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Archive for 2023
February 16, 2023
THE CURRENT STATE OF THE WORLD, EXPLAINED:
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Ignorant Boomer Shares CNN Article Thinking It’s Real.
EDMUND BURKE, POPULIST CONSERVATISM’S UNRECOGNIZED HERALD? Now available is Georgetown University Professor of Political Theory Joshua Mitchell’s updated edition of his “American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time.”
Awakening was first issued in 2020 and is now updated to reflect events subsequent to its original publication, including the George Floyd crisis, the ensuring riots, the Biden election and the Biden rollback of Trump’s tenure.
In his review of the updated edition of the Mitchell work, American Conservative’s Colin Dueck, in addition to superbly explicating the book, points to an aspect of Edmund Burke’s writing that deserves much wider consideration. Dueck pulls all of it together in his three concluding graphs:
“For any conservatives who still feel the need to defer to today’s politically correct revolution, I urge them to reread Burke’s Reflections along with his 1796 Letters on a Regicide Peace. Burke is angry, and justifiably so. He is angry at the sheer fanaticism, intolerance, and destruction wreaked by contemporary revolutionaries. He is angry at ‘men of letters,’ who provide excuses for it. He is angry at so-called political ‘moderates’—his own words—who weakly accommodate this destruction and allow it to continue. He correctly identifies French Jacobin militants as that country’s newfangled elite. As he puts it in the Letters:
‘When private men form themselves into associations for the purpose of destroying the preexisting laws and institutions of their country…massacring by judgments, or otherwise, those who make any struggle for their old legal government, and their legal, hereditary, or acquired possessions – I call this Jacobinism by establishment.’
“To be sure, Burke offers thoughtful, prudent warnings against radical social or political displacement. That is exactly why he refuses to take the revolutionaries’ continued success as a given. He understands that either the revolution will fail, or traditional Western liberties will falter. And he will do everything he can, big or small, to prevent the latter. Reconsider him first-hand. Ask yourself how he would tackle today’s woke fanatics. His recommended strategy is rollback, not appeasement. In short, Burke is a counterrevolutionary of an unusually fearless kind.”
The question Dueck does not address, but which cannot be avoided, is this: Is rollback still possible in the America of 2023?
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): The answer to that question is “yes.”
MERIT AND THE IVY LEAGUE: Harvard law journal requires applicants’ race, sexual orientation to submit articles.
UNEXPECTEDLY!
CNBC: Producer price inflation "coming in hot," accelerating more "than expected." pic.twitter.com/cgWYwvGO4g
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) February 16, 2023
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: NY Times contributors and celebrities bash paper’s coverage of trans issues.
In accordance with the prophecy:
SOLID ADVICE: Get Married. Have Kids. Stay Together. Mind Your Own Business. “American life offers space to honor all those ethnic and religious heritages, as anyone who lives here knows, while also demanding newcomers embrace ones that make a diverse culture work. Despite all our sloganeering about “diversity” making us stronger — and it certainly enhances our personal and cultural lives — what makes us “stronger” is the ability to convince disparate groups of people with disparate traditions to adopt a set of societal norms and ethos. This means sharing a broad, unifying philosophy and a common understanding about civic life: a respect for the law and order and the foundational liberal ideas of rights, governance, and liberty; a common language; a belief in a meritocratic society; and the ability to live and let live by minding your own business. The United States, notwithstanding all its obvious injustices and sins, does this better than any place in the world.”
PHIL HAMBURGER: How A Terrorist Victim Can Help The Supreme Court Address Section 230. “Nohemi’s relatives and estate have sued Google—the owner of YouTube—for algorithmically encouraging followers of ISIS to view ISIS videos, in violation of the law against assisting terrorism. Google responds that Section 230 gives it sweeping immunity. It claims to be privileged for a host of abuses, including aiding terrorism and censoring Americans. Big Tech thus takes a big interpretation of Section 230. The statute and the Constitution, however, suggest Big Tech has overplayed its hand.”
I would add that immunity from liability for publishing content may not logically extend to immunity for writing algorithms that selectively push that content. As to the algorithms, they’re the author, not a mere conduit.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: How Many Americans Will Woke Soros Prosecutors Get Killed? “The end game, of course, is total, lawless chaos, which creates the perfect conditions for the growth of progressivism. Or communism. Or fascism. Chaos is fertilizer for the worst of the isms.”
SO THEY KNEW ALL ALONG: Report: U.S. Tracked China’s Spy Balloon as it Lifted Off of Hainan Island.
OUCH: The gas bill is $907.13? Sticker shock for Californians as prices soar. “SoCalGas said the average bill in January for its 21.8 million customers was about $300, more than twice the average of January 2022 — and homeowners with pools or many rooms to heat have reported being charged north of $2,000. PG&E has projected that bills in central and Northern California will be 32% higher this winter.”
THE 21st CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Transgender Cannibal Baby Rapist Put in Women’s Prison Near Mother and Baby Unit.
DON SURBER: Fetterman Nation. “We have devolved into a big, dull, goofy, confused, barely functioning nation that given the choice between obvious and ridiculous choses the ridiculous every single time.”
MORE ON REPARATIONS: St. Louis here. St. Paul here. This stuff is not going away. A whole generation of young people are being taught (by Disney, no less) this is the way to a just and equitable future.
MASTER SATIRE: Teacher Confiscates White Students’ Lunches, Redistributes Them to ‘BIPOC’ Students for ‘Equity.’ “I gotta be honest — I took this one at face value and even wrote up a whole thing about it before realizing it was satire. Because the Social Justice™ is so unhinged, differentiating between satirical takes and actual SJW ideology is increasingly difficult.”
THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA chief: Free world locked in moon race against China.
TYPICAL: Virginia’s Embattled Loudoun County Votes Against Release of Sex Assault Report.
The tipoff that they have something to hide is that they’re hiding something.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why I Am Against Saving the Planet (and why you should be, too).
We are constantly being exhorted to “save the planet.” Indeed, saving the planet has become the de facto religion of politicians, business elites, and intellectuals in the West, replacing Christianity’s earlier mission of saving individual souls. But what does the environmentalist slogan actually mean? On examination, the phrase means saving the planet from us—that is, from human beings and our works.
Read the whole thing.
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