Happy Tuesday.

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Pixy on the Democrats and Their Love for Totalitarian Iconography

The Hillary poster in particular seems to come from some weird alternate universe in which Eva Peron was an admiral of the Imperial Japanese navy.

"Shut Up Culture" Takes on Dissent Over Campus "Rape Culture"

So Cornell student Julius Kairey wrote a thoughtful, reasoned column in the campus newspaper pointing out how the movement to end 'rape culture' on campus has seriously eroded the due process rights of students.

But the belief that rape must be prevented by "any means necessary" has been used to justify the elimination of key protections for students accused of rape in campus judicial systems. Some want the claims of the alleged victims of rape to be accepted as true, and not scrutinized in a fair legal proceeding. Just two years ago, Cornell stripped those accused of sexual offenses of the right to retain an attorney in University proceedings and the right to cross-examine their accusers. A student accused of a sexual offense at Cornell is now not able to directly ask the person who is making a potentially life-ruining accusation a single question about the incident. This is an inexcusable erasure of the fundamental right to confront one's accuser, a right that has existed for all of our country's history. Such rights are not superfluous. They protect us against arbitrary action by those who hold the levers of power.

And outrage!! from the usual campus suspects ensued blaming Kairey for fomenting sexual assault as well as the newspaper for disrespecting rape survivors by having the temerity to even publish his trigger of a column:

We disagree with the decision to publish "The Truth About 'Rape Culture,'" by Julius Kairey '15. Kairey blatantly disrespected a sensitive subject by reducing and delegitimizing the scarring experiences of survivors. This newspaper erred in publishing this article and should now also take responsibility for the harmful, triggering effects that articles like these cause.

...Those, like Kairey, who have the power to create change by advocating for survivors instead choose to ignore their voices, erase their rights and refuse to hold perpetrators accountable..

Now to even disagree with those obsessed with 'rape culture' makes you a cheerleader for sexual assault as well as a common thought criminal.

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An American man wins the Boston Marathon for the first time since 1983.

The Blaze reports that a $28 billion Army software system for organizing intelligence on the battlefield just doesn't work very well-- and the Army is refusing officers' request to implement a much cheaper ($3 million) system developed by a private software company, a system preferred by the Marines.

The Marine Corps, Air Force and special forces, through their own procurement process, had implemented Palantir [the privately developed alternative software] as an additional war-fighting tool to be utilized with their own DCGS platform. U.S. special forces, including the Navy SEALs and other elite teams, along with the Marine Corps noted in a June 2013 U.S. Government Accountability Office report that their troops thought Palantir was “easy to use” and “effective” on their recent missions in Afghanistan.

“Users indicated it was a highly effective system for conducting intelligence information analysis and supporting operations,” the GAO report said. “The software had gained a reputation for being intuitive and easy to use, while also providing effective tools to link and visualize data.”

But for the Army ,”Palantir was like a thorn in their side — they didn’t want to cut into their own research and funding — if they added the software program to their DCGS platform, it would eliminate their ability to keep lining their own pockets,” a military intelligence analyst with knowledge of the program told TheBlaze.

When a student videotaped bullies absuing him and presented that proof to school authorities, that student was quickly charged with illegally wiretapping other people and prosecuted. He was ultimately convicted on a disorderly persons charge.

Now that charge is being vacated -- but what the hell?

I think this is an example of Your Government At Work, and government's interest is always in protecting itself and the phoney-baloney jobs of its workers. If a kid presents evidence of serious bullying, that reflects poorly on the school's discipline.

So how do you solve that problem? Well, there are two ways: One is to crack down on bullying, which may be difficult and may take a long time.

The other is to prosecute the whistleblower.

Either way, it's out of your In Box. So go with the easier one.

This is pretty neat, though I don't understand the principle behind it -- French scientists say they've created a gel embedded with nanoparticles that will close a wound as if it were glue even in soft organs like the liver and lungs.

The article explains how the nanoparticles bond with each other and with the gel they're in... but I don't understand how the gel sticks to the flesh. I mean, if the gel itself is just glue, then how is this different than plain old glue?

So I don't understand it. But it seems important. Maybe one of y'all can figure out how it works from the paper submitted on the process.

Charlie Crist announces that he hasn't changed his position on abortion -- that he's always been pro-life, by which he means pro-choice.

His statement is confusing and nonsensical, as it's meant to be. more...

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Fascism is forever descending upon the rightwing but landing upon the left.*

In a move with major legal implications, The California Supreme Court Advisory Committee on The Code of Judicial Ethics has proposed to classify the Boy Scouts as practicing “invidious discrimination” against gays, which would end the group’s exemption to anti-discriminatory ethics rules and would prohibit judges from being affiliated with the group.

“The Committee’s invitation ignores the fact that the change also encompasses other youth organizations whose membership is limited on the basis of gender, e.g., the Girl Scouts, as well as the military, which continues to practice ‘discrimination’ on the basis of gender,” wrote Catherine Short, legal director of the pro-life group Life Legal Defense Foundation, in a letter to the Committee obtained by TheDC that predicts possible implications for pro-life judges in the future.

“Perhaps this is not an unintended consequence,” wrote Short.

Perhaps we should just make it official that, in order to qualify for a paying job of any kind, one must submit proofs that one has voted Democratic at least 75% of the time.

* Just in case people don't know this quote: The original quote is, "Fascism is forever descending upon America but landing in Europe." The idea is that while people are forever shouting that fascism is coming to America -- because they view America as crude and susceptible to that sort of thing -- they completely miss the fact that genuine fascism convulses Europe frequently.

Similarly, many on the left -- or those who consider themselves the "center," but who are really on the left -- are always worrying about the fascist impulse in rightwing politics. Conveniently missing their own fascist impulses.

Posted by: Ace at 02:03 PM | Comments (345)
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Via Althouse, the document that probably served as the basis for Hillary Clinton's "vast right-wing conspiracy" remark.

The actual document is here. There's not much to it. It's a fairly crude political blast-fax type thing (from the age of the blast-fax -- the emails of yesteryear).

Interesting, it uses the term "conspiracy theory" to apply not just to what would typically be termed conspiracy theories (the various theories about Vince Foster's death) but also to any derogatory story the Clinton White House wished to delegitimize. Thus, the Paula Jones and Gennifer Flower accusations -- which were not "conspiracy theories" in any sense, but just accusations that Clinton (falsely) denied -- are termed "conspiracy theories" pushed by the "right-wing."

Whitewater also gets namechecked as a "conspiracy theory."

The document is especially paranoid itself* about the powers of this newfangled "Internet" machine:

The right wing has seized upon the internet as a means of communicating its ideas to people.

Moreover, evidence exists that Republican staffers surf the internet, interacting with extremists in order to exchange ideas and information.

Egads!

Other interesting points:

The memo is much-concerned on partisans' ability to transmit memes via this "Internet" and then get them into "mainstream" news coverage. Note that the left has spent the last twenty years building up a serious and well-funded infrastructure of professional agitators whose only goal is to just that, but for the left.

Media Matters and all the rest are frequently able to get their stories picked up by the "mainstream" media, and, per Sheryl Attkisson, are also active in coordinating email/phone call/whisper campaigns to "controversialize" news stories they don't like and get them pulled from "mainstream" media broadcasts and articles.

The other interesting thing, of course, is that the names "Richard Mellon Scaife" and "Joseph Farah" litter the document like mentions of the devil in a medieval treatise on the plague.

Twenty years later, and they're still working off the exact same playbook. It's just that the Koch Brothers are the Devils of the Day.

* Note how establishment players are often extremely paranoid about "the fringe" (that is, anyone who's non-establishment).

This 2009 article describes "the paranoia of the center" (or the putative center -- certainly They think they're the center) and how their hateful suspicions about anyone Not Like Them can lead to deligitimization campaigns and suppression of vital debate.

We've heard ample warnings about extremist paranoia in the months since Barack Obama became president, and we're sure to hear many more throughout his term. But we've heard almost nothing about the paranoia of the political center. When mainstream commentators treat a small group of unconnected crimes as a grand, malevolent movement, they unwittingly echo the very conspiracy theories they denounce. Both brands of connect-the-dots fantasy reflect the tellers' anxieties much more than any order actually emerging in the world.

When such a story is directed at those who oppose the politicians in power, it has an additional effect. The list of dangerous forces that need to be marginalized inevitably expands to include peaceful, legitimate critics.

The Paranoid Style in Center-Left Politics

This isn't the first time the establishment has been overrun with paranoia about paranoiacs. The classic account of American conspiratology is Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," a 1964 survey of political fear from the founding generation through the Cold War. A flawed and uneven essay, Hofstadter's article nonetheless includes several perceptive passages. The most astute one might be this:

"It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through 'front' groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy."

Hofstadter didn't acknowledge it, but his argument applied to much of his audience as well. His article begins with a reference to "extreme right-wingers," a lead that reflected the times. In the early 1960s, America was experiencing a wave of alarm about the radical right. This had been building throughout the Kennedy years and then exploded after the president's assassination, which many people either blamed directly on the far right or attributed to an atmosphere of fear and division fed by right-wing rhetoric. By the time Hofstadter's essay appeared, the "projection of the self" he described was in full effect. Just as anti-communists had mimicked the communists, anti-anti-communists were emulating the red hunters.

It's an important piece, worth reading again every year.

So, it appears that the Democrats became paranoid about these "right wing extremists" using the Internet to "spread [their] ideas" to the mainstream media, and then spent the next twenty years diligently creating a virtual media paramilitary militia army to transmit their own memes and enforce their community-based narratives.

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Cotton already had big advantages over Pryor, but this ad just adds to those.

Oh, and Dick Blumenthal sort of cut an ad, too. Inadvertently. See below.

more...

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He may just be trolling (so I'm not linking him, but Jonah Goldberg's discussion of the troll-posts), but he may be partly serious.

We were just discussing this idea of Socialists on the podcast, with Jonah Goldberg, as a matter of fact.

Socialists actually crave the non-fighting aspects of the military life -- the collectivization of people into a single body with one shared purpose. (This feeling of a shared purpose is often craved by those with a religious impulse but who reject actual religion.)

Socialists long to be corporatized -- turned into a single cell of a much larger, much grander, much more transcendent body.

They are frequently pretty casual about admitting that they would like a military-like society, regimented and hierarchized, with orders flowing down from those of superior rank.

Indeed, the military does have these attributes, as it must. But people in the military are largely conservative-leaning, and opposed to collectivization generally.

The Daily Beast writer implies this is somehow a contradiction. It's really not. A soldier might accept that he will give up certain rights of expression and choice for purposes of an undeniably grand purpose (defending the country) and only for that purpose.

The fact that a solider accepts that he is not permitted to bad mouth his superior officers or civilian leaders while acting as a soldier does not suggest he believes that such forbiddances should attach to an ordinary citizen.

Including himself, when he musters out -- most soldiers aren't lifelong soldiers, after all. A soldier may accept some aspects of collectivism (including obedience to superior officers) in his life as a soldier, and yet be completely averse to such a situation in his civilian life.

As most do, of course.

But the left does seem to imagine that if it works for the military, why then it really ought to work for society in general.

It's a creepy idea. It's a totalitarian idea. The military is exceptional in many ways, and foremost among those ways is that the military obeys rules that regular civilians are not required to obey, nor even to recognize.

But the left does see a well-functioning society as resembling the military, minus some aspects -- such as a patriotic temperament, willingness to use force to defend a nation, etc.

But otherwise: March in formation, act as a single unit, sublimate individuality into shared purpose decided upon by your superiors, and so forth.

And so they'll keep on insisting on this point, claiming it reveals something about conservatives, without realizing it reveals far more about themselves.

Posted by: Ace at 11:29 AM | Comments (289)
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Via @rdbrewer4, a really good piece.

Chelsea assures us that her past workplaces were “incredibly, fiercely meritocratic.” Sometimes in past interviews, the interviewer inadvertently expresses surprise at the seemingly high-level jobs Chelsea Clinton gets handed...

Chelsea took that “Assistant Vice Provost” position [at an NYU school] in 2010, at age 30.

Now Chelsea’s “making her move”, which warranted that Fast Company cover piece:

Now, finally, she has decided to join the Clinton family business. As vice chair of the recently rebranded Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, she is helping one of the worldÂ’s most notable philanthropies grow up.

She must have been extraordinarily talented to be named vice chair of an organization that has her name in its title, huh? What are the odds?

...

Dear friends on the Left: You canÂ’t bemoan the death of opportunity in America, and rail against the richest one percent, and then devour puff pieces on how exceptionally talented and wonderful the offspring of our super-wealthy political leaders are, earning plaudits just by showing up with their famous last names.

The New York Times' public editor (ombudsmen) Arthur Brisbane described exactly how the media covers their favorite causes in 2012:

I also noted two years ago that I had taken up the public editor duties believing “there is no conspiracy” and that The Times’s output was too vast and complex to be dictated by any Wizard of Oz-like individual or cabal. I still believe that, but also see that the hive on Eighth Avenue is powerfully shaped by a culture of like minds — a phenomenon, I believe, that is more easily recognized from without than from within.

When The Times covers a national presidential campaign, I have found that the lead editors and reporters are disciplined about enforcing fairness and balance, and usually succeed in doing so. Across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism — for lack of a better term — that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times.

As a result, developments like the Occupy movement and gay marriage seem almost to erupt in The Times, overloved and undermanaged, more like causes than news subjects.

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I've worked for myself for most of my adult life and don't have any real experience with working in a cooperate environment, so maybe this is totally normal. Or maybe it's a sign of something far more troubling.

NBC News last year hired a "psychological consultant" to interview David Gregory's friends and family, part of an effort to get greater insight into the "Meet the Press" host's personality, according to a new report.

The point of hiring the consultant, NBC spokeswoman Meghan Pianta said, was to "to get perspective and insight from people who know him best."

...

"Gregory’s job does not appear to be in any immediate jeopardy, but there are plenty of signs of concern,” [The Washington Post's Paul] Farhi wrote.

You have to wonder if perhaps NBC is just worried about Gregory's state of mind. I mean taking over the number one Sunday talk-show and running it into the ground has to be a heavy burden anyone.

Still, it makes this image, and the DC prosecutor's decision not to try this obvious violation of the law, all the more troubling.

Naturally all of us here at the HQ wish Mr. Gregory the best in this difficult time.

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The Telegraph: China on course to become 'world's most Christian nation' within 15 years
"The number of Christians in Communist China is growing so steadily that it by 2030 it could have more churchgoers than America."

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