Category: Health of the Republic
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Three thoughts on the FBI’s bite at the Apple
I had three thoughts after reading about the brewing conflict between Apple and the FBI.
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Versailles on the Potomac
{Originally penned 2015 Apr 26 and recently rescued from the Drafts folder} So there have been police confrontations (and possibly even riots) in Baltimore over the past 12 hours, but apparently CNN didn’t feel compelled to cover them. Instead they kept with covering the White House Correspondents’ Dinner where various people, including the President, got to…
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On riots, protests, and the legitimacy of violence (short)
For everyone who has counseled the citizens of Baltimore (and Ferguson and…) that “violence is not the answer” and that it would be better if everyone just protested peacefully: 1) As has now been documented extensively, the protests were by and large peaceful — and even more by and large, ignored by the national media.…
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Happy Victory over the Confederacy Day
On this day one hundred fifty years ago, a scruffy, scrappy, but determined general accepted the surrender of his well-born, well-dressed, and traitorous counterpart, effectively ending a vast sedition launched in the name of slavery, orchestrated by cowardly politicians, and fought — like most wars are — by poor men dying at the behest of…
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Pat Buchanan is an idiot
Sorry for being so obvious. But I’ve read his latest ill-informed anti-immigrant screed and couldn’t stay quiet. Buchanan’s thesis is that we were once a unified country but now since 1960, we’ve been in decline. First off, it’s a little suspicious that the magic time was exactly when Pat Buchanan (born in 1938) had just…
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Happy Tax Day!
And I mean that non-ironically. I don’t like paying taxes, but I am proud to do it. Taxes are not only necessary to maintain the way of life we value. They are a direct investment in the very concept of civilization. Taxes are the explicit statement that we are a community and we have…
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The defining feature of modern Republicanism
It’s not small-government. It’s not anti-tax screeds or culture war crusades. It’s not being pro-big business or pro-gun. It’s not being anti-choice or anti-gay. It’s not suport of “traditional marriages” or of non-traditional “special interrogation”. It’s not being pro-Gitmo or anti-drone or pro-Keystone or anti-FEMA. It’s not even being sexist or being racist. It’s a…
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De-tuned
I wrote this nearly five years ago. I was mad then; now I’m more or less just resigned. The intellectual commons is being fenced off, now more than ever. I think we’re losing more than outlets for creativity or profit; we’re losing the shared language to remember who we were, who we are. ============== De-Tuned…
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Newshound explains: The Curious Case of the Silent Filibuster
http://newsbound.com/the-silent-filibuster/ This is a really good, really clear, and (mostly) nonpartisan explanation of the rise of the silent filibuster in the US Senate — where it came from, the damage it does, how it might be fixed.
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Noah Smith on the Rise of the Machines
Here’s a worthwhile read from Noah Smith on the future of an economy where most work is done by robots. I’ve actually thought about this for a long while. How can a democracy survive if all the economic oomph lies in the very few owners of capital? As much as he was (justifiably) derided, President…