Jun
5
2017

URLs du Jour

2017-06-05

■ Proverbs 25:15

15 Through patience a ruler can be persuaded,
    and a gentle tongue can break a bone.

I suppose the Proverbialist is going for something like "slow and steady wins the race", but that metaphor is kind of gross, am I right?

Today's Getty image: victim of a gentle tongue.

■ CNN (via Slashdot) reports: After London Attack, PM Calls For Internet Regulation To Fight Terrorists.

Prime Minister Theresa May has called for closer regulation of the internet following a deadly terror attack in London... May said on Sunday that a new approach to tackling extremism is required, including changes that would deny terrorists and extremist sympathizers digital tools used to communicate and plan attacks. "We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed," May said. "Yet that is precisely what the internet and the big companies that provide internet-based services provide. We need to work with allied democratic governments to reach international agreements that regulate cyberspace to prevent the spread of extremist and terrorism planning."

Well, of course. TSA for the Internet, I'm sure that will work well. PM May is looking for an easy target to show that she's "doing something".

■ Ian Tuttle at NR explicates The Roots of Left-Wing Violence, concentratining on the "Antifa" (allegedly meaning "Anti-fascist").

We keep coming back to that line from Orwell's 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language": "The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable'." Has anything changed in the more than 70 years since? Tuttle suggest not:

Using words to cloak reality makes it easier to dispose of that reality. Antifa are not satisfied with labeling people fascists; they want them to bleed on that account. On Inauguration Day, in Washington, D.C., an Antifa rioter sucker-punched white nationalist Richard Spencer. Spencer is as near to a prominent fascist as one will find in the United States today, and a bona fide racist (an Antifa twofer). But the imperative of anti-fascism, to reject “all forms of domination and oppression,” applies by anti-fascists’ own inexorable logic no less to Heather Mac Donald — or to the Republicans of Multnomah County, whom Antifa threatened to physically assault if they were permitted to participate as usual in the annual Portland Rose Festival parade. Why not punch them, too?

Any means necessary, baby.

■ And your tweet du jour (via Dave Barry, who reminds us that "spacingmatters":


Last Modified 2018-12-26 5:32 AM EDT