Pecking Order
The NYT published a piece (h/t Instapundit) on perhaps starting to not shun your right-wing kinfolk. The folks at Instapundit found something different in it than I did; what caught my eye was the following setup coupled with a later line:
The setup:
I met Matt Kappler in 2012, and it was immediately clear we had nothing in common. He lifted weights to death metal; I jogged to Sondheim. I was one of President Barack Obama’s speechwriters and had an Ivy League degree; he was a huge Joe Rogan fan and went on to get his electrician’s license.
The second line, after they begin surfing together:
It helped that in the ocean, our places in the pecking order reversed. Matt’s a very good surfer — one might call him “an elite” — and I am not. According to surfing’s unwritten rules, he had the right to look down on me. But he never did. His generosity of spirit in the water made me rethink my own behavior on land.
The author who thinks 'our places in the pecking order reversed' edited Yale's humor magazine and now writes for McSweeney's and the Onion. How did he ever imagine that he outranked a licensed electrician and expert surfer? Just because he wrote some speeches that a politician pretended to believe long enough to read them?
Still, the open-mindedness is refreshing.
Matt and I haven’t really changed each other’s minds on major national issues. But we have changed each other. His fearlessness in consequential surf made me more courageous. His ability to go “over the ledge,” launching himself off breaking lips, helped me curb my overthinking. Ostracizing him wouldn’t have altered his behavior — and it would have made my own life worse.
That's not nothing.
Revolution
More from ChicagoBoyz, Jay Manifold this time:
If things go as I both fear and hope, it may become a modern-day (and admittedly far more comfortable) version of hunkering down in a Christian community in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 60s and 70s AD. This is where I note that for all the rationalizations of every imaginable political system by believers over the past two millennia, the political advice of the New Testament may be summarized as “stay out of trouble.”He closes with a quotation from the libertarian POV character in the excellent "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress":
I will accept the rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
Abundance
From David Foster at ChicagoBoyz:
I see posts from Left-oriented people who don’t seem to realize that production is necessary at all. The assertion is made that abundance is the natural state of man, and scarcity is caused by capitalists fencing everything off to deliberately create scarcity.That golden goose belongs to us, and if we feel like it we can kill it! That'll show 'em!The natural relationship between mother and infant does not scale up well to society.