Category: Politics & Culture
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Don’t argue about abstractions.
It isn’t that abstractions don’t matter or aren’t real – they are. It’s rather that abstraction does not offer, in real time, as the argument develops, any feedback loop. So as the conversation proceeds the two thinkers become more and more abstract. So their disagreement grows as they talk, because the layers of abstraction are…
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The Headstones Are Gone
As houses and churches shifted toward sameness over the last century, our graves did too. Before mass production uglified the headstones the graveyards looked like town parks where tall, short, thin, squat amblers had just stopped where they stood, and there they stand. Each one a unique individual of unique sizes, shapes and colors. You…
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Congress is Perpetual Litigation
When important facts resist your model of reality, your model is wrong. The American political chattering class has never found a non-fiction model for the State, and so are ever frustrated that “government isn’t working.” But when once you see Congress as just a perpetual litigation, then reality synchs with your model, all the…
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The Three Stages of Democracy
As a society deteriorates, first elections don’t matter much, then they matter desperately, then they don’t matter at all. 1. When the central government regulates and legislates just enough to keep property safe from theft, elections are an important but minor part of life. 2. As the central government metastasizes so that any prosperity is…
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What is a Political Party?
There’s this constant obtuseness about how politics works, and it prompts a million words an hour on discussion boards, amounting to nothing. Let’s all grow up. “The Republican Party” is a group of people who have banded together to get political power. To get political power, they use words tactically. One of the words they…
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Conflict of Visions, Left and Right.
Conservative vision of property: If you can’t prove it’s stolen, I own it. Progressive vision of property: You own it till we vote that we own it. Conservative vision of government: How we prevent theft. Progressive vision of government: What we do together.
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Snowdon and the Nuremberg Principle
If loyalty to the State is an insufficient defense, then disloyalty to the State is an insufficient indictment. The world established forever at Nuremberg that immoral acts don’t have authority as a defense. If that is true, then the converse is also true: “treason” cannot be attached when the exposed secret is an immoral (or…
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Political Debate is Inherently Corrupt
Political debate is conducted in mutual bad faith, and I’m not just talking about the general malicious intent. There is a specific structural pattern to bad faith debate: while the honest debater moves toward premises, the bad faith debater actively flees from premises. Good faith debate, like you might have with a friend, is…
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Twilight Mood
If it is all just quarks, then my quarrel with myself can cease. My mind will accept that it just mediates the background radiation and I’ll go gently down the entropy chute. The sun does not regard me. It does not number my hairs nor does it note the drop of the sparrow from the…
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Smart, But Bitter, Is Uglier
A famous writer died and I thought back to the half-dozen times I’d seen him interviewed. He had a permanent sneer. He was always talking about how stupid someone else was. And he was probably right, but it was a fixed sneer, he couldn’t go far from it, no matter the topic. So in conversation…