milk and honey

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.