Filmmakers Try to Browbeat Georgia
    
So let them do all their work in high-tax CA.  That would be amusing

It wouldn’t be Hollywood if there weren’t drama. And in this game of chicken between Georgia and the titans of Tinsel Town, there’s more of it every day.

It was all very theatrical when Netflix, Disney, WarnerMedia, and Sony Pictures started shaking their fists at pro-life states and made hollow threats about canceling productions. For most conservatives, it was a familiar scene. The entertainment industry has been using the same script since North Carolina’s HB 2, when celebrities climbed on their moral high horses to brow beat voters who believe in privacy. Now their empty bluster is directed at the South, where governors are signing abortion bans into law faster than liberals can yell, “Cut!”

This week, Disney CEO Bob Iger trotted out the same old non-committal soundbites. They would be reevaluating their projects, he promised. “We are watching it very carefully,” he reassured his allies. But as well as Iger and others are delivering their lines, their performance isn’t getting rave reviews from an important corner — their actual film crews.

“None of us voted for this,” said one key grip in Georgia, “and we shouldn’t have to suffer because of what the politicians decided.” A fight is brewing, others agreed, if their companies pull up stakes and move out.

BuzzFeed interviewed scores of frustrated people on location in the South — some of whom are starting campaigns of their own. Callie Moore, a camera assistant who works for Starz, is launching a “Stay and Fight in Georgia” initiative. “I generally don’t agree that boycotting is the right call to make a real difference here,” Moore argued. “I think the film industry brings so much to the state of Georgia, economically and diversity-wise, and I think it does so much good for the state. The least we can do is fight back and try to keep it here.”

“It’s ultimately hurting more people than it is going to do any justice,” one person fumed. “It’s not going to affect the politicians and the actors. They’re still going to keep going to work in other places like they always have. But… it’s going to destroy us.” Even liberals like former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams are using the hashtag #Consequences to remind the industry that its bravado would mean “lost jobs for carpenters, hair dressers, food workers & 100s of small businesses grown right here.”

Georgia legislators, on the other hand, are probably tired of rolling out the red carpet to people who use them for their tax climate, only to turn around and shame them for the values that make it possible. “Disney is free to do what they please, but their stated intent is highly hypocritical,” Stephen Kent points out in the Washington Examiner. “When Hollywood’s moral values collide with dollars it’s usually no contest.” After all, he argues, there didn’t seem to be even a whiff of this outrage when Iger shook on his sweet deals overseas.

“There’s a deep display of insincerity going on anytime Hollywood studios begin boycotts of conservative states for abortion restrictions. Disney just completed production of Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, and before that was The Last Jedi, which featured memorable scenes shot in Croatia and Bolivia. In Croatia, abortion is restricted after 10 weeks. In Bolivia, it is entirely illegal. And yet, no Disney boycott.”

Not to mention, the Wall Street Journal points out, Iger’s obvious double standard in Asia. “More than a few Americans may also notice the contradiction that Disney is more worried about filming in a U.S. state that has passed a law democratically than it is operating its theme park and hawking its films in China, which uses facial-recognition software to monitor its population and has a million Uighurs in re-education camps…”

There will be more legislators like the one in California, trying to push more studios over the hump by dangling tax breaks in front of anyone with the hutzpah to leave pro-life states. Move to a place like ours that has a better appreciation for killing babies, the bill seems to say! It’s a nice try, but whatever modest incentives California can offer will still be offset by the state’s suffocating regulations and higher costs.

In the meantime, if Iger is so disgusted by unborn children, maybe Georgians shouldn’t wait for him to leave. Maybe they should force him out altogether. Obviously, Disney’s brand of “making dreams come true” is a bygone era. “Making the Left’s agenda a reality” is more like it. Threatening the people of Georgia because they simply want to allow children to be born speaks volumes of Iger’s new Disney.

In the end, though, these executives still see the world through dollars. That’s why these CEOs’ posturing never amounts to anything. It’s all an act. And by Hollywood standards, not a very good one.

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Why Liberals Fear the State Department’s Review of the Nature of Human Rights

“Every human law has just so much of the nature of law as is derived from the law of nature,” Thomas Aquinas wrote. “But if at any point it deflects from the law of nature, it is no longer a law but a perversion of the law.”

Aquinas’s observation that human law either ratifies natural law or perverts it is a good North Star in promoting human rights around the world.

Now that the State Department is looking to form an advisory panel to ponder whether the debate on human rights has departed from these principles, however, progressive groups are running around crying foul.

The panel, officially to be called the State Department Commission on Unalienable Rights, “will provide fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights.”

It is a much-needed corrective to what has taken place for several years. To be fair to the liberals, they do have much to fear.

The entire edifice the left has built in the United States and abroad is based on a foundation of laws and policies that depart from defensible ideas about the natural rights of humans. Instead, we have been promoting compulsions that trample these rights.

America decided at its very beginning that the individual has unalienable rights to free speech, freedom of conscience, self-defense, private property (which is the physical manifestation of our labor), and so on.

Good governments secure these universal rights, while bad governments abridge them.

Our founding documents say that these are God-given rights, a statement that nobody from Aquinas to John Locke to Thomas Jefferson (who wrote those words into the Declaration of Independence) would have found controversial. One does not need to have faith, however, to understand that these are universal axioms that precede the creation of government.

We can observe in our own human nature, for example, what Leo Strauss—one of the 20tth century’s leading proponents of the theory of natural rights—called “the equality of all men in regard to the right of self-preservation.”

We don’t need government—or the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), for that matter—to tell us that each of us would fight to prevent our murder. The right to liberty and property are really extensions of our survival instinct.

There is a debate within conservative circles at the moment as to whether rights regarding freedom from government interference are truly universal or, just like rights regarding freedom from want, they are the product of tradition and cultural values.

Strauss has Aquinas clarifying the matter this way: “the axioms from which the more specific rules of natural right are derived are universally valid and immutable; what are mutable only are the more specific rules.”

In other words, cultural habits tend to produce governments that put a premium on the defense of universal natural rights, and others that do not.

The United States and other freedom-loving nations have the responsibility to criticize those governments that quash the universal rights to religious conscience, to life, to property, etc.

These nations also have an obligation to stay out of each other’s internal debates over the size of the welfare state, for example. Ditto for such issues as abortion, same-sex marriage, or identity group rights, about which we ourselves continue to have a robust debate.

The promotion of these cultural values would undermine real universal rights. As The Heritage Foundation’s Emilie Kao and Grace Melton write, in a warning about United Nations mischief-making, “creating new rights based on membership in special identity groups corrodes principles of equality and universality.”

 “The freedom to live according to one’s conscience is integral to the flourishing of all human rights,” Kao and Melton add, yet Europe and the U.S. provide “numerous cases” of “non-discrimination laws being used to force individuals to endorse a new sexual orthodoxy by supporting same-sex relations or same-sex marriage, under threat of economic punishment.”

Progressives may have a problem with these issues being considered at the State Department; no one else should.

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Twitter Users Dumbed Down

The social-media platform tends toward less-informed rather than more-informed users.

A recently published study performed by a team of Italian researchers concluded that using Twitter negatively impacts an individual’s cognitive abilities. Surprise!

Gian Paolo Barbetta, professor of economic policy at Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan and the study’s lead author, explained, “It’s quite detrimental. I can’t say whether something is changing in the mind, but I can say that something is definitely changing in the behavior and the performance.”

The Washington Post reports the researchers found that “using Twitter reduced performance on [an understanding and comprehension] test by about 25 to 40 percent of a standard deviation from the average result, as the paper explains. Jeff Hancock, the found director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, described these as ‘pretty big effects.’” The Post further noted, “The decline was sharpest among high-achieving students, including women, those born in Italy and those who had scored higher on a baseline test. This find, the paper notes, bolsters the conclusion that blogs and social networking sites actively impair performance, rather than simply failing to augment learning.”

Karen North, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, observed, “It’s the same problem that we have with the level of political discussion. People get 280 characters, and it’s not enough. Without the full background, you’re more likely to be led astray.”

Twitter responded by noting that it’s not in the business of making people smarter.

That may be the understatement of the year, especially when Twitter is suspending people like Erick Erickson for having the “audacity” to poke fun at Elizabeth Warren. He tweeted, “Elizabeth Warren set to introduce the Wrecking American Prosperity Under Marxism, or WAMPUM Act, wherein she gives everything away for free.” For that, he was suspended for “violating our rules against hateful conduct.” It would have been more honest to say that Twitter’s too dumb to understand what he meant.

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Drag Queen Events Targeting Children Canceled at Licking and Delaware County Libraries

In the past 3 weeks, two drag queen events at Ohio public libraries for children have been canceled. The events, which were designed to teach children how to become drag queens, were canceled after community activists, pastors, and elected officials spoke out for common sense.

Speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives, Larry Householder led the way, sending a strong letter to the Licking County Public Library.

“When I was first informed our public libraries were being used to teach teenage boys how to become drag queens, I thought it was a joke,” Householder wrote. “But the joke is apparently on the taxpayers, who fund our libraries. This is a stunningly bizarre breach of the public trust. And it must stop.”

“Speaker Householder said what every Ohioan knows is true in their heart – drag queen training events have no place at our public libraries,” said Aaron Baer, President of Citizens for Community Values. “We need to let children be children, and not try to sexualize them. You don’t need to be a Bible-believing Christian to recognize that “Drag Queen Story Hours” are not something our taxpayer dollars should be promoting to kids.”

Since speaking out for our children, the attacks against Speaker Householder’s courageous stand have mounted. We need to support and thank him for standing up for our children and taxpayer dollars!

Via email

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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