Public affairs
Vice and virtue redux
I can’t get this out of my head as pundits keep explaining what’s wrong with every approach to dealing with Donald Trump’s damnable lies and crimes: A fundamental reality of human existence is that vice often leaves virtue with few good options. Evil men can attach catastrophic risks to virtually any course of action, however admirable. (David French)
If hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, what do you call vice so shameless that it doesn’t even pretend to be virtuous?
(Asking for a friend whose initials are USA)
On a related note:
- Of impeachment #2, from January 6, Mitch McConnell says we can’t impeach a President who’s no longer in office but there’s always the legal system.
- Four indictments into the legal system, Republicans scream that “the Democrats are criminalizing politics.”
There’s just no pleasing utterly unprincipled power-seekers.
The end of the uneasy anti-Roe coalition
The [Supreme] Court’s landmark [Dobbs] decision brought an end to that uneasy anti-Roe coalition, revealing the amalgamation for what it was: a group of fellow travelers whose interests aligned to a point, but who had their own, separate visions for what would replace the status quo. Was overturning Roe and returning the abortion issue to the states the end goal, as many Federalist Society types saw it? Was Alito’s Dobbs decision the first step toward a nationwide ban? Is there a middle ground that’s both morally acceptable to the pro-life movement and electorally popular?
Scientism
If the conveyor belt of science dictating politics has fallen out of favor in administrative law and is even more obviously inapplicable to politics in general, why are so many politicians returning to its rhetoric? The reason is that, even if it is an intellectually bankrupt tradition, it remains politically useful. Scientism is an attempt to shut down political debates. It shifts the discussion from questions of value, which are accessible to all, to questions of facts which are in the domain of the experts, thus shifting the terrain of the debate. It also hampers the evolution of expert consensus, because when science becomes a front for politics, dissenting from the party lines becomes harder even for experts. And it allows progressives to portray their opponents as ignorant. That has been a common trope of progressive politics: conservatives are the stupid party.
John O. McGinnis, **Blinded by Scientism
From a public point of view, the specialist system is a failure because, though everything is done by an expert, very little is done well.
Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America
Gun-in-cheek
I am not anti-gun. I’m pro-knife. Consider the merits of the knife. In the first place, you have to catch up with someone in order to stab him. A general substitution of knives for guns would promote physical fitness. We’d turn into a whole nation of great runners. Plus, knives don’t ricochet. And people are seldom killed while cleaning their knives.
Molly Ivins, via the Writer’s Almanac
Profiles in something-or-other
Brian Kemp still has balls
Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, said Thursday he would not call a special session of the legislature to investigate Willis, despite requests from some GOP lawmakers in the state. “Up to this point, I have not seen any evidence that DA Willis’ actions or lack thereof warrant action by the prosecuting attorney oversight commission,” Kemp told reporters.
Antinomy or telos?
Consensus is the opposite of leadership.
Mike Pence at the first GOP Presidential debate for the 2024 election.
I thought that was wrong in one sense when I first read it, justifying Pence’s position favoring national abortion legislation. For more than 40 years, I said that reversing Roe would return the abortion issue to the states. Now Mike Pence was boasting that it was a mark of his awesome leadership to over-promise dubiously-constitutional legislation on abortion.
My conviction has grown since then that it’s sheer idiocy, faux high rhetoric. Consensus is not the opposite of leadership; it is a goal of leadership.
Shorts
American conservatism
American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader.
Thought-provoking
The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.
Epic Blurb
Alan Jacobs finds Pablo Neruda’s book blurb the greatest ever:
Anyone who doesn’t read Cortázar is doomed. Not to read him is a serious invisible disease which in time can have terrible consequences. Something similar to a man who has never tasted peaches. He would quietly become sadder, noticeably paler and, probably, little by little, he would lose his hair. I don’t want those things to happen to me, and so I greedily devour all the fabrications, myths, contradictions, and mortal games of the great Julio Cortázar.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 