Category Archives: culture

Only Progressive-Democrats

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“Iowa nice:” what Iowans have a reputation for doing—being willing to go out of their way to help a struggling neighbor, a visitor, or a stranded motorist.  It’s a practice for which Iowa citizens have a deserved reputation. And so do the citizens of Texas, Utah, all across the South; indeed, in most regions of the US. We Americans, in the main, just try to help each other.

Yet, this, during the runup to the Progressive-Democratic Party primary campaign Iowa caucus:

As [Progressive-]Democratic presidential candidates crisscross this state ahead of the Feb 3 caucuses that start the nomination process, they are trying to balance distinguishing themselves from each other with respecting that Iowa tradition.

Only Progressive-Democrats would consider Iowa nice and candidate distinctions to be competing interests requiring “balance.”

Hmm….

Maybe Build Their Own Connections

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Idaho wants to connect several of its western communities to a renewable energy hub in eastern Oregon, and the green citizens of eastern Oregon agrees with the sentiment.  Just don’t use actual power lines to do the connection.  Brian Kelly, Restoration Director for the Greater Hells Canyon Council in eastern Oregon:

We need to develop more renewable energy, of course, but it shouldn’t come at the cost of damage to our last remaining wild places….

Yep.  Dan Shreve, Head of Global Wind Energy Research at Wood Mackenzie:

Regardless of where you go, there’s always some issues—whether it’s bats, whether it’s birds, whether it’s wealthy landowners who don’t want their view interrupted. As a consequence, you see these initiatives drag on forever.

These worthies put greater value—economic and otherwise—on sights and terrain than they do on actual power to support the folks living there to enjoy those sights and that terrain, as well as telling others elsewhere that local sights and terrain are more important than those others’ access to power.

Perhaps utilities should walk away from such areas, build their hubs and their transmission lines elsewhere, and let these folks who think energy is not all that important develop their own clean power sources and provide their own accesses to them. Surely, they’ll be able to do so much more cheaply and efficiently while preserving their views than can utilities.

“Circle Games” and Losers

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One last thought on this, and then I’ll depart from the foolishness.  Recall the cadets and midshipmen who made the OK sign as part of a so-called circle game and whose academy management teams then were cowed into investigating those cadets and midshipmen.

In the circle game, you try to trick someone into looking at your hand while you make an “OK” sign, usually below the waist. If the mark falls for it, you’re awarded a free punch.

The real losers of the round of the circle game played at the recent Army-Navy college football game are the management teams of the two academies. Their meek surrender to “woke” pressure constitutes their falling for the game’s jape, and so they have earned free punches from each of the cadets and midshipmen who were targets of those managers’ foolish investigations.

“Management teams:” those worthies are unsuited to be leaders of our nation’s military academies, and they are unqualified to be teachers of our future military officers.

Capitalism and the Progressive-Democratic Party

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Barton Swaim, in his Wall Street Journal op-ed, pointed out “socialists'” error when they claim that capitalism is a system.  Their attempts at such a definition—whether of economics, or politics, of…whatever—is necessary, though, in order for them to draw their supposedly favorable comparisons between the socialism flavor of the moment and capitalism.

But capitalism isn’t a system at all, as Simone Weil pointed out 80 years ago, using the then-European economy as her example, and which Swaim cited:

…consists in certain methods of production, consumption, and exchange, which are continually varying, however, and which depend upon certain fundamental relationships: between the production and the circulation of goods, between the circulation of goods and money, between money and production, between money and consumption.

Or, it’s consumers and producers, buyers and sellers, coming together entirely voluntarily and of their own volition, to exchange things each party valued for valued things the other party had—and after which exchange, all parties were better off than they were before the exchange.

The critical part of this arrangement, this unsystematic economy, consists in its voluntary and self-initiated nature.  It cannot be a system because it does not even approach anything systematic.

Sadly, the obfuscation of “systematizing” what they claim to be “capitalism” is all that the 21st century crop of socialists, the Left and its Progressive-Democratic Party, have. They certainly have no coherent economic, or political, or whatever policies on which to expound, other than these:

  1. Big Government is the answer

Then recursively,

2. Raising taxes

3. Raising Government spending

Harms in Public Spaces

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The Brits are working out a new way to intervene in private lives and in private businesses, this time in an attempt to control “harms” done via (not by, mind you) “online platforms”—social media.

Under the [British] government’s proposal, a new regulator would have the power to require companies to protect users from a number of identified online harms—such as pornography, extremist content, and cyber bullying.

And

[T]he pair talked through the different terms that had been used to describe social media in a legal context, looking for the right analogy. They tried “platform,” “pipe” and “intermediary.” Nothing seemed to fit. Then “we thought of a ‘public space,'” says Ms Woods. “People do different things online. It was just like ‘how do we regulate spaces?'”

“Identified” online harms? We can’t even define the harms—such as pornography, extremist content, and cyber bullying.  Even Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart ultimately walked back his foolish I know it when I see it nonsense, recognizing that such a nebulous “definition” had no place in law.

We have not—we cannot—define any of these harms, much less what constitutes a “public space;” there is no basis for Government regulating these things.

Nor have we succeeded in recognizing who actually is responsible for these harms, whether public or private.  See the disconnect, at a high level, between the Left’s Big Government is responsible on the one hand and the Right’s focus on individual responsibility on the other.

The British government may want to create a whole new, intrusive bureaucratic agency for controlling one more aspect of British citizens’ lives. When we wrote our Constitution and ratified it those two and a quarter centuries ago, we explicitly walked away from the British system of governance for a number of reasons; central among them being the illegitimacy of Government intrusions into private lives.

This is one more example.