April 8, 2024 — Steven Hayward
You know things are bad when Bill Clinton is the voice of moral clarity in the Democratic Party. Here’s what he said in 2016: “I killed myself to give the Palestinians a state. I had a deal they turned down that would have given them all of Gaza… between 96%-97% of the West Bank, compensating land in Israel, you name it.” “Hamas is really smart. When they decide to rocket
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April 7, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Richard Weaver (author of the canonical 1949 text, Ideas Have Consequences) writing about social science in 1956: Those Congressmen who are reported to have confused social science with socialism may not have been so dumb after all. They had the right intuitive perception, even if they got the academic distinctions a little confused. A thing is defined partly by its tendency, and the tendency of scientistic social science, from Comte
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April 7, 2024 — Steven Hayward
As I have written several times, with low unemployment, a (somehow) still-growing economy, and an unpopular rival candidate, Joe Biden ought to be breezing to a relatively easy re-election. But he continues to trail Trump. (Leave aside for separate treatment why the top line economic numbers are misleading. . .) Check out this chart from Bloomberg: Bloomberg translates what this means in terms of votes as follows: Trump is currently
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April 7, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Very discouraging news out of Israel today that the IDF is pulling its forces out of southern Gaza, supposedly to “rest, regroup, and re-supply” after four months of hard fighting. Let us hope this is true, but one can’t help but suspect that this move may be in response to demands from the Biden Administration that will inevitably lead to a permanent cease-fire which will amount to a Hamas victory,
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April 6, 2024 — Steven Hayward
I sometimes say that I am a libertarian only on Tuesdays and Thursdays (and April 15) because libertarian purism can be politically frivolous. I was delighted that Daniel B. Klein, professor of economics and JIN Chair at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and editor of the invaluable Econ Journal Watch, sent the following article for our consideration, and I fully agree with it: An interview between two libertarians
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April 6, 2024 — Steven Hayward
In the most unsurprising announcement of the week, No Labels has given up its plan for a third-party “unity” ticket, proving that generic brand politics has about as much appeal as generic brand consumer products. But at least the generic store brands, with their bland labels, save you money. Just what was the No Labels ticket going to stand for? Was there ever a single idea that No Labels stood
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April 6, 2024 — Steven Hayward
John Yoo takes command of host duties this week, as I was on the road at an academic conference at City University of New York, where a knowledgeable faculty member remarked that he was surprised I didn’t need an armed guard. The conference was largely devoted to the intellectual history of the liberal tradition, and was designed perfectly to induce a scornful snort from Lucretia who disdains all such flim-flummery.
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April 6, 2024 — Steven Hayward
“Well,” I said to myself upon arriving from California for three days in New York City, “at least I won’t have to worry about earthquakes.” On the other hand, things are so weird now that walking around in Manhattan, you actually find second-hand cigarette smoke a blessed relief from the dominant second-hand pot smoke, which you pick up almost every block. But right after the “earthquake,” I spotted this on
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April 5, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Terrific—a new thing for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to police in employment discrimination. A Canadian social scientist (the best kind, no doubt) is out with a paper that finds job applicants who include non-binary pronouns (like “they/them”) on their resumes get fewer call backs than normal people. Who woulda thunk it? Potential employers prefer to avoid hiring dramatists and schizophrenics. The paper is Taryn versus Taryn (she/her) versus
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April 4, 2024 — Steven Hayward
I used to joke that “I was a teenage existentialist,” which is partly true, except I knew even at the time that it was a pose. But the angst at the center of teen life that used to be the subject of every teenagers-in-heat movie of the 1980s now looks more serious. I wonder if this trend might be related to this trend:
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April 3, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The joke in the Washington Beltway is that it only take a couple of snowflakes falling to cancel public schools and generate a run on bread and milk in the grocery stores. With a substantial early spring storm pounding the left coast a few days ago, and a separate storm pounding the midwest last week, worth noting these data on which parts of the country appear to be more robust
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April 3, 2024 — Steven Hayward
You may have heard of the “Streisand Effect,” which Wikipedia describes as “an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove, or censor information, where the effort instead backfires by increasing public awareness of the information. The effect is named for American singer and actress Barbra Streisand, whose attempt in 2003 to suppress a photographer’s publication of a photograph showing her clifftop residence in Malibu, California, taken to document coastal erosion
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April 2, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Randall Kennedy of Harvard Law School is one of the progenitors of Critical Legal Theory (CLT) back in the late 1980s and 1990s. It was an early postmodern expression of the view that language itself—and therefore law expressed in language (because try expressing law through interpretive dance sometime)—is merely a subjective tool of power. It was a precursor to Critical Race Theory (CRT), which is a key component of the
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April 2, 2024 — Steven Hayward
You may recall that back around 1984, when the economy was booming, President Reagan took a victory lap with the comment that “I notice they don’t call it ‘Reaganomics’ any more.” Worth recalling that “Reaganomics” was a term liberals and the media came up with to attack Reagan during the deep recession of 1982. So it is ironic that Joe Biden decided to try to peddle “Bidenomics,” which has been
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April 1, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Now that Easter is safely past (except for the Orthodox!), maybe (checks notes) chocolate prices might start to come back down? You know Bidenflation is bad when it reaches chocolate. (Note that the last time chocolate was this expensive, Jimmy Carter was president. Coincidence? I think not!)
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March 31, 2024 — Steven Hayward
I’m currently working on a long paper I’m presenting at an academic conference on the legacy of the late historian John Patrick Diggins (d. 2009) in New York later this week (poster below, in case any New York area readers might like to drop in), and I can’t resist posting a couple of provocative thoughts from my jumble of notes. Like this from Diggins: Louis Hartz was the first to
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March 30, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Our supposedly devout “Catholic” president at work on this Easter holiday weekend: Can picking Easter Sunday for this proclamation be a mere coincidence? Meanwhile, for Monday’s traditional Easter egg hunt on the White House lawn, we have this: Pretty sure I know the thinking behind this, too, though to be sure around our household we refer to the preposterous Easter Bunny as the “Resurrection Rodent.”
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