This is what passes for an eminent philosopher these days: Julian Savulescu [Part II]

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[NOTE: Part I can be found here.]

Later on in his interview, the philosopher and bioethicist Julian Savulescu has much to say about what humans can do on the biological level to help make the world better, in the general sense as well as the biologic sense:

In my view, we should choose genes if those characteristics affect a person’s happiness. A rising percentage of kids today are on Ritalin for Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. But that’s not because there’s suddenly been some epidemic of ADHD. It’s because you’re crippled as a human being if you have poor impulse control and can’t concentrate long enough, if you can’t defer small rewards now for larger rewards in the future. Having self-control is extremely important to strategic planning, and Ritalin enhances that characteristic in children at the low end of impulse control. Now, if you were able to test for poor impulse control in embryos, I believe we should select ones with a better chance of having more choices in life, whether you want to be a plumber, a taxi driver, a lawyer, or the president.

Does he hear himself? One of the dangers of “playing God” is to think we know what we do not know. I’m referring to the consequences of decisions such as what Savulescu is proposing here. Hubris is a mild word for what he’s displaying. People with ADHD are “crippled as human beings?” Yes, they have certain problems, but so does everyone—including, I imagine, Savulescu himself. In fact, for some people with ADHD, there might even be other characteristics going hand-in-hand with ADHD that are a plus. Some are creative, energetic, and out-of-the-box thinkers who’ve contributed much to society.

We are not equipped to measure the worth of a life, and the more we think we can, and the more circumstances we include in our deity-like measuring and eliminating, the further we have gone towards the territory of “life unworthy of life” Nazi-esque judgments.

In other words, Savulescu (along with his mentor, Singer) gives me the willies.

Here Savulescu addresses—or thinks he addresses—the problems inherent in eugenics and the Nazi comparison:

People concerned about eugenics remember the Nazi program of sterilization and the extermination of people deemed to be unfit. Now it’s important to recognize this wasn’t unique to Nazi Germany. The extermination part was, but sterilization was common through Europe and the United States. Many states in the U.S. had eugenics laws so people who were intellectually disabled or mentally ill were sterilized against their will. This kind of eugenics was one of the darker sides of the 20th century.

But eugenics just means having a child who is better in some way. Eugenics is alive and well today. When people screen their pregnancies for Down syndrome or intellectual disability, that’s eugenics. What was wrong with Nazi eugenics was that it was involuntary. People had no choice. People today can choose to utilize the fruits of science to make these selection decisions. Today, eugenics is about giving couples the choice of a better or worse life for themselves.

Yes, one of the many problems with Nazi eugenics was that it was involuntary. It was a huge problem, although in their own hubris the Nazis didn’t see it that way at all. But it was hardly the only problem. Another problem is that all eugenics, not just the coercive variety—as I’ve already indicated—comes complete with an alarming degree of hubris that ignores the unintended consequences of such policies, much as all large-scale central social planning does. But it’s a persistent leftist/statist delusion that the person currently doing the planning is smart enough to avoid (or ignore) those inherent problems.

Also, didn’t Savulescu already state the following (emphasis mine), in the same interview from which I’m taking all these quotes?:

Q: So you don’t see any fundamental ethical objection to human cloning?

A: In reality, hardly anybody does. Remember that 1 in 300 pregnancies involves clones. Identical twins are clones. They are much more genetically related than a clone using the nuclear transfer technique, where you take a skin cell from one individual and create a clone from it.

Q: But twins are not something we engineer. That just happened.

A: One of the big mistakes in ethics is to think that means make all the difference. The fact that we’ve done it or nature has done it is irrelevant to individuals and is largely irrelevant to society. What difference would it make if a couple of identical twins come not through a natural splitting of an embryo, but because some IVF doctor had divided the embryo at the third day after conception? Should we suddenly treat them differently? The fact that they arose through choice and not chance is morally irrelevant.

So, according to Savulescu’s own belief system, wouldn’t the distinction between voluntary eugenics and coerced eugenics be one of means, and therefore wouldn’t it be a “big mistake” to think it’s a difference that makes a difference? I assume that he would answer that question by saying that it’s more than a distinction of means; that somehow distinctions based on voluntariness or coercion are of a very different order. But why would that be, if we are bioengineering a Brave New World?

Come to think of it, Savulescu reminds me quite forcibly of the character Mustapha Mond in Huxley’s masterpiece:

Resident World Controller of Western Europe, “His Fordship” Mustapha Mond presides over one of the ten zones of the World State, the global government set up after the cataclysmic Nine Years’ War and great Economic Collapse. Sophisticated and good-natured, Mond is an urbane and hyperintelligent advocate of the World State and its ethos of “Community, Identity, Stability”. Among the novel’s characters, he is uniquely aware of the precise nature of the society he oversees and what it has given up to accomplish its gains. Mond argues that art, literature, and scientific freedom must be sacrificed to secure the ultimate utilitarian goal of maximising societal happiness. He defends the genetic caste system, behavioural conditioning, and the lack of personal freedom in the World State: these, he says, are a price worth paying for achieving social stability, the highest social virtue because it leads to lasting happiness.

I would also assume (although I’m really not sure) that Savulescu would say that he differs from Mond in that he doesn’t believe in caste systems, and he doesn’t want to sacrifice personal freedom either. Well if so, bully for him. But such a smart person should be smart enough to see that once the sort of things he’s advocating become normal in society, the rest can easily follow, and that once social engineers are in charge personal freedom will always suffer greatly.

Savulescu does seem to have an inkling of some problems, although even there his insights seem interspersed with mistaken assumptions:

I think we are the biggest threat to ourselves. The elephant in the room is the human being.

This seems to be true. But then he says this:

For the first time in human history we really are the masters of our destiny. We’ve got enormous potential to have unprecedentedly good lives. We’ll be able to live twice as long. With our computers and the Internet, we already are smarter than any of our predecessors.

I don’t agree with any of the assertions in the above quote. I don’t see us as the “masters of our destiny”, and since Sevulascu has already just said that the elephant in the room is the human being, I doubt he actually thinks so either. Is that not a contradiction, right there?

And then there’s the phrase “unprecedentedly good lives.” “Good” measured how? People certainly don’t seem happier than they used to, if one measures “good” that way. But there are other ways to measure “good” than “comfortable” or “easy” or even “long” (see this).

And will we actually ever be able “to live twice as long” as the oldest of us do now? Perhaps, but perhaps not. It remains to be seen.

Lastly, does Savulescu really think that computers and the internet have made human beings “smarter than any of our predecessors”? I certainly don’t see that effect of computers. Whatever the reason, I see us as creeping closer towards the situation portrayed in the film “Idiocracy,” and although computers have made some people more well-informed, at least, they seem to have given others more access to false information and circles of hatred and paranoia.

Savulescu went on to add:

But we also have the possibility to completely shackle ourselves, if not destroy ourselves. The Internet is a good example. In George Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother was placing us under surveillance, controlling and censoring everything that happened. In some ways we already are under surveillance. But my worry is not the government—at least not in the U.K. or the U.S.; it’s each other. As soon as we publish something, it’s immediately pumped around the Internet to every fanatical group, which then mobilizes within minutes and creates such momentum that it doesn’t matter what you said or what the truth is; what matters is the perception. So we now live under a kind of censorship of each other and that’s just going to increase.

He said that right after he said “With our computers and the Internet, we already are smarter than any of our predecessors.” Seems contradictory to me.

I will close with something I wrote earlier in one of my posts about Peter Singer (the teacher Savulescu credits as his mentor):

When I was a child of about twelve years old, I came across (I think it was in an encyclopedia) a Goya etching entitled “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.” Here it is:

sleep

At the time, I was puzzled by the title. Did it mean that when reason goes to sleep, bad things happen? Or did it mean that when reason gets free reign, bad things happen? Since then, I’d always seen it interpreted the first way; after all, Goya himself wrote “Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters.” But that’s not the full quote, which adds, “united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of her wonders.”

I’d add to “imagination” something like “emotion,” or perhaps “the eternal and ancient human truths.”

Here’s more:

“Kearney (2003) suggests two different meanings based on the dream/sleep debate. Firstly, ‘reason must govern the imagination’, it must be watchful, otherwise the ”’forces of darkness’, will be ‘˜unleashed on humanity’. Alternatively, a more romantic approach is that the ‘˜rationalist dreams’ promoted by the ‘˜Enlightenment’ are just as capable of producing their own ‘˜monstrous aberrations’.”

Reading about Peter Singer immediately made me think of that Goya etching.

[NOTE: The interview with Savulescu was first written up in 2015, but it’s been recently republished.]

This is what passes for an eminent philosopher these days: Julian Savulescu [Part I]

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[NOTE: Part II here.]

As soon as I saw the headline for this article, I thought it might be about Peter Singer. I’ve written at great length about Singer before (see this, this, and this), and the title of the article—“The Philosopher Who Says We Should Play God”—is what brought him to mind.

But it wasn’t about Singer. Instead, it was about someone the article refers to as a protégé of Singer’s, Julian Savulescu, who has now come to some prominence in the field of philosophy and bioethics.

The article quotes Savulescu as having said the following in an interview:

“I actually think of myself as the voice of commonsense,” says Julian Savulescu. “If you actually looked at things without any kind of baggage, you’d view them like me.”

Ah, the voice of pure reason, devoid of any baggage—except, perhaps, the hubris of thinking he has no baggage, and that “no baggage” (in a Spockian Star Trek way) is an advantage in reasoning out complex bioethical issues.

If you look at the 3-part series I wrote on Savulescu’s mentor Peter Singer (to which I’ve linked above), the title of those posts was “Peter Singer and the trap of reason.” I elaborated at some length on why pure reason—or the attempt at pure reason—in discussing these bioethical questions is a trap that can lead us astray. Reason is necessary, but reason alone is not enough, and reason can miss some elements that reason should be taking into account (I refer you to those posts to see my argument in greater detail).

Here’s Savulescu on human cloning, for example, which is currently banned:

Q: So you don’t see any fundamental ethical objection to human cloning?

A: In reality, hardly anybody does. Remember that 1 in 300 pregnancies involves clones. Identical twins are clones. They are much more genetically related than a clone using the nuclear transfer technique, where you take a skin cell from one individual and create a clone from it.

Q: But twins are not something we engineer. That just happened.

A: One of the big mistakes in ethics is to think that means make all the difference. The fact that we’ve done it or nature has done it is irrelevant to individuals and is largely irrelevant to society. What difference would it make if a couple of identical twins come not through a natural splitting of an embryo, but because some IVF doctor had divided the embryo at the third day after conception? Should we suddenly treat them differently? The fact that they arose through choice and not chance is morally irrelevant.

But that’s not the point, at least not for most people. Of course we do things all the time that are not completely “natural.” Unless a person is some sort of bio-Luddite (and is against all intervention, including blood transfusions and vaccinations and aspirin), interference with nature is a given. If Savulescu were merely saying that we need to decide how much to intervene and in what way, I doubt more than a few people in a million would give him much of an argument. But (and I admit I’m unfamiliar with his work, except for this article, so perhaps he deals with all my objections in his larger work) he seems to be ignoring the real issues.

What are those real issues? Forget morality for a moment, and let’s just stick with the practical. The following is hardly an exclusive list, but one issue is (if you just take cloning, for example) the slippery slope of how the technique is used and to what extent. Identical twins existing by natural means are still individual lives, limited by the limitations imposed on all of us (although they have a leg up with kidney donation, for example) as well as occurring at a certain natural rate. They just happen to be two people (or three, in the case of triplets, etc. etc.) who are genetically identical. However, cloning is an intervention that goes far beyond what’s possible with natural twinning (timing and numbers), and to what purpose? Experience tells us that the slippery slope is very very real. Start out by saying human cloning is confined to some sort of limited situation in which it involves something seemingly benign and helpful, and you can easily end up with Brave New World’s worker bees.

It is also a cost-benefit ratio. Are the benefits worth the costs and the potential costs? And among those costs we must factor in moral issues, which do exist whether Savulescu recognizes them or not, and we must also factor in the law of unforeseen consequences when we unleash forces the consequences of which we do not understand.

Just to take an example, there’s the ability to tell the sex of an embryo combined with the ability to abort embryos of the unwanted sex, which has led to tremendously noxious repercussions in countries such as China and India, where men outnumber women by a huge margin. What’s the remedy? How to prevent it happening in the future?

It may right itself, I suppose, if women become more prized because of the shortage, and people start selectively aborting boys. But won’t the pendulum swing back wildly again? So would it be better to just forbid the practice? But how does one do that? Outlawing finding out the sex of the baby seems way too Draconian, and how could that even be enforced? Outlawing abortions because of the sex of a baby would seem more to the point (some states do it in the US, but it’s not outlawed at the federal level; unlike in India and China, it’s just not that popular here for cultural reasons). But that would also be hard to enforce, and many people object to such a rule because they would consider it to be an infringement on a mother’s rights. You could advocate trying to change people’s attitudes towards having girls in the countries affected, but good luck with that until there’s some more “natural” reason for them to change.

These are indeed “moral issues” as well as philosophical and political ones. I bring them up not to say that I have the answers, but to say that the “twins are the same as cloning” approach seems extremely short-sighted.

[NOTE: The interview with Savulescu was first written up in 2015, but it’s been recently republished.]

What’s been going on in Israel and Gaza

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A lot.

Read the whole thing, but particularly note this:

Hamas and Iranian-controlled Islamic Jihad launched over 600 rockets killing several Israeli civilians. The rockets were launched mostly from civilian locations in Gaza towards civilian locations in Israel.

Israel retaliated with attacks on terror installations, mostly empty buildings, with the exception of a targeted hit on the Hamas commander who coordinated Iranian funding. Anti-Israel congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib both blamed Israel for the conflict.

Typical, typical, typical. Hamas tries its hardest to do two things: kill Israeli civilians, and get Israelis to kill Gazan civilians (the latter is done by launching from civilian locations, so that any retaliation by Israel to the source would ordinarily be to a civilian target).

The other typical thing, of course, is that Israel gets excoriated nevertheless by the Jew-and-Israel-haters.

Much more at the link, including news of a cyber-attack on Israel by Hamas, and then Israel’s retaliatory destruction of the floor of the building (not the entire building) that had housed the headquarters of Hamas’ cyber unit.

There’s also a larger conflict that may be brewing:

…Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is keeping his eye on the larger ball, which is Iran and Hezbollah in the north, and didn’t want to get bogged down with Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the south.

This view is supported by the announcement that the U.S. is increasing both land- and sea-based military assets in the Persian Gulf region anticipating an Iranian or Iranian-proxy attack on U.S. and allied forces as oil sanctions cripple the Iranian economy. The Gaza conflict, in which the Iranian-controlled Islamic Jihad played a key role, likely was an Iranian diversion to keep Israeli military assets tied down during the bigger conflict to come.

VDH dissects Comey

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Victor Davis Hanson has written a new essay that fairly drips with well-deserved contempt for James Comey. One of my reactions to reading it was to wonder anew how it could be that Comey had been so well-respected prior to the Hillary email investigation and the Trump administration. Did something happen to him along the way? Or had he always been like this, and had everyone failed to notice it until Comey was given a larger and more public canvas on which to display his combination of incompetence and megalomania?

Recall—as Hanson points out—that Comey’s problem isn’t mere Trump Drerangement Syndrome (although there’s that). He showed his troubling characteristics even before Trump even became president, during the Hillary Clinton email investigation:

…Comey’s unprofessionalism was home-grown and certainly did not need any help from President Trump. His schizophrenic behavior both as a prosecutor and investigator in the Hillary Clinton email matter was marked by exempting Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin from indictment, despite their lying to his own federal officials about their knowledge of a private Clinton email server. Comey wrote his summation of the Clinton email investigation before he had even interviewed the former secretary of state. He was hardly independent from a recused Attorney General Loretta Lynch in the Clinton email investigation. As her rubbery courier he bent to her directives on all key decisions that led to de facto exoneration of likely next president Hillary Clinton.

Contradictions are Comey’s specialty:

…Comey seems to be prepping his own defense by a transparent preemptive attack on the very official who may soon calibrate Comey’s own legal exposure [Bill Barr]. Comey should at least offer a disclaimer that the federal prosecutor he is now attacking may soon be adjudicating his own future—if for no other reason than to prevent a naïf from assuming that Comey’s gambit of attacking Barr is deliberately designed to suggest later on that prosecutor Barr harbored a prejudicial dislike of likely defendant Comey.

How ironic that Comey who used to lecture the nation on “obstruction” and the impropriety of Trump’s editorializing about the Mueller prosecutorial team, is now attacking—or perhaps “obstructing”—the Attorney General before he has even issued a single indictment.

There’s much much more at the link.

And this:

One way of looking at John Brennan’s and James Clapper’s nonstop cable news announcements of Trump’s “treason,” the Comey-McCabe whirlwind book tours and television confessionals, the Adam Schiff furrowed-brow predictions of huge bombshells soon to go off, and the general progressive media hysteria over the last two years or so is to appreciate a transparent effort at preemptive defense.

That is, Russian “collusion” and its bastard child “obstruction,” sought to divert attention from massive Obama Administration efforts at the CIA, FBI, Justice Department, and National Security Council to use the powers of government to first ensure that Trump was not elected and then, failing that, to distort and ruin his transition and presidency.

In 2020 we may find out how successful this effort was.

I can tell you one thing: I am almost certain that most Democrats don’t read Victor Davis Hanson. But I also am almost certain that, were most Democrats to do so, they would look at the facts detailed in that article with very different eyes than those of us on the right do. Would they be shocked, because they’re reading them for the first time and realizing how deep the rot goes? Or would they just say that Hanson is making stuff up, and deeply mistaken and/or lying?

I think the latter. A mind is a difficult thing to change.

So, nu? So, Sue Me

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A while back we had a Great Musicals Debate here in which commenter Richard Saunders wrote, in response to my saying that I much prefer the original stage version of “Guys and Dolls” to the Brando/Sinatra film version:

Neo — I can’t remember a more serious disagreement I’ve ever had with you! Okay, maybe Marlon Brando might not be a great singer, but Sinatra as Nathan Detroit, Jean Simmons as Sarah, Sheldon Leonard as Big Julie, how can you beat that? And all the people who came from the show — Vivian Blaine, Stubby Kaye, B.S. Pulley, Johnny Silver, what about them? Sky’s response to Nathan in their scene in Lindy’s is a rule I’ve held to my whole adult life.

I can take the heat, so I won’t get out of the kitchen.

Of course, Sky’s response to Nathan is in the script, both the play and the film, so we can’t use that as an example to distinguish one from the other. Part of the difference between stage musicals and filmed ones is a matter of more projection and broadness—after all, you have to reach the balcony—and a film is of necessity more subtle and naturalistic. And part of the difference is that something about that proscenium arch and all those fellow audience members shifting and breathing around you reminds you that you’re in a theater and this is a stage, and there’s the excitement of a live performance that really can’t be captured on a film or video. It’s something like watching an acrobat on a high wire without a safety net. This is it, the performers stand or fall in this moment, and there’s greater risk and even danger that can lead to a heightened reaction in the audience.

That’s the general argument in favor of theater. But in particular, in the case of “Guys and Dolls,” although the movie makers had the excellent judgment to hire some of the wonderful stage play originals—the ones Richard Saunders lists—that certainly doesn’t give the movie any advantage over the play, it only means that those roles are played very very well.

Marlon Brando is only in the movie, and Richard Saunders and I seem to agree on his general deficiencies in the role. And it’s not just that although he’s a serviceable singer he’s not a good one. It’s that Sky is a big singing role as compared to, for example, that of Nathan Detroit. Sky has all the beautiful ballads, as well as the fabulous “Luck Be a Lady,” and they’re all songs that require really good singing.

Jean Simmons is okay, another thing on which we agree. She can actually sing—and, like Sky, she needs to be able to sing because her role is also a role that absolutely requires it.

And then there’s Nathan Detroit, played by Frank Sinatra in the film and Sam Levene in the play. Ah, Sinatra! Sinatra is a great singer of a particular type: smooth as silk, usually specializing in songs of heartache, although he’s also rather versatile. He’s Italian and not Jewish. But why on earth would that matter? Because Nathan Detroit, more than any other role in the play, is written with a lot of Jewishisms and/or Yiddishisms—words, gestures, accent, cadence—as an integral part the character. And it’s really not a singing role, although that’s Sinatra’s specialty.

The role’s creator Sam Levene was not a singer; he’s much worse at singing than Brando ever was. But he doesn’t even try to sing. He was adept at the Jewish vernacular that’s built into the song, and the role fit him like a glove. I had never read this part of Levene’s Wiki entry before looking it up for this post, but I’m not surprised at what it says:

Although not known as a singer, Sam Levene originated the role of Nathan Detroit in the original 1950 Broadway production and original cast recording of the musical Guys and Dolls, and later reprised the role of Nathan Detroit in 1953 in the first UK production of Guys and Dolls. His solo number, “Sue Me,” was written in one octave to compensate for his lack of vocal range. Sam Levene lost the role to Frank Sinatra in the film version. Guys & Dolls director Joseph L. Mankiewicz wanted original Broadway star Sam Levene, but producer Sam Goldwyn insisted on giving the part to Frank Sinatra. Joseph L. Mankiewicz said “if there could be one person in the world more miscast as Nathan Detroit than Frank Sinatra that would be Laurence Olivier and I am one of his greatest fans; the role had been written for Sam Levene who was divine in it”. Fordham Professor of Music Larry Stempel, author of “Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater” said if given a choice, he would cast Sam Levene, who created the role on Broadway, as the ideal Nathan Detroit instead of Nathan Lane, who played the part in the Broadway revival or Frank Sinatra, who played the part on film, stating “Musically, he may have been tone-deaf, but he inhabited Frank Loesser’s world as a character more than a caricature.”

Exactly and precisely what I think about it. Your mileage may differ, of course. That’s fine. But to me, Sinatra—despite his brave efforts—fails.

First let’s have the smooth-as-silk Sinatra, singing to Vivian Blaine (the originator of the stage role of Adelaide) in the film, crooning beautifully as always, but trying to find the right inflection for “So, nu?” and IMHO failing at that (making it a bland “So new?”):

Now we have the stage version (the London revival)—which of course is broader in style, because the performers have to reach the rafters (and in those days mics were rare)—with the non-singing Levine and the fabulous Blaine once again. You may think there’s too much schtick here. But to me it’s authentic shtick, and very entertaining. Note also, in contrast to the relatively immobile Sinatra, how much Levine uses physical gestures (in particular his hands), and how his attention is absolutely riveted on Blaine/Adelaide and is responsive to her. This is a couple who’ve been together a long time, having a fight:

[NOTE: Let me add that they eliminated many great songs in the movie: “A Bushel and a Peck,” “Marry the Man Today,” and “I’ve Never Been in Love Before”—as well as “Take Back Your Mink,” for which they substituted one of the few bad songs Frank Loesser ever wrote, “Pet Me Poppa.”]

Google’s AI ethics board

The New Neo Posted on by

The folks at Google have made sure that Kay Coles James will not be on an AI ethics board they’re setting up, because she’s from the Heritage Foundation. She may be a black woman, but as a conservative black woman, she has offended.

You can read about the brouhaha here; it’s rather typical of these sorts of fights. But there’s a deeper issue pointed out by the author (I’ve highlighted it in bold):

Neither Google nor anyone else appears actually comfortable with meaningful external oversight. Neither Google nor anyone else seems to have a principled or systematic way to handle the power it has stumbled into. That’s why companies are formulating these panels with goals like “be convincing to society broadly” — as Google aimed for with the inclusion of James — rather than “review the process for approving collaborations with the U.S. military.” The brouhaha has convinced me that Google needs an AI ethics board quite badly — but not the kind it seems to want to try to build.

Science keeps developing technology that outpaces our ability to know how to use it. I’m not suggesting that we not develop it. But I’ve long been very concerned about a sort of Frankenstein’s monster effect.

Those MAGA-hatted Asians attacked in DC were North Korean defectors

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A few days ago you may have come across the story of some MAGA-hatted Asians who were assaulted in DC:

A Twitter account proudly posted a short video clip on April 30 showing several street thugs harassing a group of Asian tourists who were wearing MAGA hats.

“Not Around Here Pimp…Ain’t None Of That Make America Great Again Sh*t,” wrote “Bigalow Black,” who hails from Washington D.C., and Miami, according to his Twitter profile.

The video shows a group of black men surrounding the Asians, grabbing the MAGA hats off their heads, and throwing one of them in the air before stomping on it. It’s not clear whether the hats were returned or if the police were called…

The tweet, which highlights an ugly and disgraceful attack on innocent tourists, was retweeted 3.8 thousand times and liked 7.9 thousand times.

Just another day in Trump’s America, and of course it’s Trump’s fault.

Now it emerges that the MAGA-hat tourists had a special history:

“The Asians wearing MAGA hats were not just tourists,” Wendy Wright, president of Christian Freedom International, told PJ Media. “They are North Korean defectors and South Koreans who get rice, medicine, and Bibles into North Korea and North Korean defectors out.”

The attack happened in Washington, D.C, Wright said.

Just days before President Trump met with Kim Jong-un in February, North Korea announced that it was facing a food crisis. Daily rations were cut and it was reported that 41 percent of North Koreans were undernourished. These Korean aid workers were in America as part of an effort to bring relief to starving North Koreans…

Wright told PJ Media by email that members of the group had bought the hats Monday night in a souvenir shop in Washington and that the assault happened Tuesday morning — the day Bigalow Black posted the video on Twitter. The thugs stole three of their hats, but the group didn’t call the police, according to Wright. “They were not hurt, but they said that may be because they did not fight back,” Wright said.

She told PJ Media that the Koreans were shocked that something like this could happen in America.

“They came from a totalitarian country that does not allow free speech or freedom of thought, and could not believe this assault on belief would take place in the U.S.,” she explained. “They were really shocked that this could happen and knew it was not random vandalism but it was an assault on free speech.”

The irony here is incredibly thick.

This incident encapsulates so many things that are wrong with the left today, but in particular its dangerous and many-pronged assault on free speech. It is often remarked on by those who escaped from totalitarian leftist countries that they came to the US for that very freedom, and lately it pains them tremendously to see the same threats to liberty occurring with increasing frequency. This incident may have been small in terms of actual physical harm done, but it is ominous for what it says about the state of our nation.

This is why I love watching YouTube

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Amateurs, doing what they love, having fun for the love of it.

Apparently they learned that in four hours.

Oh heck, I’ll throw this in too. Very schmaltzy, but good schmaltzy (the backstory is worth watching, but if you want to cut to the chase go to about 3:30):

I can’t decide whether these people are the new Taliban or the new Red Guard

The New Neo Posted on by

Maybe it doesn’t even matter which it is, because the impulse is the same whether it’s supposedly religious or supposedly secular/leftist: to destroy history and its representations and replace them with the new orthodoxy. The deeper motive is to indoctrinate in a way that will make it more difficult for people to think.

The people I’m referring to in the title of this post are a panel called the “Reflection and Action Group” (love these titles) formed by the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) to study some murals deemed offensive that were painted in a San Francisco high school during the Depression and were among several works of art in that high school that were funded by the WPA (hat tip: RedState).

The new panel recommended that the murals in question, about the life of George Washington, be removed entirely by painting over the plaster with white paint:

We come to these recommendations due to the continued historical and current trauma of Native Americans and African Americans with these depictions in the mural that glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, manifest destiny, white supremacy, oppression, etc. This mural doesn’t represent SFUSD values of social justice, diversity, united, student-centered. It’s not student-centered if it’s focused on the legacy of artists, rather than the experience of the students.

Back in the 60s and 70s, this is what happened:

Public complaints first came to light about these mural panels in the late 1960’s, and at the time, opponents called for the destruction of the murals due to their offensive depictions of African-Americans and Native Americans.

In response, the school decided to install new murals with more positive imagery by artist Dewey Crumpler. His murals, entitled “Multi-Ethnic Heritage: Black, Asian, Native/Latin American”, depict Latin Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and African Americans overcoming oppression. They were completed in 1974.

Nope, not enough for the Taliban. The offending murals Must Be Destroyed, and this is somewhat ironic considering the intent of the mural maker:

Robert Chemy, a professor emeritus at San Francisco State University who wrote a biography about Victor Arnautoff (the mural artist who painted the Life of Washington), believes the artist was presenting “a “counter narrative” to the prevailing high school textbooks of the time because his representation of the westward expansion included the slaughter of Native Americans, and he presented Washington as a slave owner, both facts the official narrative back then tended to either ignore or gloss over.” ]

“He put those ghastly gray pioneers literally walking over the dead body of an Indian to demonstrate that the settlement of the west was an act of conquest that involved the slaughter of Native Americans,” Cherny said at a 2018 Board of Education meeting. “That was a very bold effort on his part to counter the kinds of textbooks that students were seeing.”

So the artist was a leftist, a sort of Zinn ahead of his time, correcting the more patriotic “narrative” in the 30s that left out all the exploitation. Now I guess people are considered too dumb and/or too easily traumatized to take in even that message from the left; it simply must be erased, smashed, painted over, destroyed, and then replaced by another narrative.

It all makes me think of something Allan Bloom said over three decades ago:

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.

And here’s a video showing the WPA artwork, both older and newer, in that San Francisco high school that is still named George Washington High School (for now):

Another fine jobs report

The New Neo Posted on by

My, my, my:

The U.S. jobs machine kept humming along in April, adding a robust 263,000 new hires while the unemployment rate fell to 3.6%, the lowest in a generation, the Labor Department reported Friday.

Nonfarm payroll growth easily beat Wall Street expectations of 190,000 and a 3.8% jobless rate…

Unemployment was last this low in December 1969 when it hit 3.5%. At a time when many economists see a tight labor market, big job growth continues as the economic expansion is just a few months away from being the longest in history…

April’s big increase comes amid a mostly positive backdrop of economic data.

GDP increased 3.2% during the first quarter, far exceeding expectations, while productivity during the quarter jumped 3.6% for its best gain in five years. Pending home sales rose 3.8% in March, providing some hope in the real estate market so long as rates are held in check.

It must pain the MSM to have to report on this.

I also noticed some commentary by Warren Buffet, who said that no economics textbook would have predicted the present situation involving a combination of very low unemployment, inflation and interest rates not rising, plus the U.S. government spending more money than it takes in. He added this prediction:

I don’t think our present conditions can exist in terms of fiscal and monetary policy and various other elements across the political landscape,” he said. “I think it will change, I don’t know when, or to what degree. But I don’t think this can be done without leading to other things.”

Wow, talk about going out on a limb! Hold the presses: It will change! He doesn’t know when, or how, or to what degree. And it will lead to other things!