Fire Hydrant of Freedom

Walgreens unit with unsustainable shoplifting among other crimes issues in Boston cajoled by Usual Suspects to remain open despite being unsafe and unprofitable:

https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/01/woketivists-protest-to-try-and-force-walgreens-into-keeping-stores-in-high-crime-parts-of-boston-open/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=woketivists-protest-to-try-and-force-walgreens-into-keeping-stores-in-high-crime-parts-of-boston-open

https://share.icloud.com/photos/023QjMSRHZwnn4Wad_11qWbZg

Lookie here, left wing org sponsors conferences, symposia, and such judges are brought to to “learn” about environmental issues:

https://the-pipeline.org/indoctrinating-judges-on-climate-change/?fbclid=IwAR3vhO0uZw-YrDnY7qUlM0N_Pr3quXunaeqgM3S0oN47kPTOK6YMis5JyMU

Lipson argues the Republican nomination is over, and hints at Trump’s strategy moving forward:


How Trump captured his party

DeSantis’s loss in Iowa doomed him. Haley must win New Hampshire and South Carolina to survive

January 18, 2024 | 3:14 pm

Vintage news outlets, with lots of time to kill and space to fill, are desperately trying to say the Republican primary contest is still open. It’s not.

Ron DeSantis’s campaign is already filled with embalming fluid. True, he finished second in Iowa, but that was his most favorable terrain, and he failed to win outright. DeSantis’s basic strategy was to draw away Trump voters by taking strong, socially conservative positions, such as banning abortions after six weeks in Florida. It didn’t convince primary voters. That spells the end for DeSantis nationally because it failed in a state where he spent a lot of time and money and where Republicans are very conservative. To invert the song, “New York, New York,” if he can’t make it there, he can’t make it anywhere.

DeSantis didn’t win a single one of the state’s 100 counties. Trump won ninety-nine, and Nikki Haley captured the remaining one by a single vote. DeSantis claims “he punched his ticket out of Iowa.” He was punched, all right. In the face.

He knows he can’t do well in New Hampshire, where the Republican base is less conservative and Independents can vote in the primary. So he decided to concentrate on the much more conservative state of South Carolina, the home of former governor Nikki Haley. If DeSantis finishes ahead of her there, he would humiliate Haley — but that’s not enough. He has to finish well ahead of Trump, not just ahead of Haley. Polls show DeSantis is far behind the former president in South Carolina. If real-life voters say the same thing, the DeSantis campaign is over. Given Trump’s popularity among Republicans, he’ll be forced to pull out. His own political future dictates that he do so gracefully and endorse Trump.

It’s unclear if the Florida governor ever had a chance, but if he did, it wasn’t by convincing Republicans he was more conservative than the former president, who flipped the Supreme Court, cut regulations and tried to close the border. Equally important, Trump has convinced average Republicans he will fight hard for them, take enormous punishment for doing it and refuse to buckle to establishment pressure.

DeSantis’s best shot — the one he didn’t take — was to say, “I agree with Republican voters on the kind of conservative government we need. I share that vision. The real issue is to put those policies into practice. We can’t let the bureaucrats and Democrats in Congress block us, as they did to Trump. In Florida, I’ve proven I can implement conservative policies. Not just talk about them. Get them enacted. And I’ve proven I can build a solid Republican majority in a state that was purple until I was elected. I can do all that nationally.”

That’s not the platform DeSantis chose for his presidential campaign. He chose to run as “I’m more conservative than Trump.” It wasn’t enough to draw away primary voters from a former president, who rebuilt the party in his image and whose four years in office are remembered fondly by those voters.

What about Haley? She’s not in the morgue, but she’s in the ICU and the hearse is pulling up to the hospital door. To survive, Haley must not only to win in New Hampshire but win convincingly. Then, she has to build on that momentum to secure a big victory in her home state.

New Hampshire is Haley’s best shot, just as Iowa was for DeSantis. Polls in the Granite State show Haley is within shouting distance of Trump. If she closes the gap and wins, even slightly, the media will anoint her. If she goes on to win in South Carolina, they will fill the front pages and cable news with her praise, not because they love her but because they loathe Trump.


If Haley does win in New Hampshire, Trump and DeSantis will slam her victory, saying she won only because Independents can vote in the state’s Republican primary. Actually, that’s Haley’s strongest argument. She will say that Republicans need those votes in November to reclaim the White House and carry down-ballot races. “I’m the best candidate to win those swing voters to our cause,” she will say, “and New Hampshire proves it.” She’s say that even if she loses but carries the Independent vote. Unfortunately for her, that won’t convince most Republicans.

Haley may well be correct that she is the strongest Republican in the general election. But that argument doesn’t persuade primary voters for three reasons. First, there is grave uncertainty about how conservative Haley really is, or, rather, how committed she is to an uncompromising populist agenda when she faces daunting opposition from the Washington establishment and entrenched bureaucrats.

Haley’s stance as the most moderate of the top Republicans has helped her among more educated, higher-income, centrist primary voters. But those are not the party’s majority, and they are certainly not its activist base. Trump reshaped the party in his image, and the median Republican voter is convinced Haley she is closer to Mitch McConnell than to Jim Jordan and James Comer… or to Donald Trump. They’ve been burned before, especially on Supreme Court appointments by Republican presidents. They simply don’t trust Haley to stand up to the formidable, entrenched opposition she would meet if elected.

Second, Haley’s argument for electability would be much compelling if President Biden looked much stronger. He looks weak and beatable. Poll after poll puts Biden’s popularity well below 40 percent and far below that on key issues like border security and the economy. He’s hurt by Hunter Biden’s troubles, too, because an increasing number of voters believe the president himself is corrupt.

Biden’s physical and cognitive problems have also become harder to hide. He’s signaling those troubles by disappearing from public view, refusing to answer questions, and never holding press conferences. Even his short, canned videos reveal the problem. His latest was only twelve seconds. Yet he couldn’t get through it without needing an editing cut, piecing two parts of his extremely brief talk. It’s painful to watch. The idea of a ninety-minute debate with Trump looks like a bridge too far. Biden will try desperately to invent some reason to avoid it. But voters will notice.

Biden’s visible decline raises the prospect that, if he is reelected, Kamala Harris would be sitting in the Oval Office sometime during the next four years. Voters hate, hate, hate that prospect. Time after time, the White House has tried to reintroduce her to the public. And time after time, the public has said, “Please stop.” Still, Biden cannot drop her because he fears it would insult the African-American voters he needs to win. Normally, vice presidential candidates don’t matter much in the general election, even when they are as dreadful as Sarah Palin. This time looks different. Voters have reached a firm conclusion that Harris is unfit to be president. Her presence weakens an already vulnerable ticket.


That weakness undermines Nikki Haley’s main argument, that she is the only Republican who can win the White House. Republican primary voters now believe Trump can win. They could be wrong, of course, but they are surely encouraged by polls in swing states.

Finally, Trump is winning the primaries because he has reshaped his party’s base. His voters are the ones who trampled through snow and ice to vote for him in Iowa. They would walk through tropical storms in the South. Those voters are why he is very likely to win the other contested primaries, although New Hampshire is still in doubt. If Trump does win in New Hampshire, the race is effectively over. Haley should concede then and avoid the embarrassment of losing in her home states. DeSantis may wait until after South Carolina. Both will endorse Trump to preserve their own political futures.

Trump has been aided, quite substantially, by not tweeting (or whatever it is called now) and by not appearing constantly on cable TV. Why? Because much as his fans love it, he conjures up just as much animosity, perhaps more. That’s why Trump’s best shot going into the general election is to make the election all about Biden, not about Trump himself or about a face-to-face comparison. His best campaign slogan would be Ronald Reagan’s in 1980. “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” That’s an easy argument for him to win.

Trump will drive home that “better off” message and enumerate Biden’s failures. He’ll talk about his record of strong economic growth, low unemployment, rising real wages, a strenuous effort to close the border and the lack of foreign wars during his term. The more he mentions revenge or the 2020 election, the worse he’ll do with Independents.

Biden will stay in the basement and go with his strongest argument: “Trump is a danger to our democracy.” That argument would be far stronger if most Democrats didn’t want to keep Trump off the ballot and blue states weren’t trying to do it. Centrist Independents may not be too happy about Trump, but they can’t be convinced you favor democracy if you want to keep your main opponent off the ballot and throw him in jail.

As the race stands now, Trump has effectively captured the nomination and reshaped the party in his image. He will run on a record that many Independent voters think is stronger than President Biden’s.

It’s a long way until November. But it’s even longer if you are a frail eighty-one-year-old incumbent with dismal poll numbers.


By
Charles Lipson

Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma professor of political science emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he founded the Program on International Politics, Economics and Security, and a Spectator contributing writer.

https://thespectator.com/politics/donald-trump-captured-republican-party-primaries/?fbclid=IwAR0RaGhb5MLEfzwDju9ngqrHrr5_SwkX-wC0tth2LsHY5i3JuVF-4uuWgME

An accurate, in my estimation, pessimism where state sponsored digital currencies are involved:

https://newsfromuncibal.substack.com/p/not-everything-is-bad-but-everything

A well-argued piece w/ a ton of supporting links:

https://reason.com/volokh/2023/12/20/how-magazine-bans-thwart-self-defense/

What a lovely screed:

Recently the Times published this… unique essay by editor Anna Marks, on Taylor Swift’s sexual tastes, real or imagined. The piece operates by conceding that Swift is known to have exclusively dated men and has never made a single statement suggesting that she’s anything other than heterosexual, then goes on to insist that she’s queer, whatever the fuck that term means in 2024. Marks does this in part by sketching some unconvincing readings of Swift’s lyrics and by laying out conspiracy theoris that remind me of QAnon. But more, Marks simply insists that LGTBQ people need this, that the palpable longing for Swift to be gay among some queer people (the “Gaylors”) can somehow will Swift’s homosexuality into being. It’s essentially a kind of prayer, predicated on the belief that if you want something badly enough, if you’re willing to let go of any concept of privacy or self-definition or human autonomy or basic respect entirely, then the divine might make your wish come true. It’s the Tinkerbell effect for people who desperately want Taylor Swift to be horny for other girls. This would be understandable if it was expressed in the journal of a 14-year-old. Putting it in the page of the biggest newspaper in the world is just…. Well, it’s one of those “the internet was a mistake” moments.

Conversation about the piece has generally been driven by the notion that Marks’s piece was offensive and Swift treated poorly. Swift’s “camp” - I wonder how rich you have to be, to have a camp - is reportedly furious. I don’t really get offended, in that way, but I certainly understand why Swift would find the essay upsetting and invasive. With other people holding down the offense front, though, I’m free to focus on how fucking weird the piece is, and how genuinely bizarre it is that the staid New York Times, the paper of record, decided to publish it. As many people have said, it brings to mind nothing so much as a Livejournal rant from a depressed teenager, perhaps one on a Vyvanse binge. There’s this layer of the story that’s about Swift’s privacy and her autonomy, which I get. But then there’s also the fact that the Grey Lady, which will fact check the claim that the sky is blue, published a piece of what is really just speculative fanfiction. I often write about how over time, internet niches that seem marginal and unimportant subtly become mainstreamed, and suddenly the practices that define those niches are considered unremarkable. Tumblr culture (as distinct from the platform itself, which is unobjectionable) represents the intersection of social justice branding, fandom, and a total lack of boundaries or restraint, and it continues its pitiless march across our cultural institutions. Next week, The Paris Review is running a piece about how Dr. Melfi and AJ Soprano are the OTP that we should all ship, or so I’ve been told.

One interesting element of the essay is that it bucks the usual trend in our culture, which is to act as though the world owes Taylor Swift something that it has refused to give her. (Remember, the notion that Taylor Swift could ever receive adequate payment for existing is wicked.) I think this is part of the reason Marks’s essay has generated such ire - not just the righteous argument that it’s creepy and unfair to make someone the subject of sexual wishcasting in the fucking New York Times, but simply the sense that something is being asked of Taylor Swift. Anyone who reads pretty much anything on the internet knows that that isn’t how it works; the only thing we should ask of Taylor Swift is forgiveness, for surely we have failed to give her all that she deserves.

I’ve already written what I really need to say about the current fervor for Taylor Swift. I would never begrudge Swift’s success as a pop star, in the terms ordinary to pop stars, in the sensible space of normal human love for music and appreciation for the musicians who make it. It’s great that she sells so many records, gets so many streams, wins so many awards, and is beloved by both fans and the media. That’s all to the good, that’s how music works, and she has been rewarded for playing that role beyond the dreams of Croesus. What I find distressing about our current moment is this palpable feeling that no matter how much our culture celebrates and lionizes her, it’s never enough; this constant sense that no matter how much acclaim and riches we give her, we have somehow failed her. She is one of the most richly rewarded and privileged people to ever walk the face of this planet, and the ambient attitude in our culture industry is that we should be ashamed that we haven’t done more to exalt her. It is madness. And yet no one seems to want to point that madness out, I strongly suspect because they don’t want to find themselves on the hitlist of those unfathomably passionate fans. But someone needs to point out that waiting in a line for five months to get concert tickets is not a charming human interest story, but rather a record of deranged and deeply unhealthy behavior. Putting a second mortgage on your house to buy concert tickets isn’t a cute sign of devotion, it’s evidence of a parasitic attachment that can only lead to long-term unhappiness. And I’m willing to guess that many other people feel the same way but are afraid to say so.

I understand that this sort of thing is not unprecedented; Beatlemania springs immediately to mind. But then, the Beatles themselves have always said that Beatlemania was toxic. There’s this incredible moment in the Beatles Anthology documentary series where they show a clip from local news footage during the height of Beatlemania. This teenager guy is standing there with a bunch of angry and weeping friends. When asked by the reporter how he felt, the teenager says that they’re all mad because they were prevented from getting into physical proximity with the Beatles, when “we just wanted to get a piece of ‘em! All we wanted was a little piece of ‘em!” It never seems to occur to him that a bunch of fans wanting to get physically close to you, in order to “get a piece of you,” sounds very scary. Clearly, overinvested fans have always existed. I mean, John Hinckley did his thing more than 40 years ago. (Respect.) And the lines between passionate devotion and pathological parasociality can be very fine. When I was in elementary school, there was a kid who had come from somewhere in eastern Europe who would be brought to tears at the mere mention of Michael Jackson. While I find something very sweet and romantic about that, I do think that there are limits past which public affection becomes something dark and disordered.

The trouble is that the internet is a giant machine which sometimes appears to have the sole purpose of compelling people to take their interests too far. Any internet community dedicated to a particular topic inevitably ends up rewarding those users who take the most extreme position possible in relation to that topic. You can see the incredible rise of artistic populism in the past two decades for a great example. Once upon a time, there was a communal sense that being too invested in children’s media as an adult was a mark of arrested development and something to be embarrassed about; the world’s nerds spent many years developing a persecution complex because of this belief. But it turns out that such social conditioning plays an important role. Once the internet became a mass phenomenon, the nerds all found each other and rebelled against any sense of obligation that they should ever engage with art on any level more sophisticated than “Is this badass???” The media companies eagerly worked to exploit the IPs they already owned, and the ancillary industries that make merch quickly got in on the action too. With the concept of adult tastes having died the same death that befell the concept of adulthood writ large, and the money flowing in, very quickly all culture became children’s culture. The kinds of adult dramas that had once routinely gone to number one at the box office became relegated to arthouse cinemas and, eventually, streaming services; the superheroes had elbowed them all out. Anyone who argued that this all represented a culture that was unwilling to grow up was quickly accused (under whichever shameless terms) of racism or sexism or similar and dismissed.

In 1989, you had a lot of adults who could go and watch Batman and enjoy it and maybe pick up a couple of the commemorative cups from Taco Bell, mere weeks after being one of the many millions who made a hit out of Dead Poet’s Society, a movie about killing yourself over a poem Robin Williams told you to read. You could enjoy the kid stuff while keeping it in perspective. Nowadays, the financial engine behind movies featuring characters like Batman are 35-year-olds whose houses are stuffed full of FunkoPop, who listen to podcasts and watch YouTube channels devoted to these properties, and who can be relied on only to come out to those movies that are based on a preexisting franchise featuring some sort of magic or other types of unreality and which are rated PG-13. There was a cultural expectation that you had to engage with adult art and culture as an adult, a motivated minority of people resented this notion, the internet brought them together in spaces where they could grouse about it, and soon the cultural narrative flipped such that the previous belief that adults should sometimes engage with adult media was considered a kind of bigotry. The really committed nerds, meanwhile, just got busy crafting their next persecution narrative.

The negative consequences of the takeover of media by children’s stories are, I think, in part an expression of what happens when people find themselves in spaces where they can egg each other on and deny the value of restraint. But this is really a story of smaller communities, and there the consequences are more personally severe. Not to again bash a network I used to use and frequently found useful, but Tumblr exemplifies the internet’s tendency to push people into more and more extreme versions of every position that’s popular within their subcultures. You can certainly see this in the competitive social justice posturing that went on to infect Twitter and the world, where the actual righteous purpose of increasing equality and justice became subservient to the demand to express that purpose in an arcane vocabulary and with performative conviction. But I think the fandom world is the purest expression of all of this: what Tumblr consistently does is to take people with normal, deep, passionate attachment to a given movie or show or musician, and transform that into a pathological and parasocial dependence. Tumblr takes people who daydream about the characters in their favorite shows and makes them people who cut themselves in order to contain their emotions about them. I’ve gotten really, really, really into the characters and stories in my favorite books, in my life, and I understand that the impulse is both beguiling and dangerous. All you can do is pull yourself back from it when you can tell you’re in too deep, when you can’t fall asleep at night. What Tumblr and similar communities do is to provide you with someone who will always tell you, “don’t pull back, keep going, go deeper.” The site is littered with people talking about how they have developed attachments to fictional characters that are actively harmful to their regular lives. This drives both their sense that they are truer fans than anyone else and also Tumblr’s business model.

You can see this sort of thing, not just at Tumblr but increasingly everywhere, in the positively violent emotional attachment “fandom” people have to their favorite pairings. They will assert the supremacy of a particular couple - often gleefully unrelated to the actual plot of the source material, like Harry Potter and Snape or whatever - and become incredibly animated when someone denies the legitimacy of that pairing or asserts the superiority of another. The pairing off of of characters unconnected in canon goes back a long way, to the original “slash” communities, and is not at all unhealthy in and of itself. These “one true pairings” are fun and healthy, so long as they’re kept in proper perspective, as all things must be. Similarly, there’s the constant tendency to declare that certain characters are “coded” as gay, or queer, or trans, or similar. This too is unobjectionable, if expressed as a provisional claim. But a lot of these fans don’t want any of this to be considered provisional. The pairing they advance is the right pairing. The character they think is gay is gay, no matter how much or how little evidence there is in the text. And they tend to become very upset if anyone suggests otherwise. In literary terms, a reading that two particular characters would be a great pairing, or that there are subtextual hints that they have a romantic or sexual connection, or that they’re queer, is no more or less valid than any other. But the least valid literary reading is always the one that insists that there are no other valid readings, and this is exactly what predominates in those spaces.

Anna Marks looked at the rules for fictional characters that work on Tumblr, applied them to the most visible human being on the face of the planet, and published what she came up with in The New York Times. What could go wrong!

Marks makes waves at the constant claim that LGBTQ people, like other marginalized groups, lacks representation in arts and media. The entire project of wishcasting Taylor Swift as a lesbian derives its supposed legitimacy from this need - LGBTQ people need this, therefore Taylor Swift is obligated to provide it. Of course, the fundamental objection has to be that, unlike food or clothing or housing or medical care or education, someone’s literal sexual orientation cannot be subject to the expropriative demands of the needy. That is not something that can be given and not something that should be asked for. More to the point, the premise is wrong; LGBTQ people are not only not underrepresented in popular culture these days, in pure numerical terms they’re dramatically overrepresented. That’s not a normative statement, as if I’m suggesting that there are too many, but a reflection of the mere quantitative reality that it simply is not true that lesbian and gay and bi and transgender and queer people do not receive proportional representation in arts and culture relative to their numbers. And, you know, it’s not like gay people haven’t punched well above their weight artistically for a very long time. Of course I believe that there’s still discrimination against LGBTQ people; it’s just that being underrepresented in movies and television simply isn’t a part of that inequality anymore. Liberals are always so resistant to getting new material, even when it’s clear that playing the same old song isn’t addressing the actual needs of marginalized groups. And, you know, the continuing prevalence of homophobia despite all that representation is a pretty clear sign that representation is not in fact such an earth-shattering thing. It’s just something liberals usually control, looking for their keys where the light is.

The deeper, more uncomfortable question is what the endgame is, exactly, for all of the calls for representation. I find it simply undeniable that Hollywood has gone to great lengths in the past five years to attempt to appease that demand, but you can always argue that they need to do a better job, especially if a better job means making diverse art that doesn’t suck. What’s stickier is the assumption that underlies a lot of the rhetoric: that art can only serve you if it is “for you,” in this case meaning featuring and fronting people who are like you in some reductive way. That’s something you see all the time, the call for diverse art specifically because people from minority backgrounds supposedly can’t draw the right kind or amount of enjoyment from art featuring people who don’t look like them. I think diversifying Hollywood is still a worthy project, even after much progress. But the stated logic, I’m sorry to say, undermines some of my most basic assumption about what narrative art is and is for. This can’t carry much cultural weight because, as a white man, I don’t know what it’s like not to be served in that way, and never will, and trust me when I say that I’m open to the idea that my ignorance precludes understanding. I can’t ignore the fact, though, that one of the most time-honored and essential purposes of all of this storytelling is to produce empathy precisely across those lines of difference. What else is the moral purpose of novels or movies, if not that exact project of making us understand that which society has decided we never can? What better challenge is there than that?

I know some people will find this offensive, but when I watch Malcolm X, I empathize with Denzel Washington’s portrayal, I connect with it, I inhabit it, I understand it, I feel it represents me in exactly the terms of people calling for more representation. I see his plight in mine and mine in his. I understand that this sort of talk results in a lot of unhappy letters to the editor, but let me ask you: would the world be better if I didn’t feel this way, about Black or queer or women or disabled characters? If I didn’t connect with artwork by and about people who don’t “look like me,” what would be the advantage? Yes, I recognize that my complete lack of shame or self-consciousness in slipping into the conditions of others is a form of privilege, white privilege, male privilege. And of course I want those who feel marginalized and ignored in society to find their lives honored and respected in art, and I understand why they would guard “their” representation jealously. But I also want them to have the same ability that I have to slip off their demographic trappings and put on someone else’s costume for awhile. That is yet another of my privileges that I think should be spread, not ended. I assure you, I’m not going to stop listening to Mitski’s gorgeous, evocative “Best American Girl” no matter how much the YouTube comments hate that idea. Why not try and be comfortable everywhere you go? If people could get there, perhaps they wouldn’t need Taylor Swift to save them.

I covet other people’s identities, and I take them as it suits me, ruthlessly and without remorse. You can’t stop me. But you can be like me.

Maybe the more salient question is why the actually, openly queer artists that already exist are insufficient for Marks’s uses. Were kd lang, Melissa Etheridge, Tracy Chapman, Dusty Springfield, Tegan & Sara, Janelle Monáe, the Indigo Girls, Queen Latifah, Brandi Carlile, and so many more insufficient inspiration? Or were they simply not “heroic” enough, which is the only conclusion I can draw from the following paragraph?

What if someone had already tried, at least once, to change the culture by becoming such a hero? What if, because our culture had yet to come to terms with homophobia, it wasn’t ready for her?

What if that hero’s name was Taylor Alison Swift?

It’s true - nobody ever tried to change the culture of homophobia. Not even once!

This is what feels cruel in Marks, to me, the overpowering sense that past gay musicians just don’t impress her enough. And the actual claims here read like a parodic exaggeration of criticisms I’ve made of liberalism in the past - that modern liberals vastly overstate the ability of arts and culture to address structural problems. Homophobia does still exist, but it is a structural problem, not a personality flaw of celebrities, and “Taylor Alison Swift could cure homophobia” is an attitude so embarrassing, so fundamentally adolescent, that it’s incredible that a professional writer could think to publish it. Many people have died in various battles for equal rights. I find it absurd and in fact quite ugly to suggest that the problem can be solved by any hero, including a pop star.

I’m forever battling people in the comments here who insist that nothing that ever happens on the internet can ever have any real-world impact. This always strikes me as wishful thinking. Well, look - Tumblr has begun its colonization of the New York Times. If you’d like to find an answer to the question of why so many adolescents are now struggling with emotional problems, the conditions I’m discussing here speak to broader, fundamentally unhealthy dynamics of the internet that definitely matter. I think you could explore the internet history of many school shooters, including Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and see some of these behaviors at play, the lack of boundaries and of perspective, the self-mythologizing, marinating in communities that always push people to go deeper and more intense. Yes, I think this stuff matters.

Marks ends her piece saying

For a moment, Ms. Swift was out of the woods she had created for herself as a teenager, floating above the trees. The future was within reach; she would, and will, soon take back the rest of her words, her reputation, her name. Maybe the world would see her, maybe it wouldn’t.

But on that stage, she found herself. I was there. Through a fuzzy fancam, I saw it.

And somehow, that was everything.

This is a string of vague faux-profundities of a type that a lot of bad writers reach for when they’re trying to express the operatic heights of their soul. I have no idea how one would go about defining where “her future,” “her words,” “her reputation,” and “her name” begin and end, what constitutes one but not another, and this is a failure of precision that is forgivable in an overwrought Instagram caption but not in the New York Times. I don’t, in fact, think that Marks is a bad writer, although there is a whole other conversation to be had about who the industry elevates and why. No, I think she made the understandable mistake of getting caught up in a kind of reverie that, because it felt intense and personal and true to her, she mistook for being intense and personal and true in fact, in the wider world, in the hearts of us all. But as the saying goes, our guts have shit for brains. I heard that Marks felt compelled to delete her Instagram due to the backlash to the piece, and well, I would offer her words of support if I knew her personally, but I’d also tell her the truth - there is a grace only we can bestow; this is the price that you pay for a loss of control. And I think her editors at the NYT failed her. Their job is to save writers from themselves, and they abdicated that responsibility in the pursuit of the great trinity, buzz, shares, and clicks.

This level of fervor I see all around me, not just for Swift but for celebrities in general, is toxic and not sustainable. When people wake up every day and thank millionaires for bestowing on them an Instagram post shilling weight-loss tea, shouting a lusty “YES MOTHER” to someone who will never know they exist and would not care if they did, something has gone wrong. People are looking in the wrong place, and sacrificing one’s dignity is now so normalized that I don’t know if people even notice that they’ve lost something in the transaction. I think, fundamentally, that people are just desperate to feel something transcendent. But you can’t pull transcendence out of a smartphone. Art moves us to almost impossible emotions, and it’s natural to want to lavish an equal amount of emotion on the artists that make it. But it’s like everything else in life; you should be as absolutely devoted and passionate as you should be, but not an ounce more.

I’m sorry to repeat myself, but I think Swift would do herself a big favor by taking time off and actively working to create distance with her fanbase. There are no more rewards to be earned for her, now, no percentage in trying to become even bigger; the returns have all already diminished. She’s in a place very few human beings have ever been before, and I think that it’s a can’t-lose position where, strangely, a lot of the available moves ahead of her look no-win. Personally, I’d take a year off, and then maybe try to piss my fans off a little bit, to remind them that they owe nothing to each other; they have each thrown their payment in the cup, both Taylor Swift and her fans, and received more than they asked for. Telling them to grow up a little, suggesting that they move on, gently reminding them that they will never know her and that they shouldn’t want to that bad, angrily insisting to them that Fiona Apple was right…. I suspect that approach would be the best thing for both them and her. And anyway people like Marks need that. I’m always telling people that they should worry just as much about the disappointment that follows wanting and getting as they do about the disappointment that follows wanting and not. Anna, what if your dreams are true, your prophecy real, your wishes granted, and Taylor Swift comes out, and you look around and find that you’re still sad and lonely in a sad and lonely world?


https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/perhaps-emotional-dependence-on-celebrities

States he "can't remember" over a hundred times while testifying about sundry Covid era claims:

https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/01/dr-anthony-cannot-recall-much-about-covid-origins-pandemic-responses/?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=dr-anthony-cannot-recall-much-about-covid-origins-pandemic-responses

Wait, they are costly, expensive to maintain, take too long to charge (assuming you can find a charging station), and customers don't want to drive them? Who knew...?

https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/01/hertz-selling-20000-electric-vehicles-for-gas-powered-cars/?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=hertz-selling-20000-electric-vehicles-for-gas-powered-cars

Hmm, might this be the year we learn there is life well beyond earth and our solar system?

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/have-we-just-discovered-aliens/?

No doubt pointing out woke folk are often slow learners is yet another sign of privilege:

https://pjmedia.com/lincolnbrown/2024/01/12/johns-hopkins-dei-head-tries-to-walk-back-racist-letter-n4925421?fbclid=IwAR2MjCtslIryOSeFKab7c8ueaqpRgd8eUHEDYKNoVXOJotuBBr4AqXXMR88

What Nigel Biggar says about the British Empire

Samizdata.net / by Brendan Westbridge (London) / January 10, 2024 at 03:02AM

We are constantly being told by that coalition of communists and racists that talk about “de-colonisation” that the British Empire was a Bad Thing and that therefore we whiteys should a) be ashamed, b) tear down any monuments to that empire and c) give all our money and wealth to the descendents of the alleged victims of that empire. This despite the fact that there is almost no one alive who had anything to do with said empire. There is no force for good like inter-generational guilt.

For some time Oxford Academic Nigel Biggar has been discomfited by this claim and these demands. In 2017, he was denounced by “fellow” academics for running an “Empire and Ethics” project. Last year saw the publication of his book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. This itself was something of a palaver with Biggar’s original publisher dropping the thing in what appeared to be a cancellation. Luckily there is still some competition in the publishing world and another publisher came to the rescue.

Biggar is at pains to point out that he is an ethicist not a historian. He deals in moral issues not historical ones; hence the title of the book. Well, that’s the theory but with over a hundred pages of footnotes it would appear he is quite good at the not-day job.

He examines the various claims that the “de-colonisers” make: Amritsar, slavery, Benin, Boer War, Irish famine. In all cases he finds that their claims are either entirely ungrounded or lack vital information that would cast events in a very different light.. Amritsar? Dyer was dealing with political violence that had led to murder. Some victims had been set alight. Anyway, he was condemned for his actions by the British authorities and, indeed, his own standing orders. Slavery? Everyone had it and Britain was the first to get rid of it. Benin? They had killed unarmed ambassadors. Irish famine? They tried to relieve it but they were quite unequal to the size of the task. In the case of Benin he comes very close to accusing the leading de-coloniser of knowingly lying. The only one of these where I don’t think he is so convincing is the Boer War. He claims that Britain was concerned about the future of the Cape and especially the Simonstown naval base and also black rights. I think it was the pursuit of gold even if it does mean agreeing with the communist Eric Hobsbawm.

He is far too polite about the “de-colonisers”. They are desperate to hammer the square peg of reality into their round-hole of a theory. To this end they claim knowledge they don’t have, gloss over inconvenient facts, erect theories that don’t bear scrutiny and when all else fails: lie. Biggar tackles all of these offences against objectivity with a calmness and a politeness that you can bet his detractors would never return.

The communists – because they are obsessed with such things and are past masters at projection – like to claim that there was an “ideology” of Empire. Biggar thinks this is nonsense. As he says:
There was no essential motive or set of motives that drove the British Empire. The reasons why the British built an empire were many and various. They differed between trader, migrant, soldier, missionary, entrepreneur, financier, government official and statesman. They sometimes differed between London, Cairo, Cape Town and Calcutta. And all of the motives I have unearthed in this chapter were, in themselves, innocent: the aversion to poverty and persecution, the yearning for a better life, the desire to make one’s way in the world, the duty to satisfy shareholders, the lure of adventure, cultural curiosity, the need to make peace and keep it, the concomitant need to maintain martial prestige, the imperative of gaining military or political advantage over enemies and rivals, and the vocation to lift oppression and establish stable self-government. There is nothing morally wrong with any of these. Indeed, the last one is morally admirable.[/i]

One of the benefits of the British Empire is that it tended to put a stop to local wars. How many people lived because of that? Bthat leads us on to another aspect. Almost no one ever considers what went on before the Empire arrived. Was it better or worse than went before it? Given that places like Benin indulged in human sacrifice, I would say that in many cases the British Empire was an improvement. And if we are going to talk about what went before what about afterwards? He has little to say about what newly-independent countries have done with their independence. The United States, the “white” (for want of a better term) Commonwealth and Singapore have done reasonably well. Ireland is sub-par but OK. Africa, the Caribbean and the Indian sub-continent have very little to show for themselves. This may explain why Britain needed very few people to maintain the Empire. At one point he points out that at the height of the Raj the ratio of Briton to native was 1 to 1000. That implies a lot of consent. Tyrannies need a lot more people.

The truth of the matter is that talk of reparations is rooted in the failure of de-colonisation. If Jamaica were a nicer place to live than the UK, if Jamaica had a small boats crisis rather than the UK then no one would be breathing a word about reparations or colonial guilt. All this talk is pure deflection from the failure of local despots to make the lives of their subjects better.

Biggar has nothing to say about what came after the empire and he also has little to say about how it came about in the first place – so I’ll fill in that gap. Britain acquired an empire because it could. Britain was able to acquire an Empire because it mastered the technologies needed to do it to a higher level and on a greater scale than anyone else. Britain mastered technology because it made it possible to prosper by creating wealth. That in itself was a moral achievement.

Of course, modern Britons don’t actually need to justify the Empire. As I pointed out at the beginning none of us had anything to do with it. You could argue (does anyone actually do this?) that we current-day Britons are the inheritors of the same culture and perhaps we should be ashamed about that. Except that I am not in the mood to condemn a culture that produced the rule of law, freedom of speech, property rights and the Industrial Revolution. Anyway, does anyone seriously think that modern British culture would be capable of giving birth to a second empire? Culture changes. The other argument is that many of us continue to be the beneficiaries of the Empire. At very least those who have started with nothing and yet are still on the hook for reparations are entitled to feel a bit miffed. But one only has to look around to see that most of Britain’s prosperity is much more recent in origin. Sure, that big house might have originally been built from a slaver’s profits but if a more recent person hadn’t kept the roof intact it would be a ruin by now.

A narrative about a rapacious British Empire is being used to first humiliate and shame modern Britons in preparation for their impoverishment and eventual extermination. OK, maybe I am getting ahead of myself here but I’ll bet you some of them of thinking that. There is certainly nothing in the “decolonisation” belief system to prevent it. Biggar’s achievement is to demonstrate that – if you do believe in intergenerational guilt  – there is nothing to be ashamed of.

https://www.samizdata.net/2024/01/what-nigel-biggar-says-about-the-british-empire/

It frosts me to no end that the feds feel they are entitled to tell me how much water can flow through my toilet on a single flush among other bits of regulatory overreach they regularly embrace. As such it's refreshing to see such acts stymied, as they were here:

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/doe-blocked-from-undoing-trump-dishwasher-washing-machine-rules

This piece explores how the energy needs of emerging nations combined with Russia and China's utter disregard for sky-is-falling predictions and the edicts that are then spun off effectively kill the sundry agreements based on catastrophic claims:

https://archive.ph/8AZCl

This piece examines rumor that water was used to “fuel” Chinese missiles, and that silo lids are ill-fitting, concluding it is disinformation, albeit arguing light is nonetheless shed on Chinese intentions.

https://weapons.substack.com/p/water-in-chinese-missiles-unlikely?r=1qo1e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&fbclid=IwAR1HLSqYQIKvf31PZ_933xROc1w02kvCW9kpyrcwlW3MN0hh9WXOHyDpSKY

I was perusing a couple pieces today predicting that Biden would not be the Dem’s presidential candidate later this year, which inspired me to look at the dates of the various conventions, w/ Repubs being in mid-July & Dems being in the second week of Aug. IIRC. This got me to thinking:

Imagine if the Dems wait for the Repubs to nominate their candidate, at this point presumably Trump, and then some three weeks later Biden drops his candidacy and by some mechanism beyond my ken the Dems nominate someone without the baggage of both Trump and Biden? Giving the Dems penchant for playing fast and loose w/ the rules—witness various far from kosher voter registration schemes for one—that might be their most likely path to victory.

Thoughts? I’m sure there are various parliamentary or whatever procedures that would need to be wrestled w/, but the more I think about it the more it seems the Dems best path forward would involve a switcheroo like the one I’ve described.

BBG is there any way to read without registering

I’ll try to post if from work tomorrow.I didn’t have to register when I saw this at work, perhaps ‘cause I was on a .edu computer, but find it wants me to from home this evening.

As Doug notes above, the Secretary of Defense was on unannounced hiatus as his deputy was on scheduled vacation leave, meaning no civilian was minding the Department of Defense at a time when the DoD has many balls in the air. This piece explores the likely fallout and predicts Austin will be allowed to resign:

https://thespectator.com/topic/lloyd-austin-mistake-career-ending/?fbclid=IwAR2k1P27XEjTZdCeC33twQpF-bDZha4xQ3hG8skFvF9nDdckSV1YJoXKmoc

When I taught physics at Yale in the 1980s and ’90s, my colleagues and I took pride in our position on “science hill,” looking down on the humanities scholars in the intellectual valleys below as they were inundated in postmodernism and deconstructionism.

This same attitude motivated the mathematician Alan Sokal to publish his famous 1996 article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” in the cultural-studies journal Social Text. He asserted, among other things that “physical ‘reality,’ no less than social ‘reality,’ is at bottom a social and linguistic construct” and that “the scientific community . . . cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.”
Mr. Sokal’s paper was a hoax, designed to demonstrate that postmodernism was nonsense. But today postmodern cultural theory is being infused into the very institutions one might expect to be scientific gatekeepers. Hard-science journals publish the same sort of bunk with no hint of irony:

• In November 2022 the Journal of Chemical Education published “A Special Topics Class in Chemistry on Feminism and Science as a Tool to Disrupt the Dysconscious Racism in STEM.” From the abstract: “This article presents an argument on the importance of teaching science with a feminist framework and defines it by acknowledging that all knowledge is historically situated and is influenced by social power and politics.” The course promises “to explore the development and interrelationship between quantum mechanics, Marxist materialism, Afro-futurism/pessimism, and postcolonial nationalism. To problematize time as a linear social construct, the Copenhagen interpretation of the collapse of wave-particle duality was utilized.”

• In March 2022 Physical Review Physics Education Research published “Observing whiteness in introductory physics: A case study.” From the abstract: “Within whiteness, the organization of social life is in terms of a center and margins that are based on dominance, control, and a transcendent figure that is consistently and structurally ascribed value over and above other figures.” The paper criticizes “the use of whiteboards as a primary pedagogical tool” on the grounds that they “play a role in reconstituting whiteness as social organization. . . . They collaborate with white organizational culture, where ideas and experiences gain value (become more central) when written down.”
 
• A January 2023 paper presented at the Joint Mathematics Meeting, the world’s biggest gathering of mathematicians, was titled “Undergraduate Mathematics Education as a White, Cisheteropatriarchal Space and Opportunities for Structural Disruption to Advance Queer of Color Justice.”

Undergraduates are being exposed to this stuff as well. Rice University offers a course called “Afrochemistry: The Study of Black-Life Matter,” in which “students will apply chemical tools and analysis to understand Black life in the U.S. and students will implement African American sensibilities to analyze chemistry.” The course catalog notes that “no prior knowledge of chemistry or African American studies is required for engagement in this course.”

Such ideas haven’t totally colonized scientific journals and pedagogy, but they are beginning to appear almost everywhere and are getting support and encouragement from the scientific establishment. There are also indications that dissent isn’t welcome. When a group of physicists led by Charles Reichhardt wrote to the American Physical Society, publisher of the Physics Education Research journal, to object to the “observing whiteness” article, APS invited a response, then refused to publish it on the grounds that its arguments, which were scientific and quantitative, were based on “the perspective of a research paradigm that is different from the one of the research being critiqued.”
“This is akin to stating that an astronomer must first accept astrology as true before critiquing it,” the dissenters wrote in the final version of their critique, which they had to publish in a different journal, European Review.

That sounds like an exaggeration, but in 2021 Mount Royal University in Canada fired a tenured professor, Frances Widdowson, for questioning whether indigenous “star knowledge” belonged in an astronomy curriculum. The same year, New Zealand‘s Education Ministry decreed that Māori indigenous “ways of knowing” would have equal standing with science in science classes. The Royal Society of New Zealand investigated two scientists for questioning this policy; they were exculpated but resigned. The University of Auckland removed another scientist who questioned the policy from teaching two biology classes.

In 2020, Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society published an article by physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein titled “Making Black Women Scientists under White Empiricism: The Racialization of Epistemology in Physics.” Ms. Prescod-Weinstein wrote: “Black women must, according to Einstein’s principle of covariance, have an equal claim to objectivity regardless of their simultaneously experiencing intersecting axes of oppression.” This sentence, which dramatically misrepresents Einstein’s theory of general relativity, wouldn’t have been out of place in Mr. Sokal’s 1996 spoof.

Had an article like this appeared in 1996, it would have been dismissed outside the postmodernist fringe. But last year Mr. Sokal himself, noting that the article was No. 56 in the Altmetric ranking of most-discussed scholarly articles for 2020, felt the need to write a 20-page single-spaced rebuttal. The joke turns out to be on all of us—and it isn’t funny.

Mr. Krauss, a theoretical physicist, is president of the Origins Project Foundation and author of “The Edge of Knowledge: Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos.”

https://apple.news/AoNrOPBq0RO6_XhaqoZUs5w

Certainly a biased source, but they do well support their conclusions:

https://nam.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/NAM-3731-Crains-Study-R3-V2-FIN.pdf

https://www.ft.com/content/9edcf793-aaf7-42e2-97d0-dd58e9fab8ea?segmentId=b385c2ad-87ed-d8ff-aaec-0f8435cd42d9

Ruchir Sharma: top 10 trends for 2024
Europe’s economy will be more resilient than the US, the dollar will weaken and investors will demand a premium on long-term debt

Interesting piece, Doug. I found the China info worth mulling, particularly in view of China’s expansionist posture.

... and Reindeer Affairs funeral?

Trump Totally Should Pick Nikki Haley for His Veep
Kurt Schlichter

Jan 04, 2024

Let me make it clear from the beginning that I think Nikki Haley (R-Boeing) is a vapid establishment automaton who is basically the Kamala Harris of the Republican Party, a Bushesque mediocrity who represents a dying ideology that peaked in 2005, and good riddance to it. She’s the worst – self-righteous, annoying, always spewing grrrl-power nonsense and hack clichés salvaged from the back catalog of the Weekly Standard. She’s a disaster on every level, one of those people who is both very aggressive and always wrong, the worst possible combination. That being said, should he win the nomination, Nikki! should absolutely be Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick

Stop laughing. I am serious. I am not being ironic. It makes sense. Hear me out.

Look at it from Donald Trump‘s perspective. She’s absolutely the person he should pick if he wins the nomination. I don’t like it. I don’t want it. But it’s a fact. She’s awful. She’s arrogant. She’s a squish. The thought of four years of that nattering nabob of nonsense – apologies to William Safire – is positively agonizing. But Donald Trump’s most important task is to get elected, and she would be the best choice to help him do it.

I hate writing that so much. But it’s true.

No, wait a minute, hasn’t Donald Trump slammed her? Not really. He’s been remarkably gentle with her, probably because he knows she’s his best choice. Even his nickname for her – the uncharacteristically unimaginative “Birdbrain” – is soft and spongy. I do need to point out, however, that in the week of her amazing “Anything but slavery” gaffe, it was pretty obvious that Trump needed to start calling her “Byrdbrain.” What a missed opportunity!

No, Donald Trump has been very nice to her. He’s reserved his fire for Ron DeSantis, a competent and effective conservative governor – in contrast to Nikki Haley –  who provides real competition for the nomination, also in contrast to Nikki Haley. Everyone knows Nikki Haley‘s going to lose the nomination. Even Nikki Haley knows she’s going to lose. She’s been quite obviously running for vice president the entire time. She wants the gig. And there’s a lot that she brings to the table.

What does she bring to the table? Well, stupid people. There are a lot of people out there who think she’s a great politician and a great choice. I’m not one of them. If you’re reading this, I’m guessing you’re not one of them, but they are out there. Many don’t like Joe Biden, and many don’t like Donald Trump, but adding her to the ticket can win them over to the GOP. Winning the election is about addition, not subtraction. This isn’t the time to pick a favorite of the people he’s already got nailed down. Someone like Kari Lake or Vivek Ramaswamy is very popular with the Trump base, but Trump doesn’t need to win the Trump base because they are already the Trump base. They will fall in line, grumbling maybe, but fall in line they will. He has to expand the Trump base. I think Ron DeSantis would expand the base alone, but if he’s not on the ballot, Trump will need to expand beyond the Trump base. And Nikki Haley expands the Trump base. I don’t particularly dig the people she will bring in, but the point is to win, not to make people like me happy about how Trump does it.

It’s all about winning. Sigh.

He needs her to win over the doubters. For some reason, suburban women seem to like Nikki Haley. I don’t understand it, but the facts are the objective facts. Now, suburban women are the worst people in the universe, living proof that the 19th Amendment needs an asterisk to exclude anybody who prefers oaky Chardonnay. But there are many of these wine women, and they all vote. A good chunk of them will vote for a Republican ticket if it has Nikki Haley on it. Maybe it’s her girl power nonsense. Maybe it’s the fact that she looks like someone who tells you to use your inside voice. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. She wins over people Trump couldn’t win over alone.

And she brings in the Establishment. No one hates the Establishment more than me. They are terrible people with an unbroken track record of failure. They brought us McCain, and they brought us Romney, and they are utterly incapable of analyzing why they lost or understanding the rise of Trump. But there are many of them, and they’ll stay home if it is Donald Trump and somebody like Donald Trump on the ticket. Nikki Haley appeals to them because she’s just the kind of decline management Republican they seem to adore, one who won’t take any hard positions that upset the folks down at the country club. It is better to have them on the inside of the tent than on the outside, peeing on it.

It’s not just that they will vote for her but that they will write her checks. She’s the donors’ gal because she’s the kind of pol the big donors love. Big Republican donors are mostly idiots. Their political instincts are awful, and they cannot learn from repeated mistakes. That’s why they love her. That and the fact that she’s willing to do whatever they want and adopt every dumb position they want, whether it’s allowing in endless hordes of illegal aliens, genuflecting at the altar of companies like Disney, or not making fellow swells upset by banning the mutilation of children. With her on the ticket, they will send money. Trump will need money because it’s all going to lawyers right now. And while I typically like lawyers being paid a lot of money, I also like the Republican Party having enough money to compete in the general election. Nikki Haley brings that to the table – the bottomless checkbooks of sucker GOP donors, and that’s not nothing.

But shouldn’t we worry that Nikki Haley will somehow have a big influence in a Trump 2.0 administration? Frankly, no, though I’m sure she imagines she will. I think it will look like four seasons of “Veep,” with Nikki Haley as a less amusing version of Selena Meyer, constantly asking if the president called and being told he has not. That brings us to another vital attribute of Nikki Haley. She’s not going to overshadow Trump. And she’s not going to have any influence. She can get in there and advocate for whatever dumb war she’s supporting this week or whatever idiotic social fetish she refuses to fight, and Trump is going to do whatever he wants. The only problem is if somehow Trump falls out and she falls into the Oval Office. But Trump’s pretty robust. He’ll certainly live through his term, if only for spite.

Now, the ultra-mega-MAGA Trump people properly detest Nikki Haley. I mean, they just despise her, which is to their credit. But they love Trump even more. Hell, he announced we ought to reward the fascist FBI with a spectacular new building, and they cheered as genius what last week they would (correctly) call treachery. So, if he picks Nikki Haley, they will all support it. They’re going to swallow it whole and applaud. You’ll have @FatMAGADeadbeatDad69 putting out reams of memes about how this is a brilliant 27-dimension chess move. A few people will ask, “What the hell are you thinking?” They won’t get a good answer and’ll still fall in line in November.

I will fall in line in November. I’m going to vote for whoever the Republican nominee is. If the Republicans are intent on nominating Trump instead of a disciplined and effective governor who is not hated by 53% of voters and who has a really good chance of winning, I’m in. Would a Trump Haley ticket have a good chance of winning? I don’t think it would have a good chance of winning, but it would have a better chance than a Donald Trump/Anyone Else ticket.

If you think I’m happy about a situation where I think the Republican candidate would be cunning to pick Nikki Haley for any job not involving a mop and bucket, you are wrong. I’m not happy about this. I’m very, very sad. We still have a chance to avoid it by nominating DeSantis (who would pick Iowa’s Kim Reynolds for VP), but if we don’t avoid it, I don’t see a better pick for Trump in terms of winning the election as opposed to actually governing – fortunately, a vice president doesn’t actually govern. A vice president usually gets sent overseas to attend the funeral of Finland’s Secretary of Ennui and Reindeer Affairs. And standing there in the snow listening to the eulogy for some depressed Nordic elk wrangler seems like a great job for Nikki Haley.

Do I think Trump would pick her? I think Trump would do it in a heartbeat. After all, we all know his personnel selection track record, and he’s already picked Nikki Haley once for a big job.

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2024/01/04/trump-totally-should-pick-nikki-haley-for-his-veep-n2633111

Samizdata quote of the day – end of easy corporate choices edition

Johnathan Pearce (London) · Economics, Business & Globalization · Slogans & Quotations

“In recent years, businesses have been shaped by the beguiling mantra of ‘win-win’. When confronted with any difficult choice – sustainability or efficiency? excellence or equity? stakeholders or shareholders? – their chieftains have kidded themselves into thinking that you can have both. Sustainability leads to efficiency in the long term; equity is the best way of securing excellence; pleasing all the stakeholders leads to higher share prices. This will be the year that finally brings an end to the idea that you can have your cake and eat it. Companies will have to make tough decisions that they’ve been putting off as long as possible. Consumers will no longer wear the idea that, say, the green transition is cost free.

“Win-win was an affordable luxury in an era of free money and rampant virtue signalling. But higher interest rates will make both companies and consumers more cost conscious. And virtue signalling is far from cost free, as several chief executive officers have discovered. Companies will tell their young recruits to put their noses to the grindstone rather than working from home. The yoga classes and pizza parties will be cancelled. The Business Roundtable will soft pedal the talk of stakeholder capitalism.”

– Adrian Wooldridge. He is writing in Bloomberg ($), a business news and information service that at times seems to have bought into sometimes fashionable ideas, but the need to make a profit tends to keep that in check.

Interesting piece exploring whether what Smith is attempting is kosher to any degree at all:

https://dailycaller.com/2024/01/02/appeals-court-jack-smith-trump/?fbclid=IwAR2W-m1xFVw46dHmBvFGgR2jbC5PeBnlnSgUpk7TJeorXxBdrc_IgRqqqs8

A compelling read:

Defending Clarence Thomas from My Good Friend Steve Lubet
The Volokh Conspiracy / by Steven Calabresi / January 03, 2024 at 03:21AM
[The best and most incorruptible Supreme Court Justice in U.S. History]

My good friend from the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law faculty Steve Lubet has very politely, but firmly taken issue with my recent post on this Blog about Justice Clarence Thomas.  Steve does "not question [my] assessment of Thomas's exceptional intellect."  But he does question my assertion that Justice Thomas is the best of the 116 justices to have sat on the Supreme Court.  I want to begin by defending that claim before turning to the ethics issues that Steve is troubled by.

First, I am not alone in thinking that Clarence Thomas is the best of the 116 Justices to ever serve on the Supreme Court.  I am one of the three co-founders and the 40 year Co-Chairman of the Federalist Society's Board of Directors.  The Society has 70,000 members nationwide, chapters at every law school in the country, lawyers chapters in every major city in the country, and a substantial presence on the federal judiciary.  After forty years of attending thousands of Federalist Society gatherings, I have a pretty good sense of what Federalist Society members think.  They adored the late Justice Antonin Scalia, but after Clarence Thomas had been on the Supreme Court for about ten years—a frequent parlor game got started when Federalists got together.  They would ask themselves who was right in those cases in which Justices Scalia and Thomas disagreed.  The nearly unanimous answer was that Justice Thomas was right.

While Justice Scalia travelled all over the world and the United States giving speeches praising originalism and extolling its virtues, Justice Thomas worked in his office writing very consistent and powerful originalist opinions that started driving the Supreme Court in his direction.  Some people said sadly as a joke that Justice Thomas had the courage of Justice Scalia's opinions.  See Antonin Scalia, Originalism: The Lesser Evil, 57 U. Cinn. L. Rev. 849 (1988-1989) (arguing for faint hearted originalism that did not overturn major precedents).  All too often, as in Gonzales v. Raich, 545 U.S. 1 (2005) a case about whether the federal government had power under the Commerce and Necessary and Proper Clauses, to prosecute a cancer patient for growing three medical marijuana plants in her kitchen, Justice Scalia was in the liberal majority for national power and Justice Thomas was in dissent along with Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

These episodes added up, and Justice Scalia served only twenty-nine years on the Supreme Court, while Justice Thomas is still going strong in his thirty-third year on the Supreme Court.  I am not alone in thinking that Justice Thomas is the best of the 116 justices to have served on the Supreme Court today.  Most Federalist Society members who I talk to think the same way.  It is striking and a wonderful thing for the country that an overwhelmingly white group of conservative and libertarian lawyers would look up to a Black man as their personal hero.  Many of the six Republican appointees on the current Supreme Court are beloved by the Federalist Society membership.  The three Trump appointees fall in that category, but they have not been on the Court for long enough to form a reputation.  Federalist Society members greatly admire Justice Alito, but they regret that he is not really an originalist, that he follows precedent over the text of the Constitution, and has never ruled for a criminal defendant.  Similar complaints are made about Chief Justice Roberts.  Chief Justice Roberts is also seen as being too political and too concerned with public opinion about the Court.  In my view, this is a form of corruption.

Well what about the justices who served from 1790 to 1986 when Justice Scalia joined the Supreme Court.  William Rehnquist and Byron White are condemned by Federalist Society members as being just right-wing legal realists—the right's copy of Justice William O. Douglas.  The Berger Court is viewed as having been a wasteland of intellectual mediocrities including Chief Justice Burger and Justices Harry Blackmun, Louis Powell, Potter Stewart, and Sandra Day O'Connor.  The left wing justices on that Court all embrace left wing legal realism from William Brennan to Thurgood Marshall to John Paul Stevens.  The Warren Court clocks in at higher mental acuity, but the only Warren Court justice who is really admirable is Hugo L. Black and, on occasion, Earl Warren himself.  Six of the nine members of the New Deal Court joined the opinion in Korematsu v. United States, so it is hard to be wildly enthusiastic about any of them.

The pre-New Deal Supreme Court draws some admiration, but other than Justice Willis Van Devanter, I cannot say I have any heroes on the Taft or Hughes Court except for Van Devanter and Hughes himself.  The Supreme Court from Abraham Lincoln's Administration to the 1920's was filled with mediocrities who followed their policy judgments and not the law.  The Supreme Court from 1790 to 1860 had thirty six justices of which only four—two each appointed by John Adams and John Quincy Adams—opposed slavery.  The other thirty-two justices were appointed by slaveowner Presidents or northern dough-faces complicit in slavery.   This reflects the advantage the three-fifths clause gave the South in the Electoral College.  The South had a near monopoly on the presidency prior to 1861 and therefore on Supreme Court appointments.   Hence such decisions as Prigg v. Pennsylvania, 41 U.S. 539 ( 1842) and Dred Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857).

The truth is that the vast majority, probably ninety percent of the justices who have served on the Supreme Court, have been disappointments.  This is one reason why the current Court should follow the original public meaning of the text of the Constitution and not the morass of erroneous Supreme Court opinions interpreting it.  So yes, I will stick my neck out and say that Clarence Thomas followed by Antonin Scalia are the best justices so far to have served on the Supreme Court. I have read hundreds of Justice Thomas's opinions, and they are all exquisitely crafted, methodologically consistent, and are written in his own distinctive authorial voice.  He never caves in to popular opinion or worries about how the public will react to his rulings, but instead he follows the rule of law in case after case.  Liberal law school professors ignore Justice Thomas's opinions and do not read them, so they miss the genius of his intellect.  I do not always agree with Justice Thomas, but I always understand and respect why he came out the way he did in any given case.

Steve Lubet pokes fun at my argument that if Congress had adjusted the Supreme Court justice's salaries for inflation since 1969, they would now make $500,000 a year, and Thomas would need less help from his billionaire friends, but the point is simply true.  Steve is right that Republican Congresses, as well as Democratic Congresses, are to blame for this this, but the facts are what they are.  High salaries for government officials allow the poor to serve in government and not only the rich.  There is a public interest in making it possible for someone like Thomas who grew up dirt poor, and then served in government for his whole life as a lawyer, to be able to live comfortably and be paid the salary of a law school Dean.

Precisely because Clarence Thomas has such a worked out originalist methodology for deciding cases, which he always follows he cannot be bribed and is not at all influenced by public opinion.  That is why I say Clarence Thomas is incorruptible.  He always as a judge does what is right.  The fact that he has friends who are conservative billionaires irks leftist law professors who yearn for the days when swing justices like Potter Stewart, Lewis Powell, Sandra Day O'Connor, and Anthony M. Kennedy were all influenced by the Linda Greenhouse effect. They all compromised their principles to be in good standing with Ivy League law professors and the Georgetown cocktail party set.  But, this is a form of corruption far more insidious than anything alleged about Clarence Thomas and his billionaire friends.  Thomas was never bribed in his official actions by money, but Justices Powell, O'Connor; and Kennedy were, in effect, bribed by the Linda Greenhouse effect.

As to Justice Thomas's failure to disclose gifts, he asked what the policy was and was told by his colleagues not to worry about disclosing vacation travel or gifts to support his elderly mother or the boy he is raising who has been abandoned.  Congress has no enumerated power to require the justices to disclose any gifts anyway.  Such a law is not necessary and proper for carrying into execution the judicial power of the United States.  Steven Gow Calabresi, Elise Kostial, Gary Lawson, What McCulloch v. Maryland got Wrong: The Original Meaning of "Necessary" is not "Useful," "Convenient," or "Rational", 75 Baylor Law Review 1 (2023).

Justice Thomas has lived a good life.  He has exemplified the four classical Greek and Roman virtues of: 1) Courage; 2) Temperance; 3) Justice; and 4) Prudence.  Justice Thomas is by far and away the bravest justice on the Supreme Court.  He has been vilified for being the personal hero of the 70,000 member Federalist Society, and he has learned to live with it.  Justice Thomas does not eat, drink, or travel to excess.  He practices temperance.  Justice Thomas is devoted to Justice.  He has stuck a golden mean between selfishness and selflessness. And, finally, Justice Thomas exhibits prudence—the ability to see ahead and to govern oneself and discipline oneself by the use of reason.  Justice Thomas also lives out the three Christian Virtues of faith, hope, and love.  He is the only justice who knows the names of every employee at the Supreme Court as well as what their struggles with children are.  He is as beloved by the cafeteria workers, librarians, and police officers at the Supreme Court as he is by the 70,000 Federalist Society members. In a little more than four years, Clarence Thomas will replace William O. Douglas as the longest serving Supreme Court justice in American history.  He has a record all Americans should be very proud of.

 

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