Category: ideological culture

Slackers, Unite!

International socialists may once have rallied around “workers, unite!” but today’s young “communists” are embracing a Non-Workers movement, demanding free stuff and/or a Universal Basic Income (UBI).

This came to mind reading a recent New York Times’s op-ed, “Work Is a False Idol,” and an earlier report, “These Chinese Millennials Are ‘Chilling,’ and Beijing Isn’t Happy.” A new movement in China and elsewhere, known as “Lying Flat,” extols indolence.

Instead of a career? Working hard?

Do nothing!

Sounds like early retirement.

Very early retirement, for this is a young adult malaise.

Cassady Rosenblum, who took the trouble to author the op-ed, quoted a poem that asked “what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?” and answered: “Sit on the porch.”

This “Lying flat” slacker movement reminds me of a novel I haven’t read, but whose theme has stuck with me, nonetheless: Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov. It is about a young nobleman who spends the book recumbent, or so I’m told.

“Oblomovism” was a cultural obsession before the Soviet Revolution and a problem afterward. If no one produces, how could anyone consume?

With the character Oblomov, his lethargy merely drained the capital of his family’s aristocratic past.

With the hero of the new “Lying Flat” movement, Luo Huazhong — author of the mortal classic, “Lying Flat Is Justice” — he lives off odd jobs and his savings. So far, at least, self-sufficient.

With Ms. Rosenblum, it’s her parents’ porch, and, thereby, their savings.

Think of what would happen were a UBI put in place. More horizontal living and less production (for redistribution).

Oblomovism triumphs and we all lose.

After all, “Lying flat” is the perfect term for the ultimate in do-nothingism: what you do in a coffin.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags labor, responsibility, socialism, work

general freedom ideological culture

The Lollapalooza Loophole

When the Lollapalooza music festival took place in Chicago, on the hinge of July and August, with oodles of attendees (some masked), a few people cried bloody foul, on account of super-spreader event potential. But Fox News’s Ben Domenech noted that the number of murders in Chicago over July was three times the number of COVID deaths, and the nation’s capital sports a similar ratio.

When Domenech asked guest Tim Pool about the lack of interest in gun violence in gun-controlled Chicago, Mr. Pool expressed bafflement.

But — really? Politicians seem bent on focusing on regulating us with masks and jabs rather than regulating criminals. And for a reason. . . .

More striking was Anthony Fauci’s public worrying about the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, while ignoring the Lollapalooza event — as well as Barack Obama’s 60th Birthday Party, which revealed/reveled in plenty of celebs unmasked.

A familiar double standard: how the elites get to behave vs. how they say we “must” behave!

The concept of “Anarcho-tyranny” may explain much of this. Politicians of a certain sort prefer to regulate peaceful people (tyranny) while letting real criminals go free (anarchy). It is easier to police the peaceful and law-abiding, while criminals on the loose reinforce the need for a more powerful state.

The Lollapaloozans are on the “right side” (the left side?) of the cultural divide, while the Sturgis rally is on the “wrong side.”

And make a good target.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags covid, Lollapallooza, Lori Lightfoot, masks

ideological culture media and media people

Objectivity’s So Passé

“Will More Media Bias Save Democracy?” James Bovard headlined his latest column.

At issue? Yet another call for journalists to abandon objectivity, and, as Bovard puts it, “take sides on the barricades.” This time it comes from Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan, who suggests reporters use a “‘pro-democracy’ frame.”

But as Mr. Bovard explains: “Most Washington journalists reflexively presume that being pro-government is the same as being pro-democracy.”

And even worse, when differentiated, “most Washington press poohbahs show more affection for Leviathan than democracy.”

For instance, “The Washington Post devotes far more newshole to publishing leaks from FBI officials,” he points out, “than to exposing FBI abuses.”

Of course, activist journalists might frame “democracy” in their own way or choose to advance another cause.

“Journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice,” argued Stanford Communications Professor Ted Glasser during last year’s presidential contest, “and it’s hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity.”

Howard University Communications Professor Nikole Hannah-Jones of New York Times’ 1619 Project infamy advocates that “all journalism is activism,” and condemns “even-handedness, both sideism.”

Five years ago this month, during the Trump vs. Clinton presidential campaign, The New York Times offered readers a front-page commentary wherein former media columnist Jim Rutenberg argued that America’s news hounds must “throw out the textbook American journalism has been using” and become “oppositional” to candidate Trump.

Though Mr. Trump triggered massive media partisanship, which continues to worsen, it is not new. Indeed, at this point, with the public’s trust in media flushing into the toilet bowl of history, objectivity would seem almost transformational.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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objectivity

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Tags establishment media, media bias

ideological culture

Missing Fathers

Remembering my dad and father-in-law, who both passed away several years ago; being with my adult children, and two grandchildren, who were all pretty nice to me; and seeing friends and relatives celebrate their dads — Father’s Day was wonderful.

In the real world, folks know how precious and important fathers are.

But yesterday morning, I was instead torturing myself with The Washington Post. Adorning the top half and more of the front-page of the Sunday “Outlook” section was a drawing of a kids’ party with a man delivering the birthday cake while a woman looks on from outside.

Beneath the artwork, the headline reads: “Fatherhood reimagined.”

Why “reimagined”?

Well, the paper offered two opinion columns under that banner. One, entitled, “Genetic testing is changing our understanding of who fathers are,” noted that “40 million at-home DNA tests have been sold, and hundreds of thousands of people . . . have gotten the news that the man they thought of as Dad is not their genetic father.”

I moved on to the second essay. “I wanted to be a better husband. So I planned my kid’s birthday party,” read the headline, the bad news in the sub-title: “As a psychologist, I knew men did less ‘mental labor,’ but I didn’t see my own shortcomings.”

I suppose fathers have ample room for improvement, but cannot we celebrate, or merely discuss, even for a day, the positive side of fatherhood? The relentless carping suggests not a penchant for improvement but something approaching an anti-fatherhood narrative.

Searching The Post for more on “fatherhood reimagined,” the second item is Mychal Denzel Smith’s “The dangerous myth of the ‘missing black father.’” Back in 2017, I addressed Smith’s misguided argument that, essentially, in a super-charged government-welfare state, absent dads would not really be missed.

I miss my dad. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: Thankfully, late in the day, The Post reported, “D.C. motorcade celebrates role of Black fathers on Father’s Day.” Hope!

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Tags Father's Day

ideological culture

Day Off, Absurdity On

In the days of his on-air reign, Bill O’Reilly would make much hay of the so-called “war on Christmas.” One common retort among O’Reilly’s detractors was to scoff: “there is no ‘war on Christmas’; the old grump is just over-reacting to a rising tide of inclusive good manners” — the idea being that wishing a more vague but all-inclusive “Happy Holidays,” instead of a specific “Merry Christmas,” was being kind to Jews, Muslims, atheists, those who do not celebrate the ancient Christian holiday.

However much sense this strategy may have once made, nowadays it seems an absurd ploy: political correctness being so widespread, even domineering, that it extends deep into the minutia of life.

How deep? Just as the Confederate monument iconoclasm extended from General Lee back to Presidents Washington and Jefferson, now the spurning of traditional holidays reaches out beyond Christmas.

“The school board of Randolph Township in Morris County, New Jersey has decided to do away with named holidays on the academic calendar,” writes Samuel Chamberlain at The New York Post. “Now holidays like Thanksgiving and Memorial Day, as well as Jewish holy days like Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, will simply be listed as ‘day off.’”

Behind this? The notion that the posited discomfort and possible offense taken by any person of a “marginal group” should completely override the conventions of a community’s traditional in-group.

But where does it end? With less knowledge of others’ traditions, less understanding, and therefore less harmony among groups . . . including marginalized groups.

That couldn’t be the plan, could it?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling ideological culture

The A-word in Our Schools

Banning “Critical Race Theory” in public schools and other government institutions seems like such a good idea that when you read Scott Shackford’s headline at Reason, “Don’t Ban Critical Race Theory in Education. Embrace School Choice Instead,” you may balk.

“Conservatives in Florida, Idaho, and the nation’s capitol are attempting to block public schools from teaching Critical Race Theory,” Shackford writes, describing CRT as “an ideology that holds that racism is historically fundamental to how America’s political, legal, and cultural institutions are structured.” His problem with this political move is that it is “an authoritarian proposal that would cut off classroom debate about hot-button political issues.”

My issues really begin with the a-word.

From what I can tell, CRT is itself authoritarian, and groupthink-oriented, class-based and generally racist. The program looks designed to implement a sort of Cultural Revolution indoctrination-and-social control system into American institutions, definitely not to encourage “classroom debate.”

While Shackford makes the obvious point that America’s past institutional make-up was indeed racist and structurally so, and that learning this is important for a decent education, CRT did not add this to “the debate.” This has been widely acknowledged for years.

Besides, CRT activists go much further, calling “whiteness” a disease and white people ineluctably, “systemically” racist.

Though Shackford’s main point — that we should take the occasion to offer the best way out, “school choice” — is indeed a great one, letting socialist radicals and weak-minded educrats enshrine a racist theory about racism into public institutions amounts to a kind of brinksmanship, a “collapsitarian” approach.

Couldn’t we put government education’s allotted doom on the back burner, stop teaching CRT or other woke indoctrination, and also empower parents and students with freedom of choice?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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