Poking the Bear
Many sober voices warned that an expansion of NATO to Russia’s border would poke the Bear, leading to an inevitable war. As long ago as 1998, following the U.S. decision to expand NATO eastwards, George Kennan said the following to Thomas Friedman:
I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.
Patrick Deneen. (Link may be inaccurate; I don’t think it was on Substack when I read it.)
Unless we’re prepared to drop our Monroe Doctrine, we ought to be able to understand Russia’s prickliness about Ukraine’s loving glances at the West and the West sidling up to Russia’s “near abroad.”
Spencer Cox
If you had asked me last week to handicap Utah Gov. Spencer Cox’s chances of winning the 2028 Republican presidential primary, I’d have said 1 percent. But after watching him demonstrate impressive moral leadership in calling on Americans to unite after Charlie Kirk’s murder, I’ve changed my mind. It’s zero percent.
The governor is a good man in a party that’s led by hideous people and backed by voters who consider being a hideous person a political virtue …
Catoggio continues, pivoting to an important distinction I hadn’t made and that few others seem to have made, either:
Cancel culture, properly understood, is an attempt to bully institutions like businesses into enforcing one faction’s cultural preferences in the absence of moral consensus around those preferences. It doesn’t involve subjects about which we’re all in broad moral agreement, like whether pedophilia should be a crime. It involves subjects about which we disagree, like whether trans women are women. As Thomas Chatterton Williams put it in The Atlantic, “Cancel culture is more fundamentally about solidifying norms that haven’t yet been established.”
That seems like a very sensible way to distinguish “cancellation” of those who celebrate Kirk’s murder from cancellation of those who pointed out that Kirk was no saint (e.g., me, humanizing him) or even demonized him (tastelessly, given the timing).
Is this possible, circular-firing-squad style?
Vacationing in Michigan, I’m struck by all the Marijuana stores. People have spent a lot of money to build or remodel stylish stores in densities that boggle the mind (at least along major roads).
I hate it. So I was heartened by the account of a native Michigander who tells me that competition is so fierce that prices have dropped 91%. That’s one of those facts that’s too good to check. I hope every last one of them is driven out of business by every last one of them.
I’ll spare you catching up on commentary
I’ve been wading through a backlog of reading as my vacation permits. A lot of it, from guttersnipes to established journalists at major publications, comes down to arguing that the other guys are more prone to lethal political violence.
I have concluded (actually, had concluded before Charlie Kirk’s murder) that lethal political violence is bad. I’ve also concluded that the argument about which side is guiltier of it is stupid and likely to be forever inconclusive.
You’re welcome.
Loyalty over competence
Word on the street is that the attorney general is a moron.
Could be. I’m open to the possibility.
Accusing the head of the Justice Department of being an idiot would seem like a lazy smear during any other administration, but Pam Bondi wasn’t selected for her legal acumen. She was picked for the same reason that Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth were, because the president wants the most dangerous arms of the federal government led by people whom he knows will choose him over the law.
When you select for loyalty instead of competence in staffing your government, you’re guaranteeing yourself a higher than usual quotient of morons ….
[Bondi’s moronic comments about “hate speech” and “discrimination” omitted.]
We’re left with two explanations, then. One is that Pam Bondi truly is a moron, irresponsibly BS-ing her way through questions on what can and can’t legally be said in the United States like a 1L who hasn’t done the reading. The other is that Pam Bondi knows what time it is.
In a government distinguished by extreme malevolence and extreme incompetence, it’s hard to tell.
…
Postliberals don’t worry about what Democrats will do when they return to power because they have the ability right now, or so they believe, to make sure that Democrats never do.
That’s the alternate explanation for Pam Bondi’s “hate speech” comments. She’s not stupid. She just “knows what time it is” and is proceeding accordingly.
Nick Catoggio, riffing off Pam Bondi’s unironic rant and declaration of war against “hate speech.”
Why Tyler Robinson shot Charlie Kirk
I submit that we don’t really know why, and that Nick Cattogio raced just a bit ahead of the evidence here:
Unless the indictment omitted something important, though, the motive was straightforward: Like practically every progressive in this country, he abhorred Kirk’s condemnations of transgenderism. That’s legibly leftist.
I find that very plausible, but I don’t think we’re to the point where the official allegations or known evidence compel it.
In point of fact, Catoggio and I, as inactive and retired lawyers respectively, probably should be saying “it’s not looking good for him, but Robinson is innocent until proven guilty.”
Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”
[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite social medium.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 