Peaceful Protesting, Portland Style

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Several times the Portland police have had to declare a riot in progress in response to Portland’s peaceful protests and the peaceful protesters’ behavior. Saturday was the third time in a row.

Protesters broke into a building, set it on fire and started dumpster fires late Saturday night in Oregon’s largest city, police said….

And

On Saturday evening, two groups of antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters terrorized Portland, squaring off against police and federal troops. One group attacked the Portland Police Bureau’s North Precinct and the Portland Police Association (PPA)—the police union—while the other group targeted the federal courthouse and Justice Center, returning to set yet another bonfire at the ruins of the elk statue nearby. Antifa broke into the PPA and set it on fire.

But these are peaceful protests. Portland City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty says so.

…thousands of Portlanders came out to exercise our constitutional right to free speech and peaceful assembly.

This is the Newspeak of today’s Progressive-Democratic Party.

The Kancel Kulture

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Alexandra Duncan, an author, has canceled her own book just before publication. Duncan, an American author who happens to be white, had written a fictional tale in which there appeared scenes depicting an American who happened to be black, with Gullah heritage. She wrote the scenes from the American black’s perspective.

And that’s why she canceled her book.

My own limited worldview as a white person led me to think I could responsibly depict a character from this [Gullah] culture. …  I am deeply ashamed to have made a mistake of this magnitude.

Can’t comment on/write about/depict in fiction (or elsewhere) certain subjects unless the commenter/writer/depicter is of a particular race.

The assumption that the commented on/written about/depicted person or group is so fragile they have to be protected by the segregation of identity politics is just an extension of the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Duncan should be ashamed of her own racism, not of her attempt as a writer, a condescension form of racism that also was noticed, and decried by John McWhorter, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, when he called out the author of another book on race.

The racism of Kancel Kulture is made manifest.

Public Support for the US Navy

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Kate Bachelder Odell has an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in which she discusses the tribulations of today’s Navy as it has gone through a series of failures in the last few years. One of her theses is the lack of public support for our Navy.

It seems an ironic thesis.

The service is trying to do too much with too little public support

goes the subheadline. Then, there’s this, from the article itself:

Capt Brett Crozier was relieved of command of the USS Theodore Roosevelt after writing a letter saying he needed to move his sailors off the aircraft carrier to arrest an outbreak of the novel coronavirus.

No, Crozier was relieved after “writing a letter saying he needed to move his sailors off the aircraft carrier to arrest an outbreak of the novel coronavirus” and transmitting it in a manner virtually guaranteeing his letter, containing classified information concerning the combat readiness of the carrier, would be leaked.

It’s instructive that Odell chose to strip the context away from her claim, a context that is critical to the import of and rationale for Crozier’s being relieved.

Odell is an example of the “too little public support” the Navy receives.

It Doesn’t Get Any Clearer

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The good citizens of Hong Kong held massive, if informal, primary elections preliminary to the general elections that are coming up. These are pro-democracy candidates who have been selected, again informally, to stand for election.

Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam had this to say about that:

if the pro-democracy camp seeks enough seats to resist government policy, “then it may fall into the category of subverting the state power, which is now one of the four types of offenses under the new national security law.”

Even in the unlikely event that that…camp…were the majority party in the Hong Kong legislature, they can’t be the makers of government policy.

The principle of tyranny doesn’t get any more clearly stated than that.

What Makes Us Strong

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…as a nation.  Jack Brewer, CEO of the Brewer Group and advisory board member for Black Voices for Trump (and an NFL great, but that’s a separate story) had some thoughts on this while talking about the short-sightedness of tearing things down rather than adding others to the physical symbolism set.

I think at some point in our country we have to remember what makes us so strong and that is our history and our Constitution. It’s the reason why slaves are actually free, it’s the reason why schools are integrated and it’s the reason why right now you’re seeing us be able to fight for so many rights like school choice, fighting against all these late-term abortions and so many other issues that have oppressed the born and the unborn.

Indeed. It’s all of our history, not just the non-existent perfect parts.

It’s all of our history, the good and the bad. After all, if we don’t retain the bad, we can’t recognize the good we’ve done.

If we don’t retain the bad, we can’t learn from those mistakes and keep on doing good, much less do better.

If we don’t retain the bad, we can’t toughen ourselves against them or against bad in general—every wrong, including the trivial, will send our weak individual selves diving under our beds and our nation bowing to others. And begging.