Tag: social justice

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free trade & free markets ideological culture

The Woke Mob’s Capitalism

climate justice, social justice, woke, wokeism

A prominent rating system has gone “woke.”

“Exxon is rated top ten best in world for environment, social & governance (ESG) by S&P 500,” Elon Musk tweeted a few weeks ago, “while Tesla” — the billionaire’s high-​end electric car company — “didn’t make the list! ESG is a scam. It has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors.”

We could quibble. Is “phony” the right word? “Social justice” has always been slippery. It’s a “mirage,” explained Hayek, really just a stalking horse for power.

What Musk is objecting to, though, is worth thinking about. The ESG standard is supposed to mean something … based on objective criteria. The reasons to eject Tesla from its Top Ten and place Exxon at the pinnacle are laughably transparent. It’s a woke power grab. The leftist ideology has taken over another capitalist institution, the better to create …

What?

Socialism? Fascism?

Michael Rectenwald, in a fascinating essay, calls it “woke corporatism.” 

The plan is, he writes, to “establish a woke monopolistic cartel.” Musk’s company has been “subjected to the S in ESG — the ‘social’ or ‘social justice’ quotient.”

Musk, Rectenwald argues, “has been deemed a deplorable, and thus his company does not pass ‘social justice’ muster.” In other words, the putatively pro-​inclusion folks are excluding him from the ranks of the favored.

And all because he wants free speech on a social media platform!

Laissez-​faire grew out of economists’ objections to the grinding inefficiency and over-​politicization of business. Adam Smith, back in 1776, called the pre-​liberal, insider-​based trade system “mercantilism.”

The leftist mob now pushes a neo-neo-​mercantalism, mobocracy capitalism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom media and media people moral hazard nannyism social media

Tom Paine Sues Facebook

Thomas Paine, truth, offense, censorship

The ghost of Thomas Paine is suing Instagram and Facebook.

Mr. Paine, the eloquent champion of the American Revolution who penned such zeitgeist-​capturing volumes as Common Sense, The American Crisis, and The Rights of Man, is going to court to protest the indignity that these social-​media forums recently inflicted upon his spirit by censoring his statement that “He who dares not offend cannot be honest.”

The statement comes from an op-​ed Paine published in the April 24, 1776 issue of the Pennsylvania Journal: “Cato’s partizans may call me furious; I regard it not. There are men too, who, have not virtue enough to be angry, and that crime perhaps is Cato’s. He who dares not offend cannot be honest.”

Mr. Paine seems to be saying that persons of craven mettle often eschew the challenge of being standard-​bearers of truth, especially when controversial matters are involved. Articulating such views forthrightly tends to offend — somebody.

The particular mentalities of censorious Facebook flunkies and algorithms are new to Mr. Paine, of course. But he is ready to fight.

“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered,” he declares when asked to assess his prospects, “yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. . . . [I]t would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.”

If that be hate speech, Mr. Paine seems to suggest, make the most of it.

This is Common Sense. Happy New Year! I’m Paul Jacob.

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Heroism & Love Abounding

It's a Wonderful Life, George Bailey, Mary Bailey

“I cannot express how much I love this movie,” Monica Hesse writes in her Christmas eve Washington Post column about It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, dir.; 1946).* Yet she mocks protagonist George Bailey as “the tortured Boy Scout-​type” and contends that “Mary Bailey is the true hero.” Meaning that her husband George — beloved by many in fictional Bedford Falls — is not the “true hero.”

Puh-​lease. 

Even Mr. Potter, the movie’s villain, acknowledges that Bailey is “no ordinary yokel.” George is bright, ambitious, hardworking and, most importantly, a good man — someone who cares about people.

He makes sacrifices: taking over his deceased father’s business instead of going to college with money he has saved; loaning that money to his brother to go in his stead; and once turning down ten times the salary so that folks in the town have “someplace to go without crawling to Potter.”

Hesse ignores all this to mark George as a deadbeat regularly bailed out by his wife, Mary. When in one scene “a market crash threatens to sink the Bailey Building & Loan,” Hesse smugly asks, “whose idea is it to donate George and Mary’s honeymoon funds to keep things afloat?”

Indeed. But George earned that money and, having just shared it with his new bride, would never take it back. Still, many spouses would lack Mary’s quick thinking. 

Hesse belittles George’s existential panic at impending bankruptcy and scandal as “his foul work-​mood,” and highlights Mary as “the one who’s been home all day with a sick toddler.” 

As if a competition. 

Most perplexing for Hesse? “[T]he movie suggests that the saddest thing of all is that Mary Bailey became a librarian.” Well, not exactly. In the world the angel shows, in which George had never been born, it is that Mary “never married,” not the librarian gig, that rocks George.

But had Mary wed a wonderful fellow enjoying a relentlessly happy family, that would hardly demonstrate to George Bailey what the angel Clarence insists, that George’s life mattered.

“The entire movie celebrates the personal sacrifices of a nice man,” claims Hesse, “while ignoring the identical sacrifices of a nice woman.”

It’s a Wonderful Life is told from George’s perspective but doesn’t ignore Mary’s sacrifices at all. If it did, how on earth could Hesse recount them?

Moreover, George and Mary are more than merely “nice.” They have the courage and commitment to do for each other and the world around them … even under enormous stress. 

Both are heroes. Don’t let Monica Hesse or anyone tear them asunder. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* If you are part of the less than 1 percent who have somehow dodged viewing the ubiquitous film, George’s uncle misplaces (into Potter’s evil hands) $8,000 of the company’s money, which would force the Bailey Building & Loan into bankruptcy likely followed by George’s criminal prosecution. Desperate and unable to come up with the money on Christmas eve, George considers suicide to save the business and his family with his life insurance money. But an angel intervenes and shows George what the world would be like without him. George decides he wants to live and get back to his wife and kids and, when the angel returns him to real life, Mary has rallied all his friends who contribute many times the amount of money needed. Lots of heroes found in this flick.

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Which National Church?

Finland, religious freedom

Juhana Pohjola, writes Joy Pullmann in The Federalist, may be “the first in the post-​Soviet Union West to be brought up on criminal charges for preaching the Christian message as it has been established for thousands of years.”

While it may seem strange that Bishop Pohjola’s being prosecuted for saying Christian things — considering that he heads the Evangelical Lutheran Mission Diocese of Finland, and the Lutheran Church is the country’s state church — the truth is that Finland is majority nonbeliever, now, and the actual state religion might best be called Wokianity. 

That is why he’s being prosecuted.

And he’s not alone. 

Former Minister of the Interior and current Member of Parliament Päivi Räsänen also faces charges: “The medical doctor, mother of five, and grandmother of seven is accused of having engaged in ‘hate speech’ for publicly voicing her opinion on marriage and human sexuality in a 2004 pamphlet, for comments made on a 2019 radio show, and a tweet directed at her church leadership.” 

That last is a quotation from the ADF International, which describes itself as “a faith-​based legal advocacy organization that protects fundamental freedoms and promotes the inherent dignity of all people.” The tweet quoted a Bible verse.

At issue is protecting “government-​privileged identity groups,” in this case LGBTQ folks, from “centuries-​old Christian teachings about sex” that “incite hatred.” 

A sign of the times: Finland, which used to be very liberal, is now merely “progressive” — making the assault on Christian beliefs for being un-​woke completely unsurprising.

And worth noting here in America. For this sort of attack on free speech and freedom of religion is obviously what many on the left wish to implement.

It’s Wokianity versus Christianity … those with political powerful against the most basic rights of the First Amendment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Cosmic or Merely Comic?

Jussie Smollett, woke, victim, progressivism

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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Cancel Culture Cancels Culture

cancel culture, social justice, sjw,

Cancel culture, writes Christian Britschgi of Reason, may have just “jumped the shark.”

Britschgi tells the tale of “Carson King, a 24-​year-​old security guard who achieved viral fame after he was spotted on ESPN’s College Gameday waving a sign that asked people to use the mobile payment app Venmo to send him beer money.” Mr. King got a huge number of responses, then decided to give it all to charity. This spurred on both Anheuser-​Busch and Venmo to match the donations, and a hero was born.

Enter the shark.

I mean, legacy media.

The Des Moines Register chose to profile King, on Tuesday, with that special postmodern twist: dig up some ugly tweets by the man from back when he was a 16-​year-​old edgelord, saying the de rigueur racist things. 

Next: apologies, backlash.

“Treating a person’s most intemperate tweets as worthy of public shame is an exercise in hypocrisy,” Britschgi not unreasonably asserts. “What’s worse is that we have graduated from using social media history as a way of divining a person’s true nature to deploying that history cynically and maliciously.”

The hypocrisy part was provided by the Register’s registered hitman, a recent hire who was himself caught on Twitter, having used the n‑word and warning others never to talk to “strange gay men,” as Keith Mann regales us with on Heavy.

This is not the way civilized people behave.

Sure, don’t tweet ugly, vicious stuff in the first place. That’s a good takeaway.

But cancel culture shouldn’t cancel out cultural goodness. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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cancel culture, social justice, sjw,

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