Boris Johnson’s slow exit

The New Neo Posted on by

Was it really the scandals that brought Boris Johnson down? Or was it the disappointment over his weakness as a leader and his failure to deliver much of anything beyond Brexit that would differentiate him sharply from Labour?

I think the latter, and so does Melanie Phillips, who certainly knows more about it than I do:

Boris Johnson’s decision to quit as prime minister of the United Kingdom followed unprecedented scenes in the British parliament this week, as he clung on to power despite the resignation of more than 50 of his ministers in an attempt to force him out.

The immediate cause of the revolt was a series of last straws over his perceived personal dishonesty—first by breaking his own COVID laws and, most recently, lying about his promotion of a “sex-pest” Member of Parliament.

The deeper issue was a profound disillusionment among those who had voted him into power for delivering Brexit. These constitutents concluded that he had failed to use Britain’s newly recovered independence to free up the country’s capacity for progress and prosperity.

Nor was he resisting the culture war being waged upon core values, particularly the loss of control over illegal immigration and the trashing of Britain’s history and identity.

He’s quitting as head of the Conservative (Tory) party, but he says he’s staying till October as Prime Minister. Phillips thinks he might be persuaded to shorten that timetable to avoid being a protracted lame duck. There certainly is no dearth of party members calling for him to step down much more quickly.

I don’t agree with a good deal of the rest of Phillips’ piece, which is a comparison of Trump, Netanyahu, and Johnson, but I do agree that the problem with Johnson and the reason he’s being forced out goes much deeper than the scandals.

Is Boris Johnson finally on the way out?

The New Neo Posted on by

It looks grim for him, but who knows? The rodents are deserting what looks to be a sinking ship, though:

It is looking increasingly unlikely Johnson can withstand this onslaught of resignations, prompted by yet another scandal. This latest scandal involves the Conservative deputy chief whip, Chris Pincher, who was forced to resign last week amid allegations he got drunk at a private club and groped two men. That might have been the end of it, but the debacle resurfaced other allegations of sexual misconduct against Pincher, including one from 2019, when Pincher served in the foreign office…officials confirmed that Johnson was, in fact, aware of some of the allegations against Pincher.

Johnson apologized Tuesday for appointing Pincher, saying it was a “mistake,” in hindsight, to name him deputy chief whip. But it looks to have been too little too late. On Tuesday evening, two of Johnson’s top senior officials, finance minister Rishi Sunak and health secretary Sajid Javid, both resigned from the cabinet, calling Johnson’s integrity into question. Their move set off the slew of resignations happening now — more than 35 as of Wednesday, with possibly more to come.

Both Javid and Sunak are major figures in the Conservative Party who may have their own designs on leadership, so their departures were already going to be hard to overcome. Johnson, of course, replaced those ministers. But British media is reporting that some of Johnson’s top cabinet officials are currently mobilizing to convince the prime minister that it’s time to go…

“Partygate” is largely what brought Johnson to this point. Last year, allegations started emerging of Downing Street officials hosting boozy, in-person parties when England was under very strict lockdown rules. Johnson initially denied any knowledge of the parties, but more photos and stories started trickling out, and “Partygate” refused to go away. Juicy details aside, the scandal is fairly straightforward: The people in charge of making and enforcing Covid-19 rules were themselves breaking them.

Johnson survived a no-confidence vote in June, which apparently protects him from another until a year has passed since the earlier one. That’s why his own party is now trying to talk him into voluntarily resigning.

Johnson got elected in order to guide Brexit, and after that I think he outlived his usefulness. COVID was a disaster. He also has always been a wild and crazy guy, and so these scandals shouldn’t have been the least bit surprising or unexpected. He’s become an albatross around the neck of his party, but he’s a stubborn guy who may want to hold on to power past his pull date.

On the Highland Park shooter and red flag laws

The New Neo Posted on by

The Highland Park shooter was waving red flags with both hands and both feet. And yet Illinois red flag laws didn’t stop him from purchasing not just one gun but many.

This is his history – or at least a portion of it [emphasis mine]:

On Tuesday, Lake County authorities revealed that Crimo had two encounters with local police in 2019, before he legally obtained his weapons.

The first call, in April 2019, was a report that he had attempted suicide.

Then, in September 2019, a family member called Highland Park police to report that Crimo “said he was going to kill everyone” and that he had a collection of knives, Sgt. Christopher Covelli of the Lake County Sheriff’s Office said at a press conference Tuesday.

Highland Park police confiscated 16 knives, a dagger and a sword from Crimo’s home – but ultimately did not arrest Crimo, Covelli said, in part because none of his family were willing to sign complaints.

Afterward, Highland Park police notified Illinois State Police of the incident in a “clear and present danger” report.

But because Crimo did not then have a FOID card – a firearm owner’s identification card that is issued by Illinois State Police and required for gun ownership – nor an application to deny, the state police said, their “involvement with the matter was concluded.”

Three months later, Crimo, then 19, applied for a FOID card. His application was sponsored by his father, and was approved by state police in January 2020.

Later that year, Crimo passed three background checks to purchase guns, authorities said. He passed a fourth check on Sept. 20, 2021, his 21st birthday.

In a second statement released late Tuesday, Illinois State Police addressed questions about why the “clear and present danger” report did not prevent Crimo from obtaining a FOID card just four months later.

“The report indicates that when police went to the home and asked the individual if he felt like harming himself or others, he responded no,” the agency said. “No one, including family, was willing to move forward on a complaint nor did they subsequently provide information on threats or mental health that would have allowed law enforcement to take additional action.”

Additionally, Crimo’s father claimed the knives were his, and that they were being stored in his son’s closet “for safekeeping,” police said. Highland Park police returned the knives to Crimo’s father later that afternoon.

This is another example of why strict gun laws won’t prevent these things from happening at least sometimes. Illinois is a blue state with a red flag law that failed here. I’ve highlighted the parts about the father and the family because I think they show a pattern, and the pattern is either denial or excuses or misplaced compassion or some combination of the three.

And yet I think parents of troubled youths are in a dreadful bind. What to do? Sometimes the kid has had tons of therapy and it hasn’t helped (I have no idea what the therapy history of this perp was, however). Therapy isn’t a cureall. Sometimes parents are afraid if they institute a tough-love regimen their son or daughter will get even worse, and they therefore think it’s best to keep that person home.

Remember the case of the family of John Hinckley, the young man who almost succeeded in killing Ronald Reagan in order to impress Jodie Foster? I certainly do:

‘The strength drained from the sonorous voice of John W. Hinckley Sr. as he described ”the greatest mistake of my life,” the March 7, 1981, meeting at the Denver airport when he told his ”dazed, wiped out” son he could not come home again.

Weeping silently, he buried his face in a handkerchief when he had finished his testimony as the eighth witness called in support of his son’s defense, which is that he is not guilty because he was insane…

Mr. Hinckley’s wife, JoAnn, who had been bent over, sobbing into a tissue, was escorted from the spectator section of the courtroom…

According to his father’s testimony, it was at about 4:30 A.M. on March 6, 1981 – which, unknown to him, was just hours after his son had left the letter under Miss Foster’s door – that he received an ”incoherent” and ”frantic” telephone call from him in which he said he was broke, hungry and sleepless in New York and wanted to come home.

That call led to the rupture of the long-strained relationship between the self-made oil entrepreneur and the self-described ”prodigal” son, whose unwillingness to finish college or to support himself and increasingly erratic behavior had, the father said, caused ”a great deal of discord in our home.”

The father said he met his son at the Denver airport on March 7, after reluctantly sending him money to fly to Denver from New York. While driving alone from the family home in Evergreen, Colo., to the airport, Mr. Hinckley said, ”I prayed that we were doing the right thing.” . He said a psychiatrist had told him and his wife to tell their son to fend for himself, and had advised, ”Send him $100 and wish him good luck.”

At the airport, he said, ”We sat down and I told him how disappointed we were in him, that he had let us down and he had not followed the plan we had all agreed on” for him to support himself. The plan had been devised by Dr. John J. Hopper Jr., the psychiatrist. Told Son Not to Come Back

Mr. Hinckley said he gave his son ”a couple of hundred dollars,” took him to the son’s old car parked near the airport, put some antifreeze in the leaky radiator, and told him that he could not come ”back to the house again.” As his wife sobbed quietly in her seat in the front row of the packed spectator section, Mr. Hinckley continued:

”I suggested that he go to the Y.M.C.A., and he said he did not want to do that. I said, ‘Okay, you’re on your own. Do whatever you want to.’

Please read the whole thing.

It’s not that the Highland Park shooter had much in common with Hinckley except some sort of obvious mental disturbance that caused family problems. In both cases a father was present and involved in dealing with his son, although the way each chose to treat that son was very different. It didn’t matter in the end; both sons were bent on violence and committed it.

In the case of the Highland Park shooter’s father it seems as though the father’s cooperation, or the cooperation of some family member, was necessary in order for the red flag laws of Illinois to have flagged the son and stopped him from the legal purchase of a gun. Is that a flaw in the law? If Crimo the younger seemed coherent at the time the police came, and everyone declined to escalate matters further, should a red flag law have been activated anyway? And if so, for how long?

In other words, how to draft a red flag law which protects the innocent but stops the potentially dangerous from obtaining weapons? That is far from easy and in my opinion it’s probably impossible to do perfectly. And if course, if a person is determined to get a weapon, there is always the illegal route.

The Highland Park July 4th shooter

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s really little to say except RIP to the victims – and to note that the alleged perp seems obviously nihilistic and perhaps deranged. One look at his photos tells you that. I don’t usually say that sort of thing. But facial tattoos of that type are a really bad sign.

He seems to have somewhat checkered political views, including some indications he was a Trump supporter. But as with so many mass shooting perps these days, his politics seem to have been as disordered as almost everything else about him. He was obsessed with murder and death, and apparently he finally acted that out.

For those who espouse the “fatherlessness” theory of perps like this (I’ve discussed the weakness and lack of evidence for that here), it does not seem to be the case for this guy either, who is reported to have been living with his father and uncle.

Remember Ukraine?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve avoided making predictions about the endgame of the war in Ukraine, but here’s an article that discusses the possibilities:

At the time of this writing, it is not yet clear what the outcome will be. His first strategy having failed, he is experimenting with escalation of force, using more artillery and larger numbers of troops, but still not going for the full-scale destruction of urban areas with carpet bombing such as that used in Grozny and more recently in Aleppo during his Syrian intervention. Casualties would be much higher if that were the case. It is also the case that the “Finnish model” that ultimately emerged was only resorted to after an extended period of conventional warfare against Finnish forces, one that gradually pushed the Finnish back, but at a very high cost. The Finnish model was not a first choice for Stalin, but it was an acceptable one. If it was acceptable for Stalin, it is not unreasonable that it might be acceptable for his spiritual protégé, if it came to that.

The Chechen model basically writes off any expectation of willing cooperation from the conquered population, and relies on sheer terror to maintain control of the area. Putin is still acting in hopes that the bulk of the Ukrainian population can be convinced to at least accept the rule of a Moscow-appointed puppet regime, while gradually coming to accept that state of affairs as the new normal for Ukraine. After all, the Ukrainians had accepted Soviet rule with at least the same degree of compliance between 1920 and 1990, and the Belarusians accept essentially the same outcome for themselves today, so this hope does not seem entirely unreasonable to Putin. Let us call such an outcome the Belarusian model. However, it seems likely that outcomes will fall short of anything resembling a Belarusian outcome.

There’s much much more at the link. The author has no firm answer, either, but he’s pretty good at asking the right questions and analyzing the prospects.

For the Fourth: on liberty

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post from many many years ago. It was written in the springtime during a visit to New York City. Reading it now, it seems almost archaic in certain ways.]

I’ve been visiting New York City, the place where I grew up. I decide to take a walk to the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, never having been there before.

When you approach the Promenade you can’t really see what’s in store. You walk down a normal-looking street, spot a bit of blue at the end of the block, make a right turn–and, then, suddenly, there is New York:

brookheights2.jpg

And so it is for me. I take a turn, and catch my breath: downtown Manhattan rises to my left, seemingly close enough to touch, across the narrow East River. I see skyscrapers, piers, the orange-gold Staten Island ferry. In front of me, there are the graceful gothic arches of the Brooklyn Bridge. To my right, the back of some brownstones, and a well-tended and charming garden that goes on for a third of a mile.

I walk down the promenade looking first left and then right, not knowing which vista I prefer, but liking them both, especially in combination, because they complement each other so well.

All around me are people, relaxing. Lovers walking hand in hand, mothers pushing babies in strollers, fathers pushing babies in strollers, nannies pushing babies in strollers. People walking their dogs (a preponderance of pugs, for some reason), pigeons strutting and courting, tourists taking photos of themselves with the skyline as background, every other person speaking a foreign language.

The garden is more advanced in time than gardens where I live, reminding me that New York is really a southern city compared to New England. Daffodils, the startling blue of grape hyacinths, tulips in a rainbow of soft colors, those light-purple azaleas that are always the first of their kind, flowering pink magnolia and airy white dogwood and other blooming trees whose names I don’t know.

In the view to my left, of course, there’s something missing. Something very large. Two things, actually: the World Trade Center towers. Just the day before, we had driven past that sprawling wound, with its mostly-unfilled acreage where the WTC had once stood, now surrounded by fencing. Driving by it is like passing a war memorial and graveyard combined; the urge is to bow one’s head.

As I look at the skyline from the Promenade, I know that those towers are missing, but I don’t really register the loss visually. I left New York in the Sixties, never to live there again, returning thereafter only as occasional visitor. The World Trade Center was built in the early Seventies, so I never managed to incorporate it into that personal New York skyline of memory that I hold in my mind’s eye, even though I saw the towers on subsequent visits. So what I now see resembles nothing more than the skyline of my youth restored, a fact which seems paradoxical to me. But I feel the loss, even though I don’t see it. Viewing the skyline always has a tinge of sadness now, which it never had before 9/11.

I come to the end of the walkway and turn myself around to set off on the return trip. And, suddenly, the view changes. Now, of course, the garden is to my left and the city to my right; and the Brooklyn Bridge, which was ahead of me, is now behind me and out of sight. But now I can see for the first time, ahead of me and to the right, something that was behind me before. In the middle of the harbor, the pale-green Statue of Liberty stands firmly on its concrete foundation, arm raised high, torch in hand.

The sight is intensely familiar to me – I used to see it frequently when I was growing up. But I’ve never seen it from this angle before. She seems both small and gigantic at the same time: dwarfed by the skyscrapers near me that threaten to overwhelm her, but towering over the water that surrounds her on all sides. The eye is drawn to her distant, heroic figure. She’s been holding that torch up for so long, she must be tired. But still she stands, resolute, her arm extended.

NOTE: I was going to add a photo of the Statue of Liberty here. But instead I was very taken with a video about how the statue was constructed. I’d never previously thought about the challenges involved and how they were surmounted, but I learned about them here. And the video also caused me to reflect, and not for the first time, on how the forces arrayed against the US right now are good at destroying but not at building. Destroying is so much easier:

Happy Fourth of July!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a slightly-edited repeat of a previous post.]

I saw that film on TV maybe 30 times when I was a child. Loved it, and in particular loved the idea that James Cagney—whom I already knew as a tough old gangster—could dance. His dancing fascinated me because it was so non-balletic and idiosyncratic—the strutting, graceful/ungraceful, artful/artless uniqueness of his movement. In particular I recall the wall-climbing part at the end, which delighted me then and still does now.

Cagney wasn’t just an actor and hoofer, although he certainly was both. He was also a political conservative and changer. Excerpts from his Wiki page:

He was sickly as a young child—so much so that his mother feared he would die before he could be baptized. He later attributed his sickness to the poverty his family had to endure…The red-haired, blue-eyed Cagney graduated from Stuyvesant High School in New York City in 1918, and attended Columbia College of Columbia University where he intended to major in art…

Cagney believed in hard work, later stating, “It was good for me. I feel sorry for the kid who has too cushy a time of it. Suddenly he has to come face-to-face with the realities of life without any mama or papa to do his thinking for him.”

He started tap dancing as a boy (a skill that eventually contributed to his Academy Award) and was nicknamed “Cellar-Door Cagney” after his habit of dancing on slanted cellar doors. He was a good street fighter, defending his older brother Harry, a medical student, when necessary. He engaged in amateur boxing, and was a runner-up for the New York State lightweight title. His coaches encouraged him to turn professional, but his mother would not allow it…

In his autobiography, Cagney said that as a young man, he had no political views, since he was more concerned with where the next meal was coming from. However the emerging labor movement of the twenties and thirties soon forced him to take sides…He supported political activist and labor leader Thomas Mooney’s defense fund, but was repelled by the behavior of some of Mooney’s supporters at a rally. Around the same time, he gave money for a Spanish Republican Army ambulance during the Spanish Civil War, which he put down to being “a soft touch.”…He also became involved in a “liberal group…with a leftist slant,” along with Ronald Reagan. However, when he and Reagan saw the direction the group was heading in, they resigned on the same night…

Cagney was accused of being a communist sympathizer in 1934, and again in 1940. The accusation in 1934 stemmed from a letter police found from a local Communist official that alleged that Cagney would bring other Hollywood stars to meetings. Cagney denied this, and Lincoln Steffens, husband of the letter’s writer, backed up this denial, asserting that the accusation stemmed solely from Cagney’s donation to striking cotton workers in the San Joaquin Valley. William Cagney claimed this donation was the root of the charges in 1940. Cagney was cleared…

After [WWII], Cagney’s politics started to change. He had worked on Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidential campaigns…However, by the time of the 1948 election, he had become disillusioned with Harry S. Truman, and voted for Thomas E. Dewey, his first non-Democratic vote. By 1980, Cagney was contributing financially to the Republican Party, supporting his friend Ronald Reagan’s bid for the presidency…As he got older, he became more and more conservative, referring to himself in his autobiography as “arch-conservative.” He regarded his move away from liberal politics as “…a totally natural reaction once I began to see undisciplined elements in our country stimulating a breakdown of our system… Those functionless creatures, the hippies … just didn’t appear out of a vacuum.”

Cagney: hoofer, political changer. An original all the way.

Happy Fourth to you all!