So this is a story which first percolated up to my attention at the Powerline blog last week a perfectly vicious attack on a teenager by a bigger and apparently stronger teenager, which has put the first teenager in hospital with likely permanent brain damage if she even recovers consciousness at all. There’s something about having your skull repeatedly slammed on a concrete sidewalk which will do that. The attacker has been detained, which is a nice gesture on the part of local law enforcement, and a Go-Fund-Me appeal has already raised a considerable sum for the medical care of Kaylee Gains. The name of her attacker, hereinafter referred to as Little Miss Thugette, however, seems to be under a veil of secrecy in those few stories which have appeared in the news media. The comments appended on sites where the story does appear tend towards the cynical: if the colors of the two girls were reversed, most commenters acknowledge that there would be screaming headlines for weeks in all the print media, TV pundits rushing to make their two cents clear by taking a knee (literally or metaphorically), the inner cities in blue states would already be in flames and Al Sharpton would be ubiquitous in demanding justice. (Of the mob and rioting sort, naturally.)
Yon Tanpèt Pafè
In the wall mural of global incompetence that is our Crisis Era, Haiti has become the most lurid corner, a hallucinatory labyrinth worthy of Hieronymus Bosch; not so much the canary in the mine as a collapsed side tunnel whose maimed and trapped victims are within earshot and line-of-sight of First World institutional leaders already fumbling with a dozen groundwater leaks and toxic gas buildups in the main shafts.
Biden, Hamas, and Israel
In this rather confused video clip (some of it in text form in this article), Biden seems to be saying that (1) he believes the “30,000 Palestinians killed” number which has been circulating, which most observers believe is bogus, (2) that Israel is violating the international rules of war, which he says “we” changed following WWII, and (3) strongly implying that Israel is conducting carpet bombing, which is false. He also says that Hamas would like a ceasefire because they would “have a better chance to survive and rebuild.” He is apparently just fine with this outcome.
He also says he told the Israeli war cabinet: “Do not make the mistake America made,’… we should not have gone into the whole thing in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was not necessary. It was not necessary. It caused more problems than it cured.”
Whatever one thinks about the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, it requires a special kind of cluelessness to not notice the geographical closeness of Gaza-based Hamas to Israel, and the immediate and murderous nature of the threat that Israel faces.
Or, more likely, he does realize this, but does not consider Israeli lives to be very important when measured against Michigan electoral votes.
Messages in the Original Star Trek
For those of you who brought your copy of The Screwtape Letters, open to Chapter 1:
Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism [disbelief in the supernatural] is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous — that it is the philosophy of the future.
This is relevant to discourse in general. Jargon means different things to different people; it is key to preventing meaningful communication. Social media is a gold mine of jargon, or a dilithium mine in the case of the original Star Trek. (Roddenberry hadn’t invented latinum yet.) Somebody will chastise the later spinoffs for being “woke” or “too political,” and someone else will claim that the show was that way from the start. Looking over the original series I find little in the way of allusion to real-world politics or ’60s liberalism, and nothing compatible with modern leftism.
Worthwhile Reading
Hayek, Fascism, and the Administrative State
An interesting piece on the tradition of limited government in Spain
A Danish manager working in Russia finds that his workers are looking for a more authoritarian style of leadership
Related: Culture and combined arms warfare
Civilization versus the Pathocratic State
The Disintegrating Conscience and the Decline of Modernity
Why are semiconductor companies not more enthusiastic about taking the lavish subsidies available under the CHIPS act?