Envy thou not the oppressor, and choose none of his ways.
Proverbs 3:31, King James Version.
Author: Editor
Categories
Out the Window!
July 30, 1419, the First Defenestration of Prague: Jan Želivský, a Hussite priest at the church of the Virgin Mary of the Snows, led his congregation on a procession through the streets of Prague to the New Town Hall, on Charles Square. While they were marching, a stone was thrown at Želivský from the window of the town hall. The mob, enraged, stormed the hall. Once inside, the group threw the judge, the burgomaster, and some thirteen members of the town council out of the window and into the street, where they were killed by the fall or dispatched by the mob.
King Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia, upon hearing this news, was so stunned, the legend goes, that he died soon after.
On July 30, 1619, the first representative assembly in the Americas, the House of Burgesses, convened for the first time in Jamestown, Virginia. On the same date in 1676, Nathaniel Bacon issued the “Declaration of the People of Virginia,” beginning Bacon’s Rebellion against the rule of Governor William Berkeley.
On this date in 1863, representatives of the United States and tribal leaders (including the Shoshone’s Chief Pocatello) signed the Treaty of Box Elder.
July 30 birthdays include Henry Ford (1863), Gen. Smedley Butler (1881), C. Northcote Parkinson (1909), and former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947).
Vanuatuans celebrate Independence Day on July 30.
Graffiti is theft.
That is how Heather Mac Donald puts it. “To a conservative,” she writes at City Journal, “graffiti is self-evidently abhorrent, a spirit-crushing blight on the public realm, and a theft of property by feckless individuals who avenge their mediocrity by destroying what others have built.”
But that is not how “liberals” or “progressives” see it, she goes on to explain, for they regard marking up buildings and subways and streets and sidewalks as a “political statement,” referencing the New York Times recent characterization of spray-painting on property you don’t own as “a courageous strike against stultifying bourgeois values” representing “urban grit and resistance to corporate hegemony.”
With each graffito, Ms. Mac Donald insists, progressives see an icon of “the city’s vibrant, anti-capitalist soul.”
An interesting political divide. But this rumination on the “taggers’” art is not random. Mac Donald is aghast that New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has cancelled a graffiti-eradication program.
This, she insists, will lead to more crime, worse crime than mere trespass paintings. It’s the Broken Windows idea, and she’s probably right. Allowing small crimes to go unchecked demonstrates a lack of respect for persons and property, and that trains a city’s population to go on to do worse things.
But the program was cut for a reason. You see, de Blasio’s disastrous coronavirus response has put New York into the red. The city has to cut somewhere.
Mac Donald, however, calls the $3 million saved a “rounding error” on the city’s $88 billion budget. She imputes to de Blasio and others a preference for crime rather than fighting crime.
Maybe. And maybe we add law and order to health and commerce as casualties of the pandemic panic.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Categories
Tocqueville
On July 29, 1805, Alexis de Tocqueville was born. His most famous book, Democracy in America (two volumes: 1835, 1840), quickly became a classic of social and political research and analysis, and remains the most important early book about the United States of America. He is often referred to as a founder of sociology as well as a major figure in the development of classical liberalism.
Categories
Michel Chevalier
The United States constitute a society which moves under the impulse and by the guidance of instinct, rather than according to any premeditated plan; it does know itself. It rejects the tyranny of a past, which is exclusively military in its character, and yet is deeply imbued with the sentiment of order. It has been nurtured in the hatred of the old political systems of Europe; but a feeling of the necessity of self-restraint runs through its veins. It is divided between its instinctive perceptions of the future and its aversion to the past; between its thirst after freedom, and its hunger for social order; between its religious veneration of experience, and its horror of the violence of past ages.
Michel Chevalier, Society, Manners and Politics in the United States Being a Series of Letters on North America (translated from the Third Edition, 1839), p. 333.
Categories
The Panic Over Pods
“You really want to get the best for your child,” a father told NBC News, describing his family’s motivation to secure private educational services.* They are part of the “Pandemic Pod” movement “now sweeping the nation” — as so many public schools offer only remote learning this fall.
Increasingly, parents are getting together to form small groups — or “pods” — and hire a teacher to better provide instruction to their children.
It shows initiative — and a refreshing sense of parental responsibility. Of course, not everyone can afford to hire a private teacher.
“It just seems really privileged,” a Portland, Oregon, woman advised The Washington Post.
“The frantic activity . . . of families soliciting private tutors for their children,” San Francisco school board member Alison Collins explained, “is frightening to many black parents and parents of color.”
L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy, associate professor of sociology of education at New York University, called the private effort: “opportunity hoarding.”
“For those families that are most vulnerable, particularly lower-income families, black families, brown families, language-minority families,” declared the professor, “they are locked out of that.”
“Experts say that will widen the education gap,” NBC reporter Stephanie Gosk chimed in.
Ah, the experts — and their Procrustean** obsession!
Their fixation on gaps and inequality, as opposed to enhancing opportunities and achievement where possible, leads to the absurd notion that we should deny educational opportunities to some children (our children) unless we can provide those benefits to all children . . . city-wide, statewide, nationwide — or worldwide.
Read a bedtime story to your kid or grandchild tonight. Insist on quality . . . and leave the equality to feckless education theorists.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* The father and the family happen to be black.
** Procrustes, in Greek myth, was a robber who made his victims lie on a bed and stretched them out if they were too short for the bed, or lopped parts of them off, if too tall; killed by Theseus on said bed: “Procrustean” is a synonym for absurdly strict egalitarianism.
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Categories
H.L. Mencken
The French peasants got rid of their feudal masters, and it was good riddance, but new masters appeared next day. The name of the thing was changed, but the thing itself remained. The same phenomenon would be observed if there were a wholesale slaughter of millionaires in the United States tomorrow, followed by a grand inauguration of Socialism.
H.L. Mencken, Men versus the Man (1911).
Categories
The Fourteenth
July 28, 1868, is the official date for the certification of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
Nick Sandmann has won again. The Washington “Where Democracy Dies in Darkness” Post has agreed to settle out of court with young Mr. Sandmann — for an undisclosed amount. We learned this from Sandmann himself, on Twitter:
On 2/19/19, I filed $250M defamation lawsuit against Washington Post. Today, I turned 18 & WaPo settled my lawsuit. Thanks to @ToddMcMurtry & @LLinWood for their advocacy. Thanks to my family & millions of you who have stood your ground by supporting me. I still have more to do.
CNN settled in January. Suits against ABC, CBS, The Guardian, The Hill and NBC are still pending.
At issue?
“The Washington Post falsely reported in 2019 that a group of Covington Catholic High School students, including Sandmann, harassed a man named Nathan Phillips with taunts and racial slurs,” explains Beckett Adams in The Washington Examiner. “The students did no such thing, as video evidence available at the time made clear. In fact, footage of the incident shows the teens were accosted not only by Phillips, who clearly sought out a confrontation, but they were also being harassed by a nearby gathering of members of the racist, anti-Semitic Black Hebrew Israelites. The Washington Post chose to give glossy, glowing news coverage to the Black Hebrew Israelites, a known hate group, all while portraying the Covington Catholic students (some of whom were black) as racists.”
Enflamed by the Post and CNN and other outlets, a self-righteously woke online mob jumped on Sandmann and other students — included were many calls for violence, and much harping on the fact the kids wore MAGA hats.
If ever a lawsuit of this kind made sense, this one did.
But will these media outfits learn their lesson?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Categories
John Taylor
Avarice breeds the treacheries of privilege against liberty.
John Taylor of Caroline, An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States (1814).