SOCIALISM…
The childlike faith that a powerful, ever-growingGovernment couldn’t possibly pose a threat to freedom.
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Category: ideological culture
Don’t worry…
Bernie only wants “the good kind of socialism.”
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Consider the intersection of freedom and decontextualized fragments.
The specific “decontextualized fragments” in question appear in great and not-so-great works of literature, assigned in public schools for young adults to read: a graphic rape scene in Toni Morrison’s Beloved; racial slurs in Huckleberry Finn; sex, violence.
“Virginia regulators are drafting rules that would require school districts to red-flag objectionable teaching material and make it easier for parents to control what books their children see in the classroom,” reports the Washington Post.
Those regulations won’t be finalized for a year or more (because government bureaucracies are painfully slow). Yet an “earlier version of the language released on a state website drew hundreds of comments from the public,” the Post informs.
“Most parents were supportive of the change. . . .”
Teachers? Against.
Stafford County Public Schools literacy coordinator Sarah Crain worries about literature being wrongly labeled “sexually explicit.” To “reduce a book or a work down to something that is a mere decontextualized fragment of the work,” she argues, “actually impedes the ability for teachers and parents to have informed conversations.”
What about freedom?
Well, public schools aren’t primarily about freedom.
Teachers have a job to do; students follow instruction.
And it is pretty easy to see one reason for the opposition by “the professionals”: the new rules would entail more work.
Nonetheless, parents and their kids deserve as much choice as can be provided. And in every context.
Here, freedom means acknowledging the right of parents to decide. Not experts. Parents.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Original photo credit: wealhtheow on Flickr
Thomas Sowell, who retired from his syndicated column last week, may be the greatest public intellectual of our time.
Though he is “an original,” an iconoclast, his work is best seen as the carrying on of a tradition. Or two.
Consider his most famous research area: race. An African-American, Sowell is the age’s most persuasive dissident to the dominant strains of racial advocacy. He brought much common sense to a subject beset with unhinged passion.*
And yet even here he was obviously drawing on traditions that, if not well known, were firmly established.†
One of Sowell’s most important contributions, in books such as A Conflict of Visions and The Vision of the Anointed, is his distinction between two very different ways of looking at the social world:
- the “constrained vision” . . . . of most conservatives and classical liberals; and
- the “unconstrained vision” . . . of so many socialists, anarchists and progressives.
For many conservatives, this is Sowell at his best. But is it original? A few of my readers could probably lecture me on its origins in a famous essay by F. A. Hayek, “Individualism: True and False.”‡
Over at the Foundation for Economic Education, David R. Henderson addresses the one area where I tend to disagree with Sowell: foreign policy. Henderson gently calls out Sowell’s apparent credulity regarding the dishonesty of our war party leaders. Sure, Henderson writes, “[t]here are downsides to distrust. . . . But there are upsides too.”
Mourning the loss of trust in presidents, Sowell blames it on presidents lying to us in recent decades. But, as Henderson notes, “war presidents” lying to us about war is not new — providing examples.
Pity that Sowell, of all people, does not see the pattern here.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* See Sowell’s Ethnic America: A History, Race and Culture: A World View, and The Economics and Politics of Race: An International Perspective; but also popular argumentation, such as Pink and Brown People and Black Rednecks and White Liberals. And then there is the important Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?
† Economists W. H. Hutt and Gary Becker, at the very least, provided the background for Sowell’s research with their respective books The Economics of the Colour Bar and The Economics of Discrimination.
‡ See F. A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order. In another essay, Hayek provides Sowell with the seed of Knowledge and Decisions.
The President-elect has had some difficulty booking celebrity acts for his inauguration. And instead of taking this as a cue to trim down on celebratory excess, his team has extended the guest performer list to include New York’s world-famous chorus line dancers, the Rockettes.
The leggy, sequined showgirls might seem a perfect fit for the President-elect’s celebration — more, say, than a ballet troupe, or a string quartet — but one among the Rockettes protested. Being a part of a performing team might seem a dream job, but not for Phoebe Pearl. She was, she wrote on Instagram, “overwhelmed with emotion,” and not in a good way. She felt “embarrassed and disappointed” that the gig “has been decided” for her.
She feels . . . coerced.
Dan Avery, writing before Christmas, characterizes the contract as a matter of “force.”
Welcome, Ms. Pearl, to the world that most American workers already know.
But the silliness reached high pitch with actor George Takei, who tweeted: “The members of the Rockettes and the Mormon Tabernacle are like all of us: Forced to go along with something horrible they didn’t choose.”
Democracy — oh, my!
Most people have had to put up with democratic results they did not like. Are Democrats only now understanding this?
To a degree, I sympathize. Which is why I want limits placed on government. Perhaps Democrats should have thought of this every time they cheered as their elected candidates increased presidential power. Did they not realize that someday they might lose?
And if you want a right of refusal, make sure it is in your contract.
The Rockette does not have a leg to stand on.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Confucius said that our first task is to “rectify the language.”
That amounts to word control, but we probably should not take that too literally. We cannot “control the language.” Instead, we should take caution: error often rests upon improper word choice.
Take as an example not word control, but . . .
Gun control.
Which, Thomas Sowell reminds us, isn’t what it seems to be. “The fatal fallacy of gun-control laws in general is the assumption that such laws actually control guns,” Sowell wrote on the first day of winter. “What such laws actually do is increase the number of disarmed and defenseless victims.”
A new wisdom? No. Sowell, in 2016, is disabusing The New York Times for its inanities regarding the bearing of arms. In 1925, H. L. Mencken took on The Nation.
Gun control, Mencken wrote, “would not take pistols out of the hands of rogues and fools; it would simply take them out of the hands of honest men.”
Sowell argues that, no matter how irrational spree and mass murderers may seem, they “are usually rational enough to attack schools, churches, and other places where there is far less likelihood of someone being on the scene who is armed.”
Mencken noted that the gunman of his day “has great advantages everywhere. He has artillery in his pocket, and he may assume that, in the large cities, at least two-thirds of his prospective victims are unarmed. But if the Nation’s proposed law (or amendment) were passed and enforced, he could assume safely that all of them were unarmed.”
Maybe, following Confucius*, we should call laws against concealed carry not “gun control” but “citizen disarmament.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* “Confucius” is the Western name for Kong Qui (551-479 B.C.E.), the great Chinese sage. He was often referred to by the honorific Kong Fuzi, meaning “Grand Master Kong,” which Jesuit missionaries to China in the 16th-century Latinized to “Confucius.”
It’s a truism in politics: the pendulum swings. Now, around the world, we see a deep swing rightward:
- Brexit, and the collapse of Britain’s Labour Party;
- Donald Trump, and the routing of the Democrats;
- German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s turnaround on Muslim refugee acceptance; and,
- in France, the rise of the National Front’s Marine Le Pen.
Over the weekend, the Washington Post reported on events in Poland. There, the Law and Justice Party is not only making sweeping changes of a pro-family, religious conservative nature, it has also grown in popularity.
Fearing an anti-intellectual “neo-Dark Age,” the Post finds cause for that worry in the fact that the Poles are downplaying evolutionary science in government school curricula.*
Before the big freak out, note the why of this: the dominant progressive-left paradigm has proven itself incapable of dealing with the challenges of the present age — most being caused by their own policies. Worse yet, those on the vanguard left have become moral scolds and petty language tyrants.
Yes, political correctness is one of the big offenders, here.
So, of course there’s a backlash.
But, turnabout being fair play, if the move to the “right” goes too far — as it probably will — we can expect another swing leftward.
Isn’t it time to give that pendulum bob a whack, to initiate something like an equilibrium position? Many of today’s problems are caused by partisans trying to force their kind of change down others’ throats. There is an alternative: limit government, setting it to just a few tasks, letting society evolve naturally, without forced central planning.
That would be “evolutionary,” and thus neither rightist nor revolutionary-left. Call it neo-Enlightenment.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Poland’s new government has become scary, by reducing transparency, limiting press access, purging the government news network of anti-rightist journalists, hiking subsidies to traditional families and the elderly, shelving the gay marriage issue and allowing local governments to cut back on granting public protest permits. Not all of these are equally frightening, of course. Why should any government be allowed to maintain a government-run news agency? (Ideological purges come with the territory.)
It’s the Christmas season, so wait to do this until the New Year, but . . . be sure to fire your male doctor.
He’s a quack.
At least, that seems to be the gist of James Hamblin’s “Evidence of the Superiority of Female Doctors,” a report in The Atlantic on a new Harvard School of Public Health study.
“Patients cared for by female physicians,” Hamblin writes, “had lower 30-day mortality than did patients treated by male physicians.” The rate for female physicians was 11.07 percent and for males 11.49 percent.
Though a “modest” difference, it’s still “clinically meaningful.”
The study (conducted by an all-male team) tracked more than 1.5 million Medicare patients treated by nearly 60,000 general internists.
“If male physicians were as adept as females, some 32,000 fewer Americans would die every year — among Medicare patients alone,” concludes Hamblin. “[T]hese numbers may be what it takes to spur equal (or better) compensation and opportunity for female physicians.”
NBC News played the equal pay angle as well: “Many hope the new study pushes hospitals to promote and pay women equally.”
Still, in a poignant moment of concern for the lesser sex, correspondent Kristen Dahlgren advised, “Maybe not a reason to ditch your male doctor, but there might be lessons to learn from his female colleagues.”
Indeed, the study explained that “physician sex by itself does not determine patient outcomes,” arguing instead that “differences in practice patterns between male and female physicians” must be investigated.
Smart.
The other thing, of course, is that every doctor, male or female, is an individual — not merely an XX- or XY-chromosome carbon copy.
Sex isn’t everything.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
We saw glimmerings last year when Twitter began to selectively enforce “policy” against some (Milo Yiannoupolis) and not against others (the hordes of leftists who threatened to assassinate Donald Trump).
You could see it in Hillary Clinton’s campaign; after Trump won, it loomed to eclipse all reason.
And on Thursday I noted Congress’s reaction.
I refer to the hysteria over non-Democratic “memes” and “fake news” that trumped the erstwhile gatekeepers of the Fourth Estate and the political classes — including the lobbying and bureaucratic cliques — and stymied the ascension of Mrs. Clinton to the Most Powerful Office in the Whole Wide World.
Now Facebook has come on board with a way to combat this freewheeling flow of ideas.
Fact-checking.
Hayley Tsukayama, writing in the Washington Post, explained the new program:
The social network is going to partner with the Poynter International Fact-Checking Network, which includes groups such as Snopes, to evaluate articles flagged by Facebook users.
If those articles don’t pass the smell test for the fact-checkers, Facebook will pass on that evaluation with a little label whenever they are posted or shared, along with a link to the organization that debunked the story.
The problem, here, is not a First Amendment issue: Facebook is not the government; when it tampers with your communications, it does not break the law.
The problem is that the Internet’s self-proclaimed fact-checkers are not exactly fair-minded, or even capable of sticking to the facts. I quoted Nietzsche yesterday (“there are no facts, only interpretations”), today I will merely reference Ben Shapiro, who has a history with false fact-checkers, and riff off of Juvenal: who will fact check the fact checkers? (Obvious, I know.)
Meanwhile, the folks behind new social media service minds.com offer an innovative posting promotion system, and promise never to sneakily favor some ideas over others.
The proper response to a business firm’s discriminatory policy is to provide market pressure.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
“You think the police deserve to be killed?” That’s what talk show host Michael Savage asked his caller yesterday.
What brought that on?
A self-described liberal woman named Teri had called The Savage Nation. Though not a Trump supporter, she “did not have the antipathy for him that most liberals did.”
“[U]nderneath his brashness and braggadocio,” Teri had thought, “there actually beat a heart for America.” But after his numerous initial appointments, she is now “terrified.”
On air, Teri admitted that her preferred candidate for president had been independent (not turned Democrat) Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Savage called Sanders a “con man” — a “race-baiter” who “attacked the police regularly.”
That’s when he inquired if it was her desire to see police officers murdered. To which, she replied, “No, my husband was a police captain.”
Savage: “That’s amazing. How could you vote for a man like Bernie Sanders, who hated the police and used the police as a weapon to stir up minorities?”
Teri: “Believe it or not, my husband actually supported him, too.”
Savage: “Why would a police captain support Bernie Sanders?”
Teri: “Well, my husband was a very honored and honorable policeman.”
Savage: “You mean, all the police who were killed deserved to be killed?”
Savage, indeed. Does he really believe that a person criticizing certain police behavior or seeking reform necessarily thirsts for the blood of innocent police? Really?
Or does he simply hope to shut down any thoughtful conversation about the injustice in our criminal justice system?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
