RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/289037/the-lefts-race-war

I think Kirchick’s bashing of Trump is extreme and proves no racism or deliberate bigotry…., nor is there an “aggressively race obsessed vision of America.” I post this because his description of the left is very accurate…..rsk

In just the past two weeks, Donald Trump has told four ethnic minority congresswomen, three of them natural born citizens, to “go back” to the “broken and crime infested” “countries” “from which they came,” described the African American Congressman Elijah Cummings as a “bully” and his city of Baltimore as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” and picked a fight with the Rev. Al Sharpton, pronouncing him “a con man, a troublemaker, always looking for a score” who “Hates Whites & Cops!”

Trump’s game isn’t difficult to discern. He is practicing the same sort of resentment-based, racial-identity politics that has fueled his political rise since the earlier part of this decade, when he began expressing doubts that the first black president was actually born in the United States.

Trump’s motives are mean, his tactics distasteful, and his manner of expression bigoted and unpresidential. But in the race to see who can press harder on the race button, Trump has a worthy opponent in today’s left. Just as it is hard to see Trump as anything other than a bigot and a button-presser, it is similarly impossible to deny the radical transformation of the progressive intellectual and activist universe in the nearly three years since Trump was elected into a self-appointed politburo that is trying to impose its own aggressively race-obsessed vision on America.

Indeed, many of Trump’s opponents on the left have turned themselves into committed ideologues with a programmatic understanding of human behavior and human differences rooted in some biological component that is impossible or nearly impossible to change. The way the left talks incessantly about “white men,” or openly puts membership in victim groups above individual rights and virtues, is the essence of what most people mean by racism. Not “reverse racism”—but real, actual, racism.

NO POSTINGS UNTIL 8/13

The media responds to mass shootings in America with hyperbole, politicization and blame. The blame game is usually confined to the left. However, the dumbest opining on the issue comes from the editors of the National Review- hardly a bastion of the left.

Here is their Editorial:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/el-paso-shooting-white-supremacy-evil-ideology/

Crush This Evil

“We are contending with an evil ideology — white supremacy — that deserves to be treated by the authorities as has been the threat posed by militant Islam.”

Really?  Insanity, not political ideology drives these murderers……and the comparison with faith driven and calculated jihad is gratuitous. rsk

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/08/02/justice-system-allows-innocent-mans-reputation-trashed-not-fit/

EXCERPT

“Innocent until proved guilty” is – or was – one of the proudest legal doctrines of Western civilisation. It dates back to Roman law, and is particularly strong in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Why does it matter so much? I suggest two reasons. The first is about human nature. We are not always naturally fair. If we see a wrong done, we are often so angry that we wish to punish someone straightaway, without bothering to establish guilt. Society has to guard against that instinct. Otherwise, mob rule takes over.

The second reason is about human dignity. If you do not presume a person is innocent, you presume he or she is guilty. If that is the way a society thinks, the authorities gain terrifying power over the individual. The burden of proof lies on him. If he faces hostility, that word “burden” is apposite. If you have to show you did not commit any crime of which anyone accuses you, how on earth do you do it?

https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/01/the-war-on-the-obvious/

https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/01

When was the last time you were called racist? If a supporter of President Trump, it’s a safe bet the gross epithet is regularly seared upon your forehead. Always, by those who self-anoint as progressive.

Such a charge, once preserved for the truly primitive of mind, is now stamped and singed on anyone who dares to disagree with anything issuing from the left side of the political aisle.

To point out the obvious is “racist.” This week, President Trump’s blistering comments on Baltimore’s cadaverous state invited the familiar threadbare cries. Perhaps, because that city is majority-black. Or perhaps because that term is the only resort of those defending the indefensible.

Because Baltimore is indefensible. And its denizens deserve better.

President Trump’s greatest gift is his penchant for forcing his foes to defend the indefensible. Baltimore, like many Fishtowns across post-industrial America, is Hell, for the forgotten majority, at least.

Baltimore condemns its citizens with the country’s worst schools and mops up more murders than El Salvador. Its poverty rate is nearly twice the national average.

This scandal, of course, has nothing to do with a congressman’s melanin density. In the 1950s, city residents, buoyed by chrome, copper, and steel industry jobs, enjoyed a 7 percent pay bump on the average American. The number earning middle-class wages was one-fifth higher, poverty one-fifth lower than average America.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-would-we-do-without-the-word-racism-11564782112

If the country had a National Language Commission, and I were appointed commissioner, the first word I would put in cold storage—filed permanently away beside the N-word, the C-word, the K-word and other prohibited words—would be “racism.” In our day the word has been used imprecisely, promiscuously, perniciously and well beyond abundantly. If you are politically on the left, racism is what you accuse people of who don’t agree with you. If you are on the right, you can accuse them, I suppose, of socialism, but it doesn’t carry anything like the same resonance in moral opprobrium or self-awarded virtue as does racism.

The racist, if we can use the dictionary definition, believes that all members of a particular race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, which distinguish it as superior or inferior to other races. The true racist of course feels his own race is superior, and thereby he hasn’t any difficulty in discriminating or otherwise ill-treating members of other races, sometimes through government policy—as formerly under apartheid in South Africa or during the strict segregation once pervasive in the American South—or sometimes through ugly personal actions.

I am old enough to remember Jim Crow racism in action. When I lived in Arkansas in the early 1960s, there were still “colored” and white drinking fountains, separate bus and movie seating, and obvious differences in the quality of school buildings and other facilities available to blacks, and most people made no bones about it. Blacks were suppressed, oppressed and made to feel inferior in nearly every way that local governments could devise. The word racism wasn’t much in vogue in that place, or anywhere else, at that time. The majority of people who could rightly be called racist would not know what you were talking about if you accused them of racism.

https://quillette.com/2019/08/01/how-feminism-paved

In the last decade, in many parts of the English-speaking world, transgender advocacy has made substantial, and at times, expansive gains, with trans rights becoming embedded in institutions and enforced by the state. Like any significant historical event, this gender revolution has multiple causes. One is digital technology, providing virtual worlds which transcend physical reality and online networks for spreading activism. Another is academic theory: postmodernism and queer theory. I want to make the less obvious argument that transgenderism has been promoted by feminism.

Not all feminism, of course. From the start of the second wave, some radical feminists opposed the inclusion of male-to-female transsexuals under the general heading of “women.” Their argument culminated in Janice Raymond’s Transsexual Empire (1979): “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact.” Transsexualism, she observed, was the creation of medical men like John Money and Harry Benjamin. As the current wave of transgenderism was building at the beginning of the 21st century, a handful of radical lesbian feminists warned that it was detrimental to the material interests of women. They included Sheila Jeffreys, an English political scientist then teaching at the University of Melbourne, and Gallus Mag, a pseudonymous American blogger. At the time, their warnings must have seemed hysterical; they now appear remarkably prescient.

These radical feminists argued that “trans activism is misogyny” and “a men’s rights movement.” They were correct about its objective consequences being bad for females, as set out by the philosopher Kathleen Stock and the journalist Helen Joyce. The end of segregation by sex threatens the dignity and safety of women rather than men, because men are more violent and sexually predatory than women. Men in prison, for example, have a huge incentive to claim a female identity. In sports, the physical advantages of men are so great that their entry into women’s competitions automatically takes places from females. Women who enter men’s competitions, by contrast, are destined to lose. In the realm of sexuality, young lesbians are vulnerable to aggressive pursuit by transwomen, which activists celebrate as “breaking the cotton ceiling.” There is no equivalent pressure on men, whether straight or gay.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14642/alan-dershowitz-defense

In fact, former FBI Director Louis Freeh studied the allegations and concluded that “the totality of the evidence refutes the allegations against Professor Dershowitz.”

The intent of The New Yorker seems to be to convince folks that Dershowitz is guilty even though there is not enough evidence to charge him, let alone convict…. This is where famed Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz finds himself: accused of a heinous crime without any real recourse or due process protection. As the accusations pop up on screens across the globe, they are assumed to be true even though Dershowitz has not been charged or convicted.

In fact, he has done the unthinkable and asked — in an op-ed with the Wall Street Journal — for the FBI to investigate him.

So what can be done to deter false allegations in the internet era? For starters, if a false accusation is made and proven, the accuser should be prosecuted and punished. There needs to be real consequences for falsely accusing someone of a crime.

Our criminal justice system is built on the notion that the burden is on the prosecution to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt before one’s liberty, our most valuable asset, can be taken away. And for good reason. We don’t want innocent people in jail.

We are willing to live with some guilty folks going free so that we don’t have the horror of an innocent person behind bars. Our system, with all of its flaws (including the concept that prosecutors who charge people with baseless claims cannot be charged), has clung to this bedrock principle of presumed innocence.

https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/the-menace-of-political-correctness/

olitical correctness started out as a minor project of the international firm known as the Good Intentions Paving Company. What, after all, could be better intended than insisting that denigrating ethnic names (“polak,” “kike,” “spic,” “wop,” and worse) and language debasing women be debarred from public discourse and put out of bounds in civilized private conversation? Nothing, surely. But political correctness soon came to be about much more than social decorum. As with so many projects of the Good Intentions Paving Company, things haven’t worked out quite as planned.

Lashed up as it soon became with the campaign for a misguided equalizing in all American institutions, political correctness took a large leap forward in its ambitions. Criticism of any action or attempt to bring equality soon became, ipso facto, politically incorrect. Affirmative action—the rigging of admissions requirements at the country’s most prestigious universities in favor of what were deemed oppressed minority groups—was an early gambit in the campaign for equal outcomes and a boost, too, for political correctness. Criticizing affirmative action carried with it the penalty of being thought racist.

How could one admit minority students, it was felt, without catering to their special interests? So an ample buffet of courses in African-American, Chicano, and other studies were offered at universities. These courses would, naturally, be taught by matching minority-group faculty. To denigrate these courses, to argue that they were largely victimology, and as such that they lowered the standard once in place for the liberal arts in higher education, would in itself of course be politically incorrect, and most people who knew better were hesitant to step forth and say so.

What became known as the women’s movement soon claimed oppressed status, since it could not claim actual minority status. Homosexuals, male and female, were next on board. Hispanic Americans surely qualified, and so others who could construe a history—or, in the cant phrase of the day, a narrative—of inequality forced upon them. The United States began to seem a country of victims—and victimology, the study of victimhood from the point of view of the victims, became a dominant subject in high schools and especially in the social science and humanities departments of universities.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/31/menacing-invective-against-trump-creates-dangerous-climate/

Former vice president and current presidential candidate Joe Biden has bragged on two occasions that he would like to beat up President Donald Trump.

In March 2018, Biden huffed, “They asked me would I like to debate this gentleman, and I said no. I said, ‘If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.”

Biden’s tough-guy braggadocio was apparently no slip. A year later, he doubled down on his physical threats.

“The idea that I’d be intimidated by Donald Trump? … He’s the bully that I’ve always stood up to. He’s the bully that used to make fun when I was a kid that I stutter, and I’d smack him in the mouth.”

Had former Vice President Dick Cheney ever dared to say something similar of President Obama, what would the media reaction have been?

Recently, Sen. Corey Booker (D-N.J.), another presidential candidate, took up where Biden left off:

“Trump is a guy who you understand he hurts you, and my testosterone sometimes makes me want to feel like punching him, which would be bad for this elderly, out-of-shape man that he is if I did that. This physically weak specimen.”

One trait of the Democratic field of presidential candidates is always to sound further to the left than any of their primary rivals. Apparently, a similar habit is to see who can most effectively imagine beating up the president. For now, Booker seems to be in first place.