Category: ideological culture

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ideological culture media and media people

Authority Derangement Syndrome

Atlantic Magazine, propaganda, media, journalism

Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) has taken a huge toll on America. One doesn’t need to be a Trump supporter to see it. 

One only needs to read The Atlantic.

There are days when nearly every article ballyhooed in the rag’s promotional email is about how awful the president is.

There is a lot of awful in Washington, though, not just Trump. Where’s the rest of the news? 

Of course, this isn’t just about Trump. The Atlantic was once a liberal journal. No more. Now it is relentlessly progressive.

Take a recent article on Georgia Governor Brian Kemp.

“The governor has demonstrated a willingness to defer to the president instead of his own constituents,” writes Amanda Mull, in “America’s Authoritarian Governor,” begging the question of which constituents.

They are, last I checked, not in total agreement. 

Ms. Mull contends that Kemp’s deference to Trump (TDS Alert) sacrifices — yes, she uses the word “sacrifice” — “Georgians’ safety to snipe at his political foes, and shore up his own power at the expense of democracy. In short, Kemp is a wannabe authoritarian, and millions of Georgians have suffered as a result, with no end in sight.”

No end — er, except the 2022 election. 

And how is Kemp an “authoritarian”? Mull objects to the governor not shutting down commerce quickly enough, hard enough, thoroughly enough, according to the scientists she selects.

Though epidemiologists are not of one mind on how to deal with the current contagion, somehow politicians who reject the advice of her “authorities” — well, they are “the authoritarians.”

The fact that shutting down commerce is itself something we expect from the most authoritarian of regimes . . . did it not cross the reporter’s mind?

Worse than mere TDS.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture responsibility

Racism as Health Crisis?

George Floyd, race, racism, Covid, Coronavirus

How can you tell when people really care? 

It is not when they mouth the right platitudes.

Or advance a carefully crafted political agenda.

What counts more? Something practical.

Michigan’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer cracked down further with COVID-related health care mitigation efforts this week. One stands out: on Wednesday she “declared racism a public health crisis, ordered implicit bias training for all state employees, and,” reports Paul Egan of the Detroit Free Press, “created a state advisory council to focus on issues affecting Black people in Michigan.”

“We have a lot of work to do to eliminate the systemic racism that Black Americans have experienced for generations,” the governor said.

Whitmer noted that black Michiganders are four times more likely to die from COVID-19 than white Michiganders — because, well, you probably do not need to read deeply into her communiqués or watch USA Today’s helpful video. The arguments are familiar.

And not completely without merit.

But notice what she did not say.

She did not advise darker-skinned people to take Vitamin D supplements and go outside and soak in more rays than they might, otherwise.

Vitamin D deficiency has been repeatedly linked as a co-factor for the development of severe COVID-19.

Race, not racism, may be what’s most relevant. Or, as the president might say, “it is what it is”: white skin more efficiently absorbs solar radiation to produce Vitamin D than higher-melaninned skin, an adaptation for northern climes where solar radiation is less intense than in the tropics.*

While this is certainly not the only factor in susceptibility to the virus’s worst effects, and it is still unproven — a word to the wise.

From the caring.

Not the politicians.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “According to a CDC study published in 2006,” offered the Arizona Republic, “21% of non-Hispanic white people are at risk of having inadequate levels of vitamin D, versus 73% of Black people and 42% of Hispanic people.”

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crime and punishment ideological culture media and media people

Violence Against Objective Reporting

violence, journalism, reporting, news, facts

Facts matter. As do their honest expression. But given the “reporting” in recent months about “mostly peaceful protests,” you may wonder whether reporters agree.

Some do. Here’s the Charleston Post and Courier: “Brooms and dustpans replaced rocks and spray paint Sunday as an army of volunteers descended on Charleston to clean up the demoralizing mess left by an angry mob that smashed, burned and pillaged much of the city’s central business district.”

“Hundreds of New York City Businesses Were Damaged, Looted in Recent Unrest,” according to a Wall Street Journal headline. An article in the Minneapolis StarTribune tells us: “Buildings damaged in Minneapolis, St. Paul after riots.” Riots. There’s a word.

Reporters have reported (i.e., done their jobs) on rioters destroying small businesses around the country, and even killing people.

But too many supposed news-hounds shy away from honest reporting. Recently, U.S. Attorney Bill Williams of Oregon chastised a TV reporter for refusing to name openly criminal behavior . . . in this case, that of Portland rioters trying to destroy a courthouse.

The newsperson sought to blandify the thuggery as “late-night demonstrations” or “late-night activity.” Williams stressed the difference between “lawful, constitutionally protected protest” and criminal conduct. “This is just mindless violence, and anyone who defends the violence is enabling this to continue.”

The reporter wasn’t swayed. “I’m not a police officer, I don’t get to distinguish that. . . .”

The assumption being that such determinations are up to . . . police and courts? 

But legal culpability is not at issue. 

What is? Facts: a window was broken; a fire started; property vandalized; person assaulted.

If you feel disallowed from imparting evident facts to the public, a profession requiring you to do so all the time isn’t for you.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment ideological culture

Theft by Spray Paint

graffiti, New York, property, vandalism

Graffiti is theft.

That is how Heather Mac Donald puts it. “To a conservative,” she writes at City Journal, “graffiti is self-evidently abhorrent, a spirit-crushing blight on the public realm, and a theft of property by feckless individuals who avenge their mediocrity by destroying what others have built.”

But that is not how “liberals” or “progressives” see it, she goes on to explain, for they regard marking up buildings and subways and streets and sidewalks as a “political statement,” referencing the New York Times recent characterization of spray-painting on property you don’t own as “a courageous strike against stultifying bourgeois values” representing “urban grit and resistance to corporate hegemony.” 

With each graffito, Ms. Mac Donald insists, progressives see an icon of “the city’s vibrant, anti-capitalist soul.”

An interesting political divide. But this rumination  on the “taggers’” art is not random. Mac Donald is aghast that New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has cancelled a graffiti-eradication program.

This, she insists, will lead to more crime, worse crime than mere trespass paintings. It’s the Broken Windows idea, and she’s probably right. Allowing small crimes to go unchecked demonstrates a lack of respect for persons and property, and that trains a city’s population to go on to do worse things.

But the program was cut for a reason. You see, de Blasio’s disastrous coronavirus response has put New York into the red. The city has to cut somewhere.

Mac Donald, however, calls the $3 million saved a “rounding error” on the city’s $88 billion budget. She imputes to de Blasio and others a preference for crime rather than fighting crime.

Maybe. And maybe we add law and order to health and commerce as casualties of the pandemic panic.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture media and media people U.S. Constitution

The Mobs Attacked and Defended

Portland, riots, protests, Ted Wheeler

It’s “mobocracy” — the riots in major cities around the nation, but especially in Portland, Oregon, where the president sent federal agents. Local police had stood back for weeks as Democratic politicians — such as Joe Biden — referred to the rioters as “peaceful protesters.” Even as the mobs lit fires in the streets, defaced property, and attempted to break into government buildings.

Buck Sexton, writing at The Hill, makes the obvious linkage between the “anarchists” and the “Democratic” Party. 

But Sexton doesn’t really answer the key questions: “Why are anarchists terrorizing Portland? What was the real purpose of the Seattle ‘Capital Hill Autonomous Zone’? Why were ‘Occupy City Hall’ protesters allowed to fight with police in lower Manhattan for a month, until officers cleared out their encampment on Wednesday?” Sexton rejects the official reasons give by the movements’ apparent leaders, but doesn’t go very far beyond Democratic Party attempts to leverage the riots.

Which may at least offer amusement. “The reason I am here tonight is to stand with you,” Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler assured the mob as he put on goggles. “So if they’re launching the tear gas against you, they’re launching the tear gas against me.” But that same night, his security detail “scuffled” with “protesters” and his own police department threatened to use tear gas and impact weapons on the incendiary horde.

Is this really about legitimate protest, as Biden insists?

Fighting federal fascism, as Democrats and many others insist?

Americans are all-in for criminal justice reform and the right to protest. Many, me included, have peacefully taken to the streets in recent weeks.

But there is nothing peaceful about assault, arson, property destruction.

And Democrats who aim to use the fracas to beat Trump in November may find that ‘playing with fire’ . . . burns. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture

The Wide World of Woke

Achilles’ tendon, Achilles' heel, woke culture, PC,

Courtesy of the UK’s Daily Mail we read of yet another example of the Wide World of Woke: “New push to RENAME body parts like the Adam’s apple and Achilles’ tendon because they are ‘irrelevant and misogynistic.’” 

Because of the Daily Mail coverage, this bizarre tale of one “council member for the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians” and her goofy itch to jigger the medical nomenclature of body parts has received a lot of attention. Is there anything of major moment, here?

Well, the doctor doesn’t like the fact that embedded in medical terminology are semantic artifacts of past, less woke times.

“The word ‘hysterectomy,’” explains reporter Lauren Ferri, “originated from a time when women were treated for female hysteria by removing the uterus.” Adding that the good doctor “now prefers to use the term ‘uterectomy’ instead.”

To treat hysteria now we prescribe masks or marches.

But our doctor Down Under is not alone. Apparently woke medical folk around the world have many, many concerns:

  • Adam’s apple — Biblical*
  • The speculum — apparently named after a slave trader
  • The Pfannensteil incision — named after the male doctor who developed it
  • The Achilles tendon — named after the mythical hero who, as an infant, was dipped into the River Styx

The article mentions but does not link to “American researchers [who have] published a report reviewing 700 anatomical and histological eponyms and found that only one was named after a woman.”

All this no doubt seems trivial and unimportant — right up until we remember Orwell’s warning about those who wish to rule over language and to erase the past.

Like destroying monuments and altering history books: it should not be decided by a woke few.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The lore mentioned in the article is quite extra-biblical, and not worth repeating.

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Photograph of the statue of Death of Achilles.

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Indecent Exposure

Joy Reid, MSNBC, homophobia,

Next week, when Joy Reid begins hosting her new primetime MSNBC program, “The ReidOut,” I will not be watching.

But not because of her progressivism.

You see, those progressive bona fides “were called into question in 2017,” a New York Times feature on Reid’s promotion to cable TV’s evening lineup notes, “when homophobic posts and comments from ‘The Reid Report,’ a blog she wrote in the mid- to late 2000s, resurfaced on social media.”

When those writings were discovered, Reid publicly claimed her blog’s archive must have been hacked. 

“We have received confirmation the FBI has opened an investigation into potential criminal activities surrounding several online . . . blog accounts, belonging to Joy-Ann Reid,” her attorney told CNN in 2018.

But the offending posts were captured by the Wayback Machine, an internet archive, and were obviously not the result of a hack. 

No one bought her dodge. 

“Later,” as The Times puts it, “she acknowledged that there was little evidence that the posts had been faked.” 

“Little” . . . meaning zero.

The Times also refers to Reid’s “lengthy apology” to viewers. “The person I am now is not the person I was then,” she offered. But she never owned up to writing the “hateful” posts. 

“I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things,” she argued, “because they are completely alien to me.” 

But she did write them. And lied to the FBI, apparently, to hide the truth.

In a time of unbridled shaming and social-media-mob recriminations for any lack of keeping up with the dominant wokeness, how is Reid able to insult gays and (to top it off) everyone’s intelligence with such bald-faced lies?

And to be rewarded with a primetime cable TV gig. Lying works!

That’s indecent.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall

Erecting Democracy

statue, racism, mob,

Though I opposed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, I was not at all offended when an Iraqi mob toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein. 

I liked it. That statue was a symbol of oppression.

In my mind, at least. 

I guess that’s the rub, eh? A symbol of oppression to one person might be an important piece of history to another.

Here in the good ole USA, we now have our own variant of statue roulette going on, of course. And I wonder: Can we not find a better way to decide public policy regarding statue removal than today’s status quo of leaving it up to roaming, violent mobs? Iconoclastic crowds that, we can see, have some trouble coherently identifying the enemy symbols they seek to vandalize.*

“[T]he choice in 2020 is very simple,” offers President Trump. “Do you want to bow before the left-wing mob or do you want to stand up tall and proud as Americans?”

Actually, cancel those calisthenics.

Let’s vote on the issue. 

Either lawmakers or citizens should initiate ballot measures, city by city, state by state, asking voters to choose: keep or remove said statute(s).

The advantages?

  • A more fair and democratic approach, for starters. 
  • Less public policy decision-making by mobs.
  • No one else need be critically injured from faulty statue-removal efforts.

Perhaps most important of all, a real discussion and debate can take place.

Where all sides can be heard. 

Whatever decisions get made regarding any given monument, we would at least better understand each other.

Let’s stop fighting and start voting.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Monuments to famous abolitionists, Matthias Baldwin and John Greenleaf Whittier, as well as a memorial to fallen Union soldiers, who gave their “last full measure of devotion” to end slavery, have been defaced or destroyed. “The irony of vandalizing a monument to those who died to end slavery,” said a Friends of Matthias Baldwin Park member, “is lost on the morons who don’t know their history.” 

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Twitter Gulag?

Gulag, twitter,

An old Soviet-phrase — “ne chital, no osuzhdayu” (“didn’t read, but disapprove”) — seems as apt now as ever. Why? Because Americans today have revived the “Soviet mentality,” according to Izabella Tabarovsky, writing at Tablet. 

Ms. Tabarovsky, a researcher with the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center, explains that “[c]ollective demonizations of prominent cultural figures were an integral part of the Soviet culture of denunciation that pervaded every workplace and apartment building.”

Jobs lost, careers ruined, people socially disgraced — for “social media gaffes or old teenage behavior” — this is not just a Soviet mania, for Twitter mobs are on the rampage against those they deem “to be deplorable and unforgivable.” 

The difference between current mobbing and Soviet experience, though, is stark: the government does not seem to be in charge, and there are no real gulags to be sent to — as of yet.

Today’s mobbing behavior, on and off Twitter, appears spontaneous and “systemic,” not organizational — more Crucible-like than 1984-ish. 

Nevertheless, this is dangerous stuff. “The practice of collective condemnation feels like an assertion of a culture that ultimately tramples on the individual and creates an oppressive society,” Tabarovsky concludes, insisting that “the failure of institutions and individuals to stand up to mob rule is no longer an option we can afford.”

She’s right. Twitter-mobbing may be ugly, but it is more than that: it is obviously backed by force — witness the current riots; look at the policy agendas of the “politically correct” — and, unless stopped culturally it will have to be stopped in the realm of (ugh) politics and government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture Regulating Protest

The Coming Backlash

witches, pc culture, cancel culture, political correctness,

The George Floyd protests and subsequent riots, along with calls for “Defund the police,” are changing political opinions, and not in the way the most in-our-faces activists want.

At Reason, J. D. Tuccille declares 2020 to be the year “gun control died,” arguing that “to push gun control proposals” amounts to advocating “that the likes of Derek Chauvin — the Minneapolis cop who killed George Floyd — should be armed, while the communities they terrorize should be helpless.”

As movements like “defund the police” make headway, gun control seems increasingly bootless. It is wrong “to insist that when police fail at their supposedly core task of protecting the public, people should be deprived of the means for defending themselves”; it is even worse after woke leftists take police off the streets.

As I noted weeks ago, violence in the wake of (or surrounding) protests causes a backlash. 

To which even cancel culture is not immune. 

Take the case of David Shor, a social democrat who was not allowed to get away with merely relaying the uncomfortable truth just stated above. On Twitter, he synopsized a study that found that “Post-MLK-assasination [sic] race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2%, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon. Non-violent protests *increase* Dem vote, mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage.”

For daring to tell a truth that protesters did not want to hear, he was fired from his job as a data analyst.

As happened in Salem in 1692, this mania will implode, unacceptable in America’s free and open society.

Even witch hunts burn out. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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