Star Trek is a meditation on the just use of power. It doesn’t work if the writers resist the premise that awesome, hegemonic power can be wielded justly.

— Ian Millhiser (@imillhiser) February 27, 2023

repeats

Milheiser, Jan 11, 2023, responding to a question to anyone on twitter:

 "What's 100% a total scam but we still accept it in society?" 

"Judicial review"

Milheiser Dec 4 2022 [my highlighting]

The deranged Supreme Court case that threatens US democracy, explained
Moore v. Harper is a test of whether this Supreme Court can ever be trusted with power. 

...Any state constitutional provisions that protect the right to vote, that limit gerrymandering, or that otherwise constrain lawmakers’ ability to skew elections would cease to function. State governors would lose their ability to veto laws impacting federal elections. And state courts would lose their authority to strike down these laws.

He's deleted any reference to judicial review on his tl.

Liberals love benign authoritarianism. The argument is circular: it's benign when they love it.

Leiter would call it "Millian", modeled on the British empire as the British imagined it. Acknowledgment of "perspectivism" or "standpoint epistemology", is just "condescension from below". Taibbi's a putz, but that's another issue. 

Leiter: Mill and Marcuse: "Justifying Academic Freedom", and the rest of us including Palestinians should just shut up.

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I just remembered this. It's perfect: Leiter, Mill and Marcuse, Glenn Loury and John McWhorter. 

I've used it before.

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This belongs here too. 

Leiter links to Beinart. His response a model of defensive rationalization.

The reason is that the movement against Mr. Netanyahu is not like the pro-democracy opposition movements in Turkey, India or Brazil — or the movement against Trumpism in the United States. It’s not a movement for equal rights. It’s a movement to preserve the political system that existed before Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition took power, which was not, for Palestinians, a genuine liberal democracy in the first place. It’s a movement to save liberal democracy for Jews.

This is mostly true, but also a non-sequitur: even in an apartheid state, the loss of judicial independence can make the place worse, and especially when the courts are the only branch of government which sometimes defend the rights of the victims of apartheid-like policies....