Tag: NORMAL

The Golden Mean

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Today I was thinking about normalcy.  I looked through my archives and I have at least six posts that have the word “normal” in their titles.  So I read through some of them.  One of them was a celebration of life coming back to normal after the COVID lockdowns.  But the others were about defying the culture’s attacks on normalcy.  Things like celebrating sexual dysfunction and deviancy, especially with respect to indoctrinating children.

And so, it got me thinking about normalcy as a greater good.  And even averageness as opposed to either depravity or perfection.  Certainly, when compared to the ugly and even deformed there’s nothing wrong with pointing at perfect beauty as its polar opposite.  But most people aren’t perfect.  They’re ordinary.  And in the psychotic world of social media like TikTok, the only acceptable identities are either girls with faultless synthetic beauty (“TikTok face”) or the various mutants celebrating their separation from human normalcy with body positivity (morbid obesity), individuality (face piercings and blue hair) and gender affirmation (amputations and hormone therapy).

Averageness is a hidden strength in the world.  Disdaining normalcy is a disease.  Even those who actually encompass some extraordinary perfection in either appearance or other characteristic like strength or intelligence rarely find greater happiness in their lives than people who just get on with the ordinary business of earning their bread and feeding their families.  Take as an example Bruce Jenner.  An Olympic decathlon champion who had immense athletic ability, good looks, fame and fortune.  Now he’s a celebrated eunuch who pretends to be an old woman.  And his children and step-children are carnies hawking depravity as a product.  A more miserable ending for an extraordinary talent I can’t imagine.

Convincing children, especially teenage girls that unless they’re flawlessly beautiful that maybe there is something wrong with them; maybe they’re even transgender, is an example of how the perfect can be the enemy of the good.  What we should be telling kids to consider is how they can best utiilize the gifts they have and how lucky they are to be healthy and normal.  After all, average and normal leave plenty of room for kids to grow up happy and healthy.

What we should be celebrating are people living their lives in the real world without anyone capturing it for clicks on social media and without anyone caring whether it’s photogenic enough for TikTok.  Real life has nothing at all to do with the internet except maybe for the ease of finding a YouTube video on how to replace the battery in your laptop or how to program your camera to shoot on two memory cards.  For that stuff it’s actually useful.  It shouldn’t be there to tell kids what they need to look like or act like or sound like.  That’s how you end up with these idiots on campus with openly gay boys in keffiyehs extolling the virtues of Hamas, an organization that would throw them off of buildings if they happened to fall under their jurisdiction.

And the only way to embrace normalcy is to live normally.  And that means in the real world.  You need to do things in real life and specifically you need to get out of your house and spend time with people.  And that is what all smart parents should be doing with their kids.  Get them out of the house and force them to put their phones away and do actual things with actual people.  And the best thing they can do is work.  Because work is the basis of human life.  And work that forces them to come in contact with people is invaluable.  Even the most introverted intellectual must learn how to interact with his fellow man.  I mean, if you’re Albert Einstein you can end up as a genius in an ivory tower.  But even Einstein began as a clerk in a patent office.  And he was probably a better man for having done it.

So average looks, average intelligence, average salary.  But if you work hard and learn how to live in the real world, then probably you can have a good life.  So, forget about Harvard, see if you can get a job fixing dishwashers or troubleshooting a network.  Leave TikTok to the beautiful people and the insane.

NORMAL

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Glenn Youngkin, Ron DeSantis, Disney, Bud Light, Target, Heckler & Koch.  What do these names have in common?  They all relate to Americans getting fed up with radical culture war outrages and pushing back against them.

Republican Glenn Youngkin was elected governor of a blue state (Virginia) because the public schools were indoctrinating the kids with anti-white racism and forgetting to teach them the three R’s.

Ron DeSantis was re-elected in a landslide because he stood up against teachers teaching deviant sex to kids in the second grade.  And he stood up to Disney, one of the largest employers in the state of Florida, when they called him out on the school issue.  And that made him more popular still.

Bud Light stepped on their own … foot when they let a feminist marketing director “partner” the brand with a male TikTok influencer who puts on woman face and pretends he’s the reincarnation of Audrey Hepburn.  Then a video was found of that same marketing director denigrating the “frat-boy” image of Bud Light and saying that the demographic they formerly sold beer to was shrinking and they needed to go after the more progressive younger crowd that was represented by the TikTok influencer in drag.  Of course, she forgot to check if any of these new customers drink beer.  When word got back to her actual customers of her disdain for them, they stopped buying her beer, in droves.  Now sales are down over thirty percent and still falling.  Bud Light is now called Trans Beer and the company can’t give it away, literally.  They’ve tried to sell it with a 100% rebate coupon.  At some point they may have to just pull the product and try to rebrand with some other name.  But the damage now appears permanent because they refused to apologize to their customers.

Target was celebrating their annual “Pride” month with a display at the front of the store that included clothing for children including tuck-friendly bathing suits.  When this was highlighted by several right-wing media outlets a huge hostile reaction started from Target customers in several states.  Target claimed that their employees were frightened by the anger in these areas and the company moved the displays to the back of the stores and scaled it back in these areas of the country.  And the stock price of Target took a nosedive.  It went from about $160 a share to about $130 which is close to a twenty percent loss in equity.  Target claims that they will not change their stance on LGBTQ sponsorship.  It should be interesting to see how things progress over the summer.

And finally, we come to Heckler & Koch.  This German gun manufacturer also had a feminist marketing executive who decided to respond to some of the company’s on-line patrons when they called the Bud Light marketing manager “woke.”  She told them they were stupid and explained that sexist ads like the bikini babes in beer and gun advertisements was “trash marketing” and only dinosaurs liked that kind of stuff.  And she went on and on trading barbs with her company’s customer base about identity politics of various sorts.  Well, that didn’t go over well with the customers.  They threatened to boycott Heckler & Koch.  After a short pause a post from the company appeared saying “Policies were ignored.  Changes have been made.  Heckler & Koch does not engage in identity politics.”  Shortly after this a new marketing manager started posting and he very humorously disowned the remarks of his predecessor.  Problem solved.

It appears to me that there is a very large audience of Americans who are fed up with the woke agenda and will reward politicians who will fight it and punish corporations that mock them and side with their enemies.  What is needed is an organizing force to channel this anger and use it to accomplish some goals.  What we need is the opposite of GLAAD.  We need an organization that advocates for normalcy.  Its acronym should be something like NORMAL or NORML or STRAIT or something like that.  Their job should be to give a report card on corporations that reflects the degree to which they align with the values of normal people.  And they can report these findings back to the members in the general public and make recommendations for actions like boycotts or protests or letters to government to protest the actions of the worst offenders.  And alternatively, they can recommend that the membership patronize and support the companies that are most sympathetic to the community.  And likewise, NORMAL, or whatever it’s called can give scores to elected officials and candidates with respect to how they protect the interests of their constituents.

It’s easy to see how such an organization would be useful and what it could achieve.  The real question is why doesn’t it already exist.  Now all I have to do is figure out words to fit the acronym.  National Organization Representing Moral American …  Dammit, what begins with L?