Category Archives: culture

Countrymen

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Claudia Rosett, of the Independent Women’s Forum, had an excellent op-ed in Monday’s Wall Street Journal.  In essence, Rosett compared the PRC of 1989’s Tiananmen Square (she was there) with Hong Kong’s situation today (she was in Hong Kong over the summer), and her essential conclusion is

that for all China’s economic advances, it remains a brutal, dehumanizing tyranny in which the ruling Communist Party would rather destroy people than give them a genuine say in their government.

After all, we’re getting the same thing, so far, in Hong Kong:

Rather than give in to their legitimate demands, the Communist Party is readying its guns.

I agree with Rosett on 99+% of what she wrote.

I do have one point of disagreement, though.

soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army open fire on their countrymen [in Tiananmen Square].

No. The soldiers of the PLA do, certainly, share citizenship with the people of the PRC and of Hong Kong. However, PLA soldiers are not countrymen; the PLA is nothing but a mercenary army in the pay of the despots running the PRC government and the CPC.

“Journalists,” Redux

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Recall the kerfuffle over an idle tweet in which a George Washington University Associate Professor, in a mildly snarky tweet, likened New York Times Precious Columnist Bret Stephens to a bedbug.  The Prof was riffing off a headline announcing that the NYT building was infested with bedbugs.

Stephens chose to take offense, and not only did he email the Prof about it, he CCed the Prof’s Provost in a clear attempt to intimidate the professor into silence.  Or into something.  In the meantime, Stephens has earned for himself a new nickname: #BedbugBret.

But there’s something far more important here, and it goes back to the (lack of) integrity in the journalistic industry.

The Prof makes a closely related best in his op-ed in Esquire:

Bret Stephens seems to think that his social status should render him immune from criticism from people like me. …
Stephens…reached out believing my university would chastise me for provoking the ire of a writer at The New York Times. That’s an abuse of his social station.

But it’s much more than an abuse of station—a station that does not exist, properly, in the United States of America, where all and each of us are equal under law and before God.

This is an abuse of the industry of what used to be journalism.  This is a naked claim that journalism and journalists are too high and mighty for the petty rules of ordinary Americans, and we commoners have no business—no right—to tease, much less criticize, any member of the aristocracy of the press, our Betters.

The professor’s university also responded, directly to Stephens:

Stephens, though, as far as I can determine, has not reached out to the Provost or otherwise responded to his invitation to face the objects of his contempt on their turf. He seems willing only to face a single man in the comfort and safety of his own.

Stephens exemplifies the fundamental dishonesty of the press, and of the NYT in particular.  And, apparently, the cowardice of the bullying industry.

In Which the City of New York Might Get One Right

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The city’s Department of Social Services, through a subordinate agency, is proposing a rule that would require those homeless residing free of charge in a city facility to save against a future in which they live in their own home.

The rule would mandate that residents deposit 30% of their earned income into a savings account that the city’s Department of Social Services would manage. Shelters residents would have access to the funds when they move into permanent housing.
“Our goal is to assist New Yorkers with saving in order to more effectively help them plan for the future and get back on their feet,” said a spokesman for the Department of Homeless Services….

It’s possible to quibble over who it is that will manage those saving accounts, but the principle is eminently sound.  Beneficiaries of government welfare should earn their “benefits” and learn to stand on their own.

Of course, this is of a piece with requiring other welfare recipients to get a job, get training for a job, or provide a measure of community service, though, so expect the Left to raise a hue and cry over the unfairness of this proposal, too.

Oh, wait….

Councilman Steven T Levin, a Democrat who chairs of the council’s Committee on General Welfare, questioned the efficacy of the rule.
“It’s really looking at the wrong issue,” he said. “The idea of people having a savings account, that’s not one of the things that needs to happen in order to end the homelessness crisis in New York City.”

He added:

What’s really needed is for us to be very aggressive on our subsidized-housing options upon leaving shelter[.]

He wants more “rental assistance vouchers,” more subsidies—more entrapping handouts, instead of liberating help to escape from welfare.  He does natter on about helping residents consolidate or reduce their existing debts, which would be useful also, but he presents these as alternatives; he doesn’t want them done in addition to the savings accounts.

“Journalists”

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The NLMSM is getting their own tactics, on occasion, used against them.

And they’re squalling like stuck pigs.

Last week, a New York Times editor, Tom Wright-Piersanti, was demoted after 10-year-old tweets mocking Jews and American Indians resurfaced and were widely covered by conservative outlets.

But, but—no fair! [emphasis added]

“But using journalistic techniques to target journalists and news organizations as retribution for—or as a warning not to pursue—coverage critical of the president is fundamentally different from the well-established role of the news media in scrutinizing people in positions of power,” wrote reporters Jeremy Peters and Kenneth Vogel.

Here, though, are a couple of examples of “news media scrutinizing people in positions of power” (I’m omitting the NLMSM’s conspiracy-peddling here):

[A] CNN crew showed up on an elderly woman’s lawn in Florida to publicly shame her for unknowingly sharing a “Russian-coordinated event” on her Facebook page. Consequently, the woman received waves of violent threats, abuse, and harassment online.

And

[T]he Daily Beast reporter Kevin Poulsen doxed a black forklift operator from New York who doctored a video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Naming the man would have been entirely legitimate.  Doxing, however, goes a bridge—a deliberate bridge—too far. Doxing someone publishes his address, his personal contact data, where he works, the names and place of work of his wife, and the names of his children—and it often includes where those children go to school.

But the screaming from pseudo-journalists is this: don’t you dare do to us what we do to you. You cannot hold us to our own standards. We’re special, and these are special tools.

Can there be any further question of the fundamental dishonesty of the press, or of the NYT in particular?

No, Mssrs Peters and Vogel. You’re not that special, and neither are the public’s tool of discourse and criticism.  You are that disgusting, though.  And Wright-Piersanti?  Look for him to be quietly repromoted in a bit.

 

h/t Grim’s Hall

A Hypocrisy in Texas

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The Texas State government has passed a law making it illegal for government entities in the state of Texas to enter into a transaction with an abortion provider or an abortion provider’s affiliates.

Austin, the State’s capital, thinks it knows better and is working to get 150 stacks folded into its 2020 city budget to fund abortion services.  Here’s Austin city council member Greg Casar, making plain the hypocrisy:

In Austin, we believe and announce that everyone has a right to healthcare. We believe and announce that abortion is healthcare, and we refuse to back down on protecting our continuance basic rights.

Everyone but babies have a right to healthcare, that is.  The city is working hard to turn its collective back on a baby’s basic right to life.

Keep Austin Weird is the city’s unofficial motto.  With folks like Casar, and his supporters Mayor Pro Tempore Delia Garza and fellow council members Leslie Pool and Paige Ellis in the city’s government, the motto is closer to Keep Austin Bloody.