@Jeff_Foust has a roundup of the current discussion, including last week’s panel at the conference.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
Che Guevara
…and the American (and other) idiots who admire him:
Che’s comrades and associates were equally ruthless. Venezuelan-born Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, also known as Carlos the Jackal, was trained in one of Che’s guerrilla camps outside Havana. He emerged from his studies a monster and became the most wanted terrorist on earth. “Bin Laden has followed a trail I myself blazed,” he said following Al Qaeda’s assault on New York and Washington. “I followed news of the September 11 attacks on the United States nonstop from the beginning. I can’t describe that wonderful feeling of relief.”
He is serving a life sentence in the French penal system for murder.
And yet anti-establishment young people all over the world have Che’s face on their walls and their T-shirts. Most of them don’t know anything real about the man they admire. They have no idea he was one of the most violently illiberal establishment figures in the Western Hemisphere’s history. They admire the image, which is and always has been a fraud.
Fontova quotes a Cuban exile who goes by the moniker Charlie Bravo who says Che’s fans in the West need a kick in the ass by reality. “I’d loved to have seen those Sorbonne and Berkeley and Berlin student protesters with their ‘groovy’ Che posters try their ‘anti-authority’ grandstanding in Cuba at the time. I’d love to have seen Che and his goons get their hands on them. They’d have gotten a quick lesson about the ‘fascism’ they were constantly complaining about—and firsthand. They would have quickly found themselves sweating and gasping from forced labor in Castros and Che’s concentration camps, or jabbed in the butt by ‘groovy’ bayonets when they dared slow down and perhaps getting their teeth shattered by a ‘groovy’ machine-gun butt if they adopted the same attitude in front of Che’s militia as they adopted in front of those campus cops.”
Of course, that’s not the only subject on which they need a kick in the ass by reality.
Read the whole thing, and be sure to hit Michael’s tip jar.
Was Lincoln A Liberal?
Actually, he was. Conservatives are missing a great opportunity here, by pointing out that while Lincoln was a genuine liberal (and the first Republican president), the people who aren’t liberals are the leftists who call themselves that today. They stole the label decades ago to try to dress up their politics of envy and redistribution in prettier clothes.
The Obama Democrats
Their troubling view on work:
The subsidies that enable some Americans to decide “if they will work” mean higher taxes from those who must or want to work.
Republicans immediately jumped on the finding as proof that the law is a jobs killer and cited earlier discoveries about its destructive impact. These include Obama’s lie that “you can keep your plan” and the fact that many new insurance plans come with higher premiums and deductibles and fewer doctors.
Pay more, get less will be the experience for tens of millions by the time the law is fully implemented. And don’t forget its assault on religious freedom.
All true and yet, as Carney’s defense showed, something much, much larger is at play. The impacts are symptoms. The disease is that leading Democrats view fewer workers and more dependency as a good thing. That attitude largely explains slow economic growth, record-low labor rates and the explosion of handouts over the last five years.
This anti-job, pro-dependency tilt is the crux of the nation’s polarization. In essence, it pits those who believe in the sanctity of work against those who believe in penalizing wealth and redistributing its fruits.
Not all Democrats agree with that approach, but the party is now controlled by those who do. It is the party that celebrates subsidies and rewards states for getting more people on food stamps. It opens the door wider for disability payments and fights for unemployment benefits like it once fought for jobs. It does these things not because of an emergency but because of a warped ideology.
It’s called Marxism.
Eighth Avenue High
Fast time, fast times…
High school is an apt metaphor for the shenanigans inside the Times’ $850 million skyscraper at the corner of Fortieth Street and Eighth Avenue. The Times portrayed in Kurson’s article is not the established, serious, and competent institution of the liberal imagination. It is the Beverly Hills High School in Clueless, a cliquey and catty war of all against all, where the self-importance of the occupants masks deep insecurities. The next time our reporters and producers and anchors and bloggers affect an air of moral or social superiority, the next time they pretend to know the answers to every political and economic and cultural question, remember this: They are basically teenagers.
And yet as I read the story I could not help feeling, despite my better instincts, a twinge of sympathy for Rosenthal and his editorial staff. The “tyranny and pettiness” ascribed to the op-ed editor seems to me to apply equally to the behavior of a gossipy newsroom reeking of self-importance and snarky jibes. Nor are the specific complaints lodged against him any more compelling: Bad bosses are part of the human condition, and as a longtime subscriber I find it less than surprising that it can be difficult to get along with the people who produce the New York Times.
The rest of the case against Rosenthal is unintentionally revealing. “The growing dissatisfaction,” Kurson says, “stems from a commitment to excellence that has lifted the rest of the Times, which is viewed by every staffer The Observer spoke to as rapidly and dramatically improving.” But “commitment to excellence” are not the words I would choose to describe a paper whose coverage is increasingly liberal and silly, devoted to sniffing out racism and sexism and to identifying trends significant only to a select few, a paper that in the last month devoted not one but two articles to the subject of female pubic hair, that loads its news copy with opinion through mealy-mouthed phrases like “some say” and “has long been viewed,” that uses its pages as a Democratic fundraising apparatus, that thinks a $1,700 dollar suit is a sign of mayoral populism, that specializes in publishing articles detrimental to national security, that treats the president as a courtier treats a king, that is so eager to disqualify a potential challenger to Hillary Clinton that it initially misrepresented its latest “scoop.” One source tells Kurson the problem with Rosenthal “really isn’t about politics, because I land more to the left than I do the right.” You don’t say.
No kidding.
We’re Number 53,000!
[Sunday morning update]
We’re up within 35,000 today, and there are three new (all five-star) reviews.
I think this is the highest ranking the book has ever had on Amazon. Sales must have picked up this week (I hawked it quite a bit while in DC, both at the conference and with a couple think tanks — I’ll probably be doing a ReasonTV interview in the next couple weeks).
Also, it’s once again number one in the category “Aviation and Space Law.” Plus, it’s selling for full retail, which I’d assume means that Amazon thinks there’s sufficient demand for it that they don’t have to discount (not that I’ve given them a lot of room to do so, but they have had it down a buck or so in the past).
[Update a while later]
OK, based on numbers at the printer, it looks like I sold 27 books last week. Compare that to 18 for the entire month of January. Hopefully those will continue to build with more publicity, and good reviews at Amazon (six right now, all five star).
[Bumped]
On Homosexuality And Sin
Andrew Klavan makes a good point, I think:
I did not mean the sentence as the expression of a factual duality: either sex is this or that in actuality. I meant it as a response to Phil Robertson’s comments on homosexuality — a sort of mental argument with Phil, if you will. Robertson talks about homosexuality as a sin, while describing it in purely physical terms. What I should have said is something more like: “If Robertson thinks homosexuality is a sin, then he should address its spiritual aspects. If he just doesn’t like the physical nature of it, he’s welcome to express his displeasure but he shouldn’t pretend he’s making a larger spiritual point.” I used blogger shorthand and the meaning got blurred. My bad.
I agree. Whether (male) homosexuality is disgusting (as I find it) is a completely separate issue from whether or not it is sinful (I don’t think it is, but I have problems with the very concept of sin). Phil Roberts muddied the waters by conflating them. One can imagine an (unfortunate) homosexual who believes that his behavior is sinful, but by definition, doesn’t have any other problems with it. As I’ve noted in the past, and even the recent past, I think that many people who think it sinful are in fact bi (and therefore are tempted themselves), but consider themselves morally superior to homosexuals who they believe have a “choice” (as they do).
The Second Amendment
…applies to guns carried in cars.
Of course it does.
The Real War On Women
…is by Democrats. Not to mention the NAACP:
I know I’m just a blogger & radio talk show host, but it seems to me that the NAACP actively working to make sure a democrat convicted of assaulting a woman who refused him sex is something that would not only be Immediately be recognized as Newsworthy, but given the “War on Women” meme would elevate this to a national story.
It has been said that the current media are simply Democrat operatives with bylines. If they choose to ignore this story that will be confirmed without a doubt.
Oh and if you claim to be a feminist & aren’t outraged by this, then you’re lying to yourself.
Yup. Just like their defense of Bill Clinton’s predatory behavior.
Failing Well
…is the American way. Michael Barone reviews Megan McArdle’s new book
[Update a couple minutes later]
This bit is interesting:
Her advice is to avoid enterprises that are in long-term decline, such as General Motors starting in the 1970s. In business and public policy, try to learn from well-conducted experiments — but recognize that successful trials can’t always be replicated on a large scale.
I think that also applies to NASA human spaceflight as practiced for the past fifty years.