Worth Reading December 6, 2022
John DeQ Briggs recommends three items:
This is a brilliant interview of Francis Fukuyama by Andrew Sullivan on Liberalism’s Crisis. While it aired last summer, it is no less pertinent or trenchant today.
The Matt Taibbi Twitter string describing the document dump by Elon Musk and Twitter relating to the pressure by the Democrats to have matters censored is the tip of an interesting iceberg. The Democrats and their enablers have already weighed in with the shopworn Clinton defense: “old news; nothing to see here; this is just Republicans attacking democracy”. But the fact that so many government institutions were determined through prevarication and other such methods to keep certain politically threatening things quiet suggests we have entered a new phase of the abandonment of the rule of law and entered into the realm of unvarnished lawlessness.
Rarely do briefs filed with the Supreme Court as Amicus Curiae involve humor, much less are they laced with humor to make their main point. In this case The Onion filed an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in support of an Ohio man who faced criminal charges over a Facebook page parodying his local police department.
The opening paragraph is this: The Onion is the world’s leading news publication, offering highly acclaimed, universally revered coverage of breaking national, international, and local news events. Rising from its humble beginnings as a print newspaper in 1756, The Onion now enjoys a daily readership of 4.3 trillion and has grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human history.
To appreciate the full measure of the seriousness of the brief, and its hilarity, one must invest ten minutes perusing the short filing here. Readers who do so are likely to find it a memorable and rewarding experience.
Matt Daley observes that “Europeans Have Weapons But Aren’t Warriors” illuminates a major lacunae in the European mindset despite being a broad generalization that does not apply to each and every European country.
