URLs du Jour

2018-07-21

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  • Proverbs 10:3:

    3 The Lord does not let the righteous go hungry,
        but he thwarts the craving of the wicked.

    How do you know if you're not righteous? If you're hungry.


  • I've been watching—sort of—the Margaret Hoover version of "Firing Line" off the TiVo when I get the chance. Dasaun McClinton @ the Federalist notes a problem: PBS’s ‘Firing Line’ Revival Wets Bill Buckley’s Gunpowder. It's a longish article, but Dasaun eventually gets to the widely-noted claim from interviewee Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: "unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs."

    It would not have taken much for Hoover to interject and point out that the number of jobs a person has or number of hours a person works has no effect whatsoever on the unemployment rate. But she didn’t. This is just the beginning of what quickly develops into a cycle: Ocasio-Cortez says something false or historically ignorant, like that the United States was not a capitalist country when it was founded. Hoover sits, nods, then moves on.

    To her credit, Hoover retorts that capitalism has generated the most wealth and eliminated the most poverty of any other system, but undercuts her own efforts by allowing Cortez to explain away those facts as being a part of the natural evolution of economic systems. This is not true.

    I suspect that Ms. Hoover doesn't push back on outlandish claims because she's an intellectual lightweight who's unable to think on her feet. (I know, she's sitting down. You know what I mean.)


  • How Margaret Hoover could have pushed back on Ocasio-Cortez's capitalism-slagging is expressed in our Tweet du Jour:

    The other "Firing Line" interviews I've watched: Gretchen Carlson, Paul Ryan, both pretty blah. I have the Jeff Merkley episode on disk, so… one more chance?


  • Coleman Hughes @ Quillette writes on Black American Culture and the Racial Wealth Gap.

    There is arguably no racial disparity more striking than the wealth gap. While the median white household earns just 65 percent more income than its black counterpart, its net worth is fully ten times as high. And, unlike income, which individuals earn in their own lifetimes, wealth accrues over generations, and whites are more than three times as likely as blacks to inherit money from their families. In the public debate on racial inequality, the wealth gap is among the sharpest arrows in the progressive quiver. When conservative commentators argue that America is a meritocracy, or that blacks lag due to cultural factors, progressives can retaliate with a single statistic that seems to prove the reality of white privilege beyond the possibility of doubt.

    But does it? No, it doesn't. Read the whole thing. One commenter writes that "Coleman Hughes appears to be … Thomas Sowell pre-emptively reincarnated." Big, if true.


  • David Harsanyi gives us the sad news: The ACLU Has Basically Quit Defending The Constitution.

    The American Civil Liberties Union, an organization that once so rigidly adhered to the neutral principles in the Constitution that it famously defended the right of a neo-Nazi group to march through the Jewish-laden Chicago suburb of Skokie, has been increasingly rejiggering its positions to correspond with the Left’s hard lurch towards cafeteria constitutionalism.

    This week, for example, one of its senior policy analysts came up with an imaginative rationalization for limiting gun rights. “The wide availability of guns and their misuse is leading to restrictions on Americans’ freedom,” the organization tweeted this week, “and that needs to be part of the firearms debate.” The piece the tweet links to makes a, “A Pro-Liberty Case for Gun Restrictions,” which, though it’s become a tediously misused cliché over the years, can only be described as Orwellian.

    It's sad to see the ACLU self-immolate in progressivism.


  • Faint praise from Jonah Goldberg @ NRO: Obama’s Identity-Politics Warning Is Better Late than Never.

    ‘Democracy demands that we’re able to also get inside the reality of people who are different than us, so we can understand their point of view. Maybe we can change their minds, maybe they’ll change ours.”

    That was Barack Obama speaking in South Africa on the 100th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s birth.

    The former president went on to say that you can’t change people’s minds “if you just out of hand disregard what your opponent has to say from the start. And you can’t do it if you insist that those who aren’t like you, because they are white or they are male, somehow there is no way they can understand what I’m feeling, that somehow they lack standing to speak on certain matters.”

    "Welcome to the party, pal." Hypocritical? Sure, you bet. But as Jonah notes: "there’s a reason we say hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue."


Last Modified 2024-01-25 9:20 AM EDT