Nagasaki plus 81 years

81 years ago today

Today is the 81st anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki.

Prior to the bomb exploding over St. Mary’s Urakami Cathedral on 11:02 AM, Nagasaki was the most Christian city in Japan. The Nagasaki cathedral was the largest Christian cathedral in the Orient.

Unwelcome Truths for Church and State Concerning the Bombing of Nagasaki August 9, 1945

Vainglory

I have heard Christians insist on concealing their gifts and talents for the sake of their humility. We must be careful that we do not bury our talent in the earth (see Matt. 25:14–30) in the name of false modesty.

Vassilios Papavassiliou, Thirty Steps to Heaven

But …:

So often we want everything we do for the Church, every good deed, every effort we make in Christ’s name, to be praised, announced, and publicized.

Ibid.

and …:

Vainglory puts us on stage, behaving as if we were professional actors, performing to win applause from people and to avoid having them walk out. It has its victims constantly checking on the responses they’re getting from the audience. All that matters is getting applause from those for whom they’re performing. They are keenly sensitive to the expressions of others toward them, and to what others may be thinking about them.

Dee Pennock, God’s Path to Sanity

If you’re getting the feeling that vainglory is insidious, you’re right.

Far as the curse is found

One assumption I’ll invite you to rethink is the popular view that the locus of redemption is primarily individual persons. We will find that the redemption wrought by Christ stretches as far as the curse is found—which is to all of creation, including the natural world and the products of human creativity.

Robin Phillips and Stephen De Young, Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation

Traditioning until Christ be formed in you

I have had a rich experience in the work of nurturing the Orthodox way of life with converts. There are aspects that include teaching and nurturing a way of understanding and seeing – “traditioning” Orthodox doctrine. Of far greater and more lasting import, however, is something that only comes with time. I have seen this in myself as well as in others. I would best describe it as the movement of external forms into internal reality. St. Paul says this when speaking to a young Galatian community:

“My little children, I labor in birth again until Christ be formed in you,” (Gal. 4:19).

He can write to them, repeating the arguments and teachings that they have heard before, but nothing is settled until that life (which is Christ) is actually formed within them.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

Our parish growth has been so rapid that yesterday we received a man and two of his young children, none of whom I’d met and whose names I didn’t know. It’s not the first time. So at the little reception afterward, I made it a point to sit with him, introduce myself and hear a bit of his story.

It turns out that he’s on the cusp of his 30th birthday, and apparently is in a military reserve unit. He went to the Chaplain and said “I’m becoming Orthodox, so update my records.” The chaplain asked if he wanted an exemption for a long beard, and this newbie, bless him, responded “No. I’m not looking for any accommodation. I just think this is where I’ll grow most spiritually.”

Like Christ formed in his heart, I think.

Philosophy vs. the evangelical ethos

Philosophers clearly must bracket (as they say) the distinctive elements of the evangelical ethos if they are to make progress as philosophers. That is, philosophers might approve of Christian activism, but their job is contemplation. They cannot afford to be intuitive about their intellectual commitments, for the essence of philosophy is excruciating self-consciousness about presuppositions and assumptions. Neither have the Christian philosophers practiced the populist or biblicist styles that defined much of earlier evangelical thought. Their work, by its nature, has always been relatively esoteric, and so not amenable to the populist politicking that looms so large for evangelicals in other intellectual spheres. The concerns of American Christian philosophers with the Bible have been general and historical ….

Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

If the shoe fits …

[E]vangelicalism is not so much a religion as a series of fast-moving personality cults.

Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God.

I wish someone other than Frank Schaeffer had written this, but when he’s right, he’s right, and I don’t plagiarize.

Only wonder understands anything.

St. Gregory of Nyssa

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.

Saturday 8/8/26

Legalia

Ten Commandments at the Statehouse?

About 25 years ago, a court order barred the monument from the Indiana Statehouse. After a shift in case law, a federal judge agreed to reopen the case in late May, setting off a renewed legal fight over whether the Ten Commandments can be returned to the Capitol’s grounds.

Gov. Mike Braun and Attorney General Todd Rokita, both Republicans, want the monument restored. They argue it reflects the nation’s history and traditions.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana opposes the move, saying it would violate the First Amendment’s religious freedom clause.

Now, the monument’s fate depends on the federal court system’s appetite to specify what it means to maintain a separation of church and state under modern precedent.

Cate Charron, Indianapolis Star USA TODAY NETWORK (likely paywall)

I’m oddly neutral on the display, though I would have opposed it a few decades ago. That’s what I feel. What follows is “let’s write about it to see what we think.”

I’ve never wanted to thrust Christianity of any sort, strong or debased, into the public square with government’s imprimatur. I’ve moved from opposition to neutrality, then, because I’ve lost even the muscle memory of the Ten Commandments being a key part of Christianity rightly practiced. Underlying that, I think, is that I’m a Realist on the Ten Commandments rather than a Nominalist; the “second tablet” in particular is written on the heart, at least while the heart remains tender. Its value does not so lie in God’s sheer command that God could have as well commanded, rather than forbidden, things like murder, theft and adultery.

So I don’t see the monument as a distinctly Christian or even Judeo-Christian thing, but as an instantiation of American history and traditions, and the Ten Commandments inscribed on the monument as part of what C.S. Lewis called the Tao.

Why not support it then? Because we are, as Ross Douthat said, a nation of heretics, and the Commendments are still, as a matter of American folk-religion at least, “Christian.” My reflexive (but earned) suspicion Todd Rokita (a less blatant version of Texas’ Ken Paxton) led me circuitously to realize that the people he’s pandering to will chortle at this monument as fresh proof that we’re a “Christian nation,” because in their muscle memories the Ten Commandments are distinctively a part of Christianity rightly practiced. We’ve already got quite enough of that kind of high-sulfur Christian Nationalist coal in Newcastle.

It has happened

It was inevitable that DOJ lawyers mandated from the White House to do dumb, dishonest and disreputable things would cease getting any benefit of the doubt (in this context, “presumption of regularity”) from judges, and that inevitability has arrived. Federal Judges now challenge and even mock government lawyers’ representations to the court.

My main consolation is that there ought to be a bunch of idealistic lawyers ready to join up at the DOJ and District Attorney offices as soon as the leadership from the top is no longer trying to corrupt even the legal system. The corruption of DOJ is not a legacy that will last, I believe, hope and pray.

Now our President probably thinks that he’s just doing openly what all his predecessors have done surreptitiously, and that the courts are just picking on him. But that’s what happens when you’re 80 years old and have been pursuing personal gain and sexual conquest and limelight and power all your life: you think everyone else is just like you (only infinitely weaker).

Heck, Frodo’s one advantage over the consummately evil Sauron was that Sauron could not imagine anyone who possessed the One Ring actually seeking to destroy it and its power.

Short Circuits

I get a Friday summary of U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decisions from the Institute for Justice. Their pithy summaries can be pretty funny:

  • When you order food through apps like DoorDash, Grubhub, or Uber Eats, the app gets all sorts of useful consumer data, but the restaurant preparing the food only gets your first name, last initial, and the order contents. New York City thinks that’s unfair because of course they do, so they require the apps to share all the customer information with any restaurant that asks. The apps sue, alleging the law violates the First Amendment. Second Circuit: Correct. Concurrence: I just want to point out that the law is naked economic favoritism toward restaurants, which isn’t a substantial gov’t interest.
  • The Supreme Court has famously (and somewhat dubiously) held that the design on state-issued vanity license plates is “government speech” to which the First Amendment does not apply. But what about the character combination on vanity plates like, say, “FTP&ATF”? Fourth Circuit: Private speech to which the First Amendment applies.

Iran War

Both of the following items are via Rod Dreher. My doubts about Rod’s judgment are at an all-time high (though that may “just be me”), but he publishes so very, very much that he’s bound to get a few things right (or to quote people who get it right).

It has been a while since I filed a clipping under “New World Order,” but that’s where this one fits. We’re no longer undisputed, omnipotent top dog.

At the strategic level, it’s over and we lost

Five months into this conflict, a sober analysis reveals a truth that Washington’s foreign policy establishment refuses to stomach: America’s war against Iran has already been lost at the strategic level. Nothing we do from this point forward can reverse that outcome. All we can do now is limit the damage — or refuse to acknowledge reality and make the cost of failure worse. The roots of our strategic failure lie in a fundamental miscalculation of Iranian leverage.

Daniel L. Davis in Stars & Stripes of all places.

How our loss combines with our past wins to demean us

We are in a pickle. And because we did gain so much strength and we punished so many people in the world, and we destroyed so many civilizations in the world—I mean that—we’re now hated as much as we are looked at as being crazy. And I don’t know how you compensate for that while you try to fix enough so that at least you can go out with a fairly decent—maybe something like England went out after the ’56 Suez crisis. Not a really good example, but nonetheless it’s the end of empire. England had started—Britain had started—going down long before that. But I don’t know. I don’t know how you put this in geopolitical terms, in geostrategic terms, in inexorable power-shift terms, and deal with it with what we have in Washington right now. I don’t know how you can take it apart. He should have been impeached. He should have been relieved of his duties. He should have been frog-marched out of Washington. Indeed, he probably should be in jail, but he’s not. Which, on a lower scale, demonstrates the inadequacy of our structure right now and the feebleness of our structure, as well as its having atrophied over the 250 years it’s been in place.

Excerpt from a recent interview with Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (italics added)

Miscellany

“Cultural appropriation” is a dumb name for acknowledging indebtedness

I can choose someone from another century or continent as my creative ancestor. I can imagine myself as an heir to Dante or Miles Davis or Marcel Proust or Virginia Woolf or Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Some people will tell you that this is cultural appropriation. But I don’t think they grasp how indebted we all are to the great creators of the past. If we tried to cut ourselves off from them, we would lose all vitality and purpose in our lives. This is the most fruitful way of owning a work of art. All other ways fall far short of it.

Ted Gioia in Image Journal.

Why now this “socialist” surge

Socialism’s most enthusiastic promoters are quick and clever—comparatively well-educated, very online. Their talent lies primarily in media, having been immersed in it from birth—the internet, its apps, its entertainment and information flow. They know all about how people get and absorb a feeling, an impression; they know how to produce a sensation, as opposed to a thought. One of the great tricks in life is to have a talent suited to your times, and they do.

I am sorry to say they never strike me with their warmth, as, say, your great-uncle Billy was warm when he spoke about the Industrial Workers of the World. Today’s socialists strike me as colder, less human, fiercer and occasionally sociopathic. In general, they appear to have an idea of history rather than attachments to existing people and institutions. Most strike me not as people who love America and wish to make it better, but people ready to exploit its freedoms to build a movement that if successful would transform America’s fundamental nature. It will no longer be the freedom place but something else, and more common.

This isn’t happening in our politics only because people “hate the status quo” and “want change.” Americans always hate the status quo and want change. I believe what we’re seeing traces back to these factors:

A voter who is 25 was in grade school during the 2008 economic crash, and saw everything—frightened parents, lost jobs. In the years after, he saw bailouts and no one on Wall Street paying a price. It lessened his allegiance to the free-market economic system.

A voter who is 25 also sees AI rising, and wonders if the economy as it exists today has a place for him. Will he be able to afford a house someday? Widespread home ownership brings a feeling of investment, of stability and satisfaction. What does its absence bring?

The Cold War has receded as a living memory. The enforced communism and socialism of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact was a disaster—shortages, drabness, economic lifelessness. Censorship, secret police, all the bad things big unaccountable governments bring. That was long ago. “Socialism” now is a dream of Scandinavia—national healthcare, generous benefits, equal enjoyment of resources.

As religion recedes, politics takes its place. The young have been educated within a general framework of assumptions and language of the left—structures of power, oppressor groups, critical theory, intersectionality.

…

At a Gaullist campaign rally in 1968, [André] Malraux put his finger on a weakness of conservative economic thought. “ ‘Capitalism’ does not carry us in its heart,” he said. By inference, it’s also hard to carry capitalism in your heart. It isn’t a great belief, only an economic system. Socialism is a belief, and it summons feeling. Capitalism is a thing of reason, a disadvantage in an age of sensation.

Peggy Noonan

Peggy Noonan is a voice who generally sees humanity where others see demons. This was one of those times.

Sacrilege

I also began to understand why the American culture wars involved so many battles over sacrilege. Is a flag just a piece of cloth, which can be burned as a form of protest? Or does each flag contain within it something nonmaterial such that when protesters burn it, they have done something bad (even if nobody were to see them do it)? When an artist submerges a crucifix in a jar of his own urine, or smears elephant dung on an image of the Virgin Mary, do these works belong in art museums? Can the artist simply tell religious Christians, “If you don’t want to see it, don’t go to the museum”? Or does the mere existence of such works make the world dirtier, more profane, and more degraded?

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind.

The book has been around for a while. Do our culture wars still fit this pattern — taking offense that the other side is profaning something sacred?

What are the sacred cows of (in broad strokes) American progressives versus American conservatives these days?

Willful ignorance

It was the easiest, silliest con of all time. His story began to unravel with simple plagiarism claims, which I didn’t care about last week because all sociology professors just copy-paste their fake studies, back and forth. For me, it doesn’t matter if “A history of the London fashion scene through a transracial lens, 1914–1916” was plagiarized because it actually doesn’t matter at all. But this week things escalated: First, it looks like Arday truly just invented his research, and quite clumsily (read this from a University of Toronto professor digging through it, or this from the UK Times). Then it snowballed. People started looking into his super believable bio: He says he has autism and didn’t speak until he was 11, then at 18 he learned to read and write and went to university. Seems odd. Kind of miraculous. The claims go on. He says he did volunteer work overseas for a particular water charity (the charity says it never sends volunteers abroad). He says he ran 600 miles between Edinburgh and London in six days. Oh! Also that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days, adding that he did the last nine marathons on a broken leg. Right. Prior to his Cambridge appointment, he claimed he was a visiting professor at the University of Glasgow, Ohio State University, and an honorary professor at Durham University. All of these institutions have denied that he held such positions. The man is freestyling extracurriculars. The list goes on. Was he even a mute? How much of this is a lie? And how come I had never heard of Arday, who is apparently one of the most accomplished athletes of all time?

When people started to question all this, the defenses were robust, with a group of famous professors, politicians, and other luminaries writing indignantly: “We stand in unwavering solidarity with Professor Arday. We call on universities not only to defend academic freedom and robust scholarship, but also to confront racism wherever it manifests itself, whether overtly or through persistent attempts to discredit exceptional Black academics.” I’m not sure you want to stake all of black academics on Jason Arday and these broken-leg marathons.

Nellie Bowles

I didn’t want to pay any more attention to this story (on which I hadn’t blogged before), but the stupidity of Arday’s defenders breathed fresh life into it.

Valedictory

[W]atching this crisis unfold, I find that I’ve lost my sense of which contemporary worldview is most in need of criticism or opposition, where the good guys and bad guys are. Each major faction seems potentially dangerous, tempted toward the dark side in some unique way, contested or cross-pressured to a degree that makes me uncertain where the side of the angels really lies.

…

Once I would have imagined a valedictory essay offering some stirring brief for religious conservatism, some last foray into the territory where I was most likely to be in disagreement with my readers. But I don’t think that quite fits the moment.

Instead, I’ll express — along with incalculable gratitude to The Times itself, my colleagues and editors — a hope that I have contributed illumination. I hope my writing has added something to your understanding of America’s complexity, the world’s uncertain future and the strangeness of our times.

Ross Douthat‘s final column for the Grey Lady.

Artificial Intelligence

A conundrum

AI hasn’t made any money yet. And I’ve been hearing, repeatedly, that that new AI searches don’t automatically decrease the losses, bringing them close to a profit. That is to say, the marginal cost to the AI company of responding to another chat or project does not go down.

This is a major reason why I would not be surprised at a bursting of the AI bubble (and why I might be a NIMBY about data centers that might be left broke, empty, rusting).

The economics of this puzzled me, so I asked Claude (AI, for all my readers in the distant future after AI collapses) about it:

Most businesses improve their profit margin with additional customers until they hit a maximum. Then they must add staff or equipment or something and suffer higher marginal costs for a while in their new growth toward greater overall profits.

But I’ve been hearing that AI works differently. It sounds as if a hypothetical AI with, say, 100 users experiences more than 10% increased costs by adding 10 more customers.

Is that true? Why?

Turns out I was wrong that 10% more customers adds more than 10% costs, but it does add about 10% — not less.

I’ll very briefly quote the nut of Claude’s reason (I generally don’t quote AI):

Each inference (query) consumes GPU/TPU compute, and each unit of compute costs money. Add 10% more users making queries of similar length, and you add roughly 10% more compute cost—at least at constant hardware efficiency.

If you want more detail, go ask your own AI; this isn’t a tech blog. But maybe for you, like me, this answer’s enough for now. If you’re losing money on every sale, you can’t make up for it by higher volume.

The AI future (if AI survives the present)

I wonder sometimes how AI has changed the practice of law since my retirement.

I was always “the tech” guy within my firm’s four wall (we eventually hired more methodical outside IT support), and I might have been on AI as well.

But I hear theorizing and actual stories about AI turning its human users toward machine-like behavior — for instance, juggling multiple AI Agents (Agents are different than Chatbots) that are performing various tasks with need for human input at frequent intervals. Leaving your agent paused waiting for input is, ahem, sub-optimal.

That indeed sounds dehumanizing, but I can’t say yea or nay to it being the eventuality of AI.

Shorts

  • [I]f you ask me why I robbed an old lady, I could reply: ‘I needed the money’, ‘I had just watched a violent video’, ‘I inherited my dad’s psychopathic tendencies’, ‘I was high on crystal meth’, ‘I heard a voice tell me to do it’, ‘I was brought up in a subculture where it was considered normal to steal’, ‘the government cut my welfare payments’, ‘my serotonin levels were depleted’, and so on. What counts as a possible cause depends on the context of the question. Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things.
  • He’s gilding everything: The aging and patinated statues of D.C. are getting regilded. This pair of statues hadn’t been touched since the 1970s, and now they glow, which my Gen-Z translators tell me means shine. Seeing the results here, I’m actually surprised this wasn’t a term-one priority for Trump. By the time the man leaves office the Lincoln Memorial is going to be bedazzled. He is President Liberace, the first gay leader of this nation.(Nellie Bowles)
  • When I look at the biographies of recently-victorious “Democratic Socialist” candidates, I regain my love for the brilliant distillation “luxury beliefs.” (Tipsy)
  • Charisma can be just as repellent as it is attractive, so it usually baffles or disgusts anyone not under its thrall. (Molly Worthen, Charisma Rules the World)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

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.

Farewell, Golden Rule; G’bye, Beatitudes

To hell with the Golden Rule (and the Beatitudes, too)

I don’t look to Ezra Klein for spiritual insight. He delivered anyway. Christopher Nolan Stared Into Elon Musk’s Soul.

We’re not just teetering on postliberal; the GOP is emphatically post-Christian (or is it pre-Christian?), glorifying power and humiliation of foes. Paraphrasing the Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor, to hell with the Golden Rule:

We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time. … [W]e are in charge because we have the United States military stationed outside the country. We set the terms and conditions. We have a complete embargo on all of their oil and their ability to do commerce.

…

The United States is the power of NATO, for the United States to secure the Arctic region, to protect and defend NATO and NATO interests. Obviously, Greenland should be part of the United States.

…

We’re a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower. It is absurd that we would allow a nation in our own backyard to become the supplier of resources to our adversaries, but not to us, to hoard weapons from our adversaries, to be able to be positioned as an asset against the United States rather than on behalf of the United States.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen “Wormtongue” Miller to Jake Tapper

Sacrilege

I also began to understand why the American culture wars involved so many battles over sacrilege. Is a flag just a piece of cloth, which can be burned as a form of protest? Or does each flag contain within it something nonmaterial such that when protesters burn it, they have done something bad (even if nobody were to see them do it)? When an artist submerges a crucifix in a jar of his own urine, or smears elephant dung on an image of the Virgin Mary, do these works belong in art museums? Can the artist simply tell religious Christians, “If you don’t want to see it, don’t go to the museum”? Or does the mere existence of such works make the world dirtier, more profane, and more degraded?

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind.

The book has been around for a while. Do our culture wars still fit this pattern? I’m not sure we consider the same things sacred or sacred-adjacent.

Dare I suggest that the progressives today consider the feelings of certified victim groups (e.g., “sexual minorities”) sacred while that MAGA right increasingly considers “heritage America” so sacred that it’s sullied by the wrong sort of immigrant?

Trump Targets ‘Birth Tourism’ …

Speaking of “the wrong kind of immigrants”:

After the Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at limiting access to birthright citizenship, the Trump administration and Republican allies have focused their attention on ending “birth tourism” – that is, when “foreign nationals [travel] to the US with the purpose of giving birth.” “The Justice Department has told US attorneys’ offices and the Criminal Division to prioritize the prosecution of birth tourism schemes,” according to Bloomberg Law. “Stepped up enforcement could result in intense scrutiny of visa applicants and travelers to the US and charges for people facilitating birth tourism, former consular officials and federal prosecutors said.”

This push may reflect misplaced priorities (see below), but I have no principled problem with enforcing the law.

I just don’t think we’ve got a serious “birthright tourism” problem.

Let’s try a definition of birthright tourism: women traveling to the U.S. in order to give birth so that their child will be a U.S. citizen. Is that fair? Note that it excludes births to women who give birth while here on business, or as students, or for some other reason other than to have a citizen-child.

But Penn State researchers using comprehensive national birth data (2014-2024) calculated 5,000 to just under 10,000 births per year to women on tourist visas—which is 0.3% of all U.S. births, and surely not all women who gave birth while on tourist visas came here in order to give birth and secure birthright citizenship for their child — i.e., they weren’t “birth tourists.” Team Trump can counter with a figure of 33,000 per year, but not surprisingly, it’s a less credible figure.

Delegitimizing “legitimate politics”?

Illinois Democrat appeals corruption conviction to Supreme Court
Zach Schonfeld, The Hill

Former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, a Democrat, “ask[ed] the Supreme Court to review his corruption conviction,” according to The Hill. “The longest-serving legislative leader in U.S. history was sentenced to more than seven years in prison for using his position to financially reward himself and political associates.” “Madigan raised several arguments in his appeal, including that he didn’t act ‘corruptly,’ as is required by the federal program bribery statute.” “The novel bribery theories the government zealously pursued against Speaker Madigan stretch federal bribery law in ways that threaten to criminalize and chill lawful interactions between state and local officials and their constituents,” his lawyers wrote. The Hill noted that Madigan is “the latest in a line of elected leaders ensnared in corruption scandals who’ve taken claims to the nation’s highest court that they’re being criminally prosecuted over legitimate politics.”

Tough luck, kid

The . . . English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past . . . He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands.

And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.

Flannery O’Connor

Shorts

  • The great benefit to be derived from reading pre-modern authors is to come to realise that after all we [moderns] might have been mistaken. (Edward Feser, Aquinas)
  • Early in the war, the zoo had killed its poisonous snakes and spiders, anticipating that if their enclosures were destroyed, these creatures would pose a significantly greater hazard than, say, a fugitive koala bear. (Erik Larson, The Splendid and the Vile)
  • “It is a nasty game,” Mr. Smith said of politics. “But I figured out a long time ago that you’re either in the game or you’re out of the game, and I needed access for some of the industry issues.” (Sell the Company for $400 Million? He’s Giving It Away Instead. – The New York Times)
  • [T]here is an irony in folks who do not hesitate to call the [New York] Times “fake news” simultaneously demanding that one of their own be granted the prestige and recognition of writing for the paper [as a successor to Ross Douthat]. It’s a bit like demanding the Catholic Church appoint a Baptist bishop. (Jonah Goldberg)
  • [I]f you want to claim “The Odyssey” for your own worldview, to insist that the dominant movie of the summer is speaking directly to your concerns, the banal didacticism of Nolan’s script is unusually amenable to personalized interpretations. (Ross Douthat)
  • Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. (James Baldwin)
  • Secularism was not a neutral concept. The very word came trailing incense clouds of meaning that were irrevocably and venerably Christian. (Tom Holland, Dominion)
  • As far as the official version of events is concerned, Islamist terrorism is a response to a continuous crime against the Muslim community – a crime committed by everyone who notices that Muslim customs are in friction with the traditional social order of France. (Roger Scruton, Conservatism)
  • AI is a Swiss Army knife. It does everything and excels at nothing. / That’s exactly why it wins. The best tool is not the sharpest one, it’s the one already in your pocket. (Joroen Sangers)
  • He is the dirtiest man I have ever liked. (Igor Stravinsky of W.H. Auden)
  • “Socialism just means you’re for garbage collection.” (Ruy Teixeira describing DSA “sanewashing.”)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

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.

Onus probandi, nihil obstat, imprimatur – Tipsy goes all Latin

Onus probandi

[W]herever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position. The legitimate reformer endeavours to show that the precept in question conflicts with some precept which its defenders allow to be more fundamental, or that it does not really embody the judgement of value it professes to embody.

C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

What happened to the nihil obstat and imprimatur?

[T]he very thought of an imprimatur on the front of a book—the approbation of a bishop, allowing the book to be printed on the grounds that it contains safe doctrine—is something that drives some people almost out of their minds with indignation.

Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain It has been a very long time since I thought of the nihil obstat and the imprimatur. Do they still do that?

I’m not asking that question in the spirit of “How barbaric!”, but simply because it feels like decades since I saw one. Inasmuch as the Roman Catholic Church has no power in the US, or anywhere in the world so far as I know, to prevent publication of a book, the nihil obstat or imprimatur would serve, if used, entirely as a guide to the faithful, and I cannot object to that.

Orthodoxy and Israel

The prophecy of Isaiah 42 about Israel’s king was fulfilled in Christ and His Church, and in this it is typical of all the Old Testament passages about the Kingdom of God. However, within the last century or so, a school of thought has arisen (sometimes called “Dispensationalism”) which sees the Old Testament prophecies of Israel’s restoration fulfilled in the creation of the modern State of Israel. For this school, the “Israel” in the Old Testament prophecies refers to the Jews generally and the Zionist state in particular. … Whatever one’s sympathy for the State of Israel, it must be recognized that this school of interpretation is in flat contradiction to the apostolic view of the Old Testament prophecies. Each and every time the Old Testament prophecies are quoted by the apostles, it is in connection with Christ and His Church.

Lawrence R. Farley, The Gospel of Matthew.

I could say “this is the Orthodox agnosticism about the Israeli nation-state,” but I think that would be too narrow. Rather, the claim is that it is the Biblical view, with which claim I agree.

This do in remembrance

If recollecting Christ’s sacrifice cognitively were the only purpose of the sacrament, then we would do just as well skipping those tiny plastic cups and wafers that taste like cardboard and simply recite the Scriptures instead.

Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness

Only wonder understands anything.

St. Gregory of Nyssa

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.

The Noise Everywhere: Fauci, Punditry, and the Collapse of Public Authority

We’re on our own

The politicians lied and couldn’t be trusted, the bureaucrats lied and couldn’t be trusted, the government scientists lied about the data in front of their eyes, the national press was a propaganda machine. As much as anything, Chernobyl contributed to the toppling of the Soviet Union.

Looking back on the Covid crisis, a lot of professionals were trusted beyond the point they deserved. So were many politicians. As people on the ground in America rose up against lockdowns, closed schools, mask mandates, closed churches, they were often unheard, or heard slowly, reluctantly and disrespectfully. The medical and scientific establishment didn’t seem to be a part of the public anymore, but handling the public.

And by the end, a lot of people thought they couldn’t trust the politicians and couldn’t trust the scientists.

My fear is that next time, and there likely will be a next time, regular people will think: There’s no one to trust. We’re on our own.

That won’t be a good thing.

Peggy Noonan

Dr. Fauci takes the fifth

It’s true, of course, that pleading the Fifth isn’t proof of wrongdoing, no matter what Josh Hawley might tell you. But it’s also true that it’s a tactic that the public associates with criminal lowlifes like gangsters, or the president. Fauci will never fully recover.

…

The two lessons I gleaned from yesterday’s hearing and the right-wing commentary around it are (1) Fauci isn’t very trustworthy, and (2) if you’re forced to choose between letting him set your scientific policy and letting Republicans do it, take Fauci every time.

That’s what I meant when I said above that the hearing was a missed opportunity for populism. Having effectively discredited the expert di tutti experts, the GOP should have been teed up to assert itself as the superior choice for Americans on public health. It … did not do that.

When I say that Wednesday’s “right-wing commentary” about COVID wasn’t reassuring, I’m not talking about crank randos on social media. I’m talking about Republican lawmakers. Sen. Ron Johnson babbled at the hearing about an alleged epidemic of suicides among people who’ve been “injured” by the COVID vaccine. Rep. John McGuire complained to Newsmax that Americans had been urged to take a vaccine that includes “human fetus baby parts” when they could have simply used ivermectin instead. Then Sen. Tommy Tuberville topped both of them by accusing Fauci of having been responsible for no fewer than 9 million deaths.

Granted, not every Republican in Congress is a lunatic. But they all answer to lunatics, which is how we ended up with Bill Cassidy, M.D., feeling obliged to support the most infamous anti-vaccine advocate in the country to be head of the Department of Health and Human Services. In a declining America, you can have Fauci spearheading pandemic policy in between signing autographs—or you can have Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presiding over an unfolding disaster in American vaccine uptake with potentially dire long-term consequences. Take Fauci.

QAnon chronicler Mike Rothschild captured the absurdity of populist strains of thought about COVID with what’s at best a half-joke: “The overwhelming right-wing sentiment is that COVID was an engineered bioweapon that was also harmless. Trump overreacted to it by shutting down the country, then engineered a drive to create a vaccine that was the real bioweapon that killed millions, and it’s Joe Biden’s fault.” …

Nick Catoggio

Explaining noise

As I am writing these lines I see the following headlines on my Bloomberg: →Dow is up 1.03 on lower interest rates. →Dollar down 0.12 yen on higher Japanese surplus. and so on for an entire page. If I translate it well, the journalist claims to provide an explanation for something that amounts to perfect noise. A move of 1.03 with the Dow at 11,000 constitutes less than a 0.01% move. Such a move does not warrant an explanation. There is nothing there that an honest person can try to explain; there are no reasons to adduce. But like apprentice professors of comparative literature, journalists being paid to provide explanations will gladly and readily provide them. The only solution is for Michael Bloomberg to stop paying his journalists for providing commentary.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness.

This doesn’t seem unrelated to the two Covid-related items, above. The public wants explanations and reassurances. There’s some cynical benefit in giving the public what it wants as Fauci did and the financial press continues to do.

AI pundits?

And then, finally, there’s AI. My contempt for generative AI could not be more thorough. I’ve tried to withhold judgment about it while I wait to see what becomes of it. But I’ve now seen enough to conclude it really will strip away an essential element of our humanity if we let it. Writing is a quintessentially human activity; it’s how we communicate our thoughts with one another. It’s an art that takes considerable skill to do well. Why would we seek to relieve ourselves of it? Writing isn’t a burden, any more than thinking is. Yes, it can be hard, but most worthwhile endeavors are. Accomplishing it despite that challenge is part of the reward of undertaking it in the first place.

Yet at a formal level, writing an op-ed isn’t that difficult. Your thesis statement (or “nutgraf,” as editors call it) goes near the top, preceded by an introduction that frames it artfully. Then come the arguments and supporting evidence, plus some examination of contrary arguments (“to be sure” paragraphs), followed by a concession or two and lots of pushback designed to knock down the strawmen. And that’s assuming the writer even aims to do that thing I noted above, where he or she makes an effort to persuade. If the goal, instead, is to foster communal feeling, then there’s no need to look at or even acknowledge counterarguments. Just wield the sledgehammer point by obvious point, followed by a conclusion that says, in effect, as I told you at the start, I am right and everyone who disagrees is either operating in bad faith or a retard. (Have you noticed how many people online—usually on the right, but not always—use the epithet retard in their social-media posts now?)

Why can’t an LLM do that? Believe me, it can. If not flawlessly already, it will be up to the task very soon, I can assure you.

Damon Linker

I don’t want to think that AI punditry is what’s in store for us, but as Linker notes, the New York Times has made little effort to replace departing luminaries on the Opinions page.

Some smear

Tom Tiffany, the Republican running for Wisconsin governor, is smearing his opponent Francesca Hong, the progressive Democrat. Smears such as pointing out that she said she wants to abolish the Senate. Francesca’s team hit back hard: “Tom Tiffany is once again telling lies and inventing quotes, because he can’t run on his record. Rep. Hong has never called for abolishing the U.S. Senate. Tiffany cannot produce a single statement where she did, because it doesn’t exist.”

Hmm. Hmm.

Hmm. This post is still up, so, I think it’s safe to say it exists? That she pretty clearly made the statement?

Some Wisconsin fact-checkers are choosing to “pass” on it, though, with one writing in an email to Tiffany: “As always, thanks for the suggestion, but I think we’re going to pass on this one since it’s one tweet and this doesn’t seem to be her position.” Ohh, got it, so her position is just whatever she says, but the things she says aren’t relevant. Makes sense.

Nellie Bowles

Indiana’s Chud Lieutenant Governor stirs the pot

WEST LAFAYETTE, IN — A late-night post on X by Indiana Lt. Governor Micah Beckwith took aim at the state’s public universities, specifically calling out Purdue after he read a message from a parent of a prospective Boilermaker.

In a post Wednesday night, Beckwith said he received a message from a parent who recently toured the West Lafayette campus. In the message, the parent took issue with the university’s marketing of cultural clubs, which included the “LGBTQ club,” in an informational video produced by the university.

“Then on tour had to point out their diversity tree. Then one of the Muslim guides made sure to proudly mention that she was part of the MSA Muslim student org,” Beckwith’s post said, quoting the parent. “Had to explain to my kid that’s the org that caused all of the violence and hate on campuses everywhere. I hate colleges altogether I think.”

…

In his post, Beckwith asked, “Why are state schools in Indiana the worst?”

”Do yourself a favor, send your kids to Hillsdale College where woke indoctrination won’t happen,” Beckwith said.

Jillian Ellison, Journal & Courier

I didn’t even need added context to see that the “parent of a prospective Boilermaker” was insular and hysterical, and that the Lt. Governor’s response was among his more troglodyte utterances.

But the reporter did provide some added context:

The Diversity Tree, outside the Class of 1950 Lecture Hall along Oval Drive, celebrates the National Pan-Hellenic Council and Multicultural Greek Council, according to the Purdue Arboretum website. The tree is frequently painted with the letters of those member organizations.

So the simple presence of the word “diversity” was enough to set off insular parent and Lt. Governor even though the substance was “lots of fraternities and sororities.”

That leaves two objections intact:

  1. Purdue doesn’t cover up the existence of an LGBTQ Club among its cultural clubs.
  2. Purdue allowed a Muslim to conduct a prospective student and parent around campus and did not forbid her to mention her religion and the existence of a Muslim Student Association on campus, even though some insular and hysterical folks idiots freak out at the mere mention of Islam.

There’s good news and bad news in the background to this story. The good news is that Governor Mike Braun backed another hopeful as his running-mate and reportedly is uneasy with Beckwith, whose public profile and exceedingly thin political resumé (from two years on a local library board to Lieutenant Governor) make him a total loose cannon. The bad news is that the GOP in solemn convention thrust this unqualified pentecostal preacher onto the slate anyway. I think his lack of qualification was a feature, not a bug.

I do hope that Hoosier Republicans are appropriately appalled at Beckwith’s poor choice of targets (Purdue is hardly woke; it’s a Land Grant college, strong on agriculture, engineering, veterinary medicine and such, with a culture about like what you’d expect from future farmers, engineers and animal docs) and at his appalling recommendation of a private college in Michigan over an Indiana public university.

Shorts

  • [T]he difference between Americans and Europeans: Americans think a hundred years is a long time, and Europeans think a hundred miles is a long distance. (Paul Kingsnorth, Zen and the Art of Bear Spotting)
  • It seems anyone who takes up the Cross, or even seeks to do so, hears pretty soon about “works righteousness.” (My cyberfriend John Brady on micro.blog)
  • “Fidel Castro was a billionaire. Putin is a billionaire. The leaders of communist regimes are always rich. They steal and rob from those they govern,” – Ted Cruz. And Trump? (Andrew Sullivan)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

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.

Sophie’s Choice

Sanity returns from exile

[Indiana Fever’s Sophie] Cunningham doesn’t hate trans people, she said, but “I also think with that love is truth, being honest. And I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”

Kat Rosenfield.

There was a half-hearted effort to cancel Cunningham over this. It seems to have flopped, though perhaps it still has a spasm or two left. But not only did she get away with this commonsensical opinion, she got away with the truth of “biological men” instead of the shibboleth “trans women.”

And when two girls showed up at the Fever-Storm game in Seattle Tuesday, sporting “Thank you Sophie” signs, and the Storm’ co-owner called them “f*****g insane,” the co-owner got fined and banned from the next five Storm games!

I wouldn’t mention all this but for one thing that I can only reluctantly acknowledge: a lot of stupid taboos have fallen, a lot of euphemisms are barely murmured any more, since Donald Trump took occupancy in the White House. I guess there’s too little energy left for fussing about shibboleths when there’s a genuine menace reigning in the Oval Office.

I’m nowhere near prepared to excuse Trump for his transgressions because of that, but I’m prepared to recognize a correlation that feels even to hostile, never-Trump me, like causation.

Read the whole Rosenfield piece if you want to see how things have turned right-side-up again.

[UPDATE: This was first published calling the Seattle team the “Aces.” I think that’s the Las Vegas franchise. I’m enjoying the WNBA, but I don’t have all the franchise names down pat.]

Oh, damn! We were hoping the maniac was a white Christian!

An Islamist terrorist drives a van into a Berlin Pride parade, killing one person and injuring dozens more. And how is it reported? Much of the media went with the usual formulation: that the attacker might as well have been a self-automated vehicle. The white van “didn’t exactly hit the parade,” one typical report went, but as it drove through the parade it “attacked the people who were going away from the parade.”

As I have had cause to say too many times, this is something which, from Stockholm to Nice, is best understood as the “naughty van” phenomenon. If a van or car is driven into a crowd by an Islamist, you can swiftly tell who the culprit is because the vehicle will be talked about as though it suddenly took on a life of its own and began a rampage.

…

The organizers of the Pride parade gave a press conference in which they admitted that they had hoped the perpetrator had been a white Christian man ….

Douglas Murray.

I read the other day that something like 58% of Muslims in America disapprove of Islamoterrorism. That was supposed to reassure me, but I wondered why it wasn’t 98%. And it didn’t help that the 58% is inert because they are threatened by the terrorists.

I just don’t want to hang around people like that

In February, a Pew Research Center poll found that white evangelical Protestants were the only large religious group in America in which a clear majority still supported all or most of Trump’s plans and policies.

And this brings me to perhaps the least shocking statistic in America. The Billy Graham Center Research Institute at Wheaton College in Illinois recently released polling data showing that almost half — 48 percent — of Gen Z adults surveyed said that Christians’ support for Trump made them less likely to want to attend church, at least to some degree.

David French

Stupid laws make stupid problems

Local news, mid-north Indiana: Recount Commission rejects Copenhaver’s demand to subpoena voters

I am pleased. District 23 is, I believe, pretty solidly “red.” If I were a Democrat (and lived in that District), I likely would have reasoned:

No way is a Democrat getting elected in my district. The best I can do is pull a Republican primary ballot and vote for the less objectionable Republican, the one not backed by Trump because he stood up to Trump.

I’m given to understand that such a vote is against Indiana law. A stupid law: “Don’t register by party but don’t you dare pull the ballot of the party we don’t think you really in your heart-of-hearts belong to.”

The Indiana GOP, however, appears prepared to require registration by party instead of sensibly abolishing the ban on crossover voting.

What Team Copenaver should have done was deploy poll-watchers to challenge those wicked, wicked Democrats who want to be represented by the less bad Republican if they can’t have a Democrat. Then the voters could have pulled a Democrat primary ballot. But no, Team Copenhaver assumed that Trump would carry their gal over the finish line first, and decided only after a narrow loss that the VAR refs shouldn’t count the only vote those wicked Democrat cross-overs cast, disenfranchising them utterly.

The campaign was dirty on both sides, and Deery’s ads were dirtier than Copenhaver’s by my lights.

I hate politics.

Spear Phishing

An AI model doesn’t need to breach a hardened network to do catastrophic damage. It only needs to talk an employee into opening the door. And the victims won’t be only governments and businesses. They will be ordinary people — the elderly, yes, but also anyone busy enough to answer an email or a message on Slack or WhatsApp on autopilot. Many have learned to spot the tells of a mass-produced scam. Few are ready to spot an attack written for an audience of one.

Jeremy Philip Galen, Richard Whaling, AI is gaining ability to personalize cyberattacks, enabling phishing at scale – Washington Post

Data Center Defamation

Some billionaire named Kevin O’Leary (I guess if you watched Shark Tank you may know of him) announced his plan to build a 40,000 acre data center in a remote part of Utah. Opposition predictably arose:

With the controversy heating up, O’Leary and Palandjian had a choice. They could have offered to meet with the project’s opponents and laid out for them the various ways their data center would mitigate their fears. They could have stated publicly something Palandjian told me when I spoke to him—that the permitting process was just in its beginning stages. “Our permit applications will all be a matter of public record, and in some instances, we’ll have hearings that will be open to the public, where the public will have a voice. We welcome a healthy dialogue and a healthy debate,” he added.

But they didn’t do that. Instead, O’Leary went on Fox News and Tucker Carlson’s podcast and accused Kanter and Finlayson, both of whom have deep roots in Utah, of working on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party. O’Leary is convinced—and he’s hardly alone—that China is funding data center opponents, hoping to slow down the U.S. while it tries to catch up in the race for AI supremacy. There was no publicly available evidence, however, that Kanter and Finlayson were doing China’s bidding. That didn’t stop O’Leary. During one of his appearances on Fox, he said, “They should rename this thing ‘Alliance for a Better China in Utah’ after you look at how much money is coming out of China pouring into this organization.” It wasn’t until Kanter and Finlayson threatened to sue for defamation (which they ultimately did) that O’Leary and Fox acknowledged that they had no proof for this allegation, and issued an apology.

…

Is it any wonder that people are up in arms about all the data centers that are proliferating around the country? Big Tech has never been known for its transparency and accountability, and that is especially true as they rush to build multibillion-dollar data centers to satisfy the voracious needs of AI. Data center developers have bought up land in secret, forced local politicians to sign nondisclosure agreements, and then steamrolled their way to permits and zoning changes ….

Joe Nocera in the Free Press.

(The idea of public officials entering into nondisclosure agreements with billionaire developers gives me a major case of the willies, by the way. Leave it to a retired lawyer to pick that out for highlighting.)

Memento Vivere

The most obvious threat of further confusion about what it means to be alive is posed by artificial intelligence. We often describe AI tools as “thinking.” Some of the advocates and enthusiasts of AI suggest that it is conscious. And we know that people can easily become convinced that it is “alive” in some meaningful way. The famously skeptical atheist Richard Dawkins believes that AI is conscious, capable of complex thought, and alive enough to experience death. What it means to be alive is clearly less obvious to people than it used to be.

…

If a machine is better at “caring” than we are, we are bad at caring. If robots can cure our loneliness, we have more problems than loneliness. If we think AI will improve aspects of our humanity, we do not understand humanity very well. In this context, memento mori is not useless, but it would be more useful to bring memento vivere into the conversation.

…

It’s very possible that if we cannot distinguish between what is alive and what is not, or understand why someone would want to use the good silver, we are not doing much better than unlimited pancakes.

Elizabeth Stice, Memento Vivere – Front Porch Republic

Having been drawn in by the title and that gorgeous illustration at the top, I almost didn’t read this. Shift your mental gears, or suspend incredulity, and savor it.

Shorts

  • [D]octrine is not belief, it is only one way of talking about belief …. (Marilynne Robinson in one of the Gilead novels)
  • [John Williamson] Nevin … depicted Winebrenner as a religious entrepreneur, daring to invent a new and competing church: “It is felt to be as easy to start a new Church, as it is to get up a new moral or political association under any other (Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity)
  • All power tends to coopt and absolute power coopts absolutely. (Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue)
  • River Page, Welcome to Secular Sharia (The Free Press)
  • Tact is to lie about others as you would have them lie about you. (Oliver Herford)
  • [T]he last thing Americans need right now is another reason not to make out. (Faith Hill, The Horrible Rise of the Makeout Police. For the record, I don’t think she made her case.)
  • I’m telling you, most Protestants or Catholics today, if they were to time-travel back to [western Europe, 1450-1650], would be tempted to run into the arms of Voltaire. (Rod Dreher, singing the praises of Carlos Eire, Reformations)
  • “We spent $3,000 or $4,000 an acre on the Old Vineyard,” Mr. Hirsch recalled in 2005. “That wouldn’t get you through the paperwork today.” (Quoting David Hirsch, vineyard pioneer of California’s Sonoma coast, who died Tuesday at 81)
  • He was right about things early, wrong about things honestly and never, not once, boring. (Katie Kingsbury, NYT opinion editor, of Ross Douthat, who’s leaving the Times after 17 years to join CBS 60 Minutes)
  • The problem today is we value what’s countable rather than what’s important. (David Brooks)
  • Americans of all political stripes are sick and tired of pretending they can’t see the emperor’s whole entire ass. (Kat Rosenfield)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

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.

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

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.

Somehow waiting for Something

Somehow waiting for something.

I find right now it can be hard to speak about anything going on in the world: it’s all moving so fast, very little seems clear, and there is a strange indefinable sense that we are all somehow waiting for something.

Paul Kingsnorth

I suggest we’re waiting for two tangled somethings:

  1. See whether, and how, and how radically, AI shakes up the world as we’ve known it.
  2. See if the tech sector bubble (AI market valuation collectively has reached $27 trillion) bursts and worry #1 flees like a dream in the night.

With all the buzz and confidently-voiced narratives, it’s easy to forget that AI has not yet been profitable, and may never be profitable, but is up to its eyeballs in debt or in equity that likely never will generate enough free cash flow to justify it.

Running on steroids

It was on Wall Street that Luana Lopes Lara, the 30-year-old co-founder of Kalshi, was inspired to start a prediction-markets exchange. As an intern at hedge funds such as Five Rings Capital and Citadel Securities, she was baffled to find fund managers building elaborate portfolios to take positions on forthcoming elections and interest-rate decisions. Kalshi’s users bet directly on events instead. “What we are building is a financial exchange where anyone from a Robin Hood trader to Goldman Sachs to someone in an MIT dorm could trade directly in what their thesis was about the future,” Ms Lopes Lara says.

Among amateur traders, prediction markets have taken off. Everyone from students to delivery drivers seems to be having a flutter. Kalshi processed $33bn of trades in June, according to the Block, a data provider. Its main rival, Polymarket, did $10.7bn on its crypto-based international exchange, plus $3.3bn on its regulated American version. These are tiny sums next to those on big derivatives exchanges. But they are growing fast (see chart). Kalshi and Polymarket are reportedly fundraising at valuations of $40bn and $15bn.

The Economist. I’m pretty certain I’ve voiced by hatred of gambling, and gambling apps, and perhaps even Kalshi and Polymarket by name. But I confess to not having connected them to what was already going on at hedge funds.

Our “healthy” economy is running on steroids and crack even beyond what I thought. For “hedge funds” are available only to accredited and institutional investors (who can afford getting hosed) while Kalshi and Polymarket are available to any random chud. That democratic gesture bodes ill for just about everyone but the owners of Kalshi and Polymarket.

Barbarian art-destroyers

Many fresco paintings were whitewashed away in the so-called Enlightenment; it was that same Enlightenment, in its sanguinary French eruption, that smashed priceless stained glass windows in churches and cathedrals across the country. “Four fifths of [man’s] greatest art,” said Henry Adams, was created in those supposedly dark days, to the honor of Jesus and Mary. The Enlightenment destroyed more great art than it produced, and what the harbingers of the novus ordo saeclorum did not get around to destroying they slandered.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes

Mature enough for the humanities

I was having a blast. I started looking forward to my evening ‘community service’ with enthusiasm. This was what education was supposed to be like. But why was it happening here, instead of with the young geniuses I was teaching during the day?

Here’s the kicker. When I talked to other Stanford faculty members who were teaching community classes, they all had the same experience.

The adults were more impressive than the college students.

Maybe that wouldn’t have been true if I’d been teaching calculus or computer science or engineering. But anything related to the arts and the humanities needed—and deserved—a mature mind with some experience of the world before it could bear fruit.

Ted Gioia

The Odyssey

Christopher Nolan evidently has taken some artistic license in telling a story about men and women who never actually lived and the war they never actually fought as related by an ancient oral tradition attributed to Homer, a poet who (probably) did not exist. I am not at all sure that a military historian is the person I would consult to evaluate a story about sea monsters and one-eyed giants and witches who (3,000-year-old spoiler alert!) turn men into pigs. In a mythological milieu in which the Greeks’ chief lightning guy turns himself into a swan to rape an entirely different Spartan queen (queen of Sparta is one of the toughest jobs in mythology), you’re telling me that the actor formerly known as Ellen Page cannot play the role of a scrawny Greek redshirt who gets left behind on the beach to take one for the team? If you’re going to complain about Sinon, maybe start with the fact that the character does not appear in the original Odyssey at all—he is imported from the Aeneid.

Kevin D. Williamson, who I’ll read even when he’s writing about a movie I don’t plan to see.

Elena Kagan

I keep and regularly review a list of my truly unpopular opinions — not the edgy things one says or write in hopes of being thought courageous, but the things one dare not say or write in the current milieu.

This is not one of them, though it may be a bit edgy in “conservative” (whatever that term means after ten years in the Trumposcene) circles: Justice Elena Kagan is more than just one of three “liberal” justices on the Supreme Court. She is a diplomat, with stratospheric emotional intelligence, who managed to make conservative students feel welcome at Harvard Law and not infrequently attended Federalist Society meetings. When I hear discussions of SCOTUS decisions, I frequently wonder how Justice Kagan shaped them behind the scenes.

I’ll likely be gone before she is, but I suspect she will go down in history as one of the most consequential justices of the court — top decile at least.

UPDATE: On Tuesday the 28th, Josh Blackmun conveniently published this brief piece on Justice Kagan, which harmonizes well with my view of her.

Mission Creeps

Amnesty International, which once “enjoyed a reputation for defending prisoners of conscience and upholding human rights for all,” appears to be succumbing to succumbing to mission creep.

This has been most clearly demonstrated by Amnesty International UK’s publication on July 8 of a report called “A Growing Threat: The Anti-Rights Movement in the UK.”

The report branded more than 100 groups as “anti-rights,” including 51 that are dedicated to protecting the freedoms of women and gay people but are dismissed as “gender critical.” The common characteristic of these organizations is that they acknowledge the fact that human beings cannot change sex and that the rights of women and gay people are underpinned by a recognition of biological sex differences. This is apparently sufficient to see them condemned.

Andrew Doyle, Amnesty International UK vs. J.K. Rowling

I’m pleased to see that the push-back is strong.

Get over yourself, JD

The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel criticized Vice President JD Vance’s absenteeism from the Senate, where he is ex officio Senate president. His enforcers came down hard on her:

  • uniparty mouthpiece
  • billionaire lackey
  • corrupt
  • liberal
  • Marxist
  • deep state
  • captive tool
  • liar
  • establishment
  • RINO

She responds:

Can Mr. Vance possibly think this is smart? Successful politicians seek to find new allies, not to alienate longstanding ones, whether elected colleagues, interest groups, the entrepreneurial class or conservative media. Winning is hard enough without a right-on-right cage match. One answer is simply that Mr. Vance is a sensitive bunny. If he wants to be president, he’ll need to get over that.

But the other answer is that Mr. Vance knows his “national conservative” ambitions for the GOP aren’t landing. Republicans are increasingly up in arms over a Vance agenda that sounds like Bernie Sanders. Hence his Vance team’s need to invalidate anyone who disagrees as a “RINO” or a “tool” of special interests or an “elite”—the better to allow them to define what counts as a “real” Republican. A Vance Republican.

Here’s an idea: Make the argument instead. And maybe let others make theirs, too—free of the gaslighting.

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, by JD Vance

I was reading Rod Dreher when he “catapulted JD Vance into fame.” Understandably, considering what followed, Dreher and Vance remain close. But even Rod, because he actually cares for Vance, with skin in the game, has written some critical things.

I once cared moderately for Vance, thinking he might reprise the role of Mike Pence. I care for him a little less every week.

Shorts

  • From Barcelona to Bruges by way of Florence, vast swathes of Europe’s once-idyllic cities are a procession of foreigners shopping for souvenirs. Some hilltop villages in Provence or Tuscany now seem to exist chiefly as backdrops for linen-clad types sipping spritzes. … In summer Europeans are not so much residents of their home cities as extras in someone else’s social-media feed. (The Economist)
  • It turns out that when you mix narcissism and nihilism, you create an acid that corrodes every belief system it touches. (David Brooks)
  • Build a techno-social system which demands that humans act like machines and it turns out that machines can eventually be made to displace humans with relative ease. (L.M. Sacasas. This is a periodic, pithy gut-check. It evokes a lot.)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

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.

Bigger on the inside

My last few Sunday blogs felt pretty “meh” to me, but not this one. The post quoted in my first item particularly grabbed me as a true and wise observation that I needed to hear.

Bigger on the inside

[W]hen my friend Leah Libresco Sargeant talks about her conversion to Catholicism, she sometimes notes that focusing on the conversion story is a little bizarre. Like imagine (this is the analogy she’s used) that the Pevensie children come back from Narnia, and they start telling people about it—and everyone’s reaction is, “Oh sure, talking lion, mysterious lands, terrible betrayals and redemptions, I get it. Tell us more about the wardrobe!”

There’s been a rebound in adult conversions to Catholicism. This just seems to be true by now, as far as I can tell. … [T]here are all kinds of questions one could raise …

But the question online-people seem to want to talk about, instead, is, “Are these people converting for the right reasons?” There’s a lot of Discourse about whether people are coming to the Catholic Church because it’s right-wing (? not the most obvious option here but okay), or because they want to be manly men (hmm), or because of Catholic “influencers” etc. To put the fear or criticism most charitably, it’s a fear that people are entering the Church for a political persona, not an encounter with Jesus Christ.

And yet I guess all of this seems to me like an obsession with the wardrobe. Nobody stays in the Faith for the same reasons they converted. The Church is bigger on the inside. Having entered, you may discover how much there really is, beyond the little alcove where you happened to find a door.

…

So the real thing here is that when people enter the Church through small, weird, insufficient, or warped doors, they need wise guides to show them the path deeper in, into the heart of the Church ….

Eve Tushnet, Nobody Converts Right. Tushnet is a convert to the Roman Catholic Church, but her observations fit Orthodoxy as well (or perhaps even better; the press seems to have discovered Orthodoxy and to be hinting that it’s a dark masculinist and nationalist hotbed).

May you find yourself in a Church this morning that has depths to explore beyond “the Wardrobe,” that isn’t all “alcove.” And if you’re an old-timer there, may you be a wise guide to newcomers.

Nobody sticks right, either

At the conference, I had drinks with a devout Lutheran friend. We discovered that we shared a love for Carlos Eire’s stupendous history of Early Modern Western Christianity, Reformations. I told my friend that reading the book has caused me to realize, to my personal shock, that had I been alive back then, I might well have been tempted to join Luther, simply because of my personal temperament (that is, easily inflamed by corruption and abuse). To my surprise, my Lutheran interlocutor said reading the book made them realize that, given their deeply conservative temperament, they probably would have stayed Catholic. We got a good laugh out of that.

Rod Dreher

As hard as it must be

It would be silly for physicists to complain, “The truth about quantum mechanics is too hard!”  In the same way, it would be silly for us to complain that the truth about God is too hard.  The truth about God is just exactly as hard as it has to be in order to fit how things really are with Him.

J Budziszewski

Losing the trail

Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. For it doesn’t stop at being interested in paint, you know. They sink lower—become interested in their own personalities and then in nothing but their own reputations.

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

I didn’t remember that quote at all, but it perfectly fits the arc of the narrative in this, one of the most important books in my spiritual journey.

Theology as infomercial

Growing up in church, we were taught that Jesus was the answer to all our problems. We were taught that there was a circle-shaped hole in our heart and that we had tried to fill it with the square pegs of sex, drugs, and rock and roll; but only the circle peg of Jesus could fill our hole. I became a Christian based, in part, on this promise, but the hole never really went away. To be sure, I like Jesus, and I still follow him, but the idea that Jesus will make everything better is a lie. It’s basically biblical theology translated into the language of infomercials. The truth is, the apostles never really promise Jesus is going to make everything better here on earth.

Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

Agree or disagree, there’s something worthy to chew on: Where in scripture is the promise of Jesus filling up a hole in you and making everything better? My initial, long-ago commitment to Christ was not based on that, but I heard that message a great deal in my teenage years.

(I was surprised to stumble across this quote because the book, which I read after it got a lot of buzz a few years ago, was almost completely unmemorable to me otherwise.)

Talking the talk

A Christian polemic—a Christian serrated edge—must be based on the Word of God, and not based on the sensibilities of men who spend Sunday mornings swaying side to side, moaning along to the newest Hillsong release.

Promotional blurb for provocateur Doug Wilson’s book The Serrated Edge. This isn’t a book or an author I would recommend, but having come across it, I’m reminded of how Wilson appeals to a certain sort (and such once was I).

Hannah Anderson profiles Wilson:

In a weird twist, evangelicals are more likely to follow the person who talks or writes about the importance of virtue than the person who is actually virtuous.
…
when you pull back the curtain to reveal the man behind it, you find someone with a history of speaking philosophically about the goodness of common life while also undermining it. You find a man who was raised within mainstream evangelicalism who intentionally chose marginality.

You find a man who speaks a lot about submission to authority while refusing to submit himself. You find a man who easily discusses the most extreme hypotheticals, seemingly unmoved by how they would actually affect the person sitting in front of him. 

Wilson is not dangerous because he is an ideologue. He is dangerous because he’s comfortable entertaining radical ideas to further pragmatic ends, knowing that if they go wrong, he can always retreat to the safety of the theoretical. In this way, Wilson finds a natural home among the protected class of lawmakers and bureaucrats in Washington who seem beyond the reach of voters—who increasingly engage in the work of public policy as if it were a game or reality show, who are insulated from the consequences of their choices, who remain theoretically detached while others suffer and even die under their watch.

Hannah Anderson, The Great and Powerful Doug

Discernment

Sometimes the God Within isn’t God at all, but just the ego or the libido, using spirituality as a convenient gloss for its own desires and impulses. Sometimes your books and teachers are right, and what seems your Highest Thought is really emanating from the lower reaches of your soul.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

What is an evangelical?

For quick surveys, often tied to elections, national polls tend to measure evangelicalism by self-ID. That is, if a respondent says she is an evangelical, so she is.

This is a defensible method: replicable and quick. And it generally produces serviceable results. But it also makes evangelicalism whatever survey participants suppose it to be, which is how we have 7 to 20 percent of American Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, and people of no religious affiliation telling pollsters they’re evangelical Christians.

Bonnie Kristian, There Will Never Be Another Billy Graham. The title is derived from the once-useful, now-fading, definition of an evangelical as “someone who likes Billy Graham.”

The difficulty in defining “evangelical” may be a problem, but to bring today’s post full circle, a larger problem seems to be that it’s not bigger on the inside. It’s all alcove, all the time.

Only wonder understands anything.

St. Gregory of Nyssa

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.

A little whataboutism (and more)

Whataboutism

The truths that must not be named

I’m not sure there’s anybody in the second Trump administration, save Marco Rubio, to which I would extend a defense on almost anything. But whataboutism isn’t a defense.

So long as Democrat nominees to high office cannot affirm that men do not become pregnant (a stock Republican gotcha question), they lack standing to criticize Trump nominees’ refusal to affirm that Joe Biden won the 2020 election (a stock Democrat gotcha question).

(Heck, in one sense, the Democrats are worse. I’m not sure I, who detest Trump, could affirm Biden’s victory in terms stronger than “I believe he won because it has been reported so, and certified so, and I know no credible evidence to the contrary.”)

Who’s the more partisan Justice?

Who’s more partisan:

  • Justice Samuel Alito, who on questions of central importance to Trump, votes with him 87% of the time? Or maybe it’s …
  • Ketanji Brown Jackson, who on questions of central importance to Trump, votes against him 98% of the time?

Somehow, the press just isn’t interested in the KBJ side of that. (H/T Sara Isgur)

Trump doesn’t give a rip about the GOP

The only thing good things to say about Trump’s speech Thursday night were that he reportedly kept it down to 25 minutes and didn’t harp on the supposed theft of the 2020 Election. Other than that, his party was almost certainly damaged badly:

In early 2021, Republicans were poised to win a majority in the U.S. Senate … All they had to do was win the two Senate seats in Georgia headed to a runoff in January.

Then Donald Trump opened his yap. He had just lost the presidency. To assuage his own ego injury, Trump attacked the election as fake and rigged. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported the effect of this talk in Georgia … Trump had discouraged his own voters and energized his foes. His party lost both seats and any hope of retaining the Senate.

Tonight, Trump repeated …

If … you are pro-Trump, you heard a message of despair. Your president, in whom you trust, described a hopelessly compromised voting system, so broken that it fooled even Trump himself in his first presidency. Between the Chinese, the illegal aliens, and the hated liberal media, your vote will probably count for nothing. Plus, it’s crooked and unpatriotic to vote by mail. It’s all hopeless. Why bother?

… Trump’s message was one of futility, as if to say: It doesn’t matter how many of us show up, because of all the sinister plots against us. We’re doomed almost no matter what we do.

That message makes psychic sense for Trump. He’s probably going to lose at least one congressional chamber in November, perhaps two, and he desperately needs an explanation as to why it’s not his fault.

… among those who watched for sure—the hard-pressed Republican candidates begging for Trump to throw them a frickin’ bone on some issue of concern to voters—how mad are they tonight?

Trump is always about Trump first. Tonight was about Trump alone. He’s abandoned his allies because it’s his nature; he cannot help it. Soon he’ll discover what it’s like to be even more isolated and embattled than he needed to be, because he could not speak for—or about—anything other than himself.

David Frum, Trump Dooms His Own Party. See also Tom Nichols, Trump Just Did More Damage to American Elections Than China.

Someone wrote about this recently.

To every thing there is a season

If there is a season to everything, and a time to every purpose under heaven (Eccles. 3:1), then there are right and wrong ways to observe the landmarks of life. It simply does not make sense for secular authorities to use this extraordinary national birthday as the vehicle for eliciting waves of national guilt and launching a search for means of atonement. Compare this to, say, the way we characteristically observe a human birthday. When someone turns one hundred years old, do we see it as the opportunity for a struggle session, in which we browbeat that person into confessing the many misdeeds that have accumulated over the course of a long life? Or do we instead use it as an opportunity for the expression of love, and of our gratitude for the remarkable fact that this person is still among us? To what season does this occasion belong?

Wilfred M. McClay, A Nation’s Birthday

The End of Reading

My avoidance of reading The End of Reading is Here despite repeated recommendations (it’s so looooong!) reflected that even geezers can fall prey to the malady. Excerpts:

  • Ong cited case studies by the neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, who traveled to remote villages in Uzbekistan and Kirghizia in the 1930s, when peasants were starting to receive rudimentary reading and writing instruction. Luria met his subjects at teahouses, in field camps, and around evening fires. There, he posed a number of questions designed to elucidate differences in how illiterate and literate peasants thought. Luria told the peasants: “In the Far North, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North.” He then asked them the color of bears in Novaya Zemlya. The literate peasants were able to complete the syllogism. But the illiterate ones refused to try, explaining that they had never been to the north and thus couldn’t answer. Achieving literacy seemed to have conveyed an ability to think logically and abstractly, not simply to read words.
  • [A]s writing eroded individuals’ memories, the media theorist Andrey Mir has observed, it improved society’s collective memory.
  • Trump is our first postliterate president. It is difficult to imagine him being elected leader of a country where information is primarily spread through text. Ahead of the 2024 election, an NBC News poll of 1,000 voters found that Joe Biden had a 49-point lead among respondents who read newspapers. Trump has pioneered a style of communication that exploits our distracted, disputatious age.
  • Politicians on the right and the left have figured out how to exploit these new platforms. Reihan Salam, the president of the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, described to me how this plays out. “You name an enemy and you polarize the public,” he said. “You don’t allow for nuance, because nuance is just a confusion when you’re in a struggle for power.” (Ironically, Salam is the boss of Christopher Rufo, who calculatedly used exactly this strategy to attack “critical race theory”.)

Don’t be like me. Read it. Reading something that long by itself begins the cure.

A linguistic curiosity

In Turkish we have a special tense that allows us to distinguish hearsay from what we’ve seen with our own eyes; when we are relating dreams, fairy tales, or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this tense.

Orhan Pamuk and Ara Guler, Istanbul

AI detection

Freddie de Boer has an interesting piece on the brittleness of AI-detector Pangram (which I hadn’t heard of by name, though I knew the concept).

I’m fortunate to be able to subscribe to many interesting things. But I still have only 24 hours in my day, like everyone else. I’m just not that interested in whether a human or a machine wrote a logical, even persuasive, argument; what matters is the truth, falsity, or fruitfulness of it in my situation. Only if I’m trying to decide whether the putative author is trustworthy would the AI question come up.

This is not to indict as foolish those who are interested in things like Pangram. I’m only saying that given my situation in life and reading habits, it’s not of interest to me — and that some of my readers might similarly be in a situation where the human or cyber source of a writing is irrelevant.

Luigi: The Musical

The hard part of selling liberalism or American conservatism (which seeks to conserve the liberal principles of the American founding) is not how we talk about the philosophy—the trouble is with the philosophy itself. Restraint is (barring some kink) unsexy. There is nothing thrilling about acknowledging the necessity of trade-offs, the role of prudence applied ad hoc to individual cases, or that the best-case scenario we are offering is a series of good-enough second-best settlements and accommodations. (Kevin D. Williamson)

I recently reviewed Luigi: The Musical, which closes with the titular antihero (Luigi Mangione is being tried for the murder of health insurance executive Brian Thompson) singing a song in which he proposes to keep murdering people until there is peace and justice upon the land while the chorus behind him sings about policy trade-offs, the complexity of health care as a social issue, and the necessities of compromise and negotiation. Of course, Luigi drowns out the chorus. That is how it goes. 

Kevin D. Williamson

How I use AI

AI is controversial in many ways, and I know a few people who consciously shun it completely. I, in contrast, use it while continuing to read about the dangers, horror stories, and other things to hone discernment.

I came across a list of recommendations for AI use that I agree with completely:

  • Avoid using AI chatbots for personal, spiritual, or emotional matters.
  • Restrict use strictly to non-personal tasks (e.g., recipes, summaries).
  • Do not seek consciousness, spiritual counsel, or relationship advice from AI.
  • Those with mental health issues or in vulnerable states should be warned against AI chatbot use.
  • Recognize that while most chatbot interactions are neutral, there is an elevated risk for spiritual deception.

(H/T Jordan, The AI Chatbot as Digital Oujia Board)

In addition, I just haven’t been comfortable with the thought of speaking directly to a chatbot. I’ll dictate questions, then cut-and-paste into it instead. I think I’m trying to avoid any faux-personal relationship.

So how does this cash out? Of what use is AI if those things are out of bounds?

Maybe this will help. Here are some questions I’ve posed to it or some requests I’ve made over about 14 months:

  • Why do so many organizations I give to send me membership cards? Is that supposed to create some special bond?
  • Is there any evidence that any of the Minneapolis protesters of ICE immigration enforcement were “paid agitators”?
  • Please compare English translations of The Brothers Karamazov, ranking them if there is a critical consensus.
  • Can you please summarize, in 1000 words or less, the change from Second-Temple Judaism to Rabbinic Judaism?
  • I’m trying first to recall and then to flesh out an assertion I heard or read in podcast, print or another “public-like” forum./The assertion was something along the lines that whether extraterrestrial intelligent life exists will never be definitively answered because it is impossible (as a matter of physics?) for such life to travel inter-galactically (or was it impossible from one solar system to another?)/Can you help me pin it down, and give a simplified not-too-scientifically-sophisticated explanation, not just the conclusion some have reached?
  • How prevalent is “birth tourism” in the United States?
  • How is the post-flood restoration of Asheville, NC coming along?

Then there were a couple of dialogs to get things done. Omitting those related to my work with some Boards of Directors, these include:

  • I used Claude AI to help me dress up my micro.blog posts with a custom CSS (since I don’t understand CSS it’s not worth the time it would take to learn).
  • My most ambitious use of an AI agent was to migrate a couple of years of Common Place Book entries from a run-on Markdown file, with date and time metadata for each separate entry, to DayOne, a Mac journaling app that just looks way nicer. I did the same with a run-on Markdown file of Diary entries.

My commonest AI use by far is a separate service, a browser plug-in called Voilá. I think it’s built on Chat GPT, and it has capabilities beyond my humble but time-saving use: Unless I know a writer as someone I read for the writing skill, not just for the opinion or other content, I repeatedly, multiple times per day, have Voilá summarize webpages for me to see if they’re worth reading. If I save the article, I typically prepend the Voilá summary to orient me if and when I come back to it.

Shorts on the Department of Justice

  • In 2019 Bill Barr, then Mr Trump’s pick for attorney-general, said that Americans “have to know that there are places in the government where the rule of law—not politics—holds sway” and that the Department of Justice “must be such a place”. Mr Trump has no time for that. Less than halfway through his second term, he has turned the DoJ from an arm of the law into a muscular limb of the presidency.(The Economist)
  • With warrants and subpoenas, the DoJ is pursuing Mr Trump’s critics and his hobby-horses, from political adversaries to election fraud to leaks in the press. The number of lawyers has dwindled by 20%; former prosecutors point to an incompatibility between the president’s agenda and the fair application of law. The DoJ is retreating from certain types of criminal enforcement. And, increasingly, judges are telling government lawyers that they cannot be taken at their word. (The Economist again)

Shorts

  • “It’s sad for Senator Lindsey Graham that the last person he spoke to on this earth was the president who stole his soul,” – Tina Brown. (Via Andrew Sullivan)
  • “14,000 Europeans died due to heat in June. This is the same continent that doesn’t believe in installing air-conditioning. For context, [14,000] is over 10 times the number of people who get murdered in America with a gun,” – Steve Guest. (Via Andrew Sullivan)
  • In The Atlantic, Helen Lewis processed Vice President JD Vance’s recent three-hour chat with Joe Rogan: “Watching Vance’s media appearances is uniquely painful. He lacks the authentic berserk of Kash Patel, or the pageant-queen polish of Karoline Leavitt, or his boss’s unique corkscrew approach to conversation. Like Stephen Miller, Vance desperately wants to be funny and cool. Like Stephen Miller, he is neither.” (Alex Gontscharow, Ashburn, Va., and Mike Marquard, Portland, Ore.) (Via Frank Bruni)
  • … “It’s not that nothing happens. It’s that the same thing almost happens, over and over, for two hours. A promising run, broken up. A cross to no one. A shot into the third row. Soccer isn’t really about scoring. It’s about the threat of scoring, endlessly deferred. It’s all foreplay, no sex.” (Sam Downing, Houston ) (Via Frank Bruni)
  • And in his newsletter, Ron Charles captured the vertical charms — and challenges — of Portugal’s capital: “We walked 24,000 steps, and somehow 23,000 of them were uphill. Lisbon, we’ve discovered, is basically an antique StairMaster tiled blue.” (Donna Peremes, Hyattsville, Md.) (Via Frank Bruni)
  • These are just horrible people, doing horrible things, on purpose. (David French regarding the Trump administration siccing their attack dogs on federal judges, and even on their law clerks).

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

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.

Meandering through “Mere Christianity,” denominations, missions, and extra Ecclesiam nulla salus

I spent some time this week mulling over a blog that talked about some YouTube video dialogs across the lines of Christian traditions. The result seems kind of half-baked, but it’s what I’ve got this Sunday.

The point of “mere Christianity” for Lewis was not to minimize ecclesial distinctives, but rather to help people make useful distinctions as they think about their relationship to faith. Yet, and Scrivener himself develops this point in his own way in the video, to even conceive of such a project as being legitimate is itself to be committed in some limited way to Protestantism. It is not really possible for a Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Christian to separate belief in “mere Christianity” from membership in and submission to the ecclesial life of Rome or Constantinople. To imagine that there is a set of cardinal doctrines that transcends ecclesial divisions and unites all people as “Christian” is inherently to speak and think as a Protestant.

So in that sense the best way to read what Scrivener calls the era of “mere christianity” is probably to regard it as a period of deficient Protestantism in which people presupposed Protestant conceptions of the church without understanding that they were doing that. They mistook their implicitly Protestant commitments for a kind of broadly Christian and ecclesially indifferent set of commitments. That is never what Lewis was trying to do in his own work, but it is how his work was received by highly democratic and anti-institutional American readers.

Jake Meador, Is the Era of Mere Christianity Over?.

Youngish Calvinist Jake Meador is too young to feel in his bones the weight of implicit “common-core Protestantism” in America. I felt it to a degree in the 50s as a fundamentalist/evangelical oddball in a public school that didn’t share our taboos but somehow was Christianish. Observant Catholics felt it to the extent that they really supported their parochial schools. I lived across the street from an empty field on which we watched a Catholic high school arise in the late 50s.

Meador rightly observes that “It is not really possible for a Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Christian to separate belief in “mere Christianity” from membership in and submission to the ecclesial life of Rome or Constantinople.” To Protestants, that may be baffling, but Christ promised to build his church and, as I have noted before, there are Christians for whom belief in Christ and His Church is one act of faith, not two. I’m now one of them.

On the question of whether denominationalism is coming back, though, Meador is wise to distinguish the return of doctrinal particularity from the return of the denominations, each one instantiating those particularities, and to ask “how’s that going to work when most of the Christian action is taking place in non-denominational assemblies that have fancied that they were avoiding particularities?” (Spoiler alert: they weren’t avoiding partiuclarity. Try getting an infant baptized in one of these non-particular churches. They’re crypto-baptists.) Sociologist of Religion Ryan Burge has documented lavishly the decline of denominations relative to independent churches (religiopreneurs).

The video Meador is discussing features snippets of conversation between Protestant Gavin Ortlund and Orthodox Jonathan Pageau. Ortlund is kind of hurt that Pageau seemingly cannot univocally call him a brother in Christ. Pageau responds in part at the oddity of that hurt, inasmuch as Protestants have long sent missionaries to traditionally Orthodox lands, where they try to persuade Orthodox Christians that they’re not really Christians until they embrace some Protestant tradition or another.

Protestant prickliness about Orthodox Christians hesitating to greet them with unguarded bonhomie reminds me of Mormon complaints about Evangelicals (and others) not accepting them; why then, have the Mormons been sending pairs of young “Elders” throughout the land all my life to evangelize for their church? They’re asking for acceptance they don’t reciprocate.

I’m obviously on Team Pageau when it comes to repudiating “salvation by faith alone” and other aspects of Protestantism. I think it’s worth noting, too, that the Orthodox position that there’s no salvation outside the ark of the Church shouldn’t be taken anachronistically or out of context.

“Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. All the categorical strength and point of this aphorism lies in its tautology. Outside the Church there is no salvation, because salvation is the Church” (G. Florovsky, “Sobornost: the Catholicity of the Church”, in The Church of God, p. 53). Does it therefore follow that anyone who is not visibly within the Church is necessarily damned? Of course not; still less does it follow that everyone who is visibly within the Church is necessarily saved. As Augustine wisely remarked: “How many sheep there are without, how many wolves within!” (Homilies on John, 45, 12) While there is no division between a “visible” and an “invisible Church”, yet there may be members of the Church who are not visibly such, but whose membership is known to God alone. If anyone is saved, he must in some sense be a member of the Church; in what sense, we cannot always say.

Bp. Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church.

Catholics find it impossible to theologize without deductive reasoning—a characteristic shared by virtually all Western Christians

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox. I almost made this a separate item in my typical multipart collation, but it feels rather like an epilogue.

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.