Tag Archives: culture

Avoid Debate

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It might make some folks uncomfortable.  That seems to be the position of Lance Morrow, a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, in his Wall Street Journal piece.  After all, goes the subhead on his piece:

It would push the country to angrier extremes on either side, stimulating fresh antagonisms.

Morrow urged us all to “stop and think” about the implications of having a debate, here on the matter of reparations for past slavery-related transgressions.

The notion may be too volatile to indulge in a presidential-campaign year.

Leaving aside Morrow’s other major concern—

By pressing the issue they may ensure the re-election of Donald Trump….

—the question remains: if not now, when?  Apparently, “later.”

Better to keep monsters, old and new, locked in the basement, and to let the conversation upstairs in the living room be as genteel as possible—even hypocritical. In matters of race hate, candor is overrated. Hypocrisy may be the moral way to go—until, as time passes, people become more civilized.

Yeah, it’s better just to let the matter fester, building to a later, vaster explosion.

Sure.

Censorship Continued

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The Poynter Institute, an organization that masquerades itself as a…watchdog…built a list of what it claimed to be unreliable news outlets and then urged censorship through boycotting these offending outlets. “Unreliable,” mind you, was determined by Poynter personnel.  Then they got caught, and they’re claiming to have withdrawn their list.

Here are two critical clues to the nature of their list. One is [emphasis added]:

…initially released a list of more than 500 “unreliable” news outlets purportedly “built from pre-existing databases compiled by journalists, fact-checkers, and researchers around the country.”

Even those purported researchers were carefully unnamed.

And this one:

The index was created with the help of an employee for the Southern Poverty Law Center.

That’s by itself is a fatal condemnation.

From those two clues, it’s clear that the Poynter Institute got exactly what it was looking for.  It just got caught, like the Ezra Klein’s JournoList of a few short years ago.

Do we have, though, any reason to believe the list actually has been scrapped? Or is it merely being better hidden? Like that JournoList. This is, after all, a long-established member of the NLMSM.  The Managing Editor of Poynter, Barbara Allen, had this about that in her statement:

[W]e are removing this unreliable sites list until we are able to provide our audience a more consistent and rigorous set of criteria. The list was intended to be a starting place for readers and journalists to learn more about the veracity of websites that purported to offer news; it was not intended to be definitive or all encompassing

In other words, they’ll be back with a more effectively disguised version of their attempt at censorship, a censorship goal made plain by her next sentence. A starting place for readers and journalists to learn more about the veracity of websites, indeed. A “starting place” written by journalists and JournoList members who will define for us “veracity,” because we’re too stupid to recognize it on our own.

And not intended to be definitive….  Yewbetcha.

Socialism and Good Intentions

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Carol Roth, in her op-ed for FOXBusiness, said that Socialism begins with good intentions.

No, socialism does not.  Perhaps the first attempts did, but with its unbroken history of wealth concentration, power concentration, and utter failure—even for those in the concentrated top—before us and well known, that much is clear.  On the contrary, those proselytizing for and instigating socialist regimes have as their sole goal the accretion of wealth and power to themselves—and this time it’ll be different, this time they’ll pull it off.

Roth’s piece had a number of internal contradictions that illustrate the origins of socialist regimes, even though she seems to have missed them.

The first is her quote from Margaret Thatcher:

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

Those pushing socialism know this a priori, though.  They have no concern for the future, just the current seizure of all that OPM.  They’ll get theirs, and to hell with anyone else.

Then she wrote,

Socialism is quite like robbing Peter to pay Paul….

That’s not starting out with good intentions.  Unless it’s a Good Thing to rob someone, especially if it’s someone you don’t like.

And this bit:

Socialism starts out with noble intentions, preying on the envy of the population….

It’s noble to “prey on” the base instincts of the poor?  It’s noble to take advantage of others’ envy, to encourage the weak immorally to act out that envy?  How does that “logic” work, exactly?

Socialism, in each of its iterations over the last 100 years has not started with good intentions.  It has started with the greed of the few with the skill to peddle snake oil.  Socialism accelerates downhill from there.

Progressive-Democrat Hysteria

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Now illustrated by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA).

She says that Attorney General William Barr lied to the Senate in Wednesday’s Senate hearing because he refused to say what Progressive-Democrats want him to say.  This was emphasized by Senator Mazie Hirono (D, HI), who spent nearly all of her question-time in that hearing smearing Barr (with charges of lying) instead of asking him questions.

Pelosi also gleefully has called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) the grim reaper (following McConnell’s statement that he’d have to be the Grim Reaper if the Pelosi persisted in sending up her bad and partisan Progressive legislation).

Because not saying what Progressive-Democrats demand be said, not doing what Progressive-Democrats demand be done, is somehow dishonest.

The Progressive-Democrats’ FUD-raising behavior would be risible and worth ignoring, were it not for how dangerous Party is with its control of the House.

An All Too Common View

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In a Wall Street Journal article reporting on President Donald Trump, some of his family members, and his businesses suing a couple of banks to block Congressional subpoenas for 10 years worth of business records, a commenter in the comment thread had this to say:

The lawsuits by POTUS, et al., are an admission of domestic tax and business fraud.

This is a broadly held view by folks on the Left.  Objections of innocence are admissions of guilt.  Attempts to protect proprietary materials from prying eyes are admissions of guilt.  Attempts to protect privacy are admissions of guilt.

After all, goes their…logic…if someone hasn’t done anything wrong, if there’s nothing to hide, that person shouldn’t object to Government rummaging through his stuff.  Privacy, proprietary-ness—these aren’t things to be kept private or proprietary.  Let Government have a peek.

More dangerous than that severe danger, because it’s both more insidious and has broad-ranging implications, is the concept that if a Government issues a subpoena, it must be obeyed forthwith; it’s wrong to challenge it.  If that becomes the case, though, then the subpoena process will be reduced to a formality: everything in a man’s, or a business’, life will become free for the formal demanding by an unchallengeable Government.

That failure easily extends to the 4th Amendment: warrants will issue as easily as ever, but they cannot be challenged, either, even after the fact.  To do so would be another admission of guilt; after all, if the person or business has nothing to hide, then Government should be allowed to rifle through persons, houses, papers, and effects, only satisfying the formality of a claim of probable cause—which claim also must be beyond question.