Resurrecting other great ideas from the 1930s

Remember the "switch in time that saved nine"?  Why not trot it out again?  It's the Gandhi gambit:  it works only when you're up against an opponent whose principles can be turned against him.  Not, in other words, against the Second Coming of Hitler.

As a corrective, an example of more grown-up ways to resolve disputes:



My Facebook feed (now consisting largely of residents of my county who are involved with me only because of the recent election) is full of zhizzhing and dripping over who started all the incivility, and whether civility has a place in a world where whatever.  Lot's of talk about how we can't win ("any more") by being nice.  One neighbor even complained that people seem to think snowflakes just sit around singing "kum-bah-yah."  I don't think that's anyone's idea of a snowflake:  it's not their niceness that they're famous for but their thin skin, and there aren't many illusions about what's under the thin skin.  What is ever under thin skin but Old Adam?

4 comments:

Grim said...

Packing the court is a terrible idea, but it's far from the most radical idea I've heard expressed lately about how to deal with a right-wing SCOTUS. At least it's nonviolent and has a plausible reference to Constitutional language.

E Hines said...

Tell that to the Progressive-Democrats who so thoroughly packed the Court in the '30s that we're still paying for the destruction they wrought and continue to wreck.

Putting textualists on the Court is not packing it; it's unpacking it. Unfortunately, in addition to Flake, we have Murkowski and Collins to deal with.

Eric Hines

Grim said...

But at least we're not dealing with an HRC appointee. You're going to make me sound like Donald Sutherland.

E Hines said...

The truth is never negative; it's always an unvarnished good.

Eric Hines