Let me qualify my argument that D's should not attack Amy Coney Barrett.
P1 Horrible as he was, Scalia had the paper qualifications to be an SC judge and R's loved him for his relentless, results-oriented, activist jurisprudence.
C Barrett is qualified to sit on the SC, if R's really want her.
C is true. R's have the right to inflict Scalia-grade damage on the republic by appointing bad, unprincipled judges. It's bad! They should be ashamed. It shocks the conscience. But that's the system. 2/
So D's should not die on the hill of the argument that no one like Scalia should ever be an SC justice. Scalia WAS a justice. He served. He is lionized on the right. Thus, there is precedent that his level of shenanigans, from the right, is acceptable SC jurisprudence. 3/
Seriously: sometimes R's appoint justices the left thinks are bad. And sometimes D's appoint justices the right thinks are bad. (And the D's are right, by the by!) You have to be a realist about it. You cannot insist R's never have the right to appoint right-wingers. 4/
But you can insist that IF the R's are going to appoint right-wingers, D's need to have the right to balance them out with moderates at least. Nothing else is stable and acceptable. The price of ignoring this is the court loses legitimacy. That's on R's if they go for it. 5/
So the argument is about the system, not the individual. Letting the framing be about the individual - Barrett - is a fatal slip, rhetorically and even substantively, because it puts the R's back in a much less bad argumentative posture. 6/
Arguing that Barrett - who is no worse than Scalia! - is unqualified to serve amounts to implying that Scalia should never have served. Currently one or two R's feel a bit of (what was the word?) - shame! Yes, it was called 'shame'. One or two R's may feel a vestigial twinge. 7/
Well, arguing that Barrett is tout court unqualified for the court will clear that right up and for good. R's will be able to wad their shame into a ball and focus instead on how D's are bullying them for being 'originalists'. Which is nonsense on stilts. But here we are. 8/
Rather than give R's invalid - but psychologically ideal - means for confabulating away their genuine guilt and hypocrisy by changing the subject to whether even Scalia was ever acceptable, D's should focus on the better argument that a 6-3 court is wildly unbalanced. 9/
Here it is great to critique Barrett for the kinds of decisions she's handed down. That's good! Do that! I should have said more about that. Emphasize the evidence that she's a partisan extremist. But within the frame that she will be on a 6-3 court, voting Republican. 10/
The problem with the Catholic stuff is a lot of valid critiques of her jurisprudence and theory sound like things a person might say, instead, for a bad reason. The Dems aren't anti-Catholic. That's nonsense. The D's are much stronger on religious liberty than R's. 11/
It's totally illogical of the R's to argue that, because there could be a bad reason for opposing Barrett's jurisprudence - namely, anti-Catholicism, or hating moms or whatever - that therefore the opposition can't be for the good reasons. That's stupid. But - 12/
The R's will make a point of willfully mishearing and flopping around, theatrically, pretending there has been some awful, anti-mom, anti-Catholic foul committed. This is kayfabe and lies, but there is way to prevent it, rhetorically. So better to pick other shots. 13/
Don't make any critiques of Barrett, however valid and pertinent, that can be willfully misconstrued by Hugh Hewitt as anti-Catholic, no matter how ridiculous that misreading of real, valid concerns is. It's just a loser to go there. 14/
One last thing. Looking over her 'originalist' writings, I think the time has come to revisit that philosophy, in questioning. The problem is basically that 'originalism' is so flexible it allows very results-oriented, partisan judging. Hence Scalia's record. 15/
If originalism gives you a story to tell, to get results you think would be good, tell the originalist story. If it doesn't, if the results would be bad, ignore your own philosophy. That's it. 16/
Originalism is nuts (as Scalia admitted) and 'originalism, but only when I like it' (Scalia's approach, and Barrett's) is unprincipled. And that's why we need partisan balance on the court, to maintain credibility. 'Originalism' is no check on activism. 17/
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This @radleybalko debunking of the 'Derek Chauvin was wrongly convicted' documentary, "The Fall of Minneapolis", seems quite thorough, convincing, and damning. radleybalko.substack.com/p/the-retconni…
It's SO thorough & damning it's fair to say that figures like @coldxman who have promoted the documentary, & its conclusion, should either 1) debunk Balko's debunking back or 2) admit they were suckered by liars or 3) be themselves regarded as such. thefp.com/p/what-really-…
Back in December I somehow found myself listening to this bloggingheads discussion between @GlennLoury and John McWhorter, in which Loury quite strongly takes the line that the documentary exonerates Chauvin and proves 'we've been lied to'. bloggingheads.tv/videos/67137
11 things can be true at once. 1) Israeli policy towards Palestinians has been & continues to be deeply unjust. 2) Belief in 1) is not antisemitic. 3) Since 1) is a main root of the conflict 'solutions' that ignore it won't work & are bad. 4) The left has an antisemitism problem.
5) The left has an idiot problem. Lots of people shouting antisemitic slogans they don't understand out of a vague sense that this is social justice. 6) 4) + 5) is really bad and poisonous to the left. 7) The right has an antisemitism problem (and an idiot problem, duh.)
8) The pro-Israel right has an interest in playing up 4) because it is unwilling to admit 1), despite 3), and would like to believe 7) is less serious than 4), which - maybe? (Who can say, but I doubt it.) 9) 8) predictably exacerbates 4) + 5), hence 6).
My personal resolution: I'm only going to comment on the Israel/Gaza situation in a calm manner, addressed to the relatively small slice of people I think might be persuaded to see things a bit differently.
Here is @monacharen. Obviously there is a sense in which Israel did nothing to 'provoke' this attack. Nothing could justify or excuse it. But Israel did a great deal to risk it - to recklessly tempt such a development, politically, strategically. plus.thebulwark.com/p/hamas-makes-…
One can say so without thereby excusing or justifying the attack. Every Israeli is demanding to know who is at fault on the Israeli side for staggering intelligence and defense lapses. No one is saying no one is at fault because, morally, it was the job of Hamas not to attack.
[Deep breath] It's worse. It's so, so bad - so much worse even than that - that it's hard to keep the big picture in view. But let's try. Trump was denouncing vote-by-mail as "dangerous" and "fraudulent" as early as April, 2020. https://t.co/04CKW1Kl7inpr.org/sections/coron…
In fact, he made similar claims way back to 2016. All totally baseless. But let's just go back to April, 2020. As many have noted, as many R's have regretted, this was shooting himself in the foot. His voters believed him. He depressed his own turnout.
Why would Trump do that? He deliberately lowered his chances to win honestly because he calculated that doing so increased his chances to cheat - to steal the election by falsely alleging the election was stolen by D's.
Moyn's lectures were great! Haven't read the book yet but the review, which is great, emphasises his key idea: the characteristic pessimism of Cold War-era philosophical liberalism - Trilling, Popper, Himmelfarb, Berlin, Shklar. Let me rub together 2 thoughts via that.
Rothfeld, the reviewer, contrasts these figures, as Moyn portrays them, with an identikit liberal. "A chipper rationalist who is scornfully secular, naively sanguine about humanity’s prospects for self-improvement and devoted to the philosophy of the Enlightenment."
This is just SO wrong. Cold War philosophical liberalism, as Moyn emphasises, is dark, pessimistic, concessive not aspirational, pre-emptively crouched. Per Moyn, it is 'against itself'. As a result - to this day - most anti-liberal critiques of liberalism are not EVEN wrong.
The pull quote is exactly right for this one from @jbouie. One way to think about it: suppose, for the sake of the argument, there ARE two problems at present. 1) teens confusedly over-identifying as trans due to some social contagion whatever. 2) docs over-accommodating this. 1/
You reply: 1 & 2 aren't actually true. That's fine but just be an abstract normative political philosophy seminar room dork with me on this for a minute. It isn't absurd to imagine 1 & 2. If 1 & 2 were true, for the sake of argument, what would be the proper response? 2/
Broadly, there are two strategies. If you believe in liberty and respect and basic rights for all there is no alternative than muddling through. If the medical community has overcorrected for its long history of insufficiently recognising trans people, we need to correct the over