Best Read Of The Day [Archive] - Debate Policy

jimnyc

12-12-2021, 04:48 PM

Yeah, I would like to read more later, only 1 paragraph and a half is readable without subscription. :(

So I did a little searching and found this, for Firefox at least.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypass-paywalls-clean/

https://i.imgur.com/7ujDedK.png

https://i.imgur.com/NbAAue9.png

Within the add-on it has a list that looked decent, and is about 1/4 of the total sites listed:

https://i.imgur.com/E0xWG06.jpg

So I added it with very little hope, but it works and I can read the whole thing!

This is Firefox like I said, but a bunch of other browsers also support their addons. :)

So, with that said, I can take blame below. :laugh2:

There was a time—roughly from the mid-1960s to the rise of Donald Trump in 2015—when the American right was more or less definable. No more. Major political parties are always riven by internal disputes, but even during George W. Bush’s second term, at the nadir of the Iraq war, the Republican coalition seemed to hang together better than it has these past six years. Mr. Trump’s candidacy was a sign of that fracturing rather than its cause, but his presidency wasn’t marked by unity in the GOP.

Quite the opposite. A significant faction of the party now advocates aggressive industrial policy as a means of alleviating social ills wrought by “unregulated” capitalism. Another demeans the party’s traditional predilection for hawkish foreign policy as an obsession with “forever wars.” The right’s leading media personalities, meanwhile, would rather talk about the latest cultural outrage—an androgynous Mr. Potato Head!—than explain the perils of turning social welfare into a middle-class entitlement.

Are the challenges facing conservatives really so different from what they were 50, 60 or 70 years ago? Most of the architects of postwar conservatism aren’t around to ask anymore, but Norman Podhoretz—editor of the Jewish intellectual magazine Commentary from 1960 to 1995 and one of the founders of neoconservatism—is 91 and as talkative as ever. I visited his book-laden Upper East Side apartment last month with the vague premonition that he might have something to say about the fractured state of American conservatism.

My timing was good. The day before, voters had elected a Republican governor in a state most observers considered blue, and indisputably blue New Jersey had come within a few percentage points of doing the same. “I wasn’t sure they were still out there,” Mr. Podhoretz says. Who? “The ‘deplorables,’ ” he says, gesturing quotation marks as he employs Hillary Clinton’s famous term from 2016. “I really didn’t know. If the results had gone the other way, I wouldn’t have been that surprised. Our troops were not as visible, at least to me, because the media and the culture are all on the other side . . . The other side has won the culture—that’s one battlefield—but they haven’t yet won the polity. That’s very encouraging.”

Mr. Podhoretz says he uses the word “deplorables” loosely, to mean Americans of all classes who refuse to be told what to do and how to live by the nation’s well-heeled progressive elite. “The question for me was whether the sources of health and vitality I used to know existed in this country were still there. I fell in love with Americans when I was in the Army. I was born in Brooklyn; I lived in England”—Mr. Podhoretz studied English literature at Cambridge on a Fulbright Scholarship in the early 1950s—“but I hadn’t been to very many places in my country. Being in the Army, you get shuffled around. That’s where I discovered Americans. Especially the deplorables. They were great.”

This is a theme, aside from the word “deplorables,” that runs through Mr. Podhoretz’s first memoir, “Making It” (1967). In the Army in 1953-55, he wrote in that book, “usually my closest friends were back-country Southern boys, real rednecks.” (As a Southern redneck myself, I marked the passage in pencil many years ago.) “They’re sane,” he says to me. “They know there’s something wrong, let’s say, when a guy says he’s a girl. They look at that and say, What are you, f— crazy?” He waves as if to suggest this is only one among many instances of insanity. “All that stuff.”

He contrasts these deplorables with something like what the Russians called the “intelligentsia.” “The intelligentsia thought it was wrong that people who’ve made a lot of money in business should be our leaders,” he says. “They resented it. They were not being accorded the power they thought they deserved. But as time went on, they were accorded more and more power—and they stayed resentful. The intelligentsia in America is still resentful.”

Still more at Kath's link.

Kathianne

12-12-2021, 05:57 PM

So I did a little searching and found this, for Firefox at least.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypass-paywalls-clean/

https://i.imgur.com/7ujDedK.png

https://i.imgur.com/NbAAue9.png

Within the add-on it has a list that looked decent, and is about 1/4 of the total sites listed:

https://i.imgur.com/E0xWG06.jpg

So I added it with very little hope, but it works and I can read the whole thing!

This is Firefox like I said, but a bunch of other browsers also support their addons. :)

So, with that said, I can take blame below. :laugh2:

Still more at Kath's link.

This is not far off from my Trump feelings, though I'm not pro-Trump by a Longshot.

His policies I'd fight for, with far less bellicose words.

The jist of the article though I strongly agree with, the far left is at war, one too many on the right are not focused on. They're all about culture and not the system. The left is Trump strong, while the right is clinging to everything but the system