RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272235/democracy-deliberation-and-internet-bruce-thornton

For 2500 years a consistent criticism of giving political power to the masses has been the question of competence. To critics like Socrates and Plato, the knowledge of history, philosophy, and facts necessary for governing are beyond the abilities of the average citizen. Hoi polloi had to spend their time making a living rather than studying these disciplines, or they were by nature driven more by their self-interest, appetites, and passions than by the rational search for knowledge of the true and good. Thus from Plato’s Republic to today’s progressive technocrats, some form of technocracy has been preferable to rule by the “low-information” voting masses.

In the last few decades, the explosion of information instantly available on the internet has made this fear of giving political power to the uninformed more urgent in an age of “fake news.” Has the availability of an astonishing volume of information worsened the dangers of ignorance to governing, or has it provided a means of correcting it?

Plato’s student Aristotle, in his critique of his old teacher, points toward one answer to this perennial discomfort with mass democracy and voter ignorance. Responding to Plato’s complaint of the lack of technical and philosophical skills among the people, Aristotle pointed out that what we now call “crowd-sourcing” can still make democratic deliberation effective:

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/21862/the-socialist-the-jihadi-and-the-tooth-fairy

What do socialists and jihadis have in common? They both still believe in the tooth fairy. This is not funny.

Like most groups, socialists and jihadis are divided into leaders and followers. First, we will discuss the leaders.

Socialist leaders promise social justice and income equality to their followers in this life. Jihadi leaders promise 72 virgins to their suicide bombers in the next life. Leadership promises specifically address the particular desires of their adherents – the leaders aren’t stupid – they are manipulative and extremely successful at luring their believers with false promises.

The leadership disingenuously focuses on the promised benefits to their followers while the actual benefits to themselves are ignored. Any cursory study of history exposes the deceitfulness of the leadership’s promises and shows how reality benefits the ruling elite at the expense of the people. So, why do socialists and jihadis still believe their leaders? Because like children they still believe in the tooth fairy. I will explain.

The people of Cuba, Venezuela, Guatemala, and Honduras believed the promises of social justice and income equality made by their scheming socialist leaders. The people were lied to and are now living the equality of suffering and scarcity that socialism actually provides. Socialism necessarily fails because there is no incentive to be productive and eventually you run out of other people’s money.

The ruling elite in socialist countries suffer no such deprivation and the jihadi leadership worldwide remains alive and well – only their duped sycophants end up dead.

The population invasion at our southern border threatens the economic security and homeland security of the United States. Unregulated unvetted mass immigration will bankrupt our welfare system and simultaneously allow criminals and jihadis to enter the country – both create massive chaos.

The border wall is a defense against illegal entry into the United States. So, why would any politician reject it?

Leftist politicians who support socialism reject the border wall because they want a flood of illegal immigrants in the country to vote Democrat and keep them in power. Leftist politicians reject voter ID and any investigation into voter fraud that could expose illegal voting and/or deny voting rights to their followers – they sacrifice national security for their own job security. Their latest scheme is ballot harvesting.

Ballot harvesting is when organized workers or volunteers pick up absentee ballots and drop them off at a polling place or election office. There is absolutely nothing to safeguard the integrity of the ballots or to insure that all votes are delivered. Ballot harvesting is a powerful election-stealing tool that should be eliminated in favor of mailing in sealed signed ballots. If a voter cannot manage the mailing then that voter’s ballot will not count – period.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-defends-the-international-order-11544573701

Does the European Union place the interests of its people above those of its bureaucrats? One audience member reflexively shouted “Yes!” when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo asked the question during his speech to the German Marshall Fund in Brussels last week. That knee-jerk reaction to an honest question illustrates the uphill battle the Trump administration faces as it tries to restore a corroded international order. The administration’s efforts won’t be popular with defenders of the status quo, but systems don’t reform themselves.

Consistent with the postwar tradition of American global leadership, President Trump is now reasserting the role of the nation-state in a free and open order, with the goal of making institutions more effective and accountable. Mr. Pompeo’s remarks came on the sidelines of last week’s meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, one of the many international bodies the U.S. helped create after World War II to promote security, economic growth and cooperation among like-minded states. Organizations like the United Nations and the World Bank are in the same category.

This web of institutions and agreements historically has served the U.S. and its allies well. It was a bulwark against communism and terrorism. It limited interstate conflict and decreased the likelihood of war between great powers. It also helped lift millions out of poverty while impeding the rise of totalitarianism and promoting democracy, prosperity, human rights and freedom.

But this free and open order has gradually begun to fail the world in several ways. Flawed doctrines have taken hold: Multilateralism is an end in itself; the more treaties we sign, the safer we are; the more bureaucracy we have, the better the job gets done. International institutions have steadily encroached on the rights of sovereign nations. Witness how the International Criminal Court is considering investigating American military personnel when the U.S. is not even subject to the court’s jurisdiction.

At the same time, authoritarian regimes have regularly exploited the order for their own ends. Some of the world’s most egregious human-rights abusers, such as Cuba and Venezuela, sit on the U.N. Human Rights Council. China enjoys the benefits of membership in the World Trade Organization while systematically deploying unfair trade practices to protect its domestic market. Iran has used its windfall from the 2015 nuclear deal to support terrorism and other malign activities. Russia has flagrantly violated the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty by testing and deploying prohibited missiles that target Europe. Should responsible nations abide these abuses?

With the international order under siege from actors that would remake it in their own illiberal image, the Trump administration is acting to preserve a just, transparent and free world of sovereign states. This project will require the cooperation of democracies around the world.

President Trump knows nothing can replace the nation-state as the guarantor of democratic freedoms and national interests. When institutions fail to support the sovereign interests of their members, those members must reform them, lawfully cease to participate in them, or eliminate them entirely. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://readgreatliterature.com/trollopes-the-warden-empathy-v-the-media

What famous novelist attacked false news and the unbalanced power of a money-driven mainstream media, and in what novel?
What famous novelist, in this same novel, faulted popular storytellers for creating blind emotion and simplistic portrayals of “good” or “bad” people?
What famous novelist attacked a famous public intellectual for his bombastic cynicism about everything in the modern world?
What novelist thought the central character of a work should be neither a faultless victim nor a morally pristine super-person, but rather an ordinary man, weak but well-meaning, a “mixed” character with good and bad, noble and foolish characteristics all mixed together?

Answer: My favorite novelist Anthony Trollope, in the first of the Barchester Chronicles “The Warden” in 1855. rsk

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272193/kevin-hart-and-politics-comedy-bruce-thornton

For a few days last week it seemed we might witness a rare example of integrity, independence, and courage in Hollywood, that herd of independent minds. Comedian Kevin Hart was slated to host the Oscars, but some tweets insulting to gays from several years ago surfaced, and the Salemite usual suspects began clamoring for the stake.

At first Hart refused to go through the social-media show-trial of groveling apologies. He gave common-sense response that even The New York Times accepted: “Guys, I’m almost 40,” he said. “If you don’t believe that people change, grow, evolve as they get older, I don’t know what to tell you.” Faced with an ultimatum from the Academy to apologize, Hart “passed” on the Academy’s demand.

For a brief moment, champions of free speech and moral courage were heartened. In an industry famous for cutthroat careerism and ruthless ambition checked only by orthodoxy and conformity, for Hart to give up a gig as prestigious and lucrative as hosting the Oscars is unheard of.

But soon it was business as usual. Hart caved, and announced, “I sincerely apologize to the LGBTQ community for my insensitive words from my past . . . I’m sorry that I hurt people. I am evolving and want to continue to do so.” The wolves, however, weren’t satisfied. Hart is now being attacked because his apology was “botched” and “insincere.” He needed to grovel more and show true contrition and evidence he’s “changed.” The p.c. police weren’t done yet with making an example of him to warn any other celebrity who dares stray from the identity-politics plantation.

The censorship of comedians for their content, however, has implications far beyond one comedian or form of entertainment. Controlling criticism of any group because something is deemed offensive or inappropriate ultimately privileges one point of view over another, and weakens everybody’s free-speech rights.

Comedy especially is linked to free speech. Formal comedy arose 2500 years ago at the same time as political free speech, democratic freedom, and equality, and has always had a political purpose––affirming our political equality by satirizing and mocking any group or faction that claims at the expense of other groups a right to more power than it deserves.

https://quillette.com/2018/12/11/sad

“Most of all, radicals should learn to abandon false truths. The only way to escape dogmatism is to resist the calcification and sanctification of values, and to learn from the wisdom of different perspectives. As Haidt argues, there are grains of truth in opposing political positions. Radicals do themselves a disservice by seeing the world of thought outside the radical monoculture as tainted with reaction and evil. There is a rich diversity of thought awaiting them if they would only open their minds to it.”

…..When I became an anarchist I was 18, depressed, anxious, and ready to save the world. I moved in with other anarchists and worked at a vegetarian co-op cafe. I protested against student tuition, prison privatization, and pipeline extensions. I had lawyer’s numbers sharpied on my ankle and I assisted friends who were pepper-sprayed at demos. I tabled zines, lived with my “chosen family,” and performed slam poems about the end of the world. While my radical community was deconstructing gender, monogamy, and mental health, we lived and breathed concepts and tools like call-outs, intersectionality, cultural appropriation, trigger warnings, safe spaces, privilege theory, and rape culture.

What is a radical community? For the purposes of this article, I will define it as a community that shares both an ideology of complete dissatisfaction with existing society due to its oppressive nature and a desire to radically alter or destroy that society because it cannot be redeemed by its own means. I eventually fell out with my own radical community. The ideology and the people within it had left me a burned and disillusioned wreck. As I deprogrammed, I watched a diluted version of my radical ideology explode out of academia and become fashionable: I watched the Left become woke.

Commentators have skewered social justice activists on the toxicity of the woke mindset. This is something that many radicals across North America are aware of and are trying to understand. Nicholas Montgomery and Carla Bergman’s Joyful Militancy (JM), published last year, is the most thorough look at radical toxicity from a radical perspective (full disclosure: I very briefly met Nick Montgomery years ago. My anarchist clique did not like his anarchist clique). As they say, “there is a mild totalitarian undercurrent not just in call-out culture but also in how progressive communities police and define the bounds of who’s in and who’s out.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/americans-frustrated-with-international-disequilibrium-trade-immigration/

International disequilibrium in trade, religious freedoms, immigration — plenty of Americans are fed up.

It is strange how suddenly a skeptical Wall Street, CEOs, and even university and think-tank policy analysts are now jumping on the once-taboo Trump bandwagon on China: that if something is not done to stop China’s planned trajectory to global hegemony, based on its repudiation of the entire post-war trade and commercial order, then it will soon be too late. In a wider sense, at some point on a variety of fronts, Americans got fed up with perceived lopsidedness, and their ensuing exasperation started to change status-quo thinking and policy — whether China’s flagrant cheating, the recent illustration, via the “caravan,” of rampant hypocrisies about illegal immigration, or weariness with the asymmetries with the Islamic world.

China

China in its planned trajectory to world global supremacy makes two assumptions about the United States:

that China can weld government-run market capitalism to autocratic government to improve on supposedly chaotic Western democratic and republican government and indulgent human rights;
that the Western world will continue to excuse Chinese violations of global commercial and trade norms, on their misplaced theories either that the more successful the Chinese become, the more they will evolve to a democratic and transparent society and join the Western liberal community and follow its post-war international norms, or that there is nothing the West can do about a fated Chinese supremacy.

As to Chinese trust that their brand of government-managed capitalism is superior, in the short term, it is true that authoritarian governments, mostly in wartime, occasionally can achieve temporary spectacular results through partnering with capitalists.

But in the longer run, managed capitalism proves far less flexible and ultimately less productive than free markets that are moderately regulated by elected governments rather than heavily controlled by authoritarians or socialists.

In addition, the Chinese misjudge Western patience, especially as its surpluses grow, its violations of copyright and patents become more flagrant, and espionage and technological appropriation are seen as a Chinese birthright.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/anti-semitism-hate-crimes-real-threat-from-leftist-politics/It’s not as simple as blaming Trump.
This column makes spurious accusations against Donald Trump: “Further, Trump has consistently voiced animus towards Muslims, so if his rhetoric were responsible for hate crimes, Muslim victimization should have increased.” He also claims the President is anti-Latino. Check your facts which are otherwise correct Robert Cherry! The president has absolutely not consistently voiced animus to Moslems- or Latinos only to Islamic terrorists and violent illegal immigrants…..rsk

In the wake of the Pittsburgh shootings, the Anti-Defamation League reported a 57 percent spike in anti-Semitic acts between 2016 and 2017. Shortly thereafter, the FBI reported a 17 percent increase in anti-Semitic hate crimes. Many commentators linked this uptick to President Trump’s rhetoric. When commenting on the ADL report, Julie Ioffe claimed that Trump “has radicalized so many more people than ISIS ever did.”

A closer look at the statistics, however, indicates that linking anti-Semitic acts to Trump’s rhetoric is problematic and much too one-sided. The ADL report found an almost doubling of campus incidents of bullying and harassment, for example, which are most likely associated with left-wing anti-Zionist forces. And while its intimidation measure doubled, this was mainly because it includes a spree of bomb threats made by a disturbed Israeli youth. In addition, the ADL relies on reports it receives from a variety of institutions, and at least a portion of the increase in anti-Semitic acts reflected “more people . . . reporting incidents than ever before.”

Similarly, the FBI relies on reporting from law-enforcement agencies, and an additional 1,000 agencies reported for the first time in 2017. In addition, the increase was driven entirely by a substantial rise in vandalism of property, as there was a drop in assaults and incidents of intimidation. And as others have pointed out, all three categories were lower in 2017 than they had been a decade earlier.

Further, Trump has consistently voiced animus towards Muslims, so if his rhetoric were responsible for hate crimes, Muslim victimization should have increased. There was, however, an 18 percent decline in anti-Muslim hate crimes, reflecting reductions in all three categories. By contrast, during the Obama years, anti-Muslim hate crimes more than tripled.

Latinos were another group that was subject to Trump’s animus, and the hate crimes they experienced rose by 17 percent. However, anti-Latino assaults — the most serious category — were virtually unchanged, as the overall increase reflected primarily increases in incidents of intimidation and property vandalism.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/11/new-confessionalism/

Hardly a week goes by without some famous person or other revealing one detail or other of his disreputable personal life, whereupon there is an outpouring of praise for his candour and an avalanche of similar confessions. We have given up fortitude and replaced it with psychobabble.

Dr Christina Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault when he was seventeen and she was fifteen years old, initially claimed that a fear of flying made it difficult for her to come to Washington to testify. It emerged, however, that she flew regularly to places as far apart as Tahiti and Delaware.

President Trump mocked her claim to suffer from fear of flying. I am not sure that it is the place of a president to mock a citizen of his country in this fashion, but I couldn’t help smiling nonetheless. “I’m no psychology professor,” he wrote, “but it does seem weird to me that someone could have a selective fear of flying. Can’t do it to testify but for vacation, well it’s not a problem at all.”

I was familiar with this selective type of fear from my medico-legal practice. People would claim to have been rendered agoraphobic by some negligent act or omission such that they could no longer leave the house and go to work, and therefore were entitled to large sums in compensation, but when I examined their medical records I would discover that they had been immunised against yellow fever for a holiday in Brazil. The man in the street might think that this discovery would have put paid to the claim. If you can leave your home to go to Brazil (64,000 murders last year), surely you can catch the Number 17 bus to go to the office twenty-five minutes away?

But the man in the street would be wrong. The apparent discrepancy would be explained away by a psychologist, and this is precisely what a psychologist did in the case of Dr Blasey Ford. He said that it was not uncommon for a fear of flying to wax and wane according to destination. In other words (though he did not pronounce them), it was the destination, not the flying, that created the anxiety. But oddly enough courts never seemed to draw this conclusion, perhaps because it would have threatened the lucrative livings provided by the tort system. That is why practically no claim was too outrageous to be entertained.

Gender neutral language and pronouns?

What have we come to? Will the classic musical “Guys and Dolls” have to change its title to “Zeys and Shims”????

Will we no longer hear the wonderful “There is Nothing Like a Dame” from South Pacific? Instead “There is Nothing Like a Hir” ????

And what about “I Enjoy Being a Girl”???? It will definitely be banned…buy your Peggy Lee copy now.

I’m a girl and by me that’s only great
I am proud that my silhouette is curvy
that I walk with a sweet and girlish gait
With my hips kind of swivelly and swervey
I’m strictly a female female
And my future I hope will be
In the home of a brave and free male
who’ll enjoy being a guy, having a girl like me.

Oh Puleez!!!!rsk