Culture
NETTRs and NETTLs
[Charles] Haywood says that if you want to call out someone on the Right, you should do it privately, not publicly. Sometimes, yes. But this is the exact same line of thinking that allowed the Catholic priest sex abuse scandal to metastasize. Don’t talk about it publicly, you’ll only help the enemies of the Church. Secrecy about evil — not moral misdemeanors, but evil — allowed it to grow in the darkened networks within the Church, until it was eventually exposed, and all but destroyed the Church’s moral authority. Don’t talk about it publicly, you’ll only help the Left. Yeah, well, screw that.
Rod Dreher after playing a role in exposing a white-supremacist headmaster and teacher in a Classical Christian School, via Andrew Sullivan.
I’ve read enough to know that Charles Haywood personally adheres to No Enemies to the Right — i.e., he was not just assigned that side by the debate organizers.
I’m with Rod on NETTR (he’s against it), which has gotten me crosswise with Rightwing cranks occasionally. Lacking any notable national platform, the worst I’ve gotten was Judas accusations — nary a death threat. And since I was defending the truth rather than trolling anyone, that’s as it should be.
Odder than the Judas accusation, though, was a comment by a Jewish colleague suggesting that it took special courage to diss some outsider Klansmen (or was it Nazis?) who were planning a big demonstration downtown, as if I were breaking ranks and burning bridges. Sheesh! That sad misimpression illustrates why we need to rebuke the reprobate Right more regularly: so nobody will think it’s courageous for someone on the Right to repudiate racist terrorists and neo-Nazis.
The worst of the right wingnuts are those who wear a cross on their sleeves but prove by their commission of (or cooperation with) evil that it’s really about political power, not Christ.
We live in culture war hell. The internet ensures that many of us spend all day, every day surrounded by the opinions of people we can’t stand. In the scrum of the day-to-day turf war for the American soul, even minor skirmishes can seem to take on world-historical purpose. And in a relentlessly binary political culture, people frequently feel that to give any ground to “the other side” at all is to admit defeat. Which means that progressive culture warriors will often go to the wall for positions they see as broadly on their side, even if they’re so extreme as to be ridiculous. They’ll throw their full weight behind ideas and statements and arguments that they secretly feel to be stupid, so as not to tacitly lend support to the right.
I promise: you don’t have to do that.
For example, there are people who earnestly believe that the phrase “I see what you mean” is ableist—that is, disrespectful and oppressive toward people with disabilities—because some people can’t see. This is—and I choose the word carefully—nuts.
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As I write this, a minor controversy has erupted of just the kind that I’m talking about here: the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work has recently banned the use of the word field to refer to an academic discipline, as in the field of history. This is ostensibly because the word field might make black students and staff think of slavery. What black person could ever avoid hearing talk about fields, real or metaphorical?
When nonsense goes unchallenged because it’s perceived to be “on our side,” it metastasizes and spreads until suddenly, the majority of left-leaning people feel compelled to defend it. And ordinary people (that is, people not marinating in Twitter every day) will rightfully recognize the absurdity when they see it.
I’m not interested in spending a lot of time chewing through social justice language or norms. But I do want to say this: It’s okay to call nonsense nonsense, even if you feel it’s on your side. I promise. You can defend your values, be a soldier for social justice, and be merciless toward conservatives while still admitting when feckless people take liberal ideology to bizarre ends.
Freddie de Boer, excerpted in The Free Press
The is the Left equivalent of No Enemies to the Right. I confess that for some reason I find it easier to spot NETTR than NETTL; maybe because that’s because I spend more time contemplating thought on the Right half of the spectrum than on the Left half, or maybe it’s because NETTL is no longer notable.
(Of course, I should note that the French may have gotten here first with pas d’ennemis au gauche and pas d’ennemis au droite.)
Yes, there are enemies to the Right
I will not let some redpill pick-up artist pimp become a role model to my sons or to other young men in my church because I refuse to rebuke them publicly.
Neil Shenvi, making the case against NETTR. Anyone tempted by the NETTR nuttiness should read the whole piece. He’s quite disturbed that young Christian men may be looking to filthy reprobates like Andrew Tate or Bronze Age Pervert for lessons on how to combat the woke Left, and I am too.
Flannery’s violence and grotesqueries
Her fiction, which employed violence and the grotesque, horrified her mother. “Why can’t you write something uplifting,” Regina would say, “like the folks at Reader’s Digest?” As [Flannery] O’Connor confided in a letter to a friend: “This always leaves me shaking and speechless, raises my blood pressure 140 degrees, etc. All I can say is, if you have to ask, you’ll never know.”
Gregory Wolfe, Beauty Will Save the World
Food culture
[E]veryone knows that old joke,
“Heaven is where the cooks are French, the police are British, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian and everything is organized by the Swiss.
Hell is where the cooks are British, the police are German, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and everything is organized by the Italians.”
It doesn’t matter that America is not part of Europe, because to Europeans America is worse at everything (except war), especially food.
Chris Arnade, America does not have a good food culture
Guarantors of tranquillity and happiness
In France, simple tastes, orderly manners, domestic affections, and the attachments which men feel to the place of their birth, are looked upon as great guarantees of the tranquillity and happiness of the State. But in America nothing seems to be more prejudicial to society than these virtues.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
High-Toned Gobbledygook
[I]t’s not anti-intellectual to say that the left desperately needs to lose its academic vocabulary, which is overwhelmingly influenced by trends in humanities departments at elite universities.
That’s because it is incomprehensible to ordinary Americans.
Students go through those programs and absorb a certain vocabulary, they graduate and go to work at nonprofits and in media and in Hollywood, and from there they spread the terminology. Social media, especially Tumblr and Twitter, helps ensure that this fancy vocabulary colonizes left-leaning spaces. Nobody wants to sound unsophisticated, so everyone adopts these terms even if they’re not particularly comfortable with them. Like seemingly everything in the internet age, it’s mimetic. And that’s how you get people talking about the role of Latinx intersectionality in queering BIPOC spaces in the Global South.
Freddie de Boer, excerpted in The Free Press
The Texas Pander Bear
Texas AG Ken Paxton, having dodged conviction in the Texas Senate after impeachment by the Texas House, is tacitly appealing to the Texas GOP base by filing a red-meat lawsuit.
Dump on Trump
On the off chance that one reader is MAGA but persuadable, I shall continue to dump on Trump for the foreseeable future.
Bankrupt Donnie from Queens
Trump’s business—as we New Yorkers always knew—was bilking people. Oh, he had a few slam-dunk construction projects early on, using his daddy’s money. And he did prove himself more competent than the City of New York when it came to completing the Wollman Rink in Central Park. But almost everything else crashed. He declared bankruptcy four times. He stiffed the small contractors who built his casinos. He stiffed his lawyers. The real property developers in New York—no shrinking violets themselves—told jokes about what an egomaniacal phony he was.
Trump only began to make money when he signed on as an actor playing a billionaire in a reality TV series. This enabled him to take the grift to new levels: he sold his name to overseas developers who slapped it on apartment buildings, he sold steaks and wine and bottled water; he used the money to buy golf resorts and a few buildings.
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Trump is a fraud and also a traitor. He tried to overthrow our government. But he persists, an icon, because he doesn’t “sound like a politician.” Nice work if you can get it. And the Democrats can’t seem to understand that they will make little progress against him if they don’t address the issues that built his brand—the crisis at the Southern Border and the refugees in Northern cities, crime (Target is closing nine stores, including one in Harlem, because of rampaging hordes of shoplifters), the false pomposities of identity politics…and, of course, the fact that Joe Biden seems to be doddering.
Joe Klein, The Art of the Fraudster
Donnie from Queens is boring
Four years into his presidency, Trump isn’t boring in the way a dull, empty afternoon is boring. Trump is boring in the way that the seventh season of a reality-television show is boring: A lot is happening, but there’s nothing to say about it. The president is a man without depths to plumb. What you see is what you get, and what you get is the same mix of venality, solipsism, and racial hatred that has long been obvious. Trump’s abuses of the presidency are often compared to those of Richard Nixon, but Nixon had a deep, if troubled, interior life; one biographer characterized Nixon as struggling with “tragic flaws,” a description hard to imagine any credible biographer using to describe Trump.
Quinta Jurecic, The Tedium of Trump
There’s quite an illustration at the top of Jurecic’s article, too.
Flaunt/Flout
Donald Trump does not flaunt the rules of golf—that is a vicious lie.
He flouts the rules of golf—just as he flouts good taste, common decency, the Constitution, etc.
To flaunt something is to show it off: A rich man might flaunt his wealth, a beautiful woman might flaunt her beauty, one of those younger Kardashians I can’t tell apart might very well flaunt both. To flout something is to disregard it: Rolling Stone writers routinely flout English grammar and usage both.
Lapped by Trump
Poor Mike Pence. For one brief shining moment back in January 2021, standing in marbled majesty, gavel in hand, he did the Right Thing and refused to turn the Republic into a Fiefdom, which caused a mob of knuckleheads to storm the Capitol and send Pence running to an undisclosed location, but he stood tall for Rectitude and Devotion to Duty, and now here he is on the campaign trail making small talk in a Dunkin’ Donut shop with a couple of truckers trying to decide between the Caramel Crème and the Pumpkin Peppermint.
Poor Chris Christie. Once the Emperor’s Boon Companion, now his lone accuser, the former governor does his spiel for a crowd of six Starbucks sales associates on their vaping break who haven’t the ghost of an idea who this porky guy is.
Wordplay
Banned Books Week
a cloying festival of liberal self-aggrandizement
Matthew Walther’s description of Banned Books Week
Confabulation
Confabulation is subtly different than I’d thought. I considered it casual, habitual lying about trivial stuff; apparently, it’s not considered lying at all.
So much for Joe “The Confabulator” Biden.
#Fail
She “sought forms that give shape to the infinite and spiritual dimensions ….”
A poet (Major Jackson) trying to describe the work of a thesophist artist.
The next GOP Vice-Presidency
like taking a job as cleaning lady in the Elephant Pavilion …
Garrison Keillor on Nikki Haley’s prospective Vice-Presidency.
Breaking butterflies on the wheel
breaking every butterfly on a wheel of confrontational rhetoric …
Rod Dreher (hyperlink added)
Jest
“What is truth?” said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.
Francis Bacon via Hedgehog Review 24.3, p. 9
Theo
The problem with a theocracy is everyone wants to be Theo
James Dunn via @ChrisJWilson on micro.blog
Philo T. Farnsworth
Tonight Show host Johnny Carson once quipped, “If it weren’t for Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of television, we’d still be eating frozen radio dinners.”
Hermit kingdom
Hermit kingdom: a characterization of North Korea in the Economist. It may not be novel, but it had fallen off my radar.
Undecided
Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.
Laurence Peter, via The Economist World in Brief
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.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 