Category Archives: morality

The Left Doesn’t Like Free Speech

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Especially when it differs from the Left’s holy writ.

The political left is threatening to boycott companies that contribute to a GOP convention that could nominate Donald Trump.

Color of Change, MoveOn.org, CREDO and UltraViolet, et al., are threatening to job businesses that support this year’s Republican convention, but not this year’s Democratic convention.

Of course, the rank cowardice of today’s business “leaders” contributes to the Left’s assault.

The campaign appears to have already succeeded in getting Coca-Cola to limit its GOP convention support to $75,000 this year, compared to $660,000 in 2012.

And

In 2012 Color of Change led a similar assault on companies supporting the American Legislative Exchange Council, which promotes free-market policies in the states.  …  ALEC’s reward for decades of pro-growth advocacy was to see its biggest contributors—Coke [again!], General Electric, Kraft, McDonald’s, Wal-Mart —drop funding and head for the tall grass.

Such cowardice shouldn’t be rewarded; this surrender to threatening speech merely contributes to further assaults on speech—one of the most basic freedoms of our Republic.  But, then, cowards don’t like free speech, either.

Minimum Wage Laws and Special Groups Impact

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Fast-food workers and civil rights groups in Birmingham, AL, are mounting a constitutional challenge to a recent state law that bars cities from setting their own higher minimum wages, alleging the law violates the workers civil rights.

The plaintiffs filed a federal lawsuit Thursday against the state’s Republican Gov Robert Bentley, claiming the bill he signed into law in February was tainted with “racial animus” toward the predominantly African-American city.

One of the lawsuit’s main claims is that the state law disproportionately impacts minority residents who live and work in Birmingham, many in low-wage, fast-food industry jobs that leave them impoverished and on public assistance.

Using their own logic, minimum wage laws, having as they do a disproportionate impact on minorities, on single mothers, and on teens (especially minority teens, but teens generally) are themselves tainted with “racial animus,” “gender animus,” yes, even “age animus.”

Hmm….

Who is a Man or a Woman?

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Curt Schilling had a thought on the matter, and the Left via ESPN, its stand-in on this case, took action consistent with its policy toward those impertinent enough to disagree with its holy writ: ESPN sacked Schilling.

It’s true enough that Schilling was less than genteel in his expression of his thoughtSchilling

but still, he was right on the facts:

…DNA and those pesky X and Y chromosomes.  In short, in this fight between science and authority, Mr Schilling is in the amusing position of being the Galileo, with ESPN filling in for the Holy Office.

But wait—it’s what people think of themselves, how they identify, in’t it?  Not so much.

Paul McHugh, former psychiatrist in chief for Johns Hopkins Hospital, puts it this way: “Curt Schilling is of course correct with the science in saying that claiming to be a woman when you have the chromosomal and anatomical structures of a man does not make you such.  You’re still a man no matter what you think or how you dress.”

Special snowflakes are just riding the wind in the trees.

Saviors

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Don Boudreaux, at Cafe Hayek, had some thoughts on this sort of folk.  Here’s one:

Saviors need victims who need saving.  And if such victims are not real and readily available, the saviors conjure them up by convincing themselves that this or that group of people are helpless victims eager to be raised from the muck of their misfortunes by the saviors.  Sometimes the saviors convince even the groups they seek to save that they—the members of these groups—are indeed mired in a muck from which they can be extracted only by the saviors.

This much is true, but I think Boudreaux missed a couple of other characteristics of these saviors.

One is that these become addicted to their saviorism: the addiction of needing victims is the saviors‘ desperate need for the ego rush of their helping, whether that help is real or a figment of the pseudo-benefactor’s imagination.  This sort of savior cannot get along without the dependency of others on their own largesse.

The other missed characteristic is pure, raw power.  That dependency of other on these ones’ handouts is, for these, nothing more than an enhancement of their own personal power, whether political, economic, or social.  The dependent ones represent votes, or tools for gathering donations from third parties (a significant fraction of which goes to “overhead”), or prestige among peers and credulous acquaintances and strangers.

One way by which we readily can discriminate such saviors from legitimate benefactors is the nature of the benefaction.  The latter offers hands up, temporary aid, means by which the beneficiary can get back on his own feet and become/resume independence and personal responsibility.  The former gives handouts, which serve only to maintain the “beneficiary’s” dependency on his savior.

The Situation in Ukraine

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This is a YouTube video showing the front lines in Ukraine over the last two years.  The title translates as Two Years ATO [Anti-terrorist Operation] in Two Minutes; the text in the lower right names the months as they pass.

The description below the video translates, roughly, as

TSN.ua [a Ukrainian news agency] assembled in one video map all hostilities in the Donbass, distributed in Ukrainian media in the last two years.  The first of them began to appear on the network in June 2014 and since July [has been] updated almost daily.  After reviewing a two-minute infographic, you can see how over time the front line changed, and in that period as long as ATO occurred relative lull.

Notice how the front, after some time, stabilized in the north, and then then in the west: by October (ЖОВТЕНЬ) 2014.  What might the Ukrainians have been able to accomplish against this Russian invasion had they been permitted by the Obama administration and/or the Europeans to have actual weapons with which to defend themselves?