Wednesday roundup

Michael Graham, writing at the CBS News website, says that the latest school shooting, the one in Texas, causes a fundamental question to loom large for gun-control zealots:

What "common-sense gun laws" would have stopped this?

He breaks this down into some specifics:

 . . . would expanded background checks, or closing the alleged "gun show loophole" have had any impact on the Santa Fe shooter? How about bringing back the "assault weapon ban," or restricting the size of magazines, or raising the minimum age for legal gun purchases?

Answer: No. 

Consider this conversation between the Most Equal Comrade and Mrs. Food Desert:

President Obama tells the story of traveling through rural Iowa during the 2008 campaign and his wife Michelle saying to him, "If I was living in a farmhouse, where the sheriff's department is pretty far away, and somebody could just turn off the highway and come up to the farm, I'd want to have a shotgun or a rifle to make sure I was protected."

President Obama's reply: "And she was right."

Dems are in a quandary here:

Democrats are caught on the horns of their own dilemma. They can either propose useless laws that would have virtually no impact on potential mass shooters; or gun confiscation which has very little support among the electorate and would be a massive turnout magnet for Republican voters.

Don't think the MSM are in the tank for Dems? How come we're not seeing reportage of this remarkable turn of events?

Reality never campaigns for Democrats.

However, judging from the total silence over Monday's Reuters/Ipsos generic ballot poll, the nation's media certainly does. How else could an objective observer explain an apparent decision by every single mainstream outlet to ignore such a clear opportunity for website traffic?

On Monday at 2:49 p.m., Thomson Reuters' Polling Editor Chris Kahn tweeted this shocker: the Democratic Party has completely lost the double-digit edge it held just weeks ago.

That all-but-certain #BlueWave the media has harped on for months is gone, along with the likelihood that the Democrats will retake the House of Representatives. Mainstream editors deemed the possible retaking of the House based on data gathered one year out from November to be worth scores of headlines. However, not one of those editors has yet reached the reasonable conclusion that the collapse of that narrative six months out from Election Day deserves any coverage whatsoever.

Michelle Malkin reports on how former Education Secretary Arne Duncan has suddenly discovered the charms of keeping kids out of government schools:

Educrat (ED-yoo-krat) noun, usually pejorative. A government school official or administrator whose primary function is to spend tax dollars telling other parents what to do with their children.

Beltway education bureaucrats abhor families who choose to keep their kids out of public schools -- unless it's to grandstand over gun control.
Behold Arne Duncan, longtime pal of Barack Obama and former U.S. Department of Education secretary, who called last weekend for parents nationwide to withdraw students from classes "until gun laws (are) changed to keep them safe."

Emotions are still raw after a teen shot 10 classmates and teachers to death in Texas last week. But Duncan has no excuse for his cynical, made-for-cable-TV exploitation of the Santa Fe High School massacre. Existing state laws banning minors under 18 from purchasing or possessing guns didn't stop the shooter. Neither did laws against possessing sawed-off shotguns or pipe bombs.

And contrary to hysterical early reports, the accused 17-year-old gunman did not use "assault rifles." So a "common sense" ban on "assault weapons" would not have saved lives, either.

But effective solutions to maximize students' safety and well-being seemingly aren't Duncan's goals. His mission is airtime. Publicity. Entertainment. Provocation for provocation's sake. Show time -- for the children, of course.

School boycotts are a "radical idea," he admitted to MSNBC. "It's controversial. It's intentionally provocative." Praising teacher walkouts and student protests, Duncan told The Atlantic he supported parent-initiated school shutdowns for gun control because "we are not protecting our kids... And the fact that we're not doing that -- we're not willing to think radically enough to do it -- I can't stomach that." 

Ah, the royal, unstomachable "we."
Here's another thing I find hard to swallow: Education overlord Arne Duncan now championing the radical idea of parents exercising their autonomy to do what's best for their children.
As Obama's meddling power-hungry education secretary, Duncan attacked "white suburban moms" and their children who turned to homeschooling in protest of the top-down Common Core "standards"/testing/data-mining program. Duncan sneered that he found it "fascinating" that the grass-roots anti-Common Core revolt came from "white suburban moms who -- all of a sudden -- their child isn't as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn't quite as good as they thought they were."

This elitist control freak revealed his fundamental disdain for rabble-rousing parents who've taken educational matters in to their own hands. By characterizing the movement against Common Core as "white" and "suburban," Duncan also exposed his bigotry against countless parents "of color," like myself, who've long opposed Fed Ed's sabotage of academic excellence, local control and student privacy in school districts across the country. 

Note that newly minted parents' rights advocate Arne Duncan never once advocated boycotting Chicago public schools, which he ran for eight years, for their abject failure to quell rampant school violence. 

Dan Blumenthal of the American Enterprise Institute has some of the most incisive analysis of the current juncture of the North Korea situation I've seen:

The only way to succeed in pressuring Kim to give up his nukes and Xi to abide by the sanctions he signed on to is to credibly threaten the use of force on the peninsula. But that is practically impossible during preparations for a summit.

So, in the last week, Kim began to show his cards through a predictable outburst in which he poured cold water over the idea of complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization (CVID) — the only outcome the United States should accept after so many years of accepting less.

Now we come to the crux of the problem. Getting Kim to accept CVID would necessitate a radical strategic change in the direction of his country. It would be akin to Anwar Sadat’s decision to align with the West or Deng Xiaoping’s decision to repudiate much of Mao’s legacy.
Kim would have to decide to throw out years of ideology and policy that forced his own people to suffer for the “great cause” of defeating the American imperialists and their lackeys in the South Korea.
He would also have to take the risk of engaging in “reform and opening.” He would have to trust that he could survive such a change, unlike, for example, Gorbachev. Xi himself has rolled back much of Deng’s reforms, fearing too much Western “spiritual pollution.”
While Kim has somewhat lessened the hostile rhetoric toward South Korea and the US, there is almost no indication that he has made any of these big decisions.

 

Provocative piece by Daren Jonescu asking how we should regard Plato:

Apropos of a discussion of Plato’s intentions in his depiction of Socrates, and specifically the notable ways that Plato’s Socrates differs both from Xenophon’s contemporaneous depiction and from the historical figure later Socratic philosophers, such as the Stoics, had in mind, a friend who views Plato with some skepticism confronted me with this provocative question:

Is Plato a philosopher or an artist? Is Plato a man of philosophic temperament who presents philosophy in an artistic manner, or is Plato a man of artistic temperament who uses philosophy and philosophizing as the canvass for and means to expressing his art?

The question is serious, and cannot be dismissed on simplistic grounds such as, “How could twenty-four hundred years’ worth of subsequent philosophers be wrong in their judgment of him?” For we might ask how many of the philosophers of those intervening centuries were themselvestruly philosophers in the sense in which that word is normally associated with Plato, or with ancient philosophy in general. That is, from the Greeks we inherited the idea that philosophy is a way of life, not merely a doctrine or a set of answers to specific questions; and yet many of our most influential thinkers, certainly in the modern era, seem to embody a conception of philosophy more invested in claims to knowledge (i.e., doctrines) than in personal spiritual development per se. 

In addition, there have been significant members of history’s Great Thinkers Club who spoke so disdainfully of Plato, or even of ancient thought in general, that one could make the case that they would have disputed Plato’s status as a philosopher in their preferred sense of the term. I think of Locke’s or Hobbes’ loathing for Greek metaphysical language, which they mocked as in effect a rhetorical dance of the seven veils; or Kant’s dismissal of the science of being as a “dialectical illusion.”

Furthermore, some of the historically important thinkers most closely aligned with theoretical “Platonism” are of dubious philosophic stature themselves, whether by the ancient or modern standards of philosophy. St. Augustine, for example, who perhaps did as much as anyone else to keep Plato vital and relevant through the medieval and early modern eras, might reasonably be classified as, to paraphrase my friend’s question, “a theologian who uses philosophy and philosophizing as a canvass for and means to expressing his faith.”

Nor can we easily classify Plato as a philosopher on the grounds of his great and unquestionable civilizational influence, including on later philosophers. For Homer, the Bible, and Shakespeare may all, in varying ways, be said to have had seminal influence in the development of civilization and the history of ideas, and yet neither God nor the two poets could be categorized as philosophers in any literal sense.

Jonescu's own conclusion? Plato was a "philosopher of artistic means."

Marco Rubio rips the Very Stable Genius a new one over the latter's odd stance toward Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE. Well, maybe it's not so odd. The VSG is in a bit of a bind. He needs maximum Chinese goodwill when it comes to North Korea, and sanctions on ZTE would surely be unhelpful with that.