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Toxic Smile?

smirk, smile, Covington, MAGA, PC

Smirking is a subset of smiling. But what is a grimace? 

Nick Sandman, the offending Covington, Kentucky, Catholic high school student who triggered so much outrage last weekend, smiled. The effrontery!

Seeing a snippet of video, a social media mob formed, leaping to the conclusion that young Mr. Sandman was being disrespectful of an older Native American man who — chanting and drumming right up in his face — should have been “shown respect.” 

And not smiled? Instead, what: frowned? Cried? Bowed?

Smirks are irksome. Sure. But the young man’s facial expression seemed to me an attempt, only half-successful, to smile — a covered-over grimace. 

Understandable. The Covington youngsters — waiting to be picked up — had been targeted earlier by a group of nutty “Black Hebrew Israelites” who taunted at them for being . . . white. And the Native American man, Nathan Phillips, had singled Mr. Sandman out, violating his personal space. A grimace could be accounted for as putting “a brave smile on the situation,” as we used to say. 

But that was not how the Twitter mobs interpreted it. And of course the young Catholic students were wearing “MAGA hats” (pro-Trump “Make America Great Again” baseball caps) which were later said to be racist. And the pro-life rally he and his friends attended was said to be sexist. 

Can we all calm down? If we disagree on so much that even smiling is scandalous, maybe take a breath. 

In the midst of it all, economist Bob Murphy reminded us of the previous culture-war fracas, the Gillette “toxic masculinity” ad, tweeting “if you see a mob picking on a boy, Gillette wants you to intervene.”

Masculinity wasn’t to blame for the mobbing. 

Toxic political correctness was. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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smirk, smile, Covington, MAGA, PC

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national politics & policies political economy Popular

Re-Packaging Nonsense as Wisdom

green new deal, AOC, money, folly

When committed to folly, clever people make it look wise.

An article last week in Forbes, “The Green New Deal: How We Will Pay For It Isn’t ‘A Thing’ — And Inflation Isn’t Either,” by Robert Hockett, says that “how could we pay for it?” challenges have already been answered best by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. 

She demands to know why only “useful ideas,” like hers, get challenged that way. “Where were the ‘pay-fors’ for Bush’s $5 trillion wars and tax cuts, or for last year’s $2 trillion tax giveaway to billionaires?”

Where? Here!

And anywhere there’s common sense.

Hockney has his own retort, though, retrieving from the peanut gallery of economics an idiocy called “Modern Monetary Theory” (MMT). 

“Congress will authorize necessary spending, and Treasury will spend,” he writes. Government funds are “never ‘raised’ first” because “federal spending is what brings that money into existence.” 

Look, the United States has indeed come to rely upon debt financing. But it wasn’t always the rule. More importantly, the widespread and long-term effects are where post-gold standard monetary creation gets tricky. 

So are MMT advocates. Tricky, that is. What they hide are the dispersed costs, many of which we pay in higher prices.

Their main “contribution” — as stated in the National Review, of all places, yesterday — is that “When a government issues its own currency, as our federal government does, it is in a financial situation different from those of most institutions or households.”

Not really. When a household writes checks it knows will bounce, it does pretty much the same thing.

When governments rely upon debt money, someone is still getting ripped off. With government, though, it isn’t the businesses holding bad checks, it is all of us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

N.B. This episode of Common Sense has been corrected from the email version: the author of the Forbes article is not the painter David Hockney.

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green new deal, AOC, money, folly

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Inclusivity Not Included

women, woman, march, inclusion, in group, out group

The 3rd annual Woman’s March strolled by over the weekend — a tiny fraction of its former self. 

Two years ago, close to a million protesters converged on Washington, D.C., while this year’s event “appeared to attract only thousands,” The Washington Post reported, “mirroring lower turnout at marches . . . across the country.”

“[A] movement that once bragged about its inclusivity,” explained a separate news analysis, “has been roiled by reports of battles over diversity, hate speech and branding.”

In addition to squabbles over corporate ownership of the very name of the “Women’s March,” the leaders of the main organization have been accused of anti-Semitism. “Board members Linda Sarsour, Carmen Perez and Women’s March, Inc., co-president Tamika Mallory, have publicly affiliated with and praised anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan,” notes the Capital Research Center’s Influence Watch website.

March founder Teresa Shook called on them to resign, charging “they have allowed anti-Semitism, anti-LBGTQIA sentiment and hateful, racist rhetoric to become a part of the platform . . .” The Democratic National Committee and a number of progressive groups have withdrawn their support.  

But the “inclusivity” was always fake. As a “women’s” march, it started out excluding half the population. Nothing wrong with women having events or organizations that focus on issues of particular interest to females; it’s just not inclusive.

And let’s not ignore that pro-life women were specifically booted from participating in the original 2017 event.  

“Is the Women’s March more inclusive this year?” a USA Today article asked before last year’s pink-hatted festivities. 

Apparently not. This year, everyone was excluded fromthe Eureka Women’s March — cancelled because those hoping to participate were “overwhelmingly white.”

With all this inclusion, no wonder we are so divided.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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women, woman, march, inclusion, in group, out group

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folly ideological culture national politics & policies Popular

Skepticism in Order

denier, climate change, globlal warming, skepticism, science

It is not a question of “belief,” says Anastasios Tsonis. 

In “The overblown and misleading issue of global warming,” this emeritus distinguished professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee explains that in a “scientific problem ‘believing’ has no place,” going on to clarify: 

“In science, we either prove or disprove.”

And regarding climate there is no “settled science.” Lacking unquestionable experimental context — “we have only one realization of climate evolution” — no matter how strong our opinions, skepticism is always in order.

But let us admit the obvious, the “global warming”/“climate change” debate has been frustrating for just about everybody. And much of this is the result of dogmatism.

“The fact that scientists who show results not aligned with the mainstream are labeled deniers is the backward mentality,” Tsonis insists. “We don’t live in the medieval times, when Galileo had to admit to something that he knew was wrong to save his life.”

He argues that our lack of knowledge means that we should be circumspect about whether humans have caused the bulk of recent climate change. “Climate is too complicated to attribute its variability to one cause. We first need to understand the natural climate variability” — which, he says, “we clearly don’t.” 

Tsonis concludes talking about problems more urgent than climate change. We can (and should) quibble with his list, but we should be open about our reasoning.

One reason for concentrating on these other issues is that we might be more likely to gain clarity on them.

And thus might be able to do something not foolish.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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denier, climate change, globlal warming, skepticism, science

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meme Popular

Why Do You Want People to Starve?

In the 20th century, 100 million people were killed by “caring” socialist ideologues who were certain they knew exactly what everybody else “deserved” and who were eager to use government violence to enforce those opinions.

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international affairs meme Popular too much government

What Kind of Ice Cream Cone?

self licking ice cream, war, foreign policy, government

When I wrote about the Donald’s change of troop positions abroad last week, it was less than completely clear that the US President aimed to withdraw troops from Afghanistan as well as Syria. But multiple reports on the day I posted “Strategic Disengagement” make it clearer: about half of America’s 14,000 troops stationed there are scheduled to exit.

Why not all?

Well, you can see how entrenched foreign intervention is for American leaders. While most of the GOP policy establishment howled at Donald Trump’s betrayal of the cause (whatever that cause is, exactly), so, too, did many of the Democrats. And they seem awfully earnest. More earnest than one has reason to expect from the objectors to “George W. Bush’s wars.”

Even Noam Chomsky came out saying that the U.S. should stay in Syria to save the Kurds, and Howard Dean tweeted that American troops must remain in Afghanistan for the sake of women’s rights.

What we are witnessing are eternal programs that do not ever — and cannot ever — fulfill their basic purpose. No amount of occupation of Syria or Afghanistan or Iraq is going to give us what the neoconservatives promised: freedom and democracy and jubilation in the streets.

Freedom and democracy do not work that way.

There is a term for such impossible-to-win/impossible-to-stop policy messes: “self-licking ice cream cones.”

The term means a “self-perpetuating system that has no purpose other than to sustain itself,” which is just standard operating procedure for domestic bureaucracies.

But in foreign military action?

Awfully cold imagery, and too comic . . . for tragedy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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self licking ice cream, war, foreign policy, government

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