URLs du Jour

2021-05-10

  • On The Nose. Dan Mitchell presents Statism in Five Images, and I'm just going to steal one of them for our Eye Candy du Jour (it's long, so make sure you scroll down enough to see the ending punchline):

    [Abusive Relationships]

    Arguably, you might think there are items that don't fit the American government/citizen relationship. "Control what you read, watch and say"? Well, they've largely outsourced that function to Facebook and Twitter.


  • Is "Corporatization" The Problem? Jerry Coyne reads it so we don't have to: Chronicle of Higher Ed decries the diversity-driven corporatization of America, suggests some solutions.

    An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Amna Khalid has some information about the “diversity and inclusion racket,” and also some solutions that may help achieve real equality beyond the ubiquitous “diversity training” known to be ineffectual.

    […]

    Khalid descries the expensive expansion of deans and administratiors involved with diversity and inclusion, which have burgeoned at the expense of other administrators and faculty. It’s not that they aren’t addressing a problem, but are doing so in an expensive and largely useless way, and eating up huge amounts of cash that could go to genuinely advance equal opportunity and affirmative action. Seriously, is “yoga for women of color” a way to achieve equality?

    You can click the link in the first excerpted paragraph to go to the Chronicle article, but they urge you to sign up for their newsletter and marketing (both unsubscribable). Jerry provides extensive excerpts, however.

    Jerry's a lefty, and so is Amna, so you may disagree with a lot of their commentary and analysis, as I did. But I have to say that blaming a "corporate mind-set" for the craven capitulation of university administrators to the woke student/faculty mob may be on target. Especially when a lot of corporations these days are also kowtowing to their own woke mobs.

    But sometimes it's just a President/CEO thinking: What meaningless symbolic act do I have to perform to get these pesky yammerers to shut up and get out of my office?


  • Since When Do Politicians Have To Make Sense? But Kevin D. Williamson (NRPLUS) points out, nevertheless, that the Liz Cheney Republican Leadership Ouster Makes No Sense.

    You guys know he lost, right?

    Representative Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.) is (probably) being pushed out of her leadership position, most likely in favor of Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), because Representative Cheney is insufficiently Trump-loving and Stefanik is superabundantly Trump-loving.

    It’s that familiar Republican strategy: a purge for unity.

    House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) and other like-minded Republicans complain that it will be difficult for Cheney to do her job effectively in the current political environment, meaning the infantile emotional climate in which some number of Republicans stamp their feet and hold their breath like Veruca Salt when Cheney accurately characterizes Donald Trump’s disgraceful post-election behavior as a parade of lies marching through an avalanche of horsesh**.

    You know who loves the GOP's personality cult? Democrats.


  • Well, This Is Pun Salad. So I'm duty-bound to link to a WSJ op-ed, probably paywalled, from Stephen Moore: Biden May Make a Big Missed Steak.

    I hear you moaning. But:

    Larry Kudlow suggested the other day that the Biden administration may declare war on meat. On his Fox Business show, the former Trump economic adviser lampooned a climate-change study from the University of Michigan, which argues that to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, Americans will have to cut back severely on “red meat, poultry, fish/seafood, eggs, dairy, and animal based fats.” To which Mr. Kudlow quipped: “OK, got that? No burger on July 4. No steaks on the barbecue. I’m sure Middle America is just going to love that. Can you grill those brussels sprouts?”

    It was funny, but the climate lobby wasn’t laughing. Media “fact checkers” called it a “false story . . . another example of a closed ecosystem of information affecting public opinion,” in the Associated Press’s words. The New York Times’s Paul Krugman tweeted: “This is what right-wing politics is down to. It’s all false claims about evil liberals, which the base is expected to believe because it’s primed to believe in liberal villainy.”

    It’s true Joe Biden hasn’t stated he wants to curtail meat production or consumption. But people he listens to have. During a CNN “Climate Crisis Town Hall,” Kamala Harris was asked if she favored changing “dietary guidelines to reduce the consumption of red meat in light of the impact of the climate change.” She said yes: “The balance that we have to strike here, frankly, is about what government can and should do around creating incentives and then banning certain behaviors.”

    So enjoy those burgers produced by those farting cows while you can, eco-criminal.


  • The AP Gets One Right. What Happened? Jeff Jacoby writes on the history of an odious concept: Cancelling 'anti-Semitism'.

    IT ISN'T OFTEN that a hyphen, or the absence of one, draws attention. But when the Associated Press announced recently that it was changing the spelling of "anti-Semite" and "anti-Semitism" in its highly influential style guide to "antisemite" and "antisemitism," it made news — and drew cheers from historians and civil rights activists.

    There is a good deal of history behind that detail of punctuation, and it begins with the fact that the father of "anti-Semitism" was an antisemite.

    In 1879, a German nationalist and political agitator named Wilhelm Marr published a pamphlet in which he claimed that Jews were the mortal enemy of the German people and called for their forcible removal from German soil. His document, Der Weg zum Siege des Germanenthums über das Judenthum ("The Road to Victory for Germanness over Jewishness"), argued that Jews posed a particularly dangerous threat not simply because of their religion or behavior, but because they belonged to an alien racial group — the "Semites." Marr wanted a word that would imbue his loathing of Jews with the ring of sophistication, so rather than speak of primitive Jew-hatred (judenhass), he promoted the pseudoscientific term antisemitismus — enmity toward the Semitic race. But there was never any doubt about the meaning of his neologism. Antisemitismus — which became antisémitisme in French and antisemitismo in Spanish — meant only one thing: hatred of Jews. And when Marr founded a new political organization, the League of Antisemites (Antisemiten-Liga), it had only one purpose: to ignite anti-Jewish bigotry into a political movement.

    I was unaware of that hyphenated history Jeff describes. I'm gonna go back through the archives and clean up my language. According to grep, there are 89 occurrences with the hyphen, although some may be in quoted material, which I will leave alone.

    I know, that's kind of an Orwellian thing to do. So I'm not happy about it, but I'm less happy with leaving the hyphenated term in place when I (now) know better.


Last Modified 2024-02-01 6:02 AM EDT