Friday April 3

Clueless

At my gym, I have spoken to at least a half-dozen young men who 1) are constantly engaged in betting on professional sports and 2) believe that professional sporting matches are rigged. I ask: “Do you really think that such a man as Jerry Jones would permit this sort of thing to happen where his financial interests are concerned?” The response: “He’s in on it, obviously.” And I ask: “Do you really think that such a man as Jerry Jones would put at risk billions of dollars of his own wealth and many billions more worth of intellectual property he controls in exchange for whatever paltry sums he might get from entering into a conspiracy—a conspiracy requiring the cooperation and disciplined silence of dozens of hot-tempered, high-testosterone, notoriously talkative 24-year-old men whose financial interests would in fact be much better served by betraying any game-fixing conspiracy they were invited to join—to make a little side money gambling? And do you really think that the people who run the gambling businesses would allow themselves to get taken that way? Because if you do believe that, I can tell you why Jerry Jones is rich and you are not.”

Kevin D. Williamson on conspiratorial thinking

MetaTrump

From here to “Shorts” is all about Donald Trump in one way or another. I’m not clever enough to write zingers, but I can read and curate interesting takes — for those who are interested.

Abberation

At points, I tell myself that Donald Trump is a uniquely malevolent figure who has seized levers of power that no previous president had ever dared to grasp. … Once Trump passes from the scene — as the laws of nature, if not politics, require — some kind of restoration of the American democratic and constitutional project can take place.

On darker days, I find myself turning to a more thoroughgoing narrative: that Trump is the fulfillment of what America has always been — a self-satisfied nation, granted license by its myths about providence and exceptionalism to do whatever it wants. Trump didn’t come from nowhere, after all. His two victories were forged by choices made by Americans and the leaders they elected. If he had not existed, history would have invented someone like him.

…

America does not know how to exist in a world it does not control. Since its inception, America has assured itself it was simply too big, too far away and too richly endowed to suffer any serious consequences for its actions.

Lydia Polgreen (shared link).

I don’t necessarily agree with everything I curate here, but I note (1) my substantial agreement with Polgreen’s overall thrust but (2) disagreement with “what America has always been” and “[s]ince its inception.”

We were not born a superpower; we grew into it pretty slowly. And our superpowerdom wasn’t immediately arrogant, bullying and hegemonic.

Our current hubris may be the flowering of a tragic flaw present since our inception (in my circles, the facile fatal flaw is The Enlightenment), but tragedies would be terribly short if fatal flaws manifested instantly.

Epochal vandal

Trump’s break with neoliberalism and liberal internationalism perfectly fits Hegel’s profile of the world-historical individual standing at the center of a transition from one era to another. So do his character and leadership. He didn’t merely appear to act out of a “morbid craving” for power and glory; that is at the center of his being. When Napoleon became first consul of the French Republic in 1799, he had one of his successful battles turned into a national commemoration. Trump has put his name on buildings and institutions and lusted after the Nobel Peace Prize. When Napoleon became emperor in 1804, he bestowed titles and riches on his family and supporters. Trump has enriched himself and his family.

Trump, like Hegel’s world-historical individuals, has ignored or repudiated “sacred interests” including the Constitution and its checks and balances. He tried to overturn the 2020 election. He shut down or fired leaders of independent agencies that Congress created. He fabricated pretexts for patently illegal actions by invoking laws that were intended for entirely different purposes — for instance, citing the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, intended to root out French insurrectionists, to justify deporting Venezuelans to a foreign prison without a hearing. His actions — which have included calling Somali immigrants “garbage” and belittling a female reporter as “piggy” — have been, in Hegel’s parlance, “obnoxious” and deserving of “moral reprehension.”

When Caesar vanquished his enemies, Hegel wrote, they “had the form of the constitution, and the power conferred by an appearance of justice, on their side.” Like Caesar, Trump sees himself as above ordinary morality or law. In the wake of his invasion of Venezuela, The New York Times asked Trump if he saw any limits on his global use of power. “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,” he responded. “I don’t need international law.” This willingness to defy law and morality, and to pursue power and glory relentlessly, has been integral to world-historical individuals — and to their ability to detonate outworn ideas and institutions.

Jon B. Judis, Trump as Alexander the Great A Theory That Explains Iran (And Everything Else)

Don’t you dare dream that this is praise of Trump. It’s resignation that the vandal has well and truly broken priceless things for the foreseeable future. We’re not going back to normal any time in my lifetime.

Immune

I do not think that the U.S. Supreme Court decreed Presidential criminal immunity as some special favor to Donald Trump just because several of them were appointed by him and several others were appointed by other Republican Presidents. I think it would have decreed the same for any other President.

Note, too, that for the Court to make such a decree, it had to have a case before it wherein the President of the United States was facing criminal charges. Presidents numbered 1 through 44 didn’t get criminal immunity because nobody was charging them with crime(s).

I hope you understand that. Courts don’t reach out and decide things willy-nilly. They decide cases.

But what’s done is done. Now surrounded by a combination of cunning, conscienceless men and bootlickers, Trump is emboldened to take vengeance on his enemies and otherwise to take full advantage of Presidential immunity.

Introspection

In this worn, domesticated world of ours, there are few truly pristine wildernesses, remote regions where no man has gone before, places unseen by human eyes and unexamined by human exploration. And so I suppose we should be especially grateful for the undiscovered country that is Marc Andreessen’s soul.

As you may have heard, a couple of weeks ago, the billionaire investor went on a podcast and said that he aims to have “zero” introspection in his life, or at least “as little as possible.” He added that “I’ve found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It’s a real problem.”

This whole introspection thing, Andreessen asserted, is a folly invented in the 20th century by people such as Sigmund Freud: “If you go back 400 years ago, it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective.”

After the podcast aired, he doubled down on X: “It is 100% true that great men and women of the past were not sitting around moaning about their feelings. I regret nothing.”

As you can imagine, the internet erupted. Andreessen had unwittingly stumbled into one of the great cultural rivalries of modern times. On the one side are the business-world paragons who consider themselves decisive manly men of action who don’t waste time on girly things like feelings, self-doubt, and personal reflection. On the other are the humanists who look at Andreessen as just the sort of monster capitalism can create: emotionally impoverished, spiritually inert, arrogant, utilitarian, blind to all knowledge but empirical data, and voraciously materialistic.

David Brooks, Marc Andreessen’s Mistake.

Sunday and Monday, Thomas Chatterton Williams (The Very Powerful Men Who Think Introspection Is Dumb) and Brooks had very different articles on Andreesen’s comment about introspection in the Atlantic. I’d give Brooks the edge on subtlety, but Williams gets points for taking Andreesen’s philosophy into the White House to see how figures measure up — stopping just short of the President himself (but nailing Steven Miller). The number of very powerful men (no women were indicted) who think “move fast and break things” is veriest truth is scary.

Without even a hint about the President, Brooks equips the reader with the concept of low emotional granularity, where there are, in its purest form, just two poles: I_like and I don’t like. We must by all means avoid thinking that by gaining a name, we gain a solution, but low emotional granularity seems to me to play a major role in decisions coming out of the Oval Office.

I didn’t need Williams or Brooks to know that Andreesen was flat out wrong about the history of introspection, and my list of historic figures overlapped theirs. Beyond that, I commend both articles to you for their respective high merits. They’re not very long.

“Low emotional granularity,” unfortunately, is too opaque for a good epithet.

Shorts

On immigration, the president’s commendable achievements on closing the southern border have been overshadowed by the harsh, questionable, and counterproductive interior deportation strategy. (Michael Warren, Trump Has Brought Nothing But Chaos—And for What?)
[C][onversion is a different thing, sociologically and personally, than what you might call the ordinary transmission of an established faith. (Ross Douthat)
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain. (John Adams in the 1780s)
How to unlock the potential of AI for those in the field of education and the formation of human beings: throw the key into the middle of the ocean. (Fr. Jon Jordan)
Expressive activity includes presenting a curated compilation of speech originally created by others. (Justice Elena Kagan)
[U]ltimately I would rather go down with my integrity intact than “win” through the vice of incivility. (Jon D. Schaff, We Are Not Enemies: What an Iranian Film Reveals About Vengeance and Civility)
It’s a new world; it’s the same Constitution. (Chief Justice John Roberts responding to the Solicitor General’s argument that “we’re in a new world where 8 billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who’s a U.S. citizen” in the birthright citizenship case on April 1. Via the Advisory Opinions podcast; I think I’ve seen slight variants in the quotes.)
“The main characteristic of an alpha male wolf,” Rick says, “is a quiet confidence, quiet self-assurance. You know what you want to do; you know what’s best for the pack. You’re very comfortable with that. You have a calming effect. Point is, alpha males are surprisingly nonaggressive, because they don’t need to be.” (Carl Safina, Beyond Words, which I have not read but was suggested to me by Readwise.)
I am a big fan of the law. I like the faint, wheezing sound it makes as I trample on it, and the mountains of litigation that result. (Alexandra Petri satire on Trump’s personal attendance at the birthright citizenship oral arguments Wednesday.)
It is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences. (The narrator in Middlemarch. That narrator’s pretty sharp.)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot

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 my favorite no-algorithm social medium.