Prompted by stories of public schools engaging in what amounts, in all seriousness, to child abuse, routinely now targeted at children who don’t hew to the progressive messaging orthodoxy, Daren Jonescu plumbs the heart of the thing and comes away with some crucial insights:
[…]
Needless to say, not one of these cases [cap gun, Lego gun, Pop-Tart “gun,” etc] involves an actual threat or danger to anyone. Nor do any of them even indicate malicious intent on the part of the “offending” child; these were just boys playing, having fun, showing off their toys, or goofing around in the lunch room. In other words, their punishment — any punishment — seems disproportionate compared to their alleged wrongdoing.
But that conclusion, though correct from the point of view of common sense, is too easy, and actually misses the point. This is where the lines of communication between ordinary humans and progressive authoritarians break down every time. For in the Kafkaesque world of progressive regulatory theocracy, there is no disproportion at all between these children’s offenses and their punishments, once you understand that the children were not being punished for threatening or endangering anyone. Rather, they were being punished for “referencing” firearms in a nonjudgmental — or even (gasp) approving — manner. In other words, their offense, in each case, was, in adult terms, nothing less than a thought crime.
The boys’ harmless actions were unacceptable precisely because they were harmless. That is to say, in the current moral grammar of progressivism, it is an offense against society to think about guns without hating or fearing them — just as it is an offense to think about Western history without the Marxist context of systemic oppression, to think of female modesty without its radical feminist critique, or to think of wealth without simultaneously thinking of greed. Thus, just as with these other notions, entertaining the idea of guns in an innocuous way is indecent, immoral, and warrants one’s removal from the collective.
No one ever mistook a half-eaten Pop Tart for a weapon. And that is precisely why you are forbidden from saying “bang, bang” while wielding a half-eaten Pop Tart. If this still makes no sense to you, that is because you are not crazy. But try, for a moment, to put yourself into the twisted psyche of a progressive authoritarian, and ask yourself this question: What is the message being sent through such rules, and the lesson being taught through their enforcement?
First lesson: guns are bad — all guns, in any situation, regardless of who has them, or why. Even your gun is bad in your hands. The gun itself is inherently evil, and not to be trusted. And that means you are not to be trusted if you imagine that guns could ever be an innocuous or innocent toy. Having a gun, or even pretending to have a gun, makes you, ipso facto, a bad child. And the same, by implication, goes for your parents, your grandparents, or anyone else who has a gun, or wishes to have one.
As I have recently explained in theoretical terms, the very nature and purpose of compulsory public education is to soften the minds of each new generation for the tyrannical “paradigm shift” to be put into practice once that generation becomes the voting public. Here is an all-too-perfect practical instantiation of my argument. No governing document, and no natural rights theory, will be any match for the majority opinion issuing from a generation raised according to the “all guns are evil” principle.
Second lesson: it is not just guns themselves that are bad; even the thought of guns is unacceptable. Fake guns, Lego guns, Pop Tart guns, finger guns — “guns” that no one could ever mistake for a real gun — are offensive. The psychological aim is clear: you will be punished for imagining guns, until the government (er, I mean your teacher) washes that evil image from your dirty mind forever. Learning how to use contraceptives in your bisexual experimentation is an integral part of the elementary school curriculum; smoking dope like President Obama is just good clean fun; but getting caught with the thought of a gun in your mind is a suspension offense, and the police may need to be called in.
The ultimate goal is not to punish such thoughts; punishment is merely the means. The real goal is to break the young soul to self-censorship and self-accusation regarding all thoughts related to personal efficacy, individual power, independence, and self-defense. A submissive citizen does not “cling” to his weapons. Therefore, future citizens must be taught that such “clinging” is a vice. Submission to the collective is the goal. Seen from that perspective, it is quite logical to try to make children self-conscious about how they eat their Pop Tarts, lest they appear to be “threatening” society. Notice, they are not actually threatening any person; their threat, being imaginary, is abstract. It is a threat to “other students” in the abstract, to the collective. The child is learning to feel guilty if he catches himself in possession of thoughts unacceptable to the state as such; that is, he is learning to submit.
Kafka’s world is our world. The nightmare logic of infinite bureaucratic authority which drives a man into admitting his own guilt without even understanding what he is accused of is the mechanism of public school indoctrination. And like Kafka’s Josef K., we are all, in the compulsory progressive public school, to learn how to self-accuse, to self-incriminate, to self-condemn. And then, at the end of our submissive life of democratic self-enslavement, socialized medicine will treat us to the ignominy of an ending worthy of Josef K. — “‘Like a dog!’ he said; it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.”
Surreality has been a theme of mine going back some time now, though I tend to use the opening scenes from Joe vs. the Volcano or Terry Gilliam’s Brazil as referential touchstones, hoping to broaden the reach of the Kafkaesque beyond Kafka. (Ironically, Gilliam is a leftist; which means he likely would have now to support that which his movie so effectively depicts as a kind of workaday Hell.)
So Jonescu’s points resonate with me: the ends to which the means of punishment endeavor to bring about is the creation of a progressive-sanctioned thought matrix, a way to turn the PC into a kind of de facto state-approved speech. With “tolerance” and the various labels of “hate speech” working as its social and legal policing mechanism. By this method — which involves, as Jonescu rightly notes, the destruction of autonomy and the reshaping of the individual into a cog meant to help drive the happily humming Statist machine — the left doesn’t have to repeal the First Amendment or the Second Amendment and so on, because they will have trained future voters to create populist preference cascades that the progressives hope will lead to more laws, more regulation, and more niche carvings through which the natural right still remains, but it becomes so costly — socially, financially — and inaccessible, that it is left largely impotent and available only exclusively to the proper types.
Now, how language is put to (incoherent) work by the leftists (and many whose policy positions fall on the right) to reinforce the primacy of the group — the collective — while delegitimating the autonomy of individual agency, robbing it of its meaning by determining for it its intent, is something Jonescu doesn’t get in to.
But I’m sure there’s not a soul reading this who’s been here any length of time who wouldn’t be able to immediately connect those dots.
(h/t Lee)
We don’t even take a dump around here without a 27b/6
Obama’s IRS restored tax-exempt status for Hamas-linked CAIR despite years of delinquent filings
Jonescu ends:
Using the myth of the good of society, the State won when it took education. Everything else followed.
Make Room for Islamistgate: The Obama Administration’s Newest, (Biggest?) Scandal
The learning being done by this system is not like learning math or spelling. This type of learning is what I think of as emotional programing, brainwashing is what we call it in other contexts. It is one of my hobby-horses of how the left for one, radical Islam is another, seeks to change people to fit into and at the same time bring into existence the world they want.
Once you have gotten young people to react in an emotional manner you want to some object, idea, action. That emotional reaction will overwhelm any attempt to change it by a logical argument. Only having a long period of experience in life that shows that reaction to not be related to the real world can break the hold of the brainwashing done.
This is why the left wants a longer and longer time period to be in control of all children. The earlier and longer this programming the more successful and long lasting it will be. Once a generation of voters have a built-in abhorrence to even the thought of a gun why would they not then demand that those horrible objects be banned totally.
Edmonds students suspended for using Nerf guns at school
I’ve tried to make the same point about school gun rules and “educator” reactions, but the term I was missing was “thought crime”. That really makes the point, and is exactly what this is all about.
Teen Who Built Nuclear Reactor DQ’d from Science Fair
Was his reactor shaped like a gun?
A presidential or congressional candidate who doesn’t promise to abolish the U.S. Department of Idiocation won’t get my vote.
And I’m leaning toward demanding that gubernatorial and legislative candidates vow to shutter all schools of idiocation in the state’s public universities.
3rd lesson: it’s bad for a boy to act like a boy.
Capitol Police to Tea Party: Show Us Your Websites or Forget Your Rally
This is the long con that liberals are good at. Gun control will be irrelevant if a whole generation is raised to not only fear guns but fear the very thought of self defense and self reliance. All I can say is thank god for Hollywood and their tireless promotion of how awesome firearms are.
Austria: Teachers told not to cover Turkish jihad invasions of Europe, to avoid offending Muslims
The only thing standing between the Left and its glorious workers’
graveyardparadise is an army of proud, brave, American men with weapons to defend themselves.Thus, they must drive out pride, courage, manhood, and weapons.
To a ‘progressive authoritarian’, zero tolerance rules that result in these absurd cases are perfectly acceptable. But these new American Brown Shirts are adequately labeled already: Liberal Fascists.
Their influence is now nearly absolute, given that any who question their mighty Collective can be summarily and now! officially demonized (by the schools, the IRS, the Justice Department, the Capitol Police, and soon enough, any uniformed police force).
We’ve passed a tipping point. Too many young dogs responding to entrancing whistles that are countered only by gruff warning barks: all we’ve got to offer to counter. ‘Individual Liberty’ isn’t what our youthful collectivized majority wants anymore. Better, to most, is a bigger Government that’ll wipe their noses and coddle their worthless asses for life.
What will it take to slow this trend I wonder? Nothing pleasant I’m guessing. Certainly not anything the GOP can put together.
cheesehead update
Appeals Court Rules Wisconsin Voter ID Constitutional, WIGOP: Let’s Go Even Further
We’re done til we use the gun.
I think this pretty much sums up where we are. With the Bruce playing the GOP, and Wallace as the TEA party.
Actually, as I remember the movie, that scene was more 2010. Now is the part later in the movie where Wallace discovers how the Bruce fucked him over…
Word, Lee. Hubs and I have been saying the same for at least six months or actually, since Benghazi.
Democrats Publicly Endorse Profiling
11-Yr-Old Suspended From School For Merely TALKING About Guns
bordo wins the thread
The next suspension will be for thinking about guns. I’m not sure how they’ll know it’s happening, but they are working on it.
the chitown way
Federal worker busted in worker’s comp fraud by… “Price is Right” appearance
Forum on civil rights sparks protest rally for free speech
goldberg was saying sumthing about nook the other day
link
I think the pop tart kid was busted on suspicion of thinking about guns.
Hitler said something about kindergartens in a speech once.
oh look nookie
If you are an educator, say with a college on your hands, you wish to get as many students as possible, and you whittle down your requirements accordingly.
Meanwhile, the Remnant, aware of this adulteration and of the desires that prompt it, turn their backs on the prophet and will have nothing to do with him or his message.
The prophet of the American masses must aim consciously at the lowest common denominator of intellect, taste, and character among 120,000,000 people; and this is a distressing task. The prophet of the Remnant, on the contrary, is in the enviable position of Papa Haydn in the household of Prince Esterhazy. All Haydn had to do was keep forking out the very best music he knew how to produce, knowing it would be understood and appreciated by those for whom he produced it, and caring not a button what anyone else thought of it — and that makes a good job.
update nockie
And thus the muslims finally conquered Vienna.
That has to be one of the saddest headlines I’ve ever seen.
link
Hitler knew nothing of the vast deposits of methane hydrate what hold such promise for Japan and India and other resource-poor nations
” other resource-poor nations”
stupid proggs. they do “resource” po
About Bordo’s comment above.
Three Year-Old Deaf Boy Told to Change His Name – School Says His Sign Looks Too Much Like a Gun (Video)
That was last August, and the idiocators actually wised up on that one. After being pummeled severely about the face and ears by the brain-cell-surfeited..
It sounds like Darrel Prioleau needs to be questioned by the public. Loudly and repeatedly.
The gates of Vienna are breached and the city has fallen.
The anniversary celebration of The Fall Of Constantinople* has, it seems, begun early this year.
[29 May 1453 – Julian Calendar / 11 June – Gregorian]
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Thanks to newrouter and Ernst for making my trackbacked post possible.
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