Czy jeżeli ludożerca je widelcem i nożem to postęp?
Is it progress if a cannibal uses knife and fork?
Stanisław Jerzy Lec, in Unkempt Thoughts [Myśli nieuczesane] (1957) as translated by Jacek Galazka (1962).
On December 3, 1989, the leaders of the two world superpowers, the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, declared an end to the Cold War, at a summit in Malta. A little over two years later not only had the Cold War ended, the Soviet Union was itself dissolved.
A number of important criminal trials are bunching up together at the moment. The Rittenhouse acquittal came first, but the Coffee and Arbery verdicts, along with it, also qualified as major milestones. Looming over our heads is perhaps the headiest of all, the Ghislaine Maxwell honey pot case. But for the wildest comedy, there’s Jussie Smollett’s.
The story is such a travesty it is hard not to laugh — especially if you have heard comedian Dave Chappelle’s bit about “the French actor, Juicy Smolliet.”
Eddie Scarry, writing in The Federalist, provides a less humorous take: “Smollett wasn’t engaging in a hoax. He was perpetuating a scam and that scam has a name. It’s called ‘social justice.’”
Scarry makes a case for Smollett’s rationality: “It’s not like Smollett is a demonstrable sociopath who told an aimless lie about being attacked by Trump supporters in 2019 for the sake of it.” When he hired two Nigerians to fake a racist, homophobic attack on him, he did so with a purpose: to parlay rampant “woke” sentiment to gain fame and fortune. “This is what our entire culture is teaching now — that the quickest way to advance is to claim victimhood on account of race, sex, or sexual identity — ideally, some combination of all three.”
While the scam element is obvious in Smollett’s greed, social justice itself is not a scam. It is an ideology of constant revolution, always to re-make the world over to correct for cosmic injustices.
And it’s more: Social justice is open-source psychological warfare. It doesn’t need centralized control — though it has some, in the form of the insider elitists — because its strength comes from the distributed acceptance and performances of its hapless criminal pushers.
Thankfully, comic criminality may undermine its allure.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
George Santayana, “Why I Am Not a Marxist,” The Modern Monthly, Volume 9, Number 2 (April 1935).
On December 2, 1823, U.S. President James Monroe delivered a speech establishing American neutrality in future European conflicts. The policy became known as the Monroe Doctrine.
Though a much-discussed principle of American foreign policy, it was undermined by the Spanish-American War and proved a dead letter as the U. S. entered World War I.
China’s leaders fear Winnie the Pooh.
And The Simpsons.
The totalitarian regime’s opponents liken Xi Jinping, the latest Dear Leader, to Winnie the Pooh — due to an obvious resemblance. So Xi’s government works hard to expunge Winnie images.
The Chinazis also want everyone in China and Hong Kong (not to mention across the universe) to forget the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, when hundreds or thousands of people demanding democratic reform were killed.
The Walt Disney Company is eager to cooperate with this besieging of memory.
The Simpsons is part of its new streaming service in Hong Kong, where citizens have been losing the last remnants of political freedom permitted under the two-systems agreement of 1997. Whether preemptively or in compliance with instruction from the Chinese government, Disney has deleted a certain episode from the series’ archive available to Hong Kongers.
In the memory-holed episode, “Goo Goo Gai Pain,” Homer, presiding over the corpse of Mao, opines that Mao is “like a little angel that killed fifty million people.”
Another character has a stare-down with a tank, recalling the briefly effective “tank man” confrontation with a row of tanks in that fateful June of 1989.
The episode also satirizes the Chinazi determination to erase all discussion of Tiananmen. For instance, the Simpsons see a sign at Tiananmen Square announcing “on this site, in 1989, nothing happened.”
Instead of appeasing Xi’s government, what should Disney do?
What anybody who is paid to help repress a people and blank out the past: Stop doing that.
Forfeit the money.
Stand up for human rights.
Or lose them.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man, but they don’t bite everybody.
Stanisław Jerzy Lec, Unkempt Thoughts (Myśli nieuczesane, 1957; Jacek Galazka, translator, 1962).
On December 1, 1824, with neither John Quincy Adams nor Andrew Jackson receiving a majority of votes in the Electoral College, the United States House of Representatives was given the task of deciding the winner in accordance with the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
The House selected Adams. Jackson and his supporters felt deeply aggrieved, and immediately set about preparing for the next election, which Jackson won handily. Jacksonian supporters referred to the election of 1824 as “the Stolen Election,” in no small part because Jackson had received more popular votes.
Several state school board associations are withdrawing from the National School Boards Association (NSBA). And doing so pointedly.
Why?
Because of the NSBA’s September letter to President Biden characterizing the many protests by upset parents across the country as “domestic terrorism.”
Those protests are ample evidence of the growing discontent with the injection of racist “critical race theory” (CRT) into K-12 classes. In addition to calling the avalanche of complaints a form of “domestic terrorism,” the NSBA claimed that the CRT agenda “is not taught in public schools.”
This was met with widespread (and justified) incredulity. The NSBA claimed that CRT was not being taught because college-level texts purveying CRT aren’t used in K-12 classes. Nevertheless, teachers had been instructed, workshops had been conducted, and students had been lectured and censured — all in CRT lore and dogma.
The NSBA later unpersuasively apologized for “some of the language” of their previous letter without repudiating its main contentions or the CRT indoctrination.
Meanwhile, Attorney General Merrick Garland has issued no apology for using the original NSBA letter to rationalize establishing a task force to investigate parents.
The statement of the Ohio School Boards Association public sums up the sentiments of the state organizations leaving the NSBA: “OSBA believes strongly in the value of parental and community discussion at school board meetings and we reject the labeling of parents as domestic terrorists.”
Parents Defending Education reports that as of mid-November, some 26 state school board associations have “distanced themselves” from the letter. Fifteen have formally withdrawn their memberships.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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I believe the Prince of Darkness could start a branch of hell in the District of Columbia (if he has not already done it), and carry it on unimpeached by the Congress of the United States, even though the Constitution were bristling with articles forbidding hells in this country.
Mark Twain, Territorial Enterprise, April 7, 1868.