Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Trump has Made News Great Again

Politics in hyperdrive. Who can keep up? And to what extent should one keep up? Here are a couple of articles that caught my eye:

The Islamic Republic's New Lease on Life. Mercifully brief, and very interesting.  In Foreign Affairs, by one Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar.  I'd be interested in Caiati's and Soriano's comments. 

Elon Musk is America's Dumbest Smart Person.  Roger Kimball is right, and he is a very good writer to boot,  unlike so many journo-punks now churning out bad prose. How do I know Kimball is a good writer? It takes one to know one.

It's a funny world. My opinion of the 'pre-historic' Fetterman has gone up during the same period that my opinion of the engineering genius Musk has gone down.  

I would put it like this. Donald Trump has injected the 'art of the deal' into politics. He has brought the transactional skills of a consummate businessman to bear with impressive results. He was politically naive but the seemingly providential interregnum provided him with a 'sabbatical' during which to 'bone up' with the help of brilliant advisors. That, and the stark contrast with the mentally inept, morally corrupt 'Traitor Joe' Biden have brought the Orange Man to power. Maybe God had a hand in it, or we just got lucky. I prefer not to bluster about the unknowable.

Musk, on the other hand, remains politically naive. You can't engineer politics.  

As for how much time should be spent following the events of the day, see my Is it Rational to be Politically Ignorant?

Musk's third party doesn't have a chance, and in any case, Third Parties are nothing but discussion societies in political drag, as I argue over at the Stack.

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Bill Vallicella

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2 responses to “Trump has Made News Great Again”

  1. james soriano Avatar
    james soriano

    On the *Foreign Affairs* article, the author’s headline finding is: don’t expect regime change any time soon. The war’s caused the public, at least the Persian segment of it, to rally around the flag.
    What the author sees is an Iran with the regime intact, perhaps less Islamist than in the past and more open to controlled dissident, but still determined to rebuild a nuclear program and to reconstitute its proxies abroad. Its top priority right now is population control. It’s in self-preservation mode.
    Despite the upsurge in patriotic feelings, the regime must still rely on the security apparatus to stay in power. That sounds strange, but it appears to be the case.
    The essay’s written from the perspective of Iran’s internal situation and has little to say about how changes in the external environment will affect its behavior. Most of Iran’s proxies have been defeated, and although the regime may want to resuscitate them, actually doing that is another matter. Syria, a key piece, is no longer in Iran’s camp. The author touches on these issues, but they’re not developed.

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  2. BV Avatar
    BV

    Thanks, James.
    I had been cherishing the hope that the Iranian people would rise up and throw off their theocratic oppressors. But that might show naivete on my part, despite my appreciation of how tribalist the peoples of the Middle East are.
    “Population control” is interestingly ambiguous. I know what you mean by it, namely, the control by the mullahs of the people they rule. But it also refers to the control, by way of limitation, of the numbers of individuals in any given population. You are old enough to remember the ZPG movement of the ’60s.
    One of the contradictions of the contemporary Left in the USA and elsewhere is that their tendency to embrace something like ZPG comports ill with their belief in wide-open borders.
    A cognate contradiction in a left-leaning bunch like the Sierra Club is the tension between environmentalism and the promotion of open borders.
    But I digress.
    There are other fascinating questions here. Do the Iranian people bear collective guilt for allowing themselves to be dominated by Muslim savages? And to such an extent as to make them worthy of collective punishment? Woud Israel be justified in wiping out Iran’s grid and refineries?
    How about Americans? We allowed a reprobate, Biden, to become president. Are we collectively guilty? Or is the blood only on the hands of those who voted for him?

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