Nice appreciative piece:

Henceforth, the senior ranks of government can be filled only by invertebrates and opportunists, schemers and careerists. If they had policy convictions, they will meekly accept their evisceration. If they know a choice is a disaster, they will swallow hard and go along. They may try to manipulate the president, or make some feeble efforts to subvert him, but in the end they will follow him. And although patriotism may motivate some of them, the truth is that it will be the title, the office, the car, and the chance to be in the policy game that will keep them there.

They may think wistfully of the unflinching Sir Thomas More of Robert Bolt’s magnificent play about integrity in politics, A Man for All Seasons. But they will be more like Richie Rich, More’s protégé who could have chosen a better path, but who succumbed to the lure of power. And the result will be policies that take this country, its allies, and international order to disasters small and large.

Jim Mattis’s life has been shaped by the Marine motto: semper fidelis, always faithful. Against the odds, he remained faithful to his beliefs, to his subordinates, to the mission, to the country. The president who appointed him to the office might have as the motto on his phony coat of arms numquam fidelis, never loyal. His career has been one of betrayal—of business partners, of customers, of subordinates, of his wives, and as we may very possibly learn from Robert Mueller, of his country. The two codes of conduct could never really coexist, and so they have not.

Yep. The surprising thing is that Mattis stuck it out as long as he did. But also worth pointing out that Thomas More was no angel.

Hard to say. But it’s an interesting question, explored here by Kara Swisher.

It also makes one wonder exactly what Mr. Trump would do without Twitter, which has become his best and only true way to communicate. He can certainly go on television and he does; he can make a live speech and he does; he can stand out on the White House lawn and he does. But it’s not the same. The lightning-fast, easy-hit addiction of Twitter has Mr. Trump hooked like none other.

And there are zero alternatives online. Facebook is too bloated and slow; Snapchat is too small and hard to use for the olds; Reddit is a hot mess. There is no other digital harbor for Mr. Trump’s carnival barker show, no place where both the left and right can react and where all the media gathers.

So what would happen to the president who governs by tweet if he finally did or said something that forced Twitter to throw him off the platform? Could he do his job at all?

From Adam Gopnik’s lovely New Yorker essay on Shachar Pinsker’s book, A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture:

The still extant Café Central had an interior like a miniaturized San Marco, with hallucinatory Byzantine columns and swooping enclosing spandrels and squinches. (The fin-de-siècle modernist writer Peter Altenberg listed his address as “Vienna, First District, Café Central.”) Yet in its prime it was a “place of politics,” and crowded with émigré revolutionaries. A famous story had Leopold Berchtold, the Foreign Minister of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, being warned that a great war might spark a revolution in Russia. “And who will lead this revolution?” he scoffed. “Perhaps Mr. Bronshtein sitting over there at the Café Central?” Mr. Bronshtein took the name Leon Trotsky, and did.

Someone who believes that…

1. Conflict in society is inescapable
2. Unlimited human power is untrustworthy
3. Progress is nevertheless achievable; and
4. There are moral restraints on the legitimate exercise of power.

From Isaiah Berlin via Edmund Fawcett’s *Liberalism: The Life of an Idea.

One of the things that really baffles me about British politics at the moment is Brexiteers’ insistence that putting the Theresa May deal to a second referendum would be “undemocratic”. Au contraire, I think it’s the only democratic thing to do. One of the basic principles of good interface design in software is that whenever a user indicates that s/he deliberately or inadvertently intends to do something that would be damaging or that s/he might regret, the system first puts up a dialog box to check that the signalled action was in fact deliberate and that the user is comfortable with the consequences. If there were a second referendum and a majority voted to leave on the May terms or remain in the EU then that would be a truly democratic decision (you could call it informed consent) and even those of us who disagreed with it would have to accept it.