sgreffenius
The Jeffersonian
A Journal of Democracy and Public Affairs
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-shelby-steele-on-affirmative-action-sweetly-insidious-fd38cf4d?mod=WTRN_pos6&cx_testId=3&cx_testVariant=cx_171&cx_artPos=5
Great commentary on the theme of The Screwtape Letters, by C. S. Lewis.
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We have had three reasons why the United States should treat questions related to military aid for Ukraine with far more urgency than it has thus far:
They need it.
They deserve it.
The wolf is at the door.
Now we see that the wolves are at the door, and Iran beat the Russians to it. Israel left the door unlocked. Iran has no trouble equipping its allies - Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis - with the arms they need, for whatever missions these militias need to undertake. The United States' willingness to supply its allies with arms they need, when they need them, could not be more stark.
Why did it look like we sat back in the bleacher seats when Russia moved into Crimea in 2014? Because that's exactly the role we imagined for ourselves: spectators. Did anyone in the Obama White House imagine what we would do when Russia came back for seconds only a year later, where they attacked in eastern Ukraine in 2015? Did anyone in the Biden White House imagine what we ought to do in February 2022, when Russia came back for thirds after a two-month mobilization?
Apparently not. The best Washington could do was offer Ukraine's President Zelensky a flight out of Kyiv before the Russian army captured him. I wonder what Franklin Roosevelt would have thought if Winston Churchill had offered to ferry him out to London after Emperor Hirohito attacked Pearl Harbor? The United States had no strategy to help Ukraine win the war when it started in 1922, and it still does not.
The lack of a plan after two years - ten years if you count from 2014 - is still inexplicable to me. For every proposal that we gear our military aid to a strategy for victory, we utter the same response: we do not want to escalate. Yet Moscow escalates at will, with more and more strikes at civilian and military targets each month. Ukrainian leaders are at a loss to persuade its allies - and potential allies - that escalation, however you define it, is not an issue for them. It has the same goals that every other sovereign nation has: to live in peace within secure borders.
The United States has laid down many billions of dollars in aid at this point, with no plan to reach that goal. The only goal in sight appears to be the status quo: to maintain the current balance of military forces until both sides feel ready to negotiate based on -- the current balance of military forces. No wonder Ukraine wants to increase the capacities of its domestic armaments industries. No country among Ukraine's allies appears to want to help Ukraine win the war.
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First, let us get our terms right. Lab leak became shorthand for one explanation of how Covid-19 started and spread. Wet market became shorthand for a competing explanation. Both the outdoor market and the virology lab at issue were located in Wuhan, China.
The term conspiracy theory became attached to the first explanation on this side of the globe. At no point did anyone accuse staff at the Wuhan Virology Institute of cooking up a conspiracy to infect the world with a gain-of-function virus that would kill millions of people all over the world.
We know how the phrase conspiracy theory works in the West. It actually works in a lot of ways. I don't need to explain them here. Arguments about whether Covid-19 infected millions due to an accidental release of a gain-of-function virus developed at the Wuhan Virology Institute actually do matter, though. We can't let Dr. Fauci's changing attitudes about this explanation for the pandemic obscure that.
We kept hearing the phrase during the pandemic, follow the science. Without a doubt, public health officials' primary aim throughout the pandemic was to protect themselves from looking bad, not follow the science. They certainly did not want American citizens to know that the National Institutes of Health, an agency Dr. Fauci's agencies worked with, had funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Virology Lab.
Thus Dr. Fauci and his colleagues subjected us all to mumbo jumbo about conspiracy theories. Once you introduce that term into your argument, you increase confidence that your side has the upper hand. No one one wants to be caught believing in a conspiracy theory. Calling an accidental release of the virus from the Wuhan Virology Institute a conspiracy theory was a perfect way to distract attention from the fact that the National Institutes of Health had funded gain-of-function research at the lab for years.
That was Dr. Fauci's strategy. When you want to protect yourself, and the truth makes you look bad, you do not tell the truth. You obscure it. When the truth comes out down the line, you can deny your denial. You can deny that you ever denied an accidental release of the virus from the lab as a plausible explanation. That's all you need, a double denial, to make many people not care whether you are a trustworthy public official. Who, after all, expects public officials to be trustworthy in the first place?
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Colorado and Maine primary ballots
Let's credit Democrats with an incoherent campaign policy. Early in the campaign, the party did all it could to ensure Trump would be the Republican nominee for president. They even spent tons of their own donors' campaign contributions to support Trump's efforts to gain the nomination.
Now, as Colorado and Maine bar him from the Republican primary ballot, you don't hear any complaints from the Democratic party. In fact, the party supports efforts to take him off the ballot in more states. Maine's Democratic secretary of state even said removal of Trump's name from Maine's Republican primary ballot is self-executing!
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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/09/us/antisemitic-speech-palestine-israel-protests.html
After years of hate speech codes, administrative hearings to policy microaggressions, and doublespeak about what counts as permissible and impermissible speech, now campus administrators wonder whether they should overlook actual aggression against their Jewish students.
When double-dealing students insist administrators make the campus safe for like-minded ideologues, but I can do what I like to intimidate and threaten others, you never escape the tangles of dishonesty. Yet through these decades of dishonesty, campus safety activists have not acknowledged the double standard.
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Quote from Jenkins' inbox:
“If falsehoods disqualified politicians we would have none. At least Trump’s are humorous and transparent.”
Jenkins' conclusion:
What really brings us to this day, however, is the collusion hoax. I doubt Mr. Trump’s voters would be nearly as open to his return if they had been shown more respect the first time for legally and honestly winning an election.
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Another way to frame the fed's debate: Have we punished borrowers enough already, or can we tighten the screws in their fingernails a little more to achieve the inflation rate we want? Useful to remember is that the fed is largely responsible for price increases we have witnessed in the last few years, since the fed controls how much money the government borrows. The difference is, when government borrows money to fund its debt, it does not have to qualify for the loan.
Home buyers do have to qualify. Thirty-year fixed-rate mortgages hit eight percent last month. How many people in your neighborhood would even look at a mortgage priced at that level? How many would qualify? For a $1M dollar home, the monthly payment would be $7,338. That's without taxes.
Observers say, "Yes indeed, home sales are down. Home construction is down. Commercial loans are down." Everything related to the loan business is down, except interest rates and the inflation rate. People point to former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volker as our banker's model here. You just raise interest rates until you squeeze inflation out of the economy, no matter how much it hurts. You can't be weak about these matters. Do what it takes.
Perhaps Jerome Powell is correct: we need to follow Paul Volker's example from the 1980s, when the inflation rate hit double digits. On the other side, our financial markets, the ways we fund our national debt, and our government's methods to allocate resources do not operate as they did forty years ago. They have evolved a lot.
Powell has a different set of problems to solve. He did not take sustained inflation as a threat when the economy came out of Covid. Moreover, we still hear echoes of Modern Monetary Theory when officials discuss future expenditures and revenues, a theory that gained currency when the government wanted to carry the entire economy on its back during the lockdowns. Yet after all the economy endured during and after 2020, the only inflation control tool on the table is: raise interest rates.
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Selection of House Speaker
Jordan shows a Speaker nominee cannot get enough votes with Trump's endorsement. Emmer shows a Speaker nominee cannot get enough votes without Trump's endorsement. Yet the House Republican caucus shows itself helpless in the face of this bind.
Trump does not lead the Republican party unless he is president. When he is not president, and a Democrat sits in the White House, the Speaker leads the party. The party cannot grasp that they simply need to choose a leader until the election in November 2024, then revisit the question based results of the 2024 vote.
We'll never know if this leadership episode will hurt Republican chances in 2024. We can be pretty confident it won't help.
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Why power destroys security and freedom
There is a lesson here for Americans: We need to look hard at what happened in Israel, and start asking which security risks are posed by the scorn that American far-right politicians and propagandists now pour on the American military, the FBI, and of course the federal government as a whole. They have already weakened public trust and, if Donald Trump becomes president again, they may deliberately set out to weaken the institutions themselves: Preparation to replace civil servants has already begun. The impact of their campaign to undermine Americans’ faith in American democracy has already been felt, and its security implications are already evident. To take just one example, online disinformation campaigns of the sort the Russians ran in the 2016 election work best on polarized societies, where levels of distrust are especially high. ~ Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic
Anne Applebaum's paragraph above is the plainest statement of the case yet: that when we heap scorn on our national institutions, we weaken our country with disunity, make it less secure against our enemies, and undermine other people's faith in democracy. You can't have a strong, unified country that can protect itself if you have disloyal people within to spread the falsehood that government security institutions cannot be trusted.
Always left out of this analysis is the possibility that government institutions are not actually worthy of our trust. Is that because, given the record, Applebaum thinks that the FBI, CIA, NSA, and other security agencies do merit our confidence, our faith that they will protect us and rather than their own interests? Or is the argument that we must trust these institutions, because the consequences of not trusting them are too horrific? That is, if the wolf appears at our door, as these agencies say he did on September 11, 2001, then we must forfeit a lot of freedom to prevent him from getting inside.
Of course, if we say that is not a deal we would ever strike in a democratic country - because state security institutions are inherently untrustworthy, with a record of behavior that proves it so - then those dissenters open themselves to the accusation that they are disloyal to the government. Yet the fact that Trump and Netanyahu charge their opponents with disloyalty does not mean that people who distrust state security agencies are wrong in their skepticism. It merely means that politicians like Trump and Netanyahu say whatever is required to get power.
Trump was right to criticize the FBI during his first term. He did not, however, aim to reform the agency. He wanted to protect his own position. Similarly, the FBI and the Justice Department did not attack Trump to protect the republic. The department acted on behalf of people who hated the president, and who wanted him out of office. Neither side in this conflict cared about the integrity of our institutions, preserving democracy - whatever that means - or protecting our country's citizens and their freedoms.
That was the amazing frankness of the Trump presidency's political combat: no one who participated pretended to care about anything but winning. Ideals such as democracy, freedom, and security had no bearing on the methods the combatants used, or on their reasons for acting. They utterly ignored the fact that when you fight for power, that is all you get when you win: power. You have no capacity at that point to use your power for other good ends.
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Warfare and American foreign policy
We have had a lot of wars during the last twenty or more years. Several of these wars have special significance for us because the United States has participated in the conflict:
The Afghanistan war
The Iraq war
The Syrian war
The Libyan war
The Ukraine war
The Israeli war
Only the first one proceeds without U. S. participation now, due to our calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan in summer of 2021. The other five continue with our close involvement. After the massacres in southern Israel on Saturday, one wants to ask, what is American foreign policy? Surely it is not Anthony Blinken's tweet to urge Hamas and Jerusalem to reach a cease fire as soon as possible.
Blinken deleted his tweet shortly after he posted it. Does that mean the United States does not have a foreign policy?
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Yes, and who started a process in 2003 that enabled Iran to extend its power to the Gaza strip twenty years later.
You send your armored columns north to Baghdad in March 2003, the invasion turns into a fiasco, and Iran sees its opportunity.
When the United States invaded Iraq, it made an irredeemable blunder.
Further observation: now you know how to define proxy war. How long until Israel retaliates against Iran. If Israel declares war on Iran, how do you suppose the United States and Saudi Arabia will line up in that fight?
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Machiavelli: do not rely on allies
Let's say you are a country that would like to do away with nuclear weapons, but a lot of people have some hesitation about that kind of irreversible move. Two great powers, one to the east and one to the west, say do not worry, we will make sure no one attacks you. If someone does attack you, we will come to your defense.
Twenty years later, the great power to the east attacks you, and the great power to the west does nothing. Eight years after that, the great power to the east attacks you again. The great power to the west talks more about what it cannot do, than what it can do to defeat the great power to the east. Other allies follow the western great power's example.
In that situation, would you not try to be as self-reliant as possible?
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Inflatable Leopard tanks made from synthetic silk!
The Americans held on until the French sent ammunition to the Continental army, and sent their navy to blockade Yorktown. I expect Ukraine to hold on until something dramatic happens. Perhaps Turkey will decide it doesn't want Russian ships in the Black Sea anymore.
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There are different ways to rein in cops when they're out of hand: You can demilitarize law enforcement, repeal intrusive laws that create unnecessary conflicts, and focus police on the core responsibilities of protecting life, liberty, and property; or you can treat crime as a lark, discourage self-defense, and create an environment of chaos and danger.
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Of the many targets Donald Trump has attacked over the years, few engender less public sympathy than the career workforce of the federal government—the faceless mass of civil servants that the former president and his allies deride as the “deep state.”
Let's be clear about words here. "Deep state" does not refer to people employed in the civilian bureaucracy. The person who processes your passport application is not a member of the deep state. If you want to use the "former president and his allies" as your standard of meaning in politics, you have a big problem with interpretation of words, not to mention standards of truth and basic knowledge of government organization. You are not a member of the "deep state" because Donald Trump or one of his friends says you are.
Members of the deep state are part of the national security state, which began to morph into a police state after 9/11. If you want a place to start, some people who work for the CIA and FBI are members of the deep state. Others are not. We could spend a long post on analysis of what constitutes the deep state. Let's not do that here. Let's just observe that once the "former president and his allies" appropriate a term, anything goes. The Trump movement uses words for political effect.
In fact, we have reached a point where many people who participate in politics use words primarily for their effect. Therefore you do not want to accept the way those participants use words, unless you have made a prior decision to accept their entire point of view. An outsider generally cannot accept some parts of a group's political vocabulary, but not others. For a more complex form of this argument, see George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language".
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