■ Proverbs
17:8 looks into the minds of bribe-givers:
8 A bribe is seen as a charm by the one who gives it;
they think success will come at every turn.
Well, maybe. But that
brings to mind the classic quote from mid-19th century Republican
pol
Simon
Cameron (our pic du jour): "An honest politician is one who, when he is bought,
will stay bought."
Cameron's
Wikipedia
entry does not mention that quote, but there is this
entertaining anecdote [links/citation removed]:
Cameron was nominated for President, but gave his support to Abraham
Lincoln at the 1860 Republican National Convention. Lincoln, as part
of a political bargain, named Cameron Secretary of War. Because of
allegations of corruption and lax management, he was forced to
resign early in 1862. His corruption was so notorious that a
Pennsylvania congressman, Thaddeus Stevens, when discussing
Cameron's honesty with Lincoln, told Lincoln that "I don't think
that he would steal a red hot stove." When Cameron demanded
Stevens retract this statement, Stevens told Lincoln "I believe I
told you he would not steal a red-hot stove. I will now take that
back."
Were pols really so much more clever with insults back then?
■ Pun Salad likes Jonathan Haidt, and a version of his "Wriston
Lecture" to the Manhattan Institute is now online: The
Age of Outrage.
(Pun Salad
previously
quoted a portion of the lecture behind the WSJ paywall.)
I’d like you to consider an idea that I’ll call “the fine-tuned
liberal democracy.” It begins by looking backward a few million
generations and tracing our ancestry, from tree-dwelling apes to
land-dwelling apes, to upright-walking apes, whose hands were freed
up for tool use, to larger-brained hominids who made weapons as well
as tools, and then finally to homo sapiens, who painted
cave walls and painted their faces and danced around campfires and
worshipped gods and murdered each other in large numbers.
When we look back at the ways our ancestors lived, there’s no getting around it: we are tribal primates. We are exquisitely designed and adapted by evolution for life in small societies with intense, animistic religion and violent intergroup conflict over territory. We love tribal living so much that we invented sports, fraternities, street gangs, fan clubs, and tattoos. Tribalism is in our hearts and minds. We’ll never stamp it out entirely, but we can minimize its effects because we are a behaviorally flexible species. We can live in many different ways, from egalitarian hunter-gatherer groups of 50 individuals to feudal hierarchies binding together millions. And in the last two centuries, a lot of us have lived in large, multi-ethnic secular liberal democracies. So clearly that is possible. But how much margin of error do we have in such societies?
Well, nobody knows for sure. Haidt gives a number of reasons for
pessimism. And I'd quibble with some of his details. But his lecture
is very much
worth your time.
■ An Onion-style headline from the Babylon Bee caught
my eye: ‘Internet
Service Providers Should Not Be Able To Decide What People Can See
Online,’ Says Man Who Decides What People Can See Online. That
would be…
Tech titan Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, came out strongly
against the repeal of net neutrality Friday, calling the rollback of
the Obama-era regulation an “injustice.”
“Internet Service Providers should not be able to decide what people can
see online,” the man who decides what two billion people can see online
every day said in a Facebook video that was placed in front of the
precise amount of people he wished. “It’s a violation of a free and open
internet.”
“Furthermore, ISPs should not be able to charge more for certain content,” Zuckerberg intoned, though part of his $523 billion company’s revenue comes from throttling the reach of publishers’ content unless the publisher pays Facebook to show their content to people who signed up to see it anyway.
The Babylon Bee bills itself as "Your Trusted Source For
Christian News Satire", and I think I will check it out.
■ National Review's Charles C. W. Cooke notices a problem
with the Washington Post's allegedly-conservative voices: Jennifer
Rubin Is Everything She Hates about Trump Worshippers. As just
one example:
If Trump is indeed a tyrant, he is a tyrant of the mind. And how potent is the control he exerts over Rubin’s. So sharp and so sudden are her reversals as to make effective parody impossible. When President Obama agreed to the Paris Climate Accord, Rubin left her readers under no illusions as to the scale of her disapproval. The deal, she proposed, was “ephemeral,” “a piece of paper,” “a group wish,” a “nonsense” that would achieve “nothing.” That the U.S. had been made a party to a covenant so “devoid of substance,” she added, illustrated the “fantasy world” in which the Obama administration lived, and was reflective of Obama’s preference for “phony accomplishments,” his tendency to distract, and his base’s craven willingness to eat up any “bill of goods” they were served. At least it did until President Trump took America out of it, at which point adhering to the position she had theretofore held became a “senseless act,” a “political act,” “a dog whistle to the far right,” and “a snub to ‘elites’” that had been calibrated to please the “climate-change denial, right-wing base that revels in scientific illiteracy” (a base that presumably enjoyed Rubin’s blog until January 20th, 2017). To abandon the “ephemeral” “piece of paper,” Rubin submitted, would “materially damage our credibility and our persuasiveness” and represent conduct unbecoming of “the leader of the free world.” One is left wondering how, exactly, any president is supposed to please her.
I think the answer to that last bit is "Be named Mitt Romney."
I used to read Ms. Rubin's blog, but tuned out due to a combination
of her shrill content-free invective and the painfulness of the WaPo
paywall.
■ Justice Don Willett has been
confirmed
to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals (on a shamefully partisan 50-47
Senate vote). That's great news, and, even better, he's
tweeting
again. And reminds me that I missed the 244th anniversary of…