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."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-beginning-of-the-end-of-trumpism/2021/02/14/17037b70-6f02-11eb-93be-c10813e358a2_story.html
