Category: ideological culture

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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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general freedom ideological culture

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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ideological culture international affairs

Keeping Score

Hao Haidong, China, CCP,

Retired Chinese soccer superstar Hao Haidong “stunned his country,” The Washington Post reported last week, “after he called for the downfall of the ruling Communist Party and the formation of a new government.”

Certainly, Hao — “the Chinese national team’s all-time top goal scorer and an idol in the 1990s and early 2000s” — startled the country’s rulers, not to mention their multitudes of censors. Hard to say, however, how much information reached the average citizen before silence was enforced.

“The Communist Party’s totalitarian rule in China has caused horrific atrocities against humanity,” the expatriate declared in a YouTube video released on the 31st anniversary of China’s brutal Tiananmen Square massacre. 

The Butchers of Beijing are a tad sensitive about that. 

Working with “fugitive billionaire Guo Wengui, one of the Chinese government’s most reviled opponents,”* Hao and his wife, Ye Zhaoying, once an Olympic medalist and badminton champion, offered that their dangerous stand against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was “the biggest and most correct decision in our lives.”

“It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented,” noted CNN, “for a successful Chinese sports star to unleash such a blistering public denunciation of the Communist Party and openly call for its downfall.” Adding, of course, that, “Dissidents who publicly criticize the party or demand democratic reforms often face lengthy prison sentences.”

Though China blocks YouTube, news of Hao saying the CCP should be “kicked out of humanity” was spreading on Chinese social media. Hao’s account has since been deleted.  

“Hao Haidong has made a speech that subverts the government and harms national sovereignty and uses the coronavirus epidemic to smear the Chinese government and spread falsehoods about Hong Kong,” said a statement by a popular sports website. “We strongly condemn this behavior.”

Soon, the statement replaced Hao’s name with only the Roman letter “H.” Hours later, the entire statement and all mention of the incident had been erased. Poof! 

“Within 24 hours,” The Post disclosed, “Hao’s name had become the most heavily censored term on Weibo.”

It didn’t stop there. “Following his father Hao Haidong’s public criticism of the Chinese Communist Party,” informed Taiwan News, “Chinese soccer player Hao Runze has reportedly been released by his Serbian team due to heavy pressure from Beijing.”

The firing came “after an impressive debut performance,” in which the young Hao scored a goal. So “all Chinese news agencies have now removed any mention of the young rookie.”

This is the dystopian world with which 1.4 billion Chinese are stuck.

For now.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Billionaire Guo Wengui has hired former Trump advisor Steve Bannon to assist in the effort.

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crime and punishment ideological culture

Victimhood Conspiracy

riots, protest, BLM, antifa,

When a purported Antifa group tweeted an “alert” on Sunday, instructing “Comrades” to “move into residential areas … the white hoods … and we take what’s ours,” tagging it “#BlacklivesMaters #F**kAmerica,” Twitter closed the account. 

Few would object. 

That was criminal incitement to riot, and worse.

But when Twitter, Facebook and YouTube remove client content for arguing things about the coronavirus that does not fit with government bodies’ officially approved information, something else is going on. 

Last week, President Donald Trump warned of the dangers to election integrity of switching to mail-in ballots. So Twitter flagged his tweet, implying it as non-factual.*

I am not going to defend the wisdom or legality of Trump’s threats — on Twitter or by executive order. But one characterization of the whole affair by Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Reason seems a . . . bit . . . off.

“The order relies heavily on conservatives’ victimhood conspiracy du jour: that social media companies are colluding to suppress conservative voices,” Ms. Brown wrote last Thursday. “It’s an objectively untrue viewpoint, as countless booted and suspended liberal, libertarian, and apolitical accounts can tell you.”

The fact that non-conservatives have been de-platformed does not actually work against the supposition that the social media outfits are colluding against conservatives. It remains a problem if conservative thought is suppressed along with libertarian and anything else heterodox. These companies do conspire to suppress opinions they do not like, and influencers they regard as dangerous.

To center-left establishment opinion.

These social media behemoths aim to defend their approved news and opinion against what they regard as “fake news.” Thereby suppressing free debate and inquiry.

Opposing Trump’s reaction does not require pretending that these companies’ policies are not deeply problematic.

Concern about open and robust debate is not a mere “victimhood conspiracy du jour.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* How a prediction can be a factual matter is a bit odd. But let that slide, I guess.

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general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies

Masks Work

mask, filter, coronavirus, Covid, pandemic, epidemic,

Early in this pandemic, experts — including CDC officials — told us that if you aren’t a medical worker dealing with infected patients, wearing a mask is ineffective in protecting yourself and others.

Many reversed themselves, though without honestly explaining why they had ever downplayed the value of masks to begin with. Masks are even now mandatory some places.

But we still hear naysayers who declare masks to be pointless.

One blithely declares: “The main transmission path is long-residence-time aerosol particles (< 2.5 μm), which are too fine to be blocked.” That’s less than 2.5 micrometers. A micrometer is one millionth of a meter. Yes, small.

But “too fine to be blocked”?

A properly worn mask need not be 100% effective to block tiny particles. Viruses do not fly unerringly through holes and gaps in the mask. They have no guidance system and no little legs enabling them to scamper to a hole if it hits fabric. 

Nor is the virus invariably unattached to larger particles. 

Obviously, the better the filtering, the more effective the mask.

Suppose you go to a supermarket and 

  1. wear a mask, 
  2. try to keep your distance from others, 
  3. go when fewer people tend to be shopping, and 
  4. leave fast. 

All pointless?

Short of wearing a hazmat suit or never leaving a one-resident home, no protective measure will be 100 percent effective all the time, infallibly. This doesn’t mean that partly effective measures should be dismissed as entirely ineffective. 

A part of something is, well, not zero.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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mask, filter, coronavirus, Covid, pandemic, epidemic,

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education and schooling ideological culture international affairs

Expelling Dissent

Drew Pavlout, China,

The University of Queensland may expel 20-year-old philosophy major Drew Pavlou. He has been protesting against the Chinese Communist Party and in support of the Hong Kong protesters, but perhaps most tellingly has criticized his school’s ties to China.

Xu Jie, the Chinese consul general in Brisbane, has blasted Pavlou for being an “anti-China activist.”

This same man, Xu Jie, also happens to be an adjunct professor at the university.

The Queensland campus is home to one of many Chinese-funded Confucius Institutes, often benignly described as promoting Chinese culture. FBI Director Christopher Wray says that the institutes “offer a platform to disseminate Chinese government or Chinese Communist Party propaganda, to encourage censorship, to restrict academic freedom.”

The Economist allows that the Institutes “project soft power” with “occasional hints of politics,” offering as an example an exhibition at the University of Maryland, whitewashing China’s relationship to Tibet. 

Just a smidgen of politics here and there.

According to Pavlou, “Beijing exercises so much financial leverage over our universities that it can stifle all criticism of the Chinese government on campus.”

Although the school nebulously accuses Pavlou of “harassing” others, his real sin seems to be not going with the flow. Threatening Pavlou with expulsion and even prosecution hardly proves that Queensland would never act to squelch dissent at the behest of China.

There is only one fair resolution. The university should apologize for its CCP ties, reject funding from China, kick out its Confucius Institute, kick out Xu, and commend Pavlou for urging the school to reform its bad conduct.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Drew Pavlout, China,

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ideological culture local leaders political challengers

Sans Champion, Again?

Rep. Justin Amash, democracy, presidential race,

For a moment there — a few weeks — a comparatively youthful candidate with a gentle, conscientious and respectful temperament seemed poised to challenge the major parties’ sausage-twisting septuagenarians,The Donald and Sleepy Joe. A congressman from Michigan had entered the Libertarian Party’s hat-strewn ring, offering us something serious for Death Race 2020.

Then, Saturday, Rep. Justin Amash sent a series of tweets announcing that he was ending his presidential bid.

Presidential campaigns aren’t easy. And between outrageous anti-democratic ballot access hurdles and the pandemic, it has gotten even more difficult. 

Win or lose — and Amash was going to lose — I’ll miss what the Great Lakes State representative might have gotten a chance to say to audiences across the country. 

About partisanship. 

About political control. 

In Washington. 

“That’s why we have so much discord,” Amash told constituents at a 2019 town hall, “because members of Congress are just following the party line all of the time.”

Party bosses?

“Right now, you have a system in which the Speaker of the House controls the entire process,” charges Amash. “That was true under Republicans and it’s true under Democrats. Under [Speaker] Paul Ryan, for example, we had for the first time in Congress’s history an entire term where we weren’t allowed to amend any legislation on the House floor. 

“And so far under Speaker Pelosi the same thing has happened,” he added. “No amendments have been allowed on the House floor.”

“You need the House to be a deliberative body where everyone participates,” Amash declares, “and everyone has a chance to offer their amendments, to offer their ideas.” 

Great point. 

We sure could use a champion for it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Rep. Justin Amash, democracy, presidential race,

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ideological culture political economy

Cash Machine Cachet

cash machine, ATM, money,

Shutting down capitalism almost worldwide may prove to be the grandest disaster of all time. Folks on the margin of poverty in poor countries are already starving. Though scads of people seem to think we could ride out a lockdown indefinitely just by cashing government checks, the problem is that if we don’t produce, we cannot buy and consume products. 

It’s not about money, or profits as such: “It’s the productivity, stupid!” 

Elon Musk put it this way: “If you don’t make stuff, there’s no stuff.” 

A “universal basic income” won’t help if the re-distributed money chases few-to-no goods.

So how did we come to believe that we can just shut down most business activity and still survive?

Maybe the idea seems plausible because many people already do not work to survive. As their numbers have increased, our civilization has forgotten that they survive upon the work of others. 

We guffaw at young children who, when their parents say something they want is too expensive, they innocently respond, ‘well, just go to the cash machine!’ But the more people rely upon checks and bank deposits from the government — for any reason — the harder it is to remember that the power to buy stuff doesn’t ultimately come from government. With taxation, redistribution and inflation thrown into the mix, even adults think of government as Cash Machine. 

And the Cash Machine as a model for the economy.

To fight a virus, the world has shut down production — as if we do not survive by producing goods in order to consume them.

Government has reduced capitalism — and us — to absurdity.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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cash machine, ATM, money,

Photo by Tax Credits

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Accountability ideological culture national politics & policies

Believe Biden?

Joe Biden, #metoo, hypocrisy,

“Women should be believed.”

That’s what Joe Biden said when Justice Brett Kavanaugh faced allegations of sexual assault during his 2018 Supreme Court confirmation process. While former Vice President and presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee Biden is still for “taking the woman’s claims seriously,” now that he’s been accused, he wants us to “vet it, look into it.”*

Biden wasn’t alone then — “believe all women” became something of a rallying cry — and now his new procedural caution also echoes across the land. 

“Allegation against Biden prompts reexamination of ‘Believe women’” The Washington Post headlined its report. “The inconvenient truth is that this story is impacting us differently,” the creator of the MeToo expression, Tarana Burke, told The Post, “because it hits at the heart of one of the most important elections of our lifetime.”

“Compared with the good Mr. Biden can do,” Linda Hirshman writes in The New York Times, “the cost of dismissing Tara Reade — and, worse, weakening the voices of future survivors — is worth it.”

“I don’t want an investigation. I want a coronation of Joe Biden,” Martin Tolchin explained in a letter to the Times, where he once worked as a reporter before becoming editor-in-chief of The Hill. “I don’t want justice, whatever that may be. I want a win, the removal of Donald Trump from office, and Mr. Biden is our best chance.”

Thus principle loses to expedience. 

As important as fighting sexual predators is, the old principle of trusting accusers only by sex is no better than the new principle of trusting the accused by party.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* As for vetting? “We found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Biden, beyond hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them feel uncomfortable,” The New York Times tweeted, quoting from their story. Citing “imprecise language,” the tweet has been removed and that last phrase scrubbed from the online story without explanation.

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