Weaponizing

 

FYI, at the Substack, a slightly long read, no paywall.

Also, I would like it noted that the great Popehat (Ken White) wrote a Substack piece on the National Review's theory that it's illegal for Jack Smith to charge Trump with conspiracy to defraud the government that pretty much exactly dovetails with my Twitter thread piece, except that of course unlike me Popehat knows what he's talking about (where I've got nothing but logic).

Humility Lessons

Harold Lloyd in Hal Roach's Haunted Spooks, 1920, via.

David Brooks, 21 May

Aside from a few protesters and a depraved president, most of us have understood we need to suspend the old individualistic American creed. In the midst of a complex epidemiological disaster, to be anti-authority is to be ignorant. In the midst of a contagion, to act as if you are self-sufficient is just selfish.

David Brooks, 28 May

But it’s too easy to offload all blame on Trump. Trump’s problem is not only that he’s emotionally damaged; it is that he is unlettered. He has no literary, spiritual or historical resources to draw upon in a crisis.

David Brooks, 25 June

There are five gigantic changes happening in America right now. The first is that we are losing the fight against Covid-19. Our behavior doesn’t have anything to do with the reality around us. We just got tired so we’re giving up.

David Brooks, 3 July ("The National Humiliation We Need")

It wasn’t Trump who went out to bars in Tempe, 

Austin and Los Angeles in June. 

It wasn’t Trump who put on hospital gowns 

and told the American people you could suspend 

the lockdown if your cause was just. Once 

you told people they could suspend the lockdown 

for one thing, they were going to suspend it for others.

Does anybody know what that is about the hospital gowns? It's in the position where Brooks would normally put a bothsides antinomy, so I suppose to counterbalance the Republican individualist bargoers he's referring to some group of Social Justice Warriors going out undistanced, but why would they be wearing hospital gowns, especially when PPE supplies could still be precarious? Dr. Google is baffled; he finds some Wisconsin family planning advocates in hospital gowns picketing Scott Walker in 2015 over abortion law, and a bunch of Darrel Issa's San Diego constituents in hospital gowns in 2017 protesting Issa's vote against Obamacare, but in 2020 it's just nurses protesting the lack of PPE, and they obviously couldn't have been wearing gowns because they couldn't spare any.

If you want to feel some people have a worse grasp on this than you, ask a libertarian

Cheerful libertarian. Via David Brin.

Libertortionist economist Tyler Cowen wrote his own not-so-short Shorter for a piece at Bloomberg arguing for a silver lining to the Covid-19 cloud: it may destroy us all, but at least it will definitely destroy that noxious progressive left, forcing all its adherents, if any of them survive, to realize that Dr. Cowen was right all along:

— The egalitarianism of the progressive left ... will seem like a faint memory. Elites are most likely to support wealth redistribution when they feel comfortable themselves, and indeed well-off coastal elites in California and the Northeast are a backbone of the progressive movement. But when these people feel threatened in their lives or occupations, or when the futures of their children suddenly seem less secure, redistribution will not be such a compelling ideal…

I'm not interested in arguing that his ghoulish prediction is wrong, beyond noting that it's self-evidently silly, like people in some French town in 1348 wondering whether the Black Death would bring people to reject religion or cling more tightly to it (it clearly helped to bring on both, the secularization of the Renaissance and the theocracy of the Inquisition, along with a third option nobody foresaw, the creation of the new religion we call Protestantism).

But I would like to give some serious attention to the undeclared assumption that there is some crucial overlap between some or all (depending on which sentence you look at) of the members of the undefined class of "the progressive left", and some of the members of the undefined class of "elites" who are frequently well-off and frequently live in California or "the Northeast", which begs so many questions it ought to be arrested for vagrancy.

The Third Dimension

White mochi with macha filling, via Uncut Recipes.

So Jordan was wondering over in the comments how David Brooks might have reacted to the Clinton impeachment 20 years ago, and I found something kind of—unsurprising might be the right word, from David Nyhan writing for the Boston Globe in January 1999, who watched a Brooks appearance on PBS looking back at the failure of the Senate trial, and, spoiler, no, he didn't talk about how Gingrich's House ought to have been working on infrastructure bills instead:

"This is a Great Lost Cause," he enthused of the Republican drive to snuff out the Clinton presidency. "We fought for truth, for justice," he said. That notion was novel to me. This whole thing has looked like a down-and-dirty political ambush from the word go, to me and to most Americans. I could never buy the William Bennett Moral Crusade; I always suspected that was a book-tour con.

But Brooks found what he gamely phrased "a kernel of romance" for Republicans in this yearlong dive into the cesspool of semen-stained dresses, cigars in the wrong places, sneaky tapes of a ditzy young intern by a repulsive Republican operative (can anyone defend the taxpayers still paying $90,000 a year to Linda Tripp for her no-show Pentagon job?), and the greasy pawing-over of tapes, transcripts, appointment logs, Secret Service records, and other detritus of the 60,000-page House impeachment probe.

Brooks looked ahead to the Republican National Convention of 2000 and through the mist of the future, saw Henry Hyde, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, being summoned to the podium to accept the plaudits of a grateful party, with the crowd roaring for Hyde and his fellow impeachers: "They stood for principles against the polls."

It strikes me that there's more to this than simple hypocrisy, a simple double standard for Republicans vs. Democrats; or maybe I should say it's a motivated double standard.

Post-Libertarians Shopping For Ideas

Hey la hey la, my Brooksy's back ("A New Center Being Born")!

Americans have lost faith in the big institutions of society. Many fly off to extremes, to the Donald Trump right or the Bernie Sanders left. Most of the rest of us feel adrift, gloomy and politically homeless.

But people figure it out. New ideas emerge. Old ideas are put together in new ways. Today, I offer you just one example — the Niskanen Center, which has become one of the most creative think tanks in America today.

I feel less politically homeless than any time I can remember, in a wildly quarrelsome but furiously loyal Democratic party—like an Italian or Jewish or Chinese family, full of drama and hot rages and sloppy kisses, not like an Anglo one—where there's suddenly room for all my contradictory priorities to be entertained, if not necessarily carried through. But anyway...

White House Fool Report: Down to the wire

Eastern gray squirrel. Image via Chris Vaisvil.

I need you to make a phone call

Inbox

x

Elizabeth Warren info@elizabethwarren.com via proofsender1.gc.cuny.edu	12:59 PM (23 hours ago)

David, We have one last chance to stop Fast Track on trade – right now! The House has scheduled a vote for Friday, and dozens of members of Congress are still undecided (or undeclared) about which way they will vote. Will you take a minute right now to call your representative’s office and tell him or her to vote NO on Fast Track?

You need me to make a phone call? Honestly, if I'm doing it, I'm not doing it for you. I hope this great American progressive is not slowly turning into Alan Grayson.

Intolerance

Update: Amazingly, Yusor Abu-Salha recorded some audio for the StoryCorps project last spring, a conversation with her third grade teacher, and NPR broadcast it. It's pretty heartbreaking.

Yusor Abu-Salha at her wedding, dancing with her father, via news.com.au.

Is it inappropriate for me to say, as a person who does not believe in the existence of a God, that I unreservedly condemn the murders in Chapel Hill of Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salha, and Razan Abu-Salha, apparently by a person who calls himself an atheist? To say that such an act is incompatible with the principles of nonbelief as I understand them (probably more correctly classified as secular humanism), according to which our lives, from birth to death, are the closest thing we have to something sacred, and which call for

Cheap shots and Dinge-an-sich

$34K puts you in the worldwide one percent. Image via Bossip.

I meant to offer a cogent critique of the WSJ op-ed by Charles Koch, but everybody else and in particular Steve M and NTodd already did, while I was getting blindsided by one minor detail early in the piece that was too bizarre for anybody more steady-minded than me to take the trouble to notice, where he was Kochsplaining collectivism:

Follow the money

Sergei Svetlitsky. No Police State Campaign. Kiyiv, 2011.

Well, that explains something.

Really interesting: NSA Internet Spying Sparks Race to Create Offshore Havens for Data Privacy http://t.co/GrWBXMVaDN
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 29, 2013

I'm that idiot Obot who can't understand why he's supposed to feel terrorized by the revelations of NSA collecting data on the communications of American citizens, I haven't been [jump]

It's not about contraception (addendum)

Matter of fact, you know that transportation bill into which the Roy Blunt not-about-contraception legislation is to be folded as an amendment? It has another remarkable provision that

would strip several thousand workers within the rail-industry of their federal minimum-wage and overtime protections, potentially making low-wage jobs pay even less.

 [jump]