The Craziest Thing You Will Read Today: Sarah Jones, "Children Are Not Property: The Idea That Underlies The Right-Wing Campaign For 'Parents' Rights'"

Wow.

I mean...just...wow.

That is...some decidedly crazy shit right there.

   I mean, I don't think these are easy questions...and even just from the perspective of trying to limit the brainwashing and sexual mutilation of children that's associated with "transgender" ideology, the power of parents needs to be limited. There are damn few four-year-olds out there wanting to be "trans"... We're dealing here with something similar to Munchausen By Proxy. And, as in that case, it's mostly about the mothers...

   But anyway.

   My own family was no picnic. And everybody acknowledges that there are points at which others have to intervene.

   But as the left gets crazier and crazier, and more and more overtly totalitarian, and so more and more perversely, Leninishly focused on ideologically capturing the children...well, once again, the conservatives turn out to plausibly be right: the family might just be one of humanity's last, best bastions against such crazy. Even what with all the crazy in families themselves.

   God knows where that crazy woman got the idea that conservatives think their kids are their property. Though I'll bet there are some religious extremists out there who think something roughly practically equivalent.

    Conservative have long said that the left hates families and churches basically because they represent loci of organization and authority that the state can't easily displace or control. I've got no kids and no religion, so I don't have a personal dog in this fight. But the unhinging of the left that's occurred over the last ten years has--obviously--made me reassess a lot of ideas I previously derided.

   Here are some relevant ones that I didn't deride, but didn't sufficiently appreciate:

For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please. In all ages, no doubt, nurture and instruction have, in some sense, attempted to exercise this power. But the situation to which we must look forward will be novel in two respects. In the first place, the power will be enormously increased. Hitherto the plans of educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted and indeed, when we read them—how Plato would have every infant ‘a bastard nursed in a bureau’, and Elyot would have the boy see no men before the age of seven and, after that, no women,and how Locke wants children to have leaky shoes and no turn for poetry —we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses. But the man moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please.