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.
May First Things potpourri
Political Trash Talk, 5/3/16
Indiana’s GOP voters (or people impersonating GOP voters; we don’t register by party) have given Donald Trump their nod, according to the AP. Or have given the GOP establishment the One Finger Salute. Or both. Or something.
Should I change my byline from “‘Intellectualoid.’ Because ‘dilletante’ was already taken” to “Liveblogging America’s Suicide Since 2010”?
Donald Trump says Ted Cruz’s father met with Lee Harvey Oswald. I say Donald Trump sourced those Aztec protesters at Costa Mesa through rentacrowd.com.
You know how some people think Congress is full of crooks and liars except for their own Congressman? I’m not like that.
I make no exception for Todd Rokita.
An astringent to wash away some of the slime from my strategic vote in the GOP Presidential Primary (which still had all the dropouts still on the ballot, by the way) was getting to vote for WhatsHisName, Rokita’s opponent.
One of the analogies in play this year asks whether Donald Trump is Benito Mussolini or Silvio Berlusconi. If Andrew Sullivan, returned to writing at New York Magazine, doesn’t think the former, then either he’s forgotten how to write or I’ve forgotten how to read.
His is a major piece of some length, skirting Godwin’s Law without technically crossing the line.
We are, fascism analogies aside, in political terra incognita. I’m making no bets except that the story doesn’t end well.
Well, I may bet on a subsistence farm.
All of this would be amusing if the USA wasn’t sliding into the twilight of what many people call “modernity” — which is code for the techno-industrial hyper-complexity we’ve been enjoying lately as a species. We have yet to comprehend the diminishing returns of heaping more complexity on what is already too complex. Exhibit A for most of the common folk must be the Affordable Care Act (also signed by “O” in 2010). Whereas the shrewd stylings of Dodd-Frank surely mystify the public, most full-functioning adults understand what it means when their health insurance premiums go up by 20 percent and the new deductible makes it unthinkable to even consider going to the emergency room.
(James Howard Kunstler, Send Out the Clowns)
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“In learning as in traveling and, of course, in lovemaking, all the charm lies in not coming too quickly to the point, but in meandering around for a while.” (Eva Brann)
