Questions and Observations

After a few days of watching what Hurricane Harvey did to Texas (and specifically Houston) as well as the riot in Berkeley starring Antifa – again -, I’ve come to the conclusion that Houston represents the best that is America and Berkeley the worst.  The good news is there seems to be a megaton more of the best than the worst.

I have seen images and read stories about the amazing and heroic rescues that have been done in Houston.  I’ve read about those responding to the emergency from all over the US.  And not once, during those rescues did the rescuer care what color or gender the person to be rescued was.  Not once was the phrase “which personal pronoun do you prefer” uttered.  Everyone of every color, race, nationality and sexual preference pitched in together to rescue their fellow Americans.

Despite the catastrophe wrought by the hurricane, Houston restores your faith in our fellow countrymen.

So when Berkeley’s happen, you can put that in context.  When the daughter of the POTUS tweets out a prayer for the rescuers and victims of the hurricane and receives a tidal wave of hate, you can write that off as the despicable just being despicable.

And when the media, covering the departure of the of the POTUS and First Lady for Houston can only focus on the First Lady’s shoes – because, you know, she couldn’t have a change of shoes on Air Force One, or anything – well, you know it’s just the irresponsible media being … irresponsible.  Again.

And they’re still wondering how they got Trump.

~McQ

I am truly at a loss for words concerning the ESPN decision to pull an Asian-American announcer from a University of Virginia football game because his name may … offend someone.  His name?  Robert Lee, which apparently is now like having the name Adolph Hitler or something.  If Robert Lee doesn’t immediately click in your head, put an “E” between Robert and Lee and you have a dastardly Confederate name which must be erased from the earth … or the US anyway.

Lee was seen leaving in his Hyundai Accent (ok, I couldn’t resist) for parts unknown … or Youngstown, OH, which is about the same.

What in the world has gotten into people.  This is a disease.  And it is slowly infecting more and more people.  You can’t say anything which won’t offend someone and then whoever does the supposed “offending” completely humiliates themselves trying to apologize and make it all right.

This is what is dribbling out of our universities and colleges in the guise of The New Red Guard, or, if you prefer the current term, Social Justice Warriors – who are not social, nor do they seek justice and they’re certainly not warriors.  They’re pedantic fusspot authoritarians who want to control what you think and say.  And they try to use race, gender and culture as their weapons and shaming as the tool they wield.

Check this out.  The ACLU puts the picture of a 2 year old with a flag and a shirt that says “free speech”.  The ACLU says its members want that (assuming that the want is “free speech”).  A cute and attractive way to make the point:

But oh no.  It’s “white supremacy” or a variation thereof:

Yeah, a white kid with a flag, a black kid with a flag, whatever – its about “free speech”, right?  Well to most but the most racially obsessed it is.

And of course the ACLU stood up for itself and all of its members, didn’t it?  Uh, no.  It immediately caved:

No, it’s not a very good point – not if the first Tweet was true.  If the first Tweet was true it is an irrelevant point at best and a racist point at worst.  But there are no adults out there anymore that will stand up and say “enough of this nonsense”. When the children speak, no matter how ignorantly, the institutions like the ACLU quake and grovel.

Really makes you think that if you’re a white person the ACLU may not have much interest in your free speech rights doesn’t it?

Pathetic is simply not a strong enough word for ESPN and the ACLU.

~McQ

I continue to be wryly amused at the studied cluelessness of the media when it comes to the ironically named “Antifa”.  Somehow, they’ve decided that the Antifa are the “good guys”.  How I’m not sure (ok, a certain amount of confirmation bias, a large dollop of ignorance and a good helping of wanting it to be so).

Antifa, however, is exactly the opposite of its name.  It is as fascist an organization as you’ll find in this country.

You’re aware of the Antifa action in Boston this past weekend?  It was to protest a “free speech” event.  Of course the media has tried to explain away that fact by asserting the “free speech” event was simply a Nazi/White Supremacist provocation to which Antifa had responded.

Well, here’s how Boston Antifa describes itself by outlining what it is against:

It is anti-capitalist, against the US Constitution and conservatives, “classical liberals” and libertarians need not apply.

It is, in reality, a communist front organization.  All one has to do is a little reading and it becomes crystal clear who and what are hiding behind the Antifa movement.

Reason has a pretty good description today. JD Tuccille fisks an article that claims that one must “choose a side” in this fight, you can’t just simply sit on the sidelines.  And the two sides are the Nazis or Antifa.  But is that really the only choice?

“One has to take sides,” Shuja Haider wrote at Jacobin, echoing other voices on the left. “There is a side that asserts our common humanity and fights fascism, racism, and hate. It was represented in Charlottesville by the leftist groups who took to the streets to confront the far right. The other side is the one that took innocent lives on those same streets.”

Take a side? You bet. But Haider and company are trying to force a false choice. They’d have you believe that advocates of free speech, open society, tolerance, and peaceful political change have to pick between fascists with tiki torches and masked “anti-fascists” clashing with them in the streets. But advocates of a free, open, and liberal society are a side—the correct side—and the left-wing and right-wing thugs battling in the streets are nothing more than rival siblings from a dysfunctional illiberal family.

So I agree with the basic premise – one must choose a side.  I reject the follow on premise, that either of these two groups constitute a “side” that’s worth choosing.  In fact, neither of these factions get anywhere near representing what I believe nor that for which this country stands.  Neither deserve any support whatsoever from liberty minded Americans.  Both are authoritarian cabals that simply what to decide what you can think and do.  And, despite Shuja Haider’s claim that one side “asserts our common humanity”, nothing could be further from the truth.  The Antif is as bigoted and as hateful as the other group … they just target differently.  And one only has to look the the Boston Antifa Facebook post to understand who they hate and at whom their bigotry is aimed. They are every bit as intolerant of deviant thought and belief as the Nazis.

As Tuccille notes:

But that doesn’t mean we have to pick a competing brand of ideological awfulness as a viable alternative to fascism. The thugs on the left have already proved themselves to be violent and intolerant. There’s no reason to favor one illiberal force over another when our country has a long history based on much different, and much better, political principles.

No, there isn’t.  And I refuse to do so.

In the meantime, how long (if ever) will it take the media to finally admit what is obvious to just about everyone else?  I’d say their credibility is on the line but hey, they dumped that years ago and they don’t seem to care anymore.  Maybe the fact (reported by Jake Tapper) that Antifa is assaulting journalists may wake a few up.

~McQ

One has to wonder, with these attempts to remove monuments of slavery, slave owners and slavery supporters, when the largest monument to slavery – the Democratic Party, the party of slavery – will disband itself?

One only has to  look at history, and not selectively as the current crop of monument tippers are doing.  If their cause is to expunge monuments to slavery supporters, then it only stands to reason that the driving force behind the preservation of slavery in the US – the Democrats- should pay a price as well.

Seems the perfect opportunity to start a movement calling for that end result.  Disband the party of slavery.  Disband the Democratic party.

~McQ

I’m seeing a lot of gnashing of teeth since Trump used harsh and “provocative” language with little Kim.

Because, you know, appeasement has served us so well to this point.

Strong men (and I use that term figuratively in the authoritarian leaders sense) have a tendency to respect strength much more than appeasement.  Of course our history is filled with examples of that truth, but, hey, this is a new century so all that’s old and forgotten.

Whether Kim will respond properly to tough talk remains to be seen.  But we know how he handles appeasement.

Go to Hot Air and read the transcript of the interview of James Darmore of Google memo fame.  Ask how he felt about being fired, he said:

Damore: It definitely sucks but at least I was proven right.

JBP: What do you mean by proven right?

Damore: Just that the whole culture just tries to silence any dissenting view and that we really need some more objective way of looking at these things.

That’s what the New Red Guard does.  In an article I read yesterday about Harvard’s attempt to close down single gender clubs there, someone said that the New Left’s idea of diversity is “everyone looks different but thinks the same”.  I call them The New Red Guard for a reason.  And yes, he was indeed “proven right” (btw, Damore is no raving right winger – he’s just evidence that the left eats their own. See Evergreen for another example).

Apparently the “cult of the victim” has become so strong that some feel compelled to lie about it.  Halle Berry is the latest.  She whines about how badly she was mistreated in High School and had to endure “racism” and was bullied.  Yeah, that happens to all the class presidents, prom queens and head cheerleaders.  Oh, I didn’t mention she was all of those?  And now her classmates are speaking out about how full of crap she is.  Interesting.  It reminds me a bit of “stolen valor” only in reverse.  Of resume padding.  Etc.  In this case the resume padding is to give one “victim status” (and one supposes “suffering cred”) even when it isn’t deserved.

NPR has an interesting graphic that points out why there is a huge gender difference at Google.  It’s called “choice” and both women and men have been making them when it comes to the field of computer science.

NPR wants you to believe this drop in women in the field is because of, what else, the patriarchy.   And they use an anecdote in the article from … the ’80s.  Seems the reason  is a much simpler one than their explanation.  In the ’70s and early ’80s it was the “new” thing.  By about the mid 80s women began to back off because it wasn’t as fulfilling as the areas in which women usually choose and excel (because they are interested, passionate even … go figure).  Men, on the other hand, found it still fascinating and continued to pursue it.  Thus as Dale pointed out in his video earlier, it is rather difficult to achieve 50/50 equality of genders when you have an 80/20 split, men/women, in the field.  Unless, of course, you are just interested in gender and not the actual best person for the job.

Frankly, if I were a competitor of theirs I’d encourage them to pursue gender equality.  The only loser would be Google.

And by the way, there is no barriers such as NPR tries to imply exists (with it’s anecdote) to pursuing the field for women today.  So why aren’t they doing so?

Finally, did you catch the fake news winner this week?  It was none other than the Grey Lady.  That’s right, the New York Times.  This is classic:

Scientists appear to have debunked The New York Times’ claim it was leaked a secret, gloomy climate change report which it published amid fears President Trump would suppress it.

On Monday, The New York Times published a story saying there are concerns that the Trump administration could suppress what’s known as the National Climate Assessment, a project of the U.S. Global Change Research Program.

But it wasn’t the case.  Why?  Well, pretty simple.  It had been available on line to anyone who wanted it since … January:

“It’s not clear what the news is in this story,” Robert Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University who is listed on the report as among the lead authors, said on Twitter.

The Internet Archive, a website that archives content published online, saysit downloaded the report from the Environmental Protection Agency’s website in January 2017.

Kopp noted the draft was published on the site during the public comment period, but then taken down after the period. But it still remained online at the Internet Archive’s site.

But the good old NYT couldn’t pass up a chance to try to zing the POTUS, could they?

The New York Times story cites an anonymous scientist involved in the report as saying he and others are concerned the Trump administration would suppress the report.

Ah editors … they have layers and layers and layers of them, or so they claim.

~McQ

As the world continues to spin out of control, let us look at some of the most recent absurdities.

Google.  What can you say?  Dale covered it in detail in the video below this post.  I’ll just mention the irony involved – Google proved the memo writer’s point.  In spades.

In fact, the speech police are everywhere.  Lena Dunham reporting airline employees because she eavesdropped on their conversation and wasn’t happy with their attitudes.  She felt they were “transphobic”.  More importantly, the airline in question felt compelled to “investigate” this private conversation and certainly implied that some sort of action would be taken (no need to “investigate” otherwise) if they found out who these transgressing individuals were.  What a world.

And, of course, you know what is happening in academia.  I found a pretty accurate historical example:

In 1925 the Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing spoke out against the repressive political climate of Weimar Germany.

Although Lessing’s explicit target was the cravenness of the Weimar regime of Paul von Hindenburg, his real target was the emerging power of Nazism, and he blamed the government for yielding to it.

The Nazis recognized immediately the threat posed by Lessing. Adolf Hitler youth at Lessing’s University of Hanover formed a “committee against Lessing.” They encouraged students to boycott his lectures.

Nazi youth then showed up and disrupted Lessing’s classes. Lessing was forced to give up his academic chair the following year.

In his account of what happened, Lessing later wrote that he could do nothing to prevent being “shouted down, threatened and denigrated” by student activists.

He was helpless, he said, “against the murderous bellowing of youngsters who accept no individual responsibilities but pose as spokesman for a group or an impersonal ideal, always talking in the royal ‘we’ while hurling personal insults … and claiming that everything is happening in the name of what’s true, good and beautiful.”

This was fascism, German style, in the 1920s.

Of course we don’t have the “Hitler Youth” here.  Ironically those who do precisely what the Hitler Youth used to do call themselves the “Antifa” or Anti Facists.  Quite a chuckle, no?

Lord help you if you don’t have an “approved” ideology and you attempt to speak.  Not to mention the clear anti-Semitism on the left and, of course, the racism.  The author here is one Manesha Krishnan and she’s denying she can be a racist:

My default reaction to claims like this is to roll my eyes. But seeing as it’s no longer just Twitter trolls who believe in reverse racism—white fragility probably accounts for a large part of Donald Trump’s popularity—I decided to reach out to some social justice advocates to ask why they think a certain segment of white people get so defensive when minorities vocalize their oppression. And why groups like BLMTO are being painted as divisive and race baiting when really all they’re doing is fighting for equality.

“When you’re so deeply invested in your privilege, and in this case white privilege, racial equality feels like oppression,” said Anthony Morgan, a Toronto-based civil and human rights lawyer.

Simply put, Morgan said reverse racism doesn’t exist and a person who claims otherwise is “outing themselves as someone who has little to no experience or knowledge of what racism is.”

Using a pretty common tactic, the left insists on redefining racism because under the present definition, people like the Krishnan fit it to a tee.  As for having “little or no experience or knowledge of what racism is”, maybe that’s why we define it, huh?  A smart person can then look at the situation and the definition and reach a conclusion.  And lo and behold,  her words and actions point out that she’s a racist. She may be a different color than me, but she’s as racist as any Klansman.  And she’s just one of many on the left.

What we hear a lot in leftist screeds and rants is a term called “projection” where a person projects themselves and their shortcomings and foibles on the person or persons they deem to be their enemies. They claim the “other” are what they denounce when, in fact, the speaker is usually the problem.

Over the years, “progressivism” has certainly progressed – from an ideology to a religion for many.  And at its root is the usual problem – it is all about authoritarianism. Progressives can’t seem to help themselves.

In order to succeed, one of the things the left must do, is control the language.   Words and speech must conform to their beliefs in order to spread their ideology (religion). The words and speech that don’t are banned, shouted down, vilified and eventually outlawed.  It is “newspeak” rediscovered.  What’s bad is good and what is evil is wonderful if coupled with the promises of their version of eternal life under the enlightened leadership of Big Brother the leftist elite.

Because who knows better how you should live your life and for what you should commit it to than “progressives”?

~McQ