Dumbest idea of the week
Reading more poetry? That’s a great thing. Reading a book of poetry a day? That’s a 100% guarantee that you will get almost nothing from your reading. Better: Read one lyric poem a day, but read it five times.
It is a marker of impending doom that anyone could start a movement like reading a book of poetry per day as a tool of self-improvement. I guess being able to Tweet that or post a Facebook brag now passes for self-improvement.
Frankly, poetry bored me when I was young. Now that I know better, any tutoring I got in how to read poetry is long forgotten.
I now read poetry amateurishly almost every day, but I rarely read more than three pages in a row unless a single poem is longer than that. (Currently reading my first Geoffrey Hill, by the way.)
Nominal state, parastate redux
Related to my Tuesday post on “The nominal state and the parastate” is an extremely long post by N.S. Lyons at The Upheaval on how the U.S. and China are traveling separate paths to the common end of managerial totalitarianism. (H/T Rod Dreher). Unherd published a much-shortened version on the 9th.
It always hits me extra hard when two thinkers I respect spend hours and hours and hours writing long, thoughtful pieces, in much different ways, about a situation I’ve paid little attention to. Such are N.S. Lyons today and Matthew Crawford yesterday (as I write).
We need a law against debanking for thought crimes, and a constitutional right to use cash rather than digital short-cuts. I say that as one who uses those shortcuts a lot. But frictionless efficiency isn’t worth the downsides.
Put on your big boy pants and live with it
Yeah, sometimes you have imposter syndrome. And sometimes you feel like an imposter because you actually do suck at what you’re trying to do. Sometimes she’s not a narcissist, she just doesn’t love you the way you want her to, and she never will. Sometimes you don’t have ADHD, you just hate your job. Sometimes your boss isn’t a sociopath, he’s just correctly identified you as unqualified for a leadership position. Sometimes you really do have schizophrenia, only there’s nothing glamorous or exciting or romantic about it, and now you’re fat from meds and trying to hold down a steady job and going to support group to drink grainy coffee and hear people tell the same stories over and over again. And sometimes you’re just in pain because the world didn’t turn out the way you wanted it to, and you’re trying to scratch out a life you can live with, and you get overwhelmed with your mundane unhappiness on the subway home from work, and you think to yourself that it must be true that your suffering is something grander, something that calls out for medical attention and reasonable accommodation, something more that makes it easier. But it isn’t and it doesn’t and there isn’t and you’re just another good, deserving human being filled with the pain of being alive. I’m sorry. I am genuinely so sorry. You wanted things, and you didn’t get them, and it hurts. You wanted to be something else, and you’re what you are, and it hurts. You thought life would be more than it is, and it isn’t, and it hurts. Me too. All of it hurts. So let it hurt.
Freddie deBoer, concluding what Alan Jacobs considers one of his best columns ever.
I re-read C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce yesterday, and I’m struck by how closely many of Lewis’s “ghosts” fit the assumptions of Freddie’s “therapeutic/affirmational mode.”
The pander bear comes to NR
Andrew C. McCarthy of National Review has now twice published bullshitty misrepresentations of the latest Trump federal indictment. So says Ken White, a/k/a Popehat. I’ve haD to take Popehat’s word for it because my NR subscription lapsed and they won’t let me view diddly-squat there now. But now Johah Goldberg is having him on The Remnant podcast, so I can hear from the horse’s mouth.
So why might McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor like White, be doing a bad thing that looks like carrying water for Trump? Per White:
He’s not pro-Trump. But he’s anti-anti-Trump. He’s anti-Biden, anti-the-Department-of-Justice-pursuing-Republicans, anti-”deep state”) (well sort of), anti any application of the rule of law that might benefit Democrats. Plus, he’s very pro-the National Review being kept alive and relevant. The National Review is under siege from a frothingly crazy pro-Trump right, and if it’s not entirely willing to join the crowd, it’s certainly willing to indulge in deceitful critiques of anyone criticizing Trump.
Every word of that rings true. (Be it noted that I didn’t drop NR the better to pursue “frothingly crazy pro-Trump right” stuff, but rather to exit a kaleidescope of mostly-mediocre writing with no theme except pandering a little bit to every kind of conservative they recognize.)
Anthropologists in flyover country
[Walter] Kirn, for different reasons, worked the … territory for Time, GQ, and Esquire. “Knowing that I had grown up in Minnesota and then moved to Montana, my editors decided I would be their American correspondent,” he says. “I kept being asked to do these stories, which I started to feel were setups, in which I was supposed to make the safari into deepest, darkest America and come back with tales of how bizarre and ridiculous people were. And often they were bizarre and ridiculous, but not for the reason my editors thought.” Now, he says, “I don’t have to be defensive anymore, and I can actually, probably with a good clear conscience, show how bizarre everything is because I don’t feel I’m being asked to.”
Ash Carter, David Samuels and Walter Kirn Talk “County Highway,” Their New Magazine
Slitting our throats with Occam’s Razor
It is no accident, says [Iain] McGilchrist, that the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution came along at more or less the same time. These are manifestations of a more disembodied, left-brain way of seeing the world. The entire modern history of Western culture—through the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and all that has followed—is what you get from an intellect that values quantity over quality, that knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing.
It is hard to summarize a book as complex as The Matter With Things, a book of popular science and cultural analysis that is intimidatingly long … The argument goes like this: the picture of reality taken as objectively true by the modern mind, under the tyranny of the left brain, is, in fact, seriously distorted—and is killing us. This is something we all feel.
… The book is a powerful refutation of ‘nothing-buttery’—of the idea that reality is nothing but the sum total of its parts. It contends brilliantly that Occam’s Razor—the claim that the simplest explanation of a phenomenon is probably the best one—is a cognitive tool with which the modern world is slitting its throat.
Rod Dreher, praising Dr. McGilchrist in the European Conservative
Wordplay
Democracy
Forgive my sarcasm, but it seems U.S. leaders just ignore the will of the people when they are so busy spreading democracy.
Hal Freeman, who I always take with a grain of salt, but who seems on-the-nose here about aspects of our involvement in Ukraine.
Augment
“These are not additional forces,” said Lt. Gen. Douglas Sims, the director of operations for the Joint Staff. “These are forces that will augment what we already have there.”
transitive verb
1: to make greater, more numerous, larger, or more intense
The impact of the report was augmented by its timing.
2: supplement
She took a second job to augment her income
Beautiful minds
Dot-connectors and beautiful minds will use the deep state as a conceptual crutch to explain great national traumas.
Eli Lake, Hunter Biden and the ‘Deep State’.
I watched the movie A Beautiful Mind completely unaware of the plot arc, so it left a big impression when, shall we say, the plot turned. So “beautiful minds” strikes me as a great deprecatory coinage.
Jeremiah 5:19
Because you served foreign gods in your land, so you shall serve foreigners in a land not yours.
Jeremiah 5:19 (Orthodox Study Bible)
Luxury beliefs
I cannot help but feel grateful to Rob Henderson for his 2019 ’Luxury beliefs’ are latest status symbol for rich Americans.
Groomers
Rightwing commentators seem to have realized that they won’t have George Soros to demonize forever, so they’ve started grooming Bill Gates to take his place.
Political ethics
[The Dispatch is] one of the last few right-wing media outlets in America that doesn’t celebrate ruthlessness as a political ethic.
Seeking continuity and stability
[M]an was not made to tread water endlessly in a liquid world.
On behalf of my Catholic friends, I object!
Out of the two dozen homesteaders I spoke with, most were religious—either Catholic or Christian ….
Home Is Where the Revolution Is | The Free Press.
Crooked
You shall love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart.
out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made
Kant
Both quotes via L. M. Sacasas
Phubbing
Ignoring a partner in favor of your smartphone,
What Is ‘Phubbing,’ and How May It Hurt Your Relationship? – The New York Times
Peremalyvat
“To grind through”. The Russian verb is being invoked by forces on both sides of the war in Ukraine.
(Via The Economist)
Believing blue, living red
Yes, on a number of fronts Americans have more culturally progressive beliefs than they did, say, in 1990, yet by the tens of millions, they have more culturally conservative lifestyles than the generation before. It’s a phenomenon somewhat clumsily called “believing blue and living red.”
This clearly is related to the phenomenon of “luxury beliefs.”
Conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership
… it’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.
A Senior Trump Campaign Advisor explaining why they were 0-32 on court challenges of state presidential tallies. (Paragraph 25 of the August 1 indictment.)
Enormity
Before the 2020 Election, I thought Trump would leave the White House voluntarily if he lost. Anything else would be an enormity.
Caste privilege
History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.
Sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, writing decades ago, via David Brooks.
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. I’m even playing around a bit here, but uncertain whether I’ll persist.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 