Weekend links

Concerning knowing when to give up…
Thirty years ago, while we were on our honeymoon in a small town in rural Pennsylvania, we stumbled on a rundown Victorian house that was open to the public for a small entrance fee. We paid our couple of bucks to the owner, an old widow, to give us a guided tour through what was promised to be an extraordinary old building. What we saw was sad beyond imagining. Her husband had been a hardware store owner, but he always dreamed of being an artist, so one day he sold the business and bought the old Victorian, little more than a shell, with the idea that he would transform it into the center of a new arts community. With the money from his business, he set about replacing the missing flooring, plaster cast ceiling, plaster crown moldings, and ornate staircase. The problem was that he did all of them badly and incompletely. I remember his floor being a poorly thought out decorative pattern with mismatched woods and obvious gaps between the joints. In his spare time, he painted canvases that proved he had little talent for painting. They were nothing more than smudges, and not in a good way. The old canvases were propped up along the walls all throughout this sad and incomplete old building.
The artist, having spent his last dime pursuing a dream that was beyond his abilities, was stressed to the point of a fatal heart attack. His widow was left to continue to run the operation as her only source of income. I remember my deep sense of sadness when we walked out.

He should have quit.

Concerning anti-discrimination laws: They have permanently destroyed trust between races by requiring true white racists to resort to subterfuge in order to avoid hiring or doing business with races they despise. The the white face lying to them is sensed and noted by the black and brown employees and customers, and reinforces the distrust they have of all white people because they cannot be sure that smiling white face is not another lying sack of $%#@.
The black worker in the story is going to get her money, but the cost will be more subterfuge and more distrust in the future.

Alan Keyes has said that affirmative action is the worst thing that has happened to black people. In his very good book Race and Economics, Walter Williams argues persuasively that the government would do best to stay out of it, that unions were created to exclude Blacks and that in the South when Blacks would work for less pay (before unions) the employers would have a dilemma in that they could hire Whites or keep more money and hire Blacks. In one of his opinions, Clarence Thomas quoted Frederick Douglass http://lexrex.com/enlightened/writings/douglas.htm

To me, the SCOTUS-created affirmative action almost forces a presumption that if a Black is in a particular job, the person may not be as qualified as non-Blacks in the same positions. I’ve certainly witnessed that in practice. Williams notes that difficulty in firing a new hire is a significant disincentive to hiring in the first place. And I remember having one person (who worked at a radio station) tell me that if the most qualified white person in the world walked through the door, they couldn’t hire that individual. The legal existence of affirmative action definitely creates a presumption in the minds of some that they are “due” special treatment, which increases their dislike for Whites, precipitating a vicious cycle of mutual distrust. And the term “people of color” is a purely anti-white racist statement. There’s certainly a declared racist on the Supreme Court, with Justice Sotomayor saying that a Hispanic (another government created term) woman would make more compassionate decisions than a White man. She conveniently ignores the fact that it isn’t her job to be “compassionate;” it’s her job to interpret the law. There’s a legal cliche “hard cases make bad law” which encompasses the problem with her approach.

Interestingly, in his book (of quotes) entitled Hear Me Out, George Wallace objected to the civil rights act because it would place the power of the Federal Government in the smallest workplace. He specifically said that in no way was he trying to tell people in a state different from his how to handle the issue. The media was able to equate “state’s rights” with “discrimination” successfully in the minds of the public.

“When to persevere and when to quit.”

Irritating article.
I’ll quit when I choose. Or when I die.
Few if any substantive win come of failure to persevere. No Harvard, no MBA, no psychologist, can tell another for what and for how long someone should go at what they believe in and have passion to pursue.

Quit if and when you will, when you find it proper to do so. Ignore the noise say otherwise.

So there.

Do white supremacists deserve freedom of speech?
Nope. Doesn’t matter. Freedom of Speech is one of the unalienable rights, meaning it can’t be taken away. No one has to “deserve” them.

“It makes it feel like the university was almost prioritizing one person’s First Amendment rights over the comfort and safety of others,” said Rachel Katz,
Justifiably so. Unalienable rights trump feelings. If Cvejetanovic’s unalienable rights aren’t protected, Katz’s unalienable rights aren’t really safe either.

a senior studying journalism and criminal justice.
[sigh] Her profs have some makeup work to do.

Worth the read

https://twitter.com/TrancewithMe/status/1046341418367643648

One of the former Nazgul wrote an autobiography about growing up in the Pacific Northwet. I bought a used copy today for the princely sum of one dollar at a street sale. Looks interesting, and drives home the point about the present “diversity.”

Flake (the name seems strangely apt at the moment) has, I believe, chosen to behave in a classic pattern of back stabbing out the door while serving his real masters and feigning morality. I personally am very skeptical of his morals.