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-…

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.)

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-…

[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…

https://twitter.com/normative/status/1691938276104433890

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.

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.

https://twitter.com/samuelmoyn/status/1689957214134349825

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."

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/

https://twitter.com/nytopinion/status/1624590532419768320

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/

"It is hard for us, who live after romanticism's assault on the industrial revolution, to remember how liberating was the vision of a human machinery in the eighteenth century." - Gary Wills, "Inventing America"

True. But I'm not buying his whole 'Jefferson was a child of the Scottish Enlightenment, not a follower of Locke' line. But Wills quotes a funny bit of poetry, from one Henry Brooke (1792), to illustrate love of machinery, per above.

Good. There has been, I think, general agreement on the left that this is the clearly right result, and Hamline was clearly badly in the wrong. nytimes.com/2023/01/17/us/… One lesson I would draw: at least philosophically, but also politically, it's easy to correct these sorts of clear errors and oversteps. The line on the right is that the left has been totally overtaken by illiberal totalitarian 'wokeness'. These sorts of cases test that.

Here is my version of the same joke-not-joke: chaotic vs. lawful was a D&D thing (after a Michael Moorcock thing). But it was never a serious political theory thing. Machiavelli might consider how chaos can breed opportunity; but not 'being chaotic' as an 'alignment'.

https://twitter.com/WhitlockJason/status/1616473269309440000

But, chaos-whispered by Trump - a true chaotic neutral - the GOP has become a big tent in which 'being chaotic', as such, is an alignment option. Politically, 'being chaotic', per se, seems contradictory. Like: how can chaos be your 'law' without you turning out lawful THAT way?

Following up, this @baseballcrank piece is a piece of work. If John Roberts is scrupulously not looking around inside, Dan McLaughlin is averting his eyes outside, where the consensus has long been that the answer to 'cui bono?' is: supporters of Dobbs. nationalreview.com/corner/chief-j… Either: the leak was a more or less motiveless rage crime by some liberal (yes, possible). Or: the leak was calculated to lock in the draft, making it politically impossible for any con Justice to be budged by Roberts; also, the leak softened the final shock of the decision.

We can’t know who leaked it, but - if it’s true the Justices were exempted from investigation - we can know John Roberts and Michael Chertoff think it’s highly likely a conservative Justice leaked it.

https://twitter.com/jamisonfoser/status/1616175020224704514

Spinoza “Ethics” D2: “A thing is called finite after its kind, when it can be limited by another thing of the same nature ; for instance, a body is called finite because we always conceive another greater body … So, also, a thought is limited by another thought, but a body is not limited by thought, nor a thought by body.” If Spinoza were to offer paradigm examples of thoughts ‘limiting’ thoughts, a la bodies limiting bodies, what would they be?

What makes Dreher unusual, if not unique, on the right is he is so sincere. He has a wild backstory that often overshadows whatever he's arguing on a given day. Yet - here's the Dreher difference - he isn't playing that up to patch up right-wing talking points. 1/

https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/1608103042003468297

The thing that is so maddening about him is that he is so sincere & earnest & yet, by my lefty lights, he suffers from - I won't call it severe false-consciousness because I don't want to get all theory about it. He fails to make basic connections, see evident parallels. 2/

Pick your fighter. taibbi.substack.com/p/notes-on-a-f… The first thing you believe when you take the blue pill is that you took the red pill. That's what the blue pill is for, and that's why Taibbi is gobbling them down by the fistful.

But one more, possibly less obvious way to put the point ...

The Russell Jacoby piece Dawkins and Musk are responding to is ... dismayingly half-baked. 1/ tabletmag.com/sections/arts-… I'm sympathetic to Jacoby's old line: a lot of 'theory' silliness got spread about in the humanities in the 80's-90's. There were perverse incentives - professional rewards - for doing 'philosophy' badly in various ways. This was not good. I'm happy to badmouth bad stuff. 2/

A severe oversimplification - with a kernel of truth in it. (I hope we've all read our Nietzsche.) No tweet rebuttal can avoid counter-simplification but I would ask instead: how and why did the US civil rights struggle, and the heroic figure of MLK, achieve paradigm status?

https://twitter.com/antoniogm/status/1606723411287605248

Partly, MLK is an appealing, Christ-like martyr, sure. (If the other 'side' has one of those, you have to invent your own.) But the reason why the civil rights struggle 'worked', in US politics and culture and law, goes way beyond that. It's peculiarly American - but also global.

Walt Kelly. The write-up omits the most notable case of Kelly not being one to duck a fight. He only became a cartoonist because he was fired from Disney, as an animator, because he was one of the original strikers. awn.com/animationworld…

So I made a poster. (If you like that sort of thing.) In general, I decided to have another go round with my philosopher designs, now in brighter, pop art-y colors. You want Kant wallpaper? I got it! Sticker sets, too! redbubble.com/people/jholbo/… Thicker lines! I consulted old Fillmore East concert posters for color combos! (Maybe the whimsically dreary colors I picked before were a drag on the market? People are weird, you never know.)

Aaand two things are now going on: 1) David French advocates Millian liberalism for Twitter; 2) David French is now trending on the right, due to being dog-piled as a pedophile, due to liking a tweet in which someone said they didn't like Musk scapegoating Roth as a groomer. /1

https://twitter.com/jholbo1/status/1601771999172628481

Let's take them in order. 1) David French wants Millian liberalism on Twitter. /2
thedispatch.com/newsletter/fre…

And the reason why the right buys the twitter files, despite it being nonsense, is they engage in motivated reasoning. But there is still interest in working out how that goes, e.g via confused slippage between: 1) the way Twitter operated was non-ideal; 2) scandal! /1

https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/1601069555857530882

Ideally, Twitter should be a neutral 'public carrier' - a public square where broadly Millian 'no-harm' rules rule, classically liberally. Therefore, there shouldn't be private, corporate types with any power to throttle or boost or moderate or flag, or any of that. /2

Discuss. It all starts when someone steals the chief's new curried lamb recipe.