

Here's Rod Dreher, insisting in another wall of text ranting screed that anyone who isn't Christian-like-him isn't "fully human."

For [LGBT people]. one’s full humanity requires being able to express sexual and psychosexual desires, because these things are part of their identity. For traditional Christians, being fully human (in the sense of fulfilling our nature) requires ordering those desires to the ideal God reveals to us in Scripture and in nature. Understand me clearly: I’m not saying that LGBT people are “less than human,” any more than I would say that someone who cheats on his wife is less than human. Rather, I’m saying that all of us realize our full humanity when we live by certain truths embedded within Creation. In this sense, sin can be seen as a failure to be fully human, i.e., to fulfill God’s will for ourselves.

The Hell?

I'm seriously befuddled by the Religious Right these days -- well, I suppose that means most Conservatives in the USA, since the GOP has been eaten alive by the Evangelicals it coaxed into the party in the hope of winning a few elections.

Breaking News: Rod Dreher More Batsh*t Crazy Than Ever

Even his own Commentariat turn on him with this one.

"Obama Springs Transgender Traitor," he shrieks, and spends most of the post in an uncontrollable tantrum over the fact that Chelsea Manning is transgender.

This penis-having traitor suffers because people might not think she is a “real woman”. Think about that. Manning suffers serious psychological problems, and has tried to commit suicide. He should receive medical treatment — but not boobs grown at taxpayer expense on his traitorous breast, and not liberty for breaking his oath under arms.

Oh My God, Tear This Guy Apart

So, you might have heard -- yesterday Obama issued a directive ordering US public schools to allow students to use the bathrooms that match their gender identity.

The Far-Right Conservatives promptly lost their nut.

On my FB page, students I respect, who are intelligent and well-read, good-hearted, but who are conservative Christians, are likewise losing it over this.  Apparently respecting the rights of trans children, well, it's just a step too far.

Ethics, Morals, "Christians"

My kid took the English AP exam yesterday.

"How'd you do?" I asked when she got home.

"Kicked its ass," she said.

I was not at all surprised, obviously.  As the child of not one but two English Ph.Ds, one of us a fiction writer, the other a poet, she's been raised around books and reading, discussions of language and literature, grammar and rhetoric, all her life.

Rod Dreher Gives Himself the Vapors, Yet Again

Oh noes!  Sex Ed in KINDERGARTEN?

The culture is doom-ed!

Yes, Rod, sex education can start in kindergarten.  My kid, when she was in public school, had sex education classes in kindergarten.  I don't know what ridiculous fantasies have your trousers in a wad, but all this means is that once a month or so, the school counselor took them all down to the resource room and they sat in a circle and they talked about Stranger Danger; or on other days about how no one had the right to touch their bodies without permission.

Virtue-Signalling and The Right

So we all remember when the Right seized upon Politically Correct as their favorite excuse and cudgel.

Politically correct, invented as an in-joke by Leftists for those of us who were taking things a bit far (out-Veganing the Vegans, being more holy about using the correct pronouns than even the most Tumblr of the Tumblrites), was taken up by the Far-Right as an excuse to be as rude as they liked, under the guise of not being (I guess) a Leftist.

America: Where You Can Be Free....as Long as You're Like US!

So as many of you know, the new battle against LGBT people from the Far-Right Conservatives is being waged in the bathrooms.

This is nothing new.

I Suppose I Shouldn't Be Surprised

It is their culture, after all.

Over here at Rod Dreher's blog, he notes the utter disaster that Jindal has left behind him in my home state of Louisiana. The state is looking at a shortfall of over two billion dollars.  This is the worst economic crisis in its history -- at a time when most other states in the union are seeing their economic outlook improve.

Or, I should say, states that had the good sense not to elect GOP governors and Tea-Party legislators are seeing things improve.  States like Kansas, Arkansas, Idaho, and yes, Louisiana all have state governments filled those who adhere to policies endorsed by Ayn Rand and Reagan -- that government solutions don't work and can't work (and if they did work, they'd be evil); that the best way to govern is to get out of the way.

But Here in Arkansas, We've Got Poor White People

AKA the "Where's my privilege, huh? HUH?" argument.

AKA as the argument that makes me roll my eyes and sigh.

Not because it's a good argument. But, like every argument trotted out by a freshman or a libertarian or a toddler, it's one of those arguments that is difficult to refute not because it's a good argument -- it's a terrible argument* -- but because to refute it, you practically have to re-educate the person in question from the ground up.

It's not an argument that can be refuted with sound-bites, in other words.  And in general, people making this argument are only going to used to arguments made in sound-bites and bumper stickers.

So, you know, I'm already discouraged.


Part I: "What are you even talking about, delagar?"

More than once this semester, I've had a student, in class or in person, argue with me that white males are the ones who face real discrimination these days; or that white people in general are the ones facing real discrimination in our current economy.

Protests at the Universities: What's Up, Why They're Righteous

Over the past week or so, two protests at two very different universities have been stirring up a lot of ruckus, mostly on the Conservative blogs, but also on the mainstream media.

One protest is at Yale; the other, at the University of Missouri.

The Conservative blogs -- and I know, big shock here -- have been represented these protests as either "whiny, spoiled entitled rich students who need a dose of the real world" (Yale), or "SJWs out for blood" (UM).

Rod Dreher -- again, no shock here -- has gotten even more hysterical than usual. (It's the French Revolution, y'all!) I think that boy needs to get some help, and soon.

As Much as I Hate to Keep Attacking Rod Dreher....

So you've all heard of Ben Fields and how he assaulted that black child.

You know all the circumstances.  How the girl is a recent orphan.  How the entire contretemps started over the girl getting out her phone in class, and then refusing to surrender the phone. (I'll admit I have some sympathy here -- I know how essential my kid's phone is to her mental well-being, and no, I do not exaggerate, not even one tiny bit. She, too, would probably risk arrest rather than give up her phone, and she has two living parents.)