Dirty Laundry?

[Originally published Sept 2008]

To paraphrase Naomi Ragen, it isn’t that people don’t want their “dirty laundry washed in public” as much as they would like to maintain the impression their laundry never gets dirty in the first place. New York magazine’s treatment of the the ex-Satmar woman fighting for custody of her daughter is one such case. 

 I identify as an Orthodox Jew, though my practices and outlooks do not resemble my more stringent, black-clad co-religionists who might as a result question my commitment to Orthodoxy. But no matter. When people ask me how religious I am, I usually say the One who can answer that hasn’t told me; maybe He’ll tell you if you ask Him. 

Would it be better for the child to be raised by the less (or non-) observant parent? Should that not be the more salient factor in deciding the custody issue? While the upbringing could be considered a factor in any divorce proceeding, in these types of proceedings they are the predominant if not the only deciding factor. 

And that might be the actual necessity of bringing cases like these to public attention, for two reasons: 

 One, sometimes the ostensible stringency of the religious environment isn’t ipso-facto what’s best for the child, as these people believe. As a therapist friend of mine who worked with “at-risk” religious youth told a parent complaining about the level of religiosity at a treatment center: “Your kid’ll be more religious. Your kid also may die.” 

 Two, sealed communities have to be made to realize that hermetic insularity is really no longer an option; they call attention to themselves by their insular nature, and as result will be subject to all kids of scrutiny, warranted or otherwise, precisely because they expect us to believe that they are the true Light unto the Nations. 

Don’t leave the Light on for us if you don’t want us to see what’s going on.

When A Riot Is Not An Act, Act II

 Five years ago, during the Baltimore conflagrations after Freddie Gray’s death in BPD custody, this author mused:

“…rioting as the de rigueur reaction to perceived injustice—[] contra to \(or even because of) the progressive tenets that declare it justified presents the much bigger threat to public order…Grievance-driven riots are far more likely to have been deliberate rather than spontaneous, evidenced by the the direct targeting of the forces of law and order and general infrastructure as opposed to victims of opportunity.  This adds an element of intent and thereby amplifies the degree of criminal responsibility…It therefore makes sense that more draconian quasi-military responses are necessary because these deliberate riots are less likely to stop in and of themselves.”

The inevitable cries of “racist!!!” that ensued from (the few) critics who assumed that this excused “sports riots” ostensibly primarily driven by white youths showed that the critics deliberately ignored the logic, if they’d even read the piece.

But now even that point is moot: as the most currently riot-ridden city—Portland—is also one of the most lily-white un the US, the grievance-driven riot industry has now proven to be a multi-racial enterprise, just as much white as non-white.

#MeToo didn’t kill itself

During the Aziz Ansari scandal 2 years ago, when the author was much more supportive of what seemed to be the true goals of #MeToo beyond the apparent extraneous political trappings, the following observation was made:

“[L]ike all “revolutions” (pace Flangan’s description), #MeToo might eat itself; not for nothing did [Caiitlin] Flanagan “assume[] that on the basis of intersectionality and all that, they’d stay laser focused on college-educated white men for another few months”.   One can ask whether she meant that the movement risked caricaturing itself by falling into intersectionality, or whether she believes it should fall under that rubric; either way, not only has this revolution not “jumped the shark”, but it might even become the shark.”

Well that was fast.  When you get down to it, scope creep was built right into the ostensible “mission”: the scope was going to remain vague so that Creepy Joe could get elected.  This goes back way further than Biden, in any case: Eric Schneiderman, whose victims were pressured to be silent because he “promoted human rights”; Bill Maher telling Bill Clinton’s accusers in 1997 to “take one for the team”; and even Bob Packwood, the rare pro-choice GOP Senator who was considered extra important to the abortion rights movement while it was known for years that he was nearly as predatory as Harvey Weinstein.

The signs were probably there even before the movement was: anyone remember Ezra Klein cheering on the specter of blatant injustice v/v “consent laws” in the name of stopping “campus rape culture”?The fact that there were many strident critics of his analysis even on the left only underscored the fact that, for the movement ultimately, it wasn’t going to be a case of the ends justifying the means; rather, the means and ends were identical, and only applicable to those deemed politically undesirable.   Someone doesn’t hate those blurred lines;  “accountable but electable” tells you all you need to know.

#MeToo had one job—make all men behave.  A laudable nonpartisan goal.  In retrospect, it should have been readily apparent that not only was the movement never going to do that, it was going to deliberately end up making it more difficult.

#MeToo didn’t kill itself.  It was stillborn.

Progressives Screw Up Feminism And Diversity

It might be possible that the irony deficiency that afflicts progressives isn't a congenital defect; rather, it might trigger the fear that they actually recognize the contradictions inherent in progressivism, the concomitant intellectual untenability of the majority of its tenets, and the egregious hypocrisies of its most prominent purveyors. One example is the CBC's overt support of Louis Farrakhan and their successful gambit to keep a 2005 photo of the "Minister" and then-Sen. Barack Obama buried for 13 years. Had any one of Hillary Clinton's erstwhile allies in the CBC had the decency to alert her to the existence of said photo, one of only two things could have happened: 1] all evidence of the photo would have been destroyed; 2] Hillary's campaign team would have used the photo to kill Obama's presidential aspirations in the cradle. Another might be this revelation: that Bernie Sanders told Elizabeth Warren sotto voce two years ago that "a woman can't win". Aside from the question as to why Warren would wait two years to spring this revelation, all sorts of "whataboutist" claims can be made as far as the complaints that "white women" betrayed the sisterhood by electing Trump; now we see that even progressive women would sell out their sisters for the "best" candidate. What it ultimately might mean is not that feminism and diversity are bad ideas: it might mean that progressive are actually more prone to screw them up when the opportunity arises to advance them. When, in 2024, Nikki Haley, the daughter of Sikh Indian immigrants, takes her rightful place in the White House, she will prove that societal barriers to women and "color" were primarily erected by leftists.