• Tag Archives politics

  • Presumption of Innocence Is Social Justice

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    I have a friend in Papua New Guinea named Monica Paulus who was accused of casting sorcery spells because a person died in her village. Her neighbors almost murdered her until she fled the region. Now she works to save other women falsely accused of sorcery who are targets of torture and killing. This is a window into the mob violence Western civilization crawled slowly out of through the establishment of principles like the presumption of innocence.

    To millions of Americans, Brett Kavanaugh seems just as guilty as Monica seemed to her accusers. They sincerely believe, because of the power groupthink has over the human mind, that Kavanaugh has all the signs of their suspected profile of an abuser of women: rich, white, elite Catholic school attendee, conservative, and nominated by Donald Trump. Millions of people have repeated this so often that it feels deeply true. Plus, there were accusations!

    Monica’s accusers believed she fit the profile of a witch. Once the first accusation was levied, it was easy for others to believe it was true. From an outside vantage, charges of deadly sorcery seem absurd to third-party observers. But in Monica’s culture, belief in the power of sorcery to kill children and cause calamity has been universal for millennia. Though recent infections of Christianity have shaken it, sorcery is still a fact of life.

    Personhood has been a hard-fought prize of Western civilization. The idea that an individual person has a right to their own life and liberty regardless of the passions of the collective is a relatively new and fragile gain for humanity. For most of history, the individual person accused by a crowd or community had no ability to escape its all-consuming wrath.

    Humans without Christ-rooted protection for the individual quickly descend into very dangerous, unthinking crowds.

    In the book of Genesis, Potiphar’s wife accused her Hebrew servant Joseph of trying to rape her when, in fact, she tried to seduce him. Joseph was thrown into prison for this false accusation without any need for corroboration except the cloak she had ripped from him.

    “Believe Our Women!” could have been the slogan organizers used during Jim Crow against black men falsely accused of sexual violence. The “justice” crowds felt as sure about their scapegoats’ guilt as new partisan crowds do about their conservative targets. To mobs, a person’s wealth or poverty or race is sufficient reason to ignore their humanity and cast shame.

    Even popular cinema reflects a healthy suspicion of collective accusations. In the film Edward Scissorhands, a woman falsely accused Edward (Johnny Depp) of sexual assault after he spurned her advances in a barber shop. Her tears led to an angry mob destroying the life of an innocent.

    To that mob, Edward’s differentiation from their shared cultural identity made him a very guilty rapist.

    That zeal is what possesses the minds of people who think that dressing out-of-fashion, having opposing political opinions, or bearing a “guilty” skin color makes one eternally suspect for non-corroborated accusations.

    In 18 AD, if a woman claimed a high magistrate tried to sexually assault her when they were teens, she would be ignored, arrested, or executed without anything but derision in every society around the world. Two-thousand years of Jesus’s personhood revolution has made it so that such a claim against the highest of officials is rightfully treated with sacred care and gravity.

    Victim-garbed political stunts and witch hunts are growing. But those weeds take root in the cultural soil cultivated by the Crucified One. The first shall be last and the last shall be first.

    We should take survivors of assault seriously, and we do that by never using them as props for political power and by creating a culture that treats every human as sacred and worthy of supreme dignity.

    We have much to learn from a survivor of witch hunts like Monica Paulus. We should protect the voice of the powerless in the face of violence. We should treat human beings as individual persons, not pawns of identity-exploiting optics. We should fight for the presumption of innocence, not just in the court of law but as the cultural norm we grant the accused in discourse. Finally, we should remember that politics is a thin laminate on the passions and fits of human crowds: the mobs we see in recent days are a revelation of the heart of the whole enterprise.

    The State, a monopoly on violence against nonviolent persons in a given territory, is not to be trusted with centrally planning our lives. One court of nine sages deciding personal matters and vices for 300 million people just sounds like a really bad cultic idea.

    The Founders never intended the court to have such broad, sweeping ex nihilo powers of legal decree. Congress has the power to limit the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction. Decentralizing power closer to home will go a long way to easing tensions between neighbors who feel powerless when their rivals win power over our current winner-takes-all DC Leviathan.

    Monica Paulus’s example in Papua New Guinea offers a final clue as to how we should fight for justice in America. After facing gruesome near-death, she had opportunities to flee to a safe space. But she stayed.

    To this day, she continues to work in villages in which witch burnings are still used to solve social tensions and grief. She actively intervenes in the midst of self-righteous crowds—convinced of their targets’ guilt—to save women from horrible deaths. She does not seek revenge against those who accuse her. She seeks to end collective violence and protect the personhood of all people, no matter who they are.

    I’m with Monica.

    Source: Presumption of Innocence Is Social Justice – Foundation for Economic Education


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  • “The Last Jedi” and the Politicization of Storytelling

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    There’s been a disturbance in the franchise: Ambivalence, rather than anticipation, has characterized the online response to Disney’s announcement of the deluge of new Star Wars projects we are to be saturated with over the next several years. And while the trailer for Solo: A Star Wars Story (scheduled for May) was expected to be received with some misgiving, many fans are actively rooting for it to flop.

    The origin of this disturbance is not difficult to pinpoint: Until a few months ago, Disney had nimbly sidestepped any serious divergence in the fan base of the IP it acquired for $4 billion. But that changed dramatically with the release of the most recent installment.

    Indeed, the biggest twist of The Last Jedi wasn’t in the film itself but in its audience reception. Though its commercial profitability was always comfortably assured, its revenue disparity with The Force Awakens is the steepest sequel-to-sequel decline on record and its second-week box office plunge is the biggest in history.  In China, Hollywood’s largest overseas market, the film took a blistering 94 percent nosedive after the first week and was pulled from theaters with less than half its predecessor’s earnings.

    Its audience score on the critical aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes is the least favorable in the saga; currently 11 percent lower than The Phantom Menace. A petition demanding it be “struck from the canon” has garnered over 98,000 signatures as of writing. The Wall Street Journal reports that sales of toy and merchandise tie-ins are substantially below projections. And for the first time in the franchise’s 40 year history, there are predictions that the next entry (the aforementioned Han Solo spinoff) could flop.

    So what went wrong?

    A Battle for the “Soul” of Star Wars

    There’s already an over-abundance of online rants analyzing The Last Jedi’s shortcomings as a piece of entertainment. But it is in the realm of the ideas where the division between critics and audiences is most stark. Dozens of articles praise the film’s perceived socio-political commentary while countless viewers decry it for the very same reason.

    Writer-director Rian Johnson believes division was inevitable if Star Wars was to “grow, move forward and stay vital.”

    This statement reflects a failure to understand two fundamental characteristics of the Star Wars phenomenon.

    First, the 1977 original, far from accommodating the cultural climate of its time, was tonally counter-cultural. Its clear-cut portrayal of good versus evil eviscerated the moral relativism of 70s cinema. Its hopeful optimism was an antidote to post-Vietnam nihilism. It was a conscious throwback that paid homage to the sci-fi adventure serials Lucas grew up with.

    Secondly, the reasons for its enduring appeal have eluded Johnson entirely. How has the original trilogy remained such a cultural touchstone? Why are studios still making films in its shadow after so many decades?

    One reason is that archetypes and the mythic storytelling form never lose relevance. They are timeless and universal. By contrast, loading a film with political messaging for 2018, using it as a vessel to comment on current events, makes its relevance transient. Ironically, Johnson’s attempt to “update” the saga is precisely what caused his entry to feel dated at an accelerated pace.

    The original trilogy eschewed overt references to contemporaneously vogue topics. Instead of “micro moralizing,” it dealt in archetypal themes: resisting temptation, self-sacrifice, loyalty, forgiveness, and redemption.

    Of course, even these themes can be cheapened (Johnson’s script nods to self-sacrifice but drains it of poignancy by conveying it through characters we barely know, i.e. General Purple Hair and What’s-Her-Name’s sister). But when those themes are effectively portrayed as integral parts of a story, there’s no need for heavy-handed commentary (e.g. “arms dealers are bad!”) or simplistic insinuations (e.g. “rich people are heartless!”).

    The Politicization of Storytelling

    This is not to suggest that using art to make a socio-political point is necessarily bad, only when those points become detrimental to art itself. When the driving impulse is, “Use the story to serve these agendas,” when politics dictates how our stories are told and eclipses universal truths about the human experience — the deeper things that actually touch us — the result is an artistically diminished product.

    In Johnson’s film, subtexts are delivered with such a lack of subtlety it feels the director is drawing attention to his own benevolence, ironically betraying his own “white savior complex” more than serving feminism or diversity.

    And it isn’t just the film’s detractors who observe the current American political climate’s bearing on the way it was written. GQ UK gleefully claims “The Last Jedi takes on Trump”. Other articles, such as these in The Independent, The Guardian, and Wired, insinuate that anyone not on board is an “alt-right” hater of diversity.

    But if all the consternation is simply an objection to minority characters and strong female protagonists, why does its predecessor enjoy such high audience ratings? One conspicuous difference is that The Force Awakens’ diverse cast played characters integral to its story, whereas, in The Last Jedi, characters are shoehorned in with no discernable purpose other than demographic representation. The most glaring example of this is Rose Tico, played by Vietnamese-American actress Kelly Marie Tran: Her entire subplot (helping Finn find a codebreaker) ends up having no subsequent significance or narrative payoff, and the rest of her time on screen is barely less superfluous.

    If such perfunctory tokenism and pandering to vapid identity politics are what is meant by “diversity” then certainly, that was one aspect of The Last Jedi which drew criticism.

    But the fallacy that detractors must be “racist,” “white,” and “male” is perhaps nowhere more roundly debunked than on social media. For example, just a few minutes searching for reviews on YouTube brings up the following links:

    These reviewers, who identify as feminists, felt the film’s politics were a disservice to gender equality: Jessi Milestone, Jordan Harvey.

    These East Asian background reviewers abhorred it: Alachia Queen, Eric Ha Gaming, Chris Wong-Swenson, Liam’s Playback Society, Rate of D.K., DillyDC, SingToMeJuneBug, hiding in my room, Jaquan Wilcox, Justin Patrick, Allen Xie, Dr. Wong.

    As did these Indian background reviewers: NerendraTheComic, Loy Machedo.

    And these Hispanic reviewers: ufobri, The Ecua Rican, OppositePerspective, AngryJoeShow, ktvindicare, JD7 videos.

    These Arab and Jewish reviewers are united in their hate for it: NinoCompany, Ben Shapiro.

    And all these Black reviewers despised the film: TheAmazingLucas, NeoGameSpark, The Simpsons King Kong Reviews, Neverstar-X, The Opinion Junkie, BlackCriticGuy, Rob Robbie, MLKKAEFEnterprises, STAR LORD954, The Wake Up Report, Lionheart Mind Explosion, Anthonyg Gordon, JohnsonHood Daypool, Wellsbrothers, Jody’s Corner, Osiris Khufu, Myrone Magnus, Tyrone Magnus, Jay-3 Entertainment, blackericdenice, Adad Joseph, 920mario, Abu Nas, The Gospel.

    The notable diversity of the reviewers above is made doubly ironic by the almost uniform whiteness of those trying to associate the film’s detractors with “white supremacy.”

    The Culture-Shaping Power of Star Wars

    While the controversy may appear to be an inordinate fuss over “light entertainment,” Star Wars (whether by chance or intention) has come to represent something far more significant than that.

    Throughout history, stories have functioned as one of the most effective societal-shaping tools. The themes, ideals, and values communicated in stories have simultaneously reflected and molded the cultures which produced them. This is what Victor Hugo was alluding to when he wrote, “England has two books: the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare, but the Bible made England.”

    Descriptions of Star Wars as “generation-defining” are also allusions to the power of stories to shape who we are. And therein lies the problem: Johnson’s work, while managing to imitate the aesthetic of Star Wars (stormtroopers, lightsabers, etc.) is a hollow husk bearing only surface similarity to its parent material. Its shallow identity politics reflect a cultural hegemony adrift from deeper moorings.

    Such an incoherent set of half-baked ideas wouldn’t matter if not for the fact that they are being propagated on an industrial scale, becoming almost ubiquitous in U.S. and UK entertainment.

    But more concerning is the accompanying intolerance; those caught straying from the herd or expressing a dissenting opinion from the currently prevailing unanimity are often stigmatized and attacked with a zeal which one German reviewer of the film sees troubling historical parallels in.

    In a scene in The Last Jedi which practically invites the type of historical parallelism above, there’s an attempted book-burning (ignited by Yoda, no less) broadcasting the film’s overarching theme of abandoning the past.

    “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to,” Kylo urges Rey, even as Johnson urges the audience to “let the past die” so that we can embrace his Star Wars and, at a broader cultural level, the ideas his film promulgates.

    Advocates of almost any vision for society feel there is something “inevitable” about the triumph of their ideology. That their set of ideas must be more “enlightened” than what has been before. But as C.S. Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man: “A great many of those who ‘debunk’ traditional or (as they would say) ‘sentimental’ values, have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process.”

    With the backlash to The Last Jedi, the values in the background of Johnson’s film have been inadvertently thrust into the spotlight, exposing greater popular discomfort with them than anyone anticipated.

    Reprinted from Intellectual Takeout.


    Paul Cheung

    Paul Cheung has an MA in Social Anthropology and spent eight years in Asia working with an NGO and teaching on the Tibetan plateau. He currently resides in his home country, the United Kingdom.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.




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  • Liberals Don’t Really F**king Love Science

    Posted on by Azrael 1 Comment

    Democrats tend to fondly think of themselves as being members of “the party of science.” As evidence that the Republicans are “anti-science” they point to Republican skepticism about man-made climate change and the efforts by some local bible-believing conservatives to have creationism taught in public school biology classes. But as I have reported, there is plenty of anti-science to go around, especially if science is seen as telling partisans something that they don’t want to believe. Unfortunately when science intersects with public policy, it is all too often confirmation bias all the way down.

    Over at the City Journal, John Tierney, a contributing science columnist for the New York Times, has written a terrific article, “The Real War on Science,” which he makes the case that “the Left has done far more than the Right to set back progress.” Tierney correctly observes lots of leftwing partisans forget that science is applied skepticism and instead treat “science” as a collection of dogmas. What dogmas? “The Left’s zeal to find new reasons to regulate has led to pseudoscientific scaremongering about “Frankenfoods,” transfats, BPA in plastic, mobile phones, electronic cigarettes, power lines, fracking, and nuclear energy,” summarizes Tierney. And let’s not forget Rachel Carson’s thoroughly debunked claim that exposure to trace amounts of synthetic chemicals is a major cause of cancer or the assertion the current average consumption of salt is a major cause of cardiovascular disease. Tierney is correct when he writes:

    [T]he fundamental problem with the Left is what Friedrich Hayek called the fatal conceit: the delusion that experts are wise enough to redesign society. Conservatives distrust central planners, preferring to rely on traditional institutions that protect individuals’ “natural rights” against the power of the state. Leftists have much more confidence in experts and the state. Engels argued for “scientific socialism,” a redesign of society supposedly based on the scientific method. Communist intellectuals planned to mold the New Soviet Man. Progressives yearned for a society guided by impartial agencies unconstrained by old-fashioned politics and religion. Herbert Croly, founder of the New Republicand a leading light of progressivism, predicted that a “better future would derive from the beneficent activities of expert social engineers who would bring to the service of social ideals all the technical resources which research could discover.”

    This was all very flattering to scientists, one reason that so many of them leaned left. The Right cited scientific work when useful, but it didn’t enlist science to remake society—it still preferred guidance from traditional moralists and clerics. The Left saw scientists as the new high priests, offering them prestige, money, and power. The power too often corrupted. Over and over, scientists yielded to the temptation to exaggerate their expertise and moral authority, sometimes for horrendous purposes.

    Among the horrendous purposes cited by Tierney was the widespread support by leftists of eugenics in the first half of the 20th century. Tierney also describes how the social sciences have evolved into a Leftwing intellectual monoculture that deleteriously and comprehensively distorts the findings of social psychology, political science, anthropology, and sociology. For example, he notes that leftwingers think that genetic causes are just fine when it comes to explaining homosexuality, but totally taboo when differences between the sexes are discussed.

    Source: Liberals Don’t Really F**king Love Science – Hit & Run : Reason.com


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