There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me.’
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Philip K. Dick
Author: Editor
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Auberon Herbert
On June 18, 1838, Auberon Edward William Molyneux Herbert was born.
Auberon Herbert was a Liberal Member of Parliament who, after reading the writings of Herbert Spencer, became a radical individualist, authoring essays such as “The Ethics of Dynamite,” “A Politician in Trouble About His Soul,” and “The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State.”
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
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The Statue of Liberty
The Statue of Liberty arrived in New York Harbor on June 17, 1885.
On the same day in 1930, progressive Republican President Herbert Hoover — eager to please agricultural states, and confident that protectionism would yield greater wealth — signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. The Great Depression deepened, ratcheting up as each provision of the bill took effect.
Three years later, investment author and two-time Libertarian Party presidential candidate Harry Browne was born.
On June 17, 1944, Iceland declared independence from Denmark.
On this day in 1971, President Richard Nixon declared a “War on Drugs,” which steadily decreased civil liberty and the rule of law in America.
Exactly one year later, five men were arrested for attempted burglary on the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., igniting the Watergate scandal that ultimately led to the resignation of U.S. President Richard Nixon more than two years later.
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Day Off, Absurdity On
In the days of his on-air reign, Bill O’Reilly would make much hay of the so-called “war on Christmas.” One common retort among O’Reilly’s detractors was to scoff: “there is no ‘war on Christmas’; the old grump is just over-reacting to a rising tide of inclusive good manners” — the idea being that wishing a more vague but all-inclusive “Happy Holidays,” instead of a specific “Merry Christmas,” was being kind to Jews, Muslims, atheists, those who do not celebrate the ancient Christian holiday.
However much sense this strategy may have once made, nowadays it seems an absurd ploy: political correctness being so widespread, even domineering, that it extends deep into the minutia of life.
How deep? Just as the Confederate monument iconoclasm extended from General Lee back to Presidents Washington and Jefferson, now the spurning of traditional holidays reaches out beyond Christmas.
“The school board of Randolph Township in Morris County, New Jersey has decided to do away with named holidays on the academic calendar,” writes Samuel Chamberlain at The New York Post. “Now holidays like Thanksgiving and Memorial Day, as well as Jewish holy days like Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, will simply be listed as ‘day off.’”
Behind this? The notion that the posited discomfort and possible offense taken by any person of a “marginal group” should completely override the conventions of a community’s traditional in-group.
But where does it end? With less knowledge of others’ traditions, less understanding, and therefore less harmony among groups . . . including marginalized groups.
That couldn’t be the plan, could it?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Horace Walpole
The world is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to those that feel.
Horatio Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford (September 24, 1717 – March 2, 1797), author of The Castle of Otranto (1764), Letter to Anne, Countess of Ossory (August 16, 1776).
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To Freedom
On June 16, 1961, dancer Rudolf Nureyev defected from the Soviet Union.
The great Scottish moral philosopher, political economy pioneer, and Enlightenment intelectual Adam Smith (1723-1790), best known for authoring the 1776 masterwork The Wealth of Nations, was born on June 16.
On June 16, 1858, Abraham Lincoln delivered his “House Divided” speech in Springfield, Illinois.
On this date in 1963, the Soviet Space Program achieved a first with the Vostok 6 mission, placing Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova into orbit as the first woman in space.
June 16th is Bloomsday, a celebration of the life and work of Irish expatriate author James Joyce (1882-1941). The date was selected because June 16, 1904, was the date in which Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses was set. The ceremonial day is named after the character Leopold Bloom.
Banning “Critical Race Theory” in public schools and other government institutions seems like such a good idea that when you read Scott Shackford’s headline at Reason, “Don’t Ban Critical Race Theory in Education. Embrace School Choice Instead,” you may balk.
“Conservatives in Florida, Idaho, and the nation’s capitol are attempting to block public schools from teaching Critical Race Theory,” Shackford writes, describing CRT as “an ideology that holds that racism is historically fundamental to how America’s political, legal, and cultural institutions are structured.” His problem with this political move is that it is “an authoritarian proposal that would cut off classroom debate about hot-button political issues.”
My issues really begin with the a-word.
From what I can tell, CRT is itself authoritarian, and groupthink-oriented, class-based and generally racist. The program looks designed to implement a sort of Cultural Revolution indoctrination-and-social control system into American institutions, definitely not to encourage “classroom debate.”
While Shackford makes the obvious point that America’s past institutional make-up was indeed racist and structurally so, and that learning this is important for a decent education, CRT did not add this to “the debate.” This has been widely acknowledged for years.
Besides, CRT activists go much further, calling “whiteness” a disease and white people ineluctably, “systemically” racist.
Though Shackford’s main point — that we should take the occasion to offer the best way out, “school choice” — is indeed a great one, letting socialist radicals and weak-minded educrats enshrine a racist theory about racism into public institutions amounts to a kind of brinksmanship, a “collapsitarian” approach.
Couldn’t we put government education’s allotted doom on the back burner, stop teaching CRT or other woke indoctrination, and also empower parents and students with freedom of choice?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Frederick Douglass
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
The Oregon Treaty, signed June 15, 1846, established the boundary between Great Britain’s Canadian territory and the United States of America, from the Rocky Mountains to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, using the 49th Parallel as the handy marker. However, the treaty was not exactly clear on the territorial status of the San Juan Islands, so exactly 13 years later, to the day, a war erupted . . . over a shot pig.
An American farmer shot a pig rooting through his garden. The pig belonged to an Irishman. The two did not agree upon compensation, and “the authorities” were called in, with infantry mustering from the south and the Governor of Vancouver Island instructing marines to land on San Juan Island — though the rear admiral in charge refused to comply with the order, on the reasonable grounds that war over a pig was not worth it. Local troops from both sides lined up against each other, but under command to defend themselves only and not shoot first. All that was exchanged in this war were insults. It turned out to be a bloodless war, discounting the pig, so it might qualify as the best war in American history.