Academia

Protest or Insurrection?

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The protests that quickly morphed into rioting and mass looting began with an arrest of a career felon for trying to pass a counterfeit bill. He had been convicted of felony home invasion and robbery in Texas and served 5 years in prison. According to several unreliable sites, he was”turning his life around” and was involved with a church. That argument is somewhat diminished by the fact that he had Methamphetamine and Fentanyl in toxic levels at autopsy. The reaction in Minneapolis was extreme and horrific.

Some of the destruction can be seen here the next day.

It got worse, much worse.

The spineless leftist Mayor is now seeking $55 million form somebody to repair damage he might have prevented.

Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey will seek state and federal aid to rebuild city structures following over a week of looting and rioting, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported Friday.

Some 220 buildings have been damaged and require at least $55 million in repairs, the city’s Community Planning & Economic Development department said earlier this week, noting that the city was “not yet ready to produce a credible estimate.” City Council members warned that the costs will likely be far higher, while Mayor Frey said damages could reach into the “hundreds of millions.”

Typically, he tried to seek approval from black rioters and was expelled from the meeting.

He was elected on a platform of fighting “global warming.”

A pretty good explanation of what is behind all this.

For white liberals, a black identity shaped by rage is not only to be condoned, but celebrated. All politics is identity politics to liberals, because the whole object of their existence is to invent one’s identity according to therapeutic needs. That is why the progressive movement took up the cause of transgender rights with such passion: To change one’s gender is the ultimate expression of self-invention in defiance of nature and tradition.

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Worthwhile Reading

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A long but interesting essay about Peter Thiel, who is IMO one of the more thoughtful and creative among the Silicon Valley set.

The politicization of everything…including websites like nextdoor.com, “designed for people to share useful information within a neighborhood like dates of bulky trash-pick, locations of road closings, and postings of lawn equipment for sale”…as seen by a woman who is a music historian, with a particular concentration on Russia.

Dispatches from the front lines of the knitting wars.  Can these people be trusted with knitting needles? Those things can be dangerous, you know.

A post by a police officer’s wife.

Violent protest and the intelligentsia.  Disturbing parallels between pre-revolutionary Russia and contemporary America.

A walk across a beach in Normandy.  Today, June 6, marks the 76th anniversary of the Normandy invasion..I haven’t seen much remembance of this today.

Schumer’s Threats, in Context

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Democrat Charles Schumer, speaking to “protestors” outside the Supreme Court: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

This statement was clearly a threat, but what kind of threat? Perhaps a direct physical threat, but more likely, I think, a threat to subject the two justices to the kind of orchestrated slander campaign that was already unleashed against Justice Kavanaugh; a slander campaign the would result in great emotional pain to the Justices and their families and great disruption to the operations of the Court.

The crowd to which Schumer was speaking is typically referred to as “protestors” in news reports, but what are they protesting? No decision has been made in this case. Evidently they are protesting the willingness of the Court to even consider the arguments made by the two sides in this case.

I’d call them a mob. Judge Andrew Napolitano, who does not believe Schumer’s statement violated any laws, nevertheless called the statement  an “effort to  politicize the court, to make  them look like they can be  intimidated by a mob outside of  the courthouse.”

The present-day Democratic Party together with its media/academic/activist archipelago has become quite friendly toward mob action and mob intimidation. One especially appalling event was the attempt to shut down law professor Josh Blackman’s talk at the City University of New York law school. When Blackman said the way to deal with a law you don’t like is to change the law…

A student shouted out “[expletive] the law.” This comment stunned me. I replied, “[expletive] the law? That’s a very odd thing. You are all in law school. And it is a bizarre thing to say [expletive] the law when you are in law school.” They all started to yell and shout over me.

There has been an awful lot of this sort of thing, and it seems to have been increasing exponentially over the last several years.

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Strange Bedfellows?

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There seems to be a very large overlap between the political and social opinions of academics–a group which is very highly-educated, at least if we measure by time spent in the classroom–and the opinions of entertainers/celebrities–not typically distinguished in their educational level by that same metric, to put it mildly.   (Although with individual exceptions, of course)

Why?

Worthwhile Reading & Viewing

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It is unwise to let your dislike for certain individuals to run away with you to the point that you publish attacks that can be refuted with a few seconds of research.

Speaking of publishing dumb things…

Philosophers and philodoxers

Thoughts on personal productivity from Marc Andreessen

This 19th century French philosopher sounds worth reading.   From Tyler Cowen’s summary:

He explicitly considers the possibility that the rate of scientific innovation may decline, in part because the austere and moral mentality of semi-rural family life, which is most favorable for creativity in his view, may be replaced by the whirlpool of distractions associated with the urban lifestyles of the modern age.

The 10 worst colleges for free expression…the 2020 edition.

Using albatrosses to track down illegal fishing boats.   A little advice for the captains of those boats: do not, under any circumstances, shoot an albatross.

France’s most beautiful stained-glass windows