Neither tub nor man

Conservatives on social media more or less agree: Harriet Tubman was a badass (and a Republican!!1) who used guns and stuff, and Andrew Jackson was an douchebag Democrat who ruled like a dictator.

Sounds about right I guess. I’m personally A-OK with Jackson getting the boot, because he gave us now-deified mob democracy and represents the worst of the Imperial Presidency.

But my gut tells me that this can’t be the end of the story, because Republicans contorting themselves to act as though Democrats Are The Real Racists never actually scores them any points; they are here to serve as the court jester for progressives to compare themselves to, playing the loser from the backwater province known as the past. Someone way less smart and cool than progressives must be outraged at history moving forward, right?

I haven’t seen any specific examples yet, but before even writing this sentence I assume that there’s a practical cottage industry of “look at these 12 Twitter accounts who said racist things about Harriet Tubman!” articles. Let’s check:

tubman

Mariani does it again! Or maybe it’s not that I’m clairvoyant, but that the media is always willing to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find a few people with double-digit follower counts on Twitter to confirm something that we’re all already supposed to believe: that there’s a powerful racist conspiracy controlling America. Is the tweet from @whitepower12345, a 7-hour-old account with 6 followers and an egg avatar, seriously not enough to convince you?

Is there a white supremacist ideology dominating society’s powerful institutions? I don’t know. But there’s some evidence that that this isn’t the case. Exhibit A: the government just opted to replace a white man with a black woman on the twenty-dollar bill.

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Denny Hastert, sexual revolutionary

Why do liberals care that former Speaker of the House Denny Hastert molested four young boys?

That’s a serious question. Federal prosecutors allege that Hastert sexually abused at least four students while coaching wrestling at Yorkville High School in Illinois. He subsequently tried to cover up the molestation by paying the victims $3.5 million in hush money. No such luck, as the PATRIOT Act, which Hastert was indispensable in shepherding through Congress, alerted law enforcement officials to the payoffs.

George Bernard Shaw would be hard-pressed to create such delicious irony.

Liberals, seizing on the personal hypocrisy of a midwestern Republican leader, are going ape shit over Hastert’s alleged diddling of teenage boys. Mary Elizabeth Williams of Salon demands that “no pity” be given for the former Speaker. The comment sections of left-wing havens like Slate.com are littered with contempt and denunciations of Hastert’s perversion.

I honestly don’t understand how the Left can be so stinging in its criticism of Hastert. Aren’t we supposed to be accepting of the alternative sexual choices of others? Isn’t it bigoted to cast judgment upon those can’t help their sexual preference? And doesn’t social justice warriorism claim that men can’t be raped?

If Denny Hastert sexually abused male students in his role as a teacher and mentor, liberals have no reason to be incensed by his behavior. After all, it wasn’t conservatives who led the effort to rid sex of reasonable limits. Progressives started it, and, boy, do they intend to finish it.

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Future things

Daniel Clowes did it first, but I have future predictions of my own:

  • We will be ashamed for ever believing the things we currently think are cool were ever, in fact, cool.
  • Many computers will choose to convert to Catholicism.
  • Furries will routinely use gene therapy to become more like their animal-esque personas
  • Desire modification will become really common and confusing. People already modify their desire to desire sex (aphrodisiacs) and desire to not desire drugs (rehab.) But thanks to advances in neuroscience, people in the future will be modifying their desire to desire to desire to desire…
  • In an effort to stave off nihilism, many people will use brain implants to force themselves to faithfully mimic the behavior/memes of their ancestors.
  • In the wake of the collapse of earlier revenue models, pornography and advertisements will overlap. When seeing a commercial, viewers will have an option to watch the actors in the commercial have sex as an alternate ending (18+ only). Mattress commercials are the obvious low-hanging fruit here.
  • Virtual reality will make anime real, and new sexual orientations will be made to accommodate people who maintain virtual relationships with their perfect waifus.
  • Smart contracts and robotic enforcement will make property far more sovereign (immune to politics) than it’s ever been. There will also be corporations that are operated by literally nobody, just artificial intelligence.

It’s gonna be pretty crazy.

Graveyard of elephants

cementery

The GOP is in Civil War, as Rod Dreher says. There are few possibilities of a Trump victory as pointed out by Noah Millman, he will lose against Hillary Clinton and against Bernie Sanders he would probably perform even more poorly. So is there a hope. For those who read The American Conservative the permanent mantra of Pat Buchanan is that Trump would win against Hillary because he is populist. I think there are a lot of flaws in that declaration, Jesse Walker shows that the term populist had been used for a long time for very different political characters, just like some people seem Trump as a populist, liberals and some independents seem him as a demagogue. Even those on the left who could recognize him as a populist probably would prefer to throw their support behind Sanders who in a general election would accuse Trump of being a millionaire who wants to simply buy the election. While I consider myself a proud anti-imperialist, despite the efforts of Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul, few people consider foreign policy their main priority. Even if Trump probably would be less hawkish than Hillary, his defeat is almost a ccertainty. So what could happen to the future of Republican Party?

Trumpkins. The establishment would face a difficult challenge if Donald Trump doesn’t get a majority of the delegates at the convention. But whether they support him or make a last attempt to stop him, they would alienate one of two groups. If they support Trump, independents might prefer the Democratic nominee whoever it is. If they support another candidate, trumpkins might feel betray and stay at home in November. What would happen after that, the establishment really hates Trump but knows that in order to win they need their supporters. However after 2016, like in the 90s with Buchanan or in 2010 with the Tea Party, the GOP would face an existential challenge. The big question is whether Trump would run in 2020.

The establishment. Trump’s rise had shown that many Republican primary voters have little interest in neoconservatism. It seems also that Israel is not a priority for conservatives, even evangelical Christians. Another Wall Street Journal editorial calling for tax cuts and open borders wouldn’t change that. There could be consequences for not heeding what were once the Buchanan supporters in the 90s or the Paul supporters in the 2000s. Being out of power so much time could have certain effects, Jon Huntsman was almost a parody of a RINO in the 2012 primary, however as one of few national figures with bipartisan appeal the GOP may trust him for a comeback.

Libertarians. On the one hand the popularity of Trump is a clear example that a majority of Republicans are not libertarians, however it also has shown that they could vote for an anti-establishment candidate. The major surprise of this election is that the one calling for getting out of NATO is Trump. The average GOP voter maybe not be a perfect anti-imperialist but don’t buy the neocon foreign policy either. So could they want the libertarian realism of Rand Paul, I doubt it. Probably Justin Amash and Thomas Massie are going to have a better chance.

Social Conservatives. They might find out the hard way that corporate America is not going to be friendly with them. Especially Hollywood and Silicon Valley differ too much from their agenda of religious freedom. I don’t think it’s surprising that corporate America could panic more from Trump than Sanders because Scandinavia had shown that corporations could survive higher taxes, when the state take care of the necessities of workers instead of them. Immigration is a subject that Trump raised but the establishment also know that corporate America wants open borders forcheap labor. It is very difficult to imagine how they would nominee in the future Cruz, Huckabee or Santorum but the real question is if they could choose Trump again.

Some days I just wanna…

Some days, all I want is the police to violently punish the miscreants who play super victim in public.

It’s like the old Mencken saying, “Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” Except, instead of cutting jugulars, I want to see some SJWs have their skulls cracked against pavement.

The latest example: A group of students (it’s always jobless college students) at Emory University protested an overnight pro-Donald Trump chalking of the campus. As the little snowflakes descended upon the Emory University building, they chanted commie bromides about how it is their “duty to win” and how they have “nothing to lose but our chains.” The leader of the march, sophomore Jonathan Peraza, demanded university officials “Come speak to us” because “we are in pain!”

If these crybabies think a chalk drawing of Kingfish Trump’s coiffure is painful, I gleefully wonder how they’ll feel about the back of a police truncheon.

The Emory trail of tears is just latest show of pitiful behavior in a long line of academia-enabled embarrassment. Precious angels at Oberlin College are complaining about dining hall food not being culturally accurate. Black students at the University of Albany are faking being attacked by white racists. Super queer and free speech hero Milo Yiannopoulos continues to have his university speeches disrupted by momma’s boys who can’t bear to hear a thought they disagree with.

Every time I read stories of students bitching about how hard and oppressive life in America is, I wish they would get a first-hand experience at real, physical brutality. Upset a non-Mexican wore a sombrero to a kegger? Have you ever had police hounds sicced on you? Or been pummeled by a high pressure hose?

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The myth of papal culpability in the spread of HIV

One of the pillars of being Catholic in this modern age (if I may borrow a theological concept from Islam) is the ability to display patience in the face of all sorts of slander against the Church, but after years of reading articles and comments online in which people propagated the myth that the Catholic Church is to blame for the spread of HIV in the developing world, I was prodded into action. The straw that broke the camel’s back on this occasion was a piece by Ben Goldacre, physician and best-selling author of the book Bad Science. Writing for The Guardian about the visit of Pope Benedict to London in 2010 he said: “This week the pope is in London. You will have your own views on the discrimination against women, the homophobia, and the international criminal conspiracy to cover up for mass child rape. My special interest is his role in the 2 million people who die of AIDS each year.”

That’s a lot of mudslinging, but what’s crystal clear is his belief that the Catholic Church is at least partly responsible for the lack of screening for sexually transmitted infections and the spread of HIV/AIDS throughout the developing world. In this he is not alone. The Atlantic in 2013 referred to “Vatican City’s refusal to encourage condom use in the fight against HIV/AIDS” and a policy which “has had serious, long-lasting consequences across the global south — especially Africa.” My problem with these arguments is that they exhibit a fundamental misunderstanding not only of human nature, but of the religious demographics of sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the developing world.

According to the CIA’s World Factbook, Swaziland has the highest HIV infection rate in the world with over a quarter of its population suffering with the disease. Yet only one fifth of Swaziland’s population is Catholic. The vast majority of its population are Protestants.

Swaziland is not exceptional; most of sub-Saharan Africa is Protestant. Botswana is next on the list and is overwhelmingly so. Lesotho is third, with Catholics and Protestants evenly split. South Africa is fourth; only seven per cent of its population identifies as Catholic.

If the accusations are true – that the Pope can effect change in the sexual habits of sub-Saharan Africans – why are the countries with the highest infection rates not majority Catholic? How many Protestants do you know whose reverence for the Catholic Church is so great that they base their sexual habits on its teachings?

The first country on the list with a clear majority of Catholics among total Christians is Mozambique in eighth place, and even still, the Catholic population comprises a mere quarter of the total. The first country on the list that could be considered a Catholic country in the sense that Poland or Italy are is Equatorial Guinea, down in eleventh place.

Westerners have been chastising the Church for alleged influence on African sexual predilections for some time but familiarity with these accusations fails to tarnish their idiocy. Their argument goes something like this: The Pope – a religious leader in Rome – lectures people on what they can and cannot do in matters of sexual intercourse. Europeans (and other white people) are sophisticated enough to merely disregard the pontiff’s advice; anyone who contracts HIV in, say, Russia or Los Angeles has only themselves to blame. Africans, however – uneducated peasants that they are – simply cannot resist the Pope’s teachings, even when he’s not their religious leader.

Imagine the following scenario. A married taxi-driver in Kampala gets off a long shift. He goes to visit a prostitute. The prostitute suggests wearing a condom. Now this is the point where criticism of Catholic teaching regarding condoms gets strange. Assuming that the taxi-driver is Catholic (in Uganda he is more likely to be a Protestant), he is expected by anti-Catholics to say: ‘I’m sorry. I cannot use a condom. I am a Catholic and I cannot disobey the teachings of my Church.’ This poses a question. Why is the taxi-driver adhering so slavishly to this single rule while ignoring so many others? He is committing adultery, having sex out of wedlock and using a prostitute. It should go without saying that the Pope disapproves of all three.

Sub-Saharan Africa’s problem with HIV stems from other things. This is a part of the world where presidents believe showering after sex can reduce the risk of contracting the disease (Jacob Zuma, ex-President of South Africa) and where presidents accuse western leaders of ‘spreading gayism,’ calling gay rights ‘satanic’ (Robert Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe). There exists a vast number of people who often don’t have access to condoms and have no idea how to get tested for syphilis. Men are suspicious about the efficiency of condoms, men who tend to associate them with a homosexual lifestyle and others who believe that HIV can be washed away with water or, more disturbingly, cured by having sex with a virgin.

If the accusations leveled at the Church were true then surely we would see a markedly higher infection rate among African Catholics than Africans of other faiths. Yet this is not the case. In South America – an overwhelmingly Catholic continent – the country with the highest infection rate is the only one with a minority of Catholics: Guyana.

The Catholic Church has no doubt led someone somewhere sometime to refuse wearing a condom, in a philosophical sense ‘assisting’ in spreading the disease. But if the infected man listened as intently to the Pope on matters of abstinence and marital fidelity as intently as he is believed to listen to the Pope’s teachings on condoms then nobody would have the disease. We have a word for a person who knowingly infects someone with a deadly disease like HIV, and that word is sociopath. Ignorance should not be a defense. If someone you knew were to use prostitutes without condoms, thereby putting others at risk of contracting the disease, they would probably be persona non grata at your dinner parties. So why do we treat all Africans as victims and the Church as the cause of their suffering when most countries with Catholic majorities don’t have remotely similar experiences?

For its basic understanding of human biological impulses one might fairly describe the Church as naive, but one shouldn’t treat Africans like simpletons and in doing so engage in the racism of low expectations.

Derek Hopper is a native of Dublin and studied history at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He lives in Bangkok, where he teaches English at the faculty of liberal arts, Thammasat University. Follow him on Twitter.

(Image source)