Pillsbury politics

Good times, make soft people, make bad policy

In this ordered collection of consonants and the oft unappreciated vowel, I intend to draw a correlation between the internet, Queers for Palestine and a murder in Brooklyn. By now I expect we’re all familiar with the increasingly apocryphal set of words,

Hard times create strong men,
Strong men create good times,
Good times create weak men,
Weak men create hard times.

Those four lines are beautiful in their timeless wisdom, but I’d like to throw a modern take on the verse. With the advent of the internet and the perpetually online person, good times also create deeply out of touch men with bent necks and bad eye contact, hashtag adherents who clumsily navigate life with a deep gorge in their soul where common sense once held court.

Out of touch

There is a school of “thought” right now that men and women are the same. Identical wants, emotional needs and social preferences. To this I say, yesterday I spent an hour watching a video of a guy trying to start an abandoned Mercedes CL55. Please find me a woman who would enjoy watching that video with me. Or, my sister has enjoyed hundreds of episodes of Gray’s Anatomy. If I attempted that same feat I would suffer catastrophic brain failure by episode three.

How many of the 138 likes on this comment came from men?

When I hear that the two sexes are inherently identical, and the only differences are attributable to cultural programming, I can think only two things of the people who are espousing these views.

1. They know it’s not true and they are lying.

2. They spend so much time online, and so little time interacting with actual humans, that their worldview is actually warped enough that they can convince themselves it’s true. One suspects that among the population who holds this belief you might find a higher than average number of virgins.

Good times create weak men, yes, but in the internet age good times also create a class of humans who are detached from physical reality. A class who fervently believes that with an adequate number of hashtags and a sufficient quota of cancelled reprehensibles, they’ll change the laws of physics, human nature and thermodynamics too why not! Take, for instance, this lovely group of demonstrators.

I find this position to be rather perplexing. Middle Eastern countries (with the exception of Israel) are famously intolerant of homosexuality. And by intolerant I mean, well I’ll let Gad Saad fill you in. Here are a few choice words from a recent video of his.

This Jew stands for Palestine is exactly like Queers for Palestine is exactly like chickens for Kentucky Fried Chicken. So those are all exactly equivalent groups because if you're queer, you definitely want to be siding on the Palestinian side because they have this really liberating conversion program, that's gravity based, so you can look into that. It's a very very innovative program. They take you up to the top of the roof and then they kind of, uh, introduce you to gravity. So it's a way to really celebrate your queer identity.

A few months ago on Substack Notes I wrote that freedom of speech means freedom of speech for everyone! Even (especially) people who we disagree with. And I think that these intellectually questionable young zirs zems and zees should be afforded every opportunity to express their views. But I can’t help but wonder, do they realize what the stakes are? Do they have any conception of what they’re advocating?

I think not. As I wrote in my piece Give me liberty, or give me America, the west is (generally) excellent at keeping people safe, but this coddling of the citizen causes some softness in the brainial region. I could be wrong, but I don’t think these “Queers for Palestine” can even understand what it’s like to be in a situation where you can be killed for your sexual predilections. Their lives have been so far removed from the threat of physical harm that everything has become a game with no stakes.

Or is something else causing this intellectual paradox? A few days ago I read an interesting passage from The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray. This excerpt from the book concerns Rachel Dolezal, a white woman of Eastern European descent. Rachel used a bit of bronzer to pass herself off as black for a number of years, and eventually worked her way up to regional head of the NAACP. Eventually she was outed as being caucasian, however, the reaction wasn’t exactly what you would expect.

On The View on ABC-TV, Whoopi Goldberg defended Dolezal. ‘If she wants to be black, she can be black’, was Goldberg’s view. It seemed that ‘blacking up’ was not a problem on this occasion. More interesting was the reaction of Michael Eric Dyson, who stood up for Dolezal in a remarkable way. On MSNBC he declared of Dolezal, ‘She’s talking on the ideas, the identities, the struggles. She’s identified with them. I bet a lot more black people would support Rachel Dolezal than would support, say, Clarence Thomas.’ All of which suggested that ‘black’ was not to do with skin colour, or race. But only politics. So much so that a Caucasian wearing bronzer but holding the ‘right’ opinions was more black than a black Supreme Court Justice if that Supreme Court justice happens to be a conservative.

In our brave new world, is being black a skin color or a political state of mind? Are you queer because you’re attracted to people of the same sex, or because you believe the “right” things? When Peter Thiel backed Trump there were those who said that Thiel wasn’t gay anymore. Apparently endorsing the wrong political candidate is more important than sexual proclivity, in determining one’s capacity to be homosexual. Just as supporting Palestine is apparently the most important thing for queers because that’s “what queers do.” Never mind the logical absurdities.

In any case, I wanted to introduce Murray’s idea so that we might consider its validity over time. For my part, I suspect that these are fringe ideas more than anything, and a majority of people have a traditional view on what makes a person black, white, gay or straight. But I intend to write more on this in the future.

Part two: Brooklyn

I’ve noticed that when a person is wronged there exists a tendency to blame the victim. I’m not on board with this trend which is why I want to be absolutely clear: while Ryan Carson made several highly regrettable mistakes, I don’t think he “deserved” to be murdered. No matter what he wrote online, or the blunders he made in the moments leading up to his death, this was an entirely unprovoked attack and the blame lies with the perpetrator. Now, the story.

Earlier this month Ryan Carson was murdered in Brooklyn. There’s at least one murder every single day of the year in NYC but this one stood out because,

• Everything was captured on CCTV

• The attack was unprovoked

• The victim was a well-known activist of social justice who’d previously made disparaging comments about the police and crime (Ryan’s Twitter handle is Death Cab for Cohen)

If you want to see people gloating over Ryan’s death just go over to the ZeroHedge comments section, we don’t do that here. My broader interest in highlighting these Tweets from Ryan is what they reveal about his mindset.

This is a person who has most likely never encountered physical violence, or lived in a neighborhood where his life is in danger. He is Tweeting about cops and crime despite being a man with, as we’ll soon see, a stunning deficiency of street smarts. I’ve captured a few clips from the moments leading up to his murder to see where Ryan went wrong.

Location: stupidity factor 4/10

Ryan was murdered on Lafayette Ave in Bedford-Stuyvesant at 4 am while his girlfriend stood by and watched. This is not a notoriously dangerous neighborhood. In the months leading up to his murder I’ll bet that thousands of people had waited for the bus in the same place and at the same time as Ryan and nothing happened to them.

Candidly, I wouldn’t have given much thought to waiting for the bus in Bed-Stuy at 4 am either, but only if I was alone! I don’t think I would have waited there with a girlfriend, which is why I’m rating this as a 4/10 on the stupidity scale instead of 2/10.

Ryan and his girlfriend waiting for the bus. The soon-to-be perpetrator can be seen walking down the sidewalk in a gray hoodie

Going for a stroll: stupidity factor 8/10

Ryan and his girlfriend get up from the bench and begin walking down the street. At this point the perpetrator is about ~40 feet in front of them and violently kicking at an unknown object in the street. You can see the perpetrator at the top-left of this screenshot with his foot raised.

Ryan and his girlfriend continue to walk towards this man! This is where I’m raising the stupidity factor to eight. If I were in that situation I would have firmly grabbed my girlfriend’s elbow and pulled her to the other side of the street with me.

We would have been walking briskly away as I positioned her on the other side of myself so that I was between her and the violent man. Just writing these words I want to scream at Ryan, why are you handling this situation so casually? Get the fuck out!

Taking up space: stupidity factor 11/10

Well, it gets even worse. After watching a violent man attack a bunch of shit on the sidewalk, Ryan doesn’t get the fuck out. Oh no. Instead, he plants himself firmly in the perpetrator’s path and makes himself an unmistakable target. His body language says,

“DON’T YOU DARE WALK AWAY WITHOUT NOTICING ME!”

I don’t know what to call this other than sheer stupidity. The actions of a man who doesn’t understand that violence exists in this world, and that we have police because there are furious humans out there who will stab you to death for no good reason at all.

I never would have found myself in this situation because I would have already been on the other side of the street walking/running away. But God, if I had somehow gotten to this point I would be making myself non-threatening. Riding that fine line between being too weak in appearance but not too strong either. Aiming for invisible, like those kids in high school who learn to blend into the woodwork so they don’t get bullied.

Ryan does none of that. He stands with his feet apart, taking up half of the sidewalk practically begging for a confrontation. The rest is history. Ryan is murdered and then his friends start a GoFundMe to collect money so that they can all take time off work. What a legacy.

Conclusions

The problem isn’t that there are millions of people who spend ten hours a day online. People are free to live their lives. The trouble is that we’re letting activists like Ryan, who have no conception of the darker sides of human nature, dictate policy. Based on his comments, Ryan Carson would presumably abolish the police if given the chance. Yet polling has shown that inner city residents (many of them black) in the most dangerous neighborhoods across the United States want more police!

Here’s an excerpt from a recent article in The Free Press.

In the past few years, Scott has become the city’s own version of his Roman philosopher namesake—speaking truth to power—for a growing number of Oakland residents sick of crime and a smug political class that has not only failed to do anything about it, but ushered it in.

You might think a black activist and union organizer in the Bay Area would be a progressive who supports Black Lives Matter and defunding the police, but Scott rejects both movements. In fact, he says the defund debate is split along racial lines. 

“The black people who live in the impacted neighborhoods were pretty much united in the fact that they did not want to cut the police budget,” he says. “The white people in affluent neighborhoods were pretty much united in that they did want to.”

This all points Rob Henderson’s conception of luxury beliefs. Politically “enlightened” segments of our population demand policies that sound virtuous on paper and earn them good boy points with their Twitter followers. However, when those policies backfire it’s not the people who advocated for them that pay the price.

The relative safety of the west has created a generation of Americans who have no idea what it’s like to get punched in the face, to go hungry for weeks at a time or to fend through a winter without heat. This is good! This is what our ancestors’ dreamed of!

But to the extent that we let these soft and disconnected men and women write policy we’re setting ourselves up for a rough ride on the society slide and ain’t nobody gonna like how deep these twists and turns take us down.

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