So, this is where we are in 2020. Like antebellum Southern slaveholders and post-bellum Progressives, today’s radical Left and Right share a common disgust for the principles of the American Founding. Both want to deconstruct the Declaration’s “harmonizing sentiments,” and they want to end its intellectual hegemony over the American mind. Both camps are destroyers. But whereas the totalitarian Left wants to march forward to a Brave New World of radical egalitarian socialism, the dissident Right wants to return to either the canon and feudal law of the Middle Ages or to the various petty tyrannies of the Bronze Age—or worse.
Not sure I agree with some points he makes, but he does a good job showing how extremism of any kind is dangerous.
This is the year 2020. As you may have noticed, holding police accountable matters a lot to a whole lot of people right now. We need a fair way of doing that, with buy-in from lawmakers and the public. Why would we instead allow our policy to hinge on what nine unelected judges think the term “under color of” meant in 1871? On what they think the common-law “backdrop” constituted back then? On how much deference they feel like giving to the last 60 years’ worth of their Court’s own precedents? Congress needs to debate these issues and decide how to resolve them on policy grounds, without regard to how a different Congress, dealing with different issues, handled the matter after the Civil War.
The challenge here is that the Police Unions have a lot of money and sway with some of the folks in congress we would hope to be most likely to push legislation for reform.
Not sure how I feel about this. It's hard to make money as an author right now, the publishing houses are probably dying a slow death. But then I do want works to be available to more people.
A university exists for values different from those that dominate the for-profit world.
The story he shares of John Hopkins is true of most education institutes across the nation. Universities, charter schools, private and public schools. The educators get pushed out as the businessmen, lawyers, and administrators come in.
If we want to be the home to the next Wall Street or the next Silicon Valley, then we should think about how those ecosystems came to be. And if the answers do not fit into neat ideological narratives, then the problem is probably with our ideologies rather than our history.
All of this is a rather bloodless way to describe the descent into madness, but the recognition of that condition only contributed to the onset of emotional instability. How could we, free of illness, be so self-indulgent? The scale of the death and economic disaster brought about by the pandemic had devastated so many families. We were the relatively lucky ones. What right did we have to experience, much less express, discomfort amid such universal hardships? All that is true, of course, but it is no help.
The science fiction writer Philip José Farmer once summed up purgatory as “hell with hope,” an apt descriptor for the current moment. It’s what makes the reopening here in Montana so bittersweet. For the first time in a while, a hopeful future feels possible. But right now, at least for me, it’s still just out of reach.
Holy Shnikes! I literally just had this phone call with my CEO and Division Head as we were kicking around ideas for investment/innovation. The idea came up to do some kind of delivery and then we went into all the reasons we think it wouldn't work - add the list that the market is broken and the best service wont win out.
In New York, the public is today the victim of Cuomo’s longstanding, bizarre, petty, counterproductive hostility toward his fellow Democrat de Blasio. Though de Blasio publicly stated on March 17 that a shelter-in-place order might be necessary, and said so gingerly so as not to poke the bear, Cuomo fired back that it wasn’t necessary and that only he had the authority to give such an order. Privately he derided de Blasio as offering a scenario more befitting a nuclear apocalypse, according to ProPublica. Five days later, as the virus roared across the state, things had become so bad that Cuomo finally shut down the state, as usual without acknowledging that de Blasio had been correct.
Universities now contend that the price of the sheepskin shouldn’t change even if kids can’t go to campus. Every school is saying, “This is unprecedented, and we’re in this together.” Galloway jokes that this is Latin for: “We’re not lowering our prices, b**ches.”
The lesson here is that these stories aren’t really about vaccines or bioweapons or population control. Instead, they’re meta-parables about how the people telling them see themselves and feel about their place in the world.
It would be sad if it weren’t dangerous to the rest of us.
Very well done. I've often thought that there are some authors and works that have to be approached at the right time or place. Dostoevsky is great to read in the winter just before spring. Conrelia Funke goes great with late summer, when unmet expectations bring on lazy melancholy. Jack London is best read in the late adolescent or early teenage years. Hemingway belongs to the young, and should be read when it is hot and sweltering. Austen should be read when missing out on an opportunity you think you deserve. These are all just my opinions of course - but her bit about secrets to unlocking texts really hit me in a familiar way.
In Saugersville, 11 months into the isolation, a young man of learning and ambition who chafes under the new dispensation has an epiphany as he skis the sloping fields outside the village:
“I am alive and this is where I live.”
The realization fills him with joy and gratitude. May we in these strange days experience our own revelations.
This is a descriptive piece without too much commentary, it does a good job laying out the challenges the EU has always faced and how those challenges are currently presenting.
And that brings the focus back onto the contradictions at the heart of a currency union that should never have been born. To have any chance of flourishing, the currency union needs to be supplemented by a fiscal union, but a fiscal union continues to be opposed by the euro zone’s “north,” which rightly fears that it would be stuck subsidizing a profligate “south” in perpetuity. At the same time, the “north” is unwilling to run the risks that breaking up the euro zone would involve, so much so that it continues to ignore even the least bad option, splitting the euro into northern and southern units.
I think that sums up the challenge pretty well. What is the purpose of the EU? As a unified Europe to protect members interest? That is a great aim, but it doesn't require fiscal unity. As a trade federation? That is difficult and does. I don't think they ever worked out those details to a level that is required by changing circumstances.
One more challenge, Europeans remain an ethnic people. A German is a German, you can move there, learn the language, even become a citizen, but you will never really be a German. Same with France, Italy, Spain, etc. It's hard to forge federalist bonds between independent nations when there isn't a unifying force, and in fact there is a history that drives in the opposite direction.
Put in a different way, an American (meaning US citizen/person) could be from anywhere -Mexico, China, New York, North Carolina, South Africa. But a Spaniard must be from Spain.
