The Conservative icon we in the US need, the antidote to “Wokism,” “doomerism,” adolescent depression, climate change, fertility decline, Bernie Sanders, Chinese-Russian expansionism, is … JFK: “Ask not …” “Not because it is easy but because it is hard”. Brink Linsey’s advocacy of Prometheansm gets the spirit right.
That this temporarily misplaced Golden Age coincided with when I was 21 “serving” (ha!) in the Peace Corps is pure coincidental. 😊
My uncle said his boss at an advertising agency in Dublin kept the Union Jack in the attic 'just in case', and lamented the Brits leaving. he was another Catholic.
Even without the social issues the economic impact of having tariffs on a trading area next door which accounts for a huge % of your exports :(
Good joke about Bari Weiss, but to be fair to her, the hatred came first and the subscriptions are, at least partly, a response to that. Both sides can play the "hatred will not win" card, although her substack does cover a broad range of topics and is admirably open to.
I think I agree with Bernie Sanders about CEO pay and billionaires, although he doesn't suggest a solution (and I fear that higher taxes will mean they only pay themselves MORE). Whenever I see the sentiment "billionaires shouldn't exist" on Twitter, though, it always seems to mean "if we put Bezos, Gates, Musk, Trump, and JK Rowling against a wall, things will go back to how they should be" and I'm instinctively against that. (Rowling being so rich shows that this is partly a matter of scale; she just massively outsells other writers.)
That's exactly right. Of course it's absurd that Bezos and Gates have that many pesos, but the Buffett Rule and other proposals will actually have little benefit to the working poor and will just cause billionaires to adjust their finances; maybe even moving their empires to Ireland! Conor would be tickled!!
What I find so disingenuous about people like Sanders and Warren is notice how they manage to make the money issue more than the generous amount they make. For instance, how many homes does Bernie own? Neither of them are even close to average income earners, and you’d think that, at the very least, they’d be more than willing to forego some of what they have, and throw into the pot they so passionately want billionaires contributing to.
If only a few people would make their second (third, fourth) "home" available to the homeless, or offer someone an unused bedroom (or two or three), we wouldn't have homeless. That is, if the only issue is that there isn't enough housing. (It's not ;-)
I've often speculated that the editor of the Wall Street Journal's Friday "Mansion" section is a radical leveler who wants the revolutionaries to know where to go and whom to go after.
I just can’t get over how these very well off politicians love to go around telling everyone how they’re getting screwed by the wealthy. How is it that their followers never seem to look at them, and notice the irony?
I’ve never looked at the “Mansion” section in WSJ, but I remember getting this one publication years ago, and that was always included a section of several extremely expensive homes for sale. There was something very off putting about it, even though it was kind of fun seeing what was inside some of these *palaces.*
The other thing I find amazing is how much celebrities love to embrace progressive agendas (talk about living in “palaces”) while they are the very ones making all of their money from the people they claim are being ignored by the awful people on the right. And their fans eat it up with never a thought that they are the ones paying to hear that BS.
What is wrong with people?! I sometimes feel as though there is this collective stupidity that runs our lives no matter how much we talk about education and accessibility to knowledge. 🤷♀️
We can be a very dopey species, but we've got those opposable thumbs ...
I don't know why people are so susceptible to, "Do what I say, not what I do!" but we are. I mean, Tucker Carlson, "Man of the People, Champion of the Working Man"? Gimme a break. At least J.D. Vance actually did labor.
A modern phenomena is older people living as if they are younger. My grandparents' generation seemed to accept turning 65 or 70 as becoming old and behaved accordingly. My parents' generation is now in their mid to late 70s and are vigorous and active. My 80 year old godparents still sail from the US to the Bahamas every year, wintering there and then returning back to the US. At 80!
I am in my early (ahem, increasingly mid) 40s and you do notice people starting to age at different paces. Health, fitness, appearances all go in different directions, making those school reunions awkward, to say the least!
Re Bernie Sanders, America is certainly in a flux. The white working classes and growing share of the Latino working classes have swung decisively Republican. The professional upper middle and upper classes have swung decisively Democratic. Weird times. His failure is that America doesn't hate billionaires and class war has rarely played out well in the United States, being a pet project of Brooklyn hipsters, usually from affluent backgrounds. And particularly problematic for Sanders is that the billionaires, particularly in big tech, founded companies that employ hundreds of thousands of highly paid professionals and are faces of modern liberal progressive wealth and the modern upper middle classes. Based on these factors, if class revolution was to come, it'd have to come from a now staunchly Republican voting bloc.... can one see that happening? Actually, perhaps, yes, one can.
Maybe we feel younger than we are because, according to the general experience of the human species, we shouldn't have lived this long. The article is paywalled, so I'll never know Jennifer Senior's (snicker) opinion, but who cares what she thinks?
I was surprised the other day when the grocery clerk took the 5% "senior discount" off my purchases without asking, but oh, well. I sure didn't pull out my driver's license to prove I'm not 60 yet.
You sometimes read about those super-ancient people in rural societies who cant remember their age and I always think 'hold on, you MUST remember that at least'. But obviously not, and yes, I think that could be a reason.
My husband doesn't remember our children's birthdays or their middle names. I find it quite likely that he will eventually lose track of his own birthday.
Oh I know, and I don’t want to sound like I’m bashing men because I know there are plenty of them who would remember this sort of thing. However, I’m betting women are way more likely to remember names and dates of children and relatives than their spouses.
Don’t worry unless he forgets your name and birthdate!
As I look out of a train window across the rolling empty expanses of France, in this moment, I'm grateful for those bourgeois ideals that prevented another 200 million people appearing here. Hideously selfish of me, of course.
Thanks so much for sharing this. It’s nice to occasionally get articles that aren’t behind paywalls because there is no way my husband and I can afford to subscribe to everything that interests us.
I’d love to share it with the brother who voted for Trump twice, and follows Tucker Carlson, mostly because I think I can see how it is that he and others feel the election was stolen from Trump. I always thought it was about the actual number of votes, but this makes me think that it was more about the Democrats not following the *rules,* in the ways Republicans prescribed.
The problem with my brother, however, is that he won’t read it. It’s so much easier listening Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity. 🙄
Not following the rules probably describes the frustration and disparity most Republicans must feel. The difficulty is that the Democrats are following rules, but they rewrite the rules at the same time.
Everything from excessively early voting long before debates even happen to ballot harvesting to mail-in voting means within a few cycles the election has gone from an intelligent electorate following debates and campaigns and then casting a ballot in person on the same day along with every other voter across America to a blurry, seemingly incomprehensible process where an enormous percentage of the electorate has already cast a ballot by the first official debate, has only favored one party over the other. The details on what ballot harvesting involves really does boggle the mind. And the Democrats have become very aggressive, even brutal, in their turn out the vote strategy. Add to all of it a legacy media establishment that applies wholly different standards to covering Democratic and Republican candidates (do we really think if one of Trump's kid was the one with the infamous laptop that it would have been handled the same way, with slates of DC officials claiming it had Russian misinformation all over it?). The Fetterman senate campaign is another perfect example of where rules were not broken but the legacy media refused to cover truthfully the severity of the candidate's stroke, helped him by preventing difficult interviews, and they got away with pushing the sole public debate between the two candidates, and the first time Fetterman really was in public exposure, till just before the election and after at least a third of the voters had already cast a ballot. Do we really think the same courtesy would have been given to the Republican candidate had he been the one to suffer a stroke?
The American electoral system is broken because it's no longer an engagement between an intelligent electorate and politicians. No rules may have been broken along the way, but one can't say that about trust and confidence in the fairness of the electoral process.
I cannot disagree with you. I feel a tremendous amount of frustration, too. The biggest problem for me is both sides: I don’t like either one at this point. I don’t know if you listen to Jonah Goldberg, but he brought up something interesting recently. It had something to do with the fact that Democrats (who started the whole thing) are now angry at Republicans for gerrymandering because they got good at it.
The Conservative icon we in the US need, the antidote to “Wokism,” “doomerism,” adolescent depression, climate change, fertility decline, Bernie Sanders, Chinese-Russian expansionism, is … JFK: “Ask not …” “Not because it is easy but because it is hard”. Brink Linsey’s advocacy of Prometheansm gets the spirit right.
That this temporarily misplaced Golden Age coincided with when I was 21 “serving” (ha!) in the Peace Corps is pure coincidental. 😊
I mentioned this on Connor's substack but I think the level of consensus in post independence Ireland is over stated.
My uncle said his boss at an advertising agency in Dublin kept the Union Jack in the attic 'just in case', and lamented the Brits leaving. he was another Catholic.
Even without the social issues the economic impact of having tariffs on a trading area next door which accounts for a huge % of your exports :(
"Blame the French" sounds like a solid historical thesis TBF
cant go too wrong
Like "the Commie Plot Theory of Everything," it works at least half the time.
Good joke about Bari Weiss, but to be fair to her, the hatred came first and the subscriptions are, at least partly, a response to that. Both sides can play the "hatred will not win" card, although her substack does cover a broad range of topics and is admirably open to.
I think I agree with Bernie Sanders about CEO pay and billionaires, although he doesn't suggest a solution (and I fear that higher taxes will mean they only pay themselves MORE). Whenever I see the sentiment "billionaires shouldn't exist" on Twitter, though, it always seems to mean "if we put Bezos, Gates, Musk, Trump, and JK Rowling against a wall, things will go back to how they should be" and I'm instinctively against that. (Rowling being so rich shows that this is partly a matter of scale; she just massively outsells other writers.)
I think Bernie S is correct about a lot of problems but agree, I don't think his solutions will make it better.
That's exactly right. Of course it's absurd that Bezos and Gates have that many pesos, but the Buffett Rule and other proposals will actually have little benefit to the working poor and will just cause billionaires to adjust their finances; maybe even moving their empires to Ireland! Conor would be tickled!!
What I find so disingenuous about people like Sanders and Warren is notice how they manage to make the money issue more than the generous amount they make. For instance, how many homes does Bernie own? Neither of them are even close to average income earners, and you’d think that, at the very least, they’d be more than willing to forego some of what they have, and throw into the pot they so passionately want billionaires contributing to.
If only a few people would make their second (third, fourth) "home" available to the homeless, or offer someone an unused bedroom (or two or three), we wouldn't have homeless. That is, if the only issue is that there isn't enough housing. (It's not ;-)
I've often speculated that the editor of the Wall Street Journal's Friday "Mansion" section is a radical leveler who wants the revolutionaries to know where to go and whom to go after.
I just can’t get over how these very well off politicians love to go around telling everyone how they’re getting screwed by the wealthy. How is it that their followers never seem to look at them, and notice the irony?
I’ve never looked at the “Mansion” section in WSJ, but I remember getting this one publication years ago, and that was always included a section of several extremely expensive homes for sale. There was something very off putting about it, even though it was kind of fun seeing what was inside some of these *palaces.*
The other thing I find amazing is how much celebrities love to embrace progressive agendas (talk about living in “palaces”) while they are the very ones making all of their money from the people they claim are being ignored by the awful people on the right. And their fans eat it up with never a thought that they are the ones paying to hear that BS.
What is wrong with people?! I sometimes feel as though there is this collective stupidity that runs our lives no matter how much we talk about education and accessibility to knowledge. 🤷♀️
We can be a very dopey species, but we've got those opposable thumbs ...
I don't know why people are so susceptible to, "Do what I say, not what I do!" but we are. I mean, Tucker Carlson, "Man of the People, Champion of the Working Man"? Gimme a break. At least J.D. Vance actually did labor.
A modern phenomena is older people living as if they are younger. My grandparents' generation seemed to accept turning 65 or 70 as becoming old and behaved accordingly. My parents' generation is now in their mid to late 70s and are vigorous and active. My 80 year old godparents still sail from the US to the Bahamas every year, wintering there and then returning back to the US. At 80!
I am in my early (ahem, increasingly mid) 40s and you do notice people starting to age at different paces. Health, fitness, appearances all go in different directions, making those school reunions awkward, to say the least!
Re Bernie Sanders, America is certainly in a flux. The white working classes and growing share of the Latino working classes have swung decisively Republican. The professional upper middle and upper classes have swung decisively Democratic. Weird times. His failure is that America doesn't hate billionaires and class war has rarely played out well in the United States, being a pet project of Brooklyn hipsters, usually from affluent backgrounds. And particularly problematic for Sanders is that the billionaires, particularly in big tech, founded companies that employ hundreds of thousands of highly paid professionals and are faces of modern liberal progressive wealth and the modern upper middle classes. Based on these factors, if class revolution was to come, it'd have to come from a now staunchly Republican voting bloc.... can one see that happening? Actually, perhaps, yes, one can.
Maybe we feel younger than we are because, according to the general experience of the human species, we shouldn't have lived this long. The article is paywalled, so I'll never know Jennifer Senior's (snicker) opinion, but who cares what she thinks?
I was surprised the other day when the grocery clerk took the 5% "senior discount" off my purchases without asking, but oh, well. I sure didn't pull out my driver's license to prove I'm not 60 yet.
You sometimes read about those super-ancient people in rural societies who cant remember their age and I always think 'hold on, you MUST remember that at least'. But obviously not, and yes, I think that could be a reason.
My husband doesn't remember our children's birthdays or their middle names. I find it quite likely that he will eventually lose track of his own birthday.
In all fairness, that is a low to remember. 😉
True, but I can do it.
Oh I know, and I don’t want to sound like I’m bashing men because I know there are plenty of them who would remember this sort of thing. However, I’m betting women are way more likely to remember names and dates of children and relatives than their spouses.
Don’t worry unless he forgets your name and birthdate!
I don't think he's done that yet, although he's hazy about when we got married. (February 4, 1989.)
"Ireland also adopted Christianity very quickly, and with very little in the way of internal conflict."
It gets weirder when you consider that Ireland was never part of the Greco-Roman world either.
Good interview with William Clouston by the way.
As I look out of a train window across the rolling empty expanses of France, in this moment, I'm grateful for those bourgeois ideals that prevented another 200 million people appearing here. Hideously selfish of me, of course.
Haha. It is beautiful tbf.
I find the emptiness of France sometimes haunting though, at least after I've gazed at one of their war memorials :(
You look younger than me Ed.
I feel old
Or at least, I feel like I look old.
Thanks so much for sharing this. It’s nice to occasionally get articles that aren’t behind paywalls because there is no way my husband and I can afford to subscribe to everything that interests us.
I’d love to share it with the brother who voted for Trump twice, and follows Tucker Carlson, mostly because I think I can see how it is that he and others feel the election was stolen from Trump. I always thought it was about the actual number of votes, but this makes me think that it was more about the Democrats not following the *rules,* in the ways Republicans prescribed.
The problem with my brother, however, is that he won’t read it. It’s so much easier listening Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity. 🙄
Not following the rules probably describes the frustration and disparity most Republicans must feel. The difficulty is that the Democrats are following rules, but they rewrite the rules at the same time.
Everything from excessively early voting long before debates even happen to ballot harvesting to mail-in voting means within a few cycles the election has gone from an intelligent electorate following debates and campaigns and then casting a ballot in person on the same day along with every other voter across America to a blurry, seemingly incomprehensible process where an enormous percentage of the electorate has already cast a ballot by the first official debate, has only favored one party over the other. The details on what ballot harvesting involves really does boggle the mind. And the Democrats have become very aggressive, even brutal, in their turn out the vote strategy. Add to all of it a legacy media establishment that applies wholly different standards to covering Democratic and Republican candidates (do we really think if one of Trump's kid was the one with the infamous laptop that it would have been handled the same way, with slates of DC officials claiming it had Russian misinformation all over it?). The Fetterman senate campaign is another perfect example of where rules were not broken but the legacy media refused to cover truthfully the severity of the candidate's stroke, helped him by preventing difficult interviews, and they got away with pushing the sole public debate between the two candidates, and the first time Fetterman really was in public exposure, till just before the election and after at least a third of the voters had already cast a ballot. Do we really think the same courtesy would have been given to the Republican candidate had he been the one to suffer a stroke?
The American electoral system is broken because it's no longer an engagement between an intelligent electorate and politicians. No rules may have been broken along the way, but one can't say that about trust and confidence in the fairness of the electoral process.
I cannot disagree with you. I feel a tremendous amount of frustration, too. The biggest problem for me is both sides: I don’t like either one at this point. I don’t know if you listen to Jonah Goldberg, but he brought up something interesting recently. It had something to do with the fact that Democrats (who started the whole thing) are now angry at Republicans for gerrymandering because they got good at it.