An Interesting Chance to Compare and Contrast

Colin Kaepernick and lately  his imitators around the NFL have explicitly disparaged and insulted the United States and most of its people by  boorish behavior during the national anthem,  by making slanderous accusations against white people in general, and by  waiving clenched fists for black power or doing similar things  during games while on the job and representing the league and their employers.  In response to this the commissioner of the league and several owners of teams first offered them support and encouragement, and members of the traditional media treated them almost as heroes.  No owner and almost no major media people criticized them in public in the early part of the season.

A few days ago Cam Newton of the Carolina Panthers, while on the job representing the league and his employer, made a stupid comment  to a female reporter who asked him a question about one of his receivers, calling it odd that a woman would ask  about  such a technical point.  Well, more than one ton of bricks fell on poor old Cam. He lost endorsement deals, was attacked all over  the media, and required to eat the requisite amount of dirt and crawl through the requisite amount of broken glass with a public maudlin, probably scripted, perhaps insincere apology.

 The interesting question is why people in power in the NFL and the sports media treated the two situations so differently.  Both  sets of behavior were offensive to many of the NFL’s customers and other  people (with less reason with Newton, since his actions lacked malice). Both were ill mannered and in bad taste.  Both Kaepernick (along with many of his imitators)  and Newton give the impression of being arrogant jerks. Any argument for  allowing players  to “make statements” on the job would seem to apply  equally to both cases.  Yet the responses were  completely different. 

There is a pretty obvious guess why.  Kaepernick’s copiers  did not violate the canons of leftist political correctness or bother people in the traditional media, while Newton did both.   So the owners and the commissioner  decided supporting the Kaepernick crowd was expedient while letting  Newton slide was not. That is enough for phonies and hypocrites to decide how to behave. Whatever the reason, it is up to the fans to tell the people running the NFL  that siding with Kaepernick and company is wrong and, far more important,  to teach them that it is inexpedient.  That seems to be happening, based on the commissioner’s  sudden change of course in the last few days. 

Guns This Week

Many have asked what the mass murders in Las Vegas should mean for  issues related to citizens’ rights to be armed.  The answer is nothing at all, and claims to the contrary reveal a depressing lack of understanding of the role of principles in the conduct of life.  People either have a right to self defense, or they have no such right. If they have a right to defend themselves, they have a right to possess   and use the means for doing so.  If they have no such right, they may be forcibly disarmed and left  to submit to whatever aggressors – official or otherwise – choose to inflict upon them. That is the fundamental question  to answer first, and it is one to be decided in terms of general ethical principles.  Only then can particular schemes, policies, and proposed rules be considered rationally.  Claims  by leftist politicians and their flacks in  the traditional media that  one terrible criminal act  “changes everything” are not only ghoulishly opportunistic, but deeply anti-intellectual.  Single events do not change general principles, and pretending otherwise is substituting emotion for serious  thought and/ or hoping to con the public into doing so.  One’s rights are independent of and not contingent upon the actions of anybody else, criminal or otherwise.

That if the right to be armed for self defense is recognized and arms are available to people, criminals and madmen sometimes will obtain arms and commit crimes should have been obvious to all before last weekend.  It is just one special case of the fact that free societies with respect for individual rights are in some ways easier marks for criminals and terrorists than tyrannical police states are.  Free people face  such risks, knowing they are saved from the greater danger and harm that a truly effective security state would bring. 

 In looking at policy and politics on guns, it is important to remember something a writer on the subject observed.  Advocates of gun control do not wish to eliminate the ownership of firearms. They wish to centralize the ownership in members of a ruling class and its agents. It is also important to consider the following question. If the advocates of gun control do not wish the peaceful citizens of this country harm, why do they yearn so intensely  to make them helpless?

Reparations

The principle that a person should never accept undeserved guilt is immensely important.   We should accept responsibility (and blame or guilt if appropriate) for our actual failures and wrongdoing, but for nothing more.  Inducing  undeserved feelings of guilt in people  is one the most effective and commonly attempted ways to gain control over them.  Religions, governments, social movements, and other power seekers have used and still use it successfully. Guilt ridden people usually are easier led and dominated than  the self-confident.

Some leftists have attempted to blame all (or at least all non-leftist) white Americans for slavery and Jim Crow. These claims are invalid. There is no American alive who owned a slave, saw anyone held as a slave, or did anything to further or tolerate the institution of slavery in this country, and so no one alive is to blame.   Jim Crow segregation laws were repealed in 1964.  The last election electing the (Democratic Party) politicians who supported and perpetuated Jim Crow was in 1962.  The voting age then was twenty one.  So no one born after 1941 could have contributed even by voting to the continuation of Jim Crow, much less by holding political office. White  Americans born after that time and white Americans of any age who never supported the segregationists are  not responsible for  the wrongs of the Jim Crow laws and should reject any claims that they are.   

Leftists have also floated the idea of seizing wealth from white Americans and giving it to black Americans as reparations for slavery.  Forced reparations can be justified only as punishment for crimes or as a means of restitution.  The people who committed the crimes of slavery are long dead. Present day white people had nothing to do with it and should resist and reject any attempt to blame or punish them for crimes they did not commit, just as rational and liberally minded people should reject other notions of vicarious guilt, original sin, or moral taint from the sins of ancestors. 

That leaves restitution. Restitution is the returning  by a criminal to his victim of the property stolen from him.  Restitution from a  criminal to his victim is always appropriate.  Restitution from an  innocent heir of a criminal to a victim or an heir of a victim can be appropriate but only if an identifiable  amount of stolen property or gain from disposing  the stolen property exists to be returned.  For example  if person A’s mother cheated person B’s father out of thirty acres of land in 1996, and the fraud can be proved, and person A still holds the property as her mother’s heir, B might have a valid  claim to it.  However if one of A’s remote ancestors cheated one of B’s out of a tenth interest in a whaling vessel  in Boston in 1694, it probably would be impossible for  B to have a claim on A that could be justified or quantified.  The ship would be long gone, and multiple events in the intervening three hundred years would have influenced the present conditions of both A and B  (and numerous other descendants of the crook and the victim) to a point where nothing A had could be identified  as stolen property.  In the case of slavery it would almost always be impossible to attribute anything held by a particular  present day white person to the labor stolen by an ancestor of his from an ancestor of a particular black person, and so restitution would not be applicable.  The exceptions would be very and probably vanishingly infrequent. 

Any widespread payment of reparations  to black people of today from white Americans for slavery  is both very unlikely and incapable of justification. The notion  is no more sound  than demands for reparations  to present day Englishmen from Italians for the Roman occupation and enslavement of Britannia would be.  It is a reasonable  guess that at least some  of those floating the idea know this and are cynically bringing it up  to increase   feelings of resentment in some people  and of  guilt in others for political reasons.

An Easy Solution

People on some campuses and a few other places have demanded replacing standard male and female English pronouns with a “gender neutral” substitute, often suggesting “ze” or “xe” as a replacement.  Others have found such monkeying with the language silly, offensive, or even subversive.  However there is a simple solution which should please all parties.  The English language already has a well established and  perfectly good gender neutral pronoun, the word “it”. Any man or woman who does not want to be referred to as a “he” or a “she” simply could announce that henceforth he or she wants  to be spoken and written of as an “it”.  That would achieve neutrality, and  the critics of this stuff likely would go along with such requests happily. None of this should be conflated in any way with Cousin Itt who is something else altogether.