Category Archives: culture

Sexist Pandering

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Senator Cory “Spartacus” Booker (D, NJ) says the first criterion he has for his Vice President candidate, should he get the Progressive-Democratic Party nomination, is that the person be a woman.

I’m not going to box myself in, but should I come to it, you know I’ll be looking to women first.

Think about that.  Booker won’t be looking to the best qualified first, and if that turns out to be a woman, great.  He’ll be looking to a woman first because she’s a woman.  How pandering is that?

Think about another implication of that criterion.  His looking to pick a woman because she’s a woman means he doesn’t think women are capable of competing on their own merit.  Women, he’s implying, are just incapable, and the only way they can aspire to the White House is by being selected on the basis of their gender.  How bigoted is that?

Demographics and Retirement in the PRC

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The People’s Republic of China is facing an increasingly serious demographic problem.

New data show the reversal [in the one-child policy] isn’t having the anticipated impact. The number of newborns in China dropped to 15.23 million in 2018, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. That’s two million less than 2017 and 30% below the median official forecast of more than 21 million.

This has serious implications for, among other things, the PRC’s old-age pension and medical care capacity (eliding the impact on the PRC’s ability to man an armed forces establishment of the size it currently has).

By 2050, there will be 1.3 workers for each retiree, according to official estimates, compared with 2.8 now.

Most of these retirement programs are funded by local jurisdictions, rather than from the center, and most of those jurisdictions’ facilities are badly underfunded and getting more so (sound familiar?).  As a result, the PRC is trying to increase national control of those retirement facilities and to increase the bite on businesses to pony up more for the programs.  That last, especially, has its own problems.

Huang Weibin, the general manager of a property-management firm in Guangdong province, said higher pension costs mean his business will suffer a loss this year, likely forcing him to lay off some of his 80 employees.
“If the government doesn’t help us out with subsidies or tax breaks, we will go broke for sure,” he said.

He and the PRC government need only consult with that famous American economist and blogger, David Roberts:

If the question is what the [PRC] can afford…, the way to think about it is not in terms of how much money the country has. It literally has as much money as it wants. It prints its own money!

Problem solved.  Or maybe not.

There’s Bigotry

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…and there’s bigotry.  Keep in mind that the Virginia Attorney General, yet another Progressive-Democrat in the Virginia government—and third in line for succession to the governorship behind Northam (D) and Lieutenant Governor (another Progressive-Democrat and accused of rape, which he is poo-pooing) confessed last week to doing blackface decades ago.

The hue and cry over all of this from the virtue-signalers and determined nay-sayers of all sides is loud.

What’s missing from two of these cases (the alleged rape was much more recent, and it still wants serious investigation, with the Lieutenant Governor in jail or the accusers liable for damages and possibly jail, depending on the investigation’s outcome) is any sense of forgiveness and any recognition of the ability of a man to be rehabilitated, even to rehabilitate himself.

Also missing is any sense that this sort of thing is not unique to Virginia or to Party.  Ignorant, racially stupid, and bigoted behaviors were widespread in those days, and they’re still too widespread today.

There are two aspects to apparently bigoted behavior, though.  One is seemingly bigoted behavior by those who simply don’t know any better, but on learning, correct their behavior.  Yes, it is possible that folks even as recently as 35 years ago, as the civil rights movement was getting firmly under way, didn’t understand what they were doing or were simply indifferent to the negative implications of their actions—hence the need for that movement.  Such persons especially should be given the benefit of the doubt, and they should receive forgiveness.

The other aspect is that seemingly bigoted behavior actually is the result of bigotry.  That aspect is exemplified by the then-Democratic Party’s Jim Crow laws and their Ku Klux Klan, and by today’s antifa and neo-Nazi gangs, among others.  Such persons should be given the benefit of the boot from public life.

There might seem to be a third aspect, behaving in apparently bigoted ways in order to “go along.” I lump those, however, with the actual bigots via those of the go along crowd’s abject cowardice.

An Inquisition

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The “hearing” by the House Judiciary Committee of Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker on Friday was just that.

It was more than that, too.  The number of times the Committee’s Progressive-Democrats talked over and interrupted Whitaker’s answers, even dictating what his answers must be (“Answer yes or no”), before he could complete them was breathtaking.  Not a single Progressive-Democrat let him complete his answers to each of their questions; most of them wouldn’t let him complete any of them.  Here’s the 6-hour C-SPAN video of the hearing; see for yourself.

When Whitaker protested his being blocked from answering, Committee Chairman Jerold Nadler (D, NY) insisted that the time allotted to each member is that member’s to do with as he sees fit: “The gentleman [the committee member] controls the time.”  That’s true, as far as it goes.

However.

Whitaker, as are all witnesses testifying before any House committee (or Senate committee, come to that), was sworn to tell the truth.

Do you swear or affirm under penalty of perjury that the testimony you’re about to give is true and correct to the best of your knowledge, information and belief, so help you God?

It’s impossible to tell the truth, to be correct, without complete answers containing all the truth, all the facts, as understood by the witness.  The Progressive-Democrats’ repeated prevention of Whitaker from telling all of the truth, stating all the facts, in answer to the question put before him comes perilously close to suborning perjury, if not outright do so.

Flexible Genders and (Modern) Feminism

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A generally satirical piece by Bill Walsh on The Daily Wire concluded with this straight-up bit of logic:

This [the concept of “identifying as…”] is their own logic. I’m just accepting it. For the sake of argument, anyway. Liberals still have not faced the fact that their progressive gender theory completely undermines, negates, and rules out, all of the feminist “girl power” stuff. They want to have their gender cake and eat it, too. One minute they want us to believe that gender is fluid and a person’s body parts have nothing at all to do with the matter, the next minute they want us to jump for joy because a bunch of people with vaginas were elected to Congress. The two ideas stand in obvious conflict. They must choose. Or else they will have to face the fact that every time they go off on a feminist tangent, they are, according their own ideology, guilty of transphobic bigotry.

What Walsh said.