Wouldn’t see this on television today
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Category Archives: Cultural
This irreversible decision
The quiet that surrounds Obama’s mismanagement of every aspect of American society may have reached a moment of resistance in a rare agreement between Republicans and Democrats. You may not even know the internet is in need of saving, but this a story that is worth pondering, not just for what it says about the issue itself, but about the governance of the United States when in the hands of Democrats. The story from The Wall Street Journal: Congress Can Save the Internet which comes with the sub-heading, “The White House will end U.S. oversight at month’s end, unless lawmakers step in.” We are used to the freedom of the internet but that is not a future given.
President Obama wants this to be the last month of an open, uncensored internet guaranteed by the U.S. government. His plan to end American stewardship would hand new power to authoritarian governments offended by the internet as we know it. . . .
“This irreversible decision could result in a less transparent and accountable internet governance regime or provide an opportunity for an enhanced role for authoritarian nation-states.” . . .
The broader point is that the internet ain’t broke and doesn’t need fixing. Icann’s stakeholders—developers, engineers, network operators and entrepreneurs—are free to operate an open internet because U.S. protection prevents Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and other authoritarian regimes from meddling. The Obama administration may not be comfortable with American exceptionalism, but the internet fosters free speech and innovation because it was built in the image of the U.S.
Obama will do as much damage as he can before he is finally on his way. If you are interested in freedom of speech, you have to be interested in this.
Thoughts on leaving China
The only people who look for green solutions are people who have never worked a day in their lives. Spending a week in Shanghai has reminded me of all of the labour-saving devices we in the West take for granted. Manual labour of the most exhausting kind is found at every turn, you see people bicycling huge piles of goods, carrying things we would put on a delivery truck. It is a time-warp remembrance of what things must have been like for us a generation or two back.
The cruelty and profound ignorance of the Global Warming mob remains a scandal. These people basically intend to deprive everyone of the enormous advantages that electricity and the internal combustion engine have provided. They sit in their air-conditioned offices, paid for the cushiest jobs, providing nothing of value to the world. Meanwhile those in developing economies – the ones they wish to deprive of the power we take for granted – live at a standard of living fantastically below the level the bottom quartile of our societies not just take for granted, but feel shortchanged that their ability to consume is not higher than it is.
I am also more amazed than ever that Shanghai works at all. A population greater than the whole of Australia’s in an area about the size of Melbourne must be a logistical nightmare. It wouldn’t work at all if everyone had a car. They will get richer, but they will have to abandon their government-owned enterprises which will take a long time, since the unemployment they would create would be impossible to deal with. But having listened to and spoken with China’s greatest Mises-Hayek scholar, eventually they will move in the direction of Singapore and Hong Kong. Markets work, and the Chinese understand this. Meanwhile, we in the West are centralising our economies more than ever. Which calls this to mind.
Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’.
The wheel, my friends, is still in spin as it always is. Between Hillary and Merkel, and those of the same mentality who may come after, there is no telling what things will be like by mid-century.
Meanwhile, looking forward to being back in Australia in the morning.
Will talking sense work?
This is Donald Trump talking directly to America’s black communities:
Republican Donald Trump made his most direct appeal yet Tuesday for black voters in the presidential race, pushing forward an agenda to restore law and order and revitalize inner-city neighborhoods that he said suffer from years of misguided Democratic policies.
In a speech delivered not far from Milwaukee neighborhoods rocked by anti-police riots, Mr. Trump laid the blame for urban despair and conflict between police and minorities at the feet of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
“I am running to offer you a much better future,” Mr. Trump said in a speech in West Bend, Wisconsin. “Crime and violence is an attack on the poor and it will never be accepted in a Trump administration.”
He said the policies holding back minority neighborhoods were part of the “rigged system” led by Mrs. Clinton, who he said pandered to black voters but didn’t really care about their suffering.
“The political class that Mrs. Clinton has been a part of for 30 years has abandoned the people of this county. They only care about themselves,” he said. “I am going to give the people their voice back.”
And there’s more at the link. There is also no doubt he means it. What has disappeared into history is that the entire Ku Klux Klan was Democrat. This really does look like America’s last chance, but it’s a genuine one.
Meanwhile, there is only +/-2% in it. And Hillary is not a well woman.
Maybe things can get better
It’s not the individual here who matters, but the official reactions by both the Olympic Committee and the Egyptians who would not accept such behaviour:
Olympic officials say an Egyptian judo athlete has been reprimanded and sent home after refusing to shake his Israeli opponent’s hand.
The International Olympic Committee says Islam El Shehaby received a “severe reprimand” for his behaviour following his first-round heavyweight bout loss to Or Sasson on Friday.
When Sasson extended his hand, El Shehaby backed away, shaking his head.
The referee called the 34-year-old El Shehaby back to the mat and obliged him to bow. He gave a quick nod and was loudly booed as he exited.
Olympic action from day 7 of the Rio games
The IOC says the Egyptian’s conduct “was contrary to the rules of fair play and against the spirit of friendship embodied in the Olympic values.”
The IOC says the Egyptian Olympic Committee also “strongly condemned” El Shehaby’s actions “and has sent him home.”
“Terrorists are insane people”
You may be sure no leader in a Western democracy, home of free speech etc, would be allowed to say any of this. But the President of Kyrgystan can:
“Terrorists are insane people. . . .
“If you do not like Kyrgyzstan you can leave our country and go wherever you want.
“We can pay your travel expenses, even to Syria.”
The final comment is a reference to claims around 350 Kyrgyz citizens our fighting with jihadi groups in the country.
In 2014 President Atambayev said that it was not the Islamic traditions he had a problem with but more “Arabisation of society [and the] deprivation of the Kyrgyz nation of its language and traditions”.
Tolerating the intolerant in the name of stupidity
Here’s the final para in an article at Quadrant Online on: Let’s Lift the Veil on Asylum Seekers
For a host nation to naively infect itself with a metastasising societal malignancy through mindless adherence to ill-conceived notions of political correctness affords an excellent prospect for a Darwin Award on a national level. If ever there has been the need for the precautionary approach this must surely be it.
Read the whole article, but let me supplement with this comment from “Jody”:
The people in Melbourne know all too well about crime gangs and anti-social behaviour, all started by sub-Saharan African ‘migrants’. There’s the cone of silence over all of this and the people going on suffering and watching the value of their real estate decline. The bien pensant have this attitude: “Don’t discuss race because that makes you a racist; we must work out what is wrong with AUSTRALIAN society that criminal gangs can run rampant. We want an immigration policy which is non-discriminatory and if you oppose that you are xenophobic and racist. Also, we have obligations to these refugees and we think it’s a good idea to take them – and they need to go to YOUR area”.
Then when you’ve read that, you can read this from the same source: The Illiberal Left and Political Islam. Towards the end you come to this para, but again it is worth reading it all, though it is much darker and fills you with a deep pessimism about where all of this will end up:
The rising price of political freedom, it seems, is too high for many Western governments to pay. The long war for cultural freedom which began in 1989 is in serious danger of being lost. As Karl Popper observed of an earlier totalitarian threat to the open society, “If we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.” We should therefore claim “in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant”. Unfortunately, this argument does not gets much air-time, let alone political support.
A necessary discussion on the first steps in defeating terrorism
How extreme is this?
The standard rebuttal that all faiths have at one time or another shown themselves prone to violence and repression misses the essential point. All the major religions have reformed themselves, reducing or eliminating the all-too-human tendency to sanctimonious oppression—and none of these faiths, let us remember, endorsed oppression as a universal creedal or Divine imperative. Such is not the case with Islam, a communion that since its inception in the 7th century has seldom strayed from its sanguinary path of carnage and subdual. Its incendiary prescriptions and commands, as many scholars have noted, are open-ended and contain no “sunset clause.” They are perpetual and mandatory, feeding what essayist Bill Kassel calls “religious-themed barbarism.”
Not extreme at all. Read it through. And read the comments too.
I bet this was a big story in Warsaw
“Polish patriots marched against the Muslim invasion, biggest in the history of Poland. NOT ONE report in the MSM.”
Found here with text.
Comedy: you need to find the line and then cross it
Kelly Carlin, Rain Pryor, and Kitty Bruce are the daughters of the godfathers of comedy.
Their fathers, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and Lenny Bruce, shaped the stand-up comedy you hear today. If you listen to any of their routines and none of them surprise you, it’s because they influenced every comedian who came later.
In this exclusive interview with FIRE, the daughters speak out for the first time together about their fathers and the censorship fights that all three comedy legends combatted in their quests to stay true to their art.
An audio version of the interview can be heard on FIRE’s “So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast” at: http://sotospeakpodcast.com
Transcript: https://www.thefire.org/the-daughters…
This exclusive interview is part of FIRE’s campaign to defend comedy and free speech on campus. To support this campaign and to learn more about the FIRE-supported documentary “Can We Take a Joke?”, visit here.
And though this is not entirely the same thing, there is a lot of truth in this: The media wasn’t prepared to handle sarcasm from a candidate.
The idea that someone running for office could regularly engage in sarcasm or even some off color language or jokes is so foreign to the political media that they feel obligated to treat obvious sarcasm as if it was a serious policy proposal. And in reality, it’s not much of an “obligation” to deal with because it helps them continue the narrative and paint Trump as some sort of out of control monster.
It is part of how dense the left really is. It is part of how Trump deals with the media. He may unfortunately be unique in that he is not intimidated at all by what the media write. It is certainly a major point of difference, and is perhaps a major point of strength, but only time will tell.
Law of Markets 