- Condi for Veep – NOT!
- Status Envy – Plausible Charge
PenceIndiana National Guard for Governor!- Do “values” determine social practice or, roughly, vice-versa?
- Religious freedom, Germany versus U.S.
Peggy Noonan’s comments about her ability to life the cloud of ennuia over this election notwithstanding, I predict that Romney will not choose Condoleezza Rice as his running mate. She has announced her “pro-choice” sympathies, and “she has the unusual distinction of being distrusted and disliked by many neoconservatives, most realists, and all non-interventionists in almost equal measure” on, of all things, her foreign policy.
If I fail on that one, I predict that the choice will offend enough Republicans – by her positions, not her race or gender – that Romney will lose.
WSJ’s James Taranto regularly lampoons Paul Krugman at crosstown rival NYT. Taking the lead paragraph of this story as his opening, former Enron adviser (Taranto’s favorite barb) Paul Krugman opines that it “pretty much sums up the attitude of America’s wealthy elite.”
Taranto fires back on behalf of the world’s richest C+ Students:
So what’s eating Krugman? Status anxiety, that’s what. He is part of America’s intellectual elite. By the measure of his credentials–Ivy League professorship, Nobel Memorial Prize, New York Times column–he arguably is at its very pinnacle, the elitest of the elitists and, thanks to the Times, one of the most famous. He is also, as any observer can attest, a very self-important person.
It’s common for eggheads to nurture ressentiment against fat cats. Intellectuals are apt to hold a self-serving belief in cognitive meritocracy, in the idea that the brightest are also the best. They envy the rich because wealth is a concrete measure of status that is out of proportion to what the intellectual believes to be true merit. If they’re so rich, how come they’re not smart?
As a sinner who was an A student but is surpassed in net worth by many far worse students, I suspect Taranto’s onto something.
I saw my first television ad touting Mike Pence for Indiana Governor. Summarizing, Pence (whose face and grey hair lend him a gravitas he may or may not otherwise have earned) extolls, talking head style, the Indiana National Guard, says they get activated a lot, that he’s junketed (well, he didn’t use that term) to visit them repeatedly, that they’re very brave and that they’re volunteers.
The captions say we should elect him.
I’m having trouble seeing the connection between those two. Wake me up inauguration day.
David Brooks and Chris Hayes had an ostensible dust-up at the NYT about how and why today’s elite’s have screwed us up. Samuel Goldman at The American Conservative says Brooks
makes the mistake, characteristic of mainstream conservatives, of supposing that “values” determine the social practice. If we just had better values, this argument goes, society would function differently. Moral education thus becomes the crucial vector of reform.
This position is at odds with the Weberian tradition on which Hayes draws (and which is indebted to classical conservatism). On that view, values tend to reflect the structure of society. From the Weberian perspective, people’s behavior doesn’t change in a fundamental way because they are taught to be nice. It changes because the institutional and material conditions under which they live have been significantly altered.
Goldman’s conclusion is pretty inconclusive, but the point about “values” seemed notable.
A German judge’s decision, at least on his turf, to ban ritual circumcision has hearteningly produced a continuing, widespread outcry including British Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks concluding conditionally that “there are judges in Germany quite willing to say to religious Jews, in effect, ‘If you don’t like it, leave.'”
Stateside, we’ve got our own “leave if you don’t like” contingent, dumbing freedom of religion down to freedom of worship:
Jewish and Muslim religious practice is also under assault in the Netherlands, where a new law may outlaw methods of animal slaughter that comply with the obligations of kosher and halal. Religious liberty? What’s that? [Princeton] bioethicist Peter Singer sniffed that Jews and Muslims who don’t like the ban should just become vegetarians, writing that since the ban would not prohibit worship practices, no freedoms are being infringed.
(Emphasis added) Having squandered their credibility by pretending that every policy they don’t like is, e.g., a violation of God’s economic design for the world, the Religious Right may have served as the Boy Who Cried Wolf, making plausible the Obamaphile sneers that cries of “religious freedom!” against the employer mandate are just partisan politics.
Damn shame. They’re not partisan politics except insofar as vigorous defense against one’s political attacker gives inevitable aid and comfort to his political adversaries.
And why, by the way, is it plausible on the left to say stuff like “Jews can become vegetarians if their religion forbids them to eat meat slaughtered the government’s way” while it’s Misogyny in the First Degree to say “if you want ‘free’ contraceptives from your employer, get self-employed.”
Pregnancy is not a disease and contraception is not disease prevention. (For the record, I don’t think “E.D.” is a real disease, either.) That doubles the outrageousness of the employer mandate: first we pretend that contraception is health care; then we require even conscientiously opposed employers to provide it for free. No employer, religious or atheist, should be required to provide it for free.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 