Relearning the Basics

The dog did nothing wrong.

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Jonah attempts to avoid the straitjacket while The Fair Jessica is away, so he decides to spend an hour talking to himself in a dark basement. He goes through a number of topics to make even the most excitable eggheads nauseated, from the fad of stay-at-home girlfriends (why milk the cow ladies?) to Biden’s irresponsible dog ownership. Jonah regains sanity for a second to talk about the Alabama Supreme Court’s IVF ruling before hallucinating about rodents and going gonzo on Tucker’s trip to Russia.

Show Notes:

–Stay-at-Home Girlfriends Are Having a Moment

– Brad Wilcox on The Remnant

– Listen to Advisory Opinions on Alabama’s IVF issue

– Biden’s German shepherd banished from the White House

– Jonah’s G-File: Nations, Nation-States, and Nationalism

– Scott Lincicome: Unfrozen Caveman Tucker

– The Lewis brothers on The Remnant

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Comments (38)
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  1. Avatar photo
    Napalaska

    In the interest of “avoiding left and right,” you said the American Revolution was a “transgressive force against the status quo,” a pithy summary of evolution. To me, this force can be negative, driving a society into regression and dissolution, or positive, resulting in a society that evolves into a higher order unity. The American Constitution is instructive, as it opened the political space in which a society unlike any other before it could flourish. Here was a document created by a critical mass of people – our Founding Fathers operating at a very high level, (way higher than most of the people living in the world at the time, let alone American society) – that, in Ken Wilber’s words, “became a pacer of transformation, gently encouraging every activity within its reach to stand within a worldcentric, postconventional, non-ethnocentric moral atmosphere. The brilliance of this document and its framers is hard to overstate.”

    Here we are over two centuries later, and the society our constitution helped create is beset on all sides by transgressive forces. How do we diagnose our societal problems correctly so we can prescribe solutions? Part of the answer is, as the Lewis brothers talked about in an earlier podcast, moving away from left/right labels. I would add that we also need to move away from race, class, and other labels and instead focus on a developmental model. Doing so will, as Wilber has written, help us to focus “on some of the underlying factors (developmental values and worldviews) that generate social tensions.” In other words, it’s not only the objective facts of any debate (especially about the problems and potential solutions our society faces), but the subjective level of the person making the argument that needs to be taken into account.

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    John Lewis

    I always heard that too. The biggest change in life is going from zero to one kid. But I found out it’s barely true. No one tells you that the second biggest change in life is going from one to two. And it’s close. I remember being surprised by this. Going from like 0 to 100 to 198. But the third, that’s like going from 198 to 236. 🙄

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    The Bell Tower

    Really good, as always. I have two counter thoughts to the Trump v Haley stuff.

    1. Are we sure that Haley sticking around is strengthening traditional conservatism by getting her ass handed to her in every state? I want her to win and I want the Trump faction out as much as anyone but I’m not entirely convinced that she isn’t serving a sort of slave acting as a stepping stool to the king’s horse sort of role. Is she helping her coalition or making Trump look stronger? Not sure.

    2. Yes, politicians will disappoint you and it would perhaps be disappointing to see Haley endorse Trump, never mind be his VP or join his administration. The counter to that though is that if Trump, like Thanos, becomes inevitable, the big problem with Trump II is that he isn’t going to have the traditional conservatives in his administration checking his power and the power of the idiot faction that drives his success.

    Are we sure we don’t want Nikki Haley around? Imagine the alternative VP or whatever other role she might take is Vivek Ramaswamy, for example. Trump II would be quite bad enough even with the Haley faction around. I certainly don’t think conservatives should be voting for Trump but if he does win, I’m not sure I want them all sitting on the sidelines watching him throw his legos around the White House for four years either.

    It isn’t an easy decision for Haley or anyone else who might have the right convictions but be in a similar position.

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    1. Russell J

      1) As long as there is a noticeable group opposing, I think it would look stronger than if she dropped out now, given the wider public audience. The confirmation to me is in what the Trump campaign obviously wants - Haley gone yesterday. If Haley was getting 2% and losing to "Uncommitted" and candidates that have dropped out (hey Dean Phillips) then it says a different thing. Part of why they want her gone is the money side but I bet an equally large reason is they know how permanently the 20% or so are getting driven away and how likely we are going to be called scum/fascist/insert_bad_word. A separate angle is that her presence increases the likelihood that Trump continues to say dumb things as it has been clear that the campaign staff has tried to limit his comments. We should basically oppose everything the Trump campaign wants at this point.

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  4. Jarena

    Really glad Jonah mentioned passing on the "flagship podcast" joke this time around. Good call, Jonah. That joke was mildly funny the first few times, but my goodness was it run into the ground.

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  5. Avatar photo
    Jori Sackin

    I feel like as a culture we talked about language for the last forty years and walked away with all of the wrong lessons, so please, keep talking about language.

    “The left wants…the right wants”

    You point out the logical fallacies that some people fall into by the left/right dynamic, but let’s look at the other metaphor that’s hiding in plain sight.

    Parties are People.

    Thinking of complex organizations as people is so common it almost doesn’t hit the radar as metaphoric but it’s there. It’s there when we say things like, “What America wants right now” or “What our relationship needs..” etc. The logical fallacies are abundant but there’s no getting around it because there’s a necessity to simplify when communicating and the way we simplify is through metaphor. We reduce the wants/desires/dreams of 340 million people when we say, “What America wants…” At every level of conceptualization there’s information loss and this can be attributed to “fallacy”, but we are so bound up with these concepts that trying to remove them is a losing strategy. What we end up doing is shifting onto another metaphoric concept and so if right/left falls away and something similar takes its place, a whole new set of fallacies emerge. Metaphoric conceptual Whack-a-Mole, so to speak. The best we can do is identify the pitfalls, point them out and tread lightly. Oh, and also have some humility about how much information language actually communicates.

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    1. Avatar photo
      John Lewis

      I think this is a good point. My only slight push back (not quibble) would be that there are times when the abstracted metaphor does more harm than good. It really does feel like the Republican/democrat binary was losing ground during the Obama years, and then the Maga period has largely deracinated the right/left meaning from recent decades. But… appreciate your observation.

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  6. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    I absolutely love the solo Remnant and would happily listen to the 2-hour version, but Jonah if you’re overworked I won’t complain if you need to keep it to like 30 minutes.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Charley Warns

      Does your dog bite?

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        Ben Connelly

        I don’t have a dog

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  7. Avatar photo
    Charley Warns

    Inspector Clouseau: "I thought you said your dog doesn't bite?"

    Unlike man, sharks and lions can not commit rape or murder as those acts require a moral dimension. By letting those attacks go on for so long, Biden has strengthened the argument of the accusation that he's a sociopath. His lack of sympathy for the victims of his dog is consistent with Biden's inclination to mention family tragedy on the campaign trail to score sympathy points. That dog would have been euthanized if it was somebody else's pet.

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    J. Eric

    Threats or harm to my dog triggers a full John Wick response from me. 🤷‍♂️

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    1. Avatar photo
      Charley Warns

      Does your dog bite?

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    EmmyCab

    I enjoyed the conversation around the marriage episode. Where people agreed and disagreed and offered various perspectives, it was just a far more interesting comments section than "cultists" this and "Orange Jesus" that. I like these types of thought-provoking topics and hope you keep them coming.

    To your point here, "Lots of necessary things have downsides" is an important idea to keep in mind generally. The pursuit of perfection can result in considerable collateral damage, and I like the way you boiled it down in that phrase. Things are complicated, and there are tradeoffs. Thinking through the tradeoffs in advance (to the extent possible) or at least understanding them is important vs. just going lizard brain reactionary.

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  10. 698Kroll

    The lie about Poland starting WWII is what Russians tell themselves to avoid the reality that Stalun making a deal to split up Poland and open the door to take over the Baltic states is the key last piece that started the shooting. Putin can't acknowledge Stalins greed & stupidity caused the death of millions of Russians to the Russian people he claims to lead.

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