- This week’s note in Trumpian ‘Alternative Facts’ comes from Nancy LeTourneau at Washington Monthly as Giuliani wants his client to refuse a lawful subpoena because the President lives in a universe of alternate truth.
- Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger presents indications that my President has made racists bolder. That evidence is anecdotal but there are so so many anecdotes. Surely anecdotes must eventually aggregate into data.
- tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors has a complete online interview carried by the Toronto Star on the Korea cancellation. About a 10 second read.
- Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass suggests that, for the 2018 elections, there is one and only one decisive issue.
- Frances Langum considers the weird DOJ meeting to review the ongoing investigation into the Russia-Trump connection, and invites us to join in watching as Anderson Cooper demands to know why Trump representatives were there. Video courteously included.
- Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post gazes into the wild brush along the road and glimpses a prowling Vice President patiently waiting for his Trump to bumble, stumble, and fall.
- Tommy Christopher publishes, on his own website, his research from 5 years ago that remains valid today.
- @bjork55 at Bjork Report agrees that guns don’t kill people, and tells us who does.
- North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz explores the two most scary words most often heard in reports of school shootings.
- In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, Bruce proposes from personal experience in his previous existence as a preacher that pastoral confidentiality is not as sacred as we are taught. He suggests that ministerial gossip is widespread.
- At The Onion, God has harsh words as He flees from the universe with $250 in cash.
- Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit presents a new logical result born from the notion that life begins at conception. Fortunately, the reasoning is judicially rejected.
- At an online discussion, I once suggested that those on the left often understand more about the positions they oppose than those on the right. I offered, as an example, the pro-life position on abortion. The basic premise is that human life begins at the moment of conception and can be protected by the right set of laws. That leads to pretty much every aspect of that position. Could conservatives faithfully present any argument from the left?
A pro-life friend acknowledged that my summary was about on target, and insisted that those on the right could do the same thing in reverse. He was not snarking or writing from any sense of irony. He sincerely believed he was accurately restating a liberal position. The premise of the pro-choice argument as he understood it: we think it’s okay to kill babies.
My longtime conservative friend, T. Paine at Saving Common Sense, offers what passes as conservative humor about political positions he opposes. Not exactly nuanced, but instructive. He inadvertently reveals how he sees his opposition. He also reminds those of us who might have forgotten that he is hilarious.
- M. Bouffant at Web of Evil seems to be having a really bad day. Downer. Maybe my friend, the uproarious Mr. Paine, can jolly him up.
- John Scalzi at Whatever explains how a typical blog site (which is to say his) is affected by new privacy regulations in the European Union (which is to say it isn’t). Unless said website egregiously abuses the rights of its participants. Did I say Facebook? Come on, I didn’t say Facebook.
- Every blog site gets a periodic tsunami of spam, bot driven comments constructed in the mechanical hope that some small percentage will find its way to the eyes of some small percentage of readers, some small percentage of which will take the bait and click. We on those sites sigh and delete. The Journal of Improbable Research is no different, but has found a use for one piece: generating an article about it. Mildly entertaining, too.
One thought on “Corruption, Obstruction, Succession, Korea, Racism, Guns, God, Oh My!”
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“I once suggested that those on the left often understand more about the positions they oppose than those on the right.”
It helps that conservative positions are generally not very complex, primarily because they are tied to a deontological moral system. Conservative Christians have the Bible as a rulebook, libertarians focus on property rights and freedom above all, etc.
Liberals tend to be more utilitarian or at least consequentialist, which requires considering multiple possibilities, analyzing their effectiveness (as opposed to doing them regardless of the consequences), and valuing people above rules and principles. Whether or not liberals do these things well is a separate matter.
There are deontological liberals and utilitarian conservatives, but neither is the dominant voice within its larger group and the latter in particular seems very small. (See: the death of the conservative intellectual.) That’s a shame because good conservative utilitarians are important for balancing out liberal excess while conservative deontologists tend to spur it on.