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A Deeply Fractured US

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Did the author try to fit as many right-wing buzzwords into an op-ed as possible?

Calling Hillary Clinton a "war criminal" was a nice touch though. Not "alleged war criminal", mind you - did she get quietly indicted by the ICC?

Makes a change from a steady diet of left-wing buzzwords. Right?
 
I personally prefer reading Reuters and such, so fewer buzzwords of either slant.

Not sure that I can agree that Reuters is any freer of either buzzwords or slant.

I prefer sources that are open in their biases.

Telegraph and Guardian versus BBC for example.
 
Meanwhile… the US, and by extension Canada, has far bigger problems than what’s been focused on in the news.


How is this aging?



This is big.
 
How is this aging?



This is big.

It was inevitable. But- G7, ASEAN, EU, USMCA… Trade blocks are a normal thing, and will shift over time. Some of the BRICS countries are basket cases.

Fun thing with BRICS- Putin May face challenges in attending their summit.

 
Signs of hope. Politico is not a "right-wing" magazine. Nor is the magazine in which the article being referenced was published.

I feel the return of "liberalism".


While I was reading the article, with my own very obvious biases, I found myself making these observations.

Authoritarianism - Feudal establishment backed by the Church
Liberalism - Tolerant open debate
Marxism - Feudal establishment backed by the Party
Corporatism - Marxist establishment backed by the Church

The Saxons didn't have slaves because every man, woman and child was bound to the Establishment and fixed in their place, reliant on their overlords for their daily manna. They were all enslaved.

Two major events broke the system: The Black Death which killed overlords and labourers making the overlords less powerful and even labourers with poor skills highly useful and, years of fighting against each other over whether or not to follow kings hellbent on killing people who disagreed with them.

In 1689 the kings lost.

And people were free to debate life, the universe and everything and come to their own conclusions.

Some people demand certainty in life. They want "The Truth". Seminaries turn out people with "The Truth" and their catechisms to support it. Their science is settled.

Others revel in chaos. For them nothing is ever settled. They revel in never-ending debate. Change is constant.

The Truth belongs in the same sphere as the Ideal Square. There is only one way to find it - and once you do, if you do, you can't tell anybody else.

At the height of the Enlightenment in Scotland, in 1762 when Britain has just had it Annus Mirabilis, France had lost Canada, India and its Navy, and Voltaire in the brand new city of Edinburgh said “today it is from Scotland that we get rules of taste in all the arts, from epic poetry to gardening,” At this time, as the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it "Benjamin Franklin caught the mood of the place in his Autobiography (1794): “Persons of good Sense…seldom fall into [disputation], except Lawyers, University Men, and Men of all Sorts that have been bred at Edinburgh.”"

That sense of disputation that characterised the Enlightenment in Scotland started with distinctly "illiberal" act. In 1691 the Church of Scotland seminary at the University of Glasgow was gutted. The professors were ministers of the church. They taught the Church of Scotland's catechism (The 1648 Westminster Confession) despite being nominally bottom-up presbyterians. In return for his recognition of the Church of Scotland and its weird political system with no bishops, that relied (nominally) on votes from the local congregations and their elders, William of Orange demanded a sea-change in the clergy. They had to be more open to dissent, debate and difference. Or else he would kill them..... William Carstares, his right hand man in Scotland, got the message and cleared the decks of recalcitrant staff and made way for a new seminary with a new catechism - Thou shalt debate. Anything and everything. Be sceptical of everything. Debate everything. Experiment with everything. Try and fail and exploit the failures.

That is the Spirit of the Enlightenment which Glenn Loury believes is being threatened by Wokeism. I agree with him.


But how did we get here.

The open debate allowed some pretty big failures to be tried. Marxism was one of them. Marxism reinvented feudalism and put a new Party Man at the top to replace the Divinely Anointed King.

But 1891 the authoritarians were getting fed up with the steady diet of revolution constantly erupting across Europe and Latin America. Every time the weather turned bad the population revolted. In 1845 another volcano erupted.

1845Hekla Erupts from September to April - Ash spread from Iceland to the Faeroes, Shetland and the Orkneys
1845The Hungry Forties - Potato Blight hits the Isle of Wight, Southern England, Belgium and Ireland
1845Famine in Galicia - Severe rains and flooding killed the potato and grain crops
1845Highland Potato Famine (to 1857)
18451st Year of the Irish Famine
1845Irish Famine

Contrary to Irish belief the English did not wilfully deprive the Irish of food. There was no food to be had. A fact that the government recognized and changed the law to manage the speculators.

1846Irish Potato Famine (to 1849) - 1,000,000 killed and 1,500,000 to 2,000,000 emigrated
1846Highland Potato Famine (to 1857)
1846Famine in Portugal
1846Famine in China
1846Famine in Galicia - Severe rains and flooding killed the potato and grain crops
1846Greater Poland Uprising
1846Galician Uprising
1846Krakow Uprising
1846Corn Laws Repealed - Peel put through a (staggered) repeal through Parliament without a general election,[15] to the applause of Cobden and Bright.[16] The Anti-Corn Law League then prepared to dissolve itself
1846W.H. Chaloner argues that the repeal in 1846 marked a major turning point, making free trade the national policy into the 20th century, and demonstrating the power of "Manchester-school" industrial interests over protectionist agricultural interests. He says repeal stabilized wheat prices in the 1850s and 1860s; however other technical developments caused the fall of wheat prices from 1870-1894.
1846Peel's government fell over the Corn Laws
1846Peel separated from the Tories and took Gladstone with him
1846Province of Canada provides for an Active Militia of 3000

1847Famine in Galicia - Severe rains and flooding killed the potato and grain crops
1847Highland Potato Famine (to 1857)
1847Irish Potato Famine

1848Famine in Galicia - Severe rains and flooding killed the potato and grain crops
1848Highland Potato Famine (to 1857)
1848Irish Potato Famine
1848Revolutions across Europe
1848Swiss Federal Constitution
1848French Revolution of 1848 and the 2nd Republic
1848Revolutions in the Hapsburg, German and Italian states and in Poland
1848Vaudois granted freedom of religion and equality with other Piedmont/Savoyard subjects by the King of Sardinia
1848Republican Revolutions
1848Communist Party
1848Marx and Engels publish "The Communist Manifesto" - 21 February
1848John Stuart Mill's Principles
1848Chartist Petition II
1848UK government funds Catholic Schools in Britain
1848Anglo-Catholic Lord Acton launches the anti-Ultramontane "Rambler"

The Government of the United Kingdom of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and the divided territory beyond the seas known as Canada was desperate to prevent the kind of revolution seen everywhere else. They did not want their Canadian ministers to have to call on those 3000 militiamen to maintain order.

Part of the problem was internal divisions among different clubs. The Churches of Scotland, and England, and Ireland did not get along well with Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers, Methodists and other dissenting non-conformists. They had fewer problems with Catholics. The Church of England in particular was very partial to Catholic practices and the retention of bishops. Scotland had evolved and tolerated an episcopalian church that functioned alongside the nominally presbyterian Church of Scotland as the Episcopalian Church of Scotland. But the Catholics, like the protestant churches were divided as well.

They split between the English Catholics and the Roman Catholics. The English Catholics had survived since the days of the Reformation by keeping their heads down and staying as far away from Jesuits as possible. The Howards, well known in Elizabeth's court were also well known as Catholics. They said the oaths required of them and went to church on Sunday. And stayed alive.

In the 1800s the revolutionary times started to catch up with them. Too many revolutions and too many displaced and imprisoned popes angered too many popes and clerics as well as parishioners and members of Catholic establishments outside of Britain. The papacy, regardless o who was on the throne in Rome, started to fight back. They took the fight to liberals.

In England they got a hand from some of the local Church of England types that were getting tired of the way that church was heading, it was getting far too chummy and Methodist for their liking, and they started a movement to make the church more Catholic again. Some went further and decided that it was time for England to become Catholic again and nodding to Rome. This raised the age old spectre of divided loyalties. Resulting in this situation"

1846Keenan's Catechism: "(Q). Must not Catholics believe the Pope in himself to be infallible? (A). This is a Protestant invention : it is no article of the Catholic Faith"
1846Wiseman Catholics (Ultramontanists) distrusted by Old Catholics (English)

By 1891 the fight had been going on for 50 years. Rome had appointed new bishops in England and Wales. And the English Catholics and the Roman Catholics cordially distrusted each other. The papacy, with support of its Champion of the Day - Napoleon III, had tried to reclaim its supremacy by claiming Papal Infallibility. Napoleon fell at Sedan. Rome fell to Garibaldi and Papal Infallibility fell with it. Authoritarianism lost another fight.

All of this led up to Leo XIII making a case for a new system - one that looked for a Third Way between what he saw as the chaos of liberalism and the new order offered by Marx and the Communists. His prescription was defined in his encyclical Rerum Novarum.

Leo XIII: Two Concepts Of Government: II. Government and the Order of Culture, May 15 1891​

Instead of anointing kings and their heirs, after the fashion of the onetime upstart Mayor of the Palace, Pipping the Elder, the church would go out of its way to breed and select men of the right sort which could be turned into an elite, with all the right ideas and aided in securing power. These new men would then be anointed.

The new solution to chaos looked a lot like the old solution to chaos.

To a good chunk of the world, on both sides of the debate, it still does.

The liberals are still debating.
 
It could be argued that the response to Leo XIII's authoritarian meritocracy of a Catholic elite was Woodrow Wilson's progressive meritocracy of a "Presbyterian" elite. And I use the term Presbyterian very loosely in his case. He was a nominal Presbyterian but very much an Old Light Establishment Church member. The Brookings Institution, often in the news these days, was founded in 1916. It seems to function as the American Establishment's very own seminary.

PS - Wilson's "progressives" were no less authoritarian than Leo's Catholics. They travelled parallel paths.
 

I seem to be channeling Daniel Hannan ....

On John Stuart Mill - On Liberty

No one more eloquently defended liberty as an essentially negative force, a defence against coercion. Mill’s conception of freedom became politically and juridically ascendant in the Anglosphere for most of the 20th century. Free speech meant that you could not be silenced, free movement that you could not be detained, free association that you could not have your political party or trade union banned.


Even more striking was the cultural ascendancy of Millian liberalism. The idea of enforcing public morality became repulsive. People were, it was generally agreed, free to go to hell in their own way. Censorship, blasphemy laws and the criminalisation of homosexuality came to be seen as abuses of state power. Unless crimes had identifiable victims, they were not properly crimes.

A hundred and fifty years on, an odd thing has happened. During his lifetime, Mill’s support came from what we might loosely call the centre-Left: radicals, republicans and anti-clericals. These days he is more likely to be cited by conservative opponents of cancel culture.


https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/05/04/free-speech-fears-nuj-reporters-gender-critical-trans/






Blasphemy codes are still with us. If JS Mill were alive today, he would be fighting wokery​

The liberal era through which we have lived looks more and more like an interregnum between different forms of despotism
DANIEL HANNAN6 May 2023 • 5:00pm
Daniel Hannan


Portrait of John Stuart Mill (Pentonville, 1806 - Avignon, 1873), British philosopher and economist

John Stuart Mill died on May 7, 1873 CREDIT: George Frederic Watts/Getty
John Stuart Mill, the high-minded, tortured, chaste Victorian feminist, died exactly 150 years ago in Avignon. No one more eloquently defended liberty as an essentially negative force, a defence against coercion. Mill’s conception of freedom became politically and juridically ascendant in the Anglosphere for most of the 20th century. Free speech meant that you could not be silenced, free movement that you could not be detained, free association that you could not have your political party or trade union banned.
Even more striking was the cultural ascendancy of Millian liberalism. The idea of enforcing public morality became repulsive. People were, it was generally agreed, free to go to hell in their own way. Censorship, blasphemy laws and the criminalisation of homosexuality came to be seen as abuses of state power. Unless crimes had identifiable victims, they were not properly crimes.
A hundred and fifty years on, an odd thing has happened. During his lifetime, Mill’s support came from what we might loosely call the centre-Left: radicals, republicans and anti-clericals. These days he is more likely to be cited by conservative opponents of cancel culture.


On one level, this shift simply tells us that the nature of our establishment has changed. When Mill railed against orthodoxy, his targets were church-goers, traditionalists, Tories. What Edmund Burke worshipped as “the wisdom of our ancestors”, Mill damned as “the despotism of custom”.
The cultural ascendancy of Christianity has, since his day, been replaced by a new Trinity: Equality, Diversity, Inclusion. Which raises a disquieting question.
Might it be that what we thought of as the triumph of reason, the fitful but nonetheless steady advance of individualism, was nothing more than an interim between two different kinds of authoritarianism? Might it be that there was never really a golden age of free speech; rather, there was a moment of equilibrium when neither the old religious establishment nor the new woke establishment held the commanding heights?
Britain last jailed someone for mocking Jesus in 1921. But last year a former policeman was sentenced to 20 weeks for mocking George Floyd. He did not incite violence or threaten public order; his comments were on a private WhatsApp group. But blasphemy codes are about punishing impiety, not preserving peace.
Mill hated the idea of jailing people for being obnoxious. That is one of the few things we can say definitively because, like most of us, he revised his opinions over time, eventually moving from pure liberalism to something closer to social democracy.
His father, the economist and historian James Mill, was a fervent utilitarian, convinced that “that action is right which promotes the greatest happiness of the greatest number”. He brought his son up to be an apostle and instrument of that creed, surrounding him with adult philosophers, including Jeremy Bentham, and allowing him few companions of his own age.
The young J S Mill was precociously brilliant. At the age of three, he began to read and write Greek, later adding Latin and French. By eight he was reading Xenophon and Herodotus. By ten he had mastered Plato and written a treatise on the history of Roman government.
In his teens Mill was, as his father had intended, an orthodox utilitarian. As he put it in his posthumous autobiography: “From the winter of 1821, when I first read Bentham, I had what might truly be called an object in life; to be a reformer of the world. My conception of my own happiness was entirely identified with this object.”
Fortunately, Mill grew out of it – rescued in part by the Romantic verses of William Wordsworth, whose Toryism he somehow forgave. I say “fortunately” because pure utilitarianism went on to unleash unspeakable horrors on the human race. Stalin and Mao were convinced utilitarians, their lofty visions for humanity in general justifying monstrous crimes against human beings in particular.
Moral philosophers from across the spectrum have since pointed out the limitations of regulating society wholly by some imagined calculus of happiness. Suppose, to put it at its most extreme, that a large number of sadists took pleasure from watching a child being tortured. If you had millions of such sadists, would there not come a point where their combined units of happiness would outweigh the victim’s misery? On what grounds, then, would the pure utilitarian halt the abuse?
Although he never completely disavowed Bentham, Mill came to realise the limitations of his philosophy. Pure utilitarianism had to be tempered by the protection of individuals, whose rights and dignity should be paramount.
Hence Mill’s most enduring work, On Liberty, published In 1859. Its most famous passage is worth quoting, if only as a lament or threnody for the era which is now passing: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant”.
Those two sentences are a perfect summary of pure liberalism – or, as Americans who have debased the word liberal call it, libertarianism. As a political force, libertarianism is a fringe movement. But as a way of regulating our relations one with another, it has become dominant, at least in the West.
The slogan of libertarian parties internationally, their equivalent of “Workers of the world unite”, is “Don’t hurt people, don’t take their stuff”.
However limited their electoral appeal, their ideology has for a long time governed our personal morals. We generally don’t think it acceptable to use force against our neighbours or seize their property. The libertarian argument is, at its core, that there is nothing special about being in government, and that having a democratic mandate should not authorise politicians to do what they could not do as private citizens, such as confiscate our goods or prohibit behaviour that harms no one else.
The idea that a man’s opinions are his business, and that we have no business coercing him for “his own good”, is beginning to look like a peculiarly 20th-century conceit. Until 1871, non-Anglicans (including Mill) were banned from many universities. Holding heretical views about the Trinity was considered so objectionable that it prevented you from studying maths or ancient languages.
Today, we are unofficially fashioning a 21st-century Test Act, where holding the wrong views about identity politics disqualifies you from university positions. One blasphemy code has displaced another. What went between was only an interregnum.
Millian liberalism is now subordinated to the imperatives of identity politics. Free speech is assessed by the test of whether you can say things that offend minorities.

The Right as well as the Left is becoming illiberal. Republican governors in the US banned private businesses from requiring facemasks or proof of vaccination on their own property, with no more thought for freedom than those Democrats who made such restrictions compulsory.
Unsurprisingly, the new model conservatives have little time for Mill. Patrick Deneen, a clever professor at the Catholic University of Notre Dame, in the US, and an advocate of illiberal conservatism, took aim this week at those Rightists who see Mill as an ally against Leftist intolerance: “Some theoretical condition of ‘true liberty’ is purely fictional and not an aim requisite for a flourishing society,” he wrote. “We will either have today’s ‘despotism of progress’ or the ‘restoration of good custom’.”
I have a nasty feeling that Prof Deneen is right. Despotism has been the default condition of civilisation since our ancestors first planted seeds and built towns. Gaps might emerge when one official creed cedes its place to another, but they do not endure. We are a tribal species, and the idea that eccentric beliefs should be tolerated, let alone celebrated, does not come easily to us.
Millian liberalism flourished during one of those gaps – and what a gap! The countries which took liberalism most to heart, above all the English-speaking democracies, reached a pinnacle of wealth, freedom and contentment that earlier generations could not have imagined. Perhaps it was too good to last.

 
God Save the King was sung.

God save our gracious King!
Long live our noble King!
God save the King!
Send him victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us:
God save the King!

Thy choicest gifts in store,
On him be pleased to pour;
Long may he reign:
May he defend our laws,
And ever give us cause,
To sing with heart and voice,
God save the King![1]


Some other verses

Hanoverian

Lord, grant that Marshal Wade
May by thy mighty aid
Victory bring;
May he sedition hush,
and like a torrent rush
Rebellious Scots to crush!
God save the King!

Jacobite

God bless the prince, I pray,
God bless the prince, I pray,
Charlie I mean;
That Scotland we may see
Freed from vile Presbyt'ry,
Both George and his Feckie,
Ever so, Amen.


The version sung by the winners of The Presbyterian War

My country, ’tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing;
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrims’ pride,
From ev’ry mountainside
Let freedom ring!

Our fathers’ God, to thee,
Author of liberty,
To thee we sing;
Long may our land be bright
With freedom’s holy light.
Protect us by thy might,
Great God, our King!

 
So included a few opposite sources for the bias, but cannot believe how brazen this greasy George Santos is. When you read the indictment, it's not even any kind of clever fraud, it's just incredibly blatant. I'm not sure if it's arrogance, stupidity or both but it's just really low quality white collar fraud.

George Santos pleads not guilty to fraud and money laundering

George Santos in custody, federal indictment unsealed ahead of first court appearance

Is that the Republucan guy whose whole background is a lie ?
 
So included a few opposite sources for the bias, but cannot believe how brazen this greasy George Santos is. When you read the indictment, it's not even any kind of clever fraud, it's just incredibly blatant. I'm not sure if it's arrogance, stupidity or both but it's just really low quality white collar fraud.

George Santos pleads not guilty to fraud and money laundering

George Santos in custody, federal indictment unsealed ahead of first court appearance
You mean like the bidens?

That's why the indictment came down today. To take the shine off the Biden investigation announced by the House. For lying and money laundering.
 
You mean like the bidens?

That's why the indictment came down today. To take the shine off the Biden investigation announced by the House. For lying and money laundering.
Or, alternatively, George Santos is ludicrously, even comically corrupt, and DOJ conducted an investigation and developed reasonable grounds to indict on the strength of the evidence? The indictment document is public record and is floating around for anyone to read. It’s completely possible and reasonable for this to happen unconnected with other politically charged investigations. Santos appears to basically just be an absurd grifter who, quite accidentally, found himself taking his scheme WAY too far and ended up in Congress. He’s a total caricature of a compulsive liar. This one is pure FAFO.

What I find most interesting about the Santos indictment is that DOJ empaneled a grand jury, conducted an investigation, obtained documents, took statements, and laid a sealed indictment on a serving congressman with nobody outside being any the wiser that it was going on. That sort of investigative and prosecutorial work has to be making a few people nervous right now.
 
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