“Vote Your Conscience”?

David Reaboi:

I’ve always hated this idea that your vote is “sacred” and that you should “vote your conscience.”

Nonsense. It’s only ever been transactional and strategic. Nobody cares about your lofty ideals; only 1 of 2 candidates will be elected, and abstaining is also making a choice. Sitting out an election is your right—but there’s nothing valorous about not being able to make up your mind in a simple binary.

In most elections the only options are bad and worse. When worse is much worse, writing in your ideal candidate is especially foolish. Nobody will get your point and you make it more likely that worse gets elected.

Public life would be better if fewer people thought about politics and elections as battles between good and evil and more people thought in terms of making incremental improvements by choosing less-bad alternatives. This is unlikely to happen unless the stakes are lowered by reducing the size and power of government.

“When Is Blowing Up the World A Success?”

VDH’s excellent summary:

Recently, Secretary of State Antony Blinken bragged in an op-ed that “The Biden administration’s strategy has put the United States in a much stronger geopolitical position today than it was four years ago.”
 
What?
 
This is the latest campaign fantasy narrative also served up by Harris-Walz—analogous to the four-year untruth that “the border is secure” and “the economy is strong”—as they try to explain why the world utterly blew up on their watch and due to their own actions…

Read the whole thing.

Quote of the Day

Jacob Howland:

What Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran, and the other Islamist enemies of Israel have forgotten is that God chose the Jews to be a light unto the nations. Dispersed throughout the world, their light seems small and weak when times are good, but shines most brightly in the deepest darkness. The attacks of October 7 have stirred in the Jews — Hasidic and atheistic; Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, and Sephardic; Indian, Chinese, Australian, and American — what Lincoln called “the mystic chords of memory”. Today, in an existential crisis that may turn out to be the denouement of the central drama of Western civilisation, these unwilling protagonists — the whole people of Israel — are determined to defend themselves and the light they carry.

He’s got a point.

Bombing the Houthis

The Nasrallah strike, now this.

So far, contra the fears of many of us, the country best exploiting the power vacuum in Washington has been Israel.

Quote of the Day

John Hinderaker:

We are not a serious country because, as a democracy, we do not have serious voters. Autocracies like China and Russia have many disadvantages compared to us, but in the present historical moment, they are nowhere near as stupid as we are. One trembles for the future.

See also.