Category Archives: Social Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

The Lame-Duck President

Clarice Feldman knows why he squawks.

It’s all he knows how to do.

[Update a while later]

Thoughts on the brilliant political strategery of Maureen Dowd:

One interesting thing about Ms. Dowd’s description of “hardball” political tactics is just how dainty and genteel her brass knuckle suggestions actually are. A speech, an appeal to reason: there is nothing here about lucrative contracts for political supporters, promises of sinecure jobs for politicians who lose their seats, a “blank check” for administrative backing on some obscure tax loophole that a particular politician could award to a favored client; there’s not even a delicate hint about grand jury investigations that can be stopped in their tracks or compromising photographs or wiretaps that need never see the light of day. Far be it from Ms Dowd to speak of or even hint at the kind of strategy that actual politicians think about when words like ‘hardball’ come to mind. Ms Dowd speaks of brass knuckles and then shows us a doily; at some level it speaks well of Ms. Dowd as a human being that even when she tries she seems unable to come up with an offer someone can’t refuse.

This is more broadly a problem of gentry liberal politics. Gentry liberals desperately want politics to be clean, to be about the “issues.” And they yearn for their heroes to eschew all those nasty tricks of machine politicians. Thus liberal columnists like Dowd give liberal heroes like Obama two contradictory missions: fight the fight cleanly, but win big. Even when she’s buffeting President Obama over the head with her laptop, screaming at him to fight harder and dirtier, she can only think in terms of ineffective gestures, talking points more clearly recited, and speechmaking.

Maureen Dowd will clearly not be in much demand as a political strategist after this column, but the President needs to pay it some attention. Many liberals like Ms. Dowd have extremely unrealistic ideas about where the country stands and how politics work. They genuinely believe that a huge majority (90 percent!) is slavering at the bit to get more liberal legislation passed. They genuinely believe that the presidency is invested with awesome and numinous powers that can translate the will of the 90 percent into sagacious liberal laws without doing anything dirty or distressing.

When, inevitably, reality falls short of their hopes, they don’t re-examine their ideas about how politics work or where the country stands. Instead they blame the President for failing to deliver what he clearly could if only he were willing to try.

The delusions have no end. Not to imply, of course, that the president is competent. But as this failed presidency gets longer in the tooth, the long knives will be out among the Left against its author. Revolutions always eat their own.

Mathematics, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Being Normal

1 Comment

Thoughts from Sarah Hoyt:

You see, the human desire to mimic and fit in is one of our strongest instincts. We are social apes. And we take our cues from stories, whether those stories unroll before our eyes, are in a sacred book, are passed down in the culture, or are poured at us in books and TV.

Now, here’s the thing – the Marxists understand this all too well. A few of you, before, when I called them a religion (there is no such thing as a secular religion, btw. Believing in afterlife is not needed for a religion. If I’m informed correctly some older forms of Judaism are at least mum on the subject. Communism is a mystery religion, relying on “something happens” to make their paradise come about right here on Earth. To their credit they work towards the ‘something” that is to transform man. To their lack of credit, both their goal and their methods are repugnant.) But they are. They have created their fantastical past paradise – the supposedly communitarian past/female dominant option not included, though they let the feminists run with it – their fall from grace – the introduction of private property – their sin – “greed”, meaning wish for personal improvement in circumstances – and their hope of paradise – the emergence of the homo Sovieticus, though I suppose they don’t call it that now. After that, of course, it would be the return to the communitarian paradise.

(They fail to understand that their communitarian paradise is actually a h*ll of individuals being treated as things, and that, because the collective can’t ever decide things as a collective, an individual ends up taking control. Which takes us right back to feudalism. But let that pass. And having told a commenter not to trust enemies of a religion as information on it, I’m bound to say I’m not. I was taught by true believers. It just didn’t take.)

I’ve always found normality to be highly overrated, myself. It’s not normal, for instance, to be much smarter than average, by definition. I’m always amused when people complain about gays wanting to “normalize” their behavior (which is clearly abnormal), as though there is a moral component to statistics.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Evil

17 Comments

Why does it make “liberals” stupid?

Ms. Garber thinks the fear that the bombers might turn out to be Muslims represents a “sad assumption” that “Americans lack the intellectual equipment and moral imagination to tell the difference between an individual and a group.” This is arbitrary, unfounded and stupid. Let’s put it this way: Americans possess the intellectual equipment and moral imagination to discern correctly the relationships between individuals and groups. In particular, the relationships between individuals and any fanatical movements or criminal conspiracies of which they are a part.

Of course, they have no problem whatsoever with the concept of evil if the people involved had been of the correct white European (not literally Caucasian) ancestry and into guns and militias and Tea Parties. Their disappointment when they were not was quite palpable. It’s only when they are politically correct non-people of that persuasion, and particularly when they are Muslim, that they become “complex.”

[Update a couple minutes later]

Erin Burnett is “surprised that the bombers weren’t stereotypical Americans.”

Of course she was. Because unlike Islamic extremists, “stereotypical Americans” would have no problem whatsoever with setting down an imminent bomb with nails in it next to an eight-year-old child.

These are the morons from whom we receive our “news.”

[Monday morning update]

The futile hunt for the elusive Tea Party murderer continues:

…decent Muslims are not responsible for the atrocity perpetrated by the Tsarnaev brothers. However, it is hopelessly naive at this point to speak of a “tiny minority of extremists” hijacking the religion of a billion people. The radical elements of Islam are larger and more powerful than that. They enjoy financial and cultural support from malevolent political factions who find Islam a comfortable fit with their ideology. The same media that never stops trying to weave an intellectual web between mainstream conservatism and bloodthirsty murderers is willing to discreetly avert its gaze from the radicalization of Islam overseas, and the tentacles these radicals are working patiently to extend into the United States. Islam has a problem, and only good, outspoken Muslims can solve it. We’re not doing them any favors by soft-pedaling the magnitude of the challenge they face, or setting a low bar of expectations for their achievements.

We might have gotten a good look at one of those outspoken good Muslims last week. (It seems patronizing to refer to them as “moderate Muslims.” Moderating between what – support for terrorism and good citizenship? We shouldn’t be looking for the “moderate” region between those “extremes.”) The Tsarnaev brothers’ Uncle Ruslan – a man who must have been going through a private hell few of us can imagine, as word of his nephews’ responsibility for the Boston Marathon bombings spread – thundered that these despicable acts of murder were an insult to the honor of his family, the Chechen people, and Islam. He denounced the terrorists in no uncertain terms, calling them “losers” who sought to ruin the lives of hard-working people making an honorable place for themselves in the great “mini-world” of America. Instead of hunting for the mythical snipe and wumpus of Tea Party murderers, the Left should take a lesson from Uncle Ruslan on calling out the real extremists in our midst.

But it won’t. Doesn’t fit the preferred narrative.

One more point — from comments:

What I can’t stand is the use of so-called experts and talking heads to fill the airtime when none of them know what they’re talking about. This is the time when their audiences are at the highest, the known facts are at their fewest, and people will remember things for a long time that very often turn out to be untrue. It’s almost to the point where we should apply the “48 hour rule” to any news coverage of a major news story such as a mass shooting or terrorist bombing. Treat everything you hear or read in the media in the first 48 hours with a high degree of skepticism.

I continue to recall with amusement the “aviation expert” that Fox News had after the first plane crashed into the twin towers, assuring us that this must be pilot error of some kind, and couldn’t be a deliberate attack. As he was sagely explaining this to us, the second plane hit, live, in the background.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Yes, we “right wingers” celebrate Adolf Hitler’s birthday every April, because, you know, Hitler was such an individualistic, freedom-loving, tax-hating, limited-government kind of guy.

I’d like to see pressure on NPR to fire this lying, slandering hack. OK, well maybe not lying — she’s probably nutty and stupid enough to believe it.

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

“If It Saves Just One Life”

11 Comments

I agree with this take on how the terrorists won in Boston. This sort of irrational risk aversion is the theme of my book. “Safe” is never an option, in any absolute sense. In order to prevent a potential death of a citizen, the authorities shut the whole town down, costing hundreds of millions of dollars to the local (and probably national) economy. The whole town, that is, except for the Duncan Donuts shops. Which, as he says, really tells you everything you need to know. It was security theater, just like TSA.

History, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

The Warsaw Uprising

3 Comments

Thoughts on the seventieth anniversary:

I think it’s fair to say that the world has learned something from the war and the Holocaust. When hateful people begin referring to enemy groups as insects or clods of human feces or as sons of pigs and monkeys, we all know now, much better than we did in the 1930s, that this is part and parcel of the dehumanization that invariably precedes genocide. This is a hopeful collective memory earned from the war, and of course it applies universally.

Needless to say, there have been other, literally monumental efforts to preserve the memory of the Holocaust, and of the heroisms great and small of World War II. But as the generation that lived during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and the war flies from us with each passing day, we Jews, anyway, ought to know better than to rely on stone and glass monuments and buildings and sculptures and physical structures to preserve memory. That is not the Jewish way. Other civilizations throughout history have built great buildings—pyramids and palaces and castles and cathedrals and great walls, and some have even carved huge idols in mountainsides. Yet all of those civilizations have either perished, been layered over to oblivion, or are likely one day to be layered over. Jews instead built palaces of memory in the hearts and minds of their children using words and melodies, not bricks and stone. Jews have translated their historical experiences into ramparts of the spirit.

That’s the purpose of the Seder, to preserve memories, and rituals like that grow more important as the events of seven decades past pass from living memory with the aging and deaths of their participants.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Gabby Giffords

5 Comments

…poisons the well:

If Alter meant it when he said he hoped Giffords would become a “referee” of public discourse–an advocate for reasoned civility–he ought to feel terribly disappointed. She has instead turned out to be a practitioner of incivility and unreason.

That’s a harsh but justified appraisal of her op-ed in today’s New York Times, titled “A Senate in the Gun Lobby’s Grip.” It’s a reaction to yesterday’s failure of President Obama’s gun-control proposals in the Democratic Senate. Giffords’s 900-word jeremiad should be included in every textbook of logic and political rhetoric, so rife is it with examples of fallacious reasoning and demagogic appeals. Let’s go through them:

Read all. Of course what happened to her is terrible, and tragic, but it doesn’t give her moral authority to bully and insult us with illogic. And the president has even less standing to do so.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Gun Control

15 Comments

Why the president lost:

By spending time on an assault weapons ban, gun controllers hurt themselves in multiple ways. They energized the NRA’s base, who could probably have been persuaded to live with background checks. They wasted time, which had a huge cost: gun owners care about gun rights all the time, but the rest of the population mostly cares about gun control in the wake of a high-profile tragedy. And they made themselves look less like serious negotiators who were willing to come to a compromise that the other side could accept, and more like they were trying to reinstate the kind of gun laws that NRA members had spent two decades beating back.

In other words, by demanding more, they got less.

Bottom line — he’s as incompetent at negotiation as he is at most things. And of course, it doesn’t help when you accuse people of cowardice because they don’t share your opinion.