Calumny

 The New York Times ran an article yesterday in which they detail how, in the last few days before the midterm elections, Republican candidates are resorting to the most rancid possible personal attacks to try to chip away at Democrats' clear lead in the polls. In some cases, they are dredging up details from the opposition candidates' personal lives that ought to be treated as off-limits. 

But in other cases, they are simply making up outrageous and lurid accusations out of whole cloth. One Republican candidate calls his opponent a "groomer," based on no evidence whatsoever. Our vice president darkly implies that a Democratic candidate could only have stood up for the rights of trans children in the past because he has some creepy sexual fixation on the subject. 

Double Injustice

 The New York Times reported yesterday that the Trump administration is apparently planning to deport more than a hundred Afghan nationals to Pakistan—with the full knowledge and deliberate intent, as part of the agreement, that Pakistan will then subsequent force them back across the border to their home country. 

The planned group of deportees reportedly includes people who would be obvious targets for persecution or assassination if they are sent back to Afghanistan, including relatives of people who risked their lives to aid the U.S. war effort against the Taliban. 

Half-Truth

 I wish I could say that, since Donald Trump is totally wrong, that means that Democrats are always right, and that everything they do to prevail against him in this week's midterm elections is therefore justified—but unfortunately, that does not appear to be the case. 

Obviously, the big story about election interference right now is the fact that Trump has turned the U.S. Department of Justice into an instrument of his personal authority, and is using it to sow doubt about the integrity of the vote for transparently corrupt and partisan purposes. 

The Conceptualists

 A group of rich kids and their hangers-on, none of whom seems to need to work for a living, get together for a weekend of sex, drugs, and ultra-violence in a country manor. One of them may be not quite what they seem. Such is the by no means unpromising premise on which Martin Amis constructs his insanely readable second novel, Dead Babies (1975). 

The plot of the novel has been compared to a parody version of an Agatha Christie weekend murder party. But the compulsive aspect of the novel does not stem from its mystery or suspense (though there is plenty of that too). As with other Amis novels, it derives above all from the virtuoso prose.

Schopenhauer vs. The Royal Danish Society

 Arthur Schopenhauer's On the Basis of Morality is one of the funniest books ever written. Long before I got around to finishing the whole book, I had read its immortal first edition preface, in which AS takes the Royal Danish Society of Scientific Studies to task for passing over his essay in a prize contest. 

We subsequently learn that Schopenhauer's contribution was the only entrant that year in the essay contest. The Royal Society still could not bring themselves to bestow this recognition upon it. 

Chapters on Socialism

 With the recent resurgence of interest in socialism on the American left, it's worth revisiting John Stuart Mill's Chapters on Socialism as probably one of the best attempts ever to think through systematically both the merits of the socialist critique of capitalist society and the viability of its proposed alternatives. 

Better than perhaps any writer in history on the topic, Mill performs the feat of holding multiple ideas in mind at the same time—and managing to distinguish between them. He is therefore the opposite of that individual William Hazlitt once identified as the great pest of all political life: "the person with one idea." 

Grands Séducteurs

 A friend and I the other weekend sat down to watch Disney's largely overlooked and forgotten contribution to the L. Frank Baum expanded universe, Oz: The Great and Powerful, starring James Franco in the title role. 

It took about five minutes into the film before I realized this movie could only have been made before #MeToo.