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Townhall: The New Asian Exclusion Act

Affirmative action isn’t as black-and-white as we were told.

Click on over to Townhall. Come back here for even more shades.

IMAGE: A soap advertisement from the 1880s,
sub-titled ‘The Chinese Must Go’
Credit: Library of Congress

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Today

Jamaican independence

On August 6, 1962, Jamaica became independent of Great Britain. In 1991, on this date, Tim Berners-Lee released files describing his idea for the World Wide Web, and put up the first website, running on a NeXT computer at CERN, in France.

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Thought

William Gibson

Dystopia is not very evenly distributed.


William Gibson, in Abraham Riesman’s interview article, “William Gibson Has a Theory About Our Cultural Obsession With Dystopias” (Vulture.com, August 1, 2017)

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video

Gatekeeping 2.1 (The YouTube Gambit)

Paul Joseph Watson expands on how one of the major players in social media is trying to re-establish the center-left’s gatekeeper hegemony:

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Today

Flogged, Founded, Fired

On August 5, 1861, the U.S. Army abolished flogging. The same day 23 years later, Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor received the foundation stone for the Statue of Liberty (which was featured in the rousing conclusion to Alfred Hitchcock’s wartime picture, Saboteur). The island was later renamed Liberty Island.

President Ronald Reagan fired 11,359 striking air-traffic controllers (who had ignored his order for them to return to work) on August 5, 1981.

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Thought

Karl Kraus

How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.

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Today

A Prohibition Overturned

On August 4, 2010, in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, Judge Vaughn Walker overturned California’s Proposition 8, the ballot initiative prohibiting same-sex marriage that had passed two years earlier by the state’s voters.

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Thought

Stefan Zweig

All the pale horses of the apocalypse have stormed through my life, revolution, starvation, devaluation of currency and terror, epidemics, emigration; I have seen the great ideologies of the masses grow and spread out before my eyes. Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and, above all, that archpestilence, nationalism, which poisoned our flourishing European culture.

Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday [Die Welt von Gestern], Marion Sonnenfeld, translator (1942).
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Today

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

On August 3, 2008, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died at age 90. His novels, such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Cancer Ward, explored life under totalitarian Communism, and remain classics of modern literature. His huge survey of Soviet concentration camps, The Gulag Archipelago, was an important contribution to the demise of Communism as a popular ideology, showing just how horrifying the repression in the Soviet Union had become.

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Thought

Francis Hutcheson

Men have been Laughed out of Faults which a Sermon could not reform.

Francis Hutcheson, The Dublin Weekly Journal, No. 12 (June 19, 1725).