Yes, it’s the 25th anniversary of something horrible

I have nothing to add to what others have said about 9/11, but a few things to say anyway.

Dry Ice

Eric Hoffer wrote that “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

For conservatism, that progression roughly tracks with the Reagan revolution, then the emergence of conservative talk radio, and ultimately the ascension of Fox News and online media as loyal partisan megaphones for whatever message the Republican Party needed amplified on a given day.

Trumpism is unusual in that I’m not sure that it ever had a “business” stage. It began as a movement against right-wing interventionism and corporatist support for soft borders. But because it’s led by a born racketeer who craves blind loyalty, it decayed straightaway into a racket in which its leader’s momentary preferences define its orthodoxy, its media heroes defame others wantonly to serve him, and its henchmen steal everything that isn’t nailed down.

It’s the dry ice of political causes. There was no intermediate phase between its original solid state and its dissolution into a gassy amoral racket.

Nick Catoggio

Hegemonic Suicide

If this isn’t the most humiliating spectacle in modern American military history, I’m unsure what would surpass it. Iran has us over a barrel. It knows Trump is an untrustworthy liar, a blustering bullshit artist, and a coward all at once. It also knows he’s growing more unpopular by the day (in part!) as a result of his decision to launch a war he can’t seem to end on anything close to face-saving terms, let alone with a convincing victory. His only option is to launch the repeatedly threatened apocalypse, hoping against hope that it changes the dynamic without sparking a region-wide conflagration we may prove incapable of fighting and winning—or else walk away, declaring yet another bankruptcy in his long history of doing precisely that. Only this time, what he will have bankrupted is American hegemony.

Damon Linker, America Commits Hegemonic Suicide

A world of difference

We now talk a great deal, and generally stupidly, about “unity,” but there was little of that commodity to be had in those remarkable postwar years, certainly not among such figures as Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Sam Rayburn, and Barry Goldwater—every man on that list despised at least one of the others and had slight regard for most of the rest—but from the point of view of the degraded present, it is impossible not to see that each had more in common—a world more in common—with his most bitter political rival than any of them would have in common with such a contemptibly decadent figure as Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Mike Johnson, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Chuck Schumer, or Ron DeSantis, each of whom is, in his own especial way, emblematic of the post-9/11 American condition. 

Kevin D. Williamson

Shorts

  • Our techno-economic order takes the shape of a great engine of desire, training us to want what it offers and encouraging us to forget our deep desire for that which cannot be bought. (L.M. Sacasas)
  • It’s worth rewinding your brain to the basic fact that as Mr. Trump whines and rails constantly about how Canada has taken such vicious advantage of the United States, he’s talking about the trade deal he negotiated in his first term. You know, the one he unveiled on a “very momentous, historic and joyous occasion” as “the largest, fairest, most balanced and modern trade agreement ever achieved.” That one. (Shannon Proudfoot in The Globe and Mail of Toronto, via Frank Bruni)
  • [I]t looked like any other construction site, unless you happened to know that the sunken space where the engineers were fretting about the slurry wall was the hole in our country where the twin towers used to be. (Megan McArdle, I worked at Ground Zero. This question still haunts me.)
  • If UATX officials want to prevent their school from operating merely as a high-concept redoubt for conservative culture warriors, they should re-commit to the school’s own founding principles, and leave the vitriolic “anti-wokeness” fusillades to podcasters and YouTubers. (Ellie Avishai, Is the University Of Austin Betraying Its Founding Principles?)
  • Man’s conquest of nature … means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. (C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man)
  • If you govern like an occupying power, don’t be surprised if those suffering under the occupation begin thinking like the members of a resistance movement. (Damon Linker)
  • To matter, they have to win, and winning can soon become the only thing that matters. (David French, Why Trump Is Mad at the ‘Sleazebag’ Leonard Leo)
  • Qui Verbum Dei contempserunt, eis auferetur etiam verbum hominis.

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.

Labor Day (observed, to assure we get extra respite from labor)

Gut punch after gut punch

Freddie deBoer has a psychological disability, about which he is quite open, and muses on the consequences of asking people to make accommodations for the disability:

I have said, in various ways, “My disorder is a big deal,” and I therefore can’t turn around and complain when people act like it’s a big deal in ways I don’t like. This is one of the endless reasons I feel alienated from the disability rights movement; so much of that discourse amounts to people saying “I want you to act like my disability is a very big deal, but only at the times and in the ways I choose.” It doesn’t work like that. If you’re asking for the world’s accommodation you’re first asking for the world’s attention and it’s literally inevitable that sometimes this attention will fall on you in uncomfortable ways. Sorry.

… The history of bipolar disorder is the history of people who thought that they had gotten past it. People are going to interpret me through the lens of a disorder that I myself insist is a big deal. That’s part of my disorder’s unfortunate endowment to me, one small facet of its sad reality. People close to me know to fear the periods where I get too skinny; that this takes agency away from me, denies me ownership of my body, does not change the fact that they have good reason to be so concerned. There’s no use crying over it.

…

In grad school, particularly in the last several years, I was clearly breaking down. My drinking and sleeping around and general instability had become well known; I was increasingly incapable of behaving with even minimal performative professionalism of the type that people on the job market require. My own faculty were kind but the field writ large, the whisper network of chattering tenured radicals who decided who got which job each year – well, they chattered, and not in a way that was good for me. To a person, they would all tell you that they hated ableism and the way the world was built for normative bodies etc etc etc, but I wasn’t a part of their vision of what disability meant, even though they talked constantly about the “invisible wheelchair” of cognitive or behavioral disabilities. I was just some mouthy grad student they didn’t like very much. So they talked, and academia was in bad enough shape that such talk had existential consequences. Then, when I got to Brooklyn College, I was in about as progressive of a workplace as you could possibly find. Certainly almost everyone there had some theoretical commitment to the kind of disability politics that would protect a theoretical employee with a disability. Sadly, I was an actual employee with a disability, and though I had specifically asked for accommodation for the challenges associated with antipsychotic medications, the reasons for my eventual firing were more or less identical to a list of the side effects of said medications. A Disabled Person is an idea, an ideal. I was just a guy, a guy who struggled to pay attention in meetings with enough frequency that disability accommodation was an easy thing to forget.

…

This is an era of distributed opinion, and this ingroup social policing works because that distribution means nobody ever has to be the one to explain anything; meanwhile the actual professional policing goes on behind closed doors, in the backchannel. So I’m not waiting for any explanations. It would perhaps be easier to say, again, that these commitments are only real commitments when they’re hard to live with, that preference becomes principle only when there’s a cost. Like I said, though, the basic structure of digital community means that no individual human is ever in the position of having to answer these unpleasant questions. And at the tip of the spear it’s simple to just say on the company Slack that I should not be engaged with, let alone published.
…
The vast acreage of published disability theory is still insufficient to prompt its acolytes to trouble their simplistic judgment of the types of actions that the actually severely sick engage in. If you follow me.

  • So, they can’t forgive Lindsay Clancy because only a monster kills children.
  • Can’t forgive Kanye West because he’s antisemitic.
  • Can’t forgive a guy who kills his wife and kids because that’s misogyny.
  • Can’t forgive a schizophrenic who mutters racial slurs because that’s racism.
  • Can’t forgive Robert Card, an angry white man with a gun.
  • Can’t forgive the Bondi Junction stabber because he was an Islamic terrorist, or at the very least part of the global intifada, but then again he wasn’t, but still he was clearly a bad guy.
  • Can’t forgive the Paul Pelosi attacker because that’s what MAGA wants.
  • Can’t forgive the latest celebrity addict who acts the way an addict acts, until they overdose and die, after which we can’t forgive the enablers who were caught up in their addiction.
  • Can’t forgive Nick Reiner because, hell, who didn’t love Rob Reiner?
  • Most ludicrously of all, can’t forgive John Davidson for shouting racial slurs at the BAFTAs, can’t forgive a man with Tourette’s for acting like a man with Tourette’s at a ceremony absolutely stuffed with self-regard for its ostensible celebration of people with Tourette’s.

Freddie DeBoer

Freddie’s forthcoming book (from which the above are excerpts) on mental illness is on my wish list, although it would be hard to read chapter after chapter of material as painful as this.

Not worth saving?

Regarding the fights Trump picked with some major universities early in his second administration, Antón Barba-Kay writes:

Enter Donald Trump: our great unmasker.

The efforts of Columbia, Brown, Cornell, Northwestern, and Harvard to settle their disputes with the Trump administration have forced a reckoning. Those institutions have preferred paying large fines or accepting incursions into their governance to fighting the administration further through the courts. They have concluded that they cannot even temporarily afford to lose government grants while still pursuing what is most essential to their missions. As never before, they have had to clarify just what those missions are, and they have realized, or conceded, that they are primarily in the business of STEM research … They are centers for high-level research and disciplinary training; they depend on the mind-boggling sums those activities consume. They are not, at least in any substantial sense, places for democratic education, moral edification, liberal formation, or contemplation for its own sake.

(Bold added)

I don’t for a second think that Trump intended to unmask the universities, to mock the platitudes about character formation for the whole person. But he did it anyway.

Barba-Kay proposes that the truths unmasked be dealt with by a divorce — the quantitative university and the human-forming university going their separate ways from their irretrievably broken marriage:

I don’t say that the segregation of research from formation would come at no cost. For one thing, the fragmentation of undergraduate education would continue to undermine the sense that Americans have anything in common. But right now we’re getting the worst of both worlds. Students uninterested in the humanities are phoning it in or cheating, while those with an appetite for more serious engagement are demoralized by highly instrumentalized institutional settings.

The sciences would most obviously benefit from this divorce. The development of biomedical research is too important to be derailed by partisan controversies that arise from the meaning-bearing disciplines. Universities already acknowledge this in public statements where, touting their “lifesaving research,” they do not even bother to defend the humanities and the liberal arts more broadly. It is surprising that more scientists, caught in this crossfire, have not clamored to be cut loose.

…

At St. John’s College in Annapolis, my alma mater, there was a story—apocryphal or not—that served as a guiding light to some of us. The Naval Academy, which is across the street from St. John’s, tried to requisition the campus sometime in the 1940s. They needed the land as part of the war effort. It fell to Jacob Klein, a legendary St. John’s tutor and dean who had fled Germany in the 1930s, to object. So, he walked over to the Naval Academy and asked to speak to the admiral in charge. The admiral, who was in the middle of waging a war, saw Klein in and told him he had thirty seconds to explain why the Naval Academy should not seize the campus. Klein lit a match and a cigarette. He took a long drag. Then, after twenty-eight seconds, he rejoined: “Because without places like St. John’s, this country isn’t worth saving from the Nazis.”

Amen! This is an article I’m flagging to re-read (possibly again and again). You should read it at least once.

Freddie again, this time on AI

LLMs are not going to kill The Job, and in the long run I don’t think they’re going to kill jobs in a more quotidian sense either. In the short term, companies desperate to cut payroll (all companies are desperate to cut payroll) may attempt to replace human employees with LLMs. The next few years may very well see waves of mass layoffs, and you’ll likely be seeing a lot of dopey coverage about how jobs are a thing of the past. But in the long run LLMs will result in net job creation rather than net job loss. I know this because that’s what’s happened literally every time a technology has been predicted to be a net job killer in the history of capitalism. (And that’s a facet of another thing I know which most people don’t seem to, which is that the time I live in is not special simply because I live in it.) Again, you can make the extraordinary claim that this time will be different, but you’d have to provide extraordinary evidence, and no one can do that. They just snark and wave their hands at how many people a day are asking Claude “how many beers still can stay under legal limit?”

Freddie deBoer, I Think LLMs Will Prove to Be Consequential

Kiddie porn and the law

There is a 24-year-old Supreme Court precedent that the First Amendment protects Americans’ right to possess virtual child pornography, so long as it doesn’t depict a real child and remains in the home. Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 2002. Katelyn Walls Shelton is not amused:

Child porn, no matter who it depicts or how it is created, is inherently evil. It harms children, even if they are not personally depicted, because it conditions people to view them as sexual objects. And it harms adults, likewise, because it conditions them to view children as sexual objects. This type of harm against society is difficult to measure. But why should we have to measure the sociological effects of a thing before knowing that it’s wrong enough to restrict? … Ultimately, what you do in the private confines of your own home does affect me: It affects me because “your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your character, and your character becomes your destiny.”

Her argument is convincing to me.

I have no idea how realistic AI kiddie porn is today, nor do I intend to find out. Surely it’s better (i.e., morally even worse) compared to 2002.

I hope the Supreme Court will take an appeal and reverse the precedent, which raised my eyebrows at the time and still does. I’m nearly a first amendment absolutist, but possession of porn has always seemed an awkward fit with that amendment.

Converting us to a machine worldview

⁠⁠Humans are mimetic creatures. You don’t have to be a member of the René Girard cult to believe that we’ll begin to assimilate AI ways of thinking. A lot of people already think the human mind works like a computer, even though it doesn’t. A lot of people already believe all thinking is computation, even though it isn’t …

⁠⁠It’s useful to think of AI as a swarm of evangelical missionaries who have come into our world to convert us to their worldview. I suspect they’re going to have a big effect on how we unconsciously process reality.

David Brooks, AI Is Already Making Us Less Human

Natural Selection at work in 2026

12. Reuters:

The percentage of parents and caregivers in the United States refusing a standard vitamin K shot for infants at birth has accelerated sharply this year, an exclusive data analysis for Reuters found, putting more newborns at risk of life-threatening bleeding episodes. The data confirms what a dozen pediatricians, neonatologists and pediatric critical care specialists told Reuters is a top concern: rising refusals of a life-protective shot and a growing wave of mistrust toward vaccines and other newborn interventions. (Source: reuters.com. Italics mine.)

13. Wastewater Levels for Covid-19 (via the CDC):

(Both items from John Ellis News Items for September 2). I have joined the chorus people who find this newsletter nearly indispensable.

Shorts

  • There are three broad spirits in which American television portrays the rich: aspiration, judgment and reassurance. The aspirational spirit makes you want to have what they have, the judgmental spirit condemns them for what they’ve done to get what they have, and the reassuring spirit tells you that you don’t want what they have, anyway. (Ross Douthat)
  • So let’s run the race marked out for us. Let’s fix our eyes on Old Glory and all she represents. Let’s fix our eyes on this land of heroes and let their courage inspire. And let’s fix our eyes on the author and perfecter of our faith and our freedom and never forget that where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. That means freedom always wins. (Mike Pence, whose deep Christian piety this blather always makes me doubt.)
  • When I rolled into Louisiana last night, I went to dinner with some conservative friends here. Man, they are done with Trump. The war, the antics, all of it. These are small-town people in a deep red state, but the through-line of their complaints is that the country is in bad shape, and he’s only making it worse with his instability. That’s only a handful of conservative folks in one small town, but the intensity of their disgust with the president struck me. (Rod Dreher)
  • Without uprooting older communities and ways of life, from English artisan weavers in 1800 to Papuan tribal people in the 2020s, the Machine cannot operate. (Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine
  • In his Encyclical Laudato Si’, Pope Francis denounced the growing dominance of a technocratic paradigm in our globalized world: the tendency to let the logic of efficiency, control and profit alone shape personal, social and economic decisions. This makes it clear that technology is not simply a tool. When it becomes the standard by which everything is judged, it begins to dictate what matters and what can be discarded, reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency. (Pope Leo XIV)
  • A Disabled Person is an idea, an ideal. I was just a guy, a guy who struggled to pay attention in meetings with enough frequency that disability accommodation was an easy thing to forget.⁠ (Freddie deBoer, Sorry to Bother You)
  • Six justices stayed the June injunction by Judge Talwani as premature. There was nothing to sue over as no “final rule” had been issued at the time of the filing, the majority reasoned. The executive order had only directed agencies to act and the states were required to do nothing until they did. The unsigned order said nothing about the merits of the executive order. However, it did suggest that its implementation might be unlawful. ⁠⁠Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a 23-page dissent, objected that the majority had produced a “Catch-Me-If-You-Can” regime in which election challenges are premature until they are too late. Andy Craig, Trump Can’t Easily Steal the Midterms But He Can Sow Chaos and Doubt
  • ⁠Humans are not picky. We tend to love the ones we’re with. And Claude is always by our side. (David Brooks)
  • ⁠⁠Back in 2009, Joanna J. Bryson wrote a paper called “Robots Should Be Slaves.” She argued that since robots are things, not people, we should treat them as slaves, not companions. But who wants to be a slave master? It hardens your heart and is rotten for your soul. (David Brooks, analogizing to AI)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Thoughts on American religion and Orthodoxy

[John Williamson] Nevin and [Philip] Schaff also discerned certain common intellectual patterns and reflexes beneath the rampant pluralism of American Protestantism. They attributed the breakdown of theological coherence to attitudes that American Christians had assumed. These two felt that a radical Bible-centeredness was the reigning theory among Protestant sects. After surveying the statements of belief of fifty-three American denominations, Nevin surmised that the principle “no creed but the Bible” was the distinctive feature of American religion.

…

Despite the variety of Christian idioms that flowered in the early republic, most seemed to spring from the common conception that Christian tradition since the time of the apostles was a tale of sordid corruption in which kingcraft and priestcraft wielded orthodoxy to enslave the minds of the people. Ties with Catholic and Protestant traditions were severed, with a heady sense that a restoration of the primitive church was at hand. Men such as Benjamin Randal, founder of the Freewill Baptists, called for a new dispensation of gospel liberty. According to Francis Asbury, the apostolic order of things was lost in the first century, and the Reformers had beat off only part of the rubbish of intervening centuries. Methodism claimed emphatically to reinstate the apostolic form of the church in doctrine, discipline, conversion, and sanctification. In John W. Nevin’s view, the American republic had given free reign to an “abstract supernaturalism” empowering believers to transcend the corruptions of eighteen hundred years and return to the simplicity, authority, and power of the age of the apostles. “Every congregation has power to originate a new Christianity for its own use,” Nevin concluded, “and so may well afford to let that of all other ages pass for a grand apostasy.”

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (Kindle Edition pp. 166-167, italics added.)

So what are we to make of these new “Christianities”?

If you find yourself in bars, as I sometimes rarely do, and if you find yourself in heated conversation therein with people hostile to religion, as I often do, you may have a strong desire, as I always do, to establish a widely agreed-on way of distinguishing between what you believe and what Colorado Springs believes. Well at long last I’ve done it:

If someone were to shorten the field by forty yards, widen it by twenty, give you thirteen downs to advance twelve yards for a first down, and award you six points for doing so, you’d rightly object to his calling this new game “football.” You’d say to him, “that one’s taken. Find another name.”

I think the same applies to that fairly old, solid, and stately religion known as “Christianity.” Those who have altered the faith beyond recognition should come up with a new name for what it is they’re practicing. I suggest “Krustianity.”

Jason Peters, sometime in September of 2009 at Front Porch Republic, at a link that’s now dead. I used “Krustianity” and “Krustian” a lot in my blogging back then, but the usage never got any traction and I pretty much gave it up. But the impulse remains, and I sometimes feel guilty using the term “Christian” to refer to the “new Christianit(ies)” concocted by those who think they know better than the Church that gave them their beloved Bible.

So what’s the alternative?

Orthodox Christianity reads the account of Christ on the road to Emmaus more often than I ever encountered in the Protestant world. I mused on that narrative thirteen years ago.

Excerpt:

How do you suppose Christ expounded the Old Testament that day? It turned these disciples from disconsolate to rejoicing, so it must not have been what they were used to hearing. It made simultaneous sense of His sufferings and his Messiahship. It removed the scandal of His being numbered among sinners, and crucified — a particularly scandalous way to die.

Some of His interpretation has come down even into Protestantism, or else Protestants would be unevangelized as they learned Old Testament. For instance, we Christians all understand Isaiah 53 as referring to Christ — contrary to typical Jewish understanding.

I suggest that He interpreted the Scriptures in a way that’s preserved not only in subsequent Apostolic writings called the Gospels and Epistles, but in the interpretive tradition of the Orthodox Church, including its hymns, prayers and service texts. I can’t prove it, but I … can prove that the New Testament writers didn’t write down everything that was important.

Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle.

That’s why we call it “the fullness of the Christian faith.”

And you can only get the fulness of the faith in an Orthodox Church. You can’t get it by reading about it or watching YouTube videos from Orthobros, because we’re not disembodied brains. You need to get your body to Church — again and again and again.

Those who sell you shortcuts are ravening wolves.

⁠⁠Those of us in Western Culture have been reared with what I believe is an entirely incorrect framework; we’ve been taught that knowledge is somehow related to holiness.

Nowhere is this more apparent than the throngs of young people who have been flooding into Orthodox Churches the past few years, many of them coming from various Protestant and Evangelical traditions, where “knowing the Bible” and “knowing theology” are often considered very central to their faith.

Amongst the converts to Orthodoxy, especially among the young men, though not limited to them, there is this thirst for knowledge and all things related to the mind⁠⁠ …

…

⁠⁠A few years ago, a number of young men were received into our parish, in what was really the first small wave of converts that I began noticing in recent years.

All of them were obsessed with Orthodoxy.

A couple of them would stay after the Liturgy with me and talk for hours on end about Orthodox Christianity.

They kept obtaining icons the way young people obtain Pokemon cards, and they would rush to show me their newest acquisitions, proud of how many images of saints they could display on their wall and how many stories about saints they could retell.⁠⁠

⁠⁠Yet not all of these young men wanted to meet regularly with our spiritual father.

They didn’t like that he spent precious little time teaching them theology or teaching them church history. What they wanted was for him to teach them the kind of Orthodox Christianity they were familiar with seeing online; as though that was truly representative of the faith.

My spiritual father is positively a saint. Nobody will ever be able to convince me otherwise, and he could see what these young men needed was not to be educated in the mind about Orthodox Christianity, but rather they needed to learn;

  • how to be calm
  • how to meditate on Jesus
  • how to quit focusing on the external and how to learn to be more aware of the internal

They needed to learn how to be present. Both present before God and present with others. Because at the core of their place in life was an obsession with the external; on knowing things, on material knowledge, as opposed to building a deeper personal relationship with Jesus Christ through the Church.⁠⁠

Kenneth B

The Orthodox Church is not a denomination serving an ethnic niche, nor is it one of many Christian communions that happens to have certain emphases, oddities, or decorative extras; rather, it is simply and merely the historical Christian Church.

Michael Shanbour, Know the Faith

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 63rd Anniversary

Thirteen years ago today, I commemorated a 50th Anniversary on this blog, so now it’s 63 years.

I could change a few things about that post, I suppose, but it’s not worth the effort. Suffice as a teaser that it’s the story of an important benchmark in my Christian life, and that benchmark has “Evangelical” written all over it. If I could change that chapter in my life, I don’t think I would.

Oh, yeah, it might have been nice had my parents been Orthodox, and if I were raised Orthodox. But that’s not how it happened, and all things worked together ….

Enjoy.

Fall’s Eve

I, like many, consider September 1 the start of Autumn. In fact, I advance all seasons by 21 days. And most of the time the earth is flat. I thought you might want to know.

What lawyers are doing lately

If it ever appears that projects are being bogged down in legalese, I would posit that it is not because too many lawyers are involved but rather than an appropriate number of lawyers is trying to, and I am choosing my words carefully here, stop stupid shit being done. They are not always successful but at least they try.

So if it ever appears that infrastructure in America doesn’t get built any more and that nothing ever gets done, it is because the doers of this country have, for the most part, become obsessed with doing stupid shit.

Which is to say, I would be ecstatic if any of my children wanted to pursue a career in law; and I would strongly consider disowning them if they went into finance.

Miloš Miljković

Status versus contract redux

Steve Robinson, who always leaves me wanting more so rarely does he blog or podcast, has fostered 50 boys over the years, housed his dying father-in-law, housed his dying parents, and now is housing his daughter’s family of three. Somewhere along the way, the coin dropped:

We have all embraced the idea that a multi-generational home is not a financial “last resort”, a rescue operation, a pit stop to self-sufficiency, or an end game for losers. It is how families normally (should) exist. A multi-generational household is a world-wide cultural norm, a given, not an embarrassing alternative lifestyle choice, pragmatic financial arrangement (nor even an admirable “noble sacrifice”) that says to the world “we cannot afford to sustain our nuclear, self-sufficient family or pay our medical bills”. In short, we all understand that living together as adults with kids is “normal”… even when it is difficult. None of us see ourselves as the recipients of some mercy, condescension, assistance, or being given a “loan” that will come due in some future emotional hostage taking family battle.

This is very not-America-in-2026. There may be a Chud in the basement, but nobody’s happy about it.

I don’t think living with my son’s family will ever be a financial necessity for my wife and me. And my late father-in-law made it his grim mission never to be dependent on his children as his mother was dependent on him after his father’s premature death. I’ve re-written this rest of this paragraph repeatedly; suffice that he succeeded in never becoming a financial burden.

But here’s the thing: I’ll take that burden 9 days out of 10 over the statist individualism of Sweden:

Swedes have come to prize relationships entered into freely rather than maintained by material necessity. Public child care helps women avoid financial dependence on husbands, state old-age homes liberate children from obligations to ageing parents, and so on. (Even marriage is a bit suspect: in France or Germany households are the basic unit of taxation, but in Sweden all adults file independently.) American parents sending their offspring to college must submit proof of their incomes for the youngsters to qualify for scholarships. In contrast, young Swedes are assumed to be on their own: the income of their parents is irrelevant. Their independence is a gift of the state, expensive as it is to sustain.

It’s reprise of what we used to talk about as “status versus contract.” Life without status-based obligations to other people sounds pretty terrible to me.

On this blog’s trajectory

While writing the preceding item, I thought that I must have written something or a few things around October-November 2014, when my wife and I each lost our surviving parent within two weeks and 5 hours of each other. Indeed I did, and I like what I wrote. I think it’s kind of timeless..

Nonsectarian Prayer

I had forgotten that the perfect nonsectarian prayer for public meeting was written many decades ago by one of our greatest writers:

Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.

Ernest Hemingway, A Clean Well-Lighted Place

(I prefer no prayer to “nonsectarian” prayer, and that’s a preference of many decades’ duration.)

Legal news, one click down from SCOTUS

The Institute for Justice publishes a weekly collection of pithy case summaries from U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal:

…

New Hampshire parents (and a grandparent) are barred from school property after wearing pink wristbands at high school soccer game in protest of a trans player on the visiting team. First Circuit: Seems like a First Amendment problem.

…

During an oversight visit to a federal immigration facility, N.J. congresswoman has a confrontation with federal officials. She’s later charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding a federal officer. She claims immunity under the Speech and Debate Clause and alleges vindictive prosecution. Third Circuit: She loses on two of the counts against her and we remand on the third. Dissent: Sure seems like she’s being treated worse than Jan. 6 defendants.

…

Allegation: Woman peacefully protests fatal police shooting by grilling hot dogs and hamburgers outside Lafayette, La. mayor’s house. She is arrested for obstructing the roadway, which she wasn’t, and strip searched at jail. Unlawful retaliation for speech? Unconstitutional arrest without probable cause? Fifth Circuit: Qualified immunity. Dissent: Qualified immunity is made up and wrong, and also it doesn’t apply here.

…

Student visiting Michigan court as part of a vocational program falls asleep while judge is giving career advice. Yikes! The judge has her locked up for several hours and then puts her on fake trial. She sues. Judge: The “trial” may have been fake, but I am a real judge entitled to real judicial immunity. Sixth Circuit: We’ll give you points for chutzpah, but not immunity.

…

Is possessing virtual, AI-generated child sexual abuse material in the privacy of the home protected by the First Amendment? Seventh Circuit: Under binding precedent, yeah, it seems to be protected. Two-judge concurrence: Perhaps SCOTUS should give a fresh look-see to its early-aughts precedent on this subject.

…

Arkansas sex offender serves most of his 30-year-sentence, is granted parole, and seeks to live on property owned by family trust. Yikes! His parole officer fabricates a nonexistent daycare nearby and bars him from living there—a situation that other officials, apprised of the lie, do not remedy. A due-process violation? Eighth Circuit: There is no constitutional right to early release, so no.

Short Circuits excerpts for August 28. You can subscribe for free.

I’m a big first amendment guy, but virtual, AI-generated child sexual abuse material, even in the privacy of the home, strikes me as beyond the constitutional pale. I do remember Thomas Becket’s passionate admonition against punishing merely dangerous Richard Rich, but possessing kiddie porn is more than dangerous.

Celibacy, Chastity, Abstinence

Kevin Williamson, after a great accounting of Why Everybody Hates Capitalism, distinguishes three things that too often are treated as synonymous:

Celibacy, properly understood, does not refer to a state of sexual abstinence per se—it refers to the state of being unmarried or the state of having sworn off marriage, with the understanding that Christian morality requires sexual abstinence as a consequence of the unmarried state. Chastity, in the Christian moral vocabulary, does not refer exclusively to sexual abstinence, either, but to keeping sex in its place: Catholic doctrine speaks of chaste marriage, meaning one in which the dual unitive (we Catholics love our jargon) and procreative functions of sex are properly integrated into the marital relationship. Chastity may mean abstinence in one context and forbid practicing abstinence in another. Abstinence, of course, is the word for what often is meant by celibacy: abstaining.

Maybe some day he’ll get around to “immaculate conception,” too (which I didn’t capitalize because Orthodoxy holds no such doctrine, but I nevertheless know what it means).

Power to pick up and leave

British political commentator David Goodhart argues that globalization has created two types of people—the anywheres and the somewheres. The anywheres enjoy the benefits of the new networked world. They move comfortably through cyberspace and around the physical world. Their identity is the identity of the global network. The ability to move around networks freely is the new marker of power. Power is the ability to live in multiple places at once. To have the power to pick up and leave. The sense of meaning traditionally found in “place” is replaced with the freedom found in the app.

Mark Sayers, A Non-Anxious Presence

Shorts

  • I can’t figure out what made her so loveable. I think it was the sincerity of her artificiality—that she put herself together in the most artificial way possible, but believed in it like a kid believing that a cap pinned to his shoulders could make him fly. When she talked and sang, she was completely direct and honest, even into old age. The rhinestones were heavy, she told a family member, so she wanted to rest on a fluffy bed of cotton in the casket. She was one of a kind. (Frederica Mathewes-Green)
  • Under the circumstances, handing Darline Graham a Senate seat is tantamount to handing Trump himself a Senate seat. It’s akin to Caligula installing his horse in the chamber, this time with the people’s consent. Which, as others have noted, makes last night’s result feel like a logical outcome for the modern GOP. (Nick Catoggio)
  • The actual power of an undergrad Red Guard scrutinizing a candidate for some small-time faculty position he is ultimately thankful he did not get is nothing compared to the power of an unelected tech boyar and his greasy shock-troops dismantling the federal government. (Justin Smith-Ruiu)
  • Vote Republican. Vote red otherwise we’re all dead. … Your support of the Democrat party makes me seriously question how much I’m going to talk to you in the future. I don’t talk to democrats. They’re filth. Period. (Alleged remark of a clergyman grooming an emotionally fragile teenage girl) in the late twenty-teens.
  • How firm. How furious. How fleeting. (Frank Bruni’s description of one current Republican candidates reaction to January 6. I won’t name the candidate because it fits about 90% of the GOP.)

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.

Oldie, but goodie

[I previously published this on January 23, 2014. I was inordinately pleased with I stumbled across it.]

Street preacher: Are you saved?

Socrates: What do you mean by “saved”?

Street preacher:  You don’t know what it means to be saved?!

Socrates: What makes you think I don’t know what it means to be saved?

Street preacher: Huh! You just said so! That’s why!

Socrates: No. I asked what you meant by “saved.” Surely I must understand what you mean by your question if I’m to answer it to your satisfaction.

Street preacher: What kind of relativistic mumbo-jumbo is that? I asked you a simple question: “Are you saved?” Can I have a simple answer?

Socrates: Surely your question is simple only if “salvation” is simple in your view.

Street preacher: Okay. Have it your way. Salvation means escaping the wrath of God.

Socrates: Well, then. Here I stand, a mature man in reasonably good health, blessed with a wife and children, adequate food, friends, and the prospect of all this indefinitely into the future. I guess I have escaped the wrath of God so in your terms, I’m saved. Have a good day.

Street preacher: No! I mean the wrath of God at the Last Judgment!

Socrates: What do you mean by “Last Judgment.”

Street preacher: I mean the end of the world, when God judges everyone, graciously allowing some to enter heaven, sending other to hell.

Socrates: This thing has happened? How did I miss it?

Street preacher: No! Of course it hasn’t happened! It won’t happen until the end of the world!

Socrates: Then surely I cannot yet be saved since the event by which salvation is defined has not yet come.

Street preacher: But you can be assured that you’ll be saved!

Socrates: But that I will be saved is something in the future. You asked if I am saved, which is in the present. So on your terms, it is impossible that anyone is saved now.

Street preacher: Okay, but I meant by “are you saved” to elicit whether you are sure you will be saved. Are you?

Socrates: No.

Street preacher: Do you want me to tell you how you can be sure?

Socrates: From what source can you prove the legitimacy of such assurance?

Street preacher: From the Bible.

Socrates: I know that book well, yet somehow missed assurance of future salvation.

Street preacher: “I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39)

Socrates: That is a wonderful passage, but can I not separate myself from the love of God?

Street preacher: Why would you want to do that?

Socrates: I did not say I should ever want to do that. I asked whether I could separate myself if I did want to – or if I became lax, or something.

Street preacher: You cannot be so lax as to separate yourself from the love of God!

Socrates: God does not care what I do, or whether, for instance, I love Him with all my heart, soul, mind and strength?

Street preacher: No! All you need to do is Pray The Sinner’s Prayer.

Socrates: Where is this “Sinner’s Prayer” in the Bible? …

Street preacher: Er, um, uh ….

Socrates: And why, if it is that simple, did the Apostle Paul not know about it?

Street preacher: But he did! He wrote that passage in Romans!

Socrates: The scope of which were were discussing. Can nothing on my part separate me from the love of God?

Street preacher: Again, no! We’re saved by faith alone! Once you’ve had faith, you’re golden!

Socrates: Even if I lose faith later?

Street preacher: Yes!

Socrates: Then why did James write –  the only time “faith alone” is found in the Bible, by the way – “You see then that a man is justified by works, and not by faith only”? …

Street preacher: (Muttering) Martin Luther should have taken that book out of the Bible. “Epistle of straw” indeed! It doesn’t belong there ….

Socrates: But more relevant, why did Paul himself write: “And every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible. I therefore so run, not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one that beateth the air: But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.“? (I Corinthians 9:25-27)

Street preacher: Well, Paul must have been having a bad day. Assurance of salvation is central to true Christianity. Any Christianity that lacks such assurance is false!

Socrates: So Paul was a false Christian?

Street preacher: Er, um, uh ….

Socrates: Well, I must be going. Have a good day, sir.

Street preacher: Yeah, same to you. (Muttering) I hate arguing outside the Philosophy Building!

Sunday, August 30, 2026

A life without gadgets

We did not downsize as a gesture of protest against consumer society. We simply found ourselves with a reduced income and set about discovering the things we could do without. We were helped by situating ourselves in a place where it is quite difficult to spend money in the ways we spent it before. Patmos did not have available the range of goods that eat up income at an expanding rate so that you never feel you have quite enough. And doing without them has the therapeutic effect of slowing you down. It takes time to hand-wash clothes or to jump up and down on sheets, rinse them, wring them out and hang them on a line between trees in the garden; to top and tail the beans; to mix, whip and grate by hand; to haul up buckets from a well. A life without gadgets develops a different, slower rhythm. And, oddly, more time seems to be available in a life without labor-saving devices.

Peter France, A Place of Healing for the Soul

Too rich to live well

We live in comforts that the richest of aristocrats not very long ago could never have dreamed of, and yet we claim that we are too poor to have more than a child or two. The truth is the reverse: we are too rich to have more than a child or two, too committed to work for work’s sake and to the purchase of prestige, mansions, the “best” schools, and toys for grown-ups.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes

Cosmopolitans and Scholars

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

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Putting yourself in the right place

Christian liturgies serve as “frameworks of clues which are apt to induce a passionate search for God.”

Michael Polanyi: Epistemological Therapist for a Secular Age

Quick to listen and pray, slow to speak

Although one must think of God constantly, he said, one must not speak of God quickly or readily. One acquires knowledge of God through the mind, but only with the aid of prayer and ascetic discipline. Gregory taught that theology is not for all people or for all occasions. Knowledge of theological matters is not necessary for salvation; only simple faith is needed. Speaking of God is a great task, but spiritual purification is far more important

Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

The Prodigal’s Father

We may act like the wayward younger brother and feel like the hardworking elder brother, but in the end we are called to be like the merciful father.

James Martin, S.J., Jesus. (I dislike plagiarism even more than I dislike quoting this author. As they say, “even a blind pig finds a truffle now and then.”)

Humility

Real humility, I learned from the nuns of Evangelismos, is not thinking yourself less than the dust. It is thinking of others so completely that you do not think about yourself at all.

Peter France, A Place of Healing for the Soul: Patmos

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.

Wednesday, 8/26/26 potpourri

Technology and Humanity

[T]he Amish are the truest geniuses of technology, for they understand the necessity of limiting it, and they know how to limit it. They have refused to see “technological innovation” as an end in itself.

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

Americans once understood that, for all its blessings, any free-market system must account for the unfreedoms we are apt to run headlong into without due deliberation. They understood the essential role of law and society in preserving and protecting the human person against pimps and peddlers who sought to profit from our preference for ease. They understood that technology could either aid the human person in our labors and heal our hurts, or be deployed as a cheap substitute, degrading us. They understood that many technologies that look promising at the outset turn out to have unforeseen consequences and side effects, dealing out damage that then demands new technologies to repair or reverse. They understood the perverse incentives thus created, as innovators could make money first off the problem and then also off the solution. A society of people shelling out billions on junk food and also on gym memberships, diabetes treatments, and Ozempic is one that may well maximize its GDP, but not its human flourishing or happiness. Human beings have a nature: distinctive forms and pathways of flourishing that cannot easily be bypassed without causing harm. While many people still believe this, we have also been allowing technology to tell us a different story, a fairytale in which any craving can and should be met and any negative side effects are temporary — just new needs waiting for a new solution from the technological cornucopia.

Brad Littlejohn, Clare Morell, Emma Waters, Stop Hacking Humans

Technology does not drive history; rather, since the Middle Ages human desires have driven technological innovations, which in turn influence human desires.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

[T]echnology is not and never can be a thing in itself, isolated from economics and society. This means that technological inevitability does not exist.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Of course it’s Seattle

Calkins titled his column, “Agreeing with Sophie Cunningham’s stance doesn’t make you transphobic.”

He said he felt compelled to weigh in after meeting a 16-year-old who had lost a track and field race to a male student in eighth grade.

“I didn’t know if I was going to write something at that point, but after she allegedly got cussed out by a Storm co-owner during the game, I felt like I had to weigh in,” he said.

In the column, Calkins argued that, “Two things can be true at once. You can show compassion for people who feel trapped in the wrong body while acknowledging they have a biological advantage. After all, why do we separate males and females in sports in the first place?”

“It’s not due to the potential awkwardness of physical contact,” he added. 

“It’s because men have higher testosterone levels and different skeletal and muscular frames, which together produce significant performance advantages. This isn’t something I bring up at dinner parties, but it’s undeniable. By every measurable metric in sports — whether it be 100-meter times, vertical leaps, weightlifting, yards off the tee, etc. — the top males substantially outperform the top females.”

Brittany Bernstein, Seattle Times Writer Resigns After Editors Spike Column Defending Fairness in Women’s Sports.

I wish people would just shut up and enjoy the game the WNBA is playing. It almost feels as if some misogynist trolls are trying to divert attention from how beautifully women can play. If you’ve missed most of the season, you can find highlights on YouTube (mixed with the trolls, of course). I’m not even tagging this post with any trigger words the trolls are throwing against the wall.

Tariff Wars

[W]ars are not decided only by the question Who can inflict more pain? Wars are also decided by the question Who can endure more pain? Trump’s failure to accept this truth is why he lost the Iran war—and why he is losing his trade wars.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has much more political permission to accept pain from a U.S.-Canadian trade war than Trump does.

To read current Canadian polling is to see a country united under its political leadership—and energized by its dislike and distrust of Trump’s United States. A majority of Canadians view Trump’s America as a more immediate threat to their security than Russia or China. Two-thirds favor the government taking a hard line in trade talks; fewer than one-quarter regard the United States as trustworthy. Meanwhile, Carney is backed by the Canadian public, polling at about 60 percent approval, a remarkable figure in a multiparty political system.

David Frum.

I’m rooting for the Canadians on this. Trade war with Canada is one of Trump’s spastic depredations that I hope can be reversed on 1/20/29.

Educated Exile

I’ve noted how often I’m quoting Rod Dreher again, or crediting him as the source of a quote from someone else. I dropped his Substack for a while, then managed to re-up for a longer subscription than I intended. But I seem to have figured out how to sort through his logorrhea without resenting it this time around.

He recently posted with the main topic being Emilee Hackney’s Appalachian Life…. It’s another “poor Appalachian makes it to the Ivy League” story, and Rod added something that haunts me:

Emilee Hackney is now in her late 20s, married, a mother of one, and working in the English department at the University of Virginia, on the administrative side. What she may not know fully — yet — is that her life will always be one of exile, wherever she lives. She can’t ever go Home, not really, yet she won’t ever feel entirely at home anywhere else. This is a burden that many, many people live with in our highly mobile society.

Rod speaks from deep experience, though his background was more insular than poor, and his life-changing experience was a state school for the gifted rather than an Ivy League college.

Education has costs that cannot be measured in money. Life is full of trade-offs.

Without comment

Swedes have come to prize relationships entered into freely rather than maintained by material necessity. Public child care helps women avoid financial dependence on husbands, state old-age homes liberate children from obligations to ageing parents, and so on. (Even marriage is a bit suspect: in France or Germany households are the basic unit of taxation, but in Sweden all adults file independently.) American parents sending their offspring to college must submit proof of their incomes for the youngsters to qualify for scholarships. In contrast, young Swedes are assumed to be on their own: the income of their parents is irrelevant. Their independence is a gift of the state, expensive as it is to sustain.

The Economist, How Sweden became a country of big-state libertarians.

C.S. Lewis on War

It is arguable that a criminal can always be satisfactorily dealt with without the death penalty. It is certain that a whole nation cannot be prevented from taking what it wants except by war. It is almost equally certain that the absorption of certain societies by certain other societies is a great evil. The doctrine that war is always a greater evil seems to imply a materialist ethic, a belief that death and pain are the greatest evils. But I do not think they are. I think the suppression of a higher religion by a lower, or even a higher secular culture by a lower, a much greater evil.

C.S. Lewis, Why I Am Not a Pacifist in The Weight of Glory.

I was with him up through “I do not think they are.” We venerate many saints because they would not deny their faith in the face of torture and martyrdom. My doubt, or desire for clarification, comes from the last sentence.

Shorts

  • In reality, the best way to understand Trumpism isn’t that it replaced one Republican ideology with another but rather that a cult of personality essentially destroyed Republican ideology altogether and we do not yet know what will take its place. (David French)
  • “When I see something that’s honestly badly written, it’s such a breath of fresh air now,” said Angeline Rodriguez, an agent at WME, noting that some of the submissions she’s getting now “make ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ look like Tolstoy.” (Anna Silman)
  • How Greek Farmers Milked EU Funds From Imaginary Cows Politico via the Morning Dispatch.
  • Trump styles himself as an heir to Theodore Roosevelt, but where Roosevelt said that America should speak softly and carry a big stick, Trump speaks loudly and carries a small one. Roosevelt’s bully pulpit has been reduced to a bullshit pulpit. (David Graham, Thank You for Your Inattention to This Matter)
  • Francis was a charming, foolish boy who grew into a charming, foolish man. He did no harm in the world except by being born into a role he could not fulfill. (Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz)
  • The passion for the Inner Ring is most skilful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things. (C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength) (we could call it “Inner Circle.”)
  • Many of the findings of neuroscience simply offer us a description of the brain correlates of human experience. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things. I greatly admire the precision of that sentence. I could have taken several paragraphs to say it.)
  • When the little boy said the emperor was naked, he wasn’t telling anyone anything they didn’t already know. But he added to their knowledge nonetheless. By blurting out what every onlooker could see within earshot of the others, he ensured that they now knew that everyone else knew what they knew, that everyone knew that everyone knew that, and so on. And that changed their relationship to the emperor, from obsequious deference to ridicule and scorn. (Steven Pinker, Why Authoritarians Fear Common Knowledge)

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.

Leavetaking of the Dormition

Sorry for a bit of a hodge-podge today.

Leavetaking of the Dormition

Most Orthodox Christians in North America are today “taking leave” of the feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God — the death of Mary, who we honor precisely because the child she bore, after telling the Angel Gabriel “be it unto me according to your word,” was more than merely human.

It is amusing, and annoying, to read modern historical critics of the New Testament who come away from those documents arguing that the notion of Christ’s divinity was a later development. Somehow they manage to read the New Testament and miss the most obvious thing: the writers all believe that Jesus is divine. They fail to notice that the very existence of the “Jesus material” of the New Testament exists solely because its writers believed He was God. Every line flows from that belief.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, Why Mary Has Always Been Honored

What would a Christian society be like?

Every single one of [Christ’s] teachings, were we to follow them, would make the building of a civilization an impossibility. So what we’re really hearing about, then, when we hear talk about defending or rebuilding Christian civilization, is not Christianity and its teachings at all, but modernity and its end-game. It’s the idol of material progress, the progress which has shredded both culture and nature, which is causing such grief everywhere.

Yankee Athonite, Crucify Your Mind (Link unavailable)

I’m not certain I agree, but I flirt with this idea occasionally. It seems consonant with Alastair MacIntyre:

… such a society would not make the kind of material progress that our society has. But then again, to believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.

Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry.

Charisma collection

Past

Evangelicalism is not so much a religion as a series of fast-moving personality cults.

Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God

Evangelicalism revivals were “direct, personal, popular, and dependent much more on a speaker’s ability to draw a crowd than upon that speaker’s place in an established hierarchy.”

Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

They wanted a dramatic faith too, full of spectacle. They were all big personalities, which they used to compensate for their lack of training, expertise, and experience. Faith, for them, was not the act of extending one’s self beyond the realm of what could be known to trust in what one hoped could be true. They had more certainty than anything. Christianity was true, no questions asked. For them, faith was a belief that they could call down miracles from heaven to heal the sick or predict the future or change world events. Leaders like Tomczak, Engle, and Ahn didn’t come across as charlatans. They were very sincere. But early on in their lives, they got locked into a particular type of faith ministry, and they built audiences and followings based on that brand and that kind of faith. At that point, their livelihoods and incomes became dependent on catering to those same types of Christians. Personal evolution or growth became constrained by their business model.

Jon Ward, Testimony

Present?

At this point, tens of millions of believers—about 40 percent of American Christians, including Catholics, according to a recent Denison University survey—are embracing an alluring, charismatic movement that has little use for religious pluralism, individual rights, or constitutional democracy.

Stephanie McCrummen, The Army of God Comes Out of the Shadows.

I’m an old fogey, long living a somewhat counter-cultural life, who consequently misses what’s going on fairly often. So take it with a grain of salt when I say I’m incredulous about the startling 40 percent figure in that Denison University survey.

The topic is the “New Apostolic Reformation” movement, which I thought, upon first encounter, resembled hyper-Calvinist “Theonomy” or “Christian Reconstruction” (i.e., integralism for “conservative” Protestants), until I saw that is is led by Charismatic leaders claiming “Apostolic” office and authority. I don’t think you’d get 40% even if you combined the hyper-Calvinist and NAR polity adherents.

For more about the New Apostolic Reformation from a fairly discerning journalist, Julia Duin, see The Charismatic Christians prophesying Trump’s victory (and not backing down) and When covering the Trump prophets, listen up: ‘Heavenly inauguration’ is in the wings, both about the 2020 Presidential election.

Bad things can start off very small. And Americans have long been suckers for charismatic figures, especially glib ones.

But for now I think these self-appointed apostles and their followers are smaller by far than 40% of us. And if historic patterns hold, the “evangelical” culture will soon move on to The Next Big Thing.

The lure of power

… Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson, who had been Falwell’s chief lieutenants in the Moral Majority, published a book questioning not just the efficacy of political action but the righteousness of the enterprise. In Blinded by Might they argued that in the process of trying to win elections conservative Christians had been seduced by the lure of power. What had begun as an effort to restore Christian values to the nation had degenerated into an unbridled partisan struggle, creating an atmosphere in which it was assumed that Democrats could not be Christians and that Bill and Hillary Clinton were the Antichrist.

Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals (hyperlink added)

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 sense a parallel between Jerry Falwell Sr. and Simon Magus and those who used the name of Christ as if it was a magic incantation, only to be mocked by the demons they were trying to cast out.

There’s always a temptation to try to use some variety of magic to make god(s) do what one wants, and it’s healthy for me to remember that at least two Evangelicals recognized what was happening.

Permanent things

“How has it come about,” C. S. Lewis once asked, “that we use the highly emotive word ‘stagnation,’ with all its malodorous and malarial overtones, for what other ages would have called ‘permanence’?” It is, Lewis suggests, because the dominance of the machine in our culture altered our imagination. It gave us a “new archetypal image.”

Ken Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes

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.

Tuesday, August 18, 2026

SPLC

SPLC backgrounder (from a skeptical position I share)

The [Southern Poverty Law Center] was founded in 1971 to fight genuine white-supremacist terror in the American South. For almost two decades, it did necessary and often courageous work: bankrupting Klan chapters through civil litigation, winning judgments that shuttered paramilitary training camps, forcing accountability where local prosecutors had refused to. By the late 1980s, most of its original mission had been accomplished. The Klan was largely irrelevant. The overt neo-Nazi movement had been driven to the margins.

A healthy institution would have declared victory and wound itself down. Instead, roughly coinciding with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the SPLC began its transformation from a vessel of emancipation into a vessel of subversion. The legal work shrank. The direct-mail operation grew. The enemy was no longer the Klansman in the hood but the dissenter at the lectern—the Muslim reformer, the border-enforcement advocate, the Catholic theologian, the parents’ group. The SPLC became an institution that retained its old license while pivoting toward new, softer targets.

…

Consider allegations that “F-37,” an SPLC informant, helped plan the Charlottesville rally that killed Heather Heyer and traumatized a nation. According to the indictment, this individual actively coordinated transportation, participated in planning meetings, and posted racist content to maintain credibility within white supremacist circles. Moreover, it charges, the SPLC paid F-37 $270,000 over eight years to embed within the very movements it publicly condemned. When Americans witnessed the horror of torch-bearing neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us,” they were watching a performance partly choreographed by someone on a civil rights organization’s payroll, according to the indictment.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: The SPLC Targeted Me. Now Its Reckoning Has Come.

The SPLC thought, while there was a fatwa against her life, that Ayaan Hirsi Ali had an Islamophobia problem. I don’t have much sympathy for SPLC’s legal problems now even if the prosecution’s motives are suspect (as is everything the Trump DOJ does; but “suspect” doesn’t mean “guilty.”)

SPLC Legal Update

A few months ago, I expressed some ambivalence about the Trump administration charging the Southern Poverty Law Center criminally:

Even more than two things can be true at the same time:

  1. Southern Poverty Law Center did good work on civil rights decades ago;
  2. Instead of declaring victory and closing up shop, SPLC became a grifting media darling with lazy leftwing slop like its “Hatewatch”;
  3. Had you asked me if SPLC used moles to infiltrate right-wing groups, I probably would have paused for a few seconds and then answered “Why, yes; I suppose they do.” Were I an SPLC donor, I don’t think that would have deterred me.
  4. To all appearances, the criminal indictment of SPLC is, if not garbage, at least garbage-adjacent. It looks like a typical Trump DoJ stunt.
  5. The criminal indictment will cost SPLC not just defense costs, but lost revenue: This week, Fidelity Charitable and Vanguard Charitable said they had paused grants from Donor-Advised Funds to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
    …

Last week, Team Trump followed up with charges against a fairly high-ranking individual within the SPLC, and the Dispatch has weighed in with some analysis:

Approaching Beirich’s arraignment—which is scheduled for this Wednesday—and the jury selection and criminal trial set to take place in October, the Trump administration’s charge that the SPLC defrauded banks looks stronger than its claim that the organization defrauded its own donors….

[Analysis of the weak charges for “fraud” from paying informants to infiltrate groups omitted.]

The government’s allegations of bank fraud may prove stronger. After Beirich’s arrest, Blanche said that Beirich had helped open bank accounts in the names of fictitious companies. Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, told TMD that most lawyers he speaks to consider the bank counts “more likely to cause real trouble for the SPLC in court.”

“One of the reasons for that is that the laws on false statements to banks are drawn in a very pro-prosecution way,” he said. And the SPLC has few defenses on these counts, Olson explained, because the laws on bank fraud mean that “it doesn’t matter what the bank thinks of this—for example, it doesn’t matter if the bank doesn’t want you prosecuted.”

“If you have misstated things to a bank, and … if it passes a threshold of somehow being material or important, then tough penalties apply,” Olson said.

…

But even if the case is ultimately dismissed, the controversy is also drawing attention to larger questions about the SPLC’s use of its funds. CharityWatch, a nonpartisan nonprofit that rates charities, gives the organization an “F” rating for continuing to raise money while already holding large reserves—$787 million in net assets, according to the center’s most recent financial filing.

“They’re doing okay from a financial efficiency perspective, but we analyzed their assets, and what we determined is that this organization could continue to operate at 2024 spending levels for six years without raising another penny of revenue,” Laurie Styron, CharityWatch’s CEO and executive director, told TMD “So our criticism is, ‘Why are you continuing to fundraise when you have six years’ worth of money available to operate your organization that you haven’t spent?’”

Blowback from the Congress Hegseth holds in contempt

There is, in short, good reason Congress isn’t rushing to rubber-stamp the staggering defense budget. The House, by a narrow margin, passed a $1.15 trillion defense budget and a $73 billion supplemental to fund the Iran war. In addition to the money in the House bills, the White House wants another $350 billion via a reconciliation bill that can’t be filibustered by Democrats. But that measure appears to be DOA in the Senate. With time running out, the armed forces are likely to begin the new fiscal year on Oct. 1 under a “continuing resolution” that provides “only” $838 billion. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has no one but himself to blame. He has been contemptuous of Congress, so it’s hardly surprising that its members are not rushing to hand him a massive pot of cash. If Hegseth wants to win bipartisan support for the defense budget — something that was taken for granted in years past — he needs to start briefing Senate Democrats, not just Republicans. And he needs to do a much better job of addressing lawmakers’ concerns about controversies such as the unexplained firings of general officers, the lawless attacks on alleged drug boats, the deteriorating conditions aboard an aircraft carrier deployed to the Middle East and the failed war with Iran.

…

Under Hegseth’s weak and woeful leadership, the defense budget has become a piggy bank not just for Trump’s impractical flights of fancy but also for Trump family members. The Washington Post reported that companies in which the president’s sons Eric and Donald Jr. have invested have received at least $3.2 billion in defense contracts since the start of Trump’s second term.

Perhaps there’s a case for a $1.5 trillion defense budget, but, so far, Hegseth hasn’t made it, at least not convincingly. Indeed, The Post reported earlier this year that military officers were scrambling to figure out how to spend an extra $500 billion. Hegseth seems to have picked $1.5 trillion as the “top line” arbitrarily, rather than conducting a rigorous bottom-up analysis of what the military needs.

Trump, for his part, hasn’t given a single speech providing a detailed justification for the defense budget. His argument for it remains at the bumper-sticker level, claiming that all that extra spending will produce a “Dream Military.” But at what cost?

A far greater Republican president — Dwight D. Eisenhower — recognized that the nation must provide for its defense today without “plundering … the precious resources of tomorrow.”

Max Boot

I take every opportunity to say “I told you so,” but this is not a fair opportunity. It never occurred to me that we could attack Iran and not beat them. It never occurred to me that we could frightfully deplete vital munitions in a foolish war on Iran, imperiling our ability to honor other commitments around the world. I never thought about how Iran would strike back if we attacked.

But I think I can say that if I sat in the Oval Office, I’d have listened carefully to top military officials who could and probably would have told me those things – and that I consequently would not have started this stupid war.

No bail

The Tate brothers want bail pending their extradition proceedings to the United Kingdom. Unfortunately for them, it’s very hard to get bail when you’re pending extradition, and also their social media is full of statements about how they are flight risks. “You can’t ban me from driving, I have nine drivers licenses. You can’t freeze my passport, I have four.” Yeah… they’re not going to be getting out anytime soon.

Josh Barro and Ken White

Postliberalism

Liberalism is the system of government most Americans recognize as legitimate: The rule of law, constitutionalism (written or unwritten), democratic accountability (i.e., politicians are accountable to voters), individual rights variously defined, and to one extent or another, commitment to the free market.

A postliberal is someone who believes that liberalism was either a mistake from the beginning (they heap a lot of scorn on poor John Locke), or—like Marx—argues as an objective observation that it is a spent force in need of replacement. The specifics of what that new replacement order should look like are often hard to find, and even when some give it a shot, I haven’t seen any that aren’t exceedingly vague, aspirational, platitudinous, or too narrow to be the basis of a consensus (I am open to correction).

Jonah Goldberg, Thank God the Constitution is Liberal

Legal Miscellany from the Short Circuits newsletter

  • Plaintiff: My gov’t employer cooked up baseless allegations to fire me in retaliation for my whistleblowing. State court (round one): Sounds like a claim that requires discovery, which means you should file a plenary proceeding. State court (round two): Whoops! Turns out that round-one decision precludes all your state-law claims in this here plenary proceeding. Federal district court: And that all looks like res judicata for your constitutional claims, too! Second Circuit: Guys. Guys. Calm down. Nothing has been judicataed, and somebody needs to listen to this lady’s claims. Case undismissed!
  • If a Fifth Circuit opinion considering a challenge to gas stove regulations begins, “The Biden Administration proposed numerous regulations to make home appliances more expensive and less useful,” you probably know how it’s gonna turn out.
  • Sixth Circuit: Forcing a compliant suspect to pee in his front yard when there were plenty of officers on hand to supervise a trip to the toilet is an obvious Fourth Amendment violation. No qualified immunity. Case undismissed. Dissent: At the Founding, public urination was probably not a crime in these circumstances.
  • Minnesota Jane Doe, who was sexually assaulted at age 14, provides evidence for a rape kit. Anoka County police do not test the kit for over 16 years, then find it contains DNA implicating the assailant she identified. She sues the police for failure to investigate. Eighth Circuit: Crime victims have no standing for that sort of thing.
  • Automated license plate readers (ALPRs) are sold as a targeted tool to catch dangerous criminals and find missing persons. And we like both of those things. But the frequency with which officers use ALPRs for non-law-enforcement purposes (chiefly stalking) or wind up tracking and detaining the wrong people (sometimes at gunpoint) is downright alarming. Officers rarely record specific reasons for ALPR searches, and even where they are supposed to, as we learned in litigation against Norfolk, Va., officers ignore those internal department requirements without consequence. (One officer repeatedly wrote “la la la la,” and no one noticed.) Which is all to say that constitutional safeguards are desperately needed, and we have a sensible proposal that we’re bringing to a courthouse near you: If the police want to track someone, they have to get a warrant. Click here to learn more.

Right hand, meet left hand

Religio-Legal from WaPo:

Virginia requires chaplains serving in the Virginia National Guard to obtain a theology-related master’s degree. Yet despite providing tuition assistance for other types of degrees, it recently denied tuition assistance to Trace Stevens, a National Guard member enrolled in a master’s program at Liberty University to pursue the type of theology degree necessary to become a chaplain. The state claimed that such degrees are too religious to receive state support.

Things I’d rather not talk about

Surrogacy is one of those issues that conservatives simply don’t want to talk about. It is often heart-wrenching when couples are not able to have children, and IVF and surrogacy are viewed as miracles to let these couples have children. To raise any moral or legal objections to this practice is sometimes seen as a third-rail, even in Republican pro-life circles …

Yes, this is true.

… And on the left, how many of the women who wore bonnets from the Handmaid’s Tale to protest Justice Barrett hired poor women in Eastern Europe to carry their children? This is an issue that needs to be discussed more on both sides of the spectrum.

Josh Blackman

I’m one of those muzzled conservatives. “I think IVF is dodgy” was the shorthand for IVF and for surrogacy that I put in my running list of unpopular opinions.

But I’m friends with people who have children via assisted reproductive technologies that I find “dodgy.” To discuss it risks the friendship. And their children are precious however conceived.

“Woke” (properly speaking)

“Woke” has come to be used as shorthand for anything that feels like an extremist position on the left: defunding the police, favoring open borders, supporting medically invasive “gender affirming care” for teens over the wishes of their parents, etc. But, rightly understood, none of those are woke. They are public policies favored by left-wing activists. Wokeness was (and is) something distinct: a method of leveraging cultural power to reshape public opinion, thereby creating an electorate more likely to embrace those and other progressive views in the future.

That reshaping takes place outside of the political sphere—in cultural institutions in the private sphere. It can be driven by grassroots agitation (from below) or by elite agenda-setting (from above).

Conservative pundit Kevin Williamson getting hired by The Atlantic and then fired two weeks later because junior staffers at the magazine demanded it was an example (one of many) of the first. Applicants and recent hires for teaching positions at universities across the country being forced to sign documents promising to teach a specific narrative about race and gender in all of their classes, regardless of their specialized fields or research and teaching interests, was (and is) an example of the second.

A mob of progressives on Twitter circa 2019 attempting to get a conservative or “reactionary centrist” fired for staking out the “wrong” position on this or that issue of the day is an example of the first. Millions of employees being forced to sit through DEI training sessions run by their employer’s department of human resources, which is in charge of hiring, firing, and promotion for the company, is an example of the second.

The problem with and novelty of these developments is not that they involve crowds and institutions imposing or enforcing certain norms. The problem and novelty is entirely a function of the fact that the norms they seek to impose or enforce are expressions of a moral vanguard.

Damon Linker, “looking left” as his Substack regularly and explicitly does.

But note that there are right-leaning versions of something very like “woke,” too. Does Linker’s definition of woke excludes them unnecessarily, or is there something distinctive about, say, Laura Loomer (right-coded grassroots agitator, whose McCarthyite lists got a whole lotta people fired in Trump 2.0) or Ron DeSantis (an elite right-wing agenda-setter for the state of Florida)?

Shorts

  • ‌If God wanted us to have unlimited free energy He would have put a giant fusion reactor in the sky.
  • The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born. (J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know)
  • Religion has declined in the West, but Taylor thinks the more interesting story is the explosion of different forms of religion in modernity, its fragmentation. (William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry
  • If sex is just a social construct, or even if gender is just a social construct, why is there any need for medical “transitioning” starting with hormone injections? (Tipsy, H/T Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self)
  • How much would you pay for a smarter baby? — I can imagine the lawsuits later: “We paid for a smarter baby but instead we got a child who’s compassionate and generous! We’ve been screwed!” (Alan Jacobs)
  • Joe Biden’s political appointees had left the week before, and I was now the senior intelligence official in the White House. For the incoming Trump administration, the trans woman would man the gates. (Julia Curlee, The Wrong Kind of American)
  • If this is Making America Great Again, I wish he’d stop. (Rod Dreher, who voted for Trump in 2024)
  • Anywhere there was power to protect, doublespeak was, sooner or later, right there in the midst of it. As the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing put it, one realizes that “they are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.” (Russell Moore)
  • While the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace, gifted by the Emir of Qatar. (Sen. Jon Ossoff, in a remark that seems to have gotten under Trump’s skin)
  • Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics. Instead of denigrating hard working people serving their country, Jon should look deep into his soul and ask himself why he’s a miserable person who hates this country. It’s because he’s a radical, extremist Dumocrat. (Steven Cheung, White House Communications Director)

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.