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The U.K. election has delivered a huge victory to conservativesand to Tory leader Boris Johnsonand astounding losses to the Labour Party. The results mean much more than the Conservative Party continuing to control the U.K.'s governing bodies.

With at least 364 seats won, the Conservative Party has well surpassed the number required for a majority in Parliament. Prime Minster Boris Johnson "will now enjoy a comfortable majority to 'get Brexit done'in other words, to pass the withdrawal agreement that he negotiated with European Union leaders in October," notes The Economist.

"In truth, the election-night story was not so much that of a Tory surge but of a Labour slump," the magazine adds.

The Jeremy Corbynled Labour Party will see its parliamentary vote share drop eight points. It was the party's worst showing since 1935.

Labour's steepest drops came in areas where the Nigel Farageled Brexit Party did well. (But asThe Spectator notes, Farage's party did not "even come close to winning a single parliamentary seat.")

In any event, it looks like Brexit is on.

And with the chances of Scottish secession rising again, some say this could kick off the destruction of the United Kingdom itself.

The election also speaks to the rising power of combining left-leaning economic policy with conservative social views and immigration policies (so, you know, the worst of all words for free minds/markets/migration types).

Britain's third largest party, the Liberal Democrats, also "had a dreadful night," points outThe Economist. And yet

the Tories' mighty new coalition is sure to come under strain. With its mix of blue collars and red trousers, the new party is ideologically incoherent. The northern votes are merely on loan. To keep them Mr Johnson will have to give people what they wantwhich means infrastructure, spending on health and welfare, and a tight immigration policy. By contrast, the Tories' old supporters in the south believe that leaving the EU will unshackle Britain and usher in an era of freewheeling globalism. Mr Johnson will doubtless try to paper over the differences. However, whereas Mr Trump's new coalition in America has been helped along by a roaring economy, post-Brexit Britain is likely to stall.

Some say the results highlight how it's easier for right-leaning politicians and parties to embrace left-leaning policies than vice versa, though this idea has its skeptics:

"The British election results, like any election result, is the result of unique circumstances and multiple factors," suggests Jonathan Chait at Intelligencer. "It is also, however, a test of a widely articulated political theory that has important implications for American politics. That theory holds that Corbyn's populist left-wing platform is both necessary and sufficient in order to defeat the rising nationalist right. Corbyn's crushing defeat is a decisive refutation."

"Vaping policy" consumes White House.

A good piece from Jane Coaston on the new porn wars, with cameos by Katherine Mangu-Ward and myself:

For several decades now, movement conservatism has adhered to Andrew Breitbart's maxim that "politics is downstream of culture," arguing that rather than engage the forces of government to create change, conservatives should focus on changing popular culture instead. But some social conservatives are now arguing the very opposite.

Arguments in favor of the use of laws to change or improve human behavior hasn't been a characteristic of the post-2010 conservative movement that still bears the influence of the Tea Party and libertarian-leaning Republicans. In fact, Mangu-Ward told me that such arguments were, in her view, generally made by left-leaning politicians and thinkers. Referencing former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's efforts to ban large sodas, she said such rationales stem from "the idea that we should prohibit people from making bad choices," or in short, "make the bad thing illegal."

Catholic theocrat and New York Post op-ed editor Sohrab Ahmari told Coaston that pornography is "degrading" and "Andrea Dworkin was right."

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U.K. Election: Brexit Wins, Jeremy Corbyn Crashes - Reason

A view of the U.S. Capitol, in Washington DC, U.S., June 20, 2019. (Al Drago/Reuters)Well-intentioned though conservatives calling for a more activist government may be, ours has failed miserably with the responsibilities it already has.

The 2007 comedy Hot Fuzz is about a hyper-competitive London policeman who is reassigned to what initially appears to be the sleepiest, most boring small town in the entire United Kingdom. After a series of wildly suspicious deaths that the other cops insist must be accidents, the policeman and his partner uncover SPOILER ALERT a cabal of locals who are murdering their neighbors over the most minor flaws and sins, all insisting, in a ludicrous chant, that their actions serve, the greater good. The bad actor in the local theater, a local woman with an annoying laugh, a resident with an ostentatious house the town elders murder each one, all in the name of preserving the communitys award-winning reputation.

Fairly or not, every time I hear someone calling for common-good capitalism even someone as likable and usually reliable as Senator Marco Rubio I hear those deranged villagers who insist that enforcing their draconian punishments is for the greater good.

The common good can be pretty subjective. While its not that difficult to get Americans to agree on what is good in the broadest terms, its a lot tougher to build a consensus view of the good when you get down to specifics not to even mention the difficulty of forging a consensus view of how to bring the good about. Rubio, who is after all a politician, lists dignified work, strong families, and strong communities in his definition. You would have to look far and wide to find an American who wants to see more undignified work, weak families, and weak communities. But while most might agree with Rubios goals, whether and how federal policy can achieve them are open questions.

For example, Rubio warns, Weve allowed ourselves to become almost completely dependent on China for rare-earth minerals and wants the secretary of commerce to establish a privately funded, privately operated and privately managed Rare Earth Refinery Cooperative. Thats nice. Its probably a good idea, though some may wonder why, if everything about this is going to be private, we need the Department of Commerce to set it up. But its hard to believe that even if it were a success, it would do much more than nibble at the edges of whatever ails us.

The biggest obstacle to getting access to the 18 million tons of rare-earthminerals in Bear Lodge, Wyo. is securing permits and overcoming objections from environmentalists. It is odd that a proposal like Rubios is treated as part of a new force in opposition to libertarianism, but it runs into the same complaints about government bureaucracy, slow permitting, and red tape made chiefly by . . . libertarians.

Rubios other ideas are the sort that shouldnt really raze libertarian hackles that much: expanding the federal per-child tax credit, reforming the Small Business Administration, and so on. But they feel like small potatoes. If our capitalist system is doing a lousy job of serving the common good, well, that probably at least partially reflects problems in how our government regulates and creates incentives within it. Many Republicans and almost all Democrats are dancing around the glaring contradiction of asking a government thats doing a terrible job fulfilling its current responsibilities to do more.

To listen to the Democratic presidential candidates, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials are a bunch of xenophobic thugs, Customs and Border Patrol officers are abusing innocent children, the Office of Management and Budget held up aid to Ukraine for corrupt reasons, the entire federal government is asleep at the wheel when it comes to protecting our elections and voting systems, the Department of Justice keeps giving grants to police forces full of cops who are racist and abusive . . . and the only solution is to give the government more money and power.

Do these folks realize that their primary tool for promoting the common good is the sputtering, jury-rigged, frequently malfunctioning Rube Goldberg machine known as the federal government?

With almost comical regularity, if you ask the federal government to do X, it will, given tons of funding and having the best of intentions, accidentally give you the opposite of X. We have a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that sent 2,000 guns to Mexican cartels. We have an Environmental Protection Agency that accidentally released 3 million gallons of wastewater tainted with iron, aluminum, manganese, lead, copper, and other metals into rivers in three states. The Office of Personnel Managements job is to collect and protect information about federal employees; it did a terrific job of putting all of the potential blackmail material on every government employee who handles classified information in one place for Chinese hackers to steal. We have a Transportation Security Administration that failed to find hidden fake explosives in 67 out of 70 tests. The Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction found that the Pentagon could only account for 38 percent of the $3.8 billion allocated for the Commanders Emergency Response Program. The Department of Education spent more than $45 million on537 charter schools that never opened. If you put the federal government in charge of banning porn, youd probably end up getting Stormy Daniels videos sent to your phone by FEMA.

Is it really a good idea to give these folks bigger, more complicated duties?

A lot of good people work for the federal government. Unfortunately, its hard to get rid of the bad people who work there, and the good ones toil away in systems and offices that discourage change and new ideas, have few if any incentives for efficiency, use outdated technology, drown in paperwork, and have an obsessive fear of lawsuits. In addition to the traditional problems, in recent years many federal agencies have coped with a revolving door in their leadership. In his first 31 months in office, President Trump had two defense secretaries, two acting defense secretaries, two secretaries of homeland security, two acting secretaries of homeland security, two secretaries of state, one acting secretary of state, two CIA directors, and three chiefs of staff.

All of these existing agencies have a well-established mission meant to serve the greater good, from dont let weapons get onto planes to help build a decent society in Afghanistan to open new charter schools. Some days they succeed, but all too often they fall flat on their faces. That fact should give pause to Senator Rubio and others on the right pushing for expanded government powers in the service of conservative ends.

More here:
A Federal Government Thats Not Good at Its Job Cant Effectively Serve the Common Good - National Review

Im fascinated by the debate that has been raging these past several days among conservatives around the issue of pornography. Im happy to accept blame for helping to start this scuffle because I think it has been a clarifying moment for conservatism. As Jane Coaston outlined in her fair and insightfulreporting at Vox,the dispute over porn regulation really springs from a more fundamental disagreement about the actual purpose of government.

Guys like Sohrab Ahmari have come down on the pro-regulation side, while the libertarians at Reason have settled, unsurprisingly, on the other. The dividing line even runs through The Daily Wire. My colleaguesMichael Knowles and Josh Hammerjoin Ahmari, myself, and others in the view that government has a legitimate role in battling the porn epidemic, while Ben Shapiroand Jeremy Boreingsay that it should not have a substantial role and any role, if there is one, should not include an outright ban. I think everyone cited above has contributed thoughtfully to the discussion, and Im not just saying that because two of them happen to sign my paychecks.

But through this whole back-and-forth, I havent seen anyone engage with what I consider to be my strongest argument. Putting aside, for a moment, the philosophical discussion about the nature of government and the states role in preserving the common good an important conversation, but one that leads us far into the weeds and loses sight of the original subject in the process Id like to re-emphasize a very simple point Ive made about the porn problem, specifically.

The defense of pornography, or at least of its remaining legal and mostly unregulated, seems to hinge on the fact that the content is produced and viewed by consenting adults. If viewers do not consent to viewing a sexual act, we all presumably agree that a crime has occurred. It would seem to strain the bounds of the most radical libertarianism to argue that a group of adults are within their rights to have an orgy on the subway, for example.

Porn is different, its argued, because you only view it if you seek it out. If viewers of porn were not consenting if internet porn were of such a nature that millions of people were forced to encounter it against their will every year then it would seem that the argument against prohibition or regulation begins to crumble. Well, I think it has already crumbled because indeed millions of people are exposed to itevery year against their will and consent. Those defending the legality of porn seem to be ignoring this group of victims, and I think that is an insurmountable moral and logical flaw in their position.

Children are first exposed to porn at the age of 11, on average. As we speak right now, there are no doubt millions of minors, some as young as five or six years old, watching adults have sex on the internet. This is an indisputable fact. Does the fact not blow to smithereens the consent excuse offered by the other side? Our legal system rests on the assumption that minors cannot consent to engage in sexual acts. If an adult has sex with a child, the adult is guilty of rape no matter if the child verbally agreed or not. In our society, we understand that children lack the mental and emotional maturity to make an informed decision in this area. To deny that is to literally defend pedophilia.

Well, if children cannot consent to engage in a sexual act, does it not inevitably follow that they cannot consent to witness such an act? If they cannot consent as a second-party participant, neither can they consent as a third-party participant. Thus, every child who watches porn does so, by definition, without consent. Again: I dont see how you can quibble with this argument without also quibbling with the logic for criminalizing pedophilic behavior. Im not saying that the people on the opposite side of this issue are trying to legalize pedophilia. Im saying that they fail to appreciate how our laws against pedophilia also provide a basis for pornography regulation.

This all means that every consenting adult who posts hardcore sex videos to the internet does so knowing that children can very easily access and view it. They are putting it, as it were, within reach of the child. If the child reaches for it, who do we blame? Is it the childs fault or the fault of the person who put it there? I would argue that every child who has viewed internet pornography is a victim of abuse. And the abuser is the person who posted that content where a child, with no trouble at all, could find it.

Indeed, the internet porn industry makes hundreds of millions of dollars every year on children. Each hit to a site like Pornhub is monetized. If millions of children go on that site which they do, because theres nothing to stop them then Pornhub profits to the tune of millions on the psychological and sexual abuse of children. If you dont think the government has an interest in the common good, broadly speaking, will you admit that it at least has an interest in preventing people from making millions on providing pornography to 12-year-olds?

The obvious dodge here is to lay the onus entirely at the feet of parents. Its not the pornographers fault, critics will respond. Its up to the parent to stop their kids from seeing this stuff. I find this rejoinder to be profoundly lazy. Its true that parents should be doing all they can to shield their children from the filth on the internet, but its also true that the internet is so ubiquitous that parents cannot, on their own, do a sufficient job in this regard. Even if the child has no phone and no internet access at home or, more likely, regulated internet access at home he can still go almost anywhere else and access the internet dozens of different ways. Short of moving into a cave in the desert, a parent can only provide partial cover. But partial cover, in the end, is only a little better than no cover at all.

Besides, this does nothing to relieve the responsibility of the person posting the content in the first place. Even if every child exposed to porn has ineffectual and inattentive parents (which is most emphatically not the case), that still doesnt explain why anyone should have the right to post sex videos on a public forum where children can easily access them. It might be true that some children who are molested could have been saved that trauma had their parents been more vigilant, but that does absolutely nothing at all to excuse the man who did the molesting. The same holds true for pornographers.

The question is this: Do we have a natural human right to post hardcore sex videos online where children can see them? Anyone who says yes has an extremely confused and hopelessly ambiguous conception of human rights. The rational people who say no, however, must weigh whether a persons privilege to post such content outweighs the right of a child to be free from sexual abuse and trauma.

This does not have to be a deeply philosophical debate about philosophies of governance and so on. This can be much simpler. You do not have a right to expose children to sexually explicit content. Children do have a right to certain basic legal protections. That fact alone, in my view, is enough to settle the argument.

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WALSH: Every Child Exposed To Internet Pornography Is An Abuse Victim. There Should Be Laws Protecting Them. - The Daily Wire