EDUCATION Comments turned off

School Integration Draws Scrutiny — From the Left By John Hirschauer

Posted By on September 7th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/school-integration-draws-scrutiny-from-left/

Long considered a signature achievement of the civil-rights movement, the integration of schools is coming under scrutiny in odd places.

EXCERPT:

More than fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, the Left has yet to make up its mind on the question of integration. Voices ranging from New York mayor Bill de Blasio to The Atlantic writer Jemele Hill have proposed radical changes to the way we approach the integration of our educational institutions, long considered to be a signature achievement of the civil-rights movement.

Bill de Blasio is weighing a proposal to halt most admissions to the city’s various “gifted and talented” programs, from specialized high schools such as Stuyvesant to special educational opportunities in ordinary public schools. A disproportionate number of Asian and white students are enrolled in gifted programs — the two groups accounted for 75 percent of enrollees last year — which, some say, creates a regime of de facto segregation in public schools. Maintaining strict racial quotas in public education is of such importance to the de Blasio administration that the mayor is earnestly considering removing race-blind programs that, at their best, are avenues to upward mobility for some of the poorest students in the state.

This is in stark contrast to Jemele Hill, who — though focusing on collegiate rather than elementary or secondary education — encourages black student-athletes to voluntarily segregate themselves at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Her latest piece in The Atlantic, “It’s Time for Black Athletes to Leave White Colleges,” decries “the flight of black athletes to majority-white colleges,” a process that she insists “has been devastating to HBCUs.”

Hill relates how, in some cases, “black students feel safer, both physically and emotionally, on an HBCU campus,” and insists that, as currently constructed, “Black athletes have attracted money and attention to the predominantly white universities that showcase them.” What if a movement began to, in effect, embrace de facto re-segregation?”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Red-Flag Laws Should Trigger Treatment, Not Just Gun Confiscation By D. J. Jaffe

Posted By on September 7th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/red-flag-laws-should-mandate-treatment-not-just-gun-confiscation/

To seriously tackle the problem of mass shootings, we must get serious about tackling the problem of severe mental illness.

In the wake of recent mass shootings by Americans alleged to be mentally ill, President Trump has called for a national red-flag law that would preclude certain mentally ill individuals from owning or buying firearms. It’s a good idea, but for the seriously mentally ill, red-flag laws should also trigger treatment, not just gun confiscation.

It makes no sense to let people who are known to be seriously mentally ill and believed to be dangerous go without treatment, even if they have had their weapons taken away. It’s not compassionate. And it can be dangerous.

Forty percent of the seriously mentally ill have anosognosia, meaning they are unaware they are ill. Because they are unaware they are ill, they sometimes refuse treatment. Many become homeless, arrested, incarcerated, and needlessly hospitalized. Some, responding to their delusions, resort to violence that doesn’t involve guns. All of these outcomes could be avoided if they received treatment.

The red-flag law previously proposed by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), the Extreme Risk Protection Order Act of 2019, which is now being taken up by Senators Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.), Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), Joe Manchin (D., W.V.), and others, should be amended to provide a path to treatment for those who are identified as being too mentally ill to own guns.

New York provides a roadmap for how to do this. In 2013, it passed the New York SAFE Act. Among other provisions, the law required therapists to report to the county mental-health director the names of mentally ill people under their care who they believe to be dangerous and to possess guns. It then charged the county mental-health director with investigating the therapists’ reports and, if appropriate, instructing law enforcement to seize the guns from the individuals in question and enter their names into the federal NICS database, which would preclude them from making gun purchases. It further allowed for an appeals process through which the mental-health director’s determination could be challenged.

IMMIGRATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Anti-ICE Protesters in Boston Block Rush-Hour Traffic Eric Lendrum

Posted By on September 7th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/06/anti-ice-protesters-in-boston-block-rush-hour-traffic/

A far-left group protesting ICE took to the streets of Boston on Thursday, marching throughout the city and blocking rush-hour traffic for hours, as Fox News reports.

The group, “Never Again Action,” marched in protest of ICE without announcing the route they would be taking. As a result, the several hundred protesters marched across the Longfellow Bridge, which was the only route for hundreds more commuters in rush-hour traffic.

The march eventually stopped at the Amazon building near Cambridge, as part of their protest against private companies who supposedly cooperate with ICE in the detaining and deporting of illegal aliens. After arriving at Amazon, 12 of the protesters were arrested for trespassing, after which the remaining protesters eventually dispersed.

As Fox notes, Never Again Action previously saw 18 of its members arrested at a similar protest in July. The group also went viral for a protest in August where they blocked the driveway of an ICE facility in Rhode Island; a guard who worked at the facility and was trying to go to work accidentally almost drove into them, after which other personnel intervened and forced the protesters out using pepper spray.

Never Action Action is a self-described “Jews Against ICE” group founded in July, invoking the phrase “Never Again” as a reference to the Holocaust. This echoes the sentiment first promoted by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who compared migrant detention facilities to concentration camps, and even falsely accused such facilities of abusing detained illegals.

Although her claims have been debunked, her rhetoric has inspired an increase in terrorist actions against ICE and other immigration officials and facilities in recent months.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Europeans Keep Rejecting Liberty By Robert Curry

Posted By on September 7th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/09/the_europeans_keep_rejecting_liberty.html

Modern continental Europe keeps trying to solve its political problem — and then to impose its solution on everyone within reach.  Recognizing this historical process can help us understand European anti-Americanism, strongest perhaps in Germany.  America created the Europeans’ political predicament, and we keep preventing them from adopting the solutions they come up with.

America created the Europeans’ political problem by the magnificent example of the American Revolution and the astonishing, world-changing success of America.  In an interesting version of the story of the emperor’s new clothes, rule by hereditary monarchs, hereditary aristocracies, and established churches was suddenly revealed to be absurd and indefensible.

The only problem was that continental Europe was for the most part incapable of self-rule.  The attempts, for example, by Germany, Italy, and France to achieve reasonably stable regimes of rule by their own people would be comical but for the terrible human consequences of their repeated failures.

With the exception of the Netherlands and a few other European countries that, like Britain, have achieved rule by their own people, the modern history of continental Europe is the story of people trying various experiments in an ongoing effort to relieve themselves of the burden of self-rule.

For a while, it seemed certain that fascism was going to be the European solution.  The Germans and the Italians took the lead, but there were at the same time homegrown fascist movements throughout Europe, even in Britain.  The French earned from Homer Simpson the sobriquet “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” because of their feeble resistance to the Nazi invaders and their swift adoption of a policy of collaboration with their Nazi rulers.  If it weren’t for America’s military intervention, the Nazis would likely have defeated Britain, and fascist Europe would have reached from Ireland’s western shore to Moscow and beyond.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Liberalism Politics US Politics The Democrats find religion The DNC have adopted a new secular creed Augustus Howard

Posted By on September 7th, 2019

https://spectator.us/democrats-find-religion/

Now for some bracing honesty from the Democratic National Committee. In a new, unanimously adopted resolution, Democrats have declared that ‘the religiously unaffiliated demographic represents the largest religious group within the Democratic party, growing from 19 percent in 2007 to one in three today’ (emphasis added). Advocates for truth in political advertising should rejoice. The so-called ‘secular’ left has finally abandoned the canard that its views and policies are purely ‘neutral,’ or the products of inarguable empiricism. According to the resolution, the religiously unaffiliated and the nonreligious (labels used interchangeably) are, instead, members of a new faith community. This may be the first time that the Democratic party, or any official organ of the American left, has forthrightly declared the true objective of its modern politics: the promotion and enshrinement of a new religion.

With this declaration, Democrats are taking seriously their current, favorite term, ‘wokeness’ – the religious resonance of which is unavoidable. For them, to be woke is to be awakened to new knowledge, to be freed from one’s old, ignorant ways and to share in life-changing revelation. Thus, the Democrats’ woke resolution – a concise, one-page distillation of the modern, American left worldview – reads as a confessional, creedal document. It speaks of ‘values’: ‘religiously unaffiliated Americans overwhelmingly share the Democratic party’s values.’ It speaks of ostracism and suffering for beliefs: ‘the nonreligious have often been subjected to unfair bias and exclusion in American society.’ And, it articulates the essential, core aims of the creed by praising the religiously unaffiliated as ‘advocates for rational public policy based on sound social science and universal humanistic values.’

The resolution embodies what Charles Taylor, a scholar of secularism, terms ‘the independent ethic.’ According to Taylor, in establishing an independent ethic, a group will ‘deduce certain exceptionless norms’ and ‘abstract from…deeper or higher beliefs altogether for purposes of a political morality.’ And, as Taylor explains, when there ‘are real live atheists in the society…they will live an independent ethic not as some thought experiment, but as the basis of their moral lives.’ In this way, an apparently nonreligious or even overtly anti-religious creed can assume the character of what is actually religious fundamentalism.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Smollett’s Lawyer: ‘Even if He Lied, It’s the Police’s Fault for Taking it Seriously’ Keely Sharp

Posted By on September 7th, 2019

https://dailypoliticalnewswire.com/smolletts-lawyer-even-if-he-lied-its-the-polices-fault-for-taking-it-seriously/?utm_source=newsletter

Here’s a statement to make you scrunch your nose and scratch your head: Jussie Smollett’s lawyer, William J. Quinlan, actually said that even if the actor did lie about being attacked by two white men in MAGA hats, it’s the police’s fault for taking him so seriously.

Yep, that’s right. The lawyer is blaming the police for Smollett’s crime! How is that even a valid argument?

“My client from the beginning has maintained his innocence and disputed the city’s allegations,” Quinlan stated, “We contend the city is wrong … The mere fact somebody filed a police report doesn’t presume the investigation will be done and certainly not to the extent of what the city is claiming.”

The “Empire” star was charged after he staged an attack on himself in January, in which he hired two men to attack him. Then he turned to the police and the media and cried wolf, claiming that he was attacked by anti-gay Trump supporters.

ISRAEL, MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Another anti-Israel movie – from an Israeli. Jack Engelhard

Posted By on September 6th, 2019

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/24412?utm_source=activetrail&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

Call me sentimental, but I prefer those big fat movies that celebrate the glory of Israel.

Pass the popcorn for epics like Paul Newman in “Exodus,” and Kirk Douglas in “Cast a Giant Shadow.”

I am still surprised to find that the screenplay for Leon Uris’s “Exodus” was written by Dalton Trumbo, a diehard leftist. I guess leftists were different back then. They had a heart. Nor was Trumbo Jewish, and I shudder to think how “Exodus” would have come out in the hands of a Jewish screenwriter. 

Many of these are so busy implanting moral equivalency into their scripts, like Tony Kushner for Spielberg’s “Munich,” that before you know it, the good guys become the bad guys. 

That’s where we seem to be with famed Israeli writer/director, Joseph Cedar. In partnership with another Israeli, and a Palestinian Arab, and through Israel’s Channel 12 Television, we get an HBO seriestitled, “Our Boys,” a real downer, and shown in 10 parts, so that not just once, but 10 times viewers across the world get to watch a Jewish filmmaker lick the dust and blaspheme his own people.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calls the production “anti-Semitic,” and apparently that is a justified rebuke and review.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Left-wing Website Think Progress to Shut Down Debra Heine

Posted By on September 6th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/06/left-wing-website-think-progress-to-shut-down/

ThinkProgress, a once influential left-wing news site, is reportedly shutting down after being in operation for nearly 15 years.

The outlet was a “project” of  the Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAPAF), a “sister advocacy organization” of the Center for American Progress (CAP).

The Center for American Progress is a 501(c)(3) organization that receives approximately $25 million per year in funding from a variety of sources, including individuals, foundations, and corporations, according to Sourcewatch.

From 2003 to 2007, the center received about $15 million in grants from 58 foundations. Major individual donors include George Soros, Peter Lewis, Steve Bing, and Herbert M. Sandler. The Center receives undisclosed sums from corporate donors.

Wal-Mart is a major funder of the Center for American Progress, having given at least half a million dollars to the organization. Wal-Mart has been a major backer of Pres Obama’s health care legislation, which critics contend would disproportionately drive up costs for Wal-Mart’s smaller competitors.

According to the Daily Beast, ThinkProgress ran on deficits for years and “will stop current operations on Friday and be converted into a site where CAP scholars can post.”

CAP officials had been searching for a buyer to take over website and were reportedly some interested parties, but ultimately, the site was unable to secure a patron.

HISTORY, MEDIA Comments turned off

No, Jonathan Haidt is Not Like a Slavery Apologist written by Adam Rowe

Posted By on September 6th, 2019

https://quillette.com/2019/09/04/no-jonathan-haidt-is-not-like-a-sla

Eve Fairbanks, in an essay for the Washington Post, argues that many of the writers on the so-called “reasonable right,” a group that includes such seemingly benign figures as Bari Weiss and Jonathan Haidt, are making many of the same arguments and using much the same language as proslavery advocates in the American South:

The reasonable right’s rhetoric is exactly the same as the antebellum rhetoric I’d read so much of. The same exact words. The same exact arguments. Rhetoric, to be precise, in support of the slave-owning South.

Fairbanks follows this breathless announcement by acknowledging that she is not accusing anyone of defending slavery, and that includes, weirdly enough, actual antebellum proslavery writers. “Proslavery rhetoricians talked little of slavery itself,” she writes. “Instead, they anointed themselves the defenders of ‘reason,’ free speech and ‘civility.’” This is a bit like smearing someone as a Nazi, then qualifying it with the claim that overt anti-Semitism was really quite atypical of Nazism. In her characterization of proslavery thought, Fairbanks has taken a line that not even the most stalwart member of the Daughters of the Confederacy would care to defend. It is, well, an exact inversion of the truth.

In one sense, the argument is too silly to merit a serious response. The fact that defenders of slavery have in the past appealed to reason and civility no more discredits anyone who appeals to those values than the Nazis’ love of calisthenics discredits anyone who exercises. But the essay does raise, in an absurd, wrong-headed way, an interesting question about the fate of civility and free speech in a society that no longer operates on shared moral premises.

Free speech principles were often at stake in the antebellum controversy over slavery.

HISTORY Comments turned off

The Frankfurt School and the Allure of Submission Published by Matt McManus

Posted By on September 6th, 2019

https://quillette.com/category/politics/

When Fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically. They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or such yearning for submission. Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak.
~Erich Fromm

Since at least the advent of modernity and liberalism, tremendous emphasis has been placed on the importance of human freedom. For classical liberal thinkers like Immanuel Kant, freedom was the fundamental characteristic of human beings; at the center of all our practical moral action. The American and French Revolutionaries both invoked the infringement of liberty to justify the overthrow of existing tyrannical orders. And, today, political culture is saturated with references to the importance of making choices, living life as one see’s fit, and non-coercion by the state. Socialists in the Jacobin and conservatives at the National Review debate what is really necessary to secure freedom, but none disputes its importance.

Each of these positions relies upon the belief that human freedom is either basic to our nature, essential for the realization of our moral potential, or both. But if this is true, then what explains the appeal of totalitarianism? One of the great intellectual efforts undertaken in the aftermath of the Second World War was to try and figure out why so many people would willingly surrender their freedom, and even exult in submission, in order to commit murder on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Countless artists, philosophers, sociologists and economists have provided explanations. One of the deepest accounts come from the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, who had a dark and melancholic interpretation of what happened.

The Human Yearning for Submission