Category Archives: The Zeitgeist

Cold Turkey For Creepy Kids And Their Even Creepier Parents

Etiquette, Fascism, Intellectualism, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, The West, The Zeitgeist

Here is a follow up on our pro-civilization, Adult Lives Matter, reclaim-the-childhood crusade. To our dossier on a child-deifying nation, we add the insanity that is the non-dilemma below.

A DRUDGE headline blares today: “Parent: My 8-Year-Old Son’s iPad Addiction Is As Real As Alcoholism, Drug Abuse…”

You don’t need to read this drivel in which a dumb parent “shares” his dumber, self-inflicted malady so publicly—public writing has turned into anti-intellectual public advocacy, hasn’t it? Conjure and share your cultivated malady, and abracadabra, you are a hero.

Whinging aside, you already knew the following:

* It’s your fault the little snot is addicted not to books or to outdoor ball games, but to gadgets.

* Who gave the gadget to said snot? You did! Take the iPad away.

* Stop paying for your kids’ cell phones and assorted hand-held devices. (It costs a fortune!)

You and I survived without them. If Creepy kid needs to contact crazy in love parent urgently, he or she can go to the principal’s office. It’ll give Creepy an opportunity to practice a few civilizing habits you refrained from teaching him:

Knock on her door (it’s never a guy these days). Enter when she says so. Address her as Ma’am or Mrs. Ask if you may call mom or dad, PLEASE.

Alternatively, tell him to wait on the corner until you collect him, just like you, his parent, used to do (we walked home, 4-5km each day).

Oh, and if a stranger sidles up to Creepy … you know the rest.

READING:

“Adult Lives Matter: On Kids And Communism.”

“Reclaiming Childhood: They Don’t Make Kids Like They Use To.”

Blind, Self-Absorbed Media Lose Out In The NYC Marathon

Human Accomplishment, Pop-Culture, Reason, Sport, The Zeitgeist

In the context of the 2015 TCS New York City Marathon, whose “story” ought to be more compelling to a rational individual?

The story of Kenyans Stanley Biwott and Mary Keitany who won the race, or the quirky story of some blind Frenchman, who resides in the US, seems to have access to all the resources in the world, and decided on a whim to recruit friends to assist him in running a marathon (the result of which would be guaranteed face-time on the American mass media, which is forever searching out freaky stories, or ways to shape their viewers’ notion of heroism).

The correct answer—yes, I’d argue there is such a thing—is the two Kenyans. You can be sure that the two gifted, heroic runners acquired their endurance and speed by running barefoot to school and back, each day. Barefoot not because it’s the latest (Western) trend in running, but by necessity.

Wow! Can you believe that the barefoot line was written above before I looked up the story, “What Makes Kenya’s Marathon Runners The World’s Best”?

In addition, most kids usually run to school barefoot, which I think has some effect because it means they grow up being excellent runners …

In fact, the “ran to school every day” thought was first floated on Barely a Blog in 2012, on 07.26.12 @ 3:01 pm, to be precise.

In any event, our heroes are: Anyone who runs a marathon, in general. And the incredible Kenyan champions who run against all odds.

In sum, sentimentality clouds judgment and leads to misplaced sympathy and, consequently, to the blind self-absorption and solipsism on display in the blind man Fox News segment.

Gunning For Tom Brady

Race, Racism, Sport, The Zeitgeist

I don’t give a tinker’s toss about the “Ow My Balls!” episode in which the New England Patriots are embroiled. (The satire “Idiocracy” predicted that in 2505, the age of the idiot, America would be enthralled by one of two seconds-long “films.” The first is “Ow my Balls!”) Worth pondering, however, is the hatred directed toward Tom Brady.

On MSNBC, the other day, a character from The Nation, Dave Zirin is his name, alluded to Brady’s own decaying Dorian Gray portrait stashed away in his attic.

In “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Oscar Wilde told the riveting story of “a man who never ages while his portrait turns decrepit” because of his own “moral and spiritual putrefaction.” (The New Yorker.)

Nice comparison!

The Zirin bloke also protested the presence of a white man (Tom Brady) in a predominantly black sports league.

Brady’s a Dorian Gray (beautiful but evil) and he’s white (privileged but evil): If you ask me, these racists are gunning for the guy.

Rachel Dolezal: A Racially Abused Girl—Really

Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Race, Racism, The Zeitgeist

“Rachel Dolezal: A Racially Abused Girl—Really” is the current column. An excerpt:

… Poor Rachel [Dolezal] painted her face orange, gave herself a Sideshow Bob hairdo, and adopted the ideology of the eternally oppressed. Big deal. Most of America’s authentic poseurs are phonies who’ve never been oppressed.

Unlike most blacks, Dolezal—by the admission of the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Washington-State chapter—had done “quality work” to “elevate the issues of civil rights.”

“I just want to feel beautiful, and this is how I feel beautiful,” the woman said rather plaintively. Yes, Dolezal is the white face of parental and societal displacement. Why am I the only one to find her pitiful, even deserving of pity?

In America, black is beautiful.

To be black is to be more righteous, nobler; carry the heaviest historic baggage—heavier than the Holocaust—and be encouraged to perpetually and publicly pick at those suppurating sores.

To be black is to have an unwritten, implicit social contract with wider, whiter society.

To be black it to be born with an IOY (I Owe You); it is to be owed apologies, obsequiousness, education, and auto-exculpation for any wrongdoing.

Why can’t Rachel have some of that?

Was not Ms. Dolezal displaced for real in her parents’ affections? Rachel’s story should begin with parents Larry and Ruthanne Dolezal, who adopted four children, “three of whom were African-American while the other was from Haiti.”

Does this fashionable adoption not send a message to a vulnerable girl that she and her biological brother are too pale for their pious parents? …

Read the rest. “Rachel Dolezal: A Racially Abused Girl—Really” is now on The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine.