Justice? — You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.
First words of A Frolic of His Own (1994), William Gaddis’s fourth novel.
Categories
William Gaddis
Categories
Ring the Bells
July 8, 1776 – Church bells (possibly including the Liberty Bell, pictured) were rung after John Nixon delivered the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence of the United States.
Categories
Thomas & Thomas
In the Students for Fair Admissions decision, the Supreme Court rules that using race as a criterion of university admissions is unconstitutional.
Ambiguous aspects of the decision and the determination of some universities to keep using race as a criterion mean that qualified applicants may, alas, still be penalized for being the “wrong” color. Unambiguous, though, is Justice Clarence Thomas’s rebuke of the decision’s dissenters for, among other things, assuming that only racism can explain the different average outcomes of ethnic groups.
“[N]one of those statistics are capable of drawing a direct causal link between race — rather than socioeconomic status or any other factor — and individual outcomes. So Justice Jackson supplies the link herself: the legacy of slavery and the nature of inherited wealth. This, she claims, locks blacks into a seemingly perpetual inferior caste. Such a view is irrational; it is an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds. . . .”
Has Thomas been perusing the work of Thomas Sowell?
One of Sowell’s career-integrating insights is that statistics summarizing differences in average group outcomes are mute about the causes.
One must investigate causally relevant facts.
Consider, for example, differences in characteristics and outcomes between subgroups of a broader ethnic group. Sole possible cause: racism? Or the fact that Asians on average perform better than whites in certain academic or economic categories. Sole possible cause: racism?
Just two of many pertinent questions that Dr. Sowell has asked as he, in his numerous books, surveyed our world’s cultures, lands, and histories.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with PicFinder.ai
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Categories
Harry F. Byrd
Make no mistake: It is socialism which lies at the end of this rainbow and, in this rainbow, the predominating color is the red of federal deficit spending under which a whole new generation of Americans has grown and developed.
Sen. Harry F. Byrd, as quoted in a newspaper’s three-dot column some time in the early 1960s.
Categories
Seventh of July
In 1456, a retrial verdict acquitted Joan of Arc of heresy 25 years after her execution.
In 1928 on July 7, sliced bread was sold for the first time by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri.
On this date in 1958, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Alaska Statehood Act into law.
The verb is “enjoin.”
In a July 4 preliminary injunction, Judge Terry Doughty has enjoined federal officials from communicating with social-media companies except on matters pertaining to criminality or threats to national security.
“The Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the Government has used its power to silence the opposition,” explains Doughty. The government “seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”
For a few years now, government officials have asked social-media personnel to censor speech on topics like the pandemic, elections, and laptops dropped off by Hunter Biden, speech that officials want to suppress only because they disagree with it or find it inconvenient. Politically.
A lawsuit brought by Missouri and Louisiana argues that federal officials pressured and colluded with social-media companies to block speech protected by the First Amendment.
Some critics of this and other lawsuits — and of more non-formal objections to the government’s conduct — say that what has been exposed in documents brought to light during litigation, and in the Twitter files, cannot be called governmentally instigated censorship at all.
What’s really going on, they burble, is nothing more than persons working for the FBI, the CDC, the White House, and other such government-force-backed entities idly wondering — in incidental and nonbinding casual conversation, mind you — whether the social-media company they’re just happening to hobnob with could come down like a ton of bricks on the accounts of persons saying things that government officials disapprove. No big deal.
Not the most plausible pseudo-exculpation I’ve ever heard.
The relevant adjective? “Guilty.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with PicFinder.ai
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Categories
Albert Einstein
Highly esteemed Mrs. Curie,
Do not laugh at me for writing you without having anything sensible to say. But I am so enraged by the base manner in which the public is presently daring to concern itself with you that I absolutely must give vent to this feeling. However, I am convinced that you consistently despise this rabble, whether it obsequiously lavishes respect on you or whether it attempts to satiate its lust for sensationalism! I am impelled to tell you how much I have come to admire your intellect, your drive, and your honesty, and that I consider myself lucky to have made your personal acquaintance in Brussels. Anyone who does not number among these reptiles is certainly happy, now as before, that we have such personages among us as you, and Langevin too, real people with whom one feels privileged to be in contact. If the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don’t read that hogwash, but rather leave it to the reptile for whom it has been fabricated.With most amicable regards to you, Langevin, and Perrin, yours very truly,
[signed] A. Einstein
Albert Einstein, letter to Marie Curie (November 23, 1911).
July 6 serves better as a “Today in Tyranny” marker than anything positive, at least when you consider these events:
- 1415 – Jan Hus was burnt at the stake.
- 1535 – Sir Thomas More was executed for treason against King Henry VIII of England.
- 1887 – David Kalakaua, monarch of the Kingdom of Hawaii, was forced at gunpoint by Americans to sign the Bayonet Constitution giving Americans more power in Hawaii while stripping Hawaiian citizens of their rights.
- 1939 – The Nazi “Third Reich” closed the last remaining Jewish enterprises in Germany.
Since when do police place bounties on the heads of former residents who have committed no crime?
Since just now.
But it depends on how you define “crime.”
For me, to be guilty of a crime you must have committed an objectively definable, willful violation of the rights of others — fraud, robbery, kidnapping, torture, rape, murder. Speech criticizing the crimes of a crime-committing government cannot count as “crime.” To pretend otherwise would be an abuse and usurpation of proper standards of thought.
But the dictatorial Chinese regime is unbound by such considerations.
On July 3, the Hong Kong police, mere lackeys of the mainland government, placed bounties of one million Hong Kong dollars (about $128,000 USD) on the heads of eight pro-democracy dissidents no longer living in Hong Kong.
“We’re absolutely not staging any show or spreading terror,” says top HK police official Steve Li. “We’re enforcing the law.” Oh.
CNN notes that “many of the activists have continued to speak out against what they say is Beijing’s crackdown on their home city’s freedoms and autonomy.”
“What they say” is Beijing’s crackdown?
Just a smidgen of investigative journalism would enable CNN’s reporters to report, as fact, that there has indeed been a crackdown, that it’s not just “critics” who say that the 2020 National Security Law has been used to destroy the pro-democracy, pro-human rights movement in Hong Kong and “cripple its once vibrant society.”
But I guess folks at CNN dare not risk bounties on their heads, also.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with PicFinder.ai
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Categories
Aaron Burr
Law is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained.
Aaron Burr, quoted in Burton Stevenson, Home Book of Proverbs, Maxims and Familiar Phrases (1948).