Category Archives: Social Commentary

The Refugee Problem In Europe

Stand by for a collision:

When the problem was largely confined to Middle Eastern women it is easy to understand why it was ignored. Now that taharrush has come to Europe it is easier still. Events are being covered up because it runs counter to the Narrative peddled by the Western left. The Narrative is the source of their moral authority, the justification for their special graft.

What makes the pathological denial so catastrophic is that a vast, almost unstoppable torrent of refugees is already on the way to Germany, the fragments of collapsing Islamic countries. Cologne is but a skirmish with the vanguard. The main host is still on its way.

In belated mea culpa former senior adviser to president Obama Dennis Ross at last took his boss to task in an article titled: “How Obama Created a Mideast Vacuum”. It’s too late Dennis. What “too late” means was driven home years ago when one of the volunteer members of the Philippine Airlines cadaver recovery team described an accident which took the lives of 5 members of a university mountaineering club. The party was trekking along a dry riverbed on the lower slope of an 8,000 foot volcano in Mindoro. The weather was fine and the mountaineers were doomed. Unknown to them a squall had dumped a slug of rain on the peak high above them. The first warning they had of oncoming tons of water was a rumbling sound round the corner of the gorge. Then the flood came and only those fast enough to clamber up the riverbanks survived.

In the same way the present calm in Europe can be deceiving. Even if its leaders were somehow to reconstitute its borders, a gigantic flood from that vacuum upstream of the old continent is already rushing with irresistible force upon it. The UNHCR says refugee numbers are expected to increase in 2016. Some estimates say as many as 10 million more are on the way. From the beaches of North Africa to the overcrowded camps in Jordan and Lebanon; from every nook and cranny in MENA — they are on the way. One way or the other a terrible smash is now in train.

Europe as we know it may already be lost. Martel weeps.

[Update a couple minutes later]

The European media and the sexual assaults:

Scally’s bizarre use of “groping” is close to the worst imaginable example of PC disinformation from Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. “Groping” is a word better reserved for the awkward and/or unwanted advances of an adolescent teenager in regard to someone roughly his or her own age. Here, instead, we have (if Scally’s sources are to be believed) 30 adult men who organized a premeditated attack on a child—not a “young woman” as Scally mischaracterizes her—a child—a person under 18. (18 is the age of majority in most of Europe, including Germany.) This child was not “groped”—I had fingers at every orifice—she was the victim of sexual assault, rape, and attempted rape by multiple perpetrators. Again, groping generally refers to wanted or unwanted touching or fondling. The victim here did not describe “groping;” she described something far more serious: sexual assault and rape.

It’s almost as thought they’re trying to minimize the crimes for political reasons.

Ideology

Now trumps all:

This is extremely bad news for America because it is very hard to have an effective democracy without compromise. But rising cross-partisan hostility means that Americans increasingly see the other side not just as wrong but as evil, as a threat to the very existence of the nation, according to Pew Research. Americans can expect rising polarization, nastiness, paralysis, and governmental dysfunction for a long time to come.

This is a warning for the rest of the world
because some of the trends that have driven America to this point are occurring in many other countries, including: rising education and individualism (which make people more ideological), rising immigration and ethnic diversity (which reduces social capital and trust), and stagnant economic growth (which puts people into a zero-sum mindset).

This is extremely bad news for science and universities
because universities are usually associated with the left. In the United States, universities have moved rapidly left since 1990, when the left-right ratio of professors across all departments was less than two to one. By 2004, the left-right ratio was roughly five to one, and it is still climbing. In the social sciences and humanities it is far higher. Because this political purification is happening at a time of rising cross-partisan hostility, we can expect increasing hostility from Republican legislators toward universities and the things they desire, including research funding and freedom from federal and state control.

They’ve made their bed.

Cultural Libertarianism

Will 2016 be the year of the defeat of the Social Justice Warriors?

Had progressives wanted to stem the tide of cultural libertarianism, the time to do it was a year ago. They could have edged back, been reasonable and won us all over. But instead they doubled down. Fine: now they get to lose. Let’s defend culture and free expression and push these odious halfwits back into their dreary studio apartments filled with cat-piss and alt rock records and let them know that we’ve decided to opt out of the soft bigotry of San Francisco-style nonsense. We possess a working sense of humour and we’re going to use it whether they like it or not.

Let’s hope. He’s a good general to lead the charge.

Why Leftist Men Treat Women Worse

It’s because they let them get away with it.

But then, the misogyny of the Left goes back decades.

[Update a while later]

I will not stop talking about this. Good for you, Kat.

I’d never actually seen such a complete list of the women that Bill (and Hillary) Clinton abused.

[Update a few minutes later]

Sex, lies, Clinton and Trump:

times have changed and morality with it. I don’t think Bill, and certainly Hillary, would want Juanita Broaddrick brought up at a time when, on our campuses, even an unwanted kiss is legally considered rape, thanks to Title IX. Can you imagine how many instances of what is called “unwanted touching” could come out of the woodwork now if Bill started to pick a fight with Trump? It’s hard to imagine Clinton making it through Georgetown or Yale Law under today’s rules, or even through his freshman year.

And he got away with raping that young woman at Oxford.

[Update a few minutes later]

Mark Steyn: A tale of two Bills.”

Star Wars

…and the age of the fake nerd.

I suppose that’s still better than taking pride in your ignorance of math, as some do. As I noted on Twitter yesterday, it’s OK to like Star Wars, as long as you don’t delude yourself that it’s science fiction.

[Wednesday-morning update]

Star Wars TFA has a perfection problem. Note (FWIW) that Megan is married to SF film critic Peter Suderman.

[Bumped]

Economics 101

for Bernie Sanders:

As long as we have prices, the government will have a budget. And reducing the interest rate on loans with a high delinquency rate compared to other loans means that we will have less money to do something else. Giving people free tuition will also mean that the government will have less money to do something else — a lot less money. Sanders tries to deal with this problem by conjuring hundreds of billions worth of imaginary tax revenue out of thin air, but alas, the actual president will have to find real money, taken from some other use. Is subsidizing the folks who are going to end up as the best-off members of society really what we would choose to use that money for?

He was told there would be no economics.

[Update a while later]

Bernie Sanders: The economics of a toddler, and the ethics of a thug.

In other words, a typical leftist.

[Mid-afternoon update]

Sort of related: A liberal professor has given up on academia.

[Wednesday-morning update]

Last link was broken, fixed now.

The War On (Some) Drugs

This is outrageous:

…of course, we can’t have the media looking into critical public safety initiatives like “Operation Constant Gardener.” If such scrutiny revealed that cops consider merely shopping at a garden supply store to be suspicious behavior, that drug testing field kits are more about circumventing the Fourth Amendment than accurate results or that a sheriff’s boast of having shut down a drug operation run by an “average family” in a “good neighborhood” was actually a terrifying raid in which SWAT cops held two kids at gunpoint because their mother enjoyed drinking tea … well, some people might begin to question the wisdom of the drug war.

I hope they win on appeal.