Showing posts with label Victor Davis Hanson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Victor Davis Hanson. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 15, 2026
Tuesday, November 25, 2025
Victor Davis Hanson is as blind to reality as Trump
Trump II started his term with a 5-seat advantage in the U.S. House.
Trump I started his term with a 47-seat advantage.
Nothing lasting was achieved the first time with a huge majority, and sure as hell won't be this time because he's incompetent and the Congress hates his guts.
The resignation of Marjorie Taylor Greene may be just the tip of the iceberg about to sink Trump II forever. But even if it's not, a 5-seat advantage screams gridlock if Republicans will not compromise on anything.
Trump can issue all the Executive Orders he wants. They will be undone. He can declare all the emergencies he wants. They will be ended. Meanwhile the Department of Defense is still the Department of Defense, my shrimp still come from the Gulf of Mexico, and the Great White North is still Canada, eh?
There is no substitute for legislation, and he's not going to get any.
Sunday, November 9, 2025
Friday, November 7, 2025
Victor Davis Hanson wouldn't know chaos if it walked up and introduced itself
Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness
This guy is delusional.
I thought we were going to invade Greenland, Canada, and Panama at the beginning of the year, but instead we've actually gone to war in Yemen, Iran, and now Venezuela and maybe even Nigeria, all in nine months. But yeah, the Democrats are responsible for all the chaos.
I thought we were going to cut federal spending with Elon Musk at the helm, but all we got was a phony Republican tax and spending plan for the Fourth of July which has put us $2 trillion more in debt just four months later. But damn all those fired government workers who showed up in Virginia this week to vote for a Democrat for governor.
Everyday it's some new bullshit from Mad King Ludwig, but this egghead is upset that the public is reacting negatively to each new pile of it.
The administration and MAGA do not talk enough about . . . tolerable inflation . . . a calmer
Middle East . . .
Good god, man, Joe Six Pack can't afford a lousy hamburger at McDonald's and the Red Sea is no longer safe for free trade.
Tuesday, August 26, 2025
Trumpists have zero self-awareness about who's crazy
Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness
Greg Wehner, FOX Biz
Bart Jansen, USA Today
Natalie Allison
and Michael Birnbaum, Washington Post
Monday, June 3, 2024
Greek historian Victor Davis Hanson, born in 1953, flips his lid, laughably blames every single problem in America today on the Baby Boomers in a wildly insane rant, my favorite being . . .
. . . the Baby Boomers destroyed the southern border . . ..
Here.
Immigration policy in the United States was forever radically altered in 1965, by no one born in the Baby Boom.
The average age of a US Representative in 1965 was 51.4, the Congress of which overwhelmingly passed the destructive reform 320-70, which ended the American commitment to social homogeneity prevailing from the 1920s.
This was an act of American hubris, born of victory in WWII. One would think Hanson would know about that.
Their average birth year puts them in 1914, children of the mentally-ill Progressive Era (1896–1917) which gave us the income tax (1909), popular election of senators (1913), prohibition of alcohol (1919), and women's suffrage (1920), all of which were sufferable as long as their was social stability. Well, except for the prohibition.
The biggest problem affecting Baby Boomers is a lazy attention to our own history, and perhaps self-hatred.
Tuesday, February 6, 2024
Wednesday, August 9, 2023
Monday, August 29, 2022
Friday, January 16, 2015
Victor Davis Hanson's loyalty is to a part of antiquity about free speech admired by the Enlightenment, not to all of it
Here, idealizing the record of the ancient world on freedom of speech, which is much more complicated than he lets on:
Western civilization’s creed is free thought and expression, the lubricant of everything from democracy to human rights. Even a simpleton in the West accepts that protecting free expression is not the easy task of ensuring the right to read Homer’s Iliad or do the New York Times crossword puzzle. It entails instead the unpleasant duty of allowing offensive expression. ...
Westerners cannot return to the Middle Ages to murder those whose ideas they don’t like. “Parody” and “satire” are, respectively, Greek and Latin words. In antiquity the non-Western tradition simply did not produce authors quite like the vicious Aristophanes, Petronius, and Juvenal, who unapologetically trashed the society around them. If the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo loses the millennia-old right to ridicule Islam from within a democracy, then there is no longer a West, at least as we know it.
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Do we really need to remind a classicist that Socrates was put to death for expressing ideas the Athenians didn't like, long before "the West" even got going?
Or that Solon's reforms of the Draconian laws were approved of in the time of Plutarch precisely for the way they restricted impious and intemperate speech?
"Praise is given also to that law of Solon which forbids speaking ill of the dead. For it is piety to regard the deceased as sacred, justice to spare the absent, and good policy to rob hatred of its perpetuity. He also forbade speaking ill of the living in temples, court-of‑law, public offices, and at festivals; the transgressor must pay three drachmas to the person injured, and two more into the public treasury. For never to master one's anger is a mark of intemperance and lack of training; but always to do so is difficult, and for some, impossible." -- Life of Solon 21.1
Or that the Bible has a venerable tradition advocating self-censorship, arguably with a greater claim to forming the basis of Western experience among more people than Petronius or Juvenal could ever make?
"A fool uttereth all his mind: but a wise man keepeth it in till afterwards." -- Proverbs 29:11
"I will guard my ways, Lest I sin with my tongue; I will restrain my mouth with a muzzle, While the wicked are before me." -- Psalm 39:1
"If any man among you seem to be religious, and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man's religion is vain." -- James 1:26
"And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell." -- James 3:6
Or that certain forms of self-censorship could get a person killed under the Romans?
'And the Irenarch Herod, accompanied by his father Nicetes (both riding in a chariot), met him, and taking him up into the chariot, they seated themselves beside him, and endeavoured to persuade him, saying, "What harm is there in saying, Lord Cæsar, and in sacrificing, with the other ceremonies observed on such occasions, and so make sure of safety?" But he at first gave them no answer; and when they continued to urge him, he said, "I shall not do as you advise me." So they, having no hope of persuading him, began to speak bitter words unto him, and cast him with violence out of the chariot, insomuch that, in getting down from the carriage, he dislocated his leg [by the fall]. But without being disturbed, and as if suffering nothing, he went eagerly forward with all haste, and was conducted to the stadium, where the tumult was so great, that there was no possibility of being heard.' -- Martyrdom of Polycarp 8
All of these "speech codes" and more existed in the West long before the West became the West, right alongside the traditions challenging them which Hanson mentions. And speech codes also still exist in our own time, as the anti-Semitic laws of France and a few other countries demonstrate.
Arguably there should be more such laws punishing defamation of more religions if we are going to permit laws benefiting one religion in this respect, if, that is, we are going to continue to emphasize the Western principle of equality before the law. Otherwise the "duty of allowing offensive expression" must also apply to all, including Jews.
Labels:
1st Amendment,
Anti-Semitism,
Athens,
Charlie Hebdo,
Democracy,
Draco,
France,
Homer,
Iliad,
MURDER,
NYTimes,
Odyssey,
Plato,
Real Clear Politics 2015,
The Bible,
Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Everything You Need To Know About Gerald R. Ford
"Reagan’s uncommon good sense extended to sound judgments about controversial people who were similarly outspoken and principled—and thus unpopular if not under constant fire. He was an early supporter of Pat Moynihan’s courageous efforts to end decades of hypocrisy at the United Nations—at a time when even many Republicans still viewed the institution as a sacred cow. Jeanne Kilpatrick’s contentious, but insightful distinctions between Stalinists and right-wing dictators abroad won over an unabashedly supportive Reagan. He praised Soviet dissidents—even as a cautious Gerald Ford refused to meet with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. When William Bennet was taking a beating for his unsettling honest talk about the corruption in our schools and universities, Reagan brushed off worries that his Education Secretary was becoming a political liability."
-- Victor Davis Hanson, here
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