What would you think if the Court had decided the opposite? That is, if the Court had held that same sex marriage is unconstitutional, so that all state laws approving such unions are void, and all court decisions establishing same sex marriage are overruled. Would you then think it appropriate for “five lawyers,” as Chief Justice Roberts put it, to remove this issue from the democratic process and purport to resolve it by judicial fiat?
I am pretty sure you wouldn’t. I am pretty sure that in the face of such a ruling, you would howl with outrage and insist that the issue of same sex marriage be determined by democratic processes.
The Supreme Court, due process, and separation of powers are wonderful things or obsolescent white elephants that need to be repealed, depending on whether the Supreme Court is ruling on gay rights, gun rights, abortion-rights or speech rationing.
I thought you might find this interesting. For the mornings this week, I’m camped out on the second floor of the MacPhail Center for Music, while my kiddo attends a harp class. (I’m hoping she takes an interest in something much less expensive, such as ukulele, for which she has a class in July.)
After a while, kids’ music all sounds the same.
I digress:
Sometimes I’ve used my cell phone service for an Internet connection, sometimes I use the MacPhail Wi-fi. I just tried to go to SITD, and got this message instead: Redirecting you to Barracuda Web Filter.
I was able to get to National Review and Powerline, so it’s not an anti-conservative thing. I didn’t see any “bans guns on these premises” sign when I have entered, but perhaps “shot” is just too … violent, ya know?
I caught this in the City Pages – as reliable a barometer of the Twin Cities far-left, as well as the attitudes and mores of the wanna-be hipster, as there is.
I fancy myself something of a dive-bar enthusiast, and the Gopher Bar was just about the last feather to place in my Twin Cities cap.
No doubt an ironic seed cap. No,wait – that was hipsters ten years ago.
Whenever hipsters talk “dive bars”, they’re talking “dive bars hipsters go to”. Which are to “dive bars” what the Disneyland “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride is to having your ship boarded by cuttthroats.
But the Gopher probably qualifies. It gives off all the signs of being “not upmarket” and “not even a little bit gentrified”.
Click to see full size
Some signs, indeed, that make one suspect the lad might wet his pants, had he stayed long enough to read all the bar’s “flair”.
Which he did not:
Having spent the entire drive down talking to my friend about how troubled I was with the church shooting and resulting racial insensitivity, it seemed almost surreal to walk into Gopher Bar and see the Stars n’ Bars flying proudly. Upon asking the bartender about it, he replied with an (almost self-aware?) “Man, that doesn’t mean anything.” All I could squeak out was, “I beg to differ on behalf of nine families in Charleston” and walked out.
Confederates didn’t kill those nine people in Charleston. A mentally disturbed narcissist who’d latched onto racism as his vehicle to fifteen minutes’ fame did.
But I get it. The Confederate flag was the symbol of a nation that existed in large part due to slavery; the political crisis that led to its forming was over slavery; the economic battle between the North and South was between industry and slavery. The “preservation of the union” argument leading to the war was over the right to secede…over issues that all traced back to slavery. I have my misgivings about the Confederate flag.
We’ll come back to that.
The next morning I called and spoke with a woman, simply informing her that she had alienated a customer, to which she replied: “Actually, if you’re offended at that then you’re the racist, and for every one of you that leaves we have ten that come in because of that flag.”
My natural, earnest follow-up question was “Is this a Klan bar?”
That response was met with an expletive and a phone-slam.
And that was better than the earnest young hipster lad deserved. I wish he’d come into the place and ask in person.
But let’s diverge from our earnest young hipster friend for a moment and look at some history.
Rejection!: The day after VE Day, in 1945, the Swastika was trayf, worldwide. Everyone in polite, and most impolite, soceity linked it with world war, with the Holocaust, with millions of dead. Since then, the Swastika (outside of its traditional Sanskrit context) is only used for history, or to shock people. There’s never been any ambiguity about that.
Not so the Confederate flag. Southerners say it’s a symbol of the south’s valor – which is legitimate. In many ways, the South fought the right fight to defend the wrong cause. One might rightly say that “a wrong cause is a wrong cause”, and there’s a point there.
But most of our society was very slow to get it. The Confederate flag has been a symbol in pop culture roughly forever:
I mean, big pop culture:
Even popular music:
Lynyrd Skynrd yn thyir heydyy.
Now, a modern hipster might not recognize Lynyrd Skynyrd, but they were kinda PC for their day; how many southern bands today espouse gun control?
PC, hell – – even artists with impeccable liberal credentials have apparently committed thoughtcrime!
Here’s Tom Petty in 1985. Check around the 0:17 mark in the video:
It’s from an entire album about being southern and misunderstood by all us damn Yankees that practically jammed the kudzu down your throat
Even back with my father’s father, they called us all rebels
They tore up cornfields, and burned our cities to level
Well I still feel the eyes of those blue-bellied devils,
When I’m walking around at night,
through the concrete and metal,
Hey hey hey!
I was born a Rebel!
And yeah, it’s a great freaking song – one of Tom Petty’s greatest.
So – is he a racist?
Or, for that matter, the Allman Brothers…:
Click it. It takes you to the official Allman Brothers website.
…which wrapped itself in the Confederate flag at times – with its drummer, Jaimoe Johanson.
Now – was Jaimoe Johanson an “Uncle Tom” token, a victim of the Allman Brothers’ corrosive racism?
Or was it just that as of 40-50 years ago, the Confederate flag just wasn’t considered all that corrosively racist, in and of itself, devoid of any further context?
Or even 35 years ago?
Or 25 years ago?
Now – were Bill Clinton, Algore and Goofytooth corrosive racists?
Or has the flag had different meanings to different people over time?
And if Jimmy Carter in 1976, and Bill Clinton in 2002, and the Allman Brothers in 1969, and Hollywood in the seventies, get a pass on that “different meanings” clause, why not the almighty Gopher Bar?
Pick Your Symbols: Back to the hipster lad:
I realize what a self-righteous, white-privileged Social Justice Warrior I’m coming off as, [Any bets on that? – Ed] and I suppose I tacitly must support this establishment’s right to display hate paraphernalia if they so choose [Mighty big of you – The Founding Fathers via Ed.]. I just think (especially with the increased foot traffic from CHS Field) potential patrons should be forewarned and take their business to the plethora of less abrasive, ignorant, and bigoted establishments in the area.
The hipster lad – his name is “Matthew Steen” – is certainly entitled to go where he wants. As someone who goes to the Gopher from time to time – for the cheap drinks and the Coneys, not the racism, which I personally have never noticed – I say it matters not what it takes to make hipsters go elsewhere, provided they actually go elsewhere.
But if I were to meet Mr. Steen, I’d have to ask: does he have a similar petulant outburst when he encounters this symbol of genocide and ethnic cleansing, which enjoys periodic bits of ironic hipness?
Or this one, which seems to be fairly timeless in hipster circles?
Mr. Steen – I’d be more than happy to entertain your reply.
The South Carolina church shooter killed people for their race. He owns a Glock. Which is made in Austria. So was Hitler. Who also killed people for their race.
It all makes sense, now. Stop the Senseless Slaughter! Immigration Reform Now! Ban Austrians, All Their Works!
What the heck, it makes as much sense as the other people seizing this tragedy to flog their pet agendas.
Joe Doakes
It’s time the President got tough on Rhodesia. I’m sure he’ll put Joe Biden on the job.
Associating ones opponents with all that is evil in the world – the lowest behavior, the highest crimes, the grossest infractions against decency – is always the number one standby of demagogues, and intellectual thugs, and the propagandists that pimp their message.
I saw this on a highly on a highly over-trafficked lefty Facebook page the other day:
Now, don’t get me wrong – i’m not going to say this is what every “progressive” believes in the deepest pit of their heart. Indeed, it’s tempting to chalk it up to the likes of the heinous AM950 audience (or on air staff).
But that is just as much an oversimplification.
I heard the same basic sentiment a couple of years ago – that failure to support a law that the administration had pushed through was tantamount to treason – in a comment thread on the Facebook page of a left of center friend of mine, from a woman who had a non-trivial, six-figure education.
Anyway.
Addlepated as it is, and whoever the audience is, it’s of a piece with “there’s a Republican war on women!” and “and rampage killings don’t have been in other countries!” and “The DFL will lower property taxes!”; it’s intended to scare, and bamboozle, people who don’t no much and don’t have much interest in learning the truth.
I had to laugh early in the tape when I heard a girl with a Black accent yell at a cop “I’m calling my mother on you.”
Honey, if you had a Mother worthy of the title, you wouldn’t be threatening to call her on the cops; you’d be praying to God the cops didn’t call her on YOU.
If I went home and said: “Mom, the cops were mean to me at the race riot,” I’m dead certain her response would NOT be: “Those dirty sons of guns, oppressing your First Amendment Rights, we’ll sue them.”
I’m dead certain her response would be: “You went to a race riot? What the Hell is wrong with you? Wait till your Father gets home.”
Of course, I had a Mother who gave a damn and a Father who came home. I guess I need to check my privilege.
Joe Doakes
The “Texas pool party” incident has been interesting on a couple of levels.
Counting Those Chickens: The burgeoning “Cops are guilty until proven innocent, because Video!” crowd that is so in vogue on the left and among some Libertarians should get some pause with this case, as it seems – if you believe the pushback from the police union, anyway – that there was a big ugly incident before the video starts, with trespassing and fighting and assaults, which the local, mostly black, residents called in to the police.
I said “Should”. They won’t, of course. Dogma means never having to say you’re sorry.
Pathology Verging On A Berg’s Law: As we’ve learned after every high-profile mass-shooting, as well as after every controversial, racially-tinged event in recent years; the mainstream media will get all the basic facts wrong for the first 2-3 weeks. Any impression of any ambiguous event will be colored by the fact that the mainstream media – everyone from CNN to MPR – will, without exception, be simultaneously be playing the story for sensationalist ratings, and have coverage that is entirely at the mercy of sources who are in the bag for one side of the story or another (and that side is usually the “progressive” one).
The media won’t give honest coverage to a story like this, or Ferguson, or Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown, until it’s not a “sexy” headline-grabber anymore.
Hobby Horses: Don’t get me wrong. I have a serious beef with bad cops – and lazy, entitled and incompetent ones, too. I’ve encountered some of each in my time in Saint Paul – along with good, even excellent, ones who came through when my family and I really needed it.
And I understand why young (and not-so-young) black males and their supporters are concerned about prejudice and the dangers it brings. I say this while remembering that young black males do commit a disproportionate amount of crime.
And, most interestingly, while the “Cops are guilty until proven innocent” crowd has a thin veneer of urban activists, that veneer is wrapped around a lot of white liberals – and, increasingly, libertarians, who, God bless ’em, are as white as it gets.
More interesting still? I’ve seen research that shows black inner-city residents support aggressive, strong policing. Not every aspect of it, and not everything aggressive cops do, of course – but they, the people who live daily with the worst that urban culture provides, tend to want the cops to have a solid, aggressive (and fair, and just, and even-handed) presence in the neighborhood.
As with most such stories? I’m pretty much sick and tired of everyone.
The Strib reports on the weekends “tar sands resistance” protests.
Thousands of progressives swarmed the streets, and DFL scientific and economic illiteracy was on full display…
… But I repeat myself:
Rep. Frank Hornstein, DFL-Minneapolis, said many frame pipelines as a safer alternative to oil-carrying trains but that it shouldn’t be a choice between the two.
“Pipelines leak and explode and so do trains. The choice is: Are we going to continue our dependence on oil or get serious about conserving?” said Hornstein, who called the debate a symptom of “America’s gluttonous appetite for oil. The science is in, the data is screaming at us. And what goes on inside here,” he said pointing to the Capitol, “is unfortunately not helping.”
Let’s ignore the whole “data is screaming at us” bit – I’m sure something is screaming at them, but it sure isn’t data.
I have a question for representative Hornstein, on the chance that he actually answers questions from plebeians: the road to a petroleum free future is paved with prosperity. Without prosperity, there can be no innovation.
So, representative Hornstein – can you name any societies that have ever conserved their way to productive prosperity?
And Jack Tomczak caught this one on Facebook:
Demonstrators at Saturday’s march varied in age and demographics and included protesters from out of state. Megabuses brought in several hundred from Wisconsin to participate, while the Madison chapter of 350.org drove five hours to stand in solidarity with locals.
Help me out here – are Megabusas powered by sails? Or are they hydroelectric?
Lately, we’ve been seeing something that I’m sure many of us had despaired of seeing in our intellectual lifetimes; the left starting to become frightened of the excesses of its own extremism.
Of course Jonathan Chait is turning against political correctness and campus self-indulgence. Of course Vox’s editor, Ezra Klein, is now peddling lefty academics who are willing to stand up to the mob. Of course the good denizens of Jezebel are beginning to wonder aloud whether a feminism that eats the likes of Laura Kipnis is useful. If neo-McCarthyism “becomes a salient part of liberal politics,” Schlosser writes in his conclusion, then “liberals are going to suffer tremendous electoral defeat.” The American Left has started to rebel at the exact moment that its own interests are being hurt? Naturally. This isn’t about standards; it’s about power.
You’ve heard the stories of the betrothed gay couples who’ve scoured the market for test cases waiting to happen – Christian photogs, bakers, florists and other vendors who politely tried to opt out of participating in ceremonies they don’t believe in. They were sued into compliance or bankruptcy, or both.
And now, in Canada – a Christian jeweler who actually made the rings for a lesbian couple, who were favorably impressed with his work…
Were this a Monty Python sketch and not a horrifying power play, the tendering conversation would presumably have proceeded like this: Customer: We are a lesbian couple who would like you to make us a wedding ring. Business owner: Okay. I do not support gay marriage, but I will serve you as anybody else. This, I understand, is how it works. Customer: You can’t deny me service simply because you hold different views from mine. Business owner: Indeed. I have no intention of doing so. Society is better off when our differences remain private. Customer: Okay, let’s do business. Business owner: Great. Customer: Your private views are disgusting. You can’t make me do business with you. Give me my money back or I’ll unleash the kraken. If this is to be our new standard — and time will tell — it would be useful to know what legal protection our recalcitrant firms will reasonably be able to recruit to their side. In both Canada and in the United States there already exists a pernicious imbalance in the supposedly free marketplace. If a browsing consumer doesn’t happen to like the politics or the race or the religion of a given business owner, he is quite free to decline to associate with it. Thus do some progressives like to skip Chick-Fil-A, an openly Christian business; thus do some conservatives prefer to avoid Apple, whose owner Tim Cook irritated them during the Indiana fight. By that very same law, however, it is strictly verboten for a business to discriminate against customers they themselves dislike — even if they feel that by fulfilling their legal obligations they will be violating their consciences. Are we really going to add to this already lopsided arrangement a general right to break contracts after the fact? Are we going to hand the integrity of our signed arrangements over to the whim of the mob? And if we are not, what are we to expect the government to do about those whose consciences now demand that they renege on their word?
Granted, it’s Canada.
On the other hand, it’s Canada – the prototype shop for all the stupid bits of social engineering leaking into the Western Hemisphere.
YouGov’s latest research shows that many Americans support making it a criminal offense to make public statements which would stir up hatred against particular groups of people. Americans narrowly support (41%) rather than oppose (37%) criminalizing hate speech…
And yes, as PJ O’Rourke reminded us, the ones who’d burn the Rights of Man to save the snail darter are mostly left of the aisle:
…but this conceals a partisan divide. Most Democrats (51%) support criminalizing hate speech, with only 26% opposed. Independents (41% to 35%) and Republicans (47% to 37%) tend to oppose making it illegal to stir up hatred against particular groups. Support for banning hate speech is also particularly strong among racial minorities. 62% of black Americans, and 50% of Hispanics support criminalizing comments which would stir up hatred. White Americans oppose a ban on hate speech 43% to 36%.
And just so we’re clear – “stir up hatred” doesn’t mean “actively advocate violence”, which is already illegal. This refers to, for lack of a better term, offensive speech.
I’m becoming genuinely depressed about the future of this country, as a country.
William Mitchell College of Law is looking for legal writing instructors. I wonder: if the existing professors include a White liberal, a Black liberal, a Woman liberal, an Hispanic liberal, a Pacific-Islander liberal, a Veteran liberal, a Differently Abled liberal and a Pre-Operative Transgender Cis-liberal, has the school achieved sufficient diversity that they can now hire the applicant with the best education, experience and character? Or do they need to hire a Muslim liberal first?
Joe Doakes
Can’t believe Joe forgot the various flavors of “gay” teachers.
MPR News spoke with Taye Clinton, the 10-year-old boy who was infamously maced, apparently by a Minneapolis cop, at a “Black Lives Matter” protest last week.
Frontmatter: Now, since this city is clogged with people whose purpose in “life” is to find little political incorrectnesses with which to invalidate all dissent, let me establish a few things.
Too many cops see the world as “cops vs. potential criminals”; if you’re not a cop you’re a potential criminal. There are bad cops, and plenty of just-not-very-good cops (I’ve encountered more than my fair share of the latter in Saint Paul, along with some excellent ones); more importantly, until good cops start turning in bad cops, it’s going to be hard for any citizens who cares about civil liberty to trust cops. And I’m white – which I say not to disqualify my opinion (as some will take, or put, it) so much as to say “you think I’ve got cop problems…”.
15:00 And Counting: Anway – Susan Montgomery brought little Taye to another protest this past Thursday. Riham Feshir and Peter Cox report (and I add emphasis):
On Wednesday night Taye and his mother were part of a Black Lives Matter and the Black Liberation Project march down Seventh Street to protest Wisconsin authorities’ decision not to charge a white Madison officer in the killing of a 19-year-old biracial man.
Taye, who’s also biracial, says he was frightened.
“At least I got Maced and not shot,” he said.
Now, let’s be clear; Taye is 10. Perhaps he’s an incredibly sharp, precocious kid – a Mozart-like prodigy of juvenile perception of the world around him. I’ll just say it could be.
It could also be that that’s what the adults in his life, including his mom, Susan Montgomery – who dragged the lad to a protest at 10PM on a school night (not that being out on the street watching people protest is any bigger a waste of time than a day in the Minneapolis public schools) have told him to think about the issue.
The idea that a kid – coached or not – would say such a thing is, itself, a tragedy.
But I’m at a loss to remember any 10-year-old victims of police shootings in any of the Twin Cities, much less Minneapolis.
Now, there’s been a long butcher’s bill of kids Taye’s age killed, crippled, maimed and injured by people waving guns around the cities. I remember the first gang shooting I encountered in Minneapolis, 30 years ago this fall, when 16 year old Christine Kreitz was executed by the gang bangers she’d been hanging around with in King Park in South Minneapolis. I remember the first such story I was involved in as a reporter, when a grade-school-aged boy in North Minneapolis was paralyzed by a stray bullet from a Bloods/Crips throwdown a block away (the boy was a solid 60º off the line of fire, in a second-floor apartment – which is, statistically, vastly more dangerous a place to be than an actual participant).
The Question: So young Taye Clinton is thankful that he’s not the first 10-year-old biracial boy to be shot by a Minneapolis cop. I can’t argue.
Just curious; has Susan Montgomery warned young Taye about the dangers posed by, to pick a random example, teenage high school dropouts who loiter about the neighborhood and get into random fights with other guys like themselves?
The ones who, statistically and tragedy, have killed a lot more little Tayes than every police department in the Upper Midwest combined?
Women’s group wants to replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill. Time for more women on the money, and besides, he was Bad because he enforced the Indian Removal law passed by Congress, which modern Liberals claim was genocide but which Conservative scholars claim averted genocide (if the Indians hadn’t been relocated West, they’d have been wiped out by Eastern Whites).
The women recommend Rachel Carson instead, the “a marine biologist who wrote the hugely influential environmental book ‘Silent Spring.’ That was the book that urged the ban on DDT, the most effective way to kill tsetse flies. Millions of Blacks now suffer from malaria.
Or Margaret Sanger, who opened the first birth control clinic in America because society needed to kill mentally ill and defective babies. Which tended to come from families that lacked proper nutrition and health care. Mostly Black.
Or Betty Friedan, who wrote “The Feminine Mystique” to launch the modern feminist movement by ridiculing stay-at-home-motherhood, saying “. . . housewives are mindless and thing-hungry . . . housework is particularly suited to the capabilities of feeble-minded girls.”
Is it just me, or is there a bit of elitism going on here? The $1 Susan B. and Saca-bucks aren’t large enough denominations, gotta be $20? Maybe we can bring back the $1,000 after Hilary gets her email account sorted.
Last week, when stickers labeling establishments as “exclusively for white people” went up around Austin, Texas, I quietly figured it had to be a “progressive” false flag.
Why?
Because Bergs Seventh Law (“When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character, humanity or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds”), that’s why.
So – were those “exclusively for white people” stickers a progressive false flag?
Duh…:
[Austin lawyer] Adam Reposa posted the video on YouTube and made a statement on Facebook saying he was trying promote the issue of gentrification in East Austin. (Warning: The video contains explicit language)
“They’re getting pushed out, and pretty quick. This area of town is turning into white’s only,” Reposa said in the clip. “Not by law like it used to be, and everyone’s going to jump on, ‘that’s racist!’ ‘that’s racist!’ Man, this town, the way **** works is racist! And I knew I could just bait all of y’all into being as stupid as you are.”
Reposa went on to blast people for not getting the message.
“You’re just not smart enough to keep up with my argument!”
I started Berg’s Law as a joke, pretty much, back in 2004. But the more I see, the less funny they seem.
Except, of course, is that I still laugh my butt off at “progressives”.
I’ve always been curious about things like this (seen on Facebook yesterday):
Foreigners are “baffled by how much water is wasted…while other places in the world are in desperate need of water?”
When foreigners flush a toilet, where do they think the water goes? Do they think it gets destroyed? Sent into an alternate universe via a wormhole in time?
That water goes to a treatment plant of some kind or another; usually the icky stuff gets separated out, and the water goes into a holding lake, where it filters down back into the groundwater, or evaporates back into the atmosphere, to fall somewhere in the world as rain, or to float around as humidity, or (mostly) sit in the ocean.
And it’s water that’s here. Does an American have the option of sending water from his toilet – or from the Great Lakes or the Mississippi River, for that matter – to Ethiopia or the Gobi Desert? Is there an alternate flush button we could push to send the water (waste-free, natch) to the horn of Africa?
Who are these “foreigners” with no knowledge of the evaporation cycle, anyway?
To: Betsy Hodges – Mayor, City of Minneapolis
From: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re: Protest Plans
Dear Mayor Hodges,
I, like (I take it, after the news that the Minneapolis Police were ordered to facilitate rather than hinder the blocking of I35W by protesters yesterday) you, am a big believer in the First Amendment right to free speech, especially free speech focused on political protest.
This is especially important, since it wasn’t all that long ago that Tea Party protesters were being harassed by the police for waving signs above the freeway as “too distracting”.
This seems like a major step forward!
So if it’s OK with you, I’d very much like to reserve I35W at 28th Street for some of my friends; the limited-government, pro-Second-Amendment, pro-life, pro-school-choice, fiscal-responsibility and other right-of-center movements.
Say what you will about the move – signing a 39 year old fielder whose numbers are just a tad off – but I’ll give the man mad props for his first press conference:
Berardino – and most of the rest of the mainstream media who’ve commented on the acquisition – have burned a lot of column inches babbling about Hunter’s support for traditional marriage, which, let me remind you, the mainstream media has declared trayf via, I presume, “settled science”.
“Of course, the very point of the mob action is that no conscious offense by Taylor was required for him to be boiled in online oil. Thoughtcrime does not always proceed from deliberate action; intention is divined by the accusers. The goal is to create an atmosphere of terror, in which everyone is double extra careful to pre-censor their words and deeds, and by extension their thoughts, for fear of career destruction.”
Joe Doakes
It’s like 1984 – except instead of a screen watching you wherever you go, it’s your “fellow citizens”.
