Category: national politics & policies

Categories
ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

Ooga Booga Time

moon, earth, flag, Aldrin, Buz,z, tribe, tribalism, patriotism, globalism

Two tribes —

On the left, we see both iconoclasm (razing of Confederate memorial statuary) and a fixation on surface meaning (defending the actions of antifa by fixating on its name: “it just means ‘anti-fascism’!). 

On the right, rallying around the flag and MAGA hats has reached fever heat.

— Welcome to Ooga Booga Time.

In other words: tribalism.

Consider the upcoming movie about Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon. The makers of this movie have made a point of not depicting the raising of the Stars and Stripes above the dust of Mare Tranquillitatis.

Why? Because, says the Canadian actor who plays the part of astronaut Armstrong, the filmmakers wished to present “Armstrong’s success as a ‘human achievement’ rather than a patriotic American victory.”

But it was, factually, very much a Cold War victory. 

What the filmmakers are doing is rewriting history to conform to their cosmopolitan, internationalist tribal mindset.* 

Nothing new, of course — Hollywood has been a propaganda mill for a very long time. Once it aligned itself with Washington, D.C. Not any more. 

Now, apparently, even depicting a central bit of traditional American symbolism in the history being filmed is so stylistically, ceremonially offensive that actors and directors and cinematographers avert . . . our eyes.

“One thing is needful,” philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. “To add style to one’s character.” Maybe. But when it comes to politics what we need — in Hollywood and Washington and Anytown, USA — is less attention to symbolism. To style.

And more on substance. And truth.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* And, perhaps, to appease the propaganda-minded censors of Chinese government. That’s Ben Shapiro’s take.

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Categories
First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture meme moral hazard national politics & policies Popular

Re-Segregation

segregation, bias, right, left, conservative, liberal, water fountains

It is hard not to miss the ideological left’s inconsistency regarding “diversity”: demanding diversity of race and gender, they enforce a monoculture that somehow cannot tolerate intellectual and political competition.

We see this in 

  • higher education, dominated by left-of-center professors and administrators; 
  • in the news media, overwhelmingly filled with Democrats; and 
  • even in the corporate world, especially in HR Departments.

That some areas of life are filled with one type of person, and others with a different kind, should shock no one. But the intolerance of this? It has recently become extra extreme on the left: De-platforming, physical attacks on free speech, censuring and firing employees who dare offer facts inconvenient for progressivism. When a senior Facebook engineer attempted to bring in tolerance and diversity, what should have been a non-story received national attention.*

It amounts to a new segregationism. 

People are segregating more and more in their communities based on income and culture (see Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort) — despite many of these same self-segregators support for Martin Luther King’s civil rights agenda of de-segregation. 

Another current trend is shunning. When it was discovered, the other day, that the In-N-Out burger chain had contributed $25,000 to the California Republican Party, the Twitterverse cooked up something special: “#BoycotInNOut — let Trump and his cronies support these creeps” . . . well, that gem is from the chair of the California Democratic Party.

Apparently, this Democratic Party official is demanding separate eating establishments for progressives and conservatives.

But hey, where would I eat?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Arguably, many of the stories we fret about should be non-stories — as in, “none of our business.” But when some people make others’ business theirs, the stories just will not stay local.

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Categories
ballot access national politics & policies

Party Line, Nudge Nudge

I’m all for government transparency. But transparent politicians?

The office of New Mexico’s Secretary of State sent out a press release, yesterday, announcing that Secretary Toulouse Oliver “is formatting the 2018 general election ballot to once again include the option for ‘straight party’ voting.”

“The more options people have,” Oliver is quoted for explanation, “the easier it is for more eligible voters to participate — and participation is the key to our democratic process.”

This sounds all very nice and good. More options!

But hers was not a conscientious and noble adoption of a choice-promoting democratic notion. The whole point is to nudge voters to not consider a non-R/non-D alternative — perhaps especially in the state’s contest for the U.S. Senate.

In which former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson is making a not-longshot run.

As a Libertarian.

Though the Secretary of State’s office pretends to be for democracy, I have trouble buying that Ms. Oliver’s motives are non-partisan. Ditto Gary Johnson.

“Pushing voters toward straight ticket voting is a worn-out staple of major party incumbents,” says the candidate, “and flies in the face of the reality that the great majority of voters are independent-minded and don’t need or appreciate a ballot that provides a short-cut to partisanship.”

It’s a standard way to gain, as one Democratic State Senator put it, “partisan advantage in low-information elections.”*

Matt Welch at Reason quotes ballot access expert Richard Winger to show how old a gimmick it is. It’s been on its way out, actually (only nine states sport the “feature”), probably because . . . it’s just so obvious a ploy. 

Transparent.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

 

* The partisanship is also not appreciated by the Republican Party of New Mexico, which is suing the Secretary of State.

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Categories
education and schooling government transparency national politics & policies Popular Second Amendment rights

A Faulty Gun Report

While statistics are generally unreliable, data about gun crimes often qualify as “anti-data.”

“This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015-2016 school year, ‘nearly 240 schools . . . reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting,’” National Public Radio told us yesterday. Like previous stats we’ve seen cited on social media, that seems unbelievably high. 

And yes, it is — “far higher than most other estimates,” reporter Anya Kamenetz noted. “NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened.”

Were they fibbing? Well, never underestimate the power of incompetence. 

Even that’s harsh: remember that reporting requirements are a burden. And filing bureaucratically-designed forms with the Education Department may be no easier than filing tax returns with the IRS. One of the biggest errors in one school district report resulted from a simple data entry error.

That is not a sophisticated statistical problem, but a simple typo.

Not that there aren’t some difficulties of a not-so-easy-to-understand nature in the story. For one, the degree to which the report was off is said to lie within “the margin of error.”

So, how big was the error, exactly? What’s the number? Well, of the 240 supposed “shootings,” NPR claimed to be “able to confirm just 11 reported incidents.”

Yet the Education Department bureaucrats will only affix an erratum note to their ridiculous report. 

Nor will it be withdrawn or replaced, as it should be.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Categories
First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies

Snail-mail Your Contribution

Visa, Mastercard, David Horowitz, conservatives, censorship

In the dystopian world of the future, all financial transactions will be made by credit card. In this dark world, the people who run credit-card firms must be appeased. If they dislike what you’re doing, they will have the power to prevent you from receiving financial support for your work — however normal and legal that work may be.

And whom will such financial institutions be, in turn, appeasing?

Politicians.

The politicians won’t have to pass a law to get firms to do their bidding. They need merely grumble ominously.

Perhaps the politicians will cooperate with ideological organizations bearing ironically unrevealing names like Media Matters and Southern Poverty Law Center, dedicated to shutting down anybody they disagree with.

Is that future far away? No.

Here is the situation. Since cash and checks are still very legal, if you wish to support the work of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, you can mail a check. But as of this writing,* you can’t send the Center a payment online, because Visa and MasterCard have thwarted the Center’s ability to accept donations that way.

Why?

Because the SPLC has dubbed the Center a “hate group.”

David Horowitz told Breitbart News that regarding “Tech heads” as the main bad guys here is misguided: “They have been threatened by Senator Mark Warner and other Democrats if they don’t censor conservatives.”

When politicians start bullying, we are no longer talking about voluntary market transactions, or voluntarily abstaining from same. We are talking about a terrible future . . . that is already arriving.**

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* After this installment of Common Sense was sent to our webmaster, it was reported on The Daily Wire that “Credit Card Companies Restore Donations To Conservative Group After Backlash” (August 27, 2018).

** And if it takes a protest campaign to reinstate every deplatformed individual or organization, it is obvious that no great victory of principle has been won in the current reversal. In David Horowitz’s words, the battle is “very much far from over.”

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Categories
ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

No. No. No. No.

Chuck Todd, Meet the Press, right wing, left wing, propaganda, myth, bias, MSM

“Look, I think one of the best things going in Donald Trump’s favor — we know this — is the mainstream media,” David Brody, the Christian Broadcasting Network’s White House correspondent, told Meet the Press host Chuck Todd yesterday. 

“I hate to say it. I know I’m sitting on a Meet the Press roundtable, but the truth of the matter is 62 percent think the media is biased,” added Brody. “So, in other words, if you look at the approval ratings of Donald Trump versus the approval rating of the media —” 

“The conservative echo chamber created that environment,” interjected Mr. Todd. “It’s not — no. No. No. No. It has been a tactic and a tool of the Roger Ailes created echo chamber.”

“So, let’s not pretend it’s not anything other than that,” Todd insisted. (So, it IS something other than that?)

“Well, hang on,” Brody responded. “Yes and no. Because remember, the independents are part of Donald Trump’s base. . . . [T]hose Independents also distrust media. This is not just Republicans. It is many Americans across —”

“Oh, no. No. No. I take your point,” Todd again interrupted. “I’m just saying it was a creation — it was a campaign tactic. It’s not based in much fact.”

Hmmm. Todd does not dispute Brody’s assertion that a supermajority of the country sees bias in the Fourth Estate. Nor does he deny that in a battle between Trump and the so-called mainstream media, the approval-rating-challenged president bests the media most days.

Instead, the former Democratic Party campaign staffer-turned-journalist smugly maintains that one cable TV channel, talk radio and a spate of conservative websites have totally invented a fantasy of an anti-conservative bias where absolutely none exists.

Meet the press bias.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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