Tuesday roundup

 I don't know how politically feasible this would be, but from a procedural standpoint, it would do the trick, it seems to me. Steve Milloy, writing at the Wall Street Journal, outlines the way the Senate - as currently composed - could keep the incoming Biden administration from re-imposong the Paris climate accord:

To prevent the Paris Climate Accord from taking on . . .  undue power [due to a Supreme Court decision similar to the way the rescinding of the DACA program was undone], Mr. Trump should submit it to the Senate, and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should schedule a quick vote. It would certainly be rejected—ratification requires a two-thirds vote—and it is unlikely any court could subsequently resurrect a legislatively tossed treaty. Without the help of judges, Mr. Biden would need a winning ratification vote to make the accord binding, which he likely couldn’t get no matter how well Democrats do in Georgia’s January runoffs and the 2022 midterm elections. 

Mr. McConnell could also call a ratification vote after Mr. Biden’s inauguration, even if Mr. Trump does nothing. This would similarly elevate the treaty’s status and make it difficult for Mr. Biden to bind his successors to his executive actions.

I think there would be enough Senators with thinking at least somewhat along the lines of Joe Manchin that a Senate vote would yield the result depicted by Milloy: 

West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat, hit back at Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after being the subject of a viral tweet by the Democratic socialist last month, telling The New York Times that she’s “more active on Twitter than anything else.”

At the time, Manchin vowed to stand up against the radicals in his party, particularly on the subject of defunding the police.

“Defund the police? Defund, my butt,” he tweeted. “I'm a proud West Virginia Democrat. We are the party of working men and women. We want to protect Americans' jobs & healthcare. We do not have some crazy socialist agenda, and we do not believe in defunding the police.”

He elaborated:

The senator continued: “We’re not going to defund the police, we’re not for the new green deal. That’s not going to happen. We’re not for Medicare for All — we can’t even pay for Medicare for some.”

Mary Townsend, writing at Plough, explores the influence of Louisa May Alcott on French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir: 

Born in 1908, Beauvoir grew up in the thick emotive haze of leftover nineteenth-century French Catholicism, carried into pre-war France. She was educated in the same sort of immersive religiosity that provided plenty of opportunities for spiritual heroism from very young girls in particular, the same sort of upbringing that produced Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower, who aspired to sainthood from her very early youth and in her death in 1897. Beauvoir, who for several years aspired to be a nun, writes of the exquisite transports of confessional tears, imagining herself swooning in the arms of angels; she prided herself on inventing mortifications in her very few moments alone. But unlike Thérèse, Beauvoir found no lasting comfort within or even distantly alongside Christianity.

It was not by cutting herself off from transports of emotion or by abandoning the metaphysical all-or-nothing that she eventually found an image of adulthood she could live with; nor could the attractions of philosophy, which she first came across through the Thomism of her girls’ school, or the Catholic social justice group she volunteered for, do the trick. It was rather literature, as a kind of Art, and herself as Author, that managed to hold the strongest and most sustainable appeal as vocation. If you can believe it, the first non-saintly individual Beauvoir found really attractive was the fictional American Protestant, Jo March, one of the heroines of Louisa May Alcott’s wildly popular 1868 novel, Little Women. Beauvoir couldn’t quite escape the nineteenth century after all.

Like so many readers, the young Simone was passionately invested in the persona of Jo as a writer, taking up the genre of the short story to imitate her. Inevitably, she also had extremely strong opinions on the Laurie question, the wealthy neighbor who proposes to one and then another of the March sisters. Opening the second volume Good Wives by accident, she came upon Laurie and Amy’s engagement (without the help of Jo’s refusal for context), and her response was immediate and absolute: “I hated Louisa M. Alcott for it.” But the similarities between the Marches’ style of family life (fictionalized from Alcott’s own experience) and her own gave her pleasure: “they were taught, as I was, that a cultivated mind and moral righteousness was better than money.” This was something to hold on to, the more so because like the Marches, and like Alcott herself, Beauvoir’s family dealt with straitened means, the memory of better times, and the all-too-visible wealth and comfort of neighbors and relations. The reward of their virtue was to be found in the causes they took up: for Alcott, abolitionism and suffrage, and for Beauvoir, existentialism, Marxism, and her own variety of existentialist Marxist feminism. The necessity for strict social circumspection in the behavior of daughters was lost on Simone, Louisa, and Jo alike.

How did de Beauvoir wind up with the philosophical stance that she did?

I think Beauvoir settled on atheism because she was unable to imagine an intellectual Christianity. This was not because intellectualism was lacking from the Thomism or Catholic existentialism that she had come across, but because what she wanted was the freedom of a Christian, the freedom to understand God, truth, the Absolute on her own terms, and she was told that there was no way to do this. There’s an irony in her captivation with Sartre’s vision, which she found novel, of the freedom to will one’s own future – all too strangely reminiscent of the argument Luther made in 1520. For Beauvoir, the blind nationalism of the French Catholic church, its triumphal support of colonization, its unwillingness to call private property into question, failed to answer her desire for understanding a world in thrall to capitalism. One must think of Beauvoir as a rebel angel.

 

Matthew Continetti, writing at the American Enterprise Institute website, reminds us what a remarkable human being Natan Sharansky is:

Sharansky was born in 1948 in the Ukrainian city of Stalino. His given name was Anatoly. His parents were educated professionals who downplayed their Jewish identity. They did not want to risk political and social reprisal. “The only real Jewish experience I had was facing anti-Semitism,” he writes. The precocious youth spent his early years playing chess. He learned to navigate a Soviet system that maintained its rule through fear. He became captive to doublethink. He repeated official lies and myths not because it was the right thing to do, but because it was the safe thing to do.

Sharansky enrolled in the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. “I dived into the republic of science,” he writes. “This world seemed insulated from the doublethink I had mastered at home.” Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War prompted him to discover his heritage. “Realizing how little I knew about this country that so many people were now asking about made me hungry to learn more.”

Sharansky studied representations of Biblical scenes hanging from the walls of Moscow’s galleries. He came across a samizdat copy of Leon Uris’s Exodus, a potboiler historical fiction that describes Israel’s founding. “It drew me into Jewish history, and Israel’s history, through my Russian roots. It helped me see myself as part of the story.”

The following year the Soviet nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov wrote his “Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom.” Sakharov argued for freedom of inquiry. He demanded the protection of human rights. “Sakharov was warning that life in a dictatorship offers two choices: either you overcome your fear and stand for truth, or you remain a slave to fear, no matter how fancy your titles, no matter how big your dacha,” Sharansky writes. “Ultimately, I couldn’t escape myself or my conscience.”

Inspired by Sakharov, Sharansky applied for a visa to immigrate to Israel in 1973. He was rejected. He was unable to leave the Soviet Union. That made him a refusenik. “My life as a doublethinker, which I had consciously begun at age five the day Stalin died, was over. The professional world I had built for myself, my castle of science, collapsed instantly. Now, I could say what I thought, do what I said, and say what I did.”

The twin concerns of Sharansky’s life—identity and freedom—became fused. “Democracy—a free life in a free society—is essential because it satisfies a human yearning to choose one’s path, to pursue one’s goals,” he wrote in Defending Identity. “It broadens possibilities and provides opportunity for self-advancement. Identity, a life of commitment, is essential because it satisfies a human longing to become part of something bigger than oneself. It adds layers of meaning to our lives and deepens the human experience.” Freedom offers choice. Identity provides direction.

It would be a while before Sharansky could enjoy his own freedom. By 1975, he was working with Sakharov. The next year he formed the Moscow Helsinki Group to pressure the Soviets to live up to the commitments they had made in basket three of the Helsinki Accords. The KGB arrested him in 1977. “I spent the next nine years in prison and labor camp,” he wrote in Fear No Evil, “mainly on a special disciplinary regime, including more than 400 days in punishment cells, and more than 200 days on hunger strikes.”

In prison he played chess games in his head. “I always won.” He would tease the guards with anti-Soviet jokes. He was not afraid. What could they do—put him in jail? He communicated with his fellow inmates through morse code. They would drain the toilets and speak to one another through pipes. He read Soviet propaganda esoterically, between the lines. He figured out what was actually going on by determining what the authorities had omitted.

Sharansky was in prison when he heard that President Ronald Reagan had called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire.” The year was 1983. Reagan had uttered the famous—and controversial—words in a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals. “It was one of the most important, freedom-affirming declarations, and we all instantly knew it,” Sharansky said in a 2004 interview. “For us, that was the moment that really marked the end for them, and the beginning for us. The lie had been exposed and could never, ever be untold now. This was the end of Lenin’s ‘Great October Bolshevik Revolution’ and the beginning of a new revolution, a freedom revolution—Reagan’s Revolution.”

Sharansky and his wife Avital had been apart since her immigration to Israel the day after they married in 1974. Throughout his imprisonment she worked tirelessly on his behalf, and on behalf of other refuseniks and dissidents. She found an ally in Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Benjamin Netanyahu. She met with Reagan, who began asking Soviet leaders to release Sharansky. Gorbachev freed him on February 11, 1986. He was reunited with Avital in Frankfurt Airport. They flew to Israel. “‘It was just one long day,’ Avital sighed later that night, in our new home in Jerusalem. ‘I arrived in Israel in the morning. You arrived in the evening. It was just one very, very long day in between.’”

He became Natan. He entered Israeli politics. He helped resettle one million immigrants from the former Soviet Union. He opposed the Oslo peace accords. He resigned from Ariel Sharon’s government over the policy of unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. His work as an activist was devoted to building what Reagan had described as “the infrastructure of democracy.” Sharansky distinguished between free societies and fear societies. “The structural elements that enable democratic societies to respect human rights—independent courts, the rule of law, a free press, a freely elected government, meaningful opposition parties, not to mention human rights organizations—were all glaringly absent in fear societies,” he wrote in The Case for Democracy (2004).

This utterance from Joseph diGenova may be the most disturbing example of Trumpism denial of the election results yet:

On Monday President Trump’s campaign lawyer and former U.S. Attorney Joe diGenova said that fired Trump cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs should be executed for saying that the election was the “most secure in United States history.”

DiGenova, appearing on the Howie Carr show, which simulcasts on Newsmax, took aim at Krebs as an aside during a wheels-off segment full of false claims about how the United States election had been rigged.

“Anybody who thinks that this election went well, like that idiot Krebs who used to be the head of cybersecurity [for Trump]. That guy is a class A moron. He should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot,” diGenova said.

This is not just a random Parler troll trying to get attention. This is an attorney speaking on behalf of the President of the United States’ re-election campaign. And while it may read like a macabre joke, the direct nature of diGenova’s comments make it impossible to interpret as anything other than a real wish/threat against a public servant for offering truthful testimony.

Carr responded to the statement with an awkward pause and a laugh and then changed the subject. Some shit is so weird that it even makes Newsmax people uncomfortable.

Matt Walsh at Daily Wire on the absurdity of making Sarah Fuller's field goal attempt for Vanderbilt into a historic occasion:

 On Saturday, Sarah Fuller became the first woman to suit up and take the field for a Power-5 football team. The media has declared Fuller’s performance as Vanderbilt’s kicker a groundbreaking, glass ceiling shattering, historic moment. Many in media and the sports world echoed Hillary Clinton’s sentiment that Fuller proved “women and girls belong on every playing field—quite literally.” In a game of escalating hyperbole, ESPN eventually claimed victory by declaring that Fuller has achieved “immortality” through her play in Vanderbilt’s game against Missouri.

Admittedly, she was spectacular. Fuller went 5 for 5 on field goals, booted 3 touchbacks past the end zone, and even made a game saving tackle as the clock expired in regulation. Just kidding. Actually, she kicked one time, it went 30 yards, Vanderbilt lost 41 to zero, and the head coach was fired after the game. This is reality, not a movie. And in real life, women embarrass themselves when they try to play against male athletes.

Walsh says that a clear-eyed view of the situation reveals how insulting the adulation is for women:

All of this patronizing nonsense surrounding a bad kick from a woman whose ego perhaps exceeds her abilities on the football field is merely annoying for me as a man. For women, though, it is much worse than annoying. It is patronizing, degrading, and insulting.  Are women really so unimpressive and bereft of achievement that we have to treat them like we would a small child who draws a bunch of scribbles on a sheet of construction paper and claims that it’s a picture of a tree? We congratulate the small child for his bad drawing because we do not expect children to do any better than that, and because they are emotionally fragile and in need of constant positive affirmation. Is this the case for grown women? Must we stand and applaud and shout “great kick” when, in truth, it was a very bad kick? Are women so pathetic that we have to call even their failures achievements? Not just achievements — but historic achievements? Is that how sad and mediocre women are, that we must stoop to this?

Answer: no. That’s how sad and mediocre feminists think women are, and perhaps are themselves. But it’s not the reality, and it’s not what I think or what any rational person thinks. Women are capable of extraordinary things in many facets of life. They also are capable of extraordinary things in the realm of athletics. Simone Biles comes immediately to mind. But women cannot compete with men in sports designed by and for men. 

Samuel Goldman, writing at Law & Liberty, says that how we define liberty is going to determine how we can defend it:

 iberty is plural, not singular. Rather than a gross concept outside history, institutions, or social structures, it is a “relational claim involving agents, actions, legitimacy, and ends.” To speak coherently, we need to specify the freedom of whom, to do what, under which rules, and for what purposes. The freedom of Socrates to philosophize is not the same as the freedom of Atheniansto participate in ruling and being ruled. Neither bears much resemblance to the liberty of a Christian described by Martin Luther.

Which liberties require defense? In the spirit of unfashionable opinion, I want to suggest that the answer can be described as the liberties of the modern West.

Scott Atlas has resigned his position as special advisor to the president on the pandemic. 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday's Senate vote: self-worship exposed

Have you heard any attempt by Democrats to explain this?

Senate Democrats today blocked a request by Republicans to vote on a bill that would stop infanticide and provide medical care and treatment for babies who are born alive after botched abortions. The vote to stop the Democrat filibuster needed 60 votes but Democrats stopped the chamber from getting enough.

The Senate voted 56-41 to end the filibuster and allow a debate and vote on the bill itself with Republicans supporting a vote on the anti-infanticide bill and Democrats opposing it. This is the third time Senate Democrats have blocked the bill to stop infanticide as 60 votes are needed to end the filibuster. (See vote tally at the end of the article)

During the debate, Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska noted how pro-abortion Democrats refused to stand up and explain why they would block a vote to save babies from infanticide.

He said, “I urge my colleagues to picture a baby that’s already been born, that’s outside the womb gasping for air. That’s the only thing that today’s vote is actually about. We’re talking about babies that have already been born. Nothing in this bill touches abortion access.”

If Democrats in general, and Democrats in the Senate in particular, are aware of the polling numbers showing that most Americans, even most pro-"choice" Americans, are definitely not cool with late-term abortions or denying care to someone born anyway in a botched abortion, why would they do this?

My hunch is that the entire party is so beholden to identity politics that any gesture that could be remotely construed as detrimental to the feminist piece of that puzzle is radioactive.

It took me years to be able to take a square look at feminism. I came of age just as the Gloria Steinem-Robin Morgan-Germaine Greer-Betty Friedan wave of it was breaking over our society. It made a great deal of sense to me at the time. How come it took so long for women to get the vote? How come women automatically take their husbands' last names? And so forth.

But in the midst of that wave of feminism, along came Stephen Goldberg's Inevitability of Patriarchy, and I began to reconsider. Years later, as I commenced my serious faith walk, I came to see that there is an architecture to this universe that includes distinctly male and female traits and patterns of relations between males and females that are detectable in pretty much all species of animals.

Women house the next generation of the species. The uterus is designed to provide a safe, warm, nourishing environment for people at the most vulnerable stage of their lives.

Also, women are designed to have the desire to nurture stirred up within them when they so house such a person.

At the core of feminism is a resentment against the identity nature has imposed on females.

You see this played out in modern arguments that pro-"choice" public policy in a given state is good for that state's business climate. "Get in on the action" is the message. You're a woman with ambitions. Don't be hampered by some inconvenient gestation going on inside of you.

It's a mutation of God's design, a design by which he has imbued a woman with a special kind of love that comes alive when a new life forms inside of her.

And, of course, if she has already chosen to refuse to express that kind of love, if her child survives what she intended to do to it, it's still a bother to her; it's just now outside of her, breathing the same air as all other human beings already born. That's a small matter once she - we - have concluded that the life is expendable.

Ultimately, it's about love of self over love of the one kind of being in the world that one ought to have the most intense and intimate kind of love for. It's self-worship.

We continue to give the middle finger to God. His patience will not last forever.

Barney & Clyde - Episode 13

Here it is.

Technology difficulties precluded the video component, so it's just our mellifluous voices - although these portraits of your intrepid hosts are flattering, are they not?

So pour yourself something bracing, pull up a bar-stool at the Libation Station, and get in on the fortnightly exchange of libertarian and conservative perspectives on the weighty matters of the day. Specifically: 

1. They Really Said That?! - Miley Cyrus blows the patriarchy!

2. Parties Acting Stupidly - Does Amash Smoke Enough Pot to Run as a Libertarian?

3. Yes, it Can Get More Toxic - The Left's disgusting reaction to the passing of David Koch.

4. History to Fit the Agenda - NY Times' 1619 Project 

5. Meanwhile, Back in Athens - Our Local Vaping Ban + Indiana House Representative Jim Lucas' controversial noose post. 

Send your feedback to barneyandclydeshow@gmail.com

Monday roundup

Jeffrey Epstein's Rolodex is going to prove quite explosive. DNC official Christine Pelosi tells Dems to brace themselves. 

Two great pieces on the snot-nosedness and poor math skills of the US Women's Soccer Team: one at the Daily Wire by Matt Walsh and one at The Resurgent by Erick Erickson. From Erickson's piece:

Want some grade school quality sporting with a side of virtue signaling? Watch women’s soccer. Good for Team USA. They won the Women’s World Cup. They did so complaining the whole way there and after. The women’s team made Colin Kaepernick seem mute. And the sports community commentary around it just insisted you had to care. I don’t. But I do have one good thing to say about the whole miserable thing. You just have to read to the end. First…

The Christian player on the team got shoved aside because she didn’t want to wear the LGBTABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ whatever. Then we had to hear all the anti-Trump, anti-conservative nonsense only to cap off the win with the winners complaining about their money and equality.

I assure you they aren’t paid as much because women’s soccer doesn’t generate the revenue, eyeballs, etc that men’s soccer does. It’s like the WNBA, but worse.

Graham Allison, writing at The National Interest, says that, yes, we're finding out that China is not a strategic partner, but rather an aggressive rival. Allison's analysis draws heavily on Henry Kissinger's concept of the Thucydides Trap. He says that hopefully, the rivalry will play out much like the US - USSR rivalry did during the Cold War, with each side's second-strike capability holding the unthinkable at bay.

Also writing at The National Interest is the American Enterprise Institute's Frederic Hess, following up on reaction to a piece he co-authored a while back:

Last winter, in National Affairs, Brendan Bell and I published “An Ivory Tower of Our Own.” The premise was straightforward: Higher education has become inhospitable to conservatives and conservative thought—and this really matters. The goal we set was also simple: a self-sustaining university where, to paraphrase the mission of Brandeis University, the intellectual Right—in all its rich diversity—can be “a host at last.” While the institution should be oriented by an intellectual mission rather than an ideological agenda, its board, leadership, bylaws, culture, and norms should unapologetically champion rigorous, important work that challenges prevailing campus orthodoxies.
The university would embrace unfettered academic freedom in accord with the highest principles of free inquiry, with no quarter given to demands for speech codes, “safe spaces,” or the political enthusiasms of the moment. It would offer a preeminent alternative to the anti-conservatives adversely affecting the college experience of students—and the nation at large. As we put it, these members of America’s academic cartel “help determine what knowledge is pursued, legitimize bodies of thought, provide a platform for cultural criticism, shape literary canons, develop policy agendas, and hold a privileged place in the public square.”

So what has response been like?

Now, in the six months since Bell and I published “Ivory Tower,” many have wondered about the response the piece garnered. Indeed, inquiring about the response is almost invariably the first question asked by each of the dozens of academics and scholars who have written to say, “Is this going to happen? Please tell me this is going to happen. And sign me up!”

On that count, at least four things are noteworthy.

First, there has been much less interest from the coterie of consultants and consiglieri who surround deep-pocketed conservative donors than I might have hoped. It’s not that I expected rich guys to read a 7,000-word essay, or that anyone was going to pony up $3 billion-plus on the word of a Beltway egghead. I had hoped, however, that “Ivory Tower” would pique the curiosity of some hangers-on, advisers, and estate planners who are advising deep-pocketed conservatives. After all, these same donors are busy writing huge checks, and leaving even bigger bequests, to colleges and universities that have no time for the views and values they hold dear. I fear that the quiet response on this front reflects the sense of resignation that characterizes conservative philanthropy in higher education today. Wealthy conservative donors have become enablers, happy when an elite university agrees to accept millions for a new medical complex or program in American studies. Nothing of import will change, I suspect, until that mindset does.

Second, some conservative thinkers have responded by conceding that the notion is an interesting one, only to insist that we ought not be too hasty to dismiss the academy or question its appetite for self-correction. They’ve suggested that it would be mistake to retreat from the academy, and that conservatives should continue to show up, be winsome, and trust that the better angels of the academy will get their act together any day now. I wholly agree that it would be nice if we could all find a way to peacefully coexist in the modern academy. Unfortunately, it seems to me that the problems noted above make clear why such a strategy is, like they say about second marriages, a triumph of hope over experience.

Third, to no one’s great surprise, the campus mandarins have mostly ignored the critique and proposal that Bell and I sketched. When they have occasionally bothered to acknowledge the piece, they have mostly sniffed at it as a typical example of right-wing paranoia and the refusal of conservatives to appreciate the fair-mindedness of the modern academy. I’m never quite sure what to say in response. I do find myself thinking if the handful of university denizens who bother to engage with long-form essays by conservatives are this dismissive, that there’s little hope that far-seeing chancellors are about to boldly challenge the monoculture, or would find much support if they did.

Finally, the heartening and striking response is that which has emerged from the ranks of established professors, young scholars, and academic exiles who have reached out to offer some version of “I’ve yearned for a place like this.” Indeed, plenty of those writers have opened with the disclaimer, “I’m no conservative, but…,” before lamenting that they’d love to find an institution where they needn’t tiptoe so carefully around prevailing norms when it comes to vital questions of political, cultural, and social thought. It speaks to the hunger for robust intellectual debate and suggests that such a venture could be as important for its ability to help liberate free-thinking centrists from smothering orthodoxy as for the scaffolding it would offer to right-leaning intellectuals.

I’m often struck that the conservative response to higher education has wobbled between fretful hand-wringing and resigned acceptance. There’s lots of justifiable snark and head-shaking regarding campus foolishness, but far less discussion of what it would take to truly change things. Indeed, conservative wonks and officials are more likely to advocate giving colleges new funds for workforce training than they are to challenge the cartel.

The first rule of holes is: When you’re in one, stop digging. Well, when it comes to higher education, it’s time to set the shovel down. And get to work assembling a ladder.

Hopefully, Vincent Lambert, the 42-year-old man who was rendered quadriplegic in 2008 and is now subject to an order from France's highest appeals court that his food and water be stopped can somehow, by God's grace, be spared that fate, much as a mentally ill woman in Britain was spared from a court order to abort her baby. Otherwise we slide further down to the condition in which the state's power vis-a-vis that of the individual is so overwhelming that life is utterly dispensable.

Per an Economist / YouGov poll, 53 percent of post-Americans want the citizenship question on the census.

Three glimpses into the way the pro-fetal-murder crowd views the world

There's AOC's tweet in response to Georgia passing a heartbeat bill:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez‏Verified account @AOC

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Retweeted CBS News

“6 weeks pregnant” = 2 weeks late on your period. Most of the men writing these bills don’t know the first thing about a woman’s body outside of the things they want from it. It’s relatively common for a woman to have a late period + not be pregnant. So this is a backdoor ban.

The body that the Georgia legislature was primarily concerned with was that of the defenseless, innocent kid, Toots. And if you're just late, there's nothing to talk about, is there?

Then there's this chick, who tries to pull a snowflake on some pro-life demonstrators, even as she goes all violent on them:

[At] the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . . . a woman approached a couple of pro-life men with a sign on campus. The woman asked the men if the sign was theirs and immediately began pummeling and kicking the man.

The two men remained very calm throughout the attack, with one of the men calling the police. As he did so the woman began screaming at them about how they were horrible people and that the sign they were displaying was “triggering.”

Sweetie, let me explain something very basic to you. You have no right not to be offended - or "triggered," if you prefer.

Fortunately, she was arrested. But the message that one does not get to forcibly silence conservatives still needs constant reinforcing.

Then there's this broad, who no doubt claims that science is on her side when the subject turns to the supposed global climate crisis. She also has a surprisingly low threshold for polemical challenges, getting into some kind of nonsense about "fake stories" when asked to clarify her position:

Debate on CNN's "Cuomo Prime Time" caught fire Monday night after a guest proclaimed that a fetus is not a human being.

When host Chris Cuomo gave Christine Quinn, the former speaker of the New York City Council, the last word, she said a fetus is effectively a body part. Her comments drew Cuomo, Quinn, and guest Rick Santorum into a heavy debate over Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam's comments about whether a newborn baby should be permitted to live and New York's new late-term abortion laws. 

"When a woman gets pregnant, that is not a human being inside of her. It is part of her body, and this is about a woman having full agency and control of her body and making decisions about her body and what is part of her body with medical professionals," Quinn said. "Those are the facts and that is the law."

Santorum replied: "So the baby is their property and they can do whatever they want to it. They can maim the baby or torture the baby." 

Quinn shot back: "This is about a woman’s body. Rick, you're spinning fake stories. You’re so desperate here, you're so desperate here. You're bringing up fake stories. "

Satorum said he was "not desperate. I’m just asking questions." 

I've seen the pattern a million times. You challenge a leftist to defend her or his position and get some kind of meltdown in response - either sputtering like this or ad hominem attacks.

The common thread in all three of these instances is the pro-fetal-death person in question reserving the right not to make sense. "I won't even give your side one microsecond of airing because shut up."

Both leftists and Muslims hate individual human sovereignty; that's the basis of their common bond, Jew-hatred

Bookworm's blog posts often get much longer than is customary for our medium. As is the case with anybody whose output in whatever they do is prolific, some of these extended essays are better than others.

(And I guess I should note that I've had a real problem with her taking a genuine shine to Donald Trump, going beyond applauding his good moves, which any conservative does, and saying that Trump's brashness and unfiltered mouth have actually grown on her. That said, I still find her a voice in our national scream fest conversation that merits heeding on many things. She's one of those pundits whose fondness for the Very Stable genius has not completely skewed her judgement.)

A couple of days, she wrote a post that is downright important.

Have you ever wondered why lefties would champion Muslims? What's up with Linda Sarsour leading the Women's March, for instance?

So has she:

One of the fascinating things about the world in which we live is the alliance between Leftists and Muslims. At first glance, it seems as if they have nothing in common. Leftists tout women’s rights; Muslims tout women’s burqas. Leftists tout LGBTQ rights; Muslims tout homosexual hangings. Leftists purport to hate slavery; Muslims have slavery as a core doctrine. Leftists hate rape; Muslims have rape as another core doctrine.

Given these profound differences, one way to account for the Leftist/Muslim alliance today is to look to the old Arab adage stating “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” (Or, as Aristotle said first, “a common danger unites even the bitterest enemies.”) Both the Left and Islam are united in a fight against Western civilization. And significantly, the thing they are fighting against most fiercely is what lies at the core of Western civilization: The value of the individual.

Here’s the thing: Despite their superficial differences, Leftists and Muslims have something very profound in common, which is that both are completely totalitarian ideologies. Each envisions complete control over all people around the world. Individualism is anathema to them. It is this common vision that binds them in the short term. In the long term, of course, each assumes that its ideology will be victorious and that, like the Borg, the winning ideology (whether Islam or Leftism) will either assimilate or destroy the losing ideology (whether Leftism or Islam).

Oh, I almost forgot. There’s another thing that binds them and that is their abiding hatred for Jews. (They hate other religions too, don’t get me wrong, as we can see from the murderous purge of Christians across the Muslim world as well as the softer effort to purge Christians in America. But there’s something about the Jews….)

I have a theory about this Jew hatred. Judaism was the first ideology to identify individual worth, something that Jews wrote down in the Bible and that Christianity, which is Judaism’s ideological progeny, brought to the greater world. From first to last– that is, from God creating man in his own image to Christ recognizing the worth of each individual — the Judeo-Christian tradition is about the individual.

The Judeo-Christian belief system is about freedom of conscience, not mindless subordination to a tyrannical God, set of gods, or earthly dictator. It’s about moral values, not frantically thrashing about to find some way to appease mortal or immortal despots, whether with human sacrifice, animal sacrifice, or meaningless rituals divorced from morality and human worth. It’s also about recognizing God in others, whether in the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount, both of which require that we treat other humans with the dignity we want for ourselves.

Everything the Bible demands is antithetical to both Leftism and Islam. Those faiths (for Leftism is a faith) divide the world into those with power and those without. They see people as either masters or slaves. They see individuals as beings who have no free will but, instead, as beings to be endlessly manipulated for some greater good that always, somehow, coincides perfectly with the masters’ needs.

For those in thrall to totalitarian ideologies, there is no enemy greater than the man who says, “I am me” — not “I am us,” or “We are you,” or “I am you,” or “Tell me what to do,” but “I am me. I am a person created in God’s image. I have free will. I have a moral compass that it is imperative upon me to follow because of my personal relationship with God, to whom I am ultimately answerable.” In a totalitarian world, the person who insists on his individualism and moral worth is the ultimate threat.

She then goes on to explore why the object of this religious hatred that is shared by leftists and Muslims is Judaism and not Christianity. It's interesting, and part of what she concludes is that Jews who go leftist and secular can be some of the worst haters of individual sovereignty.

This Bookworm post resonates with another essay I read this morning, by Deana Chadwell at The American Thinker, entitled "The Left vs. Life in General." Chadwell says that the "triune purpose for America" absolutely drives Leftists up the wall.

God not only gave us each life, but He also gave us free will –- liberty. It is necessary that we have untrammeled volition so that we can be free to choose Him. It is also necessary so that we can each become “all [we] can become,” as Harrison Bergeron so tragically declared in the Kurt Vonnegut story. Along with life and liberty, God has given each of us amazing gifts, and freedom is necessary for us to realize our potential.

We know from Thomas Maslow’s work that we can’t reach our inbred capabilities -– he called it self-realization –- until our basic animal necessities are met. If we’re starving, or trying to sleep out in the cold, or fighting off an illness, we can’t be painting masterpieces.  We have many rock-bottom needs in order to just survive at an animal level, but a society must be able to provide the structure for us to rise above that or our humanity dies. It isn’t enough for our society to give us food, clothing, and shelter –- prisons do that. Human beings are designed to hunt for happiness.

Happiness and the pursuit thereof is the last of the triune purpose for America. But what is happiness? Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of the University of Chicago beautifully explained for us in his classic Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience. He defined happiness as the state of being when we are so involved in what we are doing that time evaporates –- it flows right past us and when we finally stop doing whatever we were engrossed in, we wonder where the time went. We’ve lost track of ourselves, of distractions and moved into a state of “optimal experience.”

After 20 years of following his subjects –- they each had a small meter with them that allowed them to record those moments when they were feeling happy –-Csikszentmihalyi discovered that in spite of all of us wanting the weekend to get here quickly, his subjects most often recorded happiness when they were working. Work –- meaningful work -- makes us happy. Not welfare. Not free stuff. Not rest. Not play. Work.  People in Venezuela right now are not only lacking the basic necessities of survival, but they have no opportunity for fulfilling work.

Note that our American dream is not happiness, but the pursuit of happiness, which confirms what Csikszentmihalyi found. We want to go after it; we know it can’t just be handed to us. Some part of our souls needs the struggle. I don’t have to sit here and write this, but I want to; doing so pleases my innermost being.  Our president doesn’t have to work. He could just be lolling around his gold-plated penthouse, but he’s working 20-hour days, struggling against horrifying odds, because it is in him to do so.

But the new left is not at all interested in our individual need for fulfillment. The left is not really even aware of the rest of us as human. We are merely the eggs for their omelet and an omelet doesn’t present each egg separately –- they’re all whipped up together, one indistinguishable from the rest, and all of them very dead.

These “Justice Democrats” are after beating us all into an homogenized, manageable mass all in the name of equality -– which is ridiculous on its face since none of us is like the other -– and these folks like to tout “social justice” and at the same time encourage every kind of immorality and injustice imaginable.  They appear to be on the side of pedophilia, of human trafficking, of terrorism. They appear to be playing fast and loose with immigration and campaign finance laws. They are willing to falsify votes in a dozen different ways and they don’t mind being complicit in America’s slavery 2.0 -- illegal immigration. Immorality is their second god.

But their biggest idol is the environment -- Mother Earth, Gaia -- their mighty goddess, a goddess so fragile that she’ll self-combust if cattle don’t stop digesting and they believe that all of us –- not them -- but all of us should be sacrificed at its altar.  Life be damned.  Liberty be damned.  The pursuit of happiness has no place in this budding dystopia. Earth only has room for the power-hungry to wallow in their useless, miserable might. 

The totalitarian impulse ultimately leads to madness, of course, because the power-hungry totalitarian wants to exempt herself from the obliteration of individual sovereignty. You have to have that in order to enjoy the dictatorial perch from which you control the rest of humanity. But someone is always going to be hot to gobble up your sovereignty and replace you on that perch. Hence, this kind of eat-their-own development:

Saira Rao, a "Justice Democrat" who ran for office in Colorado (and lost), has been active in supporting Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) following an outcry over clearly anti-Semitic statements Omar made last week at an event for progressive activists. Tuesday night, she weighed in on the debate over whether House Democrats should adopt a measure condemning anti-Semitism by comparing Pelosi to infamous white supremacist David Duke.

"Iam going to unfollow anyone who posts anything positive about Nancy Pelosi," Rao tweeted. "Nancy Pelosi is a white feminist. White feminists are white supremacists. Nancy Pelosi is a white supremacist. And if you idolize Nancy Pelosi, you may as well declare allegiance to David Duke."

So to sign up for the Leftist project is to seal one's fate: eventually getting trampled into dust.

Friday roundup

Heather Wilhelm has a great essay at National Review on the implications of the gush-fest in which cultural observers have engaged over feminist super-hero movies:

Remember when an alarming number of movie critics simultaneously lost their minds over the sheer raw feminism of Wonder Woman, documenting how they cried at the theater and declaring that viewing Wonder Woman might have been the most powerful experience of their life, which should deeply worry us all if that is indeed really true?

It’s okay if you don’t remember: The Internet appears to be melting all of our brains. Anyway, I liked Wonder Woman, and I’m sure Captain Marvel is fine, despite the web of semi-hysterical press surrounding its release. The women in the film, intones one review at Forbes, “are pilots, they are scientists, they are warriors, and while some of the men around them might not understand that or accept it, the women don’t frankly need them to and aren’t going to wait around for the myopic men to catch up to the facts.”

Ah, yes! Those daft, myopic men, always fouling things up! But wait, there’s more: “That’s not to say, however, that Captain Marvel doesn’t remind us of the sorts of daily frustrations, struggles, and inequalities women face in society — being told to smile more . . .”

Wait. What? Let’s stop here, shall we? Out of the world’s massive crab bucket of problems, let us stop and consider the modern scourge among American women of being told to smile more. Has it been two seconds? Okay, that’s probably enough time — although if you google “Captain Marvel” and “smile more,” you will discover that many people fervently disagree.

For the record, I have never been told to smile more. This deeply worries me, because perhaps it means I am smiling too much. Truly, it keeps me up at night, brooding like a superhero in anguish! Just kidding. It doesn’t worry me at all, because it doesn’t matter. I don’t care, and neither should you, and nobody should be in a tizzy about this particular subject in general, because life is precious and very short.

With that in mind, here’s what does worry me a bit, even if it is a bit tangential: Captain Marvel, or at least the reception of it, might be a subtle indicator of how suffocating modern feminism has become.

At a base level, the very idea of a superhero is innately goofy or farcical, or at least it should be. But Captain Marvel, by most accounts, is almost perfect: Strong. Beautiful. Driven. Ultra-powerful. According to Slate, she is a “serious, stolid type whose steel will and laser-focused commitment to her mission make her a formidable foe even when her fists aren’t glowing orange with photon-blasting superpowers,” which is impressive indeed. 

The whole thing is that good.

Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute provides a  grim look at how universal "health care" is not working out in the UK:

Vacancies for doctor and nurse positions have reached all-time highs. Patients are facing interminable waits for care as a result. This August, a record number of Britons languished more than 12 hours in emergency rooms. In July, the share of cancer patients who waited more than two months to receive treatment soared.

Why are the professionals leaving?

Consider one nurse’s letter explaining why she quit the profession. She described horrific working conditions. Medical professionals worked 12-hour shifts with little time for necessities like bathroom breaks or food. Managers felt they couldn’t do anything to change unsafe conditions created by overcrowded hospitals. “You cannot safely practice under such conditions,” she wrote. “Mistakes will be made and people will be harmed, some fatally.”

A Fred Barnes piece at The Washington Examiner entitled "None of This Is Normal."  A Whole lotta folks out there so obsessed with Donald Trump that it clouds their overall worldviews.

Huge nationwide blackout in Venezuela.

Jonathan Kay piece at Quillette entitled "The Rise and (Possible) Fall of Justin Trudeau Show the Perils of Woke Governance."

All governments eventually become enmeshed in some kind of scandal, of course. But Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are unlike their predecessors in one crucial respect: They have created the first national government anywhere that has explicitly presented itself as a political vessel of ultra-progressive social-justice mantras such as intersectionality and #MeToo. And there is evidence to suggest that this scandal has been all the more damaging to the Liberals precisely because their grubby treatment of a principled indigenous woman is so obviously at odds with the pious social-justice posturing that, until just a few weeks ago, often made the Liberals sound more like an activist organization or undergraduate student society than a G7 government.

This is delicious. Delicious. Poor Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times is all conflicted about how to process Ilhan Omar.  

The identity politics fiasco surrounding Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has been excruciating. Half of me is angry at her. The other half is furious for her.

Here, Michelle, lean over my glass so I can make a martini from your tears.

 

He's into empowerment for women - but only certain kinds

That guy who insulted Tucker Carlson's daughter has a position worth noting:

On Sunday, Tucker Carlson posted to Twitter an account of his daughter’s experience at Virginia’s Farmington Country Club last month:

Toward the end of the meal, my 19-year-old daughter went to the bathroom with a friend. On their way back through the bar, a middle aged man stopped my daughter and asked if she was sitting with Tucker Carlson,” Carlson wrote. “She answered, ‘That’s my dad,’ and pointed to me. The man responded, “Are you Tucker’s whore?” He then called her a “f***ing c**t.”

My daughter returned to the table in tears. … My son, who is also a student, went into the bar to confront the man. I followed. my son asked the man if he’d called his sister a “whore” and a “c**t.” The man admitted he had, and again [became] profane. … The club spent more than three weeks investigating the incident. Last week, they revoked the man’s membership and threw him out of the club.”

For the entire account, click here; I’ve declined embedding it due to language.

As it turns out, the man — Manuel Granados — is on the Board of Directors for the Women’s Initiative, an organization which provides mental health services for women who can’t afford them.

As indicated on their site, they believe in a woman’s emotional and spiritual needs:

We believe every woman has an innate capacity for healing that, once uncovered and directed, results in better mental and physical health. We believe it is critical to address each woman’s unique emotional, physical and spiritual needs.

Where does the need to not be called a whore and the “C” word fit into that?

I like what one wag said on Twitter about him the other day: This is a guy who hasn't been hit in the mouth enough throughout his life.