Tag Archives: culture

Cowardice? Or Tyranny?

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Earlier in the week, Breitbart News Editor Milo Yiannopoulos was scheduled to speak at UC Berkeley, but the institution (I can’t call it a school) canceled his appearance two hours before its start because protestors enrolled in the institution protested, violently with fire and smoke bombs.

Security allegedly was present, but the violence and damage occurred anyway.  UC Berkeley issued a statement about its decision that said, in part,

We condemn in the strongest possible terms the violence and unlawful behavior that was on display, and deeply regret that those tactics will now overshadow the efforts to engage in legitimate and lawful protest against the performer’s presence and perspectives[.]

The institution’s management talked about condemnation of the violence, but it chose to do nothing about it, it chose instead to allow the violence contribute to the destruction of free speech within its facilities.

Notice another thing in that statement.  The institution’s managers regret that violence “overshadowing” other protests against free speech, but they don’t have a minim of regret for the protests against free speech.

Nor is free speech in the Berkeley institution helped by the timidity of the Berkeley College Republicans.

Pieter Sittler, a spokesman for the Berkeley College Republicans, said the club doesn’t support everything Yiannopoulos says but “he gives a voice to repressed conservative thought on American college campuses.”

There’s no need for the protective qualifier; it isn’t relevant to the matter at hand: whether a man will be allowed to speak aloud a contrary opinion in the institution.

The cowardice, or the tyranny, of the Left says the only speech that may be freely spoken is that which the Left will permit and no other.  The timidity of the others functionally condones this tyranny.  The overt actions of the institution’s managers, limited as it is to idle chit-chat, actively condones this tyranny.

The only question remaining concerns Yiannopoulis’ description of the event:

[T]he Left is absolutely terrified of free speech and will do literally anything to shut it down.

Are they such cowards?  Or do they really favor such tyranny?  Or is this the cowardice of tyranny?

A Failed Culture

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That’s what exists in the State Department, has existed for administration after administration, and has been exposed lately by White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s remark earlier in the week about State Department personnel: I think that they should either get with the program or they can go.  The precious ones in the culture are out in force.

Some examples, with my attitude…exposed [link added]:

This ban, which can only be lifted under conditions which will be difficult or impossible for countries to meet….

Then these self-important ones should stop wasting time on their hurt feelings over not being personally consulted and spend their energies instead on helping those countries meet the conditions.  Whether or not they should have been consulted is an entirely separate argument, but the boss had and has no obligation to consult with them (see below) for all that it might be a good idea to do so.  Even at that, though, “consult” does not mean “get permission from.”

“I hope the White House is not suggesting that the officials would be fired,” [John Bellinger, State Department and National Security Council legal adviser in Bush the Younger’s administration] said….

This is completely disingenuous. “You should resign” is not at all a threat of being fired.

…the dissent channel is “a long-respected format” for diplomats and other State Department officials to express disagreement.

Indeed it is. However, it’s not a channel for employees to veto their boss’ instructions.

“It’s a specific example of the total lack of understanding, let alone respect of basic democratic norms,” a second official said.

A carefully anonymous official, notice. With good reason, too; he doesn’t understand that the organization isn’t a democracy—no organization other than a nation as a whole can be—it has a boss and employees.

A Large Misunderstanding

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A Wall Street Journal article about Breitbart writer and speaker Milo Yiannopoulos and his impact on college campus views of free speech opened with a widespread misunderstanding.

The tour by Milo Yiannopoulos is sparking reaction from more groups than any recent speaker has on college campuses, heightening tensions between free speech and public safety.

There is no tension between free speech and public safety, though: there is no public safety without free speech.  The relationship between free speech and public safety is not only—not even primarily—concerned with people whose feelings get hurt, or people legitimately insulted, and who then act out emotionally and dangerously.  The relationship is centered on Government’s ability to control what will be spoken or done and the threat that those abilities represent to public safety.

It’s only necessary to look at the vociferous protests from the Left and from the Right against what each side saw in its time as Government overreach to see the relationship.

Again: there is no public safety without free speech.  Full stop.

Whose Seat Is It, Again?

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A “journalist” asked then-Senate candidate Scott Brown (R, MA) whether he was willing to sit in Teddy Kennedy’s seat and block the Democrats’ health care bill.  Brown answered in pertinent part,

With all due respect, it’s not the Kennedy’s seat, it’s not the Democrats’ seat, it’s the people’s seat.

What brings that up is Senator Jeff Merkley’s (D, OR) claim in the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s announcement of his nominee for the Supreme Court, 10th Circuit Court Judge Neil Gorsuch.

This is a stolen seat. This is the first time a Senate majority has stolen a seat[.]

Stolen from whom?  Who owns this seat, exactly?  In the feverish minds of the Democrats in the Senate, a Supreme Court seat belongs to the Democrats, or maybe if we take Merkeley’s claim literally, it belongs to the minority party.  Or the seat belongs to a Liberal/Progressive wing of…somebody.  (Never mind that the liberal wing of the Supreme Court doesn’t even support the Constitution, holding that it lives through judicial rulings and not through Article V.)

And this, from Juan Williams, author of the piece at the second link:

[I]f a liberal now sitting on the court retires or dies and Trump has another nomination, get ready for fireworks if not all out war on the nomination.

Because somehow, that seat belongs to a liberal, if not a Democrat, or the “right” to pick who sits in that seat “belongs” to Democrats or other liberals.

And here’s that so-familiar view of morality, this time as articulated by Williams, and concerning the Republicans’ block of ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) nominee, DC Circuit Court Judge Merrick Garland, made in a Presidential election year.  Keep in mind that the purpose of the block was because Senate Republicans believed that the people in the upcoming election should have a voice in who the nominee should be.

Turnabout is fair play, acted on with glee in these politically polarized times.

There it is: the morality of a behavior isn’t at all intrinsic in the behavior, it’s strictly in whether someone else did it or is doing it.  Morality is strictly situational, the Democrat says, it’s whatever is politically convenient in the present case.  And that’s the immorality that the Democrats are applying to justify their opposition in the present case: payback’s a bitch, and we’re gonna be bitches.  Nothing at all on whether Gorsuch is qualified for the Supreme Court.

And this little detail.  By the Democrats’ logic, the vacant seat—Scalia’s seat in the Democrat lexicon—belongs to the conservative wing of…somebody, or it belongs to a Conservative, if not a Republican, or the “right” to pick who sits in it “belongs” to Republicans or other Conservatives.  Yet these Democrats in that election year demanded to install their left of center candidate into “Scalia’s seat,” and they’re determined to block the Republicans’ “right” to pick “their” judge for the seat.

But the question of whose seat the vacant one on the Supreme Court is—indeed whose seat each of the nine is—has been answered quite clearly, and the answer was plainly stated in the block of Garland.  Just as with all of the seats anywhere in the Federal government, we the People own the seats on the Supreme Court, including any vacant ones.  Not Democrats.  Not Republicans.  We the People.

Did I say feverish minds?  No, that’s wrong.  These Democrats know exactly what they’re doing, and the sad thing about it is that they’re doing it anyway.

The Party of No Refugees

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…doesn’t turn out to be Republicans, or even President Donald Trump.

Recall the Vietnam War, and our collapse in it, including the abandonment of South Vietnam by the Democrats then controlling the Congress when North Vietnam began its final invasion and that Democratic Congress refused to allow the US to try to rescue the South.

Recall the vasty numbers of refugees trying to escape the North’s takeover and to come to the US.

The Democrats said, “No!”

…a chorus of big name Democrats…refused to accept any Vietnamese refugees when millions were trying to escape South Vietnam as it fell to the communists.

They even opposed orphans.

These Democrats included

California’s then and now Governor Jerry Brown
Delaware’s Democratic Senator and lately Vice President Joe Biden
former presidential “peace candidate” George McGovern
New York Democratic Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman

Brown even went so far as to try to prevent refugee-laden aircraft from landing at the Federal government’s Air Force Base, Travis.  The Democrats’ excuse, epitomized by Brown?

We can’t be looking 5,000 miles away and at the same time neglecting people who live here.

And

They said they had too many Hispanics, too many people on welfare, they didn’t want these people.

And this:

McGovern said he thought 90% of the Vietnamese arrivals “would be better off going back to their own land,” according to the Library of Congress.

Three of those are still around, and two of them remain active in Progressive-Democratic Party politics.

Refugees, to this Party, to the individual men and women of this Party, are not human beings in desperate straits.  Not at all.  Refugees are merely tools for scoring political points for personal political gain.

Oh, and let’s not forget that Progressive-Democratic Party heroic icon, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who locked up hundreds of thousands of Americans who were already here just because they happened to have Japanese, Italian, or German heritage.