Monthly Archives: July 2020

The corruption is obvious to anyone who is willing to notice what is going on

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From Instapundit:

JULIE KELLY: Brookings Institution: A Key Collusion Collaborator: The liberal think tank helped perpetrate one of the biggest frauds in political history on the American people.

These are from the comments:

Who in the Democratic Party wasn’t part of the conspiracy to overthrow a lawfully elected president? Anyone?

When a businessman buys a company, they generally want to keep the staff around because they’re the ones with the experience, institutional knowledge, and social connections to get the job done. The expectation is that the staff will be reasonably loyal to the guy who signs the paycheck. That does not apply in politics, quite the opposite. I daresay Trump knows better now, but the damage is done.

Also, as a complete outsider to politics inside the Beltway, Trump did not have his own binders full of names as replacements for many of the positions he was entitled to fill. He also didn’t have people who owed him favors. In the end, he had little choice but to go forward with many holdovers from the Obama administration and plans to gradually replace them as time and opportunity permitted. Unfortunately, he got sidetracked by the Russia Russia hoax and never had the luxury of building an administration in his own image the way his predecessors did. We voters who picked Trump BECAUSE he was an outsider could not have anticipated how difficult it would be. Who among us on January 21, 2017, expected a Special Counsel investigation that would run 3 years and was designed to hobble his presidency or an impeachment?

For the first two years of Trump’s presidency the Republicans controlled the House and Senate. They could have shut down Mueller anytime they wanted, and investigated what was already known about the spying by the Obama administration (and we know so much more now). They could have done that but they did not. Mitch McConnell has prevented Trump from appointing anyone who might actually look into what has been going on, and Ol’ Mitch can only do that with the support of the Republican Senators. They are in this up to their necks too, that’s why nothing has happened. If Trump does nothing else, he has revealed how complicit the Republicans have been in this whole squalid mess.

The irony is all Democrats had to do was wait Trump out, then they could return to ending the Constitution with no one willing to stop them. But they just couldn’t wait and decided to start burning down the country instead.

Do you suppose Trump picked Barr? Do you know how it works? The AG has to be approved by the Senate. That means Ol’ Mitch McConnell decides who gets in. Why do you think Ol’ Mitch hasn’t put the Senate into recess during Trump’s presidency? The absolute last thing Ol’ Mitch is going to allow is for Trump to appoint someone who will actually start investigating what they have all been up to.

I think the American people have had a very great many frauds laid upon them. They ain’t seen nothing yet.

Ideas cannot win on their own. They need a voice

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From Bari Weiss Knows What ID Scientists Already Knew.

New York Times opinion journalist Bari Weiss submitted her very public resignation today. It’s a must read, and it will remind you at once of the world scientists in the intelligent design community have long occupied.

“Forays into Wrongthink”

Some excerpts:

[A] new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else….

I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist….

New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action….

There are terms for all of this: unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge. I’m no legal expert. But I know that this is wrong….

Part of me wishes I could say that my experience was unique. But the truth is that intellectual curiosity — let alone risk-taking — is now a liability at The Times…. [S]elf-censorship has become the norm.

… If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets.

Op-eds that would have easily been published just two years ago would now get an editor or a writer in serious trouble, if not fired….

All this bodes ill, especially for independent-minded young writers and editors paying close attention to what they’ll have to do to advance in their careers. Rule One: Speak your mind at your own peril….

I’ve always comforted myself with the notion that the best ideas win out. But ideas cannot win on their own. They need a voice. They need a hearing.

Why did Marx single out Mill for criticism but never answer him?

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A Question asked on Marx and Mill.

What were the theoretical issues when Marx and Marxian economists criticized John Stuart Mill as vulgarizer of classical system?

What is the real content of vulgarization, when they claim that J.S. Mill vulgarized Ricardo’s teachings? In what sense is he blamed to have opened the way to neoclassical economics?
Béla Balassa once wrote in his paper “Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill” (Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, Bd. 83, (1959), pp. 147-165):
  •  Marx’s treatment of John Stuart Mill is one of the great puzzles of history of economic thought. Reading Marx (and his followers) one gets the impression that Mill was an insignificant figure whose writings exemplify the “decline” of Ricardian economics. Whenever Marx mentions Mill’s name (which does not happen very frequently) he v\never forgets to add some derogatory comment. (p.147)
In another paper (John Stuart Mill and the Law of Markets, The Quarterly Journal of Economics Vol. 73, No. 2 (May, 1959), pp. 263-274) he wrote:
  • For present-day economists [Mill] represents a “half-way house” between Ricardo and Marshall; for Marxists he is the apologist personified, sharing the responsibility with many others for the “decline” of Ricardian economics.(p.263)
I wonder why John Stuart Mill was so unduly ill-treated by Marx and Marxian economists.

Then answer is, of course, that Marx had no answers to what Mill wrote, neither economically nor ethically. But is Marx’s animosity to Mill the reason virtually no economist will read Mill today?

Ba mir bistu sheyn

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A wonderful song but now with its history which is just as wonderful. But also with this as an economic lesson. The narrator tells how the song is eventually sold by its writers for thirty 1937 US dollars as if they had been shortchanged in some way. But as you follow the story along with the various bends in the road you see that there is more luck than genius as in many (most?) such stories. And for myself, I would rather be remembered as the person who wrote the song than as someone who had been paid a lot of money for something I once did but had no such success as part of my life story.

Frauds, snares and delusions in the age of the rhetorical virus

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Just picked up a quite excellent book in our local second-hand bookshop. It is titled, Fallacy: the Counterfeit of Argument, and was written in 1959. By happenstance, this is part of the introduction:

The triumph of rhetoric is like the spread of a virus infection. When an epidemic spreads through an area, it is said to prevail there, and local measures may be taken. But to say that it prevails does not mean that everyone is infected. Some persons may escape infection; others are immune. It is not necessary to labour the analogy in order to show that it would be a good idea if the community could somehow develop a serum against some forms of persuasion.

Few can hope to become immune to all the tricks of persuasion since, like viruses, there are too many of them. People are daily exposed to appeals to blind faith, self interest, fear, prejudice, fancy. This book cannot discuss persuasion in all its variety and complexity, but it can attempt to describe and illustrate some of the most dangerous strains.

Logic is the defence against trickery. The kinds of argument with which logic deals are the reasonable ones. Mistakes are possible, even frequent, in applying the forms of logical argument, and these mistakes are regarded as fallacies, many having been noted as early as Aristotle. We shall wish to guard against them. But the most common fallacies today are of a very different sort. It is a small comfort to know that an argument is entirely logical but that its validity derives its conclusion from its premises, and that all the rules of the syllogism, or whatever, are observed to a nicety, if it turns out that the premises are frauds, snares, delusions. There are brilliant tricks for getting people to accept all sorts of false premises as true (some of these tricks have been spotted since the time of the ancient Greeks), and these tricks are so prevalent that even when people realise that something is being pulled on them, they tend to let it pass.

Which brings me to this: The COVID Coup by Angelo Codevilla. It is the best political discussion of the political dimension of Covid-1984 I have come across so far. It was also posted at Instapundit where the “best” comment reads, in full, “Fantastic article”. From the article’s intro:

What history will record as the great COVID scam of 2020 is based on 1) a set of untruths and baseless assertions—often outright lies—about the novel coronavirus and its effects; 2) the production and maintenance of physical fear through a near-monopoly of communications to forestall challenges to the U.S.. ruling class, led by the Democratic Party, 3) defaulted opposition on the part of most Republicans, thus confirming their status as the ruling class’s junior partner. No default has been greater than that of America’s Christian churches—supposedly society’s guardians of truth.

Just read it long though it may be. If anything is needed more than reasoned discussion at this time, I cannot think what that is.