Quotulatiousness

May 1, 2023

The Presidential re-match nobody wants

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At Oxford Sour, Christopher Gage contemplates the potential re-match of Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the 2024 election … and shudders:

Perhaps for good reason, any American with their eyes on the White House must be at least 35 years of age when assuming office. Mercifully, this rule prevents anyone with a TikTok account from being taken too seriously.

Apparently, Americans apply this rule to its very extreme.

This week, President Joe Biden announced his bid for re-election, promising in a video announcement to “finish the job”. Quite what job he refers to is anyone’s guess. Though in better shape than Great Britain (a bar so low it’s a carpet) America is not having the best of days, weeks, months, years, decades, or twenty-first centuries.

Biden wasted no time. His sales pitch? He’s not Donald Trump. Evidently, the Biden team assumes Trump will steamroller over Ron DeSantis en route to the Republican party nomination. It’s 2020 again.

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but every time I see “2020” written down, or the mere words “twenty-twenty” seep into my eardrums, my heart flutters, my brain jangles, and a panic attack seizes control of my body with all the charm and consideration of a central African coup d’état.

Americans seem to agree. Seventy percent of Americans don’t think the 80-year-old Biden should run for re-election. Even 51 percent of Democrats nod their heads. Meanwhile, sixty percent, including one-third of Republicans say Trump, 76, should not run for president.

President Biden is not the most spring of chickens. Half of those who think he should sit this one out say Biden’s age is a “major” reason behind their thinking.

To put it mildly, this decade hasn’t quite gone the way of the “Roaring Twenties”. In 2019, I told anyone with ears that this decade would be the decade of decades. Reader, the jury is out. By “out” I don’t mean they’re busy making their considerations. By “out” I mean the jury is riddled with hollow-point bullets.

Perhaps that’s why a 38 percent plurality told pollsters they felt “exhausted” over the very idea of a Biden versus Trump rematch. Twenty-nine percent said they felt “fear” whilst just under a quarter felt both “sadness and fear”.

Which brings me to vice president Kamala Harris. This week, we learned of Biden’s intention to rehabilitate Harris’ image. Harris hasn’t had the most illustrious of tenures. Why? Well, let’s just say VP Harris is suited to other modes of employment. Ideally, Harris would find her feet in jobs which don’t require speaking in coherent, plain sentences and jobs which place a premium upon one’s ability to laugh at the most inappropriate of times. Reader, I’m about as socially attuned as a headbutt. Unlike Harris, I’m not literally one stopped heart away from the presidency.

It cannot be that a country of 330 million people, one which correctly claims to be the greatest country on earth, must limit itself to re-running the worst year in recent history.

And yet, there’s quite some time to go before the serious business of campaigning kicks into gear. If this horrendous decade has taught me anything, it’s that conventional wisdom isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.

April 11, 2022

Ours is a fundamentally unserious culture, two examples

Filed under: Education, Government, Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray provides some examples of just how decayed western culture has become in our headlong flight toward total unseriousness:

In Europe this month to lead the diplomatic response to a war, the Vice-President of the United States responded to a question about refugees by giggling and cackling and babbling in typical form:

And then the “fact-checkers” at Reuters explained that she actually didn’t giggle and cackle and babble, because, okay, she did cackle and giggle and babble, but she didn’t cackle and giggle and babble specifically about the refugees, so it doesn’t count: “It is clear from viewing the longer video in context that Harris and Duda laughed at the awkwardness of not knowing who should speak first. There is no evidence that Harris was laughing at the refugees or the crisis in Ukraine.” The question was about refugees, and she laughed — she laughed a lot — right after the question, but Reuters apparently called no tagbacks before the play, so no points accrue.

So we have an awkward and ineffective playactor who occupies the position of a political leader, but lacks the stature or ability to go along with it, and we have journalists who labor to protect people in powerful political positions from the possibility that people will notice who they really are and what they really do. We have political leaders who aren’t political leaders, and journalists who aren’t journalists: the form without the substance.

Meanwhile, a recent debate on the topic of free speech at Yale Law School — the nation’s top-ranked law school, which produces presidents and Supreme Court justices — began with law students screaming abuse (“I’ll fight you, bitch”) at one of the panelists, before walking out as a group and continuing to shout and pound on the walls of the adjacent hallway.

Now: The students were angry at the panelist, the bitch they wanted to fight, because she’s an anti-trans social conservative, and couldn’t you just die? But the thing that law students are learning to do is be lawyers — advocates for a position in a formalized exchange of competing views, in controversies that play out in open court. They’re training at the profession of making an argument. The point of sitting through an argument made by a person whose views you despise is that you can learn about something you want to fight against; you can see what the enemy says, and how she says it, and so do a part of the work of preparing yourself to advance a different position. So we have law students, people training for a debate-and-exchange-centered profession, who don’t want to hear things they don’t agree with. It’s like a minor league baseball player saying he refuses to touch a baseball, because baseballs offend him, but anyway, when are you assholes sending me up to the major leagues? We have people who want to occupy the profession of the law without preparing for the substance of professional engagement with competing positions: the form without the substance.

(Doing what journalists do, now, the fact-checkers explain that none of this puts points on the anti-free-speech scoreboard: “The students made their point at the very start of the event and walked out before the conversation began.” It is precisely the point that 1.) law students 2.) walked out before the conversation began. In ten years, oral argument before the Supreme Court will be that Woke lawyers stand up and scream I’M NOT GONNA LISTEN TO THIS SHIT, YOU ASSHOLES at the justices, then storm out and descend into a long round of day-drinking while waiting for the court to rule in their favor, because oh my god they CAN’T EVEN.)

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