Virginia governor’s race

The New Neo Posted on by

Everyone keeps saying this is a very meaningful race.

I’m not so sure. I consider Virginia a fairly—although not entirely—blue state. If Ralph Northam (D) wins, I don’t think it has much meaning. If Ed Gillepsie (R) wins, it has a bit more meaning because it would be a come-from-behind win. But I still don’t think it tells us much about what will happen a year from now in Senate and House on a nationwide basis.

A year is a long long time in politics.

UPDATE PM: It’s looking pretty bad for Gillespie.

If he loses (and I believe he will) the Democrats will talk incessantly about how significant it is for 2018.

Tales of Democratic Election Night woe

The New Neo Posted on by

Here are some reminiscences by political operatives and media people about Election Night 2016 (hat tip Ace). They vary from the delighted to the devastated. The surprise and shock was enormous for Hillary supporters, as you can imagine. Here are just a few examples of the quotes, from earlier in the evening to later:

Zara Rahim, Clinton campaign national spokeswoman: We were waiting for the coronation. I was planning my Instagram caption…

Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight: When I was coming in on the train at 5 p.m., according to our model, there was one-in-three chance of a Clinton landslide, a one-in-three chance of a close Clinton win, and a one-in-three chance of a Trump win. I was mentally preparing myself for each of those outcomes.…

Ashley Parker, The Washington Post, formerly of The New York Times: The RNC thought they were going to lose. The Trump campaign supporters thought they were going to lose. They were rushing to get their side out of the blame game. I spent part of my day lining up interviews for later that night or the next morning to get their version of events.…

Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, Trump’s religious adviser: I called Sean Hannity and said, “I really think he’s going to win tonight.” Sean said, “Well, I’m glad you do, because the exit polls don’t look good.” I found out later that Trump was very pessimistic, too.…

Steve Bannon: Jared [Kushner] and I were out on this balcony in Trump Tower. We looked at it on Jared’s iPhone. And the numbers were so bad that we regrouped inside. We look at each other and we go, “This can’t be right. It just can’t.” And Jared goes, “I got an idea, let’s call Drudge.” And Drudge says, “The corporate media””they’ve always been wrong the entire time””these numbers are wrong.”…

Sen. Tim Kaine: Based on the returns from one bellwether Virginia county I know well, I realized that we would win Virginia by a significantly larger margin than President Obama four years earlier. This was a huge feeling given all the work that Anne and I have done for 30-plus years to help make Virginia more progressive. It struck me for the first time, “I will probably be vice president.” That feeling lasted about 90 minutes.…

Van Jones: You got smoke coming out of every gear trying to figure out what the heck is happening out there. And you’ve got John King who had said, over and over, that there is no pathway for a Trump victory. Suddenly, that whole thing starts to come apart.…

Jim Margolis: I finally called Steve Schale, who ran Florida for us in the Obama campaign. I said, “Steve, what’s going on here? Is this just a lack of information?” He said, “I think you’ve got a problem.”…

Bret Baier: At 8:30 I turned to Chris Wallace, who was sitting next to us on the set, and said, “This does not look like it’s lining up.” We came back from commercial break and Chris said, “Donald Trump could be the next president of the United States.”…

Ana Marie Cox: I did a couple of on-camera news hits where I was told, “What you need to do here is tell people not to panic.” Meanwhile, I was panicking.…

David Remnick: Not only did I not have anything else ready, I don’t think our site had anything, or much of anything, ready in case Trump won. The mood in the offices, I would say, was frenetic.…

Desus Nice, Desus & Mero: It’s one thing to find out Donald Trump is president, but another to be on TV with people watching you watch Donald Trump become president.…

Joshua Green, Bloomberg Businessweek correspondent and Devil’s Bargain author: At 9:05 p.m. I sent Bannon an email and said, “Holy shit, you guys are gonna win, aren’t you?” He sent a one word reply: “Yes.”…

Dave Weigel: I had told my parents, who are Clinton supporters””my dad actually knew Clinton growing up as he’s from the same town in Illinois she is. I texted him early in the night saying, “These Florida counties seem to be going the way they usually go.” But once I realized there was no way for Clinton to win, I called them saying, “I’m sorry, this is what I do for a living and I was wrong.” My dad said, “Well, I’m still holding out hope.” And I said, “Don’t bother. Process this, and figure out what you’re going to do next, because it’s not going to happen.”.

Many of you may enjoy a rush of schadenfreude when you read the quotes from Hillary supporters. For me, though, it’s a bit different. First of all, so many of my friends and loved ones were suffering greatly, and I was worried for them. Secondly, I wasn’t exactly what you’d call happy that night, myself—except for the fact that Hillary Clinton would not be president. That, I was happy about. I was also happy that Congress had passed out of Democratic hands.

Unlike many people, though, quite early in the campaign I had thought that Trump was a very serious contender. From August 2015 on I thought Trump had a chance to win it all (see this).

However, although I’d never been a never-Trumper, I thought that his chance of winning it all was a tremendous longshot, highly unlikely. Therefore I greatly feared that his nomination would led to a Hillary Clinton victory, while at the same time I also feared he might be an unstable loose cannon who if elected might govern either as a tyrant or a liberal (why I thought that was amply documented on this blog in posts during the campaign year, particularly prior to him winning the nomination). Kind of like “the food is bad, and such small portions.” I certainly did not think Trump would be reliably conservative, although I thought there was at least a chance of some conservative moves (and no chance for them if Hillary won). But I didn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.

So I’d spent almost a year before the election in a state of alarm at either prospect: a Hillary Clinton presidency was awful to contemplate and a Donald Trump presidency, although it might be better, could possibly be even worse.

I was stunned at Trump’s election, but I was happy at Hillary’s non-election. So I was way ahead of the Hillary supporters I know, who had absolutely nothing to be happy about and who were just beginning their adjustment that very evening. I had a natural advantage (happy at the Hillary non-victory) and a running start on them in terms of time (by a year).

Since then, as the Trump presidency has unfolded and we have actions of his in the political/presidential realm (more important than words, promises, threats) I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the fact that Trump has mostly governed as a conservative and has not done anything as crazy as I’d feared, although he’s still himself and still periodically demonstrates his very own unpleasant style.

But I retain a certain amount of sympathy for those who are still in shock. There’s never been a political upset like it. And there’s never been a president like Trump. He offends the opposition every moment of every day, and frightens them, too. He’s not only a coarse and crass and loose-cannonish guy (not all the time, of course, but it still happens often enough), he’s thwarting them at every turn politically, and he’s dismantling the Obama legacy as much as he can.

Let me add one more thing that surprised me and still surprises me, although it’s a fairly minor thing and no one else seems to care about it. For decades—decades—I’d been hearing how no New Yorker could ever become president again. The country just didn’t like New York. Maybe the liberals on the coasts would vote for a New Yorker, but not the great middle, not flyover country! The fact that Trump—a bona fide New Yorker (unlike Hillary Clinton, who’s a fake New Yorker), with an accent even—managed to be so strong in the very middle that was supposed to hate New Yorkers is something I continue to find fascinating. The billionaire as populist Everyman.

Gun control law: the Air Force messed up

The New Neo Posted on by

The question of how the Texas church killer purchased his guns is now answered. There was a failure to report his previous offense by the organization tasked with doing so, the Air Force:

A day after a gunman massacred parishioners in a small Texas church, the Air Force admitted on Monday that it had failed to enter the man’s domestic violence court-martial into a federal database that could have blocked him from buying the rifle he used to kill 26 people.

Under federal law, the conviction of the gunman, Devin P. Kelley, for domestic assault on his wife and toddler stepson ”” he had cracked the child’s skull ”” should have stopped Mr. Kelley from legally purchasing the military-style rifle and three other guns he acquired in the last four years…

The Air Force also said it was looking into whether other convictions had been improperly left unreported to the federal database for firearms background checks.

Logic would dictate from this set of circumstances that the answer to better prevention is enforcement of existing laws.

But although both sides might agree that this would be a good thing, the anti-gun groups also want to use each incident of violence to advocate for more restrictive laws in general rather than take the logical lessons of incident one more narrowly.

I actually think that mass murders such as the one in Texas are so disturbing that everyone wants to prevent them, but that the two sides (for the most part, anyway) sincerely differ on how to go about it. Yes, indeed, there are leftists (many of them) who have a plan to disarm ordinary people in order to better effect control of and power over the population. But most people who support more gun control are not activist leftists, they are people who are truly frustrated and distraught at the number of murders in this country. And most people on the right are likewise frustrated and distraught at the same phenomenon, but they believe that enforcement of the current rules they feel are reasonable (such as the one that would have prohibited Kelley from obtaining a firearm) as well as more gun training and ownership among the general populace are the ways to go.

What’s more—and this seems so obvious that I wouldn’t think it would need repeating, but I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—it’s not so hard to purchase a gun illegally if a person is determined to do so, and there are other pretty effective ways to kill people (bombs, for example), even large numbers of people.

On carrying guns in church: thou shalt not kill, or thou shalt not murder?

The New Neo Posted on by

In today’s previous post, I began to tackle the question of whether the parishioners in the Texas church where yesterday’s mass murder took place were banned from carrying guns. In it I quoted the following rules in Texas:

Churches in Texas may prevent handgun license holders from carrying handguns inside church buildings as long as the church gives proper notice. Each church may decide for itself whether to allow:

Both open and concealed carry of handguns
Concealed carry of handguns but not open carry
Open carry of handguns and not concealed carry
No handguns regardless of whether they are carried openly or concealed

A church does not need to take any action if it wishes to allow handgun license holders to conceal carry or open carry in church buildings. If permitting handgun license holders to conceal carry or open carry on church premises is a cause of concern to your church, Texas Penal Code Sections 30.006 and 30.007 provide clear rules for notifying handgun license holders that your church is a gun-free zone or concealed carry only.

I added that it was a church-by-church decision, but I didn’t know which rules were followed by the church where the massacre occurred. Obviously, if there was a no-gun rule there, it didn’t deter the gunman and may have actually encouraged him.

Now I’ve discovered that (if the information on this “progressive” website is correct, as I believe it probably is) this question is actually a hotly debated topic in Christianity:

Whereas states like South Carolina ban guns in church in most instances, Texas allows firearms in sanctuary halls unless a church explicitly says otherwise. And a new Texas law signed in September allows houses of worship in the state to arm their congregations as a security measure.

However, while it’s certainly not unusual for churches to have security precautions or personnel, many faith leaders rebuke Paxton and Jeffress’ ideas that guns should be allowed in Sunday morning services. A 2012 PRRI poll found that 76 percent of Americans oppose allowing concealed weapons in church; This includes pastors in Texas, where many churches opted to ban guns on their premises after open-carry became the law of the land there in 2016. The Catholic Bishop of Dallas, for instance, banned guns in all his diocese’s parishes that year, following the lead of Catholic leaders who took similar steps in Georgia. Other Catholics also spoke out against open carry.

“This policy [of banning guns in church] is rooted in the belief that our churches, schools and other places of worship are intended to be sanctuaries ”“ holy sites where people come to pray and participate in the ministry of the Church,” Dallas Bishop Kevin Farrell wrote at the time.

Religious leaders have long been one of the loudest, most consistent voices calling for legislation that would restrict gun sales and use””not increase them

I followed some of the links in the article, and found statements that seem to me like an invitation to terrorists and other mass murderers. For example, see this:

Atlanta Archbishop Wilton Gregory and Savannah Bishop Gregory Hartmayer issued a decree prohibiting guns and knives with blades longer than 5 inches from parishes, churches, schools, administrative offices and other buildings owned or used by the Catholic community effective July 1.

In a statement, the bishops said Catholic places of worship are sanctuaries where “ways of peace and reconciliation” should be the rule.

“This decree is rooted in the belief that our churches and other places of worship are intended to be sanctuaries — holy sites where people come to pray and to worship God. In this nation of ours, they have seldom been the locations where violence has disrupted the otherwise peaceful atmosphere. Should it be necessary, we will seek the assistance of trained law enforcement personnel for protection, but among ourselves we will first seek ways of peace and reconciliation.”

That statement was issued back in July of 2014. It seems to me that it doesn’t make sense to wait to protect yourself until a certain quota of innocent people are killed. And if you are going to “seek the assistance of trained law enforcement personnel for protection” if the death toll in churches meets your standard for activating self-defense, then why not let your church members protect themselves? After all, an armed guard can be more easily shot or disarmed than a church full of armed—or possibly armed—worshipers. How many guards are you going to hire?

More here:

Other critics of gun violence include Shane Claiborne, a prolific Christian speaker and writer who works with an initiative that literally melts down AR-15s””weapons similar to the one reportedly used by Sutherland shooter””and turns them into plowshares, in keeping with a biblical reference.

When asked about Paxton and Jeffress’ comments, Claiborne responded by citing various Christian scriptures decrying violence and weaponry.

“Jesus carried a cross not a gun,” Claiborne told ThinkProgress. “He said greater love has no one that this””to lay down their life for another. The early Christians said ”˜for Christ we can die but we cannot kill.’ When Peter picked up a sword to protect Jesus and cut off a guys ear, Jesus scolded him and put the ear back on. The early Christians said ”˜when Jesus disarmed peter he disarmed every Christian.’ Evil is real but Jesus teaches us to fight evil without becoming evil. One the cross we see what love looks like when it stares evil in the face. Love is willing to die but not to kill.”

Hey, unlike Claiborne I’m no Christian speaker/writer, prolific or otherwise. But I’ve always been under the impression that that “swords into plowshares” verse—and the Book of Isaiah in general—is a prophecy, not a description of the way things are now. Not only that, but if Christians were to disarm themselves prior to the apocalypse there will be an awful lot of dead Christians.

Apparently, the Crusaders didn’t get the memo, either.

By the way, that story about Jesus, Peter, and the ear (with which I was previously unfamiliar) appears to be not a general call for complete non-violence, but a specific call to allow the process by which Jesus was arrested, sentenced, and later crucified to unfold:

According to the Bible, one of the disciples, Simon Peter, being armed with a sword, cut off the servant’s ear in an attempt to prevent the arrest of Jesus…

Then said Jesus unto Peter, Put up thy sword into the sheath: the cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?

I would add that the Commandment that is often cited as being “Thou shalt not kill” is a mistranslation of the Hebrew, which originally said “Thou shalt not murder.” As far as I know, there is no Torah (Old Testament) prohibition against self-defense:

The Torah chooses its language very carefully, and indeed, every dot and tittle is parsed to understand the full meaning. G-d chose the root R-Tz-Ch for the Ten Commandments to make it clear and explicit: murder is an evil, heinous crime, a crime that — like the others in the Ten Commandments — is destructive of civilization itself. But killing, while a grave action that must be seriously evaluated, is at times a necessary action — one that is a sanctioned last recourse under prescribed circumstances and one that is occasionally morally appropriate as in the taking of life as penalty for a capital offense.

I never thought Christianity was a pacifist religion in terms of self-defense, but apparently there is a pacifist strain. It reminds me of Gandhi’s advice to the Jews to allow themselves to be slaughtered, or to the Hindus of Lahore to do likewise (and if you haven’t already read this post describing both, I urge you to do so).

Lastly, the Texas church killing made me think of this scene from “High Noon.” It’s not really analogous—there is no mass murderer coming to the church—but it’s a discussion in the church about whether the parishioners are going to assist Sheriff Kane in fighting off the Miller gang that is coming to take revenge. Note particularly the pastor’s speech at the end, which I originally thought didn’t ring true, but I’m now thinking he represents a certain strain of more pacifist Christianity (the pastor speaks at 2:34, but it’s worth watching the whole thing):

Here’s a little bit more that constitutes the end of the scene:

Gary Cooper as Kane remains silent for most of the scene, with lasts about four minutes. But his face is more expressive than speech would be. He is not totally silent, however; he says this:

Which in turn reminds me of one of my favorite movie moments:

More on the Texas shooting

The New Neo Posted on by

More news is coming out today on the Texas church shooting, and as often is the case the British papers seem to have more details. We still don’t know the motive, but there are reports that the attacker was an atheist whose Facebook page called churchgoers stupid, and that his former wife and former in-laws had sometimes attended services at the church but were not present on the day of the shooting.

Two intrepid Texans seem to have given chase and been responsible for cornering the perpetrator till police arrived:

The inevitable calls for more gun control have come from the left. Reading the article and seeing the quotes in it, I don’t see a single statement that indicates exactly what gun control measure ought to have been passed, or ought to now be passed, that would have stopped this particular crime. That’s true of an awful lot of these shootings, I might add.

It’s been difficult so far to get much information on how the shooter obtained his weapon. Or rather, it’s been easy so far to get too much information on it, much of it conflicting and some (or all) of it wrong. For example, I’ve read that he tried to buy a gun in Texas and was refused:

The shooter who killed at least 26 people in a small church in rural Texas had previously tried to get a gun license in the state, but was denied.

“So how was it that he was able to get a gun? By all the facts that we seem to know, he was not supposed to have access to a gun,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott told CNN’s Chris Cuomo, citing the director of Texas’ Department of Public Safety. “So how did this happen?”

It wasn’t immediately clear why Devin Kelley, who was shot by an armed neighbour of the church after the massacre, was denied a firearm license. But, initial reporting suggests he had a troubled life, and had committed crimes in the past that could have conceivably barred him from legally obtaining a gun.

So either he obtained a gun illegally somewhere else despite the fact that gun laws worked to deny him one, or someone slipped up later on and didn’t follow the law and sold him a gun without properly checking. Perhaps the latter, because I’ve also read that he obtained a gun in Texas legally, but this should not have been allowed:

The federal government’s firearm transaction record, which buyers must legally fill out, asks about felony convictions. Kelley bought a Ruger AR-556 rifle, used in the attack on the church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, in April of last year from an Academy Sports & Outdoors store in San Antonio, a law-enforcement official told CNN.

As far as I can see, the jury is still out on how he obtained this gun, and therefore we don’t know if any law would have changed anything. It’s very possible that the law should have stopped him but didn’t because of human error. I’ll add that whatever the law, I believe this guy (who also had a history of stalking ex-girlfriends) would have obtained a gun illegally if he couldn’t have managed it legally, or would have used other weapons such as a bomb.

Just four days ago I wrote a post on gun-free zones. So today I ask: was the church where the massacre occurred a gun-free zone? I haven’t seen any reports on this yet, but I wonder. If it was, this was another case of sitting ducks. Here’s what I could find about the rules on carrying guns into churches in Texas:

Beginning January 1, 2016, Texans with a handgun license will be allowed to openly carry their handguns. Churches in Texas may prevent handgun license holders from carrying handguns inside church buildings as long as the church gives proper notice. Each church may decide for itself whether to allow:

Both open and concealed carry of handguns
Concealed carry of handguns but not open carry
Open carry of handguns and not concealed carry
No handguns regardless of whether they are carried openly or concealed

A church does not need to take any action if it wishes to allow handgun license holders to conceal carry or open carry in church buildings. If permitting handgun license holders to conceal carry or open carry on church premises is a cause of concern to your church, Texas Penal Code Sections 30.006 and 30.007 provide clear rules for notifying handgun license holders that your church is a gun-free zone or concealed carry only.

So it’s a church-by-church decision. My guess is that more of them will be allowing people to carry legally obtained guns into church after this incident. Quite obviously, there’s no way to prevent a killer from entering with a weapon. Among other things, a killer can kill guards, especially if they are surprised. But it seems to me that a congregation where some of the people were armed might have at least reduced the death toll, if not deterred the perpetrator.

[ADDENDUM: There’s a report that the shooting followed some sort of domestic dispute:

At a press conference Monday morning, Freeman Martin, a regional director of the Texas Department of Safety said the shooting was tied to a domestic situation inside the family of the shooter, identified by authorities as Devin Patrick Kelley.

Martin said Kelly’s in-laws attended the church, but weren’t at the church at the time of the shooting. He said that Kelly’s mother-in-law had received threatening texts from him.

That leads me to believe that the report I referenced in the post that Kelley’s ex in-laws sometimes attended the church may have been wrong. Maybe it was his present in-laws. Or maybe it actually was both (or neither, I suppose).

In addition, there’s this:

[Authorities] said Kelley also used his cellphone to tell his father that he had been shot and didn’t think he would survive.

That indicates to me that one of his pursuers inflicted a serious wound, and that Kelley may have lost control of his car in part because he was starting to bleed out. It’s also not clear whether the fatal wound was self-inflicted, although I’m pretty sure that can be easily ascertained by examination of the bullet.

Also:

Tim Miller is the director of security at a mega church in Florida, one of the largest in the country. He says churches are soft targets.

“Everybody gets it that you need to spiritually protect your people, you need to pray for, but in today’s world you need to have a plan to protect them,” Miller said. “In times past churches have not felt the need. i think this last month has been a huge wake up for churches across the country.”

Last September, Miller hosted a two-day seminar on church security at Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, attracting representatives from 35-area churches.

I don’t see any reason you can’t pray while carrying a weapon on your person for self-defense.]

Texas church shooting

The New Neo Posted on by

This is still a breaking story, and I imagine we’ll learn much more tomorrow, but an especially vicious and deadly shooting has occurred in a Texas church:

An armor-clad gunman opened fire inside a rural Texas church on Sunday, killing more than two dozen people in the largest mass shooting in the state’s history, officials said…

We are dealing with the largest mass shooting in our state’s history,” he added.

The shooter is also dead, officials said.

Law enforcement officials identified the gunman on Sunday evening as Devin Patrick Kelley, 26, of neighboring Comal County. Officials were preparing to search his home. Texas officials would say on the record only the shooter was a “young white male.”

Children and a pregnant woman are among the dead, including the pastor’s 14-year-old daughter.

Kelley seems to have been the proverbial bad apple:

Ann Stefanek, a spokeswoman for the Air Force, confirmed that Kelly was court-martialed in 2012 on two charges of assaulting his spouse and their child. He was confined for a year, reduced in rank to airman basic E-1 and given a bad conduct discharge in 2014, Stefanek said.

So far we know nothing about motive. Maybe the gunman left an explanatory note. Or maybe he will continue to be a mystery, just as the Las Vegas shooter Paddock has remained so far. My personal opinion is that at least part of Kelley’s motive was some sort of competition to be the biggest, baddest shooter ever.

It seems that he was planning to kill more, but was stopped by another Texan with a gun:

A local resident confronted the gunman after the shooting began, “grabbed his rifle and engaged that suspect,” Martin said.

The gunman dropped the rifle and then fled with the resident in pursuit, he said.

As law enforcement responded, the suspect ran off the road in his car at the Wilson-Guadalupe county line and crashed, Martin said. The suspect was found dead in the vehicle.

“We don’t know if this was a self-inflicted gunshot wound or if he was shot by our local resident who engaged him with gunfire,” he added.

I imagine we’ll hear more about this “local resident,” too.

What a horror show. I am sure many prayers are going out tonight for the dead and wounded and their families.

The hide-and-seek toolbar

The New Neo Posted on by

I usually take Sundays off from posting. After all, a person’s got to do the dishes now and then, right?

But that doesn’t mean I swear off the computer on Sundays entirely. More’s the pity; I probably should, but that’s what addiction’s all about.

Today I went to the computer to check a few things and discovered that overnight my toolbar had disappeared. I’ve been using computers for over twenty years, and this happens now and then for no reason I’ve even been able to figure out. Periodically, that handy little line way up on top that says things like “File,” “Edit,” “View,” “History,” “Bookmarks,” “Tools” (and the least helpful of them all, “Help”) goes on walkabout and I have no idea why and no idea how to bring it back.

That’s good for at least a half hour of Googling, reading instructions, and trying to apply them when they don’t correspond at all to what I’m seeing on my computer, and then finally finding a set of instructions that wasn’t written by programmers who already know exactly what they’re talking about anyway and see no reason to communicate anything clearly to the rest of us stupidheads.

Do you detect a note of frustration here? If so, you are correct. But at least I have my beloved, much-used toolbar back.

While we’re on the subject, why would a person want to hide every command on the screen? Is there some esthetic that dictates that a clean look is cool? Does the person just want to maximize the size of the display? Does it have something to do with the ubiquity of cellphones and tablets, which have small screens?

More and more I find that my time is taken up with this game of hide-and-seek, or “icon, icon, what’s the meaning of this icon?” I prefer words to graphics, and in that I’m probably in the minority.

Robert Frost on progressive education 100 years ago

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is written in conjunction with this post on recent events on college campuses.]

Robert Frost has long been one of America’s best-known poets. During his lifetime, he was also seen as a sort of folksy New Englander on the lecture circuit.

But Frost was far more than that (as I’ve previously discussed in many posts). Frost not only had a great deal to say about politics, human nature, science, and literature, but he’d been a teacher and a college professor for many years and he had a great deal to say about education as well.

The following excerpts are from a fascinating book called Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher, by Peter J. Stanlis. I think they are remarkably apropos to what’s been happening today, because they describe some of its roots [emphasis mine]:

To Frost, progressive education [Dewey] was a closed system that would “compel liberality.” Like Rousseau, it would force students to be free, not merely from self-discipline, but from social traditions and normative beliefs…To Frost, the progressive theory of the child-centered school was false. Its worst feature was to encourage immature and uneducated students to have a decisive voice in determining the curriculum. Frost’s response was to declare, “There is such a thing as not being old enough to understand.”…

Two things in progressive education provoked Frost’s particular rage—their abandonment of the ancient Greek and Roman classics and their attempts to apply the scientific method to teaching. The latter separated form or technique from genuine content…

Frost also rejected the social objective of progressive education—to indoctrinate students in favor of egalitarian democracy. He always favored education that would allow “the cream to rise to the top.” He believed that in secondary education the progressive theory stressed emotion too much, whereas graduate studies were too centered in abstract reason…To Frost, sound education involved all of human nature….

Frost began teaching at Amherst in 1917 (that’s exactly a century ago), under Amherst president Alexander Meiklejohn:

To Frost, Meiklehohn’s conception of academic freedom was merely a collegiate adaptation of Dewey’s progressive education in the form of doctrinaire compulsory liberalism, centered in social problems rather than in psychology. Meiklehohn’s educational reforms were in the spirit of what Frost called “the guild of social planners,” men who assumed that abstract reasoning and logic were sufficient to solve the world’s great perennial problems. After meeting with some of Meiklejohn’s young faculty appointees, Dwight Morrow, an Amherst trustee, described them to a friend as “bumptious young men…who insisted that nobody thought or studied at Amherst until they came.”

Here’s how Frost described them:

They fancied themselves thinkers. At Amherst you thought, while at other colleges you merely learned… I found that by thinking they meant stocking up with radical ideas, by learning they meant stocking up with conservative ideas—a harmless distinction, bless their simple hearts…They had picked up the idea somewhere that the time was now past for the teacher to teach the pupil. From now on it was the thing for the pupil to teach himself using, as he saw fit, the teacher as an instrument…I sat there patiently waiting, waiting for the youth to take education into their own hands and start the new world. Sometimes I laughed and sometimes I cried a little internally…

Here’s more from Stanlis:

The hubris of their young teachers deluded egotistical students to imagine that through their rational discussions they could find easy and valid solutions to the complex problems of society.

Frost wrote of the experience:

I discovered what the Amherst Idea was that is so much talked of, and I got amicably out. The Amherst Idea as I had it in so many words from the high custodian is this: “Freedom for taste and intellect.” Freedom from what? Freedom from every prejudice in favor of state, home, church, morality, etc. I am too much a creature of prejudice to stay and listen to such stuff. Not only in favor of morality am I prejudiced, but in favor of an immorality I could name as against other immoralities. I’d no more set out in pursuit of the truth than I would in pursuit of a living unless mounted on my prejudices.

Stanlis writes:

It was clear that, like Edmund Burke, whom the poet greatly admired, by “prejudice” he simply meant moral habit beyond reflection built into human nature from infancy in favor of home, church, and state. Frost was convinced that Meiklejohn’s “freedom for taste and intellect” was destructive of the norms in the basic institutions of civil society and involved a chronic separation of the intellectual virtues from the moral virtues.

Well, we know how that all turned out, don’t we? Frost experienced a sort of fractal of what was to develop into our current university woes, and recognized at once what the dangers were and what the denouement was likely to be.

Universities: the appeasement of the bullies

The New Neo Posted on by

One turning point in the history of the university in the United States occurred about fifty years ago at Cornell (as later described by Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind). And over the years the situation at academia appears to have gotten worse and worse and worse, as evidenced by recent events at the extremely “progressive” Reed College—so much worse that a lot of students are now protesting the protestors:

“The movement cannot continue to manufacture an enemy that has agreed to review the syllabus [and] bended over backwards on all accounts to accommodate the free speech of the protesters,” wrote Misha, another freshman, in the first op-ed critical of RAR [Reedies Against Racism] published in the paper. Yet the more accommodation that’s been made, the more disruptive the protests have become””and the more heightened the rhetoric. “Black Lives Matter” was the common chant at last year’s boycott. This year’s? “No cops, no KKK, no racist USA.” RAR increasingly claims those cops will be unleashed on them””or, in their words, Hum [humanities] professors are “entertaining threatening violence on our bodies.”

I believe that’s exactly what the members of the RAR want. They are Reed students (and hangers-on?) who want to provoke retaliation against themselves by an administration that so far has appeased them.

As yet no limits have been set; the administration’s hunger for appeasement seems nearly insatiable. As Allan Bloom wrote in the late 80s, describing events that had occurred at Cornell during the late 60s:

[S]tudents discovered that pompous teachers who catechized them about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears.

“Teachers” includes “administrators,” of course. One difference, though, between the 60s and now, is that I don’t think there’s quite as much talk by professors about academic freedom.

The one good thing about what’s happening at Reed is that the majority of the students at Reed, including some students of color, have grown fed up with the extremists and may have had enough. Quite a few students actually want to learn and are tired of having their classes disrupted by the protest groups.

I also suggest you read Professor William Jacobson’s account of what happened when he tried to speak at Vassar College (more links here):

The students who tried to prevent [my campus talk] from happening, who spread the lies, as far as I know, have not been called out by the administration. They’ve been coddled by the administration, and they need to be held accountable for what they did. Because they tried to deprive all these other students of those students’ right to education. They wanted to hear me speak.

This is similar to what happened at Reed—the few make if difficult for the larger group of more reasonable students. But the squeaky wheel gets the administration’s grease.

[NOTE: Please see my just-published post on Robert Frost’s take on the beginning of this sort of thing, one hundred years ago. Yes, one hundred years ago the administrations at colleges and universities were beginning to defer to their students rather than to teach them, as Frost describes.]

Twitter power

The New Neo Posted on by

After President Trump’s Twitter account was shut down for eleven minutes by a rogue employee or contractor on Thursday, Steven Hayward wondered:

…[T]his does raise an interesting question: If a Twitter employee can shut down Trump’s account, what else might a Twitter employee be able to do? If Trump has used the direct-message feature on Twitter, can Twitter access those? Could a rogue employee on Twitter send out a fake Trump Tweet, like “We begin bombing Pyongyang in five minutes”?

It’s an interesting question indeed. Prior to Twitter, presidents and other government officials communicated with the public through government channels, sometimes filtered through the MSM. Social media such as Twitter allows a president to reach the public more directly. But there’s still a middleman—Twitter itself. The president and the public rely on the integrity of the Twitter system, but is there any real reason to trust it?

The Spacey protection pattern

The New Neo Posted on by

The accusations against Kevin Spacey follow a certain pattern, one of attempted unwanted seductions, some so overt as to be harassment and non-violent assaults. A great deal of it seems to have been in the context of drinking, which doesn’t excuse it at all but probably is an indication of a drinking problem, too. I get the impression of a closeted gay man fighting the idea that he’s gay, but drinking quite a bit and taking advantage of the lowered inhibitions involved with drinking to make passes at any youngish man he saw as gay or possibly gay or willing to have a gay encounter.

Some of this behavior merely amounted to propositioning people. Some of it was worse, such as grabbing for their (clothed) genitals, or lying next to them or on top of them while they were sleeping. Some involved underage teenagers, but many involved young adults. But two things strike me about this. The first is how repetitive and compulsive it seems to have been. The second is how he managed to keep the secret all these years.

Perhaps that later phenomenon is the strangest of all. You’d think that, as a closeted gay person, Spacey would have a greater fear of being outed. But he never was, until Harvey Weinstein was accused and the MeToo campaign got started. Suddenly, it became okay to accuse famous and powerful Hollywood figures.

In all these matters it’s also possible that some of the accusations are lies, people piling on. In this case I just don’t think there’s a whole lot of that, although I can’t swear to it. If it’s all or even mostly true, one of the things Spacey apparently counted on was the fact that he was in the closet. From the article:

In the early 2000s, a journalist, then in his early twenties, interviewed Kevin Spacey in London for a national magazine, he told BuzzFeed News…

The interview, which took place at Spacey’s office at the Old Vic theater, went fine. “He was charming and doing impressions of Jack Lemmon and so on,” he said. Then Spacey invited him to go out with some friends for some drinks. Almost immediately after they arrived at the club, he said, Spacey began aggressively groping him…[[what follows is a lengthy description]…

When the journalist returned home, he said he told his editor immediately about his encounter with Spacey. (The editor confirmed this account to BuzzFeed News.)

…He said that he was astonished by Spacey’s behavior during the encounter because he was a journalist, and what “he’s not realizing is that I can f—ing hang him.” But in the days that followed, the reporter was hit with another realization: Sharing his account would out Spacey as gay.

“I consider that a pretty important principle: You don’t out people,” he said. “But it tied my hands. If I were to publish a story about Kevin Spacey sexually harassing me on the job ”¦ there’s no way without making it quite clear that he likes guys.”…

…”Being closeted has for him enabled him to use this privacy claim as a shield against anybody looking closely at his actual behavior. And then it may have served as this strange, protective mechanism, to say, ‘My whole sexual life is off limits because of my sexuality.'”

Well, I don’t think he’s alleging that Spacey actually said that. The reaction, and the decision, was all in the mind of the journalist. I find it interesting that he considered outing a gay man against his will to be a greater offense than keeping mum about his own sexual harassment at that man’s hands (literally at his hands) and facilitating future behavior of the same sort.

I’m not saying it was an easy decision either way. It sounds as though it was a horrible situation and a dilemma—like one of those hypotheticals that teachers give you to write an essay about on an exam in an ethics course. But it seems to me that once someone is doing that sort of thing to random people in a bar, the question of outing is secondary to the question of calling him on his behavior.

No one was doing Spacey any favors, either, by covering up for him. Just for starters, an intervention about his drinking might have been a good idea.

I can understand why young aspiring actors might have personal reasons for not outing Spacey. After all, he was a powerful man in the business (at the time of this interview, for example, he was director of the Old Vic) and he could hurt them in their careers in two ways: keep them from getting jobs and also out them as gay, if in fact they were. But journalists?