Noticing that my clipping bin was awfully full, I set out to blog the bin to empty. But I was stunned at how much was junky. I’ve spared you that.
You can learn a lot by reading carefully.
Yes, faithful readers, I saw the New York TImes story that ran under this headline: “Catholic Officials on Edge After Reports of Priests Using Grindr.” …
In a way, this Times story was yet another example of an old truth: Conservatives are wrong — simplistic, at the very least — when they claim that elite mainstream news publications are “anti-religion.”
In this Times piece, it’s clear that there are good Catholics and bad Catholics and that the Gray Lady gets to tell readers who is who. …
Yes, this is a Times piece about bad Catholic journalists. But it’s clear that the Times is not an anti-Catholic newspaper; it’s using the same basic doctrinal lens as progressive Catholic newspapers. …
Terry Mattingly, [Wait] a minute: What do New York Times editors think Pope Francis believes about Grindr?
A lot of progressive types, including the Times, thinks it’s "bad Catholic" or homophobic to suggest any connection between priests engaging in consensual sexual relations with other adults and clergy sexual abuse of children. But so long as the suggestion includes heterosexual and homosexual clergy unchastity, the connection is pretty well known and agreed on the left and right. Mattingly:
"Sooner or later it will become broadly obvious that there is a systemic connection between the sexual activity by, among and between clerics in positions of authority and control, and the abuse of children," [the late A.W. Richard Sipe] wrote, in a 2016 letter to his local shepherd, San Diego Bishop Robert McElroy.
"When men in authority — cardinals, bishops, rectors, abbots, confessors, professors — are having or have had an unacknowledged secret-active-sex-life under the guise of celibacy an atmosphere of tolerance of behaviors within the system is made operative."
Sipe spent a half century investigating topics linked to sexuality and the Catholic priesthood — and was a man of the Catholic left.
The nexus between widespread unchastity in the Priesthood and keeping mum about pedophile priests is that anyone you blow the whistle on for child abuse might blow the whistle on you for Grindr or your mistress. It’s a kind of Mutual Assured Destruction, so it’s not surprising that few have dared launch the first missile.
Too dumb to fail
The Cyber Ninjas agreed to conduct the [rump Arizona Election 2020] audit for only $150,000–a figure that was always entirely too low to sort through Maricopa County’s 2.1 million ballots. Why? Probably because the company’s leadership knew they could make up for it with private money from Trump supporters desperate for someone to make their wildest voter-fraud fantasies come true—and indeed, the firm reportedly raked in $5.7 million. And then the Cyber Ninjas, entirely on their own timeline, are supposedly someday returning their “findings” back to the GOP-controlled judiciary committee in the state senate.
The entire thing is a closed feedback loop of election doom that’s, in all honesty, too dumb to fail. The Cyber Ninjas could allege that magic fairy-dust particles grown in a George Soros-funded Chinese bamboo lab blown into voter machines by Antifa changed the ballots from Trump to Biden. It would be accepted as gospel by people who think that OTC horse dewormer is a fine substitute for the COVID vaccine and that D.C. Police Officer Michael Fanone is a crisis actor. Stupidity is simply not a deterrent to conspiracy theorists. It’s their shared operating principle that gives them a reason to shitpost.
Amanda Carpenter, The Cyber Ninjas’ Real Finding: Other States Can Run Sham Audits, Too
I quoted this for the amusing second paragraph.
Journalism with Integrity
A quick correction before we get started. In yesterday’s Quick Hits, we wrote this: “Eighteen commercial aircraft will arrive in Kabul in the coming days to aid in the evacuation effort, the Pentagon said Sunday.” Commercial aircraft are assisting with the evacuation, but as the Pentagon statement we linked made clear, those planes are not flying into Kabul itself; rather, they are being used “for the onward movement of passengers from temporary safe havens and interim staging bases.” We apologize for the error.
One difference between the Dispatch and the New York Times is that the Times of 2021 would probably have just stealth-edited the story and never admitted error.
What matters is winning
… [T]here is the crux of the matter. Biden’s critics [on the Afghanistan withdrawal] are united in thinking that the United States is responsible for spreading liberal democracy around the world, that our safety depends on the success of this effort, that the effort requires us to use military force against opponents of liberal democracy, and that we must never pull back from that confrontation. Keeping up with the fight or expanding it is honorable. Withdrawing from the fight on grounds of waste or futility is disgraceful. What matters is winning, and winning is defined as keeping opponents of our system of government and moral ideals on the run and under pressure. Like Christian missionaries out to convert the world to their faith, the United States is animated by the messianic impulse to spread liberal democracy and smite its opponents.
Damon Linker, America’s war over Afghanistan is just getting started
Be wise as serpents
Warning About The Woke Workplace fits a genre that frustrates me. The victim of this particular "woke workplace" (and he is the victim, not a wrongdoer) gives a vaguely Christianish rationale for his mad candor.
I highly respected her, and so I saw no alternative but to place my career literally in her hands and honor her with a gentle but honest answer.
Oh, really!? No alternative?
Something like "that’s not a good workplace topic" would have been easy and sufficient. Or "That’s above my pay grade" (the Obama dodge). Or "My faith is as precious to me as your spouse. If there’s a conflict between my faith and your love life, it surely is best not to bring it into the workplace as a source of tension." Or "That’s not for me ultimately to judge." Or even "If, hypothetically, my understanding of Christianity tells me that homosexual behavior is inconsistent with it, would you think I’m a real Christian?"
Gentle as doves, yes, but wise as serpents, too, good people. There are vindictive bastards and bitches out there.
Ill-conceived execution
I got information the other day from the producers raising money for a [Live Not by Lies] documentary here in the US. … I spoke to my friend Tucker Carlson the other day about the book … He agreed to be interviewed for the documentary.
The plan is to get this film made and in distribution in time for the 2022 election season ….
Documentary including Tucker Carlson timed to arrive "in time for the 2022 election season." What could possibly go wrong for Rod Dreher‘s reputation as a fairly honest broker?
I care about Rod, who I’ve "followed" for 15 years, since Crunchy Cons, and I fear this documentary will damage him.
Whatever happened to “strong women”?
At some point in the midst of my first pregnancy, all the official medical and government websites switched from “pregnant mothers” to “pregnant people” and from “nursing mothers” to “lactating people.” This is ridiculous. And it is offensive. I consider myself a deeply religious person [not a Christian], but becoming a mother has been the single most transformative experience of my life. The impact it has had on my relationship to my body, my femininity, my womanhood is profound. I refuse to pretend that this is a gender-neutral experience, and I am offended that it is now routine, considered enlightened even, to suggest as much. And although the physicality of motherhood may be different for adoptive mothers, I would expect they feel the same. It is past time for women to stand up and protest the erasure of our experiences, the theft of our private spaces, the attack on our achievements—not to mention the multifaceted assault on our daughters that the new gender ideology represents. (According to Abigail Shrier’s book (p. 62), schools are now describing women like Joan of Arc and Catherine the Great as “gender non-conforming.” What happened to “strong women”? I guess only [trans-]men can accomplish great things?) If that makes me a TERF, so be it.
Anonymous reader in Attention Cervix-Havers Of California!
Too lazy for long marches
You sometimes hear [“long march through the institutions”] from conservative commentators frustrated by the success of the left in making just such a march through American civil society, through the media and the arts and the universities … Instead of imitating the patience and persistence of the leftist marchers, they long for a strongman … to relieve them of the responsibility for reshaping civil society … Dreams of an omnicompetent strongman are the natural refuge of people too lazy and feckless to begin, much less complete, a long march.
Craven condescension as antiracism
The University of Wisconsin has apparently done Black people a favor. It lifted away a rock.
It was a big one, 42 tons, and at least some Black students thought of it as a symbol of bigotry. Because, you see, 96 years ago, when the rock was placed where it was until just now, someone in a local newspaper called it — brace yourself — a “niggerhead.”
That didn’t settle in as a permanent nasty local moniker for the rock. It was just something some cigar-chomping scribbler wrote in 1925 …
The true fault here lies with the school’s administration, whose deer tails popped up as they bolted into the forest, out of a fear of going against the commandments of what we today call antiracism, which apparently includes treating Black people as simpletons and thinking of it as reckoning.
…
Kabuki as civil rights — it’s fake, it’s self-involved, and it helps no one. Yes, racism persists in our society in many ways, and administrators serving up craven condescension as antiracism are fine examples of it.
John McWhorter’s New York Times newsletter, 8/24/21
This item isn’t about J.D. Vance
I wasn’t all that interested in learning more about J.D. Vance’s Ohio Senate run, so I skipped James Pogue’s piece in American Conservative until the Dispatch praised it Tuesday morning.
It really is excellent, and it’s (mostly) not about J.D. Vance, but about Ohio, and about Ohio as a microcosm of disaffected America.
Oh: it’s also by a second-generation very Lefty.
Trumpist lickspittles forever!
Someone I generally respect quoted an item at thefederalist.com, so I went back to see if it (a bunch of Trumpist lickstpittles during the Trump regime) had become responsible in the Biden regime.
No. It’s still a partisan cesspool.
You are welcome.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 