URLs du Jour

2021-04-13

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  • Desperately Looking For Reasons For Amusement Rather Than Disgust. Eric Boehm brings the goods: Stop the Steal? Organized Labor Can’t Accept Loss in Amazon Unionization Election. Losers always sound the same:

    It was a high-stakes election with big political implications for the country, one that came at the end of a bruising campaign that attracted a lot of media attention. When all the votes were counted, there was a clear winner. But the losing side refused to concede, alleging that their defeat was the result of unfair or even illegal conduct by the winner—and calling for government officials to review and perhaps even overturn the results.

    I'm describing, of course, last week's union certification election at an Amazon distribution center in Alabama.

    Workers at the Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse voted by a margin greater than two-to-one against joining the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). It was a sound rejection of the weeks-long campaign to establish the first-ever unionized workforce at an Amazon facility.

    Even before all the votes had been counted, the head of the union was calling the election unfair.

    Gems from the article: the union president saying "the system is broken" and complaints—yes, complaints—to the NLRB that a USPS mailbox was placed near the Amazon facility to make it easier for workers to drop in their completed ballots.


  • Come Out From Under Your Bed and Get Vaccinated. Then Go Back Under Your Bed. Kylee Zempel notes mixed messaging from the same guy on the same day: Americans Won't Vaccinate If Fauci Keeps Telling Them It's Pointless. About his weekend appearance on MSNBC:

    “What is the message to vaccinated and unvaccinated Americans as to what they should and should not be doing right now? For example, eating and drinking indoors in restaurants and bars — is that OK now?” asked host Mehdi Hasan.

    “No, it’s still not OK for the simple reason that the level of infection, the dynamics of infection in the community are still really disturbingly high,” Fauci replied. “Like just yesterday, there were close to 80,000 new infections, and we’ve been hanging around 60,000, 70,000, 75,000.”

    I'm tired of seeing Fauci soundbites on the news. So are the NR editors; they say: Anthony Fauci Has Worn Out His Welcome.


  • Because He Thinks Big. Also, Delusionally. Randal O'Toole wonders: Why Is Biden Talking about High-Speed Trains and Supersonic Planes When His Infrastructure Plan Doesn't Include Either One?.

    “The Interstate Highway System transformed the way we traveled, lived, worked, and developed,” said President Biden in the March 31 speech introducing his American Jobs Plan. “Imagine what we can do, what’s within our reach, when we modernize those highways,” he continued. “You and your family could travel coast to coast without a single tank of gas onboard a high‐speed train.”

    When I read this, I had to wonder: is Biden’s speechwriter simply ignorant when it comes to transportation? Or did Biden depart from the speech and allow his mind to drift to a total non‐sequitur? I wondered this because, in case you weren’t aware, high‐speed trains will not go on even modernized interstate highways. Although many people talk about building rail lines in the median strips of interstate highways, that’s just a fantasy: trains cannot handle the grades and high‐speed trains cannot handle the curves found on interstate freeways. More pertinently, Biden’s infrastructure plan doesn’t even include any money for high‐speed trains.

    It would be even worse if it did, of course.


  • In Our Refurbished and Expanded "Even Worse Than You Think" Department. Byron York is down in Mission, Texas. And he says The border is even worse than you think.

    Anyone paying attention to the news knows the situation on the U.S.-Mexico border is terrible. Anyone who actually visits the border discovers it is worse than that.

    Here is what is most striking about the government's response to the unprecedented surge of illegal border crossers: It is entirely improvised. Jury-rigged. Thrown together in a scramble to accommodate thousands of migrants who were not coming just months ago. And the reason it is being improvised is that during his first days in office, President Joe Biden blew up the foundation of the government's handling of migrants. With a series of executive actions, Biden threw out key policies with nothing ready to replace them. And he did it using rhetoric that invited migrants to rush to the border — more than 172,000 in March alone, including nearly 19,000 unaccompanied children.

    It's a mess. Democrats used to pretend they cared, but only inasmuch as they could use the issue as an anti-Trump cudgel.


  • And Finally… John McWhorter posts a long excerpt from his upcoming book The Elect. A mere snippet:

    [Critical Race Theory's] current grip on America as a whole starts with developments among a certain group of legal scholars a few decades ago. No one was chanting their names in protests about George Floyd, or while deep-sixing someone for tenure in an academic department, or while suspending someone from a newspaper, or while excommunicating someone for “problematic” – i.e. blasphemous – views. But the difference between good old-fashioned left and modern Elect starts with, for example, legal scholar Richard Delgado teaching nonwhites to base their complaints about injustice not on something so “rigid” as objective truth, but upon the “broad story of dashed hopes and centuries-long mistreatment that afflicts an entire people and forms the historical and cultural background of your complaint.”

    This kind of argument was the source for the one now so familiar, that if a brown person says they have encountered racism, then it is automatically indisputable that they did, and if you don’t agree it makes you “problematic.” Or, the left of 1980 transmogrified into the left of 2020 on the basis of ideas such as this one by legal scholar Regina Austin, urging:

    a new politics of identification, fueled by critically confronting the question of the positive significance of black lawbreaking, might restore some vitality to what has become a mere figure of speech … drawing on lawbreaker culture would add a bit of toughness, resilience, bluntness, and defiance to contemporary mainstream black political discourse, which evidences a marked preoccupation with civility, respectability, sentimentality, and decorum.

    In other words, politics needs a jolt of some gott-damned street!! Yes, this was from a scholar of jurisprudence, and its like was the fount of the idea that for brown people, the old rules don’t matter. Forget (fuck?) civility or even logic (see Delgado above) – it’s all about how you feel, and specifically about how you hate the reigning order. Critical Race Theory tells you that everything is about hierarchy, power, their abuses, and how to not be Caucasian in America is to be akin to the captive oarsman slave straining belowdecks in chains.

    I'm on the lookout for the book to show up on Amazon. Assuming Amazon won't deplatform it.


Last Modified 2024-01-20 6:22 AM EDT