RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/22/friedman-freedom-and-the-road-to-serfdom/

I just came across and article which reminded me that Nov. 16 was the 15th anniversary of the death of Milton Friedman, one of the past century’s greatest advocates of freedom. As someone who has followed his writing for most of my adult life, I can barely believe he has been gone that long. On the other hand, the abyss between the freedom he advocated and the world we now inhabit is so vast, I can barely believe he has only been gone that long.

That great gap makes me believe that now would be a good time to think back to some of Friedman’s insightful words. But his prolific output makes it hard to choose (rather than “Free to Choose“) among them when faced with limited space. How much further we have moved along what Friedrich Hayek called “The Road to Serfdom” since then, however, suggests one good source – Friedman’s “Introduction” to the University of Chicago Press’ 50th anniversary edition of the book.

The promotion of collectivism is combined with the profession of individualist values.

Individualism … can be achieved only in a liberal order in which government activity is limited primarily to establishing the framework within which individuals are free to pursue their own objectives.

The free market is the only mechanism that has ever been discovering for achieving participatory democracy.

Unfortunately, the relation between the ends and the means remains widely misunderstood. Many of those who profess the most individualistic objectives support collectivist means without recognizing the contradiction.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/11/china-and-covid-dancing-with-the-devil/

“Markson’s brilliant investigation leaves us confident enough that Beijing did not deliberately release SARS-CoV-2 upon the world. Once the virus was out there, though, and once the regime had regained its nerve, Beijing did everything in its power to turn an international crisis of their making into a victory. That is the phenomenon we are dealing with here. One of the more admirable figures to emerge in What Really Happened in Wuhan is Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, along with several key White House advisers including Peter Navarro. Though all very different in their expertise and character, common to them all is the understanding that engaging in any kind of relationship with the CCP really is akin to dancing with the devil.”

The potential readership for Sharri Markson’s new book increased in June after American television celebrity Jon Stewart shared his views with a left-of-centre audience on the origins of COVID-19: “Novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China. What do we do? Oh, you know who could we ask? The Wuhan Respiratory Coronavirus Lab. The disease is the same name as the lab. That’s just a little too weird, don’t you think?” Not too weird, according to Newsweek magazine, for the viewers who pushed back on social media with ripostes such as: “Honestly can’t tell if Jon Stewart was joking or had a senior moment on Colbert”; “Jon Stewart is flying real close to QAnon territory. Expecting him to go anti-vax any moment now”; and, of course, “like wow, way to throw more gas on the fire of anti-Asian hate”. Stewart’s detractors, though unlikely to be aware of it, were essentially conveying the official line of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Why? Beyond everything else, Markson’s book makes a good start at answering that question as well.

In the first instance, though, What Really Happened in Wuhan establishes the high plausibility of the so-called “lab-leak” theory. It is more than a tinfoil-hat conspiracy dreamed up by the Trump administration, white supremacists, xenophobes, the Murdoch press, anti-Chinese bigots, Cold Warriors and so on—or what Hillary Clinton, in another context, would refer to as a “vast right-wing conspiracy”. One of the many intellectual tragedies of the Cold War was the tendency to conflate anti-communism (or anti-totalitarianism) with a
reactionary worldview. A resultant problem was the inability or refusal of self-styled sophisticated observers from the West to grasp the essential despotism of Soviet society, which existed even in what we might now call Late Communism. Revisionist historians, for instance, went out of their way to amplify the non-tyrannical aspects of everyday life in the Soviet empire to argue a broader point: the internal social and political dynamics of a Western society, though obviously different from a communist one, were of a piece.

https://dailycaller.com/2021/11/16/new-book-reveals-organization-controls-black-lives-matter/

Editor’s note: What follows is an excerpt from Charles Love’s “Race Crazy: BLM, 1619, And The Progressive Racism Movement.” 

If Black Lives Matter is the chaos arm of the movement, the Movement for Black Lives is the operating system. How a group so connected, so influential, and so well-funded can operate with no exposure in the age of social media is both a testament to its power and a sad statement of how far the media has fallen.

It would be so much simpler to have one or two organizations with chapters throughout the country. It would result in easier fundraising and better messaging. But the Black Lives Matter movement is a complicated web of connected groups.It is basically a race-based Ponzi scheme.

…

The most interesting thing about Black Lives Matter is not their IRS status; it is the fact that there is no longer a
Black Lives Matter organization. They maintain a page and the means to accept donations, and that is really all that remains of the original organization. Black Lives Matter is largely controlled by the Movement for Black Lives and Black Lives Matter Global Foundation.

For several months, the country has been beset by protests and riots. It is obvious that they are organized, but many believe they are being funded by the Black Lives Matter movement or others with political interests. There is no doubt that funds are being used to fuel the protests, agitate against the police, and support rioting and looting. That people dealing with the uncertainty of employment during the COVID-19 crisis would use their limited savings to travel around the country to protest, risk arrest, and meet the subsequent cash bail, merely in order to throw a rock at a police officer, is as likely as a spontaneous uprising in Benghazi.

The question is: Who is funding these protests, particularly the clashes with police? After being attacked by the Republican National Convention protestors, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul called for an investigation to trace the corporations funding the protests and riots. I agree with the sentiment, but I believe it will be nearly impossible to trace. There are so many organizations within the movement, most of which have no financial declarations or lists of their members.

And even if Black Lives Matter activists are funding the riots, there is a good chance that no one at the donor level
knows. The BLM movement has a decentralized, bottom-up structure. As I have pointed out, the movement is really a collection of many groups with a common enemy. If you are fighting racism, capitalism, immigration, or any gender issue, you are welcome. Similarly, there is no true leader. Each group operates independently of each other, and each group is made up of leaderless individuals.

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

John McWhorter is an independent thinker – a rare (at risk of becoming extinct) individual in today’s academy. He is professor of linguistics at Columbia University, where he also teaches American studies and music history. At age 56, with a PhD from Stanford, he has written almost two dozen books. In his spare time, he is a contributing editor at The Atlantic and an opinion columnist for The New York Times. He describes himself as a “cranky, liberal Democrat.” He is a black man who believes that affirmative action should be based on class, not race, and that woke racism hurts those it claims to help.eview

In this book, he argues that woke racism represents a third wave of anti-racism, “…from people wishing they hadn’t missed the late 1960s.” This wave, he claims, has assumed the traits of a religion, with white privilege as original sin. The third wave “has taken it from the concrete political activism of Martin Luther King to the faith-based commitments of a Martin Luther.” He castigates the proselytizers of this religion, “The Elect,” as “pious, unempirical virtue signalers.” They resemble, in his words, early Christians who “thought of themselves as bearers of truth, in contrast to all other belief systems…” Like other such movements, they appeal “to an idealized past, a fantastical future, and an indelibly polluted present.” For the Elect, black people’s noble past is Africa, a glorified future is one without hate, but the present consists of oppressors and oppressed. He finds the Elect’s sanctimony insulting to blacks, who are led to believe that victimhood is destiny and success is due to special treatment. When conservative blacks deny victimhood, they are smeared by the Elect: Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor-elect Winsome Sears is a “white” supremacist and South Carolina’s Senator Tim Scott is an “Uncle Tom.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/real-fix-homelessness-bruce-bawer/

EXCERPT

“……I didn’t know what should be done about homelessness, but I’d come to realize that handouts weren’t the answer. What, then, is? According to most homelessness activists, it’s Housing First, which has been official U.S. policy since George W. Bush. The thinking behind it is simple: when people are homeless, the main thing they need are homes. So give them homes – permanent public housing, right off the bat, with no strings attached. What if they have other problems that have contributed to their homelessness? Well, those issues can be addressed afterwards.

Reading the Wikipedia entry for Housing First, you’d think it’s been tremendously successful. In various jurisdictions, according to that page, it’s slashed government outlays per homeless person; reduced drinking by homeless alcoholics; lowered “the number of chronically homeless persons living on the streets or in shelters”; brought down hospitalization and incarceration rates; alleviated pressure on the child welfare system; and cut the number of people who become homeless again. Which raises one little question: if Housing First is so spectacularly effective, why are the streets and parks of many American cities swarming with unprecedented numbers of homeless people? Why the seas of tents? Why all the public defecation? Why the staggering number of used syringes in the gutters? In search of the answer to this conundrum, Michael Shellenberger, a longtime San Franciscan, decided to scrutinize approaches to homelessness in jurisdictions around the world. The product is an eye-opening new book entitled San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities.

His subtitle notwithstanding, Shellenberger didn’t begin his project with the intention of condemning progressives. He’s a longtime progressive himself, with a degree in Peace and Global Studies and a background in environmental activism. In 2008, Time Magazine named him a “Hero of the Environment”; in 2018 he ran for the Democratic nomination for governor of California. Recently, to be sure, he’s been taking on leftist orthodoxies: last year his book Apocalypse Never, an attack on “environmental alarmism,” antagonized climate-change hysterics; San Fransicko will doubtless receive a similar response from the devotees of homelessness ideology, i.e. Housing First.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/book-of-ruth-wisse-phyllis-chesler

Like the poet John Masefield, I also suffer from “sea fever” and so down I went to the “seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky.” I needed no “tall ship,” only a room on the beach with a terrace—and all the time in the world to read Ruth R. Wisse’s new book, Free as a Jew: A Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation.

Reader: I could not put it down. I still chose to read it slowly, to savor it, take it all in. I must have underlined at least a quarter of the book. Wisse commands an aerial view of Jewish history, bringing it to bear on Israeli politics and on the demonization of the only Jewish state. She continues to issue her clarion call about the plague of “political correctness” that threatens to devour the entire Western enterprise.

Free as a Jew is an “intellectual memoir,” but it is also a family history replete with charming photos; a story of European Jews before, during, and after the Holocaust; and a warm introduction to Yiddish literature, and to many of the major Yiddish writers whom Wisse and her parents knew, hosted, and supported in Montreal, where they lived after fleeing Romania. Wisse introduces us to many of these writers: Sholem Asch, Sholem Aleichem, Itzik Manger, Mendele Mokher Sforim, Abraham Sutzkever, and Chaim Grade, as well as to Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Leonard Cohen, Hillel Halkin, Yehuda Amichai, Irving Howe, and Norman Podhoretz.

For Wisse, Yiddish is not a social justice enterprise, nor is it mainly associated with “progressivism.” Rather, it is a rich language, “associated with the actual Yiddish-speaking communities, which remained what they had always been: outposts of Jewish separatism, consisting mainly of religiously observant Jews living culturally apart from the surrounding population.” Yiddish—the language, the culture, the works—is not meant to be politicized.

Free as a Jew is also a story about Ruth’s love affair with Israel, and about Montreal’s Jews (told through the lens of Ruth’s long career, both at McGill and in publishing, long before she accepted a position at Harvard).

But this work is primarily a quintessential history of ideas, and about the law of unintended intellectual consequences. Wisse now questions her founding Jewish studies, just as I’ve questioned my founding of women’s studies because all identity-based academic studies have become weaponized in the war against Western civilization, which has also come to mean a war against America and Israel.

https://www.amazon.com/Woke-Racism-Religion-Betrayed-America/dp/0593423062

New York Times bestselling author and acclaimed linguist John McWhorter argues that an illiberal neoracism, disguised as antiracism, is hurting Black communities and weakening the American social fabric.

Americans of good will on both the left and the right are secretly asking themselves the same question: how has the conversation on race in America gone so crazy? We’re told to read books and listen to music by people of color but that wearing certain clothes is “appropriation.” We hear that being white automatically gives you privilege and that being Black makes you a victim. We want to speak up but fear we’ll be seen as unwoke, or worse, labeled a racist. According to John McWhorter, the problem is that a well-meaning but pernicious form of antiracism has become, not a progressive ideology, but a religion—and one that’s illogical, unreachable, and unintentionally neoracist.
 
In Woke Racism, McWhorter reveals the workings of this new religion, from the original sin of “white privilege” and the weaponization of cancel culture to ban heretics, to the evangelical fervor of the “woke mob.” He shows how this religion that claims to “dismantle racist structures” is actually harming his fellow Black Americans by infantilizing Black people, setting Black students up for failure, and passing policies that disproportionately damage Black communities. The new religion might be called “antiracism,” but it features a racial essentialism that’s barely distinguishable from racist arguments of the past.
 
Fortunately for Black America, and for all of us, it’s not too late to push back against woke racism. McWhorter shares scripts and encouragement with those trying to deprogram friends and family. And most importantly, he offers a roadmap to justice that actually will help, not hurt, Black America.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/islamophobia-industry-mark-tapson/

“There is an industry at work today, taking advantage of our liberty, infiltrating and influencing Western values and democracy,” writes Canadian author and blogger Diane Bederman in her brand new book The Islamophobia Industry: The Insidious Infiltration of Islam into the West. As the memory of the 9/11 attacks on American soil a generation ago recedes for many, this courageous short new work serves as an essential wakeup call to a Western world that, in the name of tolerance and inclusion, is allowing our rights and freedoms to be eroded as the value system of Islam grows in influence and power.

FrontPage Mag readers may recall that I interviewed Ms. Bederman here about her previous book The Serpent and the Red Thread, a unique history of antisemitism blending fiction, history and myth. She is also the author of Back to the Ethic: Reclaiming Western Values, which I reviewed for FrontPage Mag here.

I posed some questions to Ms. Bederman about The Islamophobia Industry.

Mark Tapson: To paraphrase a question you pose in the preface to your new book, why did you decide to write a book about Islam at a time when saying anything critical of it is immediately denounced as bigotry?

Diane Bederman: It says 365 times in the Bible: Do Not Fear.

Fear is debilitating. We often run away rather than confront.

I am of an age and in a place where being called an Islamophobe does not worry me. I cannot be canceled! I worry more about my children and grandchildren. We have to teach our children the importance of protecting democracy and freedom. Ducking and hiding will only lead to a loss of that freedom. The ethic that underpins our freedom, the Judeo/Christian ethic, is 3500 years old. We cannot let it perish out of fear of being called a name or even under threat of death. Without freedom, there is no life.

https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Risk-Right-Understanding-Science-ebook/dp/B01MAXIL21/ref=sr_1_3?crid=

Do cell phones cause brain cancer? Does BPA threaten our health? How safe are certain dietary supplements, especially those containing exotic herbs or small amounts of toxic substances? Is the HPV vaccine safe? We depend on science and medicine as never before, yet there is widespread misinformation and confusion, amplified by the media, regarding what influences our health. In Getting Risk Right, Geoffrey C. Kabat shows how science works—and sometimes doesn’t—and what separates these two very different outcomes.

Kabat seeks to help us distinguish between claims that are supported by solid science and those that are the result of poorly designed or misinterpreted studies. By exploring different examples, he explains why certain risks are worth worrying about, while others are not. He emphasizes the variable quality of research in contested areas of health risks, as well as the professional, political, and methodological factors that can distort the research process. Drawing on recent systematic critiques of biomedical research and on insights from behavioral psychology, Getting Risk Right examines factors both internal and external to the science that can influence what results get attention and how questionable results can be used to support a particular narrative concerning an alleged public health threat. In this book, Kabat provides a much-needed antidote to what has been called “an epidemic of false claims.”