Spot on, well said! It’s got a lot worse with the advent of social media - now every nut job politician can perform to their fan base all the time. It tends to confirm my belief that politics is a personality disorder.
LA, virtue signalling, pfft. Those guys are amateurs. You want real virtue signalling head three hours north by plane where the big heads in Calgary decided that Canada Day our NATIONAL HOLIDAY similar to July 4th needs to be "DIE"ed. “For many Calgarians this is a day of mourning or reflection,” ...... , Calgary said it would “offer diverse, educational and inclusive programming for Calgarians to celebrate culture and community.” WTF, the day we celebrate our country, which by the way is generally a pretty damn good place to live, should instead be for "mourning and reflection"?
Follow on, the Calgary city council, to their credit, also said WTF and canceled the cancellation
This was one of your best columns. I’m definitely right of center, but I’m with you on the Texas thing. Unless, of course, Chuck Heston as Moses is the one putting the 10 Commandments in the schools, which I’m totally behind. 😁
I’m convinced 90% of the anti LGBTQ legislation we’re seeing in the states is performative. Poll after poll says the public doesn’t want it, just a loud minority, but state senators and governors are so afraid of a challenge from the right that they’re performing solely for the nutbag portion.
I get that everybody remaining in the Democratic party is miffed at "Woke M&Ms" but as a resident of LA, I absorb enough wokester preaching; I don't need to be lectured by a candy wrapper. The fact that the wrapper already lists the calories makes me feel as shitty as I'm going to.
Also, as a survivor of Catholic school in the 70s and 80s I can tell you that there was no better way to teach kids to fear and hate organized religion than to subject them to the daily hypocrisy of abuse for one's own good by sadists masquerading as nuns. (Exemption for Sisters Constance and Richard, you guys were the best)
I think we're going to see the same thing with the woke mob taking over schools. The backlash is coming. Book it.
I read the part about the statue with a fetus inside the womb, smiled and expected my eyes to fall on the second half of the joke. When no such thing appeared, I Googled it, and oh my god it was real.
Try Academe the last 50 years. Every meeting was just virtue signalling. We'd pass the most absurd stuff, hire some incompetents to teach it, and insulate the productive departments. Tech and Science were left alone, the Liberal Arts were taken over by the loonies.
Well said - there's tons of politicians who would be way better served by being activists or community organizers, fields where the 'results' don't really matter. We need politicians to be effective at solving problems, not performing for social media clips.
The Faith Angle podcast recently featured Yuval Levin talking about "America's Crisis in Social Trust" and it was on these same lines. His observation was that too much of politics (and lots of other spheres) appears to have devolved into a performance because it's being recorded and can be played as a no-context clip later. The real work of politics gets done in places like the House & Senate Intelligence Committees, which aren't recorded and thus feature actual dialogue about real solutions. Members of Congress have consistently cited working on those committees as the most valuable/productive part of their time serving.
I think the problems with La Sombrita are worse than Virtue Signaling. Scott Lincicome tweeted a report by the CATO Institute showing how the entire project was essentially designed to fail. One of the most amazing things in the report was the revelation every City Councilor in LA had the right to veto new bus shelters in their districts.
It's kind of funny how we have our own moral enforcers on the Left now too. A friend of mine calls them the Rainbow-Haired Church Ladies. Instead of peeking into neighborhood windows looking to find gossip to punish people with, they go through your entire Internet history looking for dirt.
I can't believe that you made me watch that lady from Nebraska solve the world's problems.
Getting an incompetent project to pass is best accomplished by calling it a benefit for some traditionally marginalized group. If it was said that it was to protect white people from the sun while waiting for the bus, every politician in the county would have seen the waste and fraud right away. Somehow linking it to DEI initiatives meant that if you pointed out its flaws, you were just some sort of phobic person.
Another terrific post. That said, I truly believe you have, in fact, underestimated the stupidity of some Texas state Senators. (I know some NC legislators personally, and it's not exactly an IQ test to get the job--especially on the GOP side).
The M-1 "Sombrita" SALA (Shade And Lighting Awning) is planned in five variants, each requiring unique international subcontracting partnerships. (Only one will ever be produced in any quantity and the others abandoned, but this has still created jobs, Clean, green tech jobs! Whee!) Material inputs such as rare earth elements in lighting components rely on supply streams in substandard production conditions (read: a Congolese boy is digging them out of a muddy hole under the watchful eyes of a gunman right now). Progress isn't cheap. You can have it done right, done cheap, or done right away, but you only get to pick one and a half of them. See, this is why you must rule the galaxy as emperor first, is so that you can finance the programmatics of a death star with Wookie slave labor on Kessel. If we want to build an awning that is a death star, we have to spend a little.
Spot on, well said! It’s got a lot worse with the advent of social media - now every nut job politician can perform to their fan base all the time. It tends to confirm my belief that politics is a personality disorder.
LA, virtue signalling, pfft. Those guys are amateurs. You want real virtue signalling head three hours north by plane where the big heads in Calgary decided that Canada Day our NATIONAL HOLIDAY similar to July 4th needs to be "DIE"ed. “For many Calgarians this is a day of mourning or reflection,” ...... , Calgary said it would “offer diverse, educational and inclusive programming for Calgarians to celebrate culture and community.” WTF, the day we celebrate our country, which by the way is generally a pretty damn good place to live, should instead be for "mourning and reflection"?
Follow on, the Calgary city council, to their credit, also said WTF and canceled the cancellation
This was one of your best columns. I’m definitely right of center, but I’m with you on the Texas thing. Unless, of course, Chuck Heston as Moses is the one putting the 10 Commandments in the schools, which I’m totally behind. 😁
I’m convinced 90% of the anti LGBTQ legislation we’re seeing in the states is performative. Poll after poll says the public doesn’t want it, just a loud minority, but state senators and governors are so afraid of a challenge from the right that they’re performing solely for the nutbag portion.
I Superlike™️ this post, and wish I could Superlike™️ it a thousand more times.
I get that everybody remaining in the Democratic party is miffed at "Woke M&Ms" but as a resident of LA, I absorb enough wokester preaching; I don't need to be lectured by a candy wrapper. The fact that the wrapper already lists the calories makes me feel as shitty as I'm going to.
Also, as a survivor of Catholic school in the 70s and 80s I can tell you that there was no better way to teach kids to fear and hate organized religion than to subject them to the daily hypocrisy of abuse for one's own good by sadists masquerading as nuns. (Exemption for Sisters Constance and Richard, you guys were the best)
I think we're going to see the same thing with the woke mob taking over schools. The backlash is coming. Book it.
I read the part about the statue with a fetus inside the womb, smiled and expected my eyes to fall on the second half of the joke. When no such thing appeared, I Googled it, and oh my god it was real.
Try Academe the last 50 years. Every meeting was just virtue signalling. We'd pass the most absurd stuff, hire some incompetents to teach it, and insulate the productive departments. Tech and Science were left alone, the Liberal Arts were taken over by the loonies.
Well said - there's tons of politicians who would be way better served by being activists or community organizers, fields where the 'results' don't really matter. We need politicians to be effective at solving problems, not performing for social media clips.
The Faith Angle podcast recently featured Yuval Levin talking about "America's Crisis in Social Trust" and it was on these same lines. His observation was that too much of politics (and lots of other spheres) appears to have devolved into a performance because it's being recorded and can be played as a no-context clip later. The real work of politics gets done in places like the House & Senate Intelligence Committees, which aren't recorded and thus feature actual dialogue about real solutions. Members of Congress have consistently cited working on those committees as the most valuable/productive part of their time serving.
I think the problems with La Sombrita are worse than Virtue Signaling. Scott Lincicome tweeted a report by the CATO Institute showing how the entire project was essentially designed to fail. One of the most amazing things in the report was the revelation every City Councilor in LA had the right to veto new bus shelters in their districts.
https://www.cato.org/blog/la-sombrita-or-how-fail-infrastructure
I detect Emotivism in that posted video clip
It's kind of funny how we have our own moral enforcers on the Left now too. A friend of mine calls them the Rainbow-Haired Church Ladies. Instead of peeking into neighborhood windows looking to find gossip to punish people with, they go through your entire Internet history looking for dirt.
I can't believe that you made me watch that lady from Nebraska solve the world's problems.
Getting an incompetent project to pass is best accomplished by calling it a benefit for some traditionally marginalized group. If it was said that it was to protect white people from the sun while waiting for the bus, every politician in the county would have seen the waste and fraud right away. Somehow linking it to DEI initiatives meant that if you pointed out its flaws, you were just some sort of phobic person.
You are absolutely right. Nothing wrong in this one!
Another terrific post. That said, I truly believe you have, in fact, underestimated the stupidity of some Texas state Senators. (I know some NC legislators personally, and it's not exactly an IQ test to get the job--especially on the GOP side).
The M-1 "Sombrita" SALA (Shade And Lighting Awning) is planned in five variants, each requiring unique international subcontracting partnerships. (Only one will ever be produced in any quantity and the others abandoned, but this has still created jobs, Clean, green tech jobs! Whee!) Material inputs such as rare earth elements in lighting components rely on supply streams in substandard production conditions (read: a Congolese boy is digging them out of a muddy hole under the watchful eyes of a gunman right now). Progress isn't cheap. You can have it done right, done cheap, or done right away, but you only get to pick one and a half of them. See, this is why you must rule the galaxy as emperor first, is so that you can finance the programmatics of a death star with Wookie slave labor on Kessel. If we want to build an awning that is a death star, we have to spend a little.