Archive for 2021
February 8, 2021
UNEXPECTEDLY: Tom Brady Called ‘Racist’ on Social Media for Winning Super Bowl During Black History Month.
Is it possible some of these people were joking? I hope they all were because of how ridiculous this suggestion is. Were the Buccaneers not entitled to play to win the Super Bowl because they have a white quarterback? Did Tom Brady have to allow himself to be outplayed by Patrick Mahomes because of his race? Is the Left seriously so obsessed with race that activists feel that white athletes have an obligation to not outshine their black opponents during Black History Month?
I’d really like to believe these people are just joking, but there are too many tweets for that to be true.
Flashback: Professor: Tom Brady’s popularity is result of white supremacy.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): When you remember that “woke” is just a synonym for “stupid and crazy,” it all makes sense.
THERE’S NO IQ TEST FOR JOURNALISTS: WASHINGTON POST OP-ED WRITER WHO CLAIMS BUCCANEERS’ NAME IS PROBLEMATIC HAS AN INTERESTING TATTOO. “Let’s pretend we’re having garage beers here. Jamie clearly thinks it’s horrible that Tampa Bay uses Buccaneers as a nickname because her politics tell her it’s supposed to be bad, and when you’re woke there are no days off. You have to be fully outraged at all times, even if you have this as a shoulder tattoo. Now Jamie will fade off into Internet history, and she’ll go back to romanticizing pirates. Her work here is done. Football teams aren’t allowed to romanticize pirates, but Jamie is.”
SECURITY THEATER: Pelosi fines two GOP congressmen $5,000 for alleged metal detector violation. “At no time until yesterday did anyone mention the need to be wanded after entering the restroom directly in front of the guards. Unlike in the movie ‘The Godfather,’ there are no toilets with tanks where one could hide a gun, so my reentry onto the House floor should have been a non-issue.”
PROGRESS: “For years, .380 ACP has been considered a sub-standard round for personal protection, and it’s often classified as the bare-minimum level of defensive capability that a concealed carrier should consider when choosing a self-defense chambering. This contention was backed up by testing that showed many .380 ACP loads as being incapable of meeting FBI protocol standards for ballistic penetration. Thanks to the Federal Premium Hydra-Shok load in .380 ACP, that shortcoming is a thing of the past.”
CANCEL CULTURE IS ALL IN YOUR MIND: Lou Dobbs Tonight has been canceled after a decade.
RIP: Congressman Ron Wright Dies after Contracting Coronavirus. The Texas Republican “was 67 and had been battling cancer as well as the coronavirus when he died. He is survived by his wife Susan and three children.” Wright is “the first member of Congress to die after contracting the virus.”
NOT THE BABYLON BEE: Texas University Tells Students: Wear Masks During Masturbation.
“Unexpectedly,” it has since quickly come and gone: University of North Texas mum on removal of ‘Mask-urbate’ tweet on safe sex during COVID.
THE GREEN LIE: Solar Panels Are Starting to Die. What Will We Do With The Megatons Of Toxic Trash? “Most people seem to believe that wind and solar panels produce no waste and have no negative environmental impacts. Unfortunately, these people are wrong.”
SHATTERED GLASS INSTALLATION IN DC DEDICATED TO KAMALA HARRIS:
A Swiss artist memorialized Vice President Kamala Harris’ history-making win in a shattered glass installation that’s on display in Washington, D.C., outside the Lincoln Memorial.
Simon Berger carefully cracked glass to create a 6-by-6-foot, 350-pound unconventional portrait of the first woman, the first person of color elected to the nation’s second-highest office.
Berger began his work after the results of the November election and modeled his artwork after a picture of Harris captured by photographer Celeste Sloman. The glass portrait was shipped from Switzerland.
Shattered glass is a highly appropriate “tribute” to Harris, but not for the reason that Berger thinks: Meet The Rioting Criminals Kamala Harris Helped Bail Out Of Jail.
EVERYONE NEEDS A HOBBY: This dude made a mask of himself improperly wearing a mask just so he could troll people.
SCIENCE, UNSETTLED: Critical flaw found in lab models of the human blood-brain barrier.
“A FISH, A BARREL, AND A SMOKING GUN”: Trump’s Defense Brief Eviscerates the Democrats’ Case for Impeachment.
JOHN MCWHORTER: The N-word as slur vs. the N-word as a sequence of sounds: What makes the New York Times so comfortable making black people look dim?
It’s not as if any of this stuff is driven by an actual concern for the actual well-being of actual black people.
BEYOND THE CULTURE OF REPUDIATION:
As a modern conservative, [the late Roger] Scruton defends a form of democracy unknown to Aristotle. Following David Hume and Edmund Burke, however, he opposes the idea that the “political order is founded on a contract.” For Scruton, the state of nature is a chimera—an invention of modern political philosophers who had forgotten the debt and gratitude owed to our predecessors. The fictitious state of nature—so central to philosophical liberalism—obscures the fact that membership in a community, with its requisite duties and obligations, is a precondition for meaningful freedom. “Absolute freedom”—doing whatever one wants—is always an invitation to anarchy or tyranny. In the modern world, the nation is the political form that guarantees membership and self-government.
In all of his political writings, Scruton takes on the Left for scorning existing norms and customs, and for promoting a “culture of repudiation.” The Left is “negative.” It dismisses “every aspect of our cultural capital” with the language of brutal invective: accusing every defender of human nature and sound tradition of “racism,” “xenophobia,” “homophobia,” and “sexism.” Like 1984’s “two minutes of hate,” this language tears down, intimidates, and can never build anything humane or constructive—it is nihilistic to the core. At the same time, Scruton wants to reach out to reasonable liberals who eschew ideology and who still believe in civility and the promise of national belonging. His conservatism can discern the truth in liberalism (another Aristotelian trait) while the partisans of repudiation see half the human race as enemies.
Read the whole thing.
JEFFREY CARTER: I Thought I Was Going to Die.
VDH: Our Animal Farm. The Left’s 1960s dream is America’s 2021 nightmare:
“Censorship” was a dirty word. It purportedly involved the religious bigots and medieval minds that in vain had tried to cancel ideological and cultural mavericks and geniuses from Lenny Bruce to Dalton Trumbo. “Banned in Boston” was a sign of cretinism. Only drunken “paranoids” like Joe McCarthy resorted to “blacklists.” We were reminded that the inferior nuts tried to cancel the brilliant careers of their betters whom they disliked, or feared.
The Right supposedly had sunk into fluoride and “precious bodily fluid” paranoias, and “Who lost China?” conspiracy theories. Conservatives, the radicals lectured us, masked the poverty of their thinking by “red-baiting.” They talked as if “commies” and “insurrectionists” were around every corner—in hopes of militarizing the country, and using police and troops to intimidate the “people.”
Snooping, surveillance, wiretaps—all that and more was awful—the purported work of nutty J. Edgar Hoover. His flat-topped, wing-tipped “G-men” usually outnumbered Black Panthers, Weathermen, and SDS members at secret strategy sessions.
Hollywood went wild in the 1960s and 1970s by warning us about “them.” Endless movies detailed the solo efforts of heroes, who were watched and threatened by the “government,” working hand in glove, of course, with either corporations or the “rich.” In films like “Three Days of the Condor,” “The Conversation,” or “Blowup,” we were warned of the nefarious powers of surveillance.
Fearing Russia was the mark of a conspiracist nut. In films like “The Russians are Coming, the Russians Are Coming,” we were reminded that the paranoia about the Soviets was as deadly as the Soviets themselves, who were pleasant enough, not much different from us.
Students in the 1960s high schools were spoon-fed Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, Brave New World, and other dystopian novels. Orwell and Huxley warned them of the dangers of a super-spy apparat, a one-party state that reorders a docile subservient population, and the combination of “science” with thought control—the sort of stuff that Nixon or Goldwater was no doubt plotting.
So better to be an individualist, the Left preached, a rebel at war with all orthodoxy and conformity, a “Rebel Without a Cause,” Holden Caulfield, or one of the good renegades in “The Wild Ones.” We were to worship James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Steve McQueen because they were “free,” “didn’t give a s—t,” and demolished “the Man’s” silly imposed “rules and regulations.” “Easy Rider” was the 1960’s bible.
Read the whole thing. Exit quote: “The revolutionary animals are now running the farm in a way that would be nightmarish even to Farmer Jones. They won. They are now one with—but also far, far worse than—what they rebelled against.”
SPACE: The Biden administration endorses NASA’s Artemis, the Space Force. “How was it that two Trump space initiatives came to be accepted by the Biden administration, led by a president who was elected mainly on the basis of his not being Trump? The answer is that both the civilian and military space initiatives have bipartisan support in the Congress.”