Due process is what distinguishes us as a people from the monsters who do commit heinous crimes. If there’s no due process, we’re a society that can just lynch people on an accusation, with no need to get it right.
-Aaron Reichlin-Melnick
Category Archives: Thought for the Day
On Patriotism
“Whatever may have been my political opinions before, I have but one sentiment now: that is, we have a government, and laws, and a flag, and they must all be sustained. There are but two parties now: traitors and patriots. And I want hereafter to be ranked with the latter.”
– U.S. Grant (1861)
Thought for the Day – February 23, 2025
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that held them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.
“For my friends everything, for my enemies the law”.
“We have to get out of the mindset that these people are going to follow the law. Yes that’s how it’s supposed to work, but we are entering a different paradigm. They believe they are the law, not subject to it.”
Plan accordingly.
Thought for the Day – February 1, 2025
Far too many people just follow orders.
That and Congress appears to have no objections to handing government agencies over to Musk. I expected as much from Trump loyalists. I’m disgusted that there’s no opposition party.
“The only way out is through.”
Identity Politics
As much as left-wing identity politics are counterproductive and annoying, right-wing identity politics are vile. Trump and co are right-wing identity politics 24/7/365.
Michael Ignatieff, I was born liberal. The ‘adults in the room’ still have a lot to learn:
By the late 1990s, the conservatives began to gain power by playing to the resentments of the ignored. The authoritarian right, especially, understood that it could build an entire politics on mocking the blindness of the liberal elite. It didn’t need solutions; stoking the rage was enough. We are now the embattled object of that rage. What will it take to earn the trust of those whose discontent we ignored? Liberalism in the next generation will need to save social solidarity from the “creative destruction” of the market by rebuilding the fiscal capacity of the liberal state and investing in the public goods that underpin a common life for all. Saying this, at a high level of generality, is easy enough: The tougher part will be finding the language and the cunning to convert a radical liberalism into a politics that wins elections and a governing strategy that pushes change through the veto-rich thicket of interests waiting to derail our best-laid plans.
Thought for the Day – January 18, 2025
Be patient with your grief.
Thought for the Day – January 14, 2025
We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called “technology” at all. As if linen were the same thing as flax — as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin pills, were natural objects, born with us like our teeth and fingers — as if steel saucepans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled glass grew on trees, and we just picked them when they were ripe…
One way to illustrate that most technologies are, in fact, pretty “hi,” is to ask yourself of any manmade object, Do I know how to make one?
Los Angeles
It’s been almost 30 years since I spent time in Los Angeles. I contemplated a move. It would’ve been a different life. Seeing places I remember burned to the ground is surreal and too on the nose.