National Review Fun

~ Clarissa

I’m reading National Review, and hey, it’s a fun magazine. A much better way than Marie Claire to pass the 3 hours it takes to get my hair under control at the salon. 

A tiny example:

The Supreme Court has mandated gay marriage everywhere. 

You can just imagine people forced to gay marry at the behest of the Supreme Court. There is also a great article on how Latinos are on the verge of turning Republican. They are almost there! Wait for it, wait for it! Just a second! Almost there! It’s coming! 

No, not really.

Well, maybe next time. 

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Published by Clarissa

23 thoughts on “National Review Fun”

    1. “Simple one-to-one comparisons of Danish to American living standards are not very meaningful, because even if Americans make more money, they have higher living expenses. They have to pay for (or do without) many things a Scandinavian welfare state provides for free or subsidized. How exactly do you calculate the effect on living standards of guaranteed paid parental leave, health insurance, pre-school education, and public transportation so effective that nobody has to buy a car?”

      • Dumb.

      “Which brings me to the conclusion: The whole idea that a world economy can only thrive if a wandering herd of high potentials graze the economies of this world, leaving piles of shit behind them, literally is neo-colonialist bullshit.”

      • Double dumb.

      This is simply a dumb person. Why are we reading the dumb person, again?

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      1. “How could Germany attract more skilled immigrants? The sad news is, probably very little potential for improvement in the short term. Picture a brilliant software engineer, or a solid-state physicist, from Guangzhou China. Why would he pick Munich or Göttingen over Sydney, Vancouver, Palo Alto, Auckland or Singapore? It wouldn’t be take-home pay.”

        • No, it wouldn’t. And all the welfare state claptrap is of no use to such people. They will end up paying through the nose for others to enjoy the welfare claptrap. You’ve got to be all kinds of freaky to agree ti such a setup. Which, as I keep saying, the reason why Germany and Co are not managing to attract highly qualified immigrants and, in fact, lose 700,000 a year just from Germany to emigration from the country.

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      2. Why is wondering about higher living expenses in America dumb? Are they higher or not, in your view?

        Hope you aren’t too disappointed to look at Bassam Tibi’s Russian interview. Think you’ll like him much better. What impressed me was:

        \ В январе 2016 в die Zeit написали: “Мы более безумны, чем другие” Статья проводит прямую линию от ликующей толпы, принимающей беженцев на вокзале Мюнхена, к Освенциму. Немцы так радуются не потому, что они любят беженцев, а потому, что они пытаются этим гостеприимством компенсировать свою вину перед евреями. Это – плохое основание для интеграции. Историк Август Винклер называл это культурой само-упоения.

        Я могу сказать вам только одно – я боюсь таких немцев.

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        1. The successful professionals who receive high salaries and people who benefit from welfare are entirely different people.

          Bassam Tibi is great. Note how he speaks about being humiliated and rejected in Germany in spite of his perfect German and his successful career as a scholar. I know exactly what he means. In Western Europe, you are an outsider forever. And in English-speaking North America it’s much better.

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  2. Extremely interesting recent interview with political scientist Bassam Tibi. Unfortunately, it’s Russian translation from German and I could not find it in English. Would love to hear your thoughts:

    Бассам Тиби, профессор Гёттингенского университета, сириец и ученик Теодора Адорно, является знатоком ислама. Он говорит о том, чего никто не хочет услышать в Германии: об арабском антисемитизме, сексизме и наклонности немцев к крайностям.
    http://trim-c.livejournal.com/1233716.html

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  4. Another example of French going too far and hurting Jews too:

    Bacon and sausage school dinners are being used by rightwing politicians to hammer home what it means to be French. Court battles and vicious political spats have erupted as protesters warn that controversial menu changes are sending a message to Muslim or Jewish children that to be truly French, they must eat roast pork.
    …
    Tabbakhe’s home town of Chilly-Mazarin – a town of about 20,000 people in L’Essonne, which nudges up against Orly airport to the south of Paris – is the latest of several run by rightwing mayors to announce they will scrap pork-free options in school canteens in the name of secularism. For 30 years, Chilly-Mazarin has provided non-pork alternatives to Muslim and Jewish children. But from November, that will stop. On days when the menu features dishes such as roast pork with mustard and courgette gratin, or Strasbourg sausage and organic lentils, or ham pasta bake, children whose families don’t eat pork for religious reasons will be offered nothing but the side dishes. The new mayor, Jean-Paul Beneytou, from Nicolas Sarkozy’s rightwing Les Républicains party, says this is a commonsense way to preserve public sector “neutrality”. But many parents, teachers and leftwing opposition politicians call it a deliberate stigmatisation of Islam that is cruel to children by playing politics with school lunches.
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/pork-school-dinners-france-secularism-children-religious-intolerance?CMP=share_btn_fb

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    1. I don’t see the great tragedy of a vegetarian lunch once in a while if you don’t eat the meat on offer. I avoid pork, too. because I don’t like the taste. So I’d end up eating only garnish. So what?

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      1. \I don’t see the great tragedy of a vegetarian lunch once in a while

        The school has been offering alternatives for 30 years. (!) The article says that “A large population from north Africa moved [to Chilly-Mazarin] after the second world war as France shed its colonies.”

        We are not talking about halal or kosher meat here, but about offering turkey and\or vegetarian options when pork is served. Why force kids to start “eating only garnish,” when before they got a normal vegetarian option and the system has worked well for decades?

        Right wing politicians try to gain votes by intervening in this thing and forbidding to offer substitutes. I do not think how schools feed children is their business at all, if everything is fine health wise. It’s using hatred and fear in the hope to gain votes, pure and simple. The Muslim mother in the article says correctly that she takes off her head scarf at work because of French laws, but those laws do not include forbidding offering additional food options. Here is the problem as defined in the article:

        \ Once a rallying cry of the left, secularism has now been appropriated by the right, and even the far-right Front National, as part of a debate on national identity – used to rail against anything seen as not French, and particularly to target and exclude Islam from the public sphere. It is a principle meant to protect pluralism, but the sociologist François Dubet recently warned that “talking about secularism has [now] become a way to claim a white Christian France, where everyone shares the same values and traditions, a way to say we don’t want Muslims”.

        Jean-Louis Bianco, who heads national consulting body the Observatory of Secularism, has warned that the scrapping of pork-free school dinners is a “typical” example of secularism being used for political ends. “Why create a problem where there isn’t a problem?” he asked.\

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  5. “Пусть ходят в религиозную школу”
    http://taki-net.livejournal.com/2442512.html

    Think he is right here. Also, from comments:

    При всей очевидной гнусности меры с отменой опции без свинины (здесь и обсуждать нечего), тут есть одна парадоксальная деталь, которую трудно понять, не зная контекста.
    Речь идет о решениях ультра-правых и очень правых (не буду вдаваться в различия между сортами дерьма) мэров небольших, часто провинциальных городков. В контексте таких городков во Франции частная религиозная школа всегда значит католическая школа (там действительно не возражают против платков, кип, тюрбанов и не пытаются конвертировать). Т.е. речь идет не о дезинтеграции, а о попытке введения налога на иноверцев, тоже скотство, но другого рода…

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    1. Jews and Muslims can’t eat pork. Jews can’t eat shellfish either. Plus, there is the kosher requirement. Orthodox Christians have a network of complicated fasts. Mormons can’t drink coffee or tea. Hindus, Sikhs and Jains all have their dietary requirements. And so on. If the general principle of operation is that all this complexity needs to be accommodated when making lunches, the school cook will go nuts and the school budget will go bust. This is literally untenable. And of course, once you allow all this, then you’ve got to accommodate the religious holidays. Which means that you will never manage to get all students together at once.

      This is why secular societies act on the principle that everybody’s religion is their own issue to take care of. You don’t palm it off on the rest of society. Figure out your own way to live your religion and don’t make it everybody else’s problem. And this is absolutely the only way.

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      1. This is the exact same thing as the idiotic drama of transgender toilets. People aren’t really worried about peeing or eating. They want to make a nuisance of themselves over some ridiculous principle. Everybody who actually wants to pee has already accepted a discreet separate washroom. Everybody who is hungry but can’t eat the meat ate the salad, the mashed potatoes, the dessert, brought a cookie from home or got a Snickers from a vending machine. But no, it’s all about “I’m different but I’m exactly the same.” And that’s simply obnoxious.

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  6. Another comment I agree with to that post:

    \Я плохо знаю Францию, и, похоже, у меня было превратное представление о laïcité. Мне казалось, что laïcité – это “мы на твою религию не обращаем внимания и не дадим тебе ею нам в глаза тыкать”. А оказалось, что laïcité – это “мы ночь не спали, все придумывали, как бы тебя с твоей религией уесть – и наконец придумали”.

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  9. Horrible:

    As part of its efforts to take over the Palestinian Authority, Hamas unexpectedly decided to run in the West Bank municipal elections; this led Israel to scramble for an action plan to thwart Hamas’s ambitions, including legalizing illegal Palestinian homes in Area C and building a new Palestinian city, but these measures could still be too little too late, and Israel might have to deal with armed Hamas militants right on the Green Line.
    http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4844196,00.html

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    1. Was the post written by a man? White Liberal men are going nuts over the issue on Facebook and in blogs. I’ve even seen the first timid “Well, what’s so wrong with not wanting to be a whore like so many of our Western women?” It’s hilarious.

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  12. It may explain who needs refugees:

    Ранее экономисты и политики предупреждали о возможном росте безработицы в стране в связи с огромным притоком мигрантов. Для решения этой проблемы властям Германии предлагают изменить минимальный размер заработной платы и ввести больше краткосрочных контрактов. Такая мера связана с тем, что если порог для вступления на рынок труда будет слишком высокий, беженцы не смогут нормально интегрироваться в общество.
    http://hryu.livejournal.com/169629.html

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