Category: Current Affairs

The redemption of Philip Johnson

Cancel culture comes at another dead white male. But this time, it’s a dead white homosexual male: Philip Johnson, Ohioan, architect, and Nazi. But msn.com doesn’t like it. It understands it. “White supremacy,” it says, is “the west’s original sin,” so it’s no surprise that Johnson fell for it in one of its worst forms (Fascism), but he changed his views, employed black men, and banged dudes, so he ought to be forgiven.

I gotta say, that last redeeming trait gives me the biggest motivation of all not to be perceived as a racist. “Well, Eric, you applied a toxic blanket characterization to an entire race of people. You can either die a scourge of society, with your children spending the rest of their lives apologizing for your indiscretion, or you can let Franz the Trans bed you publicly. Your call.”

It’s interesting that Johnson is now being attacked. When he died back in 2005, no one said anything about his embrace of Fascism. Here’s Richard John Neuhaus writing in 2005:… Read the rest

The Hoover Institution’s Scott Atlas recently spoke at the Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Phoenix, Arizona. Atlas worked for Trump and has been widely derided by the MSM for questioning things like, you know, killing our youth with COVID restrictions. His remarks are the basis for the current issue of Imprimis.

He starts out by pointing out something that Michael Malice said on Joe Rogan. Malice said COVID has given a lot of very bad people very valuable information about how much they can abuse their power. Scott Atlas’ angle:

First, I have been shocked at the unprecedented exertion of power by the government since last March—issuing unilateral decrees, ordering the closure of businesses, churches, and schools, restricting personal movement, mandating behavior, and suspending indefinitely basic freedoms. Second, I was and remain stunned—almost frightened—at the acquiescence of the American people to such destructive, arbitrary, and wholly unscientific rules, restrictions, and mandates.

The entire piece is well-worth reading, even if he spends much of it defending himself (which I “get,” given the level of abuse he has unjustifiable received from the MSM).

(Click title to read the rest.)… Read the rest

In this age of uncertainty, you need beliefs and practices but not dogmas and preaching

“Let me tell you about COVID, the COVID vaccine, and Bitcoin.”

If any person starts telling me about those things, I write them off.

All three of those things are new and huge. As a result, they occupy a weird spot in the world of opinion: Everyone needs to have a stance on them and nobody’s stance is worth anything.

It’s difficult to reconcile such a paradox, but here’s one way: Take your stance, be prepared to shift it, and keep it to yourself.

Beliefs and practices, yes. Dogmas and preaching, no.

A wealthy client of mine recently asked a well-known financial guru for his stance on Bitcoin. I was a bit surprised the guru replied to the email, but I wasn’t surprised to see him take a strong stance: Bitcoin, he assured my client in all caps, is another Tulip Mania.

How can he know that? Bitcoin isn’t like the tulip in 17^th-century Holland. It might be in a bubble like tulips were, but it’s not a known thing like tulips. Bitcoin is brand new. At best, we can analogize Bitcoin to tulips.

Analogy is a great thing. It allows us to see things that are similar. The problem is, it first requires that the things be different.

That’s why the Tulip Mania reference is so compelling yet not. Bitcoin is not an instance of “This time it will be different,” which is the mantra of every person riding an inflated stock market, only to crash when it comes down. Bitcoin is an instance of “This time … Read the rest

A Tuesday Round-up of Worthy Articles

The Rise of Tattletale Journalism. There is a whole new genre of journalism out there: “Journalists” telling on people who don’t think correctly.

Glenn Greenwald ain’t havin’ it . . . and neither should we.

A new and rapidly growing journalistic “beat” has arisen over the last several years that can best be described as an unholy mix of junior high hall-monitor tattling and Stasi-like citizen surveillance. It is half adolescent and half malevolent. Its primary objectives are control, censorship, and the destruction of reputations for fun and power. Though its epicenter is the largest corporate media outlets, it is the very antithesis of journalism.

I’ve written before about one particularly toxic strain of this authoritarian “reporting.” Teams of journalists at three of the most influential corporate media outlets — CNN’s “media reporters” (Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy), NBC’s “disinformation space unit” (Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny), and the tech reporters of The New York Times (Mike Isaac, Kevin Roose, Sheera Frenkel) — devote the bulk of their “journalism” to searching for online spaces where they believe speech and conduct rules are being violated, flagging them, and then pleading that punitive action be taken (banning, censorship, content regulation, after-school detention). These hall-monitor reporters are a major factor explaining why tech monopolies, which (for reasons of self-interest and ideology) never wanted the responsibility to censor, now do so with abandon and seemingly arbitrary blunt force: they are shamed by the world’s loudest media companies when they do not.

Matt Taibbi follows suit, pointing out that we’ve reached a point where personal privacy is dangerous, official secrecy is not.

Matt Taibbi got ahold of the guy who wrote the viral Reddit post, “This is for you, Dad.”

If you followed the Gamestop saga, you probably saw the Reddit post, “This is for you, Dad.”

It was a brief post by “Space-peanut,” describing how the 2008-2009 meltdown destroyed his Dad and how he’d spend every dime on Gamestop stock if it would take revenge:

I remember my brother helping my father count pocket change on our kitchen table. That was all the money he had left in the world. While this was happening in my home, I saw hedge funders literally drinking champagne as they looked down on the Occupy Wall Street protesters. I will never forget that.

My father never recovered from that blow. He fell deeper and deeper into alcoholism and exists now as a shell of his former self, waiting for death.

This is all the money I have and I’d rather lose it all than give them what they need to destroy me. Taking money from me won’t hurt me, because I don’t value it at all. I’ll burn it down just to spite them.

This is for you, Dad.

This isn’t envy disguised as Marxian class envy. It’s rage at injustice admitting it’s rage. It’s rage at seeing one’s father get throttled by a system gamed by Wall Street and federal politicians. It’s rage at seeing one’s father get discarded as a chump because he played by the rules. There are going to be more and more chumps as the federal government gets stronger and stronger, doling out riches to its friends and allies, … Read the rest

“A left-wing newspaper can print the most subversive of articles, a left-wing speaker can deliver the most incendiary of speeches—but just try pointing out the dangers of such utterances and the whole leftist camp will raise a howl of denunciation.”

Solzhenitsyn & the Engine of History by Robert D. Kaplan

I was pretty stoked when my first issue of The New Criterion showed up. (I don’t know if I was more excited about the issue, or a book that coincidentally arrived the same day, Willie Mosconi’s 1965 classic, Winning Pocket Billiards, which was a mainstay of my youth.)

I was even more excited when I saw that one of its six feature essays is by Robert D. Kaplan, whose 2005 Balkan Ghosts has been grabbing my attention (albeit off-and-on) for the past month and keeps getting better and better. I mean, I thought the chapter on Croatia was excellent, and then Serbia was even better. And now that I’m on Rumania, the land of prostitutes and Dracula? I’m having a hard time putting it down at night.

(Did you know Bucharest has about as much metropolitan history as Chicago? It’s a very new city.)

Well, Kaplan’s essay on Solzhenitsyn didn’t disappoint. I curled up in my library last night and read it straight-through, relishing the non-pixelated print.

He provided an overview of Solzhenitsyn’s massive work, The Red Wheel, and used it to draw comparisons between the Rise of the Soviet Union and the United States today.

Yeah, the essay is a bit chilling, as evidenced by Solzhenitsyn’s words about leftist publications in the opening quote above. He … Read the rest