1. The Chinese respond to the debate (from a ChinaTalk post with the subtitle “If we don’t laugh, we’ll cry”):
From Guangdong:
“Alzheimer’s disease vs. schizophrenia”
From Beijing:
“Trump’s debate today taught me a lesson: If 10% or even 5% of your words in a public speech are obviously lies, then sorry, the media will not stop picking on your lies. But if more than 90% of your words are lies, then the media will really give up, because they really don’t know which words to pick on.”
I opt for laugh. My view on the election: “Vote for the less corrupt senile guy.”
2. A very interesting thread on the decline and fall of the aboriginal inhabitants of Tasmania. Reminds me a bit of the decay of civilization on Pitcairn Island.
3. It’s interesting that both the Russians and the Chinese view the other side as “Mongols“.
China and Russia have a long history of cultural animosity. When the Russians consider the marauding Mongols who threatened them repeatedly across their history as a people, they equate those hoards to modern Chinese. When the Chinese conjure up images of the barbarians against whom they built successive Great Walls to defend themselves, today they think of the Russians who live on the great steppes of Asia. Since the seventeenth century when Russian settlers began to establish large communities in Siberia, there have been frequent skirmishes between the two peoples.
Of course, Russia stole lots of land from China.
4. The Supreme Court acted to shield Trump from jail time before the election. You’ll never guess how the 6-3 vote in favor of Trump lined up—undoubtedly based on “judicial philosophy”. Here’s Reason magazine:
The Court’s decision nevertheless raises questions about whether a former president can be held criminally liable for outrageous abuses that arguably qualify as official acts. “The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor writes in a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”
5. Noah Smith’s (correct) opinion is indeed “unpopular”, which shows just how far America has regressed (in a moral sense) since the 1990s:
6. This (from the National Review interview of Michael LaRosa) is excellent:
The problem we face as a party is that we’ve spent several years shaming Republicans like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and others who we’ve accused of joining a cult of personality with Trump. Parties are not supposed to be cults of personality. They’re not families, they’re not siblings, they’re transactional by nature, because their only purpose is to win elections. That’s why they are transactional. It’s not meant to be sentimental. And frankly, the point some Democrats are making, not in public, is that we are now becoming very similar to Republicans, actually, because even though there is a real danger in Donald Trump becoming president, we are not going to step aside and leave our guy. That’s what they’re saying, that our guy, standing by our guy, is more important than winning, and we have now kind of conceded the case to Republicans. We’ve now given them quite an upper hand.
7. And who better than Janan Ganesh:
Even now, after the debate fiasco, Democrats are couching their misgivings about Biden in ambiguous language. Searching questions have to be asked about him, I read. Alternative candidates are within their rights to sound out donors, apparently. The passive voice is getting a strenuous workout. As ever, the priority is a sort of Edwardian drawing-room etiquette. On the one hand, Trump is an existential threat to democracy, and all legitimate means must be used to stop him. At the same time: don’t let’s be beastly to each other.
Soon after the debate, Biden put in a solid showing at a campaign rally. Some Democrats talked this up as though it were a missing fragment from the Gettysburg Address. This is where liberal denialism ends up: the ignominious spectacle of Biden, a proud man, who served his nation and the world by defeating Trump, being commended for getting to the end of sentences. In its own way, it is a more poignant spectacle than the botched debate ever was.