Wolf!

I have long been open about my diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from my experiences living through the war with Iraq and Islamic revolution in Iran as a child. I usually don’t share too many details mostly out of concern for other people. Sometimes I share the details just to contextualize what real trauma is. Even then I only share the exact details in strict confidence to protect the innocent, not the guilty. There are people who have experienced worse things, but we are not talking about the trivialities too many people call trauma these days. Real trauma is real and it is sad that the diagnosis of PTSD has turned into some sort of joke. It took years of therapy before I stopped being emotionally triggered by candlelight in ways I could not myself understand. Psychopathology is real and psychotherapy is real.

One aspect of my trauma included going to a segregated school for Jewish boys run by the theocratic Muslim regime. We were subjected to lessons trying to convert us to Islam and daily exercises in hating Israel as part of our specialized curriculum for Jews. There were flags of Israel and the United States painted on the doorstep. When the teachers weren’t looking, we would jump over them. During the chants of “death to Israel” that accompanied our physical exercises, we would make a slight change in pronunciation to say “death to Azrael”. When the principal could discern that too many students were saying the wrong word, he would make us keep doing jumping jacks until enough students switched over to Israel for his liking. I don’t remember if I ever gave up, but eventually morning exercises had to end. There was no way for him to distinguish the students yelling “death to Israel” from those yelling “death to Azrael.” There was only so long that he could make us do jumping jacks. There is only so far that authoritarians can go. It was a contest of wills between the principal and the boys who just wanted the jumping jacks to end. Most of the pressure came from other boys who were tired, didn’t really care who they were yelling death to, and just wanted to get on with their lives. That is what really makes authoritarianism so bad. What it makes us do to each other. The betrayal by those who want to give up and stop the resisters from making the situation worse.

I remember one particular assembly where we watched an older student undergoing corporal punishment for his behavior during an earlier assembly where the flag of the United States was burned. Apparently, someone had seen him roll his eyes or scoff somehow. His shirt was stripped off and his back was lashed with what I think was a garden hose.

These experiences led me to passionate love for the United States in a manner that my American friends could never really understand. It was in a somewhat literal sense mental illness. I envied them their naivete, but couldn’t really explain to them how good they had it. There were so many small details. I remember my father making jokes that helped me to realize that we did not have to fear the police in the United States like we did in Iran. How does an American understand the difference between fearing rogue policemen as opposed to a police state? They imagine they do. Every time someone talks about us living in a police state today in America, especially when they point to anecdotes, they loudly announce their ignorance. The sustained threat of drowning is qualitatively different from the discomfort of getting wet.

The United States gave me refuge. I have an intense interest in knowing why the United States is so very different than Iran. I spent most of my academic career studying political science and law due to this interest. It is very much related to what I am studying now.

I fear what could happen in this country. I don’t fear the Wokerati. They are incompetent and delusional. I would be less worried if there was a plausible case that they could achieve their Utopia or at least govern effectively. They very obviously cannot. I worry about the damage they are doing to our society. I believe that few people recognize the long term consequences of the corruption of our education system. It will take at least a generation to recover from the damage that has already been done. That obviously makes me sad. So much wasted opportunity and unnecessary misery is tragic.

I fear far more the inevitable right-wing backlash that they are engendering. Any competent social scientist will tell you that a right-wing backlash is capable of great harm. Conservatives are, by nature, hard to provoke. They are also, by nature, both competent and conscientious. There is no question who has the most martial training and arms in the United States. It is, without any doubt, the right. Backlashes can spiral into all forms of chaos.

I have been warning for years, as have many others, that the LGBT community is being hurt the most by the idiotic behavior of the Wokerati. Trans people are particularly susceptible to faux representatives because the vast majority are very private people who simply want to be like everyone else. The vocal trans activists have very different views from the private trans people interested in their own private lives. Many of the most private trans people pass easily for their new gender. Some of them were routinely mistaken for their new gender before they themselves identified that way. Yet these self appointed activists pretend to speak for everyone else when they make demands on behalf of the most indefensible cases.

I know many, many people who are actually LGBT. I’m not talking about the people who think it is fashionable to pronounce yourself queer because it is boring to be straight. The vast majority of my LGBT friends find much of what is happening to be bewildering and offensive. What started as demands for self-determination and privacy have turned into intrusive attacks into the lives of uninvolved people. Stay out of my bedroom is very different from bake me a cake, let me into your changing room, celebrate my wedding in your church, and teach your children about my sex life. All of them, even those who support the intersectional DEI cause, are worried about a backlash.

It is not advocacy on behalf of trans people to associate them with rapists and murderers. It is not advocacy on behalf of trans people to demand expensive affirmation surgery for someone a majority of people want to see dead. It may be virtue signaling by people with luxury beliefs. It could be a publicity stunt to raise donations for the ACLU. It might even be effective advocacy against the death penalty. It is not, however, effective advocacy on behalf of trans individuals.

Yet the threat of an authoritarian backlash cannot be reason to advocate for complacency. That is what the true believers in the Woke cause will tell us. If we stop resisting because we are in fear, we are no better than the boys who gave up on chanting death to Azrael. If we encourage others to give up, we are no better than the boys who encouraged the other boys to chant death to Israel.

There are many things wrong with this type of thinking. The least of which is to blame school boys for insufficiently resisting the Islamic Republic of Iran. You have to know when to fight and what to fight. You cannot simply resist for the purpose of resisting. You cannot let the weakest and most vulnerable in society suffer in futile resistance when you should be planning effective organization. You should not be sacrificing the LGBT community in your attempts to push a Marxist agenda. This is the cognitive distortion known as heaven’s reward. Just because you suffered doesn’t mean you deserve and will receive a reward. Just because you make a sacrifice doesn’t mean you sacrificed the right thing and heaven must reward you. Foolish sacrifices merely destroy.

The best reason to abandon this type of Woke provocation of a backlash is that it is the futile, deluded, plans of incompetent authoritarians. The Wokerati may be well intentioned, although even that is debatable. The fact is that their cause is completely unjust in every way. Good intentions do not always produce good fruit. Good intentions do not entitle you to enslave the rest of humanity to your desires. Good intentioned negligence that is indistinguishable from sabotage is no better than sabotage. Many people believe that Gandhi was well-intentioned in his disastrous policies, so that somehow distinguishes him from the other leaders who caused misery on an industrial scale. Even if Gandhi was not a child molester (if you doubt that, you have not read his confessions). Billions of people were impoverished and millions of people have died due to his massive ego and complete incompetence at every turn in his career. The threat of nuclear war between Pakistan and India is only getting worse. Gandhi is directly responsible for all of this. Does it matter to the billions of people who live in poverty as a direct result of his idiotic economic policies if he meant well? India would have been far better off if Emperor Gandhi had allowed for the home rule he claimed to value than his disastrous efforts to keep India together. It was his authoritarian nature which prevented people from living peaceably as neighbors. He could not tolerate the many different peoples in India with many different ethnicities and religions each going their own way.

All of that is context to explain my reaction to the video in this tweet. Young Canadian children being encouraged by a veiled Muslim woman to stomp on rainbow flags.

https://twitter.com/truckdriverpleb/status/1667193315576487936

You cannot imagine my sadness at seeing this video. Thanks to many years of therapy and modern medicine, I can deal with this rationally. Rationally, the only response you can have to this situation is to be emotional. Denial, bargaining, anger, or grief. Any of the above are normal responses. Pick as many as you like. The fact that this took place in Canada, however, cannot be ignored.

This type of thing does not, could not, and should not happen in a society like ours for many reasons. It is a symptom of a deeply disturbed society that parents would do such things to their own kids as a public display for a great number of reasons. I greatly fear what it says about the future of our society. I fear the actions of these people, I fear the reaction of the Woke and I fear the reaction to the reaction of the Woke. It would take me years to explain how such a public display exposes a rot at the very core of our society. All of the reasons you can think of, plus many more. Social policy, foreign policy, religious differences, failure of government, etc. The situation can quickly escalate into something I never imagined happening even in Mexico, a politically unstable and undeveloped country. The vast majority of Americans have no experience with the type of political environment that produces such a display. Not even as well traveled and experienced globetrotters to the countries where the citizens endure the environment long-term. A sustained fight for survival engenders a desperation and infighting far beyond jumping jacks. Living your life inside a raging river is very different from swimming those same waters for a brief time.

Things have changed in our society for the worse in ways that are very different than they have been in our lifetimes. I used to warn people about frivolous World War II analogies. The atrocities of the 20th Century are not a joke. The very real misery and loss of life caused by Mao, Stalin, Hitler, and Gandhi are not a laughing matter. Their maliciousness and incompetence cost millions of lives. The repercussions of their failed policies may yet lead to nuclear war. The constant crying wolf by so many in our society about threats that are at best unrealized have numbed most sensible people to any such warnings.

Yet I feel obliged to say that we are indeed looking at the possibility of something that may be even worse. Not some sudden, temporary problem. A long and sustained collapse of society. Something that can be brought about simply by reduced safety of international travel or rising energy costs which lead to a spike in prices on goods. There are any number of things which can go wrong and our society has been weakened. This is what I have been calling a Steel Age Collapse. Much smarter people than me have been warning about this recently. Not the usual boys who cry wolf. Serious adults who dismissed the previous cries of wolf are themselves now crying wolf.

Wolf! Wolf!

We can change course. We must change course. I believe that the first step toward that is finding competent people we can trust and extending trust in competent ways. We are not atomistic individuals. An individual human being is not a viable living organism.

If you see the symptoms of a real problem, then talk with someone you trust who is competent to help you address that problem. None of us can survive by ourselves. Not even in the best of times.