Category Archives: Social Commentary

Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Credit Downgrade

37 Comments

…isn’t the Tea Party’s fault — it’s a symptom of the Marxist disease:

It is time to call a spade a spade — this is Marxism we are talking about, pure and simple.

This bubonic plague of the last century killed tens of millions in the Soviet empire alone, but a young generation of Americans who know little about its destructive power decided to give it a new lease on life. In November 2008 the Democratic Party won the White House and both chambers of the U.S. Congress, and soon after that the United States began being changed from a country belonging to “We the People” into one managed by a kind of Marxist nomenklatura with unchecked power.

This new American nomenklatura started running the country secretly, just as all Marxist nomenklaturas did. “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,” the leader of the nomenkatura in the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, once told the media. That was a first in U.S. history. It did not take long before this American nomenklatura took control of home mortgages, banks, auto-makers, and most of the health care industry. When tens of thousands of Americans objected to the cloak of secrecy under which all this was taking place, the same Nancy Pelosi called them Nazis. That was exactly what all post-WWII Marxist nomenklaturas called their opponents.

This is why Fukuyama’s thesis about the “end of history” after the Cold War was so nonsensical. One of the paradoxes of Marxism is that while it defies human nature, it is in fact human nature to believe its tenets, and so the lesson must be relearned with each generation.

Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Next Stop, Space

44 Comments

This underwater hotel in Fiji looks pretty neat. I think that a lot of its clientele would love a room with an earth view.

One thing I see missing, though — no (obvious) curtains on the windows. I’ve heard that there have been problems with underwater hotels in the past, because the dolphins liked to voyeuristically look in the window and watch couples engaged in amorous activities.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Bam’s Glam

13 Comments

…is gone. Thoughts on the loss of the president’s glamour, from the glamour expert:

What happened? In 2008, after all, not just political pundits and regular folks were expecting big things of Obama. So were certified leadership gurus. Warren Bennis of the University of Southern California and Andy Zelleke of Harvard praised Obama for possessing “that magical quality known as charisma.”

This charisma, they predicted, would give Obama “the transformational capacity to lift the malaise that is paralyzing so many Americans today” because “a charismatic leader could break through the prevailing orthodoxy that the nation is permanently divided into red and blue states … and build a broader sense of community, with a compelling new vision.”

There was only one problem. Obama wasn’t charismatic. He was glamorous — powerfully, persuasively, seductively so. His glamour worked as well on Bennis and Zelleke as it did on voters.

What’s the difference? Charisma moves the audience to share a leader’s vision. Glamour, on the other hand, inspires the audience to project its own desires onto the leader (or movie star or tropical resort or new car): to see in the glamorous object a symbol of escape and transformation that makes the ideal feel attainable. The meaning of glamour, in other words, lies entirely in the audience’s mind.

That was certainly true of Obama as a candidate. He attracted supporters who not only disagreed with his stated positions but, what is much rarer, believed that he did, too. On issues such as same-sex marriage and free trade, the supporters projected their own views onto him and assumed he was just saying what other, less discerning voters wanted to hear.

Even well-informed observers couldn’t decide whether Obama was a full-blown leftist or a market-oriented centrist. “Barack has become a kind of human Rorschach test,” his friend Cassandra Butts told Rolling Stone early in the campaign. “People see in him what they want to see.”

It was pretty obvious to me what he was from the get go. His faux pas with Joe the Plumber was a big tell.

[Update a while later]

Isn’t it time we grew up?

I want to underscore the fact that it is not just Barack Obama who is living in la-la land. It’s the whole apparat. The suits in Washington have ingested and then regurgitated the neo-Keynesian socialist pabulum that mesmerized elite opinion some time in the 1960s and has never let go.

But we are letting go. By “we” I mean the people who these fools and scoundrels in Washington have misled. They couldn’t help it. They don’t know any better. How cruel it is going to be when the mentally-challenged Joe Biden is exposed as the Grecian formula empty shell that he is. And Barack Obama . . . It was a good show while it lasted. If you closed your eyes and said “spread the wealth” he might have seemed, for a moment, like a serious politician. Really, as everyone sees now, he is a Gatsby-like figure who smiles and smiles but is imploding before our eyes.

On a summer-stock stage, it might have been an illuminating melodrama. Alas, we threw caution to the winds and elected someone who resented this country, was suspicious of wealth, and whose reflexive commitment to left-wing nostrums would gravely damage the most productive economy the world has ever seen. Tens or hundreds of thousands of people will suffer because of our naïveté and Barack Obama’s malevolent stupidity.

It is deeply ironic that so many in the media have referred to the president as “the adult in the room.”

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Homecoming

15 Comments

…from death row:

Just a few months after that December 2001 raid, The New York Times mentioned Maye, Jones and Prentiss in a front-page story about how the drug trade was wreaking havoc on the poor and rural south. That article, in contrast with my own reporting, shows how drastically a journalist’s own perspective can alter a story’s narrative. Certainly there’s no question that two families were devastated as the result of a drug raid gone wrong. But when I first came upon Maye’s story, it immediately struck me as an example of collateral damage from the drug war, not of the drug trade. One family lost a young, likable son and brother forever; another family had a young, likable son, brother and father taken from them for a decade. And the pile of bodies resulting from the policy of sending cops barreling into private homes in the middle of the night to stop people from getting high has only grown since the night Cory Maye shot Ron Jones.

I found Maye’s story while researching a paper about the overuse of SWAT teams and paramilitary search tactics. And so where the Times saw another cop killed by a drug dealer, I wondered why a guy who had no criminal record and no real drugs to speak of in his home would knowingly take on a team of raiding police officers, kill one of them, then surrender with bullets still remaining in his gun. It seemed much more like a series of mistakes resulting in a tragedy — a tragedy compounded by Maye’s subsequent conviction and death sentence.

The evil and societal damage of the drug war vastly exceeds that of the drug sellers (let alone users) and drug trade, all the more because it is well intentioned.