Culture
Excellent interview of Paul Kingsnorth
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.
Nick Catoggio on the PGA-LIV merger.
Vision Pro
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?
Apple’s Vision Pro is an incredible machine. Now to find out what it is for
Media Culture
… 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.”
Ann Coulter on the woes of CNN.
Obituaries
Pat Robertson
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.
May he rest in peace.
Putin’s real mom
Here’s kind of a fun obituary: Vera Putina claimed to be Vladimir Putin’s real mother.
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.
Legalia
When criminal justice delivers injustice
My subscription to Radley Balko’s Substack is set to expire, but I finally got something worth sharing from it:
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.
Christopher Caldwell, Trump’s Justices Didn’t Doom Affirmative Action. Demography Did
Bad Spaniels
Jack Daniels wins big in challenge to spoofing “Bad Spaniels” dog toy. Legally correct, I grudgingly suppose, but I was amused and now I’m disappointed.
SCOTUS
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.
Josh Blackman, Justice Thomas’s Dissent in Health and Hospital Corp. of Marion County v. Talevski
Pride Month
A Pall on Pride
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.
…
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.”
… [W]hat planet are these people on?
(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.
Frank Haviland, ‘2SLGBTQIA+’: What’s in an Acronym?
Trump
No way out but through
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)
…
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.
The Charges and the Politics
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.
Ross Douthat, Bad Religion
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.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 