Yeah you…I’m taking to you…you, blogreader breath.
Why aren’t you checking-in every day at The Necropolitan Sentinel [fna: The Conservative Commune] to see if Dan has published another one of his insightful, erudite, and witty observations on politics and the culture?
Well, amigos?
Here’s some samples of what you’ve been missing by not making Dano’s place a regular stop on your travels through The Ether…
-From a post entitled Lethe’d Dullness:
Yesterday, David Brooks published a fantasia on how marriage was going to . . . engender responsibility among gays. I know this because David Swindle posted the article approvingly on Facebook. But bestowal of the rubric ‘marriage’ on same sex couples is not magically going to convert them to any sense of onerous social responsibility, and the evidence is that many of them, the most radical ones, continue to ally politically with such people as 4th-trimester abortionists, racialists, promoters of sex education for kindergartners, and the like. Now I don’t want to be a dick about their arrangements. If people in a same-sex union wish to refer to it as a marriage, I am not going to tell them otherwise. If a particular church or denomination wishes to marry them in a religious ceremony, that’s hardly my business, either. I have hetero friends who have been married in civil ceremonies, and it never really occurs to me to tell them that they’re not properly married, though I might on reflection wish that they had chosen a church ceremony. As far as I know, they are not harassed by orthodox Christians and Jews. Does a young couple tell me they are in love? I might have reservations, but I will keep them to myself, unless I am asked, because they think so, and that is what is most important.
…
I find no evidence to suggest that those gays who are fully on board with the Proggie Agenda are at all interested in negotiation. They demand respect, but don’t feel any obligation to reciprocate. It’s purely fatuous to beguile oneself with imagining that they are pluralistic with relation to marriage or anything else.
I remember when they said they just wanted a place at the table. Now, they wish to sit at the head of it, and tell those who set it to shut up, and they will be dismissed if they speak out of turn, especially if they are privileged by being white or male, or white male worst of all, because their privilege means that they are not one of the special subjectivities and shut up, the infantile grown ups are having an important conversation. It’s the sort of thing that I must be taught to unremember, I’m sure, because these memories are embarrassing to some people, and they have a right not to be embarrassed, especially by the truth.
-From Evolution, Progress, Reason, Iago:
Marriage, like other human institutions, can be said to have ‘evolved’ in the service of a wide variety of societies in a wide variety of cultures in various times and locations around the world. The ancient Greeks, we are told, depending on the particular city state or other portion of what we generally refer to when we speak of ancient Greek society, practiced homosexuality more or less openly according to more or less codified rules of engagement, and yet there and in other cultures where homosexuality is comparatively unsuppressed, nothing like gay marriage ever did take root. It would seem therefore that whatever the function of marriage was in those societies that practiced it–and those are the vast majority that we know about–it was felt to be necessary for heterosexual couples only. And this arrangement, sanctioned by religion and the polity, imposed certain obligations on those people who partook of it and in their judgments believed that it was right for them not only as members of the religion or polity or both, but also as individuals. The irony is, as many have noted, that those most opposed to the entire institution of marriage, those who treated it most scornfully, who trivialized it mocked it most mercilessly as a form of bondage, now discover that it is impossible for them to be happy without at least having the ‘right’ to it. But that is not a contradiction, really, because they continue to seek to destroy it by denaturing it. Gays have a right to their own ‘culture,’ as some of them continually have reminded us by being way ‘out’ with leather fetish, bathhouses, and public orgies, but nobody else has a right to any sort of culture from which they are excluded in any way. Any such culture and its institutions must be destroyed. That is what, finally, is meant by ‘diversity’ on any number of fronts.
You might have thought that after all the pooh-poohing about the slippery-slope warnings of alarmists that they would have wanted to disprove them, and show that their motives were as they had represented them, but they don’t care about any of that at all. What’s important is the power of unremitting iconoclasm and erasure of anything that is not new-normative. They have allied themselves with some pretty unsavory bedfellows, including the hyper-abortionists, racialists, millenialist Gaiaists, thought-crimes advocates and most appallingly the Islamist enablers. They are not at all alarmed to see the general erosion of American liberties or the constitutional abuses wrought by progressivism generally, including all the invasions of privacy, if it means more power; and unfortunately they have in this way proved themselves every bit as grasping as any other faction in American politics. This is ‘evolution.’ Tolerance, diversity and coexistence now mean that people who do not belong to any of the approved victim-categories will sit down and shut up, because someone else’s subjectivity trumps theirs. This also is ‘evolution.’
In this Update to the same post, Dan puts the funhouse mirror view that is Leftist Logic on full display:
To marry someone of the opposite sex is no different from marrying someone of the same sex, because there’s no difference between the sexes, right? Men and women don’t think differently, despite all the scientific evidence, or if they do, it’s just because they have been disparately socialized (not evolved, pig!), unless the research shows something that might be construed to the advantage of women. Gay men don’t think differently from straight men, except sexually–unless they want to claim that they do, and the same for lesbians. If heteros do think differently from one another in certain ways, that doesn’t mean there’s anything different about their relationships. Gays and lesbians never make a big deal of the difference between their own sexuality and that of heterosexuals, so why should we make any distinction, now, FFS? They’re just the same, with the distinction that their marginalization has given them unique insight into the human condition, so they are the same only better. So shut up, supremacist. Our weddings are different, they’re distinctive, they have panache, they’re not tethered to your tired formulas, but they’re just the same.
-In this post from today, Dan offers a tactic for battling the Left:
I could go on and on, but what I want to say is simply this: never let a lefty tell you that you owe him an explanation for anything, never let him buttonhole you or try to get your ‘feedback’ about any one of his pet outrages, until you can get him to answer regarding your own. Ever. And make sure that you hound every lefty and every lefty organization and every lefty blog and every lefty news outlet to answer your questions, day and night. Never give them a moment’s rest, and never let them turn the subject in their direction until you are satisfied. If they don’t know the answers, ask them why they don’t know, and why they don’t make your business theirs, just as they seek to make their business yours. Make the story always about your concern, about your outrage, about your narratives. Demand the answers. Demand accountability. Demand everything you want.
That’s what they do.
There’s more here by Dan on the same subject.
-Finally: I think you’ll amused in a cynical way by this one: “Verily, the din”: Some Extraordinarily Craptastic Writing, For Your Delectation.
-So…have you bookmarked Dan yet? You don’t want me coming over there and doing it for you.
