Biden's New Radical Education Appointee

 We recently heard about the Biden appointee that supported Black Supremacy in the Harvard Crimson.

Now we have another very interesting Biden nominee:

One of President-elect Biden's top Education Department nominees hosted a diversity training during which she gave an "extremely complimentary" introduction to its featured speaker, who has accused public schools of "spirit murdering" of Black children.

Discovery Institute researcher Chris Rufo previously reported on the training, which took place under Unified San Diego School District Superintendent Cindy Marten, whom Biden named on Monday as his nominee for deputy secretary of education. An attendee's notes and screenshots of the presentation allege the speaker, Dr. Bettina Love, accused schools of engaging in "spirit murder" and dehumanizing Black people.

That attendee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told Fox News that Love was introduced by Marten, who, they said, offered "glowing" remarks about Love. School board resident Richard Barerra similarly told Fox News on Tuesday that Marten's introduction was "extremely complimentary."

Fox News

One of the issues with the American left is that they associate incredibly closely with fringe, radical elements, and give them opportunities to come into schools and influence educational policy. 

Now it is like the Democrats cannot find anyone who is not blemished by Marxism, social justice, or black nationalism to serve at the highest levels in the United States.

I suspect that this will be a major theme for the American Left going forward. 

It is also noteworthy that this sort of nonsense is not immediately denounced by everyone it touches even now:

School board president Barrera vehemently defended the training and indicated he supported the idea that Black children's spirits were being murdered by schools. When asked whether the district endorsed that concept, he said: "The work that we’ve done in the trainings … not only, of course, are supported by our district but are supported by our educators who are developing capacity to improve their ability to teach our students and they welcome it and they want more of it."

The left is so latched onto this idea that conventional education symbolically murders children because they want to entirely recreate the way people learn and what they learn so as to be able to advance their own educational policies designed to thoroughly indoctrinate kids. Of course, now they cannot, and because the US is a free country that tries to be objective in what it touches kids, it does not fly as a serious proposal. 

So they seize the opportunity to use any imbalances or problems in society to claim that it is due to the education system completely failing the average Americans. 

Market Mythos & Programming

An incredibly powerful series of Tweets graced my eyes today that I felt like commenting on -- these were brought to us by Mr. Cyrillic Name. It hits on multiple levels in such a short space, making it delicious. 

Before we begin, it is important to remember that, in the same way that a dominant subconscious may exist to push people towards passive acts of racism, as is popularly believed by the left, people on the right see an anti-family, pro-consumer bias that is driving our culture away from traditional values and into sterilized & atomized living. 

"Aspirational mythos" is an incredibly important concept for us -- we should not view what is on television or in the media ever as a sort of reality, but as a virtue signal. Every story has within it some moral that is being presented, and often times, when it is most hidden and buried in the content, it is the most important message of the times. 

The aspirational mythos is not something that is just given to us in our films, sit coms, novellas, and BuzzFeed, but is also presented to us in short commercials and minor social transactions that we are not so conscious of. This sort of advocacy is also something that does not exist on the surface -- the surface, that we often think of as the "content," is really just a series of vapors that obfuscate the real plot and the virtues that are being presented.

For instance, it is the Leave It to Beaver imagery is what stands out to all of us -- the plots were all forgettable, but the clean home, loving and competent parents, rascally kids that are causing a hubbub but are always duly fixing it & looking slick doing so is what really stays with us. This is a series of tropes that all tell us, but not so explicitly, how to align our behaviors and values with our proper stations in life, and how these stations are rewarding. 

In a sense, sit coms and TV dramas are our real value drivers. Films are often more story than substance, for they are only with us a short time and cannot build up a whole system of values in our head. But the TV shows that we will spend dozens of hours watching, many of which interconnect by having the same themes, producers, and writers, are more about the tropes, and the stories are just ways to get the tropes to interact with each other. While its primary function truly is entertainment and the average writer and producer is not necessarily seeking to program anyone, but to simply be a reflection of life, it invariably results in broadcasting their interpretation of life to the world.

Like all interpretations, the story is viewed from the perspective of the heroes who interact and tell the story, and who these heroes are, and how they view the story, becomes the way that average people who watch the show begin to interpret their own lives. 

The heroes are the archetypes and tropes, and the stories that they navigate are simply a structure through which the audience laughs & cries with whilst becoming indoctrinated, in part or in full, by what is being advocated. 

It is through these aspirational archetypes found in the social mythos that we are largely programmed. Unlike previous mythos, which is based upon virtue and centered around ideals, the social mythos of today is economical and practical. The secular world itself has stripped it of virtue because we now longer function as nations, but as markets, and in Market World you get Market Mythos.

Market Mythos wants you to think about the next few years and your consumer & career options. It wants you to choose smartly. 

Nation Mythos wants you to think about history and community and your relationship to both. It wants you to choose wisely. 

Let's focus more on what is really being advocated in TV and sexual education. 

The prevailing spirit of sexuality has proven to be exponentially beneficial to the ruling class. We are basically told to endlessly prolong our high-consumption youth and avoid saving up for the future which stunts reproduction in general. 

This is because having children is very costly to the state when compared to foreign immigration because of the amount of government resources sunk into a single child as they proceed through all of the steps of formal education. Migration is instant gratification -- a worker that produces and pays taxes without having ever sucked up as much as the native class, and they are also a full grown adult making a lot of self-centered consumption decisions. 

The DINK model is also ideal for a wide range of corporations that focus on you living immaturely forever. 

While this series of Tweets does make this model sound conspiratorial, it does not have to be that way. As I hinted at before, there does not have to literally be a cabal of business interests & politicians consciously discussing and making these decisions together. There's already the ingrained bias of the people who are used to interacting with the world as consumers and product pushers, who think like marketers, that are writing all of our entertainment, or who simply find themselves in positions where they are writing public policy while trying to think of themselves as in the shoes of their neighbor, who they view as a consumer. 

In the case of sexual education, it is the case of simply wanting to stop unplanned pregnancies through informing kids, and the result is simply overshooting the target. They think they are doing their Fellow Consumers who are likely aiming for bright futures with new cars and jet-setting vacations by teaching them to delay pregnancy and marriage, but the kids are scared not just through their teens, but through their twenties and beyond. 

Moreover...

The point about an atomized dater versus a mom/dad with accumulated interest & stakes goes back nicely to the point that you would frequently hear from Weimerica Weekly back in the day -- the concept of skin in the game. When the average person has more & more investment in the future of America as a place for family and community building, the consumption patterns will change and the very way that they vote will likewise morph. They no longer think in terms of the next several years, but in terms of decades, in terms of grandchildren, in terms of nation. They are more reflective about right and wrong, not just concerning pleasure and thinking of everything as delineated. 

They are more sensitive to the fact that everything interpenetrates. They become more zen. 

Even though there is an industry based around child rearing that benefits from people having more kids, this is absolutely dwarfed by the rest of capital. Moreover, in terms of the labor market, your boss doesn't want a dedicated mom as his head of marketing, nor does he want a worker that is less dependable due to familial ties -- they want a sterile cubicle dweller committed to a career-path who views his/her workplace as their source of independence, and has little interest branching out into something else. 

To some degree, this can be intentional. I am sure there are those who are at the top that crunch numbers and consider things in these cold of terms. However, again, this is not dependent upon a conspiracy that you're literally being Psy Opped by Coca-Cola: the initial push of promoting consumer culture is all that is necessary for this to become normalized, and it is within this framework that these sorts of conclusions write themselves.

Once it is normalized and the next stages are clear, it becomes something that is more consciously advocated for. Never will you really quite see the point where it is crammed down your throat, but the fact that most people feel childlessness is a respectable and admirable option, something which was historically viewed as living with a hole in one's life, shows how consumer culture can ensorcell an entire generation. 

Buying the Election & Gaming the People

One of the most important questions when it comes to Democracy is whether or not we are actually following the will of the people. Sometimes the will of the people can be obstructed through something like gerrymandering or some other systemic flaw, but perhaps the most poignant critique of all is the idea that the will of the people is so easily manipulated. It can be bought, lied to, manipulated, or manufactured.

The American election has given us a reason currently to ask this with the runaway success of candidate Bloomberg. Without many public appearances and just through his billions and media connections, the guy is having an enormous impact.

An impact that appears to be proportional to his spending:

Some of the other candidates are concerned and put off:

“Tomorrow night, for the first time, you’re going to be on a debate stage with the former mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, perhaps you’ve heard this. Two polls out today show that he’s your closest competition,” CNN’s Anderson Cooper said. “Right now, do you see him as the biggest threat to you, to getting the nomination?”

“This is what I do know and this I feel very strongly about,” Sanders said. “You know, Mr. Bloomberg has every right in the world to run for president of the United States. He’s an American citizen. But I don’t think he has the right to buy this election. … I think it’s a bit obscene that we have somebody who, by the way, chose not to contest in Iowa, in Nevada, in South Carolina, in New Hampshire where all of the candidates – we did town meetings, we were talking to thousands and thousands of people, working hard – he said, ‘I don’t have to do that. I’m worth $60 billion. I have more wealth than the bottom 125 million Americans. I’ll buy the presidency.’ That offends me very much.”

Moments later, Sanders was asked by an audience member, “If nominated, would you accept help from billionaires like Bloomberg and if not, why throw away something that can make a huge difference in winning 2020?”

Sanders repeatedly refused to answer the question.

The Daily Wire 

If it is the case that the American people can so easily be influenced and guided in the polls through message crafting and advertisements, we have a lot more problems than just this one time showing of Bloomberg. It means that many of our elections have solely been determined by the people who got out the most clever messaging to the most people.

It means that maybe even "Russian trolls" are capable of diabolically influencing the average American voter.

Traditionally, my response to the accusation of trolls winning the election has been one that is very much in good faith with the spirit of democracy: American people are able to see through lies and, moreover, the candidate that wins the election is the one that appeals most successfully to the will of the people by addressing their concerns and coming up with plans that they believe will positively benefit their life.

So, in a sense, there can be no meddling. Democracy is not open to meddling in the sense of being won through "trolling" or shallow advertisements because it is the people coming together to reach a consensus. The only meddling there ever could be would have to be direct.

The position of the Democrats appears to be one that suggests that the American people can and are manipulated, consent is totally manufactured, and the election is not about the consensus but about gaming the people. Politics becomes a game of deceiving good people.

In a sense, this is denying the agency of the people. It leads us to only one conclusion: Americans are easily fooled. This undermines the very basis of democracy -- if the electorate can be swindled so easily, why even have elections? Why have what really matters in the long-run determined by the fickle and malleable crowd?

People who advance these arguments do not actually believe in democracy but at the same time they accuse President Trump and the Russians of "undermining democracy."

Do we really have to believe that elections are really about charlatans practicing demagoguery? Does it all really not matter? Do we really have no foundation? Can we construct a system which would actually represent the people's will...? Do the people even have something that we can point to and indicate is their will..?

It's our duty not to our partisan politics, but to truth, to try to answer whether or not it is the case that our democracy is fundamentally invalid.

The Truth is In Between 

It is hard to say that the average American voter has no idea what they are doing. It's overly cynical and makes the average man, who we are all fighting and working for, seem incapable of distinguishing right from wrong, and he comes off as a complete rube. There's something utterly nihilistic and against the Christian spirit to suggest that people are incapable of knowing the truth.

Yet, it is ridiculous to suggest that people cannot be fooled, or that people cannot be manipulated into a completely disagreeable state. For we do know that there have been regimes that have practiced evil with a startling amount of consent from huge parts of the populace, and we also know that there were cultures that practiced cannibalism and torture as if it was a normal, everyday part of life.

A healthy, educated populace that have a media actively trying to report the truth objectively, without spin, and who is open to dissent in its editorials and hasn't created a complex system of sacred cows by which they manipulate and dazzle the people can be expected to be a good electorate. These are people that won't be "gamed" or "bought," because they are interested in patiently hearing the candidates out, discovering the reality, and voting based on their principles but not based on prejudices and unproven absolutes that they are goaded to believe by overzealous personalities in the media.

We can actually achieve something like an organic community where man is not being relentlessly manipulated by the managerial class, and where man is free to come to his own conclusions which would then be reflected in an electoral process.

Yet, it seems to be that these circumstances are rare, and this is not due to the shortcomings of the people at the bottom, but because of the lust for power of the people at the top.

It is easy to then say that the truth really is in between with man, and even in the best of circumstances, there will be people who are being manipulated and lead around. This will either be due to their personal fault  (a lack of real interest or education), systematic failures of the government or media to do their job, or even from manipulation of the managerial classes.

Nobles, Elders, & Bishops to Guard Them

Every system needs a series of checks and balances. We should always have votes, of course, because it is important for the will of the people to be known to some degree, but we should also be weary of the fact that naked democracy does turn into mob rule, and that people are entirely capable of being manipulated. 

In the current American system, the checks and balances are the government being a balance on themselves, and perhaps the unspoken check of the 2nd amendment. There is no apparent check on the media and the machinations of billionaires and the mercantile class, and with the religious institutions becoming increasingly powerless, it appears that only libertine impulses have taken over among the people. 

The fact of the matter is that we need a more dynamic system that has more factors in play, ensuring greater stability and safeguarding the people not just from the government, but from a media and culture that is dominated by money and one-sided ideas, all originating in NYC or LA.

What ultimately is required is a system in which there are static forces to offset the massive cultural shifts, and this can actually come in the form of strengthened religion and cultural institutions -- namely, cultural institutions that act independent of those which are designed solely for monetary gain and cheap entertainment. In short, we need more active participation in our society by our elders and our Bishops, and it would behoove us to have a class of ennobled people that served as cultural icons of greater importance than celebrities. 

We should not be under the illusion that all of nobility was always noble, but we should remember that strict codes of honor being regularly enforced are vital to the well-being of the national spirit. 

Since we do not have these things, our culture boils and spills over, and the rights that our Constitution guaranteed us are under threat. The electorate is in a bad position to making serious decisions because it is hopelessly partisan and often voting for either their won direct financial benefit, or they are under the influence of a culture of nihilism and libertinism that should have no role in how any society is governed. 

This is certainly a low point for democracy, and even though it can be said that our electorate continues to have plenty of healthy actors in it, we are not in an enviable position at all. 

I will try to write more on the theme of democracy and culture through the course of the election and try to unpack these problems more. 

Hyperreality & Bigotry

The first time that I can remember running across the word 'bigot' I was in my early teens. I cannot remember the definition exactly, but it was something along the lines of the very most common one:

a prejudiced person who is intolerant of any opinions differing from his own

WordNet via Wordnik 

Bigot has become one of the most common words used these days, and rarely does it actually refer to someone who is prejudiced (holding unreasonable preconceived judgments or convictions - American Heritage) or one who is intolerant (Unwilling to tolerate differences in opinions, practices, or beliefs, especially religious beliefs - American Heritage), but it is almost always the opening salvo in a discussion toward somebody who holds socially conservative views.

If we are unfortunate to be discussing something in real life, these words are uttered even before the argument is presented.

My absolute favorite aspect of all of this is what I call the argumentum ad bigotum. in which the person will say even though you may not be racist/sexist/homophobe for thinking this because you have nuanced beliefs, the majority of people who DO think this way ARE bigots, as if this sheds any light on the situation instead of further muddying the waters.

We all know that the true test of your honesty and commitment to a position is if it will work n reverse... If I were to tell a "Democratic Socialist" that, while their positions and arguments may be valid, the majority of people who have them are simply the terminally lazy and jealous types who only think & vote that way because of their vices. Why, if I made such an argument, I might even be called a... BIGOT.

Yet it is possible for somebody to unironically insist that holding onto certain beliefs means that you (or at least everybody else besides you who is in your camp) is prejudiced and intolerant. The hypocrisy of such a position is often lost on people: they throw the blanket accusation of bigotry on entire groups of people because of their memories of select people and, what is more interesting to me, the false memories and narratives given to them by TV.

Jean Baudrillard referred to this concept as hyperreality. 

In our culture, Baudrillard argues that we take ‘maps’ of reality television and film as more real than our actual lives. These simulacra or hyperreal copies precede our lives, such that our television friends may seem more ‘alive’ to us than the real person playing that character. He also began studying how media affected our perception of reality and the world. Here he found that in a post-modern media-laden society we encounter “the death of the real”, where one lives in a hyperreal realm by connecting more and more deeply with things like television sitcoms, music videos, virtual reality games or Disneyland, things that have come to simulate reality. He argues that in a post-modern culture dominated by TV, films, the Internet and media all that exists are simulations of reality, which aren’t any more or less ‘real’ than the reality they simulate.

Enter Hyperreality

Jean Baudrillard, creator of the concept of hyperreality

People's new concept of right and wrong are very much formed by the messages that they interface with on television, and I believe it is as this point that they use the tidbits they come across in their daily lives to bolster the ideas that they have received from TV. We cannot blame anyone for this -- it is something that we all do. We all suffer from a sort of confirmation bias, but now the bias is working in a funny way: instead of actively criticizing what we see on TV or the Internet, we are more likely to accept the truth we get from the TV & Internet (which very much constitutes hyperreality in the way that I wish to talk about it) and we actually begin to reject reality.

Reality plays second fiddle to the digital world. This is not so much because we have actually prioritized the digital above real interactions, but it is because we spend so much time with the digital, and the time that we spend with flesh & blood reality is far more clearly interlaced with digital culture than it is with the unfiltered and naked realities that we share with other humans.

I think it may even be true for many people here that the cumulative amount of words that they communicate to people via text on digital screens or across other digital mediums over a week is actually greater than the amount of communications that they have in reality.

TV & Infotainment, the Directors of Hyperreality

TV (and this can refer to Netflix) and film have taught us that Southerners are racists, alpha male types are sexists, Christians are bigots and narrow-minded, and that those who have faced prejudice toward their sexual inclination are all angels on the receiving end of the late 20th century's greatest injustices. Of course, TV et al allows these tropes to be broken: if the Southerner is, in fact, allied against all of the paper tiger racists that the TV show has created, and if it is the one Christian in the episode who has a modicum of nuance or, far more likely, is presented as somebody with a mega-meta analysis in which Christian concepts of morality are actually thrown out the window.

The news & infotainment industries also back this up in their own quaint way by focusing on the very same issues that are usually important to TV-world. They are eager to report on any kind of incident of racism, sexism, or homophobia because it feeds directly into the themes that they want to use to mold the opinions of the country, but will ignore far more impactful news that actually deals with death, huge sums of money, or emerging legal precedents. To be entirely fair, this is not something that the media is doing solely to practice narrative crafting: they also do it because it is these types of silly stories that involve race, gender, or sexuality that end up being the focal points of far greater ideological discussions. But let us remember: the stories that are picked are carefully curated, and they are meant to serve the point.

There is a reason why Michael Brown was a lot bigger story than Micah Xavier Jones.

Of course, as stated above, hyperreality does include exceptions. The media is not entirely "black & white," but let us not pretend that the existence of some amount of gray area actually means that the industry, as a whole, is telling an unbiased and respectable story. For it is the exceptions that are always used not to break the rule and render it irrelevant, but to prove the rule. Nearly all men are born with two functioning eyes. The men who are born without two functioning eyes are anomalous, and they are viewed as having some sort of extenuating circumstance. Thus the alpha-male who is not a sexist on TV is an exception that validates the trope: he would not be a friendly character with a name and a role to play if he was like the others.

The only time that people use the exception to break a rule is when they are trying to argue against you. In reality, we all understand this concept: we simply choose to ignore it when it suits us. 

It is because of this that we can say that everything is actually set up in a way to promote a unified truth of everything. There is the Light and the Dark, and the Gray are the ones that exist as plot tools to either write a story of them coming to the light or going to the dark. 

Hyperreality & NPCs

Hyperreality ultimately fuels bigotry by creating narratives consumed by the masses, and the masses then go into the world and act upon these realities. The broadcasters, more than anyone else, shape hyperreality, and so it is the media and infotainment industry as a whole which feed the people their world view.

This is why the NPC meme hit home so well: it implied that there are loads of people that do not think for themselves but actually function as Non-Player Characters. One could state, simply, that an NPC is programmed -- they are somebody who functions only in terms of the hyperreality that is dictated to them, and they come off as impervious to change, unreachable, robotic.

There is also something pathetic about the way that they will even bring out the tropes from their TV shows when discussing things. They are Dumbledore's Army; they are Jedi Knights; we are followers of Sauron  and if you don't know it, my sweet summer child, you are in for a rude awakening.

The world is now understood in a way that has been programmed. The mind is full of fake characters and fake memories that create tropes and themes which people believe play out constantly in the real world. People no longer deal with one another as people, but deal with them as if they are characters from a TV show who are symbols and stand-ins for some kind of ultimate reality being fed to them by media.

Hyperreality itself creates a system of bigotry: everybody becomes biased, prejudiced, indoctrinated, and unwilling to change. They also become unreachable.

Can the word "bigotry" have meaning when it comes from people who are slavishly devoted to a media-driven narrative of the world?

Can the word "bigotry" ever have any meaning when it is said without thought for whether or not the person is actually displaying an actual ignorance of the topic and a manifested intolerance for the object of criticism?

In hyperreality, these things do not need to be thought about anymore. People believe that they saw it all on a TV show or in a movie; they read the article about the man who called the police on a black man for wanting to use a Starbucks bathroom. They watched the movie about Matthew Shepherd.

It'll never actually matter to them what you think. The important truths have already been decided on the screens that they look at. Even if you aren't a bigot, the characters like you on TV are bigots, and that is enough of an argument against you to dismiss anything you could say.

Maybe you're not a bigot -- but if you were on TV, you would be. Case closed.