We are not amused, even in good weather

Another splendido Saturday morning in the City by the Bay: bright sun, that blue sky, cool. And since it's winter, and therefore the rainy season, the greenery is out all over the place.

The lemon tree in my backyard

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Antis, phobias and centrisms.

A typical brain-mushed Leukophore recently prefaced a comment by saying, "Pardon me for being ethnocentric, but..." The only people not allowed to be ethnocentric are Whites. Euros. Hence, the other forbidden behavior, "Eurocentrism." Leukophore, if you're not ethnocentric, you are toast. Cause everyone else is. They only laugh at you for the fool you are when you play their game.

It's bad to be Islamophobic. It's bad to be anti-Semitic. It's bad to be homophobic. Right?

Why?

Let's think about this. People who get tarred with these anti and phobic brushes --oops, dass raciss-- receive the uncoveted accolade because their remarks and opinions reflect a settled negative valuation of a group. It may be off the cuff, intuitive, crudely expressed, or even arrived at on the basis of experience and investigation both. Makes no difference. The point is that you are not allowed to have a settled negative valuation of a group. You must think well of them. You cannot think of them as competition, threat or enemy. Cannot.

Well, that's not quite true, is it? Depends on the group. Very much so. It has to be an Official Sacred Victim Group. These are groups that we are not allowed to think badly of. Why? Because Mommy said so. Groups that are not included in that UnCivil List may be trashed and bashed at will, because in the Official Story, they play the role of Powerful Oppressors and are utterly Lacking In Moral Standing. (Or, in the case of Rednecks, are clownish stand-ins for the oppressor regime.)

To continue with our examples.

Islam and Muslims must be seen as Good People in a Religion of Peace. Somehow the tens of thousands of terrorist deaths in the name of Allah must have been carried out at the hands of Hijackers of the Faith.

Jews, both individually and as a group --Israelis excepted-- must never be named and criticized for anything they do. It might lead to another Holocaust. Despite the fact that they talk about themselves as both special and as outsiders all the time. Like teenagers and other Victim Minorities, demanding to be treated as One of Us at one minute and then withdrawing in a tantrum of You Don't Understand Me And It's All Your Fault at another.

Re: gays. Any resistance against the desires du jour of the LGBTQ crowd is instantly hating and bigotry and ignorance, because gays are just like everyone else and want marriage and a family and it's right there in the Constitution, you moron. The omission of fidelity from the definition of marriage cannot be noted. Nor the fact that only a very small percentage of gays, themselves a very small percentage, will want this, and that unravelling marriage into a genderless benefits contract furthers the erasure of gender differences and the metastasis of the State into bathrooms and boardrooms and paves the way for legal polygamy.

In short, anti, phobi and ism talk is political dogma and rhetorical bullying, nothing more.  Because it not only discards but actively prohibits the search for truth and fact, especially "hate-facts", determining beforehand the outcome of any investigation, it has not a shred of "morality" in it.

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Nevertheless, a beautiful sunny morning by the Pacific.