What is happening in Greece was completely predictable, and predicted. What will happen to us is likewise if we remain on the current path.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
The Future Of Sex
It’s apparently not enough to socially compel us to celebrate abnormal sex. Now they propose to make normal sex illegal.
Hillary’s Emails
They’re apparently a treasure trove of stupidity, banality and vanity.
The country’s in the very best of hands.
[Update a while later]
But wait! There’s more!
So Hillary can’t work a fax machine and hasn’t driven a car since 1996, but journalists are still recycling false stories about Bush #41 and barcode scanners?
Give her a break. She’s an old woman.
Media Bias
It’s gotten so bad that even Howie Kurtz is starting to notice it. See, if you think that the definition of marriage is between a man and a woman, you’re a bigot. Toss gays off buildings? Who are we to judge?
And this exchange between Ben Smith and Hugh Hewitt was in fact very enlightening:
Elsewhere, John Nolte of Big Journalism listens to Hewitt’s interview with Smith and spots this juxtaposition: “BuzzFeed Pledges Allegience to Gay Flag — Editor Ben Smith Won’t Call Shariah Evil.”
Or as Ace notes, “it is quite obvious that [Smith] has never even thought about the questions Hugh Hewitt poses before. Simple, obvious questions everyone even pretending to be a thinker must ask himself, like ‘Why is it I feel comfortable declaring there are no two sides on gay marriage, and yet I cannot bring myself to criticize Shariah law?’”
Which dovetails well with this observation from Matt Lewis of the Daily Caller, when as a (more or less) conservative, he debates leftists: “I’ve noticed an uptick in the following phenomenon: I go on a TV debate show, and the people I’m talking to fail to grasp my points. I don’t mean they disagree with me — I mean they don’t comprehend what I’m saying.“
Why, it’s as if the left and right are speaking an entirely different language — as Insta-guest blogger John Tierney noted here yesterday.
Yes. And that’s partly a difference in world views, and partly a deliberate attempt to obfuscate and Newspeak the language.
Cat Petting
News you can use, from Science.
Ours will tolerate tummy rubbing, for a while.
Legal Polygamy
Not that I care that much, but it’s probably inevitable now. But as noted there, Richard Epstein makes a great point:
In particular, Kennedy never explains why his notions of dignity and autonomy do not require the Supreme Court to revisit its 1878 decision in Reynolds upholding criminal punishment for polygamy, which is still on the books. Nor does he ask whether the dignity of workers could, and should, be used as a reason to strike down the full range of labor regulations on both wages and hours that make it flatly illegal for two individuals to enter into a simple employment contract on mutually agreeable terms.
That would require them to rule consistently, rather than just making it up as they go along based on stuff they like.
Grace And Dignity After Charleston
Thoughts from Jonah Goldberg:
There are few subjects that ignite more casual, uninformed bigotry and condescension from elites in this nation than Dixie. “Practically the whole region has rejected nearly everything that’s good about this country and has become just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment,” the Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky wrote last year.
How then to explain the tens of thousands of South Carolinians, white and black, marching in unity across the Ravenel Bridge on Sunday night? Did the city bus in decent Northerners?
The Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins glibly asserts that “the Confederate battle flag is an American swastika, the relic of traitors and totalitarians, symbol of a brutal regime, not a republic.”
If it were left to me, I would take the flag down (for the reasons South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley laid out Monday). But this kind of cheap moral preening is galling. Is it really too much for people to muster the moral imagination that the issue isn’t nearly as simple as that?
A November poll of South Carolinians found that 61 percent of blacks wanted it down. That means nearly 4 in 10 blacks felt differently. Are they deluded? Are they the moral equivalent of self-loathing Jews, happy to live under a swastika?
Bigotry against white Christian southerners isn’t just the only acceptable one; it’s almost mandatory. And it largely comes from people who embrace and vote for the historical and traditional (and current) party of racism.
The Language Of Leftists
Yes, they do talk differently, and duplicitously:
…here’s another way to look at the results. Liberals talk about politics in language that appeals to our primal socialist instincts, developed on the savanna when we belonged to small clans of hunter-gatherers who really did look out for their kin. Conservatives discuss politics in language that reflects modern reality: socialism doesn’t work in groups larger than a clan, because people do not behave selflessly when they belong to a large group of unrelated strangers. Liberals believe in what the economist Daniel Klein calls “The People’s Romance,” but that fallacy has been exposed by Adam Smith, de Toqueville and Darth Vader, among others.
When liberals say that “government is the word we give to the things we choose to do together,” they score high on affiliation, and some of them may even believe government is one big happy collaboration among equals. But conservatives know that philosophy just means giving one small group of people in the capital more power to boss and coerce the rest of us.
Yes. I think this also related to Jonathan Haidt’s thesis.
How Republics Die
My thoughts on the most recent judicial atrocities, over at PJMedia.
[Update later afternoon]
Some thoughts from Randy Barnett on “judicial restraint” and Republican judicial appointments.
I know it sounds crazy, but I want judges to follow the Constitution, not the tyrannical majority. I also want them to overturn crap decisions. Stare decisis my ass.
[Update a little while later]
Should we make Justices accountable to the voters?
It seems like a bad idea to me. I agree with Cruz’s diagnosis of the problem, but not his remedy. I think that one of the reasons that impeachment is so toothless is the original wording: “High Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The Founders had a very clear view of what that meant, but most people today do not, as we discovered during the Clinton impeachment trial. The only successful impeachments and removals I can think of occurred in the context of gross and blatant corruption (Alcee Hastings, who was later re-elected), or actual criminality. The other part of the problem is that, while they were adamantly opposed to political parties and made no Constitutional provision for them whatsoever, they perhaps didn’t anticipate how difficult they would make impeachment (even though court appointments are in theory non-partisan).
I think a better solution might be to amend the Constitution to simply modernize the grounds for impeachment. For instance, “…or, in violation of their oath of office, persistent indifference to the Constitution and the rule of law.”
Who could argue with that? It would be quite entertaining to watch Democrats attempt to argue that office holders shouldn’t have to uphold their oath of office. And if it passed, it would force impeachment trials to actual discuss those arcane concepts.
[Update a few minutes later]
This is sort of similar to proposals to rein in the government by adding the words “and this time we really mean it” to the 9th and 10th amendments against encroachments by the flawed interpretations of the Commerce Clause. It would be a “this time we really mean it” to simply following the Constitution and the rule of law.
Racism In America
90% of it comes from the Democrats and the Left.
Yes. And it’s always been the case, from the times of slavery, through Reconstruction, and Jim Crow, right up through today.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: Why do we continue to honor the racist Woodrow Wilson? He was a Democrat, and the first arguably fascist president. And his views were probably influenced by the anti-Enlightenment pro-slavery screeds of Calhoun and Fitzhugh.
[Friday-morning update]
Whitewashing the Democrats’ racist history. With (as always) the aid of the media, either from ignorance or partisanship, or both.
[Bumped]