There is only one excuse for Trump to accept the challenge to two debates as he did: to force Biden into a public forum requiring him to put his dubious conversational skills in the spotlight for an extended period of time. Only time will tell if White House handlers can get the tana leaves mixed right for Biden to appear at least halfway cogent. The downside is that the critical flaw in the debate format will remain yet unaddressed: allowing members of the press to act as moderators. That means that only those questions that matter to the press will get asked, while much of what matters to flyover country gets ignored. I would like to see a format in which questions are fielded by a panel of two or four moderators representing think tanks instead of press organizations. Imagine if a question like “What do you plan to do for small business?” had popped up during one of the 2020 Democrat primary debates. You think any of those candidates would know where to even begin to find an answer? Especially during THAT year when COVID policy herded small business to the sacrificial altar in the name of the precautionary principle? The press should be in the business of reporting the news rather than crafting policy, and taking away its role in shaping the debates is a step in the right direction.
Alan K. Henderson
Quote of the Day, Rathergate Edition
Comment from Tony_Petroski, in this PowerLine Blog post that revisits the Rathergate affair and thoroughly discredits the Killian documents:
The Mapes Miasma. My what a miserable, manipulative. maddening, malignant, malodorous, mangled, maniacal, menacingly meddlesome mockery of a mendacious mockery of a misanthropic mendacious mockery it is. Her miasma has all the earmarks of Moldavian hacking.
If anyone ever gets around to writing a history of the war between peer review and open source, I hope this episode is included and Mapes lives to see it.
The Reich Stuff
Yesterday, Transterrestrial Musings contributed to the venerable April 1 tradition with the headline Pro-German Protesters Demand Ceasefire. That brought to mind something I’ve pondered recently: does the Third Reich seem so unique at least in part because we never had a chance to see what the Aztecs, Moghuls, ancient Mesopotamian civilizations, and other pre-industrial empires would do if they had mid-20th Century technology? I can imagine boxcars unloading people at Tenochtitlan…
Messages in the Original Star Trek
For those of you who brought your copy of The Screwtape Letters, open to Chapter 1:
Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism [disbelief in the supernatural] is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous — that it is the philosophy of the future.
This is relevant to discourse in general. Jargon means different things to different people; it is key to preventing meaningful communication. Social media is a gold mine of jargon, or a dilithium mine in the case of the original Star Trek. (Roddenberry hadn’t invented latinum yet.) Somebody will chastise the later spinoffs for being “woke” or “too political,” and someone else will claim that the show was that way from the start. Looking over the original series I find little in the way of allusion to real-world politics or ’60s liberalism, and nothing compatible with modern leftism.
