Mr. Obama had voted minutes earlier in favor of an extremely similar resolution proposed by Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California.
Ms. Boxer’s proposal, which failed, called for the Senate to “strongly condemn all attacks on the honor, integrity and patriotism” of anyone in the United States armed forces.
This is one of those strange limit-cases of contemporary liberalism: it’s an important principle of liberal democracies that the civilian government has formal control the military, but only, apparently, on condition that it never disagrees with the military.
Maybe I subsconsciously believe the analytic misrepresentations of Derrida. At least, I wouldn’t have expected that in a debate between Derrida and Habermas, it would be Derrida who provides the lucid, rigorous arguments. But what else are we to make of passages like this:
The specialized languages of science and technology, law and morality, economics, political science, etc. … live off the illuminating power of metaphorical tropes; but the rhetorical elements, which are by no means expunged, are tamed, as it were, and enlisted for special purposes of problem-solving.
— Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 209
I’m probably not the first person to come up with a variation on this macro to celebrate the new Britney Spears single (though it’s surprisingly difficult to find immediately recognizable pictures of her which don’t lead to 100% wrongness when you superimpose the words “GIMME IT” on top of them). It’s really very good, although in the genre of famous‐person‐sings‐about‐not‐liking‐being‐famous I don’t know if it’s as good as Lindsey Lohan’s “Rumors,” or, of course, Britney’s own chef‐d’œuvre, “Lucky.”