Rubin, Rubin, I've Been Thinking…

For John, BLUF:  It seems [some] women don't know what to do with the male of the species.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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"I just had a wild idea. What do we need men for?  Let’s get rid of men! But then I thought, 'Well, maybe we do need them.'  So let me check."

Here is the sub-headline:

"Let me get in the car with Lewis [her dog] and go to towns named after women and ask women:  What do we need men for?  And then at the end I would know whether we should really get rid of them...."

From The Althouse Blog, by Professor Ann Althouse, 30 June 2019.

Here is the lede plus one:

From "E. Jean Carroll, in Her Own Words/The writer who has accused President Trump of sexually assaulting her in the 1990s speaks to The New York Times" (NYT). Would we ask of any other group, what do we need them for? It's fundamentally immoral to believe that other people exist for your purposes, but there are so many things you can say about men — as long as you're assuming that they're white — that you'd never say about any other group. (By the way, it's white supremacy — isn't it? — to always be assuming that, if race is not mentioned, the group is white.)

Are we about to enter an era, an eon, where men will be valued only for their contribution to conception?  And, perhaps, the occasional moment when toxic masculinity is required to save a life?  Yes, men reduced to objects.

Hat tip to Ann Althouse.

Regards  —  Cliff

Frenchman BHL on Rights

For John, BLUF:  An interesting conversation with a French Intellectual who tries to adhere to a philosophy without veering to one side or the other.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Bernard-Henri Lévy on the Rights of Women and of the Accused

Here is the sub-headline:

“It is a duty, a moral duty, to hold firm the idea that there is no people, no ethnicity, forbidding democracy,” the world’s most famous French intellectual says.

From The New Yorker, by Staff Writer Isaac Chotiner, 18 March 2019.

Here is the lede plus two:

“The history of France, a permanent miracle, has the singular privilege of impassioning the peoples of the earth to the point where they all take part in French quarrels,” the French author André Maurois wrote. With Bernard-Henri Lévy, it often seems that the world’s most famous French intellectual is taking part in everyone else’s quarrels.  Born in Algeria, to a Jewish family, B.H.L. (as he is known) made a name for himself as a journalist in East Pakistan, in the early seventies, during its struggle to become Bangladesh.  A few years later, he was part of a group of young French writers, called the New Philosophers, who broke decisively from Marxism and the influence of Sartre.  Over the past several decades, he has written philosophy and history and journalism, on subjects ranging from the war in Bosnia to the death of Daniel Pearl and the need for a strong stand against Islamic fundamentalism.

He has also, unlike some of his forebears, evinced a passionate love for the United States.  He retraced Tocqueville’s footsteps in a series of essays for The Atlantic (which became the book “American Vertigo”), speaks proudly of his “anti-anti-Americanism,” and has urged the United States to exercise its power, voicing support for military action in Libya.  (He played a large role in convincing the French government to help overthrow Muammar Qaddafi.)  His new book is called “The Empire and the Five Kings:  America’s Abdication and the Fate of the World,” and it explains why an American “retreat” from the global stage is likely to have calamitous effects, with other, less democratic countries filling the void.

Lévy has sparked controversy for a number of his stances, including his advocacy for France’s burqa ban, his “unconditional love” of Israel, and his criticism of the rape cases against the film director Roman Polanski, who pleaded guilty to statutory rape, in 1978, and fled to France to avoid imprisonment, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund.  Strauss-Kahn, a friend of Lévy’s, has been repeatedly accused of sexual misconduct.  In 2011, New York prosecutors charged him with the sexual assault of a maid at a Manhattan hotel; the charges were dropped, but not before Lévy published a piece defending Strauss-Kahn, in which he questioned why a maid would have gone into Strauss-Kahn’s hotel room alone, and claimed that his friend had been “thrown to the dogs.”

Read it to see a person struggle to go below the top layer to find truth.

Regards  —  Cliff

Them vs Us

For John, BLUF:  From one perspective there does seem to be a split between the urban elites and the more rural folk, not just in the US, but in European nations as well (and maybe in China).  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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The Globalist Mindset:  They Hate You

From American Greatness, by Professor Victor Davis Hanson, 16 December 2018.

Globalist as in intellectuals, the intelligentsia, our betters, those who live on the coasts, in large cities.

This is about the issues that stir the rest of us.

A good rundown.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

The Cathedral

For John, BLUF:  No, not that cathedral.  Rather it is an information concept.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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The Cathedral Interprets The Chicago Attack

The source is The American Conservative and the Author is Mr Rod Dreher.

Here is how the story starts out:

Driving back from New Orleans today, I caught the beginning of the Weekend All Things Considered’s newscast. Host Michel Martin said that the show was going to devote the entire program to “violence, especially gun violence.” The first story of the broadcast was a three-minute piece in which Martin interviewed Chicago-based NPR correspondent Cheryl Corley about the horrific racist attack on the mentally disabled young white man, who was kidnapped and tortured in racially abusive terms by four young black people, who broadcast the attack on Facebook.

“Is something different now? Is there a sense in Chicago that there is something unique happening?” Martin asked Corley, about the city’s violence. They quickly got into the Facebook attack, which Martin introduced with this line:

“Just this week, four young adults were charged with attacking an acquaintance in a vicious beating that they livestreamed on social media.”

She also described it like this, in a question to Corley:

“Four young adults allegedly abducted an acquaintance of theirs, abused him terribly, and broadcast this on Facebook live, what are people saying about this?”

Incredibly, in talking about it, including an update from the bond hearing, Corley not once mentioned the fact that anti-white hate, and anti-Trump hate, was a key part of the crime — so much so that the state has filed hate crime charges against the four. The only thing Corley said about race was that the four defendants are “all African-Americans” — leaving aside the fact that the victim was white, and that both race and politics were central to the torture and abuse.

This serves as an introduction to the term "The Cathedral".  This isn't about the Roman Catholic or Church of England concept of the Cathedral, but rather a secular concept.  The author, Mr Dreher, thinks that there is a sort of group think out there that causes news to be slanted, which, in turn, gives rise to alternative news sources.

Here is the beginning of his definition of The Cathedral:

The Cathedral (aka the Clerisy, the Megaphone) is basically the Western world’s intellectual fashion industry.  It consists of almost all of the respectable or even semi-respectable parts of the news media, the entertainment industry, and the softer social science and humanities parts of the education industry.

Maybe this clip from The Devil Wears Prada will help.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

The Intelligencia and the Second Amendment

For John, BLUF:  Not everyone in "Hollywood" is against guns.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

Playwright David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), Speed-the-Plow (1988), The Verdict (1982) and Wag the Dog (1997))♠ talks about the Second Amendment at The Daily Beast.  He is for it.

The title of his piece is "Gun Laws and the Fools of Chelm".

My grandmother came from Russian Poland, near the Polish city of Chelm. Chelm was celebrated, by the Ashkenazi Jews, as the place where the fools dwelt.  And my grandmother loved to tell the traditional stories of Chelm.

Its residents, for example, once decided that there was no point in having the sun shine during the day, when it was light out—it would be better should it shine at night, when it was dark.  Similarly, we modern Solons delight in passing gun laws that, in their entirety, amount to “making crime illegal.”

What possible purpose in declaring schools “gun-free zones”?  Who bringing a gun, with evil intent, into a school would be deterred by the sign?

Ah, but perhaps one, legally carrying a gun, might bring it into the school.

Good.

Yes, laws don't seem to control those who have guns illegally or guns for illegal purposes.  Thus, the question is, once all the legal guns are out of the houses, then what?

The police do not exist to protect the individual.  They exist to cordon off the crime scene and attempt to apprehend the criminal.  We individuals are guaranteed by the Constitution the right to self-defense.  This right is not the Government’s to “award” us.  They have never been granted it.

I like this quote, for speaking the truth of the situation.  And, someone else EMailed it to me.  However, let us give the police their due.  The police have a powerful deterrent effect.  The presence of a policeman on the beat is a deterrent to crime and thus a safeguard to the citizen.  However, the police have no "duty" to protect the average citizen.  And we are not willing to pay the taxes and carry the political burden of having it any other way than it is.  We don't wish to have a Stasi like police organization in our nation.

In the end, do we wish to go to firearms confiscation via a house-to-house search?  I would hope not, since that would (1) shred more of the US Constitution and (2) leave us with only cold steel, until that too was confiscated.

And, the interesting thing is, while firearms help people feel protected, confiscation helps the Government feel protected, and that is why we have a Second Amendment.  It is an educational device for helping the Government to understand that there are limits.♥

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  Doesn't sound like a George W Bush Republican to me.
♥  The Bill introduced by Senator Diane Feinstein will provide exemptions for Government Officials and police, so Government Officials must be a different class of people from police.  One wonders who they are.  Given the way Capitol Hill operates they could be anybody.

Tokens

For John, BLUF:  It is a violation of the laws of nature for a single person to be both a racial minority and a Republican.  They are not truly both, but only a token.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

At the link is a long, blog like, series of items by Mr James Taranto on "'Tokenism' vs. 'Diversity'.  Somewhere near the top, or even at the top, is a comment on people dismissing the new Senator from South Carolina as a token.  It seems the new Senator, appointed by Governor Nikki Haley, is both Black and a Republican.  The fact that Senator Tim Scott would have been sworn in as a duly elected member of the US House of Representatives if he had not been appointed Senator seems to not influence the "tokenizers".

The view that he got to the US Senate by a Republican Party plan to fool everyone about where the party stands assumes a lot more cohesion and organization on the part of the Republican Party than has been demonstrated to me over the last two decades.

The dirty little secret is that both Senator Tim Scott and Governor Nikki Haley, another racial minority as a Republican, are products of the Tea Party Movement.♠

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  There is no single overall "Tea Party", notwithstanding what you know to be true.  Although, if there was, its devious plan would appear to be to push minorities forward, thus creating diversity.