Saturday 8/8/26

Legalia

Ten Commandments at the Statehouse?

About 25 years ago, a court order barred the monument from the Indiana Statehouse. After a shift in case law, a federal judge agreed to reopen the case in late May, setting off a renewed legal fight over whether the Ten Commandments can be returned to the Capitol’s grounds.

Gov. Mike Braun and Attorney General Todd Rokita, both Republicans, want the monument restored. They argue it reflects the nation’s history and traditions.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana opposes the move, saying it would violate the First Amendment’s religious freedom clause.

Now, the monument’s fate depends on the federal court system’s appetite to specify what it means to maintain a separation of church and state under modern precedent.

Cate Charron, Indianapolis Star USA TODAY NETWORK (likely paywall)

I’m oddly neutral on the display, though I would have opposed it a few decades ago. That’s what I feel. What follows is “let’s write about it to see what we think.”

I’ve never wanted to thrust Christianity of any sort, strong or debased, into the public square with government’s imprimatur. I’ve moved from opposition to neutrality, then, because I’ve lost even the muscle memory of the Ten Commandments being a key part of Christianity rightly practiced. Underlying that, I think, is that I’m a Realist on the Ten Commandments rather than a Nominalist; the “second tablet” in particular is written on the heart, at least while the heart remains tender. Its value does not so lie in God’s sheer command that God could have as well commanded, rather than forbidden, things like murder, theft and adultery.

So I don’t see the monument as a distinctly Christian or even Judeo-Christian thing, but as an instantiation of American history and traditions, and the Ten Commandments inscribed on the monument as part of what C.S. Lewis called the Tao.

Why not support it then? Because we are, as Ross Douthat said, a nation of heretics, and the Commendments are still, as a matter of American folk-religion at least, “Christian.” My reflexive (but earned) suspicion Todd Rokita (a less blatant version of Texas’ Ken Paxton) led me circuitously to realize that the people he’s pandering to will chortle at this monument as fresh proof that we’re a “Christian nation,” because in their muscle memories the Ten Commandments are distinctively a part of Christianity rightly practiced. We’ve already got quite enough of that kind of high-sulfur Christian Nationalist coal in Newcastle.

It has happened

It was inevitable that DOJ lawyers mandated from the White House to do dumb, dishonest and disreputable things would cease getting any benefit of the doubt (in this context, “presumption of regularity”) from judges, and that inevitability has arrived. Federal Judges now challenge and even mock government lawyers’ representations to the court.

My main consolation is that there ought to be a bunch of idealistic lawyers ready to join up at the DOJ and District Attorney offices as soon as the leadership from the top is no longer trying to corrupt even the legal system. The corruption of DOJ is not a legacy that will last, I believe, hope and pray.

Now our President probably thinks that he’s just doing openly what all his predecessors have done surreptitiously, and that the courts are just picking on him. But that’s what happens when you’re 80 years old and have been pursuing personal gain and sexual conquest and limelight and power all your life: you think everyone else is just like you (only infinitely weaker).

Heck, Frodo’s one advantage over the consummately evil Sauron was that Sauron could not imagine anyone who possessed the One Ring actually seeking to destroy it and its power.

Short Circuits

I get a Friday summary of U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decisions from the Institute for Justice. Their pithy summaries can be pretty funny:

When you order food through apps like DoorDash, Grubhub, or Uber Eats, the app gets all sorts of useful consumer data, but the restaurant preparing the food only gets your first name, last initial, and the order contents. New York City thinks that’s unfair because of course they do, so they require the apps to share all the customer information with any restaurant that asks. The apps sue, alleging the law violates the First Amendment. Second Circuit: Correct. Concurrence: I just want to point out that the law is naked economic favoritism toward restaurants, which isn’t a substantial gov’t interest.
The Supreme Court has famously (and somewhat dubiously) held that the design on state-issued vanity license plates is “government speech” to which the First Amendment does not apply. But what about the character combination on vanity plates like, say, “FTP&ATF”? Fourth Circuit: Private speech to which the First Amendment applies.

Iran War

Both of the following items are via Rod Dreher. My doubts about Rod’s judgment are at an all-time high (though that may “just be me”), but he publishes so very, very much that he’s bound to get a few things right (or to quote people who get it right).

It has been a while since I filed a clipping under “New World Order,” but that’s where this one fits. We’re no longer undisputed, omnipotent top dog.

At the strategic level, it’s over and we lost

Five months into this conflict, a sober analysis reveals a truth that Washington’s foreign policy establishment refuses to stomach: America’s war against Iran has already been lost at the strategic level. Nothing we do from this point forward can reverse that outcome. All we can do now is limit the damage — or refuse to acknowledge reality and make the cost of failure worse. The roots of our strategic failure lie in a fundamental miscalculation of Iranian leverage.

Daniel L. Davis in Stars & Stripes of all places.

How our loss combines with our past wins to demean us

We are in a pickle. And because we did gain so much strength and we punished so many people in the world, and we destroyed so many civilizations in the world—I mean that—we’re now hated as much as we are looked at as being crazy. And I don’t know how you compensate for that while you try to fix enough so that at least you can go out with a fairly decent—maybe something like England went out after the ’56 Suez crisis. Not a really good example, but nonetheless it’s the end of empire. England had started—Britain had started—going down long before that. But I don’t know. I don’t know how you put this in geopolitical terms, in geostrategic terms, in inexorable power-shift terms, and deal with it with what we have in Washington right now. I don’t know how you can take it apart. He should have been impeached. He should have been relieved of his duties. He should have been frog-marched out of Washington. Indeed, he probably should be in jail, but he’s not. Which, on a lower scale, demonstrates the inadequacy of our structure right now and the feebleness of our structure, as well as its having atrophied over the 250 years it’s been in place.

Excerpt from a recent interview with Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (italics added)

Miscellany

“Cultural appropriation” is a dumb name for acknowledging indebtedness

I can choose someone from another century or continent as my creative ancestor. I can imagine myself as an heir to Dante or Miles Davis or Marcel Proust or Virginia Woolf or Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Some people will tell you that this is cultural appropriation. But I don’t think they grasp how indebted we all are to the great creators of the past. If we tried to cut ourselves off from them, we would lose all vitality and purpose in our lives. This is the most fruitful way of owning a work of art. All other ways fall far short of it.

Ted Gioia in Image Journal.

Why now this “socialist” surge

Socialism’s most enthusiastic promoters are quick and clever—comparatively well-educated, very online. Their talent lies primarily in media, having been immersed in it from birth—the internet, its apps, its entertainment and information flow. They know all about how people get and absorb a feeling, an impression; they know how to produce a sensation, as opposed to a thought. One of the great tricks in life is to have a talent suited to your times, and they do.

I am sorry to say they never strike me with their warmth, as, say, your great-uncle Billy was warm when he spoke about the Industrial Workers of the World. Today’s socialists strike me as colder, less human, fiercer and occasionally sociopathic. In general, they appear to have an idea of history rather than attachments to existing people and institutions. Most strike me not as people who love America and wish to make it better, but people ready to exploit its freedoms to build a movement that if successful would transform America’s fundamental nature. It will no longer be the freedom place but something else, and more common.

This isn’t happening in our politics only because people “hate the status quo” and “want change.” Americans always hate the status quo and want change. I believe what we’re seeing traces back to these factors:

A voter who is 25 was in grade school during the 2008 economic crash, and saw everything—frightened parents, lost jobs. In the years after, he saw bailouts and no one on Wall Street paying a price. It lessened his allegiance to the free-market economic system.

A voter who is 25 also sees AI rising, and wonders if the economy as it exists today has a place for him. Will he be able to afford a house someday? Widespread home ownership brings a feeling of investment, of stability and satisfaction. What does its absence bring?

The Cold War has receded as a living memory. The enforced communism and socialism of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact was a disaster—shortages, drabness, economic lifelessness. Censorship, secret police, all the bad things big unaccountable governments bring. That was long ago. “Socialism” now is a dream of Scandinavia—national healthcare, generous benefits, equal enjoyment of resources.

As religion recedes, politics takes its place. The young have been educated within a general framework of assumptions and language of the left—structures of power, oppressor groups, critical theory, intersectionality.

…

At a Gaullist campaign rally in 1968, [André] Malraux put his finger on a weakness of conservative economic thought. “ ‘Capitalism’ does not carry us in its heart,” he said. By inference, it’s also hard to carry capitalism in your heart. It isn’t a great belief, only an economic system. Socialism is a belief, and it summons feeling. Capitalism is a thing of reason, a disadvantage in an age of sensation.

Peggy Noonan

Peggy Noonan is a voice who generally sees humanity where others see demons. This was one of those times.

Sacrilege

I also began to understand why the American culture wars involved so many battles over sacrilege. Is a flag just a piece of cloth, which can be burned as a form of protest? Or does each flag contain within it something nonmaterial such that when protesters burn it, they have done something bad (even if nobody were to see them do it)? When an artist submerges a crucifix in a jar of his own urine, or smears elephant dung on an image of the Virgin Mary, do these works belong in art museums? Can the artist simply tell religious Christians, “If you don’t want to see it, don’t go to the museum”? Or does the mere existence of such works make the world dirtier, more profane, and more degraded?

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind.

The book has been around for a while. Do our culture wars still fit this pattern — taking offense that the other side is profaning something sacred?

What are the sacred cows of (in broad strokes) American progressives versus American conservatives these days?

Willful ignorance

It was the easiest, silliest con of all time. His story began to unravel with simple plagiarism claims, which I didn’t care about last week because all sociology professors just copy-paste their fake studies, back and forth. For me, it doesn’t matter if “A history of the London fashion scene through a transracial lens, 1914–1916” was plagiarized because it actually doesn’t matter at all. But this week things escalated: First, it looks like Arday truly just invented his research, and quite clumsily (read this from a University of Toronto professor digging through it, or this from the UK Times). Then it snowballed. People started looking into his super believable bio: He says he has autism and didn’t speak until he was 11, then at 18 he learned to read and write and went to university. Seems odd. Kind of miraculous. The claims go on. He says he did volunteer work overseas for a particular water charity (the charity says it never sends volunteers abroad). He says he ran 600 miles between Edinburgh and London in six days. Oh! Also that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days, adding that he did the last nine marathons on a broken leg. Right. Prior to his Cambridge appointment, he claimed he was a visiting professor at the University of Glasgow, Ohio State University, and an honorary professor at Durham University. All of these institutions have denied that he held such positions. The man is freestyling extracurriculars. The list goes on. Was he even a mute? How much of this is a lie? And how come I had never heard of Arday, who is apparently one of the most accomplished athletes of all time?

When people started to question all this, the defenses were robust, with a group of famous professors, politicians, and other luminaries writing indignantly: “We stand in unwavering solidarity with Professor Arday. We call on universities not only to defend academic freedom and robust scholarship, but also to confront racism wherever it manifests itself, whether overtly or through persistent attempts to discredit exceptional Black academics.” I’m not sure you want to stake all of black academics on Jason Arday and these broken-leg marathons.

Nellie Bowles

I didn’t want to pay any more attention to this story (on which I hadn’t blogged before), but the stupidity of Arday’s defenders breathed fresh life into it.

Valedictory

[W]atching this crisis unfold, I find that I’ve lost my sense of which contemporary worldview is most in need of criticism or opposition, where the good guys and bad guys are. Each major faction seems potentially dangerous, tempted toward the dark side in some unique way, contested or cross-pressured to a degree that makes me uncertain where the side of the angels really lies.

…

Once I would have imagined a valedictory essay offering some stirring brief for religious conservatism, some last foray into the territory where I was most likely to be in disagreement with my readers. But I don’t think that quite fits the moment.

Instead, I’ll express — along with incalculable gratitude to The Times itself, my colleagues and editors — a hope that I have contributed illumination. I hope my writing has added something to your understanding of America’s complexity, the world’s uncertain future and the strangeness of our times.

Ross Douthat‘s final column for the Grey Lady.

Artificial Intelligence

A conundrum

AI hasn’t made any money yet. And I’ve been hearing, repeatedly, that that new AI searches don’t automatically decrease the losses, bringing them close to a profit. That is to say, the marginal cost to the AI company of responding to another chat or project does not go down.

This is a major reason why I would not be surprised at a bursting of the AI bubble (and why I might be a NIMBY about data centers that might be left broke, empty, rusting).

The economics of this puzzled me, so I asked Claude (AI, for all my readers in the distant future after AI collapses) about it:

Most businesses improve their profit margin with additional customers until they hit a maximum. Then they must add staff or equipment or something and suffer higher marginal costs for a while in their new growth toward greater overall profits.

But I’ve been hearing that AI works differently. It sounds as if a hypothetical AI with, say, 100 users experiences more than 10% increased costs by adding 10 more customers.

Is that true? Why?

Turns out I was wrong that 10% more customers adds more than 10% costs, but it does add about 10% — not less.

I’ll very briefly quote the nut of Claude’s reason (I generally don’t quote AI):

Each inference (query) consumes GPU/TPU compute, and each unit of compute costs money. Add 10% more users making queries of similar length, and you add roughly 10% more compute cost—at least at constant hardware efficiency.

If you want more detail, go ask your own AI; this isn’t a tech blog. But maybe for you, like me, this answer’s enough for now. If you’re losing money on every sale, you can’t make up for it by higher volume.

The AI future (if AI survives the present)

I wonder sometimes how AI has changed the practice of law since my retirement.

I was always “the tech” guy within my firm’s four wall (we eventually hired more methodical outside IT support), and I might have been on AI as well.

But I hear theorizing and actual stories about AI turning its human users toward machine-like behavior — for instance, juggling multiple AI Agents (Agents are different than Chatbots) that are performing various tasks with need for human input at frequent intervals. Leaving your agent paused waiting for input is, ahem, sub-optimal.

That indeed sounds dehumanizing, but I can’t say yea or nay to it being the eventuality of AI.

Shorts

[I]f you ask me why I robbed an old lady, I could reply: ‘I needed the money’, ‘I had just watched a violent video’, ‘I inherited my dad’s psychopathic tendencies’, ‘I was high on crystal meth’, ‘I heard a voice tell me to do it’, ‘I was brought up in a subculture where it was considered normal to steal’, ‘the government cut my welfare payments’, ‘my serotonin levels were depleted’, and so on. What counts as a possible cause depends on the context of the question. Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things.
He’s gilding everything: The aging and patinated statues of D.C. are getting regilded. This pair of statues hadn’t been touched since the 1970s, and now they glow, which my Gen-Z translators tell me means shine. Seeing the results here, I’m actually surprised this wasn’t a term-one priority for Trump. By the time the man leaves office the Lincoln Memorial is going to be bedazzled. He is President Liberace, the first gay leader of this nation.(Nellie Bowles)
When I look at the biographies of recently-victorious “Democratic Socialist” candidates, I regain my love for the brilliant distillation “luxury beliefs.” (Tipsy)
Charisma can be just as repellent as it is attractive, so it usually baffles or disgusts anyone not under its thrall. (Molly Worthen, Charisma Rules the World)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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?”

Jonah Goldberg

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.