Archive for 2018
June 16, 2018
IT’S COME TO THIS: “it can’t possibly be vegan to breast feed my baby.”
I’m pretty sure Mike Judge didn’t intend for Idiocracy to be a how-to guide for life in the 21st century.
PERHAPS WE SHOULD TREAT IT AS A SEXUAL PREFERENCE, AND PROTECT IT: Shocking number of Americans have sex at work.
ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS NO ONE IS ASKING:
● Shot: Should “Fat Studies” Be Taught In School?
—Jezebel, November 4, 2010.
● Chaser: Colleges dropping ‘Fat Studies’ courses in 2018.
—The College Fix, January 17, 2018.
Found via “Orwell & Good,” who tweets, “Phew. I guess saddling yourself with tens of thousands of dollars of debt to become unemployable isn’t all that popular.”
● And finally, the hangover: Profs deride ‘weight loss’ as a ‘Western value.’
—Campus Reform, Thursday.
Rinse and repeat cycle until the education apocalypse is concluded.
HARVARD DENIES DISCRIMINATING AGAINST ASIANS; FLUNKS LAUGH TEST: According to the analysis run by Duke University economist Peter Arcidiacono, if Harvard were to drop all racial preferences and penalties, the number of Asian Americans there would about double. Harvard’s explanation boils down to “Asians don’t have good personalities or character.” Problem for Harvard: The alumni who conduct the interviews rate Asian candidates just as high as whites on personality and character. It’s only the Harvard admissions staff members (who ordinarily don’t even interview the applicants) who mysteriously rate them much lower. Plaintiffs are asking for summary judgment. No reasonable fact finder could listen to Harvard’s defense without breaking out into laughter.
More on this issue later … Right now, I am in Chile, so I need to spend some time gazing at the magnificent Andes.
BRIE LARSON MAKES A SMALL CONTRIBUTION TO THE TRUMP 2020 CAMPAIGN: In a piece titled, “Brie Larson Promises ‘I Do Not Hate White Dudes,’ But Laments Lack of Inclusion Among Film Critics,” the future Captain Marvel, age 28, is quoted as saying:
“I do not need a 70-year-old white dude to tell me what didn’t work for him about ‘[A] Wrinkle in Time.’ It wasn’t made for him. I want to know what it meant to women of color, to biracial women, to teen women of color, to teens that are biracial.”
“And while this is very woke of Ms. Larson,” Sonny Bunch writes in response at the Washington Free Beacon, “I sense two issues with her theory of criticism. The first is that she doesn’t actually have to read old white men to find out A Wrinkle in Time is not particularly good; there are plenty of women and minorities who are happy to fill her in on that fact.” Bunch links to a screenshot full of female, black and Hispanic reviewers who didn’t give thumbs up to A Wrinkle in Time, adding:
But there’s a bigger, more troubling issue with Larson’s line of thinking: the presumption that certain people are more prone to appreciating specific works of art because they fit into some broader category of gender or race or whatever. As Jessica Ritchey noted in Mel Magazine after an Internet gadfly suggested Vertigo is only considered a good movie because “lol white men amirite,” this is kind of gross:
One of the most exhausting aspects of our current cultural moment are the “ugh, only straight white men like this” takes that completely erase the voices of female critics, critics of color and fans who don’t fit neatly into binaries of who “should” like/dislike something. It’s part of a larger and much more pernicious problem — mistaking pop-culture consumption for moral worth as opposed to, you know, how we carry ourselves every day; how we treat other people; and how we support (or don’t) the causes that matter to us. Instead, we equate what someone watches on Netflix as the mark of a good/bad person.
Art is complicated; art is messy; art doesn’t fit into neat little boxes. Sure, A Wrinkle in Time got hammered. But Moonlight is a film about a gay black man that was nigh-on unanimously praised by the straight-white-male critical corps. Girls Trip is a film about black women that clocked in at 90 percent fresh. Black Panther? 97 percent approval rating. I’m not sure a more diverse array of voices would actually change that much when it comes to a bad film’s reception, at least in the extremely reductive sense of a film’s RT score.
In her response to Larson, Amy Alkon tweets, “Age-ist, sexist, racist thinking is now so chic. Guess what: I have read @TerryTeachout‘s insights for decades and appreciated the hell out of his insights. He’s a white dude. Whatever. It’s the insights I come for, not the skin color or age.”
Brendan O’Neill of Spiked wrote in his FaceBook page last year that, “It’s becoming so clear now why the war of words between SJWs and the new white nationalists is so intense. It isn’t because they have huge ideological differences — it’s because they have so much in common.”
And as Glenn noted last year:
If you divide America along racial/ethnic lines, eventually the largest racial/ethnic group will start to think of itself as a racial/ethnic group and act accordingly. But in the meantime, it’s a good living for [Ta-Nehisi] Coates, and I guess an okay one for [alt-right founder Richard] Spencer.
And if you want more Trump, well, Coates will help you get more Trump, and a lot more effectively than Spencer ever has. Right after the election, John Podhoretz tweeted, “Liberals spent 40 years disaggregating [the] U.S., until finally the largest cohort in the country chose to vote as though it were an ethnic group.” That’s where “whiteness”-as-original-sin gets you. But hey, like I said, it’s a good living for some people.
Larson’s Captain Marvel movie, distributed by the ever-woke Walt Disney Studios, opens in March of 2019. I wonder how many identity politics-themed bon mots Larson will be tossing to interviewers during its run up.
ROGER SIMON: Christopher Wray Not the Man to “Proudly” Fix the FBI.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, CAMPUS SEXISM EDITION: University of Michigan contradicted by the feds in dismissing anti-male complaint.
WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-DOMINATED INDUSTRIES SUCH CESSPITS OF RACISM AND MISOGYNY? Women Of Color In Academe Make 67 Cents For Every Dollar Paid To White Men.
TYLER O’NEIL: Did Pro-Clinton FBI Bias Get Donald Trump Elected?
THEY TOLD ME IF TRUMP WERE ELECTED WE’D SEE OPEN RACISM BECOME FASHIONABLE, AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Harvard Medical School ashamed of white male department heads. “Harvard Medical School has removed 31 portraits of its former department heads from a lecture hall because all of the individuals are men, and 30 of them are white. Dr. Betsy Nabel, the hospital’s president, said she has been considering the move for several years, concerned that the lack of diversity might upset women and minorities who are training to become doctors.”
Apparently, women and minorities are very fragile.
BYRON YORK: Viva le resistance: How political bias infected FBI Trump, Clinton probes. “The fact is, bias — political bias, anti-Trump bias — was pervasive in some quarters of the Trump-Russia investigation. And that is just what the inspector general found in his review of the Clinton investigation — not his main examination of the Trump-Russia probe. That inspector general investigation is going on now and will ultimately — no one knows when — result in a report that will likely be at least as long and at least as newsy as the report released Thursday. There could be a lot more to discover.”
IT’S NOT JUST THE TRUMP AND CLINTON STUFF: Problems at the Justice Department and FBI Are Serious. It’s widespread institutional corruption.
FOUR THUNDERBOLTS OFF THE WING: Four A-10s pace a KC-135 during Exercise Saber Strike. Photo snapped June 8.
SO MUCH WINNING: GOP wants Trump in 2020, more popular than Obama, JFK, Reagan.
Republican voters are demanding that President Trump run for re-election in 2020, the latest evidence that support among his backers is stronger than it was for nearly every recent president.
According to the latest Economist/YouGov poll, 68 percent of Republicans want Trump to run for re-election.
And Democratic pollster John Zogby said this week that only former President George W. Bush was more popular than Trump among his base going into his first mid-term election, and he had just launched a war against America’s 9/11 attackers.
Weird.
EXCEPT WHEN SOME DEMOCRAT TRIES TO KILL A BUNCH OF REPUBLICANS: Softball, the Hill’s Social Lubricant.
Related: How a Bernie Bro Nearly Committed the Biggest Political Killing In American History.
NARRATIVE FAIL: Why President Trump will be the greatest civil rights president in a generation.
In January, I attended a meeting at the White House on prison reform with President Trump. The president was the biggest advocate for prison reform at the meeting, and his actions these last few weeks prove exactly why he has the guts to bring desperately needed change in our criminal justice system.
For me, overturning these failed Clinton-era policies is personal. In the mid-1990s, a close relative of mine had her life tragically altered by a law referred to as the “Clinton crime bill.” At the time, Hillary Clinton labeled young African-Americans as “superpredators” with “no conscience” and “no empathy” that the government had to “bring to heel.”
Millions of people like my family member ultimately had their lives destroyed because of these prejudiced and discriminatory policies put in place by a man considered “the first black president.” Laws like these are the reason that, while only five percent of the entire world’s population lives in the United States, we are responsible for 25 percent of the world’s prison population.
Instead of focusing on imprisoning the most dangerous and violent offenders, our criminal justice system too often traps nonviolent offenders in decades-long prison sentences — disproportionately African-American men — resulting in a cycle of poverty, unemployment, and imprisonment.
This is a tragedy for these young people and their families, but it’s also bad for taxpayers. Operating all federal and state prisons and local jails costs American taxpayers about $80 billion a year.
President Trump believes this money would be better spent on rebuilding America’s infrastructure and communities. That’s why he has embraced bipartisan legislation such as the FIRST STEP Act (H.R. 5682), and worked with Democrats such as Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York to pass the bill in the U.S. House last month.
Stay tuned.
DAVID FRENCH: Yes, Hillary Clinton Should Have Been Prosecuted.
I know this is ancient history, but — I’m sorry — I just can’t let it go. When historians write the definitive, sordid histories of the 2016 election, the FBI, Hillary, emails, Russia, and Trump, there has to be a collection of chapters making the case that Hillary should have faced a jury of her peers.
The IG report on the Hillary email investigation contains the most thoughtful and thorough explanation of the FBI’s decision to recommend against prosecuting Hillary. At the risk of oversimplifying a long and complex discussion, the IG time and again noted that (among other things) the FBI focused on the apparent lack of intent to violate the law and the lack of a clear precedent for initiating a prosecution under similar facts. It also describes how the FBI wrestled with the definition of “gross negligence” — concluding that the term encompassed conduct “so gross as to almost suggest deliberate intention” or “something that falls just short of being willful.”
After reading the analysis, I just flat-out don’t buy that Hillary’s conduct — and her senior team’s conduct — didn’t meet that standard.
Neither do I.
June 15, 2018
AT AMAZON, last-minute Father’s Day gifts.
DERP STATE. The Ironic Tragedy of Peter Strzok: Did Pro-Clinton FBI Bias Get Donald Trump Elected?
OPEN THREAD: Thread away.