RUTHFULLY YOURS

Do we really need to create whole separate identity classes to describe which personality traits we like? The women’s blog Bustle is offering advice for anyone who may want to date a “sapiosexual” — which it describes as an “uber-trendy ‘sexual orientation’” in which people are more attracted to intelligence than other characteristics.

“Identity politics reign supreme, so it’s fitting that we constantly conceive new categories to label and define our niche sensibilities and predilections, however ridiculous or annoying or unnecessary they may seem,” writes self-described “recovering sapiosexual” Kristen Sollee, taking the words “ridiculous” and “annoying” right out of my mouth. See — I had thought that simply saying you find intelligence attractive was a good enough way to convey that you find intelligence attractive, and that the phrase “sexual orientation” was reserved for describing something a little more integral to your identity than what you could flippantly mention as “recovering” from. But apparently not.

Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley is thinking about running for president on the Democratic ticket by appealing to Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren’s populist fans. Warren is a very bright former Harvard law professor. So it is interesting that O’Malley thinks the best way to reach out to her fans is to say remarkably stupid things.

Steve Inskeep, host of NPR’s Morning Edition, recently interviewed O’Malley, asking him to respond to something GOP-presidential-contender Senator Marco Rubio had said. Inskeep: “[Rubio] argues that an active government actually keeps people frozen at their economic status because if you are well off, if you can afford a lawyer, if you can deal with regulations, you can maneuver through government and stay prosperous. And if you are not so well off, it’s harder to work the system. Is there some truth to that? You were a big-city mayor; you know how government works.” O’Malley replied: “No, I don’t think there’s any truth to that.”

When the state was established, Jews lifted their heads and decided to fight back.

One day I went out to meet my father as he returned with the Yiddish paper.

“Look,” he said, shaken and pointing to a photo on the front page. “A Jewish soldier.”

Then I saw him crying and understood how incredible this was. This was 1948. For 2,000 years there had never been Jewish soldiers.

Not a single one during Father’s pogroms and the Holocaust he’d endured. This image was colossal.

Laughing-stock UK Green Party leader Natalie Bennett has reaffirmed her party’s support for boycotts against Israel, underlining in typically bizarre style that the ideological Left in Britain remains the main repository of bigotry against the Jewish state.

Britain’s Green Party, led by the hapless Natalie Bennett, is pretty much a stereotypical ragbag of tree-huggers at the nice and squishy end of the spectrum and hard-line Lefist ideologues at the other end who never really recovered from the fall of the Berlin Wall and departed from traditional Left-wing politics on the grounds that it had sold out to capitalism.

With the latter strand of Green thinking in mind — and it is there that one finds the most influential voices in the party — no surprise then that the Greens have emerged as the party with the most bigoted approach to Israel among all those vying for representation at the general election in two and a half weeks time.

Are you upset all the time? Do minor things that other people do drive you up the wall? Do you spend all day muttering about unintended petty slights? Do you self-diagnose your own psychiatric disorders?

Are you convinced that you’re being oppressed by all the people around you?

You’re not just a paranoid schizophrenic. You might also be a Social Justice Warrior.

What the Jacobins and Bolsheviks were to earlier eras, the Social Justice Warrior is to the millennial generation. Just don’t expect an SJW to mount the barricades or storm anything physical. If there were a button on their keyboards that would let them guillotine or gulag their enemies, they would use it.

Since there isn’t, they have to generate hashtagged social media whine mobs instead.

Yesterday’s Mail on Sunday had an interesting account of a meeting in London of Nazis, neo-Nazis, British National Party types and anti—Semites of various other hues. The paper infiltrated the meeting and exposed what was said – which is a very good service and deserves praise.

But I challenge anyone to look through the photos and biographies of the few participants who gathered at Victoria station and then in a nearby hotel and not reflect that this is a gratifyingly washed-up and pathetic movement. During their deliberations they appear to have gone over the usual stuff about how they think the Holocaust was made up and been used by Jews for their own advantage and so on. But I confess to feeling fairly unbothered by such a gathering where the best they can do in terms of personnel is to find an admirer of Hitler from Spain, a retired schoolteacher wearing a British Union of Fascists lapel badge and carrying a book by Oswald Mosley and the absurd ‘Lady’ Michele Renouf, a former ‘hand model’ whose brain has never been what I suppose her hands once were.

According to the Mail on Sunday, Pedro Varela, the Spanish man, gave a speech about ‘the children of darkness’, during which:

‘He also appeared to call for a boycott of Jewish shops and businesses, saying: “In the Middle Ages, the Jews had all the gold in the world but they were living in the ghettos. They still have the gold of the world and are the masters of it…”’

All very predictable. But they’re not the only people calling for boycotts. An anti-Israel boycott is part of Green party policy.

Forty years ago, Saigon fell to communist North Vietnam. Images of terrified South Vietnamese clambering to the roof of the U.S. embassy, and Vietnamese helicopter pilots ferrying them to ships and then pushing the helicopters overboard to make room for more refugees are still heart-wrenching.

Vietnam represented a change in the American security dynamic for the protection of friends and the defeat of adversaries, but the application of useful policy lessons is hard to find.

WWII and the Korean War had required the United States to leave substantial parts of its military in place either to consolidate victory or prevent the erosion of an armistice. In the case of Vietnam, however, the U.S. armed and trained the South Vietnamese military (ARVN) and then left it to the field. The policy was called “Vietnamization.” The question should have been asked, “What is the staying power of an army when its enemy consists of its brothers and cousins — that is to say, when it is fighting a civil war — in the absence of U.S. support on the ground?” And, the corollary, “Particularly when its brothers and cousins are supported by outside powers?”

‘They came with a battering ram.” Cindy Archer, one of the lead architects of Wisconsin’s Act 10 — also called the “Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill,” it limited public-employee benefits and altered collective-bargaining rules for public-employee unions — was jolted awake by yelling, loud pounding at the door, and her dogs’ frantic barking. The entire house — the windows and walls — was shaking. She looked outside to see up to a dozen police officers, yelling to open the door. They were carrying a battering ram. She wasn’t dressed, but she started to run toward the door, her body in full view of the police. Some yelled at her to grab some clothes, others yelled for her to open the door. “I was so afraid,” she says. “I did not know what to do.” She grabbed some clothes, opened the door, and dressed right in front of the police. The dogs were still frantic.
“I begged and begged, ‘Please don’t shoot my dogs, please don’t shoot my dogs, just don’t shoot my dogs.’ I couldn’t get them to stop barking, and I couldn’t get them outside quick enough. I saw a gun and barking dogs. I was scared and knew this was a bad mix.” She got the dogs safely out of the house, just as multiple armed agents rushed inside. Some even barged into the bathroom, where her partner was in the shower. The officer or agent in charge demanded that Cindy sit on the couch, but she wanted to get up and get a cup of coffee. “I told him this was my house and I could do what I wanted.”

The knock on the door in the dead of night is the stuff of Darkness at Noon, and of the state of Wisconsin. To the question of whether armed police can storm your house and take away your personal effects and tell you to shut up about it, based simply on your political advocacy, Wisconsin answered for years, “Why, yes, they can — now please, shut up about it.”

The so-called John Doe investigations into Governor Scott Walker and conservative groups in Wisconsin have been an ongoing travesty that — now that Walker is entering the presidential stage — should be considered a national disgrace. Walker’s opponents weaponized campaign-finance law, literally. Our own David French has talked to families targeted in the John Doe raids for the first time, and their stories are harrowing. Shouting officers at the front door in pre-dawn raids, at least once with a battering ram. Armed police rifling through and carting off their belongings, down to and including a daughter’s computer. And warnings to stay silent.

The targets were told not to tell their lawyers, or their friends, or their neighbors. When armed cops storm the house next door, people often wonder why, but the targets were forbidden from discussing what happened. As French points out, this wasn’t the right to remain silent and avoid self-incrimination, but an order to remain silent and not to make any professions of innocence. They had a keener sense of due process in Salem, Massachusetts. The investigators were, among other things, fishing for campaign-finance violations, on dubious grounds. So, for exercising their First Amendment rights, some targets were denied their First Amendment rights. This is the Bill of Rights, via Kafka and Inspector Javert.

On campus, on the campaign trail. Hillary Clinton in recent months has done the following: She charged UCLA somewhere around $300,000 for reciting some platitudes. That works out to over $165 a second for her 30 minutes on stage — meaning that she made more in one minute than a student barista does in a year. Ms. Clinton acknowledges that, while secretary of state, she solicited donations from wealthy foreign nationals for her family foundation, whose funds she and her husband have frequently tapped for exclusive travel and other expenses.

Everything Ms. Clinton has said recently seems to be demonstrably untrue: Only one of her grandparents, not all four, was an immigrant. One does not need to have two smartphones to have two e-mail accounts. She did not regularly e-mail her husband. One does not secure a server by having a guard on the premises. A cabinet officer does not communicate exclusively on a private e-mail account via a private unsecured server. High government officials do not themselves adjudicate which e-mails are private and which public — and then wipe clean their accounts to avoid an audit of such decision-making. The multimillionaire Ms. Clinton, fresh from jabs against hedge funds and inordinate CEO pay, also just bought lunch at a fast-food restaurant and left no tip in the jar, before parking her car in a handicapped zone at another stop. How is all this connected?