Sunday, 9/27/26

Beauty and truth

I would never have set out upon the journey that led me to the The Ethics of Beauty had I not read Jonathan Shay’s observation in his Achilles in Vietnam that contemporary analytical psychotherapy has been largely unable to heal the suffering of the soldiers afflicted most severely with post-traumatic stress disorder. I have slowly come to see that another way to read Shay would be to say that the initial focus of soul-healing must be on Beauty rather than on truth, on a living vision of a loving and crucified God, rather than on an autopsy of the broken self. … The fatal flaw of soul-therapy since Freud, by contrast, has been its insistence that truth and not beauty be our first concern; the repellant aspect of today’s political ideologies is rooted in a similar insistence.

Timothy G. Patitsas

Is “mere Christianity” Protestant?

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, a Protestant.

This reflects my own experience going from lower Protestant traditions to fully ecclesial Christianity. The late Richard John Neuhaus puts it this way:

An ecclesial Christian is one who understands with mind and heart, and even feels with his fingertips, that Christ and his Church, head and body, are inseparable. For the ecclesial Christian, the act of faith in Christ and the act of faith in the Church are not two acts of faith but one. In the words of the third-century St. Cyprian, martyr bishop of Carthage, “He who would have God as his Father must have the Church as his mother.”

In defense of Origen (and against spurious interpolations)

After Paul, there is no single Christian figure to whom the whole tradition is more indebted. It was Origen who taught the church how to read scripture as a living mirror of Christ, who evolved the principles of later Trinitarian theology and Christology, who majestically set the standard for Christian apologetics, who produced the first and richest expositions of contemplative spirituality, and who—simply said—laid the foundation of the whole edifice of developed Christian thought. Moreover, he was not only a man of extraordinary personal holiness, piety, and charity, but a martyr as well: Brutally tortured during the Decian persecution at the age of 69, he never recovered, but slowly withered away over a period of three years. He was, in short, among the greatest of the church fathers and the most illustrious of the saints and yet, disgracefully, official church tradition—East and West—commemorates him as neither.⁠

David Bentley Hart, putting more flesh on the bones of a story I’ve known for quite some time: somewhere along the line, after he was dead and gone, Origen got a bum rap.

What I didn’t know was that it wasn’t a Church Council that did it:

⁠I cannot really say what irks me more, though: that it happened or that, in fact, it really never did. The oldest records of the council (which was convened to deal solely with certain Antiochian theologians) make it clear that those fifteen anathemas were never even discussed by the assembled bishops, let alone ratified, published, or promulgated.⁠⁠ And ⁠⁠since the late nineteenth century various scholars have convincingly established that neither Origen nor “Origenism” was ever the subject of any condemnation pronounced by the “holy fathers” in 553. The best modern critical edition of the Seven Councils—Norman Tanner’s—simply omits the anathemas as spurious interpolations.

Compare and Contrast

American Religion

The result is a religious landscape dominated by popular Christian ideas that have “gone mad,” as G.K. Chesterton once put it, “because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.” This America has a church of self-love, with prophets like Oprah Winfrey preaching a gospel of the divine self, a “God Within” spirituality that risks making selfishness a virtue. It has a church of prosperity, with figures like Joel Osteen as its bishops, that insists that God desires nothing more for his elect than American prosperity, capitalist success. And it has churches of politics, preaching redemption through political activism — a Christian nationalism on the right, by turns messianic and apocalyptic, and a progressive utopianism on the left, convinced that history’s arc bends always in its favor.

These heresies, I argued, are more important to understanding the true influence of religion in America than anything that comes out of the Roman Catholic Church or the Southern Baptist Convention. You can understand our spiritual situation more completely by reading “The Da Vinci Code,” “Eat, Pray, Love” and “Your Best Life Now” than by browsing a papal encyclical (or for that matter an atheist polemic). And you can see more of Christianity’s enduring but now deformed influence in will.i.am’s celebrity hymns to Barack Obama in 2008, or Glenn Beck’s right-wing revivals a couple of years later, than in whatever cultural authority still attaches to the New Testament or the Nicene Creed.

Ross Douthat, The Americanization of Religion

Christianity

Father Maximos then went on to say how surprised he was to learn that there were so many people today that become victims of … charlatans. The most troublesome development, he mentioned, was the fact that many people considered him to be some kind of magician. “They come here at the monastery to find out whether someone has cast a spell on them, why they were abandoned by their lover or their husband and so on. At first I couldn’t figure out why they would come to me with such problems. Then I realize that they thought of me as some kind of sorcerer capable of undoing spells.“ Father Maximos shook his head and chuckled in his characteristic way.

“What do you tell them in such cases?“ I asked.

“What do you think? I tell them that there is no magic to resolve their problems, that they need to do spiritual work. I tell them that if they have a problem with demonic energies then they can follow the prescriptions the Ecclesia to heal themselves: confession, participation in the mysteries, fasting, charity, prayer, and askesis in general. That’s the way to do it.”

“So, there you are. You offer them a recipe on how to cast out the spell,” I pointed out in a light tone. “But are they receptive?”

“Hardly. Most people crave a quick fix. They are too lazy or unwilling to invest any effort of their own. They assume that if I read some magic formula over their heads, their problems will disappear. No need for them to change their ways. No need for them to engage in systematic prayer and askesis. Of course, some to follow the therapeutic guidelines of the Ecclesia and see results.”

Kyriacos C. Markides, The Mountain of Silence

The unity of the Church

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once commented that it had been granted to America, less than to any nation on earth, to realize the visible unity of the church of God.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Religion

The early Church had no Scripture of its own, and the Jews had no defined canon of Scripture; therefore, *sola scriptura* as the foundation for what Christians believed was absolutely impossible.

Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

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](http://rwb.intellectualoid.com/). (b) I also post [some things](https://microblog.intellectualoid.com/) on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Meritocracy, Republican “conservatives,” Culture, and Covenant

Meritocracy

When “color-blindness” isn’t white enough

Our founders’ faith in our future immigrants, whatever their religious beliefs, has been vindicated. In fact, one item of evidence in support of that fact is the very presence of a large number of Asian students in the stands of Texas’s flagship university.

Texas has worked to create a colorblind meritocracy in college admissions. Under Texas law, UT-Austin grants automatic admission to Texas students who finish in the top sliver of their class. The school uses automatic admissions to fill 75 percent of available spaces for Texas residents.

And contrary to French’s argument that Texas prioritizes “foreigners,” the school is required to fill 90 percent of its freshman class with Texas residents.

Asians are roughly 7 percent of the Texas population, but they make up about 22 percent of the undergraduate student body. That’s impressive. It’s admirable. And it’s evidence of remarkably successful assimilation into the American school system.

It’s becoming very clear that when the new right praises meritocracy, the last thing they are is colorblind.

Texas has tried to create a meritocracy that rewards academic achievement regardless of race, ethnicity, sex or religion. It’s far from perfect, but one thing is crystal clear — if you do well enough in school you can go to the best university in the state. That’s a promise.

But now the results are in, and white men don’t do well enough for the new right. After spending years and years complaining when the left used admissions statistics to decry disproportionate racial admissions, the new right is now doing the exact same thing — but without having hundreds of years of racial oppression to buttress their argument that the American system isn’t yet as fair as it needs to be.

David French, chewing on the obnoxious Bo French swipe at UT student fans whose skin color apparently offended him.

Populist push-back

Wherever the Information Age economy showers money and power onto educated urban elites, populist leaders have arisen to rally the less educated: not just Donald Trump in America but Marine Le Pen in France, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. These leaders understand that working-class people resent the know-it-all professional class, with their fancy degrees, more than they do billionaire real-estate magnates or rich entrepreneurs. Populist leaders worldwide traffic in crude exaggerations, gross generalizations, and bald-faced lies, all aimed at telling the educated class, in effect: Screw you and the epistemic regime you rode in on.

David Brooks, How the Ivy League Broke America (11/14/24)

Republican “conservatives”

If they were on fire, I wouldn’t cross the street …

⁠⁠Yesterday Kevin Williamson rattled off a few of the “conservative” initiatives that the current Senate, with John Cornyn’s help, has either actively enabled or cravenly neglected to stop:

the enrichment of the president and his family and his cronies; the campaign of wanton murder on the high seas; the illegal war against Iran; the illegal war against Venezuela; continued attempts to undermine confidence in our elections and to meddle with their administration; the illegal imposition of a new national system of taxation in the form of unconstitutional tariffs; a lawless campaign of presidential aggrandizement that runs from the serious (supplanting Congress with the pretense of ruling by decree) to the tellingly trivial (the president’s obsession with putting his name on the Kennedy Center); the attacks on allies undertaken while the president enabled actual literal enemies of the United States of America, including the Vladimir Putin junta in Moscow and the Kim Jong Un cult in North Korea; financial arrangements that run from the shady to the illegal and that stretch from Caracas to Doha.

That’s not exhaustive, as Kevin notes. We’ve reached the point of right-wing ideological degeneracy under Trump where it can be said, without hyperbole, that the state will be less likely to control the means of production if Democrats are in charge of Congress than if Republicans are.⁠⁠

Nick Catoggio (Bold added)

No homecoming this year – or ever

For conservatives estranged from the Republican Party in its current debased form, there is not going to be a homecoming—not now and not in the foreseeable future. It seems likely that the Republican Party will never again be a legitimate vehicle for the advancement of conservative policy. That is because Republicans do not have the guts or the brains to do the hard work of reckoning with the Trump legacy, including the series of events that are misleadingly abbreviated as “January 6.” 

As I have argued at length in these pages, in the pages of the New York Times, and in such other outlets as will have me, the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was not exactly a sideshow, but it was not the most important part of the episode, either—it was just the one that made for the most compelling video. In the wake of losing the 2020 presidential election, Trump, abetted by prominent figures in the Republican Party and conservative movement ranging from Rudy Giuliani to Cleta Mitchell—and cheered on by the right-wing propaganda apparatus of which Fox News is the bright Morning Star (for you traditional Mass enthusiasts out there, we can use the Latin: Lucifer)—attempted to nullify the election so that he could illegally remain in power as president. In other words, Trump and Republicans attempted to stage a very traditional kind of coup d’état, taking the familiar form of an autogolpe under legal pretext. In practical terms, they tried to overthrow the government during their last days running it.

…

In a sane world, we would not be talking about whether the Democrats will impeach Trump if they win congressional majorities in November but why Republicans have not done so already. But in the insane world we actually inhabit, we already know the answer to that question: It is because the Republican Party is dominated on the one hand by bigots and authoritarians who follow Trump because of his high crimes and misdemeanors and not in spite of them and on the other hand by cowards, crackpots, sycophants, nonentities, degenerates, grifters, and hacks who put their own interests—political, financial, celebrity-seeking—above the good of the country and who have left their self-respect so far behind that they could not catch a glimpse of it with the James Webb Space Telescope. 

Here at The Dispatch, we spend a great deal of time thinking about what a post-Trump American politics will look like and, relatedly, what kind of post-Trump future the Republican Party and the conservative movement will have. Speaking only for myself, I do not see how the Republican Party has a post-Trump future. There are people I personally like and—with qualifications—admire associated with the Republican Party, but none—not one—of the Republicans who occupy positions of influence or who currently hold significant elected office is willing to reckon with the attempted coup d’état of 2021 or even to call it an attempted coup d’état. A party that makes excuses for an attempt to overthrow the government and that remains invested in defending the legacies of those who attempted to overthrow the government simply cannot be a normal and legitimate political party. Unless and until the GOP reckons with that, it must remain the degraded and debased thing it is. And Republicans show no interest at all in the kind of reckoning and reconciliation that is necessary—even as they prepare for a midterm rout in November. 

I have friends who are Republican Party supporters of varying degrees of political and financial significance, and many of them make entirely reasonable-sounding, pragmatic arguments, which largely amount to: The Democrats are likely to do lasting damage to the country, especially to the business environment, and it is still possible to work toward a Republican Party that is more like John Cornyn than Ken Paxton. That is a reasonable argument for supporting the better kind of Republicans, but I am not sure it is a true argument. On the former point: The Trump administration is doing tremendous economic damage to the United States, from creating an environment of utter unpredictability in trade and related matters to pursuing a policy of actual socialism in the form of having the federal government take ownership stakes in formerly private firms to inflicting lasting damage on the wealth of an entire generation of Americans through policies that have ensured the persistence of high inflation. Ironically, those industries whose leaders have given Trump and Trumpism the most generous hearing are among those that will suffer the most from his policies: energy, manufacturing, and agriculture. On the latter point: It may be possible to reform the Republican Party, but there is not much evidence in support of such a hope—Republicans did, after all, put forward Ken Paxton rather than John Cornyn in Texas, and Republicans largely have made similar choices in other races. The GOP is the Bo French party, not the David French party. 

Kevin D. Williamson (Bold added)

Virtue signaling —> Vice signaling

If a vogue for virtue signaling defined the 2010s and early 2020s, peaking in 2020 during the feverish summer of protest and pandemic—a period in which pronouns in bio, land acknowledgments, black squares, diversity statements, and countless other ethical performances became a form of social capital—something like the exact photonegative of that etiquette has set in now. The reassertion of brute reactionary power in the dual ascendancy of Donald Trump and Elon Musk has brought us to a cultural tipping point. Virtue be damned: Now we are living in an era of relentless, unapologetic vice signaling.

Thomas Chatterton Williams, Is This What Cancel Culture Achieved? (2/11/25)

Culture

How A Culture Survives – institutions

In Rieff’s theory of culture, a culture is defined by what it forbids. Each culture has its own “order of therapy”—a system that teaches its members what is permitted within its bounds and gives them sanctioned ways to let off the pressure of living by the community’s rules, which are traditionally rooted in religion. Moreover, the asceticism in a culture—that is, the ideal of self-denial—cannot be an end in itself, because that would destroy a culture. Rather, it must be a “positive asceticism” that links the individual negating his own particular desires to the achievement of a higher, positive, life-affirming goal.

The main thing that helps a culture survive, Rieff wrote, is “the power of its institutions to bind and loose men in the conduct of their affairs with reasons which sink so deep into the self that they become commonly and implicitly understood.” A culture begins to die, he went on, “when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling, first of all to the cultural elites themselves.”

Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation

How a culture dies – discarding the public realm

For a few years, I followed James Howard Kunstler’s ruminations quite closely. I don’t recall why I stopped, because his secular, prophetic voice could be very, very good:

Born in 1948, I have lived my entire life in America’s high imperial moment. During this epoch of stupendous wealth and power, we have managed to ruin our greatest cities, throw away our small towns, and impose over the countryside a joyless junk habitat which we can no longer afford to support. Indulging in a fetish of commercialized individualism, we did away with the public realm, and with nothing left but private life in our private homes and private cars, we wonder what happened to the spirit of community. We created a landscape of scary places and became a nation of scary people.

James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere

A Writer’s Covenant

Mere Orthodoxy, a serious-minded bunch of non-Orthodox Christians, has grown into an enterprise that people now pay to read. I’ve been neglecting them of late, but this portion of their “Writer’s Covenant” caught my eye:

We have strict policies about AI usage. Because of the way search technology has evolved, we accept that a strict ban on all AI usage is not feasible–it would require our people to abstain from using any online research tools since even search engines are today powered largely by LLM models. We, therefore, have no policy against using AI tools to aid in research. However, you should never submit text that has been generated by an LLM, nor should you ask an LLM to help you strengthen your argument in a text you have written, or to make suggestions for other structural or argumentative changes to your essay or review. The work of using one’s mind to understand and communicate truth is human work. To outsource any part of that to AI is to deprive yourself of the chance to grow and is to attack your own personal abilities in those areas by using a machine to do the work you actually need to be doing yourself. Relatedly, we encourage writers to be cautious about accepting proposed edits to their work from friends who may not be aware of our policies on AI or who are less reflective in their own use of AI.

The whole thing is worth reading.

Shorts

  • What the defenders of present civilization usually mean when they say that modern man is better educated than his forebears is that he is literate in larger numbers. The literacy can be demonstrated; yet one may question whether there has ever been a more deceptive panacea… (Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences)
  • Worst guard dog breed ever: “New York Post: Golden Retriever Brings Toys to Intruder During San Diego Home Break-In.”
  • 53% of Michigan voters want the Democrats to control the Senate but fewer than 53% support Abdul El-Sayed for Senate. (Washington Post)
  • [W]hen you’re wearing a cowboy hat, losing your mind at a college-football game and throwing up the (very annoying) hook ‘em horns sign, you’re doing a lot of things and one of them is assimilating. (David French; see above)
  • We no longer need the devil because we had Hitler. We no longer needed hell because we had Auschwitz. (Attributed to historian Tom Holland)
  • I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States. (Alexis de Tocqueville
  • This world, you can see, is on the way out, if it is not already long gone. The one that is manifesting to replace it is a left-brain paradise, all straight lines and concrete car parks where the corn exchange used to be. The future is STEM and chatbots and cashless parking meters and economic growth and asteroid mining forever and ever. (Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine)
  • Transcendence reveals its transcendence by making no noise. (Bertrand Vergely, an Orthodox philosopher from Paris, quoted by Rod Dreher)
  • For Ransom, whose study had been for many years in the realm of words, it was heavenly pleasure. He found himself sitting within the very heart of language, in the white-hot furnace of essential speech. All fact was broken, splashed into cataracts, caught, turned inside out, kneaded, slain, and reborn as meaning. (C.S. Lewis, The Descent of the Gods (Chapter 15), in That Hideous Strength)
  • Twenty months into the president’s second term and six weeks out from a national election, the great causes in which the conquering MAGA army of 2024 is now invested are affirmative action for white underachievers, bulldozing a former president’s memorial because the current president can’t put his name on it, and, as of Friday afternoon, whether CNN, MS NOW, and Politico can be barred from the White House grounds. (Nick Catoggio)
  • A sociopath is someone who does not feel that social norms apply to her and who feels free to pursue naked self-interest whenever she can get away with it. She may conform to laws and constraints imposed from without, but only because doing so is to her benefit. Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of 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.

Sunday, September 20, 2026

Atheism

I am convinced that the case for belief in God is inductively so much stronger than the case for unbelief that true philosophical atheism must be regarded as a superstition, often nurtured by an infantile wish to live in a world proportionate to one’s own hopes or conceptual limitations.

David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God

Sola Scriptura in practice

Champions of sola scriptura thought they would set Christian theology and experiential knowledge on firm ground by liberating the rock of God’s word from papal tyranny. In fact, despite themselves they precipitated literally endless contestation about the Bible’s meaning, entangled faith with biblical scholarship in new ways, and unavoidably had respective and rival recourse to their own preferred, putative hermeneutic authorities amid competing claims about the meaning of God’s word.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

The problem, be it noted, is not “scriptura” but “sola.”

By the end of the 1570s, whatever the instincts and nostalgia of their seniors, a generation was growing up which had known nothing else, which believed the Pope to be Antichrist, the Mass a mummery, which did not look back to the Catholic past as their own, but another country, another world.

Eamon Duffey, The Stripping of the Altars

However differently they defined the essence of “New Testament” Christianity, the Holiness movement, Fundamentalists, and Pentecostals shared a passion for recovering the “pure fountain” and were equally dismissive of the church’s legacy over twenty centuries.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Religion

[T]he dispensationalist attack on the institutional church was an argument more likely to find a favorable audience in the United States, where evangelical churchmanship was relatively weak, than in Great Britain, where members of the state churches of England and Scotland exerted great influence in the evangelical movement.

Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

(I acknowledge evidence that dispensationalism is waning in influence in America; my point here is historic.)

For the world? Counter to the world?

The problem I see in the idea of the Church as the catalyst for cultural and/or civilizational renewal — even if it should become that in our time — is the erroneous implication that the Church exists for the sake of the world. She doesn’t. She stands more often than not — as the Bride of Christ, wedded to one Bridegroom — as a counter to the world, marked as the world order is by transient powers, constant instability, “freedoms” that aren’t true freedom, dubious ethics (“For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world”; 1 John 2:16), “wars and rumors of wars,” and all the rest.

Addison Hodges Hart, How I Wandered Into Orthodoxy: An Uncharacteristically Personal Reflection.

I tend strongly to agree with Hart on this.

The early Church had no Scripture of its own, and the Jews had no defined canon of Scripture; therefore, sola scriptura as the foundation for what Christians believed was absolutely impossible.

Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

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.

Keeping America safe from Christian pastors

Our bad-faith INS

My wife’s Church is trying to call a pastor from Indonesia (educated in the US and fluent in English) to fill their “vacant pulpit.”

I’m a sort of bystander, but it has become obvious to me that the Trump Immigration and Naturalization Service is acting in bad faith, obstructively demanding proof that her church is real (photos, financial records, etc.), then escalating their demands (e.g., independently audited financial records) when the church surprises them with compliance. (The list is much, much longer than this.)

The INS is betting that the Church won’t sue; that’s my take. I’d bet a substantial amount that they will not get this pastor unless they do sue or Trump has left office.

I suspect that there are a lot of Trump voters in that church (my wife not being one of them) because it’s chock-full of Republicans (many of them have been city and county officials).

Isn’t it swell having a jackboot in the White House to protect Christians?

Trump’s reverse Midas touch

I generally move short criticisms of Trump elsewhere, but this is so true, and so in accord with what I realized at the time Trump was doing it, that I’m promoting it to the premier blog:

If [Georgia Democrat Senator Jon] Ossoff winds up in the White House, Mr. Trump will have largely himself to blame. The president didn’t just help him win his seat. He also spent years undermining the Republican Party in Georgia, sowing internecine discord, championing losing candidates and destroying conservative voters’ faith in the electoral system. With impressive, if unintentional, drive, Mr. Trump has fostered the conditions that transformed Mr. Ossoff from a charmingly nerdy, vaguely awkward, low-key freshman lawmaker into a political star.

Michelle Cottle

So what’s the alternative?

As I wrote yesterday, quoting historian Jerry Z. Muller, there are two kinds of nationalism: civic nationalism, in which a country organizes around shared ideals, and ethnic nationalism. Ethnic nationalism makes far more sense in Europe, where each nation was founded by a people, a tribe, a large family, you might say. That’s not how it was with America. It is hard for me to believe that the Founders would have foreseen a future America with so many non-Europeans in it (except for the African descendants of slaves, of course), but that’s the actually existing America today. It’s not going away.

Rod Dreher.

Now I will “play[] the Donald Trump role here– which is somewhat rudely getting at an essential truth that the establishment refused to discuss”: if we don’t procreate our own ancestors, our future workers, the folks who will pay into the Ponzi scheme Social Security system, what alternative do we have to admitting smart, ambitious immigrants to the America Experiment?

Bo French gets his coveted 15 minutes of infamy

How racist can a party’s voters be if they’re willing to nominate a guy named “Vivek Ramaswamy” to be governor of Ohio?

How prejudiced can its leaders be if they’re comfortable placing Harmeet Dhillon, a native of Chandigarh, India, in charge of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division?

And how bigoted can its establishment be if, as seems inevitable, it intends to fall in line in 2028 behind a man married to an Indian American woman, with whom he has four half-Indian children?

It isn’t true that the modern Republican Party hates nonwhites, particularly those of Indian descent. But it is true that the modern Republican Party relies to a considerable degree on voters who hate nonwhites—particularly those of Indian descent.⁠⁠

In fact, after five years of watching J.D. Vance’s political star ascend, that’s the only argument I’ve come up with for wanting him to be president. It’s gratifying to imagine chuds like Bo French having to cope with the reality of first lady Usha Vance ….

Nick Catoggio If you don’t know who Bo French is, check now because if there’s justice in the world, he’s soon to disappear.

The end of sclerotic liberal democracy?

[L]iberal democracy runs contrary to human nature in a significant way. It is natural, he says, for people to be more motivated to help their family and friends than they are inclined to help strangers.

…

Trump, like most other right-populists around the world, was and is responding to something real—namely, the sense that the institutions of the liberal state have grown too constraining. We can’t seem to respond decisively to our problems. Regulations and legal restrictions have gummed up the works, making it extremely difficult to get large, ambitious public projects done, to build much of anything, or to respond to challenges effectively or within a reasonable time horizon.

Fukuyama admits that this is a major problem plaguing liberal governments in our moment—and that the rise of both left- and right-wing populism (including Trump) is partly about a desire on the part of citizens to see this improve. And that’s in part what we see Trump doing: He just acts, ordering (to cite one of many examples) the demolition of the East Wing of the White House and the building of an enormous ballroom without waiting for any kind of regulatory process, external oversight, judicial review, or congressional authorization.

…

[T]he problem with Trump isn’t that he’s demonstrating that it’s possible to just do stuff, as the second administration’s defenders advocated and applauded in its opening weeks and months. Rather, the problem with Trump is that he’s doing stuff incompetently, sloppily, corruptly, and with his own narcissistic fixations setting priorities instead of the country’s most pressing needs. This implies that what the United States really needs is a president who will act with Trumpian boldness but with much greater competence, much less corruption, and a capacity to set national priorities and accomplish them quickly and efficiently. That this is where Fukuyama comes down is confirmed by his criticism, earlier in the conversation, of Barack Obama and his party for failing at the time to eliminate the filibuster so they could accomplish more goals for the American people.

…

I’m sure some of my readers will respond to this summation of Fukuyama’s position with enthusiasm. Eliminating the filibuster has been popular with lots of Democrats and leftists for a long time. I don’t have any principled or even pragmatic objections to doing it, provided Democrats make the change in full awareness that they will be just as disadvantaged as Republicans when they find themselves in the minority. Maybe that’s an acceptable trade-off, but it needs to be recognized as one: The Democrats will be buying greater power when they take majority control of the Senate in return for less power when Republicans preside over the upper chamber.

…

As I’ve argued on any number of past occasions, authoritarian overreach is a big problem and danger for us, but its underlying cause, and the deeper source of our political turbulence, is the depth and narrowness of our national divide. We both deeply disagree about ends and are quite evenly divided in our disagreement. That’s why, when each party is out of power, it uses every means it can (including institutional, legal, regulatory, and technological means) to thwart what the party in power wants to achieve—which, in turn, inspires the party in power to act boldly and with increasing disregard for constraints, even though it usually wins power quite narrowly.

Damon Linker (bold added) summarizing a point of Francis Fukuyama in his interview with Ezra Klein.

Trump’s corruption concerned me a great deal, but in the early days of the Trumposcene it became apparent that my countrymen had looked at it, shrugged, and voted for him anyway. So I shifted my attention to his narcissism, predicting that sooner or later, his narcissism would make him misunderstand something important that wasn’t all about him.

If “sooner” was Trump45, “later” seems to be Trump47, and those narcissistic chickens have come home to roost, emboldened by voter amnesia about January 6 and an intervening SCOTUS decision that, while it prevented him prosecuting Joe Biden for this and that, more importantly provides him with much assurance that he’ll never pay legally for his Presidential depredations.

Oh: and the corruption is on full display, too: for my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.

Bold, perhaps …

Steven Calabresi, one of three (sigh!) cofounders of the Federalist Society, has taken up the futile cause of trying to defend most anything Donald Trump does. His latest was defending — no, extolling — the dumbass attack on Iran.

But his fellow-profs at the Volokh Conspiracy (where Calabresi posted the paean — they don’t have a very tight sanity filter) aren’t concurring:

I guess Prof. Calabresi doesn’t see the irony that the decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025 – President Trump called it a complete obliterat[ion]” – was so “wise” that by the immediately following winter Iran was closer than it had ever been – 2 weeks away! – to developing a nuclear weapon.

“President Trump faced the hardest and bravest decision of his life and of his two terms as President in February of 2026. Should he use the military to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, . . . [o]r  should President Trump follow the advice of almost all his top advisors and do nothing.”

That’s a very odd formulation of the decision Trump faced in February 2026. To begin with, does “destroy Iran’s nuclear program” just mean a “do-over” of what we did back in June?  And was his only option, other than “use of the military to destroy Iran’s nuclear program,” to “do nothing”?

It was not.  Prof. Calabresi omits a very wide variety of alternative options that were on the table in February 2026, ranging from toughening the sanctions to diplomacy and negotiations.

Yes, diplomacy and negotiations.  The Soviet Union also wanted to destroy our way of life, and yet from Kennedy-Khrushchev to Reagan-Gorbachev, we found a way to negotiate with them, and the world was a lot better off for our having done so. If Trump was so convinced the Iran Accords were so terrible, perhaps he could have devoted some time to thinking about how a workable multi-lateral enforceable agreement might actually work.

Calabresi continues:

Young advisors like the naïve and inexperienced Vice President, J.D. Vance, the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and most of the top generals in the Department of War took the wrong, over-cautious view. They quite rightly said that going to war to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear bombs would be hard, dangerous, and unpopular work. Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz, oil and natural gas prices would rise, and the world’s economy, including the U.S. economy, would take a hit. Such a war would be unpredictable, and our European allies would fecklessly decline to help. We would run out of weapons because stockpiles in the U.S. were dangerously low. The war would not be a quick victory like the kidnapping of Venezuelan Dictator Nicolas Maduro; it would instead drag on. Trump might even lose the 2026 midterm elections or fail to keep the presidency in Republican hands in 2028. The American people would never understand why war with Iran was necessary when the Afghan and Iraq Wars were not.

Just for the record, there is absolutely no credible evidence of which I am aware that any of these words were ever spoken in Trump’s presence, or that Trump ever weighed the options in front of him in this, or any other rational, way. None.

Calabresi applauds Trump’s decision to “launch[ ] a knock-out strike on February 28, 2026, that decapitated the Iranian leadership—civilian, theocratic, and military—in a bombing that killed the Supreme Iranian leader (the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei), an avowed enemy of the U.S.”

How, exactly, did that bring us closer to the goal of a non-nuclear Iran?

David Post, Bold, perhaps; but not Brave and not Right

Shorts

  • Categorizing and detailing his daily absurdities and obscenities for over a decade has been important work. But another two years of thinking and writing in depth about this monster and his madness? I found myself buckling with nausea at the thought. (Andrew Sullivan who, exhausted with repetitive themes, is re-orienting toward podcasts with guests)
  • There have been multiple attempts at sexual revolution in Britain, as in America, but none gained widespread traction before reliable birth control became widely available. It’s not as though an unplanned pregnancy can be shared equally by both parties, and historically the parent left holding the baby was most often the woman. Under those conditions, societies maintained elaborate social codes to manage contact between horny young men and women – and to channel sexual desire towards commitment and child-rearing. (Mary Harrington, Feminism Against Progress)
  • Would Roger Williams recognize Al Mohler as a Baptist now? Al Mohler signs on to Christian nationalism
  • When Donald Trump looks at a map, he doesn’t see nations. He sees property. All of those pretty colors do not represent actual places filled with human beings who have distinct cultures, languages, and histories; the planet, to Trump, is a big board game, like Risk or Monopoly. Greenland isn’t a real location — it’s a valuable chunk of territory nestled between Boardwalk and Park Place. (Tom Nichols via Frank Bruni)
  • ⁠⁠[A]t the gym … the other day, I noticed a television advertisement for Jack Daniel’s. Jack Daniel’s is, not to my credit, something to which I have paid excessive attention over the years, but what I thought was: When did they start allowing hard liquor advertising on television? I had thought of whiskey and cigarettes as two of the things that our weird moralistic sensibilities simply would not allow on television, where they would morally cheapen the wall-to-wall sports-gambling and erectile-dysfunction advertising. (Kevin D. Williamson)

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.

What color is your church?

What color is your church?

For the last four years, I’ve been part of a church that some would describe as “purple.” I don’t like this term because it suggests a blending that doesn’t accurately portray the relationships I experience there. Still, the faithful who gather in the pews and serve elbow to elbow do sit along the political spectrum. Even more curiously, the church itself is part of a denomination in which the clergy skews more politically progressive than the laity—by a wide margin. Despite these differences, I can honestly say that I’ve never before experienced the kind of belonging I now experience in this church. I don’t think that is incidental.

Hannah Anderson, Will Politically Moderate Christians of Both Parties Work Together?

For the last twenty-nine years, I’ve been part of a church that some would describe politically as … heck, I don’t know.

I’m not interested in my fellow-believers’ political leanings. Sitting in coffee hour, I just don’t hear people talking politics. I knew one Greek fellow who detested American gun culture, but he had a pretty good reason: a disgruntled graduate student hunted down his brother (a professor) at UCLA and shot him to death. I suspect that some of our Greeks, and Romanians, and Russians, and Ukrainians, and our Serb, may be somewhere to my left if only because their roots are in Europe and Europe is generally left of the USA. Heck, most of the developed world is to our left.

So what? Are you really going to let political differences trump Christian unity? The only reason I would consider bringing politics up is to hear how and why someone else perceives the “fit” between their politics and their faith in order to expand my own understanding. And that seems more like a topic for “would you like to meet up for coffee sometime this week?” than for church coffee hour.

I became particularly sensitive to this sort of question when someone pointed out the chronic tendency of the New York Times, which famously does not “get” religion, to treat religion (or at least Christianity) as crypto-politics. I’m not really thrilled with the Dispatch for following suit.

So I guess I won’t have Hal Lindsey to kick around any more

Following up a hunch, I posed to AI a question about whether dispensational premillennialism is on the wane (I’ve lost track because it was never a thing in Orthodox Christianity, my home for 29 years now). The answer was “yes, decisively,” explicitly citing Daniel Hummel’s 2023 book The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, which concludes that dispensationalism is no longer considered a viable option among most Christian leaders or institutions.

That’s intrinsically good because dispensationalism is a relative novelty (~200 years, not 2000) and leads people to focus on lurid speculations, not on Christ.

Better yet, AI tells me that younger evangelicals are increasingly embracing amillennialism and postmillennialism; amillennialism is where I arrived 20 years before discovering Orthodoxy, and it’s one aspect of my mental living space where I didn’t have to rearrange any furniture on becoming Orthodox.

Postmillennialism is a little iffier. It comes in at least two flavors:

  1. Christian Reconstructionist theocracy — Christians (usually Calvinists) ruling in accordance with God’s word. (Think of the “iconoclastic hammers and scraping-tools of conviction Protestantism” as described in Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars)
  2. Social Justice ushering in the Kingdom.

Forced to choose between 1 (jackboots) and 2 (squishes), I’d take 2, but I’m glad there is no forced choice.

Blessing and curse

American Orthodox theologian Thomas Hopko once remarked: “As the grandson of Carpatho-Russian immigrants to the United States, I cannot imagine my life in any other society, and I feel extremely grateful for my personal destiny. But as an Orthodox Christian . . . I cannot imagine a way of life more insidious to Christian Orthodoxy and more potentially dangerous to human being and life.”

John P. Burgess, Orthodoxy at War

Unintended Reformation

The best known and most successful modern example is probably the American polygamist and putative prophet Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in early nineteenth-century upstate New York. Smith’s assertions about the significance of the revelatory vision he claimed to receive … are strikingly similar to claims made by the Quaker George Fox: the confusing cacophony of competing Christian groups and their countervailing claims characterized New York’s “burned-over district” during the Second Great Awakening no less than it had England’s “world turned upside down,” in which Fox started preaching in 1647.

Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation.

I was taught to distrust a short list of putatively pseudo-Christian “cults” because of, among other things, their demonstrable novelty:

  1. Mormons
  2. Jehovah’s Witnesses
  3. Christian Scientists
  4. Seventh Day Adventists

But I was taught that as a 20th-century American Evangelical, whose departure from Reformation Protestantism (itself a departure from the Roman Catholic departure from the original undivided Church) dates to the same period and from some of the same sort of impulses, with an unhealthy democratic egalitarianism — heck, call it “populism” — thrown in. Their theorists would tell you they were recovering the uncorrupted early church.

But what if the faith of the early church was always maintained in a visible Church and didn’t need to be recovered?

History Rhymes, of course

Most Church leaders—conscious that to condemn Nazis for blasphemous kitsch might prove risky—opted to bite their tongues. Some, though, actively lent it their imprimatur. In 1933, the year that Hitler was appointed chancellor, Protestant churches across Germany marked the annual celebration of the Reformation by singing Wessel’s battle hymn. In Berlin Cathedral, a pastor shamelessly aped Goebbels. Wessel, he preached, had died just as Jesus had died. Then, just for good measure, he added that Hitler was ‘a man sent by God’.

Tom Holland, Dominion

A heartening convergence

Orthodox theology defines only what is necessary and always leaves unspoken that which cannot be explained. This approach was part of the Christian faith from the beginning. But the Western [mindset] often suppresses, dismisses, minimizes, or ignores this stance. The Western mind is compelled to define and explain everything, since without a rational explanation a concept or fact cannot be considered true, or, conversely, all truth can be proven rationally.

Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

One of the interesting convergences I’ve noticed is between Orthodox apophaticism and the importance of the right hemisphere (versus the more analytical left) as explicated by Iain McGilchrist. I feel affirmed.

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.

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.