Mar
12
2024

It's a Pity Both Sides Can't Lose

Perceptive post-SOTU imagery from Iowahawk:

That's sort of a rosy picture, because it's easy to imagine that eventually a dying mall will be repurposed to some more productive use, and those dead-end employees will shake their heads, slink off, and learn to code, or something. Schumpeter's creative destruction, you know? You might not like the destruction, but something better might come out eventually. So, analogously, you might hope and expect our current political situation to return to sanity. But "eventually" can take a long time to get here.

David Harsanyi has a small example of Spencer Gifts leading off with a low blow from its chief blowhard: Biden Is Spreading Hamas Propaganda.

The Gaza Health Ministry’s casualty numbers, incessantly repeated by our media, are fake.

Anyone with an ounce of sense or basic comprehension of the situation knows they’re fake. They have always been fake. So, we must assume one of three things about people who spread Hamas’ claims: They are 1) irredeemably stupid, 2) propagandists for terrorists, or 3) both.

Make what you will of the president, but in a speech celebrating Ramadan, Biden repeated the claim that “30,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of them civilians, including thousands of children.” The president of the United States now not only rejects the claims of our allies in Israel but accepts the declarations of a group that is not only on the Justice Department’s terror list — one that recently murdered, raped, and kidnapped American citizens.

Harsanyi notes a recent article by Abraham Wyner at Tablet that lays out the case pretty convincingly for Hamas fakery. Harsanyi quips: "Indeed, while Islamists excel at sexual torture and theocratic repression, they are less proficient at math." His bottom line:

None of this is to say that civilians aren’t dying or that war isn’t gruesome. It is a tragedy what Palestinian leaders, who have refused to make peace with Jews for over a century, have brought on their own people. The operative difference is that Hamas (and PLO and Islamic Jihad, etc.) targets civilians, and Israel targets terrorists. No amount of propaganda can change that reality.

So Team Radio Shack must have it pretty easy, right? Just point out Spencer Gifts' dangerous (at best) credulity. Some on-the-fence spectators might start cheering for you. But they went another way, and Jeff Maurer has a question about what their choices say about their future prospects: I Wonder Why Republicans Keep Having Candidate Quality Problems.

Senator Katie Britt’s State of the Union response made the Space Shuttle Challenger launch look like a rousing success. At times, Britt seemed like a Tobias Fünke-level actor auditioning for the role of PTA Mom Who Just Dropped An Edible; other times, she seemed like someone telling a ghost story to a dog. Britt’s performance was a failure unless her goal was to portray the GOP as The Party of Inauthentic Weirdos. One of her anecdotes also turned out to be extremely misleading, as revealed not by a Woodward-and-Bernstein-style months-long investigation, but by a journalist who bothered to google “hey is that bullshit-sounding story bullshit?”

I watched the SNL Scarlett Johansson parody on TiVo-delay, and it was pretty devastating. The Arizona Republic quotes:

“First and foremost, I’m a mom,” Johansson’s Britt said. “And like any mom, I’m going to do a pivot out of nowhere into a shockingly violent story about sex trafficking. And rest assured, every detail about it is real, except the year, where it took place, and who was president when it happened.”

(Our headline du jour is from Henry Kissinger, on a different topic.)

Also of note:

  • A good question. And Robert Tracinski has it at Discourse: What Would a Pro-Free-Market 'Industrial Policy' Look Like? Boy, that question nearly answers itself, doesn't it? It's difficult to excerpt, but here's a slice:

    The lesson of the pandemic and the big stimulus packages has been distilled by the “supply-side progressives,” who discovered—well, it’s new to them, at least—that there’s no point subsidizing what you can’t produce. You can write a lot of checks, but that’s not the same as getting things built.

    They have drawn attention to the need for permitting reform, particularly focusing on NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires extensive environmental impact reviews and gives activist groups the ability to file lawsuits that add years of delay. The peculiar paradox of NEPA is that it only applies to projects that receive federal funding—which means that the more the government subsidizes a project, the less likely it is to get built. Similarly, a pioneering zoning reform in Minneapolis—which increased housing supply in the city by 12% and kept rents flat while they soared nationwide—has been put on hold by a federal judge in response to an environmental lawsuit.

    This kind of regulatory drag suppresses housing, suppresses infrastructure, and of course, it suppresses manufacturing. You can’t hire factory workers if you can’t build the factory—or if the workers can’t find affordable housing, or if you can’t build highways, rail lines, power plants and other infrastructure manufacturers need.

    A four-word summary of Tracinski's answer to the question posed in his headline: Get out of the way.

  • It's easy to claim there's no such thing as cancel culture when… you make sure people don't hear about it from experts such as Rikki Schott, who writes at the NYPost: I was canceled by trendy SXSW film festival bosses … for criticizing cancel culture.

    It appears that I’ve been canceled … for speaking up about cancel culture.

    Organizers of the South by Southwest (SXSW) film festival declined to approve my participation in a panel of speakers.

    The reason? Concern that I’d dared to speak out against cancel culture.

    An email from SXSW staff, shared with me by the panel’s organizer, reveals the festival was “hesitant to approve” my participation because my commentary has been “focused on the idea of cancel culture.”

    Oh, the irony!

    Ms. Schlott co-wrote the excellent book The Canceling of the American Mind with Greg Lukianoff. Now she's even more of an expert, thanks to SXSW.

  • Also on the cancellation beat… Jonathan H. Adler reports: Guernica Cancels an Inconvenient Essay.

    Guernica, a non-profit journal publishing work at the intersection of art and politics, published a powerful essay by a literary interpreter working in Israel and her experience in the wake of October 7 and the resulting war between Israel and Hamas. The essay, "From the Edges of a Broken World," by Joanna Chen, provides a first-hand account of how life has changed for the author. It is deeply personal, and perhaps challenging in that it does not hew to a "side" in the current conflict–and perhaps that was the problem. Not hewing to the proper side's perspective, the essay was too challenging for some portion of Guernica's readership.

    Although Guernica proclaims that it is "a home for singular voices, incisive ideas, and critical questions," this essay apparently crossed the line. The article has been removed from the journal's website. In its place reads the message: "Guernica regrets having published this piece, and has retracted it. A more fulsome explanation will follow."

    I'm pretty sure "fulsome" is not the best word they could have used there. But they definitely wouldn't have used any of the adjectives that I might suggest.