Category: Uncategorized

Trump and Netanyahu opted for “maximum pressure” in the hope of forcing regime change, or at least a complete reversal of policy, in Iran. We were told that sanctions would work, and were a viable alternative to war. This was, of course, a lie, and now the Israelis have to live with the consequences of it. The Iranians are much closer to a bomb than they ever were in the Obama years.

It does not appear, as of today, that Biden’s negotiations with the Iranians are going to succeed. What then? Here are the choices:

1. America and Israel, notwithstanding decades of rhetoric to the contrary, learn to live with an Iranian bomb. Deterrence is the order of the day, just as it was with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
2. Israel, possibly with American help, starts “cutting the grass” with the Iranian nuclear program. A low level war of indefinite duration looms.
3. Israel and/or America annihilates Iran with a nuclear first strike. The problem disappears.

The weakness with #3, of course, is that it would normalize the use of nuclear weapons, to the benefit of the Russians, North Koreans, and other bad actors. Eliminating the short term problem only creates a much larger one in the future.

What this really does is tell you how lame nuclear weapons really are as a bargaining chip. If we do threaten the Iranians with nukes, they won’t take it seriously. That is why the most likely outcome is “cutting the grass.”

By all accounts, starvation looms for millions of Afghans. The combination of the withdrawal of American aid, which represented a huge proportion of the country’s GDP, the freezing of assets, and a drought is creating a humanitarian disaster. What should America do?

There are two massive obstacles to an American aid program:

1. The Taliban want a godly Afghanistan, not a prosperous one. Mass starvation simply isn’t a big deal to them. If Allah wills it, who are they to argue?
2. Afghanistan is a client state of Pakistan, which has devolved into a vassal of China. As a result, any aid to the Afghans, no matter how it is structured, ultimately helps subsidize Pakistan and China.

The Chinese are fond of reminding people that they are a large and powerful country. They typically do this by bullying smaller countries. It is time for them–not America–to step up to the plate and actually do some good outside their own boundaries.

The three dissenters will be writing both for the general public and for posterity. My guess is that there will be three separate opinions. The key questions for them are:

1. HOW FAR SHOULD WE TAKE THE POLITICAL HACK ARGUMENT? I will predict that Sotomayor will pull no punches. The others will be more circumspect, not wishing to burn their bridges with the “conservatives” or inflict damage on the Court.
2. DO WE RELY ON THE ROE ANALYSIS OR THE GINSBURG EQUAL PROTECTION ARGUMENT? The former is the current law; the latter has more popular appeal and may be more compelling. The problem with equal protection, however, is that it logically leads one to the conclusion that the state has no right to regulate abortion at any stage of gestation. That won’t fly with a public that mostly wants some sort of reasonable compromise on the issue.

I think we will see more equal protection than right of privacy in the dissents, although there will be some of both.

Think of the Dobbs case as a cascading series of legal questions, starting with the most general and provocative to the most limited:

1. Is a fetus a “person” entitled to protection under the Fourteenth Amendment?
2. Is there a right to privacy, as held in Roe and Griswold?
3. If so, does it include the right to an abortion, as held in Roe?
4. Is that right unqualified during the first trimester?
5. If Roe was improperly decided, should the Mississippi law still be overturned on the basis of societal reliance?

The majority will decide as follows, taking the questions in reverse order:

1. All six “conservative” (only Roberts is a real conservative; the rest are reactionaries) justices will find that reliance is not an adequate basis to continue to follow Roe. Expect lots of references to Plessy v. Ferguson, the fact that Roe was controversial from the beginning, and the joys of federalism in the opinion. The last of these will be an embarrassment to reactionaries when they try to prohibit abortion on a national level. In footnotes and at the conclusion of the opinion, the Court addresses the political hack argument, to the satisfaction of no one.
2. The six “conservatives” will all find that states can regulate abortion very strictly in the first trimester. On this point, expect arguments that both society and medicine have changed since Roe, thus justifying a different outcome. There will also be mention of the fact that most abortions occur before 15 weeks.
3. Roberts breaks from his right-wing colleagues on this point; he tries to hold the decision to its facts and keep a shadow of Casey in place. The majority relies on history and constitutional text to hold that there is no federal constitutional right to an abortion–period. Roe is completely extinguished.
4. Sensing the political dangers involved in overturning Griswold, the Court does not say that there is no right of privacy, although some of the concurring opinions suggest as much.
5. The majority opinion says nothing about the personhood argument. Thomas and Alito reference it approvingly in passing in their concurring opinions.

My guess is that Barrett writes the majority opinion. What do the dissents say? Tune in tomorrow.

A fertilized egg has no heart. Nor does it have a brain, or limbs, or any other organs. It can’t think, feel, communicate, propel itself, or feed itself. It in no way resembles a complete human being. And yet, Ross Douthat argues that, because it is a living thing in the process of becoming a fully functional human, it must be treated as a person. Is he right?

No. Douthat bases his argument on the condition of the extremely sick and old, who at some point are likely to lose, either temporarily or permanently, some of the functions that most of us associate with humanity. I just don’t accept that someone who has all of the organs necessary to be human, who have used them for many years, who still have use of some of them at all times, and who may recover the use of the rest of them after a short interlude, should be treated the same way as something which only potentially has any of the attributes of humanity. It’s not the same thing.

What Douthat really believes is that the soul is created at conception. Since that is a religious argument with little appeal for NYT readers, and which has obvious First Amendment implications, he avoids it. But it is what it is. There is no point in pretending otherwise.

The right loves to complain about the values supposedly promoted by Hollywood. The fact is, however, that making movies is about the green, not the red or the blue. Hollywood’s principal interest is in reaching mass audiences with spectacle; offending half your potential customers is hardly a smart business practice. Most of the money in Hollywood is consequently spent on expensive superhero movies which have no ideological content, and can even be enjoyed by Chinese audiences.

In light of that, does it make sense for the right to expend any energy trying to censor movies? Probably not. The internet, the MSM, and the universities are more promising targets. Just boycott the movies you don’t like. The executives and the money men will get the message.

Michelle Goldberg made the case for abortion rights in yesterday’s NYT. In a nutshell, she argues that the right believes fervently in the sovereignty of the individual human body in all cases except those in which regulatory burdens fall exclusively on women. Abortion rights are thus a matter of freedom and equality for women. This line of reasoning follows an argument made by Justice Ginsberg, not the majority in Roe.

Ross Douthat, in a lengthy column published the same day, acknowledges the equality argument, but makes two points in response. The first is that it should be possible for society to redistribute the legal and practical burdens of unwanted parenthood in a reasonable and fair way without resorting to abortion; the second is that the recent relevant past shows that women can make progress in economic and civic life without relying on abortion, so abortion rights are not a necessary element of equality. Is he correct?

There are two serious shortcomings in the first argument–one conceptual, and one practical. The conceptual problem is that, even if one created an ideal society in which unlimited additional resources were provided to women who are compelled to give birth against their will, there is no possible way to eliminate the pain and danger associated with carrying a child, or to redistribute that burden to society as a whole. Requiring fathers to pay child support and writing the criminal law to exempt mothers from liability for abortions just doesn’t do the trick. Second, the argument is made in bad faith, because Douthat, regardless of his personal sympathies, is perfectly aware that his party has absolutely no interest in raising taxes to improve the lot of mothers of unwanted children, or of the children themselves. To the GOP, as I’ve said many times before, the misery associated with most unwanted pregnancies is a necessary deterrent to inappropriate sexual activity. The misery is the point, not just unfortunate collateral damage.

As to the second argument, the correlation between the slow social advancement of women and declining abortion rates proves nothing, because there is no control on the experiment. We cannot know what the overall impact to women would have been if abortion had been more readily available.

Douthat also contends that fertilized eggs are unquestionably individual human beings in his column. I will address that argument in a separate post tomorrow.

The numbers don’t lie–the internet (particularly Facebook) is essentially a playground for the extreme right. Left to his own devices, Mark Zuckerberg would keep it that way, because it makes him money. However, pressures from his employees, and the body politic in general, have forced him to become a censor. The right is outraged, but doesn’t know what to do about it; the threats from Trump and others to repeal Section 230 would only help the left by destroying Facebook’s business model and making right-wing nut jobs more legally accountable for their speech.

What reactionaries want is censorship of the left, not just freedom for themselves. How can they get there? By combining with left-leaning critics of the social media companies, and with Facebook itself, to create a new body of law that transfers internet censorship from the private to the public domain. This is consistent with what is happening in other countries all over the world and is consequently easy to justify. The legislation needs to be broad enough to contemplate a fairly rigorous degree of public interference, with minimal standards on what is unacceptable speech. Then, all they have to do is win an election and pack the new regulatory body with their own kind. At that point, they will have won; woke and socialist thought will disappear from the internet, the Great American Firewall will rise, and Real Americans will have their ideas unquestioned.

Naturally, there will be litigation, but the Supreme Court is dominated by the right. The new regulations will be upheld, and we will have our own updated version of the Alien and Sedition Act.

Once again, the moral of this story for liberals is to be careful what you ask for, because you might get it.

During his marathon monologue, Kevin McCarthy argued that nobody voted for Biden to be the new FDR. AOC’s interjection notwithstanding, was he right?

In a sense, yes; the 2020 election was a referendum on Trump, because both sides wanted it that way. The size of the state was not really an issue. On the other hand, nobody voted for Trump’s tax cuts in 2016, either, so McCarthy’s question missed the point. The real issue is, what are the voters really voting for?

I submit to you that an American election is mostly a contest between two teams with different visions of what this country should look like. The blue team sees America as a complex, multi-racial democracy; the red team thinks white men have a God-given right to rule, but are currently oppressed by women and minorities. Identity politics thus prevail among the vast majority of voters; abstract ideas about the size of the state only matter on the fringes. Since the two groups are fairly evenly matched, presidential elections are ultimately decided by the handful of swing voters who are motivated primarily by economic self-interest.

On this theory, Biden won the election because a majority of Americans decided that a red team led by Trump could not be trusted to run the country properly. They held no firm opinions as to whether the size of the welfare state should be increased, decreased, or held constant; they just wanted Trump and his divisiveness gone. That’s not a mandate to create new social programs, but it’s not a mandate not to, either. If Biden and the Democrats want to be bold and pursue an agenda of replacing the dollar store economy with a more worker-friendly version, the outcome of the 2024 election will depend on the fruits of their labor, as determined by the swing voters.

If you’re the governor of a red state, cleansing your public universities of left-wing bias is going to be a grindingly slow process, but it is conceptually simple; after all, you pay the salaries of these people. Surveys, monitors, and right-wing provocateurs can all be used to out the wokes and the commies. It will take time, but it can be done.

Private universities are a different matter, since you don’t control them. But, hey, if you win the presidency, it’s a brand new ball game! Many students rely on federal guarantees to pay their tuition; maybe you can condition the use of those funds, as well as federal funds for research, on the teaching of truth, as you see it!

Don’t be surprised if you start seeing ideas like this being thrown around the next time a Republican becomes president. The real question is whether it is already too late. Gen Z has no use for the GOP; the chances of changing that at this point are very poor.

So the Court will soon overturn Roe.

We will see just how far they will go.

We know Roe will be dead.

What will rise in its stead?

Will the process be faster or slow?

Several months ago, I was watching a French documentary on Louis XIV on Amazon Prime. At one point, a female historian was talking about the Sun King’s virility, and about how hot his mistresses were. She did this with great pride.

That would never happen in America. It also explains why “le wokeisme” will never have much of a following in France, at least with regard to sexual politics. Traditional roles are too baked into the culture to let it happen.

Reactionaries, of course, have their own safe spaces in the MSM, starting with Fox News. That’s not good enough; they need to silence the left, as well. Reinstating the Fairness Doctrine isn’t going to have any appeal for Rupert Murdoch, so that’s out. What can a good reactionary do?

There are two options. The first is the Hungarian template: win power; subject the left-leaning MSM to as much regulatory harassment as possible; and get your wealthy allies to buy any TV network or publication that supports the left. The second is to get the Supreme Court to change its position on libel law, and then start filing suits to ruin the MSM. Justice Thomas, for one, would be happy to oblige you.

Your problem is that there may not be enough obscenely rich reactionaries out there to buy out Jeff Bezos, let alone the large corporations that run the TV networks, and First Amendment jurisprudence is well-established; in other words, America ain’t Hungary. Barring a national emergency that permits you to throw the First Amendment out the window, becoming the American Orban isn’t going to be easy. That doesn’t mean you won’t try, however. Your constituents will demand it.

You’ve probably seen the commercial for Alexa featuring an elderly black couple dancing to their favorite romantic song. Two years ago, I can guarantee you that the couple would have been white. The trend towards inclusiveness in ads is unmistakable.

That illustrates the difficulty the right will have dealing with “woke capitalism.” They can keep corporations from making overtly political statements with threats of boycotts and arbitrary regulatory action, but they can’t really do much to influence corporate culture, or how it manifests itself in commercials. Even emergency political powers wouldn’t do the trick. It is a war that is doomed to fail.

Leviathan is unstoppable, moans The Economist. Not even Reagan and Thatcher could stop it. With demographic and climate change, it is bound to get even bigger. All that freedom-loving people can do is restrain it and try to make it more efficient.

How much of this is true? It is accurate to say that Reagan and Thatcher did little to limit the size of the welfare state; Thatcher’s causes were privatization and smashing union power, while Reagan was more into tax cuts and deregulation. It is misleading, however, to suggest that the history of the last 40 years has been one of new and dramatically expanded welfare programs; in fact, the increase in GDP percentage is due largely to three other reasons:

1. The demographic change driving more public spending isn’t in the near future, as the article suggests; it has been here for at least a decade. Boomers have been retiring on the taxpayers’ dime and enjoying low cost health care since 2011;
2. Rising unit costs for education and health care represent a bipartisan failure of government, not a deliberate effort to expand the state; and
3. Military spending is a much higher percentage of GDP than it was back in, say, the good old days of the 1920s. The Economist doesn’t pay any attention to that.

It is undoubtedly true that an aging population and climate change mitigation will add a few more percentage points to GDP in the coming years, as there is no free market solution to either of these problems. It is also correct to say that small government liberals should focus their attention on making the system more efficient. That is in everyone’s best interest, regardless of ideology.