A Woke Term That Rhymes With Lummox

Over at Power Line is a brief post concerning recent efforts by the far left to become more "inclusive" -- by "helping" the blind hear the term womxn.

The post includes a screenshot from the web site of UC Irvine's Womxn Center for Success. It is heartwarming to know that social justice warriors are tolerant of several possible pronunciations ... of one of the many neologisms intended to exterminate all vestiges of the word man from our vocabulary.

My "favorite" is the one that rhymes with lummox.

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Cultural phenomena like this provide great fodder for the religious right, who happily pounce on it as an example of what "the" alternative to their worldview looks like. This is the sort of thing they have been doing for decades, as they happily push the narrative that, without religion, there is no morality or even sanity -- as witness a blog post of mine on Dennis Prager from over a decade ago, when I had just started this blog:

... Judaeo-Christianity and Islam are competing for mass acceptance. Is leftism? Not really. The nihilistic left offers nothing positive to anyone seeking guidance for how to live their lives. This is why so many youths end up adopting religion, including militant Islam, instead. This is not because, as Prager implies, these religions are the "only" alternatives. It is because they are the only widely-known alternatives... [bold in original]

In that post, I was fisking Prager, who blatantly ignored the Greco-Roman strain of Western Civilization to promote the Judaeo-Christian strain. Indeed, you'd think Greece and Rome were cesspits of social justice if you took his word for it, rather than learning history, including that of early America, whose founders admired the ancients and often were deists or otherwise very dubious about religion.

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I -- a non-leftist, pro-capitalist atheist -- recalled the above, and the more general conservative smear, "secular-left," because I have been listening to Leonard Peikoff's excellent courses on his DIM Hypothesis (which he later improved and published in book form). Having to drive two hours a day every day for the past couple of weeks, I have nearly finished, and am in his final lecture of the second course, where he makes his prediction concerning America's future. It was disturbing then, I am sure to his audience, but it is more so now, over a decade later because it remains on the mark.

A memorable quote? "The god-haters are a godsend to the god lovers." I would guess that Peikoff would regard the fashionable (on the left) war against men and biological sex, which continually serves up such self-parody even as it works overtime to ruin the lives of its opponents as a prime example.

I have also read and highly recommend the book, whose subtitle is Why the Lights of the West Are Going Out. The book is not a mere prediction of doom, although it is. Nor is it merely fascinating and insightful. I think it does very well to flesh out the alternative to the false nihilism-religion dichotomy that both "sides" of the culture wars are foisting on America today.

America needs this real alternative, which the Greeks originated millennia ago: A prediction of doom is not the same thing as saying it is unavoidable.

-- CAV