Archive for 2020

RICHARD FERNANDEZ EXPLAINS THINGS:

HEH:

OPEN THREAD: I went down to the demonstration, to get my fair share of abuse.

STILL? HOW ABOUT EVER?

It looks more like Roger Stone is running the left’s strategies these days.

MICHAEL BOWEN: Race Talk Doesn’t Work Anymore. “The truce signed in the 70s by nominal blackfolks and nominal whitefolks has broken. Not by you and I, but by a collection of people who are determined to say that race matters, and that it matters more than you or I. It has broken over some truly phenomenally trivial bullshit which has been magnified many orders of magnitude into a symbol, perhaps the most incredibly weighty hot air balloon America has ever seen.”

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Qualified Immunity Is a Disgrace, No Matter Where You Live. And there’s even less reason to apply it to government officials who aren’t law enforcement officers. Law enforcement officers at least have to make split-second decisions regularly. Ordinary bureaucrats not so much.

PRO SPORTS ARE COMMITTING SUICIDE AND I DON’T CARE: MLB fans’ reaction to Jacob Blake boycotts says it all.

Fans don’t care nearly as much as they did. They’ve learned to live without sports, especially in their current diminished condition. They’ve learned that they’re taken for granted. And more and more they’ve determined that they won’t pay another dime to attend games or to watch them on TV.

Thursday’s game-time walkout in protest of police brutality may have been a sincere group action or largely based in peer pressure, but judging from the response of readers, none much cared. None were outraged or even disappointed that there wasn’t going to be a game to watch. . . .

MLB, like the NBA and NFL, has allowed its fan base — its financial blood flow — to erode.

Fans can’t help but apply Thursday’s walkout to their own realities: “Would I be allowed to simply stand up and walk out of work in protest of anything and not face suspension or termination?” And they conclude that they could not, or would not — even at a small fraction of big-league pay.

At the same time, our sports are growing desperate to reverse their downward viewership and incomes by artificial means.

Good luck with that. Just remember, the opposite of fan love isn’t fan hate. It’s fan indifference.

THE BIZARRO WORLD VERSION OF WAG THE DOG: Latest Chicago and Minneapolis riots broke out over police killings that never happened.

Motss: What do you think about lining the President up for the Peace Prize?
Brean: Our job’s over come election day.
Motss: Yeah, but c’mon…
Brean: What, just for the symmetry of the thing? [Motss nods] Well, if Kissinger can win the Peace Prize, I wouldn’t be surprised if I woke up and found I’d won the Preakness.
Motss: Yeah, but our guy did bring peace.
Brean: There was never a war.
Motss: All the greater accomplishment.

Of course, this is far from the first time a violent and destructive riot was built on a lie, as even the Washington Post (sometimes) knows: “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” Did Not Happen In Ferguson.

SAVING HIGHER ED FROM CANCEL CULTURE‘: Tomorrow night at 8 p.m. Eastern, please join Legal Insurrection‘s Prof. Bill Jacobson of Cornell, DePaul Prof. Jason Hill, Princeton Prof. Joshua Katz, and me for a live, free discussion on cancel culture and higher ed, with opportunities for questions from the audience – register here. Should be a great one, as all three of them are cancel culture “survivors.” (Not me – nobody has been dumb enough to try to cancel a FIRE employee recently.)

KRUISER, PAGLIA, VODKAPUNDIT PODCAST: President Trump Nails Convention Speech. “The RNC convention is a wrap, and PJ Media’s Stephen Kruiser and Stephen Green, aka VodkaPundit, along with Townhall and Triggered co-host Storm Paglia, to recap the final day, President Trump’s acceptance speech, the latest polls and whether or not we’ll see a Trump bump.”