Thursday roundup

The foremost development requiring our contemplation is the UK government's barbaric treatment of its most vulnerable citizen, Alfie Evans.

Three key paragraphs from David French's NRO piece about it:

With no God over the state, the state then becomes not the defender of liberty but the definer of liberty. You have no freedoms except those bestowed by the state, and those freedoms are defined entirely by the various branches of government. There is no inherent parental authority. There is no inherent right to life. There is only the justice the state gives according to the standards the state dictates.

And . . .

The long-term threat to the American experiment isn’t found in any given policy, but rather in a lost philosophy. Americans are shedding a belief in God at an alarming rate. In elite circles, fundamental liberties like free speech and due process are scorned and mocked as tools of white supremacy or oppressive patriarchies. Federalism has been reduced to a tactic of political opposition, not a bipartisan principle of self-governance.

If you don’t want America to become Britain — if you don’t want to wake up one morning to find the American state defying loving and prudent parents to declare that death is in a child’s “best interests” — I would suggest that you not wait until America is secularized, centralized, and authoritarian. I’d suggest that you not wait until the moment when the state has seized the power to act like Britain, and you’re reduced to arguing, “I know the government can do this, but it shouldn’t.”

Bill Cosby - he of the classic 1963 comedy album I Started Out As A Child, the Jell-O pudding commercials, and the Cliff Huxtable America's-dad situation comedy role - is found guilty of sexually violating Andrea Costand. 

Mike Pompeo is confirmed as Secretary of State.

Joy Reid learns that nothing expressed in cyberspace is never not permanent:

In a 2007 blog post, MSNBC host Joy Reid attacked TV host Rosie O'Donnell using misogynistic and fat-shaming language and defended future president Donald Trump.

After Reid apologized for old homophobic blog posts in December 2017, her blog "The Reid Report" was effectively taken off of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine thanks to an exclusion request added by the website's operators. But a mirror of the Wayback Machine operated by the Library of Congress remains unaffected, and several of Reid's posts are still visible on that site.

In a January 9th blog post, Reid weighed in on the celebrity feud between "The View" host O'Donnell and Trump. Earlier in the feud, Trump had called O'Donnell "a real loser," a "slob" with a "fat, ugly face," and "fat little Rosie."

Nonetheless, the liberal pundit was on Team Donald.

"How much longer until that chubbed-out shrew Rosie O'Donnell gets her fat ass canned by Babwa?" Reid asked, in an imitation of "The View" co-host Barbara Walters' first name.

"How much longer will the freak show that is ‘The View' continue to darken our television screens?" she continued. "How much more kick-ass funny can Donald Trump be???"

The indispensable Ben Shapiro rocks the house at Liberty University:

After thanking the YAF and opening with a prayer for Alfie Evans, Shapiro launched into something that many would consider a badly needed talk about a badly needed system:

The United States echoed that message from its very inception. George Washington stated in his First Inaugural Address, “Since there exists in the economy and course of nature an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness; between duty and advantage… the propitious smiles of Heaven, can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained.”

The very basis of our politics, then, lies in the recognition that rights without virtues lead to chaos, and that virtues without rights lead to tyranny. Only by balancing public rights with private virtues can we truly uphold freedom and pursue happiness.

One half of the equation, though, seems to have gone awry in modern America.

We have been taught that our rights are paramount, which is fine, but we’ve also been taught that we have no duty to be virtuous. In fact, anyone who says that we have a duty to be virtuous is harming you, microaggressing you, ethnocentrically mansplaining to you in cisgender fashion.

Shapiro then highlighted that a virtuous society cannot be brought about by a centralized government, despite the fact that collectivist politicians promise Eden if they’re just put into power.

How can anyone expect us to be virtuous, the argument goes, when the system itself is so deeply flawed? How can we blame people for being immoral when the system is biased in favor of a few white rich men at the top? First we have to fix the system – then human beings themselves will change. Virtue will become natural; we’ll all just magically become wonderful great people. All we have to do to make this magical thing happen is hand over all our freedoms to a centralized government – and that government will then provide us new rights, better that the old God-given ones. Instead of the right to free speech, the government will provide us a right not to be offended; our feelings will be protected.

Instead of a right to life, the government will provide us the right to kill unborn babies. Instead of a right to create and keep the wages of our labor, the government will provide us a nice, comfortable social safety net, without us actually having to do the work.

Then, after all that’s done, human beings will magically become better. We’ll become good, if all this happens.

Shapiro notes that this is the philosophy of collectivism, which promises more than it can possibly give if you would just give up yourself to it:

Collectivist philosophy, however, thinks differently; they expect us to give our individual striving up; no more striving, no more struggle, all we have to do is trade our individual responsibility for the comfort of collective power. Collectivist philosophy points out that individual virtue isn’t natural – it is a struggle. And we can avoid that struggle by handing over all power to a Nanny State. Judeo-Christianity says, “You’re free, and therefore you must give”; collectivist philosophy says, “You are unfree, and thus the state must take on your behalf.”

Shapiro goes on to describe how collectivism goes directly against the nature of humans, and the will of God by putting it up against each of the Ten Commandments in order in what is a very eye-opening comparison.

David Marshall at The Stream offers a great takedown of GQ magazine's inclusion of the Bible in a list of 21 famous books that one need not read.