As Heather Cox Richardson does so often and so well, she puts current events within the context of history, in this instance, the anniversary of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. The current events: the Rittenhouse verdict & reactions to it; the passage of the Build Back Better bill in the House, and efforts in Wisconsin to trash the electoral system. Important reading.
Showing posts with label Heather Cox Richardson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Heather Cox Richardson. Show all posts
Saturday, November 20, 2021
Tuesday, May 18, 2021
Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 18 May 2021
Much of this book has been a repudiation, mostly implicit but not always, of the relevance, to those of us who are not naturally lean and healthy, of Pollan’s otherwise seemingly sensible mantra—“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” For us, “not too much” is meaningless. “Mostly plants” is not ideal and may be to our detriment (ideal as it may be for the animals and maybe even the environment, although that, too, is not as simple as it is often portrayed).
[K]ings have made [arguments] for enslaving the people in all ages of the world…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent..... I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it… where will it stop?
A. Lincoln (courtesy of Heather Cox Richardson)
You’re either believing your thoughts or questioning them. There’s no other choice.
Will depends on freedom; and freedom is a matter of degree (21. 8). This complicates our simplest possible analysis of the body politic without, however, falsifying it.
History concerns not the past, but the past encased in the present in the form of evidence.
Progress gives an answer to the troublesome question, And what shall we do now? The answer, on the lowest level, says: Let us develop what we have into something better, greater, et cetera. (The, at first glance, irrational faith of liberals in growth, so characteristic of all our present political and economic theories, depends on this notion.)
We do not inhabit the body like some alien Cartesian piece of machine wizardry, but live it – a distinction between the left and right [brain] hemisphere understandings of the body.
Knowledge and information throughout our economy and society are being degraded on an immense scale. That’s because, as with legal procedure, the standards according to which competition takes place are public goods. But they reflect the private interests of those with products to sell, axes to grind and stories to spin, not the public interest we all have in being informed.
--Nicholas Gruen
Goddess worship, feminine values, and women's power depend on the ubiquity of the image. God worship, masculine values, and men's domination of women are bound to the written word. Word and image, like masculine and feminine, are complementary opposites. Whenever a culture elevates the written word at the expense of the image, patriarchy dominates. When the importance of the image supersedes the written word, feminine values and egalitarianism flourish.
Though Christianity did reach an accommodation with Aristotle, the obstacles to doing so were prima facie more serious than for the other religions of the book. The Jewish and Islamic God, “the Desired, the Existent, the Sole, the Supreme,” was already a somewhat remote and almost philosophic figure and tended to create philosophical problems for his followers only in such marginal areas as the creation of the world. The Christian God did much more extraordinary things, such as walking around a Roman province at a not too distant time in history.
Saturday, February 20, 2021
Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 20 February 2021
To be sure, every revolutionary movement has been led by the disinterested, who were motivated by compassion or by a passion for justice, and this, of course, is also true for Marx and Lenin. But Marx, as we know, had quite effectively tabooed these “emotions”—if today the establishment dismisses moral arguments as “emotionalism” it is much closer to Marxist ideology than the rebels—and had solved the problem of “disinterested” leaders with the notion of their being the vanguard of mankind, embodying the ultimate interest of human history.
Because of the undeniable relevance of these self-chosen properties to our appearance and role in the world, modern philosophy, starting with Hegel, has succumbed to the strange illusion that man, in distinction from other things, has created himself. Obviously, self-presentation and the sheer thereness of existence are not the same.
Because British conservatives avoided the dead ends and calamities of the nineteenth-century right in France and Germany, it is tempting to treat conservatism in Britain as a historic exception, perhaps a type all its own.
Rist says, “All human activities without any exceptions whatever involve some degree of assent. A totally non-voluntary act is an impossibility” (Stoic Philosophy, p.42). Seneca, for example, says “impulse never exists without the mind’s assent” (De Ira II.4 [Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, vol. 1, p. 419]). But one might wonder about the phrase “all human activities without any exceptions.”
The idea that biological properties and the structure of organisms arise from lower-level entities, but are novel and irreducible to the particulars from which the whole has emerged, became an increasingly significant theme in biology and in philosophy of biology by the late twentieth century. Arguments of emergence and complexity became important, too, in organizational management and systems theory, in which Polanyi’s work found new applications by the 1990s. [From the forward by Mary Jo Nye.]
You’re not obligated to win. You’re obligated to keep trying to do the best you can every day.
– Marian Wright Edelman
From @HeatherCoxRichardson quoting and writing about President Joe Biden:
Democracy is under assault around the world, he said. “We are in the midst of a fundamental debate about the future and direction of our world. We’re at an inflection point between those who argue that, given all the challenges we face — from the fourth industrial revolution to a global pandemic — that autocracy is the best way forward, they argue, and those who understand that democracy is essential — essential to meeting those challenges.”
“… [D]emocracy will and must prevail. We must demonstrate that democracies can still deliver for our people in this changed world. That, in my view, is our galvanizing mission.”
. . . .
In his speech, Biden emphasized not just the importance of democracy, but also how much work it is to keep it. “Democracy doesn’t happen by accident,” he said. “We have to defend it, fight for it, strengthen it, renew it. We have to prove that our model isn’t a relic of our history; it’s the single best way to revitalize the promise of our future.”
He did indeed sound like FDR when he concluded: “if we work together with our democratic partners, with strength and confidence, I know that we’ll meet every challenge and outpace every challenger.”
. . . .
Friday, February 19, 2021
Thoughts for the Day: Friday 19 February 2021
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| 2018 publication |
What is this strange need to lead, and the equally strange one to follow? What is this will to power? Why do we pursue it? Must it always corrupt? Charismatic leaders cast a spell over their followers in the same way that a magician casts one over those he wants to enchant. The power of the image, of glamour, of one’s self-confidence, is at work in both—as it is in the confidence trickster. The medium is the imagination, whether in its traditional forms or in its new electronic version.
Mazzini [19th-century Italian exponent of Italian unity] was an exponent of political style, an artist depending on the incantatory effect of words like ‘God’, ‘people’, ‘republic’, ‘thought’ and ‘action’ – terms that demanded submission rather than cogitation.
In any society which recognized only external goods, competitiveness would be the dominant and even exclusive feature… We should therefore expect that, if in a particular society the pursuit of external goods were to become dominant, the concept of the virtues might suffer first attrition and then perhaps something near total effacement, although simulacra might abound.
If defense has a clear advantage over offense, and conquest is therefore difficult, great powers will have little incentive to use force to gain power and will concentrate instead on protecting what they have. When defense has the advantage, protecting what you have should be a relatively easy task. Alternatively, if offense is easier, states will be sorely tempted to try conquering each other, and there will be a lot of war in the system.
It is much harder and more complicated to build something, as the Democrats are trying to do, than it is to destroy something. This means it will be harder to give a clear daily picture of the Biden administration than it was of the previous administration. The status of the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, for example, is not clear right now because it is being marked up in committees, as such a bill should be. While the contours are likely what they were when they went in, what will emerge and then be put into a draft bill is not yet clear enough that we can talk about it definitively.
Thursday, February 18, 2021
Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 18 February 2021
The law of karma describes the way that cause and effect govern the patterns that repeat themselves throughout all life. Karma means that nothing arise s by itself. Every experience is conditioned by that which precedes it. Thus our life is a series of interrelated patterns. The Buddhists say that understanding this is enough to live wisely in the world.
The growing body of adaptive information available in the minds of other people also drove genetic evolution to create a second form of human status, called prestige, which now operates alongside the dominance status we inherited from our ape ancestors.
The hard right, that is, abandoned multilateralism for unilateralism. For a weak power like Britain, unilateralism is a fantasy. For strong powers like the United States or China, it promises autarchy and disruption.
A thematic umbrella under which the factions of the right could gather was hostility to government. Reagan rocked audiences with jibes at the expense of “big government” so skillfully that they forgot that big government was what he was asking them to let him run. He spoke out against government spending and waste but watched deficits soar, boasting that he might be old but was not stupid, and never once sent Congress a balanced budget.
I am asking whether the age-old habit of considering the natural world (or world of things which happen of themselves) as a world consisting of various natural realms is the only possible way of considering that world. The answer is that any system of classification or division, whether the things classified or divided are colours or things that happen of themselves, is a system not ‘discovered’ but ‘devised’ by thought. The act of thought by which it is laid down is not proposition but supposition.
Hence all art, religion, and science rest on perception or history, as the earlier terms of any dialectical series on the later. But the extraordinary powers of history, the kind of intellectual feats that can be performed by a Grote or a Gibbon, though they are an essential part of the historical life, are actually acquired by this life only when it recognizes itself as historical.
“No one’s model of the power system envisioned that all 254 Texas counties would come under a winter storm warning at the same time,” said Joshua Rhodes, an expert on the state’s electric grid at the University of Texas, Austin. (NYT)
In 1971, Lewis Powell [later appointed as a justice to the U.S. Supreme Court by Richard Nixon], an attorney for the tobacco industry, wrote a confidential memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce outlining how business interests could overturn the New Deal and retake control of America. Powell focused on putting like-minded scholars and speakers on college campuses, rewriting textbooks, stacking the courts, and pressuring politicians. He also called for “reaching the public generally” through television, newspapers, and radio. “[E]very available means should be employed to challenge and refute unfair attacks,” he wrote, “as well as to present the affirmative case through this media.” https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-17-2021?
Tuesday, February 16, 2021
Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 16 February 2021
There’s just such a vast array of mistakes human minds can make that if you rejected every argument that looks like it could maybe be guilty of some fallacy, you’d be left with nothing at all. It often just doesn’t mean very much when we find that a line of argument can be made to look “suspiciously like” some fallacious argument. Or rather: being suspicious is one thing, and being so suspicious that relevant evidence cannot realistically overcome a suspicion is another.
Collingwood may well be right to say that there can be no history of nature, but this surely applies to biography, too. What gives biography its structure – what determines its particular aspect, if you like – are not natural facts, but the individual’s perspective on their life understood as a whole. The skilled biographer not only relives the life of his subject, he enhances it through the telling. In the biographer’s hands, events in life which his subject made too little of or repressed can be induced to say more.
This is a significant argument given Collingwoods rather dour remarks about biography as a genre. But I agree with Johnson.
By this process of re-enactment history is brought into the closest possible relationship with life, or, to put this in Collingwood’s language, it is necessarily linked to self-knowledge.
The world lies between people, and this in-between—much more than (as is often thought) men or even man—is today the object of the greatest concern and the most obvious upheaval in almost all the countries of the globe. Even where the world is still halfway in order, or is kept halfway in order, the public realm has lost the power of illumination which was originally part of its very nature.
Think of the macrophage—and, for that matter, the entire diverse assembly of immune cells—as a pack of friendly wolves patrolling the area inside our skin, attacking the things that might hurt us. What happens when those wolves no longer have regular prey? They go stir-crazy. They get bored. And they might turn on themselves.
The following polling figures from WTF JHT website.
poll/ 58% of American believe Trump should have been convicted. 61% said Trump’s conduct warranted him being impeached and put on trial. (ABC News)
poll/ 75% of Republicans say they’d like to see Trump play a prominent role in the Republican Party. Overall, 60% of Americans do not want Trump to play a prominent role in the party. (Quinnipiac)
poll/ 62% of Americans say a third political party is needed – up from 57% in September. 33% of Americans say the two major parties are doing an adequate job representing the public. (Gallup)
The following courtesy of Heather Cox Richardson's Substack feed.
The Senate trial also gave powerful proof of just how undemocratic the Senate has become. Voting rights journalist Ari Berman noted that the “57 senators who voted to convict Trump represent 76.7 MILLION more Americans than 43 senators who voted to acquit.”
Read this whole Tweet chain by Berman: eye-opening.
https://twitter.com/AriBerman/status/1360703942255067137?s=20
Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne noted that the adherence of all but seven senators to Trump “should end the absurd talk that there is a burden on President Biden to achieve a bipartisan nirvana in Washington. If most Republicans can’t even admit that what Trump did is worthy of impeachment, how can anyone imagine that they would be willing and trustworthy governing partners?”
And a couple of other outstanding one-liners from Dionne in his column:
"Trump will prove to be even more of an albatross than [Herbert] Hoover, who, after all, had a moral core."
"You can tell how worried Republicans are that they are now the Trump Party by the contortions of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who aided Trump almost to the end. Rarely has a politician been more blatant in attempting the impossible feat of running with the foxes and hunting with the hounds."
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