A couple of thoughts on the passing scene:
~Tempest in a K-cup: The CEO of Keurig got himself into hot water over the weekend after his coffee company appeared to take the side of the totalitarian thugs at Media Matters For America over its sleazy smear of Sean Hannity. I loathe the way every aspect of American life is now hyper-politicized, including your breakfast cereal and now your morning cup of coffee. But that's mainly a function of thought-police like Media Matters demanding that craven corporations jump, and wimp CEOs responding, "How high?"
This time Keurig's customers pushed back, posting videos of themselves smashing their coffee makers. So Keurig seems to have backed down, and its boss, Bob Gamgort, appears to grasp the difference between virtue-signaling and his business interests. I hope more corporate execs will come to understand that.
PS There's no need to smash your Keurig, because, in my experience, they generally pack up after a couple of months anyway.
~Ex-Men (cont): Jim Goad analyzes last Tuesday's US election results:
During last Tuesday's minor off-year elections, a glorious total of "eight openly transgender candidates" swept to victory, squashing the hopes and stomping on the necks of transphobic bigots nationwide.
Their battle scalps include the School Board in Somersworth, NH, which elected a transgender activist. The other winner was a Revolutionary War re-enactor, so apparently a lot of people in Somersworth like dressing up. Mr Goad, however, detects a certain gender bias:
Eight trannies elected to office in one night? That's good. Only two of them now identify as men? That's bad—especially if one wants to pretend that gender is fluid. If one even dares to notice a firm statistical pattern that the roaring majority of trannies are men who claim they're women, one risks subverting the entire Tranny Gospel. If, as the case seems to be nearly everywhere worldwide, the overwhelming majority of people who desire to change their sex are men who seek refuge in womanhood, this might suggest that our current cultural climate offers very few perks for men and plenty for women.
On that last point, I wrote three years ago:
I note there are some three times as many male-to-female transgenders as there are female-to-male. So all that "gender fluidity" is a vast net transfer from the male brutalizer sector to the female victim sector. At some point it would seem likely to become a flood. After all, it's not so difficult to imagine, a fake gang-rape story or three down the line, elite universities requiring gender reassignment as a condition of continued male admission. In some sense, the swollen ranks of the transgendered seem to have intuited that the jig is up for guys. Might as well check out of the guy business entirely. I'm thinking of pitching Marvel Comics a new superhero group featuring a transwoman, an ambigender, a pangender, an intergender, a bigender and a 2-spirited called Ex-Men.
We are all ex-men now.
Men's market share is diminishing, and will continue to do so.
~Pardon my French: The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has ruled that you can say "F**k!" on Canuck TV and radio - as long as you're speaking français:
Responding to a complaint by a listener of a Montreal French-language radio station angered by repeated airing this year of the F-word, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council panel ruled Tuesday that its ethics code had not been breached.
The issue first arose on Jan. 23 when the hosts of CKOI-FM's afternoon drive show broadcast a clip of Madonna at an anti-Trump protest march. "And to our detractors that insist this march will never add up to anything ... f–k you!" the pop singer declared...
In its response to the complaints, the station said the word had seeped into French parlance in Quebec.
"We acknowledge that some sensible ears may be offended by that often-called 'four letter word.' However, in French culture, this word doesn't arouse much reaction," the station wrote.
I yield to no one in my contempt for Canadian regulatory agencies, but I can sort of see where they're coming from. I well remember the first time I heard an elderly Montreal lady exclaim in exasperation, "Ah, c'est f*cké" - which derives from the English epithet but approximates in forcefulness to "it's all messed up". "C'est f*cké ton affaire": "That's so messed up", etc. On the other hand, the same Montreal lady would never have dreamed of ejaculating "Tabernac!" - even though, with every passing year, fewer and fewer of Quebec's godless francophones have ever been anywhere near a tabernacle.
Conversely, I recall reading this observation from my colleague Barbara Amiel on George W Bush:
Early on, he started that business about "compassionate conservatism". Those of us who give a tinker's farthing about ideas knew we were in merde up to the waist.
Had Barbara said "we were in s**t up to the waist", it would be a little too vivid. There are times when it helps to lose somethng in translation.
~An End to Isms: Adam J MacLeod teaches law at Faulkner University in Alabama and he has noticed that his students know very little, are incapable of critical thinking, appear to think their "feelings" are of interest to others, and regard labels such as "racist" and "classist" as dispositive. So he put them on notice that he would be undoing their dis-education:
Before I can teach you how to reason, I must first teach you how to rid yourself of unreason...
Reasoning requires you to understand truth claims, even truth claims that you think are false or bad or just icky. Most of you have been taught to label things with various "isms" which prevent you from understanding claims you find uncomfortable or difficult.
Reasoning requires correct judgment. Judgment involves making distinctions, discriminating. Most of you have been taught how to avoid critical, evaluative judgments by appealing to simplistic terms such as "diversity" and "equality..."
One of the falsehoods that has been stuffed into your brain and pounded into place is that moral knowledge progresses inevitably, such that later generations are morally and intellectually superior to earlier generations, and that the older the source the more morally suspect that source is. There is a term for that. It is called chronological snobbery. Or, to use a term that you might understand more easily, "ageism."
Second, you have been taught to resort to two moral values above all others, diversity and equality. These are important values if properly understood. But the way most of you have been taught to understand them makes you irrational, unreasoning. For you have been taught that we must have as much diversity as possible and that equality means that everyone must be made equal. But equal simply means the same. To say that 2+2 equals 4 is to say that 2+2 is numerically the same as four. And diversity simply means difference. So when you say that we should have diversity and equality you are saying we should have difference and sameness. That is incoherent, by itself. Two things cannot be different and the same at the same time in the same way...
Third, you should not bother to tell us how you feel about a topic. Tell us what you think about it. If you can't think yet, that's O.K.. Tell us what Aristotle thinks, or Hammurabi thinks, or H.L.A. Hart thinks. Borrow opinions from those whose opinions are worth considering. As Aristotle teaches us in the reading for today, men and women who are enslaved to the passions, who never rise above their animal natures by practicing the virtues, do not have worthwhile opinions.
Do read the whole thing. Professor MacLeod ends with three ground rules. I like the last one:
If you ever begin a statement with the words "I feel," before continuing you must cluck like a chicken or make some other suitable animal sound.
My admiration for this professor's manifesto is mitigated only by the melancholy reflection that two generations ago every single thing he said would have gone without saying.
~If you're a Mark Steyn Club member please feel free to disgree in the comments below. For more on The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget our new gift membership.
Tomorrow evening, Wednesday, Mark will be keeping his midweek date with Tucker Carlson, coast to coast on Fox News at 8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific. If you prefer Steyn in non-visual form, join us this Friday for Mark's latest nightly audio adventure in Tales for Our Time.
