8 Comments
founding

The theory that cerebrospinal fluid conducts significant amount of NIR photons into the brain and that these photons somehow interact with the brain in a meaningful way (lighting it up - instead of just heating it) is a bit quack.

Expand full comment

Brink Lindsey writes about the need to pivot our society to a Plan B because of the challenges in our society that you cite here. But what kind of political solution do you think our present dysfunctional government and our divided and distracted electorate would settle upon? It would either be forced upon the 49% by the 51%, leading to chaos, or it would be some half-baked compromise leading to chaos. The odds of a near term political Plan B being better than staying put are basically nil. I would much rather we stick as close as possible to what we have now (which, as Lindsey mentions, is actually a very good place to be historically speaking) until our culture is in a better place for making decisions. For now the push for radical change has to be cultural (toward unity and reality) rather than political.

Expand full comment

I don't know enough about Israeli politics to add much. Let me propose a caricature and see if anyone can talk me out of it.

1) People elect the legislature.

2) The legislature passes laws.

3) The Supreme Court (Israeli Equivalent) can reject and interpret those laws.

4) If the legislature doesn't like the interpretation or rejection, tough luck.

5) The Supreme Court members are not elected or appointed by elected officials.

6) The people selecting members for the Supreme Court all seem to come from a certain segment of Israeli society which is not representative of the whole.

7) The Supreme Court says its only enforcing "human rights" or some such construct, but their interpretation of "human rights" feels awfully like the disputable political opinions of a particular class in Israeli society and often could not win majority support.

----

The only analogy I can think of is how I feel about the US Supreme Court, minus the ability to at least indirectly select judges via elected officials. I often feel the US Supreme Court oversteps its bounds and acts in a partial political manner.

Expand full comment
author

See this article: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/04/23/restoring_israels_founding_balance_149139.html

My reading is that BDS (Bibi Derangement Syndrome) is what is fanning the crisis.

Expand full comment

Israel mostly doesn't have a written constitution that is superordinate to the legislature.

One caveat is that the court did decide some human rights legislation really is superordinate. Go figure.

Perhaps more importantly, there is always the power of interpretation.

Expand full comment

I don't know enough about what the Israeli Court considers a "human right" to know if its out of line or not, but my personal experience is that what modern courts consider human rights often aren't really human rights but partisan political beliefs.

Expand full comment

I think the big difference is that the Right in Israel is going to only increase its majority over time. Being surrounded by people who literally want to wipe you off the face of the Earth has a political effect.

Expand full comment

You pretty much nailed it. It isn't unlike the reaction to the fact that Trump and the Republicans were going to get to choose Scalia and Kennedy's successor for SCOTUS after the 2016 election. And it isn't unlike the agony the left has shown over the right's sudden interest in running local schools boards.

Expand full comment