Tag: New Republic

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ideological culture

The Milkshake of Human Unkindness

milkshake, political violence, New Republic, Nigel Farage, Brexit, right, immigration,

“The biggest topic in British political circles on Monday . . . was milkshakes,” writes Mike Ford in The New Republic, “or, rather, one milkshake in particular. . . .”

Milkshake, you ask?

Yes. Milkshake. 

The shake in question “was lobbed by a bystander in Newcastle at Nigel Farage, a Brexit Party candidate in the European Parliament elections later this week.” And Mr. Ford goes on to note that infamous Internet figures Tommy Robinson and Carl “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin (the latter inaccurately dubbed “alt-right”) have received multiple hits of thrown cold, frothy confections.

It is “a thing.” A meme — a replicable operation.

Burger King has even encouraged the fad, if in a bizarrely mercenary way.

“Throwing a milkshake at someone is rude at worst,” Ford asserts. “It may also qualify as assault in some jurisdictions, especially in the United States.” That second sentence contradicts the first. It is assault “at worst.”

Ford’s op-ed, entitled “Why Milkshaking Works,” has a tagline: “The far right fears nothing more than public humiliation.”

Really? Look, no one wants the inconvenience of these stupid attacks, but it is the unhingedness of the left that shines through, here — a threatening, punching, shouting-down, spilling-upon movement that I suspect mainly grows the ranks of the anti-left.* 

The New Republic has long been a progressive rag: the “new” in the title referred to the magazine’s support for progressivism.

Fitting, then, to see it cheer on, this week, the idiotic, unkind extremism of current progressive culture.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Of course, to some on the left all non-leftists are “far right.” This is called the phenomenon of “the left pole.”

milkshake, political violence, New Republic, Nigel Farage, Brexit, right, immigration,

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incumbents term limits

Chavez Shocker

Having chucked presidential term limits, Venezuela dictator Hugo Chavez recently won re-election to a third six-year term in office. Not surprising.

What is surprising, according to Francisco Toro writing in the New Republic, is that the election was so close.

Toro, writing before election day, wasn’t surprised that the failings of Chavez’s socialistic and repressive policies have been getting harder for the public to evade. But in an “increasingly autocratic petrostate, the advantages of incumbency are so deep, [re-election] really ought to be a walk.”

Toro saw Chavez’s own campaign as awkward and unpersuasive, the challenger’s as smart and effective. Come October 7, though, the former tramped across the finish line with 54 percent, a comfortable if smaller margin than he had enjoyed in previous elections.

Chavez’s advantages included rules for political ads permitting each candidate to advertise only three minutes a day on each broadcast outlet — even as the incumbent ran frequent “institutional” ads promoting the government’s doings that looked an awful lot like campaign ads. During the campaign, his government often claimed emergency to take over the air waves to spout campaign pitches. All this is in the context of years of efforts to increase the number of state-owned media and browbeat private media into uncritical silence.

The more tyrannical a government becomes, the more urgently a citizenry needs term limits in self-protection. Yet the more tyrannical a government becomes, the more easily it can get rid of such safeguards.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.