On October 28, 1886, in New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty was dedicated by President Grover Cleveland, despite the fact that the monument was not a federally funded project.
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Statue of Liberty
Author: Redactor
Resolved: pedagogic enthusiasm plus naivety about the likely reactions of the “safe space” brigade shouldn’t be a burning-at-the-stake kind of offense.
Or any kind of firing offense.
Bright Sheng, University of Michigan professor of composition and survivor of China’s Cultural Revolution, showed his class the 1965 movie “Othello,” which stars Laurence Olivier. Olivier was in blackface.
Sheng failed to give a trigger warning so that safe-space aficionados could either gird their loins or skip the class.
Uh oh.
As Reason magazine’s Robby Soave notes, Olivier’s use of blackface “was controversial even at the time.”
Given the sub-venial nature of the sin, what might any sane-but-offended student have done? Go up after class and say, “Gee, Professor Sheng, love your class, but shouldn’t you have made some preparatory comment about the blackface? Well, have a nice day.”
But no. It’s got to be a wailing reenactment of Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream, with rabid students (and others) demanding Sheng be booted. No attention to context, no proportionality, no common sense.
Sheng has offered an abject apology, saying, in part, that “time has changed, and I made a mistake in showing the film, and I am very sorry.”
Was the mob demanding his ouster appeased? No. The mob never is.
The professor has for now stopped teaching his class, and the university is “investigating.”
The investigation actually needed, alas, will not be done. What administrators must discover is a backbone.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Stephen Covey
Let natural consequences teach responsible behavior. One of the kindest things we can do is to let the natural or logical consequences of people’s actions teach them responsible behavior. They may not like it or us, but popularity is a fickle standard by which to measure character development.
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Times for Choosing
On October 27, 1964, Ronald Reagan delivered a speech on behalf of Republican candidate for the United States Presidency, Barry Goldwater, thereby launching Reagan’s political career. The speech came to be known as “A Time for Choosing.”
Two years earlier, Vasili Arkhipov, a flotilla commander present on the Soviet Foxtrot-class submarine B-59 in the Caribbean sea, defied the order of the sub’s captain, Valentin Savitsky, to launch a nuclear device. The captain had concluded that war had started while the submarine had been submerged. He had inferred this from the depth charges that American ships had deployed in order to force the submarine to the surface during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Captain Savitsky, seeking the necessary approval of two others on board, ordered political officer Ivan Masslenikov and the flotilla commander Vasili Arkhipov to launch a nuclear torpedo.
Masslenikov agreed. Arkhipov refused.
The date was October 27, 1962, and World War III was prevented by this one man, Arkhipov, who held his ground while facing the increasing anger of the submarine commander, refusing to approve a nuclear torpedo launch that would most almost certainly have triggered a conflict that would have doomed civilization, perhaps most or all of humanity.
That, we can now agree, was a “time for choosing” — and the correct choice was made.
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.
—Voltaire
Our enemies are ridiculous. So why do they seem to be winning?
For today’s lesson, catch the pro-trans protests outside the offices of Netflix. Trans activists and a few of Netflix’s own trans employees were protesting the occasion of the online streaming giant’s “platforming” of comedian Dave Chappelle, whose latest special, The Closer, took a few digs at the huge influence that the tiny trans “community” has on American cultural and political life.
Chappelle referred to the way J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, was treated online for defending biological women, declared himself a feminist on “Team TERF,” and talked about a trans friend of his who committed suicide after defending him online in a previous comedy special trans-fracas.
Did Chappelle say something untrue? Unfunny? Doesn’t matter. What he said, protesters proclaimed, was hurtful.
Each of us will judge all that in our own way. But we should be able to agree on one thing: the way the small protest mob treated one counter-protester was not truthful but very ridiculous.
Relevant details: a man attended the event holding aloft a sign saying “We Like Dave” on the obverse and “Jokes Are Funny” on the reverse.
A protester on the trans side of the divide tore up his sign, leaving him holding the naked stick, then shouting, “He’s got a weapon!” The crowd echoed, “He’s got a weapon!”
Activists these days often say “speech is violence” and “words are weapons.” Here, they violently rob a man of his speech and declare what’s left of his attempt a literal weapon. They think they are clever. But they are merely ridiculous.
Not funny like Dave Chappelle.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.
François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), aka Voltaire, in a letter to Étienne Noël Damilaville.
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Continental Congress
On October 26, 1774, the first Continental Congress adjourned in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Exactly one year later, King George III of Great Britain went before Parliament to declare the American colonies in rebellion. And one year later yet, to the day, in 1776, septuagenerian Benjamin Franklin (pictured, above) departed from America for France, seeking financial support for the American Revolution.
Remember the blow-up last summer between Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Dr. Anthony Fauci over gain-of-function research?
Paul charged that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had supported such research in China. “Senator Paul,” Fauci fired back, “you don’t know what you are talking about, quite frankly.”
“Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared to be channeling the frustration of millions of Americans when he spoke those words during an invective-laden, made-for-Twitter Senate hearing on July 20,” imagined Katherine Eban recently in Vanity Fair. “You didn’t have to be a Democrat to be fed up with all the xenophobic finger-pointing and outright disinformation, coming mainly from the right. . . .”*
Nevertheless, Ms. Eban added, “Paul might have been onto something.”
Might?
Last week, the NIH sent a letter to Congress admitting that its grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, laundered through the infamous EcoHealth Alliance, resulted in research that even the NIH acknowledges was gain-of-function.
Sen. Paul knew what he was talking about; Dr. Fauci did not.
NIH was quick to defend Fauci, arguing the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Chief Medical Advisor to the President was in the dark last summer about the controversial research because EcoHealth Alliance was two years late in reporting. For its part, EcoHealth Alliance “appeared to contradict that claim,” telling Vanity Fair, “These data were reported . . . in April 2018.”
“Given all of the sensitivity about this work,” Stanford University microbiologist Dr. David Relman remarked to Vanity Fair, “it’s difficult to understand why NIH and EcoHealth have still not explained a number of irregularities with the reporting on this grant.”
Is it?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Eban concluded her sentence with this clause: “up to and including the claim that COVID-19 was a bioweapon cooked up in a lab.” Her assertion that “the right” was calling COVID a “bioweapon” is a canard designed to prematurely halt any inquiry into even the possibility. When Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) simply said there needed to be an investigation of the Wuhan lab, he was fiercely attacked by big media and the lab leak theory was suppressed on Facebook and Google.
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Zora Neale Hurston
I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.
Zora Neale Hurston, in a letter to Countee Cullen.
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Max Stirner
On October 25, 1806, the German philosopher Max Stirner was born. Stirner was known for his radical individualism, which under the name of “egoism” became culturally chic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In addition to Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, a major work that was famously attacked by Karl Marx, he translated into German Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations from its original English and J.-B. Say’s A Treatise on Political Economy from its original French.