Editor’s Desk

Losing All Respect

EDITORIAL

“I heard his opinion, and I just lost all respect for him then and there.”

We’ve all heard people say this, or something very like it, especially over the course of the past few years. And, after all, how could we still respect someone who fell for such a transparent bit of propaganda, who listens to such an obvious con man, or who mistakes what’s broadcast on that channel for news?

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For A War Memorial

(SUGGESTED INSCRIPTION PROBABLY NOT SUGGESTED BY THE COMMITTEE)

The hucksters haggle in the mart
The cars and carts go by;
Senates and schools go droning on;
For dead things cannot die.

A storm stooped on the place of tombs
With bolts to blast and rive;
But these be names of many men
The lightning found alive.

If usurers rule and rights decay
And visions view once more
Great Carthage like a golden shell
Gape hollow on the shore,

Still to the last of crumbling time
Upon this stone be read
How many men of England died
To prove they were not dead.

G. K. Chesterton, 1919

Lest We Forget

While SCOTUS Considers Abortion

EDITORIAL

While SCOTUS considers abortion, permit me to suggest that it’s past time we do too.

I’m not talking about trumpeting loudly your positions and the hills you’ll die on. I said “consider” and I mean it. Either it’s important or it’s not; and if it’s important, it demands your attention and honest thought — however painful thinking might be, much less honesty.

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I Don’t Believe In Existential Threats

“Climate change is an existential threat to humanity!”

No matter how many times I read that line, it fails to speak to me. For one thing, the idea it encapsulates is just too big; it’s too short a sentence to properly describe what’s about to happen. Oceans will rise, wildfires will spread, flash floods and mudslides and hurricane seasons more severe than ever before — that’s all intelligible. But adding them together and saying that “Humanity is doomed unless we do something!” just doesn’t mean anything to me. The scope is far too broad and ill-defined for the imagination to easily grasp.

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On Vacation

The Not Fake News staff has decided to decamp en masse and head to the beach. Or, rather, a position near enough to the beach that it’s cool but far enough away that sand doesn’t get into our typewriters, and preferably somewhere that has good WiFi.

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