RUTHFULLY YOURS

Since Max Boot was reborn in the age of Trump, he’s decided that conservatism — pretty much all of it — was corrupt from the start.

Max Boot and I agree on quite a few things with regard to Donald Trump and even a couple of things about today’s GOP. So I understand — and empathize with — his account of how the rise of Trump could cause him to take a rigorous personal inventory and prompt him to embark on his “ideological journey.” But I find the spectacle of it quite ugly.

I have many problems with Max’s approach, but I will focus on two. First, he essentially admits — in his book and in interviews — that he didn’t do much firsthand analysis of conservatism and many conservative positions. The election of Donald Trump caused him to question the conservative movement he’d aligned himself with since he was a teenager, and:

Upon closer examination, it’s obvious that the history of modern conservatism is permeated with racism, extremism, conspiracy-mongering, isolationism and know-nothingism. I disagree with progressives who argue that these disfigurations define the totality of conservatism; conservatives have also espoused high-minded principles that I still believe in, and the bigotry on the right appeared to be ameliorating in recent decades. But there has always been a dark underside to conservatism that I chose for most of my life to ignore. It’s amazing how little you can see when your eyes are closed!

On most public controversies, he outsourced his convictions to those on the right he trusted or to conservative conventional wisdom and merely focused on his core issues. His adherence to a conservative party line was “a process of indoctrination — largely self-indoctrination, I should add — that took decades and that I am only now escaping.”

On one level, I don’t have a huge problem with Boot’s reliance on others. Every columnist, on both the right and the left, relies on experts, authorities, and colleagues they trust to do some of the heavy lifting for them. Whenever I write about guns, I always try to talk to someone like Charlie Cooke. When I write about North Korea, I make sure to talk to or read Nick Eberstadt. I don’t see this as “indoctrination” but education — and argumentation — because I will try to listen to the other side as well.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/28/no-aid-for-censors-

Last night I suspended Twitter indefinitely.

This had been building for some time for two primary reasons. First, Twitter, like Facebook (which I had given up a few months ago), is a hate machine. Second, Twitter’s ever-changing terms of service and curiously selective enforcement of said terms via shadow and outright bans made it increasingly obvious that Twitter is less interested in real conversation than it is in kabuki theater conversation—censored one-sided shadow-boxing—replacing freedom of speech with speech at the pleasure of one’s betters.

As such, Twitter has became a platform I can no longer support with my participation.

From my perspective, participation on a platform that actively censors political speech, even when that participation consists of criticism the platform, is a tacit approval. Remember how you felt when you saw those “Occupy Wall Street” folks using iPhones to bemoan capitalism? That’s how I began seeing giving Twitter my voice, a voice that they could choose to either allow or silence if it became pesky or popular enough.

Having your letter critical of state policies published in Pravda is not the same as speaking freely. You are still at the mercy of the state. Worse still, you are being used by the state to feign even handedness.

When you “join the conversation” on Twitter, you’re speaking at the discretion of Twitter’s censors, be they human or algorithms. Like Jonathan Edwards’ spider, you exist on Twitter at their pleasure. And per Jonathan Edwards, the Twitter gods “Abhor you and are dreadfully provoked.” With each new term of service added (the newest being the prohibition on “misgendering” and “deadnaming”) everyone is a potential violator. They’ve covered the floor with eggshells and then tell you that you’re free to jump around. A Twitter executive in 2012 quoted CEO Jack Dorsey proclaiming Twitter as “the Free Speech Wing of the Free Speech Party”. Hardly. Not Even Jack believes that bullshit anymore.

Being a conservative, free speech supporter, libertarian, or even the wrong kind of liberal on Twitter is engaging in speech that one hopes will pass muster with the company. It is speech reliant on approval from a system whose purposely opaque and broad rules shift with the winds. It is the acquiescing and providing power, reach and currency to the system one is criticising.

Any time I used Twitter to inveigh against Twitter unfairness, I felt as though I became another propaganda statistic that Twitter’s defenders can point to as demonstrable proof of how truly magnanimous Twitter is. “But we allow @FreeSpeechGuy557 to speak.” So there—shut up or we’ll ban you. The Soviets did, after all, hold public trials to show the world and convince themselves just how fair they could be.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/11/glamour_magazine_turns_itself_into_leftwing_rag_finds_itself_out_of_the_print_business.html

Glamour magazine has decided to end its print version, heading to a web-only format, according to its parent company, Conde Nast.

In a story from Variety:

After nearly 80 years, the monthly print edition of Condé Nast’s Glamour women’s magazine is ending.

Glamour’s last regularly published print edition, the January 2019 issue, is scheduled to hit newsstands next week, the company announced Tuesday.

It’s another move by Condé Nast away from declining print businesses to pivot to a mostly digital future, a trend that has cut across the entire publishing biz. Glamour has a print circulation of about 2 million, but the brand reaches an audience of around 20 million online, according to the company.

Which is kind of the story of a lot of print media, with all its good and bad reasons. The magazine can’t be doing well, deny it as they try to suggest in their statement to Variety.

But the lack of wellness of the magazine is hardly confined to the tech revolution’s advances, or the preferences of the Millennials – have you taken a look at what Glamour is like these days?

It’s actually pretty hideous. I did with the last issue, viewing it in the doctor’s office, and boy did I put that one back on the stack instead of sneak it out in my purse. In the past, the magazine, formerly known as ‘Glamour of Hollywood’ was a great go-to place for stories about models, makeup, fashion, boyfriends and good girly stuff. One of my mother’s favorite photos of me at age 7 was of how I used to lap up her copy of Glamour magazine, seated like a kid with my feet on the couch reading it like a kid reads a storybook.

Today, it’s decided that Hollywood for Ugly People is better than actual glamour.

Seriously, it seems to be focused now on female politicians of the strictly Democratic stripe, the kind who wear pantsuits and congratulate themselves with awards. They’re the Democrat-left establishment. They’re the Planned Parenthood-approved sisterhood. The actresses the magazine focuses on are there solely based on their leftwing activism – Alyssa Milano and the #MeToo types, not people who’ve actually done something interesting in the acting trade. There was just one clothing spread and boy was it boring. In short, the magazine has degenerated into Democratic establishment politics, which is a stupid thing given that it advertises itself as about fashion and presumably, the cutting edge.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/vogue-claims-white-women-are-voting-against-their-own-interests-by-voting-republican/

“In February, 2012 Vogue magazine published, for the benefit of its 11.7 million readers, an article titled “A Rose in the Desert” about the first lady of Syria. Asma al-Assad has British roots, wears designer fashion, worked for years in banking, and is married to the dictator Bashar al-Assad, whose regime has killed over 5,000 civilians and hundreds of children this year. The glowing article praised the Assads as a “wildly democratic” family-focused couple who vacation in Europe, foster Christianity, are at ease with American celebrities, made theirs the “safest country in the Middle East,” and want to give Syria a “brand essence.”

If you want to know how out of touch progressives have become, look no further than Vogue magazine. In an article for the magazine published last week, contributing editor Michelle Ruiz asks this mind-numbingly obtuse question: “Why do white women keep voting for the GOP and against their own interests?” How, Ruiz wants to know, could women possibly vote for candidates who are “passionately pro-life” over candidates who are “staunch protector[s] of women’s reproductive rights”? Surely, Ruiz laments, all women ought to be in favor of “a right to health care, to choose what’s best for our bodies, [and] that our children should be safe at school” (in other words, abortion rights and gun control). Voting against these things, Ruiz says, is “unsisterly.”

The complete and utter refusal of progressives to understand that there might be other legitimate viewpoints than their own would be fascinating if it wasn’t so infuriating. Do Vogue, and Vox, and Cargle, and Eltahawy, and countless others who share their views truly not understand that people might disagree with them? Do they really not know that some women believe that a pro-life stance (or support for the Second Amendment) is pro-woman? Or even that, for many women, a vagina isn’t actually their defining feature? It seems like they actually don’t understand this.

In her article, Ruiz tries to come up with reasons why white women would vote for GOP candidates. “Are they so invested in their own white privilege that they simply don’t care about other women? Are they parroting their Republican husbands and/or brainwashed by Fox & Friends?” Or are they simply “protecting their own power and status”? That’s it, according to Ruiz, those are the choices. White women are either uncaring evil trolls hell-bent on hoarding their own privilege and power, or they’re oppressed victims brainwashed by the patriarchy. Ruiz doesn’t even entertain a third option — doesn’t mention it in her article at all — that these women might just disagree. Tolerance, it seems, does not extend to those who think differently.