Wednesday, 8/30/23

Culture

Industrialism

It is a monstrous piece of bogus liberalism to deny that industrialism has done much for the highest interests of humanity by raising the standard of living. It is as foolish as to deny the harm it has done them by not raising it enough, by poisoning the skies and fields with cheap cities, and taking away the will of its employees by keeping them in political and economic subjection.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

Who thinks learning is the point of university?

[I]n the American university system the vast expansion of DEI apparat simply follows the previous (and not yet complete) expansion of the mental-health apparat, all of which siphons resources away from the teaching of students. But that’s okay, because almost no one — least of all students and their parents — thinks that learning is the point of university. The university is for socialization, networking, and credentialing, and I expect to see a continuing expansion of the bureaucracies that promote these imperatives and a corresponding contraction of the number of teachers. And anyway, insofar as teaching and learning remain a burdensome necessity, if an annoying one, much of that work can be outsourced to ed-teach products and, now, to chatbots.

Genuine teaching and genuine learning will always go on, but for the foreseeable future it will happen at the margins of our universities or outside the universities altogether. Meanwhile, the symbolic work of the party-state will grind on ….

Alan Jacobs

… that all men are created equal …

This meant bringing together supporters and opponents of slavery. (Not free and slave states: in 1776, every state recognized slavery. The Betsy Ross flag shows us thirteen stars in a circle, and every star represents a slave state.) Some of the colonists disliked slavery; others were very attached to it. In consequence, the Declaration adopts a political theory that has no direct implications for slavery: it is about the rights of insiders and focused on the question of when the governed may reject the legitimate political authority of their governors.

Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was

1619 Project versus the Standard Story

What the 1619 Project is, really, is the extreme progressive version of the standard story: it tells us that we have fallen further short of our ideals, more frequently, more consistently, and more deliberately than we realize. Yet it still tells us that “our founding ideals” were written in 1776—and it is still a profession of faith in them, of faith in an America we can work to perfect.

Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was

Protesters and vigilantes

From Tuesday more motorists must pay to drive in London. The Ultra-Low Emissions Zone—in which a surcharge applies to high-polluting vehicles—will be expanded to all 32 boroughs of Britain’s capital. The £12.50 ($15.75) daily levy will cover diesel cars and vans that do not meet “Euro 6” standards (typically those bought before 2015), and cars that don’t meet “Euro 4” (which typically predate 2006). A scrappage scheme has been introduced to help owners of non-compliant cars buy greener vehicles.

London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, a member of the Labour Party, argues that the move will improve health, especially of children. But it has provoked a fierce backlash, particularly among drivers who live in peripheral parts of the city. That has been seized upon by Britain’s ruling Conservative Party, which has had a hard time winning votes in London in recent years. The party is now portraying Labour as anti-driver. Some vigilantes have vandalised the cameras used to enforce the clean-air scheme.

The Economist’s World in Brief 8/29/23. A thousand takes on this story could be, and probably are being, written. I noted it for the trajectory of western governments and to note that another publication might have used “protesters” where the Economist chose “vigilantes.” After all, it’s “mostly peaceful,” isn’t it?

Travel

People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.

Dagobert D. Runes. But God help me, I love it anyway.

Legalia

No-fault divorce

Professor Lynn Wardle has shown that the American Law Institute’s Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution approach to fault has serious inconsistencies. If one party squanders family wealth, this fact can be considered in the property settlement, almost like an “economic fault.” Allegations of assault, battery, or abuse of the children can be handled as criminal acts.

So, if the ALI’s Principles still effectively permit the consideration of economic faults and abuse faults, what does no-fault amount to? It means that the major fault removed by “no-fault” was adultery or sexual infidelity.

Jennifer Roback Morse, The Sexual State

(I gritted and ground my teeth through this book not because of its substance but because of a style I found grating. Caveat emptor.)

Tortious spam filters?

U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Calabretta granted Google’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee (RNC) claiming the company’s Gmail spam filter unfairly suppressed RNC messages. “While it is a close case,” the judge wrote, “the court concludes that … the RNC has not sufficiently pled that Google acted in bad faith in filtering the RNC’s messages into Gmail users’ spam folders, and that doing so was protected by section 230.” As Sarah wrote last year, Republican fundraising appeals are likely flagged by spam filters at higher rates due to abuse of email lists.

The Morning Dispatch

Sobering statistic

The prison population roughly doubled during Reagan’s years in office, from 329,000 Americans in jail in 1980 to 627,000 in 1988. This trend accelerated during the Bush and Clinton presidencies. By 2008, there were 1.6 million people in American prisons, with the US leading the world in total prison population and imprisonment rate.

Jon Ward, Testimony. That should be enough to make anyone think twice, two or three times, about how “free” we really are.

Politics

What is this “white trash”?

Once, coming back on his plane with a billionaire friend who had brought along a foreign model, Trump, trying to move in on his friend’s date, urged a stop in Atlantic City. He would provide a tour of his casino. His friend assured the model that there was nothing to recommend Atlantic City. It was a place overrun by white trash. “What is this ‘white trash’?” asked the model. “They’re people just like me,” said Trump, “only they’re poor.”

Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury (I have not read this book but ran across this quote anyway.)

Manly men

[Ted] Cruz is one of the many singing the totally-normal-and-not-at-all-weirdly-homoerotic praises of Donald Trump’s recent Fulton County Jail mugshot: “Trump’s mugshot where he looks like a pissed off and angry badass is an iconic historic photo. It’s going viral, and it’s making a heck of a statement.” Jesse Watters of Fox News, affirming his “unblemished record of heterosexuality,” said of Trump: “He looks good and he looks hard.”

In reality, Trump looks like the Grinch after a makeover performed by John Wayne Gacy—I’d love to know what the last man booked into that jail while wearing that much makeup was charged with, and I’ll bet it was hilarious—but it is of interest to me what these guys with their unblemished records of heterosexuality think looks and seems tough. Donald Trump is a guy who has never lifted anything heavier than money and blasts Broadway show tunes and the Village People at his rallies for totally normal people who are by no means members of a cult. I don’t know how much time you can spend dancing to “Macho Man” before your record of heterosexuality gets a blemish, or at least a footnote. And then there’s the inevitable playing of the music from Cats.

Kevin D. Williamson

Williamson doesn’t have much use for Mike Pence, either (same column, titled The Whited Sepulcher. Ouch!).

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

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.

Sunday, 8/27/23

Mammon

Last Sunday, I shared this quote from Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation:

Despite sociological evidence to the contrary, it remains to all appearances virtually axiomatic that the acquisition of consumer goods is the presumptive means to human happiness-and the more and better the goods, the better one’s life and the happier one will be.

No sooner had I posted than I found related thoughts:

One of the key moments in the creation of modernity occurs when production moves outside the household. So long as productive work occurs within the structure of households, it is easy and right to understand that work as part of the sustaining of the community of the household and of those wider forms of community which the household in turn sustains. As, and to the extent that, work moves outside the household and is put to the service of impersonal capital, the realm of work tends to become separated from everything but the service of biological survival and the reproduction of the labor force, on the one hand, and that of institutionalized acquisitiveness, on the other. Pleonexia, a vice in the Aristotelian scheme, is now the driving force of modern productive work.

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Given the destructive fruitlessness of religio-political conflicts in the Reformation era, Catholics and Protestants alike built on trends that antedated the Reformation and decided to go shopping instead of continuing to fight about religion, thus permitting their self-colonization by capitalism in the industrious revolution. In combination with the exercise of power by hegemonic, liberal states, a symbiosis of capitalism and consumerism is today more than anything else the cultural glue that holds together the heterogeneity of Western hyperpluralism.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

These observations dismiss the popular belief that the Amish reject all new technologies. So what’s really going on here? The Amish, it turns out, do something that’s both shockingly radical and simple in our age of impulsive and complicated consumerism: they start with the things they value most, then work backward to ask whether a given new technology performs more harm than good with respect to these values.

Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism

MacIntyre acknowledges that such a society would not make the kind of material progress that our society has. But then again, to believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.

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

The peace heard ‘round the world

The Coptic Church was brought onto the world stage more recently through the terrible act of violence carried out by ISIS against twenty-one migrant workers on a Libyan beach in February 2015. How did this incident help to demonstrate the importance of loving one’s enemies?

That was a pivotal point, I think, that impacted many people around the world, religious and nonreligious. It was an act of such inhumanity that it crossed a line that many were not ready to cross. The impact the executions made had two sources. The first was the men themselves, the twenty Coptic Christians and their Ghanaian friend. Their resilience, their strength, their utterance of the name of Christ to the very end was a real display of grace.

Just as in the Book of Daniel the three young men in the fiery furnace had a fourth with them, I am sure there was a twenty-second man on that beach. Christ must have been in their midst because their peace was visible on their faces.

The second reason the execution made such an impact was the reaction of the victims’ families. The German novelist Martin Mosebach was so moved by the story that he traveled to Egypt to write his book The 21: A Journey into the Land of Coptic Martyrs (Plough, 2019). He went to live with the families, expecting to see people broken by an act that had taken away their men, but he found them celebrating their witness and forgiving the perpetrators. I think that was an eye opener.

When word of the executions first reached Britain, I had over thirty interviews in the twenty-four hours following the announcement. And all the interviewers asked me, “How can you possibly forgive?” Because in my first interview I had spoken about forgiving the perpetrators. It was such a countercultural, counterintuitive sentiment. And I think it was another display of grace. It is the grace of God in us that allows us to love as he loves and to forgive as he forgives.

Forgiveness is tied into loving God – which includes loving ourselves as the image and likeness of God. Because it is in seeing that image and likeness within us and within everybody else, including our enemies, that we are then led to love and to forgive everybody. Not forgiving the action itself but the person committing the action; never justifying or accepting the hostility itself, but recognizing human brokenness and realizing that we’re all broken and we all need God’s forgiveness. In recognizing that, we can begin to love the image and likeness of God in the perpetrators, forgive them, and pray for them that their broken humanity could one day be restored.

Archbishop Angaelos, Just Doing What Christians Do (emphasis added)

I blush at “Christian” America’s failure to live up to this. Maybe the worst example is the practice of admitting “victim impact statements” at criminal sentencing hearings, where victims and their families are, basically, invited into court to vilify, rail on, and expressly refuse to forgive their victimizers.

“Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”

Then his master, after he had called him, said to him, “You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you begged me. Should you not also have had compassion on your fellow servant, just as I had pity on you?” And his master was angry, and delivered him to the torturers until he should pay all that was due to him. So My heavenly Father also will do to you if each of you, from his heart, does not forgive his brother his trespasses.

Matthew 18:32-35

Mount Athos

I watched a YouTube on Mt. Athos Friday evening.

It’s striking how people can be blown away by Mr. Athos’ antiquity and seeming immutability without (apparently) considering the possibility that those traits form a fairly compelling case for Orthodox Christianity.

I must have brought some premises they’re not bringing (though my experience was of an American parish, not of the Holy Mountain, which I won’t visit until October).

Thwarted

One of the strangest expressions of Julian [The Apostate]’s cultural program was a project to rebuild the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. As a former Christian, he was aware that the destruction of the temple by the Romans had been prophesied by Jesus. By rebuilding it, he believed he could undermine the Christian faith and bolster Judaism as an alternative to it. The project was a complete failure. Even non-Christian sources from the time reported that efforts to restore the foundation were met with setbacks so perplexing and mysterious as to appear divinely ordained.

John Strickland, The Age of Paradise

Can you conjugate “Anglican”?

Ultimately, the future of Anglo-Catholicism lies with Orthodoxy or a reconstituted Old Catholicism because they have held to the reformed catholic identity within Anglicanism whilst rejecting its doctrinal Protestantism. The neo-Evangelicals ultimately have more in common with the Holiness and Pentecostal churches through the Convergence Movement than they do with wider Anglicanism because they share the same sort of spirituality, albeit in a moderated form. This leaves the Confessional Anglicans who share more in common with moderate Lutheran and Reformed Christians than they do the Anglo-Catholics and the Neo-Evangelicals.

Peter D. Robinson, The Greater Church via Commonplace Letters

Teasing aside, I think I get what he’s saying.

What’s not for sale?

Christian nationalism

I put this last because I doubt that any of my readers are tempted by this:

Christian nationalism cannot turn back secularism, because it is just another form of it.

Russell Moore, quoted here. More Moore:

Christian nationalisms and civil religions are a kind of Great Commission in the reverse, in which the nations seek to make disciples of themselves, using the authority of Jesus to baptize their national identity in the name of the blood and of the soil and of the political order. The gospel is not a means to any end, except for the end of union with the crucified and resurrected Christ who transcends, and stands in judgment over, every group, every identity, every nationality, every culture.

I always appreciate reviews of Russell Moore’s books because, despite my liking the guy and thinking he’s part of the solution rather than part of the problem, I rarely enjoy his books themselves, and I rarely finish them. I think my problem with them is a combination of:

Thoughtful as he is generally, Moore reflexively equates Evangelicalism and “the Church.”
Articulate as he is generally, Moore’s native language is Evangelicalese.
Maybe most of all, I have the icky feeling that I’m voyeuristically watching a family feud.

When I write those down, I can’t help but notice that he’s an Evangelical writing for Evangelicals. That’s a perfectly legitimate role for him, but small wonder then that his writing isn’t always my cup of tea.

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

No Politics, 8/26/23

Having previously sandboxed politics, I can give you something entirely different now (with the sole exception of the last Wordplay entry).

What to do with a whistle-blower

When someone blows a whistle, one option is to smear them for months and hire a billboard truck to keep it up. The other option is to take a breath and listen.

Nellie Bowles (hyperlink added)

I remember the days when GLAAD was against defamation. It was right in its name. But when you’ve got a nice grift going, you don’t let a little something like winning stop you; you reinvent your mission and carry on.

Our cult of expertise

“Doctor’s Orders.” In a brilliant cover story for Harper’s, Jason Blakely delves into the ways that COVID exposed the epistemic contradictions at the core of American public life: “American democracy and scientific authority are suffering parallel crises of credibility, each standing accused by the other. This twofold crisis has many causes, among them political polarization and the spread of misinformation on social media, as well as long-standing antirationalist religious traditions and anti-intellectual strains in American business and culture. None of these factors should be minimized when attempting to understand America’s widespread antiscientific sentiment. But they need to be supplemented by another, far less widely acknowledged, fount of skepticism—one that requires contending with what the populist view gets right: scientific expertise has encroached on domains in which its methods are unsuited to addressing, let alone resolving, the issue at hand.”

Jeffrey Bilbro.

Re-read that last sentence.

I first noticed this, and objected strenuously, when MDs were asked to opine on the “quality of life” of unconscious patients — a philosophical question on which MDs had and have no expertise. If I’d been a judge, I’d have sustained an objection on that basis. Doctors would sometimes make up “suffering” through the supposed indignity of utter dependence on others, assuming that a rational person would prefer death (and that by starvation and dehydration, no less) over total dependence.

(Gilbert Meilander once wrote a column titled I Want To Burden My Loved Ones, bless him. That was pretty counter-cultural.)

Potemkin Forest

He stumbles back through the curtain of concealing trees, crosses the road and peers through the woods on the other side. More moonscape stretches down the mountainside. He starts up the truck and drives. The route looks like forest, mile after emerald mile. But Douggie sees through the illusion now. He’s driving through the thinnest artery of pretend life, a scrim hiding a bomb crater as big as a sovereign state. The forest is pure prop, a piece of clever artistry. The trees are like a few dozen movie extras hired to fill a tight shot and pretend to be New York.

He stops at a gas station to tank up. He asks the cashier, “Have they been clear-cutting, up the valley?”

The man takes Douggie’s silver dollars. “Shit, yeah.”

“And hiding it behind a little voter’s curtain?”

“They’re called beauty strips. Vista corridors.”

“But … isn’t that all national forest?”

The cashier just stares, like maybe there’s some trick to the question’s sheer stupidity.

“I thought national forest was protected land.”

The cashier blows a raspberry big as a pineapple. “You’re thinking national parks. National forest’s job is to get the cut out, cheap. To whoever’s buying.”

Richard Powers, The Overstory. The book is fiction, but I suspect this bit’s fact-based.

Troll Epistemology

On a related note:

It’s called the “good cop, bad cop” routine, but in practice the bad cop always comes first. Softens you up, makes you want it to stop. Then comes the good cop with a kindly smile and a quiet voice. Or: You were right to think of social media as rage-bait, but you were mistaken about what came next, what happened after you took the bait. So much shouting, such cacophony; you needed to escape. You couldn’t stop scrolling, not altogether, not at first, but you needed something more soothing…on another screen. Theses days the big streaming services push showrunners to make TV shows less demanding of viewers’ attention—they say, This isn’t second screen enough, it needs to be smoother, like smooth jazz, like visual Muzak. Calming. …

Alan Jacobs, The Way Your Mind Ends. Do click through and read on; it’s short enough, and I thought it unfair to Hedgehog Review to copy and paste all of it.

Wordplay

Must everyone grind the same axe?

The “She didn’t write the article I wanted her to write!” critique trap.

I doubt that Jesse Singal coined that phrase, but I encounter what it describes all the time. Occasionally, the omitted point or theme might have made “the article” stronger; oftener, it’s mostly a demand that everyone grind the same axe.

Pronoia

Pronoia the belief that the universe is conspiring in your favour – the opposite of paranoia. (H/T Dense Discovery)

Beauty

Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.

Dorothy Parker

Russian rallies

I went to a rally, and what happened? Did it change anything? Yes it did: I was fired!

A Russian participant in a Carnegie Endowment study on a rally against the Ukrainian invasion by Russia, via Plough.

Everything sounds better in French

Word of the week: portrait parlé, or “speaking image”, the original name for the modern mugshot, which was invented in France. Donald Trump had his taken on August 24th. Read the full story.

Truth

The truth is not facts. They come and go. They truth is a deeper, more anarchic weave of polyphonic eruptions.

Martin Shaw via Tad Hargrave, Into the Marvellous: The Art of Oral Storytelling + Travelogue + Interview With Martin Shaw From His Canadian Tour

Translation

We have to speak of something of which it is the whole point that people did not speak of it; we have not merely to translate from a strange tongue or speech, but from a strange silence.

G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

Sarah Palin

… the John the Baptist of lowbrow right-wing populism …

Nick Cattogio’s description of Sarah Palin.

Since joining the Dispatch, Nick (who I rarely read before) has quickly become a favorite.

All Politics, 8/26/23

I tried, I really did, to keep politics out of my blog draft. But I failed.

So now I do the second best: sandbox it and warn readers.

Vice leaves few good choice to virtue

Dispatch family quarrels aren’t like normal family quarrels. In a normal family quarrel, a conservative dad might bellow about witch hunts and politicized justice while his liberal daughter pounds the table, insisting that no one is above the law.

In a Dispatch family quarrel, one side demands that Donald Trump be prosecuted for all of the crimes while the other demands that he be prosecuted for merely some of the crimes.

…

The Justice Department … declined to pursue Trump aggressively for more than a year and a half after January 6 and only named Jack Smith special counsel after Trump had formally announced his 2024 candidacy … So ask yourself, and be honest: Would any of these cases have been brought if Trump had chosen to live out his days playing golf at Mar-a-Lago instead of insisting on one last grudge match with American democracy?

…

I’m so invested in deterrence that I’d be willing to trade the forms we’re currently pursuing for forms that don’t involve prosecution. If the Senate had convicted and disqualified Trump at his second impeachment trial, as it should have, that in itself would have taught a powerful lesson to future autocrats about the steep cost of power grabs. You may or may not lose your liberty if you try it but you’ll certainly lose your career in politics and whatever stature you had as a public figure.

And so we return to Marco Rubio and the cowards in the Senate GOP caucus. As I see it, they all but forced the criminal justice system to try to hold Trump accountable when they refused to do so themselves.

Now here they are, whining about it.

…

Prosecutors looked at that, it seems, and concluded that if the political system can’t hold Trump accountable because of Republican cultism, the justice system had to step in—especially when he’s running for president semi-explicitly on gaining power in order to evade all forms of accountability, legal and otherwise. They let politics influence their decisions to charge him, I think, and law enforcement making decisions based on politics is corrupt. Yet an authoritarian earning legal impunity from the perks of his office and the slavishness of his lackeys in the legislature is also corrupt.

Both are slippery slopes. But I’d rather have a flawed system of accountability than none at all.

Nick Cattogio, P01135809

Cattogio’s overall point — damned-if-you do, damned-if-you-don’t — can be viewed as an elaboration of David French’s observation:

A fundamental reality of human existence is that vice often leaves virtue with few good options. Evil men can attach catastrophic risks to virtually any course of action, however admirable.

Trump’s tactical mistake?

Trump is done persuading people to like him.

One of the (female) participants in the radio Atlantic podcast for 8/25/23.

That decision may, God willing, be fatal to his candidacy, assuming that some have turned against him for January 6 and that they’ll take some wooing to get them back.

On the other hand, Biden’s negatives are really high and those who detest Kamala Harris might doubly hesitate to vote for him. Could this turn into a reprise of the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial race between Edwin Ewards, crook, and David Duke, KKK Wizard? There famously emerged a bumper sticker for the ages: “Vote for the crook. It’s important.”

Debate highlights

The fact is that no one is telling the American people the truth. The truth is that Biden didn’t do this to us. Our Republicans did this to us, too. Donald Trump added $8 trillion to our debt. Our kids are never going to forgive us for this. Look at the 2024 budget: Republicans asked for $7.4 billion in earmarks. Democrats asked for $2.8 billion. So you tell me, who are the big spenders? I think it’s time for an accountant in the White House.
Let’s find consensus. Can’t we all agree that we should ban late-term abortions? Can’t we all agree that we should encourage adoptions? Can’t we all agree that doctors and nurses who don’t believe in abortion shouldn’t have to perform them? Can’t we all agree that contraception should be available? And can’t we all agree that we are not going to put a woman in jail or give her the death penalty if she gets an abortion?

Nikki Haley in the Wednesday GOP Presidential “debate.” Her stock is rising in my estimation. (Source).

Surprise support for Big Orange

Newsweek’s Batya Ungar-Sargon had some very supportive comments about Voldemort, a/k/a Big Orange:

Trump’s accomplishments were … vast on behalf of the working class. To ask people to not vote for a man who immeasurably improved their lives, who made this country feel like it cared about them for the first time in generations, who put money in their bank accounts, and for the first time made the American dream feel like something they could start dreaming about again—to ask them not to vote for him is not just ridiculous. None of those people onstage are able to quite understand the complexity. These people are not voting for Trump because they think he’s moral. They’re voting for him because it is undeniable what he accomplished and because he represented their future.

…

The GOP base is the working class, and the working class is not hardcore … There is a huge divide in the GOP between what the donor class wants, which is the fight against wokeness, and what the voter base wants, which is an economy that works for the hardest-working Americans.
Weekend Listening: The First GOP Debate and the Elephant Not in the Room

Agree or disagree, it’s wise to listen to the other side’s best case(s).

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

Tonite’s debates

I rarely post twice in a day, but these items have a sell-by date of 8/23.

GOP Presidential Preferences

Republican voters no longer want to elect professional politicians to the presidency. Sure, they like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis well enough. They think he’s a good guy. Maybe they’d like to see him put in charge of Health and Human Services during the next Trump administration. But he’s a pol—and because he’s a pol, they don’t particularly trust him. The person they trust is Trump—more than they do their pastors, more than they do conservative media figures, and even more than they do their own friends and family. They certainly don’t trust the normie politicians fighting over scraps at the bottom of GOP primary tracking polls. You know, the people who will be debating in Milwaukee tomorrow night.

If I ran the debate …

Thank you all for being here. It is weird not to have the frontrunner here, of course. But, then, it’s a little weird that the frontrunner is the guy who lost last time around and then tried to overthrow the government.

Which brings us to our first question: Who won the 2020 presidential election?

I’d like to remind you that those electrodes attached to your … are we allowed to say that on television? … are hooked up to our state-of-the-art Acme B.S. Detector. And thanks to our sponsors at Acme B.S. Detectors! On the other side of that circuit is a Duralast Platinum AGM Battery boasting 750 cold-cranking amps—and thanks to our other sponsors at AutoZone! You know the drill: We have Mitch Daniels standing by with the controls in hand, and, if you try to wholesale the kind of bull you normally feed gullible Republican primary voters and fawning Fox News types to our audience, then it is ZAP! right in the ’nads.

…

Mr. Pence, when the administration in which you served attempted to overturn the 2020 election in a coup d’état under color of law, you did your constitutional duty and certified the electors. And for about 48 hours, you were pretty critical of Donald Trump. Well done! By my calculation, that means you conducted yourself honorably for about 0.14 percent of the four years in question with the guy you now call your “former running mate.” Don’t you think there should be a kind of time-out or something? I know you’re an evangelical, but you are also a baptized Catholic. Couldn’t you—shouldn’t you—go to a monastery for like 20 years or something?

…

Okay, so let me get this straight: If police shoot Walter Scott in the back, it’s Walter Scott’s fault, somehow, and cops have a really hard job. But if a “patriot” is barricaded in his house pointing a rifle at federal agents there to serve a lawful arrest warrant and somebody gets dead, that is … Chris Wray’s fault? Help me understand this one.

Excerpts from the GOP Presidential debate Kevin D. Williamson would moderate if only we’d let him.

You could read Kevin D. Williamson all the time if you subscribed to The Dispatch.

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

Wednesday, 8/23/23

Culture

The collectivist-individualist dichotomy

The collectivist-individualist dichotomy is a clear example of the modern mind opposing ideas that are only in opposition once abstracted from reality. What is this collectivism? What is this individualism? I have never encountered a society that was not composed of individuals, and I have never met an individual who did not belong to a society.

Take anyone you know, and try to imagine the pre-societal self that exists there free from all the social influences that have made him. If I try to imagine myself independent of where I was born, the family that brought me forth, the schools I attended, the language in which I think and speak, the books I’ve read, the friends I’ve made, I simply cannot do it, and if I were to achieve some imagining of such a pre-social self, it wouldn’t be me in any case.

So, what ought the conservative response to be in the face of people living in a way they find reprehensible, if it is not that of doubling-down on individualism? The true conservative response is: we live in a society, and there are some things we will accept and some things we will not, and where the line lies is worked out circumstantially by prudential deliberation and negotiation. We will tolerate certain behaviours which we dislike and be intolerant of others. But if you want to mutilate yourself, we will aim to prevent you from doing so, for we have to live in a community with you, and we think that such behaviour is impermissible in our community ….

Sebastian Morello, Libertarian ‘Conservatism’: A Trojan Horse

Countering the Zeitgeist

I don’t often recommend poetry, but Famous, by Naomi Shihab Nye, caught my ear in a podcast reading, and is notable in the context of Illich for its call to humbler ambitions.

Segregated sports

I had no idea that chess routinely holds separate men’s and women’s competitions, and that the women overall are objectively worse than men. See Frank Haviland, Chess: Checkmate for the Egalitarians for a fascinating and possibly illuminating treatment. I’m still scratching my head.

Striking

General Carrera Lake, Chile, via Prufrock

Legalia

Neutral laws of general applicability

Since Employment Division v. Smith in the early 1990s, we’ve been living under a constitutional regime which, viewed from a galloping horse, looks quite a bit less favorable than prior law for religious exemptions from some laws. So long as a law is neutral and generally applicable, one isn’t entitled to a religious exemption however strong one’s beliefs or weak the governmental interest in making the law.

But when you slow down and look closer, the concept of “neutral laws of general applicability” keeps tripping up rulemakers, as they keep creating loopholes for some but not for none. Sometimes, the loophole is as big as “we can make exceptions case-by-case.” In others, it’s gerrymandering the law to target a disfavored religious practice, as when Hialeah Florida tried to hobble the animal sacrifices of Santeria while permitting Kosher slaughter.

So I was gratified to see the religion-friendly ending to a case I’ve watched, on and off, since its 2017 beginning, Country Mill Farms, LLC. V. City of East Lansing, where the City of East Lansing excluded Country Mill Farms from its farmers market because it refused, at its own facility, to host same-sex weddings. Click the link for Euguene Volokh’s fuller description.

Politics

My Man Mitch strikes again

We’re mired in a hot-dog, look-at-me, dance-in-the-end-zone world. Success in public capacities seems reliant not on the quality of officeholders’ ideas or effectiveness, but on their cleverness and audacity in sound bites, tweeting and the other ‘performative’ arts.

Mitch Daniels in the Washington Post via TMD

“Vote fraud” was pre-baked into Trump’s cake

The most interesting act out of the 126 acts laid out in the indictment is the first one. It reads:

On or about the 4th day of November 2020, DONALD JOHN TRUMP made a nationally televised speech falsely declaring victory in the 2020 presidential election. Approximately four days earlier, on or about October 31, 2020, DONALD JOHN TRUMP discussed a draft speech with unindicted co-conspirator Individual 1, whose identity is known to the Grand Jury, that falsely declared victory and falsely claimed voter fraud. The speech was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.

The most significant claim here is that Trump always planned to cry, “Fraud!” if he lost regardless of the evidence. This is not a shocking revelation, given that he has a long history of preemptively saying that the only way he might lose anything is if his opponents cheated or rigged the game.

Jonah Goldberg, Trump’s Unconstitutional Enterprise

The Truthiness of Trump

More generally, Trump’s voters hold him as a source of true information, even more so than other sources, including conservative media figures, religious leaders, and even their own friends and family.

(CBS News, Emphasis added). “True information”! Words have lost all meaning!

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

The best of our few good options

I wish I were confident that the GOP will reject Donald Trump in favor of one of the candidates who is not only sane but willing to act sane. My emotional favorite is Chris Christie because he’s not afraid of Trump. By the time we reach the first primary, DeSantis is going to be in too deep to redeem his cojones from the pawn shop.

But the record of the GOP, from nominating Trump in 2016 to not even adopting a platform in 2020 (tacit message: whatever our Orange Master wants today is what we “stand for”), the GOP has shown itself overwhelmingly worthless. I was well rid of it eighteen years ago.

In hindsight, … Republican inaction after Jan. 6 boggles the mind. Rather than remove Trump from American politics by convicting him in the Senate after his second impeachment, Republicans punted their responsibilities to the American legal system. As Mitch McConnell said when he voted to acquit Trump, “We have a criminal justice system in this country.” Yet not even a successful prosecution and felony conviction — on any of the charges against him, in any of the multiple venues — can disqualify Trump from serving as president. Because of G.O.P. cowardice, our nation is genuinely facing the possibility of a president’s taking the oath of office while also appealing one or more substantial prison sentences.

…

Trump and his allies are already advertising their plans for revenge. But if past practice is any guide, Trump and his allies will abuse our nation whether we hold him accountable or not. The abuse is the constant reality of Trump and the movement he leads. Accountability is the variable — dependent on the courage and will of key American leaders — and only accountability has any real hope of stopping the abuse.

A fundamental reality of human existence is that vice often leaves virtue with few good options. Evil men can attach catastrophic risks to virtually any course of action, however admirable.

David French, Appeasing Donald Trump Won’t Work (emphasis added).

But there’s a big development in the past few days that may move the question out of normal politics.

The long of it is a long and meticulously-argued law review article (PDF download of pre-print), from two Federalist Society member legal scholars, that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment bars Trump from the Presidency just is would his being 30 years old or not being native-born. (I studied Constitutional Law under Will Baude’s father, but I digress. I got the top grade in the class, but I digress again.)

The short of it is that there’s a simple way of testing the theory: I’m looking forward, insofar as I rank our few good options, to a Secretary of State refusing to put Donald J. Trump on a primary ballot in some state because of his constitutional disqualification. That will start the wheels of justice rapidly turning as Trump challenges his exclusion. The authors of the law review article have already done the Secretary of State’s research and the best counter-argument I’ve seen so far is “the Supreme Court wouldn’t dare!”

[UPDATE: On second thought, the best counter-argument I’ve seen so far is “by broadly construing the disqualifying insurrectionary behavior, we’re opening a Pandora’s box of tit-for-tat ballot exclusions.”]

It’s hard to imagine that some blue state Secretary of State won’t do it, even though Biden might prefer Round 2 with Trump. Ambition is a powerful motivator, and an elected Secretary of State has abundant ambition.

Alternately, some MAGA-wannabe Secretary of State lets him on the ballot and, say, Chris Christie challenges it on the basis of Section 3. It’s about as long as it is wide; that gets the issue before the courts, too.

I also hope Trump’s disqualification comes up in the debate Wednesday.

If you’re thinking “How dare you cheer denying the people their choice!”, my answer is that the very purpose of some parts of the constitution is to deny the people some choices. Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, for instance, had in its initial cross-hairs the possibility of former confederate states electing insurrectionists to office, and it slammed that door shut tight:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

That very door now bars insurrectionist Trump.

Q.E.D. And may God have mercy on our wretched souls.

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

The cost of living in a tolerably decent society

I roll my eyes every time I see the conspicuous virtue signaling at coffee shops that fly the rainbow flag, but if I like their coffee, and they treat me nice as a customer, why shouldn’t I be prepared to tolerate that as the cost of living in a tolerably decent, not to say pleasant, society?

This quote comes from one of the usual suspects and expresses my feelings pretty well.

The most intensely-pondered version of my own toleration began last Spring, when the Artistic Director of a chorus I sing in announced our performance season for 2024-24. Our Fall concert was to be an unfamiliar contemporary Oratorio called Considering Matthew Shepard. If you’re unfamiliar with the Matthew Shepard story, here’s a fair synopsis from Wikipedia:

Matthew Wayne Shepard (December 1, 1976 – October 12, 1998) was a gay American student at the University of Wyoming who was beaten, tortured, and left to die near Laramie on the night of October 6, 1998. He was taken by rescuers to Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he died six days later from severe head injuries received during the attack.

Suspects Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson were arrested shortly after the attack and charged with first-degree murder following Shepard’s death. Significant media coverage was given to the murder and what role Shepard’s sexual orientation played as a motive for the crime.

The prosecutor argued that the murder of Shepard was premeditated and driven by greed. McKinney’s defense counsel countered by arguing that he had intended only to rob Shepard but killed him in a rage when Shepard made a sexual advance toward him. McKinney’s girlfriend told police that he had been motivated by anti-gay sentiment but later recanted her statement, saying that she had lied because she thought it would help him. Both McKinney and Henderson were convicted of the murder, and each of them received two consecutive life sentences.

…

A few hours after Shepard was discovered, his friends Walt Boulden and Alex Trout began to contact media organizations, claiming that Shepard had been assaulted because he was gay. According to prosecutor Cal Rerucha, “They were calling the County Attorney’s office, they were calling the media and indicating Matthew Shepard is gay and we don’t want the fact that he is gay to go unnoticed.” Tina Labrie, a close friend of Shepard’s, said “[Boulden and Trout] wanted to make [Matt] a poster child or something for their cause”. Boulden linked the attack to the absence of a Wyoming criminal statute providing for a hate crimes charge.

That ill-founded conclusion (note: I don’t blame the young friends for trying to make sense of the shocking crime) went viral and remains extant to an extent that I call it the Matthew Shepard myth. It’s powerful enough to have led to the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

But a gay author who investigated concluded that Matt was a methamphetamine dealer who knew his killers, and the murder was a drug transaction gone awry. As noted above the prosecutor argued that the murder of Shepard was premeditated and driven by greed. So “the Matthew Shepard myth” is mythical in at least two senses, including the one that connotes falsity. That’s my take.

Now, back to last Spring, when our upcoming season was announced.

I brushed the dust off my priors about the Matthew Shepard myth, looked again, and came to the same conclusion as before: the homophobic hate crime version is probably false. But it’s entrenched, and powerful; it’s Matt’s “Legacy”, and used occasionally as a bludgeon on anyone reticent about supporting the constellation of changes encompassed in the shorthand “the gay rights movement,” as am I.

Apart from that legacy, I’ve no doubt that Considering Matthew Shepard never would have been written. Could I in good conscience sing it?

I found a streaming audio recording of it (by a group the composer directs) and pored over the libretto. I found a pleasant composition with a libretto that paints “an ordinary boy,” the bereavement of his parents, a coy hint that the Jesus he’d come to know in the Episcopal Church had been with him as he hung comatose on the rural fence to which his attackers tied him, and the reality that he’d become a symbol. I found a slightly hyperbolic portrayal of the demonstrators at Matt’s funeral from Westboro Ba***** Church (the demonstrators didn’t literally cry out Kreuzige!). But I did not find the piece propagandistic per se (i.e., in and of itself); any propagandistic effect is contextual, from the reality I noted in the preceding paragraph.

I also thought of a few chorus members who are jewish, one California import who was astonishingly ignorant of the basic Christian story, and of untold numbers who probably had zero Christian commitment of any sort, orthodox or otherwise. These folks have joined in repeatedly in singing masses, passions, Christian oratorios, Christmas carols — the great music of the formerly-Christian West — without complaining that the music would never have been written had the Christian story not taken root. So too their families in the audience.

So I’m singing the Matthew Shepard oratorio, much as I preferentially buy my commercial coffee at a chain famous for pacific northwest progressivism. It seems like the cost of living in a tolerably decent society.

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

Sunday, 8/20/23

The dechurching elephant in the room

Youth sports.

Growing up, I remember that my parents’ rule for me playing youth sports was that I couldn’t play in any league that required practices or games on Sunday. And, at the time, that ruled out most youth sports in Lincoln. So I played flag football for two years, I think, and I did a year of micro soccer and that was about it, aside from the hockey league our church ran for a short time. We were in an extremely conservative fundamentalist congregation and yet even in a church like that, our family was weird. There may have been others with similar rules, but I don’t recall knowing anyone else with kids who wanted to be in youth sports who had such a rule. Even in fundamentalism, youth sports were a kind of untouchable element of life for many.

So: Shift away from general ideas about “being too busy.” Instead focus on a specific category—families who make it to church when their kids’ youth sports events don’t get in the way. If I said there are more people who dechurch for reasons such as prioritizing sports ahead of church than there are who leave over corruption, would that seem more plausible to you? If I suggested it to your pastor, would it seem plausible to him? (The answer is “YES, OF COURSE IT WOULD.”)

Jake Meador, The Slow Exit

Why schisms persist

Rarely if ever in the course of doctrinal controversy did anyone say something like this: “You’re right-I lack the Holy Spirit’s guidance in my reading of scripture, and I see that you have it in yours. I admit I was mistaken, so I’ll trust you instead.”

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

Religious minimalism

“So much of our religious anxiety is really about having to figure out how we can avoid doing the things we know we must, while still being obedient to God. We become religious minimalists, giving God only as much as we need to do to appease him, while keeping as much as we can for ourselves. This, as opposed to desiring as God himself desires. This, as opposed to living in reality.”

Rod Dreher, Reconciling With the Really Real

Learning the spiritual life

In the traditions of ancient China, the western spiritual seeker can learn the basics of spiritual life which the churches failed to teach him: how to be free of compulsive thinking and acquire stillness of thoughts, how to cut off desires and addictions, and how to conquer negative emotions.”

Hieromonk Damascene, Christ the Eternal Tao. I probably quote Christ the Eternal Tao too much, but I find it that paragraph too penetrating not to repeat it.

Reason in a materialist world

Reason is an absolute—all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based. The difficulty is to me a fatal one; and the fact that when you put it to many scientists, far from having an answer, they seem not even to understand what the difficulty is, assures me that I have not found a mare’s nest but detected a radical disease in their whole mode of thought from the very beginning.

C. S. Lewis, Weight of Glory

Hard times

There was a time when Lutherans would not have invited a Catholic archbishop to this kind of event, said Cordileone. There was a time when it was rare for Catholics to cooperate with evangelicals and other believers seeking common ground on moral and social issues.

“To tell you the truth, I actually long for the good old days when we used to have the luxury to fight with each other over doctrinal issues,” said Cordileone, drawing laughter. “But right now, the ship is going down. … The crew cannot afford to stand on the bridge and discuss the best kind of navigation equipment to use — when the ship is going down.”

The “ship,” he stressed, is not the church — “It’s our civilization.” If clergy cannot work together to defend ancient doctrines on marriage and family, while also striving to convince their own flocks to live by them, then “our civilization is … hanging by a thread.”

Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone via Terry Mattingly

Human telos

Our belief is that man is created to be in communion and union with God, and that if he rejects this communion, he will not become a human being in the authentic understanding. Apart from God a “normal man” cannot exist. The state of the man who has cut himself off from God is abnormal. Thus, the meaning of our belief in the “Image” is that God is the center of man’s existence. In other words, the divine element is what defines our humanity.

Metropolitan Saba of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America.

What are we here for? What’s the point? What is the purpose of worship? Interestingly, Wright’s answer is the same for both questions: “What we’re ‘here for’ is to become genuine human beings, reflecting the God in whose image we’re made.”

James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love

Myth & Cosmology

“So are you saying that mythology and cosmology are the same?”

“I use the words interchangeably in my writing,” he says. “Myths are a kind of cosmology in that both words express an outlook on, or a view of, the world. They are not just tales about the gods.”

Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less

What is “religion”?

[T]wo rival conceptions of religion[:] Is religion an expression of a transcendent moral and metaphysical order? Or is it just another way of pursuing ideals of compassion and social justice, which is how many liberal theologians have popularly conceived it since at least the mid-1960s?

Matthew Walther, William Friedkin’s Movie ‘The Exorcist’ Understands Old-Time Catholicism

Far more important …

Inner watchfulness is a primary element of our life in Christ, and far more important than following outward events. Our Lord makes this abundantly clear when He says that His second advent will be apparent to all. Our foremost need, then, is to keep watch over ourselves all the time.

Dynamis devotional for August 18, 2023 (from Orthodox Christian Prison Ministry).

A ready listener

I heard, particularly when I was a Protestant, complaints that “I never heard the Gospel until” [I visited my present church], although I knew that substantially the same Gospel was preached at the Church they left as in the one they now attend.

We all hear important truths many times in our lives, but it is only when we are ready for them that they penetrate.”

Peter France, A Place of Healing for the Soul: Patmos

The perennial delusion

Despite sociological evidence to the contrary, it remains to all appearances virtually axiomatic that the acquisition of consumer goods is the presumptive means to human happiness-and the more and better the goods, the better one’s life and the happier one will be.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

Saturday, 8/19/23

I probably should mention that I have resumed Journaling in DayOne. I’m a bit more candid and introspective in my Journal than here, but it also now includes some whimsy that might over the last few years have wound up in this blog — or that might end up both places.

Bottom line, this blog may change in content and frequency. Since I blog for fun, for free, and maybe for an eensy-weensy bit of influence, I feel no guilt over that, but more discerning readers might notice a shift and friends who read this might wonder if something’s wrong.

Culture

Watch what I do, not what I say

James Hill: “Eve Arnold, the wonderful Magnum photographer, used to recount a story about walking with Henri Cartier-Bresson from the Magnum office in Paris to have lunch at his apartment on the Rue de Rivoli. During the 15-minute stroll home, as he kept telling her that he was no longer interested in photography, only drawing, he took three rolls of film on his Leica.”

Why ROGD is the worst fad ever

Of the gender transitioning of minors:

Something you may not have thought of is that there are a lot of people who can’t move on from this. And that’s the people who have transitioned their own children. So those people are going to be like the Japanese soldiers who were on Pacific islands and didn’t know the war was over. They’ve got to fight forever. This is another reason why this is the worst, worst, worst social contagion that we’ll ever have experienced.

A lot of people have done what is the worst thing you could do, which is to harm their children irrevocably, because of it. Those people will have to believe that they did the right thing for the rest of their lives, for their own sanity, and for their own self-respect. So they’ll still be fighting, and each one of those people destroys entire organizations and entire friendship groups.

Like, I’ve lost count of the number of times that somebody has said to me of a specific organization that has been turned upside down on this, “Oh, the deputy director has a trans child.” Or, oh, the journalist on that paper who does special investigations has a trans child. Or whatever. The entire organization gets paralyzed by that one person. And it may not even be widely known at that organization that they have a trans child. But it will come out, people will have sort of said quietly, and now you can’ talk truth in front of that person, and you know you can’t, because what you’re saying is: “You as a parent have done a truly, like, a human rights abuse level of awful thing to your own child that can not be fixed.”

There are specific individuals who are actively against women’s rights here and it is not known why they are, but I happen to know through the back channels, that it is because they’ve transed their child. So those people will do anything for the entire rest of their lives to destroy me and people like me because people like me are standing in reproach to them. I don’t want to be, I’m not talking directly to them, and I don’t spend my time bitching to them. But the fact is that just simply by saying we will never accept natal males in women’s spaces, well it is their son that we’re talking about. And they’ve told their son that he can get himself sterilized and destroy his own basic sexual function and women will accept him as a woman. And if we don’t, there’s no way back for them and that child.

They’ve sold their child a bill of goods that they can’t deliver on. And I’m the one that has to be bullied to try to force me to deliver on it. So those people are going to be the people who will keep this bloody movement going, I’m sorry to say, because they’ve everything to lose, and it is a fight to the death as far as they are concerned.

Helen Joyce, quote by Jonathon Van Maren, Transgender Movement’s Last Defenders: Parents Who ‘Transitioned’ Their Children. I suppose your mileage may vary, but I found that a wonderfully succinct summary without being uncharitable to parents who, with no malicious intent, truly have helped sell their kids a bill of goods with no return address.

Magyar is unique because Hungarians are unique

Coming from a great distance and wholly unrelated to the Teutonic, Latin and Slav languages that fence it in, Hungarian has remained miraculously intact. Everything about the language is different, not only the words themselves, but the way they are formed, the syntax and grammar and above all the cast of mind that brought them into being. I knew that Magyar belonged to the Ugro-Finnic group, part of the great Ural-Altaic family, “Just,” one of my new friends told me, “as English belongs to the Indo-European.” He followed this up by saying that the language closest to Hungarian was Finnish.
“How close?”
“Oh, very!”
“What, like Italian and Spanish?”
“Well no, not quite as close as that …”
“How close then?”
Finally, after a thoughtful pause, he said, “About like English and Persian.”

Patrick Leigh Fermor, Between the Woods and the Water (bold added)

From Nellie Bowles’ TGIF

The social network formerly known as Twitter added a five-second lag to links from sites owner Elon Musk doesn’t like (such as The New York Times and Substack). Once journalists noticed this and asked about it, suddenly the lag disappeared. In other notes on an erratic boss, Musk apparently reached out through a mutual friend to meet with popular business podcaster Scott Galloway, who declined the invitation. Suddenly Galloway was locked out of his Twitter account and has remained so for more than two weeks.
Chicago community group called Native Sons that is working to stave off gun violence recently put out a plea to gangs: please commit your shootings at night between 9 p.m. and 9 a.m. when there are fewer innocent bystanders to accidentally kill. “We have to start somewhere,” group co-founder Tatiana Atkins told CWBChicago. I guess that’s true. But if you’re gonna do one ask. . . . Also: I don’t know if people who shoot other people will sign up to do that in time slots.
Meanwhile, in D.C.’s Ward 8, the only grocery store might close. It’s hemorrhaging money each month because of theft.
After negotiations, UPS drivers have a new contract. And they’re going to be making an average of $170,000 a year. We love to see it.

And of the viral song Rich Men North of Richmond:

Guys, it’s a country bluegrass song. You’re gonna be okay. I feel like between this and “Try That in a Small Town,” we’re in a liberal music moral panic not seen since—well, since Mom took away my Eminem CD.

Nellie Bowles, TGIF

I’d add to that last one a note to the “conservatives” who are valorizing Rich Men North of Richmond (lookin’ at you, Dreher): Guys, it’s a country bluegrass song, and the singer, who has better sense than you, doesn’t want to be your Messiah. Leave him the heck alone.

Dimwit foes of the Categorical Imperative

If the new right prevails and either defeats or transforms the conservative legal movement, it will not like the world it makes. Degrade the First Amendment, and watch your freedom depend entirely on your political power. You”ll end up banning ideas you dislike in jurisdictions (like Tennessee) where those ideas have little purchase and empowering those ideas in jurisdictions (like California) where they command either majority support or majority acquiescence.

Or, to put it bluntly: If you can ban CRT in one school, you can compel it in another, and heaven help the professor who tries to stand in the way.

David French, The Conservative Legal Movement Is on a Collision Course With the New Right

In a country with expressions like “what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander” and “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” a reminder like this should be unnecessary. But it is, because we’re about as bright as geese or ganders and our “Christianity” is mostly a heretical or grossly schismatic mess.

Political and politico-legal

Trump chickens out

I get why Mr. Trump isn’t eager to climb into this sandbox. Debating is hard, and he is out of practice. He participated in only two debates during the 2020 cycle, the first of which was the stuff of campaign legend — but in a bad way. (Proud boys, stand back and stand by!) At some point during Wednesday’s two-hour event he would need to talk about something other than his grievances. He hates doing that, and has always been kind of lousy at it.

Michelle Cottle

Predicate acts

Let’s say, to expand on David and Sarah’s analogy, the staff of The Dispatch decides to get into the kidnapping business. At an “editorial” meeting I bark out orders: “Okay Drucker, you get the duct tape. Isgur, you find us a good nondescript getaway car. Hayes, just keep eating cheese curds until we find something for you to do.”

Drucker gets the duct tape, Sarah gets a sweet AMC Pacer with a tricked-out engine. Hayes provides encouragement. And then we head out to kidnap George Will and hold him for ransom. (“He’s a national treasure! People will pay for his release!”)

When we’re inevitably caught and charged, I won’t have many defenders. But Isgur and Drucker fans might say, “Oh, so buying a car or duct tape is a crime now!? Come on!”

Buying such items isn’t a crime, but buying them in furtherance of a crime is evidence that you committed the crime …

…

With that bit of legal pedantry out of the way, let’s get to the point. There are a lot of acts in the Georgia indictment that are not illegal in their own right but are part of a broader criminal scheme that is—allegedly—illegal. So, Trump’s tweets and speeches are not crimes in themselves, but they are evidence toward proving the larger alleged “criminal enterprise.”

Jonah Goldberg, Trump’s Unconstitutional Enterprise – The Dispatch

Wordplay

Pyrocene

pyrocene

A name suggested for our era after the fires on Maui.

Treppenwitz

Treppenwitz is a German word meaning ‘stairway joke’. It’s a word for the joke or comeback you think of way too late – on the stairway as you’re leaving the building. I often experience the pain of a missed Treppenwitz.

Emily Mabin Sutton via Dense Discovery

The Plumbers Problem

John Siracusa writes about “the plumbers problem,” a phrase he created.

“The Plumber Problem” is a phrase I coined to describe the experience of watching a movie that touches on some subject area that you know way more about than the average person, and then some inaccuracy in what’s depicted distracts you and takes you out of the movie. (This can occur in any work of fiction, of course: movies, TV, books, etc.)

Canned Dragons

Violence

a category that now includes punching someone, stabbing them, and using the name on their birth certificate

James Kirchick, Pinkwashing the Thought Police

Race

What we know today as “race” is a combination of inherited characteristics and cultural traditions passed down through generations.

David Freund, historian of race and politics at the University of Maryland, College Park (via Jesse Singal)

Haplogroups

A haplotype is a group of alleles in an organism that are inherited together from a single parent,^[1][2] and a haplogroup (haploid from the Greek: …, haploûs, “onefold, simple” and English: group) is a group of similar haplotypes that share a common ancestor with a single-nucleotide polymorphism mutation.^[3] More specifically, a haplotype is a combination of alleles at different chromosomal regions that are closely linked and that tend to be inherited together.

I am too weak in science to say what, if any, is the relationship among haplotypes, haplogroups, and the “inherited characteristic” component of “race” in the prior item. But apparently haplogroups are a necessary qualification to the assertion that race is a complete fiction.

That said, take this as a possible analogy: “race is a complete fiction” is to Newtonian physics as haplogroups are to quantum physics. The practical import is that unless you’re a geneticist or some such, it’s fine to live your life thinking of race as a complete fiction.

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.