Equality in name isn’t equality in fact, no matter how hard you pretend otherwise.

So I’m doing my taxes (horribly late, I know), when I got a notification that John C. Wright has responded (yet again) to a post that I originally wrote a couple of years ago.  I mean, I should have ignored them; he said (for example) that I was quoting out of context while I provided links directly to the posts I was talking about, but hey. Maybe I was wrong and he had changed. Despite the somewhat obtuse and convoluted writing (and rather patronizing offer of “forgiving me” for what I said), I decided to go ahead and take a look and see what he’s up to these days.

I had nothing to do with me procrastinating on my taxes.  NOPE.

Anyway the first – I kid you not first – post on his site (screengrab here) when I looked a few minutes ago was enough to make me realize that nothing had really changed. So, in a bout of further procrastination (and because it’s an argument I’ve seen before), I’ll address a few of the things in that post.

PLEASE NOTE: All the quoted elements in this post are authored by John C. Wright, not myself.

This is also why I regard white separatism and white supremacy to be leftwing policies which, for reasons best known to them, leftists pretend are rightwing.

Okay, this is kind of out there, right? I mean, we identify them with the right wing because the white separatists and white supremacists self-identify with right-wing movements. So we’ve already broken with the real world a bit.

It means claiming history has a direction. No one is surprised that this allegedly scientific observation of “history” always promises inevitable victory to the party of the partisan making the claim.

Claiming that victory is inevitable and then, in the next breath, demanding we join their efforts toward victory is also a common trope and touchstone of leftism.

But if it is inevitable, you don’t need my help, do you, Nostradamus?

He’s actually right here; the “march of history” towards justice and peace is not, by any means, inevitable. One hopes that people would move toward greater understanding and compassion, but it’s not inevitable. All that evil requires to succeed is for good people to do nothing, right?  (And for such a holier-than-thou folk, he’s pretty snarky, right?)

We on the rightwing judge all men by the content of their character. That is the definition of conservative philosophy. We hold it to be self-evident that all men are created equal.

This is kind of flat out wrong.  To quote Wikipedia (here’s the primary source for this), emphasis mine:

‘The central tenets of conservatism include tradition, human imperfection, organic society, hierarchy and authority and property rights. Conservatives seek to preserve a range of institutions such as monarchy, religion, parliamentary government and property rights with the aim of emphasizing social stability and continuity while the more extreme elements called reactionaries oppose modernism and seek a return to “the way things were”.’

In fact, the concept that “all men are created equal” is anything but conservative both at the time of the Declaration of Independence and in the years since.

Before you object that not all men are equal because some men are born finer of wit or stronger of limb than others, some have rich fathers, and so on, please shut your stupid mouth, because everyone is sick of your damnable idiotic spew.

So much for compassion. I love how in this paragraph he simultaneously notes that economic circumstances create a huge advantage while handwaving it away.  Also the longest longitudinal study of human development pretty much directly contradicts this.

Equality, when we are talking about laws, means legal equality.

That is all it means, and all it has ever meant: the rich man’s mansion is protected from trespass by the same law that protects the hovel of a peon. My title own a penny is equal to your title to own a diamond. That is what equality means. It does not mean a diamond is worth a penny nor that a hovel enjoys the same vista, conveniences and square-footage as a mansion.

This is one of those things that’s technically true while being practically false, and exposes the misdirection (if not outright lie) of this whole conservative argument. It’s a simple thing to show it as being false with just one example (though many more exist):

If this was the world we lived in, there would be no such thing as a high-priced lawyer. The fact that lawyers exist – and that ones who command a high price are typically the ones who are successful at getting courts to agree with their clients. But if the law was truly impartial and not swayed by race or socioeconomic status, there would be no need for a high-priced lawyer.

But there is. And if you’re born into a rich family, guess what? You can afford a high priced lawyer so that your straightforward rape case can result in fewer consequences than, say, possession of pot.  Hell, I’m not super-rich, but the consequences of my failures haven’t fallen nearly as hard on me as they would have as someone who didn’t have the job, connections, or family support that I have had.

Equality means no white privilege and no affirmative action. It means no hate crime laws, no hate speech laws, and no sanctuary cities. It means guilt or innocence is judged by your acts, not your identity.

(Emphasis mine) I thought I’d finish here, because again, I agree with the statement I bolded up above. If things really were equal, then yeah, that would be the case.

Except that is not the world we live in, and being able to believe that we really exist in such an imaginary world is something that only people with privilege are able to do.