BECAUSE JOE LOCKHART ISN’T VERY GOOD AT WHAT HE DOES: Why doesn’t Lockhart know that you don’t show your talking points outright? This is like when George H.W. Bush said “Message: I care.”
Archive for 2019
July 28, 2019
WAY BACK IN 2018, WHEN THE BALTIMORE’S THEN-MAYOR WAS RACIST: Democrat Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh Caught On Camera Complaining About ‘Rats, Dead Animals’ Last Year.
OPEN THREAD: Finish the weekend in style.
WARREN KANDERS SHOULD GET HIS $10 MILLION BACK: And the Whitney Museum staffers who chased him off the board of directors should have to cough up the money out of their own pockets. What pompous fools.
IF YOU HAVE A STRICT FREE-SPEECH RULE, YOU NEVER HAVE TO MAKE TOUGH DECISIONS ABOUT PUNISHING PEOPLE’S SPEECH: Amy Wax Controversy Drags Penn Law Into Free-Speech Dilemma.
Of course, as John Banzhaf has pointed out, while lots of people have said Amy Wax’s statements are offensive, none of them have even tried to prove that they are wrong.
I KISSED DATING GOODBYE AUTHOR JOSH HARRIS SAYS HE’S NO LONGER A CHRISTIAN: Get Ready For A Flood Of Christian Defections.
Sadly, I could add a lot more Christian celebrities to the list. Expect to see more and more of these defections in the coming years as Christianity wanes in popularity and influence and it becomes increasingly costly to remain a follower of Christ. There will be a high price to be paid for those who remain faithful to Christ and the teachings of the Bible. People will lose their jobs, they’ll be denied professional credentials, they will be banned from popular social media platforms and essentially exiled from polite society. Christians will no longer be able to “hide in plain sight” (a phrase recently highlighted by Rod Dreher in describing how all Christians will soon be forced to publicly declare their views on LGBTQ issues). We’ll be asked at work, at our kids’ schools, at Boy Scout meetings, and even in some churches as the culture rallies around sexual minorities, elevating their rights above all others and quashing religious liberty in the process. There will be severe consequences for those who give the wrong answer.
When all is said and done, years from now we will point to some fads that became widespread in Christianity in the 90s and early part of the 21st century (particularly in evangelicalism) that contributed to the falling away we’re seeing: Seeker-sensitive church growth models, Christian celebrity culture, and the prosperity gospel to name a few, along with the rise of social media and the militancy of the LGBTQ movement. The generation coming of age now, for the most part, has not been taught a robust theology that urges them to take up their cross and follow Jesus. Instead, they’ve been taught to elevate their feelings over doctrine (which, they’re told, divides), to satisfy their felt needs over and above obedience to Christ, and to embrace the world rather than reject it in pursuit of holiness. American churches—packed out with kids who walked the aisle and repeated a prayer and were told they were saved—sent a whole generation out ill-equipped to forsake the world and suffer for Christ. The whirlwind we’re reaping will be borne out in empty churches and increasing apostasy.
Speaking of which, it’s come to this: The Church of England’s Rochester Cathedral installs an astroturfed miniature golf course (!) in its nave. “The Rochester Cathedral is England’s second-oldest. There has been Christian worship on this site since the year 604, though the present cathedral building dates to 1080. Miniature golf in the nave dates to A.D. 2019. Who ever thought that Christianity in England would expire not with a bang, or even a whimper, but with a bogey on the ninth hole?”
ANALYSIS: TRUE. ‘Bike supremacy’ is ruining the city.
FASTER, PLEASE: Two therapeutic targets identified for deadly lung cancer.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: The Left’s Broad, Bigoted Politics of Vilification.
I appeared on CNN Monday night to discuss the firestorm over the president’s caustic tweets last weekend criticizing the four most progressive members of the House of Representatives. I deemed the tweets illogical and shrill, and said so on Twitter and on Anderson Cooper’s show. I also pointed out that the overreaction from Democratic politicians and their media allies revealed a hysterical attempt to castigate the president as prejudiced. I cited the incredibly incendiary accusation of my CNN colleague Wajahat Ali who retweeted an article and its headline: “Trump is a racist. If you still support him, so are you.”
Such an immense and broad condemnation of tens of millions of Americans represents, itself, an intensely bigoted tactic. After all, utterly dismissing wide swaths of our society just because they do not share prescribed political preferences represents a wholesale effort to delegitimize and dehumanize; it’s a classic tactic to “otherize,” to borrow a term from the left. Paradoxically, liberals like Ali unveil their own inherent and systemic bigotry by belittling their fellow citizens, merely on the grounds of policy differences. Rather than engage and debate and persuade, the intolerant left chooses the politics of vilification. Their rash judgment deems the “unwashed rabble” of our America First movement as deplorables and racists, simpletons unworthy of real consideration.
When I pointed out this clear chasm between their professed tolerance and real-world bigotry, Mr. Ali admonished me, stating that white Trump supporters “will never love you … no matter how hard you try to be the Latin face of Trump, they will never love you.” This CNN commentator and New York Times writer shamelessly employed an old racist trope, essentially calling me an “Uncle Tom” for daring to be brown and pro-America First. His demeaning comment attempted to remove me of my agency and castigate me as some supplicant intent on pleasing my white betters.
In actuality, I do not view all politics, as Ali does, through the narrow prism of race, and I regard myself as an American citizen and a grown man with his own thoughts. Despite Ali’s disparagement, I am not a caricature seeking the ratification of whites. In fact, I care very little about anyone’s skin color and instead aggressively argue for a new American nationalism that rejects tribalism and instead focuses on citizenship and rejects globalism.
The mainstream identity politics-driven left really are the mirror image of the fringe alt-right.
WAY BACK IN 2016, WHEN THE BALTIMORE SUN WAS RACIST: Trump’s right: Declare Baltimore a ‘disaster’ and rebuild it.
Nuke the site from orbit – it’s the only way to be sure.
Related: Another Fox News Sunday, Another Trump Official Schools Anti-Trumper Chris Wallace On Racism.
THEY CAN’T HELP THEMSELVES: A councilman in Seattle is reportedly opposed to hosing sidewalks that reek of excrement near a local courthouse because he fears that it might be racially insensitive.
“The area surrounding King County Superior Court includes a homeless shelter and other social-services organizations and has become an “unsanitary and potentially frightening” scene — one “that reeks of urine and excrement” — according to an article in the Seattle Times. Desperate for help with the disgusting environment, two of the court’s judges have asked the city to please power-wash the poop-covered sidewalks. That seems like a pretty reasonable request, but apparently, one councilman is worried that doing so might be a form of microaggression. A councilman in Seattle is reportedly opposed to hosing sidewalks that reek of excrement near a local courthouse because he fears that it might be racially insensitive.”
I got nothin’.
MARK STEYN ON CHAPPAQUIDDICK’S FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY: Speaking Ill of the Ted.
Last year there was, very belatedly, a fine feature film about Chappaquiddick, which I reviewed here, and which contains a dialogue exchange taken almost verbatim from a ten-year-old column of mine:
As Joan Vennochi wrote in The Boston Globe:
‘Like all figures in history – and like those in the Bible, for that matter – Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse.’
Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than ‘betrayed’ him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let’s face it, he doesn’t have Ted’s tremendous legislative legacy, does he?
That bit turns up in the movie:
Joan Vennochi’s words are put in Ted’s mouth: He says defensively that all men are flawed — ‘Moses had a temper, Peter betrayed Jesus.’ And my cheap riposte — ‘Moses didn’t leave a girl at the bottom of the Red Sea’ — is given to the outraged Joe Gargan, already on his way out, supplanted by better, colder, harder fixers. When the guy gets out and leaves the girl at the bottom of the sea, it offends the natural order: Joe is telling him he’s not a man.
He wasn’t — and nor were those who went along with it. I have rarely been more disgusted by the public discourse of a free society than by the obsequies that attended Kennedy’s passing a decade ago.
Read the whole thing.
CREEPY TECH: How You Move Your Phone Can Reveal Insights Into Your Personality, Creepy Study Finds. “It may sound strange at first, but a team of researchers in Australia has come up with a method to predict your personality traits using just the accelerometer in your phone.”
FOG IN CHANNEL; CONTINENT CUT OFF: Every home in Britain will get a leaflet to prepare for No Deal Brexit: Boris Johnson’s ‘war cabinet’ plans PR blitz with Sajid Javid set to announce £1billion of extra cash to make sure Brexit happens on October 31 ‘by any means necessary.’
More here: Boris Johnson forms “war cabinet” to prepare for no-deal Brexit.
The moral equivalent of war – it’s not just for “Progressives” anymore!
(Classical reference in headline.)
CRINGEWORTHY: When Jeffrey Epstein Was Cosmopolitan Magazine’s Bachelor of the Month. In July 1980, the predatory financier was featured as the magazine’s “Bachelor of the Month” seeking a “cute Texas girl.”
Here’s how the listing looked back then:
While Cosmo couldn’t know in 1980 what was around the corner for Epstein in future decades, it’s a particularly creepy anecdote in hindsight, given the low moral tenor of the times. In September 2017, after Hugh Hefner died, but just before the Harvey Weinstein story sent the Sexual Revolution into its French Revolution phase, Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote an article for NRO titled “Hugh Hefner, Gangsta Rap & the Emerging Moral Majority.” “Slowly, however, the elite of our culture seem to be drifting toward a new, far-more jaundiced and suspicious view of popular culture from the 1960s to the 1990s.”
VISUALIZE WHIRLED PEAS: Want to fight climate change? Drink gin made from peas.
WAY BACK IN 2018, WHEN USA TODAY WAS RACIST: USA Today names Baltimore ‘the nation’s most dangerous city.’
DON SURBER: Maureen Dowd’s father “was a cop, so that makes her part of the proletariat? Officer-By-Proxy Dowd does not get it. She is next at the guillotine…I wonder which of the New York Times non-white columnists will take her on because what happens on Daily Kos eventually happens on HuffPost where it eventually lands on the pages of the Times.”
Earlier: MAUREEN DOWD, ALWAYS THE LAST TO KNOW: “Progressives Are The Modern Puritans.”
BIRTH DEARTH: The US fertility rate just hit an ‘all-time low.’
Related: The Future of the City Is Childless: America’s urban rebirth is missing something key—actual births.
Also related: Birth rates hit record low for women in teens and 20s: ‘That’s a lot of empty kindergarten rooms.’
Plus: The Parent Trap.
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