Reaction and roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

These days it’s hard to follow the news. Not only is it emotionally difficult to watch what I’ve called the unraveling, but it’s also technically difficult because there are so many stories that seem important to follow that, as one person, I’m not really able (or willing) to devote enough time to cover all of them in any kind of depth.

As a blogger, I’ve always had to pick and choose. But it seems more difficult now, and more dispiriting, although I try to take the more philosophical and psychological view and write posts that attempt to put the whole thing in historical perspective.

And every now and then I deal with it through roundups, quick glimpses of stories I’m not covering in depth at the moment, with links to those who are. Here’s one for today:

(1) The go-to place for reading about some of the details of the Chauvin trial is Andrew Branca’s work at Legal Insurrection. I suggest you check in every weekday. Here’s a particularly informative post from yesterday. One thing I’ve been thinking about in connection with the trial is how surprised the jurors – and anyone else following it very closely – will be by some of the evidence they probably have never encountered before in the MSM: the overdose, the previous 2019 incident that parallels that of May 2020 except that Floyd didn’t die in the first one, the fluid-filled lungs, and the fact that the hold Chauvin used was one approved of and taught by the Minneapolis PD. And there’s probably more I don’t even know about yet. What effect that will have on the jury that’s been fed anti-Chauvin narratives for the last ten months I can’t say.

(2) Now the long knives are out for Representative Matt Gaetz. We still don’t know much about truth or falsehood here, but at the moment I’m more inclined to believe Gaetz is the one telling the truth.

(3) They are cages and then there are cages.

(4) The Democrats end their attempt to overturn a certified election result in order to gain a House seat. The “optics” were bad, apparently.

[ADDENDUM: More on the Gaetz allegations here.]

Wisconsin Supreme Court rules against governor’s mask mandate extension

The New Neo Posted on by

The vote was a narrow 4-3, but the court found that Governor Evers needed legislative approval to extend the mandate.

What opinion do you think the author of the AP article wants you to hold? Let’s look at the lede:

The Wisconsin Supreme Court struck down Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ statewide mask mandate on Wednesday, stripping the governor of one of his last remaining tools to curb the spread of the coronavirus as the state stands on the precipice of another surge in infections.

Poor Governor Evers, stalwart in trying to protect the people of Wisconsin from the plague, and cruelly thwarted and deprived of one of his last remaining tools in that battle, as the state stands on a precipice about to tumble over the cliff and be smashed on the rocks.

Pay no attention to that vaccine behind the curtain.

Oh, and in particular pay no attention to these charts showing the rates of daily COVID deaths and daily COVID infections in Wisconsin have plummeted since January of 2021. Note also, when you look at those charts for Wisconsin, that it was only after Evers issued his mask mandate extension in August that death rates in Wisconsin really climbed. I’m not saying that is why they climbed, but the fact is that they did.

The AP article follows that lede by pointing out that the Supreme Court there is conservative-majority:

The conservative-leaning court ruled 4-3 that Evers violated state law by unilaterally issuing multiple emergency orders to extend the mandate for months. It found that Evers needed legislative approval to issue more orders after the expiration of the initial 60-day mandate he issued in August.

“The question in this case is not whether the governor acted wisely; it is whether he acted lawfully. We conclude he did not,” Justice Brian Hagedorn wrote for the majority.

The decision marks another legal defeat for Evers. The state Supreme Court in May struck down his stay-at-home order, finding that his health secretary lacked the authority to issue such an order. A state appeals court blocked Evers’ attempts to limit capacity in bars, restaurants and other indoor places in October.

I would be more encouraged by this decision if some of the liberal justices had joined the majority, but I’m not the least bit surprised that they didn’t.

Why new facts often don’t matter once a belief system has been established

The New Neo Posted on by

From commenter “Mac” on the thread about Biden lying about the new Georgia voting law [emphasis mine]:

For a lot of Democrats, I don’t think [they regard lies such as Biden’s as] even lying, in the sense of knowingly telling an untruth. They believe it. They’ve worked themselves into such a state of hatred toward Republicans that the master truth–that Republicans are white supremacists attempting to establish a white supremacist dictatorship–makes all details irrelevant. As in my anecdote above about giving water to voters–those who raged at me never referred to the specific fact at issue, but just battered away at the master truth. There is no doubt whatever in my mind that they believe it.

I think Mac is correct for most rank-and-file Democrats. Leftists and especially leftist leaders operate somewhat different and might be aware of the true truth, as it were, but for them the ends justify the means. What are their ends? Some believe they actually will be benefiting humanity by taking power, but others are just in it for the power. I have no idea what the proportions are, but that’s the division I see.

Back to the ordinary Democrats, though, without whom the leaders would have much greater difficulty seizing power. A belief system is ordinarily built from many separate pieces, like a house made of bricks. Ultimately, it becomes very strong and not just a group of bricks – but a structure on which the people living in it rely. If a single brick is undermined, or even a couple, the structure stands (I hope I’m right about this, not being a builder). The structure stands until enough bricks are removed that it collapses, or until someone takes a wrecking ball to it.

There’s also something known as a keystone, which is: “1. the wedge-shaped piece at the crown of an arch that locks the other pieces in place 2. something on which associated things depend for support ”

Removing a keystone – if a person has a keystone within his or her belief system – can cause a system to collapse in a fairly sudden and dramatic manner. I think that, during my own change process, both things happened – a slow accruing of evidence as well as some more sudden and important revelations (my change story contains some examples of each, but here’s one of the latter). Another person who had a “keystone” change experience was David Horowitz, a far left activist whose change to the right was originally sparked by learning that certain leftists he thought were decent were actually cold-blooded killers.

Most people’s belief systems are very very recalcitrant to change, and some are even impervious to it. In the latter cases – which I think are quite common – every small brick that might be removed from the edifice is almost immediately replaced with another brick, making the structure about as strong as before. Maybe even stronger, because it’s withstood many challenges. That’s the function of propaganda – to suppress the truth if it undermines the preferred narrative, but if the truth gets out, to immediately change the subject and come up with a new story to replace it. Then when that’s challenged, there’s another story and another and another for people to use to shore up anything that might be crumbling .

I believe that’s what Churchill meant when he said something of this sort:

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

For some people, it’s just that smooth a process. For others, it requires only a small adjustment before hurrying on as before.

Joe Biden lies about the new Georgia voting law

The New Neo Posted on by

Why would that be news, you ask? Of course he does. After all, Biden has often lied for his entire political life and gotten away with it most of the time. The only time he had to pay any price, as far as I know, is when he had to drop out of the presidential race in 1988 for plagiarism.

And I don’t mean little lies about inconsequential things, although he does that too. I don’t mean bragging, likewise. Those were the sorts of “lies” of which Trump was always accused by the left, but Biden habitually lies about far more consequential things. Now swollen with his own importance and insulated by the fact that the press usually covers for his lies (and has been doing so for a long time; see this for a list of his lies during the 2008 debate with Sarah Palin, an effort of Biden’s that was mostly praised in the pro-Democrat MSM), Biden lies in a way that is strategic and that appears to be pre-planned.

Of course, it remains an open question how much of this Biden comprehends. I happen to think that, although he has some cognitive problems, he still understands the situation well enough to knowingly cooperate with the lie.

Astoundingly, the fact-checker at the WaPo has criticized Biden for saying that Georgia’s new voting law (passed by the Republican-majority legislature there) would close polls at 5 PM and make it impossible for working people to vote after their shift is over. Fact-checker Kessler writes:

On Election Day in Georgia, polling places are open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and if you are in line by 7 p.m., you are allowed to cast your ballot. Nothing in the new law changes those rules.

However, the law did make some changes to early voting. But experts say the net effect was to expand the opportunities to vote for most Georgians, not limit them…

Biden framed his complaint in terms of a slap at working people. The law would “end voting at five o’clock when working people are just getting off work” or “ends voting hours early so working people can’t cast their vote after their shift is over.”

Many listeners might assume he was talking about voting on Election Day, not early voting. But Election Day hours were not changed.

As for early voting, the law made a modest change, replacing a vague “normal business hours” — presumed to be 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. — to a more specific 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. time period. But that’s the minimum. Under the new law, counties have the option to extend the voting hours so voters can start casting ballots as early as 7 a.m. and as late as 7 p.m. — the same as Election Day in Georgia. Moreover, an additional mandatory day of early voting on Saturday was added and two days of early voting on Sunday were codified as an option for counties.

One could understand a flub in a news conference. But then this same claim popped up in an official presidential statement. Not a single expert we consulted who has studied the law understood why Biden made this claim, as this was the section of law that expanded early voting for many Georgians.

Biden was given four Pinocchios.

The puzzlement for me isn’t what Biden said, it’s what Kessler wrote. At first I though it might be the start of the campaign to remove Biden and install Harris. But if that were the case, Kessler would have framed Biden’s statement as a faux pas probably due to creeping senility. But that’s not the thrust of his fact-check article at all.

However, I think I can safely say that the “experts” Kessler consulted may have studied the law, but apparently they haven’t studied Biden’s history if they don’t understand why Biden made the claim. He did it because he and/or his advisors felt he could get away with it, and that it would hurt the Republicans to label them as anti working people. The Biden advisors didn’t think the likes of Kessler would point out the lies no matter how blatant. And yet he did.

Or perhaps they thought that, even so, the Big Lie would have its desired effect. And maybe they were right about that.

Vaccine passports are the kind of ID the Biden administration likes

The New Neo Posted on by

IDs for voting, no.

IDs for having been vaccinated, yes.

It’s one thing to have proof of vaccination. It’s quite another to require it in order to travel or be allowed access to other activities:

“Considering that Democrats want to require vaccine IDs for people to conduct their basic daily activities, they now have zero grounds to object to voter ID laws,” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., told Fox News. “If under Democrat logic, you should need an ID to enter even a grocery store, surely there wouldn’t be an objection to showing an ID to legally vote.”

House Judiciary Committee ranking member Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, slammed the Biden administration for pursuing the idea of vaccine passports when the president “doesn’t seem to care about passports when it comes to illegal migrants crossing the southern border.”

Scalise is being sarcastic there; he knows the objections the left would mount against voter IDs versus vaccine passports. The left defines the first as the racist Republicans disenfranchising people of color, and many courts have agreed with the left. The left defines the second as the kind and caring Democrats protecting us all from a dread disease. One can play the sophistry game almost indefinitely, and charges of hypocrisy change few if any minds.

More:

Freshman Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., strongly condemned the idea of vaccine passports.

“Proposals like these smack of 1940s Nazi Germany. We must make every effort to keep America from becoming a ‘show your papers society,’” Cawthorn told Fox News. “The Constitution and our founding principles decry this type of totalitarianism.”

“America faces a dangerous future when its leader’s ideology shares more commonalities with Leninism than liberalism,” the North Carolina Republican added.

That’s where we are, however. And COVID has been the perfect opportunity for the left to test the waters of totalitarianism further and further, and to find that many Americans are very willing to wade right in.

[NOTE: This post ties in with this earlier post from today. Seems to be a theme. In fact, it’s probably the most basic theme we confront in the BHO administration.]

Then and now: not all of FDR’s Four Freedoms are actually freedoms

The New Neo Posted on by

Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms are famous mainly because of the Norman Rockwell art that illustrated the concepts. I wrote about that art in this post from fifteen years ago (my, my, how time flies). But today I’m writing about the ideas behind those four freedoms that FDR listed – freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear – and in particular their relation to each other.

As Sesame Street used to say – and for all I know it still does – one of these things is not like the others. Actually, two are not like the others. You can notice it first linguistically: two are “freedom of” and two are “freedom from.” But this isn’t just a matter pf prepositions, of course. The first two are liberties and the second two are protections which can often be diametrically opposed to liberty. The question for every country on earth is how to balance these opposing forces.

FDR delivered his Four Freedoms speech on January 6th, 1941, exactly 80 years before the Capitol incursion that is being used now by FDR’s even-more-leftist heirs to curb liberty. His goal was to drum up support for the Allies in the war in Europe, which America had not yet entered, as well as for his New Deal programs.

Today’s left only supports those first two liberties in situations where it is to their benefit – that is, they support their own free speech and their own favored religions (which, as far as I can tell at the moment, consist mainly of those “progressive” Christian denominations that are fully onboard with the left, Islam, and the anti-religion of atheism). Otherwise, they are actively working against those things for the right or for anyone who would disagree with them. So freedom of speech and religion are merely tools for them, means to ends, and the goal is to protect whatever supports power for the left and to squelch anything that does not.

The two “freedom froms” are their statements of protective goals with the idea of getting people to give the left more power. “Freedom from want” is the government largess that guarantees government assistance in nearly every facet of life. Who will pay? Why, the corrupt and undeserving rich. “Freedom from fear” – which FDR explicitly linked to freedom from wars – has now been expanded to something approximating “no hurt feelings for minorities and other designated victim groups,” a policy to be instituted even (or maybe especially) at the expense of the first two freedoms on the list. With COVID restrictions, we can add “freedom from risk of disease, even if the risk is small that the disease will be serious for healthy individuals under 70.”

I will add a third “freedom from” that suits our times: freedom from knowledge, particularly knowledge of history. The left counts on that lack of knowledge in order to get people to swallow their promises as well as their reframing of history as a tale of white badness and uniquely American evil.

Equality of opportunity isn’t at war with liberty, but once you introduce the goal of equality of outcome into the mix, liberty must go out the window. That one fact should be taught to children everywhere, but I don’t think it is anymore. I don’t even think that I learned it, at least not in school. I only internalized the idea many years later.

I’ll close with some words by the poet Robert Frost, with a tie-in to FDR again (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 insurrection narrative meets the courts

The New Neo Posted on by

NOTE: I have a busy day today and can’t give this the attention it deserves at the moment. But I wanted to put it out there anyway, probably to be revisited in greater depth in the future.

We’re heard over and over about the “insurrection” of January 6th. The idea that it was an insurrection is now deeply ingrained in most people’s minds, which is the point of the MSM’s and the Democrats’ rushing to judgment on such things. It’s a tried and true method that works in the sense of planting perspectives that are difficult or impossible to later change, even with the addition of facts that contradict it – and those facts are often suppressed or minimized by the media as well.

But in the world of actions rather than of perceptions, the courts still retain some say-so. And although the court system is strongly politicized, it’s not completely and totally politicized (not yet, anyway). For example, evidence that meets certain standards is still ordinarily required in court, although judges and juries sometimes ignore it or interpret it as they wish to get the results they want.

So now we have these legal developments regarding those arrested for their January 6th actions (and please see this as well as this, and this for some background).

I haven’t read all of that yet. But as I said, I plan to read the articles and comment further.

We are so much smarter and better now than past generations, right? RIGHT?

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I wrote the first part of the following post in 2013. Since then, the problem and the hubris it describes have increased exponentially. So I thought it might be a good time to re-post it and add some new remarks.]

I’ve just spent a fruitless hour trying to find the source from which I’d copied the following Allan Bloom quote some time ago. Somehow I’d lost the link, and now I can’t find it again.

But I thought I’d present the quote anyway because—like so much of Bloom’s oeuvre—it shows his uniquely facile mind and brilliant observations.

It was from an audio recording of a lecture that Bloom had given back in (to the best of my recollection, anyway) the mid-1980s. I had tried to transcribe it faithfully, complete with hesitations and idiosyncrasies and audience reaction. Bloom—whom I’ve written about before several times, mostly in the context of discussing his wonderful and highly-recommended book The Closing of the American Mind, was a professor of philosophy for most of his life. He was exceedingly familiar with the outlook of university students, primarily in America but also in Europe. Note that what he said back then describes trends that have only intensified since:

You know, we’ve all read history. Everybody, you know, world history, and weren’t all past ages maaaad? There were slaves, there were kings—I don’t think there’s a single student who reads the history of England and doesn’t say that that was crazy. You know “that’s wonderful, you gotta know history, and be open to things and so on,” but they’re not open to those things because they know that that was crazy. I mean, the latest transformation of history is as a history of the enslavement of women, which means to say that it was all crazy—up till now.

Our historical knowledge is really a history which praises, ends up praising, ourselves—how much wiser [voice drips with sarcasm] we are, how we have seen through the errors of the past…Hegel already knew this danger of history, of the historical human being, when he said that every German gymnasium professor teaches that Alexander the Great conquered the world because he had a pathological love of power. And the proof that the teacher does not have a pathological love of power is that he has not conquered the world. [laughter] We have set up standards of normalcy while speaking of cultural relativism, but there is no question that we think we understand what cultures are, and what kind of mistakes they make.

Bloom was not a cultural relativist; he believed it was a pernicious influence that had taken over American education. Time has proven him correct, has it not?

That’s where the original 2013 post ended. But I’ll add a 2021 addendum, which is that so many students – perhaps even the majority – no longer say, or no longer are allowed to say, “that’s wonderful, you gotta know history, and be open to things and so on.” The prevailing notion is that students are too outraged and violated by even hearing about history that doesn’t conform to current standards and that the remedy is to not learn about it or even be reminded of it, except in the context of how evil it was and how the current descendants of those evil people must pay a price. The price can be monetary and/or to stand at the back of the line when jobs and influence are handed out and/or the need for public confession of sins.

I would also add that Bloom, when speaking in the 80s, mentioned that history was then seen as the “history of the enslavement of women.” That way of teaching history isn’t gone, but it has now been at least partially eclipsed by the idea of history as the history of the enslavement of black and brown people at the hands of white people. The NY Times’ 1619 Project is an excellent example of the latter, in which American history was rewritten and distorted in order to fit the all-important prevailing narrative that is meant to shape the minds and policies of generations to come.

Will we ever learn what really happened in Fulton County on Election Night 2020?

The New Neo Posted on by

Probably not.

And it’s certainly too late for us to learn anything that will change the actual results of the 2020 election. But more information slowly emerges:

Counting at the State Farm Arena, however, continued past 10:30 p.m. after most staffers had left. In December, Waller told Just the News that, contrary to the numerous media reports, she had “stated to all media … that although several workers were released to go home, a small team remained behind to assist with scanning ballots.”

It is unclear why no media outlets appear to have mentioned that fact.

In the emails obtained this weekend by Just the News through an open records request, Waller appears to indicate that the ballot-counting team had dispersed by around 10:30 p.m.

n the email, timestamped at 10:22 p.m. on Nov. 3 and addressed to several county officials as well as State Farm Arena spokesman Garin Narain, Waller wrote: “The workers in the Absentee Ballot Processing area will get started again at 8 am tomorrow.” Waller goes on to request arrangements for news crews hoping to get live shots of the counting the following day.

Reached for comment via email, Waller said the email “was in response to a question received asking when all workers would return.” She did not respond to a request to see the original email to which she was responding.

More at the link.