THINGS FALL APART; THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD: David Solway on “Excluded Middles.”
Archive for 2016
May 31, 2016
WELL, SO IS AMERICA. SO WHY IS THAT BAD? Girl Scouts Still “Mostly White.”
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JUSTICE ADVANCES: Update On Murder-For-Hire Investigation Into Dan Markel’s Death.
“A SOCIETY OF EMASCULATED LIARS IS EASY TO CONTROL:”
Shot:
Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.
—Theodore Dalrymple in a 2005 interview with Jamie Glazov of Front Page magazine.
Double-shot:
To explain how dissent works, Havel introduced the manager of a hypothetical fruit-and-vegetable shop who places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!” He’s not actually enthusiastic about the sign’s message. It’s just one of the things that people in a post-totalitarian system do even if they “never think about” what it means. He does it because everyone does it. It’s what you do to get along in life and live “in harmony with society.” (For our purposes, you can imagine that slogan is a red equal sign that you put up on your Facebook page.)
The subtext of the grocer’s sign is “I do what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me.” It protects him from supervisors above and informants below.
Havel is skeptical of ideology. He says that dictatorships can just use raw power, but “the more complex the mechanisms of power become, the larger and more stratified the society they embrace, and the longer they have operated historically … the greater the importance attached to the ideological excuse.” We don’t have a dictatorship, obviously, but we do have complex mechanisms of power and larger and more stratified society.
In any case, individuals need not believe the lies of an ideology so much as behave as though they do, or at least tolerate them in silence or get along with those who work with them. “For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system,” Havel says.
— “The Rise Of The Same-Sex Marriage Dissidents,” Mollie Hemigway in the Federalist in 2014, exploring Vaclav Havel’s 1978 essay on Czechoslovakia under Soviet control, “The Power of the Powerless.”
Chaser:
— Christina Hoff Sommers, “Intersectional feminism: What is it?”, March 30, 2016.
(Via Maggie’s Farm.)
USA TODAY EDITORIALIZES: Hillary Clinton broke the rules: As secretary of State, she ignored repeated warnings about email security. If by breaking the rules you mean committed a felony, then yes.
#FEELTHEBERN: Franklin Pierce-Herald poll shows tight NH race, trouble for Clinton. “Clinton and Trump are both getting 44 percent of the vote in a general-election matchup yet just only a third of all voters have a favorable view of the two likely presidential nominees, according to the new poll. The poll should cause some concern among Democrats who have counted on New Hampshire’s four electoral votes for the past three elections.”
QUESTION ANSWERED: Why Trump attacked New Mexico Republican Gov. Susana Martinez.
Byron York’s column in the Washington Examiner boils down to a phrase uttered in 2004 by wise New York senator who would go on to be Secretary of State: You don’t have to fall in love, you just have to fall in line. Evidently, that’s Trump’s motto as well.
DON’T DO STUPID SH*T: Is the U.S. Violating Its Own Sanctions to Buy Russian Rocket Engines?
Maybe it’s just a reset of the reset.
FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Events Keep Vindicating Trump – & Discrediting Obama – on Asia.
THE DANGERS OF ELECTED, RACIST STUPIDITY: Why is Louisiana Democrat Barbara Norton so eager to insult the legacy of Martin Luther King?
THE GUILD PROTECTS ITS OWN: FNC’s Kurtz Focuses on Fake Editing of Couric, While CNN Skips It.
Flashback: Jennings and Brokaw Defend Rather Who Sees Effort to “Smear” Him.
NOW HE TELLS US: Take it from Larry Summers: Gummit ain’t workin’ good.
Guess what blatant reactionary wrote the following words: “It seems plausible to wonder if government can build a nation abroad, fight social decay, run schools, mandate the design of cars, run health insurance exchanges, or set proper sexual harassment policies on college campuses, if it can’t even fix a 232-foot bridge competently.”
Stumped? The answer is Lawrence Summers, secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration, presidential senior economic adviser in the Obama administration and, in between, president of Harvard, writing in the Washington Post. For more on the fiasco of the rebuilding of the Larz Anderson Bridge, between Cambridge and Boston’s Allston neighborhood, see another opinion article by Summers in the Boston Globe.
As it happens, I wrote a column myself back in 2010 on how long it was taking to fix the Humpback Bridge, a portion of George Washington Parkway which rises about 30 feet above an inlet of the Potomac. From the top of that bridge you can see the Pentagon, still the world’s largest office building, which was built in 18 months. I’ve had occasion also to write columns on how excellent books by Philip K. Howard, Peter Schuck and John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge which illustrate that, as I put it, “gummit don’t work good.” And I’ve written more recently on the tragic deterioration of the Metro, Washington’s “Great Society Subway.”
So even as we hear from Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton how government is going to painlessly provide us with free healthcare, free college and free Ben & Jerry’s ice cream (uh, just kidding about the last one), we see all around us how government is unable to do things it could easily do 50, 100 and (think Flint water) 150 years ago. What makes anyone think it can take on additional tasks and perform them satisfactorily? Apparently Summers, lifelong Democrat and frequent advocate of more government spending on infrastructure, is having his doubts.
We have the worst political class in American history. Thus, the government it runs is performing badly. It is not a coincidence, but it is unfortunate, that we also have the largest government in American history.
GO AHEAD, BITE THE BIG APPLE — DON’T MIND THE MAGGOTS: New York City Is a Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy — Just Ask Jessica Valenti!
Why are Democrat-run cities such wretched cesspots of scum and villainy?
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE:
● Princeton protesters want faculty with learning disabilities.
● Yale says all-gender bathroom project ‘is about public signaling.’
● Oberlin students say bad grades are getting in the way of activism.
It’s as everyone involved in higher education has forgotten its original purpose or something; this will end well.
THE HILL: Why a power grid attack is a nightmare scenario.
Stores are closed. Cell service is failing. Broadband Internet is gone.
Hospitals are operating on generators, but rapidly running out of fuel.
Garbage is rotting in the streets, and clean water is scarce as people boil water stored in bathtubs to stop the spread of bacteria.
And escape?
There is none, because planes can’t fly, trains can’t run, and gas stations can’t pump fuel.
This is the “nightmare scenario” that lawmakers have been warning you about.
The threat of an attack on the nation’s power grid is all too real for the network security professionals who labor every day to keep the country safe.
“In order to restore civilized society, the power has got to be back on,” said Scott Aaronson, who oversees the Electricity Subsector Coordinating Council (ESCC), an industry-government emergency response program.
While cybersecurity experts and industry executives describe such warnings as alarmist, intelligence officials say people underestimate how destructive a power outage can be.
The most damaging kind of attack, specialists say, would be carefully coordinated to strike multiple power stations.
If hackers were to knock out 100 strategically chosen generators in the Northeast, for example, the damaged power grid would quickly overload, causing a cascade of secondary outages across multiple states. While some areas could recover quickly, others might be without power for weeks.
The scenario isn’t completely hypothetical. Lawmakers and government officials got a preview in 2003, when a blackout spread from the coastal Northeast into the Midwest and Canada.
“If you think of how crippled our region is when we lose power for just a couple of days, the implications of a deliberate widespread attack on the power grid for the East Coast, say, would cause devastation,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine).
Well, if I were mounting a grid attack, I’d also launch cyber-attacks on things, and organizations, needed to recover from it. And perhaps mix it with some physical attacks to create more confusion.
Bill Forstchen, call your office.
SELF-FUNDED MIGHT NOT MEAN WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS: Is Trump’s money a myth?
As for his campaign, the last FEC report said he had $2.4 million in his account, and $44 million in debt. That debt, by the way, is to one Donald J. Trump, which is proof he’s not even self-funding the red-hats-and-tweeting phase of the campaign. The RNC had about $17 million on hand and $4 million in debt. They’re only about $970 million dollars short of the combined Romney/RNC/SuperPAC total for 2012.
Those are worrisome numbers, unless Trump really can ride rallies and free media all the way to the White House.
SOMETIMES, HEADS SHOULD ROLL, Kevin D. Williamson writes:
Couric is under fire (you know, like Hillary Rodham Clinton in Bosnia) for her role in an anti-gun documentary (NB: My iPad wants “anti-gun” to be “anti-fun” — changed it three times — and I do not disagree) in which dishonest editing was used to make it look as though pro–Second Amendment activists were unable to answer elementary questions about a gun-rights controversy. This technique is known as “the Jon Stewart.” What you do is take a few seconds (or, in this case, a few minutes) of reaction shots (the footage they shoot of people’s faces while other people are talking) and then insert that non-talking footage after a question is asked: Voilà, the opposition is literally speechless…This kind of thing is the stock-in-trade of faux journalists such as Jon Stewart and crude propagandists such as Michael Moore, but Katie Couric is, in theory, something else: an actual journalist. There are things we permit among comedians that we do not permit among journalists: I doubt very much that every anecdote Richard Pryor ever shared actually happened.
Read the whole thing.
‘WE HAVE TO DESTROY HER STORY’: HOW HILLARY ENABLED BILL: “Hillary tends to get a pass, because the 1990s were a long time ago, the media often scold anyone who brings up the scandals and most politicians think it’s bad form to talk about someone else’s marriage. Unconstrained by all these boundaries, Trump is hitting her with his characteristic abandon,” Rich Lowry writes. “Hillary’s defenders say this is tantamount to blaming her for Bill’s infidelities. Of course, she’s not responsible for his wanderings. But as a fully vested member of Bill’s political operation, Hillary had as much interest in forcefully rebutting all allegations of sexual misconduct as he did.”
Read the whole thing.
RUN, BERNIE, RUN: Believing he can win California, Bernie Sanders stumps in Oakland.
Moments before he stepped outside Oakland City Hall to rally more than 11,000 adoring fans, Sanders pointed to the Golden State Warriors as proof that the final buzzer hadn’t yet sounded on his presidential campaign.
“They were down three games to one, and they came back,” said Sanders, who got to watch to watch the Warriors complete their comeback inside Oracle Arena.
“Well, we started out pretty far behind. And, I think we’re going to come back as well.”
While Clinton has a seemingly insurmountable lead in pledged delegates, she still needs the backing of top Democratic Party officials, known as superdelegates, to secure the nomination. Sanders is soldiering on, insisting that he will make the case to those leaders that he is their best chance for beating Donald Trump.
C’mon, superdelegates — there’s no better time than right now to starting feeling the Bern.
BEFORE YOU HEAD BACK TO WORK, GET A BOOK FOR THOSE LUNCH HOURS: Most of these books, by authors guaranteed to be to the right of Lenin (only partly a joke, as most authors aren’t) and not inimical to humanity and liberty, are still on sale or free. Start of Summer Indie Author Sale.