Fighting Nazis is a good thing, but fighting Nazis doesn’t necessarily make you or your cause good. By my lights this is simply an obvious fact.
Source: Alt-Right & Antifa — Both Bad Groups & Ideology | National Review
Right vs. Left in Charlottesville
Let’s get something out of the way: Charlottesville is not about Confederate statues or Robert E. Lee or the Civil War or American history. What happened on Friday night and Saturday is about power, specifically about forcing the great mass of Americans to choose sides in a zero-sum clash between contemporary American versions of Weimar gangs.
Source: Charlottesville Was A Fight Between The Tribal Right And Tribal Left
A plague on both their houses. I choose the center, with a slight lean toward my right shoulder.
Silicon Valley’s Political Culture of Fear
Blind, an anonymous chat app, surveyed over 4,000 employees of Silicon Valley companies in the wake of Damore’s firing to see where they stood on it. Fifty-six percent of the Google employees who participated in the survey oppose Damore’s firing. True, this survey was voluntary, and is therefore scientifically meaningless, but it does make you wonder how many people within Google are upset with what was done to Damore, but who now know that they must keep their mouths shut if they want to avoid the same fate.
Source: James Damore, Diversity Martyr | The American Conservative
I will confess that there have been days when, wandering the pathways of the Google campus in Mountain View, I have felt an occasional longing to work for the company. Not anymore.
No portfolio of perks or vast larder of free snacks could ever offset the value of working someplace rather more obscure that allows me to hold my own opinions, to follow my own path, and to live without fear of being fired for my political views, however incorrect or antiquated.
There is something important happening here, and it may be the beginning of the end for Silicon Valley. How ironic that history will record that the place that grew out of free and open thought will collapse into a heap at the hand of an intellectual orthodoxy as angry as a Jihad.
Airbnb’s Pandora’s Box
For the record, I believe Airbnb has the right to decide who gets to use their service. I would never open my home or property as an Airbnb place precisely because there are all kinds of people I would not want staying in my home (like, for example, neo-Nazis, but also no doubt some people who would pass muster with Airbnb corporate). That said, the idea that a company would search out the political opinions of those wanting to buy its services and blacklist people over them is scary as hell. Where does it stop?
In a well-intentioned effort to do good (or, perhaps, just to pander to what it sees as its core users), Airbnb has opened a brand new Pandora’s box.
I oppose and reject without qualification the entire white-supremacist political complex that I am now dubbing the “alt-Reich,” because they have no business being legitimized as “conservatives.” They have proven themselves, as a group, to be aught more than neo-fascist thugs.
That said, Rod Dreher raises a good question: if Airbnb is allowed to refuse service to someone because of their political opinions, where does this end?
Here is another question: if a progressive believes that Airbnb is allowed to refuse service to people on the basis of their political affiliations, is the progressive’s opposition to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or, more specifically, the right of a shopkeeper to refuse to offer a service that violates his political beliefs, pure hypocrisy?
The Upside to the Chaos at 1600
An unnoticed reason for cheerfulness is that in one, if only one, particular, Trump is something the nation did not know it needed — a feeble president whose manner can cure the nation’s excessive fixation with the presidency.
Source: Donald Trump’s Diminishing of the Presidency Is Good | National Review
Are we reaching the point in America where we are grasping for straws in our desperate search for something positive to take from our current predicament? Or is this the opening that will shift Congress from its interminable focus on intramural rivalries and on re-asserting the role of the Hill in the governance of the nation?
It can only be the latter if the leaders in the House and Senate realize that there is more at stake here than partisan one-upsmanship. The Russia sanctions bill was a good start. Let’s make it a trend.
What is the West?
Broadly speaking, what we call the West are the countries and peoples formed by the meeting of Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Hebrew religion. There’s a great deal of diversity within the West, but religion, ideas, art, literature, and geography set it apart from other civilizations.
Rod Dreher
Yes, They Really Do Despise Their Civilization
The American Conservative
Dances with Soviets
The president was boasting of the “great intel” he receives when he discussed intelligence provided by a U.S. partner.
I cannot help but think about the Gipper at moments like this.
Ronald Reagan is spinning in his grave with such speed that we can almost hear it in Oxnard.
