Category Archives: Social Commentary

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Detroit’s Van Gogh

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…would be better off in LA:

Rather than an offense against art, a properly structured sale would represent a public-spirited update of how the art came to Detroit and other U.S. cities in the first place: as a way of providing liquidity to Europeans in need of cash. “The second world war has opened up an opportunity such as may never come again,” the DIA’s director wrote unabashedly in 1948. “Great private collections which have been held intact for a hundred years or more are being broken up.” Detroit is like an aristocratic estate forced to adjust to changing times. It can’t marry an heiress, but it might find some lucratively appreciative new homes for some of its heirlooms.

This is the just consequence of terrible voters’ decision and awful city management.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Religious Zealots

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…who are running our public schools:

What’s up with this? It’s not based on any concern with safety. Lego guns, cap guns, bubble guns, nibbled Pop Tarts, and fingers are no threat to safety. And the wild overreaction in these cases says there’s more going on here than simple school discipline. As I said, who treats a 5-year-old this way? It smacks of fanaticism.

In fact, it seems like a kind of quasi-religious fanaticism. I think it’s about the administrative class — which runs the schools with as little input from parents as possible — doing its best to exterminate the very idea of guns. It’s some sort of wacky moral-purity crusade. If a few toddlers have to suffer along the way, that’s tough. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

But that raises two questions. First, what business do public schools have in trying to extirpate “impure” thoughts? Aren’t we supposed to celebrate diversity? And, second, why should public schools decide that a longtime staple of American childhood, the toy gun, is suddenly evil?

Suppose you wanted to raise a generation that was both frightened of guns and thought them evil, except in the hands of government employees, and wanted to make thaat generation supine, disarmed sheep, and deferential to those same people. This is exactly what you would do.

These people are stupid, or evil, or both.

Economics, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Leviathan Fail

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Jonah Goldberg reviews Kevin Williamson’s new book:

Williamson offers a wonderfully Nockian tutorial on how all states — and nearly all governments — begin as criminal enterprises, while acknowledging that not all criminal enterprises are evil. Criminals — whether we’re talking So­mali warlords, Mafia dons, or the Tudors of England — often provide vital goods and services, from food to security. Often what makes them criminal is that they are competing with the State monopoly on such things.

Sidestepping the distinction between State and government, Williamson in­stead identifies what causes the Dr. Jekyll of government to transform into the Mr. Hyde of the State. He calls this elixir “politics.”

Williamson’s core argument is that politics has a congenital defect: Politics cannot get “less wrong” (a term coined by artificial-intelligence guru Eliezer Yudkowsky). Productive systems — the scientific method, the market, evolution — all have the built-in ability to learn from failures. Nothing (in this life at least) ever becomes immortally perfect, but some things become less wrong through trial and error. The market, writes Williamson, “is a form of social evolution that is metaphorically parallel to bio­logical evolution. Consider the case of New Coke, or Betamax, or McDonald’s Arch Deluxe, or Clairol’s Touch of Yogurt Shampoo. . . . When hordes of people don’t show up to buy the product, then the product dies.” Just like organisms in the wild, corporations that don’t learn from failures eventually fade away.

Except in politics: “The problem of politics is that it does not know how to get less wrong.” While new iPhones regularly burst forth like gifts from the gods, politics plods along. “Other than Social Security, there are very few 1935 vintage products still in use,” he writes. “Resistance to innovation is a part of the deep structure of politics. In that, it is like any other monopoly. It never goes out of business — despite flooding the market with defective and dangerous products, mistreating its customers, degrading the environment, cooking the books, and engaging in financial shenanigans that would have made Gordon Gekko pale to contemplate.” Hence, it is not U.S. Steel, which was eventually washed away like an imposing sand castle in the surf, but only politics that can claim to be “the eternal corporation.”

Read the whole thing, and buy the book.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Lie That Won’t Die

79 Comments

No, Tim McVeigh was not a Christian:

The DOJ political appointee adds in the article that the upcoming presentation will also focus on Muslim culture with a special emphasis on the fact that the religion is no different from others, even though some in the faith have committed terrorist acts, Christians have done the same. As an example he offers that the worst terrorist attack in the U.S. prior to 9/11 was committed by American Christians in Oklahoma City. He also mentioned the Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting last year in which another Christian, an American white supremacist, fatally shot six people and wounded four others.

Tim McVeigh was a self-avowed agnostic. So by definition, he was not a Christian. OK City had nothing to do with Christianity.

And if you read this article about the Sikh temple shooter, you know what you find no mention of? Christianity. Which isn’t surprising, given that he has a picture of himself in front of a swastika, and Hitler himself wasn’t Christian. He was a white supremacist, and it really is a slander to Christians to attribute his actions to that religion.

It’s really amazing how these people try to pretend that Islamist terrorism, like Fort Hood or the Boston Marathon bombing, has nothing to do with Islam, while grabbing for straws and outright lying about non-Islamic terrorism and its non-relationship to Christianity, or religion in general, all in order to strip us of our First Amendment rights. They need to be called on it, each and every time.

[Update a couple minutes later]

I didn’t get all the way to the end, so in fairness, I need to call Judicial Watch on this nonsense:

The president has even ordered the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to shift its mission from space exploration to Muslim diplomacy…

It’s amazing how many people actually believe this, based on nothing but an idiotic interview that Bolden gave to Al Jazeera. I suppose, though, because it seems pretty plausible that this administration would do something that stupid, even though it didn’t.