Month: April 2023

This was my week that was

Priorities

Rs are gonna lose a consequential Supreme Court race in WI and watch the soft defund candidate win the mayoralty in Chicago tonight, and they’ll spend all day tomorrow talking about Trump. And no one will see the problem.

Noah Rothman on the evening of 4/4.

I’m no longer an R, and not even sure I lean that way any more. But I’m going to try to be less obsessive in my denunciations of Orange Man. In fact, I’ll let him speak for himself. https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/ERUngQUCsyE?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

Gun culture

I think I’ve said, maybe even recently, that the 2nd Amendment is no special preoccupation for me. I just accept what the Supreme Court says about it.

But that’s not the end of the topic. There are cultural questions, too. And I think Matthew Walther’s voice is valuable:

The AR-15 is situated at the intersection of a relatively innocent hobbyism and the sinister mainstreaming of features of the militia culture of the 1990s, even among people who lead law-abiding lives. The primary selling point of the AR-15 is that it can be endlessly modified, configured, reimagined. It can become louder or quieter, easier to carry, wield, fire and reload, or more lethal. It is meant to be combined with a seemingly endless array of customizable stocks and grips, blast mitigation devices, piston uppers and conversion kits. These components are themselves paired with a vast assortment of accessories — vests, helmets, straps and other gear unfailingly designated as “tactical.”

It is this adjective, and the ubiquity of references to “tacticians” in advertising copy, review sites and hobby forums, that suggests the baleful aspect of AR-15 culture. Who exactly is practicing these tactics, and where and for what purpose? What this “tactics” business signals is not so much a commitment to action (the overwhelming majority of those who own AR-15s are law-abiding) as a general frame of mind. To the would-be tactician, every place that humans inhabit — housing developments, apartment complexes, stores, strip malls, hotels, churches, hospitals and, yes, schools — is another opportunity to imagine oneself taking part in military-style maneuvers. Where would you go for cover if you were here? How would you hold this position? What weapons and gear would you use?

… For AR-15 enthusiasts, the gun is not a means to an end — a tool with which you hunt, a weapon with which you protect your family and property — but rather the end itself, a site of fantasy and meaning making.

I suspect that part of the reason for the rise of AR-15 fandom is the decline of other American hobby cultures …

But for all the amateur tinkering, the reality is that these fetishized murder weapons, so often treated by their owners as if they were indistinguishable from model ships or Pokémon cards, have been used repeatedly in incidents like the recent one in Nashville. …

… My opposition to what the AR-15 represents is not a methodologically rigorous attempt to identify the primary cause of what social scientists call mass shootings. In some ways it is simply an expression of hope for a saner culture, a plea for something other than hypothetical terrorism to form the basis of our leisure time and family memories.

Interesting hypothesis about American hobby cultures, too. The link, above, should get you through the Times paywall.

I’m broadly supportive of a saner culture. If my Congressman posed with his family armed with AR-15s on his Christmas card, I’d never again vote for him, much as I’ve never voted for the current Indiana Attorney General, who early in his very first campaign did something (the specific having been lost to memory) that showed him a base and demagogic liar.

Ephemeral “growth”

Sometimes growth is an accounting artifact, with work formerly done in the home moving into the market. For example, two mothers who would prefer to take care of their own children would create GDP growth by hiring each other as nannies instead, because unpaid work for one’s own family goes uncounted but paid work for someone else’s represents new economic activity.

Oren Cass, The Once and Future Worker

I felt just covered with dirt afterwards

Auden experienced some of the complexities of this situation in early 1939, soon after his arrival in the United States. He gave a speech at a dinner in New York convened to raise money for refugees from the Spanish Civil War, and, as he later reported to an English friend, “I suddenly found I could really do it, that I could make a fighting demagogic speech and have the audience roaring. So exciting but so absolutely degrading. I felt just covered with dirt afterwards.”

Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943

I experienced that thrill once as Emcee, warming up a crowd. It took some years for the shame to sink in with me, though, and that the demagoguery was in a “good cause” doesn’t much help.

She made her bed …

Wisconsin has elected to its Supreme Court a candidate who has all but promised how she would vote on issues including abortion and redistricting. The way she campaigned is a huge breach of how judicial candidates are supposed to behave.

Her breach will open her up to many recusal motions. I cannot explain it better than Josh Blackman did in Justice Janet Protasiewicz, Say Hello To Caperton v. Massey. Short version: there’s an ill-reasoned Supreme Court precedent (by Anthony Kennedy, king of ill-reasoned precedents) that denial of a motion to recuse can violate the federal due process clause.

Meanwhile, the prominence of abortion in that election further confirms my suspicion that most states are going to end up with European-type laws, permitting abortion for roughly one trimester, than generally banning it, in order to lay the issue more or less to rest. Specifically, the total bans (not even exceptions for the life of the mother) enacted in several red states are unsustainably unpopular.

Rhetorical escalation

I have complained more than once that is one (I have in mind a pompadoured southern pastor preaching in demagogic tones) calls Playboy “hard core pornography,” he’s limited his options for describing Hustler (and even worse publications).

It dawns on my that our current demagogues of the press have done something similar in describing Viktor Orbán’s Hungary as “authoritarian.” Yes, they’ve left room for “totalitarian” to describe Russia, but what then do we call North Korea?

How about acknowledging that Hungary is a kind of democracy — an illiberal one — and that an electoral majority seems to like it that way?

Child and Adolescent Gender Transitioning

On different sides of the Atlantic, medical experts have weighed the evidence for the treatment of gender-dysphoric children and teenagers, those who feel intense discomfort with their biological sex. This treatment is life-changing and can lead to infertility. Broadly speaking, the consensus in America is that medical intervention and gender affirmation are beneficial and should be more accessible. Across Europe several countries now believe that the evidence is lacking and such interventions should be used sparingly and need further study. The Europeans are right.

…

Proponents say that the care is vital to the well-being of dysphoric children. Failure to provide it, they say, is transphobic, and risks patients killing themselves. The affirmative approach is supported by the American Academy of Paediatrics, and by most of the country’s main medical bodies.

Arrayed against those supporters are the medical systems of Britain, Finland, France, Norway and Sweden, all of which have raised the alarm, describing treatments as “experimental” and urging doctors to proceed with “great medical caution”. There is growing concern that, if teenagers are offered this care too widely, the harms will outweigh the benefits.

The Economist, What America has got wrong about gender medicine

A Finnish review, published in 2020, concluded that gender reassignment in children is “experimental” and that treatment should seldom proceed beyond talking therapy. Swedish authorities found that the risks of physical interventions “currently outweigh the possible benefits” and should only be offered in “exceptional cases”. In Britain a review led by Hilary Cass, a paediatrician, found that gender-affirming care had developed without “some of the normal quality controls that are typically applied when new or innovative treatments are introduced”. In 2022 France’s National Academy of Medicine advised doctors to proceed with drugs and surgery only with “great medical caution” and “the greatest reserve”.

The Economist, The evidence to support medicalised gender transitions in adolescents is worryingly weak

Humanities murdered?

The end of the humanities: Fewer and fewer college students are choosing to study the humanities.

I will say the very best place to hide something interesting is inside a 10,000-word New Yorker story on the crisis. Thankfully, Blaise Lucey at Litverse read the whole thing and pulled the numbers.

“From 2012 to 2020:

Tufts lost ~50% of humanities majors 

Boston University lost 42% of humanities majors 

Notre Dame lost 50% of humanities majors

The study of English and history at the college-level dropped by 33% 

More than 60% of Harvard’s class of 2020 planned to enter tech, finance, and consulting jobs”

The crash makes sense. How much do you really want to pay for a semester on the white supremacy of Jane Austen, the blinding cis-ness of Homer, the anti-lesbianism of Gilgamesh? More efficient just to burn the books and major in statistics. According to a new WSJ poll, the majority of Americans, especially young Americans, now say a college degree isn’t worth the money.

Nellie Bowles

If that last paragraph really reflects how humanities are taught today, it’s no wonder — though it remains a tragedy — that enrollments are dropping.

Soros: Now you see him, Now they mustn’t

It is sometimes allowed to be said that Alvin Bragg was funded by George Soros, but only when New York mag Soros want it to be noted in a positive way, but if it’s said with a vaguely negative tone then it’s a Fact Check: False.

Nellie Bowles

Hate to say it …

[S]ometimes you come across certain places, and even certain countries, that are clean and well-lighted. They are pleasant and harmonious. They work. …

What strikes me today is how impossible it is to feel this about the United States. As Robin Williams joked, Canada is like a nice loft apartment, but America is the party raging underneath. That party, though, is turning sour; something is rotten in the state of America. Even Williams later changed his analogy. Canada was still a nice apartment, but America had turned into the nightmare meth lab below.

Tom McTague, America’s desperate dysfunction

For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.f

Sunday, 4/2/23

The secularists’ god

A modern secularist quite often accepts the idea of God. What, however, he emphatically negates is precisely the sacramentality of man and world.

Fr. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World

Peter Pan and Prosperity

There was a strangely gripping part of the televised Peter Pan of my childhood (featuring Mary Martin as Peter) where Tinkerbell drank poison to save Peter, but she “could get will again if children believed in fairies.” The children watching were encouraged to clap to let Tinkerbell know they believed.

Her recovery was nothing short of miraculous. No thanks to me.

I’m almost positive I didn’t clap because I didn’t believe in fairies. I even felt a bit resentful at the manipulation, (Yeah, I was that kid.)

Believe hard enough and good things will happen to you, from earthly to heavenly riches (so it’s your own fault if you’re not rich) is not a message that has gone away.

Christian America or White America?

We often hear that the most significant trend in religion in America is the rise of the “nones,” those who profess no religious affiliation. That demographic group is indeed important for the future of religion, culture and politics in America, and as of 2021, Pew reported that 29 percent of all adults identified as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular.” But alongside that trend, the changing demographics of Christianity promise to transform faith and religious discourse. We cannot assume that America will become more secular so long as the future of America is less white.

…

I quickly recognized that the standard American religious survey categories no longer account for the realities expressed in the church in America. “White evangelicalism,” “Protestant mainline” and “progressive” are categories that are largely defined by a white majority. This “browning” of the church in America, as some scholars call it, scrambles all the categories. What we are seeing isn’t simply that white evangelicalism is changing; it’s that something new is emerging.

… What will it mean for politics and religion in America when religious conservatives are by and large voices of color? Even now, when white progressives criticize “conservative Christians” or “conservative evangelicals,” they, perhaps unknowingly, are largely critiquing people of color from the majority world. On the other hand, when conservatives for so-called family values take anti-immigration stances, they are ironically abetting the secularization of America.

This influx of nonwhite believers will challenge white religious conservatives to choose between xenophobia and building alliances with immigrants who share their views on social issues. These trends will also challenge them to unbundle their religious views on social issues from a kind of libertarian economics that harms those who are less wealthy. In the same way, white progressives will be in the awkward spot of choosing whether to continue to push boundaries about sexuality and gender — which will put them on the side of largely white, wealthier Westerners — or to be in solidarity with those from the majority world who most likely hold views that are out of step with social progressivism.**

Tish Harrison Warren.

I skipped over this once or twice the day it appeared, on the assumption that it was demographic stuff I already knew. But while I knew the “arc,” I did not know how far the trends have progressed nor had I thought about the political ramifications of conservative Christians of several colors making political cause against white progressives.

(Silly me! I tend to think about “religion” in religious terms, not political. And in religious terms, some of the groups Warren describes do not sound unequivocally Christian.)

Ambiguity about creation

Put in biblical imagery, this tension might be expressed as follows: On the one hand, we want, with the psalmist, to see the lion stalking its prey as seeking its food “from God” (Ps 103/4.21). On the other hand, we also want to say, with the Book of Isaiah, that when God’s ultimate purposes are fulfilled, “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid” (Is 11.6). And in wanting to use both of these images, we are implicitly admitting to an ambiguity in our attitude to God’s creation as we experience it.

Christopher C. Knight, Science and the Christian Faith

It takes a family to raise a Christian

Protecting mumbo-jumbo and mummery?

Legislators in Washington State, Vermont, and Delaware are trying to abolish clergy-penitent privilege in the context of mandatory reporter laws. In other words, a Clergyman who hears a confession of child sexual abuse would have to report it.

Eric Kniffin of the Ethics and Public Policy Center has been fighting these legislative efforts and explains persuasively why the bills are “impractical, discriminatory, and unconstitutional.”

All I want to add (or emphasize), as a retired attorney and a Christian in a tradition that practices sacramental confession, is that I’m offended by an odious implication of abolishing the clergy-penitent privilege while continuing the attorney-client privilege: that implication is that the attorney-client privilege is important because it allows attorneys to do important jobs properly while the clergy-penitent privilege merely protects some mumbo-jumbo and mummery.

Fortunately, that very invidious implication is part of the reason why the laws are unconstitutional.

Epistle of James

Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.

James 1:27

I’ve always been more diligent about avoiding spots than about visiting the fatherless and widows in their affliction.

Getting real

You look so good the slum must be inside you

Poet Tomas Tranströmer via Martin Shaw

For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

April Fools Day

AI

I finally dipped my toe into ChatGPT, having been inspired by a story of a mom who used it to plan her child’s birthday party.

I had it draft a policy on delinquent tuition payment for a private school. High marks. Over the coming days, I’ll see what other logjams it can break on my project list.

I asked it “What are some real-world applications of the quadratic equation?” It gave a plausible answer, which I cannot evaluate since I haven’t used the equation since high school and cannot remember it. (If any kids are reading this, that’s probably because I became a lawyer, not an engineer.)

Since I get too easily enamored of technology, it behooves me to read smart critiques and concerns as they come along, if only to guide my personal conduct toward AI.

Nashville shooting

Journalistic lacunae

Why not explore [journalistically] how the attack on children and teachers in a Christian school affects Christians. This massacre may have been what some call a “hate-crime” against a religious group. And it’s odd that the community whose actual children were murdered seems less deserving of coverage than the community wrongly associated with a child-killer. It would be the equivalent of asking the Muslim community how they felt about a mass shooting in a synagogue, but never asking Jews.

It also seems legit to me to cover how violent memes and slogans and rhetoric can prime already-unstable people to commit violence. If it’s fair to call out the NRA’s materials after a mass killing (and I think it is), it’s also fair to note how common violent imagery and rhetoric has become in the TQIA+ world.

“Kill Terfs” is not a fringe slogan; it’s everywhere. A leader of the TQIA+ movement, Chase Strangio, has written that laws restricting child sex-changes are, in fact, laws to “criminalize known survival care for trans youth … That goal is akin to a goal of killing us.“ He has also claimed that his opponents “want to control and eradicate” trans people. Last weekend, a trans activist assaulted a gender-critical speaker with tomato juice in New Zealand, telling a crowd that “I want her to be full of blood, because that’s what she’s advocating for. She’s advocating for our genocide … our extermination.” The mob violently shut the event down. Then there are the many

grimacing skulls that promise “DEATH BEFORE DETRANSITION”, knives, baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire, assault rifles painted in the pastel tones of the trans flag, torrents of rape and death threats, the grim vow that “EVERY DAY IS TRANS DAY OF VENGEANCE.

And it would also be great if the press could fact-check not just the falsehood that trans people are more likely to murder, but also the idea, constantly reiterated by TQIA+ groups, of an “epidemic” of anti-trans, hate-motivated murders. That notion has been repeatedly debunked ….

Andrew Sullivan

Why don’t the police release the "manifesto"?

I was just about ready to join the demand for release of the Nashville Christian School shooter’s reported “manifesto” when this brought me up short:

consider this other possibility: Might the shooter’s manifesto contain accusations of some kind against family, school, church or others? If that’s the case, police and legal officials may be investigating these claims before airing them to the public.

That’s not an entirely idle speculation, as you’ll see if you follow the hyperlink, nor is it implausible: an extremely conservative Presbyterian church in my hometown badly mishandled sexual abuse in the congregation.

So, yes, sooner or later we need to see the “manifesto.” If they’re investigating claims of the manifesto, it would be nice to know.

The Trump Indictment

Selected quotes

I’ve written a bit about the New York case against Trump, now gone to indictment. None of it was particularly original, and neither is this, but then I’m pretty selective about what sources I’ll spend time reading.

That said, some notable commentary by others:

  • David Frum notes that the charges might not even be about Stormy Daniels. (Deciding what a grand jury’s up to is a bit like reading chicken entrails.)
  • In his statement responding to the indictment, the former president said, “Never before in our Nation’s history has this been done.” But never before in our nation’s history have we had a president as dishonorable, as unethical, and as malicious as Donald Trump. (Peter Wehner)
  • There’s something very, well, Trumpy about this: He has a way of making everything sordid. Instead of a dramatic discussion about the meaning of accountability for a president who sought to overthrow the will of the voters to stay in power, we’re arguing about the dirty mechanics of hush-money payments to an adult-film star. (Quinta Jurecic)
  • I worry that a failed prosecution might strengthen Trump. Yet I’d also worry — even more — about the message of impunity that would be sent if prosecutors averted their eyes because the suspect was a former president. [Paragraph break omitted] The former president’s fixer, Michael Cohen, was sentenced to three years in prison for doing Trump’s bidding, and a fundamental principle of justice is that if an agent is punished, then the principal should be as well. That is not always feasible, and it may be difficult to replicate what a federal prosecution achieved in Cohen’s case. But the aim should be justice, and this indictment honors that aim. (Nicholas Kristoff, I Worry About a Failed Prosecution of Trump, but I Worry More About No Prosecution)
  • There is a counterargument that this is America’s moment for prosecutorial discretion to allow the country to recover and move on. As a teenager, I was outraged when President Gerald Ford pre-emptively pardoned former President Richard Nixon, yet over time I came to think that it was the right call and allowed the country to heal. Yet one difference is obvious: Nixon in 1974 was already completely discredited, ostracized and broken, while Trump denies any wrongdoing and is running again for the White House. (Nicholas Kristoff, I Worry About a Failed Prosecution of Trump, but I Worry More About No Prosecution)

Extradition

When someone on the Right accuses a progressive of being funded by George Soros, it damages my regard for the accuser more than for the accused. It’s a mark either of stupidity by the accuser or of his contempt for those listening. (The same goes for Lefties’ obsessions with the Koch brothers or Peter Thiel.)

Ron DeSantis is not stupid. You draw the necessary inference.

By the way, as Radley Balko points out, DeSantis famously removed a local prosecutor from office last year for declaring that he wouldn’t enforce the law as written for political reasons. That’s no different from what DeSantis himself is guilty of here [in claiming that “Florida will not assist in an extradition request”].

Nick Cattogio

Politics

Benchmarks

I want to leave a note here, because I expect to have many occasions to link back to it in the next several months.

Americans and Republicans, remember: You asked for this. Given the choice between a dozen solid conservatives and one Clinton-supporting con artist and game-show host, you chose the con artist. You chose him freely. Nobody made you do it.

I will be reminding you all of that, from time to time.

Kevin D. Williamson, May 4, 2016, right after Donald Trump secured the votes to be the Republican presidential nominee.

But he was wrong about something: he has had “occasions to link back to it” for years, not several months.

Williamson has another epochal column, Witless Ape Rides Escalator with perhaps the most on-point succinct summary of that ape:

[W]hen Trump sings “How Great Thou Art,” he sings it in a mirror.

When Ruy Teixeira talks

When Ruy Teixeira talks (Republicans Really Are the Party of the Working Class), Democrats should listen attentively.

In a lot of ways, the reversal of party affiliation by the white working class, in increasingly by “POCs” in the working class, is the most astonishing part of the realignment since witless ape rode escalator.

Elite Populism

There is an elite version of populism that masquerades as technocracy.

Jonah Goldberg

Freddie on “all that politics is”

I’m not sure who first said it, but it’s been observed that Trump’s fundamental political proposition is not really populism, or foreign policy isolationism, or economic protectionism. Trump’s political pitch is, simply, “I will destroy your enemies.” Which is part of what makes him a monster, his zeal for attacking his targets and the targets he picks. But when I see people who favor police and prison abolition exactly up until the police and prisons become useful tools to them, it convinces me even more that “I will destroy your enemies” is all that politics is. When you scrape the surface even a little bit, that’s all that you find, the will to destroy the other side.

Freddie deBoer, May "Destroy My Enemies" Be All of Our Law

I do not agree with Freddie on “all that politics is,” but he’s got an awfully good point about Trump.

Freddie gems

  • I am waiting for someone to tell me what the radical left approach to law and order adds up to, these days, other than an injunction against ever calling the cops for anything and people screaming on Twitter that it’s fine if you smoke meth in a crowded elevator. No one has taken me up on the offer to explain how any of this works. Because none of it works, and it’s not clear if it was ever intended to work as an actionable set of proposals. It’s all pose, all fashion. Three years after “defund the police” became a ubiquitous slogan in left spaces, nobody knows what it means, nobody feels any pressure to figure that out, but everyone is still sure that if you expect any enforcement of basic order at all, you’re a fascist.
  • Trump stood for very little in any conventional political terms, barely attempted to define a political agenda on the campaign trail, and was most notable in policy terms for his willingness to defend Medicare and Social Security after Paul Ryan’s former stranglehold on Republican fiscal ideals. Instead, he offered the ritualistic scourging of the people his fans found detestable – first in the primary, mocking John McCain and Jeb Bush and whoever else stood in his way, then the effete liberals who were allowing immigrants and criminals to ruin the country. His potential successor, Ron Desantis, is something of an idea man, but he tilts those ideas towards the urge to destroy constantly. His signature policies are all oriented towards reminding voters that he will target their enemies and use government to oppose them. He has to; it’s a political necessity for a 21st-century Republican with great ambitions.
  • What all of us have to recognize is that the nihilism and score-settling of the past seven years are not the fault of a single awful man but emergent properties of a toxicity deeply embedded in the guts of this country. We can’t cure that toxicity if we spend all of our time diagnosing it in the other side. Of course I think Republicans are mostly to blame. But that belief tells us nothing about how to build a better, healthier political culture.

Freddie deBoer

Indirect evidence on gun control

Here’s the funny thing: while conservatives balk at even the mildest gun control efforts on account of it being a slippery slope (fine), progressives have absolutely no intention of enforcing even existing gun control laws. What could I mean by this? Just listen to Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner this week on how his office won’t prosecute illegal gun possession:

We do not believe that arresting people and convicting them for illegal gun possession is a viable strategy to reduce shootings,” the DA’s office said.

This is the ur-progressive prosecutor, saying gun control doesn’t stop shootings and that he’s just not going to do it. Because enforcing gun control laws would mean—it’s almost too terrible to say—enforcing laws. And that’s a line that America’s progressive prosecutors simply cannot cross.

Nellie Bowles

Gun control gets a boost every time there’s a mass shooting, especially of schoolchildren. But when you get into the weeds, the details, where the devil notoriously lurks, it’s far from obvious what to do. We can wish that we’d never become so gun-infatuated as a nation, but we did.

Kevin D. Williamson demolishes (as have countless others before him) the case against the AR-15 in The Washington Post Misfires—Again. The only thing particularly dangerous about the AR-15 seems to be its cool factor, its status as an icon of toughness.

So what now? “Do something! (however symbolic, ill-advised or constitutionally provocative)” is not an answer I’ll accept.

Challenge

Purity … is NOT the one thing needful; and it is better that a life should contract many a dirt-mark, than forfeit usefulness in its efforts to remain unspotted.

William James

Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.

James 1:27

I’ve done the hard part, gathering the epigraphs. Would you now like to write the essay?

(H/T James K.A. Smith, by whose standard these epigraphs are far too direct for the essay I might write.)

Curiosities

Notable oddity to add a little seasoning to life: Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park

Wordplay

Anisogamy: Sexual reproduction involving two types of gametes that differ in size.

Walking:

  • All horsepower corrupts. (Patrick Leigh Fermor)
  • Walking “is how the body measures itself against the earth.” (Rebecca Solnit)
  • I only went out for a walk and … going out, I found, was really going in. (John Muir)
  • I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees. (Henry David Thoreau)

Via Andrew McCarthy

If I were to support, much less endorse, Donald Trump for president, I would actually have to go back and apologize to former President Bill Clinton.

Southern Baptist Seminary President Al Mohler, 2016. “By 2020, Mohler had nonetheless become a public supporter of Trump, even standing by his vote for Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection. ‘Based upon the binary choice we faced on November the third, I believe then that that was the right action to take,’ Mohler said on his podcast on January 7, 2021. ‘And going back to November the third, I would do the same thing again.’ To my knowledge, Mohler has yet to issue an apology to Bill Clinton.” (Robert P. Jones, Why a Trump indictment will matter so little to most of his Christian supporters)

Then the angel of the Lord went forth, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians a hundred and fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.

Isaiah 37:36 (King James Version)

‘Traditional art invites a look’, she wrote. ‘[Modernist art] engenders a stare’. The stare is not known for building bridges with others, or the world at large: instead it suggests alienation, either a need to control, or a feeling of terrified helplessness.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary. (I don’t recall who he was quoting.)

Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest [of America] is real.

Jean Baudrillard

The irony of Chat GTP asking me to verify I’m a human

@philbowell on micro.blog

… the difference between what Rowling says she believes and what her critics claim she does ….

J.K. Rowling Addresses Her Critics

For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.