Archive for 2018
July 6, 2018
EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL: Things Are Getting Better, So Why Are We All So Gloomy? Why are we so willing to believe in doomsday scenarios that virtually never materialize?
The bookshops are groaning under ziggurats of pessimism. The airwaves are crammed with doom. In my own adult lifetime, I have listened to the implacable predictions of growing poverty, coming famines, expanding deserts, imminent plagues, impending water wars, inevitable oil exhaustion, mineral shortages, falling sperm counts, thinning ozone, acidifying rain, nuclear winters, mad-cow epidemics, Y2K computer bugs, killer bees, sex-change fish, global warming, ocean acidification and even asteroid impacts that would presently bring this happy interlude to a terrible end. I cannot recall a time when one or other of these scares was not solemnly espoused by sober, distinguished and serious elites and hysterically echoed by the media. I cannot recall a time when I was not being urged by somebody that the world could only survive if it abandoned the foolish goal of economic growth. The fashionable reason for pessimism changed, but the pessimism was constant. In the 1960s the population explosion and global famine were top of the charts, in the 1970s the exhaustion of resources, in the 1980s acid rain, in the 1990s pandemics, in the 2000s global warming. One by one these scares came and (all but the last) went.
Since snowfalls are now just a thing of the past, read the whole thing.
(Classical reference in headline.)
SKIRT TOO SHORT? Blue-check dragged for claiming teen who was attacked for wearing MAGA hat had it coming.
Related: Man arrested, fired, kicked out of [Harris County Green Party] over MAGA hat theft. “As for the victim of the crime, Donald Trump Jr. promised to replace 16-year-old Hunter Richard’s hat with one signed by POTUS.”
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY. Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam on the BBC’s Diversity Push: ‘I’m a Black Lesbian.’
Last month, BBC “comedy controller” Shane Allen announced a new slate of shows for the fall with a particular emphasis on the diversity of the programs…Someone asked Allen if that would rule out shows like Monty Python in the future. He replied, “If you’re going to assemble a team now, it’s not going to be six Oxbridge white blokes. It’s going to be a diverse range of people who reflect the modern world.” That didn’t sit well with director and Monty Python cast member Terry Gilliam. Gilliam was asked what he thought of the comments and said he wanted to henceforth be known as a black lesbian:
Speaking at a press conference at the Karlovy Vary film festival, where he was presenting his new film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, Gilliam said: “It made me cry: the idea that … no longer six white Oxbridge men can make a comedy show. Now we need one of this, one of that, everybody represented… this is bullshit. I no longer want to be a white male, I don’t want to be blamed for everything wrong in the world: I tell the world now I’m a black lesbian… My name is Loretta and I’m a BLT, a black lesbian in transition.”
He added: “[Allen’s] statement made me so angry, all of us so angry. Comedy is not assembled, it’s not like putting together a boy band where you put together one of this, one of that everyone is represented.”
Sooner or later, each leftwing “diversocrat,” as Heather Mac Donald has dubbed them, has his Freudian slip, where he admits that, as Howell Raines, then-editor of the New York Times once did, that diversity in and of itself is a more important goal than the actual quality of the end product his institution produces.
Monty Python was the culmination of the British satiric revolution of the 1960s, which began with Peter Cook, Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller’s 1961 play Beyond the Fringe, the 1968 play Forty Years On, written by Bennett and starring John Gielgud, and David Frost’s 1963 BBC series, That Was The Week That Was, aka TW3, the Jurassic-era equivalent of today’s Daily Show. With the exception of the American-born Gilliam, most of the Monty Python cast spent their salad days as Frost’s comedy writers. (It’s no coincidence that Frost in turn was occasionally mercilessly satirized on Python.) As Peter Hitchens wrote in his brilliant 1998 book, The Abolition of Britain, combined, these works were a cultural sea change in England:
Beyond the Fringe, Forty Years On and TW3 created a tradition of ‘anti-establishment’ comedy which continued long after its roots were forgotten. There may still have been an ‘establishment ‘of snobbery, church, monarchy, clubland and old-school-tie links in 1961.There was no such thing ten years later, but it suited the comics and all reformers to pretend that there was and to continue to attack this mythical thing. After all, if there were no snobbery, no crusty old aristocrats and cobwebbed judges, what was the moral justification for all this change, change which benefited the reformers personally by making them rich, famous and influential?
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It also made the middle class, especially the educated and well-off middle class, despise themselves and feel a sort of shame for their supposedly elitist prejudices, based upon injustice and undermined by their failure to defend the nation from its enemies in the era of appeasement. Thanks to this, in another paradox, they have often felt unable to defend things within Britain which they value and which help to keep them in existence, from the grammar schools to good manners. They are ashamed of being higher up the scale, though for most middle-class people this is more a matter of merit than birth, and nothing to be ashamed of at all.
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Since the 1960s, when the Left began its conquest of the cultural battlements, it has always been surprised and annoyed by Tory election victories. The 1970 Tory triumph, though entirely predictable, took the cultural establishment by surprise. The 1979 Tory win, though even more predictable, infuriated them. They had won control of broadcasting, of the schools, of the universities, the church, the artistic, musical and architectural establishment? How was it possible that they could not also be the government? Their rage was enormous, and increased with each successive Labour defeat. It was an injustice. How could the people be so foolish? Now, instead of aristocratic snobs misgoverning the country, the establishment was portrayed as a sort of fascistic semi-dictatorship, hacking at the NHS and the welfare state, waging aggressive wars abroad and enriching itself while the poor lived in misery.
This series of falsehoods has now become a weapon ready and waiting for unscrupulous demagogues to harness, and perhaps use against the new ‘establishment’ which has benefited so much from the satire boom and the alternative comedians. Once you have begun to use dishonest mockery as a weapon, you can never be entirely sure that it will not eventually be turned against you, by others who have learned that abuse and jeering pay much easier and swifter dividends than hard fact or serious argument. It could be that the civilized mirth of the sixties leads in a direct line to the crude hyena cackling of the mob. In any case, there is no sign of the humour industry taking the side of traditional morality, patriotism or civility. The best it can do is dignify itself with noisy and public collections for sentimental and prominent charity. Once you step beyond the fringe, you sooner or later find yourself in very wild country indeed.
Just ask the surviving members of Python, who are discovering the hard way that all leftwing revolutions eventually devour their own.
More from Steve Hayward at Power Line: “Liberals and the Death of Comedy.”
MAYBE IT’S ABOUT HYPERGAMY: Lots of Successful Women Are Freezing Their Eggs. But It May Not Be About Their Careers. “In the years since, many more women across the world have frozen their eggs. Many are highly educated. But the decision may have very little to do with work, at least according to a new study. In interviews with 150 American and Israeli women who had undergone one cycle, career planning came up as the primary factor exactly two times. Instead, most women focused on another reason: they still hadn’t found a man to build a family with. . . . Why are so many women having a hard time finding men to have children with? One hypothesis that researchers often cite is that it’s related to demographics. Women in many developed countries, including the United States, Canada, Britain, Japan, Norway and Australia, are now more educated than men. This could be creating a dearth of appealing male partners for these women.”
“FIXED” MIGHT BE CUTTING IT A LITTLE TOO CLOSE TO THE BONE: Male Feminists Gather in Aspen to Ponder How to Fix Men — the ‘Heterosexual White Ones.’
Angela Merkel on Monday downed what she no doubt viewed as a poisoned chalice. To keep her power and her grand coalition, the German chancellor agreed finally to stanch the flow of migrants by setting up camps at the border and turning away those who had already applied for asylum in other European countries. The concession comes three years after Merkel flung open the gates to more than a million newcomers from the Middle East and Africa. For much of that time, she refused to put a cap on the number Germany would accept.
Whatever the immediate political outcome—Merkel’s position remains tenuous amid a mighty anti-immigration backlash on the center and far right—she has already cemented her legacy. And it is a baleful one. Inspired by what can only be described as a kind of liberal fundamentalism, Merkel’s response to the migrant crisis destabilized Europe and discredited the Western project in the eyes of global multitudes. Behind Donald Trump and Brexit and other populist uprisings of our time lies the figure of “Mama Merkel,” as Syrian refugees to Germany lovingly nicknamed their patroness.
As Jim Geraghty tweeted in 2015:
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Vermont, Minnesota show that law schools are still grappling with budget challenges.
‘ABOLISH ICE’ AND THE DEMOCRATS’ REGRESSION TO EXTREMISM:
The Left is hoping the midterms will be a referendum on Trump’s behavior. The self-promoting tendencies of Gillibrand and other Democrats venturing to extremes could make it a referendum on ICE instead. The harder they push on issues to galvanize the base and presidential-primary voters, the more difficult they are making it for any one of them actually to get elected president or to win the House and Senate seats a Democratic president would need to advance any legislation. The race to be most radical is a self-defeating strategy.
All the Democrats have to do is not be crazy, and they can’t even do that.™
‘MERICA: Drink beer, throw axes: Inside a new East Nashville attraction.
Having thrown axes with Glenn once before down in Texas, I’m willing to road trip down to Tennessee to try it again.
HOW COLD CAN IT GET? -148 Fahrenheit.
REMINDER: Here’s What Happened the Last Time the Left Got Nasty.
The first half of the article is questionable history mixed with Here-Are-My-Anti-Trump-Bona-Fides, but then there’s this:
Despite the [civil rights] movement’s historic achievements—and the success of liberals in securing scores of other major reforms—young radicals grew impatient with the pace of change, especially in Vietnam. Peaceful protests continued, but growing numbers of militants now styled themselves revolutionaries and adopted tactics to match. Groups like the Weather Underground preached and carried out violence, including lethal violence, which was deemed “as American as cherry pie” by H. Rap Brown, rendering ironic the name of the group he’d come to lead, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. (Brown, who now goes by Jamil Al-Amin, is currently serving a life sentence for murder.)
Most activists stopped short of planting bombs and shooting police officers. But many still blew past the boundaries of what nearly everyone considered legitimate protest. Demonstrators not only directed chants of “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” at President Lyndon Johnson; they also accosted officials of his administration when they set out in public. In 1967, when Secretary of State Dean Rusk tried to attend a banquet of the Foreign Policy Association in New York, a radical group called Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers (often called “the Motherfuckers” for short) threw eggs, rocks and bags of cows’ blood, though Rusk slipped into the hotel unscathed. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was spat upon in an airport and called a baby killer; on a visit to Harvard, a hostile mob encircled his car and rocked it back and forth until police spirited him to safety via a tunnel. Antiwar radicals even tried to set fire to McNamara’s Colorado vacation home—twice. A few years later, after he’d left government, someone tried to throw him off the Martha’s Vineyard ferry.
The confrontations continued after Johnson yielded the presidency to Richard Nixon.
I’d argue that the Left got nasty 16 years ago, and that Donald Trump is the long-simmering result. I’d also argue that the Left, or at least a significant fraction of it, has already decided to double down on nasty.
THE POWER OF FREE ENTERPRISE: Without SpaceX China would have caught up to NASA in 2030 with Long March 9 matching SLS block 2. Though I wouldn’t put a lot of faith in SLS, whose pork-laden nature has earned it the nickname “Senate Launch System.”
WINNING: U.S. gains 213,000 jobs in June; unemployment rises to 4%.
When unemployment goes up while the economy is adding jobs at a healthy clip, it’s great news. It means that people who had dropped out of the labor force and had stopped being counted as “unemployed,” feel confident enough to start looking for work again.
AT AMAZON, Lightning Deal, Outlander Packable Handy Lightweight Travel Hiking Backpack Daypack.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Who Killed the Center-Left? “The politicians supportive of illegal immigration,” Matthew Continetti writes in the Washington Free Beacon:
If there is a common denominator to these electoral shakeups, it is the politics of migration. The overthrown establishments all benefited from the economics of illegal immigration and used migrants as chits in a humanitarian sweepstakes in which the leader who signals the most virtue wins. Migration became a symbol for the “flat world” of globalization where not just people but also cultures, goods, and investments flowed freely, borders had little meaning, and sovereignty was pooled upwards to transnational bureaucracy as identity was reduced to racial, ethnic, religious, or sexual characteristics. The fantastic wealth produced by the global marketplace enriched the center-left to such a degree that its adherents became walled off from the material, social, and cultural concerns of the working people they professed to represent. And so middle-class workers who believe a country’s leadership ought to be accountable to a country’s citizens went elsewhere—devastating the ranks of the center left and creating a vacuum for the neo-socialists of the twenty-first century.
Read the whole thing. Continetti’s paragraph quoted above also dovetails with an observation Jonah Goldberg made in his new book, Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy:
Intellectuals surely have a financial motive in arguing for a system in which intellectuals would run things, but they also have a psychological one. That desire is often the more important one. Marx wanted to be the high priest of a new world order, but he didn’t necessarily want to be rich. We are wired to want to have higher status than others. We are also wired to resent those who we believe have undeservedly higher status than we do. Intellectuals and artistic elites have heaped scorn on other elites— the wealthy, the military, the bourgeois, the Church— for centuries.
[Joseph] Schumpeter’s analysis was deeply influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment, laid out in his On the Genealogy of Morals. Ressentiment, in Nietzsche’s highly literary telling, is the process by which priests use their skills to redefine the culture’s idea of what is virtuous in order to undermine the power of knights, i.e., the ruling nobility. The knights are non-intellectual men of action who hold more power than the priests, and the priests hate them for it. Thus, according to Nietzsche, Christianity elevated the meek and denigrated the powerful (just as Marx lionized labor and demonized entrepreneurs). It’s much more complicated than that—Nietzsche always is—but Schumpeter took this framework and applied it to capitalism over time.
There is one very common—if not quite universal—universal—thing that unites these different kinds of “priests”: They tend to come from the ranks of the bourgeois and the very wealthy themselves. There’s something about growing up prosperous that causes people not only to take prosperity for granted but to resent the prosperous. “It wasn’t the children of auto workers who pulled up the paving stones on the Left Bank in 1968,” writes Deirdre McCloskey. “The most radical environmentalists and anti-globalists nowadays are socialist children of capitalist parents.”
See also: Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria.