Saturday, April 09, 2016

Black Lives Matter and much more

Jonah Goldberg notices that Bill Clinton got upset at some Black Lives Matter protesters the other day. Jonah's thoughts on Black Lives Matter:
The Black Lives Matter movement is not without its legitimate complaints and arguments -- I’m in favor of some criminal-justice reforms. But they want to work from the assumption that there are no black bad actors in this story. It’s white supremacy all the way down. The problem with this is that even if white supremacy -- whatever people mean by that -- is the massive problem some lefties imagine, it still doesn’t excuse bad individual moral choices. Excuses don’t become explanations simply because you shout them. It’s a very weird corollary to social-justice logic. If you see everyone simply as representatives of groups -- white oppressors and black victims -- you withdraw the moral agency from individual actors on both sides of the equation (which, technically speaking, is racist). White people become agents of oppression and morally culpable even if they’ve done nothing wrong. Black criminals who prey on innocent black people become victims, about whom no one can say an unkind word.

Jonah further notes about Bill and Hillary,
One fun consequence of all this is that Bill very well could turn out to be a liability for Hillary, which would be kind of hilarious given that Hillary would be just another left-wing activist lawyer were it not for her husband. She rode her Arkansas mule all of the way to the White House gates only to see the sign reading, “No Mules Allowed.”

Besides these comments, Jonah has many insightful things to say about such diverse topics as George W. Bush, Donald Trump, progressivism, Richard Nixon, classical liberalism, statism, and much more here.

No comments: