The 80-foot blackboard in the bomb shelter

Hiroko Tabuchi of the New York Times on Monday published an article on the Koch Brothers killing a public transit proposal in Nashville. I read it, expecting something revelatory, and came away thinking that the case against the proposal was plausible and that Tabuchi hadn’t really described the case for it. He just waved his hands and said “Koch” a lot.

National Review’s Kyle Smith now has a pitch-perfect send-up:

The half-awake citizen may be unaware just how dexterously the arms of the Kochtopus have reached into every precinct of American life. Not one mile from my home stands a particularly egregious example: the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, home to the New York City Ballet. Koch put up $100 million toward renovating the theater, but consider his ulterior motives. Theaters like this one use a lot of floor wax. At intermission they serve drinks in plastic cups. Their seats are covered with upholstery. These are all byproducts of petroleum. Get the picture?

Look deeper. Just a couple of miles east of the Koch Theater there’s an actual Koch hospital: the New York–Presbyterian David H. Koch Center, a 740,000-square-foot ambulatory-care center that opened its doors this year with the aid of another $100 million Koch gift. Charity? No. Bonanza! The Kochs sell all kinds of items used in hospitals — medical devices, electronic components, and even hands-free paper-towel dispensers and stuffing for pillows. In 2014, David and Charles Koch gave $25 million to the United Negro College Fund. Don’t see the connection? Educated black people read more. The Kochs own Flint Group, one of the world’s largest suppliers of printing ink.

Wake up sheeple! I have all of these connections diagrammed out on the 80-foot-wide blackboard I keep in the bomb shelter. You go unprepared for the Kochpocalypse if you choose. I won’t.

The latest dastardly Koch scheme was exposed on Monday, and for this we must thank Hiroko Tabuchi, a climate-change reporter for the New York Times. In classic 80-foot-blackboard fashion, Tabuchi laid out the devious conspiracy for us.

Using a front group called Americans for Prosperity (AFP), which deployed a sneaky election-rigging tactic known as “talking to people,” the Kochs destroyed a proposal for a light-rail system in Nashville, thus keeping commuters in their gas-guzzling cars and hastening the end of the world via global warming to protect the Kochs’ interests in the barbaric, malevolent seatbelt industry. Actual sentence from the piece: “One of the mainstay companies of Koch Industries, the Kochs’ conglomerate, is a major producer of gasoline and asphalt, and also makes seatbelts, tires and other automotive parts.”

The dots connect themselves! …

Koch. Scapegoat. But I repeat myself.

René Girard rocks!

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Anti-liberal trolls

Every past administration has used some discretion in targeting whom to deport. They targeted those who were destroying society, not building it. They tried to take account of particular contexts, and they tried to show some sense of basic humanity.

But today, discretion and humanity are being stamped out. The Trump administration has embraced a “zero tolerance” policy. In practice that means that all complexity has to be reduced to uniformity. Compassion is replaced by a blind obedience to regulations. Context is irrelevant. Arrests are indiscriminate. All that matters is that the arrest numbers go up, so human beings in the system are reduced to numbers.

…

This illustrates something crucial about this administration. It is not populated by conservatives. It is populated by anti-liberal trolls. There’s a difference.

…

Here’s how you can detect the anti-liberal trolls in the immigration debate: Watch how they use the word “amnesty.” Immigration is a complex issue. Any serious reform has to grapple with tangled realities, and any real conservative has an appreciation for that complexity. But if you try to account for that complexity before an anti-immigration troll, he or she will shout one word: Amnesty!

David Brooks, The Rise of the Amnesty Thugs

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Thoroughly modern misogyny and plutocracy

Have you heard about the “Flipping Out” lawsuit? Ross Douthat sticks his neck out so I don’t have to. (I’m sure that’s what he had in mind.)

The “Flipping Out” lawsuit, sad and sordid, falls 31 years after a far more consequential surrogacy debate: The “Baby M” case, in which a surrogate mother, Mary Beth Whitehead, changed her mind after the birth and sued — ultimately unsuccessfully — for the right to keep her child. I was 7 during the case but I remember it vividly, mostly because my mother was obsessed with it. We were not Catholics then, or any kind of conservative, but opposing commercial surrogacy seemed like a natural extension of her feminist and liberal principles, which would of course oppose a system in which the rich paid poorer women to bear their children.

…

[T]he simplest way to describe what happened with the surrogacy debate is that American feminists gradually went along with the logic of capitalism rather than resisting it. This is a particularly useful description because it’s happened so consistently across the last few decades: Whenever there’s a dispute within feminism about a particular social change or technological possibility, you should bet on the side that takes a more consumerist view of human flourishing, a more market-oriented view of what it means to defend the rights and happiness of women.

… Feminists were divided over surrogacy and commercialized fertility, but the opposition to both practices gradually dissolved, and now only eccentric conservatives notice the weird resemblances between California-style surrogacy practices and the handmaids and econowives of Gilead.

…

I know that coming from a conservative columnist much of this reads like a long exercising in trolling. (Did you know, feminists, that you’re all just slaves of capital? That you need less cultural Marxism and more of the genuine economistic article?) But the most serious form of cultural conservatism has always offered at most two cheers for capitalism, recognizing that its great material beneficence can coexist with dehumanizing cruelty, that its individualist logic can encourage a ruthless materialism unless curbed and checked and challenged by a moralistic vision.

Ross Douthat

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We’re not asking for much

[Masterpiece Cakeshop] did not decide the question about religious freedom and the rights of sexual minorities. However, one key element of the decision drew my attention. The court recognized how anti-Christian bias on the part of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission negatively impacted the chances of the defendant – Jack Phillips. I have done research on Christianophobia, and some individuals choose to ignore the data to say that it does not exist. But now the Supreme Court not only acknowledged its existence but also ruled that it can negatively impact Christians.

…

The challenge to the religious freedom of Christians comes from those with Christianophobia defined as an unreasonable fear and hatred of Christians. In the United States they generally target conservative Christians. Those with Christianophobia tend to be white, male, wealthy, highly educated, politically progressive and irreligious. These qualities describe individuals with power in our cultural institutions such as academia, media and the arts.

…

The way anti-Christian attitudes manifest themselves is generally though measures that concentrate on removing Christians from the public square rather than overt discrimination. A great example of this can be seen in the recent University of Iowa ruling. The university attempted to impose a rule by which student religious groups had to allow those nonbelievers to be leaders on a Christian group but not on a Muslim group. On the surface the administrators claimed that the rule is religiously neutral, but clearly they treated non-Christian groups differently than Christian groups. Non-Christian groups were to be allowed to have a cultural presence on the campus that was to be denied to Christians.

George Yancey, Will Loss of Religious Liberty Doom Evangelicalism?

A lot of religious liberty lawyers would join me in opining that most anti-Christian bias (“Christianophobia” if you must) would disappear if only our elites would afford Christians:

the same respect they generally afford everyone else,
they specifically afford Muslims, as at the University of Iowa, or
they afford bakers who refuse commissions for cakes with Biblical “slam passages” artfully applied to the frosting.

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I also blog short items at Micro.blog .

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Simpler than “as simple as possible”

We are back to Paul Valéry’s maxim: “Everything simple is false. Everything complex is unusable.” In the world of computer modeling, this is known as Bonini’s paradox: The more realistic a model is, the more it becomes as complex and difficult to understand as the real world; the simpler and more user-friendly a model becomes, the less accurately it represents the underlying system. Mass democracy and mass media on the American model work to impose on the complex reality of American public life the simplest possible model of politics, aggregating all of political reality into two variables: Us and Them.

Another way of putting this is that the unstated task of cable-news journalism on the Fox/MSNBC model — along with practically all political talk radio, 99.44 percent of social media, and a great deal of inferior writing about politics — is transmuting intellectual complexity into moral simplicity. Even that isn’t quite right: The moral simplicity offered by the “Everybody Who Disagrees with Me Is Hitler” school of analysis is a false simplicity — simplicity for the truly simple, as opposed to what Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. described as “the simplicity on the far side of complexity.”

(Kevin D. Williamson)

Of course, Williamson has examples, including from “inferior writing about politics” from two of our premier national newspapers.

UPDATE: Immediately after writing the above, I turned to another article which, if true, is rather terrifying in light of the more obvious truths Williamson notes.

The leader of the free world still begins his day by binge-watching cable news until 11 a.m.; still spends official meetings nattering on about anything other than the subject at hand (even when said subject is how to ensure that this year’s hurricane season does not result in mass death this time around); and, most critically, still cannot be bothered to learn the pertinent facts about a given situation, before dictating a policy response to it.

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One of the president’s chief complaints about H.R. McMaster was (reportedly) that the former national security adviser had the temerity to brief him with “a PowerPoint deck dozens of pages long, filled with text” — rather than “simple, short bullets, or a graphic or timeline.” White House aides have grown so desperate to get the commander-in-chief to ingest the most remedial information about the geopolitical affairs he’s mindlessly disrupting, they’ve whittled the bullet points in his briefing book down to “basically slogans,” one administration source told Axios.

(Eric Levitz, Trump’s Briefing Book Includes ‘Screen Grabs of Cable-News Chyrons’, New Yorker)

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A masterpiece of prudence

I’m relieved in a way that the Supreme Court decided to punt on the Masterpiece Cakeshop case. We could do with a little fudging in the culture wars these days. So instead of tackling the deeper, perhaps irresolvable, conflicts of religious freedom and gay rights, Kennedy just narrowed the ruling to the single case in question, and cited the anti-religious statement of one member of the state commission as the crux of the case. Money quote:

To describe a man’s faith as “one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric that people can use” is to disparage his religion in at least two distinct ways: by describing it as despicable, and also by characterizing it as merely rhetorical — something insubstantial and even insincere.

Kennedy was referring to one of the state civil-rights commissioner’s contemptuous statement about the baker’s faith. The trouble is, a growing number of people, many of them exactly kind of person who sits on a civil-rights commission in a blue state, do actually and sincerely feel contempt for religion and religious belief. They think that all religious thought and practice is bonkers, irrational, based on ancient, strange texts, and with no relevance in the modern world, and a force, on the whole, for bigotry. When those texts and beliefs are used to do what many consider harm to someone based on an involuntary characteristic, it’s a no-brainer. Of course gay rights will increasingly win out in these cases, especially now the state commissioners won’t be so dumb as to air their real views in public.

And this is true even for weak-kneed Christians like me who have no interest in hitting anyone else over the head with our faith. When it comes to full-on fundamentalists, the capacity for some scrap of mutual understanding is increasingly remote. The more distant you are — socially, geographically, generationally, culturally — from anyone who practices religion in any serious way, the harder it is to empathize, and to see these cases as a conflict at all. It simply seems incredible that someone would hold these views faithfully.

I’m not criticizing the right to see religion in this way; I’m worried simply about how this kind of contempt and mutual incomprehension spill over into civil intolerance. Which is why I still hope we can muster up as much respect for the homosexual person as we can for the faithful one. Most of the time, if we use a little restraint, we can avoid these ugly and difficult conflicts. For those many of us who are both gay and Christian, it would surely be a mercy.

(Andrew Sullivan)

Elsewhere, Mark Shea, Catholic provacateur (I was tempted to say “iconoclast” but I don’t want to perpetuate that ugly word’s favorable current connotations), planted a seed from which a resolution to many of these controversies might just grow:

So how do we think bigger?

Well, to begin with, drop the pose of defensive hostility. At this point in the game, a gay couple coming into a bakery to get a cake is probably there to get a cake, not to launch a Supreme Court challenge calculated to destroy a Christian baker and inaugurate a nationwide purge of all Christian businesses.

But even if a customer is a militant jerk with a chip on his shoulder there are ways of dealing with this recommended to us by the gospel and modeled by the Tradition. Let’s consider them.

In Jesus’ day, Jews really did (unlike butthurt American conservative Christians with no problems bigger than Starbucks coffee cups, Google doodles, and Target clerks who say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”) face oppression for their faith. The Roman occupier could dragoon any Jewish guy into carrying his heavy armor for a mile. It was not only a pain in the neck, it was ritually defiling for the tender consciences of some Jews under the influence of the hyper-purity of Pharisaism.

What was Jesus’ counsel?

You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if any one would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well; and if any one forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. (Mt 5:38–41).

…

[R]ather than immediately leaping to the headspace of fantasizing about ridiculous doomscapes of Domination by Totalitarians (something Christianists, not Christians, habitually do) I think it wiser to leap to the gospel and to the virtue of Prudence.

That means trying to build bridges of trust, not walls of hostility ….

So the plant I see growing from this is an alternative script for the Masterpiece Cakeshop conversation:

Customers: We hear you do fabulous wedding cakes. We’d like you to make us a cake for our big fat gay wedding.

Jack Phillips: Well, thanks for the compliment. Can we talk about this?

Customers: Sure, that’s why we’re here: to talk about getting a wedding cake from you.

Jack Phillips: Thanks. My specialty is custom cakes with a lot of artistry in them. I don’t bake wedding cakes just for fun and then hope someone comes to buy them. But there are custom cakes I won’t bake. I don’t do Halloween cakes, for instance, because my conscience tells me that our celebrations of Halloween are not healthy. No law says I have to bake Halloween cakes.

My conscience also would prevent me designing and making a cake that includes rainbows, or figures of two grooms on top, or anything like that, because of my convictions about what marriage is or should be. Apparently, you have different convictions. But if I make you a cake, I’d only want to make one that looks pretty much like a cake for any other wedding, weddings of men and women.

Are you okay with that?

The conversation can go several ways from here:

Customers: No we’re not okay with that. What kind of bigot are you?!

Jack Phillips: I don’t think that makes me a bigot, but suppose it does. Do you want to do business with a bigot?

Or:

Customers: What if we’re not?

Jack Phillips: In that case, you’ll probably be happier with one of the bakers in town whose heart would really be in this, because my heart wouldn’t be, and I may not live up to my advance billing.

If you insisted, I might even refuse, but I’d rather not go there ….

Or:

Customers: That sounds fair.

Jack Phillips: Then when would you like to talk about cake designs?

None of these scenarios seem as likely to end in litigation than did The Real Jack Philips’ pretty mild remark.

Mark Shea wants such prudence because Christ called for something pointing that direction (i.e., not standing on what you think your God-given rights are) you’ll never evangelize people by asserting your right to oppose them.

I want such prudence because if the Customers really are virulently anti-Christian provocateurs out to “get the Christian baker,” I want to disarm them, or at least discuss things with them in a way that makes them the unreasonable ones. There are signs in the Supreme Court briefs and opinions that carrying the conversation further down the artistic path before any refusal would have made Jack’s case stronger.

I don’t fault Jack for not being a lawyer or thinking like one. I still think he should have won on more substantive ground than he did win on. Free speech sometime can offend, and if “he offended me deeply” ever becomes trump to free speech, free speech is dead.

I don’t fault Jack for drawing a line where even some serious Christians might disagree with him. The gravamen of “if any one forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles” might suggest that he simply bake the cake, even with rainbow flags and “Congratulations, Adam and Fred!” inscribed on top, though I really can see myself in Jack’s shoes, and I have a hard time thinking it would be one of his best works because he’d be doing it with no pleasure and little rapport with the customers. And I don’t think it’s the government’s job to interpret and enforce “if any one forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.”

But graciousness (Jack was pretty gracious actually) and dialog might go a long way both religiously and legally.

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Where I glean stuff.

Jesus, loser

I think Christian Smith pretty well described Moralistic Therapeutic Deism when he coined the term, but Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon’s definition is now my favorite:

The function of Church in society is to keep spiritually healthy and morally upright those who are pursuing the American Dream.

But according to Luke, the Gospel is to leave all things and embrace the cross daily.

Could anything be more opposed to the cross of Christ than a life dedicated to the quest for personal prosperity? … What Jesus warns this man about is a life in which he loves God with his whole heart, loves his neighbor as himself, and goes about making as much money as he can … Wealth itself so easily becomes idolatrous.

If wealth is the mark of success, then think about it: Who are the failures? Who are the “losers”? …

Can any philosophy be more at odds with the cross of Christ than the [social Darwinist] survival of the fittest? The cross is the absolute answer to Darwin, just as the absolute answer to Nietszche and the will to power. The cross stands against all of that.

The basic floor of the cross of Calvary is that Jesus did not survive. He died as a poor man who had nothing to show for his life. He left no bank account. He was a loser. As he died, he was obliged to leave the care of his widowed mother to another poor man. By every standard recognized in the money market, Jesus was a failure. A poor man who died a poor man.

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I also blog short items at Micro.blog .

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Woke for what purpose?

David Brooks nails it, though it stings:

In an older frame of mind, you try to perceive the size of a problem objectively, and then you propose a solution, which might either be radical or moderate, conservative or liberal. You were judged primarily by the nature of your proposal.

But wokeness jams together the perceiving and the proposing. In fact, wokeness puts more emphasis on how you perceive a situation — how woke you are to what is wrong — than what exactly you plan to do about it. To be woke is to understand the full injustice.

There is no measure or moderation to wokeness. It’s always good to be more woke. It’s always good to see injustice in maximalist terms. To point to any mitigating factors in the environment is to be naïve, childish, a co-opted part of the status quo.

…

These days we think of wokeness as a left-wing phenomenon. But it is an iron law of politics that every mental habit conservatives fault in liberals is one they also practice themselves.

(David Brooks, The Problem with Wokeness)

It seems to be my role in life to try to “awoken” people, from the conservative side, to the problems conservatives see, especially in the culture and in religious freedom. I’d be a lousy legislator because I’m weak on solutions. (Hmmmm. Is that what’s behind some of our polarization?) I know people who’ve made pretty good livings being even more woke (or it’s conservative counterpart) than me.

But I’ve begun reading, apropos of one of my longest-standing concerns, Charles C. Camosy’s Beyond the Abortion Wars, which is premised on there being wider-spread ~~dis~~agreement (“agreement” — “disagreement” was a Freudian slip of the fingers) than the warring sides seem to think. I’m skeptical (of course — it’s a reflex), but I’ll try to remember to share a bit if, despite myself, I think there’s much merit in his argument.

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I also blog short items at Micro.blog .

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Greengrocers, incense and such

This story/parable, of which I learned through Rod Dreher several years ago, remains one of the most powerful and timely (maybe timeless) I know:

Consider, says Havel, the greengrocer living under communism, who puts a sign in his shop window saying, “Workers of the World, Unite!” He does it not because he believes it, necessarily. He simply doesn’t want trouble. And if he doesn’t really believe it, he hides the humiliation of his coercion by telling himself, “What’s wrong with the workers of the world uniting?” Fear allows the official ideology to retain power — and eventually changes the greengrocer’s beliefs.

Those who “live within a lie,” says Havel, collaborate with the system and compromise their full humanity. Every act that contradicts the official ideology is a denial of the system. What if the greengrocer stops putting the sign up in his window? What if he refuses to go along to get along? “His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth” — and it’s going to cost him plenty.

…

Because they are public, the greengrocer’s deeds are inescapably political. He bears witness to the truth of his convictions by being willing to suffer for them. He becomes a threat to the system — but he has preserved his humanity. And that, says Havel, is a far more important accomplishment than whether this party or that politician holds power…

(Rod Dreher, quoting Vaclav Havel) I suggest the possibility of it being “timeless” because I suspect that every society needs some rituals, however informal, to bind its members together. The governors of those societies don’t care what you believe so long as you enact the rituals.

It is this, and more than this, that I’m referring to when I categorize a blog as “Pinch of incense,” for offering the “pinch of incense” imperils not just humanity, but eternity:

And there the chief of the police, Herod, and his father, Nicetas, met [Polycarp] and transferred him to their carriage, and tried to persuade him, as they sat beside him, saying, “What harm is there to say `Lord Caesar,’ and to offer incense and all that sort of thing, and to save yourself?”

At first he did not answer them. But when they persisted, he said, “I am not going to do what you advise me.”

Then when they failed to persuade him, they uttered dire threats and made him get out with such speed that in dismounting from the carriage he bruised his shin. But without turning around, as though nothing had happened, he proceeded swiftly, and was led into the arena, there being such a tumult in the arena that no one could be heard. But as Polycarp was entering the arena, a voice from heaven came to him, saying, “Be strong, Polycarp, and play the man. No one saw the one speaking, but those of our people who were present heard the voice.

[…] But the proconsul was insistent and said: “Take the oath, and I shall release you. Curse Christ.”

Polycarp said: “Eighty-six years I have served him, and he never did me any wrong. How can I blaspheme my King who saved me?”

(The martyrdom of Polycarp, circa 155 A. D.)

Today’s problematic “Workers of the World, Unite!,” today’s pinch of incense, today’s culture-binding rituals, are related to gay pride: pride flags in the window, hosting pride crossfit events and such, baking wedding cakes, observing rules that mandate use of your auditor’s preferred pronouns — you know, trifles like that. (It’s also pledging allegiance to the flag, standing for the national anthem and such — which I’m cussed enough to resist, but which I don’t fault others for observing. )

Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop is our Polycarp, Jordan Peterson our dissident greengrocer (and Peterson is expecting secular martyrdom). Both are among my heroes.

If you think I’m making a big deal out of nothing, then I think you’re part of the problem, and need to reflect more carefully on the eventuality — to you and to your countrymen or fellow believers who dissent, and who will have your pusillanimity thrown in their faces.

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I also blog short items at Micro.blog .

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

A pornographic response to porn

Kudos to the Times‘ Maggie Jones for highlighting the issue [of teen exposure to online pornography], but if this were a math assignment she would only get partial credit. She’s guessed the correct answer without quite understanding what makes it so. The Times piece seems to imply that pornography is hurting our children by showing them the wrong kind of sex—male dominated, aggressive, overwhelmingly straight, and featuring bodies that conform to outmoded beauty standards (which is to say, beauty standards). The unarticulated subtext is that if only children were watching some “woke” version of pornography, the issue wouldn’t be so alarming. It’s a response almost as crass as the subject it explores, an anemic reaction to an issue that’s more than an isolated contemporary technological predicament: it’s emblematic of the deeper operating logic of contemporary society as a whole. Simply put, it was a pornographic response to pornography.

(Scott Beauchamps, The Pornification of Everything) Beauchamps also discusses the anthropology of philosopher Byung-Chul Han, of whom I had not previously heard.

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I also blog short items at Micro.blog .

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.