Why the Adults are Losing
The stupidity out there is getting so thick a jackhammer, not a knife, is needed to cut through it. Maybe a blowtorch. Thermite pencil, anyone?
Not being much of a talk radio listener for logistical reasons (rarely in the car) and because it’s so predictably boring or boringly predictable, this afternoon I had a 30-min drive and, why not? Turning on the local, Phoenix, AM conservative yak, I found myself listening to and then turning off, a Professor Hadley Arkes, evidently of Amherst, profunditing about the culture wars, natural rights and schlepping his new book.
If this is the best the right has to offer, we definitely are doomed.
Three examples: abortion, who owns our kids, and the gender wars.
In the abortion debate, Prof Arkes insists we must apply the 14th Amendment and its guarantee of life, these are little human beings! Even the left knows this!
This is approaching an ideological debate using facts. Facts don’t win, in reality are a distraction from, an ideological debate, because it is…wait for it… IDEOLOGICAL! For this professor not to grasp this fundamental truism is scary, amazing and indicative of why the adults are losing.
Of COURSE they are little humans. So what? Does he really think the left cares about the lives of human beings? Really? Then how does he explain bad education that does not prepare them for a successful future, the preference of women to choose a career to make a few more bucks over the criticality to the society and civilization of properly raising the next generation – or even bearing them, the combo of increasing crime and murder rates in D metros and local governments concurrently decreasing incarceration, and an ever-poorer economy not able to provide decent salaries so that families can afford a home – and keep it? They left doesn’t CARE that babies are human beings. So why present multiple facts and laws supporting a case the other side, the side with whom one is arguing, rejects as foundational to their ideology as though these facts will win the debate and draw the opposition to your side?
With the School Board wars of late, the left has been demanding recognition of their ideological view that children belong to the State as they war against a right insisting children belong to their parents.
OK. Overlay this discussion on top of the abortion discussion. If children belong to their parents, the philosophical demand that the state must regulate their life and death in the womb, rests upon…?
Finally (at least finally before I turned him off) he yakked about the confirmation of KBJ to SCOTUS. Why? He was concerned that she couldn’t define what a “woman” is. This is a losing argument because the other side doesn’t care. If the left cared about women, no one would have heard of Lia Thomas or Dylan Mulvaney, Bud Light would still be a going brand, and we’d not be having discussions about putting men into women’s spaces.
KBJ said she was unable to define “woman.” The good professor said the line of questioning that ought to have been pursued was for a male questioner to ask her if he were a “woman.” Regardless of how she answered, his counter would be, “How do you know? Have you asked me?”
This is deranged thinking. It’s voluntarily fighting on the enemy’s chosen ground. It’s demanding to fight on a battlefield under long-developed interlocking fields of enemy fire.
The only salient response to KBJ being unable to define “woman” is: “OK, then. Either you are too dumb to grasp what a woman is, too ideological to say so, or too illiterate to understand the word itself. Which is it – dumb, ideological or illiterate? As such, not only should you be nowhere near SCOTUS, you need to be impeached from your current position – we need intelligent and literate, not ideological and illiterate, judges and justices.
The pursuit of strategies irrelevant to the battles being fought is amazingly absurd. It’s the Polish cavalry attacking NAZI panzers. It is SO dumb that these strategies always lose and the strategists proposing and pursuing them do not even understand why.