This is the final installment of my massive data dump starting yesterday.
I probably should mention that this is the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, observed by both the Roman Catholics and the Orthodox Church. We observe it so much that we’ve been fasting for several weeks in anticipation, and by the time you read this, I will have scored some beef brisket.
Cultural
Same old story
The Titanic story is linked to themes as old as man. “God himself couldn’t sink this ship.” “If we eat the fruit against his command, then we’ll be in charge.” “Technology will transform the world; it’s a mistake to dwell on the downside.” It’s all the same story.
Liberalism promised to harmonize classes, but produces discord. It has no solution to class conflict because class conflict is baked into its faith in progress.
Genuine conservatism—as opposed to the “right liberalism” that wraps itself in the conservative banner—is cut from a different cloth entirely. Alone among modern political movements, conservatism renounces progress.
[O]nce you start judging it primarily on the criterion of usefulness, you have lost the essence of education and have descended into mere training. Whenever I hear somebody say that we should care about Mozart because babies made to listen to Mozart in the crib go on to score 25 points higher on the SAT, the bad part of me thinks that person should have his ears cut off, because they are not doing him any good.
I’d add only that it’s not just politics that has taken over everything — at least if you think about politics as arguing over policy. It’s more accurate to say that it’s politics as spectacle that has taken over everything.
Spectacle is the sphere that achieves public titillation through public combat. In Rome, gladiatorial combat was spectacle. Professional wrestling is spectacle. Reality TV is spectacle. Donald Trump — the love child of professional wrestling and reality TV — is spectacle. Tucker Carlson presented TV news as spectacle. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence perform activism in the form of spectacle.
The point of spectacle is not to resolve differences; it is to attract attention. In spectacle you thrive by offending people. Narcissism is rewarded, humility is forbidden. Inflaming hatred is part of the business plan.
David Brooks, on the Dodgers’ descent into spectacle by honoring the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
The distinction between sport and spectacle may explain my preference for basketball and soccer over pro football, and my disgust with boxing, dog fighting, cage fighting and such. Elon and Zuck, I’m lookin’ at ya’.
I’m with Ross on this
My general view is that the U.F.O.-encounter phenomena seems in continuity with supernatural experiences reported across the long pre-modern past — abductions into faerie realms, especially. As such, the experiences are more likely to offer evidence of either some kind of strange Jungian unconscious or of actual supernatural realms than they are to involve interplanetary visitors from Zeta Reticuli.
The new generation of philosophers had a short way with traditional philosophy: “I don’t understand what you mean” was the favoured weapon of attack, and once ignorance is seen as a boast rather than a confession, it is in the nature of the case invincible. (J.R. Lucas, “The Restoration of Man,” 446–447)
…
In conversation with the philosopher Robert Marett, Rector of Exeter College, Oxford, [C.S.] Lewis wittily expressed the value he attached to respect for the “species barrier.” Marett’s opening gambit in their dialogue went as follows: “I saw in the papers this morning that there is some scientist-fellah in Vienna, called Voronoff – some name like that – who has invented a way of splicing the glands of young apes onto old gentlemen, thereby renewing their generative powers! Remarkable, isn’t it?”
Lewis thought.
“I would say ‘unnatural.’”
“Come, come! ‘Unnatural’! What do you mean, ‘unnatural’? Voronoff is a part of Nature isn’t he? What happens in Nature must surely be natural? Speaking as a philosopher, don’t you know. . . . I can attach no meaning to your objection; I don’t understand you!’ ‘“I am sorry, Rector; but I think any philosopher from Aristotle to – say – Jeremy Bentham, would have understood me.” “Oh, well, we’ve got beyond Bentham by now, I hope. If Aristotle or he had known about Voronoff, they might have changed their ideas. Think of the possibilities he opens up! You’ll be an old man yourself, one day.” ‘I would rather be an old man than a young monkey.’”
What happens when individual biases, especially confirmation bias, interact with the group dynamics of conformity bias? The result is epistemic tribalism.
In Britain, where I live, feminism has developed around the assumption that women belong to a sex class with specific physical vulnerabilities. In America, the movement has been filtered through a progressive legal tradition of outlawing discrimination against a variety of marginalized groups, and because of the decades-long abortion fight, American feminism relies heavily on the concepts of choice and bodily autonomy. In the view of many mainstream U.S. feminist writers, Britain is TERF Island, a blasted heath of middle-class matrons radicalized by the parenting forum Mumsnet into conservatism and “weaponized white femininity.” The response of some British feminists is that, in practice, the agenda of mainstream American feminism has shriveled down to the abortion fight and corporate-empowerment platitudes, and is hamstrung by its strange refusal to accept the relevance of biology.
Although I did not expect him to honor it, I appreciated what it could mean if 2016 candidate Trump did honor his commitment to appoint justices from a list made by Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society.
Republicans at SCOTUS II
Not that Leornard Leo’s nominees have proven consistently excellent, mind you:
Just this past week, he wrote four super-short opinions, which cut corners on law and fact, and failed to respond to pointed concurrences/dissents. Justice Kavanaugh was a well-regarded circuit justice for more than a decade. He routinely prepared intricate and careful decisions about the most arcane topics. But on the Supreme Court, his breezy approach to judging leaves so much to be desired. What happened? To use a theme from the case, his development was arrested. I’m about to write a sentence I never thought I would write: Justice Jackson’s opinions this term have displayed more analytical rigor than Justice Kavanaugh’s.
Reiterating, I had collected so much material that I’m breaking it up topically. I can’t certify zero partisanship, express or implied, in what follows. Just remember that I’ve never been a Democrat and I’m almost over all my Republican reflexes.
Gobsmacked?
Who is the most pro-life president in modern American history?
But if we change the metric from abortion law to actual, legal abortions, the picture is considerably different, and begins to challenge our assumptions about what it means to build a true pro-life culture in the United States. If the most important metric in determining a president’s pro-life credentials is the prevalence of abortions performed in the United States during his term, then the title of the most pro-life president in modern American history belongs, remarkably, to Barack Obama. It’s not close. And, Trump’s judicial nominations notwithstanding, a very long pro-life trend reversed itself during his presidency.
…
No president saw sharper decreases in the abortion rate and ratio from the first to the last year of his presidency than Barack Obama. In 2016, at the end of a presidency dominated by pro-choice policies and judicial nominations, there were a total of 874,080 abortions — 338,270 fewer than there were in 2008, the last year of the George W. Bush presidency.
…
[E]ven before Roe was overturned, I was under no illusions about the challenge facing the pro-life movement. That challenge is now proving worse even than I feared, and it’s worse in part because of the very compromises made to secure the Dobbs victory. The pro-life movement was Donald Trump’s mighty political vehicle. Without its support, his cruelty, malice and corruption would be a footnote to history.
Instead, his towering presence has warped almost a full decade of American life, turned Americans against Americans and transformed the culture of the Republican Party, the political home of pro-life America. It remains to be seen how long his malign influence will last. But much of America has experienced Trump’s presence on the public stage as a form of assault, and that assault is ultimately antithetical to the cause of life.
…
A pro-life movement that has long affixed its eyes on power must now remember hope. Otherwise, it may remember this period of American history as the time when it won the law and lost the nation, when the means of its legal triumph also sowed the seeds of its cultural defeat. If there is one thing that we know, it is that the culture in which we live decisively influences whether men and women possess the hope sufficient to have a child.
David French. In fairness to French, I realize that my excerpts may be slightly more negative toward Trump than his essay was.
In any event, for a 43-year pro-life veteran like me, the raw facts are challenging, and they’ve earned this French essay a flag to remind me to read it again.
The emigration of the Left
Leftists used to see themselves as champions of the poor and working classes. They viewed government as a means to protect and provide for the economically vulnerable. They wanted to rein in the power of the rich, and to ensure a decent life for the ordinary working man and his family.
This was a winning political message for the Democratic Party of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his successors, even though the reality fell short of the promises. As those on the right pointed out, big government has inefficiencies, injustices, oppression, and corruption of its own. Nonetheless, conservatives are not opposed to all government welfare and regulation, and we can recognize some virtues in the left’s old economic vision, even if we remain skeptical of big government’s ability to achieve it.
The left used to dream of economic and social solidarity. Then sex broke the left. The sexual revolution suddenly had the left talking like the most radical individualists imaginable; solidarity, commitment, and obligations were abandoned if they got in the way of pursuing a good time in bed or pursuing the next romantic relationship.
…
The heart of today’s Democratic Party isn’t the union hall, but white-collar professionals with pride flags in their Twitter profiles. This class is eager to pressure everyone else into accepting their social views, especially as regards the rainbow agenda. Hence the order to take food from poor children to force schools to adhere to the whims of LGBT activists.
I do not ordinarily visit The Federalist, which I hasten to say is unrelated to The Federalist Society. Thursday’s “front page above the fold” gives you a sampling of the unsavory flavor:
But this article was linked within another I was reading — and the description of “leftists” and Democrats seems fundamentally accurate. Further, there’s at least smoke if not fire behind that last sentence.
I feel bad that I had to learn of this story by coincidence, but I’m too likely to end up utterly frantic and unhinged if I regularly dumpster-dive for the odd bit of edible news. (I could name names, but I won’t. Let’s just say I’m glad I’m not expected to publish every day in order to keep myself and my wife fed.) Isn’t it enough to know that our general national trajectory is very bad without obsessing over every scrap of supporting evidence, Left and Right?
The prime directive of any bureaucracy
Title Nine of the 1972 Education Act was straightforward, and answered perfectly well to a democratic consensus of the time: educational institutions should not discriminate based on sex. As in “you’re a woman, you can’t attend this school.” The object of its control was institutions. But the powers said to emanate from Title Nine not only expanded, they became different in kind. Its object of control is now students: universities, as franchisees of the federal government, must now manage student’ sexual relations with one another. This transformation has taken place outside the legislative process, where it would be subject to democratic pressures (and hence common opinion), and has instead been internal to the federal rule-making apparatus.
Universities, in turn, tend to interpret the rules according to the timeless institutional principle of maximum ass-covering, which lines up nicely with the prime directive of any bureaucracy: it must expand, like a shark that must keep moving or die.
Don’t let a lucrative cause end just because you won
The goal of any civil rights movement should be to shut itself down one day. And once we get marriage equality and military service, those of us in the gay rights movement should throw a party, end the movement, and get on with our lives.
Andrew Sullivan, at a Human Rights Campaign Fundraiser before Obergefell decreed same-sex marriage throughout the land. But the HRC continued, shifting its attention to grifting for every plausible and some implausible demands of sexual minorities — er, excuse me, gender minorities, or something.
The craziest thing is that these grifters still have the respectful ears of our adult “influencers.”
In Vibetown, it always made sense
One of the three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who came down with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019 was Ben Hu, who worked on the project that received U.S. funding. This was first reported by our friends at Public, then confirmed in The Wall Street Journal.
Yes, a U.S. taxpayer-funded project. So the U.S. intelligence communities knew what was happening and why from the start. If Public and The WSJ are right, the scandal now is the cover-up. Here’s Alina Chan, who works with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and wrote a book on Covid’s origins: “When I first heard the names of the sick WIV researchers, I was in disbelief that people in the US [government] knew about this and yet allowed the public to listen to media stories about pangolins and raccoon dogs for literally years. . . . The most shocking part of this story is that it took 3.5 years for this intel to be shared with the public.”
In retrospect, there were early signs that it was a U.S. government cover-up, not a Chinese one. Only an American would know that our media is so malleable that indeed we can be told Chinese-people-eating-crazy-shit-again is the anti-racist origin story. Yes, the classic not racist explanation: the Chinese love of diseased pangolin flesh is what killed your grandma. A research lab with sloppy security? That’s called racism. Chinese officials would never concoct this PR scheme on their own because it’s insane. But you see: it’s insane in a world of logic. Not in vibes, where we live. In Vibetown, it always made sense.
Nellie Bowles at the Free Press. I almost let my subscription lapse last Monday, because I’m only reading a third to a half of their daily articles, but then thought better of it. That their interests are broader than mine doesn’t mean they’re not interesting when the stars are in alignment.
Anyway, I don’t actually remember whether “I told you so,” about Fauci, but I never believed his denial of U.S. funding for gain-of-function research. I’m pretty sure that the proof he was lying (not just equivocating with weasel-words) was revealed almost immediately.
If you live where the government regularly lies to you but isn’t consistently good at suppressing refutations of its lies, are you living in a “free country” or a “democracy”?
The new education rhetoric
Here’s a great example of the new education rhetoric: “The far right’s effort to take over schools is not limited to battlegrounds or red states—they just won 40% of the elected education roles in NYC,” writes Amanda Litman, a prominent education activist, literally just describing parents who are pro–standardized testing.
It turns out that closing schools for years was really bad. And schools deciding that math and reading are right-wing didn’t help. And weirdly, teachers becoming quasi-religious figures primarily tasked with gender-discovery journeys also did not improve scores. You know why? Those are my jobs. Yes, all of these tasks used to be the role of the lesbian aunt. It was my job to say math class is trash; Howard Zinn does it better; and Doc Martens are a good shoe that will last you years. It was me who was meant to paint your son’s nails. ME.
How and in what sense has the Right become authoritarian?
I don’t think our most fundamental problem is that one of our two parties wants to establish one-party authoritarian rule. Our most fundamental problem is that we disagree very deeply about what kind of country we should be, and that disagreement is also very narrow, meaning that which direction we will go is maximally unsettled …
As far as I’m concerned, the primary thing that has made the right more dangerous than the left through this period is that, thanks to Donald Trump and voters most devoted to him, the right now actively indulges in fantasies, delusions, and conspiratorial thinking that convince it that it’s more popular than it really is, that the left has rigged the system in its favor, and that these acts of cheating by the left require truth-defying acts of rule-bending and rule-breaking in order for the right to prevail.
That is how the right gets to nascent authoritarianism ….
How were the large animals initially domesticated? I really like the theory that ancient people used the same trick modern hunters use—salt traps. They would give animals salt (which they need badly), so they have to come. Even husbandry has an element of bribe and negotiation. … You need to give people what they want. Now what do they want? That’s usually very simple to understand, they won’t shut up about it. They may express it indirectly through projections though. … Western right wings desire a great Christian conservative power which will save them from the wokes. They dream about it day and night. … they project their need to the nearest available candidate—Vladimir Putin, viewing him as a parental figure.
Considering how flawed and dishonest virtually all politicians are, I once flirted with the possibility that Putin was a flawed, dishonest and sometimes murderous Christian conservative, so I know that Lamont is at least in the ballpark on this.
The real problem with corporate tax cuts
One way of talking about tax cuts, for example, is that they’re a bad economic policy solution to the real problems that we face. But another is that they’re a way of giving money to our enemies as conservatives. Do we really want to keep on fueling the people who are funding institutions, organizations, and ideas that we find abhorrent?
My answer to that is, obviously, no. So despite the fact that I don’t think tax cuts are great economic policy, I think they’re most stupid because they’re empowering our political enemies and we should stop doing that.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.
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.
I had collected such an insane amount of material since my last general-interest post that I had the luxury of separating out the most sharply anti-Trump stuff and posting it here.
When a liar meets a skilled, prepared journalist
When Trump went on, for example, about how he’d give the death penalty to drug dealers, [Fox News’ Bret] Baier interrupted to note that Trump had pardoned a drug dealer named Alice Johnson, who, under his new plan, would have been executed. “Huh?” Trump responded, with evident confusion. “No, no. No. Under my, oh, under that? Uh, it would depend on the severity.” But Baier pressed on: Johnson had run a major cocaine ring. Trump groped around until he conjured up an assertion that if his notional death penalty for drug dealers had existed, Johnson would never have dealt drugs. Problem solved.
Trump kind of says what you’d expect him to say (various things that are probably crimes to declare, Biden has more secret documents than I do, the economy, etc.).
A Trump-trained artificial intelligence could do it all at this point.
The Atlantic has endorsed only three candidates in its 163-year history: Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Hillary Clinton. The latter two endorsements had more to do with the qualities of Barry Goldwater and Donald Trump than with those of Johnson and Clinton. The same holds true in the case of Joe Biden. Biden is a man of experience, maturity, and obvious humanity, but had the Republican Party put forward a credible candidate for president, we would have felt no compulsion to state a preference. Donald Trump, however, is a clear and continuing danger to the United States, and it does not seem likely that our country would be able to emerge whole from four more years of his misrule. Two men are running for president. One is a terrible man; the other is a decent man. Vote for the decent man.
If my home state, Indiana, polls ambiguously on a 2024 Trump v. Biden election, I just might vote, with heavy heart, for Biden. But not since 2008 has Indiana really been “in play” in the POTUS race, so my vote likely will be for Peter Sonski. Heck, maybe even Cornel West.
Bad Theodicy
No one predicted evangelicals would go from piously denouncing Bill Clinton’s moral failings to swooning for a thrice-divorced, porn-star-screwing real-estate mogul from Manhattan …
But evangelicals being evangelicals, they couldn’t just leave it as a Machiavellian maneuver. They had to concoct a whole theodicy to make it sound theologically admirable, with Trump serving as God’s vessel in the world to achieve his own ends ….
Could I have been dogmatically wrong about Florida Man?
I have a different take on Trump’s behavior: Oppositional Defiant Disorder, which begins in childhood, explains most of his deviancy. The distinct feature of this disorder is the refusal to follow any directions requested by anyone. Those with ODD see an order or request as someone trying to control them, and it feels like life or death.
I have a nephew who manifested this condition as a child — and now, at 55 years old, he hasn’t changed a whit. If you ask him a simple thing like to pick a piece of paper off the floor, he would refuse. He would not outright refuse, but he would avoid doing it and just ignore the request. God forbid you asked him why; he would say you were a controlling person and sulk off. He has been divorced twice because his behavior drove the women crazy.
Trump could not draw his sword at military school, and he cannot return the boxes, because to be controlled feels like life or death in his psyche. It really is a mental disorder — but that excuses nothing, especially in a president.
UPDATE: I realized after posting this that I hadn’t explained the headline. I have insisted until now that Trump’s fundamental flaw, his fundamental disqualification for office, is narcissism. ODD may very well be a better explanation.
The GOP endorsement pledge
Readers too young to remember the Before Times may find the following hard to believe, but I swear it’s true.
Back in the day, Republican presidential candidates weren’t asked to formally pledge their support for the party’s nominee in advance.
There was no need. It went without saying that contenders who disliked each other would set aside their differences in the end for the good of the country and support the winner of the primary. Any Republican president would govern more conservatively than any Democrat would, therefore any Republican nominee was worth endorsing in the general election.
In the After Times, what’s best for the country in the general election is … less clear-cut.
And so, not coincidentally, the After Times are when the RNC began pushing loyalty pledges on primary candidates.
In the past week three different Republican contenders have chafed at having to commit to endorsing the GOP nominee, keenly aware of who that nominee is likely to be. Their reasons for doing so differ, as does their thinking on whether to sign the pledge anyway knowing that the RNC intends to bar those who refuse from the GOP primary debates.
But the fact that so many are struggling with the prospect of supporting Trump again highlights an ominous evolution in the nature of the process since 2016. During that cycle, the pledge aimed to bind a plainly unfit demagogue to support the Republican Party in the general election.
There is no path to the White House for Republicans with Mr. Trump. He would need every single Republican and independent vote, and there are untold numbers of Republicans and independents who will never vote for him, if for no other perfectly legitimate reason than that he has corrupted America’s democracy and is now attempting to corrupt the country’s rule of law. No sane Democrat will vote for Mr. Trump — even over the aging Mr. Biden — when there are so many sane Republicans who will refuse to vote for Mr. Trump. This is all plain to see, which makes it all the more mystifying why more Republicans don’t see it.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.
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. I’m even playing around a bit here, but uncertain whether I’ll persist.
Last week two of Trump’s most slavish cronies in the caucus introduced resolutions that aim to undo his two impeachments. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s legislation, targeting the first one, is short and sweet; Elise Stefanik’s counterpart, targeting the second, is more elaborate. The resolutions don’t purport to “repeal” or “overturn” the House impeachment votes held in 2019 and 2021, notably, but to banish them from official existence entirely. If enacted, each would have the effect of expunging the record “as if such … Articles had never passed the full House of Representatives.”
In theory, at least. Per Charlie Sykes, legal experts find the idea of the House retroactively disappearing an impeachment to be cockamamie, including the normally Trump-friendly Jonathan Turley. “It is not like a constitutional DUI. Once you are impeached, you are impeached,” he told one news outlet. Even if the resolutions pass, there’s nothing stopping a future Democratic House majority from expunging the GOP’s expungement—an un-un-impeachment, as it were.
Of course, a subsequent Republican House majority could expunge that expungement, amounting to an un-un-un-impeachment. And then a later Democratic House majority could—you get the idea.
Perhaps, centuries from now, it’ll be a House tradition whenever the out-party wins control of the chamber that they undertake to un-impeach or re-impeach Donald Trump, as the case may be, on their first day in power.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.
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. I’m even playing around a bit here, but uncertain whether I’ll persist.
What if we thought Christianity was about reality?
If it were seriously imagined that the teachings of Christianity or other religions constituted a vital and irreplaceable knowledge of reality, there would be no more talk of the separation of church and state than there is of the separation of chemistry or economics and state.
That word “irreplaceable” is a key; it challenges me in my approach to public affairs, which tends toward Rawlsian public reason even though I’ve read no Rawls.
Maybe I tend that direction because I’ve so rarely heard Christian voices in the public square seasoning the discussion subtly, like salt in a recipe, rather than waving the Bible (sometimes literally) and declaiming what they perceive as God’s “rules” rather than persuading about “reality.”
If we can see that the pre-Christian philosophers did seek the truth, and that they did catch glimpses of it, it only stands to reason that their teachings should bear some similarities, like a broken reflection of the moon in water, to the fullness of truth in Jesus Christ. Therefore, these similarities need not appear as a threat to Christianity; instead, they offer one more proof of Christ as universal truth.
I love that “like a broken reflection of the moon in water.”
Parable of the week
A certain man went down from Athens to Atlanta and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment and wounded him and departed, leaving him half dead. And by chance there came down a certain conservative megachurch head pastor that way. Now, this pastor had 14,000 sheep, and 6,000 camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she-asses, and a 10,000-person auditorium, and much gyms. He had also seven sons and three daughters, for unto him was a smokin’ hot wife named Cyndi. She did teach yoga, but she sinned not for she called the class Stretching Our Faith and never used Sanskrit words.
And when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side and he said unto himself, “This is what comes with woke politicians, slimy, dirty people everywhere. A decent person can’t even ride the bus. The Uber drivers always want a tip.” And he passed by on the other side.
And came then two Duke Divinity School post-liberals, for there was in those days in that city a theology conference. And they saw him and were moved to pity. And one went to help him. But his friend said unto him, “Ho, consider and be sure. Art thou moved by the charity that is from the Lord? Or doth thou proceed from the superficial liberal humanitarianism of the Enlightenment?”
And the other paused and did bethink himself, for he did not want to proceed from the superficial liberal humanitarianism of the Enlightenment lest the Lord wax wroth with him. And at last, he did say to his friend, “Look, this man suffereth! and would thou be treated thus? Consider that if thou were this man, thou would swap the most of for the least of these.” And his friend replied, “Whoa, buddy, thou soundeth like Rawls.” And they did argue, and growing distracted, did pass by on the other side.
But a certain disenchanted liberal technocrat, as he journeyed, came to where he was. And when he saw him, he had compassion on him and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine and set him on his own beast and brought him to an inn and took care of him and did exchange with him Reddit handles.
And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence and gave them to the host and said unto him, “Take care of him. And whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.” And the host did say, “The doctors say he needeth a new kidney.” And the man was sore afraid, but he was an effective altruist. And he said, “Lo, I have an extra one that I’m not using. And hoarding it would be irrational under the circumstances.” And he gave the man his kidney. And being recovered, he went back to his job as a consultant and great was his reward in the kingdom of God, if he would allow himself to know it.
Phil Christman, The Effective Samaritan, quoted here.
Religious liberalism
Ross Douthat has a fine column on why he’s not a liberal Catholic. With a little effort, you can translate it to liberal versus conservative in other churches, too.
Excerpt:
If liberal forms of Catholicism claimed to be comfortable as a remnant out of step with the spirit of the age, then diminished numbers wouldn’t necessarily demand a self-critique. But again, liberals are the ones most likely to insist that the signs of the times should compel the church to shift in their direction, as an alternative to marginalization or extinction. And there is just no serious or compelling proof of concept here, after so many decades of experiments. “Join or die” is just not a compelling argument if your own movement seems to be dying even faster.
A Christendom vision
Accessing things that are extremely bad for you, like marijuana, gambling, and porn, should be harder than it is. Being able to get married, buy a house (or just afford good housing), and have children should be easier than it is. A great many of our problems, I think, exist because we’ve made a world in which it is desperately difficult to be good, far more difficult than it needs to be. When I envision a Christian society, the ideas near the forefront of my mind mostly have to do with protecting and preserving family life, promoting organized labor so that workers can command better wages and more easily build and form families, and taking some reasonable steps to limit access to some especially dangerous vices, such as gambling and porn, for starters.
What the Fathers decried as schism is now regarded as normal church growth. So long as the new church does not make a point of denying the Trinity, it remains a part of the una sancta.
Basil, a consistent witness to the Eastern principle of deification, wrote about free will in a way that contrasted sharply with that of Augustine: “Good action arising from free choice,” he insisted, “is . . . present in us by nature.”
Fr. John Strickland, The Age of Paradise
The clash of cultures
Several scholars distinguish a separate Orthodox civilization, centered in Russia and separate from Western Christendom as a result of its Byzantine parentage, distinct religion, 200 years of Tatar rule, bureaucratic despotism, and limited exposure to the Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, and other central Western experiences.
Short of constituting a separate civilization, it seems to me that American Orthodox converts are building at least a distinct subculture.
One hundred years of platitudes
Then Almata cried, Why is he called The Prophet? And Gibran spoke, It is a misprint for The Profit. For that is what I have made of the Gullible’s insatiable desire for Platitudes.
The late ‘60s and early ’70s felt like Peak Gibran, but I managed to avoid both Gibran and weed.
Lucky me.
Why do I read anything but poetry …?
Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.
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. I’m even playing around a bit here, but uncertain whether I’ll persist.
I’ve always liked the story with the punchline “What the hell is water?” But I don’t think I’d ever read the full commencement address from which I got it.
Quite good, with anticipations of Iain McGillchrist and of “pay attention to what you’re paying attention to;” but David Foster Wallace’s way may be better.
The law says what the law says. The job of the Supreme Court is to apply the law, not to make up the law, not to reform the law, not to ensure that the law accords with public opinion. If public opinion is opposed to the law, then the public can elect new lawmakers and write new laws. It is not up to the Supreme Court to do that for them. If representative democracy means anything, it is that the law is made by lawmakers who are elected by the people and democratically accountable to them.
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Even Nina Totenberg has noticed that the progressives on the Supreme Court are more inclined toward bloc voting while the so-called conservatives are more inclined toward intellectual disagreement. If your bookie took bets on how individual justices were going to vote in any given hot-button case, you’d make more money betting on the progressives, who are predictable. When it comes to their most important political commitments, they sometimes have reached their decision before the first arguments are made.
I’m not sure how Williamson supports that last sentence, but otherwise it’s solid.
Damon Linker’s sober assessment
I’m not really interested in debating the substance of the issue. I’m fully vaccinated, so is my wife, and so are my kids. That includes several rounds of Pfizer’s mRNA COVID vaccine. But I’m not anything close to being a medical doctor or an expert on immunology or epidemiology. I’m not even an especially informed amateur observer of issues in public health. What I am is a broadly well-educated writer and citizen who trusts doctors, public-health professionals, government agencies, and the media’s myriad mechanisms of publicity to provide me with accurate information about the world. I trust that since tens of millions of Americans (and hundreds of millions more all over the world) have taken these vaccines, I would have heard about it in the form of a blockbuster news story if they actually did more harm than good.
But note: I don’t know that vaccines are safe in the same way that I know it’s a cloudy day in the Philadelphia suburbs, where I live and am writing this post. And this is true about an enormous number of things. Anytime anyone says “I know X” about a matter that goes beyond direct personal experience—I can see the clouds outside my window with my own eyes—it implicitly involves an act of trust: “I know X because Y says X, and I trust that Y knows what s/he is talking about and wouldn’t deceive me.”
Do you distrust the pronouncements of Anthony Fauci? Fine. But why would that lead you to trust RFK or Joe Rogan more? Just because they’re not employed by the government?
Why indeed? I know full well that governments lie to me constantly — but nowhere near so constantly that I can say “government said it so it must be a lie.” But what I also knowbelieve is that crackpots and grifters are even less reliable than the government (do I really need to cite examples?), and that I lack the time and the knowledge to personally check out every contrarian claim.
Especially at age 74, I am very aware of my mortality, and of the much higher priorities for spending the time until that day.
Maslow’s Hierarchy, level 1
For all I complain about the empty materialism of the West, there is a certain level of wealth essential to human happiness, below which family, faith, and work as a craft, isn’t solace enough. We need a certain amount of stuff to escape the drudgery and toil of existence. That level is probably somewhere above Senegal ($1,800 per capita GDP) and below Vietnam ($4,000).
The policies implementing the Sexual Revolution now have the priority that peace and prosperity used to occupy in political loyalties and discourse. The revolutionary ideology now holds the place of esteem once held by the Judeo-Christian religions.
In general, I did not care for this book, but this particular point is powerful. The Biden administration has proven the truth of it vividly in its enthusiastic celebrations of Pride Month. (If you missed the details, Rod Dreher is ever ready to fill you in.)
The late Joseph Sobran said decades ago that the Democrats had become the “vote your vice” party. It has only gotten worse (with an admixture of perverse obsequiousness toward transgender ideology).
(I grant that there are vices other than sexual, and that when Republicans are in power they either leave the declining status quo untouched or else pass performative and draconian bans that the courts strike down on various grounds, some of those grounds being solid.)
Scotomas
Speaking of vice, the current issue of The American Conservative devotes its current issue to the topic.
Yup. They’ve got the biggies:
Porn
Gambling
Marijuana
Witchcraft
Social Media
But I almost laughed out loud at the absence of binge drinking and at the article titled and subtitled The No Smoking Garden: The crusade against tobacco has depended on shameless propaganda.
I’m thinking the common thread here is “calls to legalize newer vices are bad; traditional legal vices are fine.”
This is typical of why I keep waiting for The American Conservative to realize that my subscription has lapsed.
Don’t worry; science has it all figured out
(An archaeologist finds a motel centuries hence:)
Surrounding almost the entire complex was a vast flat area, marked with parallel white lines. In several of the spaces stood freely interpreted metal sculptures of animals. To avoid the misunderstanding that often arises with free interpretation, each sculpture was clearly labeled. They were inscribed with such names as Cougar, Skylark, and Thunderbird, to name but a few. The importance of animal worship in Yank burial customs has never been more clearly illustrated.
It was easy for my generation of baby boomer liberals to be humble, because we had much to be humble about.
Many on the left had erred on what was perhaps the most important issue of the 20th century, global totalitarianism: Too many had been soft on Soviet Communism or Chinese Maoism. When you see well-meaning people on your side who were catastrophically wrong about profound moral and political issues, humility comes more easily.
These days, however, many conservatives are so ridiculous that I fear they are robbing us liberals of that well-earned humility.
Peter Wehner can always be counted on to oppose Florida Man, but sometimes he hits the nail on the head more squarely than other times:
Trump doesn’t just cross moral lines; he doesn’t appear capable of understanding moral categories. Morality is for Trump what colors are to a person who is color-blind.
Trump’s moral depravity, which touches every area of his life, private and public, has long been in public view, undisguised and impossible to miss.
Other shady and unethical individuals have served in the White House—Richard Nixon and Warren Harding among them—but Trump’s full-spectrum corruption puts him in a category all his own. His degeneracy is unmatched in American presidential history and unsurpassed in American political history.
Donald Trump, rather than using the presidency to elevate human sensibilities, did the opposite, and he did it relentlessly. Among the most damaging legacies of the Trump years is his barbarization of America’s civic and political life. He called the spirits from the vasty deep, and they came when summoned.
Mind you, I’m among those who succumbed to Trump Derangement Syndrome (the first Presidency so to afflict me), so I can’t fault Wehner for a bit of obsessiveness.
What is the reason for Mike Pence?
Pence recently did an interview with right-wing radio hosts Clay Travis and Buck Sexton, in which he refused to say whether he’d pardon Trump once in office. The hosts wanted Trump pardoned, and Pence basically had three answers. First, he riffed on the fact that he believes these are “serious charges” and he “can’t defend what’s been alleged.” Second, he says it’s “premature” to discuss a pardon because we don’t know what “the president’s defense is” or “what are the facts.” And then third, he says “we either believe in our judicial process in this country or we don’t; we either stand by the rule of law or we don’t.”
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Normally, I’m not impressed with candidates who refuse to answer questions because they look like they’re being evasive for political reasons. The lack of authenticity is like nails on a chalkboard. But here, it actually is a real answer. He thinks the charges are real, but he’s open to hearing Trump’s side of the story.
Sarah Isgur. She analyzes the other GOP candidates, too.
Pence is right, but being right often requires nuance for which voters have no patience.
I was aware of, but did not share, a Pence Derangement Syndrome when he was Governor of Indiana. I have nothing in particular against him now. But on 1/6/21, he assuredly was aware that by honoring our electoral college system over the shenannigans of Florida Man, he was ending his political career.
In 2023, Pence is a stone-cold loser, lacking even the “what the hell, why not tell the truth?” rationale of Chris Christie.
Wordplay
1
Filiation and affiliation
The late Edward Said was known for his distinction between filiation and affiliation. Filiative relations are those that come to us naturally, those that are givens of our birth and into which we are born. Affiliative relations are those we purposefully forge.
Mr. Robertson ran for president in 1988, hoping to channel evangelistic popularity from his growing television empire, the Christian Broadcasting Network, into Republican political might. Ultimately he failed — even devout Christians worried about the intensity with which the celebrity minister blended church and state.
And yet, by the time of his death on Thursday, the vision he championed had gained more power than he could have ever thought possible. The alliance between evangelical Christianity and Republican politics has fused, even as America has grown increasingly secular. The polarizing rhetoric of his often inflammatory views has become a defining feature of American politics.
“Evangelistic popularity” is pretty clumsy. It skips over primary and secondary meanings of evangelism and evangelistic to mash up a tertiary meaning (a meaning which I suggest arose from journalistic misusage, which eventually “makes proper” I guess, as “literal” now is a hyperbolic form of “metaphorical.”)
I have no idea, apart from context, what happens when an alliance fuses, and I’m not persuaded by it.
I recently read Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept 📚 The idea of religion as a sphere of life distinct from politics, economics, or science is a recent development in European history. That’s not a complete surprise to me, but I’d never before read so much on how that came about. Spoiler alert: there’s a bit of cultural imperialism in the sense of “imposing” on other cultures how the secularized West parses things.
9
Baksheesh, a word meaning bribes in Arabic, which police frequently ask for in Egypt. Read the full story.
This probably is in the same thought constellation as how notoriously hard it is to create compelling good fictional characters.
11
“Random” vs. “Mystery”
To call the unknown “random” is to plant the flag by which to colonize and exploit the known … To call the unknown by its right name, “mystery,” is to suggest that we had better respect the possibility of a larger, unseen pattern that can be damaged or destroyed and, with it, the smaller patterns … But if we are up against mystery, then knowledge is relatively small, and the ancient program is the right one: Act on the basis of ignorance.
So we come to the present pass, with the world’s most powerful nation, with all of its magnificent history and intricate constitutional architecture, at the mercy of a pathological narcissist, trembling at the thought of bringing him to justice — as if it were the act of applying the law to him, and not his brazen defiance of it, that were the anomaly
What he once wore as electoral camouflage is now tattooed all over him, in yet another fulfillment of the late Kurt Vonnegut’s warning that, eventually, “we are what we pretend to be.”
Tom Nichols on the transmogrification of J.D. Vance into a Trumpist.
D
Teenagers suffer for many reasons. One is being fragile and in formation — a human construction site.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.
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. I’m even playing around a bit here, but uncertain whether I’ll persist.
Okay, that title is cheap pandering. I don’t believe in the Hallmark Holidays. This is the second Sunday after Pentecost in the Eastern Church. Speaking of cheap pandering …
Gothardist Evangelicalism
David French had a fresher experience than I of Bill Gothard (the main villain of Amazon Prime’s Shiny Happy People) by a large margin: I encountered him in 1966-67, French in 1993. Further, French was an adult, attending a Gothard seminar motivated to believe to “get the girl” he was dating, who with her family were Gothard acolytes. Finally, as an evangelical-adjacent Reformed Protestant, French has more current insight than I into Gothardism’s reach, including into the scandal-ridden Kanakuk Kamps.
Considering all that, it’s no surprise that his ‘Shiny Happy People,’ Fundamentalism and the Toxic Quest for Certainty does a markedly better job than I did at sketching the key problems with Bill Gothard’s teachings (through the Institute on Basic Life Principles), its reach deep into evangelicalism, and how the fundamental decency of most of Gothard’s followers makes “cult” an uncomfortable label. It’s good enough that I used one of my ten monthly sharable links.
But wait! There’s more!
Former Gothard follower Sara Roberts Jones tells her experience of Gothard’s “cult” in a seven-part series. While French and I have used IBLP as shorthand, Jones refers to ATI, the “Advanced Training Institute” where they get into much greater detail through a series of “Wisdom Booklets.” A few excerpts suggest her project and one teaching that tortured her particularly:
Recently I gained access to nearly all of the original Wisdom Booklets (plus several of the updated second editions). I thought I would summarize each one to show exactly what Gothard taught us. Halfway through the first few pages of Wisdom Booklet #1 (out of 54), I realized I couldn’t do it.
Gothard defies easy summarizing. He uses hundreds of words to prove a single point. His explanations and logic are twisty, working around the obvious message of Scripture to support his own claims.
So, instead of trying to summarize, I’m going to take highlights from the Basic Seminar Textbook and several Wisdom Booklets …
My purpose is to show how so many well-meaning Christians came to Gothard thinking, “I am excited to know God better,” and ended up nodding as he said, “God holds a woman guilty if she doesn’t scream when a man rapes her.”
“God holds a woman guilty if she doesn’t scream when a man rapes her” is not, so far as I can tell, the endpoint of all the Gothardist teaching, but it’s certainly got to rank as one of the most toxic ideas drummed in along the way, followed in close second by the fetish about “eye-traps” in women’s clothing that is already extremely modest. This really is double-barrelled blaming of women for men’s unbridled lust.
I count myself fortunate that my brush with Gothard was early in his career and relatively superficial. I can’t help but imagine what might have happened if I had fallen into the deep end, but I don’t think that I should dwell on “what-ifs” like that, let alone further inflict them on you.
I will note, however, that:
If you want to know about the Gothard cult (not about the Duggars), you’ll learn more that’s meaningful, and learn it in less time, by reading David French and Sara Roberts Jones instead of watching Shiny Happy People
An explanation of God’s will that requires 54 copyrighted booklets with restricted circulation sounds more like a commercial racket or an early-stage cult than like anything one could plausibly call “Bible-only Christianity.”
I’d be shocked that evangelicalism tolerates Gothardism except that evangelicalism has no even minimally effective means for excommunication.
What’s “water”?
We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without means to measure our descent.
As Deneen tells it, what happened when the wall fell was not the triumph of freedom over oppression so much as the defeat of one Western ideology by another. The one that came through was the oldest, subtlest and longest-lasting, one which disguised itself so well that we didn’t know it was an ideology at all: liberalism.
The Silicon Valley agenda, the transhumanist agenda, is extremely utopian, and actually very religious. I think it’s like if you took the Christian religion — which they’re all sort of steeped in because they’re in America — and you take out the actual bits about God and Jesus and things, you’re left with a desire for transcendence and utopia and life after death, living forever and universal justice — all of which are sort of Christian notions — and so they’ve decided they’re going to build those themselves.
And here I thought I had been too hard on Evangelicals. Jake Meador — a Reformed Protestant and therefore Evangelical-adjacent (as I was in an analogous denomination) — doesn’t “give it both barrels” but pronounces it dead and lays out the particulars. It’s really quite devastating. The End of Evangelicalism and the Possibility of Reformed Catholicism.
Kind of self-evident, when you stop and think for a second
The early Church had no Scripture of its own, and the Jews had no defined canon of Scripture; therefore, sola scriptura as the foundation for what Christians believed was absolutely impossible.
(I know, I know: the original Reformers didn’t mean by sola scriptura what modern Evangelicals mean by it — if they even know the term.)
We need a little Auden now
One of the appeals of Christian orthodoxy for Auden, as for T. S. Eliot in the 1920s, was that it offered a more humane alternative to the ferocious ideologies of the twentieth century. Instead of blaming a class or race for the world’s evils, it insisted that we are all individually responsible and that redemption must begin by acknowledging our weakness rather than vaunting our strength.
Sadly, in the U.S. of the 2020s at least, a substantial number of Christians think it their duty to vaunt their putative strength. I used to say, “If you don’t like the Religious Right, just wait for the irreligious Right,” but I overlooked the specter of the pseudo-religious Right.
(Yeah, yeah, I know: “No true Scotsman fallacy.” Whatever.)
Canon and Tradition
The New Testament is a written form of the tradition, the gospel, the preaching, the declaration, the communion given by the Apostles to the Church, the living communion of the one gospel of Christ. But the context of that writing was the living tradition (gospel, preaching, declaration, communion) of the Church.
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Ultimately the acceptance of writings as authoritative rests entirely on tradition (particularly tradition as context). The Church recognized the authentic voice of the Church in the writings – i.e. the writings agreed with the gospel as it had already been received. St. Paul specifically describes this manner of recognition:
But even if we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone preaches any other gospel to you than what you have received, let him be accursed. (Gal 1:8-9 NKJ)
What then? Ought we not to blame those who sin? Paul also says this selfsame thing: ’Why do you judge your brother? And you, why do you put your brother down? …How then does he say elsewhere ‘Reprove, rebuke, exhort,’ and ‘Those who sin rebuke before all?’ And Christ too to Peter, ‘Go and tell him his fault between you and him alone’… (Matt. 18:15-17). And how has He set over us so many to reprove, and not only to reprove, but also to punish? …And how did He also give them the keys, since if they are not to judge, they will be without authority in any matter and in vain have they received the power to bind or to loose? …For unless the master judge the servant, and the mistress the maid, and the father the son, and friends one another, there will be an increase of all wickedness ..In this place then, as it seems to me at least, He does not simply command us not to judge any of men’s sins; neither does He simply forbid the doing of such a thing. But to those who are full of innumerable ills, and are trampling upon other men for trifles .. He says also in another place, You who strain at the gnat, and swallow the camel …And the Corinthians, too, Paul did not absolutely command not to judge, but not to judge their superiors (I Cor. 4:5) … You see, we ought not to upbraid nor trample upon them, but to admonish, not to revile, but to advise, not to assail with pride, but to correct with tenderness… If you neglect yourself, it is quite evident that neither do you judge your brother with concern for him, but in hatred instead: wishing to expose him. For what if he ought to be judged? It should be by one who commits no such sin, not by you.
St. John Chrysostom. Homily XXIII on Matthew
We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.
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.
Voters have to make a choice. Choices are always binary. In the end the majority of voters who aren’t fans of either man will have to decide whose flaws are greater. The presidential ballot doesn’t allow for a nuanced moral calculus.
Baloney! If the major parties keep serving up sh*t sandwiches, we can always refuse to choose (not vote). And there’s the choice of voting for the American Solidarity Party candidate (my choice the past two presidential elections).
Home-invasion robbers
Its mistake is not in any of the hand-written niceties it revels in, which make life orderly, cozy—even lovely. Its mistake is that it treats Leftist ideologues like quirky out-of-town guests arriving for brunch. It assumes we all want the same things and are equally devoted to the perpetuation of bedrock American commitments: free speech, free exercise of faith, equal protection, rule of law.
But the Woke are not zany guests. They are home-invasion robbers.
Nellie Bowles on Friday had the customary array of nut-picked items, but this one is particularly choice:
Philip Morris gets higher ESG rating than Tesla: Before anyone gets too excited about America making a sensible turn on climate change, let’s check in on our eco-investing program. Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) scores are meant to be guides for ethical investing, and a company’s score is extremely influential for where big investors put their money. It’s also fully corrupt, and data firms award high scores only to companies that give money to the most bizarre causes. So for example: Tesla now has an overall score of 37 out of 100, compared to Philip Morris International, which has a score of 84. Never mind that cigarettes accelerate the deaths of 8 million a year. (Read Rupa Subramanya’s Free Press article about ESG.)
(Emphasis added)
USA
American Exceptionalism
America’s “exceptional” nature … doesn’t imply superiority. It doesn’t even suggest excellence. It implies difference.
When the head of USAID, Samantha Power, comes to your country and spouts off about America’s role in facilitating “civil society” and “independent journalism,” you are not only right to be worried—you have a duty to stay vigilant.
In my seemingly endless quest for balanced news and commentary (even if it’s roll-your-own balance by reading across a broad spectrum), I’ve been frustrated again and again. When I started in the early ’90s, with a shortwave radio, almost everyone was playing our music (literally) and singing our tune (figuratively). Soon came the internet, and shortwave went the way of the Dodo Bird.
C.S. Lewis in his essay wrote that “Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.” Every country, too, tends to see some things especially well, others poorly. I try to be aware of that when I read putative enemies, both Americans, arguing with each other; I don’t always spot the hidden premise they share, that the world may not share, but I see it often enough to vindicate Lewis.
But such is the world today that even regions and countries who think differently from us publish their thinking in English, thank goodness, as I’m not currently literate other than in English. That means I can read:
Maybe foreign thinkers writing in English can supplement old books for expanding my mind.
Trump and his woes
Speaking of the Trump indictment
Here’s Marco Rubio:
There is no limit to what these people will do to protect their power & destroy those who threaten it, even if it means ripping our country apart & shredding public faith in the institutions that hold our republic together.
Rubio was speaking of the Democrats, of course; I could muster up some respect for him if it were a tearful admission he had been protecting his power by shredding public faith in the institutions of criminal justice.
Marco Rubio wasn’t necessarily the worst, but there was particular irony here.
Sober Peggy Noonan
My fear is that Mar-a-Lago is a nest of spies. Membership in the private club isn’t fully or deeply vetted; anyone can join who has the money (Mr. Trump reportedly charges a $200,000 initiation fee).
A spy—not a good one, just your basic idiot spy—would know of the documents scattered throughout the property, and of many other things. All our international friends and foes would know.
Strange things happen in Mar-a-Lago. In 2019 a Chinese woman carrying four cellphones, a hard drive and a thumb drive infected with malware breezed past security and entered without authorization. She was arrested and jailed for eight months. Another Chinese woman was arrested soon after; a jury acquitted her of trespassing but convicted her of resisting arrest. In 2021 a “Ukrainian fake heiress and alleged charity scammer” gained access, according to the Guardian.
Who else has?
Mar-a-Lago isn’t secure. Those documents didn’t belong there. It is a danger to our country that they were. This story will do Mr. Trump no good with his supporters. It will hurt him—maybe not a lot but some, maybe not soon but in time. I mean the quiet Trump supporters, not big mouths and people making money on the game, but honest people.
When individuals and communities confront a range of options, all of which are likely to lead to bad consequences, that’s a tragic situation. I think that’s where the country finds itself today—in the midst of an unfolding tragedy. The proper response to such a situation is sobriety and honesty about the dangers that lie ahead.
The New York Times describes advisers to rival campaigns wrestling today with the surreal task of “trying to persuade Republican primary voters, who are inured to Mr. Trump’s years of controversies and deeply distrustful of the government, that being criminally charged for holding onto classified documents is a bad thing.”
Nick Cattogio. Note, too, that the criminal charges came from a grand jury, not straight from DOJ.
Two key ideas for next year
I implore my conservative readers to consider two ideas:
Donald Trump is unfit for the Presidency of the United States.
The Democrats (and substantial portions of the civil service) have treated Donald Trump very shabbily. For sake of argument only, I’ll include the federal criminal indictment in that.
Now here’s the point, which doesn’t seem subtle to me but seems to be widely overlooked: Idea 2 doesn’t negate Idea 1.
Can you see that?
Should we inflict Donald Trump upon ourselves and our children just to get back at those who’ve wronged him? Couldn’t we just throw him a giant pity party? (Sorry: I’m expecting an emergency phone call that evening.)
Nailing the Wall Street Journal
Josh Barro nails the Wall Street Journal. Its opinion pieces really have been as bad as he describes in This Is Solely Donald Trump’s Fault. Excerpt:
People like those who constitute WSJ editorial board, who admit Trump broke the law but still don’t think he should be charged for it, should have to spell out what kinds of crimes a leading politician should not be allowed to commit.
And just in case you’ve wondered what Artificial Intelligence would come up with when asked for “A bathroom with a crystal chandelier, and an orange man with blond hair in a business suit reading a document on the toilet, and boxes and boxes of files stacked up everywhere, Pixar,” Barro answers that, too.
Will Republicans nominate a first-grader?
Overwhelming self-entitlement is just at the core of who Trump and [Boris] Johnson are. It is their character. This is how Johnson’s school principal described him when the future PM was just 17: “[He] sometimes seems affronted when criticized for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility … I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation that binds everyone else.” It could read as a summary of parliament’s report 41 years later.
And as with Trump and his bizarre behavior with “his boxes,” it’s very hard to see some profound, malign motive here in pursuit of something important. It’s just mindless egotism, married with an infinite capacity for deceit. Here’s how George M. White, Trump’s classmate at their military academy, characterized him at 17:
“The most significant incident, which I got into big trouble for, was when we were taking a picture in May of 1964, and Donald Trump refused to draw his sword. I’m the first captain and I order present arms and there are five guys behind me and they draw. But he refuses. I hear behind me, ‘Trump, draw your sword.’ Donald refuses. The picture gets taken. … He was defying a direct order, showing his defiance,” White said. “He was ‘being Trump,’ showing that his ego was more powerful than anybody’s. He later showed that picture around to show how defiant he was because he didn’t draw the sword.”
Trump himself told one biographer that “when I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same. The temperament is not that different.”
How seriously should we take Donald Trump’s candidacy?
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Ross Douthat As seriously as a spring tempest. As seriously as a summer forest fire. As seriously as the north wind shaking the barren trees on the last day of autumn. As seriously as the winter wind, blowing in the same bare place, with the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
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What matters most about him as a presidential candidate?
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Douthat That his second term was foretold in the Necronomicon, written in eldritch script on the Mountains of Madness and carved deep, deep into the white stones of the Plateau of Leng.
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What do you find most inspiring — or unsettling — about his vision for America?
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Douthat I believe that before the sixth seal is opened, the sun becomes black as sackcloth and the moon becomes of blood, he will deliver more winning than we have ever seen, and I look forward to it.
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Imagine you’re a G.O.P. operative or campaign manager. What’s your elevator pitch for a Trump candidacy?
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Douthat Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate to say that for destruction ice is also great and would suffice. MAGA!
Keeping Trump out of the brain
I can’t quite feel ashamed of my perpetual naïveté toward Donald Trump. I don’t want to be the kind of person who can easily enter the head of an amoral narcissist.
I’d rather not let him infect my brain. I’d rather not let that guy alter my views of the world. If occasional naïveté is the price for mental independence from Trump, I’m willing to pay it.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.
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.
I’m a big fan of Paul Kingsnorth, reading and listening to a lot of his last two years of opining. At least as regards his conversion to Christianity, Gavin Ashenden’s inteview of him seems unsurpassed. Highly recommended.
Golf
I’m glad that I’ve always hated golf. It makes hating golf today easier.
The presentation was both jaw-droppingly impressive and oddly underwhelming. The Vision is stuffed with innovations that eclipse every other headset on the market. Clunky joysticks are out, hand gestures and eyeball tracking are in. Instead of legless avatars, users get photorealistic likenesses, whose eyes also appear on the outside of the glasses to make wearing them less antisocial. The product is dusted with Apple’s user-friendly design magic.
Yet the company had strangely uninspiring suggestions for what to do with its miraculous device. Look at your photos—but bigger! Use Microsoft Teams—but on a virtual screen! Make FaceTime video calls—but with your friend’s window in space, not the palm of your hand! Apple’s vision mainly seemed to involve taking 2D apps and projecting them onto virtual screens (while charging $3,499 for the privilege). Is that it?
… media culture is simply a redo of high school where some of the sad and lonely kids have tried to invert the popularity pyramid and become the new bullies.
Freddie de Boer on mainstream media’s personal antipathy toward Bari Weiss.
Reeking hypocrisy
So: Washington and NATO … insist that Ukraine is a sovereign nation that has the right to join a great power alliance hostile to next-door Russia, and if Russia doesn’t like it, too bad. Also: Cuba is a sovereign nation that has no right to cooperate with a great power hostile to nearby America, and if the Cubans go forward with this, there will be consequences.
Do you not see the reeking hypocrisy of this? Do you not recognize the quagmire that the US foreign policy establishment, both Republican and Democratic, has led us into? They are dragging us into world war. Believe me, the rest of the world recognizes the arrogance of all this.
I agree with Dreher except I don’t know that there will be world war. That will depend on how badly our “defense” industries want it.
Long time since I read anything she wrote
Somewhere in the media right now (probably MSNBC), someone is talking about Dylann Roof, the monster who murdered nine people at a black church in South Carolina. That happened eight years and three presidents ago. But mass shootings this year keep mysteriously disappearing from the news.
January: two mass shootings of Asians in California just days apart, including the deadliest shooting in Los Angeles history. Eighteen killed in all. Gunmen in both cases Chinese immigrants, Huu Can Tran and Chunli Zhao.
The end!
February: Active shooter at Michigan State University kills three students, sends five to hospital. Gunman: Anthony Dwayne McRae, a 43-year-old black man.
The end!
March: mass shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, killing three 9-year-olds and three adults. Gunman: Audrey Elizabeth Hale, a transgender.
The end!
But she left a manifesto!
Media: Go away. We’re not interested.
April: horrific shooting at a 16-year-old’s birthday party in Dadeville, Alabama, leaving four dead — three of them teenagers — and wounding 32 others. Arrested: Johnny Letron Brown, Willie George Brown Jr., Wilson LaMar Hill, Travis McCullough and Tyreese McCullough.
The end!
Last day of April: slaughter of five family members, including a 9-year-old boy, all shot execution-style, in Texas. Arrested: an illegal from Mexico.
The end!
Would covering stories like these turn CNN into a “right-wing” network? Only if facts are “right-wing.”
I was surprised for two reasons to read a claim that the late Pat Robertson was a Baptist minister.
First, I was under the strong impression that he had no ordination as a clergyman an any denomination. But the New York Times delivered half the goods on that claim by recounting his resignation from Southern Baptist ministry in 1987 to run for President in 1988. The half they didn’t deliver was whether, having resigned, the Southern Baptist world or the evangelical world more broadly would still have considered him a “Reverend.” I doubt it; I’m pretty sure they don’t have anything like the Roman Catholic view that the character imprinted by ordination is forever (indelible).
Second, I would have suspected that if he did have ministerial credentials, it would have been in the Assemblies of God or another pentecostal denomination, because his television schtick so often veered off into very un-Baptist speaking in tongues, faith-healing, personal revelations and other woo-woo.
I never liked him or respected him (except in the sense that “the guy really knows how to monetize credulity”). The woo-woo made him seem creepy, because I doubted that he believed it. I probably was wrong, and wrong in a sense that says as much bad about me as about him.
He was consequential. Mainstream newsrooms may not have grokked him any more than I did, but it seems to me that he was mainstream within evangelicalism (by the time he was a big deal, I didn’t consider myself part of that mainstream and I could be wrong). So far as I know, he never was exposed in any scandal — unlike too many too many others, some of whom took me in to one degree or another.
I’m convinced in a low-stakes, not-worth-investigating-further sense. (I have been in “dirt-poor Mekheti,” by the way.) It has the distinct advantage of lending itself to “Putin’s a real bastard” jokes.
When the criminal justice system goes terribly wrong, it’s rarely the fault of a single bad actor. A wrongly conviction typically includes errors or malfeasance by police, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and the courts, not to mention possible contributions from crime lab analysts and other expert witnesses. Even a bad shootings by a single police officer are usually the product of institutional failure. Was the officer trained properly? What was the officer’s personnel history? Should the officer have been fired for previous misconduct? Does the police department use an early warning system to flag potentially abusive or trigger-happy officers? If not, why not? If so, why wasn’t that officer flagged?
A sentinel event review, or SER, is an attempt to dig into and correct these institutional failures. The idea is to bring in all the relevant parties to get at the root of what caused an outcome that everyone agrees is unacceptable.
The inspiration for the idea comes from two fields outside of criminal justice: the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigations of plane and train crashes, and the morbidity and mortality (M&M) reports hospitals conduct after medical errors, such as amputating the wrong limb or administering the wrong medication.
NTSB and M&M reviews don’t look to blame on individual actors. Because of this, they tend to get better participation from the parties and institutions involved. But the reviews don’t confer immunity onto anyone, either. If there are individuals who merit blame and discipline, they can still be held accountable or liable by parallel investigations by other authorities.
The aim of a sentinel event review is to figure out what went wrong and why — to get at the systemic errors that allow catastrophic events to happen, and to make policy recommendations to reduce the chances those events will happen again ….
Affirmative Action
When majorities discriminate against their own kind, as largely white universities did in the early days of affirmative action, it may not feel like a “bad” kind of discrimination. It may not feel like discrimination at all. It may even feel like magnanimity. But the biracial historical context that used to tug at consciences, pushing admissions officers (and the parents of rejected students) to a more indulgent understanding of affirmative action, is gone.
After half a century of high immigration, the United States has become a multiracial country and affirmative action has turned into a different kind of program. Building “diverse” student bodies now requires treating Asian overrepresentation as a problem to be solved.
The other Justices try their level best to apply longstanding doctrine to complicated cases. But Justice Thomas, at every opportunity, starts from first principles, and urges us to reconsider everything. And these opinions will ripple out for years to come.
I detest Pride Month, the High Holy Days of the LGBT+ Religion, to which we’re all now expected to bend the knee.
There. I said it.
But when I saw gay NYT columnist Charles Blow declare that “Yes, We’re in an L.G.B.T.Q. State of Emergency” because “This year, there is a pall over Pride,” I just had to read it. And I’ve got to say that it’s just as stupid as I expected.
There’s been a notable rise in the number of anti-L.G.B.T.Q. bills since 2018, and that number has recently accelerated, with the 2023 state legislative year being the worst on record.
According to the Human Rights Campaign, in 2023 there have been more than 525 such bills introduced in 41 states, with more than 75 bills signed into law as of June 5. In Florida — the state that became known for its “Don’t Say Gay” law — just last month, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation that banned gender transition care for minors and prohibited public school employees from asking children their preferred pronouns.
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For that reason, on Tuesday, for the first time in its more than 40-year history, the Human Rights Campaign declared a state of emergency for L.G.B.T.Q. people in the United States.
This is a reason why the expression “first world problems” still bites.
The Human Rights Campaign, which should have shut down after it accomplished its goal with the Obergefell decision, has gone on to grift the transgender cause instead. It has all the credibility of co-grifter Southern Poverty Law Project’s listing of hate groups — namely: none whatsoever. But mainstream media treat both HRC and SPLC as if they were bona fide arbiters.
Cet animal est tres mechant; quand on l’attaque, il se defend. I cannot endorse all that cet animal does to se defend, but I understand the impulse to draw lines and reclaim territory occupied by extremist sexual revolutionaries. And I understand that war is always ugly.
National Emergency
Andrew Sullivan isn’t buying what Charles Blow is selling either:
For the first time since it was founded in 1980, the Human Rights Campaign — the largest group claiming to represent gay men and lesbians and trans people in the United States — has declared a “national emergency.”
They didn’t do this when the federal government refused to act quickly against AIDS in the mid-1980s; they didn’t do it as over 300,000 gay men subsequently died; they didn’t do it when Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, or when George W Bush endorsed the Federal Marriage Amendment. But now that gay men and lesbians have won the civil right to marry in all 50 states, and transgender Americans have the full protection of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and public support for marriage equality is over 70 percent, we are in a “national emergency.”
Why? Because some states have drawn the line at experimental sex-changes for children with gender dysphoria, and removed materials rooted in critical queer and gender theory from public school libraries from kindergarten upwards. That’s the “emergency.”
(I was relieved to see that Sullivan shares my general impression of Charles Blow, this particular column aside: “Blow is not the sharpest of tacks.”)
What’s up?
The agonising wait is finally over. At last we can rejoice. Yes, June is here, bringing with it the occasional bout of warmer weather, barbecues, and of course Pride Month—a chance for us all to turn our attention to gay, lesbian, and bisexual rights, which have been completely off the agenda for the past 11 months. The suspense must be killing you to discover what the rainbow community has been up to during our last trip around the sun? Let me put you out of your misery: the LGBT acronym continues to grow, as more and more sexual identities decide they’d like to be part of a tiny, oppressed minority.
Trump needs no reason to defy the law and obstruct justice; he is not some criminal genius, or devious plotter. He is just characterologically incapable of obeying the rule of law if his ego ever gets a smidgen in the way.
That’s why he leaned on Ukraine to prosecute Biden; it’s why he refused to accept a legitimate election defeat; it’s why he fomented an insurrection; it’s why he simply could not follow the rules for classified documents; and could not cooperate properly with the FBI. Any system where he is just one among equals — even if those equals are other presidents — is one he simply does not and cannot comprehend. He has to violate any system based on equality with his peers, or any system he cannot fully control. Without that, he disintegrates. That’s why he is, and always has been, unfit for office in a democratic system under the rule of law.
…
I’d hoped we could find a way around this. I was eager for an alternative Republican, or a younger Democrat to emerge. But Trump and his enemies won’t let us move past him, and he has now all but secured the nomination of his party, and set up yet another showdown for the soul of the republic in 2024. Up against him: a frail, meandering octogenarian whom 70 percent of Americans don’t want to run again.
Note that those first two paragraphs are not just colorful invective. They are a colorful indictment on ephiphenomena of Trump’s narcissism, his fundamental disqualification for the Presidency.
Trumpiest “stupid and avoidable” scandal yet
“In my administration, I’m going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information. No one will be above the law.”
— Trump August 18, 2016 (Charlotte NC rally)
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Superficially, the Stormy Daniels mess that got him indicted in Manhattan is a “Trumpier” scandal than concealing sensitive government information. There’s infidelity, a porn star, hush money, all the sordid, embarrassing things you’d expect from a guy who spent his adulthood jungled up with the sleaze merchants at the National Enquirer.
The documents scandal is Trumpier, though, because of how stupid and avoidable it was. “Mr. Trump brought these charges upon himself by not only taking classified documents, but by refusing to simply return them when given numerous opportunities to do so,” Mitt Romney said today, succinctly and correctly. The feds spent more than a year cajoling him to hand over the hundreds of sensitive documents he’d taken, an indulgence they wouldn’t have granted to anyone else in American life. He resisted anyway, per the reporting, and may even have instructed aides to hide documents on the day before the FBI visited Mar-a-Lago. He’s now facing at least one count of obstruction of justice.
Why did he take this insane risk, exposing himself to criminal jeopardy that could lead to him dying in prison? The most compelling theory is that … he just didn’t want to give the documents back. He’s never distinguished between the perks of public office and his personal interests, an authoritarian quirk that sets him apart even from wannabes like Ron DeSantis. He kept the documents because he wanted them; they’re “cool,” as he reportedly put it in newly revealed audio recorded in July 2021.
Trump has offered several competing explanations for what he did and why he did it. That makes me suspect he’s guilty. If I’m accused of robbing a bank and I say, in no particular order, “I couldn’t have robbed it, I wasn’t there”; “I was there but I had nothing to do with the robbery”; “what happened wasn’t a robbery and lots of other people did what I did”; the “FBI is framing me”; and “as president I had total authority to take money out of that bank,” I don’t think I have to take any of your denials very seriously because they contradict each other. Trump has floated versions of all of these, from “they planted evidence,” to “of course I did it because I can.”
…
Sen. Josh Hawley, America’s self-proclaimed champion of “manhood,” responded to the news last night: “If the people in power can jail their political opponents at will, we don’t have a republic.”
Hawley, a graduate of Yale Law School, where he was the head of the Federalist Society, presumably knows the difference between text and subtext. On the text, he’s right. If the people in power could jail their political opponents “at will” you wouldn’t be able to say we have a republic. The subtext, however, isn’t merely asinine, it’s dangerously asinine.
Peruse the newspapers: You’ll find nothing about Donald Trump being put in jail. You know why? Well, because he hasn’t been and he’s not about to be (and I’m agnostic that he should be, even if proven guilty in a court of law). More importantly, the people in power can’t put Trump in jail “at will.” Trump has to have his day in court. The state has to bring evidence. It has to cite relevant law. A jury and judge have to be persuaded. That’s the rule of law. That’s what makes us a republic, as Hawley claims to understand the word. But that’s the opposite of what Hawley wants you to think is happening. He wants you to think due process and the application of law aren’t happening and that he is one of the last honest men—along with Donald Trump—in a banana republic.
…
Let’s take the Hillary Clinton talking point at face value. She wasn’t charged with a crime and that shows that there’s a double standard for Democrats and Republicans. Let’s stipulate—not that difficult a stipulation—that she should have been. Okay, so does that mean no Republican should ever be charged with a crime, too? Do you think that if one bank robber avoids prosecution for political reasons, all bank robbers—or your favorite bank robbers—should be exempt from prosecution? In other words, the people shouting “banana republic!” aren’t against banana republics, they just want a banana republic on their terms.
And they want this for what? Donald Trump? What the f— is wrong with you people?
…
It all reminds me of the parable of the drowning man.
Imagine there was a political afterlife for Republican politicians. They get to the Pearly Gates and say to God, “Why did you let Donald Trump kill my political career?” God might reply: “Oh my Me! What are you talking about? I sent you the Access Hollywood tape, a porn star, two impeachments and a bunch of indictments, and you refused to take the lifeline.”
I thought Jonah’s colleague Sarah Isgur did a good job of describing the political quandary, and some ways out, for the rest of the GOP presidential field, as part of Indictment Watch: Trump Charged in Classified Docs Probe.
“Closet normals” in the GOP
From the dawn of the Trump age, I’ve argued that the GOP has been full of “closet normals,” or people who know that Trump is unfit for the job but refuse to say so publicly or do anything about it. Well, that’s not Christie anymore. Most of the candidates are running as closet normals, willing to put a toe or maybe a whole foot outside the door. Christie is running fully out of the closet.
Think of it this way: Imagine if Christie were willing to let me vent my frustrations at him and I did so, reading him the riot act. And he responded, “Okay, what do you think I should do about it?” I might say something like, “tell the truth about the guy” or “go after him full-tilt.” Well, he’s doing that. I don’t know if it’s mostly penance or ambition—I have to assume it’s both—but he’s the one GOP candidate willing to deliver the full indictment.
“Normal” in “closet normal” seems to mean “craven careerist, who loves being in power more than he/she loves truth.”
Will Trump’s judge monkeywrench the case against him?
There has been a suggestion that the Federal Judge hearing the classified documents case against Trump is a partisan hack — a Trump appointee in 2020 who already committed pretty obvious reversible error in Trump’s favor in a related case.
Attorney Ken White (“Popehat”) is very concerned that she may monkey-wrench the case against Trump, but still thinks it should have been brought. Among his reasons for proceeding even if the judge (who fairly predictably was going to get the case) is extremely biased in favor of Trump:
[S]ome judges will always be partisan, and some politicians will seek to appoint or elect partisan judges. It’s not fair. But nobody promised you it would be fair. Deciding not to prosecute because of the risk of biased judges cedes justice to them and also relieves them of the consequences of being biased — public opinion, opinion of their colleagues, reputation, and legacy. It lets them be biased cost-free. If you confront bias, and force judges to be biased in the daylight, it’s harder for them, and social and cultural factors may deter them.
I hope Popehat’s fears prove unfounded. I’m very proud that Judges appointed by Trump stood firm against his post-election bullshit in 2020 and early 2021, and I’m hopeful that the same thing will happen again.
Irony intended.
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.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.
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.
Old-style blasphemy involved desecrating God because it was God who was sacred. Today’s blasphemy involves suggesting that man is not all-powerful, that he cannot create himself in any way he chooses.
Carl R. Trueman’s summary of Blasphemy Then and Now, a posting at First Things. I’m starting to think this is one of the most important things to keep ever in mind about some cultural tsunamis.
Everybody knows there is something very wrong with us, but not everybody knows what it is. If you would know, then go back to the beginning.
There we find the primordial sin: acting out our desire to be God.
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Kingsnorth spoke about transhumanists openly talking about creating God. Martine Rothblatt, born Martin, says proudly that transgenderism is an onramp to transhumanism. We are reliving the drama of the Garden of Eden all over again. Kingsnorth said we have lost touch with biological reality, with nature, and knowledge of our own telos — that is, for what we were created.
Maybe I’ve been beating a dead horse in my criticisms of dispensationalism. But I have some concern here:
When our grandkids find themselves alone in the house on a summer afternoon, few will find themselves gripped by a sudden fear that everyone except them has been taken in the rapture. By itself, that is a good thing. The eclipse of an unbiblical and thoroughly annoying doctrine is hardly something to mourn. Yet Hummel is perceptive enough not to allow the reader such a hasty judgment. The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism obliquely but powerfully gestures toward a hole often found in the gospel that post-dispensationalist evangelicals believe today. “In the wake of dispensationalism’s collapse,” he writes in the epilogue, “the eschatological sight of the American church has blurred.” That means that our hope is less fervent, thinner, colder.
The emphasized part makes me crazy! It’s like an invitation to make up some new heresy to fill an eschatological “hole,” the old heresy having passed its sell-by date and been swept from the shelves (unnoticed by me).
If evangelicals need something to fill the eschatological-expectation hole, let me suggest (the first and maybe the last time I’ll commend syncretism) that they adopt Orthodox Bridegroom Matins for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of their Holy Week, which could use a bit of thickening up anyway.
Bridegroom Matins even has a catchy theme song:
Behold, the Bridegroom comes at midnight, and blessed is the servant whom He shall find watching; and again, unworthy is the servant whom He shall find heedless. Beware, therefore, O my soul, do not be weighed down with sleep, lest you be given up to death, and lest you be shut out of the Kingdom! But rouse yourself, crying: “Holy, holy, holy, are You, O our God!” Through the Theotokos have mercy on us!
Voilà! Eschatological problem solved! And it’s better than some idiotic “prophecy conference” at maintaining memento mori and a sane expectation that “He shall come to judge the living and the dead.”
Shiny Happy People
Speaking of fundamentalists, for my many sins I did penance by watching Amazon Prime’s Shiny Happy People. I don’t give a rip about the hyper-fertile Duggars, but I had a brush with the series villain Bill Gothard in 1966-67 and wanted to catch up.
He was a weird little man then and appears to have gotten a bit weirder over the decades, right down to the absence of any grey hair and his ephebophilia.
His message was not a healthy Christian message. It’s not even biblical except in the formulaic sense of “proof-texts for nearly everything,” as if scripture-twisting weren’t a real thing.
I know a few people in the Protestant world who are devoted to IBLP, more fully known as Institute on Basic Life Principles — the organization that survives Gothard’s scandal and forced retirement — and I’m kind of worried about them now. Judging from a visit to the IBLP website’s “Statement of Faith,” Shiny Happy People is correct to classify IBLP as fundamentalist, though the line between fundamentalism and the evangelicalism of my youth is a fine one.
A few thoughts:
That I thought it necessary to check out IBLP for myself reflects how unpersuasive Shiny Happy People was at nailing down hard facts, preferring innuendo and the charges of critics, some of whom had no first-hand knowledge.
That IBLP feels it necessary to publish a roll-your-own statement of faith, eschewing the Nicene Creed and elevating its obsessions to creedal status, reflects how far removed it is from historic Christianity. (IBLP’s statement of faith is sorely lacking, too.)
That IBLP is “parachurch” means it can infiltrate most any Protestant denomination and makes it harder to unequivocally speak of it as a “cult” — though that label is tempting.
You could probably find better ways to spend three or four hours unless you have some compelling personal motivation (as did I) to watch this poorly-aimed shotgun blast toward unhealthily patriarchal fundamentalists.
Distress
The distress this insight speaks of was the beginning of my conscious Christian commitment, long ago (but not very far away):
To have offended God is more distressing than to be punished … If only we loved Christ as we should love Him, we would have known that to offend Him whom we love is more painful than hell.
St. John Chrysostom, Homily V on Romans 1, citing II Samuel 24:17.
Continuity
The primary aim of this book is to demonstrate the absolute continuity of ancient Israelite religion, the religion of the Second Temple, first-century Christianity, and the religious life preserved and practiced in the Orthodox Church …
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.
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.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 