Losing Patience with Dumbassery

Is nature healing?

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After fending off the voices coming from inside his walls, Jonah begins today’s Ruminant by discussing the latest entry in the House Speakership saga and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s incoherent foreign policy. He then turns to the recent pro-Palestinian protests and how their facing consequences is a sign of nature healing. Stick around for the usual intellectual history nerdery.

Show Notes:
—Boiling Frogs on Mike Johnson
—Dispatch Politics on Mike Johnson
—Wanderland on MTG’s appeasement and Neville Chamberlain
—Boiling Frogs on Joe Biden’s “Sister Souljah moment”
—Friday’s Dispatch Podcast
—Activist threatening Bakersfield city council
—The Remnant with Nancy French
—Ukraine: The Latest

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Comments (55)
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  1. Avatar photo
    C C Writer

    So here's where the binary-choice thing turns into base-stealing.

    The probable outcome of an election is that one of the two candidates (or two leading candidates) will win. That part is not disputed; you can plausibly characterize it as binary.

    But outcome is a result, not a cause. Individual voters have agency and choice. In most elections they have a set of voting options available to them, not all of which support the binary-vote scenario that some partisans and operatives would prefer. The options include not voting at all, not voting in a particular contest, voting third-party or an independent candidacy, doing a write-in--and maybe one or two things I haven't thought of but are possible.

    But when the potential outcome is spun as somehow creating an obligation on the part of the voter to cast a vote that will align with someone's preferred outcome--that's a form of gaslighting. The gaslighting is being done by those who would like to be able to control more votes than just their own, but do not care to go the route of persuasion. "You're not allowed to vote for anyone who we say won't win. And if you do, we shall be extremely displeased!" My answer: "Your proposal is acceptable."

    So if anyone is not interested in doing the work it takes to persuade, then I do not have to pay any attention to what they say, because what they say is not really argument--it's only said in the service of force or falsehood.

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    1. Pohl

      Sure. But you should still vote for Biden IF you want to stop Trump.

      Excepting those precincts where, like Jonah’s, you have the luxury of voting for boutique losers, voting for president this year is binary unless you’re indifferent to the outcome.

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      1. Avatar photo
        C C Writer

        Thank you for your advice, but I'm going to continue making my own analysis of the situation and determining my own strategy for using my vote to make things better. You do what you want with yours.

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        1. Pohl

          I didn’t want to repeat my boring argument against third-party voting, etc during critical elections, that is. I think you’ve heard it before. I can’t pull the lever for you or want to. But I haven’t heard anything persuasive in support of most of your apathetic options listed above either. Not voting at all? Skipping a contest? Hard to recommend.

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            C C Writer

            "Your apathetic options." This negative and inaccurate characterization is an assertion, not an argument, so it does nothing to dissuade me from pursuing whatever options I deem appropriate. If you don't like that, well, I didn't say you have to.

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  2. Charvondersaar56

    I would gladly drive 2-3 hours from Cody, Wyoming to hear you speak. We have a lot of Cheney-hating Trump supporters (not me!) who aren't too dumb to be spellcheckers at an M&M factory that need a good dose of Goldberg - let Nature heal!

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  3. Clark.Monson

    I've said this several times, but (presumably) Guy's descriptions of Jonah's mental and emotional state in the
    Ruminant podcast summaries never fail to make me chuckle. Still voicing his disapproval of the Ruminants, and still keeping his job!

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  4. Avatar photo
    James Spiller

    Is the lack of rebuttal in the comments because other people think that when a President says that Congress will do a thing in foreign policy that is somehow binding on Congress?

    I tend to think the reverse; that Congress properly sets the direction of foreign policy, with the President making more short term decisions within the bounds that Congress has set.

    In the case of Ukraine, both Congresses have been more hawkish than Biden, whose rhetoric is sometimes adequate but whose provision of Congressionally mandated or authorized aid had been more delayed than even the most recent aid bill. So there’s something to be said for Congress respecting the commitments of past Speakers and Houses. But there’s also something to be said for letting Congressmen cut bait on policies that are no longer working for them and in particular for letting elections change policy.

    I’m a big and well documented fan of Ukrainian aid, but I think it was good and proper that Congress bound Biden’s hands more tightly this time, mandating, for example, that he send ATACMS. POTUS is POT *US*, yes, but the other Federal branches are also Federal and not inferior.

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    Ben Connelly

    The Washington Post’s coverage of the war can best be described as “anti-anti-Hamas.”

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  6. Jonathan Edwards

    I think the most disturbing development of the last 10+ years is the rise of antisemitism in the West. Like the Geiger counter that measures the level of radiation in the physical world, antisemitism measures the level of resentment in society.

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    1. Pohl

      It’s hard to rate these things. For myself, I’m too tempted to say it’s the holocaust of millions of the unborn over any recent decade. But there’s room for multitudes of disturbing things since 2014. War in Ukraine’s another.

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  7. Avatar photo
    E7a56c3893

    I would really like Jonah (and Sarah, too for that matter) to really elaborate this "Sista Soulja" strategy they keep mentioning. I am just terribly confused and unconvinced.

    Here is my understanding of what a Sista Soulja moment is: for a politician to elevate and condemn a *universally agreed upon act of impropriety or misbehavior on their own side*

    Is publicly condemning Mayorkas really an instance of a "Sista Soulja" moment? Does condemning Mayorkas win the admiration of voters from all sides, or does it merely align with the sensibilities of the people on this podcast? We all have biases too, myself included. But as a Biden voter, "Sista Soulja moment" necessarily implicates my thinking process as well, I just have to call foul on this abuse of the term.

    I feel like an *honest* analysis of such a scenario would conclude that Biden throwing Mayorkas under the bus confuses and divides his own party. The Republican Party would lament that this act would be too little, too late. Troublemakers like MTG and Matt Gaetz would run a victory lap over how their own antics brought down an official in a historic impeachment. Moderate Republicans behind closed doors would be terribly annoyed at a new world where at a whim, the most raucous members of their caucus could be politically rewarded for abusing a serious Constitutional process, just to litigate a *policy difference*. I find this trope of "Biden needs to find a Sista Soulja moment" to merely be a complaint that Biden does not behave like my preferred [Republican] politician.

    Sista Soulja moments do exist. In Biden's case, his condemnation of the university presidents' equivocation on anti-Semitism was a clear example of a successfully played Sista Soulja moment for him. And I thank the Dispatch for keying me in to Biden's flailing anti-Sista Soulja moment when he failed his first infrastructure bill and flailed, taking up the failed "New Jim Crow" electoral reforms from the states. But in this instance I find the analysis for Mayorkas to be terribly unconvincing, and this trope is rolled out a bunch of times where The Dispatch crew complain that Biden "should just" condemn political allies to make overtures to "the middle".

    I understand that overtures to the middle are important. But at this point, it feels like every week the Dispatch discovers a missed "Sista Soulja moment" opportunity, one that just so happens to align with Republican partisans' preferred mode of politics, and conveniently omits the possible chaos and division that would be a consequence of an unnecessary, or even ill-advised, moment of friendly-fire, in an environment where media bubbles don't care to reward overtures.

    Biden staying silent on Mayorkas is smart politics, or at the very least defensible. Biden condemning Mayorkas requires *a lot* more justification. I think it is up to Republicans to justify why they waste everyone's time with these impeachments. And if Jonah and Sarah believe that these are true missed opportunities, I'd like a serious play-by-play of how this would *really* play out in liberal media, what the fallout would be for Biden to indulge every single Republican tantrum they can concoct, and what benefit Biden can *actually* expect to receive from the voters Jonah/Sarah identify as "the middle". Maybe I am wrong, maybe I can be convinced with an in-depth analysis. But right now I feel like parading this trope is doing a lot without "showing the work".

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    1. Avatar photo
      Ben Connelly

      I agree that Biden publicly dissing Mayorkas would be stupid. He hired the guy. It would divide the Democratic coalition as you say.

      A good example of a real Sistah Souljah moment for him would be to emulate John Fetterman. While Biden has been more equivocal on Israel, Fetterman has told the hard left to go screw themselves. While he has lost some support on the left, this hugely boosted his poll numbers and now hey popular in Pennsylvania among the electorate at large. Much more popular than Biden. And he accomplished this without giving up on the Democratic Party or becoming a Republican. He’s doesn’t call for corporate tax cuts and abortion bans or anything.

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      CynthiaW

      "Biden staying silent on Mayorkas is smart politics, or at the very least defensible."

      I agree. I think Mayorkas is a silly distraction. Yes, he seems incompetent, but compared to what? And it's not his fault that neither the administration nor the country has a coherent immigration policy.

      The big story about Mayorkas is, "Given nothing in particular to work with, functionary fails to achieve ... er, something."

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    Paul Montagu

    Okay, I laughed at “too dumb to be a fact-checker at an M&Ms factory” and “behaved like a monkey that escaped from a cocaine study”.

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  9. ConProf

    Universities have been captured by their audience (students) the same way partisan news networks have been captured by theirs. Because American universities are so hungry for tuition dollars (which is typically the largest source of revenue for any university), they're willing to put up with just about any behavior from the students.

    What universities need to do, and what the Pomona college president did, is say "Shut up, we're in charge, get to work." But that won't happen because you don't get to be university president today by being the kind of leader who does that sort of thing.

    Case in point: the the recently hired chancellor of a major American university spent his time during 2021 going around taking photos of people socializing in with their neighbors and e-mailing their bosses to complain. That's the kind of person that gets to be a university president in America.

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    Addicus

    "Things might not be fine in Alpha Centauri"

    David French (who's dead to us) would appreciate that my first thought was 'The Three Body Problem'. And yes, things are very very not fine in Alpha Centauri.

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