Fighting Reality

From its inception, Scragged has been all about applying logic and facts to current events in hopes of better understanding both the events themselves and an appropriate response to them.

Of course, the world is riddled with wrong, inappropriate responses, presumably due to ignorance of both facts and reality; our job is to bring enlightenment to those who may pass our way.

What, then, are we to make of the modern contention that facts and logic are inherently racist?  No less an authority than the legendary Smithsonian Institution now argues that an "emphasis on scientific method; objective, rational linear thinking; cause and effect relationships; quantitative emphasis; hard work is the key to success; work before play" and even "The King's English rules and written tradition"  are exemplars of "whiteness" white supremacy, and thus racism.  We can't even say that 2 + 2 = 4 with no exceptions anymore without being bigots.

This sounds like a demented world of psychotic madmen, and it certainly is that, but, this isn't merely confined to the hallucinogenic halls of taxpayer-funded universities.  The leftist war on reality and logic has heavily made its way into the real world, so much so that it's difficult to understand how best to reply - or even if it's worth the trouble.  After all, we don't seriously try to convince people in padded cells that they aren't really Napoleon when they claim to be; if their non-Napoleon-ness is not self-evident to them, they are self-evidently insane and not worth a rational debate.

For example: We have often argued that many of the celebrated black felons who've been shot by police earned what they got due to their own violent, lawless actions, on the assumption that explaining the truth might, in some small way, help to dispel the evil lies propagated by the media to divide us all.

But what if that's simply not so?  Consider this recent notorious incident recorded by a police bodycam in Columbus:

The 10-second clip begins with the officer getting out of his car at a house where police had been dispatched after someone called 911 saying they were being physically threatened, Interim Police Chief Michael Woods said at the news conference. The officer takes a few steps toward a group of people in the driveway when the girl, who was Black, starts swinging a knife wildly at another girl or woman, who falls backward. The officer shouts several times to get down.

The girl with the knife then charges at another girl or woman who is pinned against a car.

From a few feet away, with people on either side of him, the officer fires four shots, and the teen slumps to the ground. A black-handled blade similar to a kitchen knife or steak knife lies on the sidewalk next to her.

A man immediately yells at the officer, "You didn't have to shoot her! She's just a kid, man!"

The officer responds, "She had a knife. She just went at her." ...

Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther mourned the loss of the young victim but defended the officer's use of deadly force.

"We know based on this footage the officer took action to protect another young girl in our community," he told reporters.

It's long been argued that police should be required to wear bodycams, primarily so they know they are being watched and so will be less included to abuse folks, but also to protect them from false accusations.  The footage of this event is violent, harrowing, and disturbing, but the tale it tells is crystal clear: if the policeman had not shot the girl with the knife, the girl without the knife would have been disemboweled right there in front of him.

This is why most people believe we even have police: to protect the innocent from the evil deeds of predators.  The knifeless girl, by virtue of being unarmed, was the victim here; the girl with the knife was a potentially-murderous predator.

The cop did his job, live on candid camera, as the almost-victim whose life he saved fully understood and appreciated.  He may not technically be a hero since his own life was never in danger, but by protecting the innocent and upholding the law, he behaved honorably as we would expect him to.

The deceased attempted-murderess, Ma'Khia Bryant, truly received her just deserts, and the whole world can know it - all they have to do is watch the video.  Yes, some fake-news organizations saw fit to edit out the essential fact of the knife; others didn't, and a moment's Googling can easily reveal the whole unedited gory truth.

Yet despite the absolute, unchallenged proof of what happened, hundreds of fools are protesting the righteous shooting of this criminal:

"Today we are here to continue to lift up the life of Ma'Khia Bryant," organizer Hana Abdur-Rahim told the crowd. "I don't need a video to know she was a child and she deserved to live."

What? She tried to gut another teenager; only the quick actions of the police prevented her intended victim's intestines from being spread out all over the pavement.  What sort of psychopath will claim she deserves to live and her victim does not?

Now, it's appropriate to mourn; the fact that a 16-year-old had to be shot to protect another should be cause for sackcloth and ashes.  We have every reason to do a deep and profound self-examination of a culture and country so profoundly corrupt that teenagers lunge at each other with knives.

Indeed we're told that this happens every day and has for a long time.  Shouldn't that be disturbing if it's an actual fact?  And if it is not so, shouldn't it disturb us that commentators would make that claim without embarrassment?

What are we to do with people whose minds are so reprobate as to be utterly impervious to even evidence of this conclusive sort?  What's the point of having police bodycams, when even the visible, clear presence of a deadly weapon about to take a life isn't enough to persuade?

These folks aren't fighting for equity or justice.  They aren't even fighting against truth, per se - they are fighting against the very idea of objective reality itself.

If this were an isolated incident, it would be bad enough, but we see this sort of alternate reality everywhere.  Our supposed President has the gall to call the Capitol riot the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.  Worse than the KKK?  Than Jim Crow?  Than Pearl Harbor?  Than 9-11?  Than freaking Hitler, or Stalin with his nuclear bombers?  Who is he trying to kid?  More Americans were killed by Sen. Ted Kennedy, the so-called "Conscience of the Senate", than by rioters on January 6 - but who cares about that!

It is our unproven opinion that Joe Biden did not legitimately win a free and fair presidential election.  Yet there can be no doubt that tens of millions of living, breathing genuine U.S. citizens honestly pulled the lever for a geriatric liar and plagiarist.  Why?

"China Joe" Biden hardly even qualifies as the tip of the iceberg here - consider the dozens of Democrat disaster cities that have been governed entirely and exclusively by Democrats beyond living memory.  When one of these cities, or even a single neighborhood, claws its way briefly out of the gutter, Democrats waste no time in dragging it back down again.

Consider Baltimore, a city that is overwhelmingly Democrat, overwhelmingly black, in a deep-blue state.  If there is any racism in power, it can only be in the form of racist Democrats, since that's who's in power there.

Are its longsuffering citizens offered no choice?  No, one of the most brilliant political ads we've ever seen offered Baltimoreans a bold-color choice to rescue their Third World hellhole of a hometown.

Candidate Kim Klacik was beautiful, articulate, and a native Marylander.  By Democrat rules, she can't be racist since she's black; she can't be sexist since she's female.  The Democrats have had half a century to run Baltimore into the ground; how much worse could someone else do?  Anyone else?

Yet she was defeated 3 to 1 in the election.  Sure, there may have been fraud - that's as natural to Democrats as breathing - but 3 to 1 is overkill.  It beggars belief to imagine that she was ever the legitimate choice of the people.

No, the voters more-or-less freely chose a run-of-the-mill corruptocrat and sex pest committed to providing more of the same misgovernance that's destroyed what once was "Charm City."  They quite literally are getting the government they deserve - it's exactly what they chose, having rejected the opportunity for something better or at least different.

If Kim Klacik's ad wasn't persuasive, nothing will be.  If the Columbus bodycam isn't persuasive, nothing can be.  No wonder our political culture is a fetid mass of seething maggots, and our "debates" have all the substance and nutrition of a swine trough!

In our post-logic world, what hope is there for the rational?  The true tragedy of all this woketivist redefinition of facts is that our civilization will collapse.  When the Smithsonian said that emphasis on the scientific method and traditional mathematics are tools of white supremacy to keep BIPOC people down, they forget that the scientific method and accurate arithmetic coupled with hard work keep the lights on.

"Innovate or Starve" points out that even Hillary Clinton realized that continued innovation is vital to our getting enough to eat.  Our broken education system is making it harder and harder to maintain our high-tech farms which feed us and much of the rest of the world and woke denial of science itself makes it worse.

Neither solar, wind, nuclear, nor hydroelectric power give us anything to eat - all our fertilizer comes from oil.  Fossil-fueled agriculture feeds us.  If our education system declines to the point that we can't maintain our food supply - or, worse, that we refuse to on grounds of "saving the planet" - life will get unpleasant.

Since the Left has so thoroughly indoctrinated everyone younger than 50 in anti-logic, maybe there's no choice but to painfully attempt a reverse "long march through the institutions" to, perhaps, have better luck with a new generation not yet so steeped?

Or will our technology collapse first?  If we revert to muscle-powered agriculture, half our population will starve, starting in Democrat-abused cities which are fed by CO2-belching 18-wheelers bringing food into the city.  Is that what woketivists want?

That would certainly end in a red-state-run world - who's more likely to survive a civilization collapse, Billy-Bob? Or Lindsay?  We'd rather not find out even though the answer may seem appealing.