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This week, we go it alone. And by that we mean no guest, just our guys performing some Rank Punditry® on the news of the day, energy on Texas, WandaVision (well, James tries to talk about it), Rob’s recently completed trip to Kenya, Peter’s sojourn in Wyoming, and various other personal and political points of interest. We’ve also got new Lileks Post of The Week, courtesy of David Foster (our apologies on the tardy jingle, David), and Rob tells us how to get forbidden cheese past U.S. Customs. Information for life.
Music from this week’s show: Ladysmith Black Mambazo – (Mbube) The Lion Sleeps Tonight
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23% wind
Amazon Prime Video also removed a documentary about Clarence Thomas during Black History month
myth becomes legend
legend becomes truth
which is why we should use blacklist
Martial metaphors in politics are probably unavoidable but they’re also useless. Most people who claim to be “fighting” some supposed evil aren’t. They’re running their mouths off about it and wanting to be considered somehow heroic for that.
Gay marriage wouldn’t have been stopped or even slowed if its opponents had started yammering ceaselessly about it in that era. It would have just meant that other important discussions were sidelined and those opponents would have felt more free to use the issue as an excuse for not dealing with problems on their own side.
Arguments persuade no one who already has a strong opinion. And in today’s climate the odds are no one who disagrees with you is listening anyway, making the combative posture even more deluded.
fighting (if we’re stuck with the term) in the sphere of the culture should at least refer to something that happens in the sphere of culture rather than infecting every other kind of discourse. Go write a novel. It also means that there should be another sphere where we can have serious discussions about politics without culture war posturing and chest thumping.
So can we stop misusing “politics is downstream of culture?” I don’t know how you got the idea that it means you should launch your raft downstream and vainly try to paddle up while lashing the stream like Xerxes did the Hellespont. It means that politics can be about politics. If the cultural battles are won upstream we’ll feel the benign effects in the political sphere. If not we have to deal with reality as it is.
Rob and James are kinda correct that the mass of people aren’t demanding pure safety, up front. But when Something Happens, the mass of people – or maybe it’s just the most noisy few – demand to know why the government didn’t prevent it.
This drives me crazy. The left can’t decide what can be spoken, nor who can speak. And the only “punishments” they can dole out involve withholding their association from those with whom they no longer with to associate. The language used to describe these issues is unmoored from reality. I for one don’t want to work, do business, or socialize with those who don’t want anything to do with me. Why would I want to force myself on those who decline to associate with me?
And even if I cared about this stuff as much as everyone else here, that’s no excuse to misrepresent the first amendment or twist the meaning of free speech.
Translation:
The Right shouldn’t waste time challenging toxic Left wing ideas such as Equity, Critical Race Theory, America’s lack of exceptionalism, the 1619 Project, the need for European-style “hate-speech” codes, etc., but instead focus its energy on traditional political concerns: Elections, fiscal policy, legislation, and the courts. Those things are tangible and concrete. The rest? Mere abstraction.
Some people need their jobs to like, y’know, live.
I’ve moved away in recent years from the idea that the first amendment only applies to the government.
The fundamental premise of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence is that our rights aren’t granted to us by the government; they pre-exist the government, and the entire purpose of government is to “secure” those rights.
Logically, that means that when an individuals free speech is threatened by non-governmental actors like big tech, it is the duty of the government to take action to ensure that free speech is unfettered.
I don’t need a translation and you come to false conclusions when you don’t believe in abstractions. Different conservatives will feel compelled to focus on different things. What I’m saying is that we should be able to have actual conversations about one thing or another without bringing every single one back to a preferred culture war narrative. Some of those conversations should even be about the raging cacafuego that is the present GOP.
An awareness of whether we’re wearing our cultural our political combatant hats in any conversation is vital. Otherwise we’ll constantly be planning our eventual cultural putsch and ignoring the present needs of the country as it actually exists.
So to each according to his need then. Are we guaranteeing jobs for everyone but just those whose politics you like?
Your logic is faulty. Wherever rights come from you only have rights against those who would try to coerce you. Positive rights are nonsensical because they entail obligations on the part of others which infringe on their own rights. You have a right to nothing. Not a job, not a social media account. Unless they’re literally threatening to hit you over the head with a rock big tech can’t threaten your free speech because that’s not what free speech means. You’re arguing in favor of actively curtailing the associational rights of others based on a sense of entitlement to megaphone.
Fine. “The country as it actually exists” is populated by a generation weaned on a diet of anti-Americanism, ethnocentrism, and a new (and frightening) understanding of freedom of speech. The headwaiters feeding them are elementary school teachers, high school teachers, college professors, journalists, the social media commentariat, news editors, advertising executives, and Hollywood producers.
That’s the country as it presently exists, my friend … a country with a young, “Woke” population that 45 minutes from now will be setting policy.
With luck they won’t get past Max Headroom, which is only 20 minutes into the future…
“Wind’s share has tripled to about 25% since 2010 and accounted for 42% of power last week before the freeze set in.”
–The Wall Street Journal, “A Deep Green Freeze,” Feb 15, 2021
Actually, it’s “1 pair of XX chromosomes makes you a woman”
That seems to be a contradiction. If it increased TO about 25%, how could it have been 42% that week?
Answer: It couldn’t have been.
What that suggests is that it may have been 42% of ACTIVE power before then, because other reserve sources were not active at that time when there was a good wind supply. But when the windmills froze up, the other sources either didn’t come on quickly enough, or suffered their own failures due to cold that they hadn’t been sufficiently protected from when constructed.
Of course it can. The more institutions it captures, the more it determines which ideas will be permitted, and which will not. Can they keep you from speaking in the street, or in your home, or on the phone? Of course not. But in the workplace, for example, their ideas, put into place by go-along managers, require that certain words are forbidden, and certain words are required to replace others. You’re correct to say it’s not a 1A issue. It’s still bad, and has the effect of stifling speech and requiring people to say things they do not believe.
“SO QUIT!” Yeah okay. I’m not advocating using the state to change the situation, but I am advocating for people to push back and demand a debate.
By which you mean “not carry your book in their store,” which of course is their right, or “fire someone,” which is also their right. But I don’t think it’s healthy if someone can be fired for something they did not do because someone else lies about something you didn’t do or say, but is believed because it is “Their Truth,” and the people in charge of firing are operating along half-baked quasi-comprehended BS about power hierarchies and systemic systemisms. No, they’ve more arrows in their quivers.
Ah, then you haven’t had certain sets of phonemes banned in your workplace.
I don’t suppose anyone would, unless one is a clueless boor. But if I was in, say, the voice acting business, and had my work removed from projects on which I’d worked, and saw all future opportunities dry up because I had said something on Twitter three years ago that got the mob het up, I would be concerned about my ability to make a living. SO FIND ANOTHER JOB! Okay. Likewise, if I wrote cookbooks, and Amazon declined to carry my books because I had been excoriated by the Wokeoisie for having an opinion out of step with the times – say, equality is a better goal than equity – then I would, in fact, want to associate with Amazon despite its opinion of me, as there are few other channels of comparable size.
You make some good points, but what happened to our faith in the market? The actions you describe involve the loss of real economic value.
I see the corporate censorship issue as part of the broader trend: conservatives abandoning ideals of personal responsibility and rugged individualism when they percieve their own ox getting gored. Instead of practicing entrepreneurship and taking our talents elsewhere to those who value them, we’re suddenly supposed to think of ourselves as helpless agaisnt the power of our monopolistic corporate overlords, unless we form some kind of network of solidarity and collective action.
I never saw the world that way when those arguments were coming solely from the left and I don’t see it that way now.
Let me take another crack at this. Contract is not “power” it’s trade, including the contract of employment. That’s a core understanding of the world underlying why I’m on the right not the left. Your employer requires you to follow guidelines in the workplace just like you require that he/she pay you. It’s a free trading relationship between equal citizens. When you speak in the workplace you speak with your employer’s money, which you have no more entitlement to do than he has to speak with yours.
I’m not going to start buying into marxists or intersectionalist ideas about “power dynamics” just because it’s more fun when conservatives are the righteous victims.
James, you and I are tilting at windmills here. Many Conservatives I know have little patience for the world of ideas. Things like writing, drama, comedy, etc., are abstract intangibles that at best can be classified as Diversion. We don’t need it. Or as Jonah Goldberg’s late father-in-law was fond of asking about things of which he was dubious: “Can you eat it?”
No. You can’t. Which is why Conservatives have been such a non-presence in the arts. Their attitude (which I halfway understand, by the way) is basically: “Bah! I’ve got 50 acres of dry field to plow in the morning — I don’t have time for this stuff!”
Once again: I get it.
Except I don’t — not really — and not just because I’ve had to watch my own profession (scriptwriting) being eaten away by the gangrene of Wokeness. That’s only part of it. The rest is the Woke Left’s capture of education and (God help us all) U.S. history. Taken together — Woke art, Woke education, and Woke history — and you’re talking about an Unholy Trinity whose effect on our culture is only just now starting to be felt.
I was actually surprised to hear someone like Rob — an unbelievably bright guy and also a scriptwriter, for God’s sakes — minimizing the extent of the problem.
This country was founded on intangibles. I’ll always remember the first time I read someone in Ricochet use “scribbler” as a pejorative as if that didn’t include the founders. If conservatives are really what you describe then I was even more deluded than I’ve come to realize in thinking that I ever understood them.
Jonah was conveying a piece of personal advice from his father in law who experienced a world under communism without the west’s noble abstractions. The soviet union was a country founded on “things you can eat,” material things like the produce of slave peasants and the sweat of slave workers. No fru-fru artists there. Predictably they all starved.
Today’s right is so consumed with hatred for the new shiny affluent left and it’s pretensions to clerisy that they’ve become the mirror image of the old commie proletariat left, a workers party as they’re honest enough to call themselves.
Loss of economic value for Amazon? They could decided not to carry any books by conservatives, and it would be a rounding error.
I agree, in part, but it’s not just corporate decisions not to carry certain products or hire certain people. It’s one part of a redefinition of a set of ideas as outside the realm of acceptable thought. I hesitate to bring up CRT again, because some people regard inordinate concern over its influence strike others as anti-fluoride-types who’ve seized on the latest thing you got from your elderly relative with Re:re:re:re:re:re in the subject line. But when the NYT is doing stories about how the right is trying to “censor” CRT, then you know that the intelligentsia is invested in CRT. Do they believe it all? Probably not. Do they understand it all? Probably not. But they are certain that the people opposed to it have bad motives.
The result: the language of CRT gets injected into everything, and like all faddish dogmas, it explains everything neatly. So neatly that heretics must be mad, or evil. Once enough people are convinced of its premises and have trained themselves to see everything in terms of white supremacy, well, Shazam: white supremacy, everywhere. In everything. Assuming white supremacy is at the heart of nearly every aspect of American history and culture is the default. Reject the premise, and you’re a flat-earther in a pointy white hood.
This is what I’m concerned about, and it’s the engine that drives the zeal of the cancellers and their lazy enablers who just regard this fundamental rewrite of American precepts as the latest iteration of “good-person liberalism.”
Rob may figure that as long as he can write Woke scripts for a Woke audience, it’s okay.
I agree completely. But that’s an argument about substance. What irritates me is the obsession with tactics. Private companies in the 50s were right to blacklist communists. Blacklisting is not inherently wrong. I see conservatives making convoluted arguments about the evil of certain tactics because it gives them access to their own brand of victimology rather than making the substantive case against wokism.
Is there no validity in objecting to immediate actions that could ultimately limit conservatives to talking from atop crates at street corners?
You’re absolutely right. That’s my view too. Let me say that my primary concern is not people getting fired for refusing to participate in compelled speech. That’s big; it matters. But my primary gripe is the end result of compelled speech on the civic debate when the media companies determine the only permitted terms for discussion of the issues.
Again, that’s not my primary concern. You may not buy into them, and good for you. But when the quasi-Marxist claptrap of grievance pyramids becomes the prism through which all light must necessarily be filtered, every single debate of consequence must be seen through the new wisdom. You mentioned before that you are concerned about matters that truly affect the country’s future – well, so am I. If racist and white supremacy suffuses every aspect of society, then no governmental initiative can avoid centering itself around an anti-racist perspective, and no criticism of that perspective is valid.
Not so sure. I mean, I get the practicality aspect, but I think Conservatives were absent in the arts because the languages of abstraction were unappealing, or deduced that belief in being transgressive in art necessarily meant one had to subscribe to a raft of issues trailing along like Marley’s cashboxes. Or they saw no place in the arts for the sort of iron-laws-of-nature economic ideas that form Conservative views, and were also inclined to a soft humanism when it came to cultural issues.
As for Conservatives who are not involved in art creation being uninterested in the arts themselves, that’s never been my experience. They might be more likely to dismiss modern nonsense, but art itself? Hardly.
Wha? The USSR spent huge amounts of resources on art and culture, because it was a means of glorifying the state. The last 25 years of Soviet architecture was wild stuff. Fru-fru galore. Ugly as hell, but fascinating in a parallel-world sort of way.
Here’s the thing about a Worker’s Party: if you don’t have one, you’ll get one. Best to get ahead of that inevitability.
James, a prospect even worse than the one you’re describing – – all right, scratch that; not worse, exactly, but every bit as bad – is the prospect of a new type of government-sponsored racism carrying the benign-sounding name of “Equity,” which of course means a retributive ladder of preferences, with historically oppressed groups occupying the upper rungs and historical oppressors (guess who?) way down here on terra firma, getting, on occasion, peed on. And worse.
Not if the workers don’t see that as their primary identity or even as an identity, and are instead motivated by a patriotic creed. That’s what I thought the tea party was. Either I was wrong then or things changed. It doesn’t matter now because that kind of politics isn’t coming back if it was ever here.