I've returned from India and come down with rather a nasty head cold. Head colds have always been debilitating for me, and this occasion is no different. My state of mind is such that you could tell me anything, and I would believe you. The only way in which I can be sure that I exist is through the proposition head cold ergo sum. But Fate has a strange way of bringing out silver linings in the darkest of hours, and it turns out that my insensate Zen-like stupor is the best condition in which to receive news about Commissar Trump's first week in office. The world has been thrown into consternation by the fact that Trump, far from proving a double agent for Hillary Clinton who penetrated the Republican party in a political tour de force in order to overthrow that unvenerable institution from the inside, turned out to be exactly the asshole he had portrayed himself to be during the presidential race. The sort of people who believed this ludicrous theory are the sort who doubtless
would, if approached in the street by a shady character asking for a
certain amount of money with the promise that it would be returned at
the earliest, smilingly hand over the money and wait patiently by the
window till the end of their lives. Democrats don't know where to turn, and have been marching in protest all week.
I've never been a fan of protests. For one thing, they tend to involve people, and my tendency whenever I see a large gathering of Homo sapiens is to turn 180 degrees and march away in the opposite direction. For another, I have serious doubts about the efficacy of protests in achieving anything at all. Protests of the sort that we have just seen *may* serve to unite people under a common cause, but those people were likely pledged to the cause to begin with. I know enough people on Facebook who participated in these marches to
know that many protestors only participated because it was the thing to do at the time - in
other words, fashionable. That or they felt the need to pat themselves on the back. For what? That's not important. Whose views can they expect to change, then? Certainly not the views of Republicans, whose deeply ingrained and highly emotional political views could never be swayed by an exhibition of precisely the sort of snot-nosed whining they have always contemned in liberals. If anything, liberals ought to be sitting at home and flogging themselves for allowing such a travesty to come to pass.
People like Bill Maher are saying that the recent women's march is a sign that the left is forming a Tea Party of its own. I don't quite know how to feel about that. When it comes down to it, modern liberalism is tending in a direction just as loony as modern conservatism, with its "safe spaces" and "microaggressions" and SJWs. As Maher said, people were so busy inveighing against Justin Timberlake's claiming to be inspired by a black person that Donald J. Trump sneaked into the White House and became our 45th President. One has to be careful not to lean too far one way or the other, or one might just - to complete the metaphor, as much as it pains me to do so - fall over. I don't wish to imply that the women's march was necessarily an exhibition of the worst sort of lunacy the left has to offer, because I don't even know what it was about. Like Trump, I was not paying attention, even as Facebook friends (as I later discovered, because I have wisely removed everyone from my news feed) made protest signs and put up pictures of themselves holding them up captioned with such inspiring calls to action as "Stay nasty" and declaring with all SJW humility that "it's not in [their] nature not to stand up for people". I suppose the term "limousine liberal" was coined for a reason. But if the liberace (what would you call liberals as a group?) all around seem to support these protests, perhaps there's something in them.
I consider myself a liberal now, having traversed pretty much the entire political spectrum in my short and rather apathetic political life, starting from when I was an Objectivist and read all of Ayn Rand's stuff because it sat well with my inherent selfishness and misanthropy. Age and a little maturity have guided me along due left, all the way to Chomsky and back, like one of those Invisible Hands that keep popping up in these discussions. (Or maybe I'm so capricious that my political views at any given time are likely to reflect the last thing I read. Who knows?) I'm still highly misanthropic, and it's doubtful whether you could induce my heart to bleed by running it through with a pen knife. I am also, I suppose, pro-choice; but whereas other liberals fall to their knees and beg conservatives not to think them heartless and insist that they're only for abortion as a last resort, when the mother's life is at stake, I think it's perfectly fine for abortion to be practiced as a hobby. But that's beside the point. Given a choice, I would much rather follow someone who weaves a good epigram than some boring old Saul Alinsky type who can kill with the sound of his voice alone; but as it happens, "it's not in my nature not to stand up for people", so there you have it.
I take back what I said earlier. My heart can indeed be induced to bleed. It bleeds for the environment, which Trump has taken an axe to while Republican legislators have all but dropped their pants and begun masturbating to this dream come true, like people standing in line for the Small World ride at Disneyland. (I'm only kidding.) Conveniently enough, their supporters don't operate on reason, and they turn their wrinkled white buttocks, sagging with the weight of their patriotism, toward the microphone in lieu of their mouths whenever they're required to present a pretense of a well-reasoned argument on television. Trump's presidency may well be one of those dark ages that humanity is plunged into from time to time and must break out of better and stronger than before; or it could just be the prelude to a dark ages from which humanity will never emerge. I know enough enough about the modern American's interest in history to know that a few decades from now school children and young adults will remember Donald Trump as just a name. Maybe a TIL might pop on Reddit every now and then about one of Trump's sleazier antics, but he's really going to be remembered as not much better or worse a president than any other.
Addendum: The "protests" at UC Berkeley are an exhibition of the worst the left has to offer. The accurate term for what took place there - that CNN omitted to mention even once - is a riot. A riot of the sort that you don't even see in Third World countries anymore. I thought freedom of speech was supposed to be one of the most sacred tenets of the left. Since when has "freedom of speech" come to mean "freedom to say things that I agree with"? It's juvenile and immature and frankly retarded. It's baffling to me that people who no longer wear diapers can hold views like this. Here's a radical idea: If you don't like what Milo Whatshisnamepolous has to say, just don't go. This was not like the Nitin Jain Saturnalia that we were forced to attend at FIITJEE, where members of the FIITJEE administration took turns jerking each other off on stage over their triumph on the JEE and Nitin Jain's used toilet paper was sewn into tee shirts and handed out reverently to the student body. Students of Berkeley had the option not to go and to dissuade people from going. They could even have shown up and protested silently at the venue. But to call for shutting down the event - even without the use of violence - impinges on Whatshisnamepolous's freedom of speech under every definition of the term. Even the self-absorbed pseudo-intellectuals at Berkeley ought to be aware of that. But maybe they don't care. The fact that Whatshisnamepolous now has an even bigger soapbox from which to disseminate his ideas is quite frankly irrelevant. The fact that there was violence and that students lit bonfires and smashed windows and destroyed their own Student Union building that they themselves had paid to have built and pepper-sprayed people who held differing opinions and chased and beat unconscious men to a pulp with bike locks and flag poles makes the whole thing orders of magnitude worse. ("Oh no! Think of those poor windows!" mock the anarchists and socialists.) Ex-post-facto pleas that it wasn't the student body that committed the worst of these crimes but troublemakers from Antifa - a supposedly anti-fascist anarchist group, whose members are known to prowl the West Coast and infiltrate peaceful protests like this to turn them into orgies of violence - does not cut it, because the student body was cheering and egging them on wantonly. Is it any wonder that the populace is moving further and further right? You can lament all you like Baby Boomers' inflicting their conservative views upon the public and injecting them into the law, but they won't be around much longer; instead, today's college kids - these hooligans at Berkeley and other places - are going to be the dominant ideological group in politics a generation from now, and when that happens, you might be unpleasantly surprised to see Orwell's 1984 arise from the left instead of the right.
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Addendum: The "protests" at UC Berkeley are an exhibition of the worst the left has to offer. The accurate term for what took place there - that CNN omitted to mention even once - is a riot. A riot of the sort that you don't even see in Third World countries anymore. I thought freedom of speech was supposed to be one of the most sacred tenets of the left. Since when has "freedom of speech" come to mean "freedom to say things that I agree with"? It's juvenile and immature and frankly retarded. It's baffling to me that people who no longer wear diapers can hold views like this. Here's a radical idea: If you don't like what Milo Whatshisnamepolous has to say, just don't go. This was not like the Nitin Jain Saturnalia that we were forced to attend at FIITJEE, where members of the FIITJEE administration took turns jerking each other off on stage over their triumph on the JEE and Nitin Jain's used toilet paper was sewn into tee shirts and handed out reverently to the student body. Students of Berkeley had the option not to go and to dissuade people from going. They could even have shown up and protested silently at the venue. But to call for shutting down the event - even without the use of violence - impinges on Whatshisnamepolous's freedom of speech under every definition of the term. Even the self-absorbed pseudo-intellectuals at Berkeley ought to be aware of that. But maybe they don't care. The fact that Whatshisnamepolous now has an even bigger soapbox from which to disseminate his ideas is quite frankly irrelevant. The fact that there was violence and that students lit bonfires and smashed windows and destroyed their own Student Union building that they themselves had paid to have built and pepper-sprayed people who held differing opinions and chased and beat unconscious men to a pulp with bike locks and flag poles makes the whole thing orders of magnitude worse. ("Oh no! Think of those poor windows!" mock the anarchists and socialists.) Ex-post-facto pleas that it wasn't the student body that committed the worst of these crimes but troublemakers from Antifa - a supposedly anti-fascist anarchist group, whose members are known to prowl the West Coast and infiltrate peaceful protests like this to turn them into orgies of violence - does not cut it, because the student body was cheering and egging them on wantonly. Is it any wonder that the populace is moving further and further right? You can lament all you like Baby Boomers' inflicting their conservative views upon the public and injecting them into the law, but they won't be around much longer; instead, today's college kids - these hooligans at Berkeley and other places - are going to be the dominant ideological group in politics a generation from now, and when that happens, you might be unpleasantly surprised to see Orwell's 1984 arise from the left instead of the right.
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