Antifa, Puerto Rico, and minorities in a pluralist society

A portmanteau post addressing Antifa, Puerto Rico and Mayor Cruz, and the problem of minorities who try to bend society to their will.

Puerto RicoThe items in this post bear no relationship to each other, unless you want to say that the first demonstrates how to undermine a civilized, pluralist society, while the second shows how a minority within that society is supposed to balance benefits and burdens. Oh, and there’ll be a detour into Puerto Rico. Still, as I have other things to do, this post is a little bit jumbled.

The first thing I want to bring to your attention is Steve Crowder’s video about going undercover with Antifa in Utah. The two take-aways are (1) that Antifa people are weird losers who get excited by violence and bloodshed and (2) that the media does not want to know about Antifa. It doesn’t fit the narrative and the media is about nothing but narrative:

Speaking of narrative, I’m going to slip one more thing in here, which is the media’s burgeoning narrative that the devastation in Puerto Rico is Trump’s fault for failing to react quickly. In fact, there’s every indication that Trump had FEMA and the military ready to roll. The problem seems to be that Puerto Rico, which is Democrat-governed, has no infrastructure. It also kicked the Navy out a couple of decades ago, meaning (a) that there’s no embedded Navy in place to help and (b) that it kissed good-bye the hundreds of millions that the Navy would have contributed to the economy.

It also appears that San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz is Ray Nagin in drag: a Leftist politician who’s done a spectacularly bad job managing her responsibilities and is now, thanks to media complicity, successfully putting the blame onto a Republican president. Of course, Trump is no George Bush so, rather than retreating into quiet dignity, he’s pointing out that she’s failed in her job.

Thankfully, it doesn’t help Cruz’s claim that at least one other mayor and the governor are saying that Trump’s been trying to help, but that the infrastructure is broken and the unions are making trouble. It also doesn’t help that Cruz has been doing her grandstanding in front of pallets of supplies that she is apparently unable to get from her interview venue to the people in need. But still, the media has its narrative: Trump killed Puerto Ricans.

And now my last point, which is about minorities in a pluralist society. Healthy minorities in a healthy pluralist society leave each other alone. The government doesn’t interfere in their religious or sexual rituals if they don’t make unreasonable demands on the government or on the population. For the minority, it means missing out on some of the benefits of the mainstream society, but the real benefit is that they get to follow their own path in peace, without interference or oppression.

Islamists are not healthy minorities. Although their religious rituals and customs are often diametrically opposed to the mainstream, they insist that the mainstream should bend, rather than that the Islamists do so. Instead of saying that a veiled woman is choosing religious tradition over driving, they insist that driver’s licenses have a “picture” of her completely veiled face.  Instead of saying, because I cannot deal with dogs, I won’t be a taxi driver who might have to ferry seeing-eye dogs, they insist that they be allowed to refuse such passengers. Instead of saying, if I choose to dress modestly I can’t work at Abercrombie & Fitch, women sue Abercrombie, forcing the store to change its image. (I hate Abercrombie, but I think it gets to keep its image.)

Today’s gender and sexuality warriors are no better: Bake my cake! Photograph my wedding! Allow your church or synagogue (never your mosque, just church or synagogue) to be a venue for my wedding! Put me on the women’s sports team, even though I’m a biological male, because I feel female! And on and on….

These gender warriors will not say, “If you leave me alone, I’ll leave you alone. I’ll find photographers and bakers who have no problem with gay marriage. I’ll accept that I cannot perform on a men’s sports team, because I feel female, but that I cannot perform on a women’s sports team because my muscles and bones are still male.” Instead, they are determined to remake society into their own minority mold.

This kind of thing makes me crazy. If you’re going to be free to run against the mainstream, which is a benefit in a free society, you should accept the accompanying burdens, such as missed employment opportunities or the inability to bend people to your will. That’s way I admired so much the story of Dudi Sela, 32, Israel’s top male tennis player:

The top Israeli tennis player, Dudi Sela, 32, who is ranked 77th in the world, quit his quarterfinals match Friday in the third set of a Chinese tournament so he could begin observing Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish year, in time for the sun to set.

All Jewish holidays start at night, as according to Judaism every day starts at night, in accordance with the Biblical verses from Genesis, starting with, “And there was evening and there was morning, one day.”

Sela was playing Alexander Dolgopolov of Ukraine at the Shenzhen Open; Dolgopolv had won the first set 6-3, but Sela won the second 7-5, and the two players were eight minutes into the third set, with Dolgopolov having won the first game, when Sela retired.

Tournament organizers moved the match from its original time slot on Yom Kippur after requests from officials in the Israel Tennis Association as well as Israeli Culture and Sport Minister Miri Regev, but the sports website Vavel reported that tournament organizers refused Sela’s request to have the match played earlier in the day.

Leaving the match cost Sela a possible $34,000 in prize money.

Sandy Koufax would have been proud.