The vindication of Clarence Thomas

The New Neo Posted on by

By Steven Hayward.

Justice Clarence Thomas has long been a figure of ridicule and contempt, even hatred, from the left. Had he been a liberal, he almost certainly would have been their champion and hero: black, and raised in abject poverty with an extraordinary story that would ordinarily touch the heart. However, he’s not a liberal; not at all.

But it turns out that, jurisprudentially speaking, Thomas may have the last laugh:

Liberals have always dismissed Thomas as simply Scalia’s wingman, though no one who actually read with any care their separate opinions, concurrences, and dissents would think so. But the great thing about being a liberal is that you can just go with a cliche and skip the careful thinking part.

But now that the whole scene is in flux with the arrival of Justice Gorsuch—who, like Justice Thomas, believes that the natural law tradition in legal history stretching back to Roman times still has today what social scientists call “normative” value—the left is taking stock of things, and realizing that they are in a heap of trouble…

…Ian Millhiser, who writes about legal affairs for the Center for American Progress. He, too, thinks Thomas defines the center of gravity for conservative jurisprudence, calling Thomas “the most important legal thinker in America.”

The left still despises Thomas. But now they fear he was actually the vanguard of a way of thinking that could become far more dominant in American judicial thought. From that Millhiser article:

But if you’re asking how effectively Thomas helped sway Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Anthony Kennedy to his own views, you are asking the wrong question. In a series of opinions joined by no other justice, Thomas waged a quiet war of ideas against twentieth century liberalism — and he won the hearts of a legion of conservative law students. Many of those former students are now old enough to be judges.

As of this writing, fully 20 percent of the judges Donald Trump appointed to the federal appellate bench are former Thomas clerks. Thomas lost the war for the present, but he is the future of legal conservatism. And he may soon be America’s future.

The author of those words is not at all pleased at the prospect.

Acosta plays ball

The New Neo Posted on by

[BUMPED UP]

You may have noticed that so far I’ve skipped all the brouhaha about Jim Acosta of CNN and his anger at being heckled by some Trump supporters, and then having a testy exchange with Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

It’s one of those things that makes me weary, and besides everybody else is covering it. For example, here’s Ace on the first incident and here’s Bre Payton in the Federalist on the second. You can find excerpts from Sanders’ reply here.

That’s from the right side of the fence, and of course the left has a different take on it (see the Times, for example, where the coverage was actually surprisingly restrained compared to this sort of thing).

You can watch the video if you’re so inclined. Personally, I think Huckabee Sanders got the better of Acosta:

There there’s this by Andrew Klavan [hat tip: commenter “AesopFan”], about some fallout from the incidents:

“Jim Acosta has the sadz. The untalented little man who rudely shouts unimportant questions at important people while in the employ of the ninth most trusted name in news out of ten, got heckled at a Trump rally in Tampa, Florida. Sad panda. The hecklers chanted “CNN sucks,” which, okay, is true, but they were none too polite about it.

Acosta didn’t like it. He reported, “Honestly, it felt like we weren’t in America anymore.”

But, like virtually everything Acosta reports, this is just a reflection of his small-minded biases. The fact is, having a group of people scream at you and denigrate you is exactly what it feels like to be in America — if you don’t happen to be a coastal elite. It has felt this way for the last twenty years at least. Every television show you watch, every movie, every woman’s magazine, every comedian, and, yes, every news program tells you you suck. Your country sucks. Your culture sucks. Your religion and your morals suck. And you personally are one of those dumb-ass racists who clings to his Bible and talks funny.

I was going to write in response to AesopFan: “I guess Acosta’s never been to a Red Sox/Yankee game.” Heckling, screaming, par for the course; an old American tradition, not a new one.

But then I thought I’d check out “Jim Acosta and baseball”—because who knows? Maybe Acosta’s a big Yankees fan or something like that.

So I found this tweet of Acosta’s from last May, which he posted to illustrate the American cultural assimilation of an immigrant, Acosta’s father, who came here from Cuba many years ago:

There are some very funny responses, such as this one:

And this:

Even I am well aware of the Cuban passion for baseball. It certainly does not take “assimilation” to the US for a Cuban guy to become a fan! It may even be the case that Cubans are bigger baseball fans than Americans, on the whole. In fact, Fidel Castro was a big big baseball fan, although he was not a good enough player to have been scouted in his youth as a pitcher; that rumor is false.

So what on earth is Acosta talking about? Is he completely ignorant about the history of baseball in Cuba? Or does he think we are? [emphasis mine]:

Baseball is one of the most popular sports in Cuba. It was popularized in Cuba by Nemesio Guillot, who founded the first major baseball club in the country. It became the most played sport in the country in the 1870s, before the period of American intervention.

Despite its American origin, baseball is strongly associated with Cuban nationalism, as it effectively replaced colonial Spanish sports such as bullfighting.

So, how ’bout those Red Sox?

Toxic Sarah Jeong revisited

The New Neo Posted on by

I originally had perceived Sarah Jeong’s anti-white tweets as really bad jokes. But jokes they were. And I stand by that, although I think that if the Times and other MSM outlets and SJWs have a zero tolerance for racist remarks, they should be consistent and extend that zero tolerance to Jeong.

But much more information has now emerged about other tweets of Jeong’s, and anti-white jokes are the least of her offenses. And the rest of it wasn’t even intended to be a joke of any sort. She’s tweeted really over-the-top hateful stuff (see this and this for more details and quotes).

My question at this point is this: How could the NY Times not have seen that extreme stuff of Jeong’s? It’s really toxic, and it doesn’t appear that she ever erased those tweets, either.

Does the paper not do any research on their young and trendy hires? Or did they see Jeong’s vile and bile-filled tweets and not care? Or do they approve of them?

Do you say “ummm…” too much?

The New Neo Posted on by

When I did the Sanity Squad podcasts, I couldn’t help noticing how often I said “ummm…” while trying to frame my thoughts and articulate them. Too often for my taste, although some of the feedback I got from listeners was that it wasn’t all that much. It seemed like a lot to me, though.

It’s a common thing. But I wanted to eliminate it. Sometimes I was successful and the number of “ummms” declined precipitously, but sometimes they came out in droves. I never could quite figure out why the waxing and waning. Tension had something to do with it, but not everything to do with it.

This article gives you advice on how to reduce the ummmies. Worth trying, anyway, if your own “ummms” bother you.

Old tech stuff and new tech stuff

The New Neo Posted on by

There are a few glitches on the blog that I hope will be ironed out in the next few days. You may or may not have noticed them (some are very minor, fortunately).

One involves the strange disappearance of that checkbox in the comments, where you could check it if you wanted your name and email information to be saved so you didn’t have to fill them out each time you commented. If you had already checked it before its odd disappearance, the information may be saved (mine is, for example, at least on my computer). But apparently—at least for some people—that box is gone.

Let me know what’s going on for you, and on what browser and what device if there are differences.

It seems that, even without the checkbox, if you start typing in the lines where the name and email address go, there’s a drop-down menu that gives you the options you need. That’s not too bad. But still, it would be better if it just auto-filled.

Then to top it all off, I got a notice on WordPress today that pretty soon they will be changing to an entirely new interface for blog post writing. Great (NOT!!). Change like that is usually bad, in my experience—and I’ve had a lot of experience. Forced change is even worse (do you hear me, Yahoo Mail? YouTube?). I keep trying to retain the so-called “classic” versions of things, but sometimes (often, actually) the sites keep slyly switching me to the new one, and I have to hunt and hunt for the magic location of the magic button that will get me back to the old.

Sometimes the old is completely eliminated. But sometimes they just try to drive you crazy looking for it. They are versatile little foxes.

WordPress swears that there is a plugin that will override their new system (the new one’s called “Gutenberg”; they must think it’s quite revolutionary) and restore “classic.” We’ll see. I hope.

In the meantime, reviews of Gutenberg have filled me with dread. Horrible, horrible!

About changing that apple photo and the blog URL

The New Neo Posted on by

[BUMPED UP]

Yesterday I mentioned that “at some point I may change my apple photo, too.”

A number of people responded with some version of “No!” “Don’t ditch the apple!” “It’s your brand!”

But I said I may change the apple photo. In other words, I may change the photo but it will remain an apple photo. I’m not planning to change the apple photo into a non-apple photo.

I know it’s my brand. I just thought I’d update it.

Sort of like the change of blog name. When I first announced that I was changing the URL and site of the blog, I explained my reasons, which basically boil down to two. The first is that the design of the old blog was outdated. It wasn’t good on smartphones; no one was reading blogs on phones yet when I had set up neoneocon. It had a design so Byzantine and cloaked that I could not change anything on it, and so it was practically frozen in time in terms of its basic structure and even many of its details. The theme (that’s the basic design) had long been abandoned by its creator, who seemed to have gone incommunicado. I feared that at any moment the blog could stop functioning, and I wanted to make a change before that happened.

The second reason was that the URL didn’t really fit anymore. I originally chose “neoneocon” (in 2004) because it was sort of catchy and sort of funny, and I didn’t expect to be a serious long-term blogger anyway. My political change was quite new, and I was using the term “neocon” mostly in its original sense of “a new conservative.” I was a really new new conservative—thus, a neo-neocon.

That was nearly a decade and a half ago.

I also chose the term “neocon” to mean I favored the spread of liberal democracy with protection of human rights.” Not “one vote, one person, one time” democracy. Not by military means, unless there was a compelling other defensive reason to go to war. I explained all of this in post after post (in the category “neocons” on the right sidebar), but people continued to misunderstand, and as the years went on “neocon” became more and more entrenched as a word for “whatever we hate” on both sides.

So the combination of all of that, but mostly the fact that I was now an old conservative (without being a paleocon) rather than a new conservative, made me think I really needed to make a switch. I wanted to keep the “neo,” because that’s how I’m known. I tried to buy “neoneo.com” and “neosquared.com” and a host of other URLs that seemed good to me, but they were not available, and so I settled on this one, and I think it makes sense because I am the new neo and this is the new neo site.

So why change the photo? Well, it’s really outdated, too. That picture that was up in the right corner, and down below if you were looking at a cellphone, was taken in September of 2006. It’s a selfie (although that word didn’t exist then, as far as I know) taken with a crummy camera that I had set on a shelf, and with a timer. It was blurry to begin with, and then I zoomed in on it to get the closeup and the blurriness became even more apparent. But it was the best I had and I rather liked it.

To be blunt about it, I was also a lot younger then. You do the math; it’s easy. As time went by it started to bug me that it was such an ancient photo and just didn’t seem to express where I’m at right now anymore than “neoneocon” expressed it. About two years ago, for example, I had stopped dyeing my hair its original near-black. Now it’s silver—hey, they say that’s very trendy, you know. I actually rather like it, but it sure doesn’t look the same as the blog photo, nor do I.

And cameras are hi-def now, just in time to keep up with the aging process.

So I set out to recreate the pose of the photo with the apple. Did you ever try to copy the angle at which you held something in an old photo, the expression on your face (in a closeup yet, after the passage of twelve years), the sweater you were wearing?

Trump hits 50% approval in Rasmussen poll

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not the first time, but it’s the first time in a while (see this chart). For most of the year he’s been moving around in the high 40s, after many months in the low-to-mid 40s during much of the last half of 2017.

It’s not the highest he’s ever been, though. For the first week of Trump’s presidency, his approval was in the high 50s. Then, for the month of Feburary, 2017, it dropped to the low-to-mid 50s. But in March of 2017 it dropped below 50 and stayed in the low-to-mid 40s for the rest of the year, even dropping as low as 39 in early August of 2017, a year ago. It stayed in the low 40s until 2018, when it graduated to mid 40s. It’s been hovering in that mid-to-high 40s range ever since, with occasional forays into 50 territory.

What does it all mean? There are those who completely discount polls; I’m not one of those people, although I am very skeptical of polls. But I think they do tend to reflect general trends over time, and the trends here are pretty clear.

How this will translate to the 2018 mid-terms—and if it will translate to them at all—is anyone’s guess.

I’m not about to spend hours and hours of tracking what each of these ups and downs reflect, but my guess is the economy is a biggee. But there’s also a role for the waxing and waning in the intensity of the Russian collusion coverage. For example, what was happening in August of 2017 in the MSM, when Trump’s approval was in the 39 cellar? A full bore press on the Donald Trump Jr. meeting with the Russian lawyer, that’s what.

If you think the MSM doesn’t affect public opinion, I beg to differ with you. A lot of people are highly influenced by it, whether they say they distrust the MSM or not.

The NY Times hires woman with history of anti-white racist tweets, but…

The New Neo Posted on by

Take a look at her tweets. They certainly seem racist, if taken at face value.

But you may accuse me of being naive, but on reading Sarah Jeong’s old tweets, it occurs to me that she was joking.

For example, what can “Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being fit to live only underground like groveling goblins” be but a joke?

Let’s hope it’s a joke. To me it certainly sounds like a joke. As do the rest of them.

The problem is that the boundaries for what people say on Twitter and elsewhere that’s considered acceptable in terms of racist comments about white people and other unprotected groups have moved so far from anything I would define as okay that it has become extremely difficult to tell when someone is joking and when a person is serious. It’s the old “this is not the Onion thing.”

I saw a couple of articles today about Sarah Jeong and no one else but me seemed to be saying, “Hey, maybe this is a joke. This seems like a joke.” An unfunny joke, but there’s so much unfunny humor these days that I come to expect that.

Then I decided to check by Googling “was Sarah Jeong joking?” and I get this statement from the Times:

We hired Sarah Jeong because of the exceptional work she has done covering the internet and technology at a range of respected publications. Her journalism and the fact that she is a young Asian woman have made her a subject of frequent online harassment. For a period of time she responded to that harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her accusers. She now sees that this approach only served to feed the vitriol that we too often see on social media. She regrets it, and the Times does not condone it. We had candid conversations with Sarah as part of our thorough vetting process, which included a review of her social media history. She understands that this type of rhetoric is not acceptable at The Times and we are confident that she will be an important voice for the editorial board moving forward.

I happen to believe that this is true (even if the Times says so; a stopped clock and all that). I believe it’s true because that was my immediate impression on reading the tweets—they were so over-the-top as to be a somewhat obvious piece of mockery of the racism of others. So I’m inclined to cut Jeong some slack.

The problem is this: in recent years the MSM and cable news and the Democratic Party and society as a whole have given more serious sentiments of anti-white racism a platform, seemingly with approval as long as the racism is expressed by a member of a non-white minority group (although Jeong, being Asian, is a member of a group that has itself been treated like a group that can be discriminated against, at least in college admissions).

Another problem is that, if someone were being “funny” in a way similar to Jeong, with over-the-top fake supposedly humorous/sarcastic racist remarks about other racial groups defined as oppressed, it would not matter that the person was joking. That person would be persona non grata at any media outlet in the MSM, and would not be given a chance to “understand that this type of rhetoric is not acceptable at The Times”; that person would be out on his or her ear, pronto.

[ADDENDUM: Please see this and my reply here. Jeong is really bad news.

I now have a new post up on the subject of Jeong.]

My favicon is now in place

The New Neo Posted on by

[ADDENDUM 6 PM: I’m seeing the small green apple icon on my cellphone and on my computer in the heading above the URL line when I’m actually at the blog site. But it’s not in my computer bookmarks. In bookmarks at Firefox, I see a little grid like a tic-tac-toe board instead of the image of the green apple. What do you see?]

I didn’t even know what a “favicon” was until I realized I looked up something like “how to set little image for your WordPress site.” FAVICON, folks!

And I think I accomplished it. I just made a thenewneo setting on my cell phone home page, and it had a nice little green apple in the middle of the shortcut image.

This is what it takes—it may not seem like much to you, but to the somewhat-tech-challenged like me it’s a big accomplishment. First you have to find a nice image that is free and that allows commercial use. Not so easy. Of course, if I had to pay for it I would, but why not find a free one? Then it turns out that, even though the image I selected was shown against a transparent background, when I downloaded it I saw a black background instead.

So I had to change that to transparent. That took a while—I’ll mercifully spare you the details—but I think it’s done. Let me know if you’re not seeing it properly.

Sorry for all this inside-baseball stuff.

The redirect eagle has landed!

The New Neo Posted on by

[BUMPED UP]

Well, well, well.

The exact time was a surprise to me, too, but the redirect occurred this morning, and now anyone going to neoneocon.com will end up here.

Huzzah!

Let me know if there’s any problem for you connected with that. This blog design is still a work in progress, but it’s mostly done.

You can use the old URL or this new one. But I suggest the new one.

You may have noticed that none of the posts from the last week or two are here. I will be manually transferring them over when I get a chance [UPDATE: I have now completed this task], but the comments for them will remain on neoneocon, which you won’t have access to now. Sorry. I think the loss of a couple of weeks of comments is a small price to pay. All the older comments from neoneocon are right here, though.

At some point I may change my apple photo, too. Right now I’m just adjusting to the new surroundings. Welcome! Pull up a chair and get comfortable.

Wily old Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

How clever is Trump?

(1) he’s a moron or worse
(2) he’s a bit slow
(3) he’s of barely-average intelligence
(4) he’s smart but is in way over his head
(5) he’s quite intelligent but likes to hide it
(6) he’s sharp as a tack in certain areas
(7) he’s playing at least 5-dimensional chess

Trump’s stance on Europe and tariffs is certainly looking pretty smart so far.

And the Chinese seem to think the answer is #7. See this and this for an explanation. Excerpt:

In Chinese eyes, Mr Trump’s response is a form of “creative destruction”. He is systematically destroying the existing institutions — from the World Trade Organization and the North American Free Trade Agreement to Nato and the Iran nuclear deal — as a first step towards renegotiating the world order on terms more favourable to Washington.

Once the order is destroyed, the Chinese elite believes, Mr Trump will move to stage two: renegotiating America’s relationship with other powers. Because the US is still the most powerful country in the world, it will be able to negotiate with other countries from a position of strength if it deals with them one at a time rather than through multilateral institutions that empower the weak at the expense of the strong.

My interlocutors say that Mr Trump is the US first president for more than 40 years to bash China on three fronts simultaneously: trade, military and ideology. They describe him as a master tactician, focusing on one issue at a time, and extracting as many concessions as he can. They speak of the skilful way Mr Trump has treated President Xi Jinping. “Look at how he handled North Korea,” one says. “He got Xi Jinping to agree to UN sanctions [half a dozen] times, creating an economic stranglehold on the country. China almost turned North Korea into a sworn enemy of the country.” But they also see him as a strategist, willing to declare a truce in each area when there are no more concessions to be had, and then start again with a new front.

For the Chinese, even Mr Trump’s sycophantic press conference with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, in Helsinki had a strategic purpose. They see it as Henry Kissinger in reverse. In 1972, the US nudged China off the Soviet axis in order to put pressure on its real rival, the Soviet Union. Today Mr Trump is reaching out to Russia in order to isolate China.

I’ll tell you one thing: I certainly hope the Chinese are correct about Trump’s abilities.

[NOTE: I see that the entire cut-and-pasted quote doesn’t have double spaces between paragraphs. That’s a little glitch here at the new site. I will try to get that fixed ASAP.

UPDATE: Paragraphing has been fixed. For now, anyway.]

Les Moonves: #HeToo

The New Neo Posted on by

I confess that I’d never heard of Les Moonves before the recent accusations of sexual harassment came out against him.

I also have a general attitude against unverified allegations of this type, which I’ve expressed many times before, and it goes like this: I don’t believe or disbelieve people based on the group or class to which they belong. So I don’t “believe the women,” and I don’t “believe the children.” Nor do I believe the men, or the white people, or the black people, or the rich people, or the poor people, or the beautiful people, or the ugly people, or the charming people, or the obnoxious people. I think each case has to be decided on its own merits, and when we have trial by accusation in the press we don’t have a whole lot of ways to decide about the truth or falsehood of someone’s claims. The court system is flawed as well, particularly in “he-said/she-said” cases, and yet it’s better than the gossip system.

So that’s the background.

It is possible that Les Moonves is not only guilty of every despicable act alleged in Ronan Farrow’s latest article for the New Yorker, it’s actually possible that Moonves is even worse than the article says and that these accusations are only the tip of a considerable iceberg of abuse. Maybe even the parties involved don’t know anymore, not exactly and precisely anyway, because tales and memories can morph over time. That said, it’s also possible that Moonves is innocent, or at least not as guilty as the article indicates.

However, the fact that there are many accusers who describe a somewhat similar m.o.—and who apparently have told their stories to friends and loved ones for many years, probably without comparing notes because it was before the #MeToo frenzy began—tends to favor the idea that Moonves is certainly guilty of some very bad behavior of the sexual variety.

But one thing I noticed about the Moonves story—which matches the pattern of nearly all of these stories concerning sexual abuse by powerful men—is the varying reactions of the women. A few tell him unequivocally, right from the start, that his advances are extremely unwelcome. That doesn’t save them from being hit upon, nor does it save them from threats to their careers. But it does make the situation quite unambiguous in terms of what the alleged perpetrator Moonves knew or should have known about whether these particular women were amendable to his—shall we say—charms. Women who make their refusals clear and unequivocal are giving him all the information he needs to realize that his moves are unwanted in their case.

But many of these women Moonves and others hit on give these men very ambiguous or even friendly or jokey reactions. It may be—probably is—out of a habit of affability, and/or a desire to not make waves, and/or fear of the power of the men to end their careers, and/or just plain physical fright. The problem with such cases, though, is that the message of “no” is extremely unclear. And if more women seem affable and jokey about it compared to the women who respond with an unequivocal “No!”, then a man just might think what he was doing was no big deal. In particular, a narcissistic and arrogant man would think that.

From Farrow’s article, here is Moonves himself speaking recently about the accusations [emphasis mine]:

Throughout my time at CBS, we have promoted a culture of respect and opportunity for all employees, and have consistently found success elevating women to top executive positions across our company. I recognize that there were times decades ago when I may have made some women uncomfortable by making advances. Those were mistakes, and I regret them immensely. But I always understood and respected—and abided by the principle—that ‘no’ means ‘no,’ and I have never misused my position to harm or hinder anyone’s career. This is a time when we all are appropriately focused on how we help improve our society, and we at CBS are committed to being part of the solution.” According to CBS, there have been no misconduct claims and no settlements against Moonves during his twenty-four years at the network.

Well, maybe that’s just self-serving BS, or maybe it’s what he really believes. Personally, I think the truth is “both.” People often fool themselves, particularly when many years have passed, into thinking they are more innocent than they actually are.