Weinstein Paradox
When the scandal broke about Harvey Weinstein’s casting couch and many, many incidences of sexual harassment, it also came out that dozens or even hundreds of people knew about it but stories were spiked, people silenced and a general atmosphere of don’t-ask-don’t-tell existed from coast to coast to keep his secret a secret. The power structure wins out! So why, I have to wonder, do millions of people accept this narrative yet deny very well-documented conspiracies from JFK to 9/11 under the argument that “someone would have talked” or that “that many people can’t keep a secret?” (Nevermind the fact that the Manhattan Project was a secret kept by over one hundred thousand people during the War, or the fact that five million people are reported to have government security clearance a la Edward Snowden–that’s a lot of secret-keepers!) It’s a paradox.
Shooting Star Families
My heart bleeds for Gold Star Families–families who have lost servicemen and women during their service. My heart bleeds for them because they have lost their best but also in part because of the deception and exploitation underlying all of our military action today and perhaps most if not all in our past. Their deaths-many of them-were not for the good. Although the idea of comparing these deaths with drug overdoses seems fundamentally wrong because druggies kill themselves, there is a certain similarity in that the Drug War, which is at the heart of these deaths (see my article about Hoffman v Halsted), is also based on government deception and exploitation, so I am going to go ahead and coin the term Shooting Star Family (actually, it was my brother George’s idea upon the overdose death of my sister Rosemary in 2017).
Normalcy Bias
The phenomenon by which most people will accept an explanation that seems normal over one that seems extraordinary despite where the evidence may point.
Identity Privilege
The goal and sometime reality where having a particular identity (ostensibly one that has suffered discrimination in the past) is the basis for getting preference, priority or privilege, presumably as restitution for past wrongs against members of the group. This is a fundamentally collectivist mentality I reject (justice should be meted out for and against individuals not interchangeably among members of a group), but I also reject the problem of ignoring basic principles of equality–this allows the pendulum to swing from oppression-privilege to privilege-oppression rather than to true justice for all time.
Lovejoy’s Law
When all other policy arguments fail, resort to “It’s for the children!” or “What about the children?!” Reminds me of when someone is losing an interventionist foreign policy argument and resorts to “But Nazis!” or “Because Hitler!”
Greasetrap = Scapegoat
Classically speaking, a scapegoat is an animal upon which all the sins of the community have been deposited and then it is ritually killed. That term seems to have morphed into an innocent person taking the blame for the sins of others. I coined “greasetrap” to mean the classic sense of scapegoat–a vessel into which sins are poured then emptied and the larger body cleansed. An example of this is to call the deep state “Obama Holdovers”–as if once that crowd is cleaned out there will be no more deep state. Ha ha ha.
Controlled Crisis
I was inspired to coin this term when Binkley discovered that the Atlanta I85 bridge collapse in 2016 was likely a disaster-readiness drill! Seems that the government actors who planned this felt justified in doing so as part of their jobs to be ready for any eventuality.
