Monday roundup

Michael Brown at The Stream asks, "Do Moral Truths Change With the Times?"

One of the most common objections I hear to biblical morality is short, succinct, and to the point: “It’s 2018!” In other words, “How can you believe in such outdated values in this day and age?” But do morals change the way technology changes? Or could it be that, when it comes to moral values, older is sometimes better?

In our new animated video, “What Does It Mean to Be a Conservative?”, I made the case that a true conservative would not believe in the redefinition of marriage or the fluidity of gender. In response, one viewer commented, “Politically it means you’re 100 years behind the times and you don’t understand public policy or economic policy that works.”

So, are we behind the times if we don’t embrace the latest social trends? Are the moral values of 2018 better than, say, 1918, or 1018, or 18, or 1018 BC?

The latest on-the-fly notion of the Very Stable Genius, as reported by Susan Wright at The Resurgent:

All the “I can’t evens…”

You can break out those Buck Rogers secret decoder rings, if you have them, because President Trump has declared that the first ever United States Space Rangers is about to be a thing.

Going boldly where no man has gone before, 45 announced that he has directed the Pentagon to create a sixth branch of the U.S. military – a Space Force.

“I’m hereby directing the Department of Defense and Pentagon to immediately begin the process necessary to establish a Space Force as the sixth branch of the armed forces. That’s a big statement,” Trump said a meeting of the National Space Council at the White House. “We are going to have the Air Force and we are going to have the Space Force, separate but equal.”

I do love how he felt it necessary to point out to the plebeians that he’d just made a big statement.
You don’t want to miss it.

The announcement comes as the Pentagon is still working to finish up studies on military operations in space including an independent review ordered by Congress on how it would create a new service focused on protecting the U.S. against growing space threats from countries such as China and Russia. The review is not slated to be turned over to lawmakers until December.

Threats from countries such as China and Russia? The same China and Russia he courts with such amorous fervor?
Am I the only one getting the whole “Star Wars” vibe about this?
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis cautions that we can’t just set our phasers to stun, yet. The review must be complete and there must be some kind of understanding of what having a “Space Force” actually means.

The Air Force, which handles about 80 percent of the military's space operations, strongly opposed the idea of a Space Force when it was introduced by House lawmakers last year, saying it would just add unneeded bureaucracy. Since Trump came out in favor of the idea earlier this year, service leaders have said they are open to new ideas on how to handle space.

Because of that bizarre new thing we’re seeing, where if Trump says it, you automatically have to accept it.

Caroline D'Agati has today's absolute must-read at The Federalist, entitled, "What Took Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain Wasn't Mental Illness. It Was Something Worse."

Of course, take medication, go on vacations, quit your horrible job, go to counseling—for heaven’s sake, do whatever you must to preserve your life. But what happens when you are fighting on all of those fronts and death still wins? In a dark night of the soul, there aren’t enough friends, money, or experiences to distract someone from the Big Empty.

Every human being must at some time confront the same disease that claimed Anthony, Kate, Robin, and every other person who takes his or her life: meaninglessness. Why are we here and is this life worth living? It’s a sobering thought.

Friedrich Nietzsche—another struggler—said that anyone with a “why” to live could endure almost any how. These wealthy, accomplished people had some of the most marvelous “hows” anyone could imagine. Yet none of it could make up for the lack of “why.” 

Emphasis mine.

Important Washington Examiner editorial entitled, "Don't Become The Party of Trump":

“Complacency is our enemy,” Republican National Committee Chairman Ronna McDaniel wrote on Twitter on Thursday morning.” Anyone that does not embrace the @realDonaldTrump agenda of making America great again will be making a mistake.”

This vaguely threatening tweet followed Tuesday’s primary in South Carolina where Rep. Mark Sanford, who has a fairly conservative voting record, was thrown out by GOP primary voters because he has repeatedly criticized Trump when he believes the president is wrong, while often siding with Trump when he thinks he's right.

McDaniel later said her tweet was an imprecise paraphrase of a more sensible point she made on television earlier. Still, her message is consistently that the Republican Party is and ought to be the Trump's party and everyone in it should get into line behind their leader.

This is a wrongheaded argument that would damage the Republican Party deeply if it were followed. It’s close to being the opposite of what is both strategically advisable and morally upright. No call to sacrifice principles for temporary advantage can be a long-term success.

Neither Republican lawmakers, nor the Right more broadly — the conservative movement, the free-market cause, the pro-life movement, and the right-of-center media — ought to pledge unquestioning allegiance to Trump just because he is powerful. Might does not make right. To the contrary, the best thing about Trump’s presidency has been the degree to which these other forces have harnessed Trump and pulled him in line behind their ideas and arguments.

Trump flipped from considering his liberal sister for a federal judicial vacancy to adopting a list of highly qualified conservative jurists from which to draw Supreme Court nominees and appointees to lower courts. He went from supporting abortion rights and the country's leading abortionist, Planned Parenthood, to being the most aggressive advocate of the unborn. His biggest legislative achievement is a tax cut.

These are instances where the party and the movement pulled Trump along. This is the proper relationship for many reasons. Trump isn’t naturally a conservative. He’s new to politics, and though his instincts are often right, instinct needs to be tempered with knowledge, and careful thought, and values. The president is inconstant and intemperate, which means he cannot be relied on always to choose a path that either conservatives in general or his party in particular should follow.

This isn’t to say there’s nothing for Republicans and conservatives to learn from Trump. His populism sometimes goes awry, but it also taps into something important and true that the GOP establishment missed for decades. It is that there is real suffering in the working class, and tens of millions of blue-collar voters disdained by the Left’s culture warriors, who are ready to be Republicans.

The Right and the GOP need to learn from Trump and make space for the best of populism. This doesn't require Republicans to abandon their principles, but it should influence priorities. The next tax cut could target payroll taxes, for instance. Fighting corporate welfare ought to be a priority.

There’s plenty for the GOP to learn from Trump, but the party should not be defined by the man. It should be a party of ideas, not personality. Trump the policymaker has plenty for conservatives to like, Trump the man is not a conservative icon, to put it gently.

Hey, I wound up reprinting the whole thing, didn't I? Well, I said it was important.

Shouldn't LITD include some kind of link to someone's viewpoint about the kids-separated-from-their-parents issue within the larger illegal-alien issue? Well, the view that most resonates with my own comes from the great Ben Sasse, who has written a lengthy Facebook post about it. An excerpt:

Obviously the Congress is broken and clearly bears much of the blame for a broken immigration system. We have many different problems clustered together: The border is too porous. Our asylum and refugee polices are too subject to executive branch whim, rather than clear legislative debate before the American people. We don’t have any coherent policy for dealing with kids who were brought here as minors but who have never known any home but the U.S. And more broadly, we have no long-term agreement about what levels of legal immigration we should want, or what kinds of workers we should prioritize. The Congress clearly bears much of the blame. 

But neither the horrors of family separation nor the stupidity of catch-and-release should be about leverage for a broader debate. We should start by tackling the specific problem before us in the narrowest way possible. 

The University of Missouri continues to be a prime example of the "get woke, go broke" phenomenon.