Author: Crowhill Report

I don’t follow tennis or care that much about it, but the U.S. Open is not allowing one of the greatest tennis players in the world to compete because he’s not vaccinated.

There was a time when this might have made some sense. The so-called experts used to tell us that getting the vaccine prevented you both from getting COVID and from passing it to others. If that were true, then there’s some justification for keeping Djokovic out (although accommodations could have been made).

But it’s not true, and everyone acknowledges that. To continue to keep him out of the competition is wrong.

For those of you on LinkedIn, here’s a short video I posted.

It’s a horrible shame when the world is so messed up that you take notice when someone does something plain, obvious, and sane.

A few Catholic dioceses have issued sensible rules on “gender” nonsense.

I saw something somewhere where a critic of right-wing complaints about wokeness demanded a definition.

Yeah.

I’m sympathetic, but I also realize that is a left-brain obsession that doesn’t work in the real world.

On the one hand, we have Lewis Carroll’s caterpillar, who claims that words mean exactly what he chooses them to mean at any moment, and on the other hand, we have legal contracts, where there are pages of definitions.

But even at that, not every term is defined. Because it can’t be.

“Before you can use a word, you need to define it.”

I’ll consider your proposal if you start by defining every word in that sentence.

The idea is nonsense. While I appreciate and endorse the desire to be precise, you can’t define every word. Words are flexible and squishy.

Also, we can know a thing without being able to articulate it precisely.

Man: “I love you.”
Woman: “Define love.”

That’s not going to work out well.

But … “wokeness” is a relatively new term, and it does us good to try to narrow down what we mean by it.

At first, it meant “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination.” E.g., young blacks were “woke” when they realized how many things in society were slanted against them. A young black being pulled over by a cop had to be extra careful to stay out of trouble.

[Whether that’s true or not is irrelevant.]

In order to get to its more modern meaning, you need to reflect on the underlying attitude behind that earlier definition. That would include …

• There are classes of people who have legitimate grievances against “the man” / the system.
• Appreciating the extent of those grievances requires a change of perspective. An englightenment.
• Blacks getting pulled over by racist cops is just one example of how the system disriminates against … against what?
• The “what” that causes this discrimination is the hegemony of white, heterosexual men, who are steeped in “western” values (mostly Christianity), including capitalism and the validity of past conquests (colonialism).
• True freedom requires a release from all the assumptions of this white, heterosexual, Christian, western value system.

That’s my attempt to spell it out. Can you think of a common use of “wokeness” that isn’t adequately encompassed in that description?

Remember the scene in “A Few Good Men” where the Jack Nicholson character yells “you can’t handle the truth!”

IOW, we — the tough and smart people in charge — take care of the hard things and make the bad decisions so you can have your pleasant little delusions and live like free and happy-go-lucky hobbits.

This article reminded me of that.

Monkeypox outbreak sparks debate over guidance on sexual behaviors

Public health officials are grappling with how far to go in advising gay men to alter their sexual behavior as the monkeypox virus spreads mostly through their social networks but is a threat to anyone.

Oh dear. If we say A, people might do X. If we say B, people might do Y. And we absolutely can’t say C, because then people will do Z.

When did we accept the idea that it’s okay for public officials to lie to us to nudge our behavior toward their chosen path? Isn’t that the purpose of propaganda?

Perhaps there are times when the truth would cause more harm than a lie. Perhaps. But we seem to have taken that exception and built a 4-lane highway through it.

We don’t even expect public officials to tell us the truth anymore. It’s understood that they will craft a message designed to get us to behave a certain way.

Only a population of wimps would accept this.