choices........................

 

In judging myself, I confront what is inferior in me and recoil from it. Yet none of us can measure our true worth. I can only live in the hope that those around me might say: he is honest; he is kind to the helpless; when the powerful struck, he stood his ground. Such judgments point to generally discoverable moral truths. We have always possessed Taylor’s shared “standards of value”—we have always loved the higher and shunned the lower, even when pretending otherwise.

From the reformation of character follows the public affirmation of the conditions to which good character should aspire. I would do so humbly, guided by truth as I perceive it. Fit is better than fat, for obvious reasons. Together is better than alone, and together for life better still. Strong is better than weak. Let me name the one and pursue the other, knowing that we are flawed vessels, hostage to fortune, and bound often to fall short. Still, all of us can inch toward our highest selves.

-Martin Gurri, as cut-and-pasted from here

Checking in with Martin Gurri...............

 Already, the global chessboard looks unrecognizable.

And if the winners in this great reshuffling are not yet known, it’s easy to identify the losers.

That would be the national and transnational grandees who had pictured themselves as pillars of a “rules-based world order.”

These are elite types who worship at the altar of process: Every crisis must be papered over with consultations, negotiations and proclamations, until the public’s attention wanders and the trouble is decently shoved offstage.

Trump’s rage for change, for an actual outcome, feels to them threatening and immoral — a trampling on the proprieties.

In the rules-based world order, the point isn’t to defuse lethal situations like a hostile fanatical regime acquiring nuclear bombs — it’s to play-act at doing so, while adroitly turning present difficulties into someone else’s nightmare in the future.

-as culled from this effort

Every once in a while............

 

...........................only Martin Gurri will do:

Social relations as they actually exist, and democratic politics as they are actually practiced, are repudiated. Everyone is against, but few can say what they stand for. The radical Left, which wields substantial influence within major institutions, loathes nearly every aspect of Western civilization—its history, its economic system, its racial and sexual norms—and would happily demolish the entire edifice. The populist Right is eager to smash whatever regions or organizations that the Left controls, with little regard for the consequences. And the institutional elites, who might be expected to defend the status quo, now feel compelled to strike insurgent poses and denounce the very structures that they oversee.

----------------------

Populism is a political by-product of the post-truth condition. Once presidents and TikTokers stand on the same plane of plausibility, with only the unruly public to choose between them, the temple of establishment authority is destined to tumble like the walls of Jericho. Sensing this, elites have succumbed to a reactionary panic—they want their twentieth century back. The first article of faith in “our democracy” is that the public must be pushed out of the commanding heights of the information sphere and that the power to construct a single, universal reality should return to those deemed properly trained for the task: the expert, the scientist, the politician, the journalist, the bureaucrat.

Crack my head up..........................

Mamdani has also said that he’s intent on “seizing the means of production,” which sounds alarmingly like he wants to invade China.

-Martin Gurri,  It's Gurri, read the whole thing

Martin Gurri is a national treasure.............

 

My moral sphere is a small world, a limited space. The necessary virtues aren’t complex: humility with my family, integrity at work, neighborliness in my community—add loyalty to friends, and one has the basic package.

-from this Discourse post

Martin Gurri........................

 

..................has questions about our government:

Did the government of the United States, conqueror in two world wars and a Cold War, first to place humanity on the moon, really fund transgender comic books in Peru?

Wither go the hounds of AI..........

 

At President Trump’s request, Elon Musk has let loose the hounds of AI on the immobile carcass of the federal bureaucracy. For the first time in a century, the entire structure has become intelligible to the president. Horizontally, he can discover the endless cutouts and rabbit holes in which an agency’s taxpayer dollars have been wasted on bizarre causes and self-interested groups. Vertically, he can follow the funds allocated under his signature for—say—bridge repair to the actual bridge and track the actual repairs. Trillion-dollar players, accustomed to working in opaque and unaccountable bureaucratic lairs, find themselves exposed to the eyes of an angry public, as the walls around them turn to glass. The revolutionary character of this transformation is impossible to exaggerate. It’s as if AI suddenly shrank Leviathan to the dimensions of a guppy in a fishbowl.

-Martin Gurri, from here

Ah, politics.......................

 

The deep question in American politics today, however, concerns the fate of the Democratic Party. For Republicans, the future will look and sound like Trump and his band of young buccaneers, about to take Washington by storm. They may succeed or fail in arriving at their destination, but the direction is set. It is otherwise with the Democrats: the 2024 election shattered the party, and it isn’t clear how—or if—the pieces will come together again. . . .

Ever since, the Democrats have stumbled inside a house of mirrors, where wish is confused with reality and fatal errors appear as a mere failure to communicate. In that place of illusion, they embrace a mythology that elevates them into wondrous spirits—representatives of science, perpetual guardians of “our democracy,” saviors of a dying earth, adjudicators of perfect justice. By definition, only satanic forces could oppose such a chosen people. To abandon this mythology will be traumatic and identity-crushing. 

-Martin Gurri, from his essay Lost in the Funhouse

The assault.................................

 

....................................on the status quo.

On free speech......................

 Whether Trump’s policies turn out to be right or wrong evidently matters. But the resumption of the great American debate, of speech that is unencumbered and unafraid, of a Jeffersonian open society, matters much more, since it will enable progress.

-Martin Gurri, from here

An understatement............

 When it came to the economy, the federal government’s framework of understanding had lost touch with the truth.

-Martin Gurri, from here

What strange times we live in...............

One of my favorite pundits looks at the 2024 presidential race and has some thoughts.  Hope he is wrong about Bobby Kennedy, Jr.

 To earn the nomination, however, DeSantis will have to persuade an angry Republican base of his alienation from the government he is expected to preside over. He must demonstrate that, despite his orthodox trajectory and obvious ease with handling policy, he is not a mere politician or a creature of the institutions. Just as the Democratic Party today is the home of establishment and reaction, Republicans are the party of populism and revolt. By an inner necessity, the Democrats will nominate a safe insider; that happens to be Joe Biden’s sole qualification for the presidency. The inverse process will turn the Republican contest into a scramble for the outside rail.

-Martin Gurri, from this essay

The passing of journalism....................

 In any case, the fantasy of the relentless muckraker has been quietly discarded in the digital age. Journalists are now meek handmaidens to the elites and bland deniers of scandal. Democracy, in their view, demands the public’s permanent genuflection before the ruling class. Any other posture smacks of populism or even fascism. The hero is no longer the investigative reporter but the “fact-checker”—a dull but peevish beast whose task it is to count the lies of Donald Trump and dismiss reports of corruption in high places as “conspiracy theories” and “disinformation.” Such naked prostration before the establishment, it should be noted, has less to do with journalistic principles than with a desperate need to attract a paying audience.

-Martin Gurri, from this essay

If only our elites were more elite.................

 A vast apparatus of control—an octopus-like conglomerate of institutions that includes the federal bureaucracy, the news media, and the digital platforms—has been deployed to stop the populist wolf from crashing through the door. The panic evoked by Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter betrays an unhappy suspicion that the beast will break in anyway. The system is as nakedly rank-based as Marie Antoinette’s France. Having assumed guardianship over the complexities of twenty-first-century life, the elites must govern because they are who they are.

-Martin Gurri, from here