Sure, I'd maybe redirect a little to say it isn't or shouldn't simply be pure rhetorical triangulation; you have to pick the popular things that you want to spend political capital on to actually deliver... then live or die by the execution/delivery.
Too much rhetoric and triangulation while delivering for small but powerful factions is what destroyed the GOP (and what stalks the Dems).
Yeah, rhetorically there's been a shift where corporations are not the libertarian engines of growth and personal liberation... but I'm honestly not seeing any meaningful shift in policy preferences by Republican office holders or policy makers (such as they are).
So I see something like Youngkin the Venture Capitalist talking as if Main St. matters, but not ever planning or needing to anything as if Main St. matters. Which is to say, he's dusted off some early 80s rhetoric and will be perfectly happy to betray Main St. in exactly the same way we did in the 80s and 90s. Same playbook, same policies.
I mean, a war on HR departments and bad DEI isn't the paradigm changing economic policies we need.
Well, he's right about CRT and Schools... and it is DUMB and anti-popularist of the DEMS not to also be on that side as well.
That's the point... there's a really wide path strewn with rose petals and shade trees that either party could walk down... instead of going down that path y'all are crawling over broken glass and barbed wire and telling us it's fine.
Calling the shady easy path the "ratification of Trumpism" is why you keep telling me its unfair that "only the Dems have agency". Stop using the Agency like morons.
Sure, the Republican party is a mess... it doesn't have a coherent message outside of negative partisanship.
But it's weird to say that doubling down in 2020 proved to be the key to winning as they lost the Presidency then lost two Senate Seats in Georgia that were quite literally gimme's and practically already won.
Not to mention that Youngkin won the VA Gov. race in 2021 beating the safe pick by *not* doubling down.
I don't have any particular confidence that the GOP will self-correct (much or at all) in the near term... but I do think that conflating the enitrety of the Right with DJT and MTG makes for a much less optimal Democratic strategy that would otherwise build on the things that are buildable.
But as I (er, others) note above, possibly Money and Status don't align here.
I don't have any special window into the Supreme's minds... but I can say that the 14th Amendment talk has gotten louder.... so here's my gut:
14th Amendment: Thomas* / Alito
Penumbra isn't the basis for a sound legal regime: Comey/Kavanaugh(?)
Shhhh we can make this go away at 16-20 weeks: Gorsuch/Kavanaugh(!)/Roberts(?) **
Plurality allows for broader definition of state interests, viability, and restrictions landing somewhere between 16-20 weeks.... law already has provisions for Rape/Incest and Health of Mother (source: Guttmacher).
Nothing changes in any practical way.
* assuming Thomas doesn't want to revisit all the amendments on the day the decision is settled.
** Roberts defects if it's anything more than 16-20 weeks.
I'm with you on Biblical movies with Jesus as the main character. I just don't think they can be pulled off - not as cinema/film. I think you can do a sort of documentary where the character is a live-action stand-in for the narrator.
I think there's more room for art where Jesus is off-stage, like, say, Ben Hur or Quo Vadis (for classics) or even Anne Rice's depiction of the flight to Egypt which is biblical, but not biblically narrated (though it does get a bit dodgy with toddler Jesus - but hey - lots of great dodgy toddler Jesus art/music).
So, I'd like to see more art which accounts for Jesus off-stage (in the fullest sense)... and there have been some recent films where this has been done well (A hidden life, Bella and a others come to mind)... but other than the documentary placeholder, I just don't think it is really reasonable to try to 'model' Jesus in a script.
Finally, since we're *not* talking about The Passion of the Christ, I *won't* say that I find the film really is about The Passion and counter-intuitively Christ is appropriately 'off-stage' ... but since we're not talking about it, I'll leave it at that.
I'm ambivalent about marketing for religious art/movies... the relationship between Patron/Grifter has been fraught through the ages. And because my role as the pointy-end-of-the-offline-Catholic-spear is to watch bad popular art (usually left/liberal) I'll probably watch an episode(?) of The Chosen -- for science.
"How fast do you want to react? Are you willing to really accept the trade-offs imbedded in that change of pace?"
Faster.
Yes.
Part of the point of faster is that approving a new type of vaccine mRNA, should *also* carry a re-assessment of the approval process and requirements for mRNA v.1.2 or 2.0 -- that's a big part of an Executive push to create a new model with appropriate safeguards.
Global Pandemic is the trade-off we're making. We're never going for Covid-0 or dealing with chronic issues... we're trading risk for risk. And risk management/calculations will change over time.
If anything, treating Covid like a disease that we're trying to cure rather than a risk we'll looking to mitigate is probably the meta-failure of our general policy/approach.
Sure the laying of deaths at the foot of the president during a pandemic is kinda dumb and only dumb people would do that.
The critique of Biden - which I'll make here well before it becomes obvious 20/20 hindsight - is that his team has been too slow to adjust to the fact that we *aren't* running downhill to herd immunity like we thought in March/April 2020.
What the Biden team hasn't done is change the FDA so that we can handle the variants better... we're not positioned for Moderna/Pfizer 2.0 upgrade boosters... we're still too slow to address new drugs/treatments and nothing has been done to pre-scale production... worse the FDA has been pulling back lots of different Emergency Use Authorizations and is reversing course to BAU. Testing, Rapid Testing, Home Testing is a complete patchwork of hit/miss. The CDC is, amazingly, still a communications train-wreck.
So as we move from pandemic to endemic, the death tolls aren't the fault of a president in the midst of ubiquitous free vaccines (nor are the ubiquitous free vaccines a Biden admin achievement, if we must be fair); the test comes when/if we spike back into a pandemic situation with death spirals among the vaccinated. And there? I have the above concerns that we haven't taken this time to reposition. *That* will be on the Biden Admin (may it never come to pass).
The blindspot with Biden - which is baked into the Biden cake - is that he's 100% Washington institutionalist... so his agenda will always be more funding, but not reform. That's who he is. So I know the FDA and CDC and NIH will get more money, but they will spend it as they know how to spend it. Rules are rules, regulations are regulations...
It is possible the Biden Admin is clawing, hacking and hewing new paths, but search on the topics and the tumultuous intertube winds blow quiet. Unless OTC Monograph Reform (Cares Act) is the thing we've been waiting for. But fair enough... maybe wheels within wheels are turning out of sight. Hopefully we never need to test the hypothesis. But if we do... I'll be here to say, we squandered 2-yrs on kabuki-masking.
Heh, if we could just clear out the mushy middle of late capitalist bourgeois moralists you and I could hammer out the stuff that matters. Or die trying.
I see; I agree that it's the defacto legacy ethical framework. I just don't see that appeals to the framework can withstand challenges to the framework - as your comment also seems to suggest.
Reminds me of Marsden's book on how the Ivies went secular: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief.
Which is why I'm not a retreat to, say, Natural Law, or appeal harder to our shared Judaeo-Christian framework... not as a public rhetorical strategy anyhow. Not anymore.
I'm not a retreat the the old positions guy... the most liberating lesson I ever learned from MacIntyre was that Aquinas was just a waypoint... and while another Aquinas might not come along for a couple more centuries, a new synthesis will come.
I am, I guess, a little surprised at your sanguine appraisal of the cultural domination of Christian ontology, epistemology and even ethics... that's where I honestly don't think we've had the necessary baseline since, well, William James.
Also, I'm not sure I agree that the fragmentation is 'social' I think it is genuinely epistemological - and that's driving real ethical increasingly ontological changes.
"The permanent Democratic majority is actually happening."
Sometimes you're just Koz in relief... explaining the inevitable Democratic victory that we just can't fully grasp is coming. I think you are both wrong.
Yes, but its the fragmentation that's the core issue. If everything starts with 'posit a wheel' there's too much work that needs doing before we can agree on where to go from here. We've regressed from a collective 'here'. Or 'here' is everywhere. I am Here. Which is true. And, Nietzsche's point.
There are things to like about pragmatist epistemology... "contrite fallibilists" as a corrective to Hume and Descartes (et al.) seems useful, but I'm not sure it 'scales' as you once said about Virtue Ethics. :-)
On “Donald Trump’s 2024 Campaign Will Be Insane. It Also Might Win.”
Sure, I'd maybe redirect a little to say it isn't or shouldn't simply be pure rhetorical triangulation; you have to pick the popular things that you want to spend political capital on to actually deliver... then live or die by the execution/delivery.
Too much rhetoric and triangulation while delivering for small but powerful factions is what destroyed the GOP (and what stalks the Dems).
"
Yeah, rhetorically there's been a shift where corporations are not the libertarian engines of growth and personal liberation... but I'm honestly not seeing any meaningful shift in policy preferences by Republican office holders or policy makers (such as they are).
So I see something like Youngkin the Venture Capitalist talking as if Main St. matters, but not ever planning or needing to anything as if Main St. matters. Which is to say, he's dusted off some early 80s rhetoric and will be perfectly happy to betray Main St. in exactly the same way we did in the 80s and 90s. Same playbook, same policies.
I mean, a war on HR departments and bad DEI isn't the paradigm changing economic policies we need.
"
Well, he's right about CRT and Schools... and it is DUMB and anti-popularist of the DEMS not to also be on that side as well.
That's the point... there's a really wide path strewn with rose petals and shade trees that either party could walk down... instead of going down that path y'all are crawling over broken glass and barbed wire and telling us it's fine.
Calling the shady easy path the "ratification of Trumpism" is why you keep telling me its unfair that "only the Dems have agency". Stop using the Agency like morons.
"
Sure, the Republican party is a mess... it doesn't have a coherent message outside of negative partisanship.
But it's weird to say that doubling down in 2020 proved to be the key to winning as they lost the Presidency then lost two Senate Seats in Georgia that were quite literally gimme's and practically already won.
Not to mention that Youngkin won the VA Gov. race in 2021 beating the safe pick by *not* doubling down.
I don't have any particular confidence that the GOP will self-correct (much or at all) in the near term... but I do think that conflating the enitrety of the Right with DJT and MTG makes for a much less optimal Democratic strategy that would otherwise build on the things that are buildable.
But as I (er, others) note above, possibly Money and Status don't align here.
"
This is pretty close to the "Popularism" discourse that was mooted by Yglesias a few months ago. It did not go over well.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/moderate-democrats-should-be-popularists
Turns out that Popular policies can often excite negative reactions from Money and Status factions.
On “Choosing To Be Contrarian On “The Chosen””
Exactly.
"
Yes, and it would have been insufferably bad if He were anywhere else.
The Sermon on the Mount Scene reads better as satire than sarcasm.
On “Obsolete Philosophy: Stoicism and Judaism”
This one has that 'very collegy feel' to it. Kinda fun though.
On “Choosing To Be Contrarian On “The Chosen””
But then good religious epics are about the chariots we flipped along the way...
On “Friend of the site Gabriel Malor live-tweets the oral arguments for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health”
I don't have any special window into the Supreme's minds... but I can say that the 14th Amendment talk has gotten louder.... so here's my gut:
14th Amendment: Thomas* / Alito
Penumbra isn't the basis for a sound legal regime: Comey/Kavanaugh(?)
Shhhh we can make this go away at 16-20 weeks: Gorsuch/Kavanaugh(!)/Roberts(?) **
Plurality allows for broader definition of state interests, viability, and restrictions landing somewhere between 16-20 weeks.... law already has provisions for Rape/Incest and Health of Mother (source: Guttmacher).
Nothing changes in any practical way.
* assuming Thomas doesn't want to revisit all the amendments on the day the decision is settled.
** Roberts defects if it's anything more than 16-20 weeks.
On “Choosing To Be Contrarian On “The Chosen””
Yeah, that's a really good point and probably an even better way to put it about The Passion.
Haven't seen The Message, but sounds like conforming theory.
"
That's because this was in production before they had time to read/copy/steal from Joseph Heller's 'God Knows' which came out in 1984.
"
I'm with you on Biblical movies with Jesus as the main character. I just don't think they can be pulled off - not as cinema/film. I think you can do a sort of documentary where the character is a live-action stand-in for the narrator.
I think there's more room for art where Jesus is off-stage, like, say, Ben Hur or Quo Vadis (for classics) or even Anne Rice's depiction of the flight to Egypt which is biblical, but not biblically narrated (though it does get a bit dodgy with toddler Jesus - but hey - lots of great dodgy toddler Jesus art/music).
So, I'd like to see more art which accounts for Jesus off-stage (in the fullest sense)... and there have been some recent films where this has been done well (A hidden life, Bella and a others come to mind)... but other than the documentary placeholder, I just don't think it is really reasonable to try to 'model' Jesus in a script.
Finally, since we're *not* talking about The Passion of the Christ, I *won't* say that I find the film really is about The Passion and counter-intuitively Christ is appropriately 'off-stage' ... but since we're not talking about it, I'll leave it at that.
I'm ambivalent about marketing for religious art/movies... the relationship between Patron/Grifter has been fraught through the ages. And because my role as the pointy-end-of-the-offline-Catholic-spear is to watch bad popular art (usually left/liberal) I'll probably watch an episode(?) of The Chosen -- for science.
On “A COVID Statistic That is Beyond Meaningless”
"How fast do you want to react? Are you willing to really accept the trade-offs imbedded in that change of pace?"
Faster.
Yes.
Part of the point of faster is that approving a new type of vaccine mRNA, should *also* carry a re-assessment of the approval process and requirements for mRNA v.1.2 or 2.0 -- that's a big part of an Executive push to create a new model with appropriate safeguards.
Global Pandemic is the trade-off we're making. We're never going for Covid-0 or dealing with chronic issues... we're trading risk for risk. And risk management/calculations will change over time.
If anything, treating Covid like a disease that we're trying to cure rather than a risk we'll looking to mitigate is probably the meta-failure of our general policy/approach.
"
Sure the laying of deaths at the foot of the president during a pandemic is kinda dumb and only dumb people would do that.
The critique of Biden - which I'll make here well before it becomes obvious 20/20 hindsight - is that his team has been too slow to adjust to the fact that we *aren't* running downhill to herd immunity like we thought in March/April 2020.
What the Biden team hasn't done is change the FDA so that we can handle the variants better... we're not positioned for Moderna/Pfizer 2.0 upgrade boosters... we're still too slow to address new drugs/treatments and nothing has been done to pre-scale production... worse the FDA has been pulling back lots of different Emergency Use Authorizations and is reversing course to BAU. Testing, Rapid Testing, Home Testing is a complete patchwork of hit/miss. The CDC is, amazingly, still a communications train-wreck.
So as we move from pandemic to endemic, the death tolls aren't the fault of a president in the midst of ubiquitous free vaccines (nor are the ubiquitous free vaccines a Biden admin achievement, if we must be fair); the test comes when/if we spike back into a pandemic situation with death spirals among the vaccinated. And there? I have the above concerns that we haven't taken this time to reposition. *That* will be on the Biden Admin (may it never come to pass).
The blindspot with Biden - which is baked into the Biden cake - is that he's 100% Washington institutionalist... so his agenda will always be more funding, but not reform. That's who he is. So I know the FDA and CDC and NIH will get more money, but they will spend it as they know how to spend it. Rules are rules, regulations are regulations...
It is possible the Biden Admin is clawing, hacking and hewing new paths, but search on the topics and the tumultuous intertube winds blow quiet. Unless OTC Monograph Reform (Cares Act) is the thing we've been waiting for. But fair enough... maybe wheels within wheels are turning out of sight. Hopefully we never need to test the hypothesis. But if we do... I'll be here to say, we squandered 2-yrs on kabuki-masking.
On “Make Truth Self-Evident Again”
Heh, if we could just clear out the mushy middle of late capitalist bourgeois moralists you and I could hammer out the stuff that matters. Or die trying.
"
If it helps, I think Nihilist is too 19th century; emotivist is too 20th century; Narrative is the 21st century Nietzsche descriptor and battleground.
"
I see; I agree that it's the defacto legacy ethical framework. I just don't see that appeals to the framework can withstand challenges to the framework - as your comment also seems to suggest.
Reminds me of Marsden's book on how the Ivies went secular: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief.
Which is why I'm not a retreat to, say, Natural Law, or appeal harder to our shared Judaeo-Christian framework... not as a public rhetorical strategy anyhow. Not anymore.
"
I see, my misapprehension then. Apologies.
"
I'm not a retreat the the old positions guy... the most liberating lesson I ever learned from MacIntyre was that Aquinas was just a waypoint... and while another Aquinas might not come along for a couple more centuries, a new synthesis will come.
I am, I guess, a little surprised at your sanguine appraisal of the cultural domination of Christian ontology, epistemology and even ethics... that's where I honestly don't think we've had the necessary baseline since, well, William James.
Also, I'm not sure I agree that the fragmentation is 'social' I think it is genuinely epistemological - and that's driving real ethical increasingly ontological changes.
"
Heh, you're probably right but I don't have the stomach for these kinds of fights, so I'm just playin' it safe hanging out in neutral Belgium.
On “Yes, Democrats Do Have to Be Perfect”
I quoted you in my response.
"The permanent Democratic majority is actually happening."
Sometimes you're just Koz in relief... explaining the inevitable Democratic victory that we just can't fully grasp is coming. I think you are both wrong.
On “Make Truth Self-Evident Again”
Yes, but its the fragmentation that's the core issue. If everything starts with 'posit a wheel' there's too much work that needs doing before we can agree on where to go from here. We've regressed from a collective 'here'. Or 'here' is everywhere. I am Here. Which is true. And, Nietzsche's point.
"
Right ho, toil away old bean, toil away.
"
There are things to like about pragmatist epistemology... "contrite fallibilists" as a corrective to Hume and Descartes (et al.) seems useful, but I'm not sure it 'scales' as you once said about Virtue Ethics. :-)