🚨 JUST NOW: John Thune goes on TV making VERY clear he's TOO WEAK to get the SAVE America Act passed Thune is HOPELESS. He needs to go. We've WASTED our Republican trifecta with Thune at the helm in the Senate. Thune also REJECTED Trump's demand to attach the SAVE Act to FISA, saying it would "tank" the surveillance bill. WHO CARES?! SAVE America Act is MUCH more important than your spy bill. GET IT DONE OR RESIGN, THUNE!

I hate Rousseau, but he is unmistakeably French. Montaigne reads less like a French intellectual than a detached aristocrat observing mankind. His spirit feels less like Rousseau & Voltaire, and more like Edward Gibbon & David Hume. This is perhaps unsurprising. Michel de Montaigne's father was a French arisocrat; his mother was a Jew. He is leisurely where French writers are analytical, personal where they are programmatic, dispassionate where they are intense, sceptical where they are dogmatic. He resembles less a Parisian intellectual and more a cultivated English gentleman retired from public affairs and reflecting on human nature. His attention is directed toward conduct, character, friendship, courage, death, custom, and self-command rather than toward systems, abstractions, ideologies, or social theories. He writes as a man sufficiently secure in his position to regard grand schemes with amused indifference. All of which makes him temperamentally much closer to a typical English philosopher than to a typical French or German one. He sounds more like an English gentleman observing humanity than a French or German intellectual directing it. His scepticism is the scepticism of one who has seen too much of the world to be intoxicated by theories. In this respect he feels closer in spirit to Plutarch and Edward Gibbon than to many French intellectuals. If Friedrich Nietzsche resembles Montaigne, the resemblance may arise from the same Englishness: a distrust of systems, a preference for observation over doctrine, and an aristocratic distance from the enthusiasms of ideologues. And this Englishness, by the way, is may be less a matter of nationality than of that gentlemanly, anti-systematic disposition that survived especially well in English letters. (This is a repost. The original version was littered with too many grammatical and spelling errors.)