Mirth Dawg

My problem, well my chief problem, with the common good talk on the New Right is that it is shot through with question-begging. They assume that once you know what the common good is this awareness grants the constitutional authority, the policy skill, the economic and personnel resources and the political mandate to impose it. The knowledge problem just evaporates once they get the gnostic insight into what the common good is. (By the way, I think defining the common good is a hard but not impossible task at a high level abstraction and basically an impossible task at the ground level). A vast amount of common good talk strikes me more as an attempt to seize more and more power for a right wing faction that has utterly lost any intellectual humility and policy skepticism. That’s why most of the common good talk is simply the right wing version of the left’s “social justice” rhetoric. “How dare anyone oppose the common good/social justice!?”

Kevin O’Leary says he begged Rolex for a mythical $1.8 million watch, then cried when the box opened “It is the grail piece of all watches. It is the white gold, ruby and diamond Daytona. Grown men weep just looking at pictures of this mystical beast” “I got on my knees and begged for it. The morning before the Oscars, the phone rings. They gave me an address and said, ‘Be there’” “The entire Rolex staff had never seen it. For an hour, we looked at it. We didn’t touch it. I was weeping. Walking around with $35 million”

I am not going to comment on the merits of the lengthy New York Times Magazine piece on Heritage. But one observation in the article seems to helpfully capture the entire "fight on the right" as a fundamental, zero-sum dispute: whether there is such a thing as the "common good"—and, if so, what its substance and scope are. How you approach the common good will tell you where you are on today's conservative spectrum. The thicker one's conception of the common good, the more one will migrate toward a politics that focuses less on individual autonomy and more on the intrinsic goods necessary for social flourishing.

We mic’d up fans for Hell Is Real and it didn’t disappoint 😂

In the last week of October before you met him in the first week of November. you wrote that you wished he “saw” the danger you had deemed the urgent moral emergency after years outside the county and a handful of conversations. If you’d only done that, by your standards, he could have acted with a free conscience. But by November 12th, you apparently decided the VP wasn’t moving fast enough. I’m told Fuentes was apparently cackling with delight this week at your assist in taking down someone he hates.

The point of criticizing your government is to ‘intimidate and defame’ other Americans who blindly support the government? 😆😆 Why do the defenders of JD Vance sound so fascistic? It’s scary, actually.