URLs du Jour

2022-07-17

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  • Hey, you remember that old Biden campaign slogan? It's over there, our Amazon Product du Jour. Still on sale. And it's not actually "old", it was just two years ago.

    And now, Matthew Continetti is wondering: Why Should We Believe Biden?. It springs off Biden's recent pledge to, as a "last resort", prevent Iran from getting nukes. We'd like to think, says Continetti, that Biden "means what he says."

    Does he? In the spring of 2021, President Biden was asked about the record numbers of illegal immigrants who began crossing the southern border after he reversed his predecessor’s asylum policies. Biden dismissed the question. The migrant surge was “seasonal,” he said. It happens “every single solitary year.” Not like this, it doesn’t. The season ended long ago. The migration has continued for a year and a half. Last month saw the largest number of illegal crossings on record. Biden’s flippant answer was grossly mistaken, to say the least. He doesn’t seem to care. In fact, if he’s successful in ending Title 42 protocols allowing for the swift repatriation of illegal migrants, he will continue to make the problem worse.

    In the summer of 2021, President Biden gave a speech on the inflation that was starting to appear in the economic data. “Our experts believe and the data shows that most of the price increases we’ve seen are — were expected and expected to be temporary,” he said. Like the “seasonal” migration on the southern border, the “temporary” inflation continues. Last month’s number was higher than expectations. Real earnings fell 4 percent. The president’s economic policies have resulted in a decline in Americans’ standard of living. Nothing he says on the issue has changed the public’s dismal view of his job performance.

    It was only a year ago, remember, that President Biden was asked if a Taliban conquest of Afghanistan was inevitable. “No,” he answered. A month later, the holy warriors rolled into Kabul and America was forced into a panicked and dangerous rescue operation that left 13 U.S. servicemen killed and Afghanistan abandoned. Throughout this disaster, Biden spoke and acted as if everything was going according to plan, as if everything was under control. By Labor Day 2021, the public had severed its connection with a president whom it had placed in office simply because it was tired of the incumbent’s excesses. Biden might as well spend the rest of this year in Rehoboth Beach. He operates without public attention and without public support. His words carry no meaning. They don’t land, they don’t register, they don’t signify.

    Even the "fact checkers" who famously go much easier on Biden than they did on Trump are forced to bail these days: WaPo, July 8: Biden’s inaccurate claim about writing law review articles on privacy. Politifact, July 13: Joe Biden’s dubious math on the federal income tax burden.


  • For more on honesty… here's Jonah Goldberg on Lying Liars and the Marks Who Love Them.

    I know it may not seem like it, but I’m actually weirdly tolerant of wrongness. It may not always come across that way in my writing, but that’s because writing about and debating ideas is different from dealing with people. I kind of like wrong people—i.e. people with wrong opinions and beliefs—if they come by their wrongness honestly. I’ve had fun and interesting conversations with everyone from animists, to Communists, to all manner of reactionaries (I even loved a whole book by a guy who thinks we’d be better off as serfs). Hell, I’m really good friends with David French, and he thinks Aquaman was a great movie.

    What I have a big problem with is lies and the lying liars who tell them. Part of it is just the insult. Some lies rest on the assumption that I’m stupid enough to believe them and cowardly enough not to say anything. But it’s also the feeling of being manipulated. If you’re a big sports fan, you’ve probably met someone who claimed to be a lifelong fan of your team when you know they got into it only when, say, the Mets started doing well. If they said, “Yeah, I wasn’t really into them until recently, but now I’ve got the fever,” you’d have no problem. But when they try to act like they’ve put in the time all those years, it can piss you off. It’s not the best analogy, but that feeling is sort of what I’m talking about.

    Anyway, if you want to tell me that Stalin was a great leader who had to do terrible things to drag the Soviet Union into the 20th century, I can have a fun conversation with you. Even more fun is finding the rare fool who actually buys the more theoretical arguments for Stalin. If you believe he was a necessary instrument of the Hegelian dialectic to hasten the inevitable triumph of scientific socialism, I can talk to you for hours. But if you start telling me that Stalin didn’t kill lots of people or some other B.S., I’ll start to lose my temper. And if it becomes clear that you don’t actually believe what you’re peddling but you think it’s necessary to lie for the cause, I’ll really get angry.

    It’s worth emphasizing that these are two different kinds of people. The former is peddling lies in good faith. The latter is actually telling lies. It’s the difference between being wrong and doing wrong.

    Which brings me to Steve Bannon.

    Click through for Bannon's relationship with the truth.

    A lot of the decay in our social fabric is caused by the mentality that "the Other Side lies, so I better do it too." (Or, more generally, "dirty tactics by the Other Side justify my dirty tactics.")


  • Speaking of liars and their marks… Price St. Clair publicizes A 2020 Election Report ‘By Conservatives, For Conservatives’.

    Eight prominent conservatives released a report on Thursday examining “every claim of fraud and miscount put forward by former President Trump and his advocates” following the 2020 presidential election and reached an “unequivocal” conclusion: “Joe Biden was the choice of a majority of the Electors, who themselves were the choice of the majority of voters in their states.”

    I occasionally dipped into "stolen election" claims. I mainly encountered serious issues of confirmation bias: trumpeting allegations of fraud, no matter how flimsy; dismissing rebuttals to fraud allegations simply because they're from RINOs, or something. Obvious grifters like Jovan Pulitzer and (it saddens me to say this) Dinesh D'Souza are lionized unskeptically.


  • I see a possible Broadway smash hit musical… Veronique de Rugy says we should Shed No Tears for the Floundering Global Tax Cartel.

    Implementing a global tax cartel is hard. This lesson is being learned by the bureaucrats who dreamt up an effort to prevent businesses from taking advantage of the fact that some countries impose lower taxes than do other countries. A year after 130 jurisdictions agreed in principle to institute a global minimum tax rate of 15% on corporate profits and make it harder for companies to shift their tax liabilities from higher- to lower-taxing countries, the early result is a delay and buyers' remorse.

    The global tax agreement, overseen by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), has two main pillars. Pillar One is meant to allow governments to tax digital businesses that sell services in a country but have no physical presence there, and hence weren't previously taxed there. These companies, of course, are taxed in the country where they are based or where their intellectual property is located, which (not surprisingly) is often in jurisdictions with lower taxes. Just as you don't attract bees with vinegar, you don't attract corporations by promising to tax them heavily.

    As Mitt Romney observed, and was widely derided for observing, corporations are people. Politicians like to pretend otherwise, but raising taxes on corporations takes money out of someone's pocket: customers or shareholders. Also known as "people".


  • The University Near Here makes the news again. Thanks to the flurry of publicity about the James Webb Space Telescope, UNH professor Chanda Prescod-Weinstein got another uptick in publicity herself. Here's the College Fix, which isn't impressed: ‘Queer agender’ feminist physicist still cheesed at ‘homophobic’ NASA telescope.

    As NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope is sending back its first remarkable images of our universe, “queer agender” feminist physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein wants you to know she remains miffed at the telescope’s moniker.

    Late last year, the University of New Hampshire professor and three other scientists demanded NASA ditch Webb’s name from the project due to his alleged homophobia.

    Prior to Webb’s appointment as head of NASA in 1961, he allegedly played a role in the so-called “Lavender Scare” as a State Department official. In response to a petition started by Prescod-Weinstein et. al., NASA investigated the issue last summer but concluded there was “no evidence at this point that warrants changing the name of the [telescope].”

    If you'd like to check out CPW's TED Talk on dark matter, here you go. "The universe is more queer and fantastical than it looks to the naked eye." I think she likes saying "queer".


Last Modified 2024-01-17 9:32 AM EDT