Cromwell

I read two interesting articles about whitelash in the NYT two weeks ago. One of them addressed a resolution about welcoming people of all races in a Wisconsin town; the other was about a black farmer who receives money from a federal program supporting minorities in a rural community. In the first article, the town was preparing to vote down the resolution, because the white residents considered any suggestion that the community was racist to be a form of racism; in the second, white farmers were grumbling about the unfairness of funds targeted for minorities.

How do we deal with these attitudes? Don’t bother talking about slavery, because it is too remote, and the distant relatives of slave owners don’t feel any responsibility. Don’t talk about white privilege, because most white people struggle to get by, and don’t feel privileged. Talk about the issues experienced by black people as problems to be solved, not guilt to be expunged. In other words, social potholes that need to be filled in the normal course of business.

There is a house in my neighborhood whose owner flies both the American and the Confederate flags. I am tempted to confront her and tell her that the one is the negation of the other. The American flag stands for liberty; the Confederate flag stands for secession, slavery, and treason.

I haven’t done it, and I probably never will, for two reasons. One of them is simply that I don’t thrive on that kind of conflict. The other, which is more important, is that she might well tell me that the Confederacy is real America, and everyone else is an interloper, so there is no inconsistency. After all, that is what reactionaries genuinely believe.

I don’t think we will ever really have peace and justice in this country until they stop believing it.

The local TV station that we watch provides vaccination statistics for Virginia and Tennessee on a daily basis. The former is ahead of the national average; the latter is far behind.  

Could this possibly be because one has become a blue state, and the other is red? Inquiring minds want to know.

I was reading an article in The Atlantic about the Lost Cause a few days ago. In the article, one of the Confederate wannabes argued that the Civil War could not possibly have been about slavery, because hundreds of thousands of men who did not own slaves would have died fighting against their economic self-interest. Impossible, right?

Hardly. They were the ancestors of millions of white workers who voted for Trump against their apparent self-interest for culture war reasons. The GOP is completely dependent on those voters, and would perish without them.

On the 46th president Joe.

His plans have a long way to go.

Predictably, Mitch

Chose to fight, not to switch.

It’s minority rule, don’t you know.

Let me make this clear: anti-Semitism is a putrid, monstrous ideology whose practitioners are entitled to nothing but contempt, regardless of where they stand on the political spectrum. That said, the combination of Israel’s overwhelming military might and Bibi’s complete identification with American reactionaries made a degree of left-wing anti-Semitism inevitable. Some members of the left see Bibi as an international version of Chauvin, with his knee on the necks of the Palestinians. They are not totally wrong.

Of course, if they want to beat up Bibi’s allies, they should take on right-wing Christians, not Jews. That won’t happen, because there are way too many of them, and they have guns.

Will Bibi actually go this time? If he does, will things improve? I hope so. We’ll see.

I was lucky: I turned 18 after the Vietnam War, so I never even had to register for the draft. And a good thing, too: I was unfit for military service on a variety of levels, my lifelong interest in the subject notwithstanding.

On days like this, I wonder what I would have done if I had been drafted. I honestly don’t know; it was the land of no good options. As a result, I fully respect the decisions that everyone made at the time. The people who are most entitled to our love and admiration, however, are the ones who went and suffered for it, along with their friends and families.

The cliche is wrong; they died for what the government wrongly thought were American interests, not for our freedom. That diminishes the sacrifice not one whit. If anything, it amplifies it.

So, today, I will do my best to be worth dying for. Have a good holiday.

A large percentage of the housing stock in the Outer Banks looks new, which suggests that it was rebuilt with funds from the federal flood insurance program after a number of hurricanes. It consists of megahouses, three or four stories in height, elevated about 15 feet. About half of it, by my guess, is rental housing for tourists.

My record proves that I have as much respect for property rights as anyone. However, there is no public interest in vacation rentals that justifies using federal funds to promote development in such an absurdly vulnerable area. These houses are doomed in the long run. I don’t want to pick up the tab when they go under.

Would I agree to pay to rebuild New Orleans or New York? Yes. But the owners of these buildings should be operating at their own risk, because their contribution to the country’s wellbeing is close to zero.

I am currently reading a book on Edwardian England called “The Age of Decadence.” Since Ross Douthat has a book out which makes the same judgment about contemporary America, it is fair and appropriate to ask whether Trumpian America resembles the UK in 1914.

It does, in the following ways: a rapidly rising and aggressive foreign power; a left determined to bring about significant social and economic change; an openly insurrectionist right; and a former head of state with dubious morals.

Edwardian England was a time of tremendous innovation; we got 280 characters. In addition, there was no British counterpart to “America First” in foreign policy, so it may be that the differences outweigh the similarities. In any event, England still had plenty of bite in 1915, so if you’re Xi or Putin, the analogy shouldn’t give you much comfort.

Did Neanderthals have souls? If so, why not the apes from whom they evolved, and where is the line? If not, how can that be justified, given the functional similarities and the shared DNA?

Just asking.

Most right-wingers will tell you that raising income taxes reduces the willingness to work and invest. Are they right?

It depends. First of all, people work for reasons other than money. Second, if your minimum standard of living is relatively high, and the tax increase puts it in jeopardy, you will actually work harder. Finally, while tax increases, viewed in isolation, can discourage some financially marginal investments, what if the government spends the proceeds in a way that will widen the market for your product? That is the objective of the Biden plans.

The bottom line is that we can only guess at the impact of the Biden plans at this point in the process. My guess is that anything that is designed to move us away from the dollar store economy is worth a try.

My wife and I visited the Wright Brothers Memorial on the Outer Banks yesterday afternoon. To my surprise, there was no reference to tax cuts in the narrative about the history of flight.

In the long run, economic growth is largely dependent on innovation, which in turn is mostly driven by the simple desire of people to try to make things better. Tax cuts are largely irrelevant to that process.

The Normandy invasion was done with complete control of the sea and air and with the advantage of surprise. If the Chinese were to attempt an invasion of Taiwan, they could count on none of those. Are they likely to try it, anyway?

Of course not. They would rely on missiles and an air and sea blockade. An invasion would be way too risky.

It ended as I predicted. From a military perspective, the Israelis won, but that is meaningless; the US didn’t lose any major battles in Vietnam, either. Who actually won Gaza?

Hamas. They solidified their claim to be the authentic voice of the resistance, split public opinion in America, aroused the anger of the Arab street, and opened a new, more dangerous front within Israel. They can replace the tunnels and rockets. The victory, in political terms, is theirs.

Every society puts certain kinds of speech outside the window of respectability. Woke warriors on Twitter want to shrink the window and move it to the left, thereby branding some traditional ideas about identity as illegitimate. The right wants to use its political power to shrink the window and move it to the right, thereby silencing the woke warriors. Liberals want to leave the window as wide open as possible, and to keep it where it is.

That, in a nutshell, is what the battle over cancel culture is all about.