milk and honey

Lessons Not Learned, Part 2

Robert Pape, University of Chicago:

Iran is not a palace dictatorship resting on a handful of men. It is a state of roughly 92 million people, with governing institutions embedded across society…. Roughly one in eight Iranians works for the state or in state-linked institutions. The regime’s authority is threaded through provincial administrations, economic networks, and local security structures. Removing several dozen senior leaders — even highly placed ones — touches only a small fraction of that governing apparatus. It does not dismantle the structure; it activates it.

Lessons Not Learned

There are moral and legal cases against Trump’s Iran attacks. But a purely practical one is that heavy bombing doesn’t drive the other side to surrender, as history has shown again and again: The Blitz, “bombing North Vietnam back to the Stone Age,” Shock and Awe in Iraq …

“I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school.”

Letters from children held in detention by the United States government in Dilley, Texas.

Choices

Michael Wear, The Dispatch, February 8, 2026,

This last decade of American politics cannot become the new standard. If it does, few of our institutions will survive… This is the danger, of course. That everything will orient around this man [Trump]. That he will succeed in making everything subject to his interests and his whims. He’s willing to do it with God, and he’s certainly willing to do it with the country. Our nation’s choice about whether to elect him is in the past, but the choice we have to make about whether we will become like him is ongoing.

From David Brooks' Farewell NYTimes Column

If you want to jump in on the side of humanization, join the Great Conversation. This is the tradition of debate that stretches back millenniums, encompassing theology, philosophy, psychology, history, literature, music, the study of global civilizations and the arts. This conversation is a collective attempt to find a workable balance amid the eternal dialectics of the human condition — the tension between autonomy and belonging, equality and achievement, freedom and order, diversity and cohesion, security and exploration, tenderness and strength, intellect and passion. The Great Conversation never ends, because there is no permanent solution to these tensions, just a temporary resting place that works in this or that circumstance. Within the conversation, each participant learns something about how to think, how to feel, what to love, how to live up to his or her social role.

Hebrews 13

Let brotherly love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated …

A good piece by Ezra Klein.

The world is built on relationships, not leverage, and relationships are built on reciprocity and respect. It is not Trump’s genius to recognize America’s unused strength; it is his blindness to see that our strength was a function of our restraint.

WIth Congress in a coma,

Other institutions – non-profits and for-profits alike – must call out ICE and Trump. This article about clergy (and others) pressuring airlines is an example.

Bored with Peace and Order

For Kolnai, however, what attracted the young to fascism was not so much any real practical concern, nor any really coherent philosophy. It was, rather, a kind of boredom with the peace and orderliness of liberal times. Distinctly lacking in liberal societies is the kind of enmity, battle, conflict, and esprit de corps that a conquering master-nation can provide.

– Nathan Beacon, “How Not to Be a Fascist: How one Hungarian philosopher resisted the Nazis through ‘civilization.’"

Sounds a bit like ICE thugs, eh?

“Tiger” | Farid Khan, trans. by Tuhin Bhowal

I’m hopeful that
to save its own species,
the tiger will become a poet,
the way dinosaurs became lizards,
And the poet, occasionally, a tiger

More from Goldberg

My only point is that no one benefits from a political, never mind, a policy debate, between Team Jackass and Team Thug fueled by a flood of voyeuristic videos. This spectacle feels to me like a metaphor in miniature of American politics generally. … Everyone plays to the crowds for attention and funding. Nobody wants to hammer shut the windows and do the work of the American people.

Right. Our politics are so juvenile. (Hence, the now almost mandatory dropping of f-bombs.)

Where did all the grown-ups go?

This has got to be one of the most cruelly ironic headlines I’ve ever seen:

Ein Volk, etc.

Jonah Goldberg:

Remember how after 9/11 Katha Pollitt told her 13-year-old daughter she couldn’t fly the American flag, because “the flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war”? Pollitt was wrong. But this administration is making her seem less so.

By hijacking the language of patriotism for this nationalistic, statist, militaristic horseshit, the right is picking up the baton of the left by signaling to millions of Americans that America’s heritage—and the people who talk about it—are precisely the kinds of people who see the American flag the same way she did.

Go Right Ahead, Mr. Chairman

Tom Friedman in the NYTimes makes an excellent point: Trump’s toppling of Maduro provides Xi another precedent for invading Taiwan.

Taboos

Jonah Goldberg:

We live in a world where violating taboos is monetizable and confers enviable status. I like taboos— not all of them, of course. But I respect the role of taboos in society. Good taboos are the guardians of settled questions. They sit like gargoyles at the mouth of dangerous caves and warn against spelunking in dark and dangerous places. …

The riot of taboo-violating and dogma-disinterring is an invitation to consequences few have the courage or the basic knowledge to apprehend.

If … you conjure a world where there is no external truth, only a riot of competing, equally valid perspectives, then you create a Nietzschean world where the only arbiter of “truth” is the one with the will and the power to impose their truth on everyone else.

Strange (or Maybe Not So Much)

Whatever you may think of Kevin Williamson (and I know many some of those I follow on MB loathe sometimes have issues with him), this is sizzling:

It is strange how excessive admiration for the will to power brings out the servility in so many men.

No Kings Protest, Alamosa, Colorado (pop. 9,888), 14 June 2025

Today is the Anniversary of D-Day

I doubt that soldiers on Omaha beach could ever have imagined they were dying for this 81 years in the future.

New York Times

May 30, 2025:

#1: As Elon Musk entered President Trump’s orbit, he told people he was taking so much ketamine that it was affecting his bladder. He was also taking Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, and he traveled with a daily medication box of about 20 pills.

#2: Trump is now presenting Musk with a giant golden key he says he gives only to “very special people.”

#3: White House Health Report Included Fake Citations - A report on children’s health released by the Make America Healthy Again Commission referred to scientific papers that did not exist.

I’m special. Where can I get one of those keys? Maybe Buc-ees?

American Ideals

Danielle Allen contra Curtis Yarvin:

He gets his first principles wrong, so we have to return to ours. Most important, human equality precedes human differences. We can identify differences among us only because we are all human, and in that regard equal. As humans we share a capacity for moral judgment and an innate striving to choose actions that make tomorrow better. This is how our drive and capacity for freedom show themselves.

The proposition that all humans are created equal has never meant that we are all the same. Our equality lies in these features of humanity that make us moral beings. Nor does human difference yield fixed and permanent groupings or determine where and how human talent in its immense variety will show itself. The government that will best help humans flourish will start by protecting human freedom. This requires maximal space for self-government, and also government of the whole people that is by and for the people. Not in the interest of those who govern, but in the interest of the governed.

* * *

If our constitutional democracy is weak today—failing to help us meet our governing challenges—that may be because we have lapsed in civic participation. We have ceased to claim our own equality through our institutions, which offer it. We have allowed political parties to capture our institutions, and to govern for their own sake rather than the public good. We need to renovate our democratic institutions, starting with party reform.

But our more basic work may need to be on ourselves. Here Mr. Yarvin’s words are a warning: “Americans of the present are nihilistic and narcissistic,” he writes. “They are frivolous about the present and ignorant of the past. While these qualities may not make the Americans of today suitable for an 18th-century democracy, they may be just the right qualities for a 21st-century regime change.”

We don’t need his regime change. We need democracy renovation and renewed seriousness about our lives as citizens. This means reconnecting to our civic power, experience and responsibility. This requires civic practice and education. It also means redesigning institutions so they reward participation and deliver effective governance. We need to understand why and how separation of powers, checks and balances, due process, and a national legislature that functions are necessary to protect human freedom.

David French

According to this narrative, the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973 was the seminal domestic event that inspired Christian conservatism. It represented a deadly corruption of our Constitution in service of a culture of sexual convenience in which human life was subordinate to sexual pleasure.

The response of the Christian right was both political and personal. That approach could be boiled down to a single sentence: Elect people of good personal character who will defend human life and religious liberty.

We went on that trip, and all we got was this lousy Trump.

"They Come Up to Me and Say, ‘Sir, Everyone Respects You, Sir.'"

I’m sorry; what?

Tariff Talk

To the extent they can reasonably figure it out*, I’d like to see sellers include a separate line item on invoices that shows the portion of the price attributable to tariffs. Knowledge is powerful.

*They can acknowledge it’s an estimate.

These Days, “Conservatives” Aren’t.
Jonah Goldberg:

The market system is man-made, just as gardens are. But it is not the product of any individual will. It is a crowdsourced network of institutions, constructed over generations of trial and error, learned best practices, and the accumulation of common law and legislation alike. …

It is only when someone tears down or batters these Chestertonian fences all around us that we discover those fences are there for a reason. … That’s where we are now. One man is singlehandedly taking a plow to the garden because he is confident that he knows better than, almost literally, everyone. And his defenders have few, if any, serious arguments in his defense beyond “trust him.”