Sept 9
To Joseph Pearce and the reposting of his 2016 article that supports the existence of Great Britain's monarchy. This was reposted in the Imaginary Conservative blog.
It is clear that Pearce likes structure and authority figures, especially those with whom he can agree. Orbán, whom Pearce likes, liked to wield his authority to favor specific ethnic groups. And in admiring Orbán, Pearce shows that he doesn't have a full understanding of democracy, especially democracy in terms of what Jefferson said in his 1801 Inaugural Address.
Did Queen Elizabeth make a statement of support for subsidiarity? Subsidiarity, btw, is a view that limits the work of democracy for any government that is a working democracy. I can understand why fans of that ideology would believe that is the case. We all would like our beliefs to be praised by authority figures. But her words are unconvincing as well as the context of her statements are not included. Also, there is no contradiction between wanting an active government involved in the lives of its people and appreciating the acts of kindness carried out by individuals. Why must we think that we have to choose one or the other?
As for the monarchy, the real determinant of its continued value is whether there is a net social/political profit that emerges from the tradeoffs that come from maintaining the monarchy. And whether there is such a net profit will always be contingent on the character of the current monarch.
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Sept 13
To Joseph Mussomeli and the reposting of his 2018 article about 9/11 in which he complained that we have yet to reach closure. His complaints also included criticisms of those who are self-righteous on the left and the right and how we never learned what we needed to learn from the attacks. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative blog.
There are two points to make about Mussomeli's article on needing closure for 9/11 and its victims. The first point is that despite Mussomeli's refreshing approach about how America contributed to those attacks and that they were not inevitable, Mussomeli shakes his own self-righteous finger at many on the left and the right by insisting that he alone does things right in understanding 9/11. For the most part, the Left isn't out to excuse crime, but to point out that we are not above committing those crimes--our support for and contributions to the first 9-11 event is evidence to that claim.
As for the approach taken by many on the right. The curtailing of liberty that followed 9-11 was an understandable response to how the our increase technology makes all of us both more powerful and vulnerable at the same time. It's not that I agreed with the increased of unwarranted surveillance. It is that it was an understandable response..
Mussomeli lamented over the fact that we have yet reached closure on 9/11 unlike we have on Vietnam. But the way we reached closure on Vietnam, with new crises and enemies, both contributed to the events leading up to 9/11 and, as part of his legitimate criticism of the right pointed out, visited violence on people who were not our enemies. This is especially true of Reagan's policies in Latin America where, in El Salvador, those policies contributed to the creation of the MS-13 gang.
it's not that Mussomeli's article doesn't make any good points. As he has pointed out, we have bungled our response to 9/11. Instead of learning from and thus understanding why we were attacked, we responded in a way where we repeated some of the same mistakes that contributed to the attacks in the first place. And in seeking to understand the attacks, we can't afford to justify them. We are not safer now than before because we have not learned what we needed to learn from those attacks.
But Mussomeli draws too hard of a line between his understanding of 9/11 and the responses from the left and right about which he claimed were self-righteous.
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