Category Archives: Social Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Lileks Weighs In

6 Comments

As would be expected:

She doesn’t hate Jews. How could she? Nobody hates Jews. She just wants their homeland dismantled and its residents scattered to – well, somewhere. Take it up with Germany, she notes. Fiddle-de-dee.

Read the comments, as the right-thinking folk of the West line up to applaud her. No doubt some of these people posted it as a Facebook update, leaned back from the keyboard, and felt that rush you get when you know you’ve finally shed some archaic inhibition that kept you from doing what you wanted to do.

It’s okay. You were fooled. You were misled. No one hates the Jews. As for the Yids, the Queers, the lower forms of life known as women – it’ll all sort itself out once the millstone of Oppression is lifted from the breast of the Oppressed.

So that’s what we’re supposed to believe: good will abounds in the world. It flows from the human heart in unstanchable quantities, but now and then things happen. Bad things. Someone makes a movie. Someone dances in public. Someone sits with his wife in a Pakistan McDonald’s. The adults have to step in and make things clear. Calls have to be made. Speech has to be ceased; videos have to be blocked. If you don’t jazz the rabble they’ll come around. Any day now.

Any day.

But yesterday was not that day, and when the mob came to the embassy, it seems there were no Marines to defend the place. Perhaps that’s for the best. In the blinkered, jingo-sodden mindset of Red America, the Marines might have thought weapons free, and mowed the lot of them down. Among the dead would have been a young man – not particularly political, really, caught up in the excitement, really, righteously offended by the existence of a contrapositive argument existing in ones and zeroes on a server in America. His grieving parents would tell the world he had no weapon, he was not a terrorist. Yet they shot him down. Within hours the story would have the Marines outside the gates firing on people who had assembled to list a legitimate grievance – nevermind the security camera footage; the Jews are devilishly good at faking that – and the story would morph in a trice from an act of dogma-sodden barbarism to a tale of conflicting stories that underlines the difficulties of reconciling two sides.

Because the existence of two sides proves the equivalence of two sides. In the larger meta-sense of it all.

As always, read all.

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

A New Kind Of Leftist

4 Comments

But a Leftist nonetheless:

So what are we dealing with here? A radical leftist movement pretending to be liberal, growing out of the New Left of the 1960s, painfully aware of how the far left miserably failed in American history, and trying to create a twenty-first century stealth leftism. The first step was to gain hegemony in the key institutions that created ideas, rather than the factories that created material goods. They succeeded brilliantly.

The next step was to shape millions of Americans, especially young Americans, to accept their ideas that the United States was a force for evil in the world, a failed society, a place of terrible racism and hatred for women, and a country where the vast majority didn’t have a fair chance because the system was unfair. In fact, if you take away the varnish rhetoric, they argue that America is a virtual dictatorship of a small minority of wealthy people who just set everything up for their own convenience. Obviously this parallels both Marxist and non-Marxist historical leftism.

The fact that their description of America has so little to do with the actual country makes it all the more impressive that they’ve been able to sell this set of ideas. Having one of their indoctrinated products become president was a special bonus. That doesn’t mean Obama was backed by some conspiracy or singled out for highest office. There are thousands of such people who are in positions of power, including one-third of the Democrats in the House of Representatives. Obama just perfectly fit the needs of the moment.

Let’s hope the moment has changed.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Romney Is No Savior

19 Comments

…and that’s the point:

Do you hear yourselves? You’re Americans, not Europeans. You are the fruit of a nation constituted in liberty and based on the idea that the people can govern themselves. You should not wait for the king who sleeps beneath the hill.

Oh, I realize — I see — you look at 1980 and now, and you see the similarities and then you cry out “Romney is no Reagan.”

This is good, because Obama is no Carter. And our situation is in many ways far worse than it was.

But it is good, most of all, because Obama was bad enough that he woke the force that protects this country. It had been asleep for seventy years, sleeping beneath the dark hill of statism. It is now up, and roused and active. It is moving. The tea parties are proof of that, as is the massive swatting the Lords of Political Correctness got over the Chick-fil-A business.

Romney is a decent business manager. He’s a decent man. He likes America. He wants America to like him. He’s not going to actively dismantle our way of life, as will the one now in power. There will be no attacks on freedom of religion, no wild power grabs for the Internet, no executive orders that violate the laws of the land. He will not hanker for more “flexibility” so he can give more to Putin. And — this is petty but important for how the world sees us — he will neither apologize nor bow to foreign leaders.

Is he perfect? Oh, goodness, no. Is he exactly what we need? Probably not. Who is? Do you know the trouble we’ve got ourselves into by trusting presidents for this long? It’s a big hole. No one man can get us out of it. Only we can. And it will take time.

But that’s fine. He won’t be anointed by any gods. There will be no halos and no Greek columns. Instead, he’ll be the elected by the people and the people — the sovereign people of this free land — who are now awake will stand ready to make sure he knows it.

The Founders didn’t envision the president as a messiah, and neither should we. That kind of thinking was one of the reasons that our ancestors left Europe.

[Update]

Link is fixed, sorry!

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

That “You Belong To The Government” Video

2 Comments

…was no gaffe:

Later this summer, Obama notoriously argued that government created the environment for success through infrastructure spending. “If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that,” Obama told a crowd in Oakland. Obama later claimed he meant that businesses didn’t build the infrastructure that allowed them to be successful, and that government deserves the credit. But where did government get the capital to build the infrastructure in the first place? From the successful businesses that produced that capital, not from the Progressive Sunshine Forest.

The reference to churches in the video is another interesting point, although not one that Democrats want voters to notice. This administration imposed a mandate on employers to provide free birth control and sterilization to employees, even those employers whose religious values prohibit them from facilitating such access. Explicitly religious organizations such as schools, health care providers, and charities did not get an exemption, either. The message was very similar to what the video argued: you can join a church, but you belong to the government.

Yup.