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Archive for 2017
July 16, 2017
MORE ON DAVID BROOKS’ SANDWICH SHOP: “Let me say point-blank: if you think the sandwich shop anecdote is about sandwich shops or David Brooks’s manners, you are completely missing the point.”
It’s fun to make fun of David Brooks. But he made a good point in that piece, and the very people who need to get that seem most determined to avoid it.
PRESIDENT TRUMP NEEDS TO KEEP HIS PROMISE ABOUT INCREASED ANTITRUST ENFORCEMENT: “In the third quarter of 2016, companies owned by Facebook or Google took 90% of all new digital ad revenue.”
One place where I break with the Borkian consensus on antitrust is that I don’t think the Sherman Act was about maximizing consumer welfare so much as it was about inhibiting the growth of unaccountable political power. (The drafers of the Sherman Act, of course, weren’t aware of Bork’s theories.) We’re seeing a lot of unaccountable political power here, and it’s going to get worse if nothing’s done.
Related: Joel Kotkin: Today’s Tech Oligarchs Are Worse Than the Robber Barons. “Yes, Jay Gould was a bad guy. But at least he helped build societal wealth. Not so our Silicon Valley overlords. And they have our politicians in their pockets.”
HOLMAN JENKINS: On Don Jr., The Media Can’t Help Themselves.
But real trouble can flow even from a farce. Thinkers for whom Russia was just one problem in a world full of problems, who previously did not identify Moscow as the No. 1 enemy, now do so, vociferously, for fear of being lumped in with Mr. Trump as a traitor to America or some such.
A mob is a machine for mass-producing cowards and bullies. That’s where we are now. Just turn on cable TV.
Do I have to? Because I don’t want to.
MALCOLM GLADWELL DOESN’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT THE HISTORY OF COUNTRY MUSIC, if he thinks that early country music came out of an “enclosed, close-knit world.” There was a huge amount of cross-fertilization with blues, gospel, and bluegrass.
DAMAGED BRAND: ESPN’s ESPY Awards Ratings Tumble for Second Straight Year.
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Gov. Snyder Signs Bill Legalizing Switchblades in Michigan.
SPENGLER: Trump-hatred is all about Islam – “The camel in the living room, to coin a phrase.”
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VIOLATING THE CONSTITUTION IS ONLY BAD WHEN THE NARRATIVE REQUIRES IT TO BE: Chuck Schumer Admits Obama Health Payments Violated The Constitution. Can we get some prosecutions here?
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: DeVos sets stage to rewrite Obama-era sexual assault guidance.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Thursday blasted President Obama’s sexual assault policy for failing to foster an environment of safety and fairness on college campuses.
“We need to get this right,” DeVos told reporters following her meeting with sexual assault victims and those who have been wrongly accused under the current policy, saying that federal guidance should take both the victim and the accused into account.
“No student should feel that the scales are tipped against him or her.” Tweet This
“No student should be the victim of sexual assault. No student should feel unsafe,” she declared. “No student should feel like there isn’t a way to seek justice, and no student should feel that the scales are tipped against him or her.”
President Trump’s administration has indicated openness to reforming the current sexual assault guidance in light of criticism that it violates the due-process rights of the accused.
The Office of Civil Rights’ “Dear Colleague Letter,” a document that outlined certain school policy expectations when it comes to sexual assault on college campuses, is said to be the primary culprit behind the ineffective trial system adopted by most universities around the country.
Report crimes against persons and property to the police. Use the student-conduct system for things like cheating and plagiarism.
Related: Professor calls DeVos “a powerful handmaiden to a hegemonic white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” It’s weird that feminists in the 21st century seem to be living in a mediocre 1980s novel. But this type of talk isn’t exactly going to build a wave of popular opposition to reform.
AFTER CONSERVATISM, SADISTS AND LOST BOYS. A review of Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right:
Sex and power are inseparable for both this online left and online right in a strange codependency. For the male-dominated rightist subcultures—especially and explicitly in what is called the “manosphere”—the idea of, desire for, and act of sex becomes the primary currency of power and status.
Meanwhile, as Nagle explains, in feminized spaces like Tumblr and the contemporary education system an economy of victimization has been created through intersectional theory. Here, limitless self-defined gender identities (e.g. “Omnigay – Genderfluid, with one’s attraction to other genders changing with one’s gender, so that the individual is always attracted to the same gender) allow bourgeois white kids, who would not normally have currency to spend in such a market, to compete with minorities and the poor through marginalized sexuality.
Nagle observes that contemporary reactionaries are driven to using the trolling tactics of online life by Tumblr-liberalism’s victim fetish. For those of this alt-right who claim a modicum of conservatism, trolling is a paradoxical attempt to protect the interior of the Overton Window by smashing its frame. And for all trolls it is a gleeful display of the “if you are going to cry I will give you something to cry about” mindset. Comparative disadvantage, safespaces, trolls, harassment, antifa, and the rest work together to create a vicious cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Read the whole thing – Nagle has written a very timely book, and perhaps in the rush to get it into print, not very well edited, according to Micah Meadowcroft of the Washington Free Beacon.
Back when he was writing for the original, earlier, funnier Saturday Night Live, which, arguably, was the spearhead for the far left’s march through institutions such as NBC, and television in general’s radical change in tone and content, former National Lampoon co-creator Michael O’Donoghue was fond of quoting his hero William S. Burroughs’ catch phrase that “Nothing is true; everything is permitted,” which neatly foreshadows the rise of postmodernism in academia.
As Kurt Schlichter is fond of reminding them, the left’s not going to enjoy living under the rules they created.
Earlier: THE KIDS ARE ALT-RIGHT: Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies Explores Alt-Right’s Roots & Rise.
MICHAEL WALSH: The Coming GOP Electoral ‘Health Care’ Disaster.. “Republicans, in other words, have made the soon-to-be-fatal error of thinking that the American public put them in charge of 3/3 of 100 percent of the federal government because the voters like them. Not so: the voters properly despise them. . . .If the GOP succeeds in saddling Americans with Paul Ryan’s supererogatory ‘health care’ plan, then they’re going to get everything they deserve at the ballot box next year, especially if the media’s prolonged assault on the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s presidency continues without any meaningful pushback from the very GOP that stands to suffer in 2018.”
Flashback: Colossal GOP failure and not just on health.
THE INSTA-WIFE ON Men Who Do Too Much. “When women work more, they also endure more health problems so its easier to send the guy out to do the heavy lifting and then the women and society tell the men they are ‘privileged’ and tell him to work harder, help more at home and don’t complain.”
IT WOULD BE TRANSPHOBIC TO OPPOSE HER: Caitlyn Jenner Weighs Run For Senate.
CNN PANELIST CALLS OUT ‘OPPOSITION PARTY’ MEDIA, STELTER PLAYS DUMB:
[Former editor for the New York Observer Ken Kurson] started off by giving his view of the political landscape in America:
It’s no longer that the Republican point of view hold forth and the Democrats hold them accountable and the media covers it. It’s that the President and the White House put forth their point of view the media argues with them and the Democrats have become totally irrelevant to that discussion.
He then pointed out how the liberal media had “assigned itself the chore of undoing this election which they simply don’t accept.”
Stelter tried to shoot down Kurson by discrediting his critique, associating it with claims of a secret society of journalists pulling the strings. “Who do you think assigned themselves that? There’s not some secret cabal of people in the journalism world,” he spat.
HMMMM: Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) said that the House Intelligence Committee has already brought in some ‘big names’ — ‘more than the press knows’ — to answer questions about leaks of classified information to reporters.”
HYPERBOLE MUCH, PHIL? Phil Donahue: Trump era ‘darkest political moment’ in history:
Former talk-show host Phil Donahue on Saturday reflected on President Trump’s administration, calling it “the darkest political moment in American history.”
“This is the darkest political moment in American history,” Donahue said on MSNBC’s “AM Joy” Saturday. “Who’s going to argue that?”
Wow, who knew the Civil War, Wilson cracking down on civil liberties during WWI, FDR’s Japanese internment camps, the Cold War, JFK’s assassination and Watergate were all pretty much small beans in comparison?
REMEMBERING NEW YORK’S 1977 RIOTS, 40 YEARS LATER. Fred Siegel on “My Political Reeducation:”
Today, the graffiti and gang violence of the 1970s evoke a contrived nostalgia on the part of some hipsters, many of whom hail from out of town but wish that they could have been part of the funky seventies as evoked by Saturday Night Fever and other films of the time. But as a native New Yorker, I look back on the seventies as a kidney stone of a decade—a decade in which I heard the frightening, reverberating thud of a truck crashing through the old elevated West Side Highway a few blocks from my apartment. The city was too caught up in expanding its welfare system to pay much attention to small matters like bridge and road repair.
The dreadful 1977 riots hit Brooklyn the hardest of New York’s boroughs; the poorer the neighborhood, the greater the damage. The damage that I sustained was relatively trivial, but instructive: told that the vandalism that had destroyed Jack’s Pastrami King was an act of liberation, I lost much of my political innocence. The city itself had been mugged, I realized. I’m still haunted by that moment from 40 years ago, when my political reeducation began.
Read the whole thing – if only for the mouthwatering description of the food served by Jack’s Pastrami King, before it was “liberated” into the ground.
REVIEW: 2017 Ford F-250 Super Duty Gasoline V-8 SuperCab 4×4. I love the warning that the truck has “only one USB port.”
AT AMAZON, deals galore in Office Products.
POLAND FINDS ANOTHER WAY TO ANNOY RUSSIA: The Poles will be acquiring the latest version of the U.S. Army’s Patriot PAC-3 anti-missile missile. The Trump Administration made that deal with Poland this month. (Poland announced it July 6.) As the article notes, in 2015 the Obama Administration agreed to sell Poland eight Patriot batteries but armed with a less-capable PAC-3.
BETWEEN NORTH KOREA AND IRAN, THAT’S A GOOD THING: This new drug could help the U.S. survive a nuclear meltdown.. “An injection being developed by the Israeli company Pluristem Therapeutics Inc. appears to help the body rebound from radiation injuries.”
JOHN HINDERAKER: The Case For Spending Caps.