URLs du Jour

2018-12-10

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  • I was pointed to this David Bahnsen article at Forbes thanks to a tweet by National Review publisher Jack Fowler, who said "I wish to hell [National Review Online] published this." High praise! But on to the show: Amazon Has Teed Up A Generation Of Conservative Electoral Success, And We Apparently Don't Want It.

    It may seem that there has been ample conservative opposition to the recent announcement of Amazon’s sweetheart deals to open an office expansion in Queens, NY and Arlington, VA, but the fact of the matter is that the opposition has been grossly inadequate, unless conservatives are content to let Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez grab the mantle of principled opposition to corporate welfare.  At National Review, Jim Geraghty did a stellar job whacking the announcements for what they were – a celebration of crony capitalism.  Other writers took on the issue here and there, but the national press coverage of opposition to the deal was overwhelmingly from the left, and virtually no high profile public elected officials on the right took it on at all.

    David's right, of course. And he doesn't even mention Wisconsin soon-to-be-ex-Governor Scott Walker's Foxconn deal, which probably lost him the election. As many wise people have said over the years: there's a huge distinction between being pro-market and pro-business. If Republicans can't learn that, they really are the stupid party.


  • Two Brit university professors, Matthew Goodwin and Eric Kaufmann, write at Quillette: What Happened When We Tried to Debate Immigration.

    Immigration and diversity politics dominate our political and public debates. Disagreements about these issues lie behind the rise of populist politics on the left and the right, as well as the growing polarization of our societies more widely. Unless we find a way of side-stepping the extremes and debating these issues in an evidence-led, analytical way then the moderate, pluralistic middle will buckle and give way.

    This is why, as two university professors who work on these issues, we decided to help organize and join a public debate about immigration and ethnic change. The debate, held in London on December 6, was a great success, featuring a nuanced and evidence-based discussion attended by 400 people. It was initially titled, “Is Rising Ethnic Diversity a Threat to the West?” This was certainly a provocative title, designed to draw in a large audience who might hold strong views on the topic but who would nonetheless be exposed to a moderated and evidence-led debate. Though we would later change the title, we couldn’t escape its powerful logic: On the night itself, we repeatedly returned to this phrasing because it is the clearest way of distinguishing competing positions.

    "… and you won't believe what happened next!" Or, actually, if you've been following this stuff for awhile, you will be able to predict what happened next. Slanders and slurs about "white nationalism", "nativism", "racism", … Activists made no effort was made to engage with the issue because that would "normalise far-right hate."


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    I read Jason Brennan's Against Democracy (link at right) a couple years back, and liked it quite a bit. He's now a contributor to Bleeding Heart Libertarians, and his most recent article attempts to discover the purpose of political philosophy. And the answer is… The Purpose of Political Philosophy Is to Rationalize Evil. He imagines a hyper-logical Vulcan, T’Luminareth, to whom he gives the standard answer: "The purpose of political philosophy is to determine the standards by which we judge institutions good or bad, just or unjust.”

    She shook her head. “No, that’s not right. Perhaps that’s what Earthling political philosophy aspires to do. But that’s not what it does. Rather, for the most part, Earthling political philosophy attempts to justify holding government agents and political actors to absurdly low moral standards. Nearly all of your philosophers—from Plato to Aristotle to Hobbes to Rousseau to Marx to Mill to Rawls to Habermas—spent most of their time trying to prove that governments and their agents are exempt from normal, commonsense moral obligations. You Earthlings seem to think your governments and their agents are magical, as if they’re surrounded by force field that both relieves them of their basic moral duties and requires you to treat them as if they have a privileged moral status over the rest of you. Hundreds of years ago, you believed in the divine right of kings. You Earthlings realized that was a mistake. Yet rather than reject the idea altogether, you’ve imbued all government agents, including yourselves as when you vote, with a magical and majestic exemption from normal standards of right and wrong.”

    Provocative! Jason has a new book coming out in a couple days, and I've put it on the things-to-read list.


  • At the Federalist, David Harsanyi writes In Defense Of 'Dark Money'.

    Although the term “dark money” sounds ominous and unsavory, it’s just a misleading neologism adopted by activist journalists to make completely legal contributions to political causes they disagree with sound creepy and illegitimate. It’s become dogma among journalists to treat “dark money” as an attack on democracy. It’s not.

    The use of the phrase “dark money” reminds me of words like “loophole,” which, in its new political parlance, means “any act, although wholly legitimate, that Democrats have yet to figure out how to regulate or tax.” It’s a rhetorical shortcut meant to intimate wrongdoing.

    David notes that the spooky term is deployed asymmetrically in the press against groups leaning conservative/libertarian.

    But the general principal holds: people can (or at least should be able to) judge the quality of arguments without knowing the identity or funding source of the people making it. Yes, sometimes it's interesting information. But it's never necessary.

    If you find yourself reading an argument against your position and wondering "who paid for this?", it's maybe because you can't otherwise refute it.


  • A print-Reason article by Matt Welch is released from behind the paywall, and it's a sobering look at the election results: The Libertarian Party Future, Perennially Out of Reach.

    "He's going to finish certainly no worse than second, and maybe first," Libertarian Party (L.P.) 2016 vice presidential nominee Bill Weld enthused about Massachusetts state auditor candidate Dan Fishman in mid-October. And once Fishman grabs all those votes, Weld declared, "[We're going] to make a list of every campaign for whatever office this year that Libertarians fare no worse than second, and then we're going to take that and publicize it strongly. I think that's going to be a crevasse in the two-party monopoly."

    It looked like Weld might be onto something two weeks later when The Boston Globe took the highly unusual step of endorsing the L.P. candidate for a job that's been held, in all living memory, by Democrats. "Fishman would bring a sorely needed independent streak to the office," the region's dominant newspaper proclaimed. "Give this Libertarian a shot."

    Massachusetts voters declined the advice. When the smoke cleared on November 6, the would-be Libertarian auditor for the government of Taxachusetts finished not first, not second, but a distant third place, with a desultory 4.2 percent of the vote. The effort was enough to give the party automatic statewide ballot access for 2020—no small achievement—but not enough to stave off the national wave of nausea that afflicted many libertarians on election day.

    Matt also points out that incumbent New Hampshire Libertarian state representatives Brandon Phinney and Caleb Dyer lost badly. He could have, but doesn't, note that the LPNH lost the automatic ballot access that it won in 2016, when its gubernatorial candidate didn't come close to meeting the 4% vote requirement. Sigh.


  • And at Inside Sources, Michael Graham piles on the woes for Senator Fauxcahontas: Elizabeth Warren's 2020 "Tribe" Troubles Don't End With DNA Debacle.

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s struggles to overcome the impact of her unproven—and likely incorrect—claims of Native American ancestry are well known. This week the New York Times reported that Warren and her close aides are finally realizing what many political observers have long known, that her strategy to use a DNA test to resolve the controversy was a fiasco.

    But Warren’s been working on another effort to burnish her Native American bona fides that could be just as problematic: H­­elping the Massachusetts-based Mashpee Wampanoag tribe secure a $1 billion casino project in southeastern Massachusetts. As a result, Warren is making a strange bedfellow of a scandal-plagued, billion-dollar multi-national corporation–exactly the sort of company she has railed against at an outspoken economic populist.

    Casinos are designed to encourage people to make bad choices with their money. You'd think that might be something Elizabeth Warren would be against. Is she sacrificing her principles in order to curry favor with Native American constituents? Or is there something even more corrupt going on?


Last Modified 2024-01-24 11:52 AM EDT