Tag: progressivism

Amazon Retreats from Anarchy

Post author By Redactor
Post date March 16, 2022
2 Comments on Amazon Retreats from Anarchy

It turns out that hating on big business while shedding crocodile tears for street criminals and the homeless can have negative consequences.

Seattle, Washington, which in recent years has become increasingly “progressive” with job-killing minimum wage rate hikes, openly socialist city council members, and a whole mess of bizarre pro-crime policies, is of course driving businesses (along with decent citizens) out of the city limits.

Amazon, the giant, uber-successful Internet business announced, last week, that it will “relocate office staff in downtown Seattle due to a sustained uptick in violent crime,” wrote Thomas Kika for Newsweek. And “other businesses in the area” are continuing coronavirus lockdown policies by sticking “with remote work for the same reason.”

Government’s first job is law and order. There’s a case to be made that all other state tasks are decidedly optional, and those other jobs that muck up the first job should be chopped.

Progressives don’t get that.

But speaking of “chopped” — remember CHOP and CHAZ? These were the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest and Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone insurrections of the city’s infamous 2020 “summer of love,” where for weeks on end “protesters” took over the streets and kept out the police and generally behaved like anarchist revolutionaries. It was all very disorderly, yet city officials apologized to-and-for the movement for the longest time — presumably because the “protesters” sounded so righteous in standard leftist manner: apparently lacking any arguments against this kind of thing.

The occupied, autonomous, dangerous inanity was finally stopped, but the rise in vagrancy and crime continues.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Amazon, crime, leftism, progressivism, Seattle

media and media people partisanship

Telling Us Clearly

“While everyone in America gets to cast a ballot on Election Day,” Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon, Jr., explains, “in reality rich people, corporations, foundations, politicians and other elite individuals and organizations have outsize power.”

Ah, the Washington perspective … but don’t worry, Bacon adds, “The media that those people consume is telling them clearly that the current Republican Party is a threat to the nation’s future.”

Notice he does not use the term “informing” or “educating.”

America’s major media is a pit of partisan vipers more interested in how they can spin the news to turn votes their way, than on what you, as a citizen of a democratic constitutional republic, need to know to make informed decisions your way.

Mr. Bacon remains convinced, however, that the press “still doesn’t go far enough.”

He decries that “GOP radicalization and democracy erosion isn’t being covered extensively or aggressively by a big, important chunk of the media — the morning and nightly news shows of the big broadcast channels (NBC, CBS, ABC) …”

Can’t be serious, can he?

The columnist, like so much of the national press corps, believes in “an emboldened media.”

In fact, he is mightily disappointed that more news coverage “doesn’t implicate the GOP.” Bacon justifies the thumb on the scale because “in most cases,” he asserts, “the GOP’s behavior is far worse than the Democrats’.”

I think we’re supposed to take his word for that … or maybe already suspect as much — if well-lectured in the right universities.

Bacon’s column is headlined, “The rise of pro-democracy media.”

Close in letters, but what he and other “journalists” are calling for is Pro-Democrat Media.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags establishment media, fake news, media, media bias, progressivism

crime and punishment

Frisco Findings

San Francisco, theft, shoplifting, progressive, crime, law

Bravely risking damage and scorn, San Francisco engaged in a grand sociological experiment: testing whether or not we might all be better off “essentially ‘legalizing shoplifting.’”

Before announcing the conclusion of this daring research, let’s review.

“Shoplifting cases are all too common in San Francisco,” explained the UK’s Daily Mail, “where charges of property theft less than $950 in value was downgraded from a felony to a misdemeanor in 2014 — meaning that store staff and security do not pursue or stop thieves who have taken anything worth less than $1,000.”

After a Neiman Marcus department store was looted back in July, NBC News described it as “only the latest to give an impression of lawlessness running rampant. . . .”

The ever-so-sensitive re-calibration of the justice system has not been helped by the abundance of examples of mass theft putting stores out of business — all going back at least a year or two.

“As the number of burglaries soar,” informed KPIX, the city’s CBS affiliate, “San Francisco residents say they feel unsafe.”

Finally, following last Friday’s episode of robbing and vandalizing stores in Union Square, city authorities decided to end the research.

Mayor London Breed told her fellow ‘City by the Bay’ guinea pigs the study’s shocking conclusion: Brazen theft is “detrimental to our city.”

“What happens when people vandalize and commit those level of crimes in San Francisco,” her honor elaborated. “We not only lose those businesses, we lose those jobs.”

And then, she applied her hypersonic kicker: “We lose that tax revenue that helps to support our economy that helps to support many of the social service programs that we have in the city in the first place.”

So, there you have it. Theft is bad. Cuz taxes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Of course, Mayor Breed’s most talked-about approach to getting crime under control has been more deliberately screwing up the city’s already snarled traffic to make it more difficult for looters to flee. Courage.

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Tags crime, progressivism, San Francisco, shoplifting, theft

education and schooling ideological culture

Burning Down the House

A sign of the times: in Virginia’s gubernatorial race, the Democrat, Terry McAuliffe, is brazenly telling voters: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

Presumably, parents should just sit back, relax, and let their children be indoctrinated at will, including with the latest “anti-racist” racism.

Of course, we’re being assailed on many fronts. Things seem to be cracking up faster than ever, which is the theme of a recent Legal Insurrection post, “Gradually and Then Suddenly,” published on the blog’s thirteenth anniversary.

William Jacobson argues that for years now, “all the ‘progressive’ pieces were in place but needed a spark to burn the house down.”

The spark was the death of George Floyd in May 2020, followed by “state-sanctioned lawlessness, rioting, and looting; a vicious cultural purge from academia to corporations to the military to historical monuments; gaslighting and burying of news by a corrupt and dishonest mainstream corporate media and Big Tech; and the solidification of our post-truth world . . . where telling facts some people don’t like can get you fired, denounced, and boycotted.”

In addition to fighting back, Jacobson advises that we prep for the worst. This means, for one thing, stocking up on food with a long shelf life. (The preppers were “early,” not wrong.) We should also rely more on each other rather than on institutions.

Jacobson provides a bonus tip (one I’ve also advised): If at all possible, get your kids the heck out of the public schools.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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burning house

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Tags Big Tech, George Floyd, progressivism, riots

partisanship social media

Another Comedian Breaks Free

Post author By Redactor
Post date March 17, 2021
2 Comments on Another Comedian Breaks Free

Comedian Sarah Silverman, who has famously lent no small part of her cachet to the progressive cause, supporting Senator Bernie Sanders in both of his Democratic presidential runs, is now ditching the Democratic Party.

Her complaint isn’t that the party stiffed her candidate twice, first when the Democratic National Committee stabbed Bernie in the back for Hillary and next when it orchestrated ingenious maneuvers to gain the nomination (and then the presidency) for the tepid (and tepidly supported) Joe Biden.

I have argued before that Democrat insiders’ treatment of Sanders was deeply anti-democratic. But no, Ms. Silverman directs her ire against “the absolutist-ness of the party,” as she put it the other day on Instagram. “It’s so … elitist. You know, for something called ‘progressive,’ it allows for zero progress.”* Telling, perhaps, that Ms. Silverman emphasizes “progressive” and not “democratic,” as if it were named “The Progressive Party.”

Silverman specifically called attention not only to progressives’ unwillingness to compromise, but also to the it-takes-two-to-tango divide: “You know, Republicans might hear an idea that they would totally agree with, but, if it comes from AOC then they hate it.” She admitted that the same thing applied to her.

No wonder, then, that she does not “want to be associated with any party anymore,” complaining about “too much baggage.”

But she’s objecting to her fellow progressives’ anti-free speech agenda, too, characterizing it as “righteousness porn.”

Silverman, who has a special named Jesus Is Magic and is famous for her rape jokes, has herself felt the sting of cancel culture and would be a natural proponent of principled free speech.

But that is not a progressive cause, it is a very old-fashioned liberal one.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* An f‑bomb has been elided in the quotation from Ms. Silverman.

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Tags censorship, free speech, liberalism, progressivism

free trade & free markets too much government

The Anti-Worker Ism

California, socialism, labor, progressivism, Democrats

Progressives who lean socialist used to hide their worst intentions. Now they are letting it all hang out.

There have always been overt socialists in the U.S., of course. They would sometimes protest the reluctance of fellow travelers to fully embrace socialism’s moniker. But the sentiment “Ah, screw it, let’s just admit we want to destroy everything currently in existence” seems on the ascendance. Even a few major Democratic candidates for president are on board.

Exhibit 112 is the new nationwide push to stomp the gig economy.

Especially freelancing.

This follows Exhibit 111, the recent and so far successful push to stop independent contractors from engaging in voluntary transactions in California. (Many lawsuits are underway.)

After scanning the coiled legalese of 111 — I mean AB5, California’s law — many companies decided that ending relationships with California-based freelancers was prudence with a capital P. And that rhymes with G, and that stands for Golden. Which the Golden State used to, uh, B.

Not every self-employed person has been thrown out onto the street. There are carve-outs. Actually, the only known victims are taxi drivers, cleaners, nurses, comedians, writers, editors, musicians, transcriptionists, citizen initiative petitioners, etc., etc.

The crackdown on non-9-to‑5 work arrangements has also resulted in much gnashing of teeth by gig-seekers of all ideological stripes.

Obviously, then, such massive destruction of economic freedom must be inflicted on the federal level too. So House Democrats put AB5’s gig-killing provisions into Exhibit 112, that is, into HR2474, pending legislation.

Democratic candidates for president Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders have endorsed the California statute, a national version, or both.

Ludwig von Mises had a word for this. He called socialism “destructionist.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags California, labor, progressivism, socialism

Accountability folly general freedom media and media people national politics & policies

The Ex-Explosion

Margaret Sanger, population, progressivism, panic, birth rate,

When I was a kid, the trendy worry was “the population bomb.” Now we are supposed to worry about a population … fizzle?

“The U.S. birth rate has hit a new record low,” writes Peter Dockrill in Science Alert, “with women in nearly every age group giving birth to fewer babies than a year ago.” Titled “U.S. Fertility Rates Have Plummeted Into Uncharted Territory, And Nobody Knows Why,” Dockrill’s article fails to mention that diminishing population by reduced reproduction is an old worry.

It fanned the flames of eugenics and racism in Europe and America in the first half of the 20th century. Progressivism was full of this concern, in its heyday.*

As societies get wealthier, reproduction rates decrease. Economist Theodore W. Schultz called it the swapping of “quantity of children” for “quality of children.” This appears to be a natural, voluntary sort of eugenics — which scares actual eugenicists.

The study that Science Alert focused on fingered a different cause: lead in the environment. Over at Reason, Ronald Bailey sees some plausibility in this Lead Poison Theory. But mostly, Bailey writes, population rates in America (and elsewhere) are declining “largely because Americans are choosing to have fewer children.”

Is this really a problem?

Well, for Big Government it is.** German’s demographic collapse appears to have been one factor prodding Angela Merkel to open the doors to millions of refugees — whom Europe seems to have more trouble assimilating than does America.

I like kids — both making and rearing them. But to each his or her own, of course. Still, maybe if people freaked out less about population explosions, the implosion would prove less serious.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Before progressivism changed its name to “liberalism.” And now back. Oh, and note that the Nazis’ more famous eugenic programs were not identical to progressives.

** Ponzi-based safety-net pension systems worldwide were designed for growing populations. Oops!

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(Illustration from Margaret Sanger’s “Birth Control Review” from 1918.)

Tags birth rate, Margaret Sanger, panic, population, progressivism

ideological culture meme moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies Popular too much government U.S. Constitution

How Socialism Kills

3 Ways That Socialism Kills:

state enforced redistribution requires violence (even if some participate willingly, it’s guns and gulags for everybody else)
central planning produces starvation
a state powerful enough to enforce socialism is an irresistible temptation to those who would abuse power