Suckers!

Are you a feminist in the 21st century?  Sucker!

Every once in a while, the curtain is momentarily pulled back and we catch a glimpse of the sordid underbelly of Leftist politics.  Just this happened during the campaign for DNC chair.

Everybody understands First Wave Feminism.  Women should have the vote, they should be able to make contracts, inherit property, and so on.  Adult female citizens should have all the rights (and the obligations, with the possible exception of military service) of adult male citizens.  So, "Yes" to First Wave Feminism.

Second Wave Feminism seemed like a fraud from the start.  It's the lies, you see.  Betty Friedan was never the house-bound house-frau she claimed to be.  Feminists still man the barricades for equal pay even though equal pay has been the lay of the land for at least the past 30 years.

Or, how about domestic violence?  Remember when Super Bowl Sunday was the most dangerous day of the year to be a woman?  No?  That's good, because it ain't so.  But feminists made up this lie and successfully promoted it for years before it finally died a slow, painful, and long delayed death.

My personal favorite is the Rule of Thumb.  Legacy systems of weights and measures arose organically.  The inch is approximately the width of a man's thumb at the first knuckle, a foot is a man’s foot, a yard is his stride, a grain is actually a grain of wheat or barley, a stone is a stone, and so on.  To this day horses are measured as so many "hands" high at the shoulder.  So, a carpenter marking off wood might in some cases naturally use his thumb for an approximate measure---the Rule of Thumb.

So, the Rule of Thumb seemed an obvious, and innocuous, concept until the feminists explained that Medieval Common Law allowed a man to beat his wife with a stick no thicker than his thumb.  According to the feminists, the Rule of Thumb was a limiting concept, a first effort of a barbaric society to limit the brutality of men (who are still brutal and something should be done about them, like taking away their Super Bowl).

Except it ain't so.  The Rule of Thumb means exactly what you think it means, and nothing else.  Feminists just made up the rest.  (Really, they took a Medieval joke and dressed it up as a modern truth.)

Why all the lies?  Because feminism, the Second Wave stuff, is not about women.

David Horowitz, author, publisher, founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and former far-Left radical, explains it this way:  “The cause is never the cause.  The cause is always the revolution."  Feminism is not about women, racial justice and the BLM movement are not about Black people, gender dysphoria is not about gender, immigration is not about foreigners, etc.  All these seemingly disparate things are really about one and the same thing.  They are about the revolution.  The socialist revolution.  And to implement any revolution, first you have to tear down the Existing Order.  That is why the Bolsheviks shot dead the Tsar and his entire family.

In the 21st century, the single greatest impediment to the socialist revolution is the spectacular success of Western Civilization, so that has to go.  And to tear it down, you have to undermine its foundations.  That is what Antonio Gramsci’s “Long March Through The Institutions” is about.

To undermine the West, you have to undermine democracy, undermine the family, even cast doubt on the biological reality of men and women.  And, you have to find allies.  Here is an icon of Western feminism finding an ally in a representative of the greatest oppressor of women in the modern world, "Gloria Steinem Endorses Keith Ellison for Democratic national Committee Chair."

And here is a socialist finding an ally in a representative of the greatest retrograde force in the modern world, "Join Bernie Sanders and Support Keith Ellison for DNC Chair."

Birds of a feather flock together? You bet! And enemies of the people make common cause.

Happy Socialist Thanksgiving

The New York Times' Thanksgiving Day report on Venezuela, "Hungry Venezuelans Flee in Boats to Escape Economic Collapse".  Of course, the headline should read, "Hungry Venezuelans Flee in Boats to Escape Socialism."

Now, where have we seen this, before?  Oh, I remember, this Floating Truck is an image, one of thousands, of Cubans desperate to escape their Workers Paradise, abandoning free health care and everything.

As I have written before, more than a few times, the great mystery in my mind is how anyone can be a socialist today.  Several friends recently provided some insight.

I had long assumed that modern Westerners simply were ignorant of the horrors of the Iron Curtain.  Frankly, I still suspect this.  Oh, they may have some sense that all was not well under communism (shortages of Xboxes and whatnot), but I still doubt they know the Chinese were eating babies during "The Great Leap Forward".  And no, that is not a joke.  Not a joke.  Not a joke.  The Chinese were eating babies when 50 MMMillion people starved to death.  Just as Cubans were starving before reforms.  Just as Venezuelans are starving now.

Socialism fabricates shortages.  For some reason, this a big joke when people have to queue up, for hours, for toilet paper.  It's a lot less funny when there is no food in the stores and no medicine in the hospitals.

It turns out that my socialistically-inclined friends do not see a connection between policies and results.  Two of my friends specifically asserted that they see no analogy between the proposed policies of the Democrats, especially people like Barack and Bernie Sanders, and what had transpired behind the Iron Curtain or what is transpiring in Venezuela today.  It cannot happen here, they say, and I do not know why.  Is it the air we breath?  The water we drink?  Does the sun shine differently in the U.S.?  The socialists do not believe in American Exceptionalism, and yet they do.  For some magical reason, the same policies that have yielded destruction there, will work out gloriously here.  We are exceptional after all.

Another friend outright dismissed socialism as the cause of Venezuela's agony.  Corruption, she says, is the explanation.  Her explanation sent chills down my spine, and let me say why.

It has been long explained that the essential element of the scientific method is model building.  You build a model of how the world works, and you make predictions based on that model, and the better the predictions the better the model.  This is a plainly inadequate description of the scientific method.  Everybody builds models of the world.  Religions build models of the world, and there is the Christian model, the Hindu model, the Muslim model, etc.

It was Karl Popper who explained that the key ingredient in model building is falsifiability.  That is, are there certain phenomena that, if observed, would cause you to reject your model of the world?   Scientific models have it, religious models do not.  Since religion begins with faith---belief based on inadequate evidence---naturally there are no criteria of falsifiability.  With rare exception, there is nothing you can tell a True Believer to make him stop believing.

On the other hand, there is the famous example of Albert Einstein who, when he published his theory of General Relativity, was first in the line of skeptics.  Einstein asserted that he could not believe his own theory until certain tests were performed.  Those tests were performed, and only then did Einstein believe.  Many other tests were performed, and Relativity Theory went on to become one of the most thoroughly tested theories of the Cosmos.

So, does socialism look more like science or more like religion?  Socialism looks more like religion, and we have the evidence to prove that.

Deep down in the marrow of their bones, socialists Know how to organize society for the Greater Good.  And they have had 100 years (the centennial of the Russian Revolution is next year) and several billion people to prove it.  Each time they implemented socialism, it did not work out well.  In fact, it worked out very badly, indeed.  In fact, it failed catastrophically.  So, when things failed to work out as their model of the world predicted, the socialists had a choice:  they could revise or reject their theory, or they could suppose that some especially evil-minded individuals---Enemies of the People---were conspiring to sabotage socialism.  For a socialist, rejecting socialism is never an option.

Well!  If you are working against the welfare of millions of your fellow citizens, you are a very evil person committing a very heinous crime.  You deserve death.  And the socialists started killing, and killing, and killing.  That is why Lenin murdered more people in his first six months in power than the Tsars killed in the previous 100 years, why Stalin murdered more Russians during peace-time than Hitler murdered during wartime, why Mao murdered more Chinese during peace-time than the Japanese murdered during wartime, why Pol Pot murdered a quarter of the entire Cambodian population, etc., etc., etc.

That is why Venezuelans are launching themselves into dangerous waters in dangerous boats.  And that is why my dear friend's comment, that "It's the corruption, stupid," sent chills down my spine.  We have seen this all before.

Socialism is the problem.  And if you do not see the connection between socialism and death, then you are the problem.