#DonLemon 's Violent Campaign Rhetoric

The liberal media spent a full two or three days this last week castigating Donald Trump for using what it maintained was violent rhetoric. CNN anchor Don Lemon was particularly outraged by Trumps comments.

No one seems to have noticed yet, least of all the liberal media, but most of the rhetoric used in political campaigns is based on violent rhetoric. In fact, the chief metaphor used in any political campaign comes straight from warfare, where the rule of the day is killing and general mayhem.

Like a lot of terms in our daily vocabulary, campaign terms are metaphors from some other area of life (and, in this case, death) whose original usage we see right through because of our common use of them. 

In fact, the term 'campaign' is itself a martial metaphor. Before there were ever democratic forms of government, armies when "on campaign," meaning they went off to kill people and break things. In fact, the earliest occurrence of the political use of the term in English dates only to the very beginning of the 19th century A.D.

And the military metaphors don't end there. 'Win', 'lose', 'victory', 'defeat', 'war room', 'battleground' states, 'fight', campaign 'foot soldiers', an election constituting a 'rout'—not only is it common in political language, it is the dominant metaphor.

So let's all panic now and run around telling everyone the political sky is falling because virtually every politician out there is using explicitly martial language, clearly indicating that they are advocating death, rape and pillage—even Hillary. I'm expecting that any second now Don Lemon will go into full apoplectic mode, warning everyone that they should head for their basements and stay there until after the election is over.

Oh, but wait. 

It is not only politicians who use these terms, but journalists who cover their "campaigns." In fact, Don Lemon uses them on a daily basis.

Don Lemon. Advocating death, rape, and pillage. So sad. Maybe he could conduct three consecutive days' worth of overheated interviews with liberal commentators on what a hypocrite he is.

Bruce Jenner and the Emotive Theory of Gender

If you tried your hardest you could not make up the farcical drama we have seen played out on the national stage over the last two weeks in regard to Bruce Jenner (now calling himself "Caitlyn"), who has convinced a credulous national media that he has been able to change his sex by the simple expedient of a little cosmetic surgery and the donning of a corset for a national magazine.

The whole XY chromosome thing that we were all told in high school science class was the way to determine gender in human beings is now a victim of political fashion. Now, in a move hard to justify as an actual scientific improvement, gender is determined by feelings.

You are a man if you feel you are a man. You are a woman if you feel you are a woman. The actual biology is now incidental. Let's call it the "Emotive Theory" of gender determination, on contrast to the "Biological Theory" of gender. And of course the move to the Emotive Theory doesn't clarify anything; in fact, it makes things a lot more confusing, partly because, unlike the Biological Theory, where there are hard and fast rules, under the Emotional Theory of gender determination, anything goes.

One chapter in the historical chronicles of the early 21st century will be about why, in a time when science is worshiped with more reverence than any god, scientific principles got thrown to the wind when it came to anything having to do with sex.

It wasn't too long ago that Paul Gross and Normal Levitt could write a book like Higher Superstitions: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, about the political distortions of even basic science. It was greeted with accolades by the hard-nosed scientific community at the time. Today the academic and popular left has become so predominant in academia and the media that Gross and Levitt would be thought old-fashioned, and scientists expected to tow the party line.

In 1996 Alan Sokol took the criticism of postmodernist thought to new and hilarious heights when he wrote a paper filled with deliberate nonsense and submitted to Social Text, a prominent postmodernist academic journal. The editors published it, making themselves a laughing stock among their academic colleagues and attracting the derision even of the public that had never heard of Social Text.

Again, here we are in 2015 living in a time when what Sokal wrote in his paper is no more nonsensical than what you hear on E! television, or the View, or CNN. The heights of nonsense have been scaled and conquered.

Some day history is going have a good laugh at the expense of our generation, which has managed to confuse itself so badly about gender that it has literally rendered itself incapable of making sense of the common, everyday world. And not only that but they are even more confused about the reality they have created for themselves.

Their ideology makes them scratch their head about the world, so they create another one for their own political convenience that ends up making them scratch their heads even harder.

I would say that the Emotive Theory of Gender awaits its Alan Sokal, but in reality I don't think there is anything more nonsensical than what the media feeds us on a daily basis. You could try to make up something more ludicrous than what we are now seeing with the Bruce Jenner story, but you just wouldn't be able to do it.

Not only are the doctrines of the Emotive Theory nonsensical in themselves, but they blatantly contradict themselves.

How many times have we been told that our distinctions between the masculine and feminine are arbitrary and socially constructed. But right on the tails of that lecture, we watch Anderson Cooper's interview last week with Buzz Bissinger, where he solemnly asks,

AC: You've spent hundreds of hours with Bruce Jenner, a lot of time with Kaitlyn, are they different? Do they seem different? You know obviously their appearance obviously ... 

Buzz: Yes they're very different, very different in appearance obviously. 

And they blather on about this, making no sense at all, going so far as to refer to the "soul of Bruce" being replaced by the "soul of Caitlyn."  It's amazing what reconstructive surgery can do nowadays.

For one thing, how can Bruce become a woman if he has already been one from the beginning, which is what he claims? If he is simply bringing his body into alignment with his soul, then why are we all gushing about him "becoming" Caitlyn and the "soul of Bruce" leaving (and by the way, were exactly did it go?), and the "soul of Caitlyn" inhabiting this highly trafficked body?

And for another, are there now really two Jenner selves--one inhabiting the body before the transformation and another entering it and taking over after the transformation? And when did this transformation occur? When he started taking estrogen? When he shaved his legs? When he put on the corset? Is the seat of the soul now the breasts, of which Bruce got a brand new and significantly larger set?

What happened to masculinity and femininity being arbitrary social constructs? If they are arbitrary and don't reflect reality then how can Bruce be said to be different from Caitlyn?

We now live in a society that believes that men and women are not fundamentally different from one another unless they have been first switched through reconstructive surgery.

You just can't make this stuff up.

CNN's Chris Cuomo criticizes Fox's Duggar interview, in denial about Bruce Jenner's deadbeat dad past

CNN's Chris Cuomo criticizes Fox's Duggar interview for being a "conversation among friends." That's nothin'. He should check out his own network's treatment of deadbeat dad Bruce Jenner, who hurt his children far worse--and while they were wide awake, no less.

In fact, the double standards and self-righteousness have reached fever pitch at CNN over the Duggar interview. Armies of psychologists have been enlisted in the campaign to lecture the Duggars about whether they did enough to protect their daughters from a brother who groped them in their sleep (as opposed to humiliating them fully conscious before the public, which is what CNN has done).

We have yet to hear words of advice and reproval about what Bruce Jenner did to his children, who, by the way, are still dealing with what he did to them--as opposed to the Duggar children, who are over what Josh did to them and are now dealing with what CNN is doing to them.

Where are the calls, like those CNN has been issuing for the Duggars, for Bruce to undergo treatment to come fully to terms with his deadbeat past (not to mention is self-indulgent present)?

No. They are too busy rubbing the noses of the victims in what their brother did to them.

These people are a menace to society.

Piers Morgan was not fired because of his accent

It's the attitude, stupid.

After making the incompetent decision to hire Piers Morgan in the first place, CNN has now found a way to blame Americans for the demise of his show. The narrative constructed to explain the Piers Morgan firing really takes the biscuit. The problem, they say, is that he was British and, for that reason, was just not the American viewer's cup of tea. This allows CNN to blame Americans for the network's lousy decision by implicitly accusing them of xenophobia.

He thought football was soccer. He had an accent. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

Uh, sorry. No. Not blooming likely.

Seth Mandel has the cracking best comments on this when he points out that the problem with Piers Morgan was not the accent nor was it the confusion between the gridiron and the pitch. The problem was that Morgan was both ill-informed and arrogant:

In reality, the problem with Piers Morgan was twofold: first, he opined on complicated issues without the slightest–and I mean the slightest–understanding of them, and second, he mostly called his guests names when they endeavored to explain those subjects to him.

And despite the fact that he got his ears boxed time after time on the gun control issue, displaying his ignorance and getting called on it, he blithely did it again and again. And every time he got schooled, he just rolled out more epithets.

And then, of course, we got treated to every species of Dada sexuality, night after night. We could tune in and watch a transgender person one night, and Boy George, whom Morgan called a "great singer," the next.

Blimey.

As a tribute to Piers, we hereby link to several posts, the first in which we live blog Piers' coverage of Whitney Houston's funeral. He does his bleeding best to figure out this whole God thing, which the Black people in the funeral want to talk about, but the White people don't.

Secondly, we have my article on why we should ban guns. From liberals, that is.

Finally, we have Piers' discussion with a "transgender" person named Janet Mock who is upset at Piers for saying that she was "born a man" despite the fact that she had herself authored an article, written in the first person, titled, "I was born a boy."

Finally, I link to the NFL's website, where Piers can find out what football really is.