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Remember June 4
Tag: meme
For days on end, outside of Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, antifa protesters hounded book buyers and bookstore workers. These activists were on a mission: to get the store to expunge Andy Ngo’s book Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy, from its website offerings.
“We have to show up every day until they stop selling that f — king book,” one activist said, comparing her effort to “stopping the historical publication of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.”
As the story in FEE makes clear, the store had already banished it from the block-sized building itself. But management has so far refused to de-list it from its website.
Meanwhile, Democrats (or at least the leftists at Salon) have been dubbing attempts by legislators and school boards to get rid of Critical Race Theory and similar woke nonsense from their curricula as “censorship.”
Here’s the muddle: as mobs play censor to a privately owned book company, leftists pretend that public input into the revision of curricula in taxpayer-funded, government-run schools is worse.
There are Jewish, Christian and Muslim schools near where I live. I have absolutely no say about what they teach their students; if I demanded that they conform to my standards, my demand would (depending on threat level) constitute censorship.
But if I’m taxed to support a school, and the school is constitutionally run as democratically controlled, my “voice” on the matter of curriculum is not in any way censorship — even if educators “professionally” disagree with my position.
Forcing someone else’s reading decisions is censorship; determining your own (or your children’s) is not.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Reminder: SARS-CoV‑2 is the name of the virus that is said to cause COVID-19.
Scientists and doctors are still learning about the novel virus and the new disease. Much of the information is uncertain, in part because it has become politicized, making it hard to navigate both medical and political subjects.
Making sense of the data or the arguments is more difficult because people confuse the terminology. The virus is not the disease, the disease is not the virus, though by metonymy, we do swap terms. Don’t let a mere figure of speech fool you.
As awful as COVID-19 is, in America, more citizens are affected negatively by the virus popularly known as TDS.
Perhaps we should call it TDS-2016, since the three letters stand for “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Though the mind-virus (meme) was rampant from the moment Donald Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, the illness is not the meme itself. The illness, or behavioral syndrome, is how host brains process the meme. And it did not really set in as a disease until Trump got the Republican nomination. That’s when Democrats stopped laughing so hard and began to take Trump seriously.
And drive themselves crazy.
As with COVID-19, the worst cases depend upon co-morbidities. In TDS-2016’s case, co-morbidities include a sense of entitlement (that your side must always win); a denial of culpability in ramping up political polarization (in such things as the corruption-challenged candidacy of Hillary Clinton); and in flirting with other memes (such as “democratic socialism” and “wokism”).
As we approach Election Day 2020, TDS-2016 will only grow. The meme itself has proven resilient. We appear not to have reached herd immunity yet.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Definitions:
meme n. 1. an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation. 2. a humorous image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by Internet users.
metonymy n. a figure of speech featuring the substitution of the name of an attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant, for example suit for business executive, or the track for horse racing.
herd immunity n. a key concept in epidemiology where the resistance to the spread of a contagious disease within a population that results when a sufficiently high proportion of individuals become immune to the disease, through exposure by infection or vaccination: the level of vaccination needed to achieve herd immunity varies by disease but ranges from 83 to 94 percent. [Discussions of SARS-CoV‑2 and COVID-19 that do not mention herd immunity can only have limited value.]
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“If I’m President, Betsy DeVos’s whole notion [of school choice], from charter schools to this, are gone.”
That’s what Joe Biden, presidential candidate, had to say this December at an education forum.
Charter schools are K‑12 schools that are publicly funded but managed semi-independently— not by the standard educational bureaucracy. Biden’s repudiation represents a break with the Obama administration, which had voiced support for charter schools.
One reason for Obama’s support may have been that so many Democratic voters, like other voters, want an alternative to standard public schools.
According to a survey conducted by Beck Research, 56 percent of Democrats “favor the concept of school choice,” with “school choice” understood to mean giving parents “the right to use tax dollars designated for their child’s education to send their child to the public or private school which best serves their needs.”
Once upon a time, Biden supported greater educational opportunity — explicitly, not just tacitly as a member of the Obama administration. But now he slams charter schools for taking money from public schools. (But in a different way from how public schools take money from taxpayers.) More and more, this man’s “moderation” seems indistinguishable from opposition to any even halting expansion of our freedom.
Andrew Cuff of the Commonwealth Foundation suggests that a Democratic presidential candidate who advocates school choice will gain an edge over his competitors — given the popularity of school choice among Democratic voters.
How about it, Joe? Flip-flop again.
But this time in favor of freedom.
And better education.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
—James Madison, Political Observations, Apr. 20, 1795 in: Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, vol. 4, p. 491 (1865)
A clever “meme” made the rounds earlier this year showing, in two columns, what it would be like were guns regulated like cars.
How reasonable that would be!
“Title and tag at each point of sale”; “Driver training”/“Gun training”; Liability insurance on each vehicle/gun”; etc. It seems sound, no?
No.
The memester failed to address a context: our car and driver regulations apply to vehicles and drivers on government-run roads. On your own property you can drive all sorts of vehicles, unregulated. And it is on their own property that most gun owners’ firearms stay most of the time.
So, treating “guns like cars” would put government deeper into our private affairs.*
The meme came into an economist’s view packaged under the slogan “doing nothing means more people die.” He saw problems. For example, “someone might propose that each person above the age of 10 years old be interned in a mental-health camp, until and unless experts appointed by the state certified that he or she was not a danger to society.”
Same logic — we cannot do nothing, can we?
Another economist dubbed the problem we have identified here as “a simplistic model of public policy.” Policy advocates tend to assume that if you change a policy we get only one effect. Not true.
A third economist (I’m going for a trifecta!) discovered that even adding safety features to cars comes at a cost in human life: feeling safer, drivers compensate … and it is non-drivers who suffer. More drivers hit more pedestrians.
Be cautious when you drive, sure. Be cautious when you shoot, of course.
But be cautious, especially, when you prescribe new laws.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Not to mention that gun rights are specifically enshrined in the Constitution and vehicle rights … not so much.
