This is what a national joke looks like, with its inevitable consequences:
A Chinese comedy troupe has been hit with a £1.7million ($2.13 million) fine by authorities after one of its entertainers made a joke about the military.
Li Haoshi, who performs under the name House, went viral on the country’s social media after an audience member posted a description of the joke after a stand-up set in Beijing on May 13.
In the joke, Li recounted seeing two stray dogs he had adopted chase a squirrel and said it had reminded him of the phrase “have a good work style, be able to fight and win battles”.
The punchline is a slogan Chinese president Xi Jinping used in 2013 to praise the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) work ethic.
The Beijing arm of China‘s Ministry of Culture and Tourism Bureau determined that the comedy group had breached rules and fined it £1.7million ($2.13 million)
“We will never allow any company or individual use the Chinese capital as a stage to wantonly slander the glorious image of the PLA,” the cultural bureau said, adding that Xiaoguo Culture would be barred from staging any future shows in the capital.
www.msn.com/…
Mike Pence: “I like Walt Disney, not woke Disney.” is the best Americans can do with national(ist) jokes. Similarly Ron DeSantis thinks he can win the POTUS with demonizing a concept that no one actually believes.
Conservatives are defending racism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity in the Church of the Anti-Woke. Like the RWNJ fiction of a 21st Century antifa, there is no actual institution or organization called “woke” yet like all GOP lies made most obvious on J6, manufacturing an enemy makes no sense in a democracy when what you are protecting is racism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity. Most important is that America might be exceptional in that it guarantees a right to not have any religions, frustrating generations of dominionists. America is not a religion.
In the words of rising Conservative star Miriam Cates, "national conservatism" was born out of the 2016 Brexit referendum and Tory 2019 election victory. This was the post-Brexit, family-oriented conservatism that focuses on cultural issues, with a definite nod towards the sort of aggressive populism exemplified by Donald Trump and the hard-right Hungarian leader, Viktor Orbán.
What does it mean to be woke? First and foremost, “woke” is a religious signal that you have heard the Good News and Seen the Light. Awakening means both witnessing revealed truth and experiencing spiritual transformation. Today this has taken the form of a collective enunciation: Of a new national church, reformed and transformed, to replace the original American sect, which is wicked and corrupted.
In simple, practical terms, the Church of Woke is pledged to the destruction of Racism, Patriarchy, and Heteronormativity.
The original national religion—often called American Exceptionalism—and the Church of Woke are locked in a victory-or-death struggle.
css.cua.edu/...
On 6 January 2021, Michael Vlahos, who teaches at SAIS, saw one of three outcomes for America. Excerpt:
Hence, knowing that our great and bloody national clashes are still yet ahead, this marginal man can only sense three ends, with no assurance of clarity, or even finality, in the denouement
1-Secession: Some agreed — whether polite or desperate — coming apart of the old Union into local, state, or other-based constitutional entities, perhaps still federated, if more loosely than a nation. While this arrangement is increasingly acknowledged by commentators as potentially avoiding the worst of civil war, its realization nonetheless requires a form of civil war. There is no avoiding war.
2-Blue triumph: The ultimate subjugation of Red by main force, achieved by the preponderance of wealth, ruling institutional leverage, and military power. A social revolution as well as a political transformation: The full outcome must likely reconstitute our constitutional order in ways unrecognizable to us today.
3-Thermidorian Reaction: Exhausted by civil conflict, American society takes a modest counter-revolutionary turn, in which repudiated old traditions are [at least partly] reinstated, and a measure of political toleration and overall equipoise returns to national life, along with constitutional accommodations and firewalls to forestall another descent into civil strife.
www.anewcivilwar.com/...
Vlahos wanted the third result. Not a Trumpian lobster thermidor but a triumph of national repression by Mike Flynn and John Eastman.
First: America is a religion. American life and politics function in a religious milieu.[1] That should not surprise. In 1967, American sociologist Robert Bellah declared a national “civil religion”[2]—yet “civil religion” is a pleonasm. Greek “politics” and Roman “civil” both refer to the city, the national community of Antiquity. Hence today, in our national city, all citizens are part of an American religious congregation.
Second, the full faith conversion of an empire is a transformation. Our distant past records just such a shift. 1700 years ago an entire civilization—the sacred world of the Greco-Roman Mundus[3]—was overthrown and replaced by something new.
css.cua.edu/…
Edmund Burke demonstrates that right-wing intellectual thought is little more than a series of dressed-up defenses of conventional social relations and traditional hierarchies. In many ways, it’s fundamentally anti-modern. And it has indelibly stamped the history of conservative thought by posturing rather than appreciating logic in any of its forms.
Burke rarely provides an extensive philosophical argument for why any of this is less abstract than the apparently vague rationalistic principles of his opponents. Often, he merely ridicules his foes and asserts the obviousness of his own preferred principles. The argument frequently boils down to claims that his favored prejudices and practices have proven their worth over time, unlike the new and untested ideas put forward by his opponents.
[..]
The fundamental problem with Burkean arguments, as Wollstonecraft and others have argued, is that their hostility to so-called rationalist abstraction and appeals to affect and the profound unknown are only sustainable for those who already feel the way they do. This is why Burkeanism has been described as less a philosophy than an outlook or attitude.
jacobin.com/...
During their 75-min exchange, they discuss Ryn’s powerful critique of the postwar “movement conservatism” in the United States, the richness of America’s constitutional tradition, the dangers of American exceptionalism, the Jacobin penetration of American politics which begets the global American empire, and much more (including J.R.R. Tolkien!).
In the course of the discussion, Ryn offers a provocative account of the devolution of conservatism as temperament—focused on character—into Conservatism as ideology—fixated on political power. The latter, he claims, was philosophically unsophisticated, easily transformed into dogma, and prone to both “hubris” and “dreaminess”.
To overcome the pathologies of the age, Ryn calls for a radical realism that affirms the world as it is and “explodes” the dangerous illusions undergirding the ahistorical idealism and ideologies of both the Left and the Right.
www.agonmag.com/...
If one tries to draw an equivalency between national conservatism and postmodernism to achieve some idealized classical liberalism, there is no median of normative tradition from which objective epistemology and morality can be drawn. Ayn Randians think this possible. Contingency and reality can only be derived in a critical discourse.
Yoram Hazony is the chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation and president of the Herzl Institute. His 2018 book, The Virtue of Nationalism, established Hazony as one of the leading proponents of a new kind of "national conservatism."
Yoram Hazony, president of the Herzl Institute think tank in Jerusalem, has become a mainstay of the American right. Michael Anton, a conservative academic who served as one of Trump’s senior advisers from 2017 to 2018, drew on Hazony’s vision of nationalism in formulating what Anton describes as “the Trump doctrine” in foreign affairs. Hazony’s new American organization, the Edmund Burke Foundation, held a 2019 conference that featured speeches from Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Tucker Carlson, Peter Thiel, and then-National Security Adviser John Bolton.
Hazony emerged out of an increasingly influential yet little-known Israeli-American conservative nexus. Though born in Israel, he spent his formative years in the United States, his worldview molded by his time as a Princeton undergraduate during the Reagan years. And though he built his career in Israel, the institutions he helped create there were funded in part by American donors — part of a broader campaign to establish an American-style conservative movement in a country with a very different kind of right-wing tradition.
What is he telling us?
We CANNOT reach a universal truth.
Different groups/traditions come to their own truth.
The horizon for knowledge is not reality out there,
but the consensus of the group in line with its tradition.
(quotes from 'Conservatism: a Rediscovery').
But this is exactly the postmodernist epistemology:
No such thing as ‘the truth’.
What passes for 'the truth' is the -false-claim to universality of a particular truth: that of the West.
Other groups have their own claim to truth, all valid.
Conservatives - postmodernists:
Hazony adds that the fallible nature of reason means that we can’t reach a good/evil standard;
this can come only from God.
Postmodernists take a seemingly different step:
reason is fallible --> anything goes, no black &white.
But notice how these views are similar, in essence:
They agree there is no objective standard for morality; therefore we’ll make things up:
postmodernists will use their whim as standard - ‘good is whatever I feel like’,
whereas religious conservatives will go: ‘good is whatever my God feels like’.
Both are arbitrary.
Conclusion: if you’re put-off by postmodernism, there is nothing to see in conservatism.
If you’re put off by conservatism, there is nothing to see in postmodernism.
3 cheers for an objective epistemology and morality,
3 cheers for bridging the is-ought gap,
3 cheers for Rand!!
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constants from Burkean thought (reflecting things much older than Burke as well) for a couple of hundred years, it seems rather strange - inappropriate even - to describe them as “postmodern.”
Other conservatives take different positions on truth and rationality (e.g. Straussians like Jaffa and Mansfield). So one should be cautious of gathering conservatives under Hazony’s Burkean approach - which also has nothing really to do with Lyotard or Derrida or whoever else among the poststructuralists.
Conservatives often criticize postmodernism as relativism (even wrongly at times), but that is also the approach Habermas took as a liberal-leftist. In other words, if you don’t champion Enlightenment (preeminantly Kantian) rationality and its determination of universalizable truth, then you are both relativist and conservative. It’s a kind of intellectual blackmail, to my mind.
Interestingly, to my mind, Marxists have also been deeply critical of liberal rationalism. And have held that human beings are in fact embedded in specific times and places and intellectual and social milieu that (for Marx) is determined by relations of production.
Marxism was also historicist (and to some degree relativist, although that isn’t my preferred term here). Although many Marxists have more recently turned more towards Enlightenment emancipatory reason, and have also become much more idealists and less materialists than their predecessors.
Lastly, please give me an example of a poststructuralist (or postmodernist more broadly) who argues that truths are discovered over time through embodied persons in a real historical world in such a way that they can be appealed to as formative tradition. I can’t think of one.
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