ROBERT HEINLEIN: “NO ‘DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE’ EVER WON A WAR.”
Archive for 2020
June 21, 2020
DONALD TRUMP ON THE SEATTLE SECESSIONISTS:
I especially wanted you to notice that he talked about how he saw the political advantage in standing back and letting Seattle and other cities show us all how far they would decline under Democratic leadership. He’s ready to go in and help when asked — “Anytime you want we’ll come in, we’ll straighten it out in one hour or less” — but it’s also okay if they don’t ask. It’s to his political advantage, but it’s not an advantage he would take. He’d help if asked. But if they want to give him the advantage… well, that’s how he spins the disorder. It doesn’t hurt him, but he feels bad about it and he’s quite capable and willing to help. But they need to ask.
Well, that’s how the Insurrection Act works, though if they don’t ask, he has the option of going ahead if things get bad enough. Which, honestly, they probably have.
NOW OUT FROM ANDREW WAREHAM: Billy Bacon and John Company’s Armies.
OPEN THREAD: Put a candle in the window.
IT’S HARD TO GO BROKE BY UNDERESTIMATING THE STUPIDITY OF THE WOKE: WATCH: John Oliver mocked Trump in 2017 for suggesting Washington and Jefferson statues would fall.
SONNY, MOVE OUT TO THE COUNTRY: Escape to the Country: Why City Living Is Losing Its Appeal During the Pandemic. “In recent months, thousands of city dwellers have fled metropolises such as New York, Paris and London, moving in with family or into rentals to avoid crowds, be closer to nature or spend coronavirus lockdowns in more spacious quarters. While many have begun to return as restrictions have eased, others, like Ms. Gambey and her husband, Charles, are considering a permanent move.”
It is hardly news to anyone that, for the past few decades, researchers, journalists and partners and parents everywhere have been discussing, debating and dissecting the division of labor in homes, especially in homes where partners have children. In the 1980s, Arlie Hochschild’s concept of “the second shift” articulated the phenomenon that, despite entering the workforce, women still took care of the majority of the household duties after they came home at night. Nowadays, this sort of work is sometimes called “invisible labor” because, as the argument goes, those who do it (usually women, according to the research) are doing it behind the scenes.
But are they? In my experience, making favorite meals, calling out spelling lists and helping pack the trunks for camp has placed me center stage. Sometime after my daughter was born, when I suddenly had two children under two, I complained to an older female friend about being the one who worked more hours at home while my husband put in more hours in the office. “But you get to be #1!” she said with a surprising level of enthusiasm. “I don’t want to be #1,” I replied, somewhat appalled. . . .
What I am suggesting is that, in many families, it is not only the amount of work that partners do or don’t do that is worth thinking about but also how visible that work is—and that men’s labor may be the most invisible of all.
It is not unusual for men I know, or who I work with as clients, to complain of being called the “emergency backup parent” by teachers or to feel like a “fifth wheel” in their own homes. That’s what you get when you lie on the couch and watch football, you might be thinking, but I don’t know many dads who do that anymore. In modern families, most moms and dads are working—in the office or in the home or on the soccer field or in the car—almost all of their waking hours.
Day to day, men do the mental work of thinking about their children and spouse as much as women. And on average, men spend more time than women taking care of finances, lawn care, technology support, trash collection and home and car maintenance—tasks that are often done out of sight.
And don’t forget that other feminist bugbear, “emotional labor.” Anyone who thinks that only women do emotional labor in a relationship, has never been in a relationship with a woman.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:
● Shot: Will Joe Biden Become Our First Female President?
—Headline, CNSNews, Wednesday.
● Chaser: Biden officially forms transition team.
—Headline, CNN, yesterday.
THE LESS VIRTUE, THE MORE SIGNALING: What My Neighborhood Needs: Fewer Virtue Signaling Lawn Signs.
IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROPHECY:
● Shot: Family of woman who portrayed Aunt Jemima opposes move to rebrand.
—The New York Post, today.
● Chaser: Activists Fight Racism By Driving All People Of Color Out Of Pop Culture.
—The Babylon Bee, Wednesday.
WALTER DURANTY DELETES TWITTER ACCOUNT: Well, the Walter Duranty of 2020 – Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her “1619 Project,” but perhaps touched the third-rail of intersectionality today:
(Which is actually one of the more accurate statements she’s made: How Native American Slaveholders Complicate the Trail of Tears Narrative.)
Also today, Hannah-Jones tweeted this (see screencaps below Matt Welch’s response):
And as the Post-Millennial noted prior to the deletion of her Twitter account: ‘1619 Project’ writer claims ‘America isn’t burning’ as America burns:
The New York Times’ “1619 Project” writer Nikole Hannah-Jones said that it would be an honor to have the current destruction and mayhem across the US known as the “1619 riots.”
As detailed by the Times‘ project, the year 1619 is important as it is considered to be the start of slavery in North America. And according to some academics, the current acts of burglary, vandalism, arson, and assault are justified because of historical slavery.
Per the New York Post:
“A Northwestern University journalism professor named Steven Thrasher took to Slate to offer this analysis: “The destruction of a police precinct is not only a tactically reasonable response to the crisis of policing, it is a quintessentially American response, and a predictable one. The uprising we’ve seen this week is speaking to the American police state in its own language, up to and including the use of fireworks to mark a battle victory. Property destruction for social change is as American as the Boston Tea Party. . . .”
Hannah-Jones is among them, it appears, as she replied to an opinion piece written by the New York Post by saying that it would be an “honor” to call what is happening “the 1619 riots.”
She followed this up by saying “Also, America isn’t burning.”
Eventually, by this afternoon, Hannah-Jones nuked her Twitter account:
In response to her retweet of the person saying that fireworks “are a coordinated attack on Black and Brown communities by government forces,” Charles Cooke tweeted, “The last time she spread a conspiracy theory, she won a Pulitzer.”
Or as Neo writes: The greatest Pulitzer since Duranty: the 1619 Project.
UPDATE: Hannah-Jones reactivated her account “about an hour later. Before deleting her account, Hannah-Jones deleted a tweet that distributed a conspiracy theory thread that expressed a belief that the government was setting off fireworks in the middle of the night to sow division in black and brown communities in Brooklyn…This goes without saying, but the New York Times has a difficult situation on its hands figuring out how to address this story, where their social media standards were almost certainly violated by one of their most well known authors.”
Related: 1619 Project author: ‘It would be an honor’ to call these the 1619 riots.
FLASHBACK: VICTOR DAVIS HANSON ON THE LOOMING 1984 ELECTION:
In his own way, Trump also fights back in 360-degree fashion, from the existential to the trivial, railing against Colin Kaepernick, tit for tatting Hollywood stars, weighing in on radical abortion, open borders, power outages, the homeless and subway jumping. The result is not just that there looms a choice between two different agendas, but two quite different American lifestyles and experiences—and histories.
Like it or not, 2020 is going to be a plebiscite on an American version of Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four. One side advocates a complete transformation not just of the American present but of the past as well. The Left is quite eager to change our very vocabulary and monitor our private behavior to ensure we are not just guilty of incorrect behavior but thought as well.
The other side believes America is far better than the alternative, that it never had to be perfect to be good, and that, all and all, its flawed past is a story of a moral nation’s constant struggle for moral improvement.
One side will say, “Just give us more power and we will create heaven on earth.” The other says “Why would anyone wish to take their road to an Orwellian nightmare?” The 2020 election is that simple.
Advantage: VDH.
J.D. VANCE: Corporate America Dividing The Country, Preventing People From Unifying.
How is it that on all of these big debates, the left finds itself on the side of Corporate America? It finds itself on the side of international businesses.
You know, if I was a member of a political movement that stood up for working people and found myself every single time on the side of Amazon, on the side of Apple, on the side of Google, I might ask myself, if I’ve actually chosen the right allies, and what it says about me, but unfortunately, too many folks on the left just aren’t doing that.
Plus: “I think the Republicans have just so forgotten that there are real economic, real social challenges in this country that needs to be solved, that they’re comfortable with just doing whatever the mainstream media says that they should be doing, instead of actually fighting back in a real and substantive way. Really, the story of the past 30 or 40 years of American politics, unfortunately, is that in their own different ways, the left and the right have both found themselves effectively preaching that they’re standing up for the middle class, when in reality, they’re just standing up for corporate interests.”
J.D. is a smart guy. Read the whole thing.
THE BIRTH OF THE CULTURE WARS: This century-long conflict is born of the Western elites’ loss of cultural and moral authority.
Writing in 1973, Irving Kristol, a leading conservative commentator, drew attention to the moral depletion of Western culture:
‘For well over 150 years now, social critics have been warning us that bourgeois society was living off the accumulated moral capital of traditional religion and traditional moral philosophy, and that once this capital was depleted, bourgeois society would find its legitimacy ever-more questionable.’
Related:
More: Ancien Regime Change. “Do not worry too much about the statues which are now coming down. They mean surprisingly little. Worry more about the ones they are soon going to be putting up, and what they will represent.”
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Or not. Seen on Facebook: “Relax, they’re just making room for all the Trump statues.”
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: “This is the breakdown of the basic logic of civilization and it’s spreading.”
BRETT FAVRE COMPARES COLIN KAEPERNICK TO PAT TILLMAN, THINKS HE DESERVES ANOTHER SHOT IN THE NFL.
For what it’s worth, even Trump agrees (or is trolling like a madman) that Kaepernick should get a second chance.
But does Kap himself actually want another shot in the NFL?
NEW ZEALAND A VICTIM OF BUREAUCRATIC “HUBRIS.”
The latest series of Covid-19 blunders is a timely reminder that the entire premise of the lockdown was hubris. The bureaucrats went from flattening the curve to believing that they could eliminate the virus and quarantine a population of 5 million people indefinitely from the 7 billion other people on the planet.
They can’t. The inevitability of this program’s failure, however, does not mean we will abandon it easily. But we will abandon it.
Governments don’t walk away from a policy merely because it isn’t working. They simply re-double their efforts, imposing more costs and stripping away more freedoms while the populace cheers them on to ever-greater acts of idiocy until we all exhaust ourselves and move on to the next crisis.
New Zealand is not especially well-governed.
#CANCELYALE TRENDING ON TWITTER NATIONWIDE: “Yale University has come under fire Saturday through tweets pointing out the university was named after Elihu Yale, a slave trader. The hashtag ‘#CancelYale’ started trending nationwide on Twitter.”
Earlier: Woodrow Wilson’s Name Removed From Two NJ School Buildings.
THE EARTH HAS BECOME SMALL, AND ON IT HOPS THE LAST MAN, WHO MAKES EVERYTHING SMALL: Joe Biden and Friedrich Nietzsche.
