"I see (Trump's) supporters as failing to realize there are better alternatives in the Republican field."
Were DeSantis looking to wrap up the nomination by March, he would be facing the exact same lawfare attacks Trump is facing- the Rubicon had been crossed by the Democrats over 6 years ago. Even worse for the GOP, however, is this- without Trump on the ballot, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania are not competitive states- all three lean 4%+ to the Democrats and states like Iowa and Ohio still lean 1-2% to the Democrats. Had Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, or Marco Rubio been the GOP candidate in 2016, Hillary Clinton would today be finishing her second term as President. The Democrats have a lock on the Electoral College that only Trump was able to pick, and only the one time. If Haley or DeSantis is the nominee, Biden or his replacement will win the election by simply holding all the states Biden won in 2020 with the possible exceptions of Arizona and Georgia.
Yes- I also believe DeSantis would make a far superior President to Trump, but I don't see how he wins a general election given the massive edge the Democrats already hold in a fair election, and we now have massive mail-in-voting that only enhances that edge.
Antisemitism never died in America. People who have made antisemitic remarks in my presence did so not realizing that I am Jewish. I think my experience is fairly typical. Antisemitic remarks don't particularly bother me, as I figure they go with the territory, and in at least one instance I recall a fellow tribe member and I sharing amusement over an antisemitic comment made in our presence, but calling for the mass extermination of Jews crosses one of my red lines. I have to add that I am a bit annoyed about these wealthy Jewish donors withholding their donations to Harvard and other elite universities only after the events of October 7th and the testimony of those 3 women college presidents. I stopped donating to my alma mater at least a decade ago, and I made it clear at the time that antisemitism was my top concern, though I also mentioned the social justice crap the alumni magazine was peddling. Where have these people been?
When it comes to antisemitism there are three things to be optimistic about.
1. Israel - it continues to be an amazing success story and its success doesn’t depend on educating against antisemitism. Iron Dome, IDF and SLBMs are pretty darn effective.
2. The United States - within the U.S., creative destruction is the ultimate work-around to fashionable beliefs. Yes you have to build new, but again, this doesn’t require educating against antisemitism.
3. Education - it’s very slow, but can be very effective. It might take a generation. Tiny textbooks, chants, songs, and direct education work surprisingly well if you own the elementary school.
I recommend listening to the Akhil Amar podcast episodes with Baude and Paulsen on the 14 amendment decision. I'm troubled by the implications of this but the reasoning is in fact rock solid -- this is the law of the land. It might be better for the country if SCOTUS decides the case wrongly and finds for Trump, but the originalist support for the CO decision is very strong.
The best legal defense the opponents of the decision have come up with is that the president doesn't count as an "officer of the US." Supposedly the Reconstruction era framers of the amendment wanted to bar Lee and Davis from serving in Congress but not from the presidency. Ridiculous.
Arnold wrote "...I see (Trump's) supporters as failing to realize there are better alternatives in the Republican field." That depends upon one's assessment of the challenges we face. If one sees the government as deeply corrupt, incompetent,,and dangerous to the civil order then someone like Trump who is bent on change rather than a more conventional go-along to get-along candidate is preferable. Things have gotten so bad with the abuse of the law to try to derail Trump's candidacy that it has become imperative to support it, regardless of other concerns, in order to thwart what amounts to an attempted coup d'etat by the Left.
In the first essay in the first volume of his collected essays, a review, dated August, 1825, of a previously lost collection of Milton essays entitled “Treatise on Christian Doctrine, compiled from the Holy Scriptures alone,” Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay observes that “Throughout the volume are discernible the traces of a powerful and independent mind, emancipated from the influence of authority, and devoted to the search of truth.” Which would appear to offer support to Dr. Kling’s thinking, after, all, what greater authority is there than fashion? Minds “emancipated from the influence of authority” do seem to be a recurring problem for the sort of autocratic uniparty establishment types whose characters are best illustrated and represented by someone like Harvard’s Claudine Gay who perhaps better than anyone else might be considered the face of the uniparty establishment in the USA.
Macaulay offers a few more bons mots, perhaps demonstrating how the more things change, the more they stay the same, observing that “The men of our time are not to be converted or perverted by quartos.”
And prophesizing:
“A few more days, and this essay will follow the Defensio Populi [a reference, I assume, to Milton’s first defense of the English people, “Defensio pro Populo Anglicano,” available in English translation at: https://constitution.org/2-Authors/milton/first_defence.htm] to the dust and silence of the upper shelf. The name of its author, and the remarkable circumstances attending its publication, will secure to it a certain degree of attention. For a month or two it will occupy a few minutes of chat in every drawingroom, and a few columns in every magazine; and it will then, to borrow the elegant language of the playbills, be withdrawn, to make room for the forthcoming novelties.”
Perhaps a declining interest in the reading of books might be excused if books truly are of such ephemeral relevance?
Happily for Milton enthusiasts, however, Macaulay's prophecy, although on the mark apparently in theological circles, might be considered a bit wide of the mark in market terms judging by the wide assortment of editions of the book readily available on Amazon.
Macaulay was not a bad guy at all, actually quite liberal, and well worth reading. I believe he simply, and who doesn’t, preferred Milton’s poetry, writing in the same essay:
“We often hear of the magical influence of poetry. The expression in general means nothing: but, applied to the writings of Milton, it is most appropriate. His poetry acts like an incantation. Its merit lies less in its obvious meaning than in its occult power. There would seem, at first sight, to be no more in his words than in other words. But they are words of enchantment.”
Amen.
Perhaps anonymously leaving a copy of Paradise Lost where one’s favorite social media addict will find it is the ideal form of sedition. Enriching while simultaneously cracking the establishment media’s enervating bubble. Revolutions have been launched with less.
100% Agreed! But the power of fashion has long been evident. Remember the Dutch tulip mania? Well, me neither, since it happened about 400 years ago, but fortunately someone remembered to write about it. And that bunch, almost entirely literate Protestants, might’ve known better but were held captive by their own maniacal impulses and greed anyway. We just seem to be having the damndest time overcoming human nature, despite all the cool stuff we come up with. A couple days ago, amidst a mid-Manhattan crush of holiday revelers, I witnessed a group of young women posing for photos together, doffing their bulky coats in 35 degree weather to better capture their youthful cuteness in front of a massive, sparkly Christmas tree in the background. It was kinda funny, really. It occurred to me that it wouldn’t have happened quite the same way, if at all, in the days of film cameras.
You wrote: "Andrey Mir has sold me on the idea that what I think of as rational, scientific thinking comes from the way that our minds are shaped by reading. But as the written word gives way to electronic media, we are going to retreat from logic, objectivity, and the pursuit of truth."
Some comments:
- This sounds plausible, but perhaps it's not reading but [depth of understanding and exploration of topics beyond the superficial] that is in decline?
- Higher ed academics read a lot, no, and that hasn't stopped many from being ideologically captured and discarding/manipulating logic, objectivity, the pursuit of truth.
- MB the decline is due to: increased political power over our lives, + virtue-signaling having more value to individual political players that actually doing good, solving societal/group problems?
We can’t overcome antisemitism any more than we can generally overcome any other evil within the human heart. We need to strive to overcome the evil within our own hearts. And we must continue, always, to speak against evil at every opportunity.
My understanding of Rob Henderson's luxury beliefs is that - beyond merely being fashionable - such beliefs will very often incur significant penalties/ costs on the people that are putatively being helped by those same luxury beliefs.
GameStop was seen as a way to stick it to the industry investors - they were short selling it, so the idea was to buy up the stock so they couldn't fulfill their commitments. It didn't work all that well; they just stopped trading in it and waited out those guys.
The price looks like it recovered. No idea if it actually was taken over.
Luxury beliefs continue until they cause pain. This is a retail process not wholesale; if you personally aren't experiencing pain, it's a rare individual who will change beliefs just because there is pain elsewhere.
Almost 3 decades ago as I sat with a then powerful member of Microsoft on a safari I was guiding in Kenya, I listened to the spiel about the future dominated by electronic media and I told her, "But this will lead to the re-barbarization of the Western mind, cut off from the lexalogical filter of reading and writing."
Shout out to Virginia Postrel on similar related ideas, and her earlier book
The Substance of Style.
When someone chooses style, the fashion they follow become part of their chosen, fashion tribe, their identity.
Jew hatred is more accurate than antisemitism, just as pro abortion is more accurate than pro choice. The Fashion is to be less clear, like “duplicative language” which will probably not replace plagiarism.
Trump haters are trying to make it a fashion to claim Jan 6 was an insurrection, and among elites it mostly is. But normal folk know it’s a lie, tho it remains a Dem fashion to hate Trump.
Luxury beliefs are not always fashionable, but are always held by rich or privileged folk who won’t suffer if their minority belief becomes the majority belief. Like the idea small shoplifters should not be punished.
Even poor folk can have fashionable beliefs, like it’s OK to shoplift. It’s even cool to do so, and you’re even a dumb sucker if you don’t steal. A dumb fu**. (Fu** seems more pronounceable than f*ck) calling somebody a sucker, or shaming them, is an important mechanism for enforcing the fashionable ideas, which become the temporary norm.
I really liked and still like Lou Reed’s live Take No Prisoners album, full of vulgar fuck speech, especially his 10 min story of how he wrote Walk on the Wild Side, where the colored girls sing. Vulgar speech, especially “fuck speech” became fashionable, even tho it wasn’t quite a luxury belief. Tho the Michael Lewis book Liar’s Poker included a character, maybe Jewish, the Piranha, whose every fucking other word was fucking emphasized so you had to be some kind of dumb fuck to not fucking understand that only fucking wimps and losers were too fucking polite to turn their fucking noses up at those who were cool enough to occasionally use the word fuck.
I enjoyed that kind of fashionable late 70s verbal rebellion.
WTF? Didn’t I realize if you get rid of one set of taboo words, there would be another set? No I didn’t.
And Blazing Saddles remains hilarious, especially the sheriff.
How can you be so relaxed about a Trump presidency? The man lies incessantly, assaults women, and cheats. He has said he wants to be a dictator. He will leave NATO. He will do untold damage to the constitutional order at home, and the peace of the world. Almost no one who worked with him in his first term will support him or vote for him. Most of them are issuing stern warnings.
I agree with a lot of what you write Arnold, but...I am exasperated
Kling wrote:
"I see (Trump's) supporters as failing to realize there are better alternatives in the Republican field."
Were DeSantis looking to wrap up the nomination by March, he would be facing the exact same lawfare attacks Trump is facing- the Rubicon had been crossed by the Democrats over 6 years ago. Even worse for the GOP, however, is this- without Trump on the ballot, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania are not competitive states- all three lean 4%+ to the Democrats and states like Iowa and Ohio still lean 1-2% to the Democrats. Had Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, or Marco Rubio been the GOP candidate in 2016, Hillary Clinton would today be finishing her second term as President. The Democrats have a lock on the Electoral College that only Trump was able to pick, and only the one time. If Haley or DeSantis is the nominee, Biden or his replacement will win the election by simply holding all the states Biden won in 2020 with the possible exceptions of Arizona and Georgia.
Yes- I also believe DeSantis would make a far superior President to Trump, but I don't see how he wins a general election given the massive edge the Democrats already hold in a fair election, and we now have massive mail-in-voting that only enhances that edge.
Antisemitism never died in America. People who have made antisemitic remarks in my presence did so not realizing that I am Jewish. I think my experience is fairly typical. Antisemitic remarks don't particularly bother me, as I figure they go with the territory, and in at least one instance I recall a fellow tribe member and I sharing amusement over an antisemitic comment made in our presence, but calling for the mass extermination of Jews crosses one of my red lines. I have to add that I am a bit annoyed about these wealthy Jewish donors withholding their donations to Harvard and other elite universities only after the events of October 7th and the testimony of those 3 women college presidents. I stopped donating to my alma mater at least a decade ago, and I made it clear at the time that antisemitism was my top concern, though I also mentioned the social justice crap the alumni magazine was peddling. Where have these people been?
"A man in all the world's new fashion planted,
That hath a mint of phrases in his brain."
Who said that?
When it comes to antisemitism there are three things to be optimistic about.
1. Israel - it continues to be an amazing success story and its success doesn’t depend on educating against antisemitism. Iron Dome, IDF and SLBMs are pretty darn effective.
2. The United States - within the U.S., creative destruction is the ultimate work-around to fashionable beliefs. Yes you have to build new, but again, this doesn’t require educating against antisemitism.
3. Education - it’s very slow, but can be very effective. It might take a generation. Tiny textbooks, chants, songs, and direct education work surprisingly well if you own the elementary school.
"Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired." -- Jonathan Swift
I recommend listening to the Akhil Amar podcast episodes with Baude and Paulsen on the 14 amendment decision. I'm troubled by the implications of this but the reasoning is in fact rock solid -- this is the law of the land. It might be better for the country if SCOTUS decides the case wrongly and finds for Trump, but the originalist support for the CO decision is very strong.
The best legal defense the opponents of the decision have come up with is that the president doesn't count as an "officer of the US." Supposedly the Reconstruction era framers of the amendment wanted to bar Lee and Davis from serving in Congress but not from the presidency. Ridiculous.
Arnold wrote "...I see (Trump's) supporters as failing to realize there are better alternatives in the Republican field." That depends upon one's assessment of the challenges we face. If one sees the government as deeply corrupt, incompetent,,and dangerous to the civil order then someone like Trump who is bent on change rather than a more conventional go-along to get-along candidate is preferable. Things have gotten so bad with the abuse of the law to try to derail Trump's candidacy that it has become imperative to support it, regardless of other concerns, in order to thwart what amounts to an attempted coup d'etat by the Left.
In the first essay in the first volume of his collected essays, a review, dated August, 1825, of a previously lost collection of Milton essays entitled “Treatise on Christian Doctrine, compiled from the Holy Scriptures alone,” Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay observes that “Throughout the volume are discernible the traces of a powerful and independent mind, emancipated from the influence of authority, and devoted to the search of truth.” Which would appear to offer support to Dr. Kling’s thinking, after, all, what greater authority is there than fashion? Minds “emancipated from the influence of authority” do seem to be a recurring problem for the sort of autocratic uniparty establishment types whose characters are best illustrated and represented by someone like Harvard’s Claudine Gay who perhaps better than anyone else might be considered the face of the uniparty establishment in the USA.
Macaulay offers a few more bons mots, perhaps demonstrating how the more things change, the more they stay the same, observing that “The men of our time are not to be converted or perverted by quartos.”
And prophesizing:
“A few more days, and this essay will follow the Defensio Populi [a reference, I assume, to Milton’s first defense of the English people, “Defensio pro Populo Anglicano,” available in English translation at: https://constitution.org/2-Authors/milton/first_defence.htm] to the dust and silence of the upper shelf. The name of its author, and the remarkable circumstances attending its publication, will secure to it a certain degree of attention. For a month or two it will occupy a few minutes of chat in every drawingroom, and a few columns in every magazine; and it will then, to borrow the elegant language of the playbills, be withdrawn, to make room for the forthcoming novelties.”
Perhaps a declining interest in the reading of books might be excused if books truly are of such ephemeral relevance?
Happily for Milton enthusiasts, however, Macaulay's prophecy, although on the mark apparently in theological circles, might be considered a bit wide of the mark in market terms judging by the wide assortment of editions of the book readily available on Amazon.
Macaulay was not a bad guy at all, actually quite liberal, and well worth reading. I believe he simply, and who doesn’t, preferred Milton’s poetry, writing in the same essay:
“We often hear of the magical influence of poetry. The expression in general means nothing: but, applied to the writings of Milton, it is most appropriate. His poetry acts like an incantation. Its merit lies less in its obvious meaning than in its occult power. There would seem, at first sight, to be no more in his words than in other words. But they are words of enchantment.”
Amen.
Perhaps anonymously leaving a copy of Paradise Lost where one’s favorite social media addict will find it is the ideal form of sedition. Enriching while simultaneously cracking the establishment media’s enervating bubble. Revolutions have been launched with less.
(all quotes cut and pasted from: https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/macaulay-critical-and-historical-essays-vol-1)
100% Agreed! But the power of fashion has long been evident. Remember the Dutch tulip mania? Well, me neither, since it happened about 400 years ago, but fortunately someone remembered to write about it. And that bunch, almost entirely literate Protestants, might’ve known better but were held captive by their own maniacal impulses and greed anyway. We just seem to be having the damndest time overcoming human nature, despite all the cool stuff we come up with. A couple days ago, amidst a mid-Manhattan crush of holiday revelers, I witnessed a group of young women posing for photos together, doffing their bulky coats in 35 degree weather to better capture their youthful cuteness in front of a massive, sparkly Christmas tree in the background. It was kinda funny, really. It occurred to me that it wouldn’t have happened quite the same way, if at all, in the days of film cameras.
You wrote: "Andrey Mir has sold me on the idea that what I think of as rational, scientific thinking comes from the way that our minds are shaped by reading. But as the written word gives way to electronic media, we are going to retreat from logic, objectivity, and the pursuit of truth."
Some comments:
- This sounds plausible, but perhaps it's not reading but [depth of understanding and exploration of topics beyond the superficial] that is in decline?
- Higher ed academics read a lot, no, and that hasn't stopped many from being ideologically captured and discarding/manipulating logic, objectivity, the pursuit of truth.
- MB the decline is due to: increased political power over our lives, + virtue-signaling having more value to individual political players that actually doing good, solving societal/group problems?
We can’t overcome antisemitism any more than we can generally overcome any other evil within the human heart. We need to strive to overcome the evil within our own hearts. And we must continue, always, to speak against evil at every opportunity.
My understanding of Rob Henderson's luxury beliefs is that - beyond merely being fashionable - such beliefs will very often incur significant penalties/ costs on the people that are putatively being helped by those same luxury beliefs.
GameStop was seen as a way to stick it to the industry investors - they were short selling it, so the idea was to buy up the stock so they couldn't fulfill their commitments. It didn't work all that well; they just stopped trading in it and waited out those guys.
The price looks like it recovered. No idea if it actually was taken over.
Luxury beliefs continue until they cause pain. This is a retail process not wholesale; if you personally aren't experiencing pain, it's a rare individual who will change beliefs just because there is pain elsewhere.
Almost 3 decades ago as I sat with a then powerful member of Microsoft on a safari I was guiding in Kenya, I listened to the spiel about the future dominated by electronic media and I told her, "But this will lead to the re-barbarization of the Western mind, cut off from the lexalogical filter of reading and writing."
Shout out to Virginia Postrel on similar related ideas, and her earlier book
The Substance of Style.
When someone chooses style, the fashion they follow become part of their chosen, fashion tribe, their identity.
Jew hatred is more accurate than antisemitism, just as pro abortion is more accurate than pro choice. The Fashion is to be less clear, like “duplicative language” which will probably not replace plagiarism.
Trump haters are trying to make it a fashion to claim Jan 6 was an insurrection, and among elites it mostly is. But normal folk know it’s a lie, tho it remains a Dem fashion to hate Trump.
Luxury beliefs are not always fashionable, but are always held by rich or privileged folk who won’t suffer if their minority belief becomes the majority belief. Like the idea small shoplifters should not be punished.
Even poor folk can have fashionable beliefs, like it’s OK to shoplift. It’s even cool to do so, and you’re even a dumb sucker if you don’t steal. A dumb fu**. (Fu** seems more pronounceable than f*ck) calling somebody a sucker, or shaming them, is an important mechanism for enforcing the fashionable ideas, which become the temporary norm.
I really liked and still like Lou Reed’s live Take No Prisoners album, full of vulgar fuck speech, especially his 10 min story of how he wrote Walk on the Wild Side, where the colored girls sing. Vulgar speech, especially “fuck speech” became fashionable, even tho it wasn’t quite a luxury belief. Tho the Michael Lewis book Liar’s Poker included a character, maybe Jewish, the Piranha, whose every fucking other word was fucking emphasized so you had to be some kind of dumb fuck to not fucking understand that only fucking wimps and losers were too fucking polite to turn their fucking noses up at those who were cool enough to occasionally use the word fuck.
I enjoyed that kind of fashionable late 70s verbal rebellion.
WTF? Didn’t I realize if you get rid of one set of taboo words, there would be another set? No I didn’t.
And Blazing Saddles remains hilarious, especially the sheriff.
How can you be so relaxed about a Trump presidency? The man lies incessantly, assaults women, and cheats. He has said he wants to be a dictator. He will leave NATO. He will do untold damage to the constitutional order at home, and the peace of the world. Almost no one who worked with him in his first term will support him or vote for him. Most of them are issuing stern warnings.
I agree with a lot of what you write Arnold, but...I am exasperated