Category: culture

Zuckerberg: The Facts About Facebook

Founder and CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg wrote this op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, attempting to address the concerns about its business model.

Its a twenty-first century company so I support that aspect. I don’t have a problem with what he wrote or how it operates, except he didn’t explain if/why conservative and right-leaning posts and ads are blocked. The paragraph about “harmful or divisive content” does not explain it. If id does, he further needs to explain why conservative content fits that description, especially considering what comes from progressives — see the recent comments about the Covington students. So, the op-ed is incomplete.

Meaning of a 70% Income Tax Rate

Several Democrats have proposed a top income tax rate of 70% on incomes over $10 million.

Samuel Hammond argues that it is NOT about the optimal tax rate, soaking the rich, the rate in the past. It is a symbolic attack on the legitimacy of wealth accumulation itself.

Its goal is not about tax-fairness or raising revenue efficiently (which it fails at on both counts). Its goal is to popularize a strict egalitarian view of wealth accumulation as prima facie evidence of personal corruption. If that view catches on, it would represent a major setback in the public’s understanding of the differences, both normative and economic, between productively acquired wealth and rent seeking.

The Democratic Socialist’s economic model is Scandinavia. But we in the U.S. have our own economic model, and culture based on our own history. We are more individualist.

With the countercultural rebellions of the 1960s and 70s, followed by the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, the left and right eventually reverted back to America’s historically more individualistic ethos of self-expression and entrepreneurship.

In Scandinavia, the dominant conformist zeitgeist is called the Law of Jante, a reference to a fictional Danish town that enforces being ordinary in every possible way. “Tall poppy syndrome” is perhaps the closest concept in American vernacular, although it doesn’t do the oppressiveness of Scandinavia’s egalitarian milieu justice. Excessive ambition is frowned upon while non-conformists are treated with suspicion, as illustrated by the expression, “You are not to think you’re better than us.”

The cost of this strict egalitarianism. In Scandinavia, the rich stay rich and everybody else is stuck. They’re economic opportunity is a snapshot frozen in time. Nobody can rise up because they are taxed too much to save anything that can be invested.

In short, Ocasio-Cortez’s focus on soaking the small number of Americans who make more than $10 million in a year has earned her socialist bona fides while ironically sparing — if not threatening to entrench — the closest thing America has an to emerging nobility. That’s not radical. Far from it. It’s conformism to the most mundane progressive politics imaginable.

We are Americans. They are trying to force 300+ million people to behave the way they deem worthy. No. Move to your utopia. Leave us alone. These people are tyrants and must be stopped.

Hammond’s piece here.

CNN Analyst Accuses Black Conservative of “White Privilege”

The setup:

“Sirius XM radio host and Fox News Contributor David Webb brought Martin onto his radio show to discuss diversity in media, and he noted that he has always considered his accomplishments to be more important than his skin color when applying to jobs […] “I’ve chosen to cross different parts of the media world, done the work so that I’m qualified to be in each one. I never considered my color to be the issue — I considered my qualifications to be the issue,” Webb explained.”

CNN’s Areva Martin replies:

After Webb said that expertise and experience are what matter, Martin interjected: “That’s a whole ‘nother long conversation about white privilege, the things that you have the privilege of doing, that people of color don’t have the privilege of.”

Here.

 

2019 Inductees to Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Inductees: Janet Jackson, Def Leppard, Stevie Nicks, Radiohead, the Cure, Roxy Music and the Zombies.

Eligibility:

Artists—a group encompassing performers, composers and/or musicians—become eligible for induction 25 years after the release of their first commercial recording. Besides demonstrating unquestionable musical excellence and talent, inductees will have had a significant impact on the development, evolution and preservation of rock & roll.

There’s one quantitative datapoint (25 years) plus several qualitative requirements.

BLACK LIBERTY MATTERS

This is an interesting article on how liberty is interpreted through the lens of American history. And its not good.

Starting with history and American history, here is Samuel Johnson’s bitter rhetorical question about the American revolution: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

Because:

. . . But often it is masters. Understanding all too well how they rule over other human beings, they identify being ruled like that as the great social evil, and they fiercely refuse to be subjected to it. Slaveowners and their neighbors can see what unfreedom is like, and they resist it for themselves. This is only partly because they come to identify their freedom as their freedom to own and rule slaves, and are desperate to protect their status as masters. In a more general way, they become very sensitive to anyone proposing to treat them as they treat slaves.

And:

The language of freedom in American political discourse has very often been appropriated for the defense of white supremacy. We have often heard the loudest yelps for liberty among those trying to protect the terror and apartheid states of the Jim Crow south, the quasi-serfdom of sharecropping, segregated schools, miscegenation laws, and the suppression of black votes. Particular types of freedom or particular strategies for limiting governmental power—freedom of association, religious liberty, federalism, bicameralism, and so on—all came to be identified at one point or another primarily as ways to prevent the federal government from breaking the power of white rule, just as before the war the protection of private property rights had so often been identified primarily with the protection of slaveowners’ supposed property in other human beings.

Conclusion:

Reimagining libertarian politics in light of the truth that black liberty matters will take a lot of intellectual and moral work. And this task, reorienting a set of ideas and ideals in light of a morally compromised history, of understanding what lessons need to be learned from it, of separating the arguments for liberty from the yelps, is insiders’ work. No one else is going to do it for us.

That’s for sure.  Read the whole thing.

Miley Cyrus Picks Only Women for Her Team on The Voice

Miley Cyris is a coach on the weekly program on NBC TV network The Voice. She picked only women for her team. She supported Hillary Clinton for president in the 2016 election. Here she is crying after the election.

So, since she picked only women for her team, by her standards, does she hate men? Is she a misandrist?

I don’t really care how she chose her team. If one of the male coaches chose only men and explicitly said so like Miley did choosing women, would she think they hated women? Fair is fair.