“It’s mercy, compassion, and forgiveness I lack. Not rationality.” – Kill Bill, Volume 1
That’s awake, not “woke.”
Repost from 2019 . . .
Here’s a fable:
There was a little girl going to school in Japan. Near her place in the classroom there was a cocoon that the teacher had brought in to illustrate the life cycle of the butterfly, and it was hanging right next to her every day. For a whole week, nothing had happened, but then she noticed the cocoon shaking. She could see that the caterpillar had completed its transformation.
What bothered the girl so very much was that the butterfly was struggling to get out of the cocoon. Finally, exhausting all of the patience that a seven year old has, she helped the butterfly by ever so gently tearing open the cocoon so it could get free.
To her surprise, rather than flying, the butterfly fell out of the cocoon and onto the floor of the school room. She gasped.
The teacher walked over and looked at the butterfly helplessly writhing on the floor. It was clear the butterfly would never be able to fly.
“Did you help the butterfly out of the cocoon?”
The little girl, through eyes that were filling with tears, nodded.
The teacher explained, “It is only through struggling to get out of the cocoon that the butterfly gets enough strength to fly.”
This is one of my favorite stories. I can’t recall where I originally heard or read it.
I’d often tell that story to people that reported to me when they were facing a particularly difficult time at work. I’m sure it just made some of them mad – they wanted me to solve their problems. I refused, perhaps giving them hints on places they should look to find the answer.
One of my goals was to get the work done for the company, sure. But I also wanted to take the time to get the person developed – for me that was a moral imperative. My biggest goal was that everyone who reported to me became a more capable person – and I knew that didn’t happen without the struggle. Oh sure, I could have told Ted where the fire extinguisher was, but that would have deprived him of the struggle to find it. And one of his eyebrows finally did grow back.
That’s how I mostly have used the story, to show the importance of struggle. But there’s another and perhaps more central moral to this story:
misplaced compassion kills.
The Mrs. recently found an article that really, for me, answered the question about why the Left is turning so radical, so quickly. The article is by Zach Goldberg, and you can find it here (LINK), although he takes the data in a different direction than I do for his article. Goldberg has an interesting Twitter® feed (LINK) as well. The graphs in this post are mostly from either the article or his Twitter© feed.
It’s always nice when ¡Science!® is able to provide an insight on the problems of the world. I started with the story about compassion. When psychologists do studies of Leftists, they find that Leftists score higher in compassion than the norm – a lot higher. Well, some Leftists.
Karl Marx had only a very short career as a clown at children’s parties. After he was fired, he insisted that true children’s parties had never been tried.
Does that mean that people on the Right don’t care? Not at all. The data shows that people on the Right give more to charity and also volunteer more hours, so it’s clear that people on the Right care. But they don’t get all mushy and aren’t dominated by their feelings.
It turns out there are differences as well among Leftists based on race. One major bias that almost all people from all time have had is in-group preference. You like your family more than your brother’s family. You like your cousin better than you like your neighbor. You like people in your town more than people who live in the next town over – that’s why Friday night high school football games are so big in small towns.
This makes sense at almost every point in history – it’s rare for you to be living in France and think “Wow, that German flag flying the Eiffel Tower is such a neat thing to see.” In-group bias is normal. It’s why Americans rooted for team U.S.A. in the Women’s World Cup® even though soccer is a vastly inferior game to tic-tac-toe.
Thankfully I’ve reached the “Dad’s asleep in the recliner” stage when the Monopoly® board comes out.
White leftists, however, have somehow become biased against . . . white people. It’s like being born a guy and not liking that you were born a guy . . . oh. Nevermind.
As you can see, there is exactly one group that detests itself and prefers other groups.
But this isn’t the norm. And this isn’t how the Left has been for years. Data shows quite nicely that they didn’t used to be this way – as late as 2010, 20% of white Leftists thought that increasing border security was a good idea. 2018? Less than 5%.
It’s clear the Left has become more radical and the Right has (more or less) remained the same.
Republicans have stayed pretty steady on the border. Not so with white liberals.
What happened in 2010?
Twitter® and Facebook©.
Who would have thought that Leftist extremism starts with Grandma posting cat memes on Facebook®?
The user bases of these social networks took off in 2010. There is one thing that social networks want – your attention. They best way to get that attention? Show you content that creates an emotional response. Cats and babies are great – they make people laugh and go “aww.” But to a Leftist, to keep their attention – show them things that create outrage by violating their sense of compassion.
I hear her next initiative will be to forgive all the Electoral College student loan debt.
The Twitter®, Facebook©, and YouTube™ video suggestion algorithms have become the Democrat® brand. Social media is a particularly useful programming device. These algorithms are used every day to pull the Left farther Left. Why does this impact white Leftists in particular? They spend more time on social media than the rest of the Left. But they’re enough – white leftists are about 25% of the electorate. And they do have money. And they hate the Right.
Through this lens, the reasons for the bans become clear – even though the algorithm mutes voices on the Right, the most effective voices must be silenced. Arguments counter to the narrative have to be stopped. As has recently become quite clear – the Left owns social media and will clear out clear, articulate voices on the Right given any excuse. The chance is too great that these voices will interfere with the programming. An example:
Portlandia is funny, and there are more bookstore clips that are even funnier – this was just the most “safe for work” one I could find.
Portlandia was a series on IFC® for 8 seasons. It mocked (fairly gently) the Leftist culture of Portland. It’s certain that the stars and most of the writers of the show are of the Left. But the things that the show made fun of can no longer be made fun of. Feminism was often the butt of good-natured jokes, but the feminist bookstore that several skits were shot in broke ties with the show after they decided they didn’t want to be made fun of – at all. What had been funny even to the Left in 2010 was by 2016 unacceptable. Feminism could no longer be a laughing matter, nor could any other Leftist narrative.
In 2019, Portland has lost its sense of humor and replaced it with outrage. Antifa regularly assembles a mob of hundreds to shut down any speech it disagrees with through violence. Their compassion drives them to shed blood, but it doesn’t stop there. This same compassion compels the Left to want to give every illegal alien free health care, and a quick pathway to citizenship. In turn, that drives the 144,000 illegals to want to come here – and that was just in June of 2019. That’s a 10,000 person Caravan every other day.
All of this is caused by misplaced compassion, programmed by social media via algorithms. Certainly it’s all a coincidence, right? It’s not like large corporations owned and run by Leftists would have a political motive, right?
Ahhhhh…”Portlandia”.
Its Greatest Skit Ever summed up the left in a nutshell, er, eggshell.
“Put A Bird On It.”
Ha! That was a good one. They got kicked out of the bookstore (real store) because the Lefties didn’t do humor anymore.
“It’s clear the Left has become more radical and the Right has (more or less) remained the same.”
I might quibble with that. As the Left has become more (openly) radical, in general what passes for the public “Right”, iow Republicanism, has shifted with it to the Left. Trump aside, very few Republicans of the days of old would be acceptable in the modern GOP. Pat Buchanan once spoke at the GOP convention and Steve King was just another Congressman. Today’s Republican party has no room for people like that, instead being led by Mitch “The Glitch” McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, the epitome of the empty suit politician. Even Trump is barely right-wing in any meaningful sense. Meanwhile the actual Right has grown bolder and more open, mostly because people like me have no political representation so we can say whatever we want.
Most Americans, normies on the Left and Right, have the political opinions they are told to have. When ghey marriage was no longer forbidden, it disappeared as a topic for “conservatives” and the modern Democrat party, built on union blue collar workers, now sees working class Whites as the enemy. It is all kabuki theater but few realize they are watching a show.
They don’t realize they are watching the show in part because they see themselves as part of the show.
It’s a kind of Rocky Horror Democracy Show. Absurdity, vulgarity, and base impulses elevated to the cultural apex as the show celebrates its own self-awareness so the audience needy have any of their own. Narcissus blushes.
Looking into the camera used to be a big no-no. Breaking the fourth wall. Well in the age of self-parody, every man is Jim from the office and every woman is an influencer live birthed as a perpetual selfie. Politics is just another act in the sordid affair.
The great theater of politic has been folded into the meting pot of the mythology of Who We Are. The lie is so visceral that it can’t be ignored. So when the uncanny valley is ever present the only thing left is to invite the proles to the stage.
The people revel in their part of the lie. The cheapness of simply putting the voaters in the film has likely shocked TPTB much like the jimmy Johns and $600 “Covid” transaction.
The horror show makes no sense at all but is a thing in of itself that escapes the great noticing by nature of its predictability and audience participation.
The “horror” being something to laugh at while savoring the anticipation of being able to yell and throw tomatoes when that time comes. Again.
Just a few years back I thought the accelerationists to be wishful thinking. But it is obvious now that whether we want it or not the show is going to go on until for no reason at all the theater catches fire and all of the yelling will just seem like it’s part of the show and a great many will perish. Roll credits.
I’d put very few politicians in the Right, since the RINO wing took over. I’ll agree – Trump is a populist, but he scares them because he’s not a reliable RINO.
“When psychologists do studies of Leftists, they find that Leftists score higher in compassion than the norm – a lot higher…” But is it real compassion? As you said, the norm is to have the most compassion for those closest to you. The leftie “compassion” just looks to me to be virtue-signaling, a need to belong to the herd. Any herd, apparently.
That of course fits with your hypothesis that the driver is social-media-induced groupthink. These people have no thoughts or emotions of their own. Although that seems to some of us to make them appear inept and stupid, their apparent economic and other successes isn’t an aberration – there are good reasons and rewards to being in a herd.
It is compassion, of a sort, one without courage and without other values.
No mystery here. White liberals — the Compassion Contingent — overwhelmingly are women.
Women love power and since Eve have thirsted to rule over men. These hate and rage at anybody who won’t kneel to their nurturing ‘n inclusive matriarchy, which is why a lifelong celeb leftie like Trump could become such a target of their malevolence, even to point of indictment. WomaNation. Or Bitchdom, as they say elsewhere on the net.
Inclusion, btw, means everybody except you.
Fix the empowered white female, you can fix it all. But it won’t be easy in a nation (and capitol) established and dedicated to the Goddess, while America itself was planned long before its confederation and constitutional birth to be . . . well exactly what you see before you.
‘It’s why Americans rooted for team U.S.A. in the Women’s World Cup® even though soccer is a vastly inferior game to tic-tac-toe.’
Speak for yourself, I root against them. The Sudan, Uzbekistan, doesn’t matter. I will root for anybody against a team that exactly represents the ‘killer compassionate white women’ who are in power in the U.S. and are The Problem. Women should not compete in sports or have fabulous careers but be mothers and obedient, faithful partners to their husbands.
Exactly correct. The fast-increasing quantity of articles on the feminization of the West are both indicative and informative of the change. The “empathy” voter has become queen and killed the king. When 90% women vote for female/empathy priorities, and 50% of men vote as they’re told so as not to sleep on the couch, you have a super-majority of anti-progress voters voting for empathy over good government.
What has empathy brought us? The end result of “Oh that poor…” illegal alien, incarcerated thug, social promotion student, crap teacher, confused kid, etc.: Street crime, crap education, illiterate graduates, MORE bad teachers, below-replacement fertility, trans insanity and permanent sterility, suicidally low family formation… Who are the victims? Women and the children they use to, but no longer do, care for. Why do we have a housing crisis? Women in the workforce doubling the cost of homes. This is good for society, because…???
Why are we run as a welfare state costing trillions of dollars we don’t have? Because “work or starve” doesn’t work for empathy voters who actually believe in a free lunch. We have for so long in the West entitled women – opened their doors, carried their packages, bought homes and cars and things for them, that they figured we owe them their choice in all aspects of government, too. It’s insane, and it will not be too long before it is recognized as the existential crisis of Western Civ that it is. By then, however, it may be too late.
Western Civ rose for millennia without female suffrage. The longer women are enfranchised, the worse Western Civ gets. All the “rights” they pretend to care about – just don’t even exist outside the West they now decry – and the things they pretend to abhor, like slavery, certainly do.
One wonders when, if, it will be figured out and acted upon.. will it be before it is too late?
We can have a free, educated, prosperous country of above-replacement fertility and proud families… OR … we can have female suffrage. WE CAN NOT HAVE BOTH.
Bravo.
The problem will be an easy fix, once The Troubles that are coming hit.
Colonel Kurtz : Have you ever considered any real freedoms? Freedoms from the opinion of others… even the opinions of yourself?
“darkness falls upon Humanity
and faces become terrible
things
that wanted more than there
was.
all our days are marked with
unexpected
affronts – some
disastrous, others
less so
but the process is
wearing and
continuous.
attrition rules.
most give
way
leaving
empty spaces
where people should
be.
and now
as we ready to self-destruct
there is very little left to
kill
which makes the tragedy
less and more
much much
more.”
― Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
Hadn’t heard that one before. Thanks.
Old saying: “Liberals think conservatives are evil, conservatives think liberals are stupid.”
No, I think the Left is evil, and perhaps Evil.
‘When 90% women vote for female/empathy priorities, and 50% of men vote as they’re told so as not to sleep on the couch, you have a super-majority of anti-progress voters voting for empathy over good government.’
Yes. Factor in dads of daughters — who typically go Total Feminist the day princess is born — you got an ongoing, guaranteed super-majority over any other combinative element.
Women skew massively towards themselves, cucks gonna cuck to stay off the couch, and to top off daughter is showered with advantages, privileges, and empowerments lifelong . . . meaning the State foots her bills, not daddy.
In trad society, dad must start worrying about princess as she approaches adolescence, because sexual complications arise soon after. He must betroth her fast and marry her off pronto. Elsewise, very quickly HE is stuck lifelong with her feeding, clothing, upkeep etc. Not an attractive choice when the Hive State will pay for all her needs, without any pesky husband to potentially challenge daddy’s status and standing with princess.
The Western matriarchies of the past forty years make damn sure that princess is sufficiently entitled and advantaged such that daddy feels safe setting her on the feminist/whore/career track. The enemy makes it easy for dad to dump the Trad Marriage route and opt-in to the one-big-happy gynarchy. Added to the other factors you mentioned, this ensures that the power and political-voting bloc cannot be broken by conventional means. The fix was always in.
The Matriarchy has ruined the country, movies, television, (I could go on forever).
>>That’s a 10,000 person Caravan every other day.
Over a year ago, Daughter #2, an E-4 in the Army, Southern Command, had her unit sent post-haste to the Darien Gap to find out what the hell was going on. Formerly impassible – no road or rail – the narcos and human smugglers, with our border wide open, bulldozed a road through the mountainous jungle terrain. Not a good road, but a road. My daughter’s report ended up on the desk of 4-star, who gave her a Commendation Medal.
That was a year ago. The numbers doubled. Then doubled again. It’s estimated 45,000 people now. A year ago, she saw dead women and children and trucks with broken axels full of fentanyl and morphine. Now? Who knows.
I never intended my fictional future history to be a road map to civilizational suicide.
And the NGOs are feeding them, building way stations, etc. Bad times.