I subscribe to Jonah's take here:
this is ungood. It feels like a QVC segment where it ends with her finishing her margarita and saying, “that’s why our healing crystals are 50% off for the first 100 callers.” https://t.co/XyZ4Ak5tgv
— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahDispatch) November 27, 2024
But I also hold out the possibility that we are looking at the result of more than one edible.
If you'd like more reasons to be Thankful, Scott Johnson of Power Line has a longer video: A message from Kamala Harris. His preview/review:
But wait! There is more. The bizarre 29 seconds are excerpted from the nearly 15-minute video below. It’s a thank-you to supporters. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Harris’s vice presidential running mate on the Democratic ticket, introduces Harris for the first three-and-a-half-minutes. Harris follows for the next 10 (excruciating) minutes. Harris reminds her supporters that they raised $1.4 billion for her campaign. They remember! They wonder where it all went. Quotable quote: “The work must continues.” Stop talking!
Who knew that Marianne Williamson would not be the weirdest Democrat running for President this year?
Also of note:
-
But the cartoons are still good, right? At Tablet, Armin Rosen is impressed as he watches a printed parade go by: The New Yorker’s Cavalcade of Ignorance. Twelve essays covering twenty print pages in the mag, and the summary is: "Some of the greatest minds in America have gathered in the pages of the country’s leading weekly to declare how little they understand things now, and how little they care to understand them moving forward." Example:
“American Fascist,” Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s contribution, uses some variation on the word “fascist” 44 times across two and a half pages, along with 15 combined mentions of Hitler, Mussolini, and Putin. One imagines the interior of Snyder’s brain as a scarcely endurable popcorn machine, a rhythm of repetitive hissing and clicking that produces buckets of nearly identical thought kernels. Perhaps silence would be even harder for Snyder to endure. He offers one accidental moment of reflection, which serves to frame the entire New Yorker feature: “A fascist is unconcerned with the connection between words and meaning … When a fascist calls a liberal a ‘fascist,’ the term begins to work in a different way, as the servant of a particular person, rather than as a bearer of meaning.”
I shall not deploy my George Orwell quotes on "fascism" today. You're welcome.
But if you missed them the first N times, here's my latest.
-
"May you live in interesting times." As we've noted before, that's not a Chinese curse. But nevertheless someone seems to have loosed it upon us. Kevin D. Williamson looks at one symptom: Procedure or Chaos?
If you will forgive a ponderous opening question, I have one:What is justice?
[…]
One of the sharp bright dividing lines between populists—right and left—and conservatives and traditional liberals is that very question. It comes down to matters of procedure vs. matters of outcome, and how we weight those respectively. The economic case is the simplest to understand. The classical liberal-conservative view emphasizes procedure: If the rules have been followed, if nobody has been deprived unjustly of his property or his ability to work and earn and trade, if property rights and contract and the rule of law all are respected, then the distribution of wealth and income that resorts of this is just, or at least not positively unjust, even when the results are not precisely what we would like. The populist view often emphasizes the role of luck and happenstance in economic life—some people have natural talents, some are born to better-off parents, some people just have bad luck, some people are victimized by callous employers or other economic actors whose deeds may technically satisfy the formal rules of the system but are infused with an underlying malice or inhuman indifference. What matters from their point of view is the justice or injustice of the outcome—if Elon Musk is a wicked man (says the lefty populist), then he does not deserve to be so wealthy, especially when there are more deserving people who have less. Populists will point out that the system is far from perfect; the classical liberal-conservative view is that the justice of the system doesn’t depend on its being perfect, only on its being applied to everyone equally, and those rules of course are subject to revision, but only carefully.
Populists feel aggrieved by the state of things—the state of their own lives or the state of the republic—and their grievances are central to their understanding of the world. About 89 percent of populism comes down to a conviction, however vaguely stated, that the wrong sort of people are on top, and that the more deserving people are being kept from rising. There’s a lot of “Rich Men North of Richmond” in that. When I ask my right-populist friends (and some who are not my friends) what it is they want to do or what they want the government to do, the answer is almost always some form of: “I want them to act like they care more about the kind of people I care about and give less weight to the priorities and preferences of the sort of people who go to fancy schools, get advanced degrees, run tech companies, swan around Davos, and that sort of thing.” There rarely is any very coherent sense of what would come out of that listening—of what the government might actually do differently—as though the act of listening more to x and less to y were a whole and complete political goal in and of itself. And I suppose it may be: As I have been arguing for a long time (and the argument is hardly original to me) in a society as wealthy and blessed as ours, there is a tendency to switch from fighting over scarce material resources to fighting over status, which is one of the few truly zero-sum games in town, being entirely relative. The idea is that if Mitt Romney had become president, then that would have been a collective victory for the private-equity guys and McKinsey types and the Harvard Business School graduates—and that the status elevation of that group is an issue entirely independent of anything that a President Romney would have wanted to do as a policy initiative.
There's much more, of course, but Dispatch-paywalled, I assume. I think KDW is more on-target with his criticism than those twelve New Yorker essayists.
-
Another modest abolition. C. Jarrett Dieterle suggests we Abolish the Federal Alcohol Tax and Regulation System.
When the 21st Amendment was ratified in 1933, ending America's "noble experiment" with nationwide alcohol Prohibition, it supposedly meant the federal government was getting out of the business of regulating booze. But few governments willingly give up power, and even fewer give it up absolutely.
In 1935, Congress passed the Federal Alcohol Administration Act (FAA Act), allowing the feds to collect alcohol excise taxes, prevent unfair trade practices, and protect consumers. Determining which agency should administer the FAA Act has been quite a journey—the Internal Revenue Service; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF); and, for the last 21 years, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) have all taken turns. But one thing hasn't changed: The FAA Act still remains the main authorizing legislation empowering the federal government to regulate alcohol markets.
Dieterle notes the TTB is also in charge of "notorious alcohol labeling regulations". So let me (once again) point out one my oldie but goldie posts: my objection to that GOVERNMENT WARNING on your beer and wine containers.
| Recently on the book blog: |
|
![[The Blogger and His Dog]](/ps/images/me_with_barney.jpg)
