March 31, 2016 The New Yorker Vs Free Speech Luke Ford No sacred cows.

The New Yorker Vs Free Speech

Posted on March 31, 2016 by Luke Ford

Two days after Islamists killed nine staffers of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo for publishing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in January 2015, a writer for the most renowned magazine in the English-speaking world compared the victims to Nazis. On the website of the New Yorker, the Nigerian-American author Teju Cole wrote that while the slaughter was “an appalling offense to human life and dignity,” it was nonetheless necessary to realize that such violence takes “place against the backdrop of France’s ugly colonial history, its sizable Muslim population, and the suppression, in the name of secularism, of some Islamic cultural expressions, such as the hijab.” Invoking a paradigmatic free-speech test case, Cole stated that Charlie Hebdo had a right to publish blasphemous cartoons in the same way that the National Socialist Party of America had had a right to march in Skokie, Illinois, in 1979.
And Cole was just getting started.

Before Westerners start making generalizations about Islam and free expression, he averred, they must first acknowledge their own bloodily censorious history—a history they have yet to transcend. Connecting the “witch burnings, heresy trials, and the untiring work of the Inquisition” of yore to the more recent “censuring of critics of Operation Iraqi Freedom,” Cole ridiculed the West’s pretension of seeing itself as “the paradise of skepticism and rationalism” (even as he left unmentioned which of his opponents George W. Bush had burned at the stake). Preoccupation with Islamist violence and the chilling effect on free speech such violence creates, Cole argued, diverts scrutiny from Western governmental infringements upon liberty that are equally if not more grave. Citing the fate of fugitive National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, Cole asserted that Washington’s “traditional monopoly on extreme violence” and “harsh consequences for those who interrogate this monopoly”—Cole’s euphemistic word salad for Snowden’s stealing top-secret information and sharing it with America’s adversaries—is as much a peril to freedom of speech as weapon-wielding religious fanatics threatening to kill anyone who displeases them.

Cole’s characterization of Charlie Hebdo as a product of the far right—a publication that “in recent years…has gone specifically for racist and Islamophobic provocations” and carried out a “bullyingly racist agenda”—betrayed his ignorance. Anyone who actually bothered to acquaint himself with Charlie would have learned from two minutes on Google that its “politics,” such as they are, are best described as anti-politics. Founded and staffed to this day by anarcho-leftist veterans of the 1968 student rebellions, Charlie Hebdo is anti-clerical and anti-establishment to the core. A survey by Le Monde of Charlie Hebdo covers over the preceding decade found that the vast majority mocked French political figures, and of the 38 covers that lampooned religion, 21 targeted Christianity while only seven went after Islam.

Posted in Censorship | Comments Off

The Point Of Charter Schools

Posted on March 31, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* The whole point of charter schools is to allow well-connected insiders to steal from American taxpayers. It would be racist to deny, to the Turks only, a boon given freely to any Saudi prince, Nigerian scammer, Russian oligarch, Chinese Red Army insider, Koch brother, or any other of the world’s sociopathic parasites.

* Let’s review Economics 101, for the sake of the legislators in California (and New York, which is likely to vote for the $15 minimum tomorrow):

-Higher wages will result in higher costs for employers.
-Higher costs will result in fewer employees hired, and an increased emphasis on mechanization and offshoring of jobs.
-Higher wages will also lead to higher prices.
-Higher prices will lead to a drop in product demand, which will also lead to layoffs.
-$15 an hour minimum will lead to a ripple effect throughout the wage chain, because the guy making $19 with five years’ seniority will demand a raise as well. This will contribute to the overall higher prices and reduced demand for goods and labor.

Now, add in the following: The federal Obamacare mandate requires that businesses offer health coverage to employees working 30 or more hours. SO, the MAXIMUM any $15 an hour minimum-wage employee will ever be allowed to work is 29 hours; therefore, his pay is effectively capped at 15×29 = $435; assuming he works 52 weeks a year with no time off, that’s $22,000 and change. Not exactly get-rich-quick wages.

In other words, we’re going to become France, where a 30-hour workweek, about $30k in disposable income, and 10-11% unemployment are the norm.

Perhaps that has been the plan of the Left all along…

* Private right of action (lawsuits, in other words) will fill in the gaps in California if public enforcement is lacking. There’s reasons you regularly see billboards for lawyers seeking wage and hour plaintiffs on buses, etc. A lot of these cases allow for class certification, kickback agreements aren’t legally enforceable (obviously), and wage, hour and working conditions lawsuits allow for recovery of attorney’s fees in California (a significant economic incentive for lawyers to find clients). Cal. Labor Code § 1194. Simply paying less than the minimum wage is a fairly easy thing to prove, relative to most employment law cases. Most wage & hour cases involve harder to prove claims like not giving meal and rest breaks, overtime, salaried employees, independent contractor vs. employee status, etc.

Cases like the Gulen cult, there are cultural and religious strictures that probably keep the followers from suing the imam, as well as probably threats of immigration consequences (they likely sponsor the visas). Illegals in California aren’t likely to face the same immigration consequences (they’re illegal anyway, and California state government won’t generally bother about that issue), and doubtful they’ll care enough about the crooked Persian business owner they were working for three years ago to forgo even a few hundred bucks as a class action claimant.

Granted, California’s court system is massively overloaded and a lot of dodgy employers can always declare bankruptcy or hide assets.

* Higher wages will drive out the riff raff to other states.

it’s what blue elites want.

many small businesses will move to texas and arizona.

and low wage workers seeking jobs will go there.

CA will turn more elite.

* As others have already commented the minimum wage law is one of those classic political oxymoron contradictions. Bring in cheap labor only to force small business to pay them a higher wage. Kinda like ban abortions, but execute murderers. And just like high cigarette taxes, it will encourage less then legal ways around it.

I myself like the guaranteed universal minimum income for all U.S. citizens, similar to what Charles Murray and Milton Friedman proposed. Let’s say at the national level $16K a year. You’d have to get rid of every welfare/needs based program, eliminate all tax breaks for poor, middle and rich earners to pay for it, but mathematically it appears it could be done.

Sure, many are going to band together to rent a house and sit on the sofa all day and smoke pot, but a percent of the population already does that. What I like about the concept is employer’s will have to come up with a wage that’s an incentive to get them off the couch and come to work. Think about it.

* One recurring theme here is how California’s big growth industry, cell phone software, often relies on using novel ideas to avoid regulations that increase the price of traditional industries (e.g. Uber avoids cities’ taxi regulations, Airbnb avoids hotel regulations).

I wonder what apps the tech geniuses will come up with to help California’s employers avoid paying their employees $15 per hour. Perhaps some sort of phone-based payroll business that classifies its clients as contractors not subject to minimum wages.

* I don’t see the problem. Employers just won’t hire anyone who can’t add value at a rate of at least $15/hr. If those folks are illegal, they need to go back from whence they came. If they are ours, they’ll have to live off of drug dealing, welfare, disability, etc. which is probably what they are already doing. Maybe we’ll once again see customer service staff that can actually speak English. Imagine that!

* It’s interesting to try to total up the various potential winners and losers of a policy like the minimum wage. My take is that a higher minimum wage works, in effect and broadly speaking, as an anti-immigration measure, hitting both the illegal low-wage worker as well as the gold chains small business crowd (though how powerful an anti-immigration measure it is I couldn’t say). Higher labor costs and wages in general tend to benefit, or at least hurt the least, capital-intensive and large economy-of-scale enterprises, which can make do with fewer workers and/or have higher gross revenues per worker.

Another hidden potential beneficiary, definitely relevant to California: Silicon Valley/IT/tech. Automation (or, looking at it another way, substitution of capital for labor) is always one answer to higher labor costs (and usually one consequence threatened by minimum wage critics: automation will replace jobs). Their low-skilled labor is off in China anyway.

California I think may be approaching an interesting economic and demographic tipping point in general. It’s getting more expensive to live here, with the costs of housing, water, and other basics going up. Gentrification is gaining ground in California cities, more steadily in Los Angeles and more quickly in the Bay Area. And now a wage hike may make it less attractive to either run a small business and staff it with illiterate paisas from Oaxaca. All of this means of course that the rest of America, as per usual, will be getting what California pioneered over the last 30 years while California maybe moves towards whatever’s next.

* Can any California readers let us know how the immigrant rights groups feel about this issue.

In the past many on the conservative side of the issue have argued that increasing the minimum wage might be effective in cutting down on the hiring of illegals since it would eliminate their wage advantage. They argued that an employer could feign ignorance that some worker’s SSN was fake, but that they cannot do the same with the minimum wage. Therefore their ability to cheat, (assuming the kickbacks you described don’t take place), would be greatly diminished and illegal labor would be priced the same as legal labor.

If this is indeed the case, then wouldn’t immigrant rights groups seek to oppose such a minimum wage hike knowing that it might curtail the immivasion and actually encourage some amigos to go home if they cannot get employment?

* SEIU and the other unions have gone broadly pro-immigration (including illegal) over the last few decades. Obviously they support the minimum wage, though not on immigration grounds. Mostly they’ve been looking for more workers to organize and more voters.

Two things:

First, there aren’t really “immigrant rights groups” of any particular influence, organization, or resources devoted to that singular issue. There are only more broadly leftist groups (like unions) and politicians that support it collaterally, as part of a broader agenda, and a handful of spokespeople and astroturf groups that are there for the media (and serve as props for the former).

Second, leftist thinking on either immigration (make that thinking on immigration in general) or the minimum wage never really gets that far as to thinking through consequences. It’s about feeling, rather than thinking. Higher minimum wage = good. Immigration = good. Good + good ≠ bad. That’s about as far as the thinking goes.

* You can’t have a high minwage and mass immigration at the same time, because the latter makes the former a dead letter. The only real way to raise wages is to rig the supply and demand curves in favor of labor, and by far the best ways to do that are restricting immigration and artificially restricting the rate of new labor supply in the legal domestic market, i.e. organized labor, aka labor unions.

Posted in California, Economics, Immigration | Comments Off

Can a Dress Shirt Be Racist?

Posted on March 31, 2016 by Luke Ford

Nine months ago, I bought these shirts: “H2H Men’s Wrinkle Free Slim Fit Dress Shirts with Solid Long Sleeve White, US XL (Asia XXL)”

REPORT:

He noticed an odd pattern. In that first batch of 30, the shirts fit best on testers who were Caucasians. They seemed to fit worse, in a predictable way, on people who weren’t Caucasian. All subjects of one ancestry — Asian, say — seemed to require the same general alterations. Skerritt noted the anomaly and added a question on what he called “ethnicity”: Asian, Black, Caucasian, Hispanic, or “I’m not sure.” The question, Skerritt says, has proven invaluable to sizing his customers’ shirts.
There’s no denying the satisfaction of a smartly tailored shirt. But with this one question, the once mundane world of dress shirts is now dabbling in a kind of racial profiling. Are we ready to dredge up centuries of racial strife, simply for a perfect fit?

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* I just bought a cotton sweater at Brooks Brothers in Manchester VT that was labeled, as I recall, “Size L (XL Asian).”

* There is no such thing as a race in terms of being able to absolutely delineate the boundaries of a race,but it is generally true that black men and women have broader shoulders and smaller calves (not always, but generally), different shaped buttocks, and so on, so if people describe themselves as black, white, or Asian, it is likely that after making adjustments for age and body mass index, you might be able to make clothes that fit more people better.

If you go to the Caribbean, you will see that mannekins in store windows have more protruding buttocks than they do on the mainland US, and this is probably because the average customer there has a similar anatomical deviation.

* Ian Fleming has a bit in You Only Live Twice where he comments on how the Japanese have absurdly small buttocks.

If you are into women who are caudally equipped, stay clear of East Asia….

* I remember shopping at a hipster store in Echo Park, Los Angeles, a few years back that only carried Japanese clothing brands. I generally wear American size “Large” shirts, but I am by no means a “big guy”. I was impressed by the clothing, but I looked like Lou Ferrigno turning green in even the XXL sizes. I mentioned to the sales clerk that while I admired the clothing, everything simply ran too small. The clerk sighed, “Yeah, that’s kind of a problem.” The shop was out of business within a year.

I have noticed that Scandinavian clothing brands seem to fit me extremely well and I generally seek them out whenever I can.

I have a few Japanese clients and when they visit New York they hilariously and somewhat inappropriately overreact to the size of some of the African Americans they encounter.

* Next year’s Best Picture will go to either 12 Years In A Fitting Room, in which Solomon Northup is micro-aggressed by a racially profiling tailor and has to relive the anguish of his slavery, and Django Unfitted, in which Django gorily rights a century of sartorial injustice.

The good thing is black actors will receive the 100% of Oscar nods they deserve. Other minorities will be snubbed with the customary lack of media interest.

* I am about 6’1″ and 180 lbs. In Asia I have to buy XL clothes because Asian L is way too small for me.

* There are ideas, true and false, that cannot be aired publicly in America without placing yourself beyond the pale of intellectual discussion. These ideas are more often anathematized than argued against.

I wonder if our esteemed host would be interested in hosting an Index of Heresies.

I compiled this list, but I’m sure that there are some that I have not noticed. Obviously, some of these contradict others, but all of the ideas, if expressed, will run you out of polite society. This has gone on long enough that impolite society is now a sizable political force.

US has too many Mexicans
US has too many Muslims
There is something wrong with gay people.
There is something wrong with transgender people.
Blacks on average are less intelligent than whites.
Blacks are subhuman near-animals.
God created man and woman, separate from the animal kingdom, and has particular views about sexual morality.
Evolution did not stop with the Neolithic Revolution, and there are significant biological differences between racial groups.
Jews have too much power.
There is a Jewish conspiracy to bring down white/Western/Christian civilization
The Geneva Conventions are too restrictive, and the US would be better off going back to the practices of Sherman and Sheridan and Truman and LeMay.
Our criminal justice system, on the whole, produced more order and more justice in 1950 than it does today.
Slavery had benefits for black slaves.
Free trade will not make most Americans better off.
Women are not particularly rational beings, following instead their genetic programming to seek the seed of the kind of uncaring asshole who would succeed in a state of nature.
The common law jury trial system is a bad system, neither reliably identifying the guilty nor safeguarding the innocent.
The American creed of racial equality, encoded in the Declaration of Independence, is fundamentally mistaken.

Things that are not heresies
Anything about foreign policy. You can be Noam Chomsky on US foreign policy, or Paul Wolfowitz, or Ted Cruz and call for carpet bombing ISIS; and your ideas will still be analyzed, debated and attacked and defended as ideas with merits and demerits–not rejected as the ravings of a nonperson.

Posted in Race | Comments Off

BDS

Posted on March 31, 2016 by Luke Ford

For decades, Israel advocates complained that their opponents were unwilling to fight for their cause through peaceful means. Now we have the growing success of the BDS movement, and the arguments are shifting.

Jonathan Tobin writes for Commentary magazine:

his past week, on both ends of the country, the BDS (boycott, divest, sanction) movement against Israel received a stern rebuke. Several states around the country are passing laws that would bar their governments from doing business with companies that comply with boycotts of Israel. But in New York and California, the current debate is not about implementation of this economic war against the Jewish state but rather the way college campuses — including state-run universities like the University of California or the City University of New York or CUNY — have allowed the debate about Israel to turn into acquiescence for open expressions of anti-Semitism. In New York, the legislature has cut funding for CUNY, though BDS was not the sole motivation. But in California, the regents of the state university system voted last Thursday to take a stand against what they termed “anti-Semitism, anti-Semitic forms of anti-Zionism, and other forms of discrimination.”
The measure was long overdue but pro-Palestinian and other leftist groups are blasting it as an attempt to stifle freedom of expression. They claim this simple sentence will make it impossible to criticize Israel and its policies. They are wrong about that. Israel is a democracy and, just like Israelis, those on campus can opine all they want about its government and all it does. But what is at stake here is whether those whose purpose is to destroy the one Jewish state on the planet can pose as advocates for human rights while in engaging in hate speech against Jews.
In an era where the preservation of “safe space” for students against anything they might find objectionable, including subtle slights labeled “micro-aggressions,” political advocacy, or actual hate speech, there is one group that hasn’t gotten much protection: Jews. The reason for this isn’t much of a mystery. In the context of academia, Jews are treated as the 21st century moral equivalent of WASPS and are therefore too secure and/or powerful to merit any concern for their rights, let alone their sensibilities. To some extent, such complacency is justified. Unlike in Europe or most other parts of the world, the rising global tide of anti-Semitism hasn’t made much of an impact in the United States. American exceptionalism and the lack of a history of state-sanctioned anti-Semitism in this country has left Jews free to rise on their own merits finding acceptance in virtually every sphere of American society. Jew hatred has largely been confined to the fever swamps of the far right and left. But there is one glaring exception to this rule: college campuses.
Anti-Semitism in academia has become an issue because the BDS movement against Israel has made it one. The efforts of pro-Palestinian students to delegitimize Israel have effortlessly slipped into a campaign to stigmatize and intimidate Jewish students and organizations. As the numbers of incidents of hate speech and intimidation grow, some Jewish groups and other fair-minded people are pushing back.
Groups like the AMCHA initiative and the Zionist Organization of America have documented many of the anti-Semitic incidents and cases of incitement against Jews associated with anti-Israel agitation. Jews have subjected to every kind of insult and threat by those whose goal it is to wipe out Israel, often by promoting egregious lies about atrocity stories.
But we don’t really have to dig too deep into the files of incidents because we already know why it is so easy for BDS and pro-Palestinian advocates to slip into overt anti-Semitism. That is because, contrary to the University of California statement that was hoping to mollify some of the Israel-haters, there is no such thing as an anti-Semitic form of anti-Zionism. All forms of anti-Zionism are anti-Semitic, no matter the identity of the speaker because to single out the one Jewish state and to deny its people the right to self-determination and self-defense in their ancient homeland is, in principle, anti-Semitic. Put simply, denying Jews these rights that no one would think of challenging for any other people, is an act of bias. Acts of bias against Jews are called anti-Semitic.
That’s why the line that supposedly separates traditional Jew-hatred from the cause of destroying Israel is so frequently breached by its advocates. They can’t help speaking this way because their goal is to deny Jews their human rights. In order to justify this indefensible cause, they don’t merely resort to lies about Israel or ignore the fact that the Palestinians have been waging a century-long war to destroy the Jewish presence in the country and not merely to force it back to the 1967 lines. Like the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, which broadcast hate about Jews and praise for anyone that tries to murder a Jew, BDS supporters need to demonize the object of their criticism. And to do that, they inevitably use hate speech designed to marginalize and silence Jews…
Anti-Zionism is a form of discrimination because of the unique nature of its advocacy that serves a cause designed to ensure that the Jewish people remain not merely stateless but homeless.
As for the welcome mat laid out for Jewish anti-Zionists in the BDS camp, that is meaningless. The fact that some Jews are ready to join forces with those urging the destruction of the Jewish state is not evidence that its attitude toward Jews is benign. Part of the psychosis of the Jewish existence in the Diaspora has always been a willingness to believe that all other peoples and faiths have rights to particularity that Jews should not have or exercise. Cynthia Ozick’s quip that “universalism is the parochialism of the Jews,” tells us a lot about the tension between the two differing yet ultimately compatible strains of thought in Judaism. But when applied to the battle for the existence of the state of Israel, the desire of some Jews to treat Israel as the one illegitimate ethnoreligious state on a planet that has so many other similarly constituted nations is a testament to dysfunction on the part of this small minority of Jews. It tells us nothing about the toxic nature of the vile cause for which they serve as useful idiots.
As for Beinart’s South African analogy, it is so specious that he even disassociates himself from it even as he urges us to consider it. Democratic Israel is not, as Beinart correctly states, remotely analogous to apartheid-era South Africa.

Posted in Israel, Nationalism | Comments Off

Political Scientist: Trump Is A ‘Wrecking Ball’ Against The Conservative Establishment

Posted on March 31, 2016 by Luke Ford

Daily Caller: George Hawley, a professor of political science at the University of Alabama and author of the new book “Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism,” talked with The Daily Caller this week about the Trump phenomenon and how it is affecting the conservative movement.

“The conservative movement would be in serious decline even if Trump had stayed out of this race,” Hawley told TheDC. “The movement simply does not know what to do in a world where big business is allied with the cultural left, secularism is on the rise, changing demographics are weakening the GOP’s base of support, there is no evidence that regime change and democracy are panaceas for terrorism, and we have economic problems that won’t be solved with another tax cut.”

In his opinion, Trump’s candidacy has merely exposed the already-present weaknesses of the conservative establishment, particularly GOP voters’ lack of concern for its continued health.

“All the major figures of the conservative intelligentsia denounced Trump and the public responded to their critiques with indifference. This demonstrated that huge numbers of voters, even those who regularly vote Republican, simply do not care about the conservative movement. Trump showed the world that the conservative movement is a Potemkin village. Or to switch metaphors, it is an army with many well-compensated officers, but very few grunts,” Hawley said.

…That ideological vacuum could be filled by a number options, according to Hawley’s estimation.

“Some will try to reassert the old conservatism, or a more progressive variation of the old conservatism. Others will push for a libertarian approach. Some will openly embrace some kind of white identity politics,” he remarked.

Posted in Conservatives, Donald Trump | Comments Off

Black Mom Hires Stripper For Her 8yo Son’s Birthday Party

Posted on March 31, 2016 by Luke Ford

New York Post: This kid’s birthday bash looked more like a bachelor party.

Grainy YouTube video shows a stripper shaking her booty for a boy celebrating his eighth birthday.

One youngster is seen smacking the dancer’s backside, and another makes it rain dollar bills, during the age-inappropriate bash in Tampa, Fla.

Tampa cops received calls about the video last week, but cops didn’t act because nothing in the footage conclusively shows when and where the X-rated party happened, a department spokeswoman told The Post.

Reps for the nearby Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Department said they were not aware of the footage.

Critics blasted the twerk-fest as child abuse, the Daily Star reported.

“The mother should be put in jail and the stripper should be fined,” one disgusted video viewer said. “Disgusting.”

Posted in Sex | Comments Off

Donald Trump Took Pro-Life Seriously

Posted on March 31, 2016 by Luke Ford

If you take the pro-life position seriously, you have to be for punishing women who get abortions. If you don’t want to punish them, then your “pro-life” position is only a scam.

Women who have abortions (unless they were raped) aren’t victims.

Richard Spencer: “We don’t take women seriously as rational independent actors. Women are always victims. They’re little delicate flowers that we have to care for.”

“Donald Trump has made fun of hundreds of men… But it is not a big deal. It is only if you criticize a woman, call her a pig, that that’s terrible. Mainstream feminism wants women to have equal rights but at the same time treat them like delicate flowers.”

“In any non-insane society, we would have double standards… Men should be treated differently than women. White people should be treated differently than black people. People of high character should be treated differently than people of low character. People who are leaders in society should be viewed by a different standard than people in the lower levels of society.”

Posted in Abortion, Feminism | Comments Off

Black Countries, Counties, Cities Can’t Maintain Infrastructure

Posted on March 31, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments: In DC, management of Metro, DC’s subway system, is considering shutting down sections of the system or even the entire system for 6 months to conduct maintenance.

The fact that a major system is facing such monumental maintenance issues is stunning. However when you discover the hiring culture of Metro it all makes sense. It’s been a job program for blacks for years. So Steve while I do agree in the main that affirmative action should be targeted, it should not be used in critical areas.

* Is the DC Metro becoming a form of Atlanta’s MARTA: Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta? Pity that the system isn’t working; it was a good system when I was there between 1985 and 2004.

* I’m against affirmative action in any form. I am for every individual being treated fairly. AA is just another form of prejudicial treatment – this time directed against whites. Two blacks don’t make a white. It is not possible to make up for past transgressions by penalizing the present. Such actions simply create another class of aggrieved people who feel slighted by their government and/or officials.

* I think the libertarian objective of doing away with all anti-discrimination laws, whatever its intellectual merits, is politically unattainable in the short to medium term.

However, narrowing and targeting diversity laws to reflect “actual historic oppression” cuts back on those laws, and leads to some interesting debates with the Democratic demographics. Also, if we could change the scope, perhaps making them all applicable to business with 50 or 75 employees or more, it would take a huge level of red tape off the back of small businesses everywhere. If there is going to be red tape for small business, it ought to be in connection with a new national e-verify system.

From a GOP perspective, it would allow the GOP to set up a multiracial/ethnic coalition by targeting certain minority groups. I don’t see why there isn’t support on the populist side of the GOP for affirmative action for Blacks, because if you could make Black voters comfortable with the GOP, I don’t think they would care about immigration restrictions or lack of comparable favoritism for Hispanics (intersectionality being what it is).

You have to wonder where the Democratic party would be without being able to take out their White Racist Redneck Kachina Dolls every election cycle to frighten the children into compliance.

* It’s ironic that you choose Feynman as the poster boy for “competent white man”. When Feynman was applying to grad school at Princeton, a Princeton physics professor wrote to a colleague at MIT, ” Is Feynman Jewish? We have no definite rule against Jews but have to keep their proportion in our department reasonably small because of the difficulty of placing them.” MIT wrote back that he was in fact Jewish but that Feynman’s “physiognomy and manner, however, show no trace of this characteristic and I do not believe the matter will be any great handicap.”

* Determining who gets “reparations” based on past events cannot result in anything but a regression ad absurdam. Thomas Jefferson addressed the question of slavery in Notes on the State of Virginia and the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, and he argued that the British were to blame for slavery. He was right — slavery had been in existence in the colonies for 150 years before American independence. And it was the fault of not only the British, but the Dutch, Portugese, Spaniards, and French as well. Should they all pay reparations to blacks?

As far as the Indians were concerned, the U.S. government treated them as foreign nations, and concluded treaties with the tribes willing to do so. That was the situation until the 1920s, when Congress made the Indians citizens (which contradicts the principle of “Indian sovereignty.”)

In any case, world history is little more than one group of people killing others and taking their land. Those who win write history. Those who lose — well, they lose. Where do you draw the line? My ancestors were Polish. Am I entitled to ca$h in from the Austrians, Prussians, Germans, and Russians?

And how about the Jews of Israel? Should they pay reparations to Palestinians and Ottoman Turks? Or should Muslims pay reparations to them, since Jews lived in Israel for several millenia before Islam was even founded?

Or should the Italians pay reparations to the Jews, since it was the Romans who exiled the majority of Jews from Judea in the second century?

* Feynman pretty much admitted that he was prompted to do his little experiment by an Air Force officer on the commission. The truth was going to come out, but Feynman was allowed to be the public face of understanding the accident cause. And he really enjoyed being center stage!

Posted in Affirmative Action, Blacks | Comments Off

The New York Times Pushed For The Invasion Of Iraq In 2003

Posted on March 31, 2016 by Luke Ford

FAIR in 2006: In a New York Times article (9/5/06) on George W. Bush’s September 5 speech concerning terrorism and Iraq, reporters David Sanger and John O’Neil included a striking revision of Bush’s reasoning for going to war:

The possibility that Saddam Hussein might develop ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and pass them to terrorists was the prime reason Mr. Bush gave in 2003 for ordering the invasion of Iraq.

Of course, the drive to war rested firmly on Bush’s repeated and emphatic claim that Hussein had already developed WMDs, which he possessed and was prepared to use—a bogus claim that the mainstream media, led by the Times‘ own Judith Miller, largely accepted as an article of faith and bolstered with credulous reports based on faulty information. (See Extra!, 7-8/03.)

Bush’s charges that Iraq concealed chemical and biological weapons were unequivocal. “Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is rebuilding the facilities used to make more of those weapons,” Bush told the U.N. (9/12/02).

“The Iraqi regime . . . possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons,” Bush said in a speech in Cincinnati (10/7/02). “We’ve also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas.”

“Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised,” Bush said in a March 17, 2003 address to the nation.

The New York Times‘ editorial page unskeptically accepted these claims and incorporated them into the paper’s own arguments. In a September 18, 2002 editorial, the paper declared:

What really counts in this conflict…is the destruction of Iraq’s unconventional weapons and the dismantling of its program to develop nuclear arms…. What makes Iraq the subject of intense concern, as Mr. Bush noted, is Mr. Hussein’s defiance of the Security Council’s longstanding instructions to dismantle Baghdad’s nuclear weapons program and to eliminate all its biological and chemical weapons and the materials used to make them.

After the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution on inspectors returning to Iraq, the Times editorialized (11/9/02):

The unwavering goal is to disarm Iraq, enforcing a string of previous Security Council resolutions that Baghdad has contemptuously ignored. The cost of letting that happen has been diminished authority for the United Nations and a growing danger that Iraq’s unconventional weapons will be used in war or passed on to terrorists. Mr. Bush has galvanized the Security Council to declare that its orders must now be obeyed and those dangers eliminated.

When the inspectors returned, the paper stated (12/6/02), “Iraq has to get rid of its biological and chemical arms and missiles and the means to make them, and abandon its efforts to develop nuclear weapons.” When the inspectors failed to find any evidence of banned weapons, the Times insisted (2/15/03): “The Security Council doesn’t need to sit through more months of inconclusive reports. It needs full and immediate Iraqi disarmament. It needs to say so, backed by the threat of military force.”

As the invasion approached, the editorialists endorsed (3/13/03) British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s six-point ultimatum to Iraq as the “last hope of forcing Saddam Hussein to disarm voluntarily.” The first point: “Mr. Hussein would have to acknowledge that he has hidden unconventional weapons and pledge to stop producing or concealing such weapons.”

The New York Times‘ revision of the record, maintaining that Bush only presented Iraqi WMDs as a “possibility,” threatens to erase one of the most significant chapters of recent history, in effect clearing the Bush administration—and the Times—of their role in misleading the country into war.

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New Yorker Editor David Remnick Pushed For The Iraq Invasion In 2003

Posted on March 31, 2016 by Luke Ford

Remnick wrote in February of 2003: The United States has been wrong, politically and morally, about Iraq more than once in the past; Washington has supported Saddam against Iran and overlooked some of his bloodiest adventures. The price of being wrong yet again could be incalculable. History will not easily excuse us if, by deciding not to decide, we defer a reckoning with an aggressive totalitarian leader who intends not only to develop weapons of mass destruction but also to use them.

Saddam’s abdication, or a military coup, would be a godsend; his sudden conversion to the wisdom of disarmament almost as good. It is a fine thing to dream. But, assuming such dreams are not realized, a return to a hollow pursuit of containment will be the most dangerous option of all.

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