RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/25/myth-making-in-the-modern-age-a-primer/

Most people, I believe, think that the age of myth-making lies in the past. Myths are the things that Ovid wrote about, or Robert Graves cataloged. Their home is in the ancient world, primarily. They live on today mostly in books or in quips. Jack Worthing, in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, provides a good illustration of the latter when he exclaims that Lady Bracknell is a Gorgon and then admits that “I don’t really know what a Gorgon is like, but I am quite sure that Lady Bracknell is one. In any case, she is a monster, without being a myth.”  

Nevertheless, in school, if we went to an artsy one, we learned that myths were important. They told us not about what happened in the world, precisely. Rather, they told us interesting stories about character, motivation, and the dialectic of hubris and nemesis, crime and punishment. 

All of that is true, but I submit that the impulse to myth-making, if atavistic in origin, remains a potent force and one, moreover, that has been folded into the metabolism of partisan politics. 

An illuminating example from the recent past is the public understanding of the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. Kennedy was shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a communist radical who had adulated the Soviet Union and Fidel Castro. The bullets had barely left Oswald’s rifle before this was known. But the truth about the identity of Kennedy’s assassin was quickly overtaken and enveloped by a partisan myth, assiduously massaged and circulated by Kennedy’s widow, the media, and the political establishment. 

In brief, the myth about Kennedy’s assassin downplayed Oswald’s communist affiliation and insisted that Kennedy was killed not (as he in fact was) by a lone gunman by rather a generalized “spirit of madness and hate.” 

That phrase dripped from the pen of James Reston, one of America’s star columnists whose post at the New York Times amplified and legitimated his opinions nationwide. (The Times was still a respected newspaper in 1963.)

The process of substituting a “climate of hate” for Oswald’s index finger started almost immediately. In Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism, James Piereson notes that on the trip back from Dallas, Lady Bird Johnson and others asked if Jackie Kennedy wanted to change out of her blood-spattered clothes. “No,” the grieving widow would always reply, “I want them to see what they have done.” 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/12/china-building-150-nuclear-reactors-while-biden-daniel-greenfield/

In his end of the year roundup, Dave Barry joked that, “Inflation continues to be a pesky problem, with food prices soaring and gasoline approaching $4 per gallon everywhere in the nation except California, where, for environmental reasons, it is $137.50.”

He’s not far off the mark. It’s easy to find $6 and $7 a gallon gas. And you can see gas stations like that even in the sight of drilling going on. 

Home and business energy costs are even more insane. Surviving a summer in Southern California means almost certainly having to go into the dreaded Tier 3 at which point “the prizes double” and the costs can be utterly horrifying when you look at your power bill.

The Green special interests based out of California love nothing more than the idea of making their setup into the model for the country. 

The Biden administration had to sign a China ban on slave labor despite lobbying over the impact on solar panels. But while Democrats build solar panels, China is building 150 nuclear reactors. It’s phasing out a lot of its old dams and it’s going to what works.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/12/22/the-inhumanity-of-identity-politics/

To see how twisted identity politics has become, how morally bereft, just consider this: in 2021, the woke set shed more tears over a convicted child molester who was shot than they did over a much-loved ‘dancing granny’ who was killed by a man wielding his SUV as a weapon.

They wept and tweeted and protested more for Joseph Rosenbaum, the 36-year-old molester of children who was shot by Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha in 2020, than they did for Virginia Sorensen, the 79-year-old family woman and member of the Milwaukee Dancing Grannies who was mown down by Darrell E Brooks at the Waukesha Christmas parade in November this year.

And the reason for this disparity in political grief, this chasm-sized contrast between the explosion of concern for Rittenhouse’s victims and the shameful, snivelling silence that greeted the Waukesha atrocity, is as straightforward as it is chilling. It’s because of the identity of the killers.

It’s because Rosenbaum was killed by a white man – by the archetypal Bad White Man, if the feverish media hatred for Rittenhouse is to be believed – while Soresen was killed by a black man. By a member of the woke set’s favourite victim group. By someone who hails from one of the sanctified identities.

Which means Rosenbaum’s death fit the woke narrative, seeming to confirm that any one of us could be a victim of the violent privilege of the white male, and therefore we were encouraged to talk about it, ceaselessly. Whereas Sorensen’s death, and the deaths of five others at that bloodied parade, grated against the woke narrative. It had a black perpetrator and white victims. It didn’t compute. It wasn’t useful. So it was hushed. Nothing to see here. Move on. ‘Waukesha feels abandoned after tragic parade attack’, said the New York Post this month, after four solid weeks of muteness over that horrific event from the normally hyper-virtuous hand-wringers of the celebrity and political sets.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/12/21/the-tyranny-of-public-health/

Public health dominates political discussion today. Masks, vaccines, social distancing – these are the issues about which we now argue daily. Not economics or the increasingly volatile geopolitical situation, but public health.

And I’m not just talking about the Covid pandemic. Indeed, virtually all aspects of social and political life today are now framed through the idiom of public health. Problems we used to treat as political and social questions are now often presented as medical issues.

So critics of prime minister Boris Johnson do not simply question his political record – they also brand him a public-health problem. As one article puts it, ‘Boris Johnson’s dwindling authority [is] becoming a “public-health issue”’. Likewise, Donald Trump was labelled a ‘public-health threat’ by his opponents while in office.

Public health has become a principal means to attack a political opponent or a set of political ideas. In 2019, a group of medics even wrote a letter to the Guardian calling a No Deal Brexit a ‘threat to public health’. Other critics of Brexit called it a ‘confused concept that threatens public health’. As public health has become politicised, politics has become medicalised.

The pandemic has intensified this medicalisation of politics. There is now virtually nothing that cannot be conceived of as a public-health issue. Take racism. Writing in the Lancet earlier this year, identitarian academic Kehinde Andrews insisted that ‘racism is a public-health crisis’. In the US, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky, made a similar claim earlier this year. ‘Racism is a serious public-health threat that directly affects the wellbeing of millions of Americans’, she said. The CDC has since launched a new ‘Racism and Health’ web portal.

All this changes the very meaning of racism. Racial oppression used to be understood in terms of political, social and economic domination. Now it is understood in terms of ill-health. The racially oppressed are now as likely to be seen as patients in need of medical intervention as they are victims of political injustice. ‘Racism isn’t just unfair. It’s making us ill’, complains a Guardian contributor.

Likewise, anti-racist campaigners portray racism as a mental-health problem. Student supporters of the Rhodes Must Fall movement at Oxford University have claimed that they feel traumatised by the presence of the Cecil Rhodes statue.

Increasingly, the presentation of a social problem as a supposed threat to public health is a means to draw attention to it. That is why President Biden recently chose to condemn gun violence as a public-health epidemic. Unable to present a critique of violence and crime in moral terms, he decided to offer one through the language of medicine.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/kamala-harris-bad-press-racist-sexist/

Vice President Kamala Harris has been quoted as saying her media coverage would be better if she were a white man. She is absolutely right. She wouldn’t have bad coverage. She wouldn’t have any coverage at all. That’s because she would still be a minor senator from a big state, not the second-highest official in the Executive Branch. She was selected only because she has the identity-politics markers so important to Democrats.

It should be obvious by now that Harris is a terrible politician. When friendly reporters toss her softballs, she swings, misses and blames them. When she is given hard policy assignments, she swings and misses those, too. (In her defense, her main assignment, immigration, is President Biden’s failure, not her’s.) She refuses to visit the US-Mexican border, aside from one brief stop a thousand miles from the crisis. When she was asked about it, she noted that she hadn’t been to Europe, either. That PR blunder was widely noted but she soon corrected it: she visited Europe.

Why was this clunker picked for such an important office? We still don’t know the full answer. Part of the answer surely lies in Trump’s weakness with women voters and the Democrats’ goal of motivating high turnout among them and among African Americans, who are crucial to any Democratic victory. Candidate Biden first promised to pick a woman for his ticket and then faced intense pressure to pick an African American. The list wasn’t a long one.

https://www.city-journal.org/police-forces-stretched-thin

One night, when I was still a big-city cop, I was called to a business where a young woman, heavily intoxicated, had been caught drawing graffiti with a Sharpie. The business owner was irate because of the pervasive graffiti problem in the area, but the woman had no criminal record. The graffiti in question amounted to about $20 worth of damage. I spoke to the woman and the business owner, and we came to an arrangement. We would trade contact information, and she would return tomorrow to clean up the graffiti. If she did not, the business owner would contact me, and I would ask prosecutors to file a misdemeanor charge against her.

As far as I know, this agreement worked, and it was a win for everyone. The business owner got some justice, and his property got cleaned up. The young woman avoided an arrest and criminal record. And taxpayers didn’t have to spend thousands of dollars prosecuting a drunk, first-time offender over $20 in graffiti. I think the median criminal justice “reformer” would say that this is the kind of thing they would like police to do more often.

Here’s the catch: this “diversion agreement” (which I made up on the spot) took time. My back-up officer and I had to detain the woman, check her criminal history, and identify everyone. We had to complete a criminal investigation that would hold up in court, if necessary. We had to speak to the parties and find a mutually acceptable arrangement. We had to document everything in the appropriate required reports. And I had to take the time to follow up with the business owner, in case the woman failed to hold up her end of the agreement. Booking her into jail and forgetting about the whole thing probably would have been faster.