URLs du Jour

2020-06-12

Michael Ramirez provides the Eye Candy du Jour, concerning HBO's decision to yank Gone With the Wind from its new streaming service, HBO Max:

[Gone Baby Gone]

Background on the controversy from David Harsanyi here. He's not a fan of the move.

Although if you use Google to research the topic, you'll find very little naysaying on the first few pages of search results. Instead, most "respectable" sources follow the example: of the tediously predictable, albeit Orwellian, prose stylings of Wired, which reassures us that its "Removal From HBO Max Isn't Censorship".

Yeah. Someday GWtW will be back, from re-education camp, with whatever commentary and excisions our local Red Guard deem adequate to insure no viewer come away actually entertained.

  • And you'll note that MPR's cartoon also mentions Paw Patrol. On that topic, a suggestion from the National Review editors about Cancel Culture: Cancel It.

    The vanguard of the revolution has set its beady-eyed gaze on . . . Paw Patrol.

    Paw Patrol, a children’s cartoon about doggie do-gooders, has as one of its principal characters a German shepherd called Chase, who is a police officer. (A police officer in an imaginary universe in which dogs have full-time jobs, drive cars, and wear jaunty caps.) According to the New York Times, which just fired its opinion editor for publishing opinions, Paw Patrol has run afoul of the new commandment: Thou shalt not make sympathetic depictions of police officers, including police officers whose beat is an imaginary universe in which dogs have full-time jobs, drive cars, and wear jaunty caps.

    Paw Patrol seems harmless enough,” writes Amanda Hess, “and that’s the point.” Oh, is that the point? “The movement rests on understanding that cops do plenty of harm.”

    I suggest you buy Paw Patrol and Gone With the Wind on physical media, while you still can.


  • Speaking of Cancel Culture, The University Near Here is pretty empty these days, not much going on, except… Huzzah! For some reason, they've renamed the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs! It's now The Beauregard Center.

    No, they did not name it after the Confederate general. It's named after the late UNH student Aulbani J. Beauregard. (But, like General Beauregard, she was also from Louisiana.)

    And apparently the full name (according to this article in our local paper) is "The Beauregard Center for Equity and Liberation". Nice! Although I suspect no actual liberation will be involved.

    The new head of the BCfEaL is Caché Owens-Velasquez. She seems nice. She has her own website where you can buy her, um, art. She states that she took up art "as an outlet for stress relief and as a component of treating my mental health challenges."

    It's good to know that UNH does not discriminate in its hiring due to mental health challenges.

    At the time of that writing, Caché was at UNC-Charlotte where her study was "community organizing and spatial justice."

    Spatial Justice? Yes, that is an actual thing.

    Don't, by the way, get any funny ideas about appropriating "Temporal Justice". That has already been taken.


  • Because all government problems have been solved, the New York Times reports: Biden Prepares Attack on Facebook’s Speech Policies

    The Biden presidential campaign, emboldened by a recent surge in support, is going after a new target: Facebook.

    After months of privately battling the tech giant over President Trump’s free rein on its social network, the campaign will begin urging its millions of supporters to demand that Facebook strengthen its rules against misinformation and to hold politicians accountable for harmful comments.

    "Misinformation" and "harmful comments" will, of course, be judged by guess who? Nothing could go wrong there.


  • Veronique de Rugy reports the utterly unexpected news that Trump Is Still Losing His Own Trade War

    Regardless of whether any of the president's complaints about trade are legitimate, one of the reasons trade economists warned him against raising tariffs unilaterally was precisely that other governments would retaliate with their own tariffs on American exports. Sure enough, that's what happened. But while many industries were caught in the crosshairs of this trade war, the lobster industry took an especially serious hit.

    Despite Trump's apparent belief that politicians in other countries are either irrational or scaredy-cats, many of them have proven to be astute in the art of retaliation by targeting those U.S. exports they knew would inflict the most harm on Americans. China, for instance, which used to be the top foreign purchaser of Maine lobsters, imposed a 25 percent tariff on the American delicacy in response to the second wave of American tariffs against Chinese goods. Adding to Americans' pain, Beijing then reduced its tariffs on non-American lobster suppliers. This includes Canadian lobstermen, which, until the trade war started, were the American lobster industry's fiercest competitor.

    Well… more for us, I suppose.


  • Virginia Postrel is always an island of sanity. She suggests Cops' Fears Should Face More Scrutiny. After recounting some well-known cases of police overreaction:

    It’s an all-too-familiar pattern. Someone does something minor that someone else finds threatening. The alarmed party overreacts and summons the full force of authority to suppress the threat. The offender becomes a victim. Essential rights are infringed. The damage is both personal and social.

    To understand the problem, consider a less dangerous setting where a similar scenario occurs: college campuses.

    When a man working his way through college as a janitor reads a book called “Notre Dame vs. the Klan” in the break room, he is charged with racial harassment. When a literature instructor asks in a faculty training session how the school’s sexual harassment policy applies to false or ridiculous allegations, he is fired. When a student starts a Facebook group mocking a student government candidate as “a jerk and a fool,” he is found to have committed “personal abuse.” When a literature professor quotes the defiant black author James Baldwin using a racial slur, contrasting its use with the bowdlerized version in the title of a recent documentary, and when a law professor uses the same epithet while discussing systemic racism, both are accused of discrimination.

    Are cops snowflakes? Except with badges and guns?


  • And finally, a Heterodox Academy reminder from Hyrum Lewis: The Political Spectrum Does Not Exist.

    One of the real tragedies of contemporary politics is that our most bitter disagreements are about something that doesn’t even exist—the political spectrum. Left and right are entirely tribal designations and have no unifying philosophy or principle behind them that can be represented on a unidimensional spectrum.

    This may sound like an absurd claim, but before rejecting out of hand, consider that the political spectrum rests on an essentialist theory of ideology that has been soundly falsified. The essentialist theory says that, although it may seem that there are many distinct political issues in politics, there is actually just one big issue—an underlying essence that ties them all together (e.g., change vs. preservation, equality vs. freedom, order vs. liberty, realism vs. idealism, etc.). If politics is unidimensional (about one essential issue), then a unidimensional political spectrum is adequate to represent politics.

    Yeah. Back in the post-9/11 world, Democrats freaked that Dubya might find out what books you had checked out at the library. Today, well… you better not have checked out that DVD of Gone With the Wind, racist.


Last Modified 2024-02-02 4:53 AM EDT