Category Archives: Social Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Makin’ Mock Of Cops

9 Comments

Some thoughts on unrealistic expectations:

Essentially, the Left places an inhuman burden of patience and tolerance for risk on police officers, then jumps on the inevitable failure to achieve an impossible standard as proof of police corruption and violence. They do the same thing to soldiers in combat conditions, imposing on them restrictions that defy reason and human nature, then decry alleged “abuses” as creating moral equivalence between Americans and their enemies.

…The best way to lower the temperature in a neighborhood — to decrease the chances for the kinds of encounters that result in unarmed civilians dying to police gunfire — is to continue to engage in the law-enforcement and criminal-justice practices that we know can and do dramatically lower the rate of violent crime. And that means focusing on getting violent criminals off the streets. I strongly recommend Kevin Williamson’s piece on this point. Who commits murders? People with prior, violent criminal records. And so long as violent criminals are on the streets, police on those streets — who are properly and naturally more aggressive than civilians — will make exactly the kinds of decisions in the “fog of war” that cause anti-police radicals to chant for their deaths. It’s inevitable.

It’s all part of the Left’s war on human nature.

History, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Weird

The War On Mammals

18 Comments

…in New Zealand:

I’d come to watch the Adsheads poke at decaying stoats because they are nature lovers. So are most New Zealanders. Indeed, on a per-capita basis, New Zealand may be the most nature-loving nation on the planet. With a population of just four and a half million, the country has some four thousand conservation groups. But theirs is, to borrow E. O. Wilson’s term, a bloody, bloody biophilia. The sort of amateur naturalist who in Oregon or Oklahoma might track butterflies or band birds will, in Otorohanga, poison possums and crush the heads of hedgehogs. As the coördinator of one volunteer group put it to me, “We always say that, for us, conservation is all about killing things.”

It’s a bizarre story.

[Wednesday-morning update]

A number of commenters are wondering why I think this is bizarre. I guess it’s just because the notion of living in a place with no mammals whatsoever (other than humans) seems very weird to me. I understand that they’re not native, but I’ve lived with them all my life, and have trouble imagining their total absence. Would I even be allowed to keep a dog? Or a cat?

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Inherent Violence Of The Left

4 Comments

It’s no surprise that when you have an ideology that denies human nature, it can only be imposed by threats and force:

…(barely) deniable violence for purposes of intimidation is all part of the scheme. That’s what “no justice, no peace” means. As Richard Fernandez has written: “It is impossible to understand the politics of the Left without grasping that it is all about deniable intimidation.” That’s why they don’t want you to own guns, and that’s why they’re so panicked at groups, like the Tea Party, that aren’t intimidated.

Yup.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

“Icky” Conservative Groups

17 Comments

…were targeted by the IRS.

But remember, it’s a “phony” scandal.

[Update a while later]

More from the Tax Prof:

Here are six major takeaways from the report:

  1. The IRS admitted that the front office was “spinning” about the targeting rumors as early as 2012, after IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman denied the tea party targeting to Congress. …
  2. Then-IRS commissioner Steven T. Miller almost broke down and told the truth about the tea party targeting at a July 2012 hearing, but Lerner’s sidekick Nikole Flax told him not to. …
  3. The IRS definitely treated tea party applications by a different standard than applications from other (c)(4) groups. …
  4. Lois Lerner expressed her frustration about having to potentially approve a lot of groups, and her colleagues in the agency assured her that she wouldn’t have to. …
  5. So the IRS reached out to outside advisers to help come up with ways to deny tax-exempt status to “icky” organizations. …
  6. A May 2011 email from a lawyer in the IRS chief counsel’s office made clear that the agency sought to use a new “gift tax” to target donors to nonprofit political groups.

Move along, nothing to see here.

[Afternoon update]

The IRS was “fundamentally transformed” and “totally politicized” by ObamaCare and IRS targeting of Tea Party:

The transformation has produced “an IRS responsive to the partisan policy objectives of the White House and an IRS leadership that coordinates with political appointees of the Obama Administration.”

The inability of tax agency officials “to keep politics out of objective decisions about interpretation of the tax code damaged its primary function: an apolitical tax collector that Americans can trust to treat them fairly.”

“Not only did IRS employees allow politics to seep into their work from February 2010 to May 2012, but even after agency officials learned of misconduct, the response from senior agency officials was to manage the fallout rather than quickly expose and correct the misconduct,” the House investigators said.

And it continues to this day.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Exodus

6 Comments

…stage left:

Raise your hand if you want to see Moses portrayed as an insurgent lunatic terrorist with a bad conscience, the pharaoh who sought the murder of all first-born Hebrew slaves as a nice and reasonable fellow, and God as a foul-tempered 11-year-old boy with an English accent.

All right, I see a few hands raised, though maybe they belong to people who are still demonstrating about Ferguson. So let me ask you this: How many of you want to see how Hollywood has taken the story of the Hebrew departure from ancient Egypt — by far the most dramatic tale in the world’s most enduring book — and turned it into a joyless, dull, turgid bore?

I don’t know when I’ve seen a movie as self-destructively misconceived as Exodus: Gods and Kings, the director Ridley Scott’s $200-million retelling of the Moses story that has as much chance of making $200 million at the American box office as Ted Cruz has of winning the District of Columbia in the November 2016 election.

No one has explained to me why it was necessary to redo The Ten Commandments. I guess maybe it brings it to a new audience, with better effects, but why so totally screw with the Biblical story line?

This doesn’t inspire confidence for Scott’s upcoming treatment of The Martian.

[Update a few minutes later]

Also, this:

The problem with genre deconstruction in a biblical film is that Blue State audiences won’t touch religious-oriented films with a barge pole, and Red State audiences know when they’re being gaslighted, and those who see the film during its opening weekend quickly tell their friends to avoid yet another boilerplate Hollywood attack on religion. While some initial leftwing critics screamed that Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ was arguably torture porn and/or anti-Semitic, Red State audiences quickly discovered through word of mouth that Mel was perhaps the last filmmaker in Hollywood who took the notion of God and Jesus seriously. (As Hans Fiene of the Federalist quipped last week, if Hollywood wants to get its biblical blockbuster groove back, just “Pretend Mel Gibson is Roman Polanski.”

Heh.

[Update a while later]

It occurs to me that people opposed to this kind of thing don’t have to threaten to bomb theaters. It’s self detonating.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Left

11 Comments

…is vastly more racist than “the right”:

Since I was publicly identified with the right, roughly from when I started blogging in 2003 (although it was actually several years earlier in private), I have personally witnessed not a single incident of racism from anyone who could be considered a right winger and heard only one racial slur — and that was from a Frenchman. In the seven years I was CEO of PJ Media, I came to know or meet literally dozens of people who identified with the Tea Party. I did not hear one word of anything close to racism from any of them even once. Not one, ever. This despite their being accused of racism constantly.

…we live in [a] culture where there is considerably more black racism than white racism. Someone like Al Sharpton, clearly the equivalent of David Duke, is far more powerful than Duke ever was. No one pays attention to the execrable Duke, as they shouldn’t. But they shouldn’t pay attention to Sharpton either.

But he’s only a part of the problem. There’s also the mayor of the city of New York, Bill de Blasio, the prototype of the leftwing fellow-traveler racist who assumes someone is more moral or better because he or she is “of color.” Of course this is condescending — and therefore racist — to the people he thinks are so pure. No one is. The whole theory of “white skin privilege” is racist and totalitarian to the core: actually it was invented by totalitarians. And while I’m ranting here, all racial identity organizations like the Congressional Black Caucus are inherently racist and dangerous, just as the White Citizens’ Council was and would be.

That’s been obvious to me for decades. All their accusations of racism are just one more aspect of their psychological projection. And so overplayed has the race card become, by race baiters like Sharpton (and Holder, and Obama), that I now take being called a racist by them as a badge of pride.

[Update a while later]

This seems related:

Now and then, I think back to why I rejected the Left, many years ago — when I was in college. One of the reasons was, they always kept the racial pot boiling. They would never let the pot cool off. It seemed to me they did not want racial harmony. They preferred strife, regarding it as more “authentic” or something. Harmony was for Toms.

Yup.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Religion Of Peace Update

12 Comments

I know it’s become a sad joke, but when I heard last night about the execution of the two cops in New York, I thought “When will we find out that the perp was a Muslim”? With the last name “Brinsley,” I figured that we’d finally found a random murderous criminal act that wasn’t Jihad related — it was just from rage whipped up by the hateful race baiters like Sharpton (and de Blasio).

Well, it turns out that my relief came too soon:

In my previous posts on assassin Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who murdered two New York Police Department officers on Saturday, I noted that he had posted on Facebook a page of the Quran with a notorious verse calling on Muslims to “strike terror into the [hearts of] the enemies of Allah,” and another post about a fight he recently engaged in with an Atlanta panhandler when he discovered the panhandler was a “Muslim too.”

But an Instagram message posted by Brinsley during Ramadan five months ago may indicate that he visited one of America’s most terror-tied mosques.

Sigh.