Via the Harry Binswanger Letter, I learned of a fantastic editorial from the British press regarding the situation in Iran and what the West ought to do.
In "Iran Is About to Start a Nuclear World War -- and the West Is Determined to Lose," Allister Heath makes the following statement, which would have been obvious decades ago, but is controversial today:
I agree that the West should take care of Iran's military while the Iranians deal with this guy and his buddies. (Image modified from image at Wikimedia Commons, license.)
If Joe Biden were a serious president, he would announce that the mullahs in Tehran have crossed a red line, that they are an existential menace to civilised nations. He would declare that enough is enough, that no country can shoot hundreds of drones and missiles at one of its neighbours with impunity, that no government can go on funding terrorism, rape, torture and murder on an industrial scale. He would understand the need to deter other rogue states through a show of strength.
He would state that the Iranian regime must be treated like the global pariah that it has become, that all of its proxies must be destroyed, and that, above all, it will never be allowed to get anywhere near nuclear weapons. He would put together a coalition, including as many of Iran's Arab neighbours as possible. He would impose extreme sanctions. He would allow Israel to finish off Hamas. He would help hit Hezbollah.
Heath contrasts this with the actual policy of evasion and appeasement the West is continuing instead, which he demonstrates is a serious danger by placing this conflict within its broader context of warmongering by the authoritarian regimes in Russia, China, and North Korea: "[T]he Islamic Republic is the weakest link, the least difficult one to deal with today, if we had the sense to act."
I highly recommend reading this rare jewel of clarity and urgent call to action, and publicizing it by whatever means one has.
During a walk, I was trying to listen to the Yaron Brook Show, but was having a hard time between the constant wind and the volume being low on that episode. I could make out bits and pieces, but was mostly frustrated.
Fortunately, one of the bits I could make out was a rather topical recommendation: Listen to Leonard Peikoff's Ford Hall Forum lecture (embedded below), "A Philosopher Looks at the O. J. Verdict."
Correctly hoping it would be loud enough to hear over the wind, I took him up on the idea.
I had just started grad school during this trial, and I recall some very strange conversations among my acquaintances about what I had thought was a pretty cut-and-dried case.
Yes, one is innocent before the law unless proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but the evidence of guilt looked pretty overwhelming to me.
Peikoff was of a similar mind regarding guilt, which I expected, but he quickly had part of me wishing I had listened to his lecture long ago: It was clear I'd be getting much more than confirmation from this one.
But part of me is glad that I -- who'd gotten sick and tired of hearing about the trial at the time -- didn't listen to the lecture before yesterday.
Somewhat ironically, the wish and the relief both spring from the same source, which is that Peikoff discusses why there were such sharp differences on whether the verdict was correct or not, primarily between blacks and whites, but also between conservatives and leftists. Blacks and leftists tended to agree with the verdict, whites and conservatives not.
Listening to the lecture sooner would have helped me understand this puzzling difference much better, as the notes at the Ayn Rand Institute might indicate:
Peikoff looks at the issues raised by the trial and media response -- including reasonable doubt, conspiracy theories, racism, planted gloves and arguments from emotion -- and finds the process deficient from a philosophical point of view. Peikoff pays special attention to the standards by which evidence in a trial should be weighed, and he discusses the difference between arbitrary claims and evidence-based possibilities.
Based on his examination of the motives and attitudes of both jurors and attorneys, as well as the controversial techniques used by the defense, led by attorney Johnnie Cochran, Peikoff describes the trial as "a very ugly and frightening turning point" and "an event that forever embodies the essence of an era." [bold added]
Peikoff both discusses the long (but hastening) process by which American academics implemented bad philosophical ideas imported from Germany starting in the 1800s, and forms generalizations from examples about how the participants in the trial were thinking.
The former gradually undermined Americans' confidence in their founding ideals and indeed in their own minds and is culminating in today's racialist-tribalist mess. The latter illustrates how emotionalism and magical thinking take over once people generally internalize antt-reason premises, such as anything is possible.
Peikoff's exploration of how the defense undermined the prosecution is when I was glad I was hearing this lecture for the first time. The defense countered the straightforward prosecution with fantastic and conspiracy theory-like arguments, only loosely interpreting the evidence when they had anything to do with the evidence at all.
And the jury -- primed with the ideas and manner of thinking induced by the culture's saturation with German philosophy -- fell for this approach hook, line, and sinker.
This they did partly because they didn't know how to think, and partly because they wanted to believe the defense narrative, which fit neatly into the larger racist narrative that the intellectual establishment had already been spinning for quite some time.
I not only found myself stunned at how well this explained the verdict and the reactions to it -- good and bad, and on either side -- but I also had a hair-raising moment of realization: The jurors remind me of today's hyperpartisans in how they approach the crucial issues of the day.
The following list (omitting gloves and adding scare quotes) comes from the excerpt: "reasonable" doubt, conspiracy theories, racism, and arguments from emotion. This is a nearly comprehensive list of what passes for political argument from the far left and the alt-right these days, and note what's missing: evidence, reason, and persuasion.
(A Trump supporter I know occasionally pushes some blatantly nutty book or other, but can't be arsed to read a short editorial from another perspective -- just like a leftist I used to work with who I had to tell to quit spamming my work email with leftist political screeds.)
The Simpson jury was no anomaly: It was a group of people ahead of its time, in terms of America's philosophical dis-integration and consequent de-minding. And now, a plurality or majority of the American electorate processes evidence and arguments in the same way that jury did.
Since he became speaker based solely on his loyalty to Trump -- a man who would throw his own mother under the bus on a whim -- I had an extremely low estimate of Speaker Mike Johnson.
After he ignored such luminaries as Marjorie Taylor Greene to pass a military aid package, that estimate is slightly higher: He would seem possessed of enough low cunning or even common sense to know when and how to work with political opponents to achieve a goal.
Writing at UnHerd, Fred Bauer outlines the ways the other Trump loyalists (who are now calling for Johnson's head) screwed themselves by preemptively writing off any and all cooperation with the Democrats:
Probably a RINO, according to Marjorie Taylor Greene. (Image by United States Congress, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)
... Because of the centrality of Ukraine for the Biden White House's foreign policy, Democrats might well have eventually accepted a legislative package that paired border control measures with Ukraine-Israel funding. Republicans could have passed a broader national security grand bargain in the House and then dared the Democratic-controlled Senate not to act. The precedent would have been the 2023 debt-ceiling standoff, in which House Republicans passed a bill to raise the debt ceiling and forced the White House and Senate Democrats to the negotiating table.
Instead, recalcitrant populists in the House performed judo against themselves. Rather than leveraging the border to get Ukraine funding, they used performative opposition to Ukraine funding to block action on the border. Speaker Johnson put the matter bluntly the other day: "If I put Ukraine in any package, it can't also be with the border because I lose Republican votes on that rule." [bold added]
Just as Bauer accurately describes how the populist kook wing of the GOP got nothing by demanding everything, I believe he pretty accurately foretells the future when he considers the deep reflection this should cause among them, but won't:
... For some populists, this complete sacrifice of legislative leverage may be a policy disappointment but a messaging opportunity. Perhaps the most prized ornament among many Republicans on Capitol Hill is a badge of angry defeat -- won during the shutdowns and failed "Obamacare" repeals of the past. This debacle is another chance to rage against the "uniparty", fret about the betrayal by the Republican "establishment", and sneer at "America Last" foreign policy. [bold added]
The likes of Greene are so blinded by rage at the left that they cannot see how stupid they are behaving or entertain the idea of achieving part of what they want, under the current political makeup of the legislative and judicial branches. I am no fan of Joe Biden, but this is a textbook example of how not to win against a political opponent, and I can't think of a political faction I'd want doing this more.
The silver lining here is that Johnson has shown that there is room for a halfway sane legislative agenda to get passed in a closely-divided House: There will be enough center-left and center-right votes to pass measures that aren't too nutty for every member of either party to block, and that the authoritarian wings of each party can be marginalized.
Whenever possible, I list three wins at the end of each day. Here are a few from a recent review of my planner.
***
1. As our family waited in the terminal ahead of an hours-long couple of flights from the West Coast to home, my son cast an uncomfortable and concerned glance at his parents.
"I feel nauseous," he said a little weakly.
Grabbing a bag from the lunch Mrs. Van Horn had just brought over, I thrust it into his hands. "Keep this with you in case you can't make it to a bathroom in time," I said.
His older sister complained that she didn't want to sit next to him on the plane.
"April Fool's," my son replied.
He got all of us good by catching us completely off-guard and with an impeccable delivery.
Well-played, my son!
2. Although I sometimes do wish my son were more interested in sports or outdoor activities, I don't share the moral panic many other parents do about his screen time -- which strikes me as a mashup of the reading, television, and gaming I did as a lad.
Yes, reading, in the sense that he learns things and often follows up.
Having learned about The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he mentioned it to us as probably a good family movie, so that's what we did one Sunday evening.
I hadn't read the book or seen the movie, so it was new to me, and I enjoyed it more than I had expected to.
From the corner of my eye, I spotted these turtles while crossing a pedestrian bridge last week. (Image by the author. Feel free to copy/reuse.)
3. After the move from Florida, I still miss the wide variety of birds along with the occasional alligator I'd see when when I took walks there.
That said, the more compact town we live in means that my walks can have other advantages, like including stops at coffee shops, in addition to being more scenic overall.
As it turns out, my walks are not devoid of wildlife. The ponds and waterways here teem with turtles, as you can see from this picture I took from a pedestrian bridge.
Oh, and I run into the odd crow now and then. If I start encountering those with any regularity, I might try my hand at befriending them.
4. Ahead of a trip last month, I looked ahead in my tickler file for the days I would be away and discovered something I had slipped into a Friday folder to file away during my weekly review: My car registration receipt.
I'd tried getting my car inspected earlier in the week, but was told I'd need my registration receipt and was turned away.
Since Florida doesn't require inspections, I was five or six years out of practice: Thinking I'd probably not need that scrap of paper, I had stashed it in the tickler file and forgotten about it.
Indeed, at the inspection station, I thought I might need to go back to the DMV and ask for the document, which would mean another hour or two of wasted time.
Finding this was a big relief, because I knew I could very quickly get the inspection done now, and not have to waste time or risk getting a ticket.
Chalk one up for having a (usually boring) clerical routine in place.
Jerry Liu offers the following advice, which fellow role-playing gamers will find easy to translate into real-life terms and quite memorable: Use your potions and scrolls.
He opens with a familiar scenario:
I find that when I play RPG games, I often hoard single-use items like potions and scrolls, saving them for some future critical moment. I finish games like Skyrim with a backpack full of unspent resources, reserved for a crisis that never actually arrives. What's the point, then, of all these items?
The answer to his last question arrives from an experiment that it's probably fair to say went better than he expected:
Recently I played Baldur's Gate 3 and I decided to try something new: I would actually gasp use my items as needed, as they were intended, without undue reservation. Not only was it actually fun to use my fireball scrolls and blow stuff up, but I also discovered new layers and hidden quests. For instance, using a 'Speak with the Dead' scroll on a certain suspicious corpse unveiled a questline I would have otherwise missed.
Liu elaborates on his lesson, in the rest of his short, thought-provoking post. One insight worth remembering is that many things are actually not single-use -- although they can expire!
Liu's backpack full of unused potions and scrolls reminds me of a related insight I had over years: Having a lot of something can, under certain conditions, be the functional equivalent of not having it at all.
The germ of this one arose back in my card-playing undergraduate days, when I noticed that, depending on how one played long in a suit, one could opt to stay in a lead or basically sit out the rest of a hand. My huge supply of, say, diamonds, might mean noone could lead me into diamonds (or take them) because they were all in my hand.
That ring is in there somewhere, but good luck finding it! (Image by Arthur Rackham, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)
This isn't always helpful: Decades later, after a series of interstate moves that included young children in tow and no purging for several years, I remember looking for something in a garage full of disorganized stuff and unopened boxes.
I can't recall what I was looking for at the time, but even though I knew we had multiple instances of it, I had to buy another because everything was lost in the disorganized dragon's hoard that our garage housed instead of our cars.
Leading up to our last move, I attacked that hoard over a period of three months. We donated dozens of boxes of things to Goodwill, and lots of that stuff was brand new, or as good as new.
Until I did that, it was as if we didn't have a garage -- or most of the things that were being stored in it!
The clearing-out caused moving preparations to take longer than I would have liked, but I did not want to have the same situation on the other end. I wanted to enjoy this house!
That was time well-spent, but looking back to Liu's advice again, it is clear that, had I not had to deal with this mess, I could have used a big chunk of time for much more interesting things.
Over at Reason, John Stossel notes that "The Labor Department just imposed 300 pages of new regulations to reclassify many individual contractors as payroll employees."
Great. I guess that's why our tax preparer had all sorts of questions about gig work for us this year.
Naturally, news media uncritically parrot the administration's alleged justifications for the changes, despite the fact that, as Stossel reminds us, this terrible idea has already been tried and failed in California:
Four years ago, unions got then-Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D -- San Diego) to push through a new law that reclassified gig workers.
They were told they'd get higher wages, overtime, and other benefits.
Clueless media liked that.
Vox called the law "a victory for workers everywhere."
Ha! A few months later, Vox media laid off hundreds of freelancers.
"They expected that all these companies were going to reclassify independent contractors as employees," freelance musician Ari Herstand told me. "In reality, they're just letting them go!"
Herstand was dismayed to learn that when he wants other musicians to join him, he could no longer just write them a check.
"I have to put that drummer on payroll, W2 him, get workers' comp insurance, unemployment insurance, payroll taxes!" he complains. "I have to hire a payroll company." [links omitted]
Stossel also notes correctly that (a) some professions managed to get exemptions in California, and (b) Biden wants to make that law nationwide and without exemptions.
Never mind that it was so unpopular that even Californians partially clawed it back at the ballot box.
It's too bad that the best we can hope for in the next election is divided government. The Democrats would ram this down our throats if left unchecked.
The cash value of Trump "owning the libs" through easily-overturned means is zero. Case in point: Keystone XL never got built. (Image by Office of the President of the United States, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)
And the Republicans? I seriously doubt that the current iteration of the Republican Party will do anything positive to protect gig work, much less roll back the regulatory state that makes moves like this possible: They'll be too busy infighting, or pursuing a theocratic and xenophobic agenda to worry about such unfashionable things as a free economy.
Maybe -- if he wins and he feels like it, and as he did for some things during his term -- Trump will roll back the new regulations, as if the Democrats will never come back into power again. Spoiler alert: When they do, a future Democrat can reintroduce these regulations or worse. (For an example from the world of Executive Orders, see also: The Keystone XL Pipeline.)
And that last, Trump supporters, is what is known as "owning" the libs without defeating them.
Some time back, I tweeted a Value for Value post by Peter Schwartz which explains how our culture's dominant ethical code, altruism, justifies supporting Hamas over Israel, despite the demands of justice to do exactly the opposite.
Schwartz says in part:
Certainly, a growing anti-Semitism is at work. But the more fundamental explanation is the one provided by a schoolteacher in Atlanta, as reported in the Nov. 5 NY Times ("Across the Echo Chamber, a Quiet Conversation About War and Race"). She posted the following message on Facebook, defending her unequivocal backing of the Palestinians against Israel:
"The actual history of this situation is NOT COMPLICATED. I will ALWAYS stand beside those with less power. Less wealth, less access and resources and choices. Regardless of the extreme acts of a few militants who were done watching their people slowly die."
She is stating the essence of a moral code that is accepted by virtually everyone today: the code of altruism. According to that code, need is the ultimate standard of morality. If others are in need, nothing else matters -- you have a duty to satisfy their needs.
Now that Iran, a nation nearly ten times more populous than Israel, has more directly waged war against Israel, it would be interesting to quiz the above schoolteacher about which side she is on.
I would not expect her allegiance to have shifted, despite the fact that Israel had enough help repelling that attack that it is a fair question whether it could have done so alone.
Absent the ability to ask directly, we can get the answer by consulting a recent Brendan O'Neill article article at Sp!ked. It is titled "How Woke Leftists Became Cheerleaders for Iran," and I think the below is crucial to understanding why we're seeing mass "demonstrations" by people claiming to be in favor of this warmongering regime's "right" to "self-defense:"
The left would say, Don't believe your lying eyes or mind about this evil man. (Image via Wikimedia Commons, license.)
The Western left's blaming of Israel for everything, and its implicit absolution of Iran, is grimly revealing. These people seem to view Israel as the only true actor in the Middle East, and everyone else as mere respondents to Israel's actions. Israel is the author of the Middle East's fate, while the rest of them -- Hamas, the Houthis, even Iran -- are mere bit-part players with the misfortune to be caught up in Israel's vast and terrifying web. This is identitarianism, not anti-imperialism. A new generation of radicals educated into the regressive ideology that says 'white' people are powerful and 'brown' people are oppressed can only understand the Middle East in these terms, too.
The end result is that they demonise Israel and infantilise Iran. The Jewish State comes to be seen as uniquely malevolent while Iran is treated as a kind of wide-eyed child who cannot help but lash out at its 'Zionist' oppressor. Israel is damned as a criminal state, while Iran's crimes against humanity are downplayed, even memory-holed. This is where wokeness leads, then: to sympathy for one of the most backward and repressive states on Earth on the deranged basis that its criminal strikes against Israel represent a blow against the arrogant West itself... [bold added]
The whole idea that all of Israel is Caucasian or that the Islamic world is entirely brown-skinned is nearly as ridiculous as assuming that race determines character or as using white as code for oppressor and brown for needy or oppressed.
If anyone needs disabusing of the notion that the left stands for racial equality or individual rights, what we're seeing unfold -- the use of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories to excuse racially slurring Israelis as white (which is a racial slur coming from the left these days) en route to enabling their extermination -- should take care of that. This should also concern anyone with a grain of rationality or a sense of justice.
By casting the alleged neediness of Palestine and Iran -- and Israel's well-earned strength -- as racial attributes, the left has excused making the mindless siding with terrorists in the name of altruism permanent.
They're coming for the Jews now, and they will come for the rest of West as soon as is convenient. We're all "colonialists" now, according to the left, anyway.
