Author: readerjohn

I am a retired lawyer and an Orthodox Christian, living in a collapsing civilization, the modern West. There are things I'll miss when it's gone. There are others I won't. I tend to write about both.

It’s Monday somewhere

Culture

Excellent interview of Paul Kingsnorth

I’m a big fan of Paul Kingsnorth, reading and listening to a lot of his last two years of opining. At least as regards his conversion to Christianity, Gavin Ashenden’s inteview of him seems unsurpassed. Highly recommended.

Golf

I’m glad that I’ve always hated golf. It makes hating golf today easier.

Nick Catoggio on the PGA-LIV merger.

Vision Pro

The presentation was both jaw-droppingly impressive and oddly underwhelming. The Vision is stuffed with innovations that eclipse every other headset on the market. Clunky joysticks are out, hand gestures and eyeball tracking are in. Instead of legless avatars, users get photorealistic likenesses, whose eyes also appear on the outside of the glasses to make wearing them less antisocial. The product is dusted with Apple’s user-friendly design magic.

Yet the company had strangely uninspiring suggestions for what to do with its miraculous device. Look at your photos—but bigger! Use Microsoft Teams—but on a virtual screen! Make FaceTime video calls—but with your friend’s window in space, not the palm of your hand! Apple’s vision mainly seemed to involve taking 2D apps and projecting them onto virtual screens (while charging $3,499 for the privilege). Is that it?

Apple’s Vision Pro is an incredible machine. Now to find out what it is for

Media Culture

… media culture is simply a redo of high school where some of the sad and lonely kids have tried to invert the popularity pyramid and become the new bullies.

Freddie de Boer on mainstream media’s personal antipathy toward Bari Weiss.

Reeking hypocrisy

So: Washington and NATO … insist that Ukraine is a sovereign nation that has the right to join a great power alliance hostile to next-door Russia, and if Russia doesn’t like it, too bad. Also: Cuba is a sovereign nation that has no right to cooperate with a great power hostile to nearby America, and if the Cubans go forward with this, there will be consequences.

Do you not see the reeking hypocrisy of this? Do you not recognize the quagmire that the US foreign policy establishment, both Republican and Democratic, has led us into? They are dragging us into world war. Believe me, the rest of the world recognizes the arrogance of all this.

Rod Dreher

I agree with Dreher except I don’t know that there will be world war. That will depend on how badly our “defense” industries want it.

Long time since I read anything she wrote

Somewhere in the media right now (probably MSNBC), someone is talking about Dylann Roof, the monster who murdered nine people at a black church in South Carolina. That happened eight years and three presidents ago. But mass shootings this year keep mysteriously disappearing from the news.

      January: two mass shootings of Asians in California just days apart, including the deadliest shooting in Los Angeles history. Eighteen killed in all. Gunmen in both cases Chinese immigrants, Huu Can Tran and Chunli Zhao.

      The end!

      February: Active shooter at Michigan State University kills three students, sends five to hospital. Gunman: Anthony Dwayne McRae, a 43-year-old black man.

      The end!

      March: mass shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, killing three 9-year-olds and three adults. Gunman: Audrey Elizabeth Hale, a transgender.

      The end!

      But she left a manifesto!

      Media: Go away. We’re not interested.

      April: horrific shooting at a 16-year-old’s birthday party in Dadeville, Alabama, leaving four dead — three of them teenagers — and wounding 32 others. Arrested: Johnny Letron Brown, Willie George Brown Jr., Wilson LaMar Hill, Travis McCullough and Tyreese McCullough.

      The end!

      Last day of April: slaughter of five family members, including a 9-year-old boy, all shot execution-style, in Texas. Arrested: an illegal from Mexico.

      The end!

      Would covering stories like these turn CNN into a “right-wing” network? Only if facts are “right-wing.”

Ann Coulter on the woes of CNN.

Obituaries

Pat Robertson

I was surprised for two reasons to read a claim that the late Pat Robertson was a Baptist minister.

First, I was under the strong impression that he had no ordination as a clergyman an any denomination. But the New York Times delivered half the goods on that claim by recounting his resignation from Southern Baptist ministry in 1987 to run for President in 1988. The half they didn’t deliver was whether, having resigned, the Southern Baptist world or the evangelical world more broadly would still have considered him a “Reverend.” I doubt it; I’m pretty sure they don’t have anything like the Roman Catholic view that the character imprinted by ordination is forever (indelible).

Second, I would have suspected that if he did have ministerial credentials, it would have been in the Assemblies of God or another pentecostal denomination, because his television schtick so often veered off into very un-Baptist speaking in tongues, faith-healing, personal revelations and other woo-woo.

I never liked him or respected him (except in the sense that “the guy really knows how to monetize credulity”). The woo-woo made him seem creepy, because I doubted that he believed it. I probably was wrong, and wrong in a sense that says as much bad about me as about him.

He was consequential. Mainstream newsrooms may not have grokked him any more than I did, but it seems to me that he was mainstream within evangelicalism (by the time he was a big deal, I didn’t consider myself part of that mainstream and I could be wrong). So far as I know, he never was exposed in any scandal — unlike too many too many others, some of whom took me in to one degree or another.

May he rest in peace.

Putin’s real mom

Here’s kind of a fun obituary: Vera Putina claimed to be Vladimir Putin’s real mother.

I’m convinced in a low-stakes, not-worth-investigating-further sense. (I have been in “dirt-poor Mekheti,” by the way.) It has the distinct advantage of lending itself to “Putin’s a real bastard” jokes.

Legalia

When criminal justice delivers injustice

My subscription to Radley Balko’s Substack is set to expire, but I finally got something worth sharing from it:

When the criminal justice system goes terribly wrong, it’s rarely the fault of a single bad actor. A wrongly conviction typically includes errors or malfeasance by police, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and the courts, not to mention possible contributions from crime lab analysts and other expert witnesses. Even a bad shootings by a single police officer are usually the product of institutional failure. Was the officer trained properly? What was the officer’s personnel history? Should the officer have been fired for previous misconduct? Does the police department use an early warning system to flag potentially abusive or trigger-happy officers? If not, why not? If so, why wasn’t that officer flagged?

A sentinel event review, or SER, is an attempt to dig into and correct these institutional failures. The idea is to bring in all the relevant parties to get at the root of what caused an outcome that everyone agrees is unacceptable.

The inspiration for the idea comes from two fields outside of criminal justice: the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigations of plane and train crashes, and the morbidity and mortality (M&M) reports hospitals conduct after medical errors, such as amputating the wrong limb or administering the wrong medication.

NTSB and M&M reviews don’t look to blame on individual actors. Because of this, they tend to get better participation from the parties and institutions involved. But the reviews don’t confer immunity onto anyone, either. If there are individuals who merit blame and discipline, they can still be held accountable or liable by parallel investigations by other authorities.

The aim of a sentinel event review is to figure out what went wrong and why — to get at the systemic errors that allow catastrophic events to happen, and to make policy recommendations to reduce the chances those events will happen again ….

Affirmative Action

When majorities discriminate against their own kind, as largely white universities did in the early days of affirmative action, it may not feel like a “bad” kind of discrimination. It may not feel like discrimination at all. It may even feel like magnanimity. But the biracial historical context that used to tug at consciences, pushing admissions officers (and the parents of rejected students) to a more indulgent understanding of affirmative action, is gone.

After half a century of high immigration, the United States has become a multiracial country and affirmative action has turned into a different kind of program. Building “diverse” student bodies now requires treating Asian overrepresentation as a problem to be solved.

Christopher Caldwell, Trump’s Justices Didn’t Doom Affirmative Action. Demography Did

Bad Spaniels

Jack Daniels wins big in challenge to spoofing “Bad Spaniels” dog toy. Legally correct, I grudgingly suppose, but I was amused and now I’m disappointed.

SCOTUS

The other Justices try their level best to apply longstanding doctrine to complicated cases. But Justice Thomas, at every opportunity, starts from first principles, and urges us to reconsider everything. And these opinions will ripple out for years to come.

Josh Blackman, Justice Thomas’s Dissent in Health and Hospital Corp. of Marion County v. Talevski

Pride Month

A Pall on Pride

I detest Pride Month, the High Holy Days of the LGBT+ Religion, to which we’re all now expected to bend the knee.

There. I said it.

But when I saw gay NYT columnist Charles Blow declare that “Yes, We’re in an L.G.B.T.Q. State of Emergency” because “This year, there is a pall over Pride,” I just had to read it. And I’ve got to say that it’s just as stupid as I expected.

There’s been a notable rise in the number of anti-L.G.B.T.Q. bills since 2018, and that number has recently accelerated, with the 2023 state legislative year being the worst on record.

According to the Human Rights Campaign, in 2023 there have been more than 525 such bills introduced in 41 states, with more than 75 bills signed into law as of June 5. In Florida — the state that became known for its “Don’t Say Gay” law — just last month, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation that banned gender transition care for minors and prohibited public school employees from asking children their preferred pronouns.

…

For that reason, on Tuesday, for the first time in its more than 40-year history, the Human Rights Campaign declared a state of emergency for L.G.B.T.Q. people in the United States.

This is a reason why the expression “first world problems” still bites.

The Human Rights Campaign, which should have shut down after it accomplished its goal with the Obergefell decision, has gone on to grift the transgender cause instead. It has all the credibility of co-grifter Southern Poverty Law Project’s listing of hate groups — namely: none whatsoever. But mainstream media treat both HRC and SPLC as if they were bona fide arbiters.

Cet animal est tres mechant; quand on l’attaque, il se defend. I cannot endorse all that cet animal does to se defend, but I understand the impulse to draw lines and reclaim territory occupied by extremist sexual revolutionaries. And I understand that war is always ugly.

National Emergency

Andrew Sullivan isn’t buying what Charles Blow is selling either:

For the first time since it was founded in 1980, the Human Rights Campaign — the largest group claiming to represent gay men and lesbians and trans people in the United States — has declared a “national emergency.”

They didn’t do this when the federal government refused to act quickly against AIDS in the mid-1980s; they didn’t do it as over 300,000 gay men subsequently died; they didn’t do it when Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, or when George W Bush endorsed the Federal Marriage Amendment. But now that gay men and lesbians have won the civil right to marry in all 50 states, and transgender Americans have the full protection of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and public support for marriage equality is over 70 percent, we are in a “national emergency.”

Why? Because some states have drawn the line at experimental sex-changes for children with gender dysphoria, and removed materials rooted in critical queer and gender theory from public school libraries from kindergarten upwards. That’s the “emergency.”

… [W]hat planet are these people on?

Andrew Sullivan.

(I was relieved to see that Sullivan shares my general impression of Charles Blow, this particular column aside: “Blow is not the sharpest of tacks.”)

What’s up?

The agonising wait is finally over. At last we can rejoice. Yes, June is here, bringing with it the occasional bout of warmer weather, barbecues, and of course Pride Month—a chance for us all to turn our attention to gay, lesbian, and bisexual rights, which have been completely off the agenda for the past 11 months. The suspense must be killing you to discover what the rainbow community has been up to during our last trip around the sun? Let me put you out of your misery: the LGBT acronym continues to grow, as more and more sexual identities decide they’d like to be part of a tiny, oppressed minority.

Frank Haviland, ‘2SLGBTQIA+’: What’s in an Acronym?

Trump

No way out but through

Trump needs no reason to defy the law and obstruct justice; he is not some criminal genius, or devious plotter. He is just characterologically incapable of obeying the rule of law if his ego ever gets a smidgen in the way.

That’s why he leaned on Ukraine to prosecute Biden; it’s why he refused to accept a legitimate election defeat; it’s why he fomented an insurrection; it’s why he simply could not follow the rules for classified documents; and could not cooperate properly with the FBI. Any system where he is just one among equals — even if those equals are other presidents — is one he simply does not and cannot comprehend. He has to violate any system based on equality with his peers, or any system he cannot fully control. Without that, he disintegrates. That’s why he is, and always has been, unfit for office in a democratic system under the rule of law.

…

I’d hoped we could find a way around this. I was eager for an alternative Republican, or a younger Democrat to emerge. But Trump and his enemies won’t let us move past him, and he has now all but secured the nomination of his party, and set up yet another showdown for the soul of the republic in 2024. Up against him: a frail, meandering octogenarian whom 70 percent of Americans don’t want to run again.

Andrew Sullivan

Note that those first two paragraphs are not just colorful invective. They are a colorful indictment on ephiphenomena of Trump’s narcissism, his fundamental disqualification for the Presidency.

Trumpiest “stupid and avoidable” scandal yet

“In my administration, I’m going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information. No one will be above the law.”

— Trump August 18, 2016 (Charlotte NC rally)

…

Superficially, the Stormy Daniels mess that got him indicted in Manhattan is a “Trumpier” scandal than concealing sensitive government information. There’s infidelity, a porn star, hush money, all the sordid, embarrassing things you’d expect from a guy who spent his adulthood jungled up with the sleaze merchants at the National Enquirer.

The documents scandal is Trumpier, though, because of how stupid and avoidable it was. “Mr. Trump brought these charges upon himself by not only taking classified documents, but by refusing to simply return them when given numerous opportunities to do so,” Mitt Romney said today, succinctly and correctly. The feds spent more than a year cajoling him to hand over the hundreds of sensitive documents he’d taken, an indulgence they wouldn’t have granted to anyone else in American life. He resisted anyway, per the reporting, and may even have instructed aides to hide documents on the day before the FBI visited Mar-a-Lago. He’s now facing at least one count of obstruction of justice.

Why did he take this insane risk, exposing himself to criminal jeopardy that could lead to him dying in prison? The most compelling theory is that … he just didn’t want to give the documents back. He’s never distinguished between the perks of public office and his personal interests, an authoritarian quirk that sets him apart even from wannabes like Ron DeSantis. He kept the documents because he wanted them; they’re “cool,” as he reportedly put it in newly revealed audio recorded in July 2021.

Nick Cattogio

The Charges and the Politics

Trump has offered several competing explanations for what he did and why he did it. That makes me suspect he’s guilty. If I’m accused of robbing a bank and I say, in no particular order, “I couldn’t have robbed it, I wasn’t there”; “I was there but I had nothing to do with the robbery”; “what happened wasn’t a robbery and lots of other people did what I did”; the “FBI is framing me”; and “as president I had total authority to take money out of that bank,” I don’t think I have to take any of your denials very seriously because they contradict each other. Trump has floated versions of all of these, from “they planted evidence,” to “of course I did it because I can.”

…

Sen. Josh Hawley, America’s self-proclaimed champion of “manhood,” responded to the news last night: “If the people in power can jail their political opponents at will, we don’t have a republic.”

Hawley, a graduate of Yale Law School, where he was the head of the Federalist Society, presumably knows the difference between text and subtext. On the text, he’s right. If the people in power could jail their political opponents “at will” you wouldn’t be able to say we have a republic. The subtext, however, isn’t merely asinine, it’s dangerously asinine. 

Peruse the newspapers: You’ll find nothing about Donald Trump being put in jail. You know why? Well, because he hasn’t been and he’s not about to be (and I’m agnostic that he should be, even if proven guilty in a court of law). More importantly, the people in power can’t put Trump in jail “at will.” Trump has to have his day in court. The state has to bring evidence. It has to cite relevant law. A jury and judge have to be persuaded. That’s the rule of law. That’s what makes us a republic, as Hawley claims to understand the word. But that’s the opposite of what Hawley wants you to think is happening. He wants you to think due process and the application of law aren’t happening and that he is one of the last honest men—along with Donald Trump—in a banana republic.

…

Let’s take the Hillary Clinton talking point at face value. She wasn’t charged with a crime and that shows that there’s a double standard for Democrats and Republicans. Let’s stipulate—not that difficult a stipulation—that she should have been. Okay, so does that mean no Republican should ever be charged with a crime, too? Do you think that if one bank robber avoids prosecution for political reasons, all bank robbers—or your favorite bank robbers—should be exempt from prosecution? In other words, the people shouting “banana republic!” aren’t against banana republics, they just want a banana republic on their terms. 

And they want this for what? Donald Trump? What the f— is wrong with you people?

…

It all reminds me of the parable of the drowning man. 

Imagine there was a political afterlife for Republican politicians. They get to the Pearly Gates and say to God, “Why did you let Donald Trump kill my political career?” God might reply: “Oh my Me! What are you talking about? I sent you the Access Hollywood tape, a porn star, two impeachments and a bunch of indictments, and you refused to take the lifeline.”

Jonah Goldberg

I thought Jonah’s colleague Sarah Isgur did a good job of describing the political quandary, and some ways out, for the rest of the GOP presidential field, as part of Indictment Watch: Trump Charged in Classified Docs Probe.

“Closet normals” in the GOP

From the dawn of the Trump age, I’ve argued that the GOP has been full of “closet normals,” or people who know that Trump is unfit for the job but refuse to say so publicly or do anything about it. Well, that’s not Christie anymore. Most of the candidates are running as closet normals, willing to put a toe or maybe a whole foot outside the door. Christie is running fully out of the closet. 

Think of it this way: Imagine if Christie were willing to let me vent my frustrations at him and I did so, reading him the riot act. And he responded, “Okay, what do you think I should do about it?” I might say something like, “tell the truth about the guy” or “go after him full-tilt.” Well, he’s doing that. I don’t know if it’s mostly penance or ambition—I have to assume it’s both—but he’s the one GOP candidate willing to deliver the full indictment.

Jonah Goldberg

“Normal” in “closet normal” seems to mean “craven careerist, who loves being in power more than he/she loves truth.”

Will Trump’s judge monkeywrench the case against him?

There has been a suggestion that the Federal Judge hearing the classified documents case against Trump is a partisan hack — a Trump appointee in 2020 who already committed pretty obvious reversible error in Trump’s favor in a related case.

Attorney Ken White (“Popehat”) is very concerned that she may monkey-wrench the case against Trump, but still thinks it should have been brought. Among his reasons for proceeding even if the judge (who fairly predictably was going to get the case) is extremely biased in favor of Trump:

[S]ome judges will always be partisan, and some politicians will seek to appoint or elect partisan judges. It’s not fair. But nobody promised you it would be fair. Deciding not to prosecute because of the risk of biased judges cedes justice to them and also relieves them of the consequences of being biased — public opinion, opinion of their colleagues, reputation, and legacy. It lets them be biased cost-free. If you confront bias, and force judges to be biased in the daylight, it’s harder for them, and social and cultural factors may deter them.

I hope Popehat’s fears prove unfounded. I’m very proud that Judges appointed by Trump stood firm against his post-election bullshit in 2020 and early 2021, and I’m hopeful that the same thing will happen again.

Irony intended.

For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

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.

All Saints, 2023

A Fatal Difficulty

The perennial temptation

Old-style blasphemy involved desecrating God because it was God who was sacred. Today’s blasphemy involves suggesting that man is not all-powerful, that he cannot create himself in any way he chooses.

Carl R. Trueman’s summary of Blasphemy Then and Now, a posting at First Things. I’m starting to think this is one of the most important things to keep ever in mind about some cultural tsunamis.

Everybody knows there is something very wrong with us, but not everybody knows what it is. If you would know, then go back to the beginning.

There we find the primordial sin: acting out our desire to be God.

…

Kingsnorth spoke about transhumanists openly talking about creating God. Martine Rothblatt, born Martin, says proudly that transgenderism is an onramp to transhumanism. We are reliving the drama of the Garden of Eden all over again. Kingsnorth said we have lost touch with biological reality, with nature, and knowledge of our own telos — that is, for what we were created.

Rod Dreher, channeling Paul Kingsnorth.

Did dispensationalism die when I wasn’t looking?!

Maybe I’ve been beating a dead horse in my criticisms of dispensationalism. But I have some concern here:

When our grandkids find themselves alone in the house on a summer afternoon, few will find themselves gripped by a sudden fear that everyone except them has been taken in the rapture. By itself, that is a good thing. The eclipse of an unbiblical and thoroughly annoying doctrine is hardly something to mourn. Yet Hummel is perceptive enough not to allow the reader such a hasty judgment. The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism obliquely but powerfully gestures toward a hole often found in the gospel that post-dispensationalist evangelicals believe today. “In the wake of dispensationalism’s collapse,” he writes in the epilogue, “the eschatological sight of the American church has blurred.” That means that our hope is less fervent, thinner, colder.

The emphasized part makes me crazy! It’s like an invitation to make up some new heresy to fill an eschatological “hole,” the old heresy having passed its sell-by date and been swept from the shelves (unnoticed by me).

If evangelicals need something to fill the eschatological-expectation hole, let me suggest (the first and maybe the last time I’ll commend syncretism) that they adopt Orthodox Bridegroom Matins for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of their Holy Week, which could use a bit of thickening up anyway.

Bridegroom Matins even has a catchy theme song:

Behold, the Bridegroom comes at midnight,
and blessed is the servant whom He shall find watching;
and again, unworthy is the servant whom He shall find heedless.
Beware, therefore, O my soul, do not be weighed down with sleep,
lest you be given up to death,
and lest you be shut out of the Kingdom!
But rouse yourself, crying: “Holy, holy, holy, are You, O our God!”
Through the Theotokos have mercy on us!

Voilà! Eschatological problem solved! And it’s better than some idiotic “prophecy conference” at maintaining memento mori and a sane expectation that “He shall come to judge the living and the dead.”

Shiny Happy People

Speaking of fundamentalists, for my many sins I did penance by watching Amazon Prime’s Shiny Happy People. I don’t give a rip about the hyper-fertile Duggars, but I had a brush with the series villain Bill Gothard in 1966-67 and wanted to catch up.

He was a weird little man then and appears to have gotten a bit weirder over the decades, right down to the absence of any grey hair and his ephebophilia.

His message was not a healthy Christian message. It’s not even biblical except in the formulaic sense of “proof-texts for nearly everything,” as if scripture-twisting weren’t a real thing.

I know a few people in the Protestant world who are devoted to IBLP, more fully known as Institute on Basic Life Principles — the organization that survives Gothard’s scandal and forced retirement — and I’m kind of worried about them now. Judging from a visit to the IBLP website’s “Statement of Faith,” Shiny Happy People is correct to classify IBLP as fundamentalist, though the line between fundamentalism and the evangelicalism of my youth is a fine one.

A few thoughts:

  • That I thought it necessary to check out IBLP for myself reflects how unpersuasive Shiny Happy People was at nailing down hard facts, preferring innuendo and the charges of critics, some of whom had no first-hand knowledge.
  • That IBLP feels it necessary to publish a roll-your-own statement of faith, eschewing the Nicene Creed and elevating its obsessions to creedal status, reflects how far removed it is from historic Christianity. (IBLP’s statement of faith is sorely lacking, too.)
  • That IBLP is “parachurch” means it can infiltrate most any Protestant denomination and makes it harder to unequivocally speak of it as a “cult” — though that label is tempting.

You could probably find better ways to spend three or four hours unless you have some compelling personal motivation (as did I) to watch this poorly-aimed shotgun blast toward unhealthily patriarchal fundamentalists.

Distress

The distress this insight speaks of was the beginning of my conscious Christian commitment, long ago (but not very far away):

To have offended God is more distressing than to be punished … If only we loved Christ as we should love Him, we would have known that to offend Him whom we love is more painful than hell.

St. John Chrysostom, Homily V on Romans 1, citing II Samuel 24:17.

Continuity

The primary aim of this book is to demonstrate the absolute continuity of ancient Israelite religion, the religion of the Second Temple, first-century Christianity, and the religious life preserved and practiced in the Orthodox Church …

Fr. Stephen DeYoung makes a bold claim. Something lured him out of a Reformed Protestant pulpit into Orthodoxy. It might merit investigation.

For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

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.

Thursday, 6/8/23

Politics of one sort or another

Plus ça change …

Metapolitics

I’m a pluralist. I don’t just mean in the sense that I think modern societies are too highly differentiated for them to be oriented toward a single highest good in the way some on the right (the so-called Integralists) like to imagine they were in the supposedly good old days of unified Catholic Europe during the medieval period. I am that kind of pluralist, but I’m also a pluralist in another and deeper sense, one that traces its lineage to the work of Isaiah Berlin, who deployed the term to describe the character of moral reality itself, regardless of the composition of any specific society.

Individual freedom from external constraint or coercion is an important human good. But what about other senses of liberty? Or fairness (proportional justice)? Or solidarity? Or loyalty? Or excellence? Or authority? Or creativity? Or sanctity? Or piety? There are many human goods, each worthy of pursuit. Devoting one’s life to one at the exclusion of others will undoubtedly have value, but it will also require the sacrifice of those other goods. That doesn’t mean we must embrace, affirm, and pursue all values equally. (Equality is itself a good the pursuit of which requires the sacrifice of other goods.) But it does mean that we should make our choices in full awareness of the sacrifices involved, and not deny the reality of the losses.

…

So the love of liberty has its place. The problem is that libertarianism overemphasizes it to the exclusion of other values, and often denies there is any important loss or tradeoff involved in doing so. (Yes, that’s a little ironic for thinkers who usually like to emphasize the need for tradeoffs in the context of fashioning government policy.)

Damon Linker

Sorta Politics

After the way he abased himself to secure the Speakership, I never would have thought Keven McCarthy would be able to get anything done:

Among the various reassessments of Kevin McCarthy following his successful debt ceiling negotiations, the one with the widest implications belongs to Matthew Continetti, who writes in The Washington Free Beacon that “McCarthy’s superpower is his desire to be speaker. He likes and wants his job.”

…

[P]art of what’s gone wrong with American institutions lately is the failure of important figures to regard their positions as ends unto themselves. Congress, especially, has been overtaken by what Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute describes as a “platform” mentality, where ambitious House members and senators treat their offices as places to stand and be seen — as talking heads, movement leaders, future presidents — rather than as roles to inhabit and opportunities to serve.

On the Republican side, this tendency has taken several forms, from Newt Gingrich’s yearning to be a Great Man of History, to Ted Cruz’s ambitious grandstanding in the Obama years, to the emergence of Trump-era performance artists like Marjorie Taylor Greene. And the party’s congressional institutionalists, from dealmakers like John Boehner to policy mavens like Paul Ryan, have often been miserable-seeming prisoners of the talking heads, celebrity brands and would-be presidents.

…

[T]he most notable populist Republican elected in 2022, J.D. Vance, has been busy looking for deals with populist Democrats on issues like railroad safety and bank-executive compensation, or adding a constructive amendment to the debt-ceiling bill even though he voted against it — as though he, no less than McCarthy, actually likes and wants his current job.

Ross Douthat, Can Kevin McCarthy and Joe Biden Fix Washington?.

Bare-knuckle politics

The former governor, whose affiliated PAC calls itself “Tell It Like It Is,” didn’t pull any punches during his roughly two-hour town hall last night against the man he’s convinced gave him COVID-19, calling the former president “lonely, self-absorbed, and self-serving.”

“I’m going after Trump for two reasons,” he said in response to an audience question. “Because he deserves it, and because it’s the way to win.”

Christie, a former federal prosecutor, likely views his punch-Trump-in-the-mouth approach as killing three birds with one stone. Not only does it put Trump on the defensive, but picking fights will also earn Christie time on cable news, which amounts to free advertising for the campaign. Plus, it helps him paint himself as a fighter. “He knows how to brawl and we like that in our candidates,” Merrill said of New Hampshire GOP voters.

TMD, The GOP Field Takes Shape

Delusional politics

A Toyota memo to auto dealers in April explained the challenges to full electrification. For instance, “most public chargers can take anywhere from 8-30 hours to charge. To meet the federal [zero-emissions vehicle] sales targets, 1.2M public chargers are needed by 2030. That amounts to approximately 400 new chargers per day.” The U.S. isn’t close to meeting that goal.

Toyota also noted that “more than 300 new lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite mines are needed to meet the expected battery demand by 2035,” and they could take decades to develop. “The amount of raw materials in one long-range battery electric vehicle could instead be used to make 6 plug-in hybrid electric vehicles or 90 hybrid electric vehicles.”

And here’s an even more striking statistic: “The overall carbon reduction of those 90 hybrids over their lifetimes is 37 times as much as a single battery electric vehicle.” These inconvenient truths undermine the climate religion and government mandates.

Wall Street Journals Editorial

Culture

The Machine chooses its pronoun: “I”

Gaslit by machinery that calls itself a person :: Writing Slowly

Phone-free schools?

“Once upon a time, teachers smoked in classrooms.” There’s no reason we can’t get to a place where sneaking a look at a smartphone would be like sneaking a smoke at school—shameful for adults, a disciplinary offense for students.

Mark Oppenheimer, quoting David Sax.

Swell article, along with this. Dare I suggest, though, that Apple Watch complicates phone-free school strategies?

Wordplay

the ‘woke’ tribe

a curious agglomeration of international capital and elite progressive opinion posing as an uprising from below. (Paul Kingsnorth, The West Must Die)

It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little.

Sydney Smith (via The Economist)

zoonosis

Any disease or infection that is naturally transmissible from vertebrate animals to humans. See also Factory farming will kill us all. I think I’ll keep up buying pastured meat on the theory that — well, see the Sydney Smith quote above.

Apologies to Monbiot? I don’t think so.

The view from nowhere came from somewhere.

Subtitle of an Atlantic Article on the idea of objectivity.

Diffident

The thought crossed my mind that this has become an apt description of me. Looking up definitions, it does seem to fit. I “put a lot of stuff out there,” but have few hills I’m willing to die on. This may be a knock-on effect of a major religious epiphany after almost 50 years of excessive confidence in things I now see as sorely lacking.

A “true” story, in the older understanding, is a story that tells a truth, even if the facts are not true.

Rod Dreher, reporting on a gathering in Dublin that he and I both consider significant.

I may have said this before, but I was still, at age 18, struggling with the idea that something non-factual could be true, and I was suspicious of a young teacher who seemed to believe that it could. No doubt, that was connected to the putative literalism my (then) religious tradition of 1950s and ‘60s Wheaton-College-oriented evangelicalism. But I hesitate to try to unpack it further because the first sentence of this paragraph says all I can really remember of my hangup, which is virtually incomprehensible to me now.

To me, the Vision Pro doesn’t look like something to use, it looks like something to be sentenced to – by an especially cruel judge.

Alan Jacobs (link added, in case you’re not yet caught up in the hype)

Phubbing: contraction of “phone snubbing.” Phubbing is breaking away from a conversation to look at one’s phone screen.

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For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

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.

Monday, 6/5/23

Politics

Scratching me where I itch

I confess in advance to a highly likelihood that I’m experiencing confirmation bias when so heartily agree with this from Peter Turchin for the Atlantic:

We found that the precise mix of events that leads to crisis varies, but two drivers of instability loom large. The first is popular immiseration—when the economic fortunes of broad swaths of a population decline. The second, and more significant, is elite overproduction—when a society produces too many superrich and ultra-educated people, and not enough elite positions to satisfy their ambitions.

These forces have played a key role in our current crisis. In the past 50 years, despite overall economic growth, the quality of life for most Americans has declined. The wealthy have become wealthier, while the incomes and wages of the median American family have stagnated. As a result, our social pyramid has become top-heavy. At the same time, the U.S. began overproducing graduates with advanced degrees. More and more people aspiring to positions of power began fighting over a relatively fixed number of spots. The competition among them has corroded the social norms and institutions that govern society.

…

The long history of human society compiled in our database suggests that America’s current economy is so lucrative for the ruling elites that achieving fundamental reform might require a violent revolution. But we have reason for hope. It is not unprecedented for a ruling class—with adequate pressure from below—to allow for the nonviolent reversal of elite overproduction. But such an outcome requires elites to sacrifice their near-term self-interest for our long-term collective interests. At the moment, they don’t seem prepared to do that.

There’s nothing wrong with studying things, because intuitions can be wrong. But this — not entirely independently, but after lots of reading over lots of years — was my intuition about two major ailments even before reading Turchin.

(Thought for the day from the “History Rhymes” Department: were abolitionists proto-wokesters?)

Brahmins and Trumpists

In a parallel vein to Turchin’s:

We now have whole industries that take attendance at an elite school as a marker of whether they should hire you or not. So the hierarchies built by the admissions committees get replicated across society. America has become a nation in which the elite educated few marry each other, send their kids to the same exclusive schools, move to the same wealthy neighborhoods and pass down disproportionate economic and cultural power from generation to generation — the meritocratic Brahmin class.

And, as Michael Sandel of Harvard has argued, the meritocratic culture gives the “winners” the illusion that this sorting mechanism is righteous and inevitable and that they’ve earned everything they’ve got.

And then we sit around wondering why Trumpian populists revolt.

…

We could have chosen to sort people on the basis of creativity, generosity or resilience. We could have chosen to promote students who are passionate about one subject but lag in the other subjects (which is how real-life success works). But instead we created this academic pressure cooker that further disadvantages people from the wrong kind of families and leaves even the straight-A winners stressed, depressed and burned out.

David Brooks, Let’s Smash the College Admissions Process

Why Democrats should not desire a Trump candidacy, even strategically

There is profound discontent in this country, and for all Trump’s lawlessness and ludicrousness, he has a real and enduring knack for articulating, channeling and exploiting it. “I am your retribution,” he told Republicans at the Conservative Political Action Conference this year. Those words were chilling not only for their bluntness but also for their keenness. Trump understands that in the MAGA milieu, a fist raised for him is a middle finger flipped at his critics. DeSantis, Scott, Mike Pence, Nikki Haley — none of them offer their supporters the same magnitude of wicked rebellion, the same amplitude of vengeful payback, the same red-hot fury.

Trump’s basic political orientation and the broad strokes of his priorities and policies may lump him together with his Republican competitors, but those rivals aren’t equally unappealing or equally scary because they’re not equally depraved.

He’s the one who [long bill of particulars on Trumps depravity omitted]. His challengers tiptoe around all of that with shameful timidity. He’s the one who wallows happily and flamboyantly in this civic muck.

There are grave differences between the kind of threat that Trump poses and the kind that his Republican rivals do, and to theorize a strategic advantage to his nomination is to minimize those distinctions, misremember recent history and misunderstand what the American electorate might do on a given day, in a given frame of mind.

I suspect I’d be distraught during a DeSantis presidency and depressed during a Pence one. But at least I might recognize the America on the far side of it.

Frank Bruni

Will the GOP sign its own death warrant?

Put another way, once is what you did (made a mistake, as people and parties do). Twice is what you did (almost out of loyalty to the first mistake). But a third time—that isn’t what you did, it’s who you are.

Peggy Noonan. Noonan believes that renomination of Trump in 2024 will literally destroy the Republican party. So many people will leave, albeit in waves and for different motives, that the party will be unsustainable even as a banner for Trumpism.

Culture

Microcosm

Nearly everything in Phoenix is brand new, and part of a corporate chain. It is the furthest thing from organic. It’s all part of a corporate plan to meet and then newly concoct human needs in the most generic and profit-maximizing way possible. It’s almost as if they could simply roll out new housing developments and Burger Kings like Astroturf. I’m pretty certain they would if they could. It is quite telling that they can’t build more of it fast enough to meet the demand. There are a lot of people drawn to living in this way. The whole thing is premised on the false hope that if all our physical needs are met we would be happy. Which is patently false, though we have a hard time realizing that. This isn’t the only place it is happening. I don’t hesitate to call this kind of growth metastatic. But for that, if the power and water were turned off the whole place would shrivel up to nothing and blow away in a few days. In the meantime, we are golfing our way into the Apocalypse.

…

I don’t know how we will solve the civilizational crisis we are in. But I agree with others who tell us that even trying to solve it is part of the problem itself.

Maybe the first thing we need to do is stop trying to solve and simply acknowledge where we are and the complete mess we are in. Business as usual will no longer suffice. Instead, we should do nothing and stop trying to fix it. It can’t be fixed and the more we meddle the worse things get. I know this might sound ridiculous to some, like giving up, but I don’t think it is. It is rather to admit we are wholly outmatched by the very mess we ourselves have made. I think the best place to start is what might be called radical contemplation. For all the disasters forming up around us, the problem is not out there, but within us. We are the source and nothing else will change—no matter how clever our response may be—unless we are deeply changed. It’s a long shot, for sure.

Jack Leahy, The Golf Course at the End of the World. That last paragraph so completely echoes Paul Kingsnorth, The West Must Die that Leahy either read him or we’re getting a spontaneous consensus among relatively deep thinkers.

It’s exceedingly odd to conclude that one who was born into the world’s most powerful nation-state, forty years later saw it become world hegemon hell-bent on remaking the world in its own image, is now likely to see the ending of an epoch even bigger than all that — and isn’t entirely sorry to see that end.

I’m too much the conservative to applaud the revolution, but I’m having trouble ginning up much fighting spirit against it. Exhaustion, too, is a mark of things ending.

It won’t swing back if it’s not a pendulum

Gender Ideology is not a pendulum, and it will not swing back with a little help from inertia. Gender Ideology is a fundamentalist religion—intolerant, demanding strict adherence to doctrine, hell-bent on gathering proselytes. I do not here use the term “religion” metaphorically or lightly.

Induction into this religion begins with a baptism: the selection of pronouns and often a new name, greeted with all the celebration (and more) of a conversion. It evangelizes aggressively: through social media influencers, who claim to know a teen’s truest self better than her parents and to love that teen so much more than they ever could. Therapists, teachers, and school counselors play evangelist to numberless kids at American school.

There’s no physical evidence that any of us possesses an ethereal gender identity, of course. It may actually be disprovable; there is a good deal of evidence against it. No matter. The adherents take it on faith. The notion that each of us is born with a gender identity, utterly separable from our physiology, known only to us, imagines gender identity as the secular version of the ‘soul.’

Abigail Shrier, Little Miss Trouble

Shorts

Grooming the next Bogeyman

Somebody seems to have recognized that they won’t have George Soros to demonize forever, so they’ve started grooming Bill Gates to take his place.

Corporate Capture of one institution

By such men [as Earl Butz] and such careers the land-grant college system, originally meant to enhance the small-farm possibility, has been captured for the corporations.

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America.

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things … Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

Dwight Eisenhower in a letter to his brother, quoted by Peter Turchin

For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

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.

Pentecost 2023

Anticipating Paul Kingsnorth?

I knew that C.S. Lewis was prescient (less so that Ken Myers was), but this was Copyright 1989.

Blinded by Might

Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson, who had been Falwell’s chief lieutenants in the Moral Majority, published a book questioning not just the efficacy of political action but the righteousness of the enterprise. In Blinded by Might they argued that in the process of trying to win elections conservative Christians had been seduced by the lure of power. What had begun as an effort to restore Christian values to the nation had degenerated into an unbridled partisan struggle, creating an atmosphere in which it was assumed that Democrats could not be Christians and that Bill and Hillary Clinton were the Antichrist.

Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals

I never read Blinded by Might, but this characterization of it, which is consistent with the books title, seems prescient.

Is Tim Kellerism outdated?

Some Christian critics say that the “Tim Keller model” of engagement, his winsome, gentle approach to those with whom he disagreed, is outdated. They say that increased secularization and progressive hostility toward traditional Christianity requires the faithful to hit back, respond in kind, dominate or humiliate those who oppose us. But Tim wasn’t kind, gentle and loving to others as some sort of strategy to win the culture wars, grow his church or achieve a particular result. Tim loved his neighbors, even across deep differences, simply because he was a man who had been transformed by the grace of Jesus. As he wrote in The Times, he believed and lived as if “the Gospel gives us the resources to love people who reject both our beliefs and us personally.”

The Christian Scriptures describe “the fruit of the Spirit” — what grows in us as we walk with God — as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Tim’s life was marked by these things. And these dispositions are not a political strategy. They are not a part of a brand. They are not a way to sell books, gain power, win culture wars or “take back America for Christ.” Tim inhabited these ways of being, not as a means to any end, but as a response to his relationship with God and love for his neighbor. The last 10 years or so have been hard on orthodox or traditional Christians who are wary of Christian nationalism, hyperpartisanship and the politics of bitterness or resentment. “Keller’s passing leaves a void in the nascent movement to reform evangelicalism,” wrote Michael Luo in The New Yorker, “and today’s social and political currents make the prospects for change seem dim.”)

Tish Harrison Warren

Just one little oversight

Why Antonio García Martínez became Zebulon ben Abraham. Except for the little matter of Christ’s resurrection, he’d have a pretty convincing case against Western Christendom.

Religious, not Spiritual

Occasional strong posts like Why I’m religious, and not spiritual are why I follow Fr. Silouan Thompson. But now I’ve got another book to buy: Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept — a “modern concept” as in “Procrustean bed,” that variously cuts or stretches reality.

Protestant scholars of religion continually try to find in ancient writings the kind of pietistic interiority, feelings, or personal experience of the Numinous, that to these scholars is “true religion.” This underpins practically all modern study of religion and much of interfaith activity. But the sources don’t point to any such thing in the ancient mind; ancient religion is a creation of modern scholarship.

Why I’m religious, and not spiritual

The Religious Right (and more frank and candid atheists)

A motley crew of white evangelicals and traditional Catholics locked arms on some social issues, started voting in large numbers for Republican candidates, and changed American politics forever.

But I think that era of religion and politics is rapidly coming to a close. The Religious Right is no longer a primarily religious movement — from my point of view it’s one about cultural conservatism and nearly blind support for the GOP with few trappings of any real religiosity behind it.

Here’s what I believe to be the emerging narrative of the next several decades: the rise of atheism and their unbelievably high level of political engagement in recent electoral politics.

Ryan Burge, Religious Right? Those true believers are nowhere near as politically active as atheists.

Unfortunately, some of the Christianists on the “Religious Right” will take this as a call to go big-footing into politics at higher intensity because, as Burge observes, the Religious Right is no longer a primarily religious movement.

As for me, I find this result unsurprising. If you have no hope beyond this life, you’ll be apt to grab for all the temporal gusto you can get. If you’re getting close to the end of life, you look for the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting, and you’re trying to get ready for all that — heck, you might not even save Burge’s article after reading it and passing along this clip, if you know what I mean.

What it takes for a Tradition to endure

When I first encountered Orthodoxy fourteen years ago, my first thought was, “This is what I thought Catholicism would be when I converted back in the 1990s.” This was BEFORE I knew much of anything about Orthodox theology. This was from what I learned by worshiping liturgically with the Orthodox, and discovering the role of asceticism and related practices in Orthodox life. Years later, as I was writing The Benedict Option, I discovered in anthropological texts why some version of monastic practices is necessary for lay Christian life today, and also why Orthodox Christianity is UNIQUELY SUITED for the Benedict Option.

Rod Dreher, Healing Humanity: Confronting our Moral Crisis (emphases in original). Co-authors include Frederica Mathewes-Green, David Ford, Alfred Kentigern Siewers and Alexander F. C. Webster.

For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

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.

Largely wordplay (6/1/23)

Endonym and exonym. I had no idea these words existed. They are at least marginally useful. (H/T Tara Isabella Burton writing about postrationalists)

Revanchist.

An interesting word. It seems to me that its commonest use now is metaphorical, referring to pursuit of vengeance or pay-back, rather than literal territory.

Therianthrope (or just Therian): A person who experiences being and identifies as a non-human animal on an integral, personal level. (The Therian Guide).

(I’m with Kathleen Stock on this: it’s mostly larping, trolling, or satire. I also note that “therian” used to mean something different, of which the current meaning is derivative. There’s probably an adjective for that kind of derivation; “metaphor” doesn’t seem right.)

breaking news bias

A proposed replacement for “misinformation” at least in cases where the initial misrepresentation isn’t malicious.

In fact, most people just believe something that turned out later not to be true, and they never got the new information. We’ve seen this play out a thousand times—an initial, salacious tweet gets 50,000 retweets and the more accurate, updated tweet gets 23. You’d be forgiven if you never saw the corrected tweet.

Sarah Isgur

“Bud Lighting”—a freshly minted term for boycotting companies that cater to various “woke” causes, particularly transgender issues.

H/T Jonah Goldberg, who continues:

The most remarkable thing about the Bud Light boycott is that it worked, because boycotts usually don’t—if your definition of success is actually affecting sales and stock price in a significant way. PETA’s been boycotting KFC for 20 years to little or no effect. KFC’s biggest challenge hasn’t been from boycotters, but from rivals like Chick-fil-A, which has been going gangbusters despite facing plenty of boycotts of its own. 

Why are there boycotts if they don’t work? Because the definition has changed. The goal is rarely to affect the bottom line but to hurt the reputation of the company and create headaches for management. 

But even that is secondary. Most boycotts are what historian Daniel Boorstin called “pseudo-events,” also known as media events, which are, in Boorstin’s words, “produced by a communicator with the sole purpose of generating media attention and publicity.”

… Once you develop a taste for scalps, only more scalps can satisfy. More broadly, the rise of the attention economy makes the incentives for these pseudo-events too attractive to ignore.

Nellie Bowles anticipated Goldberg by a few days:

If DeSantis wins the presidency, you better believe he will have F-15s circling Bud Light warehouses.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Snarling logicality: Bible Answer Man Hank Hanegraff’s characterization (or at least one of them) of Western Christianity in contrast to Eastern Christianity.

What do you find most inspiring — or unsettling — about [Ron DeSantis’] vision for America?
[Jane] Coaston: His belief is that America is a problem that must be solved by the state.

Agree or disagree with the substance, her style is arresting.

Eighty is too old to be angry. Even seventy is.

Garrison Keillor

A civilization flourishes until it starts to analyze itself.

Alfred North Whitehead, via Iain McGilchrist

Frank Bruni at the New York Times often (maybe invariably) follows his main essay (usually political) with a section called For Love of Sentences. It’s one of the reasons I haven’t dropped the Times yet.

Excerpts from June 1:

  • [I]n The Guardian, Jay Rayner appraised the more-is-more culinary sensibility of a dish at Jacuzzi, which was opened recently in London by the Big Mamma group: “I would have been happy with simple ribbons of that pasta with that ragu, but going to a Big Mamma restaurant in search of simplicity is like going to a brothel hoping to find someone to hold your hand.” (Robert Tilleard, Salisbury, England)
  • [I]n The Post, Ron Charles noted the publication of “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” by Senator Josh Hawley: “The book’s final cover contains just text, including the title so oversized that the word ‘Manhood’ can’t even fit on one line — like a dude whose shoulders are so broad that he has to turn sideways to flee through the doors of the Capitol.” (Sue Borg, Menlo Park, Calif.)
  • [I]n The Times, Michelle Cottle characterized Ron DeSantis as having “the people skills of a Roomba.” (Stephen Burrow, Teaneck, N.J., and Tim McFadden, Encinitas, Calif., among others)

For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

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.

May 31, 2023

303 Creative

Lorrie Smith of 303 Creative in Colorado would like to expand her website-design business to wedding websites, but she realizes that she’ll eventually get, and will decline for reasons of conscience, requests for same-sex wedding websites. Colorado antidiscrimination authorities say that’s a no-no. The case is before SCOTUS, awaiting a decision within a month or so.

Hurt Feelings, Conscience, and Freedom

Rick Plasterer, previously unknown to me, lays out some of the social history behind such cases (with an obvious bit of ax-grinding):

Faced with a court intent on protecting freedom of religion and speech, the Left has turned to the claim that civil rights law, and behind it, the Fourteenth Amendment, mandates pro-active government measures to remove social stigma. This is really a very blatant effort to gain what social conservatives have complained about for years, the claim of a right not to be offended.

…

[S]ome research proposes that younger LGBT cohorts seem to be more sensitive to perceived stigmatizing than the older LGBT population. Given the large “snowflake” population in colleges and universities, this is not surprising. As a researcher critical of the consequences of the sexual revolution, Regnerus said he experiences much day-to-day stigma, but has learned to deal with it. The LGBT identifying population can and does deal with it as well. But pro-LGBT stigma research tends to deny “agency on the part of persons. It esteems collective action while implying personal passivity and an externalized locus of control.”

…

But although the claim to “dignitary harm” might be newly raised with LGBT liberation, the claim that there cannot be fundamental differences in society about ultimate things is old. Quoting Jean Jacques Rosseau’s “The Social Contract,” (1762), George observed that “America is stalked by an ancient fear: The creeping suspicion that ‘[i]t is impossible to live with those whom we regard as damned.’”

Rick Plasterer, Hurt Feelings, Conscience, and Freedom – Part 1.

First Amendment protections

One of my heroes, Robert P. George of Princeton, has weighed in on behalf of 303 Creative via an amicus brief:

Although the rights to free speech and the free exercise of religion are distinct and thus receive separate protection under the First Amendment, they are often intertwined. “[M]uch . . . religious speech might be perceived as offensive to some,” because faithful adherence to a religious tradition implies the acceptance of certain claims about objective truth and the concomitant rejection of certain conduct as morally inconsistent with that truth.

… the Supreme Court has consistently affirmed that the First Amendment protects even profoundly offensive forms of expressive conduct. See, e. g., Snyder, 562 U.S., at 447 (First Amendment protects group that picketed a soldier’s funeral bearing signs indicating their belief “that God kills American soldiers as punishment” for national sins); Virginia v. Black, 583 U.S. 343, 347–348 (2003) (affirming the right of the Ku Klux Klan to burn crosses at rallies); Johnson, 491 U.S., at 420 (holding a “State’s interest in preserving the [American] flag as a symbol of nationhood and national unity” did not justify a man’s criminal conviction for engaging in protected political expression by burning it). Hence, when a speaker’s message is explicit—as unmistakable in expressive intent as a twenty-five-foot-tall burning cross, for instance, Black, 583 U.S., at 349—it is clearly protected by the First Amendment. But Colorado’s argument would deny protection to far milder forms of speech, such as an artist’s refusal to design a product that promotes a message to which she objects.

The Supreme Court has ruled that “the First Amendment protects flag burning, funeral protests, and Nazi parades.” McCutcheon v. FEC, 572 U.S. 185, 191 (2014). It would be an absurd jurisprudential result to rule that Ms. Smith could not, however, politely tell a couple that satisfying their request would conflict with her deeply held religious beliefs about marriage, and then direct them to a different service provider, without bringing the full force of Colorado law down upon herself.

…

Even if Ms. Smith’s refusal to provide website design services for same-sex ceremonies is deeply upsetting, her customers’ distress would still not justify coercion, because the dignity of both parties would be at stake. Ms. Smith could just as easily claim that Colorado’s attempt to commandeer her voice inflicts a “dignitary harm” upon her. By using its power to take from Ms. Smith the right to speak and disseminate her ideas in the public square, Colorado’s actions deprive Ms. Smith of “the right to use speech to strive to establish worth, standing, and respect” for her voice.

…

The First Amendment is a default setting against governmental restraints on speech that the State can overcome only with a compelling rationale. Allegations of “dignitary harm,” on their own, do not suffice, particularly when state action to remedy that “harm” only transfers the injury to a different party.

Robert P. George, Brief of Amicus Curiae in 303 Creative v. Elenis (bold added; link is to a PDF).

I added the boldface because the impossibility of avoiding dignitary harm to someone in situations like this is generally overlooked. Instead, Colorado has been deciding the cases based on an unspoken hierarchy of who’s cool and who’s not. Currently, sexual minorities are cool; Christians who believe that no real marriage is being solemnized when both parties are of the same sex (and that lament, not celebration, is in order) are not cool.

I’m pretty confident that SCOTUS is going to correct that, but it may contrive a narrow, niggling way to avoid hitting it head-on in Lorrie Smith’s case.

Other Legalia

Advice to aspiring law students

  1. Law school opens doors
  2. Law school will not turn a Beta into an Alpha
  3. Big student loan debt closes doors. Want to work for the Innocence Project, or Becket Fund or the like? Fuggedaboudit!
  4. Unless you are a lifetime, Alpha, and you can’t imagine life apart from running with the big dogs, don’t take on heavy student debt on the assumption that you’ll have an Alpha job and Alpha compensation.

Items 1 and 3 have been a mantra of mine for several years. Items 2 and 4 just came to me very recently.

Better Late Than Never

The Texas House voted overwhelmingly on Saturday to impeach the state’s Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, over accusations of bribery, using his position to enrich himself and a campaign donor, and abuse of public trust. The vote immediately removed Paxton—in his third term as A.G.—from office, pending a trial in the state Senate, where a two-thirds majority of the 31 senators is needed to convict him. If convicted, he would be barred from ever holding office in Texas again. This is the first time since 1917 Texas has impeached a state-wide office-holder.

TMD

Clarence Thomas

If you subscribe, or are lucky enough not to hit the WSJ paywall, do read John C. Danforth, The Clarence Thomas Stories That PBS Refused to Tell

Sexualia

Trans kids

I like Andrew Sullivan’s take on trangenderism matters even better in distilled form:

A longtime reader quits the Dish:

Andrew, I cannot take your obsession with trans kids any longer. There are so many other issues you could be covering in your weekly essay: the debt ceiling, McCarthy’s tenuous leadership, China, baseball’s new rules, climate change, the Pope, and on and on. As the mother of a trans son who was miserable from age 8 on — and the friend of many other parents of trans kids who were miserable or even suicidal (one at age 6) — I cannot bear your ignorance and fear any longer. I will miss the VFYW and the contest.

I’m sorry you feel this way. As I said in the piece: “We should counter hostility and prejudice toward trans people. We should treat gay kids and kids with gender dysphoria with tenderness, care, and love.” But I confess I am obsessed when gay boys are having their heads filled with notions like “you are in the wrong body” if they are behaving like stereotypical girls, and when so many are irreversibly sterilized before they have even had a chance to grow up. Have you read Time to Think?

I’m also against crude bans on transing children. I’d prefer a European compromise whereby these medical experiments on children can continue — but only with carefully screened patients in rigorous clinical trials. But the American medical establishment refuses to acknowledge any concerns at all, and has recently abolished any lower age limit for transing children. They won’t even engage in debate.

I’m not entirely comfortable with Sullivan’s “European compromise,” because I think it is ontologically false that a female can be born in a male body or vice-versa.

But I’m not comfortable with categorical bans, either, because I recognize the reality of gender dysphoria (at levels a tiny fraction of what we’re currently seeing claimed) that in some cases is intractable and disabling. Social transitioning may give some of these unfortunate people adequate relief, but maybe not all of them. But it generally will not be until adulthood that “so intractable it needs medical intervention” becomes clear, and the social policy calculus changes with adults, doesn’t it?

If I’m wrong about that, the European compromise may be the best we’ve got in a screwed-up world.

Selective enforcement

Homosexual sex has been illegal in Uganda since the days of British colonial rule. No one’s been convicted under the statute since independence in 1962, but the rule provides license for routine repression …

TMD

This was essentially the US pattern in the 1960s as well.

It seems to me to be a principle all people of good will should support: there should be no criminal laws that are 99% unenforced, but get trotted out against people who get cross-wise with some prickly official.

Masculine virtues

In 2016, for example, the single most important intellectual work of the new right was an essay by Michael Anton entitled “The Flight 93 Election.” It began like this: “2016 is the Flight 93 election: Charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You — or the leader of your party — may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: If you don’t try, death is certain.”

That’s right: The argument was that electing Hillary Clinton, a thoroughly establishment Democrat, would mean the end of America. It’s an argument that people never stopped making. In 2020, I debated the Christian author Eric Metaxas about whether Christians should support Donald Trump against Joe Biden. What did he argue? That Joe Biden could “genuinely destroy America forever.”

Catastrophic rhetoric is omnipresent on the right. Let’s go back to the “groomer” smear. It’s a hallmark of right-wing rhetoric that if you disagree with the new right on any matter relating to sex or sexuality, you’re not just wrong; you’re a “groomer” or “soft on pedos.” Did a senator vote to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson for the Supreme Court? Then he’s “pro-pedophile.” Did you disagree with Florida’s H.B. 1557, which restricted instruction on sexuality and gender identity? Then “you are probably a groomer.”

But conservative catastrophism is only one part of the equation. The other is meanspirited pettiness. Traditional masculinity says that people should meet a challenge with a level head and firm convictions. Right-wing culture says that everything is an emergency, and is to be combated with relentless trolling and hyperbolic insults.

… And that brings us back to Mr. Hawley. For all of its faults when taken to excess, the traditional masculinity of which he claims to be a champion would demand that he stand firm against a howling mob. Rather, he saluted it with a raised fist — and then ran from it when it got too close and too unruly.

David French

Of course, we don’t need to pay attention to David French since he’s a particularly notorious groomer who has gone to work for the Devil.

Back to The Flight 93 Election. When it was very fresh, I read it and admired the Chuzpah of daring the right wing to live up to its catastrophism (about the end of America if Hillary was elected) by voting for Trump. I thought the author risked undermining the catastrophism rather than exploiting it — another in a long line of bets I’d have lost by overestimating the American electorate.

Selected dramatis personae

Losers

The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind’s flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality-without exploiting them for fun and profit.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

Mind you, I’m not denying I’m a loser by this vivid definition.

Christianists

Professor [Rémi] Brague observed that even today many Europeans defend and fight for Christian morality because they see Christianity as a set of values rather than a religion. They are, as the professor noted,  Christianists. They uphold the religion’s moral framework but do not believe in Christ. This paradox leads to a major challenge: Christian values, culture, and civilization cannot be sustained if we are cut off from Christ and tradition as the source.

Zsófia Tóth-Bíró, Shaping Europe with Real Values (The European Conservative)

That strikes me as a pretty good use of the term “Christianist” (Lord knows we’ve got plenty of them in the US), and consistent, I think, of how I’ve generally used the term.

Brief foray into politics

Overloading narrative circuits

I would prefer Trump didn’t become President. But if he became president with 40+ percent of the Hispanic vote and 25+ percent of the black vote, it would be a great thing for the country, finally overloading the circuits of the “everything is white supremacy” machine.

Wesley Yang on an ABC News/WaPo poll showing that 27 percent of black Americans would “definitely or probably vote for Trump in 2024.” (Quoted by Andrew Sullivan)

I’m afraid Linker’s right

DeSantis says: Look at all these great policies I’ve enacted!

Trump says: I’ll kick the shit out of your enemies!

And Republican voters may just prefer the latter.

…

Trump is first and foremost the vehicle of a right-wing revenge fantasy. Everything else follows from that.

Damon Linker, The Rise of the Anti-Ideological Right

For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

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.

Sunday, 5/28/23

Tim Keller

Hedgehog Keller knew two big things

[T]wo fundamental ideas propelled [Tim Keller]: Biblical Christianity is not a political position, and secular liberalism deserves theological critique—because it is not simply how the world really works, but is itself a kind of faith.

…

One might have expected Keller to imitate the apologists who were at the height of their powers while he was starting out as a young pastor: men like Francis Schaeffer and Josh McDowell, who blended their mission to defend the truth of Christianity with their callings as culture warriors.

Instead, he modeled his writing and preaching on irenic British Christians: the Anglican minister John Stott and, especially, C. S. Lewis (although Keller’s books feature a wide range of cultural and literary references, including Pascal, Tolstoy, the movie Fargo, various atheist thinkers—even, at least once, the Disney cartoon Frozen). Over the years, Keller became not just a Christian apologist but a sophisticated critic of secular liberalism, especially its worship of personal autonomy as the highest good. He pushed his audiences to consider whether total sexual freedom was truly the pinnacle of human liberation, or whether the boundaries of marriage might actually enrich their lives. He took on the false idol of professional achievement: “As long as you think there is a pretty good chance that you will achieve some of your dreams, as long as you think you have a shot at success, you experience your inner emptiness as ‘drive’ and your anxiety as ‘hope,’” he wrote in 2013’s Encounters With Jesus. “And so you can remain almost completely oblivious to how deep your thirst actually is.”

… We all seek what [Charles] Taylor calls “fullness”: an idea that, Keller wrote, “is neither strictly a belief nor a mere experience. It is the perception that life is greater than can be accounted for by naturalistic explanations … It is the widespread, actual lived condition of most human beings regardless of worldview.”

Molly Worthen

Worthen’s remembrance, better than any other I’ve read yet, shows here why I found Keller a kindred spirit. I have omitted a few of his traits that I should emulate, but frankly have not and may be temperamentally incapable of emulating.

(More on Worthen personally below.)

Keller on the social marks of evangelicalism

Keller was no fundamentalist. He saw the return of fundamentalism in the form of the Moral Majority as part of the problem. In 2022, he began speaking of the six social marks of evangelicalism, which he essentially equated with fundamentalism. These were moralism over gracious engagement, individualism over social reform, dualism over a comprehensive vision of life, anti-intellectualism over scholarship, anti-institutionalism over accountability, and enculturation over cultural reflection.

From Dale Coulter’s reminescence/obituary for Tim Keller.

If more will listen and repent, this could become Keller’s posthumous great contribution to Evangelicalism.

I am not holding my breath.

I’ve read half a dozen obituaries or remembrances of Tim Keller now, and I’ve reached a conclusion: If I had been a member of his Church when I encountered Orthodox Christianity as I did, I still would have become Orthodox, but with more mixed feelings and more nostalgia for my “former delusion” at its best.

Biblical goals, biblical ethics

Over time, some in the Christian world came to criticize Tim [Keller]’s commitment to … engagement as a weakness, or at least, as an approach poorly suited to this moment. “I would argue quite the opposite,” Bill Fullilove, the executive pastor at McLean Presbyterian, told me. “His model of gracious and thoughtful engagement, even when disagreeing vehemently, is exactly what we need more of today. It is simply impermissible to pursue biblical goals while ignoring biblical ethics.

Peter Wehner (italics added)

My first registered sour note from Tim Keller

When I asked him to define for me an “Evangelical,” he borrowed Church of England bishop and theologian N. T. Wright’s answer: an Evangelical was the one who would immediately and exuberantly respond yes to the question, “Do you believe that Jesus really, truly, bodily rose from the dead?”

Cardinal Timothy Dolan on Tim Keller.

I appreciate Keller’s ecumenical gesture, but that definition makes “evangelical” useless for anything more than ruling out professed Christians who don’t or can’t affirm the real, true, bodily Resurrection.

(In his defense, “evangelical” is notoriously difficult to define.)

Pica outbreak among the rationalists

According to Tara Isabella Burton (Rational Magic — The New Atlantis), a lot of Silicon Valley rationalist types are stepping back from rationalism and dabbling in — well, quite a palette of things:

Vogel’s enthusiasm [Vogel is a pseudonym] for beauty, for poetry, for mythic references, for an esoteric strain of quasi-occult religious thought called Traditionalism: all of this, his onetime compatriots in the rationality community might once upon a time have dismissed as New Age claptrap. But Vogel’s personal journey from rationalism to postrationalism is part of a wider intellectual shift — in hyper-STEM-focused Silicon Valley circles and beyond — toward a new openness to the religious, the numinous, and the perilously “woo.”

…

… More and more rationalists and fellow-travelers were yearning to address personal existential crises alongside global existential risks. The realm of the “woo” started to look less like a wrong turn and more like territory to be mined for new insights.

This wasn’t totally out of left field, even for rationalists. They even had a word for such impulses, according to a former employee of the Center for Applied Rationality, Leah Libresco Sargeant, who writes regularly on how rationalism led her to her Catholic faith. They called it “pica,” after a compulsion that causes people to eat dirt or other non-food objects, and that is often a sign of nutritional imbalance.

I love that “pica” metaphor.

Eyes wide open

Evangelicals claim sola scriptura as their guide, but it is no secret that the challenge of determining what the Bible actually means finds its ultimate caricature in their schisming and squabbling. They are the children of estranged parents, pietism and the enlightenment, but behave like orphans. This confusion over authority is both their greatest affliction and their most potent source of vitality.

…

I think that locating one’s primary authority as a Christian in the Bible, has a lot of implications. One thing it can do is provide a license to to break away from wider communities — from a church, from a pastor, another source of authority — who is telling you things you you don’t want to hear — a message that is in some way at odds with how you experience Christianity. And it can be a license to start your own community.

I see that impulse towards schism or toward entrepreneurship, too, would be an another way of putting it, as something that has really enlivened evangelicalism that in the context of American culture, and the at least relatively speaking, free market that we have in our in our religious marketplace …

But over the long term, I think it is not always a good thing to be able to break away from people you disagree with, from ideas and information that make you uncomfortable. And so I see that relationship to authority, and perhaps … its power, but also its brittle quality, as something that has both really served evangelicals but has also been a source of consistent struggle.

Molly Worthen, interviewed by Colin Hansen. The inset quote is from her Apostles of Reason which she wrote before she was a committed Christian. She converted to active Christian faith in 2022.

In fairness, I should note that she converted through, and now attends, a Southern Baptist megachurch, but does not appear to back down from her earlier characterization of Evangelicalism. She had her eyes wide open before her heart was.

It must be uncomfortable for her in many ways. But pastor J.D. Greer, to his credit, spent a lot of time with her, answering her many questions, even looping in Tim Keller a time or two. So I understand why she would attend his megachurch.

But she is aware of Orthodoxy, and friendly toward it, albeit while anachronistically viewing it as too ethnic. I’m praying that she’ll discover the truth about that.

The Gospel According to St. John

When I was a young Evangelical, several lifetimes ago, it was common practice to give a new convert a copy of the Gospel According to St. John — never Saints Matthew, Mark or Luke.

Sometime after I became an Orthodox Christian, I was surprised to learn that the Gospel According to St. John was traditionally the only version of the Gospel withheld from pre-converts, known as catechumens.

Only then, in the earlier days of Christianity, were they admitted to the second half of the Liturgy, and then, immediately after Pascha (the traditional time for baptizing catechumens), was the Gospel According to St. John preached, for it was considered too theological for them until baptism.

So familiar were the Gospels to me that I had trouble seeing why it was considered too theological, but that coin has finally dropped, thanks to Fr. Stephen De Young’s Bible studies. It’s not all that difficult to grasp, really.

You see, the Gospel According to St. John was written many decades after the other three “synoptic” Gospels, and it was written to a Church well familiar with the basic narrative of Christ’s incarnation, life, crucifixion, death, burial, resurrection and ascension. So John did not repeat all that basic narrative, but filled in the gaps, giving prolonged attention to some of Jesus’ teachings and to passion week, defying any strict chronology as he did.

It’s in that sense, I think, that John wrote a “theological” gospel as a complement to the three relatively more historical or narrative versions.

And that’s why I think Evangelicalism erred in passing out his version to new converts who might not yet know that outline of Christ’s earthly ministry — just who was this guy to whom they’d committed themselves?

If you can tolerate his mannerisms, as I have learned to do, you can learn a lot from Fr. Stephen, which I suppose is why Ancient Faith Ministries has given him a platform.

Chaos response

[Iconographer Jonathan] Pageau focused, in part, on waves of online conspiracy theories that have shaken many flocks and the shepherds who lead them. Wild rumors and questions, he said, often reveal what people are thinking and feeling and, especially, whether they trust authority figures.

“Even the craziest conspiracy nuts, what they are saying is not arbitrary,” he said …

“It’s like an alarm bell. It’s like an alarm bell that you can hear, and you can understand that the person that’s ringing the alarm maybe doesn’t understand what is going on. … They may think that they have an inside track based on what they’ve heard and think that they know what is going on. But the alarm is not a false alarm, necessarily.”

The chaos is real, stressed Pageau. There is chaos in politics, science, schools, technology, economic systems, family structures and many issues linked to sex and gender. It’s a time when conspiracy theories about vaccines containing tracking devices echo decades of science-fiction stories, while millions of people navigate daily life with smartphones in their pockets that allow Big Tech leaders to research their every move.

This chaos will lead to change, one way or another, he said. The goal for church leaders is to listen and respond with biblical images, themes and stories – as opposed to more acidic chatter about politics.

Terry Mattingly (emphasis added). Pageau was addressing Orthodox clergy.

Christianity as “religion”

In the pre-modern West, as in much of the world today, there was no such thing as “religion”. The Christian story was the basis of peoples’ understanding of reality itself. There was no “religion”, because there was no notion that this truth was somehow optional or partial, any more than we today might assume that gravity or the roundness of the Earth are facts we could choose to engage with only on Sunday mornings.

Paul Kingsnorth, Is there anything left to conserve

Gnostic extremists

My pessimistic views about the physical world made me instinctively suspicious of Christian traditions that incorporated tangible gestures of piety into their worship—gestures like raising hands, making the sign of the cross, kneeling during confession, and so forth. I preferred to attend churches that did not sully the worship experience with earthly things like ornate communion tables, pictures of saints, or even beautiful church buildings. Material things were in competition to spiritual things. I was surrounded by others who thought similarly, including some who went so far as to burn down their church building. “What a powerful testimony to the fact that God’s kingdom is not of this world,” they reflected while watching their former sanctuary go up in flames.

Robin Phillips, Confessions of a Recovering Gnostic.

I haven’t mentioned it lately, but I agree with Robin Phillips, who wrote a lot about it, that gnosticism is pandemic in American Protestantism.

Identity

… A mirror’s temperature
is always at zero. It is ice
in the veins. Its camera
is an X-ray. It is a chalice


held out to you in
silent communion, where gaspingly
you partake of a shifting
identity never your own.

(R.S. Thomas, Collected Later Works)

Wordplay for keeps

The problems with the King James Version of the Bible come from the translators’ imperfect mastery of Hebrew, and the problems with other versions come from the translators’ imperfect mastery of English.

Robert Alter via John Brady on micro.blog

Reductionisms

They go on to assume or claim, without philosophical justification, that the remarkable success of this methodological reductionism entails that we should accept the kind of ontological reductionism in which reality is seen ultimately as consisting only of the interactions of the universe’s basic building blocks.

Christopher C. Knight, Science and the Christian Faith

For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

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.

Saturday, 5/27/23

It’s a long one today, but I’ve broken it down by rubric.

And for what it’s worth, Mrs. Tipsy and I have been married 51 years as of today.

Culture

The single most counterintuitive social principle in all of human history.

The idea that obnoxious, misguided, seditious, blasphemous, and bigoted expressions deserve not only to be tolerated but, of all things, protected is the single most counterintuitive social principle in all of human history. Every human instinct cries out against it, and every generation discovers fresh reasons to oppose it. It is saved from the scrapheap of self-evident absurdity only by the fact that it is also the single most successful social principle in all of human history.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

I could have classified this under politics, but if we lose all culture of free speech, we’ll eventually lose the law as well — and I wanted anyone who skips politics to see it.

Tasting monasticism

Fascinating: Molly Worthen, What College Students Need Is a Taste of the Monk’s Life

RIP Europe, age 33

The Europe that came together in 1990 is coming apart again, its people angry and fragmented, its leaders visionless, the once-free-ish West boiling in a stew of hate speech laws, vaccine mandates and ever-accelerating censorship and intolerance. ‘Populists’ continue to barrack and harrass its leaders, and neither they nor their media allies can quite work out why. The last global empire is led by a confused octogenarian, and within a few years the biggest economy in the world will be a communist dictatorship. The Scorpions never saw that one coming.

Paul Kingsnorth, In This Free World

“Science” in service of ridiculous ideologies

“White-throated sparrows have four chromosomally distinct sexes that pair up in fascinating ways. P.S. Nature is amazing. P.P.S. Sex is not binary,” – Laura Helmuth, editor-in-chief of Scientific American. The sparrows have just two sexes, as Community Notes corrected. Jerry Coyne has a beaut of a piece on this.

I regret that I have no recollection of the source for this, but I hereby explicitly disclaim adding a word other than the heading.

The elite avatars of proledom

Stanford Law School students were in the news for awhile, thanks to a contingent of them having shouted down a conservative campus speaker … I’ve come to think that the whole frame of the thing speaks to a real refusal of the American left to take its own ideas seriously. The debate fell along the typical lines. Liberals and lefties, as is their habit, rushed not only to defend the student protesters but to lionize them. What I find somewhat depressing is that this has become a habit, anointing representatives of the academic 1% as the footsoldiers of progressive change. The catechism of 21st-century progressivism insists that we are creatures of our immutable demographic traits, that our race and our class and our privilege define us and our influence on the world. If that’s true, how are we to assume that law students at Stanford Law School are anything other than the next generation’s shock troops of the bourgeoisie, whatever their professed politics? Where did all of that demographic determinism go?

Freddie deBoer, Stanford Law Students Are Your Class Enemy

Legalia

This feeling that I’m feeling isn’t schadenfreude …

… because there’s not an ounce of sorrow in it:

Oath Keepers founder and leader Stewart Rhodes—convicted in November on a number of charges, including seditious conspiracy, for his role instigating the January 6 riots and seeking to disrupt the transfer of power—was sentenced on Thursday to 18 years in prison, the longest such term of any January 6 defendant thus far. The head of the Oath Keepers’ Florida chapter, Kelly Meggs, was sentenced to 12 years in prison.

TMD. It’s important that insurrectionists like Rhodes and Meggs pay dearly.

On the other hand, I’m not opposed in principle to Ron DeSantis’ promise to review January 6 convictions and consider Presidential pardons. I know one fellow I’d like to see pardoned, who wandered in rubbernecking like a bog-standard tourist. I at least glimmeringly understand why DOJ prosecuted one and all, but for some of those convicted, the process should be the only lasting punishment.

It pays to increase your word-power

With the etiology now explained (Happy 20th Birthday to the Streisand Effect), I may add “Streisand Effect” to my vocabulary.

It doesn’t pay (easily) to win a bet with PillowMan

As long as I’m channeling Volokh Conspiracy postings, here’s another one, equally gratifying and more contemporary: MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell Taken to Court for Refusing to Pay the Person who Proved Him Wrong

Asymmetry

It is in the nature of American justice that anger can end a life, yet forgiveness cannot necessarily save one.

Elizabeth Bruenig, A Murder Forgiven

Just because

You only live once

I had marked this for sharing already, but then I had lunch with someone, soon turning 61, who is feeling his age and wondering if he has mis-spent his life, and it became more salient to me:

I had a dream last night in which I visited [my parents] James and Dora on their farm after the house burned down and saw their seven kids and little Eleanor had a terrible fever and the family sat praying for her — a fleeting dream but I would give anything to revisit it. I feel the same way about the picture of my mother, 17, with sister Elsie and friend Dorothy, three girls in summer dresses standing holding their bikes by Lake Nokomis in 1932, so happy — I want to ask her, “Do you realize you’re going to have six kids and not much money and they’ll cause you a lot of problems? Is this really what you want? I’m a writer, I can send you to Hollywood. You’re very charming, very funny. What he loves about you, millions of others would love too. What do you say, kid?” And she gets on her bike and wheels away.

Garrison Keillor

The problem of Uniqueness

[T]he analytic process cannot deal with uniqueness: there is an irresistible temptation for it to move from the uniqueness of something to its assumed non-existence, since the reality of the unique would have to be captured by idioms that apply to nothing else.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

Two favorite safety devices

BitDefender Box protects my entire home network, including IOT devices. I cheerfully pay up each year for software and firmware updates plus anti-virus for all my iOS and MacOS stuff.

The only kind of stepladder I have any business using these days.

Now, even if you hate politics, you might want to read the opener to the next item.

Politics

The Quaker whose mule wouldn’t plow

One of my favorite stories, for roughly five decades now, is of a Quaker with a mule who wouldn’t plow.

Finally, after various goads, the Quaker walked to the mule, took its ears gently in hand, looked into its eyes, and said “Brother mule. Thee knowest I am a Quaker, Thee knowest I cannot beat thee. Thee knowest I cannot curse thee. What thee does not know is that I can sell thee — to the baptist up the road. And he can beat the living daylights out of thee.”

That’s pretty much how I’m starting to feel about the wokesters/progressive Left/successor ideology. My “baptists” are the Irreligious Right, the Christianist Right — both capable of violence, I think — and a few politicians who can see which way the wind is blowing, such as Ron DeSantis.

I doubt I can vote for DeSantis, in part because of his ham-handed attacks on the progressive Left in Florida and his playing illegal immigrants (I know the adjective is offensive to some, but it’s a perfectly good description) as pawns by putting them on busses headed to Blue zones. So maybe I really wouldn’t sell my cultural adversaries to him.

And I know I can’t vote for Trump.

But I’m starting to feel at least ambivalent, not entirely negative, about how the “baptists” might handle this. And I’m certain I’m not alone.

Fear casts out love

Fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.

Aldous Huxley via Peter Wehner, who was explaining ‌The Minds of Trump Supporters

I am aware of the possible irony of placing this after the immediately preceding item.

When Peggy Noonan speaks, one should listen

Peggy Noonan gives Ron DeSantis some advice:

At some point, I think soon, he’ll have to make a serious, textured and extended case against Donald Trump. Not insults and nicknames, not “Can he take a punch? Can he throw a punch?” No, something aimed at the big beating heart of the GOP that tells those who’ve gone on the Trumpian journey and aligned with him that they can no longer indulge their feelings. At a crucial point in history they’ll lose again, and the damage to the country will be too great. Throwaway lines like “the culture of losing” aren’t enough. That’s just a line that signals. Don’t signal, say. Include the long history of political losses—Congress, the presidency, the opportunity for a red wave in 2022.

Yes, tell those good people that you served your country in a tragedy called Iraq and the other guy claimed bone spurs and ran during a tragedy called Vietnam. You think you don’t have to say it, but you do. People who love Mr. Trump need reasons they can explain to themselves to peel away.

Religious conservatives in the 2016 election

When religious conservatism made its peace with Donald Trump in 2016, the fundamental calculation was that the benefits of political power — or, alternatively, of keeping cultural liberalism out of full political power — outweighed the costs to Christian credibility inherent in accepting a heathen figure as a political champion and leader.

The contrary calculation, made by the Christian wing of Never Trump, was that accepting Trump required moral compromises that American Christianity would ultimately suffer for, whatever Supreme Court seats or policy victories religious conservatives might gain.

Ross Douthat

There’s a lot distilled in those two paragraphs. I particularly note that the second paragraph at least hints at the view that Christianity is about something other than political power, a possibility that the New York Times in particular almost never considers. (“Politics is real, religion isn’t” is the gist of it.)

Yet I don’t see my own position reflected in either of them.

My core anti-Trump conviction was that his narcissism would distort his perceptions of reality, and that a President who misperceives reality — or even just a few key realities at a few pivotal times — could damage the nation terribly — worse than Hillary Clinton would.

The current formulation of my former position is inevitably colored by what actually happened, because I didn’t commit my position to writing in 2015-16 so I could some day say “see, I told you so.” But narcissism and misperception of reality was definitely at the core. And in 2016, I still thought that Christian Trump-voters were probably holding their noses because of the alternative. If I spoke or wrote about how wicked he was, it was my trying to pry others away from him with arguments that I thought they’d find weightier than “he’s a toxic narcissist.” I never expected so much troll-like adulation of that man under Christianish auspices.

Had it not been for his mesmerizing narcissism, he’d have never been such an effective demagogue and would not have won the GOP primary. So I’d never have needed to weigh whether a mere serial adulterer and shady casino magnate, without a disabling personality disorder, was an acceptable alternative to a woman who deplored roughly half the nation.

What keeps Damon Linker up at night

I just don’t think, even now, that the imposition of a right-wing tyranny is a likely scenario for the United States. Far more likely is a mutually reinforcing cycle of extra-constitutional power grabs, spasms of civil unrest, efforts to impose order, and more egregious acts of violence aimed at “the system.” This wouldn’t become a civil war like the one that consumed the United States in the 1860s, with massive armies facing each other for protracted, bloody battles aimed at seizing territory. But it would nonetheless be a form of low-boil civil war, perhaps resembling The Troubles in Northern Ireland more than any other recent examples.

… each side’s greatest fear is a dictatorship by the other side.

Another is that when each side is informed about the other side’s fears along these lines, the reaction is angry and mocking dismissal. You’re saying I’m a threat to them_? What a bunch of bullshit. Everybody with a brain and capable of unbiased thinking knows_ they’re the problem.

Yet another fact about our politics is that each side is becoming more willing to entertain (or fantasize about taking?) extra-constitutional acts in order to protect itself from what it’s convinced are the threatening extra-constitutional acts by the other side. Trump’s self-coup-attempt in January 2021 is only the most obvious and egregious example. More recent ones have come up throughout the current debt-ceiling battle, with prominent Democrats proposing all kinds of gambits, justified by the supposed national emergency posed by looming debt default, to get around the Constitution’s placement of the power of the purse in the hands of Congress.

My point, once again, is not to assign or remove blame from either side—or to treat both sides as equally good or bad. If the choice is between Trump’s self-coup to keep himself in power despite losing the 2020 election and the Democratic Speaker of the House talking with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs about a plan to undertake a coup of their own against that same dictator-president, I would side with the latter every time. But the latter is still a coup—an unconstitutional power grab undertaken to thwart a prior unconstitutional power grab.

Damon Linker

I don’t know how to prevent this except by one personal step: declaring myself a noncombatant. That won’t keep “them” from coming for me, whichever “them” it be, and I don’t know how to prevent that, either.

Imagining a Trump reprise

[I]magine a second Trump administration. This time he surrounds himself with loyalists who vow to do his bidding. Among their first acts is to impose Schedule F reform on the executive branch, which enables them to fire tens of thousands of career civil servants and replace them with even more loyalists. This would open up the possibility of a more DeSantis-like Trump administration.

Yet it would still be different in one decisive respect: Trump doesn’t affirm any consistent ideology. Instead, he aims to inflict as much pain and damage as possible on his own enemies and those of his supporters. To that end, he’s perfectly willing and happy to reverse course the moment he sees an opening for a victory or a deal. He relies entirely on his own judgment. He doesn’t follow the lead of advisers. He sizes things up with his own eyes, and makes sudden, snap decisions. He prizes flexibility and despises constraints—and as we all learned in the two months following the 2020 election, this even extends to the Constitution, the rule of law, and the norms of ordinary democratic politics, including the peaceful transfer of power.

This sounds more than a little like the kind of government the ancient political philosophers described as a kingship—albeit one in which the king wholly lacks in virtue or wisdom. They called such a leader a tyrant. Such a tyranny is different than the ideological forms of dictatorship we’re familiar with from the modern age because it has no overarching constellation of ideas it seeks to enact or to which it looks for guidance. It’s the rule, instead, of one man seeking to satisfy his own insatiable hunger for attention and thirst for the adulation of the people.

Modern ideological dictators are ascetics of a kind. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong devoted their lives to a cause.

But Trump’s only cause is himself. Somewhat like the ancient tyrants Plato and Aristotle analyzed, he is a political hedonist who acts as he does out of a craving for the pleasure that comes from being loved and cheered by a crowd.

Damon Linker, The Rise of the Anti-Ideological Right—2 I’m not sure how “political hedonist” differs from political narcissist, but I’ll let that go.

Surely not!

I’m beginning to despair of the whole right, but especially the anti-woke formation (much as I loathe woke-ism). There’s no positive vision to it. It’s unserious. It seems designed to stave off real populism at the level of political economy.

Sohrab Ahmari on Twitter (H/T Nellie Bowles)

For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

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.

Wordplay

It has been a while. Let’s have a little fun.

bellicose utopianism

The foreign policy mind-set that emerged in the United States after the end of the Cold War, demonstrated by Washington’s series of regime-change wars.

stenographic process

How ethnic-Albanian militants, humanitarian organizations, NATO and the news media fed off each other to give credibility to genocide rumors about Yugoslavia. (It’s tempting to call most of today’s journalists “stenographers”)

For both items, see Why Are We in Ukraine?.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a famous actress. And then, as I got a little older, I just wanted to be a successful actress. And then, as I got even older, I wanted to be a successful actress, and I also didn’t want anyone to know who I was.

Psychologist (and occasional actress) Pamela Paresky, who hosts a regular get-together for Thought Criminals.

There are so many people who trade in cancellation—circles where they wear it like a badge of honor. It is good to be brave. But you shouldn’t be an edgelord.

Sarah Rose Siskind, one of the thought-criminals, who monkeywrenched her young life by an anti-affirmative action column in a campus paper at Harvard.

it is because … political discourses … are so detached from the prospect of actual violence that they can afford to be so extreme.

Alexis Carré, in the concluding essay in a series on the “coalition of the sensible” at Public Discourse.

Even a bad man can get railroaded.

Peggy Noonan

It’s hard to ==underestimate== Tim Keller’s influence on American evangelicalism—even though he preferred to call himself a “conservative Protestant.” …

Dale M. Coulter, Remembering Tim Keller. I strongly suggest that Coulter meant “overestimate.”

When Princeton withdrew his [Kuyper Award], Keller went and delivered lectures associated with the award anyway, a magnanimous gesture that ==belied== his generous spirit.

Daniel Darling. I’m less sure of this, but it seems to me that “belied” is the wrong word, too. “Belie” is in my vocabulary, but I usually need to check to make sure I’m not misusing it.

I notice that sort of thing often enough that it seems like there should be a name for it. “Spoonerism” comes to mind, but that’s not it.

Décroissance, or “de-growth” in French. The aim of some left-leaning Europeans, who would like to deliberately shrink the economy in the hope of avoiding ecological and societal collapse. Read the full story.

Suddenly, talk of de-growth seems to pop up daily or oftener in my reading. Apparently, that’s not just an anglophone thing.

We owe a debt of gratitude to whoever coined “Luxury Beliefs.” It’s adjacent to ad hominem fallacies, but some lifestyle advocacy is so patently destructive of the poor (even if the elite can get away with living that way) that shorthand dismissal is a healthy instinct.