Beyond "Best of the Web Today"
A news aggregation . . . due to a fairly egregious error on my part
When the Wall Street Journal decided to create an online presence for its opinion page (which operates separately and in a separate space from its news pages), it created a separate website called OpinionJournal.com and assigned a young editor named James Taranto to create a news aggregation page on that site, designed to provide links to articles on other websites that the editorial staff thought were important. Taranto called the page “Best of the Web Today”, and during the entire run of that page, until January 2017, it remained outside of the WSJ “paywall”, even after OpinionJournal.com itself was absorbed into the regular WSJ website.
The page made Taranto, who was generally a classical liberal, into a superstar in conservative media . . . and his ability to spot negative trends became apparent when he ended the column on the last day of the Obama administration, just before The Former Guy took over, with his throwback paleoconservative approach that led to classical liberals such as Taranto widely being branded as “Republicans in name only” (or “RINOs”) by TFG’s supporters. [Full disclosure: I plead guilty to having been the target of “RINO hunts” both during and after TFG’s term.]
Why now?
I hadn’t intended to create a news aggregation type of site, but then . . . . Yesterday I finished writing a long, long article on the origins and the future of NATO, which I had discussed on Facebook. I went to post it so that I could move on to write about other stuff. And it disappeared into the ether.
The “how” is easy. I have two different accounts on Substack. Through one of them, I’m a subscriber to the website The Dispatch (which announced on a live chat last night that, with its latest hirings about to take effect, increasing its staff size to around 35, Substack was no longer a flexible-enough platform for everything that it wanted to offer, and that it and Substack were headed for a friendly parting in the near future). Through the other, I’m a subscriber to Common Sense by Bari Weiss and the publisher of this newsletter. Well, to access the live chat on The Dispatch, I needed to sign into my Substack account there, which I did through what I believed to be a separate session. But then when I went to save the NATO article, it turned out that Substack thought I was only signed in through the account linking to The Dispatch, not the account linking here, and deep-sixed the entire article, including changes that I had made but not saved over the prior 24 hours, instead of retaining it in any form in temporary memory. Yikes!
So I need to re-create that article before I forget it all, which will probably be in two pieces, a history of NATO and a future of NATO, so that I can get those up this week. But in the meantime, there were a number of good articles about which I’d otherwise comment, but my time for doing that disappeared along with my NATO post. So here are links to some of those articles, along with a brief commentary to introduce them.
Does “NEVER AGAIN” really mean “never again”?
Jim Geraghty of National Review notes the disconnect between President Biden’s rhetoric about Russian genocide and his actions with regard to Russia and cannot connect the two. I think this discomfort is being felt by a lot of Americans right now. On the one hand, no one really wants to blunder into WWIII; on the other hand, genocide! Perhaps we feel more confident with Joe Biden in charge, but perhaps not — after all, some of Biden’s advisers (like Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland) could fairly be said to be neoconservatives, and I doubt that there are many Americans who want to blunder down that path again. And yet, it’s becoming clear that nothing short of total defeat will stop Vladimir Putin’s genocidal quest for the elimination of Ukraine and Ukrainians, similar to Hitler’s genocidal quest to eliminate Judaism and Jews. How each of us feels about that is perhaps idiosyncratic to ourselves, but it’s a decision that has to be faced, with new revelations about the Russian war crime spree in Ukraine coming on a continual basis.
And do we really want to be converting corn to gasoline at a time of approaching famine? The choice to do so calls into doubt the basic pitch for Biden over TFG: competence. Did we really just replace one incompetent doofus with another?
The derailing of feminism
In Common Sense, Zoe Strimpel analyzes how feminism changed from a focus on the problems of women to a theoretical analysis of gender, which led to such ridiculous scenes as a Supreme Court nominee unable to define the term “woman”. As feminism became more abstracted from real-life concerns, it ended up becoming a front line in the current culture wars. Perhaps that’s a topic for a longer piece here on another day, where I might want to discuss the former male ophthalmologist-turned-very successful mid-40s female tennis pro Renée Richards and what that says about the undeniable physical edge to growing up male.
Is Twitter inherently evil?
That’s the question that I came away asking myself after reading David French’s “How Twitter Beclowns the American Elite” on The Dispatch. [This may be paywalled; please let me know.] I asked myself that question not just because of the evils of Twitter pointed out in the article but also because Twitter participation seemed to give French enough self-confidence to classify himself and others as part of an “American elite”. Really?
For the record, I do not have a Twitter account, and I’m not certain if that lack also beclowns me. I’ve long subscribed to the “Twittero delenda est” theory. But at least I doubt that I’m part of French’s “American elite”.
Cable news = ratings flop (repeat over and over)
In the category of “news that surprises absolutely no one”, Axios reports that CNN+. the streaming service that CNN launched and then hired Chris Wallace from Fox for content creation, is already facing big layoffs and potential shutdown, just two weeks after its launch on March 29. With new leadership coming to CNN in the next month, a service drawing fewer than 10,000 viewers daily looks to be a relatively quick and painless cut (except for all the severance pay).
Is classical liberalism on life support?
The last link is one from before the recent France elections, which produced a runoff battle between the leftist Emmanuel Macron and the rightist Marine Le Pen. National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson notes that “anti-capitalism — one prominent expression of a more general anti-liberalism — is where the radical Right and the radical Left meet.” In most of his pieces, Williamson produces great paragraphs in support of classical liberalism, the driving philosophy on the right during the 70 years between Eisenhower and TFG, and this piece is no exception:
One of the political difficulties of conservatism — and here I mean American conservatism, not the imported kind — is that by its nature it does not offer much in the way of novelty, excitement, or even enthusiasm. It is a philosophy of least-bad options, necessary inconsistency, and moderate expectations. American conservatism is rooted in the values of the American Revolution and the American founding, which are largely liberal values in the classical sense, a source of some confusion to modern conservatives. American conservatism, informed by the liberal Anglo-Protestant commercial culture of our British antecedents, does not offer the romance and pageantry of Europe’s throne-and-altar rightism. It does offer an open society in which those and many other bad ideas can find adherents and be discussed freely.
Be seeing you.