Author: readerjohn
I am a retired lawyer and an Orthodox Christian, living in a collapsing civilization, the modern West.
There are things I'll miss when it's gone. There are others I won't. I tend to write about both.
A Clash of Huntingtons
Sunday reflections
More Abraham, Less Jonah
Make me more like Abraham, less like Jonah. This I pray Thee, O Lord.
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There is no epistemological Switzerland. (Via Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 134)
NRO guys on our POTUS
There is a riddle before us. Back in that simpler time, i.e., the GOP primaries, many people assured me that conservatives could trust Donald Trump because Senator Jeff Sessions trusted him. With varying degrees of rage, snark, and dudgeon (which I think is the official law firm of Hogwarts), these people would say to me: “Do you think Jeff Sessions isn’t a real conservative?”
On at least one occasion, I recall a finger being poked in my chest to fortify the point in ways reason could not.
My response isn’t really relevant (but it was something along the lines of “Sure, but even conservatives make mistakes”). What I find fascinating, however, is how the transitive property now runs the other way. A year ago, I was supposed to trust Trump because Sessions trusted Trump. Now, I’m supposed to distrust Sessions because Trump distrusts Sessions. Okay, then.
…
While it’s certainly true that there are people sufficiently enthralled with Trump to open themselves up to the charge of being cultists, I don’t think the blind worship of “Cult 45” explains as much as it once did. I mean, sure, if you’re still convinced that everything Trump has done has been brilliant and farsighted, if you can read the president’s New York Times interview and push back from the table with the deep satisfaction that once again the master has out-thought his foes, if you still think his “I alone can fix it!” vow was anything other than the kind of bluster that traditionally leaves you with cider in your ear, then you might as well lead your herd of 50 bulls down to Trump Tower and sacrifice them to your Latter Day Baal.
Trump isn’t the engine, he’s the hood ornament for a certain movement that now feels liberated from traditional rules of decent behavior. Trump allows us to indulge our id and feel righteous while doing it. We grew up believing that decent behavior made you a decent person — but then we realized that breaking the rules not only makes victory easier, it’s more fun than having to struggle with the moral qualms of using moral means to achieve moral ends. So we’ve constructed a backwards logic to absolve ourselves of moral responsibility.
The first premise: The other side, which wants bad things, cheats and lies and acts in egregious ways.
The second premise: It requires cheating to defeat them.
The third premise: If they are not defeated, the country will be destroyed.
Conclusion: It is morally required to cheat and lie and act in egregious ways.
Americans and Republicans, remember: You asked for this. Given the choice between a dozen solid conservatives and one Clinton-supporting con artist and game-show host, you chose the con artist. You chose him freely. Nobody made you do it.
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There is no epistemological Switzerland. (Via Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 134)
Potpourri 7/22/17
Punishing the truth
How to humiliate the GOP
Daniel Henninger sticks it in and twists it:
Like pop-up dolls, across the length of Barack Obama’s presidency, Republicans voted to “repeal” the law that bears his name—ObamaCare. He laughed at them then, and he’s laughing now. No repeal and no replace. They can’t even do repeal and punt.
… Schadenfreude can’t get much better than watching the Republican Party self-humiliate with an abject inability to win while controlling the House, Senate and White House.
How better to humiliate today’s GOP, fully holding Congress and the Presidency, than “Barack Obama is still laughing at you”?
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There is no epistemological Switzerland. (Via Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 134)
Jeff Sessions
Asset forfeiture is a constitutionally questionable practice whereby property — often cash — is taken from citizens by police agencies who suspect, or at least say they suspect, that the property may have been come by illegally, often through the drug trade. Cash seized through asset forfeiture can be used by police departments, as can cash generated through the sales of seized property such as vehicles. The fact that police personnel can materially benefit from forfeiture proceedings creates a conflict of interest that would render forfeiture problematic even if it were used with discretion in accordance with the highest degree of procedural protections for the rights of the accused.
It isn’t.
(The Editors of National Review, Jeff Sessions Should Drop His Expansion of Civil Asset Forfeiture.
Oh dear! Oh dear! What shall I do?! He’s injecting steroids into asset forfeiture, but at the same time, The Mad Twitter King is trying to throw him under the bus!
I don’t see how Jeff Sessions has any choice now but to resign. He has lost the confidence of the president. And I think Sessions will one day very soon be grateful that he got out of this Dumpster fire of an administration before it all went to hell.
… Trump is also crazy. Who does that to their Attorney General — and for such a petty reason? Trump has no judgment, only appetite. There is no stability in this administration. No reason to trust anything the president says, even if you think he’s on your side.
… When it suits Trump’s perceived interests to betray social and religious conservatives, I believe he will. I don’t know if the day will ever come in which I concede that even Hillary would have been better than this guy, but I think we are moving closer to it.
(Rod Dreher, Donald Trump, Treacherous Loon)
My takeaway from the NYT interview, in which he mows down Sessions–Sessions!–is that Putin remains the only ally Trump has never betrayed.
— Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) July 20, 2017
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“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)
