Venezuela’s election: a foregone conclusion

The New Neo Posted on by

Is anyone surprised at the fact that Maduro won yesterday’s election in Venezuela? No one should be; Chavez’s successor simply could not be allowed to lose.

One odd thing, though, was the extreme narrowness of the margin of victory; shouldn’t they have made it bigger if they wanted Maduro to seem like the legitimate president of the country? But perhaps it’s because he really lost the election by so very much that they were only able to do what they needed in order to assure his victory by a mere hair.

On the other hand, Obama’s victory made me realize anything is possible, including people voting for a failed policy that has just about bankrupted the country, because they think it will be better for them. At any rate, Venezuela will continue to suffer, but the opposition grows stronger.

But doesn’t this all sound depressingly familiar? It certainly does to me:

In a Chavista stronghold in Petare outside Caracas, Maria Velasquez, 48, who works in a government soup kitchen that feeds 200 people, said she voted for Chavez’s man “because that is what my comandante ordered.”

Reynaldo Ramos, a 60-year-old construction worker, said he “voted for Chavez” before correcting himself and saying he chose Maduro. But he could not seem to get his beloved leader out of his mind.

“We must always vote for Chavez because he always does what’s best for the people and we’re going to continue on this path,” Ramos said. He said the government had helped him get work on the subway system and helps pay his grandchildren’s school costs.

The governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela deployed a well-worn get-out-the-vote machine spearheaded by loyal state employees. It also enjoyed the backing of state media as part of its near-monopoly on institutional power.

Maduro, however, is not Chavez.

His opponent Capriles has asked for a recount, but it certainly won’t overturn the election. They’ll make sure of that. Fausta is my go-to blogger on this, and she reported a few days ago about a very chilling event:

[From the Ecuador Times] “Juan Aranda, head of campaign in the Tachira State of the current presidential candidate, Henrique Capriles, was killed on tuesday morning, after been kidnapped by two individuals who were impersonating police officers.”

This is a warning to Capriles: if you disavow or challenge the result of the April 14th election, you’re dead.

As I said yesterday, the election is rigged. Capriles, who is no fool, is campaigning, knowing this. His only tactic, after the results are in, would be to challenge the results.

A brave man.

[NOTE: By the way, this is certainly interesting:

Capriles was born in Caracas, on 11 July 1972. He is the son of Monica Cristina Radonski-Bochenek and Henrique Capriles Garcé­a. Henrique was a successful businessman, and in the 1950s, he helped launch Kraft Foods’ entry into Venezuela by inviting the vice-president of its Nabisco subsidiary and persuading him to do business there. Capriles’ father was from Curaé§ao, and Capriles’ great-grandfather, Elé­as Capriles, was born in Curaé§ao in 1850.

Capriles’ paternal grandfather, Dr. Armando Capriles-Myerston, was of Sephardi Jewish descent, while Capriles’ paternal grandmother, Laura Garcia-Arjona, was from a Catholic family, and was related to political leader Simé³n Bolé­var. Capriles’ father was raised Catholic. Capriles’ mother was born in Venezuela, to Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland, who had left Europe during World War II; his grandmother’s mother and father were murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp. His maternal grandmother, Lili Bochenek de Radonski, spent 20 months in the Warsaw Ghetto. His maternal grandfather, Andrés Radonski, was an engineer active in the cinema business in Poland, who after emigrating to Venezuela in 1947, opened his first cinema in Puerto La Cruz. The company “Circuito Radonski” merged into Cinex in 1998.

Capriles’ parents agreed to educate their children in the Catholic faith until they were old enough to decide for themselves. Capriles said his faith had developed over the years, but that his time in prison in 2004 had “brought him much closer to God”. Capriles has stated that he is a “fervent Catholic”, and in an interview in the runup to the 2008 gubernatorial elections, he said that his greatest hero in history was Jesus Christ.

Capriles is really, really young, too: forty. He might be good for a few more go-rounds in this battle, if he manages to survive.]

RIP Maria Tallchief

The New Neo Posted on by

Ah, well do I remember her—tall, elegant, slightly exotic in her dark good looks, gracious, and somewhat removed and patrician as a dancer.

Confession: I wasn’t all that keen on her style, which I perceived as remote, and actually didn’t see her in person all that much. But she was a romantic figure, first for marrying and divorcing Balanchine, and then of course for being half native-American and having a great great name.

Looking at her bio now that she has died at the age of 88, I see that her Osage father was more or less a ne’er-do-well, and her Scots-Irish mother (in an interesting twist) had been the Tallchief family’s housekeeper and cook. Tallchief was from Oklahoma but her formative teenage years were spent studying dance in Los Angeles; I very much doubt she would have attained the requisite level of dance skills had she stayed in the Oklahoma of her era.

As for her name, the Wiki article says that towards the beginning of her career during the 1940s the New York City Ballet requested that she change it to “Maria Tallchieva.” It seems almost humorous at this point, since it was in part her name that seemed so attractive. She did consent to contract her original two-word name “Tall Chief” into the single word “Tallchief,” but that was all. A very smart move.

Here’s an article an alert reader sent me, containing a video about Tallchief and a bevy of other native-American ballet dancers of her day (sorry, there’s a brief ad at the beginning which I cannot seem to get rid of):

Interesting. I have a question, though: at minute 1:45 there is a still photo that immediately struck me as not being of Tallchief or any of the other ballet dancers featured in the clip. To me, it looks like a photo of Cuban dancer Alicia Alonso, perhaps with Rudolf Nureyev. Both she and Tallchief danced very briefly with Nureyev towards the end of their careers. Any ballet scholars among you have a clue whether I’m right about the photo?

[UPDATE: An alert reader has kindly informed me that the photo in question is of Rosella Hightower. On looking her up, I have to say she somewhat resembles Alonso; I hadn’t previously been all that familiar with Hightower’s looks, and I don’t think I ever saw her dance. The photo in question appeared in this obituary for Hightower, and her partner had indeed been the very distinctive-looking Rudolph Nureyev, a piece of ballet history of which I was unaware (or had forgotten), perhaps because the bulk of her career took place in Europe:

[Hightower was Rudolf Nureyev’s partner] on his first, sensational appearance in Britain in 1961.

Long one of Nureyev’s closest friends, she was his predecessor as artistic director of the Paris Opera Ballet and also founded the world’s most important ballet students’ prize, the Prix de Lausanne.

As the first 20th-century American ballerina to become a resident European star, Rosella Hightower spent most of her career in France, where her ballet school in Cannes has become world-renowned. Her home state of Oklahoma, proud of its five American Indian ballerinas, commissioned a mural depicting Hightower, the sisters Maria and Marjorie Tallchief, Yvonne Chouteau and Moscelyne Larkin, which was unveiled in the State Capitol in Oklahoma City in 1991.

Hightower led an exceptionally interesting-sounding and achievement-filled life, if her obituary is any guide.]

How do you teach critical thinking?

The New Neo Posted on by

“Teaching critical thinking” can sometimes be a cover for “teaching kids to question traditional values, and to accept our point of view instead” (i.e. leftism). But there’s no question that if it is used to refer to helping students get the skills to evaluate the veracity and logic of what they read, it is both sorely needed and sorely lacking these days.

Of course, to teach critical thinking a teacher has to exhibit at least a modicum of it, and preferably more. Sadly, that’s not something that can be said for a lot of teachers. And what of this particular teacher?:

…]T]his week, students at Albany High School were given an alarming thought puzzle: How do I convince my teacher that I think Jews are evil?

That question was posed to about 75 students on Monday by an unidentified 10th-grade English teacher as a “persuasive writing” exercise. The students were instructed to imagine that their teacher was a Nazi and to construct an argument that Jews were “the source of our problems” using historical propaganda and, of course, a traditional high school essay structure.

“Your essay must be five paragraphs long, with an introduction, three body paragraphs containing your strongest arguments, and a conclusion,” the assignment read. “You do not have a choice in your position: you must argue that Jews are evil, and use solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich!”

School administrators have apologized, and the teacher will be subject to some sort of as-yet-undecided disciplinary action. No one is suggesting this teacher actually was trying to teach anti-Semitism or to indoctrinate his/her students in it. The assignment was part of a unit on the Holocaust, and the goal (supposedly) was to teach how hate propaganda works, and how susceptible people are to it.

But an assignment to write propaganda certainly doesn’t seem like a good way to do this, especially at the high school level or younger. Analyzing the appeal of propaganda, and assigning students to write about why a person might agree with it and why another person might disagree, would be a far better one. The question of what makes certain people susceptible to being manipulated is an extremely important one, and would be a worthy and even vital topic. Writing the propaganda? Not so much.

This assignment looks like it could easily foster the very prejudices it is supposedly meant to counteract. It’s probably no accident that it’s about anti-Semitism, either, because there are so many other groups that might have been used for the propaganda-writing exercise that would almost certainly have been considered even more outrageous as subjects: for example, imagine the uproar had the assignment been to write propaganda against blacks, Muslims, or gays.

But I actually can imagine a group that would have been less controversial: I wonder what would have happened if the same assignment had been given, but the students had to devise an essay revolving around hatred of white men? We don’t lack for the material; just look at some of the campaign verbiage churned out by the left during the last couple of years, especially the election of 2012.

The sad truth is that human beings are very susceptible to propaganda, and that it is most effective when hidden behind a facade of good intentions. Even the Nazis understood this; their anti-Semitism wasn’t just “kill, kill, kill the Jews!” It was embedded in the message that Jews were evil and out to destroy the German nation, and therefore had to be fought in self-defense.

Here’s a little pamphlet for schoolchildren of the Reich (note the anti-moneylender theme, as well as the mimicking and usurping of the religious “catechism” format with which many German children were already familiar):

Which race must the National Socialist race fight against?

The Jewish race.

Why?

The goal of the Jew is to make himself the ruler of humanity. Wherever he comes, he destroys works of culture. He is not a creative spirit, rather a destructive spirit.

How is that evident?

The work of Aryan peoples shows a true creative spirit. The Jew is mostly a merchant, as he was for millennia in the past. There are no Jewish construction workers in Germany, no smiths, no Jewish miners or seamen. Nearly all major inventions were made by Aryans.

How has the Jew subjugated the peoples?

With money. He lent them money and made them pay interest. Thousands and thousands of Germans have been made wretched by the Jews and been reduced to poverty. Farmers whose land had been in the family for more than 100 years were driven from their land because they could not pay the interest.

What happened to those farmers?

They had to move to the cities. Torn from the land to which they belonged, robbed of their labor that gave their lives purpose and meaning, they fell victim to poverty and misery. Worn down, their souls crushed, they accepted Jewish doctrines that denied the Fatherland and opposed all that was nationalistic. Their strength and ability faded. The Jew had reached his goal.

What other guilt does the Jew bear?

While the German people was fighting a life and death battle during the World War, the Jew incited people at home and seduced them into treason. The November Revolution of 1918 that brought about Germany’s collapse was the work of the Jew.

The pamphlet goes on…and along with many other such publications for both young and old, helped to create the proper climate for the Nazis’ work.

One of the many legacies of the Holocaust is that comparison to the Nazis is a ready-made and almost surefire way to demonize any group, although it’s become somewhat old through incessant repetition. The problem is to distinguish between the movements that really do want to destroy other groups and those who are merely defending themselves against the unreasonable hatred of others. To the naive observer (and one who lacks critical thinking), the two can seem to resemble each other.

Hooking up

The New Neo Posted on by

Ah, doesn’t it sound like enormous fun to be a college student in the era of the casual hookup?

Not.

Oh, I know some people find it fun. Or perhaps they just tell themselves they find it fun. And I would imagine that those who really do find it fun are much more likely to be male than female.

This sort of thing did happen when I was in school, but it was the exception. Of course, by the time I left school, it was far more common, although I still didn’t know a whole bunch of people doing it. But even then there was a different groovy/peace/love/Age-of-Aquarius vibe to it compared to now, when it seems more like a business transaction without the money, and with fairly shoddy goods being exchanged.

It’s like this, and not limited to college students:

Sex is so cheap that researchers found a full 30% of young men’s sexual relationships involve no romance at all ”” no wooing, dating, goofy text messaging. Nothing. Just sex.

Men want sex more than women do. It’s a fact that sounds sexist and outdated. But it is a fact all the same ”” one that women used for centuries to keep the price of sex high (if you liked it back in the day, you really had to put a ring on it). With gender equality, the Pill and the advent of Internet porn, women’s control of the meet market has been butchered.

Men are not to blame, either. It’s women who have long been the gatekeepers, as it were. But when they tossed away what they thought were their chains, what they found instead was—this:

Sex on campus, writes the author, has been reduced to a solitary and selfish act””basically, onanism “with another person present.”

Sounds nifty, doesn’t it? Why bother? Why not just simplify things and skip the middle man (or woman)?

This is good

The New Neo Posted on by

I know, I know. You look down on “American Idol,” think it’s trash, yada yada yada.

Well, sometimes I watch it for fun, along with other fluff du jour, despite the fact that I’m not ordinarily all that keen on over-the-top diva-style pop singing.

But the young woman (age 23) named Candice Glover is good, really really good. Case in point:

Kirsten Powers…

The New Neo Posted on by

…continues to be one of the few MSM figures with integrity:

Since the murder trial of Pennsylvania abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell began March 18, there has been precious little coverage of the case that should be on every news show and front page. The revolting revelations of Gosnell’s former staff, who have been testifying to what they witnessed and did during late-term abortions, should shock anyone with a heart…

“Chaos” isn’t really the story here. Butchering babies that were already born and were older than the state’s 24-week limit for abortions is the story. There is a reason the late Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called this procedure infanticide…

A Lexis-Nexis search shows none of the news shows on the three major national television networks has mentioned the Gosnell trial in the last three months…

The Washington Post has not published original reporting on this during the trial and The New York Times saw fit to run one original story on A-17 on the trial’s first day. They’ve been silent ever since, despite headline-worthy testimony.

This is a companion piece to my post below, about the MSM’s reaction (or rather non-reaction) to the McConnell taping. The issues are very different—a horrific “abortion” mill the details of which should horrify everyone, whether pro- or anti-abortion, versus a possibly illegal political “dirty tricks” taping. But the common theme here is media coverage (and especially lack thereof, if the story would reflect poorly on the liberal cause) and how it shapes our lives, thoughts, and therefore our future.

McConnellgate

The New Neo Posted on by

Jonathan S. Tobin has a piece in Commentary entitled, “The Media Can’t Bury McConnellgate”:

Is it ever okay to bug an opponent’s political headquarters? Even those who are too young to remember what happened when officials connected with Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign unleashed an incompetent band of dirty tricksters on the offices of the Democratic National Committee in Washington’s Watergate complex, one would think the answer to that question is an emphatic no. While the Watergate scandal may have been more about the cover up than the crime, the line crossed by Nixon’s henchmen has always appeared to be a bright line that no one””not even liberals who can generally count on favorable media treatment””dare cross in this country. Yet someone or some group may have done so in Kentucky, and if that explanation of what happened at Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s Louisville office holds up what follows will be an interesting test of the media’s integrity.

…[T]here are only two possible explanations for the tape. One is that one of the senator’s high-level aides made the tape and sent it to Mother Jones magazine. The other is that one of the senator’s political opponents was running their own version of Watergate and found a way to bug his private conversations. While one cannot exclude the possibility that the former is the case, it seems unlikely. If the latter is true, then we’re going to find out whether liberals can get away with the sort of thing for which they once took down Tricky Dick.

I agree with Tobin’s characterization of the McConnell taping situation. I disagree with his idea that there’s any doubt whatsoever anymore about the tack the MSM will take. “Interesting test of the media’s integrity”? That test has been taken, and flunked, too many times to count, in situations far more weighty than what Tobin refers to as “McConnelgate.”

“We’re going to find out” whether liberals can do the same sort of stuff they get all hot and bothered about when Republicans do it? No, we found that out quite some time ago.

It has been a long, long journey for me from thinking that the media was not biased, or that it was equally biased, or not really paying close attention (before the advent of the internet, I regularly read two periodicals: the Boston Globe and The New Yorker. Nuff said.)

When did I last subscribe to the idea that the media would be fair, or even somewhat fair, or at the very least fair if circumstances were clear and dire enough? Hard to say, but certainly it would go back at least a decade. Should have realized it longer ago that that, of course. But as I said, before the internet my reading matter regarding current events—even though at the time I considered myself fairly well-informed—was rather limited, to say the least.

But I also believe that, especially during the Bush administration (which seemed to rouse the particular ire of the media) and then in particular with the advent of Barack Obama (the opposite), the MSM hasn’t just appeared worse—or more blatant in its biases, anyway. It has become worse. More monolithic, more shameless, and with this particular administration more obviously, with very few exceptions, the propaganda arm of the government.

If women were in charge

The New Neo Posted on by

Heather Wilhem rightly skewers an idea that has long seemed to me absurd on its face (and that many women, and even some men, seem to believe): that if women were in charge of the world, it would somehow be a better place.

Nothing in my experience or my observation of human beings indicates that this would be so. I’m not speaking of individual men and women, who have a broad range of characteristics with a great deal of overlap. But in the aggregate, there is nothing “better” about the way women operate, either in terms of the way they treat other people, the policies they advocate, or the degree of their propensity for tyranny.

The world wouldn’t be better, although it would probably be different. The tyranny of women in charge would probably resemble something like the world Sarah Conly envisions; they don’t call it the nanny state for nothing.

Where’s Tom Lehrer?

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: “Gringo.”]

Here’s an update on Tom Lehrer, that bitingly sarcastic troubadour of the 50s and 60s. But because he’s a reclusive sort, the article really doesn’t have all that much to say except that at 85 he’s alive and well and living in Santa Cruz and Cambridge.

If you read my previous piece on Lehrer, which is based in part on an interview he gave in 2003 to a Sydney newspaper, you’ll see that at least at that point he had gone somewhat off the deep end with Bush Derangement Syndrome. Now perhaps, with the Obama presidency, Lehrer is a bit mellower—although “mellow” seems hardly the right adjective for a man whose songs skewered almost everything and everybody.

As a minor Lehrer expert—I know almost all his songs by heart, having memorized them in my tender formative years—I have to say that one of the reasons Lehrer was so effective was that he wrote during a time when we still retained our ability to be shocked. His songs worked in part because they were so subversively funny, but it was much easier back then to push against conventional propriety.

Lehrer was a cynic with a built-in smirk to his voice. Even his tinkly piano-playing seemed to have an overlay of cynicism, although it’s hard to understand exactly how that was done. In trying to think of a song of his to post here as an example, I find an embarrassment of riches—or maybe just an embarrassment, because Lehrer’s not for everyone and is still remarkably offensive. But I especially admire the rhymes in the lengthy bridge of this one: