Monthly Archives: March 2017

Misguided

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France’s soon-to-be-ex-President François Hollande is on the wrong track, and not just because of that soon-to-be part.  He’s now saying

My ultimate duty is to make sure that France is not won over by such a program [French Presidential candidate Marine Le Pen and her program], and that France does not bear such a heavy responsibility[.]

His ultimate duty, he says, is to prevent Le Pen’s election.

No.  Duty is to the safety and prosperity of the nation.  National level political goals should not be aimed at defeating a politician, a person.  Goals, to be durable after their achievement, need to be for something—policies good for the nation—not against something; that’s the fulfillment of duty.

The proper contests should concern ideas and policies, not personalities.  Winning the proper contest usually will carry along with it the defeat of a politician, but that must be a side effect of the larger struggle, not the purpose of it.

Contesting personalities leads, ultimately, to the defeat of those ideas remaining after the main body of them have been lost to the clashes of personality.  And that loss is far more long-lasting and far more dangerous to a nation than the momentary victory of an unsavory person.

Hollande’s mindset vis-à-vis Le Pen might be one factor in his failure as France’s President.

Looking for Excuses

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…to be offended, with lots of energy.  This time it’s PETA bellyaching about a professional hockey team’s use of penguins to entertain the crowd prior to a game.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) sent a letter to the [Pittsburgh] Penguins Thursday criticizing the team’s use of live penguins during its pregame entertainment for the Stadium Series game at Heinz Field February 25.

Never mind the experts’ perspective.

Tracy Gray, a spokeswoman for the Pittsburgh Zoo, said in a statement that the safety of its animals are a top priority and that the animals were accompanied by zoo keepers and a veterinarian during the appearance at Heinz Field.

“The penguins who attended the Winter Classic are some of the same penguins that participate in our weekend Penguins on Parade event. They are very comfortable around people and noises. In addition, it was a great enrichment opportunity for our penguins to be introduced to new sounds, sights, and smells. Keepers and our Senior Veterinarian were with the penguins at all times on the ice.

“The loud pop from the pyro technical display temporarily startled the penguins and their first reaction, similar to a human’s when startled, they flapped their wings. It was less than 10 seconds and the penguins were back to normal and exploring and playing on the ice[.]”

The zookeepers are far more credible than crowds like PETA.

The Greenpeace Defense

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We can’t be sued because we deliberately lie engage in hyperbole.  That’s Greenpeace’s new story, and they’re sticking to it.  As cited by Watts Up With That, we get this from the Financial Post.  The proximate subject is Greenpeace’s accusations against Resolute Forest Products Inc, a Canadian forest-products company that’s suing Greenpeace over those, which Resolute holds are false claims and defamatory about the company’s forestry operations.

But now Greenpeace says it never intended people to take its words about Resolute’s logging practices as literal truth.

“The publications’ use of the word ‘Forest Destroyer,’ for example, is obvious rhetoric,” Greenpeace writes in its motion to dismiss the Resolute lawsuit. “Resolute did not literally destroy an entire forest. It is of course arguable that Resolute destroyed portions of the Canadian Boreal Forest without abiding by policies and practices established by the Canadian government and the Forest Stewardship Council, but that is the point: the ‘Forest Destroyer’ statement cannot be proven true or false, it is merely an opinion.”

And

Greenpeace adds that its attacks on Resolute “are without question non-verifiable statements of subjective opinion and at most non-actionable rhetorical hyperbole.”

Hmm….

Chuck Schumer’s Coarse Misbehavior

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Does Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) condone the sexual abuse of children?

A snowshoe racer from India whose entry into the US to compete was made possible by Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer was being held Friday in a New York jail on a sex charge.

It seems that after Indian snowshoe competitor, Tanveer Hussain, was denied a visa to come to the US to compete in the World Snowshoe Championship in upstate New York, Senators Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand (D, NY) intervened with the US embassy in India and got Hussain his entry visa.

Now Hussain is in jail, accused of molesting a 12-year-old girl, passionately kissing her and “touching her over her clothing in an ‘intimate area.'”

That’s pretty damning of Schumer’s morals and his fitness to continue as United States Senator.  Maybe he should resign.

Or not.  Does Schumer condone sexual abuse of children?  No, but by the logic he’s applying in his slander of Attorney General Jeff Sessions over a poorly phrased confirmation hearing question and a misunderstood (some might say cynically distorted) answer to that question, he does.

A Key Point

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…from George Friedman’s piece in RealClear World, Nationalism and Liberal Democracy.  Friedman was writing about a different, if related matter, the relationship between liberalism (in the classic sense) and nationalism.  The point I’m calling out bears on our own immigration debate.

A nation is a group of people who share history, culture, language, and other attributes. It is the existence of a common identity, a coherent sense of self and nationhood that make self-government possible, because it is that sense of self that permits self-government.

Notice that: shared history.  This is not the same thing as possessing the same history.  Assimilation is what bridges the gap; assimilation is what brings people with widely differing histories—as widely different as English from Germans from Russians from Chinese from Japanese from…—into the jurisdictional boundary of a polity to become part of the nation that exists there.  Assimilation is what lets those folks with and from those differing histories obtain a shared history, the common history of the nation to which they’ve come and of which so many of them wish to become a part.

Assimilation is critical to nationhood because

a random collection of people without a core set of shared values cannot form a coherent regime, because nothing would hold the regime together or prevent internal chaos.