Saint John Climacus Sunday, 2026

Our inescapable reality

Nor does this allow for any kind of Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox triumphalism, whereby the historical continuity and unity of the institutions can be presented as an antidote to Protestant fragmentation. To be a Roman Catholic today is to make a choice. Thoughtful Roman Catholics may object to this claim by pointing to the sacramental power that they ascribe to baptism. But that does not really address the matter of lived experience: every faithful cradle Catholic has still made a decision to live his or her Christian life as a Catholic amid a world of other possible options, from atheism to Islam to Bible churches and Pentecostalism. When it comes to how we think of ourselves, we are all expressive individualists now, and there is no way we can escape from this fact. It is the essence of the world in which we have to live and of which we are a part.

Carl Trueman and Rod Dreher, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

Provincial

A giant in the Evangelical world, John M. Perkins, has died at age 95. I clipped two obituaries for later reading. When I got around to reading the first, I was struck by the provincialism of an indictment Perkins handed down in 1987:

I think that makes a difference between whether or not that church is an action church or whether it’s just become a self-centered worshipping congregation. And I think most churches are sort of self-centered worshipping. They see the church as ‘meeting my need, meeting my need,’ and the church doesn’t have a ministry, and a concept of ministry, and a philosophy of ministry, and a statement of mission to the world.

(Italics added.)

Perkins was an evangelical, and one mark of evangelicalism is activism (to the neglect of so much else, in my opinion). His indictment is of evangelicals, and for not living up to an intentional and full-orbed activism — not living up well to his vision of how things should be.

Self-centered worshipping congregation is an oxymoron (hypothetical self-worship aside). To worship is to ascribe high worth to another. So this indictment starts off wrong-footed.

The he shifts voice, from talking about a congregation to the demand of each individual member — “meeting my need, meeting my need.” And there is where he, and much of evangelicalism, miss the boat.

They really have made Church about “meeting my felt need” in an effort geared more toward growth than toward making disciples.

Frederica Matthewes-Greene wrote of inviting a friend to her Orthodox Church. At the end of the Liturgy, her friend exclaimed “Wow! That was soooo not about me!” And I’d say Church in the 21st Century can be perceived as “meeting my need” by the masses only if it’s pandering to something other than real human needs, the foremost of which is to move from the image of God to the image and likeness of God, to grow God-ward.

Unfortunately, that’s not on evangelical radar.

Overlearned

Freddie DeBoer had a post this week on “overlearning,” which he descibed as:

the error … that learns too much, that overfits the curve, that extrapolates irresponsibly, that takes a genuinely correct observation and rides it so far past its destination that it ends up somewhere just as wrong as pure ignorance, only with more confidence.

He gives many examples, such as extrapolating a dismissal of all social science research because much of it fails replication.

Without looking for them, I found a few artifacts of overlearning in Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind:

The wood and stone from which idols are made do not deserve to be worshiped; because God made them, however, they deserve to be studied as wood or stone.

And:

I was brought up in a Christian environment where, because God had to be given pre-eminence, nothing else was allowed to be important. I have broken through to the position that because God exists, everything has significance. (Irish poet Evangeline Paterson)

A book note

A few years ago, I tried to read The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, but I quit because it felt voyeuristic for me, an Orthodox convert from Evangelical and Evangelical-adjacent Christianity, to read it. But my interest shifted from finding fodder for schadenfreude to figuring out how it came to pass that something went scandalously wrong with one of America’s most visible and vocal Christian traditions. So I read it afresh, finishing this past week.

As the author, Mark Noll, wound down, he had this summary:

The scandal of the evangelical mind seems to be that no mind arises from evangelicalism. Evangelicals who believe that God desires to be worshiped with thought as well as activity may well remain evangelicals, but they will find intellectual depth — a way of praising God through the mind — in ideas developed by confessional or mainline Protestants, Roman Catholics, or perhaps even the Eastern Orthodox. That conclusion may be the only responsible one to reach after considering the history sketched in this book. Even if it leaves evangelical intellectuals trapped in personal dissonance and the evangelical tradition doomed to intellectual superficiality (or worse), the recent past seems to point in no other direction.

A fair clarification of that paragraph, in context, is that there seems to be no mind that arises from what is distinctly evangelical about evangelical Christianity: conversionism, activism, biblicism and crucicentrism (in a classic and widely-accepted taxonomy), to which Noll crucially adds intuitionism, a dogmatic reverence for “common sense.” It is particularly intuitionism that must be set aside for an evangelical even to have the patience to engage in the sustained, intense study of a subject that characterizes a life of the mind.

So evangelicals can live the life of the mind by adopting what I’d call “methodological mere Christianity,” much as, I’ve come to suspect from outside the sciences, a scientist who hopes to contribute to specifically scientific knowledge, will need to adopt methodological naturalism even if his personal convictions are not naturalist.

That’s not a conclusion I anticipated when I decided return to Noll’s book and finish it, and it leaves me with the kinds of personal questions that make the reading worthwhile.

An unexpected answer to fervent prayer

I pray fervently that Mr. Dreher will return to the Catholic Church—not only for his sake, but for ours. I’m afraid the Benedict Option project will remain incomplete until Mr. Dreher commits to restoring the Holy Catholic Church as the central pillar of Western Christianity.

Michael Warren Davis, September 25, 2020.

Within four years of this plea, Michael Warren Davis left the Catholic Church and entered the Orthodox Church. He currently writes a Substack.

A Contrast

Shortly before he died in 1860, George Croly penned the prayer “Spirit of God, Descend upon My Heart.” In its second stanza Croly described what he felt would happen if he were to experience a deeper walk with the Spirit:

I ask no dream, no prophet ecstasies,
No sudden rending of the veil of clay,
No angel visitant, no opening skies;
But take the dimness of my soul away.

For Croly, to know God better would make our vision of the world clearer. In 1922, Helen H. Lemmel wrote the words and music to a gospel song that is as moving as it is characteristic of the fundamentalist-Holiness outlook:

Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim
In the light of His glory and grace.

While the essentially Christian motivation of this song is clear, its ironic meaning can be understood better now than when it was written — under the influence of fundamentalism, evangelicals turned their eyes to Jesus, and the world grew very dim indeed.

Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

The “science” of theology

“The Bible is to the theologian what nature is to the man of science. It is his store-house of facts; and his method of ascertaining what the Bible teaches, is the same as that which the natural philosopher adopts to ascertain what nature teaches…. The duty of the Christian theologian is to ascertain, collect, and combine all the facts which God has revealed concerning himself and our relation to Him. These facts are all in the Bible.” On the basis of these assertions, [Charles] Hodge then went on to suggest that “the Theologian [is] to be guided by the same rules as the Man of Science.”

Mark A. Noll, America’s God. I am dumbstruck by the arrogance of this, and humbled at the thought that 30 years ago I probably would have applauded it.

It is very difficult to make our contemporaries see that there are things which by their very nature cannot be discussed.

René Guénon Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World.

Satan at work

The accusation that Haitian immigrants in a small Ohio city are abducting and eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs relies not on one falsehood but on a web of them. The rhetoric evokes racist tropes about “savages” who do not conform to our civilized Western world. There’s also a religious angle: the idea that Haitian refugees are voodoo occultists who might be worshipping the devil. As an evangelical Christian who actually believes in the existence of Satan, I agree that we can indeed see the work of the devil at play here, only it’s not on the menu of the Haitian families but rather in the cruelty of those willing to lie about them.

…

To sing praise songs in a church service while trafficking in the bearing of false witness against people who fled for their life, who seek to rebuild a life for their children after crushing poverty and persecution, is more than just cognitive dissonance. It’s modeling the devil himself, whom Jesus called “the father of lies” (Jn 8:44). That’s especially true when the lies harm another person. “Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer,” the apostle John wrote, “and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him” (1 Jn 3:15).

Russell Moore, Trump’s Lie Is Another Test for Christian America.

I have a beef with Moore: if memory serves, this was JD Vance’s lie before Trump picked it up with delight and ran with it.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

March 19

I hear rumors that The Big Dance, a/k/a March Madness, has begun, but inasmuch as Purdue versus Queens isn’t until tomorrow night, I don’t really care.

Iran

Karl Rove’s vindication

Whatever misgivings Democrats had about attacking Iran, the deed’s been done. In launching this war, Trump has committed not only himself and his administration but also the United States, its regional allies, and the Iranian people. If the war goes wrong, all will suffer.

Some Democrats want to use the power of the purse to end the war “immediately,” but that is like parking a jet in midair. What does “stopping” mean now? Shrug off the danger Gulf states face from retaliatory fire in a fight the U.S. started? End the U.S. air campaign and let Israel fight alone in its own way to achieve its own goals? Leave the mullah regime intact to plot its revenge? “Stopping” is a formula that blinks away every real-world question that Americans now face.

David Frum, in the Atlantic (H/T John Ellis news items.

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

Karl Rove

Too late now?

We have become a country that demonstratively tramples on international laws. Our military bombs a different nation every few weeks, commits murder on the high seas and removes foreign political leaders by force. Our government threatens the world, including our allies, with its imperial ambitions.

We are a country ruled by a megalomaniac whose views are openly hateful and proudly ignorant, whose avarice knows no bounds and whose claim to power is absolute. Foreign leaders try to appease him with flattery and curry his favor with gifts. It rarely works to temper his appetite or even catch his attention, but it’s seemingly all they can do.

M. Gessen, One Year of Trump. The Time to Act Is Now, While We Still Can., January 18, 2026.

Trumpiana

Purge and Binge

Any successful revolutionary populist movement will eventually purge its political enemies. And after it does, the new establishment it creates will be more corrupt and more ruthless than the one it replaced.

Those historical rules aren’t hard and fast but the exceptions are rare. When a populist insurgency takes charge, expect total consolidation of power—and chaos, of course—to follow.

The purge of the Republican Party by Donald Trump and his Jacobin base took longer than it had to, nearly 10 years from start to finish. That’s because Trump himself isn’t a revolutionary or even much of an ideologue. He’s a narcissist, so he would have happily kept the pre-Trump establishment intact forever as long as it agreed to blindly serve his needs.

Nick Catoggio, Purge and Binge, March 12, 2024

Oopsie!

Attorneys representing the 30-year-old Virginia resident accused of planting pipe bombs outside the Washington, D.C., headquarters of both the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee on the night of January 5, 2021, requested in a legal filing that the federal judge overseeing his case dismiss the charges because he was protected by the presidential pardon Trump granted for January 6 offenders. Trump’s pardon applied to those charged with “offenses related to events that occurred at or near” the U.S. Capitol on January 6, and the suspected would-be pipe bomber’s legal team argued that such a description “unequivocally applies” to him, because his alleged actions are “in no manner … wholly independent of events at the Capitol on January 6.”

– A White House official said in a statement that the pardon “clearly does not cover this scenario,” noting that the pipe bombs were allegedly placed on January 5, not January 6.
– Trump issued the sweeping pardon on January 20, his first day back in office, fulfilling a 2024 campaign promise.

The Morning Dispatch for March 18.

The “White House official” is irrelevant. Trump said what he said, and the courts aren’t going to worry about what he meant.

The schadenfreude of seeing Trump’s reckless pardons bite him on the backside would almost be worth the added terrorist threat of springing this bomber from prison.

Revealed preferences

I had a not-insubstantial financial windfall within the past few weeks, but I cannot bring myself to invest any of it in stocks or bonds. Instead, for the first time in my life, I put surplus funds into a money market fund, not for a few days or weeks while I pick a few investments, but rather with no intention of investing it elsewhere until, say, January 20, 2029.

I wrote that paragraph before reading the latest missive from my cyberfriend Terry Cowan (I believe we once narrowly missed meeting in real life), who almost always out-Eeyores me.

Education

The tacit message: Just choose. Toss a coin if necessary.

These incompatible assumptions and claims are taught to undergraduates, who might be told in a biology class that universal moral norms such as (survival-minded) cooperation or (gene-perpetuating) altruism are the product of evolutionary natural selection, only to hear in an anthropology or philosophy class the next hour, based on the empirical heterogeneity of moral practices across space and time or the obvious inconclusiveness of arguments among moral philosophers, that there are no universal moral norms. What are they to infer? No undergraduate courses teach students how they might even begin to evaluate contrary claims in disparate disciplines.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

Education too narrow

Science’s analytical methods and positivist presuppositions restrict the questions we ask in education and about education, and we begin mouthing a catechism of questions for which our techniques can provide answers, whether the answers are significant or not. In education, this preoccupation with false or trivial questions makes the student adept at “faking it,“ that is, at finding the right answers to the wrong questions, questions he has never really asked himself, questions without normative consequence or implication.

David V. Hicks, Norms and Nobility

If you didn’t gasp, read it again. If you still didn’t, read Iain McGillchrist.

Shorts

  • … a culture which makes “living standards” the final norm of the good life and which regards the perfection of techniques as the guarantor of every cultural as well as of every social-moral value. (Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History) I think you can guess what culture he meant.
  • Trump still has the dumbest hair in America, which is a hell of a thing to write about a man standing next to Pete Hegseth, the Brylcreem-addicted grandstanding dipsomaniac peacock … (Kevin D. Williamson, Take your @#$%&! hat off)
  • We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. (John Adams’ 1798 letter to the Massachusetts Militia)
  • I will die on this hill: For all his faults, the president hasn’t made anyone’s character worse. He simply removed the few remaining moral checkpoints to mainstream political success and left it to individuals to decide for themselves what they’re willing to condone to gain power. Nothing in my lifetime has illuminated the American character as starkly as how right-wingers reacted to that invitation. Trump is the Great Revealer. (Nick Catoggio)
  • Murphy’s Armageddon Observation: Those who don’t learn from the past are condemned to write end-times books. Corollary: God doesn’t read prophecy books. (Quoted by Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind)
  • Recommended: David French, Can Military Excellence Save Us From Trump’s Incompetence? (shared link)
  • The Metastate subsists upon family breakdown. (Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes)
  • Education turns out competitive consumers; medicine keeps them alive in the engineered environment they have come to require; bureaucracy reflects the necessity of exercising social control over people to do meaningless work. (Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality)
  • We no longer need the devil because we had Hitler. We no longer needed hell because we had Auschwitz. (Historian Tom Holland, quoted by Glen Scrivener, The Air We Breathe)

(I hope you’re enjoying these “shorts” as much as I’m enjoying gathering them for us. I’m pretty sure I was inspired by Frank Bruni’s “For Love of Sentences,” which appears in most of his columns.)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Ides of March

Literacy versus Immersivity

The problem with Catholics is that they are bad Catholics; the problem with Protestants is that they are also bad Catholics. But perhaps they do not consider themselves Protestant anymore. Perhaps the word is an anachronism; perhaps the word is a slur. Protestantism rose with the printing press and fell with immersivity. It inhabited one specific form of literacy: in a world where people can no longer read—with attention and depth—you can only have post-Protestants. That there are Christianities focused again on a single form of literacy does not make them Protestant, if the single form is different. It does not make them Catholic either, of course—that is, it makes them bad Catholics.

Ross McCullough, The Body of This Death: Letters from the Last Archbishop of Lancaster.

Some explanation is in order. This quote is not — at least not directly — a diagnosis of our present situation, because the book is fiction, set in a dystopian future. (See the book notes at Bookshop.org for more detail.)

That said, the idea that “Protestantism rose with the printing press and fell with immersivity” is striking (it was new to me at least) even if the “immersivity” referred to is beyond our current Virtual Reality headsets. It also meshes with Brad East’s provocative suggestion that Evangelicalism is not Protestant:

Imagine a world in which every Christian is either catholic or evangelical, with nothing in between. It is a world without Protestantism—for the religion of the magisterial Reformers in the sixteenth century did not desire, commend, or practice either of these options. Theirs was a via media. They baptized babies, recited the Creed, ordained pastors to the service of word and sacrament, practiced baptism and communion as sacraments (not as symbols), and insisted on the validity of the early councils.

The world I invite you to imagine, then, is one in which this middle way—neither Roman nor Anabaptist, both traditional and reformed—has vanished. Is such a world possible? It is. In fact, we are living in it right now. Ours is a world without Protestantism.

To my mind, what McCullough adds to East is the causality by which Protestantism disappeared: the neglect of reading and the valorization of spectacle and feeling — media literacy over print literacy.

Pernicious delusion

Buddhism, like hesychasm, begins with the search for inner stillness, which it sees as a necessary precursor to understanding the delusions we tend to call ‘reality.’ This is entirely in accordance with Christian teaching, and indeed with modern understandings of human psychology.

The thing is, once you begin to examine those delusions, you see that one of the most pernicious is the construction of a self-identity. This is necessary to survive in the world, probably, but soon enough it becomes a yoke around the neck. This construction labelled ‘Paul Kingsnorth’, for example, now has a public reputation as a writer with certain opinions and a particular history. His future work, and indeed his income, is in some way reliant on keeping this fiction going. It is not a ‘fiction’ in the sense of it being a deliberate falsehood, but it is a construction, which means it is a story, which means that the actual me has ended up stuck inside it, as we all do with our stories in the end.

Things are particularly bad for this ‘Paul Kingsnorth’ character, because he makes his living writing articles like this one. Not only does he need to do this to eat, but more existentially, he has written for so long that he now sees the world almost entirely through the lens of the written word. Even if he wasn’t getting paid to write things down, he would be writing them down anyway, which would just continue to encrust the artificial world around the artificial self, and make it harder to escape from both.

Whether we are writers or not, we create these personal fictions we call ‘identities’, and the older we get, the harder it is for that simple, primal stillness which is the precursor to true prayer to break back through. Back when I practiced Buddhism, I remember seeing with crystal clarity, at a level far deeper than the intellect, that if I wanted to progress spiritually I had to stop pumping out all these words. This was not because language itself was inherently bad – it is hardly avoidable – but because of something at once fuzzier and clearer, which even now I find it hard to explain. It was that words were part of the fiction of the world. It was so clear then – and it remains clear now – that spiritual progress, that work of theosis, requires us to drop all of our illusions. To smash through the cement of words and concepts and identities and opinions. To see ourselves naked before God. To make ourselves simple again.

Paul Kingsnorth, In the Desert of the Heart.

Where are our spoils?

Speaking of the retreat of print literacy, above, I’m reading Mark A. Noll’s classic book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.

I tried to read it a few years ago and quit about 20% into it because I felt like a voyeur, peeking in on a family’s internal quarrel (and maybe feeling a bit of schadenfreude as I did). I’ve come back to it now because my interest now is less salacious and more about how it came to pass that the dominant American Christian tradition of my adult lifetime has so little interest in cultivating excellence in scholarship, the sciences and other “mind” activities, even as it exults in big-name athletes, actors and musicians (exemplars of excellence in their fields) who profess evangelical Christian faith.

That “scandal” ramifies: there are no evangelical Nobel Laureates, no evangelical Supreme Court Justices, and, as Noll put it, “not a single evangelical periodical in the United States or Canada that exists for the purpose of seriously considering the worlds of nature, society, politics, or the arts in the way that the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, or the Washington Post’s National Weekly Edition do for the general public.”

Again, from Noll’s “indictment”:

What J. S. Bach gained from his Lutheranism to inform his music, what Jonathan Edwards took from the Reformed tradition to orient his philosophy, what A. H. Francke learned from German Pietism to inspire the University of Halle’s research into Sanskrit and Asian literatures, what Jacob van Ruisdael gained from his seventeenth-century Dutch Calvinism to shape his painting, what Thomas Chalmers took from Scottish Presbyterianism to inspire his books on astronomy and political economy, what Abraham Kuyper gained from pietistic Dutch Calvinism to back his educational, political, and communications labors of the late nineteenth century, what T. S. Eliot took from high-church Anglicanism as a basis for his cultural criticism, what Evelyn Waugh found for his novels in twentieth-century Catholicism, what Luci Shaw, Shirley Nelson, Harold Fickett, and Evangeline Paterson found to encourage creative writing from other forms of Christianity after they left dispensationalism behind — precious few fundamentalists or their evangelical successors have ever found in the theological insights of twentieth-century dispensationalism, Holiness, or Pentecostalism.

Nevertheless, I have now seen a call for a kind of affirmative action in the worst sense:

Evangelicals are 23 percent of U.S. adults and one of the most loyal Republican voting blocs, with 81 percent backing Donald Trump in 2024. Yet despite six of the nine Supreme Court justices being appointed by Republican presidents, there are no evangelicals on the Supreme Court.

Aaron M. Renn, Evangelical Christians help the Supreme Court and elite institutions.

If you don’t earn it, maybe you can just demand it, as in We’re big and we helped elect you: where are our spoils?

Affirmative action for Evangelicals! The horseshoe theory of politics lives!

(The Washington Post has several letters to the editor noting the irony as well.) This was not Aaron Renn’s finest hour.

Not unrelated to DEI for Evangelicals

The religious right of a previous era really was trying to bring biblically based convictions into the political realm, with the aim of moving the latter into greater conformity with the former. Today, by contrast, “biblically based convictions” have been replaced, among many voters who would normally be defined as members of the religious right, by blatantly partisan convictions that are given a theological gloss.

Damon Linker’s hypothesis about the religious right. Beware, especially, the latter kind of “biblically based convictions.”

Wary of Contentment

A friend of mine was ordained to the Diaconate in the Orthodox Church last Sunday. He’ll probably become a Priest in a few more years.

The burdens of the Priesthood are great, even apart from a shortage of Priests. The foremost burden is that Priests (and Bishops) must one day answer to God for their parishioners as well as for themselves.

[I]f we have learned anything at all in our theological education, spiritual formation and pastoral service, we have learned to beware, and to be wary, of all contentment, consolation and comfort before our co-crucifixion in love with Christ. We have learned that though we can know about God through formal theological education, we can only come to know God by taking up our daily crosses with patient endurance in love with Jesus. And we can only do this by faith and grace through the Holy Spirit’s abiding power.

The late Fr. Thomas Hopko, 2007, via Fr. Stephen Freeman.

As the current national government explicitly exults in its lethality, I’m very glad to be in a church where every Sunday we sing the Beatitudes, which tell us the way blessedness works.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Pi Day

Subtle subversion

I went to a High School Show Choir show the other day. The highlight was a top Show Choir doing a star-spangled show with red, white and blue, flouncy red and white skirts, high energy, a made-in-America ballad (Aaron Copland, The Promise of Living), and other familiar pieces like Can’t tell a book by looking at the cover and America (from West Side Story)

The even had a Tejano-looking horn line, complete with black cowboy hats, adding a Mariachi flavor to one interlude in the singing.

All in all, it was a show that celebrated diverse America, subtly pushing back against … oh, just about anyone who fancies that Real America is white and European.

That’s the kind of resistance that’s hard for tyrants to crush.

Attacking the First Amendment

The bleeding-heart RINO communists at the Wall Street Journal investigated one particular aspect of immigration enforcement: the handling of peaceful protesters:

  • Out of 279 people accused of attacking federal officers on social media over the past year, 181 were U.S. citizens.
  • Nearly half of these Americans were never formally charged, and none have been convicted at trial.
  • Many faced public doxxing—release of personal information such as addresses and photos—leading to death threats.
  • Some bore financial burdens from bail, legal fees, and lost workdays defending themselves.

It’s impossible to keep up with all the outrages. Kudos to Brenna T. Smith, Hannah Critchfield, Brian Whitton, Belle Cushing and Emma Scott of the WSJ for trying.

Writing

Writing is a precarious profession. We are broke, for the most part. We work jobs we often don’t enjoy to keep the lights on: Faulkner at the post office, Vonnegut and his disastrous car dealership, every writer you know and their faculty gig. The average author doesn’t make enough from their royalties to clear the poverty line. Most books don’t even make back their advance, meaning they earn no royalties for the author at all. When Anna Burns won the Booker Prize, she thanked her food bank. Our work is stolen to train the software of multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence companies run by people who believe art is a problem to be solved.

Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Shorts

  • Against the “flood the zone” strategy of misinformation that the current administration seems to favor, lawyers and judges, bound by legal, professional and social obligations to work in a reality-based world, can function as a critical levee. (Deborah Pearlstein, The Justice Department Wants to Make It Safe for Government Lawyers to Lie – shared link.)
  • [Self-identified Secretary of War Pete] Hegseth says that in order to win wars like the one now being waged in Iran, “our warriors deserve legal teams as lethal and focused as they are,” though he does not elaborate on what a lethal legal team might look like. (Sarah Fitzpatrick and Missy Ryan, The Pentagon’s Lawyers Are Now Under Review)
  • “The only thing prohibiting transit in the straits (sic) right now is Iran shooting at shipping. It is open for transit should Iran not do that.” (Mr. Obvious nominee Pete “Big Hair” Hegseth)
  • “I’m not worried. I do whatever the f**k I want. DJT will pardon me,” – Corey Lewandowski.
  • We know not through our intellect, but through our experience. (Maurice Merleau-Ponty via Economist)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Res publicae tempore belli

At the waters’ edge

I’m surprised by my reaction to the war on Iran.

  • We are at war.
  • Everything about our entry into this war was wrong.
  • Articles of Impeachment should have been passed by now, with the Senate gearing up for trial.
  • Much as I detest Trump, I cannot root for America to lose.
  • But I can root for Americans, hurt in the pocketbook by his tariffs and the disruption of world oil flow (his general barbarity having passed without objection), to get furious and crush his bootlickers this Fall.

Mind you, this is reaction, not analysis. I have no qualifications to analyze the conduct of the war.

Liberating students from stultifying AI cheating

In his final year of teaching in Baylor’s Honors College, Alan Jacobs appears to be at the top of his game. He in particular has made me aware that there are, in theory, ways for conscientious profs to liberate their students from the stultifying pressure to let AI write their essays for them.

Now in his first column for the Dispatch, he gets a bit more concrete. For instance:

When I have talked with my fellow professors in the Great Texts program at Baylor’s Honors College, I have learned a few things. Some professors have for many years been giving oral examinations in the old Oxford and Cambridge tutorial style, where students read their papers aloud, and the professor interrupts to ask questions like “What do you mean by that word? What does that phrase mean?” This allows the professor to discover whether the student actually knows what he or she is talking about. In such situations, and in full oral exams, there are few ways to hide your ignorance. Professors who teach this way can largely (if not wholly) ignore the AI freakout.

…

Properly understood, the disruption of humanities teaching by AI is a gift, and I plan to receive it as such, rather than complain about a burden. As a teacher, I find these new conditions invigorating and refreshing. I feel like Charles Foster Kane when he started his career as a newspaper publisher: I don’t know how to teach masterpieces of literature and philosophy and theology, I just try everything I can think of. I find that my students—even if they’re not always as excited as I am—welcome these experiments and are quite willing to engage in them.

…

[F]or me, the rise of the chatbots has been an unexpected, late-career gift. It has made my teaching more fun for me, and I think more interesting for my students. And I believe the lessons I have learned can be generalized.

…

By depriving students of constant AI use—or, to put it more accurately, by allowing them some respite from the tyranny of the chatbots over their lives—we actually enable them to exercise their minds in unfamiliar, and for some unprecedented, ways. 

In short, there’s a great opportunity here for those who want to take it. Humanities professors of the world, unite! We have nothing to lose but our self-forged chains.

What AI Is Teaching Us About Humanities Education

What money is teaching us about education reform

Also in Texas, the private start-up University of Austin suffered an exodus of academic talent after its principal funder, Joe Lonsdale, strong-armed the institution into embracing “the four principles of anti-communism, anti-socialism, [anti]-identity politics, and anti-Islamism.”

Len Gutkin, The Right’s Academic Civil War.

This is a bitter, bitter disappointment for me, as I suspect it is for Pano Kanelos, who left the Presidency of the estimable St. John’s College – Annapolis to become the Founding President of University of Austin.

Is the idea of starting a new, excellent and free university Quixotic in the 21st century? Will moneyed barbarians always be in the saddle?

Tu quoque

Every one of these ideas is terrible — because every one of them follows from a fundamental failure to grasp the character of political reality in the United States. Hauling members of the opposing party before state tribunals for official condemnation, packing the country’s highest court with judges guaranteed to hand down decisions favorable to progressives, or otherwise altering the rules of American politics to systematically enhance the power of one party while diminishing the power of its opponents — none of that would move the country toward anything resembling “reconciliation.” On the contrary, it would move the country several steps closer to being torn apart.

Damon Linker (October 2020). Note the date.

The same observations apply to MAGA smashing norms in 2025-26 “to systematically enhance the power of one party while diminishing the power of its opponents.” The main difference is that MAGA is explicit about seeking to smash and humiliate, not reconcile.

Infantile rebellion

There is something infantile about rebellion and transgression. The need to perform and draw attention to oneself by constantly overthrowing and despising anything considered valuable or sacred by a previous generation has a rather Oedipal ring to it. Growing up used to be about learning and internalizing the values of the past in order to take one’s place in society. But a society built around transgression is really a society committed to a permanent state of immaturity.

Carl Trueman, Pride Month and the Infantilization of Society – First Things

Wordplay

So many felicitous phrases to brighten my day (via Frank Bruni)!:

  • In The Guardian, Dave Schilling considered an icy spectacle that has received more attention than usual lately: “Ah, hockey. The most impish of sports. A bunch of blissfully beefy individuals wearing colorful sweaters zoom around in skates chasing a wee little object called, of all things, a ‘puck.’ It’s adorable. It’s like ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ for people missing teeth.”
  • In The Times, Wesley Morris argued that the real appeal of the hit television series “Heated Rivalry,” set in the world of professional hockey, isn’t the sex: “The talking is the strength of the show. On the one hand, big deal. Men have never been doing more talking. They’re talking so much that we now refer to that talking as the manosphere, meaning that the chat has achieved a degree of gaseousness that only earth science can name.”
  • W.J. Hennigan pondered the prickliness of a member of Trump’s cabinet: “For a guy who calls himself the secretary of war, Pete Hegseth sure is defensive.”
  • In a post on X, Sean Davis, the chief executive of The Federalist, made fun of many Republicans’ tortured efforts not to call the attack on Iran by a certain three-letter word: “It’s not a war unless it comes from the war region of France, otherwise it’s just sparkling combat.”
  • In The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait wondered about Trump’s focus and coherence amid his shifting explanations for military strikes against Iran: “The president’s strategy seems more sundown than Sun Tzu.”

Shorts

  • …sexless epileptics jerking and lurching across a dance floor, lewd yet without the touch of a human hand. (Anthony Esolen in Out of the Ashes, describing school dances of the period)
  • … “Richard Cory,” that poem whose last line seems written expressly for the purpose of startling high-school students out of their first-period-English slumbers. (Poems Ancient and Modern)
  • Thomas B. Edsall, Trump’s Smash-and-Grab Presidency Reaches New Heights (bold added).
  • I recently heard of some new protein-heavy martini, which a comedian said tastes like a podcast. (My social medium friend Jeremy Abel, a fellow Hoosier.)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Impeach Trump

As I reviewed my latest draft weekday blog, I found it full of politics and war. So I decided to hold back everything else for another post and to put a trigger warning on this one: I give Donald J. Trump and his minions no quarter.

Missing a functioning democracy

[I]n those tense, polarized months of 2002 and 2003, we had hashed out the case for war thoroughly beforehand, as democracies do. A thousand op-eds bloomed; critical votes were taken in the Congress; political careers were weighed in the balance; and Colin Powell went to the UN to present the “evidence.”

Seems like a wholly different world, doesn’t it?

Come with me a little further back in time to the Persian Gulf War of 1991. That was a war started by Saddam Hussein, not us. How did we go about a new war in the Middle East back then? Well, we had another big public debate, another trip to the UN, and then another vote in the Congress. It was closer than we remember: just 52-47 in the Senate (with one abstention). We then went to war with a very precise aim — ending the occupation of Kuwait — after amassing a coalition of 35 countries, and did so to cement the status of international law in the post-Cold War world.

Seems like another planet, doesn’t it?

And there’s a reason for that. We had a functioning liberal democracy then, a constitutional system that was imperfectly but actually followed, a responsible president, and international law on our side.

Today, we have precisely none of the above.

We’ve had no debate; we’ve had no search for international support or allies; we’ve ignored the UN entirely; the Congress didn’t debate, let alone vote, in advance; and the American people were told about the war after it had already begun. All of this renders this war illegal and unconstitutional and outrageous, and the fact that most people have just accepted it is proof, if we still needed it, that the extinction-level event I predicted in 2016 is now well in the rearview mirror.

In plain English, this is what is in front of our nose: a corrupt, deranged monarch pursuing an illegal and immoral war primarily to benefit a foreign country. This war makes us a textbook case of how democracies stagger into tyranny and endless war.

Andrew Sullivan

Not reassuring

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an advocacy organization dedicated to assuring church-state separation in the armed forces, reported yesterday that it has received numerous complaints from military personnel that, in briefings, their commanders are describing the military operations against Iran in Christian eschatological terms. According to a report on Substack by journalist Jonathan Larsen:

A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing Monday that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” according to a complaint by a non-commissioned officer.

From Saturday morning through Monday night, more than 110 similar complaints about commanders in every branch of the military had been logged by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF).

The complaints came from more than 40 different units spread across at least 30 military installations, the MRFF told me Monday night.

Religion Clause: Advocacy Group Says Military Commanders Are Describing Iran Operations in Christian Biblical Terms.

I thought dispensationalist bullcrap was dying, but I guess the self-styled Secretary of War didn’t get the message.

Politics as Ritual Humiliation

Republicans … continue to practice politics as a form of ritual humiliation for the remains of the old guard, compelling Sen. John Cornyn to stand as an equal to Ken Paxton, the morally depraved and intellectually vacant grotesque who currently serves as attorney general of Texas. Sen. Cornyn barely topped Paxton in the three-man primary and now must face him again in a runoff.

Some Democrats have in mind the success Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer and his allies had—and continue to have—meddling in Republican primary elections to elevate extremists and kooks (more extreme and kookier than the Republican average, I mean) on the grounds that such nut-cutlets are easier to beat in general elections, and quietly are talking up the idea of working to help secure the GOP nomination for Paxton.

Kevin D. Williamson

The bellicose through-line from neocons to Trump

The best essay for understanding right-wing support for Donald Trump’s war against Iran was published in National Review in 2023, at the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion. Written by Tanner Greer, a conservative writer and China analyst, it argued that the official populist repudiation of George W. Bush and neoconservatism masked a deep continuity between the Iraq-era conservative mainstream and the Trump-era new right.

…

The famous quote from a Bush official about how “when we act, we create our own reality” directly anticipated the Trump-era belief that “you can just do things.”

…

[T]he idea that America can go into a rough neighborhood, hit our enemies hard, kill some of their leaders and force them to RESPECT OUR HEGEMONY is not some brilliant innovation of the based Trump era. It was the dominant right-wing perspective on the Iraq war (and, indeed, sometimes a centrist perspective as well), especially in the run-up to the invasion, with democracy promotion very much a minor theme.

Ross Douthat

Barbarism nukes nihilism

In liberating Western Europe and Asia, the United States military for its part firebombed German cities into virtual nonexistence. Then, on the feast of Christ’s Holy Transfiguration (August 6) in 1945, it annihilated a hundred thousand unarmed Japanese civilians at Hiroshima with the dropping of a single atom bomb. Unperturbed by the unprecedented carnage, America dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki three days later. Defeating the most nihilistic powers to threaten Christendom since the Mongol invasions provoked, in turn, acts of barbarity.

John Strickland, The Age of Nihilism

His own morality

When asked in January by the New York Times “if there were any limits on his global powers,” President Trump responded: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

I’m afraid those are the only constraints on Trump’s use of nuclear weapons in Iran.

Jack Goldsmith, Trump, Iran, Nuclear Weapons.

Would it be rude to say I’ve been unimpressed with Trump’s personal morality?

Funnies

The “targeted strike” in Iran

When I hear people saying that the U.S. is not fighting a war against Iran I find myself remembering Rex Mottram and the priest charged with catechizing him: 

“Yesterday I asked him whether Our Lord had more than one nature. He said: ‘Just as many as you say, Father.’ Then again I asked him: ‘Supposing the Pope looked up and saw a cloud and said ‘It’s going to rain’, would that be bound to happen?’ ‘Oh, yes, Father.’ ‘But supposing it didn’t?’ He thought a moment and said, “I suppose it would be sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it.’” 

I suppose what’s happening now in Iran is merely a targeted strike, only we’re too sinful to see it.

(Alan Jacobs, political Mottramism)

Obituaries

Every day, a shabbily dressed man pauses at the same newsstand to scan the front pages. He then moves on without buying anything. At last the news seller confronts him.

“I know times are tough, but you must be able to afford at least one single newspaper.”

“I don’t need to buy the whole paper. I only care about the obituaries.”

“You do need to buy the paper, because the obituaries are in the back pages.”

“Not the one I’m looking for. That one will be right up front.”

David Frum

Shorts

  • Pete Hegseth is “something between an excitable morning TV anchor and the rooster who thought he brought the dawn. ‘We’re playing for keeps.’ ‘We’re punching them while they’re down.’ He brags about our ‘lethality.’ Stop talking like that! Don’t feed the stereotypes, don’t tempt the gods.” (Peggy Noonan)
  • Trump’s Department of Justice tacitly admits that it is too corrupted to withstand ethical inquiry.
  • Cheering for epistemic humility gets you no television interviews, no requests for op-eds, and no invitations to conferences. … But in the early phase of a war, above all, it should be the prudent observer’s battle cry. (Eliot Abrams)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Second Sunday of Lent, 2026

We are not alone

Paradise is closed (vs. 3:24) but God never forsakes mankind, providing us with a means of survival through birth, growth, and human labor (vs. 4:2). He exposes sin in all its vicious ugliness and deadliness – and yet, to prevent despair, God also discloses that His image remains within us. Despite sin, the grace of God abounds.

Dynamis devotional for March 2, reflecting on Genesis 3:21-4:7.

I mention this to contradict the (prevalent? After learning that dispensationalism is waning, I realize I’ve lost touch with America’s religious notions) idea that God cursed Adam, Eve and their descendants because of sin. It’s not humans God curses. You can look that up.

God does not withdraw His blessing from us despite our expulsion from Paradise, nor on account of our sinfulness and the consequent distortion of God’s likeness within us. We hear of God’s continuing love for us “while we were still sinners” (Rom 5:8) in this morning prayer to the Holy Trinity: “Because of the abundance of Thy goodness and long suffering, Thou was not wroth with us, slothful and sinful as we are; neither hast Thou destroyed us in our transgressions, but in Thy compassion raised us up as we lay in despair, that at dawn we might sing the glories of Thy Majesty.”

Dynamis devotional for 3/5/26.

Returning from Schism

I had quite lost track of this gem-of-a-blog:

I have come to see that the biggest difference of all—and for some the biggest hurdle to true interior conversion—was our different understandings of the Church itself.

Orthodoxy’s ecclesiology is dramatically different from that of everyone … in the Protestant world, and unless this difference is understood and embraced, conversions will be incomplete and half-baked at best. It is important, in other words, that the former erroneous ecclesiology of Protestant converts be decisively dismantled. If it is left intact the door of apostasy from Orthodoxy may be left invitingly ajar.

What is this erroneous ecclesiology? In a word Protestantism regards “the Church” as the conglomeration of all Trinitarian denominations.

…

Given the problems afflicting the western church in the medieval period following its schism from the Orthodox east, one understands the insistence of the Protestant Reformers that separation from the papal west was imperative. The early Reformers regarded the Pope as the eschatological Antichrist, and this could not help but make schism from the papal church an urgent necessity. Nonetheless the ultimate result was the acceptance of schism as a defining feature of the Protestant churches. That is, schism from the papal church was accepted as normal and necessary, for the papal church (they thought) was not the true Church, but Babylon the Great, the Mother of harlots and the abominations of the earth (Revelation 17:5). For them the choice seemed to be either schism or apostasy.

Protestantism thus gradually came to lose the primitive Christian horror of schism.

What the Fathers decried as schism is now regarded as normal church growth. So long as the new church does not make a point of denying the Trinity, it remains a part of the una sancta.

…

Orthodoxy regards the Protestant denominations (and, come to that, our Roman Catholic friends as well) as in schism from the one, united, and indivisible Church. The root ecumenical problem therefore is not simply difference of doctrine, but schism. The Orthodox believe that they are the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church confessed in the Creed. Converts to Orthodoxy are not only invited to agree with its teaching, but to join its family. In converting to Orthodoxy they are not simply joining a different denomination, but returning from schism.

Fr. Lawrence Farley, The Necessary Revolution.

(Yes, this means among other things that I detest the insouciant journalistic trope, when dealing with church history, that the Orthodox Church broke from the Roman Catholic Church.)

Liturgies of the Wild

(I finished Martin Shaw’s Liturgies of the Wild this week. At the request of a “friend” on my social medium, I summarized it and now share that with you. Nobody ever taught me how to write a proper book review, and this is a book that evokes as much or more than it tutors, so I hope I achieved an evocative portrait of a book full of evocation, if not a book review proper).

Shaw was raised as a Baptist in Great Britain, but wandered off and had no institutional or ideational connection to any kind of Christianity. He was converted/reverted roughly five years ago, ending up Eastern Orthodox.

There’s a fair amount in the book about his “reversion” (my word, not his) but very little about the distinctly Orthodox shape it took. To my relief, there’s no effort to tutor the reader in Christian doctrine:

After a few months he offers some advice: Stop reading for a bit. Orthodoxy is first for the body not the intellect. That’ll come quite naturally. Stay focused on the Encounter, not the theology. Stay focused on the Presence not the history. There’s nothing wrong with study, but don’t rush there too quickly.

Instead:

This is a book that rescues lost stories. Many come from the fairy-tale and mythic traditions of the world, relegated these last hundred years to children’s books or a therapist’s couch.

Shaw rescues those lost stories under 13 rubrics, each a chapter:

  1. On Thrownaway Stories
  2. On Bones
  3. On Initiation.
  4. On Death.
  5. On Passivity.
  6. On Passion.
  7. On Prayer.
  8. On Guilt.
  9. On Envy
  10. On Dream.
  11. On Limit.
  12. On Evil.
  13. On Praise Making.

Then an epilogue: On the Ancient Good.

I can’t say I have “effable” takeaways because that doesn’t seem to be how stories and myths work:

It’s no good to go chasing after meaning as an abstraction; meaning comes in the doing of things … There are robbers stealing the horses of your imagination: Kick them out. This book has been full of hints as to how to do that. If I’m too explicit you will be left with a pamphlet not a story.

But I’m glad to have read it, and I think it’s the kind of book I may reread periodically, especially because we have thrown away so many stories and it’s not an easy job to get them back in a way that’s integral to our gut-level worldview.

Tradition

Protestant: Tradition X is wrong because nobody even mentions it until the Nth century.

Orthodox: How do you know that? Don’t you mean that we have no surviving written records of Tradition X until the Nth Century? That’s not the same thing, y’know.

Just sayin’.

Religion

If you pick up a translation of almost any ancient text of appreciable length, chances are you will find the term “religion” somewhere in the translation. There is also no shortage of books on the topic of this or that “ancient religion.” It is no wonder, then, that many people have the impression that the modern notion of religion is present in our ancient sources.

Brent Nongbri, Before Religion

Orthocardia

Put simply, if the primary American divide is between right and left, then [Texas Democrat U.S. Senate nominee James] Talarico isn’t that interesting. There’s a long history of progressive religious activism in the United States, just as there is a long history of conservative religious activism. White evangelicals might be overwhelmingly Republican, but American Christians are remarkably diverse politically, and we’ve been arguing with one another for a long time.

Yet if the primary American divide is between decent and indecent, then the equation changes. Talarico shines.

Or, to put it another way, Talarico is one of the few openly Christian politicians in the United States who acts like a Christian, and by acting like a Christian he reveals a profound contrast with so many members of the MAGA Christian movement that’s dominated American political life for 10 years.

…

It does really matter whether a politician is pro-life or pro-choice, but there is no spiritual or political scenario where you can abandon Christian virtue for the sake of the alleged greater good, and if a Christian politician abandons Christian virtue, then Christian believers should abandon him or her.

David French, James Talarico Is a Christian X-Ray (shared link because there’s a lot more stuff worth considering)

Ontology, not morality

The beatitudes have a single purpose, to help humans on their path to theosis. They are not about humanly conceived morality or about behaving properly. They have a deeper, ontological meaning.

Kyriacos C. Markides, The Mountain of Silence (hyperlink added).

This evokes one of my favorite aphorisms from Fr. Stephen Freeman: Christ did not come to make bad men good but to make dead men live.

Postscript

[W]e … live in a democratized world. We challenge walls of every sort and shout approvingly whenever they come tumbling down. In a strange manner of speaking, democracy is the maximization of narcissism. Where there are no walls, everything is me and mine.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

As the current national government explicitly exults in its “strength,” “force,” and “power,” I’m very glad to be in a church where every Sunday we sing the Beatitudes, which tell us the way blessedness works.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Thursday, March 5

I seem to be publishing more frequently. That’s at least partly because I hate to write something and then have it obsoleted by, say, a 2 am Truth Social Administration reversal. Better obsoleted after I publish.

Truth and Facticity

I recall, as a High School Senior, giving a metaphorical side-eye to our English teacher, fresh out of college, barely 3 years older than us (because he flew through college), somehow distinguishing truth from fact.

I was having none of it, and began to suspect that he was unsound (this was, for those who don’t recall my life story, an evangelical Christian school). Squishy non-factual “truths” clearly were an oxymoronic slippery slope (though “slippery slope” wasn’t yet in common coinage so far as I can recall).

These days, it feels as if I’m mostly interested in supra-factual truths: myths, poetry, tall tales generally. Before there was Iain McGillchrist, there was Michael Polanyi, and then, if not earlier but undetected, the spell of fact had been broken.

I’ve joked that my gravestone should read “Darn! Just when I almost had it all figured out!” I’m still reading as if I’ll figure it all out some day, but “it” is now rarely popularized treatments of science, or political polemics, or even “theology” in a cataphatic key.

Iran war

My spirit animal writes on Iran

Meanwhile, the best thing I’ve seen on our war on Iran so far is from center-left Damon Linker: Zero Cheers for Trump’s Regime Change War. That was true when I wrote it Monday or Tuesday and it’s still true.

Linker and I had similar breaks with the GOP, but he wised up 22 months or so before I did:

  1. He broke with the GOP over the Iraq war, which he opposed from before the onset and ended center-left. I thought that Bush was under a regrettable political necessity, wrought by 9/11, to do something big and hostile in the Middle East.
  2. I didn’t break until Dubya pledged in his second inaugural address to eradicate tyranny from the world. I ended on the center-right, if only because I’m very concerned about the insanity I’d be associated with if I were further right.

I find an awful lot of wisdom in what Linker has to say.

An explanation of the war

President Metamucillini can’t give a consistent account of our objectives in Iran, but our co-belligerent did:

A senior Israeli military official said Israel’s objective was to “dismantle the regime’s military infrastructure, including the IRGC” as well as Iranian nuclear sites, military production facilities and space and cyber capabilities. “We’re preparing for several long weeks,” the official said. They said the “third phase” of the war was under way. That followed a first phase that consisted of deadly opening strikes in Tehran on Saturday targeting the Iranian leadership, followed by a second phase of “100 hours” focused on destroying ballistic missile, drone and air-defence capabilities. A former senior Israeli official who is familiar with the current war plans warned that “this will take time . . . There is a lot of work to be done. Iran is huge.”

Financial Times via John Ellis News Items for March 5. Note that the Israeli official does not mention regime change, though dismantling the IRGC would come pretty close to that.

The Free Press and The Dispatch

I am a charter subscriber to both the Free Press and the Dispatch. I’m not giving up on either of them, but it seems to me, at least this morning after a weekend flurry of Free Press articles on our Israel-aligned attack on Iran, that the Free Press has a stableful of clever contributors with prominent names while the less prominent folks at the Dispatch not too infrequently achieve something wise or at least wisdom-adjacent.

We’ll see if that impression sticks. It may just be a side-effect of the Free Press covering so many things that do not interest me. It seems almost flighty, nerve-wracking. Maybe that’s because I’m trying to cut back on news consumption.

Sissy boys

As an adult, I vowed to help create a world where sissy boys like me could find space in society to be themselves, without any pressure to change—a goal that still feels urgent today. What I know now is that gender nonconformity didn’t disqualify me from being male. Effeminate boys, however atypical, are a natural variation of their own sex. The notion that they are really girls is anything but progressive.

My childhood experiences make me skeptical about pediatric gender medicine today. In many kids who grow up to be gay, gender nonconformity manifests long before overt same-sex attraction does. Yet from peers, from social media, and even from some school districts’ teaching material, kids learn simplistic lessons that equate gender nonconformity with gender dysphoria—in essence, If you act and dress like a girl, you are one. In recent years, many doctors and hospitals have been willing to provide puberty blockers and gender-related hormone treatments to minors after only the briefest evaluation of each patient’s circumstances, and LGBTQ activists have cheered the lack of gatekeeping.

Ben Appel. I highly recommend this article if you’re unsettled about “LGBT” issues. Appel has been through, and thought through, a lot, with a personal authority I lack. (That doesn’t mean I agree with everything he, a clever writer, says.)

Some of those gender nonconforming kids grow up to be gender nonconforming straight adults, too. Tomboys aren’t all lesbians; sissy boys aren’t all gay. It’s the flip side of the macho guy hidden in the closet.

The assumption that they are all LGBs of some sort is a subset of stereotyping. Stereotypes arise for a reason, but they’re not infallible guides. We probably can’t function without them, but they can do a lot of harm, too. Being a sometimes-thoughtful American, I’m thinking foremost of racial stereotypes in the harmful category, but sexual stereotypes are in the frame, too.

I haven’t sorted through that beyond musing that (1) we must resist unjust stereotypes and (2) our inevitable failures are part of why we need grace — from God and between one another.

That’s right, I’m not from Texas

I lived in Texas briefly, and I liked it. My inlaws lived in Texas briefly. I have a brother and some of his descendants settled in Texas, not briefly.

But I’m glad I don’t live in Texas now:

“The correct strategy for any candidate is to tie yourself as closely to President Trump as possible,”Rice University political science professor Mark Jones told TMD. “We can expect the Paxton campaign to really hit him [Cornyn] hard on this … that he’s insufficiently conservative, and that his track record has not always been nearly as supportive of President Trump as Ken Paxton’s record.”

Jones told TMD that while “Paxton has been a die-hard Trump supporter from the very beginning, Cornyn has ebbed and flowed” in his support for Trump. The Cornyn campaign has taken steps to address this, such as flagging that he votes in line with the White House 99 percent of the time. But Paxton—who appealed the 2020 election results to the Supreme Court, seeking to throw out electoral votes from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, based on Trump’s spurious claims of voter fraud—has worked to position himself as the authentic MAGA option.

…

“Republican primary voters are very much aware of his legal baggage,” but they “discount it pretty heavily as partisan,” Southern Methodist University political science professor Cal Jillison told TMD. “They know that he has ethical and legal baggage, but they see him as a knife fighter, and that’s what they want.”

Peter Gattuso, James P. Sutton, Ross Anderson, The Texas Primaries.

So why does this make me glad I don’t live in Texas?

  1. It sounds like Texans don’t know there’s a difference between following Trump and being a conservative.
  2. Although Paxton and Cornyn will have a runoff election in May, in a sane state a corrupt knife-fighting Trumpist would not have come close enough to a proven conservative to force a runoff.

But what do I know? I’m not from Texas.

Thumbnail Geek autobiography

For a guy of my advance years, I’m a bit of a geek. Oh, I long ago gave us being my lawfirm’s tech guy, and left the Microsoft cosmos at the office when I retired to my cozy Appleworld.

But as I typed a Markdown file recently, I had a flashback to my former bafflement with the idea of hyperlinks, and trying to figure out what they’d be useful for (versus a cute useless parlor trick).

I remember, earlier, standing slack-jawed at the Novell booth at the ABA’s Technology in the Practice of Law show/conference in Boston, in 1988, wondering why in the world anyone would need to connect computers to one another. (I went to Boston that year with a TRS0-80 Model 100 for daytime note-taking and a 16-pound NEC Multispeed HD luggable for evening processing — which ironically required a primitive connection between computers).

Now it’s AI I don’t understand, only this time I’m reassured that nobody understands it, and bummed that everybody’s fearful about it.

When you believe in things
You don’t understand
Then you suffer
Superstition ain’t the way

(Wonder, Stevie, Superstition, 1972)

What ultimately made me back off may have been that questions arose faster than I could find answers and I decided to leave it to guys who figured out those things for a living, focusing on what I did for a living.

I still have impulses, like glancing longingly at Linux, but I’ve learned to stop at loving glances most of the time.

Now, I’ve got to go figure out some more of the settings on my new Android-based e-reader. It’s not like iOS you know.

Unitary Executives

Listening to the March 3 Advisory Opinions podcast, I agree with Sarah and David that the current occupant of the White House doesn’t justify altering “Unitary Executive Theory,” but the occupant being Donald J. Trump instead of George Washington (the president when Article II Section 1 was adopted) does focus the mind on a question:

  1. Was and is the strong Unitary Executive Theory wrong?; or
  2. Is the strong Unitary Executive Theory right, and we must simply rely on impeachment if we continue electing, ummmm, less than optimally stable and conscientious Presidents?

I’m increasingly leaning toward strong Unitary Executive Theory being wrong, neat and tidy though it be. I also confess that if someone sane were in the White House exercising strong Unitary Executive Theory, fewer articles would have been written revisiting it (here, for instance) and I would have been less eager to read them.

Routed

Speaking of unstable and unfaithful Presidents, Team Trump has fled the federal courts, tail between its legs, on one of its earliest and most egregious outrages: the effort to intimidate the entire legal profession by punishing firms who employ lawyers who sometime or other were adverse to Donald J. Trump (shared link).

The judge overseeing Perkins Coie’s case, Beryl Howell, said the executive order “sends little chills down my spine,” later writing that the administration had sent a clear message, “Lawyers must stick to the party line, or else.” The orders, she wrote, were “an unprecedented attack” on foundational constitutional principles.

And this from the New York Times Editorial Board:

The larger goal of the executive orders was chilling. The president attacked a bedrock principle of the law, which is that everybody deserves legal representation. He sought to frighten lawyers from representing people who had the temerity to criticize him. By extension, he sought to frighten any Americans who might criticize him.

Fighting the executive orders took courage, and the four firms deserve praise and gratitude for standing up to the president. They all risked losing clients and even having their firms collapse. Nine other firms folded and struck deals intended to mollify the president.

Pre-publication “update”: maybe not.

Shorts

  • Peace means the ascent from simple coexistence to co-operation and common creativity among countries and nations. (Mikhail Gorbachev via Economist World in Brief)
  • SOTU
    • Most of the people I know declined to watch Trump’s State of the Union remarks. They’re not living in denial. They’re preserving their sanity for better days. (Frank Bruni)
    • I agreed wholeheartedly with a few of Trump’s [SOTU]comments. “What a difference a president makes.” Truest words he has ever spoken. “Nobody can believe what they’re watching.” I nodded so hard I’m pretty sure I fractured one of my cervical vertebrae. (Frank Bruni)
  • I have been thinking about existence lately. In fact, I have been so full of admiration for existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly. (Marilynne Robinson)
  • The tide has so turned on adolescent “gender confirmation” hormones and surgeries, a madness and abdication of adult responsibility that long horrified me, that I don’t even read all the latest news items and commentary about the return to sanity.
  • There is no great performance — not even a theatrical one whose surface is, by design, artifice — that doesn’t have truthfulness at its core. The search for truth is an artist’s life’s work. (Jonathan Biss, Music, at Least, Doesn’t Lie)
  • There were planning Ghosts who implored them to dam the river, cut down the trees, kill the animals, build a mountain railway, smooth out the horrible grass and moss and heather with asphalt. (C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce. The “Ghosts” were hell-dwellers on a day trip to heaven.)
  • They took paradise and put up a parking lot. (Joni Mitchell)
  • Beauty will save the world. (Dostoevsky)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Monday March 2

A keeper

Damon Linker discusses (shared link) the debates among Right illiberals, not nut-picking but citing scholars and a Notre Dame Republican student group.

Then he puts his finger on the key question they disagree about:

The question is whether the country today is actually facing a threat dire enough to justify or excuse otherwise unjustifiable or inexcusable acts. Are we facing a genuine threat to our continued existence as a country? Determining the answer boils down to judgment.

Starting at least with Michael Anton’s 2016 “Flight 93 Election” essay, there are plenty on the right excusing unjustifiable or inexcusable acts on the premise that the Democrats are an “existential threat.” I don’t believe them, and if I did it’s no longer clear to me that I would take the illiberal Right’s side in the fight. There’s a lot of evidence that they’re a bigger threat than the Democrats.

I plan to revisit Linker’s essay at least once; I’m not sure I’ve sucked all the juice from it yet.

The first thing the communists do when they take over is to systematize snitching

When I was living, fairly briefly, in Oklahoma 50 years ago, we heard not only the usual “first thing the communists do when they take over is,” but an interesting variant.

The usual, of course, was “outlaw guns.” The variant was “outlaw cock-fighting.” I’m not kidding. I do not claim that the variant was common or held by a substantial number of Okies, but it was there.

The marks of authoritarianism and totalitarianism are debated, but I suggest that one of them is recruiting people to snitch on each other even about trivial deviations from the government’s line. Kids reporting to teachers naughty things their parents or siblings said, for instance.

Making due allowance for his youth at the time and signs of subsequent growth, it nevertheless is an authoritarian blot on the late Charlie Kirk’s legacy that one of his early Turning Point USA initiatives was Professor Watch, a website for student to snitch on their professors.

If I were more obsessive about the dangers from MAGAworld, I would keep a list of the dubious stuff TPUSA has done since Kirk’s death, like the All-American Halftime Show in 2026. (That, at least, was not clearly authoritarian, but it was petty as hell.)

For now, suffice that one of TPUSA’s earliest initiatives was a tool of authoritarian wannabes.

Beating a dead(ish) horse

Wokeness is often thought to be a form of virtue signalling.  This is subtly wrong, for it is more often a kind of status signalling.  The wokist wants to be seen as belonging to “the right kind of people.”  He drapes himself with wokeness the same way that in another day and age people paraded their memberships in prestigious clubs, or that today they flaunt the brands and styles of shoes and clothing that they wear.  If ethics comes into the matter at all, it comes in not via the thought “I would never do that,” but via the thought “I’m not the kind of person who would do that.”  You know, the deplorables.

I am not suggesting that such a person is aware of his craving for status.  Very few people are fully aware of their own motives.  In a society which professes to believe in equality, and pretends to despise snobbery, it is hard for a snob who knows he is a snob to think well of himself; therefore he has to convince himself that he isn’t a snob.  With its faux concern for The People (most of whom have no interest whatsoever in the cause of woke), wokeness is a convenient way to do that.  My very expensive jeans must have holes in them.

J Budziszewski

Budziszewski’s not wrong, but a parallel takedown of MAGA vice-signallers couldn’t be all that hard. I’m not a pas d’ennemis á droite kind of guy, but I’m not going to take the time to write it — only to point out that the Right has unclean hands of its own. Do you have eyes to see that or are you blinkered?

We need to “get out” more

A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

C.S. Lewis, Learning in War-Time, from Weight of Glory

Incommensurable

[O]ne is compelled to admire a man of such verbal agility as not only to conceal from his readers and audiences the shallowness of his own thought, but to persuade them that in admiring his work they were giving evidence of their own intelligence as well. I do not say that Shaw could have succeeded alone, without the more plodding and laborious minds with which he associated himself; but by persuading lowbrows that they were high-brows and that high-brows must be Socialist, he contributed greatly to the prestige of Socialism. But between the influence of a Bernard Shaw or an H.G. Wells, and the influence of a Coleridge or a Newman, I can conceive no common scale of measurement.

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot on George Bernard Shaw, inter alia.

Manipulation in a good cause

Ten years in, and Democrats still don’t know how to handle Donald Trump. He used them as foils and they allowed it, sitting there snarling, at points screaming. Part of how to handle him is if he tries to manipulate you into doing the right thing—if, for instance, he challenges you to stand in respect for a mother mourning the murder of her daughter—you put aside that you’re being manipulated and stand. Because it is right to show human sympathy and regard. The thing to do is look better than Mr. Trump, not worse. You say: My base demands coldness. Then get a new base. If you can’t, leave before you are reduced to a soulless husk of the eager, happy person who walked into that chamber a decade ago.

Peggy Noonan, The Oprah State of the Union.

The same advice could and should be given to Republicans when their one-man “base” in the White House demands dishonor of them.

Regime Change

As Americans, we do not need regime change abroad; we need it at home. We must escape the ghastly bloodlust and other demonic impulses of the Democratic and Republican parties. Men and women of goodwill must unite in solidarity to build an alternative to evil.

Jack Ternan, Chair of the National Committee of the American Solidarity Party

Shorts

  • Two tongue-in-cheek descriptions of The Bulwark: “Pro market, anti-polio”; “The capitalist wing of Antifa.”
  • “…preposterously self-satisfied, preternaturally nasty and profoundly delusional …” (Frank Bruni’s top-line characterization of Trump’s 2026 SOTU)
  • I don’t know who coined the expression “Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining,” but it fits the overall tone of the speech. (Bret Stephens’ top-line characterization of Trump’s 2026 SOTU)
  • That’s what’s nice about politics, Yevgeny: anything that makes people believe in power actually increases that power. (Giuliano da Empoli and Willard Wood, The Wizard of the Kremlin.)
  • No, it’s not a conspiracy. It’s much worse—it’s a consensus. (R.R. Reno on “the progressive takeover of higher education … or DEI’s reign over corporate America”)

I had another few items, but after the USA and Israel attached Iran, they could have been too easily misunderstood.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.