Category Archives: Culture Wars/Current Controversies

Remember the Red Guards Before You Cheer the Woke Mobs Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism

By Peter Van Burn

The American Conservative

I’m ambivalent about statues and J.K. Rowling being torn down, but terrified of the thought process behind the destruction. Decisions should never be made by mobs.  Is America on the edge of a cultural revolution?

The historical namesake and obvious parallel is the Cultural Revolution in China, which lasted from 1966 to 1976. Its stated goal was to purge capitalist and traditional elements from society, and to substitute a new way of thinking based on Mao’s own beliefs. The epic struggle for control and power waged war against anybody on the wrong side of an idea.

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The Path to Better Policing Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Police State/Civil Liberties

Riots work. Even the Neocon Review is now calling for police reform. Some of the proposals are predictably a bit wimpy. But it’s something.

By Robert Verbruggen

National Review

After the egregious killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and the days of protests and rioting that followed, there’s a bipartisan appetite for police reform. If such reform is implemented carefully and intelligently, it could reduce crime and improve relations between police officers and the communities they serve. But if it merely undermines law enforcement, the result could be soaring crime rates and ultimately a turn back to law-and-order politics.

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Tucker: Can the left lead a country they hate? Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies

The problem that I see with Carlson’s monologue (and Trump’s speech) is that it’s the equivalent of a Roman emperor and/or propagandist proclaiming the glories of the Empire. To which the response is, “Yeah, but what about the plebians, imperial legions, and all the crucifixions, dude?” You don’t have to be an apologist for the Empire to dislike the Pol Pot wannabes on the other side of the spectrum, or to recognize the “woke” rhetoric of the new clerisy as a sham.

America Can’t Take Another Four Years of This Lethal Idiot Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Left and Right

The Red Tribe and Blue Tribe increasingly view each other as existential enemies.

By Umair Haque

Eudaimonia

I’m going to say something that you probably already know. Another four years of this — the dystopia America’s become under Donald Trump — is unthinkable and nightmarish. Like I said, you probably know that. Yet I think right about now, everyone could do with a moment of reflection on precisely why.

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What If Black America Were a Country? 2

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Race and Ethnicity

This is some interesting data. If “Black America” were a country, it would be the 31st largest nation in the world per population size, roughly comparable to England, Canada, Mexico, Japan, or Iraq. “Black America” would be 46th in income per capita, between Italy, the UAE, Russia, and Mexico. The United States as a whole is number two per capita (behind only Qatar) and number three in population size behind China and India.

By Theodore R. Johnson

The Atlantic

In a recent debate with a CNN contributor, the conservative radio talk-show host Larry Elder declared that “if black America were a country, it would be the 15th-wealthiest country in the world.” His math proved incorrect, and his invocation of “black America” was followed by a refutation of the concept by a fellow black conservative. Shortly after Elder’s remarks, the Republican strategist Ron Christie argued that there is no such thing as “black America” and, further, that the very notion of it is antithetical “to our national motto of E Pluribus Unum.”

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Racist Police Violence Reconsidered Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Law/Justice, Police State/Civil Liberties, Race and Ethnicity • Tags:

By John McWhorter

Quillette

Tony Timpa was 32 years old when he died at the hands of the Dallas police in August 2016. He suffered from mental health difficulties and was unarmed. He wasn’t resisting arrest. He had called the cops from a parking lot while intoxicated because he thought he might be a danger to himself. By the time law enforcement arrived, he had already been handcuffed by the security guards of a store nearby. Even so, the police officers made him lie face down on the grass, and one of them pressed a knee into his back. He remained in this position for 13 minutes until he suffocated. During the harrowing recording of his final moments, he can be heard pleading for his life. A grand jury indictment of the officers involved was overturned.

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Facebook is out of control. If it were a country it would be North Korea Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Science and Technology

The important takeaway from this article is that it describes how Big Tech has now become the dominant wing of the capitalist class, as Joel Kotkin has pointed out (along with the national security state and financial sector). The ruling class is not a unified monolith, but comprised of competing interests. Nor is there egalitarianism among the ruling class, which is stratified into layer hierarchies in the same way as the general society.

By Carole Cadwalladr

The Guardian

There is no power on this earth that is capable of holding Facebook to account. No legislature, no law enforcement agency, no regulator. Congress has failed. The EU has failed. When the Federal Trade Commission fined it a record $5bn for its role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, its stock price actually went up.

Which is what makes this moment so interesting and, possibly, epochal. If the boycott of Facebook by some of the world’s biggest brands – Unilever, Coca-Cola, Starbucks – succeeds, it will be because it has targeted the only thing that Facebook understands: its bottom line. And if it fails, that will be another sort of landmark.

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‘We’ve got to do something’: Republican rebels come together to take on Trump Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Left and Right

The Republican wing of the Neoliberal Centrist Party attacks the Trumpists.

By Daniel Strauss

The Guardian

Just like in 2016, a faction of the Republican party has emerged to try to defeat Donald Trump in the upcoming presidential election.But unlike the last presidential race, where the effort never truly took off, this time those rebel Republicans have formed better organized groups – and some are even openly backing Trump’s Democratic opponent, Joe Biden.

In 2016, as Trump steamrolled his way through the Republican primary, some Republican lawmakers and operatives tried to mount an effort to stop him. Elected officials and veterans of previous Republican administrations organized letters, endorsed Hillary Clinton, and a few set up meager outside groups to defeat Trump.

That’s happening again – but there are differences. The outside groups are more numerous and better organized, and most importantly, Trump has a governing record on which Republicans can use to decide whether to support him or not.

“I think it’s qualitatively different,” said Republican operative Tim Miller, who co-founded one of the main anti-Trump organizations. “A lot of people who opposed [Trump] did the whole, ‘Oh, Hillary’s also bad, and Trump’s bad, and everybody can vote their conscience’ kind of thing.”

Miller said that 2016’s effort was far more of a “pox on both your houses” phenomenon versus 2020’s “organized effort to defeat him”.

The latest prominent Republican anti-Trump organization made its debut in early July. It’s a Super Pac called 43 Alumni for Biden, and aims to rally alumni of George W Bush’s administration to support the Democrat.

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The Articles of Unity – A Patriotic Plan to Save our Republic (Bret Weinstein) Reply

by • Activism, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Electoralism/Democratism, Left and Right

Bret Weinstein seems to be a guy whose “heart is in the right place,” as a sentimentalist might say.  His core idea is correct, i.e. building an anti-establishment movement that rejects incompetent/corrupt elites while rejecting dangerous authoritarians from the far-left and far-right.

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Almost half of BLM protesters are white; a plurality are suburbanites Reply

by • Activism, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right, Race and Ethnicity

I’ve noticed this as well. But unlike most commentators on the uprising, I would make a sharp distinction between the mainstream protest movement, conventional activism like BLM, the far-left/Antifa, the far-right/Boogaloo, statue vandalizers, and exaggerated sports rioters on one hand, and the actual uprising of the lumenproletariat on the other hand.

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Two people critically injured after car plows into protesters on Seattle freeway Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies

Doug Stanglin

USA TODAY

Police in Seattle have taken into custody the driver of a car that struck two women during a protest on a downtown stretch of Interstate 5 late Friday, leaving one of the victims in critical condition, according to media reports. Washington State Patrol spokesperson Trooper Rick Johnson said early Saturday that the car, which apparently entered the closed freeway through an off-ramp, plowed into “multiple pedestrians” shortly before midnight.  The vehicle was stopped and the driver taken into custody, Johnson said in a tweet. Washington State Patrol Capt. Ron Mead said a 24-year-old woman from Seattle has critical, life-threatening injuries and a 32-year-old woman from Bellingham has serious injuries. The driver, a 27-year-old man from Seattle, was in custody, Mead said. Though motive and charges are under investigation, Mead said the man faces multiple felony charges.

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