WEIRD, BECAUSE THE PRESS KEEPS TELLING ME THEY’RE “MOSTLY PEACEFUL PROTESTERS.” ‘I haven’t seen s**t like this before’: Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said rioters are ‘f**ing lawless’ in meeting with panicked officials who described gang members walking around with AK-47s during George Floyd unrest.
Archive for 2020
June 12, 2020
A WARNING, FROM A FRIEND ON FACEBOOK:
A systemic defect inseparable from the system requires wholesale replacement of the system. That’s the game with the systemic-racism canard. The goal isn’t civic equality or respect — both widely supported, both fully achievable in-system. The goal, as Matthew Peterson has noted, is regime change.
This is why you see the aggressive delegitimization of state force, police and military alike. The capacity for violence that is properly the monopoly of any functioning state is stripped away through the closing of the necessary political space. You’re seeing it already: police won’t police, prosecutors won’t prosecute, the man in charge of the Army of the United States issues public apologies, the city fathers of Seattle abandon governance of their own urban core, even “Cops” is cancelled. The state writ large, the sole bearer of democratic legitimacy, is enervated and unsure. Solzhenitsyn would have recognized it: it looks like St Petersburg in 1917. The powerful abandon their duties of stewardship, having absorbed and believed their enemies’ critiques of themselves.
When the regime changes, the people in charge will be the same ones conducting ideological purges and smashing statuary now. It will be rule by Americans with the aesthetic ethos of the Taliban and the social ethos of Mao’s China. We aren’t there yet — but we are a long way toward it. Events accelerate, and once everyone is on board — once the nice lady on CNN who worked on Capitol Hill as senior staff gets her wish of stripping you and me of George Washington and the whole Founding — then the network coalesces and they seize the reins. The existing superstructure is too attenuated to use the power at its disposal, neither for its own preservation nor for the protection of the people whom it is supposed to serve.
The new one won’t be.
Yes, this is nothing like a civil rights movement.
GLENN LOURY: Racism Is An Empty Thesis. An African-American professor says that blacks hold their fate in their own hands. And that America is experiencing a “collective hysteria” about racial relationships.
WORSE THAN THE LIMOUSINE LIBERAL: ‘Prius woke-sters’ cheer chaos at personal risk.
Something horrifying is happening to the American moral sense — the plain evidence of one’s own eyes in the form of wanton destruction is overlooked in favor of offering some kind of generalized support for the “cause.”
The limousine liberal can buy himself out of the trouble he’s happy to visit on others. That is what made him a peerless hypocrite. But the Prius wokester can’t. Meredith and her husband and her neighbors may find themselves reaping the very whirlwind they have chosen, with such peculiar blindness, to welcome.
Read the whole thing.
HE FOUGHT THE IDIOTS AND THE IDIOTS WON: UA philosophy professor abruptly resigns as editor-in-chief of international philosophy journal over ethics dispute. Yale prof. Robin Dembroff is the person whose article he said shouldn’t have been accepted because it was unethical and unprofessional. But the paper advanced the trans community’s arguments and attacked a critic thereof, so it was published anyway. Then the subject of the attack wasn’t allowed to respond. Quoth Brian Leiter: “It’s fair to say that this whole episode will damage the reputation of the journal, beyond the loss of Professor Cohen.”
When taxpayers tire of funding of this sort of thing, we’ll be told it’s because of anti-intellectualism. But maybe it’s just that there’s not much actual intellectualism going on in higher education anymore.
IT WAS EXPECTED, BUT IT STILL HURTS: The defenders of Proposition 209 were defeated in the Assembly late Wednesday. Our opponents had votes to spare (including the votes of one Republican, two post-election defectors from the GOP, and one Democrat who’d told his constituents in 2016 he would oppose any effort to repeal Prop 209).
The issue will now go to the Senate where we have a better chance. If ACA5 passes there, it will go to voters for a November referendum.
My friend Ward Connerly tweeted, “I never thought I would see the day when American citizens would have to vote to preserve their right to be treated equally regardless of skin color. But, I never thought I would see the day when my government would require me to drink my soda from a paper straw either.”
Many great Americans helped in the effort to convince the Assembly.
On to the Senate.
WELCOME TO CHAZ. ENJOY YOUR STAY (video):
FIRST THE PANDEMIC, THEN THE RIOTS: Manhattan’s empty apartments: New leases plunge 62% in May.
MIRANDA DEVINE: A ‘Black Lives’ pander by Democrats.
With maudlin soundtrack and husky voice, the former vice president oozed empathy as he churned out empty platitudes about “racial justice” that are at odds with his personal history and the record of the Democratic Party he has represented for 47 years.
“I grew up with Catholic social doctrine which taught me that faith without works is dead,” he said, “and you will know us by what we do.”
OK, I accept the challenge.
Let us know Biden and his party by what they have done for black people in all the decades Dems have enjoyed a firm hold on their vote.
Read the whole thing.
SO WHEN ARE WE GOING TO #RENAMEYALE? Eli Yale, after all, wasn’t just a slave owner but a slave trader. I think Yale needs to be renamed — maybe Black Lives Matter University? Or maybe class it up a little and name it after Martin Luther King?
VIDEO: Here’s Why Donald Trump Can’t Wait to Debate Joe Biden.
The mask dangling unnoticed off of one of Biden’s ears is the finishing touch.
The moment I’m hoping for in the debates is after Biden spews one of his projectile word-vomit answers, Trump looks at the camera, then at Biden, then back at the camera, and says, “Can anyone tell me what this guy just said? Does he even know?”
IT’S ALL ABOUT POWER, ALL THE TIME: Liberal groups back plan to expand Supreme Court: The move comes weeks before the high court is expected to hand down opinions on several hotly contested issues.
This is probably just an effort to intimidate John Roberts, who to be fair has shown that such efforts work with him.
MY OLD LAW PROFESSOR, STEPHEN L. CARTER: We Can Fight for Racial Justice While Tolerating Dissent: We cannot allow the present moment — one of such potential importance — to deteriorate into a McCarthy-like hunt for wrong-thinkers.
We’re living at a dangerous intellectual moment. In the wake of the coldblooded police slaying of George Floyd on a Minneapolis street corner, people are marching for racial justice, a development that’s all to the good in our broken country. But when those demands turn to restricting the universe of permissible conversation, they cross a democratic line that’s worth defending.
Item: HBO Max has temporarily removed “Gone With the Wind” from its catalog, citing its racist stereotypes and glorification of Southern slavery, until the film can be reinserted with what the company considers appropriate “context.”
Item: Critics are demanding the resignation of a distinguished economist who co-edits the Journal of Political Economy because of his strongly expressed criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Item: A political science lecturer at UCLA has been condemned by his own department and is under further investigation after reading aloud to his students Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” one of the great documents of U.S. history, which includes what we’re nowadays supposed to call “the n-word.”
I question neither the pain nor the sincerity of those who are angry, fearful or frustrated. I feel the emotional impact of the moment myself. So I’m not prepared to agree with critics who say that what we’re seeing is an outbreak of an ideology they call “safetyism.”
But for the sake of our democratic future, we have to find a way past the difficult place where we currently find ourselves, a place where the expression of views that are hurtful and infuriating is viewed as out of bounds. Democracy rests crucially on the battle of ideas, and on the old-fashioned notion that the cure for bad speech is better speech.
It’s part of my job as an academic to resist the urge to judge an argument by whether I agree with it, or even whether I’m wounded by it. But professional training aside, it’s also part of my job as a citizen to allow others to make arguments that pain or frighten me — even when on the searing issue of race.
Back in law school, I worked my way through James J. Kilpatrick’s controversial volume “The Southern Case for School Segregation.” The book wasn’t assigned for a course. I sought it out. Kilpatrick didn’t persuade me, but he did make me think. I was taught that the vitality of intellectual life rests upon reading not only those who are right but also those who are wrong in an interesting way. . . .
As I’ve written before, my wariness on the subject is influenced by the fate of my great-uncle. During the McCarthy era, he went to prison for refusing to name names. He was a brilliant scholar, an expert on the work of Tennyson, but because he was a Communist, he found himself essentially unemployable.
Among the targets of the McCarthyites were films that presented the wrong message, academics who took the wrong positions and teachers who taught the wrong lessons. 1 With rare exception, nobody was legally prohibited from expressing views the Red hunters hated; they were simply publicly humiliated if they did — and that public humiliation often led to loss of status, and of employment. Books were removed from stores; teachers were removed from the classroom.
You might respond that in retrospect the Red Menace was overblown. Perhaps it was, but that’s not the point of the story. The point is that in that horrific era, those with power to control the words and fates of others saw the threat as real and deadly, always on the verge of rearing its destructive head. The only way to halt the spread of what they considered a dangerous idea was to punish anyone who propounded it. For a decade they largely succeeded. And for a brief and agonized moment of history, the Communist hunters kindled a bonfire that came close to consuming our democracy.
The 2020s aren’t the 1950s, but unless we do a lot better than we have been lately at coping with ideas and arguments that wound us, our democracy might still be at hazard. It’s vital to resist the temptation to allow our present moment, so rich with the potential for genuine and overdue social change, to deteriorate into a McCarthy-like hunt for wrong-thinkers. Because the more often we play with the same matches, the greater the chance that we’ll light the same blaze.
At the beginning, pretty much the whole country was united in horror at what happened to Floyd, and a desire to do something about it. Then the Red Guard came in and started rioting, attacking and dividing people. If people do things that keep us from coming together as a nation and solving our problems, maybe it’s because they don’t want us to do that.
I’M STILL A FAN GIRL, SO I GET ALL EXCITED WHEN FRANK J. OF IMAO.US FAME WRITES A GUEST POST FOR ME: Why do people write fiction? by Frank J. Fleming.
SO DOES PUBLISHING. MIND YOU THEY WANT TO ENSURE THAT THERE ARE ONLY REDS: Carolla: Hollywood Hates McCarthyism … but Practices It Anyway.
COSPLAYING REVOLUTION: Dem Leaders in Seattle Surrender to the Mob, Allow Antifa Goons to Take Over Part of the City.
So, how soon till the rapes the murders and the pooping on cars begins?
WHICH IS WHY THEY’VE ENDED SO MANY OF THEM??? Planned Parenthood Says Black Lives Matter.
SERIOUSLY? TRYING TO KEEP OUT OF SIGHT AND HOPING YOU DON’T REALIZE THEIR ROLE IN THE COUP: Where is the FBI?