Via Samizdata, Frank J Fleming ponders the role of President:

What was the concept of the U.S. government when it was created? That it’s our servant — we’re in charge of it. The president serves at our pleasure. So the president trying to lead us is like your butler dictating your agenda for the day. What would you do if your butler tried that? That’s right: You’d lock him in a small room in the wine cellar for a couple of days to teach him his place. Yet somehow we not only put up with the president trying to lead us, but we’ve come to expect it.

Related, Jeff Goldstein on two visions of government:

Either you believe the government owns you, and therefore you owe it tribute which it will then, in its wisdom, distribute as it sees fit; or you believe you own the government, and that while you keep more of your money and the fruits of your labour and allow the bureaucracies to molest you less, the federal government can learn to make do with what we decide to give it in revenue. And if that means, for instance, Big Bird or Planned Parenthood or solar energy companies have to compete in the marketplace with Cartoon Network or Wal-Mart or frakking, oil drilling, coal mining, and natural gas pipelines, then so be it.

Somewhat related, Zombie is compiling a “complete list of Barack Obama’s scandals, misdeeds, crimes and blunders.” It’s an ongoing crowd-sourced project so submissions are welcome.

And from the vaults, Heather Mac Donald on fatherhood and poverty:

The premise of the Young Men’s Initiative, like that of its predecessors, is that government has the capacity to produce upstanding, bourgeois citizens – if it just gets all its agencies to act in a coordinated fashion. […] Since Mayor Bloomberg claims to be a fan of managing by information, here are some more data for him to focus on: in the Bronx’s Mott Haven neighbourhood in 2009, 84 percent of births were to unmarried women, according to city health statistics, followed by Brownsville, Brooklyn, at 81.2 percent; Hunts Points, the Bronx, at 80.4 percent; and Morrisania, the Bronx, at 79.1 percent. East Tremont (the Bronx), Bushwick (Brooklyn), and East New York (Brooklyn) all had out-of-wedlock birth rates well above 70 percent. Compare those with the rates in largely white neighbourhoods, such as Battery Park (6.8 percent), the Upper East Side (7.9 percent), and Murray Hill (8.6 percent).

The breakdown of the family lies behind all other urban dysfunction. Until marriage is restored as the norm for child-rearing in the inner city, black and Hispanic crime rates and education failure will continue to be disproportionate. No government programme can possibly compensate for the absence of fathers in the home and the absence of the cultural expectation that men will be responsible for their children. […] The mayor is eager to talk about marriage for gays and lesbians, but he cannot bring himself to use the word when it comes to black and Hispanic heterosexual couples.

But hey, let’s do what Laurie Penny says instead. Yes, “fuck marriage,” “fuck monogamy” and fuck all of those other “small ugly ambitions.” Because, rather like Laurie herself, it’s all so incredibly radical and defiant. Just don’t look too closely at the practical results.

Update:

Speaking of practical results, or the denial thereof, let’s not overlook the bewildered educator Grover Furr. A Professor of Medieval English and a devout Marxist, Furr has been mentioned here before and readers may recall his indignation at the fact that a few non-leftists still have the temerity to remain in the humanities, despite the professor’s wishes for ideological purity. Well, it seems our unhinged academic is still sharing his wisdom with students.

Feel free to add your own links and snippets in the comments.

Heather Mac Donald on poverty and behaviour:  

We are supposed to assume that a 21-year-old mother of two should not have been expected to assess whether she and her male sexual partners were ready to support a family; it is for her to have babies and for taxpayers to provide for them. And if Temporary Assistance to Needy Families cuts off that support for failure to comply with its rules, [we are supposed to assume that] the problem lies with the law, not with the decision-making that led to the need for welfare in the first place. […] So assiduously non-judgmental is the liberal discourse around poverty that [New York Times reporter, Jason] DeParle portrays the crime committed by single mothers as the consequence of welfare reform — rather than of those mothers’ previous abysmal decision-making regarding procreation and their present lack of morals. […] Underclass poverty doesn’t just happen to people, as the left implies. It is almost always the consequence of poor decision-making — above all, having children out of wedlock.

Regarding the fallout of illegitimacy and absent fathers, see also this and this.

Related to the above, a vintage post by Peter Risdon:

One thing, and one thing only, keeps people trapped in the kind of poverty of mind where they don’t feed their children properly even when they could, and shit in their own stairwells. It’s a lack of ownership; a lack of self-reliance. It’s a lack of the very concept of self-reliance. It’s an idea that the mere thought that they should be self-reliant is immoral, evil, callous and cruel.

And a random thought from Thomas Sowell:

When politicians say, “spread the wealth,” translate that as “concentrate the power,” because that is the only way they can spread the wealth.

As usual, feel free to add your own.

Via Kate, Michael Moynihan on the reprehensible fantasist Eric Hobsbawm:

In a now infamous 1994 interview with journalist Michael Ignatieff, the historian was asked if the murder of “15, 20 million people might have been justified” in establishing a Marxist paradise. “Yes,” Mr. Hobsbawm replied. Asked the same question the following year, he reiterated his support for the “sacrifice of millions of lives” in pursuit of a vague egalitarianism. That such comments caused surprise is itself surprising; Mr. Hobsbawm’s lifelong commitment to the Party testified to his approval of the Soviet experience, whatever its crimes. It’s not that he didn’t know what was going on in the dank basements of the Lubyanka and on the frozen steppes of Siberia. It’s that he didn’t much care.

Readers of How to Change the World will be treated to explications of synarchism, a dozen mentions of the Russian Narodniks, and countless digressions on justly forgotten Marxist thinkers and politicians. But there is remarkably little discussion of the way communist regimes actually governed. There is virtually nothing on the vast Soviet concentration-camp system, unless one counts a complaint that “Marx was typecast as the inspirer of terror and gulag, and communists as essentially defenders of, if not participators in, terror and the KGB.” Also missing is any mention of the more than 40 million Chinese murdered in Mao’s Great Leap Forward or the almost two million Cambodians murdered by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.

Similar sleight-of-hand and attempts to isolate Marx from the practical fallout of his totalitarian blueprint can be found here. And for sheer tragicomic delusion, this is tough to beat. As is this.

KC Johnson on the difficulties of juggling Designated Victim Groups:

The contemporary academic majority worships the trinity of race, class, and gender. Class is clearly the third wheel – unsurprisingly given that most tenured professors are well-off financially and secure in employment, and therefore don’t have a personal connection to the preferred ideological viewpoints on the issue. The competition for primacy between race and gender, however, is less clear-cut. In a matter like the lacrosse case, where the preferred viewpoint on class, race, and gender all dictated a rush to embrace false accuser Crystal Mangum’s wild claims, the result – as we all saw with the Group of 88’s activities – can be vicious. But the rape of Katie Rouse, a white Duke student, by a local black man was met with utter silence from the Group. As I noted at the time, they seemed desperate to avoid making a politically difficult choice.

Armed and Dangerous finds affirmation in a flash mob Bolero:

Ravel could not even have imagined the cellphones the musicians used for coordination; our capacity to transvaluate old forms – and our willingness to do so – is unparalleled in human history. What I saw in that video is that embracing this process of perpetual reinvention is what being “Western” means. We have developed more than any previous or competing civilisation the knack of using our past without being limited by it. I looked at those musicians and that audience, and what I didn’t see was decadence or exhaustion or self-hating multiculturalism. I felt like pumping my fist in the air and yelling “This is my civilisation!” It lives, and it’s beautiful, and it’s worth defending.

And Laban Tall notes a lesson in cultural contrasts:

From time to time, I fly to Stockholm from Manchester. On arriving at Arlanda, I’m greeted by giant posters of Stockholmers saying (in English), “Welcome to my town!” On return to Ringway, I’m greeted by posters warning me not to assault airport staff. A few months ago I flew to Munich for the first time. On arrival I was greeted by a Bluetooth message from BMW, promoting their cars. Returning to Manchester, I was greeted at luggage reclaim by a giant poster offering me a test for chlamydia.

As always, feel free to add your own.

Shatner does Poe in terracotta face paint. Bewildering make-up aside, The Raven does lend itself to being Shatnered. Recorded for Hallowe’en, 1983.

Want hardcore Shatner? Of course you do. Via Nerdcore. 

John Meredith steers us to another Classic Sentence from the Guardian. Two, actually.

I’d like to say that this encounter has propelled me to carry the bag with defiance, but instead it has left me slightly bruised. I’ve since bought an incredibly sombre pair of jeans – unusual for me.

So says Mr Charlie Porter, writing of his polite yet clearly traumatic encounter with Canary Wharf security. 

All I needed for the day was a notebook, my iPod Touch, a Kindle and some keys. They all slotted snugly into a patent red zip-up bag by the young London menswear designer James Long.

Looking sharp, Mr Porter.

And it’s not just rather fabulous. It’s also a political statement.

I find the word “manbag” such a bore: it is often used mockingly, and it categorises what I think should be category-free.

Then the horror began.