Trading Lenin for Bezos

Of Amazon’s decision to expand in New York and suburban D.C.:

I used to be suspicious of the phrase “costal elites,” but it seems more apt every day. And as those elites congregate with one another, and concentrate their wealth in ever-smaller enclaves, and increasingly see the 95% of the American landmass between the coasts as material (human and natural) to be exploited for their economic purposes, they also complain ever more vociferously that the American political system — with its “undemocratic” institutions like the Senate — prevent them from exercising even more complete domination over places they will never see and people they will never know.

Alan Jacobs

Remembers this when you hear our Lords and Masters blathering about them “winning the popular vote” or saying we deplorables have too much political power.

Don’t ever let them take away the Senate as currently constituted to reflect a federalist polity.

[I]n our last election, “Drain the swamp!” was the mantra of the Trump supporters. But did anyone really expect that the man we elected, a swamp creature if ever there were one, would be able to do this? And what, exactly, does one do with a drained swamp anyway? Probably sell it to developers who would build overpriced, poorly made, beige and boring condos, nicely accessorized with a strip mall complete with a Dunkin Donuts and a Vape shop. In other words, just a different kind of swamp. The Democrats prefer the fevered swamp of coercive governmental power, whereas the Republicans prefer the fetid swamp of corporate greed. So all we have really done is trade Lenin for Bezos.

Larry Chapp via Rod Dreher.

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What’s not to like?

What’s not to like? Federalism vindicated and subsidiarity as national policy. Pretty soon, we might have a full-blown modus vivendi.

(Moi, hier)

The morning wasn’t over before I was thinking about what’s not to like: corporate power possibly becoming even more efficacious.

It is now routine for cities and states to bid against each other to attract corporate headquarters. It is becoming routine for hypocritical corporations and politicians to boycott states that exhibit some residue of sanity in their laws — you know, hypocrites like Apple (most of its manufacturing in China, which makes North Carolina look like the beatific vision), Paypal (business in countries where sodomy is a felony and the law is enforced) and Andrew Cuomo (boycotts North Carolina, visits Cuba).

I fear such corporate grandstanders, bullies and thieves might be even further emboldened by localist devolution, but then I’m not seeing the feds doing anything to stop them anyway.

On balance, it still seems like a good idea, but there is something on the other side of the balance beam.

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Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

(David Foster Wallace via Jason Segedy, Why I’m Leaving Twitter Behind.)

By modernity, I mean the project to create social orders that would make it possible for each person living in such orders “to have no story except the story they choose when they have no story.”

Stanley Hauerwas, Wilderness Wanderings

Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving. Or, if you prefer, those micro.blog items also appear now at microblog.intellectualoid.com.

Reconsidering

Young people are showing a strange attraction to socialism, as are many Christians who might have been expected to sustain [Michael] Novak’s philosophy of virtuous capitalism. The U.S. lacks leaders who combine prudence and moral vision.

(Robert A. Sirico, What I Learned from Michael Novak)

Silicon Valley is a one-party state.

(Peter Thiel at Stanford University)

The same Christians who championed free markets and corporate license are finding the ethics of Christian orthodoxy trampled on by host of large corporations. This is no accident.

…

[A]n understanding of the political economy under which we live is the note of the liberal order most often missing from Christian writers’ understanding of it. It’s that engine that moves the world. Capitalism drive secularism; capitalism drives the “sexual revolution” and the abortion regime; capitalism drives white supremacy and imperialism; capitalism drives climate change. These things will not wither away spontaneously without capitalism to support them, but they certainly depend on it for life today.

(Jose Mena, Toward a Politics of the Common Good, in Fare Forward #8)

I will give Michael Novak “A” for sincerity and “A” for diligence. But if he were living, and could set aside pride of authorship — no, make that “consider the possibility that the public virtue that was to arise from private vice was ever a foolish hope” — I wonder if he would still agree with himself.

I would not welcome abandoning capitalism for socialism, but I reject the myopia that posits such a binary choice.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.