RUTHFULLY YOURS

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

As individuals, we are a combination of genetics and experience. Similarly, the United States is a product of its genetic makeup – its people, natives and immigrants – and its experiences, which includes everything that has happened over the past four centuries – the carving of towns and villages from the wilderness, the curse of slavery and its abolition, and especially the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Our experiences include the building of roads, railroads and the telegraph, the Civil War, the taming of the west, the industrialization of the economy and the rise of cities, schools and colleges, two world wars, the Cold War and its aftermath, and the internet. Our Country’s genetic makeup continues to expand as immigrants become citizens and new births add to our population. And, so do our experiences. Everything we do – the good and the bad – add to who we are.

We are a polyglot nation, not easily categorized. We are not, as The New York Times with its 1619 Project would have us be, a nation imbued with systemic racism, a country of victims and oppressors. On the other hand, we, as a nation, should be aware of the warts in our past. God, it has been said, cares little of what we have done. He cares about we do and will do.

Robert E. Lee has become symbolic of white oppression. As a defender of slavery and Commander of the Army of Virginia, he deserves reproach. But hatred for what he represented in that aspect of his life blinds us to the whole man. Like all of us, he was complex. His father “Light-Horse Harry” Lee was a Revolutionary War General and Governor of Virginia who landed in debtors’ prison around 1812. He abandoned his family and moved permanently to the West Indies. Lee was raised by his mother who died a month after he graduated second in his class from West Point, where he later served as Superintendent. When the Civil War broke out, he was torn between allegiance to the United States and loyalty to Virginia, his place of birth. (It was a time when people traveled less; so, one’s home state meant more than it does today.) In 1865, at Appomattox, General Lee surrendered his sword without animus to a younger General Grant, who had graduated in the bottom half of his class at West Point. In the aftermath of the War and at a time of bitter recriminations on the part of many Southerners toward the victorious North, Lee supported reconciliation with a reborn United States, later led by his former foe.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/12/the-fun-police-state/

Once upon a time, America’s unofficial motto was: “It’s a free county.” Americans largely agreed that all could and should do what they wanted, assuming they weren’t hurting anyone else. You like vacations, someone else likes being a homebody. You like rock, he likes rap, and she likes country. If you wanted to smoke, ride a motorcycle, or move across the country to find yourself, that was up to you. It was understood and widely accepted that a foundational part of our system was wide-ranging freedom. And the corollary to that freedom was a strong, mutual commitment to “live and let live.”

No more. So much of the piling on that takes place today on social media involves confrontations between ordinary people going about their lives and aggressive, pestering interlopers with very rigid ideas about how others should live. 

One of the chief characteristics of these busybodies is an instinctual revulsion at the sight of other people having fun. 

What’s Important in Life?

One might think fun, enjoyment, and recreation are merely optional; the icing on the cake of the real stuff of life. This is wrong. Laughter, music, discussion, literature, falling in love, beauty, and pursuing things simply for their own sake are more real and more human than many of the supposed important things.

What we think of as important—utilitarian concerns like paying bills, politics, or safety—are the instrumental things that we need in order to live real life. When we are liberated from the realm of necessity—food, shelter, and safety—we are at our most human. As the late Father James V. Schall wrote, “[A]t peace, we should be about ritual, about what is done that need not be done, about what is beautiful that need not be, about what exists that need not exist at all. The activity is what we should be about.” 

People who confuse instrumental goods with the essence of life are the boring sorts who love to tell you about their important promotion or how they just bought a Rolex. They mistake mere activity for living.

A more extreme variant of these ordinary kinds of bores are the “fun police.” They follow and conform, aggressively harassing those who do not. They take their directions from experts deemed acceptable by the authorities. The ideology of progressivism allows these mediocre conformists to imagine themselves as daring iconoclasts. Doing what is praised, rewarded, and respectable is the essence of their life. It really bugs them that others aren’t on board with the program. 

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-7-13-on-the-foolish-quest-for-cosmic-justice-through-government-coercio

A couple of days ago a reader sent me a personal email (not a comment on the blog) responding to my June 30 post with the title “Reminder: How Progressive ‘Programs’ Keep African Americans Down.” The post discussed issues including that African Americans in the United States have lower recorded average incomes and wealth than the averages of other ethnic groups. The key point made in the responsive email was this (paraphrase): “You are full of criticisms for all the attempts to solve these problems, yet you never propose any solutions yourself.”

That is correct. I have not proposed “solutions” to these “problems.” And there is a reason for that. The reason is that no “solutions” to these “problems” exist; at least, no solutions exist if the concept of an acceptable solution consists of some government spending program or order or command issued to the people.

I have put the words “solutions” and “problems” in quotes for a specific reason. The reason is that characterizing things like group income and wealth disparities as “problems” in need of “solutions” fundamentally mischaracterizes the situation. A “problem” is something that a smart person, or group of people, can sit down and “solve.” If you characterize issues like these as “problems,” you inherently imply that “solutions” must exist and that people of good will should get to work and figure out the solutions and put them into effect right away. And then, in short order, the “problem” will have gone away.

There is no solution that is going to make issues like group income or wealth disparities go away any time soon. The things that governments can do to ameliorate these issues — things like providing equal opportunity under the law, equal protection of the laws, equal educational opportunities, and so forth — have mostly already been done. I’m not saying that they have been done perfectly. No human institution is perfect. So there is always room to improve. But no actions of this sort will ever achieve perfect fairness and justice in the world, or anything close to it. And then there are massive spending and redistribution programs. Those will only make disparities worse.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/07/27/america-warts-and-all/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

I grew up in a household in perennially corrupt Chicago, where all politicians were considered guilty until proven innocent. This seems to me even now a sensible standard, and well beyond the city limits of Chicago.

The one exception to this standard chez Epstein was during World War II, when my father was a strong supporter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Even here, though, he was less for Roosevelt than against the American isolationism, which he detested, of Roosevelt’s opposition. Eager for the United States to join the war against the Nazis, not least to help stop the mass murder then in progress of European Jews, my father was so passionate about this that he would not allow Colonel McCormick’s isolationist Chicago Tribune in the house. He used to tell the story of one day having a flat tire when a driver in a Tribune truck pulled up to help him. “Get the hell out of here, I don’t need your goddamn help,” my father told the guy. Recounting the story, my father commented, “That’s how stupid politics can make you!”

Politics, I know, has made me stupid more than once during my life. Happiness is often cited as the end of politics, but politics hasn’t brought all that much happiness into the world. The more intensely political the time, the less happiness seems available. Nor is truth another leading by-product of politics. I used to say that I have never lost a political argument, a claim whose remarkableness is offset only by the sad fact that neither have I ever won one. As for politics and rational argument, Jonathan Swift nailed it nicely when he remarked that it is useless to attempt to reason a man out of something he wasn’t reasoned into. 

This is truer than ever today, when our politics seems more divisive than I and most other people can remember. The politics of rivaling interests of an earlier time — labor versus management, big versus small government, urban versus rural — seemed more sensible, certainly less heated. Today our politics presents us with rivaling virtues, which is, somehow, more poisonous. “I’m for social justice, for eliminating poverty and all traces of racism and making the world the better place I know it can be,” says the new progressive, adding, “unlike you, Schmuckowitz, with your pathetic greed, belief in a decadent capitalism, and total failure of imagination.” The conservative replies: “Without liberty, the spirit of entrepreneurship and its resultant prosperity, and proper respect for our country’s best traditions, we are nowhere, and your naïve utopianism, Schlepperman, not to mention indignation and anger, are no help.” So they go on, Schmuckowitz and Schlepperman, back and forth, each informing the other that, let’s face it, I am a much better person than you. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/democracy-dies-in-darkness-but-dont-blame-trump-11594661547?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Remember the grave warnings when Donald Trump was elected about how his presidency would usher in an unprecedented assault on freedom of expression?

Ululations of orchestrated hysteria went up from the nation’s media. It was 1933 again. Late Weimar America would succumb to an authoritarian with a distinctive haircut and a penchant for intolerant rhetoric.

A few weeks before the 2016 election, the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a thunderous warning: “A Trump presidency represents a threat to press freedom unknown in modern history.”

“Democracy Dies in Darkness,” which some have noted sounds like the working title for an inferior James Bond movie, became the daily front-page leitmotif of a major newspaper, its reporters bravely committed to holding aloft the flickering lamp of freedom amid the gathering gloom of tyranny.

Four years on, it’s clear the warnings were justified. Consider the state of free speech in Mr. Trump’s America. Newspaper editors are forced to quit because of pieces they’ve run. Academics are removed from positions for daring to dissent from the dominant orthodoxy. Corporate executives have been fired for opinions written three decades ago that now fall outside the lines of acceptable public discourse.

In classrooms, newsrooms and boardrooms across the country, you can almost hear the silence as people internally check what they say in the knowledge that if they cross the line they’ll be publicly denounced and very likely terminated.

The darkness has indeed claimed democracy.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/07/09/blm-rebels-without-a-cause/

Around the world, people understandably reacted in anger and disgust at the killing of George Floyd. But if the subsequent protests, which descended, at points, into riots, lootings and indiscriminate iconoclasm, are meant to increase racial harmony and deter police brutality, then they’ve failed spectacularly.

In a few short weeks, more black people have died from the chaotic and indiscriminate violence, excused by leftist media and politicians, than unarmed black people at the hands of the supposedly racist police in the whole of 2019.

But were the protests at least built on a solid foundation? Is there rampant racism in the police force, and systemic racism in the US as a whole? In short, no.

Are police killing black people more than whites?

Derek Chauvin, who killed Floyd, is now under arrest and awaiting trial. He is likely to spend the rest of his life in jail. In this instance the legal system is clearly not racist. Moreover, Minneapolis chief of police, Medaria Arradondo, is black – a fact that undercuts the charge that the Minneapolis police department is systemically racist.

Racists do exist, of course. And there will be racists in the 800,000-strong US police force. But to say that the US is systemically racist is a different claim. And too many people are unable to make this distinction, or worse, propagate a narrative that deliberately blurs it.

In an essay on the Black Lives Matter protests and riots of the mid-2010s, I referred to studies from Harvard, Washington State University and the City University of New York, which all suggested that police in the US do not shoot blacks more than whites. In fact, the evidence suggested they are less likely to shoot black suspects.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/06/13/democrats-let-the-vandals-in-the-gate-and-joined-them/

There is today an air of illegitimacy and political thuggishness about the increasingly illiberal Democrats who seem bent on destroying both logic and the evenhanded rule of law.  Democrats erase facts, cancel people, proscribe and punish unwanted thought and speech. They discriminate on the basis of race and gender, taking away and giving to the favored the jobs, money and property of the disfavored. Hypocrisy sets the standard and Jacobin-like terror enforces it.

A radicalized Democratic Party is no more a normal political party benignly participating in the American electoral system than communist China is a normal nation participating in international trade and diplomacy in a benign and above-board manner.

It is easy to see the onrushing menace, but in America today, with constitutional protections and ordinary human decency already being swept aside by powerful Democrat forces in the Congress, in the media and in the streets, it is dangerous to sound the alarm and make oneself a target for retribution.

Avert your eyes, bend your knee and remain silent or suffer the consequences!

First, the evildoers came for President Trump with false charges and illegitimate prosecutions; then they illegitimately came for Judge Kavanaugh, General Flynn and others; soon, if they win or steal the election, a jackbooted squad of political sociopaths will come for all dissident Americans who refuse to knuckle under and be dehumanized by authoritarian Democrats.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/07/13/are-we-in-the-first-days-of-a-lawless-era/

Civilized people don’t behave in this way. When some portion of a society goes beyond the law, the larger portion has historically made the course correction. Today, it’s a far smaller segment than it has been in the past.

A nation founded on the rule of law appears to be yielding to the rule of the mob. Not everyone has surrendered. The trend, though, is worrisome. Too many of our “leaders” and institutions are failing us.

In 2020, law enforcement officers in this country are being treated not just with disrespect but in many instances are being abused verbally and physically. Rioters and looters are going unpunished, not because they can’t be identified or the cases against them are weak but because prosecutors (several of them backed by George Soros) refuse to uphold the law and charge the offenders. Violent gangs have been allowed, almost encouraged, to take over city streets, sidewalks, and private property; shut down the free movement of others; and topple public monuments.

Civilized people don’t behave in this way. When some portion of a society goes beyond the law, the larger portion has historically made the course correction. Today, it’s a far smaller segment than it has been in the past.

Right here we’re going to say something that might seem over the line. We believe that “the mobs of tearful, angry students,” as the Washington Post put it, who raged after the 2016 election, the current convulsion of violence, as well all the unrest in between, wouldn’t have occurred if Hillary Clinton was president. What we’re seeing is an extended tantrum over the Trump election.

https://spectator.us/the-vanity-of-white-guilt/

When I was about ten, on return home from church I ate a peach, the juice of which dribbled down my new pink frock. I scuttled to my room to change, bunching the dress under the bed. I emerged the picture of innocence, but I felt guilty. For weeks, the garment pulsed with accusation. Going to sleep, I always knew it was there.

Sure enough, my mother discovered the wad while vacuuming, and she was furious. She could have scrubbed out the juice had I told her about it right away. To this day, I’m mindful that you can only expunge stains while they’re still fresh — and somewhere in there lurks a metaphor.

I’m not prone to remembering the ingestion of individual pieces of fruit. That small memory looms as a touchstone for the experience of culpability. I’d not acted responsibly, and I’d compounded my malfeasance with concealment. When called out, I hung my head with nothing to say for myself. The last thing I felt inclined to do was to tear outside and advertise to the whole neighbourhood that I’d been a bad little girl.

Though the concept of collective ‘white guilt’ has been with us since at least the 1960s, it’s seen quite the fashionable resurgence in the wake of the George Floyd protests last month. As universities, businesses and celebrities fall all over themselves to banner their racial blameworthiness, pale-faced mea culpas gather into a deafening chorus.

The issues are two. First, one of this column’s running themes: emotional fraudulence. Clarion declarations of moral dereliction do not have the texture of guilt. They are prideful. They have the texture of preening. Elaborate racial apologies are a form of showing off. When last month the actress Jenny Slate resigned from the animated Netflix show Big Mouth because voicing a half-black character was ‘an example of white privilege’ and ‘an act of erasure of black people’ within ‘a system of societal white supremacy’, she wasn’t making a career sacrifice, but bidding for elevated status.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/jews_against_themselves.html

Jews are now commemorating what is known as the Three Weeks.  It is when Jews express grief for the destruction of the Holy Temple in ancient Israel.  The Temple was breached by the Romans in 69 C.E.  The mourning period concludes with a fast to remember when both Holy Temples were set aflame.  Thus, Tisha B’Av (Ninth of Av) is the saddest day of the Jewish calendar.

These calamitous events, among others, came from outside the Jewish world but have impacted it for centuries.  What is happening today in America and abroad is that Jews are deliberately working against themselves.  Why are so many Jews joining forces with a known anti-Semitic group such as the Black Lives Matter?

In his 2015 book titled Jews Against Themselves, Edward Alexander examines the various strains of thought that many Jews have adopted.  The ultimate aim of each strain is the hollowing out of Judaism and the obliteration of Israel.  These approaches pit Jewish particularism against Jewish universalism, the latter which results in undermining Jewish interests and lives.  In essence, it is “Jewish suicidalism [sic].”

For example “Judith Butler who urges progressive people to fight anti-Semitism … maintains that it is ‘wildly improbable that somebody examining the divestment petitions signed by herself and her co-conspirators might take them (as hundreds on her own campus already had) as condoning anti-Semitism.'”  In short, Butler dismisses actions such as BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) and cannot comprehend that they are overtly anti-Semitic.  She is wearing blinders while maintaining the alleged moral high ground.