Matthew Hennessey: France's Riots Are More Than Student Protests [Me: The Core Is Still Orwellianism]

This bit:

   France’s days of rage look to these naked eyes like an immigrant revolt—some strange alliance of Muslim youth and communist grad students. The main thing they have in common is that they’re all unemployed.
   France is officially a colorblind, secular republic. It collects no data on the racial or ethnic makeup of French society. Good estimates, however, put the foreign-born population of France at around 13%. Another roughly 12% are second-generation children of immigrants. That’s a full quarter of French society with a potentially deep ambivalence about living in a colorblind, secular republic.
   These populations were overrepresented in the recent rioting. Yet decades of stultifying political correctness have robbed us of the ability to speak about the obvious. We censor our own thoughts. We stop ourselves from noticing things we can plainly see.

The last part, obviously, in particular.

   Here are two related components of the madness of the left: the Orwellian insistence on not seeing what is before your nose...and the strictly-enforced norm on the left against speaking politically incorrect truths. This is a blueprint for disaster.

   Imagine a ship run on PC principles: no noticing things on the list of unnoticeable things--e.g. shoals, storms, rogue waves--and no speaking of them either. No bringing them to anyone's attention.

   This, quoting Peirce from a different context, is a complicated way of spelling 'shipwreck'...

   No enterprise of any importance can succeed if run in accordance with these principles. These principles are specifically to prevent acknowledgement of truth and falsehood.

   The left either believes that society and government are so frivolous (or so easy) that they needn't recognize facts...or they think that maintaining leftist ideological fantasies is more important than those things...or...here's another possibility: since one of their goals is wrecking Western Civilization...well...you see where I'm going with this...

   I predicted the Dems would snap out of this a lot sooner than they have. My ad hoc hypothesis for explaining the failure of my prediction is: Trump. He's such a repellent figure in so many ways that he's keeping people on the left who, under different conditions, would have jumped ship by now. Thus forcing the left to return to the center or lose, lose, lose...

   Though, OTOH, back in the PC "1.0" era, almost everyone I knew who considered himself a liberal stuck with the left no matter how insane it became...and there was no Trump then...

   Well, anyway: at least we're not as royally f*cked as France...