CT - 15 Jun 2022
Essays, articles, reports, opinion pieces of note discussed at FVN in the past week.
2022.06.01 - Chronicles Magazine - Michael Larson - The Trouble with Twitter: Larson discusses the benefits and drawbacks of both free speech and censorship for our fallen race. For a well-educated population, free speech means the best ideas will succeed. However, in a highly-indoctrinated society, the most pervasive propaganda will prevail. Likewise, Larson argues, censorship can be a propaganda weapon wielded by the powerful, or a tool used by wise parents or governments to maintain the mental, physical, and spiritual health of their children or citizens.
2022.06.01 - National Post - Terry Glavin - When narrative replaces facts: Glavin reflects on the media narrative of his May article covering the rampant misreporting on Canadian residential schools’ mass graves (which we’d linked to previously). He attributes the misinformation surrounding residential schools and their purported mass graves to an epistemic crisis, “the collapse of consensus about how to go about the work of determining what’s true and what isn’t.” However, he fails to identify a more important factor: the rise of identity politics and its toxic entanglement with governmental imperatives. Instead, he lets out a little of what is popularly called “Trump Derangement Syndrome”.
Glavin believes that the solution is to reassert tolerance of “blasphemous or even incendiary ideas” which he claims is “history’s most successful social principle.” But is it really?
2022.06.09 - The Volokh Conspiracy - Eugene Volokh - Washington Supreme Court: Whether Someone has been “Seized” turns in part on his race: A Washington Supreme Court precedent found that the burden is on the allegedly seized person to prove that seizure occured. In a recent decision which clarifies how one is to prove they’ve been seized, the Court includes a curious racialized statement:
For purposes of this analysis, an objective observer is aware that implicit, institutional, and unconscious biases, in addition to purposeful discrimination, have resulted in disproportionate police contacts, investigative seizures, and uses of force against Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) in Washington.
The Washington Supreme Court casually assumes that an objective oberserver would attribute disproportionate police contact between police and BIPOC to racial bias. This is a political opinion that the Court does not provide evidence for, and therefore represents a transfiguration of the subjective into the objective. Prof. Volokh points out the absurdity of the Court’s reasoning; politics in the guise of impartial law perverting the very law.
2022.06.10 - Future of Freedom - James Bovard - Supreme Court tortures the Constitution Again: The US Supreme Court, in March, overturned a lower Court ruling that information in the public domain could not be suppressed from trials at the discretion of the government which need only invoke the privilege of “state secrets”. Torture at Guantanomo Bay facilities was the case in which this expanded scope of state secrets privilege was decided, and Bovard in this long essay criticizes the pattern of decisions of the US Supreme Court. An essay of interest to anyone concerned with governmental discipline.
2022.06.14 - Taki’s Magazine - David Cole - Calamity of So Long Covid: In his polemic, Cole ridicules mainstream discourse around “Long COVID”. Useful as a quick survey of the examples of hypocrisy and hysteria around politics of competitive victimhood; a hypocrisy-hysteria politics of identity married to the politics of public health.