Then again...

Regaliceratops peterhewsi, a.k.a. "Hellboy", a triceratops cousin discovered some 15 years ago in southeastern Alberta, via Smithsonian.

I've been in something of a funk, I don't mind telling you, and I think it must have been Matt Taibbi, someone I am normally able to regard with cheerful disrespect, who got me into the political part of it, with a big report from Iowa in late July in which he suggested that the Democratic party was making the same mistakes the Republicans made in 2016, in fielding a bunch of candidates nobody could possibly want:

The top Democrats’ best arguments for office are that they are not each other. Harris is rising in part because she’s not Biden; Warren, because she isn’t Bernie. Bernie’s best argument is the disfavor of the hated Democratic establishment. The Democratic establishment chose Biden because he was the Plan B last time and the party apparently hasn’t come up with anything better since. Nothing says “We’re out of ideas” quite like pulling a pushing-eighty ex-vice president off the bench to lead the most important race in the party’s history.

But I think Matt may have some difficulty recognizing that women politicians are interesting above the neck, humans you can have conversations with, and that some of them are more attractive than others in the same way as men politicians are. In any case, it's not clear the Republican process was a mistake at all, since for one thing they ended up with a candidate who won, in his own peculiar way, and would have been ready to accomplish all the party's principal goals if he weren't so incompetent as a people manager and so unable to delay personal gratification.

In a way, the 2016 thing was a Darwinian experiment, gathering together a collection of political mutants and seeing which mutations were adaptive, an alternative to the conventional method of seeking the candidate who conforms most to the stereotype the choosers feel comfortable with, and what came up was as big a surprise as the triceratops must have been, back in the day, but it wasn't ineffective. While the Democrats' process may have been too sober. This time around, maybe we're performing a similar experiment, and with some real results, in the sense that some of our oddest candidates are the ones who have risen to the top: our oldest candidates in history, our first professional academic to run since Woodrow Wilson (and a more talented academic than he was by far). We've had candidates who became famous as tough-guy prosecutors like Harvey Dent—Thomas E. Dewey, Estes Kefauver, Rodolfo Giuliani, Christopher Christie, all losers in the presidential stakes—but how about prosecutors famous for opposing the death penalty and being black and putting the screws on a sanctimonious, reptilian Supreme Court nominee?

What I'm trying to say is, maybe our candidates are weird enough this time around to shake up the formula and make this unnatural selection process yield something.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Metablog

The moth Darwin predicted must exist, Xanthopan morganii praedicta, using its preternaturally long proboscis on the orchid Angraecum sesquipedale, pollinating it, via Encyclopedia Brittanica.

This is in reaction, I'm not sure it qualifies as response, to comments from Thornton on yesterday's Douthat post, in which he suggests I should stop arguing with Douthat (admittedly not a very dignified position), mentioning Marx, or being "ideological". I think. And some other stuff.

I'm so sick of idiots tied to masts: the First Amendment Liberals obsessed with Antifa, the Socialists obsessed with single payer health care (now that the economy makes it harder to obsess about nationalizing the banks), and the Conservatives convinced that they have to come up with some deeply principled reason for everything they do. Because trying stuff and seeing what works is just so... unprincipled.

Well, there you go. "What works" at accomplishing what? What do you want to get done? That's a question of principles, which don't necessarily have to be based on a big philosophical system. I want cops to stop killing black people, and I want the government to make sure everybody in the US gets good medical care as is done without too much fuss in other countries, because duh, or because I'm a Rawlsian, or because I'm an unbelieving Jew, or whatever, or because I picked a goddamned side from my Democrat parents. But the other side won't let me, for reasons I consider specious and unprincipled indeed, and on the basis of arguments made in what I call "bad faith". That's my problem, Republicans, Not being tied to a mast, though I understand how one gets annoyed with the one-issue hobbyhorse who won't even allow you to agree with him if you don't use the magic words.

Reality that politics is about identity and that ideology is just identity for educated elites from the majority race.

So really, he's a Marxian thinker himself, this being the fundamental point of the manuscripts Marx and Engels assembled in 1845-46 but couldn't find a publisher for, that came out at last in 1932 under the title The German Ideology. Blindness to the identity origins of one's ideology is where bad faith comes from.