Category: ideological culture

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education and schooling folly ideological culture media and media people moral hazard privacy

The Propriety of Cultural “Appropriation”

prom dress, cultural appropriation, racism, political correctness, Keziah Daum

Young Keziah Daum committed a terrible crime. She wore a traditional Chinese dress and displayed it online.

No wonder she was chastised by hordes of frothing guardians of cultural purity.

Many Chinese themselves say they find the criticism baffling. Perhaps they are burdened by common sense. They are probably not sociologically sophisticated enough to mind when an American orders Chinese takeout, either.

“Puritanism is the haunting fear,” H.L. Mencken once explained, “that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

“Cultural appropriation” is the currently favored bludgeon wielded by today’s “puritans” to ruin enjoyment. According to this misbegotten notion, it is somehow wrong-souled to enjoy somebody else’s culture.

The very idea is hard to pin down. It is unduly fuzzy. How? Well, borders between countries or groups are pretty arbitrary as cultural boundaries. To try to be consistent, enemies of culture-grabbing would have to berate any partaking of culture not strictly one’s own.

Alas, the amount of culture a person can produce single-handedly is paltry.

Nor can anybody create any unit of culture without being influenced by — “appropriating” — the creations of others. Cultural creators have shamelessly “appropriated” each other’s stuff for millennia, a process that accelerated with improvements in travel and communication.

Should all seven billion of us live our lives in separate cubicles?

Enemies of “cultural appropriation” subscribe to every kind of silliness when they attack watching foreign films or wearing socks, dresses or Halloween costumes that evoke the culture of another country, state, town, or block.

No matter from whom they stole the idea of “cultural appropriation,” they should give it back.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability First Amendment rights ideological culture media and media people moral hazard U.S. Constitution

Exit Strategy Advised

free speech, Trump, First Amendment, rights, college, campus, tolerance

The First Amendment applies only against governments, but our free speech rights can be violated by nearly anyone.

These days, these rights are most notoriously and routinely violated by mobs of students . . . attending colleges and universities nearly all of which depend upon taxpayer subsidies.

David E. Bernstein, writing at the Volokh Conspiracy, in “USC Law Professor: Supporters of Campus Free Speech are ‘Preying on Vulnerable Teenagers,’” makes a number of points regarding a law professor’s published defense of nasty student reactions to a Federalist Society speaker . . . on a campus not his own.

Bernstein notes that “the article has to have the requisite references to the Emmanuel Goldsteins of the modern left, the Koch Brothers, who are mentioned four times for no discernable reason.” The reason, of course, is demonization. For a movement needs enemies.

The USC law professor argues that journalists should ignore campus speaking events that “goad” students into “tactical mistakes” by the “mean-spirited provocations” of “seasoned political operatives preying on vulnerable teenagers and inexperienced young adults.”* Bernstein shows that the “tactical mistakes” amount to peaceful and intellectual speakers being “harrassed, shouted down, and subject to or threatened with violence”; every reasonable person knows that disagreeing with the ideas someone communicates does not excuse violating that someone’s rights.

No matter how “provocative.”

Most chillingly, the speaker who incited student ire and accusations, etc., had been advised by “a security guard” before his “talk” to devise “an ‘exit strategy.’” This indicates that the American taxpayer needs an exit strategy from subsidizing anti-democratic mob activism.

And its professorial enablers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Don’t you find this language awfully coddling of people who should be treated as responsible for their actions, and who, by their attendance at an institution of higher learning, should be capable of listening to any point of view? I find it maddening.

 

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folly general freedom ideological culture moral hazard national politics & policies

Include/Exclude

Milo Yiannopoulis, Democratic Socialists of America, Churchill Tavern, New York, Nazi

The right of free assembly is central to a free society. Not everyone understands this.

Last week, conservative/“cultural libertarian” provocateur Milo Yiannopoulis went into the Churchill Tavern in New York to dine with fellow gay journalist Chadwick Moore.

Also in the establishment? The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. When the socialists noticed Milo they stood up, faced him, and shouted at him, chanting “Nazi scum, get out!”

Milo is not a Nazi, but his past gentle treatment of the alt-right counts as “Nazi” on the left.*

The left has been pushing for an inclusivist** reading of the right of free assembly for decades. You see, state laws in the South, prior to 1964’s Civil Rights Act, allowed and enforced white business discrimination against African-Americans, such as refusing service and accommodations. Leftists argue that there is no right to refuse service or exclude customers; they strenuously criticize those libertarians and conservatives who argue that a right to associate implies a right not to associate . . . giving them no credit for long opposing laws requiring discrimination.

Yet now we see many on the left banding together to deny others their free association rights by exclusionary tactics.

This was a group of customers, of course, so this is more similar to antifa violence than business discrimination. But Brooklyn politicians echo the logic, now proudly denying free assembly rights to NRA members — on ideological grounds.

Mob action for exclusion? Politicians siding with the mob?

There’s a word for this — fascismo.

Or, in the vulgar tongue, “Nazi scum.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks articulates this point — Milo’s insistence that he is not alt-right carrying no weight, apparently.

** Rather than rule-of-law liberal, or libertarian.

 

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ideological culture incumbents local leaders media and media people political challengers too much government

The Centre Cannot Hold

UK, British, politics, parties, centrist, left, right, partisan

The British may spell their words in funny ways, but their political problems do not seem all that foreign. Their left-of-center party has gone far left, Marxoid left; their right-of-center party has gone ultra-incompetent.

A healthy majority of Brits disapprove of both parties. So, no wonder many Brits are looking to create a new one.

A new centrist political party, no less.

Over at The Economist, the columnist writing under the name “Bagehot” (pronounced “badget”) predicts that this hope will be dashed, for at least three reasons:

First, Britain already has a centrist party, and it is not doing very well.

Second, there sure are a lot of contenders — 35 new parties have been formed just this year, including one called, with humble brag, “Sensible” — and all that competition fractionalizes the vote.

Third, the country sports the same system of vote counting and elections as America does, first-past-the-post, which “is hard on startups.”

That last point is worth thinking about. In multi-candidate races, the British-American electoral system declares as winners those who obtain a bare plurality of votes — thus ignoring the preferences of those who vote for minor party candidates. This means that those who “waste” their votes not only hurt the candidacies they like as second-best but also insulate the second-best parties from those voters’ influence. So the parties become narrow-minded and unhinged from an interested group of voters.

Bagehot thinks Britain’s centrists need to rethink, conjure up some new ideas. But what they need to do first is fix a system that prods political parties away from new ideas. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard

The Cuban Slavery-and-Freedom Sandwich

Cuba, New York Times, communism, socialism, freedom, slavery

How easy is it to mix freedom with just the right amount of slavery?

New York Times reporter Azam Ahmed regards the attempt to mingle political opposites as noble or at least understandable. He doesn’t call Cuban Communism and its destructive effects “bad” — it’s a “unique tapestry.”

He wonders, instead, to what extent the Cuban government can fine-tune the contradiction.

According to the article, Cuba’s newest Dear Leader “will have to foster the growing private sector . . . while guarding against the income inequality it often brings. . . . Move too slowly and it risks economic collapse and widespread discontent. . . . Move too fast, and it risks unstitching the unique tapestry of Cuba’s social project.”

“Unique”? With or without cigars and salsa, the “social project” of repressing a hapless populace is as old as civilization. And as a “tapestry,” we’ve seen this warp and weft before.

Under freedom, inequalities are unavoidable.* On the other hand, nothing is wrong with inequality per se. Nature, human beings and economic outcomes are inherently unequal. Equality arrives only with the grave.

A government working to phase out slavery and phase in freedom may have legitimate problems in transition. But it is wrongheaded to seek just the right “balance” of both. How can any degree of freedom and markets fail to threaten a revolution, the purpose of which is a thoroughgoing assault on freedom and markets?

My advice to Cuban social engineers? Abandon Communism altogether and embrace prosperity and freedom instead.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Speaking of inequality, Cuba’s head commies certainly have not lived like the masses they’ve kept down.

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Accountability crime and punishment education and schooling First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture moral hazard Regulating Protest

The Shallow State

deep state, shallow state, free speech, censorship, first amendment, law. university

Amidst all the talk of The Deep State, we are in danger of losing track of a parallel problem: the Shallow State — which, despite lack of depth, is very wide.

I am referring to government employees who increasingly abandon any pretense of impartiality. And the public institutions that protect them.  

Consider the case of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and its 39-year-old lecturer Tariq Khan, who is a member of an Antifa-affiliated group called the Black Rose Anarchist Federation. Mr. Khan had been angrily shouting and chanting at a campus anti-Trump rally when he was mildly challenged by a non-nut student journalist. Khan went on a rampage, screamed at and pushed the young journalist, and deliberately broke the smartphone of a fellow journalist who had been recording the fracas.

Khan was charged with destruction of property. But the story doesn’t stop there.

“I was told that if I wanted the ‘situation to improve,’” wrote a third journalist, “that I should stop writing about Khan.”

The university placed a restraining order on the three, to squelch news and dissent.

So the trio sued on First Amendment grounds.

Here we have a teacher willing to abridge free speech the old-fashioned way, by playing the bully. And a public institution ready and willing to defend him, to take his petty criminality and raise it to a conspiratorial, Big Brother level.

Not only does this rob Americans of rights, taxpayers are being forced to fund what they might justifiably regard as the destruction of the republican form of governance.

Root out the infamous Deep State?

Sure.

But limit and make transparent the Shallow State, too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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