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Category: Marxists
Honking
An interesting piece sent from Loyal Reader Bill V arrived in my email. For the first time, it gives a name for the two groups facing off against each other all over the world — the Physicals and the Virtuals. Read it, it’s all good, but this is especially noteworthy:
The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life… Their only relation to productive labor is that of consumers. They have no experience of making anything substantial or enduring. They live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality – “hyperreality,” as it’s been called – as distinguished from the palatable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women. Their belief in “social construction of reality” – the central dogma of postmodernist thought – reflects the experience of living in an artificial environment from which everything that resists human control (unavoidably, everything familiar and reassuring as well) has been rigorously excluded. Control has become their obsession. In their drive to insulate themselves against risk and contingency – against the unpredictable hazards that afflict human life – the thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself.
Hence their hatred of the working classes — the “Physicals”. (By the way, you may recall the predicament of Manhattanites about a decade or so ago, when told they needed to seal off their apartment windows with duct tape against aerial contamination — and learning that these twinks not only didn’t know what duct tape was, they had no idea where to buy it. It was funny back then; it’s a fact of life for them now.)
We are heading for interesting times.
Misguided Rant
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this rant, as I do most that are aimed at government of any race, creed, color or nationality, but Insane Bob seems to have missed the point.
He devotes a great deal of time talking about the U.S. declaring war on Canada, e.g.:
The real danger of a war between our nations is that we both see internal security risks, and our central governments may no longer be absolutely able to bind our respective peoples to peace. Again, infantry and the population infantry is recruited from can be similar. Our unofficial irregular forces could war against Canada, and Canadian unofficial irregular forces could war against America, and it could prove quite messy. From my perspective, if my folks kill off the Canadian government, and Canadians kill off the US jerks, that would be about the nicest possible outcome. Wars are never that convenient for anyone. Better that folks don’t get that agitated.
As I see it, most ordinary Americans — if faced with the choice — would rather go to war against our own government than against Canada, present company included.
And as Mr. Free Market put it to me during a semi-drunken phone call last night: how bad does the Canadian government have to be, to have pissed off the nicest, politest people on the planet?
They’re so nice that SoyBoy Trudeau is highly unlikely to have a Ceaușescu Moment, even though it could be argued that he deserves one:
Our own Gummint lackeys? I’ll get back to you on that. In the meantime:
Clueless
I know that politicians are completely ignorant about everything not political or legal — and even then, they’re not especially bright — but Elizabethan ignorance on everything can only be truly appreciated by acknowledging her academic credentials. [/snark]
Even by her own heritage of ignorance, however, Elizabeth Warren’s latest broadside against Big Grocery must rank among her greatest cock-ups.
“What happens when only a handful of giant grocery store chains like Kroger dominate an industry? They can force high food prices onto Americans while raking in record profits.” Warren claimed that “a handful of giant chains” had replaced the wide selection of smaller stores that used to dot the American landscape, and she called for the use of the government’s antitrust power to “break up these giant corporations.”
Ah yes… let’s blame an industry for price gouging — an industry that traditionally runs on 0.75% net profit margins.
Remember, by the way, that while I know a few things about some things, and almost nothing about a whole lot more, when it comes to the supermarket business, I know everything about it. That’s not a brag, nor even an exaggeration; it’s what comes from close to a third of a century of experience in and around the industry.
So hear me now when I saw that Reason Magazine’s Joe Lancaster has it exactly right:
In actuality, for much of the last year, grocery stores have seen enormous boosts in revenue, but not increased profitability, for the simple reason that everything has been costing more: not just products, but transportation, employee compensation, and all the extra logistical steps needed to adapt to shopping during a pandemic. Couple that with persistent inflation—which Warren also recently blamed on “price gouging”—and it is no wonder that things seem a bit out of balance.
She is clueless, a fraud and incompetent. All she has is Marxist dialectic by which to formulate her idiotic positions on every topic under the sun — dialectic which when translated into policy has boasted a record of 100% failure — and the sooner the citizens of Massachusetts vote this moron out of office, the better the country will become.
Smoke And Fire
One of the worst decisions ever made — by a whole bunch of people, not just one — was to allow Chinese scientists to come to the United States and study in our peerless university research facilities. No doubt this was done for all sorts of noble reasons, such as spreading scientific discoveries around the world for the betterment of all, etc.
However:
Former GlaxoSmithKline Scientist Pleads Guilty to Stealing Trade Secrets for Chinese Pharma
and:
That’s just in last week’s news. There have been many, many more such incidents, and they were all completely preventable.
What bothers me is that there has been no concerted effort to stop this theft / espionage, by deporting all Chinese-born scientists out of our universities and research institutions.
That inactivity can be laid at the feet of our government.
Comply, Or Be Gone
What if your research (involving actual facts as opposed to feelings and/or dogma) shows that your employer’s cultural Zeitgeist is completely wrong?
Silly boy; if the corporation you work for is full of Marxism and Wokedom, you’re going to get defenestrated.
Which is what happened to this guy:
Zac Kriegman had the ideal résumé for the professional-managerial class: a bachelors in economics from Michigan and a J.D. from Harvard and years of experience with high-tech startups, a white-shoe law firm, and an econometrics research consultancy. He then spent six years at Thomson Reuters Corporation, the international media conglomerate, spearheading the company’s efforts on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced software engineering. By the beginning of 2020, Kriegman had assumed the title of Director of Data Science and was leading a team tasked with implementing deep learning throughout the organization.
But within a few months, this would all collapse. A chain of events—beginning with the death of George Floyd and culminating with a statistical analysis of Black Lives Matter’s claims—would turn the 44-year-old data scientist’s life upside-down.By June 2021, Kriegman would be locked out of Reuters’s servers, denounced by his colleagues, and fired by email. Kriegman had committed an unpardonable offense: he directly criticized the Black Lives Matter movement in the company’s internal communications forum, debunked Reuters’s own biased reporting, and violated a corporate taboo. Driven by what he called a “moral obligation” to speak out, Kriegman refused to celebrate unquestioningly the BLM narrative and his company’s “diversity and inclusion” programming; to the contrary, he argued that Reuters was exhibiting significant left-wing bias in the newsroom and that the ongoing BLM protests, riots, and calls to “defund the police” would wreak havoc on minority communities. Week after week, Kriegman felt increasingly disillusioned by the Thomson Reuters line. Finally, on the first Tuesday in May 2021, he posted a long, data-intensive critique of BLM’s and his company’s hypocrisy. He was sent to Human Resources and Diversity & Inclusion for the chance to reform his thoughts.
He refused—so they fired him.
I love the “chance to reform his thoughts” line — straight outta 1984, minus the rat cage strapped to his face. His only mistake was going to HR at all — what did he think was going to happen? Now go and read the rest of it to see the full extent of the rot.
For the umpteenth time, I am truly grateful that I no longer have to work for Global MegaCorp, Inc.
And final thought:
If the wire services continue to promote myths about race, violence, and policing, they will inflict grave harm on their reputations for fairness; they will also help unleash a new wave of destruction in America’s poorest and most vulnerable neighborhoods.
Both have already happened… and I don’t care if it gets worse.