Another week passes, with another round of reinforcements of Cold Spring Shops themes.
1. But such a spiffy parade-step. "Maybe Putin should read a little more VodkaPundit and a little less of his own press clippings in Russia Today."
2. James Joyner missed a compelling basketball game. "I watched [the speech from the throne] live and was dismayed at the stumbling delivery. A President who is clearly very much in command came across to me as addled and lost, constantly slurring words and losing his place." (Normal people saw the presidential brain farts long ago.)
3. Yes. "All those people who bewailed Donald Trump as a threat to humanity and a Russian pawn should be upset right now, watching their friends in Washington, D.C., bring about everything they claimed was going to happen under the previous administration." (See.)
4. Bismarck didn't have American ironclads, did he? "Putin has achieved something that other Russian leaders managed to avoid for 75 years, giving Germany a good reason to rearm."
5. Let Our Intellectual Betters tremble! "In an era of lockdowns and nanny-state Fauci-ism, the Freedom Convoy’s defiant joy was an open revolt against the dreary vision of life on offer from an army of experts, bureaucrats who insist that a “return to normal” is impossible. The truckers were relentlessly, unequivocally, unapologetically free. And their protest was an invitation for any who wish to join them."
6. Will the era of fashionable nonsense end first? "With her baby voice, vacuous ideas and social media narcissism, she seems impossibly unpresidential, but the domestic climate in 2024 may suit her."
7. Technocrats don't believe in tradeoffs. "Throughout the pandemic, the public health bureaucracy has generally done a poor job of balancing the tradeoffs between combating COVID and addressing other pressing issues of health and human well-being."
8. The church of intersectionality excommunicates heretics. "[C]ampus climate 'prevents people from saying things that they believe.'"
9. Punditry is a social obligation. "Unfortunately, for Thomas Friedman, he is very seriously bad at making very serious prognostications, to the point where a 'Friedman unit' is a synonym for bad punditry."
10. Evidence, should you seek it, of the vapidity of critical legal studies? "Democrats need to go beyond supporting racial and gender diversity in the Courts. They need to imitate the Federalist Society and undertake the task of developing and articulating better theories of Constitutional interpretation, train and promote law students who learn these theories, and then appoint them to the Courts."
11. Avoid entangling alliances? For the affirmative: "If expansion is creating the very conditions that NATO's existence is supposed to prevent, it's not working." For the negative: "Putin’s latest round of aggression already seems likely to add new NATO members, including Finland." (Both very short takes from very long pieces.)
12. Otherworldliness comes with the territory. "Artists, musicians, and other creative people often believe foolish and extreme things." They have the same right to be wrong as anyone else. "We should not want to live in a society in which artists can be fired because they refuse to endorse a political statement." Does it do any good to stand up to a petty tyrant by becoming Stalinists ourselves?
13. What would we ever do without experts? "From the beginning of the pandemic, technocratic elites have offered us a dubious bill of goods." Dear reader, keep the Fatal Conceit on mind. "Even more fundamental than suggesting elites had all the answers, it also suggested that all problems were solvable, which was never going to be true in a pandemic."
14. We're on to Brandon. "Biden has hurt a lot of people with his incompetence." The campaign speeches write themselves. "Joe Biden has turned calm into chaos, competence into incompetence, stability into anarchy, and security into catastrophe."
15. Bismarck concurs. "Aggression by a major power calls the very idea of 'global order' into question. There are no longer rules largely accepted by the world’s leading states, if there ever were."
16. Ye canna' change the laws of physics! "Politicians do themselves no favors when they pretend that the sun doesn't set, that the wind never dies down, and that these sources can provide limitless on-demand power."
17. Fourth Turning, diagnosed? "The truth is, throughout the past two years of COVID panic, we’ve seen that the world’s leadership class isn’t up to the task."
18. The quintessence of division of labor. “Nonetheless, trade jobs are valid, necessary and commendable — my brother can change my car’s headlight in 15 minutes while I couldn’t even tell you where to begin with such a task.”
19. Sic semper tyrannis. "By making a zig-zagging series of arbitrary and far-reaching edicts, officials have squandered public trust in allegedly neutral scientific institutions and effectively abandoned persuasion for coercion." Wherever possible, turf them out.
21. Let cities be emergent. "In a city destroyed, over and over, by urban planning dilettantes, this is yet another fun project for the urban wonk class, which will be paid for literally by taxpayers, and figuratively by generations of the urban miserable yet unborn."
22. I've seen some birthday parties go bad there. "Russia is setting itself up to experience a furious, bloody insurgency that will make Iraq look like an afternoon at Chuck E. Cheese."
23. Expect more road socialism. "[T]he overall trend is toward more freeloading freeways."
24. Can they even change a tire? "The upper classes draw a lot of their self-esteem from a claimed superiority to the working class, which requires a lot of put-downs for its maintenance."
25. Life is tragic. "To openly prefer a manipulative lie to the complicated truth is corrupt."
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