KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Maybe ‘Peace’ Means Something Completely Different In Norway. “Black Lives Matter is an anti-law enforcement domestic terrorist organization and nothing more. You know that. I know that. Something seems to have gotten lost in the translation to Norwegian, however.”
Archive for 2021
February 2, 2021
JOHN MCWHORTER: More on what modern “antiracism” does to schools, or could not — and some insight on the Kendi thing.
Kendi, though, reads for isolated words and single sentences rather than argument, for flavor rather than content. It is one more demonstration among many of his lack of familiarity with what people with doctorates, as well as people who write for the public and present themselves as thinkers, are expected to do.
It is of a piece with the fact that his “scholarship” is not based on sustained, original research utilizing close reasoning and being tempered through rigorous evaluation by peers over years’ time. Too, I am unaware of a single instance of Kendi actually taking a deep breath and defending one of his ideas, as opposed to batting away criticism as somehow inappropriate.
This does not, contrary to popular belief, mean that he is a megalomaniac or a huckster. However, it does mean that he is in way over his head. He strikes me as a deer caught in the headlights, and I don’t blame him for trying to make the best of that regardless. There is a certain mystique in his name, upon which we might consider that he was born Henry Rogers. Henry had no idea this fame was coming, and he’s doing his best.
But — if it turns out that the deer in those headlights is a mean deer, and is going to say such gratuitously nasty things about me on a regular basis, I feel comfortable levelling some honesty about him. (I had Henry’s number a couple years ago, but was holding my tongue as late as this review last summer. But once he started slandering me I decided to speak out.) . . .
Ibram Kendi is someone who, in the role of social scientist, proposes a “Department of Antiracism,” in neglect of a little something called the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. Kendi’s insight on education, untethered to any engagement with pedagogical or psychometric theory, is that we should evaluate students on the basis of their “desire to know” rather than anything they actually do. This is a person whose most ready counsel to the public about interracial adoption is that white adopters might still be racists even if they don’t think they are.
Kendi is a professor who, in the guise of being trained in intellectual inquiry, bristles at real questions. He dismisses them as either racism or as frustrated responses to envy, as if he bears not proposal but truth. His ideas are couched in simple oppositions mired somewhere between catechism and fable, of a sort alien to what intellectual engagement in the modern world consists of, utterly foreign to exchange among conference academics or even Zooming literati. And on that, let us remember that he is also someone who, into the twenty-first century, was walking around thinking of whites as “devils” à la Minister Farrakhan.
Here’s the rub: The people who sit drinking all of this in and calling it deep wouldn’t let it pass for a minute if he were white.
That’s absolutely true.
IN LOCAL NEWS: Newspaper firm launches class action suit versus Google, Facebook over ad revenue.
Despite Google recently announcing it would pay $1 billion to news publishers, a newspaper company has filed what it says is the first antitrust suit against Google and Facebook over digital advertising. HD Media, which publishes seven newspapers, accuses the two companies of entering into a secret agreement.
According to Editor & Publisher Magazine, the suit specifies that this secret agreement, codenamed “Jedi Blue,” manipulated online advertising auctions. It also claims that Google’s monopolization of the digital advertising market is threatening local newspapers across the US.
“The freedom of the press is not at stake,” the suit reportedly says. “The press itself is at stake.”
Someday you’ll be free to read whatever portions of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times that Google permits.
VOTERS SEE WHAT’S GOING ON: Voters See Less Tolerance for Political Differences. “President Biden promised to unify the country, but voters say Americans are becoming more intolerant of political disagreement. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 77% of Likely U.S. Voters say Americans less tolerant of each other’s political opinions than they were in the past.”
BECAUSE OF COURSE THEY ARE: Now Democrats Are Talking About Packing the Lower Courts.
THE RIGHTS FOR THESE BOOKS HAVE REVERTED: So I’ll be bringing them out (again) and writing more in the series.
FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Draw One In The Dark.
Something or someone is killing shape shifters in the small mountain town of Goldport, Colorado.
Kyrie Smith, a server at a local diner, is the last person to solve the mystery. Except of course for the fact that she changes into a panther and that her co-worker, Tom Ormson, who changes into a dragon, thinks he might have killed someone.
Add in a policeman who shape-shifts into a lion, a father who is suffering from remorse about how he raised his son, and a triad of dragon shape shifters on the trail of a magical object known as The Pearl of Heaven and the adventure is bound to get very exciting indeed.
Solving the crime is difficult enough, but so is — for our characters — trusting someone with secrets long-held.
ROGER KIMBALL: Biden and the Greengrocer.
One of the strangest aspects of America’s new cup o’Joe is the idea that the installation of Bidenharris in the White House represents a “return of normality” in the metabolism of the nation’s political affairs.
You see this meme—a less charitable person might call it a “canard”—being belched up everywhere from The Swamp.
No memo went out. The instruction was silently communicated in some mysterious way akin to the signals that direct the flight of flocks of birds.
Masses of them pivot and and strike out in the same direction. No order was given, but one was certainly obeyed.
So it is with the response to Bidenharris.
It’s taken for granted on the TV shows and in the chatter of respectable pundits. Opinion journals of the Right-left as well as the Left proclaim it in tones of buttoned-down seriousness and relief.
One organ of the respectable Right assures its readers that the day-to-day activities of Bidenharris is “a professional operation going about its business, not the reality-television show we’ve been privy to for the last four years.”
If you look closely, you can see the words “Thank God for that!” floating up off the page.
Hark: The new administration’s “announced nominees for cabinet positions and selections for White House staff are notable largely for their experience and competence.”
I’d like to you say that last bit aloud and then conjure the image of John Kerry, Janet “$800K” Yellen, Xavier Becerra, Pete Buttigieg, and Marcia Fudge. Can you do it without giggling? “Experience and competence” forsooth!
And there’s more. “Biden’s actions represent a natural harnessing of the authority of the presidency,” we read. The ancient one “is not promising to shake-up Washington; he’s explicitly promising he will calm it down.”
Right. “Calm it down.” That’s why there is that hastily erected twelve-foot wall, topped with razor wire, surrounding the Capitol.
Any bets on whether that is made a permanent feature of what Nancy Pelosi, with her usual botox rictus, called “the People’s House.” (No, not you, silly: she meant her kind of people.)
And how about those thousands of armed troops in the nation’s Capital? . . .
Anyone harboring “Trumpist” inclinations is suspect, hence the widespread calls for “deprogramming” his supporters, who are routinely said to be “marching towards sedition.”
Is that a “return to normality”? Do you feel calmer?
Plus:
This is where Václav Havel’s greengrocer comes in. In “The Power of the Powerless,” a famous essay about the day-to-day operation of totalitarianism from the late 1970s, Havel talks about an ordinary greengrocer who obediently agrees to display a placard with the slogan “Workers of the World, Unite!” in his shop window.
He does this without much thought. What if the powers that be had asked him to display the slogan “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient”? Then, says Havel, “embarrassed and ashamed,” he would have objected.
“To overcome this complication,” Havel explains, “his expression of loyalty must take the form of a sign which, at least on its textual surface, indicates a level of disinterested conviction.”
“It must allow the greengrocer to say, ‘What’s wrong with the workers of the world uniting?’”
You see how it works: “the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the facade of something high. And that something is ideology.”
Bidenharris turns Washington into an armed camp. He populates his administration with ideological apparatchiks and affirmative-action non entities and repeats the word “unity.”
Bidenharris also starts prosecuting political opponents. He governs by diktat, issuing more executive orders in a week than other administrations had done in a year. With the stroke of a pen, he shutters the Keystone pipeline and put tens of thousands of people out of work.
He also utters the word “unity” and proclaimed “tolerance” in his inaugural address, the “best” inaugural address that squeaky Chris Wallace had heard in his entire life. Normal?
Havel warned about what happens to recalcitrant greengrocers who do not get with the program. All of a sudden, “he will be relieved of his post as manager of the shop and transferred to the warehouse. His pay will be reduced. . . . His superiors will harass him and his fellow workers will wonder about him.”
And here’s the rub. “Most of those who apply these sanctions . . . will not do so from any authentic inner conviction but simply under pressure from conditions, the same conditions that once pressured the greengrocer to display the official slogans.”
“Conditions.” That’s a synonym for the swampy “normality” that Bidenharris is returning us to and that we are supposed to celebrate.
The people carrying out this restitution think that if they censor something then it no longer exists.
They think that if they call ordinary citizens “domestics terrorists” they can win an ideological battle.
There are somewhere between 74 and 75 million people who are on the cusp of proving them wrong.
I am daily amazed at the eager abandonment of what even the most partisan among our political leadership used to regard as good sense and good citizenship.
OH, COME ON, YOU NEED THE LAUGH: Not that Robin Hood. The one who stole from the taxes rich and gave to the poor.
IT’S STUPID OUT THERE. TAKE THIS: Glorious Meme Commissary of Proletariat.
IT’S A MYSTERY: Vaccine skepticism lurks in town famous for syphilis study.
Gee, I can’t imagine why people in Tuskegee, Alabama wouldn’t trust a government vaccine.
SOME OF US REMEMBER THE RHYME: Reducing An Occupied Country.
IT SEEMS TO BE CAUSING AMNESIA: The So-Called Climate “Health Emergency”.
Some of us remember when we were all going to freeze, and the solution was socialism. Warming. Cooling. The solution is always socialism. One starts to suspect that its a solution in search of a problem.
I SUSPECT MOST OF THEM ARE IMAGINARY: Did most Biden voters really not see it coming?
THEY REALLY DON’T WANT US TO ESCAPE: Environmentalists cheer FAA blocking of Starship test flight.
OR PERHAPS THE WALL: Intersectionality Has Hit The Stop Sign.
I LIKE HIS 3) ITEM: COVID19 update, Groundhog Day edition: various ICYMI items.
SHOW TRIALS: Jason Miller Discusses Next Week Impeachment Trial with David Asman.
Along with military occupation of the capital are the best way to show you believe you own legitimately. Totally.
THE LEFT PROJECTS LIKE AN IMAX: Projection.
YEAH, BECAUSE IT’S AMERICA LAST: DOJ Investigating Elon Musk For Not Hiring Foreign Applicant.
ANALYSIS: TRUE.
If Trump’s so washed up, why are Democrats still so afraid of him?
Plus: “The Democrats’ case against Marjorie Greene largely consists of the claim that she is a conspiracy theorist. Fine. If we are going to expel representatives who promoted conspiracy theories, let’s start with the Democrats who propounded the insane conspiracy theory that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians to steal the 2016 presidential election. Once all of those Democrats have been expelled or deprived of their committee assignments–that covers pretty much all Democrats, including the House leadership–we can take up the question of whether Marjorie Greene promoted unfounded conspiracy theories.”
Endorsed!
POINTS AND FIGURES: Your Regulator Overseers. “If you wonder why hearings become hyper-political and devolve into soundbite attacks, the above is why. There isn’t a lot of real world experience in the halls of Congress.”
OPEN THREAD: Talk among yourselves.
NOT THE BEE: Stacey Abrams nominated for Nobel Peace Prize.