Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Jonah Goldberg does it better

Goldberg is a Never Trumper all the way.  Like most Never Trumpers, he works overtime to make sure anything Trump should get credit for is tempered by the fact that it's Trump.  Sometimes he goes a bit far, throwing traditional and conservative and common sense views under the bus, as can happen when you become obsessed about something like distancing yourself from the sitting president.

On the whole, however, he manages to keep things more balanced than the previously mentioned Ross Douthat or George Will.  Here, he takes up both the Kanye West and Handmaid's hysteria, and does so nicely.

For what it's worth, the whole idea that even as women overtake men in more and more areas of society, they're still one step away from vagina death camps, reminds me of what a historian from S. America once told me.  We were at a conference together.  While talking about several topics, including the blessings we have in our Founding Fathers, he mentioned something about revolutions.  Being from S. America, he considered himself somewhat of an expert.

He said the revolution that can be trusted in the one that admits it won.  Like ours.  Once the dust settled and the treaties were drafted, the Founding Fathers moved on to form this more perfect union.  But the nasty revolutions never admit victory.  They always find some way of insisting the revolution must continue.  Either the evil hasn't been eradicated enough, or the goal is still eluding them, or the heroes haven't been able to plant the real flag, or they've found a new bourgeoisie, or something.  They keep the revolution perpetuated, often in the form of increased tyranny, slaughter, terror and what has been typical in most revolutions over the last couple centuries.

Just food for thought as we see women, blacks, and others continue to act as if the last 70 years never happened, and what we can see when we walk down the street and turn on the television must not exist.

On the Kanye West brouhaha, Goldberg echoes my sentiment, that West has the right to an opinion, but I won't rest too much on it.  Though if anyone - even Bill Maher - says something that is true, then it's true.  Same with West.

Nonetheless, Goldberg sees the evils of the backlash against him, mostly in the racist diatribe by The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates.  Of course it's not called racist by well known journalists who want to keep their jobs.  But I can say it.  It's nothing other than what my son said all those years ago during the Duke LaCrosse scandal, that the racism du jour is that 'you can always tell a racist by the color of his skin.'  It's racism.  A blind man can see it.  Yet like all evils of history, it's acceptable because the people with the power and influence in our society today say it's acceptable.

Kudos to Goldberg, BTW, for noticing the Marxist influence in identity politics, where no matter who we are dealing with, all must be divided into either the proletariat or the bourgeoisie.  It can be black vs. white, man vs. woman, gay vs. straight, "cis" vs. trans, right vs. left, climate change supporter vs. climate change critics - why the list is endless!  The important thing is to remember that once the dust settles, this old world ain't big enough for the two groups.  One must be eliminated.  No forgiveness, mercy, reconciliation, pity, humility.  Just eliminate.  And then, of course, find a new set of groups to set against each other.  See the 20th century record of Marxist influence for examples.

Also it was nice to see someone - anyone - actually bother to look at the complexities surrounding the history of America's slave trade, and the subsequent development of racism to justify the institution.   To hear many lecturers of American history today, you'd think the Founders personally invented slavery just to satisfy their racist ways.  That the early years of slavery in North America looked entirely different than the later years, with entirely different justifications, is lost on many today.  More lost is that the Islamic world had already ventured down a more 'racist' defense for its robust African slave trade well before Christopher Columbus's parents decided to go on their first date.

So while Goldberg will keep the Right and Trump and the GOP at arms length, and sometimes not without good reason, he hasn't chucked the basics, the truths, and common sense, the reality and the morality that traditional conservatism stood upon even as we enter the dark times in which  we now find ourselves.  For that reason alone he's worth the read.

17 comments:

  1. The observation that a revolution can be trusted if it can admit its won nicely sums up something I've noticed and been trying to define for a long time, so thank you for that.

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    1. I wish I could remember his name. His insights about why the Founding Fathers deserve more credit than we give them nowadays were among the best I've heard.

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  2. You are now Orthodox. Russia, which has close government ties to the Orthodox church, made wife beating legal last year. So long as any government, especially one with so many admirers in our government, makes wife-beating legal, women still need to protest.

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    1. 1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/0dd0ab91-145a-4137-bf87-28d0498c8d56

      2. https://www.economist.com/europe/2017/01/28/why-russia-is-about-to-decriminalise-wife-beating

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    2. Not that beating people outside of self-defense is ever justified, but...

      From the first article you cited:

      “Now, if you batter your wife - or indeed any family member - but not severely enough to hospitalise them, and it’s your first recorded offence, you no longer go to prison for two years, as was previously the law. Instead, you’ll receive a fine of anything between 5 and 30,000 rubles (around £375), or up to 15 days in prison.”

      That doesn’t sound “legal” to me. It sounds like they reduced the penalty for first time offenders who didn’t injure anyone, and it’s not specific in any way toward women.

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    3. Which rather underscores the author's point.

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    4. And I checked the 2nd link which said:
      But not in Russia, where the Duma (parliament) voted this week to decriminalise domestic violence against family members unless it is a repeat offence or causes serious medical damage.

      Hmm... judging by the way that was phrased, it's ALSO legal for wives to beat their husbands (or homosexual couples to beat each other) by her standard. This wasn't mentioned at all.... hm... I guess domestic violence is ok if it's female on male?

      Looks like Karen's claims are the old favorite: "Asteroid to destroy the earth, women and minorities hardest hit."

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    5. Did either of you read the first link? Also, why are you okay with ANY reduction in the penalties for beating your family members?

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    6. Not that any of you will pay any attention, what with spending all your time complaining that it’s no longer 1519 anymore and therefore you can’t beat your family into bloody pulps, but there are almost no cases anywhere of women killing their husbands other than in self-defense but thousands of cases where the abusive man kills his wife when she tries to leave. Or their kids. Mass shooters, including the recent Parkland HS one, frequently have a history of beating women. The attack-driver in Toronto killed people because women wouldn’t have sex with him.

      As Margaret Atwood said, men are afraid women will laugh at them and women are afraid men will kill us.

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    7. "Did either of you read the first link?"

      He literally copied and pasted from it. It is reasonable to presume, therefore, he read the link. The question I have after you posted those two links to support your argument is, did you?

      "Not that any of you will pay any attention, what with spending all your time complaining that it’s no longer 1519 anymore and therefore you can’t beat your family into bloody pulps, "

      You realize that no one will take you seriously when you do that, right? No one reads a paragraph that begins that way and thinks, "This person sounds like a reasonable person with whom fruitful dialogue can be entered into."

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    8. Hi Karen. First a couple tidbits. One, we're Antiochian Orthodox, not Russian. Second, I believe Goldberg is referring to things close to home. I don't think he's speaking of the world in general. Third, to misquote Dracula, Russia's ways are not our ways. Russia is a big mess of a country. Within the lifetime of friends from Russia, Orthodox Christians still suffered. There are priests from E. European bloc countries who actually have physical scars from the years of Soviet rule. As it struggles past that time, expect things to be rough.

      It doesn't help that, quite frankly, not all reformers from in and out of Russia are the most contrite people, coming in with flowers and candy and wanting to get along. As we saw over the previous few years, some came in with middle fingers blazing, a 'screw you' to those Russians who were trying to reclaim some of their heritage that was lost in the Soviet years, and basically willing to piss all over things that many felt valuable. It's quite toxic right now, and it's not a simple 'this side vs. that side', as most things in the world aren't. Hence a CBS special that interviewed young Russians and found out - they aren't like us.

      As for the law itself, I can't speak to that. I don't know the background, the context, the history of the previous laws, their effectiveness, the potential for abuse in them, the results of the changes and if they are connected to this or that trend. There's a lot there before we go to 'Russia wants women to die so made beating wives legal.' I'd say we are on the first step of a 300 step process of getting to the bottom of things.

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  3. You should check out his Suicide of the West, because he delves into these topics at greater length. It's a bit rambling in sections, but the overall theme of the book is spot on. And it's precisely because he's one of the few conservatives who hasn't acquired amnesia about core principles that he's worth reading.

    On another topic, if I may I'd like to lodge a small protest at the term "Never Trump," as it's becoming the new neocon: a loosely used term to describe a wide range of people with very different ideologies, and generally employed with no context. First of all, as a technical matter, it's no longer apt as we are past the election. Personally I never used the term for myself because there was often an unspoken modifier: and not Cruz either. Which gets me to the heart of why I don't like the term: it's applied equally to conservatives like Goldberg, David French, Kevin Williamson and others of that ilk as it is to moderate rigfht-wingers like Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, George Will, and a host of others. The former group ground their (much more reasonable) opposition in ideology, while the latter have made it much more about personality. And while the latter concern is not without merit, I think there is too much that distinguishes these groups to lump them together.

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    1. Thx, Paul for the recommendation. I was aiming to get the book but hadn't picked it up yet.

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    2. His book is on my short list to purchase.

      As for the term, I know it's a little cheap. But there are those who call themselves Never Trumpers. It seems to cover a pretty broad base, even if, as you say, their reasons are different. It's enough that they simply won't give Trump credit if at all possible. Though I've noticed those from the first group are less likely to throw the baby out with the bath water.

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    3. Understood, though one of the major points of departure is that the former group will offer praise when it is due. In fact Frum threw a snit not that long ago because some conservative Trump critics dared to not follow his diktat that it is never right to praise President Trump, even when he's "accidentally" right.

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    4. I believe the term we're looking for is: "narcissism of small differences."

      I can understand some of their trepidation (and the way some Trump supporters treated them was horrible) but yeah, give the man credit when he is due.

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