Statesmen are gamesters, and the people are the cards they play with.
David Crockett, first sentence of The Life of Martin Van Buren, Heir-apparent to the “Government” and the Appointed Successor to General Andrew Jackson (Tenth edition, 1836).
On August 23, 1989, two million people from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania stood on the Vilnius-Tallinn road, holding hands, as part of the “Singing Revolution” that helped set the Soviet Union to its fateful implosion.
Let’s also assume that the school’s willingness to ignore its own policies while Jewish students were the focus last year of what Judge Richard Stearn agrees was “‘severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive’. . . harassment” by Hamas supporters was motivated, rather, only by lack of courage.
Giving them the benefit of the doubt, let’s say that Harvard officials were motivated only by craven unwillingness to go against one of the latest left-wing ideological fads, that of letting anti-Israel agitators run wild.
But a policy that protects students from harassment and assault only when this is easy or fashionable to do — while insisting on “freedom of speech” for persons pushing past obnoxious speech into criminal assault and battery — is not much of a policy.
Stearns’s ruling is not a binding decision on the merits of the plaintiffs’ lawsuit. He simply allowed it to proceed.
His refusal to dismiss means that he finds the plaintiffs’ argument plausible — the argument that Harvard has violated its contractual obligations by observing what pro-Hamas students were doing to other students with supreme institutional indifference.
Indeed, he finds that the protests “were, at times, confrontational and physically violent, and plaintiffs legitimately fear their repetition. The harassment also impacted plaintiffs’ life experience at Harvard; they dreaded walking through the campus, missed classes, and stopped participating in extracurricular events.”
Peaceful protest ends when riot, assault, and intimidation begin. Institutions of both law and higher learning should always make that dividing line as clear as possible.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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All these guys they call judges? The federal judges? The Supreme Court judges? They’re not really judges. They’re just state agents whose job is to interpret the words written down on paper by other state agents. That’s it. Their job is not to do justice. Which is what a real judge does. A real judge tries to resolve dispute between two parties based upon principles of justices and fairness. These federal judges can’t do that, because their job is to interpret constitution and federal law, which is just positive enactments written down on paper by a bunch of elected bureaucrats, and members of the state. So, I don’t think they’re actual judges. They’re not actually doing law. What they’re interpreting is not law.
Stephan Kinsella, KOL361 | Libertarian Answer Man: Oaths: With Kent Wellington (October 13, 2021).
On August 22, 1952, France closed its penal colony on Devil’s Island.
At first a leper colony, it had been transformed by the end of the 19th century into a prison tasked primarily with housing enemies of the French state.
Sure, but beside the point: they spew out commie talking points not as an excuse to overthrow the state and set up a communist one, but to overthrow the last vestiges of the Constitution — free-speech rights, private property rights, the whole shebang — and consolidate power in the corporatist, neo-mercantilist fascism that yearns to squelch all dissent.
National candidates talking “far left” allows gullible left-leaners to back powerful insiders against the real outsiders, the churchgoers, the small business owners and entrepreneurs, free-lance professionals and the like.
The real revolution is what Garet Garrett, expanding upon Aristotle, called “revolution within the form.”
So, are Kamala Harris and Tim Walz just “useful idiots” preparing the way for the plutocrats’ totalitarian end game?
Would-be Cackler-in-Chief aside, the Washington Free Beacon’s Alana Goodman posits that Walz may be an out-and-out communist:
True-believing communists in the old style? Or just woke, post-Marxist totalitarians?
It hardly matters when the point of what they say is not the dogma, but the performance, allowing them to revolt against us, and the constitutional order we rely upon.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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However elusive the concept may be, there is a universal human feeling, not confined to philosophers, lawyers, or judges, that there is a quality known as justice, and that it is the aim of legal institutions to achieve it. The Constitution invokes that sense and sentiment in its first purposive phrase: it is ordained “to establish justice.” Madison, writing in Federalist No. 51, called it “the end of civil society.” It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.” This feeling that justice is a supreme goal, this sense that it is a predicate to organized society, is no mere yearning, for it is only in a fair proceeding, one that comports with our sense of justice, that we can with any legitimacy call another human being to account.
Justice must not only be done; it must be seen to be done. The interest of justice requires more than a proceeding that reaches an objectively accurate result; trial by ordeal might by sheer chance accomplish that. It requires a proceeding that, by its obvious fairness, helps to justify itself.
Senior Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit Alvin Benjamin Rubin, U.S. v. McDaniels, 379 F.Supp. 1243 (E.D. La. 1974).
On August 21, 1831, Nat Turner led slaves and freed black Americans in a rebellion that was quickly suppressed.
“It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food,” explaining Democrat nominee Kamala Harris’s economic program. “Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Far-off Washington bureaucrats would. The FTC [Federal Trade Commission] would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk.”
Rampell, certainly no conservative, concluded by suggesting to the Vice-President, “If your opponent claims you’re a ‘communist,’ maybe don’t start with an economic agenda that can (accurately) be labeled as federal price controls.”
The Post’s editorial board also noted that “every campaign makes expensive promises” but “[e]ven adjusting for the pandering standards of campaign economics” her speech “ranks as a disappointment.”
But as destructive as price controls would be, the Post’s Aaron Blake points out that, according to various polls, blaming big corporations for price gouging appears to strike a chord with the public.*
“It’s not just a potent boogeyman,” Blake explains, “it’s a potent boogeyman that deflects blame from the administration that has been in charge these past 3½ years.”
So is Vice-President Harris really a communist or just a run-of-mill blame-shifting politician?
Well, sadly, those two things are not mutually exclusive. She could be [shudder] both.
So, if you are scared that former President Trump will usher in authoritarianism, should he prevail this November, you now know that, instead, you can choose communism.
That is, the Democrats’ excuse-making, blame-shifting, market-killing standard bearer.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Though, the polling shows the public views “increasing oil production” as more effective in bringing prices down. Don’t hold your breath for Ms. Harris and Democrats to endorse that.
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I would rather be beaten and be a man than to be elected and be a little puppy dog. I have always supported measures and principles and not men. I have acted fearless and independent and I never will regret my course. I would rather be politically buried than to be hypocritically immortalized.
David Crockett, after being defeated in the 1830 congressional elections for opposing the Indian Removal Act.