URLs du Jour

2021-12-14

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  • Greg Lukianoff has a long, and accurate, memory. He notes that we're living in The Second Great Age of Political Correctness.

    The derisive term "P.C." had referred to a genuine and powerful force on campus for the previous decade. But by the mid-1990s, it had become the butt of jokes from across the political spectrum. The production of a mainstream movie mocking political correctness showed that its cultural moment had passed.

    At the same time, punitive campus speech codes were being struck down. Among the most prominent cases was Stanford Law School, which boasted a notorious speech code banning "speech or other expression…intended to insult or stigmatize" an individual on the basis of membership in a protected class arguably including every living human. You don't have to be a lawyer to see how a ban on anything that "insults" would be abused: Even showing PCU itself, which makes fun of campus activists, feminists, and vegetarians, could potentially get you in trouble under such a broad and vague rule. The 1995 court defeat of the Stanford speech code marked the end of the First Great Age of Political Correctness.

    Some assumed this meant political correctness was a fad that was gone forever. On the contrary, it gathered strength over the next two decades, rooting itself in university hiring practices and speech policing, until it became what people now refer to as "wokeness" or the much-abused term "cancel culture."

    The PCU reference is to a 1994 movie previously described in the article.

    I fondly remember getting chided by a lefty for pointing out "political correctness" back in my USENET days.


  • Want to see what arrogant privilege looks like? Ed Morrissey at Hot Air checks it out. Biden Cabinet spouse: "LOL no thank you" to paying back student loans.

    If anyone should “check his privilege,” shouldn’t it be the spouse of a Joe Biden Cabinet Secretary? Chasten Buttigieg decided to share his feelings on social media about a notice that his student loan payments would have to resume after the first of the year. Oddly, the man whose husband earned almost a million dollars (or more!) the past couple of years before becoming Biden’s Transportation Secretary thinks he shouldn’t have to repay his loans (via Twitchy):

    The husband of U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg appears less than enthusiastic about having to repay his student loans.

    Chasten Buttigieg, who recently became a father to newborn twins with the transportation secretary, posted a screenshot on Instagram Saturday of a notification that his student loan relief from the COVID-19 pandemic will expire on January 31, 2022.

    “Chasten, your student loan payments restart after January 31, 2022,” the notice read, according to a screenshot tweeted by Politico’s Michael Stratford. “You’ll soon receive a bill from your student loan servicer.”

    “LOL no thank you Merry Christmas next,” Chasten captioned the post.

    Well, that's impressive. Mayor Pete probably told Chasten not to worry, taxpayers would eventually get him off the hook.


  • It's just a coincidence. This fine article from Matthew D. Mitchell describes The Five Fingers of the Invisible Hand.

    Earlier this fall, Declan Leary wrote an essay in the American Conservative upbraiding the late Leonard Read, author of the famed essay, “I, Pencil.” According to Leary, Read displays a quasi-religious, unquestioning faith in the invisible hand of the market:

    “I, Pencil” treats supply chains in the language of religion. They are miracles in which we must have faith. They are the product of some inscrutable but benevolent superhuman intelligence. The precision alone of the Invisible Hand demands from us reverence and wonder.

    But there is a difference between awed wonder and unquestioning religious faith. Consider Richard Dawkins’s paean to science in “Unweaving the Rainbow”:

    The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that makes life worth living.

    There can be no doubt that Dawkins has reverence and wonder for the natural world. But no one could rightly accuse the famous atheist of having inscrutable faith in the benevolence of natural processes, no matter how wonderous he finds them.

    As I'm pretty sure I heard a famous conservative economist say, somewhat exasperated, on an interview show years back: "I don't have faith in the market. I have facts about the market."

    For the record, Mitchell's five "fingers" are:

    1. ‘Price Gravitates Toward Marginal Cost’
    2. We Gain From Exchange
    3. We Are More Productive When We Specialize
    4. Markets Communicate Dispersed Knowledge
    5. Dynamic Competition Solves Problems

    Pretty good summary.


  • Good advice. Stanley Kurtz has some wise words at the NR Corner: Don’t Ban Woke School-Library Books, Balance Them.

    I can’t think of a more encouraging development than the national movement of parents pushing back against woke education. Nothing can beat parents organized to halt the erosion of core American ideals like freedom of expression or equality before the law. Thankfully, a record of early successes is rapidly building a larger movement to take back our schools.

    Yet a crusade on the rise always risks overreach. Lately, some parents and public officials fighting woke education have considered pulling books from the shelves of public-school libraries. That isn’t always inappropriate, even for strong defenders of free speech. Libraries serving K-12 students legitimately take criteria like age-appropriateness and community standards into account when it comes to explicit sexual material. Because those lines are notoriously difficult to draw, battles over sexually explicit school library books are sure to play out for years.

    Bracketing the issue of age-appropriateness and explicit sexual content, however, I want to suggest that the best way to deal with woke school library books is not to ban them, but to balance them. If Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist is on your school-library shelf, don’t ban it. Have your library buy a copy of John McWhorter’s Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, instead. If your school library has a copy of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, have it order a copy of Heather MacDonald’s The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe. And so on.

    My current bête noires of wokeness, the University Near Here and the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library actually do a pretty good job of obtaining books on all sides of controversial matters. When it comes to what they recommend, however…


  • How about cutting their budget until they behave? The IRS hopes you have a short memory. Fortunately we have the the WSJ editorialists to remind us about The Internal Revenue Leak Service.

    Democrats want to give $80 billion to the Internal Revenue Service to audit millions of Americans each year. Yet six months after the progressive website ProPublica first published the secret tax information of rich Americans, the tax agency still can’t explain what happened. Senate Republicans led by Iowa’s Chuck Grassley are demanding answers.

    In a Dec. 1 letter to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig, all 14 GOP Members of the Senate Finance Committee express frustration at how little the agency has discovered or reported on the ProPublica leak. Mr. Rettig promised when the leak occurred in June to find out what happened, but in September he told Senators, “We do not yet have any information concerning the source.” Since then it’s been crickets.

    The scale alone should make investigating the breach a priority for the IRS. ProPublica claims to have thousands of individuals’ tax information, and it has continued publishing confidential details since its first report. Neither the publication nor federal authorities have said they know who leaked the records. No one seems to know, or least admit, how it was done, or how many more taxpayer files might have been stolen.

    The people who seem to gripe most about "privacy" and "protecting your data" don't seem to pay much attention to the IRS.


Last Modified 2024-01-19 5:47 PM EDT