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Now, that was a week. We try to put it all in some perspective — the protests, the riots, the looting, and the politics and we do so with the help of our guests, Andrew C. McCarthy and Victor Davis Hanson. And yes, the Lileks Post of The Week is back to blow the lid off knitting clubs. And, Rob outs himself as a super hero, Peter deals with civil unrest induced anxiety by reading biographies, and James, well, we’re not sure what James does.
Music from this week’s show: The Dream Police by David Byrne
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Peter Robinson would like everybody to “just shut up” for a while, but this is impossible: the left cannot and will not shut up because leftism is all about revolution with endless nagging, harassment, bullying, and even violence. As a totalitarian ideology it is inherently incompatible with civility and civil society.
It’s never happy about anything is it? Everything is as racist/patriarchal/oppressive as it has ever been.
The ‘stay in right lane to make left turn/U-turn’ jughandle pull offs that New Jersey’s had since the 1950s are what will really mess up the enemy invaders.
Because everything must be made into an issue to justify violent revolution. And that is why the Left is so lacking in useful solutions to real problems: it doesn’t want to solve problems, it wants to exacerbate problems in order to create chaos. As the SDS used to say back in the sixties, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the Revolution.”
That doesn’t confuse me. Where I grew up, there was East Nob Hill Rd, and West Nob Hill Rd. East Nob Hill Rd was on the east side of Nob Hill, and West Nob Hill Rd was on the west side of Nob Hill. Perfectly logical. But maybe it would confuse me if I was a Rooskie or Chi-com invader.
Actually it was Rob who suggested “Muzzles, Not Masks.”
Quite right. In a common law country, precedent – actual precedent, not was is imagined – has to matter. You can’t always turn on a dime and decide what has been customarily tolerated is no longer permissible. Further, if you demand the type of purity some demand – or more accurately pretend to demand – you run out of politicians. People have such a limited knowledge of history; all they seem to know is the Disney World Hall of Presidents version. Lincoln jailed journalists. Eisenhower is apparently generally understood to have a mistress. Reagan had Iran-Contra. H.W. Bush pardoned Casper Weinberg to end an investigation that might have implicated him. We ignore this because we like what they accomplished. The less said about the three letter Presidents (JFK, LBJ, FDR), the better. As Lord Acton said, “[g]reat men are almost always bad men.” If you don’t want the constant executions of executives that Acton seems to advocate at the end of his letter, we have to deal with that fact. This simple piece of advice is probably best: “Never meet your heroes.”
Actually I wouldn’t mind meeting Trump. But maybe that’s because I don’t consider him a “hero.” On the other hand, I have/had no interest in meeting either Clinton, or Romney, or McCain, or (gack!) Obama…
Thank you for the correction. In my craven defense, I was commenting long after having listened to the podcast, but it’s not like Rob and Peter have very similar voices.
I never get anywhere with this but I will post it anyway. Pay the one dollar and watch the interview of David Stockman on a website called real vision. The 90 minute long interview. Then watch this:
Conservatism isn’t what people think it is. They have this cartoon idealistic image and they aren’t looking around at what has really happened. Everything moves left all of the time. The really smart financial guys gave up on the Republican party when Karl Rove got Medicare Part D passed so they could finish off Iraq.
Next, this is why socialism and populism are taking off:
The bottom line is every single western government did every single thing wrong in the face of automation and globalized labor markets. We need to be more libertarian, and we need to stop importing deflation from the mafia run Chinese creeps. We can trade with other poor countries instead of those guys.
I don’t know what you are talking about – for good reason. You don’t explain in your post what you’re talking about. Neither do you explain what VDH was talking about in the podcast.
I heard no “whataboutism” in Prof. Hanson’s brilliant recitation of acts taken by Barack Obama that were directly contrary to the constitutional order, e.g., weaponizing the IRS to target political opponents; and weaponizing the FBI, DoJ, and the entire Intelligence Community to target political opponents.
VDH mentioned those acts of Obama in his discussion of several retired Generals’ complaints about Trump, of which many complaints were false or based on false premises.
What’s the difference between “whataboutism” and identifying hypocrisy?
John Adams wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” But, as Randy Barnett has observed, the Constitution governs – not Americans – but those who govern America. The Constitution lays out the structure of the government, how its leaders are chosen, what their respective duties are, and enumerates their limited powers.
Adams could, more justly, have said: “Our Constitution was made only for moral and religious leaders. It is wholly inadequate to govern any other.” We’ve had a succession of immoral Presidents – each of whom stretched the limits of their Constitutional power, each of whom ignored norms established and honored by their predecessors. As VDH noted, retired generals are now following suit. Should anyone be surprised?
Government Is How We Steal From Each Other™
Couple of comments on the Podcast.
First off, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms had a great response to the rioting and looting. She got it right and being a Black woman her immediate comment about calling her son to see where he was and if he was safe was very smart.
Next, San Antonio didn’t have major rioting, but did have a couple of nights where the police had to step in. Of course, they also blamed the counter protesters who came to protect the Alamo Cenotaph.
You would think, if Biden is looking to select an African-American woman was his running mate, Bottoms’ handling of the May 29 rioting and how Atlanta fared after that would vault her to the top of the list. But given where the Democratic Party is right now, a mayor standing up for her police force and scolding the rioters and looters might be a net negative towards her chances of being Joe’s VP choice.
This is correct. Rob and I talked about this after the show and both agreed that she should have been mentioned.
No Difference. “Identifying hypocrisy” is the lowest form of discourse.
Lower than the left’s standard tactic of personal attack and crying “racist!”?
I imagine there are bakers, florists, and photographers who would be perfectly happy to “just shut up,” but the left demands that they shout the left’s scripture from the rooftop – of the bakers’, florists’, and photographers’ houses of worship.
I’m still waiting for someone to tell the halal bakery to shut up and cater Hymie’s bar mitzvah.
Case in point.
If someone makes a claim, “X is the lowest form of discourse”, and someone else challenges that claim by asking the comparative question, “Is X lower than Y?”, then the response, “Case in point.” (i.e. you’ve just done X again) avoids dealing with the challenging question and amounts to nothing more than reasserting the claim without supporting it.
Suppose instead someone makes this case. “When an issue is brought up and the response is to deflect and divert attention elsewhere, e.g. “What about …”, without acknowledging or adequately dealing with the original issue, I call that ‘Whataboutism’. It is a low form of discourse because it is a method of avoiding an issue without dealing with it.”
A strong point can be made in favor of that case, but its strength doesn’t come from anything being wrong about “Identifying hypocrisy”. It comes from how methods of deflection and distraction are ways of avoiding some issue, rather than facing and dealing with it. That applies to all methods of avoiding a challenge (e.g. by just restating a claim rather than supporting it).
On its own terms, the ability to identify hypocrisy and other types of inconsistency is vital to meaningful discourse. How could one even engage in reason if one excluded attempts to identify inconsistency?
Among the sillier and simply wrong comments I’ve come across in a very long time.Strong reaction to follow.
Check out Steven Crowder trying to get a gay wedding cake. It’s awesome.
Where is the Obama DOJ when you need them?
A: Turning a blind eye to voter intimidation by the New Black Panther Party.
Great interview. Ok Boss has his lockdown beard, where are yours? Also next time you all need to flex the arms so we can see who has the best musculature.
Missed This. Identifying hypocrisy is fine for drawing up your own personal list of hypocrites for whatever purpose but as discourse it’s a just species of ad hominem. “You failed to apply your correct logic to X, making it therefore inadmissible to the argument over Y.” As as an argument is says nothing useful about Y. Maybe your actual point is “Why do we never talk about X?” which is fine as a stand alone point, but again contributes nothing to the argument about Y. If X relates to the actions rather than words of the supposed hypocrite then what you’ve identified is actually a virtue: the ability to think better than you live. It’s the reason we admire the founders despite slavery. If X is more words then you’ve caught someone in an intellectual inconsistency. It’s a minor vice at worse, but there are few if any people alive whose intellectual consistency or lack thereof is actually important enough to supplant Y as the subject of conversation.
@gaius — You mean, you’re not a Russian bot? Dang!
“Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.”—some French dude whose name I can’t spell,
In one sense we prefer the villain who pretends to be virtuous, to the honest villain, because the hypocrite will tend to behave virtuously (if there’s anybody watching). On the other hand, we may mistake him for a real hero, and count on him for something important; e.g,, giving Falstaff an important message to deliver on the battlefield.
Another case where it’s important to identify hypocrites: Democratic politicians extoll government monopoly education to the skies, then send their own children to private schools. This strongly implies that they don’t think their own arguments for public education are sound.
Similarly, politicians and others who cry about “climate change” while continuing to buy and use private jets and beachfront property.
Democrats buying private jets has an impact on what I think of them if I wasted a second to do so. It has nothing to do with what I think about climate change theories because it says nothing about them. The later is something that actually matters the former does not.