Daily Digest |  |
- Starbucks Threatens to Abandon Facebook
- Regarding Liz Cheney, another take
- The Mindlessness of the Left
- The war on standards, Rhodes Scholarship edition
- Taking heart from Hartlepool
| Starbucks Threatens to Abandon Facebook Posted: 10 May 2021 04:36 PM PDT (John Hinderaker) Buzzfeed has a story that is perhaps unintentionally revealing. Facebook documents leaked to that outlet indicate that Facebook is trying to assuage Starbucks’ ire at “hate speech” the company is encountering on the social media platform:
That suggests that there are a lot of people who like coffee but don’t like “BLM, LGBTQ, sustainability/climate change, etc.” dished up with their beverages. But what are we talking about here? There is an obvious difference between “negative” speech and “hate speech.” The most interesting thing to me is that none of the comments cited by Buzzfeed can rationally be described as “hate speech,” “racist”–another claim made by Starbucks–or otherwise objectionable. These are the comments cited in the article:
The commenter was correct.
Good question, in the minds of most Americans. Buzzfeed cited one more comment:
It is certainly possible that offensive comments were posted on the Starbucks Facebook page. Offensive comments are by no means rare anywhere on the internet, with most coming from “woke” leftists. But based on the selection printed by Buzzfeed, it seems that something else is mostly going on here. Starbucks executives likely live in a bubble in which they believe that pretty much everyone goes along with their left-wing “BLM, LGBTQ, sustainability/climate change, etc.” agenda. In fact, most Americans don’t. Hearing from normal customers apparently caused such cognitive dissonance that Starbucks may choose to retreat further into its bubble. That is unfortunate, but probably not untypical of what is going on across much of big business.     |
| Regarding Liz Cheney, another take Posted: 10 May 2021 11:37 AM PDT (Paul Mirengoff) Liz Cheney is about to be removed from her post in the GOP House leadership. Some conservatives are quite unhappy about this and some liberals pretend to be. Our friend Jim Dueholm, once a law partner of John and Scott, disagrees. He offers this opinion: I’ve long admired the Cheneys, father and daughter. Liz, like her father, is whip-smart, a reliable conservative, a sure Republican vote in the House, but she’s worn out her welcome in House caucus leadership. Her conduct in the second Trump impeachment fight was infuriating. She attacked the president viciously, charging him with summoning a mob and sending it into battle, ignoring all evidence to the contrary, and without for a moment considering whether it was constitutional to hand a pink slip to a person who had already received one from the American voters. And she’s not even consistent in her position. She supports a commission to look into the events of January 6. If she’s so sure the president incited a riot, sure enough to vote to impeach a goner, why does she need a commission to determine whether the president incited a riot? Her impeachment vote was anti-Trump spite, and nothing more. And she’s needlessly kept it up. She responds to every Trump tweet and uses the editorial pages of the Washington Post to attack Mr. Trump and his followers. She doesn’t need to do this. She can, and should, keep her head down and go about the business of the number three Republican in the House. Her job is to quiet troubled waters, not roil them again and again. Wyoming will send a Republican to Congress after the 2022 election, and Republican primary voters will decide whether that’s Liz Cheney or someone else. But for Republican House leadership, it’s time for her to go. My take on this dispute, which is mostly consistent with Jim’s, can be found here.   |
| Posted: 10 May 2021 10:26 AM PDT (Steven Hayward) Herewith a series of propositions and observations that all add us to the same conclusion—the left is utterly unprincipled, and will change their views on a dime when it suits their drive for power. • As recently as 2009, Democrats had 60 U.S. Senators. You will search in vain to find a Democrat who complained then that the Senate was “undemocratic,” favored small states “unfairly,” or that we needed to add two new (Democrat) states to make it “fair.” Instead of wondering why Democrats can’t compete in states where they often used to compete effectively (and quite recently), they want to change the rules. • Ditto for the House of Representatives. Democrats enjoyed the fruits of gerrymandering for decades. Suddenly, when Republicans started getting good at it, it became an affront to democracy. (The effects of gerrymandering are exaggerated and overestimated; it is the cast of mind among the left that is the decisive factor here. Oh, and have Democrats stopped gerrymandering Maryland, Massachusetts, and New York yet?) • California appears to be headed for its second recall election in 20 years of an unpopular Democrat governor. Last time there were over 130 candidates to replace Gray Davis. This time, there is talk behind closed doors in Sacramento that the Secretary of State may impose much stricter ballot access rules that will limit the field—possibly down to almost no one. (So far this possibility is attracting virtually no media attention. I almost hope they do it, so we can recall Gavin Gruesom and leave the governorship vacant.) • In Colorado, where several recent recalls have succeeded in removing Democratic legislators from office, guess what? Democrats want to change the rules to make it harder to recall anyone.
• In re: court packing. I don’t recall liberals wanting to pack the Supreme Court back in the days when the judiciary was largely doing the bidding of the left, such as during the rampages of the Warren Court. The difference between right and left on this point is instructive: whereas the left wants to pack the Court with its own people when the Court “goes wrong,” the right wanted to impeach Chief Justice Warren and Justice William O. Douglas, which is the better remedy for justices who distort the Constitution. Conclusion: for the left, it is only “democracy” when Democrats win. And of course pointing this out is racist.   |
| The war on standards, Rhodes Scholarship edition Posted: 10 May 2021 10:07 AM PDT (Paul Mirengoff) Rhodes Scholarships have been awarded based, in part, on race for at least 50 years. A friend from high school, and one of the smartest people I’ve ever known, was up for the prize in 1971. In the late stage of the process, he was in a room with other candidates from his region. When a tall African-American, an athlete whom I also knew, entered, a buzz went through the room, as my friend and the other candidates realized the prize from this region was the African-American’s to lose. He didn’t lose it. Fifty years later, the goal of having a diverse group of Rhodes scholars has evolved into an obsession with preferring non-white candidates. The Rhodes Trust boasts that 21 of the 32 winners are "students of colour," the greatest number ever elected in one year in the United States. Fifteen are first-generation Americans or immigrants, and one is a “Dreamer” with active DACA status. Seventeen are women and one is “nonbinary.” Not only that, diversity is often the preferred academic specialty of the winners, along with sexual harassment, racism, and the status of prisoners. The Trust describes the selectees as "passionate" or motivated by "fierce urgency” (presumably the “fierce urgency of now” that Barack Obama liked to wax lyrical about). David Satter translates the Trust’s description in a Wall Street Journal op-ed:
The Trust’s stated goal is “radical inclusion” in the selection of Rhodes Scholars. So the Trust doesn’t want just to include a diverse group of scholars, it wants to do so radically. This means granting preferences on the basis of race and other color and gender-based characteristics — in other words, discriminating against white males. Satter notes that this policy violates Cecil Rhodes’ will. Its 24th point states: "No student shall be qualified or disqualified for election to a Scholarship on account of his race or religious opinions." How quaint. There’s plenty more in Satter’s article, nearly all of it spot on. However, this paragraph may be too optimistic:
The erosion of standards by the Rhodes Trust is part of a much wider war, the success of which would negate Satter’s prediction, it seems to me.   |
| Posted: 10 May 2021 06:58 AM PDT (Scott Johnson) I hoped that the June 2016 vote in favor of Brexit might be a harbinger of the outcome in our own presidential election but feared this was wishful thinking. I was thinking — I think I was thinking — of the wave that brought Mehachem Begin to power in 1977, Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and Ronald Reagan in 1980. And so it proved to be. Reading Melanie Phillips’s long column on the one-off parliamentary by-election in Hartlepool last week has me wondering similar thoughts. Phillips prefaces her thoughts with an observation:
Drawing out the meaning of the result, Phillips writes:
The question occurs to me whether Democrats may be better at masking their contempt for America, Americans, and American history than the Labour crowd is about masking its contempt for working-class voters who support “their own historic culture and traditions,” or whether Republicans can unmask it. In any event, Phillips has much more, all of it of interest — whole thing here.   |
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