Archive for 2019
June 15, 2019
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GLENN REYNOLDS’ SOCIAL MEDIA UPHEAVAL MAKES THE CASE FOR TRUST-BUSTING BIG TECH COMPANIES:
Reynolds has a deceptively simple prose style that he’s perfected at Instapundit. There, he’s the master of the understated quip used to accompany his links to the news and opinion of the day (mostly from a conservative-libertarian slant). At first glance, a Reynolds’s remark often seems merely to display a firm grasp of the obvious. In fact, on first read, these can seem like bromides of prosaic pabulum.
But in every case, there’s an underlying irony or twist of meaning that cuts deeper. Sometimes Reynolds can be quite profound while masquerading as the village simpleton, like a blogging Diogenes in a barrel. And you ignore a longer Reynolds homily at your peril. He employs the same style for The Social Media Upheaval:
The ‘marketplace of ideas’ approach to free political speech has always relied on a wide variety of different views from a wide variety of different speakers, many of which will inevitably be wrong or even dishonest. The presumption is that, overall, truth will win out most of the time. The danger of monopoly organs like Facebook or Twitter is that they will selectively silence some of those voices and amplify others. Encouraging these tech behemoths to police ‘bad’ content only makes that more likely.
To allow the free market and a resurgent American educational establishment to one day ride to the rescue, what we need at present is a president or attorney general in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt, argues Reynolds. This should be someone who will go after the monopolies in the same spirit the monopolies are going after the rest of us: mercilessly.
Related: What Is To Be Done About Facebook?
EVEN AS THE US ECONOMY PRODUCES MORE JOBS AND HIGHER WAGES, SOMEHOW CAPITALISM STAYS BROKEN. WEIRD:
Today’s populists overindulge in unwarranted economic nostalgia. For them, the immediate postwar decades were when America was really great. But maybe it’s a more recent period that they should be pining for. If you’re trying to make the case that “capitalism is broken,” then the Great Recession of 2007-2009 was your big moment. Capitalism seemed shattered, not just broken. It looked like this sucker was going down, to paraphrase President George W. Bush.
But then the economy started to recover, slowly but steadily. Indeed, the US expansion hit the 10-year mark this month and is on the verge of its longest-run on record if things stay on track through July. An economy that’s producing gobs of jobs every month — a total of 20 million since 2010 — as it grows year after year is a dodgy example of broken capitalism.
But there will always be leftists, particularly journalists, oddly enough, with a severe case of “Depression Lust,” as Virginia Postrel dubbed it in December of 2008.
AND THE ANSWER IS NONE. NONE MORE WOKE: Emma Thompson’s Woke Late Night Grabs Gold In Victimhood Olympics.
UPDATE: “Unexpectedly,” Late Night didn’t grab the gold at the box office this weekend, either — despite Amazon spending nearly $50 million promoting the film:
Amazon’s Late Night, another misfire in the indie female cinema space with $4.7M after the studio spent $13M for the pic at Sundance, and from what we hear, another $35M in marketing. Poor results for a film with good exits of a B+ CinemaScore and an 80% on PostTrak from the core female 25+ audience, who showed up at 52%. Amazon observed weeks ago that Late Night was going to tank on tracking, with a $4M-$5M opening. They attempted to shift at the last minute by bowing the film in NY and LA last weekend, and notched the best specialty release theater average opening of $61.5k to date this year. Even though Amazon largely respects theatrical windows (that’s going to change with its awards season push for another Sundance pick-up, The Report, this fall), if you think about it, Late Night is an advertisement for Amazon Prime, because that’s the end game for this Mindy Kaling Working Girl comedy. It may also be one of the key reasons why people aren’t rushing out to it.
No, as Christian Toto notes in above, there are all sorts of reasons why people aren’t rushing out to see it.
THE POWER LINE SHOW, EP. 129: Cocktails From Hell, a podcast interview with fellow Insta-co-blogger Austin Bay.
THAT’S NOT CREEPY AT ALL: O.J. Simpson joins Twitter, says ‘I got a little getting even to do.’
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Team Beto: The Media Is BS Now, Man.
Still though, we’ll always have the Clash: “Beto has now resorted to telling reporters that London Calling by the Clash changed his life. He was in a punk band, remember, he’s still cool, remember. The irony there is that phony Betomania has bitten the dust.”
HAVE I MENTIONED THAT I HAVE A NEW BOOK OUT? Don’t just sit there, buy a copy. And maybe one for your local library.
NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: The Rise of Progressive Occultism — Or why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez felt compelled to share her birth chart.
For an increasing number of left-leaning millennials—more and more of whom do not belong to any organized religion—occult spirituality isn’t just a form of personal practice, self-care with more sage. Rather, it’s a metaphysical canvas for the American culture wars in the post-Trump era: pitting the self-identified Davids of seemingly secular progressivism against the Goliath of nationalist evangelical Christianity.
There’s the coven of Brooklyn witches who publicly hexed then-Supreme Court candidate Brett Kavanaugh to the acclamation of the thousands-strong “Magic Resistance”—anti-Trump witches (among them: pop singer Lana del Rey) who used at-home folk magic to “bind” the president in the months following his inauguration.
Although “progressive occultism” isn’t an entirely new development — Sally Quinn, then-married to Washington Post maximum editor Ben Bradlee, was playing with “Ouija boards, astrological charts, palm reading, talismans,” and casting spells she believed to be lethal since the late 1960s.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: An Unhelpful Study about Women in Physics.
Regarding item 3, what constitutes “suggesting people of your sex or gender are not as good at physics or math”? If people have literally said “Women can’t do physics” then they should apologize and change. On the other hand, suppose that a peer mentions arguments from James Damore’s controversial memo on gender gaps in STEM. Damore repeatedly rejected blanket statements about women, emphasizing the wide ranges of interests and abilities in both sexes (see, for instance, the figures at the top of page 4 of the memo). Nonetheless, reporters at leading newspapers have characterized him as arguing “that maybe women were not equally represented in tech because they were biologically less capable of engineering.” Since even journalists with professional obligations to check printed statements against original sources mischaracterize Damore’s detailed, footnoted memo in this way, it is quite possible that a student would similarly misinterpret offhand summaries of such arguments. Still, it would not follow that the physics community is a hotbed of sexism; it would simply mean that physicists should reflect on how to better approach difficult conversations.
Regarding item 4, how do people know that treatment is unequal and due to gender? Yes, sexist treatment does happen, and it is never acceptable. However, too many people have said “they’d never do this to a man” about things that routinely happen to men. For instance, a woman professor has lamented to me that a man delivered a soliloquy about how terrible his professors were when he took classes on her subject (at a different university), and suggested that everyone in her field should follow his suggestions for improvement. She took this to be a classic example of “mansplaining.” Alas, non-physicists—of both sexes!—routinely tell me (a cisgender male) what was wrong with their high school or college physics classes. What she regards as mansplaining, I experience as a daily occupational hazard.
Conversely, it’s entirely possible that the survey respondents have experienced unambiguously unequal treatment. Unfortunately, we don’t know what that mistreatment is or who perpetrates it. Do we need to admonish male students to let female peers participate as equals in study groups? Do we need to train laboratory instructors to give equal attention to men and women as they troubleshoot equipment? Or do we need to fire department heads who only bestow plum research opportunities upon men? We lack sufficient information to take targeted, relevant, and effective steps.
Read the whole thing.
OH, TO BE IN SAN FRANCISCO IN THE SPRINGTIME: Heat wave left Baker Beach in SF swamped with 3 dumpsters worth of trash.
Temperatures made a rare midsummer surge into the 90s in the Bay Area earlier this week, and as San Franciscans flocked to Baker Beach to cool off, they left behind a trail of trash. Lots of trash.
“Baker Beach was one of several park sites with excessive trash due to the additional visitation. For every full can, there were at least three times as much trash overflowing next to it,” said Shalini Gopie, a spokeswoman for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
Park maintenance workers ultimately collected 60 cubic yards of trash from Baker Beach, according to Gopie — enough to fill three large dumpsters, she said.
“The park did notice less garbage in park areas where trash cans were limited,” said Gopie.
Some people posted photos of the striking trash mounds to Reddit, prompting venting from commenters frustrated with the park visitors for failing to take their trash with them when they leave.
“People are terrible,” wrote user YikingViking.
“Then they proceeded to go home and post about how filthy our city is on social media,” wrote user ericgtr12 of the litterers.
To be fair, not every large gathering is as civic minded and cleanly as those deplorables in the San Francisco Tea Party movement.
JOHN MCWHORTER ON ATONEMENT AS ACTIVISM:
[T]oday’s “woke,” educated white people would quite often lap up being apprised of the racism inside of them by a black speaker they paid, lodged, and fed. That speaker as often as not today is Ta-Nehisi Coates, who charismatically limns America as a cesspool of bigotry in his writing and in talks nationwide, and is joyously celebrated for it by the very people he is insulting.
Coates is a symptom of a larger mood. Over the past several years, for instance, whites across the country have been taught that it isn’t enough to understand that racism exists. Rather, the good white person views themselves as the bearer of an unearned “privilege” because of their color. Not long ago, I attended an event where a black man spoke of him and his black colleagues dressing in suits at work even on Casual Fridays, out of a sense that whites would look down on black men dressed down. The mostly white audience laughed and applauded warmly—at a story accusing people precisely like them of being racists.
This brand of self-flagellation has become the new form of enlightenment on race issues. It qualifies as a kind of worship; the parallels with Christianity are almost uncannily rich. White privilege is the secular white person’s Original Sin, present at birth and ultimately ineradicable. One does one’s penance by endlessly attesting to this privilege in hope of some kind of forgiveness. After the black man I mentioned above spoke, the next speaker was a middle-aged white man who spoke of having a coach come to his office each week to talk to him about his white privilege. The audience, of course, applauded warmly at this man’s description of having what an anthropologist observer would recognize not as a “coach” but as a pastor.
Similarly, in the first edition of Jonah Goldberg’s new email-only “Pirate G-File,” Jonah writes:
If you listen to The Remnant podcast – back next week by the way – you know I’m obsessed with a theory of contemporary politics. We live in one of the most partisan times in American history. No, it’s not as partisan as the 1850s or even the 1960s (thank God). But the difference between now and those periods is that partisanship is running white-hot even as the parties themselves have never been weaker.
Partisanship is now a lifestyle choice as much as it is a political or ideological orientation. That’s one reason politics are so ugly these days. When the political is personal and the personal is political, political disagreement feels like a personal attack. Politics today increasingly takes up the space in our brains normally reserved for religion, which is why there are houses in my neighborhood where people post signs listing social justice nostrums like they were Martin Luther’s 99 Theses.
While Nietzsche assured the Jurassic “woke” class of the late 19th century that “God is dead,” most of the branches of the “Progressivism” that followed are forms of a substitute religion to fill the void. (See also: radical environmentalism and even socialist health care.) As the late Tom Wolfe wrote in his epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” “It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.”
GREAT MOMENTS IN PROGRESSIVE PARENTING: Gun Advice from the Worst Column Ever.
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PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
● Shot: CNN: Of course we don’t hate Trump or favor Democrats.
—Jazz Shaw, Hot Air, Thursday.
● CNN’s Camerota: ‘It’s Our Job’ to Teach Viewers To ‘Shut Down’ Conservative Arguments.
—Joseph Chalfant, NewsBusters, Friday.
And if necessary, doxx those making them sufficiently that they don’t ever try to repeat them again.
THE MLK STORY NO ONE WANTED TO READ:
This punch-in-the-gut article undoubtedly knocks the wind from its author most. David Garrow, who won a Pulitzer for a biography of King, boasts membership in the Democratic Socialists of America, and remains, alongside Taylor Branch, the most acclaimed biographer of the civil rights leader, undoubtedly becomes not only part of the story — a fate dreaded by historians — but a villain in it. Most U.S. press outlets ignore his shocking research. The Washington Post, which rejected his article, focuses not so much on his revelations but the critical reaction to them in its story, “‘Irresponsible’: Historians Attack David Garrow’s MLK Allegations.” At its conclusion, Garrow displays a naïveté in answering whether he worries about the publication damaging his reputation. “No,” he maintains. “Not at all. I think that’s impossible.” In the final line of his article published by the UK’s Standpoint magazine, Garrow writes that some aging King scholars — he is only 66 — may not live to see the 2027 release of the transcripts and audio, suggesting a motive for releasing an article on the summaries now before others get the jump on the information or before the grim reaper gets the jump before 2027.
The King revelations reveal several curious inflection points of the 21st century American elite left. In March Star Parker noted that “The Left’s Identity Politics Rejects the Vision of Martin Luther King Jr.,” and as Garrow told Dominic Green of the London Spectator at the beginning of the month, “the King transcripts are not about race. They are about the abuse of male power,” a topic that’s been at the forefront of the American left since the fall of 2017. But the DNC-MSM would not give Garrow’s revelations traction, because, Green writes, “Garrow alleges that the editors are afraid of being attacked as racist by Twitter mobs — a theory that seems to be confirmed by the Post’s attack on Garrow,” adding:
We might add that King is sacred to liberalism — perhaps so much a saint that the prelates of the press are covering up his feet of clay. Whether caused by misplaced paternalism, cowardice, or simple partisanship, this is a dereliction of journalistic duty. It’s hard to imagine the same newspapers demurring from running transcripts involving Richard Nixon or Donald Trump.
While lesser figures can be easily consigned by the left to the permanence of the Memory Hole, it’s understandable that the media refused to do the same to King’s reputation. as one of Rod Dreher’s readers wrote, “I hope Dr. King remains celebrated; I also hope that his sexual behavior (again, assuming this story is true) is not forgotten. And in the future, when someone on the Left advocates the abolition of Columbus Day, or the taking down of monuments to Washington or Jefferson or many less well-known figures, I hope that people bring up Dr. King, NOT in the spirit of ‘Whataboutism’, but in order to remind them that there is no incompatibility between celebrating the achievements of people in the past and acknowledging that those people had – as we all do – major flaws.”
WILL THE LAST PERSON OUT OF THE BAY AREA PLEASE TURN OFF THE AL GORE CURLY FRY ECO-BULB? I’m SFGate’s ‘Bay Area exodus’ reporter. Now I’m leaving myself.
THE ROOTS OF ELITE EUROPEAN ANTI-ZIONISM:
The official music video for “Hatrio Mun Sigra,” the Icelandic submission to this year’s Eurovision song contest, included real leather, fake blood, and strobe lights, one part Studio 54 remake and one part zombie Backstreet Boys apocalypse. Like most reveries dreamed up by overeducated, artistically inclined youth it landed with a thud, too breathless and mirthless to deliver real shock. The heavily publicized Icelanders lost.
Not that the band didn’t try hard: As soon as they were selected as their nation’s emissaries to the popular continental competition, held last month in Israel, Hatari—the name means “haters”—challenged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to a wrestling match, promising, should they win, to replace the Jewish state with a republic dedicated to sexual kinks. When that provocation, too, failed to elicit more than a chuckle, Hatari delivered its showstopper: As the points were being tallied, the band’s members flaunted the contest’s no-politics rules and waved red, white, green, and black scarves emblazoned with the word “Palestine.”
As musicians, Hatari’s members are tragically uninteresting, binding the worst of metal and EDM in a BDSM aesthetic that is more amusing than arousing, like the musical act in a bad Eastern European strip club. As political activists, however, Hatari is legitimately fascinating: If you’d like to understand the emotional valence of the contemporary European left, look no further than these bare-chested boppers.
Exit quote: “So here’s Iceland, a European nation troubled by a collaborationist Nazi past, eager to reinvent itself as a champion of all that is enlightened and good. To distance itself from one murderous made-up ideology, which it used to its own benefit, it aligns itself with another group of murderous haters. Against this kind of historical backdrop, the band’s S&M drag and nihilistic poses make perfect sense.”
The Weimar-esque photo atop the article is unintentionally laugh aloud funny; read the whole thing, for a look at how the children of Europe’s elite become Radical Chic: The Next Generation.
HEZBOLLAH ISN’T JUST IN BEIRUT. IT’S IN NEW YORK, TOO: The trial of a senior operative reveals the extent of the terrorist organization’s reach in the United States and Canada.
ANGELO CODEVILLA ON THE TIPPING POINT:
Truman, on advice of his counselors, had resisted bipartisan calls for a declaration of war. Such a request would have forced his administration to define and submit its objectives to a vote by both Houses of Congress. But by creating the fiction that the war was by, of, and for the United Nations, Truman et al. believed they were gaining flexibility, which is of great strategic value—but only to leaders who know what they’re doing. But Truman and his advisors did not, so their flexibility and disunity acted like a sail in the winds of events.
Truman, after convening the National Security Council, also chose not to answer MacArthur’s request for orders. “This present telegram is not to be taken in any sense as a directive. Its purpose is to give you something of what is in our minds.” U.S. troops’ successful resistance would demonstrate that aggression does not pay and would encourage others to believe in America’s pledges of assistance. “We recognize, of course, that continued resistance might not be militarily possible with the limited forces with which you are being called upon to meet large Chinese armies…if we must withdraw from Korea, it [must] be clear to the world that that course is forced upon us by military necessity.” Translated from bureaucratese, the message was: hold on with the forces and restrictions you’ve got, regardless of how many American lives it costs.
And cost it did. Some three fourths of the Americans killed in Korea died after the U.S. government stopped trying to win the war. Since Truman’s decision taught the world that no-win wars were now the American ruling class’s modus operandi, the cost of three later generations’ wars, including the incalculable toll of domestic decay resulting from Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, should also be added in.
* * *
The November 1950 elections had repudiated Democratic foreign policy. Democrats retained narrow majorities on Capitol Hill, but lost 28 seats in the House and five in the Senate. On March 20, 1951, Douglas MacArthur had answered a private letter from Republican Representative Joseph Martin, the House minority leader, seeking his views on opening a Chinese Nationalist front against China’s effort in Korea. On April 5, Martin read MacArthur’s answer from the House floor. The Truman Administration chose to see this as something akin to a military coup, and fired MacArthur in the name of civilian supremacy. In fact, however, MacArthur had become a clear and present danger not to the U.S. Constitution, but to the preferences and reputations of the Democratic Party’s foreign policy apparatchiks, and to Truman’s ego—domestic politics writ small.
MacArthur returned from Korea to a conquering hero’s reception: ticker-tape parades and a speech to a joint session of Congress. The pledge he made and kept to “just fade away” belied the contention that he had tried to usurp the Constitution, and bolstered the two warnings he left his fellow citizens. First, “In war, there is no substitute for victory.” Forgetting something so very basic had been no mere mistake, but a symptom of moral decay. Hence his other warning: “History fails to record a single precedent in which nations subject to moral decay have not passed into political and economic decline. There has been either a spiritual awakening to overcome the moral lapse, or a progressive deterioration leading to ultimate national disaster.”
Read the whole thing.