Cities and businesses are not immune to the laws of cause and effect…

The New Neo Posted on by

…although some mayors and city governments seem to think so.

The most elementary and basic task of city government is to preserve an environment in which people feel safe from attacks on their persons and property. Of course, that safety can never be perfect. Crimes are committed, natural disasters happen, and rogue cops can even go against their charge and do harm. But a municipality must be run well enough that such things are rare, and when they do occur, the response should prevent the worst results and assure the residents that the government is competent at the task.

In the case of Minneapolis and Chauvin and the other three police officers, they’ve been arrested and charged, and they will be tried (I tend to doubt they’ll get a fair trial because of all the publicity, but they certainly will get a trial). How common is police brutality or mistreatment, serious or minor, in Minneapolis? I don’t know, but I have little doubt it’s been studied and will be studied some more. At any rate, deaths such as that of Floyd are rare and I don’t think they will ever be eliminated anywhere despite all efforts, because of the nature of police work and of human beings.

But a city cannot afford to let looting and rioting and arson go on. When I use the word “afford” I mean it literally. Take away all the verbiage about how people feel – their anger and their pain or whatever feelings you ascribe to them – and you are left with the practical matter of a city’s lifeblood, its economy, which depends on creating an environment that favors investment and commerce. Businesses will leave for safer places if they don’t feel secure in a particular city. They are not sentenced to do time in that place – for now we continue to allow businesses to make their own choices about where to locate, although if the left has its way that could change as well.

Any mayor who voluntarily tells police to stand down during a riot is forfeiting that trust and safety and most likely condemning his/her city to a bleaker future. If a mayor does that because he or she actually believes it will placate rioters and make them feel better and solve some of the problem, then that mayor is a fool. But perhaps the mayor just realizes that the police and fire departments are overwhelmed by sheer numbers and that throwing them into the mix would put them at too much risk. If so, then it’s time to call in the National Guard as quickly as possible, because order must be restored.

Mayors in various cities did not do that, and those cities will pay a price. Again, that’s not a metaphor – it’s a literal price. Here’s an example:

Kris Wyrobek, president and CEO of 7-Sigma, decided to move his business out of Minneapolis after rioters burned his plant to the ground.

Wyrobek said:

They don’t care about my business…They didn’t protect our people. We were all on our own.

Why should the business feel any allegiance to a city whose leaders abandoned it?

A mayor such as Frey should understand that there is a cause and effect operating here. In that process, the city ends up losing more than the business – it loses more businesses, people, tax revenue, trust, and quality of life.

And the arsonists? They’re not thinking about attracting business or city revenue. They’re either angry and striking out at targets of opportunity, or (even more likely in this particular case) they are Antifa anarchists bent on destroying capitalism and masquerading as anti-Fascists. They count on the weakness and stupidity (and or alliance) of modern progressive mayors such as Frey.

Will the truth make itself “known in deeds” – and will it happen in time to prevent disaster?

The New Neo Posted on by

Roger Scruton wrote the following in 2006, almost a decade and a half ago. The subject matter is immigration, but it’s relevant to a lot more than that particular subject:

The destructive effects of liberalism are not usually felt by the liberals themselves—not immediately, at least. The first victim of liberal immigration policies is the indigenous working class. When the welfare state was first conceived, it was in order to provide insurance for poorer members of the indigenous community, by taxing their income in exchange for the benefits which they may one day need. The rights involved were quasi-contractual: a right of the state to levy contributions in exchange for a right of the citizen to receive support. The very term used to describe the deal in Britain—“national insurance”—expresses the old understanding, that the welfare system is part of being together as a nation, of belonging with one’s neighbors, as mutual beneficiaries of an ancestral right. The liberal view of rights, as universal possessions which make no reference to history, community, or obedience, has changed all that. Indigenous people can claim no precedence, not even in this matter in which they have sacrificed a lifetime of income for the sake of their own future security. Immigrants are given welfare benefits as of right, and on the basis of their need, whether or not they have paid or ever will pay taxes. And since their need is invariably great—why else have they come here?—they take precedence over existing residents in the grant of housing and income support. Those with a handful of wives are even more fortunate, since only one of their marriages is recognized in European systems of law: the remaining wives are “single mothers,” with all the fiscal advantages which attach to that label. All this has entailed that the stock of “social housing” once reserved for the indigenous poor is now almost entirely occupied by people whose language, customs, and culture mark them out as foreigners.

It is not “racist” to draw attention to this kind of fact. Nor is it racist to argue that indigenous people must take precedence over newcomers, who have to earn their right of residence and cannot be allowed to appropriate the savings of their hosts. But it is easier for me to write about these matters in an American intellectual journal than in an English newspaper, and if I tried to write about these things in a Belgian newspaper, I could be in serious trouble with the courts. The iron curtain of censorship that came down in the wake of Powell’s speech has not lifted everywhere; on the contrary, if the EU has its way, it will be enshrined in the criminal code, with “racism and xenophobia”—defined as vaguely as is required to silence unwanted opinion—made into an extraditable offense throughout the Union.

And this may be the most interesting part of all [addition in brackets mine]:

The problem with censorship, as John Stuart Mill pointed out a century and half ago, is that it makes it impossible for those who impose it to discover that they are wrong. The error persists, preventing the discussion that might produce a remedy [early], and ensuring that the problem will grow. Yet when truth cannot make itself known in words, it will make itself known in deeds. The truth about Hitler burst on the world in 1939, notwithstanding all the pious words of the appeasers. And the truth about immigration is beginning to show itself in Europe, notwithstanding all the liberal efforts to conceal it.

What’s happening in the US now? Perhaps – if we are fortunate – it’s the truth showing itself about the left. And if we’re very fortunate, it’s the truth about the left, showing itself in time to prevent disaster.

I have my doubts that it’s showing itself in time. Or perhaps it’s more correct to say that it would be in time, if so many people weren’t blinded by the incessant propaganda of the left, supported and spread by the MSM and the school system as well as a host of other institutions the left has taken over.

Today I’ve been thinking of this old post of mine, and the words of author Azar Nafisi on the Iranian revolution she had supported when it was happening and she lived in the US, a support she lived to regret when she returned home to Iran after the revolution [emphasis mine]:

I spoke passionately at the rallies; inspired by phrases I had read in novels and poems, I would weave words together into sounds of revolution. My oppressive yearning for home was shaped into excited speeches against the tyrants back home and their American backers…

When in the States we had shouted Death to this or that, those deaths seemed to be more symbolic, more abstract, as if we were encouraged by the impossibility of our slogans to insist upon them even more. But in Tehran in 1979, these slogans were turning into reality with macabre precision. I felt helpless: all the dreams and slogans were coming true, and there was no escaping them…

In later months and years, every once in a while Bijan [Nafisi’s husband] and I would be shocked to see the show trials of our old [Iranian] comrades in the U.S. on [Iranian] television. They eagerly denounced their past actions, their old comrades, their old selves, and confessed that they were indeed the enemies of Islam. We would watch these scenes in silence…I turned and asked Bijan, Did you ever dream that this could happen to us? He said, No, I didn’t, but I should have.

Minneapolis: If you liked the riots and burning, you’ll love it when the police leave – you privileged kulaks, you

The New Neo Posted on by

News from the hot trend-setting city of Minneapolis:

Nine of the [city] council’s 12 members appeared at a rally in a city park Sunday afternoon and vowed to end policing as the city currently knows it…

Council Member Jeremiah Ellison promised that the council would ‘dismantle’ the department.

That’s Keith Ellison’s son, by the way; Ellison will be heading the prosecution of Chauvin.

City council president Lisa Bender was interviewed:

The “New Day” co-host asked a question a lot of Americans have for people like Bender who advocate for some variation of defunding/disbanding/dismantling of local police forces in the name of social justice. Who is a person to call in the middle of the night when their home is broken into if there is no police department?

Here’s her answer:

Don’t black people call the cops when their homes are broken into? Even black people who are not especially wealthy – or not wealthy at all? And if they do, does that mean that those black people are privileged as well? Or are they allowed to call the police because they’re black and therefore unprivileged, even though they own some property?

After all, isn’t looting and stealing just Marx’s “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”? The homeowner’s got the ability to amass the goods, and the thief’s got the need. So hey, why worry about the police?

Perhaps Bender wants homeowners to arm themselves and shoot intruders first, ask questions later. After all, if the police won’t or can’t protect the home and the people in it, it’s up to the homeowner. Ah, but I bet a rudimentary police force will be kept in order to arrest those homeowners who use a weapon to defend their paltry little privileged possessions.

And come to think about it, isn’t your life just another privileged possession? If an angry person needs to take it in order to feel better, then who are you to say “no”?

No doubt this will end well:

Black Lives Matter New York chapter Chairman Hawk Newsome said his organization has marched for years to raise awareness of “the realities of police brutality and oppression.” The group is preparing “to stop these government sanctioned murders by any means necessary.”…

They are declaring war on police and “training our people to defend our communities in Black Panther style armed patrols.” Newsome continued, “We’re talking about self-defense. We’re talking about defending our communities. You know what it’s like to see a taser pointed at a 7-year-old, you know what it’s like to see a 67-year-old black woman … pepper sprayed and pushed to the ground?”

He told The Daily Mail, “It’s our obligation, it’s our duty to provide people with a pathway forward…We want liberation. We want the power to determine our own destiny. We want freedom from an oppressive government, and we want the immediate end of government sanctioned murder by the police.

The murder of George Floyd, he said, woke people up. BLM is now “mobilizing its base and plans to develop a highly-trained “military” arm to challenge police brutality head on.” Newsome said they will send out armed “Peace Officers” to “patrol black communities to challenge law enforcement and stop police brutality, reminiscent of the Black Panther Party.”

Newsome, 43, has a law degree and prior to becoming a full-time activist, he was a project manager at a law firm.

Lawyers seem to be in the vanguard of this (then again, Robespierre was a lawyer). Floyd’s death was the opportunity they were looking for, but if he hadn’t died they would have found another excuse, and the MSM would have just played along like they’re doing now.

More:

Newsome told The Mail, “We pattern ourselves after the Black Panthers, after the Nation of Islam, we believe that we need an arm to defend ourselves. I don’t see us working with police. I see us policing ourselves. I see us teaching black people how to police their own communities.”

The group has raised a great deal of money in the past two weeks from celebrities and high net-worth individuals as well as from small donors “who respect what we stand for.”…

Newsome refuses to call for the violence and looting to stop. Instead, he says people must have more “empathy” for the rioters…

Regarding the looting, Newsome tells The Mail, it is “ultimately a product of capitalist America and its treatment of the black community.”

Privilege.

Our educational system has prepared its young people to be the perfect audience for this, although I’m not sure what percentage lap it up. But not only does the sentiment tie right in with what they’ve been taught about capitalism and their own privilege and guilt, but most are ignorant of who the Panthers and Nation of Islam were and what they did.

Is the idea to turn blue urban inner cities into the no-go areas of France (the ones that, if memory serves me, don’t really exist)?:

In the 1980s, districts now officially regarded as “sensitive areas” (zones urbaines sensibles, or “no-go zones”) barely existed. Twenty years later, they have become areas where French laws rarely apply. In 2002, the author Georges Bensoussan, defined these areas in his book as The Lost Territories of the Republic. Three years later, the “lost territories” rose up in protest for three weeks and France seemed on the brink of a civil war. Calm returned only thanks to imams to whom the government ceded power. The government told them that the police would no longer intervene where Muslim populations live. In 2017, when Bensoussan published A Submitted France, he said that now the entire country was affected.

There are presently 751 sensitive zones in France. There, gangs reign and the law that is enforced is the law of Islam, sharia. Most of the non-Muslim residents have gone. Doctors enter these areas only under escort.

The residents of those areas are Muslim immigrants and their children. Our own lost territories will not be primarily Muslim; although there is a Muslim presence (such as Ellison himself, as well as Somali immigrants such as Ilhan Omar) it is not predominant. But the idea of a police-free zone policing itself is the analogy.

And they don’t need the people of Minneapolis to vote on this, either. Leftists are in charge, and they seem quite determined to do it – for the people’s own good. Trust them; they know best.

Sultans of Swing: over and over and over…

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I think we all need a break from depressing politics right about now.]

There are certain songs that you love the very first time you hear them. At least, that’s the way it is for me. One of them was Dire Straits’ “Sultans of Swing” in the late 1970s. I first heard it on the radio and even though I couldn’t understand many of the lyrics at the time, I didn’t care. It got my attention – boy, did it ever – catchy, melodic, rhythmic, unusual.

Sometimes with a song like that, a person gets tired of it. But with “Sultans” – a song I’ve heard over and over in many iterations – that hasn’t happened yet. Guitarist and vocalist (and songwriter) Mark Knopfler is able to vary it each time in a way that makes it sound fresh. And this is true although the song itself features much repetition of some of its lines. It’s hypnotic and yet somehow simultaneously energizing as well as emotionally moving.

Here we have YouTube’s “British guitarist,” whose commentary I really enjoy, opining on a “Sultans” version Knopfler performed in 1996 (or rather, a portion of a version). That’s almost twenty years after the original, and Knopfler is no longer very young. But the joys of repetition never get old, as long as it’s a master at work. How does Knopfler do it? To repeat and repeat and repeat and make it different every time, and in every line? In this particular version (and many others, even more frenetic ones) he’s so calm, like a zen master. Here, he doesn’t even bother to sing the words. And yet the piece is brilliant, and so melodic it can make your heart ache with pleasure.

[NOTE: Other famous songs I recall liking immediately on first hearing them were “Yesterday” by the Beatles (actually, many songs by the Beatles), “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones, and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” by Bob Dylan. There are plenty more. But my love for “Sultans,” and my desire to listen to it many times, is more intense than my feelings about those other songs.]

White privilege, white guilt: whites as the new Jews

The New Neo Posted on by

After I had the idea for the title of this post, I wondered if it had been said before. It has – by Jonah Goldberg back in late 2007 in his book Liberal Fascism. Whatever you think of Goldberg’s stances recently or even of that book itself, I think his metaphor was both apt and prescient.

Here’s a National Review essay he wrote not long after the book came out, in which he quotes from it and explains his use of the idea. In the 2007 book Goldberg had written:

The white male is the Jew of liberal fascism. The “key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race,” writes the whiteness studies scholar and historian Noel Ignatiev. Whiteness studies is a cutting-edge academic discipline sweeping American higher education. Some thirty universities have WS departments, but many more schools teach the essentials of whiteness studies in other courses. The executive director of the Center for the Study of White American Culture explains, “There is no crime that whiteness has not committed against people of color . . . We must blame whiteness for the continuing patterns today . . . which damage and prevent the humanity of those of us within it.” The journal Race Traitor (ironically, a Nazi term) is dedicated “to serve as an intellectual center for those seeking to abolish the white race.”…

…[T]here is the left’s shocking defense of black riot ideology and gangsterism. The glorification of violence, the romance of the street, the denunciations of “the system,” the conspiratorialism, the exaltation of racial solidarity, the misogyny of hip-hop culture: all of these things offer a disturbing sense of déjà vu. Hip-hop culture has incorporated. On college campuses, administrators routinely look the other way at classically fascist behavior, from newspaper burnings to the physical intimidation of dissident speakers. These attitudes ultimately stem from the view that the white man, like the Jew, represents every facet of what is wrong and oppressive to humanity. As Susan Sontag proclaimed in 1967, “The white race is the cancer of human history.” Meanwhile, Enlightenment notions of universal humanity are routinely mocked on the academic left as a con used to disguise entrenched white male privilege.

I would add that these days it’s not just white men who are excoriated, although that was the group emphasized in Goldberg’s quote. Note also that, as with so many things happening today, this began with intellectuals (that Sontag quote was in the 60s) and/or in the universities – who, in terms we’ve learned from the COVID pandemic, appear to be “superspreaders” of this idea and so many others.

The minute I first heard the philosophy that whites are bad and that whites therefore should feel bad about themselves as a collective whole because some whites are racist, I recognized it as dangerous and deeply racist itself. And that was back when I was a liberal and a student myself, so it’s a long long time ago. Was it Malcolm X? I’m not sure, but I recall it as a huge break from the Martin Luther King sort of activism I’d previously known, and I seem to recall that anti-Semitism was often part of the new wave.

I know the analogy of anti-white feeling to historical anti-Semitism is far from perfect. But it’s still relevant. Both have as a prominent feature the sweeping idea of inherent and collective guilt of an entire people and/or race. How can this guilt ever be erased? Perhaps never, although public self-humiliation is felt to be a small start.

So this week, after the death of George Floyd at the hands (or knee) of a policeman in Minneapolis who has now been indicted for murder, white people (or institutions that are made of a majority of white people) are required to rend their garments, wear hairshirts, and confess their sins. Many individuals as well as institutions (colleges, businesses, sports personalities) are busy saying their mea culpas in order to signal that they are suitably contrite. But can such sins ever be forgiven and these white hands ever be washed clean?

Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson says [emphasis mine]:

What the killing has done is to show us that there still persists a hardcore white supremacy racist ideology, which rejects outsiders, anyone who is not white. That ideology is now ascendant as a result of the leadership in the White House. What I see is two great traditions in America that are competing. There is the liberal tradition, and there’s the equally dominant tradition of white supremacy, which comes out of the South but traveled northward. There is real tension between them.

I’ve argued in my writings that there has been extraordinary progress in the changing attitudes of white Americans toward blacks and other minorities. As late as the early ’60s, a majority of whites openly said they saw blacks as inferior, and now there is an acceptance of equality, at least in their views. I’ve always said that this may be the great majority, but there’s still 20, 25 percent of whites who still embrace white supremacist views. This hard core of white supremacists is still there and have been encouraged and are leading a revanchist sort of movement. And that’s quite frightening.

No need to prove that Trump is a white supremacist, despite all he’s done to help black people. The Harvard Gazette‘s readership knows it’s true, everyone says it, so the argument doesn’t even need to be made properly, just stated. The incomparable Thomas Sowell, who retired from writing in 2016 at the age of 86 (and who originally had not liked Trump and yet urged people to vote for him in 2016), had this to say in March of 2019 which I think is spot on:

In March 2019, Sowell commented on the public’s response to mainstream media’s allegations that Trump was a “racist”: “What’s tragic is that there’s so many people out there who simply respond to words rather than ask themselves “Is what this person says true? How can I check it?” And so on.” One month later, Sowell again defended Trump against media charges of “racism”, stating: “I’ve seen no hard evidence. And, unfortunately, we’re living in a time where no one expects hard evidence. You just repeat some familiar words and people will react pretty much the way Pavlov’s dog was conditioned to react to certain sounds.”

Now back to Patterson. What of his assertion that twenty to twenty-five percent of whites “embrace white supremacist views”? That’s quite a claim. It certainly doesn’t match the number of actual avowed white supremacists there are in the US today, so I’d love to see the research he’s relying on (if any) when saying that. Patterson himself offers no help; he just casually throws the number out there for the reader to take on his authority without the need to check it out for him/herself. One would think such an extraordinary claim would need at least a verbal footnote, but we don’t get one.

After searching for quite some time I have found nothing that answers the question. Patterson hismelf is described by Harvard as a “historical and cultural sociologist.” He was born and raised in Jamaica and educated both there and at the London School of Economics for graduate school.

My guess is that Patterson might cite in support of his contention about the number of white supremacists some research that purports to measure – by a subtle sign involving an answer to a question on a questionnaire, perhaps – something that a sociologist has decided is a signal of irredeemable white racism. But I don’t know, and at any rate in these days the existence of widespread white supremacist beliefs is asserted as a truism without the need to prove it is true or to even demonstrate what the phrase means, so eager are so many people to nod and embrace the idea because to even question what it means makes a person instantly suspect of holding the very same white supremacism they deplore, at the very least by being “in denial.”

The left uses this as a cudgel to beat down all adherence to and reliance on what used to be nearly universally accepted beliefs and norms of behavior in the US: the existence of truth, the need for order and protection of property, the importance of teaching the history of Western civilization, equality of opportunity rather than of outcome, meritocracy, and the rejection of the idea of collective guilt of any race, creed or religion. If the left has anything to say about it, those days are gone, and good riddance to bad (white) business.

The future of the blue city: Bill de Blasio never had any intention of protecting private property

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been reading a bunch of essays about the future of New York (see this and this, for example).

They are grim. And how could they not be?

Now, you may say “who cares, they made their bed and let them lie in it.” I care, and not just because New York is my home town, even though I left it over a half century ago. I care because I still know and love plenty of people there. I care because I don’t like to see suffering, even if the suffering is a result of choices people make. I care because cities like New York used to have wonderful things about them, and still have some of those good things. I care because I worry that as New York goes, so go more cities and perhaps ultimately the nation. Is there anything to be gained by having more and more failed and broken municipalities across the land? And doesn’t New York’s economy affect us all, as well?

New Yorkers voted for Bill de Blasio in 2013 to be mayor, and then they re-elected him in 2017. So yes, they are responsible. But it’s a curious fact that the turnout both years was incredibly low, so low that in 2017 only 8.5% of New York City’s eligible voters went for de Blasio, and it wasn’t all that different in 2013.

That’s a shocking statistic in and of itself – what was the apathy about? Was New York doing so well at the time that people felt they could coast, that it didn’t matter who was elected? Were the Republican candidates so terrible that even the specter of a socialist wasn’t enough to bring many voters out for them? Or did a lot of people want socialism? I don’t have an answer, but I do know that some areas turned out in much larger numbers to vote against him, but they were overwhelmed by the voters in many other areas who voted for him and carried the day.

There’s a map at the link that you can study if you like. It’s very informative, and shows for example that Staten Island – whose population is much less than that of the other boroughs but has long been more conservative – came out forcefully against de Blasio. But of course it doesn’t matter now; they’re along for the ride, whether they like it or not and whether they asked for it or not.

Musing about all of this today (or rather, brooding), I decided to search the blog to see if I’d written anything in the past about de Blasio that’s relevant. There is little doubt in my mind that he had no intention of stopping the riots; and perhaps in some Cloward-Piven-ish manner he wanted them in order to have an excuse to effect even greater change to his leftist ideal. And sure enough, I found a post I wrote in September of 2017 that in a moment I will reproduce in full here. It’s based on an interview he’d given, so I suppose at that point he felt he could be pretty open about his plans and his dreams. He definitely had plans for private property, and they were not supportive – essentially, he wanted its abolition and total government control.

The last line of the quote from him was, “It’s not reachable right now.”

Well, how about now, June 2020, nearly three years later? We’ve had a big dose of government control in the reaction to COVID-19, and now we have the failure to protect private property during the riots. I’m pretty sure he thinks it’s a lot more reachable at the moment. Whether it is or isn’t remains to be seen.

So here’s the post, exactly as it appeared almost three years ago:

Steven Hayward at Powerline calls our attention to an interview and quote from New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio. It’s quite revealing not just about de Blasio, but about the leftist mindset about the role of government, our legal system, and what people themselves want [emphasis mine]:

Q: In 2013, you ran on reducing income inequality. Where has it been hardest to make progress? Wages, housing, schools?

de Blasio: What’s been hardest is the way our legal system is structured to favor private property. I think people all over this city, of every background, would like to have the city government be able to determine which building goes where, how high it will be, who gets to live in it, what the rent will be. I think there’s a socialistic impulse, which I hear every day, in every kind of community, that they would like things to be planned in accordance to their needs. And I would, too. Unfortunately, what stands in the way of that is hundreds of years of history that have elevated property rights and wealth to the point that that’s the reality that calls the tune on a lot of development…

…Look, if I had my druthers, the city government would determine every single plot of land, how development would proceed. And there would be very stringent requirements around income levels and rents. That’s a world I’d love to see, and I think what we have, in this city at least, are people who would love to have the New Deal back, on one level. They’d love to have a very, very powerful government, including a federal government, involved in directly addressing their day-to-day reality.

It’s not reachable right now. And it leaves this friction, and this anger, which is visceral.

There’s an awful lot packed in there, isn’t there?

First and foremost, we have the fact that de Blasio feels comfortable enough to express these sentiments openly rather than hide them. My guess—and it’s only a guess—is that he really believes that most New Yorkers, and maybe even most people in the US, agree with him about the function of government and how much it should dictate their lives. Sentiments and goals that just a few years ago were only whispered in private by any politician hoping to actually get elected are now declared openly by the current mayor of New York.

Next we have the scope of his vision. De Blasio would like the government to control as much as possible, and not just about real estate development. He says “[People would] love to have a very, very powerful government, including a federal government, involved in directly addressing their day-to-day reality.” And if Bill de Blasio and his cronies have anything to say about it, that’s exactly what would happen—for your own good, of course, because you know it’s really what you want. When Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever,” it was a dystopian and horrific vision. De Blasio thinks it’s what we all secretly—and maybe not-so-secretly—want. And he thinks that he’s just the guy to do the stomping, only he’ll call it a love tap.

Next we have the idea that government is capable of doing this sort of regulation much better than the market ever could, and much better than free and autonomous human beings ever could. When he says that “[people] would like things to be planned in accordance to their needs,” he’s not only echoing Marx (“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”), but he’s also assuming that government is capable of figuring out what people’s needs really are and designing a world that meets them. Although it’s possible that he doesn’t really believe that and he’s just cynically saying it in pursuit of power, I actually think—based on many (not all, however) of the leftists I know—that he is most likely sincere in his belief and in his hubris.

Then we have the contempt for the rule of law and for hundreds and hundreds of years of protection of property rights under it. Does de Blasio have even the remotest understanding of why our system is designed the way it is, and why property rights are so protected? I doubt it. He seems to see it as a little thing, a mere anachronism that should be pushed aside in favor of the great beneficent government he wants (“That’s a world I’d love to see..”) put in place. And he knows that you want it, too.

Lastly is the ominous phrase “right now,” found in the next-to-last sentence of the quote. We’re not there yet, folks, but if the kindly de Blasios of the world have their way, we’ll be there some day soon.

COVID and the politics of “science”

The New Neo Posted on by

I guess protestors and rioters are immune to COVID. Or at least, they pose no danger to Grandma. Or even if they do and grandma dies as a result, they’re not really granny-killers since their cause is just.

People who go to church, or have loved ones’ funerals with more than ten people, on the other hand: thoughtless killers!

Actually, I believe that, since most of the George Floyd demonstrators (and rioters) are young, if they themselves get COVID they are either really likely to have very mild or even asymptomatic cases. Hey, maybe they’re even doing a public service by helping coax along the herd immunity. Or maybe, just maybe, we won’t see any spike in COVID as a result of their mass get-togethers.

But if we do see a spike a couple of weeks later, rest assured. The media will not blame it on the protestors or the rioters. It will be the fault of the rest of us trying to open businesses and go about our lives.

The fallout of this is that expert opinion goes down several more notches in the eyes of most people noticing, although I’m not sure their reputation has any further down to go without digging underground. The hypocrisy is blatant, although they try to explain it away as some people’s causes are more important than other people’s causes, or religious observances, or funerals – or lives, for that matter. The social justice warrior health experts signing on to the idea that demonstrations are an exception to the no-crowds rule consider themselves to be what Sowell called “the anointed,” in his book The Vision of the Anointed:

The Vision of the Anointed (1995) is a book by economist and political columnist Thomas Sowell which brands the anointed as promoters of a worldview concocted out of fantasy impervious to any real-world considerations. Sowell asserts that these thinkers, writers, and activists continue to be revered even in the face of evidence disproving their positions.

Sowell argues that American thought is dominated by a “prevailing vision” which seals itself off from any empirical evidence that is inconsistent with that vision.

–the prevailing social vision is dangerously close to sealing itself off from any discordant feedback from reality.
–it is so necessary to believe in a particular vision that evidence of its incorrectness is ignored, suppressed, or discredited
–empirical evidence is neither sought beforehand nor consulted after a policy has been instituted. Facts may be marshalled for a position already taken, but that is very different from systematically testing opposing theories by evidence.

Sowell’s work, by the way, was one of the foundations for my political change experience. It was a process I was already going through even before I found Sowell’s writing. But once I started to read some of his stuff I felt an extraordinary sense of relief, as though coming home. Here was a thinker who was saying things that made sense to me, in a coherent whole that helped me realize what I think I’d always believed but had never found articulated elsewhere.

[ADDENDUM: Glenn Reynolds adds:

The public health experts had one shot, and they blew it. If deaths do result [from the riots, the public health experts] should be specifically blamed — and named — as grandma-killers. If deaths don’t result, they should be specifically blamed — and named — as business-killers. And they can’t hide behind neutral science because they abandoned neutral science for politics and preening within their own social circles.

As I said above, though, the MSM will try to blame any spike on the re-opening of businesses. But Glenn is right – and it’s not the fault of science, but of the politicization of science by scientists. It’s a practice of which the left is very fond; the Soviets were big on it.]

David Horowitz on Al Sharpton and the Floyd memorial

The New Neo Posted on by

Horowitz writes:

In a twisted way it is fitting that the most destructive week for America in living memory should be topped off by a memorial featuring the nation’s chief racial arsonist Al Sharpton…

Not the least unexpectedly, the malevolent Sharpton used the platform the mourners provided to stoke the fires of racial hatred, attacking all of white America because black America’s problems and miseries stemmed from the fact that “for 401 years white America has had its knees on our necks” – or words to that effect.

Sharpton’s four-hundred and one years ago was actually 1619, when the creation of the United States of America was still 168 years in the future, but why quibble over arithmetic when you are intent on indicting a whole race of people so you can blame them for your problems? “Four-hundred years of slavery” of course has long been a common battle cry of the racial demagogues who 50 plus years ago overwhelmed and then corrupted the civil rights movement turning it into a racial shakedown operation after the death of Martin Luther King.

That American knee that Sharpton kept referring to , of course produced the revolutionary declaration that all men are created equal and have a God-given right to liberty, which ended 3,000 years of normalizing slavery – which still exists in Africa today.

Please read the whole thing. It covers a lot of territory but isn’t very long.

[NOTE: For those of you who might be unfamiliar with Horowitz, he was a big lefty radical in his youth, but now is conservative. I’ve written many posts about him, as well as about Sharpton.]

“Unexpectedly,” jobs report is better than predicted

The New Neo Posted on by

Ah, those experts. What is it they’re expert in again? Seems like the last few months have really undermined their creds.

The rate fell somewhat instead of rising. Good news.

But it’s not good news to the left, of course. Here’s what Politico has to say:

An unexpected drop in the unemployment rate set off a fresh round of debate on Friday over how fast the economy can rebound from the coronavirus pandemic and how much the government should intervene to help.

The unemployment rate fell to 13.3 percent in May from a peak of 14.7 percent in April, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported — surprising economists who had widely expected the rate to jump to about 20 percent in May, given that more than 40 million people have applied for unemployment benefits in recent weeks.

The economy gained 2.2 million jobs last month, as states started relaxing stay-at-home orders and opening for business. Markets rallied on the news, with the S&P 500 gaining nearly three percent by mid-day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 3.8 percent.

President Donald Trump and his economic advisers, who have been prodding governors to relax stay-at-home orders, said the numbers show the economy will recover as quickly as they have been predicting. Trump at a Friday news conference compared the pandemic to a short-lived natural disaster and said the numbers are evidence of the “greatest comeback in American history.”

But some economists warned that the unemployment rate is still at highs not seen since the Great Depression — and that it remains hard to predict whether and how rapidly the upswing will continue. The nonpartisan CBO has estimated that unemployment won’t even near pre-pandemic levels — which was at 3.5 percent in February— by the end of next year.

Well, duuuuuh. It remains hard to predict. We need experts to tell us that? And it might not recover fully right away, to previous unemployment levels that were the lowest in umpteen
decades? Fancy that.

By no means are we out of the woods, either from naturally-occurring events or the plans of the left for more crises that might be manufactured. But I don’t think the right feels that some sort of decent recovery by November would be all that “unexpected.”

Just the experts.