Robert Frost on justice and mercy

The New Neo Posted on by

Recently commenter “Selfy” linked to this article and offered the following quote from it:

Mr. Rigney echoes this critique of systemic racism but reserves most of his ire for feminism, which he blames for many of empathy’s ills. Because women are the more empathetic sex, he argues, they often take empathy too far.

He found an encapsulation of this theory at Mr. Trump’s inaugural prayer service, where a woman preached from the pulpit. During a sermon that went viral, Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde pleaded with the Republican president to “have mercy” on immigrants and LGBTQ+ people, prompting a conservative backlash.

“Budde’s attempt to ‘speak truth to power’ is a reminder that feminism is a cancer that enables the politics of empathetic manipulation,” Mr. Rigney wrote for the evangelical World magazine.

Which immediately reminded me of a post I wrote back in 2019. The following is a repeat of that post.

Anyone who’s read this blog for a while is well aware of how much I admire both the poetry and the thought of Robert Frost.

For example, there’s this [in the excerpt that follows, Frost uses “justice” in the traditional sense rather than in the leftist “social justice” sense]:

Frost was convinced that the conflict between justice and mercy in human affairs is an eternal and universal moral problem of humanity, and not merely a contemporary political partisan concern…

With these facts in mind Frost’s criticism of the New Deal as “nothing but an outbreak of mass mercy,” is clearly more than mere partisan politics. In 1936, in the midst of attacks on [his collection of poetry] A Further Range by the political Left, Frost wrote to Ferner Nuhn, a young New Deal acquaintance and friend of Henry Wallace, that “strict justice is basic” for a free society, and freedom implied that some people succeeded and others failed. The winners reaped the rewards of their talents and efforts, but what about the losers? Frost acknowledged that government “must do something for the losers. It must show them mercy. Justice first and mercy second. The trouble with some of your crowd is that it would have mercy first. The struggle to win is still the best tonic. . . . Mercy . . . is another word for socialism.” Frost believed that what was commonly called “distributive justice,” the attempt to spread the wealth of society to the masses, through graduated in-come taxes and other such devices, was really distributive mercy misnamed. Frost drew out for Ferner Nuhn the logical consequences of a system of socialistic mercy:

“The question of the moment in politics will always be one of proportion between mercy and justice. You have to remember the people who accept mercy have to pay for it. Mercy means protection. And there is no protection without direction. A person completely protected would have to be completely directed. And he would be a slave. That’s where socialism pure brings you out.”

The Ruthless podcast: Mamdani on how to deal with escalating altercations

The New Neo Posted on by

This is astounding (the clip I’ve selected is about three minutes long):

Those instructions read something like the advice a therapist might give to deal with a verbal spat between friends or acquaintances. They would be absurd to use in a violent situation. Anyone recommending such a thing is either divorced from reality or malevolent, or both.

Were these recommendations really meant to deal with criminals or others threatening violence? Finding a legible copy of the instructions wasn’t easy, but I found this. The recommendations discussed in the video are under a heading that reads, “Are you encountering a conflict that appears to be escalating?” And “call the police” is certainly not one of the choices for a response. The document is put out by Mamdani’s Public Safety Team, and is addressed to small businesses.

Celebrating child murder; knocking prayer

The New Neo Posted on by

First there was rejoicing when a United Healthcare CEO was murdered in cold blood.

Then there was celebration at the murder of a young Jewish couple.

Now some leftists are applauding the act of killing little children in a Catholic church. After all, some Christians aren’t pro-trans.

See this:

I don’t know how big a group this is. I don’t know whether these are real people or bots. I don’t know whether they’re teenagers or adult psychopaths. On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog:

But it does appear that there is a vicious “blame the victim” online community. Social media acts as a way to foster, spread, and above all norm such pernicious sentiments.

Speaking of which, this latest shooting has sparked a really ignorant set of remarks about prayer, such as this one by Gavin Newsom:

Is the point to mock the power of prayer, as though the idea of prayer is to give one immunity from the bad things in life? Has Newsom ever heard of the phrase “when bad things happen to good people”? If there are no atheists in the foxholes, why do soldiers get killed? No, prayer does not stop a bullet, although I suppose some people believe in miracles. But I think the vast majority of religious people – and even people without religion – are aware that prayer is not a magic talisman.

I might also ask whether Newsom has ever heard of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755? Perhaps Newsom’s answer would be “no,” because although it was a huge event in Western history it’s not necessarily something most people know anything about. I wrote a previous post on the topic; here’s an excerpt [emphasis added]:

Like WWI and the 1918 flu epidemic, it was a cataclysmic event — not just because it killed a lot of people, but because of what it meant to those who survived. It was a case of that overused word: the narrative. If WWI precipitated a loss of faith in human progress, the Lisbon earthquake had precipitated a loss of faith in faith itself. As I wrote here:

“How many remember anything about the great Lisbon Earthquake, fire, and tsunami of 1755, which struck at 9 AM on All Saints’ Day and virtually destroyed a city that was one of the major capitals of the world at the time, collapsing churches filled with worshipers and filling Europe with horror? The earthquake struck not only at the city and its inhabitants, but at the attitude of optimism that had characterized the first half of that century, and caused many to question their previously unshakable faith in divine providence, advancing the Enlightenment and the science of seismology.”

People of faith have long been aware that prayer is not necessarily protective. What was Newsom trying to say? Whatever his intent, one can be pretty sure it was political rather than reflective, and that the goal was one of the left’s favorites: to use the murders to advance gun control. This connection is made explicit by others, in posts such as this one from a Florida Democrat in the House:

A class act.

Even the MSM is starting to admit that Bolton may really be guilty

The New Neo Posted on by

The evidence is starting to be harder to deny. At least, it’s become more clear that the re-opening of the investigation of Bolton is justified:

The New York Times wisely expanded its narrative from it not being clear “what culpability Mr. Bolton might have,” to a fairly definitive statement that a hostile intelligence service intercepted Bolton’s emails, and those emails contained classified information. For good measure, The New York Times credited Joe Biden for investigating malfeasance that occurred during Trump’s first term.

And:

Another political changer shunned by friends

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s an old old story, but one that continues to interest me. Evan Barker writes that at the beginning:

I’d worked in politics nearly half my life, starting out as an intern on Barack Obama’s campaign when I was only seventeen years old, then as a field organizer for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Before Obama won the primary in 2008, I was an alternate delegate for Hillary in Kansas’ third congressional district, one of the youngest ever in the state of Kansas.

After a series of disappointments with the establishment, I eventually found my way to the Bernie side of the party …

So she’s established her Democrat bona fides and even her leftist bona fides. However, something happened to her on the way to the 2024 election, and that something can be summarized as Kamala Harris (although certainly not just Kamala Harris):

A lot of people have asked me what the exact moment was at the DNC that made me realize I wasn’t on board with the party I’d worked for nearly half of my life. The truth is, it was everything. The crowd that mindlessly chanted “joy”, the vasectomy van offering free tacos, the coronation of a candidate with zero policies or platform available, and the final straw: Oprah Winfrey. Her tone deaf lecturing turned me off so much, I left the building, getting an uber straight to my hotel, where I booked a flight home a day early, not even staying for Kamala’s acceptance speech.

I wouldn’t agree that Kamala had zero policies or platform, but although she certainly seemed unable to discuss her platform coherently, the platform she did have was IMHO pernicious. That doesn’t appear to have been Barker’s problem with Harris, because even though Barker technically qualifies as a changer she’s certainly not on the political right even now.

Nevertheless, she’s been shunned for having been unwilling to vote for the empty Kamala:

In the past year, nearly all of my old political friends have stopped speaking to me. One of them said: “fascism doesn’t look good on you”, another said “why couldn’t you have waited until after the election?” The social ostracism has trickled out into my non political life, too. I’ve lost friends I’ve known for fifteen years. My toddler stopped getting invited to birthday parties. He was rejected from preschool. We even had to move to a new town.

Now that we are more than half a year into a second Trump presidency, I’ve been asked numerous times if I regret my decision to ditch the Dems, or if I’d publicly say sorry for what I did.

The answer is NEVER.

In fact, more Democrats should’ve had the courage to speak out about Kamala’s candidacy, and the direction of the party in general. …

If the Democrats want to become a winning party again, they need to recognize that policy, and not messaging has led them to defeat. This means they need to stop only defining themselves against Trump, and decide what they are going to stand for. The days of mealy mouthed corporate speak are over. What the public craves more than anything is authenticity.

Besides this, Democrats need to come to terms with accepting more heterodoxy within their own party. Throw the purity tests in the trash can. It isn’t a moral failing to have a different opinion when it comes to immigration, gender ideology, or identity politics. If the Dems want to truly be the party of diversity, then diversity of thought must be included.

Good luck with that, Evan. Those days are gone. Will they ever come back? Can they ever come back? I doubt it, although of course I could be wrong. I certainly don’t think it will happen in my lifetime. I don’t even think it will happen in Evan’s lifetime, and she’s pretty young.

Nevertheless, Democrats might win the presidency and/or Congress (and certainly the House) again, and rather soon. Someone such as Evan is still in the minority in her party, and many Democrats are still very energized to vote against the GOP.

Depression and rage: the Nashville school shooter and the Minneapolis school shooter, plus Columbine

The New Neo Posted on by

One can’t help but notice the similarities between Robert (“Robin”) Westman of the recent Minneapolis school killings and Audrey (“Aidan” ) Hale of the Covenant School shooting in Nashville. There are differences, of course, starting with the fact that Westman was a biological male and Hale was a biological female, and ending with the fact that Westman killed himself and Hale was killed by police.

But the resemblances are striking. Both had not only identified as trans and had given themselves new unisex names, but they also wrote copiously prior to their crimes, were fascinated and inspired by other school shootings and shooters, and both targeted students at religious schools that the perps had themselves attended. Perhaps this latter was more from familiarity and opportunity than anything else. But it’s hard to believe it didn’t involve special animosity at some level, although according to the final police report on Hale:

… [T]he 28-year-old [Hale] relished fond memories of The Covenant School and wanted “to die somewhere that made her happy,” Nashville police said.

“Hale bore no grudge against the school or staff” and considered them to be “‘innocents’ and victims on par with herself,” the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department said.

If you want to read the elements of Hale’s manifesto the FBI ultimately released, see this. I’ve only looked at about the first third, but the overwhelming impression I receive is one of profound depression. One would think that would drive a person to suicide rather than murder-suicide, and yet – apparently due to a desire to go out in a blaze of notoriety and gain a fame in death that has eluded the person in life – the person chooses not just suicide but to cold-bloodedly kill the most innocent and heartbreaking victims of all.

Westman wrote this about his depression:

Further along in the manifesto, Westman wrote: “I have wanted this for so long. I am not well. I am not right. I am a sad person, haunted by these thoughts that do not go away. I know this is wrong, but I can’t seem to stop myself. I am severely depressed and have been suicidal for years. Only recently have I lost all hope and decided to perform my final action against this world.”

This overwhelming depression was also a motive, and perhaps the primary one, for at least one of the Columbine killers – Dylan Klebold – and possibly a motive for them both, although rage, nihilism, and psychopathy seems to have been more prominent for Eric Harris. I’ve written many posts on Columbine (see this), so I won’t go into too many details about them in this post, except to add the following [emphasis mine]:

The two teens’ attack on the Jefferson County High School was meant to “kickstart a revolution” – a rebellion they could ride to infamy, according to one of five home videos the seniors made in the weeks leading up to the April 20 bloodbath. …

Those videotapes show two teens filled with rage, sick of life and mocking their family and authority. The only remorse the two Columbine High School students showed on the tapes was to their parents …

Sitting next to Klebold, 17, Harris out lined their scheme to kill “niggers, spics, Jews, gays, f—ing whites” to “kickstart a revolution.”

“It’s going to be like f—ing Doom,” Har ris said. “Tick, tick, tick, tick .Haa! That f—ing shotgun is straight out of Doom!” Klebold: “I hope we kill 250 of you.” The seniors then debated if Steven Spiel berg or Quentin Tarantino would better direct the film of their lives and the massacre just weeks away.

Harris and Klebold are so famous they are still being discussed today, which was one of their goals.

But back to Westman and Hale. Why do some melancholy young people decide to take their depression out on others? The desire for notoriety seems to be a huge factor, but I don’t think it really explains it. Way back when I was in college taking courses in what was then called Abnormal Psychology, I remember being taught that suicide is rage turned against the self and homicide is rage turned towards others, but depression is often behind the rage. In murder-suicides, the rage seems to be towards both self and others, combined with depression – but again, that doesn’t really explain the mystery, does it? There seems to be a toxic brew of rage, depression so bad it leads to despair, social media, desire for fame, and often a hatred for life itself.

Were Westman and Hale receiving hormones, which can also mess people up? I don’t know and haven’t found anything about that. Most school shooters come from intact homes (I wrote about that in these posts and also dealt with the common idea that SSRIs are at fault; the evidence for that is unclear). Westman’s parents were divorced, but I don’t know whether his father was in his life much; both Columbine killers had intact homes, and Audrey Hale’s parents were together as well.

Eric Harris – of all people – quoted Shakespeare’s The Tempest thusly on the question of parental responsibility:

Good wombs hath borne bad sons …

I’ll leave the mystery there for now.

NOTE: The left is of course pushing its preferred political angle, which is gun banning and don’t demonize trans people, you vicious hateful Republicans!

The NY Times looks at gay men working in the Trump administration

The New Neo Posted on by

What a strange article. The attitude is that these men are some sort of curiosity [emphasis mine]:

Mr. Moran, 44, is the pasha of a new power tribe in the capital: the gay men of the Trump administration.

These are the A-Gays. They’re (mostly) out, they’re proud (to work for President Trump) and they have big jobs inside (or alongside) this administration. They wield influence all over town, from the Pentagon to the State Department to the White House to the Kennedy Center. …

The most powerful out gay man in the Trump administration is Mr. Bessent. There are a handful of others in the Treasury Department. Other A-Gays include Tony Fabrizio, the president’s longtime pollster; Trent Morse, an outgoing deputy assistant to the president; Richard Grenell, who was put in charge of the Kennedy Center; and Jacob Helberg, an under secretary of state. These are just some. There are lots of other lesser-known men who make up the tribe.

They’re overwhelmingly white and tend to have a certain kind of look. Close cropped haircuts. Windowpane suits. Golf shorts. They’re not the type to be telling anyone their pronouns or using the word “queer.” And they aren’t the least bit offended that the leader of their party continues to stoke a moral panic about transgender people.

They’re gay. But they’re still Republicans.

There’s no “moral panic” in Trump or the GOP about transgender people. There’s outrage at (a) the insistence on forcing language on people, particularly language that denies biological reality (b) the invasion of biological males into protected female areas such as women’s sports and ladies’ rooms (c) the medical transition of young people, and the negation of parental rights in order to do so (including lies told to parents about suicide among these kids, in order to coerce them into giving consent). I might add – particularly in light of the shooting discussed in the post right below this one – the fact that a significant number of trans people are mentally ill and that should be the emphasis for treatment rather than the medical and/or social transition of teenagers.

What’s more, is the Times article’s author ignorant of the fact that the trans movement feeds off of homophobia, often trying to convince kids who would otherwise enter the gay world as adults that transition is a solution to their own internalized homophobia? Therefore it’s by no means a given that gay people support the trans movement.

Then there’s this:

“The funny thing is, I had a lot of girlfriends who wanted to move here,” said Natalie Winters, the D.C.-based right-wing media darling who is a protégé of Steve Bannon. “They thought the dating scene would be really great, that MAGA would bring in a whole wave of, like, you know, eligible, conservative, smart, enterprising men.”

Instead, she said, “everybody’s freaking gay.”

The article is by no means all negative:

“The gay left just can’t handle the fact that President Trump loves the gays,” said Casey Flores, a 34-year-old MAGA gay who moved to Washington in April and started a job at the Kennedy Center as a fund-raiser.

“This idea that Republicans hate gays, that’s just so not the case, as clearly evidenced by all of us,” Mr. Flores said, referring to all of his gay friends who moved to Washington to work for Mr. Trump. “We’re so over it. We just want to help the country.”

Comments I saw from readers are mostly negative – the “all they care about is power” type of thing.

Fatal shooting of Catholic school children at Minneapolis church

The New Neo Posted on by

Terrible news: two Catholic school children have been murdered at a church in Minneapolis by a shooter who then turned the gun on himself. The shooter has been identified:

The deranged gunman who slaughtered two children and injured at least 17 others who were attending morning mass at a Catholic school in Minneapolis has been identified — as a disturbing video believed to have been posted by the shooter shows “kill Donald Trump” and “for the children” scrawled on gun magazines.

Robin Westman, who is in his early 20s, opened fire through the stained glass windows of Annunciation Catholic Church during a celebratory back-to-school Mass filled with children, around 8:30 a.m. Wednesday.

Police are investigating whether a series of sick YouTube videos shared on an account hours before the shooting was connected to Westman, law enforcement sources told The Post.

In one video, a hand slowly turns the pages of a red notebook, which is laid out on top of what appears to be schematic gun diagrams. …

Videos posted to YouTube show multiple weapons — including a semi-automatic rifle and a shotgun. Magazines were scrawled with “for the children” and “kill Donald Trump.”

It almost goes without saying that this guy is/was a nut case. Certainly doesn’t seem to be a Trump supporter. The gun angle will be played up by the left, of course. There are various rumors swirling around: trans (biological male), a manifesto, that sort of thing. I suppose we’ll find out in time – or perhaps not.

Minneapolis has been the scene of four multiple-victim shootings in the last 24 hours, with one other victim killed.

RIP.

UPDATE 2:20 PM:

That was pretty quick: the shooter is confirmed to have been a man who identified as female as a teenager and at 17 changed his name from Robert to Robin. The article I just linked uses “she” pronouns for Westman, which seems awfully woke of them at this point.

In addition, Westman’s mother was an employee at the school the children attended.

Hanson: why the Democrats went crazy

The New Neo Posted on by

Victor Davis Hanson attempts to answer this question: “What Made the Democratic Party Go Crazy?”

Before I read it, I’ll attempt two very quick answers: their antipathy to Donald Trump, and prior to that the electoral success of Barack Obama and the takeover of American cultural life in the wake of COVID lockdowns and the George Floyd death propaganda.

Maybe that’s more than two.

Except from Hanson’s piece:

There are four root causes …

Democrats became a utopian elite cadre of the very wealthy who would patronize and take care of the subsidized poor, both as psychological penance to assuage their guilt over their own newfound global riches and to solidify poorer voters with expansionary entitlements. …

From 2021 to 2025, 10 to 12 million illegal aliens had been added to the pool of some 20 million existing resident illegal aliens. The left sought to mainstream these immigrants—from mostly poor countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia—into Democratic constituents, either in the first or by the second generation. …

Ironically, however, the Frankenstein monster of massive illegal immigration and DEI pandering proved fatal to the old liberal Dr. Frankenstein. …

The Rise of the Guilt-Ridden Professional …

As the new degreed aristocracy, no longer was their time and money needed to address adequate housing, fuel, food prices, transportation, or health care. Instead, they were freed to worry globally, especially about whether red-state hoi polloi’s ignorance might endanger their own beatific lives. …

Elite universities have become fabulously rich and globalized. …

Universities with new multibillion-dollar endowments opened global campuses abroad, without worry over the anti-American or anti-liberal values of their overseas partners. They sought billions of dollars in foreign contributions.

Endowments soared to 30, 40, and 50 billion in the Ivy League and elite campuses. Administrators and their staff grew exponentially to rival the number of students, all to handle the new all-purpose university (“Center for…[fill in the blanks of the oppressed or climate change brand]) that was therapeutic, left-wing, and indoctrinating.

The goal was no longer impartial education but overt ideological bias. …

The Democrats abandoned the middle class because they saw it as a global loser and themselves as worldwide winners. They now had the institutions and the big money, along with the leverage of millions of high-paid coastal professionals in law, the media, the university, and the administrative state to win elections by outspending, out-broadcasting, and out-regulating their clueless opponents.

All of that is true, but what I offered is true too. And I think that the cultural issues (especially in higher education) have been going on for many many decades, and somehow Democrats were nowhere near so out of touch as they have become since Trump took office and especially since 2020.