Cultural
Learning
The normative approach to learning draws the analytical after it, whereas the analytical approach repels the normative. The fragmentation of arts and letters into academic disciplines (literature, history, philosophy, religion, social studies, and so forth) answers an analytical need that pushes normative inquiry into the interstices between disciplines. This is the strongest argument for reuniting the arts and letters.
David Hicks, Norms and Nobility
What capitalist society requires
A capitalist society required not just capitalist practices among urban elites, but a demographically widespread social acceptance among Christians of the counter-biblical notion that the good life was the goods life.
Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation
Empty gestures
Playing the “The Star-Spangled Banner” at sporting events has become an empty gesture of patriotism—so empty that, when the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks quietly began skipping the ritual, 13 preseason and regular-season games passed before anyone noticed. On Tuesday, The Athletic reported that the Mavericks had abandoned the national anthem, making them the first team in the recent history of major professional sports to take such a stance. The next day, the National Basketball Association issued a statement declaring that every team must play the song, in accordance with league rules. Inevitably, the Mavericks reversed course.
Why Pro Sports Should Skip the National Anthem
A new, and very revealing, locution
Over the past decade a new, and very revealing, locution has drifted from our universities into the media mainstream: Speaking as an X . . . This is not an anodyne phrase. It tells the listener that I am speaking from a privileged position on this matter. (One never says, Speaking as a gay Asian, I feel incompetent to judge this matter.) It sets up a wall against questions, which by definition come from a non-X perspective. And it turns the encounter into a power relation: the winner of the argument will be whoever has invoked the morally superior identity and expressed the most outrage at being questioned.
Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal
MAGA-lite
“Sad to agree [that] the Free Press (for which I had high hopes) has ‘descended into MAGA-lite.’ Yes, PC-SJW-Critical-Woke-Intersectionality is bad, but some perspective, please: Blowing up the international order, sucking up to autocrats, wrecking the world economy, sowing doubt about vaccines, spreading medical quackery, strangling lifesaving foreign aid, pardoning violent rioters, preventing data collection, spewing nonstop lies, & extorting the press, law firms, and universities is worse,” – Steven Pinker.
I haven’t cancelled yet, but it’s getting close. Part of it is the MAGA-lite vibe, but another part is that it’s trying to be too much like a full-blown newspaper, right down to the culture vultures fluff.
On the other hand, it’s not terribly expensive — if one excludes the “cost” of wading through some of it.
My visit to the Xitter
I wanted to communicate something positive to a restaurant chain, and couldn’t find a way to do it other than @ing them on X.com:
@Wendys Your Panko fish sandwich is easily the best in the fast food biz. Could you find in your hearts to have it all year, not just in Lent?
Then I made the mistake of looking around, finding tons of tacit confirmation of Fr. Stephen Freeman’s advice:
Quit arguing about politics as though the political realm were the answer to the world’s problems. It gives it power that is not legitimate and enables a project that is anti-God.
I’m not going to get more specific than that advice because that would be like the kid at the table who says “Mom! Joey had his eyes open while Dad was praying!”: You can’t fault someone for anti-God politics without arguing about politics.
Political
To see ourselves as others see us
4. The US needs to “stop whining” about being a victim after “taking a free ride on the globalization train”, China’s official state media said, as the trade war between the two countries continued to spiral. Last week’s tit-for-tat tariff rises appear to have paused, but the conflict between the two biggest economies is showing no signs of letting up. On Tuesday evening, China Daily, the ruling Chinese Communist party’s (CCP) English-language mouthpiece, published an editorial saying Donald Trump’s frequent claims of the US being “ripped off” were “hoodwinking the US public”. “The US is not getting ripped off by anybody,” it said. “The problem is the US has been living beyond its means for decades. It consumes more than it produces. It has outsourced its manufacturing and borrowed money in order to have a higher standard of living than it’s entitled to based on its productivity. Rather than being ‘cheated’, the US has been taking a free ride on the globalization train.” (Source: theguardian.com)
Deep American Impulse
Religious populism, reflecting the passions of ordinary people and the charisma of democratic movement-builders, remains among the oldest and deepest impulses in American life.
Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (1991)
To see ourselves as others see us
4. The US needs to “stop whining” about being a victim after “taking a free ride on the globalization train”, China’s official state media said, as the trade war between the two countries continued to spiral. Last week’s tit-for-tat tariff rises appear to have paused, but the conflict between the two biggest economies is showing no signs of letting up. On Tuesday evening, China Daily, the ruling Chinese Communist party’s (CCP) English-language mouthpiece, published an editorial saying Donald Trump’s frequent claims of the US being “ripped off” were “hoodwinking the US public”. “The US is not getting ripped off by anybody,” it said. “The problem is the US has been living beyond its means for decades. It consumes more than it produces. It has outsourced its manufacturing and borrowed money in order to have a higher standard of living than it’s entitled to based on its productivity. Rather than being ‘cheated’, the US has been taking a free ride on the globalization train.” (Source: theguardian.com)
Judicial
Payback Lawfare
Political persecution this, political persecution that: The Trump administration is seeking criminal charges against New York attorney general Letitia James, Trump’s public enemy number one. Federal Housing Finance Agency head William Pulte accused James of mortgage fraud, saying she misrepresented her building to get a better loan deal. He also accused James of claiming a Virginia property as her primary residence while she was New York’s AG in order to secure a lower interest rate on a loan.
You’ll recall that Letitia James literally campaigned for attorney general on a platform of prosecuting Trump on anything she could. Here she was back in 2018: “We will use every area of the law to investigate President Trump and his business transactions, and that of his family as well.” But now, with the shoe on the other foot, James is accusing Trump of politically persecuting her. Her team said that Trump was weaponizing “the federal government against the rule of law and the Constitution.” Such are the consequences of lawfare: always in litigation, always filing briefs, never settling, never quite winning.
Not mincing words
It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter. But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done.
This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.
…
The Executive possesses enormous powers to prosecute and to deport, but with powers come restraints. If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home? {See, e.g., Michelle Stoddart, ‘Homegrowns are Next’: Trump Doubles Down on Sending American ‘Criminals’ to Foreign Prisons, ABC News (Apr. 14, 2025); David Rutz, Trump Open to Sending Violent American Criminals to El Salvador Prisons, Fox News (Apr. 15, 2025).}
And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present, and the Executive’s obligation to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” would lose its meaning.
…
The basic differences between the branches mandate a serious effort at mutual respect. The respect that courts must accord the Executive must be reciprocated by the Executive’s respect for the courts. Too often today this has not been the case, as calls for impeachment of judges for decisions the Executive disfavors and exhortations to disregard court orders sadly illustrate.
It is in this atmosphere that we are reminded of President Eisenhower’s sage example. Putting his “personal opinions” aside, President Eisenhower honored his “inescapable” duty to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education II to desegregate schools “with all deliberate speed.” Address by the President of the United States (Sept. 24, 1957). This great man expressed his unflagging belief that “[t]he very basis of our individual rights and freedoms is the certainty that the President and the Executive Branch of Government will support and [e]nsure the carrying out of the decisions of the Federal Courts.” Indeed, in our late Executive’s own words, “[u]nless the President did so, anarchy would result.”
Now the branches come too close to grinding irrevocably against one another in a conflict that promises to diminish both.
Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, conservative icon Reagan appointee, mincing no words. Via Eugene Volokh.
Article III
Remember, courts cannot solve all of society’s ills. Some problems can only be resolved through the political process.
This is true. Blackman’s Trump-era meta-theme seems to be that federal courts are getting out of their proper constitutional lane trying to solve ills wrought by Velveeta Voldemort.
The reality that the Bill of Rights is deliberately counter-majoritarian doesn’t always mean that the courts can beat back “populist” majoritarian idiocies. In the political process, it has pleased the sovereign will of the American people to well and truly screw the pooch.
On the other hand …
Perhaps the federal courts are incited to action by the pugilistic stance this Administration takes in the lower courts, its demands for impeachment of judges who rule against it, and its murmurs about maybe defying the courts:
Yesterday Justice Alito published a fiery statement explaining his dissent from the Supreme Court’s early Saturday morning order directing the U.S. government “not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees [subject to Alien Enemy Act removal] from the United States until further order.”
Alito’s statement highlighted the rushed and unusual nature of the Court’s order. What it neglected to mention was that the Court probably acted so quickly because the U.S. government cannot be trusted to comply in good faith with the Court’s April 7 order that the “AEA detainees must receive notice . . . within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.”
Jack Goldsmith (bold added)
Bearing witness against Mafia Don
I’m trying to keep our contemptible President out of this blog. If you want to see what I’m reading (and thinking) about him, I’m keeping them here.)
But I’ve got to call attention to his Easter Greeting. (Trigger warning: blasphemy) “Christian” Trumpists take note.
NEW!
Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 