Category: folly

“Despacito” Desperation

When Hillary Clinton talked about carrying hot sauce around in her handbag, on the popular Breakfast Club show featuring the annoyingly monickered Charlemagne Tha God, did anyone believe her? It was such an obvious and shameless ploy to get African-Americans to see her as “relatable.” For Mrs. Clinton, however, that was ‘a bridge too far.’

Now Joe Biden provides the cringe.

“I just have one thing to say,” Biden informed his audience at an event celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month. Looking down at his phone, he struggled for a moment. “Hang on here.”

And then he played a song. “Despacito,” which means “Slowly.”

Try not to think too much about this, for the song is a little sexually suggestive. The Daily Wire reprints a translation of the lyrics, for your disgust or delectation.

First element of cringe: It was an obvious play for Latino sympathy. The song itself had nothing to do with anything other than that it was a popular song from “the community” When you are this pandering, this patronizing, this transparent about your play to the cliché, what kind of respect do you hope to get?

Second element: It’s such a desperation move — with the Florida Spanish-speaking vote in jeopardy. Cuban-Americans, especially, are turned off by the Democrats’ move further left, having themselves left Cuba to come to American freedom. And the generally woke-socialist mindset of the Biden-Harris team (or is it Harris-Biden?) is a bit hard to take for the generally culturally conservative folks hailing from the south.

When will Democrats try authenticity again?

Third element: Assuming riots and conflagrations aren’t precisely that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling folly general freedom

The Foam Rubber Bullet

The reports say the color of the top of the Nerf gun is neon green. In the photo I saw, it seemed less colorful than “neon” — but that hardly matters. It is a toy gun. Its ammo is nerfy soft. And it was held by a boy, Isaiah Elliott, briefly, during a Zoom chat educational session as has become common during these days of the pandemic. And his teacher saw it.

And things spiraled out of control from there.

Now, while cities are burning and Marxists are sharpening their knives and dulling their wits for the summer season’s final gasps of “protest,” you might think that teachers and public school administrators would have obtained some perspective.

But no. This is 2020 and we are to be spared nothing.

In a decades-long tradition of educators freaking out at boyish (and girlish) play with pretend firearms, the teacher informed on Master Elliott — though she knew it was a toy gun.

And the school suspended the lad for five days.

This has nothing to do with school safety, of course. The school is virtual, now. Pretense that this is about safety is an insult to not only adult intelligence, but child intelligence, too.

I guess what public school administrators want to teach their charges is that they are running a cult, that boys and girls and all on the sliding scale in-between must OBEY.

Must not offend against the State by showing even playful reverence for the Great Taboo and Talisman of Freedom, the Gun.

Thankfully, young Isaiah is headed to a different school.

And his Nerf play days are not over.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly general freedom responsibility

Bath Tub Fails

“Barely one in 1,000 Britons has died from coronavirus,” states Tim Harford, in U.K.’s Daily Mail, “and yet the economy is in cardiac arrest, Government debt has run into hundreds of billions and many parents are terrified of sending their children to school.”

Trying to put the pandemic in context with actual numbers, to assess realistic risk, Harford goes on to argue that “given the current low risk of infection, combined with the low risk from the disease, a 30-year-old is far more at risk from riding a motorbike, going skiing or horse-riding — let alone sky-diving, rock-climbing or scuba-diving — than from the virus.”

He makes the startling claim that a trek outside, with possible SARS-CoV‑2 exposure, “is not much more serious than taking regular baths over a year.”

Harford makes many attempts not to minimize the danger, and assuage Brits’ past and present concerns, thus acknowledging that they weren’t exactly crazy, but in the end the situation is like this: “The prospect of bathtime tragedies has never shut the country down.”

People die of risky activities every day, and not just on slippery porcelain: we risk our lives on asphalt, staircases, and in the air. Yet we go on, plunging ahead.

Brave people, we?

Not now. The worldwide government response has been, with a few notable exceptions — Sweden and South Dakota, to name the two most famous for bucking panic and lockdowns and mask-wearing mandates — a pitch to people’s fears.

Maybe in Britain thought leaders and statesmen have praised valor and fortitude as well as caution and individual responsibility. But in America, calls to courage have been few and far between.

Hey: I just noticed something, “panic” is contained within the word “pandemic”!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment folly

Qualified Backlash

Extreme forms of protest — that is, rioting, looting, and street violence, as well as chanting about killing people, carrying torches, and the like — don’t help the cause of those who engage in it.

You know it; I know it — but is it common knowledge?

So, as a contribution to the common wisdom of Homo (hopefully) sapiens politicus, let us stress the truth, which we can now back up with a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Eric W. Dolan, writing on PsyPost, explains that six experiments involving 3, 399 participants “assessed how different types of protest behaviors influenced support for a variety of progressive and conservative social causes, including the Black Lives Matter movement and the anti-abortion movement. They found that more extreme behaviors — such as the use of inflammatory rhetoric, blocking traffic, and vandalism — consistently resulted in reduced support for social movements.”

While “extreme protest behaviors” garner media attention, they turn away more people than they bring in.

“We found extreme anti-Trump protest actions actually led people to not only dislike the movement and support the cause less, but to be willing to support Trump more,” the researcher who talked to Dolan, said. “It was almost like a backlash.”

Almost?

Protest organizers have to understand that their enemies also know this backlash effect, and have incentives to corrupt peaceful protests by sparking extremism. Infiltrators from governments as well as opposing groups have been known to incite riots or cause destruction simply to discredit protests.

While destruction and mayhem by some do not negate the crying, dying need for criminal justice reform,* the tragedy remains: violence does spoil good will.

And calling in federal troops, as the president threatens, discredits almost everything. What a mess.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Much better than the turn to violence? Protest morphing into specific legislative and administrative reform. Ending “qualified immunity” for public officials, mentioned here Friday, and proposed by Representative Justin Amash (L‑Mich.), would be a great start.

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Tags backlash, brutality, police, protests, race, riots

folly international affairs national politics & policies Popular

Remember … the Maine?

“President Trump warned Thursday that America ‘will not stand’ for Iran shooting down a U.S. drone over the Strait of Hormuz,” a Fox News report summarizes, “while at the same time leaving open the possibility that the attack was unintentional.”

This incident immediately follows the previous week’s apparent provocation, attacks on Japanese oil tankers in the same vicinity — also said by our government to have been caused by the Iranian military. Nearly everyone now regards these events as portending war,* which some see as a long time coming, since American relations with Iran have been antagonistic since the late 1970s, when Shia clerics raised a popular revolt to oust the American-installed thug, er, Shah.

While Mr. Trump was incredulous that the strike on the drone (opposite of a drone strike) could have been intentional, the rest of us can dare doubt even more: Can we really trust the “intelligence” that blames Iran’s military or paramilitary Revolutionary Guard for these puzzlingly dangerous provocations?

Not based on past performance.

The “intelligence” used to justify America’s several wars with Iran’s neighbor, Iraq, seems more disinformation than mere misinformation. And we now know that the Gulf of Tonkin incident enabling U.S. escalation into Vietnam was a lie.

We should even “remember the Maine!” — the questionable rationale for the Spanish-American War.

Lying to start wars is obviously not unheard-of in our history. Indeed, some insiders have itched for war so badly that they have plotted false flag ops against the American people.

The truth of what is happening now may not be known for years … by us … or even by President Trump.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* According to the New York Times, late yesterday President Trump authorized and then de-authorized a strike against Iran.

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folly individual achievement media and media people

Bezos’s Big Breakaway

Something big may be about to happen.

Trump impeachment? Financial collapse? War with Iran? — each is all-too-likely, none desirable. But I am referring to space.

In The Economist, May 14th, we read of Jeff Bezos’s itch to live off-planet.

The article is “Amazon’s boss reckons that humanity needs an HQ2,” which tells us that on “May 9th the founder and boss of Amazon, who also runs Blue Origin, a private rocketry firm, unveiled plans for a lunar lander. ‘Blue Moon,’ as it is called, is just one phase of a bold plan to establish large off-world settlements.”

And then comes the obvious literary-cultural reference: “It is a vision ripped directly from 20th-century science fiction.”

Can we dismiss it as space opera, though? A number of major figures, not least of whom is Elon Musk (whose Space X has often been mentioned here), are talking seriously about near-term orbital, lunar, and Martian habitation.

It is hard to wrap my head around an imminent private space colony project. It has always been something for the indefinite future, not something I expected to see.

There remain scoffers, of course (and they may well be right), as well as more paranoid speculations — are the higher-ups, the most insidery of insiders, tipping their hand to a “breakaway civilization” event, perhaps to avoid worldwide catastrophe?

“People now have more information” than in the past, wrote Thomas M. Disch in The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World (1998), “and they are smarter, overall, as a consequence — even in those ways they choose to be dumb.”

I am keeping an open mind on whether Bezos’s proposed lunar colony is dumb or genius.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

N.B. The government is also jumping on board the Moon bandwagon, with the president floating a similar-to-Bezos schedule.

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