Category Archives: Social Commentary

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

The DC Economy

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Are we living the Hunger Games?

Washington is rich not because it makes valuable things, but because it is powerful. With virtually everything subject to regulation, it pays to spend money influencing the regulators. As P.J. O’Rourke famously observed: “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.” But it’s not just bags-of-cash style corruption. Most of the D.C. boom is from lobbyists and PR people, and others who are retained to influence what the government does. It’s a cold calculation: You’re likely to get a much better return from an investment of $1 million on lobbying than on a similar investment in, say, a new factory or better worker training.

So Washington gets fat, and it does so on money taken from the rest of the country: Either directly, in the form of taxes, or indirectly in the form of money that otherwise would have gone to that factory or training program.

I’m not the only one to notice this, or even to make the Hunger Games analogy. As Ross Douthat wrote, “There aren’t tributes from Michigan and New Mexico fighting to the death in Dupont Circle just yet. But it doesn’t seem like a sign of national health that America’s political capital is suddenly richer than our capitals of manufacturing and technology and finance, or that our leaders are more insulated than ever from the trends buffeting the people they’re supposed to serve.”

I always have a sense when I visit DC of a corrupt and decadent capital, bleeding the rest of the country, which it barely deigns to fly over, white.

[Update a while later]

Link was missing before. Fixed now, sorry.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Girls

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…not coming of age:

…there’s an important difference between Apatow’s work and Dunham’s, and that is that Apatow tells and re-tells stories of growing up, while Dunham shows a group of women who stubbornly refuse to do so. Apatow shows characters learning the importance of responsibility and morality, while Dunham’s characters are largely devoid of the former and uninterested in the latter.

The show’s main character, played by Dunham herself, embodies all of this. In the first scene of the pilot, when her parents tell her they won’t be paying her bills any more, she loses it, and informs them that instead of pushing her out of the nest, they should be grateful she isn’t addicted to pills. Her friends are equally appalled by the prospect of a 24-year-old paying her own phone bills, and, for the most part, they’re equally reckless. For instance, in the second episode, one of them misses her abortion appointment because she’s busy having sex in a bar. And their romantic relationships — unsurprisingly — come in about every possible iteration of dysfunction.

…You can almost argue that Lena Dunham sees President Obama as the perfect surrogate for everything missing in her characters’ lives: He’s their gentle lover, supportive parent, and empathetic friend. He’s special. He won’t let them down. He’s Prince Charming. And that kind of defeats the purpose of feminism.

You’d think the feminist elevation of agency would result in women who take pride in being responsible for their own bodies. You’d hope that telling women that they can do whatever they want would imply that they’re responsible for what they do. You’d think serious feminists would argue that true empowerment is something you lay claim to, not something the federal government dispenses in all its benevolence. But for Dunham, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Because feminism was hijacked by the left back in the seventies, despite the fact that campus leftists were some of the biggest male chauvinist pigs around.

Business, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The “Hollywood Holocaust”

68 Comments

…and other Cold War myths. I agree with Glenn:

Leaving aside the obscenity of comparing out-of-work screenwriters with gassed Auschwitz inmates, there’s this: Communists are no better than Nazis. Refusing to hire Communists is on the same moral plane as refusing to hire Nazis. Which is to say: It’s a good and admirable thing, not a sin. Go broke and starve, commies. It’s what you deserve for being eager, willing servants of totalitarianism.

That it’s perfectly acceptable to be a communist, but not a Nazi, in society at all, let alone teaching students on campus, is morally disgusting. All children of Rousseau should be ostracized in a truly liberal democracy.

Education, General Science, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Politicians’ “War On Science”

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Who said it, Rubio or Obama? It’s useful to point this kind of thing out, of course, and I’ve always thought that Chris Mooney’s theses were nonsensical — both parties have ideologies that are opposed to scientific reality.

But I disagree with this:

So Obama believes in evolution, and presumably he’d like to teach it in the nation’s public schools, while Rubio suggests that “multiple theories” should be given equal time. But even so, both men present the science as a matter of personal opinion. Obama doesn’t say, Evolution is a fact; he says, I believe in it.

Well, he shouldn’t say that, because evolution is in fact not a “fact.” It, like gravity, is a scientific theory. And it is perfectly philosophically legitimate to say that alternate theories should be taught in school, but it should be done not in a science class but in one on comparative religions (of which science is one). That there is an objective reality about which we can discover things through scientific methods is not a fact, or “truth,” but an axiomatic assumption. Science is a form of faith, but in terms of understanding the natural world, and forging new artificial creations from it, it is a very successful and powerful one.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

A Media-Caused War

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CNN, among others, has childrens’ blood on its hands:

By participating in this pas de deux, the media are complicit with Hamas in that killing and maiming because it is done for them. It happens so the media can report it. They might be shocked to hear it, but if they stopped to think for a second, the media would realize that the war, on Hamas’ part anyway, would not exist if no one publicized it. Without publicity, Hamas couldn’t be less interested. And the Israelis, unprovoked, would never send a single missile into Gaza. Everyone knows that.

So Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the others fight for the benefit of the media. That’s it. That’s their sole motive — to show Israel as brutal with the help of the press. They live for the Israelis to make a mistake — and if the Israelis don’t, they invent one.

By participating in this charade, the media are effectively racist, treating the Palestinians like “ignorant wogs” from the days of British imperialism, incapable of taking care of themselves or of making a decent society for themselves. The media portray the Palestinians as victims, therefore encouraging Palestinian victimhood.

They are also “objectively pro-fascist” in Orwell’s term, because Hamas is an Islamofascist organization and they are doing Hamas’ will.

CNN et. al. rarely report the obvious — that if Hamas devoted a tenth of the time and money to hospitals, schools, and other civic institutions that they do to amassing an arsenal of 12,000 missiles and whatever else, the Gaza Strip would flourish like a paradise.

Because that would be the wrong narrative.

Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Tribal America

48 Comments

Some depressing thoughts on our demographic demagogued destiny, from Mark Steyn:

The short history of the Western Hemisphere is as follows: North America was colonized by Anglo-Celts, Central and South America by “Hispanics.” Up north, two centuries of constitutional evolution and economic growth; down south, coups, corruption, generalissimos, and presidents-for-life. None of us can know the future. It may be that Charles Krauthammer is correct that Hispanics are natural Republicans merely pining for amnesty, a Hallmark Cinco de Mayo card, and a mariachi band at the inaugural ball. Or it may be that, in defiance of Dr. Krauthammer, Grover Norquist, and Little Mary Sunshine, demographics is destiny and, absent assimilationist incentives this country no longer imposes, a Latin American population will wind up living in a Latin American society. Don’t take it from a right-wing bigot like me, take it from the New York Times. In 2009, Jason DeParle filed a story about suburban Maryland, in which he helpfully explained the municipality of Langley Park to Times readers:

Now nearly two-thirds Latino and foreign-born, it has the aesthetics of suburban sprawl and the aura of Central America. Laundromats double as money-transfer stores. Jobless men drink and sleep in the sun. There is no city government, few community leaders, and little community.

Golly. You’d almost get the impression that Mr. DeParle thinks that laundromats doubling as money-transfer stores, jobless men drinking and sleeping in the sun, and dysfunctional government are somehow characteristic of Central America. That sounds awfully judgmental for a Times man, no?

Immigration, multi-culturalism, democracy. Pick any two.

Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Good News For Israel

2 Comments

Sort of…

What the official characterized as “the implosion of the Arab world” would make it much harder for Arab countries to mount a conventional threat against the Jewish state, he said. “Between the alternative of having our enemies divided or united, we prefer to have them divided,” he added. “The states put together after World War I by Mr. Sykes and Mr. Picot won’t hold together. We are finding out that Arab countries aren’t really countries in the first place. Libya turns out to be not a country, but a collection of 140 tribes. And we hardly need talk about what is happening in Syria.”

He added, “The clout of the Arab League is falling, and Arab oil is becoming less important.” After the 1967 war, he observed, the Arabs consoled themselves for their defeat by asserting that time was on their side. “Now, no-one can say that time is on the side of the Arabs. They are in danger of disintegration. Time is on nobody’s side. Time is on the side of whoever prepares best for the future.”

It’s bad news, though, for the people of the Arab world. Of course, there’s never been a good time for them.

Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Taking Back The Joint

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Betsy Woodruff thinks that the Republicans could use pot as a wedge issue against the Democrats:

For the GOP, this is more than just an opening; it’s a magical messaging moment, which, to paraphrase Rahm Emanuel, conservatives shouldn’t let go to waste. “This is a classic example of where they can walk the walk,” says Tim Lynch of the Cato Institute. This isn’t really a drug-legalization issue; it’s a states’ rights issue and a limited-powers issue. All conservatives have to agree on is that the federal government might have better things to do with its freshly printed money than try to enforce a nigh-unenforceable law that local voters and leaders think was a bad idea in the first place.

That’s how Clarence Thomas sees it, too. In his dissenting opinion in Gonzales v. Raich — a case that decided that California couldn’t allow home-grown medical marijuana — Thomas wrote that “local cultivation and consumption of marijuana is not ‘Commerce . . . among the several States.’” And, therefore, it’s not in the purview of the Feds. “Our federalist system,” he continued, “properly understood, allows California and a growing number of other States to decide for themselves how to safeguard the health and welfare of their citizens.”

Just sub “Washington and Colorado” for “California,” and you have a constitutionally sound, politically popular, stupidly simple criticism of the White House. If the GOP is going to be competitive in 2016, it has to communicate to young people that intrusive federal government makes their lives worse. It has to communicate that it’s the party that respects personal choice and individual responsibility. And it would probably help to communicate that when in doubt, the GOP doesn’t automatically take the side of the insanely expensive branch of the federal government that breaks into people’s homes, shoots their dogs, and imprisons them because they added a funny ingredient to their brownies.

But expect the Stupid Party to continue to be so.