Kendi-DiAngeloism. Both are derived from Critical Race Theory. Kendi proceeds as if any statistical disparity between races proves that systemic racism is at work. That’s very objective, but takes no account of intent.
McKinnonism. Katherine McKinnon, feminist, and her “subjectivism of harm.” Rape is when a woman has sex and feels violated. If the feeling’s there, the harm is there — but it takes no account of intent.

These kinds of thinking arise from the need for more “gains” for “oppressed groups,” not attainable within classic liberalism which insists on intent for almost all conduct in order for it to be punishably bad. The holders of cultural power become disciplinary and punitive to a new extent, against dubiously bad actors.

That’s how, from sheer willfullness and domination of discourse, we ended up with stuff like a Med School professor apologizing for using the words “pregnant women.”

Woke capitalism and the MSM

Woke capitalism is about taking consumerism and applying the power of moral compulsion. It’s a remedy for what Fukiyama called the terminal boredom at the end of history.

There is a need for people educated past a certain point to identify themselves with some grave moral cause. And in the absence of a deity, in the absence of a spiritual world, and in the need to identify themselves with a moral vanguard, [they] just invent one. And people will buy it because the machinery is there to spread it, and they’ll actually believe it.

How BLM arrests multi-racial liberalism

In California, there was a vote on authorizing affirmative action and it lost.

The Board of Regents commissioned a study of the SAT by their own experts, who recommended keeping the SAT as the most effective way to identify promising minorities, immigrants; they were overruled, and the Universities tossed the SAT after George Floyd got murdered in Minneapolis.

In the 1990s, the electorate was majority white — but not in California, which has passed the racial tipping point. So in 2020, the elite thought it was time to reverse the prior referendum affirmative action ban. The newly diverse electorate defeated affirmative action by an even wider margin than had an earlier, less-diverse electorate — despite having been outspent by elite proponents of affimative action 9-to-1.

So what happened? The elites ignored the vote, eliminated the SAT and did what they wanted, and shrank the Asian proportion of incoming medical students (UCSF) by 40%.

That’s what we can expect by the equity agenda, the Successor Ideology. They’d probably continued affirmative action all along.

I’m giving Yang’s new Subtack a trial subscription.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

The end of the world as we know it …

THE EIGHT PRINCIPLES OF UNCIVILISATION

‘We must unhumanise our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.’

We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it.
We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of ‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’.
We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths.
We will reassert the role of storytelling as more than mere entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality.
Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet. Our art will begin with the attempt to step outside the human bubble. By careful attention, we will reengage with the non-human world.
We will celebrate writing and art which is grounded in a sense of place and of time. Our literature has been dominated for too long by those who inhabit the cosmopolitan citadels.
We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under our fingernails.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.

The Eight Principles of Uncivilization (Dark Mountain Project)

I wonder whether Paul Kingsnorth, an author if this Manifesto some years ago, would still unequivocally endorse this from Priniciple 5 now that he is a Christian:

Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet …

It seems to me that it is defensible from one standpoint, but also incongruent with, for instance, “who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became man” from the Nicene Creed, which he now confesses.

[T]ime has not been kind to the greens. Today’s environmentalists are more likely to be found at corporate conferences hymning the virtues of ‘sustainability’ and ‘ethical consumption’ than doing anything as naive as questioning the intrinsic values of civilisation. Capitalism has absorbed the greens, as it absorbs so many challenges to its ascendancy. A radical challenge to the human machine has been transformed into yet another opportunity for shopping.

Dark Mountain Manifesto

“At a time when fewer Americans attend religious services, religious narratives about Christian nationhood may have their strongest political effects when, and perhaps because, they are detached from religious institutions.”
Please read that sentence again.

Richard Ostling, Did January 6 attack on Capitol highlight ‘D.I.Y. Christianity’ as decade’s next big thing?.

[T]here is no such thing as independent media; there are only different kinds of dependence. If your financial security is derived from the approval of others, you are not independent. You can be dependent on different people and that difference does matter. I have been remarkably successful here in a crowdfunding context but I probably would never have been able to get a staff writer job at any traditional publication. (Such a job would probably pay a third of what I’m making, but that’s for another time.) But my generous readers are themselves stakeholders whose interests I will inevitably weigh and value. A consequence of this dynamic is that “independent” media is subject to external pressures too, in ways both good and bad. If you don’t like something about what is typically branded as the independent media, you can yell about it, which increases engagement and helps who you want to hurt; you can hope that it will go away, which it almost certainly won’t; or you can try to use the power of incentives, that very universal dependence.

Freddie deBoer

[In t]he attempted suppression of the old Mass…, Francis is attempting to use centralized authority to complete the revolution of Vatican II, to consign definitively to the past a liturgy that’s often a locus of resistance to the council’s changes. (It’s many other things as well, but Francis is not wrong to see it playing that role.)

Ross Douthat, ‌The Ungovernable Catholic Church

I love that parenthetical, because I know it’s true from conversations I’ve had with the kinds of Catholics who support the Latin Mass. But at present, Pope Francis is keener on making the big catholic tent big enough for German progressives than for those who resist some or much of Vatican II.

As an Orthodox Christian, I tend to support the traditional Latin Mass simply because it is at least recognizably Christian Liturgy (unlike the Novus Ordo).

Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi. A Church nourished on the Novus Ordo apparently is friendly to gay marriage and women priests, hostile to 2000 years of tradition.

During the hundred days after George Floyd’s death, one heard frequently about unrest in the city of Portland, Oregon. Every day, the journalist Andy Ngo posted video on Twitter that seemed to show horrendous clashes between the police and black-clad rioters that Ngo identified as antifa … At the same time, the journalist Bret Weinstein on his DarkHorse podcast told tales of ongoing, bitter antifa provocation and violence. Not long ago, the writer Douglas Murray visited Portland and compared the city to third world war zones he had visited. “This is not normal,” he said again and again.
How did the Times respond to the situation in Portland? There had been criticism of the paper by conservative outlets for under-reporting the events in Portland and under-playing the violence when it did report. In July, a couple of months after Floyd’s death, when the troubles had been going on for some time, the Times sent the distinguished journalist Nicholas Kristof to investigate. He wrote a piece, much of it tongue in cheek, about how very hard it was to find a genuine anarchist in the whole city of Portland. The demonstrations, as he saw them, were overwhelmingly instances of peaceful civic engagement. “We see dueling narratives. One is Trump’s, and it portrays Portland and other cities with protests against police brutality as teetering on the abyss and requiring his Lincolnesque hand to hold America together. The other is—well, shall we call it reality? Yes, there’s violence and vandalism, as well as opportunistic looting, and it will be a challenge to manage it, but local officials are much better placed to do so than the White House.”
Now of course Trump reacted in predictable fashion, sending federal officers into the city. If in fact there was horrid violence in Portland, then Trump was right—and one began in time to sense that in this paper, Trump could almost never be right. So who was one to believe? Should I credit the Times’s distinguished representative? The paper newly committed to an agenda would surely prefer that there was nothing terribly dangerous going on in Portland. So Kristof had some reason to see some things and block out others. Or should I believe Andy Ngo, who has been fighting a one-man war against antifa for some time? He’s surely more sinned against than sinning in all this—antifa members put him in the hospital with a brain injury not long ago—but obviously he has his views and biases. Should I believe Bret Weinstein, an admirable one-time science professor who stood up against a mob at Evergreen State College? Weinstein now hosts a podcast for “curious minds and free thinkers” and his view of Portland is far more dire than that of the visitor from the Times.
Ten years ago, this question of belief would have been very easy to answer. I would believe the Times, of course. A decade ago I would never think to measure Ngo and Weinstein’s views of the truth against the truth dished up by a Times stalwart like Nick Kristof. But for many readers like myself, that kind of confusion will, I suspect, become more and more the order of the day as people begin to see that the Times has transformed itself.

Mark Edmundson, Changing Times (boldface added).

A very good point. The Times versus Donald Trump? No problem. The Times versus Andy Ngo and Bret Weinstein? Should be no problem, but it is.

The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill from Christianity Today has been riveting thus far. But dare the flagship publication of a movement of mostly independent churches ultimately indict Mark Driscoll’s D.I.Y. independence itself as a major cause of the spiritual damage?

While waiting for the next installment of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, I listened to The Roys Report‘s recent two-parter on Trinity Church, Driscoll’s latest venture. It’s now clear to me that Driscoll has gone full personality cult, and that people should flee while they still can.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

Adiaphora, 7/27/21

[T]he problem with the Freedom Phone … is that it exists in an ecosystem where the user’s options for having a useful device without connecting it to services that deprive it of its “freedom” are exceedingly small.

Still, say you decide to buy one. Congratulations, you’re the proud owner of a new Freedom Phone, “free” from Google’s intrusive monitoring and censorship. But it’s also free of most of the reasons you’d bother to own a phone and keep it charged and connected to the internet in the first place. You want email? You want to have your phone guide you to your next insurrection-planning meeting? You want a calendar to put that meeting on? You want a contact list that is shared with your computer? You want to make a handy shopping list (of groceries or, say, materials for protest signs and Molotov cocktails)? You want to do some research on just how bad critical race theory is? The minute you try, you’ll notice that your phone simply isn’t as useful as it would be if it were connected to some of the services Big Tech provides. If you want to do those things, you’ve got to start installing Gmail and Facebook and the other apps that, well, defeat the purpose of having such a device.

You see—the phone isn’t the problem. In fact, you can turn any Android phone into a “freedom” phone by signing out of your Gmail account, turning off your location sharing, and then only using the apps that swear on their mother’s graves never to track you (and they might be lying).

All snickering aside, if the Freedom Phone were better executed, and perhaps marketed less to the right wing than to those with a general, both-sides-of-the-aisle concern about the growing social and political dominance of the tech giants, it might conceivably be a pretty resounding shot across the bow of smartphone retailers. After all, this is a device that’s as disengaged from the primary culprits of digital dictatorship as it can be while still being minimally useful.

If the makers of the Freedom Phone genuinely cared about freedom, they would not be focusing just on the right, but trying to tap into the widespread desire to use technology that doesn’t exploit us or take advantage of our proclivity to become addicted to outrage. This is an admirable sentiment. If there really is a market for such a thing, perhaps someone of better faith and more competence can come and service this market. For now, though, the Freedom Phone is a gimmick being sold to people who don’t know any better, and its purpose is not to reduce political anger but to put it front and center.

The Freedom Phone Is a Cynical Gimmick – The Bulwark

I may have just found the perfect label for my kind of conservatism: anti-Promethean.

[T]he fantasy that humans can somehow shift ‘offworld’ and recreate such systems on Mars or the Moon when we can’t or won’t live with Earth anymore, is just that: a fantasy, peddled as we saw in the last essay, by the likes of Jeff Bezos and his fellow techno-apostles.

Paul Kingsnorth. Damon Linker also raised the issue and provided le mot juste.

The prevailing strategy is not to ignore Trump or just hope for the best, but “to treat him like a crazy person who’s pushing conspiracies, not as an equal.”

Finally, a Biden policy I completely endorse.

In the past two weeks, I’ve added to my knowledge of Latin: Motu Proprio means "because I damn well say so, that’s why!"

Who knew? ‌Giannis Antetokounmpo As An Orthodox Christian And Star Of The 2021 NBA Champion Milwaukee Bucks. (Well, who knew the first part anyway?)

Mississippi Asks Supreme Court to End Roe v. Wade Abortion Rights
The state’s brief for coming high court case says landmark abortion decision violates the Constitution’s provisions on states’ rights.

Wall Street Journal Headline, subheadline. Need I say that this optics on this would be better if the argument came from just about anywhere but Mississippi?

Why Vaccinated People Are Getting ‘Breakthrough’ Infections
The vaccines are effective, but they are not a golden shield, resulting in some vaccinated people getting infected, mostly with mild or asymptomatic cases.

How do I learn that I have asymptomatic Covid?

Two employees out of more than 1.3 million have quit over this issue, so of course that’s a news story.

Jesse Singal, on internal efforts at Amazon to deplatform Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage.

It’s fine for the Washington Redskins to rename themselves, and I suggest, thinking of Washington, that Lickspittles would be appropriate or Filibusterers.

Garrison Keillor, Scribble, scribble, quibble, quibble, ishkabibble

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

How wrong? Fractally wrong.

I heard a very evocative description in mid-April, and it has stuck with me.

I believe it involved a religious question, which the speaker could not possibly even begin to answer because the question itself came from premises so false that the resulting question was simply incoherent to him.

He described the question as “fractally wrong.” If you put it under a microscope and zoomed in, you’d find the wrongness pattern repeated over and over again at ever-more-microscopic levels.

I feel as if that might be a useful framing of the difference between Orthodoxy and Evangelicalism (maybe Protestantism more broadly, but I’ve never really been a mainstream Protestant, so I hesitate to say that).

Let’s start off in Eden, Genesis chapters 1-3. I think Evangelicals would see the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil as simply a test God set up to see if humans would obey; He never wanted them to know evil at all. In contrast, I think Orthodoxy sees it as something there for humans — eventually, like when they had prepared and were ready for it.

But they jumped the gun, eating of that tree when they were not yet ready (and God hadn’t green-lighted it), requiring that they be removed from the Tree of Life lest they live forever in their fallen state. That’s Orthodox. Or maybe they disobeyed God, requiring the punishment of banishment. That’s Evangelical.

Sin is like crime (Evangelical) or like cancer (Orthodox), requiring, respectively, punishment or healing.

We inherit sin from our parents and are wicked right from the womb, deserving God’s wrath (Evangelical); or we inherit mortality, and the fear of death, which inevitably leads us into reactive behaviors including sin — missing God’s mark. (Orthodox).

And so on and so forth. I’ll soon be above my pay grade if I’m not already.

Thus if Evangelicalism is wrong, and I absolutely think it is, it’s fractally wrong. We don’t even share premises, let alone answers.

That, along with Orthodox reliance on intuitive modes of knowing, makes fruitful discourse, like questions and answers, very difficult.

I know this because I’ve been Evangelical and have analyzed our miscommunication a bit. Other Orthodox may have experienced it, but more with bafflement. They and Evangelicals may both be making the provincial mistake that H. Richard Niebuhr identified: “There is no greater barrier to understanding than the assumption that the standpoint which we happen to occupy is a universal one.”

The only way out of it may be for the Evangelicals to “come and see,” though if they do they’re rather likely to leave Evangelicalism.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

Biggest sinner on the block

Roosh V was a nasty piece of work, but it’s all cool now

Rod Dreher distills the story of Daryush Valizadeh, a/k/a Roosh V, a red-pill manosphere pickup artist and social media personality who in 2019 stopped all that crap cold turkey, returned to Christianity and eventually (May 2021) entered the Russian Orthodox Church. Valizadeh is full of zeal and has found other men who are full of zeal as well — almost a baptized religious version of the manosphere but without the misogyny.

I found the tale sorta interesting, but found one thing creepily evocative about it: “I was the biggest sinner on the block” testimonies were tiresomely common in Evangelicalism, and this brought back those memories. Those big-sinner-who-got-born-again types seemed to turn into creeps of various sort with suspicious regularity. Part of it was that Evangelicalism just could not help itself; as soon as some celebrity announced getting born again, they’d thrust them in front of their congregations (later their cameras) in contradiction of scriptural warnings.

His history is what it is, and I don’t know how much the foregrounding of his sleazy history is his doing and how much is just thrust upon him by others. I hope it’s the latter and I wish they’d stop.

For Dreher, the tale evoked his own triumphalist zeal for Roman Catholicism — which zeal and faith he lost calamitously 16+ years ago covering the clergy sex abuse scandals as a journalist. Those were not fun, liberating times for Rod, and he cautions Valizadeh to be careful of triumphalism lest he face a similar crisis of faith when first he encounters an Orthodox scandal.

I guess Rod and I share a common theme of concern for Roosh, still a relative novice in a 2000-year-deep faith, that he gets formed well and isn’t exploited for his celebrity.

After lamenting how his personal story dissuades him from aggressively proselytizing for Orthodoxy, or even for Christianity generally, Rod concludes:

Still, there is a particular reason I recommended Orthodox books to the visionary writer Paul Kingsnorth when he first began to inquire about Christianity — and there is a reason he embraced Orthodoxy quickly. There is a reason why Dr. Iain McGilchrist, the author of The Master And His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, told me that he is not a believer, but if he were, he would be Orthodox, because of all forms of Christianity, it is the one that has … maintained the best balance between logical and intuitive modes of knowing). There is a reason why, after sixteen years (next month) of worshiping and praying as an Orthodox Christian, faith in Christ is sedimented into my bones in a way it never was before.

Rod Dreher. I am not surprised at McGilchrist’s observation, having fairly recently finished ‌The Master And His Emissary.

I have no reason to think Rod reads my blog, and there’s no way to comment on his Substack offerings, but I’d like to point out to him that it is difficult to speak eloquently, truthfully and adequately about Orthodox Christianity precisely because of the extent to which it relies on intuitive modes of knowing. Speech is largely a left-hemisphere creation that relies on logic and analysis to make its persuasive points, and intuition translates poorly into the left-brain’s dialect.

Or as Dr. McGilchrist notes in the book:

one feels so hopeless relying on the written [or spoken – Tipsy] word to convey meaning in humanly important and emotionally freighted situations.

and again

It is precisely its accuracy and definiteness that make speech unsuited for expressing what is too complex, changeful and ambiguous.

That, I think, emphasizes why the invitation “Come and see” is as important for making Orthodox Christians today as it was for making disciples at the beginning.

“What we believe” pages

I’ve been off Facebook for several years now (I’ve lost track).

I’m not bragging. I got on for honorable reasons (to reconnect with high school friends, who since I went to boarding school, were more important to me by far than college friends) and got off it for honorable reasons as well (I didn’t like Facebook turning some of my family members into trolls, nor did I like lining Mark Zuckerberg’s pockets).

But while I was on, I hurt somebody a bit. A high school fried was deeply involved in an Evangelical megachurch in a major city. I visited its website, found a page on “what we believe,” and found a roll-your-own substitute for the historic creeds of the Church. The net effect imbalanced if not heretical. I critiqued it without naming the church or why I’d visited the site.

Unfortunately, my friend figured it out and was wounded by what seemed like a gratuitous insult — even trolling her — the reason for which utterly escaped her.

That incident came back to me recently, and though I regret hurting my friend, I don’t regret calling out the arrogance of churches that think themselves entitled to create bespoke religions for their respective clienteles and call them all “Christian.”

Okay, that was a bit harsh. But consider:

First Baptist Church of Dallas (friend of Trump, and of Sean Hannity, it created a choral anthem Make America Great Again) is so big that they have both a “What We Believe” and a “Articles of Faith.”
Willow Creek Community Church, imitation of which was a major fad 25 years or so ago (I don’t know if it continues) has a Beliefs and Values page and a lengthy Elder Statements pdf.
Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston has, at least on paper, beliefs far less vacuous than what comes out of Osteen’s mouth every time he opens it.
The Wheaton Bible Church, where I was baptized about 55 years ago (and where my wife and I worshipped as newlyweds in the Chicago area), has become a full-blown megachurch, and it, too, has an “About” page.

I’m not going to stop to try to analyze and critique these. My point is they inherently confirm that there is no single “Evangelicalism.” Without a strong denominational identity, each local church must decide for itself, and publish, what it thinks the Bible clearly teaches.

The inability of denominations, let alone independent churches/fiefdoms, to agree on that clear (“perspicacious”) message is one of the things I saw one day, can never unsee, and made me forever non-Protestant.

Of course, my Church has a statement of faith, too, which we recite (oftener, sing) every Sunday Liturgy: The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, written not by us but by two Ecumenical Councils of the Church in the Fourth Century (when some heresies (Arianism, Apollinarianism, Macedonianism and Chiliasm) were riling the church and it was imperative to define the true faith in contrast with those heresies).

If you’d care to compare the Nicene Creed to these ersatz “What We Believe” statements, you’ll note that at least one thing in all the ersatz statements gets nary a mention by the historic Church. Can you spot it?

It’s sola scriptura (in today’s hyperbolic marketspeak, “we’re all about the Bible”) and its corollaries, the bedrock of Protestantism.

Interesting, huh? And yet somehow there remains one Orthodox Church and countless big and little churches, each marching to its own drum.

Anti-Promethean conservative

Americans have always had a thing for Prometheus — the Titan god in Greek mythology credited with (or blamed for) stealing fire and giving it to humanity … Today, those ambitions have moved to the private sector, with Promethean billionaire entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos working to make space travel far more commonplace … Is Promethean dynamism a good thing for human beings? … But which end is more compatible with happiness understood as human flourishing?

Damon Linker

One big dispositional difference between me and David French is that he applauds, enraptured, these Promethean stunts.

He needs to look more closely at what drives Jeff Bezos, and to re-read Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. Heck, finish the trilogy: read That Hideous Strength, too, David.

I may have just found the perfect label for my kind of conservatism: anti-Promethean.

[T]he fantasy that humans can somehow shift ‘offworld’ and recreate such systems on Mars or the Moon when we can’t or won’t live with Earth anymore, is just that: a fantasy, peddled as we saw in the last essay, by the likes of Jeff Bezos and his fellow techno-apostles.

Paul Kingsnorth.

Last acceptable bigotry is alive and well and living just about everywhere in the USA

Martin: Cries of anti-Catholicism are too frequent. Anti-Catholicism is nowhere near as prevalent as racism, homophobia, or anti-Semitism. Not every critique of the Church is an offense against religious liberty. And The New York Times is not anti-Catholic. But from time to time, it’s important to remind people that anti-Catholicism is not a myth.
Green: I wonder if there are instances where this has become politically complicated for you. For example, when now–Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett was in her hearing for the Circuit Court of Appeals, Democratic senators questioned her about how her Catholic faith would affect her rulings on issues like abortion. Senator Dianne Feinstein famously told her, “The dogma lives loudly within you.”
A lot of people thought that was open anti-Catholic bigotry—a U.S. senator expressing fear that an accomplished legal scholar couldn’t be a fair judge because of her faith. Did you think they had a point?
Martin: Well, first of all, I thought that that phrase was inherently funny. The dogma lives loudly within you. It was just strange—almost nonsensical. But I think it was appropriate for Senator Feinstein to ask, “To what extent will your religious beliefs influence your legal decisions?” That’s not unreasonable.
Green: Do you think so? I mean, the Constitution says that no religious test should be required as a qualification for public office. It’s a founding principle of our country that Americans don’t consider religion when we vet people as public servants.
Martin: I think the difference is that Justice Barrett is well known as a devout Catholic. I didn’t think that was an offensive question. The way it was put was a little ham-handed.

Emma Green, Father Jim Martin on Anti-Catholic Prejudice (the springboard was an issue of the New York Times that “deferentially cover[ed] a language shift meant to show respect for Roma people but … also print[ed] a story that relished a film scene in which a holy Catholic object is defiled.”)

Not a fan of Fr. James Martin, so it’s tempting to add “In other words ….” But I’m going to resist the temptation. You can do your own critical reading (no paywall).

Standpoint

There is no greater barrier to understanding than the assumption that the standpoint which we happen to occupy is a universal one.

H. Richard Niebuhr via Lance Morrow

Which reminds me of “what you see depends on where you stand.”

Christian athletes

Soccer

[T]he future of Christianity is going to be black and brown — at least in the UK. The other day I was somewhere in this Central European region, can’t remember exactly where, and was talking to a group of fellow white Christians about migration to Europe. I asked them if they had to choose, would they prefer to live in a Europe that was predominantly black but faithfully Christian, or predominantly white, but atheist. Everyone agreed: black and Christian.

Black Christians, British Football – by Rod Dreher – Daily Dreher

Basketball

‌Giannis Antetokounmpo As An Orthodox Christian And Star Of The 2021 NBA Champion Milwaukee Bucks.

Who knew? Or rather, who knew the first part?

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

Curated for your reading pleasure

MYOB

Once, when Berlioz sobbed at a musical performance a sympathetic onlooker remarked: ‘You seem to be greatly affected, monsieur. Had you not better retire for a while?’ In response, Berlioz snapped: ‘Are you under the impression that I am here to enjoy myself?’

Via Iain Mcgilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

Contemptible hyperbole

Books are violence, so says the American Violencesellers Association.

Tweet included in this story

If so, there’s something wrong with the regime.

The reason why what Francis has done matters is because some day the kind of liberalism he embodies will come for you — for the simple, sweet thing you were doing that wasn’t bothering anyone else but, by its mere existence, was an existential threat to the governing regime. You are next.

The Pope’s merciless war against the Old Rite

Evangelical/QAnon overlap

I don’t really trust Vice News, but this is a reasonable answer (because Ryan Burge it both a pastor and a serious sociologist of religion) to a question (‘why the big overlap between QAnon believers and Evangelical believers?’) that may not be as urgent as appears (because the premise that 34% of America is "Evangelical" ignores that many identify as "Evangelical" because they’re conservative-leaning and not atheist or agnostic, though they rarely go to church; further, if I wanted to be mischievous, I could affirm that I’m "born again" in both this historic sense — I’ve been baptized — and the Evangelical sense — I once had an emotional experience of "inviting Jesus into my heart").

Caveats aside, this could be worth 6 minutes of your time. The prevalence of Dispensationalism was the major reason I left Evangelicalism 40+ years ago.

Deconstructing "America is back"

In his Friday G-File, Jonah riffs on the Biden administration’s incessant “America is back” declarations. “For Biden, it seems to have two meanings. One is his narrow argument that we are rejoining all of the multilateral partnerships and alliances that Trump pulled out of or denigrated,” he writes. “But there’s another meaning to ‘America is back.’ It’s an unsubtle dig at Trump and a subtle bit of liberal nostalgia all at once. It’s kind of a progressive version of ‘Make America Great Again.’ It rests on the assumption that one group of liberal politicians speaks for the real America, and now that those politicians are back in power, the real America is back, too. But the problem is, there is no one real America. There are some 330 million Americans and they, collectively and individually, cannot be shoe-horned into a single vision regardless of what labels you yoke to the effort.”

The Morning Dispatch, 7/19.

Good points, Jonah.

Huxley > Orwell

With the benefit of hindsight, I concluded for long ago that Huxley was more prophetic than Orwell:

“Hug me till you drug me, honey; Kiss me till I’m in a coma: Hug me, honey, snuggly bunny; Love’s as good as soma.”

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Yes! But …

Censorship Circumvention Tool Helps 1.4 Million Cubans Get Internet Access | World News | US News

"The Toronto-based company’s Psiphon Network receives U.S. government financial support."

I think this is great, but:

I would not be surprised if Psiphon allows the U.S. to spy on its users as a quid pro quo for financial support.
This sort of thing just begs for retaliation — like ransomware attacks, maybe.

A rare naughty

Those who confuse burro and burrow don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground.

Spotted on Pinterest by the Missus.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

Religious but not spiritual

What Modern Man can’t recognize

Though most contemporary conservatives (who are really libertarians) would not agree, I think Berry is very much an old-fashioned conservative — so old that the moderns can’t recognize him. But the same thing could be said of Christianity in general these days.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias, recommending — nay, urging — his readers to read Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow.

"Thinking"

The healing that is inherent in Christian salvation is not just found in what (Who) is known, but in the manner of knowing as well. The abstraction that we call “thinking,” etc., in the contemporary world is a diminishment of what it means to be human. We have learned to focus on a very narrow stream of information, and, in turn, have come to be possessed by the information on which we focus.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, Saving Knowledge

Thoughts on Pope Francis’s crackdown on the Traditional Latin Liturgy

Alan Jacobs

It is sad and strange to me that Francis can be so warm in his sympathy for those who openly reject his Church and its teachings, but so icy-cold, so corrosively skeptical, towards some of that Church’s most faithful sons and daughters. Sad, strange — and, I believe, profoundly unwise.

Alan Jacobs, ‌asymmetrical charity

If this chart is accurate, "profoundly unwise" may be understatement. (TLM is Traditional Latin Mass; NOM is Novus Ordo Mass. Source via Rod Dreher.

Rorate Cæli

Bergoglio is in reality a man of vengeance. A pope of vengeance. An angry bitter Jesuit settling scores through vengeance.

What ought traditional Catholics to do in response to the latest attack on the Mass and all those who love tradition? Simply put: ignore it. Ignore its message. Ignore its motivation caused by pure hatred and vengeance. Keep calm and keep on going as if it does not even exist.

…

Ignore the Agent of Hatred and Vengeance, and all his works and all his pomps.

RORATE CÆLI: A RORATE CÆLI Editorial: The Attack of Hatred and Vengeance Against the Latin Mass Should be Ignored That last sentence is potent, pointed stuff.

Rod Dreher

Commenting on Rorate Cæli (with which he sympatizes):

How can you do that and still be Catholic? How can you defy the Pope in good conscience, as if his order was never made? I honestly don’t know how one remains Catholic if that’s what one believes about the Pope and the exercise of his authority. The only truly stable thing within Catholicism of the last sixty years has been the papacy. If you cast that aside — and that’s what Rorate is calling for in effect here — what do you have left? If you defy the Pope, even in the name of Catholic orthodoxy, how are you not a de facto Protestant? How is that remotely tenable? Somebody needs to explain this to me.

It seems to me that some Trads are in the same place I was back in 2005 with regard to the faith. I found it impossible to believe — not just unpleasant to believe, but impossible to believe — that my salvation depended on being in communion with the Catholic bishops. I came to the conclusion that I had probably been wrong about papal infallibility, and about Catholic claims to exclusive authority ….

Moi

I have feelings about this — maybe even thoughts — but I try to take myself by the scruff of my neck and say "This is not your church and never was, so butt out." I’ll only say this:

The Novus Ordo mass is, per se, a big impediment to healing the Great Schism.
The traditional Latin Mass was not, per se, a big impediment to healing the Great Schism.

For all their claims to ancient wisdom, there’s nothing remotely countercultural about the Tolles and Winfreys and Chopras. They’re telling an affluent, appetitive society exactly what it wants to hear: that all of its deepest desires are really God’s desires, and that He wouldn’t dream of judging.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

Mostly tales of decline

Czech conservatives are worried about us

Rod Dreher speaking with Czech friends in Prague:

They all follow us closely. It is hard to overstate the prestige the US has long had here, because of our opposition to Soviet communism. My experience is only anecdotal, of course, but it was disconcerting to see the pained puzzlement in the faces of my Czech friends. They really do fear that America is tearing itself apart. What could I tell them? I think so too. The transgender thing, I find, is the most mystifying to Central Europeans. They struggle to understand it as a phenomenon, and really struggle to understand why a society like America’s would celebrate this disorder, and even privilege it.

… I was sharing this yesterday with a Czech friend back in the US, a man who hated Communism so much he fled to America when he was young. This man said, “We live an a patently evil world and at the end it was the US — not the USSR — who made it possible.”

If he were a standard leftist saying that, it would be one thing. But he’s not. He’s a fierce conservative and Christian who really did think America was a land of hope. He married and had kids in America. He is living through disillusionment now, but knows that he doesn’t have the luxury of despair. He is preparing for very hard times ahead, and reminds me from time to time that he’s actually more pessimistic than I am. It’s probably because he lived through Communism, knows what it’s like, and knows that the ideological madness that has America in its grip is going to play out in similar ways. In fact, he was a nominal Christian until the Great Awokening made him aware that the only way through what is here, and what is to come, is through a deeply committed, sacrificial relationship to God.

Weimar America

Strauss was himself a conservative revolutionary in his youth, supporting the antiliberal right during the era of Germany’s Weimar Republic. When the most extreme of the right-wing parties — Adolf Hitler’s virulently anti-Semitic National Socialists — rose to power, Strauss (a Jew) fled the country, first to France, then to England, and finally to the United States …

That is a lesson that Strauss’ devotees at the Claremont Institute, who delight in pouring rhetorical gasoline on the country’s many smoldering civic conflicts, have actively unlearned. Unless they failed to grasp the point in the first place. Either way, they’ve ended up where Strauss’s quest for wisdom began, knee-deep in the pestilential swamps of the radical right, as Laura Field’s masterful essay amply documents.

Damon Linker, commenting on Laura K. Field, What the Hell Happened to the Claremont Institute? (The Bulwark). The devolution of the Claremont Institute into a bunch of low-down, lying Trumpist trolls is really tragic, but with "conservative" intellectuals giving up on our system and vowing to smash it, we may not have seen the worst yet.

I initially wondered what the Bulwark would do with Trump voted out of office, but so many Trumpistas remain enthralled that I don’t think the folks there need to be sending out resumés.

Priorities

A majority of American fourth- and eighth-graders can’t read or do math at grade level, according to the Education Department. And that assessment is from 2019, before the learning losses from pandemic school closures.

…

Recently, the nation’s two largest teachers’ unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, announced that they had jumped on the bandwagon. At its annual meeting earlier this month, the NEA adopted a proposal stating that it is “reasonable and appropriate for curriculum to be informed by academic frameworks for understanding and interpreting the impact of the past on current society, including critical race theory.” More, the organization pledged to “fight back against anti-CRT rhetoric” and issue a study that “critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.” There was no proposal vowing to improve math and reading test scores, alas.

Jason L. Riley, Critical Race Theory Is a Hustle

Culture war over fault for the culture wars

I channeled Andrew Sullivan claiming that the Left is more responsible for the culture wars than is the Right, but I have come to realize that it’s a complicated question — not that I (or Sullivan) was wrong (he is outstanding and you should read him), but that there’s more to it.

Thomas Edsall first cast the scales from my eyes. His column links to all four columns (Drum, Linker, Noonan and Sullivan) that had previously toyed masterfully with my confirmation bias.

Tim Miller of the Bulwark had me chuckling enough that I thought I was reading Jonah Goldberg, but Goldberg actually refuted Miller.

Your answer probably will depend in large part on whether you re-frame "who started the culture wars" as "who most zestfully prosecutes the culture wars?"

I’ve long known a witticism I should have recognized as the key from the beginning: Cet animal est tres mechant; quand on l’attaque, il se defend. Or as Goldberg puts it:

It’s called a culture war for a reason. Just as culture is about more than the aggregate opinions of voters, it’s also about more than the shenanigans of politicians. And I don’t think any reasonable observer of our culture can dispute that the majority of people and institutions that control the commanding heights of the culture are well to the left of the average American (and even the Democratic Party) … One reason Democrats seem more reasonable in their cultural warfare is precisely because they have the wind at their back. The media, academia, and Hollywood all provide cover for Democrats in myriad ways.

Burden of proof

In science you can be as perfunctory as you like as long as you are saying what everyone else is saying, but if you are saying something different, you need, reasonably enough, to be as explicit about your evidence and as empirically based as possible. That way you are open to challenge, and that is how science progresses.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

Exploiters versus nurturers

The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. . . . The exploiter wishes to earn as much as possible by as little work as possible; the nurturer expects, certainly, to have a decent living from his work, but his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible.

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

"Religion"

I am in the camp that sees fundamentally religious impulses behind ultimate commitments and even civic pieties. That means I don’t think it’s possible for a nation to be truly neutral unless it’s truly adrift, bereft of any sense of mission (and probably dying as a result).

As Marty uses it in this case, the term “religion” refers not to ritually putting one’s hand over one’s heart and reciting a pledge of allegiance to a piece of cloth endowed with totemic powers. The term religion applies only to the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ refusal to do so. And yet the violence against the Jehovah’s Witnesses is exhibit A in Marty’s warning about the violent tendencies of religion.

William T. Kavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence

For the first 40 years of my life, opposing commies was more or less our national religion. I’ve faulted the Republicans for not finding any inspiring replacement for that, but the recent illiberal ejaculations from that party’s luminaries kind of makes me long for when they were adrift rather than powering toward crypto-fascist shores.

Adiaphora

Billionaires in Space

Just about the only thing I find cool about billionaires racing each other to "space" is that Purdue-trained astronauts — women, actually — were one-third of the actual astronauts for Richard Branson. The worst part is our inability to leave the billionaires up there.

Feckless conservatives: Aw Shucks versus Chest-beaters

Conservatives were handed a political gift they did not win and do not deserve—the disaster of the Left’s ascent. The activist Left’s policy agenda is widely disliked. Its positions veer between unreasonable (Defund the Police), unlivable (indulge looters, larcenists, and vandals), unsustainable (open the borders), and untenable (transwomen are women). Almost no one actually agrees with any of this. But rather than find common cause with moderates who would join the fight, Chest-Beating Conservatives would rather heap contempt on moderates, score points for Team Red, and sully themselves in rudeness.

…

The Aw Shucks Conservatives meet the Left reluctantly and meekly, praying like hell the other side will forfeit. (It won’t.) They allow themselves to be convinced that the current madness will burn itself out, or that they could not possibly respond to even the most outlandish of Woke claims—like whether biological men’s participation is healthy for women’s sports—without a PhD in kinesiology. They dream that America will come to its senses.

The Chest-Beating Conservatives at least do not underestimate the task at hand. But they lack discipline and restraint and occasionally even seem to revel in ignorance. They find their personification in Marjorie Taylor Greene, the greatest thing to happen to the Left since Roy Moore.

Abigail Schrier, Want to Save America? Don’t Act Like a Conservative

(She said it so well. I wish I could agree unequivocally.)

The Diversity Industry

Almost Four Decades After Its Birth, The Diversity Industry Thrives on Its Own Failures

With a title like that, I’m not altogether certain I need to read the article.

What 007’s creator thinks of him

“I have a rule of never looking back,” Ian Fleming said. “Otherwise I’d wonder, ‘How could I write such piffle?’”

The Failures That Made Ian Fleming via Arts & Letters Daily

Woke illusionists

Is is just me, or do the most woke corporations share the least common denominator of making their stuff with Chinese labor? D’ya think they’re trying to distract us?

"Human Infrastructure" sickens me

Apart from “human infrastructure” being a political coinage to make the Democrat/Progressive wish list more palatable, I find its implication that we mostly matter for economic production to about as pretty toxic as calling someone "a vegetable."

Oil

“Oil is the lifeblood of modern civilization.” I would like to rephrase that sentence to this: “Nothing about modern civilization is normal, ever, in human history, because it runs on oil.”

Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain’t Normal

Stories

I had lunch today in Budapest with a visiting anthropologist who told me that the older he gets, the more he realizes how little that we can actually know — which is another way of saying how mysterious life is. He also said that he is increasingly frustrated by academic thought that believes it can pin everything down — and if something can’t be pinned down, it can’t be said to have existence. This is not true, said the anthropologist (who is not a religious man, he told me), but scientists and academics don’t have the humility to admit it.

In Prague, Kamila Bendova told me that she read Tolkien in communist times to her children, “because we knew that Mordor was real.” We should tell the story of the Golem of Prague because in the same sense, we know that golems — things we arrogantly create to serve us that end up seeking to destroy us — are real. Science won’t tell us that; myth will.

Rod Dreher, The Golem of Prague

Updates

A premier sociologist of religion is not buying that mainline Protestants now outnumber Evangelicals. He explains why here.
I was reading along and nodding vigorously at Abigail Schrier’s latest (see above) when I realized that she wasn’t saying anything fundamentally different than Aaron Renn’s "liberals play to win and conservatives should, too." So I’ve re-subsubribed to Renn’s Masculinist podcast, making a mental note to suppress my annoyance with the way he presents some things — but also to keep my guard up.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

Irresistible forces and immovable objects

Two serious blogs in one day is unusual, but here’s the second.

Liberalism versus the Successor Ideology

Liberalism leaves you alone. The successor ideology will never let go of you. Liberalism is only concerned with your actions. The successor ideology is concerned with your mind, your psyche, and the deepest recesses of your soul. Liberalism will let you do your job, and let you keep your politics private. S.I. [The Successor Ideology] will force you into a struggle session as a condition for employment.
…
Look how far the left’s war on liberalism has gone.
Due process? If you’re a male on campus, gone. Privacy? Stripped away — by anonymous rape accusations, exposure of private emails, violence against people’s private homes, screaming at folks in restaurants, sordid exposés of sexual encounters, eagerly published by woke mags. Non-violence? Exceptions are available if you want to “punch a fascist.” Free speech? Only if you don’t mind being fired and ostracized as a righteous consequence. Free association? You’ve got to be kidding. Religious freedom? Illegitimate bigotry. Equality? Only group equity counts now, and individuals of the wrong identity can and must be discriminated against. Color-blindness? Another word for racism. Mercy? Not for oppressors. Intent? Irrelevant. Objectivity? A racist lie. Science? A manifestation of white supremacy. Biological sex? Replaced by socially constructed gender so that women have penises and men have periods. The rule of law? Not for migrants or looters. Borders? Racist. Viewpoint diversity? A form of violence against the oppressed.
[Ibram X] Kendi, feted across the establishment, favors amending the Constitution to appoint an unelected and unaccountable committee of “experts” that has the power to coerce and punish any individual or group anywhere in the country deemed practicing racism. Intent does not matter. And the decisions are final. An advocate for unaccountable, totalitarian control of our society is the darling of every single elite institution in America, and is routinely given platforms where no tough questioning of him is allowed. He is as dumb as Obama is smart; as crude as Obama is nuanced; as authoritarian as Obama is liberal.
…
We are going through the greatest radicalization of the elites since the 1960s. This isn’t coming from the ground up. It’s being imposed ruthlessly from above, marshaled with a fusillade of constant MSM propaganda, and its victims are often the poor and the black and the brown. It nearly lost the Democrats the last election. Only Biden’s seeming moderation, the wisdom of black Democratic primary voters, and the profound ugliness of Trump wrested the presidency from a vicious demagogue, whose contempt for our system of government appears ever greater the more we find out about his term in office.
… one reason to fight for liberalism against the successor ideology is that its extremes are quite obviously fomenting and facilitating and inspiring ever-rising fanaticism in response. I fear the successor ideology’s Kulturkampf is already making the 2022 midterms a landslide for a cultish, unmoored GOP. In fighting S.I., we are also fighting Trump.

Andrew Sullivan, ‌What Happened To You?. I’m marking this as a favorite. It’s just devastatingly effective demonstrating that the Left is the aggressor in the current Culture Wars, and just how damaging those wars are (the Left just might give us Trump 2024).

And, by the way, Trump’s baaaaaaack (at CPAC)!

Why “critical race theory” is a decent approximation for the Successor Ideology

[The New York Times] is the media hub of the “social justice movement.” And the core point of that movement, its essential point, is that liberalism is no longer enough. Not just not enough, but itself a means to perpetuate “white supremacy,” designed to oppress, harm and terrorize minorities and women, and in dire need of dismantling. That’s a huge deal. And it explains a lot.
The reason “critical race theory” is a decent approximation for this new orthodoxy is that it was precisely this exasperation with liberalism’s seeming inability to end racial inequality in a generation that prompted Derrick Bell et al. to come up with the term in the first place, and Kimberlé Crenshaw to subsequently universalize it beyond race to every other possible dimension of human identity (“intersectionality”).
A specter of invisible and unfalsifiable “systems” and “structures” and “internal biases” arrived to hover over the world. Some of this critique was specific and helpful: the legacy of redlining, the depth of the wealth gap. But much was tendentious post-modern theorizing.

Again, Andrew Sullivan, ‌What Happened To You?. This felt worth extracting from his general discussion of successor ideology radicalization because it gives the “critical race theory” moniker its due.

J.D. Vance finds his inner Winston Smith

“It was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Donald Trump,” – Robby Soave, on J.D. Vance’s volte-face over Trump now that he’s seeking the cult leader’s endorsement for the Ohio Senate race.

Via Andrew Sullivan, ‌What Happened To You?.

The cardinal problem

C. S. Lewis describes the premodern view as one in which “the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue.” According to the modern view—unwittingly set in motion by Bacon, Descartes, and others—”the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.” And there is no reality—no truth of things—to order our wishes.

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

This book is at least 19 years old, and I think the original publication is further back than that. And up it pops in Readwise with another insight that converges on what I’m currently focusing on. (I needn’t posit divine intervention: what you’re thinking about and looking for shapes what you see.)

Conservatives are the counterculture now

Because the larger culture has drifted away from the traditional norms of family life, for instance, mere persistence in those norms is becoming a countercultural statement—and a community consciously built around them becomes, almost by default, a subculture with a moral life of its own, provided it is given the freedom to try.

Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic.

Is Levin’s premise true? Upperclass liberals live boringly conventional and bourgoise marital lives.

MAGA Anger Explained

Sometimes, I’m surprised how long it takes for gossip to reach me. This time, it was 5 days.

Last Thursday, a Twitterstorm began issuing shortly before noon, from one @MartyrMade. I missed it because I’m utterly neglecting my Twitter account.

That night, Tucker Carlson took 7 minutes to read it on air. I missed it because life is too short to fit in Tucker Carlson.

Donald Trump read from it during his 90-minute CPAC therapy session (I think that was Sunday). Need I explain that I don’t follow CPAC?

@MartyrMade’s Twitter account surged from 7,000 followers to 70,000. Good for him. But crickets were all I heard.

But today, Glen Greenwald turned over his Substack to @MartyrMade, a/k/a Darryl Cooper, “to elaborate on his influential thread, with a focus on what led him to these observations ….” The observations were a sharp and plausible “general theory” about why so many Trump supporters distrust the 2020 Election.

Spoiler alert: they distrust the Election because they’ve come to distrust many of our major institutions, and not without reason.

Here’s one of Cooper’s many observations, to my mind one of the best:

GOP propaganda still has many conservatives thinking in terms of partisan binaries. Even the dreaded RINO (Republican-In-Name-Only) slur serves the purposes of the party, because it implies that the Democrats represent an irreconcilable opposition. But many Trump supporters see clearly that the Regime is not partisan. They know that the same institutions would have taken opposite sides if it had been a Tulsi Gabbard vs. Jeb Bush election. It’s hard to describe to people on the Left, who are used to thinking of American government as a conspiracy and are weaned on stories about Watergate, COINTELPRO, and Saddam’s WMD, how shocking and disillusioning this was for people who encouraged their sons and daughters to go fight for their country when George W. Bush declared war on Iraq.
They could have managed the shock if it only involved the government. But the behavior of the press is what radicalized them. Trump supporters have more contempt for journalists than they have for any politician or government official, because they feel most betrayed by them. The idea that the corporate press is driven by ratings and sensationalism has become untenable over the last several years. If that were true, there’d be a microphone in the face of every executive branch official demanding to know what the former Secretary of Labor meant when he said that Jeffrey Epstein “belonged to intelligence.” The corporate press is the propaganda arm of the Regime these people are now seeing in outline. Nothing anyone says will ever make them unsee that, period.

‌Author of the Mega-Viral Thread on MAGA Voters, Darryl Cooper, Explains His Thinking

Pointing out what may be obvious

I didn’t set out to follow a common theme, but I seem at least halfway to have found one.

The successor ideology is totalizing
MAGA American doesn’t want to be totalized by anyone but Donald Trump
MAGA America, famously if formally leaning Evangelical, isn’t all that faithful in Church attendance, and they’re not letting some preacher totalize them with knowledge, exhortations to self-discipline and virtue. No, they’re going to try to subdue reality to their wishes.
This is not a formula for healthy civic life. Left-liberals, center-liberals and right-liberals need to make common cause against the toxic extremes.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

We interrupt the frenzy over CRT to revisit Cancel Culture as a bipartisan curse

I know that Cancel Culture is passé now, and that my former tribe has moved on to Critical Race Theory.

But it hit me during this morning’s romp through sundry news and commentary sources that cancel culture is both alive and bipartisan in America.

First, Bari Weiss tells the story of Maud Maron, an impeccably liberal Legal Aid attorney who was canceled by her colleagues for not drinking their latest Kool-Aid:

“None of this would have happened if I just said I loved books like White Fragility, and I’m a fan of Bill de Blasio’s proposals for changing New York City public schools, and I planned to vote for Maya Wiley for mayor. The reason they went after me is because I have a different point of view,” she said.

That difference came out most starkly in education, and in Maron’s role on the school board and as a candidate for city council she was outspoken in her views.

“I am very open about what I stand for. I am pro-integration. I am pro-diversity. And also I reject the narrative that white parents are to blame for the failures of our school system. I object to the mayor’s proposal to get rid of specialized admissions tests to schools like Stuyvesant. And I believe that racial essentialism is racist and should not be taught in school,” she told me.

This apparently didn’t sit well with some of her colleagues.

None of her colleagues, who know that the charges against her are bullshit, dare speak up for fear they’ll be next.

(Bari Weiss, A Witch Trial at the Legal Aid Society)

So far, so perfectly consonant with conservative talking points.

But this, on the Trumpist Right, is harder for me to look at, as it involves my former tribe, involves cancellation of a pubic official precisely because he upheld the constitution and laws he swore to uphold, and cancellation by party officials many of whom took the same oath:

To many Americans, Brad Raffensperger is one of the heroes of the 2020 election. Georgia’s secretary of state, who is a conservative Republican, refused then-President Donald Trump’s direct pleas to “find” the votes that would overturn his defeat in the state. “I’ve shown that I’m willing to stand in the gap,” Raffensperger told me last week, “and I’ll make sure that we have honest elections.”

As he bids for a second term as Georgia’s top election administrator, however, Raffensperger is not so much standing in the gap as he is falling through it. A Trump loyalist in Congress, Representative Jody Hice, is challenging him in a primary with the former president’s enthusiastic endorsement, and the state Republican Party voted last month to censure him over his handling of the election. GOP strategists in the state give Raffensperger no chance of prevailing in next May’s primary.

“I would literally bet my house on it. He’s not going to win it,” Jay Williams, a Republican consultant in Georgia unaffiliated with either candidate, told me. Another operative, speaking anonymously to avoid conflicts in the race, offered a similar assessment: “His goose was cooked the day Georgia’s presidential-election margin was 12,000 votes and Trump turned on him.”

(Russel Berman, Trump’s Revenge on Brad Raffensperger in Georgia – The Atlantic — italics added).

Few Republicans, who know that Trump’s charges against Raffensperger are bullshit, dare speak up for fear they’ll be next.

I could multiply examples were I willing to ruin my day. But I’m retired, and I need not ruin my day to produce more publishable words.

I just wanted to share these two signal cases. And to say that having public officials, or former public officials, so willful as to do what Trump and the Republicans are doing in Georgia, and so powerful that nobody seems willing to stand up to them, is more ominous than some crazies at the Legal Aid Society. You’ll never convince me that a majority of Republicans would have protested had Trump announced that he was cancelling last November’s election because the Democrats were ‘up to no good.’ There is no line Trump could cross that would lose him many of his supporters.

Oh. This too: To the ~~cowards~~ courage-impaired: You are at little more risk of assassination for speaking out than you already are for being public figures. You are not, in America in 2021, at risk of prison for speaking out. You are only at risk of getting primaried (or cancelled by frenzied colleagues if you’re on the Left) and having to find some other work to do. Buck up, bunky! You can do this!