Archive for 2020
June 18, 2020
NIFTY: ‘Hey Siri, I’m getting pulled over’ shortcut makes it easy to record police.
Police body cams are great. Having your own copy is even better.
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Mark Wahlberg Had the Perfect Response to Cancel Culture. “The ‘Boogie Nights’ star’s approach could work for others … but there’s a catch.”
KURT SCHLICHTER: This Leftist Tantrum Is an Information Operation and Trump Is Winning It.
THE UNIVERSAL SENTIMENT OF THE CHATTERING CLASSES ISN’T SO UNIVERSAL ELSEWHERE: More Americans Say Military Bases Shouldn’t Be Renamed Than Say They Should. “The 33/48 overall split there looks eerily similar to the split Morning Consult got when it asked about removing Confederate statues from public places last week. In that case it was 32/44 against, which showed movement from 2017 (when it was 26/52) but proved that a plurality of the public is inclined to let sleeping dogs lie. About a third of the country wants to jettison Confederate tributes of various stripes, but no more than that.”
REUTERS TURNS THE GASLIGHT UP TO 11: Facebook removes hundreds more accounts as right-wing violence spreads.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Cornell law professor William Jacobson censured by dean after criticizing Black Lives Matter movement.
And from Jacobson himself at his Legal Insurrection blog: Anti-intellectualism at Cornell Law School: Student groups organize boycott of my course.
THE COMING URBAN EXODUS: Failing progressive governance is making daily life too chaotic and stressful in many U.S. cities. Living hard will take its toll.
MY LATEST FOR THE PJMEDIA MOTHERSHIP: Let It Burn and/or Give Them What They Want.
President Trump has been walking a fine line with the rioters, the sometimes less-than-peaceful protestors, and the looney leftists trying to eliminate the police in Minneapolis and actually seceding from the union in Seattle. On the one hand, the Let It Burn theory will doubtless provide an object lesson in what happens to once-fine cities once the looney left takes charge. On the other, how long can we afford to let so many cities go on under such anarchy?
Fine line or not, until today I had wished Trump were being more decisive. One doesn’t float the idea of sending in regular troops to back up the Guard and local police, and then just let it wither on the vine. And if he’s going to run on a law and order platform in the fall, as he’s indicated, then eventually he’s got to supply some of both. Trump is the incumbent, not a challenger like Nixon in 1968, running against a sitting Democrat who’d lost control of the streets and let our cities burn.
But that was yesterday. Today I thought, “Let it burn.”
With a special appearance by Alan Arkin as “Simon.”
This one is just for our VIP supporters. If you’ve been thinking of becoming a member, you can do so here — and don’t forget to use that VODKAPUNDIT discount code.
HYPOCRISY, THY NAME IS NANCY: Pelosi Pours $180,000 Into Facebook Ads While Calling for Advertisers to Boycott Site. I would have thought it was Betty Jo Bialowsky.
WELL, CAN YOU BLAME THEM? Some Atlanta police call in sick, mayor asks for them to honor commitment.
June 17, 2020
“WE ARE ALL SOCIALIST NOW,” THE WASHINGTON POST* ADMITTED IN 2009, AND THE PAPER’S MAOIST STRUGGLE SESSIONS HAVE NOW BEGUN: WashPost Exposes Its Own Cartoonist Tom Toles Lying About Friend in Blackface at His House.
The intensity of feelings about race inside newsrooms is leading to surprising revelations. On Wednesday afternoon, The Washington Post reported that its own staunchly liberal political cartoonist Tom Toles allowed a woman to wear blackface at his 2018 Halloween party – mocking Megyn Kelly’s comments about children’s Halloween costumes on Today – and then lied to people who were upset, claiming he didn’t know who she was.
This is the same Tom Toles who did a cartoon comparing Obamacare opponents to segregationist Alabama Democrat George Wallace, and the same cartoonist who mocked opponents of political correctness, claiming they thought ‘I am so sick of not being able to insult and belittle women and minorities.”
* * * * * * * *
Sean Davis of The Federalist tweeted out this story, tsk-tsking: “The blackface is coming from inside the Washington Post. These are the people who’ve appointed themselves the arbiters of who is and is not racist.”
The Post goes on to note that the woman who wore the blackface has since been fired after being outed by the paper:
Schafer said she has learned in recent weeks, as protests have sparked new conversations about race, that racism “runs so much more deeply than I’d thought. I should know. I’m Jewish and my grandmother was a child slave for two years. I’ve hung my head for months. I hurt people in my carelessness.” She said she understands Gruber and Prince’s “pain and their consternation and their hurt. Clearly, I didn’t understand the history of blackface enough. I failed completely, but I’m not a malicious person.”
Schafer wrote an email to Tom and Gretchen Toles the day after the party, saying that she had “made a huge mistake. I’m very sorry I ruined the evening for some of your guests.”
She said she would like a chance to tell Gruber in person how sorry she is: “With this story, they’ll get the public humiliation they want, but it won’t foster any real dialogue between us. I wish they would talk to me. I made a mistake, and I understand now that when black people make a mistake, they can get killed.”
On Wednesday, after Schafer informed her employer, a government contractor, about the blackface incident and The Post’s forthcoming article, she was fired, she said.
Exit question from Newsbusters’ Tim Graham: “Now the PC Police have come for Toles, and his lady friend who upset the minorities – and the Post is outing the whole thing. Will he get fired after the newsroom erupts in outrage? If an editor can lose his job for a mere headline of ‘Buildings Matter, Too,’ why not Toles?”
* Via the cover of its then-subsidiary publication, Newsweek.
UPDATE: Democracy dies in doxxing:
NOW OUT FROM GREG BENFORD AND LARRY NIVEN: Glorious.
CLASS WAR: Consider this passage:
The class war in our country is business class vs. first class; in automotive terms, it’s E-Class vs. S-Class. Everybody’s comfortable. And that produces some odd outcomes: Nobody’s going to do one goddamned thing about how they conduct business in Philadelphia or Chicago or any other corrupt, Democrat-dominated city, but there are going to be some “new representation and inclusion standards for Oscars eligibility,” and we are going to be treated to — joy of joys! — a deep national discussion on whether some Broadway stars don’t have it quite as good as other Broadway stars. The bloody-snouted hyenas have looked up from the kill just long enough to announce the creation of the Goldman Sachs Fund for Racial Equity.
It’s always the same thing: Our newspapers are full of intense interest in Harvard’s admissions standards but have very little to say about New York City’s dropout rate. People can’t help being fascinated with themselves and their peers. If you want to know what is on the minds of the leaders of the American ruling class, it’s no secret. They’ll tell you, if you ask — and if you don’t.
George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police. More than a third of black students will drop out of high school in Milwaukee. But Forbes has announced a change in its in-house stylebook and will henceforth honor the woke convention of uppercase Black vs. lowercase white. And George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police.
Oh, but they got James Bennet, the opinion editor at the New York Times. And surely that is something? It is, indeed, a very useful illustration of the E-Class vs. S-Class divide. Bennet was fired after purportedly endangering the lives of black Times staffers — a charge no mentally normal adult actually takes seriously — by publishing a guest column about the riots and the Insurrection Act by Senator Tom Cotton. The campaign to end Bennet did not come from America’s poor black communities as the workers of the world looked up, stunned, from page A24 of the New York Times — the venom came straight and undiluted from 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y., with Bennet’s underlings and juniors more or less putting him on an ice floe and pushing him out to sea.
Bennet was pushed out on behalf of marginalized black Americans, which necessitated that Bennet immediately be replaced by . . . a well-off white woman who went to Georgetown and Columbia and won a Pulitzer Prize for writing about that great loathsome theater of American middle-class anxiety: restaurants.
I’m reminded of what Kenneth Anderson said about the Occupy movement:
In social theory, OWS is best understood not as a populist movement against the bankers, but instead as the breakdown of the New Class into its two increasingly disconnected parts. The upper tier, the bankers-government bankers-super credentialed elites. But also the lower tier, those who saw themselves entitled to a white collar job in the Virtue Industries of government and non-profits – the helping professions, the culture industry, the virtueocracies, the industries of therapeutic social control, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites.
The two tiers of the New Class have always had different sources of rents, however. For the upper tier, since 1990, it has come through its ability to take the benefits of generations of US social investment in education and sell that expertise across global markets – leveraging expertise and access to capital and technological markets in the 1990s to places in Asia and the former communist world in desperate need of it. As Lasch said, the revolt and flight of the elites, to marketize themselves globally as free agents – to take the social capital derived over many generations by American society, and to go live in the jet stream and extract returns on a global scale for that expertise. But that expertise is now largely commodified – to paraphrase David Swenson on financial engineering, that kind of universal expertise is commodified, cheaply available, and no longer commands much premium. As those returns have come under pressure, the Global New Class has come home, looking to command premiums through privileged access to the public-private divide – access most visible at the moment as virtuous new technology projects that turn out to be mere crony capitalism.
The lower tier is in a different situation and always has been. It is characterized by status-income disequilibrium, to borrow from David Brooks; it cultivates the sensibilities of the upper tier New Class, but does not have the ability to globalize its rent extraction. The helping professions, the professions of therapeutic authoritarianism (the social workers as well as the public safety workers), the virtuecrats, the regulatory class, etc., have a problem – they mostly service and manage individuals, the client-consumers of the welfare state. Their rents are not leveraged very much, certainly not globally, and are limited to what amounts to an hourly wage. The method of ramping up wages, however, is through public employee unions and their own special ability to access the public-private divide. But, as everyone understands, that model no longer works, because it has overreached and overleveraged, to the point that even the system’s most sympathetic politicians understand that it cannot pay up.
The upper tier is still doing pretty well. But the lower tier of the New Class – the machine by which universities trained young people to become minor regulators and then delivered them into white collar positions on the basis of credentials in history, political science, literature, ethnic and women’s studies – with or without the benefit of law school – has broken down. The supply is uninterrupted, but the demand has dried up. The agony of the students getting dumped at the far end of the supply chain is in large part the OWS. As Above the Law points out, here is “John,” who got out of undergrad, spent a year unemployed and living at home, and is now apparently at University of Vermont law school, with its top ranked environmental law program – John wants to work at a “nonprofit.”
Indeed. Plus, just a reminder: In America, class war is disguised as cultural warfare, and cultural warfare is usually cloaked in talk of race.
Related: A New Class Problem.
SO I’M SEEING A LOT OF REPORTS ON TWITTER that Atlanta PD are walking off the job, or not coming on shift. Hard to tell how big the numbers are given the sourcing, but it’s worth noting that I’m pretty sure the Atlanta PD is majority black.
Atlanta PD states: “Earlier suggestions that multiple officers from each zone had walked off the job were inaccurate. The department is experiencing a higher than usual number of call outs with the incoming shift. We have enough resources to maintain operations & remain able to respond to incidents.”
People are posting that the scanners show the police bands are basically dead, but I can’t confirm that. There are a lot of tweet reports from Atlanta that strike me as unreliable.
GET WOKE OR GET TOSSED: Issues & Insights assesses the times, using the deplorable situation at my alma mater as Exhibit A in reaching the conclusion that “what was a non-controversial statement last week is grounds for a death sentence tomorrow.”
I am so angered by the cowardice of Oklahoma State University President Burns Hargis and Athletic Director Mike Holder, and disappointed by Coach Mike Gundy caving to Chubba Hubbard’s bullying. This is only the beginning, there will be more such blackmail and college football, like the NFL and so much more, will be politicized and utterly ruined.
OPEN THREAD: Insert clever lyrical allusion here.
SCHRÖDINGER’S COPS: Atlanta Police disputes rumors of mass walkouts.
However, a blue-checked news anchor with Atlanta’s CBS affiliate tweets:
SEATTLE ADDS CONCRETE BARRICADES TO CHOP:
I can’t help but wonder how much of this has to do with President Trump’s comments about sending the military to take care of the CHOP once and for all. Concrete barricades are a lot tougher to get through than tents, after all.
Regardless, this move represents Durkan’s approval and her essentially ceding over control of parts of her city to another entity. Honestly, how the people of Seattle can support her right now is beyond me.
Seattle’s last Republican mayor left office in March of 1969.
UPDATE (BY GLENN, FROM THE COMMENTS): “CHOP: We’ll build a big, beautiful wall, and we’ll get Seattle to pay for it!”
In 2020, everything fractally converges on Trump.
JOHN HINDERAKER: Corporate Pandering Means Invisibility.