National Holiday

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There is a movement afoot to make Juneteenth a National Holiday. People likely think this is free, and is just a nice way to show African-Americans that we care about them.  Who could be against that?  You wouldn’t want to be against that, would you?  That would be unkind, impolite, and racist.

Articulate what Martin Luther King Day is for.  The first meanings of that verb are “utterance,” “putting into clear words,” and that’s what I mean.  If you want Juneteenth, you should first have to put into words what MLK/Civil Rights Day is for, not just think about them vaguely and have a feeling. Only then can you go on to describe how Juneteenth is different and brings something new to the table.

I’ll just wait here while you scratch some things on the page and imagine delivering those words before an audience.  They have contests for that, don’t they, asking schoolchildren to write speeches about what MLK Day is about?  What do they say, do you think? 

When you have finished that, scratch down some percentages of what a new federal holiday will cost businesses and governments which would then have to pay people to stay home, or at minimum pay them a higher wage. Describe to me where that money will come from. As a starting point, people work 5 days/week for 52 weeks, minus ten days vacation minus fifteen holidays minus sick days – about two weeks. Call it 225 days a year. Back of the envelope is fine.

Now remember that this will feel good to do but have only psychological effects on people who really dig this stuff.  There will be no improvement in policing, or schools, or job prospects, or city infrastructure, or, well anything. Hispanics might rightfully wonder why they got left out.  At least “Civil Rights” applies to everyone, at least in theory.

Sell Your Soul or Lose Your Livelihood (updated)

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Every day, people are losing their jobs because of political opinions or assertions about reality which are considered unacceptable.  David Shor, a political data analyst, lost his job after tweeting a summary of research indicating that nonviolent protest tactics tend to be more effective than violent tactics. At  the Poetry Foundation, both the president and the chairman resigned after being heavily attacked because their statement on the current situation…which said that the members “stand in solidarity with the Black community, and denounce injustice and systemic racism”…was vague and lacked any commitment to concrete action.  An Illinois high school principal  finds her job under attack after advising students that, if they protest, they should refrain from violence and looting. The list could be expanded indefinitely and includes people in all industries and at all levels.

This isn’t new. For the last two decades, the ‘progressive’ left has loudly insisted that dissenting voices (dissenting from the Prog worldview, that is) must be suppressed. But the trend has accelerated sharply.

I am reminded, as I often am, of the memoirs of Sebastian Haffner, who grew up in Germany between the wars. One very affecting section of the book describes what happened to Haffner’s fathera civil servant under both Weimar and the Kaiserfollowing the Nazi takeover. The elder Haffner, long-since retired, had considerable accomplishments to his credit:  “There had been great pieces of legislation in his administrative area, on which he had worked closely. They were important, daring, thoughtful, intellectual achievements, the fruits of decades of experience and years of intense, meticulous analysis and dedicated refinement”and it was extremely painful to him to see this work ruthlessly trashed by the new government. But worse was to come.

One day Mr. Haffner received an official letter. It required him to list all of the political parties, organizations, and associations to which he had ever belonged in his life and to sign a declaration that he ‘stood behind the government of national uprising without reservations.’ Failure to sign would mean the loss of his pension, which he had earned through 45 years of devoted service.

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Police vs Prisons

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Here’s an interesting piece suggesting that there is a tradeoff between spending on police and spending on prisons.  It is claimed that money diverted from prisons to policing buys at least 4x the reduction in crime.  Apparently, on a per-capita basis the US now employees 35% fewer police than the world average…an interesting data point given the current calls for police defunding.

New! – Your Least Favorite Movies and Books

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Here are some of mine:

Movies

Death In Venice – I walked out of this one in college. A middle-aged man’s erotic infatuation with an adolescent boy simmers, it is suggested, beneath the surface. In reality nothing ever happens. The action is all silence, furtive glances and views of dramatic sunlit esplanades. Hard pass.

Whale Rider – A politically correct, tear jerking piece of crap. It’s got the exploited-native-peoples angle, the anti-Anglosphere culture angle, the You Go Girl! feminist competition-fantasy and anti-male angle. And of course those stupid whales. What’s not to dislike?

The Help – Essentially a cartoon in which the white characters are crass, stupid, racist jerks and the black characters are smart, kind and wise. In case you don’t get the point, the disgusting white people are all southerners with strong southern accents. We must fight stereotypes – except, it seems, the ones that serve our argumentative purposes. Run, don’t walk.

Books

The Magus – The worst book I’ve ever read. The protagonist is unappealing, the plot silly and incredible. This one-star Amazon review tells the tale:

A reminder of how terrible writing can be
 
Perhaps the worst book I’ve ever read. I’ve seen Scooby Doo episodes more plausible than this mess. Suggestion for the author: if your plot turns on its head not only every chapter, but practically every page, readers will realize the story is contrived garbage and stop caring.
 
What is contrived here? Maybe the endless scenes of naked people running around wearing antler masks, the star chamber of evil academics from the Sorbonne watching naked prisoners whip each other on racks, oh just remembering the juvenile and ludicrous “plot” makes me wet with embarrassment. The author admits in the preface that this book was an unsuccessful and sophomoric effort, and that’s the only convincing thing in the whole book.
 
[. . .]

(True story: I was once at a social gathering when someone asked someone else to name the worst book he had ever read. I immediately thought about this book. It was the other guy’s choice too.)

What are your least favorite movies and books? Feel free to share in the comments.

Saying “No”

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I lifted a graphic from last weekend’s Powerline Week in Pictures, and posted it on my Facebook feed (where I post only anodyne stuff and things to do with my books, home improvements, and social schedule) which pretty much sums up how I’m feeling this week. Kermit the Frog stares out a rain-drop-misted window, and says, “Sounds Like Thunder Outside But With the Way 2020 is Going, It Could Be Godzilla.”

Even before one could draw a breath of relief that the Chinese Commie Crud had not ravaged the US population anything like the 1918 Spanish Flu did, and that life was returning to something like normal, what with businesses slowly reopening here came the stomping behemoth of violent protests and race-riots, in the wake of the death (possibly caused by drugs rather than the apparent mistreatment) of a long-time violent criminal of color at the hands of a white police officer.

This entire brutal and grotesque encounter was on video and understandably condemned as unacceptable overreaction on the part of the officer by just about every reasonable person of any color who watched it. Serious concerns regarding the militarization of police have been raised for at least a decade among thoughtful citizens, what with so many instances of police barging into houses in no-knock and full SWAT mode (often the wrong house, and opening fire indiscriminately), of abusing civil forfeiture statutes and traffic fines as a means of making budget. This concern was exacerbated by resentment during the Chinese Commie Crud lockdown enforcing social distancing like pursuing a solitary paddle-boarder, all alone on the ocean, and going all-out on parents tossing a softball in a park with their kid.

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