Archive for the ‘Progressives’ Category

How progressives promoted the ‘runaway convention’ myth to save judicial activism – The Hill (blog)

You may have heard alarms that if we hold a national convention for proposing constitutional amendments the gathering would be an uncontrollable constitutional convention (con-con) that could propose anything at all.

The claim is called the runaway scenario. It has almost no basis in history or law. But it has long frightened Americans away from using the Constitutions chief mechanism for bypassing Congress and curing our dysfunctional federal government.

Now we have more information about how it was conjured up.

Last year, the Article V Information Center published my paper showing that confusion between an amendments convention and a constitutional convention first arose in the 20th century. The paper further documents how, during the 1960s and 1970s, leading establishment liberals, such as Kennedy speechwriter Theodore Sorensen and Kennedy confidant Arthur Goldberg, capitalized on that confusion by raising the runaway specter.

The paper concluded that their plan was to scare people away from using the Constitutions convention mechanism. Their goals were twofold. First, they wanted to protect from reversal by constitutional amendment several Supreme Court decisions that had proved highly controversialamong them Roe v. Wade, the case that legalized abortion nationwide. Second, they sought to block growing momentum for amendments imposing term limits and requiring a federal balanced budget.

Now the curator of the Article V Library has produced more evidence confirming these conclusions.

The Article V Library collects every state legislative resolution calling for an amendments convention. It also offers features for screening them by subject and for ascertaining which are still in effect.

Without prior knowledge of my own conclusions, Robert Biggerstaff, the librarys curator, conducted an n-gram search in Google Books to find out when the phrase runaway convention arose (now updated to 2008, the last year for which data are available). He discovered that the term was almost unknown until around 1960when it suddenly became extraordinarily common. Usage rose to counter rising popular demand for constitutional amendments. In the 1990s, as momentum for amendments abated, so also did resort to the runaway scenario. Another n-gram search shows that the abbreviation con con, widely used by convention opponents, also was invented around 1960.

Biggerstaff notes: In the 1950s and 60s progressives actively sought change through courts when it was not possible through legislatures. This was an express tactical choice to seek through judicial activism what was stymied by legislatures.

However, their strategy had what he calls an Achilles heel. Supreme Court decisions can beand several times have beenoverturned by constitutional amendment. After the Supreme Court required states to reapportion their legislatures in the 1960s, for example, 33 of the necessary 34 state legislatures filed applications demanding a convention to propose an amendment reversing the courts rulings.

As a result, Biggerstaff says, it became important to neuter the Article V Amendment processparticularly to prevent triggering by convention applicationsto protect progressive successes achieved in the courts.

Biggerstaff concludes that this was why the runaway convention fiction suddenly emerged from nowhere during the 1960s. In his view, generating unwarranted fear of the Article V convention process was a ploy introduced by progressives as a way to prevent states from countering progressives use of judicial activism.

Rob Natelson is senior fellow in constitutional jurisprudence and heads up theArticle V Information Centeratthe Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver. He was previously a constitutional law professor.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.

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How progressives promoted the 'runaway convention' myth to save judicial activism - The Hill (blog)

Progressives vs Conservatives: Fried Chicken or Pork Belly? – Korea Expos

With just one day left until South Koreaspresidential election, many are busy speculating who will lead the country.Meanwhile, someare trying to tackle this incredibly challenging question about the future of the country: What will people eat while watching the post-election coverage?

Spoiler alert: Fried chicken won the poll, but not by an absolute majority.

On May 6, Realmeter released the result of a riveting poll commissioned byTBS radio show host Kim -jun, likely as a joke. When Kwon Soon-jung, a Realmeter researcher, reported the poll results on Kims radio program, Kim laughed so much that Kwon had to tell him to stop.

Joke or no joke, the poll really happened. Here are its results. 502 respondents told researcherswhich late-night snack theyd consume on election day. Illogically enough, respondents were categorized by political tendency, supporting candidate, supporting party and age among others (I mean, does your political preference say anything about your love of pork belly?).

Predictably, the most popular choice was fried chicken. South Korea didnt get its nickname, the Chimaek (fried chicken and beer combo) Republic, for no reason. Other popular Korean dishes, from jokbal (pork trotter) to tteokbokki (stir-fried rice cake with pepper sauce), didnt even come close to fried chickens popularity.

For the most part, the love of fried chicken seemed like a bipartisan choice. But there was a notable difference between progressive andconservative midnight snackers.

Respondents who identified as conservative seemed to opt more for pork than their moderate and progressive compatriots. And this couldnt have been truer when the poll got a little more specific. Check out how the snacks fare for supporters of different presidential candidates:

The biggest mystery is why there are no fried chicken-lovers amongCho Won-jins supporters. A whopping 56 percent of them opted for grilled pork belly: over six times the average. Dont draw any conclusions, but many of Chos supporters are also fervent supporters of Park Geun-hye. We will meet again! Chos campaign posters say underneath a photograph of Cho smiling at the now detained former president.

Kwon from Realmeter speculated that the noticeable absence of fried chicken may have to do with a preference for alcoholic beverage soju over beer. Chicken goes with soju. Pork goes with soju, he said.

Dont go away just yet. Theres even an age breakdown for the post-election snack poll:

Younger voters generally preferred fried chicken more than their older counterparts. And none of those aged 19-29 chose grilled pork belly as their late-night snack option, while the older age groups (forties and up) leaned towards it. But the future of pigs in slaughterhouses still looks dismal: The young respondents in the same age category chose jokbal (pork trotter) more than any other age group.

By the way, lovers of pig trotters out there might want to be careful. Jokbal is a politically controversial dish. In March, conservative daily newspaper Joongang Ilbo sparked controversy after reporting on Moon Jae-ins supposed penchant for jokbal, which it described as a North Korean dish. (Conservatives often criticize Moon for his supposed pro-North Korean tendencies.)

We hope this article illuminated a critical aspect of South Korean society and the presidential election. One thing is for certain: The future of South Korea may not be as revolutionary or rosy as many of the candidates suggest but it will most certainly be greasy.

Cover image: Fried chicken and pork belly are popular inSouth Korea (Source: Pixabay)

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Progressives vs Conservatives: Fried Chicken or Pork Belly? - Korea Expos

Why Progressives Need a Long-term Strategy, Built on Values | By … – Common Dreams


Common Dreams
Why Progressives Need a Long-term Strategy, Built on Values | By ...
Common Dreams
There's a fight on for control of the Democratic Party. Incredibly, the old-guard neoliberal establishment is doing all they can to hold onto the status quo that ...

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Why Progressives Need a Long-term Strategy, Built on Values | By ... - Common Dreams

Science & Identify Politics Conflict from inside the Progressive Left … – National Review

Progressives claim to love science, but what they truly love is power.To be a good progressive is to adhere simultaneously to two incompatible notions: one, that science provides the final word on any question about which scientists offer any opinion; two, that the scientific method is illegitimate, a tool of the sundry atavistic forces conspiring to keep down the female, the black, the brown, the poor, the gay, the disabled, the gender-fluid everybody except Mitt Romney.

If you were looking at the college campuses with the right kind of eyes in the Eighties and Nineties, you could have seen this coming.

The more philosophically self-aware progressives have long been ensorceled by the belief that science or, really, Science could be pressed into service bearing loads of social management too heavy for a mere bureaucracy. The Soviet Union invested a great deal of its scarce capital in something it called Soviet cybernetics, a sort of Stone Age attempt at using what wed now call Big Data to analyze and solve social problems, especially those related to the management of economic production. The old Marxists took their scientific socialism seriously.

In the English-speaking world, progressives, under the influence not only of political philosophers such as John Dewey but also of the engineer and management theorist Frederick Winslow Taylor, fell into something like a cult of expertise. Experts under the tutelage of Science could, would, and should decide . . . almost everything. How much steel should U.S. firms produce? How should they produce it? What should the line workers at the factory be paid? What about their supervisors? Taylors Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911, provides a testament to the ambitions of the Progressive Era: He and his contemporaries believed that, using such new technological tools as stopwatches and motion-picture cameras, one could study industrial processes at the most granular level how a certain employee turns a certain screw and produce a single, best way of performing any task.

There is a great deal of ideology embedded in that belief, along with a great many political assumptions, but Taylor and the others denied that they were engaged in any sort of politics at all: Their business, as they saw it, was Science. There is a reasonably straight line from early-20th-century progressivism to contemporary, Barack Obamastyle pragmatism, which is dishonestly and glibly characterized as simply doing what works. In reality it means doing what I want done, in the most convenient way.

But managerial progressivism, with its implicit faith in hierarchy and its inescapable elitism (not everybody gets a Ph.D. from Harvard), was always set for conflict with the more populist and emotional tendencies on the left that came to prominence in the Sixties, political currents originating largely in issues of identity (from black power to Chicano power to what we used to call womens liberation). Such concerns exist uneasily alongside a managerial progressivism based on the wisdom of people who were and are overwhelmingly white, male, and highly educated, working in institutions built by (and, the identity Left would argue, for) people who were overwhelmingly white, male, and highly educated. For years, this played out as old-fashioned progressive elites exercising a kind of managerial veto over the wilder ambitions of the identity Left: Bernie Sanders proposes reorganizing the American economy around the cultivation of organic hemp, and somebody responsible tells him, No.

This gave the identity Left a very strong incentive to work to undermine the prestige of Science, a project that was undertaken with great enthusiasm back during the heyday of postmodernism. The academic world endures a lot of voguish nonsense about African science and feminist mathematics and queer physics (My early postulate is that queer physics speaks about knowledge-making in physics that takes the form of subverting the hegemony of a dominant and mainstream discourse). The extreme, Foucauldian version of that analysis was ridiculous and lame and easy to write off if you were not an academic. But the more moderate version of that view became quite mainstream: We may not hear very much about feminist physics, but we hear about womens ways of knowing, gay perspectives on this, black perspectives on that, etc., as if there were not as many black perspectives as there are black people. Michel Foucaults lurking malice was reinvented as the motive force in the rhetoric of intersectionality, the belief that the oppression of people with certain characteristics (black, gay, disabled, etc.) isnt a matrix of attitudes and discrete episodes but a complex nest of social relationships that can, conveniently, explain anything the phlogiston of identity politics.

The Indiana Jones heuristic the search for fact is science, the search for Truth is philosophy can go only so far in finessing the inherent conflict between science, which is organized around assumptions of objectivity, and the poisonous identity politics holding as its fundamental principle that everything is subjective. The scientific view is that true is true and false is false, irrespective of any particular demographic or political characteristics of the speaker. (Though these of course may provide grounds for skepticism: Who paid for your study? is not an entirely unreasonable question.)

At the same time, the identity Left has its uses for Science. For one thing, it was a convenient cudgel to use against conservative-leaning Christians distressed by certain implications of evolution or discombobulated by the possibility that homosexuality is a phenomenon with roots that are biological rather than diabolical. That sort of thing is usually the stuff of low-value conversation: A certain kind of eternal adolescent never stops getting a thrill out of scandalizing his retrograde Lutheran grandmother. But if you have a sufficient number of such interactions and we have no shortage of them they can become a part of the tribal identity that is the real basis of our politics, however much we might pretend that what we are really talking about is public policy. As the identity Left moved out of the communes and into the suburbs and progressivism became much more strongly associated with the interests and habits of affluent, educated, coastal elites, professing ones love of Science became an exercise in telegraphing status.

But if it were really about science, wed be hearing more from scientists and less from people who have batty, superstitious attitudes about modern agriculture and evidence-based medicine. You will not hear Democrats complaining about the fact that the Affordable Care Act clears the way for subsidizing such hokum as acupuncture and homeopathy. Seventh-day Adventists may make some claims about the world that sound ridiculous from the scientific point of view, but so do practitioners of yoga and sweat-lodge enthusiasts. The public adoration of Science isnt about science.

Which brings us to the recent March for Science and the popular poster boy for all things Science, Bill Nye. The March for Science was no such thing; in the main, it was a march for the one thing almost every faction of the Left can agree on: a larger public sector. Progressives are culturally at home in large institutions (universities, federal agencies, Fortune 500 HR departments), and they have learned how to game those systems pretty well. More funding for science means a lot of funding for things tangentially related to science and a lot of comfortable sinecures related to science in the vaguest way: A great many people with degrees in womens studies or Latino studies have jobs in science as community-outreach coordinators and program officers with responsibilities that might charitably be described as light. Its a safe bet that $100 spent on science gets you about $17.50 worth of astrophysics with the balance going to community development, paid political activism, and overhead. That is not an argument against spending on science it is an argument for better and more responsibly run programs.

And that would be a fine argument to have, if we could have an argument. Which we cant.

Charles Murray, who wrote one of the worlds most famous books bringing scientific research to bear on social questions, has in effect been forbidden to speak at college campuses. In one of the most shameful spectacles of contemporary academic malfeasance, Bert Johnson, the chairman of the political-science department at Middlebury, has apologized for the episode in which Murray was prevented from speaking on campus by rioters: Professor Johnson apologized to the rioters for having had the poor judgment to invite someone to campus whose views are at variance with their own. It could be that Murrays work represents poor science; some respected parties have made exactly that argument. But what does Science have to say about the disputation of claims?

The postmodernists were correct in one thing: There is some politics built into the scientific method, in that the scientific method assumes an environment in which people are at liberty to speak, debate, and publish a liberty with which the American Left, particularly on college campuses, is at war. They are not interested in debate or conversation. They are interested in silencing those who disagree with them, and they have high-profile allies: Democratic prosecutors around the country are working to criminalize the holding of nonconformist views about global warming (some prominent activists have openly called for jailing climate deniers), and Howard Dean has taken up the novel argument that the First Amendment does not actually protect political speech with which he disagrees. (It is, he insists, hate speech, a legally null term in the American context.) Dean has argued that the federal laws governing the conduct of political campaigns could and should be used to regulate all public speaking.

The partisans of Science believe themselves to be part of an eternal war between Galileo and the Inquisition, but they have in fact chosen the Inquisitions side. They have chosen the side of the Censor and the Index so long as they get to choose who serves as Censor and who manages the Index. That is how they have reconciled Science and its claims of objective fact with identity politics and its denial of the same: They are engaged in neither the pursuit of fact nor the pursuit of Truth only the pursuit of Power.

READ MORE: Science vs. Science! The Left Hijacks Science The Lefts New Cure-All: Science

Kevin D. Williamson is National Reviews roving correspondent. This story first appeared in the May 15, 2017, issue of National Review.

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Progressives aim to sway new City Council on SLO campaign funding – The San Luis Obispo Tribune


The San Luis Obispo Tribune
Progressives aim to sway new City Council on SLO campaign funding
The San Luis Obispo Tribune
After a second unsuccessful attempt lobbying the San Luis Obispo City Council to pursue a democracy voucher that would give voters city money to donate to candidates in local elections, a progressive group led by former congressional candidate Bill ...

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Progressives aim to sway new City Council on SLO campaign funding - The San Luis Obispo Tribune