Back to laughing at that right-wing moron ("Bob Bishop" is his name if I remember correctly.)
The demoralization stage is composed of ideas, structure, and life components. Ideas or brainwashing are constructed in the media, education, and culture, for example, where historical figures are replaced with false heroes (Saint George Floyd). The structure is undermined by discrediting the police, lawfare to deny opponents’ legal rights, destroying family values, and the American last policy. American life has been attacked by erasing national history, inflaming race relations, promoting equity over equality, and promoting victimhood.
Whaddaya make of this? While it is true that whoever controls the media you have access to, or the education that you will receive, and those who have contributed to the culture you are immersed in (the values, morals, a sense of the collective's psyche) will all have their agendas, this does not automatically mean "brainwashing" does it?
Certainly it is possible to successfully resist this brainwashing. Myself and my esteemed colleague Mr. Bishop are living proof of this (albeit from different extremes of the political spectrum).
All that having been said, I'm not going to deny the propagandistic aspect of much of what passes for media, education and culture in late-oligarchic corporatist neoliberalism. What I WILL dispute is that a ranting, shit-for-brains, racist imbecile like Bob Bishop has any claims to being an independent thinker of any importance.
Take for instance, this crap:
historical figures are replaced with false heroes (Saint George Floyd)
Is anyone seriously proposing that all mention of Thomas Jefferson be expunged from the history books to be replaced with biographies of and rap lyrics by George Floyd?
For those not in the know, Thomas Jefferson had a big part in writing the Declaration of Independence and he was one of the founders of the US-American republic. He was a pretty smart guy doing his part to wrestle with the insights of the European Enlightenment whilst in the wilds of the 18th Century British colonies/United States of America. He was also a slave-owner, and therefore a hypocrite, who kept his own children with Sally Jennings as his property, only freeing them in his last will and testament.
Currently there is an important debate occurring where one side (the "Social Justice Warriors") whom Bishop despises, says that memorials to problematic figures from the past ("problematic" because they were slavers, or racist mass-murderers, or the architects of enormous crimes) should be taken down. They should not be honoured with statues, or buildings or parks named after them, or what-not, because our societies no longer believe that these people are deserving of our honour and respect.
Would anyone put up a statue of Adolph Hitler anywhere in Europe? Why would that be problematic if they did? Wouldn't a statue of Hitler just be a reference to an important historical figure who had a major and lasting impact on the society he was a part of?
Or would anyone wanting to put up a statue of Hitler just be some stupid nazi who believes in all of Hitler's murderously racist theories?
If a bunch of racists in the US South put up statues of generals of the Confederacy decades after the war was lost, as an attempt to remind everyone who saw them, that the South is a different society and culture from the rest of the USA, and that they will do things differently, and that this means they will continue to treat Black people as inferior until someday, somehow, they can enslave them again, ... are people living today who reject this disgusting nonsense (including Black people paying taxes to their communities) obligated to look at these pieces of cast-iron junk for all eternity out of respect for the racist opinions of the shit-heads who erected them?
As I said though, this is an important debate. John A. Macdonald was Canada's first prime minister. For that reason he's important. (Just as Thomas Jefferson is important in the USA.) He was also corrupt and an alcoholic (which only made him endearing to me) as well as a brutal racist who deliberately used starvation as a policy tool (which is unforgiveable and was condemned in his own lifetime). Should someone so historically important be erased from public consciousness and known only by the occasional reference in a school text-book (with anyone who wants to study history also able to find references to him in scholarly works that nobody else will ever see)?
Or would it be better if the symbols of the existence of this important historical figure remain standing, and the schools, libraries, whatever, continuing to bear his name, while all the time, all mention of him in education and popular culture reminds us of his monstrosities?
I honestly don't know.
Sir John A. Macdonald funded the residential schools with the deliberate intention "to take the Indian out of the child." Is that what Egerton Ryerson wanted? Ryerson did think that the belief systems of North American Natives was obsolete. He did want to convert them to Christianity. But he was also the sort of guy who one First Nation looked to for help in a legal matter and he (from what I remember) diligently pursued their case as a question of honour. Also, as a Christian, Ryerson clearly wanted what he (delusionally) thought was best for them. I'm going to go out on a limb here and assert that Ryerson didn't want or intend to have the residential schools become sites of physical and sexual abuse and tuberculosis or unmarked graves.
Does that mean that he's off the hook? I don't know.
Am I right to think that a country's founding father's existing memorials should stand (as opposed to some Confederate brigadier general) so long as it's understood across the culture what they did, good and bad? I honestly don't know.
Some of the statues and memorials to historical figures exist as celebrations of those historical figures' entire legacy. Even the problematic parts. Some will say "Every historical figure has their problematic elements." And the 21st-Century SJW's will say that we should start rectifying the imbalance of historical celebration of slave-owners and thieves and murderers and start erecting monuments to the oppressed, the forgotten heroes, the nameless victims who actually built civilization?
Bishop makes a snide reference to "Saint George Floyd." George Floyd was the man murdered by racist cop Derek Chauvin in 2020. Racist dipshits point out that Floyd was a convicted criminal, with one of his crimes having been an armed robbery. They do this because some SJW's or "Black Lives Matter" (BLM) activists point out Floyd's qualities as a human being that were extinguished by the racist cop's murderous arrogance. For a racist dipshit, if anyone says that George Floyd was a human being who didn't deserve to die, it is incumbent upon all racist dipshits to mention his criminal past. Are these racist dipshits saying that George Floyd deserved to die because of crimes that he'd already served his time for? Generally speaking, racist dipshits won't come right out and say that. They'll just make their stupid point and then clam-up. Because they're cowards. They're cowards who secretly celebrate the murderous racism of many US-American cops because they themselves hate and fear Black people. Because they're idiots and hypocrites.
Bishop bemoans leftist subversive vermin "discrediting the police." In so doing he exposes himself as a psychopathic racist idiot. A barrel-sucking authoritarian-worshipping scumbag. Any and all pretenses people like him make to being a defender of freedom and democracy and political equality and all of that good stuff are fraudulent because the ignorance required to honestly uphold the police in the USA as defenders of these values is titanic. And the cynicism required to pretend that the police in the USA aren't the racist upholders of a violently, racist oligarchic monstrosity is unspeakably evil.
Not all police in the USA are racist thugs. I'd say that given the similarities between our societies, cops in the USA come from the same sorts of people who become cops in Canada. And cops in Canada have a reputation for sexist, misogynistic behaviour, of violence and of racism. But for cultural reasons, Canadian police don't kill people at levels remotely proportional to that of US-American police.
As with the shorter lifespans, higher infant mortality levels, lower social mobility, of US citizens compared to other OECD nations, Bishop stupidly champions a racist, violent criminal justice system in which all citizens, but especially Black or Latino citizens are at greater risk of being killed by their police forces and to suffer incarceration rates that are off the charts compared to other countries with similar income levels. I could provide an avalanche of links to studies that establish these facts as well as hideous anecdotes of police corruption and violence to back up these claims. But the fact that Bishop can't even figure out the sane response to the murder of George Floyd shows that all evidence is wasted on him. He's a deluded racist asshole who would rather stick his head up his ass than face reality.
Again; Why am I writing about this loser's garbage essay? Because a LOT of people of at least normal intelligence agree with him. And, in recent years I've seen a lot of "progressives" who I know to be of at least normal intelligence, buying into a LOT of stupid crap of their own. As obvious as it might seem to some of you reading this, the stuff I'm writing in response to Bishop's bullshit will come as a revelation. The same way that exposure to obvious truths from outside the progressive bubble might come as a shock to you. (Obviously they might do what liberals and progressives do when you criticize their shibboleths. Which is to copy Bishop and shove their heads farther up their assholes so as not to encounter challenges to their idiotic beliefs.)
The genocide in Gaza isn't going to last a second longer or end a second sooner depending upon if I write about it or not. Global warming isn't going to be affected by my blog either. I'm just going to vent about whatever the fuck I feel like venting about.
No comments:
Post a Comment