Maybe a good thing; maybe the only thing. I know I've been a little lax lately keeping up with DTO links, but this one's definitely worth your click: my so-pessimistic-it's-optimistic take on why conservatives might be completely incapable of preventing the kind of government they despise.
1. Maybe peak oil really will bring back 'family values' -- by making awkward long distance relationships unaffordable, too.
2. It's not an official editorial statement, but Al Jazeera is running commentary like this:
others in the region are more optimistic and see the Union not as a zero-sum process, but rather one that will pave the way towards implementing substantial progress and cementing partnerships that would ultimately benefit all the countries of the Mediterranean.
It is this sense of optimism that the organisation's foreign ministers will use when they meet in November, to decide on a permanent home for the secretariat of the Union and a number of other specific projects that were suggested during the summit.
Either way, France has taken the lead - and the risk - and succeeded in bringing everyone on board, with the exception of Libya.
[...] But more importantly, the Paris summit also stands in stark contrast to the US position, as voiced by George Bush, the US president, (from the Israeli Knesset in June) that Europe and the Middle East not speak to radicals and "terrorists".
That's on the Mediterranean Union Union for the Mediterranean, something on which I'll have much more to say later. For now: the pressure's on Sarkozy to turn this into a real game-changer, and time is running out.
3. Without getting too overheated about it -- because this song keeps playing in my head, something called "No War With Iran's Gonna Happen (Least Till Next Time)" -- let me second Daniel and Pat Buchanan as forcefully as I can: war with Iran is not in the American, Israeli, or Arab interest. Not to mention it looks awful for Turkey and Iran as well. I've been on the record against war and for negotiations for a couple of years, now, but the sticking point is this: it very much is in Israel's interest, and ours, for Israel to successfully blow up the Iranian nuclear program without triggering a general Middle Eastern war. The really dangerous delusion haunting us now is the notion that this just might work. Because it might! But it won't.
4. Eros lo Volt! watch.
5. Shawn Macomber charts the continuing transformation of Tyra Banks into crosslegged barefoot therapeutic goddess Shethang, the beast with eight hundred foreheads.
6. Red Spam: Chinese communists junk-emailing God-fearing Americans!
7. Ezra sees a gulf of sanity and intelligence between Obama and Romney on jihadery and Islam. But during the primary season Romney struck me as the only 'big league' Republican candidate with any kind of nuanced vision of America's 'role' in the 'Arab world.' Yes, he's wrong to think we need to lead Muslims into modernity -- they're already there, and that's why some of them have been radicalized into crazy nihilists and savage reactionaries -- but I read him as saying the following: the Arab/Muslim world is a fluid realm of different allegiances and faiths, but jihadists are a brutally united cadre of freaks that cross these subtle boundaries with their common devotion to killing innocents, and so they all must be treated as the innocent-killers they are, without regard to their particular sect or sub-identity. I think that's pretty oversimplified, but it's an arguable claim: "This is about Hezbollah and Hamas and al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the worldwide jihadist effort to try and cause the collapse of all moderate Islamic governments" -- ? To this I answer "yes but," not "no."
8. For the record, I'm also hearing some pretty sketchy rumblings about Wachovia. Not good, dog.
[...] disaffected conservatives no doubt will ask, "What's the point of electing an ideologically unsound Republican president who is almost certain to further damage the GOP 'brand'?"
A fair question, and it's hard to summon a positive argument in response. But the purely negative argument -- the potential benefit of dealing the Democrats their third consecutive presidential loss -- is not entirely without merit.
[...] Granted, there's no civic virtue in electing a Republican president purely for the pleasure of crushing the hopes of liberals. But wouldn't it be fun? -- Stacy McCain
Maybe. I don't know. In the best of all possible worlds? Could be. In real life? Not actually. Because after beating Obama, all tomorrow's problems would still be ours to confront and solve. Which is fine, or is one thing, but look out Elephant Co.: will a freshet of hot new ideas really come pulsing out of a McCain administration? One which has to govern under a Democratic -- probably a fiercely Democratic -- Congress?
Win or lose, Republicans face a reckoning. And there's no hoping for a draw; you see how that turned out in 2000. Beating the other guy is usually fun, but cleaning up one's act under conditions of extreme time pressure and partisan dogfighting, internecine and otherwise, is not. Go and sin no more.
Like Barack Obama, whose infamous 'bitter' comment has entered into the public lexicon this election season, Phil Gramm -- a man I was sure would never be in the news again -- has given us 'whiners', the 'wimps' of 2008. His apologia runs as follows:
"what I meant is that American leaders are whiners -- they've got excuses for everything," he said Thursday, adding that some look for scapegoats instead of addressing problems. He criticized Obama for blaming oil companies and speculators for higher gas prices, rather than supporting more oil and gas drilling and nuclear power -- as McCain does.
“Gramm defended his recession comments, saying journalists have been ‘amplifying bad economic news’ and too many people believe things are worse than they really are. -- MSNBC
Whatever. The point is that Americans are whiners, but also sometimes not whiners. They are sometimes whiners about bad actual things they can't affect, and sometimes whiners about stupid things (my gas is going up! It'll cost so much to drive to Starbucks!) but not about much less stupid things (I won't be able to afford heat this winter!). Gramm's rhetoric is so troublesome because it's so falsely polarizing -- in a world where there are two types of people, whiners and nonwhiners, a redress of grievances is impossible, because there are no grievances worthy of the name.
Sorting whines from grievances is a critical task of politics -- witness the housing situation, where many irresponsible buyers and their irresponsible corporate partners whine for money they should've had the foresight to keep in the first place. But sorting appropriately, with dispassionate conservatism, is a task made more, not less, difficult by the likes of Gramm's sweeping generalizations.
Flint, MI, one of the biggest hellholes in America, is trying to get a grip on things by criminalizing sagging. I don't know if this would be my way of improving city life at the margins, but I do think -- as I scroll down through the long and colorful and occasionally hilarious list of comments at Hit & Run -- that it's exceptionally easy to ridicule this new slate of laws at a safe distance from Flint, MI. We are dealing with a profoundly decayed polity, here. I'm fairly confident that a statewide law banning the exposure of underpants would run afoul of a number of judicial and commonsensical judgments, but I'm also pretty sure that nobody has a constitutional or moral right to hang their boxer-clad ass out of their jeans in Flint, MI.
The wealthy "aren't locked in to being here in California," said Senate Budget Committee Vice Chairman Bob Dutton (R-Rancho Cucamonga). -- LAT
It's simple, really: the California government spends money it doesn't have and then takes some from whoever has the most. At least state legislators have a common-sense idea of what rich is -- wealth penalties would affect $321,000-earning families to the tune of a 7.5% increase, families with $642,000 to the sourer tune of a whopping 18% increase. Tough times, but nowhere near as outrageous as the standard Kerry/Clinton line that if a husband and wife (with four kids) each make $100,000 in pretax income then they're not a working family but a rich one.
But Vice Chairman Dutton is right -- not even the rich have a right to live in California. One possible problem with my mobile-society defense of (fairly) radical federalism is that it's easier for the rich to leave than the poor. Another problem could be that legislators will cater to the rich in order to keep them from moving away. But it's arguable that the wealthy are often so plugged into the social and economic networks of their jobs and peer groups that moving away is simply not possible. And obviously here with California you have legislators basically betting on the likelihood that that's true. Fair? Not really. Just? Yes. Rotten policy? Of course. Why? Because California can't afford its 'social' spending. And California's spending anyway. Just as rich people don't have a political or moral right to live in California (although of course rich California citizens have a political right not to be kicked out of California), they don't have a duty to give away their money until people stop asking (unless of course tax increases are passed and they elect to stay in California, but that's no moral duty).
(An example, PS, of why 'justice as fairness' seems like a mistake to me. Fairness is actually more exacting a standard than justice (at least sometimes, probably often, and maybe always; I'm still working that out). And it plays by different rules. If you think that standard is better than justice, say so; but don't say fairness should be justice, because then our legal institutions (especially courts) become organs designed for the manufacture and imposition of fairness -- which they are certainly not, and never should be, designed to do. The imposition of fairness can actually be -- unjust!
MORE...
Megan picks up the thread with some sharp-sounding Actual Economist's Observations, noting that
places like Buffalo are still saddled with a tax-and-spend system that they literally can't afford--the city recently ended up in receivership despite large transfers from the state government.
McArdle readers and others should refer at once, if they haven't already, to Edward Glaeser's definitive City Journal piece from last year, Can Buffalo Ever Come Back?: Probably not—and government should stop bribing people to stay there.
I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams. -- Hamlet, Prince in Darkness
The best time capsule of the present time that I have come across lately is here, the latest entry in what seems to be an ongoing series of soul-searching wire reports. Pauline Arrillaga's coverage -- and the commentary of those she interviews -- speaks for itself. Best/worst line:
"There is a sense of helplessness everywhere you look. It's like you're stuck in one spot, and you can't do anything about it."
Even after you eat it, the Flag is still There. Happy Independence Day from all your friends at Postmodern Conservative.
(American Pie courtesy Kreations by Kara via Flickr.)
Daniel talks big truth about our esteemed visiting blogger:
Speaking of John Schwenkler, he is a newer blogger who has risen quickly to become an important advocate of traditional conservatism, and I’m glad to say that TAC has been among the first publications to notice his talents. John has the cover story in the forthcoming issue on conservatism and food culture in what I suppose you could call our “crunchy” con issue–we also have Rod Dreher’s interview with Michael Pollan, whose book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Caleb Stegall has recently discussed here. I mention John as an example of what Brooks was arguing when he talked about writers rising through unconventional channels outside of the normal movement structures, because John has started writing in magazines and journals just as I did, which is to say by first being a blogger.
I think it's significant, too, that, yes, a lot of Us Folks have benefited from and participated in big, well-funded institutions on the right -- but have not parlayed, and never really sought to parlay, these (often outstanding) experiences into mainstream/partisan-track positions on the professional cafeteria line. From time to time you hear people praising the Amish Model -- raised to be turned loose on the world as the last best test of whether you want to come back -- and this is a rough example of why. Although in this case, at least a few of us have come back from the non-politico, non-journo, and non-partisan world with fundamentally different and deeper perspectives. Instead of reverting to doctrine, we remained altered. (Not to say we didn't sometimes also rediscover the worth of certain tenets of typical conservatism -- like taking to the public sphere to engage in 'merely' political argumentation!)
In our specific case, these are different, deeper, and more deeply altered perspectives on the American and human situation than those which inform the average piece of Beltway political journalism. And blogging permits us...and you...to work through and develop those perspectives as we go, without having to pass a recurrent series of litmus tests. This is invaluable to political philosophy generally -- and to conservative political philosophy in particular, at this particular moment in time.
From where I stand, it's easy for rising gas prices to look like a great thing. My family lives in a beautiful, pedestrian-friendly neighborhood that enables us to walk to church and shop for the groceries not provided by our CSA program at a market down the block. Right now we do have a car - a borrowed '93 Volvo station wagon which we're looking after for my adviser while he's in Europe - but we drive it very little, and lately we've been making a point to rely on it even less. Yesterday, for example, my wife decided I needed some new clothes as an early Father's Day gift (I am now the proud owner of a fedora and some seersucker pants which unfortunately do not match my seersucker jacket), and with the tank nearly empty and the possibility of a $50 fill-up staring us in the face, we opted to take the bus downtown and then walk home. (The first part was great - my son has developed a bus obsession since he learned the hand sign for it - but our return, with the westerly sun beating down on our faces, turned out to be a bit tough. All in all, though, a great afternoon, and very much more enjoyable than driving.) And so when I think about $5-a-tank gas, and imagine for example how it might bring our extended family members to cut down on their own driving in similar ways, it makes me feel all happy, both inside and out.
But then I read things like this, and those feelings go away pretty quickly. (An exercise for the reader: compare this map, which illustrates the average portion of income being spent on gasoline, this one, which maps median household incomes by county, and this one, which shows per-capita carbon emissions.) Sitting here in Berkeley and legislating from the seat of a state-of-the-art, zero-emissions bus, with the Volvo gathering dust and bird droppings back at home, the realization that somewhere else in America there are people spending as much as twenty percent of their income on gasoline hits me like a blow to the gut, and the post-petroleum future suddenly looks a lot less bright. And so, as much as I would like to agree with Megan McArdle and Ezra Klein about the rationale behind artificially raising the cost of high-carbon lifestyles, my inclination instead is to abandon all hope and start drilling in ANWR.
Let's be honest with ourselves: these are not people who are likely to be helped by improved public transportation. Nor are they the wealthy, short-sighted bobos who've bought exurban homes on Paradise Drive, and for whom sympathy feels more than a bit misplaced. And it really seems a gross understatement to speak of them as people for whom gasoline fuels a "way of life": given their circumstances, it is rather the stuff that pretty much waters the roots of life itself, and the notion that we ought to take steps to make it even more expensive seems to me to border on obscenity.
I am, however, aware that carbon emissions are a serious problem, and so I can't pretend to have a good solution to any of this. I know that people who think harder than I do about the details have tried to think up ways to offset the initial regressiveness of carbon taxes and other such measures, and to help to transition rural America into a more sustainable future. It's crucial, though, that those of us privileged enough to have a plethora of earth-friendly options right down (or on) the street not lose sight of the immensity of the challenges facing those who don't.
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