Category: ideological culture

Categories
Accountability crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies privacy property rights responsibility Second Amendment rights too much government U.S. Constitution

The Myth of the Monoliths

NRA, monolith, March for our Lives, members, gun control, guns

According to organizers of the “March for Our lives,” the National Rifle Association is wholly evil, a corrupter of democracy, a malign presence straight out of Mordor, bent upon murder — a monolithic influence responsible for every mass shooting event.

The clearest expression of this is by young David Hogg, who figured that the NRA’s sum of contributions to Sen. Marco Rubio, when divided not by the number slain in the recent Parkland shooting but instead by the total number of students throughout Florida, came out to $1.05 per student.

Forget the computation — think nasty imputation.

What Hogg and his friends in the media elide is a simple little fact: the NRA is a membership organization. When critics of the Second Amendment point at the NRA and shout “evil!” they are really pointing at the organization’s millions of members.

People, not malign institutions.

Also neglected? The fact that, as near as I can make out, not one NRA member has mown down students in any school or church in America. Instead, at least one civilian NRA member took out his AR-15 to bring down one such mass-murdering shooter.

“Evil NRA” talk is misdirection and slander.

Also not a monolith? Students. Christian Britschgi, writing at Reason, notes that teenagers made up only 10 percent of marchers at the recent rally, and, catching a whiff of astroturf, cites a poll that found less than a majority of Millenials favoring an “assault rifle” ban.

Citizens of all ages disagree. Pretending that all kids are against guns, or that the NRA is anything other than a citizen advocacy group, distorts reality.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

The Sitcom Society

Roseanne Barr, sitcom, sit-com, comedy, Television, controversy, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, satire

If we are entering a new Golden Age of television, it is for the most part passing the legacy TV networks by.

So, Roseanne Barr to the rescue!

The reboot of ABC’s Roseanne — a hit situation comedy of the late 1980s and much of the 1990s — should put the network and the art form back in the spotlight.

But though it is very popular, the show is not without . . . its political controversy. You see, funny-woman Roseanne plays Roseanne Conner, and she . . . (drum roll) . . . voted for Trump.*

Horrors!

Predictably, our modal mainstream media cultural mavens are not on board. Roxanne Gay, in the New York Times, complains that Roseanne’s views are “muddled and incoherent.”

Roseanne to Roxanne, hello-o-o: the character is fictional. Who said characters in a comedy should have coherent views? One would think the point of comedy would require the opposite.

Jezebel provides another fine example of this. In “What’s Up, Deplorable; Roseanne Is Back,” Rich Juzwiak opines that “[n]ever discussed was the laundry list of hateful, stupid, and wrong things Trump said, nor their even more nefarious implications.” On Twitter, Professor Jared Yates Sexton calls the character’s perspective “a cleaned-up lie,” and amounts to a turning a “blind eye to Trump’s many, many bigoted statements.”

Neither Juzwiak nor Sexton mentions any problem with the main alternative to the president in the last election — something Roseanne does in the show itself.

It’s almost as if what these (and many similar) critics want is a tidy propaganda piece for their opinions; it’s almost as if their objection is to the show’s realism.

Now that’s comedy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* In the season opener, Roseanne defends the president from her dippy Democrat sister, whom she had not been speaking with since the election. Her sister, Jackie (played hilariously by Laurie Metcalf), enters the tenth season wearing a red pro-Hillary t-shirt and one of those grab-em-by-the-x pink hats. Their reconciliation is a hoot.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
Accountability general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism responsibility too much government U.S. Constitution

The Abortionists’ Cartoon Advice

planned parenthood, left, Trump, extremism, radical, Trump, funding

Let it not be said that Planned Parenthood lacks for principles.

When Donald Trump offered a deal, last year, to fund Planned Parenthood only if the organization would stop doing abortions, the company immediately clarified the situation. “Offering money to Planned Parenthood to abandon our patients and our values is not a deal that we will ever accept,” said the outfit’s executive vice president. “Providing critical health care services for millions of American women is nonnegotiable.”

And, for Planned Parenthood, abortion is indeed critical. “The Trump administration needs to stop playing political games that would put access to the full range of safe reproductive care at risk,” said Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand (D-NY), “or they will get the fight of their lives.”

Well, that fight was won by Planned Parenthood. The politician who once said he would “shut down the government” over the abortionist enterprise has caved after various roadblocks. Trump signed a stopgap omnibus spending bill, last week, which continues to funnel $500 million towards the outfit.

So, as if to celebrate, a Pennsylvania branch of the abortion mill — er, “reproductive care” service — engaged in a bit of ebullience, a “light-hearted” tweet:

We need a disney princess who’s had an abortion

We need a disney princess who’s pro-choice

We need a disney princess who’s an undocumented immigrant

We need a disney princess who’s actually a union worker

We need a disney princess who’s trans

This caused a firestorm.* And not because its Disney obsession was silly. The problem? The tweet showed that Planned Parenthood is really, really committed to valorizing the killing of fetuses. And that its agenda is far, far left.

The outfit should be left without taxpayer funds.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* The Tweet was quickly removed.

Printable PDF

 

Categories
folly ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

Bipartisan Planks

gaslight, gas-light, delusion, reality, Resist

When a partisan discovers that opposition leaders engage in blatant, bald-faced lying, do you find it charming . . . or sad?

Donald Trump and his “administration are gaslighting us,” writes Ariel Leve. “It’s a term we are hearing a lot of right now.”

Of course we are. “The term ‘gaslighting’ refers to when someone manipulates you into questioning and second-guessing your reality,” explains The Guardian’s helpful reality guard.

By way of explanation, she discusses some vague abuse* her family directed towards her as a child, and then asserts that her mother’s denial of the issues, the “erasure of the abuse,” was, to her, “worse than the abuse.”

I can see that. But what if “your reality” — what you defend — is irreal itself?

Sure, she thinks Trump and the Republicans are “gaslighting” her. Well, welcome to the club, Ms. Leve. I thought Bush and the Republicans were gaslighting me — as were, in the previous century, the Clintons and all those Friends of Bill, and, more recently, Obama and Pelosi and the incredibly fawning media.

The problem sure looks like the proverbial protesting about the mote in the other guy’s eye while not seeing the two-by-four in one’s own. But it is worse when the lumber juts from most eyes on both sides of the partisan aisle — enough to build a McMansion with all the spare wood.

Leve advises the reader to do like she did — trust in her “version of reality. Not allowing it to be altered on demand. Resistance.”

Good advice, but only if you aren’t deluded.

And could politics be too often an avenue for wounded people to lash back at (or make up for) childhood grievances? That would explain a lot.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Ms. Leve helpfully expands upon the chaos of her childhood elsewhere. Sounds horrifying enough to me. She is convincing.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
Accountability ballot access folly general freedom ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies Regulating Protest

The Real Democracy Hack

Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, data mining, hack, hacking, elections, democracy, meddling

A whistleblower in a British data company called Cambridge Analytica accuses his company of stealing as many as 50 million Facebook profiles. This is the latest version of the “hacked the election” meme pushed by the establishment after Trump’s 2016 defeat of Hillary Clinton.

Cambridge received data on 270,000 Facebook users, who traded their personal Facebook data and their friends’ profiles to download and use an app. The 50 million figure is an extrapolation supposing the average user had 200 friends.

The outrage over this “hack” — by the whistleblower and by the television news commentators, who seem collectively to suffer from a case of the vapors — appears to be mostly pretense. That is, they pretend voters voted in a way they did not want to vote.

But that simply wasn’t the case. The implication that conspiratorial, behind-the-scenes puppeteers changed votes in some nefarious scam remains far off the mark. All we are really talking about is data miners gaining additional info that they pushed to political propagandists who in turn did what campaign propagandists always do.

Maybe we should be grateful. 

And saying this data group propelled Trump is like saying that support for term limits propelled the GOP to take over Congress in 1994 — though, in this analogy, the data firm deserves less credit than the term limits issue. 

This is more a “life hack” than a technological intrusion into the political process. “Democracy was hacked” like civilization was hacked by Johannes Gutenberg.

What the fainting couch crowd really regrets? Their inability to control new media.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
education and schooling general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies Second Amendment rights too much government

Civic Engagement Activities

blackboard, sheep, public schools, indoctrination, protest, guns

I love a good protest.

My first was in Mrs. Grubb’s third grade class, after a substitute teacher gave us a ton of math homework. During recess we organized and delivered a written statement  announcing a student strike against doing the math.

Believe it or not, the assignment was withdrawn, called an April Fools joke . . . but boy did we catch hell when Mrs. Grubb returned.

This week, with the school walkouts across the country to protest “gun violence” and demand “gun control,” some older kids finally got in the game. I may disagree with their public policy shibboleths and disdain their tone, but I would defend to the . . .

Well, you know.

The problem isn’t students or protests. It is the partisan government school system. The system’s taxpayer-paid agents — teachers, administrators — believe they can support student protest movements for changing laws they want changed, but block and punish protests on issues they do not favor.

And, especially, bring the hammer down on anyone who dares notice the double standard out loud.

Rocklin High School teacher, Julianne Benzel, “has been placed on paid administrative leave due to several complaints from parents and students involving the teacher’s communications regarding today’s student-led civic engagement activities,” the California school district said in a statement.

Benzel told CBS in Sacramento that she did not discourage her students from joining the protest — er, I mean, civic engagement activity. But in class, she did raise the issue of whether the school administration would similarly allow (much less facilitate, dare we say, encourage) student protests against abortion, instead of guns.

Let’s protest what we can actually change: public schools engaging in partisan political activity.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
education and schooling First Amendment rights folly ideological culture media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies

The Critique of Pure Intolerance

Christina Hoff Sommers, Lewis & Clark Law School, Federalist Society, fascism, free speech, censorship, no platform

If you are older than 50, you probably remember when “liberal” meant free speech advocacy to the point of absolutism. “I may disagree with what you say,” stalwart liberals pledged back in the Sixties, “but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”

Nowadays, if you are under 30 and have gone to college, you may not even have encountered this saw.

Which has consequences.

Nine student groups protested, last week, the Federalist Society’s invitation of writer Christina Hoff Sommers to speak at Lewis & Clark Law School. The groups called it an “act of aggression and violence” and smeared the philosopher and Democrat as “a known fascist.”

Bari Weiss, writing in The New York Times, calls this “the moral flattening of the earth,” the “main effect is that these endless accusations of ‘fascism’ or ‘misogyny’ or ‘alt-right’ dull the effects of the words themselves. As they are stripped of meaning, they strip us of our sharpness — of our ability to react forcefully to real fascists and misogynists or members of the alt-right.”

While this “flattening” does prevent the flatteners (bullies) from even seeing any gradations of threat or error, let’s not pretend to be surprised. Their techniques do not merely echo, but replicate exactly, neo-Marxist postmodernist philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s proposal, in “Repressive Tolerance,”* to censor writing and speech “from the right.”

Ideas have consequences. Just as Marxian socialism led to Lenin, Stalin and Mao, these tyrants led to Marcuse, whose thinking set much of today’s Academia into full tyranny mode.

It’s time for liberals “on the left” to repudiate explicitly the methods of tyrants . . . to their left.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* See Herbert Marcuse and Robert Paul Woolf, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965). My college political theory professor, a proud communist, was a big fan of Marcuse.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
Accountability general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies Regulating Protest Second Amendment rights

The Other Kind of Trade War

trade war, fractured, division, Alex Jones, censorship, boycott, civility, civil discourse

President Donald Trump’s promise — threat? mere negotiating gambit? — to add a 25 percent tariff on steel could usher in a new international trade war, which he says is “easy to win” but which in reality could lead to a cascade of tariff increases worldwide, throttling trade and plummeting us into a Great Depression.*

This is not just politically divisive (designed to please his protectionist base), it’s socially and globally divisive.

But that’s not the only radically divisive move at present.

Last weekend, YouTube froze, for a short time, the account of one of the most popular channels on the video service, Alex Jones’ Infowars. This is part of a major effort by Google’s platform, Jones says,** as well as a general trend by businesses and European governments, to suppress the speech of the strongest critics of open immigration, PC speech codes, gender politics, and outrageous media bias. Though, in Jones’ case, admittedly peddling some ridiculous conspiracy theories in the process.

YouTube has admitted that the new people the company had hired to police the platform — from the Southern Poverty Law Center, Jones pointedly emphasizes — had taken down thousands of sites without cause.

For partisan reasons. Apparently.

Jones and many other YouTubers call it a “purge.”

What to make of all this I’m not sure. But I do know that the pressure that activist groups are putting on some companies to sever all ties with the National Rifle Association has an obvious problem: fracturing the market into warring political tribes.

Do activists on the left not see where this ultimately leads? Some companies serving half the market, others the other — this is a disaster in the making.

I prefer civil discourse.

And democracy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Just as it happened in 1929-1931 with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act.

** Infowars insists that CNN is behind at least some of the push against Jones’ popular radio/podcast news-and-conspiracy commentary business, as CNN’s own coverage more than suggests.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
Accountability crime and punishment education and schooling folly general freedom ideological culture moral hazard nannyism Second Amendment rights too much government U.S. Constitution

Insufferable Common Sense

Timothy Locke, Cherry Hill High School East in New Jersey, gun, gun control, 2nd Amendment, hysteria

Sometimes common sense and open discourse can’t be suffered — or won’t be, anyway.

So discovered Timothy Locke, a popular teacher at Cherry Hill High School East in New Jersey, after discussing the possibility of arming teachers to help protect adults and kids from would-be mass-murderers. Locke also suggested that he’d be among those bearing arms if allowed.

Most of Locke’s students were okay with his opining. But one student was bothered enough by the viewpoint to complain to administrators.

Without further ado, the school — the “Home of the Cougars,” which proudly proclaims its promotion of “a welcoming environment, community, diversity . . . participation . . . growth mindset, grit. . . ,” so forth — searched Locke’s belongings, subjected him to mental and physical evaluations, and suspended him.

Mental evaluation? Wasn’t that a ploy in the old Soviet Union: dissenters must be crazy, hence ought to be carted off to the loony bin? Let’s go nowhere near such sanctions against independent thinking here.

“The bottom line,” Locke summaraized, “is that I was very concerned about security at my school.”

Through an online petition and otherwise, hundreds of students have protested the shabby way that a teacher who inspires them has been treated.

Students less enthusiastic about Locke lament the teacher’s tendency to digress — still legal in all 50 states.

So what now? After a futile school board meeting deflecting questions on Locke’s fate, a second, special meeting is scheduled for tonight, March 6, at 7 pm in the Cherry Hill High School West Auditorium.

Let’s hope sanity prevails.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
Accountability crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture judiciary media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies Regulating Protest too much government

Post Blindfold

blind justice, unions, Supreme Court, polarization, politics

While the Supreme Court heard oral argument, Monday, in Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the court of public opinion focused not so much on the constitutionality of the law in question, i.e. justice, but instead on the partisan impact of the decision, i.e. politics.

A Washington Post editorial advances the notion that the court was presented “with two questions. The first is the legal issue . . .” and the second “implicit” question is “how the court should conduct judicial review in a deeply polarized society.”

Plaintiff Mark Janus and his legal team are seeking an “extraordinary remedy in the context of the Supreme Court’s tumultuous recent history,” claims the Post.

But that history is not Mr. Janus’s.

Or the union’s.

Or even U.S. labor relations’.

The editors are talking about Washington’s bitter 2016 political fight.

What does political polarization have to do with the facts or law of this case? Nothing. Except . . . what’s in peril is a system whereby government workers who do not wish to join a union are nonetheless forced to pay union dues.

So, if the Court nixes current law, AFSCME might wind up with fewer dues paying members . . . meaning less money for AFSCME’s political pet, the Democratic Party.

And Democrats — now stuck with a conservative replacement for the late Justice Scalia — are left only with Obama’s pronouncement: “Elections have consequences.”

And, embarrassingly, the Post’s bizarre case for “steering the court modestly down the middle of the road.”

A lady, blindfolded, holding scales and a sword symbolizes justice. That blindfold is not to avoid reading the law; it represents the imperative to ignore politics.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing