Political Backwash

“[D]ictatorial systems make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems—freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning…tremendous complex and difficult questions,”

So what is Loper Bright actually about?

Loper Bright overrules a Reagan-era Supreme Court decision known as Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council (1984), which held that when a federal statute delegating policymaking authority to an agency is ambiguous, courts typically should defer to the agency’s reading of that statute rather than trying ... See more

Paine rejected the idea that any man could be born to rule others, and he ridiculed the idea that an island should try to govern a continent. “Where…is the King of America?” Paine asked in Common Sense. “I’ll tell you Friend…so far as we approve of monarchy…in America THE LAW IS KING. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free count... See more

Hannah Arendt powerfully explained “the constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people who can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and w... See more

The capacity to act in concert for a public-political purpose is what Arendt calls power. Power needs to be distinguished from strength, force, and violence (CR, 143–55). Unlike strength, it is not the property of an individual, but of a plurality of actors joining together for some common political purpose. Unlike force, it is not a natural phenom... See more

You defeat a despot at the ballot box and work to create political affiliations and movements to undermine their destructive goals or else the problem gets worse. You cannot kill ideas. We should have learned this during the War on Terror and yet the faulty notion continues to proliferate.

Relations with the former colonial world now have switched to the opposite extreme and the Western world often exhibits an excess of obsequiousness, but it is difficult yet to estimate the size of the bill which former colonial countries will present to the West and it is difficult to predict whether the surrender not only of its last colonies, but... See more

In infants, the chief causes of outrageous behavior — impulsivity, grandiosity, attention-seeking, and a sense of entitlement — are considered normal, but in adults they’re key symptoms of the “cluster-B” personality disorders. All four such disorders — narcissistic, histrionic, antisocial and borderline — are characterized by overemotionality and ... See more