Tag: imperialism

Thursday, 9/14/23

Culture

Building new kinds of stability

In a world where absolutely everything is unstable, from geopolitics to money and even the climate, some far-sighted younger millennials and Gen Z-ers are already pioneering a new model. Willow, a twenty-five-year-old writer based in rural Canada, married at twenty-three and is cocreating a domestic economy with her husband, Phil, one that is clearly an update of the premodern “productive household.” In addition to her writing projects, she does carpentry with Phil, roughly dividing the work into “first fix” (which requires more strength, and which Phil does) and finishing (which requires more patience and manual dexterity, at which Willow excels). Because they have a small baby, Willow cannot do much carpentry at present, but she is active in finding Phil clients and sometimes apprentices. Willow also tends a small farm on her and Phil’s property.

From an industrial-feminist perspective, Willow’s approach is unacceptably in thrall to patriarchy: She married young, views childcare as largely her domain, and is not the main money earner. Yet Willow is sincerely pursuing her interests as an embodied woman, in her relational context, rather than as an atomized, abstract “human” in an inconveniently female body.

Mary Harrington, Is There Hope for Marriage?

Thought about poetry

Free verse was all the rage at the time, with the Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg also experimenting with the same pharmaceuticals and literary devices. Personally, I remain uncertain about the value of these creative detours. Poetry is meant to be the most distilled way to communicate. Does anyone think Ginsberg and the other Beats were able to distill their thought, or even put their fingers on it? To me, those fellows slowed thought down.

Constraints in poetry do a number of things. They discipline the writer—no small thing. They help the reader, and also, the rememberer. 

It is hard to memorize chunks of free verse, just as it is hard to remember large chunks of prose. There is a reason that almost nobody can say, “Do you know my favorite paragraph from my favorite novel?”—and then recite it.

Douglas Murray

Those grimy white cliffs

Chaplins Restaurant and Carvery in Dover, despite all the visible unhappiness is a happy place. Everyone that came in knew everyone else, including lying Jon, and understood them. They knew where they were coming from and what they were going through.

Because England, even the “worst” parts, still has a real community built around a shared history and culture. Even if it sometimes gets turned into tourism board silliness, it very much matters.

That’s essential, and at a deep level Wall Street me didn’t understand. The English know who they are, and are ok with it.

Chris Arnade, Walking England’s Coast Part 1: From Dover to New Romney

Confusing comfort for civilization

The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilisation.

Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, British statesman, Conservative politician, writer, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, via Life on Dover Beach

AI in medicine

AI without the ballast of intuition represents the tyranny of pure analysis. Unleashed, and without intuition to give it a more profound understanding of humanity, AI stands ready to extend the power of reductive and often dangerously misleading concepts.

Ronald W. Dworkin, Paging Dr. Bot

Subscribing to flatness

Most consumers don’t know that by using internet-based (or -generated) platforms—by buying from Amazon, by staying in an Airbnb, by ordering on Grubhub, by friending people on Facebook—that they are subscribing to a life of flatness, one that can lead directly into certain politics. But they are. Seduced by convenience, we end up paying for the flattening of our own lives. It is not an accident that progressive ideas spread faster on the internet. The internet is a car that runs on flatness; progressive politics—unlike either conservatism or liberalism—are flatness.

Alana Newhouse, Everything Is Broken

Gut-punch

There’s a very short and very brutal poem by the Scottish poet Hollie McNish, written in 2019 and titled “Conversation with an archaeologist”:

he said they’d found a brothel
on the dig he did last night
I asked him how they know
he sighed:
a pit of babies’ bones
a pit of newborn babies’ bones was how to spot a brothel

“It’s true, you know,” said the writer and lawyer Helen Dale when we had lunch in London last year and I mentioned this poem, which I chose as one of the epigraphs to my book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. Helen was a classicist before she was a lawyer, and as a younger woman she had taken part in archaeological excavations of ancient Roman sites. “First you find the erotic statuary,” she went on, “and then you dig a bit more and you find the male infant skeletons.” Male, of course, because the males were of no use to the keepers of Roman brothels, whereas the female infants born to prostituted women were raised into prostitution themselves.

Louise Perry, We Are Repaganizing

Inflation and privilege

Both being retired persons now, my wife and I are taking our annual week in Traverse City, Michigan next week rather than June, as we used to. A friend who we’ll join up there gives a scouting report that our breakfast favorite (French Omelettes) is closed; they couldn’t afford to pay what staff needed to earn in a quite expensive city.

I peeked at the online menu of a surviving “fine dining” restaurant; this is going to be a fairly expensive vacation. That I can afford it is a privilege. That servers, cooks, busboys, dishwashers and such cannot means that my deliberately high level of tipping hasn’t been enough to make those jobs attractive.

Politics

Social imperialism

Austin Ruse of the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-FAM) sends out weekly missives detailing the machinations of activists at the UN to get abortion and LGBT-supporting language in treaties and formal documents of every kind; Marguerite Peeters described the phenomenon of how institutions were infiltrated and colonized in The Globalization of the Western Sexual Revolution (2012); sociologist Gabrielle Kuby did the same in The Global Sexual Revolution: Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom.

…

Nigerian human rights activist Obianuju Ekeocha described what the West has been perpetrating on Africa in her essential 2018 book Target Africa: Ideological Neo-Colonialism in the Twenty-First Century as well as the 2019 documentary Strings Attached. So-called humanitarian aid, she writes, nearly always comes with strings attached—contraceptives, demands for the legalization of abortion, perverse Western-style sex education, and the replacement of traditional African values with post-modern Western ones. The desperate need of many African countries for Western foreign aid is exploited to push for the imposition of a top-down sexual revolution.
 
…

But the Guardian would have us believe that a few Christian groups are imposing their views on unwilling African populations, and that this is also serving as a testing ground for laws in Hungary and American red states. The brazenness of this level of gaslighting is almost impressive—but it needs to be called out. The truth is that rich Western countries are pushing the LGBT agenda and abortion in developing countries, promising them cash in exchange for their souls—but you won’t read that in the mainstream press.

Jonathon Van Maren, The Left’s Colonial Mission (The European Conservative)

As someone said, if a third-world country asks for a bridge, China will build them a bridge; the US will force some aspect of the sexual revolution on them and only then build a bridge.

Who do you think wins more hearts?

Newly-conservative?

Our unabashed dictionary calls a conservative a liberal who’s been mugged:

  • “We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. Say it with me. DISMANTLE The Minneapolis Police Department. If you’re still disagreeing with that BASIC FACT, I’m not sure what to say to you,” – Shivanthi Sathanandan, Minnesota DFL’s Second Vice Chair, in June 2020.
  • “Look at my face. REMEMBER ME when you are thinking about supporting letting juveniles and young people out of custody to roam our streets instead of HOLDING THEM ACCOUNTABLE FOR THEIR ACTIONS,” – Sathanandan, this week, after being violently car-jacked and beaten bloody in front of her children in Minneapolis.

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

What if Biden bowed out?

More from Sullivan (see Newly-Conservative, above), begging Biden to bow out of POTUS24:

A new candidate would immediately shift the dynamic of the race. The Democrat would represent the future; and Trump the polarized past. A younger candidate would instantly reverse the age argument in the Democrats’ favor. The news cycles would be full of Dem debates, fights, campaigns and energy — and not dictated by the defensive torpor of a frail octogenarian, or the unending narrative of Trump against the corrupt elites.

…

Biden was elected as a means to check Trump; the logic of his presidency was always that the old man would get us back to normal; and that argument makes much more sense for a one-term presidency … there could be no worse legacy than handing the country back to the monster you rescued us from.

I agree. Trump’s secret weapon, maybe his margin of victory, is Biden’s manifest infirmity.

But any other Democrat is likely to be even more extreme on sexuality.

Superiority

Democrats who indulge in hubris are liable to assume and sometimes proclaim their innate superiority through their education or their modern morality. Republicans do it by exalting two particular types as superior: the businessman and the pious man.

Henry Olsen, The Three Deadly Sins of the Right (American Compass)

You’re not likely to get American Compass quotes here very often, but this seemed accurate and illuminating.

My problem with Theocracy

[I]n the Christian nation that Wilson and his allies want to bring about, there wouldn’t be much space for Christians like me to operate. He told the Washington Post that

while leaders would strive to ‘maximize religious liberty for everyone,’ Catholics are unlikely to feel welcome — ‘I think it has to be a pan-Protestant project,’ he said — nor would Christians who disagree with his stridently patriarchal social norms. … Asked to explain where liberal Christians fit into his theoretical Christian society, Wilson said they would be excluded from holding office, later noting similar prohibitions in early American Colonial settlements such as the Massachusetts Bay Colony. When it was pointed out that Puritans executed Boston Quakers, Wilson said he would not “defend” the hanging of Quakers, but then argued it was important to understand the context of the time.

It’s gonna be fun to watch these old boys and the Catholic integralists go at each other, if either side can tear themselves away from their keyboards long enough to find their way to the field of battle.

Rod Dreher. That neither Douglas Wilson nor the Catholic Integralists have in mind a world hospitable to Orthodoxy keeps me at arms’-length from them. If I cared to, I could probably impugn their ability to govern wisely even by their own lights.

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

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Monday, 8/1/22

Against the (Mono)Culture

The aim of a healthy farm will be to produce as many kinds of plants and animals as it sensibly can.

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

Feelingsball

If legitimate critiques of, say, Josh Hawley’s specific claims about wage stagnation or the WTO are met with emotional responses—“Okay, fine, but The People don’t feel that way, and oh by the way you’re basically a lobbyist for China”—there’s little point in engaging again. (The New York Times’ Jane Coaston recently called this vague and ever-changing use of the emotional trump card “Feelingsball,” after the Calvin and Hobbes schtick, which is pretty much just perfect.)

Scott Lincicome, Populist Indulgence Thwarts Serious Governing

Haunted by Tradition

The best movies, songs, musicals, and popular fiction of the period through the 1950s were created by people who were, like the early Modernists, haunted by tradition. The lyrics of a Cole Porter, the sense of drama of an Orson Welles, the rhetorical sensibility of an Edward R. Murrow were all sustained by the lingering presence of the tradition of high culture. Reminded of that tradition by such institutions as universities and museums, the proponents of popular culture paid certain, if modest, homage to the past.

Ken Meyers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes

The West and The Rest

The non-Wests see as Western what the West sees as universal. What Westerners herald as benign global integration, such as the proliferation of worldwide media, non-Westerners denounce as nefarious Western imperialism. To the extent that non-Westerners see the world as one, they see it as a threat. The arguments that some sort of universal civilization is emerging rest on one or more of three assumptions as to why this should be the case.

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

(mumble-mumble) maybe I oversold this complaint

Okay, since I may have said something snarky about media and government tap-dancing around Monkeypox, a partial retreat is in order: Should Monkeypox Be Considered an STD? Experts Debate. (H/T The Morning Dispatch).

Staying inland

Now that I know about shark-infested beaches, I have one more reason to stay inland. I don’t want some poor reporter to have to write the second paragraph of my obituary, “Mr. Keillor was eaten by a shark off Jones Beach on Tuesday while wading in a raspberry-colored swimsuit and wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat fringed with straw fronds. A memorial service will be held at a time to be announced later.”

“Memorial service” suggests that there was not enough of me left to put into a burial plot. The shark took the meaty parts and other sharks got some and turtles finished the job. What was left could be put in a tunafish can. I was a productive author for fifty years but in the future, if my name comes up in conversation, someone will say, “Wasn’t he the guy who was eaten by sharks?” So I renew my vow to avoid beaches.

Garrison Keillor

Dreher and Orbán

Damon Linker, as preface to interrogating Rod Dreher’s defense of Viktor Orbán, traces Rod’s public progression over the 20 years of their friendly acquaintance. Excerpt:

Rod’s timing ended up being slightly off. Though he had been making versions of this argument on his blog for years, the book-length statement of his position—The Benedict Option—was published in March 2017, two months into the Trump administration, at a moment when the religious right was in no mood at all to entertain stepping back from the political fray. Demoralized just a few years earlier, its hopes had been raised by the new president’s promise, despite his lack of personal piety or virtue, to fight ruthlessly for social conservatives and to push back just as ruthlessly against the left.

While consistently withholding support from Trump himself, Rod spent the next few years adjusting his political stance to a new political reality. Instead of practicing what he preached and turning inward, he focused more resolutely than ever on outrages committed by the left. Rod became convinced, not only that the Social Justice Warriors were wrong, as I often thought they were as well, but that they were hell bent on building a comprehensive political-legal-cultural-technological system in which they would actively persecute Christians and anyone else who resisted The Official Woke Teaching on Gender and Sexuality.

That vignette strikes me as true, and useful, as is (in a more humorous way), his characterization of Rod going to

Budapest, where Viktor Orbán was enacting an austere and intellectually rigorous style of right-wing populism—one that Rod found far more appealing than the trashy, downmarket version Trump was haplessly pursuing at home.

…

My own position on Orbán is somewhat different than the standard liberal-progressive line, which portrays him as having directly targeted and largely succeeded in destroying Hungarian democracy. I’m more inclined to see him as what he claims to be: a scourge of liberalism in the name of majoritarian democracy.

Yes, he’s been pretty heavy-handed with the media, giving his party somewhat of an edge in elections. But his constitutional adjustments and other reforms haven’t imposed electoral changes out of line with other democracies, and his party today wins roughly the same portion of the vote and from the same largely rural constituency as it did when it first gained power in 2010. In the country’s most recent election, this past April, election monitors didn’t take note of any systematic fraud. Hungarians are simply voting in favor of making Hungary an illiberal democracy.

Linker cites some recent Orbán remarks to conclude that he’s beyond the pale and that Rod should back away, rather trying repeadly the “What he meant to say was [insert some bowdlerized version].”

America lags more sensible countries again

Britain’s only gender-reassignment unit is to close following a damning report into its operations. The Tavistock clinic was accused of being too quick to rush children onto puberty blockers and of failing to explore its patients’ mental-health problems. Kids with gender dysphoria are to be sent to new regional centres, which will be required to have stronger links with mental-health services.

(The Economist) Lisa Selin Davis has more at Bari Weiss’s Substack.

Go thou and do likewise, America.

“The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can’t play; and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness ….” (G.K. Chesterton)

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Monday, 7/11/22

Culture, here and there

Universalism to the West, imperialism to the rest

Alone among civilizations the West has had a major and at times devastating impact on every other civilization. The relation between the power and culture of the West and the power and cultures of other civilizations is, as a result, the most pervasive characteristic of the world of civilizations. As the relative power of other civilizations increases, the appeal of Western culture fades and non-Western peoples have increasing confidence in and commitment to their indigenous cultures. The central problem in the relations between the West and the rest is, consequently, the discordance between the West’s—particularly America’s—efforts to promote a universal Western culture and its declining ability to do so. The collapse of communism exacerbated this discordance by reinforcing in the West the view that its ideology of democratic liberalism had triumphed globally and hence was universally valid. The West, and especially the United States, which has always been a missionary nation, believe that the non-Western peoples should commit themselves to the Western values of democracy, free markets, limited government, human rights, individualism, the rule of law, and should embody these values in their institutions. Minorities in other civilizations embrace and promote these values, but the dominant attitudes toward them in non-Western cultures range from widespread skepticism to intense opposition. What is universalism to the West is imperialism to the rest.

Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations (Kindle page 183)

Transnational capital and the progressive Left

This bears, and rewards, close reading:

Why would transnational capital be parrotting slogans drawn from a leftist framework which claims to be anti-capitalist? Why would the middle classes be further to the ‘left’ than the workers? If the left was what it claims to be – a bottom-up movement for popular justice – this would not be the case. If capitalism was what it is assumed to be – a rapacious, non-ideological engine of profit-maximisation – then this would not be the case either.

But what if both of them were something else? What if the ideology of the corporate world and the ideology of the ‘progressive’ left had not forged an inexplicable marriage of convenience, but had grown all along from the same rootstock? What if the left and global capitalism are, at base, the same thing: engines for destroying customary ways of living and replacing them with the new world of the Machine?

…

The post-modern left which has seized the heights of so much of Western culture is not some radical threat to the establishment: it is the establishment. Progressive leftism is market liberalism by other means. It enables the spread and growth of Machine society by launching an all-out war on any cultural norms that remain to us in the 2020s: norms which act as a brake on the spread of Machine values. The left and corporate capitalism now function like a pincer: one attacks the culture, deconstructing everything from history to ‘heteronormativity’ to national identities; the other moves in to monetise the resulting fragments.

Paul Kingsnorth, available at his Substack and now at Unherd (excerpted by Alan Jacobs).

Miscellany

Thinking outside a 50-year-old box

[T]he modern American anti-abortion movement that emerged by the late 1980s was an ecumenical joint with an evangelical id and a [narrow] sense of what it meant to be “pro-life.” In place of a broad societal vision, it had a highly specific legal goal: regulating the practice of abortion … Organizing, funding, and political activity all centered on this singular effort. Everything else was noise.

Thus, though American pro-life activists have had decades and plenty of encouragement to tackle the privations—poverty, poor housing options, and limited access to child care—that seem to precipitate many abortions, their attention has instead remained obdurately trained on regulating the practice of abortion itself …

Nevertheless, the triumphant post-Dobbs press releases had to say something, and most of them gestured at precisely the kind of legislation that the anti-abortion movement has adamantly ignored for the past 50 years …

A better tack: Rather than tee up an exhausting, decades-long legal battle over whether crisis pregnancy centers (the modern anti-abortion movement’s preferred delivery method for services, money, and goods for women in need) ought to receive state funds and under what conditions, agree that pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum care should all be free, and demand that the federal government make it so.

…

This would require veteran pro-lifers to take on a trifecta of onerous tasks: moving on from a narrow fixation on regulating the practice of abortion itself; taking up welfare as a cause just as worthy of political agitation as abortion; and overcoming a veritable addiction to liberal tears, indisputably the highest goal of American politics at this point in time, and which militates against human flourishing in every case. It’s time the pro-life movement chose life.

Elizabeth Bruenig.

I kinda like it.

Truth will out

In 1973, David Attenborough presented a BBC documentary that included an interview with one of the leading modern synthesists, Theodosius Dobzhansky. He was visibly distraught at the “non-Darwinian evolution” that some scientists were now proposing. “If this were so, evolution would have hardly any meaning, and would not be going anywhere in particular,” he said. “This is not simply a quibble among specialists. To a man looking for the meaning of his existence, evolution by natural selection makes sense.” Where once Christians had complained that Darwin’s theory made life meaningless, now Darwinists levelled the same complaint at scientists who contradicted Darwin.

Stephen Buranyi, Do we need a new theory of evolution? (emphasis added).

I’ve paid so little attention to supposed faith/science controversies in the last decade or more that this story kind of blindsided me. Suffice that any need for an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis is not an argument for young-earth creationism.

Meanwhile, the slip of the tongue — that natural selection fills an existential need for meaning in the lives of some scientists — was interesting and blindsided me only by its candor.

GID

I learned many women, especially lesbians, have experienced periods of wanting to be men in intense and visceral ways, ways that met the diagnostic criteria for GID or gender dysphoria, but were eventually really glad that they had instead made peace with themselves as one type or another of unconventional women.

…

I am grateful for the perspective transition has given me on how the medical-industrial complex fails women and girls in pain.

…

I understand why someone would feel transition saved their life. Do others understand that transition can also do profound harm?”

From Ryan T. Anderson, ‌When Harry Became Sally, Kindle pages 1203-31.

Saying such things today qualifies as "transphobia" and will get your book censored by our corporate overlords at Amazon. (See above on "Transnational capital" and Anthony Esolen, below.)

Politics

Envying the Brits

For an American liberal … the schadenfreude brought by [Boris] Johnson’s collapse is mixed with envy. We are watching a still-functioning democracy dispatch its bombastic populist leader because his amorality and narcissistic dishonesty were simply too much … Mired as I am in the demoralizing squalor of American politics, I’m jealous of the relative quaintness of the scandal that finally brought Johnson down: lying about someone else’s sexual misconduct! … Imagine having final straws!

Michelle Goldberg, The Delightful Implosion of Boris Johnson

Thinking outside the duopoly

I was reading in the New York Times this morning that the Democrats are looking at the four major planks of their new policy to see if they are going to have to take anything out when it comes to family benefits. They were looking at the child tax credit, paid medical leave, universal pre-K, and—I can’t remember the fourth one. All of the people they polled said, “Hey, we think universal pre-K is best.” And here I’m thinking, well, it doesn’t surprise me that the state thinks that’s the best way to handle the situation, because at the end of day, they want to directly control what the family looks like. They specifically say, we want everyone to be in the workforce.

I’m all for women working in the workforce. But if the family is the basic structure of society and of economic policy, then we want to be creating policy for the benefit of the family. Does the family benefit by us putting three-year-olds in school all day long and paying for it so mom can go out and work? That’s problematic because it doesn’t respect the nature of the family—not, as many people have said, like the child credit, which gives the family the opportunity to do what they think is best for their family with the funds they get. That might be daycare so mom can work. It might be so that mom or dad can stay home and be with the family.

Neither side respects the family. On the right, they only respect the corporation, and on the left, they only respect the state. And they’ll do whatever they can to squeeze the benefits out of us until there’s nothing left.

Alan Mickle, of the American Solidarity Party, which I’m pleased to learn is (at least by some measures) America’s fastest-growing third party.

Great Replacement Theory 101

The right wing version is that immigrants, especially immigrants of color, outbreed people who were born in the country, so that descendants of the former will “replace” descendants of the latter. This is supposed to be bad.

The left wing version is that immigrants, especially immigrants of color, trend more to the left than people who were born in the country, so that leftists will “replace” conservatives. This is supposed to be good.

Both versions of the theory are nuts.

As to the former version: If the country becomes browner in a few generations, so be it. People who are too selfish to have children deserve to be “replaced” by people who love them.

As to the latter version: Immigrants who are acquainted with the politics of the country are often quite conservative; they don’t want to lose what they’ve worked and suffered to attain. So if left-wingers think immigration will lead to the “replacement” of conservatives by liberals, they may have it backwards.

J Budziszewski

The fallacy of Boromir

When people justify their voting choice by its outcome, I always think of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien emphasizes repeatedly that we cannot make decisions based on the hoped-for result. We can only control the means. If we validate our choice of voting for someone that may not be a good person in the hopes that he or she will use his power to our advantage, we succumb to the fallacy of Boromir, who assumed he too would use the Ring of Power for good. Power cannot be controlled; it enslaves you. To act freely is to acknowledge your limits, to see the journey as a long road that includes dozens of future elections, and to fight against the temptation for power.

Jessica Hooten Wilson, What ‘The Lord of the Rings’ can teach us about U.S. politics, Christianity and power.

If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Potpourri 1/29/19

1

I’m disinclined, in January of 2019, to declare who I’m voting for in November 2020. In a saner age, I don’t think the question would even come up.

But we’re all politics, all the time now, and the uniquely detestable man in the White House tempts one to reveries.

I am affiliated with neither the Democrats nor, since 2005, with the Republicans. I’m assuming that Donald Trump will get the GOP nomination again if he wants it, so the record and positions of the Democrat nominee will become pretty important.

An orthodox progressive, but with a history of conservatism and a seemingly heartfelt and courageous insistence on religious liberty (this essay clearly was taking on, among others, Kamala Harris), provides one of the more attractive reveries — not for her progressivism, but for the leaven of religious toleration, too rare a political commodity on the Left these days:

We’ll see, if she becomes a real contender, what the Democrat Roger Stones can come up with to slime her.

2

Fifteen years have been spent in a fruitless search for a viable business model that will support the kind of journalism the country expects — and, no, conservatives, I’m not talking about “the liberal media.” I’m talking about media organizations that pour resources into informing the public about the everyday, noncontroversial stuff that makes up the bulk of media content.

The journalism business isn’t being destroyed because its liberal skew alienated readers. The problem isn’t getting readers; the problem is monetizing them as they move online. Facebook and Google and Monster and Craigslist have hoovered up the advertising dollars that used to pay for reporting … The main competition for ad dollars now comes from massive tech companies that don’t produce content at all.

Megan McArdle.

3

Roger Stone is not everybody’s cup of antifreeze. I don’t want to go too tweet-mean on the guy, but let’s face it, physically he does look a little like Zippy-the-Pinhead — if, say, Zippy had made it to community college and learned how to manage a four-in-hand necktie.

James Howard Kunstler.

4

My country has seamlessly transitioned from British colony to US military/intelligence asset without ever once raising its head toward anything resembling national sovereignty except once briefly in the mid-seventies, which saw a CIA/MI6 coup oust our elected leadership here …

Sovereignty is such an alien concept in a collective reality tunnel that has been shaped by propaganda to view imperialism, American exceptionalism and nonstop interventionism as perfectly normal that we now have the American establishment simultaneously (A) shrieking about Russian clickbait on Facebook as an unforgivable act of war, and (B) using crushing sanctions, CIA covert ops, and an active campaign to delegitimize a nation’s leadership in order to topple an entire government. This wild discrepancy is justified with the unquestioned assumption that the US has something called “moral authority” in the world, while Russia and Venezuela lack moral authority, despite the US being responsible for innumerable acts of butchery and destruction which are grossly immoral by any metric.

Australian Caitlyn Johnstone

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