A Tale of Two Nations

If your initial instinct upon reading the title of today's offering included an eye-roll, rest assured you are not alone. It is hackneyed, in more ways than one. And, yes, I knew it from the moment the title sprang to my forebrain.

On top of that acknowledgement and shared groan, I offer another caveat or mea culpa or whatever over-used latin term you might wish to apply: Dividing anything into two groups will inevitably (barring binary things like red pills and blue pills) accrete disparities into each group.

It's only after those eighty-eight words of preamble that I feel I can present today's "two types" without cringing. Thank you for indulging me.

The 'prompter,' the thing that fired inspiration for today, was this article by Doug French about the "green gang's" growing attacks on farming and ranching. Environmental do-gooders, who've subordinated everything else to their global warming absolutism, are angry that the rest of us dare eat anything that isn't organic, sustainable, and biodiversity-friendly, or whatever the en vogue terms happen to be.

If they were simply angry, we could give their arguments a moment's heed and either adjust our behaviors, should those arguments be compelling, or continue to live as we have should those arguments ring hollow.

Suggestion, exhortation, and proselytizing don't satisfy them, however. If we will not cooperate, we must be coerced.

In the Netherlands, the Best-and-Brightest seek to halve the livestock population via government coercion. Supposedly, the biggest offenders will be given a one-time buyout offer. If they don't agree to sell, they'll subsequently be forced out of business.

Vito Corleone could not be reached for comment.

New Zealand, another nation with a large agricultural sector, is imposing a "fart tax" in order to induce livestock population reduction. Similar actions are being taken in Ireland and Canada.

The campaign against tasty ruminants is just one of many fronts on the Greens' war upon the unwashed masses. I recently discussed how New York State's more-progressive-than-thou mandarins are setting us up for sky-high energy prices, energy shortages, and cold and misery by banning all forms of energy that aren't wind, solar, or hydropower.

California has written a phase-out of gasoline-powered cars into its law, no matter that EVs are an expensive niche technology, no matter that the resources to accomplish this feat are scarce and mostly controlled by hostile nations, no matter that their power grid is nowhere near ready to handle this change, no matter lots of other inconvenient realities. A number of other states' leaders are eyeballing CA's move with "hmm, that sounds like something we could do."

The Biden administration has engaged in a war on domestic carbon energy from Day One, has been gaslighting us (pun intended) about it even longer, and turns to sneaky workarounds even when the public screams in protest.

Food and energy, two of life's fundamentals, where improvements across the centuries have produced the massive increases in our living standards, to be made scarcer and more expensive, for some nebulous future benefit that would be far more efficiently addressed by adaptation if, where, and when needed.

The people who seek to impose these hardships on us won't be affected much, if at all. They're by and large the wealthiest - people who won't notice if their grocery, heating, and air conditioning bills go up by twenty or thirty or fifty or a hundred percent.

These people are also the ones busily restructuring society away from one that aspires to egalitarian meritocracy. School grades and test scores suddenly don't matter any more. A growing number of universities aren't requiring or even considering SAT and ACT scores. Prospective lawyers don't need to take the LSAT, and prospective doctors may not need to take the MCAT. Social promotion in primary education is sending under-prepared young people to schools they would not be able to handle, but for a dumbing down of standards. Grade inflation is rampant, and people are starting to ask "should we trust our young doctors, lawyers, engineers, and other professionals with things that affect our lives?"

I bet, however, that the Best-and-Brightest will find ways to ensure they continue to have access to the most highly skilled professionals, just as they won't feel the sting of higher energy and food costs.

Then there's the other social front: the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion racket and its variants. Its deep infiltration of Corporate America is revelatory. It helps us with the "two types..." sorting that I promised (threatened?) at the start of this bit.

The Left developed around a principle that all human relations are of an "oppressor-oppressed" dynamic, abandoning entirely the notion of mutually beneficial interaction, free exchange, free markets, and individual sovereignty. Within that context, consider this bucketful:

• Big government politicians, who see "green" as the most useful tool ever discovered.

• The legacy media, who are now buddies, allies, co-conspirators, and henchmen of those big government politicians.

• Corporate America's upper echelons, which saw green in both Green and Rainbow, let the fanatics inside the tent, and now is either controlled by those fanatics, or cowers in submissive fear.

• Big Tech, living mostly in clusters such as Silicon Valley, where there's only one correct way to think and anyone who doesn't adhere to it is not only wrong, but needs to be corrected.

• Big city millennials, who've been so thoroughly steeped in all this that they either don't realize the harm they're doing to themselves and their fellow humans, or are all-in on coercion and rights abrogation of those who don't conform.

Are any of these folks "oppressed?" Is anyone stopping them from eating "sustainably," using only electric cars and appliances, or being woke?

Of course not.

Their argument, however, is that if we don't all live as they do, we are not only dooming the planet, we are oppressing others along the way.

Therefore, they have to coerce us. In that coercion, our rights become secondary, to be protected only when they align with their values.

They hate that we might disagree with them or say something they don't want to hear, so they've abandoned the premise of free speech in favor of censorship and state-sponsored propaganda. Even our opinions are no longer ours, no matter if we keep them to ourselves. We must speak as required, or face wrath and cancellation.

They've hated gun rights forever, and are so furious at the positive progress made on that front in recent decades that they're thumbing their noses at the Supreme Court.

They despise the fact that some find happiness in religious belief, so any application of that upsets them must be crushed (... but only for some beliefs. Homosexuals in Islamic nations could not be reached for comment - probably because they're in jail or dead).

I've walked this ground before. I've concluded and shared how there are really only two identity groups. In the Left's language, those are "oppressors" and "oppressed." Today, in sorting into coercers vs everyone else, I'm simply granularizing the bad side of the sort into the five categories I bulletized above.

There are the coercers, and there are the coerced.

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Peter