URLs du Jour

2018-12-13

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

  • At Quillette, Conor Barnes does a bit of psychologizing on Sad Radicals.

    When I became an anarchist I was 18, depressed, anxious, and ready to save the world. I moved in with other anarchists and worked at a vegetarian co-op cafe. I protested against student tuition, prison privatization, and pipeline extensions. I had lawyer’s numbers sharpied on my ankle and I assisted friends who were pepper-sprayed at demos. I tabled zines, lived with my “chosen family,” and performed slam poems about the end of the world. While my radical community was deconstructing gender, monogamy, and mental health, we lived and breathed concepts and tools like call-outs, intersectionality, cultural appropriation, trigger warnings, safe spaces, privilege theory, and rape culture.

    Conor's thesis: "The ideology and norms of radicalism have evolved to produce toxic, paranoid, depressed subjects." I usually don't like this sort of psychologizing, but I'll make an exception because (a) Conor is extrapolating from his own experience and observations; (b) I've kind of suspected this anyway. It explains why lefties are so diligently humorless. Or, more exactly, why their "humor" is so bereft of fun.


  • At Cato, Chris Edwards tells the sad story of one more massive, but lousy, piece of Federal legislation: Farm Bill Socialism in Senate.

    Republicans have criticized the socialism of Democrats such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but they should reflect on their own party’s socialist vote in the Senate yesterday. The upper chamber voted 87-13 for the bloated monstrosity known as the farm bill, which funds farm subsidies and food stamps. Republicans in the Senate voted in favor 38-13.

    It is not hyperbole to call the farm bill “socialism.” It will spend $867 billion over the next decade, thus pushing up government debt and taxes. It includes large-scale wealth redistribution in the form of food stamps. At its core is central planning, which is obvious when you consider that the bill is 807 pages of legalese laying out excruciating details on crop prices, acres, yields, and other micromanagement. Furthermore, the bill lines the pockets of wealthy elites (landowners), which is a central feature of socialism in practice around the world.

    It also passed overwhelmingly in the House, 369-47. At Reason, Eric Boehm chimes in: it "somehow manages to suck even more than most farm bills."


  • At NR, Kevin D. Williamson writes on the recent Shutdown Theater & the Spectacle of Trump.

    The problem is that the Republicans have the right politics but the wrong policy. (Often, the opposite is the case.) Building a wall would bring some benefits and would present the Trump administration with an important symbolic victory, but it is at best an incomplete policy, and in some ways a bad one. For much of the U.S.-Mexico border, a wall is neither practical nor desirable, something that would be clear to the denizens of Washington if they spent much time on the parts of the border that are not within micturition distance of a Starbucks in San Diego.

    As a long time NR reader, of course I know what "micturition" means.

    But as KDW notes, the problem with the wall is (a) it's massively expensive and (b) it won't work. But it's symbolic for Trump, and he's looking for a "win". For himself, not the country.


  • At AEI, Jonah Goldberg chronicles one more sign of decline: Trump trouble shows we've abandoned morality for mere legality.

    In Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s legendary 1978 commencement address at Harvard, he lamented how in the West, law had replaced higher notions of morality.

    “Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution,” he observed. “If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required. Nobody will mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk. It would sound simply absurd.”

    This is a point that conservatives once understood.

    Well, some of us still understand it.


  • And Kyle Smith reviews Aquaman at NR: unfortunately, it Stinks Like Last Month’s Fish. Reading Kyle's review is more fun than you'll have at the movie, I think:

    Aquaman’s back story is like a discarded draft of Splash: Atlanna, the Queen of Atlantis (Nicole Kidman, with 30 years digitally erased from her face) washes ashore in Maine, where a kindly lighthouse keeper (Temuera Morrison) nurses her back to health. Their son, Arthur (Jason Momoa), combines both of his parents’ qualities and is described as a bridge between the land and the sea, which is not actually how bridges work, unless they’ve got major design flaws.

    Jason Momoa was on SNL last week. His one joke, repeated in multiple sketches, wasn't funny.


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