Keeping Them Honest

It’s another very, very early morning Ruminant today, yet somehow Jonah is annoyingly bombarded with ...

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It’s another very, very early morning Ruminant today, yet somehow Jonah is annoyingly bombarded with texts at the start of the podcast. After figuring out how to stop the interruptions, he delves into what he thinks are the essential books for all conservatives to read. Then, sadly, he shares his thoughts on shootings, guns, body armor, and more. Stick around to hear Jonah’s thoughts on the latest iterations of Star Trek. Finally, a potpourri of topics: Is Jonah actually optimistic about the future of the GOP? Why are we obsessed with “having an honest conversation?” 

Show Notes:

– Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek

– The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism by F. A. Hayek

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  1. Avatar photo
    Bill Dyer (aka Beldar)

    I enjoyed this podcast, Mr. Goldberg, and thank you for your efforts in creating it.

    Regarding your assessment of the various bells and whistles accessory to firearm ownership: When we say, during a debate, "What are the odds that someone would need ____?" — whether that blank is being filled in at the moment with high-capacity magazines, body armor, semi-automatic weapons, long guns, military-style long guns, or whatever — we all mentally convert that question to "What are the odds that I, in particular, would need ____?"

    If you're imagining a self-defense of home scenario in an urban apartment in New York or Washington, you may have trouble perceiving why you'd need or even want any of these things. In your mind, setting yourself in your own real-world circumstances with its lifetime of mostly consistent experiences, you're thinking of a burglar, or two, whom (as you said in the previous podcast) you'd need to "scare off" by "firing a warning shot or two in the air."

    That's a perfectly valid frame of reference, for you. But not everyone's like you.

    Imagine, instead, that you're a parent in a ranching family, in a west Texas county sprawling over hundreds of square miles but with a total population of less than 5k. The sheriff and her deputy live 25 miles from your house as the crow flies, but more like 40 miles in their Jeep. Your next nearest neighbor is 10 miles away, and you get along okay but not so's you'd expect him to ride over the ridge to your defense in a home assault situation. It's 4:00 a.m. and there's a gang of five human traffickers, all very dangerous men with criminal records, all below the age of 23, who've just led 20+ undocumented immigrants into Texas earlier. Then they met their transport mules, who'll further distribute the drugs they brought with them across the Rio Grande. So they're flush, already beginning to party on their way back to the border, and heavily armed — maybe with weaponry that's illegal on both sides of the border. They're outside your house, surrounding it and behind cover. You know they know you're inside, because they've shouted to you and your whole family to come outside. They want to "date" your teenaged daughter.

    Now do your same costs/benefit analysis from that frame of reference. Your results may vary.

    I believe you to be very open to questioning your own "priors," having heard and read you doing exactly that over and over again. But this might be an occasion for that.

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  2. Avatar photo
    The Bell Tower

    Speaking of dead ringers, the cover of GK Chesterton’s In Defense of Sanity looks a lot more like Jonah Goldberg than it looks like the actual Chesterton.

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    The Bell Tower

    The trans stuff was by far the least offensive part of the Gervais special. Which is weird.

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  4. Spooky

    I tweeted at Jonah about this, but I feel like it'd probably get his attention here:

    Couple of items re: Star Trek:

    1) Picard just ended its second season; it's confusing because all the hype is now about its upcoming third (and final) season, since it'll be a "proper sendoff" to the TNG crew and will include all of the main cast of TNG.

    2) Terry Matalas (not Michael Chabon - he did the first season) is showrunning and producing the final two seasons (this past season and the one coming up) and indicated that he'd stepped away from the second season about 1/3 of the way through filming so that he could focus all his attention on the third season and making sure that was done right, which is why this season felt like a big ol' mishmash.

    3) Terry Matalas indicated that they'd gone full Butterfly Effect - basically, any changes in the timeline went both directions. If Picard was leading a galactic-level purge of non-humans aboard the CSS World Razer (not a particularly imaginative name, tbh), he wasn't leading a mission back to 19th Century San Francisco to meet Guinan, and Kirk wouldn't have gone back and met Gary Seven or gone to retrieve George and Gracie, and Sisko wouldn't have replaced Gabriel Bell in late 2024. Should they have thrown in some BS infodump about that? Yeah, would've been helpful, but they were too busy squeezing in crap about how ICE cooperates with the LAPD (laughable if you've paid any attention to either of those two organizations) to disappear people, or more quips about how awful the past is in general.

    Anyway... yeah, go watch Lower Decks or Prodigy, those are MUCH better shows. Lower Decks is just hilarious all the way through, skewers the hell out of Star Trek, and Prodigy, while marketed as a "kids show" is probably the best spiritual sequel to Voyager ever.

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    Ondra Masker

    The Goldberg Quote of the Day:

    "I can feel you guys trying to remember if you still have angry birds on your phone."

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  6. D. Lee Grooms

    I was hanging in there until the notion of Beverly D'Angelo having A Much-Needed Conversation About Race was thrown out there around 1:15:40; then I cracked up. She's definitely the go-to when you don't know what to say except it's Christmas and we're all in misery. Robin DiAngelo is the other one, and of the two, I'd tune in for Ellen Griswold anytime (I wouldn't even be making this comment except as an excuse to reference Christmas Vacation).

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    Malaise Muscle Car

    JoGo, no Strange New Worlds? As Spock would say, "WTF"?

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    Ben Connelly

    I’m looking forward to that piece by Continetti! Wish I’d been able to make it to the 500th episode. I was really enjoying that list of conservative books to read by the way. I could definitely listen to a whole podcast like that because I like lists and books and conservative eggheadery.

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  9. AgMike

    I know this is nothing new but hanging onto the "stolen election" seems terrible and dumb for everyone involved EVEN IF IT'S TRUE (I don't believe it is) and is therefore stunning that Trump won't let go

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    Scarlette Tarte

    Sorry, but Ted Cruz's response to the foreign journalist was not something to behold. The journalist asked a question a lot of Americans themselves are thinking...why is America so exceptional at gun violence?

    It deserves a well thought answer, not some "I'm a patriot" nonsense. If you think America IS exceptional, why can't we stop doing this?

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