It’s becoming the lowest of pejoratives. For the Left, if you compare the way conservative politicians are treated to progressive ones, you’re rationalizing. You’re making excuses.
If you use your brain the way thinking people do, you’re not really thinking.
You are a cowardly MAGA-hack who is throwing up a smokescreen to camouflage the unique, sui generis evil that is — all together now — Donald Trump.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on A Proud Defense of Whataboutism — Comparing Trump to Other Cases Is the Practice of Law
One of the criticisms of the public company model is that the managers tend to think in the short term rather than long term. This was a popular critique of American business in the 1980’s when Japan was on the rise. The Japanese magically thought long term, which allowed them to benefit from long term investments in industry. Sinophiles made similar arguments about China as she rose economically. The Chinese think long term, it was said, while America thinks short term.
Up until Trump came to town and started making bad noises about China, those same Sinophiles made this point about democracy. The democratic West, they said, was hobbled by the short-term thinking that arises from regular elections, while China avoids this problem through one party rule. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times was fond of making this point. China’s system was winning because the Chinese were not thinking from one election to the next.
Of course, the real reason Japan and China rose from the ashes to challenge American industry is that connected people in the United States saw a profit in helping these countries at the expense of America. They flung open the gates, so to speak, on deindustrialization of America, which led to the shifting of manufacturing to low-cost places like Japan and then Korea and China. It turns out that both China and Japan were the beneficiaries of short-term thinking.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Death of the Hired Man Society
The law required companies that used the same machinery to produce sesame-containing foods and non-sesame-containing foods to thoroughly (and expensively) clean the machines between the two. Instead, the companies quite rationally added sesame (not enough to taste) to their non-sesame foods so that they would save the expense.
A California state senator told a gathered crowd of parents at the California Senate Judicial Committee to flee the state on June 13 during a hearing on a bill which would put parents who don’t affirm their child’s “gender transition” in danger of child abuse charges.
Sen. Scott Wilk, R-Santa Clarita, is the lone Republican on California’s Senate Judiciary Committee, and he has served in the California Legislature for 11 years. He was also the lone voice warning against language in AB 957, which a Democratic senator had amended on June 5 to rewrite the California Family Code to list “gender affirmation” alongside a child’s need for “health, safety, and welfare.”
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on State Senator Tells Parents to Flee His Own State Amid Bill That Would Take Kids Away From Non-’Affirming’ Parents
The beautiful Siwa Oasis in the far western deserts of Egypt is a remarkable place, for multiple reasons. It’s probably been inhabited, continuously, for 12,000 years. Alexander the Great came here to consult the already renowned Oracle of Amun-Ra in 332 BC (some say he is buried here, as he loved Siwa so much). You can swim in Roman cisterns fed by one of the 300 natural springs — which also nourish thousands of date palms and olive groves. The locals have their own Berber language — Siwi — spoken nowhere else on earth.
But there’s one facet of Siwa’s history which is less talked about. Within living memory, they had black slaves here, generally fetched from further south in Africa, and trafficked along Saharan routes trodden by Muslim pilgrims, ultimately heading for Mecca.
As I read about this nugget of history, last week — sitting on the stunningly silent, mud-brick balcony of Adrere Amellal, a hotel which overlooks the oasis — it jarred quite hard with a news story I’d read an hour previously. Namely, that politicians in California are proposing to pay reparations to black Californians who can prove they descend from slaves. The sums being discussed are not trivial. The official task force has decided that entitled individuals should each get up to $1.2 million; others say this is nowhere near enough, and every individual should get $200 million — that is not a typo.
Islam has no problem with slavery. Never did. Saudi Arabia had black slaves into the 1960s.
Last week we passed along the stunning news that two of the largest hotels in San Francisco have decided to walk away from their investment entirely, defaulting on $725 million in debt on the properties. Today the Wall Street Journal follows up with some comparisons with other cities. Short version: hotel traffic in other major cities has recovered, while hotel traffic in San Francisco has not….
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on This Week in San Francisco’s Doom Loop
Chief Justice John Roberts famously wrote in a 2007 case: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
He was exactly right in saying so in that Supreme Court decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1.
Too bad Roberts didn’t follow his own admonition in Allen v. Milligan, the Alabama redistricting decision released last week by the Supreme Court.
The fact of the matter is that we aren’t immune: Right now, today, each and every one of us is caught up in a cargo cult of some variety, going through pointless motions that we’ve been told (or that we’ve told ourselves) will lead to desirable outcomes. This occurs in business, in finance, in romance, and even in science… but one of its most insidious and impactful manifestations lies in entertainment and how we consume it.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Cargo Cult of the Ennui Engine
Prime Minister Kristersson promised reforms that could see violent offenders given heftier prison sentences and a policy that could ban them from certain districts and municipalities.
Kristersson also mentioned that “more people must learn the language,” hinting at the fact many of those involved in gun crime and criminal gangs are from migrant backgrounds, something only recently admitted by Swedish police and others in the Swedish establishment.
Georgia GOP elects election deniers to key posts (Atlanta Journal-Constitution) In the Narrative media, ‘election denier’ is someone who suspects that Democrats might possibly cheat in an election.
One line of attack against various forms of socialism has been that these organizational models run contrary to human nature. Humans naturally want to keep the produce of their labor, so any system that requires them to give over their labor to the whole is going to require a great deal of force to implement. Similarly, humans are not equal in ability, so there will always be unequal outcomes. A system that supposes no one is in charge and everyone is equal is unnatural.
Libertarianism has a similar problem. Like communism, it assumes things about humans that are not true. This is why there are no libertarian societies. As Hans Hermann-Hoppe observed, there is no way to go from the present to a libertarian society within the rules of libertarianism. More important, there is no way to maintain a libertarian society within the rules of libertarianism. Like communism, libertarians imagine a world that is odds with the human condition.
In both cases, what we see is a clash between the model-dependent reality of the ideology and reality itself. It is not hard to imagine a society that operates by the sorts of rules the ideologue prefers. The trouble comes when you try to implement the scheme on flesh and blood human beings. As with every model, there are going to be things the model must ignore in order to make sense. In real life, the things that exist outside the model tend to land in a death camp.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Reality of Model Dependent Reality
Threatened by North Korean nuclear weapons and communist Chinese conventional air and missile fires, South Korea has decided to spend serious money on an old but often spurned military concept: the arsenal ship.
The concept is simple. Take a very large but comparatively inexpensive civilian commercial ship. Oil supertankers and huge container carriers fit the profile perfectly — they’re inexpensive when compared to navy warships.
Now pack the ship with vertical launchers and several hundred long- and mid-range missiles capable of destroying enemy shore targets and perhaps enemy surface ships. Add short-range air and missile defense weapons and presto, enormous sea mobile firepower bang for the buck, or in South Korea’s case, bang for their wons.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on On Point: South Korea Bets Arsenal Ships Will Give North Korea and China Second Thoughts
After the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 ended segregation in public schools, many jurisdictions in the south engaged in what they openly called “massive resistance” to the Court’s decree, and enforcing the decision required both legislation and many follow-up lawsuits at every level of the federal judiciary for many years after.
It appears colleges and universities are already preparing their own “massive resistance” to a prospective Supreme Court finding later this month striking down race-conscious admissions (fingers crossed after the inexplicable VRA ruling last week).
Zuckerberg says ‘establishment’ asked Facebook to censor COVID misinfo that ended up true: ‘Undermines trust’ (Fox) And of course they went ahead and did so.
