Category: ideological culture

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ideological culture national politics & policies

The 7 Percenters

voting machine, term limits, democracy, voters, voting

Forget “the one percent.” I want to know about the seven percent.

Last month, the Gallup polling outfit asked Americans about our confidence level in Congress. Did we have “a great deal, quite a lot, some or very little”?

Unlike the 93 percent of us with firing brain synapses, there appeared an enigmatic seven percent, folks who actually confessed to harboring “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of faith in that cabal of corrupt careerists legislating loquaciously in our nation’s Capitol.

It takes all kinds, I guess. The shadowy, slow-​witted, and ill-​informed must show up in statistics somewhere, right?

Granted, only five percent of Republicans expressed that much cockeyed confidence; it was six percent a year ago. Trusting Democrats hit double-​digits, with ten percent believing congressional bull, a fall from the 17 percent hornswoggled in 2021.

Gullible independents came in at the overall average — seven percent — a decrease of five percentage points from last year, when 12 percent clutched a false sense of security regarding our federal legislature.

Among a long list of American institutions, Congress roused the absolute least confidence. Odd that we feel worse about the people we elect to represent us than those we have little if any direct responsibility for or control over.

This must change.

We desperately need term limits. And the competitive elections brought by creating smaller districts where grassroots campaigns employing shoe-​leather can compete with the big money and special interest power behind professional politicians.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Illustration assist from DALL‑E

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First Amendment rights ideological culture Internet controversy

The Random Malefactor

Matt Walsh, free speech, doxxing, violence

I’m pretty sure I’d never heard the term “stochastic terrorism” until last week; now it’s everywhere.

What does it mean?

It sounds redundant, as if the first word didn’t modify the second so much as define it, but I could be wrong, so I … freespoke … it.

Freespoke is the new search engine I’m trying out, now that all the old ones seem compromised in weird ways.

Matt Walsh, of his Daily Wire podcast and his documentary film What Is a Woman?, appears to be one of the term’s current honorees. He is said to commit “stochastic terrorism” by calling attention (in one case) to the child abuse going on in hospitals in the form of “gender affirmation” treatments and surgeries. Merely by identifying something that is actually happening and judging it as bad qualifies because it has some unmeasurable likelihood of eliciting violence against those who are thus fingered — not ineluctably or directly or certainly or anything like that. 

Just randomly. 

Stochastic means random.

Of course, the charge against Walsh (or say, Trump, or anyone else) is that by identifying specific people in specific institutions he’s inviting random followers to engage in violence. But what Walsh is doing specifically is inviting his followers to protest and take political action against the malefactors he identifies. 

In familiar terminology, Walsh’s naming of names is similar to doxxing, and can be judged on that basis.

Yet, that hardly justifies calling non-​violent speech “violence.”

Furthermore, back to my opening concern, isn’t all terrorism random? Terroristic acts differ from insurrection and assassination in their randomness, the better to elicit a culture of fear in the populace. The randomness in “stochastic terrorism” is not in the targets but the terrorists.

In a heavily polarized political climate, all specific charges by one side against specific people on the other side could be seen as “stochastic terrorism.”

Better to tread carefully. And drop the term.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture Voting

Thoughts on Nothingness

Liberty playing cards with Aristotle by DALL-E

“Democracy has nothing to do with liberty,” the Libertarian Party announced on Facebook, “just as so many of the world’s greatest minds have warned.”

Huh? Just exactly which “greatest minds” are we talking about?

Not Aristotle!

The party’s statement introduced a meme quoting Hans-​Hermann Hoppe, the “Austrian school economist and libertarian/​anarcho-​capitalist philosopher,” Professor Emeritus of Economics at UNLV and Distinguished Fellow with the Ludwig von Mises Institute. It read: “Democracy allows for A and B to band together to rip off C. This is not justice, but a moral outrage.”

Dr. Hoppe has a point, of course. The ‘will of the people’ can be just plain wrong … even, at times, malevolent.  A democratic vote can lead to the tyranny of the majority and even to a tyranny of the minority, as those politicians promising to serve ‘We the People’ end up serving themselves and their cronies.

I’ve not read Professor Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed, where he sort of argues for monarchy over democracy, but I offer two points: (1) no one in their right mind talks of democracy without including the protections of basic individual rights, which have become the hallmark of democratic countries across the globe, and (2) no one in the real world thinks democracy is God.

Still, we won’t trade it for monarchy. 

My issue with this social media post, however, is really with the Libertarian Party’s comment that “democracy” — including the democratic means the party has purportedly been employing across the country for decades — has provided no past benefit and offers no future hope for sustaining or expanding our freedom.

So, don’t vote Libertarian this November?

I’ll take that under advisement.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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“Liberty Playing Cards with Aristotle” by DALL‑E (note that the AI has chosen to show Lady Liberty as bruised and beaten. Her torch appears to be made of tissue.-)

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education and schooling ideological culture

Power Theory

CRT, critical race theory, communism, racism, race

What if CRT were precisely about what its advocates say it is?

“Far-​right white people are in a moral panic over Critical Race Theory,” Pennsylvania educators are being taught, “because they fear losing political power.”

Beth Brelje, at The Epoch Times, explains that this is the lesson of a “a webinar presented by Justice Leaders Collaborative, a Michigan-​based social justice training organization.” Ms. Brelje quotes Shayla Reese Griffin, the webinar leader, who states that these “far-​right white people” are “really just using Critical Race Theory as a kind of an umbrella term for any kind of cultural things that the far-​right isn’t interested in.”

This is, of course, disingenuous. Critical Race Theory is not merely an umbrella term. It is a theory of power that tracks oppression (which is a specific variety of power) along rigid class lines, the classes being defined by race.

And it is a movement of the “far left.” 

Which is why CRT’s defenders and obfuscationists identify their opponents as “far right.”

Heaven forbid were moderates and centrists also to object!

It’s a bluffing tactic, this extremist-​identification, aiming to make moderates, centrists, and just normal, non-​political people ashamed to criticize CRT.

It’s manipulative.

CRT’s way off, since power, broadly defined, is everywhere and omnipresent and omnidirectional — everybody has some power, nobody has all power. Critical race theorists aim to ply victimhood status as leverage against innocents who do not want to harm anyone; too often they pretend that everybody on one side of a racial divide is a victim and everybody on the other side is an oppressor. It’s a repackaging of a too-​familiar “guilt trip,” as we used to say in the Sixties.

As for parents in most school districts, they’ve discovered they have little power to lose. But by confronting the people they vote onto school boards, they gain more.

Democracy proves itself as one method of holding the powerful to account.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture national politics & policies social media

Receding From the Facts

fact check, media, truth, lie

Thesis: we’re entering recession, but the Biden administration disagrees.

For political reasons.

May we discuss?

Sure, here in Common Sense. (We’ve yet to censor or flag ourselves.) Big Tech social media is a different story.

Loath to preside over an officially designated recession, the Biden administration suggests that when you look at all the data in just the right light, it’s “unlikely that the decline in GDP in the first quarter of this year — even if followed by another GDP decline in the second quarter — indicates a recession.”

Others disagree, saying the familiar definition cannot be so summarily dispatched. On Instagram, poster Graham Allen cheekily asked Siri how we know it’s a recession. Her reply: “two consecutive quarters of negative growth.”

Not a sacrosanct indicator, but standard.

Enter the Guardians of Discourse. 

Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram) has flagged Allen’s post as “false information” and in some cases prevented viewers from seeing it.

The “independent” fact checker on duty was Politifact, which warned Web surfers it just ain’t so that “the White House is now trying to protect Joe Biden by changing the definition of the word recession.”

This is where we’re at. Discussion of political motives at the White House has become so hazardous that the People of the Fact Check must rush to repudiate any intimation that any assiduous politics is going on. It’s all just assiduous data comparison.

Well, reality check: “fact checks” can be biased too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment ideological culture local leaders

Sorosian Justice?

George Soros, San Francisco, crime, justice

Criminal courts provide an old kind of justice, where individuals’ specific acts are judged and individuals, if found guilty, are punished.

“Social justice” is something else again — a daring, socialistic attempt to correct for all the ills “of society” or, more widely, “the cosmos.” That’s a huge agenda to stuff into the old practice, which, while never perfect, did serve, in its way, a noble social goal: curbing crime.

But when the social justice crowd infiltrated the old system in places like California, crime flourished. In early June, San Franciscans recalled their radical District Attorney and sent woke politics into a tailspin.

I’ve reported on this, but the story continues. As explained by Jack Phillips in The Epoch Times, the newly appointed replacement “district attorney in San Francisco fired at least 15 employees from the prosecutor’s office after her left-​wing predecessor Chesa Boudin was recalled last month.”

Heads rolled. And heads weren’t pleased. 

“I was unceremoniously fired without cause via phone by the Mayor’s appointed DA,” one prominent civil servant tweeted. “I am the highest-​ranking Latina/​LGBTQ member of the management team at that office. I will continue the fight 4justice.”

But what is that justice?

It’s a “fairer system,” said Chesa Boudin, the ousted DA, who objects to having been “scapegoated” for rising crime — but it’s sure hard to believe his pro-​criminal policies did not contribute to the crime wave.

Boudin’s brand of justice has been rumored to benefit from extensive promotion by billionaire George Soros. Soros’s office has denied supporting Boudin, yet The Epoch Times notes that Mr. Soros’s PAC funded, through an intermediary, Boudin’s recall defense campaign.

Most Americans want reforms to our justice system but do not agree with George Soros.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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